Today, patch 5.3 drops, in which things ramp up towards an ultimate confrontation with the Big Bad in 5.4 or later.  This is the first patch day I will have missed since Vanilla, in that I am using a tethered cell phone for network, and my game time is currently zero’d (no point in paying for something I don’t use).

I had barely gotten into 5.2, which my experience thus far leads me to regard it as a vary bad idea¹. All signs point to 5.3 being more of the same, with a different location.

Well, I won’t pan it until I’ve tried it, which will be in a week or two, depending on how our move goes this weekend.

Those that wanted more frequent updates, well, they’re getting what they asked for. I feel a little rushed, though – I barely had time to explore the 5.1 story line before 5.2 dropped, and I didn’t have a change of location to blame for that one.  I was still getting caught up with 5.0 things!

The question remains: does the increased frequency in patches also carry over to an increased frequency in expansions? I’m thinking not likely … Blizzcon is the most likely time to announce it, and if they wait until then, the next expansion will be out on approximately the same schedule as the past ones have.

I am NOT one with the doomsayers that say that the last two quarters’ numbers indicate that WoW will be dead by 1Q15.  First of all, two datapoints is a stupid wrong way to draw a trendline.  As an example, if you take the past THREE datapoints, WoW ends 1Q14 – a whole year earlier – instead.  Even they aren’t being that bold, possibly on purpose.  One should only choose the data that supports one’s foregone conclusions, after all.

The one valid point of the we’re-doomed crowd is this: if the next two quarters don’t look better, or at least level off, Activision will likely try to pull the plug.  I realize that the ultimate optimists at Blizz’s core management team claim that Activition would NEVER have that level of control, but I assert that Bobby Kotick’s an assertive enough asshole that he’d make it happen by coup.  Never underestimate the power of a determined asshole.

A final question I have – a hypothetical – is how far Pandaria goes?  Is 5.4 the end, or will there be one more? 5.4 is rumored to be the one where we settle Garrosh’s hash – and who doesn’t like that – but what we don’t know is if that is the end of the matters as far as Pandaria is concerned.  I’m not sure it is.

Well, happy patch day to you. I’m off to replace a heating element in my new place’s water heater.

1. I am quickly joining the camp of people that think that dailies are a lazy, uncreative way to fill players’ time so that they’ll keep paying, rather than other more satisfying approaches.

This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on May 21, 2013.

World of Warcraft loses over a million subs since February, now down to 8.3 million

Oops. 

Sorry, guys, I’ll get back as fast as I can. Didn’t expect that big of a sympathy drop.

This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on May 8, 2013.

In the recent developer Q&A we find this exchange:

Fojar: Following the fall of Garrosh, will the Alliance be turning its attention to reclaiming its lost territory in the Northern Eastern Kingdoms? I speak primarily of Lordaeron, Gilneas, and Stromgarde.

Fargo: This is something we struggle with, because after Cataclysm we seriously question the time-investment of re-doing old zones. Presumably, from a lore standpoint, the Horde is going to have to back down from areas on the edge of conquest (particularly Ashenvale.) But we don’t want to re-do that zone – it’s an important Horde level-up area. And even if we DID re-do it, we’d still have to have quests – it couldn’t just be night elves /dancing. On a related note, would you guys be willing to sacrifice a new zone in the next expansion for us to re-do Gilneas? As an Alliance only zone? What gameplay would we get out of it?

So it’s an open question for us, how we show the impact of the war without re-doing zones that we just re-did for Cataclysm.

and

Kamrian Green: A fear many Alliance players have is that everything that the Horde has done to the faction up until this point will be laid on Garrosh and all will be forgiven. Can we safely assume that this will not be the case? To the Alliance, the Horde has a lot to answer for without Hellscream.

Fargo: I address this somewhat in an above answer¹- how SHOULD we depict Alliance justice without deleting a bunch of old zone content? Also, we still need to make sure a Horde EXISTS after Garrosh falls, because, you know, they’re half our players. But certainly going forward into the next expansion we can carry forward the themes of Horde trying to rebuild itself from an absolutely terrible war and the Alliance – a unified victorious juggernaut – taking the initiative in the challenges that lie ahead.

Orgrimmar is going to be a bloodbath.

There seems to be the perception² that the zone revamps of Cataclysm were, by and large, a failure. There are many reasons given, but by and large, the finger usually points to execution – it was in general done poorly. 

One example would be the added real estate that remained, by and large, dead.  Go to EPL and have a look at the highlands in between the northwestern and southwestern halves of the zone. Lake, devoid of life. Hills, devoid of life.

There are other examples to draw upon, of course. How questing was "on rails". How you ran out of XP headroom before you ran out of quests. How the lore was treated disrepectfully in some cases. The retcons. And so forth.

But there were some good points, too.  The whole Wrathion storyline issues forth from one of those revamped zones. Oversized zones³ were cut into manageable sizes. Things moved forward as time passed (WPL, to some extent).

In general, if you ask someone how they feel about revamped, updated, or modernized zones, as a thing, they’ll be positive.  But if you ask them how they feel about how Blizz executed the revamped zones, the response will be overall negative.

Now, let’s look at the above quotes again.  Fargo gives the impression that, yeah, they want to modernize zones, but, because they didn’t work out, they don’t feel that putting resources into it is a worthwhile thing.

The thing is, I think that the response to the bad execution is being taken as a response to the whole idea of zone revamps, and I have to disagree with that perception.  I think that if they had done a better job of it, the response would be far, far more positive, and Blizz would probably see this as a thing worth pursuing.

Right now, moving the lore on Old Azeroth forward seems to be held up by their unwillingness to try to revamp a zone again. Look at the comments above; yeah, would be nice of Alliance took back Gilneas, but that would require a zone revamp.  Yeah, Alliance justice would be interesting to depict, but we’d have to revamp a bunch of old content.  Yeah, Alliance would probably assert itself in Ashenvale again, but that would require a zone revamp. 

Eventually it stops sounding convincing. Eventually it sounds like a bunch of weak excuses.

The lore should move forward. If that means revamping old zones, you do it, or things start to fall apart.  Eventually you’re not going to be able to staple all the old lore to new expansions’ lore without some change.

On a lighter note:

Guest: Turalyon and Alleria are still absent after all these years. Did they find a portal to a tropical island planet and are sitting on the beach drinking cocktails with the little umbrellas in them right now or something?

Fargo: I LIKE that answer! But I suspect they opted to do something heroic instead. We’ll come back to them when the time is right.

Keep in mind where it is that we lost track of these two, and we see some foreshadowing that points towards Outland once again. Goody!

1. The one I just quoted, in fact.
2. A perception I share.
3. I’m looking at you, Barrens.

This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on April 26, 2013.

¹

Astute readers will have noticed a distinct lack of activity here in the past few weeks.  The answer is simple: network access is minimal at best. Grimmtooth Actual is in the process of moving to new digs … network’s on at the new place, but our FIOS contract at the current apartment is up, so what access there is, is via the cell phone hotspot, which is not all that useful for WoW-ing.  Four to six weeks, we’ll be back in the groove again.

Life marches on. Eff the Ineffable has been stalled on the first tier of raiding; a solid block of people don’t have the patience to let us get execution down on, say, Elegon and thus have simply stopped showing up.   I Joined Eff the Ineffable because a bunch of my friends where there. They moved on, and I stayed for the raiding. Now that that’s not happening, I’ve decided to move on to a new server somewhere to hang with some friends again². We might raid, too, but maybe that’s not so important to me anymore.  More on that when it happens.

Jasra’s guild, the Vorpal Bunnies, managed to down their first boss shortly after I went offline. This seems to be a trend; I don’t show, and good things happen   Given that they seem to have a decent healing team going now, I’ve asked if I need to dust off Flora or keep Jas geared. Hard to say where that’s going to go.  I’m flexible, at any rate.

Prior to the enforced downtime, I was asking myself if I was ready to leave the game; the 5.2 content is frankly a downer, with the focus of dailies in place of new content, and the probability that we’ll see the same in future. However, this extended hiatus has not in any way diminished my desire to play, "World of Dailycraft" or not.  Truth is, jaded, cynical, or not, I still find plenty of reasons to enjoy the game, and hundreds of things still to do.  So, we’ll be back.

See you then.

1. I can’t explain it; OK Go just makes me happy.
2. GM has been notified, via Twitter, or at least I hope she got the DM, otherwise this is a rude surprise for which I apologize in advance.

This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on April 19, 2013.

Grimmtooth Actual’s first best love is Grimmtooth the hunter, no doubt about it, but one could argue that the Hunter is so second-nature at this point that it’s more like a Stay-cation than a true diversion. Grimmtooth’s existence at the moment is all about getting things done, from the scrupulous attention to gardening to the grueling slog of dailies.

Warlock’s what comes out when we want to play.  I’m not a raiding main, Jasra is, so I’m free to indulge myself as I see fit.  I’m not even level 90 yet.  And with Grimm and Jas sucking up all the CPU they can, I rarely get to come out and play, so I make the most of it.

I’ve got myself a good adventuring outfit, for example. Black velvet robes are good for shaking down the locals in Stormwind, displaying a decadant sense of evil that the rubes truly appreciate. But they tend to snag on everything. Denim and forest leathers are a lot more appropriate for stomping around in the wild.

Also, I have horns from time to time.  While I like the look, it was hell on hats until I figured out to punch a couple of holes in the right place.

But that does bring me to the part of this expansion that I dislike the most about the Demonology spec.  Demonform has gone from a hefty buff to DPS to being a whole second spell rotation to learn. It plays hell with my rhythm, let me tell you.

But outside of that, Big D is a blast.  I cut through mobs like a hot knife through butter. I use Hefty Voidwalker to gather them up and just beat them to the ground. Even Grimm can’t AoE that well. I don’t even use most of my rotation because the mobs die too fast.

There’s this green fire thing coming up, I’ve heard, once I hit 90.  I have some nice prezzys from Jas to wear when I hit that level, too, so it looks like I’ll end this turn at the wheel on a high note for sure, since I’m 89.25 now.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

Damn, it’s good to be a Warlock.

Addenum:

Been out front of Stormwind lately?

Yep, been patched right up!

Well, almost.  The minimap still shows the glowing embers for the gate towers, though, as you can see, they’re just fine now.

Glad to see my tax money going into something other than blowing panda bears up.

This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on March 21, 2013.

Today, Blizzard released two trailers for our enjoyment.  The first, for WoW Patch 5.2.

I wanna make one observation.  The voice of the narrator is the same horrid, insulting mock-Chinese that we’ve heard elsewhere.

Yeah, that’s them.

So George Lucas gets all sorts of hate and grief for using these stupid racial stereotypes, but Blizzard gets s free pass? Guys?

Can we move on from this crap?

Maybe this guy can report it for you when it happens.

The other trailer is for Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm.

So, can someone tell me why Sarah Kerrigan still wears high heels into battle? Can somebody explain to me why her mutated Zerg form also has high heels? Can somebody explain to me why all the guys are wearing tank-grade armor while she’s in form-fitting catsuit armor?

Much work, still to do.

This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on February 27, 2013.

In which Actual Numbers are used to derive Actual Conclusions. Accept no substitutes.

I mentioned a while back that I didn’t trust WoWHead’s numbers on pigment yields from herbs, based on a few things.

1. Uploads from the collection tool don’t seem to be applied in real time.
2. There is no indication as to how often stale data is purged,
3. … or how old is considered stale
4. No indication as to how much of that data is from Beta, and thus no confidence in whether the data was from artificially inflated yield rates¹

I also mentioned at the time that I had created an addon that would grab milling data automatically in order to obtain an alternative set of numbers that would be – to me -  unimpeachable.

The downside to this is that I could not trust the numbers I saw until I had more samples.  I think I have enough – for MoP herbs – to provide some more or less accurate commentary, which I present forthwith.

As you probably know, there are two types of pigments yielded – common (for Ink of Dreams), and rare (for Starlight Ink).  The former is for the mundane stuff such as glyphs, the latter for the rare and epic items, quite often cards for Darkmoon decks.  So there are two thing to consider when obtaining inks to mill – what are you looking for, and what are you going to do with it?

For the average glyph monger, high yield of common inks and low cost (if buying) are key factors.  For Darkmoon Card makers, high yield of rare inks will be the overriding concern.

As you can see, common inks are largely clustered around the 2.5 per mill mark.  Fool’s Cap far outstrips that at 2.84 per mill. So if other factors are the same, Fool’s Cap is the way to go.  Otherwise any of the other herbs except for Desecrated Herbs are equally good. Desecrated Herbs are probably going to be overpriced, but if they aren’t, they’re marginally better than others.

Rare pigments have a similar story, with most clustered around one pigment per four mills, or 0.25. Fool’s Cap again is crazy large at more than one per every other grind, but the price may make it unfeasible.  However, given it’s close to 3-to-1 superiority to the others, a bit of flexibility on the price is warranted. Even at double the price of the others, its yields make it more profitable.

Again, Desecrated Herbs have a marginally higher yield rate than the others, but not high enough to justify a premium price.

The clear winner here is Fool’s Cap, with its tremendous yields of both pigment types. You can justify quite a lot of time farming or money on the AH in order to obtain stacks of this herb. This is especially true if you are after rare inks – the other herbs don’t hold a candle to it.

1. It’s possible, in order to get more iterations, that node spawns as well as milling yields were tweaked in beta. I have no evidence that that is the case, but I have to consider the possibility when it comes to working numbers.

This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on February 25, 2013.

I don’t usually shill or endorse for any organizations, I figure you’re marginally less interested in reading that sort of stuff than, say, my warlock’s mogging choices.  But sometimes I make an exception.

If you are not familiar with the charity Child’s Play, let me summarize. No. It is too much. Let me sum up.  Child’s Play is a charity founded by the Penny Arcade gang for purposes of turning the rabid gaming masses into a source of comfort for sick children.  I lost count, but last I looked the organization is responsible for over ten million dollars’ worth of toys and games going to children’s hospitals. Gamers are just awesome like that.

One of the WoW arms of this effort is Iron Man Mode, a comedy site that uses the "iron man" gaming method (i.e. if you die, even once, you’re done) to entertain you and obtain fundage for Child’s Play.  Last year they raised over $1000, this year they’re aiming to double it.

So if you were looking for a way to enrich somebody’s life, and consider sick kids a worthy beneficiary, why not go through Iron Man’s site to do it, and make even more people happy?

Okay, end of sales pitch. I return you now to my epic series, "what my alt found in her belly button lint, and how it means that Blizzard is doomed."

This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on February 19, 2013.

You may not believe it, but addons are severely limited in what they can do.  Mostly, they are driven off of "events" which they can react to, or they’re re-imaging of something that already exists.

Warning, technical bits

Addons that have a lot of animation or fast reacting indicators, such as cast bar replacements ala Quartz, usually trigger off of an event called "OnUpdate".  It fires every time the current "frame" (i.e. your screen) updates, and it’s the only event of its kind. Thus, the higher your FPS ("Frames per Second"), the more often this guy fires.  If you have low FPS, all animations tend to be choppy, including your addons.

Because it fires so often and is at the heart of your FPS, OnUpdate even "handlers", such as the code routine that updates your cast bar, are supposed to be kept small and focused. All the stuff that sets the texture, size, position, and other frippery associated with the cast bar, for example, will be done elsewhere. We try to restrict the OnUpdate handler, in this case, to calculating and drawing the cast bar, nothing else, and then handing off to the client so it can get about the business of rendering.  If we put stuff here that takes a long time to do, it will drag the system FPS down.

What this means to you

There are a few conclusions you can draw with this knowledge.

Addons count

The addons you have loaded will affect your client’s performance.  Furthermore, those with no OnUpdate handler will impact performance far less than those that use one.  I don’t suggest you learn to read LUA source code as much as be familiar with what addons are high-impact with animations and critical indicators, such as Quartz or any unit frame addon. The more of these you have, the more delay there is in rendering each frame, until your FPS starts to decline.

You can’t eliminate this, but you can mitigate it.

The fewer, the better

The first principle is that the more active addons you have, the less responsive your client will be.  So if you can eliminate addons that you don’t really need, that will help performance. Sometimes it’s a matter of disabling those that you only use from time to time, such as MogIt – which does have some real-time components, but nothing you need in the middle of a raid. 

Quality Counts

Comparative testing of addons is a must, to eke out every bit of performance. The best approach is to get a little FPS addon (or just use CTL+R to turn on the built-in one), then find a quiet place to test your candidates.  For example, all else being equal, try each HUD addon and look for dramatic drops in FPS. Any obvious outliers can be given the boot.

A good place to test your candidates is in the entrance of just about any instance. Avoid those with a lot going on – e.g. Violet Hold or ICC – and opt instead for those that have nice, quiet staging areas, like Karazhan.

Easy Upgrade

All other things being equal, if your client’s main issue is with framerate under load, a simple video card upgrade may do the trick.  I’m running a Radeon 5000 series card which I purchased for under $100 over a year ago, and get on average 30 fps in cities.  I have a lot of problems in 25- and 40- man raids, though. Purchasing another identical card and coupling it with the one I have already will improve matters a lot, and that will also improve the performance of all my high-impact addons.

Or, I could upgrade to the next tier of Radeon, a 6000 or 7000 series, whichever is available in my price range from my favorite vendor (I prefer Gigabyte solid cap boards because electrolytes are icky)¹.

It isn’t just WoW that will improve, I’ve found. So many apps and games use similar mechanics for updating high-activity visual components that a nice video card upgrade.

So, protip – if you buy to last, you can stretch a PC’s life a long time with video card upgrades.

1. Example only, but oho, looky, under $100!

This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on February 14, 2013.

As long as I’ve played, I’ve seen a constant flow of envy from other classes.  They look at our magnificent demonic steeds, and say "Hey, why can’t we have one?"¹  They gaze longingly at our portals and whinge, "why can’t we use them?"  They even cried about healthstones so much that Blizz gave them a vending machine for healthstones. I imagine that somewhere out there, someone’s upset that they can’t summon Warlock pets, either.

The most recent outbreak has been over a new quest series in patch 5.2 in which Warlocks go to change our mundane orange fire for green fire, as it should have been all along².  Apparently, some people are annoyed that we get to have all the fun here, and want something like it for themselves. Ignore the fact for a moment that there’s nothing about (for example) mages³ that gives them that "cool factor" like Warlocks, and thus no real REASON to have a special epic quest series.  They just want it, because, reasons.

As always, Auntie Flora has worked long and hard to bring a solution to you.

You want all the warlock goodies?  Here’s what you do.

1. Log out.
2. Select CREATE NEW CHARACTER⁴
3. Select class = WARLOCK
4. Log in.
5. Get your neat Warlock stuff.

You’re welcome.

1. Mind you, they didn’t look at the massive cost of our mats and go, "Hey, why can’t we be taxed as much for our mounts?"
2. Don’t get me started on THAT,
3. You know that fire mages have GOT to be at the center of this.
4. If you have no free slots, delete a mage.

This post originally appeared on Grimmtooth's Troops on February 9, 2013.