Production Company is Recruiting

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I don’t think I’ve ever made a post solely for the purposes of recruiting before, but there’s a first time for everything. After a 6-month break, graduations, births, and new jobs, the team is back together and looking for more!

Leave the Drama to the Actors

Basic Information

Production Company

10-man Alliance, Moonrunner-US

Founded July 2007

Raid Times

Sunday 5 p.m. – 9 p.m. PST

Focus

All raiding content (heroic) and raid achievements completed by the end of the expansion.

This is a change from our previous raiding experience as a ranked heroic mode guild.

The Group

Production Company is primarily a group of adult, working professionals. Although we are reducing our raid hours per week the type of player we want to raid with remains the same: self-motivated, self-correcting, and dedicated players who strive to improve their performance week after week. Guild activities vary and are largely at the discretion of individual members. There is little directed activity outside of the raid.

Raiding

Raiding with Production Company is all about maximizing encounter time. Members are expected to be able to dedicate themselves to the raid time when they are able to attend. Flasks/potions/feasts/repairs/enchants are provided for raid-ready members. Breaks are scheduled on an hourly basis. Since raiders are responsible for their own performance and improvement, errors will not be pointed out–we expect you know what you’re doing wrong and act accordingly.

Current Openings

  • Tank with fully capable DPS specialization. Shield tanks preferable.
  • Healer (2). Low desire for druids.
  • DPS (variable). Low desire for mage/rogue.

Get in Touch

If this sounds like the type of raid group and schedule you’re looking for, you can contact our team in a variety of ways.

Just start a new thread in the Casting Couch forum titled “Questions.” Our official application hasn’t been updated to reflect the new schedule, but it can still be used if you’re ready to apply.

  • Contact a member in-game.

My battletag is Windsoar#1521

Otherwise, just track down someone within the guild.

  • Contact by e-mail

Official/GM: 10manraiding @ gmail.com

Mine: windsoar.jadedalt @ gmail.com

 

[GW2] Social Aspects

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Although Syl’s recent article on Guild War 2’s end-game have absolutely nothing to do with my subject, they did remind me that this is a post I wanted to write. I’ve seen the argument (sorry I’m link poor on that one) that the on-the-fly-fellowship model improves the social life of the MMO.

How does that work? How does not having to communicate make you more social? How does it make you connect with other players? It doesn’t. In the *almost* month I’ve been playing GW2, I can count the total number of things I’ve said in a chat channel on one hand.

Now, I’m willing to take the bulk of the blame. I’m very happily wandering around the world and discovering little nooks and crannies. I’m sure there *is* some way to actually scroll in my text box, but I haven’t taken the time to figure it out. What can I say, I’m a little anti-social on a good day. When I have been social in MMOs, it’s primarily been the result of group content. I had to communicate to function in a group setting.

While I don’t have any quibbles about not having to be social in order to enjoy an MMO, I do have a major quibble with saying that I’m enjoying the “social life” of an MMO. Auto-grouping doesn’t encourage me to do group activities and it sure doesn’t encourage me to actually interact with my fellow players. While I have enjoyed the group encounters I’ve taken part of, the absolute self-reliance that players are encouraged to embrace has left gaping holes in the mentoring you often see in new MMOs.

Let’s look at one of the encounters I took part in. The boss did a stomp. If you weren’t dodging during the stomp, you died. Pretty simple. You could spot the new people by the ring of death surrounding the boss. Since we’re not a “group” in the traditional sense, it doesn’t really matter to the bulk of people that these folks are dying. We’re all self-reliant, they’ll figure it out or just die a lot, right?

Chatter in the area was either:

  1. Melee can’t do this fight (lies! I was melee!)
  2. Rez me (it doesn’t matter that I’m right under the boss and you won’t actually have time to rez me before the stomp again)

 

It was rather frustrating to be a part of. Since it was my second time at the boss, I’d figured it out, and actually had enough time to look around and see the circle of death. I realized how nice it would have been if someone else would have done what I did: explain how the fight works. Moving on to new zones and new encounters, I saw this pattern repeated again and again. Sure, people were talking, but it was generally the same crappy bullshit you get in any forced group. As much as I’ve complained about having to struggle to form groups, or to keep groups together, the very fact that I must depend on other group members for a minimum set of time made me want them to succeed. As a result,because I was invested in my fellow players, I’ve formed a lot of great relationships in a multitude of different communities. Now that’s what I call being social.

The GW2 model, at least for outdoor auto-group type raiding doesn’t make me invest in others, which means I have less reason to want to talk to them, help them, or form relationships with them. As a result, I fail to see how we can say that the GW2 model encourages socialization. It might encourage you to enjoy “group” content, but that’s a story for another day.

The Story Thus Far: Storytelling in MoP

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When Blizzard announced they were going old school and bringing back the Alliance v. Horde rivalry that initially fueled the game, I was a little worried. One of the nice things that we’ve seen over the years is a real improvement in how WoW chooses to move our personal storylines, and those of the main characters, forward. The Battle of Angrathar the Wrathgate was an absolutely awesome moment in the time I’ve played the game, and how do you do that if there’s not an end-game in sight?

Now that I’ve wrapped up Jade Forest, I wonder how I could have been worried. Just because there isn’t a label on the back of the box saying “EVIL BOSS #2438 SHALL DESTROY THE WORLD UNLESS YOU BECOME AN EPIC HERO AND SAVE US ALL” doesn’t mean that Blizzard doesn’t have the end-game in mind.

And I’ve decided, I’m glad they didn’t. I like the mystery and the sense of discovery as I run around Pandaria. As much as I loved Wrathgate, I do distinctly remember how much I hated Arthas showing up all the time and while I stood there with spittle running down my chin as my fight or flight response went into overdrive and decided NOT DOING ANYTHING was a great idea.

I don’t even mind doing chores for monks and killing monkeys. I mean, I’m a hero right? But like one character so sweetly pointed out:

Hey, hero person. How about you help me with this non-hero stuff so I can decide whether I trust you with the really important jobs.

I like that I’m figuring out what the problems facing the realm are along with my newfound (and desperately trying to get you to like me here!) allies. I like that I don’t know what to screenshot, because I don’t know if that figure I just met is REALLY important.

Even better is when you’re wandering around the world and find out something you already thought was cool, is like *really, really* cool once you get far enough along in the story.

So I’m still not sure what ALL THE EVIL is going to be, and I’m ok with that. Judging by the story thus far, it’s going to be awesome.

 

[Screenshots] First Day of MoP

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I’m not ready to break out the pen and wax lyrical about the beauty of Pandaria, or even complain about my bugged dungeon. Instead I just wanted to provide a nice vista to relax between the flurry of guides, gear lists, and instructional videos. Enjoy!

[Minipost] Looting Addons

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In my UI overhaul I discovered a couple of nifty addons to add to my roster that make the life of a looter cleaner and easier.

Miniloot

Reduces looting chat spam with nifty icons. Especially nice when AoE farming.

 

Get it at WoWInterface or Curse

Peddler

I know, you’ve probably already got an addon that sells those pesky grey items. But do you have an addon that lets you mark up items you want to sell so that all your crap ends up being a one-click at the vendor?

 

Like other grey sellers, greys are automatically marked for auto-sell, but you can also right-click items in your inventory to set them as ready to sell. I love being able to auto-run and clean up my inventory at the same time.

Get it at WoWInterface or Curse

Why a Sequel?

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This probably isn’t the best time to be doing this discussion since MoP is 3 DAYS AWAY! Almost 2 weeks ago (I really do keep up with my blog list… honest) Matthew Rossi discussed whether a sequel is really necessary for World of Warcraft. After all, Everquest did it, and it look what happened: World of Warcraft took a big ‘ol bite out of the MMO market during the transition phase.

I’m not a guru when it comes to subscriber numbers and what makes an MMO sink or swim. Things that many people usually cite such as graphics, character models, new races, and the like have been and continue to successfully be updated with the expansion / patch model. However, at this stage of the game, with the number of years not only myself, but countless others have spent in the game, I can see at least two advantages to having a sequel instead of an expansion.

The Journey Begins

When’s the last time you started a brand new character with the intention of reaching max level? Contemplating doing that for MoP are you? Me too. You know how excited I am about it?

I’m not.

Oh, I’m excited about having a new race to play. I’m excited about the new zones. What fills my heart with dread is those 70+ levels where I’m slogging through the same ol’ quests, scenes, and annoying slow-downs that I have for the last several years. Add the horrific balancing issues as a leveling character and you’ve got a very unenthusiastic player–one who actually likes to level.

Now you might be thinking:

Expansions can fix that! Just look at Cataclysm!

I call bullshit. Were there new quests? Yes. Were there “structural” map changes? Sure. Was there a deep fundamental change to the vanilla quests and scenes? I can’t make myself say yes.

I leveled a few characters through the new vanilla. You know how many times I went to a hub expecting a wonderful new set of quests only to discover everyone I talked to had me doing the same shit, just in their now destroyed crib? A few too many for me.

Although there was enough “shiny” to get me through the zone, we’re not talking about complete transformation. Add onto that BC, Wrath, and now Cataclysm, and that’s a lot of zones that I’ve seen the backside of a few too many times to get really excited about.

I want a sequel so I can not only reset my level, but so that the entire leveling experience gets a reboot too.

A Time Machine You Say

If Cavern of Times taught us anything, it’s that time travel is… complicated. Blizzard has made some pretty valiant attempts to allow players to mingle with their past and future selves in an effort to flesh out the Warcraft universe. The longer the World of Warcraft franchise moves along, continuing to pop out those expansions, the more cumbersome and confusing all these converging story and timelines become.

Although you can successfully show the progress of time through events like the one for Theramore, or the new digs going up out in Westfall, it simply isn’t as effective as wiping the slate clean.How would you like to be a new player trying to fit the Argent Tournament into any meaningful context? You wouldn’t, because it only makes sense in the context of the expansion itself. As more expansions get tacked on, so to do we get more of these weird events that are isolated in time and space and pretty damn irrelevant to the next “story.”

And how do these time changes affect us? Time *is* moving forward, yet Jaina still looks like she’s 16, and I sure don’t look any older. How does this view of progressive time affect our ability to connect to the gameworld, the figures who inhabit them, and our own characters if time stands still for the *actors* but not the land itself?

Final Thoughts

I really enjoy and want to see Warcraft be a vibrant and successful universe for years to come. However, I also think that Blizzard is backing this Universe into a corner with the way they have handled their expansion model. By creating new lore every expansion complete with “current” events, they are continually causing cracks in the cohesiveness of their universe from level 1 – level xx. Add to that the increasing level cap, the lack of sufficient and meaningful revamps of the earlier expansion zones, and the game is encouraging players to only experience end-game content. Players are leveling their 10 85’s through the new content, or make a single new character for the novelty, but fail to remain engaged in the content from 10-80 (soon to be 85).

A hard-reboot, a sequel, might not be the answer from a business standpoint (good luck getting a few million people to wave goodbye to their virtual selves in order to set up shop in a new locale) but I think it does have benefits for the title long-term.