Author: Ravious

I played the blood elf for a couple more levels, and I finally ran into two people at the second quest hub.  It was interesting because at first the duo (one blood elf and one troll) just blew by me, but due to QuestHelper we were clearly following the same path of quests.  It felt like drafting.  We exchanged pleasantries and buffs, and they played through.  Then, Indy came down the MMO mountain like Pai Mei, and told me what I had seemingly overlooked.  I could play a death knight, and just start out with the second expansion’s material.

Numina became Excrucian, and my days serving the Lich King began.  With the death knight starting area, Blizzard had clearly found the inclusivity I felt was lacking in the other starting areas.  There was activity, things were dying, and I felt like I had a job to do.  Through my next degree of WoW, I only ran into two or three other people, but this time it did not matter.  The world felt alive.

And in this strange dichotomy of degrees, I learned something about myself.  I liked MMOs not just because it was multiplayer, but it was massively so.  The first word in the acronym took on new meaning.  Maybe it wasn’t a matter of objective degree, such as the number of players on a server.  It felt like it was more subjectively about the activities going on around me.  When I walk in to town with players chatting, using the auction house, fishing, crafting, and dancing that’s when it felt like dancing.  The death knight starting area and a few other MMO starting areas showed me that to some degree, the feeling of massive-ness could be faked with good use of NPC’s.  But, I digress…

Continue reading Degrees of WoW – 100 Minutes

I did get a single add-on before heading out to the blood elf starting area: QuestHelper.  QuestHelper is a popular add-on that adds the location and direction of the fedex items or NPCs to kill for each quest (much like Guild Wars, Warhammer Online, or Lord of the Rings Online).  The added benefit is the add-on seeks to map out an efficient route for the player to complete the quests.  I liked it.  It made things faster.

So, I grab my first quest.  Kill weak mana creatures that are standing a stone’s throw from the little blood elf enclave.  It seems that through the first few quests that the animals have gone ape-y due to the blood elves loss of control of magic.  It starts really simply, and even though this is a new zone, it feels much like my start so long ago killing wolves in the human starting area.  My first ten minutes are really basic, and I am kind of disappointed.  This was Blizzard’s chance to redo a starting area so that it is engaging.

The NPCs might as well have been sign posts, and the animals could have been boxes.  The area was pretty, but there was no sense of inclusivity.  It was clearly a tutorial in the most banal sense.  I guess I was a little spoiled by Lord of the Rings Online immediate foray into the epic story.  And, Warhammer Online was perfect in giving players the feeling that this was war and war was where they belonged.  NPC’s were fighting NPC’s.  Things were dying.  Cannons were destroying things.  Even when I was alone in the area it didn’t feel like it.  And, honestly that might have been the problem.  I was dead alone on a workday night in a game with nearly 12 million subscribers.  I hope I will run in to someone in the next degree of WoW.

–Ravious
sleepless long nights

After hours of downloading and updating, I am finally in.  The RPGNet crew beckons me to Kirin Tor, and I choose blood elf because I am told that the new starting areas are much better.  Plus, for a while I will actually have access to new content.  I choose a priest because it feels like comfortable, old slippers.  Click random, click random, hot enough.  Enter world.

I had not set foot in the game for three years.  I joined World of Warcraft about four months after launch.  I had a brand new laptop to play the game on, and a little time to play each day.  My character was a human priest on Feathermoon, the most populous RP server at the time.  With the time I played it took me quite a while to get up to level 46, and then I quit.  I just could not take the seeming no-man’s land between 40-59 anymore.  It felt like that last mile in a race, only everybody was finished and that mile was longer than all the other ones before it.  I guess it didn’t help that I liked to fish for those oilies so much.

Why am I playing again?

A few reasons spring to mind.  Blizzard does a good job at many things, and since they have come back from the elitist edge of The Burning Crusade into something much more casual, it grabbed my interest.  I want to try out the new expansion.  The phased storyline and Wintergrasp are two things I really want to experience.  I am kind of in a lull with the other MMOs I play.  Unlike some other new MMOs, this has uber-polish.  Hit and miss F2P games are not worth my time to try.

Things I am not excited about?

The subscription.  With the amount I play I kind of agree with the subscription seen as welfare for the hardcore.  Luckily, money is less of an issue at the moment.  The grind.  In the early stages things move rather quickly, but in World of Warcraft of past, I quickly hit a wall.  I’ve heard that Blizzard has graded the leveling curve to be a bit quicker now, and I can always transfer a level 55+ character to Kirn Tor and make a Death Knight.  That being said, I am playing how I want to play and casually.  I am praying that Blizzard has pumped up this type of gameplay in the “old” content.

We’ll see how this adventure goes.

Ravious
1, 2, 3, 4 tell me that you love me more