Month One: WoW Classic

It's been almost exactly a month since the launch of WoW Classic so I thought it might be time for a recap. I only thought of doing this half an hour ago, while I was closing in on Level 20 with my Warlock, so don't look for any detailed analyses or amazing insights!

When Classic was announced it barely registered. I was five years late to the WoW party. I have a Vanilla nostalgia rating of zero. As the months passed, people with a closer attachement to Azeroth than mine became increasingly excited and even impatient for the thing to arrive. My own interest grew somewhat.

Obviously it was going to be a Major Genre Event and you never like to miss out on one of those. Also I was pretty sure I could mine Classic for a few blog posts. Always an incentive. And it would be a (weak) chance to experience somethinng (not much) like the original launch frenzy. Maybe.

My expectation, which I expressed freely and often in comments all over the place, was that I'd play for a week or two, write a bunch of posts about it, then move on (or more likely back) to something more to my taste. I was all but certain I wouldn't be renewing my subscription when the first month ran out.

Well, I renewed my sub a few days ago. If I ran one of those activity monitors that a few bloggers swear by it would probably show the huge majority of my PC time these last few weeks was taken up either by Classic or by Blogger, where 60% of all my posts since August 27th have been about the game. For the last month I've either been playing Classic or writing about it.

I've also played it for more hours and with greater intensity than any MMORPG since the launch of Guild Wars 2 seven years ago. I wasn't expecting to get bitten this hard again until and unless Brad ever gets Pantheon out the door.

I've thought long and hard about why this is. I've written a bunch of lengthy posts about it and left comments almost as long on the threads of other bloggers, many of whom have been wrestling with the same concerns. I wouldn't claim I've gotten to the bottom of the mystery but I have come to one important conclusion: Classic works becasue it has the kind of consistent, considered, coherent design that we haven't seen in a very long time.

This, I think, accounts for more of the reasons why the game clicks with me than any other single explanation. Classic runs like finely-tuned clockwork. Every piece meshes seamlessly with every other and together they drive the machine forward.

The effect Classic has on some players.

By comparison, other MMORPGs are a hotch-potch of mismatched parts, many of which don't fit together and some of which actively grind against each other. Take Guild Wars 2, for example. I've played it for seven years so it clearly has a lot going for it but with the best will in the world no-one could say it has ever been either coherent or finely-tuned.

Take the languishing, desperate World Vs World as a prime example. It's a walking disaster now (even though I still enjoy it, on occasion) but when was it ever anything else? I wrote a post in October 2012, just a couple of months after launch, which I titled "What's Wrong With WvW".

Back then I outlined four problems:

1. Free Server Transfers
2. Orb Bonus For World That Needs It Least
3. Ladder-Style Server Matching System 
4. Night Capping (not as much fun as it sounds) 

Of those, the only one that's been fixed in seven years is #2, for which ANet's nuanced response was to remove the entire Orb mechanic and replace it with... nothing. The Ladder has been tweaked and fiddled with and as a result is now even worse than it was. Free Server Transfers, now Paid Server Transfers, remain one of the most contentious issues as does night-capping, now expanded to include all "off-hours" play.

ArenaNet launched a major MMORPG with three disparate game modes, none of which had any synergy at all. All of those modes were compromised, flawed and poorly implemented at launch (sPvP crashed and burned as an eSport, a huge number of PvE events were bugged for months - some for much longer than that). In the succeeeding years Anet showed little sign of understanding how to fix any of their mistakes, nor in knowing what a fully-integrated, holistic MMORPG ought to look like.

Based on what I see and experience in Classic, the Blizzard team of the Classic era suffered few doubts, either over what their game should be or how to make it function exactly the way they wanted it to. Everything seems to have been designed to within an inch of its life and yet nothing feels stilted or formal or forced.

The much-discussed "difficulty" of Classic consists almost entirely of two things: patience and forethought. The developers evidently expected their players would be willing to stop and think before they acted. They trusted players to read quest text and NPC dialog, understand it and act on it.

Finally getting Unending Breath was one of the highlights of the last month's play for me.

They had no intention of facilitating any kind of "action" gaming as we understand it now, even though, in comparison to the MMORPGs the designers themselves played and loved, they were providing a smoother, faster (yes, faster) and easier overall experience.

When WoW launched in 2004 I chose not to play it for two reasons. Firstly, after three months of beta and two weeks of Live, I was already committed to EverQuest II and, secondly, everyone I knew in-game at that point was of the same opinion of World of Warcraft; it was a kiddie MMO.

I'm glad I didn't play it back then. I think I would indeed have found it "too easy" and "for kids". Five years later, when my views on many things, not least MMORPGS, had mellowed, I came to WoW and found it surprisingly good fun. A decade on from then I find I've changed enough that the recreation of the original game suits me almost perfectly.

Classic has most of the elements I love in games of the era that preceded it; a plethora of complex, interwoven systems that reward patience and close attention; combat that relies on the brain more than the fingers; pacing that allows plenty of time for thought.

I find that pacing almost ideal. Much though I love EverQuest, these days the pace of progress I enjoyed in the early years of the 21st century is just too glacial. I've proved that to my own satisfaction when playing on Progression servers over the years.

Unlike Isey, I don't see myself ever finding my happy place on P1999, even with that new server smell. Very much to my own surprise it's the accelerated pace and increased convenience of Classic that hits the sweet spot.

Amusing myself by making my Voidwalker run through the water while I stay on the shore. Serves him right for moaning all the time.

Which is ironic considering just how much the pacing and satisfaction of Classic's gameplay is built on inconvenience and what seem to many to be some very rough edges indeed. I guess it depends where you're making your comparisons.

Those "rough edges" are, of course, nothing of the kind. Almost without exception they are well-thought-out design choices, intended to structure and direct gameplay. All the running, all the fetch and carry quests, all the side-trips and searching and unexpected discoveries, the wandering vendors and elusive trainers are there to ground you in the world.

If you don't like that then, in 2004/5 at least, you really didn't like MMORPGs. That's what the genre was at the time and Blizzard, doing what they were known for, took what others had created and polished it until it glowed.

And that's why we have so much controversy over whether Classic is immersive or tedious, addictive or alienatiing. In the decade and a half since WoW launched, the entire genre it bootstrapped into the mainstream has fractured, split and changed out of all recognition.

We live in a world where PokemonGo and Dark Age of Camelot are supposedly both part of the same family. Where Black Desert Online can offer combat that largely consists of hammering one mouse button while EverQuest II can accomodate six hot bars of skills, most of which you might use in a single fight.

It's no surprise to me that players are deeply split over Classic and Retail. They're different games that appeal to different audiences. It's not aboout whether one is "better" than the other; it's about which one you want.

It seems I want Classic. No-one could be more surprised than me.

Too Much, Too Soon : EverQuest, GW2, Pantheon

Something that was mentioned in passing during the Pantheon stream about the tendency of newer MMOs to over-reward struck a chord with me. Casting my mind back to the early days of EverQuest, two of the most motivating aspects of the pacing were the five level gaps between spell upgrades for casters and the relatively sparse, partially random chance of acquiring better armor and weapons.

Given that even the lowest levels seemed to take a very long time, waiting five levels for every new set of spells could be frustrating. The significant upside was that impact those new spells had when you did get them was immense, even game-changing.

The acquisition of a new pet could transform the gameplay of a Magician or a Necromancer out of all recognition. With the arrival of each set of spells, things that had been out of reach would become, if not easy, then entirely possible.

Your character might suddenly be able to breathe underwater or fly (okay, levitate). Leveling up didn't merely mean a percentage increase to DPS and some more hit points - it meant you could do new things, almost as though you were suddenly playing a new class.

Similarly a single, fortuitous drop from a Named mob could raise your character's game substantially. Acquiring a weapon that procced Snare or Fear might allow your character to kite mobs and thereby solo when previously she'd needed a partner or a group to do anything much at all.

A rare sight!

At the time, though, this didn't necessarily seem like such a great trade-off. Oh, it was wonderful when it happened, but for every bonanza level ending in zero or five there were several levels of increasingly arduous diminishing returns, where each session could seem like a struggle and a Ding! could end up leaving you feel weaker not stronger. For every life-changing drop there might be countless disappointments as camps dragged on, Nameds failed to spawn and rare drops eluded the RNG.

When EverQuest moved to giving new spells every level instead of every five I was initially wary. It seemed as though something would be lost. At the lower end of the level range, to some degree at least, that turned out to be true. In general, though, the pace of that particular MMO was so stately that a single level provided plenty of time to come to terms with each set of new abilities before the next appeared.

Also, casters in EQ get a lot of spells. The amount you would get all in one go after five levels could be overwhelming. Even spread out there were always enough to go around, something that never changed even when the level range eventually stretched to three figures.

When my Magician dinged 90 last week she went on a spell-buying spree. The scrolls she needed to buy ran into double figures. Of those almost none were upgrades to existing spells. Most were new abilities entirely. It was an entertaining and satisfying session.

In time I came to prefer the "every level" approach. I definitely wouldn't revert to a five level spread. It's nice to have something to look forward to every level and since levels don't exactly fly by the sense of anticipation is retained. That's not something I can say for GW2, where "Reward Tracks" were recently added to World vs World.

Reward Tracks have existed in Structured PvP for a long time as a means of providing players who don't do PvE with most of what they would get if they did. Whether it's a good idea or not to attach the rewards from one part of the game to the gameplay from another is a question I don't propose to debate right now. That decision having been made, however, I do take issue with the implementation.

Much more typical.

Rather than add any sense of excitement, anticipation or satisfaction, mostly what the coming of Reward Tracks to WvW has brought for me is irritation and inconvenience. GW2 is already infamous for showering players with an endless rain of bags and boxes to be opened, many of which contain yet  further boxes and bags. The Reward Tracks follow that pattern almost to the point of parody.

As I ran with the zerg my limited inventory space was already constantly filling up with loose pieces of white, blue and green quality weapons and armor, the main function of which is to be salvaged and sold on the Trading Post. Along with spikes and similar items intended only to be sold to NPC vendors for a few copper and the mats from the deconstruction of the said items, plus the bags filled with the salt tears of our  foes (not literally, sadly; just more mats) space runs out fast.

Now, to that monsoon of convertible currency, we have to add box after box of "Rewards" from dungeons or PvE maps that, you might imagine, were I to want, I would be doing instead of what I actually am doing. All of those have to be opened and dealt with, either in the odd hiatus as we cata down a recalcitrant fortification or enjoy a rare two-minute drinks break, or else at the end of the session.

Often it takes me fifteen or twenty minutes to clear my bags. More. An activity I used to look forward to as a treat, it long ago lost its allure and now threatens to become a chore I resent.

So, there's a balance to be achieved between a satisfying flow of meaningful rewards and an endless drip-feed of things you don't want but can't bring yourself to destroy. Modern day EverQuest still hits that balance, just about, although I notice even there that I spend more time clearing and re-clearing my bags than I used to do.

Whether contemporary players would ever be content with a "less is more" approach, though, I am not so sure. I imagine my objections to the Reward Tracks in WvW would put me in a very small minority of dissatisfied players. Most would probably want the rewards to come faster even than they do, whereas I'd rather see them removed completely.

Pantheon probably isn't attempting to reach the average contemporary player let alone the average GW2 player, so the benchmarks it will need to hit may be very different. Still, getting to that sweet spot, where satisfaction and frustration balance each other out, won't be easy. The ideal would be to make every reward welcome, even thrilling, yet still have them appear with a periodicity that isn't off-putting.

I'm not sure if that's achievable but it's definitely something worth shooting for.

Keeping Things Regular: GW2, Everquest

Keen has a post up in which he observes that in their slow and steady progress through The Elder Scrolls Online he and Graev "are what you might consider ‘regular’ players.  We put in 3-4 hours a week". This attracted some surprise, even disbelief, in the comments, not least from me. It also made me think.

On my desktop there are twenty-four icons that I could click to launch an MMO. That's not all the MMOs I have installed, merely the ones it's likely enough I might want to play that it's worth keeping them patched up and ready. In my head I think of myself as a current "regular" player of maybe half a dozen of them, an ex-regular, currently on hiatus, of half a dozen more and merely a curious observer and occasional visitor of the rest.

How many, though, am I really playing, even enough to meet Keen's liberal definition of "regular"? As of this last month or so: two. That's probably the smallest number of MMOs I've played concurrently since GW2 launched, a figure only ever normally reached when I'm in the throes of that passionate obsession that comes with a brand new world to explore.

If only I'd gotten that far...

It should have been three. I planned to spend a few hours looking a little deeper into the WildStar beta this weekend. That didn't happen. My key still worked, in that I was able to open the launcher and patch the game, but when I hit the big green PLAY button instead of spitting me out into the bubblegum-bright world of Nexus the screen greyed out and "No realms are available at this time" appeared stamped across the middle like a "Rejected" mark on an unsavory cut of meat. What's more, it left me hanging there and I had to open Task Manager to escape.

A little research informs me that WildStar is going to be one of those irritating "Region Locked" games that checks your IP address and blocks access if you smell funny have the temerity to try to play outside of your own backyard. It seems this is keeping some players out this weekend, me among them, although I didn't entirely follow the reasoning. Come open beta (supposedly there will be one, no dates or details yet) the key will work again. Whether I'll be interested enough to use it is another matter.

Fortunately for me I've no plans to play WildStar at launch so I can afford to just shake my head and move on. It's bad enough when a company like SOE decides to license out its properties to different publishers in various territories but at least there's some kind of commercial imperative there that can be understood if not accepted. When a company like NCSoft retains direct control and yet splits its customer base up along regional lines, enforcing strict isolation, it just mystifies me. Why would they even want to do that? Does it save money? Avoid legal issues? You'd think it would be more expensive and create more work.

So, anyway, not playing WildStar.

The walls....they're...breathing...

As usual the bulk of my playing time went on GW2, where the sheer pleasure of leveling my not-quite-so-new guardian continues unabated. She dinged 50 last night with 29% of the world "completed". That's exactly the same as my Asura Ranger, who dinged 80 months ago and who I've played quite a lot since.

I never really paid much (or any) attention to World Map Completion. My first, Charr, ranger, also my first and probably most-played character, sits at 69%, by far the highest of any of my nine (soon to be ten) max levels. I still think the gimmick detracts from involvement with the world as a world and actively mitigates against immersion but at this stage, coming up to two years in and with no new territory to explore, it feels like this might be the time to give it a go. We'll see how long I can keep it up...

Progress along the Trait trail is interesting. As anticipated it is incredibly slow. Nineteen levels after unlocking the tree my Guardian has four points. That said, I'm not finding it off-putting at all, indeed I quite like it. Yes, it's a long wait between points, and feels it, but the impact of each of those points is significant and I notice it in a way I rarely did under the previous system. Because opening each one is a relatively unusual event I look forward to it and pay it more attention when it happens.

I explored all of Blazeridge Steppes
and all I got was this lousy Trait

I suspect the new system will better suit people like me, who aren't especially interested in builds and min-maxing, than it will the substantial body of MMO players who dote on that kind of thing. I rather like having the opportunity to stop every few levels and re-assess my options, then close the window and forget about it. I'll reserve final judgment until I reach cap but so far I think it's an improvement.

The Megaserver effect seems to have calmed down somewhat. World Bosses are still crazed zergs, but then they often were under the old system. In maps with no World Boss or where no WB is due for a few hours, sometimes it seems almost as quiet as it used to be. Well, perhaps not that quiet but certainly not manic or overcrowded.

The Sorting Hat still resolutely fails to match me up with anyone I know, regardless of whether I am guilded, friended or even grouped with them. That needs fixing. Community remains fractured if not entirely broken. There may be no fix for that. And yet, as with almost every change that comes to an MMO, no matter how disruptive or ill-judged, those who don't leave get used to it and within a disturbingly short time everyone behaves as if things were always this way.

The Tourney rolls on. The Swiss System seems to have spun up a yoyo where Yak's Bend is concerned. We play Isles of Janthir and Northern Shiverpeaks one week and come top, then Henge of Denravi and Fort Aspenwood the week after and come last. Unless anything amazingly unusual happens that pattern looks set to hold for the remaining few weeks. It works well for me. We get lots of good fights, plenty of tower and keep defense and while the results may be predictable the margins aren't, which keeps things fresh. I think we'll place either third or fourth.

Some people are so easy to please.

That's GW2. It is what it is, as the mantra goes. The Living Story seems to have fallen off the table, taking its bi-weekly updates with it. Evidence for anyone missing it, in or out of game, seems hard to find. Looking back, it must seem like an awful lot of work was done to no real purpose. Much has been said and written about the endless stream of here-today, gone-in-two-weeks temporary content and how players do or don't take to it but I wonder just how the developers who have to produce it feel. Are they happy to see weeks of work so swiftly consumed and forgotten or would they rather be making something a little more substantial, something that might still be around, giving pleasure and generating feedback, in a year or several?

Speaking of things that have hung around for a while, when I'm not playing GW2 I'm over in Norrath, slowly chipping away at the mountain that makes up the 100 levels of a modern-day character in Everquest. Thanks to the Heroic leg-up that jumped my Magician from the 60s to the 80s, my highest level character is now only a baker's dozen away from that cap.

SOE finally hit "Go" on the long-discussed All Access changes with the predictable result: lots of unplanned downtime and a slew of messed-up accounts. Having been here before, many times, I chose not to log in until the worst of the debris had been cleared and (touch wood!) seem to have avoided any weird and unpleasant side effects. One account even got an unexpected benefit in the form of several extra Legends of Norrath packs.

Chop him up for kindling wood

In compensation for the inconvenience we got a Double XP weekend that I was frustratingly unable to take full advantage of due to work. In most MMOs these days I tend to try to slow my leveling down but EQ remains the exception, especially after about level seventy or so. There, any boost is more than welcome.

I managed to get in several hours, mostly in the level 75 and 80 Hot Zones, Oceangreen Hills and Hills of Shade. I keep trying the level 85 Hot Zone, Old Bloodfields, but it's more trouble than it's worth solo, even at my new exalted level of 87.

With the weekend's Double XP, plus Double XP from my veteran's Lesson, plus the unspecified but significant Hot Zone bonus, plus a 25% xp potion, all running together and stacking, and doing Franklin Teek's tasks for the large XP rewards, in one half-hour burn I managed almost 30% of level 86. I could actually see the xp, if not from individual kills then at least from runs of two or three! Unheard of in Everquest at that level.

It was a lot of fun and very satisfying, even more so because of the contrast with my normal, stately pace. Of course, the nominal XP rate is only one of many factors in how quickly you progress in Everquest. Of all the MMOs I have ever played it has by far the longest set-up times. Even with all the many enhancements and accelerations that have been added across the years it still takes a significant amount of time to buff, to travel, to get established at a safe spot and to recover after a fight.

If anything goes badly wrong then, particularly as a mage with a pet to re-equip, you're looking at 20-30 minutes just to get back to where you were. Although in these days of Mercenaries and corpse-summoning NPCs the actual loss of xp on a death is trivial, the much greater penalty comes from the half an hour it takes to get up and running again, half an hour with no XP coming in at all.

Even without a death there are significant gaps in the XP flow. In the zones I'm comfortable soloing a single add is fine and two perfectly manageable. With a very powerful pet and a Mercenary healing I've even had some great fights with half a dozen adds and managed to come out on top. Only, though, if I have room to maneuver. In confined surroundings like tunnels or buildings I'm constantly conscious of the consequences of a bad pull or a runner. I tend to keep my cursor hovering over Gate if there's any doubt as to the outcome.

Franklin Teek, curse him, set me the task of killing five Rotcaps in Hills of Shade yesterday and they only hang out in tunnels. I got a runner that took a left-turn round a corner, breaking line of sight so I couldn't burn him down fast enough and he found half a dozen friends and his courage with them and they all came barreling back around the turn, looking for revenge. That meant a hasty exit and five or ten minutes just to get back for round two.

In contrast, a death while leveling in GW2 might delay you by, oh, as much as five or ten seconds. Just one example of how the pacing between these games is so different. The ryhythms don't even begin to match. I love them both but it takes a big re-adjustment to move from one to another.

Perhaps it's not only a shortage of hours to play that limits the number of MMOs a person can realistically play "regularly". Maybe it's also the effort required to adjust and re-tune as you move between them. For all the complaints that MMOs are too samey, interchangeable even, it really isn't so. It takes a significant amount of time to pick up the "feel" of a game after even a few days of not playing and it just adds to the disconnect if you need to drop the "feel" of another MMO to make room.

Even so: two MMOs? Not good enough. Must try harder.

Slow Down... : Guild Wars

... and give me one more chance

One nice side-effect of my recent post on Guild Wars 2 is that it got me playing Guild Wars again. I didn't have any GW2 screenshots what with the game not actually existing yet and all, so rather than just stealing some screenies off the interwebs I thought I'd use some of my old Guild Wars shots instead.

Only it turns out I don't have any old Guild Wars screenshots. I thought I would have taken some when I briefly came back to the game a couple of years ago, but apparently I didn't. The last time I played before that was at launch, over six years and three computer lifetimes ago. No screenshots survive.

You got planning permission for that?

So I patched up and took some new ones. Ye gods, but Guild Wars has aged well ! It looks amazing. It still has that weird, flat quality it always had, but the detail, the color, the vibrancy are all stunning. My appetite was whetted. Re-whetted. Re-re-whetted.

When I played Guild Wars the first time round I finished the main campaign and some of the post-20 content in about six weeks. Mrs Bhagpuss carried on and finished pretty much all of it, which I think took her a couple of weeks more. Then we both put it away for nearly five years until I spotted The Complete Collection on Amazon for very cheap indeed.

I am so playing one of these in GW2. Whatever he is.

 In retrospect, buying all the expansions at once was a mistake. I know now how people feel when they come back to EQ2 for the first time in years. There can be just so much content, so many options, that it becomes almost intimidating. (It's perhaps worth noting that when I began playing WoW for the first time five years after launch, I didn't notice anything like that. The whole thing seemed very manageable. If anything I thought Azeroth was on the small side for an MMO. Another of the many ways Blizzard is able to smoothe the path for potential customers in a way that seems to escape other MMO Houses, I guess).

Rather than continue with my old characters, I made a new account and started over. That might have been a mistake too. My first character was one of those Dervish fellows. That was definitely a mistake and after about eight levels I re-rolled as a ranger.

Which brings me, long-windily, to what I was going to talk about: the pace of combat in Guild Wars. It's so flaming fast! I'd forgotten just how frenetic and chaotic it is. Back in 2005, coming from Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot, Guild Wars combat seemed like a revelatory, hyper-saturated, amphetamine rush. It took my breath away and for a month I thought all MMOs should be like it. Then the rush wore off.

 Anyone need any help? Thought not.

 Now, six years on, what I need is a slomo button. It's just too manic! And way, way too busy. Every time I enter an Explorable Area I feel like I'm in a raid. There's my ranger and her pet (who dies in about 5 seconds), several Heroes who appear to have attached themselves to me though I can't now recall how or why, a couple or three Henchman that I've hired because, well, you can never have too many healers and a bunch of NPC characters who just seem to tag along for the ride.

It would be confusing enough if I had to control that lot, but they all seem to have their own agendas. As soon as an enemy pokes his head around a corner the whole pack of them are off like skinheads out of a bus station, chasing anything that moves. I generally die two or three times before I have the least idea what's going on. Sometimes it's only after they've killed everyone and I'm picking up the odd meagre scrap of loot they've left me after they've all helped themselves that I spot from our confidence debuff that I must have died yet again and been rezzed so fast I didn't even notice. 

Don't mind me. I'll just lie here.

Even when they aren't all causing mayhem I'm not much more than a bemused bystander. They all bicker and banter and make in-jokes that I don't get. They reminisce and gossip about battles I don't recall and people I don't remember. It's disturbingly like being a child on a family outing, where all the conversation goes over your head but that's fine because no-one listens to anything you have to say anyway even if you had anything to say, which you don't.

It's not that I'm not enjoying myself. I just wish the same things could happen at half the speed. Or a quarter. I don't want the BioWare option that let's you literally stop time between each and every incremental action so that you can micromanage entire battles. That's equally annoying in it's own way. Nor am I talking about turn-based gameplay. I just want Guild Wars but slower.

Anyone know an MMO that does that?