Late to the event

I finally got around to do doing the Gree event the second time around. The first one I skipped as I was a bit busy at work. I was also pretty burned out on any sort of dailies after doing a bunch of them in WoW to get my main there exalted with all of the factions. (Since my main there works on the reputation achievements the grinds were effectively mandatory. Having been the primary tank for my guild unlocking the valor gear was a motivator, as well, for the reps.)

The rep grind has been pretty relaxed for me. By the time the event goes away again I should have enough rep and rep tokens banked to get me all the way to Legend. Not bad for a two week event. In future I'll be able to just focus on the dailies that give me the item tokens.

I started out at first doing the dailies on three characters, my Jedi Sentinel, my Jedi Consular, and my Sith Warrior.  Once I hit Friend and could do the Grey Secant quests I stopped doing the dailies on my Sith Warrior. I did do the one-time quest on all three. That one was fun, other than a few hiccups on Voss, as I got to get out and about on the planets instead of sitting on my ships or on the fleet. I even skipped doing dailies a couple of days when I just didn't feel like logging in. It has been nice to be at the point I do dailies when I feel like it and not feeling like I "have" to login and do them to keep up.

The pve quests were generally painless, though the pirate one could be a pain when you went for the 'end boss'. Having him spawn next to another gold mob can be problematic for a healer with a tanking companion. Still, it was a bit reassuring, in a twisted way, to see that Bioware still screws up mob placement even now. ^_^

The pvp dailies were the most surprising. On my server, Jedi Covenant, very few people were doing them. Turning in the orbs was quick and painless for the most part. I think the most I ever saw in line for the orbs was three people (including me) on one occasion  Other than that, it was pretty much wait a minute or so at the pylon and turn in your quest.

Actual pvp was limited to a few times when my group was doing the heroic in the pvp area for speed and once on the pylon/orb quest. The pylon pvp was actually funny as a there were several Consular involved and they kept blasting people back from the pylon. No one was hurt and I was just laughing at my keyboard as I had the image of a school ground shoving match going on.

I do hope Bioware brings back the other events. Even if they were once a year things, that would be nice. Definitely the Rakghoul plague because re-occurrences of a plague makes sense. The Grand Acquisition might not make sense, but being a bit selfish I would like to see it because I wasn't able to work on it while it was here.


All in all, I liked the Gree event and I'm ready to start working on the other reps (as I feel like it) when the Gree event is over. Kudos to them for a successful event.

By the numbers

My son and I were talking about Richard Garriott's Shroud of the Avatar Kickstarter game.  We were specifically discussing the 'personalized multiplayer' aspect of the game. He mentioned he wished he had more money to help support nudging the industry more towards this direction. I mentioned that even if the title was more of an indy hit, you didn't need big numbers to be profitable. Ultima Online is still running and it has around 100k subscribers. (Which, swtor fans, is good news. EA will keep a profitable MMO running for a long, long time even if it doesn't have a WoW-sized player base.)

Later on I thought about how World of Warcraft effects everyone's perceptions of success, especially the ardent defenders of the game. Now, to be clear, I am *not* saying that WoW is dying. Far from it, but there are things in the subscriber numbers to notice and watch. At its peak WoW had 12 million subscribers (Blizzard press release for October 2010). As of date of this post the official subscriber numbers are at 9.6 million subscribers. The numbers have been lower, surged a bit at the release of Mists of Pandaria, and have dropped back down. Most of the defenders tend to focus on the raw numbers. To be fair, they rightfully say that WoW's numbers are still impressive (they are) and that most MMOs would love to have a player base equal to what WoW has lost. 2.4 million subscribers would stellar for 99% of the MMOS out there.

The thing is, the defenders haven't discussed the dip in subscribers from a business perspective. Any business (and Blizzard is a business first[1]) would be very concerned to have lost from 20% to 25% (at one time) of their market. Losing that many people means something has gone wrong. It could be internal mistakes or a failure to adapt to external changes. When you look at Mists of Pandaria from this angle you can see why some of the design decisions were made. Perhaps not as a primary factor, but definitely as a significant one. The loss of subscribers helps explain why Blizzard went back and recycled some of the concepts from Vanilla and Burning Crusade (tiered raids you have to progress through, alt-unfriendliness, etc). Going back to systems, albeit with a fresh coat of paint, which originally brought in a lot of subscribers is worth trying.

If we look at that loss a bit differently it can actually be positive for WoW in the long run. In some ways the loss is permanent. People's lives change and they just won't play an MMO, any MMO again. In other ways that loss is good if it means people went to a different MMO and are having fun. Ignoring the inevitable WoW-bashers in other games, most of the people playing other MMOs are having more fun with their current MMO than WoW. This is good for the industry as a whole when each MMO can find its (profitable) niche. More experiments, more successes, more people playing MMOs (or MMO-likes, such as Shroud of the Avatar), even WoW. Having WoW (or any big MMO) can be nice because it gives us a common language to talk about MMOS in game terms. It isn't so nice when to succeed people try to imitate WoW or call themselves WoW-killers *cough*sw:tor/warhammer*cough*. As players we need those experiments to push the genre. Without it we're stuck with Blizzard trying to reinvent WoW each expansion and the inevitable stagnation and player-base decay that will occur. So the next time someone gets defensive about WoW's decline in subscriber, introduce them to the idea that it could be a good thing for WoW in the long run. :)

[1] Blizzard is a very competitive, very hard-nosed business-oriented company. If you look at when they release cinematics, patches, expansions and when their competitors do the same you'll find a fair amount of matching up on the dates. While they disingenuously say they develop on their own cycle without paying attention to competitors (a tactic Apple uses all the time) there are too many coincidences for them not to be trying to compete. Now if I was an Activision-Blizzard shareholder I'd be happy about this. If I was a competitor I'd try to make sure I was ready for Blizzard to mess with me.

Spacebar

I've been trying to hit up a flashpoint everyday with my smuggler to get the daily planetary commendations. (Having a lot of adaptive gear creates that hunger for the leveling mods, dontcha know? :)) As I've been reaching the conversations pitstops I noticed that I was waiting on the rest of my instance group to reach the response tree. Having played since the beginning I had gotten used to everyone hitting the space bar to get through the conversation as fast as possible. Grab those social points and go, go, go.

At first, I figured the other people were likely the casual f2p players being in the instance for the first time. Later I realized when folks were buffing me with all four buffs everyone now seems to be actually watching the events, even the long term subscribers. I don't know when people's behavior changed, but this is a welcome improvement as far as I'm concerned. Having and enjoying the story in the flashpoints is part of the fun and I had missed it during the spacebar-at-all-costs era.

Big in-game events

I was playing the ending arc of Chapter 2 of my smuggler's story line when a casual line by an enemy got me to thinking.  The line was to the effect that the Republic and Empire were officially at war. There was more, but the thing that focused my attention was the fact that Bioware never really showed the war starting. You can easily miss the fact about the war as you level because it was so quiet. It is easy to continue on up to Corellia not realizing this. (In fact, Voss's planetary storyline is such that it could easily be a cold war situation.)

For a game company that made story its Fourth Pillar, not seeing the events that started the war unfold is strange. That's a major story event, and big events should be shown to a player. If they happen in passing or in the background then they become minor and unimportant. I don't know how they would have included the start of the war, but having each class see or be a part of the start would have ratched up the tension in the game and added to the flavor.

This isn't to pick just on Bioware. Blizzard really messed this up with the beginning of Cataclysm. There was an event in two of the cities of each of the factions. An elemental invasion were if you slew enough elementals you could open a portal to four bosses for some quick loot. The problem was that fairly quickly only one of the faction cities gathered enough folks to kill the elementals. Since two of the four bosses were tied to each city if you wanted a drop from the other two bosses you were out of luck. Yep, it was pretty boring and uninspired as far as world events go. (The Mists of Pandaria non-event was even worse. There was none, just a showcase of a scenario that didn't make sense to anyone that hadn't read the book. Talk about disconnects.)

Now, when Cataclysm started you basically woke up in a set spot and moved on. Unless you played through specific low level areas (Darkshore, for example) you never even felt the impact of events. Heck, the Worgen starting zone literally has the Cataclysm happen off screen. As it was, it was a 'Huh? What happened? :shrug:' and move on moment. Instead of having us fear Deathwing or making a connection to us where he mattered, Deathwing became this empty threat that would torch a zone once in awhile. Instead of being this dangerous, intelligent if crazy opponent, he became this ineffectual blowhard that we put down while we advanced Thrall's life crisis. :sigh:

I think if Blizzard had let us be involved with the Cataclysm happening then it would have allowed us to make an emotional connection to the events. Ask anyone that played WoW if they remember the zombie invasion pre-Wrath, or the pre-BC event where a massive demon attacked the major cities. Those big events got us fired up and ready to go when the expansions launched. When we got to the final fight we could look back and have closure. So, my thinking is, if we could have tried to stop Deathwing at the start and *failed* then it would have A) let us see the start of the Cataclysm and B) allow us to get emotionally invested in stopping Deathwing. When we finally beat him in Dragon Soul it would have made for a much better sense of closure.

TL;DR: If a game company is going to have a big, world changing event, they need to let the players be a part of it. We need to see it unfold and be in it, even if on a periphery. Big events that happen in the background or off-stage are non-events.

Leveling tip

One of the things I've found helpful while leveling characters is the ability to switch world instances. World instances are the that Bioware handles lots of players on a given planet. Too many people and you get lag and too much competition for mobs, resources, etc.. By having from 1 to around 120 people per world instance Bioware balances the feeling of having enough folks around to make the world seem active with the easing of excess competition.

All that said, sometimes you hit the leveling wave at the wrong place on a planet and have to wait longer than you want for mobs, quest items, etc. What I've found that can sometimes help is to manually switch world instances (if you've ever joined a group on a world to do a heroic quest and been moved you've encountered the automatic version of this).

If you want to switch just press M to bring up the main map and look in the lower right corner at the World box. If you see your planet's name and a number then you're read to switch. If you don't see the dropdown box then you're currently out of luck as there aren't enough people on the planet at the time to spawn multiple world instances. I've only seen Quesh not have multiple world instances. (Mainly due to Quesh being so fast and short.)

Choose your destination, click yes, and hopefully you'll be able to get back to leveling!

Note: You can generally only take this option once every 30 minutes or so. Occasionally you can bounce between instances without having the cooldown start.

I posted part of this as part of a comment on Blessing of Kings: Disengaged, but I thought I'd post it here, as well. Maybe I can get off my behind and start actually writing stuff up on my gaming blog. :) Consider this as a snapshot of what I'm playing, MMO-wise.


The Secret World - I'm still mucking around in Kingsmouth. I felt the starter bit for the Dragons was pretty poorly done. (Give me a tutorial mission where you give me abilities and then take them away at the end? Not too smart.) I think Funcom's problem is that they when they did the quests for TSW they got too enamared of ARGs for everything and not just for Investigation quests. This game really feels like you need a second monitor with a browser open looking everything up all the time. Personally, combine that with the ability to eventually learn all the skills in the game (though you can only use a few at a time) and you get the situation where you feel like you're spinning your wheels without any direction. If they had taken the idea Guild Wars 2 used and an obvious story thread to follow, plus a few stock 'archetypes' for abilities I think they would have kept more folks subscribed. It also wouldn't have hurt if they had put something more interesting in as the starter zone. Zombies and the Lovecraftian/King atmosphere are both rather overused at this point in time. I eventually want to push through the content and see everything, but I feel like I'm fighting the game to see it and not working with it. :sigh:

The Old Republic - Right now I'm just leveling characters to 50 to see their class stories. With the new expansion coming I'm not worried about doing anything with my other 50s. Leveling characters is a lot of fun because I'm seeing how Bioware intertwinned the stories among all the classes, plus I love seeing the little callbacks to the KotorR games. This is the game I'm spending the bulk of my time at the moment. Being able to do what I want, when I want has really invigorated my desire to log into an MMO and play.

World of Warcraft - I was pretty burned out by the end of Dragon Soul, but I hung in for my guild to help give it some leadership stability. I've leveled three characters to 90, but with all the dailies and the alt-unfriendlyness of the expansion, I've pretty much gone into hibernation with it. All I'm doing is logging in to see if I can get my other binding from Baron Geddon once a week. My guild is still raiding, but with the changes in raiders due to folks leaving at the end of Cataclysm they picked a raiding time that doesn't work for me. That's ok with me, but it does mean the normal "I need to be on and prepared to raid" efforts aren't keeping me logged in. I have done LFR and subbed in on some normal mode runs, but I have to say that T14 is pretty 'meh' for me. That may be just DS burnout lingering, but it may be that I'm very tired of trying to stay on Wow's Red Queen's racetrack of progression.

Guild Wars 2 - I had been leveling a Charr with my son and we were having a blast with the content. Luckily both of us are in sync with how we like to play (both completionists about things) so that made the leveling very fast and smooth. I've also been messing around with a Norn guardian. While I tend to do the best with melee classes, I normally wouldn't be quite so exuberantly extroverted as she is. It has been a fun change to play a character so different in tone from my usual choices. I need to get back to the game, but that's one thing I really appreciate about GW2 is that I don't feel like I have to log in or else I'm wasting my subscription fee.

World of Tanks - I downloaded this to just see what it is like, but unfortunately work decided to eat my extra free time. Right now SW:ToR and a tiny bit of WoW playing consume my free time. But as someone that loved the old board wargames like Panzerblitz, Tobruk and Squad Leader the idea of manning my own tank is irresistible.

Edit (Mar. 10, 2013): Thanks to my sharp-eyed son for noticing that I had my ToR mixed in with my WoW. That should have been "level three characters to 90", not to 50. >< Fixed now.

Raiding and the Red Queen's Race of Heroics

(Note: I posted this on the official forums, but I wanted to memorialize this here as well)

First off, I respect Blizzard’s right to steer WoW however they see fit. With what I write below I’m trying to say why it doesn’t work for me, not that they suck for what they are doing and must stop immediately. I hope adding my voice to these discussions gives them another insight or data point that allows us to find a common ground that makes things work for both of us.

I’ve taken a break from WoW and below are some of the issues that keep me from wanting to come back. I’ve enjoyed raiding as it has been some of the best fun in the game for me, but the current situation just leaves me indifferent about the game.

A part of the problem with raiding is the lack of chances to practice without involving others. I can go practice my PVP skills (such as they are) without dragging guildies or friends into it. I can’t try a new strategy for tanking the Omnotron Defense System without involving 9 or 24 other people’s time and effort. Having a ‘practice mode’ for raids that let you try with a few friends or solo with a set of bots would be a big help. (Ironically, making 10 and 25s share the same lockout on a boss means many of us have less chance to work on a fight than we did in Wrath.) You can explain a fight, but for many doing the fight is the best way to learn the ‘muscle memory’ that’s going to help us down bosses. I realize that practice mode is ambitious enough to be more a next-expansion-feature, but I do see it being a useful tool for helping new raiders.

Given that the ‘practice mode’ is very ambitious, perhaps it would be better to have the trash teach people about the various boss abilities they are going to be dealing with. Give them something to relate to when their raid leader says “This boss does ‘x’, ‘y’, and ‘z’” because they’ve seen those three things with the trash they’ve cleared. As it is, WoW bosses are like being given a teacup, a harpoon, and a bagel while standing in the middle of a bull ring with no explanation of what you’re supposed to do. It’s very difficult to determine if I’m being skillful or just lucky when I don’t know the rules of the game. Leaving it to the community to provide that information is problematic. Those who work through the encounters often relay the sizzle, but not the steak of the boss fight. People tend to cover their part of a fight without touching on the roles. If more information was provided by Blizzard in-game then all the roles would be appropriately covered. The community could build on that base instead of kind-of, sort-of working on the base itself.

Another issue is that a number of fights in the current tier seem to be more about reversing the Wrath idea of accommodating the player before the class. Granted there are always going to be some classes and specs consistently on the top of the various charts, but Cataclysm raids really seem to be tuned for more ranged and/or DoT heavy classes over melee (and elemental shaman). Building a static 10 man while letting folks play the characters they want becomes more frustrating for all involved because of encounter design. Add to that the increased difficulty of the encounters for those that might only be able to raid one or twice a week for three or four hours at a time and the problems compound. In Wrath you could still be successful and have fun. In Cataclysm it feels more like you’re not wanted as a raider. I know that’s not the intent, but Cataclysm has to live with the consequence of the broader group of Wrath raiders.

All that said, the biggest reason for me not to come back to raiding is something that isn’t raiding. It is running heroics for points.

A little background, first. I don’t mind grinds. I don’t necessarily like them, but reaching a goal is doable for me. You can check my achievements for evidence that grinding out something isn’t daunting for me.

My issue is mostly with the running of heroics for valor and justice points. Once you’ve gotten the gear you want out of heroics they become a chore. They aren’t a grind as a grind has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Heroics are a Red Queen’s race for valor points.

We’ve been running heroics for badges and points for four years now. People are burned out doing that. I think the biggest problem people have with the increased difficulty with the Cataclysm instances is not that they are harder, but that they take longer and that we’ll be running them for two long years over and over and over…

Even moving the target from a daily run to ‘seven on Sunday’ doesn’t help. As a tank, I can get instant queues, so let’s say I get great pugs each time and each run is thirty minutes or so. That means for me, I just spent three and a half to four hours working for valor points. I wasn’t raiding, I wasn’t working on skills that help me beat a progression raid boss, I was doing a chore. I basically spent the equivalent of half a day of overtime doing something that wasn’t fun. If I queued as a dps then my times get that much worse. Queue lengths for dps are around forty-five minutes on my LFG group. Keeping the same instance run time, we end up spending eight and three-quarters hours on Sunday just trying to get our valor points!

(If my numbers are off, please feel free to let us know what the actual average queue times and instance run times are. I’d rather have accurate numbers and discuss those than my anecdotal experience.)

Adding the 4.1 troll instances as a separate tier makes it even worse. People will be trying to run those *two* instances seven times. As soon as the tanks and healers can move up a tier the bottleneck you’re trying to avoid with the Call to Arms is going to reappear making longer for newer dps to get the gear / points to the higher tier instances.

It has been said that Blizzard wants us to play more alts (with how the raid lockouts are working), but given the amount of time it takes to run heroics there’s less incentive to want to run heroics for your main and then turn around and try to do the same for one or more alts. (Assuming you’re wanting to get and keep an alt raid-ready at the level of your main.)

Oh, as far as the Call to Arms goes, the incentive doesn’t motivate me to tank more. Having to solo queue for the bag is anti-guild. Normally as a tank I want to include as many of my guild’s dps so that they have short queue times. Given I’m already burned out on running heroics, I’m not going to run twice as many heroics, so I can either alienate some guildies or have strangers bitch if something goes wrong that all I want is the bag. :sigh: Still, I’m glad to see Blizzard experimenting, but I don’t think the Call to Arms will work that well.

As a side note, reseting people’s valor points when a new tier of raiding comes out is just insulting. We earned those points. Why be so dismissive of the time we put into earning them by devaluing them? It just becomes another reason why trying to build up valor points via heroics is so unpleasant. Yes, they become justice points, but justice points aren’t a difficult thing to get.

Honestly, I wish you got all your weekly valor points when you defeated your first raid boss of the week. That would at least tie the valor points to raiding and not running heroics.

At the risk of generating enough heat to melt a few glaciers, I’d rather see this endless rush after gear go away. I’ve been changing gear since Diablo 2. It would be nice for once in an expansion for the first heroics be the intro raiding gear for the entire expansion. Then have the various raiding tiers stay at the same item level. Go for more varied gear at each tier. This way the player can decide when they have the set of gear they like without feeling like they are gimping their raid. It becomes more of a choice of what to use than a ‘I must upgrade no matter what’ situation.

A side benefit is that all throughout an expansion a fresh 85 could run the heroics and get geared enough to step into a raid without having to run a sequence of the initial heroics, then the next tier of heroics (the troll ones for Cataclysm), then whatever other heroics that get added. The way it looks now is that if we want to gear an alt later in the expansion we’ll have to run all the tiered heroics in order to catch up to the then current raiding tier. Adding more plateaus just eliminates more folks from endgame raiding later in the expansion.

I know some will just tell me that I need quit my bitching and go kill more raid bosses. :shrug: I’m not in a twenty-five man raiding guild nor were we killing enough bosses in my ten man guilds to even make that much of an impact on valor points. Heroics are what many of us have to use to make up the difference. We’re trying to see the content when it is appropriate, not get stuck on waiting for the next tier to come out so that we can clear all of the current tier.