Culturally Speaking

ESO's Elsweyr expac finally dropped, and I celebrated by hanging around Vvardenfell and doing some crafting and questing.

What, you thought I'd do something else for a change?

No way, man. I'm not getting in the middle of the mad rush over to Elsweyr. And apparently I'm not the only one, given the crowd over in Vivec City. As Shintar put it, ESO does a good job of spreading people out, but I also think that it's now baked into the game's DNA.

The reason why I'm bringing up the "baked in" part is because I had a conversation with the oldest mini-Red today. She's home for (part of*) the Summer from her university, and she's spent the past two weeks catching up with friends and getting in some MMO playing.

This evening, while I was working on dinner, she and I were talking about MMO culture. She said that in LOTRO today, the main discussion in World Chat centered around a new player who had recently left WoW and decided to try out LOTRO instead. The new player simply could not stop praising LOTRO's in-game culture, talking about how nice everybody is, when back in WoW the culture was so toxic. Given that LOTRO has their own culture issues with a few notable malcontents --on the Gladden server at least-- I was kind of surprised by the story. "Had WoW gotten that bad?" I wondered.

I'd also been reading in chat on ESO about an influx of WoW refugees finding that ESO is a more pleasant gaming social experience than the present atmosphere in WoW, and I knew of posts on Reddit (of all places) mentioning that SWTOR is a more pleasant gaming experience than WoW.

This kind of begs the question whether the WoW experience is now more toxic than it was when I left.

***

The only way to really find out what WoW is truly like is to resub and then login to an old toon. However, I wasn't planning on doing that until right before (or right after) WoW Classic comes out, so it'll be only then that I'll find out exactly what Trade Chat has devolved into.

That being said, I realize that it has been about 5 years since I last subscribed to WoW, so my remembrance of WoW's Trade Chat has faded somewhat. Since then, Blizzard's fortunes have waxed and waned, and WoW itself has bled both subscribers and devs. You know things have changed when Elitist Jerks has faded into nothingness as people from EJ have been hired on by Blizzard itself.**

My great fear is that WoW now has a toxic culture baked into the game in as much the same way that League and some other MOBAs now are more well known for a toxic culture than being incredibly popular worldwide. It's also entirely possible that the type of person who is attracted to WoW's dictum that "the game begins at endgame" is more likely to engage in toxic behavior than those who don't subscribe to that belief. Other MMOs, such as LOTRO or ESO or SWTOR, have more of an "enjoy the journey" attitude toward their MMO design, and aren't defined by toxic culture.

But this is all a "who came first -- the chicken or the egg" sort of speculation, because people could have left for other MMOs because of the toxic culture in WoW, or WoW became toxic as people left.

***

I don't believe that a game's culture is set in stone. Blizzard can change WoW's culture, but it requires Blizzard to invest in more aggressive policing of Trade Chat, Zone Chat, and other areas where poor behavior has been allowed to fester.

Reputation, however, is much harder to change than the culture itself. Once a game acquires a bad reputation, combating that will take a lot of effort above and beyond the effort needed to fix the cultural issues. And it takes the one thing that WoW likely doesn't have in abundance any more: time. Blizzard is on the hot seat to "turn things around", and a corporate quick fix won't correct a poor reputation because quick fixes are designed to make things look good on the quarterly balance sheet, not address any underlying long term problems.

Poor Bobby Kotick. The two things that are required to fix problems in WoW --time and money-- are things that he doesn't want to use. He'd much rather cut costs and demand people do more with less than actually fix the long term problems.




*She'll be spending a few weeks back at her university during the Summer as a camp counselor/chaperone for a Summer Music Program, and then spending another week away at a double reed camp. Then she'll move in early because of Band Camp, which is a boon to us because we'll be taking her brother up to his first semester at a university during the time she'd ordinarily need to go back.

**Courtesy of Reddit, here's the thread Why did Elitist Jerks die out? There's also the additional nail in the coffin as EJ was bought out by Ten Ton Hammer and the latter tried to monetize the site. I could have told them that EJ was --more than anything else-- a labor of love, and trying to make people pay for that will inevitably backfire.

Farmer Red Out Farming

It's been a long time since I farmed mats.

How long? Well, I used to support the ICC-10 runs that our Horde guild had by farming mats in Icecrown Glacier as a relaxing activity in between 5-man runs.*

Sure, I farmed ore and cloth a bit in Cataclysm and Mists, but without the need to support a guild's raids my farming activities were reduced to a (very) small sidelight of my in-game WoW activity. I was happy to level my crafting up to max and that was pretty much it.**

The past several weeks, however, I've been hanging around Vivec City in ESO, leveling the various crafts that I have by completing dailies. I've done some questing --and I had completed the ESO Morrowind expac already on my first toon, so I know what's coming-- but when I venture out in the wild I've been keeping out an eye more for mats instead of actually working on the various storylines. Truth be told, Vivec City is pretty much ideal to use as a base for farming and crafting, because all of the crafting stations are close to the delivery crates, there's a bank located in the center of the crafting area, and all three are close to a wayshrine so you can hop over to a specific locale and go mat farming.

Many of the mercantile oriented guilds have already figured this out, because the distance between the wayshrine and the crafting area is filled with various guild merchants.

***

If you're like me and used to the more traditional MMO expacs where everybody abandons the previous expac's hub(s), seeing Vivec City as both relevant and active is quite a sight. When Cataclysm dropped, I parked Neve at Dalaran and conducted a robust business opening ports for players. After a month, however, Dalaran had turned into a ghost town in the same way that Shattrath was largely abandoned when Wrath dropped.

The reasons for this happening can be boiled down to two simple design decisions: the zone resources and hub vendors were limited to their affiliated expac's mats and rewards, and the ability to transport to different locales is by "realistic" transportation. For example, if you want to mine Fel Iron, you go to Hellfire Peninsula. If you want Copper, you go to an intro or low level zone in WoW's Old World. That doesn't change, so if you want to mine the latest mats you have to go to the latest zones. If you want the latest vendor gear, you go to the current expac's hub(s).

And transportation to and from those hubs can take a lot of time too. At least WoW has flying mounts for waypoints, because with LOTRO you're frequently stuck with riding hubs, and in SWTOR the speeders from the travel hubs tend to follow the roads and/or buildings.

ESO utilized a different set of design decisions.

The first major design decision was to utilize phasing to change the "leveling" materials to coincide with your toon's Crafting level. If the highest level blacksmith mat you can utilize is Orichalum, you find Orichalum nodes throughout the ESO game world. If it's Ebony, you find Ebony. And this remains the same no matter where you're located, whether it's Coldharbour, Vvardenfell, Stonelands, or Kenarthi's Roost. This makes gathering mats a lot easier to handle, and frees a player from having to restrict themselves to the latest expac's zones.

The leads right into the second design decision, which answers the question "if I can go anywhere to find my leveling mats, how do I easily get to where I want to go?" In this case, ESO adopted the GW2 method of wayshrines for easy point to point transfer. You pay for transfer to a wayshrine out in the wild, but there's no cooldown, either. And wayshrine to wayshrine transportation is free.

Finally, as part of the the rewards for completing a crafting daily, you have a shot at getting a map directing you to a rich deposit of mats in a specific zone. The map isn't so detailed as to take out all sense of adventure, but it does give you a pretty decent sense of where the rich deposit is. Once again, not completely handheld, just making it easy enough to quickly handle your farming activity.

***

While the ESO method does make farming for mats quick and fairly painless, that doesn't necessarily mean it's superior to the more traditional "grind it out" method. The former works great for the casual farmer --of which I am one-- who doesn't want to spend 1/2 hour a day farming mats to perform dailies. The latter is better for a more realistic world, where mats are found in specific regions. If you've got the time, the latter is better. I, however, don't have that time that I used to, so the former is better for me while I play ESO.

Still, I'm sure that when WoW Classic drops I'll become reacquainted with farming again while trying to build up any sort of gold pile.





*I learned the hard way to land your mount first and then enter into a 5-man. Only the most ridiculous of "GO-GO-GO" players wouldn't wait for that.

**That's the completionist in me talking.

ATTENTION ALL PLANETS OF THE SOLAR FEDERATION

...We have assumed control...

...We have assumed control...

...We have assumed control...

--Rush, 2112

Everybody got that?

Okay, I now know when I can resub to WoW.

Ignoring the Obvious

In my years of MMO gaming, I don't think I've ever spent more than a couple of weeks in a PTS server.

And if you throw out those MMOs that hadn't even been released yet when I visited the PTS --Rift and Wildstar-- then my result is a big fat zero.

The primary reason for this is because I don't want to spoil the story on an expansion. Unlike some people, who check out PTSs to help out the debugging process, or guilds who want a leg up on upcoming raids or content, I'm perfectly happy remaining ignorant as to future content.*

Well, getting onto the ESO PTS was an exercise in avoidance.

***

Sure, I kind of expected the PTS to be just like the regular environment, but with the additional zones, but still I was surprised to find my toon in Vvardenfell, where she left off. So, if I wanted to see the new zone, I had to go find my way there.

"If I have to go to Cyrodiil to get there..." I began.

Then I remembered how Summerset and Vvardenfell worked out: you take a boat to get there. Sure enough, there was transportation awaiting me once I reached an embarkation point, and I happily took the easy way there.

I made a point of avoiding the questlines around, which was no small feat given all the interesting scenes and quest givers out there.

And cats.

Lots and lots of cats.

Good thing this is in-game, because otherwise I'd be sneezing my head off about 5 minutes after arriving in Elsweyr.

I kind of split from the city hub and ran out into the wilderness, keeping an eye open for a delve to go check out. I found a couple and jumped right in, believing that I could go check out these delves without giving away too much story.

A great idea, but I got the feeling that I was being given a piece of the story anyway, especially in the first delve I found, where I kept hearing ethereal voices telling me how I was going to die and live here with the denizens of the delve (which was a crypt, naturally). A nice atmospheric touch, but still it left be thinking that had I picked up a quest or two the voice would make more sense.

But hey, if you want to be a murder hobo in ESO, nothing is stopping you.

***

What surprised me the most was the in-zone conversation. It had nothing to do with the expac at all, but rather more mundane stuff. Like the NHL hockey playoffs. Or which ESO race is the best. (For boinking, someone added, and that conversation took a weirdly R-rated turn real fast. I felt like I was listening to people describing Hentai in public, which made the conversation that much worse.)

At one point, someone rather pointedly asked in chat "What are all of you doing here in the PTS, anyway?"

"Hey, we all got Beta Keys, so we're here," one person replied.

"Yeah, but you could be having this conversation in the main servers."

"No we couldn't, we're here."

I sighed and shook my head, and did my best to ignore the conversation from that point onward.

***

So, if you're actually looking for a "what does it look like?" from me for Elsweyr, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I can say that I didn't see any obvious bugs, like hands sticking through walls, or toons looking like they're inside out (see Assassin's Creed games for examples). My whole point was to at least see what the zone looks like, and I can say there are a lot of cats. And cat people. And talking cats. And more... well, you get the idea.

Now, if in-game chat can stop talking about which is hotter, Amalexia or Ayrenn (or Emeric vs Jorunn which was the parallel debate), I'd be grateful.



*It makes for a great excuse as to avoiding game forums, aside from avoiding drama. I have teenage kids, I have a job, and those two items alone provide me more than all the drama I want. I don't need any more drama in my life. That's a big part of why I don't want to sign up for Twitter, and have been trying to step back from Facebook: the outrage machine is more than I can stand. That doesn't mean I avoid keeping up with current events, but modern social media seems designed to generate outrage to keep people engaged, and I don't need that. At all.


EtA: As Shintar pointed out, it's not PTO, but PTS. I've corrected that in the post.

An Early Easter Present

Well well well....

Guess what popped into my INBOX this afternoon:

And right after my post on I Sheep Things as well.

For the record:

No, I did not request a beta key.

Really, I didn't request one.

Honest!

And since I'm playing my way through from Vanilla ESO through Summerset, I certainly wasn't expecting to get to Elsweyr any time soon.

My guess is that they pulled my account out of a hat for a random key giveaway, because specifically targeting me would be an epic fail on their belief of the reach of this blog.

If anything, I was debating about taking a few extra dollars and purchasing some of the DLCs --or at least comparing the cost of purchasing DLCs versus an ESO Plus membership-- rather than jumping into Elsweyr. After all, it'd be nice to get a bit more backstory on some of the places in the DLC*.

However, I think I can swing this. I can stick to some of the non-story specific places, such as Delves and whatnot, without actually playing through the story and spoiling the expac for me. But for the record (and in a non-spoilery fashion), I'd dearly love to allow my character interactions to punch Tharn right in the face, in much the same way the Smuggler in SWTOR gets an opportunity to slug Guss Tuno in the kisser.

*I also would like to know how Cyrodilic Collections fared in Murkmire.

Mr. Stark, I Don't Feel So Good....

I was perusing some of the old Blogs in Mothballs this evening and discovered that I Sheep Things has finally vanished into the ether.

For the longest time, I Sheep Things was the domain of Rhii, although she was only one half of the blogging team. I remember her constant updates throughout WoW's Wrath heyday, and her can-do attitude was infectious. But I also recall her despair when, as Cataclysm approached, that her guild leaders decided to abandon their guild and go and hitch a ride on another guild's ICC runs to finally take down Arthas before the expac ended. She felt they were so close to beating Arthas that the guild leaders' behavior was a betrayal of the highest order.

I could only feel for her, because I wasn't a raider, but she always felt like that enthusiastic kid sister I never had and I wished I could have done something to help her out.

Not too long after that, real life began to intrude on her gaming and blogging, and she soon dropped out of sight to leave a gigantic hole in the WoW blogging community.

Aurdon, the sole remaining member of I Sheep Things, rarely posted, and compared to Rhii's manic output was practically non-existent. However, he decided to revamp the blog a bit and focus instead on non-MMO games, because he'd stopped playing MMOs a while ago. But I guess that he decided to eventually give up the domain for I Sheep Things, and now that piece of MMO Blogging history has gone to join Righteous Orbs and other blogs of that era.

***

At times like this, I get a bit pensive and wonder why we keep PC running when other bloggers have come and gone.

To be honest, I don't have a driving need to write my thoughts about gaming down, and at the same time I can't really give it up. We don't have a large following; in fact, our likely largest following was when I wrote the old Two Sides to a Coin posts back in 2011 that was promoted by WoW Insider (now Blizzard Watch) as one of their blog posts they liked. And as you may have guessed, I'm not enamored of some of the things that drive the current crop of Influencers in social media.*

I guess you could say that I just like blogging. It fills some hole in my psyche that I can't explain, and I feel kind of bad when I don't get a chance to pound out a blog entry at least once a week.

But I do also miss all of those who were here before PC, and those who welcomed our little blog with open arms into the wider WoW blogger community.






*Come on; someone on the far end of the 40s isn't exactly Influencer material. When your wife gets invitations to join AARP in the mail, you know that your life is about to change.

No Words....