Out of touch?

WoW for sure isn’t dying, but not even I, normally a sparkling optimist, can deny that something has happened. It isn’t the same old "WoW is dying since I don’t like the game personally” whining that has been going on since the game was launched. It’s different.

What we’ve seen lately is a serious discussion in the community about the state of the game, where a lot of relevant points of concern have been made by veteran players. And yes, we’re also seeing the same players voting by their feet now, unsubscribing. Of course those losses might be compensated to some extent by the influx of new players, and therefore isn't such a big deal to Blizzard. However something tells me that it isn’t exactly as if they’re singing up in masses these days, at least not on the old and established markets as North America and Europe.

Ringing the bells
Considering the atmosphere surrounding WoW currently, Blizzard’s latest PR activity left me a bit puzzled. Are they really this much out of touch with their audience? Or is this just picture of their priorities: that the share holders are more important as a target group than the players are nowadays?

While I enjoyed the 20 year anniversary movie, I seriously wonder what they were thinking ringing the bells at the Nasdaq stock exchange the other day.

How cool as it might have felt for those former geeks to be let into those salons, I don’t think it looks quite as cool in the eyes of the customers of Blizzard. They’re honesty wasting some of their street cred capital this way.

Blizzard previously has been good at giving the impression (probably truthfully) that the people who work there are passionate gamers themselves and because of this they understand their audience completely. They’re on our side. But on whose side are those costume dressed gentlemen? Sure, they claim that they had a game of Starcraft II after ringing that bell, but it really doesn’t change the main impression: That the stock market matters more.

Now don’t take me wrong, I don’t think the stock market shouldn’t matter to Blizzard. In the end, it’s a company and not an NGO, they need to make a profit. But they would make wiser not to be so blatantly open about it, taking better care of their image.

The fact that they’re soon to launch yet another mount in the Blizzard store doesn’t help to improve the impression.

Ghostcrawler in touch
Not all is bad though. Even if some people seem to have lost their touch, Ghostcrawler hasn’t. After a couple of months of silence, he’s back with an interesting and honest post about raid difficulties. It doesn’t only show how hard they work to balance the end game to be enjoyable to a wide array of players. It also signals that they are interested to get feedback from the community that might help them to correct whatever did go wrong in Cataclysm. The US thread is spotting some 1500 comments and new ones are still incoming, many of them very long, detailed and insightful.

I sincerely hope they’ll make good use of it and show that this discussion is more important to them than ringing the bells at the stock market and that they’re still in touch with their players.

An already chewed chewing gum loses its flavour quickly

I don’t normally chew chewing gums, for various reasons. One is that it makes me look stupid. Cows look peaceful as they’re grinding their jaws. Humans not so very much. Another is that I never know what to do with it when I’m done. There is never any bin around when I need it, throwing it on the ground is unthinkable and swallowing it seems unhealthy. I can’t stop imagining it will get stuck somewhere and mess around with my digestion.

However, I have munched a few chewing gums in my childhood and one thing I remember is that you could reuse it. First you chewed it until it lost all flavour. Then you put it at rest, putting it back in the wrap. And after some hours, when it had matured, you could put it back into the mouth. At this time a miracle occurred! For some reason the chewing gum had accumulated more taste again. It wasn’t as the first time you put it into the mouth. But at least it was far better than the tasteless piece of junk you had spit out a few hours earlier.

Diminishing returns
There was this thing about second time chewing though: you always knew that it would be a short pleasure. This was a clear case of diminishing returns. Within a few minutes you’d just want to get rid of it again.

This summarizes my feelings about the news on the upcoming 4.1 patch, where once again Blizzard will recycle content, this time in the form of the old raid instances Zul Gurub and Zul Aman, appearing as 5-man heroics.

I was a bit surprised to see the – at least initially – rather enthusiastic comments at MMO-champion. People immediately started to drool over mounts or recalling the raid instances from the past that they used to love so much.

I too can see why a quick trip back to ZA could be fun. Once. Chew it again, feel the taste! But in the long run?

I doubt that those who already have done those instances a number of times will be able to enjoy them as interesting, added content. You only need to think about what happened to Onyxia’s comeback in wrath. While it was thrilling and interesting for a couple of times, our interest for it faded every so quickly.

Recycling as a trend
The trend is there. Blizzard is cycling through the content once again. And I can see where they’re coming from. The turnover probably makes this content new to many of the current players, and the veterans who still are around will hopefully embrace it as well for nostalgic reasons. So what’s the harm?

Well, the harm is if the existence of rehashed material will gimp the efforts they put into creating new, original content. It’s been said that there will be a shiny 5-man instance as well, Abyssal Maw, and if this turns out to be correct I guess I needn’t whine too much about this patch.

I can’t help wondering though how much more of recycled content we’re going to see in the future. Karazhan 5-man? Tempest Keep? A miniature version of Black Temple?

To be honest I’d rather see them put all effort they could into creating new content. After all, if you’re in the mood for a walk on the memory lane, what is there to stop you from venturing into it in a miniature raid today?

Let the Amani War Bear rest in peace

A thread on the US forums has exploded in a heated discussion about a possible future reinstallation of the Amani War Bear.

In case you started to play in Wrath or Cataclysm and have no idea of what bear I’m talking about, it’s a mount with a rather exclusive aura that dropped as a reward for raids that managed to clear the 10-man raid instance Zul Aman back in TBC within a certain time limit. This was quite a challenge back in the days, even if you spotted a full set of T6 gear.

The poster suggests that the bear should be brought back since “it’s such a cool one and I’d love to have one.” He argues that this mount never should have left the game. He admits that doing a chest run in Zul Aman at level 85 isn’t exactly hard these days, but neither is downing LK heroic or Yogg+0. And since those mount rewards still are in the game, it doesn’t make sense that the bear isn’t. According to him there should be a small chance for it to drop from the fourth chest.

Vague statement
Needless to say, there are quite a few people who disagree with him, but he also gets some support from players who mock the upset Amani War Bear owners for being equally childish and elitist and that they should get over it and stop wanting to be a unique and beautiful snowflake.

Until now there are about 1000 comments and the thread is still growing. I think what has made this thread so big and infected is an obscure comment from the blue poster Zarhym, who wrote:

“One never knows what might happen with Zul'Aman and the treasures of old found therein...”

This statement isn’t even worthy of being called a statement. It could mean anything and nothing at all. But I can understand those who interpret it as if there is a chance that the bear will make comeback. It could refer to a planned revamp, tuning up the mobs to level 85, on par with what they’ve done with Deadmines and Onyxia in the past. And this talk about “treasures” could also lead the thoughts to archaeology. Have they plans on making Zul Aman into a dig site?

But maybe this doesn’t actually mean anything. Maybe it’s just a slip of the tongue. Blue poster Tigole was very clear about Blizzard’s position back in 2008, and Zarhym would have made it easier from everyone if he had referred to it:

”Once Wrath of the Lich King goes live, you will no longer be able to obtain the Zul'Aman bear mount by saving all 4 prisoners in the timed run. The Bear Mount will be replaced by a very good, epic item that is level appropriate for people doing the zone. To be clear, the Zul'Aman bear mount is supposed to be an item of very high prestige. We want players who have earned it during the appropriate era (aka before the level cap gets raised) to be recognized for their accomplishment. We have absolutely no problem with higher level players (above level 70) going back and doing Zul'Aman after Wrath of the Lich King is live. We just want to preserve the accomplishment of having saved all 4 prisoners at the intended difficulty level.”

Stick to their guns
For my own part, I hope Blizzard will stick to their guns.

No, I don’t have a bear of my own. I completed Zul Aman a number of times and I think it’s a wonderful instance – short and yet intense, with some really fun boss encounters. But I never did it within the time limit and I don’t think I’m entitled to have one of those mounts. The players who did the bear runs put a ton of pain and effort into it - or gold, for those who bought a spot in the raid, which wasn’t uncommon towards the end of TBC. And I think they’re perfectly entitled to show off a bit with their mounts.

The game moves on. Old content is removed and new content will arrive. That’s the natural evolution.

The newcomers to Azeroth should make themselves a service and stop crying over missed opportunities in the past. Then they might notice that today there are other challenges in the game, challenges that have replaced the ZA bear runs, challenges that come with equally exclusive rewards that grant you bragging rights.

Let dead bears rest in peace.

A Haunted Week

I won’t hide it to you. This week is best described as “meh”, which is odd. After all it’s Patch week and we should be bouncing and clapping our hands – alternatively raging and knitting our fists over the buffs and nerfs to different aspects of the game.

But it’s quiet. Too quiet. I see apathy in the blogosphere and I see apathy in my guild and it’s damn hard to not get somewhat affected by it - even if you’re blessed with pink pigtails.

Adam wrote a post the other day claiming that old bloggers like me have a “responsibility to rise to the occasion and inspire others”. Are you serious Adam? I’ve been doing this for three years now, don’t you think I deserve a rest at some point?

But OK, I’ll do my best not to be too dark and whiney as I’m about to ramble away, sharing what’s been on my mind lately.

The haemorrhage in our guild
So, what’s up? Well, first, there’s the constant underlying worrying about the future of my guild. I wrote about it a while ago and we’re still struggling with our recruitment. While we still get an application here and there, we’re losing our older players at the same rate as the new ones join – or actually slightly quicker. The veterans aren’t leaving us for other guilds; it’s a case of reaching the point where the game doesn’t have a grip on them anymore. They’ve had their fun but now they’re done with it.

Of course this was bound to happen at some point, but I must admit that I’m a little bit surprised at the timing of it. We’re still just a couple of months into the expansion. It’s not like when we had been raiding ICC for six months and there was nothing new on the horizon. I wonder if this is just our guild or if it’s a sign of an overall change in the game. Are we seeing a shift of generations here? Are the vanilla veterans marching out?

The shift in the blogosphere
And then there’s the blogosphere. The part of it where I hang around took a huge hit this week as Righteous Orbs closed down. I still stand by what I wrote in a comment – that I’m happy for them, since I think that their talent was too to be spent on solely writing WoW-related blog posts. I understand and support their decision to move on, and somehow it’s almost a bit inspiring and liberating to see them let go so of it so easily.

But this said – Tam and Chas are leaving a huge void after them as they’re moving on. Normally I remove blogs that have shut down immediately from my blogroll, but in this case I can’t yet bring myself to do it. The community won’t be the same without their voices. They brought colour and life to it and as I look around in what’s left of bloggers, we all appear a bit grey and dull in comparison, to be honest.

However - life goes on and I suppose the rest of us will recover eventually. But I can’t deny that it feels as if I too am getting closer and closer to the day when it’s my turn to bid farewell and head for new pastures. The thought has crossed my mind, more than once.

On the brighter side: when oldies like RO and – at some point in the future – PPI shuts down, it leaves more space for the newcomers to flourish. And there isn’t any lack of new blood. Every week several new blogs are introduced in the Blog Azeroth forums. I keep getting letters from newcomers, such as most recently Stubborn at Sheep The Diamond, asking me how to get started and noticed. Maybe he will grow up and find his own voice and eventually and become the next generation’s equivalence of RO? You never know.

The LFD buff
So what about the patch that dropped this week? Does it get a “yay” or a “boo” from Larísa? Well, I think the biggest news in it was the introduction of the up-to-15 percent buff to LFD parties, which made some players cheer and others moan. I’m in neither party since I’m currently only doing dungeons in guild groups, so it really doesn’t affect me at all. And I don’t give a crap about if it’s easier or not for non-guild parties. It’s not my concern.

For me the most interesting aspect was the fact that we had been doing those random dungeons for such a long time without anyone noticing that the 5 percent buff didn’t work. It reminded me a little bit of when you’re teaching a child how to ride a bicycle. As long as you assure them that you’re holding the rear luggage carrier, everything will go just fine. They’ll keep going until the moment they realize that you’re actually not holding them anymore and haven’t been doing for a long while. As they see this, they’re bound to fall over, and they’ll be very angry with you, claiming that they can’t ride the bike unless you support them.

I know there have been come complaints, but I can’t help being a little amused thinking of that so many players seem to have been riding that bike damn well without anyone holding it. However, now all of a sudden, GC isn’t just holding the bike for us, he has even put on supporting wheels.

Is it for good or for bad? I don't know. I don't pug and I'm not the target audience for this change, so I'll refrain from judging and raging this time; I've done enough of it in the past.

Drop of the week
Let’s end this post on the brighter side. After four years of playing WoW, I finally got my first epic world drop in the form of a pair of plate trousers. For some obscure reason a crocodile in Tol Brad carried them in his pockets, so I killed him and sold them for over 20 k gold. This is a sum that I personally never ever, under any circumstances, would pay for a piece of gear that inevitably will be replaced in the next content patch. But of course I’m happy that other players think differently!

On the other hand, I'm prepared to spend ridiculous amounts of gold on other sorts of items that I suspect other players would consider utterly useless. Worthless fluff, filling your bags with nothing. And that’s exactly what I did for a part of the income from the trousers: I bought myself a shadow.

For ages, I’ve been cursing myself for losing my Haunted Memento, somewhere along the road. In case you’ve forgotten, this was an item that you got during the scorge invasion in the pre-Wrath events. If you have it in your bag, it will give you a haunted buff or debuff, (considering how you look at it), and occasionally you’ll also see a dark figure discretely following you in a distance.

Once upon a time I had one of my own, but I must have lost it during some bank clear-out, in the belief that it was just another trash necklace (the icon model is not unique for the item). And ever since, I’ve been a sad panda for being so careless and stupid.

However, rich as a goblin after my world drop, I entered AH and bought the one that was up at 5 k gold. It was worth every copper of it!

Finally I’m back to myself again. This is Larísa, this is me, in a nutshell. A gnome with bright pink pigtails, carrying a shadow she never quite can escape.

It’s been a haunted week indeed. So let’s end it here with a toast.

I’ll have a big one myself. I think I need it.

Cheers!

Where to find friends in WoW of today

Let me share a quote from Blizzard’s official game guide for new players:

“Friends
Beyond parties, raids, and guilds, you will inevitably encounter other players who share some of the same interests, likes, and dislikes as you, people with whom you’ll end up chatting even when you’re not in a dungeon or on a quest; the kind of people where you don’t even notice the hours flying by as you swap stories, joke, and play together. In other words, you’ll make friends. Making friends and going on adventures with them is part of what makes World of Warcraft so much fun.”

You’ll make friends. They said it! “Swap stories, joke and play together as the hours fly by”. It sounds great, doesn’t it? Making friends is a part of what makes World of Warcraft so much fun! And so easy! Inevitable as they say.

Counting my friends
The question is: is this true? I figure it was back in the early days of WoW; at least I’ve been told so. But is this still valid?

I went to myself and did a quick count where I recalled how many friends I have in WoW right now. How many players are there who I chat with, not in raid channels about practical issues, but in whispers about nothing-important at all? How many players do I know who give me a personal greeting as I log on, who will tell me what they have for raid snack, who will notice if I seem to have a bad night and ask what’s up? How many players do I know who might ask me to do something together in the game because we enjoy each other’s company rather than to achieve something?

I ended up with around three. And I suppose three are better than none, but it’s far, far from the social platform that Blizzard makes us believe that WoW is.

The silent club

I’m not sure what the problem is – if there even is one. Is it the game that has changed into a solo experience – for all the beautiful promises in the gameguide ? Or – perhaps – it’s more about me, how I choose to approach it?

On one hand I can agree with Copra, who complains about the lack of social tools in WoW of today. There are no natural meeting points anymore - group quests removed and the LFD tool turning PUGs into speechless, anonymous let’s-get-it-over-with experiences with strangers you’ll never meet again. If you don’t already have friends as you enter WoW, you’re not likely to get any new.

On the other hand I wonder if it isn’t a little bit unfair and too simplified to blame Blizzard for this as for so much else. Haven’t the players got something to do with it? Isn’t this more about what we want and how we act in game?

Wolfshead has a new post about on the issue of group play (or the lack thereof), as a part of his ongoing crusade to “bring back the good community experience that once existed”. He compares the modern MMO experience to the gentleman’s club pictured in the Sherlock Holmes series, where talking is strictly prohibited.

“It occurred to me this has become what many solo gamers find appealing about MMOs. They are just places where they can go to relax, unwind and not talk with anyone. But what happens when the majority of people in a virtual world are escaping to such a silent club?”

Well, my question is: if the majority wants the club to be silent, can you really blame Blizzard for supporting such a play style?

And if I go to myself: how much effort have I, Larísa, put into trying to get to know more people? If I roll an alt, do I look around for new players in the starting zone to possibly connect to? Do I spot players who struggle and offer them a helping hand? Do I add them to my friends list and next time I see them come online, do I whisper them and ask them if they want to play with me for a while?

As long as I don’t lift a finger to do this, as long as I behave pretty much in game as in real life, keeping most people at a safe distance, who am I to complain? You can’t really expect friends to fall from the sky right into your hands.

Where to find friends in WoW
But let’s come to the point of this post, namely that maybe we’re missing something as we’re discussing the lack of opportunities to make friends and build communities in the cataclysmic version of Azeroth.

You see: I actually do have quite a few WoW friends, it’s just that they don’t play on my server. They’re people in the blogosphere, readers and writers, who I’ve exchanged my most personal thoughts and experiences with for years. We’ve followed each other through bad times and good times, sharing our proudest as well as our worst moments, opening a window into our minds.

I’d dare say we know each other pretty well by now - better than I know many of my guildies, and If I’d ever find myself guildless for some reason, I’m pretty sure that someone would offer me a new home.

I believe that you still can make WoW friends, even if the game is turned into a silent gentleman’s club, but you don’t necessarily make them the traditional way, as you bounce into people when you're out in the world on adventures.

There are better places today for meeting people. If you want to make friends, you won't find them in /trade or Goldshire. You'll find them in the blogosphere, in the forums or on Twitter.

Perhaps this is something to include in the game guide for beginners? Don't look for WoW friends as you're logged into WoW. Look for them in the offline community.

The blog names I’d rather see go away

Disclaimer: This post is probably going to upset a few readers. I’m about to thread on some toes of fellows in the blogging community. Please don’t take it personally. I don’t hate you. I don’t hate your blog. It’s just the name of it that I don’t fancy that much. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. OK?

I’m not picky when it comes to blog names. Basically you can call your blog whatever you like, as long as it’s not a blatant rip-off from another, well-known blog, which is something I don’t approve of. Build your own brand with your own ideas, thank you very much!

However there is one kind of names that has bugged me for years now and finally I’ve decided to speak up about it. Maybe, just maybe it could prevent one of you who might be thinking of starting your own blog from picking such a name.

Girl blogs
So. (Larísa takes a deep breath. She's not much of a toe stepper).

I have a problem with blogs called something with “girl” or “chick”. Girl playing WoW! Girl not playing WoW! The girl that games! Gamers can be girls! Chick gamer! I’m a super chic gaming chick girl IRL, yes you heard it right, girl, GRRRLLL!!!!

Well the last one wasn’t authentic but you get the idea.

What’s up with you people? Is your gender really such an important aspect of your blog that you have to display it in the name? You could believe that those blogs would be full-fledged gender blogs, wresting every thinkable topic to be about feminism or anti-feminism or whatever. But they rarely are. They’re just normal WoW blogs by normal gamers.

They keep coming. I see them popping up in the newcomer section at Blog Azeroth where new bloggers introduce themselves and every time I see a new blog named “girl” or “chick” blog, I cringe.

Some of the chick named blogs have been around for years, which makes it more understandable. I only started to play games four years ago, but further back, I’ve heard that the situation was different. Females were rare spawns in the gaming community and those who spoke up and came out of their wardrobes were a bit of pioneers. If you were one of the early adaptors it could make perfectly sense to start a blog where you stated that here was a real girl, playing games, a rebellion against the prejudices. Becoming visible was essential.

But now? In 2011? Haven’t we come any further than that? I’d dare say we have. Being a girl who games isn’t exactly shocking news anymore. And it’s definitely not the unique selling point you may look for as a new blogger, rather the contrary if you ask me. If you name your blog “I’m a girl who plays WoW”, I guarantee you that I’ll be unable to tell it from the 20 other blogs with similar names that already are on the market. (Male bloggers are in a different situation; as far as I know there’s only one blog that displays gender in the name – A boy and his death rays.)

Girl or woman
And while I’m raging, what’s this thing about always using the name “girl”, either you’re a 17 year old blogger or 37? If you insist on marketing your gender for whatever reason, what’s wrong with the word “woman”? Could it possibly be that “girl” comes with a connotation of being innocent, harmless and cute, while a grown-up woman feels a bit more creepy and threatening?

Saga has been around blogging for quite a while, but recently she took the step to change her blogname from one of those “girl” themed into the neutral “Spellbound”, which I think is a beautiful blogname and appropriate for a warlock. I wish that more would follow her example.

It’s about time that we stop presenting ourselves as “girls” and start looking at ourselves as “gamers”. No matter how good the intentions are, I think the “girl that games” blog names make more harm than they help to make female gamers into fully accepted members of the community. I look forward to the day when no one would come up with the idea to name a blog “girl” as little as they’d name it “Vegetarian plays WoW” or “The right-handed WoW player”.

Friday night toast
And this was quite a grumpy rant for being a Friday night post. Normally I try to end the week a bit more cheerfully, but I needed to get this off my chest.

To all of you who have a blog named “girl”, I’m truly sorry if I offended you. If you want to mock the name of my blog, please go ahead! I’m sure you can find up something about it. After that I suggest that we end this evening, sharing a toast, making peace again.

After all, the weekend is incoming and hopefully a nice one for all of us. Boys as girls. Women as men. Gnomes as orcs.

Cheers!

At 3 am he nukes a pizza and checks the combat logs

What’s it like to play on the bleeding edge? Kruf of Paragon, the current highest ranked guild in the world, recently shared a typical day of his life.

Here’s a sample from his blogpost. Kruf has just finished a raid that lasted eight hours straight, from 6 pm to 2 am. And yes, he holds a fulltime day job and his alarm goes off at 8:10 every morning.

“02:00. Raid ends. Now it's time to do some daily quests, maybe a random heroic if necessary to reach the Valor Point cap on either of the raiding characters and restock consumables for next raid.

03:00. Done with all the "mandatory" stuff ingame, so it's time to get some food in real life. Depending on how lazy I am, that means either cooking something or just tossing a frozen pizza in the oven or nuking something in the microwave. Most of the time, it turns out to be pizza. Check the forums and news while eating. Try to fix some addons, do some parses on combatlogs to figure out boss ability timers and such.

04:00. Finally ready for bed”

This is what his life has been like most days since Cataclysm launch, and Kruf tries to explain what motivates him:

“A lot of people would wonder "Why does anyone do something like this?", for which I have no better answer than vanity, wanting to be one of the best.”

Different worlds
I don’t normally bother too much about the competition for the world firsts, who killed what, with or without bugs. They live in their world and I live in mine and never will those worlds meet. Just because you like to play football with your friends in the backyard it doesn’t mean that you need to follow every step of the players in Champions League.

However there was something in this post that captured me. I think it was the refreshing honesty. Sometimes hardcore players claim that they play less than casuals. It’s a sneaky form of bragging, if you ask me. We’re led to believe that their godly WoW skills come from talent rather than from spending insane amounts of time on it.

The truth is probably a bit of both. Of course you can spend all day long in Azeroth, doing lapdances for gold, without improving in any aspect at all – apart from possibly becoming a good lapdancer. If you use your online time carefully, always focusing on activities that eventually will lead to your overall raiding goal, you will get a way better return on your time investment and progress quicker in the game. But you still have to invest time, even if you’re ever so talented.

Kruf doesn’t pretend that it’s easy to combine a normal life with job and family with raiding on the bleeding edge. At 3 am, when you’re done with the “mandatories”, you warm your pizza, fix your addons and check the combat logs. That’s what it’s like to be on the top. If you want to be there, you have to pay the price - either you’re WoW player, a football player or a mountain climber.

The scale of seriousness
Kruf’s post made me think about how different approaches we have to WoW. The scale of seriousness is gigantic. On one end you have Kruf. On the other you have what Gevlon calls “morons and slackers”.

Where do I find myself on this scale? Somewhere in the middle I suppose, but probably closer to Kruf than to the bleeding edge of casual players.

I do arrange my real life a bit around our raiding schedule so I can make most of our three raid nights a week. But our raids last three hours, not eight. Like Kruf I make sure to refill my bags with consumables after a raid. On the other side I won’t torture myself with mandatory dailies or running a heroic just to cap my valor points, if I’d rather go to sleep. And I don’t eat pizza at 3.am in the morning. I have dinner with my family.

Not a problem
Do I think that Kruf’s lifestyle is bad and something that therefore should be condemned? Not at all. While it admittedly sounds a bit unhealthy in the long run, I can't see any problem in it, as long as he's the only one who takes the consequences and his life choices doesn't affect someone else, as a child.

However it can be good to bear his blogpost in mind as you compare your own progression rate to Paragon’s deeds. If Kruf's guild has cleared all the heroic modes, while you're wiping on the first bosses in normal, there is a reason for it. They've paid a price that you're probably not prepared to pay.

There ain't such a thing as a free bosskill.

I'd rather play with a living moron than with a dead NPC

Tobold has a tongue-in-cheek post today where he pictures WoW in 2020. By then it has reached huge success turning into a solo game. Instead of grouping up with annoying people, you can clear all of the content, including soloing raid bosses, assisted by AI controlled NPCs.

Is this a crazy fantasy, something taken out of the blue? Well, although a little bit exaggerated, I think he has a point. Without having any scientific data as support, I have the feeling that many players have become less and less interested in the social aspect of WoW during the four years I’ve been playing it.

A waste of time?
Judging not only from what I see on the forums, but also from many blog posts, we tend more and more to regard other players as obstacles and annoyances rather than as potential friends, people you might like to get to know and hang around with. People are annoying, they’re clueless, they’re morons, slackers and above all: they’re not you.

If we socialize, we tend to do it with people we already know. I feel truthfully sorry for new players who enter the game on their own, like I did once upon a time. My impression is that you’d better have some real life friends joining at the same time, or you might end up lonely and alienated. It seems to me as if people don’t have the time for small talk they used to have once upon a time. It’s all about efficiency and return on investment of time. Get your achievements done. Gear up. Get your ranking. Accomplish. Don’t waste your time on strangers!

Or as Tobold remarked:

“I bet that over half of the people reading this post think "I want to play that!" instead of considering it as something bad. One day you will need to realize that you are part of a shrinking minority that actually wants player interaction in a multiplayer game.”

The word “social”
Adam at The Noisy Rogue is also talking about this in a post, where he rightfully puts up a different meaning to the word “social”, which seems to have become a bit of a dirty word in the gaming world. He points out that the social aspect is the only thing that makes an MMO different from a single player game – the ability to log on at any time and encounter people playing the same game:

“You can see them, you can talk to them. I remember the first time that I logged onto an MMO virtual world and another player walked past me, and I realised that I had just seen another person playing the same game that I was. It was mind blowing.”

Exactly. It was mind blowing at that point – and it still is. The thought that someone sitting in Italy is seeing and fighting the same ugly dragon as I am and that we could talk to each other any second, just a click away, fills me with wonder.

Playing with NPCs
Currently I’m finishing Twilight Highlands and the other night I ended up doing exactly what Tobold predicted could be standard procedure in a future WoW. I grouped up with a squad of NPCs and we worked our way towards Grim Batol, fighting off ambushing mobs on our way. I tossed away a scorch here and there, since it seemed to be the best way to make the NPC soldiers understand that they were supposed to kill stuff. (To be honest they were kind of dumb for being artificial intelligences).

And all this time, as we fought in the canyon, I thought about how much more fun it would have been if the squad had consisted of real players instead. Even a complete moron makes better company than an ever so skilled and polite NPC, void of anything that remotely could be regarded as a personality.

Annoying or not – every time you team up with another player you bring something from it. You may not get a new person on your friends list, but you may gain an insight, a laugh or a good story to share in your blog.

I’m not a horrible person to be around, but I would absolutely hate to play an MMO where I was left out to only have company with myself. I hope sincerely that Tobold’s vision of the future online gaming won’t come true.

When the ballet boss turned into a punch-bag

Magmaw was nerfed last night. Before someone will enrage, I might add that it wasn’t Blizzard who did a hotfix in order to please entitled casuals or anything like that. We did it ourselves as we changed strategy.

No more anxious watching over the cooldown for pillar of flame, no more worries about stray parasites pestering the ranged group, spawning more of them. No more dancing, at least not for me. Our DK did it for all of us, beautifully keeping the little buggers occupied (with the help of some hunter traps) while everyone else stood in melee range, focusing on the boss and nothing else. The melee people had previously claimed that Magmaw was about as exciting as Patchwerk, and now the ranged couldn’t but agree.

From ballet to boxing
So we got our kill without a single death and we were even rewarded with an unexpected achievement for it since the pesky parasites didn’t even touch us. Needless to say this will most likely be how we fight Magmaw from now on, unless Blizzard decides that it’s not what they intended and fix it.

It’s the natural law of raiding, isn’t it? We will always find the quickest way down, like a creek of melt water will use every shortcut it can find as it flows down the mountainside. Why complicate it if you don’t have to?

And yet I couldn’t help feeling a little bit cheated on my raid experience. Just a tiny little, but still. My dance class suddenly turned into a session at the boxing club. All I was supposed to do was to stand there on the same spot and punch that bag the hardest I could, over and over again. It was like facing one of the training dummies in IF, with the difference that this one carried epic loot.

Admittedly, sometimes a tank’n’spank fight can be exactly what you need. I remember nights of slow progression, when we’ve been wiping for hours on some complicated ballet-style boss. Finishing such a raid beating up one of the dummy bosses in VoA can be a bit of a relief. Punching a boss really hard and you might get back to your senses.

I don’t say that tank’n’spank is The Evil and should be exterminated from the game. But given the choice between the two extremes, I’d vote for ballet bosses any day.

For me raiding is more about learning the dance than hitting a punch-bag.

Overcomplicated fights?
Some players think differently about this though. Keen over at Keen and Graev’s Gaming Blog for instance had a wipe night in Bastion of Twilight, facing the three random dragons with intricate combinations of buffs and debuffs. Keen calls it “overcomplicated” and doesn’t hesitate on calling out Blizzard:

“When the whole raid has to orchestrate a ballet in order to not wipe in 10 seconds it crosses the line”.

According to Keen, more complex doesn’t mean more fun and he asks Blizzard to stop what he calls “the insanity”. He doesn’t make unreasonable claims, suggesting that bosses should be designed like Patchwerk. But he definitely wants them to be simpler than most encounters I’ve seen so far in Cataclysm. According to Keen, Gunship and Saurfang in ICC were examples of good fights, where there’s enough going on to make them interesting, while they’re still simple enough for you to be able to “just enjoy the content”.

I must say that I disagree with this praise, especially when it comes to Gunship. Sure, I bet Blizzard had the very best intentions as they designed that fight: they wanted to create something new and refreshing, something different from the old fire spitting dragon concept. And of course I loved the rocket jumping, is there anyone who didn’t? I hope they’ll bring them back into game and reuse it at some point, if nothing else in a quest or a five-man dungeon. Jumping makes me giddy.

But aside from that, Gunship was more than anything else annoyingly slow, something you did just to get your “free loot of the week”. The lack of challenge always left me with a hollow feeling and a bad taste in the mouth. Did I really deserve those epics? Maybe I did, but not as a reward for making an effort, but rather as a compensation for the horrendous lag we had to endure doing it. A bad night the fight could easily stretch out to 15 frustrated and painful minutes – or even more.

What about the other example, Saurfang? Well, he wasn’t bad. The mechanics were straight forward enough, but still quite challenging initially and required good execution. However, since it was very much gear depending, it became rather trivial as we geared up and the ICC buff decreased.

I wouldn’t say that Saurfang was what I consider a perfect boss fight. I want bosses to be a little more complicated than that, more steps to learn and if possible several phases. Think Yogg-Saron. Think Lich King. Were they complicated? Absolutely! It took me ages to learn them. But they were good ballets.

A nightmare dancer
This doesn't mean that I'm a perticularly good dancer myself. I won’t lie to you; if you met me in WoW you’d probably consider me a bit of a nightmare partner at first. I would step on your toes; I would mix up left and right and would bump into other couples, making you and everyone else embarrassed.

However, if you wouldn’t run away from me yelling, you’d see that I would improve over time. Eventually I would see the pattern, sense the rhythm and hear the music. My feet would move by themselves, without me having to yell commands at them “left foot, move one step forward – press button – engage”. And to me, the magic of raiding comes in those moments, when everything suddenly clicks. Ballet bosses have it. Punch-bag bosses don’t.

Magmaw turned from a ballet partner into a punch-box yesterday. But there are still many other bosses in Cataclysm who require me to learn how to dance, so I don’t think I have anything to worry about.

Enough of rambling - I think it’s about time that I wrap up this post. It’s Friday night at the inn, the dance floor will open soon and we serve some pretty good punch in the bar. There’s something for everyone, just like in the game. So go ahead and enjoy!

Cheers!

25 man raiding – how long can we defy the law of gravity?

Back in April I asked if anyone will bother to do run 25 man raids in Cataclysm, considering the announced changes with shared lockouts and loot in 10 mans becoming the same as the 25 man loot.

As someone who loves 25 man raiding, I was concerned, even though I also could understand why the 10 man raiding guilds welcomed the changes and thought it was about time. The gain of someone is the loss of someone else.

Here we are now, one month - soon to be two, into Cataclysm. How did it go? Has the world changed or were my worries unfounded? Is it business as usual?

Hitting hard
Well, I suppose that it’s still a little bit too early in Cataclysm to make the definite call. People have only been at max level for a month. Players who aren’t on the bleeding edge, but still plan to raid in Cataclysm, are still in the process of gearing up in heroics. And the post-Cataclysmic guild landscape on each server isn’t set in stone yet; it’s a process in progress. We’re only seeing the first tier of several and each one might have an impact on the social structure and how people choose to raid.

So there are a lot of reservations and maybes in this post, in the usual Larísa manner.

However, if I’m putting up my finger in the air to feel where the wind is going, I would say that Cataclysm has hit the 25 man raiding pretty hard.

I can only speak about what I see on my server, but where there used to be at least 15-20 guilds on the alliance side that did 25 man raids back in the days, there are just a handful who do them in Cataclysm, so far.

If you look at the recruitment ads on the forums, there are plenty of guilds who claim that they’ve got plans on 25 man raids. However, when you look a little closer at their raid progression, it turns out that most of their kills, if not all, are from 10 man raids.

Not everyone will agree with me. I read a post by Gavendo at Rapid Fire, who argued that the hardcore guilds such as Paragon still are rocking it in the 25 mans. He also talks about why 10 mans are harder than 25 mans, since there among other things is less room for individual mistakes. So according to Gav we were wrong to worry about the future of 25 man raiding.

And sure, I’m certain that the top class guilds of the world are doing just fine. But the world I live in is different. What we currently experience is a distinct lack of people who want to do 25 man raiding. Recruiting is harder than ever been before. For all the efforts we’ve made, we don’t get many applications, and I find it hard to believe that it would be because it’s not as if we’re not an attractive guild. We’re one of the oldest, most reliable and well organized guilds on the server if I’d dare say so, with an infrastructure that works and a solid record of progression in the past. If we can’t recruit, it’s not just because we’re not good enough. It’s something else going on.

Was it only about the loot?
Last spring we had quite an intense debate going on in the blogosphere about 10 vs 25 man raiding. There was a lot of talk about the loot aspect, where 25 mans always had been at advantage and things now would be more or less equal (although with a little more points awarded to 25 man raids.) Many argued that if loot was all that kept people doing 25 mans and that players really didn’t enjoy it for its own sake, then it was just as good if it disappeared.

And I’m sad to say it, but it seems as if this is what we see happening now. With the promise of better loot to show off in the cities gone, the gravitation towards smaller, easier-to-handle, more tightly knit raiding formats is turning out to be strong, maybe too strong.

Our guild is still determined to defy this gravitation. Loot or not, we think that 25 man raiding has a certain “something” that 10 man raiding lacks. Not that there’s anything bad about 10 man raiding. I enjoy the smaller format immensely too, with the intimacy and cosiness that a tighter team brings. However, it’s a different creature and it can’t really replace the experience of having a 25 man team climb a learning curve, click and pull it together.

But unfortunately, people like me seem to be a dying breed and the question is for how long we can keep doing this. And how much worries and stress can our officers put up with before it’s wearing them down?

History repeating itself?
The other night our officers set a date. If we can’t fill our vacancies before March 1, so we’re sure that we can pull off every raid and progress as planned, we will no more be a 25 man guild, but a 10 man guild spotting only one team, and the roster will be cut down accordingly.

No one wants it to happen and everyone’s prepared to do whatever they can to help out recruiting. Hopefully Adrenaline won’t become one of the victims of the 25 man raiding death of Cataclysm. But there’s no guarantee we’ll succeed.

If you forget about Paragon and their buddies, I think it’s a tough time for many 25 man guilds in Cataclysm. I was never around for the 40 man raiding in vanilla, but I’ve understood that the transformation for TBC, when they were removed from the game, was painful to say the least. While we still have 25 man raids in the game, I can’t help wondering if what we see now is the beginning of a repetition of the past.

And the next question that comes to mind is of course: how could Blizzard possibly motivate keeping making content for 25 man raids in the next expansion, if it’s just a small minority of the players who bother to do it? It sure carries a symbolic value, but it also pulls development resources, and the question is how much they can allow it to cost.

Again: it probably is too early to judge out the 25 mans completely. This is not my “The End is Near” post. Not quite yet.

But the situation is indeed worrying for all of us who love to raid in 25 mans, but wouldn’t qualify to do it in Paragon.

The Single Pack Disease at AH

I shop my groceries in a supermarket once a week. It's the quickest and cheapest way to get the stuff you need for a family of four. The carrier is always filled to the brim, so heavy that I just barely can handle it and stop it from running straight into the back of adjacent cars in the parking area. I guess I'm like any ordinary middle aged mum in my neighborhood, apart from that I normally listen one or another of my favorite WoW podcasts as I'm doing it. This makes the task far less tedious.

But let's move along to the point. As I do my shopping I tend to buy the items in big packs. Living in a fairly small house I haven't got storage space enough to go for the Very Biggest, Supergigantic and therefore also cheapest versions. But I go for the middle priced. Take toilet tissue. I wouldn't dream of buying that in singles. It would be quite inconvenient for one thing, but it would also be far more expensive. So normally I stick to the 8 or 12 packs, even though I know that the ideal would be to buy 64 at a time, if I only had somewhere to put it.

The more of them you buy, the better price you'll get. That's the norm in real life shopping. Buy three books and you'll get a fourth for free. Buy ten at the price of nine. You know the drill.

The Cataclysm change
It used to be that way in Azeroth too. Stacks of items were always cheaper per item than buying them one by one. Pre-Cataclysm you could always make a little money at AH this way. You bought one elemental fire and cut it into ten crystallized fire pieces, selling each one at the double price of what they had cost you to begin with. The people who only wanted to buy that single crystallized fire they needed for their crafting were happy, the seller was happy, everyone was happy.

Enter Cataclysm and something happened.

The "Multi packs always give you a discount rule" is broken. Nowadays the rule seems to be exactly the opposite, at least at my server. And it drives me nuts.

My main is a tailor, but I don't have any miner or herbalist at max level. This means that I need to buy elementals to do my weekly special cool down cloths. And I buy loads of them. Each cloth type takes 30 elementals and I can make five of those cloths a week. This means 150 freaking volatiles of different flavours!

All this would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that the rule has changed. The elementals even stack better these days, so theoretically I could buy 30-packs. Click, click, click, loot mail box, DONE.

But alas - no. I can't speak for other servers of course, but on my server, Stormrage EU, you have to pay extra nowadays if you want a proper stack. The single packs are always cheaper per item, and I mean a LOT cheaper.

For every single item I need this means that I have to click at least three times in AH. One time to mark the item, one time to mark that I want to buy it out immediately and a third time to accept it and get it done. Looting it from the mail box fortunately only takes me one click, provided that I remember to use shift and right click. But never the less, all in all, it's four clicks for each one of the 150 elementals every week, which if I count it right will result in 600 clicks. And that, my friends leads to a LOT of clicking.

One day this is going to give me some problems with my arm, no kidding. The repetitive clicking, over and over again isn't just boring and annoying, it even hurts, physically.

I suppose there is a solution out there if you use the proper addons. There surely must be some addon that enables you to bid on a multitude of single posted items without having to mark and click on each one of them.

But should I really have to go through that hassle to find that addon, to install it, to configure it, to keep it updated and make sure it doesn't drag down my system?

I don't even WANT an auction addon in the first place! I'm not interested in gold making and I spend as little time as possible messing around with business related activities. I'm in the game to kill dragons, explore worlds and hang around with people I like.

Possible solutions
I guess there are two solutions to this. One is that Blizzard could change the game default UI in some manner so you don't need to do all that clicking if you want to buy 30 volatiles and end up buying them in singles because people refuse to post stacks of them.

Another solution of course is that we somehow get back to the standard that the more you buy, the less you pay. But I suppose that won't happen.

The goblins get better paid for big stacks, which require them less work to post. And I must admit that I'm sometimes even prepared to pay them for it, even if I grumble as I do it. It happens that I just can't face another click-my-way-through-thirty-singles session and buy out the pricey stacks just to save me some time. So why would they refrain from the possibility to do such good business?

The question is what a grumpy gnome is to do when she's out to do her weekly stack up shopping for her crafting?

Well, I put on a podcast and try to think of something else as I click my way through page after page at AH. Just as I do when I go for my weekly shopping at the supermarket.

But I can't help thinking myself back to better times, when the market in Azeroth behaved like other markets and one elemental was cheaper than ten crystals.

The honeymoon is over for the bitter veterans

I probably shouldn’t write about this post since doing it puts me in a slightly bad mood. However, there are some thoughts and views that have been swirling aruond in my backhead for a few days now, following a debate in the blogosphere. And I can't help myself; I need to let out this steam so I can enter the weekend with peace in my mind.

The firestarter is no one but Wolfshead, who is done with his month of evaluating Cataclysm and now has come to the conclusion that it’s the worst expansion in the entire MMO history.

The blogger who more than anyone else (possibly with exception for Syncaine) loves to hate WoW, the guy who has appointed Blizzard the Evil Destroyer of the MMO concept, has once again played WoW for a few days – how many hours is unclear – and come to the conclusion that it still sucks. I would have been way more surprised if he had changed his mind.

“WoW is dying” over again.
As long as I’ve been playing, since 2007, there have been people whining on the forums about how “WoW is dying”, how the game has been ruined by equally bad and evil developers, spiced up with some well chosen general insults to the entire community, meaning: all other players except for me are idiots.

We saw those ex-players return for Cataclysm and for a month they’ve been occupied playing the game. Now the honeymoon is over and this week a wave of negative posts popped up in the blogosphere, Wolfshead the most extreme example. Apparently those who basically don’t like WoW because they’re burned out or just haven't come over EQ are done with their thing and about to leave us.

And to be truthful: the quicker they go, the better it is. I’ve had enough of their presence. Their constant flow of bitter and poisonous throw-ups in blogs and forum posts is sickening and doesn’t’ give me any insight or knowledge whatsoever. All it gives is an annoying debuff on my mood.

It’s hard to take doom and gloom prophecies seriously. Is Cataclysm doing well or not? I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see what the annual reports for Blizzard Activision say. But one think is clear: I don’t think that Wolfshead’s conclusions or a bunch of whiny forum posts can be hold as evidence that Cataclysm is a bad expansion, that it’s badly received, that Blizzard has failed and that players now are leaving for greener pastures.

We’ve seen exactly this happening in every expansion of WoW. Players fled after Vanilla, after TBC, after Wrath and now after Cataclysm. Just like in any other hobby activity, people come and go for various reasons.

But when it comes to WoW it’s a little bit different. For some reason, those who are unhappy can’t just cancel their subscription and play another game that suites them better, which seems to be the logical thing to do. Oh no, they have to make a hell of a noise as they’re leaving, slamming the door to make sure we’re really noticing their departure, yelling in red: “We’re all doomed, WoW is dying!”

A kick from bashing WoW
Isn’t this behavior a little bit odd, thinking about it?

I mean, it isn’t as if WoW was the only game on the market, just as little as there is only one sort of food available in the store. I for instance don’t like the taste of egg. As a matter of fact I hate it in its pure form, such as a boiled egg or an omelet. Does this mean that I’m at war with people who like egg, who make those dishes and eat them with pleasure? Do I call them tasteless, childish and lacking any kind of thinking ability because their taste is different to mine? Do I think that egg-producers are doing the wrong thing, destroying the market for good and tasty food? Nope. The thought is rather absurd.

However, some ex-players feed on and get a kick out of bashing WoW. I’m not sure why. Could it possibly be that it’s a case of an unhappy divorce, an unfinished relationship? WoW is their ex lover and they’ve parted from it on the paper but not in their heart and mind and now they’re trying to convince themselves to let go of it. When they demonize it, it’s their last, desperate effort to try to get away from it.

Lack of nuances
I guess Wolfshead wanted to provoke a discussion, but how do you argue with someone who so completely lacks nuances and perspective, claiming that “It’s almost as if someone has kidnapped the game designers at Irvine and replaced them with childcare workers.”?

How do you talk to someone who sweepingly says: “Like some deranged madman bent on suicide, Blizzard has destroyed everything that was good and noble about MMOs and seemingly wants to take the entire genre with it into existential oblivion”? Can you take this seriously?

Wolfshead claims that Blizzard has created “the worst community in MMO history”.

On what grounds does he say so? I’m a part of the community. So is my guild. So are the bloggers I read and love. Are we all just childish, entitled scum in the world of Wolfshead?

And he goes on:

“You’d almost think that Blizzard feels that socialization and camaraderie are liabilities that should be removed from MMOs altogether.”

I suppose Wolfshead hasn’t noticed the new guild leveling and guild perk system or the changes to raiding that means a huge buff to small, tightly knit 10 man raiding guilds? Likewise he doesn’t see how beautiful Azeroth has become. Has he ever set his foot in Vashj’ir?

All he does is raging about how thee world has been ruined: “Familiar and sentimental zones like Loch Modan, have been destroyed and replaced with desolate ugliness.” Would he prefer if Azeroth had frozen and looked exactly as it did in vanilla? A museum rather than a living, breathing and always changing world.

I could go on and on about Wolfshead’s post, but I think I’ve ranted enough. I just can’t help thinking that it’s a little sad that the guy doesn’t use his writing skill, influence in the community and knowledge about MMOs to make something more interesting. He could have initiated a good discussion; instead he comes out like a reckless forum troll, just repeating it self. Such a waste of talent.

The Cataclysm disease
Wolfshead isn’t the only blogger who has been writing rather negative posts about Cataclysm this week. There have been quite a few others. On that stood out as better an more interesting than many others was the one by Lonomonkey, who tried to put his finger on what he calls “The Cataclysm Disease.”

As opposed to Wolfshead, Lonomonkey doesn’t fall into the pit hole of troll rhetoric. He’s reasonable and I think he’s on to something when he talks about the backside of the streamlined player experience – a lack of free choice and control. I’ve noticed it myself, especially as I was leveling in Uldum and felt as if I was on a moving walkway, unable to decide for myself.

For my own part I haven’t seen enough of the game to make a verdict on how Cataclysm panned out at this stage. I’ve leveled a character to max level, I’ve seen most of the five man dungeons and I’ve started out raiding, but I haven’t quested through the revamped zones with an alt. I have yet to try out PvPing, I have yet to pay the worgen and goblin areas, I have yet to see the new Azeroth from a RP perspective. And above all – I haven’t seen what impact the changes to the game have had on the community from a long term perspective. It’s way too early to make the call. You can’t base such a judgment solely on what people post on the forums.

The good and the bad
If you push me for an answer, asking for my gut feeling, I’m a little bit worried about the lack of player choice, just like Lonomonkey, and I also have the feeling that 25 man raiding has taken quite a hit, judging from what I see on our own server. I miss the group quests while leveling, thinking it was a good preparation for five-mans and a way to get to know other people on the server. Overall I think that leveling is too much of a pure solo experience, considering it’s supposed to be an MMO.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of stuff that probably makes Cataclysm the best WoW expansion ever. The quests are more fun and varied, many zones are incredibly beautiful and imaginative, they’ve made the five man dungeons interesting and challenging again and they’ve given players more incentives to join guilds and play with friends, at least on end-game level. Epics feel like epics again, a reward for effort and overcoming of challenge. There’s a lot to be happy about.

However as I said: my picture is incomplete. We have all time in the world to discuss this. This expansion has only begun and if I’m allowed to speculate I doubt we’ll see the next one until the end of 2012.

I’m looking forward to have some serious and balanced debates about what lessons we can learn from Cataclysm and what future we see for WoW as well as the next generation of MMOs. But let the WoW haters leave the scene first. Then we start talking.

And now I think we all need something to raise our spirits after the hit they took by the post-honeymoon backlash. It’s time for the weekly toast. I hope you’ll get an enjoyable weekend! Oh, and let’s make next week into a happier one, shall we? I for one am still having a blast exploring Cataclysm.

Cheers!

Gnomebliteration for Daily!

I’m normally not a huge fan of daily quests. I make a few of them, but more often than not it’s out of duty and a fixed idea that I “have to” make the best out of my character than anything else. Not doing them would feel like slacking. Yeah, I’m probably a bit silly, but that’s me.

I still have painful memories of being captured in slavery for the Sons of Hodir, polishing their not-to-be-mentioned thingies and whatnot. Pure humiliation, I tell you.

The very moment when I dinged exalted with Therazane, I told them some truths about what I really thought about them and made it perfectly clear that I was out of that pit for good. If they wanted shiny rocks from labyrinths they would have to grab them themselves. I was done.

Tol Barad
I’m still on the fence about the Tor Barad dailies. Admittedly those guys have some quite shiny trinkets in their store and a close to irresistible non combat pet. However most of the quests are underwhelming, to say the least.

We thought that Blizzard hade moved on from the “kill-ten-rats” quest era and that quests were supposed to be fun and interesting these days. The truth is: they haven’t. Not entirely. They just gathered them all up in this zone. Gather body parts from crocs, kill tons of spiders, kill X amount of mobs in the Y village. Zzzzzz.

I still do the Tol Barad quests occasionally, sort of half hearted. But not all of them and not every day; that would be more than I could stomach.

When you think about it closer, isn’t it rather insane to even consider doing the same simple, un-fun quest over and over again? Especially so since I still haven’t cherished all content there in for instance Vashj’ir and Twilight Highlands. But the min-maxing madness is hard to resist once it gets hold of you. I reckon that’s why I haven’t given up on them altogether.

There are exceptions of course. Pygmy slaughtering, say no more! You can never get enough of that, can you?

Quests I can do again
As I shared my enthusiasm for that daily quest the other day, I started to think about other quests I like in Cataclysm. Was there any other quest that I hadn’t had enough of doing it once? Was there a quest that I could imagine to do over and over again, even once I’ve reached exalted, just because of the entertainment value?

There was. There was one quest that came out as top-on mind, one quest that kept me giggling all the way as I did it. One quest that tendered to my need for big numbers and merciless slaughter of small creatures.

Yep. I’m talking about Gnomebliteration, the quest in Uldum where you handle a gigantic fireball, rolling down the hill on the hunt for 1 000 (!) crazed gnomes.

If I’d known better as I did it, I would never have turned it in. Then I could have done it over and over again as much as I wanted to. According to the comments at Wowhead, you can proceed in Uldum without completing this quest. But I didn’t know, so now it’s out of my reach unless I level an alt.

My hope now is that Blizzard will hear the cries from the masses. Judging from pleading threads in the forums and from several of the comments to my pygmy quest post, I’m not the only one who loves to crush gnomes with a giant ball of fire.

Make Gnomebliteration into a daily!

My take on the puzzling dungeon nerf

Rohan of Blessing of Kings welcomes the incoming nerf to the heroic 5 man dungeons.

Well, I don’t.

While I could see it happen in the course of time, possibly in a few months, I can’t see the reasons for doing just over a month into the new expansion.

For God’s sake, we just dinged 85 a couple of weeks a go! Could you please give us a chance to try out the new content for ourselves before you decide that we’re probably not good enough for the challenge? Just askin'.

As if the rush to catch up with gear to get raid ready after the holidays wasn’t enough, I also have to rush now to see the instances before they’ll take the edge out of them. I hear about three hour long wipe feasts in heroic Deadmines. Well, I tell you: I would have loved to experience one of them, but unfortunately I have yet to see it. The question is if I’ll be able to get in there before 4.06 hits.

I’m disappointed and above anything: confused. Ghostcrawler only recently wrote a brilliant post where he explained the reasons for why they’ve put the instances at the current difficulty level. For instance:

“The bottom line is that we want Heroics and raids to be challenging, and that is particularly true now while the content is new and characters are still collecting gear. They’re only going to get easier from here on out. We want players to approach an encounter, especially a Heroic encounter, as a puzzle to be solved. We want groups to communicate and strategize. And by extension, we want you to celebrate when you win instead of it being a foregone conclusion.”

Did you notice the sentence: “They’re only going to get easier from here”? Exactly. And do you know why? It’s because it happens naturally as we gear up. Blizzard doesn’t need to lift a finger for it to happen. The gearing up is a nerf in itself, even if it seems to slip their minds sometimes.

The timing of Ghostcrawler’s post and the announcement about the nerfs (yes, I know a few bosses were buffed as well, but the total of it was a nerf) is unfortunate.

It’s never a good idea to try to convey two ideas at the same time.

I wish they had stuck to their guns.

Edit: After posting this I read Tam's take on this topic at Righteous Orbs and I have to admit that he has some good points. It's possible that my negative reaction to the changes is somewhat hasty and knee-jerkish. However, I still can't help feeling cheated for never getting the chance to do DM when it was at its hardest. It's not about that I want other players to have an equally hard experience as I had. It's about my own challenge.

And I still think that the timing between this and GC's post was bad. He could easily have avoided the double messages by mentioning some of the changes in his post, as examples of how they want to tweak things.

The moving walkway

First of all: I’m having a blast as I’m questing my way through the new zones of Cataclysm. There’s so much to love – so much beauty, so much imagination, so many new and thrilling quests, especially in my current zone Uldum, which has blown me away on several occasions.

So don’t get me wrong. What I’ve seen of Cataclysm so far has lived up – or even exceeded – the somewhat crazy expectations that have been built up ever since the announcement at Blizzcon 2009. But I have a little thought of doubt: hasn’t the questing in WoW become just a little bit too streamlined?

Following the pathways
Everywhere I go, I see players following the pathway that Blizzard has put out for us. Strictly speaking I reckon I could deviate from it. It’s not like when you’re hiking in one of those heavily populated nature reserves where you’re more or less forced to follow the assigned trail to preserve the surrounding grounds. But in practice this won’t happen. The quests are supposed to be done in a certain order; one thing leads to another, moving between phases. Woe the player who dares to break the quest chain! No more quests for you, ungrateful scum! Leave the trail and you’ll be condemned to trash grinding your way to 85 killing nothing but murlocs.

Every now and then, without previous notice, the screen goes black and I’m suddenly thrown into a mini cinematic of some sort. And this adds to the feeling of linearity. It’s even more linear than the experience of reading a book or seeing a movie. When you’re consuming something in those media, you can always go back. You can replay the scene you came to think about on your dvd or you can go back and look at the previous chapter if you get lost in the novel. WoW is much less forgiving. If you get distracted in some way, you’ve missed it.

A moving walkway
Over and over again an image pops up in my head: the image of the moving walkway in the room where they keep the royal jewels at The Tower of London. The only way you can see them is by standing on that walkway, and it passes those jewels at set, nonnegotiable pace.

You blinked as you passed? Your toddler came by as the quest cinematic was running? You got a phone call and didn’t see that scene where Harrison swings around in his rope on the giant statues? Too bad for you, but the conveyor band has moved passed the jewels and the exit is there. You’ve completed the quest, here's your reward! (Which on a side note feels rather bizarr - why are we rewarded for doing nothing but staring at our screen, drinking coffee?) What are you waiting for? Hurry up, step into the next rollercoaster ride! Want to see it again? Sorry, mate. Roll an alt or check YouTube. You're in a different phase now and the ride only goes in one direction.

Who’s driving?
Tam asked: “Who’s driving this story?” and my answer is simple: it certainly isn’t me. I feel like a marionette doll, secured in the threads under the rule of the designers, in a way that I’ve never ever felt before.

I remember how I back in the days sometimes used Jame’s levelling guides, with mixed feelings. It was efficient levelling on one hand, but it took away a bit of the “a virtual world to explore” feeling from the game. It quickly became a threadmill, with a tunnel vision focus on the XP/hour rate, rather than on the thrill of adventure and uncertainty.

The last few years Blizzard has taken WoW in a direction where the guides and quest addons aren’t needed anymore. It’s all built into the UI, showing where to go and what to do next, and into the pipeline quest design. The tendency started in Wrath, but Cataclysm takes it up to the next level.

I reckon it’s my lack of experience from other games that makes me react against it. Maybe this is the way that stories normally are told in games?

I’ve become used to – and fond of - Blizzard’s open-world-design. I know that some old school players sneer at it, thinking it’s more of a theme park for players that lack any kind of imagination of their own, than a sandbox where you can make anything happen.

The same meal
Until now I’ve always thought that the theme park accusations were unfair and that there were more player freedom and options than you’d think of at first sight. You could tweak your WoW experience into something different from everyone else’s. I didn’t have such a strong feeling that we’re all having the same standard hamburger meal as I get in Cataclysm.

It’s an awesome hamburger, the best one they’ve ever made. Shiny. Entertaining, full of surprises. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as curious, excited and involved as I’ve been exploring Uldum for instance. I’ve even started to read the quest texts for some reason, and this fact surely must be a sign of a huge improvement. Quest design taken at a new level!

Perhaps I just have to take the bad with the good. Maybe there isn’t any other way to make the design than by forcefully leading us through certain pipes?

Another thing to remember is that I haven’t yet dipped my toes into Archaeology. From what I’ve heard it might offer a counterweight to the streamline questing, giving the sense of freedom, exploration and individuality that rollercoaster rides somehow lack.

It’s too early to make the call what impact the changes to questing will have on us, too early to say if we’ll enjoy all those cinematics as much next time we bump into them, or if they’re just an annoyance, “been there, done that”.

But I can’t quite get the image of the walkway at The Tower of London out of my head. The thought is a little disturbing.

Perhaps it's there because it tells us something about our real lives. Am I living my life as if I was in a sandbox, a world of freedom and possibilities, where I'm in charge of myself? Or am I just idly standing there on the conveyor belt, waiting for the trip to end when Life is done with me?

The thought crosses my mind and I pick it up and look at it briefly, before I carefully put it back in my backhead again where it came from. Some things are too scary to give a full examination.

Queues, oh my!

So the queues are up again.

For my home server Stormrage EU, this means a 15 minute waiting time to come online. I can’t remember last time this happened. We used to have some pretty bad instability issues a year ago, and this resulted in a major exodus from the server, bringing down the population to middle size. But now we have a queue and I can only imagine how bad it must be at the more popular servers, those that were labelled “full” even before the launch of Cataclysm.

Of course the queues were to be expected, and I believe that most players can understand and accept that there is a certain waiting time during the peak period that follows the release of an expansion. However, the queues that are reported on the official forums now are more than long. They’re extreme. We’re not talking about 15 minutes, but rather 4 hours. The question is what Blizzard can or should do about it.

Bashiok's posting

Blue poster Bashiok has made an effort to try to moderate some of the threads of wrath and hatred, doing exactly what companies should do in situations like this. He shows that Blizzard is listening and that they’re aware of the situation, he expresses his compassion and concern and he points out what they’ve done to address the situation so far and the possible solutions for the future. But obviously this isn’t enough for the infuriated players. Finally Bashiok gives in and says that he’ll stop responding, since “people are just consistently quoting things out of context or just not reading my replies at all before posting.”

The thing with the queues is that there isn’t any quick fix to it, at least not anyone that is good.

To quote Bashiok:

“How do we handle the thousands upon thousands of people, per realm, that have come back from weeks, maybe years of not playing to play today on their old realm? Delete their accounts? Forcibly move their characters to low-pop realms while they weren't looking?”

As an emergency measure, Blizzard has decided to raise the cap of how many players that can be online at the same time on a certain realm. This seems to have helped a little, but it hasn’t wiped the queues as far as I understand it. And is it really a good solution? It will no doubt affect the player experience, with increased piling on the questgivers and worse competition for popular quest mobs. Not to speak of the risk for lag. In the end it’s a question about the balance between quantity and quality, and I hope that they won’t go too far in this direction, just to get rid of the queues. And the complaints will still be there, only that they address the density on the server rather than the waiting time. I’m not sure if it’s that much of a gain.

One thing I think that Blizzard should and could do is to give out better information about the queue situation on different realms. On the Battle-net website with the list over the realms, there’s a column called “queue”, but the only information they put there is “yes”, which I assume means that there is a queue. What it they could make live updates on exactly how many players are in queue for each realm and how long the estimated waiting time is?

Such an overview could help players to play their gaming better. Even if the queue is an annoyance, at least it won’t have to come as a shock. If you know about the queue in advance, you can join it and go and plan for other things to do while waiting. Also: if players see how bad the queues on their home realm are, they might consider spending that night on an alt on another realm, just to see the new content.

It could also possibly inspire players to consider switching to a less populated realm. Don’t be too sure about it though! The psychology of queues never ceases to fascinate me. Even if we grumble about queues, and you never hear about anyone enjoying them, we’re at the same time weirdly attracted to them, light a night fly to the torch light.

Queues as marketing
For how crazy it sounds, a proper queue can be one of the cheapest and most forceful marketing activities you can come up with. There is some strange logic that tells us that something that is so popular that there is a queue for it, must be so good that it’s worth queuing for. If there’s a queue, we’re quick to join it, because who knows how quickly it will grow?

I’ve seen examples of it in real life, as people join queues that they don’t even know where they’re leading, for instance in theme parks. Rule number one is to secure your spot in the line. Once you’ve done this, you have plenty of time to start worrying about what the line is about.

If you apply this to WoW I’m afraid that the more popular a realm is, the more attractive is it to the players. “Oh, so Argent Dawn in EU is apparently a hot spot. There must be something fantastic about this realm. What do they have that we don’t have? I’d better queue up and check it out for myself. It must be worth it or there wouldn’t be so popular”. And equally a low population realm can easily be overlooked. It gives the same creepy feeling as looking into the window of an open restaurant that is empty on customers. “Ouch. No people! There must be a reason. The food is either bad or expensive. I’d better go somewhere else.”

I guess much of the queue issues will sort out themselves in a not too far distant future, when the powerlevellers have done their thing and the holiday season arrives, when players will either go afk for real life issues or spread out their gaming over the day, since they’re off from work and school. I think Blizzard does right not to mindlessly open new realms in an act of desperation to counter the queues. If a realm is crowded now it doesn’t mean that it will be the same in a couple of months, and players on "empty" realms tend to be even more misarable than they ones that are stuck in queues. Blizzard must plan further ahead than the nearest week.

But even if they don’t act, they must keep communicating. So big kudos to Bashiok, for at least trying.

Further ideas about more enjoyable flights in WoW

Let’s talk a bit more about travelling in World of Warcraft.

I won’t argue about if it was a good or bad design decision to close down the portal hubs in Shattrath and Dalaran. I think I’m pretty much done with that discussion. However I recommend you to read Tam’s thoughtful post on this of today. He disagrees with my support for the change and argues why the portals should have been kept, using his full arsenal of charm, wits and intelligence. It’s hard to resist this eloquence, so I humbly have to admit that I’m on the fence now. Maybe it wasn’t the best thing of Blizzard to do for all their good intentions? Read and judge for yourself.

Anyway – back to the topic for this post.

The enjoyable flight
When I started to play WoW, flying was one of my favourite things to do in game. The first time I used a flight path I was thrilled, almost as thrilled as I was the first time I used the subway between IF and SW and called for my family to come and watch it “Look, just come and look, how cool isn’t this, squee!”. For the longest I always looked forward to the next time I got the opportunity to get up on a gryphon. It was fun and exciting and I wouldn’t miss it for anything.

Eventually the freshness of it wore off – even for me, Larísa, the Merrymaker and nowadays I have to admit that I’m quite likely to go AFK as I’m flying, using one of the strategies I presented the other day. The recently changed landscape will of course increase my interest for the scenery for a while, but that effect will go away too.

Now, let’s assume that the portals will remain closed for whatever reason - disturbances in the Twisted Nether, Deathwing was mean, Blizzard hates all players and want us to suffer or they’ve screwed up the code and don’t know how to fix it.

Let’s assume that we can’t get away from travelling and ask ourselves: is there anything Blizzard could add to the flying experience that would make it more interesting, something that would keep me in game and by the computer rather than making snacks, reading blogs or emptying the dishwasher?

Steering or shooting
Well, I have a couple of ideas at hands. One is as simple as to let the players be able to steer the gryphon or bat just a little bit, like you do in those carousels at amusement parks. You can’t affect the course of the vehicle you’re sitting in, but you can affect the height of it. Imagine if you could dive down to the ground or up in the air as you wanted to. It’s a small and silly thing, but I think I’d like it. And wouldn’t it be kind of cool if you were out questing somewhere and suddenly, out of nowhere, a bat would skydive, like a seabird trying to snatch your sausage?

Another idea is to give you some kind of activity or even a mini game where you had the ability to shoot, bomb or possibly grab something from the ground using a hook. The reward could be small, bordering to insignificant, but it would give you the feeling of being more involved in the game rather than a passive observer.

Storytelling
What I’d most of all like to see however, is an option to talk to the mount. Just like Nils spoke to the flying goose Akka who he rode during his travels through Sweden in the classic children’s book The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.

My idea is that the mounts could be some kind of lore masters, offering their knowledge to the players.

Speaking for myself I have very little patience for lore as I’m out questing. My mind is set on killing, completing quests and moving on, and I don’t take much time to optional reading of books or NPC dialogues. On most occasions, I just click through it without looking closer. At the best I pay it a quick glance, but it doesn’t stick. This isn’t a behaviour I’m proud of; it’s just the way I work.

I think I’m not the only one to be honest. I believe there are many stories that are told in Azeroth with hardly anyone listening, and it seems like such a waste of creativity and effort. Couldn’t those stories enhance our gaming experience, if they were told under different circumstances, such as in the form of on-board entertainment?

I think a long distance flight would be the perfect time and place for some proper storytelling. Let the gryphon or bat speak up about something connected to our destination or to one of the zones we’re passing. Or perhaps they could just tell random tidbits from any time or place in Azeroth.

As you started your journey, you’d get a question: “Would you like to hear a story?” And if you clicked “yes”, he would start: “ Let me tell you about [insert NPC, faction or historical event]: ….”

Even better, they could also give the alternative to hear the story read by a voice actor, rather than reading it as a text. Reading huge chunks of text isn’t for everyone after all.

I guess it wouldn’t work well for short distances, such as Stormwind-Goldshire. But it could surely make the journey from Ironforge to Booty Bay feel a little bit shorter.

More than clams

I’m not a game developer myself, so I don’t know if my suggestions are doable or even entirely good. Maybe there’s a good reason why they haven’t put those features in the game.

However I do think that Blizzard could and should make an effort to try to make mounted travelling a little bit more interesting and interactive.

Opening clams isn’t enough.

"Any FoS for killing them?"

Maybe I'm a bit grumpy. But I cringed inside as I read this comment at MMO-Champion's news report about elementals attacking the capital cities:

"Any FoS for killing them, tabard, etc? If not what the point?"

Is this how far the stimuli-response training has taken us? Are we nothing but trained animals, performing acts on command, but only as long as we can expect a proper reward? Have we lost the idea of what's it like to roam about in the playground just for fun?

I see this player in front of me as he passively stands there, looking at the invasion, doing nothing as the elementals rip the citizens into pieces. What does he care? He won't move a finger unless Ghostcrawler gives him a Feat of Strength. Or at least a shiny tabard. It's a minimum!

I keep reminding myself that it's just one voice in a forum. A whiner. There have always been whiners around, so what's new? There are probably thousands, even millions of players who happily will defend the cities, not to get achievements or to get access to epics from mini bosses, but because they're playing a game in an imaginary world, which they care about. I try to stay positive.

However I can't quite get the worrying thought out of my head: he might not represent the entire community, but he represents something - a mindset that has stuck. How and when did this happen to the player mentality? It surely wasn't like this as I started to play in 2007.

And what will the future hold for WoW and the MMOs that will follow? Is there any way back? Can Blizzard find an alternative in their next MMO or will they continue on this path, since the rats - sorry - players want it so badly?

In places where one sleeps but once

Where's your home in Azeroth? This was asked in a shared topic at Blog Azeroth a little while ago.

I didn't participate in it, mostly since I don't have any particular home. Sure, there are some places that I like more than others. As a matter of fact there are quite a few, such as the twilight zones of Zangar and Duskwood, the happy greenery in Elwynn or the hill just behind the inn in Westfall, which happens to be a wonderful hideout for nightly meditations under the starry sky. But I couldn't point out one certain spot, claiming it to be my home, and as a matter of fact it doesn't bother me. My home is in Azeroth and that's enough to me.

I'm not playing WoW to furniture a house. If I did, I could as well play Sims or build myself a real life doll house. I play WoW to kill dragons, explore strange new worlds and hang around with other geeks. Besides, if I ever feel that I need a steady point in the WoW universe, I beleave that I already have it. It's called The Pink Pigtail Inn.

Player housing
Wolfshead takes a different position in a recent post, where he once again argues strongly for player housing. He talks at length about the importance of player ownership, putting up Farmville and similar social network based games as an example to follow for the MMO industry if they want to remain successful.

He points at the benefits of allowing player ownership, claiming that it helps the players to bond with the virtual world, which will give a deeper more meaningful game experience for the players and more loyal subscribers for the game company. He also claims that it will contribute to create a better community, since players who don't own anything are mere guests and tourists and behave as such.

This isn't exactly news: Wolfshead has talked about player on many occasions before, like in the spring 2009. My conclusion after pondering upon this issue for a while and asking other players with experience from games with player housing, was that it certainly sounded like something that could be "nice to have" but not necessary, which I wrote in a reply post.

Now that Wolfshead brings up the topic once again, I looked back at my post to see if I had changed my mind, and I found that I really hadn't. So with the risk for repeating myself, I'll follow Wolfshead's example and talk about it one more time.

What to do
My major objection with the house idea is that I don't see what you would do in there. I'm afraid it would grow old fairly quickly, unless you put features into it, such as storage services, vendors, mail and AH. But on the other hand: if you did this, you would risk draining the cities from the players who make them come alive.

Is it really all that fun to be a house owner that you want to do it when you're gaming as well? You know what? I don't even own the real life house I'm living in - I rent it. Yes, I know it might sounds shocking - at my age you're expected to have paid your mortgages for years. But our family has decided to live a fairly modest life style, free from such things as a second car, fancy furniture or a summer house. We haven't invested in property. At all. We eat simple; we live simple, but we invest in experiences. My daughters may not have big and beautiful rooms like their friends have, but on the other hand, they've been on safari in Tanzania, they've done an unforgettble road trip in California and soon they're about to make a journey to India. And actually they don't complain. Not a bit.

I probably should blame Thoreau for this. I read Walden as I was young and even if I can't sign on all of his ideas today, he has had an infuence on my perspective on life.

Among other things, he made me realize that you won't automatically become happy just because you own a big property. All the work that comes with it, all the obligations and the need to maintain it, can become such a burden that it enslaves you.

It's not about you owning the house anymore. It's the house that owns you. I've seen it happening in real life a number of times, to friends at the same age as I who have prioritized the creation of their home to other activities in life. Even if they're not even remotely interested in crafting and building, they end up spending all their leisure time on different sorts of house renovation projects. There isn't any end to it.

Let the players decide
My thoughts are wandering too far away from the topic, as they tend to do on Friday nights. Let's go back to the issue on player houses. I don't look for them for my own part, because I think I'll have more fun exploring the world. However, I'm not the only player in WoW, and if Blizzard decided to go through with this idea I wouldn't rage against it.

If Wolfshead speaks the truth and there's a big enough interest for this among the players, I can't see any reason not to go ahead with it. It's definitely more interesting to me than projects such as remote AH access or Battle Net communications over game boundaries.

All I ask for is that they find a way to deal with the logistical issues, making sure that neither the houses, nor the public space areas in the cities, will end up as deserted ghost towns.

For my own part I'm not sure if I'll ever bother to settle in one of those virtual houses. I'll end this post, quoting a couple of lines from poem "In motion" by the Swedish poet Karin Boye.

The best goal is a night-long rest,
fire lit, and bread broken in haste.
In places where one sleeps but once,
sleep is secure, dreams full of songs.

Friday night toast
My Friday night toast this week goes to all of you wanderers stopping by at this inn on your journey through life. Please make yourself comfortable by the fire. There's room for everyone. May your sleep be secure and your dreams full of songs!

Cheers!