More Warcraft Stuff:

Blizzard likes to recycle stuff so I have an idea for more recycling. It isn't necessarily ground breaking but here goes. There are some pieces of armor, non set items or even old set items that people prefer more over the newest set pieces. There are a few items in the game that are upgradeable. You take the item then add some higher end materials and you get a better item. I think there were weapons like this Burning Crusade.

They can take it a step further and allow you to upgrade the item level of any piece of armor provided you have the materials. These upgrades can be done by crafters so it'll give crafting professions something to do as well. So, for cloth items, tailors do upgrades. Leatherworks do Leather / Mail. Blacksmiths can do mail / plate items. Engineers should be able to upgrade their own craftable items as well. So guns, goggles, the old MC Shield, etc.

So basically the way it would work is, say you have your Tier 1 plate set and really love it. If you wanted to upgrade it to say, Tier 2 quality stat distribution, high end items would be like enchanted throium / arcanite or dark iron. If it wanted to be upgraded to Tier 3, then use elementium. Or maybe if elementium is too hard to come by, they could use obsidian from AQ or possibily Fel Iron.

Tier 4: Fel Iron / Fel Steel / Elementium?

Tier 5: Adamantite / Hardened Adamantite / Eternium

Tier 6: Eternium / Khorium

Tier 7: Cobalt / Saronite

Tier 8: Saronite / Titanium

Tier 9: Titansteel / Titanium

This doesn't just have to be tier pieces either, it could be say, any Level 60 item or better. you put in the metal and other crafted items needed, maybe gems, or enchanting supplies to include the enchanting profession. So say after doing a series of heroics or Naxxramas you have an armor combination that you love, you can have it upgraded.

I think that if a blue quality item is upgraded, the stat distribution should stay as rare quality. However, maybe there could be a way to upgrade the item from rare to epic by using more supplies and having it enchanted or something.

This would allow people to stop looking the same and look more unique. It would prevent blizzard from having to re-tune items and rename items that share old models. Look at the Onyxia loot table.

Instead of Goblin and Worgen...:

In my experience it seems that Blizzard likes to recycle as much content as possible, I was really surprised to see a revamp of the worgen and goblin models for the upcoming Cataclysm expansion. I wish they would have done an idea that I've had for awhile. I got the idea when I was creating a death knight for the same time. The idea is basically to create sub-races.

What do you mean by sub-races?

When you create a death knight there a few unique to the death knight only faces and skin tones. You can take it a step further by adding different races. For example.

Alliance:

Humans:

Stormwind and Theramore have a population of High Elves that never left the alliance according to the RPG books and lore. Change the blood elf eyes from green to blue, and bam you have high elves. Have the High Elf be tied to the human character creation screen. So while you are going through faces, there will be some that will look like high elves. Or, you can just have an option that says sub-race and click High Elf and basically create a Blood Elf. They can share all of the human starter quests.

Dwarves:
The Dwarves could get the newly discovered Frostborn on their side. So you can make the sub-race of a frostborn, give it some frost resistance and it can start in Dun Morogh or something.

Gnome:
Not sure what they could add here. Doesn't necessarily have to be every race.

Night Elves:
They are anti social, a possibility could be dryad but then you have the argument if they get to wear two pair of boots since they'd have four legs. Haha.

Draenei:
Give them the Broken! When I first heard Draenei were the new alliance race that is what I imagined. They'd have to create some female Broken but adding the Broken would be awesome.

Horde:

Orcs:
They can add the surviving orcs of Draenor into the horde. So the clan under Garrosh's command.

Trolls:
Adding another troll tribe would be cool. They can add those larger trolls that seem to share the orc model into the horde.

Tauren:
Tauren can add the Taunka. The Taunka female model would have to be updated because right now it looks like a normal tauren female.

Blood Elves:
Nothing.

Undead:

It always bothered me that they say that 90% of the population in Quel'Thalas was destroyed by Arthas yet you see no undead elves running around. Adding some corpse-y elves with their ears partially bitten off would be awesome.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

As the release of Wrath of the Lich King grew closer I grew more and more excited for the expansion. I thought the addition of the engineer motorcycle was the coolest thing, especially since I was an engineer. I forced myself to do dailies so that I could accumulate a small fortune to buy the bike. I took the day off in order to get the collector's edition and a copy of the game for myself.

Eight days after launch I was level 80. Which is by no means the fastest but for me it was super fast. I impressed myself. I worked full time and I was specced holy and I managed to level quickly. Ten days after launch I had my motorcycle and I was one of a handful on the server who had one. Anywhere that I could use a mount I was on the bike. People thought it was the coolest thing ever. They'd ask me if they could ride in it.

However, once I hit my two goals. Getting to Level 80 as fast as possible and getting my motorcycle as soon as possible. I started losing interest in the game. I continued on, doing regular and heroic five mans for loot but I wasn't having a good time.

I switched servers. I followed Hans and Stella to Thorium Brotherhood and picked up an unfinished level 42 Blood Elf paladin I had made back in early Burning Crusade times. I decided to do this paladin different. I immediately made the paladin a retribution spec. I've given ret paladins so much crap, most of it jokingly, so I felt so dirty when I did it. As the ret paladin progressed, my Earthen Ring guild started Naxxramas. I started going to the Naxxramas runs and was pretty neutral about how I felt. I didn't mind healing, but I've been holy specced forever and enjoyed dpsing more.

For awhile I was doing heroic five mans with my ret paladin and had a blast doign the five mans with Hans and Stella, sometimes, very rarely, featuring Poke. I was also raiding with my holy paladin. I eventually hit a wall. I started getting gear for both characters but I realized something I had already known and something I have done many times in the past. I will have to do this all over again. I didn't want to do it all over again. I will have to chew glass in Ulduar. I will have to replace all of my gear. I will have to get it re-gemmed. I will have to get it re-enchanted. I had chewed a tiny bit of glass for Tier 5 content and a lot of glass for Tier 6 content. It didn't really bother me much. The only thing that bothered me was the amount of time that had to be dedicated to it.

I ended up barely playing for awhile. I let my account lapse for awhile too. Though I've returned, I am primarily working on a Blood Elf Priest. However, I know that once the priest hits 80, I will be faced with the same end game situation.

I went to an Ulduar run. There were a lot of wipes. I don't want to think about how much gold I spent there. While there were a lot of wipes, I enjoyed it because it was new content. That has alawys been my goal, to see all of the instance content that I could. However, I know that once I wipe on that new content several more times over several more runs I will start to lose interest. Maybe the content gets stale to me? Maybe I don't like failure. Maybe I don't like losing gold. Who knows.

Since We(I) Last Tuned In:

My last entry was a rant, prior to that I was talking about Left 4 Dead and World of Warcraft:
I'll start with Left 4 Dead then make another post about WoW.

Left 4 Dead:
Didn't play too much of it, but enjoyed. However with the last few weeks, I started playing a lot more. The amount of people playing seems to have increased so finding a multiplayer game is a lot easier. Left 4 Dead is freaking awesome. Before I didn't like the idea of 4v4 mode where you can play as one of the dead. I take that back, 4v4 mode is awesome. Survival mode is intense and I love it.

Left 4 Dead 2:
When I saw that there was going to be a sequel that is supposed to be out later this year I was hit with a mix of emotions. At first I thought it was cool. But immediately afterward, I started to wonder why it was being released. This game isn't even a year old yet. There is really a lack of content. You can play through a campaign in about an hour. Dedicate 4-5 hours and you've done all of the maps in the game. They say that the sequel will have much more content than the original. Honestly though, I think it is too soon for a sequel and it reeks of greed to me. They should have added more content first and waited a bit longer before setting up a sequel.

There are community mods that have been in development since the release of the game that aren't done yet. Some of them look like they'll be cool add-ons and a much needed addition to the game. I wonder if they will get finished or not. New content would be nice. I'm not too thrilled about the addition of melee weapons. I think the ability to hit the undead with the butt of your weapon was enough melee. Running around with a frying pan just seems dumb.

I just hope both games are compatible. Like they'll show L4D1 and L4D2 servers from whatever game, then you can switch accordingly. They will probably be seperate which will divide the community. Well, I suppose that means I need to recruit friends to play the game and do the content with them.

Thoughts:

Sometimes I don’t understand the illogical things that people do. If it bothers you, why do you do it? You hear people bitch about how hard it is to be a parent and what happens? They spawn another crotch dumpling. So if one kid is hard, is their logic that adding a second brat to the mix will make it a lot easier?

So why is it that people park their cars far away from their apartment? It isn’t an issue of lack of parking either. For example the guy that lives next to us parks his car at another building and walks over to his place. There are two guys who appear to live at one building, but they park two buildings away and walk to their building. I don’t get it.

Left 4 Dead:

I don't like the number in the title but the game looks very interesting to me if one condition could be met. I think the game would be the most fun in co-op mode and having a total of four people working together to fight against the undead horde sounds like it would be very fun. So having a consistant group of people would be the condition. I saw their intro video and it has me even more pumped for it.

I don't like that it has 4v4 mode and some people can be zombies. Being able to control a zombie and not being mindless doesn't sit right for me. 

Wrath of the Lich King:

The newest WoW Expansion is right around the corner, I am wondering how long it'll be before I can actually play it. What I also wonder is how it is that blizzard has 11 million subscribers and cannot get stable servers four years after the release of the game. The build up the Burning Crusade was bad, there were some queue times but I don't remember all of the issues that have been happening lately. Since the 3.0 patch the game has been a pile of lag during peak hours and guaranteed queues. They have been doing server reboots pretty much everyday along with extended downtime on Tuesdays. The game was down most of Tuesday the 11th. It is down this morning the 12th for more emergency fixes. 

I hope the Outland server is stable, but whatever is bogging down the servers as of late, it doesn't really seem to matter what zone you are in, the lag still destroys you. I am hoping to do quests in Outland and get some levels and hope that the initial zones in Northrend die down. 

I am expecting no server activity on Thursday the 13th. Maybe some play time on Friday the 14th. The weekends may be met with several crashes. It'll be interesting, to say the least. It is too bad that Left 4 Dead didn't come out before WotLK, then I'd have something to do while things stabilized.

 

Day of Defeat Source: The Server

I've been playing a lot of Day of Defeat: Source. A lot more than usual. The feeling of wanting to play a game instead of being in a game that is a big grindfest feels rewarding. The problem I am having are how the servers are set up.

There is a mod that enables sidearms for players. I like this mod. However it seems that most of the servers that have this mod, are servers that allow "realism mode." I really do not like "realism" and I really do not like when I am on a winning streak and they declare "we are going to realism now."

What is "realism?"

Realism is roleplaying, I suppose.

The servers that do it are in clans that have a hierarchy of ranks. So, the 88th ID. They'll have their PFCs, corporals, sergeants, etc etc etc. So when they go into realism mode the highest ranking player will take command of their team. (Picking the damn teams take forever.) They then restrict the classes. It ends up being primarily riflemen with a few of the different classes. The bazooka seems to be never used.

A lot of them try to add a medic class to the game but it is always buggy and it seems to be very useless. Most of the medics appear as a giant "ERROR" message that is red and flashes. You see a gun floating in between it but you cannot see if it is on your team or not so you end up team killing people. The suggested methods I was given by the players of the server to fix the broken medic addition have not worked at all.

Most of them salute the higher ups with a chat emote of *salute* and many address a higher rank by ending their sentences with sir.

The people are generally nicer but I don't like being interrupted for a impromptu realism match.
Ask Kieran, one guy was extremely friendly to him, telling him he wished that Kieran would stick around for their realism match.

Another interruption that occurs is when they have "drills" to attend. They boot everyone from the server and password protect it.

All of these realism servers have all-talk enabled. (They turn off all talk in a realism match.) I think it is retarded that everyone is talking to everyone about stupid shit. I usually end up muting about half of the server so I can have a semi-quiet game. I love the in-game voice option, I find it to be really great when people us it as intended but that seems to rarely happen.

With all of that said, I want to get my own DoD:S server. I've found hosts and pricing. But before I go further I need to do more research on actually running a server. I need to find out what to do to be able add mods and add admins. How to modify the map rotation. Learning all of the commands. Things like that. I need to find a good and catchy name though.

My biggest concern is being able to find a player base to fill the server. There are a lot of DoD:S servers that seem to always be empty, I don't want to be one of those servers especially if I am paying monthly for it.