Tuesday, March 24, 2009

All is fair in Love and Warcraft

It's been a while since I've had a chance to update here, not for lack of things to say. I've had a few ideas of what I wanted to say but haven't really had the time or the energy to really update anything.

I guess the first thing I want to touch on in guild management. I have several toons across a couple of servers. I've been in every type of guild imaginable from hardcore raiding to social guilds. Up until recently I had an excellent balance of guild types. On one server I had a social guild I was in, and then on another server I have a semi-hardcore raiding guild that I belong to. 

With everything that has happened over the last couple of weeks, I'm beginning to think that the raiding guilds have more cohesiveness than the social guilds do. 

I see less drama, and less real life issues in raiding guilds, there aren't verbal attacks on people in raiding guilds, well, there is and there isn't. Usually the verbal attacks are because people aren't following the raid leader's instructions. 

I'm finding that in social guilds it's the opposite, they seem to ooze drama and bullshit. Recently I was in a social guild on one of the other servers that I play on, I have since left that guild, unfortunately with very hurt feelings. The whole scenario was that there was an attack on my person that was not asked for nor was warranted, and even though I walked away from the argument, it was brought up again and again resulting in my temper flaring, and eventually a yelling match ensued. Things were said that were less than appropriate, and name calling ensued. Unfortunately, there was someone in the guild that I care very much for, and now I'm being punished by that person for my indescretions. Though that is not what this post is about. 

This post is pretty much about how far is too far. 

There are people in the World of Warcraft that come from different walks of life, they have different personality types. Some people take criticism well, and other's need a more softer approach. 

I unfortunately am the latter. 

When I play any toon, I do research, preparing a toon to be heroic or raid ready takes months and months of planning, and the planning can be ongoing. When I build gear sets, I go after gear that is going to provide the best route to reaching the necessary caps (whether it be hit, expertise, defense or whatnot). Unfortunately it sometimes seems as if I'm doing nothing, until you turn your head and look and I'm almost geared out. 

Some people do not understand how I play this game, and some others do. My guild on Draenor-US understands that I play a very mathematic game, and have basically given me the title of statistician. Nothing ever gets past me, tanks say they're not getting heals, I call them out on it, someone says they didn't get heals, I pull up the timeslice of their death.

This is how I play the game. I will not change that for anyone. I play based on the mathematics of the game and I play analytically.

Some people don't like this because it comes across as slow and tedious. I can agree with it being slow, and tedious, but I'm not going to take a piece of gear to play with when someone could necessarily use it more than I could. 

Anyways, I'm rambling here. 

The whole situation in the social guild was this....apparently someone wasn't pleased with the fact that I was aiming for hit/expertise cap...which had nothing to do with tanking, and apparently had gotten the idea into their head that I cannot DPS for the life of me, which is completely incorrect. My death knight, who currently is in half DPS gear and half defense gear (tanking) pushes a tidy 1700 DPS, this 1700 DPS is with credit to my close friend Ceridwynn of Azuremyst-US. If it wasn't for her, I would still be farming ore, and begging in trade chat for titansteel cooldowns, and leatherworkers. Or still grinding not only my mining, but my blacksmithing, and basically tanking regular dungeons for lowbies.

There were accusations that I was doing nothing, which is untrue. I had people in guild asking me to tank on another character, which I was doing willingly, and pushing myself to the point of exhaustion, I would log out at the end of the day so exhausted from tanking instance upon instance and literally pass out in my chair. I do agree that I was doing nothing on the toon I was supposed to be playing, but on the other hand, I was helping guildies get the necessary gear that would help them perform better. In otherwords, I was putting the guild before myself. I helped another guildie open up hundreds of dailies, so that he would have access to funds aside from crafting. 

But then, I suppose that this is how the cookie crumbles, and gives me a sharp reminder that sometimes not all is fair in the World of Warcraft, and that to the jerks go the spoils.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

The Guild Bank

This morning I was sitting in trade chat watching accusations fly by, and a thought came to mind over what was discussed.

There were people in trade accusing another person of stealing something from a guild bank. These people were threatening to report him to Blizzard Entertainment.

Have we ever thought of where the line stands between Blizzard Entertainment and Guild Leaders and their Justicars?

Usually disputes within guilds are handled by the guild themselves not by the game masters.

The biggest dispute that I have been enountering is that someone is invited into a guild, the guild bank is left open, and they then proceed to remove items from the guild bank (whether it be a green or an epic or mats or whatnot. They then are either kicked or leave the guild with the same mats in their hands.

Then they are berated in trade chat and are threatened with reporting to Blizzard because they removed an item from an obviously open guild bank.

What people don't realise is that Warcraft is a social game. Blizzard is technically there to solve coding issues, or misaloccated loot or to fix bugs. They are not there to mediate our own internal guild issues.

An Easy solution to the Guild Bank "Ninja" is this: Lock down your guild bank, only allow withdrawls by the Guild Leader and the Justicars (Officers). Or, in my raiding guild on Draenor (US), you need to be a full member to be able to access the guild bank,, and then that is even limited to 1 or 2 stacks a day, and only from certain tabs.

Protecting your guild bank is easy, you just need to take the time to do it, and for the love of god, don't air your dirty laundry in Trade Chat!

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Glory of the Raider

Tell me, that this is not the most amazing piece of cinematography the world of warcraft has seen. 

For quite some time we have relied on Ciderhelm's concise and straightforward boss explanations, and then to see this piece of mastery, literally made my jaw hit the floor. Watch the video above....you'll see what I mean.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

The Druid

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Raid Efficiency

Raiding: We've all done it at once point in our World of Warcraft careers. We've had raids that take 3-4 days to do a full clear on an instance, and we've done full clears in just a couple of hours.

I suppose my biggest complaint about raiding is inefficiency. We've all been guilty of it, whether it would be waiting to be resurrected instead of running back, or asking for buffs while pulling trash, all of these things waste time. 

I timed a guild run several months ago, and discovered that from raid formation to first boss pull was a little over 3 hours. During that 3 hours we could've cleared at least 2-3 bosses, but we were stopping after almost every pull just to rebuff people.

In a raiding guild it should be expected that you are fully prepared and ready to buff up as soon as raid invites go out, which means as soon as you receive that invite you should be on your way to the instance. Your flasks, reagents, food and potions should all be prepared and in your bag prior to this point. You should be fully repaired and at 100% before you head to the instance. 

I realise that people playing this game do work, and may log in just as raid invites go out, which means that you should be doing your restocking and repairing the night before, so that if you're only able to log in just as raid invites go out, you're ready to go and just need to get at the instance.

Touching a bit on buffs, during trash pulls all you really need is your own self-buffs. It's trash, WoW Webstats doesn't really record trash pulls, so really, as long as you can get the trash down, there's no reason for full buffs. If you die during trash, release, run back, and as you're running back, self buff and get back into the fray.

If you follow these few simple ideas, you'll see more bosses go down in an evening.


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