Rabble Rabble Rabble (RL, WoW)

[thistlechaser]

I'm beginning to dread every time I get a letter from my apartment management. Our (already higher than average) rent goes up more than once a year, and today I just got a letter that he's going to start charging us extra for water and sewage use. It's not even based on what *I* use, just the number of people per apartment. *I* take speedyfast showers, I always have. I can hear that my neighbor takes really long showers. Yet we'll have to pay the same.

I always think about moving at times like this, but my laziness generally wins out. It's just so much work to get all packed and moved, not to mention things like having to get my address changed with 847197423471410438 companies, net service moved, all that.

Rabble rabble rabble.

Last night I typed up a WoW post, but ended up not posting it because it was too negative. There's a lesson in it though, so I'll just toss it up behind a cut.



My goldmaking sense failed me badly this patch (or WRA is just so vastly different than other servers). Knowing that the new stuff in 4.2 would need all sorts of volatiles, I stockpiled them for weeks. Fire, air, random whatever. And the prices since the patch? LOWER than before it. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over. Oh, wait, right, a server actually needs to raid to get and want these things. :/ Fire is the biggest disappointment. I went into 4.2 with three stacks of 200, but the prices are way lower than air (about half the price). So much money lost...

My other failure was even worse. When I moved Crowfeathers from Horde to Alliance, I filled up his inventory and bank with Horde-only pets. He arrived on Alliance side maybe two weeks before the patch, and I got in a panic that they wouldn't sell post-patch. The pets were selling for 5-10 gold, and any smart pet collector would long since have all these pets. So, worrying that I would be stuck with them all and spend forever trying to sell them, I moved them early. For 5-10 gold each. Now, post patch, I have just a small handful left of them... they're moving for 70-100 gold each. /wrist Why didn't I trust what I knew? Idiot me.

And continuing the subject of me failing at things, stupid me listened to a LJ post about these new Firelands quest. "Why not do the Thrall questline? Everyone should! They're fun! They're easy! They're fast! You make a ton of gold and get an ilevel (whatever high ilevel) cloak out of it!" So I decided to try it. Me, PvE-hater, questing-hater, with crap armor and worse skill, jumped into this event. This event, where I had to kill endless level 85 mobs, including elites. I went bear because cat kept dying while trying to kill one mob, but of course bear has AoE abilities so I always ended up with too many mobs. And know what? Every time you die, your #/100 number of mobs killed resets. I lost track of how many times I died tonight. I gave up on the final step, the 100 fire ones.

I'm at such an amazingly low point with WoW right now, and that most of my RP is happening off-WoW isn't helping making me want to stick around.

Comments

[elo-sf.livejournal.com]

I'm at a low point on my return to WoW for different reasons but totally empathize.

On the apartment, get a year-to-year lease so they cannot raise rents mid-year and seriously consider moving.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

I think he doesn't want leases for that very reason. I'm looking at new places right now, hopefully something will catch my eye and make me want to go through the work of moving.

[elo-sf.livejournal.com]

yes moving does suck

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

The more I'm looking, the more I'm (re)discovering that my rent is more average than high. I think I discovered this the last time I thought about moving, too. It's possible I'm just seeing higher end locations in my searches, I'm going to keep looking.

[veloxe.livejournal.com]

I'm at such an amazingly low point with WoW right now, and that most of my RP is happening off-WoW isn't helping making me want to stick around.

I've actually been hearing that from a lot of WoW players. From raiders to PvPers to RPers. And I think I found the reason! I saw one of those animated web ads for 4.2 and in it, the blurb boasted "PUG Friendly raids". Blizz seems to want everyone to be able to do everything. While nice in super happy fun world. In reality it just makes everything bland, boring, and stupid to the point of lowest common denominator.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't know of many people who are happy with WoW right now. I know some people do like Cata, but seems like the majority don't.

Unfortunately "lowest common denominator" has always been WoW's goal, it's one of the reasons it's so successful. :/

[elo-sf.livejournal.com]

One of the lows for me was Cata was all about make it hard to get purples, but then you do thralls quest and get a 365 that is replaced 2 hrs later on Firelands trash for a 378 cloak. They went WAY too hard on Cata and now are overcompensating the other way.

[giftofarthas.livejournal.com]

Cata is, quite frankly, a terrible expansion so far. I say this as both a former hardcore raider and current casual player. They went with a hardline status when Cata opened up, and now that their is a significant decrease in subscriptions they've nerfed the opening content to ridiculous levels.

TBH, my little casual guild had no business killing Al'akir last night on the first attempt. We lost 3 players right off the bat and by the time we killed him we had only 4 people left up (and me the only healer). Yet he died anyway, and there was no sense of accomplishment. I wish we'd downed him last week, we were so close. It would have felt better.

So now you have two extremes going on. Either you're a hardcore raider running around killing things in Firelands or you are a casual raider who can raid the previous content without having to think about it much. Bleh to both.

[elo-sf.livejournal.com]

yeah, my guild had some internal drama and then 10 people managed to clean both BoT and BWD in about 2 hrs each last night (they might have had raid lockouts with 1-2 bosses down already) taking down bosses that had been "impossible" for the past 6 months. Our guild is hard-casual overall on raiding so yeah.

I wish the bosses just had more variable settings for difficulty so that it wasn't just normal/heroic, but you could pick more easily.

So far the FL daily quest hub feels full of fail with EVERYONE still doing the same quests at the same time it just is a new flavor of Argent Tournament.

[giftofarthas.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I'm less than enthused about the Hyjal quest hub. I had hoped for something more akin to The Shattered Sun area. Still packed with people, but I dunno, it had an epic feel about it that Hyjal doesn't.

[elo-sf.livejournal.com]

There is something DISTINCTLY non-epic about singlehandedly taking out elite after elite using various different mechanics. There is also something fundamentally silly about requiring us to repeat these for 30-60 days just to slow the pace of stuff, are people really going to do these for another 12-18 months? Or like Argent get what they need and move on.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Not to mention, Thrall, the strongest shaman around, needs us to rescue him? Little old us? Me, who does so little non-AH stuff, nearly rescued the guy. What's that say about how strong he is? Shouldn't he be rescuing us?

[elo-sf.livejournal.com]

well yes, this does expose the probably of 12 million of us running around all being special snowflake heroes as opposed to ordinary people.

[veloxe.livejournal.com]

Shouldn't he be rescuing us?

Hey, Thrall died and resurrected for our sins you know!

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

I'll remember him come Easter!

[veloxe.livejournal.com]

Honestly I liked what they did in ICC with the buff. The only way it could be better I think is if they had made the levels optional. Like, instead of on or off you get to chose 5%, 10%, 15%, so on and so on. Obviously some groups will just chose the highest percentage because it makes it easier (or the lowest because they want the hardest challenge). But it could let guilds that aren't overly hardcore still experience the content without having to wait for a blizz nerf-hammer to swing down. Plus if a guild has got a fight down (like, Marrowgar as the ICC example) then they can increase the difficulty for that boss then switch it back.

I don't know what you would do for loot. Since it would be a ridiculous amount of work to balance and edit the stuff so each tier had it's own iLevel but maybe just save the higher iLevel stuff for the hardmode. Maybe just offer more (as in quantity) drops. So if you do it on 30% buff you'd get 2 drops but if you lower it to 25% there is a chance you get a 3rd one. 20% is a guaranteed 3 and so on. Or whatever, just something to give an incentive to lower the buff without forcing them to.

As for achievements you could make ones for each buff tier (seems too much to me) or just give a standard achievement for beating a raid with any buff level, one for no buff, and then 1 for hardmode. Obviously just make the realm firsts and stuff for the "no buffs" option.

I think when you're dealing with WoW's exceedingly large player base you almost need more customization on difficulty or else you end up making the casual bitch that it's too hard, the hardcore bitch that it's too casual, or everyone bitches except for the people who end up right in the middle.

[elo-sf.livejournal.com]

Yep, I often talk about the fact that WoW is several games at once. Also content seems to take WAY too long to come out given how recycled the models often feel.

[achika-soladia.livejournal.com]

The funny thing is, I seem to recall that they *didn't* want Cata raids to be PUG friendly, or at least as much so as WotLK raids were.

[elo-sf.livejournal.com]

losing 600K subscribers convinced them they were wrong.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

I hope, based on that, the next expansion is back to WotLK-like. Maybe even set in Northrend again! (Unlikely, yeah, but I can hope.)

Teeeeeeempt...

[tersa.livejournal.com]

There's a little unit for sale catty-corner from where I am going for $85K. :) That's $20K less than what I paid for mine, and you'd be my neighbor. :)

The space rent does go up every two years, but it's pretty minimal, and it includes water, sewage, and trash.

Re: Teeeeeeempt...

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

That does indeed tempt! Whine whine dither.

:D

Re: Teeeeeeempt...

[elo-sf.livejournal.com]

it's an awesome locale you should investigate

Re: Teeeeeeempt...

[tersa.livejournal.com]

You should come by and grab a flyer and/or call the realtor to at least talk about it. Worst that can happen is get an idea of the numbers you'd be paying on the loan, take a look at the place, and walk away. :)

And if you want, I could accompany you--the realtor selling the place is the same one who sold me mine.

[priestpluswolf.livejournal.com]

Your gold-sense for volatiles isn't off. Do not sell them until everyone can get the blacksmithing/engineering recipes from the Molten Front, which'll still be a few weeks. These weapons are going to require 8 truegold /each/ - that's a lot of volatiles. When these recipes become available, you probably won't be able to keep yourself stocked.

Your sense is just off by a week or two. There's nothing new to craft - not yet. But people are going to want these new 365 ilevel weapons, and spend a lot of gold to get them..

Right now the things that'll be selling for ridiculous will probably be leg patches and cloak enchants, since everyone and their dog is trying for the new cloaks, and the tier 11 legs aren't 'that' expensive for people who PVE extensively.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's a good point. Thanks! Guess I'll go back to stockpiling. Luckily with four (soon to be six) alchemists, the pile goes up fast.