The Great Readjustment

I'm playing WoW again.

I hope you didn't forget me

I struggled with deciding to reup my subscription or not for a few days. I planned on getting Legion from the beginning, that plan didn't change, but I had been piecing together a long term plan.

First, I would prepurchase Legion, which I still have to do and am planning on asking for it for my birthday. Secondly, I would, as money allowed, transfer a few of my characters over to Chromaggus.

Why the transfer? First, some backstory to catch you up:

The Grand Garrison Mistake

As of this moment, I simply cannot stand my garrison. Just a few moments of walking around in my garrison reminds me that I'm sick of it and I'm sick of Warlords.

That's just how I feel. I'm sure not everyone does, but I'm definitely not the only person. But why? What did they get wrong?

Garrisons were a decent idea that got implemented poorly. There is one particular aspect of garrisons that is not only a problem on its own, but caused a huge problem in Warlords entirely.

Jungles, Shipyards, and Orcs Oh My

So 6.2 came out yesterday. This was me, today, on Wednesday.

zeroed in on the druid changes

Yesterday, I went on a day trip and played MH4U, forgetting there was a huge patch. So, I dove in today.

I updated my addons, - except for Master Plan since it wasn't updated and doesn't work and my life is in shambles - half assed some of my garrison chores, and built a shipyard. I'm killing orcs in Tanaan Jungle, and vaguely remembering that there was something about being able to fly.

pigeons?

I didn't read up a lot on the new patch. Honestly, I haven't been keeping up to date with what's coming in and going out in patches for awhile. This is the biggest patch of Warlords so far, and here is an exhaustive list of what I knew about it before today:

• A meta-achievement to grant flying but apparently not yet or something
• Timewalking and relevant weekends (which I wrote about)
• Tanaan Jungle, supposedly kinda like Timeless Isle
• New raid instance
• Shipyards are a thing

Funnily enough, I've really been looking forward to 6.2. Not for anything in particular really, since I haven't been paying that much attention, but for a dive into some (hopefully) exciting new content.

Those Damn Dirty Scoundrels

Recently, Blizzard went back on a thing they said. It was super significant. Discussion about it had been going on for kind of a long time if I remember correctly.

As any time where Blizzard does something differently than they said they would earlier, people jumped out of the woodwork and wrote angry forum posts about how Blizzard are LIARS!

NO! THRALL SAVE US!

Liars, all of them! They said they would never do this thing, and then they did. They said this thing would be a thing forever and now it's NOT! This other thing, they said it would be made this thing, but now it's a totally different thing! How can we ever even trust any single thing they ever say?!

these things

The very idea!

Flying's Back, Alright

Well, I honestly didn't think they'd do it. I also realize I lied about not doing another flying post, but I feel like this is a monumental decision and there are some words I'd like to put all in a row about it. 

If you're late on the uptake like me, who was very confused to hear people talking about flying in Draenor yesterday, Blizzard has made a concession to bring flying to Draenor. That's right, everybody!

Backstreet's back! wait

The way they have decided to implement flying into Draenor is to award it to you, account wide, after you've accomplished a meta-achievement that requires you do a ton of stuff in Draenor on foot, first.

The way this change has been implemented is getting a wide variety of praise, complaints, death threats, and the rest of the usual - but let me tell you why it's absolutely perfect.

The Flying Purple People Eater

Yesterday, I wrote about flying. Well, no, I wrote about Warlords of Draenor's lack of interesting and engaging content. I am a person with various opinions that require many words to reveal their true nature, and in my previous post I precariously left unspoken the matter of my actual opinion on the flying debate. It sparked some feedback, where it seemed to me that I may have implied I think the flying debate is unimportant.

not working as intended

While there may have been parts that alluded to my beliefs, the reality was shrouded. Here is the thing, though: my opinion doesn't matter.

What am I trying to say? That, as one singular individual within the vast Warcraft playerbase, my opinion isn't important? Am I implying, in this statement, that all of your opinions don't matter?

No, no. Here's the situation at hand: the voices of those so opposed to the flying restriction that they have continued to voice their concerns for more than a year are more important than my opinion.

The Flying Scapegoat

The flying restriction in Draenor is one of the biggest controversial topics in the game to date. From the moment it was announced until now and guaranteed into the future, there has been heated discussion on the topic.

this thread was started in March of 2014 and was only just recently locked at 2241 pages

One of the opinions I see that a lot of pro-flyers share is that not being able to fly keeps them cooped up inside of their garrison. They feel that without the freedom to soar over inconsequential enemies and mountains to head to their exploration or farming destinations, they have no desire to leave their garrison at all.

It's my amateur opinion that being flying restricted isn't actually the cause of this garrison-hermitism, and I'm going to tell you why.

These Boots Are Made For Timewalking

Timewalking is a new feature coming in 6.2. This official Blizzard preview summarizes it pretty quickly, but if you haven't read about it and need an even quicker summary: you can queue up for some randomly selected old dungeons, where you will be scaled down to reasonable power, but you can still get rewards relevant to current content.

baby I'm coming home!

Oh, but only if the current weekend event is a timewalking event.

Game Evolution - Why The Game Changes

World of Warcraft has changed dramatically over the course of its life. We all know that the game does change - duh, it's not going to not change. We joke about playing "the same game" for ten years, but really, no one is going to play the same game for so long. The game has to change for people to keep playing it. You'll go back to a game you liked and play it again, but not for, say, six hundred total days worth of time. For a game to accumulate that kind of loyalty, it has to keep its playerbase entertained and happy.

A more curious question is why does the game change the way that it does? What factors influence the designers' decisions on how to change the game?

well...

This subject is misleadingly complex. There's no shortage of people claiming they know exactly what would fix the game, but that actually attributes to part of the problem.

We all know the game has to change, that the driving factor in changing it is to keep people playing, and that the changes made are intended to keep people playing and hopefully increase the amount of people playing it. Anything else would be nonsensical.

What's complicated about that? Well...

playerbase vs. blizzard

Warlords Subscription Prescription Description

If you already read forums or read trade chat (why would you do that, though?), you don't need to read anything else about the state of World of Warcraft's active subscription numbers, I'm sure - but I don't usually talk about the active subscription counts, so hear me out for a moment.

This is the (cropped - view full, interactive chart here) chart of WoW's active subscriptions. At Warlords release, subscriptions skyrocketed to be as high as they were at Mist's release, clearing the leap upwards from the dismal sub count that Mists had earned after overstaying its welcome with over a year of SoO. With this latest report, we're seeing that in record time of only six months, subs dropped back down dramatically to almost as low as they were at Mists' lowest point,

However, in case you forgot, Mists' release came with that Annual Pass deal - free beta access, a mount, and Diablo III for free - if you had already paid for Diablo III, you had game time credited for the worth of the game - if you agreed to subscribe to the game for a full year. Cancelling before your year was up revoked your mount and Diablo III access. Of course, after the Annual Pass ran its full year course, the subscription count was 7.6M.

What Warlords Did to Guilds

8/10H thanks to random pugs and lots of perseverance

My guild has been through a lot since Warlords came out, but after finally being able to relax for a minute, I realized that it's not just my guild that's suffering - Warlords' new raid system set up has had a widespread, far reaching effect on the vast majority of guilds.

As we know, Warlords removed 10 and 25 mans as a thing and replaced all difficulties with flexible roster numbers, except for mythic, which is exclusively 20 - a number Blizzard probably looked at as a 'happy medium', and a solution to the 10 vs. 25 drama.

The problem now is that there's a large number of small guilds that need to recruit for 20 man rosters and not enough potential recruits to go around. Every 10 man guild from Mists is looking to bring on 10 or more new people just to reach mythic content, but there are nowhere near that many recruits looking to join new guilds. It's not like 25 man guilds had to shed any of their members - those extra five people simply had to compete for their spots and the losers likely stayed in their guilds to warm the benches. The result of the 20 man "happy medium" was that 10 man guilds were expected to scrounge for a minimum of 10 more people, while 25 man guilds had to do nothing.

written out it's something like this

The WoW Token - The Cure?

We first heard about the WoW Token awhile back as a potential addition to the game. It was recently confirmed. In summary:

The tokens are purchased for actual money (The price isn't set yet, but it won't be less than the regular subscription price.) and are only able to be sold in a dedicated game time token section of the auction house.

They are set to an exact amount, determined by the game rather than the seller, and unable to be bid on, only bought out. Once purchased, the item becomes bound and can only be used to give yourself 30 days of game time. It does not expire nor can it be destroyed.

Basically, it's a way to buy game time with real money and sell it for gold, allowing players to "buy" gold from other players by selling them these tokens - hopefully cutting down on the gold selling problem in WoW.

Hallelujah Heirlooms

With 6.1 we saw a revamp of the heirloom system - MMOC has a short little video about it if you haven't seen it yet, or you can read the screencap summary below!

Previously, before Warlords, heirlooms were datamined to be available to purchased with gold at release, but they scrapped that and they were unable to be purchased at all for quite awhile, except with darkmoon faire tickets, with the promise of a future new heirloom system. I wrote a bit about my baseless theories on the impacts of removal of the valor point system, like months ago, but it looks like heirlooms are just about the only things that are able to be purchased with gold, and apexis crystals are the 'new valor points'.

Simcraft Is a Tool, Not a Farseer

Simulationcraft is an amazing tool when used properly, but a large number of people don't seem to understand that it's not an infallible truth. I love what you are able to use simcraft for - stat weights and other research - but the general playerbase tends to look at simcraft charts and, basically, lose their minds.

We've seen these simcraft results pop up every time there's a new raid tier or general class rebalance. Here's one of the more recent ones, they are just more or less bar graphs showing everyone's theoretical max DPS. They are put together with each dps class in the most possible similar standards - in a no adds, patchwerk type fight - and with various bars for the same class depending on variations of specs, like fury with either one-handers or two-handers.

Goodbye Pandaria, Hello Draenor!

farewell, pandaland

Warlords of Draenor comes out in just a few days! With its release comes the end of Mists of Pandaria (finally), our fourth expansion to World of Warcraft.

Mists came out on a Tuesday, September 25, 2012. Mists will have lasted two years, one month, and 18 days once Warlords is released this Thursday.

While two years in itself isn't super crazy long for an expansion in WoW, the fact that its final content patch, 5.4.0, lasted for a year, two months, and two days is a little dizzying. However, they did a pretty decent job keeping that last patch relevant for a long time - by adding heirloom weapons off of the last boss, and subsequently removing their drop chance with the release of Warlords, they created an incentive to continue to do the content up until the very last few days.

The Possibility of Relaxing the Cross-Faction Restrictions

Before real ID and battle net, if you wanted to keep in contact with your friends, you had to add their characters' names to your friends list. Each time you made an alt, you whispered your friends to add you so you could talk, along with making sure to get a guild invite. It was unlikely that your friends were even on the other faction unless you met them in real life. It was difficult to make cross-faction friends through other mediums over the internet, especially since faction loyalty was much stronger during vanilla.

as demonstrated with cats

But real ID changed everything.

Pascal: Origins

of course a master of the zergling rush

I've been playing video games since I was very young. I only played console games until my family got its first computer around when I was 11. The first notable games I played were Starcraft and Command and Conquer: Red Alert. I played other games, but RTS games were by far my favorite.

My brother owned Warcraft 3 but he insisted that I'd break it if I played it, so he never let me. I finally played it when I visited my family in Germany - my uncle specifically asked me if there were any games I'd like to play while I was visiting and I asked him for it. Once I got home, I secured myself a copy of it and played it for months.

When World of Warcraft first came out, I didn't even know it existed, but my brother got it a few months after its release. He no longer believed I would break his computer just by touching it and he more or less demanded that I come upstairs and play it.

Legendary Legacies and Content Removal

As most of us know, Blizzard decided to remove the legendary cloak quest from the game as of Warlords of Draenor release. This was just one change of quite a few things, some of which were expected while others were a shock.

A recent blog post overviews each thing that is being changed and removed, while there are other posts clarifying these things in detail.

The End is Nigh!

If you have doomsday prophecys for your class or spec for warlords release, you're not alone - all I have heard from friends and guildmates has been that their class is going to be useless come the expac.

Our tanks are not looking favorably at the tank squish and jokingly - or maybe not jokingly - said that tanks would be unecessary in warlords and raid groups would just be dps ping ponging aggro back and forth with a few healers.

Regarding Tank Concerns - Then and Now

June 5, 2006 - i.e., ancient history

World of Warcraft has changed fundamentally over the years. There are a lot of different players all with different ideas about how the game should be played, some more vocal than others. 

Certain behaviors and attitudes I think are completely justified, but perhaps just not everyone feels the same way about them. Some others are remnants of ancient history and are no longer applicable to the game the way that it is today, while others are simply perpetrated by players who may be jaded or stuck up. 

Something that I find to be very interesting is how players ten years later are viewing the mechanic of threat, and how some tanks in particular view themselves. Omen used to be a required raiding addon to join even lower end raiding guilds, while nowadays it tends to be merely suggested, if even mentioned. Threat is a mechanic that has changed dramatically since the original incarnation of the game, and I believe some people haven't updated their outlook on it.