The WoW Diary

I first heard about John Staats' WoW Diary when Wilhelm posted about its failed first run on Kickstarter. In what you would very much expect from a former Blizzard dev, Staats learned from his failure, iterated on his approach and tried again a few months later, this time achieving rousing success. His newfound marketing chops were through the roof, as I saw him guest on at least three different WoW podcasts to promote his book within the course of a couple of weeks, and that was in my own very limited sphere of influence. He was probably on a lot more.

I was tempted to chip in for a copy of my own back then but held off, just to regret it almost immediately. After everything I'd heard from Staats and about the book, I really wanted a copy, but I figured that I'd just have to wait until the public release on Amazon. I remembered to check back a couple of times but at no time was it marked as available yet.

Interestingly it was while I was visiting a friend's house and watching a YouTube video there without adblock on that I saw an ad for the book, immediately prompting me to go, "Oh, it's finally out?!", at which point I instantly went to Amazon and ordered my own copy. Unfortunately Amazon.co.uk only had the Kindle version available (and according to the author himself that won't change any time soon), but the US site also offered shipping to the UK so I went for that.

Product picture from Amazon.

Including shipping, I thought that the price of nearly £50 was pretty steep even for a big hardcover, but I can't say that I've regretted my purchase. It's not really one of those glossy coffee table books - while there are interesting images inside, they are mostly low-res screenshots and grainy, twenty-year-old photos - but the content was absolutely worth it to me.

Staats documents the development of WoW from 2000, when he joined Blizzard as a 3D environmental artist, to its launch in late 2004. The short chapters, sometimes only 1-2 pages long, attempt to document events in chronological order, though many tend to cast a spotlight on different aspects of the project that were going on simultaneously to an extent, such as zone design and creation of character models.

If there's one overarching lesson I came away with is that it's a minor miracle that WoW, or any MMO for that matter, has been made at all, considering how many different parts needed to be co-ordinated and required constant refinement and iteration until launch (and sometimes even afterwards). It really makes you respect the people involved all the more.

The subject of crunch - an uncomfortable discussion point in game industry circles in recent years - also came up somewhat to my surprise. While Staats made a point of saying that overtime was largely voluntary and driven by passion for the project, he does also admit that this wasn't always the case, and that other times people were just dispirited by the long hours required to hit some new deadline. I had thought that this sort of working environment was a recent trend brought on by corporate greed, but clearly practices like these have been part of game development for much, much longer.

Still, for the most part the book is quite cheerful and light-hearted, featuring amusing anecdotes about goings-on in at the then still quite small Blizzard offices and fascinating insights into why certain features of WoW came out the way they did. To think that all these years I could have avoided getting lost in Wailing Caverns by simply following the mushrooms!

The one slight criticism of the book I have is that the amount of name-dropping, while clearly meant to simply give credit where it's due, can sometimes be overwhelming, as it can be hard for the casual reader to remember the names of every dev and artist the author mentions throughout the book and then make sense of what it means when he says that so-and-so also worked on feature X.

That said, when you do know who he's talking about it's super interesting. I had to smile when he mentioned John Smedley and Brad McQuaid being nosy on more than one occasion, and I did a double-take when he mentioned someone called Michael Backus being part of the early quest team - the same guy who used to work at Bioware and whom I once interviewed on the subject of flashpoints.

I can heartily recommend this book to anyone who's a big fan of old-school World of Warcraft or the MMO genre in general. The insights it provides are quite amazing.

Strangers In The Night

I mentioned that I also have a mage alt now, and she was getting into the right level range for Wailing Caverns. I've also mentioned that I learned from experience that Wailing Caverns is full of annoying collect quests that can actually be a bit of a pain to do in a larger group, so that it's actually better to knock out as many as you can outside the instance itself.

On Friday night I returned to the outer caverns to farm more Deviate Hides and Wailing Essence, after successfully knocking off Serpentbloom and the 99-year-old port a few nights prior. I found that my mage could just about solo the elite mobs in the area but needed to eat and drink after every pull, and if anything went wrong even in the slightest - including but not limited to an additional mob joining in - I had to make a run for the exit.

As I was killing more of the reptiles near the entrance, a number of other players came past and there was the usual drive-by buffing and occasional assistance with mobs. (Based on the levels of some of the passers-by, we've already reached "I'll just boost you through with my main" territory, despite of the many at-level groups still running.)

I noted a level 22 undead priest wanding things to death nearby and inwardly shook my head a bit that he was even bothering - I know from experience that soloing elites as a priest is painfully slow, even once you're high enough level to make it possible. As it turns out, he was clearly having similar reservations about what he was doing, and after casting Renew on me after several of my kills in a row, he finally shuffled over and asked if I was farming quest drops too.

When I replied in the affirmative, he asked if I wanted to group up and I accepted almost immediately. While being grouped makes collection quests somewhat more annoying, the fact that I couldn't take on more than one mob at a time by myself was worse, and I figured that we'd both have a much better time as a team of two.

I wouldn't call a mage/priest duo particularly synergistic - we were both squishy and more than once we both ran out of mana and had to slowly wand things to death together. But it did make the whole process much safer for me as a mage, since I didn't have to worry about dying, and much faster for the priest, whose own dps was terrible.

He was almost apologetic about the fact that he was only there for this one quest, but I explained that it was more or less the same for me. I did want to do the dungeon itself too and had joined the LookingForGroup channel for this purpose, but while that was scrolling past at its usual insane speed, there were no calls for dps for Wailing Caverns, only the occasional damage dealer looking for a WC group themselves.

Round and round we went, often competing with other groups of various sizes, while my priestly companion moaned about how much he hated that quest, its stupid drop rate and Classic altogether, in what I assumed wasn't an entirely serious way. It certainly seemed appropriate for someone playing a Forsaken, whom I always picture as a bit morose and sarcastic.

He also made some more light-hearted in-character jokes though, such as asking me if I didn't need to pee soon after I sat down to drink for the umpteenth time in quick succession, followed by declaring that as an undead he didn't have such problems since he was lacking the necessary parts anyway. I told him that was too much info.

In case this makes it sound like we were super chatty, I do feel the need to point out that this was not in fact the case. We went for very long periods of time without saying anything, just killing mob after mob after mob, but it was an entirely comfortable silence.

One interesting thing were the Devouring Ectoplasms or sludges as they are more commonly called. They are needed for a quest too, for Wailing Essence, but you only need six of those and the drop rate seems to be close to 100 percent. Compared to the dinos, there are way too many sludges in the caves, and they tend to feel like nuisances that just get in your way (a lot, since they all seem to patrol as well).

To make things worse, they have an ability to clone themselves when their health gets low, which results in a Cloned Ectoplasm with the same health and stats (as far as I can tell) as the original, meaning that you have to fight another elite mob right away, and one that drops no loot at that.

The cast of the cloning ability is easy enough to interrupt, but in Classic many classes don't have interrupts, which included the priest and my mage (at this level). It was possible to nuke the sludge down just so to make sure it didn't have time to finish its cast anyway, but this was very hard and most of the time we were what felt like just a millisecond to slow. After failing again and again, and having to deal with Cloned Ectoplasms over and over, the next time we finally managed to avoid the extra spawn was like a victory in itself.

After we had been at this for what felt like more than an hour, requests for damage dealers for Wailing Caverns actually did start popping up in the LFG channel. While I had warned my priest partner early on that I might leave if that happened, I ignored them and kept quiet. We'd been going for so long, by that point I wanted to actually get the quest finished for both of us more than I wanted to join a dungeon group.

In the end we finished very close together, which was interesting in that I had started the evening with way more hides than he did, but RNG had ended up evening things out. We thanked each other for the company, and despite his earlier grousing he said that he'd enjoyed himself before we parted ways.

I couldn't help but think once again that this sort of easygoing interaction with strangers is, to me, a big part of what Classic's appeal is all about. No great deeds were accomplished other than the completion of an arduous collection quest for two characters, and I'm not sure I'll ever see that particular priest again. But that doesn't really matter, because it was perfect as it was.

(Oh, and I did get into a Wailing Caverns dungeon group soon afterwards, as another call for dps went out while I was handing in my quests. Serendipity.)

Guilded

I've mentioned in a few of my posts about Classic that I am in a guild. This guild has no relation to any guilds that I've previously been a member of in WoW or SWTOR. In fact, I didn't go into Classic with any plans in regards to guilds at all.

Nemi however, one of the two friends with whom I rolled up on launch day, went into Classic with the intention to raid, and therefore immediately set out to find a suitable guild, before launch even, which is why we ended up in <Group Therapy> on Pyrewood Village.

She picked them mainly for their raid times and for the fact that the core group has previously raided on a private server, something she saw as a promising sign of dedication to the game and assurance that the guild was going to be interested in Classic in the long run.

While I have no plans to be a raider in Classic myself, I was happy to join as well since they do accept social members, and I do like the thought of maybe getting to join one or two raids on a casual basis later on if the opportunity arises, just to see what it's like. Plus it has been my experience that it's usually a good thing to have some friends who are better at/more into the game than you are and for whom it's no big deal to help you out with something that might seem challenging to you but is pretty much routine for them.

So we signed up to the guild's Discord, agreed to the guild's rules and that's been that. I have to say I'm old-fashioned in that I still find it strange to conduct a guild's organisation entirely via Discord, as I prefer something that feels a bit more tangible, like an actual guild website. That said, Group Therapy's is probably the most organised Discord server I've ever seen.

I did run dungeons in guild groups a few times during the first week, and everyone seemed nice enough, but this has dropped off over time simply because most people have levelled up quite quickly and are already at endgame while I'm one of only a small handful still bumbling around at level thirty. I don't mind too much though, as I'm quite happy to pug, and I'm sure the guild connections will come in handy once I reach the level cap myself (whenever that might be).

I also have to admit that I have what you could call a professional interest in seeing how a guild this large functions, as the biggest one I was in before that was maybe half of Group Therapy's size. It's clearly not an easy task to manage that many people, as I've already seen various mini dramas break out in guild chat, usually about some supposed cliquishness among certain members. That always makes me roll my eyes a little because of course little cliques are going to form in a guild this big; you can't be equally good friends with a hundred people!

I admit that there's a certain fascination in watching these conflicts play out in guild chat, especially since I'm somewhat detached from it all myself and usually don't even quite know what's going on, but as a long-time officer of much smaller guilds I sure feel for the guild master who's supposed to keep all these people happy.

After years of holding various officer positions myself, it's also kind of nice to just be an unimportant face in the crowd again for a change, just watching the green text scroll by with no responsibilities other than to behave like a decent human being when dealing with other players.

Level 30 Hunter And Other Tidbits

One month into Classic's lifetime, my hunter has been my first character to hit level 30. I still think of the shaman as my "main", but I'm trying to keep that one in sync with my husband right now, whose enthusiasm for Classic has greatly diminished and whom I can therefore only get to play every couple of days. Meanwhile the hunter is always available for a short play session here or there during the week, so she was bound to get ahead in levels eventually.

Level 30 meant that I got my favourite of all hunter abilities:

As you can see in the screenshot above, I also went ahead and tamed that second pet I'd been thinking about. I opted for a plain old cloud serpent from Thousand Needles this time, no rare skin or anything. I'm hoping for distinction through species for this one, as I don't see many hunters running with cloud serpents, most seeming to prefer cats. It does remain funny to me how due to this, even "rare" cat skins seem way more common than whole other species.

For example I've seen about three different night elves with the Ghost Saber already, and I ran into a multiboxer who was playing five identical hunters who all had Echeyakee as their pet. Comparatively, I haven't even seen a single hunter of either faction with a spider pet so far... but then that might change once the PvP system comes in and people have an incentive to conduct psychological warfare against arachnophobes in battlegrounds.

Hunter may well be the most fun class to play solo in my opinion, to the point that I don't even mind grinding mobs. There's just something very relaxing about sending your pet in and then just plonking away at the enemy from range.

Belghast had a good post about farming spots up a few days ago, and I spent several nights in that vein killing furbolgs in Thistlefur Hold in Ashenvale. It's a place that wouldn't meet all of Belghast's criteria for a good farm spot, not least because the nearest vendor for Horde characters is miles away, but it's pleasantly unpopular with the crowds and offers a dense mob population that's easy enough to kill if you're high enough level.

I remember back in Vanilla I didn't even find out about its existence until I levelled my first Horde character, since it's so easy to miss as Alliance, and it being basically one big cave crammed with furbolgs doesn't make it a particularly pleasant place to be in general... but I didn't find it too much of a problem. I only died once in there, and that was due to such a hilariously out of control overpull that it was at least as amusing as it was frustrating.

While farming those furbolgs I got my first blue BoE world drop in Classic. I paused and took a screenshot, just like my first blue drop on Kronos was among my highlights of levelling on that server. Rare items in Classic live up to their name.

It was an off-hand called Antipodean Rod and while spell damage is generally a good stat, I wasn't entirely sure what to make of it. According to Wowhead comments it's a very good twink item for mages, but of course there is no real market for that yet with no battlegrounds.

I tried putting it up on the auction house for three gold anyway, but it didn't sell and the next time I checked someone else had put one up for a single gold. I decided that I didn't want to part with my first blue for that little money and sent it to my lowbie mage instead.

Yes, I made another alt, why not? (Not a cow this time, simply because they can't be spellcasters.) This one's main purpose was actually to become my disenchanter, since I was recently reminded that disenchanting had no level requirements back in Vanilla. Doesn't mean I'm not going to play her at least a little bit.

And so it goes, as everything I do in Classic quickly sets me on the path towards something else, and it feels like I have endless goals to pursue. This is why I expect that it's going to keep me busy for a while.

Blackfathom Adventures

My last few posts have all been very theoretical, so let me tell you a story involving actual gamplay for a change, to mix things up a bit.

This past weekend I decided that I wanted to go to Blackfathom Deeps on my hunter. After keeping my eyes peeled on both general chat and the LFG channel while questing in Ashenvale for a while, I eventually managed to join a group.

It was a pretty pleasant and uneventful run up until we got to the area with the Twilight cultists. First our tauren warrior tank asked if we minded taking a smoke break for him. It's one of those rather awkward questions to ask in a pug, because realistically most of us were probably thinking something along the lines of: "Ugh no, this is taking long enough as it is, and you want to make us sit around for another ten minutes just so you can smoke a cigarette?"

On the other hand though, you also want to keep everyone in the group sweet and the last thing you need is the tank getting grumpy due to nicotine withdrawal. So we all agreed that he could go while the rest of us tried to use the break in other constructive ways (getting drinks, going to the toilet, that sort of thing).

He came back and we cleared the way to the temple, but we hadn't been underwater yet, to pick up the quest item from there and kill the thrasher boss. The troll shaman and I kept urging people to come over and get into the water, but the tank and feral druid seemed oddly reluctant.

Suddenly the druid sat down, said that he had to go and logged off. We were a little taken aback by the suddenness of this, but it's not like BFD is cutting edge content - I figured we'd be able to continue just fine with a dps down.

However, then the tank suddenly said that he also had to go. "Really?" asked one of my remaining group mates, somewhat incredulously, to which the tank replied that his mum was in the hospital and logged off.

It was one of those awkward moments where you don't quite know what to think, because the timing sure made it seem like a lie concocted on the spot to ward off any criticism or damage to one's reputation for leaving people hanging like that, but on the other hand it's the sort of thing that makes you hesitant to call someone out because if it's true they are of course completely right and deserve nothing but sympathy.

Either way, the troll shaman, undead priest and I were left at a loss. Getting a replacement of any kind this close to the end of a dungeon is rarely feasible.

Still, not wanting to give up I suggested that we should press on with the three of us to see how it'd go with my pet tanking. Unfortunately poor Snowclaw didn't stand a chance at keeping aggro off my level 29 group mates, being only 25 himself, but the shaman didn't seem to do much worse at tanking anyway, so he equipped the dagger that dropped off Old Serra'kis, strapped on a shield and we continued like that.

The temple is probably one of the toughest part of the instance, with all the trash requiring careful pulling and some of the mob waves spawned by the brazier doing quite brutal damage. However, our shaman bravely did as much kite-tanking as he could, running enemies in circles around his earthbind totem, and the priest gave it his all, contributing damage with his wand after he ran out of mana to heal.

Slowly but surely we managed to whittle down the remanining enemies that way until only Aku'mai herself remained. She was tough, especially since I could contribute only relatively little damage, what with being three levels lower than her. Again, we all ran ourselves out of mana by the end, but the boss eventually collapsed at the same time as my pet and with our shaman only having a smidgeon of health left as well. Victory!

I felt very warm and fuzzy at the end, pleased with how the three of us had worked together all the harder after our other two group mates had left. These are the moments to remember and that plant the seeds for new friendships. I'm not really looking for new friends right now, but I added both of them to my friends list anyway, just in case.

Also interesting: The next day I ran BFD with my husband on my druid, and there we also had a dps quit in the run-up to the temple. To be fair he'd pretty much said that he was only there for the one quest item, so I guess it wasn't entirely surprising that he closed the game shortly afterwards.

Still, when you're already this close to the end and everything's going smoothly, why not just finish the run and have a shot at loot from the last two bosses? I get that real life can always interfere, but three out of seven pugs quitting at around the same point in the dungeon sure felt odd. Am I missing something here?

Balanced

As we're approaching four weeks since Classic's launch, I have three tauren ladies in their mid-twenties. It's not how I expected things to go at all (I very much expected to be much more focused on my main), but I'm having fun. I do want to level up, but I keep feeling the pull of other attractions.

One thing I've found very striking about playing Classic is how well-balanced everything feels. Expressing it like this may raise some eyebrows, since balance is usually only associated with things like raid dps and PvP, and I certainly wouldn't claim that Vanilla WoW was all that great in those areas.

But when exactly did we decide that those two aspects of an MMO needed to be balanced above all else? What about things like levelling speed, difficulty of soloing or profession rewards? Why should these be treated as also-rans?

Almost everything in Classic's levelling game feels extremely thoughtfully balanced against each other. One-on-one combat is not difficult by default, but you can dial the difficulty up or down not by selecting some sort of UI toggle, but by choosing to engage mobs that are above or below you in level. Soloing is comfortable, but the world is threatening enough that grouping usually feels beneficial anyway.

While levels are your primary progression mechanic, they are far from the only thing to care about. There are flight paths to unlock, weapon skills to level, professions to work on, class-based progression mechanics like a shaman's totems, a hunter's pets or a rogue's lock-picking to consider. All of these matter and everything feels logically tied together.

Take something as simple as money. Having gone through the same starter zones multiple times in quick succession, I found it notable how they are designed in such a way that as you complete that very first handful of quests, you should - on average - have just enough money to afford your new spells as you level up, but nothing else. You may have a few copper left, or be just a little bit short of an upgrade, but you'll likely be close.

And this continues as you level up, as you'll probably find that for a long time you'll only have just enough money to get by, and always find yourself longing for more - again, on average. If you spend all your time grinding mobs you'll probably be somewhat better off financially compared to someone who's trying to level a crafting profession as they go along.

Also, something as simple as which class you play can make a difference: For example I noticed that my shaman has a much harder time with money, being expected to upgrade a bazillion different totems every other level, than my druid or hunter, who'll often have less than half a dozen new spells to train. Still, the trend is clear that you're given enough to get by but are always left longing for more.

As another example of balance, let's look at something like fishing. It's a secondary profession, purely optional, and I'm sure many people skip it altogether because they consider it boring. However, it does have benefits that make it worth your time: It's an easy source of food, both to level your cooking and just to have something to eat if you're a class that doesn't have any healing abilities. Most hunter pets also eat fish, making it a great source of free pet food as well. Alchemists need certain rare fish for a couple of their recipes, and if you seek out fishing pools you can also dredge up kelp (another alchemy reagent) and crates full of money, leather and cloth bolts for tailors.

Nothing feels bolted on and like it's just intended to be busywork: all systems are interconnected in ways that make them extremely engaging. It's something that I haven't seen done this well in any more modern MMO that I've tried. Seems that the original dev team weren't just lucky with their timing and all that, but also actually knew their craft very well. Who'd have thought it?

Classic Dungeoneering

One of the interesting side effects of my current altoholism in Classic is that I've probably run Ragefire Chasm and Wailing Caverns more often in the last three weeks than I ever did them in modern WoW, which is quite ironic considering that modern WoW since at least Wrath of the Lich King has had a heavy focus on spamming dungeons, while Classic does not. However, levels 1-15 go by quickly, and if you enjoy running dungeons, why wouldn't you then jump right into Ragefire Chasm at the first opportunity?

Here are some of the things I've learned about RFC in the last three weeks:

- If you bring someone of level 12 or lower along, when running up the ramp to the lost satchel and Oggleflint, you run the risk of aggroing the entire other half of the trogg area (which most people never go into) from across the gap between the two paths. One of my groups learned this the hard way, but it was kind of amusing at the same time to suddenly be buried under a dozen troggs coming seemingly out of nowhere.

- The quest to collect two books for Varimathras has an awful drop rate, and you're pretty lucky if both books drop in a single run. It's quite possible to kill every single mob in the instance and only get one of the two books, forcing you to do a whole second run just for the second book.

- If you go up the ramp to Bazzalan first, you can then pull Jergosh the Invoker with a ranged attack from up top without engaging most of his trash. He'll run all the way round and up to you while only bringing two or three adds with him.

And some lessons I learned in Wailing Caverns:

- All the quests that require you to collect anything are best started early and can be partially or fully completed among/from the elites outside the dungeon itself, in a smaller group or even solo if your character is of a high enough level. This is a good idea because if you go into the instance with a full group of five that has all the quests, there won't be anything close to enough Serpentbloom, Deviate Hides or Wailing Essence to go around.

- Apparently tremor totem can break the annoying sleep cast by many of the enemies inside the caverns themselves. Unfortunately for me I only found out about this after my own shaman had made it through an entire run cursing about the stupid sleep spell and (as I thought) being unable to do anything about it.

- Even fifteen years later, with all the add-ons and internet resources one could possibly want, people still get confused about which way to go inside WC (including myself). I love it.

In general, all of my runs have been very pleasant. There were a couple of wipes, but people were always good-natured about them.

In general it feels great to be grouping with people again who all clearly want to be there and actively want to take in the whole dungeon as an experience. As soon as a party has fully formed, everyone will make their way towards the instance without prompting, and if someone is delayed they'll make sure to let the others know. Quests are often shared without anyone having to ask for it, and nobody minds killing a few extra trash packs to help with someone else's quest, or to get access to a chest for example. (One RFC group I had even gleefully went on to kill every single mob in the instance, "because XP".)

Who'd have thought that dungeon runs could be far more pleasant when they only involve people who actively want to be there and aren't afraid of talking to other players? As opposed to consisting of people who just want to get their weekly done or who pressed the queue button without necessarily even knowing where exactly it would take them.

Ah, but what about the horrible group forming experience of (in the words of J. Allen Brack himself) having to "spam cities and say 'need a tank, need a tank, need a tank'"? Well, that was never my reality, and it isn't now either.

Belghast made a post the other week about how to group successfully in Classic, and it reminded me a lot of a similar guide I once wrote on my old guild's forums back in the Burning Crusade. I, too, remember being somewhat exasperated at the time with certain groups of players who were forever complaining that it was sooo hard to get into a group while simultaneously being unwilling to make even the tiniest bit of effort to actually make it happen. Long before any developers had dreamed up the modern dungeon finder, there were always people who just expected groups to simply happen to them - and surprise, surprise... that never worked.

If you know what to do on the other hand, if you're not afraid of starting your own groups and starting them in a sensible way (which is to say involving a tank or a healer), and if you're happy to leave a solo quest for later when somone is LFM for something you need, it was always fairly easy to get stuff done and still is.

What makes things even smoother in Classic is that the servers are so insanely big and busy that you can find a group for pretty much anything at almost any time of day right now. Oddly enough, I've had the most trouble finding groups as a healer... similar to my experience on Darrowshire, there was a period where there seemed to be a proper glut of healers in my level bracket and you were actually more likely to find people looking for dps. I'm hoping that this will get better with time though.

Anyway, my own pro tip beyond agreeing with most of Belghast's advice is to join the LookingForGroup channel, which is always abuzz with activity. In fact, on my server I only join it when I'm actively looking for a group and then leave it again immediately afterwards as it otherwise drowns out all other chat that I'm following. As it's a global channel, people can shout about all kinds of grouping requests in there while happily continuing with their questing wherever. Not that I've really had to do that, considering that you can often find a group within mere minutes anyway.