MMORPG

The first hurdle of a guild is getting the 10 silver required for the charter. We managed to get that within the first few hours of Classic. The bigger hurdle however is the 10 gold required to be able to choose your tabard design. I remember back in Vanilla we did some runs of Deadmines where we vendored everything that someone didn’t actually need and funneled that money into funding the 10 gold. This time around we took a more communal approach. As you reach 20 you start getting a little more wiggle room in your money situation, and as such I set up one of my alts as a banker and folks mailed donations to it.

Over the course of four days and lots of generosity we gathered the 10 gold needed to buy the tabard design, and last night when I first got on I labored over making sure to pick the right items. I really wish there was a number system or something so that I could make sure that what I was choosing was exactly what I wanted to choose. I had used some of the tabard designers to come up with the basics of what I wanted and last night was largely just trying to match that design in the tiny window that is the tabard designer and the generally poor lighting conditions of Undercity.

In the time it took to earn the money I also cobbled together a logo. The idea for the tabard was to make it sorta look like a pirate flag given that we are playing on the pirate themed Bloodsail Buccaneers server. The purple border is for the Forsaken given that a huge chunk of us were Forsaken to facilitate the signing of the charter. I also happen to really like purple as a color and thanks to Ultros I will always associate the color with octopoids. In my travels I found a really cool woodcut illustration of an octopus on a public domain site and I incorporated that into the logo.

Other than setting the tabard, last night was largely one of chill leveling. I originally went over the HIllsbrad to help Tam out with a quest, but then realized it was at the very end of a quest chain… where I opted to try and catch up so we could do it together. I did not realize this was one of those quest chains that went on forever and I made it to step three before I stalled out a bit and reached a phase where I am going to need to call in some help myself to push through it. I tried duoing it with a Shaman but we just didn’t have enough oomph to push through it.

In other bits of excitement, thanks to a pretty regular flow of materials from Dynar I am now officially an Expert Blacksmith. This is another point where I did not remember things working like they do. I kept trying to train in Undercity and my memory told me that I should be able to train the next rank at level 20 and 125 skill… both of which I had passed. After a quick jaunt over to the WoWhead Classic blacksmithing page I realized that I would need to take the Zeppelin. I vague remember this now but in order to train a skill you have to find a higher skilled smith than you are currently. So in order to get to Expert I had to find an Artisan, and the only ones of those that exist are in Orgrimmar and Ironforge.

Then when I want to move to Artisan I will have to go to Booty Bay and track down the only Master Blacksmith in the game. Now it makes sense as to why the quest for the purple smithing hammer was in Stranglethorn Vale. So at some point… I am going to need to make my way to Booty Bay, which thankfully is WAY easier for the Horde than it is for the Alliance. It also means that I am going to have to do the faction repair method in Dire Maul if I decide I want to become friendly with the Bloodsail Buccaneers. I mean I could trash my goblin rep once I have trained all of the available patterns… but that is a decision for a really long time from now.

Since I took yesterday off and I have a post in me, I figure I will make two posts today.  World of Warcraft Classic has shook my world like few other games have. It is making me re-evaluate a lot of my own memories.  Largely for some time I have been in this headspace of thinking that maybe I had just grown apart from the type of experience that World of Warcraft had provided.  Cataclysm is the point where I first made a break from the game, and there were a bunch of extenuating circumstances surrounding that.  

Cataclysm represented the end of non-guild raiding as a whole and it saw House Stalwart ballooning in size overnight as we tried to incorporate all of the different cultures that made up the satellite guilds that raided with us as part of the Duranub Raiding Company.  It also saw us reaching a point where we were trying to make 4 different 10 player raid teams function at the same time, and I had allowed myself to get snagged by the most hardcore of these teams. I’ve never really been a hardcore raider in mindset, and it lead to me playing the game not for fun, but for success.

I burned out and bounced extremely hard, and am realizing that I just used Rift as a handy lifeboat to ferry me away from the gameplay and experiences that I had not been enjoying.  I also found the breaking of the world to be a frustrating experience and didn’t enjoy seeing all of these areas that I had come to know like the back of my hand to be completely changed in the process.  Cataclysm was a turning point in the way I viewed World of Warcraft, and while I came back and played each expansion the time until I bounced kept getting shorter.

As I said before, I reasoned this shift as me reaching a point where I was a different sort of player than the World of Warcraft experience really supported.  However this made me start to question my feelings towards Classic WoW as well. Was I simply viewing that time through rose colored glasses? Was it not as magical as I remembered it being and was simply the circumstances that it was the best game we had available to us at that time?  I felt certain that there was no way I could go back in time and feel the way that I felt when I first stepped foot into Mulgore.

Playing Classic has been this deeply cathartic experience, because no…  it very much is as good of a game as I remembered it being. Sure there are frustrations with the missing quality of life elements that we gained over the years, but on some level that makes everything we do have feel all the more special.  I feel like I am earning my way through the game for the first time since probably Wrath of the Lich King. Each mob kill, each level ding, each time I go bankrupt at the trainer… feels like I did something significant. The fact that one week into the game I am only level 25 feels important.

I remember in Wrath I decided to level a Deathknight and had it up to raid reader in seven days of actual time.  The leveling game was probably the thing that I enjoyed the most out of World of Warcraft and it was truncated to a fashion where it no longer mattered.  Starting a brand new toon and getting it to level 120 is reportedly a 5 to 10 day process. The bulk of the game has been sped up to the point where it just doesn’t feel like it matters anymore.  Pouring on ten levels in an evening makes every single ding feel less important than the last.

The Community is another aspect of the game that I had missed, because effectively human interaction had been optimized out of the game.  Over the last week I’ve seen a lot of bitter tweets talking about how we could be communicating right now in live, and that we just choose not to.  The truth is I have made attempts to bridge this gap because there are certain protocols that I have gotten used to thanks to the much better communication in Final Fantasy XIV.  In that game it is effectively expected for you to join a group and say some sort of greeting. If people are feeling communicative then often times there will be a rolling banter as you do content.

With both Legion and Battle for Azeroth I attempted to move this protocol over to World of Warcraft.  I would join each new group with a hearty “Hey Folks!” and occasionally I would get a response back. However most recently this greeting is met with silence or grumblings to “pull faster” as we all barrel forward silently along the most efficient path towards the final boss.  I’ve seen a lot of this same “silent running” mentality start infecting the groups in Final Fantasy XIV, and I sorta miss the random conversations I would get into there as well.

In Classic however the model has changed drastically because for the first time since the launch of Wrath we actually need other players.  I don’t mean need as in to run dungeons or group content, but need as in to complete quests period. I accept every group invite because I know that I will be getting valuable assets at my disposal in the form of more bodies to kill things faster.  I stick around after I finish my kills to make sure the rest of the party gets theirs because I know it is highly likely that I will run into this player again at another date in the future.

I’ve created a social channel on Bloodsail Buccaneers and I am using these interacts as an opportunity to snag people for it.  Yesterday alone in two random groups I met two different pairs of people who seemed to be both competent and good-natured, and snagged them away to the channel.  When it comes time to build harder content groups at maximum level this channel will serve as a resource for our entire guild and maybe even serve as the basis of a non-guild raid.  I am systematically working towards that goal as I move through the world, because each person I meet has a permanence that just doesn’t exist in the current WoW Climate.

What I mean by that is we are no longer only exposed to players from our own server.  Often times when you push a button and get a group you are thrown in with a batch of players scattered across a large block of servers.  That means you are likely never see that Priest of Earthen Ring or Hunter from Scarlet Monastery ever again. Because of this a lot of the investment goes out the window when you know it won’t lead to future grouping experiences?  In Classic on BB, I am constantly running into the same players over and over so it is worth that extra effort to send a player a tell thanking them when I got a drive by buff.

Classic is effectively unspoiled and still pristine, and part of me wants to preserve it at all costs.  Argent Dawn my server since launch on the other hand has been tainted by fifteen years worth of bad blood, toxicity and apathy.  I can carve out a peaceful existence in my own guild, but I find it hard to be willing to put much effort into making a change to the ecosystem as a whole.  Social Channels were killed when the Dungeon Finder went in at the end of wrath, and I killed my own best home for making a change when I let ArgentDawn.us forums atrophy and die.

I’m fifteen years wiser going into Classic, as are a good number of the people that I am playing with in House Kraken.  I am loving the experience of getting to revisit a time and place that I held so high in my memory, and at the same time building brand new memories.  Classic really is a story engine because I’ve run Ragefire Chasm, Wailing Caverns, Shadowfang Keep and Deadmines and in every single instance I have a few stories to tell about them.  Classic excels and producing quirky moments and those are the sort of thing that embed memories in your brain. I’ve probably run Freehold a dozen times, and I can’t point out a single instance in any of those times that was memorable enough to freeze it in my brain.

Classic represents this magical opportunity to see MMORPGs before they changed.  I am determined to enjoy every moment of this while it lasts. Who knows we might really make it work and get raids going.  Even if we don’t however I am going to have a bunch of great new memories to take with me into whatever game comes next.

I should in theory write about staying motivated this morning, given it was my list of suggested topics for each week and I have not touched that one. However the biggest suggestion I can give you in order to keep motivated is to follow your heart. There are going to come a lot of times when you feel like you should be making one post for various reasons, but you actually want to write a completely different post. My suggestion to you is to always write about the thing that interests you the most regardless if it fits neatly into your blog.

Nothing saps your spirit more than feeling like you need to write about a thing just because it is popular or you think for some reason you will gain a bunch of views. You are not going to get rich off of your blog, and it is highly unlikely you will ever get enough money through shilling products to make a sustainable living. Instead you need to find what draws you to writing and what interests you and then cling to it with both hands. For me… it is these long form rambling conversations that I have with you each morning which are pretty much the exact opposite of marketable material. You either are interested in my life and my take on the world or you are not, and nothing I do is probably going to change that.

Following my own advice however… I want to talk some more about World of Warcraft Classic. It really is the little things that make it worth playing. It is the rolling parties that sort of seamlessly come up from nothing and then dissipate in the same way like a passing storm. It is the random stranger last night that handed me a pair of shoulder pads because he had just upgraded his own and noticed I didn’t have any. It is the fact that I keep cramming bags in to peoples inventory when I get one to drop out in the wild. It is everyone in the guild constantly offering things up to help out like crafting patterns or something cool that they just learned how to make. There is a spirit of us all being in this together that is infectious.

Side note… Kodra is my hero because I logged in this morning to a mailbox full of copper ore.

I think more than anything I am enthralled by World of Warcraft Classic because it represents something that I never really dared dream would happen. Sure I had high hopes about getting the band back together and tromping around in Azeroth. However what I really missed was the return to the sense of broader community that existed during that time. Apparently lots of people also missed this because it has done my jaded heart good to see players helping players constantly. The number of random drive by buffs that I receive is excessive and I try my best to thank everyone that does it to keep bolstering that community spirit.

What does break my heart a bit is what I am calling the hopefuls… the folks who hang out in front of a dungeon instance looking for a group. Lately I have been focused on leveling and generally speaking the only time I end up near the instance portal is when I am running a dungeon with a guild group. So far I’ve run Ragefire Chasm the last two nights, and it does in fact go so much more smoothly when I actually have tanking abilities. Grace, Ash and I needed to dip back inside to do one last quest that we picked up and did not have primed for our first run. We managed to snag Vernie and Moughsie who had not run it at all and while we had a bizarre group comp it was a lot of fun. I look forward to running Wailing Caverns over the weekend and am trying to collect the quests required for it in The Barrens right now.

I could however be spending my evenings pugging and helping folks out that way, but I just have not been able to cross that line as of yet. It definitely seems like there is a shortage of tanks, given the fact that almost every request I saw in trade chat yesterday was hunting for a tank. I’ve even started getting random tells from people looking for a tank, which was to be expected. Were I in their situation I would have done exactly the same thing, utilizing the level/class query options. Maybe over the weekend I will tank some stuff for random people, but for now it feels like I have enough folks in the guild that probably need dungeons to keep me busy.

Maybe this is silly… but I feel reinvigorated. I feel like I regained a chunk of my soul that has been missing for a really long time. I feel like I am once again in love with World of Warcraft and the MMORPG genre. Time will tell if this is a crush or if it will be a lasting thing, but lord knows I am hoping for the later at this point even though it will mean me not playing a lot of games that are coming down the pipe.

In the continued tradition of Bel learning things don’t quite work like he remembers them… I introduce to you the Warrior Training panel. In theory this is where I learn new abilities every few levels. The challenge with this however is that I did not remember needing to scroll down to find each of the various talent trees worth of abilities. As a result up until this point… I had only ever been training the Arms abilities and not realizing it.

As a result this lead me to run Ragefire Chasm last night with a group of guild friends with only Rend, Heroic Strike, Sunder Armor and Taunt. I somehow made that work for the most part, especially on single target fights… but it all seemed way the hell harder than it should have been. That is because I had apparently never trained Shield Block, Shield Slam, Mocking Blow and Enrage… all of which that would have been super helpful in trying to keep multiple targets under control.

So far for the most part World of Warcraft Classic has been a continued series of these things not quite working like I remembered them. This is a sequence of things… firstly that I am 43 and I am having a hard time remembering exactly what things were like when I was 15 years younger. Next I played through a series of changes in the game and don’t quite remember when they put which things in. So I for some reason thought that meeting stones would actually work to summon players… but no they do not. I also thought that the Barber Shop was something that I could do to change my hair cut… also not a thing that exists yet.

The challenge is that so many little things don’t quite work the way that I remember them working, and as a result the game feels very new and fresh… rather than ground that I have tread upon a thousand times before. It has been nine years since we have played through the old world zones in the condition they are in now… and quite frankly there are many cases where I get mixed up the way the world used to be and the way it was post Cataclysm. It is the little things, as simple as expecting to find the quest where the kid is looking for his dog that has the recorded voice of Ezra Chatterton. That however didn’t go in until way later.

The weirdest part about all of this… is that I am finding that I really do love World of Warcraft. At least I love THIS version of World of Warcraft. Maybe we are just in the honeymoon phase, but it seems like so many people on Bloodsail Buccaneers are going through this same sequence of events, and it is leading all of the public channels to be relatively delightful places. Granted this is all Horde side… for all I know the Alliance side may be a dumpster fire. The Horde seems to be exception at keeping their head down and moving on with things as a whole. Even retail WoW Horde side is way more chill than it ever was on the Alliance side.

Also we are apparently up to 57 characters in the guild? This still floors me.