You see Blizzard was slowly phasing in the new content for weeks now. Last several patches introduced the new rules, nerfs and upgrades as well as re-shaped the familiar areas of the world. A large portion of the brand new content was already in game, for everyone to explore. The only things that would get unlocked at 3am were the brand new zones for level 80-85 players, the two new races and few dozen new skills. One of which would allow you to use your flying mounts in vanilla WoW world (up until now, flying was only allowed in Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King zones which were on different continents/planes of existence from the main game world). This was exciting but I sort of figured that my medium population server would be just fine on the launch day.

What happened yesterday was actually kinda silly. When the content got unlocked at 3am Blizzard forced everyone to log out and log back in. As you can imagine the synchronized log out and log back in maneuver conducted by a five million players effectively bitch slapped their activation servers into oblivion. For all intents and purposes this was a massive scale DDOS. So for about 20-30 minutes most people could not get into the game.

When I finally got in, I saw this:

Crowd around the flight trainer

Yes, this is a large group of people crowding around the flight trainer. Can you spot the NPC trainer in that mob? Neither could I. Neither could anyone really. Everyone seemed to want to get this new flight skill, but no one was willing to step away from the trainer. There was lot’s of yelling, lot’s of name calling as well as laughter. I was mostly laughing at how ridiculous the situation was. I mean, if enough people would just step back, or go do something else for a few minutes, this gigantic traffic jam would dissipate within minutes. But, this is the internet so no such luck…

Another angle

And yes, I was part of the problem. As soon as I logged in, I made a bee line for the trainer, and after taking few screenshots I squeezed myself into the middle of that crowd. Fortunately for me, I grew up playing old school point and click adventure games. I did enough pixel hunting in my younger years to know exactly how to approach this problem. It was all about careful maneuvering, adjusting the camera angle and then just aiming your cursor in the exact spot at the exact time. It took me several minutes but I managed to get my mount:

Weeeee!

Of course seeing me mount up, and rise above the mob prompted several people to question my sexuality using the yell feature, but I guess that was to be expected. All in all, the whole experience was quite amusing.

What is not amusing is that my server suddenly went from medium population to “you must wait at least 20 minutes in a queue before logging in” population:

I took this screenshot after about 15 minutes of waiting

It’s almost like everyone and their mom reactivated their WoW accounts and came to my server. A server I picked specifically because I did not want to wait in queues. Sigh… Hopefully in a week or two, all the new players who just came to check things out will leave and I won’t have to plan 20 minutes ahead to log into the game.

Did any of you go back into the game to see what the new expansion is going to be all about? How do you like it so far?

Most MMO’s are this way, so eventually you just get used to it. Wrath of the Lich King however breaks away from this model. When you start playing a Death Knight character, you begin in an instanced shard of the world and almost every quest introduces new changes to the environment. At first you are sent to do few introductory tutorial missions. Then you participate in a raid against a human town. Eventually, as you progress through your quest you can see human defenders falling back, until the town falls. The fields are deserted, the buildings are empty and Lich King’s minions are everywhere. The whole quest chain is very immersive and very engaging. Most of the time when you play WoW story and narrative are at best tangential to what you are doing. But in WotLK newb areas they are what actually drives you. The only other parts of WoW which has similar story driven setup are certain instances – but since you usually end up grinding those many, many times they lose a little bit of their charm.

Unlike instances however the Death Knight areas still offer full blown MMO experience. Each time you complete a quest, you are phased to new “sub-instance” and the story progresses. You are still free to interact with players who are in the same phase (ie. at the same point in the chain quest). To keep things clean however you don’t actually see the players who are behind you or ahead of you with their progress.

If you consider that a flaw, think about this: the newbie areas in WoW are usually completely deserted. If you are lucky there will be one, maybe two low level players there trying to complete the introductory quests. And they almost never will be advancing at your pace anyway, because they are either seasoned players who want to speed through this segment as fast as possible, or newcomers who will want to stop every few minutes to read the tutorial pop-ups and just look around exploring the game world. So so this mechanic works perfectly for introductory areas.

I had so much fun being a newb Death Knight that I blew through all the quests in less than two hours, and was disappointed when the game threw me back into regular non-phased world. It is almost a shame that Blizzard hides away this sort of game play from new players. You can’t create a Death Knight character until you have a high level character on the same realm for example. And the only other places where phases are used are in the very high level areas of Northend which means most players just starting with WoW won’t see them for months.

Because of my experience with WotLK I’m actually a little bit intrigued by Guild Wars 2 which actually promises to make this sort of thing a core game play mechanic. I’m pretty sure you have seen this video already but let me post it again:

They are pro promising to make an MMO that plays like no other MMO out there. Can they pull it off? I think they can. I mean, they already had something similar to this in the original Guild Wars. Your actions really did affect the game world at certain junctions. But at the same time, most of GW was instanced. GW2 is supposed to have a more conventional, persistent world. But since Blizzard managed to pull this sort of thing off on a very small scale with parts of WotLK I’m sure that ArenaNet can do it too. If they can take the same approach and crank it up to 11, we can have a very, very interesting game on our hands. An MMO in which quests do not suck. An MMO in which what you do really affects the game world. Granted, I doubt that GW2 will be able to threaten WoW’s position in any way. But, I might actually get it when it comes out just to see how they tackled this issue.

I do this every time I go back to play Morrowind. I buy, steal and collect fancy clothes and stash them in my house. Then when a quest requires me to visit a local noble or some high ranking official I strip out of my armor and put on nice stuff to be presentable. This has absolutely no effect in game terms, but it makes me feel like I’m role-playing that character. After all, that’s what you would do in real life, no? You wouldn’t wear your combat gear to a job interview or a fancy banquet.

Actually, I really wish this sort of thing had an impact on game play. I’m still waiting for an RPG that would reward you for wearing situation appropriate clothing, and punish you for running around in your scary combat armor everywhere. But we already had this discussion once before.

I recently discovered that you can actually do the same thing in WoW. I play a Tauren hunter but when I’m hanging out in a town, shopping or crafting I usually look like this:

Everyday Clothing

This is my every-day, non-combat outfit which features a plain shirt, low level leather pants and funky goggles. The goggles are actually quite unique. In WoW most goggles are restricted to characters with Engineering skill who are the only ones that are able to craft and wear them. There are few vanity goggles in the game available to everyone, but they are usually rare drops or high level quest rewards that either can’t be traded, or sell for exuberant prices at the auction house. Mine were freebies. I got them as part of a quest during which I was supposed to use them to detect some hidden crystals underwater, but I liked them so much that I never finished that quest and just kept them.

When I go fishing (which is another skill you can level, and also good source of income since some fish you can catch are sought after by alchemists) I change into this outfit:

Fishing outfit.

I don’t know – it just feels wrong to fish in full combat gear. Which by the way is currently in a state of complete miss-match. My character is currently level 57 and wearing pretty much whatever dropped for him during instance runs. Mostly greens, few blues and an occasional purple. It is the classic RPG hero look:

Combat gear.

Everything I’m wearing has a sort of reddish motif to it – except my pants which are inexplicably green. I’m trying to mask this by wearing the red guild tabbard over them and it is somewhat blending in. Still, I’m not entirely happy with this look, and I feel much more comfortable walking around in my two meticulously crafted, minimalistic outfits.

Unlike in Morrowind, Oblivion or Fallout, doing this in WoW does have some meaning. I play on a RP server where this behavior is actually encouraged, and good outfit will get you some positive comments and praise from other players. My outfits are done on the cheap, but they tend to stand out from the crowd of over-geared, miss-matched heroes that you tend to see in the major cities.

Have you ever played dress-up with your RPG characters like this? Which games did you do it in? Do you have screen shots? Let me know in the comments.

My standard canned answer as of late has been “the random dungeon thing”. You see, I discovered that I can play WoW with other live people without actually talking to them. No, you don’t understand – to me this is brilliant. I just push a button, and I get thrown into a dungeon with 3-4 random folks without the usual pre-instance foreplay bullshit. No hanging around in the town chatting up strangers. No awkward traveling together to the instance location. It is almost like playing L4D only instead of frantically shooting zombies you babysit your cool-down timers. Frantically at times… It is actually a fun multiplayer co-op experience. But that’s not the main reason why I started playing WoW again.

As I mentioned before, I am not the type of guy who is easily impressed or entertained by game mechanics. I love games that have interesting characters, and tell worthwhile stories. WoW doesn’t really have much of that does it? It has characters, but NPC’s don’t usually do any character developments – most of them are just static quest dispensers. It is also not very good at telling stories. Granted, most quests come with the associated background fluff, but it is often hard to treat it seriously when you know that most things you do will have no effect on the game world.

So let’s summarize this:

1. Most of the quests in WoW are shallow meaningless and unappealing
2. There is no character development and basically no prominent NPC’s you could get attached to
3. There is no overall driving plot or story

Why the fuck am I even playing this game?

It’s the setting folks. I admit it – I’m that guy who will sit there and read all the Codex entries in Mass Effect games or Dragon Age. I’m the guy who will actually read the various books in Morrowind and Oblivion. It’s like an addiction. When I find a setting I like, I like to immerse myself in it completely. I think it started back in high school when I discovered pen and paper RPG. I got invited to a game of Warhammer Fantasy RPG by one of my friends, and not wanting to look like a complete n00b I ran out and bought the rule book. I still remember cracking that sucker open – it was a magical tranformative experience. I actually got to explore and learn about a world that did not exist – read about the races that inhabit it, their cultures, religion, customs and beliefs. It was awesome. I ingested the contents of the entire book over the course of the weekend, and was hooked. Similar thing happened when someone lent me a Vampire: the Masquerade rule book. Next thing I knew, I owned several World of Darkness books for systems I wasn’t even going to play, and had a shit-ton of illicitly downloaded source-books.

If you think I’m kidding ask me to show you my Corax source book for Warewolf: Apocalypse. It’s a book that provides rules on how to play a Ware-Raven. And the only reason I have it is the “background fluff”. Most of the people in my gaming group at the time were not very much into WoD (especially Warewolf: Apocalypse setting) , and even if they were I can’t imagine anyone actually wanting to play a ware-birds. But I was like “WTF? Ware-avians? I’ve got to see this”.

The point is that I am a big sucker for that kind of stuff. I own army books for Warhammer Fantasy Battle and 40k for armies I don’t even collect. I have rule books for RPG systems I have never played, and probably never will. Every time I find a setting I like, can spend weeks exploring, reading, researching and talking about it.

And guess what? World of Warcraft is a huge, complex, diverse and interesting place. Every time I visit a new area I see something interesting – and old ruin, a strange race, a new faction that I previously haven’t heard about, etc… Then I go hit the Wiki pages and read up all about it. Everything in the game has heaps of lore associated with it. Lore which was collected from various sources such as the older Warcraft games, the pen and paper RPG rulebooks. It’s all about exploring: I often go out of my way to seek out places I have only read about and visit them in person, or spend hours reading about something I just saw few minutes ago. Granted, the fluff is sometimes shallow, and silly but that is pretty much expected. Even the pen & paper RPG fluff is often kept shallow and vague on purpose – it’s because you are supposed to use it as background information, fill in the blanks yourself and run with it.

That’s why WoW keeps drawing me in. I like this setting – it is silly, offbeat world of fantasy, thinly veiled pop-culture references. It is actually quite interesting to see how Blizzard injects it’s product with all these memes and references, and at the same time inspires fair share of memes and references on its own. That’s also probably why other MMO’s I have tried left me cold. They simply didn’t have a setting as complex and lore-rich as WoW – they didn’t have the expansive and constantly expanding world, the attention to detail, the pages upon pages of collected fluff and the huge community devoted to cataloging, explaining and celebrating every noteworthy tidbit of information about the game.

I’m still not a fan of grinding. Grinding for experience and materials in areas I didn’t particularly enjoy visiting is what made me quit the game the first time around. The lack of plot and story would normally turn me off but I came to a realization that every WoW location, race and NPC has a metric ton of lore associated with it. The world seems shallow and static at first, but once you start reading about it, you realize that there is a good deal of depth to almost everything. Each place has a history, each conflict has a reason and each race has it’s culture, architectural style and flavor. That there was an great amount of research, concept design and thought put into designing this whole world. Granted, you could get most of this lore and flavor without paying a monthly fee – but there is just something about experiencing it yourself.

But I’m not going to talk about WoW today. I want to talk about the excellence that is Blizzard tech support. But let me back up a bit and tell the story from the start.

Every time I log into my Battle.net account Blizzard gets in my face and tells me that I have not purchased all the WoW expansions yet:

I see this in the sidebar every time I log in.

They are that crack dealer on the corner of the street trying to entice potential customers:

“Hey man, I noticed you don’t have the Burning Crusade yet. You are totally missing out. Seriously, just click here and you could be rolling as a Blood Elf or buying a totally sweet flying mount in Outland. Flying mounts dude! Think about it!”

Normally I just ignore this knowing full well that I will likely get bored with WoW again before I ever reach Outland. But the other day I finally broke down, and decided to splurge some money on an expansion to a game I have been playing quite extensively in the last few weeks. So I clicked that damned button, filled out my credit card information, hit submit and… Got a rather broken looking error message:

Apparently Blizzard does not care that their error messages contain unescaped HTML strings.

I tried this same exercise with two other credit cards thinking that maybe its something on my end – like my credit card company getting tired of gold farming scams started to automatically decline suspicious WoW charges or whatnot. Same results.

Well, I guess the online upgrade page is broken – or maybe it never worked in the first place. I mean, I tried online upgrades with Blizzard in the past, with very similar results so I can’t say I was surprised. Hell, I think this is an improvement.

Previously they just took my money and promptly suspended my account. And apparently that’s their standard policy for online upgrades that don’t follow their pre-defined pattern. This time, instead of taking my money and shafting me they just gave me a broken HTML form. Much better.

So I decided to thank them for implementing this feature crafting the following email:

Dear Blizzarders,

I wanted to thank you for saving me $30 today. I was trying to use your direct online upgrade feature to puchase the Burnin Crusade expansion for WoW. Unfortunately I got the following error message:

“Error 202: We were unable to process your request with the information provided. Please consider purchasing a retail copy of the game or contacting Billing and Account Services for further assistance.”

I think that either your online form is broken, or there is something wrong with my account. I am still willing to give you that $30 bucks so please let me know how could this be fixed. Here is my account info.

Naturally I had to wait about two days for a response because Blizzard is really great with their customer service acumen. This is what I found in my mailbox today:

My name is Alex. I am with Blizzard Entertainment’s customer service department. Thank you for taking the time to contact me regarding your current issue.

“Error 202” indicates that, at this time, we are unable to process the requested transaction with the information provided. As an alternative, you may wish to purchase a boxed retail copy of the game to upgrade the account. If you would like assistance upgrading the account, please contact Account & Technical Services by phone.

Honestly, I don’t even know what to say to this. I mean, “no shit Sherlock” while appropriate does not even scratch the surface here. I am left speechless by the depth, breadth and the scope of this support ticket. The fact that Alex took the extra trouble to read the error message back to me totally dispelled all my previous misgivings about Blizzard customer support.

I’m still not all that into the regular questing aspect of the game but I have realized that there are several aspects of the game that I totally missed the first time around.

For one, I’m totally having a blast doing the random dungeons. You basically queue yourself up and after few minutes get dropped into a random dungeon with 4 other strangers. When you queue up, you actually get to specify your role in the group (tank, healer, dps, etc..) so everyone knows what they are supposed to do right off the bat. It removes the hassle of assembling a team, traveling to a specific location, starting the instance only to find out that your tank has to quit because his mom just called him for dinner. If that happens in the queued game you can just have the Dungeon Finder tool assign another player from the queue to your team and keep on going.

It is loads of fun so far, and I have been leveling up like crazy since all you fight in these things are elite mobs that are worth mad xp. I have also started doing battlegrounds trying that PVP thing people have been raving about. It is a very different experience from PvE and I actually had to adopt very different strategy as a hunter. Usually you just hold back, send your pet in as a meat shield and spray your enemies with gunfire. In PvP the pet is usually useless as a distraction so you have to team up with a melee player or act as a sniper picking off weakened players that are trying to run away from combat to heal up.

Plus I get to play with my brother who keeps supporting me financially by sending me gold and neatherweave bags and who has decided to create a guild for the two of us and some of his friends so that we can dump all kinds of useful shit in the guild bank.

But none of this has anything to do with the subject of my post. It was just an introduction necessary to set up what I really wanted to talk about. My brother and me came to a conclusion that in WoW, Alliance are the bad guys. I touched upon this in my earlier WoW posts, but the fact he has also noticed this, made me think it is not just me.

When my brother was doing his WoW trial, he actually created a Night Elf on some random server. He didn’t really want to give his friends to much hope in case he ended up hating the game. He took that character up to level 30 before he switched over to the Horde side and started playing on the same server as the people he knew. This allowed him to experience quite a bit of the game from the Alliance perspective.

He mentioned that the tone in which the quest givers talk about the opposing faction is strikingly different. Alliance seems to be all about defeating Horde, treating it as a blight upon their lands. Horde NPC’s on the other hand seem to be in a much more defensive mode. Their missions are about defending their land from encroaching raiders, protecting their families and etc…

If you watch the trailers for Cataclysm the bits about the two new races are similarly very different. The Goblins were “taken in” by the Horde because they had to abandon their home lands and found themselves surrounded by humans who chose to ignore the fact that they were a neutral faction and decided they didn’t want them around. On the other hand Worgen were “adopted” by alliance because of their combat prowess and ferocity. Goblins are disenfranchised tribe that needed a new home and was graciously offered a place among the peace loving races of the Horde. Worgen were ferocious race of beast-men who were drafted into Alliance armies to be a new weapon against the Horde.

Alliance seem like total jerks…

This of course is mirrored by Alliance players – many of whom tend to lack in the maturity department. There is always some asshat camping in Crossroads killing the Wind Rider so that people can’t fly out when they want to. Also when you meet an alliance player in Booty Bay or Rachet they will immediately flip you off and then challenge you to a duel. At least that was my recent experience so far. I spent some time observing the Horde/Alliance interaction in the neutral areas and I noticed that 90% of the time PvP is initiated by the Alliance side. I’m on an RP server which means you must be flagged for PvP which meant that to get what they wanted Alliance players had to follow around Horde folks around the town making rude emotes. If that failed, they would promptly make a bee line for the Wind Rider in crossroads.

Now, I know there are mature players who prefer Alliance. It is just funny how most WoW players I have been interacting with lately have the same view of Alliance as a whole: “jerks, bullies and assholes”. This includes both the NPC factions as well as players. Every time we have a quest that involves Alliance we end up saying something among the lines of “Sigh… God damned Alliance. Why do they have to be such dicks all the time.”

If you remember my previous WoW posts, you know that this is exactly what I loved about the game back then. The fact you can play an Orc or a Troll and not be the bad guy. That you can be a monstrous minotaur like creature and fight the asshole dwarfs and gnomes that are building crappy mines on your land and polluting your shit. You don’t really see anything like this in video games out there.

Anyways, have you been playing WoW recently? What server are you on? I’m a level 32 Hunter and I picked skinning/leatherworking as my professions – any suggestions for cool places to go and interesting things to do?

Btw, in case you were wondering – I’m not planning to post much WoW content on the blog right now. In fact, I have two non-WoW games in my review queue. So I will keep the WoW content down to a minimum for those of you who have quit the game, or never had any interest in it.

Give up?

A gamer will more likely than not have a clock positioned in an easily accessible point so that they can glance at the time while sitting at the computer. Usually on top of the monitor, or next to it. A non-gamer on the other hand will probably have a wall clock or alarm clock somewhere in the room positioned in such a way that it is easy to see it while not sitting at the computer. That’s because a non-gamer can always glance down (or up) and check the time on their task bar. Gamers are ofter running full screen games which hide the real time clock.

You know what though? There is no reason for that! Most games have fairly complex HUD displays with healht/mana bars, ammo counters, mini maps, skill buttons and etc. How come a system clock can’t be one of the HUD elements? It’s not like it would take away much screen space anyway. For example, in WoW the clock is simply a tiny bump on the mini-map. It is four characters wide, and you can easily miss it if you are not looking for it:

WoW puts the clock on the mini-map.

But you know what? It helps! It really does. I love this feature!

Of course, one could argue that a real time clock would take away from the immersion. That is true. For example if you are playing a game that does not have any visible HUD elements, you wouldn’t want to add a clock, even though it would be convenient. It would absolutely spoil the effect and the immersion. But I’m not talking about these games – I’m talking about games that have large and complex HUD displays. I submit that a stylized clock made to look just like the rest of the on-screen widgets wouldn’t hurt most games. In fact, it would be a welcome addition. Hell, make it optional feature that is off by default and let players enable it at will.

It’s funny but most MMO’s I have played do offer this feature and I think I know why. They are actually better off reminding you what time it is in real world than not. If you lose yourself in the game and play for 12 hours straight, that’s 12 hours of bandwidth they have to pay for. If you constantly do this, then the costs of keeping you online start cutting into the profit margin they get from your monthly fee. So if they constantly remind you what time it is, chances are you will log out more often maximizing their profits.

On the other hand, single player games do not have such incentive. Conversely they don’t have a reason not to include a clock either. They don’t care how often or how long do you play their game -as long as you pay for it up-front they are in the green. So I suspect the lack of real time clocks in most games is simply a convention – or lack of thereof. In other words, most game developers don’t actually consider it as something you would add to a single player title. They should though.

What do you think? Would you like to see real time clocks in more games? Are there non MMO games out there that have them? Are there reasons other than the immersion argument that would make a in-game clock a bad idea? Let me know in the comments.

Shamus mainly looked at single player games but MMO’s suffer from very similar problem. Many of them however found a solution to this issue in the form of money sinks such as mounts or various other prestige/vanity items. But in addition to the static vendor based economy most of these games also have a separate dynamic player driven marketplace – which also tends to be broken. I’m going to use World of Warcraft as an example here because that’s the game I’m most familiar with.

WoW has a crafting system that allows players to gather ingredients and create new items from them. For example a leatherworker uses leather must be gathered from animals by a skinner. A blacksmith uses ore that can be collected by miners… Tailors and engineers can craft items out of various resources that drop out of mobs during questing. Since at any given time a player can only have two professions you would think there would be a vibrant market out there where gatherers sell raw resources to crafters and crafters who sell their wares to everyone else. Conceptually, you would also expect it to work more like a real world market. For example you would expect a leatherworker to be able to go to the market and buy bunch of leather, then use it to make fancy leather armor and sell it with a profit. This is however not how it works.

In WoW auction house raw resources are very, very expensive but the crafted goods you can make out of them are mostly worthless. This is especially true at lower levels where you are much better off trying to sell raw leather than to make it into something – that is if your aim is to make money. However higher level items are also mostly worthless. For example a high level tailor can make a cool flying carpet mount but you have to be a high level tailor to use it. This means that all of his potential buyers are other tailors who can make the same item for themselves. In fact the only way he could hope to sell that item is if he priced it at below the auction house cost of the ingredients that were used to make it. And thus, the economy is broken. Why is that though?

Gathering leather, copper, linen, wool and other common crafting materials is a time consuming process. It essentially forces you to go out there and visit the pick-up spots or grind specific mobs all day. A lot of players don’t want to bother with this tedious chore but they want to level up their crafting profession quickly to be able to make powerful high level items (for themselves or for their buddies – obviously not for sale). They are willing to pay big money for the luxury of not having to do the tedious gathering grind. New players who are just leveling up their first character are happy to pick up the slack and do the grinding for them, selling them raw resources at marked up prices. In fact they can get away with hiking up the prices as high as the market will bear it. But how high is that?

Well, in a game like WoW which has been running for a while it is pretty high. The people who are willing to pay premium for raw resources are usually seasoned players who already have one or two characters that hit their level cap and are rolling in wealth due to the very brokenness of the static RPG economy and escalation of quest rewards that Shamus described in his article. Whenever the decide to pick up a new profession they make a new character and transfer a fraction of that wealth to them to start them off. And so the economy remains broken.

That’s how it works in WoW though. I’m not sure if there are MMO games out there with economies that don’t suck because… Well, I don’t play MMO’s that much. I hear that when Star Wars Galaxies first came out it actually had a working economy that made some sense – or so goes the legend. I have never actually played it, and it was later irreversibly broken so that it could be more Jedi oriented and more like WoW.

Also, I’m pretty sure someone will mention Eve Online on the comments. For the record, I have played it but was very underwhelmed by the gameplay. Basically I found it very boring. Flying in space was boring – you just select a target and go get a cup of coffee while your ships flies there on autopilot. Combat was boring as well. You just select a target, tell your ship to circle around out of the other guys weapons range and go watch TV. I won’t even mention mining which consists of pressing a button every and staring at your ship shining a beam onto an asteroid for a solid minute. I love reading about the crazy hi-jinks that take place in Eve but playing it was putting me to sleep. That said, their trade system seemed to be very complex and well developed and the game itself is a bit different from your average “quest and grind” MMO so chances are they actually made it work. Any Eve players on here who can confirm this?

Do you have other examples of broken MMO economies? Are there other games out there in which the economy works they way it should? Let me know in the comments.

Often if someone wanted to talk to me I would pretend that I didn’t speak Orkish and just type stuff in the Troll language, then use the /confused emote when they responded, wave, bow and run off to do my thing. I’m being social at work, then I come home and I’m being social with my family, and then I sit down at my desk to be social with some random assholes in WoW? I think not. My brain gets totally pissed off if it doesn’t get it’s daily quota of sweet solitude. It was plain to see that I was not getting all out of WoW because my general dislike of chatty online strangers who want to team up and run instances all the time. If you take the social aspect out of WoW the game essentially turns into a Diablo like running game that involves running around and killing things. There are some plesant diversions such as collectibles, minigames, achievements and etc. But in the end, your daily grind usually boils down too running from one area to the other and killing X of Y. There is nothing wrong with that, but I have been spoiled by RPG games with real depth to them.

You know, games which will actually allow you to play a thief and level up by stealing, fencing and trading, without really needing to commit any bloodshed. I’m talking about Morrowind of course – that one game that keeps drawing me back in over and over again due to it’s immense replay value. The great thing about Morrowind is the sheer variety of quests you will get just by doing side missions unrelated to the main storyline. One day you are spying on someone, next day you are stealing secret documents, later you are sent to negotiate trade agreement and etc.. You can easily level up and advance your character without ever needing to kill anything.

Yes, you can play a pacifist in WoW too but it is not easy. It is actually quite difficult, if not impossible to achieve without serious commitment to the cause. If you are doing it, you might as well start a blog about it and people will read it because it is such an unusual (and strangely awesome) thing to do. In games such as Morrowind and Oblivion, a semi-pacifistic life style can simply a logical outcome of you choosing your character class. If you rolled a thief or a rogue you will be doing missions that require stealth, good speechcraft and security skills (stealing, extortion, burglary, pick pocketing) rather than the heavily combat oriented stuff. And there is nothing unusual or blog-worthy in that. It’s just how that game works.

Part of it is of course the fact that Morrowind and Oblivion have fairly complex system of rules that allow you to train in pick-pocketing, or lock picking and then use these skills in the game. This complex system of attributes, skills, racial/class feats and special abilities is the legacy of the western single player RPG tradition. Computer RPG games inherited it from pen and paper games like D&D which (out of necessity) had to include rules for all this non combat stuff.

Funny thing is that MMO’s break with this tradition. If you are a gamer you know that this is true. And yet someone looking from the outside would be surprised. D&D is social affair isn’t it? You get together with bunch of friends, you drink a gallon of Mountain Dew, eat a bag of Doritos an tell inappropriate jokes while the GM is trying to build tension or whatever. You could almost say that D&D is a multi-player game, could you not? WoW is a multi-player game too. Massively! Sounds like a match too me. But it’s not. Playing WoW is probably as far from playing an actual pen & paper game as you can get. In WoW your stats are limited to bare bones minimum that is required for calculating how hard your character can hit stuff. When you level up, you get almost no choice as to how you can upgrade your character. The skills you learn are mostly special attacks of varying range and/or damage output. You can’t learn lock picking in this game because there are no locks to pick. You can’t use your superior charisma or speachcraft skill to talk your way out of sticky situations because you never actually talk to anyone in this game. Your interaction with NPC’s is limited to taking or turning in quests and not much more.

WoW does have a limited crafting system but you can’t just play a craftsman. In order to excel at your craft (be it smiting, engineering or leather working) you need to go out and kill large quantities of “things” to gain the necessary levels and XP. The crafting system is meant to be a diversion you engage in between missions. The kill X of Y thing seems to be a MMO thing rather than a WoW thing though. It is like a MMO questing paradigm that almost defines the genre.

Is it always like that though? Are there MMO games out there that do not follow this pattern and offer you alternate ways to advance? I know of two counter examples. One of them is Eve Online which I have tried and got bored with pretty quickly. But then again I wouldn’t really call Eve a conventional MMO. I’d probably classify it as a hybrid between Microsoft Excel and Progress Quest – the only other game I can think of, that rewards you for not playing it. But that’s just my opinion and you have to keep in mind that I’m a people hating introvert and when I play MMO’s I actually run away from people that want to team up with me more often than not. If you are a social person, Eve like any other MMO offers you tons of entertainment in the form of guilds (or corporations) and player driven drama.

The other game that used an approach that was closer to single-player games (and thus the pen & paper roots) was Star Wars Galaxies where you used to be able to pick a merchant or an exotic dancer as a class. I never played that game, but I heard both good and bad things about it. All I know is that at some point they decided to overhaul the whole game engine and nerfed it down to the point where it became almost a WoW clone.

Everything else seems to follow the WoW lead, simplifying the stats and game mechanics to the bare bones minimum, and reducing the game play down to a controlled genocide. I can see why this is happening. The “kill X of Y” type missions are easy to write, script and deploy (so you can make them in bulk). Players can easily team up and accomplish these missions together as a team, and the missions are easily repeatable (ie. large mobs do not deplete easily, so players are not sitting around waiting for them to re-spawn all the time). But I can’t help to think that the MMO genre would be richer and deeper if it went back to it’s roots, and added bit more complexity to it’s system in order to allow for some more variety. But that’s me.

Don’t get me wrong – I think that WoW is probably still the best MMO on the market right now. It is definitely the best one that I played. I tried Guild Wars, Eve Online, and Anarchy Online and WoW is the only one that actually made me fork over the money for the monthly fee. The game is immense, it runs great on my crappy old computer, and the art direction gives it a unique look and feel that sets it apart from everything else out there. The world is immense and the level of detail put into the design of each location is breathtaking. If you never played an MMO and you want to check one out, WoW is the way to go. That said, I’m bored with it. Here is my post mortem report on what probably killed the fun for me in the end. I will make it a point to log into the game few more times before I hit that cancel button and see if I can locate the fun again but I’m not very optimistic.

Repetitive Game Play

I have said it before, but I’ll repeat it here once again. 99% of WoW missions are a variation of the classic RPG staple known as “kill 10 rats”. They mix it up a bit of course. It’s not always rats. In fact, when I say rats, I really mean a generic monster or humanoid mob that spawns in an area. But it’s all the same – your task is always to exterminate them. Like rats. It’s not always killing exactly 10 rats either. Sometimes you have to kill 15, 20 or just 5 of them. But every mission involves you going somewhere and killing things. Even when the quest doesn’t mention killing of any rats, you can safely assume that it will end up being an implicit requirement. For example, if a quest require you to to find 15 shiny doodads you can bet your sweet ass that these doodads will be either dropped by some sort of rats (or other creatures) at a very low rate, or will be located in an area that spawns new rat mobs every few minutes.

No matter what you do and where you go, you will eventually end up killing rats (or some other sort of local vermin). You are a hunter? Great, go hunt some rats! You are a rogue? Go assassinate me some rats. You’re a spell casting class? Go exterminate some rats with magic! There is very little variation. Once in a blue moon you will stumble upon a currier mission which requires you to take an item to a distant point on the map but those are rare, and far between. Invariably each of these currier runs starts a chain of missions which sooner or later culminate in killing some rats.

There are different modes of game play of course. For example there are instances, where you team up with a group of people and enter specific enclosed area to kill things. The area is instanced, which means that each group of players that enters it gets their own unique copy all for themselves. The enemies are harder and, and the loot is better. They can be an interesting experience if you can find a good group of people to play with. Unfortunately it is not that easy. See my next point about the social aspect of the game. I had one awesome Scarlett Monastery run in which we were all lv. 30-40 and had to work together not to wipe. People had their assigned responsibilities, the leader marked the targets for aggro, and for crowd control and we were hacking away like a well oiled machine. It was great experience, and one that I was never able to replicate again in any of the medium level instances with a rag-tag groups of random players.

Typical approach to running instances such as Scarlett Monastery is to bring a lv 70 alt with you who will plow through the enemies while the rest of the group runs up as swipes the loot from the fallen bodies (always voting need for everything of course). This is not much fun, since all you do is to follow the high level character and bicker over the drops with other players. Supposedly this issue goes away in the end game (since by that time everyone is level 70 and you just have to work together to survive), but I’m nowhere even near that point yet and I’m already sick of these type of instance runs.

There is always PVP but it doesn’t really do anything for me. I guess I’m just not that interested in pwning other players or anything even remotely related to that. Every duel, and PVP brawl I have fought ended with me being raped by a higher level close combat oriented player who could avoid my ice trap ignore the concussion shot, close in, and then end me with less than 4 close combat attacks. I do understand that people love this aspect of the game, but I never really was big into PvP in MMO setting. I can’t imagine playing on a PvP server where ganking n00bs is just a part of the experience.

Social Aspect of WoW

I know that many people play this game because all their IRL friends do, and they get to hang out and do things together in a virtual world. My WoW experience was a lonely one. I basically only know the following 5 kinds of people:

1. People who don’t play MMO’s and/or video games in general
2. People who don’t play WoW (at all/anymore)
3. People who do play WoW but on a different server (usually a PVP one)
4. People who do play WoW but are hard core alliance players and don’t want to create Horde character
5. People who do Play WoW but are never online when I am

The fact that the WoW world is so fractured into servers, and that you actually have to pay for server transfer does not really help. It means that if you pick the wrong server you either have to pay, or start a new character if you want to join up with a friend who is on another one. Mostly though it is scheduling – I play at odd irregular hours and my style is very much touch and go. I pop in for an hour, do few quests and sign off. I usually have clear objectives in my mind when I log in (finish quests A and B, go to a town, unload, visit trainer, see if I can level, etc..) and I rarely actually have time to “hang out” and chat.

So without close friends to hang out with in the game world, and no work/school/online buddies with similar schedules or preferences I was left to play with complete strangers. This is not the end of the world, but it is sometimes hard to find decent people in this game. And by that I mean people who do not fall into one of the two extremes: immature wow-tards, and hardcre wow-tards. The line between the two is fuzzy but it usually boils down to this: and immature wow-tard will call you a “fag” for tanking without a shield. A hard-core wow-tard will kick you out of the guild for it.

That is not to say there are no nice people in the game. There are, but they come and go and I’m not the most social person when I’m playing. As I said, I’m on a schedule and I want to accomplish certain things before I sign off. So while I may meet some kind and helpful stranger every once in a I usually don’t hang around long enough to “get to know them”. Sometimes you luck out and you hook up with a really great group of people. Most of the time you run around with bunch of idiots or assholes trying to convince you that they totally “need” every single item drop.

Running solo missions gets boring after a while for the reasons I stated above. Grouping up with complete strangers can get annoying unless you luck out and find some decent folks. Obvious answer to this problem is to join a guild but once again, not all guilds are created equal. I need a slacker guild which consists of people like me – casual players who are just looking for non-idiots to play with at weird hours. I really don’t want to have a schedule, I do not want responsibilities and another job. I don’t want a hard core riding guild!

At some point I actually did join a loosely organized guild like that but it did not deliver what I hoped for – a sense of community. Out of 60+ members I never see more than 4-5 online at the same time. The guild message board is a ghost town, and the guild chat is silent 80% of the time. This seems to be a common problem for small, non-riding guilds. Folks like me join up hoping to meet new people and form alliances but without responsibilities, common goals, perks, strong leadership and organization everyone just drifts apart and keeps doing whatever they were doing before. I don’t really know anyone from my guild. A lv 70 guild mate once ran me through the Scarlett Monastery and sent me some low level loot that was sitting in their bank for months which was nice. We never really met in-game after that.

Here is a request – if you are a regular/casual reader, you play Horde on Kirin Tor and you are happy with your guild let me know! I want in!

Anyway, let me know what draws you in? What makes you keep playing this game? At this point I’m a bit bored. I’m not sure if I’ll ever reach lv. 60. I will probably never get to 70 and venture into Outland because why should I invest in a game that already bores me. Is there a lot of interesting stuff to look forward to in the expansion and the endgame? Did I reach some sort of boring plateau that happens between levels 40 and 60? Let me know if I will miss out of some great fun if I cancel right now, but keep in mind the comments above.

In the meantime I think I might take a break and fire up Morrowind once again.