Miscellaneous Thoughts on a Saturday Night

You'd think that I'd have learned by now that a lot of MMOs are in "easy mode" compared to Age of Conan. Unless you're deliberately pushing to level through questing and you jump straight into a new expac*, the average MMO's quest mobs are easily handled.

But nooo...  I have to go login as my Barbarian and rush right on into the first mob I see.  Which, in traditional AoC fashion, will also cause a nearby mob to also aggro and swoop down on me.

Scratch one Barbarian.

What was that line Conan said when he was praying to Crom? "And if you don't grant me this, then to hell with you!"

Yeah, somewhere Crom is laughing at me.

***

After my previous post about the Love is in the Air event on WoW, I discovered that Aion has a similar event. Curious, I tried searching for info on it, and discovered that you can exchange gifts as well as buy items from the store. The F2P nature of Aion does make the promotion of buying items a bit more front and center than in WoW, but it isn't too badly done. Now, if they'd get rid of the spamming...

Anyway, why don't MMOs have some events like the Olympics? Sport is fairly universal, and PvP and other competitions would seem natural for an MMO's special event. As for those who would claim that you'd want a special event to be open to even the purely PvE people, I'd also point out that the WoW events haven't exactly changed much over the years. Given their prevalence and PvE orientation (with the notable exception of one item in Children's Week), it would seem that a PvP oriented event would be a natural thing. In pre-Cata times I'd have suggested races at the Mirage Raceway, but of course that's under several hundred feet of water now.

***

I was perusing the materials for the D&D Next adventure "Murder at Baldur's Gate"** when I was struck by nostalgia. The Bioware classics Baldur's Gate I and II invigorated the CRPG genre, and reading about the history of the city in the game materials was like a stroll through the past. I spent many an hour working my way through the game, enjoying where the story went, and I can still see the influence of this game on Bioware's later works (including SWTOR).

But seeing the statue of Minsc and Boo among the artwork brought a smile to my lips.

"Go for the eyes, Boo!"

From Murder at Baldur's Gate, Wizards of the Coast.

*This is what happened when I jumped straight into Mists of Pandaria when I hit L85.  I'd just entered Uldum at the time and had maybe a couple of pieces of gear that were better than Hyjal/Vash'jir greens. For an underpowered Rogue, jumping straight into the Jade Forest was a brick wall.

**It is not edition specific, so you can play it with D&D 3.x (and, presumably, Pathfinder), D&D 4e, and D&D Next.  D&D Next is still in development, and will be released officially later in the year.

Time for that Love Thang

Ah, February.

The time when a young man's fancy turns to college basketball.* Bitter rivalries in league games are played out throughout the month as teams jockey for position for the upcoming conference tournaments in early March.  The NCAA Tournament is on the horizon, and who gets in and who is left out becomes watercooler topic #1.

What, you were expecting something else?

Oh, THAT.  With three kids in the house, Valentine's Day does NOT mean love and kisses, it means cards. Lots and lots of Valentine's Day cards. And the "who is going with who" and "who sent who an anonymous Valentine's Day card" drama.  Certainly not romance.

If there's one event that seems out of touch with your standard MMO fare, it's the Valentine's Day events.

You could make arguments about the global appeal of festivals surrounding the Summer and Winter, Harvest and the New Year, and even the Spring and Brewing (another Harvest Festival, really), and I'd only point out the Western origins of most of them.  Still, most cultures do have festivals covering topics such as those listed above.** But Valentine's Day is so much a holiday rooted in Western Civilization that any reference to it in a Fantasy or Science Fiction MMO unintentionally breaks the fourth wall.

That's doesn't mean that it's not possible for another society to have a holiday based on love and courtship, but a lot of cultures do tend to combine Spring festivals with fertility rites.*** Festivals grounded in sexual desire and a big fat party (/cough Spring Break /cough) are distinctly different than the modern Valentine's Day, yet we see the latter in MMOs (Brewfest) as opposed to the former.

You won't be seeing this sort of art out of the official
Love is in the Air material,  but it makes
for inspired fan art.****   (From Wowhead.)

WoW's Love is in the Air event doesn't change much at all from year to year. Much like the modern Valentine's Day, you're sent scurrying around for cards and candy for different people.  There's also the everpresent questline to defeat the purveyors of the "love sickness". But that's pretty much it. Kind of cute, kind of harmless, and right in line with the expectations my kids had when passing Valentine's Day cards around at school.*****

And it is soon forgotten.

It's too bad, really, because WoW is so caught up with chasing the next expac that events like this are on autopilot. I'd argue that a Valentine's Day festival really doesn't fit in with what they're trying to do with WoW (as far as squeaky clean image goes), but if you're going to do it, make it different than something my kids do on February 14th. Make it an Azerothian event, something that you don't just put a thin veneer on and call it good enough.

Hallow's End, while keeping a lot of the modern trappings of Halloween, is Azeroth's. The Midsummer Fire Festival is Azeroth's. Love is in the Air, not so much.

Now that I think about it, a lot of what I think of the Valentine's Day problem is simply that Blizzard never bothers to show us the parts of Azeroth that festivals like Love is in the Air and Noblegarden are about: love, marriage, spring renewal. They just don't exist in Azeroth. Oh, they could, but they don't.  The middle school humor surrounding the occasional marriage/courting questline (the Troll one in Zangarmarsh, for example) deflects any reality behind the curtain. Aggra and Thrall's questline in Cataclysm (4.2) is distinctive because it shows Aggra's devotion to Thrall; it is the outlier in the World of Warcraft game.

Blizzard does get into love and marriage, but not in the game itself. You have to hunt down the novels and comics to find those topics, but they are distinctly separate from the actual game.

But it doesn't have to be.

Ironically enough, one MMO that integrates love/marriage into the game story is SWTOR. Bioware has had plenty of practice in integrating relationships into storylines, dating back to Baldur's Gate II, so it shouldn't be a surprise that they did it in their MMO. Even so, it's mostly an interaction with your companion(s) where the questlines come into play. Yes, you can flirt with NPCs --and that does have an impact on relationships with your companions-- but it's not at the same level as companion interaction.

Could Blizzard incorporate a SWTOR-esque interaction in WoW? Only surrounding a questline, such as the Goblin intro story, and even then their options are limited. And to be honest, I doubt they'd even try, since they've already got a formula (raiding and PvP) that makes them money.

Therefore, if love/marriage/romance is going to be injected into a world such as Azeroth, it would have to be done by the players.

And now that I think about it, relying upon the players to fill that void is both blessing and curse. While you may have true RP interactions like that found between Vidyala and Vosskah, you also get... Goldshire.

In the end, I guess the best thing to do in this situation is to just carry on as you were, with the MMO version Valentine's Day festivities pretty much optional.





*"And woman's!" my wife called from the other room.  She grew up in Louisville, and the UofL Cardinals ("GO CARDS!") are in her blood.  As is horse racing, but that's another post.

**Brewfest is kind of the outlier here, but if you acknowledge it is more a harvest festival than anything else, then yeah, it fits.

***But not found in MMOs such as WoW very much, since they avoid the topics of sex and fertility like it was some plague, going with the squeaky clean version of Noblegarden and Love is in the Air instead.

****As someone who can sew, I'd like to point out that the open heart makes for a problem with the rest of the front of that outfit. The top would need stiffer support material built in or the heart covered in mesh to support the top edge properly. What? Never heard of a guy who can sew?

*****I'd even argue that the "love sickness" questline could have originated in discussion among boys about "girl cooties", but there's no proof of that. ;-)


EtA: Updated the pic from a link, as that pic may disappear.

Keeping your Internal Clock Going

If you put your effort and concentration into playing to your potential, to be the best that you can be, I don't care what the scoreboard says at the end of the game, in my book we're gonna be winners.

--Coach Norman Dale (Gene Hackman), Hoosiers

Before Christmas, I spent one evening watching my youngest in her elementary school's Winter music program.  Being in 5th Grade, she was allowed to take lessons in a band instrument (woodwind, brass, or percussion) at the school, so she leapt at the chance to learn the snare drum.* That particular evening, she stood in the back as the school band's lone percussionist, keeping a steady beat for the rest.

Late in the show, just as the band was to start another piece, her music stand tilted and her sheet music went splat on the floor.  Her music teacher, her back to us, looked over at her.  I could tell by the teacher's body language that she asked a question: do you want to go get your music?  My youngest, her face dead serious, shook her head once.  I recognized that face from having played against her in chess: Don't worry, I got this.

The teacher waved her arms, and the band began playing.  My youngest never missed a note and kept up with the rest of the band without a problem.

It was at that point, in a completely out of the blue moment, that I realized part of the reason why she loves playing tanks.

She has the internal clock that all tanks need.

A tank has to have an internal clock that allows them to know when certain things are coming.  Sure, add-ons are nice, but the reality is that a tank is watching a lot more than just what the timers are.  And if you play an MMO that doesn't allow add-ons, then you absolutely have to have a great sense of time.  

When I play an MMO and things seem to be going south during a fight, time for me seems to slow down. Those procs can't come fast enough, and I'm constantly spamming buttons until something happens.  But someone with a good internal clock allows the fight to operate at its own speed; in sports terms it is called "letting the game come to you". Don't press. You can be quick, but not too fast. And if that sounds weird as hell, remember that there is a difference.

Have you ever had nights where you seem to be CC-ing everything in sight, your procs are coming at just the right time, and you've got this rhythm going?  But on another night that you seem to be just off, no matter how hard you're trying, and you just can't get into that groove? That's when you're pressing. You need to back off, relax, and let your internal clock take over.

And if you can do that, you don't need add-ons. Or sheet music.

*One of her goals is to play "Seven Nation Army" by The White Stripes, because "the drummer for the band is a girl." She also loves the music, which never hurts.

General Winter has been invading my MMOs

"Nothing but snow for kilometers either way, and I already can’t feel my toes. Whose idea was it to come here again?"  --Andronikos Revel, upon reaching Hoth



On a day like today, where we got about 6 in/15 cm of snow and the winds are gusting over 30 mph/50 kph, it certainly does feel like Hoth outside.*  You shovel the driveway, and less than three hours later the winds have covered the concrete again in the powdery white stuff.

In that respect, the artists' job of rendering Hoth was spot on.  The equipment is usually kinked to one side courtesy of the winds, and the "roads" are barely there at all.  Hoth has that beaten down, worn out look to it.

Compare Hoth to Ilum, and Ilum has the brilliant stars in the sky as well as a dearth of story incorporating the icy surroundings.  Ilum is beautiful, not beaten down.

Turning to WoW, there's Winterspring.  It's more an idyllic winter scene --complete with monsters, naturally-- but the hot springs and the snow formations make for an inviting journey in the snow.  Hitch up the team to the cart and head on to Everlook, but just keep an eye out for the wolvar.

Storm Peaks is akin to Ilum, starkly beautiful, while Icecrown Glacier suffers under the yoke of the Lich King.  Nowhere else is Arthas so reflected in the scenery than in Icecrown.

The Cimmerian winter areas of Age of Conan, such as Conall's Valley and Eiglophian Mountains, skew toward the Winterspring end in terms of scenery, but the weather is second banana to the foes found there, such as the Vanir and Ymir.  The AoC regions don't have the omnipresent nature of a Lich King, but the sheer volume of enemy encampments dominate the landscape.

But only in Hoth do you see winter rein supreme as the central figure in the zone.





*I can hear the laughter from my Canadian friends all the way down here.

Hey, You Got a PROBLEM wit' Dat?

With all of the snow and colder weather than usual, you'd think that I'd be able to play MMOs a bit more. Well, that's what I thought, anyway, but I was wrong.

Seems that I've spent even more time than in the Fall being the family taxi, which boils down to schlepping kids to and from activities/friends' houses, etc.  And when the day is over, I swear that their clothes must breed in the laundry bin like some bizarre ooze or something.*

And naturally the SWTOR Rakghoul event is starting just as my workload is going up, too.

***

For the first time in a long time, I've begun hanging around an area to protect my faction.

As I'd mentioned in the last post, I've begun hanging around Hellfire Peninsula to protect the Alliance from Horde PvPers.  While I'm technically on a PvE server, the wave of PvP gankers has been on the rise the past few months.  I figured that since I'm not doing much, just waiting around between BGs, the least I could do was flip the PvP switch and protect some fellow Alliance members.

And that first week, I'm glad I did.

Somehow, somewhere, the CRZ for Hellfire Peninsula now includes Area 52.

You know, the large server where Neve and Q can be found.  And the Horde:Alliance ratio is something like 10:1.

So.  That means there's a swarm of A-52 Hordies all over Hellfire, basically raising some hell for the Alliance toons there.  In my informal scans of the area, the Horde outnumbers the Alliance between 2:1 and 3:1. While some Horde toons play nice, others, well, don't.  I've seen L90 toons gank L60 toons, Tarren Mill style, and I've seen Ganklethorn Vale behavior of an L90 toon trailing along at a distance from an L60 toon, just waiting to step in when an Alliance L60 toon swoops in for some PvP action.

I don't go for ganking the low level toons, but I do believe in fairness. And if I see you picking on my faction, I'm going to retaliate. Want to slaughter NPCs at Expedition Point? Fine, Reaver's Fall doesn't need that many questgivers. Trying to torment that L61 Mage working on quests around the Path of Glory? A few judicious sappings will convince you otherwise.  Ganking that L60 DK trying to take the Stadium with your L90 Warlock?  You might want to look behind you, someone just might be there.





*Whenever I venture into the laundry room, I keep expecting to hear Brann Bronzebeard yell "Incoming!!" like he does in the last boss of Halls of Stone.

Miscellaneous Thoughts on the New Year

One thing I dislike about getting back to work after a vacation is that the sheer volume of work awaiting you can be overwhelming.  And, like the polar vortex that brought Canadian weather to the Midwest*, my workload blew me over for several days.

I did, however, get a little bit of gaming in that didn't involve losing at Mario Kart or bricking 3-point shots in Wii Sports Resort.**

I spent one evening as Azshandra, loitering around Hellfire Peninsula to keep the Horde gankers away from the L60 toons.  I'd finished a game of Eye of the Storm and gotten up to get something to drink, and came back to find a Hunter assaulting Honor Hold.  A DK was keeping the Hunter busy, but the Hunter was skilled enough to keep the DK at arm's length.  I jumped into the fray, forcing the Hunter to retreat by air. Meanwhile, a Lock was bothering people at the Stadium, so a Worgen Hunter and I went over there and dealt with that threat.

"The guy isn't very skilled at PvP," I said in Gen Chat after we dispatched him.  "I've seen a single Demo Lock hold off 3-4 people in BGs."

"Yeah," the Worgen replied. "I don't think he feared us once."

"Well, maybe this will attract that Troll Hunter.  I want another crack at him."

"Pains me to say it," the DK added, "but I couldn't DPS him down."

I scouted around, including a foray into Thrallmar, but that Troll Hunter never came back.  (Good riddance.)

But still, I never used to have to worry about this sort of thing very much in a PvE game.  Occasionally there would be some asshat who would slice through a town and kill all the NPCs, but when the auto-leveling of guards to L90 was put in place in the Old World, that sort of thing disappeared.***  I guess it's migrated to Outland, where the lure of ganking new DKs is a powerful attraction.

***

In non-WoW news, I finally finished Makeb, just about catching me up to the current story.  Ironically enough, my Sith Sorcerer is the toon who made it to L55 (and the end of Makeb) first.  In some respects, the Sorcerer (with Lightning Spec) reminds me of my Rogue.  Oh, not with stealth, I'd have had to spec myself differently for that, but with the issues of constantly finding myself undergeared for fights toward the end of a questline.

When I had issues with the elites in the final questline for Makeb, I had to abandon the quest for a while and go run some flashpoints to gear myself up properly.  Then I was able to make some inroads on that last quest, until I met the final boss.

I suspect that a Sorcerer with the right companion would be able to solo the Hutt Boss, but I had Andronikos with me.  I didn't want to waste time gearing up a separate companion for this boss, so I ended up teaming up with a Sith Assassin and working through the boss that way.  Even though I'm specced Lightning (read:  glass cannon), I ended up spending a lot of my time during the fight healing.  The assassin dropped about 2/3 of the way through the fight, but I was able to battle rez him and heal him back up before we wiped.

That last boss fight on Makeb saw me do more healing than I've done in a long while.  I think I have to go back to some of the early instances that I ran with Tomakan as a Holy Spec Pally to match the amount of healing that I did.  Of course, that wasn't a good situation to be in given that I was specced DPS, so I guess you'd have to go back to Wrath-era WoW when I was still playing Quintalan (Ret Spec) to something that was an equivalent.

Still, courtesy of gear repair and a bit of luck, I survived another day.

Oh, and apparently my Sorcerer is married to Andronikos now.  Not sure what the other members of the Dark Council will say about that, but for now they're not saying much of anything.

***

I watched my oldest play LOTRO for a bit the other day and I got the urge to login to my old L16 toon there.  The only thing that's keeping me from doing it is the LOTRO interface.  I have issues reading the interface --and the map in particular-- and I don't want to end up with a headache over something pretty basic.

This is the one place where WoW and SWTOR have an advantage over LOTRO:  the ability to tweak the interface in a meaningful fashion and improve legibility.  WoW allows add-ons which completely revamp the entire interface, and SWTOR's interface adjustments do exactly what I want to improve legibility without sacrificing screen space.  Oh, and the coloring in WoW and SWTOR are much easier on my mumblety-mumble aged eyes.  I may not have color blindness, but I can only imagine the UI coloring in LOTRO playing hell with people who do.

Still, the LOTRO UI interface is better than that in Age of Conan, which often leaves me frustrated when I try to tweak it.

EtA:  Before anyone asks, I know that you can mod the UI in LOTRO.  However, the mods I've found a) keep the same text font, which still isn't the easiest thing for me to read, and b) the map mods don't really replace the current map with quest info into something I can more easily read.




*I've got a new respect for my Canadian friends who deal with -10F/23C temperatures on a regular basis.  Of course, having a home that's insulated for that weather helps too, which the homes in the Ohio Valley sadly aren't. I wonder if Mike Holmes does housecalls.

**If there's one thing that Wii Sports Resort has right with their simulation, it's that I can't shoot worth a damn in basketball, whether it be real life or in the game.

***I once sat, stealthed, on the entrance to Nijel's Point in Desolace and watched an L50 Troll Hunter slowly work their way up the path.  (See a pattern here?)  Once they got close enough, the guards aggroed to L90 and carved him up like he was a rib roast.  I'll confess I did the "/point  /laugh" at him.

What a way to start the new year

I wasn't planning on making this my first post of the year, but I see being an ass in video gamer space is reaching the level of interfering with emergency calls:

Hackers Harass League of Legends Livestreamer with DDOS Attacks

Calling 911 on somebody?  Really?  Just how old are these people, 10?

Alterac Valley: The Spirit of Christmas, Scrooge Style

The Lock was not pleased.  "No, dammit, that's the old strat," he snapped.  "The new strat is to rush everyone to Drek, cap the two towers nearby, and then kill Drek."

"Somebody had told the Horde, then, because they're ahead of us in getting our first two towers down," I quipped.  "If we want to win, we have to take them back."

"Didn't you hear me?"  The Lock demanded as we finished recapping Stonehearth and Icewing Bunkers.  "Everybody get down to Drek now!"

"F--- him," a Druid in the backcap team said aloud.  "We've got to get DB North and South back."

We recapped the two Dun Baldur bunkers --as well as the Aid Station-- and then everybody began the trek south.  Meanwhile, the 25+ people surrounding Drek began their attack, but kept wiping.

"What gives?" someone asked in BG chat.  "You have 8 healers there."

"We ALSO have 7 Horde in the base, asshole," the Lock replied.  "We need EVERYONE down here!"

Another half dozen or so of people abandoned their watch on Stonehearth and Icewing and ran south, just in time for the Horde to begin to cap those two bunkers.

I watched from my position at DB North as a dozen Horde pushed their way up north and began crossing the bridge.  There were only a few of us left to counter them, and not enough time to get to Stonehearth or Icewing before they were captured, ending the game on attrition.

The Lock kept up a running diatribe on how badly we sucked, and if we'd have just done what he wanted we'd have won anyway.  Regardless of whether he was right or not, changing the strategy by abandoning our position in the southern two bunkers meant that we absolutely HAD to burn down Drek within a few minutes or lose.

And given the title of this warm and fuzzy piece, you can probably guess the outcome.


EtA:  Somehow the first sentence got chopped off.

Courtesy of Cheezeburger

Okay, I laughed.  And yes, it does have MMO content.

An NSA/WoW Top Ten List

Apologies to David Letterman, but this is what you get when you have too much coffee too early in the morning.


Top Ten things people said when they heard the the NSA was spying on them in WoW:

10)  Well, that explains why the Alliance never has healers in a battleground.
9) I bet they were just checking out Goldshire for terrorists.
8) That explains the "Terrorist Hunter" guild name.
7) Can you transmog your gear into a "spy" outfit?
6) I bet they were planning on infiltrating SI:7 too.
5) Did they team up with Pat Robertson to investigate Warlocks for witchcraft?
4) They thought Tauren were a sleeper cell of the terrorist group Al-'Cow'da.
3) All those taxpayer dollars, and the U.S. still can't field a top raiding guild.
2) Ghostcrawler leaves and the NSA report is leaked.  Coincidence?

And the Number One thing people said when they heard the NSA was spying on them in WoW:

1) Were these the people behind all the crap in LFR after all?

For what its worth, Jon Stewart's The Daily Show has their own take on what they call NSA's World of Watchcraft:

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook

Because, you know, we gamers are hotbeds of subversive activity....

A new report from Gizmodo points out that NSA had infiltrated WoW (among other MMOs) back in 2008.

And you thought the worst thing about MMOs was the proliferation of bots and asshats.

Speaking of which, does that mean that the NSA is controlling the bots?  It would explain a lot, you know...

Charting Some Progress

Courtesy of the American Thanksgiving holidays, I did something that I haven't done in ages:  I didn't log into an MMO for a week.

After about the first day the shakes died down, but I still got twitchy whenever someone said "boss" or "toon" or "character" in conversation.  Okay, not really, but there was a day or two where I kept thinking that I had to try to squeeze in some MMO time, but that feeling passed by about the third day.

As far as addictions go, I guess MMOs don't captivate me that much.*  Which is a good thing.

That lack of playtime didn't keep me from thinking about MMOs, however, as I was reacquainting myself with the old Moldvay D&D Red Box set:

You know, this thing.  Complete with Errol Otus cover art.

I'd decided to go Old School with the kids and take them through the classic module B2 - The Keep on the Borderlands, and I needed to get back up to speed on all the rules from Basic D&D.

Or rather, unlearn all of the rules from subsequent versions of the game.

The character sheet for Moldvay D&D** is a study in simplicity:

From tabletopconnect.com.
A scan of a sample character sheet in the Moldvay Basic D&D rulebook

Compare that with the D&D 4e character sheet:

And this is just the front page!

And if you take a gander at the average MMO character listing, it's even more complex:

I often wonder why a Rogue would be bent backward like that.
It's not like a pair of oversize daggers would weigh that much.

It's deceptively simple, since all you have to do is hover your pointer over a piece of gear and you get all of the crunchy numbers.

An MMO can create that sort of character sheet because it can take the crunch and hide it from the player, and unless you're a theorycrafter or a hardcore player, you don't necessarily have to worry about the details. But with a pencil and paper RPG, you have to pay attention to the numbers because the actual "fighting" or "doing things" is all done with your imagination.

For most people, however, there's a tradeoff between the crunch and imagination.  It's a bit of a moving target, because different people can handle different levels of crunch, but there comes a tipping point when imagination starts to lose out to the crunch and an RPG becomes all about the numbers.  While my personal tipping point is somewhere more complex than, say, Pathfinder, I can't say where anyone else's --much less my kids-- tipping point is.

Which brings me back to Moldvay D&D.

The game is simple enough to pick up and play, and compared to more complex RPGs*** has a minimal amount of crunch.  And yet all the flavor of a D&D-esque game is still there. For my purposes --a quick, minimal setup type of game that I already know the rules to-- it should be perfect.

The kids created characters, they met up at the Keep of the module's title, and hired some men-at-arms to accompany them in their search for the mysterious Caves of Chaos.  They set out on the morrow, but they'd better not get lost in the forest along the way.  There are things in the forest that love to feast on adventurers.

***

A short update on "Ever, Jane", the Jane Austen MMO: it made it's Kickstarter goals, and the design team is moving forward with the game.  You can find a short article about the game on The Mary Sue's website. The game seems to be highly attractive to roleplayers who would find Regency Britain an intriguing setting.




*At least not compared to coffee.

**It's called that because Tom Moldvay edited this version of the game, so as to differentiate between the earlier blue book version edited by J. Eric Holmes and the later red book edited by Frank Mentzer (which had the Larry Elmore cover art.)

***Even Savage Worlds, which I've used as a pretty basic RPG in the past.

Does Azeroth even know what a Pilgrim is?

I once read a blog post by SFF writer and former SFWA president John Scalzi* in which he defined the straight white male to be the lowest difficulty setting there is.  By using the video game analogy --and WoW in particular-- he helped to explain the privilege that the straight white male has in the Western world.**

Today, on the eve of the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, I was reminded again of how U.S.-centric WoW is when I logged in and discovered that Pilgrim's Bounty had started.

If you live in the U.S., you probably never gave it a second thought.  Just like if you live in Germany or you live in a place with a lot of German immigrants (like the U.S.), of course there's a Brewfest holiday!  Or that the mid-Summer/mid-Winter holidays line up with someone living in the northern hemisphere.

Sure, there's the nod to the Chinese New Year, but two things about that festival:  out of all the international non-Western festivals, Blizz chose only that one; and the Chinese New Year festival is celebrated in the U.S. too, mainly in areas with a sizable Chinatown (such as San Francisco and New York City).

To be fair, WoW isn't the only MMO with a sizable chunk of Western themed festivals --there's LOTRO, for starters-- but WoW has a much bigger non-Western and non-U.S. subscriber presence.

***

I've occasionally wondered what it must be like to play a game that has so many nods to a culture not my own.  I'm not into anime/manga, and I grew up just before the original Nintendo console swept the world, so I have no insights into JRPGs or Japanese video games in general.***  I can see the differences in games such as Aion and to a much lesser extent Guild Wars 2, but that's more a matter of graphics and quest text. The immersion found within is still Western in emphasis, such as light and dark angels in Aion.

Mists of Pandaria was an attempt by Blizzard to create an Asian-themed culture, but it was more a mashup of existing Asian cultures than anything else.  I liken it to Hasbro's attempt to appeal to Football/Soccer fans by creating Manchester United Monopoly.  If Hasbro expected Arsenal or Norwich City fans to pick up a copy of Man U Monopoly, they were sadly mistaken.****

Since I'm in the default setting for our current batch of MMOs, I don't know what it's like to play an MMO from another culture or country.  I don't know what small things might be present that I just simply assume to be correct and never realize that's unique to the U.S.  (Dear Lord, I hope that Paris Hilton isn't that well known internationally.  PLEASE.)

Then again, maybe this is just so much navel gazing, since obviously people don't care enough to unsubscribe from WoW or other MMOs about it.




*And he lives in my state, so I claim him as local.  One of these days I'd like to actually get a chance to meet him when he comes to visit our local bookstore, but work always seems to intervene.

**I'm not sure how it translates to non-Western countries, but given the cultural dominance the West has, it's probably still accurate.

***Outside of Donkey Kong and other 80's arcade games.  And the numerous Zero Wing "All your base are belong to us" memes, of course.  I did watch Star Blazers (known to anime fans as Space Battleship Yamato, complete with the sea shanty theme song) and Speed Racer, but that's it.

****Maybe they were counting on other English Premier League fans burning copies of Man U before matches.  I could see THAT happening.

Lemme go get my alt, and, um... This may take a while...

This post is a little late.  I'd like to be able to say that it was due to my extreme focus on NaNoWriMo this year, but it was due to work suddenly getting busy these past few weeks.  The push for the Holidays has begun, and people are trying to throw projects over the fence before they split for vacation.  So, once again, my attempt at NaNo boils down to whether I can get to at least 15k words or not.  Last year it was definitely a "not", and this year isn't looking so good either.

Anyway, I'd been playing a Commando on SWTOR for months, and I decided to pull my Sith Sorcerer out of stasis and level her for a bit.  When I last went adventuring with her she was on Quesh, or as I like to call it, Hutta Part II.*  It took me a few minutes to get my bearings, then off I went into the polluted swamps.

I'd figured that I'd need some time to settle into the button commands, but what I didn't expect was how long it would take to become comfortable with those commands.  I've been playing her for several hours now, but I still don't have an attack sequence down pat.

This is the first time I've had trouble getting myself to remember what buttons to push for a toon.  This goes beyond the "it'll take a level or so to get used to things" that I've become accustomed to, and into the "OMGWTF is happening here?" realm.  Have I finally crossed that age boundary where things become harder to understand?

I certainly hope not.

When I hear people 10+ years younger than me say "well, back in the day...." in an MMO chat session, you just know that this genre is designed with younger people in mind.  There's no avoiding that of the people who still login to my WoW guild, I'm by at least a half a decade the oldest.  I used to chuckle at Ancient's blog subtitle** because she was poking fun at herself, but now I chuckle because I wonder if I'm joining her in being well outside the demographic too.

I look at LOTRO's keybar graphics and wonder how someone with worse eyes than mine can distinguish between the abilities.  When I first tried LOTRO a few years ago, I thought the keybar graphics were the worst part of the game, and as time has gone on, my eyes --and my opinion-- have only gotten worse.

While I get that computer games are considered the province of the young, there are plenty of us out there who began playing in the Pong era.  Those of us who remember Colossal Cave or Zerk or even Space Invaders would like a seat at the big table, and not pushed off to the Candy Crush/Farmville table.***  Like the grandma who plays Black Ops, we want to challenge ourselves and enjoy a game with a deep storyline. And maybe blow up some stuff, too.

I recognize that I'm not going to be the quickest clicker out there.  Hell, even when I was young I was never one of the best at the old Konami Track and Field arcade game, and the entire game consisted of pounding the buttons to go as fast as you could.  Being the quickest, however, shouldn't automatically translate into being the best.  Strategy and knowing your limitations are both important, as well as finding ways to maximize your strengths.  And those are things that anybody can do, regardless of age.

It may just take some of us a bit longer than usual to get up to speed on a particular toon, that's all.





*Or "Bejing on a sunny day."  I'd have said Los Angeles in the past, but I think Bejing's well documented pollution problems have pushed it way past Los Angeles or Mexico City.

**"No wisdom here, just thoughts about the games from someone seriously outside the demographic."

***The Sid Meier's Civ series, on the other hand, is a fantastic turn-based game, proving that you don't have to be the quickest clicker around to win a strategy game.  Same for the Total War series, where you don't have to fight the battles and instead play the game strictly as a strategy game.  Now, if someone could get around to making an updated Master of Orion without overloading on the fiddly bits....

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.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Yes, there's something strange afoot, Watson, and it has nothing to do with BlizzCon.

A Kickstarter campaign is underway for an MMO with a Jane Austen theme.

Called "Ever, Jane", it is a virtual world based on the works of Jane Austen.  Unlike a more traditional MMO where fighting and gear acquisition are first and foremost, this is an MMO about "playing the actual character in the game, building stories."*

From what I can tell, the emphasis is on activities in Regency England at the time, such as balls/parties, gossiping/sleuthing, hunting, and other activities.  The thrust is to emphasize roleplaying while allowing a player's actions to help shape the story.

It sounds like an ambitious project, and if people are interested they can check out the Kickstarter campaign to view the video as well as download the prototype.  There's a lot of work ahead for their development team, but I wish them well.

EDIT:  Here's the video from the Kickstarter:

*From the Kickstarter site.

Well, that didn't take long....

That's a wee bit of a screwup in advance of any announcement.

If the rumors are true and time travel --and Garrosh-- are at the center of the expac, I'm not so sure I'm on board.  I'm kind of blah about the whole idea of Garrosh again.

A Short pre-BlizzCon Post

Everyone in the WoW-verse seems to be yakking about Warlords of Draenor in the past week or two, focusing on the new WoW expac.  But this being a con for all things Blizz, what if they announce something else entirely?

Like, say, a WoW themed game* for Xbox One/PS4?  A PvP oriented game?

They already have practice with Diablo 3, so it's not too much of a jump to consider that they'd tap into the next-gen console market.

Again, something to consider as people are probably already lining up for the 11 AM PST opening ceremonies.



*Or Starcraft, for that matter.

"Look, I'm a Rogue. I'm not supposed to have more health than a Prot Pally."

The past week or two's worth of random battlegrounds has seen a dramatic rise in a rather disconcerting trend:  I've got the high health.

That's not how random battlegrounds are supposed to work.

You're supposed to have a mix of players, or at possibly a premade of a guild/arena group in the mix.  And really, I see a lot of the latter on the Horde side:  4 out of every 5 random BGs I'm in involve a Horde premade of some sort.*  But even without the premades, I can see the health of each enemy player, and they follow the standard pattern of high to low health:  tanks > plate DPS/locks > leather DPS > other cloth DPS.

However, the Alliance health numbers are all over the map, with the lone exception that my Rogue is always in the top two in health.

I knew what my max health with Malevolent PvP gear was (360k-ish), and what my max health with Tyrannical gear was (420 ish).  I'm now part of the way through getting Grievous gear, which puts me in around 450k health.  But most of my random BG teams have health in the 350k range, with some players around 410k and the fresh L90s at less than 300k.**

That means that Alliance teams are typically undergeared and severely outgunned by Horde teams.

How undergeared?  Well, I know that by only running random BGs, I've fallen behind the arena players by an additional Grievous piece***, or two if you count the 1250 point gear and take this week into account. That's enough of a difference for a maximum geared Hunter (plus current raid tier gear) to 4-5 shot me, as happened multiple times last night.****  And if I'm at max PvP gear without running arenas, imagine what it's like for someone with a half Malevolent/ half Tyrannical set.

I was in a Twin Peaks BG this morning and I watched it happen.  We even had more than the usual number of healers at four (!) whereas the Horde only had one, and our health was actually decent for a change (averaged in the low 420s.)  But the Horde side, where I counted 6-7 players at 480k health and higher, simply cut through our side like a hot knife through butter.  Putting it in a different way, the Horde was able to out-DPS four healers in a 10v10 match.  That we were lacking in strategy --only about 1/3 of the team was trying to get the flag at any one time-- was almost immaterial when 2 healers in a convoy couldn't keep a Shaman or myself upright.

Such a DPS imbalance in random BGs is worrisome, particularly when in arenas/rateds at least you're paired against teams with similar ratings.  That doesn't guarantee similar teams, but it sure helps in evening out the skill levels.  Shouldn't there be at least a reasonable attempt at matching up the iLevels of players in a 10s or 15s random BG so you don't have slaughters like this one?

But then again, I've seen weird groupings in randoms.  Like six rogues on one side in WSG.  Or seven hunters vs. five locks in AB.  When I get to a random that's not raid size, I quickly check our listings.  If I see more than three rogues in a 10s or four in a 15s, I'll voluntarily drop, telling the group there's no way you can win with this many rogues.  I can go blow off 15 minutes soloing Pit of Saron or Halls of Lightning instead of getting frustrated when I'm being farmed by a Mal'Ganis or Tichondrius premade.

***

BlizzCon is this week, so I presume that on Friday we'll hear about the new WoW expac.

Unless we won't.

I'll concede that it's entirely possible that The Dark Below is going to be the name of the next WoW expac, but in terms of Blizzard history they are very late in announcing an expac after the last major patch for the current expac drops.  Perhaps Blizz saw that extended beta as a big part of the reason why their subs dropped and are swinging heavily toward the "don't tell them anything until we're just about to release it" Apple-style presentation.  The risk for this is to have an unstable release where people have major problems at launch (see:  Diablo III).

But here's an idea:  maybe Blizz is going to go for a lot of smaller expacs rather than one big one every two years.  What about the possibility of new content every year --ala SWTOR and GW2-- with 2-3 patches accompanying it?  More content, quicker, so people will fork over $20 for an expac every year rather than $35 every two years.

Or make Wow F2P, but gateway raids and arenas to subs only?  That would enable Blizz to keep most of their subs who live for raiding or arenas/rateds, but allow the casuals to drop in and out as necessary.  Of course, a cash shop would be needed to pump the casuals for money, as Blizz would be giving up a lot of money in subs to do this.  But it is more of a likelihood than I considered before.

Either way, in two days we'll see what happens.  One thing I will bet money on is that while their subs are down, don't count Blizz out just yet.  They're not the same crew running things during vanilla and BC, but they're not going to screw up their IP.

At least I don't think so.




*For the sake of simplicity, I'm focusing on 10 and 15 man BGs.  the 40 man raid BGs will almost always have a guild group in the mix due to the size of the teams.

**I've said it before and I'll say it again:  chain running AV and IoC for an Alliance player is the quickest way to get geared up with Honor level gear.  And for a plate wearer, that'll put you on par with my health.

***Merely running random BGs will get you a max of 1800 Conquest points a week, while arenas will get a max of 2200 Conquest points.  If you want to keep up with the Joneses, you have to run arenas, which is suicide to most Mists-era Rogues when paired against other classes of equal skill.

****You get used to the routine:  either they spot you lurking about or they ride in when you're trying to help finish off an enemy by a flag.  They send their pet after you, use their Deterrence to deflect your blows, and then drop some traps to slow you while jumping backward to rain down hell while you try to run after them. You can't run quickly because you likely blew your escape CDs on getting away from the Concussive Shot and/or captured by a net.  And since some of the Hunter's DoTs aren't removable by Cloak of Shadows, you can't Vanish.  You're a sitting duck.

NBI: Random Blogging Thoughts

This post is part of the Newbie Blogger Initiative.

Blogging is an interesting hobby.  Like most hobbies, it can consume a lot of your time, but unlike most, there's nothing physical to give to someone to say "I made this" or "I read this" or "I won this" or "I played this".  If you're like me, when people ask what I do for fun, I'll either fail to mention PC entirely or downplay it into "and I write some stuff online for a gaming website".  If I say "I'm a blogger", there's a tendency among people I meet to say "Oh, like Matt Drudge".  And if I say "I'm a gaming blogger," more often than not I'll get a reply akin to "Oh, like how to win at poker or blackjack?"

The concept of a gaming blogger that has nothing to do with casinos is a big mental block for a lot of non-gamers.  And if you talk to someone who can get past that, they'll respond with "So, what do you think of that new Call of Duty game coming out?"

"No, like WoW."

"WoW?  What's WoW?"

"World of Warcraft."

"That thing?  That's for weirdos."*

Such is the life of an MMO blogger.

But you know what?  That's okay.  You're not writing for them.  Even if you secretly harbor ambitions to be the Ashton Kutcher of the MMO blogging community, don't let the ignorance of the masses get you down.

Write for yourself first, then write for others.

Don't bother chasing readership if you don't like what you're doing.  Blogging isn't a job.  Okay, it can be if you want it to be, but most bloggers start out just doing it for other reasons.  Stray from that, and readers will notice.

Now, that's not to say that you can't appropriate work habits to use when blogging.  A regular publishing schedule is good to stick with, and having a set writing time helps you stay on task, especially on those days when you've got problems coming up with something to write.  There have been days when I sit at the laptop and say "I don't know what the hell to write this week," and days when I have three or four ideas simply drop into my lap.  To limit the former, I've taken to jotting down inspiration when it strikes,** so that I've got a list of ideas to choose from when I write.

I'll freely admit that one of the items on my to-do list is one that I've started several times and never completed:  the dreaded fanfic.  I figure if I'm going to actually write some fanfic, I'd want it to stand on its own, and not sound like amateur hour.  The spectre of old D&D fiction I'd written back as a kid, the sort that has "Sir Doofus drew is +5 Holy Avenger and charged at the ancient red dragon" in it, is what's holding me back.  But that's just me; other bloggers can whip out fanfic without breaking a sweat, and for them this is no big deal.

In the end, you get to define your blog, not the other way around.  Do what you want, on a schedule you want.  Be active in the blogging community.  There are always new blogs with interesting voices; go and find them.  Participate in discussions.  The more you give to the community, the more you'll get back.

And whatever you do, as Wil Wheaton once said, "Don't be a dick."





*When people tell you that IT and tech fields are full of geeks, don't believe them.  I know this from experience.  Some companies may have high numbers of geeks, but they're balanced out by IT companies populated with MBAs and smarmy salespeople.  Cubicles filled with college/pro sports paraphernalia (including, but not necessarily limited to NASCAR) are also a big clue that maybe your work environment doesn't have a high geek population.

**Just don't do it in a meeting at work.  It's like having your ringtone going off, with the professional sound of "Sunny Day" from Sesame Street announcing a call from your kids.

One Person's Trash is Another Person's... Trash Mob

One drawback of random queues for content is that you run into people with differing viewpoints.  No, I'm not talking political or sports views --although I was once in a SWTOR Flashpoint where an argument broke out over American football-- but rather different approaches to the content should be run.

I say "drawback" because one of the big sources of instance/BG drama is that clash of viewpoints.  Failpugs are full of tanks who bypass bosses, healers who refuse to heal people who make mistakes, and DPS who decide they know how to pull properly.  But in a basic sense, what you might be looking for in group content might be completely different than everyone else, and when you feel like you're being dismissed/ignored that can cause significant drama.

This isn't a new revelation.  I've been in instances where the tank decided his version of "fun" was to chain pull the entire first area in Halls of Lightning, expecting the healer to keep him upright.*  The completionist vs. the minimalist clash is often found in instances such as SWTOR's Taral V or WoW's revamped 5-man Zul'Aman/Zul'Gurub.

But this clash of views took on a whole new meaning in an Alterac Valley run the other day.

I'm used to the arguments about Blue vs. Green in Strand of the Ancients and Gold Mine vs. Blacksmith vs. Lumber Mill in Arathi Basin, but the fight that broke out in BG chat in AV was a new one on me.

Prior to the other night, I'd only been in one so-called "bridge stomp" in AV.  For the uninitiated, a bridge stomp is a strategy where almost the entire Alliance gathers behind the bridge to Dun Baldur, allowing the Horde to kill off Belinda and sack Stonehearth Bunker and Icewing Bunker.  The Alliance then rains down hell on the bridge, which in theory will kill off Horde at a far greater rate than the Alliance defenders.  If everything goes according to plan, the Alliance wins a war of attrition and earns a ton of HKs.

As a Rogue, I'm kind of superfluous to the bridge stomp itself --I'd get killed too quickly to help the plate wearers defend the bridge-- so I and a few other stealthies basically peel away some of the Horde attackers by forcing them to constantly retake their own towers and the Coldtooth Mine.

The first bridge stomp I'd been in, the guild behind it had opened up their Vent channel and had set up a raid group specifically for the attack, which made perfect sense.  They also had complete buy-in from the rest of the AV team, because the sheer number of HKs also meant that we were able to summon Ivus, which is something that most people had never seen.**  Therefore, when I'd ported into an AV run and the people there started chanting "War!!!", I kind of had an idea what was up.

But not everyone appreciated having their AV run turn into a bridge stomp, and said so loudly on BG chat.

"I don't want my BG hijacked by some lame-ass premade," groused one DK.

Another player added that these players "...didn't know how to play AV," among other (more colorful) things.

"You're all a bunch of little kids!" said a third.

The bridge stomp team kept mocking the detractors and egging them on, causing a dramatic escalation in hostilities.

"Yep, we don't let anyone older than 14 in the guild!"

"Whoops, I just grew a pube!"

And things kind of went downhill from there.

I tried to ignore the fight as best as possible and kept to just annoying the Horde side, even when the anti-stomp crowd started taking other graveyards, loudly announcing their intention to disrupt the bridge stomp plan.

Just how many adults are actually in this BG anyway? I thought.

After about close to 1/2 hour, the anti-stomp crowd began to drop, firing off a few obscene parting shots along the way.

A lot of this fight could have been avoided by the bridge stomp team behaving maturely.  Announcing intentions prior to the start of AV, and even organizing things via Vent would have gone a long way toward keeping things civil.  That said, once the bridge stomp team began, the people who expected the "15 minute zerg" AV threw a tantrum and behaved no better.  Each side wanted their way, victory be damned. The fact that we won was superfluous by the end, because I was sick of everybody's behavior.  The parent in me wanted to send everybody into time out for a good long time, because you can bet that if I found out my kids were behaving like that, a time out would be the least of their worries.

I felt bad for the Horde, because they probably had no idea what the hell the Alliance was doing with half doing one thing and half doing another.  But if nothing else, the Horde were the ones who actually behaved like adults; they tried to win as best they could.

*And chewing him out when he wasn't able to.

**Watching Ivus whallop a Horde tank certainly made my night.