D(ragon) Day

So, the release of dracthyr evokers in the run-up to Dragonflight has been... interesting. I was honestly pretty hyped about it. It's been a long time since I was part of this kind of event in retail WoW, and I had pretty fond memories of the community buzz in the days immediately after the Shattering for example. Things didn't entirely turn out the way I'd hoped though.

First there was the confusion about when exactly the unlock would happen. Blizzard had been advertising the 15th for ages, and I already had the day off work for unrelated reasons, so it didn't even occur to me that this might not be one of those world-wide launches - as it turned out, there were no dragons yet for EU players on the 15th, and of course the next day was an office day for me, which left me with minimal time to spend on anything other than commuting and work.

Still, I managed to at least log into the game early in the morning to create my evoker. I had actually done some preparation for this, as I found a tool on Wowhead that simulated the dracthyr character creator. I know that I can get pretty caught up in character customisation, and with the dracthyr having more customisation options than any previous race, I wanted to familiarise myself with all the different options in advance. I was just confused because when I tried to use the option to save my creation, Wowhead kept telling me that my dragon needed more clothes, which made me wonder whether it was mandatory to equip a minimum number of the cosmetic armour pieces that are available for the class (it was not). In the end I just took a reference screenshot manually.

Anyway, thanks to this I had a picture to speed up my decision-making on Wednesday morning, though since I hadn't yet looked at the visage form options at all, the process still took me more than twenty minutes. Still, I managed to at least finish my character before having to dash off to work. Thus, "Shindragosa" was born.

The husband and I then sat down to play together late in the evening, but again things were not off to a good start as I was greeted by the error message "cinematic not available" upon logging in, so I had to immediately set off to YouTube on my second monitor to figure out what the hell my character was supposed to have seen before even starting. While I was doing that, the husband was struggling with a different dilemma - for him the cinematic had played - at least partially - but then he got stuck in the room you spawn in and found himself unable to get out. I googled that issue as well, and the common advice seemed to be to "restart your game five or six times". This did work eventually, but basically, just getting both of our characters out of the very first room took us something like ten to fifteen minutes.

After that, things continued somewhat more smoothly, though the area felt very quiet. I'm guessing this was done intentionally via phasing, as we did see more players once we got out of the first building, but if there had been a big rush earlier in the day, we had clearly missed it.

The Forbidden Reaches were fun enough as a starter zone - mostly WoW standard questing fare interspersed with a few (working) cut scenes, but our real focus was on our soar ability and using it to fly around a bit whenever it was off cooldown. There's a quest at the very start where you can practice soaring with no cooldown and I would have liked to spend some more time on that, but the husband just wanted to move on so I did too, without ever really getting the hang of it. The two times or so when I got it to work properly after that it felt great, however most of the time I just lost momentum way too quickly and dropped like a rock. Needs more practice.

Towards the end of the area quest line there was another "cut scene not available" failure, this time affecting both of us, and we were very confused as a battle we'd been fighting just phased around us and things had clearly gone to shit in some way but we didn't know how or why. Again I looked it up on YouTube and that one was definitely a very important cut scene!

Eventually we made it to Stormwind and did the intro there (I thought Wrathion's introduction was laugh-out-loud funny, not gonna lie), but we felt it was too late to look at the elemental invasion event or do the dungeon quest we'd been given. Guess that one's for another day.

In terms of play style I don't know yet whether evoker will be for me or not. The pacing of skills in the starting zone felt very good, but then you come out of there and the game's like: "Here, have fifty talent points or so and another ten abilites to place on your action bars! Hope you enjoy reading tooltips!" and I really can't judge that without actually trying some of those new skills properly first.

Random Retail Ramblings

Last night I had a random idea for an alt in retail, so I started playing around with the character creator. A bit of fiddling was required until I found a suitable name that wasn't taken (the way WoW's character creator gives feedback on that while you're typing is very good by the way); then I hit finish... and was presented with the following error message:

You already have the maximum number of characters allowed on this account.

While I've been vaguley aware of this limit of fifty characters per account for a long time, I never expected to actually run up against it myself in a million years. My immediate reaction was to go back to the server selection screen and add up the numbers myself. Yes, I had ten characters on my old Horde server, ten characters on my old Alliance server, plus obviously a few characters on Azjol-Nerub, where I'm playing with my husband nowadays, but that's barely halfway there!

The numbers didn't lie though - apparently I'd amassed so many random low-levels across a number of different servers over the years (to say hi to friends there, take part in projects/events etc.) that I had indeed hit fifty. Interestingly, for all the interest in monetisation, additional character slots are not something Blizzard sells even to this day. Fortunately I had no particular qualms about deleting a random level three druid that I could barely even remember making to free up some space, so I could then go ahead and create the new worgen rogue I'd actually wanted to make.

This was my third time through the worgen starter zone, and it was shockingly lonely despite of cross-realm zones. This isn't some sort of "game is dead" dig - the worgen starter experience moves you around a lot and involves a lot of phasing, so this wasn't entirely unexpected, but still... I remember running into a total of three other players during the entire two play sessions I spent on this little adventure, and none of them stayed within my sights for long.

By the time I was finally ejected from Gilneas, I was level 17, which is about where you'd end up back in the day as well but which still feels mildly insane to me now that the level cap has been squished down to sixty. After a bit of musing about how much it must suck to roleplay a Gilnean in lore right now (you lose your home to the Forsaken, carve out a little niche among the night elves, and then their whole tree gets burned down by the Horde as well), I ran into my usual troubles figuring out how to travel cross-continent in retail.

It wasn't lost on me that it was quite ironic that my attempts to google advice on this mostly resulted in results for WoW Classic. I know my way around Classic, thanks; things make sense there! Say what you want about boats, there's a lot of logic in reaching a shoreline, seeing a port, and taking a boat from there to somewhere beyond the water. Portals may be convenient but they can be anywhere and lead to anywhere, so there's no natural rhyme or reason to where you can find a portal to go to any particular place in WoW (with the exception of the big portal room in the Stormwind mage tower). Fortunately I eventually found a portal to Stormwind regardless.

Every time I play an alt in retail it strikes me that there's still a lot of "world" in World of Warcraft but that the game just has zero interest in making you engage with it. The best way for things to make some semblance of sense for new players is to put them through a very curated experience that just ignores everything pre-BfA (which is what Blizzard has done with Shadowlands) and it just seems like such a shame when I suspect that it's precisely all this older stuff that keeps many people subscribed long term, even if that content doesn't reward relevant gear anymore. Or at least that's what I'm seeing with my husband, who spends hours going through old quests and grinding old reputations and achievements for completion's sake. And there are certainly only so many hours in the day that I want to spend exclusively on the newest expansion content myself.

Dragonflight Announcement

I got to watch the new expansion announcement stream live on Tuesday evening because it actually happened at a convenient time for me. Sadly, all the "live experience" added was a scrolling chat full of the WoW community's worst dregs being juvenile and bigoted every time there were female devs on screen, which was distracting and not in a good way. One star, cannot recommend.

The expansion cinematic was a bit of a weird one. It was of course beautifully rendered as always, and I liked how people got really invested in Stony Tony's fate (or however the golem dude ended up being called in your circles) and were instantly meme-ing about him ("already a better character than the Jailer" etc.), which was quite fun to see. As Rohan also observed yesterday, players who meme affectionately are happy players.

However in terms of content and hype, the trailer felt like a bit of a nothing sandwich to me. Looking back at previous expansion cinematics, they always tended to include at least one of three things:

• cool fight scenes
• depictions of one or more of the expansion's new features
• an iconic lore character

Dragonflight doesn't really deliver on any of those - we do see a bit of the Dragon Isles, but what we see is very barren and not really showing much other than the big beacon thing. And Alexstrasza is technically an important character in lore, but considering that we've been on a first-name basis with her since Wrath, never mind the commodification of dragons in WoW in general, just seeing her fly past and roar isn't really that awe-inspiring anymore, sorry.

The actual dev round-tables were interesting, though my first thought was simply: "God, does Ion look old and tired." The past few years clearly haven't been kind to him. The general presentation style was also somewhat stiff - not insincere, but like everything was heavily scripted, and even with that in mind the general vibe (as I perceived it anyway) was that of people who are a little timid and very aware that anything coming out the wrong way would lead to them being torn apart by the community later. I'm all too happy to acknowledge Blizzard's corporate failings, but it's also impossible for me to not feel compassion for the people who are still working there on the ground because they enjoy what they're doing and who've clearly been having a rough time.

Now for the actual expansion-related content reveals... like many, I was kind of surprised/impressed to see Ion actually admit that they'd heard the feedback about players being sick of all these temporary systems and that they want more long-lasting additions and improvements to the game. And to be fair, a lot of the feature bullet points seemed to indicate that Blizzard have listened!

First off, there's a new race and class, the "dracthyr evoker". This one was a big surprise to me because for all the speculation that had been going on about the dragon theme beforehand, the idea of playable dragons always seemed ludicrous to me. But no, Blizzard are actually doing it! Sorta.

Mechanically, everything about the new class sounds very sound and appealing. It's going to be another hero class with its own starting zone, and it will be a ranged dps/healer that wears mail, which seems like a sensible decision in terms of balance. (Did you know that until now, every single class that has been added to the game since launch has been melee?) The fact that the new race and class are a package deal, meaning that you can't have one without the other, is unusual by WoW standards but again, pretty reasonable under the circumstances and certainly not a novelty in the MMO space as a whole. (The most frequent parallel I've seen people draw here is to the Beorning in LOTRO.)

I have yet to see anyone comment that they really love the aesthetic of these new dragon people though. What's been shown of their animations reminded me of the Worgen (whose animations I used to loathe, though I got used to them over time) and overall the closest thing to these dracthyr that we've seen in WoW before is probably Maloriak, the raid boss from Cataclysm, who was created by Nefarian fusing the body of a young human with the corpse (!) of a dragonspawn. There's even a parallel in the origin story here as the dracthyr were apparently created by Neltharion wanting to combine the best humanoid and draconic traits. It's not a good look, is what I'm saying!

Then there is dragonriding, a new form of flying exclusive to the Dragon Isles, and the mechanics of which appear to be a wholesale copy and paste job from Guild Wars 2's Skyscale mount - honestly, I recognised that even as someone who's never played GW2. I see no shame in copying good features from other MMOs though - it's what WoW used to be good at, after all. I personally can't judge how fun this will be, but it does seem like a potentially neat idea and like it would offer a different kind of non-combat gameplay. The dragon mounts are also supposed to be super customisable. If this takes off (pun intended), we can only hope that it or something similar at least will also become an option for other mounts/in other expansions eventually.

There will be a long overdue revamp for professions, with crafting supposedly becoming more involved - I guess we'll see how that pans out in practice, because WoW's crafting has never been great even at the best of times, so I'm a bit sceptical of whether the team has the design chops to get this right... but I do appreciate them making the effort at least. There'll also be a new "work order" system where you can advertise that you want people to craft stuff for you, and they can even turn your soulbound materials into gear for you. This sounds great! Makes me wish we could have buy or sell orders for general goods as well though, instead of being stuck with an auction house where everything needs to be relisted every two days.

Talents are making a comeback! Now, having lived through times when Blizzard changed the way talents work every expansion, I can't fault people for being a bit wary of this, but the system introduced in MoP never grew on me, so personally I'm happy for them to revisit this. From my point of view almost anything they can do in that area can only be an improvement.

And finally, while I'm sure that a lot of addon lovers won't care about this, as someone who's been playing with the default UI for most of my time in WoW and who generally wants to avoid dealing with addons as much as possible, I was very pleased to hear that they're planning to upgrade the default UI. While they've made some tweaks to things like raid frames over the years, I've generally been quite astounded by how little they seemed to care about the UI, seemingly because they assumed that if you didn't like it, you could always download an addon. Which is an approach that's fine for some things in my opinion, but not so much for the basic window through which the player interacts with your game.

I've been trying to get an idea of how to characterise the community response to Dragonflight, and it's been somewhat difficult, because the reactions have honestly been all over the place, with most of the ones I've seen sitting somewhere in the middle. I guess in a way that's telling in itself, seeing how I used to joke that it was typical of the WoW player base in general to always be hyped for every expansion when it's announced and then hate it two weeks after launch. So things have definitely changed... then again, maybe that will give Dragonflight a chance to prove itself on its own merits instead of having to live up to made-up hype. I don't think it's a coincidence that Mists of Pandaria is now remembered so fondly by many while also having been the expansion that probably had the coolest reception at the start.

I'm also in a strange position myself since I have little interest in classic Wrath of the Lich King at this point (which was also confirmed during the announcement by the way), and it's the first time since Cataclysm that I'm actually an active (if casual) retail player at the time of an expansion announcement and could potentially see myself playing it when it comes out. From that point of view I've got to say that I like what I've seen, even if I'm not "hyped". Things like a new race/class, updating the UI, re-thinking talents and revamping professions are long-term investments in the game - and dragonriding could potentially be developed beyond this expansion (though I'll be honest and admit that I kind of doubt it will be), which to me is a better way of managing the game than the modus operandi of recent years where stuff gets added and then trashed again pretty much on a schedule.

Allied Races

Are y'all ready for another episode of "Shintar talks about game content or features that people cared about four years ago but that are very much old hat by now"? Well, ready or not, here it comes.

Allied races were introduced with the Legion expansion and even though I wasn't playing at the time, I remember there being quite a bit of hubbub around their inclusion back then. They are basically different species available at character creation that (in a post-level squish world) start at level 10 instead of 1, don't have their own starting zone, and don't have unique animations but offer different skins. People love additional customisation options of any kind, and I recall cries to make pretty much everything and everyone into an allied race, something I could only shake my head at.

Accordingly, I didn't pay too much attention to the feature when the husband I started playing retail again, but the other day I realised that with us having completed both BfA and Legion at this point, I had most of the requirements for all the Alliance allied races unlocked and only had to actually go through the associated scenarios/intro quests to trigger the unlock properly, so off I went.

The Kul Tiran quest chain was honestly pretty cool, even if I was a bit exasperated by the amount of flying back and forth cross-continent that it required. The scenarios for the other races were noticeably less impressive, though the one for the lightforged draenei still resulted in a very memorable experience for me, for reasons that were probably not intended.

You see, I did this scenario on my demon hunter, who's currently level 54 without ever having set foot into Shadowlands, but is wearing the best gear you can get from Legion content. The lightforged draenei scenario scales to your level, which means that it was filled with mobs my level or one below. Should be easy enough, right? NO! A single level 53 mob in that scenario was enough to absolutely destroy me.

After a couple of deaths I quickly learned to let T'paartos, the friendly NPC I was supposed to be accompanying, do most of the fighting as he was pretty strong and sturdy anyway. But then disaster struck, when one pull resulted in several adds and I followed my gut instinct of starting to AoE, which meant that I went squish instantly. Oh well, what's another death, right?

The problem was that dying in that particular spot caused me to respawn away from my NPC friend and on top of another mob, meaning that I got killed again right away. I tried to get up again a few more times but without much success - if I managed to evade one mob, I'd just aggro another. Eventually I waited for Metamorphosis to come off cooldown before reviving again and managed to clear a little safe patch for myself. Then I slowly and carefully started making my way back to where I last left T'paartos, taking great care to never start a fight with less than full health and several cooldowns available and to never get more than one mob at a time. Eventually I made it back to him and the quest could resume.

After that I was even more careful and did okay for a while, until we got to the big end boss, who seemed to do some kind of hard to avoid/unavoidable(?) AoE that killed me in a few hits even with cooldowns up. I tried to make it back in time while T'paartos was still fighting but got delayed by more mobs in my way. While I was still busy getting lost inside the cave this was all happening in, I suddenly got the message that the scenario was complete, as T'paartos had managed to finish off the boss on his own. That guy really earned his lightforged status, is all I'm saying. My entire armour was yellow from all the deaths by the end of that, but I guess it was kind of funny.

I did make both a lightforged draenei and a Kul Tiran alt so far and quite like them. I think I'm coming around to this allied race idea... if for no other reason than that still being able to earn meaningful rewards in old expansion content is something I like, as it flies in the face of the sort of planned obsolescence model that Blizzard applies to too much of its modern content in my eyes.

How Does This Work Again?

I said that I probably wouldn't have anything else to post before Classic launch, but I resubscribed today and thought that the whole experience was kind of amusing.

First my initial credit card payment refused to go through, only yielding an extremely vague error message. I was already halfway through writing a ticket to Blizzard support when I happened to check my phone and saw that my bank had texted me about "potential fraudulent activity" on my card - basically they'd blocked the transaction because they thought it too unlikely that I actually wanted to give Blizzard money! Once I actually confirmed to them that yes, I did want to subscribe to WoW, the payment went through just fine.

First order of the day was to log into Pyrewood Village on Classic and create my tauren shaman there. I'd forgotten that female tauren only had literally four face options back in the day. For me, less is probably more in that regard though, as I tend to spend a significant amount of time at character creation anyway, even with such a limited number of options.

I got my first choice of name but was a bit concerned to see the server already marked as full. With Classic launching at 11pm local time tomorrow, I won't really have the time to sit in queues for three hours before playing. So I made a night elf hunter on the RP-PvE server as a backup, since that one was still flagged as having only a medium population. If Pyrewood Village is too full tomorrow night, I should be able to at least log into Hydraxian Waterlords to spend some time in the night elf starter zone, before braving Pyrewood queues again on Tuesday morning (I took the day off work).

After that, curiosity won out and I also logged into the live game to remind myself of where I'd left off there. I was immediately taken aback by the sheer amount of servers on which I had one or two characters each. Since the first character I selected also had a name with lots of numbers attached to it, I actually worried for a moment that a gold seller had gotten into my account somehow since I last played, but then I remembered that Blizzard did free up some names from inactive accounts at some point in the last seven years, so I guess those alts' names fell victim to that. In the end I only found two that were afflicted in such a way anyway.

Still, clicking my way through those character selection screens was a real workout for my memory as I tried to recall just why I had a level 6 tauren shaman on Aggramar or a level 6 draenei priest on Nagrand. Most of it did come back to me eventually (oh yeah, I even made a blog post about how I accidentally kicked someone from a Halls of Stone run and then made an alt on his server purely to apologise) but some did remain a bit of a mystery to be honest.

This is why blogging is important to me: In the moment it might seem silly to worry about ever forgetting what you're doing right now and why, but give or take five to ten years and it's quite a different picture. This is also why I greatly admire historians for trying to make sense of people's actions from centuries ago, because I can barely remember what motivated me less than a decade ago.

The next thing that struck me was that I'd forgotten just how bad the female tauren models came out of the big character model revamp of 2014. Just... yikes. So many of my characters were female tauren and I can barely even look at them now.

Eventually I decided to actually take the plunge and log into the character that I played the last time I was subscribed for a short while during Mists of Pandaria, my level 90 Worgen druid. I was pleasantly surprised to see that I had given her what I thought was actually a pretty cool transmog. The little mail icon next to my mini map kept telling me that I had mail from several NPCs but nothing actually showed in my mailbox, and generally getting to grips with all the UI changes that Blizzard made since the last time I played was pretty overwhelming.

Even the quest log looked totally different, making it so that you can't just look at your quests anymore without also having a giant map take up two third of your screen. Personally I thought that the general theme was that everything was too busy visually, with illustrations and icons and pop-ups for everything. I don't remember it being that bad last time I played. I chose some talents and killed a couple of mobs in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms (which is where my druid was parked) but the oppressive feeling of too much input didn't want to go away.

While flying around a bit, I accidentally went right into the local Horde base, where I quickly died to the guards and found myself flagged for PvP. I thought that wasn't a thing anymore with war mode?

Anyway, at that point I logged off again, to come back for Classic tomorrow I guess. I know coming back to an MMO after several years of absence is always going to be tough, but I honestly didn't expect things to feel that bad to me. It's an odd thing that the six years since Mists of Pandaria seem to have only widened the chasm between me and the game further, while slipping back into a gaming mode from almost fifteen years ago feels entirely comfortable. Maybe this is what it's like to get older, when you can remember things from twenty years ago as if they happened yesterday, but events from five years ago are barely more than a fuzzy memory.

What's in a name?

I know I've been talking a lot about Cataclysm as of late, so let's have a post focusing on the here and now for a change. The question that I'd like to talk about is: What the hell are some people thinking when they name their characters? It's something that I ask myself quite often, but the latest opportunity for me to wonder arose yesterday when I looked over my boyfriend's shoulder and saw him pugging Gundrak with "Lalapala" and "Pallytard". What's worse is that I looked them up on the armoury later and there were no less than twenty-one results for Lalapala and five different Pallytards. I then started to randomly search for what I thought were really stupid names and was alternately amused and horrified to find that yes, there are characters out there called "Imdumb" and "Phukoff".

Now, I guess that as someone who mainly plays on a roleplaying server I'm predisposed to be a bit of a name snob, but I'd like to think that I'm really not that bad. I understand that not everyone likes to get into the roleplaying mindset and work on coming up with something that someone in the World of Warcraft might actually have as a name. I can relate to the feeling of wanting to roll up a troll warrior right now but being unable to come up with a good name, so you just take a brief look at him and decide to call him Tuskinator. I may wince a little, but I won't make fun of you for being named Shammyheals or Moohoof. Tusky, Shammy and Moo at least make for decent nicknames.

But some names just make me want to strangle someone because of how stupid they are, like the aforementioned Lalapala and Pallytard. I mean, really? That's the best you could come up with? You want people to address you as "hey tard"?

Which kind of brings us to what I can only guess is the root of the problem: I think people who give their characters really stupid names, the kind that will be cause you actual annoyance and embarrassment to use, is that they don't think about the fact that what they are naming is their avatar. They look at the character as something completely isolated from themselves and go "yeah, I'll just name this little picture Lalapala". The thing is, no matter whether you're into roleplaying or not, that avatar and its name will be all that people see of you in the game, so for all intents and purposes it is you. So before you name your next character something silly on the fly, think about whether you would want to be addressed by that name day in, day out yourself, or whether you would really like having to call out things like "Phukoff, taunt now!" in a raid every week. Names are for life - or until you reroll or pay for a name change - so the least you could do is spare more than a few seconds of thought on them. Otherwise I fear for any children you might have one day...

If only NameScore was as popular as GearScore!

Adventures of a noobcow

I didn't think that I considered the daily emblem grind on my various alts a chore, since I still enjoy running instances despite of the repetition - but it's funny how quickly those emblems became (at least for now) uninteresting when I was suddenly presented with a fun-looking alternative way of spending my in-game time, also known as Tamarind's guild experiment. In other words, as soon as I read about it, I hopped over to Argent Dawn and created a little tauren shaman there to join Single Abstract Noun.

The guild, so far, feels like one of those unique social environments that you only seem to get on the internet - where people know each other yet don't, and it's mind-boggingly easy to have a good time with people who for all intents and purposes you don't really know, but you know that you all like WoW, and you know that you like to think and write about it, and you know that there are real people behind the avatars - and somehow that's enough.

It's also been a long time since I created a new alt, and even longer since I did so on a server where I didn't have any higher-level characters yet. As such I was quite surprised by a lot of things that I vaguely recalled skimming in recent patch notes but that I then didn't pay further attention to, like the new and improved tutorials for new players. I didn't need them of course but I couldn't be bothered to find the option to turn them off, plus I thought it was vaguely interesting to see what Blizzard had to say to new players these days. Most of their "tips" seem glaringly obvious to someone who's played for a while, and my boyfriend and I spent some time gently mocking some of the advice we received ("What, I can use the WASD keys to move while swimming too? Amazing!"), but I do think that they are a good addition for people truly new to the genre, and they tend to pop up at the appropriate moments. For example I got a warning that my bags were nearly full when I only had two or three free slots left, and another when they actually were full, advising me to see a vendor soon.

Another noticably useful change is the increased mana and health regeneration for low levels. I can actually move from one mob to the next without having to pause most of the time, and if I get in trouble by over-aggroing and find myself forced to run, I actually regenerate enough mana while running that I'll often be able to get one more spell off while running, which has saved my little shaman's life more than once already. It's easy to forget how difficult life can be at low levels, when you only have a two or three abilities in total and no cooldowns to use to compensate for mess-ups. The increased regen definitely helps though.

And finally... the neutral mobs! This was a funny issue that I saw get brought up by someone in guild chat literally every other hour (myself included). There has always been a bit of a "safe zone" around the spawning points for new characters, with the first and second level mobs in the area being neutral, so nobody ends up stumbling to their death before they've even figured out the movement controls. However, many of us didn't know that this "safe zone" had been expanded to include whole starter areas - which isn't a problem per se, but felt very strange when superimposed on stories that were originally written with hostile mobs in mind. Go slay those evil quillboar that threaten us! Except... they totally don't, they are minding their own business and bother no-one. In fact I felt pretty evil wandering into the middle of their village unharmed and then assassinating their leader. Aren't we supposed to be the good guys here? Other starter zones drew similarly bizarre pictures, with those magically transformed mobs in Eversong not actually harming anyone, and the Burning Blade being a bunch of nice chaps that are just fond of hanging out in caves in Durotar. One more thing for the "I hope Cataclysm will fix this" list, I guess!

Customisation and lack thereof

I did something unthinkable the other day: I signed up for another MMO, namely Champions Online. Now, I don't intend to start talking about it a lot, not least because I haven't actually played it enough yet to have much to say, but it has inspired me to talk about something WoW-related anyway, namely character customisation.

Champions is a game that allows for a metric crapton of customisation whenever you create a new character (with the potential for some pretty hilarious results). Other games offer pretty detailed character customisation as well, and often when I hear people talk about such games they make a comment about how WoW really fails in that area because everyone looks the same.

While I really enjoyed fiddling with all the options that Champions offers so far, I still feel the need to defend WoW in that regard. I mean, I wouldn't mind if female Tauren could have more than four different hairstyles, but at the same time it really doesn't really strike me as a huge problem that they don't.

The thing with very involved character creation screens of any kind is that they are a sort of mini-game of their own. You can easily spend half an hour or longer composing just the perfect character in there. It's a kind of artistic exercise: Can you transfer the image you have in your head onto the screen with the tools available to you?

But then you actually start playing... and it matters very little what eye colour you chose for your hero or what kind of belt they wear. Most of the time you won't even notice, since actually playing requires you to zoom out to a certain extent and pay attention to other things. Sure, when you zoom in to stand still and ogle at your creation it looks great, but how much time do you usually spend doing that?

As far as actual gameplay is concerned, giving your character a custom look only really serves two purposes: to make sure you're reasonably comfortable with what you're looking at (numerous are the tales of people who created characters and then deleted them again because they realised that there was something about them that they just couldn't stand to look at for longer periods of time), and to sufficiently distinguish yourself from everyone else so you and others can still recognise your character in a crowd.

Now, I admit the latter used to be a bit of a problem for druids, but this has been addressed with the different fur colours for feral forms and hopefully trees and moonkins will receive the same treatment eventually. Sure, there are only a handful of different colours, but how often do you realistically find yourself playing with more than four other druids fulfilling the same role as you?

Druid forms aside, I have to say that I can't recall ever meeting another character in WoW who looked exactly like one of mine. Sure, a lot will have the same hair style for example, but even with the limited options available, running into someone else with exactly the same face, skin colour, hair style and hair colour are fairly slim. Or maybe that's just me being biased because I mainly play a female troll who doesn't have that doe-eyed face and tiny tusks.

Also, let's not forget the huge customisation offered by armour! Admittedly a lot of people will go after the same pieces of armour at endgame, but unless you're playing on a server where every other guild clears the top raid content on a weekly basis, you're unlikely to run into many people who're actually wearing all the best-in-slot gear for their role. More likely most of them will have done a fair bit of mix-and-matching with whatever they happened to get their hands on, giving each of them a unique look.

Yes, being able to give your character a very unique look right from the start is pretty cool as well, but very much disconnected from the quality of actual gameplay. In fact, character creation that is too involved can even become a bit of a barrier when you first start playing. My first Champion still sits at level two, not because I didn't enjoy what I've seen of the game so far, but because it took me so long to get her looks just right that I found myself with very little time left to actually play before I had to log off again. Comparatively my first ever character on WoW didn't take more than few minutes to make (even with me being a complete noob at the time, reading all the class descriptions and so on), leaving me with much more time for my first play session - and by the time I was level six I was hooked.