MMORPG

Why I Became Horde

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This weekend an event happened that I thought I would talk about, however first I feel like I need to give some background. During the heyday of World of Warcraft I was a die-hard Alliance player. They were of course the faction that had Dwarves, which went an awfully long way for me. However because of the human faction hacks, the fear break, and weapon skill hacks I ultimately re-rolled at some point as a Human Warrior that became Belghast, the character that I ultimately became most known for. Argent Dawn during Vanilla was a magical place, that much like cheers was a server where everybody knew your name. This was in part due to the fact that it had a very active server forum, allowing different guilds and both factions to mingle freely.

As I moved my way into leading raids, I got indoctrinated into a bit of a club of other raid leaders who were in pretty regular communication. I’ve talked about this before but we had an incident where someone took BOE loot as need, left the raid and posted it on the auction house. I mentioned it to one other raid leader, and within fifteen minutes this player was on the do not invite list of all of the major raids in the game and on non-raiding probation for the guild based raid that he just joined. Twenty minutes he was in chat begging me to reverse all of it, when in truth the cat was out of the bag. No one wanted someone like that in their raid and all I did was mention it to one other leader in passing and it set the wheels in motion that really couldn’t be undone.

Argent Dawn was a server that was greatly impacted by a number of events over the years, most specifically the Alliance faction. Firstly the transition between 40 player raids to 25 player raids was extremely fraught, and similarly was the shift down to the existence of 10 player raids. Probably more than that however was the shift away from non-guild based raiding that came with Cataclysm. Blizzard started attaching things at the guild level, and Argent Dawn was a server with a still thriving ecosystem of raid groups that weren’t actually really associated with a specific guild. For years we were an overpopulated server being one of the first two Roleplaying flagged servers, and each time new servers opened up Argent Dawn was often times in the list of eligible targets for transferring characters off. On the Alliance side of the house this claimed entire guilds as they decided to make the jump to greener pastures.

For me personally, I checked out of World of Warcraft during Cataclysm, and it began a cycle. I would go through this pattern of returning at the end of one expansion, playing the pre-expansion content and then ultimately leaving again one or two patches into the new expansion. This is not exactly what you want in a guildmaster, and this ultimately lead me to hand off the reigns a few times… firstly to Elnore who was a serious raider and shifted the focus of the guild to raiding. Then to Rylacus who was more or less the Steward of Gondor, not really leading the guild but more keeping tabs on it while I was away. Finally the guild transitioned to Kylana, who like Elnore once again shifted the guild and the infrastructure to serve the purpose of raiding. There was a time where I was unfairly bitter about the changes in the guild as a whole, since I fought hard to keep Stalwart not just another raid guild. However I can see that they made the changes that were needed by the people who were still around and still playing the game while I was constantly gone.

The bigger problem however, is that I was never just active in House Stalwart. I was active in the community at large and while I was gone it changed in even more sweeping ways. Not only did my effective “home” feel a little foreign each time I returned to the game, but the server community as a whole felt like strangers. There was a time when I had the limit of server channels configured on my characters, and coming back they were all ghost towns. Gone was the council of guild and raid leaders, gone were the social channels of friend raid groups, gone were the few roleplaying groups that I was still friendly with, and replaced was a bunch of asshattery in raid chat by a completely new crop of people. I tried to make connections, but ultimately it didn’t feel like home.

For years I had been a semi-active member of the Bloodmoon Chosen guild on the horde side, which was made up of a bunch of people that I knew from the Argent Dawn server forums and the eventual Argent Dawn IRC channel. These were folks that I had communicated with daily for years, so it absolutely made sense that I park my little horde alts in their guild. It was during Warlords of Draenor I believe that some drama happened on that side of the fence, and while I am still not exactly sure what went down, all of my friends from BMC broke out and founded their own guild. Facepull felt like home because it was made up of so many people that I had known since Vanilla days, and I started leveling a Paladin that served as my horde main for a few expansions.

The funny thing about Argent Dawn Horde side is that it seemed not to be changed so severely by the rigors of time. While roaming around in both the Hubs and the over-world zones I was constantly bumping into familiar faces and having random conversations with folks that I actually knew form the onset of the server. This weekend one of these events happened, and it was ultimately what inspired me to write about my shift in allegiance. I was landing at the Great Seal just as a familiar name was about to take off, which caused me to send a message to her. Tenebres is someone I have known from the forums for decades, and I remember when she posted baby photos of her now 15 year old daughter in what I think was the IRC Server at the time? So what followed was us talking for a good 45 minutes catching up on how and what we have been doing.

The thing is… this isn’t a one time event because I am constantly bumping into people that I have known for years while roaming the world, because it seems like the Horde never had the great server splits that the Alliance side did. The Horde just feels like home right now. There has been massive turn over in the Alliance guild, and I dearly love some of the folks that still tie back to the era in which I was actively playing. However playing Horde reminds me of the social fabric that I loved about the server because while it is somewhat diminished, it still exists and there are still large groups of people that communicate on a regular basis. It is ultimately those social connections that root me to a game and to its server, and without them the entire process just feels hollow. Ultimately this is why I am spending my time of late playing catch up and leveling an army of alts, because that is the one thing that I miss the most from Alliance side, being self sufficient in all of the tradeskills.

Warlock Ascends

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Well folks… the madness continues. Last night I dinged 120 on my fifth character in rapid succession. Prior to the launch of Legion, there was a pre-launch demon invasion event that I abused for every drop of experience that I could on the Alliance side. During this I managed to level one of every single class to 100 while doing these events. However on the horde side I have had mostly a bunch of low level characters to go along with what is ultimately my two main characters, the Demon Hunter and the Warrior. The goal has been to take these experience boosts and catch the stable of characters up so that going into Shadowlands I have a bit more choice in what I am going to play. I’ve always found running up alts relaxing, and last night getting the Warlock to 120 gave me my first caster.

So one of my friends pinged me the other night on Steam to ask a question and apparently I completely missed it. I won’t lie folks, you are most likely to get an answer from me on Twitter, because in the modern age I am exceptionally bad at paying attention to the chat services associated with the plethora of social options we all have. However the question was pretty straight forward and essentially boiled down to asking how I was leveling these alts so quickly. It is really straight forward… I am questing, rapidly, and with flight. I talked about this the other day but right now there is a Winds of Wisdom buff that gives you an extra 100% experience, meaning every drop of xp gained is twice what it previously would be. If you also have heirlooms that adds up in total to either +45% or +55% depending on if you have rings or not.

What that feels like in experience however is that extra experience gain appears to be multiplicative because I did not have heirlooms while leveling the Warlock and I absolutely noticed a massive difference. Normally speaking with heirlooms I can do all of Battle for Azeroth in completing a single zone’s worth of content and opening the three war campaign footholds. Without the heirlooms I had to complete one full zone, open the three footholds and then go do almost all of a second zone. It felt like everything was going about half as fast as I would normally go, but there were a few other factors. Namely leveling a caster is not my jam and my time to kill was probably significantly lower. This makes a big difference because the other thing that I do while questing is that I kill everything in my path while getting to the next objective rather than just swooping down on a mount.

I’ve always leveled quickly, the the answer has always been the salted earth approach that I take, since monster xp doesn’t seem like much but adds up over time. All of that said I absolutely boosted a mage because it is the least “bel” class on the planet. I actually enjoy leveling a priest way more than I do a mage, so more than anything this is probably just for sake of seeing all 120s sitting in my roster. I boosted the mage last time on the alliance side, so it appears to be a tradition for me. I will never likely take this character off any “sweet jumps”, and often times they turn into my banker alt. The real question is… after having finished leveling the Warlock, what character do I start with next? Right now I am leaning towards pushing up my Highmountain Monk, because a Tauren monk is hillarious.

The Gank Squad

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Random aside before I get into the meat of the topic this morning. Apparently it is my 11th anniversary on Twitter this morning, or probably more likely later this afternoon. Twitter and blogging have forever been inextricably linked. I joined Twitter for better engagement with other bloggers and creators, and wound up staying there because I found a terribly interesting and engaging gaming community. Sure there was a challenge in trying to hold a conversation in what was then 144 characters at a time, but somehow we managed to string together some pretty interesting topics. Now that we have proper threading, longer character counts, and @ing in people not eating up all of the conversation space, it is staggering just how much easier it is to hold a proper discussion.

Which leads me to a segue to the topic at hand, which actually came up yesterday in a Twitter thread but has also been something I have been discussing with the AggroChat folks. Each time I see a new game advertised as a massively multiplayer sandbox survival game, I have to resist rolling my eyes back into my head. This is a design pattern that budding designers seem to think they can make work, but so rarely does. They set out with this ideal of simulating a realistic world with consequences and one that forces interesting decisions to be made for the sake of survival. What ends up happening is either a barren wasteland that no one is playing or a brutal and toxic kill box that eats anyone who did not start on day one or does not have the fortitude to wade through a river of feces to get to a stable place.

There is a very vocal minority of players that will scream at devs about wanting the ability to kill other players and loot their corpses, but what they really mean is that they want to prey on the weak. So a new game is released with a bunch of tantalizing world building elements or intricate crafting systems, which draws in players like myself that have always wanted an interesting modern PVE sandbox experience. Then like blood in the water the gank squad shows up to ruin everyone’s day. My working theory is that this is effectively the same group of players that show up in every new game. Much like FPS players are fickle and will flock to whatever title has the most traction, the gank squad shows up in whatever environment they feel has the most hapless noobs.

It begins a cycle of these player killers making life hell on the PVE populace until they ultimately log out never to return. I still remember the opening weekend for ArcheAge there was a quest that involved having to cross a bay in a rowboat to continue the storyline. Lined up were a bunch of players with massive ships that would do nothing but ram into the poor innocent rowboats and sink them. Eventually I logged out and decided that the game just wasn’t for me, and perpetuated the cycle. The gank squad flocks to these fertile hunting grounds and once their toxic behavior has turned them fallow, they move on to the next new hot game trying to make this design pattern work. The PVE player wanders off feeling frustrated and swearing that they will never go through this process again… only to be lured later by some killer feature in an otherwise frustrating game.

The funny thing is in my experience if you return to those same games six months later, what has grown up from the dead earth is often times a thriving oasis of cooperative players that more or less ignore the player versus player aspect of the game. Some two years after the launch of ArcheAge I returned to the game and found that I could roam freely and enjoy the world for what it was. Sure it was hell trying to find a plot of land since those had long ago been snapped up in the process, but I managed enjoy the leveling process without ever encountering another hostile player in the process. From what I understand from friends currently playing Sea of Thieves the same thing is happening there, and they ran treasure missions without encountering another hostile ship throughout the weekend.

Ultimately my question is… why do companies keep trying to make the PVP and PVE elements work together? If it is actual player combat that folks are craving, then they are far better served by a game that ONLY supports player versus player engagement. However that is not what the gank squad wants. They want unfair fights where they roll in and “pwn noobs” and then laugh about how weak their prey ultimately is. So when I hear complaints on forums about there not being enough players engaging in a system like “war mode” from Battle for Azeroth, what I am actually hearing is that there are not enough lambs to slaughter for the gank squad to get their jollies. The players who actually care about challenging combat are off playing games that are solely focused on player versus player engagement. The folks that want to feel powerful as they dominate the weak… well they roam off to the next new game looking for victims.

To answer my own question, the reason why these games keep trying to make this work is that player versus player engagement is effectively free content. Story driven content is time consuming and thus costly to make. However dropping a bunch of players into a kill box looks enticing because the theory is that the players will ultimately create their own content. Visions of giant continent wide battles dance in the designers head as they envision players creating complex social structures as they duke it out in multi-tiered warfare. This didn’t even work in the games that folks hold up with praise like Dark Age of Camelot, because ultimately one faction became so dominant on a specific server that it forced a defacto alliance between the other two factions if they had any hopes of delaying the slaughter.

Ultimately I welcome continent wide battles… but I want those battle to be waged with intricately crafted NPC factions and not a bunch of random players. Where I get hung up with playing games that have open flagging for player combat is that I could have a lovely evening where I get a bunch of things accomplished that I wanted to. However equally likely is that I will be minding my own business and wander across a band of player killers and wind up logging out of the game rather than trying to recover my body while dealing with the spawn camping. At its core, I don’t like the idea of having my fun impacted by other players. I realize in an PVE game I might have this sort of impact when I queue for a dungeon and people are assholes. However there are plenty of other activities I can do entirely solo that dilute those negative interactions. When engagement with the world alone paints a target on my back, I find it really hard to get hyped about going through those motions.

I would love to see some of these games that really no longer have active player killer populations simply remove that functionality from the game entirely. Taking your otherwise interesting game with PVE sandbox mechanics, and making it “safe” for players who want no part in the other aspects would be essentially igniting a beacon to those of us who had been avoiding it. Hell even having a PVE only server would go a long ways. I mentioned Dark Age of Camelot earlier, and the moment they opened Gaheris which was the co-op server I re-rolled there without a second thought. That server was an awesome thriving environment of folks who wanted to engage in the awesome PVE and raiding content in the game, but wanted nothing to do with the battleground experience. If it worked so well in the game that everyone holds up as the pinnacle of making a PVP game engaging, it can pretty much work in any game.

I still feel like there is effectively a single loud mouthed PVP Gank Squad that roams from game to game, and an ocean of PVE only players that are turned off by them existing. It seems like it would make business sense to create those PVE only servers that players ask for. I admit a lot of my lack of excitement over the Fallout 76 changes are knowing that there is a slim chance of my enjoyment being adversely effected by some other player as I wander the wasteland. I was originally not interested at all in the New World until they took a massive uturn and moved away form the multiplayer kill box concept. I’ve avoided Sea of Thieves similarly because while I am fine with a piracy simulator, I want to be engaged with interesting NPCs and not running away from players. Similarly I have always been interested in the Dark Zone in The Division, but have avoided it like the plague because I don’t want to engage in combat with other players. Each time I bring up these points I realize how not alone in this line of thinking I am, as was the case on Twitter yesterday. Surely there is a market here that is more or less being ignored by the constant striving for a design pattern that doesn’t actually seem to work.

Patio Open Time

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It seems like each weekend we have attempted to tackle one big thing. While the options are limited due to the fact that we are still very much sheltered in place, we have done a fairly decent job of finding something meaningful to do. Before the wider lock down happen we made a trip out to Garden Ridge, or whatever that store is currently called and found new outdoor rugs and throw pillows that have been sitting in the garage waiting on us to open the back yard officially. We’ve had a very cold and wet year thusfar and as a result we pushed this back further than either of us would have liked. However our little backyard oasis is officially open for business… or at least open to the two of us.

In theory we should be opening the pool within the next week, which will be nice because I think given the amount of time we are at home I might actually start using it every day. We need to figure out some sort of clothes line or something for swim suits and towels. The last step will be getting flowers, and from what I can tell our favorite greenhouse is open for business. We are trying to avoid leaving the house when possible, but I think at some point we will risk a trip out to get flowers. The flowers and the ritual of watering and care will start making things seem more normal, even though we are largely stuck in stasis.

As far as Friday’s post goes, I want to thank everyone for their comments. It seems like every so often I need to get one of those sort of posts out of my system and once I have I can move on with life. It is like I am putting all of those thoughts onto the written page and sending them out into the world where they develop a life of their own. However the process of exorcising them from the recesses of my mind helps me to get on with life and stop dwelling on them. I could just as easily write them on a piece of paper and then wad the paper up and toss it into the trash can, but at least on some level I think it is helpful to let those around you who are also struggling know that they are not necessarily alone.

On the gaming front, I managed to hit 120 on the Dino Druid. I actually dinged a few minutes into the podcast on Sunday evening and have since gotten his gear up to around 380 in a few days of World Quests. What I need desperately is a weapon upgrade, and I might actually target some of the LFR options that I have open to me trying to get a polearm or something similar. I’ve been spending some time working on factions on the Alliance Paladin, and managed to unlock Dark Iron over the weekend. The next target is Kul Tirans, which requires me to keep doing daily quests… and there are probably a few zone quests that I could also do to help speed that process up.

That is me and leveling four 120s in very rapid succession. Rather than start with another lowbie and run it all of the way up, I feel like I should probably finish off my Warlock as it is sitting at 113. I could in theory finish it off in a few days and would at least make me feel like less of a slacker for leaving it sitting in BFA level ranges for so long. All of this is oddly soothing because it gives me micro objectives to play towards without really having to think much about it. I know that is not exactly everyone’s idea of fun, but for me it is helping me bring order to chaos. Special thanks to my wife for providing a picture of the bedroom patio, since I failed to take one over the weekend. I hope you all have an excellent week and that you find peace in the midst of the nonsense times we are living.