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Medeor's Mishaps and Mayhem

Let's get into the Overpull this week!

Here’s the lineup this week


What's the Buzz

We’ve posted a guide to Love is in the Air and the Lunar Festival. Be sure to check those guides out!

The big news for me this week is that Upper Deck will no longer be handling the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game. What does this mean for us WoW players? Well, it doesn’t mean anything all unless you’re collecting loot cards. Even then, we don’t know what Blizzard plans to do about that with their new TCG partner. You can read our news post on this right here.

My thoughts are simple, Pokémon was handled by Wizards of the Coast up until July 2003 when Nintendo took over publishing themselves leaving Wizards publishing Vampire: The Eternal Struggle and the Neopets TCG as their non Magic: The Gathering card games. So there is precedence for companies to take their card games internal, but also the fact that Wizards has very few awesome TCGs right now. Blizzard stated that they’re working with another partner. Then again, rumors abound about Blizzard doing everything from the art to the card sets internally for the last year. So who knows what will come of it.

Limited attempts were removed this week from Icecrown Citadel. At the same time, most heroic bosses have been defeated and the Lich King has over 100 million HP. Raiding ain’t what it used to be folks.

Cataclysm is slated for a late 2010 release and Blizzard has said there will be another content patch (although there will be no major raid in it). So don’t disparage over the fact that there is nothing to do in the game right now.

The weekly bonus BG will be Warsong Gulch for those of you seeking to farm a bit of extra honor.

Hey our forums are open if you want to talk about any of this. Click here to find your way over to our community and put your two cents into the news this week.


What's the Buzz

Loremaster's Corner #2: Arthas's Effect on Cataclysm

To avoid spoiling the recent lore, I won't include a snippet, I'll just give you a link. Here you go.


What's the Buzz

This week’s question is: What’s the most frustrating thing for you in the game?

That’s kind of a hard question for me – there are both very few and very many things that frustrate me. I love the game and that in itself can tell you that I don’t find it bothersome to play, but at the same time there are a few things that strike me as overly irritating. However, nothing really stands out to me as the most frustrating thing in the game. So I asked the above question to many of the players that I knew and the results were quite uniform and did shed light onto an answer for me.

The most frustrating thing for me in the game is the players and grouping. Grouping is a difficult task because no matter your level there exists a self centered player who will either slow the group down or cause a group to wipe because of their absolute refusal to listen to basic instructions. There exists a type of player who quickly becomes bitter and childish if they don’t have their way or are completely ignorant to most aspects of the game.

For instance, say you’re doing the Deadmines. You’re a new player and you struggled in either the lengthy queue or through general spam to form a group. You’re going through the instance and the tank ignores the mobs and begins to loot corpses. Something gets on the healer, who dies, and your group wipes. During the long walk back everyone explains to the tank how this was his fault and how he shouldn’t loot during combat. The tank ignores this and wipes again, ruining your experience of the dungeon as you wait through a painfully long queue to hop back in and try again.

In the above example the tank, while he may be new, is not concerned with his groups well being and would rather do what he feels is more important (gaining personal wealth) even after being informed it’s bad manners and can wipe the group.

Another example could be found in heroic Utgarde Pinnacle. The tank takes a vote at the start to skip straight to Skadi and four people agree to it with one player silent. The tank then skips the first boss and runs through the monster run to start the Skadi encounter. That one player, bitter that he’s not getting the optimal amount of badges for the run, activates the encounter and wipes the group. The group disbands.

In the above example the lone DPS class ruined the entire instance experience for everyone else because of their badge greed. They were informed that they were skipping the boss, they didn’t voice their thoughts, and they started the encounter anyway in order to hold the group hostage in an attempt to get that one additional badge. In doing so they ruined the gaming experience of four other people.

Are these players malicious in their intent? No they are not, but more often than not we can confuse selfishness and greed with malice. They are simply playing the game without a care for the other people in their groups. They are the ones who come to Onyxia raids to train their weapon skill or kill themselves off to skip to the end and avoid putting work into the raid. They are the ones that lead to other frustrations.

Those other frustrations are gearscore checks on almost every raid and insane DPS/HPS checks to even roll on loot. Players feel like they’re forced to throw faux velvet ropes to their activities in an attempt to avoid the non-contributors and leechers. Even then, their methods don’t prove to be highly successful and they continue to raise their requirements to a point that it becomes difficult for newer players to get anywhere in the game.

Guilds are made to combat this, but how often can you rely on your guild for everything? This is an MMORPG, it’s for playing with other people, not just limiting yourself to a small core group of people and ignoring everyone else. We should be able to invite random people without a worry that they’re going to wipe the group because of greed or just not contribute because they think they can beat the system. We should be able to say that these kinds of experiences are rare when we’re dealing outside of our guilds. Yet, we’re incapable of doing so, because of how prevalent it is.

My penultimate example to reinforce this is normal Utgarde Keep during the Love is in the Air Event going on right now. If you’re level 68 to 72 then you’re going to have a fun time as your group is composed of a level 80 DPS Warrior as a tank who takes massive amounts of damage, a level 80 Shadow Priest who queued as a healer (and is not going to be healing you), and level 80 Hunter who will not even be using his arrows this entire time and instead will feign since you cannot kick him before the boss is dead. The last two players, the low levels, will find themselves dead in the first few rooms as the level 80s slay the boss, argue over the off-hand, and then all leave.

Finally, my ultimate example of bad player manner is the latest holiday event. Join a group and no matter how you try to screen players you will find that the group is composed of a DPS Shaman who isn’t a healer, two of the other members not having summons (even though they said they did) and finally someone who will need Shadowfang and drop group. That’s ok, they didn’t have a summon either. Furthermore, no matter if you say “put on a perfume”, none of them will, and everyone will die as they stand in stuff on the floor and then the group disbands.

None of these scenarios are fun and they’re all frustrating. They’re not all that rare, either. Each example is an event I’ve personally seen. When I was new there was a Paladin who looted and kept wiping us in Deadmines. There was a group who said “let’s skip everything” and someone started the encounter. When pressed, they said “I don’t care, I want my badge.” I farmed normal UK for the off-hand and found that I had to carry the lowbies to the end because I felt bad ruining their fun just so I could get an achievement.

Finally, yes, I had a group that bad for SFK. In each of these examples the right thing to do was communicated and ignored. In each of these examples the gameplay was negatively affected because of someone took the group out of grouping. Each of these examples could have been worked out and people could have been well mannered enough to be nice about it. The Paladin could have stopped looting until after combat, the badge farmer could have asked nicely when the group voted to skip everything, you can duo the first boss in UK with a tank and a healer so there is no reason to exploit the lowbie queue for your achievement, and finally it’s not hard to put on a perfume and be nice about at least having a summons.

I’m sure many will read this as whining and how being part of a guild solves it all, which is true, but I’m just making a point. The most frustrating thing to me about this game is the community itself, which spawns its own problems, and there is nothing you can ever do to fix it.

This Week's Forum Thread for your commenting pleasure.

-David "Xerin" Piner

WoW News, Quest Database, Leveling Guides, and More at WoW.TenTonHammer.com

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Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

About The Author

Get in the bush with David "Xerin" Piner as he leverages his spectacular insanity to ask the serious questions such as is Master Yi and Illidan the same person? What's for dinner? What are ways to elevate your gaming experience? David's column, Respawn, is updated near daily with some of the coolest things you'll read online, while David tackles ways to improve the game experience across the board with various hype guides to cool games.

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