Ulduar!

Fuck yeah! Comin’ to save the motherfuckin’ raid now!

Ulduar! 

Fuck yeah! Hard mode is the only wayyyy now.

Alright, so maybe I got a bit carried away, and Ulduar doesn’t deserve it’s own theme-song, but it’s a sad state of affairs when yours truly is so eagerly anticipating something, that I decide to break into song. 

You, my loving readers, are oh so lucky to have just experienced that. But, moving on.

Ulduar is just around the proverbial corner, and think the only thing that’s keeping my guildleader from wetting himself in ecstasy over the prospect of a completely new instance to violate is more than likely the same as every other major raid/guildleader out there – You know that it’s going to be a fleeting experience, like rubbing one out in the bathroom at work. Yes, it may make you feel good for that moment, but once you leave, you’ll just feel dirty, mellow, and also have an uncontrollable desire to raid the nearest fridge. 

Get it? I talk about a RAID instance, and then make a comparison that makes you want to RAID a fridge? Yeah? Y’get it?

Oh shut up. 

But it is inevitable. We’re seeing two instances in one as we did before – a ten and a twenty-five man (or woman, sheesh) version with the same basic experience in each. And the major point that Blizzard has been shouting about almost non-stop for the last few weeks? The fact that it’s loaded – LOADED – with ‘Hard mode’ fights. I’m resisting the urge to bitch more about it, but moving on. But the basic question that I’ve heard asked a few times, and in a few back-alley forums on teh internetz is “How long is going to last?”

Now sure, you’ve got the ten-man guilds out there that are still working in raid-alliances or whatever to be able to field a 25 man run for Naxx still, so there are those people that aren’t going to be going there anytime soon. But what of the ‘core’ raiding element in the World of Warcraft community? 

And I’m not talking about those SK Gaming fucks that are treating it like a second job. People may think that’s cool, but I’m sure as hell not one of them. Doing this stuff because you enjoy it, or you enjoy the company of your fellows is one thing. Doing this kinda shit because someone is paying you to do it, to be first in the world, country, state, zipcode, whatever, just seems to be too much like masturbation without the payoff to me.

 Days? Weeks? A few months, at the most I’m sure, before the place is just as much on farm-mode as Sarth 3D and whatnot. Then we wait, in annoyed silence, for our next blast of joy in the form of another content patch. So, I guess that everyone should sit down, kick back, and drink down this new instance the moment it comes to them.

Me? I’m going to pass. Too much like drinking Drain-o. Sure, it’ll clean you out, but it’ll leave you hollow inside.

As a side-note, I’m currently dying of the plague IRL, so my entries will be slowed slightly. I was hoping to put up a guest-post by a pvp-nazi friend of mine, but he sent it to me in a text-file, and I wasn’t feeling that productive.

Looking at the trend.

So, I was sitting here earlier, pondering the various deep and earth-shattering things that a person of my impressive intelligence ponders (not a word out of you, Joveta), and suddenly the whole ‘trend’ that World of Warcraft has been taking as of late become all too clear for me. And you know what? Usually this would be a point where I would remind all of you with smug cynicism that I’ve predicted other happenings in the game and was correct, but honestly, I don’t feel that way on this one. And I blame Blizzard.

And you know what, Blizzard? I used to be on your side. When World of Warcraft was announced, I was still a hold-over from Everquest, fapping at the epic warrior swords that my WOOD ELF warrior had.

 

Lightsaber, motherfawkers.

 

That’s right. WOOD ELF. Fuck you, those of you that rolled your eyes.

 

 

Anyway ….. where was I? Oh yes, the fapping. The ability to fly from place to place, mounts, orcs, night elves and tauren, oh my! You go down the list of the original things that they had offered to the press in their first meaty press release, and I was sold. I mean, to be able to go to Stormwind, see Lorderon, and so forth. All of these places I knew because I was usually playing Warcraft 2 and 3 about six BILLION times a month, and the thought of interacting in them? Wow! 

Of course, that was before I knew that going to Stormwind ment you had to pass through Goldshire, which (on my server) is the online WoW equivalent of willingly going to Thailand with a bottle of Vaseline, cheap booze and even cheaper 12 year old boy prostitutes, but I digress.

But I was sold on all of it. The game came out, I started playing, seeking out the awe-inspiring places of Warcraft lore, killing everything there, taking their loot, it was like American foreign policy, only I had an exit strategy. Raid instances were challenging, epic loot was.. well, epic, compared to what you could get without raiding, and the first time you saw Ony take off into the motherfucking air, you had to have felt a little turned on.

>.>

<.<

Anyway.

Then comes TBC, which was fun. Flying mounts, ten more levels, -tons- of content and quests, along with heroic versions of instances that you could get special badges out of to turn in for loot off of a vendor. And hey! Tired of your tier items never dropping? No problem, bosses now had a very convenient  item that specific classes could turn in for specific tier pieces. Helps stop the bottleneck, keeps the economy going, and so forth! Fantastic, right?

In hindsight, I’m not so sure. Well, the tier tokens, yes, that was a good call. I spent way too much fucking time in MC to get my warrior her shit, and I have the mental scarring and sunny disposition to prove it. But the heroic badges, now.. I’m not sold on anymore. It was only the inevitable step that bosses in TBC started dropping them as well. Raid bosses, that is. And why not, you may say. Some of the better items for certain classes came off those badge vendors, so the more you can get, the better.

However, then came Wrath. And yes, for those of you keeping count, I’m skipping the SWP and it’s surrounding isle of fun. Why?

BECAUSE IT’S MY BLOG.

Anyway, Wrath. Now we see that we have heroic versions of the same instance, as well as having two new types of badges. Two new types of badges that can buy three separate pieces of tier armor. I was excited about this at first, but now, I think it was a very bad sign. I mean, I know -I- was bitter when I went through my first 10-man Naxx, got a few T7 items, and then walked out into Dalaran and saw some asshole that had never put one foot into a 10man, who had some of those items himself. Why does this make me bitter? 

Remember back in the day, when you saw someone with Tier 5 shit? They (mostly) looked BADASS. And you would sit there and be all “WHOA. That guy (or girl) must be good!” Christ, they’d have to be for someone to drag their ass along through SSC and TK. What I’m saying is that, barring a few exceptions, if you saw someone in mostly tier gear, they were usually decent players. I think most of us can agree to having taken part in a pug recently where some dicksmoke paladin named “Retlolol” or whatever, packing a few items of t7, facepulling and wiping everyone out, or doing other stupid shit. Why? Because this guy is so foul, so absolutely putrid, so irredeemably shitty that the Republicans wouldn’t even draft him for Iraq. So much for Tier armor being a sign of a good (or decent) player.

So I have to wonder, what’s going to come next? Are we going to be going into instances, raid and otherwise, where each place has it’s own vendor? The mobs don’t have loot tables, just little coins, or badges, or Hello Kitty bottlecaps, whatever, that you collect and turn in for an item from a vendor out in front of the joint? Given the way things are sliding, that would make sense, in a very cynical way. Why make the casuals spend more time in an instance than they have to? Lets make it easier!

After all, they are the core of the game, we’ve got to keep them playing. Twats.