Another weekend

And what a weekend. Played several toons over several hours and... well, achieved nothing worth mentioning. A couple of achievements, some reputation, nice gear. The same, would the bored out veterans say.

But the main thing is that I had fun.

With my Ally priest I healed through Stockades: holy/disc priest with shadow gear managed pretty well in a pug which consisted of pallies who didn't know how to play pally. They refused to heal even themselves and adamantly refused to listen to my oom's and manabreaks. Yea, we wiped just before the achievement and the group disbanded. I got nice blues from the run and one friend to my list to quest with later on. Not bad.

With my Horde mage I set my talents so that I'm aiming for 61 point Frost. Yea, and it shows. It's a killing machine: three levels higher mobs were eaten alive. Constantly. So the questing for this poor mule took a nice turn for a change.

With my Horde main, the druid, I tried and tried the world event, but... I got pwnd so bad I just hearthed him home to Sattrath and he'll be waiting there.

And my 'new' main, Laiskajaakko. I quested a bit for draenai reputation, got a nice chunk of the starter area covered, when I got a call for an Uldaman pug which I had been asking for. I have several quests in there, waiting to be done, so I jumped anxiously into the party. I'm just over the level range, so I cannot use the LFG tool for it, so I had to travel there as the darn summoning stone wouldn't work. Got there to help summoning the other's though.

Only to see how the party leader left the party as soon as he had teleported to the stone. We started to hunt a new priest to heal us and the leadership was tossed from one to another until the original healer came back. And one other toon left. And another came and another left and...

This all took over an hour before we got into the instance. Where it came very clear for me what was the name of the game: I, being the highest toon and protection, would rush into the mobs and kill them, while the others stood at the background and helped at the last moments.

I was getting angry. It's my first time in an instance, and I'm supposed to do all the work.

Well, we cleared one area a a time, I returned a quest here and there and took the follow-ups. And tried to cope with the adds that our warlock and priest aggroed when I was engaged with the mobs. Oh, yes, and we ran out to summon another toon as one left again!

I was so pissed when we found out the first 'boss', the ancient stone golem or something. And that is when the crap hit the fan. I tanked the boss, and took him down, but at the same time the rest of the party aggroed the lot of them and got the priest and shaman (yea) killed. I scored however: I got the nice blue gauntlets, which improved Laiskajaakko's defence a lot.

I was already ready to leave, and we had spent over an hour INSIDE the instance at that point. Not even started, really.

We went through the tunnel areas and finally caused a wipe in the troggs. The warlock aggroed ten more and the group wiped. I was tanking five to seven those elite troggs at the same time without help from the rest. Ok, they had their share of the adds, granted, and they couldn't cope with them either.

I got ressed, acted like an ass and left the group. Got free hearth to the Inn of my choice and honestly speaking I'm going to avoid the ones I remember from that group. The worst ones were the "I have seven lv70s, but I haven't been in here for ages" and "don't you know how to play your toon, noob". Usually combined in one and same sentence. The only one worth mentioning in the group was a super twink rogue who played like a dream. Then again, the elite troggs could take a one outburst of damage from him, whereas I had to work to down them.

Ok. The last pug wasn't fun. But it proved me one thing: we cannot manage Uldaman by ourselves, not yet. Three lv 45's are not prepared for that.

But we will. Oh, yes, we will.

PS. There will be no posts this week. Work becons and it's travelling time. Take care.

Invasion continuing

I took a hint from Tobold's comment on his own post about the Invasion epics and took my lv62 (I checked...) Tauren Druid off from dusting and -after a while of tweaking and addoning- took off to hunt some Lich King Minions.

Only to notice that the event is steered only to lv70's and guilds in which lv70's take care to equip their lv65+ up and rising members.

The mobs are all lv69-lv71, the highest being the rares. And I got pwnd, heavily. Ok, I could scratch their skin a bit, and when I pulled accidentally one, I just ran amidst of the other players and ... scored a kill, as they finished the mob! This happened twice, because I felt it was cheating, big time.

Then again, taking into account the events progress, it might not have been. Every minion which gets killed damages the crystal, the main focus of the event, and when it's damaged low enough the 'repairmen' get summoned. So in a way the party clearing the event area benefits from all minion they kill. And to lv70 only the Necrotic Runes matter, not the exp the mobs give.

Whatever the case, I would have preferred to see some variation in the mobs, just for the sake of making this event available for wider range of people. Even the way that if the 'landing zone', the area around the crystal, is unattacked or just appeared, the initial mobs would be of lower level to accomodate us not-so-well-versed in the game, and their stats would get better the more they are harvested. At this point of the game, it doesn't matter a bit how difficult the mobs are thought to be, as the toons harvesting them have most probably pretty high end gear to compensate. I mean, I saw the palladins, mages and hunters cut the minions down faster than my druid could say cheese. And that's pretty fast.

My only hope is that the next stage of the event is more of a WORLD event like the zombie infection. People in my Alliance levelling guild didn't even know about the Necropolises except the one outside Stormwind nor about the invasion even. They had been wondering what the skulls meant in their maps.

That's the kind of guild my Alliance toons are, and I like to help them to learn the game, the lore and the guild. And for them I wish -mainly- that these events were made applicable for all players, not only for the burned out lv70 raid machines looking for change. Damn, they have the dailies already! Blizz could make them more varied!

When expectations are not met

Title actually describes the varied reactions of people towards the WoW zombie infestation and 'Invasion' world event. Tobold wrote about it in a pretty nice way, and the comments on that post really show how different views people have on this.

I'm mixed. When I entered today with my Horde lv62 druid to run through the Halloween event quests, zombies and zombified players ruined the fun. Then again, when I entered the game with my lv16 Alliance warlock, I had the time of my life. And in Friday I had a blast running Stockades as a zombie with my lv45 warrior and my brother. Absolutely hilarious session with loads of 'BRRRAAIIINS'-shouting and fury. 

This difference in experience got me thinking the reason.

It's all about expectations. About the activity you are about to engage with. About the fun you are about to experience. About the entertainment. If these expectations are not met, but are altered in a way the player cannot change, the reality doesn't conform with the expectations and most probably the overall experience is ruined. If you go to a movie to see a light comedy and end up watching Coen brothers' "Fargo", I bet you are not going to be very happy. Fargo is a great movie, but it isn't exactly light comedy.

I loved to play as zombie on my lv16 toon, because there were other people engaging in the similar activity. It was a bliss, and I could easily get away from it. My expectations were different with my horde toon. I expected to be able to do the Halloween quests -for the achievements, I admit- but was denied of the fun. With the Ally warrior I expected to be running as a zombie and eating brains, and it was hilarious.

This can be taken a step further. Players are like any consumers in that they are ready to tell different things in surveys than what they really want. AoC was marketed as a completely different experience than WoW, and players were jumping in joy. In the end, it proved to be too different, causing the game to be next to abandoned (yea, yea, nevermind the technical issues etc. It's a simplifying example, ok?). War didn't even try to change the mechanics, but made the change in the way the game was played. And was very much easier to digest.

We are slaves to our expectations. When they are not met in full, we feel cheated.

But I also came into a conclusion with the world event. I just love the unexpectedness of them. Nevermind the fact that the Invasion is in fact aimed for the bored level capped people: I couldn't touch the Lich Kings stormtroopers with the Druid (well, I could but not solo). Never the less, I had fun with the fact that everything had to be taken as it came.

I'm off to see if I can contribute in the Ally side. CHARGE!!!

Next big one to look foreward to

I told earlier that my brother (the rogue) got married some weeks ago. The ceremony and the celebrations were as great and pompous as should be, needless to say that the bride was handsome and the groom beautif... the other way around, naturally.

I met an interesting person over there, who is deep in the tabletop miniature gaming. And I learned an interesting piece of information from him. I haven't checked the RPG news for this, but apparently there is coming a Warhammer 40k RPG sometime soon. I'm sucker for WH40k, the original small group skirmishes in the original rules, so I started drooling right away.

While driving to work today two things just clicked. Will we see WH40k MMO someday? Now that Mythic has excelled an excellent PvP game in WAR, what is holding them from creating similar from the 'other IP' of WH40k?

Imagine: you start as a Marine in training. Or an Space Orc. Like in the original set, where there were no Genestealers, Necroids or anything. Just the Marines and Space Orcs. And other greenies, naturally. Ok, not the Squigherder, but almost all others.

The specialisation would be the arms to which the character would specialise: Power Glove, Power Sword, Heavy Flamer, you name it. Bolter would be for all. And the similar on the Greenies side.

Unleash the havoc and see! We have WAR in Space!

The thought went on. The Marines could be confined to troopships, to travel to distant planets to combat. Add Chaos Marines on one planet (new expansion!). Add Tyranids. Add Eldar.

And you have a soup. With spoon. And baquette.

The RvR would be of domination of a planet. The planets could be servers, from which you could travel to another (provided your faction has a landing zone cleared).

I'm having wet dreams already. *drool*

Oops! There goes a week and a half!

Woopie. Didn't think it would take this long when I left for a short Autumn vacation. I was away for a week and then I had one hell of a headache for three days. And nights.

What a bliss it is to be without constant pain. It's really one of the minor things you don't notice when you are ok. But when the pain starts to bother your everyday life, it easily destroys every joy you have in your day. For me it effectively took away my playing, as I couldn't sit and watch the screen even for ten minutes without hoping to die.

I had enough time to check the 3.0.2 patch of WoW. And after an hour of play (including the darn addon scherade) I can say that I love the new Achievements. If only I knew what I can do with the Achievement points... they are a pointless e-peen enhancement, I think. But it would be nice to be able to use them for something. Like the Honor points, for example?

I'm also a bit torn about the Blizzard style of making the achievements tied so tightly to whole of the content. There are only few meaningfull achievements that cover the Old World content, but combined with Outlands (later Northerend) they yield concrete rewards. To me this seems that Blizzard is enforcing people to purchase TBC and WotLK... coercion which I do not like. But like any good addict I'm going to comply with this.

I have been having good, clean fun with the browser based MMO I mentioned earlier, The West, which has already launched the third world for players to explore and conquer. The frontier life has never been so fun and furious. And the best part of it is the fact that the quests and jobs take real time to complete. I can put my character to dig graves for 2 hours, play something else during that time and return and reap the benefits! What an easy way to make things work.

A comment on the 'news': people are already burning out from WAR, nothing major but Tobold already quit, Hudson is having difficulties to motivate himself to only WAR and some other CoWs have claimed similar things. To me it seems to be the forerunner's dilemma: there is always something new and spanky around the corner. It was AoC, then WAR, now Fable2, next Fallout3 then WotLK... and they all fight for our gamers' spare time, not giving nor yielding for the others. And the forerunners have to be in the front line, experiencing it all before others. Are they the Explorers or the Achievers in Bartle?

Oh, and obviously the next 'Big One' is also around the bend: Star Wars: The Old Republic. Or SWTOR for short. Will it be the next hype mill ála WAR? Time will tell, but for me the combination of BioWare, LucasArts and Star Wars is really something to keep eye on. Especially as they promise Story-driven MMO, in which every decision counts and converstations have multiple outcomes... Did I mention something earlier? I think I did...

Anyhow, I'm back, maybe twice or three times a week. Time to run.