No Guild Housing for Me, I Guess

Housing has arrived in modern WoW, something Blizzard Watch referred to as "the biggest week for Warcraft since 2004". My feeds are filled with screenshots of some admittedly pretty creative houses. Yet strangely... I feel nothing. Except maybe some slight jealousy that people are so clearly excited for something that simply seems to do nothing for me.

The thing that had me the most intrigued about WoW's version of housing was the promise of guild neighbourhoods and endeavours, as the things I read about those things reignited fond memories of tending to our guild stronghold in Neverwinter for me. That not all of these features are part of the early access is fair enough, but unfortunately I also learned that a guild neighbourhood will require ten continuously active players to be maintained, or else it will be closed down.

It's not entirely clear to me how "active" will be defined in this context, as Blizzard has understandably been cagey about restrictions that could generate any negative press, but it's clear that it won't work like creating a guild, where you just need ten people to sign the charter at the beginning and then everyone but one person can leave and the guild still remains.

Our little guild only has seven active members right now, and while we could probably coax a few friends of friends into moving an alt over to make up the numbers, I wouldn't trust those players to remain whatever definition of "active" is required, and opening a guild neighbourhood just to have it get shut down the moment that tenth player stops playing would just be too depressing. I understand that for logistical reasons there probably had to be some limitations to avoid spinning up too many empty neighbourhoods, but I don't have to like this particular implementation.

So that immediately dampened my enthusiasm, but then everything else about the new housing system also left me weirdly cold. I did the tutorial, bought my first house in a random public neighbourhood, spent a few thousand gold on vendor decos, placed a few of them, and then logged out.

I actually went back to my first post about SWTOR's housing to see whether I felt similarly aimless and confused back when that came out over a decade ago but no, I was actually significantly more excited back then, so I'm not sure what it is about WoW's housing that just seems to miss the mark for me right now. I knew I was never a huge housing enthusiast, but based on how I feel about it in SWTOR, I expected it to speak to me in some way?

The best guess I can hazard is that for me, housing is less about building and decorating and more about a sense of place. Re-reading the above blog post about SWTOR, I had to chuckle at this little tidbit that I'd completely forgotten about: "I did unlock all the rooms on Coruscant though, and promptly felt the urge to throw myself off the balcony just to see if it was possible or if I'd get stopped by invisible walls. (The answer is, I died.) Since it was advertised in the description as offering freedom from safety restrictions, I just had to know!"

I've seen people enthusiastic about the way things work in WoW make comparisons to the Sims, and as someone who went through her own Sims phase about twenty years ago now, building and setting up a house was always my least favourite part of that experience. I just wanted my Sims to have a comfortable space to have their adventures in.

WoW's housing feels like it's purely optimised for builders, with very little sense of immersion and worldliness. Every house is a Tardis whose inside bears zero resemblance to its outside. And while the "neighbourhood" is a space, I was shocked to find that it's a space in limbo. What I mean by that is that I knew it was going to be instanced, but I thought it was going to be instanced the way something like Warsong Gulch is instanced - which still has a marked location on the map, and the instance just allows us to have a little more space on the inside of the instance than there should strictly be available on the world map.

From all the screenshots I'd seen of Founder's Point, the Alliance neighbourhood, I was convinced that it would have a similar sort of entrance somewhere around where Westfall, Duskwood and Elwynn Forest meet, so that people could pretend to have a house somewhere on the edge of either of those zones. But no, Founder's Point is just an island in the middle of nowhere, like Exile's Reach, devoid of any real connection to the rest of the map and only accessible by portal. I hate that, even if I'm fairly sure that it's the kind of thing that won't even register with most players. I thought I was going to be able to plop down a house at the edge of Elwynn Forest. I don't care about living on some random island.

I also thought that we were going to get a second hearthstone, one for an inn as before and one for our new home. Instead there's just a "teleport to plot" button in the housing window. It's convenient, but nobody cares about how any of this is supposed to fit in with the rest of the world.

Lumber, the new crafting reagent to make housing decos, is also weird. I feel like woodcutting should really have been a profession, even if it was a secondary one. Instead you have to buy an axe from one specific vendor, and then this item works as a tracker for lumber while in your bag, independent of the normal tracking UI. Also, all the wood you gather is warbound, so you can't even trade any of it. Why is regular old lumber of all things bound to me? It's just weird.

Finally, maybe the complete lack of utility of housing right now is another thing that's putting me off. SWTOR's strongholds were initially required to access the legacy cargo hold, though I'm not sure whether that's still a requirement now that there are some of those on the fleet as well. Again, I get that the Blizzard devs wanted to avoid another WoD situation where everyone just sits in their garrison all day, but I'd say it's possible that they've perhaps been a bit too aggressive in their efforts to avoid giving housing any utility whatsoever. Would being able to have a mailbox at your door hurt anyone for example?

I'm not writing the whole feature off entirely at this point - it's very possible that I'll loot a decoration one day that'll make me want to go back to my house to proudly place it on my wall, or maybe I'll suddenly discover enthusiasm for crafting decorations, but right now it just feels like a lot of... stuff with zero appeal to me, which is strange - and a bit sad to be honest, as I'd love to have fun along with everyone else. I know it's easy to say "housing just isn't for everyone" but... it has been for me in some contexts, so the fact that nothing about this particular implementation has clicked for me in this first week has been surprising to me.

The Toxicity of Damage Meters

I've been thinking about damage meters lately, for three different reasons.

One is that I found it interesting how in a recent post by Kaylriene about toxicity in the WoW and FFXIV communities, a lot of the bad behaviour he talked about seemed to at least be partially inspired by people's reading of damage meters. The second reason is that part of the feeling that my Classic guild became too competitive for me to continue progression raiding was due to people suddenly talking about damage meters a lot. Thirdly, in our little retail levelling group, one of my guildies decided to install a damage meter and started commenting on people's dps, and I was surprised by how much that instantly irked me.

First off, to get the obvious out of the way first, obviously damage meters are not inherently evil, and in harder content they are a useful tool to diagnose problems. The problem I have with them is their seeming ubiquity in WoW and the way players use them to turn absolutely everything into a competition, no matter the circumstances. (When I returned to WoW two years ago, I never bothered to install a damage meter addon myself by the way.)

When I expressed some of my disappointment in the constant damage meter talk during raids on the guild Discord prior to stepping back from progression, I got some pushback along the lines of: "But people are only saying nice things, such as congratulating the top dps [after every single trash pull...], what's wrong with that?" At which point I disengaged from that conversation because trying to get people out of that box was clearly getting too deep for random guild Discord chatter, but the question behind it has continued to bounce around in my head ever since.

It's not that I don't get where they're coming from. I, too, used to be that person who unthinkingly had their damage meter open all the time. There's a post on this blog from back in Cataclysm when I mused about how odd it felt to do some dungeons without it after a patch had briefly broken my addon. Back then my ultimate conclusion was that while I kind of enjoyed the experience of not having to worry about anyone's numbers, harder content simply made it mandatory, as wiping all the time without understanding what's going on isn't exactly fun either.

The thing is, since then I've spent the last ten years playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, which doesn't have universal combat logging, and found that to be an improvement in pretty much every way. The thing is - and while I initially found this system kind of clunky I actually think it's genius now - SWTOR allows personal combat logging, so if you care that much about your own numbers, you can see them, but you can't see anyone else's without their explicit permission. The latter requires you all to log into a third party program together, which is absolutely what we do when we do harder progression content and need to see in detail what's happening. But that random pug you decided to do? Has no idea about your actual numbers, and neither do you about theirs, and I'm glad because not everything has to be a bloody competition. (Also, it means that if there's a problem, everyone has to work together to try and solve it instead of simply trying to identify the weakest link according to the meter and kicking them, but that's just a bonus really.)

There is nothing wrong with competition, I can be quite competitive myself under certain circumstances, but there's a time and a place for it. There's nothing wrong with running a race, but if I invite you to a stroll in the park, you starting a stopwatch and constantly bringing up our current walking speed is going to feel odd at the very least! At worst, loudly comparing and rating people in various categories of your choice is generally considered quite rude.

And let's be clear here: A lot of MMO content is definitely not designed to be competitive. Sure, you can absolutely do a Maraudon speed run to see who can clear the place the fastest, and if I see that sort of thing on YouTube I genuinely admire the effort, but that doesn't mean that every Maraudon run ever should be a speed run from then on and that people who just want to see the sights and kill bosses are in the wrong.

And that is my problem with talking about damage meters, in a nutshell. It shifts the conversation away from the stuff that I enjoy, the stuff that we all got into the game for in the first place. We choose the framework through which we view a game like WoW, and fixating on damage meters is a choice to turn the game into a competition, even in content that isn't meant to be. It doesn't matter to me if your constant talk about "pumping" is positive or negative, because I reject the whole idea that we should be spending our evenings measuring who's got the biggest coloured bar to begin with. I log into an MMO for the explorative aspect of solo play and the fun of grouping.

I know that different people have different priorities, but I do find it frustrating that we seem to have reached a point where many WoW players seem to struggle to even conceive of a world where we simply don't think about things like dps very much, and don't understand how it can be a burden to be unable to opt out of that, to be publicly rated every moment you're grouped whether you want to or not, whether you're struggling to hit a dps check in a raid or merely breezing through a lowbie dungeon.

And I do think it's telling that for the dozens of different addon functionalities that Blizzard has incorporated into the base game over time, live damage meters are something they have refused to touch with a bargepole to this day. I think it's because they know that this functionality is something that actually makes the game worse for many people, and if things like dps numbers were literally visible to everyone, all the time, by default, it would make for a horrible experience. Just something to think about next time you feel like giving unsolicited commentary about someone's position on your meter addon I guess.

A Quiet Month & Arathi Basin

As you may have been able to deduce from the fact that I haven't actually posted about anything Classic in over a month, I haven't been playing it very much recently. It's not that I lost interest in the game or anything, but as I've learned in the past, I'm just not really able to devote time to more than two MMORPGs at a time, even in these exceptional times of having extra gaming hours available. I may still try to play as many as three simultaneously, but ultimately something always slides onto the back burner, and for the past month this has been WoW.

Right now its fortunes seem to be on the rise again however, as I recently finished the latest campaign in Neverwinter and don't currently feel motivated to spend all that much time on alts there, meaning that my playtime in that is likely to drop off again soon. Plus with all the (sometimes quite hectic) running of group content I've been doing in SWTOR, logging on my hunter to just grind some mobs in Tanaris has been positively relaxing in comparison.

That said, the only really noteworthy thing to report about my Classic activity in the past month or so has been that I tried out Arathi Basin. My hunter was approaching the end of level 49, and this seemed like a good time to have another go at a bit of midbie PvP, especially since I had fond memories of AB.

I'll admit that I was thoroughly wrong about that one. Or as someone in my most recent instance pug said in a completely different context: "Your opposite faction memories are bleeding through." Just like the map design of the original Alterac Valley quite clearly favoured the Alliance, classic AB gives an advantage to the Horde because of how much easier it is to defend the farm-blacksmith-lumbermill triangle than the corresponding Alliance mirror. In fact, I did have flashbacks to happier days in Cataclysm and how my rated battleground team would stand poised at the crossroads between the three bases to rush to the defence of any of them at a moment's notice.

This is not Cataclysm though, and I'm not playing Horde. Or in other words: With Alliance already having a reputation for being rubbish at PvP in Classic, having that situation exacerbated by the map design just resulted in a complete shitshow. We didn't simply lose all three matches that I played, but got completely roflstomped every single time. I think at one point we were even five-capped. It was... not very fun and left me with no desire to queue for AB again.

For all the things I love about Classic, I really don't think that PvP is one of its strong points, and I think I'll continue to scratch that particular itch in SWTOR instead. In Azeroth, I'll be back to chilling out while grinding bug parts.

My Raiding History, Part 4: Cataclysm & SWTOR

As explained in my last post, my guild didn't have the best start into Cataclysm, what with an enforced downsizing to ten-man due to a mass exodus of core players. That said, the new expansion started off pretty well from my point of view despite of that.

The old world revamp provided a great incentive to level new alts, and the new, harder dungeons actually gave people a reason to form guild groups again instead of simply hitting the dungeon finder queue button as soon as they logged in. The first tier of raiding was really good as well, consisting of no less than three different raid instances and offering up what I considered a decent challenge. (I seem to remember Blizzard saying later on that Cataclysm's normal raids were tuned close to what later became heroic mode - there was no real "entry level" at the time.) I also got into rated battlegrounds and really came to love them.

That said, all was not well. There was a certain malaise in the air around the expansion, with everyone citing different reasons for their discontent. Looking back at this blog, I was surprised to find just how well I articulated my annoyance with Blizzard's forced obsolescence model as early as February 2011. It got worse when they decided by the end of June that everyone should be done with tier eleven now and swung the nerf bat hard. Re-reading that last post, it sounds a lot less negative than I remember feeling at the time, but even so I got people in the comments telling me that my guild was just bad if we hadn't managed to clear the tier within six months and that it was time to move on. I remember finding that whole attitude - both from Blizzard and other players - incredibly patronising and annoying.

Firelands was another decent raid tier... but somehow the passion wasn't there for me anymore. I think I got closest to figuring out what was wrong in this post when I concluded that I was still having fun, but couldn't help but feel that based on past experiences, it should be possible to have way more fun than I was having. In hindsight I think it was too many small factors finally coming together: holy priests not being in a great place performance-wise, little useful loot for my class/spec in Firelands, missing some of the camaraderie I used to have with guildies that left (I liked most of the ones that remained a lot as well, but it just wasn't the same with the much smaller numbers), and feeling beat down by Blizzard's constant push to finish new content on their schedule instead of on my own. In September that year, I decided to call it quits on raiding.

I continued to play WoW for a few more months however, with my rated battleground team more or less taking the place that raiding used to occupy in my evenings. At the end of November Blizzard released Dragon Soul, the last raid of Cataclysm, right alongside the new raid finder feature, which I tried and rated kind of entertaining in an odd way but I also concluded that it had little to do with raiding in the traditional sense. The most obvious expression of this was when I saw Deathwing die and felt nothing.

In December, Star Wars: The Old Republic came out, the first new MMO to release since I'd started playing WoW that interested me enough to try it. Like with Warcraft back in the day, I didn't get into the game with the intention to raid (though unlike back then, I did know what raids were this time around and had a general idea of what I was getting into), but the small, friendly guild that included some friends that had formerly been in my WoW guild too (before they stopped playing) soon had me hyped, and when I actually joined my first raid soon afterwards, I had an absolute blast.

In fact, I was loving the endgame in general, despite of the game's general focus on alt play. Not just that - I loved it so much that when my friendly social guild fell apart a few months later, I actually set out to find a new home just so that I would be able to continue to raid, and found it in Twin Suns Squadron - where I eventually ended up meeting my husband, who actually runs the guild these days, and where we are still raiding eight years later.

Both the guild and the game have undergone a lot of changes throughout those years (with the biggest one probably being the introduction of level sync in 2015, which made all raids valid endgame content, even the oldest ones), but in a way it's felt much more stable than anything I ever had in WoW. I think in a way that has served to crystallise just what it is that still attracts me to raiding after all these years.

Throughout my raiding career in WoW, I often found myself wondering just what it was that really mattered to me. When Blizzard seemingly got raid difficulty "wrong" it frustrated me at times, but did that mean that I was looking for a different challenge level than they were providing? Lack of useful gear drops for my class/spec annoyed me, but did that mean that I was only in it for the gear?

I think SWTOR has taught me that above all else, I raid for the social aspect. I guess it should have been a hint that my best times raiding in WoW were when my guild was also at its strongest and most unified. Concerns about things like progression and loot distracted me, but I think ultimately even those things were only really an issue for me in so far as they affected the guild's social cohesion.

SWTOR has little to offer to anyone looking for constant novelty when it comes to raiding, as they only release a new operation once every couple of years at the current rate. Challenge levels are (relatively) consistent across the board (though Bioware has been pushing the envelope somewhat with more recent releases) and are limited by the game not supporting add-ons, so that no fight can throw more at you than a human brain can easily process. For several years now, raids haven't even been the best place to get gear anymore either, just one more supplementary source of it.

So while you do get people that look for novelty, challenge or gear from raiding in SWTOR, they tend to fade in and out relatively quickly as it doesn't take long to satisfy their particular itch and then there is nothing left for them. The ones who stick with it are those that just enjoy the experience of hanging out and cracking stupid jokes with a group of friends on a Sunday evening, and don't necessarily mind that the boss fight they're wiping on has been in the game for seven years already. After all, if it ever gets a bit too much, we can always go and fight something else for a few weeks, what with all the raids being valid endgame.

It's been an interesting journey to say the least.

Update: There's a part 5 now!

Dungeon Milestones

Something that I've been thinking about while levelling my alts in Classic is just how important dungeons are to me, and have been ever since I first encountered them as a concept back in 2005. I mean, I've known for a long time that I like this sort of small group content, but I'd never really paused to think about just how much it influences the way I play, both in WoW and in other MMOs that I've played over the years and that have similar types of content.

To summarise it in a simple example: I can't imagine levelling an Alliance character and not taking them to the Deadmines around level 20. Running that place is just way too enjoyable and rewarding, so that while levelling any character through their teens the goal of "running the Deadmines" serves as a beacon for me the entire time: get x more levels from regular quests, start gathering up the various dungeon quests around level 18, then start looking for a group while doing some more regular quests in the area.

Then I rinse and repeat the whole process for every single dungeon in the game (more or less). In a way it makes me much more resilient against the drop-off in interest that many people seem to experience in the forties as quests become more sparse, as there's no lack of dungeons at any level range, always giving me something interesting to work towards.

You might wonder how well this system works in other MMOs that I don't already know inside out the way I do Classic - after all, I can't really use dungeons to plan my levelling when I don't know what dungeons there are, right? This is correct, but at the same time modern MMOs tend to make it much easier to get into this content than Classic does. Usually you can simply open a dedicated interface that will show you what group content is available at your level and you can just queue up for automated group formation, without having to spend time manually looking for a group or hunting down dungeon quests.

That said, my "obsession" with dungeons has its own pitfalls too. It's just a different sort of routine and has its own vulnerabilities to getting disrupted that can cause my progression to stall or even halt completely.

For example, many modern MMOs are designed around the idea that you don't actually need to do a lot of the available content to get to the level cap - which is fine in principle, but feels bad to me when the available "content chunks" don't slot into each other in an organic manner. For example I was not pleased when in post-Cataclysm WoW, basically doing any dungeon whatsoever would quickly cause you to outlevel whatever zone you were questing in, making it hard to meaningfully combine the two types of content. During my first stint in Neverwinter, one of the reasons I lost interest was that I accidentally outlevelled a skirmish while doing some quests, and there was no way of going back to see that content once you'd left the eligible level bracket. It may seem a bit silly to get upset over something like that, but the point is that it can really disrupt my flow and therefore lessen my enjoyment of the game.

Even in Classic itself I can run into issues when I feel that I "ought to" be doing a certain dungeon but it's hard to get a group for it for example. What got me thinking about this whole thing was that after doing BFD, the Stockades and Gnomer on my nelf hunter, I thought about Razorfen Kraul as my next potential destination and how hard it was going to be to find a group for that as Alliance - not to mention that I was enjoying a blast of nostalgia doing more or less all the quests in Ashenvale at the time. So I made the conscious decision to give myself "permission" to skip that one, and any later ones as well if I just don't feel like doing them at the time.

It does require a conscious effort for me to think like that though, because my default is simply to always make a beeline for the next piece of group content.

Classic Halloween

It's Hallow's End in World of Warcraft, and I can't help but notice how quaint the celebrations are in Classic. There are some seasonal decorations in places, such as the giant pumpkin at the entrance to the Undercity, but they are not as ubiquitous and over the top as in the live game.

There are a couple of simple quests to do that don't reward anything too exciting, some temporary buffs to pick up, and you can bob apples or trick or treat at innkeepers for a silly temporary costume or some free food, with the latter being something that's actually not to be sniffed at in Classic.

Overall though, there's no pressure or urgency, no achievements or cosmetics to grind. The event's only real purpose seems to be to have a bit of fun and set a certain mood, mostly through the temporary costume buffs filling the cities with ghosts, pirates and leper gnomes.

It's quite a stark contrast to how most modern MMOs handle seasonal festivals, and I like it. Similarly to how people complain about many public holidays being too commercialised these days, focused on selling expensive chocolate in seasonal packaging above all else, I dislike it when MMOs use a seasonal event as an excuse to make people do more of the same stuff they already do all year anyway (usually grind special currencies and cosmetics), but with a "limited time only" urgency message attached just to get you to log in every day.

The events I don't mind so much and even like tend to be the ones where some unusual activities are on offer that I happen to enjoy and don't usually get to partake in, such as racing on ice in Neverwinter's winter festival or herding chickens during the same game's summer festival, because I like doing them for the sheer fun of it and for a change of pace.

I get that big and noisy events can serve as an incentive for inactive players to come back, but if I'm already playing your game and enjoying it, trying to sell me on it again while I'm already happily playing what's there tends to feel a bit like overkill.

Vanilla WoW on Hold

Just in case anyone has been wondering why I haven't posted an update on here in over a month, I wanted to give a brief explanation for that. Basically, I found that it's impossible for me to play three MMOs at the same time, at least while also maintaining a level of involvement that I'm comfortable with. (That is to say that I'm not someone who's happy to play any MMO for two hours a week.) So something had to give, and WoW was the natural choice since it was "only" a solo project. In both SWTOR and Neverwinter I have other people coaxing me to log in, so those games couldn't be dropped as easily. (Well, that and SWTOR has been my main game for three and a half years now... it was more of a case of WoW vs. Neverwinter really.)

That doesn't mean that I've lost interest in the project or have completely given up on it. Based on experience I would expect my pet tank's interest in Neverwinter to decrease again after the summer, at which point I might be able to give that game a break and get back on the road to Stranglethorn Vale instead.

It's quiet... oh so quiet...

One of the things I've found the most striking since returning to WoW is how extremely quiet the game feels. The server we rolled on is consistently marked as having a medium population, one that's supposedly heavily lopsided in favour of our chosen faction, but I'm just not seeing it.

And no, I'm not saying that the game is dying - save your breath. Subscriptions have dropped by several million since I last played, which most certainly had an impact on how busy the in-game world appears, but there is more to it.

The Old Republic has probably spoiled me for what I consider a high population. Ever since they consolidated everything into a handful of "mega servers", there isn't an area in game that's completely quiet, ever. Each faction's fleet (the major hub) consistently has 300+ players puttering around at any time of day. Doesn't matter which planet you go to (except Quesh maybe, since it's so small...), at least on my home server there'll always be between 100 and 200 people out and about on each.

Meanwhile, in WoW I do a /who in Stormwind and it shows that aside from me, there are only seven other people online in my faction's capital. Ho hum. If that's a medium population, I'm not sure I want to know what a low pop server is like! It shows on the auction house as well, where even cheaply priced staples like herbs or cloth expire without anyone buying them every so often, and prices bounce like ping pong balls because supply and demand are extremely inconsistent and easily thrown out of whack by a single guy levelling a new profession (or that's what it feels like anyway).

Things aren't that much better out in the open world. Thanks to cross-realm zones, we do see other players about, but not that many. No two of them seem to share the same realm tag either, indicating that a lot of different servers have to be squished together this way to create the impression of any kind of activity. It also feels like the number of player characters that we run into (regardless of server) keeps dropping the further we advance in levels, CRZ or no CRZ.

I reckon that the active players that are out there are all hidden well out of sight of our lowbie characters, presumably chilling around some new portal hub in Pandaland (feel free to enlighten me). Flying mounts are also good at making people invisible to those who are ground-bound, and it's only every now and then when someone suddenly swoops out of the sky in front of you to "ninja" a gathering node you were making your way towards that you realise that there's potential for a whole additional layer of players traversing the skies above you and never interacting with you in any way.

It's certainly a far cry from the bustling MMO world that welcomed me with people all around me seven years ago (and back then the game actually had fewer subs than it does now).

My nominations for the Piggie Awards 2011

Don't know what the Piggies are? Go read this. Only a few more days left to get nominations in too, so if you were planning to add yours and haven't done so yet, it's time to get cracking! In fact, I haven't seen any other nominations posts yet this year, but maybe people are just sending them in by e-mail (I hope).

The Melting Pot is trying to spice things up a bit this year by accepting nominations for all MMOs, not just WoW, which sounds like a sweet idea in theory, but I'm a bit concerned how well it will work out in practice - after all WoW is still by far the biggest game out there, so it's likely to have an edge simply due to the amount of players that are familiar with it. I'm not sure how much enthusiasm there will be for including other MMOs in nominations. Not to mention that I'm not sure all MMOs are equally comparable... but we'll see how it works out. Myself, I'll mostly stick to WoW since that's what I know, and maybe make the odd point about SWTOR here or there where it strikes me as relevant.

Best raid instance

This one is easy for me and my vote goes hands down to Blackwing Descent. It didn't really have anything to truly amaze like other great raid instances of the past, but it was definitely my favourite of Cataclysm's offerings. It recreated some of that old school Blackrock atmosphere, the difficulty was nicely tuned in my opinion and all the bosses were interesting in their own way.

Least successful raid instance

My first instinct is to say Firelands, simply because that seemed to be the raid where most people had something to complain about this year, whether it was the bosses being too dance-y, too hard, or too easy after the big nerf.

However, I've said in the past that the truly unsuccessful raids, in my opinion anyway, are not necessarily the ones that people complain about, but those that they don't even bother with. In that category I think the winner should be Throne of the Four Winds. It being an instance with only two bosses that felt kind of out of the way of everywhere, even with portals to Uldum available in the cities, and crappy loot with random stats, I got the impression that few people ever went there once they had killed Al'akir... or even if they never killed him, they simply might've forgotten about it completely. (I know our raid group always scheduled raids for either Blackwing Descent or Bastion of Twilight in tier eleven, Throne was a complete afterthought that only came up whenever someone whined about wanting to go because they had never even seen a Conclave kill.)

Best small-group instance

I think Cataclysm has had some pretty nice five-mans in general, but this is where I'd like to give a vote to SWTOR's The Esseles, which I've seen people compare to the original Deadmines elsewhere - and it certainly gave me that same epic feeling that I got from the old Defias hideout back in the day.

Least successful small-group instance

Like with the least successful raid, this kind of depends on your definition of success. The Zuls got everyone riled up with their repetitive valor grind, but Halls of Origination sticks in my mind as "that instance where most people don't even want to bother killing half the bosses". A shame too.

Most longed for instance

I think the Dragon Soul five-mans were the most longed-for, simply because people wanted to have an excuse to get out of the Zulroics.

Silliest gold sink

Larísa gave this award to the Sparkle Pony last year, and in line with that I would give it to the Winged Guardian this year. The whole craze about store pets and mounts reminds me a lot of fashion trends in real life, which are something that I don't care for either.

Biggest game addition / improvement

I think the single biggest addition to WoW this year has without a doubt been the raid finder. However, since I'm still not convinced that this will actually be an improvement to the game in the long run, I'd nominate transmogrification instead - something nice that finally allows people to give their characters some individuality again, and there really is no downside.

In a more general sense, I think that SWTOR's more interactive quests and group dialogues have really made a difference to how people will perceive questing in the future.

Best quest

I can't think of a single quest that stood out above all others, but Silverpine Forest as a whole has been rewritten in a very compelling and interesting way.

Ugliest new piece of outfit

Probably hunter tier 11. There is trying to be creative and then there's trying to pass off a murloc suit as epic armour. Priest tier 11 with its shoulder bird baths was pretty awful as well though, especially since up until then priest sets had never been truly ugly.

Favourite non combat pet

I loved Mr. Grubbs and his silly bouncing when I picked him up in the Plaguelands while levelling new alts! Though an honourable mention has to go to the Lil' XT that was gifted to me by a guildie and that finally provided me with an easy way of getting rid of annoying train sets.

Most charming games company employee

I listened to a long interview with one of the people behind SWTOR the other day, but unfortunately I lost the link to it so I'm not even entirely sure what the guy's name was. I do think it was Daniel Erickson, the lead writer, and he sounded like an utterly charming fellow.

Best podcast

The Instance continues to amuse and entertain me at a level that is unparalleled by any other podcasts I've tried. I don't always agree with everything they are saying, but it's refreshing how the hosts always remain both positive and professional.

Most memorable blog post

Are 400 Pull Kills Good Design? Are They Fun? by Beru.

Most noticed blogger breakthrough

Stubborn from Sheep the Diamond. He made his entrance sneakily by leaving thoughtful comments all over the place at first, and if you then clicked on his name you'd find an even more thoughtful blog, written in an interesting and unique style.

Most solid content provider

Nils from Nils' Blog. He just can't stop talking, but I'm very grateful for that because it gives me new things to read all the time!

Most hugged blogger

Probably the Gold Queen after that horrible ordeal she went through one and a half months ago.

Best writing

I would give this one to Stubborn as well, because he really has a way with prose. I don't think I've read a single post of his that didn't make me crack a smile at a pun or unusual turn of phrase. We need more teachers in the blogosphere...

Biggest controversy

I always suck at remembering these for some reason, though I always follow them with interest while they are current. Probably the Mists of Pandaria announcement.

Most appreciated announcement

That SWTOR wouldn't launch with a dungeon finder... *cough*

MMORPG Company of the Year

I want to say Bioware, because regardless of how SWTOR turns out in the long term, they've delivered a very smooth launch for a highly anticipated and so far very fun game.

Most “Er… what?” moment in MMOs this year

The announcement of Mists of Pandaria.

People’s Choice: Blog Post

Same as above.

People’s Choice: Games Company

Same as above.

Since some people asked for it...

Any further thoughts I have on SWTOR will now go here. Enjoy!

Fair Warning: World of Star Wars

Like many people in the WoW blogosphere, I'm currently trying out Star Wars: The Old Republic. For me this is a big step though, because unlike many other bloggers, I've never really tried out any MMO other than WoW. To be honest, none of them ever looked interesting enough to me to make me want to play them, and none of them looked like worlds I'd want to immerse myself in. Observing various MMO launches over the years and seeing pretty much every single game go from the hyped up Next Big Thing to just another small fish in a big pond hasn't really enthused me towards trying something new either.

SWTOR has been different for me however. I wasn't interested in it at all initially, but the closer it came to release, the more I learned about it that had me really intrigued. Now I even ended up in the early access for preorders, and I'm positively hooked. People are already nitpicking about all kinds of little things, and I can't honestly say that they are wrong, but a lot of it strikes me as akin to criticising a painting for the brand of colours the artist used and completely missing the actual picture. I imagine that very few people ever quit their MMO of choice because the chat window wasn't in their favourite place or the crafting system felt a bit bloated. And TOR's big picture is great in my personal opinion. In fact, I'm very much reminded of WoW the way it was when I first started playing: a beautifully stylised world, vibrant and teeming with activity; general chat full of people looking for groups, answering questions and sharing their thoughts on the experience. Group content that can actually kill you; elites out in the world that you have to keep a watchful eye on. People bonding in guild groups where nobody minds if one member gets lost on the way and takes a while to actually arrive. And to spice things up, some comparatively minor new features like more interactive quests and companion crafting.

Anyway, before anyone feels sickened by my gushing, let it be said that I won't be doing any more blogging about TOR on here. This was always meant to be a blog about WoW, and that's what it's going to stay. I think I'll be happy just enjoying TOR "blindly" for a while, without overthinking any of it, but if I do eventually feel the urge to talk about it more, I'll make a new blog for that.

To be honest, I initially expected to cancel my WoW sub by the end of this month. I still think that it's a great game in many ways, but over the years it has changed too much for my taste - the only issue was that I wanted to continue playing an MMO and until now there wasn't anything that looked even remotely like a viable alternative to me.

The only "problem" that remains are that social ties are hard to sever. I still owe someone a Sulfuron Hammer for which I need to grind Molten Core trash every now and then. My rated battleground team is still ace. For these things alone I'll stay subscribed to WoW for now. But I expect that I'll be playing a lot less, and as a result this blog might become quiet as well, as I'll have nothing much to talk about.

In the meantime, I hope that we can all continue to have fun in the game(s) of our choice.

MMOs can really spoil you for single-player games

It's been quiet on here because I haven't been playing much, and as a consequence I haven't had a lot to say about my limited play time. On the plus side for me, this means that I've had time to do other things that I hadn't done in a while, such as play a single-player game, in this case Dragon Age II.

Without going into too much detail about it, I can say that I really enjoyed it. I was a bit wary of it at first because it had received some very mixed user reviews, but my worries were completely unfounded. I had a blast. I stayed up late several nights in a row just to play that little bit further. And when I finally completed it, I was happy to simply watch the credits roll by for a good ten minutes or so, just to allow the whole experience to sink in.

Even after I had finished my first playthrough, I still wasn't done. There were alternate progression paths to be explored! But more than anything, I felt an urge to connect with other people who had also enjoyed the game. I talked to friends who had played it, read reviews and sought out a bunch of forum threads that were discussing various aspects of the game. This was enjoyable for a while, but oddly enough it also diminished my desire to actually play again somewhat. I wanted to share my enthusiasm, but playing the game again effectively meant isolating myself.

At the end of the day, I can talk to other players about how they played the game all day long, but I can never actually meet their characters. We all play in our own little bubble worlds, and we can talk about how much fun it is but we can never actually interact while playing. And it's kind of scary just how much I miss the ability to share space.

Back before I got into WoW, The Sims 2 was my game of choice. I spent hours upon hours breeding funny-looking Sims, taking screenshots and making up stories. I was also a member of various communities and took part in a vivid exchange of ideas and information there. It was all I could have wanted from a game.

But then I started to play WoW and... in principle playing with my Sims was still as good as before, but I just could not stand playing completely on my own anymore, having to wait for the interaction to happen afterwards and on forums. In Dragon Age II I could briefly overcome this problem because I managed to really immerse myself in the story and wanted to see where it was going, no matter what. However, now that I know the ending I'm really longing for company again.

It's a bit of a shame because intellectually, I'm aware that single-player games can still offer great entertainment. And I would kind of like to play around with different settings and options. After having spent so much time playing an MMO however, the experience of just doing my own thing in my own lonely little world just feels a bit hollow these days.

Why we should have more class quests

On Saturday night I finally got lucky with the dungeon finder and managed to get into heroic Sethekk Halls on my Alliance druid. The run was a lot more fun than I've had in a five-man for some time, and I was pleased as punch to finally complete Vanquish the Raven God and acquire swift flight form. Despite of the difficulties I had with getting that last step of the quest done now that the level cap is at eighty, it was still very much worth doing and I can heartily recommend putting the effort in yourself if you've got a druid of the right level. It's definitely one of the best pieces of class-related content currently in the game.


The main thing that makes this quest line stand out to me over many others is the fact that it doesn't just take you to places you might not have seen before and present you with class-related lore, but that several of the individual quests are specifically tailored towards using druid class-abilities. To Catch A Sparrowhawk for example requires you to trap, not harm, a shy bird that will fly away from you if you get within its normal aggro range. For several classes that would be pretty much impossible, but a druid can use soothe animal to get close, switch to cat form and prowl, or simply make the bird hibernate.

The three "essence" quests are even better, with each one being designed to be completed in a different form. The first boss has low health but summons a lot of adds quickly, so the sturdy bear form has the best tools to deal with him. The second boss is a squishy caster with a decent amount of health, so trying to claw him to death quickly while in cat form works great. And finally, the third boss is extremely hard to fight in melee but very vulnerable to spells, so even if you're a feral druid your best bet is to stay in caster form, root and moonfire him. Oh, and did I mention that you have to dispel poisons and curses from yourself too? It's not nearly as hard as it used to be, but provided you do those quests at roughly at the right level you'll still have to engage your brain and learn how to play your class. And that's a good thing!

If anything it's a shame that druid players aren't presented with a quest like this much earlier. If people were already confronted with challenges like this at level twenty or thirty, it would really help those that are new to the class to get a better understanding of what the different specialisations are about and which style of play they enjoy the most. Nothing like valuable guidance for those truly new to the game, who might not even know that they are supposed to do research on different talent specs online. Not to mention that it's just plain fun!

Blizzard has said in the past that they don't want to make any more class quests because they don't like spending too much time on content that only a small portion of the player base will ever see. I understand that reasoning but at the same time I think that it's faulty. People used to complain about raiding not being accessible enough, which led Blizzard to change their raiding philosphy in this expansion and make sure that everyone could see everything, which I assume is what is influencing their stance on class quests as well. But nothing is stopping anyone from rolling an alt of another class! Providing some content that is unique to one class doesn't mean locking players out of that content, it means giving them an incentive to roll an alt of that class and see for themselves!

For comparison purposes, I mentioned playing Dragon Age: Origins recently. One of the things that I found most fascinating about the game the longer I played it were the many different choices you get to make on the way. The very basic core of the story about you becoming a hero and fighting the big bad remains the same, but a lot of other things are entirely up to you and how you decide to advance the story, who lives or dies, who becomes friend or foe, who gets to rule the kingdom in the end. However, this also means that you only see a limited portion of the game in a single playthrough - if you choose to kill an important character, you obviously can't see the ending that involves him being alive. Bioware didn't say, "oh well, we need to make a game where everyone can see everything in a single playthrough or else people won't like it" and were still successful. In fact, as soon as I completed the game I started up a new session with the intent of seeing how I could make events play out differently. Variety is the spice of (virtual) life!

I think Blizzard is really missing out on some great opportunities by neglecting class quests these days, both to teach players a little about how to play their class in-game and to give everyone more of an incentive to reroll and try out different classes.

Going from WoW to Dragon Age

I have a confession to make: I haven't been playing a lot of WoW in the past couple of days; instead I've been playing Dragon Age. This is unusal for me in so far as I never played a single-player roleplaying game before. Yep, you read that right. Before I got into WoW I used to play old school adventure games, real-time strategy games and The Sims, but never any RPGs. They looked very similar to action adventures to me, and I didn't like action adventures because they took the old school adventure games that I loved and slowly shifted their focus towards jumping, running and fighting, which was simply not something I wanted from the genre. The only reason I ended up getting Dragon Age was because Spinks raved about it when it first came out and I was intrigued by the things she posted.

After I finished playing with the extremely detailed character creator, I found that the game itself looked pleasantly familiar to a WoW player: I need to upgrade my gear, clicking on things that sparkle is useful, there's my health and my mana bar, warriors are the tough guys in plate, mages cast cone of cold and heal... wait, what? Healing mages? Well, since there are no priests or anything of the like, someone had to do it I guess.

The main difference between Dragon Age, or any single-player RPG I suppose, and a game like WoW is the shift of focus. A single-player game is all about the story: You need to go out and save the world, and everything you do is focused on making the next step necessary to achieve that goal. You gain levels on the way, upgrade your gear, learn some professions... but it all feels damn trivial in comparison. I mean, my main character is a herbalist and can make healing potions out of flowers she finds by the road, but considering the same potions drop off dead monsters like candy it feels pretty superfluous. Not to mention that there are no skill-ups for using your profession or anything like that.

Upgrading your gear is nice, but there don't seem to be all that many different options and it all kind of looks the same (boo realism). In WoW I get excited about gear upgrades; in Dragon Age the constant need to check whether what just dropped is better than what I already have before selling it all simply feels like a nuisance that stalls my story progression - though I guess the fact that I'm having to manage the outfits of a whole party at once isn't helping. (Are these boots an upgrade for my warrior? No? What about the other warrior?)

In contrast to that, a game like WoW has an overarching story too (like in the case of the current expansion the expedition to Northrend and battling the Lich King), but it's comparatively low-key. Most quests are only very tangentially related to the plot (at best), and a lot of things that are basically just "fluff" in single-player games are inflated to be full-blown, very time-consuming features that become a goal onto themselves, like gaining levels to be able to advance, skilling up professions or collecting all the best gear available.

Looking at it from that angle, I think I can understand why many people complain about a lot of aspects of WoW being too "grindy", if these people are used to the way these things work in single-player RPGs. Why do I have to waste so much time collecting all that gear if all I want to do is kill the Lich King?

Coming at it from the other end of the spectrum however, as someone who started with MMOs without ever having tried anything similar, it feels like the MMO way of requiring everything to take a lot of time is the normal way to go and anything else is lacking. After all, things like skilling up professions can be a mini-game of their own! It's all about perspective I guess.

Going from WoW to AD&D

A few weeks ago I ended up joining my boyfriend's Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying group. I'm having a blast so far, but it's also a kind of strange experience for a WoW player, because WoW was my first roleplaying game of any kind, so going back to one of its "ancestors" is both weird and enlightening.

Take the soloing vs. grouping debate for example. I'm guessing that most WoW players, even the really social ones, spend a fair amount of time playing alone, exploring, doing quests and so on. Solo roleplaying on the other hand simply doesn't exist. I mean, your character might temporarily get separated from the group, go off on a short side quest or whatever, but as a rule of thumb being in a group and messing around with your friends is what it's all about. If you spend extended amounts of time making up solo adventures for your character you're basically acting as a storyteller, but you're not playing.

The obvious reason why that doesn't work in an MMO like WoW is that you're going to encounter a lot of strangers, with whom you won't interact nearly as cordially as you do with your friends, so it's a completely different environment to begin with. Still, it does make you wonder what a game like WoW would be like if your first priority after creating your character was not to level up, but to join a party and get acquainted.

Also, character life cycles. In WoW, it's all about levelling up as quickly as possible to hit the cap, which is where a lot of the action happens. Some people might prefer to level more slowly and to create lots of alts, but gaining levels is still a major focus of the game even then. Also, once you've created a character, you never lose it unless you delete it. Death in game really doesn't mean anything but a minor temporary stat penalty.

In pen and paper D&D there is no hard level cap (though I guess in practice you probably won't go far beyond twenty), and levelling is just something that kind of happens on the side as you adventure. You'll want to have a minimum amount of levels and skills before you confront the big bad of the campaign, but your dungeon master will generally adjust the monsters you meet in such a way to be challenging and interesting to fight for the party regardless of your level.

Dying is pretty final... there is a spell to resurrect the dead, but it's designed in such a way that it's rarely feasible to use. On the plus side, since you're almost always grouped, there should always be a helpful party member nearby who'll try to save you if you get into really grave danger, and the DM's encounter design should ensure that you don't end up throwing yourself against opponents against whom you don't stand a chance to begin with.

Still, there's a pretty good chance that you'll lose a few party members throughout the campaign, but players are generally pretty laid back about this, because while you lose your character, it doesn't mean that you're out of the game. Generally you can just roll up a new character to replace your old one, and it will automatically start at a high enough level to be able to join the adventuring party.

Also, regardless of whether your character survives the adventure or not, there will always be an end to the story, at which point you'll shelve your little adventurer and create a new one for the next campaign. It's like a never-ending cycle of alt creation.

Once again, imagining such a scenario in WoW is pretty mind-boggling. Perma-death? Oh noes! Then again, you'd also have the ability to roll up a character at a higher level. Unfortunately it's quite obvious why such a system wouldn't work in a game where gaining levels and hitting the cap is largely the point of the game.

Another thing that really threw me for a loop in my first D&D session was the length of combat. Just playing out an encounter with a couple of monsters takes absolutely ages, as you have to decide on character actions for each round of combat and roll half a dozen dice to determine the outcome. The funny thing is that all of this more or less exists in WoW as well, it's all just calculated so quickly in the background that you can kill most things in a matter of seconds and then go "now what".

To "make up" for this you have travel in WoW, as you actually have to physically move your character from one point to another yourself all the time, even if some of it is automated by flight paths and the like. Compared to that, moving anywhere in a D&D game is instant. Oh sure, getting to the next town might take a couple of days in-game time, but if nothing of relevance happens during that time the DM will just say so and you can immediately continue at the point where you've already arrived at your destination.

In this case I can't actually say that I clearly prefer one solution over the other. Overly drawn-out combat sequences can get boring, but since you have to look at every detail in the process it also gives you a certain appreciation for things like a massive blow just missing your character, or one of your allies pulling off a particularly impressive maneuver. WoW's fast combat is missing that, but on the other hand it means that you're left with more time to admire the scenery and do other things (even if I guess that many players don't actually appreciate that).

Finally, the last big difference that really stood out to me was in regards to items. My current D&D character has a cloak which gives her plus two to charisma. Looking at this from the point of view of someone who's used to WoW's endgame numbers that's pretty lame, right? To make things worse, you can't have two items that give you the same stat bonus, so I couldn't have boots of charisma as well. Thinking of the massive single-stat stacking that's going on in WoW, that just makes me laugh.

Nonetheless good items are still highly coveted. It's just all on a much smaller scale, so even a small plus to a single stat can make a lot of difference. What really differentiates it from WoW is that you won't actually change your gear all that much throughout the adventure. It takes a massive backseat to other kinds of development.

Looking at all these differences, you can't help but wonder how a game like WoW ever got to where it is now. Who said that there had to be a hard level cap? Why did reaching that become the main goal and why was so much more content placed there than anywhere else? It's funny how we take a lot of these things for granted and accept them as necessary without even thinking about it.