Ahead of the Curve: Argus the Unmaker!

Yes, my screenshot skills are very rusty. This is better than the shots where I have my back to the camera.

My guild downed Heroic Argus the Unmaker this weekend!  We spent an hour trying to get our fifth kill on Aggramar, so it wasn't looking very promising.  However, our first attempt was a heart-breaking 0% wipe, so we knew it was in our grasp.

The next couple of pulls were odd wipes, including one where Argus decided to walk away from the tanks, turn around, and Cone of Death them. Finally we got a good pull where everything went well, went into the last phase, got Titanforging early, and everyone stayed alive longer than normal.

Argus is an interesting fight in that the last phase completely resets the board. Everyone who's dead comes back to life with the rest of the group and you start again cleanly. In some ways it's kind of nice, because once you've mastered the first phases, you don't have to do them perfectly while learning the last phase. A death or two here or there is perfectly survivable, and you can save battle resses for the last phase.

Now we just have to fix our issues with Aggramar. I'm not sure what's going on. I think we made some small changes which is making the fight more fragile for us.

Still, that's Legion pretty much done and dusted for us. I doubt we will try Mythic, just due to avoiding the roster hassle.

Paystyles

Imagine that there are two MMO players: Sally and Lucy. Both of them regularly play the same four MMOs: Game A, B, C, and D. However, they don't play each game equally, but for different amounts of time. Sally and Lucy spend 50% of their time in A, 25% in B, 15% in C, and 10% in D.

Both players have the same entertainment budget of $60 per month.  However, how each spends that budget is different.  Sally prefers to spend $15 on each game. Lucy, on the other hand, spends all $60 on game A, and $0 in the other three games.

Game	Time Spent	Sally	Lucy
A	50%	$15	$60
B	25%	$15	$0
C	15%	$15	$0
D	10%	$15	$0

My contention is that Lucy is a more accurate model of how most gamers want to spend their money. She doesn't mind spending a significant amount of money on her hobby. However, there is a threshold which a game has to surpass to be considered worth spending money, and all the money goes to those games which surpass the threshold (usually only one game). Even though Lucy spends 50% of her time in other games, they don't get any money at all.

Of course, if next month Lucy spends most of her time in game B, she will spend the $60 in game B.

There is a minority of gamers who are like Sally, though. Who prefer subscriptions and spreading the spending around.

I think the reason lockboxes are so popular is that they more closely match how Lucy wants to pay for her games. I think the game companies would prefer Sally and subscriptions. Witness how many games attempt to start with subscriptions but have to convert to F2P and lockboxes. The game companies are stuck with a audience of Lucys.

The common refrain in the community lately is that lockboxes are evil and predatory. The vocal community, though, tends to be Sallys. Perhaps lockboxes are empowering for Lucy instead, allowing her to spend her money exactly as she would prefer, even if Sally thinks that way is illogical and foolish.

Updates

I haven't posted in a while, so here's an update on how things are going.

Rift Prime

There's a fair amount of hype and nostalgia going around for Rift Prime. I decided to give it a whirl and downloaded the Glyph launcher again.

Unfortunately Trion's website won't let me add my credit card as a payment method for some reason. It just stalls with no errors or response. So that's the end of that plan.

World of Warcraft

My guild has cleaned up our act on Coven, even one-shotting it a week ago. Unfortunately, this has also been accompanied by serious regression on Aggrammar in the last two weeks. We've been wiping much more than we did on our first two kills, making it very hard to actually get attempts in on Argus.

We did finally get a chance to make three or four serious attempts on Argus last raid. We even had a 1% wipe.  We just have to clean up that last phase and reliably get the Titanforging buff early.  Hopefully Coven and Aggrammar will go well next week, and give us enough time to down Argus.

I also got the Lightbringer title from Argus (the zone) last week. For some reason, I could not get the hang of the goblin glider, as this was the first time I've really used it. Normally I just bubble when I need to fall a long distance. I fell off the edges of Argus and died numerous times while trying to get the hidden treasures. I finally got them all, and got a nice title for my paladin.