Time Expectations in WoW Classic?

With the news today of EA reducing by 75% the time it will take in Star Wars Battlefront 2 to unlock a hero character, can we expect to see modern gamers head into WoW Classic and start complaining?

(c)2017 Electonic Arts

Lets just recap though, World of Warcraft, vanilla, people played a character to level 60 in about 4 days played, that's about 96 hours played.

EA's plight, and collapse into pandering, happened with a played time of around 40, that's less than half... Reducing it by 75% that now makes a hero in SW:BF2 in 10 hours.

10 hours for Vanilla WoW was not enough, and this is where my first concerns with WoW Classic come about, firstly, will Blizzard be forced to pander down to newer gamers whom most certainly want action & reaction, risk and reward.  They certainly don't deal in patience nor RNG.

My second concern comes that this is a big issue, and perhaps Blizzard will side step it, by simple nerfing the amount of time to level, or perhaps increasing the rate of XP gain, as arguably since Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Litch King, the business model for WOW has been to push players to level cap as fast as possible and explore repetitive tasks in that area.

The way of thinking Blizzard have entertained (no pun intended) since I stopped playing was daily's, and find a group, find a raid, tokens, faster reward for input, but with exponential damage, health and other stats making that power-wonder factor... Fast rewards, I said during my appearance on "Shut Up We're Talking" that this was where things would be going.

Rinse and repeat.  That is all I've seen delivered, it's certainly all I've heard explained.  Should I name drop "Garrisons"?

All this said however, we must remember, that there will be a huge influx of tourists to WoW Classic, toe dabblers, so what could the population of regulars; the hardcore; who settle there expect?  These are the things we don't know and as you can tell by this post, we can only speculate about.

Software Engineering : Arduino Uno - Flashing Clock

What is this flashing clock?  Well, it's just an arduino uno, with three LED's, one each for the seconds, minutes and hours.  They don't show the time, they just flash as each period they're counting passes.

So, we're going to count the seconds and flash just the second LED.  Then each 60th flash, we reset the seconds counter, increment the minute counter and have the minute LED flash.  Ditto for the hour counter each 60th minute.

I've got the LED's VCC legs connected to digital pins 8, 9 and 10, with the other connected to the three grounds.  When I come to make this an actual board I can have a single ground pin being used up, rather then using all three on the board.

An important part of the code to focus on is how to turn on each light in turn...

If you want to turn on the second, the minute and the hour LED all at the same time, you could have some horrid "if" statement controlling them, but much more clean looking is this:

// Turn lights on

switch(CycleCount)

{

    case 2:  digitalWrite(HourPin, HIGH);

    case 1:  digitalWrite(MinutePin, HIGH);

    case 0:  digitalWrite(SecondPin, HIGH);

                break;

}

So, the count is reset to zero each cycle it is incremented if we add to the minutes, and incremented if we add to the hours.

The switch statement then drops through, notice that there are no "breaks" on the 2 and 1 (hours & minutes) cases.  So, if we have incremented the hour, we have a count of two and so we set the HourPin High, drop through to the MinutePin High and finally the Second Pin High before we break.

Likewise, if we only set the minutes this cycle, then the count will be one, so the switch statement will drop down to the Minute Pin high, skipping the Hour pin totally.

The effect of this is to seemingly instantly turn on all the LED's each cycle as they are needed together, there is no humanly noticeable staggering of the lights coming on, as one might get with an if statement, or once might get if one were to set the LED as we increment the values.  Doing Lights on when we increment actually clearly shows the LED's going on and off in a staggered pattern.

Our task after turning all of them on is to just wait a short time (100 milliseconds) and then turn them all off with another switch statement.  And with them all off again simply wait for the remainder of the second (i.e. 900 ms).

Keep this in mind as you read the following code:

// The pins

int SecondPin = 8;

int MinutePin = 9;

int HourPin = 10;

// The counts

int CycleCount = 0;

int SecondCount = 0;

int MinuteCount = 0;

int HourCount = 0;

void setup() 

{ 

  // Setup the pins

  pinMode (SecondPin, OUTPUT);

  pinMode (MinutePin, OUTPUT);

  pinMode (HourPin, OUTPUT);

}

void loop() 

{

  // Increment the counts

  CycleCount = 0;

  SecondCount = SecondCount + 1;

  if ( SecondCount > 59 )

  {

      SecondCount = 0;

      ++MinuteCount;

      ++CycleCount;

      if ( MinuteCount > 59 )

      {

        ++CycleCount;

        MinuteCount = 0;

        ++HourCount;

        if ( HourCount > 23 )

        {

          HourCount = 0;

        }

      }

  }

  // Turn lights on

  switch(CycleCount)

  {

    case 2:

      digitalWrite(HourPin, HIGH);

    case 1:

      digitalWrite(MinutePin, HIGH);

    case 0:

      digitalWrite(SecondPin, HIGH);

      break;

  }   

  // Light are on for 1/10 of a second

  delay(100);

  // Tuen lights off

  switch(CycleCount)

  {

    case 2:

      digitalWrite(HourPin, LOW);

    case 1:

      digitalWrite(MinutePin, LOW);

    case 0:

      digitalWrite(SecondPin, LOW);

      break;

  }   

  // Lights all off for 9/10 of a second

  delay (900);

}

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