Players of the Last Alt

One more time around the block as they say. One last character reroll, on the Horde side, for old time sake before we give up WarCraft (again) and play SWTOR this fall.

We've decided to farm up a bunch of heirlooms and mail them to level 1 horde alts to level up together. I got a jump start - and need to stop for a day or so - and got my hunter up to level 25 in about 6 hours played. I'm playing an orc hunter with the heirloom helm, shoulders, chest, bow, and dual daggers, with everything enchanted. I've been purposely trying to take it slow so I don't jump out ahead of everyone else, but it's almost impossible.

I figured battlegrounds would be a good way to waste time with little xp, but because of the heirlooms and the guild bonus (we joined a L20 guild) when we win a Warsong Gulch match I end up getting almost a whole level of XP! Crazy.

I'm still doing my firelands dailies on my paladin, and this is just for fun and filling spare time. Skinning & leatherworking are my professions, and I've already got ~100 in fishing, cooking, and first aid. Seriously, I must be bored. When will we get our TOR release date?

Star Wars: The Phantom Beta

Apparently there is a lot of information out there about Star Wars. Somehow, I'm not getting any of it. There is one very helpful summary post on the SWTOR forums that TheDarkKnight provided summarizing all the leaked information to date (and it's on the site, so you know it's true and non-NDA threatening). But in spite of reading it a few times and searching for other sources, I'm not getting the answers I need about SWTOR.

Check that - the answers I want, not need. And I don't think anyone will provide the answers I'm looking for. I have questions about classes, crafting, combat, world exploration, NPCs, ships, and lots of things. But what I want to know most of all is if I'll like it.

Yeah, no one can tell me that, but I could find out really easily if I had a chance to play the Beta. When I got into the Cataclysm beta for WoW it reassured to me that there was a lot of new and interesting content (especially for re-rollers and casuals, like me) and that purchasing it was going to be a certainty. I thought I wanted to get into the beta to learn about the crafting and zones and what the quickest path to prosperity was, but I discovered that the only thing that gratified me was seeing that there was new content to explore.

I participated in beta the way a person should. I did quests, discovered and reported bugs (Town-In-A-Box, etc.) and tried lots of different things to explore the fringe edges of the game. It was fun. But then I logged out after only a couple of days and didn't go back, because I wanted to save the content for when it went live. I had my answer, I liked it.

Am I going to like SWTOR? I don't know. I'm not sure anyone will be able to answer that for me. I need to know what combat is like. I need to know if I will be relying on macros and keyboard tricks to survive in PvP. I need to know if the interface is built for clickers. I need to know if the content is forgiving enough to support people no matter what choices they make. I need to be able to drive the game with one hand and the sound off for periods of time, because I refuse to ignore the family while I play: The game is in the background, not the family.

Nobody can tell me these things in a forum post or even a youtube video (which would be a violation of the NDA right now). Nobody, however eloquent, can describe in enough detail what I will find annoying, what I can deal with, and what I will really enjoy. The only way I can get these answers is by trying the game myself. If I weren't already promising to a group of friends that I'm playing SWTOR at launch, I would be hesitant to buy it. Not because of the content or quality of the game, but because of the interest, interface and comfort of play.

I don't play games much for the "enthralling story and lore." I'll take whatever storyline they give me, and enjoy it enough. The make or break however is the feeling that without keyboard smashing and just a combination of normal reflexes and intelligent strategy that I can survive most of my obstacles and PvP encounters. If I can't, if it requires overly complicated techniques and focus, then it's going to have an uphill battle winning my admiration and spare time.

So I've been entered in the beta for a long time now, and I've had an account on the SWTOR site for almost two years, but I'm not getting in the beta, and my questions are going unanswered.

Will I buy it? Yeah. I promised I would.

Will I like it? We'll see.

Summer Vacation

It's like that last summer after high school, when you know you're done with public schools forever, yet you haven't quite begun the adult adventure of college. You have a deadline of fall to grow up, but you sort of want to cling to the childish years a little while you can.

So goes the summer before SWTOR. WarCraft has been an excellent game and has absorbed hundreds of hours of my time, but SWTOR will be the game I graduate to this fall. I'm still playing WoW while I wait, but there's no seriousness to it. We five-manned Vashj last night for kicks but there wasn't any real reward for doing it. We were happy that we were able to do it, and moved on.

SWTOR glitters on the horizon. It appears that our group will be playing the light side, and I'll be a Smuggler. Even a universe with light sabers and force powers needs a few gunslingers, amirite? The sabre stuff looks cool, but the space cowboy is my style. Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side, kid.

April Showers

Bring May flowers. Without any game communities placing demands on my time I'll be spending time outside recreationally and gardening, etc. There are still rainy days though, and for those times it's good to break out the old solo games (Jedi Academy, MW2, Red Alert, etc.).

There's nothing new coming out that appeals to me, although I may break down and spring for a copy of Black Ops. I'm almost done beating Spore (on sale at a Walmart near you for $20), but it doesn't seem highly replayable. Rift is exactly what it was advertised to be - a great, flexible fantasy MMO - but I'm just burned out on fantasy games and MMOs at the moment.

There's always baseball games, I guess.

Divergence

Everyone I know is on a different kick at the moment. But before I get into whom and what and details, I need to lay the foundation for this update.

Once upon a time, everything you'd ever want to play was available at Walmart. The time was about 2005, and the everything was console games, computer games, handheld games, roleplaying games, collectible card games, and everything else gamey, nerdly, and techy.

Then Blizzard entered the MMO market. With the rise in broadband access and cheap proliferation of internet access and a networking-style game based on a popular franchise in the same genre as the newly released Lord of the Rings movies, it sucked up huge amounts of market share to the point that little else was available on the shelves aside from deer hunting and console games. It was the One Ring that ruled them all, the AOL of MMOs.

There were some software stores in malls that did a healthy traffic of consoles and console games and second-hand items, but they didn't really start to flourish until about 2007, when people started to get sick of WarCraft. Up until then, for two solid years, World of WarCraft had an unbreakable grip on all of us. We slowly struggled to gain our freedom, and until the release of the Cataclysm expansion we hadn't felt like Frodo had succeeded in tossing the mind-controlling ring of MMOs into Mt. Doom, breaking its hold over us.

Those who broke away earlier have been playing mostly consoles and some 1st person shooters (Call of Duty, for one), waiting for the rest of us to come around. At the end of 2010 Cataclysm popped and the spell was broken for many of us. Some of us fled to the land of consoles, some for single player games (Dragon Age, et. al.) and some headed to a replacement MMO, Rift.

And now, there is a great divergence. Sensing that the next event that will semi-unite us again is long on the horizon in the form of SWToR, we are staying in touch but sampling different games. I'm full into Rift, and enjoying it. I play a little MW2 on the side, but Rift is it. A couple people are playing The Show, a career baseball game for the PS3, and some are looking forward to the new edition of Mortal Kombat. My son is fully into Minecraft and loving it, although he misses WarCraft sometimes.

The subscriptions and attention slide away from WarCraft, and the community prospers as a result. There are now a larger number of people who appreciate daily electronic gaming as a pasttime, but don't want to play WarCraft to fulfill that need, so there's plenty of money to go around again for other titles.

Which is good, because with this economy we need to reinvest in our sole industry of dominance - entertainment. (Preferably, the electronic version.) Coin up - Buy American!

Rift Delivers

It lacks the lore characters of Azeroth that people have become familiar with. Aside from that, Rift beats the pants off of World of WarCraft in almost every way.

At first I took a look at Rift (a soon-to-be-launched MMO from Trion) as something to do and explore the limits of in place of Warcraft, which was feeling more and more like a box game and less like a sprawling world. The interface for Rift was extremely similar to WoW, which allowed me to jump right in. I can't emphasize enough how important this was, because as an older player I am less and less able to acclimate to different sets of keybindings. I bound the middle mouse to toggle autorun and I was set.

Running the game even on an ancient laptop with limited graphic ability I was able to navigate well, engage in combat, and use my abilities. The quests were understandable and not meaningless, the zones that were highly populated were not cumbersome, and the battles were winnable. When grouped with different classes, tanking, damage-dealing, and healing roles all shined. It was clear that this wasn't an Age of Conan debacle, this was a real MMO.

What happened after that was unexpected. Normally, I have no reason to really care about NPCs or even the world I'm playing in, I'm just a sword and a bag of gold. After playing WarCraft for so long I learned all of the NPCs - if only to just be able to solve quests - and I had a huge mental database of people, places, and things. I was worried that I would miss my investment in WoW lore and knowledge. It didn't happen. There's two reasons for this.

First, WoW blew itself up. The whole world changed, and what I realized I valued most was my knowledge of where to go and what to kill in order to farm items and craft with them. All of this accumulated information was now worthless. Monsters had all changed, dungeons had changed, zones were mutated, and I found myself relying on the auction house to obtain goods (which is a sure-fire recipe for poverty on most servers). I wasn't interested in re-cataloging all of my information, I just wanted to know where, and how. Wowhead had a fairly decent database of new drops, but I got tired of tabbing out and asking a website for every little question. In short, it became tedious. I was starting to lose my attachment to the world.

Second, Rift doesn't hold still. The world is constantly under attack from elementals shifting in from different planes, wreaking havoc on the countryside and putting yourself and your allied NPCs in peril. If you don't beat them back, they'll grow stronger and destroy you! I don't have much interest in defending the world, but the guys who are teaching me to fight and to do crafts are pretty important, and I'm not about to let them get crushed by some elemental army. So I fight! I join the dozens of other adventurers in an impromptu raid and beat them back, so we can continue on our quest to grow stronger.

The "uh oh, look out" instant raid group events bind you to the game in a way I wasn't expecting. It felt somewhat like the old days of Tarren Mill and Southshore in WoW, when you ended up in a battle due to proximity, not because someone gave you a quest to go there. It makes the world feel alive, and it gives the game an extra level of energy.

And I'll be playing Rift starting the 24th, in the final 'headstart' beta. No server decision yet, but probably as a Guardian on a PvE realm.

Seven-Year Itch

Blizzard's World of WarCraft has been in operation for over six years, and will reach the seven year mark in November of 2011. By that point there are going to be a lot of people who will be seriously contemplating how faithful they are willing to be to WarCraft.

Already, signs are emerging that it is the beginning of the end.

As we discussed last February, the most powerful lore character - in terms of his ability to carry a storyline - was Arthas, aka The Lich King, and he's dead. He was killed and replaced with Bolvar (mostly so that people can keep running the dungeon content if they want and it sort of makes sense), who now resides as eternal ruler over the Scourge, to keep them from running wild.

Posts are starting to show up on the forums from people who were initially concerned about whether the game would remain interesting after the death of Arthas, and they're having a hard time getting into the villany of Deathwing. There's no argument that Deathwing is powerful, but he doesn't have the same grip on players the way Arthas did. Arthas was one of us. In fact, in WarCraft III we played part of the game as Arthas and saw first hand his downfall and weakness and transformation into video gaming's greatest villain.



Deathwing... is a big dragon. He's always operated at a historical level, and when he's been thwarted in the past the playable races had nothing to do with it. It's like fighting El Nino or Terrorism - his scope is beyond the actions of a single player. Of course they'll scale him down, probably as a result of long player-completed questlines that marginalize his power, and with the assistance of a bunch of dragons you'll get to slip in at the last second when everything is in balance and deliver the final blow. Yeah, you can see this coming from a mile away. The guy has over 200 million health, there's no way a party of 10 people is going to spoil his day alone.

Also on the forums we're seeing a lot of people asking outright "does it seem like people are leaving?" The answer is yes, of course, there will always be people who leave after the first two months of an expansion. A lot of people said they would come back to see Cataclysm, and they have, but they never said they'd stay. They wanted to see the world and see the changes and they've seen it. Additionally, another wave of "I've been playing since launch" players are trickling out the door.

It's an expansion based on nostalgia. The old world has been given a massive makeover, with all of the classic instances revamped for ease of play or level changes, territories mutated by the tidal waves and earthquakes that accompanied Deathwing's arrival, and a shift of control over regions by the Alliance and Horde as a result of their renewed war. The war itself is kind of refreshing. We've been trying to obliterate each other for six years because - let's face it, diehard Hordies and Alliance really do hate each other - but after years of things like account bans for griefing NPCs and 'dishonorable kills', it's hard to get the factions to take world PvP seriously anymore. Usually it's a few nere-do-wells ganking people by surprise in the wild, or packs of arena monkeys holding small camps, and nothing more.

Guilds have been given a larger role in the expansion. They now provide purchasable rewards like heirlooms and noncombat pets for guild growth and achievement, so it benefits people to be a member of a larger guild to take advantage of them. This doesn't really solve the problem of people being unwilling to participate in guild events, it just makes guilds bloated and less familiar. It's a double-edged sword, guild leaders need to accommodate players and not burn bridges, and players need to endure the disgusting affectations of their guildmates to continue enjoying benefits. It makes the guild system stronger, but individual guilds weaker and less socially meaningful.

Cataclysm is also the first expansion that launched without the addition of new servers. Being a self-admitted server locust (I enjoy rerolling on new servers to watch the communities grow from stratch), I was a little disappointed to see that no servers were added. Initially, we suspected that they might add one or two because there were dozens of servers 'locked' - meaning they would not accept new accounts rolling characters on them. This weekend in the evening I looked at the server list and there were only a dozen or so that were in the 'full' state and none of them were 'locked'. I haven't heard of any login queues at all for any server. It is undeniable, the active population has dropped dramatically since the launch of Cataclysm, probably by now to the point of pre-launch, and malaise has set in.

Every expansion brings a series of phases:
1. Wow, this is new, I love it
2. Ok, I've seen everything new and I'm running out of exciting things to do
3. Content Patch 1: Some people love it, some wonder if they'll ever play it, some reroll
4. The state of game balance becomes clear, people reroll favored classes on favored factions
5. Content Patch 2: Some people love it, some never see it
6. Pre-expansion game changes implemented

With each phase the active population goes up a little, then declines more than it rose. The high point in population is always at launch of a new expansion, and it declines slowly, somewhat buffered by content patches. It appears at this point that the population was never higher than previous levels, and is declining faster than with previous expansions.

Something happened when the game changed itself to accommodate the more casual player: Players treat their game play more casually. It has become less important to them and they are more willing to walk away and do something else instead. They know that being gone for a couple of months or even a year will result in a very small setback, and in some ways will make their playtime even more enjoyable. Blizzard has made the game easier to pick up for new players, but also easier to put down for veteran players.

And currently, it looks like people are ready to put it down and walk away.