Ding! 88 [sic]

Hrm. Strange. I don't have a ding for 87. I'll have to see if I can't turn that up.

I was going to wait until I dinged again to post and had something more useful to say about my return to Azeroth, but after bbr's timely comment on my last post, I figured a quick Ding! is better than no post at all. Note that I'm backdating to the time of the ding, as I normally do.

bbr asks, "How active are you of late?" Ha.  Not at all. In fact, I think it's time to admit that WoW has reached the same stage that my Ultima Online play reached, well, well over six years ago. I'm a tourist. That's it.

I'd read a bit about the new expansion that's coming soon, fondly remembered Lorewalker Cho, and figured I'd shell out for another month to ding 90. Not sure if I'll make it, though I'm spitting distance away from 89 now.

About all I've noticed is that there are lots more "store" buttons. Other than that, uninspired play. I mean, the sights are nice, and it's enjoyable, but still no real engagement. I still want the same stuff I always ask for -- weave back in older areas. Recognize things Jal did when he was younger. I mean, my achievements for the Old World are essentially at 0%. You'd think I played WotLK more than any other, and that's hardly the case. Give me credit for obsolete quests. He's an old timer, and should be recognized for it.

Give me quests for items that seem important. I want achievable, soloable epics. They can be as low-powered as you want, but I want to have something fun to work for, some story that doesn't require raiding.

I don't know. The game feels the same. The same buffalo-like creatures roam the wild. Vultures of a new color are flapping around. Highborne ghost equivalents are haunting some new temple, still screaming at me. Second verse, same as the first, just with better textures.

And good heavens the game is too easy to solo. I'm just putting in the time, doing the quests, dying when I pull too large a group out of extreme boredom.

So, again, still fun, but I'm a tourist. That's all at this point.

Free mount! Anybody want to send me a Scroll of Resurrection?

I'm not sure how many regular readers I have -- seems most of the traffic comes from Google searches, and often for images.

But if you are a reader and want a free mount, give me a yell at jal in drine at gmail (no spaces). Jal's ready to drop back in. I did email Lissanna at Restokin first, but haven't heard back in, what, probably all of 18 hours before it hit me I had a blog too. ;)

Quick item up: Moonwell Chalice Nightweaver's Amulet

ARGH. At first I thought you could get the Moonwell Chalice immediately upon entering Firelands, but no luck with the vendor for 31 days, apparently.

There is a full month-long chain of dailies to unlock her and the other two vendors.
..
To unlock the first vendor takes 31 days; to unlock all three takes 41 days.

But for your parting gift, I give you the Nightweaver's Amulet, which you can bag essentially immediately after hitting the Firelands.

And now back to the item you can get 31-41 days from now.


I've been trying to update the pre-Heroic gear list for 4.2, and it's been a pain, in part because Wowhead was misreporting Valor Point items as Justice Point ones. I thought I was about to get insane legs, pants, chest, wrists, and rings. Now, not so much.

That said, check this item out. I like the Gale of Shadows as much as the next guy, but this item is apparently purchaseable right inside the Firelands available only after a month of constant daily runs:

Moonwell Chalice - Item - World of Warcraft:

Binds when picked up
Unique-Equipped
Trinket
+340 Intellect
Requires Level 85
Item Level 365
Use: A small moonwell appears, blessing you with 1700 Mastery for 20 sec. (2 Min Cooldown)

Beginning Firelands/Patch 4.2

Well, 4.2 is out. I've played a bit -- all on the MacBook -- and it's, well, interesting. It's not so much PvE end game for soloers as much as a minimally interactive movie so far. Sure, I've gotten lazy and dropped two healing pots, but there's really zero strategy and lots of mob clean up stuck between cut scenes. Even though the cut scenes, like the one where Thrall is taken away, are meant to pull you out of the millions of PCs running around HyJal right now and thrust you into what briefly looks like a position of singular fame and power, the facade drops away so quickly once the cutscenes are done that Blizzard'd be better off leaving them out entirely. It'd be better to treat you as what you are -- one of thousands attempting to fight the same thing.

The touch-and-tally quests (instead of "Kill X of Y" we have "Damage X of Y before someone else is done with them") really undercut their difficulty and feeling of accomplishment. I feel like I'm marking time.

Anyhow, the best source I've seen so far in the blogroll for figuring out the big picture for the questline is at Shifting Perspectives in the post "Faction rewards for balance in 4.2". Right now we're all here:

In order to begin your new adventure, simply pick up the starter quest from any of the new adventure boards located in a major city. This will send you out to Sanctuary of Malorne in Hyjal where the druids are under attack. After the initial quest chain, you'll gain access to three daily quests. It takes 20 Marks of the World Tree to open the next stage, which requires three days' worth of questing to get.

After those minimum three days, you've got "at least 10 days" before you can move from the first group of Firelands dailies to "unlock either the Druids of the Talon or the Shadow Warden" who offer you yet more quests that apparently take at least seven days to complete. After that, "you will open up three new quests that will finally net you the rewards that you've been after. Each of these quests require 125 Marks in order to open, which will take you 6 days or so in order to reach."

So, to sum, "From start to finish, it will take you around 36 days, 35 at a minimum, in order to unlock everything." Wow, indeed. If the quests don't get a heck of a lot more enjoyable, and soon, this will redefine the meaning of "grind". If Blizzard loses many more subscribers in a month than they gained from folks coming back, I wouldn't be surprised in the least.

EVE's microtransactions: Developing profit vs. fun? Virtual vs. Real?

Spinks recently had a post on EVE's apparent plans to put pretty involved microtransactions into the game.  Her response was, well, I can't quite say "common", because it's not the most common response, but perhaps it's the most predictable of the interesting, thoughtful responses.  Here's a bit.

One of the main reasons that I think long term players get concerned about some of these microtransaction plans is that there’s a point where you wonder how far game devs are putting profit above making fun games. And if your main concern as a consumer is to buy (and pay for) fun games, you’d probably like THAT to be their main focus. [emphasis mine]

These are interesting distinctions.  Is there really a fun vs. profit measurement duality for video game developers?  Isn't profit always the primary motivator for, say, Blizzard and CCP Games when they're designing a game?  Whose job is motivated and measured only by fun maximization?  I wonder about playtesters, but I'm having a hard time arguing they're really primarily about fun; having done that a bit, it's more of a bug finding expedition.  In fact, the only game designer I can think of that's really gotten away with "fun" (measured perhaps in unconventional ways) rather than profit is id, where johnc seems to be able to release when he's darned well ready, after the game has whatever techs and features he feels are appropriate.  It's the one place where "When it's done" is always the deadline, and if there's no id software release for, well, years, that's also okay.  But they only get to ignore profit because they already have plenty [and apparently manage that profit fairly well!].  I think you also have to argue that they changed the mode of production with video game design, or at least added an alternative mode, that of shareware.  They could make a game on their own schedule and release, give or take, directly to their market.  PopCap has a lot to thank id for pioneering.

Well, I guess there's another prime example of a "game dev" who puts "fun" above profits, and that's Jonathan Blow.  Braid was a game that was meant to be completely for "fun", though I believe the term of art is (ironically) an "art" game.  Watching what he's doing with The Witness, the currently in-dev Braid follow-up, is also interesting, particularly his undercover demo of the game at the Penny Arcade Expo.


I mean, Blow is a guy who says stuff like, "[My presentation is] about 'best practices' of modern game design that I find unsettling, and the way in which 'social games' and 'gamification' are destructive."  Though Braid has been horribly successful and, I think it's safe to assume, a serious moneymaker, he's likely (?) not primarily motivated by profit.  Rather, he's at the very least actively interested in (vs. id, who was passively hoping to) redefining the mode of production for video game design and consumption. 

Anyone who comments on the state of games should watch Blow's MIGS lecture slides with audio here to see a sort of game developer countculture/alternative.

(There are others who might call themselves academic game developers, but honestly, I'm not sure I've seen anyone more motivated as a group by money, with some exceptionally notable exceptions (he said twice), than academics.  Academics [in the humanities and in "hybrid" or interdiscplinary fields that include or originate largely in the humanities; engineering professors, eg, are much more honest about their profit-centric research] money fetish is revealed largely by their obsession with repressing their pursuit of cash, you know, like when they frame funding as "a necessarily evil", but love to wield the power from grants like children on their birthday.  I can't consider most of these academic game developers in the same boat with Blow though, again, many are doing good stuff.  For example, based on their work that I've seen, I'd like to think Michael Mateas or Nick Montfort is trying, but I don't know either well.)

Let me also mention, just for Google, "singular rhythms" here.

Anyhow, here's the discussion from Spink's blog, copied here in case Spinksville ever goes away (not that it should, it's just that I hate when blogs disappear).

on June 23, 2011 at 5:11 pm | Reply jalindrine

we like virtual worlds because they’re separate from the rat race of the real world. It’s because the real world doesn’t have much effect on the game world that the game world can be relaxed and fun

You’re first going to have to show me which games don’t overlap with the “real world”. Some are softballs, like “time”, which is obviously shared. But you also have to think about links between hardware requirements, internet access, and economic status. Think Bot Fighters (a mobile phone game) vs. World of Warcraft. Also think of cultural overlaps — ever seen someone speaking French in game? Fun, isn’t it?

As brief as I can put it: There’s no way I play Sojourn MUD literally for days if I’m not a student in college, you know? I’m not exposed to it, I don’t have the always-on network connection to play, nor the “free” time at 2am to play.

There’s a willful suspension of belief [sic] when someone goes virtual, but virtual is always about potential (sorry to trend Deleuzian here) rather than an alternative to the real.

• on June 23, 2011 at 5:34 pm | Reply spinks

  
  

  “You’re first going to have to show me which games don’t overlap with the “real world”

  
  

  If you really don’t want to assume people have time and hardware enough to play computer games then I guess board games or storytelling games is where you start, and assume the majority of people could make 20 mins for a social gaming session.

  
  

  But we’re talking about computer games, so let’s assume a baseline of hardware and some available time. It is pretty easy to suspend disbelief in a virtual setting, even with minimal graphics, so it won’t need to be especially good hardware. I’m quite good at suspending disbelief, but not if game mechanics are constantly throwing RL in my face.

  
  

  But ultimately it’s easier to think of it as a continuum. Some games or types of games it’ll be easier for a player to immerse and shut the real world aspects out while they play, others it’ll be more in your face the whole time. You can still play Sojourn MUD without playing it for days on end, right? Presumably a game where power is related to time available is more immersive than one where it’s related to both time available AND RL money available. I did say minimal overlap, not none at all. I just meant a game where it’s easy to pretend it really is another world.

  
  
  • on June 24, 2011 at 3:19 pm jalindrine

    First, just to be clear, I never played Sojourn MUD for days on end. It was just that my /played there was the first I’d seen measured in days, which scared me. Little did I know how low that number would be relative to what I’d be playing in a few years… ;^)

    
    

    In my post, I was just trying to focus you away from virtual vs. real. It’s so much more interesting to talk about how the two interact, as they’re always interacting. The real world always has a direct effect on the game, since there’s really no distinction. Even a board game is highly situated culturally and commercially. What game? Where was it made? How was it made? What supply chains are required for it to be made and distributed? How was it marketed? What are the origins of its rules? Does it require literacy to play? Math? Logic? What types of logic does it favor? How is gender represented in-game? etc etc etc Those are interesting questions, but for me, MMOs raise some more very interesting and specific ones.

    
    

    So here, I wonder what’s lost by having cosmetic items in game? How does the ability to directly translate conventional cash into goods break your suspension of disbelief — and why? Why is a shirt purchased with traditional 1st world currency any more off-putting than one purchased with in-game only currency? Both require time to amass. Both represent work traded for consumables. Both sorts of goods accumulation represent very similar rat races. Why is it that a highly structured and controlled rat race in-game is more liberating to you than the rat race of a gameless life? What’s the benefit of keeping a mental distinction between the two? Is there a point at which the online rat race could become the drudgery and you’re excited about your job? Do[es] anyone work at Starbucks to escape their boutique in Second Life? ;^) These are interesting questions with potentially enlightening answers, I think.

    
    

    The lack of virtual vs. real is largely the point of Edward Castronova’s work, but it’s a line of inquiry that’s worth extending. Sure, there’s a relatively minimal overlap somewhere, but that’s only a relative measurement. Dig a bit under the surface, and that perception of a minimum overlap is actually a heck of a deep interconnection.

I guess I would sum by saying, "Games always throw RL in your face, there are just times we've let ourselves get too habitualized to notice it." And it's there that the real politics begin.

Dev Watercooler discusses questing past 85

It's an interesting discussion, and good to see (duh) that Blizzard realizes there are people who enjoy questing more than instancing -- or at least those whose lifestyles support 20 minutes (sometimes 2 minutes!) of questing, not and hour or five of instancing and raiding. There should be multiple endgames.

Here's some of their take:

In the absence of gaining levels, there are still ways to reward players who want to continue questing or playing through quest-like experiences. Here are some things (there may be more) that might encourage players like this to stick around:

Participation in an epic story
A sense of progress
Discovery of something new or unexpected each day
Earning character customization (including cool mounts!)
Earning fun toys
Making your character more powerful

That's a good start. Story and gear are certainly my two. I want something memorable. That's been rare. I also want to be able to run instances without detracting from the party. The Catch-22 of having to run an instance to get instance-ready gear is a real pita. And when you don't get to instance that much, you want to overgear slightly to make up for your gameplay. I can PvE with the best of 'em. Not so much run Shadowfang.

We've grappled with this problem before, and we'll continue to tinker with solutions. The Isle of Quel'Danas provided people with a great sense of progression, at least on a realm-wide level, and it sure felt epic. The Argent Tournament definitely gave players a sense of personal progress, as well as lots of fun toys.

Ewww. The Argent Tournament stunk. STUNK. Not fun. The Isle was at least an easy, visually impressive grind, and I got to put my items to good use waxing demons, so there was a little strat going from quest to quest, but it was still more grindy than epic storyline. They're overselling themselves here.

The Guardians of Hyjal are getting smart in patch 4.2. They're not just assaulting the Firelands with hardcore raiding guilds… they're attacking that place with everything they've got. That includes you, solo players! We've created a whole zone dedicated to daily questing. There are some 60 new quests in total -- that's about half a zone's worth of quest content. While the raiders are concentrating on taking down the likes of Ragnaros, you'll be securing the rest of his fiery domain.

There's also a story here, a chronicle of a vicious, knock-down, drag-out fight that begins in Hyjal and progresses -- over the course of weeks -- across the mountaintop and then into the Firelands themselves...

The progression is personal: you won’t see it happen until you make it happen.

Well, let's hope. I did enjoy the story in HyJal the most, though Therazane was the most visually impressive and the Wildhammer Clan the most memorable. The developers essentially beg you to beta test Firelands in the Watercooler piece, asking you to tell them where the storyline ain't hot. W[hy]tf do I want to see the storyline to tell you how to make the storyline better? The whole point of being a causal quester is that I like to run through the stuff once. If I just loved questing and didn't mind seeing content over again, I'd be an alt-a-holic.

And though Matlocker, prot-boy extraordinaire is now 21, I realized this week that it's been six years since I last quested in Duskwood. SIX YEARS. That's how long I like between doing and repeating my quests. I hope they go PTR to roll-out for Firelands in less than 6 years. And even then I want a cataclysm in between and a good reason -- Recruit-a-Friend and a friend -- before I'll run it.

Much of the motivation here is nostalgia. Just look at my complaints about what they did to Stitches and Acheus. I'm upset about a sword I never used, for heaven's sake. I'm not replaying just for fun. I'm not going to run the PTR and then run Firelands again when it's released. I've no interest in "What If" Jalindrine. I want good story and gear that rewards my serious questing and allows me to enjoy the periodic instance the first time.

/thus ends the lesson ;^)

The end of a grind in achievements

It's finally over. I have the Stump of Time, and now have a gear score of 344. I'm not sure there's much higher level that's useful for a Balance druid that I can get on my own pre-Heroic runs, and nothing I think I can get efficiently. I've regemmed, reenchanted, but not quite yet reforged.

I was going to make a huge retrospective post with tons of pictures, but there were too many, so for now I'm just going to slap in a few of the achievements I got while grinding. And, admittedly, much of this -- particularly Archeology -- was done when I was bored out of my freaking mind during the grinding.

There's at least one more. I received an achievement somewhere about getting 50 Chef's Awards, though I was holding 70 and had spent several before I got it. Seems like lots of the counters for achievements didn't start at Day 0 but at some random implementation point in the future.

Also note the "Next Battle" time for the Baradin's Wardens achievement. Cutting it pretty close. ;^)

I'll try to get up the gumption to write a step-by-step, PvE, casual gamer Balance Gear Guide in the coming days. I ended up buying three pieces, and most of my gear from Normals dropped more than once, iirc, so I think I can give a pretty good, specific list for those leveling alts who want a paint by numbers guide, which I haven't found yet -- which zones to run, which rep to grab in what order, what to buy, etc. Not pick from three items, but get this item, you know? It might not be absolutely "right", but when you're researching this crap, being able to offload all this researching would be nice.

Without further ado...

Gear upgrades and Grinding Tol Barad -- 18 quests a day!

I've been running archaeology digs, farming for Winterspring Cub Whiskers, and grinding Tol Barad while waiting for running normals recently. I recently bagged a Scepter of Power and traded in some JP for the Apple-Bent Bough. With the off-hand intellect enchant, I think I come out ahead of my old Staff of Siphoned Essences. Here they are compared on WoWhead, though it misses the +40 INT from the off-hand enchant. That with a few smarter enchants and though my iLevel is the same, DPS should start looking up. I also traded out my one piece of Heroic gear, the Corrupted Egg Shell, for the normal Gale of Shadows I picked up in my tenth or so run of Grim Batol last night. It was time to stop worrying about convenient mana and to throw in on more DPS.

But the real lesson for my grind comes from
this comment on Baradin's Wardens at WoWhead:

You can do a maximum of 18 daily quests to earn reputation with Baradin's Wardens [A] or Hellscream's Reach [H].

The post continues to tell you how. I've been stopping after "6 daily quests (out of 22) that you can pick up at Baradin Base Camp [A]", when, "If your faction controls Tol Barad, then there are 12 daily quests that you can pick up at Baradin Hold." Whoops. 18 a day (even the more sure 12, since I won't check in that often) would speed up the grind for the Stump of Time just a little bit!

Revamping the Hero class: A better alternative than free max level characters

Spinks recently covered the interesting topic of providing veteran MMORPG players max level characters. On its face, this seems to make a lot of sense. There are certainly two games, at least in WoW, 1.) level grind and 2.) max level, instance-based gear chases. You might separate a third, guild-based, end-game raiding. I, like many who live in 2), would like to be able to play the second with characters I haven't been forced to take through the first.

But *POOF* max level chars seem an ill-thought out money-grab (see UO's advanced characters). Hero classes, or even just plain heroes (high level chars from the start) in conventional classes with their own quick intro quest lines -- combined with alternative and/or class-specific, sped-up quest progressions through old content -- is a better way to go.

So, for instance, our guild needs another tank, and I started a Death Knight this month because I can't stand the thought of leveling from scratch. The DK intro zone was great. Good lore, questionable morals, admittedly, but a decent intro to DK specific talents and abilities.

But what if we had needed a healer? Right now, it's, "Hello, level 1." Imagine starting zones for "hero" druids, pallies, warlocks, etc that are like the DK zone. Give folks just enough time to learn some additional lore and basic class playstyles. It's not a bad compromise.

That said, though the DK was an interesting, mostly successful compromise for Wrath, now running a DK through Cat, I can clearly see that the class has obviously lost some of its prime positioning. A DK starting at a level somewhere between 65 and 75 makes more sense now, and to do it, you're only making minor revamps the starting gear and area. Beautious.

As a DK in Outland, however, it's current the same ole same old. I really don't want to run Zangramash again. That's not compelling. At least in Cat I can run the quest chains I skipped while leveling my main. I took him through Hyjal and Therazane and quickly ended up at 85. There's lots of Vashj'ir and the Egyptian-styled zones I never touched, and I'd like to take a look.

These clearly parallel quest chains in Cat were obviously by design. You could leap from one to another, or you could run them twice. Similar is the literal cataclysm's changes to level 1-60 progressions. Both the parallel quests and remade zones are pretty obvious "New Game+" fixes. I've found myself thinking that Cat's forked quest progression approach to New Game+ might be better handled by one that allows DKs (and other classes) a *class-specific* (or even race-specific) alternative route through Outland and other once-and-done content.

And there's a lot of waste in these "New Games". If I've run both forks in Cat, now what? Also, if I just started WoW, I get exactly zero from the cat-impacted starting zones. Are these progressions better? No, not really, my re-experience of levels 1-14 tells me, it's just new. In a sense, the Cat paradigm for remaking 1-60 is wasted time. You give old players a partial excuse to run 1-60 again, once, but new players are still stuck. Overlaying progressions, Choose Your Own Adventure style, make more sense. Putting the 1-60 revamp work into new 70-80 hero quest lines cut by class and/or race would have been a better use of time.

The heirlooms (and access to gear via shared account gold) sorta provide a Rich Man's alternate to the old grinds, but only in that they make the progressions shorter and share the same logic as instant max level chars. That is, a max level char would skirt the issue completely/take heirlooms to their obvious endpoint. Spinks' comment that, "it's certainly easier than revamping the entire lower level game," is a heck of an understatement, and lets games off too easily. There are better solutions than giving max levels to everyone that allows them to completely skip the often single-player, PvE learning experience.

Rep Ding! Exalted Therazane

What's new with Jal? Not much. I've been running daily normals for Justice Points, and wearing my Therazane tabard for rep. The daily rep quests were boring enough that I've been traveling up in Winterspring grinding Wintersaber Trainer rep instead as I wait for LFG, in part because I saw that, come 4.1, Wintersaber Trainer rep is getting nerfed, and when I say nerfed, I mean homogenized. I should also admit that I spent hours and hours in vanilla farming rugged and other leather from the frostsabers under the rock without ever knowing the trainer was up there, scowling at me killing the wild cats. It was a great place to farm. Rarely anyone there, and nobody really taking down the sabers, who would respawn very quickly. If I'd only known. I did wonder what my mount, a frostsaber, thought about it...

Even so, it didn't take long to get exalted with Therazane. After a few runs, I was just a few hundred points of rep away, and I went back for a final quest. That apparently makes for five exalted reps. Funny, I'm not sure what they are offhand. Therazane (shoulder enchants), Wildhammer (great rep gear for Cat), Sons of Hodir (LK shoulders)... um... (runs to Armory) Apparently the Alliance Vanguard and Stormwind. Who knew?



That said, who really cares? What a payoff!



Wow. Now you know why swag motivates workers, I guess. I remember when I worked at a shop that gave out bonuses for each additional billable hour you clocked, but if you did the math, the percentage of each hour you were bagging dropped after a certain point. If your own company doesn't value each extra hour of your time more, why should you want to give them? Well, that never stopped the company hawks. Anyhow... Looks like I'm susceptible after all.

And for those reading hoping this'll serve as a sort of guide, next is Tol Barad commendations for the Stump of Time, though I'll probably get the frostsaber mount first.

During my daily runs, I'm gradually performing better. The below Recount for Halls of Origination (I came in part-way) is pretty good, and I was off-healing much of the time for our ungeared Shammy.



Shammy follows:



It's not a big deal, and I don't mind our three wipes (!), but I was surprised to feel my own reaction when I saw the lack of enchants and gemming.



Though I didn't have a violent reaction and am actually happy to pull along newbies, I see now why people get so irate when undergeared folk try running heroics. And it's much easier to carry undergeared dps (not that I've been yelled at, as I've only run one heroic) than healz. She just couldn't keep up. So I went elven for a while and threw around some resto-ige (still spec'd balance) and had fun. I also have to take some grief for not knowing that Void Seekers heal themselves if you left two stay close to each other. Whoops.



In other news, Spinks has stopped playing. No big deal. I think it's funny to hear someone trying to figure out the distinction between quitting and quitting for a while. Goodness knows, if you've read this blog at all, you know I take breaks for months at a time. Blizzard expects you to at this point, I believe. Doesn't want you to, but expects it.

Ah yes, I also dodged the temptation to buy a MSI R6850 Cyclone PE/OC Radeon HD 6850 with a gig of VRAM for what's now under $170 with rebate. I decided this was what I wanted when I put together my new rig, but I've been sliding by with what's almost a four year-old card. I mean, look at the roller coaster heatsink! Still, $170 is just $70 shy of what I paid for a quad-core AMD Athlon II at 3 GHz, a new mobo, and four gigs of RAM. Crazy.



The only other thing I've got is that the Frostesaber Stalkers really have it in for the bunnies. I mean, wow. They'll leap four times their body length, it seems, to take one down, and then they don't even bother eating it. See the pic of three going after one at once. INSANE. ;^)



That last one looks stepped on.

Collage brought to you by the fine folk at Microsoft Paint.

On: Winterspring Frostsaber Mount Grind Changed in 4.1 - The Wowhead Blog

More of my comment crossposts. I've started running Frostsaber rep now 1.) to pretend I'm protesting and 2.) because I'm bored out of my mind as I wait for a PUG to show up.

Winterspring Frostsaber Mount Grind Changed in 4.1 - The Wowhead Blog:

I don't understand the point of this change.

Why this obsession the new dev team has with homogenizing everything?

+1

There was a time when you could argue that a set of of Nature's Wrath gear was a good poor man's tiered armor for a boomkin. Then it didn't matter that Wrath was Nature dmg and Starfire was Arcane. Resistances nearly disappeared. Instead of type-specific spellpower boosts, it was just "spellpower." Then "of healing" was the same as "of spellpower".

This might seem unrelated, but it's the same sort of homogenization. Gear standardized. Rep runs standardized. Is it really wrong that the Alliance can get a crappy but pretty ground mount in a day and Horde can't? Dude, I farmed frostsabers for weeks for leather in vanilla and never even saw the guy on top of the rock. If 80% of the Alliance don't know he's there, what percent of the Horde care?

I wonder what percent of WoWers depend on WoWhead.com and similar, outside of the game, help sites? Doesn't anyone play casually? Why pander to either type of player (casual gamers who don't want to learn the difference between healing and spellpower, and hardcore gamers who don't want cross-faction mounts to be different. At all. No matter what.) to the point that the whole game is watered down? Does "of Nature's Wrath" or grinding rep really kill the game?

If anything, they should put the rep right back like it was in vanilla and make it a serious, long-term grind that only the truly crazy complete.

OMGWTFBBQ!! UNLIMTED FREE SAVAGE LEATHER IN TOL BARAD!!shift-1!

I promise not to make another post title like that again. At least any time soon. BUT OMGWTFBBQ!!!! This, my friends, is why soloers/PvErs run druids.

Travel Form + Hibernate == Unlimited, pain-free savage leather.

Gearing for Naxx

Welp, I'm trying to spend some of 79 positioning myself for good entry raid gear. Thanks to WoW Insider/WoW.com's Dan O'Halloran's comment about Shifting Perspectives' gear at 80 list, I thought I was starting off well. Unfortunately I made two mistakes.

The first was to go for shoulders first, and to try for Shifting's best quest piece: "Mantle of the Flesh Giant, from the quest The Flesh Giant Champion in Icecrown". Decent questline, horribly quick XP, but it turns out that Mantle isn't even as good as one of their runner ups, "Purehorn Spaulders, a Leatherworking BoE," which not only gives more boomkin power, but is a leather item. So I dropped the fleshwerks quest line and off I went last night to start farming Hath'ar Skimmers.

The respawn rate was ridiculous, and I was able to put on some melee gear and the Staff of ye olde Sorrowful Chieftan and grab 30 Nerubian Chitin's in no time. I was helped by someone who didn't reply to /whispers who was whacking everything in sight, but didn't skin. I usually like to /whisper before I start vulturing all the leftovers, but after throwing a MotW and Thorns on the farmer, I gave up. It was a level 80 character, so I'm not sure what the angle was. Gold farming? No idea. The mobs did keep respawning so quickly that it supported four folks running around whacking things. You can just barely see my proverbial benefactor over Jal's left (your right) shoulder in the screengrab with the Spaulders.

And though the Spaulders look pretty kewl and all, this brings us to my second mistake: Not comparing the list to Laser Chickens. I completely missed his wrap up, and it's a very good one. For shoulders, I do have the best craftable from Shifting Perspectives, it appears, but I'm apparently looking for Mantle of the Eternal Sentinel, a BoE drop from Sartharion. That's a big difference. Still, Shifting's on the mark here.

Shifting might not be for other slots, though, compared to Chicken's more recent gear. Let's compare the "accessible" gear (so the best spellpower (oversimp, I know) from Chicken's list, with the best craftable for any drops, and from WoW.com's.

(This will have to be a two-parter; here's the Chicken list, and the Chicken List totals:)

Intellect 405
Stamina 541 (616)
Spirit 185
Armor 3087
Resilience rating 186
Critical strike rating 238
Haste rating 37
Spell power 673
+ two sockets

Set bonuses in parens.

3.1 fishing changes are unethical. [sic]

I put a pretty phat comment up on Restokin, a blog I enjoy even if they spec'd their druid wrong. ;^D Unfortunately they were championing another change in the game that makes it more "accessible," which plays into a number of my pet peeve topics. Here it is, reproduced below (actually, I ended up drafting here then c&p'n there.)

However, I really think they made some great improvements to fishing in the 3.1 patch that convinced me to go back and work on my fishing some more.

What was that change? I can now fish anywhere, even with a terrible fishing skill. I could fish in the dalaran sewers or pond. I can fish anywhere in Northrend.

This reminds me too much of why of Teeth and Claws said he was hanging it up and leaving WoW: the game's becoming too accessible, imo. He's not the only druid that's said see ya to WoW recently either (a bit about it here).

There's a problem with ghettoizing the old world as well as cheapening the work behind the sense of achievement those that truly grinded through parts of the game have "earned". This change in fishing reminds me a bit too much of the reasoning behind dailies. Make the game easier and bribe your players with a little virtual cash. Good thing WoW learned the lesson from Ultima Online that a closed economic system doesn't work, and went straight to manipulating the virtual market in an attempt to maximize reality cash. (I'd say there's nothing inherently wrong with that, but then Jonathan Blow apparently thinks there is. Check the RPG Vault article I linked earlier, and Teeth and Claws is talking the topic up some more now too.)

And seriously (insert smilies! I kid Hasselhoff, I kid!), there's no excuse for a druid not to level up fishing the "right way". Moonglade teleport and a few casts before sign-offs, anyone?! ;^)

Attunements made you do your homework

Here's a longish quote from Part-time Druid (huh? Sounds familiar; luckily I think I predate the blog) called "Removing Attunements BAD!", posted in Feb, quite a while before I started ranting that the new, advancement-friendly WoW is a bad idea. Here, the Part Timer shows there are practical reasons to keep things as difficult to attain -- self-training.

So, Black Temple will be open for anyone who wants to enter come patch 2.4. Surely there are hardcore raiding guilds everywhere bemoaning this development, angry that basically anyone with an account can now tread on “their” turf. Well, I can’t evade that argument. It’s true. I can now get together with 24 other guildies and hit Black Temple. It should be fun for us when we wipe in about five seconds, and the fun will surely continue as we wipe over and over and over again. You see, the point of the attunements to these major league instances was twofold. One, it required a good deal of coordination and determination to complete the necessary steps. Two, the “hoops” you had to jump through FORCED you to prepare yourself for what was to come gear-wise.

One might find the same argument works even for new players who blast through the lower levels too quickly.

Cheaping the WoW experience to entice new players?

I was reading WoW Insider today and was intrigued to hear that lowbies can get mounts at level 30 instead of 40 now.

This prompted a response from Zarhym [a Blizzard forum mod, iirc] 'Allowing players to purchase and ride mounts at level 30 does not at all diminish your prior accomplishments in my eye sockets, Ithnin' This was followed by a post explaining that new players may get their mounts ten levels sooner, but they have ten and soon twenty more levels to go through before they reach the endgame. The majority of responses in this thread are supportive of the change.

I'll disagree, as you might have guessed already from my Take the Nether off the AH post. It's easier to level with a mount. That's why we all buy them. The world contracts when you've got a way of getting places 60% or 100% more quickly, and that means it takes less time to to whatever it is your character needs to do.

To level a new character, you still, generally speaking, have to pass through the same content to get your experience as you did when WoW was first released. Now Duskwood, one of the more memorable zones in my leveling below 40, will have all sorts of folk riding through at breakneck speed. That makes Duskwood easier, and cheapens the time I spent there, and I was there a while.

(And if memory serves (it might not), haven't the experience requirements for leveling already been cut considerably? Certainly attunement's been shut down, which stinks.)

But here's my main gripe: Blizzard had already found a way to make leveling easier for your alt characters. It's called starting your Death Knight at level 55. My highest level alt is level seven. I don't care much for the lower levels. I'll certainly be giving a Death Knight a shot, though, even though they sound like a moonkin-like hybrid (non-squishing magic using tankable) in many respects. A Death Knight is already going to be powerful enough to run the content I remember enjoying. Heck, if you just start me off strong enough to adventure in Duskwood, I'd probably play alts more.

Does the Death Knight cheapen the game? Arguably yes, but in a much different way than making mounts cheaper and more available or reducing XP needed to level. Now experienced players can create a special class of alt char that doesn't have to lowbie grind. We've solved the problem that Blizzard must have seen when BC came out. Sure, Blood Elves and Draenei are k3wl, but I didn't have much fun blasting mana eels or whatever they were for 7 hp a pop. The Blood Elf starting levels looked spectacular, but I couldn't leave them and quickly got tired of snarking around -- and heck, my main saw the same architecture in Outland. Many other veterans must have been similarly unimpressed with the new alt experience. Okay, Death Knight in and problem (hopefully) solved.

So the main reason to make lowbie leveling easier, imo, must be to get new players involved more quickly. This suggests that the endgame (and near endgame) content must be much more enjoyable than the lower level questing to new players. Is the motivation that if you can get players new to WoW to endgame quicker, they're more likely to stay and keep paying?

Instead of cheapening lower levels by playing god with leveling economics, why not do like you did with the Death Knight -- put in the development time and change the game. Put in instances for level 5 characters, perhaps. Have lowbie PvP battlegrounds. Allow people to level in PvP until level 30 or some such. Now traditional leveling is still an option, but you've got the flash that's needed to keep some of your new revenue stre... ur, players.

If you don't simply introduce new routes in the same vein for leveling lowbies but instead starkly change the lowbie game experience, you might find more veterans starting over too.