Op Ed

VentureBeat - Why I (and probably 600,000 others) stopped playing World of Warcraft. Thanks nin.
I think Blizzard dropped the ball by trying to artificially extend the life of the expansion by making the game too hard for casual players. I got to the end of Cataclysm and started running heroic dungeons — suped up versions of the regular dungeons that are designed to be the next natural level of progression. They have better rewards that are more suited to their difficulty. And I was struck by just how hard those dungeons were.

Like, really hard. Ridiculously hard. Enough to make me start yelling at my screen.

Joystick Division - Rethinking Online Gaming. Thanks Joker961.
Forget ever-improving graphics and blazing processors and goofball motion controls. The greatest advancement in console gaming over the last decade has been online play. From old friends halfway across the country to that dude right down the street whose apartment smells like a summer camp bathroom, online gaming lets us play with people we can't or don't want to hang out with in person, something that was impractical to impossible just ten years ago. Recent events have shown the downside of online dependency, though. Can the internet be trusted as a vital foundation for a video game, or should online be treated as a special bonus instead of a core feature?

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Re: Op Ed
May 13, 2011, 15:22
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Re: Op Ed May 13, 2011, 15:22
May 13, 2011, 15:22
 
I find it laughable how people were crying up and down at the end of the WoTK expansion about how easy heroic 5-mans were and how easy the raids were...even though most couldnt even think about killing the Lich King until the 30% zone buff was in place.

Shortly after Cataclysm came out, people were bitching about heroic 5-mans being too hard. Now they've added 5-man group buffs just for using the RDF, put in an additional buff for 5-man zones that you get from an Archeology quest. And people are still complaining.

I was in a 25man guild at the start of Cata (first week of Dec), by the end of December I had geared up on 5-man heroics/emblem gear and had killed the first 4 raid bosses. The following week we started 25man raids...needless to say 2/3 of the raid was not prepared with gear, consumables and definitely not skill. This went on for a few weeks of 4 hours epic fail raids with 1 or 2 bosses being killed (when some of us had already done 5 bosses [and working on 3 others] in 10man format).

Basically the people that were ready to raid split off and formed a 10man raid guild. A friend and I were part of this, but delayed a few days because we were unsure of a few things. In the end, the new guild leader had an ego the size of Texas and only took his real life friends on raids, meanwhile he and the other officers poorly mismanaged the 2nd raid group. I got fed up having bad players wasting my time in raids, also split up with my ex around the same time. So I'm currently on a break from WoW.

Point being, I'm on a break due to other people being incompetent and wasting my raid time, not because the game was too hard or too easy. At some point I'm sure I'll return and try and find a decent guild that isn't full of fuck-ups.

In the end, if you think the game is too hard...it's not. The problem falls on you and your ability. You simply have to wait until the next tier of gear comes out and progress a tier behind.


EDIT: If anyone has a good 10man guild, no bullshit drama, raids 2 or 3 evenings a week (after 6pm PST), gets shit done, no screwing around during raids and has a regular melee dps/tank spot open, feel free to contact me.

This comment was edited on May 13, 2011, 15:28.
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