Five Things From Friday : WoW Edition

I haven't done one of these in quite a while, so it's worth reiterating that the title "Five Things From Friday" contains three implicit promises (five items, on friday, every friday) that I have no intention nor inclination to honor.

1. If Blizzard released a patch in the woods and there was no one to complain about it, would it still be a patch?
   
   
2. The Greedy Goblin is a pretty interesting blog concerned with making money in WoW. He's also a self-admitted Randian, and when he's complaining about other players it often brings to mind Whitaker Chamber's famous rebuke:
   

   From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber — go!"

   I mention Gevlon because above he recently bragged about excluding a player from a five-man heroic group because the player had not yet completed the Naxxramas ten-man raid (in case you aren't familiar with WoW, a ten-man raid is far more advanced than a five-man heroic). People in over their heads are certainly a problem in WoW, but so are elitists who take upon themselves to arbitrarily decide who is worthy and who is not.
   
   Come to think of it, there's considerable overlap in that particular Venn Diagram.
   
   
3. Faction changes are here, which have to be the most-signficant-yet-least-asked-for feature in the entire history of WoW.
   
   It's nothing I seriously considered before, but it does hold a certain charm. In the Grand Pantheon of MMORPG's I could never get into, there resides a special place for Leveling in WoW As Horde, a task I've oft begun but have never completed.
   
   
4. The Chinese ban on Gold Farming came and went this week. Like many things that seemed to odd to be true, it was too odd to be true.
   
   
5. I keep meaning to make a "Coolest Things Since I Returned From WoW" list but I don't know if I'll ever get around to it. One very cool thing that has nothing to do with Blizzard : I can now get my WoW news from WoW.com instead of scanning the (awful) forums for blue posts thrice daily. This is a dereliction worth celebrating.
   
   
6. The other "Coolest Thing" that has nothing to do with Blizzard : mods have really grown up. I'm returning from my second long absence in WoW. During my first nine-month absence mod maturity advanced ... by about nine months. During my second, two-year-long absence, mods seemed to advance by ten years.
   
   Ackis was originally based on a mod I wrote and then quit maintaining, and if any of my work is still left it is now unrecognizable. And Ackis is marvelous, far better than anything I could have done.
   
   So it's quite possible that the greatest thing I ever did in WoW was make a mod and quit.
   
   
7. The #1 Video Game podcast on iTunes is WoW-focused The Instance. I have recently partook and found it excellent, although my #1 Video Game podcast will always remain the Bombcast.
   
   
8. The Expansion Prediction Wagon has arrived : it will be called WoW Cataclysm and it will be based on The Maelstrom. I am hitching myself to this wagon.
   
   
9. Speaking of hitching, some time ago there was a (possibly fake) secret leaked plan for WoW expansions. It has proven remarkably accurate in the duration, although details have obviously changed. According to the notes, the fourth expansion seemingly introduces new starting zones, "Wolfenhold" and "Pandaria", presumably for Worgen and Pandarens.
   
   I'm going contrary to The List, and predicting that based on the Children's Day updates, the two new races will come in the Third Expansion, and will be Wolvar and Gorlocs.
   

Happy Independence Day to you, readers!

Achievement Streak 3 : Despair and Redemption and Then More Despair

In an attempt to make WoW more fun for the average everyday casual Boat, I've decided to try for an achievement every day on my new Warlock, Boatorious. This is my week three log ...

So, checking my achievements on Giant Bomb has proven a little more useful, history-wise, than checking them on the WoW Armory. So here are last week's achievements in all their cut-and-pasted Giant Bomb Glory* :

	Flame Warden of Eastern Kingdoms 10 points	Honor the flames of Eastern Kingdoms. 0 comments	World of Warcraft June 28, 2009
	Giddy Up! 10 points	Learn the apprentice riding skill. 0 comments	World of Warcraft June 27, 2009
	Level 30 10 points	Reach level 30. 0 comments	World of Warcraft June 26, 2009
	A Simple Re-Quest 10 points	Complete a daily quest every day for five consecutive days. 0 comments	World of Warcraft June 25, 2009
	Journeyman Fisherman 10 points	Become a Journeyman Fisherman. 0 comments	World of Warcraft June 25, 2009
	Professional Expert 10 points	Become an Expert in a profession. 0 comments	World of Warcraft June 24, 2009
	5 Daily Quests Complete 10 points	Complete 5 daily quests. 0 comments	World of Warcraft June 23, 2009
	Expert in First Aid 10 points	Become an Expert in first aid. 0 comments	World of Warcraft June 22, 2009
	An Honorable Kill 10 points	Achieve an honorable kill. 0 comments	World of Warcraft June 21, 2009

Like last week there is a bit of a glut problem. Based on that and a few other factors I've decided to change the rules from here on out : the rules of the streak now entail at least one achievement per day AND ten achievements per week.

This will save me a little heartburn from meta-achievements and the many "accidental" achievements I seem to get. I don't consider getting two achievements in a day to be "breaking the streak", per se, but any easy achievement I get today could come out of the end of my streak (when I eventually run out of easy achievements).

I'm also loving the whole idea of the streak. There's no point in setting a goal that's too easy, so instead I always set goals that are too hard. A daily achievement streak is good for me because I do have trouble doing things every day (so that makes it hard) but there are a lot of easy achievements (so that makes it achievable). It also makes for a nice mix of playing the game and strategic make-believe-meta-gaming.

It's also got me through the first twenty-five levels, which means I'll probably get this character to 80. I have probably created a hundred WoW characters, but only five have every broke twenty-five, and all five of those eventually hit sixty. I made it from ten to thirty in the past three weeks, which isn't technically fast, but it is pretty fast for me, and I've been happy with my progress.

* I edited the date on several of the achievements here. WoW records the dates a little weird in that the "next day" starts at 9 PM or so.

Achievement Streak 2 : The Second Week Glut

Still playing WoW. Still trying to get achievement every day. Still succeeding. Leveling another warlock -- my main back in the day was a warlock. New toon goes by the name of Boatorious.

Second week has been a little harder than the first. Every secondary skill (fishing, cooking, first aid) has a bunch of achievements and I don't want to get more than one per day. So I'm knocking on level 30 and I haven't trained fishing up since I first got it. So here's the second week :

Day 8: Explore Loch Modan
Day 9: Level 20
Day 10: 100 Quests Completed
Day 11: Journeyman Cook
Day 12: Explore Redridge Mountains
Day 13: 50 Fish
Day 14: The Old Gnome and the Sea (Fish from a school)

Luck, how bout it? Got my first blue yesterday, a level 19 shield called Redbeard's Crest or something. Today I got my second blue ... Redbeard's Crest again. Allegedly it's good for twinks but the auction house will measure the truth of that.

PvP servers, I don't miss them. It wasn't getting ganked that I hated the most -- it was all the stuff you had to avoid if you didn't want to get ganked all the time. Like doing quests, for instance -- much better to find a forgotten cave and grind there for like four levels. My favorite spot was this cave full of Naga just south of Feathermoon. It was difficult for Horde to get there so getting ganked was not much of a concern. That was Mannoroth -- now I'm on Ysera, a PvE server, and it's nice to be done with grinding in caves.

Although I'm a little late, E3 left me unimpressed in the Massive Department. I predict that The Old Republic will make a ton of money but will not be a successful MMORPG by any other measure. APB always sounded like an awful game but looks pretty darn cool. And if Final Fantasy XIV is a hundred times better than Final Fantasy XI it will still be about a hundred times worse than WoW.

Kongore's Bad Fur Day : The Unstoppable Achievements Streak

If you're going to play WoW casually it's good to make your own game. The game Blizzard made, what with the endless scheduled raiding, is not a very good option.

So I've decided my game will be to see how long I can make an achievements streak last on a new character, getting at least one a day. I'm now seven days in, although according to my Armory Page I haven't got any new achievements in three days.

If it was the armory page was up to date, it would read something like :

Day 1. Level 10 - Reach level 10.
Day 2. Professional Journeyman - Become a Journeyman in a profession.
Day 3. Explore Dun Morogh - Explore Dun Morogh, revealing the covered areas of the world map.
Day 4. Duel-icious - Win a duel against another player.
Day 5. 50 Quests Completed - Complete 50 quests
Day 6. Journeyman in First Aid - Become a Journeyman in First Aid
Day 7. 25 Fish - Fish up 25 items

I've been pretty curious how long I will be able to extend my streak. Looks like there are about 150 fairly easy achievements, so as long as I keep playing I should be able to make it about five months. Of course, I'll probably drop out long before I start getting to the hard achievements -- the list of ways I might fail (in increasing order of likelihood) is my server is down for an entire day, I fall asleep in my chair, I just forget one day, and (most likely) that I just get bored. Time will tell.

Oh yeah, Kongore. The thing I dislike most about making a new warlock is that you have all new demon names. Sarthun was my Voidwalker for about 90 days played, now I'm stuck with Kongore. Before Blizzard fixed it you used to be able to dismiss and summon a new demon (with a new name) ... those were the days.

Why Tobold is Killing Me

Tobold is the best massive-game blogger around there, because he's brilliant ... and because he posts like three times a day. But, dude, you're killing me ...

And yes, while I defended Blizzard for making the STARTING raid dungeon easier, and still think that this is a good idea, I never wanted them to nerf hard mode for the more advanced raid dungeons. And I repeatedly said so, but nobody listened, because everybody makes the same mistake as Gevlon: They all think that 100% of the game should be designed to be exactly at the difficulty level they enjoy most.

This is something you see in the forums constantly. But let me tell you a little story about a Raid Dungeon in World of Warcraft. It was really hard and nobody could beat the final boss. So they nerfed it. Then a bunch of hardcore guilds started beating the raid. Then they nerfed it again, so even more guilds could beat it.

This raid was called Molten Core. It was the first raid dungeon in World of Warcraft -- it was in the game at launch. That was four years ago. Since then, every single raid dungeon has been nerfed at some point after hardcore guilds started clearing it.

Why does Blizzard do this? Well, really, who knows. But this is my view of it.

Take guild A. Casual guild. They raid twice a week for three hours, so they spend six hours raiding a week.

Now let's create an arbitrary measure of their raiding prowess in terms of consuming content -- let's say they could kill one million Hoggers in an hour. So they consume raiding content at a rate of 1 Megahogger per hour.

Now, consider guild B. Hardcore guild. They are better than guild A in every imaginable aspect of the game -- they have better gear, better buffs, better specs, more knowledge, are better organized, better at following instruction, and are more focused. In fact, they are ten times more effective than guild A -- in other words, they could kill ten million Hoggers in an hour. They consume content at a rate of ten Megahoggers per hour.

And, by the way, guild B doesn't raid for six hours a week like guild A. They raid for fifty hours a week.

So guild A consumes six Megahoggers of raid content per week, while guild B consumes an incredible five hundred Megahoggers per week.

So what happens if Blizzard wants a hardcore guild to take a at least two weeks to clear a raid dungeon? Well, they have to crank out a Gigahogger dungeon. That takes guild B two weeks. And guild A ... well, about that : It would take guild A a little over three years to get through this raid dungeon. They wouldn't get through it, in fact, because no guild is going to spend even a year trying to clear a raid dungeon.

I'm not factoring in the fact that guild A is going to start reading about the strategies that guild B used -- and guild A is going to start getting gear from the dungeon. So let's say, generously, that guild A gains half a Megahogger in raid efficiency per hour every week. So week one they raid at one Megahogger per hour, week two they raid at 1.5 Megahoggers per hour, etc. It would still take guild A about six months to clear the dungeon. Six months might seem "ok", but consider that guild B probably has a couple months head start on the dungeon to begin with.

Blizzard nerfs the dungeons because they have to do so. The reward for raiding is ultimately not getting great gear -- it's getting great gear months before everyone else.

I realize this makes guild B a little sore, but you'd think in four years they could have made their peace with this.

Every MMO Is The Same

Back to WoW. I made a new character and I'm going to try to get an achievement every day and see how long I can last.

But it did occur to me when I was reading about the newly-found freeness of DDO -- nearly every MMO is the same.

A few months ago I endeavored to find a new MMOG to play, and ended up finding a few different lists of massive games and looking at screenshots of most of them. I didn't like what I saw because every massive game has the exact same screenshot : a dude in the middle of your screen, hanging out in a 3D world.

There are precious few exceptions -- EVE Online, Air Rivals, Naval Field, and Maple Story, to name a few. Would that there were more.

A Day and a Half back in WoW

Took me a morning to dowload the client and apply all the patches.

I've been out of the game for right around two years. What's the very first thing I do after two years away? I start writing a mod that will never be useful enough for anyone else to ever see. I'm such a nerd.

It was weird to see Shattrath empty. Really weird to load the Stormwind map and see the Harbor on there (still haven't gone there yet). Cool to see what a Gnome Death Knight looks like.

Didn't see any old friends around, but my real "friends" in WoW were people I played with for six months ... four years ago. They probably don't even remember me anymore, I barely remember them. This fall I have a college reunion and I'd like to see one of my old friends, but it's the same thing -- we were friends for four years ten years ago and haven't talked much since, not sure he'd even know who I was.

I haven't seen any of the new content yet (unless the map of Stormwind counts) but I've already seen the weirdest thing, and I'd say it's the most fundamental change in the game since launch, possibly tied only with the 40 to 25 man raid switch.

One plus one equals two, and hearthstones have a 60 minute cooldown. I've kept up with patch notes but I have no idea when it went down to 30 minutes. Most fundamental change to anything in the game since launch, in my eyes. Wow.