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TheSpeedGamers - Final Fantasy Marathon I don't post a lot about charity events and I thought it might be a good occasion to do it.  TheSpeedGamer’s Final Fantasy marathon to raise money for <a href="http://www.act-today.org/" target="_blank">ACT Today</a> begins Friday July 17th @ 6pm cst and will last one week (168 hours straight!). Final Fantasy 1-12 will be played with no tool assistance. A game feed will be hosted here on our site <a href="http://www.TheSpeedGamers.com" target="_blank">www.TheSpeedGamers.com</a> alongside a commentary feed and chatroom. I'll keep the stream embedded here for a few hours to give them some exposure, I will remove it sooner or later depending on what happens in the World of Warcraft today. <ul style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0;"><li>Please check <a href="http://www.thespeedgamers.com/" target="_blank">their website to donate</a>.</li><li><a href="http://www.thespeedgamers.com/page/1" target="_blank">TheSpeedGamers Blog</a> for more details.</li></ul> <div align="center"><object id="utv_o_309829" height="320" width="400" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"><param value="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/226402" name="movie" /><param value="true" name="allowFullScreen" /><param value="always" name="allowScriptAccess" /><param value="transparent" name="wmode" /><param value="viewcount=true&autoplay=false&brand=embed&" name="flashvars" /><embed name="utv_e_342037" id="utv_e_58468" flashvars="viewcount=true&autoplay=false&brand=emb ed&" height="320" width="400" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" wmode="transparent" src="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/1/226402" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" /></object></div> Blizzard Entertainment at gamescom 2009 <div class="blizzquotewrap"><div class="blizzquoteinner"><div class="blizzquoteheader">Quote from: Ancilorn (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/1/10106902396-blizzard-entertainment-at-gamescom-2009.html" target="_blank" style="color: white;">Source</a>)</div><div class="blizzquote">We’re pleased to announce that Blizzard Entertainment will be attending gamescom 2009 in Cologne, Germany next month. We look forward to welcoming old friends and new to our booth, which will feature hands-on gameplay with our upcoming games. Our booth is open to the public from Thursday 20 August until Sunday 23 August. We will be revealing more information on our activities during the show in the coming weeks. You can find out more about what gamescom has to offer, and how to get there, at <a href="http://www.gamescom-cologne.com/" target="_blank">http://www.gamescom-cologne.com/</a> Our recruiters will be at the booth ready to answer your questions about recruitment and working at Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard Europe currently has numerous open positions in quality assurance, localization, customer support and other departments in our offices in Velizy, France (near Paris) and Cork, Ireland. We’re looking for Italian, Polish, Russian, German, French, Spanish and English speakers. Bring your CV along and talk to us about our employment opportunities. <a href="http://eu.blizzard.com/en/jobs/" target="_blank">http://eu.blizzard.com/en/jobs/</a></div></div></div> Blue posts <div class="blizzquotewrap"><div class="blizzquoteinner"><div class="blizzquoteheader">Quote from Blizzard staff</div><div class="blizzquote">Population imbalances in Battlegrounds We've been discussing the population imbalances in Battleground matches a lot lately. If you read the Battleground Q&A we did a few weeks back, you may remember Cory Stockton mentioning that we have a lot of plans for Battlegrounds -- including rated, performance-based Battlegrounds providing access to higher-quality rewards -- actively in the works. We'll be discussing more of this at BlizzCon, but I'll add that the issue of faction imbalances in Battlegrounds you mention is something we recognize as a problem and plan to address when we're prepared to roll out some revitalizing touches to the Battleground system. Many of our plans are not fully conceptualized to the extent that I'm able to share details with you at the moment, but I'm confident you'll hear more at Blizzcon and perhaps the weeks to follow the event. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/1/18600872382-fix-av-please.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) Class representation and game balance Say we did some extensive data extraction from Ulduar and found that only 5% of guilds use Feral tanks when learning hard modes. Assume for the sake of my very contrived example that we could somehow select for those guilds with a potential to beat the encounters, but that the encounters weren't on farm yet. Assume that the sample size was somehow large enough that the statistics are not at fault in any of this data collection. (I'm trying not to let you Kobayashi Maru your way out of being able to resolve the scenario.) Now, let's also assume that we convinced ourselves beyond a shadow of a doubt that using a competent and appropriately geared Feral tank made most of the hard mode encounters significantly easier. Assume that the community also felt the same way -- that it wasn't a dark secret. The fair thing to do from a balance point-of-view would be to nerf Feral tanks. This will likely cause the percentage of them to drop from say 5% to 2% or virtually nil. A game designer should look at that and say: Yikes! You can argue that maybe the bear is just a horribly frustrating spec to play and so nobody does it despite its advantages. I don't really buy that though. Players tend to say that about all of the classes, and I don't see a lot of evidence that Ferals are somehow unique in this regard. Furthermore, many of our players will do things that are soul-crushingly frustrating if they think it might confer to them a small advantage, which is often why we nerf such things -- to save players from themselves so to speak. It's just hard to resolve how, in this particular example, why more guilds don't go stampeding towards druid tanks if they are overpowered. It's a tough question -- what to do with the overpowered but underplayed spec, assuming it doesn't have any crippling gameplay flaws? What do you do with the spec that is wildly popular but underpowered? Do you make them somehow less fun (even if it's relative) so players try out the other specs? I think saying "just make all the specs as fun!" is a cop out. We try to do that all the time, but I don't think that will ever result in as many shamans as warriors. This is why I say we don't balance around representation. We don't tweak numbers until we have 25% of each tank in Ulduar.(Or should the number skew higher towards DKs since they have more than one spec? Or should the numbers skew lower for paladins and druids since fewer races can be them?) But we do have to consider representation when we're making changes. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/26/18358915042-why-is-class-representation-considered.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) "Bring the Player, not the class" and raiding homogenization We don't think that's true. Some of you guys seem to always head for a purity of game design where things would look very neat in a table or plotted on a graph. But we're not trying for a design where every possible raid comp is equally viable. We don't need to support a design where the raid of 8 mages and 2 dps warriors is as effective as the raid with 10 Holy paladins. All we need to accomplish is to give groups enough flexibility to be able to bring the players they want while still getting all of the big buffs and enough of the smaller buffs. And we've done that. In the Sunwell days, the rosters of most progression-oriented raiding guilds (basically the ones trying today's equivalent of hard modes) were very similar. Now they are quite diverse. We don't have 30 specs represented yet, but we have 4 tanks, 5 healers and at least one dps spec of every class. That's more class diversity in raiding than WoW has ever had before. If you look at the guilds doing hard modes, they have pretty different rosters these days and that's even more true of the normal modes. If you're new to raiding in WoW, that's awesome because a lot of people are and we made a big effort in LK to make that happen. But talk to the groups that did Sunwell and the frustration they had in trying to build their raids. The first thing these guys said to us when they heard about a new class was "There's no room in my raid to take any." If you're looking for that one thing that's going to get you a raid spot, I'd shoot for a reputation that you know what the blank you're doing and some good friends. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/15443190965-bring-the-player-not-the-class-should-be.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) <img src="http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/idruids.gif" alt="" border="0" /> Druid (<a href="http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?page=700" target="_blank">3.1 Skills List</a> / <a href="http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?druid" target="_blank">3.1 Talent + Glyph Calc.</a>) Comparing Restoration Druids and Shadowform I think the best way to explain it is that when the Shadow priest has a model to follow – there are dps casters and in this case, a class with healing capabilities is deciding to turn its back on those abilities in order to be more like those casters. You can debate the relative power and utility of say Shadow priest and warlock, but at a high level there is a lot of overlap there. Now consider the Resto druid who decides to go Tree of Life. He is becoming a new type of character – he isn’t like the other healers, because they aren’t giving up buttons (except for those already absent from their talent tree). The Resto druid is giving up buttons, and for what? To be as effective a healer as the others. (You can argue Resto druids are overpowered if you’d like, but it certainly isn’t the design that Tree of Life allows druids to be the best healer in the game). (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/27/18601080646-druid-qa-the-twilight-zone.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) Tree of Life Yup. But honestly...</div></div></div>

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