Ask Gauss

Sunday end of the weekend here we are. I would say end of winter as well but it cannot really decide what it wants to do around here. Weather has been all over the place, that is Canada for you though. You are not here though to read me complain or praise the weather I am having. You are here to see me answer some questions. So I will just get right into it.

How do you feel about DLCs?

In general I have no issue with a company that wants to put out DLCs as long as they are addons to the game and are not essential to the experience. Some expansions are labeled as DLCs but at least they are explained to be such so never mind about those. I am talking about teh games which are not free to play which throw out all these DLC micro transactions which are needed to play the game correctly and effectively. It is wrong to treat your customers this way and really is something they should be ashamed of. EA is famous for this or famous for overcharging for basic things they add to the game.  A good DLC in my mind is something like the most recent DLCs for Lightning Returns they are just outfits for lightning which you don't need to play the game just something extra in case you wanted something different. Now if those outfits were needed to beat the game then it would be a completely different story.

Do you like the new D3 Paragon system?

I find this interesting because I was just having a talk with Ziggie about this the other day. I really didn't have a problem with it till he pointed out to look at someone's elite kills compared to their paragon level. When I did I felt cheated like I wasn't given enough for the time put in, and I wasn't even half the paragon Ziggie was. Just seems they didn't reward the people enough for their vanilla accomplishments if how people are leveling now is to be expected. Not sure their think behind I  really do feel for the people who had multiple 100 paragons whose time seems to have been wasted.

Did you get into Heroes of the Storm Alpha?

Sadly no, but hoping for the beta and I am sure you all will be hearing plenty about it when and if I do.

That's it questions all answered for this week. As always thanks to everyone who sent something in and make sure you enjoy the rest of your weekend.

LFR Exploit

Well Blizzard decided to act on what had been going on for the first week of the LFR system. People who they have found out have used this exploit were given anywhere from a 3 to 8 day ban. What this basically has done is taken away a week of raiding from players in top end guilds and in turn has made it so the ground they have to catch up to attain world first kills is a substantial one.

Here is Blizzard's official statement on the suspensions

Shortly after patch 4.3 was released, we became aware that some players were abusing an exploit to obtain loot from the same Raid Finder bosses multiple times in a single raid lockout period (one week). The Raid Finder loot mechanic is of course intended to only allow a person to roll on boss loot drops once per raid lockout period. The raid lockout mechanic has been a mainstay of the World of Warcraft rules since Onyxia and Molten Core, ensuring that no one can obtain loot from a boss more than once per lockout. Due to the nature of the exploit and the clear intent of those who abused it, they've been issued notices and given temporary suspensions from the game. We’re also working to remove all Raid Finder items from those who used the exploit.

Some would say it was Blizzard's error and therefore the players did nothing wrong. That is like saying if someone left their bank card in the machine logged in it would be ok to clear their bank account out. Yes they were not the brightest for doing this, but the players in this case knew what they were doing was wrong and should have acted accordingly.
 
Paragon who is always under the microscope posted this apology on their website.

An LFR Apology

There has been a lot of misinformation going around, so to clear things up, here is a truthful account of what exactly happened with the LFR and what we have to say about it:

The patch hit EU servers on Wednesday. We started off with our 5x Firelands runs to wrap up legendaries and called it a night. For Thursday, we had an elaborate plan to run a personal LFR raid for every main character to get the maximum amount of loot.

As we were doing the first few runs, we noticed an unrealistic amount of tier pieces on some guilds' armory profiles, which we thought was unattainable through normal means. We started looking into it, and found out that you can loot passed gear from bosses, regardless of save status, if you zone out and back into the instance. This did not provide the raid with any extra loot, but it did eliminate a major portion of the RNG that would have been involved in simply doing personal runs for everyone.

We acknowledge that using this unintended behavior, which was quite clearly a bug, to our gain, was wrong. The fact that others were using it as well is no justification for doing it ourselves. We apologize for doing it, and accept whatever consequences follow.

This shows that the knew it was wrong and they did it anyway. This really shows you what guilds have been doing to get world first kills. in 4.2 entire guilds faction changed just to get a 1 week ahead of everyone else. There was no ban in that case and Blizzard had to change the system. Also the entire Lich King issue last expansion. Now is this because it is competitive or because the guilds feel they have to cheat because everyone else is? The whole steroid issue in some professional sports only time will tell. Until then I think anyone who exploited this should get what they deserve.

Heroic Ragnaros Dead

So yes this happened on the 19th but the point is still out there. First let me show you what paragon themselves had to say

Ragnaros: Too soon!

Or was it? No, not really. Not if you ask us.


We've NEVER put as much effort into a kill as we now did on downing Heroic Ragnaros. We had a few grueling low percentage wipes and we were already planning on continuing early tomorrow with a better set of gear. Our kill attempt was going to be our last pull of the night as the thunderstorms and disconnects were kicking in.

Then everything clicked. All of our combined effort, practicing, theorycrafting and planning finally paid off. We had a near-perfect try and Ragnaros just melted away. A wave of relief washed over us. It was finally over. We wiped 500+ times on the boss, although I lost count at some point. Absolutely epic feeling after such an epic fight!

We'd really like to thank all of you guys for supporting us. We also would like to extend our gratitude to our sponsors who help us do what we do; a big thank you to SteelSeries, ASUS and especially our new partner DREAM! We'd of course like to thank Blizzard and the developers as well. The hotfixes were lightning fast. :)

I want to give a big congrats out to Paragon on all their hard work on getting the first kill and being consistently awesome at getting these kills done since Wrath. You give the community something to strive towards and that is something you all should be proud of.

Now with that out of the way let's talk about something important with this kill and the past first kills. This is the 3rd world first end boss kill in the past 3 patches where there was not one DPS Shaman in the raid makeup. In fact there was only 1 resto shaman in the past 3 world first end boss kills. So what does this mean? Is this something that Blizzard should be worried about? Or is this something that is realized after the fact and is fixed? Or does this only effect the top of the top players in the world, and the average player should not worry themselves with it whatsoever?

I am thinking that yes it really doesn't matter to much to the average player, but it is something Blizzard should look at seriously. If the top guilds are not taking a particular class to kills this really is a concern on Blizzard's part in regards to balance. They think it is a disadvantage to actually bring such a class and spec and that is completely against what Blizzard has been trying to achieve. So hopefully Blizzard just doesn't brush something like this off like it is nothing and looks at it with the seriousness it requires.