Armory Stats - Proving Grounds, Robert Kazinsky Interview, Tweets, Warcraft Movie

[Deleted]

Except you're not grinding for gear. There are no "ultimate weapons" or whatever to unlock--all characters have their weapon(s) and abilities right from the start. You basically only have to "grind" if you want different skins/emotes/sprays. The rest of the time you're just playing the game.

Oh noes hipsters cannot play on their Mac *worldends*

[Eleccybubb]

Oh noes hipsters cannot play on their Mac *worldends*

Methinks you misquoted. Also nothing wrong with someone playing on a Mac whatsoever and I assume Overwatch will get support eventually. The recent Imacs as pricey as they are run high end games quite well.

[Logwyn]

Methinks you misquoted. Also nothing wrong with someone playing on a Mac whatsoever and I assume Overwatch will get support eventually. The recent Imacs as pricey as they are run high end games quite well.

Just looked up the price of new IMAC..... wow. Just wow. I could build a PC that would blow that out of the water for that price. Eeek!!!.

MAC/Apple crowd.... a world on their own.

[Eleccybubb]

Just looked up the price of new IMAC..... wow. Just wow. I could build a PC that would blow that out of the water for that price. Eeek!!!.

MAC/Apple crowd.... a world on their own.

Oh yeah for sure pricing is retarded but if someone wants to use one then it's their choice. I think the mac is shit not the user.

[Stormykitten]

I think GC is missing a point, and that is that the human psyche is pretty much built to feel rewarded if you accomplish something. The trick is not to throw something superhard in the path of the player (although that definitely pleases one crowd) but to give the player the tools to learn without getting too frustrated. The people who get frustrated without trying at all, I just feel compassion for them as they are missing out on so much in life. It's just a question of finding a good balance.

[Deleted]

Except you're not grinding for gear. There are no "ultimate weapons" or whatever to unlock--all characters have their weapon(s) and abilities right from the start. You basically only have to "grind" if you want different skins/emotes/sprays. The rest of the time you're just playing the game.

Are these things tied to special achivements which come from the "quality" of your playstyle (=skill), or is this a thing of "win x matches with character y to get skin z", where x is a double or even a triple digit number? Is there a kind of achievement tree which is mostly based on time spent in game, not on special situations? If time is the main thing, then it is grindy. You will probably not notice that if you are having fun, than it's good for you. But this does not change the fact.

Edit: Compare these 2 promotions. Hearthstone got you a unique WoW mount for winning 3 (!) games of a category (I don't remember much about that achievement, and I don't play Hearthstone anymore). This was not time-consuming, and definitely not grindy. Now take Graves, a HotS promotion pet for WoW. To get this, you have to level a character in HotS to level 40 (!). Now, this is time consuming, and grindy.

[Eleccybubb]

Are these things tied to special achivements which come from the "quality" of your playstyle (=skill), or is this a thing of "win x matches with character y to get skin z", where x is a double or even a triple digit number? Is there a kind of achievement tree which is mostly based on time spent in game, not on special situations? If time is the main thing, then it is grindy. You will probably not notice that if you are having fun, than it's good for you. But this does not change the fact.

Edit: Compare these 2 promotions. Hearthstone got you a unique WoW mount for winning 3 (!) games of a category (I don't remember much about that achievement, and I don't play Hearthstone anymore). This was not time-consuming, and definitely not grindy. Now take Graves, a HotS promotion pet for WoW. To get this, you have to level a character in HotS to level 40 (!). Now, this is time consuming, and grindy.

It's get to level 20 in Heroes with your account for the pet. Not grindy at all. Cap on a hero is 10.

[Aelric70]

Just looked up the price of new IMAC..... wow. Just wow. I could build a PC that would blow that out of the water for that price. Eeek!!!.

MAC/Apple crowd.... a world on their own.

With somewhat careful component selection, you can set one up for both Win10/OS X at that better price.

[Eleccybubb]

With somewhat careful component selection, you can set one up for both Win10/OS X at that better price.

Indeed Macs are just overpriced because of branding plain and simple. People say that whole "graphical design" bullshit but you can easily do what you can on a Mac on Windows.

[saltyphry]

Any chance you could do a break down via class on the proving ground stats ?

I did some basic research showing that Hunters were an order of magnitude easier to get through proving grounds than a Warlock (the worse).

Would love some full blown stats though.

Here are my stats (from WoWprogress) ...

Here is the list of classes in order of easiest to hardest in proving grounds, along with the score for person #23 in their class. I've also added the number of characters with a score of 7000 or higher in endless.

Hunter : 8697, 29@ over 7000 <--- easiest
Monk : 7593, 25@ over 7000
Rogue : 7298, 23@ over 7000
Paladin : 6879, 19@ over 7000
Druid : 6596 16@ over 7000
DK : 6372, 13@ over 7000
Shaman : 5799, 11@ over 7000
Priest : 5589, 6@ over 7000
Warrior : 5397, 5@ over 7000
Mage : 4895, 5@ over 7000
Warlock : 4397, 4@ over 7000 <--- hardest

If these are from wowprogress they are extremely outdated and aren't remotely close to the actual numbers.

[Aelric70]

I think GC is missing a point, and that is that the human psyche is pretty much built to feel rewarded if you accomplish something. The trick is not to throw something superhard in the path of the player (although that definitely pleases one crowd) but to give the player the tools to learn without getting too frustrated. The people who get frustrated without trying at all, I just feel compassion for them as they are missing out on so much in life. It's just a question of finding a good balance.

It may come as a shock to you, but some people actually get more joy out of relatively simple but fun activities for their R&R time than they do from "hard" games. There's always constructive activities (i.e. not time wasting games) that produce far more value for someone seeking hard challenges to overcome. Accomplishing something "hard" in WoW is worth exactly zilch.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Funny how people thinking Classic is a challenge try to take a former developer to school on the subject...in their minds, massive grind = mechanically difficult.

[Bizarre Monkey]

It may come as a shock to you, but some people actually get more joy out of relatively simple but fun activities for their R&R time than they do from "hard" games. There's always constructive activities (i.e. not time wasting games) that produce far more value for someone seeking hard challenges to overcome. Accomplishing something "hard" in WoW is worth exactly zilch.

I for example, play WoW and mostly do old raids to get gear that looks cool then x-mog it so my characters can also look cool.

I haven't touched raiding of a current sort since Wrath, lol.

- - - Updated - - -

Funny how people thinking Classic is a challenge try to take a former developer to school on the subject...in their minds, massive grind = mechanically difficult.

Thank you i was worried no one was going to be intelligent enough to put forward that grind doesn't equal difficulty, it just means you have a tolerance for repetition.

Shovel Knight is a good example of difficulty done well.

[Fang7986]

I think the biggest thing is that certain players perceive things one way but Blizzard has the actual data. Blizzard knows exactly how many players do what and it's exact numbers not guesstimates like you get from wowprogress and the like that this site presents as hard concrete numbers.

[voskopoula]

About ghostcrawler, he is just a trophy recruit at LoL in my opinion. I dont know how many questions he gets for LoL, he does get many from wow fans though. It is sad, he should be avoiding replying to these because he and blizzzard are not together years now. Unless he continues the hype for advertising reasons. Diplomatically burying wow by replying as sphinx perhaps is important in his job.

About the poll, i dont want to play overwatch now, it was fun game but thats just that for me and some more UT players. I prefer to help in UT alpha. I hoped overwatch had some better graphics than what i saw..

About kazinsky, this guy is leaving the dream, end of story.

[Valentyn]

Indeed Macs are just overpriced because of branding plain and simple. People say that whole "graphical design" bullshit but you can easily do what you can on a Mac on Windows.

Not so much graphics design, although when it comes to video editing a MacBook Pro with Final Cut Pro X is amazingly well put together, and gives a custom high end computer a run for its money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P5UWEKSUXo

Sadly I do agree about price to build quality. There was a time Apple had a decent price for their systems, and did use very good components.
When the Mac Pro line launched it was significantly more expensive to get either a custom build workstation, or a competitor's Windows one that matched it on price to performance.

The same happened with the 2013 version aka the Trashcan Mac. Issue is, they dropped user upgradeability, and haven't updated it since its launch; while the price remained the same. So it's pointless getting that now.

Until I sold my 2009 Mac Pro, I made that thing work for its keep until 2013. I flashed the firmware, changed from a 2.66Ghz Quad Core, to a 3.33Ghz 6 core, upgrade from 8-24GB of RAM, added in a Blu-Ray drive/writer, added in SSD's and a PCIeSSD, USB3.0, and changed the GPU several times.

You could simply use any current NVIDIA GPU at the time as both Apple and NVIDIA released drivers. NVIDIA actually do so one a 2-3 month cycle. So at the moment if your PSU can handle it you can slap in a GTX 980 or a Titan if you want and it would be supported. Only issue being you won't see the boot screen until it's time to log in due to the GPUs not using an Apple EFI, and use a normal Bios instead.

http://i.imgur.com/T7zQoGL.jpg

Sadly since then they completely change their direction, and I honestly can't even recommend their systems to even die hard fanboys.

I would love to use FCPX again, it's just great, but I don't see myself going to a Mac anytime soon again, or bothering with a Hackintosh.

Even so, I know quite a few people that still game on their Mac, and these are older models so Metal support Legion alone is nice as even in it's extremely early stages of support they're seeing 10-20fps games in heavy areas.

Considering then how well Overwatch runs on a host of systems, I do hope Blizzard support OS X there as well. They have been supporting OS X since the 90's; and many people are disappointed they can't get the latest Blizzard game on their platform of choice.

[ejpaints]

We definitely have more crowds in this game than the casual vs hardcore players.

Casual tends to be classified as the "lol stand in fire while collecting loot in lfr" guys, while hardcore tends to be classified as the "Raid every night, grind till my eyes bleed" crowd.

Meanwhile there's this wide variety of players who enjoys a little or lot of everything in between yet gets tossed into 1 category or the other by the community as a whole. It's sad really that we treat our own community this way. Hard doesn't have to = grind. I would argue that grind doesn't = hard in the first place. Hard is something that requires skill. Most grinds in this game can be accomplished by anyone willing to put the time into doing it. That's not hard. Depending on the reward for doing so, it's not even fun in many cases.

Take proving grounds for example. I was one of those select few who did the endless waves in MoP. But I didn't even go beyond silver for WoD. As a matter of fact, I haven't even went back in since the day I unlocked the heroic dungeons at launch. Just not worth it for a few more achievement points. Now for people who go for achievements that makes little sense, but for me, it's just not a fun use of my limited play time I have these days. To each their own though. We'd be a happier community if everyone would try to remember that from time to time.

[Gaarashatan]

No, i will not be playing overwatch when it launches. because i am poor and under the poverty line. my pc isnt good enough to even install it nor do i have a ps4 or xbox one

[Frumpy Frumpy Frak]

Oh noes hipsters cannot play on their Mac *worldends*

Why would hipsters use Macs? I thought Apple products were the domain of "mainstream sheeple" these days.

If anything, hipsters would be using Linux or something.

[schwarzkopf]

If these are from wowprogress they are extremely outdated and aren't remotely close to the actual numbers.

Numbers aren't relevant ... the proportions however are.