The Queue: Raiding, Patch 6.2 PTR, and more

You know what you should do? Go and load our site on your phone — it’s much more mobile friendly now. We’re using specific technology to avoid a lot of the excess you get otherwise, and the result is that it’s pretty darn fast.

We’ll also be undergoing some additional tech upgrades in the coming weeks. We’ve been getting a bit spiky traffic lately, and while I thought I’d be able to wait until this summer to put things in place to deal with that, it’s becoming apparent that I need to act sooner. So changes are on the way! All good stuff for this little site of ours.

For me it was a few things. First and foremost, it came down to what I wanted to do with my ever decreasing freetime. I’ve always been career focused, but about seven years ago, right when I started at The Other Site Which Shall Not Be Named, I decided that I wanted to push myself to the next level of software engineering. I began to expand beyond all the stuff they taught in college and I picked up in my first couple years elsewhere. That lead more and more to a situation where I needed to focus on weighty subjects outside of my day jobs. It was the right choice — I feel as if I’ve given myself a graduate degree worth of education, but that lead to less and less free time. Throw in getting married and hatching crazy business schemes across many different venture, and that leaves no time for raiding.

Secondly, this was all made possible too by the introduction random groups and LFR. Why spend an inordinate amount of time on temporary social groups (aka: guilds) when you can just fire up tool, wait around a half hour, and get into a group and see the content? Granted it’s not nearly as challenging and the social connections don’t exist “in-game,” but the community surrounding the game elsewhere makes up for that for me.

Finally, I got a little tired of the lack of diversity of encounters. It seems that everything is just a slight change from something done earlier. There doesn’t seem to be a new amazing technique or mechanic that has sung it siren song for me to return. Firelands and Deathwing, yes, absolutely. But since then? Nothing I can’t experience in LFR.

To each their own here, too — I’m sure that others are going to have radically different opinions than I do.

At this stage of the game I think it’d be too much to pull of. You need to look at other attempts at third factions, such as in Anarchy Online, and then look at Blizzard’s track record of doing better. I think back when the game was beginning they’d have been able to make a third faction work (a neutral faction), but right now there’d be too much issue with the general leveling story, social dynamics, and a plethora of other things.

One of the biggest problems would be giving people a reason to play it — so much so that they’d abandon their characters and friends and start anew (basically). Any incentive would need to be so big that it’d create some real unbalance; and we know how we all feel about things that are not balanced right…

Yes, Alex has reached out to people already. Soon™.

Not really! We’ve seen it get more spiky at times, which is what our general indication of “players are board and are looking for something to get excited about.” We’ve found over the years that our traffic is pretty stable at the lulls between content patches, certainly less than it’d be normally, but not dramatically so.

But more important than our traffic, I think you’re on to something about the way players are feeling. Blizzard needs to keep people engaged, and I think they’ve made a tactical error in the way garrisons were implemented. There’s so much just sitting in them that the outside world doesn’t seem as relevant as it once did. Garrisons with daily quest hubs elsewhere? Something as simple as that would have gotten people out of their throne room and into the world more; thus keeping people engaged.

Next week.