Newbie gripes

As I'm playing with the Auction House in WoW, I get awfully lot of WoW beggars asking for "spare gold". Like any respectable goblin would have any to spare, it's all MINE!!!

The most recent one stated exactly those words when he opened his whisper, begging for gold. That warrior was at level 19 and I told him that by that time he should have about thousand golds if he had played the game cleverly. His response was "No". 

I proceeded - very politely - to tell him that Gnomore had over 700g at level 17 without killing a single creature and without doing any of the quests requiring killing, only from gathering professions and selling the materials. I even gave him the Armory link to see for himself. 

And he disappeared.

I should have taken his name up, because I could have helped him to learn even more of the game, even mentor him onwards to become a better player than I am. Though with the beggar mentality that would have required quite a lot from my part.

Anyhow, as today is the beginning of Rift headstart, I thought I'd put up a memory list to all, each and everyone ever starting a new MMO. Not how to play, but how to maximize the money on the run. There are only few simple things to remember, things which are a second nature to all nomadic gamers out there.

1. First of all, loot everything. The crap is worth every copper, silver or coinage the game has.
2. Get bags to your all bag slots. You can never have enough or too much bag space.
3. Get the gathering professions, unless you are sure which crafting professions you are going to take.
4. Loot everything, gather everything. 
5. Replace your bags with bigger ones whenever you can.
6. Run a dedicated auctioning character aka AH mule to the nearest auction house and set it up for trade.
7. Loot everything, gather everything and post everything except the worthless loot to the AH mule.
8. Level up and enjoy life.

I think that covers the basics. The first time around I would suggest - however - to forget the mule and just loot, gather and sell as long as your bag space can hold the gathered materials and good unbound gear looted. You'll get to the nearest city soon enough to empty your bags to the bank or AH.

Happy adventures!

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How to improve character and have a direction to improve for noobs

Ok.

There have been some posts and discussions over the few weeks in the WoW blogosphere about the difficulty of gaining enough information on how to improve your character. General consensus seems to be that the game gives you quite enough information on how to gem and enchant your character, but to me this is utter bull. The information is scattered and not concise, and sadly you have to resort to the internet resources.

To be quite honest, the mere basics of a character improvement are pretty easy to come around. To get the talents, glyphs, gems and enchants to at least tolerable level you can use WoW Popular in which you just choose the class, main specification and push button. The listing shows the most popular builds, glyphs and all in a very concise manner and thus gives a solid basic set up for your character. If you are clever enough, you can also see what these suggestions really aim to.

I'd say WoW Popular is the first place to go to just to get the basics right.

After hitting the magical 80, you find yourself grinding for gear and emblems. This is the part where things start to get ugly, as the gear contains so many stats and variables to take into account. Generally you should check Elitist Jerks or a dedicated blog about your class to see the main stats to concentrate on. For some classes MaxDPS gives excellent recaps on both the stats, rotations and specs, but not all. The rotations are a generalisation and you should -no, I should say you MUST- practise the rotations on a dummy to get them right.

To select the right gear or see if this goes above that you can use the MaxDPS's fine gear selection tool, for which you can even restrict the instances or raids you can attend to to see what would be best from that area. On the other hand, if you want to see what you SHOULD have on your character, you should see Gear-Wishlist which just ranks the gear for your character based on its spec: the beauty of this wishlist is that you can see where to acquire the gear, if it's sold or crafted and how it relates to other gear.

Caution should be advised, though. Gear-Wishlist is just dumb ranking system, and some of the suggestions will not endure a real stress test with all classes or specs! Running stuff like Rawr (highly recommended later on!!!) may well show the lack of finesse in the Wishlist ranking, but it's a solid way to build your character upwards.

For normal instances you are ok with the gear you have acquired from questing: in fact, some of the pieces hold as high as the entry raids (which are now defunct as everyone and their cousins are running ICC). Heroic instances require some normal instance gearing, but not much as long as you stay out of Halls of Reflection. To enter raiding you'd most definitely need at least the tier 9 equivalent gear, say almost full set of Emblem of Triumph gear with some random epics from heroics and perhaps that first piece of Emblem of Frost gear you should be able to get after all that daily heroic grind.

And you should put most emphasis as soon as possible in grinding the IC5 man instances: the loot and emblems really make it worth the while.

I hope this helps the newcomers and people with life to get their characters into shape and accepted in PUG raiding and/or guilds raiding. Just check your Gearscore for the nerds out there and be prepared with the strategies.
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Are bloggers the trendsetters?

After reading several blogs from my blogroll about the copying/tweaking issue risen by the Tigole post in WoW Forums, a thought surfaced. Just like a slowly growing irritation in the back of the mind, the thought had formed itself into a solid being after I quit my lunch. And -like all good reasons to write- it compelled me to hear it's call and write about it.

Being the newcomer to the MMO's and especially blogging, and generally being one of the followers of trends rather than the trendsetters, I'm a bit slow and late. I rather am late and safe than early and apologetic. And I take my time to consider things before making a decision.

But it seems to me that majority of the active bloggers aren't. People seem to make their decisions pretty fast, take their stand and defend it with fervour rarely seen in real life. When Age of Conan was about to be launched after so and so many delays, it was the flavour of the month: each, every and then some bloggers readily discarded their other chores and booked a trip to sunny Hyborea. Only to return later 'in the wait of the next gen mmo'.

Weeks before the Open Beta of Warhammer: The Age of Reconing launched, the buzz was already there, and as the early entry started, the blogosphere was full of entries of WAR, it's mechanics and how fun it was to bash real player characters in the scenarios. Well, honestly speaking this is still going on, even though there are some reports already that this may have been just the initial rush to the new, greener pastures.

And here I am. Newcomer to the MMO's, befuddled by the buzz and hype on the next great shiny MMO, hearing how the game I'm just now playing is 'old news' and 'so passé'.

Of course, the buzz before the launch of AoC or WAR was mainly due great marketing, but the voice of the blogosphere -especially in the small niche of MMO players- turns the tide for better or worse. The enthusiastic reviews of the game and it's mechanics are sure to suck players who have nothing to complain in their current game to the next big hype.

The sad part is the fact that no-one seems to remember that there are still newcomers to the older game. Especially in this case, where WoW has been around for 4 long years and the ones who have been burned out by overdoing the content have gotten their friends, spouses, siblings and youth interested. The bloggers -the über-gamers- show clearly that the newcomers are noobs because they do not understand how inadequeate the game of their choice is. And the newcomers clearly feel it as the MMO of their choice -if it's not the current flavour of the month- is void and empty, without the MM part of the whole definition.

I have played, on and off, for a bit over two years, mainly WoW. From the beginning I witnessed the terrible urge of people to level up the content to the cap, to 'enter the game'. And all the while I have been wondering the reason to that, as I have not had the possibility to participate in the 'end game grind'.

Instead, I started to enjoy the game the instance I started to play the content. When I decided I want to read the stories and find the longer story lines.

The more I'm wondering the terrible rush to the cap currently, because I'm encountering more of the newcomers to whom the basic concepts of the game are completely lost. But they are convinced that they have to level up as fast as possible, nevermind the content or the scenery.

Sure, the great majority of the players have their toons capped and are at the top of the pecking order when the WotLK launches. The more the newcomers to WoW will feel obliged to level up as fast as possible, and the less they will understand their class or playing in groups when they reach the cap someday.

During that time the bloggers who have overplayed and burned out by WoW will blog about WAR, their accomplishments and bewildering thoughts on how much better their gaming experience is than what it was in the earlier game.

Till the next flavour of the month comes with a bang and boom.

Fallout MMO? Starcraft MMO?

Who knows, but the next one is lurking already.

Are you ready?

Do other games change the way you play?

It was the first thought I had when the WAR Closed Beta was over, NDA lifted and people started blogging their experiences about Public Quests (PQ’s), and I logged in to WoW to play my human warrior after almost a half a year hiatus. Before that, you had to hunt for a party, on both horde and ally, in the Old World content, to even enter a dungeon, let alone an instance.

Now the parties came hunting for me. I was just in the neighbourhood and I started to get invites for a quick Deadmines run. First of all, Deadmines is never quick. Second, it slows down the levelling which I was so anxious to do to catch my brothers (some 12-15 levels gap back then). And as always, a PUG is a PUG.

After the first –miserably failed- PUG run I thought that this was just a lucky incident. But as this has been going on ever after, I have started to think over the causes to this change. Of course, currently I cannot verify if this is the situation in the horde side, too, but in ally side it seems to be the norm. I log in and within the first half an hour I get invited or asked to join for an appropriate level instance run.

It cannot be only the fact that I have a warrior, because my brothers have reported similar incidents, though not as often. To me this has changed over something that has changed the thinking of the levelling players.

Could it be, that the evaluations and reports about WAR PQ’s have had an impact on the players of WoW, who are trying to recapture the ‘open party’ mentality?

We are all influenced by what we read and/or hear. Why not to the point that we start to wonder if it was possible to do something differently for a change? Because in the PUGs I’ve joined I have asked people how long they have played, and mostly they have been levelling their xth toon. I’d say that 4 out of 5 have been long time players and 1 out of 5 claims to be a newbie. Which I do not buy myself, knowing how easily I claim to be one, too. But that’s another story.

It’s easy to see how we are influenced by others just by following the blogosphere. One post which gets our eye follows us to our next own post and it seems as if majority of the bloggers are thinking about the same problem. It’s not that, its just the influence of the surroundings, which in case of MMO-blogging are quite few and far.

As I have already noticed. Newbie.

Like a pack of hounds...

Needless to say, I love instances. Who doesn't? Especially when they are ran with a group of people knowing what they are doing –or at least willing to learn how to contribute better to the whole. When the communication works. And when the greed is governed by reason.

An excellent instance group works like a pack of wolves or sighthounds: each knows the common aim, everyone commits to the greater good of the group and all are driven by their own special talents and abilities. In a pack of dogs the roles are cast in silence: as the alpha female gets the impulse, the whole pack moves. They spread into a fan formation, with the leader in the center, and they start chasing the prey. No sound, only efficiency. The chasers and the flankers take care that the prey doesn't flee, and the alpha does the killing. Clean and effective. No fuss.

I have been in a couple of groups which have had this ability to read each others’ intentions. Without /p walls of text, without vent or voice chat. Just by knowing what the group is trying to achieve. They are few and separate during my two years MMO experience, but they exist: the excellent gamers who delight the whole genre. They are the groups from which you try to add people to your friends list only to forget them later on as they level up so much faster than you do.

Majority of the PUG’s, however, come from the other end of the scale. Unorganised, uncivilised and destructive on their own merit. It is impossible to play the game so that everyone in the group enjoys it with these types. And sadly, these come thirteen in a dozen.

And they are not usually the newbies like me, but the ones who have been around from day one and still haven’t learned to play their class nor in the groups. The N00bs.

After the first five such blunder-PUG’s I gave up on understanding the why’s and how’s of these guys. There didn’t seem to be any connecting factors between them. Maybe age or mental age, but that’s all. Maturity isn't dependant on age, it's more a state of mind. That's somewhat so hard to accept, but it's true. And games seem to bring out the best in jerks, too.

Now I’m in a nice situation. I have two brothers whom with we have decided to play a sort of hobby-game of WoW. We have it all at the moment: priest, rogue and warrior. Granted, we could have more dps on the side, but hey, if we go into an instance, we get to take the lucky one with us. I want to show people how things could be run, and with the training we provide to each other I think it’s soon possible. We may not be the most experienced, but guess what: we enjoy the learning process! For us the levelling is the game, end game is just some sort of a pipe dream in the future.

We are the pack of hounds, though without the alpha female.

She’s in the kitchen, generating huge amounts of wife aggro while we enjoy.