Older than the Internet

Please add the following catch phrases to the cultural lexicon:

“He/she’s older than the Internet”

“Never trust anyone older than the Internet”

With that, lets all wish the Internet a happy birthd

Removing the World from Virtual Worlds

Been reading the discussion of the WoW 3.3. patch and after being struck with alternating waves of “cool!” and “its about time!”, I was overcome with the feeling that a good portion of the “World” part of “World of Warcraft” just swirled down the drainhole.  To be fair, its been doing that by degrees for quite some time.

I’m truly torn watching these trends.  On the one hand, I greatly enjoy gaming sessions with a regular group of friends.  The socializer and achiever in me loves the efficiency that all of these travel and ancillary changes have wrought over time.  The explorer side of me, however, dies a little with each subsequent patch.
 
As our instance group has proven, even the most casual of players, playing only a scant few hours per week can progress through the game’s instanced content almost exclusively without setting foot on virtual terra firma outside of capital cities.  That of course was never our explicit intent, it was simply a reality due to the lowest common denominator time budget for our group members.
 
We wanted to run all the instances at level and the xp and gear from doing those instances was vastly superior to doing group “open world” content.  As its well known, open world group activity is penalized and seeing as we didn’t intend to play solo (nor was speed leveling the object of our efforts), solo questing wasn’t on the table.

The World Before Us
 
Most of our group had been playing together since December 2004 and had already experienced WoW 1.0 as it then lay before us– a large number of quests and zones to explore punctuated by reasonably challenging instanced content along the progression path to the level cap.  Quest chains led you to and fro across the continents chasing threads of storylines that conveniently intersected with various instances– instances that felt distant, dangerous and exotic. 

In some cases, getting to the instances felt like a bit of an adventure itself.  Scarlet Monestary beckoned well before you were able to purchase your first mount at level 40.  After running all the way from Southshore through Horde Territory, you were rewarded with a dangerous place in a hostile land, far from the nearest Alliance town.  Likewise, before Light’s Hope Chapel was made into a full Alliance quest hub, Stratholme was a dangerous place, far far from the safety and support of an Alliance town.  But to the intrepid went the rewards.  Dire Maul was on the far side of the world for Alliance.

Of course all this open world travel and adventuring took time.  Quite frankly, more time than many people enjoy or can afford.  If all a person can afford is about a two hour block of time to play and the dungeon may take close to that to run, then 45 minutes of inventory management, repairs, preparation and travel (x5 people) acts as an insurmountable gate to that content.
 
Mass Transit
 
Warlocks’ summoning spell was always a great help to get stragglers to the group.  Great if you had a warlock in your group and three members had already arrived to perform the ritual.  While convenient, it hardly shrank the world to a significant degree.  Likewise, Mage portals at best got you to the closest capital city.  Aftewards, you were on your own.

Multiflightpoint taxi travel also took the edge off of travel to far flung destinations, even though you still had to manage any boat travel connections manually.  At least you could bio and microwave your hotpocket while you AFK flew from Darnassus to Feathermoon Stronghold on your way to Dire Maul.

The ever maligned meeting stones were finally repurposed as group summoning stones. Now only two group members needed to be present to summon (though they were level restricted).

Portals in Shatrath and Dalaran (and in each capital city to the Dark Portal) eliminated the vast majority of the travel tax for most players.  Add some additional mage portal destinations and long distance taxi travel is all but eliminated.
 
Hearthstone cooldowns were reduced making them much more of a travel strategy rather than a one time “done for the night” utility.  Especially in conjuction with the city portals.

Once upon a time, you had to visit a battlemaster in a city or actually travel to Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin or Alterac Valley to join a battleground instance (Do the other BGs other than Wintergrasp even have a world presence?).  Through successive patches, all that is now required is a wee click on the pvp button to queue for a battleground and be magically whisked into the disambiguated battleground instance, promptly to be returned whence you came upon the battle’s conclusion.

Patch 3.3 is effectively accomplishing the same thing with the sweeping changes to the LFG tool and the implementation of cross server instance groups.  As Nils reported a response in the comment’s to Tobold’s recent post: “YES!  I will never have to leave Dalaran again!”  Indeed.

The Incredible Shrinking MMO
 
I’m reminded of the recent success/failure of Warhammer’s disparate approach to the same problem.  Early on, the insta queue anywhere battlegrounds were the most efficient means of gaining xp and the most reliable way to find pvp which was lacking in a pvp oriented game.  There was something of a world out there, but for many it simply didn’t exist in any meaningful way.  Log in, queue, BG pops, go done, repeat until cap.

I’m also reminded of DDO which I’ve been revisiting a bit of late.  In many ways its the ultimate session play environment.  In DDO (like Guildwars), there is essentially no massive multiplayer world outside of the instances which are spawned as needed for a solo or group players.  In DDO, all progress comes from completing these instanced challenges too, so walking the earth like Caine and grinding on what you find there is pretty much nonexistent. 

All of these “improvements” increase social interaction but at the expense of the sense of a virtual world.  Maybe that’s what most people want.  Heck, I was lobbying for our group to pick up Guildwars or DDO as a follow on to our WoW instance efforts because of these features that would allow all of us to quickly and easily get into the group content we enjoy without all these hassles.

Can the mass market support a virtual world or are we relegated to a shiny 3d chat room with a right click adventure menu?  Yes, of course, with WoW, one can always choose to run, ride, fly or even walk to experience the virtual world.  That’s not the point here.  The question is, what will future massive games hold for us?

Will Blizzard’s next gen MMO adopt most of the grouping/travel paradigms that are evolving in WoW?  I recall reading somewhere about wormhole travel for the upcoming STO and I’m cautiously pessimistic.  Likewise for SW:TOR.  Game functionality tends to evolve convergently.  Functional solutions and popular features from earlier games tend to end up represented in subsequent games of the same genre.  Part of this is meeting consumer expectations and part of it is simply addressing a gameplay need for the player base. 
 
As much fun as group content can be, I can’t help feeling we are losing the world from our virtual worlds.  The increasing focus on the “endgame” only exacerbates the problem as the virtual world is reduced to a series of repeatable instance pinatas, all of which must be run and rerun to fuel the gear progression game.

Hallowed Be My Name

Hallow’s End is in full swing in Azeroth and despite the end of our regular instance group activities, we all seem to enjoy the double meaninglessness of holiday events AND achievements.  So, after a good warm up on the recent Brewfest, most of us are enjoying the Hallow’s End fun and rolling the Headless Horseman for loot (and hoping for the possibility of his rare mount drop).  Since Eldre’Thalas is an east coast server and we’re west coast, Hallow’s End started for us last Saturday night.  We didn’t have a complete group on, so I got started in on the fun early.

In addition to the great loot that drops from the Headless Horseman, the meta achievement for the event is the title “the Hallowed“.  A laudable achievement and indeed a very priestly title.  Me want that.

Titles are fun.  Titles were one of the things I liked quite a bit about LotRO.  And of all the meaningless achievements, at least you get to keep the title forever.

Fortunately Hallow’s End runs for almost two weeks this year, so I thought even with my usual rotten luck, I might have a chance at the title with a bit of slightly less than obsessed diligence.  Most of the achievements are fairly pedestrian, requiring the completion of the basic daily quests, trick or treating locations in the Eastern Kingdoms, Kalimdor and Outland.  Trivial for someone at the level cap, more so for an “Explorer“.

Some require collaboration and luck– The Masquerade requires being transformed by various wands which requires someone else to be lucky and then favor you with the transformation.  With our group, getting that out of the way wasn’t bad.  The wands are random items that come from trick or treating innkeepers which you can do only once an hour.  Of course, intrepid enterprising folks are always advertising in trade offering their transformations for a price (I’m happy to say I got all mine from our little group rather than resorting to naked capitalism).

That left only a Sinister Calling to complete for the title.  This requires the acquisition of a sinister squashling and the hallowed helm.  Both are low percentage drops from treat bags.  Each trick or treat can result in a short duration trick, a costume transformation or a treat bag, so getting a bag each time is not a certainty, let alone the contents you desire in each bag.  So, I’ve been diligent this year in trick or treating as often as possible– log on and get one before I leave for work, log on when I get home and then come back after dinner, etc.  If I’m very diligent I might get about 5 in per day.  Otherwise, about 3 is typical.

So of course tonight, after another quick pummeling of the Headless Horseman, I was about to head off to bed when I saw the timer was only another 10 minutes before I could trick or treat again.  I was feeling pretty good since I had been able to finally get the squashling earlier in the night and the final transformation.  Only the hallowed helm to go and still plenty of time left in the event.  I was feeling good until I remembered our tank’s 60+ runs through old Strat trying (and not succeeding) to get his Tier 0.5 set pants back in the day… Still, think positive.

As the timer ran down, I thought to myself, hey I should probably be ready to take a screen shot just in case.  Yeah, right.

Treat Indeed

Five minutes before I was about to log, but I thought, well, just one more tonight…

Hallowed be MY name

Gift Horse

Been very quiet.  Topsy turvy work schedules and generally nothing constructive to say have somehow managed to keep me from posting much of late.  Something I’ll try to fix as the longer nights of fall and winter arrive.

I checked out of Eve last summer after a long and productive winter/spring run.  For me for some reason, Eve is a winter game.  Somehow it doesn’t seem right to be travelling the cold lonely depths of New Eden when its 100 degrees and the scent of barbeque is wafting in the windows with the sound of someone’s distant lawn mower.

So, as seasons turn, my thoughts were turning to Eve yet again.  Not quite the time to resub just yet, but soon.  Then suddenly to my surprise, I received this reactivation offer from CCP:

Sign me up for the bailout!

Needless to say, I don’t recall having over 3.4 trillion ISK laying around when I pulled the plug.  As a reactivation premium, this certainly got my attention.  Now I’m sure there are capsuleers out there who would skoff at a mere 3.4 trillion ISK, but for me that would be an order of magnitude greater than the ISK I had ever had at any one time.  Such largess from the cruel universe of New Eden.  It couldn’t be correct, but made me curious.

The email looked genuine enough.  When I looked at the source code all the urls seemed correct.  I even independently visited them without clicking through.  Yup.  The genuine Eve Online site.

Curiosity finally got the better of me and I clicked through.  After retrieving my password, I was granted my one day free pass.  Curiously no mention of the bounty of ISK awaiting me yet.  Oh well, I’m sure they just dumped it in my wallet right?

After logging I went straight to my wallet:

Well a cursory examination of my station contents didn’t reveal any hidden PLEX laying around or any sort of claim check or mystical note or crumpled brown paperbag stuffed with ISK notes.  Boy, that number in my wallet sure looks familiar…. All the while, I’ve been trying to come up with the methodology CCP used to generate that enormous number… Then it hit me.  Its just 4 decimal places off.  What the last two mean, I have no idea.

Looking to confirm my suspicions, I hit google found a thread and came up with this:

We regret the error...

I guess my gift horse has false teeth.  Oh well, at least it made me patch Eve so I’m ready for those long winter nights.

Summer’s Bounty

Its been pretty quiet this summer.  I’ve spent less time gaming and blogging and taking advantage of our unseasonably mild summer to spend more time doing non-computer related things, including a few weeks of vacation.  Not that it mattered too much, the summer has been relatively quiet on the gaming and news front, and August is always a slow news month.

Of course, just when I thought I might take the rest of the month off from just about everything, the trickle of new/newsy things turned into a sudden torrent.

Fallen Earth

The new indy post-apocalyptic MMO Fallen Earth open beta started on the same day as the Champions Online open beta.  I didn’t really have any interest in CO, but FE sounded interesting.  I was only able to give it probably about 10 hours total to investigate so these are just big fuzzy impressions.

My views tend to run along the lines of Darren’s.  It might have been the beta client, but graphical performance was less than stellar on my machine which is still on the forward part of the bell curve.  In a nutshell, this is a game I want to want to play, but it wasn’t grabbing me as much as I thought it should.  I was getting the impression that there is a really interesting game in there but it would take a fair amount of time to discover it with a bit off teeth gritting as performance issues get worked out over time.

Definitely not a game for everyone.  With some care and feeding by the devs and the playerbase, this might turn into something interesting over time.  I wont be playing at launch but will likely check in at somepoint.

Champions Online

Since I threw down for the Fileplanet subscription to get the FE beta, I thought I’d try Champions Online as well.  I was not terribly interested in the game.  I had tried City of Heroes/Villains a while back and while it was amusing, it didn’t grab me by the throat.  I’m not really a super hero gamer person, but I can see the appeal.

I had also read an increasing amount of “meh” impressions and reviews.  I was rather surprised when I got in the game.  I managed to get in probably about 10-12 hours of total play on a couple characters.  As noted elsewhere, the character creator is pretty amazing.  A bit confusing, but if you are willing to spend a few hours on it, you could probably generate just about anything you could imagine.  Not being that creative, I hit random a few times and then tweaked a bit.  Thus I ended up with “The Mime”.

I wont go into specifics here, but I will say that what I saw of the game exhibited a high degree of polish.  Highly stylized, but if you like that style, it looked good and performed well.  There was certainly fun to be had very quickly once you got in game.  Mechanics were nothing new to an MMO vet and that might be dissappointing to some.  It plays a bit like a console game.  For me, it was like eating popcorn.  Hard to stop once you start, but eventually you get a tummy ache and its a poor substitute for a real meal.

I hate to break it to you, Bud, but no one's afraid of a Mime...

Also noted, there is a fair amount of instancing of content.  To be fair, apparently the crisis zones are fairly small and limited while other zones are apparently much larger.  I didn’t get too far so I can’t really comment.  That could be a bit of a game breaker for some.  It does look and feel quite a bit like CoX, but that could be a good or bad thing depending on your perspective.

All in all, though, I was pleasantly surprised by what I found given the negativity in the blogosphere.  A solid game with polish that is worth a look if you fancy the genre.  I wont be picking it up, but I can see the appeal.  Not too surprised that that the lifetime subscription plan was oversubscribed.

I...AM...NOT...A...CLOWN!

Star Wars:  The Old Republic

We got to see some in game footage.  Opinions seem to run the gamut.  My take was “looks good so far, but nothing too new” and “whoa, hows that dialog thing going to work out in the long run.”  I found the cinematic dialog in AoC interesting and well done, but ultimately a bit annoying over time.  I anticipate difficulty with group dynamics.  Still I remain optimistic.

GuildWars 2

The same week, GuildWars 2 release a teaser video after long silence.  While intriguing, there’s not much meat there to make a meal of.  Still, if they are starting to release game footage, however, fleeting, maybe we can expect more in the near future.  Definitely one I’m watching.

Blizzcon

And of course, the avalanche of news coming out of Blizzcon eclisped everything with the announcement of the Cataclysm expansion.  Lot of more thoughts to give on Cataclysm, but I’m calling it WoW 2.0 and see lots of win there.  Heroic Deadmines.  Flying in Azeroth.  ‘Nuff said.

Capped

Finally, I hit the big ding with Skronk, my instance group priest.

Thanks, Creteus

Now that’s over, I’ve been doing just about everything else with him not having to worry about level creep– Argent Tournament, BGs, Dailies, and running through regular content that got passed by.  With all the buzz, its kind of gotten reinvigorated on the gaming front.