There's a new World of Warcraft expansion coming out in two weeks and I thought I'd take a look and see what stuff they're adding in this time around. This was probably a mistake because it turns out it sounds pretty sweet and now I'm probably going to end up wanting to play it again. They're adding two new game modes that sound pretty fun and they added one in the last expansion that I didn't really play that they're continuing on that really seemed up my alley. Thematically it sounds like this expansion is trying to return to making the Alliance and the Horde be fighting each other again instead of teaming up to fight the big bad. I don't much care about this one way or the other, but it does mean the mechanics are more PvP focused.
The first new mode is a Warcraft II mode to take over control of a zone from the other faction. Oddly it isn't PvP at all; it seems they actively want the zone to flip back and forth and if it was PvP then on most servers it wouldn't flip at all. Instead it's like a 20 person PvE fight where you build resource gathering buildings and barracks and stuff and then lead dudes into battle. It sounds neat, but probably not something you're going to want to do a ton of. You could just go play WCIII (which got a patch recently to revive that game) instead. But it should be fun.
The second new mode is a 3v3 race to score the most points by doing WoW type things. Kill monsters, do quests, open treasures, etc. The map is covered by a fog of war so you need to explore around and adapt your plan based on what actually spawned in this particular instance. There are a bunch of different islands to create ground rules but the location of things is procedurally generated so you need to adapt on the fly. Blizzard claims to have designed good bots to play the other 3 person team for the easier difficulty levels but the hardest mode requires you to have a premade group of 3 and pits you against another 3 person team. Spread out and get treasures? Gank squad to kill the other team? Someone with stealth and a lot of CC? Healers? Lots of options and it should be fun. Small scale skirmishes are the sort of PvP I can get behind, so hopefully this mode is done well.
The last mode, which existed already, is mythic+ dungeons. It's a system that's been evolving for a while, and has stolen some things from Path of Exile, and seems to be in a pretty good spot now. The basic idea is you do a hard 5 man dungeon with a time limit. Finish under the time limit and you get an item to let you run another harder 5 man dungeon. Beat that one in time and you get an even harder one. As you get harder and harder ones you start getting affixes on the dungeons that change the way things work. More enemy damage, less healing, weird dots... All sorts of options, and they're adding new ones. The loot is good and I think people pushing the really high mythic+s is a fairly competitive thing so I'd like to get in on the ground floor for it this expansion and see what I can do. It takes 4 other people and I don't know people who play anymore, but I imagine my old guild will at least have a few people interested at the start. I'm pretty sure Death Knights rate to be really good tanks for mythic dungeons at any rate, so I have a niche to fill! And who knows, maybe streaming mythic dungeons is a thing people are interested in watching?
Showing posts with label World of Warcraft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World of Warcraft. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
Monday, April 27, 2015
World of Warcraft: Back to Raiding
A couple weeks ago I was thinking about games I'd played in the past that I wish I'd streamed. World of Warcraft was the first one that jumped to mind. Having a recording of how I'd played undoubtedly would have been good for getting better, and it would also be nice to have things like Tribute to Dedicated Insanity up on Youtube to be able to watch and reminisce about years in the future. The very next day Sky put up a post on his blog about differences in recruiting in his current guild and in the one we used to run back in the day.
WoW also recently went free to play. Well, not exactly, but pretty close. Instead of paying a monthly fee you can choose to sell some gold to another player, through Blizzard, and they pay your monthly fee for you. I have more gold on my account than I know what to do with so resubscribing with gold doesn't cost me much of anything at all. So I can try to get back into raiding without a monetary cost...
{As an aside, Blizzard still owes me around 400k gold from when my account was hacked. Now that that amount is over a year and a half of subscription fees I can't imagine ever getting it back, but it just makes getting hacked all the more annoying.}
Sky went and cleared it with his guild leader that streaming is allowed in his guild, so I've been working on getting my gear to a state where I can plausibly raid without just being a drag on things. I did some reading on rotations and stats and such and I'm pretty ready now, so tonight I'm going to try streaming a raid at 9:30 AST.
I normally prefer to tank things, but coming in super undergeared and not knowing any of the fights means I'm going to be a beatdown DK at least to start. And maybe the whole time? The way flexible raids work really make it seem like extra DPSers is fine, but extra tanks aren't needed unless old tanks cut back on play time. But that's just fine by me, as I've liked beating down too.
I will say, I've only been back playing for a week and I'm already sick of both LFR and Ashran. The queue times for both are really long for a DPSer and the gameplay in both just isn't very interesting. But they both provide a way to bootstrap my gear, so I felt obligated to do them. I'm about done with both of them now though, I think...
WoW also recently went free to play. Well, not exactly, but pretty close. Instead of paying a monthly fee you can choose to sell some gold to another player, through Blizzard, and they pay your monthly fee for you. I have more gold on my account than I know what to do with so resubscribing with gold doesn't cost me much of anything at all. So I can try to get back into raiding without a monetary cost...
{As an aside, Blizzard still owes me around 400k gold from when my account was hacked. Now that that amount is over a year and a half of subscription fees I can't imagine ever getting it back, but it just makes getting hacked all the more annoying.}
Sky went and cleared it with his guild leader that streaming is allowed in his guild, so I've been working on getting my gear to a state where I can plausibly raid without just being a drag on things. I did some reading on rotations and stats and such and I'm pretty ready now, so tonight I'm going to try streaming a raid at 9:30 AST.
I normally prefer to tank things, but coming in super undergeared and not knowing any of the fights means I'm going to be a beatdown DK at least to start. And maybe the whole time? The way flexible raids work really make it seem like extra DPSers is fine, but extra tanks aren't needed unless old tanks cut back on play time. But that's just fine by me, as I've liked beating down too.
I will say, I've only been back playing for a week and I'm already sick of both LFR and Ashran. The queue times for both are really long for a DPSer and the gameplay in both just isn't very interesting. But they both provide a way to bootstrap my gear, so I felt obligated to do them. I'm about done with both of them now though, I think...
Friday, January 09, 2015
More Pay To Win Thoughts
Tobold put up a post today claiming that everything that every online game sells is pay to win. He's been saying for an awfully long time that League of Legends has to be pay to win because he didn't think selling skins was a viable business model. So he'd say things like xp boosts were pay to win power boosts when they're completely irrelevant for the majority of the player base. He doesn't seem to have backed off from that stance, though in this post he at least acknowledges that LoL has a successful business model for their game. (Even if he makes that point only to deride it as an option for any other game.)
At any rate, there was a conversation in the comments and I started typing and typing. When I was done the system wouldn't let me post my comment because it was too long. So I pruned it down, but I still had a bunch of stuff written up and I figured I should just make a post about it. On the plus side thinking about the topic in an attempt to figure out why I think Tobold is wrong is useful for thinking things through. Needing to work through why I think what I think is important!
One phrase I took particular exception to was...
Please do! Either there is no win condition at all in World of Warcraft, or everything you want is a win condition in World of Warcraft.
This is a false dichotomy. He's making the claim that it has to be A or B when it should be pretty clear that a spectrum of possibilities has to at least be an option.
What could be more accurate is that anything _could_ be a win condition in World of Warcraft. As essentially an open world game with a plethora of things to do any given person is certainly free to feel good about accomplishing whatever they think is cool. My big concern is when someone else's win condition impacts my win condition. For example, think about the specific instance of pet battles...
Some people will want a lot of high level pets. Some people will want a specific few high level pets that allow them to beat the legendary pet battles. Some people will want a specific few high level pets that allow them to beat other players in pet battles. Some people won't want any pets at all.
Blizzard sells plenty of pets in plenty of ways, and some of them are actually quite powerful. I don't know if they actually sell an exclusive best pet or not, but let's pretend they do. Someone who is an A will think this is mildly pay to win. They'll never be able to get ALL the pets without buying this one. They can still get close, and they can still have fun getting close.
Someone who is a B might think this is pay to win. The difference will be how good the 'free' options happen to be. If the epic PvE fights are trivial without them then they don't matter at all. If they're impossible without them then it is extremely pay to win. If it's somewhere in the middle then you'll have a spectrum of how the B people care about it. If they want a challenge they'll do it without the paid pet. If they want to win easily/quickly then they'll feel obligated to buy the paid pet.
Someone who is a C will think this is definitely pay to win. There's no way to avoid the existence of this pet because your opponents might or might not have paid to get it. Your experience against these people is absolutely impacted, and that's the specific thing you care about. In this hypothetical world you either buy the awesome pet or you can't play the game the way you want to.
If you're a D then you really don't care at all. Picking the pet out of your mailbox wouldn't be worth your time so it could be free or cost a billion dollars and you wouldn't care.
So, is this pet pay to win?
I'd argue the way to make that decision is to look at how many win conditions are impacted by the existence of the item. So the distribution of the players between the different categories and the way non-buyers are impacted need to be considered.
In a world where most people are Cs then this pet has to be considered pay to win. Most people care about head to head battles, and you can't win without paying money. So a large proportion of win conditions among players of the game are impacted.
In a world where most people are Ds then the pet isn't really pay to win. It would probably be more accurate to say that the pet battle part of the game is a paid mini-game. Competitive PvP pet battlers aren't going to be able to play WoW without this pet. Similar to how they won't be able to play a mythical Pokemon Fight game without paying for the game. Now, this mini-game may well be pay to win, but I don't think it existing in a world with mostly Ds would make the overall game pay to win.
The tricky part is when most players are Bs. How many win conditions are impacted in this scenario? The people who like a challenge won't care much because their game experience doesn't change by the item existing, unless the PvE fights are tuned under the assumption you have the awesome pet. (Also, some people will be annoyed that other people get to take the easy mode. I don't particularly care for that argument but I'm sure it can be made.) So it would come down to how the Bs are split and how mandatory the pet feels.
Now, change the framing a little. Instead of a pet it's now a weapon. How would the argument change? The Ds and Cs and As wouldn't change. The Bs would. Why? Because PvE in WoW is often group based. The game itself explicitly gates who can join group content based on their gear and historical experience tells us that players will act the same way. (See: gearscore) So you having this weapon does change my win condition. The game and the players will exclude me from the content I want to do (and by extension make my win condition harder or impossible) regardless on what level of challenge I want.
In a world where the other players or the game itself will exclude you then purely PvE items do impact my gameplay and are pay to win. In a world where I don't interact with the other players in this aspect it isn't pay to win. If you could buy outhouses to get more easy achievements that could be pay to win if your achievement score impacts my game. If it doesn't then it probably wouldn't be.
Basically... I don't care about your win condition. I care about mine. If you spending a lot of money makes it easier for you to win, and that makes you happy, and it doesn't change mine then that's awesome. The developer should make money and this setup probably results in me paying less. But if you paying money hurts me then I'm not happy. So if you can buy a max level character I don't actually care. Extra level 100s wouldn't hurt me. (It might cause some groups to have inexperienced and therefore likely subpar players. But there are plenty of those players anyway.) But if you can buy all the gear to enter the hardest raid finder raids and I have to grind for months before I can get in then I'm not happy.
Note that the game being pay to win isn't necessarily a deal breaker. I still play some CCGs and you'd be hard pressed to claim that someone who spends a lot of money on Hearthstone packs won't have better cards than I do! I am more likely to get frustrated and quit because of the pay to win aspect, though.
At any rate, there was a conversation in the comments and I started typing and typing. When I was done the system wouldn't let me post my comment because it was too long. So I pruned it down, but I still had a bunch of stuff written up and I figured I should just make a post about it. On the plus side thinking about the topic in an attempt to figure out why I think Tobold is wrong is useful for thinking things through. Needing to work through why I think what I think is important!
One phrase I took particular exception to was...
Please do! Either there is no win condition at all in World of Warcraft, or everything you want is a win condition in World of Warcraft.
This is a false dichotomy. He's making the claim that it has to be A or B when it should be pretty clear that a spectrum of possibilities has to at least be an option.
What could be more accurate is that anything _could_ be a win condition in World of Warcraft. As essentially an open world game with a plethora of things to do any given person is certainly free to feel good about accomplishing whatever they think is cool. My big concern is when someone else's win condition impacts my win condition. For example, think about the specific instance of pet battles...
Some people will want a lot of high level pets. Some people will want a specific few high level pets that allow them to beat the legendary pet battles. Some people will want a specific few high level pets that allow them to beat other players in pet battles. Some people won't want any pets at all.
Blizzard sells plenty of pets in plenty of ways, and some of them are actually quite powerful. I don't know if they actually sell an exclusive best pet or not, but let's pretend they do. Someone who is an A will think this is mildly pay to win. They'll never be able to get ALL the pets without buying this one. They can still get close, and they can still have fun getting close.
Someone who is a B might think this is pay to win. The difference will be how good the 'free' options happen to be. If the epic PvE fights are trivial without them then they don't matter at all. If they're impossible without them then it is extremely pay to win. If it's somewhere in the middle then you'll have a spectrum of how the B people care about it. If they want a challenge they'll do it without the paid pet. If they want to win easily/quickly then they'll feel obligated to buy the paid pet.
Someone who is a C will think this is definitely pay to win. There's no way to avoid the existence of this pet because your opponents might or might not have paid to get it. Your experience against these people is absolutely impacted, and that's the specific thing you care about. In this hypothetical world you either buy the awesome pet or you can't play the game the way you want to.
If you're a D then you really don't care at all. Picking the pet out of your mailbox wouldn't be worth your time so it could be free or cost a billion dollars and you wouldn't care.
So, is this pet pay to win?
I'd argue the way to make that decision is to look at how many win conditions are impacted by the existence of the item. So the distribution of the players between the different categories and the way non-buyers are impacted need to be considered.
In a world where most people are Cs then this pet has to be considered pay to win. Most people care about head to head battles, and you can't win without paying money. So a large proportion of win conditions among players of the game are impacted.
In a world where most people are Ds then the pet isn't really pay to win. It would probably be more accurate to say that the pet battle part of the game is a paid mini-game. Competitive PvP pet battlers aren't going to be able to play WoW without this pet. Similar to how they won't be able to play a mythical Pokemon Fight game without paying for the game. Now, this mini-game may well be pay to win, but I don't think it existing in a world with mostly Ds would make the overall game pay to win.
The tricky part is when most players are Bs. How many win conditions are impacted in this scenario? The people who like a challenge won't care much because their game experience doesn't change by the item existing, unless the PvE fights are tuned under the assumption you have the awesome pet. (Also, some people will be annoyed that other people get to take the easy mode. I don't particularly care for that argument but I'm sure it can be made.) So it would come down to how the Bs are split and how mandatory the pet feels.
Now, change the framing a little. Instead of a pet it's now a weapon. How would the argument change? The Ds and Cs and As wouldn't change. The Bs would. Why? Because PvE in WoW is often group based. The game itself explicitly gates who can join group content based on their gear and historical experience tells us that players will act the same way. (See: gearscore) So you having this weapon does change my win condition. The game and the players will exclude me from the content I want to do (and by extension make my win condition harder or impossible) regardless on what level of challenge I want.
In a world where the other players or the game itself will exclude you then purely PvE items do impact my gameplay and are pay to win. In a world where I don't interact with the other players in this aspect it isn't pay to win. If you could buy outhouses to get more easy achievements that could be pay to win if your achievement score impacts my game. If it doesn't then it probably wouldn't be.
Basically... I don't care about your win condition. I care about mine. If you spending a lot of money makes it easier for you to win, and that makes you happy, and it doesn't change mine then that's awesome. The developer should make money and this setup probably results in me paying less. But if you paying money hurts me then I'm not happy. So if you can buy a max level character I don't actually care. Extra level 100s wouldn't hurt me. (It might cause some groups to have inexperienced and therefore likely subpar players. But there are plenty of those players anyway.) But if you can buy all the gear to enter the hardest raid finder raids and I have to grind for months before I can get in then I'm not happy.
Note that the game being pay to win isn't necessarily a deal breaker. I still play some CCGs and you'd be hard pressed to claim that someone who spends a lot of money on Hearthstone packs won't have better cards than I do! I am more likely to get frustrated and quit because of the pay to win aspect, though.
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Missions
Two of the games I've been trying to play recently have both featured a mechanic where you send off party members on missions. In World of Warcraft the sole purpose of most followers is to go on these missions; in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance it's something you do with characters you can use in your actual fighting party. In both cases it works pretty much the same way. You get given a description of the mission and the rewards for succeeding and have to pick a number of characters to send away. After an amount of time (real life time in WoW, world map movements in FFTA) the characters come back and tell you if they succeeded or not.
In FFTA the odds of succeeding on a mission are based on the level and jobs of the characters you send. You're supposed to use the description to figure out who to send. (Fighter type characters should probably go work in a mine while a mage should go help a librarian.) It's really not an exact science though, and I haven't read up about it but I feel like you need to use the mission system to get the really good items. It may even gate beating the game in some way? In WoW it tells you straight up what your chances of succeeding will be for any given combination of characters. It also tells you explicitly which abilities are going to help increase your odds.
I like the WoW system more than the FFTA system because it actually gives me the information I need to make informed decisions. Maybe that word should be in air quotes though... When you know exactly what you need to maximize your odds you should just do that and move on with your life. It can be a little interesting to make sure you have the right mix of followers with a spread of abilities to always have access to what you need, but once you finish that stage of the process it's just doing the obvious best thing.
In short... The system is pretty cool to explore in the short term but becomes a tedious grind in the long term.
It's even worse in FFTA where I'm pretty sure the grind really is the long term. Chains of missions, no idea what will let you succeed, and limited time when the missions are available. Maybe I would have found it interesting to work out what was best for each mission by playing the game over and over and trying different things. But actually, I bought this game the day it was released and started playing it right away... But I didn't end up playing it enough to beat the game once, let alone play it many times to work out who I want to send on what missions.
I'm not really sure what to do with FFTA. I'm not terribly interested in playing it. I am at least a little interested in moving my marathon along, especially if I can play a game I can stream. Like, say, Final Fantasy XII which I believe is next among the games I actually own. I'll dig into more when I get to that point to see if I can easily acquire things like Kingdom Hearts 2.
But for now, I should really give FFTA more of a chance. But I don't want to worry about the stupid mission system. So I think I'm going to do some reading about missions to see what ones I actually need to worry about and see what I can do about doing just those ones.
In FFTA the odds of succeeding on a mission are based on the level and jobs of the characters you send. You're supposed to use the description to figure out who to send. (Fighter type characters should probably go work in a mine while a mage should go help a librarian.) It's really not an exact science though, and I haven't read up about it but I feel like you need to use the mission system to get the really good items. It may even gate beating the game in some way? In WoW it tells you straight up what your chances of succeeding will be for any given combination of characters. It also tells you explicitly which abilities are going to help increase your odds.
I like the WoW system more than the FFTA system because it actually gives me the information I need to make informed decisions. Maybe that word should be in air quotes though... When you know exactly what you need to maximize your odds you should just do that and move on with your life. It can be a little interesting to make sure you have the right mix of followers with a spread of abilities to always have access to what you need, but once you finish that stage of the process it's just doing the obvious best thing.
In short... The system is pretty cool to explore in the short term but becomes a tedious grind in the long term.
It's even worse in FFTA where I'm pretty sure the grind really is the long term. Chains of missions, no idea what will let you succeed, and limited time when the missions are available. Maybe I would have found it interesting to work out what was best for each mission by playing the game over and over and trying different things. But actually, I bought this game the day it was released and started playing it right away... But I didn't end up playing it enough to beat the game once, let alone play it many times to work out who I want to send on what missions.
I'm not really sure what to do with FFTA. I'm not terribly interested in playing it. I am at least a little interested in moving my marathon along, especially if I can play a game I can stream. Like, say, Final Fantasy XII which I believe is next among the games I actually own. I'll dig into more when I get to that point to see if I can easily acquire things like Kingdom Hearts 2.
But for now, I should really give FFTA more of a chance. But I don't want to worry about the stupid mission system. So I think I'm going to do some reading about missions to see what ones I actually need to worry about and see what I can do about doing just those ones.
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
World of Warcraft: Ding 100!
It took me six days to hit max level of this expansion, which actually feels longer than previous expansions. Part of that was losing a day of playing while Blizzard suffered DDoS attacks from China. Part of it was spending more time doing other things when I was playing, like fishing and archaeology and hunting for treasures. And maybe, just maybe, part of it was from actually reading most of the quests and watching all of the cutscenes this time around.
I only really did quests in two of the zones, too. So I still have plenty of quests to run around and do for fun. I managed to get enough garrison resources while leveling to upgrade to a size 3 town, but I didn't have enough resources after that to build new buildings in all the slots I gained by getting bigger. I didn't build any of the buildings that generate extra resources, and I built one that I think costs resources. I also found a lot of treasures, and killed a lot of rares, to get extra resources. So I suspect getting a resource generating building early on would actually have been a pretty good idea. But if I'd done that I wouldn't have been able to level my followers as fast, and I only have 2 of those at max level so far... So maybe if I'd gone the other way I'd have lots of resources but all my people would be underleveled? Who knows!
Hitting level 100 opened up so many quests around my garrison and in the area I as leveling that I actually ran out of space in my quest log. And it wasn't like I had low level quests kicking around clogging it up! I can't remember the last time I hit the quest log limit... So clearly there's a lot of stuff still to do.
I must say, I'm still happy I got this expansion.
I only really did quests in two of the zones, too. So I still have plenty of quests to run around and do for fun. I managed to get enough garrison resources while leveling to upgrade to a size 3 town, but I didn't have enough resources after that to build new buildings in all the slots I gained by getting bigger. I didn't build any of the buildings that generate extra resources, and I built one that I think costs resources. I also found a lot of treasures, and killed a lot of rares, to get extra resources. So I suspect getting a resource generating building early on would actually have been a pretty good idea. But if I'd done that I wouldn't have been able to level my followers as fast, and I only have 2 of those at max level so far... So maybe if I'd gone the other way I'd have lots of resources but all my people would be underleveled? Who knows!
Hitting level 100 opened up so many quests around my garrison and in the area I as leveling that I actually ran out of space in my quest log. And it wasn't like I had low level quests kicking around clogging it up! I can't remember the last time I hit the quest log limit... So clearly there's a lot of stuff still to do.
I must say, I'm still happy I got this expansion.
Thursday, November 13, 2014
World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor
Warlords of Draenor, the newest expansion for World of Warcraft, came out this morning. For every other expansion for the game I've taken time off of work and I've worked to set my sleep schedule such that I would be ready to go right when the servers opened and could play all day long. This time around I did no such thing. I didn't need to take time off work since I'm unemployed and I didn't see any reason to play the second the doors opened. So I didn't set an alarm and I just got up when I woke up normally. In this case it happened that I woke up 2 hours after the expansion went live, which actually turned out to be a pretty good time to play. I missed the big rush of people going right at the start so I didn't have to worry about fighting for quest items and the like, and the servers weren't overwhelmed, but there were still enough people around to make the world feel populated.
I think a big part of why I didn't feel the need to get up right away was the removal of the realm first achievements. I definitely would have felt the need to try to defend my blacksmithing title, and while I am sad they took them out and I couldn't try for it I'm also happy that I didn't need to worry about it and could just relax and do my thing. So I was able to pet battle, and fish, and dig up artifacts instead of being all in on gathering/buying ore.
By later in the day the large number of people trying to play started causing issues. Most realms had to put up a log in queue and world servers were sporadically getting overwhelmed and crashing. But compared to any other game's launch... Smooth as silk.
The game itself is fantastic. They've put in a fair number of cinematics (at least thus far... I've only done one zone!) and the quest chains really flow well. And something as simple as making quest rewards have a chance to upgrade themselves is really interesting. Sure, you probably don't need that green item... But it could be purple! And you won't find out until you do the quest!
Garrisons are everything I'd hoped they'd be, and maybe even more. Getting followers as quest rewards out in the world is really cool. You do some quests for someone, help them out in some way, and they decide you're awesome and head to your town to help you out in return. And those followers follow the same loot upgrade system so random people will end up being purple for me when they're just green for you.
I did some dungeons with random groups of people. Queueing as DPS was a 40 minute way so I went and tanked instead for the instant pop. I haven't tanked in two years, and a lot of the buttons have changed, and my gear is entirely DPS focused. Didn't matter. Maybe it's just really easy. Maybe I'm awesome. Who knows? I had fun and one of the healers complimented me after the run so that was nice.
Anyway, after one day of playing I can heartily endorse picking this expansion up. It's tons of fun. And it would be even more fun with more people playing!
I think a big part of why I didn't feel the need to get up right away was the removal of the realm first achievements. I definitely would have felt the need to try to defend my blacksmithing title, and while I am sad they took them out and I couldn't try for it I'm also happy that I didn't need to worry about it and could just relax and do my thing. So I was able to pet battle, and fish, and dig up artifacts instead of being all in on gathering/buying ore.
By later in the day the large number of people trying to play started causing issues. Most realms had to put up a log in queue and world servers were sporadically getting overwhelmed and crashing. But compared to any other game's launch... Smooth as silk.
The game itself is fantastic. They've put in a fair number of cinematics (at least thus far... I've only done one zone!) and the quest chains really flow well. And something as simple as making quest rewards have a chance to upgrade themselves is really interesting. Sure, you probably don't need that green item... But it could be purple! And you won't find out until you do the quest!
Garrisons are everything I'd hoped they'd be, and maybe even more. Getting followers as quest rewards out in the world is really cool. You do some quests for someone, help them out in some way, and they decide you're awesome and head to your town to help you out in return. And those followers follow the same loot upgrade system so random people will end up being purple for me when they're just green for you.
I did some dungeons with random groups of people. Queueing as DPS was a 40 minute way so I went and tanked instead for the instant pop. I haven't tanked in two years, and a lot of the buttons have changed, and my gear is entirely DPS focused. Didn't matter. Maybe it's just really easy. Maybe I'm awesome. Who knows? I had fun and one of the healers complimented me after the run so that was nice.
Anyway, after one day of playing I can heartily endorse picking this expansion up. It's tons of fun. And it would be even more fun with more people playing!
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
World of Warcraft: Boost to 90
Ian posted a status update on Facebook last week about the free boost to level 90 that comes with the purchase of the upcoming expansion. Basically asking about why bother playing a leveling game at all if you're going to skip most of the levels. Some other people chimed in against the concept as well, with arguments along the lines of you should need to put in the time and earn level 90, or how it's just a money grab from Blizzard and indicates the game is a sinking ship. I disagree with all those sentiments, but I wanted to really figure out why I disagree with them.
First off, I think getting to start at the current maximum level is a fantastic idea. It lets lapsed players and new players all do the expansion stuff immediately with any friends who did play through the last expansion. I got Sceadeau playing, and I'm pretty sure if he had to spend several weeks playing without me before he could play with me that he just wouldn't bother. Last expansion I convinced Robb to start playing because challenge mode dungeons sounded really cool. (It's timed 5 player content with a gear cap so you can't just farm raids to trivialize them.) But after we played for three days straight and he wasn't even level 60 (nowhere near the 85 that the rest of us were at) he gave up. If Blizzard had had a 'boost to 85' option with that expansion I feel like Robb would have stomached the 5 levels of questing to hit max level and would have done challenge modes with us. And having one extra person working on them likely would have kept the rest of us actually interested and playing much longer than we all did. So in a sense it would have been a cash grab (they would have sold an extra copy of the expansion and earned several months worth of subscription fees) but it really feels like it's just win-win for everyone involved.
But what about fairness? If we set some record times with Robb who didn't play through Northrend is it really fair? Shouldn't he have to put in 'the time'? I've never really been one who understood the whole 'keeping up with the Joneses' thing, but even if I ignore that there's the (often ignored) fact that 'the time' actually can't be put in anymore. What do I mean by that? Take The Burning Crusade expansion, which let you level from 60-70. When that expansion first came out the zones were designed with the pace of leveling and ability sets of 2007. The story was designed to make sense with the world as it existed at that time. The stuff you could loot and gather was relevant. You couldn't fly, and leveling towards getting a flying mount was a big deal. Zones were populated and you could reasonably expect to find people to run dungeons and do world PvP if that was your thing. None of those things are true now.
Basically, leveling from 60 to 70 in 2007 was a grand time and I would recommend anyone buy that expansion. In 2007. Leveling from 60 to 70 in 2014 is a real chore. They've gotten a lot better at building quests in the last 7 years for one thing, so the difference when you get to 60 and head to Outlands is pretty stark. And then there's all the issues with pacing and irrelevancy of the items and no one being around.
I don't think anyone could say with a straight face that 60-70 in 2014 is a better game than 60-70 in 2007 was. I also don't think anyone can say that 60-70 in 2014 was a better game than 90-100 will be. So the idea that you would force someone to play through 60-70 in 2014 just because you played 60-70 in 2007 as a fair thing boggles my mind. Games are supposed to be fun; let people get to the new, fun stuff!
I also don't think World of Warcraft is a sinking ship. The user base may well have eroded from the peak, but it's still stupidly strong compared to any 'competitor', if there even are such things. Even if it was a sinking ship I don't see a boost to 90 as being an indicator of that fact. I see it as showing that Blizzard understands what people want to do. Each previous expansion came with nerfs to the previous leveling time, but those just served to make the leveling game not make much sense. You level too fast for the zones now, and it's jarring. Blizzard has always understood that when an expansion comes out people want to play the new stuff. They don't want to play the old stuff, even sped up. And now they've finally taken the logical step and are just letting people start at the new stuff no matter where they were before. And without screwing the old leveling game up even more.
Boosts to 90 aren't just for new players, either. It's a way to change servers, or to change factions, or to change classes. I have no plan for my boost but maybe at some point I'll want to go play on a new server for some reason and I'll have it in my pocket.
First off, I think getting to start at the current maximum level is a fantastic idea. It lets lapsed players and new players all do the expansion stuff immediately with any friends who did play through the last expansion. I got Sceadeau playing, and I'm pretty sure if he had to spend several weeks playing without me before he could play with me that he just wouldn't bother. Last expansion I convinced Robb to start playing because challenge mode dungeons sounded really cool. (It's timed 5 player content with a gear cap so you can't just farm raids to trivialize them.) But after we played for three days straight and he wasn't even level 60 (nowhere near the 85 that the rest of us were at) he gave up. If Blizzard had had a 'boost to 85' option with that expansion I feel like Robb would have stomached the 5 levels of questing to hit max level and would have done challenge modes with us. And having one extra person working on them likely would have kept the rest of us actually interested and playing much longer than we all did. So in a sense it would have been a cash grab (they would have sold an extra copy of the expansion and earned several months worth of subscription fees) but it really feels like it's just win-win for everyone involved.
But what about fairness? If we set some record times with Robb who didn't play through Northrend is it really fair? Shouldn't he have to put in 'the time'? I've never really been one who understood the whole 'keeping up with the Joneses' thing, but even if I ignore that there's the (often ignored) fact that 'the time' actually can't be put in anymore. What do I mean by that? Take The Burning Crusade expansion, which let you level from 60-70. When that expansion first came out the zones were designed with the pace of leveling and ability sets of 2007. The story was designed to make sense with the world as it existed at that time. The stuff you could loot and gather was relevant. You couldn't fly, and leveling towards getting a flying mount was a big deal. Zones were populated and you could reasonably expect to find people to run dungeons and do world PvP if that was your thing. None of those things are true now.
Basically, leveling from 60 to 70 in 2007 was a grand time and I would recommend anyone buy that expansion. In 2007. Leveling from 60 to 70 in 2014 is a real chore. They've gotten a lot better at building quests in the last 7 years for one thing, so the difference when you get to 60 and head to Outlands is pretty stark. And then there's all the issues with pacing and irrelevancy of the items and no one being around.
I don't think anyone could say with a straight face that 60-70 in 2014 is a better game than 60-70 in 2007 was. I also don't think anyone can say that 60-70 in 2014 was a better game than 90-100 will be. So the idea that you would force someone to play through 60-70 in 2014 just because you played 60-70 in 2007 as a fair thing boggles my mind. Games are supposed to be fun; let people get to the new, fun stuff!
I also don't think World of Warcraft is a sinking ship. The user base may well have eroded from the peak, but it's still stupidly strong compared to any 'competitor', if there even are such things. Even if it was a sinking ship I don't see a boost to 90 as being an indicator of that fact. I see it as showing that Blizzard understands what people want to do. Each previous expansion came with nerfs to the previous leveling time, but those just served to make the leveling game not make much sense. You level too fast for the zones now, and it's jarring. Blizzard has always understood that when an expansion comes out people want to play the new stuff. They don't want to play the old stuff, even sped up. And now they've finally taken the logical step and are just letting people start at the new stuff no matter where they were before. And without screwing the old leveling game up even more.
Boosts to 90 aren't just for new players, either. It's a way to change servers, or to change factions, or to change classes. I have no plan for my boost but maybe at some point I'll want to go play on a new server for some reason and I'll have it in my pocket.
Thursday, November 06, 2014
World of Warcraft: Garrisons
The big feature being added in the Warlords of Draenor expansion is the ability to create your own little city. A form of player housing, if you will, but instanced in a way that you don't need to compete with other players for land. They took a baby step in this direction with the farm in the last expansion and from the reading I've been doing today it seems like they've gone all in on making these garrisons awesome.
From the sounds of things you ultimately get to have 12 buildings and 20 followers in your little town. But there are 25 possible buildings and 291 possible followers so you sure don't get to have all of the things at once! So there's a lot of picking and choosing to be had as you build the buildings you most want to have and recruit the right followers to properly use those buildings. The buildings can all level up to level 3, and the followers can level up to 100 (and then can level up their gear) so there's an awful lot of numbers to make bigger in these things. I like making numbers bigger!
I decided to take a read through what the buildings do to see if I could come up with a preliminary plan for what I'll want to work towards. You get 5 buildings guaranteed (town hall, mine, herb garden, fishing shack, and pet house) and the rest are divided up by size of the building. You get 3 small buildings, 2 medium buildings, and 2 large buildings of your choice.
There are 10 possible small buildings and they mostly have to deal with crafting professions. 8 of the buildings are specific to a crafting profession (like blacksmithing) and are used to get the recipes for those professions, to give you access to more of the daily cooldown generated crafting materials, and to allow people who don't have those professions to craft most of the stuff. Like, for example, Darkmoon Faire cards, which can be crafted with the scribe house. That sure does make me tempted to get a scribe house for both of my level 90 characters... And makes me wish I had more characters to level up to get more scribe houses...
The other two small buildings are the salvage yard and the storehouse. The salvage yard looks like it lets you accumulate transmog sets (may be of interest to some people but not to me... I have axes on my head and shoulders!) and small amounts of gear for you and your followers. The storehouse lets you access your bank and the guild bank from your garrison and lets you start more work orders in the other profession buildings. It's unclear if that will increase throughput or just let you go longer without logging in to add more orders to the queue.
The medium buildings all do a wide variety of things. There's a pvp house which gives you titles and pvp related quests. There's an inn which gives you daily pve dungeon quests and gives you more control on what followers you can recruit. There's a lumber mill to generate extra garrison supplies. There's a trading post that lets you sell stuff for garrison supplies, gives you access to the auction house, and gives you a reputation gain buff. And there's a barn which gives you leather, meat, and a new crafting reagent used in all epic item recipes. It seems odd that everyone gets free ore and herbs but you need to use a medium building to get free leather. Sucks to be a leatherworker I guess? I also have no idea how hard it will be to get garrison supplies so I don't know if the buildings that give you more are awesome or just for people who don't play much.
There are 5 large buildings that do a variety of powerful things. The armory makes all quests you do have an increased chance of awarding bonus loot, lets you generate gear for your followers, and gives you free bonus rolls on raid loot. (You get at most 3 per week, but have to pay a fair amount of currency to get them. This gives you one for free.) The barracks lets you level your followers up faster, lets you fight in the open world with one of your combat followers helping, and raises the follower cap to 25. The mage tower lets you move quickly around the continent without needing to use flightpaths. The gearworks gives you a bunch of crazy engineering abilities including the ability to drive around in the open world with a tank of some kind. The stables gives you access to new mounts, lets you mine and pick herbs while mounted, and increases your mounted movement speed by 20%.
It's hard to know just by reading about these things how important the different things are going to be. Is the bottleneck going to be garrison resources? Follower levels? Follower gear? Specific followers? I believe you earn resources and followers just by playing the game and questing so my gut feeling to start is that they aren't terribly important for me if I'm going to be playing a fair bit at the start. So I probably don't need to worry about the buildings that pump those out? This makes me think my eventual setup is going to be a blacksmithing house, a scribe house, and a storehouse for small buildings. A barn and an inn for medium buildings. And a stable and a gearworks for large buildings. And I'm pretty happy the mine, the fishing shack, and the pet house are locked in!
From the sounds of things you ultimately get to have 12 buildings and 20 followers in your little town. But there are 25 possible buildings and 291 possible followers so you sure don't get to have all of the things at once! So there's a lot of picking and choosing to be had as you build the buildings you most want to have and recruit the right followers to properly use those buildings. The buildings can all level up to level 3, and the followers can level up to 100 (and then can level up their gear) so there's an awful lot of numbers to make bigger in these things. I like making numbers bigger!
I decided to take a read through what the buildings do to see if I could come up with a preliminary plan for what I'll want to work towards. You get 5 buildings guaranteed (town hall, mine, herb garden, fishing shack, and pet house) and the rest are divided up by size of the building. You get 3 small buildings, 2 medium buildings, and 2 large buildings of your choice.
There are 10 possible small buildings and they mostly have to deal with crafting professions. 8 of the buildings are specific to a crafting profession (like blacksmithing) and are used to get the recipes for those professions, to give you access to more of the daily cooldown generated crafting materials, and to allow people who don't have those professions to craft most of the stuff. Like, for example, Darkmoon Faire cards, which can be crafted with the scribe house. That sure does make me tempted to get a scribe house for both of my level 90 characters... And makes me wish I had more characters to level up to get more scribe houses...
The other two small buildings are the salvage yard and the storehouse. The salvage yard looks like it lets you accumulate transmog sets (may be of interest to some people but not to me... I have axes on my head and shoulders!) and small amounts of gear for you and your followers. The storehouse lets you access your bank and the guild bank from your garrison and lets you start more work orders in the other profession buildings. It's unclear if that will increase throughput or just let you go longer without logging in to add more orders to the queue.
The medium buildings all do a wide variety of things. There's a pvp house which gives you titles and pvp related quests. There's an inn which gives you daily pve dungeon quests and gives you more control on what followers you can recruit. There's a lumber mill to generate extra garrison supplies. There's a trading post that lets you sell stuff for garrison supplies, gives you access to the auction house, and gives you a reputation gain buff. And there's a barn which gives you leather, meat, and a new crafting reagent used in all epic item recipes. It seems odd that everyone gets free ore and herbs but you need to use a medium building to get free leather. Sucks to be a leatherworker I guess? I also have no idea how hard it will be to get garrison supplies so I don't know if the buildings that give you more are awesome or just for people who don't play much.
There are 5 large buildings that do a variety of powerful things. The armory makes all quests you do have an increased chance of awarding bonus loot, lets you generate gear for your followers, and gives you free bonus rolls on raid loot. (You get at most 3 per week, but have to pay a fair amount of currency to get them. This gives you one for free.) The barracks lets you level your followers up faster, lets you fight in the open world with one of your combat followers helping, and raises the follower cap to 25. The mage tower lets you move quickly around the continent without needing to use flightpaths. The gearworks gives you a bunch of crazy engineering abilities including the ability to drive around in the open world with a tank of some kind. The stables gives you access to new mounts, lets you mine and pick herbs while mounted, and increases your mounted movement speed by 20%.
It's hard to know just by reading about these things how important the different things are going to be. Is the bottleneck going to be garrison resources? Follower levels? Follower gear? Specific followers? I believe you earn resources and followers just by playing the game and questing so my gut feeling to start is that they aren't terribly important for me if I'm going to be playing a fair bit at the start. So I probably don't need to worry about the buildings that pump those out? This makes me think my eventual setup is going to be a blacksmithing house, a scribe house, and a storehouse for small buildings. A barn and an inn for medium buildings. And a stable and a gearworks for large buildings. And I'm pretty happy the mine, the fishing shack, and the pet house are locked in!
Wednesday, November 05, 2014
World of Warcraft: Professions in Warlords of Draenor
I did a bunch of reading last night to figure out what exactly is going on with all the professions in the coming expansion. If I want to level stuff on my alts do I need to also level up their character level or do they just need to get close enough like in the past?
Turns out the answer to that question is very simple. It looks like pretty much every profession is learned in exactly the same way: by killing monsters in a WoD zone. They have a chance to drop an item for any profession (primary or secondary) that you've already learned and that item will start a short quest chain for that profession. Complete the quest chain to unlock the ability to level that profession up to 700. The items all have a minimum level requirement of 90, so before any character can raise a profession up above 600 they need to hit the current level cap.
What's interesting is the quest chains give you some other stuff above and beyond just unlocking the ability to get up to 700. It gives you some stuff towards your garrison which I haven't really delve into yet and it gives you some initial recipes to use in leveling the profession. All of these recipes are worth skillups starting from level 1 and use stuff from the WoD zones. Gathering professions let you gather stuff in WoD zones even at level 1. It's unclear if archaeology will actually let you skip ahead or not but everything else looks to be guaranteed able to level from 1 to 700 just off stuff you get in the expansion zones.
You won't need to go running to a trainer to raise your profession cap every 75 levels like I had to do when I just leveled my mining back up. Even if you started at level 1, you get the ability to go all the way to 700 just from that one quest. They did also make it so you get a benefit from leveling your professions up though. You get a daily cooldown ability that makes 4 copies of an item at level 1 or 10 copies of it at level 700. You use these items to make all the good stuff, so making more of them is obviously better. But if you don't want to run around lower level zones to gather materials and level up the old fashioned way you can get in there at level 1 and catch back up pretty easily. And it's way better to get 4 of those items at level 1 than to get nothing at all until you get up to 600 or 700!
From the sounds of it you do may well need to go unlock the professions first before the quest items will drop, so if you're starting out or are switching things up you probably want to go at least learn the profession at level 1 now before the expansion hits. Leveling it up now will almost certainly take longer and be more expensive than waiting, but if you don't have anything more productive to do before the expansion hits it could be a thing to do.
It also seems like if I want to have more professions going I'll need to level more characters up to 90. With only a week to go I feel like that's not going to happen, though maybe I'll go fool around on my druid and see what happens...
Turns out the answer to that question is very simple. It looks like pretty much every profession is learned in exactly the same way: by killing monsters in a WoD zone. They have a chance to drop an item for any profession (primary or secondary) that you've already learned and that item will start a short quest chain for that profession. Complete the quest chain to unlock the ability to level that profession up to 700. The items all have a minimum level requirement of 90, so before any character can raise a profession up above 600 they need to hit the current level cap.
What's interesting is the quest chains give you some other stuff above and beyond just unlocking the ability to get up to 700. It gives you some stuff towards your garrison which I haven't really delve into yet and it gives you some initial recipes to use in leveling the profession. All of these recipes are worth skillups starting from level 1 and use stuff from the WoD zones. Gathering professions let you gather stuff in WoD zones even at level 1. It's unclear if archaeology will actually let you skip ahead or not but everything else looks to be guaranteed able to level from 1 to 700 just off stuff you get in the expansion zones.
You won't need to go running to a trainer to raise your profession cap every 75 levels like I had to do when I just leveled my mining back up. Even if you started at level 1, you get the ability to go all the way to 700 just from that one quest. They did also make it so you get a benefit from leveling your professions up though. You get a daily cooldown ability that makes 4 copies of an item at level 1 or 10 copies of it at level 700. You use these items to make all the good stuff, so making more of them is obviously better. But if you don't want to run around lower level zones to gather materials and level up the old fashioned way you can get in there at level 1 and catch back up pretty easily. And it's way better to get 4 of those items at level 1 than to get nothing at all until you get up to 600 or 700!
From the sounds of it you do may well need to go unlock the professions first before the quest items will drop, so if you're starting out or are switching things up you probably want to go at least learn the profession at level 1 now before the expansion hits. Leveling it up now will almost certainly take longer and be more expensive than waiting, but if you don't have anything more productive to do before the expansion hits it could be a thing to do.
It also seems like if I want to have more professions going I'll need to level more characters up to 90. With only a week to go I feel like that's not going to happen, though maybe I'll go fool around on my druid and see what happens...
Tuesday, November 04, 2014
World of Warcraft: Preexpansion Things To Do
When I started playing World of Warcraft again a couple weeks ago I had a few things I wanted to try to get done before the expansion hit next week. The three main ones were to level mining back up on my death knight, hit max level with my rogue, and complete the crazy legendary cloak quest that dominated the entirety of the last expansion.
I needed to level mining (again) because I'd dropped it for the better challenge dungeon bonuses provided by engineering. They got rid of all profession specific bonuses in this coming expansion so there's not really any pressing reason to keep engineering around. I like having a gathering profession to go with a crafting profession because sometimes I like running around in a circle picking stuff off the ground and I like to avoid the insane material cost at the start of an expansion when leveling my blacksmithing. They may have taken the realm first achievements out but I'm still going to level blacksmithing pretty early on. I'll probably be able to make a fair amount of cash selling pvp gear to people as soon as they hit max level. This took some time but was easy and fun and is now done.
I wanted to level my rogue because he's my main way of making money. He's my glyph maker and I want to be able to make any new glyphs and the new Darkmoon Faire cards as soon as possible. That'll probably require farming up some herbs on my own and he'll need to be max level to pull that off. This also took some time, and was less fun because a lot of quests are annoying for whatever spec my rogue is (AMBUSH!), but it was still fairly fun and is also now done.
The legendary cloak quest now looks like a pipedream. I missed a week or two of raid resets in the middle thanks to being hacked and moving and not having enough gear to pug the newest raid zone and that's set me back too far. This isn't something I can just throw more time at since it requires drops from raid zones and I can only try to get a drop once from each boss each week. I didn't really want the cloak other than it wasn't going to be possible to get it when the expansion hits. Pugging the raids was fun, and I may still keep trying in the hopes of getting super lucky and going on a streak of lucky drops, but I've pretty much given up on this happening.
So what now? I can level more alts to get access to more professions? (I miss having a jewelcrafter, for example.) I can farm up achievements by running raid zones from previous expansions? (I assume I can solo them now.) Apparently Blizzard is pretty serious about continuing to add actual Pokemon content to the game with crazy boss fights and the like... So maybe I should get on that? I've been playing it a bit while waiting for raid queues to pop and it's been pretty fun.
I needed to level mining (again) because I'd dropped it for the better challenge dungeon bonuses provided by engineering. They got rid of all profession specific bonuses in this coming expansion so there's not really any pressing reason to keep engineering around. I like having a gathering profession to go with a crafting profession because sometimes I like running around in a circle picking stuff off the ground and I like to avoid the insane material cost at the start of an expansion when leveling my blacksmithing. They may have taken the realm first achievements out but I'm still going to level blacksmithing pretty early on. I'll probably be able to make a fair amount of cash selling pvp gear to people as soon as they hit max level. This took some time but was easy and fun and is now done.
I wanted to level my rogue because he's my main way of making money. He's my glyph maker and I want to be able to make any new glyphs and the new Darkmoon Faire cards as soon as possible. That'll probably require farming up some herbs on my own and he'll need to be max level to pull that off. This also took some time, and was less fun because a lot of quests are annoying for whatever spec my rogue is (AMBUSH!), but it was still fairly fun and is also now done.
The legendary cloak quest now looks like a pipedream. I missed a week or two of raid resets in the middle thanks to being hacked and moving and not having enough gear to pug the newest raid zone and that's set me back too far. This isn't something I can just throw more time at since it requires drops from raid zones and I can only try to get a drop once from each boss each week. I didn't really want the cloak other than it wasn't going to be possible to get it when the expansion hits. Pugging the raids was fun, and I may still keep trying in the hopes of getting super lucky and going on a streak of lucky drops, but I've pretty much given up on this happening.
So what now? I can level more alts to get access to more professions? (I miss having a jewelcrafter, for example.) I can farm up achievements by running raid zones from previous expansions? (I assume I can solo them now.) Apparently Blizzard is pretty serious about continuing to add actual Pokemon content to the game with crazy boss fights and the like... So maybe I should get on that? I've been playing it a bit while waiting for raid queues to pop and it's been pretty fun.
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
World of Warcraft: Hacking Home Stretch
I got most of my stuff unloaded tonight and found the bag with all my computer wires. I got myself all set up and after taking my Civ V turns I went to check on my World of Warcraft account. I went to log in and got an incorrect password error message. Now I've changed that password probably close to a dozen times in the last little while so I wasn't sure if I even knew what it was supposed to be. So I tried a bunch of passwords for a while and none of them worked. So I went to my backup email account that is now running my WoW account to see if it had any information about what was going on. After trying a few passwords on it I got in and found that on Monday my password had been reset.
*sigh*
I went and poked around on the Blizzard website and it wouldn't let me reset the password without first telling it the SMS phone number associated with the account. So I went and got that from my sister again. Then it made me enter in a code it texted her. Then I got to reset my password and log in. I went and took a look and found a ticket in the system submitted by the hacker around the same time when the password reset request went in. The ticket was ultimately cancelled.
The conclusions I can draw from this is the hacker tried to get a GM to let him back into my account and the GM took a first step towards letting him do so, but only if he had access to both my new email account and to my sister's phone. The hacker obviously has access to neither of those things, so they didn't get in. My password did get reset and it took me a bit to jump through the hoops to enter a new one again, so I'm not thrilled that the GM let him get even that far but at least I didn't lose my stuff again.
And since the hacker tried on Monday, failed, and hasn't tried since? I'm probably free and clear. I still need to figure out the guild leadership issue and then petition a GM for the rest of my money back, but it feels like I should probably get the expansion again after all. Woo!
*sigh*
I went and poked around on the Blizzard website and it wouldn't let me reset the password without first telling it the SMS phone number associated with the account. So I went and got that from my sister again. Then it made me enter in a code it texted her. Then I got to reset my password and log in. I went and took a look and found a ticket in the system submitted by the hacker around the same time when the password reset request went in. The ticket was ultimately cancelled.
The conclusions I can draw from this is the hacker tried to get a GM to let him back into my account and the GM took a first step towards letting him do so, but only if he had access to both my new email account and to my sister's phone. The hacker obviously has access to neither of those things, so they didn't get in. My password did get reset and it took me a bit to jump through the hoops to enter a new one again, so I'm not thrilled that the GM let him get even that far but at least I didn't lose my stuff again.
And since the hacker tried on Monday, failed, and hasn't tried since? I'm probably free and clear. I still need to figure out the guild leadership issue and then petition a GM for the rest of my money back, but it feels like I should probably get the expansion again after all. Woo!
Thursday, October 23, 2014
World of Warcraft: Hack Free!
After my 5th time being hacked earlier this week the GM I talked to reset my secret question and had me change the email address on my account, but he failed to restore my characters properly. The next GM I talked to got confused while trying to restore my characters and decided to permanently ban me instead. But she didn't mark that ticket as resolved, she just locked my account and walked away. So the next day someone else got around to the open ticket, tried to restore my characters, and unlocked my account. 4 nights later and I still have my account. Looks like either the hacker got bored, or the hacker somehow knows they didn't restore all my stuff yet, or the changes the last guy advised actually worked. Certainly without knowing my new email address the hacker can't use the web tools to steal the account. They'd need to go through a GM. The GMs did hand over my account once already so I don't feel super safe, but I do feel reasonably safe.
There's still the issue of my account no being properly restored. They actually restored my gear twice, so I have a second copy of a lot of my stuff. That doesn't actually help much, but it's a thing. I'm still out most of my money. I figure I'm short about 280k still. I also still don't have leadership of the guild. That belongs to an alt of someone we used to play with back in the day. I tried emailing him about it but his old email address doesn't work anymore. If the hacker hadn't deleted him from my Battle.Net friend list I'd try messaging him there. Oh well, not really a big deal I guess. I still have alts that can invite people to the guild, so there's not really a problem. The guild bank is still gone and makes up 174k of the 280k I'm missing. I'm not sure of Amaranthea has it or not. I'm not sure if the GMs would restore it to him or me or what.
I'm also worried that if I bring attention to my account that Blizzard will ban it again despite not being hacked in what feels like a long time.
Eh, I'll figure that stuff out later I guess. Now that I have my gear back I can at least play the game. Unfortunately I'm stuck on a PvP quest in my PvE quest chain... Why in the world would they do that? I'm sure not geared for PvP so being forced to win 2 battlegrounds with me in them is a pretty hard thing to do. *sigh*
But it does seem like I get to play again... So it's prime time for other people to be coming back to play too! At least in 3 weeks when the expansion hits... Think about it...
There's still the issue of my account no being properly restored. They actually restored my gear twice, so I have a second copy of a lot of my stuff. That doesn't actually help much, but it's a thing. I'm still out most of my money. I figure I'm short about 280k still. I also still don't have leadership of the guild. That belongs to an alt of someone we used to play with back in the day. I tried emailing him about it but his old email address doesn't work anymore. If the hacker hadn't deleted him from my Battle.Net friend list I'd try messaging him there. Oh well, not really a big deal I guess. I still have alts that can invite people to the guild, so there's not really a problem. The guild bank is still gone and makes up 174k of the 280k I'm missing. I'm not sure of Amaranthea has it or not. I'm not sure if the GMs would restore it to him or me or what.
I'm also worried that if I bring attention to my account that Blizzard will ban it again despite not being hacked in what feels like a long time.
Eh, I'll figure that stuff out later I guess. Now that I have my gear back I can at least play the game. Unfortunately I'm stuck on a PvP quest in my PvE quest chain... Why in the world would they do that? I'm sure not geared for PvP so being forced to win 2 battlegrounds with me in them is a pretty hard thing to do. *sigh*
But it does seem like I get to play again... So it's prime time for other people to be coming back to play too! At least in 3 weeks when the expansion hits... Think about it...
Monday, October 20, 2014
World of Warcraft: Account Locked
Over the last 4 days my World of Warcraft account got hacked 5 times. I still don't know how it happened in the first place. As far as I can tell there's still nothing wrong with my email account or with my computer, and he only gets to repeat the account hack because Blizzard has done a poor job of securing my account on their end. This is a bit of a serious accusation, but I feel like I can back it up.
Hack #2, the attacker likely got in by using the SMS service he set up on my account during the first hack. Or by using the secret question he set up on my account during the first hack. Neither were removed by Blizzard when they restored my account the first time, even though I explicitly noted the SMS service had been added by the hacker. After this hack I made sure they removed the SMS.
Hack #3, the attacker certainly got in by asking nicely.
Note that before I could get my account back in the first place I had to provide photo ID. This guy did not need to attach ID. Heck, the GM who let him into my account didn't even bother to fill out the madlibs form properly, unless somehow my name is NAMEHERE and my issue was ISSUEHERE. This time the hacker changed my account email address.
Hack #4, the attacker likely got in using the secret question. The GM who helped me out this time couldn't do much, and had to leave my account locked while a restoration team guy worked on the account. He didn't have any new suggestions for securing my account, but what I did on my own was got my sister to let me use her cell phone as the SMS thing. I assumed this would be good enough, but it was not.
Hack #5, the attacker likely got in using the secret question. The GM this time suggested the secret question as a potential vulnerability and had me change it. They also had me change the email address associated with the account. Both of those changes seemed reasonable, and it surprises me in retrospect that none of the other GMs suggested it. Frankly, those seem like much more reasonable things to suggest than getting me to change my email password a second time. (The first time seems quite reasonable.) This GM was helpful in terms of helping secure my account but he failed when it came to restoring my account. He said he'd done it, but my character had no gear and almost all the money was still missing.
So tonight after getting Sceadeau and Elaine to start playing I went and opened another ticket, this time to get my stuff restored. The GM this time around took her sweet time looking into things, which is just fine. An earlier GM had just mailed me 404k to fix the problem and get me out of his hair and I'm more than happy to have someone sit down and restore what I should have. This GM did a restoration, but it was not anywhere near correct. I ended up with 114k total gold when it's obvious that at least 404k was stolen from the guild bank log. I'm pretty sure the total amount is more like 534k. Anyway, I explained a bit of the math behind how I arrived at my number. She went away for a while longer and then came back saying my account had to be locked because of how many times I was hacked.
JUH?
If this was standard policy given how many times I'd been hacked I'd be bitter but could understand it as a stance they'd take. Especially if nothing new had changed. Repeating the same action over and over is just feeding the hacker 534k gold every time and I can see not wanting to do that. So if that's what the guy this morning had said instead of offering 2 new things to try, so be it. But that's not what happened. (Especially if Blizzard can't track down the gold that gets stolen and just makes new gold to give to me, the hacker is making almost $400 each time he hacks me. I can see why he keeps doing it!)
I'm especially pissed because the number of hacks is being used against me when at least one and probably 4 of the 5 hacks can be attributed not to my actions, but to Blizzard's actions. If the first guy had removed the SMS the hacker added and also realized the secret question was added at the same time and had that changed as well we'd probably be free and clear. Certainly the time when a GM let the hacker in has to be on Blizzard! I feel like too many of these GMs have reacted in a way to speed up getting a fix out instead of making sure the fix was the right one and it probably sped up their individual call response times but is jamming the system in general.
This GM said the only way to unlock the account was to have an authenticator mailed to me and used. But she couldn't get them to mail one express before I move, so I'm looking at not being able to play for a couple weeks. And since now is when my friends have started playing that's not really a good option. I also wanted to use this time before the expansion hits to play. Oh, and I'd bought the expansion and the game time last week because I was going to play this month. So I asked for a refund and was denied.
I pressed some more, and eventually she caved. But not to unlock my account. Not to send me an authenticator quickly. Not to run a test to see if changing the secret question and the email address were good enough to secure the account. No. She refunded my expansion purchase. Not my gametime purchase, which I can never use because they locked my account, just the expansion. So they gave me back $50, but not the extra $42 for 3 months of gametime. I'm going to have to yell about that one way or the other too.
I fully intend to open a new ticket tomorrow morning to see if things won't change when I get a different rep. If this experience tells me anything it's that the reps are not consistently trained, so there's a decent chance I get someone else who just lets me in and mails me 404k again. Of course this all depends on not losing my Battle.Net account again overnight. We'll see if the question and email changes are good enough.
But if they aren't, or if Blizzard doesn't let me back in... I'm probably done with WoW. Which sucks, because I was having fun playing and because I'd convinced Sceadeau and Elaine to start playing too.
Hack #2, the attacker likely got in by using the SMS service he set up on my account during the first hack. Or by using the secret question he set up on my account during the first hack. Neither were removed by Blizzard when they restored my account the first time, even though I explicitly noted the SMS service had been added by the hacker. After this hack I made sure they removed the SMS.
Hack #3, the attacker certainly got in by asking nicely.
Note that before I could get my account back in the first place I had to provide photo ID. This guy did not need to attach ID. Heck, the GM who let him into my account didn't even bother to fill out the madlibs form properly, unless somehow my name is NAMEHERE and my issue was ISSUEHERE. This time the hacker changed my account email address.
Hack #4, the attacker likely got in using the secret question. The GM who helped me out this time couldn't do much, and had to leave my account locked while a restoration team guy worked on the account. He didn't have any new suggestions for securing my account, but what I did on my own was got my sister to let me use her cell phone as the SMS thing. I assumed this would be good enough, but it was not.
Hack #5, the attacker likely got in using the secret question. The GM this time suggested the secret question as a potential vulnerability and had me change it. They also had me change the email address associated with the account. Both of those changes seemed reasonable, and it surprises me in retrospect that none of the other GMs suggested it. Frankly, those seem like much more reasonable things to suggest than getting me to change my email password a second time. (The first time seems quite reasonable.) This GM was helpful in terms of helping secure my account but he failed when it came to restoring my account. He said he'd done it, but my character had no gear and almost all the money was still missing.
So tonight after getting Sceadeau and Elaine to start playing I went and opened another ticket, this time to get my stuff restored. The GM this time around took her sweet time looking into things, which is just fine. An earlier GM had just mailed me 404k to fix the problem and get me out of his hair and I'm more than happy to have someone sit down and restore what I should have. This GM did a restoration, but it was not anywhere near correct. I ended up with 114k total gold when it's obvious that at least 404k was stolen from the guild bank log. I'm pretty sure the total amount is more like 534k. Anyway, I explained a bit of the math behind how I arrived at my number. She went away for a while longer and then came back saying my account had to be locked because of how many times I was hacked.
JUH?
If this was standard policy given how many times I'd been hacked I'd be bitter but could understand it as a stance they'd take. Especially if nothing new had changed. Repeating the same action over and over is just feeding the hacker 534k gold every time and I can see not wanting to do that. So if that's what the guy this morning had said instead of offering 2 new things to try, so be it. But that's not what happened. (Especially if Blizzard can't track down the gold that gets stolen and just makes new gold to give to me, the hacker is making almost $400 each time he hacks me. I can see why he keeps doing it!)
I'm especially pissed because the number of hacks is being used against me when at least one and probably 4 of the 5 hacks can be attributed not to my actions, but to Blizzard's actions. If the first guy had removed the SMS the hacker added and also realized the secret question was added at the same time and had that changed as well we'd probably be free and clear. Certainly the time when a GM let the hacker in has to be on Blizzard! I feel like too many of these GMs have reacted in a way to speed up getting a fix out instead of making sure the fix was the right one and it probably sped up their individual call response times but is jamming the system in general.
This GM said the only way to unlock the account was to have an authenticator mailed to me and used. But she couldn't get them to mail one express before I move, so I'm looking at not being able to play for a couple weeks. And since now is when my friends have started playing that's not really a good option. I also wanted to use this time before the expansion hits to play. Oh, and I'd bought the expansion and the game time last week because I was going to play this month. So I asked for a refund and was denied.
I pressed some more, and eventually she caved. But not to unlock my account. Not to send me an authenticator quickly. Not to run a test to see if changing the secret question and the email address were good enough to secure the account. No. She refunded my expansion purchase. Not my gametime purchase, which I can never use because they locked my account, just the expansion. So they gave me back $50, but not the extra $42 for 3 months of gametime. I'm going to have to yell about that one way or the other too.
I fully intend to open a new ticket tomorrow morning to see if things won't change when I get a different rep. If this experience tells me anything it's that the reps are not consistently trained, so there's a decent chance I get someone else who just lets me in and mails me 404k again. Of course this all depends on not losing my Battle.Net account again overnight. We'll see if the question and email changes are good enough.
But if they aren't, or if Blizzard doesn't let me back in... I'm probably done with WoW. Which sucks, because I was having fun playing and because I'd convinced Sceadeau and Elaine to start playing too.
Friday, October 17, 2014
World of Warcraft: Account Hacked
So I've been playing WoW a fair bit lately, trying out all the raids I missed and digging up some artifacts and leveling my alt to 90. It's been fun. Then I woke up Friday morning to some odd emails. Apparently I'd paid to transfer off 5 of my characters and then Blizzard locked my account down for suspicious behaviour. This had happened about 30 minutes before I woke up. I was able to change my password to something else and log in, discovering that I'd stolen the guild bank and run off with the cash. Just like what happened to Stochastic a year ago.
I went to submit a ticket stating that I'd been hacked. In the process it asked me to enter my SMS phone number, which I couldn't do because I hadn't associated a phone number with my account. (And I actually can't do such a thing because Blizzard detects my phone as being 'prepaid' and therefore won't allow it to be used.) I clicked a link to remove it and it told me it had just pinged my phone and I needed to enter the code it sent to do so. Which meant it actually pinged the hacker's phone and let him know I was trying to do something about what he'd done. So he came back and changed my password on me, kicking me out of my account.
In the meantime I'd changed my email account password to be safe (though if the hacker had access to my email account he should have been deleting the emails letting me know what was up) and ran some malware scans on my computer. Spybot and Malwarebytes both turned up nothing, so I'm not sure how they got my password.
Blizzard is set up such that you can't call support until 10am and can't use the website chat until 9am so I got to sit around bitter for 6 hours until the website opened up. I got in and talked to someone on the website who was pretty nice about the whole thing but ultimately couldn't do much except send me to someone who could do something. Which is fine, I've worked support on a game before and I understand that not everyone can do everything.
A couple hours later I got emails indicating that the character transfers I'd paid for had been reverted, but before they'd give me access to my account again I'd need to send in some ID to prove I am who I am. Fine, I actually have a scanner now thanks to my mother buying me a combo printer thingy so I scanned in my health card and attached it to a new ticket on the website. I ended up having to go to bed before they got back to me about it, though.
I woke up to find they'd unlocked my account (presumably thanks to my health card), reverted the character transfers, and given me back my gold. They did not remove the SMS number the hacker added to my account. So while I slept he took my account back over, bought character transfers for my characters again, and tried to take off with the newly restored cash. *sigh*
It's not clear exactly what happened because the transfers kept getting denied. He ended up buying 16 all told in 3 waves trying to get my characters off of my server. He even had the gall to submit some tickets of his own trying to get access to my account at one point. Of course while my tickets all explained what was going on his only stated:
'My god!!Where are the characters in realm Vek'nilash?I just left out for a little while!'
I'd like to think that wouldn't have worked on them, but in their support website it actually got a response from a person letting them know they'd been helped and that my gold had been restored. Pretty sure this is when he took the account back over via SMS and tried to run off with the gold again.
Anyway, as soon as I got up I sent off a new ticket of my own spelling out that they'd need to remove the SMS from my account and do another restoration. At 9am I again went to the website chat and talked to someone who was able to remove the SMS for me and reset my password. So I got my account back and was able to log in and see what was up. 5 of my characters were flat broke, the other 5 had the maximum amount allowed for a character transfer, and the guild bank was still empty. So I had the website chat person look into that and after showing them the guild bank cash log (by having them log into my character?!?) they just gave me the full amount removed from the guild bank. I suspect this is pretty close to the amount of money I should have since the first time around the hacker deposited ~230k of my own money into the guild bank, presumably because the rest of my wealth was able to be server transfered on 5 characters. So I probably had 130k on those character, 230k added to the guild bank, and 170k from the guild bank itself. I still have the 130k on the 5 characters so giving me 400k should let me get things back to where they should be. I don't actually know how much money I had. 360k sounds like it's probably in the right ballpark? 170k in the guild bank sounds low since it was at 268k when Stochastic got hacked. But maybe he didn't put it all back in? Or maybe repairs are expensive? Or maybe people have been slowly embezzling? Who knows? Who cares? I mostly just want things to be right because I like when things are right. It's not like we actually need the money.
It also turned out the hacker had screwed up all my keybindings. Because he's a jerk. Or probably because he wanted to be able to run using WASD and I've set those to be other things. And Blizzard stores keybindings online now, so him changing them on his end overwrote what I had on my end. Thankfully my sister showed me a trick with Windows Restore and I was able to revert my settings files to what I used in 2013, so that was fixed pretty easily.
He also deleted all my Battle.net friends. Because he's a jerk. Oddly he didn't delete all of them... He left Randy and Jeff. Everyone else was removed. I thought I could use StarCraftII and the Facebook integration to find all my friends again, but I can't. So if you want to be my friend on Battle.Net again, well, send me a friend request (ziggyny at gmail.com)!
I went to submit a ticket stating that I'd been hacked. In the process it asked me to enter my SMS phone number, which I couldn't do because I hadn't associated a phone number with my account. (And I actually can't do such a thing because Blizzard detects my phone as being 'prepaid' and therefore won't allow it to be used.) I clicked a link to remove it and it told me it had just pinged my phone and I needed to enter the code it sent to do so. Which meant it actually pinged the hacker's phone and let him know I was trying to do something about what he'd done. So he came back and changed my password on me, kicking me out of my account.
In the meantime I'd changed my email account password to be safe (though if the hacker had access to my email account he should have been deleting the emails letting me know what was up) and ran some malware scans on my computer. Spybot and Malwarebytes both turned up nothing, so I'm not sure how they got my password.
Blizzard is set up such that you can't call support until 10am and can't use the website chat until 9am so I got to sit around bitter for 6 hours until the website opened up. I got in and talked to someone on the website who was pretty nice about the whole thing but ultimately couldn't do much except send me to someone who could do something. Which is fine, I've worked support on a game before and I understand that not everyone can do everything.
A couple hours later I got emails indicating that the character transfers I'd paid for had been reverted, but before they'd give me access to my account again I'd need to send in some ID to prove I am who I am. Fine, I actually have a scanner now thanks to my mother buying me a combo printer thingy so I scanned in my health card and attached it to a new ticket on the website. I ended up having to go to bed before they got back to me about it, though.
I woke up to find they'd unlocked my account (presumably thanks to my health card), reverted the character transfers, and given me back my gold. They did not remove the SMS number the hacker added to my account. So while I slept he took my account back over, bought character transfers for my characters again, and tried to take off with the newly restored cash. *sigh*
It's not clear exactly what happened because the transfers kept getting denied. He ended up buying 16 all told in 3 waves trying to get my characters off of my server. He even had the gall to submit some tickets of his own trying to get access to my account at one point. Of course while my tickets all explained what was going on his only stated:
'My god!!Where are the characters in realm Vek'nilash?I just left out for a little while!'
I'd like to think that wouldn't have worked on them, but in their support website it actually got a response from a person letting them know they'd been helped and that my gold had been restored. Pretty sure this is when he took the account back over via SMS and tried to run off with the gold again.
Anyway, as soon as I got up I sent off a new ticket of my own spelling out that they'd need to remove the SMS from my account and do another restoration. At 9am I again went to the website chat and talked to someone who was able to remove the SMS for me and reset my password. So I got my account back and was able to log in and see what was up. 5 of my characters were flat broke, the other 5 had the maximum amount allowed for a character transfer, and the guild bank was still empty. So I had the website chat person look into that and after showing them the guild bank cash log (by having them log into my character?!?) they just gave me the full amount removed from the guild bank. I suspect this is pretty close to the amount of money I should have since the first time around the hacker deposited ~230k of my own money into the guild bank, presumably because the rest of my wealth was able to be server transfered on 5 characters. So I probably had 130k on those character, 230k added to the guild bank, and 170k from the guild bank itself. I still have the 130k on the 5 characters so giving me 400k should let me get things back to where they should be. I don't actually know how much money I had. 360k sounds like it's probably in the right ballpark? 170k in the guild bank sounds low since it was at 268k when Stochastic got hacked. But maybe he didn't put it all back in? Or maybe repairs are expensive? Or maybe people have been slowly embezzling? Who knows? Who cares? I mostly just want things to be right because I like when things are right. It's not like we actually need the money.
It also turned out the hacker had screwed up all my keybindings. Because he's a jerk. Or probably because he wanted to be able to run using WASD and I've set those to be other things. And Blizzard stores keybindings online now, so him changing them on his end overwrote what I had on my end. Thankfully my sister showed me a trick with Windows Restore and I was able to revert my settings files to what I used in 2013, so that was fixed pretty easily.
He also deleted all my Battle.net friends. Because he's a jerk. Oddly he didn't delete all of them... He left Randy and Jeff. Everyone else was removed. I thought I could use StarCraftII and the Facebook integration to find all my friends again, but I can't. So if you want to be my friend on Battle.Net again, well, send me a friend request (ziggyny at gmail.com)!
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
World of Warcraft: Updating Addons
I spent today's patch downtime browsing lists of achievements and getting nostalgic for running around in game doing things so I reactivated my account so I could play a bit after the patch. It turns out that not logging in for over a year meant that I had a bit of an issue with outdated addons. I have no clue what addons I need or want anymore, but I figured just downloading new versions of the ones that were yelling at me was probably a good place to start.
This included my auctioneer replacement, TradeSkillMaster. And then once I had that updated I figured I should put it through the paces again and see if I couldn't make some money off of selling some of the glyphs I have just lying around on my old glyph selling alts. I have no clue what these things are legitimately worth, but what I do know from previous expansions is they're worth more right now than they will be later since there's bound to be a lot of people coming back to the game who also don't know what things are legitimately worth but who will want glyphs to do fun things. So I'm just undercutting whatever's up there now and asserting that they're probably not out to lose money with their prices.
Besides, all these glyphs are already made... So really they're worth nothing to me anymore! Any money I can get for them is good money. Knowing what they're actually worth is more a concern if I want to make more of them to supplement my supply. Which I'll probably want to do soon enough since I like making things... But by then I'll have several days of AH scans and presumably some sale data as well to try to make a more educated guess about things.
I ran my death knight around for a bit and did some stuff on my farm. I found it amusing that the seeds I'd planted in June 2013 had grown into harvestable vegetables and hadn't rotted or anything. I was also surprised to find I'd switched to blacksmithing and engineering at some point. They're removed all profession perks in the next expansion which makes me wonder if I even care what I have anymore. I feel like I almost certainly want mining back because I do enjoy zoning out and mining things and I guess I should probably keep one of blacksmithing or engineering since they both use ore. I'll need to look into it and see if it possibly matters which one I keep. I suspect it doesn't.
At any rate, I have the game to what is likely a playable state. Now I just need to read what all my abilities do and then go out and kill things! After I sleep, anyway.
This included my auctioneer replacement, TradeSkillMaster. And then once I had that updated I figured I should put it through the paces again and see if I couldn't make some money off of selling some of the glyphs I have just lying around on my old glyph selling alts. I have no clue what these things are legitimately worth, but what I do know from previous expansions is they're worth more right now than they will be later since there's bound to be a lot of people coming back to the game who also don't know what things are legitimately worth but who will want glyphs to do fun things. So I'm just undercutting whatever's up there now and asserting that they're probably not out to lose money with their prices.
Besides, all these glyphs are already made... So really they're worth nothing to me anymore! Any money I can get for them is good money. Knowing what they're actually worth is more a concern if I want to make more of them to supplement my supply. Which I'll probably want to do soon enough since I like making things... But by then I'll have several days of AH scans and presumably some sale data as well to try to make a more educated guess about things.
I ran my death knight around for a bit and did some stuff on my farm. I found it amusing that the seeds I'd planted in June 2013 had grown into harvestable vegetables and hadn't rotted or anything. I was also surprised to find I'd switched to blacksmithing and engineering at some point. They're removed all profession perks in the next expansion which makes me wonder if I even care what I have anymore. I feel like I almost certainly want mining back because I do enjoy zoning out and mining things and I guess I should probably keep one of blacksmithing or engineering since they both use ore. I'll need to look into it and see if it possibly matters which one I keep. I suspect it doesn't.
At any rate, I have the game to what is likely a playable state. Now I just need to read what all my abilities do and then go out and kill things! After I sleep, anyway.
Monday, October 13, 2014
World of Warcraft: Patch 6.0.2
Tomorrow is seeing the release of patch 6.0.2 for World of Warcraft and if you're familiar with the way they number their releases you'll know this is a big one. There's a new expansion coming out in a month and this is the patch where they bring in most of the systematic changes in the expansion as a sort of trial run. It's genius, really... Content has been mostly exhausted for a lot of people from the last expansion so there's not a lot of danger to screwing people over if some sort of brutal bug or balance issue exists with their changes. They get a month to fix things before the actual expansion comes out, when tons of people will want to be playing and where systemic issues would be a real problem.
Now, I haven't really played the game since the last expansion came out two years ago. I got a few months of fun out of that expansion and I feel like the same will likely be true for a new expansion too. WoW is just such an incredibly polished game that the idea of getting a ton of new quests and achievements to plow through and new mechanics to fool around with is very appealing. Probably more appealing with enough other people to run challenge modes or raid or something, but still pretty fun mostly alone too I would think.
Anyway, reading the patch notes and the upcoming features in the expansion has me pretty excited. They're making a bunch of changes that feel like they're for the better. Reforging is gone because while it sounded like a good idea it just forced everyone to have someone crunch numbers for them and it always felt like a chore to get an upgrade. Along that same vein they took hit and expertise out of the game completely and are changing the way haste works with dots to remove all those silly breakpoints and caps that you needed to hit if you wanted to be optimal. They're also streamlining gear to get rid of 'holy paladin' loot drops by making all plate have strength and intelligence on them. Sure, only one of those stats will do anything for you, but if every item has both of them it's not like you can find one with a better stat mix for you. It'll feel a little silly for my warrior to be a smart guy but it's a change that just makes sense.
They're finally doing something about the insanity of number inflation that comes from having 5 expansions worth of power jumps. Everything is being rebalanced so there's a smooth line from level 1 to 90 and then it'll start ramping up again. Along with this they're trying, once again, to fix healing by inflating health pools. I don't play a healer but I've heard this song and dance before. Maybe they'll actually make it work this time? The claim is they're going to make health keep scaling over the expansion at the same rate as healing does so you won't get to the point where you can just fill someone up with your cheapest heal.
They're also cleaning up tool bars by removing a bunch of abilities from the game. Including a lot of the instant heals and crowd control abilities in an attempt to reduce clutter and make PvP work better. Feels like it's probably a good thing. There wasn't really a need to have 3 runic power dumps for a death knight... Removing rune strike and just tweaking death coil for tanks seems like a fine idea.
Then there are the stuff that came in this expansion after I quit or that will be coming in with the next expansion. Things like flexible raid sizes so you can bring all 14 people who show up to your raid one day and then just 10 the next day and no one has to be benched. Apparently you can also invite people on your friend list from other realms to join your flex raid. Both of these are things that probably would have kept OGT raiding back in Cataclysm.
The big thing in the expansion is player housing where you get to build up your own garrison with your choice of buildings and followers who will work with you. It sounds like a return to Warcraft roots where you build a little town and then the buildings do things for you. It sounds really cool. You can have something like 25 followers in your town, and they all have internal experience bars, and you can level them all up to 100. So many numbers to make bigger! BIGGER NUMBERS! WOO!
They're adding in a 'toy box' where all the cool junk items you find can get stored to play with on a whim without being forced to fill up your inventory with them. This makes me way happier than it probably should. I used to carry around a bunch of silly little things (mostly from archaeology) to use and not having to waste bag space on them will be awesome. Dancing Dwarves ho! They're also making it so crafting reagents stack to bigger numbers (and they're making it so professions have no stat boosts anymore so you can just do what you want) which will be nice.
One cool thing they're doing is giving everyone a free boost to level 90 with the expansion. This is nice because it'll let people try new classes or reroll to play with friends on another server.
Realm first achievements really do seem to be gone. Unlucky. I'd have wanted to try for the realm first cooking threepeat!
Anyway... The actual expansion is coming out Nov 13th. I feel like I'll be there with bells on...
Now, I haven't really played the game since the last expansion came out two years ago. I got a few months of fun out of that expansion and I feel like the same will likely be true for a new expansion too. WoW is just such an incredibly polished game that the idea of getting a ton of new quests and achievements to plow through and new mechanics to fool around with is very appealing. Probably more appealing with enough other people to run challenge modes or raid or something, but still pretty fun mostly alone too I would think.
Anyway, reading the patch notes and the upcoming features in the expansion has me pretty excited. They're making a bunch of changes that feel like they're for the better. Reforging is gone because while it sounded like a good idea it just forced everyone to have someone crunch numbers for them and it always felt like a chore to get an upgrade. Along that same vein they took hit and expertise out of the game completely and are changing the way haste works with dots to remove all those silly breakpoints and caps that you needed to hit if you wanted to be optimal. They're also streamlining gear to get rid of 'holy paladin' loot drops by making all plate have strength and intelligence on them. Sure, only one of those stats will do anything for you, but if every item has both of them it's not like you can find one with a better stat mix for you. It'll feel a little silly for my warrior to be a smart guy but it's a change that just makes sense.
They're finally doing something about the insanity of number inflation that comes from having 5 expansions worth of power jumps. Everything is being rebalanced so there's a smooth line from level 1 to 90 and then it'll start ramping up again. Along with this they're trying, once again, to fix healing by inflating health pools. I don't play a healer but I've heard this song and dance before. Maybe they'll actually make it work this time? The claim is they're going to make health keep scaling over the expansion at the same rate as healing does so you won't get to the point where you can just fill someone up with your cheapest heal.
They're also cleaning up tool bars by removing a bunch of abilities from the game. Including a lot of the instant heals and crowd control abilities in an attempt to reduce clutter and make PvP work better. Feels like it's probably a good thing. There wasn't really a need to have 3 runic power dumps for a death knight... Removing rune strike and just tweaking death coil for tanks seems like a fine idea.
Then there are the stuff that came in this expansion after I quit or that will be coming in with the next expansion. Things like flexible raid sizes so you can bring all 14 people who show up to your raid one day and then just 10 the next day and no one has to be benched. Apparently you can also invite people on your friend list from other realms to join your flex raid. Both of these are things that probably would have kept OGT raiding back in Cataclysm.
The big thing in the expansion is player housing where you get to build up your own garrison with your choice of buildings and followers who will work with you. It sounds like a return to Warcraft roots where you build a little town and then the buildings do things for you. It sounds really cool. You can have something like 25 followers in your town, and they all have internal experience bars, and you can level them all up to 100. So many numbers to make bigger! BIGGER NUMBERS! WOO!
They're adding in a 'toy box' where all the cool junk items you find can get stored to play with on a whim without being forced to fill up your inventory with them. This makes me way happier than it probably should. I used to carry around a bunch of silly little things (mostly from archaeology) to use and not having to waste bag space on them will be awesome. Dancing Dwarves ho! They're also making it so crafting reagents stack to bigger numbers (and they're making it so professions have no stat boosts anymore so you can just do what you want) which will be nice.
One cool thing they're doing is giving everyone a free boost to level 90 with the expansion. This is nice because it'll let people try new classes or reroll to play with friends on another server.
Realm first achievements really do seem to be gone. Unlucky. I'd have wanted to try for the realm first cooking threepeat!
Anyway... The actual expansion is coming out Nov 13th. I feel like I'll be there with bells on...
Thursday, February 13, 2014
World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor Realm Firsts
I tend to only read about games I'm actively playing, so I go through periods of time where I'll read a ton of stuff about World of Warcraft and then there will be periods where it's like the game doesn't exist at all. I pretty much haven't played the game in over a year except for a brief time when they gave me a free week last summer and I used it to discover the guild had been hacked. Anyway, earlier today a post showed up in my Blogger reading list from a crafting blog. The post itself wasn't about much of anything, just an explanation of why she hadn't been posting more often, but there was a comment that caught my attention...
It would seem Blizzard announced a few months ago at Blizzcon that the next expansion wouldn't have the now standard realm first achievements for doing things very fast at expansion launch. I went searching to try to find an explanation and pretty much only found people on the internet yelling things at each other. People who didn't like those achievements insulting the people who did. People who did sniping back. Not very much actual information about much of anything. Thanks internet.
Anyway, it sounds like WoW has been doing a bunch of fake server mergers or something such that you play with people on other servers all the time which seems to negate the whole idea of a 'realm first' since you'd be working with and against people from lots of different realms. It also sounds like they might well be making this expansion take longer to level (it's back to 10 levels instead of just 5) and having a Blizzard encouraged excuse for people to play for days on end is probably not too wise?
Personally I've always liked the idea of realm first achievements. I have 5 of them from the last couple expansions, after all, and I had a lot of fun trying for them. On the other hand I also tried for the realm first 'all the reps' achievement last expansion and it totally burned me out. Mostly because it involved doing all of the daily quests every single day for months and there were a LOT of stupid daily quests. Apparently they're not putting any max level daily quests into the next expansion which is fantastic news to me! They're putting in some sort of RTS/player housing thing which will probably fill a similar role of giving 'casual' players something to do every day which sounds pretty sweet.
It makes me a little sad that they're removing the realm first stuff because even when I wasn't doing them myself I'm always intrigued by what sorts of things people would do in order to win them. Having out of party people healing you, or kill monsters you tagged, or finding a mob worth too much experience and just grinding it for hours and hours on end... This is probably why I like watching speed runs so much! Anyway, it's unfortunate that they're taking these things out, but realistically it's probably for the best. People are still going to play a ton at expansion launch anyway, I don't know that Blizzard really needs to trick people into playing even more in an attempt to get one of a very small handful of achievements.
Doing all that reading makes me want to play again! Well, mostly they make me want to play the new expansion which doesn't even have a release date... But I'm totally in when it comes out!
It would seem Blizzard announced a few months ago at Blizzcon that the next expansion wouldn't have the now standard realm first achievements for doing things very fast at expansion launch. I went searching to try to find an explanation and pretty much only found people on the internet yelling things at each other. People who didn't like those achievements insulting the people who did. People who did sniping back. Not very much actual information about much of anything. Thanks internet.
Anyway, it sounds like WoW has been doing a bunch of fake server mergers or something such that you play with people on other servers all the time which seems to negate the whole idea of a 'realm first' since you'd be working with and against people from lots of different realms. It also sounds like they might well be making this expansion take longer to level (it's back to 10 levels instead of just 5) and having a Blizzard encouraged excuse for people to play for days on end is probably not too wise?
Personally I've always liked the idea of realm first achievements. I have 5 of them from the last couple expansions, after all, and I had a lot of fun trying for them. On the other hand I also tried for the realm first 'all the reps' achievement last expansion and it totally burned me out. Mostly because it involved doing all of the daily quests every single day for months and there were a LOT of stupid daily quests. Apparently they're not putting any max level daily quests into the next expansion which is fantastic news to me! They're putting in some sort of RTS/player housing thing which will probably fill a similar role of giving 'casual' players something to do every day which sounds pretty sweet.
It makes me a little sad that they're removing the realm first stuff because even when I wasn't doing them myself I'm always intrigued by what sorts of things people would do in order to win them. Having out of party people healing you, or kill monsters you tagged, or finding a mob worth too much experience and just grinding it for hours and hours on end... This is probably why I like watching speed runs so much! Anyway, it's unfortunate that they're taking these things out, but realistically it's probably for the best. People are still going to play a ton at expansion launch anyway, I don't know that Blizzard really needs to trick people into playing even more in an attempt to get one of a very small handful of achievements.
Doing all that reading makes me want to play again! Well, mostly they make me want to play the new expansion which doesn't even have a release date... But I'm totally in when it comes out!
Thursday, June 13, 2013
World of Warcraft: Brawler's Guild
One of the features they added in the first big content patch this expansion was the Brawler's Guild. This is basically a series of solo boss fights in a room under the tram between Stormwind and Ironforge. It's got a pretty neat atmosphere as an underground fight club style thing. Some of the fights I've done so far have neat twists to them, so it's a lot like I get all the things I liked about raiding with none of the bad parts!
Well, I lied. There is one bad part... Mechanics which punish melee characters. I've beaten 25 fights so far, and am stuck on fight 26. The fight is certainly interesting. It's got a boss who starts off immune to damage, and who can cast two spells. The first summons an add, the second hits for a ton of damage but can be interrupted. When you kill the add the boss becomes vulnerable to damage for a short period of time. So you need to manage interrupting the boss with alternating who you're damaging based on when the boss is immune.
Oh, and the adds have a significantly larger than normal attack range. And they melee for 175% of my max health. You can stun the adds by looking at them, ala the ghosts from Mario. But the stun takes some time before it registers. So if you're a melee character and you see the ghost spawn and you run at it to kill it, you die. Because his range is larger than yours. So instead you need to run up to a medium range and stand still. Wait for your stun to resolve. Then attack. Oh, and my interrupt is melee ranged, so if I do this I can't interrupt the big damage spell he's going to cast. The adds build up faster than you want to kill them, but you can stun them all if you can get them into a line.
All of these things are significantly easier for ranged attackers. I feel like the fight is winnable for me, if I play perfectly. But that if I was a warlock or a hunter that it would comparatively trivial. I haven't played perfectly yet, though. It doesn't help that I have a 10 minute cooldown to hit that I want to wait for. Part of me wants to wait until I get a better weapon to try this fight. Part of me wants to keep trying every 10 minutes until I win. And part of me wants to glitch the fight (sometimes you can have two people fighting two bosses and if either boss dies you both win).
Well, I lied. There is one bad part... Mechanics which punish melee characters. I've beaten 25 fights so far, and am stuck on fight 26. The fight is certainly interesting. It's got a boss who starts off immune to damage, and who can cast two spells. The first summons an add, the second hits for a ton of damage but can be interrupted. When you kill the add the boss becomes vulnerable to damage for a short period of time. So you need to manage interrupting the boss with alternating who you're damaging based on when the boss is immune.
Oh, and the adds have a significantly larger than normal attack range. And they melee for 175% of my max health. You can stun the adds by looking at them, ala the ghosts from Mario. But the stun takes some time before it registers. So if you're a melee character and you see the ghost spawn and you run at it to kill it, you die. Because his range is larger than yours. So instead you need to run up to a medium range and stand still. Wait for your stun to resolve. Then attack. Oh, and my interrupt is melee ranged, so if I do this I can't interrupt the big damage spell he's going to cast. The adds build up faster than you want to kill them, but you can stun them all if you can get them into a line.
All of these things are significantly easier for ranged attackers. I feel like the fight is winnable for me, if I play perfectly. But that if I was a warlock or a hunter that it would comparatively trivial. I haven't played perfectly yet, though. It doesn't help that I have a 10 minute cooldown to hit that I want to wait for. Part of me wants to wait until I get a better weapon to try this fight. Part of me wants to keep trying every 10 minutes until I win. And part of me wants to glitch the fight (sometimes you can have two people fighting two bosses and if either boss dies you both win).
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
World of Warcraft: Boo Hackers!
Stochastic commented on my Monday post about the guild bank saying he didn't take the guild gold and had cancelled his account. He'd been hacked in the interim and someone else must have made off with the gold. I'm glad the hacker didn't kick everyone out of the guild and try to sell it, but I guess that probably would have meant continuing to use a hacked account for far too long.
I opened a ticket in game just to see what they'd say. There was no category for 'friend got hacked and the hacker used your stupid guild stealing feature to steal our guild bank' so I improvised and used the 'item restoration - other' category. It took them a couple days, but they responded this afternoon.
We've got Stochastic's account locked down, we restored the gold to him as he's the guild leader, and I removed Sairoy and promoted him back to GM. Anyway, the gold is available whenever he's able to log in and deposit it. As you said he stopped playing, you can let him know, if you have a way to keep in touch, that our billing department could probably give him a free day of time when he's ready to log in and deposit the money, if he'd like to do that. Hope that's helpful! ^_^
So, huzzah? It's not clear from the response if the hacker also stole Stochastic's personal gold (I have to assume the answer is yes) or if Blizzard restored that too. The good news is that we don't have a dummy character as guild leader anymore and I don't have to worry about someone logging in and taking the gold I put in the bank so I can hit the muscle memoried repair button. If we ever played again and needed the gold (maybe next expansion?) it'll be on Stochastic's account. The gold itself was never actually the problem though, at least for me.
Stochastic probably should run a malware/virus scan if he hasn't already and change at least his Blizzard password? Blizzard seems happy to give him a free day to give us back the gold, but since we don't actually need it I wouldn't worry about patching/reinstalling the game at this point just for that sake.
I opened a ticket in game just to see what they'd say. There was no category for 'friend got hacked and the hacker used your stupid guild stealing feature to steal our guild bank' so I improvised and used the 'item restoration - other' category. It took them a couple days, but they responded this afternoon.
We've got Stochastic's account locked down, we restored the gold to him as he's the guild leader, and I removed Sairoy and promoted him back to GM. Anyway, the gold is available whenever he's able to log in and deposit it. As you said he stopped playing, you can let him know, if you have a way to keep in touch, that our billing department could probably give him a free day of time when he's ready to log in and deposit the money, if he'd like to do that. Hope that's helpful! ^_^
So, huzzah? It's not clear from the response if the hacker also stole Stochastic's personal gold (I have to assume the answer is yes) or if Blizzard restored that too. The good news is that we don't have a dummy character as guild leader anymore and I don't have to worry about someone logging in and taking the gold I put in the bank so I can hit the muscle memoried repair button. If we ever played again and needed the gold (maybe next expansion?) it'll be on Stochastic's account. The gold itself was never actually the problem though, at least for me.
Stochastic probably should run a malware/virus scan if he hasn't already and change at least his Blizzard password? Blizzard seems happy to give him a free day to give us back the gold, but since we don't actually need it I wouldn't worry about patching/reinstalling the game at this point just for that sake.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
World of Warcraft: Looking For Raid
I'm dabbling in all kinds of things in my little trip back to Azeroth. On the weekend I decided to give the looking for raid thing a go. I could use a better weapon, after all! And I did like raiding back in the day...
I ended up doing 10 bosses, I think, across 4 raid zones. They were all trivial. I understand they set up the looking for raid system to be pretty easy by default, and that I was doing older raids because I didn't have the gear to get into the newest ones. But everything seemed really undertuned and we just stomped it all.
That said, it was still fun. I could see how some of the bosses were interesting puzzles and how they could have been a lot of fun figuring out with a guild. There was one insect boss that was particularly interesting. He had an ability that killed anyone who walked under him, and I could imagine is figuring that out as Bung got himself killed standing under it. There was a trail ability that you had to pick up off your friends when they got debuffed and then run around the room making sure you leave room for the fight. Drew was totally on that duty. You have to kill the boss legs to damage the body but they keep respawning. It was fun.
Trash was incredibly boring. I never hated trash while raiding, but then I like the ambiance of having a populated game world and it tended to at least do something.
I got lots of loot. No weapons though. 8(
I ended up doing 10 bosses, I think, across 4 raid zones. They were all trivial. I understand they set up the looking for raid system to be pretty easy by default, and that I was doing older raids because I didn't have the gear to get into the newest ones. But everything seemed really undertuned and we just stomped it all.
That said, it was still fun. I could see how some of the bosses were interesting puzzles and how they could have been a lot of fun figuring out with a guild. There was one insect boss that was particularly interesting. He had an ability that killed anyone who walked under him, and I could imagine is figuring that out as Bung got himself killed standing under it. There was a trail ability that you had to pick up off your friends when they got debuffed and then run around the room making sure you leave room for the fight. Drew was totally on that duty. You have to kill the boss legs to damage the body but they keep respawning. It was fun.
Trash was incredibly boring. I never hated trash while raiding, but then I like the ambiance of having a populated game world and it tended to at least do something.
I got lots of loot. No weapons though. 8(
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