A Wall of Text for Larisa

This is a story to Larisa of The Pink Pigtail Inn blog. She writes a lot of personal stuff about her adventures (drama?) in The World of Warcraft and recently she posted about some guild issues that seriously affected her pleasure in the game. Chances are that I don't have many readers (if any) and the few I might have probably read her blog already. But, I felt the need to write this for her. I think she would appreciate it.

Dear Larisa,

Living in an online world has proven...interesting for me. I kept a safe distance from online games for a long time, mostly because I grew up with pen and paper games and then solo box games. Mostly, I couldn't fathom paying a subscription every month of a single game when I was buying several a year for upwards of fifty bucks each. And not only paying every month, but also for the online connections? I thought these people were insane.

One day I began working with someone who was playing World of Warcraft and it was all he could talk about. We had computer access at work and every chance he had he was showing me the wiki pages for the lore in the game and screenshots. After a few months I finally broke down and accepted a guest pass from him and bought the game.

It changed my life.

All of my other hobbies were forgotten. I stopped buying other games. Soon enough I had deleted all of my current games from my computer. I even built a computer from scratch (with little knowledge of what I was doing) so that I could play the game on max settings.

I began playing a few weeks or so before Naxxramas first appeared in the game and shortly after The Burning Crusade was released I was raiding. It was small guild that was built from veteran players who were trying to go from Karazhan to 25-mans so they made two groups of ten, hoping to merge them and pug the rest if they needed to. The guild broke within weeks of me joining but my group (Group Two) formed a new guild. We rarely did a 25-man run, but we learned to really love Karazhan. We had a lot of fun in the Gnome Pawn Cartel. Got to know each other really well.

But we had some issues. We wanted to do those 25-mans regularly. I wasn't confident of my abilities as the off-tank but rarely had the opportunity to really challenge myself as a main tank. My lack of confidence was noticed and other people were brought in when our maintank wanted to do dps instead. I did well enough, but I never felt I was as good as I could be.

Eventually this guild also disbanded. Many of the members either quit the game or changed servers.

I had raided with them for over a year and suddenly felt like something had been wrenched from inside of me. They were faceless friends but they were the only friends I had besides my own family.

And now I was alone. Guildless and friendless.

I soloed for a few weeks then joined another guild. This one actually put me through a test of sorts and I passed. Suddenly I felt good about my skills. I was upping my game because I was trying to impress strangers who had something I wanted, not just playing with friends. I was still off-tanking, but more than once I saved the raid from a wipe and it felt great.

Then they merged with another guild and no longer needed me.

Alone again.

I soloed Wrath of the Lich King.

I was lonely and took a lot of long breaks. Facerolled a few heorics towards the end of the expansion.

I finally joined another guild a few months before Cataclysm was released but I didn't raid with them. I just wanted to see some friendly chatter in my chat box.

I'm still playing a solo game, but I'm slowly getting to know some people in the guild...sort of. I've done some heroics but my confidence in group settings is low. I'm taking another break now.

See, that first raiding guild was special. We connected with each other. It felt like a second family. It may be my fault that I haven't invested emotionally in this new guild in all this time, but it takes a lot of energy. They have a core raid group and their own little group clicks and I don't want to force my way into those little circles. I especially don't want to hear anyone tell me I'm not good. I'm not ready to invest enough energy into the game to be good again, to get to know my character intimately again (Dear, Blizzard, stop making my toon a stranger to me, please).

The point of this wall of text?

To say that I am really greatful that you were able stay with your guild. You seem to be a sensitive and emotional person, like myself, and it hurts to have to start over. WoW may be fore friendly to solo players these days, but it still has a long way to go if it really wants to go in that direction. If you don't have friends to group with on a regular basis, it is a lonely game.

Good for you.

Thanks for sharing.

"Leaves That are Green Turn to Brown."

Someday I am going to update my blogroll to reflect some blogs that I frequent via other people's blogrolls. And when I do that, Klepsakovic's Troll Racials are Overpowered blog is going to be included. I've been to his comments section and argued with him once over items and features that Blizzard seems to be breaking just for the sake of removing fun from the game.

My argument was that there are things in the game that were broken upon release and players became used to some of them. When Blizzard finally gets around to fixing things, suddenly some veteran players feel as though some of the fun has been removed from the game. But complexity plays a roll in how long some "harmless" things remain broken in the game and fixes can take a long time to come as more important things tend to push the "harmless" issues down the list.

Anyway, this apparent removal of fun is a big issue for some players. It includes not only the issue of "fixed" items, but the removal of motivation for exploration. When nothing surprising can happen off the beaten path, then why bother with it? The linearity of leveling is a prime example of Blizzard's effective "fix" of the explorer's fun.

I wrote that Cataclysm is the highest quality product Blizzard has yet released for World of Warcraft and I stand by that statement. However, their attention to the quality of the leveling experience and the graphics of the new and updated zones, has forced them to pay less attention to random random experiences.

I think that Blizzard knows precisely what they are doing.

They want to make the game more easily accessible, but also they want to make the game look more stunning, provide more bells and whistles. They also want to release more content at a faster pace.

A sandbox game requires attention to lots and lots of little, random, "accidental" things for players to explore and stumble across. But this kind of game has to pull attention and time away from the environment, if they intend to keep to any respectable release date. No one game can provide both great quality environments, such as the new Cataclysm zones, and the open gameplay experience of Elder Scroll's Daggerfall. Maybe that game is on its way in the form of Rift or Star Wars: The Old Republic, but it's going to take Blizzard a lot more effort and time than their standard expansion pack allows for. Maybe Blizzard's next MMO will be that game.

The point is that World of Warcraft is not that game.

And as one blogger states, "Veterans of World of Warcraft had their standards and expectations set too high for Cataclysm."

The truth is that Vanilla Wow was mostly just thrown together. The developers spent a lot of time on making great features, but the game was so big they couldn't even finish the maps. Throughout Burning Crusade and even some of the Lich King, Blizzard was still finishing vanilla material and including it into the expansions as new stuff. Cataclysm is possibly their first entirely new product for World of Warcraft since the game launched, aside from a handful of zones and dungeons previously released.

World of Warcraft was never the game that the veterans really wanted. Instead it was an unfinished tease of what they wanted. Now it seems that Blizzard has an actual direction for World of Warcraft, not just "This is our first MMO, let's make it cool, big, and functional!"

To be honest, I too am a veteran RPG player, and I don't know how much longer I can play World of Warcraft. However, as other bloggers have stated, there just isn't anything else that is big enough, fantastic enough, or detailed enough to take us from WoW. For the most part the game for myself, is good enough. But I do long for a different game.

A Neutral Critique of Cataclysm so Far.

Once again, Larissa from http://www.pinkpigtailinn.com/ has inspired a blog post.

Cataclysm is a great expansion, as all three WoW expansions so far have been. Each expansion is almost a new game unto itself.

Cataclysm includes more new content than any previous WoW expansion so far. Some people are upset that a lot of the new content was not designed for leveling or end game.

People are mad because they can't get rewards fast enough in the new guild features...so Blizzard might have to focus a little more attention on perks for the smaller guilds, I'm sure they've got the message. But overall, crying over vanity items and speed buffs seems rather petty to me.

Just how many pets do you need to be happy? How fast does your mount have to go? How desperate are you to avoid the leveling content?

Speed, experience, and vanity sort of defines the guild features at this time.

All of the new zones are chock full of quality. Possibly the best quality in an MMO zone that I've ever seen, and I've played a lot of MMOs. Phasing is a mixed bag that I'm not sold on yet. Could live without it, but it has a nice story-telling function.

It's a little more difficult to get epics so far. I like nice-looking gear. Great weapons are hard to come by. You have to like the game if you want to spend the time to get some of the better-looking gear. Otherwise, why are you bothering?

There are some things to really like about the group system. I miss seeing people congregate at summoning stones, but I don't miss the traveling.

Tanking, Dualspec, and Gear Swapping.

I've done a couple of normal runs as tank. The first one was very stressful. The second one was ok though. I have a clue about the buttons I need to use so that's great.

It felt good to be back in my original roll. I'm am also very greatful that I can switch back to dps with just a few buttons. The gear swapping feature was a learning experience for me, but I got it figured out and am glad for it. Dualspec overall is now something I no longer dread. I was once afraid that groups (especially raids) would expect warriors to switch between dps and tanking on a whim. It seems that I was wrong to think this.

Still need to get my glyphs and enchants straightened out, but I guess I'm in no rush. Maybe if I ever get to tanking heroics, I will worry about it.

Anyway, so far so good!

Good-bye Adsense.

I finally got around to removing the Google add stuff from this blog. It was initially added when I created the blog because I was still learning SEO, or SOE, or whatever it's called. The guides I was using suggested adding the Google adds because...why not, I suppose.

I think I looked at the results once or twice, but haven't done so in about two years, so I don't even know if I have any money owed me or not. I guess I don't care enough to bother. I don't write the posts for money, it was just one of those things that seemed to be "on the side". One of those things that you do if you make a blog.

However, I've noticed that most of the blogs I read don't have any add revenue generators. I probably should have removed them a long time ago, but it seemed like such a nonsense thing that I didn't even want to waste the few seconds it would take to click "remove".

So, now it's done. If anyone might have had a negative opinion about it, I guess...yay?

Questing in Cataclysm.

Questing in World of Warcraft is love-hate relationship.

I love having something mindless to do, but I hate feeling as though I have to get through it to get somewhere, or something.

Yet, I actually like questing at level cap.

I don't feel rushed if I'm already capped. It may not be so challenging, but so what? Questing is about enjoying some stories and taking part in some emersion. A challenge only gets in the way of that.

On the other hand, questing while leveling up sort of sucks. You're feeling rushed because there's stuff to do, places to go, but you can't do it or get there until you're level is maxed out. And you have some weird feelings while leveling. You get a great green upgrade to a previous green upgrade, or maybe it's even a blue. But you know that within hours, you're going to replace it with another green, or blue.

Once you craft your first set of blues, none of the leveling gear matters. It's just garbage for the vendor, or something for an enchanter to break. All of it, blues and greens alike. Sure, everything in the game amounts to that in the end, but while leveling, it's more pronounced. You had to complete a task to get the gear and you needed the gear upgrade to keep moving on. But that first crafted set is going to sit with you for a while. With heroic queues and thirty-fourty minutes, you aren't doing too many a day. And there's never any telling if your next upgrade is going to drop or, if it does, if you are going to win the roll.

But, at least while I'm waiting for the next upgrades, I can quest at my leisure and not feel rushed or as though I must be successful to move on.

So, I'm wondering if questing should be changed. Maybe we can do just a handful of "heroic" quests to level up, then the rest of the questing adventure can just be for giggles.

Anyway, I'm glad to be level-capped, and also glad to have lots of questing left to do on the side.

My First Heroic (and Second).

After the gear achievement popped up from my newest gear acquisitions, I quickly joined the queue for heroics. Forty minutes later I was in my first group which lasted all of five minutes, or less.

After the first pull two party members began bickering. One of them pulled the second pack and promptly left group. The rest of us wiped. When we got our health back only two of showed up in the instance. We waited around a few minutes. No one else joined us but no one else was dropping group either. I finally got fed up and left the group.

My second heroic that evening (another forty minutes later) went much better. I died a few times, we wiped two or three times, but we finished. I scored a Chaos Orb and a Two-handed axe. It was well worth the effort.

I'm still not a fan of grouping, but I do intend to do a few more heroics. I want the orbs. And better gear, of course...for some reason.