About a week ago I was writing a rant on world of ming. I decided not to publish that initially. Why send him more traffic. However I guess I am not the only one Ming has touched off recently. Nitrana of WSG fame has written a blog / rant on World of Ming. http://www.gameriot.com/blogs/CantBeStopped/Aint-no-thing-but-a-Chkn-Ming/ The blog is in response to a MySpace Music song made by the character Shaunconnery. Absolutely hilarious. Even if your Ming's fav fan boy you should listen to this song just for a good laugh. After all the hate he's been getting lately I don't think I could write it up any better. Please humbly accept these links to the lollerink! http://www.myspace.com/shaunconnery

Labels: rant

Actually I'm quite guilty of this myself. How many times have you run a 2v2 composition, a 3v3, or a 5v5 and run into another team that made you think to yourself "god what a bunch of lamers, running XXX/YYY/ZZZ, wow that takes skill". You just ran into Priest/Mage/Rogue and you're running Warrior/Rogue/Druid. Well gosh, Pot, meet Kettle. The fact is every team composition out there is "pretty lame", and we can muse on that all we want just to make us feel better about our own compositions, but when it comes right down to it we are guilty of the same thing. The team compositions are lame, but they work. And this is the means of succeeding in arena. It breaks my heart to say that a lot of team makeups might be more "fun" because they're wierd and all, but many players are out to win. They don't care about playing fair, or playing with honor. Now, I draw your attention to a very dead-on article regarding the "Art of Video Game War" as I like to call it: Playing to Win If you are not about to read that whole article then let me sum it up for you. You don't get first prize by playing honorably. You don't win a duel by bringing a knife to a shootout. You don't- well you hopefully see where I'm going with this. A lesson to learn is that the most successful arena players win by minimizing their disadvantages and adjusting their advantages to the times. Each season brought about new compositions that became widely popular due to this very fact. PMR was extremely strong in season 2 with it's heavy CC and ability to drop a lot of burst damage very quickly. 2345 dominated the 5v5 bracket until a counter (2346) was found, until another counter (euro, or 5432) was found. This is how the times change. Flavor of the month comp will be a FOTM until the new FOTM takes it over, and everyone will flock to that. This is not necessarily "cheap" or "lame", but top players take advantage of these head starts to win. Of course all of the above is not to say that everyone who doesn't play a FOTM matrix isn't going to win, after all most of the comps played are, or were FOTM at some point in time. Just because the flavor has moved over to the next jug in the ice cream freezer doesn't mean the old flavor has gone out of style, of course. Just remember next time you step into arena, if you see a FOTM team comp, go ahead and call them lame for running it. If nothing else, they are probably mumbling on the other side of the field, the same thing about your team.

Labels: arena, pvp, rant

I think I am going to make Ranting a Monday morning type of thing. I know you say how can you schedule a rant Cerias? By definition isn't it something you do when you lose control and make broad general claims that are not backed up by any substantial evidence in the heat of the moment. Pretty much sums it up. However I get the most comments when I speak from my ass. Sooo expect more of it. Basically I have to piss people off to get them to post. Whether they get pissed off and support my general directive or get pissed off and post in contradiction doesn't matter. All that matters is that you care enough about something to post. You know what pisses me off? The Official Rogue Forums. I have a problem with the name Official. Why are they the official rogue forums? Honestly blizzard you should appoint community run forums as the official forums. Even if it's not RogueSpot... it would still be better then directing your newer players to the cesspool of topics that is the Rogue Forums. The World of Warcraft Rogue Forums have not seen a moderator in months, maybe years. If I could liken it to getting a haircut the Rogue Forums have a mullet. Nerf this, Overpowered that, rick rolled lol! There, just summed up 90 percent of the posts for you. At the very least Blizzard could pay for some decent moderation... it's not like your short on cash. I bet there are a lot of people that would do it for free. It seemed like they had the right idea by making those Most Valuable Posters that post in sickly light green. Then they dropped the ball. Did they continue to make new ones? Even at RogueSpot I recognize that people leave the game or get bored with trolling the forums or put time else where. This is such a basic element of forum management I don't understand how they can not find adequate moderation for their forums 24/7 . Out of the Millions of people and the Billions of dollars there has to be a way! Because of this lack of moderation good information is lost by the wayside. Posts that should be stickied for new Rogue's to read is lost because the post eventually hits a limit of replies and then falls below the pruning limit and is cut from the forums. We don't prune at all at RogueSpot I am sure you could find the first post ever posted on these forums if you really wanted too. Posts that deserve it get stickied. Hell we have an entire 2 forums of stickied posts. Those stickies are automagically listed on the front page here to your left under SI: Library. This thread by Mephz on Mutilate should have been stickied weeks ago. http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=5103943299&sid=1 It's still being bumped zealously but its halfway to oblivion. I am writing this post 5 days before its published... but I am pretty much guaranteeing that post will not have a sticky by then either. Is it the off chance that your post might get seen by a blue. I can understand the attraction for people posting videos. You will get much bigger exposure. But for any reasonable discussion the wow forums just don't cut it. 2 Years ago the situation might have been different. Even I had my Advanced Rogue Guide 3.0 stickied in the Rogue forums for nearly 2 years as well of a bunch of other very useful resources. In Summary. WoW Forums Suck... RogueSpot Rocks. Get over here!

Labels: rant, wow

I don't consider myself an Elitist even though I share their views. I guess it is because I read this article and think to myself this would not be a problem if Blizzard would stop shooting themselves in the foot. I am not mad at the casual raider... I am mad at blizzard. They are screwing over the hardcore and casual alike and they are about to do it again! The root of the problem is mudflation. The huge increase of stats from one level to another. A great example of this is the fact that you replaced purples with greens when you go into TBC. Blizzard has stated that they like the way TBC rolled out that they think of it as a reset. Everyone gets to start out at the same place. The casuals probably even scream out that yea! this is what we want! However like most people ... we rarely know what we really want ... or to a lesser degree whats good for us. Blizzard tunes their dungeons based on the gear you should have at certain levels. When TBC came out you had casuals that had geared up through ZG, MC and were cracking into BWL (they still had yet to experience ANQ, and NAXX. You probably had casual players that had kitted themselves out gradually in full epics and were becoming a force to reckoned with in a raid instance. Then in one move Blizzard released TBC and reset the casual player to greens. With in months hardcore players were back in purples and raiding dungeons that require purple quality loot to break them with only a minor bump in their play. Casuals however were working their way out of greens into blues and getting their first purples. Blizzard smacked all of the casual raiders on the hand with TBC and said no no! Those epics are not from this expansion go get new ones. When if they had tuned TBC correctly with a gradual shift in power people raiding ZG would have been able to use their purples to start raiding kara... and gruul's and there would be a wide variety of gear but if you had already epiced yourself out it would be a gradual improvement. Blizzard is about to do it again with WOTLK, they are going to smack you on the hand take your hard earned epics away and who is going to have the hardest time replacing them? Who is going to be relagated back to the bottom rung after working their way up the ladder of progression to try the next hardest dungeon. The casuals. The hardcore raiders will blow through the levels and the gear upgrades in a month or two tops. I am mad at the situation Blizzard has created that they even need to use badge loot as a bandage. Like I said in a previous post Blizzard created this situation themselves and they are not catering to the casuals even if it does look like it from the outside. If they were truly designing with the casual in mind they would make it so there wasnt such a huge gear gap between expansions so that the casual could continue to progress while raiding casually. How many casual guilds will be raiding a month after WOTLK? My bet... none.

Labels: rant

Was it always like this? It goes without saying that WoW has been. I can't recall pre-wow if the situation was the same. I challenge you to go to any class forum and with in the first page you will find... Your OP... You play this class cause its EZMODE! X Class Takes NO SKILL! I find it funny that all of the classes in WoW are actually perfectly balanced... they all take no skill. Well according to the forums anyway, and if you believe that I have a Black Temple attuned 60 Rogue in greens to sell you. Is it our first instinct as individuals that when we are beaten to make excuses, theories, and explanations of why it happened. Have we simply taken the next logical step which would be that once we are beaten enough we take to preaching our explanations and excuses to the masses to convince our peers of the same thing that we have convinced ourselves of. Personally I like to look inward, maybe its just not in my nature to level blame at another class when I am killed. Granted I always play a Rogue... I have 2 70's a Night Elf Rogue and an Undead Rogue. When it sucks to be a Rogue... I am still a rogue. I don't have a flavor of the month class. When I am beat in a 1 v 1 I look at my hotbar and analyze the last bit of my combat log... I should have done x at y time... and geez I still have evasion up... totally should have used that. A lot of the responses I will undoubtedly receive will be ... of course you don't think about nerfing other classes ... your class is OP! OMGROLLMEINBBQSAUCE! But I don't remember the instantaneous call for Nerfing of one class or another in the other games I played. Even if there was the Dev's ussually responded STFU you newbs. Blizzard dev's are more of the "Yessir" variety I guess. Granted I am used to the fact that I was given stealth to avoid confrontation. As such it was natural for me to be the least powerful class. I looked at every buff other classes received as something I needed to different. The strategy was constantly changing. Reviewing the forums I have noticed that every class is OP, has a EZMODE, IMBA builds, and unbalanced abilities that have some sacrcastic pet nickname like... Cloak of Skill. What does all this mean... how do you sum up this entire post... Take a step back, look inward, dont cry Nerf little boy.

Labels: rant

This rant has been boiling up from the depths for the past year or two. Each time I thought it would plateau, curb, or level off Blizzard surprises us with another amazing innovation that soothes and appeases the masses yet ruffles the feathers of the dedicated, sometimes lifeless mmo'ers. I am not debating Blizzard's ability to make serious bank from their game. Obviously they are doing something right if they have the most popular MMO in the history of MMO's. I am questioning their attitude of caving to the needs of the lowest common denominator. The badge loot patch in 2.4 is the straw that broke the camel's back for me. Black Temple quality loots for running Kara and "Heroics." Heroics is in quotes because I have run a couple of these and they are anything but Heroic. Understandably the Hardcore raiding community is taking up arms and complaining their loudest against the changes. It's a huge slap in the face from Blizzard. "Were glad that you spent months learning and breaking this content... spending more gold then a Chinese gold farmer would see in a lifetime. But were just going to let everyone else have the same quality loot for the work they have been doing in their Heroics" Blizzard brought this on themselves though. Their plan of releasing expansions that nullify all of the content before it causes this rush to see end game instances that won't be worth a damn in a couple of months. Blizzard has alot of TBC content that a HUGE percentage of guilds have not progressed to. SSC, TK, BT and soon Sun Well. Before TBC it was Anqiraj, and Naxx. I remember both of those instances being out and I was still raiding BWL and Moltencore on a regular basis and enjoying it. When Wrath of the Lich King comes out all of the TBC instances will be worthless... the continent will be empty save for the one person per zone that will be leveling an alt. But back to the present. Blizzard is going out of their way to make sure there are no obstacles in the way of the casual gamer. Taking away every last sense of accomplishment or symbol of status. There used to be quests that you couldn't find unless you moused over a foot print on the ground or an item hanging on a nondescript wall. Now all these items glow with sparklies and have a huge exclamation point on the minimap. You used to be able to ask a guard for help location a few important things in cities. Now you can use built in tracking skill to find an array of vendors and points of interest. It does not end there. Each patch sees something that makes it a little easier. The experience from 1-70 was made quicker. For what? So people could make so many alts that they were forced to buy new accounts? But I won't be boycotting Badge Loot... no im not stupid I will stand in line and get my new daggers. I will hand in my easily farmed badges and shake my head at how absurdly easy this game has become. I fully expect that all characters to reach level 80 in the new expansion will have the latest season of Arena gear mailed to them. I do feel sorry for every new player that will pick up this game for the first time in the coming year and level to 70 or 80 and never see BRD, Strat, Scholo, Diremaul, ZG, MC, BWL, Anqiraj or Naxx... will have no idea what it was to get attuned. Will only see a raid instance if they get bored... and even still they might just go in and solo Ragnaros to see what they missed but they wont understand that it used to be a 40 man raid that caused newbie guilds to wipe on the FIRST PULL! ~Cerias Shadows

Labels: rant

Multi-boxing has been around since the beginning of MMO's. It has taken on different forms in different games and been labeled differently in each game. Before I jump into whether its wrong or not you need to understand what the different types are. The first type of multi-boxing is the old school type. You have 2 clients open and your alt tabbing or moving your mouse between the two screens clicking the buttons. In my opinion this most primitive version is perfectly legal in any game setting. It gained popularity in the days of Everquest due to the fact that most classes weren't all that busy during a fight. The second type of multi-boxing is the most likely to be characterized as cheating. Back in the day it involved using a client such a macroquest2 that ran a pre created script. This script could be as simple or as complicated as the coder was talented. Simple scripts from backstabbing at the right time to complete control moving / assisting / fighting / looting... all controlled and performed with the user AFK. The third type is what I am seeing in World of Warcraft and it seems like the GMs have deemed it legal. The user has 5 accounts, opens 5 clients on 1-5 machines. Using software like key clone which is a p2p key sharing program that propogates your key strokes to the rest of your clients on other computers. Now even though Blizzards policy has been that if your controlling the chars yourself it is legal. I think this is an instance of with holding some information to make it sound more appealing. For example... the multi-boxers in this case are saying... "hey I am controlling each character myself." What they aren't shouting about is that they are using a third party p2p program to echo commands pressed in one client to up to 4 other clients... hell if you have the money and the hardware theres no reason you can't run... 25 clients. Now my take personally is that if its ok with Blizzard its ok with me. However you cannot deny that 5 boxing gives you a certain edge in battlegrounds. I have seen evidence of 5 boxing going on to level characters, badge farm heroics, run a 5 man arena team (with a rating of 2000+ ), just about anything else you can do with 5 men can be done with 1 man controlling 5 shamans. But I will let you decide take a look at these videos on youtube and then join in the discussion at the Mansion. 5 Shamans, 1 Man. AV PVP VIDEO http://youtube.com/watch?v=Cz3HaGzIg34 5 Shaman Sethek Halls HEROIC http://youtube.com/watch?v=_mDwawWr2yQ&feature=related Testing out Arena Quad-Boxing http://youtube.com/watch?v=-ylMdFMlNis&feature=related

Labels: rant