frustration
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Breakfast Topic: Where's my red Battlegear of Wrath?
Look, I'm a transmog aficionado. I have no bag space left because I collect gear constantly. So every time I go to Tempest Keep to kill Kael, I run into these guys and they irritate the heck out of me. I already have the Battlegear of Wrath, and its recolor. I prefer the classic look to the Burning Crusade green color dungeon set, but I'd very much prefer that red set above to either, and I can't get it. It doesn't drop anywhere - the only place you'll see it in game is on mobs like the guys in Tempest Keep and Ruul the Darkener, who makes it even worse by dual-wielding Thunderfury while he's at it. This irks me. I want this set, but I can't have it. It's not a major concern - it's just irritating. So let's make this about you - any mobs who have something you want - an item, gear, a special mount?
The Daily Grind: When's the last time you logged out in frustration?
The other night I had to take a break from The Secret World, because it was either that or ram my head through the monitor. A particularly tricksy mission boss had been kicking my butt up and down the alley until all of my armor was broken and my soul was reduced to a whimpering, pathetic noise. It got so bad that my character, upon resurrection, would face me, fall to her knees, and beg that I not send her back into that meat grinder once more. I'm sure I'll get it next time, but I just had to take a break to cool down and regroup. That happens sometimes, you know? So what about you? When is the last time you logged out in frustration and why? Was it just a hard quest, a difficult mechanic, or progress that was wiped out in the blink of an eye? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: What quest has frustrated you more than any other?
I have a relatively acrimonious relationship with most of The Secret World's investigation missions for reasons too ornate to detail here. Hell and Bach, however, deserves special mention. It's not that it's one of the game's worse examples, but that the actual mechanics behind clearing the mission are very finnicky. You have to click a series of symbols in just the right way to spell out a phrase, but the symbols are close together, it's easy to miss a click, and to top it off it won't work if you have the reference guide open as you do so. For all-time frustration, that mission ramped up pretty highly, although I enjoyed it once I cleared it. But it's not about what frustrates me, it's about what frustrates you. So what quest has frustrated you more than any other? Was it unclear in its objectives, or were its clearly stated objectives just dizzyingly hard to actually accomplish? Or was it something even more mundane, like a Final Fantasy XI quest that irritated you because you could never find the other people to do it with? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Blood Sport: 5 frustrations of PVP and how to overcome them
Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women? That's why Blood Sport is here! WoW is a big, big game. In most of the game, you get to hang out with friends, do your best, and eventually see all the content. Even if it requires extra levels, raid nerfs, and gear improvement, chances are you will eventually get the chance to kill every boss in the game. Play long enough and keep working hard enough, and you can be guaranteed to see all of the player-versus-environment content. PVP doesn't work that way. PVP is a zero-sum game. In order for someone to win, someone has to lose. The Arena doesn't end until one of the teams suffers a total defeat. In the Battlegrounds, one team achieves its objectives and the other team fails. The result of this zero-sum situation is that PVP can be very, very frustrating. We have some tips and techniques that will help you battle these frustrations, either by managing your emotions or overcoming the most annoying aspect of PVP.
Enough Already Arduino mutes TV's overexposed celebrities, frees you to live again (video)
Are you besieged by celebrities? Sure, you could try turning off the TV, but now there's a more complex, DIY solution: Enough Already, an Arduino box that mutes your television at any mention of certain names -- Lady Gaga, for example. The setup's fairly simple if you're comfortable with hardware hacking; it uses the Video Experimenter Shield to read closed captioning data, then sends the mute command via IR whenever offending words appear. Of course, you can tweak the blacklist however you like, so Pippa Middleton updates will still get through. Follow the tutorial after the break and you'll be able to once more channel-surf in peace, knowing you'll never again have to hear the word "Snooki."
The Daily Grind: When does friendly turn frustrating?
We all know, from years of experience, that there's a certain community duty to help newer players get acclimated to the game. Or younger players, or... really, anyone. It's in the community's best interests to be friendly and open. But there's always the threat of the player who seems friendly and enjoyable... until you log on again and he whispers you almost instantly. And then the next time. And again. He's always there, latched onto you as if you're the only beacon of kindness in the world, and while you want him to keep playing, you want to play City of Heroes, not City of Helping the Socially Maladjusted. The worst part of these situations, naturally, is that it spoils you on helping former players. It makes the community as a whole more hostile, and even though you still know helping new players is a good thing, it's hard not to be colder. So when have you run into a player whom you wished you hadn't helped out? When has being friendly and open wound up frustrating you to no end? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Survey reveals what twinks are all about
This is interesting -- our friend Drayner over at Twinkinfo.com recently took a survey of his site's readers, and after picking up almost 1,000 replies, he's posted the results. They show a little bit of insight into the kind of person that plays a twink (a character maxed out at a certain level before 80, usually to run around in PvP battlegrounds). Specifically, they're male, under 21, play for 21-30 hours a week, think their gear rates a 5 out of 5, and are probably level 19 and in Warsong Gulch capturing flags. I'm not sure if that's suprising or not, but those are pretty safe majority votes, even given the smaller sample size of the poll.Twink players are also more likely to not have more than one account, which kind of makes sense -- they only need one account and just have lots of characters on them. 66% of twinks are actually in twink guilds, and most have at least more than one twink to play around with. Hunters and Rogues top the class choices (though not with a clear majority at all). And perhaps most interesting, over 50% of twinks say Blizzard is serving them just fine -- they're not ignoring them, and they're not giving them any more love than other players. Still, as Drayner pointed out to us, about 36% of twinks said they'd leave the game if Blizzard shut them down with an additional 30% saying Maybe, so Blizzard does have a little incentive there to keep twinking happening.Quite interesting -- twinks might be one of the only groups of players who are completely fine with how they're being handled in game. 2.3 obviously gave them lots of new items to play with, and while there is some frustration from other players, Blizzard has made it so easy to level that if you don't want to play with the twinks at 19, you can move on pretty quickly.
Blood Sport: Hitting the brick wall of 1800
V'Ming - who thinks that gnome warlocks are travesties of nature and need to be KOSed - shares thoughts and ideas on becoming deadlier at the Arenas. He also dabbles in the dark arts in Blood Pact.You've formed your ideal Arena team. You have great expectations and diligently put in time and effort to claw your way up the ratings. You dust yourself off after defeats and trudge on, knowing that great things will come your way if you persist.Gradually your team rating improves, and the sweet taste of victory more than makes up for the disappointment of defeats. You move past 1600, and 1700 eventually. You notice that victories are becoming scarcer, and defeats seem a lot more painful. Your team hits 1800 - woot! - and suddenly match wins seem to all but dry up - and your weekly matches start to feel like exercises in futility.Welcome to hardcore Arena - where your opponents are much more likely to be decked out in full Season 3 gear and less likely to give you an "easy" win. You start to run into a lot more cookie-cutter comps - you know, the ones you read about here. The queues are long but the matches are short - and you've run out of encouraging or witty things to say to your team while waiting. It's almost an awkward, seething silence between matches, and the game becomes a test of patience. "Did I sign up for this?" You ask yourself.
Breakfast Topic: What's your favorite quest?
Yesterday's forum post of the day discussed everyone's least favorite quests. The ones that seemed to come up most frequently were Courser Antlers, Zeth'Gor Must Burn, Mok'thardin's Enchantment, and most escort quests. WoW quests seem to be pretty formulaic. "Bring me some number of this item or kill that number of mobs." I guess there only so many types of quests that the developers can make. In order to ensure that you get enough experience from some quests, they assign a ridiculously low drop rate. Sometimes I think there are sensors in the keyboard that measure one's level of the frustration by how hard you hit the keys. Once you reach a certain threshold, the item drops. I'm probably wrong about that.
Forum post of the day: These are the people in your raid
When you put five, ten, twenty-five, or forty people together you're bound to come across people who annoy, amaze, and amuse you. Peri on Terokkar posted a list of raid archetypes who may seem familiar to you. Some highlights of her post include: The GM's Significant Other- Okay, so he was going to have to quit but he tricked his SO into playing. She loves it. She's terrible. You'll effectively 24 man every boss. Count on 4 constructs in the raid, every attempt. She plays a Belf. The Backbone- Plays a tank. Doesn't have much to say. Made an error once in SSC, or so you heard. Will disconnect when Gorefiend is at 30% and keep aggro while offline for the rest of the fight. Has never said anything negative to the healers. Ever. GL with your progression without one of these. Hates the prima donnas. The Prima Donna- Requires special attention from management. Constantly whining. Plays some vital role. Might be a main tank, mage tank, or lock tank. The officers really hate this guy and as soon as they can find another tank with 24,000 buffed HP, he's out.
The Daily Grind: It's better to burnout than to fade away
One of the things that any MMO player who has been playing for a while can tell you about is burnout. You know, that point in time where you get to where you dread logging into your game of choice. It may be because you've never made it very far and you can't manage to solo content by yourself; it could be because you're not interested in listening to 24 other people bicker about what's going on with loot; it can be just as simple as not being excited or happy to be in that particular world anymore. Whatever the case may be, we've probably all felt it at one time or another. In my case, I'm burned out on raiding. Of course, it seems to be most all there is to do once you hit endgame in World of Warcraft, so I find myself logging in less and less. Of course, for me, the nice part about this gig is that a whole bunch of other worlds then open up to me to check out, which I find I've been really enjoying. But for today's question, we'd like to ask what you do when you get to the point where logging in feels more like work and less like fun? Do you jump around from game to game, hoping something will take? Do you go outside (gasp) and spend some quality time under that bright fiery ball in the sky? Do you get more reading time in? Do you just keep going because others are depending on you until such a time as you absolutely can't stand it anymore? We're curious. How do you handle the burnout?
Game Over!: An exercise in futility (by design)
Don't you hate it when a decent game is ruined by one horrible, overriding problem? How about a game with 21 of those problems?The FORTH Institute of Comupter Science designed Game Over! to be the world's first universally inaccessible game. Each level of the simple, reverse-Space-Invaders-clone is intentionally saddled with a major game design flaw -- touchy controls, horrible resolution, instructions in Swahili, etc. -- that makes it nearly unplayable. In doing so, the levels explicitly outline the importance of the institute's Universally Accessible Games guidelines.It's a strange concept, but the strangest thing about Game Over! is that it's actually kind of fun. With the deck stacked so ridiculously against you, the pressure to succeed turns off and the desire to just try to beat the system kicks in. There's something perversely addictive about wanting to keep playing a game just to get a positive score. Kind of like the perverse pleasure of watching the Star Wars prequels -- you know they'll be bad, but you have to keep watching to find out just how bad it can get.Previously: Making games universally accessible[Via GameSetWatch]
Are you Wii-less? We can help [update 1]
[Update 1: Our apologies; we had simply assumed the service was free. Thanks to our trusty commenters, we found a better one! For free! WiiSearcher.com!]All right, well, maybe not us. We're too busy having way too much fun slamming our parents into the ground in Wii Tennis (except for Nikki, of course). The internet is a vast place, however, and the local denizens are sure to help you find your way if you ask nicely enough.Welcome to NintendoFinder.com WiiSearcher.com, a wonderful place that uses voodoo and sorcery to immediately discern availability of the Wii at pretty much every retailer ever. As soon as a store restocks, torrents of E-mail are sent to any and all subscribers to the system, letting them know to get their click on. It's a great tool for those of you worried about getting a system before Christmas, and we recommend you tell your parents (nudge nudge) to check it out. You know. So they can let Santa know, too.(Santa is a universally understood figure used for the purposes of a substandard joke. Please, no religious quarreling.)[Thanks, Matt, for shamelessly plugging your own site! ^^]
Breakfast Topic: Pet Peeves
This thread in the general forums brings up a good discussion topic about everyone's in-game pet peeves. And note the definition - a minor annoyance that causes extreme frustration. I have a number of them, myself, including people who refer to me only as "priest," players who start yelling "HAEL ME!!!" the second they take damage, and the players who see me shadowforming in PvP and feel they need to lecture me on the worthlessness of a priest that doesn't heal. (The latter especially irritates me, as anyone who's played with me for a while should realize that, even with a shadow spec, I know how to shift out of shadowform, and if I wind up in a good group will spend entire AV matches healing. Argh! I get frustrated just thinking about it!) But what are your personal pet peeves in this game?
