T w e n t y S i d e d

This week’s article is about the complexity of World of Warcraft and other MMO games in general.

And speaking of WoW…

I have this thing where I prefer to level characters in the wrong zones. I like to take starting Dwarves and Gnomes to Human areas and vice versa. Previously, I used to like leveling in the Night Elf areas, but I became aware of just how much of a time sink the place is and I can no longer stand it. It’s pretty, but there is just too much dang hiking. I’ll miss Darkshore in particular.

So, my character, who just dinged 20 as of last night:

My goal: Get to Theramore Island (one of my favorite locations in the game, visually) and get myself a giant turtle to replace the bear.

Several people offered me help. I was going to tough it out and Do It On My Own because I didn’t want to break the game. I like fighting against a little scarcity. But I am to the point where being broke is hindering my ability to make money, if you see what I mean.

In the game you can have two professions. There are gathering professions like skinning, mining, and herbalism that let you gather raw materials. Then there are production professions like leatherworking, blacksmithing, and alchemy. These consume raw materials and produce useful stuff. These are usually designed to go in pairs. Herbalism supplies alchemy, skinning supplies leatherworking, and so on. If you’re covered in noobsauce, then the thing to do is to take two gathering professions and sell everything you get at the auction house. There tons of veteran players out there with heaps of gold, and they’re leveling alts that have two production professions. They’d rather pay a newbie to do their gathering via the auction than waste their time doing it themselves. This is a wonderful way to “vent” some cash from high level players to lower ones. But instead of going for cash I took the engineering profession. It’s crazy fun, but it consumes all the stuff I could otherwise sell at auction and is keeping me poor.

I’m level twenty, which means I’m due a mount. But the total cost to do that is 5g. I have, after twenty levels of careful savings, 2g and change. I would need to double my money to get a mount. Ouch. And there are abilities I haven’t even trained yet. If I were to grab every ability due to me at this level, I’d be down to 1g. So I’m officially at the point where I’m ready to accept a little help. But please don’t mail me 1,000g or anything crazy like that. But if anyone can spare a gold piece and maybe a 12 slot bag, I think it would take the pressure off.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Just a bit of silliness.

No, this isn’t the comic I was trying to make on Monday. I’d wanted to do a Breen thing, where he ends up trying to make fun of Blizzard’s Real ID only to have Metro tell him the joke was now irrelevant. Eh. I kind of feel like the moment has passed on that one by now. So instead we’re talking about Alan Wake for some reason?

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

This will no doubt disappoint more than a few people, but my next Let’s Play series is actually just my last one. Go read it, if you like. Or, stick around and read some ramblings about why we’re doing a re-run and what I’m working on next.

The thing is, these things take time to write. Lulzy’s tale clocked in at ~50,000 words, which is just long enough to count as a novel. Add in the fact that each entry required several hours of gameplay and then the time it takes to add in all the screenshots, and we’re talking about a non-trivial amount of work.

I’ve spent the last couple of months casting about, looking for a new MMO. Trek Online is fantastic in terms of setting. (True science fact: It is impossible for there to be too much Trek satire in the universe. If you were to go back in time and replace everything ever written with Star Trek satire, then history itself would be full of plot holes. Actually, that sounds like a pretty standard setup for a Trek episode.) I wrote a few pages of stuff for it, but the game itself had almost nothing in the way of story. Most missions were just generic fill-in-the-blank auto-generated filler. My material was almost completely divorced from the game itself and was basically just fan fiction. That’s not a horrible idea, but it’s not what I want for this series.

I tried a couple of other games, but none of them really grabbed me. APB was so monotonous and devoid of fun that I don’t think I could bring myself to play it for any length of time, no matter how much amusement you might get out of it. D&D Online looked possible, but I didn’t want to go buying little bits and pieces of content à  la carte, looking for stuff that would be fun to cover.

So we got down to the end of Lord of the Rings and I didn’t have a new series ready. I didn’t even have a game lined up. I suggested we run a condensed version of my Champs series instead of just going on hiatus, and that’s how we got where we are now. Most Escapist readers haven’t seen it, so it will be new to them and will keep my spot warm while I come up with new content.

I’ll be shortening the series a bit by combining some of the shorter entries and cutting some of the longer digressions on gameplay.

I’m playing WoW again and noodling around with ideas. Well, actually I’m just leveling a couple of characters. I emailed Blizzard twice trying to re-activate my old account. (Which I can no longer log into since to migration of WoW accounts to Battle.net accounts.) After a week they finally got around to sending me an auto-generated email saying, “please tell us again you need help or we’ll just pretend the whole thing is resolved.” And no that is not a joke. So, I punished their ineptitude and apathy by purchasing the game again. I’m hoping someday they will all be crushed to death under a mountain of All Our Money.

But now I’m on a brand new account and cut off from all of my old contacts and characters. I forgot what a hassle it is to try and play this game fresh like this. No bags, so you’re constantly starved for storage, which makes it hard to earn money, which is bad because you’re flat broke, which makes it hard to get the upgrades you need, which impairs your leveling, etc.

I rolled on Kirin Tor (Alliance) simply because that’s where I lived last time around. I’m probably going to find another roleplay style server and roll some Horde characters as well.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.