Altitis

From the other end of the gamer spectrum, Lume the Mad offers his perspective on reaching the end of the Burning Crusade, and the meta-game represented by the world first race.

A few choice words, on the matter of quality vs. the time it took to produce:

I think the fact of the matter remains that raiders are going to defeat content faster than Blizzard can simply produce it. And faster production lowers the quality. It would be similar to asking Nintendo to put out a new Zelda game every six months, because players beat each in the first week or two. It’s just simply not going to happen. And I’d rather have a quality experience every nine months than a terrible experience every few. I know some people will disagree, but it’s funny considering people complained how BT was relatively easy and called for something more difficult. And now that something more difficult and higher in quality has been produced, people are complaining about the time it took to produce it. It’s a huge cliché, but: “You can’t please everyone.”

About Blizzard destroying the high-end raiding scene:

I don’t think there’s anything they [Blizzard] can do to destroy it [the high-end raiding scene] other than to make every single instance as easy and boring as, say, Molten Core. As long as the content is at least somewhat decent in quality and there’s a guild willing to go the distance to be number one, it will never die. People might note their surprise and disappointment about how quickly the content was defeated, but the fact of the matter is that people will still follow whoever the top guild is through that content.

Ah, heck, just go ahead and read it all here at the source.

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As most of you will have seen already, Kil’Jaeden is down, and the PvE content of the Burning Crusade is now complete.

Two things strike me, first, it was SK Gaming who got the world first, putting an end to 25 months of Nihilum dominance. Congratulations.

The second thing is that KJ fell (again) in less than one week. Thanks to the gate system, Blizzard basically ensured that Sunwell Plateau would artificially remain unvanquished for 10 weeks, but in practice, the instance would probably have been cleared within 4 weeks without gates.

Now a couple of years ago, I would probably have jumped to the conclusion that spending all that development time on the top content to see it eaten up in a month was overkill, catering to 0.1% of the playerbase for very little additional content. But in reality, this kind of discourse is almost always tied to the notion that the casual content comes up short (something I may have been guilty of myself in the past), a notion which is only true in the eye of the beholder. In practice, lots of content has been added for casual players as well, and while old Azeroth isn’t really being given much love these days, little touches here and there still happen.

In SK Gaming’s own assessment, despite falling in 5 days, Kil’Jaeden is the hardest boss in the game, and perfectly tuned to demand the best a player can give. Contrast this with Naxxramas, which took a couple of months to clear, how do you reconcile that difference?

Well, I do believe the relatively short time between a boss’ gate opening and its first kill is actually speaking less about blizzard’s devs and more about top raiding. Let me venture an educated guess here, but to me the 10-20 guilds forming the world first contenders have mostly reached the game engine’s limits itself, a point where no matter what combination of methods are being coded, they can recognize the pattern, relate to a previous boss fight, and devise the appropriate counter almost naturally (if I liken this to the Treck borg, I’m gonna sound like the ultimate geek). There’s probably a point where stuff like not standing in burning vortexes, clicking on spawned thingies, dealing with nasty adds, handling aggro resets, positioning the raid properly, not staying around your guildies when you’re about to explode, managing fear, composing with an  enrage timer, decursing, healing and dpsing according to whatever situation becomes natural.

In a similar vein, one thing about having Altitis is that the newbie zones is probably what you will have visited more often than anything else – I sure did. The draenei and blood elf starter zones are something I’d qualify as both very well done and faster to finish even on the first run-through than the original ones. And that isn’t just because the zones were done with a lot more polish than their predecessors, but also because there’s only so much you can do in terms of newbie quests before the player recognizes and reacts to patterns. Let’s face it, there’s only one single questline in the draenei and belf zones which provides original components, the Stillpine Furblog chain in Azuremist Isle, and even that one, in the end, amounts to little more than fedex and kill.

I think (but feel free to tell me just how much I’m talking out of my arse) it’s pretty much the same with boss fights. The limits nowadays are the game engine proper, but also the imagination of the devs – there might still be some mechanisms to be devised to innovate on boss fights, but in the end, it probably becomes harder and harder to find new stuff which can be countered with more than one specific raid composition, allows for more than just one set of cookie-cutter approaches, and is more than “chug enough of the right type of consumables to beat”.

The bottom line is that this relatively short time to clear the hardest bosses in the game demonstrates, in practice even more than in marketing speak, that we have indeed reached the end of TBC, in the sense that only the new skills and talents WotLK will ship with could provide room for new mechansism and types of boss fights.

Even then, I’m not sure there will be enough novelty and variety available to dispel a feeling of “more of the same”, a complaint I’ll go on record predicting will become much more pervasive in the top raiding circles once Wrath is live. Something which, unfortunately, will probably not be fixable within WoW, independently of the quality and challenge Wrath could provide. Should any of the competitors in the MMO market provide a decent endgame, I expect a good portion of the top raiders to leave for pastures providing a different shade of green.

Makes me pretty glad to have Altitis, actually. I’m nowhere near the point where I could reach the limit of what the game has to offer.

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MMO-Champion reports the last TBC boss is now accessible. The last World First race has begun. I expect Wrath to change the top raiding landscape a  bit, this may be the last classical race of its kind.

I just hope the challenge will last a bit longer than a week.

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Well, Matt, I’m not suffering from writer’s block, but I take your challenge nonetheless.

Here are 16 Patch 2.4 changes and additions worth mentioning:

Shorter 2v2 Arena queues

2v2 has, admittedly, several balance and synergy issues, but one which is more irksome is the queue time on heavily-populated Battlegroups. Due to the sheer number of people wanting to play 2v2, which, let’s face it, is the easiest to set up a team for and requires least coordination, queue times can exceed 15 minutes at peak time. Due to the low organizational requirements, 2v2 will always remain the bracket with the lowest barrier to entry for the most casual player, even if entering it as a brand new green level 70 player is going to be quite an experience.

Well, fortunately, Blue has recently posted that this will change for the better:

There is a change in 2.4.0 that will allow the servers to kick up more arena instances in a shorter amount of time, generally lowering the amount of time it will take to get into a game with an equal amount of people queuing. We want to avoid calling this a one time “queue cure” as we’re still not entirely certain how the changes will affect queue times under full load. Especially considering the increase in activity we see with any major patch release.

I think they’re guaranteed to have some effect, but if it isn’t an adequate impact we’ll need to make further adjustments.

Although I don’t have an arena partner or arena spec at the moment, shorter queue times = win.

The Sunwell Plateau

Part of the current higher-than-average tension between “hardcore” and “casuals” (also in its side incarnation PvE vs PvP) is most definitely due to the fact that the top raiders have run out of content, some of them several months ago. While I definitely don’t like AQ-Style server-wide unlocking events, this one looks to be less mindless grind-focussed than its infamous predecessor. The Isle of Quel’Danas is probably going to be as packed as Hellfire Peninsula was during the first days of TBC’s release, and since I currently don’t play my horde pallie, I’ll give the whole offensive a miss.

Still, the whole Shattered Sun Offensive comes along with a huge amount of new content from solo to five-men to full raids, so people who more or less ran out of things to do will have plenty new stuff to keep themselves occupied for the coming few months.

Of course, the top catassing guilds may very well burn through the new content in two weeks like what happened with MH and BT, but designing content with these people in mind is, fortunately, no longer on Blizzard’s agenda. Either Tigole and his crew grew softer on the catassing part or the rest of the design team has been overshouting them for a couple of months now (in fact, Tigole has been very subdued since his ill-advised Welfare Epics remark). Whatever the reasons, this is full of win for the large majority of the playerbase, hardcore and casual alike, and the couple of sour apples who don’t find the game challenging or fun enough for their taste anymore will move on. Less lag for me, and probably 0.1% less QQ on the o-boards. Not that you’d notice any difference of course.

The New Combat Log

The new combat log is going to increase data collection accuracy for damage meters and for WWS alike. While the change will require all addons working with the log to change, the net result is more precise information from all relevant tools. For any player, hardcore or casual, striving to improve their playing skills, accurate measurement of their performance is a good thing. Always remember, though, that in a group or a raid, you are actually playing an instance, not “top-the-meters”.

Teleport to CoT

Due to the travel time involved, getting to Caverns of Time is almost as much as a pain than going to Kara. Adding a means to teleport from Shattrath straight to the summoning stone is removes a lot of the wait, leaving more time for actually playing the instances.

Intellect Boosting Mana Regen from Spirit

While I don’t play any classes which rely on spirit and the 5-seconds rule as part of their normal routine, this will be huge for priests, druids but also mages. Other classes will spend less time drinking, which equates to less downtime. Now if it would only affect MP5 while casting too…

Faster Weapon Skillups from 1 to 295

Anyone who ever had to skill up a neglected weapon by even a mere 100 skill points will immediately remember what a pain in the nether regions this is. Less mindless killing for skillups? Yes please. The only thing unclear to me is whether it actually applies to weapon skill below 295 or players below level 60. If it’s the latter, the change will be, unfortunately, not noticed by level 70 toons, which would immediately remove this paragraph from the sexy additions to the “badly thought out” list.

Daily Quest Amount Raised to 25

Not that I’d care too much since I rarely do more than 3 dailies (never managed to unlock Ogri’La on the paladin). Still, more choice is always a good thing in my book.

Multi-Target Abilities no longer hit CCed NPCs

I have a bit mixed feelings about this one, actually. It certainly lowers the skill requirements in instances and participates in the dumbing down of the playerbase. On the other hand, it also means less wipes when running with people who lack the most basic CC management skills. An interesting side-effect, though: people who no longer care how they position CC relative to tanks will actually find running with a tankadin more difficult than before if their CC ends up in the Constant Consecration area. Since the Flavour of the Month in terms of 5-men tanks remains firmly in tankadin hands, the dumbing down may result in a couple of unexpected and hilarious wipes. Then again, good tankadins don’t really need CC in the first place.

Mana Cost Reduction on Regrowth

I don’t play a drood but from what they tell us, this is a very nice change, which actually gives them more variety in their spell casting rotations. As a recovering healadin, having just one single heal which makes up most of your casting routine (at least there’s cleansing and protecting to break the monotony) is something which gets pretty dull. More tools to keep your party or raid group alive, more varied gameplay? Yes please.

Avenger’s Shield Won’t Hit Critters Anymore

I love this one. Imagine the following pull: 3-mob group to the left, another group farther back on the right. The closest mob of the left-hand group stands at the right side of that group. Your tankadin positions himself and pulls with Avenger’s Shield on the closest mob of the left group, expecting all three mobs to have a good does of front-loaded threat on them.

Unfortunately, there’s a pesky critter sitting, unnoticed, between the left and right group, and Avenger’s shield actually bounces over it to hit the closest mob of the right-hand group. Your group now has to deal with 6 mobs instead of 3, 4 of them without any frontloaded threat.

Sounds familiar? Won’t happen again. Win.

Turn Undead Rank 3+ working on demons

Makes sense. Though why not Rank 1 and 2 escapes me. Then again, I think the last time I’ve ever used Turn Undead was on my level 26 alliance paladin desperately trying to survive an unexpected meeting with Morladin in Duskwood while bubble was on cooldown. And that was before TBC got released. So it’s a sexy but pointless change for the sake of consistency.

Partial Vanish Debugging

There’s been various abilities which would leave a rogue stealthed when using plain normal stealth but break vanish. Bug fixing is always nice in my book, and vanish has been plagued by bugs for a long time now.

New Stormstrike Icon

I’m kidding. Shamans get little love in this patch, and one of the more jaded shammies out there once commented on a message board “it will be changed to a middle finger Blizzard is pointing at shamans”. ‘Nuff said.

BG Honour calculation changes

There’s no more diminishing returns per kill until an opponent dies 51 times, and honour gets awarded on the spot. If it helps diminish the AFKing in the peace cave, I’m all for it.

Horde AV starting point moved back

This is a change for the better, and will help balance the map. In the same spirit, actually mirroring the whole map perfectly would definitely remove any claims of map imbalance and make it all about teamwork and tactical skill. This has been suggested for much longer than I’ve been playing AV and should come back.

In the same vein, joining AV as a group is something I have very mixed feelings about. If the group is 5 or 10 friends joining together, I rather like it. But with the extremely soft matchmaking happening, getting steamrolled by a 40-men preform AV for 0 honour (which you probably never will be allowed to join if you don’t have 350+ resilience, which you won’t be able to get in a hurry because the bloody AV premades kill you over and over for 0 honour) is going to be utterly detestable.

Warsong Gulch changes to Flag Carriers

In a valiant effort to shorten the pat situations where both sides could have been hiding with the opposing flags for ages, Flag Carriers will now appear on the map within 45 seconds and will get a 50%/100% damage increase debuff after 10/15 minutes. I like it but I still don’t think it goes far enough. Add reinforcements like in AV, each cap and kill taking off from the enemy reinforcements, and you could pretty much guarantee much more action-packed games lasting 15-20 minutes tops, and perhaps even kill the mindless HK farming which happens way too often. One can always hope…

And that takes up to 16 changes. There’s actually more to be highlighted, but Cosmo said 16, so 16 it is.

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