Enthusiasm

With recent news about Cataclysm’s revamped views on raiding (http://www.wowhead.com/guide=cataclysm&pve#general), there has been questions recently in the guild regarding whether we should continue forward as a 25 man raid guild of stay a small, focused 10 man raid guild.

While in some ways I say getting to 25 man size has been a bit drama inducing, once we get to the 25 man size, there will be significantly less drama than there has been recently. Fact is that much of the drama recently has been due to people not being able to get into raids, either due to only one 10 man running or the logistical nightmare of running dual 10 mans and failing at it.

In 25 mans, you get better loot distribution because generally you have one of every class at the raid. This means there is little to no chance of gear getting sharded and in turn progression is a lot smoother because weeks don’t go by where no one (or very few) get an upgrade. In 25 man, many people get upgrades because everyone can use something. Sure it makes loot distribution more complicated, but if you have a nice loot system like ours (which has turned out very nicely), then loot is distributed fairly with little to no drama.

Another thing too, if we just give up on the idea of doing 25 mans for cataclysm, then I would have been A. lying to all these people I’ve been recruiting recently that I plan on continuing to move the guild forward as a 25 man raid guild B. would be forced to say goodbye to many people who will not be happy in a guild that reserves itself to always being a 10 man guild and C. the guild would have to shrink a lot, to as little as 20-25 people (it’s around 88 right now) before we get to the point where there will be no drama.

Finally, I think that running a small group of 10 people, while that sounds fun… it’s pretty boring after a while. I’m sure that it’s fun for those who are progressing right now and pushing 10 man content with almost the same 10 people every week, but if you did that for an entire expansion… it would just get old. People would crave that 25 man content feeling. I know I would. My class isn’t built for 10 mans. I might as well reserve myself to always being shadow if we decide to give up on 25 mans or switch to Disc instead of Holy.

I feel we should stick with the plan to move to 25 man raiding. It’s definitely a major goal I’ve been striving for as a guild leader.

BLOG NEWS: On a side note, I’m going to try to blog at least Monday / Wednesday / Friday for now.

Game development on our new XNA Xbox 360 game has continued in recent weeks. We’ve been getting together after work on Wednesdays so that’s at least a dedicated day for development and whenever we have spare time in the evening during the week. We also of course brainstorm at lunch about it. So far we’ve re-assembled the team again and it’s got some good steam.

Victor Laurence aka “CyberVic” – Executive Producer / Lead Developer
Victor Hermenzie aka “Voctor” – Executive Creative Director
Kerin Dimeler-Laurence aka “PDXYarnHo” – 2D Vector Artist
Dave aka “DaveUK” – Soundtrack
Robin aka “Hat the Red”- Writer
Aric aka “Baldun” – Developer

Voctor is working on the Game Design Document and doing quite well. He already has all the skills laid out for the classes (something like 144 unique skills) and built out the 3 tech trees for each class in diagram form. I’ve been doing well development wise. Taken the game from a simple fly around and shoot other player ships game to a game where there is dynamic random “spawning’ asteroids that are destructible, enemy ships spawning and attacking nearest player ships with basic fly strait at you attack AI, a shield and hull indicator on the HUD, a current target name/shield/hull indicator on the hud, an experience system, a skill system with togglable active skill with cooldown indicated on the HUD, and finally a reworking of the basic flight / shooting engine with a speed boost system for player ships.