This blog disappeared for a month. I took it down for a number of valid reasons but I regretted doing so, I missed being able to ramble about games and TV. The decision never felt right, putting it back up doesn’t feel right either but I have to still be me, fun can still be permitted.

With that in mind when I deleted it a month ago, I didn’t save my theme settings which is annoying. Time permitting I will likely fiddle with the look of the site. However, looks are always secondary to content. I have imported all the old posts and pages.

I debated about that, as it’s been three years since I started and I have said some very stupid contradictory things over the years. In the end I decided to leave it, as no-one really reads this and it’s what I thought at the time. The fact that I was wrong means at least I’ve learned something. I’ll probably shuffle and rewrite the pages but that’s about it, the posts and any idiocy contained will stay for now.

Right onto the point of this post – Warcraft and patch 6.2 which hit the PTR last night.

A word about the game as a whole
It’s no secret that I’ve been unhappy about the direction blizz is taking Warcraft. I miss how certain parts of the game used to be, I’ve written many posts complaining about the changes and wishing it was different. However, the fact is that blizz will do what they want, and all the subscribers they have prove they must be doing something right. There’s no point complaining about the same issues over and over again. It’s time to accept the new reality.

This meant I considered quitting again. I unsubbed from March to November last year, as I was done with Siege and didn’t want to pay blizz for a content patch that lasted 14 months. I still think not updating a sub game for 14 months is appalling but that’s water under the bridge now.

I knew that if I quit this time I probably wouldn’t come back unless blizz reversed their current trend. When I unsubbed last time I always knew I would come back for the next expansion, this would be different, this would be finally the end. I’ve invested so much time, money, effort and social connections in Warcraft, it’s really hard to say that final goodbye.

At the weekend I spent an hour making up a word document, called Warcraft collections. In this document I listed all the mounts, pets and toys that I didn’t have and could go after. It was something I should have done months ago, as it put something huge and unmanageable into something I could understand. This gave me a plan, it gave me an idea of what I could do when I logged in.

When I first started playing Warcraft I fell in love with achievements. I didn’t raid, I didn’t really want to raid, I just wanted to collect all the things. Sometime in the intervening years I lost that, the game become something else to me, I changed my focus. Well now I’m not raiding again, I’ve come full circle and maybe given the direction of the game that’s a good thing. I can ignore everything I don’t like, as it won’t have as much impact on me as it would if I was playing the true ‘endgame’.

I don’t know if this will work, if I’ll unsub in a couple of months when I’m finally ready to say goodbye, but we’ll see. Maybe, Warcraft has life in it yet for this veteran player.

Patch 6.2.
When I opened my twitter feed this morning I saw all the new announcements. Three questions instantly came to mind:
– Will the shipyard have to replace a current garrison building?
– Will the mythic dungeons be available via LFG, and able to be completed by an LFG group in reality, not just in theory?
– Will the Timewalker dungeons drop anything useful?

No answers are forthcoming on those questions just yet. They might not be answered for some time, not until a future build on the PTR, but the answers to those questions are important to me.

If the shipyard replaces a current garrison building, I don’t know what I can afford to lose. Especially given that I’ve not done 1/10th of what I could and should do in my garrison. I haven’t really been playing the game much at all, there is a lot left undone. Losing a building spot, will be irritating, as I’m going to have to swap buildings in and out anyway. Limiting the choices of what I can swap will be a pain, but I suppose not insurmountable.

If the mythic dungeons aren’t available for, and able to be completed, by an LFG group then that content might as well not exist for me. I’m no longer in a guild, I have no desire to put together my own groups. The games group finder is an unfriendly scary beast, where I’ve heard tales of people declining and kicking for no reason. At least regular LFG is random, anonymous to a certain extent, and put together by blizz. I can cope with the LFG system, the group finder is a different matter.

Given that I love dungeons, being able to run any dungeon in the game sounds amazing, so long as the reward is right. The problem with dungeons in the game as it stands is that they don’t offer anything of value. Their place on the gearing ladder has been taken by LFR which I refuse to run. I know content should be enjoyable for itself but that’s not the mentality of Warcraft. In game I like to achieve something in my session, have some sort of measurable progress. Running something for the sake of it, just doesn’t work for me.

Blizz said about mythic dungeons that they would provide an alternate progression path. This has been something I have been begging for ever since LFR was introduced, and it became raid or die in terms of progression. However, I have been burned before by this promise from blizz, so I will wait and see on how it is implemented and how it is tuned.

Think heroic scenarios, they weren’t available via LFG, and in my guild at least people barely ever wanted to run them. They were the fastest, easiest way to cap valor but people just didn’t care. Unless you overgeared them they could be a pain, if you did overgear them then the random rewards they dropped were useless. Heroic scenarios were great in theory, worked well for lots of people, but were a disappointment for me. They could have been great but because of my situation they weren’t.

I can’t obviously blame blizz for the guild I was in, or how my friends approached the content. Opening up heroic scenarios to LFG would probably have been a massive mistake, as people would expect them to be easy and they weren’t tuned for the masses. I know that sounds elitist of me but when dealing with random groups, blizz should really assume that they are full of the lowest common denominator. In their tuning they think too much of their playerbase.

I like the idea of their being a really hard dungeon, that has to be approached like a raid but isn’t a timed challenge. If I was still in a guild, and I could interest my guild in that, then I think that would be great for the game. It would provide a really good option. However, the option that is missing in the game right now, isn’t necessarily the tuning of dungeons but the rewards that they give.

If mythic dungeons were like mini-raids, then they should drop comparable rewards with normal or heroic raids. It’s heroic dungeons now that are causing the issue, they should drop LFR level gear. That way I wouldn’t be wanting dungeons that drop higher gear, as I would have what was fair already. With each new raid patch either update the gear offered so it remained comparable with LFR, or even better bring out a new tier of dungeons, just like it was in the old days.

There needs to be progression outside of raids. If mythic dungeons fill that gap I’ll be ecstatic but I remain doubtful that they will. It is likely that they will cater to the same crowd that raids do, those that have the time and commitment to form their own groups, not those that play solo, and only have very limited time.

We’ll have to see.