Two Sides to a Coin: Part 1 -- Introduction

“I hate the Space Goats.”

“Blood Elves are gay.”

“Draenei are stupid."

“BE women are designed just for oversexed teenagers.”

“Female Draenei are like looking at J-Lo with a tail.”

“Blood Elves aren’t real Horde.”

“I go out of my way to gank the Goats.”

“When I see a BE, I want to punch them.  Pretty Horde my ass.”

Sound familiar?

If you’ve played WoW any stretch of time, you come across a lot of strong feelings about the two Burning Crusade races.  Sure, there’s plenty of love for them out there, but there’s been just as much (if not more) hate.  These two races rarely seem to inspire a ‘meh’ reaction from the WoW crowd.

I’m a bit of an odd man out in that I not only play both races but I actually like both of them.  I recently finished the Loremaster of Outland achievement on Tomakan, and I can now share a belief that’s been growing on me the past year:  the two races have enough in common that they could be considered fraternal twins.

Yes, I know, this is a bit of a departure from a previous post of mine, but that post concerned the low level experiences of both races in the Old World.  That post still remains valid because Blizzard didn’t change things very much for both races in the post-Cata Old World.  As for the entire breadth of Draenei/Sindorei lore present in WoW, consider the following racial history:

• Tempted by outside powers, the majority willingly turn to Darkness.  As a reward, they are granted tremendous power.  Those who refuse flee.
• Finding a safe haven, they rebuild a semblance of their prior life.
• Invaded and decimated by outside forces, what remains clings to life support.
• These outside forces are the focus of their ire to the exclusion of almost all else.
• Convinced of their superiority, the race has a blind spot the size of New Jersey.

Now, which race am I talking about?

Anyone?  Bueller?

Both.

What I intend to do the next few posts is expound upon how similar the two races are, so that maybe they can be seen in a different light.  I’m going to focus upon the in-game lore, because that is the lore that gets the biggest dissemination in WoW.  If you play WoW, you have access to the in-game lore; not everybody is going to read the books/comics or watch the DVDs from the BC Collector’s Edition.

Of course, I’m not finished with Alliance side Loremaster --I might miss a few isolated things in the post-Cata Old World-- but I’m reasonably confident that I’ve got most of the Draenei/Sindorei in-game lore covered.

Hopefully, these posts will help a player gain some insight into these two BC races, and encourage people to explore the in-game lore for both sides and come to their own conclusions.

Paizo to License Pathfinder MMO

Well, this is an entertaining development.

Paizo, the company that created the pencil and paper RPG Pathfinder*, has contracted with Goblinworks to create a sandbox MMO called Pathfinder Online.

Here's the link to the Paizo blog.

I suppose it wasn't too surprising that if World of Darkness and D&D found their way online that the current best selling PnP RPG would eventually get there, but I guess I was thinking that they weren't going to branch out in that direction.  However, there's a long time between here and any supposed release date; just ask World of Darkness.


*Known around RPG circles colloquially as D&D 3.75.

Musings for a Wednes Thursday

Given all of the (rather obvious) Cthulhu influence in the WoW-verse, I'm surprised that HP Lovecraft's estate hasn't been asking for a cut of the dough from WoW.  Well, if the estate went down that route, I guess they'd have to tackle Hentai too, and I'm not so sure I'd really want to see that brought up in a court of law.

***

You never know when a conversation might turn to MMOs.

I was in a meeting the other week when I was talking with a fellow employee.  He's always been the sober, stern type, the sort that if there was an entry for "dour" in the dictionary, his picture would be there.  He never talked about anything --anything-- other than work while I was within earshot, but he took one look at my laptop's screen and exclaimed "Ah ha... World of Warcraft!"

My screen is typically covered in IMs, server console windows, and a few other apps, but the telltale "W" in WarCraft from the background pic was visible at the top.  "You play?" I asked, surprised.

"Oh yeah, but I don't get the chance to play a lot.  I don't think I've ever gotten a character to max level.  You?"

"I've got a few at max level, but playing has been kind of low on my priority list these past few months."

He chuckled.  "Imagine that!"

***

I sometimes wonder about celebrity endorsements.

We're all familiar with the "What's Your Game?" series of WoW commercials, starring people such as Mr. T and William Shatner.  However, I hadn't realized just how long ago those ads were until I saw a commercial starring (among others) NBA player Derrick Rose for the new Assassin's Creed PS3 game. 

Do celebrity endorsements in the computer gaming world actually work?  To me, it seems more to highlight how mainstream computer gaming is than anything else, but maybe some people do pay attention to what games their favorite celebrities are playing.

The Invisible Wall

It's been a while.

When I logged on the other day, I found not only some Halloween quests in my queue, but some Brewmaster stuff as well.  I hadn't played for an appreciable stretch of time in well over a month, and I still haven't logged into my Horde toons since, oh, early October.  This isn't due to any real lack of desire to play, but merely my credo of keeping my priorities straight.

My overall absence from the game is due to a combination of factors, but the primary ones can be summed up in two words:  family and work.  It was kind of a perfect storm, really, where work amped up right at the same time that the family got really busy, and I'd end up hitting the hay later and later at night.  Since I play early in the mornings, less time for sleep on the one end meant I had to make it up somewhere, and my WoW time suffered as a consequence.  About halfway through my disappearance from the servers, I finally admitted defeat and let my sub lapse for a little while.  Hell, if I wasn't on to play, why pay for it?

Well, this past week I finally resubbed and logged back in.

You know how Larisa over at PPI once talked about how she'd gone away (on vacation or something) and then came back to find that she couldn't remember how to play at all?  Well, that is no lie.  The first few battlegrounds I got into I swear I was doing little better than hitting a button --any button-- hoping it would score a hit.  About all I was good for was announcing when there were incs or taking away the enemy's attention on the healer.  If anyone had listened in on that first early morning, they'd have heard a steady stream of "no, TV comes after I get the 3 HP...  Dammit, I hit Exorcism again!  Stop it, you moron, use your CDs!  Now why the f*** did I blow both the trinket and Divine Shield?  He only hit you once!"

Times like this, you kind of wonder why I logged back in in the first place.

(Of course, talking to yourself is one of the first signs of senility, and as the Old Man around the WoW bloggers I frequent since Larisa retired, I'm sure I'm letting myself up for a bunch of retirement jokes.)

To be honest, I did kind of question myself a bit about resubbing.  After the first week or so, I found that I didn't miss it quite so much, and I could quite easily keep up with what was happening on the blogosphere and on the guild website without actually needing to login to the game.  Was it a sign of an addiction that I wanted to resub just because?

Maybe, but then again, maybe not.  Interacting in the blogosphere or on a website (or, yes, on Twitter) isn't the same as in-game interaction; there's a voyeuristic feel to reading about people's exploits or general chatter, and an unspoken but omnipresent barrier involved.  If you're not out there, interacting in-game, you're just a spectator.  Grab some chips and the remote, and you've got an evening in front of the tube watching a reality show.

But really, what is more interesting:  reading about people interacting in-game, or actually being in-game?

Some people (/cough Rades /cough) could write about killing ten fire elementals and turn it into epic prose, but the rest of us aren't so gifted.  We need context, we need grounding, we need the interaction itself to make our words come alive.  You can mention that "I finished my last Firelands dailies!" or "I finally got that Netherwing Drake!" and those who have a common reference can appreciate it.  If you don't have that, they're just so many electrons cluttering up the interwebs.

The irony is that I'm talking about playing in a virtual world when there are likely some people out there saying "Go outside!  Enjoy a physical world for a change!"  Well, yeah.  You've got a point.  And yes, I do go outside and enjoy the wilderness, such as it is in my part of the Midwest.  But this isn't a blog for my outdoors foibles, and it misses the point.

If I wanted to merely read about people playing WoW, that's all fine and good, but the fun of WoW is actually playing the game.  It's a shared experience.  People respond to the game --and the other players-- with the entire wide range of emotions because the game world is a living, breathing thing.  Perhaps WoW has more than it's share of detractors due to it being the 1000 lb gorilla in the MMO world, but if people didn't care, everyone would yawn.  MMOs live and die by the passion they stir in their players, and the players themselves are a large part of that.  When an MMO generates merely indifference, then the barbarians are at the gate.

As for myself, I decided to resub because I missed the interaction with friends and fellow bloggers/guildies online.  Sure, I tend to play when the servers aren't exactly busy (or are filled with insomniacs), but they're busy enough.  And the lunchtime crowd can be plenty fun too.

And naturally, right after I resubbed, I came down sick with a very nasty virus.  As I lay on the couch, dosed up with Robitussin and Ibuprofen, I kept muttering "....don't it just figure?"

FYI...

...I'z busy right now.

Will post soon, but real life has been beating me with a clue stick.

PvP "Hybrids"

The thing that I do find most intriguing is the concept of the kinda-sorta PvEish version of BGs.  Imagine the PvPish zones in Grizzly Hills, and instead of a loosely connected set of dailies, convert them into an "event", and that's what you'll get in this new PvP hybrid.

In practice, I'm not sure how well this will work, and whether phasing will do the job as needed.  Think of Tol Barad, and how that has dropped off like a rock.

I was thinking about this, and how the smarter thing that Blizz could do would be to create a PvP option where --if selected-- you'd buff up the non-Boss NPCs in Alterac Valley and add NPCs as needed in the other moderate to large BGs.  That way the NPCs wouldn't be a pushover, and you could theoretically turn AV back into the epic battle of old.

Mists of Pandaria = PvP Land and Other Musings

The title is my first opinion in a nutshell.

If you don't like PvP, I suspect that you're not going to like this upcoming expansion quite so much.  PvP has been carrying the Alliance v. Horde conflict for quite a while now, and I don't expect that to change.

When the stated goal of an expansion is the conflict with the opposing faction, PvP will become more important, and possibly more important than raids.
The racials of a Pandaren are very interesting from a PvP standpoint too:

• Bouncy: reduces fall damage by half.
• Inner peace: double rested XP.
• Gourmond: +15 to cooking.
• Epicurean: double stats to food buffs.
• Quaking Palm (from the live stream): Puts a target to sleep for three seconds.

Quaking Palm is very PvP oriented, as is Inner Peace.  (Just wait around the Capital City and queue for BGs.  Watch the XP rack up!)  Bouncy is kind of meh, and Gourmond and Epicurean equally favor PvE and PvP content.

***

If we complained about Outland being out of date before, I guess we ain't seen nothing yet.

Outland will now be more out of date than the Old World would have been when Cata dropped.  Northrend almost as bad, and the Old World will be filled with Deathwing references.

***

In case nobody was noticing, Inner Peace means that Pandaren will rocket through the leveling system.  Add a few heirlooms, guild perks, and....

***

My previous post about "quests-on-rails" and the effect of making the leveling secondary is going to be even more pronounced in the upcoming expansion.  When Blizz explicitly mentions that they're focusing more on max-level content for this expansion, then you know that leveling has taken a back seat to the WoW experience.

***

WoW Pokemon?  Are you kidding me?

Is Blizzard losing subs to Wizard 101 or something?

If there's something that's going to land on the cutting room floor before the game goes gold, I expect this will be the one to get the axe.