Monday Musings -- Brann's Trusty Pick Version

There are days when I think WoW is composed of 2 million subs and 8 million gold farmers.

Why yes, I'm working on mats for a chopper.  Does it show?

The elimination of the wait for older mats when a new expac is released, such as Titansteel (and Felsteel for you older BC types) has been a blessing and a curse.  It's a blessing because you can farm all you want to collect the mats needed to create Titansteel without having to wait a day/week/what-have-you, but it's a curse because everyone else is doing that too.  The entire cycle is compressed, and when you add the gold farmers to the list there can be days when you could spent almost all of your WoW time cruising Northrend and not find a single Titanium node.

Back in Wrath, I used to farm Titanium and Saronite for the gems, and in the wee hours on a PvP server there would be three of us (quite literally) fighting it out for the nodes.  When I switched Q over to a PvE server, that number fluctuated between 3-5 people, but it wasn't too difficult to get your share of the ore and assorted goodies.  However, in late Cata, it seems that there's a toon parked over every spawning point for Titanium or several cruising Icecrown or Sholazar for all of the spare Saronite.  The number of toons farming ore has more than doubled, and I've spent 10 minutes or more hunting around before I found a lonely hunk of Saronite that wasn't being mined at that very moment.

Strangely enough, this doesn't translate into an overabundance of gold farming in the BC zones.  Khorium and Eternium are still easily mined, while the BC herbs have been left alone as well.  (My Worgen Lock finally made it to Outland, so he's ready to get some clown gear to match up better in BGs.)  I guess you could chalk it up to not a lot of demand out there for the BC stuff, but if you read the blogs touting transmog you'd think otherwise.

Perhaps what really attracts the gold farmers is the near 5 digit price tag that a chopper or mechano-hog will fetch on the AH.*

***

Since I've been Farmer Bob the past couple of weeks, instead of running BGs I've queued up for a few normal 5-mans instead.  I figure that the time it takes for the queue to pop is better spent cruising for mining nodes than the extremely short entry times for BGs.

I still don't know what the Heroic queues are like, but the random normals are clocking in at a half an hour.  Based on that, I've been reluctant to specifically queue up for those normals I haven't done on Tom yet, mainly Stonecore and Throne of the Tides.  It's not like I've not seen Stonecore before --it always seemed to proc whenever I queued up on Neve-- but it would be nice to actually mark that as finished on a Ret Pally.  And Throne of the Tides...  Well, I think I've seen that pop once all of Cata.

Naga just aren't as popular as they were in BC, I guess.

***

I didn't quite notice this until the past couple of weeks, but leveling via BGs in WoW is cyclic.

When you start out at the bottom of the level range for a BG, you're just glorified fodder.  (Clothies, such as Priests and Locks, are even more so.)  It can be painful to drag yourself up to that next level, and you get used to dying a lot.  Once you make that level, however, then path to level after gets easier.  And the next one, even more so, until you just kind of cruise out of one level range into another.

Then the cycle starts over again.

This cycle is a lot like leveling via questing in Age of Conan.

There's a pretty big dropoff in XP when you kill a mob two (or even one) level beneath yours in AoC, even more than WoW.  What that means is when you're questing in a zone and you level up to where the mobs close to you are 2 levels below you, your XP intake drops precipitously, and your leveling slows to a crawl.  You then have to push yourself to another portion of the zone where you match up better with the mobs.  The thing is, AoC orients those mobs so that you have to be really precise about your pulls so that you don't end up with 3 or more mobs on you at once.

Oh, and did I mention they spawn more frequently than WoW?  If you enter a higher level zone, you'll not only have to fight your way in, but also fight your way out.

I'm sure this was done to "encourage" grouping, but for someone who plays at odd hours, that means that the leveling process operates in spurts:  you gain a level or two fast, then you have to go to a higher level area where your progress slows to a crawl.  Just like leveling via BGs in WoW.

***

I don't often talk about my kids' MMO playing, but I figured I had to share this little tidbit:

My oldest managed to get her L22 Elf Hunter to Rivendell last week.

The kids had tried to get their toons to Rivendell before --they play F2P, so they had to run there-- but they always would get zapped by the high level mobs once they got past Weathertop.  So it was no small effort that she managed to zip through that last zone to reach the Last Homely House East of the Sea.

She then proceeded to start geeking out.

"OMG!!  There's Frodo!  And there's Gandalf!  And Bilbo!!  And look:  there's Merry and Sam and Pippin!!!  This is just so cool!!!"

I don't think she stopped grinning the rest of that evening.




*The Battered Hilt still shows no sign of dropping in value, probably more due to transmog and desire to see the questline than anything else.  The thing is, you can clear most of the mobs in the entry area of Heroic Forge of Saron without that much trouble, so why not just do that instead until you get a drop?  You'll even get a nice supply of Frostweave to sell on top of it.



EtA: Have I mentioned that I disklike trackpads that are too sensitive?  They make "whenever I" change into "when I ever".  Sheesh.

Blog Alert - Need More Rage Has Gone Sentimental

I could try to post something about the death of Maurice Sendak, but anything I'd come up with pales in comparison to what Ratshag did at Need More Rage.

Go now, and smile.

When Rateds Attack

Last week I had an evening to myself, so I logged in as Tomakan to get in some BGs.

The first couple of runs were okay, but when I got Arathi Basin, I ported in and was greeted by groans.

"What?" I asked in BG chat.  I may not be the best BG player out there, but I'm certainly not that bad.

"The Mal'Gannis crew is here," one of my team replied.

I took a look at the Horde side's lineup and saw the telltale server name Mal'Gannis five times.  "Oh... crap."

"Maybe we should give up now," another Alliance player suggested.

"Hell no," a Rogue replied.  "We'll beat those assholes!"

Having met the Mal'Gannis Five before, I had my doubts.  They were all members of the same guild, and at the very least they were kitted out with a full set of Cataclysmic gear.*  That indicated they either ran Rateds or 5s in Arenas, and they were all used to working with each other.  Compare that with a traditional pugged BG, and the differences were obvious.

In this particular AB run, they were a roving group of five and smashed everyone in their way.

The lopsided loss took its toll on a few players.  "Alliance always sucks!" said one enlightened soul.

"Come on," I replied.  "We're a bunch of puggers up against a Rated team.  You don't think that has an impact?"

"Alliance sucks!"

I rolled my eyes.  When confronted with such logic, there's not much you can do.

Still, that does bring up the question what a Rated or 5s group was doing in a traditional pug, anyway.  I'd put it up to a "blowing off steam" or "taking a break", except that they've been staples of the random BGs for the past month.  Well, sort of random, anyway:  you'll find them in the lower sized BGs for the most part, where they can have a larger impact on the outcome (WSG, BoG, TP, AB, and EotS).  The advantages of a well-oiled machine like what they have over a bunch of puggers ought to be obvious; it would take a massive screw-up on the rest of their side to lose.  Or having a comparable Rated team on the Alliance side.

From a game standpoint, a Rated team has just as much right to run a regular BG pug as the next group, but I can't help but think of the similarities between that and an event that happened several years ago.

My son was playing baseball in an instructional league for six and seven year olds.  Each team was allowed a maximum of two eight year olds per team, because of the instructional nature of the league.  If you've ever seen six and seven year olds play, you know that you've got the wide spectrum of abilities and attention spans assembled out there on the field.  I used to pull my hair out watching my son looking all over the place rather than at the batter; on more than one occasion the ball would be hit toward him and it scooted right on by before he realized what was happening.

In one particular game, however, we arrived and I noticed several of our parents looking worried over by the sidelines.  I shooed my son over to where the coaches were and joined the group.  They'd been watching the other team warm up, and something wasn't right.  "They're acting way too mature for six and seven year olds," one mom told me.  Sure enough, that team had gotten the balls out and were warming up without any supervision whatsoever, and their accuracy was almost frightening.

Once the game began, it was clear there was a mismatch.

Their pitcher was throwing hard --and I do mean hard-- and mowed down our players with three consecutive strike-outs.  They came up to the plate, and started killing the ball everywhere.  Before the first inning was over, the score was 6-0.  I was annoyed, but I couldn't say much; I mean, the other team was just that good.  It was like watching a major league team play against a college team.

When one of our coaches came back to the dugout, however, he was mad.  He'd been talking to all of the other teams' kids when he was out at second base as an additional umpire, and it turned out that the other team was playing with a stacked deck:  all of the kids were eight year olds.  Additionally, that team had a game the next day, in an eight and nine year old league.

They were using our team as batting practice.

As you can surmise, the game was called after three innings due to runs.  Our coach put in a protest to the league about the other team, and we found out later that several other teams had done the same thing.  Nevertheless, the damage had been done.  It's kind of hard to explain to a seven year old that the ass-kicking they just received didn't count because the other team cheated, because they'd just been beaten out on the field.

Comparatively speaking, what that baseball team did was cheating, while a Rated team running regular BG pugs isn't.  However, the mismatch is very real, and can be very disheartening to someone learning to play BGs.  Spend an entertaining afternoon being corpse camped in WSG and tell me how you feel that makes you a better player.  Here's a hint:  it doesn't.  When you respawn, get buffed, and then you get stun-stun-stunned to death, you have almost no chance at actually learning to play.  Instead, you'll probably decide to not play PvP.

The hardcore EVE types will argue that it's all for the better to separate the wheat from the chaff, but there's a drawback to such behavior.  You feed into the stereotype that PvPers are all assholes who hang out with ninja looters and trade chat nutjobs.  "L2P noob!" doesn't help the community, it harms the community by making it shrink.

Am I arguing for a self banning of rated teams from regular BGs?  It is tempting, but I believe what's needed here is restraint.  Sure, you can wipe the floor of the WW with the other team's butts, but there's no need to go corpse camping.  It isn't necessary to hold onto that last flag instead of capping just so you can farm honorable kills.  The big rule ought to be "Don't be a jerk."

After all, karma can be a real bitch.



A short update:  In between the time I wrote this and posted it, I spent a half an hour in WoW.  I got into WSG, and discovered the full Mal'Gannis Rated team on the other side.  What happened?  After the first flag capture, they put us on farm.  Players began leaving like rats fleeing a sinking ship.  After another five minutes of it, even I gave up and took the debuff rather than get killed another dozen times.  Soloing the Pit of Saron seemed like a better deal.



*Remember, the Armory is your friend.  And when that doesn't work, create a toon on the server, go to the Hall of Legends, and inspect them that way.  Know thy enemy.


EtA:  Corrected a couple of grammar errors in the baseball story.

Just D... Wait, what do you mean that line's taken?

This is written for the Newbie Blogger Initiative, which is going on throughout May 2012.  You can find more info at http://nbihq.freeforums.org.



Trademarks aside, that's the best advice I can give a new blogger.

Just go ahead and write.  Don't be afraid.

Well, be smart.  Don't write things that'll get you in trouble at work, or with your family, or with your friends.  If you want guild drama, the easiest thing to do is start posting about the scuttlebutt in your guild and what you think of it all.  If you wonder whether something you're writing is going to cause trouble, skip it and come back to it later.

If, however, you really don't care what people think and you've got the intestinal fortitude to back it up, then damn the torpedoes!

I realize that people will say to write what you know, and yes, that does let a new blogger start out on familiar ground.  But for my money, the act of writing itself is more important.  You're only going to get better as a blogger and a writer if you challenge yourself, by pushing what you can do.  When I look back at my initial columns when writing PC, I cringe.  I had no idea how little I knew about WoW, and what I thought then was decent writing now seems really klunky and pretentious.  Do I wish I'd been a better writer back then?  Sure.  But the thing is, the only way I really did improve was to work at it:  I played more, learned more about the game, and I wrote.

When you write, a funny thing happens.  You gain perspective.  You analyze yourself and what you believe.  You realize that not everyone will agree with you.  Hell, you also realize that what you thought was pretty good might be utter crap to another person.  Or worse, boring as sin.

Don't go into this because you want to be an awesome! cool! popular! blogger, because that's lightning in a bottle.  You can't chase fame without sacrificing yourself in the process.  Instead, blog because you want to, and because you have words that want to come out.  When you blog like that, you're exposing more of yourself than if you were chasing fame, but in that risk lies the reward.

A blog is a strange thing.  It's composed of your writing, and it can live indefinitely if you want it to.  It doesn't need readers to survive.  What it does need is a blogger.

Don't worry about readers.  Don't worry if it seems you're shouting into the wind.  Concern yourself with what you can control, and that's the content.

Write.

PC Joins the Newbie Blogger Initiative

I found out about this initiative from Spinks of Welcome to Spinksville!, and I can't think of a better way to help bring new blood into the blogging hobby.

This initiative is being run by Syp of Biobreak, and there's a board nbihq.freeforums.org where bloggers --both old and new-- can sign up and participate.  The initiative is slated to run over the month of May, and both PC and many other bloggers will be posting encouragement and advice on blogging on their own blogs.

See you around!

Redbeard Boards the Twisted Nether Blogcast

Yes, you read that right.

I will be a guest on this Saturday's episode of the Twisted Nether Blogcast at 8 PM PST (11 PM EST).  Stop on by and enjoy the show!

(Hopefully, Hydra and Fimlys will make me sound better than I really am.)

To listen to the live stream, go to twistednether.net/live and join in the chat room.  See you there!

EtA:  For people overseas, the time is 3 AM Sunday GMT.  London is 4 AM Sunday,
while Melbourne is 1 PM Sunday.

A Few Other Random TOR Thoughts

When I started playing TOR last Thursday night, I didn't finish my first quest before I started getting a massive headache.

"Oh crap," I thought.  "You've got to be kidding me."

I've mentioned before in some other posts that I get headaches and disorientation when I play first person shooters.  I've had this problem dating back to the original Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, when the old conflict between what my eyes are seeing versus what my inner ear is telling my brain first reared its ugly head.  For a long time I assumed that MMOs would cause me trouble as well, but once I started playing WoW I discovered that the only location that I had problems was in Shadowfang Keep, with it's tight twists and turns causing the camera to constantly zoom in and out.  Rift, LOTRO, and AoC didn't cause me any trouble at all, so I didn't expect anything different from TOR.

I couldn't see anything obvious in what the game was doing that would cause me issues, so I decided to simply call it a night and go and sleep it off.  The next morning, however, I didn't have any trouble with the game at all. I chalked it up to sinuses and kept playing without incident.

Still, if first person shooters give you problems, go slow on TOR before you're comfortable enough with pressing onward.

***

Another thing happened in those first five minutes in addition to the headache:  I was invited to join a group.

I'm used to the occasional random grouping request from other MMOs, but usually you get your feet wet before you group up with someone.  With TOR, however, the group requests came very frequently throughout my free period.  I really haven't played enough to get a good feel for the game community, but at first glance TOR seems to foster a community that works together, which is a bit different than that found in WoW or LOTRO.  AoC does encourage grouping because the quest lines have a sizable number of multi-group quests, but TOR appears to have this driven organically as opposed to being imposed artificially.

Now, the higher you level, that scenario might change, but this is based on the first 11-12 levels or so.

***

Like most MMOs, TOR has multi-player quests.*

What I found interesting was where those multi-player quests --called Heroic Quests-- lay in the spectrum on MMOs.

In one end you have the group quests in Age of Conan, which are impossible to solo at level.  In fact, the L20-ish group quests for AoC are only solo-able once you get into the upper L40s.  Yes, that's a 15-20 level difference, and believe me the difference is real.

Somewhere in the middle you'll find the leftover WoW group quests and the LOTRO group quests, where the group quest difficulty can vary from quest to quest.  Some of Icecrown's quests you can solo with raid gear at level, but others are too difficult to achieve otherwise.  As a rule of thumb, a L10 difference (at low level) or an L5 difference (at Wrath level and beyond) is sufficient for soloing.

TOR, on the other hand, had 2-player group quests in Ord Mandell that were doable only a level or two higher than the intended level, and if you take along a companion there's no trouble at all.  My suspicion is that this will scale in difficulty the higher up in level you go, but I didn't get far enough into the story to find out.

Nevertheless, to an experienced MMO player the 2-man group quests in TOR are doable at level with a companion.  Just make sure your companion stays upright, and don't merely try to out-DPS the enemy.

***

The toon creation options are much greater than that in WoW or LOTRO, but most of the toons I saw had a similar body build.

So what did I do?  Create Redbeard, of course.

I didn't go whole hog and make my Smuggler obese, but he is definitely on the chunky side.  He's also tall (like the Ghost of Redbeard from the Scooby-Doo episode, not me), and he's got that full red hair and a beard.  If I tried to do that in WoW, the best I could come up with would be a Dwarf; not exactly what I had in mind, you know.

Still, my Smuggler really did stand out from the crowd.

I didn't get the try the female creation tools, but I've seen articles by Spinks on them already, so they sound a bit like what you find in Age of Conan.  Not perfect, but better than WoW or LOTRO.

So, if in case you were wondering, I did try something different than the most common models out there.




*Yes, WoW still has some group quests around, mainly confined to the BC and Wrath zones.  In Icecrown, for example, you can't complete the Loremaster achievement there by soloing as an L80 with quest greens/blues; there are too many group quests standing in your way.  When I finished that achievement on Quintalan back in Wrath, he needed T9 gear and the Quel'Delar quest chain to solo some of those group quests.

Getting Killed by Pirates Separatists is Good

I'm not the greatest beta tester in the world.

Oh, I know all about creating and implementing test plans --I worked in software QA for five years-- and I've a nose for finding bugs, so that's not a problem.  It's the lack of time I can devote to a (non-work) project that prevents me from assisting in a beta.

So while everybody else was checking out the MoP and Diablo III betas (although D3 isn't really a beta, since it's a bit late in the cycle for it to be called that), I took advantage of what time I had and tried out The Old Republic instead.

This past weekend was one of the TOR 'free weekends' for people who haven't tried the game out yet.  In anticipation of me wanting to at least get my toe in the water, I'd downloaded the game a couple of weeks ago, so it was a small matter of getting up and running with TOR.*

For me, there were two really big concerns about the game, and none of them had anything to do with gameplay.  The most important of the two was that I barely met the minimum requirements to play the game on my family PC.  The graphics card was better, but the motherboard/CPU/RAM was right at the minimum.  I'd 'played' games before in that situation, and most games at the minimum requirements were barely better than worthless; I'd much rather DL a movie trailer on a dialup line than play a game with the bare minimum requirements.  The second, and it was kind of unique to my situation, was that if my kids found out I was testing out the game over the weekend, I'd be deluged by requests for them to play too.  It's one thing for them to pay LOTRO for free using my account, since I turned off guild/kinship and group/fellowship invites, but everything I'd heard about TOR pointed toward grouping up as more of a requirement than some other MMOs.  Besides, given the 'romance' aspect of TOR, I knew that I'd have to police their activity, and I didn't really feel like dealing with that.

When I made the decision to try TOR out this past weekend, I did so knowing I'd play the game only when the kids were asleep, and that it was entirely possible that the game was unplayable for my machine.  I'd have preferred a better set of circumstances, but you have to roll with what you're dealt.

***

I logged in, started up TOR, and....  had to adjust the graphics settings.

I tweaked several settings down to low, and managed to get a relatively smooth movement experience.  The graphics itself seemed to be okay, but I knew I wasn't getting even an average experience.  Hell, when 4.0.1 dropped on WoW I had to turn off a lot of the 'gee-whiz' water settings, because otherwise my PC would be spending all of its time rendering water while I'm over on, say, Darkshore.**

In WoW, when I used to hang around Dal in Wrath my PC's framerate would drop to the teens on a regular basis.  Org/Stormwind during Cata is better, but the low 20s still ain't that great.  When I made it to the first space station in TOR, I expected things to get busier.  They did, and I could tell my framerate dropped by comparison.  However, there were fewer toons wandering around than were ever in Dal --more NPCs, but fewer real toons-- but what I saw didn't give me a lot of hope that if I hit a very active zone that my PC could cope.

***

For the record, I created a Smuggler.  

Yes, I like Han Solo.

Plus, I didn't feel morally obligated to play it to the straight and narrow that a Jedi toon would have driven me, so my toon could act far more like The Man With No Name than Roy Rogers. 

***

As for the kids, they had no idea I was playing the game at all.  They noticed TOR on the start menu, and I told them that I'd downloaded the game so that if they had a free weekend I could check it out, but I kept mum on the free weekend being THIS weekend.

I knew that if they found out there'd be a "OMG!!!! STAR WARS!!!!!" frenzy, and they'd be hanging on me like piranhas until I relented and let them play.  But compared to WoW (or LOTRO, which they do play), I expected there to be a bit more morally ambiguous choices in TOR.  In WoW, you head to a quest hub and almost every quest is a "rah rah--go good guy--save us!" variety; not all, but most.  LOTRO has the same thing.  Age of Conan is a bit greyer, but the quests are still of the "go out and labor like Hercules" group.  TOR, however, makes you choose the result of the outcome, and rewards you with Dark/Light Side points --or affection points for a companion-- for doing so.  The NPCs are grey --even the ones found in the Intro Zones-- and they have motives where you'd never expect WoW NPCs to go.  If you ever had any opinions whether the Republic is the 'Good Guy' side, the Ord Mandell Intro Zone will disabuse you of that idea.  How else do you describe NPCs who actually are trying to smuggle drugs to keep the populace "stupid enough to stay with the Republic"?  Or NPCs who are really Sith spies?  Or who set up a "competiton" so they can thin the refugee population of excess mouths to feed?  Or NPCs who grab and torture those who they claim are Separatist spies to make them divulge their secrets?

No, TOR delves into greyer area than you see WoW plumb, and it is definitely not for kids who aren't mature enough to handle the questions.

(An aside:  perhaps the Sha is Blizz's answer to Light/Dark Side points.  Given the current state of WoW, however, I'm not sure how that will work out.  From a story perspective, it's kind of hard to simply flip that switch on in Pandaria and ignore it in the rest of Azeroth.)

As for the romance, I didn't exactly progress along anything resembling that in my online time to say how that will shake out, but I'd say that if your kid can't handle real romance very well, I doubt they'd handle an in-game one any better.  Then again, maybe the "not everyone is who they seem" isn't a bad lesson to learn, either.***

***

None of this is news to someone who has played TOR the past few months.

("In other stories, Deathwing has returned to Azeroth!  Film at eleven!")

And if you haven't noticed, some WoW (or ex-WoW) bloggers have left for TOR, grown dissatisfied, and left.  All of this, naturally, has fueled the WoW vs. TOR flame war simmering out there.

That said, I think there needs to be some perspective here.  Should we expect a new MMO to have as much to do as one that has been around and expanded upon for seven years?  Or, perhaps, TOR's focus isn't on luring existing WoW gamers, but bringing in new gamers into MMOs?

What's the startup cost for someone brand new to WoW these days?  Let's say someone comes in, plays the free L1-20 on WoW, and decides to subscribe.  For that person to get up to speed on Cata, they have to plunk down $20 for Vanilla + BC, $30 for Wrath, and $40 for Cata = $90 (not counting discounts via, say, Amazon).  With MoP, that price will go up by another $50 or so to $140 (again, before discounts).  That's a hefty cost for one game, especially if you want to play a Goblin or Worgen.

For TOR, by comparison, the cost is $60 (before discounts).  Sure, you get less, but you've paid less too.  You're not getting a game that has been either in development or in production for almost a decade, but something new.  The polish and variety of gaming experience will always favor the older title, because it has been around longer.

As for the quests, the feel is somewhere between WoW's BC and Wrath questlines.  TOR has one main quest chain running through a zone, with a lot of side quests along the way.  For everyone whom I've seen who complains about the linearity of quests in TOR, I have to ask whether they've actually done the quests in post Cata Old World.  I coined the 'quests-on-rails' term for Cata, not TOR; if there was ever proof that there's too much of a good thing, it's that.  The news that WoW is returning more to a pre-Cata model for MoP is a good thing, in my opinion.

WoW will always win out on the "things to do at max level" argument, because WoW has been tinkered with for so long.  The only way TOR would hope to match that reality would be to hire an army of developers and have them slave away as quickly as they can, and no software company in their right mind will do that for a title that hasn't even proven itself.

Where WoW suffers the most is from a continuity standpoint.  A new MMO such as TOR doesn't have the baggage of a base game + three expansions worth of quests, so continuity isn't going to be a problem.  But to a new gamer, WoW's environment --while vast-- tells a chaotic story.  The timeline jumps around so much that a new gamer will get lost trying to understand the plotline.  Once a new gamer gets the whole idea of what is going on in the Old World, they're whisked back in time to Outland and then Northrend.  And MoP isn't going to do anything to fix the continuity issues, either.

Add to this the design decision by Blizzard to have significant events take place not in-game but in books, and the story gets even more chaotic.

For long time WoW players, this isn't an issue at all.  Really, anyone who began playing in the Wrath days or earlier remembers the original questline progression, and they're on the current timeline without a problem.  But new players didn't have that experience, so they'll be lost.****  By comparision, TOR (or even LOTRO) with their single timeline continuity won't have these problems.

***

One final item of note:  is it so much to have an MMO where the word 'hero' isn't thrown around so much?

I thought I'd escaped that word once I started playing TOR, but even there it follows your toon around like a bad penny.  In WoW, "Heroes!" is used so often that I've taken to calling it the Azerothian equivalent of "Hey you!"

I could have used more of the "....then my son is dead to me" sort of quest endings than the almost-sappy "Oh, you're a hero!", because if you're going to plumb some morally grey areas, you might as well have morally grey responses.




*Well, sort of.  The 'free weekend' download required me to re-download the game again, but in this case I suspect it inserted a file that gave me a temp license and then just rubber-stamped the rest of my installation.  It was more than I expected, but in the end much less painful than if I'd have tried to DL the thing over the weekend.

**I did the same thing when I tried out Rift, too, so maybe that was why I was kind of non-plussed about the game's graphics.

***Also, unlike Age of Conan, it doesn't seem like there's any nudity in the game, so at least that isn't an issue for kids.

****Or, potentially, they won't care, having bought into the belief that the game only really starts at max level.



EtA:  Corrected a few English errors.  My English teachers would not be amused....
EtA:  Apparently I can't add either.  Geesh....

As If We Didn't Have Enough Bad Stereotypes...

...it looks like the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik admitted he trained using Modern Warfare 2, and he played WoW at one point upwards of 16 hours a day.

From CNN: Admitted Norway Killer Breivik says he trained on video games

He's a thoroughly despicable (and likely insane) person, slaughtering 77 people last summer in Norway, and to be linked with him, however vaguely, is enough to make me want to go take a shower.

In Search of Fun

Last weekend, I was on WoW when a guildie posed a question to some others who'd been AFK for a while:

"So, how was SW?"

There was a slight pause, and the response was "It was fun until it wasn't."

"You know," I chimed in, "I've been hearing that a lot lately."

And I have.  This isn't a TOR issue either, because I know of people who left WoW for TOR and haven't looked back.  And if you read the general chat areas of places like Age of Conan you'll find loads of people who delight in bashing WoW and announcing how more awesome their current MMO is.

But still, in this case let's talk about TOR and WoW.  What was it that TOR was missing?  Or, for those who still play TOR and have not looked back, what is it that TOR has?

Lost in the Basin

Sholazar Basin has to be my least favorite zone to level in.

This, in spite of the presence of the Avatar of Freya and the amusement surrounding the "Why is everyone looking at me like I crashed the ship?" banter, and the Frenzyheart vs. Oracles quest line.

I suppose I should be happy about a series of quests that are blatant in that they're the "kill ten rats" variety --that's what you get with Hemet and Co, really-- but all I feel is "please please PLEASE just let me get through this quickly!"  At one point I looked up and checked the number of quests I'd finished in the Basin, saw it was around 15, and blanched.  I had about sixty more quests to go?

I needed a beer.  Badly.

Of all of the zones in Northrend, Sholazar is the one that feels the most 'tacked on'.  The Scourge only start to take center stage once you get through all of Hemet's quests and almost to the end of the Oracle/Frenzyheart quests.  Yes, you could skip around and head straight to Freya, but in the end there's no avoiding the Nesingwary and O/F stuff.

When I made it to Sholazar Basin the first time on Quintalan, I'd already finished up Storm Peaks and most of Icecrown, and I'd paid the (then) 7k gold to get Cold Weather Flying.  However, that did me little good in Sholazar because of the tree cover.  Having returned to it twice now, I've found that it is harder and harder to navigate because you have to fly so low to the ground.  I'm sure I'm not alone in this, but the more obstacles to fly through and constantly change directions with give me headaches.  In much the same way that first-person shooters give me motion sickness, flying through Sholazar --like Un'Goro or Feralas-- is a chore for me.  Then, when you add the numerous 'kill ten rats' quests of Nesingwary and Co, Sholazar makes my head spin.

I thought about other forest zones that don't give me such problems, such as Ashenvale and Felwood*, and two things do stand out:  the density of the foliage and the gaps in the forest.  Ashenvale and Felwood are temperate forests, and the density of the trees at flying level isn't so bad.  Or rather, you can fly at a decent level above ground and see where you're going.  You also get breaks in the forest where you can get your bearings and not feel so closed in.  With Sholazar (and U'G and Feralas), that feeling of claustrophobia can come on strong, along with the disorientation of a forest that looks alike in every direction.

Maybe with some Dramamine Sholazar Basin wouldn't feel so bad.  At the same time, however, it is pretty much a dead-end, storywise.  I'm not sure if that's what's intended, but the impression I get is that Sholazar is the odd-man out of the Northrend story Blizz wanted to tell.  Sure, there's an Avatar there fighting the encroachment of the Scourge, and you have a connection with Un'Goro, but as far as the focus on progressing the story toward the Endgame, Sholazar stands apart.  It takes you nowhere.  Normally I wouldn't mind, given that it expands the overall feel of the game world, but given that the three expansions after Vanilla got away from the "sandbox" type of game, Sholazar just feels out of step from the rest of the design goals for Azeroth.


*I would include the Ghostlands too, but you can't fly there.  Yet.

A Few Random Monday-ish Thoughts

It's no secret that I have a stable of Paladins.  Soul plays tanks, Rades (Orcish Army Knife) likes Hunters, and Vidyala (from Manalicious) likes Draenei.

What makes people stick with one race or toon or class over another, while others are confirmed Altoholics?

I can honestly say that I got into playing Paladins because of their similarities to D&D's Clerics.  I play Clerics --first because we needed a healer and then by choice-- and so naturally the first class I'd try out was the Priest, thinking it was a WoW version of a Cleric.

It took about 15 minutes before I discovered how wrong I was, and after some encouragement from Soul, I switched to the Paladin.

As for others, I can't say.  Maybe it's the appeal of bashing someone in the face, controlling the fight, or the lore of a specific race, but some folks latch on to something and don't let it go.

But Altoholics....

I watch my son play LOTRO, and I swear every time I turn around he's creating a new character.  He likes to play Hobbits, but I don't think he could settle on a single character even if his life depended on it.

Oh well.  Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks, right?

***

As I've been working through Alliance-side Loremaster on Tomakan, I've cruised through Grizzly Hills.  In a post-Cata world, this, more than anything else, sticks out like a sore thumb.

"Have you been bloody bitten??!!" the Alliance scout shrieks as we're fleeing to safety.  The fear and loathing of the Worgen in that zone is just as palpable as you'll find in pre-Cata Silverpine Forest and Duskwood, and they are so far out of the reality of Worgen as Alliance that it's laughable.

Can you imagine that Alliance scout asking that of a Worgen toon?

"Um, well....  Now that you mention it, yeah!!  But I got better...."

***

I encountered a newbie in Zul'Drak this past weekend.  I'd forgotten how fresh everything seemed at that stage of the game, but even then, this newbie was in a race to 85.  I got the impression that he was jumping as quickly as he could from zone to zone, following some manual or add-on, which put a damper on my reverie, but merely finding a newbie these days is an achievement when you're surrounded by jaded veterans at max level.

I think I need to get out and hang around in the starter zones a bit more often these days...

The Blogger as Revolutionary

Count de Monet:  It is said that the people are revolting.
King Louis XVI:  You said it! They stink on ice!
--From History of the World Part I


I have a mid-40s Dwarf Paladin over on the Moonrunner (US) server that dates from the pre-Real ID days.  Back then, myself and a few other WoW bloggers created a social guild to connect in-game.  As Real ID and cross server grouping has replaced the need to hook up on the same server, the guild has fallen into disuse.  That said, every couple of weeks I login to Balthan to get in some low level BG action on a Ret Pally.

Well, the other day I logged in and was greeted by the following pop-up:

Now, let's set something straight:  I know that the GM isn't inactive; he's Rades of Orcish Army Knife.

Before you ask, yes, he has an Alliance toon.  And a female Draenei Hunter, no less.  (So much for that Horde bias, right?)

Considering that I know Rades hasn't exactly bolted for greener pastures, I got in touch with him about this little pop-up.  Naturally, he thought it funny that it appeared, and he wanted to see what would happen if I tried to dethrone him.  I wasn't so sure about how this would work out, since I was the only person from the guild to login for the past 4+ months, and if there were a vote, I wasn't sure how that'd work out with nobody else to cast a ballot.  Hell, given the fact that we'd never identified which toon belonged to which blogger, I had no idea who was even still around to assist.

Well, I need not have worried.

 

And that was how I ousted Rades in a bloodless coup, providing him with endless fodder for blog posts as the exiled GM of Puggers Anonymous.  (Well, it's not really that bad; I kept him on as an officer.  You know the quote: keep your friends close and your enemies closer....)

Hmm, maybe I should create a Fabulor toon on Moonrunner before Rades decides to make one there....

 

 

That Elusive New Shiny

(Note:  I kind of wrote this straight without editing, and I decided to post it as-is.  If it meanders, well, you know where that came from.)

I was on Tomakan, working my way through Un’Goro Crater, when a guildie posed me a question.

“What do you think of the revamped zones?”

“I’m kind of torn,” I replied.  “I don’t like the quests-on-rails, but in some zones the stories are compelling:  Stonetalon on both sides, Southern Barrens on both sides.  They needed to do the quests-on-rails format to tell a story, especially with the phasing involved.  However, for a sandbox it doesn’t work so well.”

I couldn’t get those comments out of my head while I took a break and got catapulted into a WSG run.  While I’m not the biggest WSG fan, I still preferred that WSG game to the prospect of going back to Northrend and finishing up the zones I’d left behind.  Why was that, I asked myself.  Leveling a Warlock via BGs in Cata is an exercise in masochism, yet that was preferable to finishing up Zul’Drak for the fourth or fifth time.

The easiest answer to that is because the story never changes.  Even with phasing, we know this tale because we’ve played it before.  The outcomes are always the same, every time you play.  You may have an impact on the game world, but your choices don’t matter.  The few times you do have a true choice –to either kill or release the harpy leader in Hyjal, for example—it’s not a game impacting decision.  It’s a lot like the jokes that would get thrown around in the Culling of Stratholme instance about simply letting Arthas die:  everyone knows that the point of the instance is to keep him alive, in spite of our personal preferences, so we’ll simply just tag along in the knowledge that this really isn’t our story, but Blizzard’s.

This understanding about the game world is the basis for how Blizzard gets away with having major plot threads performed off-stage in books, rather than in the world itself.  I’ve found even in my own writing that it is easier to have certain major events occur off-stage and then have the characters react to that instead of the more arduous task of actually putting the events down on paper.  I can only imagine that this difficulty is magnified when you have to have people “act” in an MMO:  you’d have to design the quests, the NPC activity, the words, the artwork, and all sorts of other stuff associated in setting up a scene vs. paying an author $5k-$10k-$20k to write a book.  To a finance department, that’s a no-brainer.

And yet, I can’t help but wonder if a good portion of the reason why the lower level zones are so consistently empty is because we really don’t have an impact on the story.  Those zones are reduced to being leveling fodder for people hunting for a transmog piece of gear or are populated with gold farmers trying to crank out as much raw materials as they can.  Because we can’t change the story we’re forced to relive the events of the doomed Alliance commander in Southern Barrens where he is effectively betrayed by elements of his own side who want a scorched earth policy toward the Horde.  We can’t even raise a red flag to the Horde commander in Ashenvale that there might be a demon hiding in his midst until such activity draws the ire of Garrosh.  (Old Garrosh despises demons far more than the Alliance, and I have to give him credit for that.)  Have we seen this play before?  You bet we have.  And like a cursed sailor on the Flying Dutchman, we’re forced to relive these events every time we quest in a particular zone.

Perhaps that’s what appeals to me in BGs:  the outcome is uncertain, and you can have an impact on the game.  Sure, you can be saddled with a lot of people who know nothing about how to play AV, but so can the other side.  Plenty of real battles were fought when one side was hopelessly green or outnumbered, and yet you can never say for certain what will happen in the end once the troops are committed.  (The Battle of Marathon or the Siege of Rhodes in 1480 both come to mind.)

In a game designed like WoW, perhaps this is the best we can come to an uncertain outcome where our decisions actually matter.  Sure, there’s raiding, and I’ve heard and seen the toll that smashing your collective head against the impregnable wall of an end boss can put on a person and a guild.  Raiding is, by nature, a hard thing to accomplish, and once you succeed all of that effort will have been worth it.  However, the story will never change no matter how many times we down that boss.  Once the boss is a photo op lying on the ground, we know how things will go.  The NPC reactions are always the same.

This might be an unintended side-effect of the LFR tool:  as more people can easily see end content, the clamor for the new shiny comes louder and quicker.  While some folks love to chase hard modes (or even normal modes now) others who are conditioned by console gaming say “Okay, I’ve beaten the game.  Now what?”  This isn’t because people are greedy, it’s just that they’re conditioned to play the game a certain way, and if that goal is reached more quickly, they’re at a loss as to what to do.

***

MMOs –even those that aren’t sandbox types-- are by nature big worlds with lots of options.  Soul and I have posted that very thing on occasion when the “I’m bored!” crowd kicks it into high gear.  If you’re bored with 5-mans, try BGs.  If you are looking for something off the beaten track, try a naked dungeon challenge like what Rades advocated.  Or maybe how about an old-time flashback and organize a Paladin vs. Shaman throwdown? 

However, it needs to be said that people have different motivations when playing an MMO such as WoW, and when that motivation is unfilled, people will move on in search of that magic.  But what is that magic that people are chasing?

Everyone is different.  People play games for different reasons.  Some love a good story; some love the thrill of having beaten the game; some go for the competition of PvP; some love to collect, and some just live to role play.  There are as many different motivations to playing an MMO as there are options inside a game.  That elusive magic that a game can bring into your soul is a chameleon; each player sees a different siren leading them onward.

Perhaps the restlessness we see in the MMO world today is a reflection of chameleon like nature of our pursuit of the magic.  People remember that moment, that ‘oh wow’ moment, and they wish to recapture it.  For some, the new shiny holds promise, and we shouldn’t be surprised when people unsub/resub in pursuit of that new shiny.  This same group will migrate to and from MMOs, testing the latest and greatest, yet remembering their first.

I still play ‘old’ games such as Civ and Master of Orion, because the magic is still there.  I remember that thrill when I finally beat Civ I on King level, a feat I’ve never repeated.  My kids will see the clunky graphics and primitive sounds of MOO and laugh, but I know that they’ll remember Civ IV the same way I remember Civ I.  Or how I remember when I finally started playing WoW.

Now that the NDA is Over...

...I've seen the female Pandaren design.  While it's better than I expected, she's still too skinny.  Is it too much to make a female Pandaren look more like a Panda first and a dwarf second?

On That New Pandaren Silhouette...

When I saw the female Pandaren Silhouette, this is what I thought of:

Yeah, Jack Black and Gwyneth Paltrow.  

If you're going to have male Pandaren that look a helluva lot like, well, pudgy pandas, why on earth would you create a female Pandaren that looks like she's been on The Biggest Loser?  Don't give me the "we have to make females look significantly different than males" crap, either.  Therazane alone defeats that concept.

To me, making female Pandaren "skinny Pandas with J Lo hips" signifies a lack of imagination.  Another way of looking at it is to consider the female Pandaren as a female Human base that has been "Panda-ized", instead of going from a real honest-to-god Panda and building a recognizable female from that.

Think of Therazane; she broke the mold for female bosses and (semi) faction leaders completely, and Blizz could have built on that by going in a more unique direction.  But with the female Pandaren silhouette, it looks like Blizz played it safe and sexy because it sells.

Monday Musings

Let's get this out of the way now:  I'm a PC gamer.

That said, the appeal of a console for gaming right now is pretty strong, but not because of what you'd think.

There are a lot of good, new games that I'm interested in but I've not pulled the trigger on because of the system requirements.  My aging PC still meets the minimum system requirements, but I know from two decades of gaming experience that those minimum requirements are just about worthless.  So, instead of paying for the game itself, I'd also have to pay for some significant upgrades to my system.

With a console, I wouldn't have to do that.  Yes, that means I wouldn't be able to play a lot of the games I currently own as they aren't made for the console, but it also means that I don't have to pay for hardware upgrades every couple of years.

***

Speaking of hardware upgrades, WoW's older graphics engine might actually work in it's favor for a while.

As newer MMOs with more sophisticated graphics are released, you need more horsepower to run those games seamlessly.  For gamers such as myself, who are reluctant to shell out cash for the hardware just to play one or two games, it's a cheaper option to simply remain with WoW.

I doubt we're going to see much impact by that, but I know that one significant deterrent from me playing TOR are the system requirements.  My PC struggles when you get all 40 people wailing on Drek or Vann in AV, and  there have been a few times where I've actually gotten kicked out of the game in AQ40 when there's been too much activity on screen.  Now, throw in the nicer but more processor intensive graphics of the latest MMOs, and you get the idea.

***

Given the instant popularity of Healers Have to Die, you'd think that Healers would be higher on the priority list in a BG.  Or at the very least, CC them or something to keep them from assisting in the BG.

But nooo....

I can't tell you how many times I've been in a BG lately where people have had to spell out "KILL THE HEALERS" in BG chat.  You know, it's one thing if there are four enemy healers in Warsong Gulch and they're all focusing on the flag carrier, but it's quite another if there's just one Holy Spec Pally out there spamming Holy Light.

It's as if everyone in the BG is expecting someone else to do it, so they get the glory of offing the FC.

One-a-Day Plus Something or Other

After spending much of the Cataclysm expansion playing BGs, I've recently returned to my questing roots.

Sure, I've squeaked in BGs, but I've been recently cruising through Azeroth, working on that Alliance Loremaster for Tomakan.  I figure he'll have it by the end of the NCAA Tournament, when most of the people at work seemingly disappear into the ether and I can take a few days of vacation.  (Okay, I'm not going to take vacation days just to play WoW, but it is something to chill out with.)

Horde Loremaster Quintalan has been operating in semi-retirement, occasionally dropping in to Silvermoon or Eversong Woods to stroll the area.  There's always some smart-ass lowbie toon who thinks it's funny to challenge Q to a duel if he's on Sunstrider Isle, but I always refuse those requests.  I've been tempted to send him into AV, but right now he's content to relax and fish for a while.

In Q's absence, Neve has taken over the Horde toon mantle for the time being and has been running both Firelands and Quel'Danas dailies to keep herself busy.  I'm not exactly sure why I decided to start both at the same time, but a mage's teleport ability is invaluable for handling this task.

Comparing the two sets of dailies has been very educational, even though Neve can sleepwalk through the Q'D dailies given the level imbalance.  In fact, the two sets of dailies have demonstrated the evolution in daily design over the lifetime of WoW.

The Quel'Danas dailies came at the end of BC and featured one big element found in some of the more vexing pre-Cata Vanilla questlines: trooping all over the Continent just to kill or collect something.  Does anyone remember the questline that the ghost in front of Stratholme sent you on?  First you had to collect stuff to assemble the ghost detector in order to contact him, then he sent you on quests all over Azeroth (and several times into BRD) to assemble what you needed to defeat the monster in question.  Finally, after crisscrossing Azeroth numerous times you were able to complete the quest chain and return to the capital city for your reward.  While about half of the Quel'Danas dailies were in Q'D proper, the rest sent you all over Outland to collect and/or fight things.

Most people who come to Quel'Danas these days see the sunny location and the numerous dailies to choose from, but it wasn't always the case.  Q'D as released was a rainy beachhead that only changed as enough dailies on a server were completed.  The Shattered Sun gradually retook the island, more dailies opened up, and skies cleared.  It was a great idea in theory, but in practice what happened was that on some servers people were in such a rush to unlock more content that they blew through the daily requirements and unlocked everything in record time.

The next major set of dailies, for the Call of the Crusade patch in Wrath, improved on things a bit by removing the world trigger for a change in the dailies.  Instead, the player progression unlocked the next level of dailies, and the player could move at their own pace.  The variety of locations you could be sent to was reduced to a more manageable level, with the implication that you could do the dailies and then go about your raiding (or whatever).  The trouble was that the same 5-8 quests got monotonous after a short while, and each time you tried to become a champion for another race in your faction you had to go do this all over again.

Blizzard apparently learned from these issues when they designed the dailies for the Firelands, because they brought back the world effect changes, but tried to keep the character oriented approach.  Firelands utilizes phasing to separate out the world event changes, from the growth of the tree at Malfurion's Breach to the addition of different quest types in an effort to prevent stagnation.  This allows the dailies to take place in a more limited locale, reducing the monotony of travel time and increasing the amount of in-game activity.

Variety?  Check.
World altering events?  Check.
Small locale?  Check.
Time length?  Um.....

I've discovered that the Firelands dailies take a lot of time --and I do mean a lot-- when compared to their predecessors.  Even though you can one-shot mobs in Quel'Danas, you still take about 10-20 seconds fighting monsters in Firelands on average.  You'd also have to consider that Firelands is still active as a quest hub, so there are enough other players there that your way from one location to another isn't hindered by having to mow down excessive mobs.  Quel'Danas probably would take about 10 minutes longer if I were at-level, but that still doesn't take as long as the 45 minutes for me to clear all of the Firelands dailies, and I haven't even unlocked everything yet.  Blizzard didn't eliminate the time factor, they just tweaked it so that you had to do more dailies at once for fewer days overall.

The current state of dailies rewards persistence, not skill or gear level.  While persistence in and of itself isn't a bad thing, too many people who don't value persistence at the level required of the Firelands felt obligated to run those dailies to get the rewards at the end, and people don't like being forced into anything.

What's That About Wrestling With a Pig Again?

Most of the time my battleground chat is restricted to announcements.  You know the sort:

"3 inc TP"
"3 to Farm, no 4"
"SHB is secure; need 1-2 more for def"

That's what you see in BG chat, anyway.  I might be shooting the bull with people while holding down a location, but I never stick that in BG chat.  I figure there's no reason why I should clutter up the channel further when nerd ragers are doing that all the time.

Well, last week in an IoC run I broke my rule.

I was on Neve, which must mean something, but I'm not sure what.

Things were not going well for the Horde in this run.  While our D had taken out the glaives early, the Alliance's D inside the keep was doing a good job of preventing us from breaking through.  I was staying put at the Workshop, waiting to escort the siege engine once it became available.

Ding!  One siege engine rolled out into place.

There was nobody around to drive it.

"Need someone to take engine."

"Got an engine ready to go."

Finally a Pally (unfortunately) came riding up, hopped in, and began driving toward the Alliance keep.

We'd all been going to the East Gate, but this guy drove straight to the Main Gate instead.

"East Gate!  East Gate!" I said, then said it again when he started to go to the West Gate.

He pulled the engine out and rotated it toward the East Gate just as the announcement that the Alliance had broken through popped up.  I knew we had a chance if our D could hold just a bit longer, but we needed speed and firepower.

The Pally then started wiggling the engine as if he were dancing.  "Don't I have a hot body?" he yelled.

I gritted my teeth.  "And no brains," I typed as I was dumping all my CDs trying to distract the Alliance defenders.

"Nevelanthana is either a guy or a really ugly bitch!"

Another guy piped up.  "Why don't you STFU and drive the damn engine!"

"You're just jealous of my abs!"

Thankfully, the Alliance slew Agmar a half a minute later, so I didn't have to see his idiotic comments any further.

***

You know how I've mentioned in the past that if you're a newbie to BGs that AV is an ideal starter because one person isn't going to make that much of a difference?  Well, I've noticed something the past month or so in AV that kind of disproves that assertion.

Whether it's due to sloppy play or some other issue, I've notice that the majority of runs are almost completely of the zerg variety --where the pull starts with two towers/bunkers down-- with almost nobody playing any sort of defense.  In a pure sprint, you're totally  dependent upon things such as Crusader Aura, and that nobody on the other side is setting up any sort of defense.

You can see where this is going, can't you?

If you've got all your CC available, you can hide out in TP or IWB and do just enough to throw the other side off schedule so that your side can pull first.  The last AV run I won on Neve I did just that, hiding out in TP alone, and when the Alliance stormed up the tower I cast Invisibility, drawing them in, and then unloaded with every CD I had.  In a tight area with three mirror images of myself as well as a water elemental, chaos ruled.  Sure, I went down after about a half a minute, but it was just enough of a nudge to throw the Alliance off schedule so we won.

I'm not very proud of that, given that I prefer the turtles, but I'll take the victory.

***

Free Hint:  If you're a stealthie, dismiss your companion.

I was on Tomakan in AB, holding down the Lumber Mill, when I saw a Perky Pug walk by.

"What the--" I began when a Rogue materialized and began slashing me.

Thankfully, he was an undergeared Rogue, but once I realized what was going on, I kept close tabs on the location of that Pug.  Sure enough, he was lurking out there, waiting for the two of us to drop our guard.  Twice he tried to get the drop on us, but that pug gave us enough warning to lay down some AoE of our own.

How do Cross-MMO Guilds Work?

The advent of TOR and the subsequent creation or TOR branches of WoW guilds has gotten me to thinking. How much to the WoW guilds share with their TOR counterparts?

If you want to use Venn diagrams then so be it:

Just what is inside that intersecting area? Web sites? Vent/Mumble? Just a spot on a guild’s forums? Nothing at all?

The thing I can see is that --even with the best of intentions—the two guilds will grow separate over time. Members may join for one MMO but have no inclination to join the other. Perhaps a guild may have a rule that only their WoW members are allowed to join the TOR guild, but that will create a subgroup within the larger WoW guild that may eventually seek independence from the larger organization.

If both groups are large enough, does it make sense to maintain a single Vent/Mumble server or subdivide into two separate servers? If you’re recruiting for your TOR guild, is it really smart to just have a single section on your guild’s Forums for TOR, or should you create an independent website? (Or something in between?)

I’d imagine that the answers are a whole lot of “it depends”, but I’m curious as to how this little social experiment pans out.


(Side Note:  I'm trying to track down the source of a potential issue with the blog.  At least one blog reader has informed me that some browsers are showing some of the words without spacing between them.  Instead of "this and that" they read "thisandthat" instead.  If you see that issue, let me know so I have a better idea how to fix it.)

The F2P Field is Getting Crowded

Not only is the original EQ going F2P, but Rift is following Blizzard's lead and releasing a Rift Lite, wherein the first 20 toon Levels are free.

To quote that German guy on Laugh-In:   Velly interestink!

That Great Gig in the Sky

"Nature just gave up and started again.  We weren't even apes then.  We were just these smart little rodents hiding in the rocks.  And when we go, nature will start over.  With the bees, probably.  Nature knows when to give up, David."  --Stephen Falken, Wargames

Lately, I’ve been wondering how WoW will end.  Not the storyline, mind you, but how the game itself will shut down.

(In February, you get some serious brooding done.  Either that or I’m listening to too much Dar Williams and Pink Floyd these days.)

How will it look to those of us who have been around for a while?  Will we know the contraction caused by lost subs when we see it?  I’m reminded of what it would look like for people living in the decline of an empire, and whether the citizens would recognize the decline around them. 

I suppose the first sign would be the lack of activity on the servers themselves.  Of course, at this stage of an expac it would be difficult to notice real subscription loss versus the ‘end of expac blues’, so it would be quite easy to ignore the wide open spaces and empty zones.

But it wouldn’t be easy to ignore server shutdown.

I imagine there’s a certain level of subscription loss on a server that, once crossed, would place the server on a path to consolidation.  Corporations do this all the time to save money; they will go through periods of server expansion up until someone finally checks out the amount of support they’re paying for each server.  Once that happens, a corporation will consolidate as much as it can to retire old and underutilized servers.  Electrical costs, maintenance costs, and other items affecting the bottom line will push Activision, and they will in turn push Blizzard into making their server farm more ‘efficient.’

Eventually, that will happen with the WoW servers.  One day you’ll wake up, login, and find a message stating that Wyrmrest Accord is being folded into Argent Dawn.  Then it will hit you:  WoW really is contracting.

The large population servers may not even notice this contraction going on; they have, after all, a huge number of toons on them, and they wouldn’t have any mass migrations of their own.  It’s only when you check to see server availability on Patch Day and you mutter to yourself that the server list looks smaller than it used to be that you’ll start to wonder.

Tools such as LFR and LFD will hide declines very easily too, giving the appearance that server activity is up when the reality is quite different.

If server activity declines and consolidations occur, what about character/faction transfer?  Those will already be in decline due to LFR and LFD and cross server grouping, but as fewer toons are being played there is less incentive to take advantage of these offerings, so Blizz will see revenues fall in this arena too.

Once a decline begins, it is very difficult to stop it.  Typically, a corporation will cut staff in response to a lack of funding, causing development staffs to scale back release schedules and content, which only creates a feedback loop, accelerating the decline.

But at this critical period a development team needs more funding, not less, to dampen the subscription loss and reverse the long term trend.

In the end, if this cycle goes on for a while, the product will limp along with a small amount of hard core players, until some corporate boss will pull out a PowerPoint stack and demonstrate how cost effective it would be to simply shut the servers down.  People have moved on, he will say, and our resources would be more efficiently deployed on other teams.  Or maybe the corporation would be best served selling the product to a third party who would be more focused on the business than they can hope to achieve.

Such a spinoff, if any, might give an MMO a second chance at life, but these divestitures are often a complete crapshoot.  Either way, it may only stave off the inevitable for a few years.

And then the ghosts of SW:G and other defunct MMOs will gather on a specified day to watch their most well known cousin finally join them in the graveyard of software.  The cycle will be complete, and another will have taken WoW’s place.

(Hopefully I’ll come up with something a bit more uplifting next time, like people acting stupid in Isle of Conquest.)

And My City Was Gone

With the announcements that there will be no Blizzcon this year and that there will be a Battle.Net World Championships event to be held in Asia in 2012, it seems that Blizz is suffering from not enough personnel all around.

Okay, that's the face of it, but here's some other theories.

1. Focusing on Asia when an Asian themed WoW expac is released is a smart way to revive the WoW franchise.  Well, maybe.  Part of this depends on how the Asian population will feel seeing a culture that is an echo of their own in MoP.  If WoW sets a patronizing tone with the Pandaren culture, this whole thing could backfire and be a big release disaster.  The assumption that the pop culture references and snark found in WoW will play the same in Mists of Pandaria can be a very bad one.
2. Blizzard's focus is now on the Asian market.  Similar to #1, but in this case Blizz is going to develop and market with the Asian market in mind first.  Considering the worldwide appeal of their games, I'm not sure I quite believe this, but I do realize that the Chinese market will eventually dwarf all others.  Still, I'm sure that there are plenty of large overseas markets (hellllooo, Brazil) that don't like being passed over.  We don't know whether the Battle.Net Asian event is going to be located strictly in Asia or whether it is going to move to different cities each year.  Of course, it could be a one-off gimmick, too, but we'll have to wait and see.
3. Blizzard needs to realign staff to get their releases out the door.  Well, yeah.  They said so themselves in their post on the WoW website.  Still, for people who are wondering why they aren't hiring staff, consider this:  anyone who works in IT/software development will tell you that it takes at least six months before a new hire gets up to speed, and often that can stretch up to a year.  Contractors can fill in a pinch, but unless they are former employees even they will take some time integrating into your business environment.  Therefore, the best method of dealing with this situation is to peel personnel from other, lower priority projects and delay what you can.  Blizzcon, as the lowest priority among the staff, got the axe.
4. The three releases Blizz wants to work on are in significant trouble.  Although similar to point #3, this is more of a technical issue than a personnel one.  We haven't heard a peep out of Blizz since D3 was delayed, and as time goes on, this silence becomes more and more damning.  From being a week or two away from release to what seems an indefinite hold, the "tweaks" that D3 needed seem to be more major than realized.  If Blizz realigns staff (see #3 above), to deal with these major issues, this will have a ripple effect on the rest of the Blizz development projects.  In that case, Blizzcon as just the lowest priority item got chucked onto the woodpile.  Since Blizz keeps their development timeline so close to their vest, we won't know if there are other slippages in the release schedule at all until you wake up one day and say "hey, what happened to Heart of the Swarm?"
5. Activision/Blizzard is getting hit hard by SWTOR defections.  It's hard to tell right now given the lack of direct data out there, but judging by my personal experience I believe this is more a factor than some people would care to admit.  I never discuss guild material on the blog, so I'll only say that TOR has had an impact among the WoW players I know, and I'm sure it will have an impact with their quarterly subscription numbers.  If Blizz is feeling some pressure from TOR, then they may be shifting personnel around to accelerate development among all of their projects, not just the ones officially acknowledged. Like oh, say, Titan?
6. Activision/Blizzard is going to move development overseas.  I mean, really?  Come on, man.  You're going to read that into this move?  Get a grip.  If Activision/Blizzard decides to move development staff overseas, I'm sure there will be other signs than the movement of a con to Asia.
7. Activision/Blizzard is going to kill Blizzcon.  That's entirely possible.  The corporate world works in Byzantine fashion a lot of the time, but one truism often remains:  the money will go to the cheaper alternative.  If Activision, as the parent company, decides that Blizzard is flushing too much money down the drain by hosting a separate event when they could be better served integrating into PAX, that'll be the end of Blizzcon.  Given the history of some game companies to have less than stellar customer relations, it wouldn't shock me if this was merely the beginning of the end of Blizzcon.  That said, I'll believe it when I see it.  Of course, I said the same thing about Pandaren in the upcoming expansion, so maybe I ought to be careful what I wish for.

Overall, I expect that the next quarterly investor call from Activision/Blizzard to be very interesting, and will shed some light on the direction of WoW in the near future.

The Elekk in the Room

Remember how busy the Old World was when the Shattering happened?

Toons swarmed over the Vanilla zones like ants on a picnic, investigating the new quest lines and the leveling experience.  Many new alts were created, and a plethora of blog posts were written about the new zones.  This fed into the excitement surrounding Cataclysm’s release and for the first few months after, keeping Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms busy.  Blizzard’s gambit to revamp the Vanilla zones paid off in spades.

Or did it?

I’ve spent the spare time I’ve had in between battlegrounds catching up on my Eastern Kingdoms’ questlines, and what I’ve noticed more than anything else is how empty the zones are.  There are a few farmers around and maybe one other leveling toon out there.  Some zones, such as Arathi Highlands or the Hinterlands, are completely empty.  In fact, it seems like the only busy zones in the entire Eastern Kingdoms are the starter zones.  I’ve cruised up and down the Ghostlands right before Christmas, and there was nary a Horde toon around.  You’d think the sight of a Draenei riding on a blasted Elekk around the Dead Scar would bring some L85s out of the woodwork, but that didn’t happen.

Is it possible that all that work to revamp the Old World was wasted?

Think about it:  we’re back to where we were in terms of leveling zone population from mid-2010 in a bit over a year since 4.0.3b dropped.  It’s the equivalent of a kid ripping open Christmas presents, playing with them, and declaring “I’m bored!” an hour later.

Are there no players leveling toons?

Well, there might be toons being leveled, but there are LFD and BGs as alternate routes to max level.  Additionally, we can’t simply state that there aren’t any new players, either, because new players are typically shunted into the new, empty servers.  However, on servers that have been around for a while, there are definitely very few players leveling toons through questing.

Which again begs the question:  was the revamp worth it if very few of the existing player base take advantage of the options presented?

Now Mist of Pandaria is on the horizon, and without a further update –aka more money spent on these zones that have seen little long term interest— the Vanilla zones will be once again out of date.  A new player to WoW will end up scratching their heads if they try to level via questing.  (“I thought Mists of Pandaria was about Pandas!  All I see are all these Deathwing references!  And who’s Illidan and that Lich King guy?”)

I believe that the revamp was a bold move, but incomplete in execution.  Furthermore, by performing the revamp Blizzard set itself on a course where the story of Azeroth is told in a jumble, not in a series of sequential chapters.  A revamp is pretty much an all-or-nothing scenario, especially when you mix the expansion’s new zones in with the original Vanilla zones.  No amount of hand waving can make a new player forget about Outland and Northrend --especially when you have to pay for them!

Where is that d20, Anyway?

I’d say about 99% of the time I play WoW, I forget about the ‘RPG’ part of the ‘MMORPG’ label.  That’s neither a good nor bad thing, it just is.  I don’t play on an RP server, and there are just enough metagame pop culture-ish jokes in Azeroth to prevent me from being completely immersed in the story.  Oh yeah, and there’s the little fact that nobody else is RPing, either.

It just struck me how strange that was, given my RPG roots.

I’ve been playing RPGs for 30 years, dating back to the day a friend of mine offered to show me this cool game he’d started playing called Dungeons and Dragons.  Those early days were filled with homemade dungeons with a lack of plot and story, and plenty of “you open a room an inside are…. Three Red Dragons!” 

(What was the Loot chart for a Red Dragon, anyway?  Something like “Q” or “S” on the table in the AD&D 1^st Edition Monster Manual?)

We were too young to know any better about the story, given that we were in the Sixth Grade and we’d skipped the plot and flavor text in the old Keep on the Borderlands module and gone straight to the Caves of Chaos.  Kill the monsters, get the loot.

Sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?

I’m not exactly sure when, but sometime during my high school years the story became very important to my role playing.  The most important question you could ask a player –why—infected me, and I pushed myself to provide reason and logical underpinnings to my gameplay.  Ever since, I’ve played and/or GMed a story driven campaign.

They why don’t I roleplay more in WoW?

You know, I don’t have a really good answer.

Some of my toons –Q, Neve, and Tom—I have a backstory for, while most of the others are just, well, there.  I created some of them to address a need (Balthan to try out the Dwarf Paladin, Adelwulf the Warlock/Worgen, etc.) and others just for the hell of it.  Still, my big three toons do have a (semi-cohesive) story in my own mind, but I don’t act on it.

The game doesn’t really lend itself well to RP-ing without investing significant effort.  Blizz has spent a lot of time incorporating pop culture into the game, and while that may be amusing to me as a person, it also is the metagaming equivalent of throwing ice water in the face of an RP-er.  Even if you manage to avoid that pitfall, tools used to simplify life in Azeroth will throw you out of the RP zone too.  As Souldat once remarked on a post of mine about RP-ing LFD, it would be hard to RP when you’re ported into an instance on the fly.  Compound that with potentially four other players who aren’t interested in RP-ing, and you get the point. 

I’ve read several posts over the past few years about how RP-ing is an endangered species, even on the RP servers, and I can understand why.  In a sense, WoW is a victim of its success, in that even RP servers have significant populations who are more interested in the metagame rather than the world itself.  Their subs pay the bills, so Blizz can’t complain, but in a sense it makes the game smaller than what it could be.

Still, RPing does survive in WoW. 

I have a low level toon on Wyrmrest that I created just to check things out.  When she entered Silvermoon City that first time, she was hailed by a higher level toon passing by, asking the time of day and whether I needed assistance. 

“Just point me in the direction of the nearest inn,” I said.  “I’m tired.”

The Tauren did just that, and wished me well.

I sat back in my chair and smiled.  All was not lost.

Wanna run a BG? Um, what time is it?

No, seriously.

I've some time off this week, so my AV runs have been split into two separate groups:  early morning and mid-afternoon.  And believe me, there's a huge difference in group personality between the two times of day.

The early morning runs are quieter with less chatter, and more attention paid to details.  Call outs are the norm, defense and back-caps are common, and you'd better run in a pack if you're a glass cannon (aka Mage).  People actually thank you for the Lock cookies, Feasts, and Rituals of Refreshment.  If you say "need 1-2 more to defend SHB", you'll actually have 1-2 (sometimes 3) toons appear from nowhere to assist in defense.

Mid afternoon, on the other hand, is an exercise in confirming stereotypes.

I've rushed in, taken Iceblood Tower, and then watch everyone else as they moved on en masse.

"Need 2-3 more to defend IBT."

[silence]

When the inevitable backcap happens, a flood of recriminations spits over BG chat.

"You @#%&ing idiots!  What a fail group!"
"Somebody go back and get it!"
"Get it yourself, retard!"
"Doesn't matter, we can win pulling with two towers up."

When THAT strategy doesn't work, you get:

"What a fail group!"
"Yeah, healers suck!"
"You're tanking in Fury Spec, you idiot!"

Oh, and did I mention the 3-4 people who hang around the BG entrance, waiting for the free Honor?

Why the huge difference in group personality?

I can think of one reason:  the early morning runs aren't populated with the teens/college kids that the latter runs are.  After all, those folks are probably sleeping in until noon anyway.

If that's the case, then shouldn't the 5-man LFD runs mimic the BGs?  You know, I don't know, given that I haven't run LFD in ages, but it wouldn't shock me to find that out.  My experience from previous times, however, is that LFD is such a small sample and such a mixed bag that you never know what you'll get.  BGs, having larger numbers and are quixotically quicker than your average LFD run, tend to take on distinct group personalities.  And when those personalities change --due to an injection of teen hormones, for instance-- the result is noticeable.

Dealing with the mid-afternoon crowd isn't too difficult, just keep your expectations low and ignore most of BG chat.  Well, and also console yourself in the fact that the current AV queue time is 1-2 minutes.  At least you're not waiting 1/2 hour for LFD to pop.