The Masters of WoW

This is something I hear sporadically, most recently from Syncaine:

By making it so you don’t have to actually understand it, the average player can still progress and collect his ‘epics’ in WoW today, while back in 2004-05 anything at-level required some basic understanding of stats/mechanics, and raiding required an Elitist Jerks degree in theorycraft.

And here was Tobold

In vanilla WoW, somebody having geared up in 5-man dungeons would have no way to bypass Molten Core. Molten Core would not only be necessary for him to gear up for Blackwing Lair, but would also teach him how to play his class optimally in a raid environment.

I still think that anybody who waxes poetic about early WoW either did not play it, or does not remember it well.

I played WoW back in 2004 and 2005 and raided in 2005, and I remember it very well. It was difficult at the time, and even the best guilds had trouble doing it successfully – the final boss of Molten Core, Ragnaros, was nerfed before he was ever felled.

But it was hard in the same way it was hard to sail across the Atlantic in 1492, or fly (no airships allowed) across it in 1927. Sailing still has challenges, as does flying, but much of what was difficult in the past has become trivial.

Here’s how you raided in 2005 if you were a warlock : you spammed the “1” key, or whatever key you had mapped to your shadow bolt. There were only eight debuff slots so you couldn’t even keep your DoT’s on the boss. That was my Elitest Jerks Doctorate in Theorycrafting : the “1” key.

Compare that to modern WoW : I have raided with two different warlock specs, both with different playstyles, and both of them ten times harder to master than a 1.0 lock. There’s a third viable warlock raiding spec I haven’t even tried yet, but would provide an advantage in certain fights. All are far more complicated than the one viable spec/playstyle in 2005. And I have to further modify my behavior based on my trinkets and glyphs.

Just to give an example of how the difficulty of playing your class has changed : a trinket I just replaced had a stacking buff, and managing that stacking buff was pretty straightforward. It’s but a tiny, tiny part of what I do as raiding warlock. Just interacting with that one piece of gear was harder than every circa 2005 class-specific warlock task put together.

I didn’t raid with every class in vanilla WoW, but I can tell you that Warlocks, Mages, Hunters and Warriors were all significantly easier to play in 2005, and I doubt the other classes are much different. Blizzard has since made most classes depend on rotations or priorities so play is more challenging. There have been new situational spells and abilities added as well.

If playing your class was simple in 2005 by today’s standards, then the encounters were pitifully simple by today’s standards. The main fight mechanic in MC was “there are adds that you need to tank”. Then, depending on boss, either kill the adds first or the boss first. Occasionally (but not for every boss) there might be some movement involved. The biggest challenge for me was staying awake, and that’s no joke. My iconic raiding Molten Core memory was fighting to stay awake while my guild did Majordomo Executus.

BWL was a little harder, with perhaps one of the fights (the last) matching a modern raid in complexity. AQ40 (the third raid) was a further refinement, with Naxxramas (the fourth and last raid of WoW 1.0) pretty similar in complexity to modern raiding – except that, of course, your class was much easier to play in Naxx40 than it is now in a level 80 Naxx25.

This is how I remember my classic WoW raiding experience : sitting at my desk, bored out of my mind, fighting to say awake, jamming the “1” key for ten minutes at a time. Little did I know that I was some superhuman Master Of WoW.

Blizzard (kind of) announces 10 man cross-realm raiding, and how it will work

Blizzard as a corporate identity is pretty consistent, so you can often speculate on interesting information by reading between the lines, or noticing what goes unsaid. And trust me, as a Blizzard News Junkie I relate this to you in the same way an alcoholic might tell you that Children's Tylenol contains an astounding amount of alcohol**.

A couple of weeks ago I was curious if Blizzard had said anything more about Gnomeregan in Cataclysm. So I checked around and didn't find much, except for several forum threads stating that since "Blizzard didn't say it", nothing that might happen to Gnomeregan was official.

Well, not really.

The information did not come directly from Blizzard, but it came from PC Gamer, who were doing an Exclusive Article on Cataclysm. Considering the official motto of Blizzard PR ("Manage Expectations or DIE") and the lengths Blizzard goes to avoid granting even tiny grains of hope ("Possible Potential Release Date"), it seems unlikely that Bliz would let an Exclusive Content Provider deceive the WoW-playing public.

Blizzard said nothing, which said everything, and now we are retaking Gnomeregan, and I'm ecstatic.

Well, today Blizzard had some welcome news about Holiday Bosses :

Just to clarify some misconceptions about this new functionality, the summoning of holiday bosses is going away. Players can queue for these bosses via the Dungeon Finder or special holiday NPCs found in the world. Once the party is finalized, the group will be ported directly to the area where the holiday boss resides. Players can kill the holiday bosses as often as they want for standard loot (epic rings, trinkets, etc.), however, they will only drop one holiday-themed loot trove per player per day. These loot troves will have a chance of containing rare holiday items such as The Horseman's Reins.

So Blizzard has added functionality to track dungeon process of players individually, instead of relying on timers or daily quests ... or Raid IDs. I wonder if they could find a use for that :

Doing [cross-realm 10-mans] is a bit more complicated than the 5 player dungeons. For 5 player dungeons it's not a big deal to allow the random heroics to skip lock outs and is not very hard to setup a group. We obviously can't skip lockouts for raids and it just much more common for raids to not complete all of the content, so you could come back a few days later and find someone else cleared your instance. It's definitely something that sounds good in theory but there are a lot of issues that we would have to figure out first.

Oh yeah -- so if Blizzard is now tracking and rewarding individual player progress on Holiday Dungeon Bosses, they could also track and reward individual player progress on, say, 10-man cross-server raids. Awesome.

** Probably not true

Gold Farming

I read a book in elementary school I thought was called "The Adventures of Monte Carlo" (though I can't find it online anywhere) about a boy named Carlo Monte, who with the help of some identify confusion (the school grading system originally had his name as "Monte Carlo" but when it was fixed the original student file was never erased) plots to complete high school in two years instead of four.

In the book they relate the story of one student and a model electric guillotine he made. He was able to use this guillotine for his French project -- and his shop project, and his history project, and for his electronics project, and so-on.

I feel the same way about Gold Farming. I'm going to write about it once, today, and then I'll just repost the article every six months or so. I'll post it as a comment every time another blogger blogs about Gold Farming. I'll make an addon that will incrementally post my article in guild chat or city chat whenever the subject arises. When I go to the Opera, and my fellow Opera Lovers are constantly talking during the Opera about Gold Farming, well, I'll Be Prepared.

Lame Rationalizations of Gold Buyers

People who buy gold in WoW are a lot like criminals in that they have a compulsion to explain away their behavior. The guy who robs a liquor store and shoots the clerk in the leg will tell you, I'm sure, that, "Hey, everybody steals." Gold buyers, when presented with their iniquities, always do that. "Everybody does it." "Everybody does it." "Everybody does it."

Well, if you say that everybody does it, that must be true, right? And if everyone is doing it, that makes it morally acceptable too.

"Blizzard doesn't care." Again, since you say it it must be true, even though Blizzard spends copious amounts of money tracking down and then banning gold buyers and sellers. "It's just money," to Blizzard, even though every sport and competitive activity in the world must and does deal harshly with cheaters, despite any theoretical financial benefits, because cheating destroys the integrity of competition and hence any interest in the competition itself.

"I have a life and can't spend it playing the game," even though the majority of raiders these days seem to have families and full-time jobs. And if your life is so great and engrossing, why do you need to get your kicks by cheating in a game? Cheaters are, well, cheaters, and I have a hard time believing that anybody who'd rather cheat in a game than work towards their goals has some very successful life that prevents them from playing enough WoW.

How does it affect the economy?

Except on one count a gold seller interacts with the economy in much the same way a player does. It is still fundamentally wrong, however. Think of those 6-2, 200 pound "12-year olds" that are always showing up in the Little League World Series. They interact with the game, and the baseball, and most of the rules, and the umpires in the same way every other player does. Their mere presence is the offense, and that makes their every normal, ordinary action fraudulent.

The real wrench they throw into the economy is on high price items. Only one in a thousand people that are going to buy that 300g stack of titanium ore are gold buyers. When it comes that 30k rare mount, however, the number is probably more like one in ten, or one in five. So if you're in the market for high value items you're paying more to beat gold buyers, or maybe even losing out on items entirely.

And Gold Sellers Are Bad People Too

One of my favorite drug legalization arguments (and that's a bit like being the world's most expensive twenty-pound diamond, in that you're already in with the best) is about ultra-violent crime. Oh, if we legalize drugs, I'm sure all the murderous thugs who run and man the cartels will devote themselves to selling organic turnips at farmers markets. People who murder over drugs only murder over drugs, am I right? That guy who murders people over a missing shipment of cocaine is a pussycat when it comes to stealing jewelry.

As Blizzard has pointed out, gold sellers are also behind practically every account hack in history. They will never stop at just gold farming, and will always be looking for unethical ways to make more money. Every gold buyer bears moral responsibility for these account thefts and cheats.

Here Come the Screwups

After two months with my guild I no longer feel like the new guy. I don't know anybody well but I do recognize names and some voices, and I'm starting to get a feel for the landscape of the guild.

Funny that it's around this time when you quit feeling like a newcomer to the guild and start noticing the screwups. Funny too that it's written "screwups", but pronounced much differently when I complain to my wife.

If you raid you probably know the guy. The guy that misses every other ready check, leaving the guild waiting until he shows up. The guy that never has flasks. The guy that has something to do that is 1) urgent enough he's willing to make 24 people wait until he's finished, but 2) not urgent enough to complete before the raid begins.

They say real life is more important than a game, which is why I'm wondering why you're wasting my real life by taking up a raid slot on an evening when you couldn't set aside time to actually play.

Why do officers tolerate these people? Why do we tolerate officers that tolerate these people?

My favorite screwup trait, though, is their ability to go afk a dozen times every week, yet never once, in two months of raiding, ever be afk when there is loot to be rolled.

Hydraxian Waterlords vs. Mass Effect 2

I like getting achievements in WoW, and collecting recipes. So running Molten Core is productive in two ways, working towards an exalted reputation (with achievement) and having a shot at some of the more obscure engineering recipes.

One thing that often gets lost in my MMO playing, though, is how much time it takes to reach some of the more obscure goals in the game. If I only ran MC with my wife (and there usually aren't many groups for it) it would take me roughly 20-25 runs to max out my rep, and a similar number of attempts to be sure I got the engineering recipes. Duoing MC takes a good three or four hours, so that's a seventy-five hour investment.

The most time-consuming WoW achievement? Hardly. Longer than any single-player game? Yes, in fact longer than almost any non-RPG by a factor of five or ten. It's also more time than it would take to get your fill of almost any non-MMO multiplayer game. I loved both Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead (and seemingly played them for months) but I'm still pretty sure I've spent less than seventy-five hours in either game.

If you play WoW all the time, seventy-five hours for an achievement and a few recipes doesn't seem so bad. But in a world where you haven't yet played through Mass Effect 2 (or two dozen other great single-player games) it seems like an obscenity.

So for now I've decided to stay away from the Hydraxian Waterlords achievements and that whole ... category of time-intensive, functionally useless WoW achievements that I really, really want.

Ensidia Got Banned

So, I was going to write a post about Ensidia getting banned, and what I thought about it, but when looking for a blog I read earlier I found this Blessing of Kings take, which was pretty close to my own, which is that Ensidia are big boys and had to know that their encounter was bugged.

When you are raiding there is this strange kind of go-with-the-flow thing where you don't worry too much about encounters being bugged if it benefits you. There was a lot of this back in the days of Blackwing Lair, Blizzard's second raid and buggiest piece of content ever.

At one point a GM showed up in our Molten Core raid while we were killing Garr and started talking to us. Fortunately it was about a bug that prevented us, or anyone, from continuing in BWL (which you do care about and report). After a lot of goading we got the GM to make himself visible. I've lost all the screenshots, but I remember he had a male model with a shirt with the stomach showing (female clothing model on a male model?). His character was level 60, and it was pre-TBC announcement, so we asked him if he could level up. He obliged us by leveling (animation and everything) ... to level 1.

On top of getting to meet a GM which was cool, one of our hunters was furious. When the GM in the instance the hunter got booted from the instance, and an item dropped from Garr that he had been waiting for for a while. So he not only didn't get to meet the GM, he also was cheated out of gear. Which made one of the coolest moments I've had in WoW also one of the most hilarious.

I thought about writing a nice email to Blizzard's GM-Feedback email address but never got around to it. I later learned that the guy who talked to us was the actually the head GM.

I'm guessing that Ensidia probably has a closer relation to Blizzard than most ordinary raiders do. If they really didn't know what caused the bug (which they insist they didn't, but probably should have anyway) they should have reported it and I'm sure attention would have been quickly paid. Even if they had completed the encounter with the bug, if they had reported it they probably would have escaped the ban, while still losing the achievements and gear.

Ten Things I Hate About WoW : The Auction House

I've often expressed my dislike of sandbox games but I don't often go into why. There's really only one reason I hate sandbox games. Simply, the greatest rewards tend to go to players willing to endure the most boredom.

A good way to make a ton of money in EVE is mining. I'm sure a handful of people find mining thrilling, but I'd imagine they are in the minority. Since only people willing to endure boredom are miners, their services are at a premium and they tend to make a lot of money, which opens a lot of doors and makes the game much easier.

The problem is that people are paying you to play a game, and you hand them the most boring task imaginable and say, "Ok, if you want to be really good at the game you need to do this."

WoW is mostly free of this. I've said before that WoW is great because stupid things are hard and hard things are stupid. In WoW you benefit from doing things you like, like raiding, PvP, questing, and running instances. Except that, well, there is one little fly in the ointment ...

The Auction House. I Hate The Auction House.

I've never, ever heard anyone say they like to play the auction house. Every player has either one of two opinions :

1. I LOVE the auction house because I can use it to make tons of money

2. I HATE the auction house, but I still use it to make a little bit of money

Notice that neither group finds the auction house "fun", that can only be found elsewhere. However, if you are willing to be bored by the auction house -- willing to memorize numbers, keep track of vast amounts of inventory, constantly check the auction house for bargains -- vast amounts of money can be yours.

So once again we've reached Sandbox Junction, where up is down, down is up, and winning the game requires being bored out of your mind.

Let's just ditch the auction house. It belongs in the dustbin of MMO history, along with forced grouping, spawn camping, and death penalties.

It should be replaced with a no-hassle "market" that allows players to quickly and easily buy and sell items for set prices. Items sold to the auction house would cease to exist, and items bought from the auction house would be created for the buyer. Prices should still be influenced by supply and demand, but on a slower scale (perhaps weekly). Mass posting and buying-then-reposting would be prohibited, so as to make "playing the auction house" impossible.

Doing this would make the most profitable acts in the game also the most fun -- namely just playing the game.

Why we need Easy Heroics

My last post (which was last week -- raiding really puts a dent in the blogging, doesn't it?) was about how Heroic dungeons can be a little challenging for new players. It's not that they are hard, it's just that it's very hard to know what to do and how to do it, since little of that information can be found in the game itself. I felt (and still do) that something needed to be done to make them less challenging and to make sure players were ready for them.

So it was funny to read Tobold today and see him complain about how easy Heroics are, and how they should be more difficult. This is not an unusual complaint -- Heroic dungeons were much more difficult in TBC, and anything that is made easier in WoW is criticized for being easy.

It's useful to step back, and look at the whole world of difficulty in games. I think you can sort all PvE content in WoW (and probably in any MMO) into two bins :

Bin A : All soloable content, and simpler non-solo content that can be done easily with pick-up groups

Bin B : More difficult group content that relies on more competent PUG members or (ideally) playing with a set group of friends or guildmates.

A major innovation of WoW was rifling through Bin B, finding a box labeled "Leveling", and saying "Hey, this doesn't need to be here!" and tossing it in Bin A. Grouping was not removed from WoW, it was not made anti-social, but you no longer had to wait for your friends to log on before you really played the game.

At some point when Wrath was in development, Bliz went back to Bin B and grabbed out five-man dungeons. These were usually pugged in WoW 1.0 and 2.0, but never productively or reliably. It was still best to do them with guildies. Why not hoss them convincingly in Bin A? So they did.

The funny thing is that this brought back something people had been missing for a while -- what happened to that happy camaraderie from the days of forced grouping? WoW brought it back in 3.0 with short, simple heroic dungeons that gave rewards for everyone.

Lately Blizzard has added the concept of "normal" and "heroic" versions of every raid, in both the 10-man and 25-man sizes -- so every raid dungeon has four versions. This was done, I think, more to expose all players to all the raid content. But a very nice side effect is that you generally don't run every useful raid with your guild, since counting old raids there can now be four or six useful raids at a time. And since so many people have run some version of the raid and they can't do all versions with their guilds, many raids are run with pick-up groups. Blizzard's done such a great job training raiders that they've essentially tossed raiding into Bin A as well.

In terms of social gaming, these are game-changers. I now play more with strangers than I ever have before in my WoW career. Most times we don't talk a lot, but a little talk is better than none at all.