2 days of Battlegrounds!

Day One

Started it out by finding the first entrance to the Horde side in Northern Barrens.

I got into the que and it took about 30 minutes for me to get invited into the Battleground. I was excited and ready to kill!

My excitement was cut short as I realized my team was down two flags and the third flag was about 30 seconds away from being captured. By the time I got out the door the battleground closed. Thirty minute wait for nothing... I was no longer excited.

I waited another 20 minutes or so for the next BG. I got in and immediately went to work. I was quickly up on the top of the killing blows and honorable kill list. I wanted to explore the ins and outs of the BG so I wasn't a team player at all. I spent the entire game just killing anything red. In the end I had 20 killing blows and 28 honorable kills. However our team was mostly under level 60 and the Alliance team was just steam rolling and carrying the flag away. We lost rather quickly.

The next BG only took about 15 minutes to get into. It lasted about an hour before the Alliance finally beat us. I started to learn the ins and outs of flag carrying. Druids make great solo flag carriers and the Priest/Warrior combo is rather tough to beat.

Day Two

My first BG took less than a minute to load into. It was an easy win for us. I was still learning the flag carrying routine and only managed to grab it once... losing it in the middle of the BG to a group of rogues. I was disconnected originally and it took me about five minutes to log back in. We were up one when I got back in and the second flag was on the way.

My second BG of the day was my time to shine. I had my flag routine down now that I knew the map. I was in first and fast and had the flag out within minutes. I lost it though when I ran into the alliance attacking force.

My second run was much better and I played hide and seek the whole way back for any easy start. The next flag fell into our hands when we basically caught all the Alliance waiting to resurrect.

The last one proved more difficult because they had taken our flag right after I had taken their flag. They camped out in their flag room and I just hid. Our team sent everyone to get our flag back and it was just proving difficult with almost all their team defending. We finally got our flag back and right when I went to place ours... an Alliance rogue took ours.

Some bug caused me to drop the flag when I chased after the rogue to get our flag. So it defaulted back to their base. We stopped the rogue but had to get their flag again.

45 minutes later our warrior had their flag and it was an all out fight to get it back. Their entire team and our entire team met in the middle of the BG and it was a battle royale all the way back into our flag room. I saved all my mana to heal the warrior and was empty right as he placed it to win.

A great end to a great two days!

Battlegrounds... the basics!

I didn't exactly get to indulge fully into the battlegrounds (BGs) due to real life stuff, but I headed to Warsong Gulch for a couple hours last night. I will run down the three major things I noticed.

1. The queue. Players run up to the instance entrance portal and get a menu. The player can then select an individual BG to wait for, or first available, which will put them in line for the first open BG spot. There were eleven separate Warsong Gulches open when I arrived. Then I had to wait and when my turn came up I instantly portaled into the BG. A player can portal in from anywhere in the world, a very nice feature for an auction house junkie like me.

The problems with the queue I noticed:
- The estimated wait time was always wrong. It would usually say there was 6-10 minute wait, but I had only one wait time less than 20 minutes.
- Players get invited into BGs to replace players that have left. The problem, players get dumped on their rear with no idea how the battle is going. It could be a jump right into a team winning, or a drop-in right as your team is losing, effectively wasting the 20 minutes the player just waited.

2. Forming groups and raids in the BG is just plain rough. Mixed groups from different raids, and other groups, forcing players to reform. It is a pain because some people just want to go solo. My fix: force all players into a raid group for that BG. This way everyone can communicate and no one has to spam "WHO HAS THE RAID GROUP??".

3. If a player goes into a BG with people that don't want to team together, they will hate life. Unorganized players stand no chance in a BG unless the other team is just as disorganized. Unfortunately, all it takes is 2-3 coordinated players to effectively grab flags and win a game against an unorganized team.

More coming later!

Update: 6 Apr, 2007 - Edited labels and post.

WoW patch 1.5 goes live... Battlegrounds!

Here are the notes.

Here is a link over to my great friends at Dizzarian.com that have researched some alternate download links for the patch.

Get in and get deadly!

Expect a full write up tommorow when I hopefully get into some battleground action tonight!

Raiding Stormwind...

Last night a call went out in Ogrimmar for a raid heading into the depths of Stormwind to kill off the Alliance's Archbishop of Stormwind. It was a well lead and coordinated effort for the most part. We were all summoned in within 45 minutes and the Archbishop fell within an hour of me joining the raid.

Wether both our raid groups got credit is still to be seen. Hopefully when I log on tonight I will have gotten some sort of reward in contribution points. I will be disapointed if we didn't get credit being in the second raid group.

When the end of raid damage reports came out I placed # 3 overall with just over 14,500 damage done. Well done considering it was a 50+ person raid.

Definately a fun event. I followed it up by heading to TM for a few more HK's, but ended up with a disconnect ending my night. My fault actually... knocked my network switch's adapter out of the power strip.

Miyamoto... champion of gaming!

The creative mind behind Mario, Zelda, and Nintendo frontman, Shigeru Miyamoto, has always been a champion to me. Focusing on gameplay and innovation over all else. There is a reason each new Zelda or Mario draw huge amounts of gamers... because the games are always fun and always on the driving edge of gameplay. And according to this article he just isn't happy with the current route that Sony and Microsoft are taking the gaming market.

"Rather than thinking we have a new console, let's make epic games, I want [developers] to make more unique products," - Miyamoto

I couldn't agree more. How many more shoot shoot shoot or drive drive drive games do I need? The problem I see though is that game development costs are skyrocketing forcing developers into the old reliable "make games that people always buy" mentality. This is why we have Tomb Raider games still cluttering shelves; because there is always money to be made in a sequel. It is the reason all the new consoles, Nintendo included, will be launching with sequels to their best franchises.

Like I said in a previous blog post "Is going back a good idea for the MMO world?" maybe game developers need to go back and redefine their roots and then proceed forward with new original ideas instead of pushing graphics over all else.

That is why Miyamoto is my champion of gaming because he will never settle for only graphical upgrades. A few more of him in the gaming industry and we might just avoid a few dark years for gaming.

Legal radar for WoW?

Legal radar for World of Warcraft or UI mod over the edge? That is the focus of this morning’s talking points memo. Sorry, I am a Bill O’Reilly watcher.

Now, I do not condone the use of hacks or cheats in any games I play. Also, I do not support any links to such materials. However, this is the grey area between UI mod and cheat that WoW gamers are quickly becoming unsure of.

The UI mod in question, which cycles through all targets around a player and then populates their mini-map with dots that, is firmly in this grey area. If an enemy is within targeting range, then they can be displayed and tracked on a player's mini-map. Is this considered a legal form of radar? For the moment, it seems that it is.

I do not have much programming talent, or knowledge on the inner workings of this mod, but I only see two possible reactions (fixes) from Blizzard.

1. Remove the ability for a UI mod to track distance and direction between a player and their target. Distance is a core tool in many UI mods. It lets players know when a target is in range for any number of abilities. I don’t see how this could be removed without causing more problems than it is worth.

2. Remove the ability for a UI mod to display self-updating dots on the mini-map. This would not hurt many useful UI mods that display information on the mini map, but would have a negative effect on this "legal radar". However, what effect would it have on hunters?

I hope that I am completely wrong about the fixes, but I will leave it in Blizzard’s capable hands. I say capable assuming that they can and will stop this mod from working.

And that’s the memo.

Update: 4 Nov, 2007 - Edited post and applied labels.

NOTE: I've long since given up watching Mr. O'Reilly. Cable news sucks.

Chuck E. Cheese 2.0

Nolan Bushnell, creator of Pong and founder of Chuck E. Cheese restaurants, is up to a new project, one that may just merge the inner gamer and bar rat in all of us.

"Imagine a Chuck E. Cheese for grown-ups—with booze and Caesar salads instead of balloons and singing animatrons. Bushnell has built "party tables" where six customers can play each other in the same game, and tournaments where diners in any of the restaurants in the chain can compete against each other in a single contest such as Texas Hold 'Em. Bushnell says he will open the first restaurant this fall in Los Angeles."

Obviously, this isn't going to be an overnight success, but it has great potential. I can remember countless trips to the local Pizza Hut, sitting around thumbing through the little trivia cards set on the tables, and quickly giving up due to boredom. Between meeting fellow gamers, and potentially having a place where a gamer can feel at ease talking about Warcraft, Mario, or a new PC's hardware specs, the restaurant should give a great avenue for a new audience of gamers. This could potentially be the cigar shop for the gamer. The only thing that may hold it back, the name, uWink Media Bistro.

Update: 8 Jul, 2007 - Edited post and applied labels.

E3 MMOG's

From the author of the MMOGchart.com website there is his wrap up of all the MMOG's that were at this years show.

The link.... http://www.mmogchart.com/E32005.html

Couple things I wanted to highlight out of the write up.

"Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar (formerly Middle Earth Online)"
- Why the name change? I hate to think they will try to cash in off the success of the movies because I strongly doubt that this was a move towards the books. Most people identify with Lord of the Rings rather than the Middle Earth terminolgy. Maybe its just my inner nerd that felt some lost sense of pride at actually knowing what Middle Earth was before the huge success of the movies.

"I can honestly say that DDO was easily the most interesting and fun MMOG I saw at E3 this year."
- Gives me some hope that my hopes for a decent D&D MMO will be released. Outside of Neverwinter Nights there hasn't been much for the D&D crowd.

"Tabula Rasa has undergone a complete makeover. The game is now more like a First-Person Shooter with RPG elements."
- Not that I was looking at Tabula Rasa at all really... well until I read this. I have renewed interest in it now and maybe it is heading down the right path. Sci-fi just makes more sense in a fast paced FPS style game.

"SUN: Episode I of the Soul Ultimate Nation"
-I must admit I have never heard of Webzen before, but it seems they may be a Mythic type company. Mythic was able to become a big time player through Dark Ages of Camelot and maybe SUN is Webzen's gateway to the big time. They seem to be on the right track. Now it only remains to see if they can cross over into the American market.

Invisibility coming back?

According to a post on World of Warcraft's PvP forum, it looks like invisibility may be coming back.

"We definitely wish to bring invisibility back into the game for the Mage at some point, however, it would more than likely be a slightly different mechanic than players might remember from Beta. It's important that invisibility is both useful and fun to use, but not so much that it provides its caster with an unfair advantage or allows for the bypassing of game content."
-Eyonix

I find the "bypassing of game content" line funny. After all, the early beta version of invisibility combined with the broken version of blink was a great tool for mages. Obviously it unbalanced the class, but that is what beta is for.

Here is my question: why does rogue's stealth work the nearly the same way that invisibility did in beta?

Does Blizzard even look at what they put in game? At one point, stealth was bearable and rogues could be detected relatively easily when they were in front of you. Now, there can be several rogues within a three foot radius and you won't see a single one.

It amazes me that Blizzard is going to put invisibility back into the game and change it from beta. Yet, they refuse to even mention how rogue stealth basically equals the old invisibility.

Update: 4 Nov, 2007 - Edited post, removed broken link, and applied labels.

Is going back a good idea for the MMO world?

I was reading this thread on VN boards and started thinking back to my early days in MMO's and why I was so drawn into them back then. I started in Ultima Online(UO) and moved onto Dark Ages of Camelot... never playing Asheron's call.

Reading that thread though about people's experiences from Asheron's Call made me wonder something. Does the MMO genre need to go backwards in order to progress forward?

Would a 2d "looking from the top down" game work in the current day? Years ago when I was still in high school I was a frequent reader of Inquest Gamer, a tabletop, pen and paper, video game, card game, and misc. fantasy game magazine. One issue they had put out a hit list of "what would make a great online game".

Of course Star Wars topped their list and they had chosen a unique graphical look... over the top just like UO. I remember drooling over the fake screen shots they had made and reading over the details of their make-believe Star Wars MMO.

And now it dawns on me several years later... that article had it right. Not the graphics... but the ideas behind the game. Reading that thread on VN just confirmed it... the people weren't talking about graphics AT ALL! Everyone was into the gameplay and the game world.

Maybe what we need in the MMO market is the following...

A low budget company with good ideas and a passion for gaming. A small title game that doesn't focus on graphics and hits all the major points of good solid gameplay. Sure there is probably some out there right now, but nothing that has caught my eye enough for a few of my dollars.

Maybe the MMO market just needs to go backwards... find its roots again and then progress from there.