Levelling Through Southern Pandaria

Sorry, I couldn't think of a nice alliterative title including "Valley of the Four Winds" and/or "Krasarang Wilds", so I gave up on that particular little game.

While I had received some recommendations about which zones to prioritise in terms of story, my pet tank and I had decided long ago that we were going to do ALL THE QUESTS anyway, so we might as well just follow the natural zone progression as it happened.

This meant that our next stop after the Jade Forest was the Valley of the Four Winds. It's quite a beautiful and serene zone, though the wildlife messed with my head a little. Previously the game conditioned me to expect certain mobs to be hostile and others to be neutral, but in Pandaria those expectations all seem to get turned on their heads, as I keep running into things like peaceful crocolisks while getting mauled by swarms of aggressive moths and hostile birds.

Anyway, the quests were reasonably entertaining but honestly a bit dull at the start. Help this farmer. Now help that farmer. Now help another farmer. Didn't I already do some variation of all of this in Elwynn Forest back in 2006? Chen Stormstout and his niece Li Li made for amusing company though, and things picked up as we progressed through the zone.

Then we got to Halfhill and learned about Pandaren cooking. Yikes! I like cooking, but this whole system with the different ways seems unnecessarily complicated to me. Then again, maybe I'm just jaded, knowing full well that this is another convoluted system whose only purpose seems to be to provide busywork for one expansion and which will be swept under the rug and circumvented completely once Warlords of Draenor comes out.

Also, we got a farm! I thought that I had read somewhere that you couldn't unlock your personal farm until level ninety, but either Blizzard has changed that since then or I misread and what I was reading was only referring to some features being unavailable until max level. We just kind of stumbled across the whole thing by accident as we were doing the regular quests around Halfhill, and it turned out to be pretty fun. The farm is one of those features that I'd heard nothing but good things about, and I can already tell that it really is a fun little mini-game.

Once we hit level eighty-eight, we also decided to try and duo the first two Pandaria dungeons, Temple of the Jade Serpent and Stormstout Brewery. The former didn't give us any major trouble, but where duoing instances had started to feel kind of slow in Cata, doing so in Pandaria was like wading through molasses. Just killing the Sha of Doubt must have taken us something like fifteen minutes. Stormstout Brewery was even worse, and some of the trash leading up to the last boss in that one gave us serious trouble as well. We eventually managed to down it with a mixture of kiting and quick corpse-running, but when the last boss wiped us within a minute with some bubble ability, we were too dejected to keep trying. We just did it again through the dungeon finder, and with some proper dps it was a piece of cake - though funnily enough, the boss didn't blow any bubbles at all that time around.

After the Valley of the Four Winds we continued to Karasang Karasarang Krasarang Wilds, which ended up being kind of the opposite of the previous zone for me in so far as I thought that the first hub was really fun, but after that it quickly devolved into a series of boring kill-and-gather quests. The saving grace came in the form of a quest that sent us back to the Valley at the end and which I thought was just a breadcrumb to direct you there in case you had gone to Krasarang first, but actually it turned out to be a full-blown little chain that tied up the stories of both zones in one epic finale. That was some seriously good stuff.

After the Stormstout Brewery we gave up on trying to duo any more dungeons while levelling and just queued for some randoms, which got us into both Shadow-Pan Monastery and Gate of the Setting Sun so far. Fortunately they were easy enough to understand even without having done the lead-up quests to them. We also found them reasonably challenging in our gear and actually wiped once in each.

We hit ninety after having completed three zones worth of quests as well as five Pandaria dungeons, just as we were entering Kun-Lai Summit. In a way 85-90 took us longer than I had expected, but looking at our pre-Panaria levelling for comparison, our levelling speed didn't actually slow down that much. I guess I just expected the last five levels to have been nerfed even more than they have, knowing how Blizzard does these things...

Interlude: Duoing Old Raids

It's not all about levelling.

Unlike me, my pet tank was never a raider when he played WoW previously, so he expressed interest in going back to look at some old raids once we were of a high enough level to do them with just the two of us. It's been a pretty interesting experience so far, with him getting to see many zones for the first time and me getting to indulge in nostalgia by boring him with stories of just how much of a pain in the arse this or that boss used to be back in the day. Here's a list of which raids we've done so far in order of raid progression, which is not necessarily the order in which we actually completed them:

Molten Bore Core: Okay, this was one was pretty boring as it was "before my time" so to speak (as I didn't start raiding until Burning Crusade) and I didn't have a lot of stories to tell beyond some vague memories of the Hydraxian Waterlords and needing special water to douse the flaming runes. We did have some fun failing at killing Core Hound packs simultaneously for a while, but other than that it was a pretty boring-looking instance with fairly boring bosses.

Blackwing Lair: The transition from Molten Core to Blackwing Lair always fascinates me because it's just such a complete change of pace in terms of how complicated the mechanics are; I can only imagine how much of a pain that must have been for raiders back in the day. Razorgore is pretty much the perfect boss to duo these days though, with one person using the orb and the other killing everything. He also gave us our first pet drop, an Unscathed Egg, which was won by me.

Vaelastrasz was the first boss to give us trouble, as we first tried him at level eighty-one or so and found that we couldn't get him down before he cast Burning Adrenaline twice, thus killing both of us. With proper cooldown usage we eventually managed to down him anyway, as I cast a quick battle res on my tank after he died, so that he was still alive when the boss finally keeled over. When we came back a second time at eighty-six, Vael didn't even get a single Adrenaline cast off before going down.

During our first visit we were also stopped dead by Ebonroc, as we couldn't outdamage his self-healing and my pet tank wasn't keen on trying a possibly long and drawn-out tank swapping strategy with me in bear form. Again, once we came back at eighty-six he gave us no problems whatsoever, and all the bosses after him also fell in quick succession.

Karazhan: Not much to say about this one other than that it was very easy. After all the trouble I remembered having trying to solo the chess event, I was grateful to have another person to help with keeping the king out of the fire though. Pet Tank also commented that the trash looked like it must have been a nightmare back in the day.

Gruul's & Magtheridon's Lair: These were also fairly boring once we sufficiently overpowered them, though it was interesting to note that High King Maulgar and his posse, as well as Mag's trash could still rack up a significant amount of damage due to the sheer amount of effects and debuffs they've got going on.

Serpentshrine Cavern: Ahh, a raid that was much beloved by me in Burning Crusade, and not just because of the mad end fight! The first five bosses gave us no real trouble, except for Karathress' minions being a bit of a pain when they were all piled up on top of each other with all their different effects and abilities (similar to the Maulgar fight). Vashj on the other hand was going to be a different kettle of fish (pun intended). I had a hunch that they had removed the tainted core's ability to root you, but other than that I wasn't sure whether the fight had been nerfed significantly in terms of mechanics, and the answer seemed to be no. Our first attempt went hilariously badly as I was atrocious at killing the regular elementals and chasing down the tainted ones before they despawned, so by the time we finally freed Vashj herself she was up to eighty stacks of empowerment. I was impressed that it still took us a little while to die! On our second attempt things went much more smoothly, but we then wiped in phase three as Pet Tank kept getting stunned in puddles of green goo and I couldn't provide him with enough healing as feral. After I went resto for our third try, we managed to overcome that obstacle too (and incidentally, Moonfire spam is actually not a bad way of killing the elementals either).

The Eye: After the trouble we had with Vashj, I knew that Kael wasn't going to be a slouch either, and I was right. The other three bosses were once again easy enough, and Solarian even dropped a little voidwalker pet that was won by my pet tank. Just like back in the day, Kael started off easy enough as well, but the phase with all the advisors up at once was just a giant mess. With only two people to eat all the various debuffs, we were basically in a state of constantly being punted around the room while stunned, disoriented, feared and on fire all at the same time, which soon led to our demise. For our next attempt I respecced resto once again and made sure to loot and equip the Staff of Disintegration to at least save us from some of all the disruptive effects - which was fine until phase four, when Kael started mind-controlling me over and over again to heal him and made me get up to all kinds of shenanigans, which once again led to a wipe. I wasn't sure whether there was any way of getting around that other than going in solo, but fortunately I found a video online that showed that simple line of sight prevents the mind control, so I just spent most of that phase standing behind a pillar, which eventually led us to victory.

Anyone got an idea up to what level old raids will be solo-/duoable once we are ninety? I'm guessing that some Cata bosses will be manageable, but probably not all of them...

Jolly in Jade Forest

(Sorry, I've been having way too much fun with alliterative post titles lately.)

So, shortly after hitting level eighty-five, our Worgen duo was off to Pandaria, which was finally going to be new content for both of us. The expansion didn't exactly make the best first impression, considering that the continent's loading screen is possibly the ugliest thing ever (seriously, who wants to look at these Mogu things all the time?), but the Jade Forest itself drew us in quite quickly.

We're both the sort of player who likes to go off the rails every now and then, so we had fun right away by sitting down on a rock and fishing in the middle of a war zone, which promptly rewarded us with some quest items which we're apparently supposed to take to another, higher-level zone. Speaking of random fun, I was also very pleased to see the increased attention that has been given to rare mobs, both by making them more interesting to fight and making them visible on the mini-map, so they are easier to spot even without add-ons. We ran into two at our level, as well as into several Zandalari warscouts. We knew that it was probably a bad idea to engage the latter, seeing how they were five levels higher than us, but we were too curious not to at least give it a try. Let's just say that we went splat very quickly - though we also vowed to come back when we're higher level to get some revenge.

The actual quests in the area were sufficiently fun and varied, though I really wish that Blizzard would take a leaf out of SWTOR's book and make questing in a group less of a hassle. It wasn't too bad in Jade Forest at least, but there just doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to whether certain quest drops and updates are shared or not, and "picking things up from the ground" type quests are always a pain because the game doesn't let you share loot from the ground, ever.

The new quest reward system took some getting used to as well. At first I missed the option of getting to choose between several different items, even if most of them probably wouldn't have been useful for my class, but that feeling quickly went away as I was happy to just watch the upgrades roll in. The one thing I didn't like, and more importantly, which I absolutely do not understand, is how some quests will allow you to choose between rewards for different specs but most of them will only show you the item for your current one. Having to switch specs before handing in a quest every time I want a piece for my off-spec just feels extremely clunky.

My impression of the Jade Forest story can probably be summed up as: pandas aren't so bad, but my faction kind of sucks. I was never a rabid hater of the pandaren, but I wasn't all that keen on them either when they were first announced. Travelling around Jade Forest however, I found interacting with the panda NPCs quite enjoyable, as they were whimsical and funny without being over the top. They also didn't seem to scare easily - I was most amused by a quest to free some trapped miners, who then just went on to talk about how "they were just lying down - under rocks, obviously" or how they'd have to tell their children about how exciting the whole experience had been.

The few Alliance-centric quests were generally a lot less impressive however. Some of the NPCs were likable and amusing, but on the whole it seems to me that the Alliance is following the Horde's example of becoming more and more aggressive and militaristic in a way that feels off-putting and strangely modern, which is not particularly fitting for the setting in my personal opinion. Yes, WoW has never really been high fantasy and has always had steampunk influences, but when your introduction to the zone consists of machine-gunning down orcs from a helicopter, I kind of feel like I've fired up the wrong game.

The one bright influence on the Alliance story was Anduin, whom I already loved in Cata and who just continues to be adorable and amusing in his priestly ways. My favourite bit was the cut scene where he mind-controlled a friendly NPC to create a distraction. Genius! It always bugs me when NPCs are portrayed as completely different from player characters in what they can and can't do, so it's nice to see the writers make good use of abilities that you would expect a priest to have when working on Anduin's scenes.

The one thing I'm not so sure about is that the zone still felt very linear, which would be a problem for replayability, just as it was in Cata. The first two hubs at least felt heavily railroaded, though the map opened up a lot after that and we were given the option to do a variety of sub-zones in a different order. There was still an overarching story to the area however, so I'm not sure whether all that choice was just an illusion and you still need to do everything to be able to witness the zone's climatic event, or whether the side-quests are genuinely non-essential.

Cruising Through Cata

Up until level eighty, our levelling experience was mostly a pleasant nostalgia trip, even if there were some disappointments along the way. Cataclysm was going to be a slightly different matter however, as it was the expansion that originally led to both of us quitting the game.

"Which zone(s) are we going to do?" I asked. "Not that we have much of a choice... but I'm still feeling burnt out on pretty much all of them. With the way Cata questing worked, you had to do at least part of each zone to unlock all the portals, reputations etc., and with all the alts I had, I must have done most of them half a dozen times in total."

"Hey, I only did them once each," replied my pet tank, "and I hated them the first time."

We eventually agreed on doing Mount Hyjal in full, plus whatever intros we needed to do to unlock at least the portals to the other four zones, which fortunately wasn't too much. Mount Hyjal wasn't too painful either - though the loot we got from completing the whole thing certainly helped. All throughout Outland and Northrend we had struggled to keep our gear up to date, due to a mix of weird and now outdated gear itemisation and the devs seemingly "forgetting" about certain classes and specs when it came to quest rewards and dungeon drops. After a full tour of Mount Hyjal on the other hand I finally had a level-appropriate piece of gear for both of my specs in every single slot for the first time in a long time.

Once we'd acquired a few quest rewards to boost our stats, we set out to two-man Blackrock Caverns. It went very smoothly once again, more so than I expected... but it also felt quite slow. After eighty levels of all of our abilities being way overpowered for their purpose (it was telling when we duelled in Northrend once and my tanking friend literally one-shot me with a Shield Slam), health pools were finally starting to scale and it took a while to chew through things with no dps. So we decided to brave the dungeon finder for the first time since Sunken Temple to speed things up. (The promise of justice points for doing a random helped as well.)

It went reasonably well and we ended up running randoms for a large chunk of our Cata levelling stretch. We met two bad apples in total, a mage and a death knight who both had a tendency to charge ahead and make suicidal pulls when people weren't ready, but everyone else seemed nice enough, and if not chatty, then at least co-operative. In Vortex Pinnacle pet tank had to unexpectedly go AFK at one point, and when I said in chat not to worry because our tank would be back soon, the dps immediately asked whether he was my pet tank, which made me laugh. In Halls of Origination we ended up with a group where pretty much everyone said that they'd only just come back to the game recently and were still traumatised by Cata heroics.

In the end, the five levels flew by even more quickly than either of the previous expansions, and while we were grateful in a way, it also made keeping our professions up to date even more of a pain than usual, with seventy-five skill points crammed into only five levels. We hit eighty-five while doing the intro to Twilight Highlands, which led to the rather odd combination of us getting the Pandaria intro cut scene about Anduin having gone missing at the same time as we were escorting him around Stormwind. I also thought I'd briefly jump into Tol Barad for nostalgia's sake and was booted off the PvP island for being "too low level". What the hell? I take it they raised it to level ninety then or something? Rather jarring to be excluded from that now when it used to be level eighty-five content.

Anyway, so much for Cata. Expect first impressions of Pandaria soon!

Wrapping Up Wrath

After we burned through the entirety of Burning Crusade's level range in about two days, I should have known that Wrath wouldn't take very long either. I couldn't quite believe it though, because somehow I still remembered seventy to eighty as this massive slog, and I figured that Wrath of the Lich King wouldn't have quite as many dungeons to keep us busy either.

In truth, it only took us another two days or so to get through that stretch of content as well, and the only thing that felt slow was moving across Northrend. It's still huge, and neither of us were able to afford fast flying yet, which meant that transportation was a bit of a drag. Still, when we weren't trying to get from Howling Fjord to Boring Borean Tundra and back, we were making swift progress. Quest-wise we only did Howling Fjord and about two thirds of Sholazar Basin; the rest of our XP came from gathering experience and two-manning dungeons - and while there were fewer of them, there were still enough for us not to need to repeat anything.

Initially I was a bit disappointed that we still didn't seem to have any trouble two-manning things. Wrath instances were never particularly hard, but I recalled the normal ones being at least a little bit of a challenge initially, especially when you were coming into them with sub-par gear. But no, even with mid-level Outlands gear, the two of us cleared everything up to Drak'tharon Keep with no problems.

Old Kingdom was the biggest disappointment to me personally, though not because of the difficulty. First off, they redesigned the quests to guide you straight past the optional boss, à la Gnomeregan. Not just that though, they also removed the little bonus quest you used to be able to get in the cave with the mushrooms. Mustn't reward people for straying off the main path, oh no! It was a funny quest too: if I recall correctly, you gathered all these "interesting" looking samples from the elementals and then the Nerubian you handed them to gave you a bit of an odd look because they were essentially elemental poop and worthless. The worst thing was the final boss though, as they changed the insanity mobs into generic red blobs that didn't seem to have any abilities whatsoever! Was that mechanic really that confusing as it was? Killing lookalikes of your party members was what made that fight fun! Le sigh.

When we hit seventy-five halfway through Drak'tharon Keep, I put a Glyph of the Treant into my third minor glyph slot and spent the rest of the instance bouncing around like a loony. It was so nice to be an ugly little tree again! I still remember the "save the trees" parade I observed at the end of Wrath. And I have to admit that making it a minor glyph is actually a great solution, as you can keep the look if you want it, or drop out whenever you feel like it, without incurring any practical penalties either way.

Gundrak was the first dungeon where we ran into a genuine challenge, as we couldn't kill the first boss and his adds fast enough before they cocooned both of us and we got hopelessly overwhelmed. Eventually we succeeded by having me switch to my feral spec and going for a quick burn before he even had a chance to summon any adds.

In Halls of Stone we had a funny moment when I DCed and died during the Brann fight, and thanks to talents and self-healing, pet tank managed to stay alive long enough for me to not only come back online but also run all the way back into the room where he was fighting. During the NPC conversation afterwards I also had the embarrassing realisation that I've been spelling vrykul wrong for a whole five years - for some reason I always thought that the r and y were the other way round ("vyrkul").

The Oculus was the next instance that turned out to be a major challenge, as our gear was crappy and the drakes only had the absolute minimum amount of health. After a couple of failed attempts on Eregos we eventually managed to get him down by having pet tank circle-kite him on a red drake, spamming his main ability to do damage and get rid of the whelps, and occasionally using his dodge (especially whenever the boss enraged). Meanwhile I sat on top of the boss on a green drake and alternated between focusing on dpsing him and casting heals on the red drake as needed. With the kiting the damage on the drakes was manageable, though it was a very long and slow fight with no bronze drakes to do proper dps.

Trial of the Champion was also pretty tough, and not just because the jousting was quite a drag with only two people. Argent Confessor Paletress did absolutely nasty damage, especially to me, since she does a lot of non-aggro-based attacks and I was the only target that wasn't the tank. I'm not sure I would have been able to survive being feared around and smited as much had I been playing any other healing class, without the druid's heals over time ticking away whenever I was incapacitated.

The ICC five-mans were interesting as well. Again, the bosses in there had a lot more mechanics than previous ones, and I basically had to deal with everything at once since there was nobody else to do so. I always had to kill my soul fragment on my own on Bronjahm; I always had mirrored soul on the Devourer of Souls. On the last boss of Pit of Saron, I was almost constantly incapacitated or transferring damage and healing to the boss, which made for a very long and touch-and-go encounter. Halls of Reflection actually defeated us initially, as we didn't quite have the dps to make the fourth wall, but we came back once we had upgraded our gear a little and made it without problems after that.

We were level eighty-one by the time we moved on into Cata content.

Burning through the Burning Crusade

After taking a bit of a break over Christmas, our Worgen duo is back on the levelling track. Having done a round of all the Blackrock instances meant that we entered Outland about halfway through level sixty. We then left for Northrend just after hitting seventy-one, and after only about two days or so of playing (though we did admittedly binge-play quite a bit during those days).

Questing in Hellfire Peninsula was indeed quite a break from the rhythm we had got used to in the revamped old world, with its very linear "get two or three quests at a time" formula. While there were still some mini quest chains with two or three follow-ups that needed to be done in order - generally speaking, the world was our oyster. I was strangely delighted to see a dozen quests or more in my log at once, and the whole map of the area lit up by quest markers. It was a little overwhelming, but also liberating. We had the freedom to do whatever we wanted, in whatever order we wanted to! Of course this also had the side effect that we had the freedom to make "mistakes" by doing things in an inefficient manner, such as by going into certain sub-zones before we actually had all the available quests for that particular area. I didn't find it overly annoying though; mostly I was just slapping myself on the head and telling myself that I should have known better, seeing how I had done all of this before (even if it was quite some time ago now).

As an aside, we were surprised to find that cross-realm zones had turned Hellfire Peninsula into a hotbed of PvP activity, due to that quest to capture the fortifications. Nothing like level ?? death knights one-shotting innocently flagged questers before you've even had a chance to realise what happened. Some of them also flew into Honor Hold to gank the quest givers there and then do a little teabagging dance on them while all the people actually trying to level stood around /facepalming. It was funny to me in so far as I have a screenshot from circa 2007 of Hordies raiding Honor Hold and killing our quest givers, so the whole thing certainly brought back memories. However, at least the invaders had to put up a fight back then. It's less fun when they literally have fifty times as much health as anyone or anything in the area and are just ganking out of boredom.

We were sixty-three by the time we finished all the quests in Hellfire and decided to set out to duo some instances next. Every time I set foot into an Outland dungeon it strikes me just how formative those BC years have clearly been for me, because I instantly remember all the difficulties we used to have in each instance, the tricky pulls, which mobs had disruptive abilities and needed to be crowd-controlled. Yet every time I'm also disappointed by how easy those very same dungeons are nowadays, even when you're two-manning them. Somehow the lesson of "that's just how it is these days" never seems to stick.

One thing I did kind of like was what they've done with the quest givers. I knew in theory that they moved all the instance quest givers inside the actual dungeons some time in Cata, but I hadn't actually done any instances beyond the level sixty ones since then, so all the changes from Hellfire onwards were new to me. Basically they seem to have added some quests to dungeons that didn't have many to make sure that there would be a roughly even amount in each instance, and they changed the story and quest givers to make the whole experience more coherent if dungeons are the only thing you're doing. In some way that's sad I guess, considering that many of the Outlands dungeon quests were very intertwined with the story of the outside world, but to really get the whole context you needed to do both loads of quests as well as all the dungeons, which - let's be realistic - is just not happening these days, not with how quickly the levels fly by and the convenience of the dungeon finder. Considering that harsh reality, it made sense to edit some storylines out of the quests and just focus them on the quest givers that are actually there in the instance. And there is at least some internal consistency now. For example you save Naturalist Bite in the Slave Pens (well, in theory you do, assuming you don't let him die in the naga attack like we did...) and he then shows up as a quest giver in the Underbog and the Steamvault, so even if you've done nothing but dungeons there is some sense of recognition and progression.

After a couple of instance runs we continued our questing in Zangarmarsh. This is where I have to admit that my TBC nostalgia took a bit of a nosedive. In Hellfire I had felt liberated from the linearity of Cataclysm-style questing... but Zangarmarsh reminded me that, for all the progress the Outlands quests demonstrated from Vanilla questing, they still weren't without their flaws. Too much running back and forth all over the map, too many quests to kill ten rats or gather five boar livers with little variety to spice things up. When we finally finished the zone, I was pretty tired of Outlands questing and ready to just go the rest of the way via duoing dungeons. Which we did, as they gave more than enough XP, and since Outland has so many instances we never had to repeat anything either.

Somewhat disappointed by how easy things were, we continually worked our way up from doing dungeons a little below our level, to ones the same level, to ones up to three levels above us. By that point things did actually get moderately challenging, but mostly because any mobs that my pet tank didn't maintain solid aggro on would grind me into the dirt before I could even blink. Still, duoing Black Morass at sixty-eight for example was pretty fun as we rushed from one portal to the next, remembering just how challenging it used to be back in the day to control all the little adds.

We finished our tour of Outlands with a round of Isle of Quel'Danas dailies, after having done all of two zones worth of quests and all the normal mode dungeons once, all within the span of two days or so. It pains me to think of how busy this whole expansion used to keep us, and how it's reduced to barely a blink during levelling time now... but at the same time things like the tedium I felt in Zangarmarsh show that there is no going back to some things even for those of us with cases of severe nostalgia.

Oh, and I really wish they'd make the Shattrath cooking and fishing dailies available at level sixty. That "must be level seventy" restriction is very out of touch with the way the game works now, only giving people access to something that is effectively levelling content just as they are leaving for the next expansion.

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).