Pony Pony Run Run : Wizard 101

If I wanted to finish Inventory Full off for good, turning it into a Wizard 101 blog would be a pretty good way to go about it. I don't think I've seen anyone in this corner of the blogosphere (can spheres have corners?) mention the game since Tipa stopped posting about it back in 2012. It's a risk but I can only write about what I'm playing (yeah, right...) so here's my third post in a row about the Hogwarts-inspired MMO.

W101 will be ten years old this September. It's notoriously difficult these days to estimate the health of an MMORPG because of all the tricks developers employ to hide any deficiency in population or popularity, but as far as can be told, things seem to be holding up pretty well for a game nearly a decade old.

Certainly the central F2P areas are teeming with players and there are a number of channels or shards or servers (I forget what Kingsisle calls them) to choose from, some of which appear to be "full". Further into the game, past the velvet rope that separates the freeloaders from the paying customers, population thins out somewhat, but then I can only see the low-to-mid game areas, the part of every MMO of a certain age most likely to suffer from de-population. It's highly likely the heavily-populated areas will be at end-game.

With names hidden it's hard to tell who's a player and who's an NPC sometimes.

Canny readers (assuming I have any readers of any degree of mental acuity left) will by now have worked out for themselves that, yes, I re-subscribed. Only for a month and I have already pre-cancelled to prevent an accidental rollover, particularly since I'll be away and unable to play for the two weeks that would otherwise immediately follow renewal, but money has nonetheless changed hands.

It only seemed reasonable. I spent whatever time yesterday I didn't spend out and about in the glorious sunshine, indoors playing the game. Partly what drove me to re-sub was the eye-candy.

W101 is one of those MMOs that features jaw-dropping, attention-grabbing mounts, everything from vintage cars and hoverboards to dragonflies and hydras. After someone sped past me on rollerblades, complete with hip-swaying animation, followed by someone else riding a fox, I decided I'd had enough of jogging around in my unfashionable trainers.

See fox. Want fox.

We didn't have mounts back when I played before so I had no real idea how to get one. I guessed they might be quested or dropped (they are - something to look into in detail later) but if there's a cash shop that's always the first place to try.

It turns out you can rent Temporary mounts that last a week or so via the Crown Store or an NPC but I never feel comfortable on a mount that's going to melt, especially since these particular loaners are hardly cheap anyway. Permanent mounts cost somewhere between 5000C and 15000C which is $10-$30. It's not unreasonable by established MMO practice but still more than I want to spend on a single item in a game I might only play for a couple of weeks.

Some things in W101 can be bought for either Crowns or Gold, the in-game currency. The Crown Store has a tab for paying with Gold but only a small proportion of the items are on it. Even those that are, are also far from obvious. Anyone would think it was done that way on purpose but I'm sure that can't be right...

Do I look like an eight year-old girl?
Don't answer that.

I tracked them down eventually, even if, in the end, I had to resort to yet more googling, wiki-reading and YouTube watching, something that's becoming a definite pattern with this game. Finally, I found some suitable mounts, including one I could afford, although it would nearly have bankrupted me. I have just over 60k Gold from my first run in the game and the cheapest mount, a pony, is 50K. And I don't want a pony.

That got me thinking about how I might make some more Gold. While I was musing on that I did a few quests. First I finished surveying The Commons and got my Range Pole. Then I started clearing out a few old quests from my journal. I ran into a Bear from Grizzleheim and did some errands for him, which unexpectedly gave me a peek at his home world, which I believe was added not that long after I stopped playing.

That in turn started me wondering about all the other, newer Worlds I'd never seen. One thought led to another and next thing I knew I had my wallet out.

With the entire game at my disposal as a paid-up Member, where did I choose to go? Marylebone, the canine version of Victorian London, that's where. Ostensibly I was still clearing out old quests. I did one, then another and then I ran into Sherlock Bones, who had some new mystery on the go.

You can't turn down a request for help from a legend like Sherlock, which is how I found myself an hour and a half into a forty-five minute dungeon, facing a Tier 5 Boss and his T5 Elite henchman. He wasn't even the final boss, either. She was standing on the sidelines, watching, no doubt waiting to provide the coup de grace should I somehow stumble to victory.

Well, there was no chance of that. I'd already had to create myself an entirely new build just to get past the previous two encounters with T4 Elites. I died about four times before I got that right. The T4 Elites had about 1800 HPs each. The T5 Boss had over 5,000.

I was too busy dying to take many combat screenshots.

I tried him once then gave up. Clearly I need to level some more, upgrade my gear, find a whole load of new spells and come to some basic understanding of how to play before I'm going to be of any use to Sherlock as a Baker Street Irregular.

I went back to journal-clearing and had a lot more luck with a different Boss from some old quest I'd forgotten to finish. Things were definitely looking up and I was about to move on to the next step in that chain when I realized I'd been playing for somewhere close to five hours without a break. I'd almost forgotten how that feels.

My memory of Wizard 101 is that it can be both very immersive and addictive and yet tiring and tedious at the same time. It's one of those "just one more try" games, which is fine when the one more try turns out to be the winning turn but not so good when it's just another in a long line of failures.

At the moment, though, it feels fresh and exciting, not least because I have such an enormous amount to learn. I plan on playing as long as it stays fun and stopping when it isn't. First thing on the agenda: make some money.

Hmm. I think that calls for some more googling...

Say Hello, Wave Goodbye : WoW

My subscription to WoW runs out in a couple of days. I had a think about it this morning and decided to cancel.

On the one hand it's only a tenner a month and that's buried in the monthly credit card bill. I could leave it running and not notice. That would mean I could log in on a whim and play my Hunter or my Warlock or anyone else.

I could explore the changes wrought by the Cataclysm and adventure through Pandaria, which just about everyone seems to have re-assessed as one of WoW's highlights. I could try Pet Battles, take a look at my Garrison, get to 100 and open all those boxes in the bank. I could, eventually, buy Legion and join everyone else in what, by then, will be stale, old content, as we all wait another two years for whatever comes next.

The thing is, though, I'm  not playing WoW right now. I was playing, almost daily, for several weeks. Before the Invasions started I was happily leveling my Gnome Hunter and once the dreadnaughts started disgorging demons I was there every night along with everyone else, battling the hordes and soaking up the xp.

Once the invasions ended though, and I decided not to buy Legion just yet, I pretty much stopped logging in. Momentum carried me through the first few days, when I took the Hunter to begin what seemed to be the start of the main Pandaria questline but it felt flat and a little bit, well, dull.

After the excitement of the invasions, much though I complained about certain aspects of them at the time, the prospect of completing dozens, scores, hundreds of quests as a way of leveling up seemed strangely unappealing. After a couple of hubs I flew to The Timeless Isle, about which I'd read some good things on various blogs a year or two back.

Can I at least get a change of clothes before I go?

There I had fun for a while, running around killing mobs that dropped things that might be upgrades if only they were for my class. I bought a few items on the Auction House to fill in the slots the Invasions had missed. Briefly there was a future where I'd grind quests and gear up and Azeroth would be a place I lived...

And then I stopped logging in. Mostly I went on playing GW2, which I play for several hours every day and a lot of hours every weekend. DBG announced their expansion program, handed out Level 95s and fired up a double xp weekend so I went back to Norrath, both flavors. That made me remember I was paying a subscription that included DCUO so I got that fired up and I played last night, did a couple of levels and had a blast.

This morning, home all day with the house to myself, I thought about what I might play and a whole flurry of options presented themselves. All of the above for a start. Then there's the long list of MMOs I haven't logged into for a while but still think about logging into most days - Dragomon Hunter, Riders of Icarus, Dragon Nest, Rift, Landmark... And the ones I was in the middle of and enjoying and then dropped for no reason - Black Desert, Blade and Soul, ArcheAge...

As I was thinking it over I watched a little of MJ's First Look at Twin Saga. I considered downloading that. I thought about AdventureQuest going into Open Beta in a few weeks. And round about then it occurred to me that all of these options plus dozens more were available to me for free. Even the two EQs and DCUO, for which I do pay but don't have to.

My turn again!

And then I though some more and realized that not only could I also play WoW for free under the Starter Edition but that I would probably enjoy that more than playing "real" WoW in dribs and drabs, here and there. WoW is a great MMORPG. It has a vast wealth of content, a huge and fascinating world and something for everyone. Unfortunately, it also seems to have the vampiric ability to suck all the joy out of itself in remarkably short order.

It's been noticeable how the tone has changed as people progress through Legion. The initial reaction was almost universally positive. Gevlon may have been the only naysayer and even he doesn't find that much to complain about. And there could be a simple solution to the main issue he's highlighting: perhaps Gevlon's Girlfriend could follow Belghast's lead and start the conversational ball rolling herself - or Gevlon could sub up and make it his mission to Get Azeroth Chatting. I think we'd all like to see how that might pan out...

A month in, though, and some people are already over Legion, while some still plugging away wonder how much replayability there can be. The general theme seems to be that Legion was a very good expansion and well worth the cost for the solid 4-6 weeks of intense gameplay it offers. Thanks, Blizzard! We'll all get back to you when you have something new to offer.

I guess this works as a business strategy. I mean, any software developer that could spend two years developing a product and then sell 3.3 million copies in the first week would probably consider it a solid return on investment, wouldn't they?

Mark Jacobs would probably lay any malaise in the genre squarely at the feet of the change in payment models. Mark, of course, has always been dead set against the entire concept of Free-to-Play so he's just being consistent when he says subscription gaming "is the model I have always believed in". He's been around long enough to remember how, when the handful of MMOs that existed all had subscriptions, that in itself was seen as some weird aberration by the vastly larger community of non-MMO-playing gamers.

Even I might get a turn..and I'm an elf!

Still, you do have to wonder whether he might not have a point. If all the games on my want-to-play list used either the Buy to Play or Subscription model, would I have unsubbed from WoW an hour ago? Might I not have thought it better to pay one small monthly fee for access to a very big, polished, stable and reliable game and just stick at it rather than squirrel around all over the place trying this and that and the other for five minutes here, five minutes there?

Well, no. I didn't unsub to WoW because of the cost. I unsubbed because the gameplay in the Free Starter edition is, to my tastes, superior to the gameplay in the paid-for game. What's more, I would actually pay a subscription to have access to a WoW that went on being more like the Free Trial but without the restrictions. And I told Blizzard that in the "Why Are You Leaving Us?" box.

I'd like a simpler, slower, less gear-focused version of WoW. One where the concerns are small, the problems human-sized (or Gnome sized). Especially I'd like a version where you don't feel that every minute is vital for Progression of Your Character and a moment missed is a failure on your part to Do Your Job. I'd pay good money for that.

In short, WoW's free Starter Edition feels like play but paid-for WoW feels like work. That can't be the right way round, can it?

So for now I'm back to being a F2P scrub. Looking forward to it in fact. I've enjoyed my paid time and as I told Blizzard in my resignation note I'm "very likely" to re-subscribe at some point. But for now I'm done.

Buyer's Remorse : WoW

Last night, after months of toying with the idea, I re-subscribed to WoW. It happened suddenly and almost on a whim. I don't know quite yet whether I'm happy about that or not.

Playing on the excellent Veteran version of my old account means I've been looking at all my old characters idling away on the character select screen every time I log in. There's a big "Reactivate Now" button right in the field of view but until last night I've had no problems ignoring it.

These days every MMO's doing it, flashing up an offer or demand. Get this expansion, visit the cash shop, upgrade. GW2 is particularly determined to have everyone on the same HoT page; Daybreak Games really would like you to know they have an All Access plan you could be enjoying. It's visual noise. My brain automatically tunes it out

Here's a clue...

So what happened? Well, this. And this. And this. Need I go on?

Stargrace is musing over why her friends are all playing one game one minute and another the next and Syl is pondering the power of trends. So there's a lot of that going on but then there always is and yet I don't jump every train that passes through the station. What's different this time?

There's a theory to which I have long subscribed that says you can't con a satisfied mark. In order to sell someone something that person has to be feeling a lack. If they're happy with what they have then you need to spark a little fire of greed first before you can fan the flames.

 I've been meaning to check out the pre-Legion invasions ever since they began but somehow I couldn't find the time until last night. That somehow added a sense of urgency, a feeling I might miss out if I didn't get with the program.

Miss out on what? I wasn't quite sure. The first reports I read left me feeling it was a high-end event for people with max level characters but as dispatches from the front filtered in it became clear there were things happening at all levels. People kept making comparisons with Rift's rifts and GW2's zergs, talking about gaining levels and getting geared. My buttons weren't just being pressed: they were lighting up.

Please fasten your seat-belts. We may be experiencing some turbulence.

So last night, when my level 20 Gnome Hunter flew through Dun Morogh on a griffin to see the Imperial Battlecruiser of the Legion burning up the winter sky with green felfire, I felt more than a frisson of excitement. Excitement turned into exhilaration as the Mechanostrider carried her clanking down the long hill from Ironforge, straight into battle alongside the hard-pressed dwarves.

Blizzard have taken their own sweet time assimilating the changes to the genre brought about by Trion and ANet over the last half-decade but someone has clearly been taking notes. The Demon Invasion has all the classic hallmarks of the revolution in open access, non-competitive MMO gaming I for one have come not just to enjoy but to expect.

The huge demons scaled exactly to my young hunter's level. They stomped and stormed and raged in a most impressively raid-like fashion, attracting suitably raid-like swarms of players to oppose them. The air was filled with explosions, the sounds were ear-shatteringly loud. Dwarven NPCs, some of whom I actually recognized, rallied the troops with voice-acted exhortations. I fought, I died, I got credit.

Remind me who you are again?

For once WoW felt...modern. Well, modern-ish. I found it impressive, exciting - even immersive, despite the incongruous ubiquity of motorbikes.

I was having a great time but that doesn't explain why I decided to flip the switch and subscribe. Sadly, that can be explained in a single word: greed.

The first invasion rewarded me a smattering of the new currency and two Legion Chests, one small, one large. I wasn't sure what to expect when I opened them but out popped several Blue items, all of which were useable for my Hunter and all of which were huge upgrades. She put them on and I started to think. Always dangerous.

As I fought and died through a second invasion wave, watching the big xp numbers melt to nothing against the immutable bar of my Veteran Account Level 20 lock, I started to worry about waste. Yes, I was having fun. A lot of fun. But if I was playing my old Hunter who retired at 69, wouldn't I also be having fun but filling my leveling boots at the same time? And if getting great gear at level 20 feels good wouldn't getting great gear at level 70 feel even better?

Nunney Castle - what's left of it.

You'd think so, wouldn't you? And what does a WoW sub cost, after all? Ten quid. Mrs Bhagpuss and I went to Nunney Castle yesterday afternoon. It was a beautiful summer's day and although we hadn't planned to have lunch there it was so nice we grabbed a coke and a ciabatta at a pub. That cost exactly the price of a month's WoW sub - each.

So cost isn't a factor. I don't have any regrets over spending the money. Why, then, did I go to bed feeling I might have made the wrong decision?

It just might be that I really do prefer restrictive rulesets to "having it all". It's not a new concept for me. I definitely felt that the best balanced gameplay I ever experienced in EQ2 was on the revised version of the F2P "Silver" account. Having some restrictions tightened everything up in a way that felt both more manageable and rewarding than the full, Gold version seemed to provide.

Getting the gear upgrades from the Legion pre-event on the level-locked Hunter felt somehow as though I was winning a prize. Turns out that getting equivalent upgrades on a just-turned-seventy character, or on the high-thirties Warlock I woke up afterwards, feels a little bit like cheating.

Why's everyone in such a hurry?

Those characters took six months to get to where they were when they woke up. To have them almost instantly acquire better gear than they have ever seen, in a matter of seconds, didn't give me much of a buzz. If anything it came as a bit of a down.

Instead of going to bed excited at the thought of another session the next day that might power those characters through a few levels and see them smartly dressed in new armor, I found myself wondering  whether I should just write off the cost of the subscription, mothball the account for a month and play on my other, free account instead.

I'm not going to do that, although I might play the free account as well, if time permits. The decision's made and I'll carry on and make the best of it. I expect the negative feelings will dissipate quite quickly as I get back into the swing of having characters who can progress past twenty.

One thing the whole experience did emphasize for me is just how much I would like slower leveling in WoW. I loved playing my Gnome Hunter up to twenty but it probably took not much more than three or four hours, if that. It's not just too fast - it's insanely too fast.

Umm...can I get some back-up here? I'm only level twenty.

What's needed is variable, player-controlled leveling speed. That's something I would pay a subscription to have. In the meantime I'm thinking of taking my Gnome Hunter to talk to Behsten in Stormwind to get her level locked at 20. That way I can enjoy the invasions, gear her up and also have her earn gold, all the time knowing that when I cancel the subscription she can return to her Veteran status and still be able to come out to play.

Meanwhile, I might make another Gnome Hunter to level up further. If there's one thing Blizzard isn't stingy about it's character slots. And leveling up another character certainly isn't going to take very long. As to whether I buy the Legion expansion, I'm still undecided. Let's see how much use I actually make of this sub over the next couple of weeks.

Right now, though, I'm going to log in and kill some Demons. I can feel that Buyer's Remorse fading already.

Wagons Roll! : Rift

I stepped back into Rift last week. I'm subscribed right up to April but I've hardly logged in since late last year. When I read that Rift's first twenty levels were going to be freely playable (Not F2P. Oh dear me, no!. We can't be having any of that kind of talk) my first thought was "Great! Now I can cancel my account and just drop in and play low-level whenever I need a Rift fix".

The thought of seeing the first twenty levels hopping with new players like they were just after launch is a very pleasing prospect. The busier the zone, the more rifts pop, the more invasions fire. Things could be just like the good old days, back in the mists of yesteryear, lo! those long ten months ago.

Then I read about the changes to the Soul Tree system (as discussed here and here among other places) and thought that if I was going to pontificate about them I probably ought at least to try them out. Not that lack of personal experience usually stops me climbing on a soapbox. Nor lack of a soapbox, for that matter.

Before I could do anything I had to move all my characters off Shadefallen. And move the guild. (Didn't need to call a Guild Meeting on that one. The entire guild membership is me and Mrs Bhagpuss and she's not playing Rift even more than I'm not playing Rift so I just took an executive decision. That's what Guild Leaders do).

Look and wonder!

As promised, moving the guild was very straightforward, as was moving each of the characters. Well, it would have been if not for two things: the guild bank and my mail. Storage has always been at a premium in Telara and I've been in the habit of using the mailbox as a kind of poor man's bank vault. The Guild Bank was completely full of crafting materials and various consumables. Since you have to have an empty mailbox and nothing in the Guild Bank before your application to move can be approved I had a happy couple of hours shifting stuff about and buying larger bags and new bank vault slots before we finally got our passports stamped for Faeblight.

Which is where the next complication arose. Faeblight was the "reserved" destination server for Shadefallen characters because it's the only remaining RP-PVE server. That reservation had expired, but I still wanted to go there because of the RP part and because we have our Guardian characters there and, hey, it's easier to remember where they are if they're all in the same place, right? Only I'd forgotten that Rift only lets you have six characters per server and I had a total of seven and Mrs Bhagpuss had eight or nine.

To cut a long story short, I ended up moving all the Guardians to Millrush, which meant another round of mailbox-emptying, although at least we'd never gotten around to making a Guardian guild so there was no guild bank to deal with. Finally, about four hours after I'd had the passing notion to try out a preset Soul build, I logged in my Rogue and hit "N".

Oh that's where they go!

First off I compared the Presets on offer for each Calling with what I was using. Apparently I'm a bit of a maverick. Or an idiot. Let's go with "maverick". Whatever, my choices look quite odd compared to the presets, which make a good deal more sense. I chose the "Huntsman" model and, after paying a large chunk of money to my trainer for nine tiers of upgrades to abilities I'd never even considered taking in all the time I've played that character, I went Warfronting.

Guess what? Trion have a better idea how a ranged DPS class should spec than I do. Who'd have thought it? I imagine having designed the game gives them some kind of an edge. That and the fact that I detest allocating points and just try to get it over with as fast as possible. Either way, the "Huntsman" build plays a lot better in Warfronts than my Ranger/Bard hybrid ever did.

I did a few Warfronts and remembered how much I like Codex. Probably my favorite instanced PvP zone out of all the ones I can remember from DAOC onwards. Even more fun now that I'm significantly more effective so thumbs up for the Preset Soul. Pretty much kicking into an open goal as far as I'm concerned since I never wanted the responsibility of creating a build in the first place.

I'm in two minds now about cancelling my subscription. Chances are I won't want to play much Rift after April. Guild Wars 2 looms. And there's the free twenty levels sitting there if I do. But I did really enjoy being back. I'll wait and see how much I play over the next six weeks and then decide, I guess. Which is in itself a win for Trion. Apparently they do know what they are doing after all. Maybe.