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MMOs Worth Playing – World of Warcraft

November 6, 2015 by Belghast

Changing Course

When I started this segment of my blog the original intent was to highlight games that are not getting a lot of press and talk about all of the things I like about them. That said since the column is called “MMOs Worth Playing” I knew eventually I would have to get around to talking about some of the bigger names. So as a result I am going to have a momentary lapse of purpose here… and go with serendipity. Today’s is coming on the morning that BlizzCon 2015 starts, and as a result it just felt natural to talk about World of Warcraft. There was never a point where I would not ultimately end up covering the game, given that in many of the discussions I end up talking about it. So here we go… my attempt to create an overly positive discussion about the benefits of World of Warcraft.

The Standard

In every industry there is a leader that for the most part everyone gets compared to. In the MMO world this leader is World of Warcraft. Even though this has become the stuff of internet memes… it is by no means the first MMO, or in truth did it invent many of the things that folks attribute to it. That said it did manage to take the model that was burgeoning at the time of its release… knock off the rough spots and sand it to a mirror shine. Blizzard is really good at making games that appeal to the masses, and World of Warcraft is no exception. The problem is… the “appealing to the masses” has been a moving target causing the game to shift and dodge numerous times along the path. Each time it has changed course it has created a set of fans nostalgic for their imagined version of “the way things used to be”. So here we are today, with a legion of fan… some joyous, some in denial, and some begrudgingly along for the ride. Everyone has a World of Warcraft story, and if they don’t… they should. Every so often a questionnaire circulates through the community asking what game you would suggest a person with zero experience in MMOs should play… and the only actual answer you can give is in fact World of Warcraft.

This is the game that takes the complex concepts of an MMO and feeds it to players in bite sized chunks at just the right times to convert them from a MMO gaming neophyte to a seasoned veteran. The problem is that we have seen is that Warcraft is really good at creating Warcraft players, because many of these gamers never really venture out into other games. This is in many ways a failing of the other companies to embrace the same sort of low level educational campaign that Warcraft has. Sure to us long time players we see the Cataclysm revamp of the newbie zones as a travesty, but in each case they just work better… when you view them through the eyes of someone who has zero ancestral knowledge into the way that these games work. Each blatant breadcrumb, or cheese quest designed only to deliver you to the next quest hub… is honestly not for us, but instead for the players that NEED those clear indicators of what they should be doing next. We recently saw the subscription numbers for Warcraft and in part that number is due to the fact that a decade later they can still manage to induct brand new players into the tribe of WoW.

The Paradox

I am naming this section the Paradox because it highlights something odd in the game. When people leave Warcraft it is generally stated that they are leaving because they have “run out of things to do”. The problem that a game like WoW creates is that in order to keep the front edge of players happy, they have to keep cranking out content… something that Blizzard has proven to find difficult in the massive lags between end of expansion patches and the new expansion. The paradox comes in that one of the big reasons why I would suggest this game is that there is so damned much content to experience. Sure it might not be anything a veteran player wants to do… but for a brand new player this is a smorgasbord of brand new experiences and over a decade worth of sights and vistas to experience. World of Warcraft is by no means a gorgeous game at this point, because it feels a decade old at times… but there are still moments that are breath taking, like the first time you roll into Booty Bay and see the giant Goblin statue, or the first time you look down from the top of Thunderbluff onto the valleys below. These are important experiences that I feel like no one should rob themselves of.

So many of my good memories of this game however come from the interaction with the people. Part of my nostalgic chagrin however is realizing that so many of those players are no longer playing the game. Many of my best memories are tied to specific moments in the games history that will never come back. That however is not to say that each and every night new memories are not being made. People are still loving this game with all of their heart, and I have stated this before that I am more than a little jealous of them. I miss the types of experiences I used to have in World of Warcraft, but since many of those were tied to my “first time” doing this or that… I realize those are experiences I will never be able to have again. This is a game I was utterly devoted to for over half of that decade, and still have pangs of remorse when I think about those things I have lost. This game is powerful, and the experiences you have through it are equally powerful. Which is why I feel like everyone should step foot in the game and find their own version of those “first times”.

The Model

As I said many of those moments were because of the other players, but one of the benefits about starting World of Warcraft at this point… is that essentially everything is available to you as a solo player. That is not to say that I do not suggest that you find your way into a really good guild, because guilds make the entire experience better regardless of the game. However there really should be nothing locked from you because you did not bring a legion of friends into it. The game itself is subscription based, but you can get a free trial account to start and dip your toes into the water. If you end up liking it, the base game is $19.99 and will carry you through level 90, with the latest expansion Warlords of Draenor costing $49.99 on top of that. The later comes with a free boost to 90… which I highly suggest you don’t use at least not for your first character. There is a bunch of really awesome content to experience, and part of my frustration in the past is that it feels like these boosts cheapen the older content. Some of the best content in the game, is well below the level cap… so to skip over a Deadmines, Wailing Caverns, or Dire Maul would be a travesty. Then to maintain your account it is an older monthly subscription model of $14.99.

Over the years I have said a lot of hurtful things on this blog about Blizzard and World of Warcraft, and in many case those were about specific problems I had… that most players would never even care about. If I were creating a Facebook profile about my relationship with Warcraft… the only thing I could possibly pick is “complicated”. Similar to my feelings about Star Wars, with all of the hype and disappointment… I also hold in my heart a lot of frustration and disappointment with all of the possibility that was squandered. I’ve also come to realize that I wholeheartedly love Blizzard as a company, it is just one of there franchises that I have some issue with. Diablo 3 and Heroes of the Storm are both amazing… and what I have played of Starcraft 2 was really fun… even though I am not really an RTS player. I anxiously look forward to Overwatch and seeing how it does… and occasionally I break out a Hearthstone game even though that is not a regular occurrence. With World of Warcraft… I know that eventually I will go back and resubscribe because I always do. This game has a hold on my heart that even though I have tried to purge it so many times… it stays there clinging tightly. No matter what my current feelings are for the game, that power cannot be denied. So regardless of what the current hype cycle thinks… this is a great game and has so many excellent experiences that you would be robbing yourself of it you did not experience them. That is not to say that I don’t also think there are so many other amazing games out there… but when creating a column called “MMOs Worth Playing”… Warcraft had to be included among that number.

Instant Relevance

November 4, 2015 by Belghast

King of Match Three

Yesterday morning was the Activision Blizzard earnings call for investors, and much of the focus has been on one particular tidbit of information. They announced that they are acquiring Candy Crush maker King Digital for the sum of $5.9 Billion dollars. The reaction to this announcement has been pretty varied, because in truth… many “core” gamers loath the concept of games like Candy Crush. First off there is some confusion to clear up. Activision Blizzard is not the same thing as Blizzard Entertainment, so early reports I saw talked about Blizzard buying King Digital… which caused some outrage. Activision Blizzard is the big parent company that pulls all the strings of the various products from Call of Duty to Skylanders to of course the Blizzard franchises. At first I have to admit I was taken by surprise by the announcement but that pretty much went away immediately when I thought about it. In doing this deal ActiBlizz is essentially buying instant relevance in the traditional mobile gaming market.

Now you might be saying to yourself… But Bel, Activision and Blizzard already doing mobile gaming. Sure they do… but they do it in a way that attempts to appeal to “core” gamers that are wanting something on their phone to play when they don’t have access to their normal gaming platforms. This is a vastly different market than the one that King Digital generally focuses on which are for lack of a better term “casual” and “mobile exclusive” users that would never in a million years… consider themselves gamers. Essentially King Digital targets people like my wife, that spends plenty of time playing games on her iPad but does not in any fashion think of herself as a gamer. So in essence with this one… albeit expensive acquisition, they now cover a market that they did not serve in any fashion. Sure Hearthstone is a great mobile game… but it really only draws in people who already are in the fold of “gamers”. The big thing is all of these “non-gamers” have prove time and time again that they are in fact willing to spend money on micro-transactions.

What This Means

In truth I doubt for the short term it really means anything. Activision will continue releasing big budget shooters like Call of Duty and Destiny… and Blizzard will continue flirting with e-sports while still not quite certain what to do with World of Warcraft. Another big chunk of this earnings report was a note that the WoW subscription numbers have more or less stabilized from their post Warlords of Draenor free fall. I feel like there is some fuzzy math at work here, but according to the official figures they have dropped from 5.6 Million to 5.5 Million. There was a strange little definition that was released to explain what they determined a subscriber.

Subscriber Definition: World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees’ territories are defined along the same rules.

This makes me think that these subscription numbers are in fact counting WoW Token players… seeing as how that would count as “prepaid” access. So the actual month to month subscription numbers would be a bit lower. To some extent I wish they would have broken those numbers out separately… since a monthly sub is semi-guaranteed income, and a token is a one time purchase. The other big news however is that they plan on this being the last month they actually announce subscription numbers. Instead they have a new sort of engagement number formula that they are working on to determine the health of the game.

At first glance this sounds a bit odd… and maybe like they are trying to hide losses within the cloak of mathematics. However… we are just days away from Blizzcon and it makes me wonder. Will this finally be the year that they announce World of Warcraft going to a free to play model? Cutting the ties of relying on subscriptions to convey the health of the game… would at least be one step in that direction. If I were Blizzard I would be seriously considering it… because honestly Free to Play seems to work. With the recent high publicity relaunch of Wildstar… that game is doing significantly better now than it was, and the same was essentially true with Star Wars the Old Republic went to the model. Free to Play has been the salvation of otherwise dying games… and even though World of Warcraft is far from dying… I still think they would benefit from the switch. It would be a massive shift in methodology and would probably change the way content is delivered, but it would also bring back a bunch of players that want to dip their toes in the game every now and then… but not feel like they are chained to a subscription. Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone are both wildly success as Free to Play experiences… and with Overwatch starting to ramp up and following that same model… it just seems like Blizzard has wrestled with how to make it work.

What I Hope Happens

So while I don’t think anything will change for a bit… my hope is that through this deal there is some cross pollination of skillsets. I would love to see better integration of mobile platforms and traditional games. As you know I have been playing a lot of Destiny… and quite honestly the way that game works is just not as clean as it should. There are a lot of things that you can do through the website… slightly different things that you can do through the mobile app… and even a different set of things through the game itself. The entire process feels cludgy as hell… but an attempt to move in the direction of giving players access to tools outside of the game. Now if you take that basic desire and match it with a company that has proven that they can spin the same old match three schlock into infectious gold… you can maybe create really interesting experiences that span traditional platforms and mobile gaming ones.

What I would love to see is a better mobile app for World of Warcraft. Why can’t we fish on our mobile phones and have it grant skill-ups and materials for our characters in game? Why can’t we do the normally tedious action of Archaeology in a mobile mini-game? Garrisons themselves were essentially the same sort of thing as a tiny tower like mobile game… why didn’t exist on mobile platforms allowing people to do the upkeep and maintenance activities when they couldn’t otherwise play the game? Why can’t we have a significantly better auction house integration system? Essentially… give players a reason to stay in the game by making them feel more connected to it.. on their own terms. A big part of my frustration with Garrisons is that I knew I had a one to two hour ritual waiting on me every time I logged into the game, before I could feel like I was free to do interesting things… like slay internet dragons. If I could do Garrisons while walking to my car at night, or on my lunch break… it would take some of that burden away so that I knew once I got home… I could do the fun stuff without having to worry about the “paperwork”. Essentially we live our lives on our phones… and the games that integrate better with how we live our lives are going to feel more “real” to us.

Spindle Envy

November 3, 2015 by Belghast

Game of the Month

This month for AggroChat Game Club we decided to do something a little different. This was the brain child of Tam, who wished we had the time to really dig in and explore a much larger game. If you’ve noticed we tend to pick relatively short games for the Game Club because it gives us a shot in hell of beating it before the end of the month and we record the show. We also tend to pick relatively cheap games, making it easier for all of us to pick the title up… which a lot of times limits us to Indie titles. Instead this month we are digging wholeheartedly into post apocalyptic Boston… in Fallout 4. Since we are hitting that time of the year when people start to have conflicts, and we have decided to make Fallout span two months. So the plan is to have it be both the game of the month for November and December, with a bit of a preview show at the end of November to talk about our progress so far. Then around Christmas a tell all show talking about our feelings about the game and more importantly our experiences. This is the sort of game where everyone who sits down in front of it will have slightly different experiences, and at least to some extent I plan on trying to keep a running journal of what all I find in the wastes.

Fallout and I go far back, and I can honestly say I have been a huge fan of the series since its launch. I remember going to the local Wal-mart to buy a copy for the PC shortly after it launched, and pretty much losing all sense of time playing it. I wish I could say that I went as far back as Wasteland, but alas I did not. I remember the game, I remember people talking about it… but when it existed I simply did not have a computer. Fallout is one of those games that changed the way I felt about PC gaming in general. In the years prior to it, I was pretty much heavily a Super Nintendo gamer… thinking that Final Fantasy and the JRPG thing was the superior gaming experience. Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment… changed all of that and I started moving heavily away from the consoles and focusing almost entirely on PC RPGs and eventually allowing myself to get sucked into the MMO world. So it is with zero hyperbole that say that Fallout shaped the way I feel about gaming, so when a new one releases… I end up almost vibrating with excitement. I realize in the coming months I am pretty much going to be dead to the world apart from poking my head into the occasional game here or there. For at least the first several weeks my blog is pretty much going to be entirely devoted to my travels in post apocalyptic Massachusetts. I am hoping that you will join me in this adventure, and we will sort out how best to convey your experiences so we can talk about them on the podcast as well.

Lost to Light

Yesterday the mission in Destiny called “Lost to Light” was the daily heroic, and as a result that meant Black Spindle the exotic sniper rifle was once again available. I had plotted and schemed all day long about this being the night we would actually go do this. I was so phenomenally wrong…. but we at least made an attempt. I grabbed Carthuun and Squirrel Pope and we made a valiant attempt. Earlier in the day Squirrel had actually managed to get through the quest with a group, and while we didn’t succeed we didn’t do that horrible in the grand scheme of things. Basically I think we are still slightly too low light, but that seems to be the general problem… because I have no clue how to get over 300 reliably other than run the raid. Everything was going pretty smoothly, we destroyed the Ogre which started the sequence where we run through the hive fortress and branch off to go up onto the Ketch instead. Once on the Ketch we did fairly well for the most part, other than the room with all the snipers. It took us a lot longer in that room than it probably should have, which made everything feel that much more stressful. We were sitting roughly at the 5 minute mark when we set foot into the final room to fight the taken version of Taniks. From there… things just went bad… we died a lot… we failed to knock out one of the blights in the far back of the room… and we simply were not doing enough damage to the boss fast enough.

From there we decided to lick our wounds and head into Nightfall, because according to Squirrel it would be far easier than what we just went through. I am not disappointed mind you in our progress… it at least gives us a goal to work towards. Nightfall had a few frustrating moments but we took it nice and slow after the rushed experience of trying to clear to and defeat Taniks in ten minutes. When we finally downed Alak-Hul I got lucky enough for him to drop his unique helmet, which I am now rocking after some fiddling with it. I really love collecting these unique items, like the arms with the chain fist from the bond brothers strike. For the Nightfall itself I was awarded a 4th Horseman, which sadly I already had… so it pretty much immediately became an exotic shard which is never a bad thing. I’ve talked about this before but as far as shotguns go… I just cannot think of a situation where I would want 4th Horseman over Invective. From there we attempted to run a few heroics… which we got through the first one without issue… then during the second one Carth disconnected. He has been having some internet issues lately… and I forgot to set the group to “locked” so the game filled for us… and we ended up finishing the restorative mind with a stranger. All in all… which we had some frustrations it was still a really fun night, and I am hoping to be able to get in again tonight and do some more fun stuff.

The Villainy

November 2, 2015 by Belghast

Extra-Life : Support Liore!

We started out this year with every intention of doing Extra-Life as AggroChat. However somewhere in the middle of all of this good intention… life happened. At this point we have done nothing to prepare for Extra-Life and done absolutely no fundraising. This means… that AggroChat is not in fact doing Extra-Life this year but will be taking a rain check in the hopes of rebooting this initiative next year. In the meantime… I highly suggest you support the person I am supporting for Extra-Life. We have joked for awhile that AggroChat and Cat Context are similar enough that we should start having special “AggroCats” episodes where we jumble the cast together. I feel like the podcast would end up feeling pretty similar. Liore and Cat Context were so much inspiration when we decided to start AggroChat… so backing Liore in her Extra-Life is kinda like backing us! In truth if not for Cat Context there would likely not be an AggroChat because that podcast taught me that it is perfectly okay to do a podcast with natural conversation instead of show notes and such!

It is my hope that even though I am not doing Extra-Life I can pop by on Liore’s stream and hang out a bit while she does her thing. We even talked about potentially playing something that is all multiplayery that we can hang out and chat while doing. I love the concept of this event, because it proves that gamers can in fact put their hearts in the right place and do amazing things for the world. It is not in fact all about teabagging… and I was honestly shocked that was still a thing when I encountered it recently in Destiny. Like people did that in the Quake 3 engine days… and I figured surely by now people had gotten over that “phase”. I got off track… anyways I highly suggest you pop by the donation page and throw a few bucks towards the cause. I will be tuning in for as much of Liore’s stream as I can, so it should be a good time!

Favorite Weapons

Yesterday I decided to do a new sort of video for me, where I go into it with a specific topic… you know like most youtube videos in existence. Generally speaking YouTube is just this place where I dump backup copies of whatever I have streamed, and not something I really do intentionally. This time around I wanted to talk a bit about the weapons I am currently using in Destiny and what I like about each of them. So during the course of the video I go through my current arsenal:

Zhalo Supercell – Auto-Rifle
Hakke Zarinaea-D – Auto-Rifle
Suros DIS-43 – Scout Rifle
Suros Hawksaw – Pulse Rifle
Invective – Shotgun

I cannot fully put into words how excited I am that Xur had a Zhalo Supercell on Friday. Other than No Time to Explain exotic… this was the weapon I wanted most. This gun is so much fun, and more importantly it does a bunch of interesting things. Namely it seems to be able to reach around shielded mobs when it procs. So if you are fighting a Hive Knight or Cabal Phalanx… the procced lightning damage will still damage them even if they have the shield up. This means this is my go to weapon for most strikes because it will simply decimate so many mobs… and can drop the shield of annoying mobs like Knights, Captains and Harpies that have those Arc Shields. I am really hoping that everyone who wants one of these got it this past weekend, because even though it is only 280 I was able to pour enough stuff into it to make it reasonable for most things. Largely right now what I am lacking is weapon parts… and decent high level weapons to feed into my legendary weapons of choice. I wish I knew the secret to getting decent drops… because I am equipping every last ounce of light I can before I start decoding, and still habitually ending up with 260-280 items that are utterly useless to me.

New Weapon

Traditionally my Hunter has used the hand-me-downs from my Titan as far as weapons go. Then if I ended up really liking a weapon… I would end up stealing it from the hunter and giving it to my Titan instead. I think the above weapon is the first time I am not going to do that. On my Titan I already have a really capable Pulse Rifle in the form of a Hawksaw, that nicely rounds out my weapon arsenal. If you want to hear more about it, I go into it in detail in my video above. The other day I managed to rank up with Future War Cult that my Hunter reps… and the package handed me one of their weapons called the Villainy. I didn’t think much about it and ultimately it took me awhile to get around to testing it out. Yesterday during our Star Wars pen and paper session I spent a good deal of time running around in Destiny on my hunter and chewing through the backlog of bounties. During most of that time I used this weapon, and I have to say… I am liking it.

If you look at the two weapons… Hawksaw and Villainy they stack up pretty closely… but I have to say in almost every possible way the Villainy is just better. It has significantly more impact, more range, more stability… similarly reload. The more I look at it verses the Armory profiles for each weapon… I am guessing I simply just got a really ideal roll on my Villainy. This is one of the things I like about this game that would end up driving others absolutely insane. I like that two different weapons from the same family can vary so much, because it makes you feel like this weapon or that weapon are more “yours” because they may not be exactly the same as anyone else’s version of it. My specific Villainy has Partial Refund, Perfect Balance, and Third Eye… and it is an absolute amazing weapon to use. Part of me is hoping to get another one just to see how different they might feel. All I know for certain is that for the time being… this weapon is the go to for my hunter. I also posted a picture of my hunter above just because he looks kinda bad ass right now. I am hoping to get more pieces of the Neuroghast set… because seriously… that name is fitting for me, and it looks pretty amazing.