Tim G. left an excellent comment on my post about the XP reward vs. Risk in RPG games. That post is a little old and the conversation has trailed off, so I thought I’d quote it here. Also, it’s always nice when I can just have visitors write my posts for me: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Story Ownership”
Lots of people have this impression of MMO games – not entirely undeserved – that the gameplay is an unbroken stream of monotony. You walk up to a monster an click the attack button until it falls over. Continue to do this until the “level up” gauge fills, at which point you go find a new, slightly different monster and continue doing the same thing.
I alluded to some of the depth of WoW gameplay in an earlier post, but let me go over one of the character classes in WoW and talk about how this really works:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “World of Warcraft:
Hunter Class”
As a counterpoint to the post earlier today:
My brother signed up for WoW this afternoon. He called in to upgrade from trial to full account, and was very happy with how things went. The woman on the phone was uncharacteristically eager and cheerful and even bantered with him a bit. He sounded as through the experience may even have been uplifting.
He got the same story: It’s much easier to simply run to the store than to upgrade a trial account. (That is, ignoring the trip to the store.) He didn’t mind, and in fact ran out and got the fancy edition that includes Burning Crusade and strategy guides and whatnot.
And now he’s home, and will spend the rest of the evening downloading patches.
Sigh.
Kirin Tor – the server I inhabit in WoW – is a “Roleplaying Server”. I’ve mentioned before that RP servers have a much better ratio of idiots to normal people. There are a lot of rules regarding how you’re supposed to behave on an RP server. While I like the result (less idiots) I don’t actually think you can get several thousand disorganized strangers together and call anything they do “roleplaying”.
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| Three naked female characters hanging out in (where else) Goldshire. I should make one of those motivational posters out of this. The caption would be: ROLEPLAYING: ur doin it rong. Actually I could have it say ENGLISH instead of ROLEPLAYING and that would work too. |
Everyone has a different idea of what roleplaying means or how it works. Everyone has their own taste for how much roleplaying they want. Is it okay if we just avoid talking about cars and the internet, or do we need to speak in arty language? What about game mechanics? Do we need to talk around things like what level we are? In a tabletop game you might have a character who is terrified of spiders, or a Dwarf who has a deep hatred of Elvenkind. Those are fine attribures in a game with friends, but in an online game that guy is just going to be a pain in the ass to play with.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “World of Warcraft:
Roleplaying Servers”
My experience with Blizzard has been flawless so far, but that is not true of everyone. Blizzard: You guys screwed up here. You were insulting, vague, and unhelpful. You at least owed him an explanation, as all the guy did was try to buy your damn product.
I didn’t have any problem upgrading my trial account. But then, I upgraded from trial to full copy in just two days. I picked up Burning Crusade a week later. I was able to download both without needing to muck about at the store.
Having said that: When I download software from you guys I don’t expect to need to step through a half dozen patches once I do. Shouldn’t the version you give me be up to date in the first place? Barring that, can you at least automate it so that all the patches will download overnight? Every time an update finished I dumped me back to the launcher, and I had to log in again to get the next one. Asinine.
Once the game is running things are all unicorns and sunshine, but getting into the thing is more hassle than it needs to be. Odd that their failures happen when dealing with potential customers instead of existing ones. Usually it’s the other way around.
Goldshire is the name of one of the newbie areas in the game. It’s the hub town for human characters between levels 5 and 12. (Give or take.) It’s a cute little farming village surrounded by woodlands. It’s also a natural crossroads. It’s just a two minute walk from both a major city (Stormwind) and the spawning area for new Human characters. I don’t think there are any other towns that offer this level of access.
For whatever reason, Goldshire has become a nexus of insanity and idiocy. Despite the fact that each server has its own self-contained copy of the world, every single iteration of Goldshire on all of the servers of WoW is a raging madhouse.
During busy hours you’ll find high-level characters dueling in the street. There are often several duels going at once, so the center of town is a swirling tempest of colorful particle effects, fire, and summoned beasts. Characters run naked (underwear) through the buildings and roleplay obscene or preposterous vignettes. The chat box is a rushing torrent of strange emotes and melodramatic shouting.
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| Like a town in a Stephen King novel, the place looks peaceful but is filled with crazy people! |
In order to explain further I’m going to have to resort to anecdotes:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “World of Warcraft:
Goldshire”
This weekend, instead of writing my usual obsessive analysis of gameplay mechanics I wrote… fanfiction. World of Warcraft fanfiction. Some people write fanfic about their characters in WoW. I’ve decided to write some fanfic about the player behind a character I saw in WoW during one of my first excursions into the game. Which means this mess is some sort of reverse… meta fanfic… or something. Look, I have no idea. Just read it.
I was on Garithos – a PvP server – when I saw this person, and the following story came to mind:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “WoW Fanfiction”
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T w e n t y S i d e d
