Centurion Xö

by Oozo

The full movie is up on Youtube and will be up on Warcraft movies soon. I'm curious to see what the comments will be. I suspect that there will be a number of flames, just because... well, it's me. I also suspect that there will be negative comments on the number of green cons squished in this movie. :)

As stated in the intro, I outgeared most people in the AVs that I did. I tried to compensate for that by singling out the alliance twinks and putting myself into some crazy 1vN situations. Unfortunately, the alliance twinks didn't present much of a challenge in 1v1 situations. The warrior with the Brutal 2Her used none of the tricks an experienced warrior would use (how did he get that weapon?) and the perma-twink warlock trinketed my, erm... nothing and then shadowfuried straight into my cloak of shadows. They no doubt had a macro that did trinket-->shadowfury. Which would work against the standard rogue vanilla opener cheapshot-->kidneyshot. Not so hot against against cheapshot-->cloak of shadows-->kidney shot. That's the danger of letting your macros play too much of the game for you.

Of course, the best players don't make these kinds of mistakes. Then again, you aren't going to find the best players doing 70AV. Myself included.

Now, back to the green cons. I will probably get flamed for this, but the thing is... gear > level. I have clips doing 70-79 WSG with this rogue, but decided to exclude them for consistency and length (damn that 10 minute restriction on Youtube videos.) To atone for the sins of this movie I might be persuaded to do a followup with me being the green con, if there is interest.

And again, always remember: i hope u enjoy this movie as much as i enjoyed making it! and be nice! this is my first ever pvp movie. also im a girl irl lol!!!

Gear and Centurion Xö

by Oozo


One thing I've come to realize in my return is that gear really does matter. Yes, that's my tongue you see in my cheek. I find it curious (not really) that many people, who claim to seek competition, fight so hard to keep others from getting equivalent gear. On one hand, they say BGs are boring because of all the undergeared opponents and on the other hand they say those people don't deserve gear because they are all "bads." They seem to lack the self-awareness to recognize the logical dissonance of their position.

Why should they care if the "bads" have the same gear as they do? I mean, they are bad, right? A good player with great gear beats a bad player with great gear, so why the dire concern?

In Beta, Blizzard stated that there would be PvP areas in the game with special rewards. They said that those rewards would be no better than items you could get through other aspects of the game, but that they would have special, cooler looking models. And, that is exactly how it should have been.

People who excel at PvP should be rewarded the most badass looking gear in the game for the bragging rights. They should not be given a huge gear advantage over the people that they already crush. And to those who bitch about not having enough geared opponents while at the same time arguing that those opponents should not have gear? You fail, IRL. And, that is much worse than failing in-game. Because that kind of fail stays with you no matter where you go or what you do.

I've taken some of the feedback from the Iwl short movie and applied it to the following short preview. I've moved the player health to the bottom center of the screen and removed the opponent health, since you can track their health via nameplates. I couldn't do anything to fix the buff/debuffs issue and the SCT feedback can get really obnoxious when you are doing 1v5s. ;P

So, I'll have to work on fixing that as well.

Iwl Reborn

by Oozo


With time off during the winter break, I have decided to invest some time to learn some new tricks using Sony Vegas to make movies. You can probably tell that I generally don't like the UI taking up a lot of screen space. There are a couple of reasons for that. First, I personally don't like cluttered UIs from an aesthetic viewpoint and I think they can distract from the action and movement of the clips. Second, by zooming in it makes it easier for those who only watch streams to see what is going on better.

That was the idea behind the massively flamed "Oozo Lives" experiment.

The main reason that movie failed, IMO, is that it left the viewer detached and not understanding what was happening in the movie. They couldn't see my health and they often times completely missed key events in the movie (through no fault of their own). For example, I got flamed for missing a kick on some warlock. The thing is, I didn't miss the kick. I nailed it. It just so happens that the warlock was wearing a battlegear set that gave them a chance to resist interrupts and that is exactly what happened. You could see that in my combat log, but the viewer couldn't see it because I had (naively) cropped it out.

And, of course, people will latch on to those kinds of things like a bulldog (you see the same thing in politics) to discredit and defame even when they are completely wrong. Not that they would care even if they did know that they were wrong. But, I suppose that the ever-increasing decay of our society's morality is a story for another day.

In Moozo's movie, I made a compromise by zooming in but leaving the combat log in place so people could doublecheck to see exactly how badly I was playing. But, character health and abilities used could still be hard to track. I play at a high resolution, so they are hard to see at times on a youtube stream.

Iwl's movie is meant to correct that. Check it out and feel free to give positive/negative feedback on the presentation of content.