Nuggetty Goodness

*Nugget looks at image from left to right.*

Nugget: WTF is that thing coming out of his...

Nugget: ...

Nugget: ...oh it's a bow.

XD CraftyGod has written a fairly detailed and nice first impressions review of TERA, but for me, the entire thing was overshadowed by this guy's... bow.

*hangs head*

Ok, ok. I also CS occasionally, so it should be 'some' FW CSers. ;) But adding subtlety to trollface is just not done!

People who have played GW1 will know why "balance" is bad.

True, a PvP system based on skill only and nothing else is fair. However, such a system has three fatal flaws.

Firstly, it is uninteresting, because the skill gap between players in an online mmo is never going to be large enough. People switching from gear-based MMOs like Forsaken World to skill based and super balanced games like GW2 tend to see themselves as the under-appreciated "pros" that could easily beat the "noob" CSers, if only there was no gear difference.

Lol.

These same people will probably get their asses whopped roundly and soundly by real "pros" in GW2, and feel more worthless and have less fun than they did in Forsaken World.

Anyone who made it past rank3 hero and r1 gladiator in GW1 will know that only a select handful of r11/g7 players in GW knew how to play the game at a level truly above the masses. To attain their level of skill, one must practice interrupting/KD locking/synchronized damage spiking with their teams constantly. Getting to this level of skill in GW is much more difficult than getting level 3 wings in Forsaken World. GW PvP is much more selective than Forsaken World PvP.

The second problem with these "skill based" games where gear does not matter is the lack of connection between the player and his character. If all your achievements and efforts in PvE will never contribute to your combat effectiveness in PvP, then what is the point of accumulating wealth/power, which is what an mmo is all about? Characters are created and deleted every month to catch up with the new meta-game. A player can be any class and any spec. Nothing is permanent. Long-term investments mean absolutely nothing. You might as well play a FPS or RTS game.

The last problem is best demonstrated by a quick example:
An extremely skilled and experienced warrior who has played GW since its release for 4 years faces a necromancer who just recently bought the game and knows nothing about it. The necromancer click on two hex skill, and the warrior is now removed from the game. Thats right, removed from the game. He is effectively deleted from the server for the duration of the hexes. Oh and one more thing: these hexes can be chained. No amount of "skill" could save the warrior from his natural counter class. That is how bad it is. In Forsaken World, an assassin could still kill a warrior through BoR if he has the situational advantage with superior gear/red hand. A priest with barely any damage can still solo a vampire with lvl 2 wings if the vampire has 0 mana. In GW, there is not even the remotest theoretical possibility for a player to defy the iron rules of "balance" imposed by the developers. You WILL get countered by your natural counters, and thats that.

Whoa. It's always interesting to read something that is right on the opposite end of the pole when it comes to what you believe.

This guy isn't trolling. And where he's coming from... I can understand due to the kind of point of view that he is espousing.

Which I can sum up in one sentence:
Balance is bad because making skill the cornerstone is too elitist.

His original post detailed why FW is superior to GW and will be superior to GW2 in every way.

(What I'm getting), FW is better because:
Cash-bought power is easier to acquire than skill, and therefore not elitist.

And no, nugget is not any kind of GW PvP god. Poster says he has R4 Gladiator, which is certainly a mark of GW PvP skill.

To be honest, I'm not even sure quite why I posted this other than, 'Wow, that's a lifeform so totally different from me that I'm surprised we share superficially similar skins.'

XD

P.S. The last scenario he's describing isn't balance, it's IMbalance. It's precisely what ANet mucks around with PvP and PvP skills SO often to try to put right.

Moar thoughts:
Maybe his view stems from a frame of mind which says, 'If I'm not proving that I'm better than someone else, then I'm not interested. GW takes too much time and effort to be better than someone else. FW just takes money. Therefore, I like FW better.'

Could be why his viewpoint seem to be the antithesis of a nugget's. Nugget is all about proving to nugget that she got better than nugget. =P That nugget beat nugget! *beat self* Beating others is just icing. From this, we can see that nugget has a much larger ego than quoted-fellow, for to nugget, nugget is the only important milestone. XD

Please note, there has been an update to be found at the bottom of this article on April 14th, 2012.

So, you know how I was amazed at how bad that LFR run in Dragon Soul was as a healer?

Yeah. Second round was even worse. I blame Red, I went in for more healer gear.

What we had tonight could have been a good run, except for one thing.

A single player held the fun of 24 other souls hostage… and that players name was Dalra.

Yes, that says Dalra of Icecrown US. 

Would you like to see a picture of Dalra, proud enhancement shaman, in action on the Spine of Deathwing?

Just in case that is difficult to make out, here, let me zoom out a bit.

There in the center you can see the raid group on the Hideous Amagamations in the center, up and down the line.

And there, up in the upper right hand corner, you can see Dalra, all on her own, killing a tentacle. As an Enhancement Shaman. All there, all alone, killing tentacles. Spawning adds. Lots and lots of adds.

You see that title she has? Destroyer’s End? Yep. Solid Enhancement Shaman DPS. Dual wielding, got 4 piece tier, yay.

Too bad she queued as a HEALER.

The whole Spine of Deathwing fight, Dalra did nothing except single-handedly destroy tentacles, spawning endless waves of Hideous Amalgamations and the bloods that follow.

And here is something I didn’t know. If all the tentacles are dead, a new tentacle spawns, so there is no chance of your ever accidentally killing every Hideous Amalgamation and being left with no way to nuclear blast the plates off to expose the tentacle.

I. Did. Not. Know. That.

But now I do, and I have Dalra to thank for that. So, thanks!

24 people in a raid trying their best to win and move on, and those 24 people are subject to the whims of one person, a person who has the achievement and the title of having completed it on normal, who knows what it is they are doing, and who chooses to try and screw everyone else intentionally.

For fun, I guess.

And there is nothing anyone can do about it. that is the point of this post. Once the boss is pulled, that’s it. The group has no control in any way over the outcome from that point on.

You’re done. Wipe it or push on, beat it despite them, and give them their ‘fair’ chance at loot.

Once that boss is pulled, that player is free to do whatever the hell they want for the rest of the fight.

I want to be clear on this.

The issue is not Dalra. Dalra is nothing.

Nothing unusual or special or even especially irritiating went on tonight. If Dalra logged off with warm fuzzies knowing they got a second Deathwing Axe and relic drops tonight (according to the Armory) by queueing as a healer for insta-queues, doing enhance DPS while the group was down a healer, and even intentionally screwing people by trying to wipe the run if what she wanted didn’t drop… well, most people didn’t even notice.

Apathy and expectations are so low at this point that nobody really cared. It was just faceless, nameless asshat number 45862. As the picture shows, the tone of comments weren’t outrage, just tired acceptance. “No joke, I’m tired of morons in LFR.” That’s not nerd rage, that’s apathy and acceptance that stupid is just stupid.

We went on with some other faceless clown in LFR, and finished the run. Most people, I imagine, don’t even realize that it was on purpose. They are probably so used to stupid people by now, that if anything, they just pegged Dalra as being another in a long chain of incredibly stupid players, and went on with their lives.

I know better, because after Monday night I went into Spine looking at all the tentacles to see if I could identify another asshat and get some screenshots for my own fun. AND I DID. I watched while healing my whack-a-mole frames, as Dalra didn’t even start on the normal group tentacle. Right from the start, they went to an untouched one, destroyed it very fast, went to the next, destroyed it, and so on until all four were dead. Then kept killing tentacles as they respawned. Then, when the first plate lifted, killed more tentacles. As fast as they could pop.

There was no mistake, no confusion. It was a dedicated attempt by Dalra to wipe a raid from the second it triggered Spine. And I caught it early, notified everyone, began asking for Dalra to stop right away. There was nothing anyone could do to stop her. Just watch, and do our best to heal and kill.

If anything, anyone in the guild Shining Star Crusaders should feel ashamed that Dalra is carrying your torch, representing you. I don’t know anything about Shining Star Crusaders, maybe it’s a guild on Icecrown famous for shenanigans and being trolling asshats. Maybe it’s just some dude in a basement that is so ineffectual in real life that they have to do stuff like this to feel some kind of connection with someone else. Some kind of desperate bid for attention, any kind of attention, to rise out of the meaningless morass that is their pathetic excuse for a life, something to try and prevent themselves from feeling so cold and alone in a world that hates them. And they’ve got a personal guild full of their alts. I don’t really care.

My take is as likely to be accurate as anyones, and mine at least is based on personal experience seeing one of their guild members at play when they didn’t know they were being watched somewhere that it might turn up in public later.

Update: Some folks in reading this thought it was an actual slam on the guild mentioned. I thought I had stressed in the post, fairly bluntly, that I was speculating wildly on the kind of guild that had Dalra as a member, while at the same time knowing nothing whatsoever about the truth of the guild. That I was speculating like this or ‘musing aloud’ to prove the point that Dalra was serving as my only window on the kind of guild SSC might be, because in LFR cross-server activities, I didn’t have any way of knowing anyone in that guild prior to seeing one memeber in LFR be an asshat, which is entirely UNLIKE the old style single-server runs where guilds could form lasting recognizable reputations. In point of fact, after this post went live and word about Dalra got out, SSC took immediate action, removed Dalra from their roster, and took further action to make it clear that kind of behavior was not representative of their guild in real life. Clearly, in real life the guild SSC is not actually a single kid in a basement. Some of the responses (on each side) also showed me pretty clearly that a lot of people fail at reading comprehension. At least, they do where imagined insults and direct attacks are concerned. End of update, I now return you to the original post.

Dalra is not important. This post isn’t really about Dalra.

I am simply USING Dalra as my little bitch to make a point about an extremely serious issue in live LFR.

Just over a month of Rift has convinced me that it *isn't* just random cross-server LFG that has made the WoW PUGging community so toxic. (Went back 1 month for Cataclysm, levelled AGAIN from 1-85, unsubbed and never want to go back blah de blah.)

I used to think that cross-server LFG which was 'after my time' (I first unsubbed for 2+ years at the end of TBC), was the main reason for the utterly horrible experience of the WoW community that confronted me on my short stint back for Cata. It was so bad I started trying psych experiments on my PUGs. =P Results, inconclusive due to sample size, but still kinda interesting, detailed here:
http://nugget.posterous.com/priming-consistency-cheating-and-being-a-jerk

Other folks are welcome to try it!

But the thing is, Rift has almost exactly the same mechanic and people are so damn POLITE! At the very *least* they are civil 95% of the time. On good runs, they are kind, considerate, and sometimes even funny and charming.

Even though they've more or less duplicated WoW's LFG system.

This in turn convinces me that the horror that is the WoW community (PUGwise) is a lot more to do with a) evolution of that community, and b) existing culture influencing the behaviour of new folks.

Or rather, of turds seeing other turds act like turds and thereby feeling happy in knowing that their turdiness is the acceptable norm.

From what I can see, there's no reason Rift PUGging shouldn't be the cesspit that WoW's is - but it just isn't.

Same with the arena-based PvP and general PvP culture in Guild Wars. Yes there is a certain degree of elitism, some might even say a lot of it. But I will say that as a scrub PvPer, Guild Wars PvPers are in general incredibly civil. GW was the first place I ever saw the opposing team thank their opponents for the match. See them say 'GG (Good Game / Good Going)' and not have it be sarcastic.

More studios need to see that the culture of their community matters, and address it throughout the life-cycle of their games.

Cataclysm was *beautiful*. Sylvanas never looked so hot. Blizzard obviously put so much love into it. And despite that, I'll never touch WoW again with a 10-foot pole now. I left TBC thinking I could go back someday and maybe, maybe like it, if I had a fresh start. Cata made me realise that for me, in WoW, there's nothing to go back to.