This weekend on the podcast Tam tipped me off to something called Kind Words (lo fi chill beats to write to), which started as a humble monthly bundle exclusive game in July but is now available through other platforms like Steam. Weirdly it doesn’t actually seem to be purchasable on the Humble store, just through that one bundle. The biggest challenge about the game is that I am not entirely certain it qualifies as a game, but is instead more of an experience. I realize that is not exactly selling it strongly yet, but hang on and stay with me.
The idea is sorta simple. You are a character sitting in a room listening to this radio that plays the chillest of music, and as you sit there paper airplanes come zooming through your room. You can click on them and open them up for a note from some anonymous stranger on the internet. The catch however is that the notes are supposed to be positive or helpful. It might be a kind word, a favorite quote or even a recipe for some excellent brownies. The notes themselves are heavily policed to keep from allowing anything to disrupt the friendly ecosystem of chillaxing.
Your interaction is through Ella the Mail Deer, which is super shocked that you have never had a Mail Deer before. She folds your notes into airplanes, and in the case of requests which I will get into later she serves as a go between to keep the whole arrangement private and secure. The idea being you are placed in this box where everything you say is kept secret, and not subtly nudged in the direction of positivity rather than negativity. The thing is it works, just a few moments into the experience and you find yourself being willing to share advise or stories with complete strangers, or at least I did.
The most basic interaction is to send a note out to the world via paper airplane. There is no interaction involved with these and they just blast your comment out to the world. I’ve opened dozens and dozens of these and not a single one so far has been anything bordering on toxicity. The internet has taught me that anonymity is a bad thing… but generally speaking those relationships are when only one side is anonymous. When both you and your audience are anonymous, and you are placed in a box and told to do good things… weirdly people seem to do exactly that.
The other kind of interaction is that you can make or read requests from others. These are situations where the other person is wanting some sort of feedback to something they are going to say. As a result you get 14 lines worth of text instead of the usual 7 lines on a paper airplane. Reading these confessions if you will invoked two different reactions. Firstly it made me realize that so many people have exactly the same fears, which sort of binds us all together. Secondly I started wanting to share my own wisdom with these folks, or whatever passes for wisdom.
You find yourself trying to help out in situations where there really isn’t a clear answer. I can tell a lot of the people I am reading notes from are significantly younger than me, and at age 43 I have gone through a lot of these same experiences. For example the one that I am responding to in the above screenshot is someone bemoaning their friends getting involved with relationships and other things that make them no longer available to them. This happens and it is a part of the natrual flow so I attempted to summarize that concept in a note with the advise to keep putting yourself out there to meet new friends. I went through this especially as my friends started having kids and dropping off into a void that they are only now starting to emerge from.
There is also a low-key sticker collecting mini-game where when you reply to a request you can attach a sticker to the bottom. Everyone starts with one of the random stickers, I started with the blobfish sticking its tongue out. So when I wrote replies I always remembered to attach the sticker because as soon as you get a sticker you can start sending it out as well. When someone has replied to one of your requests you are given the opportunity to attach a sticker as a thank you, and as you get more stickers you sorta developer a larger vocabulary of options for thanking other players.
The only negative about the “game” is that you wind up losing time while sitting here responding to things. This is in part why AggroChat yesterday was so late getting out because I just kept clicking on paper airplanes or responding to requests. I even shared some of my own fears in request form and got back some pretty cogent responses. This as a whole is a really interesting social experiment and it seems to be working. I greatly approve of their inclusion of a Mental Health Resources button on pretty much any page where you can put input. That said in many ways this is a form of therapy as you send your troubles off into the void and get back a satchel full of positivity in return. If you too suffer from depression or anxiety… or just have a bunch of worries, I would suggest checking Kind Words out. I definitely feel better after spending a little time in this super chill isolation chamber.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we have a handful of things to talk about that are not World of Warcraft Classic and were smart enough to start with those. First up Ash has been playing a lot of Fire Emblem: Three Houses and seemingly Tam and Ammo are stuck at the same point before things get interesting. From there we talk about Greedfall and confronting the legacy of colonialism in a fantasy Action RPG. Tam talks a bit about Kind Words, something that is not exactly a game but is most definitely a joyful experience that has conspired to make me late getting the podcast out this morning. Finally we talk at length about World of Warcraft Classic and some of the design differences we are noticing between it and Retail.
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.
