Sunday, November 14, 2010

Blizzard Broke My Speakers

Sometimes I'd like to take the opportunity to abuse this blog to vent some nerdrage. Nerdrage is supposed to be rambling and incomprehensible, so I'll do my best.

With every patch there are a couple of things that will annoy me more than other things. Usually Blizzard bust their asses off to fix these things first, but in some cases I just wonder what the heck their up to since nothing has been done. Every new patch I quickly sift through the notes in the hope of those wonderful words saying "we've finally fixed this guys, no need to be annoyed over it anylonger". And everytime I don't find them I get a little more raged over the fact that Blizzard aren't addressing the issue. In this case I mean "not adressing" as in both not fixing it and not even mentioning that it's a problem.

I am talking about two things. Let me begin with the one from which I named the post. For some, unfathomable, reason Blizzard have made it so that the sound of the "Play" button on my launcher plays at what seems to be a ten times higher volume than anything else on my computer. That means that everytime I press the launch button without thinking, and trust me I do that alot considering I have been pressing that button several times a day for a couple of years without thinking and it's kind of difficult to just stop doing it, my speakers explode with the roars of the launch sound. Or even better, for the times I use headphones I can hear my own ear-drum shatter. You know cartoons when someone gets their head smashed between two cymbals or the like and their head vibrates from the blow? Well that is how I feel when this happens.

Admittedly I haven't been searching high and low for any words from Blizzard about this. Honestly I shouldn't have to. In my opinion this isn't a small problem. It's a huge problem. Listening to anything else on my computer usually requires that I keep a moderate volume and if I don't remember to turn it down way low before I push that button I get a shockwave of sound in my face, which just can't be good for my ears or my speakers. I shouldn't have to remember to turn my speakers/sound off everytime I push that button! The extreme sound is there for no good reason at all and I shouldn't have to adapt myself at all to protect myself from it. It's like if McDonalds had a policy that you got to suit yourself if you didn't wear protective shoes from the CALTRAPS THEY RANDOMLY LEFT LYING ON THE FLOOR, HAHAHA! (Disclaimer: McDonalds doesn't actually leave caltraps or any other hazardous items randomly on their floors.)

Seriously Blizzard, I'd even accept an extended maintenance if you just fixed this already!

So... on to the second thing. I wrote about this one already - the extremely slow death gryphons. Nothing makes me happy after a wipe like having to very, very slowly fly inside again on that slow-ass thing. Or if you're ganked just outside the entrance. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you'll be alive when spawning by the graveyard, and if you're even more lucky there won't be someone of the opposing faction camping the graveyard for easy kills. I first wrote about it three weeks ago and they have still not done anything about it. Or even said they will.

Surely this can't be intended. If it is, it is the worst attempt at forcing us players into a time-sink that I have ever seen in the game. Forcing us to grind for emblems for cool gear, gather items or fly all over the world to complete quests is one thing. But this is just taking it to the absurd and demeaning to our intelligence (maybe not to some puggers that I've mets intelligence...). I fiercely refuse to believe that Blizzard would sink to such childish levels, when they're generally smart designers of this game. I do believe you need time-sinks in a game, I accept them. But don't make them this obvious! No... no... it's all just a programming error and it will be fixed "soon".

Maybe I should be happy that everything isn't extremely slow in the death world. I mean even when things are bad they could always be worse? Although it would be interesting to see people actually fear death just because it would be so extremely tiresome and tedious to recover your corpse. It really would alter peoples playstyles methinks (bye bye random pug). That could be something for another post!

I think I'm happy with my nerdraging now, I got to vent a little anyway. That this won't in any way actually help the situation doesn't really matter, we never whine to actually do something about it, right? It's just to make us feel better. Ahh... I feel better already.

6 comments:

  1. Indeed. It's a nerdrage. But I'm on your side.

    I was also really frustrated by the button-thingy until I swapped the link in my dock. Furthermore, primary the fact, that you pay ~13€/month for game, which developer can't fix such a tiny bug within 3 weeks makes me so angry about it. Fortunately you can avoid this by swapping the link.

    The griphon thing is the worst part. I like to bypass this annoyance by trying to die near to an entrance of an encounter, making it easy to get rezzed. If you are lucky, and your mates do not get ganked, your raid can go on easily.

    The even worser part was a few weeks in the past for me. WoW spit errors every 5 minutes out. Continuous, when I was dead and awaited a rezz, even when I immediately captured the flag in WS. Nope, critical error. Must be pretty frustrating, watching a flag carrying warlock, standing in the enemy base, not reacting at all.
    Moreover I still have hardware lags, which come and go from time to time. Sometimes the encounter runs fluidly, sometimes not. Explain that.

    I think I feel like someone would feel after a confession.

    Hang in there, take a break, grab a coffee. Preferable not on a griphon.

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  2. @Vasburg
    Hmm link-swapping ey? Tell me more!

    And yes, I had my fair share of constant crashes too. I nerdraged some over those as well, but fortunately Blizzard fixed those fairly fast.

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  3. I have a theory on those insanely slow deathmounts.

    The other day I was doing this random PUG on my priest and got PoS. The dps was so low I was third highest dps by smite healing even though my gear isn't all tjat good. Ofc we wiped and ofc I was angry but by the time tjat insanely slow mount vad brought me back to the instance I had cooled off and the two suckiest dps were replaced.

    They are slow so we get time to cool down ;)

    /L

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  4. With swapping links I meant to avoid the launcher. You can find in your hard drive in the world of warcraft directory a launcher .exe file and a World of Warcraft .exe file. The first one starts the launcher, the second one starts World of Warcraft directly.
    You will miss the news, but also your exploding speakers.

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  5. @Vasburg
    Ah yes, thanks for the tip! It comes with the drawback of not having the background updater active I suppose, but it might actually be worth it.

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  6. @L
    Actually that's not a bad idea. You get so frustrated at the gryphons you forget everything else you might've been angry with ^^ In raids it gives people ample time to think through any mistakes they made that might've caused the wipe.

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