Greedy Goblin

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Openraid.eu

I wasn't happy with the raiding in The PuG. We killed DW on Jan 23, according to MMO-Champion, we are ones of the 300K out of 5.6M who did that (way in the top 10%), what is enough to prove that it works, however clearly not as elegantly as I expected. At first we had to cancel raids due to low attendance, and also I lead most of the raids.

However something great happened that can finally make the proof complete. Mirth, one of the members of the guild (and not me), came up with the idea of using the site openraid.eu to find other people to raid with. It has the drawback that the RL has to use realID, however it makes it sure that not I will lead it.

Why is it great? The guild is called "The PuG" for a reason. I want to prove that a random selection of non-M&S is capable of performing and social bonds and structure are not necessary or even useful. They become inevitable when we have to fish jewels from the sea of idiocy. If you finally found someone with more brain than a baboon, you stick to him, try to bind him to your circles so you can keep cooperating.

/trade pugs and the Looking for Retards feature got their infamy from the amount of drooling tools that pollute it. When you are happy that there are only 3 Amalgamations on Spine, it's a good sign that LFR did not become the great feature I expected. Why? Because you have no simple (and lately not at all) way to get rid of the leeching M&S and simply because their wast numbers make finding people for a one-time raid very time-ineffective. That's why I wanted to collect these people into a guild, however that's still a social structure, no matter how hard I try to de-socialize it by rules.

However if the raid organizer openraid.eu (or any similar) works, that would remove that last problem and let people enjoy successful and M&S-free raiding without any social bonds.

Why would it work better? At first the pure thing that you have to find a site is a serious barrier from the M&S. I mean if they could find elitistjerks or a class blog, they wouldn't be terrible at the first place. Secondly such service allows you access to countless players, you don't have to go with whatever warm body to find and hope they perform better than an empty slot.

Thirdly, since such service is not in Blizzard control, they can no longer stop us from excluding M&S. Your ignore list has 49 places for a reason: it's likely that you have less than 49 personal enemies so it serves the purpose to exclude the guy who got you kicked from your social guild for not helping, but you can't use it to /ignore every below-healer DPS (noticed that the term "below tank" lost its usage?). There is 2-hours cooldown on kicking from LFD and LFR, you can't kick from Tol Barad raid, you can't /ignore guilds and so on. Blizzard actively fights excuding even the most obnoxious creatures from our own playing since those things are paying customers too and without being boosted they couldn't kill even a Stormwind Rat. On the other hand a third-party site, especially on a web platform allows the creation of auto-excusion tools that makes this not only possible but simple and intuitive. For example if I mark someone "good player I want to play again", I could automatically exclude all the M&S that he marked useless.

We will do the test run at Saturday 19:00 server time (I guess that's Paris time) with BWD HM (can't run DS yet via realID raids). Feel free to join. Message from the raid organizer: I haven't yet figured it out, but chances are that you _must_ specify a RealID email before you can see cross-realm raids on this website. If that's true and the raid isn't showing up for you. If that states true, just add any e-mail for that field, an unexisting one will also work. In case some of you would like to join directly, without registering on Openraid, my realID: inbox@helvene.ru. The link to the raid is http://www.openraid.eu/index.php/users/raid/577/

10 comments:

Sum said...

Can't raid Dragon Soul through that though, only FL and older.

Anonymous said...

"When you are happy that there are only 3 Amalgamations on Spine, it's a good sign that LFR did not become the great feature I expected. "

Interesting. US LFR doesn't seem to have this issue. Or rather, I have yet to come across it.

Inasmuch as people can scream about stopping DPS on an Amalgamation, thats the worst I have seen so far. And when the tard factor is high, people start yelling at 50%, not 15%.

If you can wait a little while, BattleTags will be in WoW shortly too.

Anonymous said...

There used to be a great addon for WoW (wasn't updated for long time) called Cirk's Badapples. Basically it was an ignore list shared by all your characters which allowed you to enter your own comment, so you could always remember if someone was just acting like an asshole or performing poorly.

Foo said...

There is an addon ignoremore

While it uses the Blizzard ignore list; it removes additional player whispers from your display window. You simply don't see them.

My default use for this is anal spammers. If you engage in anal spam, I don't want you in my raid.

Gevlon said...

Ignoremore and other addons remove them from my chat but won't stop LFR/LFD to put me into my team. It's not their chatter that annoys me but their below-healer DPS

Anonymous said...

openraid.us is the other version.

Just in case your readers don't see the link.

Anonymous said...

You left out the part of the MMO-Champion article where they said "Keep in mind that the sample contains many alts, which makes the absolute numbers look lower than they are in reality. This means that we are looking at encounter difficulty relative to the easiest encounter, not the percent of the player population that completed each encounter." I suspect a lot more alts have killed Morchok than Deathwing (that's how it is in my guild), so your "top 10%" claim may not be accurate. WoWProgress ranks the PuG at about 18k, with 48k guilds having killed Morchok.

The OpenRaid service is intriguing, but I will point out that it doesn't give you "access to countless players", but rather 4587. I assume that's for combined US and Europe, since both web sites quote the same number. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see how it goes.

Anonymous said...

Won't the ability to not trade gold to/from these players be a hinderance on The Pug? Will they simply be removed from the raid and plug in the next openraid goon? How will items be looted as a result of a non gold bid system?

Gevlon said...

Good point. Probably openraids won't be gold bids.

Anonymous said...

At first this seem intriguing. However, because of all the offers & renewals, I used my "real" mail id and not ipwnu@mailinator.com when I set up my realid years ago.

If you give out your email address to internet strangers for any amount of purple pixels in WoW, then you are really a moron and risking more than the value of any raid. At a minimum, I can imagine the amount of spam and special offers you receive after the trolls, goonswarm and pull-the-boss-and-leave special snowflakes arrive.