World of Matticus

It took about two years. It’s nice to be acknowledged finally though. I don’t hold any ill feelings towards the WoW Magazine or Blizzard.

Picture this. You’ve retired from raiding. You have a nice, quiet home in the interior. Maybe there’s a river or a stream nearby. Everyday, you sit back on your Pyrium reinforced lawnchair with your fishing pole provided graciously by the Kalu’ak when you helped them out in Northrend those years ago. Some days you get a bite, some days you whiff and get nothing. It’s a peaceful life where you do nothing else but fish and drink beer everyday.

But you’re tired of it, aren’t you? You want to Brett Favre your way back into the raiding scene. Maybe Michael Jordan your way into the guild again. There’s a right way and then there’s a not-as-right way.

Go back in time for a moment when you explained to your leaders that you wanted to stop raiding. At the time, you probably figured it was a permanent thing. You had a new job, new spouse, or maybe you were just sick of the game. Whatever it was, you couldn’t commit anymore and your leaders understood, they wished you the best and said you could keep your characters there.

But then you said something like this:

“I’m going to quit raiding but let me know if you need me to pitch in for a day or something.”

Saying that doesn’t work for me. It’s nice of players to offer their services like that on a part time manner. The reality is that leaders have a hard time planning for unexpected contingencies. It’s not always possible to provide any kind of reasonable notice. If you happen to be online and the guild is desperate for a spot, sure you got lucky.

As a leader though, I don’t like being placed in that situation of having to depend on a person who has said they wanted to step back from raiding. Once I hear the plug pull, that’s it for me. I’ll still be friends with them easily and there will be no hard feelings. In my eyes though, when a player quits, they quit. There’s no inbetween. I’d rather pull in a new recruit and trial them in the raid. I would only pull in a retired player after every avenue was exhausted. I can tell you right now that no leader wants to rely on someone who said that they were quitting raiding.

Leaders prefer the safety and security of knowing that players will do their best to attend raids regularly. Having a question mark over the head of someone who decides to raid at their own whim doesn’t help the rest of the group.

So you want to come back

Then say so.

Let your leaders know that circumstances have changed. Maybe your scheduling is different or your living arrangements allowed you to raid again (or you sacrificed something important to your significant other for the ability to raid). You need to explicitly sit down with the officers and tell it to them instead of constantly saying “Hey, I’m around in case you can’t find anyone.” That just doesn’t work and it leads to a bunch of misunderstanding especially if the raid leader’s trying to respect your wishes and not have to resort to you, the retired player, all the time.

I never really understood it. Either you can (and want to) raid or you’re not able to. Just being in between seems to be detrimental to the raid at best. Maybe one of you readers can shed some light if you’re in such a situation?

My blog is 4 years old today!

Thanks to all of you turkeys, clowns, gnomes and gators that have subscribed and put up with my insanity. Work must be that boring, eh? Hat tip to all the guest posters, the team and the supporters that have continued to give me the fortitude to continue writing.

So a quick informal survey. What’re you interested in seeing more of topics wise (or anything in general)? There are some days where I come up with a blog post idea and then realize I wrote about that back in 2009. Not that there’s anything wrong with revisiting old topics for discussion as long as I add a fresh perspective to it, of course.

Monocle smile.

EDIT: By the way guys? Your GMs called. They asked me to ask you to stop putting Amani Hex Sticks in the bank!

Hot out of Gamescom is the announcement of things we’ll see in patch 4.3

• Deathwing’s raid and a set of 5-man dungeons
• Transmogrification: Ability to customize look of armor
• Armor closet
• Raid finder

Sources: Kotaku, WoW Insider, Battle.Net

This means the thrilling conclusion to Cataclysm is approaching. What an incredibly short expansion cycle. I’m quite curious as to what type of bosses we’ll be seeing in Deathwing’s raid. Perhaps some elementals? Other black dragons? Select minions that we stomped out in Deepholm?

On Transmogrification

Who knows how many typos are going to be made? Transmogrify, not transmorgify. I’ll need to remember this. On the feature itself, I am really pissed. Why? Because it means I have to go on the tier 2 hunt all over again! For me, it’s either going to be tier 2, tier 5 or tier 6. I disenchanted all of my old gear as we went from expansion to expansion because I simply ran out of room. I believe both tier 2 and tier 6 had the entire outfit (all 8 main pieces). Thankfully, I kept all my weapons (Val’anyr and Benediction).

This means I’ll need to set up raiding expeditions into:

• Serpentshrine Cavern
• Tempest Keep
• Blackwing Lair
• Black Temple
• Sunwell
• Caverns of Time: Mount Hyjal

Damnit.

On Raid Finder

Finally, Chilton explained a new feature coming with the patch called “Raid Finder”. The Raid Finder essentially operates like a dungeon finder, automating the search for fellow players on the hunt for a good raiding party. It will be built into the game’s updated user interface when the patch hits, they said.

The current iteration of the LF raid tool isn’t the greatest. I daresay a majority of the community doesn’t know it exists and relies on trade chat to fill up their players. For me, when I’m on an alt randomly doing stuff in the city, I’m not actively scouting for a raid group to join. But when I see someone that advertises LFM 25 man BoT, need DPS/healers, I’ll whisper that guy and try to get in on the group. Now with the addition of the raid finder though, that’s going to automate the process entirely. I’m really anxious to see what it looks like. The possibility exists where the system can be “gamed” like the current dungeon finder where it’ll organize and invite players according to gear levels. As a raid leader, I can foresee using these for older raids (or at least, raids that are a tier behind us or so). I don’t know how desperate I would be to use it for current raid or progression content.

It’s not explicitly stated that the raid finder is going to be cross realm so we don’t know yet. If I were to hazard a guess, that’s a probable yes. It might give us the capability to raid with people we know from other servers.

Bonus: If it does go the route of cross realm raiding, that means the ability to raid with Real ID friends won’t be far behind. Pretty soon raid leaders can offer tryouts to players without the risk of server or faction transfer costs.

Would love it if this feature would be enabled for all previously discovered raids. Sometimes it can be hard to fill up older raids.

Just a quick update on the podcast. Originally, we were planning a two week hiatus because of summer and all the different events that we individually had to deal with and such.

But then an update was released which affected some of the behind the scenes technological wizardry we had going on. As such, we’re going to be out of action for a brief while until that fix gets resolved. We have explored alternative options but nothing has really been appealing. I promise we’ll be back as soon as we can. Besides, it’s a great time for us to regenerate, recharge and revitalize our creative energies.

Penny Arcade Expo

Anyone hitting PAX next week? I’ll be at the convention myself and I’d love to meet and greet any fellow gamers/blog readers in the area. Games I’m looking forward to playing the most:

• League of Legends: Dominion
• Counterstrike: Global Offensive
• Guild Wars 2

There’s probably more that I’m missing. I’m not much into the table top stuff so I’ll be hanging near the PCs and console stuff. Any suggestions for other titles to check out? I’m primarily into shooters and RTS games.