Blizzard kills PUG Raiding (in the Conservatory, with the lead pipe)

Today Blizzard announced that players will just have one raid lockout per Raid Instance.  Meaning you can just enter one version of a raid dungeon (10 or 25) a week, and then you choose normal or heroic difficulty for each of the bosses.

Trial of the Crusader, the previous tier raid, had 4 raid lockouts: 10 regular, 10 heroic, 25 regular, 25 heroic. And it was the Golden Age of PUG raiding.

Few guilds did all four raids, so there were always PUG raids going.  They were mostly run by people who were familiar with the content, so TOC PUG raids were the odd exception to the WoW rule of know-nothing groupmates.  I never partook in many (any?) but it was always a nice security blanket, knowing that I had another option if the guild collapsed or couldn’t take me some week.

ICC went down to just two raid lockouts per character (10 and 25), and now this.  This change will pretty much destroy PUG raiding.  New raiders won’t be able to go to slightly-stale PUG 10-mans to gear up.  And already with the ICC changes you ran into the situation where experienced raiders in casual guilds can no longer put together PUG heroic raids with the experienced raiders in other casual guilds.

It will make guilds more important but I’m not sure that’s a good thing.  In vanilla WoW the leader of a 40-man raiding guild was king and they nearly always acted like it.  Cataclysm is not exactly a return to that, but I’m generally against anything that increases the power of guilds rather than diminishing that power.

There's also the issue of disparate raid skill.  My guild has a core of hardened veterans who raid every night and know what they're doing, but we also rely on people who are far more casual or just come to raid for a month and quit.  If you run tens with the other vets it doesn't seem so bad, but that'll no longer be an option, which is the kind of thing that leads to even more drama.

I’m not sure what problem this is supposed to solve.  Who is harmed by PUG raiding?  Who is harmed by guilds running multiple raid instances?  Who suffers when I get to spend my normal raiding time doing 25’s with the guild, and one or two off-nights running 10’s with some of my more competent (and devoted) guildies?

Are Games Art?

I hope not.

Art, today, is something that requires government funding to survive because it is so bloody boring it cannot find an audience.  In the US we have something called the National Endowment for the Arts that basically props up and subsidizes the "Art" industry.  Not to mention the Art Appreciation classes, the Music Appreciation classes, the tedious museum field trips, and all the other useless, boring crap you need to suffer through until you escape public education, secondary education, and finally escape to the real world.

Needless to say, there is no National Endowment for Video Games.  There are no lavish, taxpayer-supported, marble-paved LAN centers. Little Bobby doesn't have to study Pac-Man because he has a test tomorrow in Video Game Appreciation.

Games are entertaining because they have to be.  Art is generally not because it doesn't need to be -- in fact, the unpopularity of art is considered a mark of honor by its makers and its few patrons.  They are more sophisticated than the rest of us because they understand and appreciate art.  They really aren't that much different than smug Darkfall fans.  Except, of course, that Darkfall is financially self-sufficient.

It's Good to Be Boat

So in the past three minutes I've learned that Gears 3 will have 4-player co-op (which I'd been hoping for), and that 2K Boston is indeed working on an X-COM game as I'd also always hoped.

That's a phenomenal three minutes.

A Series of Unrelated Thoughts

What is that saying?  The Mind is Willing but the Time is Weak?  That's where I've been for the last week, so here's some interesting stuff I will not get a chance to expound upon:

1. Rotface is down.  After twelve weeks of working on him and Festergut.  This brings relief but also a bit of malaise.  I have this weird thing where I want to win but don't like having won.  If I'm ever playing a first person shooter and dominating the score (very rare) I'll feel so weird that I switch tactics, inevitably to something far less effective.  For someone who considers himself a gamer I really lack that killer instinct.  Also, I lack Killer Instinct.

2.  I started working on a game.  I'll abandon it shortly too, like I do with every other game I try to make -- there is a reason I blog about how tired I am of playing games and not about how tired I am of making them.  But occasionally before I abandon developing my game I'll find something cool, and I wanted to show it to you guys.

Now, I've been fooling around with HTML 5, specifically the "Canvas" object.  It is intended to be a replacement for Flash and Silverlight and may or may not become that.  For my purposes it mostly doesn't cost seven bills for a dev kit (like Flash).

I was curious about performance so I made a little image of a guy and had him bounce around the screen.  That worked fine, so I tried ten guys.  Then a hundred guys, then a thousand.  A thousand ran smoothly in Chrome, which is pretty impressive -- Stirring, even. The thousand guys was a little much for Mozilla, unfortunately.

I don't really have a website where I can post the actual running web page, but here's a screenshot of the mayhem at 40 FPS:

And here's the current state of the project.  I've noted the Unintentionally Disembodied Arms.  Ah, the wonders of developing software.

3.  Syp is ever the trend-setter and I'll be taking a break for a similar happening in about six weeks.  If I can get my act together I'm going to run "Boat's Favorites" for a month with my favorite old (and new) posts.  So if I'm motivated, and you see that, you'll understand why.

4.  After decades of slander, I've decided I'm a proponent of God Modes in video games.  My three year-old has decided he likes to play video games but it's ultimately a frustrating experience for him, akin to a three year-old playing video games.

The best games are those where my son can just run around to his heart's content without a lot of perishing and the attendant Mom/Dad-assisted menu navigation that requires.  He enjoyed Fat Princess (fingers crossed he wasn't permanently scarred by the cartoon blood) but I dug out the GameCube for Animal Crossing so he can enjoy a game that doesn't involve him saying "Dad I'm shooting the princess" as he shoots a princess with a shotgun.

5.  I recently discovered Cynwise's Battlefield Manual.  If you are a fan of WoW PvP I would recommend it, heartily.

6.  Lastly, I never remembered to actually enter Wilhelm's contest, but here was my blockbuster entry:

Which is mostly an excuse to post a Simpson's clip:

The Retaking of Gnomeregan is Nigh

Behold!

Creating the Worst Holiday Ever

I'm slowly becoming one of those people who hates Holidays.  I don't hate my family.  I'm not overcome with cynicism.  I don't hate my culture or my country.

It's just those bloody WoW "Holiday Events" that are killing me.

Most holidays have a "Meta-Achievement" for completing some or all of the achievements that go with that holiday.  Then there is another "Meta-Achievement" for all of those meta-achievements.  That second-tier meta awards a 310% mount, the fastest flying mount in the game.  For me it's the only feasible way of getting the 310 mount.  So I have to do the World Event Achievements.  And they are always boring.

I was thinking that Blizzard should have an April Fools Day event, so I could combine my great hatred of World Events with my great hatred of April Fools Day.  I think it would involve an hour-long fight against a dangerous raid boss, and when you opened the chest at the end a fake snake would shoot out instead of loot.

I Hate April Fools Day

The one day of the year that the entire internet decides they are clever and/or funny.  Meanwhile, two people succeed (millions fail) and I have nothing to read for a day.

Worst holiday ever.

Why I think Free2Play is an awesome business model

One of my friends back in the day was a big time UO and then EQ player.  At one point he'd been playing for a nice long while and decided to start a new account, so he decided to sell his old one.  He was able to get around two grand for his account.  I don't know where that ranks it the modern day of account selling but I'd never even thought of the idea of account selling and suddenly my buddy made two bills.  Seemed like a lot of money.  I was surprised that anyone would spend that much money on a game.


Fast forward, not to today, but to a few years ago.  The makers of Puzzle Pirates, Three Rings Design, decided to try a new type of server.  Instead of being a regular subscription server, the new servers would use 'Doubloons'.  You could play on a Doubloon server for free but only with a limited subset of the game.  To get the whole experience you had to use Doubloons to get special 'badges' that would let you play all parts of the game.  There were also Doubloon charges for certain special purchases, like new ships.


And there would be an exchange, where players could buy Doubloons for money and exchange them with other players for in-game gold.


I thought it was a dumb idea that would go nowhere.  But after a short while Three Rings announced that it had been a roaring success.  I hadn't taken into account the guy who had spent two thousand dollars on an EQ account.  I'm guessing that Doubloon servers are a roaring success because a small percentage of players are spending thousands of dollars a year, where in a subscription game they could only spend as much as anyone else.