2407: Looking Again at World of Warcraft After a Good Few Years

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I last played World of Warcraft in the Wrath of the Lich King era. I played it off and on ever since launch, to be honest, but it was Wrath of the Lich King that saw me finally get to the level cap, although looking back on my time with the game through the eyes of an experienced Final Fantasy XIV endgame player, I now realise that I barely scratched the surface of what WoW had to offer.

World of Warcraft is one of those games that I consider to be part of the ill-defined, amorphous “gaming canon” — it’s a game that I thoroughly believe everyone should play for at least a short time to understand what an impact it’s had on the games industry as a whole: its importance to popular game design, the influence it’s had on other games, and the aspects that it’s drawn from its successors back into itself to evolve and adapt.

Like most MMOs, it’s fascinating to chart how WoW has changed over the years because it’s virtually unrecognisable from when it first hit the market. This most recent time I’ve been taking a look at it represents probably the biggest change I’ve seen to the overall game structure and experience, and among other things it’s put certain aspects of my Final Fantasy XIV experience into a broader context.

My time with Wrath of the Lich King was spent primarily playing PvE (Player vs Environment) in the game’s open world. This is still an entirely viable way to play World of Warcraft right the way through until level cap, unlike something like Final Fantasy XIV, which gates significant portions of the main story behind group content, albeit only of the most casual, straightforward variety right up until you reach the original level cap of 50.

The pacing of WoW is also very different to Final Fantasy XIV. While Final Fantasy XIV is relatively slow-paced with an almost turn-based feel thanks to its long “global cooldown” — the period of time between which you can use most of your abilities — WoW is relatively fast-paced and frantic. This comes at a slight cost, though: whereas Final Fantasy XIV’s encounters are, for my money, much more interesting thanks to their strong emphasis on dodging and being in the right place at the right time — a distinctly Japanese approach to encounter design — World of Warcraft appears to be, to my limited experience, much more about gearing up and overpowering your enemies as much as possible. There’s still an element of “don’t stand in the shit” at times, but not to anywhere near the same degree as Final Fantasy XIV.

The two approaches are both valid, although the fact that it’s possible to WoW-style overpower some of what used to be Final Fantasy XIV’s most formidable encounters leads to a certain feeling of dissonance at times; there’s always that feeling of conflict between the beautifully paced and choreographed encounter that the designers of Final Fantasy XIV put together, and the players’ desire to bulldoze their way through it as quickly as possible. It’s sort of a shame to see what a mockery modern groups make of fights like Garuda Extreme, although when you take this in the context of Final Fantasy XIV being a JRPG at core, it could simply be likened to the experience of level-grinding to a ridiculous degree, then steamrollering everything that once gave you grief into oblivion.

WoW also feels a lot more “free” than Final Fantasy XIV thanks to its diminished focus on storytelling — something which I always used to regard as a bit of a drawback to Blizzard’s game, but which with more seasoned eyes I can see allows it to feel much more explicitly “game-like” than Final Fantasy XIV. This may sound odd, but it’s true: FFXIV very much likes to put everything in some sort of narrative context, necessitating unlocking everything manually by completing various quests, whereas modern WoW simply unlocks things automatically and organically as you level up; you can jump into a dungeon as soon as you hit level 15 without having made prerequisite progress through a questline, whereas Final Fantasy XIV brings you to your first dungeon as part of its main scenario.

Modern WoW also features something I like very much, but which further contributes to its “game-like” feel: the Adventure Guide. This screen can be popped up at any time after level 10 and gives you suggestions of what to do next, allowing you to automatically start questlines without having to manually go to the location first, jump into dungeon queues the moment you’ve unlocked them, and even review strategy guides for dungeon bosses to save the tedious cries of “go watch a youtube video, noob” when a more inexperienced player enters group content for the first time.

WoW also seems to have taken some inspiration from Final Fantasy XIV’s FATE (Full Active Time Event) system in the form of its pre-expansion Invasions. These are events that occur in the open world and require the cooperation of multiple players (albeit not in an organised manner) to accomplish various challenges. WoW’s Invasions are much larger in scale than FFXIV’s FATEs, however; an Invasion typically encompasses an entire zone, with objectives scattered around the place, whereas FFXIV’s FATEs are constrained to a smaller area.

WoW also makes use of an incredibly elegant scaling system for these Invasions, where the monsters that appear as part of the event appear at different levels according to each player’s own level. For example, I was participating in one earlier tonight as a level 12 character, so the enemies were appearing as level 12 with appropriate amounts of health and damage. Meanwhile, my friend Cat came to join me on her level 100 character, and the enemies appeared to her as level 100, with appropriately inflated amounts of health and outgoing damage. The higher-level characters still have an advantage due to better gear and a wider selection of available abilities, but it’s nice that it’s so simple for people of different levels to be able to cooperate on something and get meaningful rewards from it — it’s a bit more elegant than FFXIV’s slightly clunky Level Sync system in that you’re not artifically gimping yourself to participate; the encounter gimps itself to lower-level players.

One thing where I’ve felt WoW has always had the edge over Final Fantasy XIV is in terms of gear. FFXIV has a strictly vertical gear progression system, with very little in the way of variety within each tier of equipment. As you’re levelling, you get a new set of gear roughly every 5 levels or so until you reach level 50, at which point a few dungeon runs will allow you to purchase gear that will take you to about level 58 before you need to replace it. Once you hit 60, there are generally two or three “tiers” of gear that are “relevant” at any one time — one that is available with the endgame currency that has no weekly cap on it, one that is available with the endgame currency that does have a weekly cap on it, and, depending on what stage in the patch cycle the game is at, one or more tiers of raid gear from either the 24-player “casual” raid or the 8-player super-difficult “Savage” raid. In other words, everyone at an equivalent gear level in FFXIV will be wearing the exact same stuff as other people playing that class, though the last set to be introduced did at least encourage the insertion of Materia for limited customisation of secondary stats.

WoW, meanwhile, has a huge variety of gear right from the get-go. Shitty grey gear, poor white gear, slightly more exciting green gear, very exciting blue gear, mega-exciting purple gear and OMG I GOT IT Legendary gear. (And possibly some more tiers besides.) WoW throws a lot more loot at the player than FFXIV, particularly during dungeon runs, with green gear in particular taking an almost Diablo-esque approach to itemisation with prefixes and suffixes denoting variations on a particular item level’s gear.

FFXIV does have an item “rarity” system along these lines — there are white, pink, green, blue and purple items — but in practice, getting a blue item simply means that you’ve acquired some level-cap gear, and purple items are, so far as I know, exclusively for the grind-tastic Relic and Anima weapons at levels 50 and 60 respectively. The only items that have any real variety to them are the pink items you find in dungeons while levelling up; these have standardised basic stats for the item level, but randomised secondary stats. In practice, though, it never really feels like the secondary stats make that much difference; perhaps this will change at higher item levels, but at the moment, adding 5 points of Determination on to your armour doesn’t feel like it has a big impact on how powerful you are, and this is, I feel, a real weakness of FFXIV that should be addressed in future expansions.

Do I like one better than the other? No, I actually like them both for different reasons, and can quite feasibly see myself playing both, since they’re both enjoyable and distinct experiences from one another. Oddly enough, spending a few hours playing WoW and getting to level 20 has made me appreciate the things that FFXIV does better, and also given me a certain amount of understanding as to why some players are the way they are. That doesn’t excuse their behaviour at times, of course, but if you look at how they play in the context of having had previous experience with how WoW does things, certain behaviours like the desire for speedruns or overpowering encounters start to make a little more sense.

All in all, it’s been a positive experience — and if you’re a lapsed WoW player who has been thinking about checking out what the game looks like in 2016, I’d encourage you to do so. The experience for new players has been made a whole lot smoother, and the whole package is significantly slicker than it once was. Plus, regardless of whether or not you bought any of the previous expansions, all WoW players now get all the expansions up to Warlords of Draenor completely free, with only the impending Legion requiring you to spend any additional money. The game as a whole seems much more friendly to short, casual sessions than it used to be, and that can only be a good thing — though naturally once you hit endgame, it doubtless won’t be long before the desire to raid kicks in… and that’s when things get a bit time-consuming!

1292: LFRP

I haven’t done nearly as much role-playing in my life as I’d like to have done by now. No, I’m not talking about sexy role-playing (although now that you me– huh? You’re still here? As you were.) but rather role-playing in the, you know, role-playing game sense.

I play a lot of RPGs on computer and console, of course, but those aren’t the same thing. True role-playing is the opportunity to become someone else for a while; to take on another persona and enjoy a complete escape from reality.

I’ve indulged on online role-playing a few times in an attempt to get my fix. The earliest time I tried was when I gave the original Everquest a go out of curiosity. I joined a “roleplaying” (“RP”) server, created my character and jumped in. The first person I ran into, I spoke in character, the message log at the bottom of the screen noting that I was speaking in Elvish. The response? “lol”. I was disappointed, to say the least.

Later attempts yielded somewhat better results. My fondest memories of online role-playing — and probably my fondest memories of playing any sort of game online, for that matter — come from the game Neverwinter Nights, the spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate series and an unusual multiplayer game. Neverwinter Nights was based on the popular pen-and-paper Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game, see, and in keeping with that, the multiplayer mode allowed one player to be the “Dungeon Master” and take control of the game world and all the characters in it. This meant you could run adventures that simply weren’t possible using pre-scripted modules; instead of being railroaded down a plotline, things could go off in unusual directions.

I had a group of people I played with semi-regularly that I met via the website Neverwinter Connections — said site still seems to be there, but it doesn’t look like it’s really very active these days, which is sad. I’m not entirely sure how I came to Neverwinter Connections in the first place, but that’s where I met StarStuff, Scorpio and several others. I’ve since lost touch with them — this wasn’t entirely my fault, as they moved on to Guild Wars, a game I didn’t really stick with, but I do regret not being able to count them among my friends any more. We had some good times.

One of my favourite games we played together was a lengthy quest that went on for several hours. I forget the exact circumstances of the quest itself, but I remember my character: Jay Wrekin the sorcerer. Jay was a middle-aged wizard with a pixie familiar named Sianie, and a quirk of the Neverwinter Nights engine allowed you to take direct control of your familiar if you saw fit — including making them speak. This led to the interesting role-playing challenge of speaking for both Jay and Sianie simultaneously, though Jay chose to keep Sianie’s existence a secret initially, with her only appearing when he sneezed (or possibly the other way around).

Later in the quest, we found ourselves in a tricky situation — again, I forget the precise circumstances, but I do remember that for whatever reason, the only option was for Jay to reveal the existence of Sianie to the rest of the party, and for Sianie to go off and complete some sort of tricky challenge on her own. It was great fun and, although I felt I was monopolising the role-playing at times, the rest of the troupe all complimented me a great deal after the adventure was over. It was a significant challenge role-playing one character, they said; to manage two and make them distinct in personality from one another was an impressive achievement.

Later, I played a bit of World of Warcraft off and on with some friends. Like my initial abortive foray into Everquest, I picked the role-playing server, only this time I found a lot more people willing to indulge in role-playing fantasies. My friend and I decided how our characters related to one another before we started, and over a long period of time we developed their relationships and personal stories, culminating in us role-playing a run on the original form of the Stratholme dungeon. This was a surprisingly dramatic experience, since we’d agreed between us that, in terms of our character backstory, we both grew up in Stratholme and were driven out during the events of Warcraft III; consequently, we were hungry for revenge, and the long time it had taken us to get up to an appropriate level to beat Stratholme comfortably meant it really felt like we’d been on an epic journey.

There’s a bit of an issue with role-playing in massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, however: they’re not really designed for it. Oh sure, you have emotes and can sit in chairs and whatnot, but there aren’t really the tools available to get some really good role-playing going. There’s also a constant nagging feeling of conflict — while you’re sitting around chatting in character with friends, you could be outside bashing goblin heads together for experience points. There’s no inherent rewards for role-playing in World of Warcraft, only the satisfaction of creating an immersive environment with friends.

I’m intending on playing Final Fantasy XIV when it launches later this month, but I don’t think I’m going to be role-playing — it just doesn’t seem to be the right kind of game for it, though I can probably have my arm twisted if people I play with are into it. I am not, however, ruling out the possibility of other forms of online role-play in the future — I do find myself wondering if it’ll ever match up to the adventures of Jay and Sianie, though.

#oneaday Day 850: Diablolical

My friends and I wasted many, many hours on both Diablo and its sequel over the years. We picked up cheap copies of the original game when we were in our first year of university and quickly figured out how to take advantage of our free phone calls between rooms to network our computers and play multiplayer. Later, we found ourselves enjoying the sequel a great deal — though I must confess, despite enjoying it a great deal, I only ever beat it once.

Fast forward a large number of years and we come to Diablo III. Does it still have the magic of its predecessors?

Simple answer? Yes.

Oh, you want a little more than that? All right.

First up, let’s address the Big Issue that people have been ranting and raving about: the supposed “DRM” that requires a persistent Internet connection. If you spend any time actually playing Diablo III, you’ll likely come to the same surprising realisation that I have, and that is this:

Diablo III is an MMO.

It’s not an MMO in the same way that its stablemate World of Warcraft is — there’s no open world and you don’t randomly bump into other players wandering around — but it is a game designed to be played online, and it is a game where hundreds, thousands, millions of people all log in at the same time and are able to communicate and play with one another. There is a persistent chat interface allowing conversation with both friends and strangers even if you’re not in the same game session with them, a persistent friends list (albeit one that isn’t cross-region, annoyingly) and the ability to sneak a peek at your friends’ equipment, achievements and other data. There is an auction house, allowing you to make some money (currently only in-game currency — the controversial “real money auction house” is due to launch later in the month) from those awesome items that your current characters can’t use. Your characters are saved “in the cloud”, allowing you to log in on any computer and pick up where you left off.

Most notably, there is the ability to immediately, instantly and seamlessly drop in and out of players’ games. Friends who are playing are shown on the main menu, and joining their game is a simple case of clicking their name. Joining a public game (or opening your own session up to the public) is just as straightforward. The only thing that would make it easier to play with friends would be Steamworks compatibility, but this is Blizzard; that ain’t going to happen.

Yes, you can play the game solo, but you can still chat to people while doing so. You can lock people out from auto-joining your game so you may only play solo if you want to, but you’re still soloing online like any other MMO. You have the option to invite people or open your session up at any time without having to come out of your game or make a character specifically to play online with.

In short, the “always-online” thing is actually a key part of the game’s design, and in execution really rather cool. While it may be frustrating to not be able to play “single player” offline, and the early server issues were a pain in the arse for a day (a single day, maybe two at a push — the game is running perfectly now) the fact that the game is, in fact, clearly an MMO makes it clear why this is the case. The entire game’s infrastructure is designed around playing online.

But let’s leave that aside for the moment, as it’s a concept you’ll either be on board with or you won’t. What about the actual game itself?

Diablo III has undergone some significant changes from its predecessors. Gone is Diablo I and II’s progression system, which allowed you to distribute stat points on every level up as you pleased, replaced with predefined stat increases. Gone is the “skill tree” system from Diablo II, which allowed you to “build” a character to your own specifications (or create a completely unworkable mess), replaced with a system where you unlock skills at predefined level boundaries and can only equip a limited number at once.

It takes some adjusting to, but Diablo III’s way of doing things is streamlined and efficient without taking away the element of player choice. Everyone always levelled up their stats the same way in Diablo and its sequel anyway, and despite the illusion of complete freedom of choice that the skill trees offered, it was all too easy to create an underpowered character that wasn’t particularly good at anything. What Diablo III lets you do is customise your character to work the way you want it to in any given situation, and then tweak it at any time. What you can’t do, however, is hot-swap skills while you’re in the middle of combat. You have to make some choices as to what skills you’re going to use before wading into the fray, and reevaluate your decisions after various demon hordes have stopped having their wicked way with you.

The presentation is good, though not stellar. The in-game visuals work well but seem to have surprisingly demanding system specifications for their quality. In-engine cutscenes are a bit crap and look like something out of a game made in the late ’90s. The special effects are great, however, with some wonderful physical modelling on bodies and objects around the game’s environments, and spell effects are appropriately ridiculous, particularly when you’re playing with several people all flinging pyrotechnics around the screen.

Sound design — always a strong point in Blizzard titles — is great, with some excellent voice actors and quality background music. Plus someone on the Diablo team has finally got wise to the fact that boss battles are infinitely more exciting with some boss music rather than the understated ambient rumbling of the previous games.

As with the rest of the series, it’s the gameplay where Diablo III shines. There’s a decent narrative running throughout the game, but the Diablo series has always been far more about killing thousands of monsters and stealing their stuff rather than paying much attention to the (surprisingly deep, if a bit po-faced) lore. And in that department it delivers in spades. Combat is straightforward, addictive and fun — particularly with friends. There is a huge variety of loot to collect, equip, sell, disenchant and craft. And a well-implemented achievement system actually makes you want to achievement whore because going after the challenges in question is so fun and satisfying.

I get the impression Diablo III is going to grow and change over time, too. We already know that a player-vs-player competitive element is coming, as is the real money auction house. But what then? Expansion packs? Content updates? New character classes? There are a ton of possibilities that Blizzard could incorporate into the game, and they could even use the patch process as a means of incorporating features which some are a little disappointed at the current lack of — things like voice chat. (Personally, I can take or leave voice chat — I suffer from telephobia when talking to people on the Internet almost as much as when I’m using the phone — but I accept that a lot of people expect it nowadays.)

In short, the future looks very bright for Blizzard’s latest title, and if the amount of support Diablo II got — even once World of Warcraft arrived on the scene — is anything to go by, then players can likely look forward to a game that will last them for years.

#oneaday Day 848: I Can’t Get Angry About Diablo III

I know I have a track record of Getting Angry About Shit, particularly when it comes to things like DLC, DRM and other three-letter acronyms. But I’m finding it rather difficult to get riled up over the issues surrounding Diablo III.

For the uninitiated, Diablo III is the latest game from World of Warcraft creators Blizzard, who are part of Activision. Activision used to be gaming’s resident Empire Of Evil, but that mantle has since passed to EA, and Activision are now simply Those Guys Who Killed Bizarre Creations, Pump Out Call Of Duty Every Year And Have Something To Do With Blizzard. But that’s beside the point.

The point is that Diablo III was always going to be a massive seller and an immensely popular title. It’s the long-anticipated third entry in a series with a long history, and one which a lot of players have been looking forward to for a long time.

It’s also one which a lot of people are getting extremely angry about, largely due to what they describe as its “always-on Internet DRM”. Said “DRM” has had difficulties today due to overloading, leaving many players unable to log in and play the game.

Here’s how the system works. To play Diablo III, you have to log in to Blizzard’s online service Battle.net. Once logged in, you can then play the game. You have to stay connected in order to play, even if you’re playing solo. The benefits of playing in this kind of “always on” environment include the fact you can always see when your Diablo-playing friends are online, that you can jump in and out of each other’s cooperative multiplayer games, and that you can make use of the game’s auction house facility to trade items.

Some people are getting very upset about this — particularly the fact that you can’t play single player offline. And while that may seem a bit silly, I can’t help but thinking a lot of people are looking at this from the wrong angle — the “gamers are getting screwed” angle. This is perhaps understandable, given the amount of time gamers spend getting screwed nowadays, but I really find it difficult to agree with the people getting riled about this.

Here’s the thing, though: Diablo has pretty much always been designed as an online game to play with either friends or random strangers online. The classes are designed in such a way that it’s both desirable and fun to group up with other people and tackle the game’s challenges cooperatively. You can play solo, sure, but the game has always been designed with online in mind. With this latest iteration, including the auction house and other mechanics, Diablo is now closer in execution to a massively-multiplayer online title than a single-player dungeon crawler like Torchlight. Sure, it doesn’t charge a subscription fee or feature a truly massively-multiplayer open world to explore, but the game has been designed specifically to be an online title. People don’t complain about World of Warcraft, Guild Wars or the like having to be always online — what, really, is different here?

I think the issue is that Blizzard hasn’t appropriately set people’s expectations for the game being an online-only title. We have no problem with games like the aforementioned requiring us to stay online in order to play, despite the fact you can play them solo. (In the case of Guild Wars, you can even team up with computer-controlled partner characters if you really can’t stomach playing with real people.) So what, really, is different about Diablo III? Is it simply that the previous games had a discrete “Single Player” option that didn’t require you to be online? (I haven’t finished installing the new game yet so at the time of writing don’t know if this is still the case.)

The other issue is that people believe Blizzard, being the company who runs the world’s biggest massively-multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft, should have anticipated demand and made sure their servers were up to the job of dealing with the thousands (millions?) of people who were likely to be wanting to log in at the same time. This I sort of agree with, though there is no genuinely reliable way of predicting quite how much demand there is going to be for any given title. Blizzard underestimated demand, and it’s caused problems — much like has happened with the launch of many other online-only games. That doesn’t make this a “disaster” or a “debacle” or anything like that; it makes it an occurrence that we’ve seen before. An occurrence we should have figured out a solution for by now, yes, but one we shouldn’t really be surprised about any more.

Within a matter of days, the whole issue will be completely forgotten about as everyone starts playing and enjoying the game, which kind of makes the whole RAGE!!! thing seem rather pointless, really.

But I guess you could say the same thing about any sort of “controversy” — including the Mass Effect 3 issues I wrote about a while back.

The fact is, though, this is an issue I find it very difficult to get riled up and upset about. So far as I’m concerned, Diablo III is an online game, almost an MMO, therefore I accept the fact that an unavoidable part of its existence is downtime, during which you cannot play. It’s not as if I’m short of other stuff to try when that happens — and getting angry really won’t solve anything. I accept that others’ views may differ on this subject if Twitter today is anything to go by, but that’s how I feel personally.

If you’re getting upset, go play something else. Or, in the words of my good friend Jeff, GO OUTSIDE.

#oneaday, Day 97: Ding! Growing Up

I reached level 80 in World of Warcraft today. This is the first time in any MMORPG that I’ve reached the level cap, and the character with whom I achieved it is the one I started playing on the day the game was released. My friend Tim also reached the milestone in the early hours of this morning, having originally started at the same time as me.

For those who have never got into an MMORPG, talk of reaching the level cap being “just the beginning” of the experience sounds like absolute nonsense. After all, reaching the level cap in a single-player RPG just means that you don’t need to grind any more and can zip through the rest of the story with ease. But reaching 80 in Warcraft, or 50 in City of Heroes, or the rather more casual-player friendly 20 in Guild Wars, is simply a sign of maturity.

In fact, the whole “levelling up as metaphor for life” idea is, on reflection, quite a potent one. Bear with me on this one.

You’re born. You come into the world knowing nothing about it. Everything is new to you. You spend your time exploring, finding out how to do things. Some things you find out for yourself, others you are taught. You’re weak and feeble. You often need help doing things. You make friends. You quickly learn the people to avoid. And all the time, you are learning, growing stronger.

As time goes on, you eventually reach a stage where you have outgrown your home. It doesn’t offer you any challenges any more, so you move on. You say a fond farewell to the familiar surroundings of your home and spread your wings, and during this time you continue to learn new things. Your challenges become greater, and you sometimes still need help, but at other times you can do things for yourself. On the occasions where you return home, everything suddenly feels much smaller. Things which once offered you a huge amount of challenge are now mere trifles to be knocked aside as you pass through.

Time passes. You continue to learn and grow. You move further and further away from your home until you eventually reach a stage where you feel like the world is your oyster. There are still some challenges which seem insurmountable, even with help, but you are feeling more independent. You still feel that you have a lot to learn, and you run into people who have more experience than you regularly, but you know that you are much more capable of finding things out for yourself.

Eventually, after what feels like an extremely long journey, you reach maturity. You are independent. You can go anywhere, you can do anything. You could co-operate with others for a common good. Or you could pursue your own personal goals. You could take possession of bigger and better things to help you become stronger, but there’s nothing more for you to learn. But there are still challenges to overcome. Challenges of your own deciding.

In Warcraft, reaching 80 is reaching maturity. You can go anywhere and do anything. There are no new skills or spells to learn, no way of working to become stronger. It’s all up to you and your possessions to prove your worth. And at this point, being an “adult”, other people start to look up to you. The people who are still at the beginning of their journey look at you, seemingly at the end of yours, and believe that you are someone who knows what they are doing. But you might not. Just because you’ve negotiated the perils of childhood, puberty, adolescence and young adulthood doesn’t mean that you know everything. You might not want to be a leader. You might still want someone to tell you what to do, even though you’re theoretically strong enough to make it on your own.

I often find that online games tend to reflect social values quite nicely. Past experiences with Second Life, in particular, have been interesting, but the same thing happens in Warcraft. I’m nearly thirty years old, but in my daily life I still don’t feel like a “leader”. I’d feel weird if I was placed in charge of a group of people, and it’s the same when I join a party in Warcraft. I don’t have the experience of leadership, though I do have other skills. So I wouldn’t want to be the one bossing a party or a raid around, but I’m happy to follow orders and give my own ideas. It’s the same in reality – I’m happy to follow someone else’s instructions and suggestions, and occasionally chip in myself, but were I to be in charge of a group of people? I’m not sure how I’d handle that.

I guess my past work in teaching is technically a “leadership” role, so I have done it in the past. And I’m completely comfortable showing people how to do things, or explaining things to them. I think the thing which I find most difficult is being decisive on behalf of other people. I fear looking stupid in front of others, or deciding something that turns out not to be of mutual benefit to everyone. So I defer to others. Now, admittedly, in real life you’re unlikely to suffer a “wipe” as a result of a bad decision you made. But there are other ways that things can go wrong. Feelings can be hurt. You can find yourself in a situation you’re not sure how to get out of. Worse, you can feel you’ve trapped other people in a situation you don’t know how to get out of.

Decisiveness is clearly an art to learn, whether you’re a level 80 mage or a level 0 everyman. And there’s no class trainer to help you with that one!

#oneaday, Day 83: Crafting War

The reason why World of Warcraft is still fun eludes me. According to the game, my “main” character (i.e. my highest level one) has been playing for something like 18 days. That’s 18 days total time logged in, not I started playing 18 days ago. 18 days… that’s… (counts) 432 hours, or over four runs through Persona 4. And yet somehow, despite the clunky animation that all MMOs are cursed with, its inconsistent attempts at storytelling and its overwhelming focus on killing things repeatedly… it’s still fun.

There are many things which could cause this. Perhaps it’s the fact that you’re constantly being rewarded. Recent non-MMO multiplayer titles like Modern Warfare 2 have cottoned on to this, rewarding players with points, perks and unlockable things just for playing the game normally, not necessarily being the best at it. WoW is the same. Do quests, get experience. Kill monsters, get experience. Whatever you do, you’re achieving something that will better your character and make your experience more fun. And since Blizzard added an extremely robust Achievements system with the Wrath of the Lich King expansion pack, there’s always plenty of things to do, even if you don’t fancy level-grinding. Perhaps you could go back and solo some dungeons that used to give you trouble. Perhaps you could work on your crafting skills. Perhaps you could take part in one of the entertaining seasonal events, ending up with some sort of kooky reward. Perhaps you could delve into the infinite world of Add-Ons and customise WoW’s interface to make it into the game you want it to be. (For my part, I’ve completely rejigged the interface and use an excellent system called Soundtrack which allows you to assign custom music to zones, monsters, special events and battles).

Or perhaps you could spend your time interacting with other players. That is one of the key things about a multiplayer game, after all.

I play on a roleplaying server – Darkmoon Faire, if anyone’s interested – and this means several things to me. Firstly, it means that there are people out there who sometimes like to forgo the levelling experience for the sake of some in-character conversation. Anyone who has played a tabletop roleplaying game will know that some of the best moments come from the inter-party banter and improvised storylines. RP in WoW is no exception and while, yes, you do get a few teenage lesbian Night Elves around the place sometimes, and yes, you do get some people who don’t know when to stop with the melodrama sometimes, for the most part RP on Darkmoon Faire is mature and entertaining.

The other thing about an RP server in my experience, though, is that those same people who like to RP tend to be the nicer, more articulate people that there are. People who write in full sentences, know how to use capital letters and punctuation. People who don’t abbreviate everything just for the sake of it. And, hey, people who are polite.

I know a big part of my WoW experience is the people I get the chance to talk to while I’m playing. And while most of them are streets ahead of me in levels, experience, time played and skills, meaning that I rarely get the chance to actually play alongside them, the fact that I can chat to them on the channel they’ve set up, or turn up to the regular improvisatory RP sessions that are held in newbie-friendly areas makes the whole experience more worthwhile socially.

But still a massive waste of time. 🙂

Heartwarming Tale of the Day

Hello! Regular posting will shortly resume. Those of you who know me well will know that I’ve been in the process of finding a new job and preparing for that. That starts on the 2nd of November, excitingly.

I also have tons of things to talk about that have gone on recently, what with some decent new games and all manner of other things, but now’s not the time for it. For now, I just wanted to share a heartwarming story posted on a World of Warcraft forum I frequent that shows that, mercifully, not everyone in the world is a complete douchebag.

Ok so heres the story… I come from an RP realm (let the flames begin) joining a guild that centres itself around RP doesn’t care if you have epics, doesn’t care what level you are. Just so long if you abide by the server rules, and enjoy storytelling etc, that sorta thing, you are welcomed with open arms. (that doesnt mean we all wear robes and try to do impressions of Gandalf)

On Moonglade our guild is somewhat respected for its RP, and being a guild officer, i have to deal with a lot of requests from people to join.

A few months ago i was in STV using the neutral action house, and i recieved a whisper from someone “please cn you help me with some quests” usually i’d just tell people i’m busy, or ignore them, but he actually made the effort to spell the word “please” instead of “plz” or the ever confusing “pl0x”

So off i went, with a lvl 34 Human Warrior, and helped this fella out with a few of his red quests.. We chatted a little whilst we played, and it came to my attention that this wasn’t a very old player, as he kept on having to go “becuase dad neds 2 chek the emall” he also clearly had no idea how to play, kept on pointing at random objects and saying “coooooooooool!!”, and by the state of his outfit, it looked like he hit mach 2 and collided with a Dorthy Perkins store.

Anyhoo.. After a few quests, i really had to go, he was a very polite kid unlike most that play, and actually said “thank you very much” instead of “thx” but then he started asking if he could join my guild.. Now i don’t wanna sound big headed, but that sort of player isn’t suited for an RP guild.. Atleast not the one i’m in.. Its like a fury spec warrior wearing all green items, asking to be main tank in an MC run.. Its just a big no no.

So not to hurt his feelings, i just told him we were full at the moment, he didn’t mind, and bounced off into the sunset, again thanking me.

Over the course of the next few weeks, i would recieve messages from him, just random stuff of his progress, the occasional “ding! lvl 50 :D” he wasn’t one of these annoying people that you help once, and then they seem to think you’re some sort of xp vendor for the remainder of there leveling process.

A few days ago i was in SW checking the AH, and some people were flaming some poor guy in the trade channel about selling an item for a high price… Afteri while i realised it was this kid that i helped out so long ago.. I didn’t want to get involved and just let the flaming die down, but these idiots on the AH were just being really nasty to the poor kid, sure i know they probably didn’t know his age, but still, you should be aware of that when playing games like this.

Anyway, a few hours later, i get a message from this kid “i got kicked from my guild :(” i tried to cheer him up, but it wasn’t happening.. And to be honest i couldnt be arsed trying, and i was tired and logged off.

So yesterday i log on, and say my usual hellos to everyone, and go to the mailbox.. When i get there, i see this kid sitting next to the mailbox, no guild tag, people bouncing around him having fun.. And theres him, all alone, no-one paying attention to a “noob”.. Now i know human race facial expressions never change, but as far as avatars go, this one looked really depressed.

So i message him asking if hes cool, and he tells me hes thinking about quitting, becuase he gets bullied alot at school, and his ex guild mates all said really horrible things to him, and that he knew some of the kids in reality, becuase they go to his school, and are beggining to bully him in school about how he plays WoW etc. We all remember how it was.. I remember i used to get bullied in school for not having any toys, or having an old version of a toy.. Imagine it now, you get bullied about it at home AND school too.

Now this kid had got himself to lvl 62 under his own steam, where as the kids that were giving him a hard time, were all about level 20 and spent the majority of there time in Goldshire asking people to raid Crossroads.

So what did i do? I took the kid shopping is what i did… Bought him his epic (ground) mount, a load of nice armour off AH, which i made sure was well colour co-ordinated AND gave him very nice stats for his level. Bought him 2 very nice rare axes (fotgotten the name) and got a guild mate to put +15 agility on each one.

I also bought him a host of accessories, fun stuff, like a mana wyrm, somedeviate delights, an Orb of deception.. yunno.. all the “coooooool” stuff.

Then i invited him to an outing to Goldshire with 6 other guild friends, to casually walk past these bullies who kicked him from the guild. I then RPed the role that he was a great warrior, and saved me from some horrific fight etc etc blah blah.. The bullies then started to flame him in general chat about “noob” things hes done, so i told them hes one of the best PVPers i have ever met, and he won his epic mount from a bet, by defeating the most powerful PVP player on our realm (whoever that is…. sorry! hehe).

After a while, these kids started to change there attitude, and actually began to beg for him to rejoin there guild.. But i told him not to.. Instead, i helped him make his own guild, i bought his tabard, helped him with his spelling etc. And also helped him recruit enough members to get his charter registered.

Fast forward to today, and i get a mail from this kid.. Except its not the kid, its his Dad, thanking me.. He said i quote

“Dear Falcore

I want to thank you for helping my son in this game, he’s been so excited for days about the new things you bought him, hes also been having a tough time in school latley, and we agreed we would get him this game as an escape, although latley its turned into nothing more than another source of bullying and abuse.

Thanks to you the little chaps smiling again.

Once again, lots of thanks!”

Now all of this cost me a total of 1600g-ish. Money that i was saving for my epic flying mount… But i tell ya, putting a smile on a bullied kids face like that is worth more than every epic in the game.

Moral of the story? Helping makes you feel happy, flaming just makes you an *!*@*#%.