Suspension of Disbelief

In an effort to practice reviewing stuff before reviewing “Arthas: Rise of the Lich King”, I review other stuff to practice my trolling critiquing.

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Many, many people like to throw words around like “illogical” and “preposterous” when discussing movies. It’s used as a sort of catch-all phrase for “stupid”.

Essentially, saying something is illogical conveys two meanings. Either the movie was inept and failed to follow it’s own internal logic, or whatever happened in the movie could not possibly happen in the real world.

The latter meaning is utterly ridiculous. This is fiction. Expecting it to play by the rules of the real world is… dare I say it… preposterous and illogical.

There’s a little something called the willing suspension of disbelief. It’s us, the audience, willing to put up with and enjoy things that probably aren’t entirely realistic.

Sure, maybe in real life a man wouldn’t fare so well if he jumped out of a car going 80mph, but when Bruce Willis does it’s perfectly reasonable.

What we, the audience, have an issue with is when things fail to be internally consistent.

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Get These Damn Orphans Out of My Damn Killing Grounds

I wondered. I really wondered.

The quality of horde in battlegrounds has deteriorated extremely fast. Horde went from utterly destroying alliance, every single damn battleground, to unable to kill Balinda overnight.

I thought maybe it was patch 3.1. Maybe all the good hordies are off raiding Ulduar. After all, Horde did suffer a general dip in PvP competence with all the rerolls thanks to blood elves and death knights.

Especially blood elf death knights. For every decent BEDK (pronounced “bee dick”), there about fifty thousand absolutely horrendous ones. They’ve been stinking up my battlegrounds with their idiotic strategies and general ineptitude, but I put up with it.

You can’t really expect everyone on Horde to act like… well, Horde; not these days.

But still. Even with all the elves, even with all the douche knights, there was still eptitude. (Shut up, eptitude is a word if ineptitude is. Screw you, english.)

There were still warriors who would go out of their way to save a priest. There were still shaman who would drop a Grounding Totem not to save themselves, but the guy next to them.

Sure, there would still be about twenty peeps in AV that would mindlessly zerg, but there were still plenty prescient enough to defend stuff and grab mines, even if all that defense was only to backcap towers and graveyards.

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Ranting about Pirating

This is a very long post with very strong and unwavering opinions. It has nothing to do with WoW. Read at your own risk.

So.

Some of you are probably aware that there was a trial involving some of the people behind The Pirate Bay. These people were convicted, fined $900k, and are to serve a year in prison for their despicable crimes.

Yes, you read right. Providing the means with which to pirate files is a crime worse than rape.

To summarize in a quick and dirty fashion: “the industry” (essentially the companies and other businesses) for music, games, TV, movies, etc, don’t respond well to seeing their product distributed to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, for absolutely free.

So they try to stop it. Branding the people behind it as criminals, and trying them as such, all in a vain effort to preserve their own paycheques.

And vain it is.

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Watchmen

This is me weighing in on Watchmen. Feel free to skip this and feel disappointed if you’re only here for WoW stuff.

SPOILERS AHOY!

So Big Bear posted his thoughts on the Watchmen movie. Check out his perspective as somebody who grew up with the comics in the ’80s.

My perspective is totally different. I wasn’t even alive when the comics came out, and didn’t even read them until last year.

No, I was not one of the people dragged into it by the movie hype, I was dragged into it by a friend who loaned me some of Alan Moore’s work, so I decided to read what else he had written. The guy is a bloody genius.

Bear has already gone into great detail of how Moore works with his characters. The way Moore set up Watchmen was simple. He created a world, created characters, put those characters in the world, and observed what happened.

There was no plot imposed on characters. No story with archetypes and plot devices. Merely his characters existing.

I, for one, really enjoyed the movie, and was pleasantly surprised at how well they managed to keep the ending non-retarded.

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It’s Raping My Nose!

Much has been made of these newfanged “morality” style quests. Rohan, for instance, railed long and hard against them, and more recently, little “death by fire” gnomey has had some… issues with the whole deal.

My question is this: where and how, precisely, does the whole idea of “morals” translate to the game?

The real me would probably think twice (or three or four times) before killing another person, would never intentionally torture someone, and most certainly wouldn’t mindlessly slaughter hundreds of annoying things (as much as the real me would like to).

The in game me, the Euripedes, the terrifying mage inside me, wouldn’t hesitate to do any of those things.

Sentence a tribe of Furbolg to death? Sure thing!

Extinguish the leaders of the Scarlet Monastery? Done and done!

Slaughter dozens of alliance children? FOR THE HORDE!

Kill fifty elves on a whim? It’ll be fun!

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Gear List? I ‘ardly Know ‘er!

I’ve been asked (repeatedly) recently for a gear list. Whether it’s for Heroics, 10 man or 25 man raiding, there are multiple somebody’s out there who want one.

Let me destroy your hopes right now. I will not, nor will I ever, provide a definitive gear list.

The reasoning is long-ish and suitably wordy to constitute a blog post. So here you go, you disappointed goons.

Before BC came out, it was fairly easy to provide a gear list. There were very, very few sources of quality gear, and even then most of it was crap. One could say, with absolute certainty, that a mage would need this hat, and this trinket, and everything else was total junk.

With BC released, it became somewhat more difficult. One could get quality gear from PvP and professions in addition to instances. Oh yeah, and thanks to a thing called “Heroics” and this new fangled “badge” mechanic, there were far, far more pieces of gear floating around.

Rather than saying “get this item”, gear lists leaned more towards the “get this, or this, or this, and this is good too, and so is this if you can afford it” style.

LK has gummed it all up even further. The amalgamation of Spell Healing/Damage into raw Power means that there isn’t even a genuine line between healer gear and caster gear.

Providing a gear list would be a monumental task, and largely pointless as anyone could get the exact same list with a modicum of effort on Wowhead.

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Hulk Factor

I’m not talking mad, or frustrated, I’m talking right FURIOUS, spittle flying from my lips as angered jibberish and blasphemy pours from my face. I’m talking rage hot enough to boil lobsters from yards away.

This is… Hulk Factor.

People who go to various WoW forums and post crap like “ONLY 60 DAYS TO WAR”

Ok. We get it already. Warhammer is an MMO. And it’s coming out. And it’s going to be good. Y’all said the exact same thing about Hellgate London. It sucked. You said the same thing about Tabula Rasa. It sucked. You said the same thing about Age of Conan. It sucked.

You said the same thing about LOTR Online and… it didn’t suck. Not really. It was WoW for the serious crowd.

I personally didn’t like it; it felt exactly like WoW but devoid of robot chickens and rocket launchers. That, and the UI was stifling at best.

So I can concede that yea, it’s entirely possible Warhammer will be an awesome game. But will it be better than WoW? Not a chance in hell. Sure, if you like it more, go for it.

Just stop coming to our forums and beating on a game we all know and love (except for you, apparently), and try to promote a game you haven’t played. You look like an idiot.

Hulk Factor: *grumble* morons…

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Changing of the Guard

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard of the change in LK that will change all the buffs/debuffs so that multiple classes can have them.

Case in point, Fel Intelligence, a buff that increases Intellect and Spirit, just not as much Intellect as AI does, or as much Spirit as DS does. And all these various buffs/debuffs no longer stack. For example, Scorch and Winter’s Chill will no longer stack with each other.

What this change is supposed to do is kill raid stacking, so that people don’t have to go raid with people because of their class/spec, but rather, raid with the people they want to raid with.

In other words, raiding with their friends, without screwing themselves over because nobody rolled a priest.

The good news: casuals rejoice! No more shall you have to scrape to get the right people in order to actually run a successful raid! No more shall you be forced to call a raid because a key person(s) somehow failed to show!

The bad news: say goodbye to class originality and uniqueness! No more will you be able to stack groups favorably, no more will you have to stack groups favorably. Now you won’t need to put in any effort whatsoever to raid successfully!

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Why I Don’t Play AoC Anymore

This post is not about World of Warcraft, so feel free to mark as read, skip it, whatever it is.

I will hide the majority of this rant behind the page jump so those of you who do not wish to read this do not have to.

Also, there is adult language. Things like Stupid and Dumb, but in their somewhat meaner forms.

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This Made Me Giggle…

Right now, if you go to the wikipedia page for WoW developer Tom Chilton, you have the following rather amusing picture accompanying the article:

*Edit – Obviously, this has been removed. It is preserved here for giggles*

The article currently states the following:

Although Chilton was on the developer panels at BlizzCon 2005 in October 2005, it is clear he has no sense of game balance, and shows blatant favoritism towards warlocks and rogues. It is no surprise that with this love comes a deep loathing for the mage class. His hatred for mages knows no bounds. Unsurprisingly, due to the fact that he was scarred by a mage as a child, every time he hears the word mage, he compulsively clutches to his precious nerf bat for dear life.

Obviously, somebody is a little bit bitter about something, and doesn’t know too much about World of Warcraft. Or any MMO, for that matter.

Let’s take a step back, and look at this from an objective angle for a bit.

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