November « 2009 « Rawrcast

This week Rawrcast offers up few titillating listener questions, and pose a few of their own as we all sit and wait for the release of Icecrown. And, in their downtime this week, the Haf and Stomp, along with many members of their guild – Bound – take their online adventures to Steam. Personally, Stomp is stumped when it comes to how to approach the spawn’s smart ass Christmas list. Read more…

Gooble Gobble!!! On behalf of all the crew here at Rawrcast.com, I would like to wish you and your families all a very happy and safe Thanksgiving. Please take time to give thanks to all of the things that you have to be thankful for, like the guild bank, feign death, and howling blast. Seriously though, make sure that you are not reenacting that quest in Northrend, you know, the one in Grizzly Hills, you know…the one with the outhouse. Make sure you read up on food safety this holiday. Those leftovers that sat out on the counter for 8 hours are crawling with bugs and it’s hard to play WoW on the toilet. (I am sure SOMEONE out there has done it.)

Anyway, be safe and keep checking here for the latest podcasts and blogs!

Your Editor in Chief,

Ozi

Editor’s Note: Yes I found people playing while on the toilet. I linked it above.

The holidays are here and that usually means one thing for guilds in WoW, low attendance. Students are headed home from college for the week and working stiffs get a couple of days off to enjoy the holidays with their family. This equates to low turnouts for guild activities and a general lull that can wash over WoW throughout the holiday season.

What should you do? As much as it pains me to say it, the holidays are a great time to pick up another game. There are tons of great PC and console games out for the holiday season that can help pass the time until holiday schedules calm down. My personal recommendations: Dragon Age Origins and Torchlight.

If you plan on staying in WoW during the holidays, my advice is to write up a list of all the things you want to do in game but never seem to have the time for. Fishing, reputation grinds and achievement farming are just a handful of WOW activities that don’t require group play. Personally, I plan on leveling my Paladin up to 80 with the help of some flashy heirloom gear. If you have a handful of friends on, try jumping into some battlegrounds (I used to be a part of a three man Rogue wrecking crew, very fun).
Most important of all, take some time to hang out with RL friends and family. For me, WoW is often the most fun when I’ve taken a little time away from it.

With 3.3 fast approaching and it being the final content patch of this expansion, some of us will be lucky enough to experience the full wrath of the Lich King, but the expansion has brought about another wrath, one far more menacing than its namesake, and it is the wrath of the moron.

Bob Knight and WoW

Back during the talking tank round table, cdeagle and I exchanged comments in the chat room about tanking prowess. We both, if I remember correctly, likened tanking to running a Bob Knight motion offense. Nothing is more mesmerizing as watching a Bob Knight team, an old school 70-80’s Indiana Bob Knight team, run a well executed motion offense. Read more…

The World of Warcraft has always been a little short on the ‘War’ part. Sure we get to choose Alliance or Horde and there is some interaction in battlegrounds, but all in all, there is very, very little feeling that what you are doing in your PVE activities are contributing towards the overall war effort. Especially in Vanilla WoW, there is very little variety besides the basic, “kill X amount of mobs and return to me” or the dreaded Alliance “Fedex” quests where you bring something to another person, like horseshoes, to a NPC who is usually in another zone. Then you have to bring a second item back the first person. These quests really suck. There I said it.

Now when BC came out, we were introduced to an interesting concept. There is an external force out there that the Horde and Alliance needed to work together to overcome. The same concept is working right now in Northrend. There are still the basic sucky quests that I loathe in Wrath, but for the most part, the DK instanced starting zone and areas like the Wrathgate show that questing can be exciting and give the player a feeling of actually living up the ego-boost we all received when we entered the Wrath starting areas. Quests can be and should be more than a simple way to award gear, XP and gold. Plectical introduced an awesome concept of a traitor quest line that would somehow “prove” your allegiance to your new faction. It is an awesome read and you should check it out. My idea takes this one and pushes it completely out of the realm of anything that WoW had done. My idea is after the break.

If we can choose to switch allegiance to a faction, something that Blizzard said would never happen, then I don’t see why we can’t choose to fight on the side of the Lich King. Imagine how cool it would be if the end of the DK starting area we had a choice: fight against the Lich King, or fight for him. Other heroes of the Alliance or Horde might see the shift and choose to join the legions of undead marching down upon them too. This would in effect, create a third faction that always fights for with “Bad Guy.”

This might sound simple, but really it would change the game. Quest lines would actually mean something. How quickly and how often quests were completed would actually count towards the progress of the faction. Think of it as the ultimate meta-game. The way that we understand WoW now is that in due time, the Lich King will die and we will move on to the next Xpac. I don’t see why we can’t have some servers with the Lich King in complete control of the land and other servers with the Lich King on his last stand with his back to the wall, or throne so to speak. The possibilities are endless.

Now I understand that there are so many reasons why this wouldn’t work. Not to mention what happens to the many different story lines when Cata hits. But the idea of fighting against other human players to spread the Wrath of the Lich King or whatever Baddie Blizzard comes up with gets me all giddy in anticipation.

So how about it Blizzard, can I please, please, please do this?

lol The World of Warcraft has always been a little short on the ‘War’ part. Sure we get to choose Alliance or Horde and there is some interaction in battlegrounds, but all in all, there is very, very little feeling that what you are doing in your PVE activities are contributing towards the overall war effort. Turning in stack after stack of silk and rune cloth just doesn’t seem to be hurting the other faction all that badly. Especially in Vanilla WoW, there is very little variety besides the basic, “kill X amount of mobs and return to me” or the dreaded Alliance “Fedex” quests where you bring something to another person, like horseshoes, in Goldshire, to a NPC who is usually in another zone, like Red Ridge. Then you have to bring a second item back the first person. These quests really suck. There I said it.

Now when BC came out, we were introduced to an interesting concept. There is an external force out there that the Horde and Alliance needed to work together to overcome. The same concept is working right now in Northrend. There are still the basic sucky quests that I loathe in Wrath, but for the most part, the DK instanced starting zone and areas like the Wrathgate show that questing can be exciting and give the player a feeling of actually living up the ego-boost we all received when we entered the Wrath starting areas. Quests can be and should be more than a simple way to award gear, XP and gold. Plectical introduced an awesome concept of a traitor quest line that would somehow “prove” your allegiance to your new faction. It is an awesome read and you should check it out. My idea takes this one and pushes it completely out of the realm of anything that WoW had done. My idea is after the break. Read more…

This week Stomp welcomes a long-time twitter buddy and popular WoW web comic creator, Cadistra of WoW, Eh? and Nourish. Cadistra shares a couple of new recipes on Nourish that are sure to be a lovely addition to everyone’s Thanksgiving menu. Check out the full recipes for Trisifal Pumpkin Cookies and Anvilmar Mulled Cider, and leave a comment on Nourish to let Cadistra know how your recipes panned out! Read more…

How awesome would it be if Blizzard revisited old raid and dungeon content and tuned it for level 80 players? They’ve already deployed this model to great success wtih Onyxia and Naxxramas, why not keep the ball rolling and continue to re-tune retro content? Imagine taking a group of level 80s into Blackwing Lair or Molten Core, and instead of face rolling through the instances, you find yourself faced with a real challenge.

First off, this would be a no-brainer for Blizzard to implement. All of the assets, engineering and loot tables have already been developed. The only real work required is to re-tune the hit points of the mobs, re-allocate stats for the loot tables, and take a fresh look at the encounter to make sure that the game play experience doesn’t suffer when it’s tuned to a higher level (are there any mechanics or spells that will be over powered when they re-tune the encounter, is the encounter simply too long, etc). Re-tuning old instances would ensure that “new” content is being released on a consistent basis and the low development costs would ensure that Blizzard could still be working on new content. Read more…

Keeping a guild together for any significant amount of time in WoW is an unbelievable accomplishment. People and personalities always seem to get in the way, drama takes over the guild and keeping everyone happy seems to take an extraordinary amount of effort. If you are looking for a guild, you know, one of the good ones, then it pays to do your homework. Here are a couple of tips to finding a guild that fits your personality.

“When the student is ready, he will find his master.” It is not the other way around. Good guilds usually are not in trade channel recruiting. So when you see a guild spamming trade channel or you get a random whisper inviting you to a guild, my advice is to steer clear. The worst (and rudest) way to get an invite is to have the window pop up on your screen, “Mstrbater wants to invite you to the guild, ‘Purple headed yogurt spewers.’” Steer clear of these invites and follow up with a nice /rasp for their efforts.

So how do you find a good guild? My advice is to ask around. Join a PUG group for a dungeon your level and find the best players in terms to gear/play-style, but don’t discount personality at all. In fact, I really think that personality wins out over gear check every day. The ret pally with uber gear but an ugly attitude when you accidentally pull agro in Dead Mines probably will not be a great raid teammate in end-game content. Ideally, your future guild mates will be people that you would want to hang out with in RL.

So when you find a good player and ask him about his guild, you should check for a couple of things. One, what is the guild focused on? Is it end-game content stuff? Progression raiding? Is it a causal group of players that is out just for fun? Is it one that dabbles in end-game raiding? When are the raids are usually set up? Are they willing to gear you up for encounters that you have not caught up to? Are there guild dues or mandatory meetings? Finally, what is the overall attitude of the guild?

These are some very important questions to ask before you submit yourself to join the guild. If too many of these questions do not match what you are looking for, consider looking for another guild. Why join a guild if you can’t raid on their schedule? Or why join a guild that raids when you can, but there are no slots open? Some guilds have a set group of raiders that never changes, so if you can’t get in on the raid, why join?

How the guild handles your request to join the them also says a lot about how the guild is run and organized. It also says a lot about the effort that the leadership has put into developing the guild. If you are not directed to a website to submit an application, you might not be joining an established/organized guild. The website says a lot about the guild’s communication setup and allows dissemination of information even though people are away from the game. (Like at work.) It is virtually impossible to get every member of a guild online at the same time, so the website allows everyone to be on the same page as far as where the guild is heading. Also there should be some sort of interview with an officer in the guild where both of you can gauge how well of a fit you are going to make.

None of these are hard and fast rules. Not all guilds are going to fit into these guidelines, but it is my experience that the guidelines that I outlined here will go a long way to making your experience in WoW a pleasant one. My guild, The Blackwater Seawolves on the Argent Dawn server-US, is celebrating its 5 year anniversary on November 23. Now that is quite an accomplishment.

allakhazam.com

Keeping a guild together for any significant amount of time in WoW is an unbelievable accomplishment. People and personalities always seem to get in the way, drama takes over the guild and keeping everyone happy seems to take an extraordinary amount of effort. If you are looking for a guild, you know, one of the good ones, then it pays to do your homework. Here are a couple of tips to finding a guild that fits your personality.

“When the student is ready, he will find his master.” It is not the other way around. Good guilds usually are not in trade channel recruiting. So when you see a guild spamming trade channel or you get a random whisper inviting you to a guild, my advice is to steer clear. The worst (and rudest) way to get an invite is to have the window pop up on your screen, “Mstrbater wants to invite you to the guild, ‘Purple headed yogurt spewers.’” Steer clear of these invites and follow up with a nice /rasp for their efforts. Read more…

I came across this interview at WoW.com and was absolutely stunned. The play experience described by Mixler was so far removed from my day to day experience in WoW that I had to take a step back and admire the meta game that he’s helped to establish on Feathermoon. For those of us who are reading impaired, here is a quick run down.

Mixler has formed an Alliance Guildwatch on Feathermoon that is designed solely to defend all Alliance held territories from Horde incursions. He uses a blend of scouts, spies, defensive tactics and global chat channels to organize defenses. They operate under a strict code of honor, forgoing any offensive strikes against the Horde to focus entirely on defense. Read more…

Since I’ve found myself listening to more and more podcasts the longer I’ve played WoW, I now have a library of over 20 podcasts that I’ve subscribed to. Parsing through the massive list of WoW podcasts on ITunes can be a chore and there is generally little rhyme or reason to which casts are quality. Here is a list of some of the more obscure casts that are among my favorite.

Proudmoore Pansies: This cast serves as a much needed deep breath from a game that can oftentimes be extremely serious. The two hosts, Josh and Nate, approach WoW with a heaping dose of common sense and humor that drives home the point that WoW is after all, just a game. Both hosts provide an interesting look into the day to day operations of running a guild, the difficulties of getting players to sign up for raids and the week to week triumphs and disappointments that they experience in game. This is a must listen. Read more…