Figuring It Out

 My experiments with World of Warcraft's new leveling options continue. Largely unsuccessfully.

Well, not unsuccessfully in terms of the levelling itself, I guess. That's going fine. I played my goblin shaman for a couple of hours last night and she went from ten to thirteen, which is level thirty in old money.

As I commented this morning over at Ulalu's blog, I'm finding the new system unexpectedly confusing. I thought the whole point of the revamp was to make everything simpler and clearer. It seems to have had the opposite effect, at least on me.

So far I've made two new characters, one Alliance and one Horde, both on the same unsubscribed account with no max-level characters. I've used the endless free trial, which allows you to make characters and play them to the new level twenty, which would be the mid-forties under the old method of counting.

Both characters were offered the option of starting in either their original, racial starting zones or in the new, universal starting zone, Exile's Reach. Supposedly only "veteran" accounts get that option. Having completed the new tutorial zone, however, neither received the dialog option I was reliably informed they should have had that would have allowed them to opt out of the introductory tour of their respective capital cities in favor of moving straight to the expansion of their choice.

As things stand I have a level ten worgen hunter in Stormwind who has visited Chromie, the expansion-of-choice facilitator, only to be told to finish the tour and come back later, and a level thirteen goblin shaman, now committed to helping the trolls of Zandalar with their seemingly endless series of trivial chores.

Anyone else getting those Roger Dean flashbacks again?.

 

I was planning on taking the shaman to see Orgrimmar's version of Chromie once her introductory tour ended but the whole thing moved so seamlessly into the beginning of Battle for Azeroth I didn't even spot the join. I was enjoying the pretty good BfA opening movie before I knew what was happening and by then it was too late.

Which is fine. I'm determined to get my Vulpera fox-person started at some point and to do that I'll need a Horde character capable of getting the quests, for which they'll need to be, I'm guessing, at least level forty-five, which would have been one hundred and ten, entry level for the expansion when BfA launched. I'll have to subscribe to get that high, of course, and for all I know I might need to do the last five levels as well. I'll find out when I get there.

There seems to be a lot of that going on right now. The only way to find out how things work is to try them for myself. Just looking stuff up on the internet isn't cutting it. I'm not finding my experience in game to be an exact match with what I'm reading. 

It's maybe not all that surprising. There are a lot of moving parts. Does it make a difference whether the account is subbed or not? Does it matter whether you have a maximum level character? Does that mean the maximum possible at the time the account was last subbed or the maximum during Battle for Azeroth? Is the game checking flags for things you've done, maybe by way of achievements? Does it know whether you really have already made yourself familiar with the capital cities or is it just going to take your word for it? 

I'd hate to be a street-cleaner in this town.

 

Once you've gotten started on Battle for Azeroth content, can you just drop out, talk to Chromie and start over somewhere else? Can you do that over and over again? And what if you don't take the tour or talk to Chromie? How about if you just arrive in Stormwind, fresh from Exile's Reach, then turn around, walk out the gate and go start leveling in Westfall and Redridge?

Honestly, this feels to me exactly like a beta. I'm really hyped to go out and experiment with all this stuff. I feel like making a slew of new characters and trying out all the options and seeing what I can break. I'd like to try doing the same things on an established free account, an established, subscribed account and a brand-new, free account to see what the differences are.

One thing I'm pretty sure about is that doing all that unpaid testing would be a lot more intellectually stimulating than playing the game itself. As Ula points out, leveling in Retail WoW is almost entirely challenge-free. So far I've found it next to impossible to get into any kind of trouble. Most mobs die in two casts. Healing seems a distant memory. I've yet to need to eat or drink anything, make anything, buy anything or do anything at all other than click on NPCs and equip quest rewards.

Hey! None of this was my idea!

 

As far as I've gotten, the game pretty much plays itself. How am I staying focused? Or even awake?

Well, the scenery in Zandalar is spectacular. WoW's graphics may be stylized but they very definitely don't look outdated. Exploring would probably be fun, just for the screenshots, if I ever managed to step off the questline conveyor belt.

Speaking of quests, they literally never stop. Every one leads inexorably to another. There is no respite. At all. The writing is... okay, I guess. It's better than functional but not by a lot. I'm a dedicated reader of quest dialog in all games I play but here I do find myself skipping lines, paragraphs even, almost involuntarily. 

The trolls seem like they ought to be amusing but somehow they rarely are. There's clearly a discussion to be had about their ethnicity. I'm guessing that's a converation that's been had elsewhere, already. It would pretty much have to have been. I can just about deal with the voice-acting but the phonetic rendering of the accent in the quest text is... difficult.

I feel like I want to say something but maybe I shouldn't?

 

As for the action, the quest designers clearly try to keep themselves amused by trying every variation in the playbook, even when the result mitigates against reason, sanity or enjoyment. I'm all for a bit of variety but I find myself wishing I could just go somewhere and kill stuff for a level without having to deal with the minutiae of troll politics for a while. Or doing their tedious chores.

Even so, the time passed fairly painlessly last night as I burned through all my rested experience and added three levels to my tally. I'm reasonably keen to carry on. Can't say I feel very involved, though. It's a weirdly passive experience, somehow.

My mind keeps drifting back to the externals. I really would like to get to the bottom of how this new leveling process works. Only I suspect that would take a lot more effort and time than I'm going to feel comfortable giving it. 

It's one thing to explore the structural limits of a game in beta but it seems kind of strange doing the same thing in the latest live release of one of the biggest, oldest, most successful games of its kind in the entire world. You'd figure there were people being paid to do that, wouldn't you?

Fix It

Just before I switched my computer to go to bed yesterday, I made the foolish mistake of giving my email one final check. Always a bad idea last thing at night.

The only new item was this little gem from Google:

Naturally, I couldn't let it lie. I spent forty-five minutes looking stuff up and fiddling about. In the end I gave up. Life's too short for this kind of thing.

It seems Google has decided desktop users are the past. The present and the future belongs to mobile. As they explain "Today, most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. However, our ranking systems still typically look at the desktop version of a page’s content to evaluate its relevance to the user. This can cause issues when the mobile page has less content than the desktop page because our algorithms are not evaluating the actual page that is seen by a mobile searcher."

Actually, they explained that back in 2016. I must have missed that memo. I also missed the one three years later, when they moved Inventory Full into the brave new world of Mobile First Indexing.

So, it seems the blog's been assessed according to how well it reads on an iphone for the best part of a year, now. Until last night it didn't seem to be a problem but when someone who ought to know tells you something needs fixing you do feel you ought to pay at least a minimal amount of attention. 

It took me a few minutes to work out exactly what the supposed issue was. At first I assumed it was a generic shortcoming of the blog as a whole. I certainly don't make any attempt to customize it to perform well on mobile devices although the new Blogger interface does now include a handy button that shows me, on my desktop display, what the page I'm creating looks like on a tablet and a phone.

 

The warning I received, however, doesn't relate to the blog per se. Just to one specific page. This one. From September 2011. If you click through the link you might notice it looks a bit odd. That's because I was fiddling with it last night, trying to make it so the text wasn't "too small to read" or the "clickable elements too close together".

It's amazing, isn't it? A blog page from almost a decade ago doesn't display well on a mobile phone today. Who'd have thought?

Apparently Google's "Smartphone Crawler" picked this up yesterday and immediately sent me a report suggesting I do something about it. Why they were interested is anyone's guess. What's the demand for nine-year old blog posts on daily quests in Rift, d'you reckon? Are today's smartphone users particularly into that kind of thing?

I did manage to fix the third issue, "viewport not set". A quick search gave me a line to insert at the top of the HTML code that did the trick. The other two issues proved harder to solve, not least because Google itself seemed conflicted over whether any problems really existed.

There's a useful Mobile-Friendly Test you can run on any url to let you know whether it meets Google's standards. It's provided by Google themselves. I put my failed post into it and it passed.

It passed in both its original and its revised form. I tried my latest page and that passed, too. So does the draft of this one.

Then I re-checked the 2011 page using the link Google sent me in the email, the one you use to see if the fixes you've applied work. It failed.

The re-check was certainly doing its job. It acknowledged the fix for the viewport. The revised error report only mentions the size of the text and the clickable elements. 

I tried to check it again just now so I could get a screenshot but re-running the validation today fails altogether. Instead I Checked the page through yet another option provided by Google, the Google Search Console. It returns this assessment:

Google doesn't seem to be able to make up its mind. I had a think about it and decided I don't care.

I don't care whether my blog is accurately indexed for Google's algorithms. I don't care if a Google search returns any results for my blog at all. Almost everyone who's ever going to read anything I write is going to end up here from a link on another blog. This scene, such as it is, works on a system of networking and personal references. All those random Google searches that pad out the page views just land, bounce and never return, so why court them?

If anyone reading this is having trouble reading any posts from 2011 or so on their mobile phone, please feel free to drop me an email or comment on a current post and I'll be happy to send you a plain-text email copy or something. If I had a printer I'd print one out and post it to you if you wanted. Still waiting for the printer I have on order with Amazon to come back into stock at the moment. I ordered it in June so it might be a while.

Meanwhile, it's going to be business as usual here. Google's had forty-five minutes of my time I'll never get back and I'm blowed if they're going to get any more.

Once More Into The Reach : World of Warcraft

After reading Shintar's and Rohan's posts and comments on the Alliance version of Exile's Reach I was curious enough about what the differences might be to go take a look for myself. I also wanted to see if the Alliance experience would be as bug-ridden as the Horde's and to go exploring rather than sticking slavishly to the plot.

I didn't want to take all afternoon doing it so I didn't spend too long agonizing over which class and race to go with. I settled on a worgen hunter, two of my favorite options. Of course, having picked a combination I might very likely want to play at some stage, I lost any time I might have saved by taking an age getting her hair and ears right.

Character creation seemed considerably more varied than last time. I wasn't imagining it, either. Worgen get a lot more choices than goblins - more hairstyles, more jewellery, more ear-shapes - and then they also get to customize a human form, too. It hardly seems fair.

Worgen are spoiled for choice, looks-wise. Just look at those glowy eyes!

 

My first choice of name was taken, suggesting someone else has read Martin Millar's werewolf trilogy. I got my second choice, though, further adding to the likelihood she'll get played someday. (Talk among yourselves for a moment while I add Martin Millar's excellent blog, which I have just discovered and spent half an hour reading, to the blog roll).

Thankfully the dreadful connection problems I was having yesterday seem to have calmed down a little. I'm not sure what's behind it all. It's certainly not just World of Warcraft that's having problems. I've had issues of one kind or another in Guild Wars 2, EverQuest II and Genshen Impact over the past few days. I'd suspect my ISP but it seems to be happening to a lot of people and by no means all of them from the same countries.

With no lag or disconnections it was a lot easier to tell what was a "bug" and what was just very bad latency. Someone at Blizzard really wants to do some sanity checking on when tutorial tips and prompts open and close. That's the main source of confusion. It does seem to me that the game ought to be able to tell that you've not only followed instructions to "Use the Dungeon Finder to enter Darkmaul Citadel" but that you are, in fact, already in a group, which you did join via the Dungeon Finder and that the group is in Darkmaul Citadel and has been for some time!

Even worse, the game remembers you not doing what you were told even after you log out. I didn't want to put my spells where the prompt suggested so I ignored it and put them where I wanted them. That seemed to satisfy the prompt gods when I did it but when I logged back in just a couple of hours later a bunch of tutorial prompts began flashing all over again and wouldn't stop until I put duplicate spell icons on my hotbar in precisely the slots indicated. Whether that will put an end to the incessant nagging remains to be seen. I kind of think I might still be doing it when I hit fifty.

It's not even pointing at the right spell! And notice I now have three Feign Death spells on my bar, all from trying to shut the damn prompt up.

The Alliance's end-of-tutorial dungeon is identical to the Horde's, as is the plotline leading up to it. Indeed, most of the Exile's Reach experience is copy-pasted between the two factions. The NPCs are necessarily different although their roles are direct analogs and quite a lot of the dialog is unchanged. 

The quests are there and thereabouts the same, with just a little of the text re-arranged for flavor. Most of the differences I did spot almost certainly arose from my playing a different class rather than a different faction. There was no spirit army this time. Presumably only shamans get that one. Instead, as a hunter I got several new quests teaching me how to tame and manage my pets. 

The one completely different and totally unexpected encounter, something that had me quite excited when it happened, is probably another class-specific event. I'm not sure, though. 

It happened when I went exploring. I was determined to go poke my nose where it wasn't wanted but even though the map, when you open it, suggests quite a large explorable area, Exile's Reach doesn't seem to have many nooks and crannies that aren't being fully exploited by the plot.

It looks more attractive in game. It would have to, really. So dark and dingy!

 

It does, however, have a very inviting river valley leading towards a large waterfall. And nothing prompts you to go there other than your own curiosity. A waterfall is like a signpost to adventure, though. It's a truism that no waterfall should go un-looked-behind. Or, in this case, beneath.

I was swimming upstream towards the cataract, underwater because it's quite deep and the lighting effects are lovely, when I saw a glow in the distance. A cave, under the falls, guarded by a couple of turtle-folk. 

 

I was so keen to see what I'd found I didn't even check if the guards were friendly. They didn't seem to be bothered so in I went. Inside were several more turtle people, one of whom looked quite chatty. I had a hurried and somewhat nervous conversation with them. I was already conscious of being underwater and holding my breath. 

Okay, you're scaring me now, Tiang.

 

When the turtle mentioned they didn't know how long worgen could stay underwater without breathing I panicked a little and immediately accepted an offer to be sent back to the center of the island. I was expecting to be teleported but instead another turtle read some words off a scroll and a huge bubble of air surrounded me, lifted me up and floated me all the way back, down the river to the camp.

When I'd gotten over the shock I went straight back up the river, checked just how long I could hold my breath (ages!) and swam back down to have a better look. I spoke to all the turtles, each of which had something to say. I also noticed I'd gained reputation with them. I'm now Neutral with Tortollan Seekers. No idea who they are but apparently they live a very long time and don't get out much.

Do the bubble spell, Mey! Do the bubble spell!

 

It seemed out of kilter for there to be such a well-decorated easter egg in this highly utilitarian zone. Nice, but odd. Then it occured to me that it was more likely the turtles are part of some other class's questline. Druids, maybe. Even so, some considerable effort has been made to make finding the hidden cave a memorable experience. I appreciate it. I just wish there was more of it.

The other major deviation from my Horde experience came with the quest involving the re-sizing of wild boars. The Horde's mad scientist - a goblin, naturally - comes up with a plan to inflate a boar to giant size and use it to crush the army of undead guarding the sacrifice. This plan gets radically revised when in-field testing shows the re-sizer can be used more efectively and directly as a weapon. 

In the Horde scenario, the player ends up hanging from a remote-controlled drone, blasting undead into dust from the skies. For the Alliance, however, the mad scientist (inevitably a gnome) sticks with the original plan. A boar is duly blown up to elephantine proportions and the player gets to ride it like a tank, crushing all before them.

I dunno... I'm just not sure it's the armageddon weapon you think it is.

 

Given that the preceding stage, where the player gets hoiked around on the drone for the purposes of reconnaissance and general ridicule, still exists, I really wasn't expecting that. I can't quite see why it was done differently. Again, though, nice to see someone making the effort.

Other than that I don't think I noticed much difference. Following my comments about the Horde's Exile's Reach involving some "spooky swampland" and Shintar's description of the Alliance enjoying "lush meadows" I was expecting some completely new scenery but it turns out this is entirely a difference in perception. The landscape is exactly the same.

Looking at it objectively, I think both our original descriptions are hyperbolic. The areas I thought of as ghostly marshes are more like dank, dreary forest floors while Shintar's idyllic fields are more like rough scrubland. The whole place is generally scruffy and uncared-for. It also seems to be perpetually overcast and quite dark. 

Anyone know a good landscape gardener?

Other variations came in the number of bags I got (more) and the amount of damage I took (also more). One of those was down to luck and the other to forgetting I'd dismissed my pet before pulling a boss mob. Still didn't die but it did come down to the last hit.

I can also confirm to Rohan that I categorically did not get any option to turn down the "tour the city" quest when I arrived in Stormwind. I took great care to check all the options and screenshot them, too. I'm guessing that if your account has never completed the Battle for Azeroth storyline you cannot opt out of doing at least those opening quests and quite possibly you'll be compelled to do the whole thing on your first character, regardless of how many other higher-level characters you may have.

That would make the definition of "Veteran" players mean anyone who has completed BfA. And to be fair the very detailed description of the new leveling system at Icy Veins does make that clear: "New players do not have access to Timewalking Campaigns and must play through Exile's Reach and Battle for Azeroth first to reach Level 50 with at least one character, before they classify as Veteran players and can seek out Chromie on subsequent alts." 

Then again, Icy Veins also states quite plainly "A new starting zone called Exile's Reach has been added and is mandatory for new players. Veteran players can simply opt out of it and begin at Level 1 in the starting zone for their race." Well, I can make a gnome and start in Gnomeregan, because I just did! It seems there are veterans and veterans.

Just to be sure, I took my worgen hunter over to the Stormwind embassy to talk to Chromie, the npc who hands out the timewalking passes that allow players to select an expansion to level in. She was in no doubt. Do the tour, noob!

So I have to take the tour but maybe then I don't have to do the BfA quests? I guess I'm going to have to do the whole thing to find out.

This is definitely not turning out to be as straightforward as I imagined. Was leveling ever this complicated before they simplified it?

In Exile

Exile's Reach is World of Warcraft's new, all-race, all-faction, all-purpose starter zone. It sailed in on the update formerly known as the Shadowlands pre-patch, blown loose from its moorings by the storm that pushed the expansion back to an as-yet unknown release date. 

Sorry. Sorry! It's hard to avoid the maritime metaphors when you've just hauled yourself up onto the beach from yet another MMORPG shipwreck. How many times have we done this now? Let me think... when was the last time? Oh, yes, that would be the New World showcase back in the summer. That long?

I love the classics, though, don't you? I mean, why re-invent the wheel, right? But I did find this particular cover version particularly ironic, what with the similarities to WoW's contemporary and so-far-back-in-the-rear-view-mirror-it's-barely-a-dot "rival", EverQuest II, but Norrath does have separate islands for the factions so it's not exactly the same. Is it?

Hard to be sure. So far, I've only run through this thing once, as a goblin with the Horde. Come to think of it, I can't recall seeing any dirty Alliance scum hanging around. Maybe there are two islands after all.

However it works, all brand-new players have no choice other than to begin in Exile's Reach. Experienced players, by which I believe Blizzard means any account that already has a character over level ten, get to choose whether to take the shipwreck or begin in their traditional racial starting zone.

Every character on my regular account (I have two - maybe three - I forget) belongs to the Alliance but I'm planning on starting a Vulpera as soon as I can get the pre-reqs done, which means having a Horde character of high enough level to do the quests. I maybe should have thought of that when they were running the months-long double xp promotion...

To kill two birds with one stone, or at least stun one of them a little, I thought I'd make a goblin and run her through the new starting experience. That also allowed me to take a look at the revamped character creation options. Hey, three birds! What is this, hunting season?

It's been so long since I last made a character in WoW I couldn't really remember how it used to be so any comparisons I might try to make between the old and new versions would be fairly meaningless. Also, WoW seems to be having some fairly serious connectivity problems since the big patch so I didn't see things at their best. 

I got disconnected just before I finished making my first goblin. Nothing saved so I had to make another. That one glitched half way through and changed several of the options I'd picked. It was hardly a slick, polished process. After about twice as long as I expected I managed to get a goblin I was happy with, a shaman, a class I don't believe I've ever played.

Things began with a short cinematic with very hyped-up voiceover bigging up the gung-ho collective responsibility of the Horde in what I thought was a peculiarly uncomfortable fashion. I wasn't quite sure if I was joining an anarcho-syndacalist collective or the U.S. marines. That tone, unfortunately, persisted for the entire time I spent in Exile's Reach and seemed set to continue into Orgrimmar, where I ended up, being given the tour by a relatively un-brainwashed goblin, ten levels later.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. How was Exile's Reach itself? 

Buggy, in a word. Really quite buggy. Like, late beta buggy. That buggy. Which I found surprising. Isn't Blizzard the company that's famous for its polish? Maybe that's Old Blizzard, as SynCaine would say.

After a few extremely basic tutorial steps (WASD, how to hit a target dummy)  I got sent to kill murlocs and retrieve First Aid kits they'd stolen. Yeah, didn't make any sense in game, either. Unfortunately I couldn't target any of them."Invalid target", every time.

I couldn't cast my one spell, a lightning bolt, but it didn't stop me killing the little blighters because right-clicking on them and auto-attacking worked fine. Didn't help as much as you'd think, though, because I couldn't loot anything I killed, which meant no first aid kits, which meant I couldn't complete the opening quest.. 

 

I fiddled around with that for a while and got annoyed. Logged in and out a couple of times. Tried another character to see if it was just happening in Exile's Reach (it wasn't). Eventually I found a supposed solution online (you just have to press "Alt" apparently) but when I swapped back to my gobin shaman for the third time the problem had magically fixed itself.

Not the greatest of first impressions. It occured to me that, had I been a brand new player, at this point I might have been thinking of playing something else. Since I'm a veteran I carried on. 

Some more bugs I experienced over the next couple of hours: 

• being told to eat some food to recover my health every single time I opened my bags even though I was always at full health already
• having as many as four flashing prompts on screen at once, all overlapping each other so none of them could be read
• and finally (after I foolishly ate something to get the flashing prompt to go away) getting a huge banner stuck across the bottom of the screen telling me "Don't move while eating. Watch as your health recovers", which would not go away no matter what I tried.

Despite the flurry of irritating and inaccurate messages I persisted. It took me a couple of hours to get to level ten. I was quite surprised when I checked the time at the end. It seemed shorter. I probably lost twenty minutes fighting bugs so I guess it was. 

 

Experience and levels seemed to come pretty quickly and as advertised there was something to get excited about each time I dinged. Mostly a spell, which the game was very, very insistent I should know about. I was understanding of the first animated prompt to tell me how to open my spell book and move a spell icon onto my hotbar but less so when it was still happening at level nine.

The early stages involved a considerable amount of business around making sure my character was prepared for the danger of the fights to come. It seemed ironic considering the speed everything died. At no point was I ever in the slightest danger from anything. Most mobs fell down in two or three hits. If my goblin took any damage I didn't notice it.

Somewhere around level six, as I was running somewhere to do something for someone (to call the storyline generic would be rude to genres) I spotted a big mob with a fancy border around its name so I piled into it to see if I could get an actual fight. 

It wasn't touch and go, let's say that much. The thing did drop an eight-slot bag, though, so I was happy enough. I also received a ten-slot from a quest. With last year's Classic experience still quite fresh in my memory I suspect I may have gotten more excited about getting those bags than was wholly appropriate.

 

Visually, Exile's Reach is impressive. The opening area on the beach doesn't really set the scene for what follows, a romp through some very picturesque and spooky swampland. The ghost army was worth seeing, too.

In retrospect I kind of wish I'd gone a little deeper into the swamp, poked around a little, but the entire experience is very much on rails. There's little incentive to explore. The main sequence questline is extremely linear and although there's the odd side quest none of them actually take place off to the side.

As far as gameplay goes, the designers have managed to throw in several of their favorite tropes:

• the one where you get turned into something else
• the one where you ride an NPC as though they were a mount
• the one where you dangle from a flying contraption
• the one where you destroy hundreds of baddies with massive air strikes. 

Plus, naturally, all the kill ten and fetch quests you'd expect. I don't recall there being an escort quest but I may well have done one and forgotten about it.

The finale involves that nemesis of all introverted would-be soloists, the unavoidable, compulsory group instance. Being WoW, this is as automated as it possibly could be. A dungeon finder window opens, you click it and if you're lucky like I was you're in a group in less than five seconds. 

Astoundingly someone did actually take the trouble to type in "Hello everyone", to which I felt obligated to reply "Hi there", by which time the two players who hadn't taken time out to introduce themselves had already killed most of the trash and were lining up for the boss. We killed him and then (spoiler!) the real final boss spawned so we killed him too.

 

I was nominally playing a healer. A shaman is a healer in Wow, right? Or maybe it's not. Certainly nothing happens in Exile's Reach to suggest anyone ever needs healing of any kind. Well, other than that that blasted "eat your greens" prompt. Anyway, I did keep an eye on the other party members' health but since no-one ever went under 90% it seemed like a moot point.

There was loot that looked like it might be nice. It was blue, at least. I'd barely registered anything had dropped before I found myself alone again. I've never seen people disband so fast. I guess they had somewhere to be.

Back in the open world again, all that was left was a quick debrief and a wyvern ride to Orgrimmar. The wyvern person warned me it was a one-way trip. Frankly, I couldn't think of a reason I'd want to come back. Unless it was to bring a dictionary to show them the correct phonetic pronounciation of "Wyvern". It's Why Verne ffs, not Wivv Urn! What is it with voice actors? They do the same thing in Guild Wars 2.

Anyhoo... there I was in Orgrimmar, still bugged with that stupid food message. I was going to stop but the guy giving the tour was right in front of me and there was something about getting a mount so I carried on for a while until I got my three-wheeled hog. Or Goblin Trike as the game less than thrillingly has it.
 

According to Rohan at Blessing of Kings taking the tour option locks you into doing at least the Battle for Azeroth starting quests. I might as well do that anyway, since it will all be new to me. And I want my fox person!

Overall, and assuming the bugs get fixed, I wouldn't say Exile's Reach is bad. The story is perfunctory. Although there are a few amusing lines now and again, it all feels very bland. It's unoriginal but functional. It moves along at a good clip. I was never bored, at least.

But, compared with the rich, complex, involving storylines of the goblin or worgen starting areas, just to pick a couple of races, Exile's Reach is a huge step back in immersion and quality. Back in 2013, when I last played through the goblin Isle of Kazan, I called it " a fascinating place" and "genuinely laugh-out-loud funny". I also seem to remember it taking me something like two full evening sessions, maybe five or six hours, just to get to level five there, and all of it fun.

Somehow I can't see Exile's Reach ever fostering the kind of nostalgia that led Daybreak to spring the return of the Isle of Refuge on EQ2's audience as a glorious surprise. It does a job and I guess that's about as much as anyone expected.

She's Crafty

After I hit max level on my EverQuest magician I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my Overseer quests any more but I did know I wanted to carry on doing them. Setting and collecting ten missions each day has settled into a ritual. I wouldn't say I look forward to it but I definitely get some level of mild satisfaction from the simple process.

It did occur to me to start leveling another character, naturally. You need to be at least level 85 to access the Overseer system but thanks to multiple rounds of free Heroic handouts over the years I have quite a few characters sitting around at precisely that level.

The question I found myself asking was why bother? What would I do with another max level character if I had one? It's not like I'm doing much with the one I've got even though I've made the effort to get her passably well-geared and Magician is probably the best solo option there is. Would I get anything out of a maxed Necromancer or Druid or Beastlord that I can't get from the Mage or would, as I suspect, playing any of those feel more limiting?

There certainly wouldn't be much point having another maxed character on the same account, either. That really would limit the synergy. A druid or enchanter or shaman on another account could provide extremely useful buffs or teleport my Magician to places it takes her a long time to travel to on her own. I can definitely see the utility there. Having two max levels on the same account would double the workload for no gameplay benefit at all.

If I was going to level up a character on a second account, though, wouldn't I be better off dual-boxing, with the Magician, who would be godlike to a level 85, power leveling? Except I've tried two-boxing in EverQuest a few times and I find it quite irritating. It's definitely not something I can imagine doing for pleasure.

 

So, maybe Overseer leveling another character on another account might make sense. Then again, if I was really interested, I could have been doing it the whole year already, couldn't I? It would only have taken another fifteen minutes a day. I'd have been pretty much finished by now. It's not like it didn't cross my mind.

And anyway, it doesn't address the core issue of what to do about the Overseer quests on the primary account. The one I do (sort of, sometimes) play.

I thought maybe it was time to take a closer look what else you can get from Overseer quest rewards other than experience. The options are

• Character experience - self-explanatory
  
• Mercenary AA experience - self-explanatory
  
• Tetradachms - a currency useable at a specific Overseer vendor
  
• Collection Item Fragments - combine four to get a Collection Item Dispenser
  
• Ornament Dispensers - choose from a large variety of cosmetic "ornaments"
• Tradeskill Items - specific items from specific expansions
  

The currency sounded interesting. I checked the vendor to see what I could get. There were some definite possibilities, a range of stat-enhancing augments and plenty of cosmetic adornments, all of which appeared to be non-Prestige. Generally both of those categories require a paying account to equip so I could certainly get some value there.

I've only recently begun to investigate collections in EverQuest. They work much the same as in EverQuest II, where they've been a staple since launch. Completing them gives some excellent, practical rewards and some of the individual collection items sell for big money in the Bazaar. 

The problem is randomness. As is well-documented, I like randomness and I'm not at all averse to spinning the wheel and seeing what I get but the fact is I've barely begun collecting in EQ. Almost anything I get is going to fall into an open slot in a collection I'll most likely never finish. If I was going to start on the system in earnest I'd be far better off running Heroic Adventures and visiting older zones to work on specific collections.

As for Ornament dispensers, it's true I could really do with a new look. With a relatively limited choice in both armor and weapons due to not being able to equip Prestige items, access to adornments a non-paying player can use is quite an attractive option.

I was mulling over all of these until I looked at the tradeskill items you can get for doing Overseer  harvesting, crafting and research quests. For most of the last year my primary source of income in EverQuest has been twofold - selling cash drops like gems to NPC vendors and selling tradeskill materials to players. 

When I was selling my mats via barter the two income streams ran about neck and neck
but when I took the trouble to set up a bazaar vendor on a second account and leave him in offline sales mode 24/7 my Bazaar earnings quickly dwarfed anything I could make by clearing old content for drops. The only problem was keeping my trader supplied with stock and it looks like this could be the solution.

I looked at the Overseer tradeskill rewards with the Barter and Bazaar windows open at the same time so I could check the going rates for the stuff I'd be getting. I knew exactly what that would be because there's no random factor. Each quest gives you listed quantities of listed items for each expansion. The higher quality and/or longer the quest the more items you get.

Checking the current offers and wants there were several possibilities but in the end it looked like I'd get the most bang for my buck out of either 2018's The Burning Lands or, surprisingly, 2012's Rain of Fear. The former gives out relatively small amounts of indigenous mephit blood and meat, both of which sell in the Bazaar for five to seven thousand platinum pieces each. The latter gives considerably larger quantities of befouled silk, which turns over at around a thousand per.

Both also hand out lots of other period-specific items, almost all of which sell for a few hundred or so a time. Doing all the appropriate available quests looks as though it could net upwards of a hundred thousand plat a day. Always assuming people are buying, that is, but I've found it to be widely true that anything someone is asking for on barter will sell fast at a much higher price on a Bazaar trader. And most of this stuff is very much in demand on barter.

After the first day's questing I logged in both accounts and handed the mats from one to the other. Since I'm not currently adventuring with the magician I guess I could cut out the middlegnome and just have her do her own trading but somehow it feels tidier to use a dedicated trader and aggregate the income from across the various accounts.

And yes, of course, as I priced up the loot and calculated just how much money I might be making it did occur to me that I have access to half a dozen accounts with level 85 characters, thanks to all those promotions in the past. What's to stop me logging them all in to do Overseer quests and thereby massively multiplying my income?

Nothing, apparently. Out of curiosity I logged in three more accounts, ran through the Overseer tutorial, which takes less than a minute, and set them all to doing crafting, harvesting and research quests. They were all able to do it although one account was only allowed to take three quests whereas the others could all take five. I suspect it may have something to do with when the accounts were originally made or possibly whether I ever paid the nominal five-dollar fee to go Silver back when that was a thing you could do.

Whatever the reason it doesn't much matter because I don't propose to make a habit of logging five or six accounts in twice a day to farm Overseer quests for mats. Or not for long, anyway. Maybe just until I've earned enough to buy the Magician all the spells she's missing from the last ten levels. They get expensive when you pass level one hundred or so.

And I guess, if I'm logged on anyway and there aren't enough of the right kind of quests to fill the daily allowance, which sometimes there aren't, I might fill out the empty slots with the ones that give experience. I mean, since I'm there anyway...

Yeah, well, we'll see. For now, though, let the money roll in!

I Remembered You Older And Taller

Where I live, World of Warcraft's big level squish patch landed around two o' clock in the afternoon. I'd been reading about it without paying quite as much attention as i should have been so I was expecting it last night. 

I logged in after work yesterday, went through Blizzard's security routine, which apparently kicks in if you haven't played since this time last year, downloaded a three gigabyte update and logged in to see my characters as I'd left them, unsquished.

Reading the patch notes more carefully I realized we in the U.K. weren't getting the update until October 14th. The servers went down around dawn and came back up just after lunchtime. That suited me well enough. I didn't have to go to work today and I had nothing else planned.

Just after two I went to log in only to find Blizzard was "unable to authenticate" my account "at this time". They politely suggested I try again later, which I did. About thirty seconds later, in fact, and then again a few more times for good measure. No luck.

It seemed like a sound approach. I mean, doing the same thing over and over in the hope of a different outcome is always a solid choice, right? Still, I thought maybe I ought to check. 

Googling to see what was up I found several sources suggesting if I just kept trying I might get in. See? I knew it!

Meanwhile, Blizzard's Twitter account was busy apologizing

As I write, four and a half hours later, the apologies have stopped but the investigation continues

I might be taking a different tone if I was still waiting to get in but in fact the internet was correct.

After a couple of tries I closed the launcher and re-started it. That got me past the "cannot authenticate" issue and into the real patch, all thirty-four gigabytes, the previous evening's three having been merely an amuse-bouche.

Blizzard might have been having problems with the log-in servers but there was no holding the patcher. The whole thing was done in a matter of minutes and I logged in to see... the Shadowlands trailer. 

I've seen it before. It's quite good. I happily watched it again. And then the game kicked me back to login.

At this point I might have started to get annoyed only there wasn't time. I entered my details yet again and there I was, at character select, looking at the damage the squish had wrought. Or, more accurately, at a massive warning preparing me for the emotional impact of what I was about to see.

Which, at first glance, didn't seem to be all that much, possibly because I don't have any max-level characters and I can't remember exactly what levels the characters I do have have might have been before the squish, even though I was looking right at them only last night. 

It took me a couple of minutes to work out what had happened to whom. My Hunter, who was around about level 100, I think, had squished down to thirty-seven. My Warlock, who I seem to recall being in the sixties, was now twenty-five, along with my Death Knight, who hasn't been played in a decade, so what does he care?

Those three were all flagged "Inactive" because as yet the account remains unsubscribed. All of the rest were now well below the threshold for WoW's version of free-to-play, which remains at level twenty despite the squish.

This presents me with a rather pleasant quandry. I had fully intended to resubscribe for at least a month so as to enjoy the manifold changes, along with the pre-expansion events. As it turns out, however, it seems the squish has effectively doubled the leveling opportunities available under the endless free trial or whatever they call it.

Since I had been thoroughly enjoying leveling several of these characters (plus my goblin on a different account) until they ran into the buffers at twenty, I don't feel any great need to give Blizzard any money just yet. I ought to be able to get quite a bit more out of the unpaid version before I free-cap my panda monk, my gnome hunter, my goblin (whatever class she is - I forget), my worgen druid...

Yeah... not really feeling it.

 

As for the pre-expansion events, as far as I can tell, they won't start until two weeks before the expansion itself and as yet we don't have a date for that. I'm only really interested in seeing the zombie invasions of the home cities, anyway, and I doubt you'll need to be subbed for those.

I will eventually have to subscribe just so I can level a Horde character into Battle for Azeroth if I want to do the quests to open the Vulpera race. Once that's done, though, I think I can make and play my fox for free.

All of which seems a bit of a shot in the foot for Blizzard. I mean, I was all set to subscribe but now they've made it so I barely need to think about it and certainly not yet. I'm quite surprised they didn't squish the free to play offer down to Level 10, which would have allowed the exact same content access for what is effectively supposed to be a free trial. Glad they didn't.

When I was able, I logged in several characters to see what was what. I started with my now-level six night-elf druid, followed by my now-level ten gnome hunter and finally my now-level nine worgen druid. 

All of them were just where I'd left them. All of them had just a single hot bar up and that nearly empty. I spent a while re-opening hot bars and re-installing spells and abilities. Everything looked very tidy but I couldn't remember what I used to be able to do clearly enough to know if much had changed.  

Thinking about how much leveling fun I might have ahead of me and also wondering about the supposed new by-expansion leveling paths I was curious to see how fast squished xp might flow. The worgen druid had a host of quests up on the tracker so I started working through some of those and in about half an hour she was level twelve. 

Hold on, let me get my breath...

Granted she had full rested xp but that did seem fast. With a cap of twenty that looks like no more than a couple of good sessions per character. According to the handy conversion chart included in TAGN's post on the patch, the new level twenty should get me to somewhere in the old mid-forties. I'd have thought that would take longer but maybe my estimations are being tainted by my time in Classic last year. Still, hardly seems like enough time to get through an entire expansion.

However it pans out, it's a whole lot of free content I didn't have access to yesterday. As I was saying a while ago, what with FFXIV raising the free trial bar to sixty, Lord of the Rings giving away most of the quests and now this I can't see why I'd pay for anything. And that was before I'd even heard of Genshen Impact. Not to mention all the other MMORPGs I can play for free - EverQuest, EverQuest II, Guild Wars 2, Elder Scrolls Online... remind me why anyone ever pays for games again?

I'm back at work tomorrow but after that I have five straight days to do whatever I feel like and I think I might feel like making a new character and playing through WoW's fresh-paint one-to-ten zone, Exile's Reach. It sounds uncannily like half a dozen other intro/tutorial zones I've played through in other games. 

Not that I'm saying Blizzard like to iterate on other developers' ideas. Or that that would be a bad thing. Then again, I'm not sure anyone else has tried taking away more than half the hard-earned levels of players who spent a decade and half working on them, along with 96% of their power. I guess we'll see how that works out and who, if anyone, decides to follow suit.

Spend Your Wishes

Tobold has a strange post up today, in which he seems to be complaining that you if you want to play Genshin Impact you have to... play Genshin Impact. (I know, right? Shocking!) He calls this "hitting a playwall". 

Having reached a point where, in order to progress, he needs to beat a certain boss and then beat it a few more times to farm some materials it drops, he says "This is exactly the sort of gameplay that I abandoned MMORPGs for". I'm not at all sure that having to defeat specific bosses to move a narrative or storyline on or develop a character is a mechanic unique to MMORPGs. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's not. 

Leaving that aside, though, to object to the self-same mechanic in this specific game on the grounds that "You can visit other player's worlds, or let them into your world, but there is no system in place to look for people who want to kill the same elite boss than you do" does seem to me to suggest that he'd find his problem considerably easier to resolve if Genshin Impact were an MMORPG. Not to mention that, as Belghast made clear, you can invite other players to join you in the open world if you want to, which does indeed trivialize downing bosses like the one that's giving Tobold conniptions.

I didn't come here to unpick Tobold's logic, though. The day's too short for that. I mention it only because the post does glance against my own recent experiences in Genshin Impact.

As a general rule, when playing any games with progression mechanics, MMO or otherwise, my tendency is to leave upgrading for as long as possible, particularly if it involves any kind of step-change or decision point. I like to carry on as I began for as long as doing so feels comfortable. Only when I start to run into one of Tobold's "playwalls" do I start to look at what I might need to do to clamber over it.

 

Until a couple of sessions ago I hadn't really encountered anything like that in Genshen Impact, other than one timed challenge I didn't quite have the dps to beat. I've been treating the character you start with, The Traveler, as "my character" and the handful of other characters the storyline gives you as "her team". That's meant Amber, Kaeya and Lisa for the most part, giving me access to the "elements" of fire, ice, electricity and either wind or earth, the Traveler being able to swap between both.

I also had a couple of other characters, one more from (I think) the storyline and one of whom I'd acquired I when the game prompted me to try out the "Wish" mechanic. 

I didn't understand what the Wish thing was. You get some currency and you can spend it on Wishes and you get a random chance to win weapons and characters and stuff. I tried it the once and it seemed a bit pointless so I did what I do in every game that has systems I don't get but also don't feel like I have any need for: I ignored it.

I've also been ignoring the "Ascension" mechanic. Many rpgs, massively multiple or otherwise, have something called "ascension". It rarely bodes well and I tend to pretend it's not there for as long as possible. I'm pretty sure I could get a good few more sessions out of Genshen Impact without ascending but something came up that made me think it was probably about time.

It's not that I haven't been doing anything to improve my characters. It's just that Genshen Impact has a lot of progression mechanics. In addition to expanding your roster of playable characters and ascending them, they all have levels, as do their individual weapons and each of the five artifacts they can wear. I'd been doing due diligence on all of those so I had all my main characters level 20 with most of their gear partially upgraded.

 

There's also the all-important "adventure rank", the real benchmark the game uses to gatekeep the storyline. That's the one you can't really ignore. I'd been tickling that along to the point where I was able to access the quest to open Stormterror's Lair and confront the dragon that's been plaguing Montstadt.

The Domain that presents itself at that point is flagged as appropriate for a team of characters around level 26. All my team were level 20, which is the highest you can reach without undergoing the first of several ascensions.

That, clearly, was my note from the game telling me to stop slacking and ascend, already. As Tobold mentions, ascension requires certain material components. At the stage he's reached some of those only drop from bosses but for the first ascension they come from all over the place and I already had everything I needed for my four main characters.

I also had a ton of the dropped books that give huge chunks of leveling experience so it was the work of a couple of minutes to ascend my whole team and level them to twenty-five. As I was fiddling around with that I happened to open the Wish window by mistake and in doing so I noticed that two of the four kinds of wish currency I had were about to expire.

The way my mind works, I'm entirely happy to hoard currencies and containers for the entire life of a game, never opening or spending them before sunset comes, but put an expiry date on anything and I'm damned if I'm going to let it go to waste. With just seven days to use my Wishes I thought I'd better get on with it. 

I still didn't really know what they were for or how to use them, so I did a bit of reading on the subject. It turns out that "Wish" is what the game calls the infamous mechanic that's mentioned in every article and review I've ever read about the game, the "Gatcha". Who knew? Well, everyone except me, apparently. 

Once I knew, I began to see the point of wishing. This is how you get the most powerful characters! Having them makes combat easier, always good with me. As is very well known, though, the gacha mechanic is designed to make getting the best characters a long and expensive process, especially if you have your sights set on one character in particular.

I read a bit about who the most sought-after characters are right now and apparently top of the tree is Diluc. There are a bunch of "guides" on how to get him but as one of them puts it most succinctly "getting Diluc boils down to getting lucky with a Wish".

That guide goes into a lot of detail on how to optimize your chances and concludes "you’re basically going to have to spend money unless you’re prepared to play a lot of the game or just hope to get extremely lucky". Yeah, well, about that...

One of the limited-time currencies I had was for the bizarrely-named “Ballad in Goblets” wish. According to several guides I read, this is heavily weighted to give you a character called Venti, assuming it gives you any five-star characters at all, which isn't by any means guaranteed. 

 

Since I didn't have any five-star, top-of-the-shop characters, other than the Traveler, who everyone starts with, and since Venti is himself considered a top-tier character, I figured I didn't have anything to lose by spending my free money, especially since it was going to evaporate in a few days if I didn't. 

I had enough for ten pulls of the gacha/wish handle. The first four or five gave me various three-star weapons, each preceded by a shooting-star animation lasting several seconds. I imagine that would become quite annoying if you were spending money hand over fist trying to get the drop you wanted.

I wasn't really paying attention until the next shooting star exploded onto the screen with a markedly more spectacular display of fireworks than any of the others. "Hello", I thought, "something's up!"

What was up was Diluc, in fact. Riding in on the tail of a comet to invite himself into my team. What are the chances, eh? Well, about 1.6%, from what I hear. Or 0.6%. I still don't really follow the fine detail.

Anyway, I have him. He's suposedly the best DPS character in the game as it stands although no doubt he'll be superceded in no time since that's how the monetization works. And I also have the second best damage-dealer, Xiangling, a four-star character who arrived on the very next shooting star after Diluc.

 

I had plenty of xp boost books left to bang those two up to twenty-five and enough mats to boost their weapons some as well. I swapped them into the roster ahead of Amber and Lisa and now I have to learn how to play all over again. I don't imagine having two fire (or Pyro, if you prefer the language of the game) damage dealers is ideal but, hey, burn all the things! It may not be subtle but it usually works.

At least I have the Ascension and Wish processes a little clearer in my mind now. It seems exceedingly unlikely I'm going to need to spend any money in Genshen Impact any time soon and most likely never. Meanwhile, the story is getting ever more intriguing , the world ever more gorgeous and intricate and the gameplay more satisfying.

I can't say I'm too worried about either paywalls or playwalls right now.