We're Gonna Make You An Offer...

 

Sometime yesterday evening, my Timerunning Hunter dinged twenty, bringing the shutters down on her unpaid progress through World of Warcraft's Pandaria Remix event. It took me four hours and forty-three minutes to get there, from which you could conservatively subtract maybe half an hour at the absolute outside for time spent AFK. Probably a good bit less.

For the sake of argument, let's call it four hours straight. That's two and a half levels an hour or roughly a level every twenty-five minutes. 

Is that fast? I'm not sure.

I could run a comparative experiment. I just happen to have another hunter already in regular, unremixed Pandaria. She's Level 14. I could play her to twenty and check the difference. But I'm not going to.

Partly that's because I'm not interested enough in finding out the result but mostly it's because Pandaria Remix is just more fun, so why miss out? And anyway, it turns out XP gain in the Remix isn't a constant, so what would it prove?

The factor I hadn't accounted for at the start is the Cloak of Infinite Potential, an item you get early on in the event, which continuously grows in power as you gain "threads". I'm not going to attempt to explain exactly how this works for the simple reason I don't fully understand it. 

There are plenty of discussions about it on Reddit and elsewhere, suggesting the process is a lot more complex than it first appears. Apparently it has all kinds of implications, particularly for other characters on the account. 

The only part that concerns me at the moment is the basic XP gain function, which for the cloak my Hunter is wearing, has reached 20% at Level 20. I wasn't paying close attention during the leveling process so I'm not sure whether that's a co-incidence or whether the gain keeps step with the level. I think it's a co-incidence...

Whatever it is, so far I haven't really noticed that leveling feels much different to what I'm used to in WoW. It always feels freakishly fast once you get into double figures. The Free Trial ends before the slow-down comes. 

I still don't have a max-level character in the game after all these years and that's down to the grind that sets in towards the upper reaches of the level range. Either that or I've never stayed subscribed long enough to get there. Actually that's probably the more likely explanation.

XP gain aside, the Remix does feel very different, mostly because there seems to be so much going on all the time. The constant drip-feed of rewards in the form of chests to open make it seem like something's always happening, even when it probably isn't. Then there are the talents to set, the gems to slot and the new appearances to goggle at. It's all designed to make you think you're having fun all the time - and it works!

It's a while since I last capped a character out in the Free Trial so I'm not sure if this next observation applies only to the Remix or whether the whole thing has been revamped, but I'm all but certain you used to be able to carry on gaining experience to the end of Level 20. After that your character would be locked and you wouldn't be able to play them again unless you subscribed.

Now, if you're a Timerunner, it looks as though you can carry on playing as long as you want, at least until the event ends. You'll just stay at Level 20 and won't gain any more xp. I did a quest just to check and it completed normally but I didn't get either XP or a chest.

Surprisingly, though, you can still get loot from mobs. I ran around Jade Forest for a few minutes this morning, popping porcupines and cranes with my bow, and all of them dropped Bronze, the Event currency. I thought at first it was only going to be coin but on about the seventh or eight kill one dropped a gem and a consumable, so I'm guessing they keep the same loot table.

That does mean you could farm the currency and improve your gear indefinitely on the Free Trial. Since you'd never level up, you'd never outlevel the mobs. I'm not quite sure where that would get you but I'm sure someone's already doing it.

What Blizzard want you to do, of course, is subscribe. They'd really like that. A window pops up right across the middle of the screen every time you log in, suggesting it. When you hit twenty, up it pops again,as illustrated, this time with added PvP value. 

The real hard sell comes after you log out. Within seconds I received a long email congratulating me on hitting the dizzying heights of level 20 and extolling the benefits of a subscription. Apparently, "Countless epic adventures and incredible rewards await" should I care to continue on my journey and should I choose to commit to a monthly subscription I'd be able to "collect companion pets, mounts, and transmogs; face the realm’s deadliest enemies; and take your place among the world's most legendary heroes!"

So far, so expected. The paragraph that really stuck out for me, though, was this:

"Your subscription is the key to endless adventure across Azeroth with access to four legendary games—including World of Warcraft, Wrath of the Lich King Classic™, WoW® Classic: Season of Discovery, and WoW Classic: Hardcore realms. Each month of your subscription you’ll also get a complimentary 500 Trader’s Tender to spend on eye-catching collectibles offered at the Trading Post in World of Warcraft.!

Does that sound at all familiar to anyone? Because it certainly reminds me of something... four games for one sub... 500 in cash shop coin every month...

All they need to do is bang a 10% discount to cash shop purchases on the end and I think we have a viable clone!

I am a little less than convinced by the "four legendary games" part. I'm not going to get into their legendariness, which is mostly a subjective judgment. I'm more concerned about whether they really count as four separate games. Aren't they more like four different modes of the same game? 

Also, should they really still be plugging WotlK Classic? I mean, okay, technically that was the status quo when the email arrived and still is now for almost another eight hours but maybe they might have gone ahead and pre-empted the inevitable by inviting me to subscribe for Cataclysm Classic, since that's almost entirely what I'd be getting. I wonder if the message will change? I'm almost curious enough to level another character to 20 to find out.

That would mean I couldn't carry on leveling up my Gnome Hunter later today, though, and I really would like to do that. I was having a great time. I'm quite keen on taking her all the way to 70. I'm pretty sure it'll be quicker, easier and more fun than getting that last level-and-a-half on my Berserker in EverQuest II, which was otherwise going to be my plan for the next few weeks.

I'm going to have another think about it but I'm very much minded to sub for a month. That'll give me time to enjoy the Remix and also dabble in Cataclysm Classic. I'd be quite surprised if I need more than a month to do either but only time will tell. In the meantime, I have a couple more characters to take through the Free Trial before I have to decide.

All things considered, I think you'd have to call Pandaria Remix a success, both in terms of the entertainment value it provides and in its main purpose of increasing interest and raising revenue. WoW is looking surprisingly spry these days. I have to say the unexpected flexibility suits the old warhorse a lot better than I would have expected.

A Hunting We Will Go or Be Vewy, Vewy, Quiet - I'm Hunting Pandas!

Somewhat to my surprise, I was at my PC at exactly six o' clock yesterday evening, when the timer ticked down to zero for the start of World of Warcraft's Pandaria Remix event. I logged in, partly expecting a queue of some kind, but there was none. It was straight to character select and the option to make a "Timerunner", which is what Blizzard has chosen to call participants in this glorious experiment.

Skipping ahead a step, the whole affair is typically garlanded with unnecessary trimmings. When I arrived in the world, I found myself immediately engaged in some kind of overly complicated, hard-to-follow narrative, involving dragons and time-portals and the inevitable ill-defined existential threat to natural order.

It would have been quite confusing enough on its own but since I was thrown into the middle of it all with what seemed like hundreds of other players, half of them riding mounts the size of busses (I'm surprised no-one was driving an actual bus...) it was positively over-whelming. 

This not being my first - or probably my fifty-first - server launch, I was able to handle it but I would like to go back and start over when things have quietened down, just to see if any of it actually makes any kind of sense. I tend to doubt it.

Going back to character creation, I'd forgotten just how basic a function it is in WoW. I'm so used to spending half an hour just trying to get my eyebrows right, it came as a bit of a shock to realize there was next to nothing for me to do.

Once you've set the trifecta - race, gender, class - there are just eight appearance settings you need to consider and half of those are colors. Given the paucity of options on offer it seems bizarre that "Eyesight" made the cut. Also, what the hell do they mean by "Eyesight", anyway?

In WoW's Character Creation, "Eyesight" means whether you you're blind in one eye, both or neither. I am honestly not sure whether this is Blizzard attempting to be culturally sensitive by offering a disability option or the exact opposite.

I'm assuming that blindness in the game is purely cosmetic, which certainly points towards the latter. If giving your character cataracts actually does impact gameplay, then I take my hat off to whoever came up with the idea. It would be quite radical.

I decided not to risk it. I felt I'd already taken enough of a cultural back-step by making my character blonde. 

Once I was in the game, everything proceeded smoothly. Very smoothly for a new server. At least at first. After about half an hour or so the disconnects began and eventually drove me out but until then, everything was fine.

By then I'd spent around an hour in the Remix, some of it on the Timeless Isle, which is where everything begins, the rest in the starting area of the Pandaria expansion, the name of which escapes me, even though I've been there twice this month already.

Last time I was playing a Goblin for the Horde. This time I was playing a Gnome for the Alliance. Both times I was playing a Hunter.

I was thinking about it as I ran around two-shotting mobs with my bow: the WoW Hunter has to be one of my all-time favorite MMORPG classes. I know it has something of a bad reputation but for all the right reasons. 

Hunters are self-sufficient to an infuriating degree. They can manage pretty well on their own in a genre where team-play is often deemed essential. Even more annoyingly, when played well, they can fit into a group with alarming efficiency. Playing a Hunter is often considered EZ-Mode and not without good reason. If what you're looking for out of your gameplay is relaxation and control, you could do a lot worse.

Given that WoW took a huge amount of inspiration from EverQuest and that many of the original design team had played EQ, I can't help feeling one of the reasons the Hunter is so good is that the Ranger in EQ was so bad.  

Rangers in early EverQuest were deeply disappointing, weak in almost all regards. They got beefed up eventually but for years they were, at best, comedy relief. The WoW Hunter looks like someone asked the EQ Ranger Class Lead for a list of improvements that would make the class worth playing and then doubled down on all of them.

I didn't think about it at the time but it was probably quite important that I pick a class and race I'm comfortable with for this experiment. I'm feeling more and more inclined to re-sub for a month or two while the Remix goes on and if I do, it's not impossible this could end up being my highest character. 

It is apparently possible to level all the way to the cap in the event. When it's over, Timerunners will be converted to regular characters on your regular server, or wherever you made them, if you picked somewhere else. My current highest character on Live is 50 so he may well get overtaken if I decide to take this thing even half-seriously.

From what I've seen so far, I just might. Pandaria is a very enjoyable expansion. I've already played through a lot of it and I remember it quite fondly, which is more than I can say of several others. I certainly wouldn't mind pottering through it again, especially on fast-forward.

That said, I didn't find the xp rate that invigorating yesterday. I was expecting something a bit faster. As I said, I did two levels in about an hour, which is probably what I'd have guessed I would have gotten in the regular game at the same point.

Then again, there is all that Level Squish nonsense. I may be thinking of how many levels I used to get in an hour, back when there were twice as many. It's hard to keep track.

Other than the leveling speed, there's also the loot. A big deal has been made of the cosmetics but that doesn't mean much to me. Not because I'm not into playing dolly dress-up with my characters. As multiple posts on this blog can attest, I very much am. No, the problem is that I think most WoW characters look pretty bad, whatever they're wearing.

When I see people proudly sharing screenshots of their best-dressed characters I can rarely see what it is they think they're cerebrating. WoW has a particular aesthetic that definitely works but it does not shine in close-ups. I think my characters in almost any other MMORPG look better than even my better-dressed Azerothians.

I do like the new loot, though. The mobs drop little chests that give Remix-specific loot and it's fun to open them. I also like the gem system, which once again reminds me very specifically of Augments and Adornments in the two EQs. They seem like they'll be fun to play around with, not least because the mechanic for slotting and unslotting them is very straightforward.

I can't say the same about the weirdly overwrought system for scrapping items you don't want and turning them into Bronze, the Remix currency. To do that you have to spawn a portal in the world, then open it and drag and drop your items inside. It's very tactile and fun at first but I'm not sure how entertaining it'll be when you have to do it for the thousandth time.

All in all, though, I thought it was a promising start. I'm quite keen to get back and dig into it a bit more. I would think that by the time I hit Level 20, the kick-out point for freeloaders, I should have a pretty clear idea whether I want to subscribe for a month. 

If not, I can always just make another character and try again. It'll be a Warlock, I expect. If it's not a Hunter, it usually is.

On Provenance: Thoughts While Waiting For The Pandaria Remix

While Mrs Bhagpuss and I were out walking Beryl through some very muddy fields this morning, I had an idea that something was supposed to be happening today. I thought it might be the launch of the Anashti Sul server in EverQuest II, which made me quite excited. 

I thought, when we got home, I'd get that patched up, make a character, play for an hour or two, then write a blog post about it. I wasn't a hundred per cent sure I'd gotten the day right, though, so the first thing I did was check the launch date. 

I hadn't. It's a month away yet, not due to launch until 13 June.

Well, of course it is. I remember, now, writing about what a long beta it was going to be and how that meant Darkpaw had to be pinning a lot of hopes on the whole thing being a success. Just shows how much I listen to myself when I talk.

Still, I was pretty sure I remembered something was happening today and I was just about convinced it involved a new server starting up in a game I already played. I scratched around in the back of my mind for a while, trying to come up with a clue as to what it might be and then it came to me. Pandaria!

That was why I updated Battlenet and logged into World of Warcraft Retail a couple of weeks ago. I'd been thinking about taking a look at the Pandaria Remix event or, to give it its unwieldy official title, World of Warcraft Remix: Mists of Pandaria.

And yes, that does indeed begin today. I'd be playing it now, with a view to writing about it this afternoon, except the doors don't actually open until teatime. The official start, which doesn't appear until the very last line of the lengthy official announcement, is 10.00AM PDT, which translates to six in the evening where I am.

That's fine, as far as it goes, although not great for me. I'll probably be eating quiche and watching the Chase about then, after which Beryl is likely to enter Evening Entertainment Mode and require an unhealthy amount of attention due to her innate Princessy tendencies. Even so, I should be able to get an hour or two in before bedtime.

A few bullet points on that:

• I'll be playing on my Endless Free Trial account, which allows me to make a character for the event but only level them to 20. 
• All Remix characters skip the first ten levels, stepping into Pandaland as fresh Level 10s. 
• A key selling point of this particualar dog and panda show is accelerated levelling. 
• The trip from ten to twenty is already over in a short session at regular levelling speed.

It is theoretically possible, then, that I might be able to log in, make a character, play for an hour, see enough to have something substantive to say about the experience and still have enough time left in the evening to put a blog post together. It'd be tight, though.

Which is why I'm writing this now, at midday, instead. Even though I don't really have anything new to say about the whole affair.

Ah, except I do. Last time I talked about it I'd only read the news reports and listened to some chatter. Now I've read the whole of that Blizzard news item I linked earlier and it's very interesting. 

Interesting to me, anyway, because the feature list reads like a Best Of from the last decade or so of EverQuest II. 

I'm not remotely saying these are ideas that originate there or that they haven't been used elsewhere, often, by other games. Plenty of them are generic to many MMORPGs. What I am saying is that I recognize versions of just about all of them from special ruleset servers in EQII that I've played on, as well as from the regular, Live game.

More specifically, a whole chunk of the Remix's remit seems to draw inspiration directly from EQII's Kael Drakkal server. In case you don't remember, that was the one where you started at 90 and all the content in the game was at the same level, which I admit doesn't sound very similar at all. 

This does, though:

EQII: "amazing new armor and weapon appearances made exclusively for the Kael Drakkel server"

WoW: "collect a variety of powerful new items and transmogs"

EQII: "Special loot drops along the way will allow you to upgrade your base gear as you progress."

WoW: "Each time you loot new items, you’ll have the chance for powerful new upgrades"

EQII: "Kael Drakkel armor appearances that will be usable on all characters on all servers"

WoW: "take your transmogs with you when you continue your adventures in World of Warcraft®:The War Within™"

 

All quotes verbatim from the two official announcements and the announcement for the update Kael Drakkal received nine months after launch.

I'm not saying none of this would have happened without Holly Longdale taking over as WoW's Executive Producer but it's getting hard to deny the equivalencies. They might not be immediately obvious to anyone who's only played WoW but as an EQII player, just about the first thing that comes to mind these days, whenever I hear about something new that's coming to WoW, is "That sounds familiar..."

Everyone spotted the debt dragonriding owes to Guild Wars 2 right away because GW2 is a much better-known game than EQII these days. A lot of the other innovations that seem to be changing the whole way WoW operates are coming in much lower under the radar, originating, as it seems they do, in a game most WoW players have probably never even heard of.

Whether this kind of cross-pollination is likely to create a stronger, healthier game remains to be seen. From my perspective as an regular EQII player who occasionally dabbles in WoW, though, it feels like a very positive development. 

I wonder whether the trend will continue in the next expansion. I do hope so. That would be interesting.