Gilneas is my hometown!

Ever since Blizzard released the first snapshots of Gilneas, home of the new worgen race in Cataclysm, I have been a little enamored with the place. Shady, dark and spooky, with rooftops looming over the lantern-lit cobblestone streets, Gilneas looks like the proper medieval Jack-the Ripper setting to me, very atmospheric and also very very Fable:

Streets of Gilneas
Fable II Town

I’ve been considering to roll a worgen for fun in the expansion just so I get to see the starting quests in the area. I don’t exactly like the female worgen models though (wtb facial diversity), so I cannot quite make my mind up about what to do!

Then last night while looking for new screenshots, I came across a picture on MMO Champion I had never seen before….

…and it struck me like a bolt of lightning: Oh my God, Gilneas IS my hometown!! That’s why the place feels so strangely familiar and “cosy” to me, it looks exactly like the place I grew up in! And before you roll your eyes thinking “yeah riiiight”, here’s the proof:

Syl’s hometown

How creepy is that?! =O *shudder*

Have a good weekend everybody!

World of Warcraft secrets: Dalaran’s sparkle

“This topic is dedicated to all the special and secret NPCs in WoW, out there serving tirelessly, overlooked and undiscovered.”

There is not a lot that is secret in the World of Warcraft and it’s always made me a little sad. This world we play in is vastly explored, analyzed, documented and datamined all over internet websites and communities. I’ve never played any MMO where such myriads of information were available on every aspect imaginable. This is obviously what you’ll get with an MMO that’s played by ~10mio people, but it’s not just that: World of Warcraft is a very functional, pragmatic game and there’s not an awful lot of superfluous or “useless” content, certainly not on the cosmetic side of things. But some of the best things in life are just that: useless. Or I actually prefer the term “pointless”. Many pastimes and hobbies that we pursue are merely for our own fun and entertainment. WoW is such a pastime too.

Yet, the truth is that inside the game precious little is actually pointless or surprising: most maps for example feature all the necessary posts to make the player’s leveling progression as smooth as possible: You have your inns, your vendors, flightmasters and questgivers stationed at strategic points. Most of them do nothing but repeat generic lines as you click them to open their service windows. The same goes for buildings and shops in cities and really pretty much every other site. This is what we’re used to and we don’t even examine all the NPCs around us closely as we enter a new zone or questgiver camp. And why would we? It’s not gonna be any different from the last 100 times, right?

We can rely on Blizzard to tell us if there’s really anything “special” going on: if an NPC does anything extraordinary, there will be clues and signs to make us aware of it. If there are important places we should go to, we can be sure a series of quests will take us there. It is hard to miss much in the World of Warcraft. Blizzard takes care of that.

I know this is the nature of games that have been played to death and WoW does actually a pretty good job at things like Easter Eggs or non-generic zone design. But for most parts the game is very predictable, with little randomness. Somehow I miss that there’s not more pointless things that are spread far and wide over the world for no good reason, maybe only to be found by those that seek them out.
Why was there never a single questgiver stationed on any of the flying islands in Nagrand? Why is the Darkmoon Fair such a complete letdown when people long for minigames in WoW for years? Why is there nothing going on anywhere under the ocean? Only a few things I’ve wondered about in the past.

Dalaran’s secret

This is why Dalaran is special. Now you see, I don’t like Dalaran, I’m actually with Stumps in this. Nonetheless I will always have one pleasant memory attached to Dalaran forever and that is the memory of one little gnome, one humble, unremarkable NPC that was special. Maybe you know about him, maybe you don’t. I have talked to many that haven’t and that’s why I think he is worth an hommage at this point: I am speaking of Sheddle Glossgleam.

Sheddle Glossgleam is located on the second level of the Threads of Fate cloth armor shop in Dalaran. He is your standard low-profile vendor NPC, selling shoes for emblems of valor without much decorum. If you click him, he’ll open the usual vendor window accompanied by a generic service line. And that’s it.

Almost. There is also the chair. There are chairs all over the city, you say? That’s true, but then they ain’t quite like Sheddle’s chair!

Once you sit down on the chair beside Sheddle, he will walk over to you and polish your shoes, applying a cosmetic sparkle-buff to them that lasts for 60minutes! I don’t know how many times I have visited him just to get my shoes polished before a raid or how many times I got someone whispering me “where can I get that boot enchant?”. In fact “shiny shoes!” has become somewhat of a running line in my guild. Yes I love you, Sheddle Glossgleam!!!
Not just shiny shoes

You see, my friends have laughed at me for this in the past, but the fact that I’m a female who likes to get her shoes sparkled up is only 50% of why I love this NPC. What I really love about this silly trifle is that it’s actually something special and unexpected. If you never bother to sit down on chairs in WoW and don’t chance on this information randomly on a website, chances are you will never know about the little gnome in Dalaran. There is no exclamation mark over Sheddle’s head, there is no other NPC sending you on a quest to get your shoes polished. Sheddle won’t tell you about it either. There is no hint whatsoever inside the game about what’s gonna happen if you sit down on that chair!

Sheddle Glossgleam is a little secret. He is a surprise. One of those utterly pointless yet delightful things in a game that is usually so eager to inform you about everything. Dalaran sparkles a little more because of him.

Who else is out there?

I’m glad I discovered Sheddle because that experience suddenly made me a lot more aware of the world and NPCs around me. They came alive again, like they hadn’t for a long time. I started to wonder “what else might there be that I have overlooked in the past? What other NPCs are there, only sharing their secrets with those that seek to find them?” I sat on every other chair in Dalaran just to make sure.

So where are they?? What special places in WoW have you found that are hiding away secretly to be discovered by those with open eyes and inquisitive minds? Which NPCs have I overlooked on my speedy journeys and never known for their silly, unexpected services? I’d really love to know.

How much gold should we take into Cataclysm?

I bet a few are thinking now “what a silly question! As much as possible of course – you can never have enough gowld!”.
In fact you can, or at least I think I can; gold has never been of any further interest to me in WoW than getting me to where I’m going and pay the bills (most of which are raiding related). Money is boring and frankly, it’s already too big a fuss in the real world – I don’t need to dedicate time on it in a game as well. Because of that, the whole money game and auction house-mania has utterly passed me by all these years. I get no kicks from things like profit or bargains and really, I can afford the things I need and there’s precious little that I want that can be bought (and if it is, I have it by now). My ultimate question about my ingame currency is always “what items can it get me?” – it’s not there to look pretty, is it?

I’ve always been a little baffled by the concept of “unlimited wealth”; it’s probably my pragmatic side but I see no point in having more money than I can ever spend in a game. It’s not like I can pass it on to my children or something. It becomes an abstract number and since ‘the gamble’ doesn’t hold any fascination for me either, I never gave money-making much thought in the past. Sure, I’ll sell some welfare epics if I happen to get them, it’s fast and requires zero effort (also, what else should I be doing with them?). It’s the same with me and cars, if they get me from A to B, I care very little about the rest, they’re just a functional tool. I have a lot of love for the shinies otherwise, but goldmaking and cars aren’t two of them.

That said, there’s been one moment during my WoW career when I was struggling for cash: when I couldn’t afford the epic flying mount start of WotLK. It’s rather ridiculous to be short on cash in WoW and I’d never claim it’s hard to generate, but like I explained before, I was never the player to care about goldmaking just for the sake of it. So when WotLK hit, I sat around 3k gold because I had done more or less nothing but raiding and PVP in TBC. I had also not properly informed myself about how much the whole cold-weather and epic flying deal would cost in the upcoming expansion. My fault obviously and so I ended up taking a loan to afford birdie straight away (which I have since paid back in numerous ways /cough).

I do learn from past mistakes…sometimes. This time around, I will be prepared when Cataclysm throws its 5k+ at me to fly around Azeroth at 310% speed. This time around, I could even afford to pay this amount of gold several times without it impacting on my small change for covering everyday stuff. But it’s more of a tribute to WotLK than my trading efforts really: it has been insanely easy to fill your pockets in this expansion. I’ve not done much besides raiding this time either, but the epics, orbs and saronites from badges made all the difference and there was nothing else to do for me with all the extras (I don’t gear up alts). I wager that Blizzard being aware of their players’ general cash influx, have more than just Azerothian flying in store as goldsink in Cataclysm.

So what do you reckon, how much cash should we take into Cataclysm? Not from a greedy goblin’s point of view, but a pragmatic AH-lazy person’s perspective? Is 15k gonna be enough, or aim higher?

Are you prepared?

What’s your favored loot distribution?

Gear and tier sets especially, are a big deal in World of Warcraft. We’ve seen Blizzard continuously reform their loot system for raiding sets since vanilla WoW, sometimes with better or worse outcome. I always found the tier distribution a fairly tricky topic, with potential for juicy drama.

Cataclysm will once more reform the way players gain their tiers and apparently Blizzard aims for more identification again whereby certain items are clearly associated with boss loot tables. They also want epic gear to be “truly epic” again. Whatever that means.

But if we were the ones to call the shots, what system would you personally opt for? This is what we’ve had in the past:

  1. Bosses drop slot-specific tier items randomly for every class: this is more or less what we had in Vanilla WoW whereby a certain boss drops the tier legs for every class randomly. If you got no use for the item, it gets sharded.

    2.  

  2. Bosses drop slot-specific tokens randomly for every loot-group: representative of TBC, Lady Vashj would for example drop the head-slot T5 token randomly for loot-group A, B or C. No more shards, instead more gear for off-specs in the raid.

    3.  

  3. Bosses drop tokens that are neither slot-specific, nor class/loot-group specific: this was done via trophies for T9 in the Trial of the Crusader (Coliseum) raid instance in WotLK.

    4.  

  4. Bosses drop non-slot-specific tokens randomly for every loot-group: a mixture of the two previous loot distributions which we have seen in Ice Crown Citadel in WotLK.

Me, I have mixed feelings about it. I would definitely never ever want to see loot-groups again because that particular system is a real can of worms. My own guild was stuck with some really foul loot-luck in the priest/paladin/warlock loot-group for several weeks in the past, while at the same time the “pink-whites” (as I call the priest loot-group) made up more than half of our most active raiders roster at that time.
It does not only get very tense during raids when mages and DKs (who in our guild were more or less alone in their group) start collecting off-spec tiers while your 10+ pink-whites in the raid still sit on 1 tier each, but it hits guilds the wrong way as a whole. Especially nowadays when Blizzard themselves want guilds to bring the player instead of the class and we got all sorts of very different raid setups in every guild; we were often very low on druids, shammies, warlocks and rogues for example, with sometimes three times as many priests and paladins to make up for it.

Your most active raiders might belong to the unlucky (or simply over-sized) loot-group and there’s nothing you can do to gear them up, while the rest is forced to collect offspec-gear because you can’t shard tokens. At the same time you will have to deal with the inflation of DKP for those that cannot bid even if they’d really love to.
And personally, as a very active priest healer, I was rather frustrated that I paid 200 DKP for a T8 token that went for 15 DKP in other groups, because this forced me to save on other slots like rings, trinkets etc. where I couldn’t compete against those anymore that got their tiers so cheap. All you can do in such a situation is to say “sod tiers, I’ll get everything else first and the tiers last”, but that is only so much fun.

I actually loved Trial of the (Grand) Crusader exactly for this reason: finally all raiders had an equal chance on tier loot and the distribution was very mixed and even, even if the most active raiders might finish a little sooner (and there’s really nothing wrong with that). There was no tension anymore and we could actually focus on other things rather than rolling our eyes in advance over what the boss might drop.

The only thing I missed about the trophies was that a certain item could not be associated with a respective bosskill no more: I like the fact that gear tells a story. I’d like to see some of the raider’s or raidguild’s achievements or their current state of progression on the player. I think we lose a bit of content-depth without this. So ideally, I’d like the opposite of what was done in ICC: slot-specific tokens yes, class/loot-group specific no. You can still associate the item with a boss if it goes into a defined slot.

Do I think tokens as a whole are a good idea? I can see why you would dislike them: how “realistic” (fantasy-speaking) is it that a mob carries generic raider-tokens around, rather than just gear? Not very much. Gear has the one advantage that you can produce shards for the guildbank if nobody needs the item. Tokens have the advantage that your raiders can gear up their secondary spec (depending on how you handle this, but there’s little point in trashing tokens).

There’s certainly pros&cons to every loot system, and I guess some of us would even love to see something entirely different for WoW. I’ve never been invested in endgame raiding à la WoW in other MMOs, so I can’t draw comparisons there, but I’m sure there’s some interesting, different concepts around.

What is your favored loot distribution? And do you see an issue in tokens and badges?

    All rise to the Arisen dance!

    In case you don’t know who the Arisen are, they’re possibly the greatest race ever to star in an MMO. They’re part of the evil or empire faction in Allods Online, a very polished free MMO I have briefly reviewed in my previous article this week. Now while I don’t play Allods actively, I am utterly in love with the superior air and style of this undead cyborg race –  if you got nothing else to play sometime and are up to dabble with a free game, they’re one good reason to look into Allods!

    But this post isn’t about promoting free MMOs: it’s actually about dancing. That’s right, dancing!!

    I’ve always loved fan-made MMO dance videos, I am that silly! They’re just another proof of how inspiring games can be to those that love them – whether you blog, write fanfics, draw fanart or make awesome fraps videos, you’re being creative (and it’s actually not so easy to make a good dance video where everything fits!). There’s a few fun WoW dancing videos on youtube which I’m sure most have seen by now.

    But I bet you haven’t seen the Arisen do Daftpunk yet, have ya?! Well here’s two clips nobody should miss:

    I don’t know if it’s my love for the race or the fact that the creator chose one of my favourite Daftpunk songs to go with it, but I love this video!

    • Arisen Rave  (I’m not much for techno, but it really fits here!)
    *dance dance*

    The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Or: the fastest way to rekindle your WoW passion

    The good old pre-expansion blues is taking its toll on guilds and WoW players all around the globe. Bloggers struggle to find topics to write about while waiting for new content (or argue a lot more than usual), gamers run the same old 5mans on their alts or hunt for the last achievements they can possibly do. This is the twilight hour of the MMO: the old sun is setting as we wait in darkened shadows holding our breath, longing for the new dawn. But Cataclysm is still a good 2 months away, if we want to believe the optimistic voices.

    For some it’s been too long a wait already. They take their leave from the game or website communities, some to take a hiatus, others with the firm intention never to return. Some question if they still got any future in the world of warcraft.

    Well I have good news for you: if you feel your passion for the game dampened, if you doubt whether you should even bother to play Cataclysm, there is a very quick way to make up your mind. You can do what I’ve done the past few weeks, if you’re hooked to the genre like I am, knowing that you’ll always want to play an MMO because it’s ruined all the single-player games for you anyway.

    It’s simple: go and check out the other MMOs out there. Get a trial subscription or try some of the free MMOs that are supposedly “not too bad”. There is NO better way to rekindle your WoW spark than by looking at what alternatives the market has to offer you.

    Believe me when I say I’ve tried

    The past few weeks and months, I have tried, tried real hard too, to give another MMO a chance. Even if I’ve played and loved WoW since the beta launch, I am not a fanboy, I’m generally equally positive as I am critical of the game which makes it hard for more extreme Nay-sayers or Yes-sayers to place me. I don’t love WoW unconditionally, I have too many comparisons for that. It’s still the best game I ever played and the one that has changed me the most, so that counts for something. I can discuss pros and cons of games in a dispassionate manner and I am open to new things. I am also frankly bored of WoW, so I took some time browsing general MMO sites and talked to friends to make my picks.

    The games I eventually opted for were Allods, Age of Conan, Everquest 2 and Rappelz. I also meant to try FF14 at some point but alas, that ship has sailed. I intended for a mix of MMOs that complement my previous experiences and chose some of the more popular ones as much as a few free games with a small, die-hard player base. I’m not a big fan of micro-transaction MMOs but I’m still interested to see what some of them have to offer in return.

    It was a dizzying and ultimately enlightening journey through the jungle, or should I say “Black Morass” of the MMOs out there. Not that I expected much in the first place, but there were a few surprises along the way, even if the painful experiences outweighed the positive. I am fully aware that I am not the most forgiving customer: if you have a strong WoW background, you’re basically spoiled, you take a lot of features for granted. Many of these MMOs have got between 50’000-100’000 subscribers. For 2010, EQ2 is said to sport approximately 200’000 and AoC around 160’000. That means the vast majority of MMOs has plus-minus 1% of the player base that Blizzard can work with.

    My final judgment can still only be from a very personal and biased viewpoint. This is how new MMOs will have to convince new customers to switch over – they will be measured by what’s considered a standard in 2010+. They don’t have to be perfect and they don’t have to copy WoW (they shouldn’t, in fact), but they will have to deliver good reasons to play them instead of WoW. They will have to deliver a ‘package’, because that is what Blizzard really achieved: neither the best graphics, nor the most content depth, nor the best or most complete features, but A LOT of everything! It’s a well-rounded and coherent world we play in, with a high playability and variety that caters to more than one or two types of gamers. Even if it’s not perfect in every respect, it still achieves to be good or very good in most. When we criticize WoW, we’re criticizing on a very high level.

    So I’m not gonna be particularly forgiving or aim for completeness and fairness when presenting my experiences. I’ll be short (kinda..) and selective in retelling what impression the games I picked made on me during my very first hours of gameplay, because that’s when most of us decide to continue or not. The average MMO player does not grind his way up in hope for entirely different or better endgame and that’s usually not what you’ll find anyway. I am also personally not so interested in the endgame raiding aspect anymore, like I used to be. I’ll try and be specific about why I stopped in each game’s case.
    (Continue reading via the link below)
    The Good…

    As mentioned earlier, I was positively surprised once or twice during my ventures, namely by Age of Conan and Allods Online.

    Allods
    Like Rappelz, Allods is a gpotato deal. I chose to play it because it’s a rather remarkable WoW clone graphically and I was intrigued about the Russian team behind it. As expected the game has huge polish from the second you enter the character creation screen. I loved the style of the different races and even if Allods looks a lot like WoW, it shows originality in character design and other cosmetic aspects like armor and world atmosphere. I absolutely loved the Arisen, this gotta be the coolest race ever! You start your journey in a sort of intro scenario, fighting your way out of your homebase and the game controls are easily handled and intuitive.

    That’s when the grind begins…..you keep doing the same fetch&delivery quests we got bored of in vanilla for a very long time and combat is slow. At some point, even though this is one of the best free MMOs out there, you ask yourself “why am I doing this?”. Why play an MMO that looks like WoW when you can play WoW without the micro-transaction deal and in the company of a lot more people?

    Allods doesn’t only look good, but managed to copy many good aspects of other MMOs while still retaining its own style and unique feel. It runs smoothly and should appeal to a more mass market audience. But it ultimately fails to deliver enough reasons to switch over from WoW. Also, most gamers want to pay subscriptions rather than dabble around with ingame shops all the time.

    Age of Conan
    While Age of Conan drove masses of players away at its launch in 2008, Funcom have continuously improved the game since then. I spent several weeks playing (and paying) it, before I rested my lvl 60 priest for good. AoC manages to provide you with a coherent world and lore like WoW does, with its unique style and graphics that succeed to create an immersive atmosphere of High Adventure set in the more barbaric and rough world of Conan (there will be blood!). After a very elaborate character creation, your journey begins with your character washed up at a shore, trying to remember his past from there. You’ll spend your first 20 levels more or less following your own ‘destiny quests’ before you get tossed out into the actual world. The zones are beautiful and of an epic scale, I loved exploring while listening to some of the wonderful tunes. The pseudo real-time combat is fast (especially for melee) and the solo features in the game are great.

    I had a good time with AoC, but I was surprised at how little care was given to the UI and controls which are highly inflexible. Features like the clunky quest log and grouping tools make it very hard for beginners to find their way around. I was also baffled that an MMO wouldn’t even bother to provide you with proper friendlist functionality. The skills and talent system are rather complex and it took some reading up to work out specs.

    But these are things I can deal with. What really discouraged me and my friends from playing together, was the horribly imbalanced group mechanics and at stages dubious difficulty levels for certain dungeons or zones. It was impossible to group up without an exact number of people and classes present (even for dungeons you should out-skill) and once you managed to find the right pugs to join you, it still ended in a very frustrating experience. The tanking mechanics are supposedly better at max level, but aggro control and CC are hideous when trying to level or pug. And while the healing approach in AoC is really refreshing to a WoW healer, it leaves you tearing your hair out due to the broken group mechanics and balance. Apparently this is also a big issue on the PVP side of the game.

    So while AoC is possibly the most mature and unique MMO besides WoW and should cater to a more grown-up audience too, it is not quite there yet. The good aspects outweigh the bad, but it’s still a trade-off in parts. I might re-visit it at some point though.

    …the Bad…

    Rappelz
    Rappelz is one of many asian, free MMOs that regularly pops up in respective top 3s. While the overall graphics and character design look okay (if not slightly hermaphrodite) compared to others, the world and game play are horribly stale. The maps are boring and the music is either dull or annoying. That’s just the more superficial aspects of a game but they shape your first impressions nonetheless and are rather significant when it comes to atmosphere and immersion.

    The game play does nothing to improve things: you start grinding your way into the first town with two basics skills on your hotbar. 10 levels later, you’re still grinding boring mobs on a boring plain, pushing the same two buttons (attack and smite, yay!). When you finally get to ‘upgrade’ your talent tree and chose a more individual skill path, you get rewarded with a shocking number of 0 new skills or abilities. I kept going until I received my first supposed ‘elite-quest’ and went all “Yay, finally a challenge!”, looking for a group because the NPC told me I’d need one. On my way to find people, I accidentally killed a mob which turned out to be the ‘elite mob’ for my quest…

    But that wasn’t the worst about Rappelz, really. The worst is the controls: no mouse-control or WASD, Rappelz is one of the CLICKY-games! If you want to move your character, point and click the environment is all you’ll get. It annoyed me no end and I cannot fathom why some devs still think this is a good idea in an MMO – gawd what were you thinking??!

    …and the Ugly

    Everquest 2
    EQ2 marks my grande finale. I am still utterly baffled about those that told me EQ2 was “that other game beside WoW” or allude that it’s somehow similar. Now I’ll be fair and say the free-to-play feature of EQ2 is currently in its beta but still, the game was released in 2004! That makes it as old as WoW maybe, but definitely not as good.

    Yeah I care for things like character creation and looks, you know what, it matters! And EQ2 is HIDEOUS!!! I went temp-blind trying to customize one of the TWO available character models for humans and apparently they’re one of the more agreeable races. Seriously Sony, seeeeeeriously??

    Maybe I shouldn’t have chosen the green-violet starting area of the silly fairies, but the optic aspects of the game didn’t improve from there. At least you can run the game smoothly, even after you fought and scrolled your way through the gazillion available ingame menus and submenus to max performance. The gameplay wasn’t so bad, it was easy enough to find your way around the UI and first quests which are rather similar to WoW; the beautiful zone map (…) assists you there. Also, EQ2 makes up for all the skills and abilities Rappelz is so reluctant to distribute: for every level gained, you get at least 2 new spells for your hotbar. At level 14, I was already half-way to filling my 3rd, losing track quickly of what each of those buttons do and when I should use which and why. The skill and talent system is equally confusing: 3 different tabs on ‘alternate advancement’ that give you no hint whatsoever on where to start, while the game keeps reminding you that you got unused skill points lying around!

    The game is kinda big for letting you know stuff like that…It also tells you that your two bags are full, after which you will have no peace and won’t be able to loot anything until you found the one vendor NPC that lets you sell trash items. You’ll have to make your way there at reduced speed because apparently walking gets harder after you picked too many flowers and mushrooms.

    And then there’s that pesky annoyance of a pop-up that you’ll get to click away every 10minutes, telling you to upgrade to the game’s “silver version”. Apparently that’s Sony’s subtle way of encouraging their free-version players and trialists to buy the upgrade. I’m sure that works really well……not.
    There’s actually a GOLD version popup following that silver one, I hear!

    If you’ve played WoW for years and decide to test EQ2 nonetheless, I wish you good luck. At least you won’t have to wait for a long install and patching procedure, because the game is smart enough to download most of its ugly maps while you’ve already started playing. That is, if you can get the launcher to run without issues, depending on your windows version. ^^

    A look ahead

    I give every game a chance but I’m merciless if it manages to annoy me already at the start, fails to meet the most basic standards or doesn’t manage to motivate long term game play after several hours. If you want to hook players or lure them over, you better create some motivation quickly! I don’t think I’m harsh, but I got a clear focus on things like overall atmosphere, coherence and playability when having my first look at an MMO. After that, I’d like a new title to feature something unique instead of just copying WoW: it’s not enough to be as good, you’ll need to be better and different! Try and excel where WoW is lacking, have a good look at how the fathers of the genre created content depth. And make sure you’ll deliver a package, because you’ll be dealing with WoW players with a low tolerance for bullshit.

    I would love to give another game a go but looking around, I doubt 2011 will change a lot. Very few games of the past years have shown promise, but they aren’t quite there yet. I have the same feeling about upcoming titles such as SWtoR or The Secret World, even if I’m probably going to look into the latter.
    However, most of the current MMOs out there, free or sub-based, are a waste of space, time and nerves. It’s something Blizzard ultimately benefits from, aside of WoW being the king of MMOs for many other reasons.

    Before I agree to settle for less, look like some ugly hobbit on steroids or move my character around like a unit in some freakin RTS, I pre-order my Cataclysm copy and let it be known: it’s not perfect, but it’s definitely your best bang for the buck folks!

    Why do you play another race in MMOs?

    Following several discussions on ‘gnome representation’ in WoW the other week, I ended up noticing how different some MMO players choose what race to play from myself. Since it was gnomish debates that got me thinking about this, I’ll take the gnome race in WoW as an example:

    I would never roll a gnome in WoW. And while I agree that the gnomes are rendered somewhat goofy and ‘a-sexual’ (or childish) in this particular game, that has nothing to do with it. Even if gnomes were testosterone- and estrogen-pumped starlets of human sexuality, I wouldn’t roll one (or rather that would be one more reason not to roll one). And I actually think gnomes are awesome, some of my alltime favorite NPCs are gnomes and I’ve loved the whole theme of gnomes as tinkerers and engineers introducing more ‘modern’ technology (steam-engine zeppelins!) to the fantasy genre, ever since Mount Nevermind of the Dragonlance series back from the 1980ies.

    But no, I would never roll a gnome, no matter how cool and fun they are. I wouldn’t roll a dwarf either, nor a nightelf or any other race for that matter, simply because I don’t feel “represented” by them. In almost every given MMO I’ve played for longer in the past, I have played a human female if such was possible. I need to identify with the character I play – I am that kind of player. Now I know that race and looks are very superficial and cosmetic: if I was to chose the WoW race that is most likely “like me” in humor or lifestyle (the way it’s presented by lore or NPCs), I would probably roll a troll. But then I don’t care so much about lore and NPC representation; I believe that my char is more of a vessel that’s gonna get its personality from me, if that makes sense. The way I’m playing MMOs, my character is just a projection of my real self and so I will fashion my ingame looks after the real thing if I can. All the Syls in the past, be it in Final Fantasy Online, Age of Conan, WoW or some other MMO, have had the same hairstyle, color, complexion, height (if available) or whatever other cosmetic aspect. I am also rather particular about my ingame name like that.


    Am I just boring?

    I bet there’s a fair few of you thinking now: Wow, how boring! And in a way I agree, it IS really boring, isn’t it? Maybe if I played alts (which I don’t), I would roll another race, I have mules in WoW that are grumpy dorfs or dashy nightelves after all, it was fun to create them. But the character I mean to play and spend most of my ingame time with needs to be “me”. Identification is closely linked to immersion and immersion in MMOs is a very big deal to me.

    So, I realize that we do not all pick our characters in the same way; there are many WoW gamers that choose races like gnomes and nightelves (or horde races) exactly because they like to play someone else in a game. And I can totally understand that – it’s fun to assume a different race, it’s a change from being a “boring human” all the time, right?

    It just doesn’t work for me that way. I “like being myself” as silly as that sounds and what I’m looking for in MMOs is taking myself into fantastic realms that I can share with others. And different races are so very much a part of that experience for me too: what would the fantasy genre be without them? I love racial diversity, I’m just not looking for escapism from myself when I pick my character. Maybe that’s self-fixation, or narcissism if you will, I certainly wouldn’t call it race-fixation however. What I like too about this, is that when I look back on my past ventures in all the MMOs I’ve played, it feels like the same character, me, has journeyed through all of them which makes my experiences and memories feel much more like a consistent story (and humans are usually always available as a race choice).

    Coming to think of that, I feel this is mostly important to me in MMOs where we are so deeply invested in our alter egos: I have played a lot of Japanese console RPGs when I was younger and as the hero was usually set there, I’d be a male teenager called ‘Ryu’, ‘Link’ or ‘Crono’ (sleepy head!) without experiencing any loss of story because of it.
    Still, if I am able to choose, I will always choose to play a female character and most likely a human. If an MMO featured male characters only, I probably wouldn’t play it. It’s why we get so much character customization in this particular genre of games: our alter egos are our avatars, our manifestations and developers account (sadly in various degrees) for this demand for customization which is all about identity and individuality. That said, I would draw the line at playing human models that look simply hideous for the same reasons and I’d choose to play an Arisen in Allods (for reasons of awesumness).

    So I wonder, how is it for those WoW players that have been running around as shorties, elves, tauren or trolls for years? Did you instantly identify with your character, no matter how different it looked from you? Or do you feel some of the non-human races of WoW actually represent you a lot better?
    Or is this maybe not what you’re looking for at all, are you looking to role-play in a way (not in the sense of you rolling on an RP server), getting some time off the real me?

    Why do you play another race in MMOs?

    I’d really love to hear some views on this and whether I am the only person playing a human character for reasons of identification and immersion.

    WoW priest outfits!

    [For an overview of collectable WoW hats, check my World of Warcraft Hats guide.]

    I am a gear collector and very happy with the way most outfits are designed in World of Warcraft. It is not the first time that I play a healer in an MMO and I think our gear is great – I’ve never had much reason to complain. Aside of warlocks, priests have definitely gotten the most love when it comes to Tier sets in WoW, reaching its peak in TBC with the godlike T5 and T6, which are still the most often depicted priest sets in WoW fanart. I have never played another game where the healer archetype is presented with such variety in armor.

    I admit that when I was leveling up in vanilla, there was some gear that didn’t look very flattering, but that was the case for everybody: colors were horrendously shrill and mismatched overall. Some of the robes looked just abysmal on males especially. If I think vanilla outfits, the first picture that comes to mind is the male mages in their flamboyant pink or blue robes, quirky crimson felt hat, green satin shoulders and yellow belts. Bless vanilla – the era of circus clowns!

    But I never really had to deal with gear that I hated or felt exposed or plain silly in – there are a few more sexy outfits in WoW but I can’t say that I was ever forced to wear anything skimpy as a female priest. Even if you faced wearing one of those eyeroll-worthy “heavy armor bikinis” like some mail- and plate-wearers did, you could still combine them with one of the numerous shirts in the game.

    I am used to the way females are often dressed in asian MMOs, and also some western games (the attire female fighters get to wear in some beat’em ups is ridiculous), so I give kudos to Blizzard for giving their players so many gear choices. Their female models are a lot more realistic in terms of body proportions too: the human female for example has an average womanly shape, neither skinny nor big and the curves aren’t unnaturally emphasized either. I would certainly welcome more customization in WoW to actually let you shape your own shape and height similar to Age of Conan, but overall Blizzard has done a good job to present their female race models with a variety of body types. They even implemented an ‘old granny face’ for most, which isn’t something you find easily in other MMOs.

    So let’s have a look at priest outfits!

    All of the following images are taken from my personal screenshot archives. I’ve documented my entire WoW history rather consistently which is handy for this overview. Let’s have a look at the way priest outfits are designed and also change over the course of the years in WoW! I have to say, looking back on some of the sets below, my wish for a cosmetic gear feature in WoW becomes even more fervent – it’s such a shame we’ll never get to use some of these models again unless we switch gear back and forth manually all the time.

    Priest outfits in vanilla WoW

    An assortment of priest outfits representative for this era (note that not all of them are priest-exclusive), number indications in the notes as seen from left to right:

    Vanilla was rather down to earth when it comes to gear sets and tiers. A lot of the robes and vests acquired while leveling were old fashioned and the very first class sets looked very ceremonial and formal (3rd and 6th image). The names were rather silly too. There was some very shrill ‘disco gear’ around and only a few okay-looking greens and blues, like the runecloth set (7th image). Tiers started to get more interesting and daring between BWL and original Naxx. I still think Transcendence / T2 is the nicest set of this era. Another favourite of mine is the necro-knight’s garb (5th image). Non-tier shoulder pieces were abysmal all across.

    The Burning, steaming hot, Crusade!

    TBC was awesome for priests: after a very boring dungeon set 3 (2nd image) and a totally EUGH T4, Blizzard presented us with the possibly greatest tiers in the game: T5 and T6. The wings and halo-hood have become a priest trademark –  even though I prefer the awesome looking fresco shoulders of T6 personally. The pic in the middle shows a mixture of T5 robes and T6 shoulders and hood model which is my all-time favourite priest outfit in the game. Get a staff of immaculate recovery with that and you got epic win!
    Sunwell featured a very nice non-tier set as well – if only I had the shoulders to go with that (7th image)! Speaking of which, there’s an increased effort to make shoulders and headpieces look more interesting.

    Priests in Wrath of the Lich King

    Looking through this last assortment of WotLK outfits, I feel somewhat reconciled with this expansion. My general impression was that we didn’t get much tier love in this era, partly also because everyone looks the same nowadays. Blizzard have gotten really cheap in their efforts to create unique class gear and we’ve certainly seen the worst PVP sets up to date (3rd and 6th image).
    I also felt that this expansion was hideous for headgear – with the exception of T8: I actually love that white set with the ‘rogue-ish’ headpiece and glowing eyes (middle pic)! All in all we didn’t actually do so bad, textures and effects got more elaborate and there was a lot less mix’n mismatch than in WoW 1.0 or 2.0 due to the recycling of so many armor models. I really hope we see unique sets again in Catacylsm though!

    My tops & flops

    • Top 3 best priest outfits in the game: T5, T6, T8
    • Top 3 worst priest outfits in the game: T1, Dungeon set 3, T4 

    So what’s your favourite gear era in WoW? Oh, and if you’re a priest, you should visit World of Matticus and let him know your wishes for our Tier 11!

      For Keep’s Sake!

      Over at Blog Azeroth, Feral Tree suggested a topic that is so perfect for me, I couldn’t resist to join in: “WoW mementos, things you’ve kept over time.”

      Oh my…those that know me, have rolled their eyes at me over how bad my bank is crammed with all sorts of useless clutter, old gear, dresses and random goofy things. I can’t part with at least half of them and I actually believe that bag space is something that happens to other people.

      For one thing I am a bit of a loot-paranoid: whenever I get special items (like the goblin rocket helmet) or for example a new trinket, I will keep the old one because I might NEED THIS AGAIN FOR SOMETHING! It happened to me once or twice in the past that I dumped an item I had a use for later (and a totally game-altering one too) and ever since I choose safe over sorry. I wonder if that’s just me or whether other players have this eerie feeling about dumping gear too..

      Then there’s my outfit spleen: I have kept almost all my old tiers and PVP sets, I’ve also kept my old trinkets from MC, Onyxia, BWL…At some point I decided that “staves are really cool!”, so I started keeping all my staves. And then there is of course an endless number of special dresses, from holidays, vendors, or drops, stuff like the jungle hat and my ‘blue collection’ which is essentially…..blue dresses only (I like the color blue, can you tell?). Of course I don’t manage all this on my main, I have a mule with my own guild bank full of stuff – she keeps extra minipets too, in case my own run away.

      So it’s not exactly easy for me to pick my mementos – but I won’t post an endless list of random items here. To be fair, most of these things I keep because I am a maniac shinies collector and not so much because they’re keepsakes. So what I will do is list the Top 5 items that I kept for their meaning rather than just looks.

      1) Benediction

      Thats right, Benediction is the ultimate priest keepsake. Nothing says “I kept your asses alive in vanilla” the way this staff does. I earned this the hard way, raiding and waiting patiently for weeks (and patience really ain’t my thing) until I finally got Major Domo’s eye for my priest quest. And I did it the first time around too, all by myself, thank you very much! /flex

      If there’s a thing like a vanilla-epeen, I think I have just found mine.

      In any case, a priest trashing her/his Benediction is unthinkable, disgraceful, blasphemous! You will probably never get another weapon that’s transformable like this one either! There was only two of them and one required you to be a hunter (eugh). 

      2) Devout Set

      Not officially a Tier and not really nice looking, I kept this oogly lilac set because it was the first priest set in the game and also, it took me longer to complete than any Tier set ever after. I think all that went through the same grind for the 8-piece Dungeon sets know the feeling. I don’t remember how many Scholomance runs it took me just to get the crown – one can only take so many “school is in session!” before your sanity’s self-protection kicks in.

      3) Gavel of Infinite Wisdom

      I tell you why I kept this mace of infinite suck – so that it would always remember who its master is! I GRINDED you, you utter piece of shit, that’s right!! /hysteric laughter

      There are not many rep grinds in WoW that come close to the drudgery and torture of getting Cenarion Circle to exalted back in the days. I haven’t done the insanity achievement, so for me this was the single most horrible, tedious and mind-altering thing I ever did in this game. I’d redo all my WotLK rep grinds in a heartbeat instead of this.

      For one thing I really hated the insect theme of Silithus and the AQs. Farming in the hives drove me mad – getting lost in Hive Ashi anyone? I spent tons of cash on the AH to buy twilight texts or armor just to speed things up A LITTLE. I summoned more of those stupid lord things together with an equally driven guildie than warlocks can say “succubus”! There was nights when I actually dreamt a giant wasp was chasing after me through endless gooey tunnels.

      I will keep this weapon of doom forevermore, like the trophy head of my worst enemy. Also, it was better than Benediction which is kinda outrageous!

      4) Grayson’s Torch

      LOL I really still have this torch. It was a reward from a lvl 20 quest at Westfall lighthouse and I loved the blazing graphics of it. I have an awesome screenie of standing over Westfall beach overlooking the sea while the torchlight is illuminating the night around us. /emo
      What makes this memory even more special is that 1 minute after I took that same screenshot, we were ganked like the utter noobs we were by a group of equally low level hordes because we didn’t know what ‘PVP flagged’ was at the time. Oh, teh memories!

      5) Big stick

      The Big Stick was given to me for an Xmas present by a guildie and co-healer last year. I dont know if I got it in reference to my healing team often calling me the ‘lady with the whip’ or maybe because I’m a teacher (same thing?) or whether he was trying to tell me something quite different, but it made me laugh all the same when I found it in the mail. I used it in this picture here that I created for our 2nd anniversary’s quiz page.

      True memories

      These are mementos I will always keep. Most dresses and baubles can be replaced if needed,  but these items really can’t. It’s not so much about the item but the story behind getting it.

      Maybe it sounds weird to some people but I feel about these items the way I feel about the screenshots in my WoW folder: as if they were real things and real photographs. I think they are too – after all I was there.

      And with this I end my contribution to this lovely topic with some very old screenies of mine, because a picture (or two) says more than a thousand words:

      1 Minute to go,
      enjoy it while it lasts!
      /sigh

      We remember the hard times

      Lately there was quite a bit of discussion on gend……..errr, I mean, there was quite a bit of discussion going on about where the MMO genre is going and also, about people being bored silly with WoW while being unhappy with the increased “dumbing down” of the game by Blizzard these past few years.

      I’ll admit that I am one of those that have an issue with the continuous ‘casualization’ of WoW; not because I need to feel so l33t over more casual players and think they shouldn’t experience the same content as I do, but because I feel a sharp loss of ‘authenticity’ and immersion as a consequence of the related changes since WoW launched in 2004. And I don’t label myself an elite player, far from it.

      I am not going to pink-glass vanilla WoW here: there was certain imbalances and unnecessary downtimes that were plain annoying and I wouldn’t want those back. However, I feel that Blizzard’s increased endeavor to make the game more and more accessible and easy to play for a mass market audience, ever since halfway through TBC, has killed a lot of what I consider the ‘soul’ of the true MMORPG experience. A topic that has possibly echoed most of my own feelings in brilliant detail was Wolfshead’s article on EQ3 and the future of the genre in general.
      Was everything better back in the days? No. Neither was everything worse. It is rather depressing that oldtimers like Everquest and Ultima Online are still regarded as the games with the most content depth and immersion in the MMO genre up to this day.

      When I think of how 5mans are being run in WoW nowadays, it seriously makes me cringe. While it’s far from being my only issue, I think it serves as a good example: queue up for an instance, wait a few minutes, zoom into some cross-server party of which hardly anyone will even say ‘Hi’ in partychat, steamroll the instance, cash your badges and leave, rinse and repeat – it’s like the zombie hour of MMOs.

      • People don’t speak to one another. And if they do, it’s most likely about gearscore or damage meters.
      • People don’t die anymore. And if they do, it is such an unheard of, outrageous thing that the tank and healer are most likely to ragequit after the first wipe because they got NO TIME FOR THIS!
      • People don’t even need to travel to the instance anymore. And if they did, they wouldn’t notice the world around them and its beautiful maps, because their super-fast epic mount flies at “ludicrous speed” somewhere up in the clouds.

      Some bloggers have actually compared this way of gameplay to a “one-night stand”: no emotions involved, get in and out quickly, mutual benefits, no strings attached. And why would you invest anything more on people from different servers anyway? It’s an almost complete anonymity, even if you behave like a stupid troll there won’t be consequences. Just yesterday Grumpy described a very similar atmosphere in WoW’s battleground PUGs where communication and teamwork are at an all time low.

      Now you could say “but this is all optional, you don’t need to use the dungeon finder if you don’t wish to play with strangers”, but that’s not it really. You play with strangers in MMOs all the time, it’s kinda the POINT. And whether I use this feature or not, it is there and it does impact on the community (lolz I said “community”) as a whole. It is also just one symptom of a spreading disease – and I’m saying this as somebody that is still in love with the world of Warcraft.

      Of value and cost or: heroes and dragons

      The underlying issue of most of my own points, but also those of other players, comes down to a strong disparity between effort (or challenge) and reward. The irony in WoW’s case is not that the game is too hard and frustrates players by rewarding them too little, but that it is on the contrary so fast and full of opportunities that you do not feel rewarded anymore, as there is hardly a challenge.
      As human beings we attach value in relation to what a certain item costs us – value and cost being two very separate things in this case. If it takes you a long time to gain a reward or if it was hard to obtain and required you to overcome many obstacles, you value your reward more, as part of an accomplishment. Well, there is no accomplishment without a struggle: there are no heroes where there is no dragon.

      So, where is the feeling of adventure and achievement in playing the game in its current state? When was the last time you really struggled questing in a new map, calling a friend to aid you? When was the last time you had several corpseruns in a 5man because communication on pulls and CC was so crucial? How much effort went into collecting your current set of gear? I had to think hard – the last time we struggled in a 5man was in Magister’s Terrace back in TBC. The instances in WotLK make me feel a lot of things, but certainly not heroic.

      We are currently over-loaded on fast opportunity and reward in WoW, to a point where cooperation and teamwork isn’t a key feature anymore. You can solo and pug your way through almost everything with little struggle, downtimes or consequence. Even if you don’t pug, the low difficulty level itself is detrimental to any team building effect: you build strong teams over struggling together, not steamrolling together!

      The fact that rewards not only don’t feel like rewards anymore, but also don’t look very rewarding, is doubly ironic: we all look the same nowadays, no matter how we play the game. Our gear tells no stories anymore. It seems the more we are given, the less we got. And then there are those goons that do not even know (or remember) what a party is and how instances used to be, quitting raids over a few deaths or failing horribly whenever they visit an oldschool instance.

      When times were tough and memories were epic

      I don’t know about you, but personally I lose all sense of adventure when the co-relation between challenge and reward, need for cooperation and teamwork, fear of death and requirements of for example travel, become so secondary in a game. There are no essential struggles, no moments of big consequence or fear – these factors being of course all co-dependent. WoW feels further and further away from the classic MMORPG experience and there goes my sense of ‘authenticity’ down the drain together with immersion.

      In his article Wolfshead compared his experience of playing a (good) MMO with watching a horror movie – I find this quite a fitting analogy. If I play in a fantasy world, I’d like some excitement, some tension and moments of terror. I’d like to be scared, calling on my companions to beat a challenge together. Or in other words, I’d like to run and scream in terror; because fear is part of adventure. What follows after, is an epic feeling of accomplishment, reward and fun shared with those that assisted you – or alternatively a feeling of shame and embarrassment over being such a chicken. It is those moments we remember in MMOs, not the easy kills, not the fast loot: what we remember is the really tough times.

      I remember how my guild beat Vaelastraz after weeks and weeks of wiping in BWL, and the tremendous relief we felt to have overcome this obstacle together. I remember being scared shitless trying to cross duskwood as a lowbie, waiting for my party to escort me. I remember endless hours and corpseruns in Stratholme, BRD and UBRS because those instances were actually hard for any group. I remember grinding my way to exalted with goddamn Silithus, which is quite possibly the worst thing I ever did in this game (I have still not quite recovered), but I DID IT!

      It is the times of our worst struggles and the feeling of achievement in overcoming them as a group of heroes set in a fantastic and scary world that make our best memories in an MMO. I want more “MMO-RPG” and less fast food, please. I want times to be tough and adventures to be epic!

      I want memories that last.