Tuesday/Thursday (5 Nov) - Cataclysmic Thoughts

Tuesday/Thursday (5 Nov) - Cataclysmic Thoughts

Note - I started this post on Tuesday, but got sidetracked and just got back to it.

The Wild Family played hooky Tuesday night and stayed pretty much away from the game. Now that JB has her +hit gear from the Argent Tournament and Wild has no raid to go to on Tuesday, the Family is somewhat at a loss as to what to do with that night.

The comments keep coming in on the guild website regarding our future raiding plans. The tug of war continues between the guildies who's primary focus is raiding and the guildies who's primary focus is social. If that were our only issue I think the guild would survive just fine, as we have long been able to bring both camps to common ground, and most of us in this guild want to see and participate in both. Being able to balance that has been a major strength of the guild that I think we still have.

That said, our raiding situation is not good. Some excellent reasoning has been put forth as to why that is:

The Guild
* Lack of good communication - a major issue, but one that can be fixed
* An unusually large number of key guildies with real life issues - this can't be helped, but it contributed to the slippage in both raiding and in maintaining social contacts across the guild.
* I hate you. I hate you more! Sometimes some folks just don't get along. There is some of that going on and it's spilled over into a public fight. These things will run their course - either things cool off or eventually someone(s) leave.

The Game
* Raids are more complex than ever, requiring a higher level of skill and concentration to master. Some raiders shy from tough content until it can be beaten with regularity; some raiders get frustrated at lack of progress and move to other guilds. Both scenarios mean fewer people signing up.
* The current content is boring. Complexity aside, Ulduar got old fast for a lot of folks, and ToC is nothing more than an arena match swaddled in trickery to try to make it interesting. Neither are particularly necessary or important, since Chain heroics can be run by just about anyone for badges/emblems as an alternate source of quality gear. Chain heroics are also the height of mindless farming (when you succeed), and the worst kind of useless time sink when you struggle. Result - loss of interest in playing, switching to playing alts, getting interested in other games, rediscovering there is a "real life" out there.

I looked at our server forum and virtually every post is about guilds looking for raiders, so I don't think the lack of raiders is only a problem with our guild, but affects a lot (or even most) guilds right now. The problem with that is recruiting new raiders is doubly hard - there is a lot of demand for raiders, and right now our guild can't offer a prospective raider much since we aren't running 25 mans.

Which brings me to the next patch (3.3) and the next expansion, Cataclysm.

First, the patch. Patch 3.3 will bring us another dungeon called Icecrown Citadel: The Frozen Throne, the first dungeon where raid leaders can select normal or heroic mode on a boss by boss basis, and where we will at last get to battle the greatest of heroes/villains in Warcraft, the Lich King himself. There are three 5 man dungeons that have to be completed in a certain order to unlock the later ones. Then there is a 10/25 man raid. Icecrown Citadel will keep hard core raiders intrigued for about a week, and the rest of the raiding community for a month or two. It does look interesting, though, and hopes for re-invigorating our guild raids depends in part on how fun IC is.

For those lovers of grinding dungeons, Patch 3.3 makes significant, even radical, changes in how players group up to do dungeons and raids. It is going to be something like chain heroics on massive steroids. I haven't made up my mind yet on whether it will be so game changing that asking for LFG (looking for group) in the city trade chat channels will become extinct. For those who don't get the magnitude of that, Blizzard has been trying since they first released WoW to figure out a way to get 5, 10, 20, 25, or 40 peopled together to do a dungeon, raid, or event. All have been complete failures. The primary means has always been, and still is, to advertise in the trade channel, which can only be viewed in major cities.

Patch 3.3 is another attempt by Blizzard to fix this, and it's a doozy. First is what they do away with:
1) The old LFG tool is retired.
2) Daily dungeon and daily Heroic quests are eliminated. This is important because completing these dailies earn badges/emblems, and is the most sought after dungeons for groups each and every day.

Now, what will change? The new tool is called the "Dungeon System" (DS) and at it's simplest operates the same way the LFG tool worked - add your name to the tool, select the dungeons you are interested in, and wait for someone to get back to you. If you are looking for more people for a group that is forming, you can look for candidates who have put their names in.

Now for the changes. The new tool opens things up to include all players on every server. So, JB on Silvermoon could find herself in a group with a player on the Frostmourne server. How can that work? Dungeons and raids are "instances" that are really independant of the world servers, so it is irrelevant to the instance what server you came from. The first thought that comes to mind is WOW, there is going to be a whole lot more choices available when forming groups and raids. This is good. Then comes the second thought - you are not going to know who any of these folks are, they'll disappear back to their own server when the run is over, and the odds of winding up with a scammer/hacker/ninja go way up. Still, opening up dungeons/raids across a population of 11 million or so players is certainly an interesting idea - but I can't help thinking that if it is actually popular and used, then most of the time it will probably be crashed and unavailable. Not cynical or anything, am I? Frankly, Blizzard already does this with battlegrounds, assigning multiple servers to a "battlegroup" where players are drawn from. But BGs and dungeon runs are whole different animals.

The second major change is that the new tool will allow players to sign up for "random" dungeons and raids if you don't care what dungeon you go to. The tool assembles a group and randomly assigns a dungeon to them. So now you can get grouped with complete strangers who you might never see again after one run and most certainly won't see running around on your home server, and you'll also be doing a completely randomly assigned dungeon. That takes dungeon runs down to the very lowest common denominator, but it certainly helps Blizzard manage traffic and lag in their dungeon instances.

But who would want to do that? Now, this is where Blizzard gets diabolical. Remember that they are removing the two dailies from assigned dungeons. Well, you can still get dailies for a normal and heroic run, but only when you sign up for and complete the dungeons using the random option of the Dungeon System. In one fell swoop Blizzard will now FORCE players to use the random option of the new dungeon system to form groups in order to get the daily badge/emblem rewards.

For pick up groups, which this mostly applies to (but not completely, as I'll explain in a minute) the tool will use some kind of matchmaking system similar to battlegrounds matchups and will also do a "gear check" and attunement check. Dungeons and raids will be greyed out and unavailable to those who don't make minimum requirements.

Here are some more interesting rules. Don't like one of the members of the group? There is a voting system that can get him kicked out. Want to leave early? You'll be tagged a "deserter" (just as in BGs) and will be denied access to the Dungeon System for 15 minutes. Want to keep a player away? - put him on Ignore, and never will you be assigned to a group he's in, or will he be invited to a group you are already in.

The tool allows groups to sign up together, so that JB and DER could group and then sign up for a dungeon as a group. There is also a separate Looking for Raid (LFR) section of the tool which looks pretty much like the old/current LFG tool with a few bells and whistles added. I won't even go into all the special rules that are required due to the cross-server nature of the tool - Blizzard doesn't want any trading or money handling going on across servers.

That's a lot of preamble to the discussion of the next expansion, Cataclysm. It's still too early to go into all of the details and ramifications. The main change, though, is that all of the original world of Azeroth, what we often call Vanilla WoW, will be totally transformed by a world changing, well, cataclysm. When the old world gets to be too familiar and boring, then change it. Wish we could do that in real life, sometimes. For us original players of WoW in particular, this has a real attraction. Wild's earliest experiences are his fondest. Cataclysm is, in some ways, a path to relive those earliest days in the original world we grew up in, but in an utterly changed environment that turns the vanilla world into a fresh, new world that will hopefully be worth exploring.

I'm pretty sure that I will be rolling a new character or two just to experience the changes wrought by Cataclysm. I can see the possibility of even retiring (or semi-retiring) my high level toons - once they reach level 85 (which will be the new max), of course. I am considering making another effort to pull together a group of players who want to grow and learn this remade world together - like Philly started out doing with the Grunt Foundation. We'll see.