f13.net

...So, what do I want? What do I think could be changed to make World of Warcraft a better game? Jumping to conclusions, some might think that I would want more high-end content and encounters of higher difficulty. That's far from it. I want to be able to log on, and have worthwhile content to do which would lead to me actually progressing my character. It can be anything from 5 man up to 25 man, all is game as long as it's fun, challenging and worthwhile doing.

Compared Final Fantasy XI, another MMO that I played, there's a lot of content that can be placed at the mid levels, as well as much more group oriented content that is not in form of a 10-15 minute zerg through an instanced dungeon. The gear progression could easily be slowed down as well, so you don't constantly replace every item as soon as a new content patch is released. Sure, it might be nice to be at the top of the foodchain upgrading from the second best item to the best item for any of your slots, but that does not change the fact that it's also enjoyable to upgrade the 10th best weapon to the 9th. That's one of the biggest things that I think Blizzard have intentionally overlooked to adjust the game for their new target audience. In other words, the lack of character progression makes the game as it is today; boring, very boring. No amount of vanity pets, mounts, kill x, deliver y, collect z quests, mirrored instances, heroic instance zergs, arenas, battlegrounds and homogenized classes will change that fact. All to cater to an audience that won't be playing the game for more than 2-3 months at most...

Who cares what some douchebag Euro thinks about progression when his e-world comes crashing down around his ears? Anyone who dedicates this much of their life to being world-first in a game has lost total touch with reality and should be pitied.

I honestly can't see what other players are seeing in the game to keep them going, especially the veterans.

Didn't they rage quit already?

In all seriousness, I never got the hate over the hardcore. They do their stuff, you do yours. They decide to sink countless hours into a game, you decide to sink less hours into a game and you have friends that sink no hours into a game. To random people of the last group _you_ should be pitied. You should be happy that blizzard realizes we're the majority and makes the game for us and not for them.

"I'm burned out, and you should validate my feelings by being burned out too."

I just think it's ironic he's playing the wounded casual player role after basically being a douchebag and a turbo-hardcore raider for 5 years, and conveniently after basically being humiliated in that world by people he slagged off.

It seems that a majority of the people who claim to be casual are not casual at all.

Hell, I have one level 80, have played since release, and don't consider myself a casual player.

Sounds like a Yank is all sad over their poopsockers still not having a kill :(

That's one of the biggest things that I think Blizzard have intentionally overlooked to adjust the game for their new target audience. In other words, the lack of character progression makes the game as it is today; boring, very boring.

I've never seen [sic] the inside of AQ40, for example.

It seems that a majority of the people who claim to be casual are not casual at all.

Hell, I have one level 80, have played since release, and don't consider myself a casual player.

Indeed.  It's fucking awful.  Molten Core levels of boredom and stupidity.

You should probably consider yourself lucky.

I've never [...] seen the inside of AQ40, for example.

If by "best" you mean "Hey wouldn't it be awesome if a little bit of lag RIGHT AT THE START could kill everyone in the place,"  then sure.

It was a fun fight, to be certain, as it was still entertaining when I did it 3 years later. However when a fight insta-wipes 20 overgeared & overpowered level 80s it's a fucking cockblock of stupidity at the appropriate level.

Insta-wipe mechanics: Never fun.

which would make clear that you cut out the parts you weren't interested in?  If I understand the use of [sic] correctly, you use it when quoting someone who made a mistake which you are leaving as-is.  So, you modified his quote, and they said, "this is the way he wrote it", which is not factually correct.

Also, I'm pretty sure that there is nothing wrong with the part of the sentence that you [sic]'d - "I have never seen the inside of AQ40, for example".

Must be something in my coffee that is making me more of a douche today... yeah, that's it!  Can anyone tell me what is/isn't correct in that usage?

Grammar Snake

Casual is not about number of hours played.  Everyone has free time hours to spend on something.  You might choose to use them on an MMO.  I have a crapton of hours into the game, but that's just how I choose to use my free time.  It is my replacement for TV.  I don't watch it.

Casual is about what those hours played are.  Do you?:
1.  Tell friends, family, work that you can't do something with them because secretively (or not so secretively) that is raid night?
2.  Do you constantly put off chores like mowing the lawn, shovelling the sidewalk, changing the babies poopy diapers, etc. just to play?
3.  Do you spend more than 50% of your actual play time in game, out of game looking up data to min/max your character?
4.  Do you wake up every morning completely pissed that you stayed up so late playing the night before?  Work suffer from it?
5.  Do you get emotional when your guild fails to reach an objective to the point of affecting your attitude/emotions in RL?

If you said yes, you might be a hardcore MMO player. (There are a lot more examples.  We should start a thread on it.)  I think most of us can say we've been on the fringe of this or occasionally fell into this.  I certainly have from time to time.  However, 95% of the time I get my RL stuff done before logging in and regret the other 5%.

Casual is when your main isn't 80 yet, and you don't care.

Serious is when you raid, or LFD and spend more than a handful of gold on your gems and enchants.

Hardcore is when you realize that skipping your shower gives you 15 more minutes to finish dailies on your 3rd raiding alt.

 "But honey, I promised my WoW guild I'd raid with them during that time..."  Ummm, no, that would not go over well and I would not feel comfortable saying it.  I don't care if I lose a spot due to it.  Not important to me.

My fiancee and I have a pretty good understanding that a couple nights a week i do Raiding and can't be too bothered afterwards, but I also try to have dinner made before the raid and what not. She uses that time to watch her shows, or do some hobby she enjoys.

Casual is when your main isn't 80 yet, and you don't care.

Serious is when you raid, or LFD and spend more than a handful of gold on your gems and enchants.

Hardcore is when you realize that skipping your shower gives you 15 more minutes to finish dailies on your 3rd raiding alt.

I started playing in open beta and I have just one lvl 80.  I consider myself a casual explorer, have the achievement to prove it. :)
I've tried to raid, but my gear never seems to be up to par for it.

And I suck at it. :(

I just saved you like 5 years of your life.  Grats.

I can draw on years of raiding experience and extrapolate from the above statement that you just don't play enough to raid.  It's not a matter of sucking.  I'm pretty confident I could train a monkey to raid.  And I know virtually nothing about monkeys.  I'm saying what you perceive as sucking is simply a lack of time investment.  Time reading about the mechanics of this or that, time practicing situational awareness and key-binding muscle memory, time wrapping your brain around your class role, time modifying the UI to your specifications, time conditioning yourself to endure some of the inbred fucktards on the internet, are all things that just take time.  And if you don't have it, human nature usually wants to blame itself.  It's not you.  I just saved you like 5 years of your life.  Grats.

So to be casual, you need to have a lot of alts? Because that's the only way anyone who actually subscribes to the game could lack a level 80 main by now. The expansion has been out for like a year and a half, even someone who plays maybe an hour or two on weekends and absolutely nothing more could have a hundred hours sunk into WOTLK already.

There are a few people in my guild who haven't hit 80 yet. And don't have alts.
But the "Don't care" is the important part.

I think there are a lot of people who even raid who consider themselves casual, and its probably a fair title, you don't need to invest much time OR energy to raiding these days, unless you are doing the most recent stuff.   Then again, I raided for many years during some of WoWs most difficult and casual unfriendly instances/encounters, so to me a lot of the new stuff seems very accessible, with all the different difficulty levels and so on.  Not that it is a bad thing, but I just mean to say, you can "care" and be casual.

To me, if you raid, you're serious enough to get 10-25 people organized and working together.

Great dps knows exactly how many ticks of the fire they can safely take.

Bad dps stands in fire

Good dps avoids the fire altogether

Great dps knows exactly how many ticks of the fire they can safely take.

I seriously can't make this shit up.  :awesome_for_real:

I've never had a high level engineer, or seen the inside of AQ40, for example.

Something surreal took place in my guild alliance over the last 6 days. I want to point this out on the varying levels of wanna-be-hardcore aggrandizing douchebaggery in a forum post:

- Dude posts about his 10 man raid in the general forum.
- The post was related to the Lich King kill on their 10 man normal (not heroic) run.
- The post was a preemptive kill post, meaning they haven't actually killed anything at all. He wanted it as a placeholder.
- He made a follow-up post stating that he was going to have a live feed to their attempts this weekend, on Saturday and Sunday afternoon.
- He's open for a Q&A session about the fight 15 minutes before they get the run going.

I seriously can't make this shit up.  :awesome_for_real:

hahahaha I just looked at that. Who the shit cares about a normal mode Lich King kill outside of the people doing it? It's totally cool to be excited about killing the major big-bad of the series since the fight really isn't a joke even on normal (and you can't brute force it. Even with a 400% damage/healing/HP buff 1-2 retards make it undoable), but at this point...who cares?

They can do it if they want, but it's alright if people find it silly.

I do admit however, my guild streamed/recorded our first runs into Ulduar when it dropped for the first 2-3 weeks so our people who couldn't go got to see how the fights worked (it helped, a lot. Seriously), and because a guild we were friends with had a bunch of people dicking around who weren't in the main raid group either.

After about the 3rd week though we stopped because we were all familiar with the first several encounters and the shine had worn off.

2. Wipes / nobody in combat resurrects your raid beside the group > at a respawn point > at the door.

Yes - this is what should happen. When your group exits combat and the boss resets, the whole group should be resurrected with full health and mana and with the buffs and position that they had before the fight began, in exchange for a five minute timer where they can't attack.

AQ40 had some of my favorite bosses, of course, it had some terrible ones too.  Way better than Molten Core though.  To this day I think C'thun is the best fight Blizzard has ever made