Raid Changes for the less active Raider

Shamelessly lifted from MMO-Champion as usual:

We’re continuing to refine the raid progression paths in Cataclysm, and we’d like to share some of those changes with you today. Please enjoy!

The first of the refinements being made is that we’re combining all raid sizes and difficulties into a single lockout. Unlike today, 10- and 25-player modes of a single raid will share the same lockout. You can defeat each raid boss once per week per character. In other words, if you wanted to do both a 10- and 25-person raid in a single week, you’d need to do so on two different characters. Normal versus Heroic mode will be chosen on a per-boss basis in Cataclysm raids, the same way it works in Icecrown Citadel. Obviously the raid lockout change doesn’t apply in pure Icecrown terms though, as this change goes hand-in-hand with a few other changes to raid progression in Cataclysm.
I’ve already seen this described as the ‘death of raiding’ on a guild forum, but I feel that is a bit of knee-jerk reaction rather than a duly considered one. To me its more of a levelling of the playing field between the larger and smaller guilds. The smaller guilds who can only run 10 man raids will no longer be disadvantaged by 1 lockout per week, where the larger ones managing a 10 and a 25 get the benefit of 2.  I believe most of these changes are designed to ensure there is as little requirement as possible to be in a large guild.

We’re designing and balancing raids so that the difficulty between 10- and 25-player versions of each difficulty will be as close as possible to each other as we can achieve. That closeness in difficulty also means that we’ll have bosses dropping the same items in 10- and 25-player raids of each difficulty. They’ll have the same name and same stats; they are in fact the exact same items. Choosing Heroic mode will drop a scaled-up version of those items. Our hope is that players will be able to associate bosses with their loot tables and even associate specific artwork with specific item names to a far greater extent than today.
This just adds to what I have already said, not even any major loot advantages for being in a 25 man raid over a 10 man one.

Dungeon Difficulty and Rewards

• 10 and 25-player (Normal difficulty) — Very similar to one another in difficulty; drop the exact same items as each other.
• 10 and 25-player (Heroic difficulty) — Very similar to one another in difficulty; drop more powerful versions of the normal-difficulty items.

We of course recognize the logistical realities of organizing larger groups of people, so while the loot quality will not change, 25-player versions will drop a higher quantity of loot per player (items, but also badges, and even gold), making it a more efficient route if you’re able to gather the people. The raid designers are designing encounters with these changes in mind, and the class designers are making class changes to help make 10-person groups easier to build. Running 25-player raids will be a bit more lucrative, as should be expected, but if for a week or two you need to do 10s because half the guild is away on vacation, you can do that and not suffer a dramatic loss to your ability to get the items you want.

“A bit more lucrative” – that’s as good as it gets for 25 man raiding. Greater drop rate, badges and gold – when they have to start mentioning the rewards will be in gold we know they are getting desperate to sugar coat the pill. With all the mentions of guild levelling and guild rewards, being in a guild is going to be important. My concern was the guilds achieving  25 man raiding success would have a major advantage over the guilds managing only 10 man raiding. That the 10 man guilds would end up feeding the 25 man guilds, not just for the raiding rewards but because this guild would be a higher level guild because it was managing 25 man raiding. Blizzard seem to be trying to make being in a 10 man guild every bit as desirable as being in a 25, or at the very least not majorly disadvantaged by being in a 10 as opposed to a 25. Overall I think this is a smart move.

We recognize that very long raids can be a barrier for some players, but we also want to provide enough encounters for the experience to feel epic. For the first few raid tiers, our plan is to provide multiple smaller raids. Instead of one raid with eleven bosses, you might have a five-boss raid as well as a six-boss raid. All of these bosses would drop the same item level gear, but the dungeons themselves being different environments will provide some variety in location and visual style, as well as separate raid lockouts. Think of how you could raid Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep separately, but you might still want to hit both every week.
Sounds reasonable, and still trying to give something for everyone.

We do like how gating bosses over time allows the community to focus on individual encounters instead of just racing to the end boss, so we’re likely to keep that design moving forward. We don’t plan to impose attempt limitations again though, except maybe in cases of rare optional bosses (like Algalon). Heroic mode may not be open from day one, but will become available after defeating normal mode perhaps as little as once or twice.

In terms of tuning, we want groups to be able to jump into the first raids pretty quickly, but we also don’t want them to overshadow the Heroic 5-player dungeons and more powerful quest rewards. We’ll be designing the first few raid zones assuming that players have accumulated some blue gear from dungeons, crafted equipment, or quest rewards. In general, we want you and your guild members to participate in and enjoy the level up experience.

We design our raids to be accessible to a broad spectrum of players, so we want groups to be able to make the decision about whether to attempt the normal or Heroic versions of raids pretty quickly. The goal with all of these changes is to make it as much of a choice or effect of circumstance whether you raid as a group of 10 or as a group of 25 as possible. Whether you’re a big guild or a small guild the choice won’t be dependent on what items drop, but instead on what you enjoy the most.

The big guilds may howl at this, but only because they are losing some of their advantage. I think these are good changes, but we will see properly once they are implemented. I don’t often say this, but ‘Well Done Blizzard’.

We realize that with any changes to progression pathways there are going to be questions. We’re eagerly awaiting any that we may have left unanswered. To the comments!

And now a Troll, mon

Before I converted to Horde I was of course an Alliance player through and through. As I have said elsewhere, my first ever character was a Paladin called Arleff (now deleted), my first ever alt was a druid called Tarsis and he is still level 33 and lounging in front of the fire in a Stormwind inn. My second alt was a Night Elf rogue called Albanas. The name coming from the old Gaelic word for Scotland (Alba) and a pseudo Elven suffix of -nas to give the whole thing an Elf-like feel. I levelled Albanas sporadically and when I went server wandering he went to Eonar for a while and got up to level 66 in TBC and thereafter did very little else as I had gone Horde. A few months ago I went back to visit him and transferred him back to Runetotem under the name of Brutaldeluxe (homage to the old Amiga game of my formative years) and got him up to level 80. But work changed and there was no way I’d be able to raid in my old Alliance guild due to time constraints so that fell apart. Aside from that I just was not comfortable playing Alliance again. There was the real danger half way through a raid I’d be targeting the gnomes instead of the mobs.

Looking for a change, I have moved him to Saurfang server and faction changed him too. Say ‘hello’ to Cimetiere the Troll rogue. Naming the Troll was always going to be hard, so I looked up some voodoo stuff on t’internet and found that Cimetiere is an alternative name for Baron Samedi, a loa of the dead. That sounds suitable for a troll rogue methinks. Having just turned 80 before I transferred him I’ve had to spend the last couple of weeks running lots of instances for badge gear, still got a bit to go, but gradually improving. I have added him to the cast and we shall see where his adventures take him.

Here we see him “hangin’ wi da Voodoo Priest mon” in his quest for spiritual enlightenment.

I Blame Work

Sunk without trace for the best part of a week. Not been blogging and barely even on WoW. The main cause of this was our National Sales and Marketing Conference. The plan was sound: hold it at Heathrow for ease of transport for everyone to attend. That plan fell away somewhat as every airport in the UK shut due to the ash cloud. End result was 6.5 hours in a car to get there and the same to get back. That killed off Wednesday and Friday. Thursday was the conference itself. The conference part of the day tends to be fairly uneventful, it’s the usual mix of propaganda and motivational speaking along with an award ceremony later on. That finished up about 10.30pm and that’s when the real conference begins, retreat to the bar and catch up with the people you haven’t seen for a year. By 2.00 am I was ordering and drinking Tequila (if there is ever a warning sign that its bedtime, ordering tequila must be it), by 4.00 am I had the sense to call it a night. By 8.30 am I was up for breakfast. By 9.30 am we were on the road back to Glasgow – and I sure as hell was not driving! Saturday was a day of recovery. Sunday I’m blogging and hopefully even playing. Normal service is on its way back – promise!

Celestial bankroll?

For a long time Blizzard took the Moral High Ground with the view that anything a player wanted was available in the game at some level or another. Want a 310% mount? Go get that achievement done. But nothing stays the same does it? Enter the frame the Celestial Steed and Lil’XT. The only achievement required is hitting your credit card to the tune of $25 or 20 Euros depending on location, and that’s each. They look like this:

Very pretty indeed.  But I wouldn’t buy them. In fact I didn’t think many people would. So I have been a bit surprised to see the number of characters sitting around Dalaran on their Celestial Steeds. Dozens of them! I did a little looking and it turns out Blizzard have hit a gold mine. I found this article 140,000 people queuing for the damned things! There were even worries they would sell out! How the hell could they sell out? I’m sure Blizzard have one for every schmuck in the queue and can get a few spares pretttty quickly if they need to as well. ‘Quick lads, getting those Celestial mares back to the breeding pens – we need more steeds!’ Well, it’s not quite like that. This is an infinite resource, just change the number in the quantity field in the coding and Voila: more steeds. No need to panic buy, I promise.

So onto the morals of this. $3.5m – that’s a shed load lot of morals right there. I’m with the accountants on this one, if the customer is prepared to buy it then by all means let them have it. Adam makes a nice point about the people who buy these items help keep the subscription down for the rest of us. I’d like to believe that, but I reckon it wont happen that way, or not for long anyway. Instead Blizz will be looking for maximum revenue from both income streams – subscription and purchasable in-game items. I just can’t see the latter reducing the former.

But the issue isn’t really about a mount or a pet, which despite looking different have exactly the same function as any other pet or mount available in the game without having to reach for the credit card. They may look different but there is no playing advantage to having them. The issue is how much could they make selling armor or weapons? That’s the real market, but if not handled properly they could upset the players and risk seriously reducing the player base. I’ll bet market research is underway even as I write to determine capital gained against reduced player base.

Picture the scene. Six weeks after the first kill of the Lich King on 25 man, you were able to buy any of the 10-man  loot he has for $49.99 each.  Blizzard could still claim they were not ruining the game because only the 10 man drops were being made available, and players have had ample time to kill the boss. The top raiding guilds would be OK because they won’t be focusing on 10 man raids anyway. Hell, the top raiding guilds could even claim moral high ground by killing the bosses so you other guys who don’t have the time to raid like us can get good loot too… That only 10 man loot is available, means the big raiding guilds still have the impetus to carry on and will still have some ability to score on the epeen points by having items which even money can’t buy. Now whether you agree with this scenario or not, can you try to convince me that Blizzard are not thinking along these lines in some respect? If something like this was implemented, would you really be THAT surprised?

So who would buy the epic items with real money? Those with the financial resources, but its a matter of carefully pitching the price to ensure you don’t rule out too many people by the item being cost-prohibitive for them whilst still trying to get as much as possible for it at the same time. But we create the market conditions here ourselves. Anyone who even wants to join a lowish-end raiding guild is going to get gear checked before taken into raid instances. At the lower end of the raiding guild hierarchy, they may be more relaxed but some level of gear will be required, if not no raiding for you. So the would-be raider spends time grinding through heroics and trading in badges, or he gets his credit card out and buys a couple of items which save him that time.

I’m fairly neutral on the whole thing, but having had such a big result on the current items I have no doubt these will not be the last of the purchasable items. Wouldn’t surprise me to see us practically at monthly released items in the future. For usable in-game items as opposed to Vanity only items, I think that day will come too. But probably not until after release of Cataclysm, maybe 6-9 months after that when things have died down a bit on the content front and people are focussing on raiding rather than levelling.

I can accept the moral argument for not buying usable items: ‘You didn’t put the effort in so you shouldn’t have the reward’. But the counter argument is ‘I don’t have time to put the effort in due to my work, so by buying an item all I am really doing is offsetting my lack of time by having a little more disposable income’. There’s no real ‘Right’ answer to this one. I can easily accept buying items is cheaper than grinding them if you put a value on your free time, but I’m personally not prepared to spend my hard-earned Real Life rewards on Virtual goods. 140,000 Celestial Steeds may however suggest I am in a minority.

Rogue Changes

Well now that every other rogue has given their thoughts on the new changes announced I thought I’d give mine too. Shamelessly lifted the factual bits from MMO-Champion.

New Rogue Abilities

Redirect (available at level 81): Rogues will be getting a new ability to help them deal with changing targets. Redirect will transfer any active combo points to the rogue’s current target, helping to ensure combo points aren’t wasted when swapping targets or when targets die. In addition, self-buff abilities like Slice and Dice will no longer require a target, so rogues can spend extra combo points on those types of abilities (more on this below). Redirect will have a 1-minute cooldown and no other costs.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t know how often I have used a 2 or 3 combo point finisher as the mob was about to go down and its very much a case of  ‘Use them or lose them’. I think the smart rogues will be the ones who quickly learn when to store the points and when to spend them. I’m very much looking forward to this change.

Combat Readiness (level 83): Combat Readiness is a new ability that we intend rogues to trigger defensively. While this ability is active, whenever the rogue is struck by a melee or ranged attack, he or she will gain a stacking buff called Combat Insight that results in a 10% reduction in damage taken. Combat Insight will stack up to 5 times and the timer will be refreshed whenever a new stack is applied. Our goal is to make rogues better equipped to go toe-to-toe with other melee classes when Evasion or stuns are not in play. This ability lasts 6 seconds and has a 2-minute cooldown.
Everyone else has said it, and I’m no different  – this is very much a pvp ability.

“Go toe-to-toe with other melee classes” – Seriously, are you mad? I’m a rogue! The last thing I want is a fair fight. I have no interest in going toe-to-toe with anyone (unless they are several levels weaker!). Sneak up and butcher them from behind, whilst emptying their pockets at the same time – that’s my kind of rogue. If I wanted to fight fair I’d be a paladin.

I think Arena junkies will be a fan of this, I can also see it as a ‘oh shit’ button for pve when soloing. I think Blizz have given what a number of people who play Rogues want with this ability, it’s just not something I think I will have a big use for.
Smoke Bomb (level 85): The rogue drops a Smoke Bomb, creating a cloud that interferes with enemy targeting. Enemies who are outside the cloud will find themselves unable to target units inside the cloud with single-target abilities. Enemies can move inside the cloud to attack, or they can use area-of-effect (AoE) abilities at any time to attack opponents in a cloud. In PvP, this will open up new dimensions of tactical positional gameplay, as the ability offers a variety of offensive and defensive uses. In PvE, Smoke Cloud can serve to shield your group from hostile ranged attacks, while also drawing enemies closer without the need to rely on conventional line-of-sight obstructions. Smoke Cloud lasts 10 seconds and has a 3-minute cooldown.
Now this is the really curious one, and I don’t think many people will have anticipated it. Firstly, even the most hardened cynic who plays a rogue will think Smoke Bombs are cool. I’ll really be looking forward to seeing just how this looks in game. It’s just soooo Rogue-ish. It’s bad ’70s Ninja movies all over again. Smoke Bomb – Vanish – Guards taken out by Shuriken from no-one knows where….But ahem, back to the WoW version, 10 second use with a 3 minute CD means it wont be getting overly used and frankly without seeing it in-game its open to all sorts of presumptive comment. My gut feeling is it will look great and be so situational it will hardly ever get used in PvE. In PvP I’m slightly concerned about a bunch of players grouping together for an ability, it just seems to open the AoE fest for the opposition.

Overall I still like the Smoke Bomb and not be there when the smoke clears idea. Which is why I am not a games designer but have watched some very bad movies in my formative years.

Changes to Abilities and Mechanics

We’re also planning to make changes to some of the other abilities and mechanics you’re already familiar with. This list and the summary of talent changes below it are by no means comprehensive, but they should give you a good sense of what we want for each spec.

• In PvP, we want to reduce the rogue’s dependency on binary cooldowns and “stun-locks,” and give them more passive survivability in return. One major change is that we’ll put Cheap Shot on the same diminishing return as other stuns. The increase to Armor and Stamina on cloth, leather, and mail gear will help with this goal as well. The Rogue community have been crying out for reduced dependency on CDs for some time so in line with the other changes this looks like it as addressing the request – to some extent anyway. The devil will be in the detail, so again wait and see on this one.
  
• In PvE, even accounting for active modifiers like Slice and Dice and Envenom, a very large portion of the rogue’s damage is attributable to passive sources of damage. Yes, they are using abilities for the entire duration of a fight, but we want to reduce the percentage of rogue damage that comes from auto-attacks and poisons. More of their damage will be coming from active abilities and special attacks. This doesn’t actually tell us anything other than a pretty vague idea of where they see the class going. So they want less auto damage and us actually having to do a bit more? The main issue I have as a Mutilate rogue is waiting for the energy bar to fill up, so unless they reduce the energy costs of abilities then I’m not going to be able to do much different. There has been discussion (I’m not sure how official) about Haste allowing for faster energy regen, now that would certainly help, but I can see a damage per attack nerf coming in on the back of that one. Not enough detail to go on here at all.
• We would like to improve the rogue leveling experience. Positional attacks and DoT-ramping mechanics will be de-emphasized at low levels and then re-introduced at higher levels for group gameplay. We are also providing rogues with a new low-level ability, Recuperate, to convert combo points into a small heal-over-time (HoT). Well large chunks of the Rogue blogging community have really thrown the toys out of the pram with this one! We is Rogues, we DPS – not healz! Personally, I think it’s a good idea. The key here is the use of the word “leveling”. Lots of people have commented that levelling a rogue is a lot harder and more time-consuming the either say a paladin, hunter or DK. This ability I do not believe is aimed at the experienced player who already knows the class mechanics and is using BoA gear to help him. Think of the new guy to the game who has never really played before. For him/her this talent should be a Godsend.
  
• To complement the change to combo points, non-damage abilities such as Recuperate and Slice and Dice will no longer have target requirements and can be used with any of the rogue’s existing combo points, including combo points remaining on recently killed targets. This will not affect damage abilities, which will still require combo points to be present on the specific target you want to damage. To coincide with this, the UI will be updated so that rogues know how many combo points they have active. All sounds good, just need to see the exact detail.
  
• Ambush will now work with all weapons, but will have a reduced coefficient when not using a dagger. When opening from Stealth, all rogues will be able to choose from burst damage, DoT abilities, or a stun. I’m  a mixed bag on this one. Makes sense to avoid having to carry the weapons caddy around (‘Pass me the no.4 sword for this one please, my good man…’). But I’m wondering if it is too over simplified. Perhaps I just have an unhealthy liking for daggers?
  
• As we’ve done recently with some of the Subtlety abilities, we want to make sure more rogue abilities aren’t overly penalized by weapon choice. With a few exceptions (like Backstab), you should be able to use a dagger, axe, mace, sword, or fist weapon without being penalized for most attacks. A mace is never subtle, that’s always puzzled me. But pretty much as above here.
  
• Deadly Throw and Fan of Knives will now use the weapon in the ranged slot. In addition, we hope to allow rogues to apply poisons to their throwing weapons. I like this, its my kind of flavour. But I do wonder about poison procs and throwing weapons. I suspect that’s why the word ‘hope’ features there. I suspect they will want to do it and then find it doesn’t translate as well.
  
• We are very happy with Tricks of the Trade as a general mechanic and as a way to give rogues more group utility, but we don’t want it to account for as much threat transfer as it does now. It’s fine! Leave it alone

New Talents and Talent Changes

In Cataclysm, the overall feel of each of the rogue’s talent trees will change, as we would like each tree to have a clearly defined niche and purpose. The talent details below are meant to give you an idea of what we’re going for.

• Assassination will be more about daggers, poisons, and burst damage.
• Combat will be all about swords, maces, fist weapons, axes, and being engaged toe-to-toe with your enemies. A Combat rogue will be able to survive longer without needing to rely on Stealth and evasion mechanics.
• The Subtlety tree will primarily be based around utilizing Stealth, openers, finishers, and survivability. It’ll be about daggers, too, but less so than Assassination.
• In general, Subtlety rogues needs to do more damage than they do today, and the other trees need to have more tools.
• Weapon-specialization talents (for all classes, not just rogues) are going away. We do not want you to have to respec when you get a different weapon. Interesting talents, such as Hack and Slash, will work with all weapons. Boring talents, such as Mace Specialization and Close Quarters Combat, will be going away.
• The Assassination and Combat talent trees currently have a lot of passive bonuses. We plan to dial back the amount of Critical Strike Rating provided by these trees so that rogues still want it on their gear. Ah the language of the Games Designer… You say Dial Back and I say Nerf…. That said, all the above make reasonable sense.

Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

Assassination

• Melee damage
• Melee critical damage
• Poison damage

Combat

• Melee damage
• Melee Haste
• Harder-hitting combo-point generators

Subtlety

• Melee damage
• Armor Penetration
• Harder-hitting finishers

The initial tier of rogue Mastery bonuses will be very similar between the trees. However, the deeper that a player goes into any tree, the more specialized and beneficial the Masteries will be to the play style for that spec. Assassination will have better poisons than the other two specs. Combat will have very steady and consistent overall damage. Subtlety will have strong finishers.

Meh – it’s all a bit vague isn’t it? Sort of stating the obvious which will attract little criticism but doesn’t really tell us much. Keeping us hanging on for the next installment.

Overall I’m slightly disappointed with the whole bunch. They have addressed a number of concerns of the class and tried to make the class more attractive to new players as well, so that’s all good. But aside from the Smoke Bomb (which you only get at level cap) I don’t see much new in there other than tweaking the mechanics (and by the sounds of things doing it well). I was looking for something a bit more flashy as well as the tweaks. It’s all just a bit too much ‘sensible’ and not enough ‘fun’ factor.

WoW – MMORPG or just MMO?

Most Tuesday nights I meet up with a few friends and we play Role Playing Games. There’s about 4 of us and we have been doing this for several years. The evening is  more about banter and humour than serious role-playing, but that’s the way we like it. We have also all played WoW to some degree or another.  With my look at a RP server, I can safely conclude that’s nothing like what we do on a Tuesday night. WoW RPers are into free style RP and make it up as they go along with no end in sight. We use bought scenarios and there is usually a goal to be reached – sometimes we even reach it.

We are currently playing Pathfinder, which is a system I have begun to really like. Seeing as it’s a fantasy based game its hard not to draw comparisons with WoW (seeing that is my other major time-sink). A tabletop RPG is only as good as the people playing it and especially the person running it. But I have noticed there is a flavour to our Tuesday night games which just doesn’t appear in WoW.

Currently our Tuesday night game has our low-level characters (mixture of 3 x lvl 3 and a lvl 2) infiltrating (read hack, slash, kill and burn anything in our way) a goblin camp in an old fort in order to discover the nefarious plans of the as yet unseen bad guy who has been using these Goblins to create problems for the locals. Its standard plot stuff but no less fun for it. But here are some samples of the sort of thing you just don’t get in WoW:

• We take out the goblin sentries in the tower from range with bows. As we approach the tower we notice a strong smell of some kind of preservative, a bit like vinegar. What diabolic deeds have we intruded upon? As we make our way cautiously  into the tower the smell only gets stronger. When we get to the upper level we find a goblin with an arrow through his head and broken jar of pickles lying at his feet.  You just don’t get flavour (sorry!) like that in WoW. Its entirely visual, nothing to do with the other senses.
• As we continue through the fort we stumble into a patrol, 3 more goblins and two goblin hound/mastiff type creatures. One of the Goblins is holding a string with a seagull flying about 4 feet above his head flapping rather angrily. The two other Goblins are carrying several stones each. Turns out we have interrupted a game where the goblins take it in turn to throw stones at the seagull, the one that kills the seagull gets to eat it. The Goblin with the string jerks violently on the string to make aiming harder for the other two, if they run out of stones, the Goblin with the string gets to eat the seagull! It’s just fantastic! And we never see anything like that in WoW, we are too busy killing ten kobolds on order to loot the candles.
• We meet the caster boss, being the fighter I charge in 2h sword swinging and with a simple spell my sword is obliterated from the Shatter spell cast on it (I’m onto my third 2h sword now….). Imagine if when squaring off to the Lich King the first thing he did was destroy the tank’s sword? Talk about an agro reset? Imagine the whining from the players when their high ilvl epics were turned into dust on the first encounter? The forums would be ablaze with “WTF Blizz?????”

All the above work really well in a table top environment and ensure laughs a plenty. They could not translate into WoW, not without horrendous (and prohibitive) cost. I still rate WoW as the best online game out there, but it’s not a RPG, it’s just a fantasy MMO with all its limitations. I can accept some players are happy to free-form RP a bit, but standing around in Silvermoon trying to come up with another way of doing /angst is not for me. Give me the Goblins any time!

The Great DKP Debate

I’m (surprisingly enough) not in a raiding guild. Instead my mains hang around a guild which is generally a casual/social guild but is also big enough to cater for all types and they do raid from time to time. Not seriously, but that doesn’t mean they are complacent about it when they do and they like to down bosses. The times and days of raids don’t suit me so I can’t see my participation (or lack thereof) changing.

Prior to new content being released and not a lot happening, all there really is to do for the typical player is grind through raid bosses. It can all be a bit tedious at times so people look for other things to do. One other thing to do in a casual/social guild is bitch about the loot and suggest the introduction of a dkp system. Our guild seems to go through a cyclical approach to dkp.  We don’t use it and never have any problems, we get bored, we have a minority push for introduction of dkp, we have lots of debate about it, introduce it anyway, get new content and stop being bored, drop the dkp system because we are all focussing on the new content, then we get bored again etc etc. Somewhere in there the minority who insisted on having the dkp system leave for a more progression orientated guild and we end up with new recruits who missed the whole thing but some of whom when they get a bit bored suggest perhaps we should implement a dkp system. So that’s what happened at the start of last week, someone started a ‘change the looting system’ thread on the guild boards. This quickly turned into how DKP was much fairer and in his old guild he ran a system which much superior to our current system which is basically giving the loot to who ever needs it while its shared as evenly as possible.

In a raiding guild I can see why DKP is a requirement, but in a casual guild it’s so much of a minefield. On our forum boards we had 6 pages of comments on the DKP thread, anything else never gets beyond about 2, maybe 3 at a push. One thing led to another and we ended up having a vote where 11% said they wanted the current system overhauled, 20% said they would like to see some changes made to the current system and 63% said they would like the system left as is and 6% didn’t raid therefore did not express a preference. My view was the matter was therefore dealt with. The majority had spoken. But no, the instigator (now an officer for about a week) behind the push for DKP was not to be deterred. That such a significant percentage wanted the system changed obviously indicated we had a serious problem and needed to spend more time finding alternatives…. This was then followed with a request that anyone concerned about the system should speak up and those who were content with the current system please remain quiet  – their views were “less important” – I kid you not.

Fool that I am I called him on it. I should just have kept quiet, it’s not like I raid anyway, they can divide their loot up any way they want without it affecting me.  But there is nothing like someone trying to manipulate figures and push a personal agenda to really piss me off. I also hate being told my opinion is less important than others! I waded in and next thing we are up to 10 pages of comments and the other officers are pleading for a cooling off period and no more posts till things settle. It’s a sensible request too. It’s also a pretty typical reaction to whenever the dkp subject gets raised too. I have no excuses on this one, I have seen the subject and the resultant drama before, yet I still went ahead and fired it up some more rather than have some buffoon ensure he gets his ‘lewtz’ faster. I may have stuck to my guns and explained why I believe the buffoon is not only wrong but trying to manipulate others, but did it actually help anyone?

I’m left questioning my membership of the guild. Firstly, if the buffoon is a the kind of person who gets made an officer, perhaps its time I accepted the guild and I no longer have so much in common and its time to find pastures new.  That leads into the ‘ok, but what….?’ situation. I don’t have any immediate answers to that one. Although I did see that I’m not the only one going through such thoughts (nothing to do with my guild here, just another blogger pondering his next moves).

Secondly, I’m not sure why I got so riled by the buffoon’s machinations. It’s not like he has any real bearing on my normal gameplay. Perhaps I just need a new challenge in the game and this was just something to divert my energies into.

None of this has me feeling it was wrong to call the buffoon on what he was up to – I just wish it had been someone else. That way I could have agreed with them without becoming embroiled in the drama myself.

I’ll be curious to see how the whole thing ends (this time).

To finish on a lighter note, bonus points if anyone can guess the class of the buffoon’s main.

…tumbleweed…

It’s true, I have been pretty lax here. No posts for over a week. I’ve been a bit out of sorts with WoW so the blog suffered too. Anyway what has been going on is I have a job interview tomorrow and that has been occupying my time. Same company, bigger role – more authority, more responsibility and even some more money! So lots of preparation and my mind keeps wandering to what to expect in the interview. Normal service will be returned late tomorrow afternoon.

I was going to post some rogue stuff then decided to wait to see what the Cataclysm class review came up with and having read it all here I’m still trying to decide about it. More on that some other time when I have made my mind up about it.

I have resurrected an old rogue and I’ll be trying some stuff with him at some point in the near future.  That combined with my usual dilemma about ‘what do I really want to do in WoW’ – all coming soon… promise….