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Dungeon Finder reactions from players
The long-awaited Dungeon Finder is finally out on the servers, and people have had a few days with it now, so let's jump in and gauge some early reactions. Overall, it seems to be a big hit -- tanks and healers are jumping into groups right away, and while we've heard of longer waits for DPS, it doesn't seem bad at all. While of course the initial flood of people brought instance servers down (I'd expect to see the same thing happen during peak time this weekend), everything seems to be working well since then: disenchanters are correctly dropping items out, loot is getting distributed correctly, and groups are doing what they were always supposed to do: rake in the badges and rewards for players. Hots and Dots actually has a long take on the Dungeon Finder, including "15 Things You Should Know," like that tanks and healers are still as important as ever (if you sign up for DPS and another role, you likely won't be doing DPS), and that we're finding out very quickly just how skilled or knowledgeable people really are ("the Party Leader will be forced to confess midway [through] that they actually know nothing about the instance").
The Daily Quest: Guild switching
We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. Everyone's playing guild musical chairs: Sheep Blink Invis just disbanded one of their guilds, We Fly Spitfires wants to find one, Nibuca's working on names for hers, and Hots and Dots is seeking mages for theirs. Hopefully we made at least one match in there somewhere. Good luck to you guildless folks! Grandpappy Frostheim says Hunters these days have no respect, I tell ya. Planet of the Hats has a nice long post up about "gear pollution," a growing problem in the game. And OutDPS tells you how to hunt for Heroic Northrend Beasts. The encounter, not the actual beasts themselves. Click here to submit a link to TDQ
Advancing the battlegrounds
With all of the hubbub around the new LFG interface coming in patch 3.3, we haven't done much thinking lately about that other form of group play in the game, battleground PvP. But Cassandri at HoTs and DoTs has, and she has some interesting insight about what players are doing in the battlegrounds and why. She notes that some people dive off on their own, like Lone Rangers. And she hints that maybe, if these people were so persuaded, things would go better if they fought together, rather than on their own. An interesting thought, for sure, and probably true -- while there are situations where I aim to be by myself in the battlegrounds (if I'm on my rogue and just want to hunt down some clothies), things almost always go better in there when you work as a team. So here's an idea: why not take the rewards implemented in the LFG system and apply them to better behavior in the battlegrounds?
Defeating the anxiety of running your first instance
One of my favorite WoW blogs, HoTs and DoTs, has a great post up about Dungeon Groups 101 -- the very basics of running instances. You may think that there's nothing more basic to the game than getting in an instance with four people and taking down a few bosses and trash, but you'd be surprised. Even in a social game like this, one of the first hurdles newbies have to deal with is joining a group to play together. They worry that they'll do things wrong and that other people will make fun of what they're wearing or playing, and that worry keeps them from enjoying my absolute favorite part of the game. Cassandri's writeup is an excellent read for anyone who feels that way (and feel free to pass on this post to any friends or relatives you know who've been too leery to join an instance yet). She does do some basic knowledge stuff in there, just hints on the classes and what they can all do -- and our WoW Rookie posts will help out with that stuff too -- but more importantly, she says what lots of new players need to hear: that messing up in an instance isn't that big a deal, and that playing together with others (which is the reason why we're all playing an MMO rather than a single player game in the first place) is more than worth getting past any anxiety around joining a group. I've read a lot of comments like the one Cassandri quotes in her post, too, and I'm here to tell you: if you haven't run an instance yet, it's time to stop worrying about what it'll be like and give it a try.
The evolution of a UI
I love this post over at Hots and Dots, and it almost makes me wish I'd done the same thing with my UI (though truthfully, I don't get too complicated, so most of my pictures would look like her first one). Lathere has collected a series of screenshots of her UI, showing off how much its changed over the years, from her first raids in Karazhan up to the current raids in VoA and Ulduar. And it's very cool to see how things have changed -- early on, she really adhered to addons and what they did as a default, and as time passes, you can see that not only are the addons getting better at giving you the tools to lay out the UI the way you want it (not to mention that other tech has gotten better as well -- she goes widescreen about halfway through), but she's getting better at customizing things exactly the way they should be. The UI gets much more abstract and simplistic as time goes on, though you'd presume that it actually lets her do more in terms of her character.In fact, aside from the actual graphics in the background and the icons, it's almost hard to tell this is the same game. Of course, Blizzard has to keep a lot of things in the default UI the same, so they leave a lot of the really creative edits in the UI to the addon developers (and then, of course, steal the most interesting back). And they can get very creative indeed -- when you put these screenshots over a period of years up against each other, it's interesting to see how both the addon code and the player has changed the interface they use to play the game.
