EVE Online's Development Approach

So I was reading an interesting article about how EVE Online plans out some of their development.  Basically in summary: CCP (The company who created EVE Online) allowed the playerbase to select 9 players to represent them to the development team.  These 9 players came up with their top 10 issues they think should be resolved and give them to the dev's, who estimate how long each task will take.  Given those estimates the group of 9 will prioritize them and send them back, and the dev's then get to work.

I'm about to begin working for a company that's main focus is projects.  This process therefore seems extremely logical and familiar.  When I look at how WoW does their suggestions (forums for the most part I believe?) and then how EVE does theirs.  It almost seems like CCP is treating these 9 people (who are actual players) as CUSTOMERS. 

Yea, pretty shocking.  I know.  But these 9 people get status reports from the devs and then in turn give those to the playerbase.

Because these 9 people are 'elected' by the players it would seem very democratic and representative...right?  I am curious if that is actually the case, or if it is similar to our political system in the USA.  And while technically any of the players could get elected.  In reality you need to be a part of a major in game corporation to be considered.  I wonder if there's an electoral college in game too?

If WoW moved to something like this, do you think the elections would be truly anyone could win?  Or would people just vote in the biggest names? A member of Ensidia? Ming?  Would that even be that bad of an idea?

What Keeps You Coming Back?

Recently Real Life has been really getting in the way of my WoW time.  I play soccer Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday, with Softball Tuesday Thursday, and then some volleyball thrown in Friday.  With all of this I find it hard to find the time to play anymore.  However, when I think about it, I've more or less always played a lot of sports after work, but I still found time to play WoW or other games.  My fiance also moved in with me this last week.  As the relationship is no longer a distance one I also spend a lot more time with her (obviously).  All of these things come together and seem to keep me from playing WoW, but I do not seem to disappointed with it.  The only drive I have to play is my goal of getting 1800 in the arena to buy a weapon.  While this seems like a fairly easy goal to a lot of people I have found it extremely difficult.  This season alone I've had 3 different 2's partners on 3 different teams.  All 3 of those teams seem to sit around 1700 before either Lock A deactivates his account, Lock B doesn't have the time to play said Lock along with his priest in HC Raids, 5's, 3's, 2's as well as I believe his druid in some arenas as well.  The good news about all of that though is that it means I'm back to my old 2's partner.......

RAITHEN!!!

  Yea, in case you were curious, that's what he does to people.

However, he also has some drains on his time.  Meaning my free time does not = his free time.

PvP is trying to bring me back, but not doing a good job.  With Cataclysm around the corner (hopefully).  What keeps you playing until then?  What keeps you excited?

Fail PuG

I'm sure everyone has seen these posts all over blogs and forums.  People complaining about the (not as new anymore) LFG system and the people it causes them to get stuck with.  I was healing on my druid when the system came out, and I really didn't have many problems with people.  Some DPS might suck, or Tank may not be able to hold aggro.  But honestly, I knew more or less what I was doing and I had the gear to back it up (read, completely overgeared for heroic content).  If a DPS did pull aggro, chances were good they had decent enough skill to kite for a second and I could NSHT/Swiftmend/Nourish them and keep them up.  Either way, I never really saw what all the fuss was about.  Now I'm leveling a warlock, she's 72, and I've been running instances.  Now I realize the DPS complaints about 20 - 30 minute queues.  Still not too terrible as I just queue and continue doing quests.

Last night I had a stellar experience with my run through Azjol' Nerub or however it's spelled.  Our first tank (before we even got into the instance) declined group invite, 2nd tank went offline before we even pulled.  3rd tank is a DK that seems to have an idea of what to do, so I'm excited.  He pulls first mobs in the Gatekeepers rooms and dies at the end of the pull. "Wtf healer, heal".  Priest apologizes and we move on.  The priest didn't survive a different pull later on.  Tank asks me to put a SS back on the priest, so I let them know it's cooling.  Tank immediately  asks again, and so does the healer this time.  So I let them know it's actually still cooling like it was 5 seconds ago.  I'm beginning to get slightly irritated by this time, but we move on.  Tank boy asks for levitate and takes off, dropping down the hole towards the final boss and continues running right to the last adds and pulls them.  I'm right there with him and looking around at the complete LACK of anyone else in our group.  Healer is still back up top drinking water as he had to res some people.  DK dies "Wtf Healer, Heal"

I politely explain why pulling when he doesn't have a healer is a bad idea.  He then whispers me and asks if he can have a soulshard.
1) wtf are you going to do with a soulshard?
2) they're soulbound

I just don't understand where these people come from.

TWOTHREEFOURFIVE

So there are some pretty stupid nick names for different arena makeups but the comp I've been recently playing really takes the cake. It is really shocking that someone called Warrior / Ele Shaman / Frost Mage / Disc Priest / Holy Paladin 2345 and it stuck. It isn't catchy and its not amusing. But apparently it did stick and even spawned 2 copycat naming conventions 2346 and 2347. Apparently 5 = frost mage, 6 = warlock, and 7 = hunter. Anyway I've been playing that comp recently and doing alright, esepcially considering I had never played my paladin in 5s before. My gear was pretty gross, with only 2 pieces of relentless and 3 furious - and almost no wrathful off pieces. My GS was 5100 compared to the rest of my teams > 5800 so they were definitely carrying me a bit. Of all the people on the team I have one of the least difficult jobs as I mainly spam flash of light with the occasional holy light bomb or cooldown to save someone. That being said my priest is extremely aggressive both on mana burns and offensive pressure so the better I stay on top of healing the more it allows him to control the mana pace of the match.

One thing I am noticing I need to work on a lot more is my positioning. I have played 2k+ in all brackets on my priest as disc before and its amazing the difference in where I need to be as a paladin vs my priest. Priests have a good number of mobile heals and their positioning forces the enemy to react with the threat of mana burns. The difference on the paladin is I am way more effective of a healer when I don't have to move and get to pump out heals. In order to do this I need to almost predict where the fight is going to be so I can be where the action is going to be as well as where it is now. With 2 defensive dispels I don't need to worry too much about polymorphs but I could still improve a lot about deciding when I hide from cc and when I stay in and heal.

The other thing that I have been working on is using my hammer at good times. 2345 has a lot of offensive pressure, which acts like CC in a way by forcing people to line our frost / elemental turrets. Besides that all we really have is polymorph on demand so we really have to use our hex / fear / hammer wisely. I'm still learning but I've had some big stuns that have scored us kills when we didn't have a polymorph or counterspell available to use against one of their healers. My general strategy there is to inch closer to their paladin or druid. If I run up to their paladin early I can usually lure his hammer when it really isn't effective. My team is pretty verbal on swaps so I know when it's time to help out. Most of the time their healer can trinket it right away but that brief interrupt is enough time for our burst to drop someone very low and even if we don't score a kill they are burning cooldowns, mana, and iniative.

The new random BG system is simply amazing compared to the old suffer through isle of conquest strand of the ancients to complete the set. I am at full wrathful off pieces on my rogue and only need to upgrade furious ring to wrathful ring on my paladin after 2 hard weekends of farming. I wish alliance stood a chance in WG on my server, but in the last week we won a total of 3 times. The silver lining is with 9 tenacity I'm going 30-1 soloing on my rogue taking on 3 people at once and winning with under 20% health. I know its not skill but it is fun to break face sometime. We'll see how much the upgrades matter on my paladin tonight, we're hoping to break 2000 team rating this week. We started the team from 0 (ugh) and have kept a ~65% win ratio. Our initial 1800 MMR quickly rose once we started beating a few 2200-2300 teams but we're hanging steady now at about 2200 MMR because we keep running into a really good Euro Comp (Lock/Mage/Rogue/Resto Druid/Disc Priest). That comp was invented in S3 to beat 2345, and while we haven't given up, they have both the comp advantage and 5 really solid players.

I'll try and fraps some matches tonight and see if it is even worth watching from the paladin's perpsective :)

I'm back!

Yeah its been a while, so fucking sue me. I've been busy with... yeah I got nothing I get distracted easily. Anyway Season 8 has been interesting so far playing a new fun comp with Karial and Ernnie and trying to ride the druid/lock synergy train towards goodness. It would be better if I was a warrior (obviously) but here are some key tips I discovered our first week of playing.

1. Queue with energy - you got to be pumped to get into that fight. Positivity is at least as good as plate with several defensive cooldowns, incredible damage, and a fuck you move where only death can stop you (I wrote this before you could disarm it - ty Blizzard).

2. Go over strategies with your team mates while you buff. Our warlock shared this brilliance with us in a recent match
Ernnie: you guys should stealth
Rogue + Druid in Unison: WE ARE FUCKING TRYING TO
Blizzard: hahhaha we outsourced our servers to Antartica to save on heating costs. This allows us to enjoy this



3. Once the match starts don't be afraid to adapt. In our 10th and final game last week none of us spawned before the gates opened, and since I was already being judged by the holy paladin, I quickly adapted by vanishing. My druid then spawned in the middle of the warrior and dk. He popped barkskin like a champion. I knew he was gonna get squashed so I cheapshotted the warrior. The warrior was having none of that and instantly trinketed and span in a circle like a ceiling fan made of knives. This game is like rock paper scissors, only in this case spinning hatchet of death, tree, and helpless dude who can't save his druid. Our warlock managed to spawn with 10 seconds remaining until we needed to leave the arena (which no matter how hard we clicked did not work).

4. Momentum is everything
Match #9 from the same week we spawned before the gates opened (hooray) but then froze in place. When our lag ceased the gates were open and the druid dk and hunter had flares death and decay cleverly awaiting us directly under the pipe, which then proceeded to vomit us out onto their waiting grasp. We used this momentum, and their massive incompetence to get a restealth off and open hard on the hunter. Riding the momentum train we were clevelry winning until the lag hit again leaving our druid unable to cast, and poor Ernnie got death gripped into his early grave.

Ok all joking aside our resto druid lock rogue comp has been very fun to play. When we are doing things right we have a lot of CC. Our general strategy is, I stunlock whatever melee will prevent Ernnie from dotting everyone up. When I finish the stunlock, Karial will rotate his cyclones on while I switch to our main target. With Ernnie/Karial rotating cyclones and fears and me swapping quickly to play a mix of offense and defense we can put out some serious pressure. We can then blind a healer or if the healer is exposed from trying to keep up, hard swap to him. It takes a lot of coordination but we are loving it so far. The biggest problem is finding time to play (those ICC bosses aren't going to kill themselves) and a certain someone keeps leaving on weekends to do real life stuff... what a loser.

Back to Arenas

The Bits and I finally found time to 2v2 again this last weekend.  Ahh how I miss it.  We were doin pretty good! Like 6-1 and we're fighting a prot pally and warr.  I'm doing my best to control the warrior, roots to cyclone and back to roots and whatnot.  Their pally is dotted and at like 50% health, but I am DYING!  I try and run behind some boxes to hide and heal, but mr pally finds me...He's laying into me, and I'm actually a little worried I may die.  All of the sudden he just DROPS...wtf happened?  That little nub cleansed a UA off himself while DPSing me......


......
.....
BAHAHAHAHAHA.  I don't think we stopped laughing for a solid 5 minutes.  It also probably contributed to our 0-3 run we went on following that.  Oh well, worth it in my opinion.

Too Busy Taunting

So this is a tribute to Jong about his Least Favorite PvP Spell.  The Bits, Raithen, and I were doing some arena's last night in Ring of Trials.  I'm running away from this DK who's trying to eat my lunch.  I'm about to run behind one of the pillars meanwhile I am laughing over my shoulder at the DK who is Nature's Grasped to the ground as I cheetah away...YOINK! I'm in squishy form next to the pissed off DK.  I went splat.  Raithen and Bits continue on their merry way.  Raithen tries to run behind a pillar to re-stealth.  YOINK! Raithen goes down in a blaze of glory.

Yea, Death Grip sucks.