Evolution

I went back to world of warcraft.

I’ll take a second and let the feeling of defeat that I hope that sentence communicated sink in.

Defeat?  Yes, defeat.  At least for the time being WAR is just too much for me to commit to.  The grind is mindless and boring.  No, I’m not saying that WoW’s isn’t mindless, and it’s CERTAINLY boring, but its over. The fact of the matter is that I have a level 70 character that I can play end-game content with.  I don’t feel like there’s enough reward to warrant the months of casually grinding endless scenarios to reach 40 in warhammer.  It’s a good game with a lot of potential, but not for me right now.  Maybe that will change next month when Wrath of the Lich King is supposed to come out and I’ll have to grind to 80, but who knows?

Speaking of which, I’ve been around WoW a long-ass time.  I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on anything, but I was looking over the old patch notes last night and realized that I’ve been playing WoW since somewhere around 1.2.  Mara was in the game when I started and Diremaul wasn’t.  In preparation for the new expansion, I was thinking of doing a series of posts documenting the extreme changes I’ve seen the rogue class go through–the evolution of the metagame.  There’s a really good read on what a game is, and what the metagame contributes to that here.  Everytime the powers that be change something in the game they effect the metagame.  We’ve seen a fair number of changes, the diligent folks over at shadowpanther have gone to great lengths to put them together here.  While I disagree with some of their distinctions between buff, fix, and “usefull addition” it’s a pretty good list.

I’ll try to get started on that tonight, but I’ve got a million things to do… (like farm Baron’s mount, and level enchanting.)

The cake of world RvR is a lie.

I decided this weekend to put WAR down for a while.  I got really discouraged by the endless scenario grind and the general lackluster feeling of both my zealot and magus.  I started a black orc (named Kgb), but really didn’t want to push another lowbie through tier1.  So instead of busting out guitar hero 3 which is my go-to game for downtime, I decided to catch up on a series I had started a long time ago and never got to finish:  Half-life2.  I played episode 1 from start to finish over the weekend, and also managed to complete Portal.  I have to say, Portal is quite possibly the most fun single-player game I’ve ever played in the last 3 years.  That doesn’t say all that much when you consider that 90% of my game time in those years was spent playing WoW.  It was a damned good game though.  There were so many little things that added up to a great experience.  The game could have been confusing, disorienting and nasuea inducing, but it was crafted in such a way that it was challenging, fun, and delightful.

I wish there had been cake.

I went back to warhammer on Monday, a day that was a federal skip day.  Like senior skip day, except government approved.  A couple of friends of mine from WoW had recently come over to play with the rest of us and had caught up to me… not all that difficult a task since I play maybe an hour or two a day during the work week.  After some difficulty with the in-game chat, which is terrible by the way, we got hooked up and went off to go kill things.  My tank friend and myself managed to duo a PQ hero down to ~30% when a horde of people came along and helped us kill it off.   I mention this only because I really have a fun time bending and stretching the limits of how things are supposed to be done. This wasn’t a wild departure from what the developers planned I’m sure, but coming from a class in WoW that you just didn’t NEED to get things done it was a good time.  WoW was all about the holy trinity: a tank, a healer, and a mage.  1 to take the damage, 1 to heal it, and one to provide free food, water, and CC. I used to love going on stealth runs with friends to see if we could down a certain boss.  

Later that night I got together with another guy and we decided we’d wander around and kill anyone we came across, which was a whopping 3 people before we got zerged.  I was really surprised to see how much experience we got for killing someone though.  We downed a guy 2 levels above us and each got 2200 XP.  as much as a lame 15 minute quest to gather some wood, or save a guy’s daughter from being raped by trolls. This gets back to what I feel is the biggest challenge facing WAR’s lasting potential.  The night could have been a lot more fun, we wandered around for about an hour and ran into 3 people.  The town we flew into from the capital city had 50-75 players in it, all just waiting for their scenario queues to pop. Leveling is a game of queuing for scenario after scenario and in each tier there’s a single popular scenario that will pop time after time after time despite you queuing for all of them.  So you play the same mini-game a couple hundred times and then move on to the next tier when you level out where you’ll play a different mini-game a couple thousand times…. etc.  The issue is that it’s the best XP/hour and most people are interested in hitting the level cap as quickly as possible so it’s the way to go.  Lets call this “WoW-syndrome”.  This is because there was next to nothing to do in WoW unless you were level 60.  Once you were 60 you could start collecting the armor sets, go on raids, do battlegrounds, be worth a damn in world PvP… so everyone rushed to 60.  The easiest way to level past a certain point was to just sit in a field and kill a million boars… quite possibly the most mind-numbing 4 days of my life was the grind from 58-60… i was playing 4-8 hours a day killing the same things over and over and over and over so that I could go on a raid with my guild and have fun.  Why did I have to wait til 60 to have fun?  Why should I have to wait til level 40?  I don’t.  Most people are glossing over the fact that controlling lower tiers is the key to controlling the highest tiers.  Most people don’t realize that when they get to 40 and haven’t done anything but instanced PVP they have no idea how to handle themselves in an open environment.

I put up with some decidedly annoying factors in the game like everyone looking the same, and the spells animations being choppy because I write them off as how the game was optimized to provide LARGE scale battles between hundreds of people.  This 10 versus 10 mini-game pvp isn’t going to cut it for me anymore, if WAR continues down this path we’ll see most people go back to WoW where the pvp minigames are worse, but the combat and general feel of the game is better.  There’s a good long read on the subject here.