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description= Originally a pair of views on gaming, it s now musings by Redbeard on video games (mainly MMOs), board games, RPGs, and other geeky hobbies.;
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activity has been a driver of the more controversial changes to wow over the years from the automated group finder to lfr lfd s raid level equivalent given that blizzard has stoked the fomo furnace over the years it s no surprise that raid and dungeon teams have spent a lot of time trying to find the right player to help them clear content we re not talking about friends and family raid teams who raid in a more social manner but raiders who have aspirations of heroic and maybe even mythic clears of content oh and then there s puggers who don t belong to a regular raid team for various reasons yet still want to experience group content it goes without saying that pugging is a bit of a hit or miss activity in mmos in general without even taking into consideration any requirements placed on the prospective raid leads the wow community has responded to those needs and the fomo driver by creating addons and websites to assist people in finding the best players for their needs to say that these have been controversial has been a bit of an understatement anybody remember the initial release of gearscore back in wrath there it is in all its glory i had this from another post i can t remember which one now the gearscore addon caused a huge row in the wow community by attempting to reduce a player s raid usefulness to a single number the gearscore itself which led to entries such as this in trade chat need 2 dps for icc 25 gs 5000 req the irony about gatekeepers using gearscore as a barrier to entry is that all it provided was a compilation of the ilevels of your gear not whether you were any good in a raid i mean by the end of wrath of the lich king my ret paladin quintalan had a gearscore of something like 5200 and he never set a single foot in a raid instance all that gear he got by grinding badges by running random heroic instances could i get into some of these raids with these gs requirements certainly did it mean i was a good raider certainly not why dredge up gearscore again didn t we have a repeat of gs in wrath classic oh yes wrath classic where people swore right and left that they weren t going to use it until it came out and people used it like crazy once more the thing is gearscore is just one incremental step along the way to the current status of pugging in wow parse culture has always been around to an extent but ever since gearscore and the rise of fomo parse culture has been pushing the envelope of what it means to be a good player notice i didn t say good raider but good player if you raid or run instances and you pug you have to deal with people who think all of your qualities as a wow player can be reduced to a single number a color or a summary chart and now here comes archon from the archon website as of april 7 2025 archon is brought to you by the same team that created the warcraftlogs app and website and the tl dr is that it takes all of the searching through warcraftlogs and places it into a tooltip addon so you can perform real time analysis of who to take as a pug in your raid gearscore on steroids basically this addon has been the subject of quite a bit of discussion on mmo champion and has seen its share of youtube videos of course archon has been around in early access for months now but a wider release apparently happened last week ish the current version everybody can use but if you subscribe as in pay real money you can get more info than what the free users get it s not as if gatekeeping is new but this is making gatekeeping easier than ever before just rolling up and hovering over players allows you to see at a glance what it would have taken people a lot longer to review manually on warcraftlogs even then it still doesn t tell you everything archon can t tell you if you do the mechanics right in a raid and if you perform a critical job which typically also means having a lower parse you re punished for it look at vanilla naxx as an example i was on wall duty on maexxna and would be tasked with calling out and freezing the scarabs on anub rekhan both of which are critical tasks for success on those bosses both of them also required me to be basically giving up on my parses for the good of the raid with archon however i d be punished for such behavior with a lesson to be learned is that i need to play less as a teammate and more of an asshole and who wants to play with someone like that needless to say there have been some interesting takes on this from the comments from bellular s video above from the mmo champion thread linked to above i tried to avoid some of the more toxic responses in those threads especially when you see people pooh poohing the whole thing as it s easy to to get xxx parses basically trolling everybody and it kind of spiraled out of control in spots from there still if the best advice to give people is join a guild and raid with them well i have some experience there no this was not me from the comments from bellular s video above my own experience with guilds over the past 15 years of playing mmos hasn t been that inspiring the guilds i ve been in the longest over this time have been by quite a wide margin the guild the kids and i have in lotro heroes of the old forest on the gladden server and rades old blogger guild puggers anonymous on moonrunner us the retail guilds from back in the day either imploded with the the force of a thousand suns or faded away to nothing the guilds i ve been a part of in classic wow either faded away or swung heavily toward hardcore to the point where it was unbearable to remain we want to raid with friends indeed after years of those shenanigans i fail to see why i d want to sign up for it all over again just to raid or run dungeons and let s be honest for a minute if my experience is pretty typical i d say that joining any guild will have issues because of the cliques that have developed over the time the guild has been around unless guild leadership makes an actual effort to include new people in group activities any new guildie will find themselves it a double bind where they can t get into guild runs and they can t get into pugs and really if the solution is continuously guild hop until you find one that you like at what point to you decide to go and do something else that aside i think this is just more of the same as far as wow goes for the people who seek out drama they ll find it in spades with this addon for the people who are part of a guild of any real cohesion then this is a non issue for them for people who stick to lfr and normal heroic mode instances and delves this won t affect them at all it s only the people who want to try something different to push themselves beyond the basics that will find issues exacerbated by this addon if blizzard wants to turn the casual crowd into something more then this addon and the community culture will torpedo that but maybe blizzard doesn t want to bother trying any more because that s not what they measure success at in microsoft there it s all about whether you met your profit numbers and if another mount or two in the cash shop will get them there that s what we should expect i had to go login to retail to make sure i had the server right eta corrected grammar and some wording posted by redbeard at 6 00 am 2 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels addons fomo guild pugs retail videos wow classic friday august 30 2024 a short ponderable for a friday one of the things i ve just gotten into the habit of doing is logging into curseforge before i enter into wow considering that it only takes a few seconds to make sure my addons are updated it s not a big deal but yesterday i just realized that something is a bit out of date no not my addons she s nice and all but why hasn t alexstrasza been replaced by that elf that looks like a purple female version of kael thas either someone at curseforge is lying down on the job or blizz hasn t provided a new graphic for use i remember that when dragonflight released this graphic was already set at about a month before the dragon isles opened up blaugust2024 posted by redbeard at 6 00 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels blaugust2024 addons musings retail wednesday july 27 2022 third party ponderables just how important are achievements to the retail community it may not seem like big deal but i wondered about it today because i was thinking about the arms race that blizz found itself engaged with addons such as deadly boss mods according to far too many videos and blog posts i ve come across over the past couple of years the complexity of raids has amped up by blizz in an attempt to counter dbm and other third party addons providing a counter to the already existing boss mechanics dbm provides alerts on certain mechanics so blizz makes them more complex so dbm adjusts to compensate for the complex mechanics and so on and so forth but i wondered about achievements for a pretty simple reason blizz has the ability to sense third party addons and if it detects them blizz has the ability to encode a change to wow to block achievements based on the presence of said third party addons think of it this way you push hard for a world first kill and you finally get it but blizz denies you the achievement because you were using addons or certain types of addons that wait for certain flags and act on those flags such as dbm i d presume that the wow community would be a wee bit upset about that but just how upset is something i have no insight on if wow wanted to kill off addons that s one way of achieving that goal without resorting to an official ban on addons that s for sure of course blizz would have to dial back the boss mechanics if they wanted to give raids a fighting chance against them but still yeah i think the popping of the dbm bubble like the fed raising interest rates is probably an extreme solution to the problem but i have no idea just how raids would function in a no addons allowed wow environment it obviously works in other mmos such as ff xiv and swtor but wow is an mmo built upon third party addons like dbm and elvui discuss eta changed some grammar posted by redbeard at 6 36 pm 5 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels addons mmos musings retail thursday june 23 2022 creating wilderness when there is none one day a couple of decades ago i was working away at my job as a software qa engineer with the npr interview program fresh air playing through my headset the subject of terry gross interview that day was jon krakauer the author of into the wild for those unfamiliar with the story it s about 22 year old recent college grad chris mccandless who grew disenchanted with his family and decided to basically take off on his own he abandoned his car gave his entire savings to charity and even burned the cash in his wallet and set off into the unknown eventually his body was found in the alaskan wilderness having starved to death jon originally wrote an article for outside magazine about chris and later expanded it into the book we know of today after listening to the interview i made a point of stopping by our local bookstore on the way back home and picking up a copy after a week or so of staring at it wondering whether i was ready to read it i finally gave in and devoured the thing in a day today you can find into the wild and jon s most well known book into thin air in summer reading lists for high schools and universities when i last visited my local bookstore into the wild was on the large summer reading list shelf surrounded by more classic fare such as dune and the aeneid into the wild is a tragedy caused by hubris but a fascinating one nevertheless when i read the book one thing kept coming back to haunt me just how in the age of maps and global knowledge of entire areas did chris mccandless get lost in the wilderness even in the 90s before smart phones that were more powerful than the best pcs of the era you had access to everything you needed to survive in the alaskan wilderness where you were and where to go chris wanted to go to a blank spot on the map and without any of those left he decided the best way to achieve his goal was to simply get rid of the map i ve thought a lot over the years about that decision chris mccandless made to throw away the map because it has a certain amount of appeal while it is frequently construed to sticking your fingers in your ears and going lalalalala i can t heeeear you if you want to test yourself without relying upon modern conveniences the cheapest way to do so is to remove those conveniences how much of a challenge is the challenge if sensors and monitors tell you everything you need to know in the same way a gps vest is worn by footballers these days certainly even with all of the advanced tech in the world there s still plenty of challenge and in quite a few endeavors that challenge can still prove fatal i suppose that is the same sort of impulse and hubris that causes people to ignore instruction manuals when installing building something only with potentially far more disastrous results the thing that gnaws at me about chris throwing away the map is that i do that sort of thing in some of my own endeavors when i was about 13 or so my parents drove the family up to indianapolis to visit the children s museum if you ever are in indy it is worth a visit if your kid or you likes dinosaurs from theculturetrip com one of the exhibits there was about gears and levers and among the interactive displays they had there were two differing gears with their teeth intertwined the idea was to provide an example as to see which could move first the smaller or the larger if you know your mechanical engineering or you ve ever ridden a bike with multiple gears you ought to know that the smaller gear has the advantage here and yes even back then i knew that courtesy of 6th grade science class but when my father offered to compete against me i chose the larger gear why because i wanted the challenge to see if i could win through physical strength even though all the advantages were with my dad of course i lost and as he began to point out why based on the display i said i already know that then you shouldn t have chosen the wrong gear he snapped and walked away yes i was an arrogant adolescent teen but how could i explain to my dad that i deliberately chose the larger gear because i wanted a physical challenge rather than the safe and smart option he was in absolutely no mood to hear about that and to him i just proved my stupidity by choosing the wrong gear rather than using my mind to choose the correct one compared to this stuff the way i play video games is pretty much small potatoes however my approach to video games and to a lesser extent boardgames and pencil and paper rpgs is to eschew the optimal or smart option and instead deliberately choose other options beca...
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