A New Reality

Friday night my Questing Buddy and I and another friend were attempting to complete Mara with 3 people (L60 Frost Mage, L60 Hunter, and L49 Holy Paladin) when the whisper came in.

"Hey, are you running boosts? I'll pay to join your group."

I didn't hesitate.

"Sorry, but we're running to get some quests done out of our log."

"Oh."

When I mentioned it to the group, my Questing Buddy pointed out that:

• I am a Mage
• I'm L60
• I am in Maraudon

So, it made sense for people to think I was running boosts.

Which does make sense, but it kind of sucks. As I pointed out tonight when we ran Zul'Farrak with another friend, they had no idea I was a fresh L60 with absolutely no gear for running Frost Mage style boosts.

Or is it?

"I wonder if there's a Tacotip for Era. brb"

Sure enough, the dreaded GearScore app was available for Classic Era, and I quickly installed and restarted WoW. 

"Yep, it's there. So there is a GearScore for Era."

"Oh great," my Questing Buddy grumbled. I could see why she'd be annoyed, as she had to deal with that enough in Wrath Classic.

"Well," I replied, "Era is a different beast. People here don't seem to care nearly as much about GS." 

Which is a good thing, because unless you have a regular group to hang with, Wrath Classic pugging can be not a lot of fun. Another friend was complaining last night about a pugger being a real asshole in their Wrath Classic raid; he was complaining about the lack of DPS from people, and my friend was pointing out that she was taking care of the adds like she was supposed to, and here this pugger was shooting his mouth off implying they were all shit.

I could feel the heat from her words all the way up here in Cincy.

***

All this got me to thinking.

In my YouTube Recommended section, this particular video popped up:

I'm not a big Taliesin and Evitel fan, so I think he's kind of dancing around the problem that WoW has: it's player model of quickly leveling and then dungeon + raid (or as players in the Comments section pointed out that it's "Mythic+ and Raid") appeals to a small segment of the potential player base. I said 'potential' because I believe more people would play Retail WoW if the current model weren't so restrictive.*

A common theme in the Comments section was that WoW's Mythic+ pug scene is a toxic cesspool, and that perception --fair or not-- is going to drive people away from WoW if the alternative is to grind renown. And I can see that, because that was what happened to me in Wrath Classic. What I liked doing best in original Wrath, running heroic dungeons, was "enhanced" by Wrath's version of Mythic+ with the Heroic Plus (and Heroic Plus Plus) dungeons, which were all what people wanted to do once they came out.

But Taliesin saying that the Shadowlands 9.1 patch may go down as being the patch that eventually broke WoW is likely correct. It was bad enough that it broke the hold that the game had on enough people for the subs to likely plummet.**

And that leads right into another video, this time from Venruki:

Now, Venruki is a PvP player who plays Arenas, so he's got a different vantage point than I do. But the overall thrust of the video is that it takes far too much time and effort to get into playing Arenas if you're a new player, and all of the external systems --addons and whatnot-- are a major problem that keeps people from playing the game. 

To illustrate his belief, he also points out at roughly 9:28 that damage rotations are far too complicated in Retail WoW, and uses the Arcane Mage raid rotation as an example. 

Having played a Mage from late Wrath up through early Mists (and back again in Classic), I was floored by the complexity, which starts upwards of 10 seconds before the boss pull. Which to my mind, which sits in "I have to manage my mana" mode, is kind of nuts. When on top of it you have to also have situational awareness to move around and handle various aspects and mechanics of a boss fight, you're just asking for trouble.

Before anybody gets on a comment here saying "oh, it's not that bad, you only have to do that if you want to raid at a high level," let me tell you that perception is indeed reality. These videos are out there, and potential WoW players will see them. So commenters telling me "it's not that bad" are warring against that, not me, because those videos will tell people otherwise. 

I can see why people aged 20-25 make up 37% of WoW players, and apparently people age 50+ make up only 0.5% of the WoW playerbase.*** It can feel that due to the complexity and requirements and whatnot that the game has passed me by.

NOTE: After this post, Shintar was able to determine that the data listed above came from a survey dating from 2013. (See the comments.) Whether or not the data is accurate is irrelevant, as the date of the survey is 10 years old. Therefore I'm striking the data and leaving the strikethrough visible. Still, I do feel that WoW is far to complex for its own good: it's difficult to get started, the systems you learn while leveling don't apply once you reach the current expansion, and the sheer grind and complexity once you reach max level becomes an albatross when newer gamers want to load up a game and just, well, play. And if you step away for a period of time, the game makes it paradoxically easy and hard to return: easy to level up, but hard to freaking pick up on all of the details you need if you want to truly embrace Endgame content again. And the community does itself no favors.

#Blaugust2023

*I get that my main complaint, that the story and focus has gone off the rails compared to Vanilla (and to a lesser extent TBC) days, is something that only a small portion of the potential player base is concerned with. To the majority of people playing Retail WoW, story only becomes a concern when it is gated behind a certain amount of activity (or in-game timers); whether the story makes sense or whether it appears to be created by conspiracy theorists in the midst of an LSD-induced fever dream isn't high on people's agenda. I'd probably be less harsh about the story if I felt like I had a stake in it, but really, I don't. Blizzard's story team made that plain when it is obvious that we're basically the meat shields for whatever the faction leads (or whoever else is in charge) decide. 

**No, I have no idea if it is the case, just all I've heard. Even if it wasn't as bad as people say, the perception was bad enough that it takes on a life of its own.

***That chart that Nixxiom has on the video also shows people aged 30-40 make up 9% and 40-50 make up 1% of the player base, respectively. So... All us old farts who blog a lot are definitely in the minority.

EtA: Corrected some word flow.

EtA: Corrected some grammar.

EtA: It was Zul'Farrak, not Zul'Aman. Wrong Troll instance, and wrong expac.

When You Just Can't Relax

This past week has been unseasonably cool for mid-August in the Ohio Valley, so my first inclination after work is to actually go outside for a bit and enjoy the outdoors. But me being me, I can't simply enjoy the outside without looking at the yard and thinking that "I need to work on that". 

Like, oh, the deck.

Or my daughter's car.*

Or that garden plot we keep talking about putting in the backyard.

I tend to drive my kids bananas with plotting out how I'm going to get stuff done and when, because efficiency is a big deal when you've limited time to get something done.

And right now, you're probably snickering because I rail about the min/maxing that goes on in MMOs, when I do it myself in real life.

That's the difference, really: when I'm in an MMO I'm there to not do what I do irl; I want to relax. It takes some doing, but I do force myself to not min/max my way in MMOs. Sometimes it just leaks out, like knowing what crafted gear gets me good boosts while leveling, but in general I keep it under control.

While I rail against min/maxing in general, I'm fine with individuals doing it if that's what they want to do in game. Just don't expect me to do it. And the quickest way to make me dig in my heels and become as stubborn as a mule is to try to force me into doing it. After all, that's not the way to change someone's mind.

#Blaugust2023

*My youngest drove up to visit for the weekend, and when I happened to lean against her car it felt... chalky. "When did you last wash the car?" I asked. 

"December."

"Uh oh." Her car needed a good polish or she was in danger of losing her paint job. Maybe if the car was only 5 years old she could have gotten away with it, but it's 14 years old (she bought it from my sister-in-law). "Let me work on that."

So I spent several hours over the weekend washing and then polishing her car to remove all the built up residue on the paint job. I hadn't used the car polish in ages, but I finished the bottle on Saturday and had to run to the auto store early on Sunday morning.

Journey's End, Journey's Beginning

Well, I wasn't expecting this to happen that quickly, but...

Kind of fitting that it happens on the
Onyxia quest line, which no longer
exists in a post TBC world.

I honestly thought it'd happen after September 1st, but stuff happened and I got through the last couple of levels pretty quickly. (I remember it taking Azshandra, my first WoW Classic toon, upwards of 5 months to make it to max level in 2019-2020.)

I suppose I ought to work on another toon as well, but the Plaguelands are calling.

#Blaugust2023

Keeping the Fire Going

Sometimes the inspiration for a post comes from out of left field*, and this certainly fits.

Zinn over in Jinxed Thoughts --yes, Zinn's back!-- had a post this evening about a Choose Your Own Adventure book series, called Dice Man:

From Jinxed Thoughts.

Zinn is a fan of Judge Dredd, and so that cover caught her eye. Only one of the stories covers ol' Dredd, but that's fine. That post she wrote jogged my memories about the Choose Your Own... style books that I'd bought back in the 80s while I was forbidden from playing RPGs, and I have no idea where they are now: Tolkien Quest/Middle Earth Quest series and the Lone Wolf series.

***

I had the top three books, but this is
a sampling of what was put out.
From u/aelphia on this Reddit thread.

Let's talk Tolkien first, shall we?

This was my gateway drug into the Middle-earth Roleplaying System by Iron Crown Enterprises, but I'd almost completely forgot that little factoid. Back in the 80s when I was banned from RPGs, the first book appeared at one of our local bookstores,** so I naturally snapped it up. 

Inside the book looked a lot like the traditional Choose Your Own Adventure books, only there were fights and skill checks involved, and for those checks you could either close your eyes and point a pencil at a page in the back with random numbers on it or you could get out some dice and ...you know... roll for it. There was even a miniature character sheet in the back, as I recall, and the story itself was well done.

I know now that the book, being produced by Iron Crown Enterprises, meant that the quality was bound to be high, but I had no idea what to expect. I mean, the old Choose Your Own Adventure books themselves suffered from uneven quality from book to book, so I had kind of steeled myself for a potential let-down.

But the best part? It looked like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, so it passed whatever invisible inspection my parents' had, and besides it was the size of a paperback***, so I could easily toss it in a book bag or in the middle of some other books and nobody was the wiser.  After the third book I didn't see any more being published, but that was okay by me; by then I'd moved on to hiding the MERP RPG books themselves in my room.

Having done some short research, it appears that the series was restarted when I was away at college, which is why the actual number of Middle-earth Quest books is much larger than the three I remember.

***

There was also another reason why I was okay with the Middle-earth Quest series ending, and it was this series that I stumbled upon at that same bookstore:

From the Lone Wolf Fandom Wiki.

I knew from the moment I saw it that I was too old for the target audience, but I quickly snapped it up and skimmed the inside anyway. There was a similar system in place to that of the Middle-earth Quest books, so I acknowledged that it was more for elementary and middle-school kids and swallowed my pride and bought it. 

Looking back on those Lone Wolf books now, I can see the obvious kid-oriented plots, but I was still happy to feed my RPG habit with these supercharged Choose Your Own Adventure style books. The funny thing is, I tired of these more quickly than the Middle-earth Quest books, mainly because after the first story arc finished, the author Joe Dever went back and started another story arc with your character essentially starting all over again. In an echo of complaints about every MMO expac ever, I wasn't so thrilled to essentially toss out all of my old abilities and weapons just because. Still, I have some very fond memories of these books that kept the RPG flame alive for me in the 80s when things looked bleak for me.

#Blaugust2023

*A slang term referencing baseball. The outfield in baseball is the farthest away from home plate, so "out of left field" is slang for "from out of nowhere".

**It feels so weird saying 'bookstores' these days, but when I look back on it, the 70s and 80s were 38-48 years ago. We even had a bookstore at the local strip mall a short bike ride away from my home, and that's something my own kids would never ever comprehend. To them, going to a bookstore is a "pile into the car and drive for 20 minutes" event, especially since the Borders 10 minutes away closed back in 2011. And that was the summer before our oldest mini-Red began Seventh Grade; she'll be 25 this Fall. (!)

***And cost as little as one, too!

It Is a Puzzlement

I've mentioned before about how Modiphius Entertainment came out with a pencil and paper Dune RPG, and I am puzzled.

Yes, they did win an Ennie award for it, but...
From the Modiphius website.

I mean, it not only exists --and Modiphius won awards for it-- but I just can't wrap my head around the concept of an RPG based on the Dune universe. 

While I can understand the concept of a strategic game, such as the legendary Avalon Hill board game Dune,

It had been out of print for so long
--and the Herbert estate had sat on it--
that I figured it wasn't ever going to see
the light of day again. Still not sure how
Gale Force Nine pulled this one off.
From Boardgamegeek.

an RPG based on the intellectual property is an entirely different matter.

RPGs are meant to be personal, so even when you have a troupe or stable of players, such as in Ars Magica or Vampire: the Masquerade, you can identify or understand the motivations of the player you're inhabiting at the moment. That intimacy doesn't necessarily translate into a universe where factions war with each other and unless you're at the heart of the malestrom you end up being chewed up and spit out. The novels themselves are focused among the people at the very center of everything, and Paul's family in particular, so a game like that necessitates you have to be attached to a noble house and perform deeds for that house. That sounds a bit closer in tone to, well, this particular game from Wizards of the Coast:

At the intersection of Eurogames
and RPGs, likes this one.
From Boardgamegeek.

People I know who have played Lords of Waterdeep like it, but then again those folks tend to love Eurogames in general, and the crunchier the better.

I guess I'd have to see Dune in action to really make a better judgement, but for me it certainly seems like this has to be a hybrid type of RPG at best.

#Blaugust2023

Twenty Three Years Later, The Argument Goes On

Back in the year 2000, when most non-gamers thought of computers, they thought of the Millennium Bug. Or maybe the Dot Com Bust, which began in March of that year. 

But for us gamers, the year 2000 was more well remembered for two games that released within a few months of each other, and because they both kind of fit into a similar game type their fates became intertwined: Diablo II and Baldur's Gate II.

Released on June 28th, 2000.
From Wikipedia.

Released on September 21st, 2000.
From Wikipedia (again).

The fact that the game that released first, Diablo II, was an Action RPG and that Baldur's Gate II was more of a "traditional" RPG was kind of lost in the discussions that followed, as the fans of the two games devolved into two separate camps as to which game was superior.

I know, the concept of both games being good was kind of lost on people --myself included-- as I found myself being the Baldur's Gate fanboy among my gamer friends at work. 

And yes, I will freely admit that I was outnumbered in the arguments that followed. Part of that was simply because I lived with D&D for so long --and dealt with so much crap for it back in the 80s-- that a good, well-designed D&D game was always going to get my love. That what my friends loved the most about Diablo II, that you could use gems to customize your gear, wasn't why I played Baldur's Gate II. BG2 had story, the setting, a familiar system, and honest-to-god romance storylines in the game that blew me away. In an early prelude to my love-hate relationship with gear in MMOs, my friends' preoccupation with gear wasn't what drove me to play either of these games.*

***

The irony is that here, in 2023, we're back to the Diablo vs. Baldur's Gate arguments with the releases of Diablo IV and Baldur's Gate III within a few months of each other.

Just like before, D4 released
first, on June 5th, 2023.
From Wikipedia.

And BG3 followed suit later,
on August 3rd, 2023.
Can you guess? Yes, it's from Wikipedia.

One thing is certain: I won't be playing either game any time soon. I've got other games to play, and once I settled all of my bills for the month, I had other spending priorities in mind. 

I mean, I'm sure both games are nice enough, and they likely scratch the itch of their respective fanbases, but at this stage in my life I can afford to wait. 

That being said, if people want to make arguments here, go for it. Just play nice. It's been quite a while since I've had to wield the ban hammer on someone other than a spammer.

#Blaugust2023

*Although having also played a Paladin in my early D&D days, I'll freely admit that Bioware adding Carsomyr, an actual Holy Avenger, to the game was highly inspirational. No, I didn't play a Paladin in BG2, but my heart soared knowing it was out there.

Meme Monday: Back to School Memes

Because it's that time of year again in the US, may I present a selection of memes to remind people of how much fun (kinda sorta not) school was:

I feel this. Big time.
From imgflip.

That's akin to those lines in the movie Wargames:
"Who proposed the concept of reproduction without sex?"
"Your wife, sir?"

Been there. All that's missing is the
"MOOOOM!!" or "DAAAAD!!"
From Facebook six_pack_mom.

Having played Minecraft, I actually
get this one now. Well, more than I would
have before then.
From knowyourmeme.