World of Warcraft – Ghostcrawler responds to the backlash
Ghostcrawler’s latest blog post.
Aside from being partly responsible for the size of my arse, this truly addictive game has got somewhat frustrating of late. One of my characters hit 85 ages ago, yet due to a number of reasons I haven’t done much more than the fishing/cooking dailies and dig for archaeology. My 85 is a priest. I don’t belong to a raiding guild (raiding is an awful way to spend an evening in my opinion). Along with guild group achievements, I had hoped to be running rated BGs with a guild but no-one is interested in those. As for heroics, unless you belong to a raiding guild who are “gearing up” you have to use the group finder tool and enter heroics in a random group and after an average 30 minute wait in the queue, endure around an hour of torture or suffer the group deserter debuff (which lasts 30 minutes). It is currently quite difficult to raise the rep or currency required to buy a decent level of gear as the rep/currency gains in normal instances are pretty low. Prior to Cataclsym I used to heal raids/heroics without any problem. Now I don’t bother as I am out of mana after 3-4 efficient heals due to my gear being devoid of enough spirit (catch 22 situation as my main character’s item level is 343 which is good enough, I can’t run any heroics as my as gear is too low to survive them). Normal cata dungeons are pointless as they are not suitable for a level 85 (joining the random puts you in a group of clueless randoms and low item level rewards). So I’ve resorted to levelling alts until I get bored and cancel my subscription. Ghostcrawler seems to imply that people are exaggerating on the forums about the lack of fun there is in the game and/or people not bothering with certain class roles any more (primarily healing) at the moment but they’re not. I have one example; I moved servers (costly as I moved two characters) to join a large guild that shared what I wanted to do in the game. Within three weeks all but 3 people (in a guild of originally over 100 players) either cancelled their accounts or just stopped playing due to frustration/annoyance with the game being no fun. I joined a new guild who are of the same opinion and all seem to be levelling alts as that is much more fun than being level 85. Going back to rated BGs – the fact that they don’t exist is the biggest disappointment of all. Several players (myself included) believed that it would be possible to join either a rated BG or a normal BG in the usual way. No-one realised that you would have to form a group and then queue for 15-20 minutes to enter (by which time people will have got annoyed with waiting and left the raid, meaning you have to start all over again). I think rated BGs need to be re-looked at for ways to improve entry into them.
It will be interesting to see what changes they make, if any. If WoW continues to favour the “hard core” raider over any other player, than no matter. I got myself a Nintendo Wii for Christmas and I’m sure that will be ample electronic entertainment!
One more thing; when will the developers realise that only the very immature consider random strangers that happen to be in the same guild do not consider other guild members to be “friends”? That concept is for the Facebook generation (12-19 year olds; currently no-one in the guild I’m or was in previously falls/fell into that age-group). “Guild members” is a far more appropriate term.
