Getting There : WoW

The current demonic invasion of Azeroth has been both profitable and revealing. The more I play World of Warcraft the more I realize it isn't and probably never has been precisely the game its public image would suggest.

When WoW launched, all the way back in 2004, I'd already been playing MMORPGs for half a decade. I'd been playing video games for a lot longer than that, right back to the very early 1980s, but I had never played a Blizzard game so the hype around the upcoming Warcraft spin-off meant very little to me.

Even so, it was impossible to be involved in the genre and not hear something about what was coming. During the six months or so before WoW launched all my attention was focused on EQ2. Who would or wouldn't be moving there from EverQuest and what the arrival of a second MMO set in Norrath would do to the fortunes and health of the first were topics of far greater interest to my coterie of online friends and acquaintances than the prospects of some vague wannabe contender.

If I knew anything at all about WoW it was that it had something to do with that easy-mode rpg Diablo that no-one I knew had ever had anything much to say about. That, indeed, was the one thing everyone I talked to agreed on about WoW - it would be an MMO-Lite experience at best.

My impression never really changed in the five years it took before Mrs Bhagpuss and I finally got around to trying WoW. It was an impression reinforced by comments from people we met in the MMOs we played. Some, like us, had never played the game, forming their judgments from the odd screenshot or review they'd seen or read. More influential were the reports from people we met in guild or groups, who had played WoW and stopped.

It's okay, you all go on and have fun without me. I'll just sit here...

Especially telling was the main reason they tended to give for not playing it any more: "It's okay but it's too easy. I got bored". That tended to be the gist. When we finally arrived in Azeroth at the butt-end of a prolonged MMO slump I think both Mrs Bhagpuss and I felt we were slumming. I can remember the short discussion when we decided to give WoW a try - it went along the lines of "well, we've tried everything else..."

WoW turned out to be very different from the simplistic, even childish experience we may have been imagining. It was somewhere around the middle of the Wrath of the Lich King's reign and the word among the cognoscenti was that WoW's Golden Age was already over, Blizzard's current development team keen to dumb things down for the vast, casual crowd that had turned the game into a cultural phenomenon.

I was astonished to find a much slower-paced, thoughtful, full-bodied MMORPG than anything I'd heard or read had led me to expect. I could only imagine how much more so it must have been in earlier years. I kicked myself, gently, for missing it but gave myself a pat on the back for getting there in the end.

We only lasted six months as subscribers. Neither of us leveled a character to the cap. I forget now where we went when we moved on - probably back to EQ2, I imagine. Mrs Bhagpuss has never returned but since the Free-to-20 endless trial appeared I've pottered around, on and off, here and there, now and again.

It's hard to tell, though, playing a very low-level character under the restrictions of a glorified free trial just how the game as a whole stacks up to modern expectations. This week, with the chains off and some higher-level characters to run around, I've been able to take stock and once again the facts turn out to be surprisingly different from the reputation.

Smartest he's ever looked.

I'm not going to say WoW is hard but boy, it's a lot harder than you'd expect. Than I expected.

Yes, there's that crazy leveling speed at the low end but stack that against what's been going on this last couple of weeks. The demonic invasions as they began gave huge boosts to xp for character of all levels. It led to vast armies of players afking alts under the xp hose to soak up those free levels.

Blizzard took objection and slammed down the nerf hammer. The intention was to make players work for their levels but way they chose to do it was highly instructive. Rather than merely cut the xp they split up and multiplied the invasion sites, reducing their duration and increasing their frequency.

This had the effect of forcing players to move their characters around the world if they wanted to carry on raking in the levels. Coming from GW2 and EQ2, I didn't foresee that being a problem. Until I tried it.

Moving from place to place in Azeroth is almost as awkward as it is in Old Norrath! Possibly more so. Having opened my map and found invasions marked in radioactive green on two continents I found myself stumped. How to get to any of them? I had no clue.

Thinking it to be ignorance and lack of current game knowledge I turned to Google. Wowhead had a comprehensive guide. My hunter was in Dun Morogh. I tried to follow the directions to Tarren Mill.:

"Tarren Mill, Hillsbrad Foothills:

• Alliance: Fly from Twilight Highlands, take Cataclysm portal in Stormwind to Twilight Highlands"

Cataclysm portal? What the heck is that? I had no idea but Reddit did. So now I need to do a quest to open a portal?

Let's step back a second.

I just don't know what I'd do without my griffin.

Here's the sequence. My Hunter used his Hearthstone to get back to Ironforge. From there he took a Griffin to Stormwind. In Stormwind he had to find the docks and get the quest from the Hero's Board (first enabling lower level quests so he could see it). After that there'd be a trip to the throne room of Stormwind Keep and a jaunt through another portal to Moonglade.

A bit of quest business and he'd have access to the Cataclysm Portal...back in Stormwind. So, a trip back there on a griffin, I guess, or re-use the hearthstone, if it's off cooldown, and come back round. That would get him as far as Twilight Highlands after which he's on his own - the guide ends there!

I did try but I gave up when, after about twenty minutes, I still hadn't even found the Hero's Board. Instead I flew all the damn way from Ironforge to Hillsbrad Foothills on my slow Snow Griffin. That was after I spent a third of my entire savings on a Flying License, which apparently I'd never bothered to do back when I was playing last time.

At least the Hunter has that option. The Warlock, at 50, has to take a scheduled flight or ride his goat. He's not going anywhere. I have him parked in Westfall and he's staying there. As for the possibility of even seeing an invasion on Kalimdor I've pretty much given up on that one for the time being until I can work out how to get there. Didn't there used to be a boat...?

No, I have no idea what's going on either.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how old school WoW still is. It's much more old-fashioned than anyone lets on. If leveling was really so log-falling easy then why would so many people be so keen to jump on any opportunity to speed it up and so cross when they're told they can't?

If the game is such a great fit for casual players with tight schedules and real-life pressures, why is it so difficult to get from one place to another? Something doesn't add up. What about the hoops you have to jump through to get the look for your character that you want? And this Transmog is the improved version?

It seems to me that there may be more reasons for WoW's declining subscriptions than mere ennui among its existing playerbase. It just might be that, compared to almost any MMORPG of the last five, six, seven years or so, it could be coming across to new players as a tad...harsh.

It's not just the inevitable accretion of systems and content from a dozen years of operation that makes all older MMOs daunting for new blood. It's the surprising disconnect between WoW's reputation as the grandfather of casual gaming and the reality of some highly complex and rather demanding basic gameplay. It makes you think about just where Mike O'Brien's notorious manifesto snipe at games that "make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun" was aimed.

None of which is meant as a complaint. I am certain sure that, were I to be playing WoW as my main MMORPG, I would relish the granularity and texture these legacy systems and structures support. Bring it on, I say!

For a drop-in, hour-a-day, casual MMO experience, though, it's not quite what you might expect.

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.

Summer Fun : GW2, WoW,

Over these last few weeks it seemed as though I was settling into the kind of gaming routine I'd been hoping for, juggling half a dozen MMOs and pottering around from one to another at whim. A few things have conspired to obstruct that happy state of affairs but not in a bad way.

For one thing I have been playing slightly less overall. It is summer, after all, and the weather has finally decided to admit it. It's not quite as tempting to sit in all day playing games when the sun is streaming through the window. Plus I've been working late most days this week so that cuts into the available gaming time.

Then comes the choice of which games to play. Factors to be considered include an increased attendance and interest in GW2 from Mrs Bhagpuss, who added Heart of Thorns to her second account and is now busy gearing up a whole new set of characters, a much better WvW match than we've had for a while and some very enjoyable new content that came with the Out of the Shadows update.

The upshot has been a week of nothing much but GW2. Even the pre-Legion fun over in Azeroth hasn't managed to pull me away although I do want to get to it at some point before it's all over, if only to try out the "Dark Whispers" fun Tyler mentioned in the comments.

I also need to log both the All Access accounts into Legends of Norrath one last time before the shutters go down for the final time on the seventeenth. Contrary to what was expected it seems there was a final stipend at the beginning of the month so I still have a last hand to collect.

At least I don't have to worry over whether or not to fork out for No Man's Sky. This could have been the summer of non-MMO gaming for me, with We Happy Few entering early access and NMS launching, but it seems both aren't ready for PC prime-time quite yet. Going to wait until the bugs are all ironed out and the gameplay's plumped up before I lay down any money for either, I think.

In the meantime GW2 is doing a surprisingly good job of keeping me entertained despite what can at best be described as a thin period for new content. Although the Summer Update, which is officially all we are getting in the way of New Stuff for at least two months, only really took a matter of days to run through it has more lasting appeal for me. I really like the new map and for once I want the items you can acquire by grinding playing there.

Better yet, the "Current Event" that came with the following bi-weekly update is a good one. Well, I'm enjoying it although I know that's not a universally-held opinion. The way in which ANet are able to turn excitement into frustration is depressingly predictable. As seems to happen more often than not some poorly-designed mechanics left players first puzzled then annoyed as large groups gathered and stood around waiting for anything up to three hours for events that didn't happen.

It's clear that the people designing these events still don't have a handle on the psychology of the players who they are designing them for even after four years of seeing how they react every. single. time. If you create an event with rewards or achievements a huge proportion of players will try to complete those achievements and gain those rewards in the minimum number of attempts at the fastest pace.

If that means standing around doing nothing for literally hours waiting on 30 seconds of action then that's what they will do. They won't like it. They won't enjoy it. They will complain about it. But they will do it. What they won't do is carry on playing normally and allow the achievements to fill themselves out over time and the rewards to arrive whenever.

Repeatedly designing events that expect behavior that the playerbase as a whole has never exhibited throughout the lifetime of the game is either incredibly stubborn or incredibly unobservant. Or maybe it's pure wishful thinking; "They'll get it this time, won't they?"

Well, no they won't. And it doesn't help when you give them something to click that tells them the opposite of what they think it's telling them, either. At least it only took a day or so to hot-fix that - an improvement on the days of denial we've suffered over similar design flaws in the past.

Despite all that I had a good time chasing down my Bloodstone Sightings and Bloodstone-Crazed Creatures. I had them all in a couple of sessions and the longest I waited around was about an hour, during which there was good party going on with fun boxes and fireworks.

I still have to find all the Bloodstone Slivers but that's the easy part. I just haven't gotten around to it yet because I am the kind of dilettante, whim-driven player the devs apparently wish they were making this stuff to entertain.

I did collect my 5,000 unbound magic and earn my 200 blood rubies to buy the Ascended back item although I have yet to decide who gets to use it. I'm currently stockpiling more for the jewellery although I may not spend it just yet. I believe these currencies will be in play for the whole of Living Story 3 so there may be better things to buy later. That_shaman knows but I prefer not to spoil my fun by peeking ahead.

Looking ahead I'm hoping to return to something of a more balanced MMO diet as the summer wears down and we head into autumn. The long-delayed arrival of Project Gorgon on Steam is supposedly due "soon" so there's that. Again, I might opt to wait a little longer and glean the benefit of the promised optimization and graphical improvements before wading in.

P:G is one of the few upcoming MMOs that eschew the action/console controls for traditional hotbar and tab target, a very strong selling point for me. The other one I have my eye on is AdventureQuest 3D. AQ3D, like P:G seems to be another MMO with a very quirky, humorous approach led by a strong, individual personality, but it has a considerably larger team with an established track record so I'm expecting great things. Or things, anyway.

It seems I've been saying this every year for the lifetime of this blog but despite the never-ending pronouncements of doom and gloom for the entire MMO genre, there is always far more on the table than I am ever going to be able to consume. If this is a dying hobby then god forbid I ever move to one that's on the up.

Fight! Fight! Fight!

In the comment thread on Aywren's previously discussed post Dahakha makes the excellent suggestion that to avoid becoming trapped in a task-oriented mindset you should consider designing your own content. Many MMOs provide specific mechanisms for this from decorating houses to creating entire dungeons. Dahakha also lists a number of social activities of the kind that the better guilds often put on to keep both their members and the community entertained.

As well as all of those, there are also a myriad of ad hoc amusements that can enliven a dull session or brighten a gloomy day's grinding. Long ago I posted about my predilection for encouraging enemies to make pretty patterns when they die. I still do that.

When I wrote that post I made some indication that it would be the first in a series called "Simple Pleasures". Well, here's the second in that series - just five years later!

Simple Pleasure No. 2 - Getting Creatures To Fight Each Other

This is something I used to do a lot. It was an intrinsic part of the gameplay in EverQuest back at the turn of the century, when "splitting a camp" was an essential skill for any soloist. You did it because you had to but I also used to do it for fun.

There were several classes with specific abilities that allowed them to mess with the heads of monsters (and, for quite a while before it got changed, other players). Enchanters and bards were the prime culprits with their ability to "charm" just about anything. You and I might have a number of let's call them 'creative' ideas on the possibilities that mind control would offer but in Norrath the only option was basically to have your guy fight the other guy.

Other classes could charm specific types of creature- Druids got animals, Magicians elementals, Necromancers undead and so on. It was a high-stakes game because the charms were prone to break early and unexpectedly and most creatures tended to resent being used as unwitting attack dogs. Still, it could be a lot of fun while it lasted, at least until you woke up your bind spot with a couple of hours xp to make up.

I don't have many pictures of things fighting each other - I do have this perfect ring of corpses though!

Necromancers, Shadowknights and most especially Monks had something even more amusing - Feign Death. The plains of Karana and the swamps of Kunark were littered with human and iksar monks who'd "fallen to the ground" as they tried to train up their skill but once perfected they were a right old nuisance force to be reckoned with.

There were bad monks and even nastier necros, who made it a practice to flop down at the feet of people they didn't like, leaving a train of slavering orcs hot for blood - anyone's blood. Less controversially and antisocially it was possible to set whole gangs of monsters at each other's throats by dragging one lot into the camp of another that weren't on the best of terms with the first. Then you'd drop to the ground and let them sort out their differences in the traditional manner.

I didn't do much of that in EQ but I made a hobby of it for a long time in Vanguard - at least until some po-faced killjoy at SOE changed the rules. My Raki Disciple was a kind of monk in away, although far superior to any monk class any entry in the official EQ franchise ever had. He could FD with the best of them and for months I satisfied both my explorer's curiosity and my childish sense of humor by running into dungeons and falling over.

What happened in Vanguard at that time was that when an angry goblin found himself suddenly without a target he'd transfer his hate to whatever was standing next to him. Didn't matter if it was his clan leader or his long-suffering wolf. My Raki would run around a room until everything in it was chasing him then hit the ground and lie there laughing as the whole lot of them engaged in a battle royale to the finish.

Hmm... I wonder what the rules are going to be like on New Telon?

I seem to remember I also benefited from the xp from all those deaths and if so, even though it wasn't why I was doing it, it explains why someone decided it had to stop. Shame. Like many of the odd, probably unintended sideshows in the first and second wave of MMORPGs - giving weapons to monsters was another - it added so much to the gaiety of nations.

As time went on and the games, arguably, became more professional. so these little wrinkles were ironed out. It's with great pleasure, then, that I'm able to confirm that I've found it's possible to get some things in GW2 to fight others.

I only noticed it the other day but Mrs Bhagpuss tells me it's not new. I was aware, of course, that many things in Tyria like to fight other things. That's an excellent piece of scene-setting that all MMOs should have. Wolves anywhere will leap on rabbits and one-shot them. Grawl hunt moas in Everfrost.

There's a moose and a raptor that roam near the walls of Garrison on our borderland that fight to the death every time they meet. I watch them often from the battlements. They're evenly matched and the outcome is uncertain. Someone should run a book.

What I hadn't realized until recently is that, by a judicious use of dodging and timing, it's possible to train creatures that don't have an innate animosity onto each other and get them to fight. If the creature chasing you has an attack that misses you as you dodge and you can line it up to hit something else then it's like ducking in a bar fight. The guy that gets hit with the chair isn't best pleased.

I've only just begun to experiment with this. I need to try it with someone who can stealth and see how that goes. I'll report back when I have more evidence. Maybe in around five years from now...

Community Service: WoW, We Happy Few

Keen is going through one of his periodic spells of self-reinvention at the moment, this time in the hope of getting more involved in the games he plays and the communities that surround them. It's a fine aspiration but I just thought I'd mention that he's still an "influencer" without even trying.

A few weeks back, when he was covering the E3 convention, Keen dropped a throwaway comment about a game he'd seen promoted there called We Happy Few. The sum total of his coverage was "WTF…Creepy. Skipping." It was enough to make me google the game, find a video of the promo that had so disturbed him, watch it and decide it was a game well worth following.

The game went into Early Access via steam in late July. I was thinking of picking it up but it's currently selling at the equivalent of a full-price release while being, in the words of the developers themselves, unlikely to be ready for launch sooner than "between six and twelve months" from now.  It has a decent Overall Rating of Mostly Positive based on almost a thousand reviews but reading through them tells the story of a game with great potential that's yet to be realized.

I decided to take the advice of many of even the most positive reviewers: wait until the game is finished - or at least getting there. This really is one of those cases where the main reason to buy in now is to help fund the game and do your bit to try and make sure it eventually gets made.

I'm interested but not that interested. If it was an MMO then I'd be all over it whatever the stage of development but survival games are a long way out of my comfort zone to begin with.

In the meantime, however, I'll keep watching the progress and there is one small thing I can do to help. I mentioned We Happy Few briefly in a post shortly after I heard about it from Keen and regular commenter Simon was kind enough to point me at the blog of one of the creative forces behind the game, Alex Epstein.

It's an excellent blog, insightful and amusing on the subject of making games, and it ought to be in my blogroll. It is now!

This morning I read a post there about the problems Alex is having with Wikipedia. Apparently the Wikipedia editorial stance is that primary sources are ineligible as authority for amendments. He's quite upbeat, even supportive, about it but you might equally argue that it's The Intentional Fallacy gone mad.

Alex says that We happy Few is based in an alternate timeline where Britain was invaded not by The Nazis, as Wikipedia asserts, but by The German Empire. For sound commercial reasons as well as, no doubt, aesthetic ones, Compulsion Games want to avoid any reference to Nazis in their 1984/Clockwork Orange-inspired survival offering.

While Wikipedia won't accept the person who wrote the story as an authority on what the story is about, apparently they might look more favorably on a third party referring to that author's testimony. "Hopefully, someone will quote this blog post in their blog, and then I can cite myself", he says. Well, here you go Alex. Cite away!

It's probably safe to say that Keen won't be playing We Happy Few ("WTF…Creepy. Skipping.") but he is playing WoW. Again. So am I, in Veteran Starter Edition kind of way. He's playing a Gnome Hunter, which he boosted to 100, and he's been providing practical guides on where to find and tame Mechanical pets, almost all of which would one-shot me from the next zone.

A lot more useful for me was his discovery of an Add-On that turns WoW into Guild Wars 2. I am not a big fan of Add-Ons or Mods. I try to avoid them in most games but I'm not religious about it. I've used them, sparingly, in EverQuest, EQ2, ESO and others. When I subscribed to WoW I used a couple that ran in the background - I think one auto-declined duels...

The screenshots of this one looked fascinating and although I hadn't been struggling with the default UI I thought I'd give it a try. After four years of GW2 I would imagine I have a lot of muscle memory accrued so maybe I could get some benefit from that.

Not, of course, that anyone's going to be struggling to eke out that extra one percent of DPS in WoW's first twenty levels. The compliments I gave WoW a couple of weeks ago over the pacing of the low-level game turned out to have a hollow ring even before my hunter hit double figures.


It seems the only reason she was having decent fights was that she had no armor and no stats. As soon as she acquired some green gear the mobs started dropping on the second hit - sometimes the first. Add to that the firehose of xp from quests that took about twenty seconds and all the bad things people say about WoW's modern leveling game begin to come true.

Not that I wasn't having fun. And even having capped out at twenty there's plenty to do on a free account. There are pets to tame and there's reputation to grind for a start. And last night I spent some of my capped gold to buy a mount.

WoW is a lot of fun and I am more than ever minded to buy Legion and sub for a month or two. The GW2 mod has only increased the likelihood. The whole layout is so much better than the default, which itself is not at all bad. It feels natural and comfortable and I am able to find the buttons I need a whole lot faster.

The real benefit, though, is something I don't think Keen even mentioned: a complete revamp of the entire quest interface. I believe this is available separately, so you can have a vastly improved, far more "immersive" questing experience without having to go the whole hog and clone your UI to GW2's. I wholeheartedly, enthusiastically recommend it. If you enjoy questing and, especially, like to read the quest text, you won't regret it.

WoW has good quests, usually well-written and often very amusing. The game also has possibly the worst color palette, font and general art design for presenting them that I have ever suffered in an MMO. It turns what could be a pleasure into a pain.

The GW2 UI mod does away with all that. Instead you get a center-screen panel that shows your character on one side and the quest NPC on the other. You click on the panel to progress the dialog and it plays out perfectly, like a conversation. The characters even use emotes to emphasize what's happening. It's brilliantly done and it transforms my questing experience almost out of recognition.

So, thanks Keen. Your community service credentials remain intact, even if you do think they need a bit of a polish!

When You Climb To The Top Of The Mountain

I arrived in Bloodstone Fen last night in the middle of a heated discussion in map chat over whether or not GW2 was a "grindy" MMO. The first line I read was "if you don't like it go back to WoW" so it was already clear any further contribution on my part would be pointless. Not that I let that stop me.

A little while later, tabbing to check Feedly between zones (GW2 has some of the longest zone loading times I have ever seen, although the new PC has improved things somewhat) I came across Aywren's plaintive post entitled "MMO Soul Searching: How Do You Learn to Relax at End Game?". The two events, co-inciding, set me thinking.

Aywren's post has attracted some excellent, thoughtful and helpful comments from Jeromai, Dahakha, Karinshastha and several more. Some could easily stand as blog posts in their own right and the thread is well worth reading in full.

My own reply there is perhaps more negative than I intended but the question of what to do at the cap has always been a thorny one for MMO players. The traditional vertical progression model, developed in the days of a near-universal subscription model, has always relied very heavily on building retention, often at the expense of entertainment. As I said in my comment "these games rely on players never reaching a plateau where they can stop, relax, look around and take stock. If that were ever to happen there would be a significant proportion that would conclude they had “beaten” the game; they would stop playing and stop paying".

I missed that memo. Again.

As a natural Low Energy gamer, playing primarily for relaxation and amusement, I have not spent a great deal of time at the cap in most MMOs. My tendency has been either never to reach the maximum level at all, even in games I played for a significant period of time (Dark Age of Camelot, WoW, LotRO), or to quit altogether soon after I did (Wizard 101, Rift).

It's very telling that the handful of games in which I continued to play just as fervently after hitting the cap are those that heavily encourage the making and leveling of "alts". (Alts is a term I have always disliked and avoided but that's a topic for a post of its own. I'll stick with it for clarity).

Aywren's difficulties in FFXIV, as she describes them, are twofold. Firstly, the activities necessary to continue playing and - most importantly - to feel she is pulling her weight at the cap, tend to be stressful rather than relaxing. Secondly, due to the game's "do all the things on a single character" design, the escape hatch offered by other games of simply rolling another character is firmly closed.

As she says, "FFXIV really discourages alts...in fact, rolling an alt just feels like even more work". My own short time with the game, which I loved in many respects, told me exactly the same thing. Indeed, the sheer implausibility of ever playing and enjoying multiple characters in Eorzea was one of the main reasons I declined to subscribe after the free month.

Now what, Piggy?

MMOs in which I have had - or currently do have - one or more max level characters all take the opposite approach. EverQuest, EQ2, Vanguard and GW2 each have many races and many more classes, multiple starting areas and an array of disparate leveling paths that make it not just possible but positively appropriate to repeat the leveling journey over and over, even when the destination has already been reached.

They all also benefit very strongly from having either a huge choice of horizontal content, alternative and discrete vertical progression paths, or both. Frequently, if you would like to become self-sufficient - always one of my goals, if one that's seldom achieved - an army of alts is not an indulgence but a necessity. Players of the traditional "one Main, one Alt" variety find this approach as unattractive as I find it delightful, which is, of course, how game economies are built.

The argument in map chat over GW2's "grindiness" fell down over definitions: one person's "grind" is another's "farm". I confess to willfully contributing to the confusion. Sometimes I just can't help myself.

I have a very straightforward definition of "grinding" in MMOs: grind is any form of repetitive activity I don't enjoy. "Farming", on the contrary, can readily be defined as "something in game that I'll happily do over and over and over just for the fun of it". 

Harvesting nodes for materials or killing easy mobs for faction so that I can make an item that will make my character more powerful or allow her to use a vendor that currently won't trade with her  - these are classic farming activities. Running the same dungeon over and over to kill a boss who may, but most likely will not, drop a piece of gear I need to raise an arbitrary statistic on a specific slot by a small amount so she can edge a step closer to passing a gear check to enter another grade of the same dungeon and begin the process all over again is a classic grind.

Farming and Flying

There is no natural law that says spending time on one of these activities is morally superior to the other. It's all pixels as the saying goes. Some people absolutely loathe harvesting or faction grinding, seeing it as busy-work of the worst possible kind. I'm not attempting to place any of these essentially frivolous ways of passing the time into any kind of hierarchy of value.

What I am saying is that, while there may not be any extrinsic difference in worth between grinding or farming, there is a difference nonetheless. That difference is Agency.

When you farm you have complete control. It's a pick-up and drop activity. You can start it when the mood takes you and jack it in when you get bored. No-one is relying on you to hit one more Ancient Wood node or kill one more Corrupt Guard. No-one, that is, but you.

What's more, farming generally allows you to be as social as you wish. You can chat on all your channels, with your guild, your friends, randoms in zone, while keeping the mats or the faction flowing. By contrast, for all, its supposed social benefits, grinding, at least in its modern LFG/LFR form, has become a soulless, mechanical, silent drudge. If you're lucky.

The invention of Dailies muddied the distinction between grind and farm and between agency and obedience. Dailies were introduced, in part, to counter discontent with the perceived "grind" of faction farming (see how confusing these terms are?). They replaced killing large numbers of creatures Faction A disliked in order to make that faction like you by doing a small number of tasks for Faction A instead.

Easy Dailies!

This approach, which caught on and replicated across the genre like a virus, offers an uncomfortable half-way house for Agency. You have a limited freedom over which Dailies to choose and when (or rather whether) to do them but they tend to offer a much smaller range of options to achieve the same result and they come with a timer that the old farms happily lacked.

You don't have to do your dailies every day but, hey, they're called "Dailies" for a reason, aren't they? Miss a day and feel yourself slipping behind. And that's also the innate problem with vertical progression for anyone who isn't wholly on board with a life of High Energy High Achievement as a preferred way of spending their leisure hours.

Story time. There was a brief period when I was at the cap in EverQuest. It wasn't even that brief: I'd been at the Velious cap of 60 since some point in the life of the following expansion, Shadows of Luclin. I reached the  increased level cap of 65 during the Planes of Power expansion in 2002. I remained there until the cap was raised to 70 in Omens of War two years later.

I played EQ for four expansions at the 65 cap. I had two max level characters, a Cleric and a Shadowknight. I didn't raid but I both healed and tanked regularly for full groups in at-cap content for a couple of years.

I also played umpteen lower level characters throughout the run. By and large I managed to retain a Low Energy approach even though much of the activity was nominally High Energy. The way I did that was by retaining the maximum possible amount of agency throughout.

I did the entire Bard Epic. I never even played a bard.

At that time Mrs Bhagpuss and I were in an active guild and we did a lot with them but our primary social resource was a cross-guild custom chat channel. This was started by a friend of the time with our encouragement and over a couple of years we used it to build a network of like-minded individuals.

We invited people who enjoyed running dungeons for the fun of it, not just to get specific drops. We were laid-back enough about it all that, generally, we wouldn't even need to use /random to determine who would get most items. People were added to the channel based on whether they were good company not on how well they played.

How good anyone's gear was didn't even get a look-in when we were handing out invites or picking groups, although we did end up with a couple of top tier raiders, who appreciated the opportunity to kick back and relax once in awhile. As a Cleric I should have had my Epic. All clerics had to have their epic. But I didn't and it didn't matter.

Epic Quests were on the list of things I didn't fancy much, like raiding and getting flagged for the higher Planes, so I passed. Ironically, I did take part in several, but only as one of the party or raid helping someone else to get their Epic weapon.

I even once tanked Trakanon (the relatively easy triggered version) for a friend's Bard epic, probably the highlight of my limited tanking career but the only Epic I ever completed on my own behalf was the famously short and simple (relatively speaking) Beastlord version.

Another day, another Epic.

That was years later on another server and by then I was high enough level to solo most of it. Another Low Energy option - wait it out. Meanwhile, back in the PoP era, my capped characters opted out of the gear grind and yet were able to enjoy a full and varied palette of max-level content for a couple of years until EQ2 came along and derailed the train.

 At the beginning of my reply to Aywren I claimed "I think it is, both by definition and by design, impossible to have Low Energy fun *and* remain competitive in the endgame of a vertical progression MMO – especially one that uses a subscription-based payment model". The key word in that sentence is *and*.

If your goal is to live a relaxed, low energy life at the cap of an MMO designed around vertical progression you have to accept that you will not be competitive. You won't have the best gear. Your iLevel or equivalent will be sub-optimal. You won't be top of any ladders, meters or leader boards. You will, in the estimation of some, be coasting. You may feel your more driven friends are carrying you and they may be.

This is fine. You don't need to be competitive. You merely need to be competent. As Jeromai says "Priorities shift so that it’s no longer mission critical to be considered best of the best… “Good enough” will do". And "good enough " is by definition good enough. Your friends, if they are your friends, will be willing, happy even, to take some of the weight but that doesn't mean you need to be a burden.

Venril Sathir - is that the Druid Epic? It's all just a blur.

I was a good healer as a cleric in those days. I didn't have my Epic and my gear wasn't cutting edge but I knew what to cast, when and on whom, I didn't panic in a crisis and I kept people up when they might have gone down. My cleric was a first pick when groups were being made, partly because back then all groups wanted a cleric, but also because I was a good team player and because I was "good enough".

As a low energy gamer playing for relaxation and fun at the cap it is, in my opinion and from my experience, essential to be "good enough" while taking things seriously but not too seriously. You are there to enjoy yourself. If you find that, for whatever reason, that's not happening then it's time to make a polite excuse and leave.

If you can hold on to some agency you can enjoy life at the cap as much as you enjoyed the ride that took you there. Some MMOs, like GW2, make that a much, much easier thing to do but if it can be done in classic EQ then it can be done anywhere. Even FFXIV.

I look forward to hearing how Aywren squares that circle.

The Russians Are Coming!

Today is the first day of Blaugust. Last year I shadowed the event. I didn't sign up because a) I don't like filling out forms and b) I didn't want the prizes. I just posted every day to see if I could.

And I could, or so it seemed. At least, I managed a post every day last August. It wasn't unpleasant or even particularly onerous but when I started thinking about whether to do it again this year I soon realized it was an experiment I wasn't keen to repeat.

Of course, because Bhelgast is running a chilled-out version this time around, with no prizes and no specific requirements for posting, there was no reason not to sign up other than laziness. And being disorganized. And a) above, again.

Anyway, for whatever reason, I didn't. I haven't. But thinking about it did set me off looking at my blogging stats. They are weird.

July 2016 was my "best" month ever. Over 28,000 page views. It didn't start out like that. Half way through the month it looked as though there was going to be a summer slump. Then the spikes began.

The first half of the month is what I would call genuine traffic. It runs between 500 and 600 page views a day. Steady. Unspectacular.

With five years of posts in the bank these days most of my traffic comes from various flavors of Google. All of the blogs that used to feature on my Top 10 referrals have now vanished except for Keen and Graev, who still send me a lot of visitors.

Then around the middle of the month everything went nuts. There are two huge spikes on the 21st and 27th with several lesser but still large hits before and after. What's going on?

It would be nice to think that I'd been quoted on some forum or linked on reddit or something  - these things happen periodically and often cause a sudden surge of interest in a particular post. It's always possible to track these hits back through Blogger's stats.

I often know if Syp has included one of my posts in his Massively OP "Global Chat" column before I even read it just by seeing "MassivelyOP" pop up in the referral list, for example. In this case there was no clue what was causing the flurry of page hits.

It wasn't my shameless coat-tail riding of the Pokemon GO phenomenon. That certainly kept the coals glowing, bringing in a no doubt confused and disappointed trickle of Pokemaniacs all month. Nearly three times as many as any other post in July, although that's as nothing compared to the post on building a raft in Black Desert from earlier in the year, which is now my most-viewed post ever.

No, as far as I can ascertain this is probably "referrer spam". This stuff used to show up in the stats so at least you could tell which bots were artificially inflating your numbers but now it seems to leave no trace. Apart, that is, from in the "Audience" section.

Russia is a big territory for MMOs. They play a lot of them over there. They even make some of their own. EQ2 had dedicated Russian servers until just recently. What's more, I know for certain fact, because I was once able to trace and visit the website, that Inventory Full posts have been cloned, copied and used as content in the past by at least one Russian MMO news agency.

I've also been linked on Russian gaming forums and had traffic that way so some visits from that part of the world are to be expected and welcomed. Not, however, half of an entire month's traffic in ten days. This is evidence of some bot farm operation or some other nefarious unseen activity.

This is the sort of thing that makes it so hard to work out just how many readers you really have. There's a ridiculous difference between my paltry fifteen subscribers (why is that number so low and what is a "subscriber" anyway?) and my topline figure of more than 28,000 monthly visits.

My guesstimate is that this blog has maybe 250-300 regular readers It perhaps gets a few thousand casual but interested clickers-by each month on top of that. The Google Analytics report, which I look at a couple of times a year, if that, generally shows a lower number of page visits but an encouraging amount of time spent at the site once people find it. Why those figures differ from the Blogger ones when both are supplied by Google is a mystery to me.

In the end there's not a lot of point worrying about it or worrying away at it to find out what's going on. Like many hobby bloggers I tend to evaluate success by the number of comments and the liveliness of discussion below the line.

Still, I would love to know what's actually going on over there in Russia. I do get quite a lot of hits from Yandex.ru, Russia's homegrown version of Google. Those are probably real. Who are those people? Are any of them reading this right now?

And I'd like to know why I get an ever-increasing number of hits from Google Images - over a hundred and fifty from Images.Google.fr and Images.Google.de last month alone. Are they searching for pictures of ratongas or asurans posing against dramatic backdrops? If so, how are they doing that? I would too, if I knew.

I'll probably never find out. But if anyone has any light to shed, well, you know where the comment section is!