WoW has a ton of issues.. I'd hardly say that everyone who plays it, loves it. General consensus is that pvp completely sucks right now, arenas participation is down 60% and there are counless thread made requesting to remove it all together, and then dungeons/raids are tuned way too easy.
It seems like all the classes are slowly losing their uniqueness, which a lot of people are frustrated about, and there is no sign of this changing in the future. My guild is utterly bored, and the next content patch will not fix that for long. It will be a month or two and place will be completely farmed because the game is now tuned to accessible to bad players. My guild is not the only one on my server to experience the problem in the drop off of attendance.. pretty much all the upper tier guilds I've talked to have had around a 50% drop off in attendance. We've gone from 40+ on an average night to 15 or 20 if we are lucky.
I have to say that WoW's community is pretty juvenile. The thing is though, it's the largest MMO community out there. All to often people state how "mature" their mmo is. The problem with that is that it only has 100-300k players. Obviously it will seem more mature because there are less people to interact with. Throw 11 million more people in there and see how mature it is, lol.
People who play WoW need to let it go, once they started to pick up the redundant pattern and lack of development. Remember, they only have half the content in WotLK than they did in TBC... Burning Crusade had a good chunk of things to do... WotLK--- its a bit laughable and its one of the reasons why it got boring so quickly.
But concerning the OP's post... this is quite possible. Since Blizzard does not prevent certain flags from misfiring. It doesn't happen all the time, but apprently these guys may have found a loop-hole. I'd love to know the names of these GMs and some screenshots. Maybe I can drive over to irvine and give Blizzard a piece of my mind at its degrading customer support practices.
First off let me explain why the raid lock mechanic works the way it does (note only applies to raid instances).
You are locked into an instance (specifically the raid instances) for 1 whole week. This is designed for 2 reasons, one it allows you to complete an instance in a longer time frame - ie. you can come back the following day (even with a different party) and pick up where you left off as long as you complete the whole instance within a week. Two, it prevents groups from raping an instance repeatedly in a short time frame to farm out the loot - you can only complete the instance once per week instead of multiple times a day.
So yes this kinda of behavior (raid ID stealing) can and does happen. But you cannot blame the game mechanics, those loopholes exist for very real and normal usage (being able to try again with different guildies/pug on another day).
The best thing you could've done is just to ignore them. You stated this was this guild's first ever Naxx run, why couldn't that wait till next week since the current week was fubar? At the end of the week, your raid ID would reset and you'd never have to worry about them ever again. Is it such a hardship to have to wait a week to allow for a stupid mistake to clear up?
I don't blame the GMs for their response. There are much bigger and worse fish to fry in the game's world than a couple of guys working within the system to grief. Yes it sucks, but guess what, without any action by the GMs at all the whole situation would resolve itself with just a little bit of time. And in the meantime you've got plenty of other content to do. They are only going to be able to grief you in Naxx, and in there only for a few more days. Wow should provide a whole lot more for you to enjoy than just Naxx, and if the loss of Naxx for a week is such a devistating thing to you than perhaps you should be rethinking why you are playing the game in the first place?
I hate to come off as scathing and as a polar opposite to your view, I'm just trying to put a little perspective in place for those that might think this is absolutely critical to your game experience. I'm truely sorry you had a rough time of it, but I think the whole thing is blown way out of proportion and all will be better in just a short amount of time.
I don't blame the GMs for their response. There are much bigger and worse fish to fry in the game's world than a couple of guys working within the system to grief. Yes it sucks, but guess what, without any action by the GMs at all the whole situation would resolve itself with just a little bit of time. And in the meantime you've got plenty of other content to do. They are only going to be able to grief you in Naxx, and in there only for a few more days. Wow should provide a whole lot more for you to enjoy than just Naxx, and if the loss of Naxx for a week is such a devistating thing to you than perhaps you should be rethinking why you are playing the game in the first place?
Like what? Don't even give us a null answer either... you seem to know that GMs have a bigger job than dealing with a harassment issue.
Doesn't the raid only save for the raid leader? If so, why couldn't they disban and make another guildie a leader and start over? Again, I don't raid so I may be way off. I would like to know how it works though. I would even take a link to a site if anyone has one, lol.
Doesn't the raid only save for the raid leader? If so, why couldn't they disban and make another guildie a leader and start over? Again, I don't raid so I may be way off. I would like to know how it works though. I would even take a link to a site if anyone has one, lol.
Z
basically, player A and player B go in a raid. they clear half of it. player A leaves the instance. player C (who isnt saved to the instance) comes in to finish the raid. player A is still in the same instance as B and C, as far as the game is concerned, but cant go in because there is a player limit tot the group. this locking out is done so people cant clear a raid, and just go right back in and do it again (lockout resets on tuedays for WotLK). everyone in the group gets saved, not just the leader.
this happened accidentally to me in karazan, someone didnt sayt hey were already saved to it (wasnt the leader) so our group defaulted to his instance of karazan, which was nearly fully cleared, and had someone else in the zone already talking to a questgiver (thats how we firured out why only 9 of us could zone in. if i remember right, we also became saved to his instnace, so we had to waiy for the reset to run it at all.
its a shitty thing to do on purpose like what happened to the OP, buts its not peculiar to WoW. kill stealing and the like have existed in mmo's forever (i know its not quite the same, but the sentiment of the perpetrator is.)
Like what? Don't even give us a null answer either... you seem to know that GMs have a bigger job than dealing with a harassment issue.
Well, maybe stuff like guild leaders running off with guild banks, accounts being hacked and all the gear being vendored for gold, crafters stealing materials, players that are unable to rez and the 'unstuck' features fails, people spamming gold offers, bugged battlegrounds, exploiters. Those are just a few things that come to mind.
With this case it looks much more like the game was 'working as intended' with two groups of people that got in a pissing match when one group didn't fully understand the game mechanics of the raid locking system. It's not the GM's job to mediate arguments between a bunch of annoying pre-teens and teens. They even offered a solution that was declided. What more do you want them to do? Come to your house and rub your feet and tell you that you're a great person?
Like what? Don't even give us a null answer either... you seem to know that GMs have a bigger job than dealing with a harassment issue.
Well, maybe stuff like guild leaders running off with guild banks, accounts being hacked and all the gear being vendored for gold, crafters stealing materials, players that are unable to rez and the 'unstuck' features fails, people spamming gold offers, bugged battlegrounds, exploiters. Those are just a few things that come to mind.
Out of all the things you listed very few are "bigger fish." We'll start with guild leaders running off with guild banks, that would be working as intended, the guild leader controls the guild bank and if they choose to empty it and leave the guild that's in their right. Accounts being hacked happens daily and the GM's probably have tools by now to easily do character restores to return lost items. Crafters stealing materials, not something the GM's can do anything about, you traded the materials to them. If the crafter decides to take the goods and run that's also "working as intended." Players unabled to rez and or being stuck with the stuck feature not working are told to use their hearthstone, if that's on cooldown the GM's teleport them to their hearth location, takes maybe a minute at the most. People spamming gold offers, GM's don't do anything about them, they tell you to use the "Report Spam" option and move on. Bugged battlegrounds might be pretty high up there if the GM's can even do anything about that. Exploiters, GM's might do something about them but more often don't do anything and if anything is done it doesn't take long to ban a person, not like they are able to fix the exploit.
Out of all the things you listed very few are "bigger fish." We'll start with guild leaders running off with guild banks, that would be working as intended, the guild leader controls the guild bank and if they choose to empty it and leave the guild that's in their right. Accounts being hacked happens daily and the GM's probably have tools by now to easily do character restores to return lost items. Crafters stealing materials, not something the GM's can do anything about, you traded the materials to them. If the crafter decides to take the goods and run that's also "working as intended." Players unabled to rez and or being stuck with the stuck feature not working are told to use their hearthstone, if that's on cooldown the GM's teleport them to their hearth location, takes maybe a minute at the most.... Exploiters, GM's might do something about them but more often don't do anything and if anything is done it doesn't take long to ban a person, not like they are able to fix the exploit.
Well, GM's do, in fact, actually restore items raided from guild banks. For a long time now they do, in fact, return items that have been stolen by crafters or other scammers. They check the chat logs and confirm that someone was scammed. As a result, it has greatly cut down on the frequency of those events.
All of these things take time though. Restoring items takes time, restoring vendored gear takes time, porting people takes time, banning people is by no means a quick process, neither is verifying that they are exploiting. You seem to imagine that they are sitting around with nothing to do until you file a petition and then they have the luxuary of spending 30-minutes dealing with it. They simply don't. They have thousands of standing requests spread over the hundreds of different relms that they are trying to address as quickly as possible. And when they don't have a live petition there are plently of submitted off-line ones that need to be delt with. Like I said before, spamming the GM's with 30 requests dealing with a single incident is going to be seen as a very hostile act. They weren't the ones that screwed the raid. People need to learn where to direct their anger. The GM's on the other side of the computer are actual people too. To purposely make their life more difficult, because of what somebody else did, isn't going to get you very far. That's true whether we are talking about WoW or just the real world in general. The idea that they teach in business school - that the customer is always right - is actually a big fat lie. A point is reached where a customer becomes far too big of a hassle to be worth dealing with - the company is far better off without their business.
The orginal author seems to be at that age where whatever problem he is dealing with personally is, by far, the most important issue in the world. And he feels everybody else should see it that way too. Then when people don't, he throws a fit. Personally, I see this as a parenting failure...but that's another matter. It's a simple lost week of Naxx, not the end of the world. And in the future they will be more careful about whom they invite to their raids. It was a small price to pay for a lesson they will remember.
You should give LOTRO a try. I have never had a problem with this game or its developer Turbine. I have been playing LOTRO since the beta, and I have been playing Turbine's games since '99 with the release of Asheron's Call (still the best MMO in my mind). Turbine has always been quick to help, and has always corrected any problems I have had - assuming it was feasible that is. You got nothing to lose, LOTRO has a free trial on their site. They limit a few things you can do (to prevent trial spam) like mail and trade, but other than that it functions like normal.
Comon guys.
Another push the copycat MMORPG in thread.
LOTRO was played and shelved. Throughout 2008 it was selling at 7 Euros at Bart Smit in the Benelux. Apparenlty we have a PR wave of Turbine since a few months on this site with 250 logged in visitors.
Yes we know with 600 votes on the yearly vote on mmorpg.com world wide web it did cap the price.
Just as if the lukewarm reception of the 2007 cold launch was ever forgotten. Same 11 EU servers as before (5 english ones).
I think it's funny when people accuse other games of copying WoW, as if WoW didn't copy things from other previous MMOs, particularly Everquest.
Sure, LOTRO may be similar to WoW, but I'd say that in most aspects of game-play(other than PVP) it's superior.
You don't have to get so defensive. There are plenty of aspects other than graphics, in which I'm sure many would agree that LOTRO tops WoW(as reflected by the ratings on this site). In the end it's really all a matter of opinion based on what you are looking for in a game. For me personally, the community of WoW is bad enough to outweigh many of it's better features.
Anyway, this is all getting a little off track from my original point, which is that you were accusing LOTRO of being a "copycat MMORPG" when the same could be said for the game you were accusing it of copying.
BTW, I really don't see where people get this "stick up the ass" thing about LOTRO's animations. I think the animations look great, and at least you won't have to worry about nightmares of Night Elves humping the air every time they cast a spell.
You should give LOTRO a try. I have never had a problem with this game or its developer Turbine. I have been playing LOTRO since the beta, and I have been playing Turbine's games since '99 with the release of Asheron's Call (still the best MMO in my mind). Turbine has always been quick to help, and has always corrected any problems I have had - assuming it was feasible that is. You got nothing to lose, LOTRO has a free trial on their site. They limit a few things you can do (to prevent trial spam) like mail and trade, but other than that it functions like normal.
Comon guys.
Another push the copycat MMORPG in thread.
LOTRO was played and shelved. Throughout 2008 it was selling at 7 Euros at Bart Smit in the Benelux. Apparenlty we have a PR wave of Turbine since a few months on this site with 250 logged in visitors.
Yes we know with 600 votes on the yearly vote on mmorpg.com world wide web it did cap the price.
Just as if the lukewarm reception of the 2007 cold launch was ever forgotten. Same 11 EU servers as before (5 english ones).
I think it's funny when people accuse other games of copying WoW, as if WoW didn't copy things from other previous MMOs, particularly Everquest.
Sure, LOTRO may be similar to WoW, but I'd say that in most aspects of game-play(other than PVP) it's superior.
Many games copy aspects of other games and WoW is just a collection of many other games aspects. At the core it is an EQ clone, but when you play EQ and WoW you get vastly different experiences.
Now this is just my opinion, but lotro is an eq/wow clone at the core. The problem is that the gameplay is nearly identical to wow. The experience playing lotro is almost the same as playing wow. That is to say that if you played wow and then started lotro, you would understand just about all of the games mechanics within the first day and be repeating nearly identical tasks for the majority of your gameplay time.
This isn't really a "problem" as I stated it, but I think that is what held the game back from being much bigger than it is. It just doesn't do enough different and doesn't offer as many things. Still I think it is a great mmo and have litte in the way of complaints about it.
Comments
WoW has a ton of issues.. I'd hardly say that everyone who plays it, loves it. General consensus is that pvp completely sucks right now, arenas participation is down 60% and there are counless thread made requesting to remove it all together, and then dungeons/raids are tuned way too easy.
It seems like all the classes are slowly losing their uniqueness, which a lot of people are frustrated about, and there is no sign of this changing in the future. My guild is utterly bored, and the next content patch will not fix that for long. It will be a month or two and place will be completely farmed because the game is now tuned to accessible to bad players. My guild is not the only one on my server to experience the problem in the drop off of attendance.. pretty much all the upper tier guilds I've talked to have had around a 50% drop off in attendance. We've gone from 40+ on an average night to 15 or 20 if we are lucky.
I have to say that WoW's community is pretty juvenile. The thing is though, it's the largest MMO community out there. All to often people state how "mature" their mmo is. The problem with that is that it only has 100-300k players. Obviously it will seem more mature because there are less people to interact with. Throw 11 million more people in there and see how mature it is, lol.
Z
http://www.TheIronZ.com
People who play WoW need to let it go, once they started to pick up the redundant pattern and lack of development. Remember, they only have half the content in WotLK than they did in TBC... Burning Crusade had a good chunk of things to do... WotLK--- its a bit laughable and its one of the reasons why it got boring so quickly.
But concerning the OP's post... this is quite possible. Since Blizzard does not prevent certain flags from misfiring. It doesn't happen all the time, but apprently these guys may have found a loop-hole. I'd love to know the names of these GMs and some screenshots. Maybe I can drive over to irvine and give Blizzard a piece of my mind at its degrading customer support practices.
First off let me explain why the raid lock mechanic works the way it does (note only applies to raid instances).
You are locked into an instance (specifically the raid instances) for 1 whole week. This is designed for 2 reasons, one it allows you to complete an instance in a longer time frame - ie. you can come back the following day (even with a different party) and pick up where you left off as long as you complete the whole instance within a week. Two, it prevents groups from raping an instance repeatedly in a short time frame to farm out the loot - you can only complete the instance once per week instead of multiple times a day.
So yes this kinda of behavior (raid ID stealing) can and does happen. But you cannot blame the game mechanics, those loopholes exist for very real and normal usage (being able to try again with different guildies/pug on another day).
The best thing you could've done is just to ignore them. You stated this was this guild's first ever Naxx run, why couldn't that wait till next week since the current week was fubar? At the end of the week, your raid ID would reset and you'd never have to worry about them ever again. Is it such a hardship to have to wait a week to allow for a stupid mistake to clear up?
I don't blame the GMs for their response. There are much bigger and worse fish to fry in the game's world than a couple of guys working within the system to grief. Yes it sucks, but guess what, without any action by the GMs at all the whole situation would resolve itself with just a little bit of time. And in the meantime you've got plenty of other content to do. They are only going to be able to grief you in Naxx, and in there only for a few more days. Wow should provide a whole lot more for you to enjoy than just Naxx, and if the loss of Naxx for a week is such a devistating thing to you than perhaps you should be rethinking why you are playing the game in the first place?
I hate to come off as scathing and as a polar opposite to your view, I'm just trying to put a little perspective in place for those that might think this is absolutely critical to your game experience. I'm truely sorry you had a rough time of it, but I think the whole thing is blown way out of proportion and all will be better in just a short amount of time.
Like what? Don't even give us a null answer either... you seem to know that GMs have a bigger job than dealing with a harassment issue.
Doesn't the raid only save for the raid leader? If so, why couldn't they disban and make another guildie a leader and start over? Again, I don't raid so I may be way off. I would like to know how it works though. I would even take a link to a site if anyone has one, lol.
Z
http://www.TheIronZ.com
basically, player A and player B go in a raid. they clear half of it. player A leaves the instance. player C (who isnt saved to the instance) comes in to finish the raid. player A is still in the same instance as B and C, as far as the game is concerned, but cant go in because there is a player limit tot the group. this locking out is done so people cant clear a raid, and just go right back in and do it again (lockout resets on tuedays for WotLK). everyone in the group gets saved, not just the leader.
this happened accidentally to me in karazan, someone didnt sayt hey were already saved to it (wasnt the leader) so our group defaulted to his instance of karazan, which was nearly fully cleared, and had someone else in the zone already talking to a questgiver (thats how we firured out why only 9 of us could zone in. if i remember right, we also became saved to his instnace, so we had to waiy for the reset to run it at all.
its a shitty thing to do on purpose like what happened to the OP, buts its not peculiar to WoW. kill stealing and the like have existed in mmo's forever (i know its not quite the same, but the sentiment of the perpetrator is.)
Well, maybe stuff like guild leaders running off with guild banks, accounts being hacked and all the gear being vendored for gold, crafters stealing materials, players that are unable to rez and the 'unstuck' features fails, people spamming gold offers, bugged battlegrounds, exploiters. Those are just a few things that come to mind.
With this case it looks much more like the game was 'working as intended' with two groups of people that got in a pissing match when one group didn't fully understand the game mechanics of the raid locking system. It's not the GM's job to mediate arguments between a bunch of annoying pre-teens and teens. They even offered a solution that was declided. What more do you want them to do? Come to your house and rub your feet and tell you that you're a great person?
Well, maybe stuff like guild leaders running off with guild banks, accounts being hacked and all the gear being vendored for gold, crafters stealing materials, players that are unable to rez and the 'unstuck' features fails, people spamming gold offers, bugged battlegrounds, exploiters. Those are just a few things that come to mind.
Out of all the things you listed very few are "bigger fish." We'll start with guild leaders running off with guild banks, that would be working as intended, the guild leader controls the guild bank and if they choose to empty it and leave the guild that's in their right. Accounts being hacked happens daily and the GM's probably have tools by now to easily do character restores to return lost items. Crafters stealing materials, not something the GM's can do anything about, you traded the materials to them. If the crafter decides to take the goods and run that's also "working as intended." Players unabled to rez and or being stuck with the stuck feature not working are told to use their hearthstone, if that's on cooldown the GM's teleport them to their hearth location, takes maybe a minute at the most. People spamming gold offers, GM's don't do anything about them, they tell you to use the "Report Spam" option and move on. Bugged battlegrounds might be pretty high up there if the GM's can even do anything about that. Exploiters, GM's might do something about them but more often don't do anything and if anything is done it doesn't take long to ban a person, not like they are able to fix the exploit.
Well, GM's do, in fact, actually restore items raided from guild banks. For a long time now they do, in fact, return items that have been stolen by crafters or other scammers. They check the chat logs and confirm that someone was scammed. As a result, it has greatly cut down on the frequency of those events.
All of these things take time though. Restoring items takes time, restoring vendored gear takes time, porting people takes time, banning people is by no means a quick process, neither is verifying that they are exploiting. You seem to imagine that they are sitting around with nothing to do until you file a petition and then they have the luxuary of spending 30-minutes dealing with it. They simply don't. They have thousands of standing requests spread over the hundreds of different relms that they are trying to address as quickly as possible. And when they don't have a live petition there are plently of submitted off-line ones that need to be delt with. Like I said before, spamming the GM's with 30 requests dealing with a single incident is going to be seen as a very hostile act. They weren't the ones that screwed the raid. People need to learn where to direct their anger. The GM's on the other side of the computer are actual people too. To purposely make their life more difficult, because of what somebody else did, isn't going to get you very far. That's true whether we are talking about WoW or just the real world in general. The idea that they teach in business school - that the customer is always right - is actually a big fat lie. A point is reached where a customer becomes far too big of a hassle to be worth dealing with - the company is far better off without their business.
The orginal author seems to be at that age where whatever problem he is dealing with personally is, by far, the most important issue in the world. And he feels everybody else should see it that way too. Then when people don't, he throws a fit. Personally, I see this as a parenting failure...but that's another matter. It's a simple lost week of Naxx, not the end of the world. And in the future they will be more careful about whom they invite to their raids. It was a small price to pay for a lesson they will remember.
Comon guys.
Another push the copycat MMORPG in thread.
LOTRO was played and shelved. Throughout 2008 it was selling at 7 Euros at Bart Smit in the Benelux. Apparenlty we have a PR wave of Turbine since a few months on this site with 250 logged in visitors.
Yes we know with 600 votes on the yearly vote on mmorpg.com world wide web it did cap the price.
Just as if the lukewarm reception of the 2007 cold launch was ever forgotten. Same 11 EU servers as before (5 english ones).
I think it's funny when people accuse other games of copying WoW, as if WoW didn't copy things from other previous MMOs, particularly Everquest.
Sure, LOTRO may be similar to WoW, but I'd say that in most aspects of game-play(other than PVP) it's superior.
D&D Home Page - What Class Are You? - Build A Character - D&D Compendium
You don't have to get so defensive. There are plenty of aspects other than graphics, in which I'm sure many would agree that LOTRO tops WoW(as reflected by the ratings on this site). In the end it's really all a matter of opinion based on what you are looking for in a game. For me personally, the community of WoW is bad enough to outweigh many of it's better features.
Anyway, this is all getting a little off track from my original point, which is that you were accusing LOTRO of being a "copycat MMORPG" when the same could be said for the game you were accusing it of copying.
BTW, I really don't see where people get this "stick up the ass" thing about LOTRO's animations. I think the animations look great, and at least you won't have to worry about nightmares of Night Elves humping the air every time they cast a spell.
D&D Home Page - What Class Are You? - Build A Character - D&D Compendium
Comon guys.
Another push the copycat MMORPG in thread.
LOTRO was played and shelved. Throughout 2008 it was selling at 7 Euros at Bart Smit in the Benelux. Apparenlty we have a PR wave of Turbine since a few months on this site with 250 logged in visitors.
Yes we know with 600 votes on the yearly vote on mmorpg.com world wide web it did cap the price.
Just as if the lukewarm reception of the 2007 cold launch was ever forgotten. Same 11 EU servers as before (5 english ones).
I think it's funny when people accuse other games of copying WoW, as if WoW didn't copy things from other previous MMOs, particularly Everquest.
Sure, LOTRO may be similar to WoW, but I'd say that in most aspects of game-play(other than PVP) it's superior.
Many games copy aspects of other games and WoW is just a collection of many other games aspects. At the core it is an EQ clone, but when you play EQ and WoW you get vastly different experiences.
Now this is just my opinion, but lotro is an eq/wow clone at the core. The problem is that the gameplay is nearly identical to wow. The experience playing lotro is almost the same as playing wow. That is to say that if you played wow and then started lotro, you would understand just about all of the games mechanics within the first day and be repeating nearly identical tasks for the majority of your gameplay time.
This isn't really a "problem" as I stated it, but I think that is what held the game back from being much bigger than it is. It just doesn't do enough different and doesn't offer as many things. Still I think it is a great mmo and have litte in the way of complaints about it.