Things that Cloud up my Game

The more I play MMOs, the more I am convinced they are a microcosm of the larger mass of humanity. It's the sort of thing that keeps me from flipping out and going postal on people when I am playing, but also the sort of thing that saddens me. We play games to escape from the real world, but more and more real life is shaping my games. Okay, I may be ranting here, and even worse I have two rants on two related but different subjects.

First, some background. Last night was the first entry into Mt. Hyjal for L8Raid. Being new content, there were upwards of 45 people interested in running an instance that only allows 25 people. So yeah, lots of people were put on the wait list. I was one of them, and for the most part I was happy to be on the "WL" as they say. If you are going to be successful, you need to bring your best and brightest. So I sat around on the WL for a little bit, then some of those waiting thought we should run another instance while we waited rather than sitting outside the instance counting each other's toes (something I've done when raiding with Inner Focus, and that is less than fun).

So, in the spirit of my previous post, I formed a ZA raid with the 6 people that were interested...all DPS. That's not all that surprising, because blasting and ripping things is always more fun than standing there and getting your face pounded in or standing back and keeping everyone alive (not my opinion, but the general consensus). Now, I know that any 10 man raid will need a couple tanks and a couple healers, and as there were none of either of these, I let the group know that Zul'Aman wouldn't happen. They were fine with this, because really it was a group of people in gear that would be way too expensive to repair. So we went to Heroic Magister's Terrace.

Went being the appropriate word. We visited, pulled one group, and then the rest of the group got angry at me for insisting that we crowd control. Granted I yelled, but the phrase "Let me friggin' sheep," is not exactly the most offensive thing to say to a group. I ranted to Staulk who was in the group with me, but kept most of my insulting comments said allowed without hitting "Push to Talk." I was frustrated. These are people that are raiding 25-man instances, that are supposed to be mature enough to know how to reset a 5-man instance and how to mark pulls and crowd control them. Evidently there is a reason they were put on the wait list. Now once the affronted members of the group pushed me to leave the group (not something I do unless there is a good reason), I went to help Boyfriend with his crusade against the Ogres of Nagrand (AKA grinding Kurenai rep).

But while I was listening to the raid group on vent cheering as they downed two bosses and proceeded to the third, my "what is best for the group" rally cry faded. I suppose my original reason for raiding (the desire to experience everything in the game) has morphed into something different. I love raiding. I love playing the game with mature people who not only know how to play their classes and work as a cohesive unit, I love the feeling you get when that group had tackled something new. You can stand back and say "I was part of that, I helped." But I wasn't there last night, I was only listening in. Instead of was killing ogres in a dimly lit cave, hearing others as they rejoiced at that feeling of accomplishment.

That's when the bitterness started. I'm not proud, but at least I'm self-aware, and that ought to count for something. I hate being excluded, being left behind. It's the sort of situation I am more sensitive to as a result of my childhood, and something that I know I have a problem with, and I do my best to cope. It wasn't really until I started selfishly resenting the core raiders for their accomplishments that I realized I enjoy raiding for a whole new set of reasons that I explained above. Now, I was bitter, and started in a lovely spiral of negativity, but such a spiral brought up an interesting idea that I've considered before. I figured it was blog-worthy and thus enjoy rant #2:

In society today, it takes money to make money. The people who are rich can invest their wealth and generate more. The same is true within WoW. I can't raise as much gold as others because I don't have an epic flying mount. I've ranted about this before because I have learned to use my bitterness to fuel my writing. I realized last night that this also extends to raiding. Those with the best gear will be invited to raids, where they will get better gear and become more valuable to the raid. It's a cycle, and an unavoidable one even within an extremely inclusive raiding group like L8Raid. I feel fortunate that there are a couple ways to break this cycle, or at least step into the cycle yourself. The first way, obviously, is finding a group like L8Raid that does its best to include as many players as possible in their raids. Show up, try hard, get to raid more. The second way is the badge loot from Patch 2.4. Suddenly there is a way for a non-raider or a second-tier raider (like me) to get gear on par with Zul'Aman and beyond. Sure it's a lot of work, but it's 5-man heroic work, and not beyond anyone willing to run the instances a LOT. Now if you're lazy and hate grinding, then you only have one choice: bitter ranting.

The Problem with PUGs

So, anyone who's followed my on-again-off-again love affair with raiding will understand my joy when I tell you I've found the perfect solution to my problem. My problem being a guild with no motivation to raid conflicting with my desire to see all the content in the game. I have attempted to join raiding guilds on Elune, only to find that my West Coast time zone and my need to work to earn a living previously came into direct conflict with the raiding schedule of most guilds (well those guilds that didn't implode upon my arrival that is).

I had heard about the L8Raid back in November when I was getting back into the normal workforce, but I didn't brave joining the channel until a few weeks ago. Well, in reality I did PM the raid leader/organizer several months ago, and was discouraged not to receive a reply. These sorts of things frighten me, stepping into new territories without guidance or (more importantly) an invitation. To explain the concept, L8Raid is a group of people that want to raid, but have West Coast schedules for some reason or another. Instead of leaving their guilds, they have allied together to raid, and as a result are progressing nicely through the content.

Enter Nitnoid. Noid was a WoW Insider reader who contacted me in game to harass me for not posting on the site anymore. I had the lovely opportunity of explaining that it wasn't by my choice, and lo and behold a friendship was born. I credit Noid with much. It was he that revitalized my love of blogging, that reminded me that I don't need a paycheck to write about the game I love. It was also Noid that suggested I hook into L8Raid, and now with the group being brought up twice, I wasn't one to ignore a sign. Therefore I typed /join l8raid and have been happier ever since.

The most interesting thing is I am raiding with an alt, the priest, and enjoying the challenge. I expected to have her rejected on account of her sad gear and +healing, but that wasn't the case. The first night I ran with them to Tempest Keep and had an epic boots pattern drop, and that was the beginning of the DKP guilt cycle. Within a week of that I had improved my gear exponentially with a combo of amazing luck in Karazhan and making my new boots. In essence, I went from having a character barely ready for Kara to a character almost ready for TK, and all with gear I received while with L8Raid.

But Mandifesto, you ask as a clever reader of titles, what the heck is the problem with PUGs? Where this concept of the organized pug breaks down is Sundays. The group runs ZA on Sundays. This in and of itself is not a bad thing, at least for the 10 core raiders. They have a set group and organize their group outside the L8Raid channel. What ends up happening is that the rest of us log in at the regular time waiting for the raid organizers to pull together ZA groups, we here nothing, and end up logging out in frustration as the core group happily runs their instance.

Last night I suggested that perhaps next week in the name of inclusiveness and the greater group that one large group be formed and then smaller raids be filled from those interested and available. What ended up happening is that they asked me to work on that, which I guess is fine, except that I am not one of the leaders of the group. Sure I can organize things, but it is not my intent to take over someone else's concept. I didn't join L8Raid to lead, but then again it seems, neither did anyone else.

And that is the problem with PUGs, and to a larger extent groups in general in WoW and in life. Sure there may be a shortage of tanks and healers, but there is a greater shortage of leaders. There are very few of us that are willing to step up and make something happen rather than simply waiting until someone does it for us. Personally, I can be one of those people, but the problem with leading PUGs is that I usually get told to sod off when I take charge. This has happened to me since grade school, and more recently with the last guild I tried to raid with. Therefore I am a little hesitant in stepping up lest I am asked to step out.

Fun with /console

Tuesday night Boyfriend pointed me to a post on World of Raids regarding the command /console. For the less technical among us, this command allows a player to adjust the visual settings in their game, for instance controlling the amount of ambient vegetation generated by the game engine or glow effects on a player's weapons. There is a massive opportunity here with this command for allowing personalization of the visuals in the game. I also would love to see how our Machinima artists will use this sort of control to develop new film content. I am wondering if anyone out there has completed a comprehensive list of the /console options available. A druid in Tuesday night's TK run was my source for the /console options on player glow effects. If you hear of someone with a nice beefy list of /console commands, let me know and I will update my post here.

Here are some examples of /console commands given on WoR. This particular macro increases the draw distance and amount of vegetation generated by the game engine. When Boyfriend enabled this on his system Arathi Highlands alluva sudden was more lush than Stanglethorn Vale:

/console farclip 777
/console horizonfarclip 6226
/console groundeffectdensity 256
/console groundeffectdist 140
/console smallcull 0
/console skycloudlod 3
/console characterambient 0

And here's the macro to revert your settings:
/console groundEffectDensity 16
/console groundEffectDist 1
/console horizonfarclip 1305
/console farclip 177
/console characterAmbient 1
/console smallcull 1
/console skycloudlod 1
/console detailDoodadAlpha 1

Now I imagine you can play around with the values in the first macro, as long as you use the second to revert to the original settings. I do not have enough processing power to try this myself (my FPS is already sadly lacking), but I did see the results on Boyfriend's system, and they were impressive. It really makes the game resemble some of the beautiful rendering I saw in LotRO.

I do not, however have Mr. Druid's macro for reducing glow effects on players. I was too busy healing main tanks during the A'lar fight to write it down.

[World of Raids]

Politics, WoW Style

I'm not what you call political, but I am fascinated with the circus that politics becomes in a presidential election year. Train-wreck, rubber-necking to see car accidents kind of fascinated. I just can't look away, despite how ludicrous things become, or perhaps because of exactly how ludicrous things are.

I am what you would call a gamer, and my current preferred game is World of Warcraft. So when I visited the Indecision 2008 website this morning and found an article about campaigning within WoW, I smiled on the inside. I might have smiled on the outside as well, but I'm frankly too tired from raiding Tempest Keep last night to notice much of anything beyond the flatscreen monitor before me and the cup of coffee inches away from my fingertips.

The article makes a couple of references to game mechanics that completely fail (interrupting Feral Combat spells? And the Death Knights aren't even in the game yet, my naive political satirists.), but all in all the satire is fairly sound. We look at things from a class perspective in game, and I still maintain that Boyfriend isn't simply playing a paladin he *is* one. I often consider things from a DPS perspective in real life, in attacking the weakest problems first, burning them down, then moving on to the next. Sure I can AoE several adds at once with my IRL version of Blizzard (manic multitasking) but that will wear me out faster, and will cause me running for the snack machine to regenerate mana and health several times a day.

I wonder though, are the candidates missing the boat by ignoring cyberspace? There are 10 million WoW players, 2 million in the US alone. Those are a lot of potential votes. Although, to be honest, with Clinton's anti-gaming stance the Internet itself might reject her login as viral and erase her virtual existence on contact. Still, I think the gamer as a demographic is growing, and soon it will be one that cannot be ignored when planning out a walk down the Yellow Brick Road we know as the campaign trail.

[Indecision 2008 Blog]