I Love the Smell of Gyrocopters in the Morning...

At the end of an Isle of Conquest battleground, my Rogue dinged 85.  I looked around the entrance to Uldum, decided there was no reason to stick around, and I went back to Stormwind to begin my expedition to the Orient Pandaria.

Having ignored most of the Beta and being baffled by most people's commentary on their own blogs (Mogu, Schmogu), I figured I was going in as blind as you could be without actually being a complete noob to WoW.  Also, I decided this would be a good duplication of my previous attempt in Cataclysm, the "Convoy to L85"*, but with my iL at 280 I assumed this would be a bit rougher of a transition.**

I flew up to the Skyfire, landed, and we were off.

About five minutes into the intro questline, I had one overwhelming thought:  why are we still playing WoW with swords and axes and bows?  WoW has gone full steampunk with Mists, and the old paradigm has become obsolete.  It's so steampunk, both gyrocopter sequences --the one you pilot as well as the one where you tag certain places in the Horde stronghold for air strikes-- felt like something out of Apocalypse Now.

Throughout the entire SI:7 portion of Jade Forest, the comparisons with Vietnam grew stronger, with the Alliance and Horde's arming of the indigenous populations echoing the Soviets and U.S. arming the Vietnamese.***

And then, things just collapsed.

We were back to the traditional WoW environment of kill ten rats, sly names with a nod to popular culture, and quest writing similar to any other expac.  It's almost as if Blizzard went up to the edge, looked over the precipice, and decided to play it safe and go back to the tried and true.  With the exception of the graphics and voice actors, if you were to drop the Pandaria quests into another expac you'd not tell the difference.

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense:  WoW is what it is, and putting an Asian veneer over it isn't going to change the core of the game.  Just like how I could tell Aion was Korean in origin by the quest text****, I could tell that this was WoW by the quest text.

Still, my first observation stands:  why are we using bows and swords and axes in a game that has become dominated by "magic tech" and steampunk?  I can understand a Rogue's use of daggers in an assassin's role, but the Paladin, Warrior, and Hunter seem obsolete in the tech that you see in WoW.  The magic oriented classes --Druid, Shaman, Priest, Warlock, and Mage-- have more utility in the New WoW Order than the melee based classes.

From a historical perspective, once one group makes a major technological leap in warfare, other groups quickly follow suit or they get steamrolled over.  When the musket was introduced and the concept of interchangeable parts introduced, all of the major powers of the day almost instantly switched to this new tech.  Blizzard went in this direction with the entire opening and SI:7 sequences, yet pulled back from the obvious conclusion of modifying the classes to accommodate new arms and tactics.  Yes, the game would have been radically changed forever had they gone through with those sort of changes, but it remains that Blizzard seems to have wanted the flash and bang of the new stuff without the natural conclusion that those changes would have wrought.

Unless, of course, Titan is really WoW Steampunk.




*Use the label to find the old posts on that adventure; I examined the transition from Wrath to Cata as a pair of fresh L80s --Neve and Tomakan-- without the benefit of having run a single Wrath raid or heroic instance.  For fun, I added Q into the mix just to compare the difference in Hyjal from someone with T10 gear vs. Wrath greens.

**Oh, I guess you're curious how my severely undergeared Rogue handled the intro zones.  It was much slower going than the transition to Cata, and the first boss, Ga'trul, proved to be a true gear check.  I'd be doing well enough until he converted to Sha form, and then I'd end up wiping.  In the end I had to go back and blow some of my Honor and Justice points to get enough gear to allow me to knock that warlock out.  Once I got past Ga'trul, however, the road was much smoother than I expected.

***You could also insert any Nineteenth Century European power here, particularly during colonial expansion.

****If there's one thing that makes me hesitate about Guild Wars 2, it's that I didn't like the tone of the quest text from Aion.  If the same company, NCSoft, makes both games, it stands to reason that I won't like feel of GW2 as well.

A Few Newsflashes

I was writing something else but here are a few pieces of news from around the Blogosphere:

• The Old Republic has 1.7 million new accounts since they went F2P.  Subs are steady at 550 thousand or so, but profits are up for the game.
• WoW lost 1.3 million subs since Q4 2012.  The bleeding has been most prevalent in Asia, but all regions lost subs.
• RIFT just announced it's going F2P.  Not sure about the details yet, but they are going F2P June 12th.
• Neverwinter has generated a huge amount of interest, but you knew that, right?

The Hardest Thing.....

I figured I'd end this Friday with a few musings on MMOs, all beginning with the words "The hardest thing..."

Feel free to add your own!

***

The hardest thing about playing a Rogue is learning when not to do anything.  If you're used to playing a tank or DPS who rushes into the fray, a Rogue is a huge change of pace.  You can't simply jump in, because you're too squishy.  Everybody knows you can do monster damage on a single hit, so they all gang up on you.  You sometimes have to wait, let the mob go by, and then catch the lone person left behind.

***

The hardest thing about playing on the Sith Empire side is that it messes with your morals.  Like the agent on Balmorra who wants you to set up IEDs to deliberately kill children.

***

The hardest thing about playing the new Neverwinter MMO is that I feel I should be using a gamepad.  (More on that in another post.)

***

The hardest thing about playing LOTRO is the UI.  I don't know why, but the screen buttons and whatnot just feel so.... busy.

***

The hardest thing I've ever done in an MMO is tank.  Trusting somebody to keep you upright is not easy, particularly when you've seen a lot of bad pugs.

***

The hardest thing in a battleground seems to be getting that last 2% of health on that enemy you're fighting down to zero.  I swear, if I had a dollar for each time I came thisclose to finishing someone off and they still managed to escape....

***

The hardest thing about playing a mage is resisting the urge to run in and blast everyone with a Cone of Cold.

***

The hardest thing about playing Age of Conan is realizing that mobs are much tougher than you find in other MMOs.  Usually you remember this after they ganged up on you and you're back at the graveyard.

***

The hardest thing about Star Trek Online is that all of the NPCs --your crew and others-- all seem to look alike.  They have the same general look in the eyes and mouth, and after a while they all start to blend together.

***

The hardest thing about trade chat is resisting the urge to reach through the computer screen and headbutting the idiot who just said a racist/sexist/disgusting thing for the tenth time.

***

The hardest thing about Mists of Pandaria has to be hearing for the five thousandth time "Oh, you mean this is just like Kung Fu Panda!"  

Although seeing the four hundredth permutation of "Po" or "Kung Fu" or "PooPoo Platter" as a toon's name comes close.

***

The hardest thing about watching my kids play MMOs is resisting the urge to toss them out of the chair and "help".  They don't need my help, and if I keep telling myself that, I'll finally start to believe it.

***

The hardest thing about MMO blogging is that I always --and I do mean always-- find a grammatical or factual error right after I press Publish.  The author Michelle Sagara once said in a post of her own that she has the same problem, so I don't feel too bad.  But still, it is annoying.

***

The hardest thing about guilds is watching them implode, and realizing there's nothing you can do about it.

***

The hardest thing about WoW mounts is that damn White Polar Bear mount.  I still haven't gotten that sucker to drop.

***

The hardest thing about MMO friends is that there's never enough time to merely hang with them.

Did Somebody Get the License of that Truck?

I'd thought the L75-L79 BG range was the worst for leveling via BGs.  The Cata gear entering in at L77-L78 skewed the BG fairly heavily toward the top end of the BG, even more so than the average leveling BG due to the compressed nature of an entire expac to five levels.  Having gone through that range twice now, once with a Lock in Cata and now on my Rogue in Mists, I figured I knew what I was talking about.

Seems that I was wrong.

When my Rogue hit L80 and entered into this BG field, with Blizz's internal adjustments my health was about 52-53k.  I saw L84s with 84-90k health, and figured it wasn't too bad all things considering.  I knew I'd have to run through either Vashj'ir or Hyjal to get enough Cata gear to compensate for losing most of my old Wrath and BoA gear*, although I had enough Honor farmed to get some good L270 PvP gear.

Things just looked better than the L75-L79 range, and I breathed a sigh of relief.  Mists was in sight.

The first few battlegrounds I got into --Isle of Conquest, Eye of the Storm, and Warsong Gulch-- I was able to contribute to.  I wasn't a terror out there, as I wasn't high enough level or had enough gear, but I held my own and wasn't a drag on the teams.  Well, let's be realistic here:  Children's Week bringing in a lot of unskilled PvPers helped me considerably.

Then came last night.

I was in an IoC battleground, and we'd quickly stormed the Horde Keep.  I and two other people held back to defend the Keep while the rest went after Overlord Agmar.  A lone Warlock showed up and gave battle, which even though Locks are much improved over the Cata version**, a Hunter, Druid and Rogue (me) should have no trouble dispatching him.

He blew through us in 20 seconds.

"What the hell was that?" I asked as we were waiting by the Spirit Guide.

"Did you see him?" the Druid added as we ran back to the Keep.  "He had 180k health!"

"All I knew is that he one-shotted me and I had 66k!"

We made it back to the Keep and were joined by two more toons.  It didn't help, as it took the Lock a mere 25 seconds to dispatch us all.

"Skip D-ing the Horde Keep," a DK said.  "Just run in and kill the boss!"

"No kidding," I grumbled.  "The Lock is more powerful than the boss!"

Needless to say, the Lock all by himself managed to win IoC for the Horde.

I was still shaking my head over this when I got into an Arathi Basin run.  While the Horde didn't have a 180k health Lock roaming around, they had about half of their team over 100k.

"This is ridiculous," a DK said.  "I might be able to take on one of them, but not a whole side.  Just go ahead and let them 5 cap so we can get this over with."

"So Blizz didn't close that loophole in the gear that they started with Cata?"

"No, they didn't.  What makes it worse is that while they can't queue up for it, a toon can be invited into a group running a Mists dungeon so they can get Mists blue gear.  You've got guilds running their twinks through multiple runs just to get tricked out."

"And I thought L75-79 was bad.  At least I didn't get one-shotted there."

"Yeah, the gear inflation isn't linear between Wrath Cata and MoP."

Well, it looks like my prediction about the BG issues back in Cata has come to pass in Mists.  If Blizz isn't going to allow toons to migrate straight to Cata and Mists from L78 and L83 respectively, they ought to move the low end Cata and Mists gear to a requirement of L80 and L85.  While the gear discrepancy is bad enough between Wrath and Cata, the non-linear nature of gear inflation has made it progressively worse between Cata and Mists.  And while Blizz attempted to level things out a bit by raising the health level of the new L80s in battlegrounds, the L84s with access to blue Mists gear far outstrip any manual intervention Blizz accomplished.

I'm not going to hold my breath on any corrections any time soon, because this is the second expac that Blizz has let this go; obviously, they gain more by leaving things as they were than actually fixing this discrepancy.  But from where I sit, this is just as bad as how weak Warlocks were in Cata.  And we know how Blizz addressed that, don't we?





*I ended up with two Toxidunk Daggers due to the generosity of a fellow Rogue on the Ysera server, who saw I was at L78 and in AV at the time.  The Rogue didn't want any gold, he just wanted to give the daggers to someone who was going to use them in BGs.  Who said that Rogues were disreputable people, anyway? ;-)

**Apologies to Cynwise, but I felt like an old man griping that "I leveled a Lock via BGs when it was HARD, back in Cata, and all these young whippersnappers don't know what it's like to be Rogue chow!"

...And Next on the Runway....

"Oh, I love your outfit!"

This announcement was made by a Bounty Hunter in the Cademimu flashpoint, right as we were buffing up.

"Who?" the other Bounty Hunter asked.

"Both you and Sree.  I love how you both look!"

I blinked.  I'm no fashion maven like Rades or Kamalia, as my rules for toon appearance can be boiled down to three words:  "no clown gear".*  My Inquisitor looked like a proper Sith in her hood and chest gear.  A bit plain, perhaps, but since I was still gearing up I didn't have much more than the chest and leg orange gear at the time.  I deliberately turned off the helm view, because I'm not in the mood of staring at a Jason or Scream lookalike for hours at a time.

The second Bounty Hunter spun around, showing off her gear.  "Thanks a lot!" she said.

"Thanks!" I added.

I considered that a unique situation until the other day, when I was getting ready for Warsong Gulch.  While skimming the team lists, I heard a telltale whisper sound.

"Nice mogging job," someone had pinged me.

I blinked.  Again.  "It's not mogged," I replied.  "It's all current gear."

"Really?  I'll inspect you and take some notes."

While I'm sure that I've been inspected before, it felt vaguely voyeuristic that someone wanted to see what my gear was for fashion purposes.

Maybe I ought to avoid Goldshire for a while until this whole fashion thing blows over.





*For example, I still think that Q's T9 Liadrin gear looked the best on him, even if it looked like a generic knight in shining armor.  To me, it just looked functional and cool.

Belsavis is Like Monday -- It Just Seems to Go On and On.....

Having only taken one toon to (what was then) max level on The Old Republic, I've been pleasantly surprised at how other class stories have been playing out.

I've just finished Chapter 2 on my Commando, which took far longer than I expected.  Having only the Smuggler to go on, I expected Chapter 2 to last fairly short, with an interlude at an off planet location.  The Commando's Chapter 2 disabused me of that notion, by finishing up in between Hoth and Belsavis.

It also surprised me for another reason:  I got to see my entire team in action.

That was never really an option in the Smuggler class story, so seeing my entire team storm onto the ship during the Chapter 2 story was a pleasant surprise.  And the end of that assault led to another surprise, which made it a bit hard on my next assignment.*

Still, I've found the stories in TOR to be enjoyable enough that I've been taking my time with them, enjoying each step of the way.

And now I'm looking Belsavis in the face; the one planet that I felt was never going to end.

I can now identify with how Lewis and Clark must have felt when they reached a high point in the Rocky Mountains, expecting a quick jaunt to the sea, and discovered that a huge mountain range --the Cascades-- lay before them.  Every time I thought I was reaching the end of the Belsavis questline, lo and behold there was another area to clear out.  Yes, the story was interesting, it was just spread out way too much.

That said, if you're playing a male smuggler, the ending to the class questline was very amusing.  "I thought you hated each other," Corso said to me.  So did I, but what do I know?  Apparently not enough.

But that ending is far enough in the future that I'm starting to wonder whether it's not a bad idea to go work on that Inquisitor questline for a while instead....




*Sorry, I'm not going to give away any spoilers.  They aren't big --like end of the Knight's Chapter 1 big-- but it did have an impact on me.

Just Exercising Those Facepalm Muscles, That's All

I'm not the most socially savvy person in the world.

(In other news, the sun rose today.)

Being a bit older than your average MMO player, I occasionally make misinterpretations about what other players/bloggers are saying by reading things wrong.  For example, I had always read "omw" as "Oh my word" instead of "On my way".  I just chalked the prevalence of "omw" in various chat forms to politeness rather than anything else, until the other week when I mentioned to a fellow player about it while guarding the Farm.

"It means 'on my way'," he replied.  "What on earth did you think it was?"

I could almost see the implied "doofus" added on at the end.  "I thought it meant 'oh my word'," I said, about as meekly as you could type in a chat.

There was a long awkward silence that was only broken up by an incoming group from the Blacksmith.

***

Shintar over at Going Commando wrote a blog post about two new questlines in TOR, the Seeker Droids and Macrobinoculars quests/dailies.  While her first impression when she heard about the binoculars was of Luke Skywalker scanning Tatooine in the original Star Wars, I instead thought of what Marty McFly's dad used them for in Back to the Future:  being a Peeping Tom.*

Perhaps that's just a generational difference, but it could also be that part of my childhood was spent BSW:  Before Star Wars.  After I'd seen the original movie in the theater, it wasn't until several years later that I saw it again --on television-- so the iconic image of Luke was lost on me.

Now THIS is far less creepy...

...than this.  Safer, too.

***

I'm also not the smoothest commenter in the world.  I can't tell you the number of times that I'd written a comment on a blog post which sounded good but turned out to be absolute gibberish.  Or had grammatical errors.**  Or when I type in a comment and I realize later I'd said a bit too much, which kind of leaves everything sounding awkward.

Like the time I'd asked one of my kids' teachers how she ended up with a cell number from several states over when I knew she grew up somewhere else, and she began to explain about how complicated that was and it involved grad school and whatnot.  I opened my mouth and agreed, saying that it was the sort of story you needed to tell over coffee.  It was only hours later that I realized that it sounded like I was hitting on her, which was not what I'd intended.

***

Then again, a lot of my social cluelessness dates back to my youth, when I was a geek back when geeks weren't cool.***  In those days, geeks were into science, reading SF&F, playing on Atari/Intellivision/Commodore 64/TI-99 consoles/computers, and playing D&D.  If you've ever had your parents throw out your D&D materials because they considered them to be Satanic, you know what I'm talking about.  I mean, I used to twitch every time I was playing Tunnels of Doom on the TI and my parents would come in, because I expected them to realize I was playing a form of D&D on the computer and they would take the thing away.****

And here, what do I do for fun?  Play D&D and Savage Worlds with the kids, Talisman with my wife and friends, and MMORPGs on the computer.

I'm still amazed at it all.

When I read about boss fights, raids, gear optimization, and (even) dailies, a small part of the back of my head is going "Are you kidding me?  Don't break this down into minutae; this is awesome!  We're playing a game that would have gotten you slotted for deprogramming a quarter century ago!"

I see reports from PAX, BlizzCon, and ComicCon, and still pinch myself that there's not a book/game burning in sight.*****  The gamers and geeks have emerged from the basements and proclaim their geekdom in public.

And yet I go to work and circulate among other parents, pretending that other side of me doesn't exist.  At most I can occasionally chat about comic book movies, because their popularity extends beyond Geek circles.  When I go into the office, I try to make sure the background on my laptop is a plain, unassuming gray, not the WoW or TOR backgrounds I typically use.  When surrounded by suits, the last thing you want to do is rock the boat.

"Um, Yeah.  You're planning on filling out those
TPS reports after you finish that quest line, right?" 

I know, far too well, how negatively geeky activities are perceived in some quarters.  When someone shouted out "I love you, man!" to Ghostcrawler at BlizzCon, a part of me winced.  I remember middle school and high school, when you just kept your head down and tried not to stand out.  Even ol' Pat Robertson has recently resurfaced, talking about how there was a game called Dungeons and Dragons that led people astray.  (Newsflash to Pat, it's still around.)  If perception is indeed reality, to these people little has changed since the 80's, except that the geeks are now easier to spot in public.

In fact, if you try to get approved for telecommuting while it's known in the office that you're a gamer, you'll find it harder than you think.  After all, you do just play games all day, don't you?  Why should you get paid for that?

***

I suppose that all things considered, it could be worse.  I'd much rather be occasionally clueless than intentionally cruel. And while there are times it seems that there are far more of those out there in MMO space, it's still good to know that there are decent people out there too.  Even if they're a bit of a doofus, like me.




*Before you ask, no, I never did that.  I knew one kid who did and got in big trouble with his Dad for that, however.

**Which have an unfortunate habit of showing up in a comment on an author's blog, which makes you feel like you're back in grade school and you just got an F in sentence diagramming.

***Okay, they aren't cool now, either, but comparatively speaking today's nerds have it easy.  Not that you could convince my kids of that.

****They never did.  I chalked that one up to Pat Robertson not having the TI Home Computer on his list of Things Corrupting America's Youth.  But Rush and Triumph, two of my favorite bands, were; the cover of Hemispheres alone nearly cost me my cassette tape collection.

*****Unfortunately, the Westboro Baptist Church does attend.  They're better off being ignored, anyway.