I am struggling a bit when it comes what to call this post because I don’t want it to seem overly alarmist. That said I have noticed something over the last seven days that gives me concern. I mentioned these thoughts to my friend Eliyon yesterday and at 7:00 pm CST last night he agreed that there might be something to it. Last week there would have likely been 8-10 people on at that time of the evening, but last night there were three… and of those 3 one of which was Stargrace’s auctioneer that she leaves logged in most of the time while doing other things. There has been a noticeable drop off in activity.
Granted at this point we are twenty four days after the official launch of WoW Classic, and also at this point folks are exiting what I would call as the “easy levels”. At 37 the going is so much slower than it was even in the 20s and I have been chewing on this level for a couple of nights now. Granted I am not focused on being optimal and more focused on trying to get as much ore as I can to push up blacksmithing and mining, along with keeping up with the constant maintenance of needing to craft food. As a warrior I eat an excessive amount of food, and in order to lower downtime I am eating every 2 or 3 encounters.
I am not sure if I can really call this a trend yet since it more or less just started happening over the last week. I know of several cases where folks have stuff going on, like Grace for example is going to be out of pocket for another two and a half weeks or so. The west coasters don’t tend to start showing up until 9 ish my time, which means that in many cases we are ships passing in the night. They are coming on as I am logging off and I think players are starting to move away from playing the game at any cost and trying to find a more healthy balance. All of these things are probably adding up to the absence that I have noticed, but it does still give me pause.
For me at least I have not felt the sirens call of something else. I didn’t even pick up Borderlands 3 for example because I knew I would be otherwise engaged. Similarly there is a bunch of stuff coming out this week that I am likely going to just let sit there unpurchased until I hit a lull. The desire to hit 60 and gear up is way too great to allow myself to be distracted by something else. The only thing looming on the Horizon that is likely going to pull me away at least part of the time is the impending release of Destiny 2 Shadowkeep on October 1st. Even my beloved Monster Hunter World and its Iceborne expansion has not been enough of a draw away from Classic.
The positive is that there seems to be a group of us all in the same level range that seems to be similarly committed to this nonsense. So long as I can keep easily building guild groups I am likely going to stay engaged. However I wanted to throw this discussion out there. Have you been noticing a drop off in your own guilds? What things have been pulling players away from the game that you have noticed? I am curious if I am alone in this observation. Ultimately I am hoping this ends up being just a “bad week” and not a lasting trend. The servers are still actively populated and the chat channels lively, but I have noticed a thinning out of players in the level range I happen to be in.
I think ultimately I am finding myself between waves. I am too slow to be part of the “first” crowd, and too fast to be among the folks that are still in their early to mid twenties. I think maybe I need a change of scenery. I have been focused on grinding out the items needed for the Warrior level 40 weapon quest, and doing runs along the walls of Arathi for ore. This means I am moving every so slowly, but it does give me constant access to raptors which serve as two sources of cooking materials. I still have no clue where I am going to get the money in a few levels for a mount, and I figure that is going to be another phase that stalls me out as I go find something grey to grind. The various “gold farms” that I have heard of are all heavily camped, so I may just go without a mount for awhile.
Last night I participated in something and will pay today for it. I’ve kept a fairly firm rule that I try not to get engaged in much within Classic after about 8 pm CST. The reasoning being that I generally head to bed around 9:30 pm and go do my winding down activities before falling asleep. Very few dungeons take less time than a minimum of an hour and a half. Gnomeregan was one that I had expected would take roughly 2 hours, and was ultimately right. When I got home however we had all of the members of a group minus one player, that was expected to be logging in soon… so I allowed myself to commit to tanking.
The challenge there is that soon was a little longer than I expected and we had not started the instance until about 8:40… which had us leaving the instance around 10:40 two full hours later. It was a lot of fun, but I also need to not allow myself to get pulled into this practice on the regular because I definitely can feel its toll this morning, as I am a little groggier and creakier than I normally am. 5 am comes really really early. There was a time when I was in the habit of going to bed at midnight every night, but I have gotten out of that habit and it is probably for the better health wise. Classic and timezones are conspiring to try and shift that however.
I think everyone has memories of Gnomeregan being a giant pain in the butt, but to be honest I wasn’t exactly sure why until setting foot into the dungeon last night. There are a bunch of mechanics that just conspire to make the player suffer. Everything seems significantly higher aggro than most areas, and there are a bunch of “gotcha” mechanics that allow what was a stable pull to snowball with a large number of adds quickly. There is also the deep level range of the stuff at the top of the zone being level 25 and the final content being around 36. That deep level range is felt significantly as you gain confidence on the early packs and start paying for it later on the final trench clear to Thermaplugg.
For the most part I had been praising the fact that we had the old feel with some of the more modern conveniences of reasonable pathing. Pets for example do a good job of not pulling everything in the zone if you hop down off something. For the most part they now just despawn and you summon them back. Chain aggro also had seemingly been less of a thing, that was until getting into Gnomeregan. While doing the final clear the mobs are packed so tightly between two sides of a trench and the basin of the trench… that things get really twitchy making it extremely easy to wind up with a massive train of Dark Iron Dwarves seemingly coming from out of nowhere.
The above image shows what happened to us twice as we started pulling that last stretch. At first we were trying to hug the lefthand wall and pull only the mobs along that catwalk, and managed to get a massive train from the trench. Then we opted to pull our way down the trench and had almost reached the bottom… when we got a massive train coming from either side. There was no fighting through the sheer volume of mobs that came at us. The first time we had shaman reincarnation to get us back up and running, but the second time we remembered the back door to the instance and the fact that ghosts can apparently run through doors. We had the key in our inventory from a previous encounter and were able to get back down to the Thermaplugg area rather quickly.
We successfully completed all of the quests associated with Gnomeregan that were available to the horde, and I finished off one level and managed to make a little bit of a dent into the next. Another funny thing happened on the way to the irradiated cesspool however. We were waiting on the boat at Ratchet and up rolls another Undead player named Blodghast. We were talking about it in party chat when he sent me a tell saying something to the effect that “we might be cousins”. I need to friend the character and actually run some stuff with them given they have a good taste in names.
All in all it was a really fun night, but I need to ration this whole staying up way later than I intended thing. I guess Thursday is a reasonable night to do this on given that my Fridays are generally fairly light. Given that it is Friday however we might do some more late night shenanigans because I am starting to collect quests for Scarlet Monastery. I do feel a bit bad because Grace is going to more or less be out of commission for the next three weeks. By that point I will have leveled well out of her optimal range, but I plan on running a bunch of dungeons to help her catch back up.
I am woefully behind on my blog post reading, and as a result I did not read this excellent post from Bhagpuss on Inventory Full until yesterday. If you have already read that post and my comment on it, you are going to get a bit of a sense of deja vu since more or less I figure this will be a remix of some of the ideas contained therein. The post in question is in itself a bit of a remix of a bunch of OTHER excellent posts, so I highly suggest digging down into each of the posts that spawned that one as well.
This is largely going to be about my own experiences with retail versus classic players. I am going to comment again that I really think it is weird that we landed on the term retail to describe the live modern game, but that is coming from Blizzard ultimately. I’m seeing a lot of interesting patterns when it comes to the players in House Kraken. At this point we have 103 members in the guild with a smaller percentage of that total accounting for various alts. It is a smattering of people that I have known from lots of different places but for the sake of this discussion I am going to break them down based on their relationship to the live retail World of Warcraft Client.
The Bounced – We saw them the first weekend but more recently they have returned to the fold of the retail client. Various folks arrive at this point for various reasons, but given that I am Battle.net or Real ID Friends with a lot of folks I can see them over on the modern side of the house.
Cheating Loyalists – These are folks who are playing Classic but still very much still playing the Retail client. They may be spending a lot of time in Classic but are still logging over for raid nights and the occasional round of dailies.
Honeymooner/Content Locust – I couldn’t think of a great term for this, but this is the group I fall into. We go hard and heavy with a new World of Warcraft expansion until we hit the cap and then at some point we fade away. Often times we revisit a few times during an expansion life cycle, usually when new content is released but similarly gobble it all up and disappear again. We love it while we love it and then we get disillusioned.
Embittered Veteran – These folks played the game and loved it at some past point in time but had a break from the game at one point or another and never really returned to the fold. They were seemingly gone permanently until Classic happened.
In the example of our guild, the Bounced is a really small group of people who played it… turned their nose up at it and walked away. The Cheating Loyalists are another smallish group of people who are trying to play both clients at the same time. The honeymooners make up a much larger contingency, but I would say the probably largest chunk of our guild are people who walked away and never expected to come back. So while Classic is draining some resources away from the live client, it seems more to me like it is expanding the base of players and bringing back folks that never expected to be playing let alone enjoying the game ever again.
That said I am still seeing a lot of Anti-Classic sentiment coming from those who were left behind, because it is still having an effect. I imagine at this point late in the expansion cycle, it is already a challenge to pull together raids. Losing any number of players to something shiny and new means that it becomes all the harder to make them happen. Hell I am already hearing some rumblings from Tam about having trouble pulling his Final Fantasy XIV raid and wondering if Classic has anything to do with it. For me personally it has been a time and commitment thing, but I would imagine that part of it absolutely is the fact that I didn’t engage in it knowing that I would be playing Classic a few weeks later.
The angry rhetoric that I am seeing from live players however is nothing new. I’ve seen the same thing time and time again anytime something new pops up to pull players away from live. When Warhammer Online launched, we got a bunch of push back from our Blizzard Loyalist guildies that we were off venturing into another game. The same thing happened in a bigger way with Rift as several of us broke off from the pack more permanently at that point. Another big departure happened with the launch of Star Wars the Old Republic, and with it more frustrated players who couldn’t imagine playing another game.
The thing is… it sucks to be the one left behind and World of Warcraft has a phenomena attached to it that no other MMORPG has ever had. That is that World of Warcraft has a higher percentage of players who have never played another MMORPG other than WoW and in some cases play no other games. We had a lot of them in our guild over the years that were brought into the fold of the game through a friend, relative or spouse and then stayed behind when the person who brought them in continued the cycle of game hopping that most “core” gamers experience. In some way I think of Blizzard as the AOL of games, in that it brought a bunch of new people into the industry but very few of them actually trickled out into the larger world that existed past that entry point.
There will always be a group of players who whom World of Warcraft live client is the only thing they care about, and cannot really see why anyone would care about anything else. For that group of players they will also always view anything that pulls players away form the thing that they love as a hostile action. However as I said above in our own guild… the vast majority of players where not active Warcraft players. In so many cases these are players who had been gone from the game for years if not over a decade. They are arriving back at the doorstep and walking inside because the game has returned to a state where they actually enjoyed it. For this group of players the classic design has been a poisoned well for a really long time, and in truth pulling these players back in can only be good for Blizzard as a whole.
The problem with modern WoW is that the design has become super limited to a set of activities that have been deemed to be the pinnacle of gameplay. In many ways the game as a whole is a cattle chute leading to the abattoir that is the end game raiding grind. If you take raiding out of the picture completely, there really isn’t much game left for the players who have no intent on raiding. I remember reading an article about Classic WoW and contained within was some data behind raiding. It was said that less than 10% of the players of the original game had ever completed a raid and less than 3% had set foot inside of Naxxramas.
I think they took this data and tried to figure out ways to slowly shovel players towards raiding. There were a bunch of missteps in Burning Crusade, because they seemingly came up with the calculation that 40 players was too big of an ask, and by lowering the numbers to 25 more players would have access to raiding. With Wrath they dropped this down to 10 players as the entry point, as well as adding a bunch of catch up mechanics late in the cycle to pull players towards being geared enough to participate. Cataclysm saw the introduction of Looking For Raid and a watered down version of raiding that could almost serve as a practice mode. With Pandaria the gear design became more formulaic and more dependent upon the item level, sanding off a lot of the interesting effects for the sake of utilitarian simplicity.
Over the years the other methods of playing the game suffered for the push of getting players into raids as soon as possible. Sure there are players who make an entire game out of pet battles, or knocking out achievements or financial player versus player actions on the auction house with gold making. However right now in Classic it feels like the world is massive and full of possibilities. For me personally my game method of choice was running dungeons with my friends and making new friends through pulling people together for groups. I liked meeting people out in the world because it was so often that we grouped up to complete objectives.
In theory Mythic dungeons should have been my jam, but they were permanently ruined with the introduction of the timer mechanic. I hate being on a timer, because it feels like I am locked to doing a thing for a fixed amount of time. I also loathe the “big pulls” and “pull faster” mentality that arose in World of Warcraft. I like to chain pull, but I like doing it on my own terms while taking into account all of the arguments of healer mana and damage output. I set what I feel like is the fastest sustainable pace, but having that timer makes me feel like I need to constantly play loose and fast or else I am sacrificing the potential reward at the end. While this changed eventually and you always get rewards regardless of how long you take… knowing the timer is there still soured the experience.
Classic has been a breath of fresh air for so many of us, and a remembering that there was a time when we wholeheartedly loved the gameplay experience. There is a certain characteristic of the gameplay that makes it almost impossible to be truly optimal, and in that there is a freedom. Sure you can play better, but every aspect of the game is fighting against you building something perfect. Everything from the gear to the ability specs all has an aspect of wiggle room in it and acceptance that you just can’t stack only the stats that you want without getting some things that are not super useful to you. As an example see all of the great rogue daggers with caster stats on them, and the tanking gear that for some reason inexplicably has heaps of spirit.
The game pushes back against us in a way that the modern client doesn’t. We can’t achieve perfection, but we can achieve “good enough”. It is in that lack of optimal game-play that I revel and the potential that it presents of lots of different divergent gearing choices. There are so few items that exist in the game that are just universally better than the item that came before it. Each time you are making an interesting choice to give up this in favor of that. The wide range of what is usable gear also ends up pushing you to go off on a journey to find this or that item that might change the way you play the game, rather than always narrowing your focus to a smaller and smaller group of activities.
To those players who don’t get the joy that this represents… I am sorry. Let us have this moment, because it gives us a glimmer of hope that maybe we can have MMORPGs again to play along with all of the MMOs we presently have. There is this quiet trend of letting players roll back the decisions and play the original core experience. While there is a huge dose of nostalgia in that experience, it is honestly more about returning to a style of game play that is just poorly supported in the modern grind to the endgame experience. It is my hope that someone will catch onto this trend and start building new gameplay experiences that draw heavily from what worked so well on the games leading up to World of Warcraft, and that was sadly forgotten after the industry fixated on chasing its success.
I am reaching a point where I can say that I unabashedly love Bloodsail Buccaneers and the players who call it home. As someone who traditionally rolls characters on Roleplaying Servers but doesn’t actually roleplay at all in game… it can occasionally put me in an awkward space. However there are moments when role-players make the entire world a better place with impromptu zone events. Enter the Goldblood Caravan a roleplaying guild that focuses on being a trading caravan that rolls into a town and sets up shop offering goods to players and bartering for raw resources.
What this meant in practice is that they offered really cheap bags, weapons and armor in trade for a smattering of whatever raw resources that players happened to have. Got a stack of linen? Awesome here is some gear for you. You a miner and gathered up some ore? Awesome here is some gear for you. I have an addon that lets me see what role characters are set to in a given guild and they have roles based on this them as well. One of the players was the Caravan leader, another a bodyguard, and then another couple something like artisan. I am so on board with this being an active presence on our server and will be interested to see how this shifts as we all level.
Making Friends and Enemies
As far as the game goes I moved my way out to Desolace last night and started working on the Centaur tribal quests. Before logging for the night I managed to get friendly with Clan Gelkis and complete the 15 Centaur Ears quest. I am not exactly sure why but I have a soft spot in my heart for Desolace. I find it weirdly peaceful and I think I liked it back in Vanilla because I was a skinner… and there were so many things to skin. It would be a major challenge but that axe I picked up in Razorfen Kraul seems to really be helping me whittle through the mobs.
The only negative of the zone is that everything is super spread out. I could in theory move to Stranglethorn Vale and have a much faster leveling experience. The problem there however is that I have done STV so many times as an Alliance player and am not super looking forward to going back and doing those quests. I mean the Nessingway quests are worth a ton of experience and just involve a ton of directed killing… which tend to be my favorite style of quests. However I do want to finish the Gelkis clan stuff before they start to drop in experience. Also last night I managed to get a couple of Mageweave that I sent to Grace for eventual bags.
I’ve still yet to pug anything, because I have not really had to. That is the benefit of being a tank in a world where being a tank is always going to be in need. I felt bad last night because Tam and Eli were trying to make a Gnomeregan run happen last night. The problem with that however is it was starting around 8:30 my time and I figure as big as Gnomer is, it would be at a minimum a two hour run. With me being sickly right now I really need not to stay up super late, and as a result I declined. I was up later than I should have been Monday night and while I don’t think it actually made me sicker, it definitely was probably not a thing I should have done for healing purposes.
Timezones are the worst, and have been a constant problem since a significant chunk of my player group moved to the west. The two hour difference makes a bigger deal now that I am trying really hard to head to bed around 9:30 to begin my normal winding down process. Generally speaking I head to bed around 9:30/10 and then fiddle around on my tablet for another thirty minutes to an hour until I fall asleep. The wind down period really seems to help the quality of my sleep because it gives my brain time to shut down rather than laying down and feeling pressured to sleep quickly because 5 am is only “a few hours” away. Having a more structured plan towards sleep seems to have reduced my incidence of insomnia, which also makes my life better.
