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Walking Through The Door

I re-roll to a higher population server, which also happens to be the unofficial role-play server of Lotro…

lotro lotro

World of Cashcraft

Another rant. I promise my next post will be happy!

anger anger

Does Size Matter?

After taking a week off to let the chaos die down, I’m back at this blogging thing. The topic for today is game world size. How does size effect the game?

size size

Decision Time

The time has come. With just over 12 hours left on Jeg’s World of Warcraft account, what happens?

goodbye goodbye

Pugcast 43: Rantcast With Fen

Fen from Ventchat stops by the chatroom and is brought in to help rant on the direction of WoW and the class homogenization issue.

rant rant

Walking Through The Door

Posted by Jeg on June 1st, 2010
lotro

Role-playing is lame… At least in my view of World of Warcraft. I just could never see the RP nature of WoW. Sure, it has a thick story, but the game lacks immersion. Anymore it feels like a first person shooter. You log in, play, log out. There just doesn’t feel like there is a connection to your toons anymore. This could be a problem with me and me only. Either way, it’s how I feel about WoW RP.

I purposely stayed away from the Landroval server in Lotro because it was “the unofficial RP server.” My experiences with RP have been limited in the past, I will admit. As much as I try to not look down my nose at RP, I know I am guilty of doing so.

So I rolled on the Meneldor server. Its population is a lot lower than I had thought. This might simply be due to the fact of Lotro being so immense. Though the Auction House was never very busy.

Listening to a few podcasts I kept hearing about player run events taking place. All of them on Landroval. I’ve been to a couple player organized deals in the past, but never in a theme park MMO like Lotro. I imagine it’s like a straight dude going to a gay bar. The guy is freaked out before he even steps foot through the door. The fears of being gang raped by horny dudes who simply can not control themselves scares the hell out of him. Then when he walks in and no one pays two bits of attention to him. The bar patrons do their own thing and have their own fun time, just like at a straight bar.

I decided to walk through the door. I rolled a Champion on Landroval. At first it was way more populated than Meneldor, but that could also be attributed to the Welcome Back Week that Turbine just threw. No matter the case, just seeing other players and on a much more frequent basis was refreshing. That’s when it happened. I walked into the inn in Combe. A kinship (guild) was in there… They were… RPing…

I sat quietly and just watched, much like a deer in headlights I’m sure. I guess I expected to see complete one-star activities go down. To my surprise, the players were just having meaningless small talk, but instead of doing it in kinship chat, they gathered their toons and shot the breeze in person. Oddly enough, I didn’t look down on them for their ways. I thought for sure I’d be a prick and roll my eyes at them, but I didn’t.

I guess I’m hypocritical like that. I demand immersion but not if it means I have to RP. Maybe I couldn’t feel immersed in WoW because I was so turned off to RP (or maybe because most of the RP I’ve ever heard of in WoW is from horny 14 year olds and it isn’t very lore driven…). While I wasn’t excited to see RP, I wasn’t turned off either.  I myself won’t be doing any of it, but to see others do it sort of made the game more immersive than it already is. Instead of mindless NPC banter, these were real people having real conversations, even if they were pretending to be someone or something else.

I’ll be checking out more of these player run RP events. They seem to be a nice change of pace from the normal raid/farm activities I’m used to.

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World of Cashcraft

Posted by Jeg on May 27th, 2010
anger

Jeg’s list of “games I’m not remotely interested in ever playing” has grown by one. Call it doom saying or just flat being pessimistic, but Everquest II just stole a page from WoW’s book of fucked up douch-ism.

/rant

When the pets went up for sale on the Blizzard store, I was against it, and still am. I foretold a diabolical prophecy in which Blizzard would reach deeper into people’s pockets and murder any baby that stood in the way. Much like a blood thirsty animal, once Blizzard got the taste of quick cash, it wouldn’t shake it. Luckily, there doesn’t appear to be any infants close by.

Now, before you jump my ass, let me explain. First, this is capitalism. A company is free and clear to do whatever they can to suck your wallet dry. More power to them for their rights. Second, I have no problem with micro-transactions. I’ve even played a few free to play games with cash shops. You get all the software for free and just start playing. Once you are hooked, the developer offers things to make the journey easier or “more fun.” They give you the base game and you customize it how you want. These items usually cost a couple of dollars at most but their goal is to get you to spend around what you would on a subscription. That isn’t always the case though.

Most free to play developers that are willing to share a shred of data have all agreed that there are three types of players in their games. The first type budget themselves and spend around a subscription fee per month, $10-15. The second type is the free loaders. They spend nothing. This is bad right? No. The third type will buy everything on the store. Everything. Either rich or charging it and not caring, these people can spend hundreds of dollars. In the end, it all evens out.

It is a personal choice to not spend money on games that offer gear. In the East it’s done a lot and succeeds. In the Western markets it fails miserably. Paying real money for an advantage is a huge turn off to a lot of players. A game like Runes of Magic (at least back when it launched, which is when I played) offered the XP scrolls, mounts, housing stuff, ect, but never dared to sell gear. As far as I can tell, it was mildly successful.

Back in my day we said to hell with all of the micro transactions. Give us everything for one flat fee per month. For as long as I can remember it has always been one or the other.

Enter World of Cashcraft, the game that basically prints its own money.

Blizzard started offering name changes, server transfers, ect for real money. I can’t remember if they were the very first, but they were one of the first. Somehow the supporters of Blizzard’s cash shop use this as their proof that I am a hypocrite. Those people are all morons. How can you equate your time to fluff? A mount is not equal to the hours you spend playing the game only to find out your server sucks or you have friends you didn’t know were playing but who are on another server. So then it comes down to paying to move your character or playing through all of the content you just grinded through.

Lets say it takes you six months to level. If you start over, it’ll cost you $90 and countless hours to catch back up to where you were. Let’s not forgot how far ahead your friends can get in those six months too. Or, you can pay the $25 to server transfer and then the $90 for six months and be ages ahead of where you would have been. To me this is an out of game service.

Something that your toon uses, rides, or interacts with is an in game good or ware. These are normally items obtained in the game itself. Even if you buy them on a cash shop, you have to be in-game to use them. So when these goods are bought they aren’t yours. When the server shuts off, you don’t get your toy. If you don’t pay a sub, no big deal. Buying that toy is how you paid to play. If you do pay a sub, you are renting the rights to play with that toy so long as you pay your $15 a month. If you stop paying your sub (renting a space on the server), you don’t get your toys. Well, whatever. If you want to buy into that sham, feel free.

This is, however, where it gets messy. I have no problem with people buying this. I personally feel it is a rip off, but who the hell am I? My problem is that I don’t want to buy my games, pay to play them, then buy in-game items. If you do, fine. I’ll think you’re stupid and you’ll think I’m stupid. If this were contained to WoW, I would have an easier time with it. That isn’t the case. It has now leaked out to other companies because hey, “fuck making a quality game experience, let’s just make some quick cash!”  I have invested over 13 years in the MMO genre to see this garbage stunt it’s growth. WoW was a huge success. It broke MMO’s through to a much broader audience. Ask people that don’t play MMO’s “why?” The answer 9/10 times is “you have to pay a subscription to play? You’re nuts!” I’ve heard it a ton of times from my first person shooter and racing buddies.

We know that people only see what’s on the surface until they are submerged to see the whole picture. I fear now the MMO world could teeter on this recent revelation. Potential customers already look at us like we’re crazy. What does “buying the game, paying to play, buying in-game items” tell them? To stay the hell away.

Name an MMO outside of launch that has added servers? EVE? I’m sure they’ve added to their super cluster. Name another one.

Go on. I’ll wait.

That’s right. Not a single one. Now, name the games that have had server mergers. Uhm… Every other game except WoW? Probably correct. To be honest, we are starting to hear of super low pop servers in WoW, but will Blizzard do the right thing and merge servers or offer free transfers? Nope. Not when $25 hangs in the balance. If you choose to play on low pop, Blizzard thinks that’s your choice. You have the option to leave at any time. It’s bullshit.

When was the last time you heard Blizzard brag about subscription numbers? Late TBC to early WotLK? Sounds about right. The question is, why? It’s simple. Their sub numbers are going down. Instead of rectifying that and putting their heads down to crank out some bad ass content, they’d rather take the easy way and re-skin a mount to sell for $25, or over half the price of an expansion. So if they can do that, why bust their ass to make quality content? The Ruby Sanctum is a re-skin to keep players busy until they are finished dragging their feet with Cataclysm, which honestly isn’t that impressive after seeing the leaks.

I’ve ranted and lost my path. My main point was the WoW is the USA of the MMO world. They control what all the little guys do. If they do something retarded, the other guys will feel pressured to “keep up.” Sony’s gaming division has long been stupid and it’s really no surprise they are the first to jump on the “we want to fuck our customers with a jackhammer” bandwagon.

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Does Size Matter?

Posted by Jeg on May 18th, 2010
size

In a recent Kotaku article, Michael Fahey found an image on Digg of a graphic comparing the sizes of a few game worlds.  MMORPG.com reposted the info and went a little further by focusing on the sizes of MMO worlds.  Does size matter?

As we all know, playing an MMO and not seeing anyone around can give a lonely feeling.  Blizzard keeps using this as their prime reason for not including player housing in WoW.  They claim people would spend time at their house and not in capital cities.  This would rend the open world as empty.  My initial reaction is “Blizzard doesn’t play other games.”  Having a house is nice, but you don’t spend a whole lot of time there.  This is a whole other debate.

Getting back on track, according to calculations that someone, somewhere did, WoW is 80 square miles.  Lord of the Rings Online is 30,000 square miles.  So lets pick it apart.

If you think about flying or even running from one end of Kalimdor to the other, it honestly doesn’t take as long it would to travel across a real continent. That’s good, right? I mean after all, this is a video game.  Who wants to spend their time traveling?

Think about time spent from 10-40 or so. How many people did you see? Not that many except in big cities and even then, only in select cities. Undercity and Thunderbluff were sparse at best. Orgrimmar had a decent amount of people running around, but don’t even think of Silvermoon… That place is an utter ghost town now.

Then look at Dalaran. People with lower end computers can barely go there. Why? Because of the massive amount of people crammed into a small space. This is brilliant! Sure, a slow processor or bridge won’t be able to transfer data fast enough and you’d get some sputtering, but how alive does Dalaran feel?  It feels like a bustling city. How many people are really there at one time? 200-500?  OK, honestly 500 might be pushing it, but think about it. How many people are in a moderate sized city compared to how big the land it is sitting on is?

I’m all for an amazingly big world to explore, such as LoTRO’s. It really adds to the huge feeling of walking around in Tolkien’s world. The scale feels more natural and it is easy to feel more immersed in the game world. The downside to all of this is the hardware limitations of servers today. There is still a cap on how many people a developer wants on each game world.  This is to avoid lag and server side crashes, but the downside is the vast emptiness of a forest feels…well, empty.  Even the cities dwarf WoW’s. Bree feels to be double the size of Stormwind. While this is more realistic, it isn’t necessarily better.

While Lotro is hells of fun, the empty feeling in places does suck. Point goes to Blizzard for having a big enough world to move around in, yet small enough to keep players crossing paths.

Moral of the story: Bigger isn’t always better.

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Decision Time

Posted by Jeg on May 13th, 2010
goodbye

The decision day is here. My stomach is in knots.

“It’s just a video game!”

It’s so much more than that. It’s no different than being on a bowling team, a softball team, a book club, or any other social gathering. The difference is that instead of driving to those places, I park my happy ass in front of my computer and put on a headset. It’s still a social experience.

I have quit before. I have left friends to go play other games. Contrary to all the talk behind my back, I am not burned out on the game. Fun was still being had in Azeroth. So much so, I just spent $55 to transfer my shaman. Excited and jubilant are two words that come to mind.

“But you sat out raids!”

There were three mages in our group. It only made sense to take turns. Which is exactly what we did. So I sat out. Then I raided the following week. The week after that was a holiday here in my home town. I had plans with the family so I was unable to make the Tuesday run. I still showed up and filled in on the Thursday run when someone couldn’t make it. The following week was my turn to sit out anyway, but that is when my attitude started to sour. I elected to take the week off. I admit this. I had originally planned to level my shaman but more and more teasers were released by blizzard. By the end of the week a full blown “leak” was out in the open.

That is when it happened. That is when the proverbial straw that broke my back happened. Blizzard was releasing bit by bit to string along the player base. Why wouldn’t they? They are masters at drumming up excitement. While it has so far worked for everyone else, it hasn’t for me. It did the opposite. I felt further and further from confident in Blizzard. Then we record Pugcast 43 and all of my frustrations that had been seething and churning came out. My displeasure does not come from the people I play with, the game itself, or even the community attached to it. It comes from the company itself.

I don’t expect anyone to agree. As a consumer I feel Blizzard is fully tainted by the reasons I no longer buy Activision games. The Call of Duties, Guitar Heroes, and now Warcrafts are simply over saturated. Activision has no issues driving a franchise into the ground and milking every penny out of it while they look for their next big hit. I just don’t see a passion for gaming from that company. I’m sorry, but if I’m giving someone my money to entertain me, I want them to be passionate about it. Call it a character flaw or me just being a dick.

I’m not going to sit here and say Blizzard is ruining the game. That is for each person to decide on their own because its a simple opinion. I disagree with how they are doing business, plain and simple. Honesty be told, if the podcast, guild, and everything else attaching me to WoW didn’t exist, I would have left the second the first pets went up for sale.

So, instead of being a hypocrite or giving people one more reason to hate me, I am leaving WoW. My twitter account will be my personal account. It won’t change much from what it is now, but there will be a lot less WoW tweeting.

Does this mean you’re out of the community?

I have no idea. I’m sure I’ll slowly start to unfollow the boring fucks that do nothing but talk about WoW like your WoW.com people, but the mass majority of the people I hope will stay put. I may have found people because of WoW, but we tweet about all kinds of things that aren’t all about WoW. I’ll still have an opinion on WoW and I will still keep up with the news.

What does this do to Pugcast?

Again, I have no idea. None of this has been easy. And while I hate to mess with something I love, I can’t very well talk about a game I don’t play. The WoW talk was an excuse to hook up with Drae and talk shit every Saturday night. It doesn’t have to be about WoW. We haven’t figured out the exacts yet.

Regardless of what anyone thinks. This has not been an easy decision or one made in haste. I have been thinking long and hard for two weeks. The time to move on is here. I’m not saying I’ll never play WoW or another Blizzard game ever again. I hope Cataclysm is the greatest expansion ever released for any video game. I swear I do.

Over the last year I have made some dear friends. We’ve also had people I consider friends transfer their toons to our server to play with us. To all of those people, I am very deeply sorry. I spent the same if not more to hop around and I feel burned in those transactions too. Drae will still be around and he will lead you to glory. Maybe I’ll see you in Cataclysm or maybe you won’t let me show my face. Either way, WoW is just a vehicle for us to share. There is always facebook, twitter, and other games. This is only the end for those that elect to let it be. I’ve already had a few reach out and we’ve figured out ways to stay in contact. Hopefully you and I can do the same.

Tonight I will log in, say my goodbyes, face the firing squad and listen to any bitching people need to do, give out the hugs and kisses to those that are sad rather than mad, transfer guildleadership, and be gone.

BTW, as I said, I don’t want to leave the game, so if you want to pay my sub, feel free to hit me up! I have no problem spending your money. I just don’t want to spend my own! lol Sorry, I needed to end this on a smart ass, semi-humorous note.

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Pugcast 43: Rantcast With Fen

Posted by Jeg on May 11th, 2010
rant

There’s so much seething and bile… Angry Jeg is angry! As we were in pre-show prep, our chatroom goaded Fen from Ventchat to pop in (even though he was planning on listening and editing his own show)

The blizzard real-id system for battle.net: How much do you trust the people you play with? (source)
- When the battle.net changes first launched, with promises of cross-server, cross-faction, and even cross-game communication, I’d wager most people were excited. All this for good reason, it opens doors and makes it that much easier to communicate. So much for that, Blizzard unveiled the “Real-ID” system and to all the features they promised are there, will one dubious addition. Confirming a Real-ID friend will force you to communicate using your actual name. Yes, that’s right, the name from your Battle.net information (and subsequent billing information) will be used. This begs the question, how much do you actually trust the people you play with?

Be still, my beating heart… (source)
- I fully admit to being a bit jaded with 5 months potentially until Cataclysm’s launch, but the screenshots of the “DEVASTATING WORLD CHANGES, LO THE VERY WORLD IS RIPPED APART AT THE SEAMS” are underwhelming to say the least. There are some awesome looking pieces, but let’s be honest. Cataclysm is WoW 2.0, and this redesign quite frankly needs some redesigning. Putting a volcano and a bit of charred earth in the middle of a zone does not a cataclysm make. Hopefully this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Activision insurgence step 1: Put a ‘suit’ above Mike Morhaime (source)
- Is this the first step in ‘pulling back the curtain’ and admitting that Activision is really running the show? Why else put a COO above Mike Morhaime who reports directly to Bobby Kotick? This could all be hapless arm waving on our part, but is this a move that needed to be made? “Quick! Sales are down this month, whip up another sparkle pony for the cash store now!” …

Activision insurgence step 2: Remove executives resistant to change (source)
- Details aren’t exactly forthcoming from Activision’s side as there are multiple lawsuits pending, but according to Jason West, Vince Zampella have been terminated “weeks before they were to be paid substantial royalty payments as part of their existing contracts for Modern Warfare 2″. Activision has claimed “an internal human resources inquiry into breaches of contract and insubordination”. Who to believe? I suppose the information will be coming soon, but it has the look of impropriety on Activision’s part when 35 other members of the Infinity ward team left behind West and Zampella.

Activision insurgence step 3: Give less and less for the same money (source)
- This feels like whining, but it really can’t be ignored. Assuming that cataclysm comes out in September (which may be optimistic at this point) the only content we will see is the Ruby Sanctum. A one boss encounter over 9 months is ludicrou$ … see what I did there? To put it into monetary figures, the 11 million warcraft subscribers will be paying $135 for a one boss encounter. What other MMO can you think of that can survive apathy of that magnitude?

Shameless guild plug
- If you happen to be looking for a guild to raid with that plans on clearing some content, check out our charter, roll an alt on US-Jubei’Thos and look for Jegsus!Draechen! More needed to fillout the 25 man roster!
-Specifically YOU healers!

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Decision Deadline

Posted by admin on May 10th, 2010
cancelled2

Today I posted on the guild forums that I was taking a break. I had been thinking since last week but this week’s show brought out my honest opinion of Blizzard. I’m not saying anyone should join my train of thought. I’m simply saying that is how I feel.

Anger, frustration, sadness, guilt, and sorrow are all words that describe how I feel. Not being sure how I truly felt, I cancelled my account last night. I did this to force myself to make a decision. What I wasn’t prepared for was the flood of emotions that soon followed.

“World of Warcraft is just a video game.” That is what outsiders say. They don’t understand the social aspect of the game. They don’t understand that while some people play softball or are on a bowling team or go to book club, that this is our outlet. MMO’s are much more than just video games. If you want to call me out for “QQ,” feel free. I’ve cancelled my subscription before and not gave a second thought. It is a video game and I turned it off. I played and was guilty of thinking “its just a game.” Now I sit here, angry at the company, but sad because I have met people I would call my friends. Sure they live in different areas of the world, but we still share a social bond. Leaving means leaving that bond.

I have given myself until Friday morning to decide what to do.

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Blizzard Rolling Greed?

Posted by Jeg on May 9th, 2010
moneypic

The show notes will be up tomorrow (unless Drae drags his vagina), but if you follow me on Twitter you know I’m none too thrilled with Blizzard right now. The greed of Activision is starting to show through.  Listen to Pugcast 43: Rantcast to hear exactly how I feel.

The short version is that in my opinion Blizzard is coming across as taking the easy way out. I could completely fathom the creative hands sitting in a meeting and saying “what can we do with the minimal amount of work but the maximum amount of return.” They’re a business. Making money is the name of the game. I’m pissy because I see a company that used to have a massive passion for making video games changing in the name of greed. They are the fucks rolling need on an item they already have.

“Back in my day” we used to take computer games and mod the hell out of them. Warcraft didn’t even look like Warcraft in some cases. Is that wrong? No. It extends the life of a game. The engine is why you spend the money. The mechanics of the game are what make it great. I equate it to a FPS. Take Half-Life and the countless mods that came out for it. The new trend in which is happening is that the developer locks the code down and you have to buy the mods. Once upon a time the devs were all about the community being so into their game that they tweaked it and made it live on longer. Now it’s all about the quick return. Starcraft 2 will be no different. If someone in the community mods it, you’ll either have to hack your copy or submit it to Blizzard. The way I understand it, they can sell it. It’s all good because the kids today don’t know any different. I see myself getting less for my money.

The exact reason why I didn’t buy the reskinned my little pony mount was I do not personally find one mount worth about HALF of an full expansion. Thats my personal choice. As a consumer I feel its a rip-off. If you don’t, good for you. Enjoy the mount. If Pepsi starts selling me a six pack for the price of a 12 pack, I’m going to stop supporting Pepsico. Same deal here. I see the focus shifting and I don’t like it. It’s my opinion that I don’t like where it is all going. If you bitch in the community you hear “talk with your wallet and leave.” I am really torn as to what to do.  The fact that I’m torn, pisses me off.

On one hand I feel strongly to not support this game. If the strings weren’t attached I honestly would have left when the first mounts went up. The strings are attached though… I do a podcast that people have enjoyed enough to spend money to transfer their characters to play with us. I feel like I owe those people. If I stick around, I’ll probably grow to absolutely hate this game and Cataclysm could see my final departure from the game.  If I take a break, I could see myself coming back for Cataclysm and having a blast. Would I have a guild to come back to though? I wouldn’t hold it against anyone to hate me forever for leaving. I agree it would be a pretty shitty move, but do they really want to play with a bitter douche bag?

God damn you Blizzard. God damn you.

A game like LoTRO is really appealing to me. It’s a completely different style of MMO. Sure the controls are mapped like WoW, but to call it a clone is bullshit. It does so many little things along with all of the big things that it stands apart in my opinion. It doesn’t have my friends though. I could retreat to Lotro to blow some steam off and come back refreshed, but again, am I a traitor to those that came to an oceanic WoW server to play with us?

Well, this isn’t a professional blog post as much as a diary entry. lol. So I’m going to make dinner and think about it some more… just like the past week… I have until Tuesday to decide. That’s when my WoW account re-ups. (I’m a one MMO person. $15/mo is it for me. So there is no play something else AND WoW for a while until the spark is back.)

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WTF is this?

Posted by Jeg on May 7th, 2010
donkey

I’ve been meaning to put together a blog for quite a while. Here it is. More than likely Pugcast.com will be for strictly WoW and Pugcast.net will be for the MMO genre. You can bet your sweet ass there will be WoW talk here though.  I wrote About page and I’m just going to copy it in here for my first official post. Also, each week I will bastardize Drae’s show notes and post them as well. So prepare yourself for one more asshole with an opinion.

——————————————————————————

Pugcast is a World of Warcraft podcast hosted by long time real life friends Jeg and Draechen. The show is dirty and raunchy, but that is what makes it fun. It certainly isn’t for everyone. You can check it out at Pugcast.com. It is available through all of your favorite feed readers like iTunes and Zune.

Now that you know about the podcast, you’re probably wondering what is this blog about.  Yeah, ok, probably not. I’ll tell you anyway.  Pugcast.net is my personal playground. Oh, this is Jeg writing this by the way.  I’ve been wanting to make a blog but never got around to it. Drae has been adamant that he is likely to not write. Slowly but surely I’ve decided to just use the Pugcast.net both to host show notes and personal opinions. We still hold Pugcast.com through our sponsor, Guildlaunch.com. That site will remain the “business” end of the deal.

Who is Jeg? Most people would probably answer “an opinionated douche bag.” I tell it like I see it and have a bad habit of not caring if it hurts feelings or pisses people off. I have my opinion and you have yours. For those that agree or are at least curious as to workings of my inner asshole, I present this blog. It will not always be about Warcraft. In fact, time will tell but I would wager it is a general MMO blog. Pugcast is where I vent my Warcraft opinions. We’ll see what this turns into, but I can promise one thing. It’s bound to be controversial.

Jeg the player is a late 20′s husband and father of three. I’ve played almost every MMO you can think of except for the Everquest games. I seriously have no idea how I avoided them.  Ultima Online was my first MMO. It didn’t really do much for me though. Asheron’s Call soon followed and had me hooked for a while. Mix in some other games including Star Wars Galaxies  and Final Fantasy XI and the stage was set for WoW. My life got busy and I actually avoided WoW until the start of 2006. Drae managed to get me hired at the company he was working for and we started our adventures in WoW.

We have always had a bad habit of rerolling. We would level, him faster than I, and when we neared the end of the leveling process we’d start over on the opposite faction and on a different server. We finally level capped and raided on the Horde side of things. This was in the Burning Crusade days. When I talk about my own personal “glory days of WoW” I am referring to this time period. I find it hard to think anything can beat those days.

Eventually other games started coming out. I would usually go AWOL for open beta’s but actually quit WoW for the first time for the launch of Lord of the Rings Online. My computer back then wasn’t so hot so performance issues drove me back to WoW.

I quit a couple of other times but nothing like the Warhammer Online launch. This game was hot. The open beta played like crap but I figured they were running debuggers on the server and were stress testing it. I went so far as to purchase the Collector’s Edition for WAR, deleted a couple of higher level toons in WoW and gave all of my gold and wares to my wife. I was convinced I was not coming back to WoW. Warhammer still played like piss. What does a sane individual do in that case? Buy a beefed out computer of course! WAR was amazing fun in comparison to WoW…until you find yourself alone. I’m not a PVP person, but WAR was fun. If you take the PVP out of WAR and focus on PVE leveling all you are left with is a turd of a game with no substance. I hung on for two months before retreating back to WoW.

In March or so of 2009 I received my first iPod. The Touch was awesome for carrying around music in my pocket but the applications hooked me. One day in iTunes I searched for Warcraft just to see what would come up. I found a list of podcasts. Hearing of podcasts but never actually listening, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I downloaded a few and it was as if an angel touched me in the privates. Sure most podcasts are low budget and horribly edited, but they are short little wanna-be radio shows with a very exact topic. My hour commute to and from work was instantly made tolerable by hearing talk of WoW. Not only did it keep me interested in the game, it made me want to podcast.

Enter Draechen. Drae has played since we started and hasn’t looked back. He’s way more into the game than I am. So I started trying to convince him to try podcasting with me. It took a solid two months for me to get him to agree. We needed a name. The biggest and baddest kid on the block is Scott Johnson’s The Instance. This “instance run” is so fluid and smooth we knew it would be the opposite of our show. What’s a bad instance run? A pick up group, aka a pug. Hence such, the Pugcast was born.

At the time of writing this there are 42 episodes of Pugcast and we are rapidly approaching our on year anniversary.

As I said, life and gaming isn’t all about WoW. So god only knows what I’ll come up with to post here…

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Pugcast 42: The Twitter Table

Posted by Jeg on May 7th, 2010
RoundTableKnights

There are no show notes for this week.  We sat down with some twitter followers and followees.  Cornelious, Avalonna, and Bryterside joined us to discuss the big changes to raiding coming in Cataclysm.

Check out Cornelious on the Rawrcast Under the Hood segment.

Check out Ava on TalesOfAPriest.com.

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Pugcast 41: Less Length, More Girth

Posted by Jeg on April 25th, 2010
short-fat

It’s a really big ban hammer… It takes awhile to swing, you know?(source)
- Dear lord, what will those hardcore diablo2 and warcraft3 players do now? 300,000 accounts were reportedly had their battle.net accounts banned, first offenders were only given 30 day punishments but others weren’t so fortunate. I’d advise you to uninstall those Orcs vs Human hacks pretty soon…

Ugh, your hack got all over my beta…! (source)
- Isn’t it a little early to start hacking games? You would think that Blizzard’s attention would be the highest in the open beta, and as the ‘Starcrack’ team found out, apparently it is. We aren’t naive enough to think that wow private servers don’t exist or even that starcraft 2 servers won’t, but this is jumping the gun.

One case of PvE changes affecting PvP? (source)
- It may as well be on the Blizzard store! The eager arena tournament participants (Read: Those that want a free non-combat pet) will be saddened to learn that there is now a $20 price tag per arena season. Sort of puts those pets in perspective I’d wager, but hey, the elite people can still get titles or put that money you’re spend to good use in their pockets.

How bad do you want the spectral tiger mount? (source)
- It can be yours! The elusive spectral tiger mount, couple with the ethereal plunderer and quite a few other goodies went up for auction to raise money for
the Peninsula Education Foundation. The real question is if you asked the students, would they prefer the loot cards? Who needs new books!?

Shameless guild plug
- If you happen to be looking for a guild to raid with that plans on clearing some content, check out our charter, roll an alt on US-Jubei’Thos and look for Jegsus! More needed to fillout the 25 man roster!
-Specifically YOU healers!

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