The Joy of Anonymity

While my son and I were grabbing lunch before visiting our local game store for Free RPG Day*, he asked me if I was planning on playing Final Fantasy XIV any time soon. I'd created a Lancer a few years ago, but I'd never gotten around to playing him. 

"I don't know," I admitted.

It's not that I don't want to give the game a try, I suppose, but it's more like I'm not sure if I'm going to like it very much. After all, I've expressed my displeasure on more than one occasion about the focus of WoW circa Wrath onwards of the player as the Champion of Azeroth.

From ifunny.co.

When the story doesn't involve a telenovela about the major faction leaders, that is. 

From Pinterest. (And ifunny.co.)

I may not know much about the FFXIV story but I do know that your character is supposed to be the equivalent of the Champion of Azeroth, the Warrior of Light, which puts you on the level of a Godslayer or something. Given that we've been killing gods in Azeroth since 2006, this isn't exactly unknown territory. Still, that original C'Thun raid was a 40 person raid, and was a stand-in for an army in-game, even though it doesn't explicitly say so.**

In FFXIV, being called out as the Warrior of Light right from the beginning means that the focus of the story is on you in more ways than one. You're the protagonist in a fashion that's closer to being The Dragon Reborn (The Wheel of Time) or The Child of Light (The Belgariad) from a novel. 

Even Google anticipates the inevitable Mary Sue question.

But that's neither here nor there, since one of the things I've learned as I've gotten older is the enjoyment I derive from being anonymous. 

***

Being a redhead --and having worn a beard since roughly 1990 or so-- I know a bit about sticking out in a crowd. Beards are accepted now, but they weren't that common 30+ years ago. Couple that with a natural hair color that is also the rarest, and you have a recipe for being "that guy" who people notice in a crowd. 

Even if I'm not trying, I used to be able to stand out in a crowd just because of what I wore. I remember one time I went to a Star Trek convention back in the late 80s and I stood out because I was one of the few people who did not wear a t-shirt with a logo, a jean jacket, or a Star Trek outfit of some sort***. I figured just dressing like I was going out to a baseball game or to Kings Island would be appropriate; who knew that wearing a pretty basic polo shirt and shorts would make me stand out like that? Oh well.

Fast forward about 30 years, and the older I've gotten the less I stand out. More people wear beards these days, more people dye their hair****, and my clothing is for the most part jeans and t-shirts unless I go somewhere where I have to dress up. I'm just Joe Average, and I'm fine with that.

It's quite freeing, being able to go places and people not really giving a fuck about you at all. If you've ever been to a car dealership and you're pestered by the sales force ad nauseum, you now understand the beauty of being invisible. Sure, it sucks when you actually want to speak with someone and you can't find anyone, but I'd rather have that problem than fighting off the vultures as they swoop down on you.

From @itsmariah.

But if you're famous for some reason or another, you can't just blend in with the crowd.

Maybe you don't want to blend in, but when you're famous or of high rank (pick an organization, any organization) your time is not your own. 

This may surprise some of you, but back in the mid-late 90s to the early 2000s I was a member of the Parish Council at the Catholic church we attended. As such, I got to go over items such as the budget and planning for the next fiscal year. Let me tell you, it was pretty eye opening. But even more than that, it opened a window as to how the time spent by the Pastor was divided. What we saw, as handling Mass and other Church observations, was merely the public face of their activity. There was a ton of stuff (sorry, not at liberty to discuss) behind the scenes that took up a lot of their time. When someone asked during one of the Parish Council meetings about something concerning the Archbishop, the Pastor told us a story about one of his recent discussions with the Archbishop. During the meeting the Pastor asked about scheduling some time for the Archbishop to work on a particular line item, the Archbishop opened up his calendar and pointed out that his time was booked solid for the next three months, and there was a backlog just to get on the calendar for non-essential items. The conclusion of the story is that if we thought we could get to the Archbishop for anything, well... Good luck with that. "He has no time for himself, and it's been like that for him since be became Archbishop."

***

If you take that experience into MMOs, you begin to see how my own real life experiences have colored my in-game experiences. I've known teachers who have moved well outside of the school district they teach in because they want to have lives separate from their students,***** but that only works in the modern era where you can be that far away and still teach. If you're in Fantasy Land, you could potentially do that if you're a Mage,

Neve: "Of course I can."
Me: "Oh shush. Shouldn't you be hunting
on the plains near Garadar or something?"

but most everybody else would be stuck wherever they were at. And like celebrities everywhere else, you're not going to get a moment's peace from anybody who wants your ear.

So while it would seem at first blush to be pretty awesome to be the central character and the Warrior of Light, I'm not so sure that's a blessing. Being the hero and being able to rush out and do your own thing whenever you want is very much a best of both worlds for the player. It's like partying all the time while you're the king, because it gives the impression that there's nothing to ruling a kingdom: you just show up and things take care of themselves.

Having seen how it all works makes it that much more difficult for me to appreciate MMOs (or other video games) where you can be the hero without consequences, because my brain won't simply shut up and enjoy the ride. Kind of like me, the guy with a Minor in History, having to leave the room when I watched National Treasure for the first couple of times because I simply couldn't take the butchering of history that was done in the movie. (My wife can attest to this, as I did it while we were watching the movie together.) 

I do have to admit it was very well acted and

plotted, however.

I guess I may eventually play FFXIV, but I need to push through the inevitable doubts that are going to crop up in my head.

*Last June 22, if you're curious.

**If you're in a 40 person raid versus a 10, 20, or 25 person variety, you can feel the difference in scope.

***They weren't cosplayers by any stretch, just people wearing a Star Trek jacket or shirt or wearing vulcan/elf ears. There were very few people who dressed up in costume (as we called it then), but quite a few people who at least made some effort to put their full-frontal nerdity on display. 

****That's so they can either hide the graying of their own hair or so they can have it a funky color. Either way is fine with me, but you'd never catch me doing it myself. 

*****::something something middle schoolers::

The Wheel of Time Moves On...

...and ages pass.

When Souldat and I began this blog in 2009, the mini-Reds were 6, 8, and 11. 

They are now 19, 22, and 24.

This past weekend my son graduated from college, and armed with his Bachelor's degree in History, will be attending graduate school in the fall to work on his Master's degree.

In his time away at college, 
he got into paining minis.
(From John Kovalic's Dork Tower.)

And he plays FFXIV. When he asked if I was going to attend Gen Con this year, he mentioned that at least one of his guildies was planning on attending. (Heh.)

He put a version of this, from
Final Fantasy XIV, on his cap.

Congrats, kid. Onward and upward.

Are We Not Gods?

It's a problem that every RPG DM or developer has to grapple with eventually: what do you do when the players in your campaign (or game) become too powerful? 

I'm not talking "famous" or "powerful" or "admired", but POWERFUL.

As in "demon lord slaying on home plane" powerful.

Or "defeating Death" powerful.

Or "Godslayer" powerful.

Or... You get the idea.

That was a problem I grappled with back when I first played D&D, as my first characters to survive to L20 or higher were so powerful that I had to do something with them. They steamrolled Orcus and Demogorgon, for pete's sake, and while that was also back in the days of dungeons containing rooms filled with "five red dragons!", I at least understood enough that I ought to retire my characters. So, I rolled a die and adjusted my characters' stats upward, anointed them as gods*, and retired them. Having the original Deities and Demigods book by TSR around didn't exactly hurt in that regard.

But still, what to do with overly powerful characters is a problem that people wrestle with all the time, whether it be in a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign or a video game.

Baldur's Gate 2 confronts that problem in the course of the main storyline, and without invoking spoilers, let's say that I totally understand Bioware's solution to the conundrum. I'd like to think that I could handle that situation as good as they did, but I do realize that I never really had the chance. That solitary situation in my youth was the only time I've ever been a part of a campaign where my characters' levels reached crazy powerful territory. I mean, the Cleric in the recently concluded 20+ year D&D 3.0 campaign never reached above 9th Level. It was just the nature of that game to not progress fast, and while that lack of progression didn't bother me, the lack of progress on the overall story did.

None of the games I cited above had the baked in issues that are confronted by online games, such as MMOs, however.

***

MMOs --especially those who have a progression based model-- will eventually confront the problem of "the characters are too powerful". And I don't mean "too powerful for low level zones" either, because that's a separate (although related**) issue. This is more along the lines of when a main character in a novel becomes so powerful that they venture into Mary Sue/Marty Stu territory, such as Pug and Tomas in Raymond E. Feist's first Riftwar series.

Or, say, the problems confronted by Saitama, the One Punch Man.

Yeah, pretty much.
From imgflip.com.

Part of the problem is the scale of the enemies a player faces; because of the scaling up in power, the enemies have to scale up as well. So you may have started from humble beginnings, but by the end you're hobnobbing with the rich and powerful.

Every video game RPG ever.
From Reddit.

Do this a couple of times over the course of a few expansions, and the next thing you know you're consorting with godlike beings. 

"Here goes nothing."

"Eeep."

Now, this trajectory doesn't have to happen --at least to at this much a degree as it has in some MMOs-- but eventually all online RPGs that hang around long enough will hit this wall. 

But is it a wall?

Well, once you get past a certain point, the scope of the game changes. You're no longer in "Kill Small Creatures" questing scope but "Kill Big Ol' Demons" territory.

Or you progress beyond that into "Slay an Old God" territory.

The people you interact with in game changes --either slowly or quickly depending on the game involved-- and you're far beyond those salad days of digging up turnips for a farmer in The Shire.

***

He looked all round him and it was only then that he recognized the place as his own cell.

'Yes,' said he, 'there's the stone I used to sit on! There are the marks where my shoulders rubbed their shape on to the stone! There's the stain left by the blood from my forehead the day I tried to batter my brains out against the wall! Oh, and these numbers . . . I remember . . .

--From The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, Unabridged Edition, pp 1048.

Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo --D'Artagnan from The Three Musketeers is another-- comes into power and consequently the story changes around him. The stakes are higher, because the people Edmond seeks revenge upon have maneuvered themselves into positions of power and prestige, but they remained fundamentally the same lowborn conspirators who betrayed him all those years ago.

Or in Baldur's Gate, you're introduced to the Big Bad (in game) in the intro, only you don't realize what the context is until you've played the entirety of the game. By the end of the game your position in life has changed, but the Big Bad has not. 

Both, however, are works with a defined beginning, middle, and end. MMOs don't really have that luxury, so the stakes constantly change with each expansion. And the easy way out for MMOs is to raise the stakes with each successive expansion. Unfortunately, that can back developers into a corner, content-wise. 

A Legion thing I presume.
From Know Your Meme.

That meme aside, when you get successively more earth shaking and more powerful end bosses in each new expansion whose plots to do "whatever" are even more outlandish than the one before it, you get past a breaking point. 

LOTRO had it easy, relatively speaking, because that MMO followed the books, right up until the end when the Ringbearer completed his quest and Sauron was destroyed. Now the MMO becomes, "What do we do next to top that?" And there's no easy answer.

But other MMOs, such as WoW, have a harder time of it when you have to raise the stakes with each successive expansion without falling into any one of the following traps:

• "I'm not bad, I'm defending us from the NEXT Big Bad!"
• Meet the new Big Bad, same as the old Big Bad.
• Bait with one plotline and Switch to a repeat of an old plotline.
• An "I was Good (or at least Neutral) but now I'm Bad" Big Bad.
• Changing the backstory to create a new Big Bad out of whole cloth plotline.

Even if the plotline of an expansion covers one of these traps, you can still find an MMO story/expansion that doesn't necessarily have a corresponding escalation in power to match the players' own arms' race. It's not a given by any stretch. However, it takes a rare MMO to avoid falling into the "more bigger better MORE" design. 

More gear.

More shinies.

More powers.

More everything.

And then you wake up one day and wonder just how you started out as this:

And then you find yourself looking like this:

And this is before the current
expac in WoW Classic.

And you are hanging around with people like this:

You bet your ass she's bowing.

Or this:

I'm running out of screen space.

How the hell do you describe this to people back home without them wondering what has become of you? And what do you do when a suitably lofty opinion of yourself creeps into your psyche? When beings of this amount of power and prestige call you friend and invite you to sit at the table, it can't help but influence your opinions of yourself, and just how far away from your beginnings you have come. 

"More" indeed.

There's no easy answer to the power creep per se, since to a lot of people there is no problem at all. There's always another hill to climb, another challenge to overcome. But I guess getting on toward middle age has taught me a bit about that spiral; how there always is an upper barrier on what can be achieved, and eventually we all have to live with our limitations, our regrets, and our failures. 

Of course, a game that provided such an outlook wouldn't have a lot of players, because it's more fun to win than be reminded of our mortality. (Dark Souls notwithstanding.) Even changing the overall trajectory of the power creep just a little bit, whether it be by level squish or moving the focus away from a world shattering in-game story, can engender more than its share of angst. Think of Dragonflight, and how there were more than its share of detractors when the expac was announced. I, for one, applauded the movement away from "the world is ending" vibe that tends to permeate the WoW ecosystem, but I wasn't so foolish as to think that WoW was going to stop being on a gear treadmill once the Dragonflight released. That treadmill is still there, and the surest sign that WoW is still WoW is that you get to help choose the next leader of the Black Dragonflight.***

Think about that for a moment: why would the two rivals for leadership of the Black Dragonflight, a Flight (in)famous for their haughty attitudes toward all "lesser beings"****, be wanting your support? They only respect people more powerful than their own. That I've yet to see a post saying "Hey, waitaminute" from my blog feed pretty much shows that people simply accept that you can make the choice. Not necessarily that you may want to, but that you are in the right to do so. In effect you are the Cardinal Richelieu of Azeroth.

"Who are you for, King Wrathion or Cardinal Sabellius?"

--D'Artagnan, probably

***

I guess that this is the nature of the beast, that power creep is inevitable and you either accept it or jump off the train. Okay, there's a third option, to simply ignore it and...

I hear Silvermoon is nice this
time of  year.

Or maybe just hang around The Pig and Whistle and roleplay? Or maybe The Lion's Pride?

From Reddit.

Or create a twink for BGs and just do that?

Or run one of those places in FFXIV?

Or form a band and play in Bree on Fridays?

Or maybe be a roadie for that band.
(FWIW, this band still plays on Friday
afternoons on the Gladden-US server.)

There are things to do, but they are decidedly against the spirit of MMOs.

Or are they?

Nothing says that you can't simply ignore what the developers want you to play and just do your own thing. Crafting your own resolution to The Hero's Journey isn't necessarily a bad thing to do, after all. You're in effect doing what I did all those years ago: retire your character from active adventuring.

And again, nothing says that you can't spend your days playing a D&D campaign that consists of minding a tavern as adventurers pass through.

Just gonna put this here.
I was so happy to give my 
local bookstore my money for this.

Of course you're not obligated to buy any new MMO expansion --or in the case of LOTRO or SWTOR or some other MMOs you don't have to buy anything at all-- but that's up to you. If nothing else, you can control your own resolution to the power creep, which is a good thing. You have the option to say that you are not a god, you are a person. And even the heroic need a reality check from time to time.

*I think I "officially" called them demi-gods, because being a good Catholic kid I wasn't messing around with actual godhood itself.

**Some MMOs --Guild Wars 2, SWTOR, Elder Scrolls Online-- adjust your level downward if you're in a low level zone, and dole out rewards accordingly. This has varying levels of success based on the amount of tuning the devs have performed, but at least it's an attempt at a solution. Some MMOs don't even bother trying.

***I'd have called it spoilers, but you can't throw a stick in a Retail WoW blog without some mention of it in there.

****Admittedly, the Twilight Drake Vesperon says "You pose no threat, lesser beings! Give me your worst!" But come on, where do you think that Vesperon got that idea from?

Who Gets to Decide?

Puritanism — The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
--H.L. Mencken

 

I remember the day, as clear as a bell. 

Back when the LFG tool was shiny and new, I got onto a run of the Halls of Lightning instance.

For the uninitiated, it's one of two five person instances attached to the Ulduar complex. This is where the Titans created Earthen and the iron giants that serve Keeper Loken in "keeping Yogg-Saron in prison". Yes, in traditional WoW fashion, Loken has been corrupted by Yogg-Saron, and the Old Gods created the Curse of Flesh that turned Earthen and the iron giants into the first Dwarves and Vrykul (yes, Viking Giants). At the end of the Halls of Lightning you confront the corrupted Keeper, but to get from here to there you have to kill a lot of things in a place that looks straight out of a Medieval Astronomer's hideout.

When you zone in, you have to navigate some ramparts that are part Harry Potter and part The Vikings*, which can take some time to clear even if you skip a lot of the trash.

Well, on this particular day, I zoned in with four other random people, and the tank just up and takes off. He begins pulling. And pulling. And pulling. Until he pulls the entire room. 

Oh, he wasn't done there. Oh no.

He kept right on pulling, up through the next room, until he finally died.

"WTF are you doing??!!!" The healer cried.

"I'm having fun!" was the reply.

After we rather predictably wiped, the tank got back on and tried doing the same shit again, which led once more to a quick death. One DPS dropped, their replacement almost instantly died and dropped group, and their replacement kept saying "OMG! OMG!" while running to us.

Randoms like that were things that made me question my sanity, especially given that this was in the pre "merge" LFG, where you theoretically got to know people on your server even through random LFG pugs.

The thing is, Area 52 - US was a huge Horde favored server back in the day (10:1 Horde) which is now even larger and almost completely Horde (there's something like only 3 Alliance guilds on the server compared to 1130 Horde guilds, according to WoWAnalytica). With a size like that, a random asshat will almost never be seen again by people in LFGs, so they could afford to behave so poorly.

But I was reminded of that run last night when I was reading Horde LFG chat on Myzrael-US while I was on Neve, grinding some mobs in Eastern Plaguelands for their Runecloth.**

When I popped in, people were talking about what I can only describe as hentai with a side of "WTF are you talking about?"

After about 10-15 minutes of rather R-rated discussion, one person had finally had it and started reporting and ignoring people. 

"He's just upset we're having fun," someone replied to that person's leaving.

The response I did not say --I decided to not get involved-- was "Whose fun?"

***

In a multiplayer game this sort of question inevitably comes out. How people define "fun" to them is going to be on a pretty broad spectrum, and one person's "fun" is going to be another person's "annoyance".

Or, in the case of that so-called LFG Chat "discussion", much worse.

And I don't know if I can answer that question effectively.

There ought to be some sort of community standards in place in multiplayer games, especially when they're advertised as T (for Teen) as World of Warcraft is (and, I believe, SWTOR and LOTRO are too). Sure, Age of Conan and it's M (for Mature) gets a bit of a broader allowance for shenanigans, and EVE Online is, well, anything goes. But still, my point is that you kind of have to adhere to the rating you aimed for (and received) on the box.

But chatroom behavior just one aspect of multiplayer games.

There's behavior out in the field, in a group context, in raids***, in battlegrounds/PvP, and just general "off time" behavior in game you have to navigate. What is applauded in one area might not be in another.

For example, ninja-ing things are applauded in battlegrounds, but are rejected in other forms of group content. The quickest way to find yourself ostracized on an MMO server is to become known as a loot ninja in groups or raids.****

I'd like to think the easiest way of saying how to behave in a multiplayer format is Wheaton's Law: "Don't be a dick", but what that really means is up for interpretation. Some people are more strict about what being a dick actually entails than others, and that disagreement can spark issues. 

For example, I've always considered it unseemly if I, as a raid lead, got loot ahead of others. When discussion about the Legendary Twin Blades of Azzinoth that drop in Black Temple came up, I was surprised and shocked that on the 2x/week raid one of the raid leads was fingered to receive the weapon. I found out that the other Rogue on that raid team was a bit upset, but she figured she'd lost her chance at the legendaries because she wasn't picked to be a raid lead. I said in our internal raid lead chat that was the reason that I would pass on the weapons on principle, as I'd never want anyone to think I used my position as a raid lead to influence whether I should receive the two blades. 

"You're a better man that I, Brig," another of the raid leads replied. "I'd take it. But I wouldn't be part of the conversation, either."

Regardless, what is fun for people can vary enough that in a multiplayer format I don't know if there's a happy medium that can be reached. Some people have to have a defined set of goals to achieve, others don't. Some people like the grind (yes, they do exist) and others don't. Some people like group content, and others would rather avoid groups like the plague. I guess the question remains as to whether an MMO can be all things to all people, and yet still try to push players in a specific direction. Can an MMO such as WoW, which is all about the Endgame, still be broad enough to accommodate the player for whom the journey is far more important than the destination? Can an MMO, which like so many other video games is focused on the acquisition of things, accommodate people who are not interested in the new shiny?

***

Anybody else remember the Sparkle Pony?

If you're of a certain MMO age, you probably remember it. The Celestial Steed, if you want to use its formal name, was the first mount in the Blizzard Shop that you could buy using actual money and use in game. I certainly remember my first encounter with a Sparkle Pony, as I was on one of my toons handling some Auction House work in Silvermoon when a player rode by on one. I did a double take and asked the player where they got that mount. "Oh," they replied, "It's from the Blizzard Shop." 

"Oh."

Within hours we were inundated with Sparkle Ponies all over the damn place, and the mount went from "hey, that's kind of cute" to "WTF" to "those damn things" just like that.

Over a decade later, despite the tempest in a teapot that was the controversy over the Dark Portal Pass Deluxe Edition, there were tons of people using the Phase Hunter Mount and the Dark Portal Hearthstone skin. Obviously those people who bought both mounts off the Blizzard Shop were having fun, despite the visible annoyance to a lot of other people. 

I guess the best thing we can do make our own fun, so long as it's not done so as to annoy others. After all, it could be worse. Such as using an honest to god ERP brothel in an MMO.

*Yes, the cheesy old Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis movie.

**Sometimes, you just have to kill things for their drops. In this case, I wanted enough cloth to level Tailoring so I could make some Frostweave Pants for Neve. Yes, she's a Frost Mage, so getting a bonus in Frost damage is always a good thing, especially if it means she's not totally outgunned when she crosses the Dark Portal.

***Raids have a separate dynamic from smaller group content, so I identified them separately.

****Of course, a quick name change --and maybe a guild change-- and you're back in the saddle, ready to ride again. Kind of sad if you think about it. Blizz laughs all the way to the bank, and the player gets off (mostly) scot-free.

 

Do You Have a Moment to Hear The Good News About The Meta?

Remember when I posted this YouTube video a few entries ago?

 

Well, now is as good a time as any to discuss this.

John's premise in the video is that anybody who has 'solved' an MMORPG and figured out the optimal path toward achieving the goals set out in said game is providing people with the 'metagame'. No, not the Facebook 'Meta', which is abjectly silly and just marketing speak for trying to bring as many disparate concepts/items/whatever under one roof*, but something quite different. 

This is the roadmap of "how to level in TBC Classic properly", or the definitive boss strategy in raids. Or the optimal raid composition and/or class spec for raiding. Or how to get yourself attuned (or Attune-d (tm), couldn't resist) most efficiently. Or.... Well, you get the idea.

But to continue, Josh believes that the metagame or 'meta' is ruining MMORPGs because it eliminates player choice. 

Yes, you read that right. And, once you hear him out, you'll likely agree with him.

The entire point of the meta is that it is the optimal way of doing something. And if that is the optimal solution presented to the gaming community, why would you do anything else BUT that? To do so is to cheat yourself of the best solution in a game. 

I was reminded once again of the metagame after the Friday Karazhan run** when during the Discord chatting post-raid someone mentioned about getting rep for Cenarion Expedition. Another person chimed in with how you "ought to do it" by buying those Unidentified Plant Parts and turn those in, one after another, until you reach Honored. Then you can go questing and get the rep needed rather than running Steamvault multiple times. Considering that I just went out and quested on Linna, not really caring about rep, until I hit Honored and the Plant Parts left in my bag*** were useless. But I was more annoyed that I knew about the meta for Cenarion Expedition rep and I deliberately chose not to do it, and I was --unintentionally-- having my nose rubbed in a pile of dogshit because of my choice.

And that's the thing about the meta: it exists, and because it exists you are always reminded of it even when you aren't following it. Unless you turn off Discord or chats and eschew grouping in favor of solitary play. Even then, the knowledge that a meta exists in some form or another will haunt you, despite your protestations of innocence. 

After all, even I end up on some WoW websites, trying to figure out the optimal builds and talent trees for my toons. Those published entries are as much a metagame as Attune or other attunement walkthroughs, and a not so secret reason why I haven't gone into any 5-person instances on Linna**** is because I messed up and took an extra level to finally get the talent for Blessing of Kings, and I didn't want to blow any extra gold on resetting my talent trees just to fix my screw up. 

And then I thought, "Why the hell should I be apologizing for not having the 'right' build, anyway?"

My brain almost immediately responded with multiple instances in the past where I was in instances, learning, and being told that I suck and the rest of the people dropping group. 

"Oh, right."

Then I thought about guild groups, and then I remembered that I was --rather politely-- told to 'get gud' by being 'counseled' on how to improve my DPS in SSC/The Eye and in Naxx.

***

Oh, you didn't know about that in Naxx?

Oh yes, I was given some unsolicited 'counseling' by a fellow guildie one evening --who didn't even run a Mage as anything other than a lasher farming alt-- on how to maximize my DPS. I was seething afterward, because I knew exactly where I needed to go but gear held me back, and here was someone who didn't even take part in our Mage Crew discussions trying to tell me what to do. I basically took the 'advice' and threw it in the trash, because I had my own roadmap and I knew that the rest of the Mage crew would back me up.

And now, having been on the other side of the raiding leadership, I know how this works: someone in raid leadership asked him to talk to me about it, rather than asking my class lead who was likely not involved at all. (And I have a really good feeling as to who it was who asked him, too.) Even though I didn't raid with him in TBC Classic (or that part of guild leadership), that experience soured me considerably on whether some random person might want to 'help' me by 'informing' me of the meta for whatever it is I'm doing.

So yeah, I don't need any guild groups in 5-person instances while I'm learning things, thankyouverymuch. 

Even if I did want to group up in guild, guildies would soon learn about my toons outside of the auspices of the guild and start adding them to their friends list. The only person who knows Neve and Linna are attached to me is my questing buddy, and I prefer it that way. A few other people are aware that I boosted a Paladin in case Ret were needed, but that's all they know.

***

Regardless, Josh's 'solution' isn't one that I think would work. You'll have to watch the video to form your own opinion, but my belief is that the meta is here to stay, and it will pretty much rule the MMOs that already have been 'figured out' because of human nature. 

If you ask someone what their goal is in playing an MMO such as WoW Classic, what is the answer?

How many say 'To win"?

How many say "To have fun"?

But the kicker is what does 'winning' and 'fun' mean to people? 

If it means 'endgame', odds are very good that it also means utilizing the metagame to win the endgame. Even if 'having fun' means that people want to 'raid with friends', eventually raid leadership will have to come to some hard decisions about people who simply aren't doing a very good job but happen to be good friends. Who do you pick, the friendship or finishing a raid tier?*****

If it means 'winning PvP', it means following the PvP meta. After all, the PvP crowd is more intensely driven to winning and min/maxing their way to success than even progression raiders.

If it means doing anything other than that, then perhaps the meta doesn't matter that much. But to an MMORPG, where everything is geared around Endgame and PvP and raiding, the meta will still rule.

***

So....

Where does this leave me?

Probably trying my damnedest to keep my head down, run the Friday Kara until it simply isn't viable anymore, and just mind my own business. Eventually I'll get over this funk, and since I've got about 10 months or so until Wrath drops I've got plenty of time. I can console myself in that no matter what MMO I play, there will be a meta lurking out there, so it's not like I can change a game and free myself from the metagame. It's all about the community, and how overt --or backhanded-- they are in pushing people toward the metagame that matters.

And that last statement probably deserves a post of its own.

 

*There's another Josh Strife Hayes video on that, right here:

**You remember the person who was interested in learning to raid lead and was offered --without my knowledge-- a chance at running my Friday Kara run? He never followed through. I was going to contact him directly, but I was told to wait to see if he followed up with me. So far, he hasn't. Of course, he might contact me this week because that's just my luck. I post about it, and it happens.

***And a few mailed over by my questing buddy.

****Outside of 'Normal' runs for Hellfire Ramparts, Blood Furnace, etc. being very hard to find.

*****A couple of weeks ago, during the Friday Kara someone said in Discord that they missed raiding with me on Mondays. "Thanks," I replied, "but you at least have [raider's name] now, and she brings 300-400 more DPS than me." And nobody said a word about missing raiding with me after that. It's very easy to assuage your own guilt by saying platitudes, but the reality is that my replacement brings significantly more DPS than me. People can't deny the uncomfortable fact that when I replaced her for Vashj in SSC on my very last progression raid night we couldn't bring Vashj down. The next week, they nailed her on the second try. My questing buddy continues to insist that I'm missing the point and that people do miss me, but I believe I just simply said the quiet part out loud that nobody wanted to admit.

Distractions, Distractions

Today has been a day for LoFi music.

Part of that is dealing with the unexpected stuff at work, part of it is the ice storm that's currently trying to switch over to snow right now. 

This is what it was like around mid-morning.
That's ice and ice pellets on the ground and
road. Not snow or slush. And I was not crazy
enough to go driving in it. (Photo from the
Cincinnati Enquirer.)

 

And part of it is just dealing with the hand I was dealt with in Classic.

***

I got on Card this morning, when nobody else was around (and at work there was a (very boring) all hands meeting talking about sales), and killed some mobs for the Frostsaber questline. I never really did any of those quests because I never really wanted a Frostsaber*, and to be fair there's a lot of quests up in Winterspring that I never did on Card, so there's plenty of quest opportunity there. Because of that, Card is about halfway to L63 right now, still not having gone to Outland, and at this rate I think she can make L64 fairly easily before the grind starts to get extreme.

But it's something to do, you know, when I'm not on Neve.

I did get on Season of Mastery for a bit, but I discovered that quick leveling does have one big problem: you outlevel your ability to make gold for training purposes very fast. Since you then have to spend time grinding crafting so you can sell it on the AH and make gold that way, it slows you down a bit on an artificial basis. Still, the pace of leveling is actually, well, fun. It's faster than the old Classic servers, naturally, but it just feels smoother, I guess. I haven't gotten to the mid-30s, which is where Classic really started to slow down (before TBC Classic gave leveling a boost with XP tweaks), so we'll see when I get there.

Those two things serve as a distraction, of course, because the big question mark is what to do with Briganaa. 

I've thought about taking her to another guild's raid that fits in more with my time slot, but some of the guilds I'd have considered either left the server or blew up and don't have much of a presence at all any more.

"What happened to Conquerors?" I asked when I heard that another guild, Midnight Souls, blew up a few weeks ago. "I haven't seen any of them around much lately."

"Oh, they imploded several months ago," someone replied. "No big loss if you ask me."

Considering I'd never had any bad interactions with them, I was kind of surprised.

So.... Scratch off two potential guild landing spots.

Even so, I'm not exactly sure if I want to just go raid somewhere else right now, anyway. I did raid with another guild's alts on Az for a while back in Classic, but when that raid stopped being able to down Ragnaros due to geared people leaving, I found out that other guilds don't have it as well as we did. And with people not really spamming LFG (or using the LFG tool) to set up dungeon runs as much these days, there isn't as much of a chance to get to know people before I'd consider joining a raid opening.

Plus, there's that little matter of running the gearing up rat race should I join another guilds' raids, and.... No. I'm good for now.

So I'll just pull Brig out of the garage on Fridays, and occasionally help out when my questing buddy needs a second for making spellcloth, but I think that Brig is going to just not be my focus for a while. I'm just not into the complexity of her rotation, and I'd rather not be told how to up my DPS by people I barely know. 

There's always the option of server transfers, but I'm not really interested in that right now. If I transfer anywhere, it's faction transferring rather than server transferring.

***

There is at least one option available that I've not fully explored: Final Fantasy XIV.

As nice as it has been seeing FF XIV kind of stick it to WoW without really trying, and that FF XIV has a ton of story that's (apparently) well done, there's a lot about FF XIV that makes me uneasy. The whole "stick a leaf on your name so people know you're new" does kind of bother me when you're trying to just kind of blend in and not be noticed. FF XIV does encourage people to help out newbies, but you know, I'd rather not be helped if it means everybody knowing you're new.

And there's the art part about FF XIV. You know, the part that screams "anime": bunny people, cat people, tiny people that have a vaguely childlike look about them. Thankfully, that last group don't make me feel as dirty as when I see the Elin in TERA.** There's the anime look of the humans too, which simply doesn't do it for me, because the little anime I watched were first generation anime, like Speed Racer and Star Blazers/Space Battleship Yamato. I don't have that generational connection to the genre and art that it seems a ton of people do now, so it's just not my thing.

Still, it is a possibility. If I can find a server that works for me. I already poked around enough to try to create a toon on my son's server only to find that they're not accepting new toons there now.

Oops.

*I did the raptor grind on Quintalan back in Wrath, so I knew what the grind meant.

**I still cringe when I think about it. The fanservice to the outfits in TERA aside, the Elin alone --as well as the players who "dress" their Elin in the most revealing outfits possible-- make me want to vomit. There's a reason why I uninstalled the game, and it has nothing to do with how my Elves looked while playing.

EtA: Frostsaber, not Wintersaber. Oops.

The Wandering Eye

Unlike his big sister, my son plays Final Fantasy XIV these days. Part of the attraction is his love of the FF series, which he's played every iteration (as far as I know), and the other part is that all of his friends play FFXIV. I've walked by his room --door shut, naturally-- hearing him working out an instance with his friends, all the while smiling to myself. 

So when he mentioned to me that yeah, they've been seeing a big influx of WoW refugees lately, that intrigued me.

I'd bought the game during the Steam Summer Sale --there ya go, Syl!-- so it's been sitting there, waiting for me to download, but that interest in FFXIV far predates the current issues with WoW. As my son pointed out, I'd had it on my Steam Wishlist for several years now. So when I began to pay attention to all of the posts and videos about people leaving for FFXIV I felt simultaneously ahead and behind the curve.

But this particular video attracted my attention, because it was done by Jesse Cox, whom (along with WoWCrendor) at one time I'd linked to over in the links section of the blog.*

Yes, it really did attract my attention.
Be warned, it's 1/2 hour long.

I knew Retail was in trouble, but not to this extent. 

***

The thing is, I can see the origin story of a lot of Retail WoW's current problems in TBC Classic.

Just look at the endless grinding of dailies --normal and heroic instances-- for badges, for rep, to unlock said heroics, and to unlock the various attunements. Were it not for the retail inspired Meta of chain running instances, rushing to max level, and total grinding to get all the attunements and rep grinds done ASAP, I'd likely have never noticed the obvious connection between TBC and Shadowlands' rep grinds and gated content. The emphasis on spreading out and making people grind to get the mats to craft gear --particularly in Tailoring-- has created an environment where people would find grinding anything preferable to the crafting grind.** The grind and the speed of leveling has encouraged and/or required the leveling of alts so you can do all the things, and alts are still very much a huge part of Shadowlands today.

And I haven't even touched on the reputation of the player base either. 

Even some of Retail's narrative problems can be traced to TBC era WoW, as the WoW comics began publication during TBC, and their storyline directly contributed to the TBC storyline. That last part is critically important as Blizzard had published novels before, but until that point these non-video game publications hadn't become required reading to figure out what's going on in the current WoW story. This effectively offloaded a significant portion of the narrative, which meant that the WoW devs could spend more time working on what became the holy trinity of WoW: raids, dungeons, and PvP.***

***

Are other MMOs a panacea to the problems WoW has? That is a question I can't answer. I haven't played FFXIV (yet), and the single player centric nature of Elder Scrolls Online won't necessarily appeal to everybody. SWTOR continues to hang on with their niche audience, as does LOTRO, and the original storylines for both continue to impress me the longer time has gone on. There are other new MMOs on the horizon, most notably (for me) New World, and they will have their time to shine too.

But all good things do come to an end, and right now WoW is more vulnerable than at any other time in their past. I'd never count them out, but outside of deliberate scheduling tricks --something WoW has done in the past on a fairly frequent basis-- their well of goodwill is currently dry. They've got their endgame raids, dungeons, and PvP, but I don't think that's enough to keep a decent portion of the player base. Maybe that's the portion of the player base that the WoW leadership cares about, but that alone isn't enough to keep WoW viable for the long haul.

*I swear, Blogger, get yer act together and support more native controls for other Google applications. This isn't hard, people. If Wordpress can do it, surely one of the largest corporations on the planet can do it. And if they need programmers, I happen to know one who's pretty damn good at her job.

**Enter LFR in a later expac, after crafted gear became less important in Wrath and Cata. There were times in both expacs where I felt that I was the only one who even bothered with crafting gear in those two expacs, particularly with the introduction of Heirloom gear in Wrath. 

***I could add a fourth pillar to that trinity: the rush to max level. Sometimes I wonder why WoW devs even bother with the leveling process if the whole point is to just raid, run dungeons, or do PvP.

 

EtA: Corrected some grammar mistakes.