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!

The Unfiltered Joy of Smashing Thieving Little Pluckers

Let me reveal a secret. Those pink pigtails - the doll-like cute little face if mine – is just a disguise. In reality I’m a full-fledged slaughter machine, always craving for blood.

The more they bleed and scream, the wider is the smile on my face. It feels good to be evil!

Pygmy cravings
My true nature was revealed to me the first time I did the quest Thieving Little Pluckers in Uldum.

As I raised the Tehtret Dynasty Mallet, which is about the size of Larisa and smashed it into the living pillar of equally annoying and cute sand pygmies, and as I saw how they fell in all directions, blood flowing and yellow numbers filling my screen, I knew that I was lost.

I had to do this again! Please, please let me! I would do anything in my power – even level an alt if that was what was needed– to get the chance to just one more time pwn those little creatures and tear them into pieces.

Fortunately enough it turned out that someone at Blizzard knew about those darkest corners of the pink pigtailed mind. Of all quests in Uldum, they had picked this one for making a daily, in an effort to meet the needs of us addicts. And I pulled a sigh of relief. I could do this quest, over and over again, as many times as I liked. The flow of blood from smashed pygmies would never get dry.

And this was how it all began back in December. Many pygmies have died for my mallet since then and Ramkahen now are so pleased with my services as a smasher that they’ve given me a camel mount and released me from my duties. If I insist on keeping smashing pygmies, they let me of course, but the salary is set at a modest 7 g 85 silver, which I probably could earn quicker if I just gave AH 30 seconds of my attention.

From a strict goblin perspective, there’s no reason why I should do this daily again, ever.

But I do. Because I’m just like Raz the Crazed in Blackrock Caverns. I like to smash!

The joy of destruction
I frankly don’t know what it is about it that makes it so satisfying. There isn’t any challenge, no e-peen to wave and certainly no tasty quest reward awaiting.

And yet I love it, the same way as I enjoy stomping on the thin ice covering a ground pool an early winter morning, seeing the ice shatter into pieces as you pray silently that this pool was empty and not filled with dirty water. I think it’s something about the sound and the very sensation of breaking things. It’s the joy of pure, unfiltered destruction.

Bam, bam, splash! You’re so dead!

Blizzard may break their backs to provide us with all sorts of sophisticated quests with phasing, invisible vehicles, mystical mists à la Emerald Dram or crazy action filled cut scenes in the company of Harrison Ford. But we players are strange, ungrateful creatures. Sometimes we don’t want sophistication. Sometimes we just want to smash things and listen to the sound of screaming victims and flowing blood.

Thieving Little Pluckers. I think I already have a good candidate for when it’s time to nominate the best quest of 2011.

To all fellow smashers
My Friday night toast goes to all my fellow pygmy smashers out there. Maybe you find reasons to hide your addiction, putting up a façade that you prefer quests to be challenging and intriguing. But even so, don’t feel ashamed for your secret cravings.

You’re not alone!

Cheers!

How I almost started to care about the Harvest Festival

Fitz at Healer Trek gives the Harvest Festival an F grade. “Worst holiday in the game, no doubt about it. If you find a reason to care about Harvest Festival let me know why. I'd love to know.”

Well, as a matter of fact I almost started to like the event when I stumbled up it this weekend. I say “almost”, because in the end it was a fail. I’ll tell you the story.

The yellow exclamation mark
It all started where all our adventures in Azeroth begin, with a shiny yellow exclamation mark. It was a beautiful Sunday morning in Dun Morogh, I had just come online and was about to take the usual quick jump from entrance of Ironforge down to the Brewfest camp for the daily booze party, when I noticed a new guy standing there, begging for my attention.

I consider myself pretty much well updated on what’s going on in game. The combination of excessive blog reading and regular browsing of wow.com and MMO-champion is usually enough to keep in touch. But this guy had slipped through the net. He was talking about some sort of harvest celebration and had a mission for me as well.

I draw the conclusion that this must be part of some sort of seasonal event, which probably gave some fancy fluff rewards, if nothing else another pet to my collection. But instead of following my instincts, looking up a “how-to” guide to complete the Harvest Festival in the most efficient way, I decided to do it differently this time. I would approach this the way I played WoW when I started in February 2007. I would follow my instincts and let the quest take me wherever it wanted to. I would explore the world rather than conquer it.

Of course there was a difference now to my first stumbling steps in Azeroth. I knew the world a little bit better. So the journey to this Uther’s Tomb in Western Plagueland was pretty straightforward.

As I was riding the gryphon, I checked out the achievement tab for the holidays. Even if I didn’t want to use any Internet guide for this event, I thought I could check out the achievements for it. That would give me an idea about where this adventure would bring me and didn’t feel like cheating. But I soon found out that there wasn’t any achievement at all for it. I decided to not be disappointed about it. It only meant that there was no tick-box stress luring on me. I could enjoy it as a casual, relaxed adventure.

Disappointed
Finding the tomb wasn’t hard, even without addons and guides. I had a vague memory of where it was situated, and it turned out that I was right. It was even included in the world map, so I shouldn’t have worried about it.

I approached the place, curious and a little bit excited. I had no idea about what would happen. Was there to be some phasing? Would I pick up the next quest in a long chain? Would a ghost appear and talk to me, maybe some cool voice acting performance? This could be anything!

I guess I don’t need to tell you that I was pretty disappointed when I did my clicking and the only difference I could notice was that the quest was completed. Oh well, there would surely be a nice follow-up once I got back to Ironforge to turn it in. The guy would have another mission for me, and so would the ghosts hanging around the place by the dinner table. Once I turned in this quest there would be a jungle of yellow exclamation marks for me. And I wouldn’t have a clue about what anyone of them meant. Oh joy!

Little did I know.

I received my 12 gold, a crap book and a “thank you”. No yellow mark. Maybe this was the kind of quest giver who wanted to hold a little speech and wander around doing a little piece of acting before he told me what he wanted. So I waited. And waited. And waited. Nothing.

The food table
Then I turned around, looking at the ghost party, starting to click whatever I could, desperately hoping that there was something more I could do, now that I finally had come to my senses, using a “let’s see what this leads me to” mindset rather than a “let’s get over with this grind” mindset as I approached an in-game event.

Yeah, there was a firework vendor. But his assortment wasn’t impressive to be honest. And then there was this food on the table. I inspected it suspiciously. This was the kind of food that probably would have come handy when I was levelling my first character, provided that it wasn’t a mage, who brings his own. But for me – to be honest it was just another bag filler. The only fun thing about it was that the supply was a bit limited. If I took enough of fruit from the table, the plate would disappear. This amused me for a second, for some reason it tickled my sense of wardrobe role playing. I felt immersed as I wondered around, tasting all the goodies of the table.

And that was the end of my Harvest Festival experience.

Reasons to like it
Fitz gave the event an F-grade and considering my disappointment I’m not far from doing the same. However, there is one little reason to like this event that I would like to point out: the pleasure of change.

The longer I play WoW, the more I’ve come to appreciate anything that isn’t exactly the same from day to day. The Darkmoon Faire moving around. One day it’s there – the next it’s not. There is a point in those holiday events coming and going: it gives variety and a sense of the passing time.

For this reason, I even visited the Pirate day event in Booty Bay! I’m not a huge pirate fan myself and the fun of speaking as a pirate is beyond my sense of humour. The whole thing felt shallow and provided little content, most of all it appeared to be a lag party on the rooftop. But nevertheless – it was a change, a welcome break in the everyday life of Azeroth. Those things definitely helps to make the world come alive – especially if you choose to approach it from a casual, exploring, deliberately inefficient way rather than grinding them.

I almost started to care about the Harvest Festival. Given just a few follow-up quests and a little bit more of content, it could have been a little bit of fun.

Are you feeling guilty for not doing dailies?

First of all I want to state clearly that I don’t intend to name and shame anyone in this post. So please don’t take offence, Anea at Holy Discipline!

I don’t want to point you out as particularly strange or stupid; it’s just that your post hit something within me that put me on fire. It’s not that I’m anywhere different or better than you are. Probably I’m without knowing about it just as guilty of this kind of behaviour as you, and that’s why I’m so touchy about it.

What made me upset
People who haven’t read Anea’s post may wonder what’s up. What’s all this about?

Well, in this post Anea writes about how she feels guilty when she logs in and doesn't grind dailies, in this case the Argent Tournament amongst others. She obviously doesn’t enjoy them, particularly not the mounted ones. She keeps telling herself she’ll do it next day, then she ends up not doing them, and then she gets annoyed with herself for escaping from her duties.

And this makes me shake my head in disbelief. What IS this, really? Feeling guilty, over what? Feeling guilty over doing something else in the game which you probably thought was more fun and enjoyable? Aren’t we escaping into the game to get AWAY from the real life duties, chores, burdens and tedious work? Isn’t the workload in real life enough, do we have to throw ourselves into things that we hate online and then blame ourselves when we do something else?

Seriously, being disciplined is a good thing, probably even in WoW, but save it for good reasons!

Turning my back to it
A little while ago I suddenly realized that I didn’t enjoy the Argent Tournament dailies and turned my back to it. I haven’t looked back yet. Even the information that there will be dailies in the next patch that I can’t do unless I have the crusader title is enough to pull me back to it on a regular basis.

Why? Because for me those vanity items like titles, mounts and pets are what it says: vanity. They’re optional. Not something I MUST have to feel happy about my character progression.

Admittedly Blizzard is planning to add a little bit of usability to one of the pets. He will be upgraded to a portable post box every so and so hour. But seriously, how often do I need that on my mage, which I don’t play much outside of raiding? It would be useful for my druid alt, questing in remote areas, bags about to explode with all those quest items, extra healing gear, cloth from drops and leather from skinning. But for my mage? Not very often.

So unless I’ll find something else that shows that I a crusader title is crucial to me to perform as a raider, I’ll stick to my promise to myself: to only do those dailies when I feel up for it. And I don’t feel guilty about it for a second.

Of course you can set up goals for yourself, goals that sometimes include a bit of grinding, that you’re willing to go through because the sweetness of the reward. But feeling guilty if you're not sticking to the original plan? Isn’t that way out of proportion?

Reasons for feeling guilt
The only reason I can see for feeling guilt is if you’re breaking the social contract you’ve made with other people in game. If I would turn up to raids in last minute, demanding a summon, without being repaired, without having flasks and proper gear, without knowing the tactics. Or even worse, if I’d stand people up, not coming to an appointment, without giving any explanation or making efforts to get in touch with them. If that would happen I’d rightfully feel ashamed at myself.

But feeling guilt over not throwing yourself into the time sinks handed out by the developers to keep us occupied until the next patch? No, just no.

Dear Anea, dear Larisa and dear anyone else who has a tendency to fall into the guilt trap: Get out of there immediately! Enjoy whatever activity you’ve picked instead of the daily grind. Be stronger! You deserve to be happy, whatever you’ve chosen to do with your game time.

Taking the mystery away from the game

Today I read the patch notes about the upcoming change of the world maps and something in me died a little.

Once upon a time WoW was a game that offered mysteries to be solved, adventures to be experienced. The world was there for us to explore and it was endless. Not so anymore. It’s like if the whole concept of questing is turned into something that requires as much brain activity as fishing.

I’ll quote the notes in case you haven’t seen it already:

Quest creatures and objects will now show on the player’s world map.

• A skull graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where players can find creatures they must kill for a quest.
• A skull graphic with red eyes will be placed on the map in the general area where creatures can be found that must be killed in order to collect quest objects.
• A gear/cogwheel graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where players must loot quest objects found in the world.
• A chat bubble graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where players must interact with a specific NPC for a quest.
• A yellow question mark graphic will show on the map to provide the location of a NPC whose quest the player has completed.
  

The benefits
Now, before I’ll throw myself into my doubts about the change, I must admit that I’m a bit torn in my opinion. I can see why they do it. It’s a part of the ongoing mission to make levelling up a bit easier. Completely new players can more easily work their way through the more or less dead zones and reach the +70 zones where most players hang around. They don’t have to wander around for ages, annoyed and frustrated at quests that sometimes are pretty cryptic and poorly written.

And to players who have been around for a while it doesn’t change anything. They’re using Questhelper or Lightheaded anyway, which do about the same thing. Now those features are built into the game, which means they have an addon less to update and to put strain on their system.

So, OK, I too see the reason for it. And probably I deserve to be called a hypocrite, since I too use Lightheaded and TomTom to give me the coordinates and directions when I level my druid alt.

All this said I still want to vent a bit of the sadness I feel seeing this happening.

My sadness
What bothers me is that somehow the “being efficient and do things as quick as possible, ticking off things from your list” concept has completely overtaken the “experience, explore and lose yourself into a different world” idea.

I think back to my own first levelling experience, two and a half years ago. I started in TBC, at a point where there was already tons of information available to facilitate your questing at institutions such as Thottbot. But I was all new to gaming, I didn’t know anyone and I had no idea those tools existed. I played the game vanilla, the way it was presented to me, fumbling for quest objectives in complete darkness for my first levels. And how I enjoyed it!

A typical example of this was when I completed the quest Retrieval for Mauren, which is handed out by a guy standing close to the mage tower in Stormwind. There was something in the quest description that really kicked off my curiosity and imagination:

Travelers keep asking me about the Stonetalon Mountains. It seems to be a popular place for adventure--it doesn't matter if you're seeking wyvern, elementals, or you have business with the Venture Co.Within the Charred Vale, deep in Stonetalon, there used to be a species of basilisks whose scales, when ground to dust, made a wonderful reagent for some spells I've created.

If those basilisks still live, I would love to have a few of their scales.

Take your time, it is no rush, but I can pay well.

Off I went on a journey that seemed endless. Completing this single quest took me three nights – at least. I didn’t have flight points anywhere, I didn’t have any mount. I don’t remember how I finally got there, but I can vividly imagine that I didn’t find the shortest route. And my corpse runs were countless. All this for just a crappy wand as quest reward. I remember teleporting back to SW, turning in the quest and then wondering: was this all? And then I went back to questing in whatever area of Easter Kindom I was working on.

This was of course a waste of time and effort, measured in xp/hour efficiency, and I’d never ever consider doing it again on any on my alts. But was it fun? Absolutely! The world was endless and almost everything on the map was dimmed. I didn’t know where I was heading, I didn’t know where to go, what to do, and this gave a sort of immersion that I think is hard to obtain if there are skulls and crosses all over the map.

What’s next?
Probably I’m just a sad old lady, longing back for an era of youth and innocence that WoW lost long ago. I guess I want to protect the new clueless “Larisas” coming to the game today from getting too much information. I want to let them enjoy their first steps in the game the way I enjoyed them. But it’s a lost cause, since those players were quite rare when I started and hardly exist at all anymore.

WoW is aging quickly and there’s nothing we can do about it. We can walk down the memory lanes and mourn what’s lost and gone, but the development isn’t in our hands. If we want adventure and exploring we would probably be better off trying a new game.

Still I come to think of the brilliant prediction of the patchnotes 5.2 that Gevlon made a while ago:

• "an "adventure guide" NPC was added to all starter zone who provide quest "kill 3 boars" for XP to level to 100

  streamlining classes: the complicated rotation of the 2 spells/class introduced in 5.0 has been revised. Now every class have one spell "Ipawn" doing 50000 damage to all hostile cratures in 20 yards and heals 60000 damage for all friendlies in 20 yards up to 10 targets.

  Reputation requirements for "awesome screenblocking flying whale" mount has been reduced to Whale Tamers friendly

  New Whale Tamers daily quest introduced, providing 500 Rep for bringing a letter from Whale Tamer Jack to Whale Tamer Joe, both standing in the largest building.

  Material requirements for ilvl 400 legendaries have been reduced to 10 dream cloth/dream skin/dream bar and 1 ultimate earth/fire/shadow/life"

I’m afraid that this isn’t just sarcasm. It’s exactly what’s going to happen. Changing the maps in 3.2 is just another brick in the wall.

Finally seeing the game as a gnome

It probably sounds pretty odd, but it wasn’t until this week that I realized that I’ve never seen the game from a gnome perspective. Now I have and my love and respect for gnomes has reached a new level.

But let me start from the beginning. I’ll walk down the memory lane, back to my first stumbling steps in Azeroth, more than two years ago.

The beginning
First there was the introduction movie. Do you remember it? Or will you normally escape away from it whenever you start an alt, too eager to begin questing?

I remember the feeling very well. It was a virtual punch in my stomach, not like anything I’d seen before. It gave me the same thrill as a high standard 3d movie at an amusement park, only that it took place in the middle of my living room.

It was all a blur, an unknown universe, but somehow I realized that I was about to take a step into a new zone of my life, starting an adventure that I had no idea of where it would end. Or maybe I’m just making this up afterwards. Maybe I just thought: this is a computer game my sister has been talking about. I’ll play it a few hours and then put it aside.

Anyway – I remember also that it wasn’t just the presentation of the glorious past of human race that impressed me (mind you, my very first toon, soon deserted, was a paladin). I was also thrilled when I saw how it ended, in the smooth transition from the movie to the starting area where you suddenly see your character in game for the first time.

The camera was flying pretty quickly, coming from a far distance and then closing in. Without noticing any barrier I went from the timeless to the present. I started to notice NPC characters in action, toons controlled by other players who in this very moment were playing the same game as I was, occupying a spot in the same space and time continuum.

It gave me a “sense of wonder” experience first time I went through the process – and somehow it still does, even though I’ve created a number of characters since my debut. And I think the thrill didn’t just come out of the idea that you’re actually seeing other people in a virtual room (probably something a teenager will take for granted, but quite revolutionary for a 40 year old lady). It also was somehow connected to the movements and perspectives of the camera.

I’m afraid that the sensation of this first flight never quite came back in the game. The travels between regular fp:s have never been able to give me much of excitement. (Apart from the first flights between IF and Stormwind, oh, how I stared at the volcano landscape below me, with mobs at unknown levels, wondering if I’d ever be as big and strong that I’d be able to go into those zones.)

Zooming out
After this first flight I didn’t think all that much about camera movements. I wasn’t aware of the importance and the possibilities until much later. If anything, it made me a bit seasick to move my character. My previous gaming experience was limited to Lemmings and a little bit of Civilization, so moving in a three dimensional space on a flat screen was completely new to me and it took me quite a while to get used to it. For one thing, I thought the characters moved too quickly. Pretty much the same way you feel when you start learning to drive a car and think that 30 kilometres per hour will make you lose control and crash.

It wasn’t until much later that I became aware of the importance of the camera perspective. I think the wake-up came when I started to do Void Reaver in Tempest Keep and Jan’alai in Zul Aman. I learned how to maximize my camera distance with the help of a macro. Playing an ant-size version of Larísa changed the level of difficulty.

Ever since then, zooming out has been the standard way that I play the game. Most fights including any kind of fire or zones to avoid, will become substantially easier seen from a distance. The question is: even though it will improve your raid performance, will it improve your game experience? I’m not so sure.

Zooming in
The insight about how much the camera affects us even if we don’t think about it came to me the other day as I was doing a few Hodir dailies on my gnome rogue. Yeah, if anyone’s wondering, I still boycott the AT grind, but the exalted isn’t that far away on my rogue, and since she’s a herbalist she can grab quite a few ingredients for flasks at the same time, so I do them – not every day, but once in a while.

Anyway – I was in the cave to kill off a few slimes and the worms guarding them – when the idea suddenly came to me: I wonder what this would look like through the eyes of Arisal? I started to spin my mouse wheel frenetically and suddenly I wasn’t staring at the back of Arisal anymore. My whole screen was filled with the hungry, screaming, frightening face of a worm monster, bowing over me. Considering the size of his jaws he was capable of swallowing me in one piece, without chewing once.

I shivered more than I imagine I would have done if I had been around those days when Ragnaros was about the most impressive thing you could see in Azeroth. And then I started to ponder my little mace in a heroic effort to defeat this monster of gigantic proportions.

Suddenly the rather bleak “meh” quest in the cave was turned into a real fight! Lacking the overview I found that I did many more mistakes, aggroing things I didn’t want to aggro, unable to avoid mobs that sneaked upon me from behind.

You could hardly call it an effective way of questing – it probably took me twice the time to complete it compared to how long it takes normally. But the experience, the experience! Oh boy, it was almost as if I was thrown back to those first, innocent days, seeing the introduction movies. This was cool and exciting!

A new way of playing
I kept playing in this zoom-in-manner for a while and it certainly gave me food for thought. It’s not breaking news, I know, but you don’t quite see how incredibly small gnomes are until you see it from their point of view. Even the most common, everyday-life things that you take for granted suddenly appear in a different manner. For instance: did you ever know that a herbalist gnome actually doesn’t pick herbs and flowers? She fills her magic backpack with bushes and trees! A lichbloom is huge when you see it from the ground.

So is this how I’ll play the game in the future? Well, hardly when I’m in company, unless we all agree about it for the joy of having a change and a laugh. After all it gimps my performance quite a bit and I don’t want others to suffer from my experimenting. But if I’m soloing and doing some rather repetitive task just for the reward, I’ll definitely do it once in a while. I’ll do it for the laugh and thrill of it and for the gentle reminder of why small is beautiful and the gnomes deserve our love and admiration.

A moment of clarity - how I finally turned my back to AT

Why am I doing this? I don’t enjoy it the slightest anymore!

The insight hit me like a rock as I was slowing down to land in the middle of a bunch of scourge, assembled on an ice field, waiting for their daily execution.

Yeah, by killing those creatures I could make some easy gold and make another faction admire Larísa a little bit more than they did before. I would get currency to get one more pet to forget to display. Looking at it briefly it seemed efficient enough – I’d get two quests done at the same time, since killing one scourge counted for both. The amount of gold and vanity loot I could make per hour was decent, not to say amazing.

It was just one thing. One little thing, but nevertheless important. The very thought of doing those quests another time was revolting. I was totally done with it.

Why had I even bothered to pick it up? Had I completely lost my mind?

From theory to action
I’ve been writing a few posts touching on this issue lately. Some readers have pointed out that I seemed to be on the verge of burnout from daily questing, suggesting that I’d look for a change. And after some therapeutic ranting at PPI, I’ve finally agreed with them. What is more important: I won’t let it stay as a thought experiment. Just as Gevlon preaches, I’m actually doing something about it.

I landed my bird on a safe spot. I felt that this was one of those blessed moments of clarity. There would be no more jousting. No more flying all over the world to kiss a frog and get a sword. No more scourge massacre. At least not for a long time, though I won’t say “never again”, since the itch may come back at some point. But for now being I refuse to spend another single minute on a grind I don’t enjoy. The decision was taken and it was such a relief.

I decided to immediately put Larísa to bed – it was not a raiding night and I just couldn’t come up with anything fun to keep her occupied. Now what? Suddenly I remembered something. Didn’t I roll a little druid a month ago? A blue-faced creature, with tattoos all over her face, currently sitting in Darnassus, collecting dust, waiting for her mistress to finish this tournament business?

The awakening
A few minutes later I found myself bravely attacking level 12 mobs in the deep forests of Darkshore. The loot was about as far from epic as you can come. I got copper instead of gold. I cheered at an offhand giving me +1 intellect, which I hoped would make my mana pool increase slightly. But what mattered more was that I needed to be on my toes all the time, as I was trying to figure out when to be a bear and when not to, when to root and when to heal myself, how I would make best use out of my mana or rage

Trust me; facing a rabid bear is far scarier than taking out defenceless scourge, if you’re not overpowered by higher level or better gear.

I became aware of things that had faded away from me during all those months spent in endgame. Like the huge aggro range of low level characters and what it’s like to make corpse runs when you’re questing and the graveyard is in the other end of the zone.

How had it happened that I had forgotten how fun this game can be – outside of the raids? This was an awakening. Admittedly the zone wasn’t as polished and artistically interesting as Northrend is and the quests were pretty simple, not sophisticated at all. No phasing, no movies, no vehicles. I was back to killing 20 boar, sorry, bears. But at least it was 20 bears I had never seen before and the spells and attacks were all brand new.

Once again I was a noob, slowly learning how to druid. To my astonishment I also looked at Darnassus with completely new eyes. It wasn’t just the deserted city where the lack of NPC:s to ask makes it annoyingly hard to find your way around. It had turned into my home town, a peaceful spot in the world, which I wanted to defend against the threat from the evil forces of the world.

It was a complete change of perspective, a brave new world to inhale, more than can just be explained by my change of height, from gnome size to nightelf.

The Deadmines project
Does this mean that Larísa has turned in to an altoholic, giving up raiding, giving up her struggles to reach worthy, and challenging end-game goals? No, absolutely no! My mage and her ability to raid will always be my main priority. But as the game has evolved in WotLK there isn’t the same need even for a dedicated raider to grind between the raid nights as there once was. It isn’t hard to get the gold you need to finance repairs and consumables. And the only rep grind that is required for maximising your gear is the Son of Hodir, which I’m done and over with since long. When I did this AT grind was rather done out of habit (“grinding is what you do when you don’t raid”) than out of desire.

So what’s next? What are my aims for my druid? Actually there aren’t many. I haven’t made any progression plan. I picked skinning and leatherworking as professions for now, not because I’ve made any deep analysis how it will fit into the team of my other characters, but because they’re new to me and seemed to be OK for a druid.

I don’t rush anything. For the first time in a long time I can honestly say that I’m not in any hurry whatsoever. I’m levelling alone, so there isn’t any “I should keep-up-with-the-others stress”. I don’t know if I’ll even reach 80. The only clear goal I have is to make an old dream of mine come true: to clear Deadmines properly, without any boosting, at the right level.

I don’t expect it to be all easy to find a willing party to join me in this mission once I’m in the DM level range. Who wants to spend hours wiping in an instance the proper way, when you can get boosted and get the loot and xp you want in just 10 minutes? Who wants to put up with a newbie druid, who never has tanked or healed anything in her life before and probably needs some direction? It’s as far from a free lunch as you can come.

But maybe there are a few likeminded people out there. People who have been hit with a moment of clarity and want to slip out from the burden of the daily grind. I hope so.

Wanted: better incentives for endgame questing

There I was, once again trying to catch the monsterbelly to get the lost arm of a fisherman and bring it back to Dalaran. The Frozen sea looked exactly the same is it did yesterday. I caught it at the fifth try. Not too shabby.

Then I mounted up and continued to the lake in the Howling Fjord, where the poor maiden in the iceblock was to be released once again. I knew it was a lost cause. Every time I’ve melted the ice, she has instantly refrozen before I’ve even left the place. She’s doomed to never leave the spot.

Finally I discussed with myself if I should go to Brunnhildar village once again and beat up the poor reluctant prisoners in the cave. The thought was revolting, but still, I couldn’t quite erase the bear mount from my wish list.

It was another night in Azeroth and I suddenly realized that I was doing what I’m doing most of the time when I’m not in a raid. I was doing dailies, meaning that I was doing the same, easy, silly quests over and over again. I was exactly as scripted as the NPCs. And I was in the danger zone of growing really bored.

Reasons for repetition
It was quite incomprehensible when I thought about it. Here I was, in the middle of a huge game, where I still had unexplored areas, where there still were tons of quests that I had never done. And still I chose to stick to just a few quests. How come?

Reason 1: out of laziness. It’s like water pouring down a mountain: it takes the shortest way down, following the already existing ravine. If I make a new, unknown quest I may have to think a little bit and make an effort, however small, to find out what to do. Even if I use a quest support addon as Lightheaded I’ll have to at least read a few lines. Doing dailies requires less effort than doing real quests. It’s relaxing in its own peculiar way, just like picking herbs.

Reason 2: because of the rewards. Doing normal quests in Icecrown generally will give me less in exchange than doing dailies. The possible gear rewards are useless to me and I’m not an enchanter, so I’ll just get a few gold from vendoring the items. I’m exalted with all the connected factions since long from grinding instances, so that’s not a motivator either. And the daily quests at Argent Tournament will award me currency that can be traded for vanity rewards such as mounts and cute pets – useless things, but still attractive to a childish player like me. Ordinary non-daily questing wouldn’t offer me anything like that. Just gold and a Loremaster title, which I don’t care much about.

Why it’s bad
I’m probably not alone in my behaviour. I think there are many other players who still haven’t done half of the offered quests in game, but have slipped into the habit of doing dailies. And while we obviously find reasons to do it, we also grumble and whine a bit about being bored from it. “Oh-my-god-I’m-sick-of-this!” Yet we do it. Kind of weird, isn’t it?

I think this is harmful to the game experience in the long run. A lot of displeased, whining players will create a negative climate, feeding the feeling that we’re playing a game that has passed zenith and now is declining, heading for it’s inevitable future death. It will also make players cluster all at one spot, at the Argent Tournament ground or the fishing spot of the day, rather than populating all of Northrend, which at least makes me a sad panda. To me a big part of the fun in playing an MMO is that I actually meet other players in the virtual world, not only friendly and unfriendly NPC:s.

My suggestion
So here comes my suggestion: why couldn’t they make the rewards from doing ordinary quests once you’ve reached endgame slightly more attractive? I doesn’t necessary have to be huge gold rewards. I think just a RNG feature, such as the items you can find in the fishing reward bag would be enough.

What if there was a chance, every so small, but still a chance, that you could get a special mount, pet or an epic gem such as you can get from the fishing quest, every time you completed an ordinary quest in Northrend. You wouldn’t know exactly what your reward would be; there would always be a moment of lottery in it. I think that would be inspiring enough to bring more people to finish off the zones, in this way using more of the content, meaning that less developer effort would be wasted. Everyone’s a winner.

Stop repeating myself
Well, I don’t expect suggestions from Larísa of Stormrage to be implemented in the game. So I’ve decided to try to be strong. When I have some time over, outside of raids and the obligations that come with it, I’m going to turn my back towards the monsterbelly, the frozen maiden and the blue people village. If not always, at least sometimes. I’ll stop just repeating myself and open my eyes to the one-time-only quests I’ve yet to do.

And I won’t do them for any other reward than the pleasure of seeing the quest designs and the stories.

After all: the amount of entertainment you get from an activity beats everything else in the end. It’s just sad that I have to remind myself about it.

My love for things that don’t carry yellow exclamation marks

The first thing I met when I entered Azeroth the very first time two years ago in the shape of a completely clueless paladin was a yellow exclamation mark. I didn’t know anything about MMOs or even about gaming, but still I was sort of drawn to that yellow sign. My intuition told me I should interact with it somehow and soon I was off questing my way through Azeroth.

Ever since that moment my WoW experience has pretty much been dictated by those marks. When I’m not raiding or gathering supplies I turn on my internal radar, look for the marks and do what they tell me to, mindlessly. You know the drill. Click mark. Get an assignment. Perform. Deliver. Get the reward. Repeat until fed up.

Too obvious
Don’t misunderstand me, there’s nothing wrong with it. Especially these days, when the kill-12-pigs quests are less common than they used to be and we’re treated with sophisticated inventions such as and vehicles, phasing and even little movies. The yellow exclamation mark often leads to some sort of entertainment.

Still there’s something about the yellow exclamation marks that turns me off a bit. I can’t put my finger on it, but I think it’s the fact that they’re too obvious. Yellow, big and shiny to make sure that not a single newbie player will miss them. And so are the quest items since last year I think it was. Sparkles all over the place, more or less shouting to me in red letters: “hey! Don’t look there, look here, pick me, I’m all yours!!!”. It’s convenient. But it lacks the taste of discovery.

What I like are the hidden things that there’s no way you’ll find out unless someone tells you about it – or if you’re really curious minded, constantly experimenting on your own and have oceans of time available to explore every little corner of the world. Like the hidden Westfall Chicken quest. I love it. OK, there’s a quest mark there, but it won’t appear unless you do something really silly. (I can’t help wondering who found it out in the first place, before there were guides on the Internet which told you to go there and fool around like a chicken. They surely must have got the hint from somewhere?)

Recently I saw another hidden jewel, revealed to me thanks to Letters from Birdfall – the little drama taking place if I bring out my brand new Stinker when there’s a Bombay Cat around. There’s no exclamation mark anywhere, no sparkles. The only reward from it is the smile you get on your face (until the poor creature is heartbroken), but that’s good enough to me.

The hidden jewels
I simply adore those little hidden jewels in the game and I think it’s an example of what makes WoW so great. The developers don’t only care about making up huge, impressive Raid encounters. They care about the art of clam opening and they sprinkle the whole place with small scenes, full of humour, without any other purpose than making us smile.

I’m absolutely convinced that there are a lot more of those “secrets” out there that I don’t know of yet. Have you got any that you come to think of? Feel free to share your exclamation-mark free surprises in the game! I want to make more of those discoveries.

The lagoon is lonely now

Do you remember Riplash Strand in Borean Tundra? Not? It was the place where you camped the mist wrapped beach in company with 200 other players, waiting for a certain naga to spawn so that you could kill him, thus helping a Captured Tuskarr Prisoner, who then would give you a quest.

The competition on this spot was insane. (And this is on a PvE server I can imagine how it must have been like at the PvP servers. It’s a wonder anyone managed to level at all). While waiting for the poor naga to make another futile try to survive more than a second, we all looked desperately for a mob to kill to keep our XP/hour rate. Time was precious and we all were eager to level up quickly. Idly standing waiting on the spot felt like a waste of time. But even though there normally are loads of Vikings running around in the area, there weren’t enough to keep us going. There was a quest where you had to kill a certain guy in a cave, and even though we partied to make it go a bit quicker, the chances were still pretty slim that someone in your party would be the first one to tag him.

A godforsaken place
Three months has passed and the other day I revisited the Riplash Strand for the first time since the release. I couldn’t believe my eyes. What used to be a crowded party room was now a godforsaken place with nothing but npc:s around. I could as well have been in Desolace or Azshara. This place had turned into one of those ghostlike places where the general chat is silent and no action whatsoever is going on, except for the one you cause yourself by attacking the mobs. My rogue alt killed the annoying naga spawn not only once, but maybe three or four times, since he came around and ganked me while I was killing other mobs. It felt strange and spooky, and to be honest I didn’t like it much.

It’s one thing to go fishing in a far-away area. It’s somewhat expected that you’ll be pretty lonely by the river and you can even enjoy the calmness, as I wrote about the other day. But to go questing is another matter. I don’t like to be completely alone where I quest. I don’t say that I like standing in the crowd at the release, but I certainly don’t like the opposite better.

A few people around will make the whole gaming experience so much more interesting. You can adore their pets, inspect their gear and talent builds and get ideas from it. You can party for group quests and you can grumble a bit when they’re a little bit quicker snatching the mobs that you both want. You can throw away a buff to them, just because you feel nice, and sometimes you may even chat a little bit.

The presence of other people adds clearly adds another dimension. They may be nice and friendly or annoying idiots, but at least they’re all for real – not programmed scripts, and therefore they’re always somewhat unpredictable. You never know what will happen next.

The wave is moving on
The lagoon is lonely now. I hadn’t thought it would go so quickly. It was somewhat expected that Outlands would become deserted (with the exception of the DK militia). But Northrend? Now? I guess it makes sense though – the first wave of levelling is over and perhaps people are still gearing up their mains and haven’t come around to start levelling their alts.

It’s the way this game works. There’s a lot of space for everyone, but we’re hardly spread out over the world. Most of us are members of a crowd, moving through the content like a wave. Still I can’t help feeling a little sad thinking about all the lonely spots in the game. There was a time when the yard outside of Karazhan was the meeting point for everyone. You ran into people you had once pugged with or ex-guildes, you hugged and waved happily and exchanged a few words before going in to see this week’s version of the Fall of the Maiden. Now she’s as deserted as Hogger, if not worse.

Time passes. Enjoy the party in Naxxramas while we have it. There will be a time when it will be deserted, when we’ve once again moved on to new and greener pastures.


PS. The title of this post isn’t my own. It’s shamelessly stolen from a book I stumbled upon 20 years ago, about the vanishing traditional lifestyle of the inhabitants of the Cook Islands, which are spread over a large area of the Pacific Ocean. The author Ronald Symes made a point about how the influence of the modern western way of life, brought there by tourism, not necessarily has improved the life quality of the islanders. It’s a beautiful book, although a little bit sad, bringing a farewell to something that is inevitably gone. The issue is double sided and there are no easy solutions to the dilemma of the effects of the colonization. But I won’t write anything more about it since it’s not WoW related. I just wanted to credit the author.

The gift of imagination

Today a thought crossed my mind: the things I enjoy most in the real world as in Azeroth actually don’t cost anything. Or rather: they don’t wear a price tag, telling me to pay x dollars or y gold. I’m thinking about the ideas and experiences I share with other people. Actually Gevlon, of all people, commented on this the other day. He put it beautifully, when he answered a commenter the other day about why vanity mounts really is a useless way to try to stick out in the crowd:

It's the new and unique thoughts that make us unique, and not mounts.

How true isn’t this, especially in this time if the year, when the goblin people of the world tare trying to persuade us to waste a fortune on pretty pointless gifts and items of pure vanity?

A Christmas gift
The best Christmas gift I've heard about didn’t cost the giver a cent and yet it was beautiful and priceless. In his family (with grown-up kids, I guess it would be harder to make such a thing with children around), they had agreed not to exchange any Christmas gifts in a physical meaning. But that didn’t stop them from giving away presents. In stead they were all supposed to give an imagined gift of any kind and to write a rhyme about it. This guy had decided to give his daughter “1 000 pairs of shoes”. I bet she enjoyed them, especially since her father is a writer and the poem probably was witty and entertaining.

I haven’t sent or received any Christmas gifts this year in game. Last year I sent a tonk to a boy I knew on my former server (he was much into duelling, and constantly asked me to fight him, partly because he enjoyed outclassing me, partly because he had a hope that he could teach me a few things). I gave it with a promise that I’d run tonk duels with him as much as he liked, and I had bought one for myself too. The gift was very much appreciated. This year I never came up with any good idea about gifts to my friends, so I skipped it.

However, I recieved a thing a little while ago, which was as good to me as any Christmas gift. It was a link, sent to me by Zakesh, my lazy co-innkeeper, who knows pretty well what kind of game related things I love.

Events in Darrowshire
The link went to one of the most beautiful machinima videos I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a small and simple music video, made by the machinima maker Cranius. He tells the story of a few events in Darrowshire, Eastern Plaguelands in pictures, music and lyrics.

You probably can recall the quest giver, the little girl Pamela, who’s lost her doll and her family. You’re supposed to help her find it. This was one of those quests that stayed in my memory, since it wasn’t about collecting boar intestines. But yet, I never thought much about the lore content when I did it, it was just another quest to along the way, something to “get done” as soon as possible, to move on to the next one.

When I did the quest once upon a time I probably did it the normal way – I checked on Wowhead/Thottbot/Lightheaded/Questhelper to get the coordinates, killed whatever I had to and delivered the items, my mind already set on where to find the next quest objective. I never reflected about what I was doing. Not until now.

Seeing this movie I suddenly saw the story in it, thanks to the imagination and creativity of the people behind it. This little quest came alive to me and I know for sure that if I ever roll a DK, I’ll definitely savour it in a way I never did before. Pamela has touched my heart. What a gift isn’t that?

The best things Azeroth can offer us don’t cost anything, neither gold, nor dollars. Don’t forget that.

There’s nothing bad in using Auctioneer in order to get rich. But if you use your imagination every once in a while, I promise you’ll get even richer.

Node stealing, inner moral compasses and a true story

Recently there has been a lot of talk on the blogs about player behaviour. Some players have complained about supposed “ninja actions”, when players “steal nodes” from other players, who have cleared the way to the node, killing the mobs around it.

Others have witnessed about the opposite – how easy it is nowadays to group in player heavy areas instead of fighting over a certain named, slow spawning mob, needed for a quest. People help each other because it benefits everyone in the long run.

Goblin philosophy
Gevlon at the Greedy Goblin took another approach to it the other day, pointing out that there is no such a thing as a rule that you “earn” nodes or certain mobs. With his usual goblin logic he showed the futility in doing such claims. Not surprising he got quite a few comments on this post, including one from myself.

Something in me revolted against the idea that only rules that are written down and decided from an authority should be respected. Life – in Azeroth as well as outside of it – is full of unwritten rules, conventions and agreements people have made since hundreds and thousands of years. Of course some people don’t care about them, but most do, and that makes life a lot easier and more pleasant than it would have been if they hadn’t existed.

The idea that you “earn” a node by killing the mobs around you comes out of a feeling of justice, no different from real life. If you work you expect to get the fruit of it (with the exception of taxes of course.)

Differently tuned
Now comes the inevitable question: how do I know what is fair? Well, I think I have a sort of inner moral compass. A feeling of what’s right and wrong, coming out of some kind of humanity dwelling inside of me in my brain, my heart or perhaps an organ yet to be discovered by scientists. And I think I share this feeling with many people, no matter of what beliefs they may have and not have. It’s not about religion. It’s about being human.

What I think causes some problems in the game is that for some reason the inner compasses of some players are differently tuned in the game than in real life. I doubt that the guys who grab the opportunity to snatch nodes from others would do the same thing if they were out in a forest picking mushrooms. “Hey, someone else found a spot of mushrooms over there, I’d better rush and pick as many as I can in front of their eyes. After all there’s no law against it”. You don’t see that often, if ever. But in the game you do.

Where does this difference come from? Well, maybe our inner compasses aren’t telling the whole story after all. Maybe we all carry more features of selfishness or even evilness than we want to admit, even to ourselves. There’s an additional arrow in our compass, pointing in another direction. And the game provides an anonymous arena where we can try it out, obeying those less flattering sides of ourselves. Maybe we need it, as an outlet.

This is an attempt to explain it – but still I still don’t think it’s a valid excuse for behaving like a moron. If you want to explore your aggressive and mean sides, you can do that in PvP and no one will whine about it the slightest.

How to handle it
However, even if I do disagree with Gevlon – in the aspect I think that we as civilized citizens have moral contracts apart from the written laws – I do agree with his conclusion:

Of course you can call the people, who don't follow your non-existing rule "asshats" or "jerks", but it does not change anything. They most probably don't even know what you think, and if you /w it to them, remember, you are just an /ignore away. Calling them anything won't stop them taking "your" node. It increases your blood pressure though.

How true isn’t this! Getting angry won’t change anything, it will only make you more miserable – and what’s the point about that? Stay calm. Turn your back to hate and blaming and keep your eyes open. When you least expect it you’ll find someone with an inner compass pointing in the same direction as you and it will make your day.

A true story
I’ll end this quite messy, ranting post (which I apologize for, for some reason my mind seems to wander more than usual today) with a sweet – and true – little story. It all took place in Sholazar Basin, where I was questing the other day. I was on a mission to make a quest where you’re supposed to kill an elite by using a ward, reflecting his nasty deathbolts. When I arrived at the spot the mob was dead and I saw another guy waiting there. Now this was a hordie, so we couldn’t group. Since he was first on spot I waited to see him take down the guy first. He didn’t. He died, even though I tried to help him. When he had died, the tag went over to me, but of course I died too. (This quest was a bit tricky until you understood the drill). Corpse run back, followed by a new try, which also ended up in both dying. The third time however I managed to help him take down the mob. Conversation was impossible, for known reasons but he thanked me in gestures and I happily hugged him back. Then this hordie stayed around and waited for the mob to respawn and returned the service, helping me out.

There was no written rule that forced me to help him in the first place. And certainly no law told him to return the service. Still we partied in the way we could, since our inner moral compasses were synchronized. And you bet the warm and cosy feeling I felt in my stomach after this short encounter was a much bigger reward to me than the xp, gold and gear that the questgiver gave me.

So my final words are: keep listening to your own inner moral compass – no matter what the formal rules of Blizzard say. Do what’s right and don’t feel as a looser if other players take advantage of you because you’re “soft hearted”. Sooner or later you’ll run into likeminded players and in the long run I think you’ll end up as a winner, one way or the other.

If nothing else you’ll have a warm tummy.

The lack of pigs in Northrend spoils me

My picture of Northrend was somewhat hazy before I entered it. I never made it into the beta and for some reason I haven’t been keen on reading about it and watching movies on beforehand. It wasn’t as if I avoided it un purpose, but I had enough of unfinished business in TBC to keep me occupied. I couldn’t put time and energy to explore the new game before it was there for real.

I only had two clear ideas about WotLK before it arrived:

1. I expected new landscapes, rather influenced by Scandinavia than by Africa. There would be ice and tundra and not so many jungles and deserts.

2. There would be pigs. A lot of them. I would be expected to kill them and turn in details from their bodies for xp. Perhaps the pigs would have a bit thicker fur to withstand the coldness. Perhaps we would cut out some other part this time – eyes or tongues instead of livers and snouts?

For some reason I had the idea that levelling would be rather tedious, a more or less monotonous sequence of barely disguised grinding sessions.

How wrong wasn’t I? Not about the landscape – as far as I have seen they’re quite much what I expected. But I was wrong about the pigs and the questing.

It had been so long since I levelled a main character, experiencing content for the first time that I had forgotten how fun it is. End game still is what I enjoy most and aim for, but the road to get there can be quite entertaining.

Up to now I’ve managed to get halfway to 74, questing my way first through Borean Tundra and currently in Howling Fjord. And what I’ve seen until now has been amazing. I haven’t encountered a single pig so far. The quests are far from repetitive – on the contrary, they’re varied and full of humour and surprises.

I’ve dressed up like a crazy murloc (try a few moves with it like jumping or dancing and I promise you’ll end up giggling). I’ve been flying all sorts of vehicles, including turning myself into a hawk. I’ve entered the spirit world and I’ve tortured people, which took my by surprise, but didn’t make me as upset as Rohan of Blessing of Kings.

Seeing all of this I’ve become a bit spoiled. Or at least I’ve got higher expectations than I used to have. Every quest now is like a little wrapped-up gift and even if I know that some of the quests still are in the genre “Kill 10 evil guys”, they still have some freshness in them and every now and then I know I’ll encounter one of those jewels that make me go: “Wow!”

So where does this leave the pigs? I think that the low areas in the old world really have lost their charm when you compare it to Northrend. It’s beyond my comprehension how anyone could go through the pain of killing pigs in Westfall or gnolls in Redridge in order to bring up another alt. I certainly know that I couldn’t.

It’s no wonder that they’re introducing the possibility to get alts ready to go at lvl 55. Blizzard wants to direct us to the newest and coolest content so that we’ll stay satisfied and not get tempted to try out some other MMO.

Are there any boars at all in Northrend, hiding in a corner? I don’t know. Perhaps the Vikings grilled them in a barbeque beach party. Anyway I certainly don’t miss them for a second.