The Conundrum of Casual Raiding

posted this on July 8th, 2010.
Categorized as casual, General, raids, Skirmishes.

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Full link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cstmfeed/~3/p_L3iqmyo4E/

This post will briefly touch on the age old debate of Casual vs. Hardcore. While it is not my goal to rehash past debates; I feel it pertinent to give my opinion on the matter so as to provide a reference point from which the following has been spawned.

I would like to first, try and present this from my point of view, because this is a post on how I see it. I consider myself a casually hardcore gamer. I aspire to some of the hardcore play styles and tasks, but am limited by other obligations that take a higher priority to my gaming, hence the casual. I do not view it as either/or, or mutually exclusive, but more of a sliding scale from one extreme to another. I am somewhere in the middle, but more on the hardcore side if that makes any sense.

When I refer to raiding I will be referring to the 12-mans in LOTRO, i.e Rift, Vile Maw, Dar Narbugund, Barad Guldur, and any of the skirmishes that provide for 12-man runs.

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Poll: Hours Playing LOTRO

posted this on January 9th, 2010.
Categorized as casual, hardcore, hours, playtime, poll, Weekly Poll.

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Full link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cstmfeed/~3/8CZC5lSWV54/

This week’s poll question is: How many hours do you play LOTRO in a week?

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.


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The Blind One

posted this on November 2nd, 2009.
Categorized as boss, boss fight, casual, Dar Narbugud, lotro, moria, raiding, raids, random thoughts, rotations, the blind one.

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Full link: http://nerfthecat.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/the-blind-one/


He’s a big, bad, monster deep within Dar Narbugud. It’s a tricky, Thrang-style fight. We’ve been at it a few weeks (I think would have been a bit faster with a fixed group, but our kin practices ‘rotations’ so we often have people new to the fight with us). We can now easily get through 1st and 2nd stage and yesterday got him to 38k on one attempt and then 28k on the next (from 500k). We’re making progress. And soon, it’ll be second nature to handle the transitions.

But for now, he’s my biggest frustration in LotRO. Captains, in our kin, are a rare breed at max level and radiance-d out. We get to go to most raids, which is quite a bit deal as every other class has to rotate between 3-4 players (we have more guardians but one is sitting out the rotation). I’m not a huge fan of rotation on such a wide-scale, but it’s meant to be fair to those who want to raid. Strictly, we’re very close to being able to run two raid groups, just not every week, and we’d be missing the Captains. So it’s a Catch 22 situation.

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Does everyone hate DKP?

posted this on October 14th, 2009.
Categorized as casual, dkp systems, dragon kill points, fairness, guilds, hardcore, lists, loot distribution, loot systems, lotro, MMOs, raiding, raiding in lotro, raids, rotations, sk, suicide kings, unfairness, when casual raids become hardcore.

Shorthand Link:
Full link: http://nerfthecat.wordpress.com/2009/10/14/does-everyone-hate-dkp/


Since when did DKP become a polarising factor? I quite like it, and I’ve seen a few different versions. Each DKP system  can be tweaked for a specific raiding group/guild, it’s up to you how you award points and how to spend them. But it seems people either love it, or despise the very concept.

Dragon Kill Points. Something we’ve all become aware of since the old Everquest days. Who knew they’d become so fixed in the MMO world?

In the days of massive raid numbers in Dark Age of Camelot we had a pretty simple system going. Turn up for a Sidi raid, get 10 points. Spend points each week bartering for items that dropped at the guildhouse of the guild running said raids. Either save up points for armour or weapons (at say 40 or 50 points per piece), or spend 10 points on the cheaper loot, such as respec stones. Perhaps from this I started with a good opinion of DKP.

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