Grendalsh

Learn2Read!

As Captain of the HMS Dawntreader, loyal ship of the Kul Tiras fleet, of which Lady Proudmoore is our royal sovereign, I look forward to our Queen blowing shit up!

Pre-ordering the book now.

LIGHT SAVE THE QUEEN!

Glad to know I'm not the only one who thinks this would be a beneficial system. Positive behavior feedback loops are a proven method.

I have like 3 pages of design notes I've been toying with. The short form is that players could up-rate other players for being good players, but only in the LFG/LFR system, and not for fellow guildmates. Each player would accumulate a total number of upvotes and opportunities for up-votes, and a percentage of the last 100 opportunities. Votes would be by role, including leader, so learning a new role (ie dps) wouldn't negatively impact a high rating in another role.

This would be tied in with a system of achievements and titles per role, so you could earn a 'Shield Wall' title for being rated as a good tank, or 'Commander' for having a high leader ratio. The titles could then be visual in-game identifiers that someone knows their role.

There are a lot of usage loopholes that would still need to be addressed.

Thanks for letting me know I need to send my Razer contact a note. Wish I coulda made BlizzCon to chat him up in person. If there's something coming out affecting the Nostromo, I need to know about it. No, really. NEED!

PC gamepads (ie Logitech G13 or Razer Nostromo) are made to be used WITH your mouse, not as a replacement. Thus they are meant for left hand use, as most lefties still use the mouse right handed. There are a few ambidextrous gamepads, but they drop the dpad for WASD control, which kinda defeats the point of a gamepad..
I hope if enough folks bug the manufacturers, they'll figure out that a tandem left/right set with swappable dpad/thumbballs would be the killer PC gaming input setup.

@Blue Jay686
The Nostromo is perhaps the single best MMO peripheral on the market. The Naga is a close second. Together, they form an unholy union of PC game control best described by the color Purple.
For more on using the Nostromo with WoW, check my YouTube channel, The 2 Ring, at http://www.youtube.com/user/grendalsh.

One of my still-favorite MMO models was in Puzzle Pirates (PP). There were no levels or gear progression, just skill and experience, and a robust player-driven crafting economy. However, content was still gated based on participation. If WoW had something like this, I would still play it.
For instance, in PP, if I took out a small boat, then I would only be attacked by brigands roughly 'at level' for my crew. In WoW terms, there were mobs from lvl 1-60 in the same zone, and only those that were within 5 levels of you would bother to attack you. None of this low-level = aggro the whole zone. So, in one 'zone', there would be several different 'levels' of crews - solo players on small ships (questers), whole flags on grand frigates (raids). But as a green scrub (lvl 5), I could go jobbing and wind up working with one of those raids on a grand frigate. Since there were no 'levels', the more warm bodies we had the better.
While this was often seen as a kiddie MMO, because of the 2d, graphics, and mechanics, it strongly encouraged playing together, not just to take down bosses for epics.

In WoW, 'level' could be redefined as 'skill and experience', and meeting certain metrics with your abilities (consistently achieve a certain dps/threat level/hpm ratio), completing quest lines, completing dungeons with only x deaths, would be the gate system, rather than just "I killed 100 murlocs, and got a new sword".

doh.. DO have normal sized hands..

The dpad is not that far to reach. I don't have a normal sized hand, and the dpad fits snugly under my thumb while I can still reach all the keys. Many of my guildmates are ladies with smaller hands, and after removing the wrist rest (it pulls straight up), they also have no problems using the dpad for movement while hitting all the keys. Considering Matt said he bound his most used abilities to the bottom row keys, which I actually find slightly uncomfortable to curl my fingers back to hit.. i'm curious if perhaps his unit has the wrist rest set for large hands..

The Razer version does NOT save profiles to onboard memory like the n52te did.
This feature unfortunately actually gimped the performance of the n52te. Macros were limited to the onboard storage, and all macros had to be interpreted and run by the onboard chipset.
The old n52 and now the new Razer model use a software interpreter, allowing the unlimited length macros and instant profile swaps, as well as easier updates to the keybinding system. Razer enabled using modified keys like shift-1 as a single key bind, something the n52 could do, but was never enabled for the n52te.