MMORPG

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.

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.

WoW Classic: A thread.

What is this phenomenon? Why do people want to go back to the place that everyone agrees was terrible in so many ways?

— Tam (Chris) (@Tamrielo) August 27, 2019

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.