Multiboxing AV with 5 accounts

Tonight was an especially wonderful night for the Alliance in AV. In my battlegroup the Alliance have enough trouble winning with the constantly turtled Horde. But tonight there was one clever horde (is that possible?) with 5 accounts and 5 identical Tauren Shaman (surprise). It was quite humorous to run into Galv and find huge stacks of totems and elementals running everywhere. It may have been fun for him but it made for an awful boring night for a lot of other people.

Epics for everyone!

I will never understand why some people seem to think they are more entitled to epics than others. We all pay the same amount to play this game. And when you strip off all the QQing and PWNing that is all that matters.

Do you really think that Blizzard cares HOW MUCH you play? Do you really think Blizzard cares how well your 3s team plays? They just want to make sure you keep playing and paying. So, in their eyes all players deserve the same chances/abilities to obtain epic items. They are rewards to keep you playing.

Do you really think that the ability to play 8 hours a day makes you more worthy of an epic item? Does the ability to coordinate 25/40 people to properly play their class make you more worthy of epics? If it did, then only raid/guild leaders should get them. Does the ability to roll through AV after AV just going through the motions make you more worthy? How about the ability to work with 2-4 friends and grinding away in the Arena? How are any of these examples any more difficult than the others? Explain how anyone can't accomplish any of these tasks. It doesn't take talent. It doesn't take skill. It just takes time and that is not reason enough to think of yourself as "better" than other players.

Sure, there are a few truly hardcore players. People who really love the game itself not just the love of beating the game. People who know the lore and have followed Warcraft through the non-MMO stage (yes, Warcraft was around before Wow). These few truly hardcore players follow the storylines, play on PVP/RP servers and participate in true Pvp. They conquer evil and reach goals that most people don't even know exist. These are the people who truly deserve epics.

It's too bad there is no reliable way to distinguish these players from the epic-farmers in the game.

The Dark Side

With my priest almost covered in S1 gear from battlegrounds (well, some mooncloth too), I now feel myself turning to the dark side.

I am on the welfare epic road with my Lock now. I specc'ed SL/SL and just picked up my Gladiator's Dreadweave Hood and I have started down the dark path. Here are my stats with blues and greens (Okay, I have the Halloween event epic rings).

Raid vs. Pvp Rewards -- The Real Answer

I understand Raiding takes a lot of time and effort, Pvp does too. I also understand the people who excel at these deserve to be rewarded properly. But rewarding them with "better gear" is not the answer. Simply because as soon as the next batch of content (Pvp or Pve) comes out that gear is just trashed and any sense of accomplishment is gone. They need to be rewarded with "unique gear" (not just in color). Something along the lines of the "Champion of the Narru" or Gladiator titles. Or perhaps the "Purple Trophy Tabard of the Illidari" (I know that is not raid level gear, just an example). And I don't mean unique as in just one drops each time you take 5 hours to kill one boss. I mean unique as in each raid member gets a "My guild made it to the Black Temple and all I got was this lousy teeshirt" kind of deal.

I still have my Benediction staff because it's unique, not because it's a great staff. I don't use it but I can whip it out and cart it around to show it off as an accomplishment in the game. I'm sure the same goes for many GM staffs.

If Blizzard would stop re-shading and upgrading stats on old gear and work on unique equipment/rewards this whole argument would go away.

I know there is the whole argument about performance issues and character models and how much RAM is required but that just doesn't make sense to me. The idea of unique is that there aren't thousands of them. If there were a few people on each server it wouldn't create that much overhead (the unique mounts for example).

How many people on each server get to see the real end game content? Is it too much to ask that they can show it off for more than a couple months? In Arena Pvp you have titles with some meaning why not more of this in for the raiders? Perhaps this gear does exist but is indeed so rare that most people never even seen it.

It seemed for a short time there we had a distinct division between Pvp and Pve rewards. There was the title system for Pvp, restricted barracks, and officers quarters. There was unique gear for raiders (tiers 1-3) and unique Pvp gear. I think the problem started when Blizzard got lazy and started merging this gear (the graphics anyway). At least the weapons haven't fallen into this trap. It is usually easy to tell a Raider from a Pvper by the weapon they carry. Why can't armor be the same way?

There is clearly a distinction between playing style, there should be the same distinction in gear.