Blog #4 A moment to Nerd out after the readings

After reading A new Culture of Learning I felt I really needed to write out the two different sides that were processing all of this. The Art Educator and the Gamer were both chiming in and it quite interesting. I did play World of Warcarft, or WoW as it’s normally called, primarily through the expansions Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm

Fun Reference Chart how players called the game:

World of Warcraft (the original release)= Vanilla

The Burning Crusade= TBC

Wrath of the Lich King= WoTLK

Cataclysm= Cata

Mist of Pandera= MoP

Its might also be a fun place to note that gamer writing lingo can easily be seen from game to game with just unique game words only appearing in certain games.

Anyways the gamer that lurkers with feels the need to give some very brief history on raids and to show that the game has not always been the way the author depicts, on the contrary the level of it required to actually compete some of these raids was even harder.

When WoW started there were 25 man raids, but they weren’t the top end game raids. These belonged to raids that took 40 players… yes 40. However it was impossible to actually beat these 40 man raids even if what the author says about breaking through was (and kinda is) true. You had to beat the 25 man tier 1 raids multiple times before you could access the tier 2 raids and repeat the process all the way to tier 3. Where the book talks about raids is around the start of TBC and it got considerably easier. The reason was more people wanted to be able to access the end game content. The problem had mostly a few real issues

1.       Most guilds were only able to actually take on some of the final raids before TBC and only 2-5 guilds in the entire world were able to beat the final few raids.

2.       Getting enough people to complete some of the lower raids could be hard enough because limited amounts of random gear would drop and there was not enough for even a majority or participates.

3.       Getting people who could always preform at maximum tanking/healing/damage per second (dps) was never easy

4.       The mechanics of the game were just kinda dumb If a warrior had 1 point to few in spirit (at the time did health regen and was/shouldn’t have been important to warriors) there was a possibility that the 1 extra health every so many minutes might cause the raid to fail.

5.       The bosses were just insanely hard. On at least two occasions bosses were actually found to be impossible to beat by humans and had to be patched so they could.

Blizzard ended up hearing the majorities cry and made more and more players easily access end game content. Boss difficulty and access in (TBC), More access and the 10 man raid in WoTLK, and etc.

One the sense of breaking through on a boss battles it wasn’t always never spoken on what went right. Every play had and in game meter that could record DPS, Damage taken, and Amount Healed. Sometimes it was obvious if a certain character wasn’t doing enough damaged based on their DPS and what percentage each of their spells were contributing to that DPS. Others it was a matter of positioning and the getting a few lucky breaks from the random factor not hitting certain players (like a healer). Then it did get easier, because of gear, but also because it did feel do able and losing to that boss again did become frustrating.

It should also be interesting to note that almost every player knows how each class is played but they only master one or two. Even classes that are considered more noobish are respected when a player who could play their class extremely well and weren’t just played due to ease.

As I finish typing this up I realize that I am not really completely sure if I fully answered some of what the book talked about and what I wanted to mention because I got so into my brain that hadn’t been opened in a long while.

At the very least I think there could be something said that the Gamer in me wasn’t really surprised by anything that I read. However the art educator in me appreciated a certain amount of enlightenment to it all.

As I leave I wanted to give any readers a fun little list of some MMORPG boss battles. One of the three WoW ones on here are  famous outside of the game to nonWow players and neither are the ones that were unbeatable. However I think there is something to be said about the difficult of bosses number #3 and #1

http://news.mmosite.com/content/2010-02-08/top_10_greatest_mmorpg_bosses_of_all_time,1.shtml