The Winds Of Mysterious Fortune Blow Me Back To WoW

As I suggested yesterday, I'm not invested enough in any particular MMORPG just now to have a reliable, ready-to-use supply of incidents, ideas and opinions on hand to fill three or four posts a week. It's happened before and no doubt it will happen again. Luckily, I have a well-tested workaround for times like these. 

Actually, I have more than one, this not being my first rodeo as the saying goes (Although if it was really a rodeo then it most definitely would be my first, so that's a weird thing to be benchmarking against...) For today's post I'm combining two methods in a belt-and-braces stylee (And again, who even wears braces these days? Clowns and Jacob Rees-Mogg and that's about it.). 

First, there's the good old "Copy what everyone else is doing" plan, sometimes given a positive spin as "building community" but just as easily defined as pinching ideas from other blogs. In this case, though, the idea I'm pinching is so old that, if it was a folk song, it would have (Trad.) after the title. It's picking up an old game and complaining about how it's too hard/easy/annoying or just plain not as good as it used to be. That one always delivers.

"Incompatible" with what?

There's not really much point trying to build up any suspense by waiting until paragraph four to reveal the name of the game because literally everyone who ever reads this will already know from the picture at the top of the post that it's World of Warcraft. I hadn't really been thinking of going back until I read two posts in quick succession, where Shintar and Redbeard both happened to be talking about their recent experiences in Retail, playing low-levels after being away for a while. 

I won't lie. It was actually Shintar's mention of a levelling event that swung it. I am very much not one of those people who find leveling in Retail too fast. I generally don't find it fast at all, probably for exactly the reasons Shintar outlines (Try it on a character with no Heirlooms and no help from any other characters on the same account some day and see how fast you find it.) Plus I always like events where good loot drops like leaves in the fall.

Both of them play WoW regularly although Redbeard pretty much sticks to Classic these days and Shintar, by her own account, bounces between Classic and Retail. I can't actually remember when I last played either. 

Okay, that's not strictly true. I do remember when I last played Classic, or I can soon look it up. It was right when the big scandal broke and the boycott started. I know because that was what decided me not to renew my sub.

When was that, anyway? My God! It was July 2021! Four years ago! Seems like... well, two years ago, at least. And it turns out I have played Classic again since then because there was a free weekend  almost exactly a year ago and I had a go at that. I'd totally forgotten about it.

As far as I can tell, though, I really haven't logged into Retail for nearly four years. My Battlenet client was obsolete. Had to download a new one. Then I had a 56GB patch to install, which I was hoping was going to be one of those new-fangled ones where, after the digital dust settles, it turns out only a fraction of it was new data. 

Don't look at me like that. I don't know who you are!

Sadly, not this time. It was the full fifty-six gigs and now the drive I have WoW running on is in the red. Probably going to need to do something about that so thanks for that, Blizz. (Mandatory unjustified sarcastic remark quota fulfilled - minimum one per comeback post; no maximum.)

I had lunch while that was going on and it was all finished when I came back so I logged straight in, expecting confusion. I was confused for much of the time I was playing (Just over an hour.) but I also had quite a lot of fun.

WoW is very playable There's no point pretending otherwise. I do think the developers go out of their way - often several miles out of their way - to make it less playable than it could be but the basic structure is so robust it's almost impossible for them to fuck it up completely.

I will take a small portion of the blame for such confusion as there was. It was my choice to play one of my few Horde characters, which was already taking me out of my comfort zone, but even worse I picked one who was camped in Orggrimar.  

I have a love-hate relationship with the Horde capital. I love what it looks like and the general ambience but I hate trying to find anything there. Or even just trying to get from one side of the city to the other. It's not just a maze, it's a chaotic, unstructured mess. It's full of dead ends, there's no line-of-sight and the map is seven shades of totally useless. 

Warband-related perk. I think?

I was confused even before I got to Orgrimarr, though. I knew Warbands were a thing and I had the vaguest idea what they were but it turns out I know nothing about them that's of any practical use. After some trial and error I managed to get some of my characters sitting around a cheery campfire, like a bunch of sitcom characters on an ill-advised camping trip, but only about half of them made it (So maybe it was a horror movie not a sitcom...). 

I couldn't figure out why the rest were only listed on the drop-down list at the side of the screen. I never did manage to get any of those into a campsite. Whether that means they're not in the Warband or if they're in a Warband of their own or if they are all in the same Warband but just aren't showing up, I have no idea. 

I suppose I could go look it up but a) I don't have a lot of faith in the accuracy of online information about WoW, thanks to too many out-of-date or just plain wrong readings in the past and b) I don't care.

Since I'm a cheapskate, playing on the endless free trial or whatever it styles itself these days, none of my characters over a certain level were available. I think the cap for free play is still 20 but 20 is like 50 in old money now, or something? Not a problem anyway. I have plenty of lower-levels who are still allowed to log in and do stuff.

My favorite race in WoW is probably Goblin but I've done a lot of low-level goblining.  My second-favorite is Vulpera and I haven't worn them out yet so I picked on Odelie, a Level 10 Vulpera Warlock and woke her up.

When she arrived in Orggrimar (After the mandatory viewing of the visually impressive but otherwise almost wholly meaningless cinematic for The War Within, the current expansion that I can't play, not having bought it, so why even show it to me?) my first thought was  naturally to get the hell out of town. I would have, too, had Odelie not been standing right next to someone with a quest.

That quest turned out to be the start of a short breadcrumb trail to the expansion before last, Dragonflight. I didn't know Dragonflight was even available to players who hadn't bought it, although now I think about it I do vaguely recall reading something about old expansions being rolled into the current one for nothing. 

And this is one of the nicer views...

Anyway, it seems to be true because after I'd rounded up the scientists and scholars I was asked to persuade to go on the trip (And caught a bunch of stray balloons for some random kid because that's the sort of thing we heroes always have time for.) it was off to the Dragon Isles in a rather impressive zeppelin. The Horde do know how to travel, gotta give them that.

Arrival in the new lands was a lot less impressive. I swear, if I was the Executive Producer of a new MMORPG or the latest expansion for one, my very first ordinance would be "Put the best-looking zone right at the fricken' start". Why do they almost never do that? Why is it that the zone you see first is always a barren desert or a swamp or, as in this case, a filthy grey pile of rocks whose bleak ugliness is only made more depressing by dull, barely-glowing pools of lava?

Horrible place, made worse by horrible lighting. And it's not because the game is old or the engine isn't up to anything better. I have plenty of screenshots of delightful Azerothian scenery, all filled with color and vibrancy and interest. Didn't take any like that today.

Never mind. I'm sure it gets better. I just don't get why anyone would want it to be the first impression players get.

By this point I'd been playing maybe half an hour and I'd made next to no experience at all. I thought I probably ought to make at least some effort to progress so I grabbed what quests I could find and ran around doing them. Or trying to do them. It's quite hard to kill proto-dragons when you don't have any spells on your hotbar.

I'm not sure when or why but it seems while I was away something so significant must have changed that they had to wipe everyone's hotbars. All six of mine were completely empty, except for a single icon that had something to do with Warbands. Yes, them again.

Luckily for Odelie there was a guard nearby and he dealt with the proto-dragon while she sorted out her spellbook. Otherwise that would have been her second death of the session. I know everyone says Retail is so easy now you couldn't get yourself killed if you tried but I assure you that's an exaggeration. Just try running across those canvas roofs in Orggrimar and see what happens.

Once I'd got that sorted out, the rest went quite smoothly. The starting area in the Dragon Isles feels like it might have been designed by the same people who worked on the town planning for Orggrimar but other than that I enjoyed it. 

The gameplay, that is. The story, not so much. I will say, yet again, I find questing in WoW very dull compared to just about any other game I can think of. The quest text is dull both to look at and to read, which makes it hard to get invested in the narrative, such as it may be. 

Functionally, though, it's fine. The kill numbers are low, the drops come fast, the mobs die even faster... what's not to like?

As for the xp it was decent. I played for just over an hour and Odelie went from the start of Level 10 to just into Level 12. Two levels in an hour sounds quite fast (Although, honestly, not that fast by modern standards.) but bear in mind I had full rested xp and there's supposed to be an xp event on. I wonder how fast it would have gone if neither of those was true?

I finished up in the big clearing in front of the Embassy building. There were loads of players there. There were quite a few in Orggrimar, too. For mid-afternoon on a weekday, I thought it seemed pretty busy, especially since it wasn't even current content.

And as I said, I had fun. The xp was nice but the real treat was the loot. I got a couple of the Mysterious Chest drops from the event and while the gear in them wasn't game-changing (Still an upgrade, of course, though.) the 30-slot bag I found in one certainly was. Add to that the 20-slotter I got from a quest and I more than doubled my slots. When I logged in all I had was the default inventory and one ten-slot bag!

The event only has another week to go - I started late - so I'll need to get a move on if I'm going to make the most of it. Whether I have the motivation to keep logging in is a good question but if anything's likely to spur me on it's free bags.

Moving On...

Following some helpful advice in the comments to my last post, this morning I took advantage of the dying hours of World of Warcraft Classic's free weekend to move all my characters off their current server, Hydraxian Waterlords. 

Not that I wanted to move them anywhere. I would have been perfectly content to leave them where they were. Hydraxian Waterlords has been a very pleasant place to play. It makes little difference to me whether it's busy or quiet. I mostly play WoW as if it was a single-player game anyway.

But it wasn't my choice. Hydraxian Waterlords is scheduled to close when Cataclysm arrives. Not that I'd have known if it hadn't been for Pallais and Shintar explaining the situation. 

In fact, I still can't nail down an official confirmation from Blizzard. There are some very recent forum threads asking Blizzard not to close it and trying to rally support to keep it as the only EU-RP server but although everyone acts as if it's a done deal, no-one bothers to link to an official closure announcement.

Working on the dubious assumption that it's better to jump than be pushed, I made the decision to take my characters' fate into my own hands and move them anyway. Maybe they could just have sat tight and nothing would have happened but who knows?

The Free Transfer process is both simple and confusing. For a start, you have to somehow magically know about it already to access it. If the server really is about to close and free transfers have been offered, I would have expected either an in-game notification or an email to my account address. Then again, I have a suspicion free transfers off Hydraxian Waterlords may have been open continuously for a couple of years now, since the last time Blizzard threatened to close the server, so maybe they sent out notices then.

Once you know the option exists, you have to go through the cash shop to take advantage of it. That's how it's worked in most MMORPGs where I've done something similar in the past, although there have been cases where I was sent a token in the mail, which seems like a more elegant way of doing it. 

Blizzard gets points for not asking for banks to be cleared or guild permissions reset or auction house listings to be removed or any of the myriad other fussy housekeeping tasks I've had to fiddle about with in other games. It's a straightforward change of address with no complicated paperwork.

Unfortunately, they lose points for the all-round kludginess of the whole thing. I moved seven characters to two different servers and at no point was I ever entirely sure if the transfers had gone through correctly. The feedback from button-presses is all but non-existent. 

My confidence in the process wasn't improved when the first transfer I tried crashed fairly spectacularly, spitting out a chunk of incomprehensible code. Along with the error message there was a button to Reload UI. I pressed it and it dumped me back to character select, where the character I'd been trying to move had vanished altogether.

It was only a level 10 priest I will almost certainly never play again so I wasn't all that bothered but it made me apprehensive about moving the others. In the end, they did all transfer successfully, with no further crashes, although there was an unnerving moment when I went to log into the new server, only to find I had no characters there at all.

If in doubt, relog. I started over and there they all were, so that was fine. More worrying was the string of gibberish attached to the end of one of my characters' names.

It hadn't occured to me that someone on the destination server might have prior right to a name I was using. I rarely have much trouble with that sort of thing. I tend to pick names no-one else would be likley to think of so I'm generally safe. 

And that was how it worked out for six out of seven of them this time. The exception, naturally, was my highest level character. It bloody would be.

I renamed him and with that I was done. I now have four characters on Pyrewood Village and three on Mirage Raceway.  Those were the only available options under the free transfer system, which made me think I'd been wasting my time. 

They're both PvE servers, or "Normal" as Blizzard calls them, both with similar-size populations and similar faction balances. I can't see it makes any difference which of the two becomes my new home. I might just as well have done nothing and let the automatic relocation shunt me on to whichever it felt like, if and when Hydraxian Waterlords does finally close.

It's done now, anyway. In the not entirely likely event that I resubscribe for Cataclysm Classic, at least I know where I'll be.

Excuse Me? I think Your Hat Might Be On Fire.

I had a vague memory of having read something about July being some kind of anniversary or special occasion for Amazon Games. There was going to be an extra large giveaway. Was it forty free games? Something like that. Even though it wasn't quite July yet I thought I might take a look anyway, see if anything was happening. 

Oh boy, was it ever! So many new games. So much new free stuff. Where to start?

The only way out is through as they say ("They" being children brought up on Michael Rosen's "We're Going on a Bear Hunt", presumably.) I started at the beginning and worked my way through to the end, looking at the thumbnails, trying to guess from the picture and the title whether it was worth reading the brief description, then clicking through to the websites of the more interesting ones.

I'm increasingly impressed with the way these monthly giveaways are presented. Compared to Steam, which sometimes make me wonder if it was designed by a bunch of teenagers on community service or the Epic Games storefront, which has all the authenticity and character of the Shopping Channel, the Amazon Games front end feels well organized, clear and helpful. I wonder if it's because they're not trying to sell me anything, just give it away?

Whatever the reason, I always look forward to browsing through the offers at the start of the month, whereas I have to force myself to dig through the jumble at Steam and can barely bring myself to log in to Epic at all. Even so, the sheer volume of offers this time around made getting through them all quite a challenge.

As far as I can tell, the splurge is a promotion for Prime Day, which is why it ends when that event does, on the 14th of July. Whether that means a second set of offers will land mid-month I'm not sure. I kind of hope it doesn't. I'm not sure I could cope with another drop so soon.

Or maybe I could. There weren't all that many titles in this batch that piqued my interest. For once the virtual shelves seemed empty of point&click adventures. There wasn't a Monkey Island game to be found. 

I considered several games that looked like they'd have very intriguing narratives but which told their stories by way of mechanics I don't enjoy. That happens in the analog world, too but at least, when you go to the ballet, no one expects you to dance.

I claimed seven of the offers, two of them packs of three. Those came from another platform by the name of Legacy Games. They specialize in casual games of the Match 3 and Hidden Object variety and they've apparently been in that unfashionable but highly popular business for almost a quarter of a century. 

I had to register an account with them to claim the games, whereupon they handed me yet another free game for signing up. It reminds me of the old 1950s pusher trope, where the first hit comes free. Only I never pay. Or wake up in flop house on the Bowery with a kidney missing. Oh wait... different cliche.

The titles I got from Legacy Games were these:

I can't honestly say I know what type of games any of them although the word "Adventure" did crop up somewhere.The one with the picture of a cow was the bonus title. If any of them turn out to be any good I'll probably do a post about it some day. Otherwise, I imagine this is the last you'll ever hear of them.

Of the others, the pick of the bunch was a second installment of the Darkside Detective series so beloved of Syp. I wasn't that struck on the first one myself but it was a decent enough occult comedy adventure. I'm quite happy to go again.

Crow's Eye, HUE and Rain World all look interesting but I suspect the gameplay will defeat me. Sheep and Clouds 2 might be fun for a session or two. Since I've barely even looked at any of the games I claimed last month, it's a bit of a moot point anyway.

Although not, perhaps, as moot as the in-game items I claimed from the Twitch portion of this month's offer. Once more, I found myself taking the trouble to make sure I didn't miss out on cosmetics for games I no longer play and may well never play again. What is wrong with me?

New to the offer this month, or at least I don't recall seeing it there before, is World of Warcraft. Blizzard really must be getting desperate. Despite not having logged in since the scandals began and having no intention of doing so until they're at least convincingly swept under the Microsoft rug, I made the effort and linked my Battlenet and Amazon accounts. 

It was surprisingly painless, although it did involve the usual near-clinical levels of paranoid security. I sometimes suspect we're already living in a cyberpunk noir timeline and we just haven't noticed yet. All I'll get for my diligence, should I ever log in again, is a transmog for a helmet that I'll never use, the Jewel of the Firelord. There are two more dramatically-named hats to come. I suppose I'll have to claim those, too. You can never have too many hats although personally I'd rather none of mine was on fire.

A much more compelling offer and one for a game I have no compunction in going back to is the Windhelm Cliff Ram Mount for Elder Scrolls Online. It comes with some facial tattoos (for your character, not the sheep.) and two Xanmeer Crates, whatever they are. Lockboxes, I assume.

Lost Ark, another game I keep meaning to revisit but somehow never do, trumps ESO's ram with a penguin. A penguin suit, that is. I wish a few mmorpgs I play regularly would acquire Lost Ark's bizarre animal cosplay fetish. I'd love to run around Norrath or Tyria dressed as a giant penguin.

New World has some fairly ordinary armor on offer. It looks a hell of a lot better than the hideous leaisure suit currently being given away to people with so little going on in their lives they're willing to give up four hours of their time watching one of the last remaining Twitch streamers pretending to enjoy the game. It's odd that there are two different giveaways for the same game from the same source at the same time but at least I only wasted a few seconds on mine.

The last freebie I grabbed was a Void Shoulder Sheep for my avatar in Roblox. There's a sentence that would have had almost no semantic value at any time before the turn of the millennium. It doesn't really have a lot now. Also, it's the third thing in this month's offer to involve sheep. Is it some TikTok trend I've missed?

All I have to do now is find time to play at least a few of these games before the next deluge of free gifts arrives. I'd better get on with it.

Rockin' It!

From the idea-well all but running dry, things seem to have gone full flood again, which is how it usually goes. Another insight to remember for Blaugust. (We are doing Blaugust again this year, right?). 

I've had a post about the Tinkerfest solo dungeon in EverQuest II mentally queued up for days but other things keep bumping it down the line. This morning I have at least three new ideas - things I've done, things I've read or seen that I'd like to bounce off ...

I'll get to them all, eventually. Probably. Maybe. In the meantime, I thought I'd share this article from PC Gamer that I originally saw linked in a news item at NME. Both pieces have the video nicely queued up at the relevant part but I'll embed it here for convenience anyway.

I particularly love the way Winona Ryder not only doesn't know what World of Warcraft is but obviously doesn't even recognize the name. That either puts our hobby into perspective or tells you a lot about Winona. Or both. It's probably both.

I just finished watching Season Four of Stranger Things. It's really excellent. The show has a hyper-reality about it now, or maybe that should be a meta-reality, that makes it very different from the show it was when it began. It's something that happens to many, maybe all, long-running, non-realist shows but it's better managed in this one than in most. Very much looking forward to the Season finale in July and even happier there's another season and several spin-off shows coming along behind.

Just to round this short clip-post out, here's another video I watched for the first time this morning. It's not new and I came across it in a somewhat roundabout way, in a throwaway link in a review of the new μ-Ziq album on Pitchfork.

I don't have any great interest in μ-Ziq although I believe there's at least one CD by him (It's one guy, real name Mike Paradinas, as I learned only today.) somewhere in the house. It'll be Mrs Bhagpuss's, though.

The only reason I clicked through the link was because of the title of the album: Magic Pony Ride. I have a long-standing theory, borne out by much testing, that any band, artist, song, track or album that incorporates the word "pony" is likely to be worth a listen. 

Whether it applies in this case I still don't know because I haven't listened to any of it. Let's do that now... yep, sounds pretty much exactly as I expected. It is, as the Pitchfork review so pithily put it, "dad rock for lapsed ravers".

Which is all very well but I wouldn't have bothered mentioning it if it hadn't been for the link to the webzine's own animated definition of the term "Dad Rock." I felt it was worth featuring here, if only as a warning. This is what complacency can look like, but also comfort. Telling those two apart is a vital life skill.

I'm not even sure if "Dad Rock" gets the job done as a descriptor any more, anyway. Some of the acts in the video would have been at their peak when today's dads were in short pants, if they'd even been born at all. Springsteen, McCartney, Knopfler? They're Grandad Rock by now, aren't they? Is that a thing yet? If not, it needs to be.

And what about Mom Rock? I can't say I've ever heard anyone mention it. The Urban Dictionary claims it's a thing but they claim a lot of things are things, even though no-one else seems to know about them. Do moms get a pass on growing out of being cool or, more likely, do the cultural gatekeepers, whoever they are, just assume moms never were cool to begin with?

Bowling For Soup painted around the lines of the meme with the seminal 1985, a song I dearly love. I respect its musical and lyrical merits, as well as the pitch-perfect video, but mostly I revere it for the way it became weirdly instrumental in shaking me out of my own musical lethargy. 

When I happened across it on Mitch Benn's radio show, I went on to YouTube to see the video he talked about and that, in part, was what jump-started my deep dive into the lost-to-me music of the past and re-instilled my desire to seek out the music of the future.

Kinda ironic, given the lyric, although possibly not as ironic as the other great rekindler of my musical energies, Lana del Rey's Video Games, given it was my then decade-long obsession with mmorpgs that estranged me from music in the first place. Hey, David Harbour! You got off lightly!

Bringing this whole thing full circle and tying it up with a neat little bow, Kate Bush, surely an icon of both Dad and Mom Rock if ever there was one, is currently enjoying her own moment of inter-generational magic, thanks to the inspired use of her timeless classic, Running Up That Hill in Stranger Things. 

Just in case anyone hasn't seen it yet I won't say any more about it, other than it's frickin' epic and that I was surprised to learn La Bush had never had an American Top 10 hit before. Well, she has now. And about time, too.

That's it for now. Not the post I expected to write but the one I wanted to. Another tip for advice week. I should write these down. And I'll get to that EQII Tinkerfest instance post one day, see if I don't. 

Of course, by then I'll have built it up so much everyone's going to be all "is that it?"

Ah, well.

Try To Keep Up!

Isn't there a lot of news around at the moment? Gaming news, I mean. Well, entertainment news generally but I already covered that or at least a bit of it. It doesn't stop, though, does it? And everything's getting muddled and mixed, like when they cross the streams in the first Ghostbusters movie, which is supposed to be bad. Crossing the streams, that is, not the movie, which is great. You knew that. (Although, does anything bad actually happen when they cross the streams? Oh, yeah, I guess that's not so good. Not if you had the appartment below the penthouse suite, anyway.)

What am I talking about? Well, we all know NFTs are bad, right? But now Kanye's on our team. Are we happy about that? I mean, judge a person by the company they keep, right? And Ye's only saying nay "for now". It's always good to keep your options open.

I know, I know. This has nothing to do with gaming. Okay, maybe not. But this does. "Of all the applications, gaming is a place that *players* can benefit a LOT from blockchain." So says Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park, a band I have never willingly listened to although sometimes these things just happen. 

Why gamers should listen to what musicians think about gaming I have no idea although, like every driver's a potential pedestrian, when they're not driving, I guess every musician's a potential gamer, when they're not playing. Playing an instrument, that is. Not a game. Just go with it, aright?

Wilhelm has a really solid, in-depth post up about why Mike Shinoda is, shall we say, mistaken, although the post is technically about the metaverse, not NFTs - but who can tell the difference these days? Certainly not the people throwing money. 

As Wilhelm says, in repy to my comment querying why gamers are getting dragged into this thing in the first place, "As for “why gamers?” I think that is just the easy, lazy answer to the question based on who is already interested in virtual worlds." 

One of these days I'm going to have to do that post about what I think the metaverse is or will be. Is, really. It's at least halfway here already, by my definition. That day is not going to be today.

No, today I'm here to talk about a couple of much more specifically mmorpg-related news stories. The one that's getting all the traction is Blizzard's unexpected announcement, rolling over on decades of tradition and lore to prop up falling populations on World of Warcraft servers make everyone's lives just that little bit better. (Does anyone click through all these links, by the way? I seem to be hyperlinking like it's 1999 today.)

The reaction across the blogosphere is just starting to roll but what I've read so far has been a little mixed. There's a bit of "about time" and a lot of "it's a start" and some "why now?" I expect to see a lot more opinions in the next day or two but I don't really have a dog in this fight. (And isn't that an archaic expression?)

No, well, okay, maybe I do. Not as far as WoW itself, since I'm not playing and was never invested even in the slightest in the bipartite struggle between... what is it, anyway? Good vs evil? Order vs chaos? Smart vs casual? 

I do, however, have some pretty hardline views on the general concept of opposed factions in mmorpgs, which is that if you're going to have them they should be immutable and unchanging. Pick a side and damn well stick with it and that applies to devs as well as players. 

If you want to service a clientele that considers "playing with friends" an important selling point, then don't make people choose sides in the first place. Conversely, if you're constructing a narrative based around opposing forces and building mechanisms into your game to enforce compliance, accept that you're going to exclude a lot of more casual, social gamers and get ready to cater to extremists.

Either way works. Just don't cross the streams. Oh, I did that one already... make it "change horses". At least you can't say Blizzard bent with the wind at the first light breeze. It took a hurricane of bad news to shake that sour fruit loose.

Interesting though that news was, like the report of Sony swallowing up the Destiny and Halo studio for a mere $3.6 billion, I don't feel I should say too much about it. As for Sony's spending spree, the deal involves games I don't play made by people I don't pay. It would be rude of me to comment.

Another mmorpg developer I haven't given any money to is Gameforge. At least I don't think I have. I might need to fact-check that. There are various theories going around about why Sony might want Bungie on board but there's no question as to why Gameforge have decided to switch Swords of Legend Online to Free to Play: it's because no-one is. Playing Swords of Legend, I mean.

I quite enjoyed SoLO when I tried it in open beta last year. It's been on my Steam watchlist ever since and I nearly bought it when it briefly appeared in a couple of sales. I'm glad I didn't, now!

As the press release notes, the box price of the Buy-to-Play game has been "a limiting factor for a lot of people." Curiously, if you have more money than you know what to do with, the option to give some of it to Gameforge still exists, for the moment at least. The cheapest option is the Standard Edition at £35.99 but you can go as high as £89.99 if you want.

Maybe the Deluxe and Collector's editions still have some value but since, according to the FAQ, "The full game experience will be available to everyone for free. This includes all old, new and future content, like the new classes and zones", it's probably a better idea to wait until the 24th of February, when you can have it all for nothing.

Despite my previous enthusiasm, I probably won't bother. As I may have mentioned, there's a lot going on just around then, what with the Guild Wars 2 expansion, the new EverQuest II server, my infatuation with Chimeraland, New World doing whatever it's doing to make solo play more appealing and who knows what-all else. 

Don't you wish these people would get together and arrange their releases so they don't all overlap like this? I mean, they're going to have to get it together when they all sign off on the deals that allow us to take out NFT swords from one game to the next. They might as well get started on those non-competetive, non-commercial contracts right now!

Blowing Up

Kaylriene has a post up about losing faith with World of Warcraft and - maybe, possibly, perhaps - being done with it for good. It's a thoughtful, considered post in which he says, among other things, that it was Blizzard's failure to provide sufficient new, compelling content that opened the space that let him try out a new mmorpg, New World, and delve deeper into one he was already playing, Final Fantasy XIV, which had always, until last year, had to take a back seat to WoW.

The post reminded me of something I'd been thinking to myself, as I pounded down the dirt tracks of Aeternum yesterday, finishing up the Winter Convergence event. How necessary, or even advisable, is it to commit to a single game? 

For the longest time now, I've played a lot of mmorpgs. As I've written before, since the very beginning, when I discovered EverQuest in late 1999, I've almost never kept to a single one. Partly it's been an endless sense of curiosity. Almost as soon as I read about a new entry to the genre I want to try it out. 

As I've learned over a couple of decades, it doesn't pay to dismiss any mmorpg out of hand, sight unseen. Yes, at times (And this last couple of years has definitely been one of them.) there seem to be more mmorpgs coming on-stream than anyone could hope to keep up with but experience tells me it's a lot harder than you'd imagine to know which will end up being one you'll always remember fondly and which you'll forget forever the moment you log out.

Take Chimeraland. I'd never heard of that game until I read a very brief news item saying it had launched. I only tried it out of curiosity and in the hope of generating an easy blog post or two. I wasn't expecting to spend most of my gaming time over the next two weeks playing it, every chance I got. I could say much the same of a number of other unfashionable titles that crop up regularly here, Twin Saga, Dragon Nest, Blade and Soul, Riders of Icarus...

Those and many, many more are titles I picked almost at random, never expecting to spend much time with them. There must be dozens of mmorpgs I've spent longer playing than I have most single-player titles I've bought and enjoyed. There was a flurry of conversation in the blogosphere recently concerning which games people had played for more than five hundred hours. I thought about joining in, then thought better of it. It could be embarrassing.

There's a problem here and it's not the thorny old chestnut of how much game-playing is too much? It's the less self-flagellating "too many games, not enough time." As Kaylriene says, what he describes as "the competetive landscape of MMOs and gaming in general" has changed a lot in recent times. 

It began a long time ago in what we thought of then as the "Free to Play Revolution" but in what feels like a wholly counterintuitive backflip, it's spawned an unexpected sequel - "Return of the Subscription". As Krikket was saying, this is a much wider cultural phenomenon than just gaming but I've spoken about that several times in the past and I don't really want to go over it all again. I think we're at the point where we can all accept it's the culture we're living in, at least for now.

What's exercising me more at the moment isn't the cost, the convenience or the cultural implications, it's the more pointed question of how all of this is supposed to fit together. For once, I'm not whining about how there are only so many hours in the day, as I often do when it all starts to feel like it's getting on top of me. No, I'm thinking more of how much preparation, planning and effort it's going to take to get what I want out of what's on offer.

Looking outside of the gaming bubble for just a moment, only this week I've had to take time to download some seasons of shows I've been watching on Amazon Prime because they're going to be "leaving the service" shortly. If I hadn't spotted the warning, I'd have logged in one evening to watch the next episode and found it wasn't there. 

Netflix is losing ground to Disney+ as the mouse claws back content it was happy to license out before it had a subscription service of its own. I'm not so much concerned that I'll have to subscribe to multiple services as that I'm going to have to start scheduling what I watch based on who's showing it when. That sounds disturbingly like a step backwards, heading in the direction of the bad old days when we had to rely on broadcast media for our entertainment.

I was very interested to read Kaylriene's observations on the way Blizzard times content releases to spoil the pitches of competitors. He seemed in absolutely no doubt whatsoever that this isn't just a thing they do, it's a thing they always do.

Over the years I've seen many denials that any such practice exists. Blizzard is too big to care what others do, its defenders protest. The company wouldn't even notice what lesser lights were doing. All that's beneath their dignity. 

I've seen similar claims made for most of the larger developers and I've never found the arguments particularly convincing. If you can steal a competitor's thunder, why wouldn't you? It's not as though this is all some kind of friendly, altruistic club. It's business in the post-capitalist age.You don't raise yourself up by standing on the shoulders of giants if you can stand on their corpses instead.

Whether or not it's intentional doesn't matter so much as that it's almost inevitable. The market is so crowded now. There's no space to dodge everyone even if you wanted to try. 

For the first few years after I started paying attention to the genre, the announcement of a new mmorpg was an event in itself. There weren't so many you could afford to ignore any of them but also, with a box fee and a monthly subscription the norm, there weren't likely to be that many you could afford to play, either.

That was a long, long time ago. Everything was different then. Mmorpgs kept coming out. Many of them hung around. The MMORPG.com list runs to sixty-three pages and there are fifteen titles on each page. That's getting on for a thousand mmorpgs. 

As Kaylriene's post makes painfully plain, mmorpgs need to keep pumping out content to hold on to the players they have. It's like treading water in a deep ocean. The moment you stop paddling you're going to drown. To all those intriguing, exciting new games you can add Updates and Patches and Expansions and Events for all the ones we have with us already.

Earlier today, MassivelyOP flagged several upcoming promotional events for Guild Wars 2's fourth expansion, End of Dragons, for which, as Bree pointed out, we don't even have a firm launch date yet. In the discussion that followed it was suggested that ArenaNet might want to push the launch back into March "just to get out of the way of everything else being released", to which the reply was "March isn’t much better for major releases, both months are fairly brutal."

The schedule is congested, it's true, and has been for a long time. Last summer I was writing about the log-jam of new mmorpgs and things have scarcely slowed down since (Except at Blizzard, of course.) It's not likely there'll be much respite this year, either. Perhaps that's why Darkpaw decided to get their markers down early.

I used to wonder why anyone would stick to just one mmorpg but I can kind of see it, now. As Kaylriene complains, along with the rest of us, WoW comes with a lot of "padded busywork" to keep the core audience locked in. So do most mmorpgs. The genre is famously time-consuming.

It's not just the intentional stickiness of the regular gameplay, either. As my recent posting history confirms, every mmorpg likes to pump out holiday content for the same holidays. The more imaginative add extra holidays based around the cultural traditions enshrined in their own lore but everyone mirrors the big real-world events. 

It can be moderately challenging to keep pace with this stuff even in just the one game, especially if you like to play multiple characters. Mrs Bhagpuss has been known to burn out on both GW2 and EverQuest II holiday events, trying to get all the things for several characters on different accounts. I'm nothing like as diligent but I find it too much of a good thing sometimes.

Chimeraland has put a lot of this into perspective for me. It's a very good game with a great deal of potential. It's system-rich, there's much to learn, it has a slew of interesting progression systems, particularly in crafting and housing and there's a core gameplay loop involving catching and evolving monsters that I know has proved highly compulsive in other games but which would be entirely new to me.

I could easily see myself playing Chimeraland as a "main game" but I remember saying similar things about Genshin Impact, Black Desert, Bless Unleashed, Blade and Soul... The thing is, I'm already de facto playing both GW2 and EQII as "main games", a fact easily proved by my purchase of every expansion either of them has put out. 

It's plain I can barely keep up with those two. I haven't completed the adventure questline for Visions of Vetrovia yet (Okay, that is mostly because I couldn't beat that one boss...) and I've been doing the bare minimum to keep up to date in GW2 for a couple of years. It was a blessed relief to me when they mothballed the Living Story in favor of letting everyone play catch-up before the expansion.

If I'm going to go on playing multiple mmorpgs, which I most assuredly am, I have an uncomfortable feeling I might need to be more organized about it. It goes against the grain, I can tell you. I am not going to go as far as some people and draw up a gaming schedule but I will have to decide on a few broad guidelines based on goals and priorities.

Or I should. Whether I will is another matter. I was kind of hoping setting it down in print like this would focus my mind and it has, a little. I can say for sure that I want to carry on with Chimeraland, even if it's at the expense of something else. It's the game I most want to play each day so it would be crazy to play something I was less interested in just because it had seniority.

When End of Dragons drops, though, I'm going to feel obligated to give it some serious attention, even though right now i can honestly say I've rarely been less interested in an expansion for any game I was actually playing. If ANet postponed it for another few months I wouldn't be complaining. 

They won't, though. They're committed themselves. Maybe I should follow their example.

Unrealistic Expectations

I've seen an awful lot of discontented posts about Blizzard and World of Warcraft lately. It's hard to avoid them. Even though I'm not currently playing WoW it remains, as it has been for the best part of a decade and a half, the big story in the genre just about all the time.

These days, of course, there isn't just the one World of Warcraft. Blizzard may never have produced a sequel but, perhaps without intending to, they've somehow managed to make it seem as though they have. As with Norrath and a growing number of imaginary worlds, there are multiple versions of Azeroth available now. 

With three distinct and different versions available it's quite possible, likely even, that some are doing better than others. Not everyone is going to be unhappy all the time. Even so, there seems to be a general sense of malaise around the franchise as a whole.

For much of this year it was Retail in the firing line. There seemed to be no end to the complaints and discussions over everything that was wrong with Shadowlands. I kept hearing how most of the mechanics and systems introduced by the expansion were flawed or Not Fun. Either Blizzard wasn't doing much of anything about it or whatever it was doing didn't seem to be working.

As Classic wound down and the countdown to Burning Crusade ramped up, there was a fair amount of excitement but also some apprehension. Choices needed to be made and not everyone seemed comfortable about them. In the event the launch did arrive with the anticipated rush of exhillaration, and yet in a matter of days I found myself reading more tales of woe. 

Players leveling Shamans felt ignored and neglected, left in the old world dust to fend for themselves as the leveling bubble rose through Outlands towards the cap. Then there was the inevitable guild drama over reduced raid sizes, benching and the usual internecine maneuverings guilds tend to foster.

With the advent of the latest patch (9.1 I think it is) there's been a tinge of optimism over in Retail. I've seen commentary suggesting notice has finally been taken of the general levels of disatisfaction. Attempts are being made to turn the ship. Even then, there's a sense that it might be too little or too late or both.

The release of the recent Carbot Animations video "This is World of Warcraft" seems to have ratchetted the anxious tension around the games up another notch. Wilhelm has an excellent post on that, as does Gnomecore. Their positions overlap in a number of interesting way, especially given the extreme difference of their in-game interests and experiences. Both seem to agree the problems, whatever they are, lie as much with players and their expectations as with developers and their intent.

Both the posts also generated some lengthy and thoughtful comments. I get the impression the current state of all flavors of World of Warcraft and of the company behind them is giving a lot of players pause for thought.

It is, of course, not just about the games. It's only a couple of years since decisions taken over what could or couldn't be said in a livestream gave Blizzard unwelcome prominence on non-gaming newsfeeds all over the world. That controversy, bright though it blazed, doesn't appear to have smoldered as long as some expected or maybe hoped. In the end it seems it's the gameplay that matters most; the gameplay and the friendships it sustains.

Or doesn't. And that seems to be the problem. One of the problems, anyway.

In a comment on Wilhelm's post, Shintar linked another WoW video. 

 

I watched it but, like the Carbot video, it didn't really connect with me on the kind of visceral level it seems to have reached almost all of the two thousand or so YouTube viewers who left anguished comments on the thread. It's not that I don't recognize the experiences, albeit from games other than WoW; it's more that I don't look back on those same experiences with the anything close to the kind of emotion I'm reading about.

Perhaps the main difference between the two videos is where the center of gravity sits. The Carbot appears to drill down into what Blizzard, as both creator and curator, first got right and then got so badly wrong. The Pint video, conversely, appears to place a question mark over the validity of the experience itself, leaving the viewer uncertain where the blame, if blame there's to be, might lie.

All of this dovetails neatly into a sequence of posts Wilhelm has been running concerning the unwillingness of mmoprg players, en masse, to accept or even recognize the practicalities of keeping these games alive. Put shortly, it takes money and players don't want to pay.

There's another, closely-related theme playing out elsewhere. It concerns the attitude of players to games developers in general. Kaylriene has an excellent post up about that. He takes a very reasoned and reasonable approach, assuming goodwill on the developers' side, but it's worth reading the very well-argued counterpoint by Jackie in the comment thread, which includes this telling assessment:

"I don’t believe the developers want to engage with the playerbase. They’re not interested in criticism even from the people who can articulate it. If they wanted to communicate they would. My perception is that it’s an inward looking culture rather than outward looking."

It jibes nicely with something I said in my own comment on the thread there, where I asked why it might be, if we accept the premise that games developers do care quite deeply about the quality of their work and its fitness for purpose, that "so many changes in so many games appear to work so badly for so many players".

It's a worrisome question, isn't it? Personally, I've always been skeptical about player involvement in games development. I don't necessarily accept that individual players know what they want and I certainly don't see much in the way of collective agreement. 

Even if players did know what they wanted and could band together to express their wishes coherently, though, wouldn't it feel even worse to know the developers were listening and did care, but were fundementally incapable of doing anything very effective about it? 

Devs aren't gods, after all. Not even gaming gods. On the same day I read Jackie's comment I read this heartfelt statement by a developer for whom I have a lot of time, CharlieX of SmokymonkeyS, creators of the wondeful (now, sadly, mothballed) Ninelives. Despite the idiosyncratic English the emotion comes through perfectly: 

"Sometimes a player tells me, you design your game to more difficult and annoying to prevent the player to get the achieve. Well, this is a wrong idea overall. Sadly, this mean the developer's intend is not going well, and it happens always. Sometimes I go to watch my game player's video and get sick every time I saw the player stuck, get lost, or failed caused by my design."

Just because you know what you want to do doesn't always mean you're able to do it.

So much for the developers' side of the table. Returning to the comments in the threads following both the YouTube videos I mentioned, the recurring, indeed overwhelming theme coming from the players seems to be one of heroically unrealistic expectations. 

Playing World of Warcraft has very definitely been a seminal experience for many. Almost a rite of passage. From comment after comment I get the sense that playing WoW marked a transition from solipsistic isolation to social engagement, at least for some. Some feel betrayed that Blizzard somehow took this away from them. Others seem bereft, almost guilty. They lost the way all on their own.

The Pint video is fascinating in the way it depicts a player who, after playing and then leaving the game, has clearly been able to ground themselves in a committed relationship and, by implication, in the web of adult responsibilities required to support their newfound social status. Even with that support structure firmly in place, however, it just takes a nudge of commercially-driven nostalgia to tip them back into longing for a fondly-remembered past.

Wilhelm has another great post up about what prerequisites an mmorpg developer might need to have in place before choosing to enter the nostalgia market. For most games I think the factors he lists would be sufficient. For World of Warcraft, though, I suspect there needed to be more to make it work.

WoW wasn't just a video game. It was a global phenomenon. Its players weren't necessarily like other mmorpg players, either then or now. A lot of people ended up playing WoW who hadn't played other, similar games before. The things they did there were different to other things they'd done, not just in degree but in essence. 

I'd be willing to bet that some of the people posting elegaic, emotional comments on the threads following these deeply nostalgic videos found social engagement and acceptance in Azeroth for perhaps the first time. In their memory the experience isn't just one of many, another social setting where friendships were forged then forgotten. It was an intense experience that changed them and for that they value it highly.

It's a theme not in any way unique to WoW or indeed to mmorpgs or even video games. I see it repeated over and over in comment threads that draw on any widely-shared experience, from childhood itself through musical trends to a college education to sports... Any moment in a life when everything just seems to fall into place. When people around you understand. When you find your tribe. When you belong.

It always fades. School breaks up. You graduate college. The bands you followed split up or find new directions that don't sound good any more. You don't get picked for the team because you can't run so fast or jump so high and anyway practice is on a weekend and there are things you need to do, more important things. Your guildmates stop logging in, even on raid nights. Life moves on, everything changes, nothing stays the same.

 

If you're hoping that long-lasting mmorpg you used to love is going to buck that trend and stay the same forever, you're in line for a disappointment. It's going to change along with everything else or else it's not going to be there or if it is then no-one will be playing any more. 

And if you believe a Classic server is a time machine to take you and your friends back ten years to when you were younger and freer and life was better, well, you might, if you're lucky, get to take a nice vacation in a well-managed resort version of a specific snapshot of that past. And then time will catch up with you once again and you'll be back where you started, only with more disappointment than you had before because one more fantasy turned out to be just that and nothing more.

Listening to the various voices, the ones that seem most sanguine, most satisfied, are those that recognize a game is after all a game. Not "just" a game. More than that. But not so much more it can stop time and bring back lost youth. The people still having fun in World of Warcraft, both Retail and Classic/TBC, seem to me to be those who aren't expecting it to change their lives, just entertain them for a while.

I suspect that, if developers concentrated a little harder on entertaining people and worried a little less on keeping them locked into a revenue cycle, both sides might stand a better chance of getting what it is they really want. The games might hold onto the interest of more people for longer if players felt more accepted and more at home.

It's a pipe dream, I know, but its one that quite a few people seem to share. A few years back the buzzwords around the genre seemed to be Classic and Retro and Social. Now, the mission statements of many of the plethora of new studios spinning up from splintering mmorpg majors all seem to echo the call for a more emotionally intelligent approach to making mmorpgs. It's not so much a case of turning back time as it is learning from the past.

Whether any of them will be able to turn good intentions into good games remains to be seen but I think we should probably give them the benefit of the doubt, for now at least. If they can pull it off they'll only be giving us what we say we want, after all. 

Whether we'll want it when we get it, though, that's a whole different question.

Terms And Conditions Apply

Ever have one of those dreams where the faster you run the slower you go? No, me neither. I think that only happens in the movies.

Unlocking the Vulpera allied race in World of Warcraft is turning out a bit like it, though. Certainly not how I imagined it would go.

I thought I understood it. As I'd heard it, originally, you had to own the Battle for Azeroth expansion, complete a bunch of fox quests and get your reputation to Exalted with their faction, the Voldunai.

 

Then, with Shadowlands looming on the horizon, Blizzard rolled BfA into the base game along with every other discarded expansion. And, just to sweeten the deal, the rep requirement got dropped as well. 

Next, Shadowlands got pushed back, as we now know to November 23rd, but the pre-patch turned up a few weeks ahead of schedule anyway, bringing with it all the major changes to the game that supposedly came as part of the package. 

At that point I had a clear and simple vision. I'd subscribe for a month, knock out whatever quests you had to do to unlock the foxfolk, then I'd make a Vulpera to try out the new tutorial zone, Exile's Reach, and the subsequent squished levelling experience. I imagined ripping through the unlock quests on one of my higher-level characters in half an hour or so then settling down to pick fur and eye colors.

Yeah.That didn't happen.

 

First I found out that although the rep grind wasn't needed any more you still needed to have the achievement "Secrets in the Sand" complete and safely recorded on your permanent record. 

Okay, one achievement. That doesn't sound so bad, does it? In MMORPGs it's not unusual to get achievements for things you didn't even notice you'd done. Not this one.

To get the Secrets in the Sand achievement you need to complete the full zone storyline for Vol'Dun. That's a seven-part sequence where every quest but the final boss fight comes complete with several sub-quests of its own. The commentaries I read all said it would take a few hours to finish and they weren't kidding. In total, there are around eighty quests in Secrets of the Sands!

 

Still, a few hours is just one good session, isn't it? And with the new level anywhere you like system I could just pop over to Vol'Dun and knock the whole thing out in an evening, right? Yeah... no.

When Blizzard said you could level up in any expansion you liked they didn't mean any zone of any expansion you liked. Or maybe they did. It's hard to be sure. 

If you let Chromie, the Bronze Dragon that pretends to be a gnome, tailor you to fit an expansion of your choice then, yes, you pretty much can pick your zone, within that expansion. If you just wander around the world on your own recognizance, though, the previous rules still apply. 

 

Don't ask me which rules. I gave up trying to work it out ages ago. All I can say is that without Chromie time running, zones have level ranges. Or some of them do. 

Battle for Azeroth, which isn't included in Chromie's collection, is supposed to be the default now to go from ten to fifty. If you don't actively try to avoid it, the game funnels you there when you leave Exile's Reach and keeps you there until you're ready for Shadowlands.

Vol'Dun, the zone where the Vulpera live, is flagged for levels thirty-five to fifty. When i found that out it changed things but I thought I could still get right on it. I'd get my highest character, a dwarf hunter, squished to thirty-seven, to do it.

 

Except, of course, he's Alliance and the Vulpera are a Horde-only race. (For good reasons, as it turns out). But achievements are account-wide so maybe... 

Nope. Big, fat nope. Secrets of the Sands is a Horde-only achievement because the Alliance get their own Vol'dun storyline. Which just happens to involve some truly appalling colonial racism and near-genocide... against the Vulpera.

So, very much no dwarves welcome there. Which left me where I've been these last few posts, levelling a fresh goblin shaman to thirty-five so she could go to Vol'dun as a representative of the Horde, complete the zone storyline, get the achievement and - finally - unlock the vulpera race. 

Too easy! Way, way too easy!

 

I spent most of today on the questline. It's very good. I enjoyed it a lot. Which is just as well because if I was expecting to cap it off with a stint in character creation followed by a happy couple of hours running round as a fox, well, then I was going to be disappointed, wasn't I?

The moment I got the achievement I hearthed back to Orgrimmar to tick whatever final box I needed and...

... after about an hour of online research...

.... and a lot of running to and fro between the embassy and Grummash Hold....

... trying to talk to a whole bunch of people who didn't want to talk to me...

... with much reading and re-reading of my quest journal...

I finally discovered you have to have a level fifty character before you can get the actual quest that starts the Vulpera unlock questline!

Seriously, could someone not have mentioned that right at the start? Really?

Not to go into a rant (and I know longtime WoW players will find this at best an exaggeration and at worst heresy) but the out-of-game resources for the game are some of the most confusing, misleading, incomplete and often just plain wrong that I've ever had to try to use anywhere. 

There are so many assumptions made, so often. So much is taken as read or just not thought worth mentioning at all. I've learned the hard way that the best information is hidden in the comments, where other players, who've already learned the hard way that the headline "facts" are half-baked and incomplete, exercise some social responsibility by explaining what you really need to do.

 

It would be rash to say I now know exactly what's left to do before I get this blasted fox. I think I know but I wouldn't be all that surprised to find you can only do the quests after midnight or during a full moon.

I have to be getting close, though, surely. My Shaman dinged forty on the Vol'Dun storyline. She's got another ten levels to go. I can do that. The ironic thing is, I plan on staying in Vol'Dun for a while, which means she'll most likely end up Exalted with the Voldunai anyway! 

It'll be nice to have a max level character, I guess. For the couple of weeks before Shadowlands raises the cap to sixty, anyway. I wasn't planning on it but I'm not unhappy. 

You have to take your pleasures where you can, these days.