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The Summoner's Guidebook: Roaming the jungle in League of Legends Dominion
Although players often consider jungling to be a role exclusive to League of Legends' Classic gametypes, proper exploitation of the jungle is vitally important to success in Dominion as well. At the lower levels of play, players often feed too much information to the enemy and allow their foes to move through jungle areas unmolested. Never do this! When you're ahead, the most important thing you can do in Dominion is secure your lead further by limiting the enemy's movements. The only way to do this is to control the jungle. If you're familiar with the idea of warding the enemy jungle to limit enemy movements on Summoner's Rift, controlling the jungle on Dominion will likely be familiar to you.
The Daily Grind: What goals do you set for yourself in an MMO?
There are two kinds of goal with any given game. The obvious goals are the ones that the game sets for you -- quest objectives in World of Warcraft, for example, are just things you have to do to clear a quest. But then there are the goals you set for yourself, like leveling one character of each advanced class in Star Wars: The Old Republic or taking down another player while in a mining ship in EVE Online. These goals aren't necessarily meant to make the game harder or easier, just to give you something else to shoot for as you're enjoying the game normally. So what goals do you set for yourself in an MMO? Have one alt of each class or character type? Master all crafting skills? What sort of esoteric objectives do you place alongside the goals that the game lays out for you? 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!
NintendoLand is a virtual theme park on your Wii U
Nintendo has announced a set of minigames called NintendoLand for the Wii U, which uses various Nintendo characters to show off the capabilities of the new systems. There will be 12 different "attractions" in the game, with five them being shown off at E3 this year. From the demo being shown on stage, NintendoLand seemingly collects last year's Wii U demo minigames and expands on them.The Legend of Zelda: Battle Quest, Animal Crossing: Sweet Day, DK's Crash Course, and Takamaru's Ninja Castle were the attractions mentioned in the presentation, all of which highlight a certain feature of Nintendo's newest console. Sounds an awful lot like the PlayStation Vita's "Welcome Park" application if you ask us!Nintendo compared the mini-game collection to Wii Sports, the pack-in title for the original Wii. NintendoLand launches alongside the Wii U this holiday.
The Daily Grind: How much searching do you want in your game?
No matter how clear the maps and how many waypoints we get, our first time in any MMO is going to include a whole lot of getting lost. After all, we're not familiar with the game yet. But some games give you plenty of pointers to send you in the right direction, ways to ensure that you know where a given quest is pointing you. It's useful, but at the same time, it means that you aren't exploring the wild reaches in the distance so much as following a glowing blip on your minimap. Most players aren't clamoring for a return to days when you had to draw maps on graph paper as you walked, but there is something to be said for having a bit more ambiguity in destination. How much do you want to search for things when you play? Do you want to have clearly marked objectives, a wide-open map to explore, or something in the middle? 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!
Wasteland Diaries: Combat fatigue
Fallen Earth has the best crafting system I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Fallen Earth's PvE is not too shabby either. And I actually enjoyed the game's PvP for a time until the end. I can't really say that Fallen Earth's PvP is bad, but it has several fatal flaws. And these flaws have caused the vast majority of the endgame PvP crowd to move on. In this post I will examine what I think these flaws are. This is just my opinion, but my experience PvPing on all levels extensively lends my opinion at least a shred of credibility. The fact is: PvP in Fallen Earth is at an all-time low. There is hardly any real penalty for dying in the game, so why are there so few people partaking? There are several reasons that nobody PvPs in Fallen Earth, and the death penalty is not one of them. After the cut I will analyze the most common reasons for not PvPing. I will try to represent the facts of the matter, but like most of my critical articles, this one will be smothered in opinion.
Patch 3.3 PTR: Patch notes updated
New patch notes have been release for the patch 3.3 PTR. The changes present in this iteration of the notes will be active when the PTR comes up this evening after the latest patch is applied to your client. While there are a handful of changes to a few classes, there are two major areas which everyone will be talking about for a few days. First, you no longer have to clear Naxxramas to get to Sapphiron's lair. Tha means that raids will now be able to go directly to Sapphiron, and (presumably) subsequently Kel'Thuzad. Secondly, quest objective tracking is now present in this PTR build. This was originally present in the initial patch 3.2 builds, but was taken out by Blizzard after issues crept up with it. We'll have more on this new feature later this evening or tomorrow. The entire list of patch notes changes after the break.
What to do about perpetual losers?
Many Alliance players have this impression that the Horde is constantly united, more cooperative, and generally understands how to play better than the Alliance does. Whether this is true or not is not something I myself can speak for, though I have heard my Horde friends say they have just as many clueless PvP people as the Alliance does. So perhaps both factions can relate to Mendax's complaint that so many people seem to go into the battlegrounds with no idea how to win, and somehow fail to learn how, even in spite of playing a great deal and getting a lot of good gear. Their tendency is just to go in and lose over and over again, repeating the same old proven-to-fail methods for various reasons: possibly because they don't know anything better, possibly because they don't care anymore, and possibly because they've already identified themselves, their faction, or everyone else in their faction as born losers.In any case, Mendax thinks that Blizzard should make the battlegrounds themselves reward you for better play, so that the game mechanics themselves encourage you to play in such a way that you're more likely to actually win. First of all, they could provide more honor for kills near contested objectives (such as flags or towers), and secondly, they could deny all bonus honor if you lose. His first idea quite interesting -- I like the possibility that the reward system of the battlegrounds could somehow teach you to play better in itself, if that's really possible. However, while I can understand his reasoning in removing all bonus honor gain for losing teams, I think this would just make the "losers" stop queueing up altogether. We might be happy to get rid of whiners, complainers and all them, but in the end would the increase the waiting time in between battles be worth it? And in any case, would the "losers" really go away, or would they just look for ways to get around the system?
Addon Spotlight: QuestHelper
We love quests, but they can be excessively frustrating sometimes. Usually they annoy you most when they make you wander all over, back and forth, without seeming to accomplish things efficiently. The fastest levelers will tell you to try to "stack quests," or do all the quests in a small area first, then gradually move around the map to other areas. But often the best way to do this isn't clear -- you may not even know exactly which area a quest is asking you to go to.Addons to the rescue! First, there was LightHeaded: an in-game database of comments from Wowhead.com that could help you when you get confused. Now, there's QuestHelper: an in-game guide which can tell you which direction to go, what to do, and what order to do everything in, all before you even get confused in the first place. QuestHelper isn't always right -- you still have to use your own brain, for sure -- but using this addon you'll be much less likely to make silly mistakes in your questing that slow you down and waste your time.
