Posts Tagged ‘hardcore’

As the Year Turns

And here we are, on the brink of 2009, and as usual, it’s time to look back at what changes the year brought.

One year ago, the hot topic in the WoW blogosphere was still the PvE / PvP opposition centered around the notion of Welfare epics. When I wrote my closing post on the matter, I didn’t yet measure how different 2008 was going to be – not only has the topic practically vanished, but as Megan astutely points out, the notion of Welfare epics nowadays could, if used at all, be applied very readily to raiding, whereas PvP gear is currently a lot harder and longer to aquire.

The one thing which hasn’t changed though is that the term is still being used by certain people to demean the achievements of those who are following a different path from theirs, one they deem inferior. 

2008 was largely dominated by the long Wait for the Lich King, and like the end of 2006, the controversies have centered around the hardcore / casual divide and the raiding scene. One thing which has changed drastically though is the reputation of the few dominating figures. In 2006, even me (then still raiding) was following the race to the Naxx world first with interest. Death and Taxes and Nihilum were in a neck-to-neck race and most people were cheering them on. Even if we weren’t directly affected, we could sympathise with all uberguild’s dismay at the reduction from 40-men to the 25-men raiding format.

Two years later, Death and Taxes has suffered from problems but has at least exited the immediate consciousness of the average player rather gracefully. Their opponent, though, through countless name changes, ugly drama, questionable sponsorships but foremost through a series of graceless and classless public tantrums about the difficulty of the game, haven’t just tarnished their name but in the end effect massively diminished the interest of the community in the life and adventures of the überguilds. In my mind they have become like the spoiled, rotten elites living lavishly and criticizing the taste of this year’s caviar and champagne when the unwashed masses are having sausage and beer. In the most ironic development, while they were wallowing in their pride and spitting at the rest of the gamers (with their dwindling cohorts of me-tooers), the world first for the currently most difficult raid achievement in the game, killing Sartharion on 10-men with 3 drakes up, was snatched up by Method.

In the meantime, titles and mounts for PvE feats have become a lot more commonplace, and the introduction of the achievement system has brought an entirely new dimension to certain aspects of the game. Whether by a bit of an accident or clear design, achievements don’t just give raiders more elements to compare and measure up against each other but also allow for different grades of challenges for farmed content. A bit like all those RPGs with several party members where players have developped additional challenges (single character, low level, gametime etc…) but formalized in a quite addictive structure.

I can’t help but wonder how my old 2007 antagonist Stop the Warrior views today’s game. Might give way to an interesting argument.

So here we are, on the brink of the new year. Last night, Steptoe remarked that this was the most hardcore evening he’d ever seen me play: we ran 5 instances in a row together. Which is indeed more than I have ever done in this game. That being said, it was 2 times Violet Hold, Drak’Tharon followed by another pair of Violet Hold runs (Steptoe wanted the plate pantaloons off the voidwalker boss), and Violet Hold isn’t exactly a long isntance – according to my Blessings timers, it takes slightly less than 24 minutes from buffing to exit. It was quite a profitable evening for my paladin, too, with a couple of nice drops.

Steptoe has taken to taking with his Death Knight and is doing well. Let’s also immediatly put one notion to rest: on leveling instances, you do not need to be crit immune as a Death Knight, far from it. Steptoe was level 75 and his gear was around 435ish defense after he got the legplates, with a combined avoidance of about 40%. The healer was a level 74 priest, who didn’t really have too much of a hard time apparently (and since we ran UK the night before when Steptoe was only around 410 defense and the guy came back, that speaks for itself), and throughout the evening the amount of free FoLs I was tossing the tank’s way have decreased quite a bit.

We had two wipes throughout the 5 runs, one early in Drak’Tharon because sometimes a lifetime of experience in not standing in stuff isn’t enough to recognize the stuff you shouldn’t stand in, the second one in VH on the netherstalker boss because of an unfortunate conjunction of me getting hit by an energy sphere about a half second before critting with judgement of blood. Wipe by Bloodicide. Had to happen once.

Regarding Ret performance, I’m a bit peeved about where I was sitting on damage meters. Oh, I came out on top in Drak’Tharon Keep, that one being an undead-heavy instance, no contest. The first two Violet Hold runs, though, I was only third (not by a large measure but still), behind a mage and Steptoe, and in the last two runs, I really had to work my arse off to keep on top against a level 75 boomkin, including eating AP food.

In the end, some gear upgrades, and I dinged Coldweather Flying in the middle of the last run. 3 more levels to 80. Still with about 20 quests in Dragonblight to go, that’s just three zones I’ve seen and used so far. Glad to have my epic fyling back though.

And this concludes my last 2008 post. Whether you level, raid, PvP, and do it casually, softcore or hardcore, I wish you all a very merry evening and a happy new year. To 2009, and may your chosen activities in game and in Real Life bring you joy and merryment.

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Ghostcrawler on Current Raid Difficulty

Says the designer crab:

“A couple more points about Naxx: many of the guilds who cleared it quickly already knew the encounters from 40-player days, AND were allowed to practice extensively on beta. By contrast we gave players very little exposure to Kil’jaeden on the PTR.

But really, trying to slow down worldwide progression by making encounters insanely difficult is a losing proposition. We’re in the world now of professional guilds with corporate sponsors and players willing to put in enormous numbers of hours and attempts. We can certainly (and will) make very challenging encounters for which guilds can take pride in server firsts. However, I would not expect to see encounters that are so difficult that the entire WoW community wipes on them for months before achieving success. I just don’t know if that game exists anymore.”

That pretty much sums up everything there is to say. As much as Nihilum Curse SK Gaming 25th November Ensidia Whatever-They’re-Called-This-Week and the other handful of überguilds hate it, the C’Thun days appear to be gone for good.

There’s another piece of wisdom hidden in that statement. When the world’s biggest überguild has fully beta access, sees the content, remains absolutely silent about the difficulty then race through the content on release in order to bitch about the lack of challenge, it isn’t just faux outrage and manufactured controvery. It isn’t just a clear demonstration that whatever firsts they achieve in the future is no longer properly legit and completely meaningless (as opposed to the merits of every single guild who was NOT in beta, clears the content and remains out of the limelights monopolized by what has in the meantime devolved into WoW’s biggest collection of attention whores and drama queens). It also shows that they are a total failure as beta testers and haven’t understood the purpose of all these shiny passes they have recieved.

The game too easy for you? Sod off. You should have said so in beta. Now get off the headlines.

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Extreme Hardcore Guild Wins Wrath, Jumps the Shark

So Nihilum and SK Gaming merged, rushed to level 80, and then proceeded to clear all raid instances weeks or even months before the unwashed masses. Good for them.

When you pay a monthly subscription to burn to content which is meant to last other people a couple of months within 2 days, that’s your business.

Then something interesting happened in the PR statement released below (emphasis is mine):

“We are proud to declare that all WOTLK PVE raid content has now been cleared. This is both a moment of triumph and a cause for concern. The question in all our minds right now is if we could do this, how soon until the rest of the top guilds in the world clear all the raid content that WOTLK has to offer? Did Blizzard miscalculate in the tuning of these encounters? Or is this Blizzard folding under the weight of a large casual player base that demands to be on equal footing with end-game raiders?“

By that statement combined with the timing of the whole thing, Twentyfithnovember (that’s the new name of the merged operation) made one thing clear. They no longer represent anyone in this game but themselves. Not even what you would qualify as a hardcore guild.

Mind you, it’s not the fact that they rushed through content and cleared it all within two days, it’s the fact that they take this and act as if they were any reasonable measure of anything.

By their own words, Twentyfithnovember have just rendered themselves completely irrelevant. They aren’t even a role model for the other gamers, they’re just a cadre of people sponsored to raid and churn out world first.

The one thing which they have made crystal clear is that Blizzard should in no way listen to anything they could say in regards to content tuning or balance, in the best case they could be treated as an extended QA team to spot and test out bugs on the PTR. For anything else, their point of view is so far removed from the reality of the playerbase that they could just as well be playing a different game altogether.

And that’s actually what they are doing.

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Wrath to End PvE / PvP Gear Dispute

One of the gripes most often heard during Arena Season 2 and Season 3 from part of the hardcore raiding crowd was about the fact that Arena gear was recoloured tier gear, so that an Illidan-killing hero wouldn’t really appear remarkable when walking in areas where arena dancers gathered.

In Blizzcast 3, Tigole announced that this part of the disagreement between arena players and dedicated raiders will be a thing of the past in Wrath of the Lich King:

PvP armor will be different from the PvE armor entirely in looks and colors this time.

Of course, to some people this might be a trivial issue, but for all the people to whom recognition is also part of the values driving their gameplay, this is a welcome change.

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Raiding and the Patrouille des Glaciers

From last Wednesday to Sunday, the Swiss canton Wallis was host to the biannual Alpine competition Patrouille des Glaciers. This is pretty much one of the biggest races in Ski-Touring, an otherwise not very widely-known sport combining running, mountain climbing and skiing.

One of the checkpointsI have a certain fondness for this race, not least because two years ago my annual tour of duty in the Swiss military had my unit participate in building and managing the communication network used both for the race organization and participant safety. To set the backdrop of the race, a couple of numbers:

The competition, originally a military event which was meant to verify the fitness of our mountain troops during and after WW2, has been relaunched in 1983 and is open to civilian and military teams. There are actually two routes available, the “grande Patrouille” or long route, which goes from Zermatt to Verbier, and the “petite Patrouille” or short route, going from Arolla to Verbier (Arolla being one of the checkpoints for the long route).

A couple of figures to give the scale of the race:

  • The short route is 26km long but spans altitude changes of +1881m / – 2361m for a flat distance equivalent of 53km
  • The long route is 53km long and spans altitude changes of +3994m / -4120m for a flat distance equivalent of 110km
  • The winners for the short route close the distance in about 3h of time, whereas in order to participate the teams should be able to run the distance in 8h30
  • The male record for the long route stands at 6h 18 minutes since 2006 whereas the female record was broken this year and stands now at 7h53mins.
  • There were 1412 teams of 3 registered this year, for 4236 participants. 1818 ran the long route, 2418 ran the short route
  • Each team must cross the finish line with a distance below 100 meters between the first and the third member of the team.

Teams scattered through the mountainsWhat’s interesting with this event is that you have about 100 pro teams competing, the rest is comprised entirely of amateurs. The oldest participant I’ve heard of this year is 66 years old. The race is split across two nights, with teams starting in smaller groups at different times of the night. The long route starts in Zermatt at 10 pm, with additional starts given every hour until 3am. The short route starts in Arolla at 4am and has additional starts every 30 minutes until 6.30am.

In 2006, my own military unit, 200 people strong, was scattered all over the canton, with 6 manned and 7 unmanned stations to oversee during the whole event. We had 40 metric tonnes of equipment, which spanned a surface of half a football / soccer (depending on where you come from) field. Although military-grade equipment is particularly robust, we nonetheless had to arrange the exchange of key equipment pieces about every 1.5 days due to extreme temperature conditions (our highest relay was having some nice warm -30° C at some point). That wasn’t too bad though, as we were collaborating with one of the local civilian telcos who plugged into our network to provide GSM coverage for the participants. Contrary to us, their electricity generators were more sensitive to cold, and they had to worry about having a special and customized fuel mix available so that their own kit would continue to run in both extreme temperature and altitude conditions (ask any standard manufacturer of electronic devices, including computers, and you’ll find that their normal operating conditions are limited to 3000m in altitude, not to speak about temperatures of course. Good luck having LCD displays working in sub-zero temperatures).

The Matterhorn, from ZermattAll in all, our activity was taxing but very rewarding – contrary to what often happens during our annual tour of duty, we all worked in the certainty that our contribution wasn’t a waste of time (something which isn’t always as certain, which is a bit the curse of militia army systems). But enough of my military recollections, if you want interesting, funny and well-written accounts, BRK among others has much more interesting stories to tell than me.

What does this all have to do with raiding? Well, there are actually a couple of parallels between the Patrouille des Glaciers and raiding. First of, there’s only a small amount of teams which have a shot at winning the race – for the long route, the average amateur team takes about 10-11 hours from start to finish (up to 18ish for the last to cross the finish line) compared to the 6h and 18 minutes for the male record, a gap not unlike the difference between the guilds competing for world and server firsts, and all the other. The rest of the people race first and foremost for themselves, to overcome a challenge they have set to themselves.

From speaking to teams racing both in the short and the long route, the most common trait is that no matter their final standings, every single participant I’ve ever talked to (and I have both work colleagues and business partners racing) will always acknowledge the efforts made by everyone else. You would be extremely hard-pressed, for instance, to find someone racing on the long route to sneer at the teams running the short route. Or at those who, for whatever reasons, had to drop out. You’ll never find a team talking down the accomplishments of teams who started later in the night than them (it’s obviously a completely different matter to run through the night or through mostly daylight), or earlier when the snow conditions are better.

One of the checkpointsAll the participants respect each others, because what counts for them is overcoming the challenge the mountain and the weather conditions present them with. Similarly you wont find any of the amateurs accusing the pro teams of cheating, doping or similar things, nor would you find a pro team talking down the amateurs because they run the route in twice or even thrice as long as they do.

Contrast that with raiding, in particular the competitive aspect of it. The tone, the mentality is, unfortunately, entirely different. Look at what happened recently on the Eredar Twins: When Nihilum announced their world first, the reaction of other guilds, including some of the future US-first holders, was a complete disgrace. From accusations of cheating to ugly US / EU stereotypes, non-stop play and other nasty things, to Nihilum’s own reply in kind, you’d be hard-pressed to find solidarity or respect as the dominant trait (though SK Gaming, who got the world second, was in fact extremely gracious about it, setting an example of a different attitude), many congratulation posts were also complemented with a couple of cheap shots.

This isn’t reserved to the World First race either – the vocal fringe of hardcore raiders often and routinely talk down and dismiss anyone else’s accomplishments in the game if they are even 15 minutes behind them, and God help them if they actually PvP or take advantage of badge loot or removed attunements to clear instances.

I’m mentioning raiding here but the same can be said, to a point, to arena play (and the delusion of turning it into an e-sport). There’s just something completely different in terms of spirit between the people who go out in the cold and harsh weather and accomplish a big physical effort, and us computer warriors pretending that our button-pressing skills are something particularly remarkable in the grand scheme of things.

That’s where much of the cultural disconnect happens between me and the more vocal fringe of the hardcore raiders. I value progress for itself, regardless of when it happens in the broader context of wowjutsu ranking. The important part, for me, is beating content or overcoming a ranking objective with online friends, and seeing content many won’t have access to (including myself for that matter). You do it for yourself first and foremost.

I believe the hardcore playing scene in WoW would greatly benefit from having a bit more sense of sportsmanship and fair play. That obviously ties into valuing other people’s honest efforts more rather than separating the world into elite and scrubs (where the cut is always made so that one is elite and those below scrubs, no matter where one stands).

One can always dream, of course.

All pictures courtesy of Patrouille des Glaciers www.pdg.ch copyright

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Catering to the Casuals Indeed

As most of you will have noticed by now, Blizzard, in yet another clear demonstration that the hardcore whining raider-fabricated myth of the complaining casuals is just that, a myth, kowtowed to the tiny but vocal minority and added arena rating requirements both to most S4 arena gear but also, in a slightly more surprising move, to the S4 honour gear.

As had to be expected, the catassing few are very happy about it, to wit, everyone’s favourite faux hardcore raiding blogger is gloating with Shadenfreude.

Aside from reminding the overeager that S4 is still a while off and things may yet change, I’m quite happy about this myself. As things will stand, looks like the only gear to which you can apply the moniker Welfare Epics is the badge loot, which is obtained through PvE only. In one of those delicious bouts of irony, the very term coined by the catassers‘ role model and lead developer Tigole to mock the PvPers now strictly applies to PvE, his very own area of competency in WoW.

What will this change, if it goes live as announced? Well, for the casual arena player, he will actually start and play in the 1300-1700 range and face opponent teams which do not hopelessly outgear him (especially if you combine these rating requirements with the new mechanisms introduced in 2.4.2 to fight point selling). The casual gamer who does arena because it’s one of the activities available to him due to the limited organization and scheduling required will benefit from more competitive gameplay, where mainly S2 and S3 gear balances itself out with the respective skill of all the contenders.

The competitive PvPers will find themselves in the 2000+ range, just as today, not feeling any particular impact except that they won’t be able to get 3 pieces of S4 the day the new season starts. They’ll also fight with their peers and compete for the honours of top rank. Nothing changed here.

Where there could be a difference, a gear aristocracy of sorts, is in the 1700-2000 range, where the teams trying to move upwards will find themselves matched against those from the bracket above who regularly stay around the fringe. Whether this will really create a 2-season gear gap in practice remain to be seen.

As Stop puts it, there’s no fast track through PvP for late level 70 joiners or alts anymore, which means the raiding gear-up game will start again with renewed strength. I expect there to be more drama generated, again, by top raiding guilds poaching geared members of mid-progression guilds, probably just what we need to offset the lack of popcorn moments generated by the pre-WotLK fatigue WoWInsider keeps telling us has already settled in.

All in all, for the casuals, it changes nothing. They will get S2 and S3 gear with no more efforts than what they need to invest today for S1 and S2 gear, but they can start with S0 blues since patch 2.4. That’s enough to enter entry level PvE content with casual guilds if they so desire – at least for DPS and healers. Tanks have, as always, no alternative solutions or fast track to gearing available to them. For the truly hardcore, it changes nothing. Season gear has always been inferior for top PvE content, and that doesn’t change. The only people this will really affect are any PvE players who face itemization gaps, in particular in the weapons department (or runs of bad loot dropping luck), making it harder for them to switch to a different progression path to compensate. Considering it’s that same crowd who appears to be most happy about the change at present, that shouldn’t be an issue either.

In other words, Blizzard chose wisely with their pandering to the loudmouthed crying hardcore minority.

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