Well, whaddya know...

Remember this post??

About how I saw that Blizz was doing a naming purge and I'd considered subbing for a month just to keep the names alive.

Well, guess what appeared in my inbox a few days ago:

No electrons were harmed in the screenshot of this e-mail.

Sometimes you just can't make this shit up.

I mean, if I were to write this sort of coincidence in a novel, people would say "Hell, Redbeard, at least be realistic every once in a while!" But I've still got the e-mail to prove it exists.

What have I done with this opportunity?

Not much, if you consider accepting the free trial and keeping an eye on the PC as it downloaded 11 GB of updates "not much".

I've not actually logged in or anything. That also means I've not

• found out if I've been purged from the (mostly dead) Alliance guild my toons were in. It has been a year since I last was subbed, after all.
• discovered what my toons actually look like since they've been redone.*
• checked to see what my (miniscule) friends list is up to.
• ventured into a BG to watch the Alliance lose.**

Will I end up doing much of anything with this free time? Not likely, no. I doubt my frustrations with BG imbalance have suddenly changed, and if I were serious about returning to the game I'd start over with a new toon and level to 90 before buying Warlords, and by the time that happens Blizzard would be ready to drop their next expac.

But at least my stable of toons will survive the next purge, which is fine with me.

*Seriously, Turbine, you have to get better looking toons for LOTRO. At least make the toons look as good as the background scenery, please.

**Come on, some things never change.

Mark Your Calendars

Warlords of Draenor will drop on November 13th, 2014.

Here's the trailer:

All done?  Good.

Given the focus of the cinematic, I think it's pretty plain we're back to a Horde-centric story.  It also feels like, well, a bit like this:

That doesn't mean that all that's old is new again and we're back to the original Warcraft stuff, but it is definitely a throwback in design.

But I just can't get excited for it.

No demons here, move along. Nothing that says "the Alliance will play an integral part of this expac," either.

Welcome to Draenor 2.

Whole Lotta Slimming Going On

Courtesy of Rohan of Blessing of Kings, I found out about this little tidbit from MMO-Champion:

"Questing

• The Jade Forest quests had a very clear story, but it also had a lot of side quests that could bog you down.
• In Warlords of Draenor, your map will show you where to go to continue the main storyline, along with the locations of bonus objectives.
• The bonus objectives no longer have any story text that go with them, just a list of objectives. Now when there is quest text, you will know that it is really worth reading."*

My first, flippant remark on Blessing of Kings' comment section was that Blizz is cutting corners rather than being innovative. And really, on the face of it that sure seems to be the case. But I wonder if this is just another nail in the coffin for all previous WoW content.

Consider: you buy WoD, you can get an instant L90 upgrade. You'll also be allowed to purchase additional L90 upgrades as well. Both of these, taken together, mean that you don't have to play any of the previous content at all to play WoW. 

Now, add the quest "slimming" to the mix, and you've got a recipe tailor made for people who say "the game only starts at max level". The only way it could get easier to get to max level would be to show up in different places, watch a cutscene, battle a boss, and move to the next location.**

I'm sure Blizzard is viewing this as a win-win situation. After all, consider the following positives:

• Less time coming up with clever ways to describe how to kill ten rats.
• Shuts up the complainers who say that leveling is a bore and takes time away from raiding.
• Partially cuts the legs out from under the shadowy business of third party "we'll level your toon for you" routines.
• Focuses the storyline so that authors don't have a myriad of new names to keep track of when writing novels.***
• Makes the game seem more like Guild Wars 2, which has a similar mechanic, but on a reduced scale.
• Allows Blizzard to put more time into Scenarios and Raids for important content, rather than spending time trying to explain side quests.

However, all I can think of is one thing:

Mankrik's Wife.

Side quests give a zone a flavor just as much as art and music. Were it not for the side quests, the "kill ten rats" quests, we'd never have come to know Mankrik's Wife, one of the most well known memes in the game. The original Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest --that maddening quest that would fill up your bag space-- gave pre-Cata Stranglethorn Vale as much flavor as all the ganking going on. The old questline in pre-Cata Thousand Needles to assist Magistrix Elosai in searching for a cure for the Blood Elves' magical addition would be gone, as would Apprentice Mirveda's attempts to cleanse the Dead Scar in Eversong Woods.

Life --even online MMO life-- is filled with little quirks and oddball things. Quest slimming would eliminate a large part of that, in favor of speed and efficiency. Which begs the question: is this a game, or a job?

*MMO-Champion is referencing this developer interview held at PAX East 2014 on YouTube.

**Or you could just buy a max level toon. Opening up Pandora's Box by allowing people to buy an expac's starting level means that it's not out of the realm of the possibility.

***Any expanded universe of novels --Dragonlance, Thieves' World, Forgotten Realms, Star Wars, or Star Trek, for starters-- has to deal with this problem. And, I've been told, it's not pretty.

Hope you Don't Mind Waiting....

...but the WoW Facebook feed mentioned --as part of the "pre-order and get an instant L90" campaign-- that Warlords of Draenor launches this Fall.

Not Spring.

Not Summer.

Fall.

I suspected as much, given that a new Arena season just started, but this confirms it.

Commence hand wringing in three... two... one...

How the Mighty Have Fallen

For some reason I had the urge to check my old L13 Tauren Hunter, which I'd created somewhere around mid-Wrath era, so I had to switch servers to Stormscale-US.

It was then, during the server switching, that I noticed it.

Ysera-US had fallen so far in population that it now had the dreaded "New Players" tag on it.

I didn't know that an old server such as Ysera could get the New Players tag, but there it was.

I perused Area 52-US where Q and Neve reside, and it was still going strong. Actually, it was even stronger than before because I noted it was full, something that only rarely happened during Wrath and not at all during Cataclysm. But now that I think about it, that 10:1 Horde bias on A-52 probably explains its activity. If you're tired of fighting unintentional PvP such as in the Timeless Isle, it's easier to simply move to a server where your faction is the majority.

Perhaps this is the true fallout of the decline of WoW's population: the biggest servers get huge and the not quite as big suffer.

***

I guess it's not too early to consider what class I'll be playing in the next WoW expac. The past few expacs I've played classes that were natural enemies (Warlock and Rogue), the newbie special (Paladin), and the glass cannon (Mage). I'll also freely confess that a small part of the reason why I decided on a Rogue this expac was due to Rogues carving people up left and right in PvP, not guessing that Blizzard was going to nerf Rogues heavily in response for Mists.

Therefore, this next expac I'm going to choose a class that will do the following:

• Not a class I've previously played to max level (or close enough to max level)
• Hold its own in PvP/BGs
• Not be a candidate for major nerfing
• Not require a complete overhaul of my UI
• Be fun to play

I put the most important one last, but that's pretty much a no-brainer. Since Arms Warriors, BM Hunters, and Disco Priests are the current awesomesauce of BGs, I can cross those classes off of my list. I'm also crossing off a return to my Warlock because I not only suspect they'll be in for a mild nerfing but that by the time I reached L74 there were simply too many buttons to keep track of without dedicating a lot of time. I may not want the old Ret Paladin method of whack-a-mole in deciding what button to push, but there comes a point where you reach information paralysis due to too many options.

As it is, I've been looking into a Druid or Shaman for the next expac, but I'm more than a bit concerned about the UI portion of those classes. I could swing any of my previous classes with one or two UI tweaks (of course, back in Wrath era the Pally Power add-on was absolutely essential to track Blessings), but knowing both classes will require a larger investment in time for the UI doesn't exactly give me the warm fuzzies.

Time to do some research, I suppose.

***

In spite of my best attempts, when faced with choices in a video game I tend to choose the "good" option. Like how my son explained his decision to abandon his Imperial Agent in SWTOR, I have a hard time doing morally bad things.

So I have an even harder time explaining why I'm playing my Bounty Hunter more balanced between light and dark side than any other toon.

I think some of it was due to the class story on Nar Shadda, where I showed mercy to someone and it turned out that they squealed on me after all.* That surprised me a bit, and probably influenced my decisions from that point onward to not give someone a chance to shoot you in the back later. Were it not for that, I'm almost certain I would have played out the decisions in the immediate post-Nar Shadda questline differently.

And yes, I'm not comfortable making those decisions.

I definitely went dark at the end of Makeb expac (Imperial side), but that was more due to the accumulated dislike of the main antagonist, and his gloating about how we were going to lose in the end anyway. That, however, didn't change the overall outlook of my Sith Sorcerer. She'd survived through the Machiavellian nature of Sith politics and had gone primarily Light Side to do it, so this one turn to the Dark Side after a long period of trending Light wasn't going to have a great impact. But my Bounty Hunter's personality is still forming, and the Nar Shadda incident had a greater influence than I'd like.

Those people who are able to explore the dark side of a game, such as SWTOR or Baldur's Gate, have caught both my appreciation and my curiosity.

To understand where I'm coming from, I'll reach into my gamer past with one of the classic Machiavellian board games, Diplomacy. For those who don't know it, Diplomacy is a game about the great European powers in World War I, but it was really about psychological manipulation. Each player took the role of one of the major powers (Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire), and would each turn move armies and/or fleets into different territories. Movements were submitted secretly and then read out in order and placed on the board. The movements were simple enough, and you couldn't lose an army or navy unless your unit had to retreat and had nowhere to retreat to. The complexity in the game centered around the period before the moves, which is when the players would talk among themselves as to what to do. (Think of the television show Survivor, and you've got the idea.)

I used to play Diplomacy a lot in college. Initially my friends and I would play in face-to-face games that would last hours**, but then when we gained access to the VAX system on campus and it's e-mail, we migrated online. As you can probably guess, a few players were more conniving and bloodthirsty than others, and other players were just very good at manipulating others. What I discovered was that with few exceptions the people who were the best at playing Diplomacy were the people you didn't want to hang around with outside of Diplomacy. Very often, those people who were great at Diplomacy were like that in real life; they couldn't establish boundaries inside and outside the game.

This brings me back to playing a Dark Side/Evil character. For those people who can separate the game playing from real life and can play a Dark Side character, I think it's great. I'm glad you can. But I can't do it, and I wonder about some of the people who do play those Dark Side characters, and whether they're just letting their personal beliefs manifest in game form.

No, I don't mean everybody, and I certainly don't believe there's a ton of really scary people playing some of these MMOs, but there are people who I run into online who set off the "Danger, Will Robinson!" alert in my head. And when some of those people open up their mouths in Gen Chat, well... Let's just say I'm glad they don't live next door to me.





*I'm aware that the story probably adjusted to whether I showed mercy or not by inserting that extra line about "So and so was right after all", but it still doesn't diminish the impact when I heard it.

**Much pizza was consumed during those games, typically the cheapest we could find.

Paging White Wolf.... Someone is taking your WoD moniker...

(I keep wondering when someone else is going to point out that White Wolf's World of Darkness has been using WoD since the Vampire: the Masquerade RPG was released back in 1991, but I guess it's just me.)

Seems that everybody else is jumping on the Warlords of Draenor commentary, so as usual I'm bringing up the rear.

Here are some thoughts about the announced WoW expansion:

• Blizzard is taking dead aim at EQ Next.
  
  Remember how EQ Next will be more of a sandbox with player housing?  Blizzard does, and the new Garrison ability is designed to counter that.  The idea is to give a player just enough of a taste of the sandbox that they won't be tempted by EQ Next's bigger sandbox environment.  Blizz isn't about to change their themepark MMO environment into a sandbox, so they decided that most players will only want a little bit of a sandbox instead.  Of course, this could backfire on Blizz to where enough players say "Hey, this sandbox is kind of fun, maybe I'll go try out EQ Next and see what it is like." But knowing Blizz' track record, I doubt it.
  
• The rest of Azeroth doesn't matter.
  
  If you didn't realize this when Cataclysm's revamped Azeroth left Outland, Northrend, and the BC starting zones out of whack (story wise), then they made it pretty plain with Warlords of Draenor.  They expect to give an account a free jump to L90 with a purchase of WoD, and "learning to play your class" means "going to the Proving Grounds".  This is the real intention of the Proving Grounds; to make all of the legacy software in WoW irrelevant.  Sure, you can level the old fashioned way, but Blizzard doesn't want you to.  The solution to fixing story problems caused by Cataclysm is to simply pretend that they don't exist; they want a new player to skip years of MMO development so you can get to the end game.
  
• "It's all about the endgame" is what WoW is about.
  
  That refrain about endgame is how WoW has kept its dominance over all other MMOs to this point.  Any other challenger to WoW's crown has been smacked down because of players who rush to the level cap and then complain that there's nothing to do.  While WoW has fallen victim to that complaint before (see: Cataclysm), Blizzard has kept WoW going with enough new endgame content to keep its core subscriber base satisfied.* Now, with WoD's "instant L90" and the Proving Grounds, Blizzard is basically saying that those people who claim "endgame is where the game begins" were right all along. A new player can buy all of the WoW stuff**, jump to L90, hang around in the Proving Grounds for a few hours, and take off for Draenor. No fuss, no muss.
  
  On the flip side of that, Blizzard is running the risk of eliminating one of their big edges over their competition:  their years of developing the world of Azeroth.  You can spend up to a year playing one toon and still not reach the level cap, but by eliminating that richness of the experience, Blizzard is reducing the entire WoW focus to ten levels and raiding.  A smart company can exploit that should there be delays once the level cap is reached.
  
• The devs didn't watch Star Trek.
  
  The City on the Edge of Forever by Harlan Ellison ought to be required viewing for anyone who wants to make time travel the centerpiece of an MMO expansion.***  To stop someone from altering the timeline, you jump to a period just prior to their entrance into the timeline and stop them when they appear.  Allowing them to work their disruption and THEN show up to put the pieces back together just makes for messy storytelling and makes suspension of disbelief incredibly hard to pull off.
  
  The devs wanted to go to Draenor; I get that.  And I get that probably 70% of WoW players won't care because they just want to kill stuff and hang with their friends.  But surely they could come up with a better excuse to go to Draenor than this.  This just seems like they had "Heroes of the Storm" on the brain when they dreamed up "let's have them all go back to kill Gul'dan and company!"
  
• The devs DID read comics.
  
  This story smacks of comic book alternate Earths.  The difference here is that while the alternate Earth idea for comics came about because too many authors had written stories that simply couldn't be reconciled without this handwaving, WoW had much tighter control over the story and the direction of the game. They shouldn't have gotten themselves into this sort of trouble --in game-- where they needed to perform this time travel handwaving.
  
• And Doctor Who... Don't go there.
  
  Keep The Doctor --and The Master-- out of it.  I'm quite looking forward to The Day of the Doctor on November 23rd, and I don't want to have arguments claiming that The Doctor was the model for Azerothian time travel disrupting it.
  
  Besides, I'll sic a Weeping Angel after you if you suggest such a thing.
  
• The Old Gods are Behind This.
  
  I guarantee it.  We'll probably find out that the Infinite Dragonflight is behind this, with the Old Gods pulling their strings.  Why?  Because who else would hate both the current Azeroth and the Burning Legion?  Blizzard has shown via the Mists storyline that they're unwilling to deviate from the Legion, the Lich King, or the Old Gods as the big bad for the end of an expac, so this expac will be no different.
  
  The final boss?  A corrupted Nozdormu, who creates the Infinite Dragonflight from the Bronze Dragonflight.  Pure speculation, but there's two groups that have access to time travel, and this wraps everything up in a complete package.
  
• Trolls will show up somewhere.
  
  There hasn't been a WoW expac without them as an adversary, so why stop now?
  
• Blizzard continues to get a lot of mileage out of their graphics engine.
  
  New character models notwithstanding, from Vanilla through Mists the artists have been able to maximize the terrain to great effect.  If you look closely at the terrain, it's still the same old stuff that's out there in the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, but just reworked to maximum effect.  I believe this will continue to be the case with WoD.
  
• Warlords of Draenor won't get a release date until EQ Next and Wildstar have one first.
  
  It's a game of one-upsmanship, and Blizzard has shown that they intend to wield their power as the 800 lb gorilla of the MMO market to maximum effect.  Wildstar's devs have said that they intend to go straight after WoW, so expect WoD to drop right before Wildstar does.  As much as I think this entire behavior is infantile, there's no denying that it works.

I guess I had more to get off my chest than I expected.  I know I've got some months --maybe even years, if I go and do what I usually do and start a new class from scratch-- before I make a decision on WoD, but I find myself stuck on the entire concept of the thing.  This expac has the feel of a Michael Bay movie, where it's all pretty, but there's nothing at it's heart that makes sense.

*Just a guess, but I suspect that 2-3 million of the subscriber base are what I'd call WoW's core players, those who'd play WoW until they turned off the lights.

**Not a cheap investment, by the way.  It's still somewhere over $100 if you will buy all of the expacs + Warlords of Draenor when it comes out, unless Blizz really cuts the price on all of the previous expacs to a minimal charge.

***Back to the Future I through III comes in a close second.  Oh, and while I don't like Harlan's behavior as a human being (go read his Wikipedia entry for an eyeful), there's no denying he wrote some classic SF.

Edit:  Fixed some punctuation and grammar errors.