Lack of posting

Sorry about the lack of posting over the last month. I've lost a bit of steam when it comes to playing WoW and the blog follows right along. For some reason Hornlove's guild which was running so well one day fell apart the next. I haven't had the energy to try and find another yet. Eve Online has been good for a bit. If you're reading this then you probably want to hear about WoW-related stuff so I won't start posting Eve junk.

The last 5 days have been spent doing work in a feeble attempt to get a demo out for our booth at the game developer's conference which started this week. It's been forever since I programmed stuff for the PC and never for windows, so I'm afraid even with the huge push to get the demo out I still came up short. There just wasn't enough time. It was quite depressing.

Well lets try and get something WoW-related here.. Failsauce got exalted with the Kalu'ak, so that makes all 3 of my 80's with a fishing pole. Yay! Just in time for them to nerf the hell out of fishing, making it easier to level up. She also was able to get into a Naxx group last week *gasp, I know!* and pulled some decent upgrades, including the T7.5 chest. It was nice to finally get Failsauce some Naxx-action. Most of the time there are no spots available for DK-DPS.

Ulduar can't be far away. I should try and get into a new guild soon. Things will pick up.

New computer, yeah baby!

Last Wednesday I bought a new computer, mostly for playing WoW and EVE Online. Previously I had been using a Dell that had worked very admirably for over 5 years. (I also bought that one for playing WoW at the time of release). It was certainly time for an upgrade! What I ended up with was another Dell, the XPS Studio with a 24-inch 1900x1080 screen. What a difference! Now running at 60FPS in Naxx, Dalaran, anywhere. It's certainly going to breathe more life into computer gaming for me.

I also have the power to run Fraps and hope to have some movies up here soon. Messing around with the Vista movie editor was a bit frustrating. I wanted to add multiple sound channels (one for music, one for narration, etc) but it was incapable of doing that. Also, uploading movies to YouTube really destroys their quality as they're reprocessed for low bandwidth. I'm not sure how people keep the quality high when sharing the movies online. It will be a learning process.

Anyways just thought I'd share my good fortune. I had been saving for a couple months to get this upgrade. Now if I can still pay next month's rent I'll be just fine. ;)

The shelf-life of a Twink

I read an interesting post about how Twinks will be losing a lot of enchants come 3.1 on General today. It seems a lot of people actually really hate Twinks! Although I don't have a twink myself, I always liked the idea of maxxing out a char at level 19 or maybe 29.. get all the best gear and enchants. One thing I like about it is you won't have to do a lot of work on them when a new expansion hits. Another thing is, nobody should have you outgeared (by much anyways), so that's one less factor to worry about when testing your meddle.

Some twink-backers in the thread say that the enchants, which are mostly stamina-boosting, help the battles last a bit longer and help people from getting 2-shot by the burst damage. Without much low-level BG experience I can't say one way or the other but that claim does seem to make a lot of sense. In any case I still think I'll get a twink made and see how it is. I planned to get my Banker-guy rogue up to level 18 for those "sprints" from the mailbox to the AH and back. One more level isn't going to hurt. =)

Blizzard hates dwarves.

First they completely neglect to give Find Treasure a use in all of Northrend. Now they are nerfing the hell out of Stoneform, getting rid of the 8-second immunity to poison, disease, etc. What gives? Is there any reason to choose a Dwarf anymore?

I haven't played much WoW lately I'm afraid. I went from 2 guilds to 0 in the span of 3 days. I quit Hiredgun's guild. It was getting quite full and I was unable to make one of the raid days (Thursday). Hornlove's guild (Chaotic) sort of imploded overnight. Some drama between the guildmaster and his girlfriend caused all sorts of havok. Our 25-man naxx (with 16 pug members) failed to kill KT for the first time, well.. ever! Chaotic may reform in some way, we'll have to see where it goes.

One thing that amuses me about CCP (eve online) is how non-corprate the company is. Check out this "blue" response to a player who is speculating about a coming feature in the game. Can you imagine a Blizzard representative telling a player to "Cry some more?" /lol

A weekend without WoW.

Most of the time when I don't post over the weekend it's because I'm playing WoW instead. This weekend I was busy with other games. Killzone 2 for the Playstation 3 is amazing. I completed the single-player campaign and had my ass handed to me online. I also was busy getting my Eve Online accounts in order after reactivating them. I didn't even have time to play with this new toy.

So if posts here are a little slow here lately, you know why.

Dual-Spec, Tri-Spec, Quad-Spec.. argh

I usually don't write about other blog posts. Maybe I will do more of that, however, since I often can't think of original things to talk about. BigBearButt talked about how some Noob ranted about Dual Spec. The rant was very good and certainly made me think about it. Without going into detail, I'll just say that I'm starting to like the idea of dual-spec less and less. Miss Elf found some people complaining about dual-spec as well.. except this conversation begins with crying about the 1000g price tag for the privilege. *rolls eyes* Taffybag, Stompalina, and Half briefly discuss Dual-Spec in the RawrBitchRawr podcast which they did live for the first time (grats!). Floramel at Grimmtooth's Troops had something to say about Dual-Spec, as did Santyn from Lethal Shots. Now Hunters, Mages, Rogues, and Warlocks are single-purpose (DPS) classes, but that doesn't stop Perzyx (Crooked Bow) from writing about how he may use Dual-Spec to switch to and from a Survival build and Lassirra giving us her take on Wow Insider.

Ok, I think I got it out of my system. I'm feeling a tug in another direction. BTW, Eve Online players... after years and years of asking for it, we're finally going to get a skill queue. Might be time to fire up those inactive accounts.

Loot Rules

It's Tuesday and that means a naxx run with HiredGun. This run was supposed to be the group's first full clear in one night. Before it gets started tho, there's an announcement that loot rules are changed. Basically there are 2 tiers of members coming. "Raiders" and "Other". If you are of "Raider" status, you get 120 "loot points" to spend on items, "Other" get 100. When an item comes up for distribution, you private message the raid leader with your bid (minimum 10 loot points). Right away, you can see this isn't completely fair. Why should certain people start with more points? Because they show up every week? I dunno maybe this is normal procedure for most people, but I am of the beleif that when running a raid, everyone should have an equal shake.

Only main-specs can bid on an item. It's a blind auction, nobody knows what anyone else is bidding. Naturally, whoever makes the highest bid gets the item and the "loot points" are deducted from them. If there is a tie for the highest bids, those people roll to determine a winner. If nobody makes a bid on an item, it then directly goes to Off-spec, and people roll on the item. Whoever wins the off-spec roll gets the item without spending ANY loot points. Now here's the thing that annoys me about the off-spec thing... During this off-spec roll, if the item would have been good for your main-spec, YOU AREN'T ALLOWED TO ROLL ON IT. So if I'm a hunter, a mage, or a rogue, basically you'll never get an off-spec roll "free" item. Very unfair to the single purpose class I say. There were MANY off-spec rolls last night. Raid leader's response "oh well, if you let main-spec roll on it they'd never use their loot points." So f'in what? If someone is going to let off-spec roll with them on an item, they're taking a big chance that they're going to lose it rather then spend the 10 points they'd need with a bid. Just let them roll if that's what they want to do.

So why was this system put into place? Apparently last week there was some complaints about a somewhat-scrub mage taking 4 greed items and then winning his need roll on the KT mage ring. *shrug* I've personally never had a problem with the 1 Need, 1 T7 need, unlimited main-spec greed system. I guess some people do not like it tho when someone gets 3-4 items and then scores the nice KT loot as well. What does it really matter tho? The stuff the guy won with his greed items couldn't have set anyone back really that much? They always had the option to use their need on any of that stuff. Besides that, there are going to be days when the mage can't win anything on a roll. It all evens out.

What's happening is this... The very well-geared members of the raid (that perhaps only need an item from KT) don't want to have to roll against scrubs who still need stuff from the rest of the raid. So if you go into naxx knowing you need a drop from KT and nothing else, I can see why you like this system. Btw there was still a Pally last night who won *5* items in the run using these new rules, including an off-spec piece and a T7.5 item. Weren't the new rules supposed to prevent such a thing? Was this unfair? Guess not, since it wasn't competing with anything the raid leader was rolling on, and this Pally didn't have any points to spend on KT.

Is this system one you've seen before? It's not DKP, the points don't carry over to the next raid. Any thoughts?