Little Moments

It was Thursday evening and I was in Undercity trying to get ready for Naxx. To be honest, I was supposed to be ready already, as I'd logged out at Light's Hope Chapel in preparation for the raid, but then I realised at the last moment that I'd forgotten something and had to fly back to Undercity to retrieve it.

As I was flitting around the central area surrounding the bank, I noticed a low level character emoting /wave at me. I didn't recognise the name, but I figured it might be an alt of someone I knew, so I politely /waved back, not really thinking anything of it.

As I continued my running around, trying to get my act together, I noticed that the lowbie had done a /kneel where I'd just stood a moment ago. Was he... trying to kneel in front of me? Why? Was he roleplaying a beggar?

Several thoughts wrestled for my attention in my mind. The Pyrewood cluster isn't officially an RP server, but as a former RP server refugee, it still delights me whenever I see people with more of a roleplaying mindset. Then again, I'm generally not too keen on people begging strangers for money or boosts - though my response does kind of depend on my mood and how exactly they're going about it.

I walked back to him and quickly inspected the character. He was an unguilded level 10 rogue, dressed in nothing but some grey and white rags - definitely looking like a genuinely new player. "You look kind of poor," I commented in /say, before opening a trade window, handing him one gold, and then once again returning to the task of finding all my stuff.

This is when I noticed that my whisper window was flashing. I've separated whispers from the rest of my chat so I don't miss any messages scrolling by during the announcement spam that happens during raids, but what happens in practice is that I often miss my whisper window flashing instead and don't immediately see direct messages when I first get them. I'll usually see them eventually, but it might be much later.

In this case, I found two whispers from the little rogue. First: "Huhu, do you have 5 silver for me, that I can learn how to fight with a sword?" And then: "OMG, thank you very much!" I had a good chuckle and responded that I hadn't even seen his whisper; he'd just been too good at RPing being poor. "This is something I hear very often 😑," he replied. Finally, I told him to go forth to train how to stab things, and he promised to do his best.

I just loved this little encounter because situations like these are the sort of thing you just don't get in more modern MMOs. They have other parts that are fun, sure, but random community interactions like these are usually lacking.

Though I did wonder whether I had somehow placed a mark on my head now, as literally the next day, a level 38 from another guild whispered me to ask whether I was up for donating to his personal fund for his first mount. I gave him five gold. Is it all the Naxx gear that makes me look rich?

In totally unrelated news, except that it's also an example of a "little moment" I guess, we've got a new guild on the server that advertises as follows: "Are you a boomer? Have kids? A job? Big cock? Then <Quitting In A Month> is the guild for you. We've got an honest name to match our realistic expectations. Join us and be welcomed into a casual guild where you'll get some free rose tinted glasses." For obvious reasons, I'd love it if they actually stuck around.

Into the Unknown

I could join you... but I won't.
Some look to raid here, but others don't.
There's a thousand reasons I shouldn't log in today,
should ignore your whispers, which I wish would go away!

Oh-oh-oh.

You're not my friends, you're just temptation in my ear!
And if I liked you - which I don't! - I'm spoken for I fear.
Everyone I love's already with me in SWTOR;
I'm sorry, raider sirens, but I really don't need more.
I've had my adventures, I don't need something new.
I'm afraid of what I'm risking if I go with you

Into the unknown!
Into the unknown!
Into the unknown!

What do you want? 'Cause you've been keeping me awake...
Are you here to nag me 'til I make a big mistake?
Or are you just some people who play a lot like me?
Who can tell just what a great fit our union would be?
Every day's a little harder as the urge inside me grows
You just seem to know there's part of me that longs to go 

Into the unknown!
Into the unknown!
Into the unknown!

Wait, what? That's it? That was somewhat less exciting than I expected... guess I've beaten the game now?

I suppose that means the part where I get a cool new mount and find my hidden inner power has to wait until another time.

Zalazane's Fall vs. Operation: Gnomeregan

So I want to talk about the world event that started with the latest patch, partly to simply record my thoughts on the matter so I'll be able to remember them later, but also to share them with others. This post will be pretty spoilerish, so if you haven't participated in Zalazane's Fall or Operation: Gnomeregan yet and want to be surprised once you do the associated quests, don't read any further.

I started off with Zalazane's Fall since I mainly play Horde and my main is a troll as well. They also happen to be, if not my single favourite race, then at least tied for first place with the tauren. I also really like Vol'jin and hate how he always seems to get treated as nothing more than Thrall's appendix, so this event had me pretty thrilled. I even put on a set of roleplaying gear before I went to Sen'jin, something I hadn't done in a while.

The first quest for the trolls has you collecting frog critters and imbuing them with magic at the local shaman's sentry totem. I can only assume that this was meant to be a nod to shaman players and their love/hate relationship with what's undoubtedly one of the least useful abilities in all of WoW. That made me grin. You then get to ride a bat and "deploy" the magic frogs on the islands to work as spies. Frog-bombing... I thought it was funny.

Meanwhile the local captain also sends you to Razor Hill to gather some troll volunteers for the cause. I was childishly delighted by the fact that the NPC followers I collected were clever enough to mount and dismount in accordance with what I was doing.

Back in Sen'jin you get a quest that imbues you with a tiger spirit, which makes you look like a sort of were-tiger and allows you to walk on water. In this form you discover a hidden troll druid on the Isles who agrees to join your cause. One of my guildies complained about this, saying that he thought it was a "lame" way to introduce troll druids. I'm a bit undecided - I liked that Blizzard bothered to give them a lore introduction at all, but does this mean that these druids won't join the Cenarion Circle? Since their shapeshifting was apparently learned elsewhere... would be a bit of a shame.

Finally you were supposed to consult the spirits for support, but I hadn't even figured out what I was supposed to do for that quest when I already got a "completed" message. Apparently the point is just to trigger some NPC talking, but he was just finishing up from someone else starting it and I got credit automatically. Oh well.

And then came the actual battle: it was a lot like the Battle for the Undercity, which is a quest that I consider overrated, as I mentioned before. I have to give credit where credit is due though and admit that I liked this quest better, and not just because it's about trolls. I think the main thing that made a difference for me is that due to this being a limited-time event, everyone is doing it at once and you're likely to almost always have quite a lot of people around. This means that everything dies quite quickly, so the event doesn't take as ridiculously long as the Undercity battle, and being surrounded by lots of other players generally makes the whole thing feel more fun and like a real battle (as opposed to some NPCs soloing everything while you can pick your nose).

That said, I still didn't feel like I was making a meaningful contribution, especially as a healer. I was actually trying to heal people at first, but with the massive survival buff nobody needed it anyway. And throwing piddly smites at zombies just didn't feel very satisfying.

Eventually I decided to just lean back, run along and try to enjoy the story being told. There were considerable NPC walls of text (though they were fully voice-acted also, which I found commendable), and those are always a mixed bag. I mean, I was absolutely willing to get into it and tore up a little when Vol'jin emphasised that he was asking the help of the spirits only for his tribe, not himself, but other players interjecting with random comments about how bored they were (one guy felt the need to yell "BLA BLA BLA" for example) was rather off-putting. And this is with Earthen Ring supposedly being a roleplaying server! It was rather shameful.

Still, overall I enjoyed the experience and I'm looking forward to seeing what the Echo Isles will look like in Cataclysm, fully taken back so to speak. Operation: Gnomeregan had a lot to live up to.

I started the Alliance version of the event with a slight sense of embarrassment: the letter in my mailbox told me to help the gnomes in Ironforge and immediately got annoyed when I couldn't instantly figure out where in Ironforge the quest givers were. Where are my easymode quest markers to show me where to go? /cough. The quest starts in Tinker Town, which makes sense of course.

The gnomes start off with a recruiting quest like the one for the trolls, except that, being gnomes, they use technology to "convince" people to help out - and typical for gnome technology, it doesn't always do what it's supposed to do. One of my potential recruits got turned into a rabbit for example. It made me laugh. This trend continued when the next quest sent me to participate in "brutal and rigorous" gnome training, which consisted of things like emoting /cheer at the drill sergeant in unison.

Gnomes being gnomes, all the rest of their quests were about doing something or other with their machinery: testing ejection seats, controls and weapons of their tanks. Nothing special but not boring either. There was also a "bombing" quest to measure the radiation coming out of Gnomeregan's vents. Gnomer has vents? Since when?

Finally you're supposed to test some drafts of a speech for Mekkatorque, which is again pretty amusing, as some of them are quite silly. Then you deliver the final speech to the High Tinker near Gnomer and get ready for the Alliance version of the second Battle for the Undercity.

Now, I kind of liked that this one felt more fast-paced as there was less NPC chatter going on, and the messages you did get from Thermaplugg were pretty amusing. However, it did have one big disadvantage as it bugged out just as we were about to go underground; the High Tinker just stood at the entrance for ten minutes or so until he finally reset and anyone with good sense suddenly had to make a run for their life, being faced with respawned elite mobs and no invincibility buff. If one raging player who apparently experienced this before was to be believed, it's caused by people running down into the tunnel too early. I don't know if that's true, but there you go.

On the second attempt I managed to complete the event, but the ending was a bit disappointing in a way. Unlike the trolls, the gnomes don't actually get to kill their big bad, and Mekkatorque's pride in having taken back the surface feels hollow, considering that said area only contained a couple of buildings with leper gnomes in them. I can understand Blizzard wanting to keep Thermaplugg around so Gnomeregan can remain an instance, but couldn't they have allowed the gnomes to retake most of the city and at least push him back into deeper tunnels or something? As it is I feel kind of sorry for the gnomes; they definitely got the short end of the stick here (no pun intended), only being able to retake a really small area while their archenemy continues to hold most of the city and in fact managed to take the radiation levels in it to new heights.

All in all I think I liked the Horde version better, but that's probably largely due to my racial bias and the annoying bug in the Alliance version. I also think that the trolls tell a more engaging story, but I do have to give the gnomes credit for making me laugh. What did you think of these quests?

Account-wide achievements: a different perspective

Larísa made an interesting post earlier today about why she thinks that account-wide achievements (a feature that Blizzard has at least hinted at as something that they might look into in the future) are "a terrible idea". I was originally going to reply in a comment, but then I thought that it would just go on and on and that I might as well make a whole post of my own about it.

Basically, I disagree with Larísa on this.

She argues that for example seeing a level one Kingslayer running around would be very immersion-breaking, and that the whole notion of wanting account-wide achievements doesn't seem to be based on anything but a desire to show off to as many people as possible.

I have to say that I found the immersion argument more surprising than anything else, because for me achievements themselves are one of the most immersion-breaking things in the game as it is. Nothing screams "this is a game" like a big golden badge with some witty phrase popping up in the middle of your screen while you're going about your business in the world. The way achievements are recorded afterwards has no connection to the in-game world either, it's just a tab of information accessible on your action bar. Ditto for titles really... seeing "the Kingslayer" next to someone's name can only be considered immersion-breaking if you're also roleplaying that everyone has their name floating above their head, otherwise you wouldn't know anyway.

For me achievements have always been directed at the player, not at the character, because they don't even exist in-character. Sure, you could have your toon talk about that time she faced the Lich King, but that's not really dependent on actually having any record of it, is it? You might as well talk about some completely made-up adventure. Unless you treat your achievements as some kind of magical diary that you carry around in your back pocket and that records things like that one time you fell off the Scryer's Tier while completely smashed... but even so it would require you to make things up that aren't actually supported by the game. Achievements are simply not part of the world, they are something to look at for the players behind it.

With that said, I think it would only be logical if they were actually tied to the account instead of the individual character. I'm not saying we have to severe the connection to the characters altogether, since as Larísa correctly pointed out, doing a fight as a healer can be very different from doing it as melee dps for example. You could have account-wide achievements and still have a note saying something like "completed on: character X", or simply have two layers of achievements, individual character and accout-wide.

Larísa refers to an account-wide achievement system as a "fraud", yet at the same time she cheers for one of her commenters when said commenter says that she likes the way the current system allows her to impress people who think her alt is a noob because it doesn't show up as having any great achievements. Isn't that fraudulent, giving the impression that you know nothing so people won't expect as much from you? I think if anything, an account-wide achievement system would be a bit more honest, letting us know at a glance what kind of player we're dealing with: experienced, new, raider, hardcore PvPer or whatever.

As for the argument that people just want account-wide achievements to show off... erm, of course they do, what else is the point of having achievements at all? Larísa refers to them as "public record or diary", but I think public is the keyword here. They are meant to be shown off. I don't need achievements to remember my greatest moments in the game myself, they are purely there so others can easily see them as well. So what exactly is wrong with wanting them to be as easily accessible and widely visible as possible?

The only downside I see in account-wide achievements is that they would remove one of the incentives to go through old content again. Part of the fun of levelling alts is that rush of fast progression, steady improvement and feeling that you're achieving something (regardless of whether you get a golden badge for it or not). Similarly having to unlock each achievement separately for all of your alts can give you a reason to do a certain bit of content again even if you wouldn't do so on your main. But then, as I said above, having account-wide achievements wouldn't necessarily mean having to abolish character achievements altogether, so there is room for compromise.

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.