The Arena is Killing this Game

I'm noticing a very disturbing trend in this game, recently. I'll be trying to run 5 man instances, and will be looking for a tank. I do /who Shattrath, and after searching through a number of the other cities, find that by far the largest concentration of different people (and Warriors in particular) are in that city.

I go down the list, messaging them and asking them if they are willing to come. Usually it's the Steamvault, but sometimes it's the Shattered Halls as well. To a man, the answer is no thanks. From my time on the forums, I've begun to realise that nearly every one of those 70s I see in Shattrath will be in queue for the Arena.

I've been looking at the Arena gear recently, as well. From what I've been able to figure out, it's better than just about everything else in the game, other than maybe Black Temple stuff. Hence, people have very little real incentive to do group PvE any more.

The forums have become even more toxic than usual recently, as well. There has been an unbelievable storm of crying and screaming among Hunters in particular, but other classes as well, for class changes. Every change however that is asked for is purely in relation to the Arena, and anyone who dares voice concern about the effect that this might have on PvE balance is immediately and ruthlessly shouted down.

Another negative change on the forum has been the use of someone's Arena rating as a measure of the worth of their opinion. It is now standard practice on the forum, that if you don't agree with what someone has written, to simply use their arena rating (or lack of, according to your own standards) to entirely discredit said person's opinion, rather than attempting to mount a counter-argument based on the actual topic at hand.

I believe that all of these elements, both within the game and outside it, (in terms of the forum) are contributing to the continual decline of player population within the game. Some of you may not have heard of a man called Tom Chilton, or Kalgan, who is apparently the lead designer of the pvp elements of the game, among other things. This man, it turns out, was also the lead designer of the Ultima Online expansion, Age of Shadows, which is generally blamed for the downfall of that game.

Age of Shadows introduced a particular dungeon, Dungeon Doom, which was very different in design to the earlier dungeons of the game. Dungeon Doom ended up becoming the sole focus of nearly everyone who played the game; you didn't log into UO to do anything other than farm Dungeon Doom, in the end.

Dungeon Doom also led to UO becoming much more explicitly item-based than it had been previously, but you didn't get the items from there in order to use them anywhere else, because there was nothing else in the game that was more difficult than Dungeon Doom. People got the items from Dungeon Doom solely for the purpose of being able to claim that they were inherently superior to others who didn't have said items.

Hence, what had once been a varied and worthwhile game degenerated into nothing other than an e-peen contest. Not long before I finally left the game for good, I actually saw one particular character outside the Britain Bank with nearly all of the rare drops from Dungeon Doom equipped.

The character's name? Peter North.

Voice Chat Adventures

I was finally able to get a group together to do the quest chain in Shadowmoon Valley for the Stalker's Helmet of Second Sight. Now I just need to farm up enough cash for two more Delicate Living Rubies, in addition to money for my flying mount, in addition to another possible spec adjustment once I hit 650-700 Ag.

During this group though, I had voice chat going and was talking to one of the people in the group; it's a great addition to the game, and I strongly recommend trying it out if you haven't already. I had a really interesting conversation with a guy from America while playing an alt for a bit on Demon Soul the other day, too. It's great for meeting people.

My first experience with it was also a scenario where a guy flew with me over to the Black Temple and showed me some great mobs for cash and signet ring grinding, which was probably the best of the three, as well. I'm trying to be a bit more social in the game, and am discovering that I can learn a lot of secrets about earning gold and other things by doing so.

It could just be my hardware, but I wasn't able to get it going via Linux, unfortunately...it's one feature that is Windows only, it seems. That is a bit of a shame, because it means I can't have OpenGL, (which I love) with lower latency and voice chat all at once.

Starting to worry

So, my guild originally wanted to start running Kara at the beginning of this month. They didn't have enough people then still, so it got pushed back to the middle of the month.

That would mean the 14th. Which is five days from now.

I honestly don't think I'm going to make it. I've just got my epic land mount yes, which means I now only have to save for my flying mount...but making 1k gold in 5 days? Not only that, Jubei'Thos is dead for groups. I tried to find a group for Durnholde, because apparently I have to run that for Kara attunement; nothing. I've been trying to get SH groups for some of the drops there as well, again; nothing. Even when I can get groups, it will be with every class other than a tank available.

I always thought also that guilds were actually supposed to work together even as far as attunement and so on was concerned; I guess I'm just on at the wrong time of day, but whenever I do get on, I'm lucky if there are three other people there.

I'm not sure what to do. I'm thinking I should continue getting ready at my own pace, and when it happens, it happens. If I'm ready to go in time with the current guild, great...if I'm not, I may end up having to leave and seek another guild that are ready at the same time I am.

WoW in Linux

Recently I started having technical difficulties while running WoW. I'm in Australia, and in addition to the lag problems a lot of other people have mentioned, even with the Oceanic servers, I was also having problems where at times I'd get randomly disconnected from the server.

Like a lot of people, I initially thought the server was to blame. However, I'd previously installed WoW in Linux as part of a different project of mine, (I've been using Linux in some form or another for close to a dozen years now, on and off...although Windows has remained my primary system for most of that time) and had already noticed in passing that my latency seemed a bit lower under Linux. I went back over to it a couple of times recently when a lot of other people were complaining of lag or dropouts from the server...and lo and behold, for me those problems entirely disappeared.

My ping times are consistently under 400 ms, (occasionally under 300 for brief periods) I never experience the types of disconnections I used to under Windows, and the OpenGL rendered graphics are really gorgeous, and moreso in some ways than Direct3D in Windows. On the negative side, the currently experimental voice chat wasn't working when I tried it this morning, but I'm fairly sure that's due to my sound card.

Of particular relevance to Hunters though is the fact that a below-400 ms ping time means I have at least some chance of being able to perform a proper 1:1.5 shot rotation, which is the recommended rotation for Marksmanship or Survival, without anywhere near as many stray shots. The other reason why this is a good thing is because if I'm not having stray autoshots between my specials, it raises my odds of having crit specials dramatically...so I've started seeing scenarios at times at least where I can fire Steady, Arcane, Auto, and get a 1k+ crit on both specials in a row. Pretty awesome stuff.

If you're interested in having a crack at doing this yourself, you can download Ubuntu and then go to the WoWWiki page for more information. If you do a search in Google for "Ubuntu wiki wow", (without the quotes) you'll also find a link to the Ubuntu wiki. You might want to go to that wiki anyway if you're new to Ubuntu in general, and have a read up about it. It does take a little bit of doing, as most things with Linux do, and if you're not technically inclined you might want to leave it...but if you're feeling adventurous, give it a try. :)

For non-American players, the lag reduction is probably going to be the single biggest draw, although some of you might be interested in seeing how things look with the different rendering engine, as well. It's very nice.

I have links!

I discovered technorati, and lo and behold, people are linking to me! Only four at the moment, but still...cool. :)

http://teethandclaws.blogspot.com/ - Teeth and Claws. A feral Druid from Garona server, apparently. Seems have quite a lot of writing on different stuff.

http://xi-perience.blogspot.com/ - Xizang has been one of my most regular commenters here.

http://aspectofthehare.blogspot.com/ - Aspect of the Hare. A fellow Hunter, by the looks. Greetings. :)

The last reaction was actually from BRK, the veritable Godfather of Beast Mastery, who I have a sidebar link to.

I also want to mention Wolfstalker, whose blog I quietly added a link to, but who I haven't actually explicitly mentioned. He/she (I think it's a she, but not entirely sure) seems a wonderful person. She's written a tutorial for new Hunters which I think I have mentioned before, and can often be seen on the Hunter forum, braving the trolls, the elitism, and the vitriol, and often being the source of the only answer many new Hunters to the forum end up getting to their questions.

A /salute to you all! :)

I love my guild :)

Thanks for all the feedback, guys. :) If anything, the single best thing it confirms is that yes, people are still reading, despite me being so slack with updating lately!

Also, in terms of my current spec choice; I feel like I need to explain something. (As in, I'm currently 0/40/21)

Everyone who reads this ought to know by now that yes, I do love Survival. However, as I said to my class officer this morning, the main reasons why I've loved it is for the trapping and melee stuff. Being honest, until you have around 700 agility and 25%+ crit, compared to the other two trees though, the ranged damage just isn't there.

Another thing I said to my class officer earlier is that despite Survival being my native spec, I was willing on at least a temporary basis to respec in whatever manner we mutually decided was in the best interest of the guild. He has been awesome about this as well; there has been absolutely no pressure on me to go in any direction whatsoever. A fear of that is what kept me out of guilds for a long time, because I read a lot of posts on the forum where people complained that their guild or raid leaders arbitrarily demanded that they respec according to said leaders' misconceptions, without giving any thought to that individual's playstyle.

So...although I'm most likely going to go back to 0/20/41 Surv once I have the ag and crit to make it work, for the moment I'm staying Marks, by my own choice, in order to improve my damage. This isn't just for my own place in meters, either. The thing that prompted me to start looking at temporary alternatives was a guild run to the Shadow Labyrinth, where we wiped three times on Murmur. Someone else asked why we were wiping on him, since it actually seemed like a fairly straightforward fight. It hit me as to why we were; the group DPS just wasn't there at the level it should have been.

Anyway, I have to go back into the game and get busy, now. I've worked out that I need another 14 water primals to get my epic land mount, and a total of 70 water primals for my basic flying mount. I'm probably never going to want to go into Skysong Lake again, after this. ;-) Although I'm thinking maybe I should mix it up with some air farming from SMV as well...since they sell for more, too.

Thanks for sticking with me even though my posting has slowed down a little. If anyone's interested, there's a song I'm listening to a lot while preparing for Kara recently...it's a good one for it. It's an Australian song called, "More than a Game," and is rather difficult to get, but if you want it yourself, email me and I'll tell you where you can get it.

Also...if you don't have a guild where the people treat each other as well as they do in the one I've recently joined, you owe it to yourselves IMHO to /gquit and find one that is like that. :)

The Warlock Rock

I've finally got sick of trying to run the Shattered Halls and Steamvaults for the gear I wanted to go to Kara with, primarily because said stuff never did actually drop. I'd discovered a viable alternative was the bind on pickup epics at the top of the leatherworking profession, and I'd already gained enough rep with a few factions to be able to pick up some nice ones.

However, my dilemma became that my two professions were engineering and skinning. I didn't want to drop engineering, so that meant skinning had to go. However, the next problem was that the AH at the time didn't have much light leather, and what they did have cost over a gold each.

Enter the Warlock.

I'd had a Warlock alt for a while, but I didn't enjoy playing it much because, although the playstyle is good for instances, for soloing I grew bored very quickly due to it being insanely overpowered. However, I realised that for rapid farming to support my main Hunter, it would be exactly what I was looking for. According to the information I've been able to find online, the Warlock currently holds the proverbial gold straw hat, with a BM Hunter still coming in second. Life Tap and Drain Life are apparently the reasons, in that they allow the Warlock to use mobs to regain health and mana, effectively allowing the class limited invincibility, and close to zero downtime.

Thus, my plan is to level him up as quickly as possible, while also sending light leather from WC to Mirsh, where I need it at this point for leatherworking. Once the lock gets high enough that soloing instances starts becoming a possibility, I'll drop mining for enchanting and focus on using it to make money via disenchanting blue drops from the Scarlet Monastery and RFD. Once I get the lock up, this should help me get my flying mount a lot faster, too.

Any advice people could give me on a good farming spec for the lock would be good, too...I've also been told that stam is the main attribute that they need...is that true?