Seventeen Days : WoW Classic

So... WoW Classic. Soon to be upon us like a speeding locomotive in just a couple of weeks plus change. Will it drive all before it or crash spectacularly into the buffers?

As reported by Massively:OP, subs are up: "Subscribers in World of Warcraft® increased since mid-May, following the release date announcement and beta for World of WarcraftClassic and the Rise of Azshara™ content update.". And as Bree observes "...wouldn’t it be worrisome if they weren’t?".

Well, yes it would, although maybe not quite yet. True, you have to have a subscription to join in the revivalist fun. On the other hand, if all you want to do is party like it's 2004, it's bit early to pull the switch. What are you going to do for the next two weeks? Money wasted, isn't it?

Makes a lot more sense to re-sub just before the launch date. That way you get a full month of Classic play, which I'm guessing is going to be a week or two more than a lot of people are going to need before they discover that subbing hasn't made them fifteen years younger after all.

That's what I'm going to do. I had already decided to do it purely based on the blogging opportunities it's sure to afford but last night I asked Mrs Bhagpuss (in guild chat in Guild Wars 2 because why get up and walk into the next room?) whether she was interested in re-subbing for Classic and she replied with an unequivocal "Yes".

I wasn't sure she even knew WoW Classic was a thing. I don't think we've talked about it before. She's also not much for going back to MMORPGs she's stopped playing. She did return to EverQuest, EQII and Vanguard but all of those were more than a decade ago.

But then, Mrs Bhagpuss did like WoW when we played, possibly more than I did. She made it to a slightly higher level and carried on playing for a few weeks longer. Conversely, I've been back many times to futz about at low levels, whereas she's never played a session since she stopped about a decade ago.

This is where it all begins. Well, after a bit of a jog. Get your snowshoes ready.

The thing is, we both missed out on World of Warcraft when it was a cultural phenomenon and an unstoppable force in the genre. By the time we got around to trying it, sometime around 2009, WoW was mid-WotLK, considered by some to be the zenith of the game. 

I found that version very enjoyable. There was still plenty of granularity. Mobs didn't fall over from a hard stare. Leveling took a while. The world felt open, connected and real.

On the other hand, a lot of the more interesting mechanics I'd read up about had already left the game. I was particularly disappointed to find that pet management for hunters was no longer a thing.

Because of the way I came to WoW, a great deal of my interest in Classic relies not on nostalgia but on a desire to experience something I missed out on first time around. I'm aware it's going to be a recreation but I'm expecting it to be a convincing one.

As we get closer to launch a few questions arise. With Mrs Bhagpuss signed up I know I won't be playing entirely alone but I'd quite like to have a few other contacts, not least so we can do some dungeons. WoW dungeons are quite good fun.

There will, of course, be a huge number of guilds recruiting and Mrs Bhagpuss, who is a lot more social in games than I am, will quite likely end up in one. That said, she's nowhere near as game-social as she used to be. I don't think any of us are, The games themselves have largely removed the need to make that effort. Whether the old social skills will return remains to be seen.

No pandas, space goats or jolly green goblins in 2004 2019!

I'd be interested in joining a guild made up of bloggers from the local blogosphere but so far I haven't heard of anyone planning to start such a thing. Even if someone does, it will either be a European guild on an EU server, where I won't be playing, or an American guild on a US server, where I will play, but mostly when everyone is asleep.

I prefer U.S. servers for a number of reasons. I've played on many EU servers over the years and they tend to be really bad-tempered compared to US or Global servers. U.S. players just seem generally more cheerful. 

More importantly, though, I really don't like playing MMORPGs in their prime time. I like a busy environment but prime time in a successful game isn't just busy, it's heaving. Playing prime time  is like choosing to go and do your weekly shop at lunchtime on Saturday, when you can't get around the aisles for families shooting the breeze with their friends and neighbors and every checkout has a line ten deep.

Much better to play shoulder hours. As a UK resident, I'm five hours behind the East Coast, nine behind the West. That means things are beginning to liven up around the time I get home from work and just starting to get really busy when I log off to go to bed. Weekends are generally comfortably populated from lunchtime onwards and weekdays I have the place to myself, unless the game has a lot of Australian players, which many do.

Blizzard just released their initial list of server names. Most of them are... odd. TAGN has the full list. I'm inclined towards Bloodsail Buccaneers, which has the virtue of a memorable name, almost the only US server that can make that claim, and a PvE-RP ruleset. It's also physically located on the East Coast, which, by dint of the transatlantic cable, generally gives me at least as good a ping as most EU servers.

I don't do a lot of RP (sorry, Psychochild) but I am very much "RP compatible" as Wilhelm describes it. I'm happy to be around people who roleplay, I pick character names that don't offend the lore and I like to talk "in character" if the opportunity arises. Mostly, though, I find that my playstyle just slides by unnoticed on an RP server.

After choosing a server comes faction, race and class. I really don't think there's much of a decision to be made here. I tend to prefer Alliance to Horde. Goblins are a huge draw but there are no goblins in Classic so Alliance it's going to be.

Wrong. Just wrong.

For race I strongly prefer the short of stature. That means Dwarves or Gnomes. My general preference is for Gnomes but WoW Gnomes are a bit creepy, at least the male ones. I think it's the mustaches. That means it's most likely going to be a Dwarf.

Actually, it has to be a Dwarf because my class of first preference is Hunter. As I mentioned, I was somewhat disappointed to miss out on the pet management aspect of the class and I'm very keen to explore that. Also I really like having to manage arrows as  a resource rather than having a magic bow that never runs out of ammunition.

If I end up hanging around for a while I'll almost certainly make a Gnome Warlock. I like the class and it suits a Gnome. I'd entertain the idea of playing a Druid but the only Alliance race that can be one is Night Elf and I'd uninstall rather than play one of those. I might try a Tauren Druid for the Horde if Classic sticks.

That about covers everything, I think. It's tempting to re-sub now but if I did I'd just end up boring myself with the dull Legion content my Hunter is lumbered with or, more likely, not log in at all. I'll have to exercise restraint and wait until sometime around the 25th or 26th.

Nice to have something to look forward to in MMORPGs for once, even if it is a decade and a half out of date!

Off To The Races

When I checked my Feedly this morning the first thing I saw was this question from Keen:


What’s Your Favorite MMORPG Race and Why?


I immediately thought of the Lunar New Year's race through Divinity's Reach in GW2. I did that over and over and really enjoyed it. Did I enjoy it more than the aerial races organized by EQ2's gnomes for every City Festival, though? Or the many races around Metropolis and Gotham in DCUO? And what about that all-time classic, EverQuest's Naked Gnome Race from Ak'Anon to Freeport?

Then I read Keen's post and realized he didn't mean that kind of race at all. He meant the kind of race you choose at Character Creation. The one that decides whether you're short or tall, hated or admired, a genius or a dimwit. Whether you're covered in fur or scales, have a tail or wings. All that good stuff.

The term "Race", of course, is a bit of a misnomer as it's generally applied in MMORPGs. Sometimes it can be an accurate description, as in Vanguard, which has four "races" with the subtitle "Human", but usually it means Species. Then again, the species boundary gets very blurry in fantasy.

We tend to think of Humans, Elves and Orcs as genuinely disparate, separate species but that can hardly be the case when they can interbreed to give us Half-Orcs and Half Elves. Not to mention Half-Giants. The line fades to the point of invisibility when magic comes into the picture with races like EverQuest's Drakkin, "a human race" with "a touch of dragon blood...scaly skin, marking, hair and sometimes horns that mirror the dragon that gifted them their heritage".

Exactly how a dragon  "gifts" such a heritage is - probably wisely - left to the imagination. The more you ponder on all this, the less sense it seems to make. Why are there so many half elves but no "half-humans"? Is that just a naming convention or are the Elven parent's genes always dominant? If Elves and Humans can interbreed successfully, why not Gnomes and Dwarves? Or can they, but they just don't, for cultural reasons?

At first blush MMORPGs - particularly those with a fantasy setting - appear to offer a multiplicity of racial options but they tend to narrow down to a handful once you look at them closely. For a start, almost every Player Race in every MMO is bipedal. Istaria famously lets you play as a (four-legged) dragon, which was the game's primary USP back when it launched as Horizons. Project: Gorgon's Cows are another notable exception, although even there you can't actually roll a cow (!) at character creation. You have to become one by magic in game.

GW2's Charr are highly unusual in that, while bipedal in combat, they drop to all fours when running. It's one of the features that make them so appealing as a racial choice for me even though they are definitely on the larger end of the scale. I do cleave to the smaller races as a rule.

Many Western MMOs have a handful of options that at least attempt to add some variation to the "Short human", "tall human", "human with horns", "human with tail", "human with wings" palette seen in so many imports from the East. WoW has Bulls, Wolves, Goats, Pandas and Undead, all of which walk upright on two legs and look like humans dressed up for Mardi Gras.  

Allods, which modelled a deal of its visual appearance on WoW, took things a stage further with Gibberlings, who come in packs of three and are a lot closer to "animals dressed up as humans" than the other way round. Indeed, Gibberlings probably rest at the cusp of Fantasy and Anime, or Fantasy and Cartoon if you want to be Western about it, which is where the real non-human races come into their own.

There was that one MMO where I played as a rabbit. What was that one called? Eden Eternal, that's it! It's still running, too. There was also the similarly-named and much-missed Earth Eternal, an all-animal MMO I played in beta with some degree of enjoyment. Those animals still stood upright, though, unlike the deer in Endless Forest, a bizarre affair which has, astonishingly, spawned some kind of sub-genre that incudes Meadow and Wolfquest.

Plenty of choice if you cast your MMO net far enough. Closer to home, in the handful of MMOs we all talk about as though they represented the genre, not so much. Which brings me back to Keen's original question. So, what is my favorite MORPG race?

Just for once I can answer that question! In fact, I can list my top ten in order without having to think too hard about it.

1. Raki - Vanguard - Stocky foxes with a great backstory, characterful animations and the happiest faces.

2. Ratonga - EQ2 - Cute rats with another excellent backstory and the most endearing verbal tic in gaming.

3. Gnome - EverQuest - Short, smart, every one kinda likes them and they have the tickingest city in Norrath.

4. Charr - GW2 - Big cats that don't do the "catgirl/catman" thing, run on all fours and have the city Ak'Anon would be if it was a military-industrial complex.

5. Asura - GW2 - They're rats but they won't admit it. Why do you think they're so obsessed with the Skritt (who would totally be on this list if you could play them). Best animations and great voicework, too.

6. Gibberlings - Allods - Three demented gerbils for the price of one. What's not to love?

7. Vah'Shir - EverQuest - Another non-cute cat race. I never really took to the EQ2 version but I played a Vah'Shir Beastlord in EQ for many years and the combination of a tiger-person with a tiger pet is hard to top.

8. Goblin - Warhammer Online - Cowardly, obsequious, disgusting and only they can be the second-best class in any MMO, the Squig-Herder.

9. Dwarf - EverQuest - Just a classic. So solid, so reliable, so predictably gruff. Everything you want a dwarf to be and everything you don't.

 10. Riven - City of Steam - The race I wish I'd played more before the game closed down. Cool, stylish, mysterious, the Riven could have been so much more if only City of Steam had followed its original plan.

Well, that's the top ten today. Ask me tomorrow and it may have changed. Raki is always going to be number one, though. In my heart, anyway.

Waking A Tiger: GW2, WoW

Over the past few years there's been a significant change in tone from both developers and players in regard to what we might call the innate difficulty setting of the MMORPG genre. For a long time the wind was squarely in the sails of players, like me, who prefer the game itself to do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to tedious things like targeting and positioning. These days there's almost an obsession with bringing the modes and means of regular video games into the previously staid and stately world of MMORPG combat to make it more "challenging".

That's something I abhor pretty much without reservation. If I wanted to play those kind of video games I'd be playing them. I don't. That's why I started playing these ones instead.

I take a much more nuanced view on the current trend towards recovering what was supposedly lost in the long march towards mass market acceptance. Call it the heart or the soul of the thing, whatever it was there are plenty who believe it's not there any more. It's a situation whose underlying causes and present complaints are neatly articulated by Marc Jacobs in the third of his Foundational Principles.

While I have some sympathy with the movement, my general feeling is that I was there, I did pay my dues and I've earned my easy ride. I don't hanker after the days when it felt like it took you half a play-session to get to the place you were going to hunt or when getting six people to the same spot on the map meant four of them dying and two of them rage-quitting before anyone even saw each other.

Neither do I look back with nostalgia to Sunday afternoons spent sending tells to crafters in the hope of finding one who wasn't too busy doing a corpse run or sitting in a guild meeting or attending an in-game wedding to travel five zones to a city with a bank where the guards would tolerate both of us, all so he or she could make me a set of level 15 armor for which I'd hand over all the money I'd managed to scrape together since I last bankrupted myself for the level 10 set two weeks ago.

I could literally tell dozens of stories like that, mostly drawn from memories of things that happened while I was playing EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, Vanguard and EverQuest 2. Marc and countless others would point to the mere fact that not only do I have all those stories but that I can still remember them in detail a decade and change later as offering the strongest evidence in support of their case. It's the argument that says it has to hurt a little if you're going to care.

It's true. The reason those experiences live with me still is because they were painful and in being so the memories associated with them were laid down in accordance with the mechanisms associated with strong emotional reactions. What's questionable, in my opinion, is whether that's a desirable outcome for an activity that is, essentially, artificial and meaningless.

It would be a lot harder for me to come up with an after-dinner speech's worth of anecdotes based on the last five years of playing MMOs. Not because I've played fewer hours or paid less attention but because many of the sharp edges and rough corners have been sanded down and smoothed out. I have fewer scars.

The memories of the elation at last-second wins in boss fights or the sense of satisfaction at the completion of  lengthy questlines don't seem to be laid down to last in the same way as the recollection of the anxious hours spent waiting to see if the guy who promised to build my sloop in Vanguard would ever log in again let alone the traumatic loss of my level six corpse down the hollow tree in Blackburrow (and no, I am not ever going to get over that, thanks for asking). It seems that, when it comes to what we might call regular MMO gameplay, no matter how intense the fight feels at the time, the underlying understanding that it can be repeated ad nauseam until the right result pops out undercuts the brain's sense that anything worth recording for posterity is going on. It probably gets the same priority as your daily commute.

Or perhaps it's the lack of agency that matters. The key part of almost every one of my "MMO war stories" is that I was doing something I'd decided to do, something that required me to make choices and decisions. Bonus memory points if some of those choices were dependent on the choices of others.

It's here that I believe we might find a way in to what was actually lost rather than what we imagine has been lost. In attempting to pave all the roads and open all the gates to allow the smoothest of journeys MMO developers also closed down every side-road and took over the steering wheel. Instead of being the drivers of our own destinies we have increasingly taken on the role of passengers.

When I finally got around to playing WoW  some five years after it began my first character was a Hunter. One of the things that most interested me about the class was the relatively complex and demanding process of finding, catching and taming pets, which I'd read about in some detail on one of the many websites devoted to all things Azeroth. Of course, by the time I got there, all that had been re-assessed and re-evaluated as arduous busywork. I forget what you did have to do to tame a pet but I know there was nothing about it worth remembering.

Three years ago in GW2 my first character was a ranger. I was, once again, looking forward to the process of acquiring pets. It turned out that to charm a pet in GW2 you have to stand next to a juvenile of the species and press a button on a window that pops up on screen automatically. That's it.

Well, the wheel turns. That process hasn't changed a jot in Heart of Thorns and yet gaining the new pets for the first of my rangers has been one of the highlights of the expansion. The pets, which are both powerful and visually appealing and hence very covetable, have been placed in comparatively awkward to reach locations, where you would be unlikely to run into them other than by sheer good luck. Moreover, a couple are soft-gated behind the completion of the Dragon Stand meta-event, which offers only a tight fifteen minute window on success before the whole map resets.

Running across the blighted landscape after Mordremoth's defeat, trying to avoid mordrem snipers and not fall down gaping holes filled with poison gas, while attempting to follow map directions from Reddit and instructions in party chat from Mrs Bhagpuss, who'd done it before, all in the hope of finding my Tiger before being unceremoniously booted back to the Pact base camp on a map reset that loomed ever-nearer, stands a good chance of becoming a story I'll still be telling years from now. If I'd failed to find the little striper that memory would come with a lifetime guarantee.

There's a passing fair chance I'll buy WoW's Legion expansion next year. I was already minded to give it a try but the odds improved markedly when I saw this. "Most Mechanical pets will be challenging to tame, requiring you to first locate them and then use your Hunter abilities in unusual ways" they say. Well, that's the kind of challenge I can appreciate. In fact you might say it's what I came here looking for in the first place.

The idea that MMOs need to return to the levels of social interdependence that were the norm before Blizzard overturned the tables makes my blood run cold. The numerous pragmatic changes that a succession of developers has brought to the genre seem to me to have made both for better games and better entertainment. Somehow, though, complexity, nuance and, most especially, agency got tangled up with awkwardness, frustration and inaccessibility. Somewhere along the way a few babies got thrown out with a lot of dirty bathwater.

It seems ridiculous but there's just an outside chance that Gnome Hunters could help, just a little, in bringing back a taste of what was lost. Some variety, some choice, some agency. And, yes, even some challenge. It's asking a lot from something so small but who could be  better placed to herald the return of over-engineered design than a gnome?

104 Beats That: EQ2

 I spent much of yesterday flying through hoops. Hadn't intended to but sometimes that's just how life turns out.

Norrath's travelling Festival rolled up at Halas last week giving The Flying Freebooters the excuse they needed to charge their boosters and set up the death-trap they call a racing circuit. I have no idea who the Freebooters are, other than yet another set of gnomes with a pirate fixation and a desire to find new and exciting ways to get us all killed testing another half-baked engineering project. 

Psst! Ladies! Wanna see my Crash Pad?

The gnomes offer a bribe for flying in races meant to knock the kinks out of their contraptions at no risk to themselves. It's a "C.R.A.S.H. Pad" that looks like a cut-down Enterprise. You can use it as a ground mount or as an appearance mount for flying if you have an actual flying mount. Most of my characters already have at least one so I wasn't planning on racing, but the gnomes had a juicier inducement on offer and my plans changed.

You get the mount just for completing five circuits. Anyone can do that. But if you can do it fast enough you get a title. Not just a title, a prefix. Everyone wants a good prefix and Mrs Bhagpuss especially wanted this one - Snowflake Chaser. So did I, come to that.

One careful owner

Flying the races gives Mrs Bhagpuss motion sickness so the actual piloting falls to me. Not usually a problem. I learned to do these races in DCUO, which uses the exact same system, and the Norrathian version is generally much easier. Generally, but not specifically. I found the Frostfang Sea course exceedingly hard.

To get the title you need to complete the course in 104 seconds. After a dozen tries my best time was 116. My average time was more like 124. Worse, I couldn't figure out how to improve. I'd have given up had a guildie not logged on for his once-a-week casual session, taken a couple of runs at it for practice and then and nailed the damn thing on his next run with a second to spare.

Frustration This Way

I couldn't tell myself it was plain impossible now I'd just seen it done, so I tried a bunch more times and still got nowhere. I went in search of inspiration. And more inspiration. I watched those two videos and at last I could see exactly what I'd been doing wrong. I got back on the horse bike C.R.A.S.H. Pad and tried again. And I still couldn't do it!

This time, though, at least I was getting close. 106 seconds. Then 105. So many 105s... Refine, refine, refine. Shave that hoop. Cut that corner. Hit every booster, miss every cloud until you find your dream. 

Ratonga pilot + gnomish engineering = fireworks

It took me around six hours to get the title on four characters. Time well spent? Well, I got this blog post out of it. And Mrs Bhagpuss and I are both Snowflake Chasers. Twice.