Oh, gee!

Another leaf has been turned in my WoW endeavours: for the first time since I joined the browser based game community years yonder (and when that group entered WoW in US server) I have filled a proper application for a guild. In the US server guild it was much more generic, this one was... intriguing to put it mildly. It must be a very effective way to keep the guildhoppers, epic hunters and lazy slackers away from even applying, as it goes through your gaming history pretty neatly.

Then again it serves dual purpose: weeds out the raid applicants very neatly and in a nice way if there is competition for a raid position in the guild, and it gives the casual applicant (aka moi) the sense of importance and seriousness of the application. And of course, it gives out the business card of the guild.

I made this decision only after having a lengthy and nice chat with the guildmaster: it only proved what the website and the guild description had given me to understand. The decision was easy after that convo, thanks to that!

For the time being I won't go into details of the guild, but it's sufficient to say that the guild has long history on the server, it's mentality is that of "humble superiority" which I have grown to appreciate over the years in games and it caters both casuals and raiders: one growing to another, the other making way to another.

I'm pretty excited about this. Really.

It's like the saying: "When the pupil is ready, a mentor will show." In my case it's that as I'm ready to change my way, everything just snapped to place. First my rant about how it's impossible to get into anything 'meaningfull' in the game anymore, Azariel's deep and wise (as always) comment and my visit to the realm forum where this particular guild had just posted it's announcement for more players for their raid team. It was way too easy and way too straightforward. Just like my life in general.

There are only two issues left: to get the Three Stooges in together (as my brothers haven't done their applications as of yet) and the fact that I'm going to be away for a couple of weeks at the end of this month/beginning of the next due to our dogs competing in European Masters Lure-Coursing...

But still, I just noticed I've been given green light by the recruiting officer.

Oh, Gee!!

Obsolete endgame content

Just read an older post from Tobold, in which he proposes a form of horizontal expansion model to keep the whole content of the game more alive: Instead of adding more content to the level cap -thus making the old level cap content obsolete- he suggests that the players at the cap could get more beginning class options opened. Like in a racing game, you open up more car options after winning certain amount of races. From basic four (mage, warrior, priest, rogue) you advance to hybrids (paladin, warlock, druid, shaman) from which you advance to heroic classes (dk and so on), which you would start from the level 1 and keep the old content alive for the newcomers to come and enjoy the populated MMO environment.

(Side note: It's funny, but when I wrote my Learning to Play text, both syncaine at Hardcore Casual and Spinks in Spinksville wrote about the same issues which boggle my mind. Great minds and so on.)

What I had bobbing in my mind was the reason why the former end game has gotten forgotten. Why the reputation grind for factions goes completely unnoticed (in WoW), why the instances get forgotten and passed on the premise of a new expansion and how come the designers forget to tie in the expansions (at least in WoW... In EQ2 I saw some pretty neat quest line tie ins leading from one content to another...).

It seems that the vertical expansion route deliberately forgets and abandons the former -"farmed to death"- content in favour of the new one: the entry level to TBC was lv58 (56 if you had a mage to teleport you to Shattrath), and for the WotLK it's lv68 (which is IMO still too OP for properly geared toon...). What especially bothers me is that Pike's example I linked to earlier: Sunwell and Kael'Thas has been neglected by a huge amount of people, and still it's bound to be a great experience -even as nerfed one.

Let alone Mnt Hyjal and Black Temple...

To turn obsolete 'end game content' into something else... you have to device some twists into the former end game rewards and/or add some levels to the reputation rewards which incite the need to visit and do more for the earlier factions in order to advance in the new ones. Currently you can easily advance through the game and forget the faction reputations, and grind only the level cap ones you want to.

What if this wasn't so?

You couldn't gain the much fabled reward enchantment without an earlier faction rep at certain level: the fastest way to gain this would be a mentoring run through an earlier (heroic) instance. Old World endgame instances should be cut into smaller pieces and designed to work the same way as the Outlands and Northrend ones, being fairly easy one shots in normal and challenging at the heroic. The instances granting extra amount of reputation could be even harder than Heroic, scaling to the level of the party attending to it.

The options are there: it's all about the willingness of the design team to tackle this 800lb gorilla monster and make some tweaks in the basics. The game has been dumbed down enough now.

We casual players have brains, too, so the challenges could be something else than just adding twitch into the boss fights.

Belated first impressions

Sure. I made the unimaginable thing.

I activated the WotLK trial. Without my brothers, I entered Northrend, trying to fight the expectations posed to me throughout the months the expansion itself has been around.

First of all, I have to say that the downloading and updating of the game client sucks. Big time. The game client took about 4-5 hours to download: not due to my connection, but because the downloader just couldn't get enough data to deliver. Secondly, after this was through, the updates from 3.00.00 till 3.1.9XX took 3 hours and 38 minutes (that's what the downloader told me). PLUS the installation/initialisation of the install.

So, it took almost 10 hours from the beginning of the download to the final, playable game.

Purchased game would have cut that in half, because the 3+ hours of patches would have been there, still.

Enough technicalities. Off to Stormwind and Northrend.

Valiance Keep. The entry to the city-castle is impressive: the icebergs floating in the sea, the flashes of the cannons and the occasional trembling of the ground. The game-not-to-be-named had a slogan which suits here exceptionally well, and is in fact the carrying theme of the Borean Tundra: The War is Everywhere.

The recruiting queue, the mission briefings, everything in the Valiance Keep points to the fact that this keep is doing it's best to keep the foothold of the Alliance in the area. And as you move outside of the keep, the war hits you in the face: the marauding troops of the Nerubians keep pushing the human defenders to the brink of falling.

What really pleased me to see was the fact that your character was greeted as a hero by all the people in Valiance Keep. The initial questgiver giving the directions to the keep's master especially stated so and thus the initial storyline was started.

But then started the congestion of storylines and all of a sudden -even though I read all the story texts- I was swamped with a notion that I don't know what story this specific quest belongs to!

My first impressions can be summed up in one sentence: Outlands, but more of the same.

Ok, have to have something positive to say. The initial quests give gear rewards which improve the easily acquired Outlands blue gear pretty nicely, which was to be expected. The way how the gear is handed out is just plain slap on the face though: every quest gives you a choice of all basic types and the initial plate is geared towards warriors... protection warriors especially, being +STA gear. With odds and ends of other bonuses.

The loot, on the other hand, has proven to be a bit disappointing. Where in Outlands you could hope for an easy blue or good green as a drop, here in the six+ hours I played I got only three adequate greens. A couple of recipes were a plus, but otherwise the drops have been disappointing.

Like I said, there is too much to get oneself immersed into the problems and difficulties of the human settlers and Tuskarr/Kvaldir-conflicts, and the amount of factions poured over my poor head was way too much.

There is no coherrence in the area, all is just a jumbled mess.

What I realized was that the way to steer a character on a 'route' in this kind of a world would have been the Fighting Fantasy gamebook approach: at the questgiver you can decline or approve the quest, and either choice would open different opportunities at the next quest. In this 'every quest is open to everyone right away' approach the stories in the game get lost and I have to say that I enjoyed more the few hours I hunted down a couple of elites in Netherstorm with my brother, than the jumbled mess of stories in the Borean Tundra.

I can only wish it gets more interesting later on.

Learning to play

I read this Tobold's post with somewhat mixed feelings: Mind you, I'm viewing the situation from the point of view of lv70 prot warrior and lv55 holy priest disc priest, with no raiding experience.

In general terms, if there was a new game in which to incorporate this feature, I would suggest that the levelling game should be taken away and replaced with an interactive and interesting tutorial. However, in WoW the situation is already such that the levelling game is being effectively killed by Blizzard itself. In a way, the Old World is void, empty and full of unused questgivers, and the whole development is focused in making more candy for the end game raiding scene.

Which itself is already splitting in different sub-classes which are served with a) new, harder content and b) nerfing the previous harder content. Oh, yes, and c)by making the gear progression easier to move from one to another, even if you do not want to cannot play up to the standards of the raiding guilds. Like Gevlon so nicely put it. And I fully agree on his opinion in that post.

However, in terms of learning to play the class, the current situation in the raiding scene is unbearable. Like I have earlier posted, the /2 -trade channel that is- is filled with the LFM-announcements for people with the achievements for the instance they are going into. It's a Catch-22-esque situation: you have to have the instance completed to get to complete the instance. So the PUG way of learning to play the raiding game is effectively closed and as such the door to the reasonably progressive raid guilds is closed.

My question actually is, how can you learn to play the end game, if there is no way to learn to play the end game as such? And how can you apply for a raiding guild without having the proper (achievement proven) raiding experience, which you cannot get without being able to raid in meaningful way?

I liked Tobold's idea of having a raiding tutorial to teach the people entering the end game the basics of raiding. The problem with that idea, however, is the fact that most of the current mid- and high-level raiding guilds are already so far in the progression that there is neigh possibility for the newcomer to get into that game anymore.

The game is already separated into three classes of players: those still levelling (and probably never entering the raiding game), those who have entered the raiding end game (and are putting time and effort to it) and those who are in the high end of the raiding (raiding the hardest content Blizzard can toss to the players). These three are separated by /played, time available for playing and -like it or not- earlier progression in the end game content.

The guides on how to break into the raiding game released pre-WotLK are already outdated.

There is no way anymore, because there is no way to learn to play the game.

Big decisions

Had some duo fun with Bishopgeorge last night with my Laiskajaakko: Disc Priest and Prot Warrior, both lv70 (stuck at BC cap) taking on Skettis missions. downing all lv71 elites in a breeze, but getting our butt handed to us on a platter by select few lv72 elites. How sad is that.

What we gained for the hours of work? Reputation for the Netherray mount, but not quite enough to get it. Some gold (which I gain more from AH). Some odd gear to disenchant. No real updates. Only one blue during the whole time, which was a disappointment.

However, we made a council decision: we decided to close down The Order of the Fist. Meaning that the guild we started as fun experiment and gathering place for ourselves is now exactly that: gathering place for us brothers and select few who have been invited in there. Invitation only, and that's all. (Solaire, you and alts are safe with us... :P)

I kind of feel sad about it. But then again, to run a guild, casual social and blah-blah, is a real job for one person. The players come into guilds looking for someone else to arrange things for them and are not willing to do anything by themselves. The good ones move on, which is great, but the ones who remain... I hate to say this, but Gevlon the Greedy Goblin is correct: Morons and Slackers. They just rule the average WoW-playing Joe/Jane category completely.

This doesn't mean I'm quitting, though: in fact, I've gotten a new direction and inspiration in the game, so I may even start posting more often in here, too.

Dang. That sounds like a promise...