Monday, July 27, 2015

Monday Random Thoughts

- I like to do soloing for fun, I am sure I have mentioned that before.

- Been doing ToT for a chance at the mounts.

- But I can't get up to the Ji-Kun yet.

- Admittedly I have not really tried that hard.

- It is more a healing issue.

- Might have to try some more well timed FDs, that is how I get past a lot of stuff.

- At least I can try for the horridon mount.

- Just not that one yet.

- I could check youtube to see if some other hunter has done the bosses I am stuck on.

- But what fun is that.

- I'll do it if I get frustrated and give up.

- Just have not reached that point yet.

- If I get the horridon mount and still have not managed to get up to Ji-Kun by then, I'll look it up.

- Or I could just start gearing up my DK.

- DKs are absolutely sick soloing things with high healing requirements.

- Hey, mounts are shared right, so who cares what I do it on.

- But I like soloing on my hunter, so I always try it with him first.

- I'll admit, I am a little upset soloing horridon is so easy.

- After the hell that boss put most guilds through when it was current, would have never expected it to be the easiest boss in there to solo.

- My alts are running into oil issues lately.

- I guess I need to do at least the one daily once in a while on them.

- Or get to revered and get the oil platform.

- Which also means I need to do some dailies on them to get to revered so I could buy it.

- Blah, blizzard found a way to force me to play my alts.

- Funny part with alts are when I could play them whenever I wanted, even if rarely, I loved having them.

- As soon as I started to feel like I "have to" do things on them I hate having them.

- I used to love having an army of alts, now I dread it.

- I have a post in mind about the "alt issues" I am having.

- Each person is different.

- One person in guild loves having to log into alts to do this stuff.

- He likes that he feels like he "need" to do something on his alts.

- It makes him feel like he is accomplishing something on them.

- Like I said, each person is different.

- He is also unemployed and playing is all he does every day.

- 6.2 was a patch for the unemployeed.

- At least if you want to play alts.

- Even doing LFR is an all day adventure.

- When it was a nice 30 minute or less run with a 20 minute or less wait time, LFR was close to being bite sized content.

- Now with 2 or 3 hour wait times, doing the LFR on multiple characters is like having a part time job.

- Except with much less reward and much less fun.

- Blizzard put all their bets into LFR, pushed everyone into raiding with it, and then went and did everything they could to try and kill it.

- Who the hell is running blizzard?

- Why do you push all the focus of the entire game into raiding and then destroy the "easy access" system for it?

- Wonder if blizzard notices what is going on, or are they just playing blissfully ignorant about it.

- The earning call is Aug 4th I believe.

- I wonder how much rushing 6.2 out saved them.

- You know it did save them.

- If not for the reversal of the flight decision and pushing 6.2 out as fast as possible, even with enough testing, they did everything they could to stop the bleeding.

- If they did not change their mind on flight and release 6.2 when they did at the end of the quarter I am sure that another game, FF 14, could have passed them in active subs.

- It is all about business however, not about quality.

- I do not mind that 6.2 was rushed so much.

- Except when I think we will be stuck raiding HFC for the next year or more because it was.

- They did say that they have no intention of adding another raid.

- So they could have waited another two or three months with it.

- And filled it out a bit more so the end of expansion gap would not seem as huge.

- After all, 6.2 will end up being the only content patch we have all expansion.

- It could have been bigger and they could have waited to make it so.

- And do not say 6.1 is a content patch.

- Even blizzard employees say that 6.1 was not a content patch.

- And these guys routinely take bullets for being the face of bad decisions in the front office.

- So if they will not tow the company line calling it a content patch, it was not a content patch.

- Had an argument with a guild mate about that.

- He said it was a content patch, but he just did not like any of the content in it.

- I said, no, it was a bug fix patch with adding a few things that should have been in game at release.  It was 6.0.5 or something, not 6.1.

- I never said it was bad, I just said it was not a content patch.

- I might have no use for the twitter or the selfies, but I see nothing wrong with adding them, they are just not for me.

- I don't say they are not content because I do not use them, I say they are not content because, for the sense of a content patch, they are not.

- They are the added things to a content patch, not the heart of one.

- And that patch had only them as content, so it was not a content patch.

- Just because you order something off the appetizer menu and eat it for dinner does not make it a dinner, it is still just an appetizer.

- Twitter and selfies are appetizers only, just because you liked them does not make them dinner.

- I get a kick out of some people in trade sometimes.

- They even amaze me or confuse me at times.

- Sure most of the time they are morons and I feel myself losing brain cells even reading it, but sometimes they are just funny.

- Saw and argument in trade that started when someone said they were having trouble with the proving grounds as a destruction warlock.

- Of course there had to be someone that said destro was easy and the guy sucked.

- But that was expected right?

- People insult everyone else in trade, that is just the normal.

- That is not what I found funny.

- What it turned into was unexpected and that is what was funny.

- After that they all went off with how everyone else's class is so easy and theirs was so hard.

- Am I the only person that found my own class easy?

- I would think everyone would find their own class the easiest out of all of them.

- And this one guy said shadow priest was the easiest of all classes.

- Shadow priest was the only one I did not one shot it on, changed a talent and did it second try.

- Sure it was easy with the right talent, but of all my classes I would say there is no way they would even be in the top three of easiest.

- It was funny because everyone was trying to make their own class sound like it was the hardest thing ever.

- To maybe make themselves feel better?  Who knows?

- I gladly say that for me on my hunter it was easy and I think hunters are the best class for it.

- But that is because everything is easier on a hunter because hunters rock.

- I did get a kick out of the one guy who was fighting that hunters were the hardest class to do it with.

- I got an even bigger kick out of the fact, no one argued with him.

- I am sure someone would have stepped up, even if as a jerk or to troll, and said something like hunters are the easiest class in the game.

- Like someone always does.

- But nope, never happened, some people even agreed with him.

- What?!?

- This is not the trade I know, what did you people do with my trade.

- I guess I got a kick out of it because it was like I was in the twilight zone or something.

- Usually trade is filled with people saying how easy every class is or insulting others classes.

- But now everyone was saying how hard all the classes were and agreeing that some classes were even harder.

- I, of course, did not say anything, but I did sit and watch for a while.

- Was paging through the group finder looking for something to do anyway, so trade kept me there longer than I might have otherwise.

- Wanted a group for heroic HRC and just could not find a group I liked.

- I really need to relax like personal restrictions.

- Because I could never find one.

- Was looking for specific bosses, could not find them.

- I don't join groups that phrase things disrespectful.

- Something like "no bads" I skip by, but "must know fights" which basically means the same thing, I am fine with.

- I figured if the guy is a jerk in his description, he will be a jerk leading the raid.

- I have no desire to play with jerks, or to help them down stuff for that matter.

- There were a few fresh ones, but they also did not meet my requirements.

- I do not want to sit and wait for a group to fill.

- If I see 1 or 2 people in the group, I skip right by it.

- If I see all DPS and no tanks or healers, I skip right by it.

- If I see stupid requirements, I skip right by it.

- I basically locked myself out of all groups because I could not find one.

- All because I am way to picky.

- I need to learn to loosen up.

- Too many bad experiences has jaded me.

- So I started paging through custom.

- Figured maybe something would tickle my fancy.

- Maybe a garrison invasion, a garrison raid boss, claw farming, what have you.

- I saw a level 91 needed help with an elite quest, so I applied and went to help him.

- Needless to say it took me a thousand times longer to get to him than to kill the mob for him.

- Call it my good deed for the day.

- Really could not find much more to do, so I popped around helping some people out.

- Hey, it gave me something to do right?

- My horde hunter finished the elemental runes part of the quest this week.

- Wow that was quick, it only feels like a couple of weeks ago when I started it.

- Actually, it was only a couple of weeks ago.

- I had no heart in me to wait 3 hours for the LFR however.

- So not sure how I am going to get the tomes done.

- They do not drop from missions, they do not drop from work orders, and I do not have the time to wait for hours and hours on end on an alt for LFR.

- My hunter and druid are fine, they raid the real raid.

- Even if I do not run on both each week and they do split time, they will get it done sooner or later, even if I did not do LFR.

- But without a raid team for my horde hunter any more, and without a guild for that matter, I don't see how I am going to manage it.

- And my gear is not good enough to pug with.

- At a 660 item level I could do better than half the people in pugs, but who would take me.

- Admittedly I would not even take me with an item level like that.

- I guess I could do some island grind and just upgrade any old piece to 695 for item level purposes only.

- As much as I hate the idea, I might consider it.

- Or I will not ever get the tomes part done on that character.

- Unless blizzard can do something to fix the LFR.

- I got an idea blizzard, make it worth doing again.

- Let me explain something to blizzard.

- If something is not worth doing, people don't do it.

- There is your answer why LFR participation is so dreadful low.

- Even non raiders do not want to do it any more because it does not feel rewarding enough.

- They did such a fantastic job of not making anyone want to do it that no one does it.

- How come the only thing blizzard can manage to do exactly what they intend to do with it is bad for the game?

- They need to add tier sets back into LFR to bait raiders in there to make the pool of players larger and make the runs faster.

- That and add back valor and valor gear, people did LFR because it was quick and easy and a nice decent chunk of valor.

- Have a few bosses drop pets, or even mounts on LFR only difficulty, and make it that those things could be sold.

- Keep the drop rates really low, but it would get people in there.

- People need some sort of incentive to do something, right now there is none.

- Heck, even many of my alts are better geared than anything the LFR can drop.

- If it were not for legendary quest line items I would not touch it with a 10 foot pole on any character, ever.

- The removal of raid gear from LFR and the removal of valor and the things it is used for are what I would guess to be the top reasons why I wait 3 hours now on a bad day.

- I almost feel bad now about complaining about the 45 minute waits.

- Now 45 minutes would sound like a godsend.

- You don't know what you've got until its gone.

- Maybe that phrase will ring a bell in blizzards mind when they continue to lose subs.

- Once most of them are gone maybe they will learn to respect the ones they have left.

- So who thinks that warcraft will be below 5M before the next expansion comes out?

- Which would mean it lost more than half of its players from release.

- I know it will be under 5M.

- Unless they make some serious changes and add more content before the next expansion, and good content at that, I am sure they will be under 5M.

- Heck, I would be willing to bet if they did not do that quick turn around on flight it would have been under 5M when they do their quarterly report.

- I am probably sure they fell under 5M after they announced no flight ever, and that is why they changed their mind so darn fast.

- The announcement of no flight was costing them money, money is all that maters to them, not content, not happy players, just money.

- The real question is, who the hell is running that place?

- They did not need to do all this.

- They did not need to upset players, possibly lose players, to test out some silly no flying idea.

- They could have listened to the players when they said they would, like they said they would.

- The players told them, loud and clear, if you remove flying we are leaving.

- So they removed flying and then were surprised when people left.

- It is like some idiot when you tell him, if you drop that on your foot it will hurt, so what do they do, they drop it on purpose just to see if you were right.

- Stupid people do stupid things.

- Seriously, who is running that place?

- Did they just say "they are just joking, they will not leave."

- They gambled and they lost.

- Someone needs to spend some time on the unemployment line in my opinion over that decision.

- Do you ever get the feeling like we were lied to about flight the whole time?

- Like they never intended to add it, ever, from the beginning.

- The whole, "we will see what the players think" was just a ruse.

- No matter what the players thought, even if they did a poll and 100% said they wanted flying, they were still going to remove it.

- Well, I have proof, or what I believe to be proof, that is the case.

- Okay okay, it is not proof, but it is a compelling argument at least.

- They never intended to give us flying at all.

- Think about it for a second.

- We know for a fact, because they said so, that some parts of the draenor are not capable of flight.

- This game was developed a long time ago.

- Don't you think if it was their intention to add flight that they would have built everything for flight in the first place?

- So it comes to one of two things.

- 1) They never intended to add flying and that is why they did not design for it everywhere and need to do that now.

- 2) The management of the game right now is really in that bad of a place that they could make such a huge mistake like that.

- As horribly mismanaged as warcraft has been these last few years I find it hard to believe that even they would be so stupid as to make a mistake of those proportions.

- Even if mismanaged if it was their intention to add flight, they would have created it capable of flight.

- So the only other answer is, they never intended to have flying, even from before beta was released, and that is why they did not design for it in many places.

- You have to figure that every place where conditions for flight were never put into the game were created after their decided to never add flight.

- Being many of those places are on the main land that was there at release, that means the decision to never give us flying was made while the game was still in development.

- Maybe even before beta came out for all we know.

- So how do you feel now that you know the decision of no flight was made before they even announced there would be no flight.

- How do you feel knowing that when they said, "we will see what the players think" they had already made their decision and they were just trying to appease us making us feel like we had a say in it?

- Blizzard really pulled a fast one, and everyone fell for it.

- They did not give a crap what the player base wanted.

- The game was designed without flight in mind from development and blizzard led people to believe they might get it.

- I am so glad so many quit and made them have to go back on it.

- I am happy they have to waste time fixing it.

- Because flight should have been in the game at release.

- Maybe they will notice that next time.

- I have a list of things I will do when I can fly.

- All things I want to do mind you, but it will not be enough.

- I would like to bring my alts into LFR to gear up once in a blue moon and not have to play them longer than I do my main most nights to do so.

- I would like to find a reason to do dungeons again on them, valor and valor gear were great for that.

- As it stands now most of my characters have never done a dungeon and the ones that have only did the ones needed for the legendary quest line.

- I would like to find a new and easier way to find pugs for things.

- I miss the old open raid with hundreds of people on all looking for different stuff all the time.

- Want a new raid, people there recruiting, want an old raid, people there recruiting, want a challenge mode, people there recruiting.

- Now... nothing.

- I will enjoy having flight back, doing more pet battling, archeology, exploration and more importantly freedom from stuns, roots, dismounts and annoyances.

- But that only is part of the problem with warlords as I see it.

- The game is broken right now.

- There is no other way to describe it.

- Can't wait to see if they intend to keep going on the wrong path.

- I expect an expansion announcement at gamescon.

- Or perhaps I should say I hope it is announced there.

- Because if it isn't, we are surely in for over a year of HFC.

- Heck, even if it is announced at gamescon I can see us having a year of HFC.

- A year with no new content is not so bad when you are enjoying the expansion, really bad when you are not.

- Have a great day.

43 comments:

  1. Anon, Grumpy's former Guild Leader:

    Well I vote for number two. I really think Blizzard's management team is lost in the wilderness, no longer able to find their way back to the quality game company they were only short years ago. Yea, I can easy see employees being told to shift priority off finishing things for flight as that can always be gone back to and then never finished in the rush to get the product out the door. While the walls around Tanaan were necessary as the province was not finished at release, it was supposed to be part of the package deal and wasn't. Oh yes, very very easy for me to think Blizzard is a company with a management crisis. In fact with all their missteps as of late, I would even go so far as to say it was obvious that Blizzard was having leadership problems above and beyond all else.

    A major revamp of the game is needed in the next expansion, one that is designed to transition into the following expansions which need to be laid out in a storyboard fashion. Blizzard basically needs to get their act together on the storyline for the future. I won't do it this time, but I know for sure I could get several storylines from the current fiasco and use them to create interesting expansions for the next decade. The worn out war between the horde and alliance needs to be resolved, and yes, that means PvP needs to be seriously revised to reflect a new in game political reality. (And yes, I have suggestions on that too.)

    Warcraft is not dead. Warcraft is not in a healthy spot though. Most of the player base seems to no longer have quite the explicit trust in Blizzard to be a gaming company by gamers for gamers. Your five million (or less) projection by the next expansion is likely a realistic one. The next expansion is going to be a long time from now at best (and maybe better for us players if an extra amount of time is taken to make sure it is done right). So maybe within a year we will see it, and then again as important to Warcraft as the next expansion is going to be, it may well be 2017 mid year or there abouts. Me, I look for the next version to ship in November 2017. I don't have all that high a set of hopes about it though, and while it likely will be an improvement over WoD, I got doubts about it being enough of one.

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    1. So you really think that they are that badly managed that they would design an expansion that was intended for flight without coding it for flight?

      Sounds like your faith in the game is even worse than mine. But it is possible, the management team has made a lot of confusing and suspect choices of late.

      I do not think even a revamp can help them now. There would be too many spots in the game that would be gaping holes thanks to warlords.

      I'll use professions only as an example. You need to "find" the books to skill up, it is not learned from a trainer. Easy fix, allow it to be learned at a trainer, but you know they will not do that.

      But the real problem is everything, and I do mean everything, you need to level a profession needs to be made from a crafted material that takes time to assemble and needs extremely large amounts of material to make.

      This means, in future expansion, when people pass through draenor in 4 hours their professions will stay left behind unless they fix something. And you know they won't.

      The only other option is to keep the everything can be crafted at level one approach forever now. Which I dislike as well. It devalues professions.

      Now, if one simple and small part of the game has so many problems with it, I don't think they will be capable of fixing it, or anything else. They will revamp and it will just end up worse than it was before thanks to the wasted resources used on it. See cataclysms old world revamp wasting resources and warlords character models wasting resources. Both bad ideas, both things that should have been patch material and not selling points, and at least the cataclysm one, something that was ill advised.

      So you are predicting another 15 month end of expansion raid? That is entirely possible. I would surely hope unlikely however. But as you said, if they are going to use that time to "fix" stuff, and fix it the good way, not the way they have being fixing things, it might actually be worth the wait.

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    2. Hi Grumpy,
      This example for professions is incorrect. You can currently level from 1-700 with no cool down recipes in about 10 minutes. Once you buy the learn draenor [x] profession from the trainer at Asheran, make the cheapest smoldering recipe repeatedly until 600. Then do one secrets of draenor discovery and learn the re-roll recipie. Make 33 of these to max the profession.
      For example it cost only 3000 gold to level Blacksmithing from 1-700 in Draenor using the AH.

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    3. I know, but most people will not do that. I did that on some myself. But most people just make the bigger stuff and slowly get themselves there. I think they should not be allowed to make the bigger stuff until they do what you mentioned to level it.

      Actually worked out nicely for me as well. I needed dust early on, had thousands and thousands of ore. Leveled a new blacksmith and sent the stuff to my enchanter to turn it into dust.

      That was also an awesome use early on if you wanted to make gold. Dust was expensive, herbs are ore were being given away for free basically. So turn that ore and herbs stock into dust. Nice and easy.

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  2. I'm a bit confused by this notion that WoD was designed without flying in mind.

    Flying has always been in WoD, it's just limited to flight points, Aviana's feather and Goblin Gliders etc.

    Aside from moving treasures so you can't just swoop down on them at will, there shouldn't be anything else they need to tweak for 6.2.1.

    I did read on the WoW Reddit that if you use Aviana's feather to fly into T2 it's empty, so there might be some phasing issues to sort out, but that's it.

    And I always point to Blizz giving us a flying Dread Raven mount for pre-booking the WoD xpac.

    As I remember it, 6.1 was supposed to introduce flying, so the decision was made before that came out. I was horrified when they said "no flight, no more, ever", and relieved when they recanted.

    Whatever their thought process, I think we've ended up with a good compromise. I like the Pathfinder achievement: it requires a fair amount of effort but you only have to do it once. I wouldn't be upset to see that model used in future xpacs.

    I'm also not too upset about WoD being around for a while yet. I'm enjoying 6.2 and T2, and our guild hasn't finished any of the raids in Normal yet, let alone Heroic, because we always move onto the next one as soon as it comes out.

    I want to finish all the WoD raids on Heroic before the next xpac comes out. I missed out on the Curve in MoP and then HM/BRF by a couple of weeks each time, I really want it this time for HFC.

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    1. Nothing to be confused about. Blizzard has said that there are some spots that were simply never designed for flying and that is why they did not release it with 6.2. They had to bug test and fix those areas.

      Yes we have the feather and other stuff, but have you ever dropped out of the sky from any of them, hit a wall in the air with any of them, landed in a place where you fell through the ground on any of them? I have, all of those.

      The reason I have is because the expansion was not designed to ever have flight. Was fight capable? Yes. Was it intended? No. Or they would not have so many problems adding it now.

      There is a hell of a lot to tweak for 6.2.1. There are 100s of places with dead pockets in the air that will drop you. There are a lot of issues they never addressed because they had not intended to add flight. Most of them, they admit, are over area with phasing. Those are usually the #1 spots for death drops.

      I personally think the true reason they did not want to add flying had nothing to do with immersion or any other excuse they gave. It is that they did not want people to see how small draenor really is.

      When I was on beta I could run, on my ground mount, from my garrison in shadowmoon all the way to my base in nagrand in less than 3 minutes. That is covering the entire map basically. It was like that throughout my entire beta time.

      One day I logged in and I was moving like a snail. I could not even get out of shadowmoon in that time frame. They lowered the speed we run at. Sure it still say 120% speed, but they scaled everything down to be slower to make it seem normal.

      They figured people would never notice, and most have not actually, they did an awesome job of scaling everything down. But go take a ground mount around the old world. Ride around for a while, then hearth to your garrison and mount up and start running. Like I said, they did a great job scaling it, but you will feel the difference still. The difference in the speed is still notable.

      I am not saying they did not originally intend to have flying. What I am saying is that during the beta process, probably around the time they slowed us down, they made a decision they would not be adding flight because the world was too small and they wanted it to seem bigger.

      Perhaps one of the problems they have with flight is that they need to scale it correctly, speed wise, to move in relation to the land better. Because that is something they never did on beta because on beta there was no flying.

      I do not mind the pathfinder idea. I just hope next expansion it is there on release and we do not need to wait for it. I also love that it is account wide and I do not need to do it on all my characters. I do hope if they want to put hoops to jump thought for flying that they keep using this method. I also hope they do not make us wait for it like they did this time either.

      I believe they learned their lesson. You can not remove flight. Not now. Love it or hate it, it is a part of the game.

      That is the one good thing about a year long wait, it allows people to get stuff done like that. I am afraid without valor gear, without item upgrades, without a raid wide zone nerf or buff like ICC and DS, that many people that never finished stuff will still never finish stuff. Which, if that is the case, will make the year long wait a very painful wait for the majority of the player base.

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    2. Egads, so they build in pseudo-flying and still don't correctly code for it?

      I confess I hadn't noticed, I've used the Feather and Goblin glider and got (roughly) where I wanted to go. I guess I was lucky, or used them where Blizz "intended" me to.

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    3. They never tested it. They coded for it, so to speak, but never checked to see if it worked.

      I explore a lot, so I die a lot. That is also part of it. I find the places that were never worked on because I go to those places a lot. Nothing is worse than getting your feather going and as soon as you start moving forward you hit a pocket and drop. I will admit it is kind of fun on a hunter. It becomes a game of "can I hit disengage at the right time".

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  3. If we want to talk about what is going on at Blizzard I think we need to talk about what went on with 6.1. Grumpy I think you forgot what was in that content-less “patch”. A host of UI upgrades including, character re-models and heirlooms came out. The type of content you would have expected to have seen at launch. I’ll get back to what should have been at launch in a minute…. What we did get was the BRF portion of the Legendary quest, upgraded quest rewards and well…. that’s it.

    The community had a conniption. Tanaan was supposed to be our starting area, Netherstorm was the level 100 quested area that was never added, and flight was still missing. Accusations flew that content was cut to support store mounts, store pets, selfies, and twitter integration because that’s what was advertised so heavily as being part of the patch. And the design choice to make all in game mounts recolors of the same three models, so that the store mounts are instantly distinguishable with their unique models. That has been, SUPER POPULAR!!!! Just read the blue posts about it.

    So, initially the company line was “these are content in 6.1”, and then became “no, these did not come at the expense of content”, then it was “6.1 barely counts as a patch”.

    Take your misgivings about fight out of the picture for a moment, does this sound like a company that responds to customer input, or one that runs roughshod over the community in pursuit of more money and free publicity?

    At Launch/Release it was an unfinished game, and not just because Tanaan was inaccessible. The dailies and reputations being brutal mob grinds were not an accident, they were the result of bad time management, even Lore admitted as much in the interview before 6.2.

    I bring up launch/release because this game cost 10 more dollars, has only one content patch, three raids and 12 less bosses than Pandaria had. Its also the first expansion to have no Battle Ground, no capital city and less than 3 content patches, regardless if 6.1 “counts” or not. Speaking of no’s I had no choice when I paid an extra ten bucks to ‘boost’ an alt to 90 so that Blizzard could be ensured that 7 of the 10 million subscribers will be experiencing this content at least twice, hey that’s twice the content!!!

    So how Alt friendly has this expansion been, since the VAST majority played MoP and already had a max level character? Well with the cool down economy they are practically mandatory, but that’s not the point. How well is the game designed for alts? It flatly isn’t. Hell they said as much in their interview, they didn’t scale rewards, the garrison, the center of the expansion, was not designed for it, people are getting burned out yada, yada yada. I view this as charging for content, an entire EXTRA character’s worth of content and then delivering on none of it.

    Now they haven’t officially said this is the last content patch. They will probably announce that after announcing the next expansion, when they will take less heat form the community. That said, the interim excuse still irks me. They don’t know what to do with Netherstorm, but if the community comes up with something they like they MIGHT do it. Well when you cut Tanaan out and added it two patch later as the Netherstorm content, you kind of wrote yourself into a corner. That’s not my fault as a customer, but here’s a half a__ed lazy, and easy to implement solution that you guys at blizz love. Battle Ground for the PVPers and a faction controlled raid in the center a la Baradin Hold/Wintergrasp for PVE.

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    1. I did not forget what was in it. Patch stuff was in it. Not content. Patches, fixes, things that should have been put in instantly when they fixed it and not saved up for one big bundle of fixes that they wanted to pass off as a content patch. We seem to somewhat agree on that.

      As you said, we did get the BRF parts of the legendary and such, but that would have come out with BRF, which was not part of 6.1 to begin with. So even if they list that as part of 6.1 "content" it wasn't.

      As you said, everything in there should have been part of release. Except maybe twitter and selfies, that could have been packaged with 6.2 when it came out to give it a little more luster. Actually, I think they would have fit better in 6.2.

      I also happen to agree with the people that say tanaan is intended for release. It was, watch blizzcon, it is (was) a level 99-100 area. They just were running so behind schedule and needed to release something so they cut it to add later. But it should have been ready for release. They advertised it as such, so those people are 100% right.

      "Take your misgivings about fight out of the picture for a moment, does this sound like a company that responds to customer input, or one that runs roughshod over the community in pursuit of more money and free publicity?"

      It sounds like a company in pursuit of more money and free publicity. They started telling people what they wanted to hear so they would shut up about about it and the bad vibes they caused over it would stop being front page everywhere.

      So it was absolutely about money, nothing more. They were only "listening" so they could appease people so they would not quit because they would lose money if they did that. They were not listening for meaningful feedback to try to make the game better. Sadly.

      They charged us more for less than we ever seen before. Agreed.

      It is an alt unfriendly expansion. Agreed.

      They did not say it was the last content patch, but they did say it was the last raid patch. Which to many means content patch.

      Over all this will turn out to be the most expensive expansion with the lease content ever. Even if they do release another patch, even if they do jam pack it filled with lots of stuff we do not know about, they would still end up well behind all the other expansions. Again, sadly.

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  4. Obviously I have no proof, but it seems to me that what we saw play out on flying is pretty much what happened.

    If they had "never designed Draenor for flying" then we wouldn't be able to use the feather, and I'm damn sure it would take more than ~6 weeks to code in flying. I figure that the sequence went something like this:

    1. During development, they started designing the zone for flying, which they always do.

    2. Over the course of development, an "anti-flying" faction became prominent within the dev team, and persuaded the leads to postpone flying to 6.1. They thus put working on the "finishing touches" for flying on the back burner to focus on getting the (already very late) expansion launched.

    3. When that got announced and the expansion launched with only a bit of grumbling, the anti-flying faction gained influence, and persuaded leadership to float the "no flying ever" trial balloon. When they did that, grumbling increased, but again there was no huge outcry. The anti-flyers triumphed, and persuaded leadership to go full-on no flying.

    4. They tried to soft-pedal the news by sneaking it into a holiday weekend interview. All hell broke loose, customer feedback exploded, and probably subscriptions tanked. The anti-flyers were routed with heavy losses (and probably several people lost their jobs), and Bliz reversed the decision.

    5. Now they were way behind on wrapping up the artwork to accommodate zone-wide flying. As a face saving move, and also to buy time, they put in the "Pathfinder" restriction.

    I just don't think they are clever or devious enough to manipulate the public the way you describe. As the adage goes, never assume malice when incompetence explains things just as well.

    For the record, I suspect that next expac there will be the Pathfinder approach as well, but that the game will launch with it. They *may* postpone it till 7.1, not sure, but I bet they'll build it into the plans

    (of course with the way Blizz see-saws on everything, they'll probably design the next expansion with flight required for absolutely everything right from when you zone in ;) )

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    1. I have to say, I think Jarnow has the more likely path, except I am not convinced anyone lost a job over it. I have no evidence of that, just a wild guess. I fully agree with the malice v incompetence explanation.

      Also, and I know this is somewhat of an unpopular idea, I think expansion pace and patch pace are somewhat to blame. I, again, have no proof but if they constantly feel rushed to get content out because people are blowing through it, quality is almost sure to drop. If I remember correctly, they said something about bringing on a bunch of new programmers during MoP and training them, and that was part of the reason for the delay of WoD. If that is true (IF), perhaps those new coders aren't capable yet of producing content at the pace they are being asked.

      Some of my thoughts on that: http://casuallyodd.blogspot.com/2015/07/expansion-and-patch-pace.html

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    2. @Jarnow

      I believe it was originally intended for flight but after they noticed how small the world was they decided to remove flying, while it was still in beta.

      That is why the main areas were you can not fly, where it needs to be fixed, are areas where content was later added or content that has phases.

      As for the feather you can die a million and one ways (exaggeration of course) do to drop points in the game. I've hit at least a dozen myself. Because they did not design it for full flight in mind.

      "never assume malice when incompetence explains things just as well."

      Your theory is not very different from mine. Might however does consider deception on their part whereas your just considers incompetence.

      I we were to use just those two things to judge, your theory holds more water than mine as blizzard has proved countless times they are, indeed, incompetent lately whereas mine which considers deception would require intelligence to pull off and if they were proved incompetent, they most likely are not all that intelligent either.

      Our timelines to flow the same way however. Both being guesses and both being possible. But your incompetence theory is better. And you can prove that part.

      Yes, and as blizzard always seesaws things, next expansion will be completely in the air where we need to move from land mass to land mass by flying mount. They do have a habit of going too much on one direction.

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    3. @Casually Odd

      His explanation, which follows the same exact time line as mine, is easier to accept as blizzard has shown a fair deal of incompetence lately.

      I think "blizzard" has more workers. I do not think they are working on warcraft however. Their production rate seems slower than it has ever been for having the largest staff they've ever had according to them.

      I'll have to check out that post, thanks for sharing.

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  5. You know...I want to find a way to test your throttled speed idea. Now that you've spelled it out I feel like I've noticed it but not consciously. It could be post hoc rationalization though but it does feel right.

    The thing that I know I read somewhere, the size of the world isn't as vital as the depth. If it is engaging enough, it won't need to be huge. Yes, in the beginning, the game needed the feel of a huge world. But that was 10 years ago and while people want a big world, they don't want a big, boring, empty world.

    They want it to feel real but not purely in size. I would say not even primarily in size. It has to feel lived in. Vanilla I think did a pretty good job of that. Some things were close, others far away but overall it (more or less) felt "real".

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    1. It is very subtle. Trust me. If I were not on beta when it happened I might not have noticed it. Would have just had that "feeling" you mention but not noticed it.

      I went from running like the wind to crawling on back to back days on beta. That is how it was so easy to notice it. But they did an awesome job of scaling the world around it to flow really smooth.

      I agree, you do not need a huge area to be an enjoyable one. Look a dalaran, still my favorite city and probably the smallest one they ever made. It was well designed, well laid out, and had everything I needed. It did not need a lot of space when that space was well used.

      So I do agree. But I also believe blizzard knew people would compare land masses to land masses and find that draenor was so small.

      There was a huge post on it at one point on how small it was and then after that blew up the change was made on the beta. Someone on MMOC, after the change, did a time to travel experiment and somehow figured out, based on travel time, it was close to BC land mass size.

      If he did that after the change, it surely was a boat load smaller before that. Which is why they made the change.

      Personally, between me you and everyone that read here (hopefully blizzard), I would have rather move really fast through a small land that was fun than really slow over a large land that was boring and/or annoying.

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  6. You can tell your guild mate that even Hazzikostas stated in his Interview that 6.1 was not a major content patch and in fact should have been labeled as 6.0.xx instead.

    Too bad you're server isn't in my Battlegroup (Shadowburn). LFR queue times are around the 15 minute mark. On the weekends I often get a 14 minute queue and then 3 minutes later it has popped and it's on the first boss of that LFR wing (so no more queuing again). Seems like whatever group you are assigned to just has huge wait times - longer than most that I have seen.

    Now, with regards to flight, my take on it is this. I honestly (and yes, I am giving Blizzard the benefit of the doubt) think this was still a highly debated topic at the time of WoD's release and on into 6.1. Since the question of whether there was going to be flight or not was still undecided at that point, there would be absolutely zero reason to devote time and effort (and money) in the development process to work out those flight issue bugs where you run into an invisible wall, or dismount when flying over a specific area, etc. If flight was determined to return, the Devs would then take the time to work those bugs out and smooth out those areas that had known issues. Again, Hazzikostas even stated this as to the reason flight being turned on would have to come as a patch after PTR testing (in his Interview). There are many times that I look for the more underlying and sinister reasons for the decisions others make and announce to the public (not just Blizzard) - almost "tin foil hat" at times. But this one just made sense. If you hold it up to Occam's Razor (VERY basic definition: All things being equal, simpler explanations are generally better than more complex ones) then it really does seem logical that these flight bugs would have existed and were left unchecked/unresolved because, at the time, no one was flying (with the exception of short bursts of flight via the feather).

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    1. I did tell him that. Doesn't matter, he is more stubborn than I am. But for me I did not need him to say it. Logic dictates what a content patch is based on their past content patches, and this was not it.

      As I said to him at one point, and it was a great line I think. Content patches have names, 6.1 was called garrison update. It was not a content patch.

      I did BRF this week on sunday morning and it was not horrible. About 40 minutes. But even attempting HFC is 1 hour minimum, even at prime time on reset say when you know more people are doing it. Blizzard needs to fix this and fix this fast. Because I am tired of it and I am not alone.

      I can not give blizzard the benefit of the doubt no matter how much I try. Opinions on flight completely aside, I can not see how anyone working for the game could have imagined removing it would turn out well for the game. So there was no debate, that would mean there would need to be a hell of a lot of really stupid people working there. It had to be one person in charge that went on his own agenda with it.

      There should have never been a debate about it. All they needed was one logical person to say you can not remove a quality of life improvement to the game and not expect people to be pissed off about it.

      I know why flight needs to be testing, because they never flight active to test it before. There are a lot of instant death drops out there. I ran into more than my fair share with my feather.

      But they happens. There is still a death drop in the old world after the cataclysm redesign over ZG, and me like an idiot seems to always hit it when flying through there. There is also one in hellfire peninsula that got me once not so long ago.

      The thing is, there are not a couple, like the examples I showed, there are hundreds most likely in warlords because no one ever tested it. So they really need people with cord addons to fly around trying to find them and then reporting where they died. Hey, that is how you test flight.

      I found a spot with my feather where I landed on a building that had no roof, even if I could see it. I just went down all the way into the ground. They never actually designed a top to it, because at that point they had already decided not to add flight most likely. Things like that need to be fixed too because the likelihood of someone landing there is much higher now.

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    2. 100% agree with you about the "debate" - and I guess I should have defined what I meant by "debate" as well. I envisioned it as one or two lead Devs saying "No flying, EVAR!" Because let's face it, making sure people don't fall to their death for no action other than flying over a bad spot takes time and money to flush out those bugs. Then there's the rest of the Blizzard employees saying, "I don't think you're playing the same game we all play?!?"

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    3. Debate in that sense makes sense.

      Like I said, I think it was more one person in charge with a personal agenda. It had nothing to do with the health of the game because even a moron would know you can not take something like that away without a backlash.

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    4. I do not believe it was a personal agenda that motivated the individual or individuals whom made the No Flying Decision. I believe it is much more likely that the company set deadlines and budget for the expansion and/or content patch. That team lead went to their superiors and said, its going to take X amt of manhours to debug and properly prep flying, and either that cost and/or time it would take blew the budget/deadline up. Then the command decision came down and said No Flying to meet the company's dictate on time and on budget (or as closely as possible).

      Having worked for a number of corporations, the business side of the operation often would put unrealistic demands upon the actual operations of the company. This seems to me the most plausible and simple theory on why the Decision was made.

      It also stands to reason, that all the positive feedback (and yes, they did receive a lot of positive feedback) that temporarily losing flight wasn't unbearable or that big of an issue during the "honeymoon" period of the new expansion. The Decision makers used this feedback as cover for perminantly disabling flight, but didn't do a close examination of the feedback. If they had, they would have seen most positive feedback was qualified with statements such as, "For now, no flight isn't that big of a deal." or "I'm not finding lack of flying too inconvenient at the moment." I know I was one of them. But as the shallow content wore on and people plumbed the shallow depths of the content, they grew bored with the content. That's when the lack of flying qualifiers lost cohesion. Why would I want to endure tedious travel I've done literally hundreds of times to get to an activity I find boring at best and soul crushingly worthless at worst?

      The managers who made the Decision saw what they wanted to see on the flying feedback to justify a decision that would make it easier for them to meet the company's goals on budget and on deadline. I do not think it is anymore complicated than that.

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    5. Blizzard has always been horrible at reading feedback. Like people being "fine" with it at the start was reading it wrong, if they thought that meant they could remove it. Of course people were fine with it, there was new content, new things to do, new alts to level, new dungeons to gear up in, there was not a lot of time to fly around anyway. Once that wore off, people wanted their freedom back.

      It is like why we have (had) no dailies this expansion. Blizzard saw people hated dailies in mists and instead of reading why they hated them they just removed them. If they actually read the feedback they would have noticed that it was not the dailies they hated, it was the mandatory feeling of them because the valor gear, profession patterns, etc were locked behind the reputations. If the gear and patterns were not locked behind reputations, this dailies, people would not have hated them.

      Blizzard does a lot of things well but there is one thing they do worse than I have ever seen any company do. And that is reading and comprehend feedback.

      They can read (or say they read) feedback and come away from it thinking the exact opposite of what everyone was saying in it. It is quite honestly amazing that people with this level of reading comprehension even got out of school, nevertheless managed to get a job.

      If they were being squeezed to save money, they could have not done the character model updates. They do not have any impact on game play so if anything needed to get cut, that should have been the first thing on the chopping block.

      Again, as I said, bad management.

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  7. Knowing a bit about development procedures in big companies I'm pretty sure part of the disaster was cutting resources - especially resources allocated to "testing". Blizz launched 2 new products "recently", and I bet they are cutting corners in WoW wherever they can.

    I'm also convinced that the Garrison is relatively low cost when it comes to dev and maintenance resources.

    Finally I'm certain knew early on WoD would not be a real winner. But in such projects you do not have a choice. You need to push through, hoping for the best (not a good strategy in this case...).

    My bet we'll see an expansion announcement at Gamescon, on something easy and quick to implement. Like - involving the starter islands of Goblins, in 7.1 expanded by something brewing in Gilneas. They know they can not wait another 12+months in Draenor. Beta will start at Blizzcon, and the new "expansion" will be around in Feb - unfinished as WoD was.

    Rauxis, chosen of CAT

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    1. I know what you mean, they could not just give up on warlords even if they knew it would be a failure. The thing is, from a user perspective, they should have not been so telling in the fact that not even they liked warlords.

      Also, I believe that if there were any real management in that company the new expansion would have been announced a couple of months ago and we would be in the beta testing for it.

      Makes me wonder why that has not happened. They knew warlords was an epic failure. They knew they wanted to get out of it as soon as possible. Apparently people are not actually working on warlords based on the minimal amount of content we have seen added, so what exactly are they doing?

      No matter what the case is, lack of management has to be the key to why things are going so poorly lately. Communication mistakes with the customers, development mistakes on releases, suspect decisions on direction of the game, etc. All signs that there is no one manning the controls of the ship. It is just free floating, letting the waves carry it wherever it wants to.

      I said about a month and a half ago here that we would see the announcement at gamescon for no other reason that we have to see it then.

      It is sad that you are predicting that the expansion will be release in an unfinished form but what is even sadder still is the fact you are right. Their heart is just not in the game any more. They do not care about making a quality product any longer, and it shows.

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  8. so when are we getting flying? a future patch release does what they want - no flying.

    As always, enjoy your Monday random thoughts. Thanks GE.

    -roo

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    1. They have not announced 6.2.1 yet, but that is when it will be coming. It is on the test servers. I had originally predicted it would be out today. Being I am usually not that far off, unless they run into some major problem, it should be soon.

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    2. Thanks GE, LOL, I am reading (finally) this post of yours and ran into the flying part again and came here to ask the question, that I asked above. See, I told you I had it bad. New meds today start I and not sure if it is keeping me up or what. :)

      Now do you think that flying will really save WOW from going under 5 mill? I don't know, but I don't think it will. I would love for flying to come about, but the world was bigger without and I am afraid, with it, we will see how small WOD actually is.

      Ok, take it easy. Well, I know the answer to WOW - just needs more cowbell!

      -roo

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    3. Flying will not save the game, it is not that important, but having it will most definitely slow the bleeding.

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  9. I am curious, what part of the Ji-Kun fight is stopping you? I did it at 690 ilvl and I cant recall having any difficulty with it. Just ignore every mechanic, maybe even get a corehound and just unload on it.

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    1. Ji-Kun is not the problem, I can do that fight fine. It was tank and spank at the end of mists, so it would just be easier now. Just died on council, so did not get to him. Did not try a second time. Frostbite got me. Just going to FD it next time so I do not get hit by it. That is how I get past the first boss so he does not despawn, I FD it.

      I think that if I get the Kaz trinket with leech it might be good for that fight. It is a healing issue, not a DPS one. I just did not give it another try as I had to go, but I am fairly certain FDing the frostbite will work.

      How did you manage to live though that?

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    2. I just pop everything on Malakk and move the spirit to another boss before he casts it. Then I kill him, move to Sul and after that switch between Kaz and Marli. The fight is still not that stable for me though, since they do a lot of incidental damage

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    3. I do wonder if you can FD the frostbite. Many bosses if you FD before something is cast it will not choose you and without a target it lands on no one.

      I think that was my problem, using blink strikes and not stampede, that change alone should more than handle it.

      Next time I will do a slow attack and try the FD thing, just want to see if that works.

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  10. Anon, Grumpy's former Guild Leader:

    Yes, I do think that the company is that badly managed at the current time and has been since late MoP. Not sure what happened, nor who is to blame, but the actions of the company are obviously that of one that is disconnected from its customer base. The examples just from the ones who responded here to this post shows it is not just my belief but is pretty near unanimous among your responders--including yourself. Your example of how badly crafting has been handled is a perfect example of a company that is not being led well, i.e. how the design got approved for live is not comprehensible to anyone who cares about the game or its future expansions.

    Perhaps it is a longer cycle of the Blizzard tendency to go to extremes. What else it could be I have no idea because most of the main folks at Blizzard are still in charge. Yes, there has been some churn in who is who, but truly nothing outstanding or remarkable in and of itself. In any organization, people come and go, but the organization carries on in its same traditions. Look at our guild for a perfect example of how this works. There are no suddenly evil designers now controlling Blizzard, but rather a lack of resources for development compared to the percentage spent on public relations. Having to do more (or at least as much in theory) with fewer resources of the overall total probably contributed a lot to the attitude shift among Blizzard designers.

    So yes, let us all hope it is an indication of the Blizzard tradition in the sense that no matter how far it swings in one direction, just be patient and the pendulum will swing back again. In which case, we are in for one hell of a treat of an expansion sometime in the near future (soon TM).

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    1. They seem to have been in turmoil since ghostcrawler left. Mind you, I never really liked the guy over all, but at least they seemed like they had a direction when he were there, even if I did not like it. They are a rudderless ship right now.

      For crafting, how it went live is even more amazing being everyone I spoke to on the beta talked about the problems with it. How could something be so well known to be a problem and blizzard completely miss it.

      Same goes for all the garrison crashes at launch. It crashed all the time in the beta. What did they think would happen when they had 100 times the amount of people using it? Did they think it would fix itself? How did it get released live when it was not even stable on beta with substantially fewer people playing.

      Maybe this is one of those swings, as you said, in the wrong direction, and it will come back and we will get direction again.

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    2. A number of times they mentioned "design by consensus" - which is utter BS. You either have someone taking the lead (and the herd follows), or a herd with little imagination nodding heads to everything that pops up.

      Apart from GC a few others also left WoW if I remember correctly.

      Fewer visions, limited resources plus a fixed launch date and you have a disaster in waiting (that a number of MMOs already experienced)

      Rauxis, chosen of CAT

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  11. It's lack of resources that matters I think.
    Let's look up at the recent year:
    1. Overwatch - brandnew game and genre from scratch, which Blizzard didn't do before.
    2. Hearthstone - several expansions
    3. Big, big, big Starcraft II - Protoss, which isn't even an expansion, it's a separate game.
    4. HotS - done from scratch.
    5. Smth. with Diablo - I don't check the news, but they had something too.

    Now we can tell where the human/time resources went.

    Good news: I predict that now, when these games would need some improvements, patching and expansions (not big development), they finally have some spare hands and hours for WoW.

    As for flying, I don't see much use of it now. I would explore some Gorgrond, find treasures which I don't feel like nintedoing to, finish Archaeology and Fishing. It will occupy me for few days, but... They actually add flying when we don't need it.

    I did epic naval quests yesterday, and suddenly I don't need Shipyard <- Oil <- Dailies. I get some Exalted, and I don't want Tanaan anymore. Why even fly there?..

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    1. Can't really count overwatch. That was titan and was something they were working on for a while. So if anything the group doing overwatch recently is smaller than the one that had been working on it when it was a bigger game intended to be titan.

      I get what you mean however. They have so much going on and some of it makes a lot more money, based on what you have to out into it to get something out of it, than warcraft does. So for a company trying to maximize profit, which blizzard is, warcraft is really more of a pet project now than a money maker.

      I agree with the timing of flight. Adding it when we are already bored with the game is kind of useless, but I would still rather have it than not have it.

      I'm keeping with the shipyard until I get all the achievements. Still need most of the rare missions. They must really be rare because I never see them.

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    2. Got a pet mission pretty early and a mount mission. Won them with 78-85 chance.

      No rare missions ever since. Oh wait, there was one: 550 gold. Isn't that a PRIZE? Worth playing Shipyard?

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    3. I got the intellect heirloom ring. Got the mount on one of my characters, got one other that might have been gold, and got the bag that gives you the versatility trinket. Those, I think, are the only ones I have seen so far.

      Heck, even on follower missions I still have not seen my pet, the cinder pup is it? And I have 6 characters over 675 I think. Not one of them has seen it. RNG can be a bitch sometimes. Well, to me a lot more then sometimes. lol

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  12. random number generator - i.e. 100 sided die.

    :P

    Cinder Pup - where do you get that one from/

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    1. I finally got it.

      You need to have your followers at item level 675 and your character at item level 675 and then if you get lucky it will appear as a follower mission.

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    2. I have to have all of my toons at ilvl 675 on the server? Egads, never will happen. half are banking toons. Oh well, just the cat that I can buy is all I need.

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    3. Nope, just need to have some followers and that one toon with the followers to 675.

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