MMORPG

Story Engine

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I am still very much lagging behind my peers in World of Warcraft, but I am hoping that the long holiday weekend will fix that. Last night I hit 12 on my Undead Warrior and am about halfway into that level towards 13. I have officially completed all of the quests in the Brill area and wrapped up the last quest chain between Undercity and the Tirisfal this morning. I have no clue what level Grace or Mor or Tam are at this point, but based on my figurations once I hit 13 I might be viable to start tanking Ragefire Cavern, which I am hoping for maybe tonight.

In other news… House Kraken has exploded, and I mean that in a good way. As of last night we had 43 members of the guild with only a couple of those account for alts. I believe there are still several people who won’t be creating characters until the weekend. That said I also started up a chat channel this morning and am going to try and get everyone joining it, and conversely snagging people as they group up with good folks. The idea being that if and when we actually decided to entertain raiding, we will have a social channel that we can operate out of.

I am a huge proponent of non-guild-based raiding. Most of us in AggroChat cut our teeth doing that in either the Late Night Raiders or Last Horse raids on Argent Dawn. I really like that clear delineation between what is “Guild” stuff and what is “Raid” stuff and as a result I have always had a bit of a distaste in my mouth towards “Raiding Guilds”. I feel like the social interaction of the guild suffers for the sake of the raid. This is different than a casual guild who happens to raid together like Facepull. Maybe the distinction doesn’t mean anything to anyone but me… but it does me. Also it makes it way easier to pull in random people from other guilds that they don’t want to leave for the purpose of clearing content.

Last night would have been more productive were it not for a few points where I needed to log out either to swap machines, or to come back upstairs to help watch the print jobs. This is the absolute worst I saw the server queues last night for Bloodsail Buccaneers. This is not a sign that I want everyone to swap over to it and roll on our server, because I rather like having small queues and being on a chill Roleplaying server. I am extremely happy that unlike Cactuar in FFXIV we can at least reliably get our friends onto the server to play with us.

Tam posted a massive thread on twitter yesterday which is worth a read, and highlights a lot of my own experiences about coming back to classic. The one point that I really feel hits home though is that Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes and early World of Warcraft were story engines in a way that modern games just are not. The frustration and friction often times turned into these elegant stories about how you overcame adversity to push through the process of completing a specific task.

When I look back upon my Everquest days for example, it is moments like clearing The Hole with nothing but rusty weapons to get back or corpses, or getting called in the middle of the night to come rez someone who got killed in Kael Drakkal. When I look back upon Dark Age of Camelot it is stories of us accomplishing things through perseverance and many corpse runs that we should not have been able to accomplish with way less than a full party. When I talk about City of Heroes I am going to talk about the stupid things I managed to accomplish with my Katana Regen Scrapper and some of the horrible deaths that I took when things went wrong… that and the horrendous rubberbanding.

I also wonder if this lack of generating stories is why that MMORPG blogging has been a dying art over the last decade. These games used to give us a constant font of tales to tell, that were actually often times humorous or interesting to read. Tam and I have talked about this many times, but gamers love to tell tales of things that happened in games. The problem is most games just don’t really give us an interesting story to weave anymore. “I spent my night pushing through ten levels without encountering any obstacles” is not exactly a compelling tale.

However if you have to tell a story about how you weaved your way through a camp carefully body pulling enemies, and then getting completely overwhelmed right before you got to the final boss. That is a tale of defeat but it is an interesting tale nonetheless, and I have already had several versions of this tale in my memory. I’ve grouped up with so many random people to work together on shared objectives and in some cases this has worked out swimmingly… and in other cases we have died horribly. I’ve also gone out of my way to be that random stranger who saves people from death when I happen to notice that their health is a wee bit low.

I’ve missed the era of MMORPGs as Story Engines, and I think this along with many other reasons are why I am having a blast right now. If you are one of the Anti-Classic folks that I am seeing pop up in my timelines… I am sorry. You are going to be getting a lot more WoW Classic discussion from me over the coming weeks… and hopefully coming months. The Kraken has risen and now we are slowly conquering this forsaken land.

The Kraken Rises

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The sea of baby forsaken while the intro plays

Last night is without a doubt the most stupidly fun night I have had in years. The servers came online sometime around 5 pm my time. I somehow managed to get home and finished with the basics that I do every night around that time. Shockingly I didn’t hit a queue or anything of the sort and managed to sail straight through to my Warrior Belghast. Mor and Grace were already online, because of course they were. After grabbing some food to nom on I joined them in voice chat and we proceeded to do stupid things along with Vernie who we have to get on voice at some point in the near future.

Everything becomes significantly more complicated when there are a couple hundred characters running around and trying to do the same quest objectives. The kill quests were fine and we pulled together a group to get those done. The real challenge came when we started needing to loot things, because of course each time something died it may or may not drop an item. If it did drop an item, it only dropped it for one of us. Thankfully the “boss” kills were set so that everyone had the quest objective on the body, otherwise that would have been true madness to try and complete because it was a trick to get even one successful tag in, let alone multiple.

The other thing that came flashing back in my memory is that many of the warrior abilities don’t actually start you attacking. Namely Rend and Charge, so I had to break out my macro muscle memory. Essentially for your information what you ultimately want is something that looks a little like this.

/#showtooltip Rend

/startattack

/cast Rend

simple Rend Start Attack Macro

The reason why this matters is I watched many a warrior charge at a target only to get it tagged by another player who just swung a weapon at it. Rend was the ability that I used for tagging purposes most of the time because it seemed to do just enough damage to flag the mob as mine.

So we continued on questing as a group until we hit Brill, when for the most part the group devolved into a bunch of people doing different quests and me deciding to venture forth into Undercity to try and find the mining trainer. Without a doubt you see a half dozen ore nodes when you don’t have the skill, but none when you finally do have it. While in Undercity I decided to check the cost of a guild charter, and I am thankful that I did. I had it stuck in my head that a guild charter was 1 gold… aka 100 silver since for the first bit you are dealing with scourging to get a few silver. However it turns out I was completely wrong and the charter was only 10 silver. At this point I had 9 already on me and I met Tam in the newbie zone who handed me the last silver.

So from that point on the rest of my evening focused entirely upon wandering around and trying to collect the signatures needed to make the guild happen. You need 10 total signatures including yourself, and I am super thankful to Elly for signing even though they had other plans guild wise. I similarly helped another friend from Argent Dawn get their guild up and running by signing the charter on my babby orc huntress. So the servers came online at 5 pm and I got the guild up and running by 8:30 pm… which seems pretty solid. I think technically Vernie and I had it done in faster time at the launch of Vanilla, but we were also more dedicated about collecting the money.

I took a screenshot at this location because it was my corpse. This was my first death in classic wow, and it happened from a bad pull where two level 10 Vile Fin Oracles attacked me at the same time and I was too slow to run away. I was level 7 at the time, and was dumb enough to try and fight them for a few swings before realizing that I should be running. During the middle of the night Grace managed to get a green two-hander and handed it over to me… at which point I started trying to skill that up. Also something I had forgotten… the need to go train weapon skills because it is 10 silver to learn swords as an undead rogue apparently. I started with Daggers, and both One and Two Handed Swords… which honestly is the majority of what I would be using anyways.

I managed to get to level 8 before logging for the night around 9:30 pm. Yes I am in fact an old man and either can no longer deal with all night grinds… or I have reached a point where I have the wisdom to avoid them. You can decide which of those is true. Grace and Mor made it to around level 10 in the same time, but I spent a lot of time faffing about trying to connect with people to get a charter signed. One last thing I am going to talk about this morning are what addons I am running, since I have several… but I might dial that back a little bit namely not sure if I actually need TSM. Here is the list of everything I currently have installed and an explaination.

  • ElvUI – includes all of the bar mods and such that Elv normally does
  • AtlasLootClassic – When I start running dungeons I would like to know what drops from each boss.
  • DBM – Eventually it will be a thing so I might as well just install it now.
  • BetterVendorPrice – Adds a bunch of sell price information to the tooltip. Useful for deciding if it is worth throwing an item away for something that will sell for more money when bags get full.
  • Inventorian – Gives you a single all purpose bag instead of multiple bags. I would have greatly preferred if I could have gotten a port of ArkInventory but I will deal with this.
  • Leatrix – Swiss army knife of addons, allows you to sell vendor trash and a bunch of other things.
  • Leatrix Maps – reveals the full map instead of giving you the fog of war.
  • Questie – Shows all quests available and where the quest objectives are. I broke down and installed this after a few hours of fumbling around.
  • TomCats/TomTom – Not really working as I would have expected yet, so I am wondering if they are blocking them. It did provide a navigation arrow to find my corpse when I died so I will probably let it ride.
  • WeaponSwingTimer – Since hitting an ability right before a swing is about to go off is a damage loss… I figured I would get used to watching this now. Basically shows how long until you do another auto attack for each hand. Shows a similar bar for how long before you auto fire a ranged weapon as well.

World of Warcraft: Then and Now

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There is a thing going around twitter right now where folks are posting pictures of themselves back in 2004 around the launch of the original World of Warcraft, and then a more modern picture to show how they have changed in the fifteen odd years that have passed between. This is somewhat challenging for me, because of two points. One I was an early adopter of Digital Technology and swore by my trusty Mavica… which was an early digital camera that recorded 640×480 images to Floppy disks. Second I was generally the one behind the camera and as a result not in any photos that I have access to. I am sure my mom who is constantly taking fake composed group shots has a plethora of photos of me from that era… but we never actually see any of them after she has taken them.

At the time of the release of World of Warcraft on November 24th of 2004 I was 28 and at that point had been married for 6 years. I lived in the same house that I do now that we purchased and moved into in 1999. I was working with Vernie (pictured) and Socar (not pictured) at a handheld device company where we worked on applications for Palm Pilot and Pocket PC devices mostly. I worked primarily as a web developer and wrote some very early services infrastructure that allowed the mobile devices to remotely synchronize with our servers. Vernie and I shared a cube and worked together with him doing all of the heavy lifting on the front end, and me doing the back end stuff.

Shadoes and I went to the same college and wound up working together at a previous employer along with Mannax. In the above picture you can also see the original House Stalwart tabard featuring a golden tree instead of the crusader cross that is more common these days. The other members of House Stalwart were largely folks that I had met through my sequence of games to that point so a mixture of people from Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, Horizons and City of Heroes. Not pictured in the photo but part of this Scarlet Monastery group was Shiana, who we met through City of Heroes and would ultimately leave the guild to found Cerulean Sanctuary and the non-guild based raid Late Night Raiders where I did most of my Vanilla raiding.

The character pictured was not my first character, but ultimately became my Vanilla main. Lodin the Hunter was who I raided in Late Night Raiders with and Djagun was my trusty white cat pet that I picked up in Dun Morogh. I feel bad that I don’t have the original Djagun anymore on that character, but instead swapped the actual pet out for a Wintersaber when I became big enough to train one of those. Part of me wishes I had stuck by my original pet however. From late Vanilla all the way to present I have never played this character as a main again. I was a bad hunter and kept trying to make melee work, so I briefly explored that when it became a viable spec in Legion.

We scan forward to 2019 and I am largely playing Horde with my Blood Elf Demon Hunter as the thing that most closely represents a main. I am playing with Facepull, which is largely a group of players that I met back during Vanilla through Wrath of the Lich King on the Argent Dawn server forums. There used to be an IRC server associated with the forums and we all hung out daily both Alliance and Horde characters. It was the sort of Utopian existence that I hope eventually comes to game when both sides can play together freely.

For years I had this other family on the Horde side but never really played much with them apart from the occasional alt. Starting with Warlords of Draenor I started spending a significant amount of time on that side of the fence and with Battle for Azeroth it was the first expansion where I planned form the start to main horde. While I have bounced off of this expansion pretty pathetically, it has been nice to spend time with this other side of the family. Over the years I handed House Stalwart off to various other friends… first Elnore, then Rylacus and now it rests in the hands of Kylana.

The truth is House Stalwart doesn’t really feel like home, because enough time has changed and the names and faces with them. Kylana brought with him a focus on raiding first and guild second, which is a decision I always fought. I consider Cataclysm to be the real moment that House Stalwart changed for me, as we made the transition from non-guild-based raiding to raiding as a guild. With this we wound up consuming a bunch of the smaller satellite guilds that were part of the Duranub Raiding Company. With that caused a culture clash and a bunch of strife… and also around this time is when I first checked out of the game for any length of time with the launch of Rift.

I feel horrible that I dumped this all in the lap of my friend Elnore, and then chastised her as she made a bunch of changes to make the guild more raid focused. I tried for years to juggle the whole raiding and guild leadership thing, and probably did a poor job at it. The raiders were the most dedicated players, but I wanted to keep the guild as a sort of casual friendly place for everyone. Elnore, Rylacus and Kylana all made shifts to support the raiders above the random casual players, which rubbed me personally the wrong way… but ultimately were probably good for the long term health of the guild. I mean for a guild founded on day one it is pretty magical that it is still alive 15 years later.

As far as an image goes, this is the best I could come up with. In December of 2003 we took a cruise, and this is one of the photos taken with a Mavica, and as a result looks pretty potato quality resized up from a 640×480 image not framed as a head shot. As far as me personally… I am still living in the same house I was at that point and really see no signs of moving. I’m now 43 and have been married for 21 years. I’ve changed jobs several times, some for the better and some for the worse… but have currently been at the same place for 11 years in October.

I’m no longer actively developing apart from occasionally troubleshooting or patching something when it breaks and I have no other developers on hand. These days I manage sixteen people in a multi-disciplinary group that includes five application developers, five geographic information system specialists, five data analysts and a business analyst that sorta floats between the three teams. Each team has a super visor that serves as a discipline lead… not entirely different from the composition of a raid and having a dedicated class lead.

I credit my experience raiding and leading raids for helping me feel comfortable enough to transition away from being a pure technologist and move into management. I try my best to be the sort of manager that I always wanted, which may or may not be the manager that all of my employees want. However I do regularly have people transfer into my group, and the only time folks leave really is to move on with their career and find another gig that can pay more than we can. I consider that a win and the general sign of a functioning ecosystem.

That is another lesson that raid and guild leadership taught me. Occasionally someone needs to move on with their life and make some changes, and that is a perfectly natural part of things. I learned through gaming not to burn bridges someone needs to leave, and as a result many of those people eventually make their way back into my sphere of influence. The same goes for employees. I feel like part of my job is a manager is to mentor them along their career journey, and when that leads to them taking another job… you wish them well and do your best to keep in touch because at some point your paths will probably cross again.

So now we sit on the cusp of a brand new vanilla experience. Time has passed and I have changed a lot along the way. However I feel like I am interested in trying to reclaim some of the things that we lost through this new retro experience. While I played a lot of MMOs prior to it… World of Warcraft is the game that I imprinted on the hardest. I will be around playing Belghast on Bloodsail Buccaneers, and if you find yourself on that server say hi. I will be doing whatever it takes to get the one gold needed to buy a guild character so that I can get a guild up and running, but I have a feeling it will take a few days. It is going to be interesting stepping through the wormhole and seeing a version of the game similar to what I played fifteen years ago.

Familiar Frustration

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I’ve been back playing World of Warcraft for roughly a week now, and have spent most of that time catching up on the storyline. One of the systematic problems I had with Battle For Azeroth’s design as an expansion is coming back to bite me in the butt however. During the entirety of Legion, weapon drops were not a thing because we were leaning upon the Artifact Weapon to always be relevant. As a melee this felt amazing since the most important slot we have is our weapon. You can drag along with some pretty shitty armor so long as you had a really good weapon.

Unfortunately as we went into this expansion, it feels as though the game designers forgot they took away our artifacts. I remember at launch it feeling exceptionally difficult to get viable weapons while leveling and especially so once I capped out at level 120. The Demon Hunter was a little easier because I had the IWin button that was leatherworking being able to craft fist weapons for the first time this expansion. The challenge there is now that I am coming back and the item levels greatly increased… there is seemingly no updated version of these weapons.

I’ve been spending most of my time doing either Mechagon or Nazjatar, which are decently laid out but so big and dense that I find trouble doing both in a single night. I’ve managed to get both factions to Honored, and I am more or less exclusively grinding to unlock flight which happens at Revered. I did manage to get a lucky drop while in Nazjatar of a 415 fist weapon, and I managed to pick up a 380 off of a world quest, which is infuriatingly low given that my cumulative item level is 402 at the moment.

My chief frustration is that I feel like I don’t have an awful lot of great options to work towards. With Nazjatar they added in some really neat Benthic armor that you can work towards upgrading to I believe a maximum cap of 425. The problem there however is that once again… the designers forgot that we didn’t have artifact weapons and left those slots out of the system. There is currently a 400 sword available from a Dungeon World Quest, but I sat in queue for 30 minutes last night as a tank… and was not even seeing an estimate for how long the queue might last.

I noticed that a Heroic Warfront option went into the game since I left so I gave it a shot last night thinking the 430 chest might spawn a weapon. Like the mythic dungeons however they left off a queue system which meant I had to rely on the group finder tool. I was rejected for seven different groups until I finally found one. I have no clue why I was rejected apart from maybe people disliking Demon Hunters? Once I got a group it went quickly enough and counted for both the normal mode and heroic mode weekly quest. I got a cloak, which is fine but I really needed that weapon.

I noticed there was a decent looking fist weapon available through the PVP Conquest system, and it was enough to make me willing to throw myself at a system I have no interest in. I queued up for a few random battlegrounds, at which point I realized… there is no consolation prize worth chasing. If you win you get a meager around of conquest points… 40 to be exact out of the 500 that I need to get the weapon. If you lose however you get nothing at all but some honor points, which I am guessing won’t get me a weapon upgrade.

This is largely a case of me not correctly reading the tooltip. I was willing to throw myself at a generally unfun experience 13 times to get a weapon. Even if a loss would have given half conquest… I probably would have been willing to throw myself at the wall 25 times to finish that out. I am not however willing to play enough battlegrounds to get good enough to start winning matches and instead will just deal with the fact that I have a 415 main weapon and a 380 offhand.

I still have the raid to attempt… but the queues there were also atrocious with at one point reporting 50 minutes. I waded through the queue once to get a group that had finished the first two bosses… aka the ones that have a chance of dropping a weapon. I was a good sport and finished the raid. The thing is… I realize that I won’t care at all about any of this come Tuesday when I am playing a vastly different World of Warcraft. More than anything coming back has cemented my opinion that Battle for Azeroth was not a good expansion.