Profile: Kurush
Send PM  Forum Posts  Forum Topics 

Recent Forum Posts [more...]

• • Breaking! Warlocks are quitting WOW in droves.

  • Originally posted by geetornsage
    

    No really.  The BETA testers are telling horror stories about warlocks haveing their a$$es handed to them  and I mean they re the one-eyed, left-handed, red-headed step child of WOW in WOTLK. They just keep nerfing warlocks whilst ret pallies are 3 shotting everything in sight. And don't get me stated on mages who are now so OP they might as well be bosses.

    It's  sick twisted thing Blizzard did to warlocks and they keep buffing stunlock! My freind has the best PVP gear in WOW and he gets stunlocked by blue rogues from 100 to 0. Thus rogues need to be nerfed ...or rather stunlock does or all warlocks will quit.

     

    Your friend is exaggerating, tbh.  There is no such thing as 100>0 stunlock if you're in full pvp gear.  An early trinket break still completely messes up a stunlock rotation, and you still have a few moments to respond in the middle of a rotation.  If your friend isn't good enough to take advantage of those moments like everybody else has to do when fighting a rogue, then he deserves to die each time.

    If you want to complain about stunlock, complain about dismantle being used during the stun gap.  This means _complete_ shutdown on melee (and hunters) for the entire rotation.

    Just to clarify what the OP is talking about, warlocks have lost some of their "tough caster" status.  This means they now have to deal with stunlocks in the same way that every other class has to, and all the nooblocks who were getting by before are now drowning the forums in rivers of QQ.

    And no, they're not quitting in droves.  Every class says that every day.

  • Posted: 10/07/08 2:45 AM
    World of Warcraft
• • Breaking! Warlocks are quitting WOW in droves.

  • Originally posted by bensculpt
    

    Can anyone tell me what there doin to the hunter? I wasnt impressed w/ the BC skills, only one i can even remeber was kill command!

     

    There is way too much to get into with just one post if you haven't been keeping track, to be honest.  Hunters are getting changed quite a bit.

  • Posted: 10/07/08 2:38 AM
    World of Warcraft
• • Value of User communities for MMORPG

  • Originally posted by ao_ninor
    

    Hi,
    I am currently working on the master thesis for my MBA and looking into user communities of MMORPGs.  Basically I have sorted them into four different categories:

    1. In-game community: Raid leaders, Guild leaders, Role-playing and events
    2. Out of-game community: Websites (New, Guides, Tutorials), Wikis and Databases, Media Content (galleries, comics, radio, video)
    3. Developer organized: Contests, Helpers (Class-professionals / Most Valuable Poster), Beta Testing
    4. User innovation: Tools and chat/help-bots

    
    I would like to get some feedback from you guys on how important you think they are or any other input you think might be of interest. One focus is on point 4. What games show the most user innovation, extensive tools and why you think this is the case.
    I'd appreciate any feedback you could give since most of the game companies have not given me any feedback so far.

    
    Thanks a lot.

     

    If you want to look a bit deeper, you can delve into other topics.

    1.  How user communities affect the development of games.  There have been several notable failures in which game developers took too much inspiration from a game community that didn't know what it wanted.  There have been other failures where a change caused a widespread revolt because there was no user feedback gained before implementation.  It's a delicate balancing act; if you go too far to either extreme, it can be bad.  With MMORPG's especially, many developers can't possibly playtest everything internally, so they tend to rely on a mix of after-the-fact feedback (even though it doesn't seem so) and the "vision" (their own internal ideas of what the game should be).  There was a recent keynote on this at a major games conference, but I forget the speaker.

    2.  Just how much of a game's playerbase participates in the forum community.  We don't really have reliable information on this, but the only figures we've seen suggest that less than a 1/4 of a game's playerbase participates on the forums for any game, and most of them are "core gamers".  So how reliable is any feedback contained therein?  You might have advice there which is contrary to what most players want.  On the other hand, it might be entirely correct.

    3.  You also might want to look into the social dynamics of an in-game community itself.  Which groups are doing what and why?  How does this affect the others?  What are relationships like between them?  For instance, in PvE-based games, you often have reverence for the top raiding guilds on a server.  In PvP games, the most lethal clans are often known by name, even to those who have never seen their members.  They take on an almost exemplar status.  You have this weird, de facto class structure seen in MMORPG's which even includes racial and gender stereotypes.  It's fascinating, almost.

  • Posted: 10/07/08 2:26 AM
    General Discussion
• • Best game for getting groups in?

  • Originally posted by Effect
    

    Does anyone know which game is best in terms of ease of getting groups at the lower level up till the endgame?

     

    CoX is honestly the best for finding groups.  It also has the best PUG's by far.  I've been around a bit, too.

    If you play FFXI, grouping is forced, and PUG's are OK, if hard to make.  You either get into a good linkshell (guild) or deal with the occasional fuck during the VERY LONG leveling process.  I think idiots are fairly rare in FFXI, but they're noticeable because FFXI is not a forgiving game.  One tiny mistake = wipe, possibly group breaking up.  The only way I could keep a group going consistently in FFXI was to write down the name and class of people I saw and pick them up as my own party slowly dissolved.  Running a group in FFXI is like trying to drive a car from New York to LA, replacing the wheels that fall off as you go.  People have to eat, get tired of grinding, etc.

    EQ2 and WoW are honestly shit for grouping while leveling.  Almost nobody does, and when you do, you don't need to.  This is doubly true since Blizzard de-elited its leveling areas, and SOE constantly goes through EQ2 to make leveling "smoother" (hint, just got way easier).  EQ2 is a bit better in this regard, but in both cases, grouping is mostly done by max level players accomplishing group-oriented challenges.

    Guild Wars has the worst PUG's and grouping mechanism I have seen in my entire life.  GW is _the_ best ORPG arena PvP game, period.  Unfortunately, its PvE side attracts the worst MMO players I've ever seen.  I mean, it was honestly just sickeningly bad.  I can't think about it without literally laughing or getting a bad taste in my mouth.  To give you an idea, I could do _any_ mission with the retarded (quite bad in those days) AI henchmen with a near 100% success rate, but PUG'ing them was near suicide if I couldn't carry the entire mission myself.  Think about a game where bots you can barely order around do better than players.  Then again, if you don't mind using the now much-improved hench system (you can customize them now), it's actually fun to solo GW missions like that.

    The bottom line is to guild up or deal with bullshit.  Only exception is CoX.  I don't know why, but it's true.  I played CoX tons.  I did every piece of Hero-side content that was released before I quit, including the obscure lvl 50 TF's that most people didn't touch.  PUG'ing was not only always sufficient, but it was almost always fun.  It's only bad in the first twenty levels.  You need to be a master cat-herder with a solidly min-maxed spec to XP up fast in PP, for instance, and grouping is probably pointless before then.

    Only problem with CoX is that you actually need to know how to build a good group, fish for players, quell dissent, etc.  It's much better to make and run your own groups than to wait for invites.  I actually consider that part of the fun.  It's not hard.  You just need to have basic intelligence and know how to take responsibility without being a typical "MMO leader" (overbearing prick with no idea what he's doing).  If you're the kind of guy who bitches on forums about how crappy PUG's are because your group died twenty times, and you think you were powerless to fix it, grouping will suck for you in CoX too.

  • Posted: 10/07/08 2:03 AM
    General Discussion
• • LucasArts, BioWare Prepare To Announce Joint Project...Oct 21st

  • Ok.  I've called just about every secret project so far.  This one has been more transparent than any of them.  In fact, it's one of the worst-kept secrets in the industry that I've seen.  There are only two possibilities here.

    1.  Yes, this is KotOR Online or something close, and EA Bioware is simply shitty at keeping a secret.

    2.  It's totally different.  If this is the case, John Riccitiello is a fucking genius and EA Bioware is about to replace Blizzard as the king of secrecy and misdirection when it comes to upcoming titles.

    Seriously, I hope it's 2.  I love to be surprised as much as anybody else.  It would also show Ricci to have as much marketing suave as people give him credit for.

  • Posted: 10/07/08 1:44 AM
    General Discussion