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April 18, 2007 5:35 pm
Thanks for all the kind comments and emails. My wrist’s recovery isn’t quite on schedule — I was supposed to be able to type by now, but the doctor’s telling me to wait for another freaking month. This has significantly hampered my ability to work, but after a few days learning to target with the keyboard, I’m playing WoW at about 90% efficiency. It helps that I’m a caster druid, so my job is to either “tab to target, hit Moonfire hotkey, hit Insect Swarm hotkey, hit Wrath hotkey a bunch of times, tab to next mob” or “hit f key to target groupmate, hit Lifebloom hotkey, wait … hit Lifebloom hotkey, wait … oh shit, hit Healing Touch hotkey, wait …” About all I ever have to type is the initial “am I healing?” when I join the group.
This may say something about group gameplay and dynamics in WoW — not that I’m complaining. I’m happy I can do something other than watch Star Trek: The Next Generation on DVD.
In “stuff I wish I could comment on further that’s come up in the last few weeks:”
- The discussion on guilds at Will’s is timely, because another one of my recent WoW activities has been shopping for a raiding guild. It’s been an interesting experience, and I plan to rant about it later. See also Kevin’s followup commentary.
- Terra Nova talks PvP balance. I’ve done PvP balance for a long time. I eventually discovered a secret to making changes that feel responsive, rather than change-for-the-sake-of-change or an attempt to jerk players around: wait until the last minute to commit changes. Producers hate it, QA complains, but if you fix a perceived problem and sit on it for two months, nine times out of ten that’s enough time for player ingenuity to solve the problem on their own. Then you post the patch notes and they think you’re an out-of-date idiot, and you are! (Well, regardless, they always think you’re an idiot.) (And assuming that the game mechanics allow for sufficient emergent behavior.) I’ll have lots more to say on this in the future, heh.
- Darius Kazemi’s new metrics middleware company gets off the ground. They have an extremely awesome blog so far. I expect they’ll be an extremely strong competitor to Emergent.
- Holy shit, Rush Limbaugh intelligently defends games. Well, he defends games by way of comparing them to guns, which doesn’t really work on the target anti-game audience, but hey.
Tess wrote:
Wow, at least your cat knows how you feel.
The last time I was seriously out of typing commission was when I chopped my fingertip off. It was the index finger on my left hand. That might not sound so bad, until you remember that I mouse with my left hand, and suffer with the sort of pain you are very familiar with, if I use my right hand, instead. So, this was bad, all around.
Well, I’ll raise my beer in the hopes that everything heals up properly. In the meantime, you may want to check out a little something that helped me during my misadventure in digital abridgement: http://clans.gameclubcentral.com/shoot/
Posted on 18-Apr-07 at 9:33 pm | Permalink
Tess wrote:
Also, hey, I know one of the Orbus guys. Used to hang with him in IGDA DC. Shame about the company name, though. It’s easy to get it confused with Orbis, here in Austin.
Posted on 18-Apr-07 at 9:38 pm | Permalink
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I dub today, Light News Wednesday: The developers of Lost Planet are looking for your multiplayer feedback, including weapon favorites and what error messages you’ve run into. 1UP asks if virtual goods should be taxed. Sara at We Can Fix……
Posted on 19-Apr-07 at 12:41 am | Permalink
Wolfe wrote:
How to shop for a spot in a good raiding guild:
Select one guild at a time for investigation. Once you find one that appeals to your style and try get a better sense for their culture. Figure out reasons to interact with their members without even brushing against the topic of looking for a guild. Figure out other reasons, and pick the moments with care.
Get familiar with at least three members of the guild, dont bother with chatting up the guild leader of official recruitment people until after you got a hook on the leaf nodes.
Figure out how to be “independently wealthy” in WoW terms. (Once you can grind up about 200g per hour you got that part nailed down. Farming metal nodes of flowers is currently a good way to reach this productivity if you practice a bit and install the cartpgrapher addon.)
Once you are independently wealthy you can fit any type of druid role since respeccing is no longer a significant expense. As a druid it is most likely that you will be able to contribute the most as either Healer of “offtank”. We have used Bear tanks for our first full clears of Karazhan since the druid itemization makes bears superior tanks when using “blue gear” while warriors need epix. Anyhow make sure that the spec you play is adaptible to the desires of the guild. The ability to moprh role will help with next step.
Once you are hooked to the leaf nodes of the target organism try catch them in a colaborative combat situation. The standard trick is to run an instance with a comfortable level of Pugness. Try to avoid an instance you havnt already done to make sure you dont get surprized by something new while showing the targets that you are a competent player.
Since you also are independently wealthy show that you are generous and only pick up loot that is a guaranteed improvement over the gear you got for the role you are playing in the situation. (Sadly its the least likely that you will get this close to a raid guild as oomkin since dps classes tend to be the crowded ones.)
Study the raid encounters that the target organism is working on, currently that is likely to be Karazhan and maybe the first 3 or so larger raid instances. Wowwiki is great for this info.
If you play the standard 20 hours per week I would guesstimate that you will need about 2 to 4 weeks of hooking on to the target guild to reach the position where they will take an application from you seriously. Start with talking to one of the three people you got in touch with first and see if they can inform you about how to apply to the guild properly.
If you got a bit more time you can work on multiple guilds this way up to the point where you start talking about your interest in joining up. However once you mention that you would like to join pick your best target and work on that one until you get a good picture of your odds and possible timeframe.
A good guild will put you on hold for a while to make sure you are interested in them specifically rather than “any guild”. This can be painful, I used to put serious applcants on hold for about 2-4 weeks to see if they would be impatient enough to drop us for another guild. Patience is a highly valued virtue, a guild leader needs to kill the expectations of its members or suffer entrappment by silk gloves. Prove that you have no expectations by whichever actions you can take, including no expectations of a fast /ginvite by hanging around and making yourself available for helping out when the guild can use a hand.
Some additional hints:
If you apply as oomkin (DPS) get a mod that shows how much DPS you actually can do (damage meters does this well enough). Then figure out how to squeeze out 500 dps reliably on a variety of targets. If you cant reach 500 dps reliably over 10 minutes straight switch role to tank or healer.
As tank install a threatmeter, there are some addons for this one is called something like KTMThreat Meter or somesuch. Figure out how to reliable squeeze out 700 Threat per second over a 10 minute stretch.
As healer you should be able to apply with much less technical considerations as a raid guild knows that healers need to be well taken care of and your primary requirement will be to do the right thing at the right moment. (Maybe about 1000 + healing is a rough guide for what type of gear they might expect from you to get on your own.)
Or just go with the strategy you feel is more you. This one is generally going to work on guild I would label as “nice and mature”. Maybe not the most hardcore but well off enough to get you raiding reliably.
Posted on 19-Apr-07 at 2:41 am | Permalink
Sara Jensen Schubert wrote:
That’s really interesting, Wolfe. I’m not nearly that hardcore. My server is pretty small, and there aren’t many successful raiding guilds. The most hardcore ones don’t seem to require much more than a voice chat interview. The others are like “you can heal? YOU’RE IN.” Sure, I’d like to find a guild that’s a good personality fit, and I’d like to keep my current DPS/OH spec, but my real goal is just to see Karazhan. And hey, I like healing.
It’s giving me a lot to think about in terms of guild recruitment tools, too. I wonder how much sooner I would have found a guild if WoW had an in-game system like EQ2.
Posted on 20-Apr-07 at 10:30 am | Permalink
capnjosh » Blog Archive » How Games Matter to Reality wrote:
[…] Sara Jensen has a great blurb about an aspect of “game balance”, as I interpret it at least. She is responding to “Nerf, Nerf, Nerf” on Terra Nova (by Joshua Fairfield). Here’s what Sara says: I’ve done PvP balance for a long time. I eventually discovered a secret to making changes that feel responsive, rather than change-for-the-sake-of-change or an attempt to jerk players around: wait until the last minute to commit changes. Producers hate it, QA complains, but if you fix a perceived problem and sit on it for two months, nine times out of ten that’s enough time for player ingenuity to solve the problem on their own…. assuming that the game mechanics allow for sufficient emergent behavior. […]
Posted on 22-Apr-07 at 7:10 am | Permalink
Wolfe wrote:
It will be interesting to hear what you find with the guild seeking project. The server we play on is a bit backwater too, compared to my previous experiences with primarily UO, EQ and AO our WoW server is like a third world nation. Still I have to advice you to aim at the top and look for a guild that gets stuff done. Lots of the smaller guilds on our server are recruiting people to reach critical mass so they actually can do Karazhan productively, but most have trouble getting beyind the first 30% or so. Most because it gets to be a rather hardcore type of problem once you get further.
Beware of getting stuck with a disfunctional guild and good luck
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