Theorycrafting gaining popularity finally

There are many more online resources for WOW compared to SWTOR. This makes sense, people had more years to create content for WOW than they had months to create content for SWTOR. One thing that I was missing in SWTOR is a good theory crafting site, like Elitist Jerks. What's more important to invest in? crit, alacrity or surge? You can try to do some calculations yourself, try to play a bit with the numbers, but to get a real, definite answer you need data gathered by many people, you need class experts who really tested things and did the research, you need deep intelligent discussions and conclusions. You need "Elitist Jerks", or more precisely a SWTOR site similar to elitistjerks.com.

Well, finally I found one sithwarrior.com, it's not that new, but it's been gaining huge popularity lately and as a result, now contains ton of data for all classes, deep and very interesting discussions, impressive amount of theory crafting numbers and tests. Exactly what you need to be able to really dig into maximizing your class performance.

The questing experience SWTOR and WOW

MMO Champion, one of the biggest MMO resource sites, released yesterday an interview with WOW Lead Quest Designer, discussing the Cataclysm questing experience post mortem. You can find the full article here: Cataclysm Post Mortem Quest Design I found it very interesting, having played the Cataclysm since launch day and considering I really enjoyed the experience. I think the Cataclysm, mainly the old world redesign was a very big step forward for WOW at the time, making many significant improvements to the questing experience. I intentionally don't call it "leveling experience", because this implies that the goal is to progress through the levels, while I consider the goal to be enjoying the experience. If it was simply work that was needed to get to end game and not a fun experience I doubt many people would've spent 20-30-40 hours doing it. Regardless of what you think of questing, whether it's a fun game, or a chore on the way to the "real game" at max level, an MMO can never succeed without a good and enjoyable questing, simply because most of the people will never get to the endgame.

I found some of the things he said at the interview very interesting, I'll sum it up for you:

Why do we play? Gear vs content

We've cleared EV (Eternity Vault) last weekend. This weekend we went there again. We had 3 players who weren't at the first run. The time it took us to clear it went from 3:30 hours to 2:15. Pretty descent progression, which makes sense considering most of us knew the encounters and we had an extra week of gearing up. When the op was done, an interesting discussion followed. What do we want to do next? There were 2 main points of view voiced by different guild members, with most people belonging to 1 or the other. 1 is to move on to Karagga's Palace, the second is to keep running EV. Obviously we could also do both, scheduling 2 runs next week, but we do have a "main" op night and members who will have to choose one of the other if we had 2 runs.

I'll present the main arguments for both points of view as well how we ended up handling it. I believe most groups running content are finding themselves having the exact same decisions to make. These are inherent to MMO endgame and even pre endgame play and boils down to a simple question: "Why do we play?". I have a very clear personal opinion on the subject which I'll try to leave to the end of the post.