The Abomination that is The War Z

Hello guys, I am back. I haven't been doing much other than just a variety of things. Some World of Warcraft here, watching Netflix there. I've gotten into League of Legends recently as well while temporarily shelving my Warhammer 40k project. But question is, what brings me back to the blog? Well, as stated, the abomination of a game called The War Z. I'm sure many have at this point heard of all the scuttlebutt regarding the abomination, I'm not gonna repeat everything. I've come across a post that very concisely puts everything together regarding it.
  http://themittani.com/features/war-z-lesson-greed

One thing I do want to comment on is, RHINOCRUNCH, nailed it on the head regarding this... thing. He may have been a bit on the rage side toward it therefore many put him off as a DayZ fanboy rager. But the fact is, he has been dead on regarding the game. He said it 4 months ago and he basically was saying everything that I was seeing in this abomination as well. But I also want to point to another video, one that more calmly looks at everything and points out what is wrong and where the Devs of this shit had been lying.

I also came across this on The Shit Z steam community page(yes, sadly it is back on Steam) and is something that supposedly Sergey Titov the man behind all this had sad on their own forums.
EDIT: Actual link to the forums. http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?92204-Interview-asking-DDOS-Attacker-to-stop/page2

I'm not going to comment on whole DDOS thing, but since my name was mentioned here, I'll probably will say a few words - to our players, not to this guy.

1) Unfortunately it's not just up to me to decide when and how things will be done. Until recently I've been public face of the project, so I can understand why some people are associate project with me personally, and not people who's making game and operating/publishing it. Okay I'll say that - yes I deserve some of the ♥♥♥♥ that I'm getting personally for being bad communicator.

2) I agree that few features that have been promised in 2012 are still not yet delivered - and in my personal list Server Rentals goes under number one. I'm trying to push dev guys hard as I can for them to complete this feature ASAP. Saying that - unfortunately I do not posses as much power as players want to believe. Still here's my list of features that are important for a game that are still not available to public :
- Gameworld server rentals
- Stronghold servers and maps
- Leaderboards
As for this guy in a interview - unfortunately I personally CAN'T produce "proof" of the features being developed, I can only as a shareholder of Hammerpoint can say I know they're being worked on. But it's up to development leads/team is to decide if they want to show anything until it's done or not.

3) Unfortunately DDOS attacks are not helping anyone. Here's why - instead of spending time developing game, resources including MONEY will be spent on making sure that we'll have infrastructure in place to withstand them. This will delay release of the features. More importantly - people who actually vote what to do with a game in a future ( and that's not just me unfortunately ) will take this under consideration. 

A lot of people are pointing at #3 and reading between the lines where they are basically saying with that last line that the future of this crap is questionable.

MY THOUGHTS? This game is dead, it IS AND ALWAYS WAS A CASH GRAB! They made tons of money and now that they have gotten such flak for their BULLSHIT LYING TACTICS they are just doing damage control while they work on dropping the game altogether using DDOS attacks as a scapegoat.

Backing up to the days of the Steam fiasco 2 interviews popped up with this Sergey Titov.
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/the-war-z/1226980p1.html
 This first one was before the shit was taken off steam and fixed and put back on, but they called Sergey out and the whole time you could see as he refuses to take responsibility and instead place blame on the consumers for misinterpreting everything.
http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/12/20/the-war-z-interview-sergey-titov-backlash/
Then there's the response days after, which first things first, doesn't even sound like it's from Sergey who speaks a broken english. Second, they finally mention taking responsibility, but not once, did they even apologize for it. All that is said during this is that  we were wrong, but this shitty game is still so great and we are awesome so come back. At that point I honestly felt that they needed to truly apologize for everything and maybe even admit that this started as a cash grab and they want to turn it around and put in a true effort.But they won't ever do that because that isn't their goal.

Honestly folks, they charge for the alpha, then they turn around and throw in-game transactions and charge for instant revivals and other crap that you easily lose once you die.  How is it NOT a cash grab. So anyways, to those out there still reading, if you bought into this shit, I'm truly sorry but you got scammed. This crap Z isn't going anywhere and will be nothing but a memory and hopefully a lesson to all regarding what you put your money into regarding alphas and betas. 


ALSO: I was browsing The Crap Z forums and came across a thread regarding their Survey methods.
http://forums.thewarz.com/showthread.php?90901-Survey-for-warz-really

Originally Posted by SteveJ 

So in other words,
The people that stopped playing and are waiting untill you FIX IT can't vote on your survey unless they read this thread and start their game up.Smart move, get all the fanboys on a survey and publish the numbers.

Not exactly.

1) It's clear that if you have PLAYED game and stopped playing it - your vote will be 1.

2) We really want to know feedback from users who CONTINUE to play game. this is a reason we do not advertise this survey. It's open to public, it's not to hard to find if needed.But our goal is to get rating by our players first.

3) at the end - we're making game for our fanboys. I don't know if it's hard to understand, but yes - we want to keep our fanboys happy. Yes it'll be awesome to convert as many people as we can into being our fanboys, but at same time we should recognise that it's impossible task.

Sergey Titov
Executive Producer
The War Z

This was on page 4, the italics being Sergeys response. I'd like to take note they only care about getting surveys from people who haven't quit their game and are still currently playing the game despite how shitty it is. He got called out for only caring about  their "fanboys" numbers and not the whole community in general. Which basically confirms what I already suspected when I read somewhere that Sergey stated something like 90+% love the game. With his biased surveys and all the bannings regarding negative naysayers disabling their ability to participate in such surveys, yeah, I see how you can get those numbers.

ALSO ALSO: This Sergey is an ass, and through all this has disrespected the gaming community believing all of us to mindless idiots ready to eat whatever shit he shovels out in front of us. Hoorah to those out there speaking out against The Crap Z and Sergey Titov..

Pa Pa Pa Pandaren Style

I was okay with the Panda dance being the Shuffle. It fits the Brewmaster completely as you literally shuffle around all the time anyways. But this.. this is what I wanted the Male Panda dance to be.



I was late to the scene and unaware of Gangnam Style, even Shuffle. I don't pay attention to this stuff. But eventually curiousity got the better of me and I had to find out what this business was and, it's hypnotic. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.. and it doesn't help that it's actually catchy, that's where they get you.

So many cool Necron color schemes.

There were two factors that drew me to choose the Necrons as my army. One would be their common shared ability of Reanimation Protocols, allowing them a chance to come back from the dead. Seeing it in action was what clinched it. I watched  Battle Report of a 1700 point game where the Necron player was able to bring back 460 points worth of models thus making him difficult to kill.

 Second, it's the Necrons standard Black and Green color scheme. With my favorite color being green, and with how sweet the black and green look, it was a clear choice for me.

 However, you do not have to paint your armies the way the boxes look. Most armies have different divisions and different color schemes or you can just make your own, as long as the units represent the units, the colors do not matter. And this is where I am torn. I have seen several different color choices and this is where I am going to share my options since I just can not decide. Pic heavy post, if you are ready for it, hit the break.

A New Hobby

I think it's about time for another blog post since it has been a while. This time I'm gonna talk about Warhammer 40k. A miniature war game that can e an expensive hobby. A game that I expressed interest in when my group of friends stepped into a Games Workshop. But also a game I purposely set back down and walked away from knowing how expensive it would be to get into.

Fast forward a month and I get a message from one of my friends saying he just ordered the very same Limited Edition Dark Vengeance Starter set that I previously walked away from. My first thoughts was of the scene in The Big Bang Theory when the guys are at the comic shop and they are shown te new Collectors Edition Cowboy Expansion for the Wizards of Ka'ah card game they play. They all start of calling it ridiculous but then Howard wants one, then Raj wants one and then Leonard chimes in with exactly how I felt about what just transpired with Warhammer 40k. "I hate you and I hate myself, I'll take one too."

So thus began a new expensive hobby. So while he waited for his starter set to come in I did research. I checked out the various armies, priced the different kits and found some videos. Still reluctant to start this game it was the videos that pushed me into it. The game looks damn fun but even better it hit my creative side. I'm probably more looking forward to making the battlefields. Either way I was hooked, picking up the monster Rulebook and eventually decided on the Necrons for my starting army.

This weekend I finally picked up some kits and while taking things slowly due to still maintaining World of Warcraft. I spent this weekend leveling my monks Professions to MoP levels from nothing. Back to Necrons, I started with the Deathmark and Lychguard kits. So far I've only glued together the Deathmark kits and am waiting on painting because honestly I can not decide on a color scheme. There are too many good looking options.

Putting the Deathmarks together have been somewhat of a challenge though as they don't have any means of clipping pieces together. The arms join the shoulder via a ball-joint which at first thought was cool. I was all "sweet, that means I can position them anyway I want!".

But soon reality hit and I found that it just made things difficult because things needs to line up perfectly an without some peg to fit them in I meant the parts were loose. So when i'd have the left arm glued to left shoulder and right arm with gun glued to right shoulder, then when I try to attach left wrist to left hand on gun i would need to do so perfectly or else pull the right arm out of the shoulder. Did you follow that? Either way it was frustrating. My buddy had it lucky as his Dark Vengeance set had all its figures fit together with ease.

Next up are the Lychguards and since they will not be wielding a single item with both hands they should be considerably easier. Anyways here are my unpainted Deathmarks so far as well as a funny WH 40k picture I came across.

Everyday I'm Shufflin'

And quite literally as I have been leveling my panda monk. So quite often you'd find me jumping onto some object and /dance. Also the fact that I went Brewmaster I am also constantly shuffling for that extra Parry. There's also the Gift of the Ox passive that drops free healing balls as I do damage. So in those few times where I actually do take damage because Guard isn't up, I am shuffling left and right picking those up.

So how do I like the Monk so far? Well I am loving it, to be more specific, I love the tanking. I knew when I first heard about it that I was going Brewmaster. And leveling as a Brewmaster has been awesome. So much so that when I had intended on Mistweaving through some dungeons while leveling. That just never happened, putting all that caster leather heirloom gear to waste.

Leveling with heirloom is fast, leveling a monk with heirloom is insanely fast. At level 20 when you can get an Enlightenment buff increasing xp gains by 50% for an hour. After a quest at 20 that grants this buff you can do it again as a daily and also getting a new quest every ten levels. There is bug with the buff that refreshes it to 2 hours if you do the quest while you already have the buff. So at one point I had 5 hours of the buff. And trust me it helps. I managed 60-66 in less than 3 hours as well as 80-83 thanks to this buff.

As of late last night I am 85. I would have been there sooner but I took a break the other night. I quickly stepped into Pandaria to get a feel for it and it's going to be a breeze. Mostly due to having crafted Misthide armor to start with and having the Spear of Xuen from Archaeology. Having a weapon with level 90 stats at 85 is awesome.

Goals to date.

Get my main Rogue to 90 = COMPLETED

Get all guild professions to 600 for Leg Heirloom gear = COMPLETED

Get guild to level 20 for Head Heirloom gear = COMPLETED

Get various factions on my main Rogue up through Dailies = IN PROGRESS

Power level my Monk = IN PROGRESS

Level my Warrior and other Alts = ON HOLD

Get our Guild to level 25 = PASSIVELY IN PROGRESS

Get 55 factions to Exalted in our guild for the Dark Phoenix Hatchling = PASSIVELY IN PROGRESS

My Rogue in MoP

I've wanted to talk a lot more about Mists of Pandaria. But the truth of it is, when at computer, I'm going to be playing the game and not doing much else, which includes keeping up this blog.

So let's start from the beginning. I started with my Rogue and progressed rather nicely with her. One thing that was a must was keeping up Recuperate and Slice and Dice at all times meaning using the glyph to refresh them when killing mobs. This allowed me to only need to turn them on once in a blue moon and focus on damaging finishers.

Unfortunately one thing I've noticed as I leveled her up and especially now at 90 doing dailies is that she became more and more energy starved. This is a fact that is coming up around the internetz and something that is difficult to do is avoid comparing them to the Monk. They are both energy users with a point building system. With key differences being that the points are stored on the monk as opposed to on the mobs and that rogues have to spend their energy both on the generators AND the finishers while monks don't have to spend energy on their chi abilities. This makes the monk a more active class as on my Rogue, after the first 8 seconds of a fight, I am just sitting there stabby stabby with my auto attacks while I wait for energy.

I really hope Blizzard does something about this. Initial thoughts are too remove the energy costs on finishers but if you look at the various articles and forum posts on the subject you might find that may make the rogue too OP. Their damage at the moment are through all the various DoTs give them tons of passive damage. While monks rely on the energy free chi moves for their damage.

So this is why they aren't making the Rogues finishers energy free as they generally hit hard. If they did so they'd have to nerf them and/or all the passive damage. One start I think would be okay though is to remove energy costs from the non damaging and utility abilities.

This is just my thoughts on this, I'm no theorycrafter, I just play the game and notice things that work and don't. And simply put something does need to be done about it because I'm getting frustrated with my rogue after the first half of a fight.

Funny how this post turned into what it became, I was only planning on talking about what I have been doing with MoP in general including all my characters. Guess I had to vent/rant about the Rogue energy issue.

EDIT: Here are some links now that I am home that have I guess inspired this post.
Why we are energy starved.
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