Results tagged “QQ”

I decided to add Aion: Tower of Eternity  to my stable of "backup" games but have made an interesting discovery: The "Eternity" of the subtitle is the time taken to get on to the servers. Arriving home yesterday evening I decided to take my Assassin or Sorcerer out for a spin, only to find there was a 2 hour logon queue on the servers. Every server (believe me, I tried them all). Had I realized this before applying my Live serial number to my Aion account I'd have held off until there were enough servers to meet demand (or the demand had fallen off).

Now, I can understand their point of not having too many servers at launch (that then become ghost towns) but having 13 full servers, each with 2000 people waiting (after 2000, it doesn't let you queue) sends a pretty bad message at launch. As I mentioned the other week, Aion isn't a bad game (though it's no WOW), and is a darn site more fun that Age of Conan, but charging a premium for the game (it retails for £45, usually discounted to £30-35 compared to £20-25 for WOW or WAR, both usually available for £15-20) and then not giving people the chance to play is cheeky in the extreme.

NCSoft's advice so far has been "try another server" (though all are in the same boat that I can see) or "come back later" (great for those with a limited play time ...). I'm sure they'll get it sorted eventually, but at the cost of how many subscribers I wonder. 

I'm pretty much a middle of the road player - I'm not in a raiding guild off doing Ulduar and hard modes, but neither am I what Gevlon would call a slacker (though moron, possibly). My main interest is PvE, questing and instancing with my friends, but I also enjoy the odd bit of PvP in Battlegrounds (AV, SoTA and AB mostly) and Wintergrasp. I won't pretend to be a good PvPer - dogged would be the best description - but I like to think I have some idea of the what to do. It's surprising how many don't though.

In AV I know the importance of taking the towers (and defending them until they're capped) and of denying the same to the enemy. All too often though, people are in a frenzied rush to get to the enemy boss, or else are stood in midfield beating up on the opposition (which is a really efficient way of reducing their reinforcement count ...) and so tower defense comes down to a pair of clothies trying to hold off a horde hit squad .... A lot of times the battle is nothing more than 30-40 individuals running at disparate targets while the enemy seems to be working as a well-oiled machine, picking off lone Alliance troops (or even uncoordinated groups). I'm sure they're not really as coordinated as they seem (unless we're up against a big pre-made) but even a modicum of coordination and tactical thinking can be devastating when you're up against the zerg that is the Alliance in Ruin (or Emberstorm as it is now). It would be nice, for once, to see a measure of coordination on the Alliance side - it happens occasionally by chance, but all too rarely - but I suspect the cries of "we've lost" or "you noobs ..." will continue instead - it's much easier to QQ than to try and solve the problem.

Historically, the Ruin battlegroup has struggled for numbers and balance - we were a (small) mix of pvp and Rp realms (and some newly opened servers) and thus starting battles was always a chore, and when they did kick off there was a good chance that one side (usually the Horde) was grossly outnumbered. A month or so back Ruin was merged with several populous German PVP realms (Emberstorm), which has had two effects on BGs: Firstly, there are a lot more of them (benefits of a larger population). Secondly, because of the way cross-language BGs work you never find yourself teamed up with the Germans (though we have a server of Italians in Ruin so it'd make little difference ...), only opposed by them. As a result, you either find yourself facing off against other Ruinites (so the old imbalance issues arise) or - more often now - partial group of Ruin Alliance/Horde players vs a full opposition group from the German realms. The prior situation was unacceptable, but beyond all comprehension the new situation is even worse! Indeed, one of my associates who is more into PvP than I am decided to move server rather than put up with the situation in Ruin/Emberstorm (though he found the mirror situation there - .many more Alliance than Horde; I presume there were 'technical' reasons why the BG mergers weren't done in more sensible manner ... not that it isn't galling to see the possibilities.)

Which leaves Wintergrasp. That actually runs quite well (and the win/loss balance isn't as one-sided as it was). Yes, there is lots of tactical muppetry and the horde usually has Tenacity (so not much chance of the "Against the odds" achievement for the Alliance at present) but all in all it remains fun. However, having the WG quests go weekly removed some of the impetus for playing (unless you're after Wintergrasp tokens, though to be honest there's not a lot to buy ,,,) which I guess was Blizzards aim to try and smooth out the numbers taking part. I'm not sure how the upcoming 3.2 changes will play out here though, with WG becoming a pseudo-Battleground with restricted player numbers (though I'm not sure having a 100-a-side hardcap will make too much difference on Steamwheedle Cartel).

No, this isn't a QQ about "School of Hard Knocks" (I managed to do 3 of the four PVP tasks before bed last night, including the EotS one that had me worried; just WSG to go. In fact, some of the horde helped me do the AB achievement by waiting patiently for me to assault the mine flag as they saw I had an orphan with me) but rather "Daily Chores" and "Home Alone".

"Daily Chores" isn't recognising daily tasks (or wasn't last night at least) and "Home Alone" isn't sticking - I've had the achievement twice, but it then seems to forget it. Given there's only a week in which to do the achievements there's not a lot of wiggle room and  I'm hoping Blizzard fix this ASAP - it's been suggested that it may work correctly after the 2am quest reset, but if that's the case then its sloppy programming to allow the achievement to be attempted several hours before it will actually work (and Home Alone doesn't have that excuse). If my "Hard Knocks" completes haven't stuck I'll be seriously pissed ...

On the plus side, I got Storm Capper and Storm Glory while in EotS and Veteran Nanny (not part of the Children's Week meta)

Interesting. The PTR for 3.1 is up (official patch notes and undocumented changes can be found on MMO-Champion here)

So most classes get a major workover, and mages get some mana-regen fiddling and a Polymorph Rabbit spell. Nice.

((And yes, I'm aware there'll likely me more substantive changes, but I can't help be feel a little underwhelmed ...))