Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Less QQ, Moar BRAAAAAAAAIIIIIINSSSSS

I'm going to say this very seriously. Lighten up, all of you who complained about zombies and infections and quest killing. It was one weekend out of your lives. It's over now, and I for one am sad. There is nothing to break up the monotony like an army of the living dead coming to eat your flesh and make you one of them.

Now, I understand the frustration of finding your auctioneers, flight masters or quest givers dead. Perhaps I understand it all too well, as on my server, a PvP server, that can happen at any time. And perhaps that makes me more tolerant of being ganged up on, whether it's my own faction or not, and being turned into a zombie.

I do not understand the people who became upset about the zombie event for one simple reason: if it bothered you so much, you could have shut off the game. You could have read a book, you could have played a different game, you could have taken a nap, gone to the movies, began thinking about NaNoWriMo or NaBloPoMo, you could have written a song, volunteered at a hospital, watched some TV, daydreamed, called your Mom or Dad, gone out with friends, gone camping, done theorycrafting, taken up kickboxing, played with your children...the list is endless. If something you want to do becomes something you do not want to deal with, the answer is not to complain about it, especially when it is temporary.

Try enjoying it, instead of figuring out every way it is an inconvenience to you, next time. And if you still can't, you're wasting more time complaining when you could be doing something else.

11 comments:

Scarele said...

I completely agree. It was one weekend of insanity and even though the execution was deemed by the general population as "a total epic failure", I thought it was quite fun.

There is nothing like doing dailies and seeing all your murlocs turned into zombies (now that's fear on a whole different but sad level). Or getting that five boxing shaman team a good smack with a disease. I don't know what was more fun, blowing up on him or watching him wreak havoc with five characters.

Belle said...

Oh I love you. I enjoyed the event for the most part! So much yummy RP!

Ratshag said...

It were kinda like a bad snowstorm - shut a lotta things down fer a couple days, then moved on. I were occasionally annoyed, but once it were clear what it were what it were accelerating so fast what it weren't gonna last 'til the 13th, I just did me best to avoid cities and major towns and got on with me tasks.

Might be good to do this stuff more often - let folks get used to the idea of zombie plague / yeti invasion / falling ooblek or whatevers being a nuisance fer a couple days now and then.

Unknown said...

Agree to disagree, I suppose. Personally I think forced PvP on a PvE server is something worth complaining about.

Not something worth writing hate mail about, mind you, but a blog post here and there certainly doesn't seem out of line.

Hana said...

I'm on a PvE server and I loved this event. I did have a bit of a problem finding an auctioneer and I had to run/hide from a crowd of zombies once, but I found it thrilling. I liked the last Scourge invasion, but this racheted the danger up a notch.

I would not have wanted things to have gone on to the point it was on Sunday for the whole time we're waiting for the Lich King, but for one weekend it was fine.

Keeva said...

It was a fun and crazy event, but I think they should have added some protection for particular key NPCs, and/or the ability to attack player zombies in Shatt, rather than being helpless to stop them as they killed off all the quest NPCs. That was very frustrating. Some people had genuine fun with it, but a large number of people just used it to grief others, and that was the problem.

It was fun until you really needed to get something done. I was trying to prepare for a KJ raid, so it was pretty annoying to have bankers turn into zombies and infect me, which meant having to run back and try again to get something out of the bank. I couldn't go to another bank, because all of the cities had the same problem.

I don't think you can really offer an "opt out" option for a plague - but it was very tiresome for people who did want to just play the normal game and get things done. I log on after work and think, "ok, I have X amount of time before raid, I'll go do my cooking quest" but I have to stand and wait for the NPC to respawn because griefers are killing him over and over for lolz. This is precisely why I left my PvP server - because I was tired of people hindering me for laughs when I just wanted to get things done in a certain time frame.

Having said that, for the most part I just found a remote area of the world to fish in and avoided major hubs. It was fun and entertaining, but I'm glad it was only for a short time.

Aertimus said...

I thought it was AMAZING. When my husband e-mailed me at work to tell me it was over I was very sad. I was looking forward to going home and eating the brains of NPC in small, remote towns with low PC populations.

The best moment for me was in Stormwind, hiding by where the Griffen Master should have been and having a handful of PCs run up to me yelling "Thank God! More survivors!"

I actually liked the fact that it kept getting worse and worse, and the NPC healers started to disappear. It was impending doom for the first time ever. Do keep in mind my perspective is coming from a PvP server

I hope that the blue quite "Zombie Invasion of '08" means we will see this event again in the future.

krizzlybear said...

It's one thing to take the zombie time off to think about NaNoWriMo. But when it comes down to me actually LOVING the zombie event, I didn't have any time to prepare for NaNo! Now I'm screwed~! T.T

Keeva said...

Although it irritated me at times, I think that it ended too abruptly. I heard rumours of items that would help you to fend off the disease for short periods - I would have happily farmed up a few of these items to be able to do my pre-raid banking.

Someone else suggested that killing zombies (defending cities) should have given a small amount of Argent Dawn rep. That would have got more people involved, although it would probably be easy to abuse.

If I had been a priest or paladin I think I would have had more fun, because I could have taken a more active role in defending - but as it was, I couldn't do anything to help defend Shattrath (or myself) so it felt a bit like being forced to endure it if I wasn't in the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" kinda mood.

Perhaps they should have had the option to farm up some item that you could throw at the zombies to injure/kill them. Something so that it didn't feel so one-sided. I wanted to be able to do more to help, but had no means to do so - especially in Shatt where you couldn't even kill player zombies. Standing and watching them kill all the NPCs and being helpless to stop it was disappointing.

I'd love them to do the event again, but give some more options for people to help defend - even if ultimately Blizzard forces it to become a losing battle, because that's how they want the story to go.

Hagu said...

I disagree; anyone who doesn't understand our frustration hasn't looked at a calendar. Once 3.0.2 got somewhat usable till the 13th was about three weeks. Bliz can make the PvE game unusuable any time they want, I have 3 weeks - *ever* - to finish getting alts up and find people who want to run ZA/SSC/Kara. ( How many guildies are going to be running Kara on the 14th??? ) Having a surprise ( this would have been so much less annoying if the unavailability had been announced well in advance. ) take away a third of that time was very, very frustrating. A third. A third!!!

And Blizzard is a company and we are customers. They can choose to have more of these events or not. Surely their shareholders would want them to know how costly (both sub $ and ill-will) this is for them, especially in PvE-land????

BTW, while the events and complaints are temporary, it seems like the need for pro-zombie blog posts is equally ephemeral. Bored people with sunwell geared alts, PvPers who like to grief normal a/k/a PvE servers and most bloggers liked it. Most or certainly a significant majority of customers did not. Blizzard can make a business decision about how many more such events they want to implement.

Sir Sannhet said...

I embraced it and invaded Chillwind, and subsequently Lights Hope Chapel, with my army of the Living Dead. I got a lot of very angry tells, but to be honest....I've always wanted to be on Arthas' team anyways >.>.