In the MMO world where it seems that speed (and loot) is king, my fondest memories of dungeons/instances are those that simply feel alive.
I've made my feelings pretty clear on how game developers simply don't make instances on the size and scale of a Blackrock Depths (Classic WoW) or Garth Agarwen (LOTRO) anymore. Instances are now designed as bite-sized chunks for a quick dopamine rush, where the fun is less an experience of an epic place but more of a test of skill in your speed at completing the instance.
I was thinking about this last night when I responded to Kurn's blog post from Sunday, in which she asked what was people's favorite Classic WoW instance. While I ultimately chose Deadmines as my favorite because of its status as a gateway drug (and the conclusion of the main Defias story throughout the Stormwind territory), I have to give plenty of props to the "big guns" of Classic WoW instances: Stratholme, Blackrock Depths, and Blackrock Spire.
By comparison, Scholomance is a short instance.
Compared to modern instance design, those Classic WoW instances --well, most of them save for Dire Maul and Scarlet Monastery-- are gigantic places that were meant to be living, breathing locales. The devs took their cue from RPGs and the big dungeons found in tabletop games, such as Expedition to the Barrier Peaks or The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, and created expansive places to explore. Yes, you had to make multiple forays into a lot of the instances to complete quests --not just for loot-- and more than one of them were informally gated by level difficulty, such as Uldaman, where if you did the early portion at-level you'd find yourself vastly underpowered at the end of the instance.
Over time, however, these strengths of the older instances grew to be looked at as less than a key feature and more of a bug, and were consequently smoothed out of dungeon design. I suppose you could say that as MMO design focus changed from the leveling journey to endgame raiding, instances grew to be looked at as a stepping stone for the player. With the introduction of timed challenges (Retail WoW's Mythic Plus) and perpetually increasing difficulty modes, instance design is now far more about the mathematical and skill-based exercise of speed and precision rather than the integration into a game world. At that point, instances have grown to be looked at as an endgame in itself, complete with a story-mode (with or without AI-assisted NPCs) all the way to a perpetually increasing challenge mode (Mythic+).
***
For all the speculation of a Classic Plus to Vanilla Classic WoW, and for the record I am still highly skeptical that a true Classic Plus is coming*, one of the hallmarks of anything that would classify as Classic Plus would have to be a return to grand, sprawling instances. If Blizzard were to put all of the Classic Plus content after the Naxxramas raid, then the vertical progression would kill off any real sense of a Classic Plus. It would just be an alternative to the official WoW timeline but keeping all of the problems contained therein.
Of course, I am in a pretty small minority here, because the popularity of the modern instance design speaks volumes. When most people talk about Classic Plus, they speak of "NOT the official timeline" rather than "more stuff for the leveling journey" in Vanilla. It's a reaction to how things are now and deciding that taking another fork in the road is a better idea.
From the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Relics". (via Tenor).
Answering the question "What does Classic Plus mean" will go a long way toward understanding what Classic Plus we might get, and knowing the Blizzard of today I'm not sure I trust them to answer it in a way I'd like.
*I believe that it's equally likely that Blizzard would announce the ability for people to purchase their own private server software so they can host "official" Vanilla WoW versions. Blizz might even allow those purchasers the ability to manipulate some things, such as difficulty levels and buffs/debuffs to players and mobs to make the experience easier or harder. If there's one way to kill off the private server market, it's that.
I sometimes wonder what my midlife crisis would look like.
Yes, before you point out that I'm north of 50 so I technically should have had my midlife crisis a decade or more ago, I'm aware of that. But I also know I didn't really have a midlife crisis either, so...
Would it be a fast car, like this Mercedes I discovered at my son's apartment parking lot when we picked him and his partner up for Gen Con?
It was SO out of place compared to all of the rest of the cars in the parking lot. Fun Fact: I looked up the price online and it costs close to what our current house cost back in 2002.
Nah. If I had my choice of car, it'd likely be something from the mid-90s to the mid-2000s, although I'd not say no to a mid-80s Ford Mustang or Pontiac Firebird.
These were made locally until mid-1987.
The thing is, that era of cars are in high demand from people my age (or a little older), so even the thought of buying one to try to fix it up is kind of cost prohibitive.
The pricing bubble has also afflicted another hobby of mine, audio, because I'd like to have picked up an older 1970s era receiver, but again a ton of people my age have gone into that and driven up the prices.
Such as this Pioneer SX-780, made in 1980 (the manufacturing run was 1978-1980). From Oleg's Vintage Audio.
Then again, my trusty old NAD T751 receiver could stand a cleaning and repair job, so maybe it's for the best to stick with the NAD and my Pioneer VSX-2000 that is still chugging away in the basement.
Or I could go the route of a friend of mine and start up an AD&D campaign of my own...
Such as module S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. From eBay.
But I'm happy playing in his campaign at the moment. No sense in stealing his thunder.
Maybe I could just take that period of my life when I actually did progression raiding in Vanilla Classic and say THAT is my midlife crisis, and then we'll call it a day. That's probably the easiest answer.
Oh, not in real life. IRL, I'm a softie who enjoys romance. Not necessarily Romance novels, mind you,* but I meant the concept itself. Yes, yes, I know, somebody alert my wife.**
I also don't mind having romance in video games, because for me that's a personal choice. If you want to romance an NPC, go ahead. If you don't, you don't.
What I meant was romance in pencil-and-paper RPGs, although to a lesser extent romance between two players in an MMO as well.***
This was sparked by a video that popped up the other day concerning D&D and romance:
Yes, I follow Ginny Di's YouTube videos. No, I didn't get into her videos from Critical Role, but rather I stumbled on her channel when she progressed to other RPG topics. The algorithm looked at my viewing history and thought "You know, there's this woman who dyes her hair that you might find insightful..." and here I am. She does have some great and insightful comments on a variety of RPG topics, and between her, Pointy Hat, Stephanie Plays Games, Kelsey Dionne, Bob World Builder, and several other 20s and 30s content creators, I feel that our TTRPG hobby is in good hands for the future.****
***
I guess the reason why I watched Ginny's video was due to my own "experience" with romance in a D&D game.
If you've been around this blog for a while, you might recall I was part of a long-running D&D 3.0 campaign. As in a 20+ year old campaign. When our DM got together with us to hash out what the campaign would be about, there were a few ground rules we decided upon: low to mid level magic, use the Greek and Egyptian Pantheons for the campaign and world building, some roleplaying in character but not pure amateur thespian hour, and absolutely no romance. That last one was a hard no from us players, as we were all dating and/or married*****, and we really just wanted to focus on a campaign with no romantic escapades involved. We've had romantic subplots in our campaign back in college, and when it's involving people who are actually dating IRL who then break up, it gets really ugly really fast. Therefore, just keeping things platonic would make it easier for everybody.
We players figured that with the ground rules set, we were ready to play.
Things worked out okay for a while, and outside of us using IM to play (this was 2001-2 after all) things seemed to progress decently well. After a couple of years, however, our DM began trying to slip in romantic subplots. And the occasional Conan-esque nudity into the game. We all knew our DM, who was a bit of a horndog back in college, so we just figured it was him being him and we didn't take the rather obvious bait.
We kind of kept things at bay until a new player joined the group for a few years. He was a coworker of the DM, and he wanted to play a Bard.
You can see where this is going, right?
Yeah, they both went there. The Bard started wanting to screw every woman he met, and this began to wear on us. This isn't what we wanted, and we definitely didn't ask for it, and it kept diverting us from the actual campaign. Then the DM started having NPCs hit on my character, and I began having to be more forceful in my nipping of those subplots in the bud.
The rest of us began talking among ourselves about whether we need to take a stand with the DM, and then the problem solved itself: the new player had to stop playing, and just like that the division mostly evaporated.
Mostly.
The DM still would try to sneak in some opportunities for romance here and there, but we ignored them and kept the game focused on the campaign. In the last few months of our campaign before it ended, however, the DM began to ratchet up the opportunities and the PG-13 nature of those "encounters". I won't lie and say otherwise, but after 20 years we players had had enough. There were several other things that contributed to our decision to want to end the campaign, but one of the top complaints on our list was that the DM kept pushing the romance and sexual angles on us.
I think it needs to be said that we're all adults, and we can handle adult themes.****** However, people have to buy into the concept of romance and shenanigans or you're risking a lot by trying to push it on people when they don't want it. I personally would have to be in the right frame of mind to accommodate an RPG campaign with romance, and I'll also freely admit that I am not an actor in that I would have issues separating the character(s) from the player(s). I probably could do it if I were in, say, a play or musical or something, but in a TTRPG? That'd be harder.
***
Okay, that's tabletop RPGs, but MMOs?
Hoo boy. That's an entirely different kettle of fish.
If Asmongold's your dad, Nixxiom,
I'm a Jelly Doughnut.
Outside of occasionally being hit on by some oversexed player, I've never been in a romantic situation with another MMO player before. And you can't not realize that there's another player on the other end, which separates it from NPC romances, such as the companion romances in SWTOR. MMO RP romances are going to be with another character, and the specter of ERP (and Goldshire's Lion's Pride Inn) hovers over everything.
There's this too. And yes, I've kept this from an old Meme Monday just because.
Some people can make it work, but I'm almost completely certain that I can't.
But if you (not me, for certain) want more detail about doing Romance RP in MMOs (yes, it's WoW but applicable in all of them), there's this:
I guess knowing my limitations is a good thing, and that I'm not planning on putting myself into a situation where they would get tested. If you can handle it, more power to you. I think I'll just go do my own thing instead and leave the romance in MMOs to y'all.
Oh, and because I couldn't resist, here:
Now you'll never hear that old Sonny
and Cher song the same way.
*Although I have made some attempts to check out the genre, because the only way to know if you'll like it is to try it.
**Ironically enough, I think that between the two of us I'm the romantic one. That doesn't mean that I'm not as clueless as the next guy in trying to figure out if someone is hitting on me; actually my son --nicknamed "Mr. Oblivious" or "Captain Oblivious" due to his cluelessness about such things-- is a chip off the old block.
***Spouses and significant others who are playing the other toon you're romancing kind of get a pass on this, since you're obviously thinking of the other person who you're already romantically involved with.
****They don't need me to tell them that, but consider it just an observation that I'm happy the next generation has taken the reins from us older folks and run with it, in the same way that I'm proud my kids have engaged with the hobby over the years. For all of the "get offa my lawn!" sort of behavior from the old guard (who are as old or older than me), I just wanted to get it out there that I'm happy they're showing their love for the hobby and contributing to its overall success. And maybe this year I'll get a chance to run into one of them at Gen Con.
It also goes without saying that some of the Old Guard have opened their arms to the new generation of content creators. People like Matt Colville, Professor DM, and Baron de Ropp could have circled their collective wagons and been assholes toward the new blood, but they haven't. And our hobby is all the better for it.
*****The DM was married to one of the players, in fact.
******If you're NOT an adult, it goes without saying that parental guidance is strongly suggested. My oldest once attended an RPG game session in high school with some acquaintances, and ALL of the guys there tried to hit on her character (and by extension, her). She got really creeped out, and that was the end of THAT.
If the previously concluded election didn't prove we lived in interesting times*, I opened my email this morning to discover this:
I use Outlook for my email. So what?
Yes, the New York Times is covering WoW's 20th anniversary.
For independent confirmation that yes, the NYT is doing this, here's the cover of Sunday's Arts and Leisure section:
Any excuse to visit a bookstore...
You can see Vin Diesel on the cover, South Park, a very stylized Tauren who's more Minotaur than Tauren, a generic-looking Orc (sorry, NOT Thrall), and a Red Flight dragon. I get the feeling the artist is busy shouting "FOR THE HORDE!" somewhere...
But between this acknowledgement of WoW's continued existence, we also have had celebrations of the Granddaddy of RPGs, Dungeons and Dragons, and it's 50th anniversary. You know that D&D is finally big enough when it gets the Time Magazine special issue treatment:
I got it at Target --of all places-- about a month or two ago.
I'm just not ready for this pop culture acknowledgement of our geeky pastimes.
Poltergeist is kind of appropriate for all of this. From tenor.com.
I still remember the Satanic Panic, and I know that there are still a significant number of people who still believe that all things RPG are Satanic (my own family included). People who think that those times are gone have never interacted with the Satanic Panic crowd; if given half a chance, they will attempt to assert their own morality on everybody else because they simply can't understand the concept of "mind your own business". Oh, they understand it, but only when it applies to them, not other people. They feel like they're doing the "proper thing" by attempting to impose their morality on others, because they want to share in the path to Heaven with everybody; the concept that religion and faith are a personal matter for other people as well as themselves just doesn't compute.
This. From Medium.com.
Here's to another anniversary in 10 years!
*As the saying "May you live in interesting times" implies.
D&D is 50 years old this year, and because of that anniversary it has now been given a status like that of other pop cultural icons: on the cover of US stamps.
The official US Postal Service announcement included stamp series honoring legendary basketball coach John Wooden, photographer Ansel Adams, and the classic summertime pastime of carnivals in Carnival Nights.
Before you ask, no, I'm not going up there on Thursday just to get the stamps; I can get them at our local post office without much of a big deal. (We're going on Sunday, however!)
What does amuse me is just how much the anti-D&D crowd is likely to explode when they discover that the Post Office is peddling SATANIC MATERIALS!!! I'd better prepare myself in the event my mom has a coronary when she goes to the post office.
When I went away to college, I was a kid who listened to Rock and Metal, but also enjoyed Classical music. I had a thing for Canadian power rock trios, as my collection of Rush and Triumph cassettes proved, but I also would listen to the Classical LPs that my parents had in the basement*.
As far as I know, they're still down there. This pic is from Etsy, but this was the first album in the set.
I knew that Alternative --aka Modern Rock-- was out there, as was New Wave, but when I was in high school I wasn't really exposed to it at all. The legendary WOXY, 97.7 FM, was up in Oxford, Ohio, and while we could (barely) pick it up back home, it was more well known locally as the station used in the movie Rain Man.
The tagline was created for the movie, and
the station loved it so much they adopted it.
I knew of punk, and what I heard I liked, but it never got on the radio back home. Top 40 dominated the airwaves, and big corporate radio companies (Jaycor, a predecessor to IHeartRadio, began in the late 80s in Cincinnati) were just starting to make inroads on homogenizing what you could hear over the air, so I expected that going away to college would expose me to far more of what I liked than what I could hear locally.
But of all the things I expected to be exposed to, this certainly wasn't on the menu:
My new roommate was from Chicago, and I quickly learned a few things when we moved in together: we both shared a love of D&D and Doctor Who**, he certainly loved his Chicago Cubs and Chicago Bears, no city in the US was as good as Chicago, and that he was fine with putting up posters that would have given my parents a heart attack.
We both contributed to the decor in our dorm room. My posters were more along these lines:
Mine was a 5 foot version of this, which I still have stored away in the basement. (From Ebay.)
But these were more of my roommate's taste:
I had no idea who Samantha Fox was until he put this 5 foot tall poster up on the back of our door. This caused... drama... when my parents picked me up for Thanksgiving. (From Worthpoint.)
Oh, and he had eclectic taste in music.
He had an actual CD player --a portable model, and the first one I'd ever seen-- and about a dozen CDs. Sure, I'd seen a few CDs at stores, but compared to albums and cassettes there were very few of them. But I was surprised at what he had on his collection. Amy Grant? Stryper? He didn't seem like the sort for Christian music. He also had Genesis' Invisible Touch, a greatest hits compilation of The Young Rascals, and...
It might have been Fresh Aire III, but This was a better quality photo. From Discogs.
Fresh Aire? What the hell is this? And...
From Discogs.
"Windham Hill?" I asked.
"Yeah, it's pretty nice music. I'll put it on later."
Given his other geeky pastimes, I was willing to give it a try. And I surprised myself by actually liking both CDs, although I'll freely admit the sound quality of the CDs alone probably had an impact. By October, I'd heard enough to know two things: I actually liked this "New Age" type of music, and I wanted a CD player for Christmas. Given that I didn't have a receiver but I did have a boom box with AUX inputs, that's saying something.
***
Fast forward to today, and the past couple of months I've been spending time re-ripping my old CDs at a better bit rate than before***, so I've reacquainted myself with my old Windham Hill and Mannheim Steamroller CDs. I mean, I still play them from time to time, but one thing about re-ripping means I'm hearing everything again, listening critically, to make sure that the CD was ripped properly.****
Because of this exercise, I've been struck by how greatly my roommate from 37 years ago influenced my musical tastes of today.
And now, I've got online friends to thank for influencing my musical tastes again.
Found this at a bookstore. This one's for you, Bhagpuss.
*My dad did NOT listen to Classical music; my mom got the Funk and Wagnalls collection --one week at a time as they were released-- from our local discount store down the street.
**When he was moving his stuff into our dorm, I noticed this magazine on the top of one of his boxes:
Took me a while to find this out of the Parallel Context archive, but here it is.
I immediately recognized it as TSR's Dragon magazine, so I pretended I didn't see anything so as not to attract my parents' attention, but if I had any doubt that I had found another one of my people, this dispelled it. He also had a signed black and white photo of Tom "The Fourth Doctor" Baker on his desk, next to the prom photos with his (then) girlfriend. So yeah, a nerd through and through.
***Yes, it's still MP3s, because I don't have that much in terms of disk space for storage to handle FLAC. Besides, being in my mid-50s means that my ears aren't as good as they once were, but they're good enough to hear the difference in some pieces of music in a 192-bitrate versus a 320-bitrate MP3. You just have to know where to listen --and have the right sort of music-- to make it noticeable. Sure, FLAC or WAV files are better than MP3s, but MP3s are pretty universal, so I don't have to worry about not having a format that won't play (I'm looking at you, Samsung Music).
****Alas, after 35+ years, a handful of my CDs no longer play. It's not because they're scratched, but it looks like it's a failure of the metallic material comprising the CDs. Among those CDs were The Eagles' Hotel California, The Cult's Sonic Temple, a Greatest Hits compilation from Golden Earring, and Alice in Chains' Dirt.
Something that frequently gets overlooked is that --relatively speaking-- non-mobile video games are still something that not a lot of people play.
Sure, video games may make more money than movies and music do combined*, but when you look at sales of the games themselves, you realize that a lot of money globally comes from not that many people.
I was curious about how many copies of Madden 2024 were sold, and I discovered that it was around 5 million or so. To put that in perspective, EA sold Madden 2024 to roughly the entire population of Alabama. That may seem like a lot, but when you remember the population of the US --the prime target of Madden, given it's American Football-- is 333 million, you realize that's kind of a drop in the bucket. And when you realize that the average viewership of CBS' comedy Young Sheldon is 8 million viewers, you get a better comparison between passive viewing and active playing.
MMOs are even more of a niche market, given that the largest MMO out there, World of Warcraft, pulls in somewhere between 4 to 8 million or so subscribers** globally. Yes, only at best 0.1% of the world's population play WoW.
So, when people talk about how WoW was a phenomenon, it's all relative. More than twice as many people bought the Spice Girls' Spice than the best numbers World of Warcraft posted in the last 8 years.
And we don't want to compare WoW to the number of people who have cable and/or satellite television subscriptions, do we?
***
So why bring this up?
I was reminded of this because I frequently interact with people at work and at other places who aren't gamers of any sort, and they have --at best-- only the vaguest idea about what might be going on in the gaming industry. They may know that game companies are making a ton of money because it improves their retirement accounts, but beyond that they are left in the dark.
When people find out I'm a gamer, I usually get a "Oh, like Madden?" question directed my way.***
If I respond with an "Actually, I play WoW," I get "those" looks.
The "you're a weirdo" looks. The ones that I used to get when people found out I play Dungeons and Dragons.**** I have no idea what it'd be like if I said League of Legends or Fortnite --since I play neither of those-- but I'd imagine there'd be similar reactions.
The irony is that people in my WoW friend group aren't all aware of the industry beyond WoW itself. When I mentioned Baldur's Gate 3, only one person in the chat said "Yeah, I play that too!" There were a couple "can't afford that right now" and a few "Huh? What game is that?" reactions.
Usually right about now someone will point out those profit numbers and how many people tend to watch the League championships. That's nice and all, but League still has a ways to go to match the viewership of the 2023 Major League Baseball World Series, and that World Series was the least watched Series in television history.
By comparison, 300 million people worldwide watched Joe Frazier beat Muhammad Ali in 1971. From Sports Illustrated.
It's kind of strange how boxing doesn't have the cultural cachet that it used to have, but I honestly believe that the pursuit of profit and moving boxing from something you could see on television to a strictly pay-per-view environment hurt the long term health of the sport. If you don't have eyeballs watching your product, it'll fade from public consciousness.*****
So, video games are this financial juggernaut, but that's largely on the backs of mobile games and live service games, where you constantly feed money to the beast.
But the long term cultural impact? Well, that remains to be seen.
My perspective as a gamer is that gaming is having a large cultural impact, but that's because I'm inside the ecosystem. However, my work and life take me outside the ecosystem, and for that reason alone I remain skeptical. We may no longer be in a world where a single cultural event dominates over all others --such as the final episode of M*A*S*H or the release of Michael Jackson's Thriller-- but that doesn't mean that gaming is lost in the noise.
I think that we gamers just need to realize that we're not as culturally important as we think we are.
*As of 2022 via a Forbes article which I won't link to because it's behind a "stop using your adblocker" wall.
***If they don't at first think that I go out to gambling casinos, that is.
****That's gotten better over the years, but you still have to read the room before you declare your full frontal nerdity to people.
*****And before somebody pipes up with the violence inherent in boxing, the popularity of MMA and UFC belies that. Those latter two can be easily found on television without pay-per-view.
Of course, that question is predicated on a lot of assumptions, such as "Why do people play the game?" and "What do the developers believe the players want?"
A college acquaintance had the LP and insisted I listen to it (among other LPs of his.) I'll admit I listened to part of it.
Although it wasn't a Legendary item in and of itself, my first experience with an item that "everybody" seemed to want actually predated MMOs and video games by years: the +5 Holy Avenger from AD&D.
Among players of 1e AD&D, the +5 Holy Avenger was the ultimate weapon in the hands of a Paladin, at the time one of the hardest classes to roll for --and play-- in AD&D. Sticking to the straight and narrow of Lawful Good --in TSR's original Deities and Demigods sourcebook, Galahad was considered a 20th Level Paladin and Lancelot a former Paladin and now merely a 20th Level Fighter-- meant that you couldn't really participate in anything resembling a heist adventure. Or really, depending on how strict your DM was, anything that involved stealth. You were very much the stereotypical Knight riding up to the cave mouth to challenge the Red Dragon inside.
The Paladin's quest* for a Holy Avenger, either the sword itself or something earth shaking enough to warrant the sword as a reward, was one of the high points of an AD&D campaign. The adventure Fedifensor in Dragon Magazine #67 --reproduced here on Wizards' website in PDF form**-- was notable in that it was one of the first published adventures featuring a Holy Avenger (Fedifensor) as well as the first adventure featuring Gith (Githyanki in this case) as the baddies who stumbled upon the sword in the Astral Plane.
The first page of the Fedifensor scenario by Allen Rogers, from Dragon Magazine #67 Page 37. (November 1982)
Still, despite the (supposed) rarity of a +5 Holy Avenger, it wasn't nearly as rare as the Artifact/Relic section in AD&D. Those were one-of-a-kind items that had boatloads of special powers but equally risky side-effects. The Hand and the Eye of Vecna --back in the day when Vecna was merely a powerful Lich who was supposedly dead-- were two artifacts whose first side effect upon grafting them to your body was to turn you immediately Neutral Evil. And the problems only got worse from there. Artifacts and Relics were nothing to be trifled with, even among mortals.*** By contrast, the Deck of Many Things was just a rare Miscellaneous Magic item, not a Relic of considerable power by itself that merited an entire D&D supplement.
Having the ultimate item in an RPG adventure has persisted through the years --what Witch or Wizard wouldn't want the Elder Wand, for example-- and so I suppose it's only natural to covet what is best. But if everybody has one, is it really something to covet versus just something to just acquire as part of the normal progression of things?
And what are game designers to do with game balance when accommodating an item of legendary power?
***
MMOs have a particular problem with this design, because the persistence of the game world and the constant addition of new content mean that what is currently game breaking may be no better than a basic quest reward a few years later. Or, worse, due to game design, that game breaking item might actually be worse than a basic quest reward.
Yes, I'm bringing out the old Nerfnow.com comic again for this post.
This was a particular problem in Vanilla Classic WoW, where it turns out that some quest rewards or dungeon gear drops were better for your class and spec than the raid specific "Tier" gear. For example, while the Mage's Tier 0 or Tier 1 set might look pretty, a variety of crafted gear and dungeon drops were better for Mages overall. This had its drawbacks, as the three piece Bloodvine set had no Stamina bonuses which meant a Mage or Warlock wearing it was extra squishy in a fight****, but there was no denying the superiority of the damage potential for that set.
However, there were two items that it seemed everybody coveted: the legendary items Thunderfury and Atiesh.
This meme is so old hat that you can now get it on a t-shirt. Yes, really. From Redbubble.
Thunderfury looked awesome, but Atiesh, not so much. It looked like a sulphur ball set atop a cane unless you looked closely.
I was not impressed. From Wowhead.
Still, there was the general perception that since the work involved to get either item was involved --and in the case of Atiesh it came in the Naxxramas raid, which very few raid teams back in the day completed-- only a few people ever got either item. Even in Classic WoW, guilds usually designated a few select people to be those to work on either questline.
Between that scarcity and the potential for guild drama, both items were rarely found in WoW.
I'm not sure where things changed, but gradually the desire for an item of legendary rarity became normalized to the point where access to such legendary items became easier to obtain.
When I started playing WoW back in 2009, I became aware of legendary items as a "well, unless you raid and you're of the right class and status within a guild, you're not going to get one" sort of item. However, by the time I reached max level the "Fall of the Lich King" patch was released. Yes, everybody remembers the Icecrown Citadel raid, but I remember the decidedly unsexy Patch 3.3 name for two items: Shadowmourne and Quel'Delar.
That first item, Shadowmourne, is the two-handed legendary axe that people could obtain after completing quests in Icecrown Citadel. I can't speak of the scarcity of Shadowmourne, but one of the last things to do before completing the questline and obtaining Shadowmourne was to actually kill Arthas, the Lich King. Given that took a while for a lot of guilds, and I've mentioned numerous times how smashing your head against ICC for months on end ruined guilds (including mine), I can't imagine a lot of people obtained a Shadowmourne in original Wrath.
Quel'Delar, on the other hand, was more obtainable although still a bit of a rarity.
***
While not a legendary item per se, in order to obtain Quel'Delar you had to complete a questline once you obtained the ol' Battered Hilt, which was a rare drop in the Heroic ICC 5-person instances.
Although the Wowhead entry for the Battered Hilt mentions a 1-2% drop rate, due to a bug in Patch 3.3 the initial drop rate was a bit higher, and a ton of Battered Hilts dropped before Blizz fixed the bug. I wasn't high enough, gear wise, to get into the instances where the Hilt dropped before the fix, so I had to wait for said Hilt to drop at the "proper" drop rate.
And wait.
From Wowhead.
And wait.
After several months of only seeing exactly one Battered Hilt drop (and losing that roll), I finally got tired of waiting and scraped together the 5000 gold necessary to buy one off the Auction House. It took me a month of steady dungeon running and selling ore to do so; I was going to buy Epic Flying then, but... To me, the questline was very epic, and since my Paladin Quintalan was a Blood Elf it fit perfectly into my race's lore.
Yes, I'm pulling out this old screencap from Eversong as proof.
***
Judging by how the game has progressed since December 2009, it seems that while Quel'Delar wasn't a legendary item in the same vein as Shadowmourne, Quel'Delar was enough of a success that it seems that Blizzard decided to move more in the direction of using the sword as a model for how to handle legendary items in WoW.
And with that has come a sense of entitlement from some MMO players that I find both confusing and off-putting.
If a legendary item is supposed to be rare and difficult to obtain, why does it seem that a lot of players expect to obtain one over the course of an expansion?
Perhaps Blizzard is at fault for this sort of behavior, because a lot of their modus operandi in WoW's design is "Awesome players doing awesome things", and what isn't more awesome than having a legendary weapon?
Well, the funny thing is, if Blizzard designs its systems around teams having one or more legendary items, if you don't have one you suddenly feel like you're behind the curve.
This really just covers commentary around
this phenomenon, so you don't have to read it.
This isn't just a Retail WoW phenomenon, because Classic WoW is infested with it too. Just look at all the people who lusted after Thunderfury or Atiesh or Shadowmourne and went back to Classic WoW just to get that. Or their Scarab Lord title and associated mount.
From Reddit. (And SpongeBob Squarepants.)
***
I guess the ultimate question is "Why should we care about motivations when playing an MMO?"
Well, ordinarily I'd be saying that it doesn't matter what others want to do, what you do matters, but when the game design focuses around certain game behaviors, it does matter.
Think about the Legion expansion and the Artifact Weapon:
Yep. Another blast from the past.
The concept of everybody getting an Artifact Weapon didn't appear out of nowhere. If you're going to be an awesome player doing awesome things, what better way to combat the (then) ultimate power in the WoW-verse than for everybody to have their own Ashbringer (or equivalent)? It was the desire for a Legendary item for everybody baked into an entire expansion. While that fed the desire for a legendary item, it also introduced the so-called Borrowed Power systems into Retail WoW, which had a huge impact on the game's enjoyment and understanding.
Good luck trying to explain Borrowed Power to a new player, for instance.
From Reddit.
So... What now?
Hell, I don't know. I'm just gonna do my own thing, but I worry about whether the player base in general --and Micro-Blizzard# in general-- aren't repeating old mistakes with each new expansion. Why would I think that?
Oh, no reason...
*Yes, Paladins would call them quests back then, denoting their outsized importance to the Paladin. Nowadays, people just call any task a "quest" of some sort, but back then a quest was very much in the realm of "rescue the maiden from the Evil Big Bad" sort of thing. No Kill Ten Rats here.
**I saved a copy locally on my PC just in case Wizards ever yanks the adventure, so I can upload it for future use.
***And yes, in the era of Elves living 4000 years, they were considered mortal.
****I was once in a Blackwing Lair Raid while wearing my Bloodvine set, and I kept dying during a specific set of trash pulls. A healer whispered an apology to me, saying that she'd keep throwing heals on me but I'd die before they landed. I told her I wasn't angry or anything because the Bloodvine set, while powerful for damage, meant I had absolutely no extra health to me at all. She was much relieved that I wasn't one of those asshole Mages who demanded that healers TRY HARDER for something out of their control.
I figured I'd start an exploration of some of my PCs and toons with my AD&D 1e character, Alarius. You know, stick to the classics at first.
I'd originally joked that I should name him "Joe the Cleric", hence the "Joe" there. And yes, when someone says something funny at the table, it goes on my character sheet somewhere.
Alarius is, in some ways, an unfunny me. He takes himself far too seriously, doesn't really like "the Hilarious" moniker he was given*, and doesn't talk much about his gods. There's an out of game reason for that last part, as one of our game group is a Methodist Minister, and therefore I'm not inclined to be obnoxious as far as in-game religion is concerned.
Alarius began the adventuring life following up on rumors of slavers operating in the area, and joined up with a group to pursue those rumors. Along the way, the slaver conspiracy kept growing in scope and size, and as the group gained in knowledge and strength they began to find themselves a target of the slavers themselves. When they finally reached the heart of the slaving operation, they were instead captured and thrown into the dungeon, presumably to await execution. Only a fortuitous volcanic eruption --"A gift from the gods!" Alarius said at the time-- allowed them to escape, find their gear, and overwhelm the guards at the docks.
(Yes, that was the content of the old AD&D Slave Lords modules, A0 through A4.)
While perusing the slavers' documents, Alarius discovered that a shipment of slaves had been sent out to a remote area, which stood out from other possible locales. The party reassembled and headed out to investigate, only to discover that the surrounding countryside was under assault from a clan of Hill Giants.
(Oh yes, it's THAT module.)
Alarius and Company defeated the Hill Giants and followed the trail to a stronghold of Frost Giants, and subsequently to a fortress of Fire Giants. It was only then that they discovered the long rumored but never seen "dark elves" or Drow not only existed but were directing the Fire Giants in their acquisition of slaves.
At the moment, Alarius is somewhere underground, following a path marked on an incomplete map to what appears to be a Drow city. The party already had to fight off some Drow slavers, who took off with some of their number, and followed them to an underground supply post. The abductees were subsequently rescued and everybody escaped an underground supply post by the skin of their teeth.
(Yes, we're finished with module D1 - Descent into the Depths of the Earth, and are about to start D2 - Shrine of the Kuo-Toa. For those who don't know who Kuo-Toa are, think giant murlocs. EVIL giant murlocs.)
***
Aranandor is up next, an Elven Champion in LOTRO:
There are stories about that already?
LOTRO is an ideal game if you want a story, because the original Shadows of Angmar story is absolutely fantastic. You can get bogged down a bit while you level and the UI is really bad for the Red/Green colorblind, but if you're a fan of Middle-earth, it's always worth a trip.
So... Aranandor.
I made a point of making a character with an "accurate" Quenya name, although after the royal "Aran" I think it means royal/noble of Andor. Or maybe not.
Aranandor spent some time earlier in the Third Age at Rivendell but eventually grew restless and made the trip to Ered Luin, where the Grey Havens lay. As the Shadow of the east grew larger, he considered following the call of the sea and going to the Undying Lands, but instead he chose to stay and fight the Shadow as best he could. The Witch King wove many intricate plots around Eriador, from Ered Luin to Bree and even as far east and south as Eregion, and no matter how hard Aranandor tried, he always felt that the minions of the Witch King were a step ahead of him.
As Angmar looked unstoppable, The Witch King's chief minion decided to dole out his own twisted form of justice on a minion he perceived to be insufficiently loyal. That turning on a loyal minion, causing the minion to in turn betray the Shadow, was the break Aranandor and the Free Peoples needed.
"Strange how such a thing as petty jealousy can cause the downfall of the great," Aranandor once mused while resting at Imladris.
After the Angmar affair, Aranandor spent time with the Dwarves in Khazad-Dum, a relentlessly grim place that he shudders to remember. The boughs of Lothlorien were more to his liking, his kin from afar dwelt there, after all, but even there the Shadow stretched its arms toward the Golden Lady. He would die for Galadriel and Celeborn, but rather than asking that sort of sacrifice they instead chose another: to draw the attention of Mordor away from the Fellowship, Aranandor was tasked with assisting an assault into Mirkwood. The darkness that dwelt there reminded the Elf far too much of the darkness in Moria, and as companions died his spirits flagged.
A change was needed.
When he returned to Imladris for healing and rest, Elrond summoned him to his side. "Word has reached us that Aragorn has need of his Kinsmen," he told the elf. "Assemble the Rangers of the North so that they may head south and rendezvous with him in Rohan."
Ever the dutiful Wood Elf, Aranandor rode throughout the north, bringing word to the Rangers and then riding south with them to the country of the Dunlendings. There he found loyalty and betrayal among the people so thoroughly dominated by Saruman, yet he also found courage and heart in those few Dunlendings who rejected the Shadow.
It is there that Aranandor's story ends, for much lies before him and is yet to be told.
As you can guess, Aranandor's primary motivation is his desire to see the Shadow defeated, but the long and often lonely paths he has trod has worn on him. He smiles less now, and he has seen far too many of those he calls friends fall in battle or to the plots of the Enemy. Yet he has not totally forsaken the Grey Havens, as he knows that when this age is over he may yet cross over the sea to the West.
I recently volunteered to do a one shot RPG with a friend of mine, and I was allowed to use any existing PC I've created and are currently using in an RPG.
"Do mouthy WoW toons count?" I asked.
Oh, shush. That was a term of endearment.
Although this wasn't exactly what my friend had in mind, it was a player character for an RPG (of a sort), and as I am currently playing an iteration of this particular PC, my friend decided to allow it.
I will be the first to admit that I have had my share of RPG campaigns over the years, and plenty of PCs to choose from, but as far as personalities go, that's a big conundrum. Until my MMOs came along, my experiences in creating PCs with a somewhat divergent series of personalities was pretty limited.
Hence the reason for this post.*
***
When I first began playing RPGs, I was in 7th Grade and the concept of 'roleplaying' itself was reduced to "you enter a room with 5 Kobolds and 4 Orcs." Not exactly stuff that will engage with my inner Master Thespian, I can assure you. That didn't mean that I didn't dream of being the Knight (or Paladin, in this case) fighting evil wherever I found it.** That dream of inhabiting a character was there, it's that my "characters" were, well, me. The were simply extensions of me and my personality, no more and no less.
It was only when I was forced to go "underground" on my RPG playing and in turn embraced reading a lot of SF&F that I began to understand a bit more about how roleplaying could work. The PCs didn't have to be me with just different names, but they could be created and/or voiced by me. They could have different personalities, just like that found in the various novels I read.
So... A lot of my characters began to act similarly to those that I read out of Lord of the Rings, The Belgariad, or The Elric Saga. (Among others.) Not that much of a reach in terms of personal motivation, but when the alternative was "acting like me", it was a decent enough stretch for someone taking their first steps into a fictional world of their own making.
The summer of my Senior year in high school, I had a discussion with a couple of my co-workers about how an RPG campaign works. While they were proponents of the "you meet at a tavern and then go out and kill monsters", I went in a different direction.
"Sure, you could initially meet in a tavern," I admitted, "but say you take a contract to do something small. You do it well, then that leads to another job, a bigger one. This continues until you begin to acquire a reputation, and you attract the attention of someone in power. They decide to take a chance on you, and whether you perform well or not means that they become either your enemy or your patron. Or, you could become the King's personal problem solver, a 'Mission: Impossible Team'***, ready for when he needs you to take on a big job."
Nothing much came out of that discussion, but looking back on it now it seems that was a sort of turning point. Between then and me heading off to college a short time later, I turned a corner in terms of what I wanted out of an RPG.
Well, kind of.
My first big RPG experience in college gave me an example of how a DM was restrictive because he wanted us to play things his way. He had designed this entire elaborate campaign and recruited about 14 people to play --at once-- but the campaign and his DM style left his players no room for role playing. It was "play the campaign the way I want you to or else". Well, without giving the players any real freedom to do much more than react to what he was telling your character was they were doing, it became all about him and his story. The fact that he had far far too many people playing in a single campaign at once became a recipe for disaster.
The campaign lasted a grand total of one night, and somewhere about an hour into the game he came to the realization that he couldn't control the situation and left in an offended huff.
There were 5 of us who kind of hung around after, critiquing what the DM tried (and failed) to do, and we all wanted to still play. One of us piped up that he'd DMed back in high school, and he had some campaigns he could run.
And our primary D&D campaign in college was born.
This second RPG experience lasted much longer --it eventually evolved into the 20+ year campaign a decade later with a subset of players from that group-- but I reverted to form and basically played, well, a version of me.
(Gotta go with the classics, I guess.)
Even its descendent campaign, the 20 year one, I ended up playing a version of me, personality-wise. Oh, he started out as an inquisitive type who was so wrapped up in their own studies that he only broke out of it when presented with a carrot on a stick in the form of a mystery to be solved, but ol' Lucius Raecius devolved into a version of me who would charge into battle, spear at the ready, because that was naturally what a Cleric of Zeus would do.****
I only began to break out of that when I was given a Wizard character to play in addition to Lucius: the original Nevelanthana.
Yes, Neve started life as a D&D PC of mine, an L4 Wizard in D&D 3.0. I'd advocated for a magic wielder of some sort, because we didn't have any in our game group, and I could see the need for magic in a future campaign.
The D&D version of Neve was snooty, somewhat arrogant, brilliant --and boy did she know it-- and really wanted to be the game world equivalent of an Elven Ranger like her father, but she wasn't good enough to join the corps. So, she became a Wizard instead, like her mother,, but she still kept practicing archery to prove that she was better than everybody thought. (Rejection can be a helluva motivating tool. Believe me, I know from personal experience.)
Oh, and one more thing: she spent several years of the campaign as a ghost.
Yes, she died not too long after she joined the campaign. It was a classic case of one of the party members being mind controlled by a harpy and turning and attacking the closest player: Neve. He rolled --in succession-- 20.... 20.... 20!!!
The DM decreed it resulted in an instant decapitation.*****
Rather than having Neve simply shuffle off the mortal coil, the DM kept Neve around as a ghost until we were able to figure out how to bring her back.
During that long period of "Ghost Neve", I learned how to work with a player with a distinctively different set of motivations than mine were. Ghost Neve couldn't fight, and she couldn't be heard by almost everyone, but she could still affect the game in some ways. Because of that, I couldn't fall back on playing Neve like an extension of myself. I was still me, and Lucius was still me, but Neve was definitely her own person. Her personality was such that I turned to my experiences writing fiction to try to keep her narrative fresh and interesting, and both my role playing and my fiction improved as a result.
The irony is that were it not for a dead PC I wouldn't have learned how to play living ones better.
***
And a further irony is that I needed to play single player story driven games to give my MMO players their own motivations and personality.
My original MMO, World of Warcraft, doesn't have a lot of story driven content from the standpoint that you get to choose how a player reacts. You roll on up, you get the quest, and you complete it. The original SWTOR had modifications to that formula as you could select various options, some of the Light Side and some of them Dark, but the net effect is that you don't affect the story nearly as much as you might think given some of the weight you may place on certain decisions. The Elder Scrolls Online is a similar MMO where the overall story moves in one direction, and while there are small decisions you can make the overall thrust of the story is predetermined.
I suppose that's also the case with single player RPGs, the effects of various decisions in them can be larger, much larger, than that of MMOs.
Take The Witcher, for example. I've only played about half of the first game in the series, but that first game showed me what the consequences of my actions are. "Because I chose X, X enabled me to get to Y, and then I could reach Z," were the obvious connections the in-game narration provides. It might be beating you on the head with a stick, but those actions and the follow-up from the same provide the basis for a character's decision making.
And from there, a personality can emerge that drives that decision making.
Of course, this can go awry, as "it's what my character would do" can be driven to extremes and ruin everybody's fun. Obviously being a Grade A asshole doesn't help anybody, and if you're going to have a character of yours do that, you'd better be
In a single player video game
Writing a story
because if you play a character that actively sabotage's the group, people won't want to play with you. As one of the replies in that Reddit thread I linked to pointed out, D&D is as close to a coop game as you can get. When you play as an asshole without regard for the group, then expect the group to rebel against you.
Okay, I digress.
Due to those single player games and the sometimes uncomfortable situations a player may find themselves in, I learned how to evolve a personality which simply isn't an extension of my own.
Does that mean my method of playing is superior to these others? No, it's just different. It's kind of hard to explain, but my understanding and satisfaction of roleplaying has changed over time, and each type of roleplaying from "extension of me" to " a fully fleshed out three dimensional character" give me a lot of satisfaction in their own way.
If you've got the time, Matt Colville has a great lecture about this actual topic:
So we have come full circle. As I began playing WoW Classic back in 2019 I began to have thoughts about why the toons I was playing were out adventuring. Vanilla Classic has some really good initial questlines for low level players, and the Defias -> Deadmines story is the best of the lot, but it was a new toon's initial arrival at the starting zone was what puzzled me. Those ponderings eventually lead to two offspring: this post about player motivation in general, and the creation of One Final Lesson.
In it's own bizarre way, were it not for Neve, I'd not have had Card to play with.
What sort of person is Cardwyn, anyway? Or the WoW version of Nevelanthana? Or Linnawyn? Or Quintalan? Well, that's where Part 2 comes into play.
#Blaugust2023
*And yes, my friend is going to see this post, because why not? It's not as if I want to hide any of this from her.
**Or a Jedi. Or a Cowboy, or a Naval Officer. Okay, that last one might seem like a stretch, but we had an old set of 1954-ish era World Book Encyclopedias at home, and I stumbled across what US military dress uniforms looked like. Lo and behold, the Naval blue dress uniform looked a lot like the sport coat in my closet, so... I'd dress up in my sport coat, attach paper "rank sleeve stripes" via scotch tape, and voila! Instant military uniform to play... uh.... Army with? Oh well, it wasn't perfect.
***Our boss was really into Mission: Impossible, so whenever we had team get-togethers, video recordings of M:I episodes found their way onto the television.
****Narrator: For a smart person, Lucius wasn't as wise as his Wisdom score would indicate.
*****I'm still pissed about that turn of events. Not the actual 20 - 20 - 20 combination, as that was just unlucky rolls distilled into their purest form, but that the player who did the rolling thought it was the coolest thing ever. The rest of us were horrified --or maybe said a few choice four letter words-- but he and the DM thought it was awesome stuff. And that sincere lack of sympathy even out of game pissed me off.
