Replies to my Stun article

Going to consolidate some thread links for you for replies to my Stun article.

VN Boards WoW General Board post
WoW.com Azgalor Realm Forum
WoW.com PvP Discussion Forum post

And here is by far the best reply out of all the boards... from VN WoW general board... owning up Rogue whiners.

"If I understand the argument correctly, a Rogue "needs" all those stuns in order to kill "some" classes. I hear a Warrior can "own" a Rogue with Overpower if a Rogue so much as THINKS about using his Evasion skill. I hear that, due to armor and hit points, a Warrior has to be stunned if a Rogue is to have a chance.

With Frost Nova, Blink, Polymorph and Mana Shield, a Rogue needs stuns to kill a Mage. Maybe I'm getting too simplistic here, but do Rogues want to be able to easily defeat every other class? Or do they want to be "balanced"?

There's a simple mathematical FACT that most PvP freaks seem to forget: for every VICTOR there must be a VANQUISHED. What's the matter? You don't want to take your turn as the vanquished? That's just stupid. You already have a way to pick and choose your battles. You already have a way to escape a bad situation. A Chance at escape is all anyone should ask for, and you have it.

If Blizzard decided to re-work the class to where you LOST much of your stun ability but GAINED in other areas to compensate, would you still play a Rogue? Or is it strictly the "gank factor" you crave? I just wish some developer would get past the "mezz-stun" combat model and make it so every class has a chance to win or escape a fight.

If the Rogue Class didn't exist, then WoW would be pretty close to that and we'd be griping about Polymorph. Unfortunately, I think we're seeing how different it is to balance PvE abilities with PvP abilities. I still don't like to be frozen and unable to respond when I'm playing a game. If that's anyone's idea of fun, then you are made of sturdier stuff than I am." - Rethyl

Giving credit where credit is due... great post. Wish I could claim credit for it!

And it happens... WoW honor data lost

The day after the 1.7 patch and Blizzard is sorry to inform everyone that all honor data for the last 24 hours has been lost.

"There was an issue during the Honor tally process which resulted in incorrect collection of Honor points. While we have addressed the issue so that Honor will properly calculate in the future, we regret to inform you that the PvP Honor data which did not calculate for the last 24 hours since the end of Tuesday’s maintenance cannot be recovered." - Blizzard

Good or bad? Well no one likes losing anything. It is good for me in the fact that a lot of people hit AB hard and heavy gaining A LOT of honor. So now I will not have to gain as much to hopefully compete this week. Unfortunately that 24 hour period is about the only time I will get to log in during prime time bonus experience this week.

We will have to wait and see what Blizzard does about this.

MO2 - Stun

stun (st n)
tr.v. stunned, stun•ning, stuns
1. To daze or render senseless, by or as if by a blow.
2. To overwhelm or daze with a loud noise.
3. To stupefy, as with the emotional impact of an experience; astound.
n.
A blow or shock that stupefies.

Now that is how it is defined in the dictionary. How is it defined by an MMO gamer such as myself? A few words come to mind… gay… lame… retarded… and I probably could think of a lot more.

The essence of stun in any form in any MMO makes me sick to my stomach, but when it is thrown into a MMO’s Player vs. Player (PvP) system it makes me downright mad. Any ability designed to completely prevent you from playing your character is just bullshit. Slow, root, and other movement afflicting skills are great because you still have the option to fight back in some form or another.

It boggles me how any MMO developers building a game that is meant to be FUN can add a game mechanic that allows one player to completely prevent their enemy from fighting back. Where is the skill? There isn’t. Simple fact… if your enemy can’t fight back because you pressed the STUN button and killed them… you DON’T have skill.

Stun has been around since the beginning. Ultima Online had it in the form of paralyze. Everquest had it. Countless MUDs before both of them had it. Dark Ages of Camelot was the first “second generation” MMO to abuse it and every MMO up until now seems to be using it. World of Warcraft is the new flavor that seems to rejoice in letting a select few classes have mind boggling amounts of stun.

WoW being my current game… stuns have become a daily annoyance. Rogues, paladins, warriors, hunters, mages, Tauren, and any engineer have a form of stun. There is diminishing returns built into the system, but a stun is still a stun. The initial stuns last plenty long for a rogue to kill you and a paladins stun lasts long enough for the paladin’s friends to trounce you. Mage, hunter, warrior, and engineer stuns are short and uneventful.

However, they INTERUPT your current action. I can understand this being part of a classes abilities, but giving it to engineers and Taurens as a racial ability? WTF. It’s bad enough the most overplayed classes in WoW, rogues and paladins, spam stuns everywhere on the battlefield, but having engineering slowly become the must have trade skill profession for PvP… blah.

Stun when it is used as an interrupting ability and not a game stopping ability can work. WoW warriors intercept stun is an agreeable use of stun. It lasts for merely a split second and is as described… an intercept. WoW rogue stuns are unbearable and have driven me to log out more than once. Classes get some items that break stuns, but the stuns can be reapplied so quickly that it is worthless. Blizzard needs to realize diminishing returns are not working properly for stuns and fix them the same way they fixed slow effects such as frost shock and frost nova. The fix… after three stuns you become immune to stuns for approximately five minutes.

Stuns plain suck. They were reason for outcry in Dark Ages of Camelot and are creeping into the bullshit category in WoW. Let's hope the next generation gets a clue.

Everquest 2... the SOE effect

What is this SOE effect you ask? Its the pattern that SOE has shown us for their two largest MMO's to date... Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) and Everquest II (EQ2). Basically... release the game and fix it later.

SWG recently underwent major changes to the combat system and Jedi system. These are two essential systems that any Star Wars MMO should have in a final working condition the day of launch. Combat should be something any MMO has figured out at launch.

I have combat system bolded for a reason. Everquest 2 is suffering a similiar fate... behold Everquest 2's Producer Letter. I quote the letter "Many people will be relearning parts of their characters, getting used to new spell lines and working with altered buffs. That's a lot for us to ask, and we realize that. " Essentially EQ2's combat is being overhauled similiar to what happened when SWG's combat system was overhauled. Also in the letter "We understand that changes of this magnitude, even when many of them are positive, can be disconcerting."

Not only does this show that EQ2 was not ready to come out of beta, but it leads to a disturbing trend amongst SOE MMO's. Complete reworking of CORE game systems is what BETA is for. SOE does not get this and have not gotten this. Both SWG and a very limited EQ2 beta were nothing more than PR events to get players excited about the game. A vocal majority from both games beta testers provided in length reasons why the repsective games were not ready for launch. To steal a quote from Tobolds MMORPG Blog "EQ2 has 400,000 paying beta testers, which were subjected to major "disconcerting" changes from day one" - Tobold.

So the SOE effect is in full force again. I wish people would stop giving SOE their money... send a message that SOEunderstands... $$$.

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send a message that SOE understands... $$$.

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I don't want to completely blow this letter aside... there was one good quote in it. "To sum up these changes: In any MMO, people come for the game, and they stay for their friends and the long-term challenges and rewards present in the world. We're not just in the business of providing an interesting, fun, and challenging world to adventure in. We're equally responsible to ensure that we provide a setting in which our game draws people together as best as it can." - Scott

Drawing people together... Massively Multiplayer... go figure.

World of Warcraft Patch 1.7

Update: 8 Jul, 2007 - Removed post. This will be kept as a placeholder for historical value.

Originally, this post contained links to various World of Warcraft patch download websites.

A down week for WoW

Once again I fear that I will be set back in the WoW PvP ranks game. I have strived for Rank 6 for a couple weeks now and I made it 3/4 of the way through rank 5 last week with a few good AV wins and some spare time spent owning Tyrs Hand farmers.

This week however I have had few prime time logins and once again my real world PvP was lagging behind and I have a measly 3,000 contribution points to show for it. So hopefully I can grab some more before I head off to sleep. Work tonight :(

Having no access to EZ mode AV wins blows. Blizzard to please fix this crap on Tuesday.


Pray with me! Blizzard can dooooo it!

A link...

This is all I will post in regards to the human disaster in the wake of Katrina.

Link to the original article.

Update: 10 Nov, 2006 - Edited post and included full text transcript of the article below since I believe this is one of the best articles to come out during the ungodly disaster of Hurricane Katrina.

An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
by Robert Tracinski

It took four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it also took me four long days to figure out what was going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists—myself included—did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over four days last week. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency—indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows a SWAT team with rifles and armored vests riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to speed away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Superdome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage one night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"—the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels—gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails—so they just let many of them loose. [Update: I have been searching for news reports on this last story, but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police Department; see here and here.]

There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit—but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals—and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep—on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. In a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters—not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.

The welfare state—and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages—is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005

[This article is available for reprinting free of charge. For the permission to reprint, write to editor@TIADaily.com. Click here for a shorter version of this article.]

The Intellectual Activist magazine articles on the web: Islam vs. the West, Environmentalism's Big Lie, Man's Best Came With Columbus and Altruism's War on Reality.

TIA Daily articles on the web:An Unnatural Disaster, Anything Less Is Suicide, The Empire of the Pursuit of Happiness, America's War Song, A Real Invasion, The Hinge of the World, Liberty and Union, What Have We Lost?, Martha Stewart, "See How America Grew", Human Achievements Blog and TIA Daily Sample Issue. Recommend these articles It took four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it also took me four long days to figure out what was going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists—myself included—did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over four days last week. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency—indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows a SWAT team with rifles and armored vests riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to speed away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Superdome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage one night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"—the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels—gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails—so they just let many of them loose. [Update: I have been searching for news reports on this last story, but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police Department; see here and here.]

There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit—but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals—and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep—on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. In a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters—not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.

The welfare state—and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages—is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005

[This article is available for reprinting free of charge. For the permission to reprint, write to editor@TIADaily.com. Click here for a shorter version of this article.]

The Intellectual Activist magazine articles on the web: Islam vs. the West, Environmentalism's Big Lie, Man's Best Came With Columbus and Altruism's War on Reality.

TIA Daily articles on the web:An Unnatural Disaster, Anything Less Is Suicide, The Empire of the Pursuit of Happiness, America's War Song, A Real Invasion, The Hinge of the World, Liberty and Union, What Have We Lost?, Martha Stewart, "See How America Grew", Human Achievements Blog and TIA Daily Sample Issue. Recommend these articles to others using the "e-mail this article" link at the bottom of each article.

Blizzard's battle plans v2.0 - Commentary

Blizzard announced their plan of action for the next "however long". I would love to fill that "however long" in with an actual time frame, but we all know Blizzard. So without any more BS onto my commentary and highlights.

"BlizzCon is quickly approaching, and we're preparing the lineup of programs, dev chats, and the concert to be held at our inaugural event. I’m very happy to announce that we'll have the first public showing of the expansion for World of Warcraft at BlizzCon. Attendees will be able to view the work that is going into the project and hear some of the eagerly awaited details. To those of you who won’t be able to make it to the show, please keep an eye out for the game magazines that will be hitting newsstands right around BlizzCon, because some of them will feature in-depth articles on the expansion with plenty of information about how World of Warcraft will be evolving."
-From this Gamergod.com interview from an actual face to face interview with a WoW developer, Shawn Carnes, and not a PR campaign release... we know the expansion is due in late 2006. The "in depth articles" is just a fancy term for these magazines to sell copies and its sad to see Blizzard playing along with it. Don't bullshit the community when the community has great sites like Gamergod.com to get the real deal from the developers.

"One feature we’re excited about is the addition of mid-sized raid dungeons. While the epic 40-player encounter is challenging and rewarding, we feel that a mid-sized raid can serve as a dynamic and fun departure from 40-player raids as well as the standard 5-player parties.
-Finally they are listening. People have been complaining about the fact that there is no middle ground. There is hardcore and then non-hardcore. The gap has been growing for months and 15-20 man raids are the ONLY ANSWER to at least closing the gap a bit. Hopefully these will work out for the best and pick up groups will be able to do them reliably like the current 5-15 man dungeons.

"At the top of the list are some major changes to Alterac Valley. We hope players have been enjoying the experience our epic Battleground provides, with its wide variety of goals and tasks. That aspect is something we definitely want to keep in Alterac, but we also want to make it more accessible by lowering the launch requirement from 30 players per side to 20. We also plan to shorten the length of time required to complete a game of Alterac Valley. Some of the changes we’ll be implementing to accomplish this goal are balancing out the terrain, slightly decreasing the landmass, and improving the queue to ensure balanced teams for each game."
-Man I almost feel like they've read my blog and have actually listened. Amazing huh? However it is too little too late. People will be flooding Arathi Basin and Alterac Valley will go the way of Warsong Gulch... a ghost town. Too many people got free AV exalted status and gear along with insanely high PvP ranks for doing nothing. By leaving AV in its current condition for so long it has alienated too many players from caring about battlegrounds.

"Another popular player request has been for us to increase outdoor PvP battles. Prior to the Battlegrounds, the outdoor landscape was fraught with PvP. However, once the Battlegrounds were introduced and NPC dishonorable kills were implemented, outdoor PvP greatly decreased. We want to bring back the hectic action of mass PvP, but with some improvements. One idea on the table is to place a capturable objective in the exterior environment."
-Let me spell it out for them. Double the honor gained outside battlegrounds. Give capturable objectives that can't just be ninja'd by half a dozen rogues. Observer ownage commence.

"Character-Transfer Service. Another feature of the Web site we'll be implementing is fee-based character transfers."
-Yayyyyyyyyyyyyy! I am not thrilled about the "fee-based" part, but finally I may have a chance to jump ship and move with friends that I was seperated from due to the queue problems at launch. This will be mad $$$ for Blizzard. I am only afraid that many small servers may be emptied.

So there it is... flame away.

WoW PvP rankings and what they mean for you!

Update: 5 Nov, 2006 - Removed post, but this will be kept as a placeholder for historical value.

This post originally linked to a Gamergod.com (now defunct) article I wrote about World of Warcraft and the original Honor system rankings. No copy of this article was saved.

Heroes of Might and Magic V getting a hint from Blizzard

I present Exhibit A


and Exhibit B.


Gamecloud is running an interview with an Ubisoft rep about upcoming fantasy strategy game, Heroes of Might and Magic V. The article is dribble for all I am concerned. My capacity for Might and Magic died in the 90's before the first real 3D version ever was released.

Pointing this out because of the eye candy and how its artistic style compares to a company oh so well known for "cartoony" graphics, Blizzard and Warcraft. You want to know something though? I LOVE IT! These are kick ass screen shots and I love this sort of artistic style. It remains to this day why Final Fantasy VII and IX are my favorite Final Fantasies.... good cartoony > almost real looking or barbie doll graphics.
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"I LOVE IT! These are kick ass screen shots" - Heartless_

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Fantasy is about fantasy... let us escape the world of five foot nothingness and escape into a world where vibrant color and tall tales parade across our screen on gallant steeds.

+1 for this game.