Aion, Comments, and Stuff!

First of all, a big thank you to all new readers and especially those that commented or buffed my posts.
I screwed up on the comments, I was sure I had comment pre-moderation disabled. Turns out I didn't and some of your comments got delayed. My apologies.

Summer Raiding And You

If you've been in a raiding guild at all you've probably seen this. Everything goes great, your guild is progressing, people are attending, everything is fine.

And then it gets warm outside.

All of a sudden your attendance rates drop, raids don't happen and raids that do happen get worse. People start coming late or leaving early while others go AWOL for two weeks. Congratulations, summer got you and you're thoroughly screwed.
Or are you? In the following I'll discuss why raiding is so difficult during summer and solutions to keep your guild together. If you have more, by all means leave a comment!

Applying to Multiple Guilds

Matt over at World of Matticus just blogged about the question of whether or not applying to multiple guilds is a sin. His opinion is clearly that it's not an issue at all, I happen to disagree.

Investing in the Future of Gaming

I first heard about this idea in the aforementioned ABC interview with Gabe Newell but got reminded of it on sunday evening by Octale & Hordak.

It basically goes like this: Instead of having business people invest money into a game's production and players buying it when it is complete, why not have the players themselves invest into the game in the first place? Microinvestments if you will.
Companies would pitch their game concepts to players and those could then purchase shares of that game. Not only would they get the game when it's finished but they would eventually get paid out a small part of the game's profits. For more details of the original plans, please refer to Octale & Hordak's excellent show.

Sniping and Overhealing

Sydera has an excellent post over at World of Matticus about healing meters and how to read them.
I very much agree with most of what's said there, except for her views on heal sniping. The comments also bring up the topic of overhealing which I'll address below.

Healing Vezax as Enhancement

UPDATE: there are reports that this strategy doesn't work very well any more. I have not tested this in 3.2, but be advised that it may not be a good idea these days. It was fun while it lasted.

UPDATE 2:
It is confirmed, enhancement healing is dead.

Enhancement shamans receive a healing debuff similar to the ones Retribution paladins have had since the encounter’s initial implementation

- Crygil

I mostly play as a restoration shaman in World of Warcraft. In that role I recently found an interesting alternative way of healing the General Vezax encounter in Ulduar on hard mode.

Piracy - is it really a problem?

There has been a discussion over in the wcradio.com forums about piracy that I found very thought provoking. Personally I haven't pirated a game in years and refuse to do so because I believe in supporting development studios. That doesn't mean, however, that I think piracy is a problem at all.

Launch

Welcome to Procrastination Amplification, my personal blog about all things gaming. A number of these posts will be about World of Warcraft as that is the MMO I'm currently playing (and that I keep coming back to), but you'll also find me writing about any number of games that currently concern me for one reason or another and posts about the gaming industry in general.

Thanks for giving me a shot :)

scrusi