Project Lore

When I said that SolidSamm's guild "canceled raiding for the foreseeable future" I knew it wasn't going to last long.  For starters, the GM has been a big PvEer since EverQuest, and many of the officers and other members have been with him since then.  Two of the members outside of that group are formerly from a hardcore guild - where they met the current GM - who still take the game very seriously, but can no longer dedicate the same amount of time.  Thus, they never lost their itch to dominate content, just the time required to do so.  Lastly, the Heroic Wednesday event that I initiated has been quite a success in its short life, with numerous dungeons being run on the formerly inactive day.  The indications were obvious that the Warriors were ready to head back into Naxxramas, so we gathered up the troops and dominated Kel'Thuzad's stronghold in record time. Actually, that is a lie.  We failed.  Epically.  The Warriors of Faith wiped for hours, downing a single boss - Anub'Rekan - over the course of a night.  Yes, yes, it certainly sounds pathetic but the repair bills are forgiven because we attempted to move up to the big leagues, Heroic Naxxramas.  Hey, even Ghostcrawler said 25-man Naxx is "too easy to pug", we just wanted to test out his statements. Our little guild barely has enough raiding ready level 80s in its entirety to fill a full raid, so we had to flesh out the ranks with non-guilded friends and a handful of random players.  Where does the blame for the collection of graveyard runs go?  On everyone.  We allowed pugged players with terrible gear and little knowledge in the raid, we had our own members with inadequate gear, and we even failed to research the subtle differences in 10-man, 25-man and 40-man encounters.  I ended the night with something along the lines of a 110 gold repair bill. Am I upset, annoyed or angry at our failures?  Not at all, we tried something a bit different and difficulties are to be expected.  Heck, there is actually an upside to what didn't go down.  A few of the PUGs joined the guild and have already begun to gear their toons at last night's Heroic Wednesday run.  How those went?  Well, that is a story for another day.  I just hope that our morale stays high and these new members stick around for the long run.  After all, if tonight's second attempt at Heroic Naxxramas doesn't go a bit better, members may just disappear until Ulduar.  But I don't believe our core members expect instant gratification or to be carried through. As masochistic as this may sound, I absolutely love these times in a guild.  Despite the numerous setbacks we are sure to face, they help weed out the weak players or those who are just in it for the good times (read free loot).  They push players to the edge, getting them to eek out every bit of DPS, mana or threat-per-second their class can muster.  They breed competition, creativity, interesting discussions and strategies.  From these difficult times comes good, long-lasting members and friends.  And when there's finally that taste of success, it becomes that much sweeter.  It's the digital equivalent of being in the trenches - just without the trench foot, machine guns, mustard gas, shell shock and death.  See, just like it.

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Fing classic.

Patch v3.0.8 had many of us at ProjectLore a bit excited. Heck, you could get away with calling us downright ecstatic at all the changes the first Wrath of the Lich King patch would bring. We all all had our owns reasons for the anticipation, new achievements, cheaper enchants, one-shot mining, knowing that Dorkins will never stop complaining, it was all there. Blizzard finally dropped the patch on us this Tuesday, but not all was well in the lands of Azeroth. Actually, the whole ordeal has been quite a clusterfrak.

The first major bug to rear its ugly, beady-eyed head was a Death Knight related bug. The non-gameplay issue basically nullified one of the “features” being added by v3.0.8. For many, the ability to make Death Knights on any realm, so long as you had a level 55 character somewhere, was unavailable. Not a big deal, and it didn't affect a majority of the players directly. However, the hotfix forced a series of rolling restarts, the first of many to come.

The next two issues were huge, game changing problems that brought major features of WoW to its knees. A bit more troublesome than some lag and server restarts for sure. Lake Wintergrasp, a highly touted feature for Wrath's release, had a moth in it so bad that it crashed servers or at least Northrend (depending on  reports). I was indirectly informed that Wintergrasp's issue had something to do with zone population. According to the informer, the zone was not stress tested heavily enough on the PTR.  This allowed the bug to sneak into the live code and wreak havoc.

The next major $#*() is far more upsetting than Lake Wintergrasp being disabled. Blizzard silently modified the way Arena matching and rating was calculated in the patch with disastrous results. The modifications allowed teams to shoot up to 2000+ ranking in no time flat. This was caused by the fact that a losing team did not see a reduction in Arena points. Following the Wintergrasp debacle, Blizzard pulled the plug on Arenas as they attempted to correct the bug.

What's worse (to some) is that the developers decided that everything gained during this time frame was “illegitimate.” Do to their stance, the company reset team and personal ratings to pre-weekly maintenance levels, removed all awarded gems, points and enchantments. I for one agree with them on this entirely, but it still sucks when people waste their time.  Kalgan also has a post up that goes into more detail on the rollback.

Hopefully we can have an uneventful weekend after this morning's emergency maintenance “to resolve current In-Game issues,” but at this point who knows. I guess I may have been lucky as none of these bugs really bothered me. I have avoided Wrath PvP so far, as I am still working on my gear.  On my server the Alliance was stuck with the Wintergrasp buff. So that was cool. In fact, my buddy who plays the game for the Arena actually ran some rare instances!

Oh geez, I almost forgot this non-patch related dozy. Despite my best efforts to warn them about the pitfalls of ads on their official forums, Blizzard got a little greedy and did it anyways. As the screenshot shows, an unapproved group of ads slipped through their filtering process. Someone over at Microsoft (who owns the ad provider) is getting canned. At least the banner managed to stay on topic!

Tell me Bastosa, was this the mess you were “so anxious” about?

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Well it has come down to this, the final level. I am fairly certain that I am going to be the last player at ProjectLore to hit level 80, but in all fairness, they play the game for a job. I write about the game for my job. My original goal was to hit the level before the holidays, enabling me to get some raiding in before the new year. Then it was to have it done before my birthday, which was yesterday (Thanks for the awesome weekend Lesley). I guess all those trolls are right, I do fail in an epic manner. New goal equals this week!

I may not have hit 80, but over the weekend I busted into my final stretch to immortalizing SolidSamm as one of the millions of toons to hit the level cap. After watching my second to last ding go off, I quietly logged out of the game and pondered his immediate future. On recommendations from friends and guildies, the little rogue will skip out on all of the quests for the lower zones, heading straight to Storm Peaks and Icecrown to finish out the experience bar.

Many of you may be wondering why a level 79 character hasn't already been in these zones, and that is a legitimate question. Being a hardcore PvEer, I have been tackling every quest I have come across, interesting or not. No ? has gone unanswered as of level 79. Due to this incessant questing, I spent most of my time in the lowbie zones – Borean Tundra, Howling Fjord, Grizzly Hills, Zul'Drak – going wherever those NPCs lead me. With 80 coming in just a few hours and my guild waiting for me to join the raiding ranks, I am abandoning Dragonblight and delaying my personal quest to complete all of Northrend's quests, in favor of starting my Sons of Hodir questline for the shoulder enchant.

Don't worry though, my escapades won't stop me from reporting on any fun quests that I came across. Icecrown's many phasing quests are supposed to be awesome and I will be running through them in short order. On top of that, I do plan on returning to questing between my reputation farming, heroic runs and raiding.  Those of you in my boat, how do you plan on heading to 80?  Do you have any special celebrations for when you join the ranks of the raiding elite?

Before I go, I have to mention Blizzard's newest WoW product, the The Cinematic Art of World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King. When I originally heard about the book, I figured it was another cash grab by Activision-Blizzard, but after previewing the first chapter, they had me sold. Hopefully some of our thoughts on the cinematic are confirmed.

P.S. Amazon is offering a nice discount on the book right now.

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