Deciphering the rage

Okay, so after ranting and raving in the last post (With lovely bad spelling and grammar) I've calmed down a bit.

The reason I was so annoyed was that I saw Blizzard as setting a precedent for selling players fluff for excessive amounts of money. Blizzard are setting precedents in all the wrong areas, as leader of the MMO genre, you would think they would have some shame at what they are creating. To sell a fluff item at an exorbitant price in a pay-by-month game to me seems extremely arrogant and greedy.

That said Blizzard is a business (As I said before) and are there to make money not do gamers any favors. The MMO genre will not improve in any way unless gamers demand it, and in this instance it is clear that commercial gamers are clamouring for the opposite.

Just when you thought it couldn't fall any lower...

News just in: Blizzard are charging 25 bucks for a new ingame mount. That's zero new content for half the price of an expansion, or one of many, many brilliant games. Its hard to get your mind around this situation, with over 115k people lining up to get their virtual mount.

On one hand I jsut want to slap every single one of those 115000+ idiots. Its people like them that are bogging gaming down and holding it back from quality experiences.

Bliazzard, I really want to say its all their fault, but it really isn't. They know its going to make millions with minimal effort, and ultimately they are a business, so it really is down to the players. I made a post a while back discussing how I felt that WoW was holding the MMO genre back from developing and becoming the beast that it can be, and this action just reinforces that.

I'm /facepalming so hard right now, that I can't express it adequately. Ultimately its the customer's fault and it frustrates me no end that these morons are not just buying a fluffy virtual item for a horrendous amount of money, but by that they are setting a precedent which spells nothing but trouble for the general gaming population.

Commercial gaming, if possible, just got worse.

Gearing up a warrior tank

The good thing about rolling a warrior is that you only have to generally wait a couple of seconds for a random dungeon to pop. This is good in a way because I have been able to gear very quickly now that my warrior is 80. This post doesn't really have any direction, its just going to me talking about tanking.

The first issue that I had to confront was gear. When I just hit 80 I didn't q as tank because at the time I only had around 19k health. So I would Q as dps for instances such as ToC which gives massive upgrades to what I had. For a couple of runs I was pretty much carried as everyone else had gearscroes of around 5k. Most groups didn't complain too much about the fact that I was going dps in tanking gear simply because they were just creaming through the content. It was only when I started Qing as tank that issues began to come up.

Once the entire group fell apart after the healer complained that my health was too low before we killed one mob. Its strange because gearing as a tank is quite easy in terms of getting a lot of randoms popping but a lot of people don't want to run an instance unless the tank has pretty much got all the gear he needs. My best tanking experience was in a random heroic where everyone else in my group was above a 5k gearscore. I was sitting on around 3.4k but it ended up being a very fast smooth run. With all of them saying I was the best warrior tank they had seen, even including tanks with 40k health. As a tank you pretty much live for those moments because there are plenty of other bad experiences.

Just today I was tanking normal ToC and we wiped on the last boss (I'm sitting on 24k health unbuffed) when another Warrior in the group assumes the role of tank because he has better gear. When he changes to his gear he is witting at 38k health...but we still wipe on the boss. It frustrates me no end when people just look at the gear each player has.

My worst experience was in a random instance, when on the last boss our group wipes. I don't say anything about and just run back when the druid healer complains about the wipe blaming it on my terrible 25k health. Another member points out he himself has bad gear, but the healer makes the excuse that she only hit 80 two days ago. (Which I has as well) She then asked hi mto go easy on her for that reason. I piped up saying that if she was making excuses for her gear then she shouldn't complain about mine. (As it happened she had a 3.4k gearscore while mine was sitting at 3.8k...even though I hate GS with a passion) On our next attempt she barely healed me and I died but the rest of the group managed to kill the boss. After the gear had been rolled for the healer left the group, leaving me to run back in.

This was never a problem during the levelling game, and already I feel tired of the GS spam. Its frustrating going from one group of 5k+ GS who say I'm an excellent tank, to a group with lower gearscores who complain about my gear. For the most part the gear grind for a tank isn't a whole lot of fun. Is this considered to be the content that all other MMOs strive to copy in its amount of content and quality of entertainment? I can only hope that once I join a good guild, and no longer need to do so many random instances that the experience will pick up.

Blizzard loves Warriors

It says something about Blizzard's attitude towards Warriors when you can level from 58-76 doing quite regular instance runs and not one piece of Warrior gear drops. Ever. The closest warrior piece that I saw was a Pally shield, which even though it gave spell power and intellect it wa s a massive upgrade from what I was heaving about. GG Blizzard.

WoW is holding back the MMO genre

I should have made this post a while ago, but have been pretty busy lately. Specifically, putting together a portfolio for an interview to go to a Uni, which is coming up this Wednesday. But anyway, let's talk about WoW.

In many ways WoW has disapointed me. The game has been out for a long, long time now, but I feel they have done so little with the content and oppotunities they have. Specifically, the leveling game. With Recruit a Friend the levels fly by, and days of content (Back in the day) are passed through in hours. The problem I have is that Blizzard have been hugely lazy, in focusing on bringing in more of the same end-game raid content, and speeding up players to reach that point. Thsi sacrifices a wealth of oppotunity with the single player.

One thing I loved about LotRO, was the continuing storyline that continued throughout the whole levling experience with your character. It was a great source to develop your character as a person, and supported your place in the world. In WoW its nothing like that, sitting at a very shallow, materialistic entertainment. My warrior is defined by the gear he has, the damage he can do, and how well he tanks. he isn't a character at all. I'm all for refining the leveling game to make it easier for newer players, but at least make it interesting! Instead of ignoring those levels and leaving them with all the 'kills 10 x's' couldn't Blizzard have used their resources to craft a unique leveling experience?

WoW is an arcade game. It redefined the MMO genre back in the day, but now it is holding it back. MMOs have so much oppotunity for awesome, but companies such as Blizzard like to stick with the working formula. I'm not saying WoW isn't enjorable, far from it, just that it is sad to see such a lazy piece of work the leveling game is. Well enough of that, I'll jsut leave you with my latest video of some open world Prot Warrior PvP.

Your oppotunity to powerlevel with Chappo (+ video)

Hey guys, sorry I haven't made a post in a while, the past week or so has been pretty hectic, and my Gran who had been sick for a long time passed away on Christmas day. So instead of giving you that long opinion post on WoW I'll just post up this short video I made.



Also, importantly, if anyone is interested in trying out WoW I would love to do another recruit-a-friend thing. I'm getting a bit frustrated with my alliance/US server combo. If you like the idea of some insane powerleveling to 60 then just leave a comment and we can do it together. Mind you, I will be playing probably an Undead warrior on an Oceanic server. If Horde/Oceanic sounds good to you then what are you waiting for?

The tragic story of my (WoW) life...thus far

I have been almost pushing myself to make this post for a while now, but haven't made the time until now. There is a lot I want to talk about so this might be a fairly long post.

The main reason that I resubscribed to WoW is because I found out a good friend of mine had played it in the past. I had made a joke of him playing it all year (Not actually knowing that he did) at school asking him about WoW and how much raiding he had done over the weekend. He denied the whole year and it wasn't until after school had finished did he admit to playing. We started talking about the game and we discovered we had a very similar interest: twinking. It wasn’t long before we decided we should do some dual twinkage.


But he couldn't just resub on his old account because it had gotten hacked, just like mine had. We could have tried to get everything back from Blizzard but in the end we decided it would be fun to level new characters with the Recruit a Friend triple experience. He rolled a mage and I chose a warrior. Now this is where it gets slightly confusing. I am a horde guy, I have nearly always played horde and wanted to continue doing so. However as I said before, both my friend and I are majorly into twinking and he had a good guild up his sleeve that would fund our characters. (Its also hard to earn enough gold as you level to train up when you are leveling so fast.) This guild was on Durotan: a US server and part of a battlegroup which houses nearly all the 19 twinks in WoW whereas the other battlegroups have fairly dead twinking communities. Ultimately this means consistently high pings which is a bit of a nightmare in battlegrounds, which in my mind, defeats the purpose fo rolling twinks in the first place.


So despite all that both he and I rolled alliance characters on the Durotan server, fast forward two weeks and things are pretty different. Despite our original thoughts we have been able to fund our twinks quite well. We were able to be run through stockades a couple of times when we were a fairly low level. This rocketed our levels up, but also supplied us with a lot of much needed gold. Feet of the Lynx dropped as well which sells on the AH for over 250g which allowed us to pocket a lot of cash. Ultimately we used this gold to get both our twinks up to 150 engineering. From the looks of it, we won’t need the help of the twinking guild which was the reason why we rolled alliance/US. It doesn’t help that I grouped with some of them and they were all pretty much elitist jerks.

Anywhoozles, our characters are sitting at 55 now, and after running a couple of BGs I've noticed that I am at a severe disadvantage because of the ping. It is extremely irritating to hit charge and run at a target but end end up a few kilometres behind the guy, or better yet, just charge in the opposite direction of one of your enemies. (Which happens in the video below)
Right now I am thinking of fully twinking out my 19 hunter (Including all the new BoA gear) and leaving him with probably 1000g before transfering my warrior over to an oceanic server. Now I'm a bit annoyed that I'm stuck with an alliance character on a server which hits me constantly over the head with the lag bat.


I think I'll stop here, this post has just updated you to where I'm at, I'll follow this post tomorrow or some day in the future with one detailed my actual thoughts and opinion on the game and its new features (Such as the 3.3 LFG system). But for now I'll just leave you with the video that I made for my youtube channel. Enjoy :P

There's no easy way to break this

I bought the WoW battlechest a few days ago. Yup. Just a week ago I had no intention of trying out WoW again after 2 years of abstinence, but somehow I got lured in. A good friend of mine just resubscribed to the game and he offered to recruit me and level together with triple experience. As it happens we are both PvP nuts, and both planning on making 19 twinks. (I had 4 horde twinks on my old account) I took my computer over to his house for afew days and we played a fair bit and what suprised me so much was how easy Blizzard had made the game, I mean mounts at level 20?? The triple experience was incredible and we both hit 32 yesterday. I'm playing a fury warrior (soon to be arms) while my friend is rolling a frost mage.

It feels weird having been lured into playing WoW in such a short time, and I kind of feel bad because I was looking forward to playing Allods Online a lot and making videos. I am still planning on doing that, but I doubt I will have time to play the CB2 or OB, however I will definitely start a character at launch. Lastly, not sure whether I mentioned this earlier but I also bought COD4 last week when it was sitting at 30 USD, been playing that a fair bit, and boy is it fun. Mainstream casual gaming times ahead. :P

Private Server fun

I'm sick and I have a lot fo work to do...a perfect recipe for messing around. Today I went on some WoW private servers and acted like a 10 year old elitist player. I would overdoing it so much but yet some people still believed I was serious. Its fairly long but it gets better towards the end. (I think) My character's name is Cougher. Enjoy!

Lets skip the formalities and get to the endgame

The general consensus about WoW is that the game begins at the level cap. I'm not going to get into whether this statement can be considered true or not, instead I was wondering what would happen if Blizzard took away 1-80, and just focused totally on the endgame. I don't know how much work goes into designing hundreds of quests, new zones, and new spells and tweaks to classes but its easy to imagine that making that 1-80 content wouldn't have been easy. And if this is so then isn't a waste for it to be disregarded so easily? Blizzard has made it even worse now with a player able to power through the levels much, much faster then it would have been possible in vanilla WoW. So not only do people completely ignore the 1-80 content and focus on the aspects of the end-game but it seems that Blizzard itself believes that the game believes when a player hits the cap.

So it would make sense for Blizzard then to throw away the formalities and just throw away levels altogether. Throw out the unused zones and concentrate on raiding and PvP. Give the player a fairly long tutorial in a single player instance where they are shown the ropes of their abilities and such. The zones around the place would be highly populated with instances of varying degrees of difficulty. You start with simple 3-5 man instances and move up to the 20-40 man raids. With this, Blizzard will be able to make the raiding even more epic then it is, and perhaps bring an element of skill to the plate rather then make everything rely on gear. This way Blizzard will be able to focus all its mighty power on making the PvP and raiding even more awesome. There are of course a few problems with this idea, mainly the fact that Blizzard will be unlikely to completely throw away something they spent millions on creating, but its a nice thought. And who knows? Perhaps one day when WoW has dropped down to a measly 3 million subscribers/dedicated raiders, they will go for this option.

Why was World of Warcraft so good? part 2ish

I am sorry, I was going to write a lengthy article about this topic again, but slowly felt all life drain from me and the desire to live fading. It was too depressing. As I went through all the reasons why I believed that WoW was great it dawned on me that so much of this was missing from the present game.

I truly believe that WoW was a great game when it came out. I believe that it was great for a year or so after that but soon the patches and little adjustments were slowly taking away the challenge and authenticity of the game. It was getting easier and easier to do things that were so hard before. Gear nowadays is absurd, with purples being the norm, blues being useless. PvP is ridiculous. BGs are short and all anyone cares about is the gear that they are going to get by completing them. No longer are Horde and Alliance fighting each other in AV, now they just run madly past each other, drooling for loot.

The game is not an experience anymore, its carnival.

The reason why WoW was great was because it was a world; a place to get lost. There was so much to do, and seemingly everything mattered. The war effort event was hugely successful and helped the game because people did it not only for the rewards, and it added depth to the world. If a war effort happened today, the gear would need to be outrageous for anyone to give away their precious crafting gear. But nobody seems to want depth anymore. 10 million people say they like loot-grabbing goodness and fast leveling and Blizzard follow that. Money talks.
This is so depressing..
First WoW was great because it allowed the player to submerge him/herself in the game. Now it is popular because it rewards you for everything, everyone can look flashy, there is very little punishment, and there are so many things to do. This being said people now do not explore places or run low-lvl instances preferring to rush to the top and get their gear. Blizzard, I am sure, will someday release another mmorpg after WoW, I will be very interested to see whether it follows the first type/version of WoW, or the present one.

One thing is for certain; I am no good at doing 2-part posts.

Why World of Warcraft so good? Part 1

This is the question that so many developers have asked themselves. Why does everyone love WoW. Why does blizzard have over 10 million subscribers and there are no other really good mmorpgs on the market. What are other developers doing wrong? Are they dong anything wrong?

I'll kick off the study by quoting the blurb on the back of the World of Warcraft retail box;

'Descend into the World of Warcraft and join thousands of might heroes in an online world of myth, magic and limitless adventure. Jagged snowy peaks, mountain fortresses, harsh winding canyons. Zeppelins flying over smoldering battlefields, epic sieges-an infinity of experiences await. So what are you waiting for?

Seeing that now so much later then the initial release it seems so strange and clean as apposed to what WoW is seen to repesent and to be in the present day. Thousands would become millions. Beautiful scenery becomes flashy gear. Epic sieges become 15 minutes Alterac Valley battles. Things have changed so much.

I started my experience with WoW, like many others, from a trial disk that a gaming magazine gave out with one edition. Just from a few screenshots from the magazine the game looked exactly like the retail box blurb described it. It looked exciting, and fun, and the scenery looked stunning. I should note here that I have always had a truly dreadful computer that can only run most games on low graphics, if indeed at all, so it was a relief and a great new experience to enjoy something so rich and colourful.

I picked a dwarf warrior, and after messing around with his looks I entered the world of Warcraft. For the next hour or so I ran around aimlessly as I was in a completely new world, something I hadn't experienced before. Dun Morough was so fun. The music was calming, yet thrilling and I would take enjoyment from the smallest things, like completing my first quest, or finding a new zone. The game was fresh and exciting. I soon quit my dwarf warrior and started a human rogue. I didn't like the starting zone quite as much so dropped him soon after and took up a gnome mage. The mage sucked horribly at the time but I didn't care. I hit lvl 20, which was higher then any of my other characters, and was running around Redbridge having the time of my life. Soon I got tired of the gnome and started a human paladin. I enjoyed this so much that I played him right up to lvl 35 which was quite a feat for me, being normally restricted to 30min - one hours time playing per day.

Back then the aim of the game for me was not to level, I just enjoyed doing quests, finding new places, getting new gear, just basically playing the game. I never really grouped and I didn't craft, because I didn't know how. I was completely new to mmorpgs as I am sure were so many others. Those first few months were probably the most enjoyable for me, simply because it was new and special. No other game had seemed so important or interesting. I planned out what I was going to do in the game while I wasn't playing. I dreamed of the game, I discussed it with my brothers. It was all-consuming for me.

Perhaps it was because I was so young and naive and new to the scene but I think the reason I liked the game so much was firstly because it was simple, and that is key. And the second because it was simply fun. The game was simple to me; you logged on and ran around exploring the areas, get quests, kill new monsters, finish quests, and get new gear. That was the game for me and it was all I wanted. The game was simple in this manner, not getting serious until you started to hit the higher levels where it took real commitment to get to 60. And then it was hardcore raiding. I stayed away from this and just enjoyed my little, low level, nooby-new world. And it was fun in its simplicity.

What about you? What was your first mmorpg? What did you enjoy most about it? Was it a completely new experience? Did you enjoy just exploring and finding new quests and new monsters?

WoW private server investigation

Nearly a year ago now I quit the game World of Warcraft (WoW) after playing it for roughly a year and a half. WoW is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) which is a complicated way of saying ‘a bunch of people playing the same game together.’ WoW currently has 10 million players all of whom pay a $15 dollar fee each month to continue on playing, this equals roughly to 50c a day. Now some people in this world decide that they have no wish to spend such an extravagant amount of money on a game and prefer to play on private servers. These servers are set up by independent people or companies that hosts the same game, but with a difference. For starters, there are no monthly payments, instead you have to option of buying ‘donor gear’ but I will get to that later. Instead of spending up 500 hours of constant playing to level up your character to the highest level most of the private servers allow you to level instantly or a whole lot quicker then average; saving you plenty of time and commitment. Generally these servers also offer vendors in which a player can get all the best gear in the game instantly and for free. These items are generally only acquired by the elite players on the retail version, and even then it would take countless hours to obtain the gear.

So basically these private servers supposedly take out all the boring stuff that no one wants to do and leave you with…well, what do they leave you with? There is no motivation for you to try and beat the game any more as you have all the best stuff that the game has to offer. You cannot level and you can’t get better gear, leaving the only option to fight against other players or PvP. This however can turn out to be very frustrating as everyone has the same gear, no one works together, and nearly everyone is under then age of 13. PvP is made even worse by ‘donors,’ people who pay the hosts to give them customised weapons that have outrageous power, thus allowing them to defeat any other play with total ease.

So is it worth it? Despite the fact that you do not have to pay anything, so much of the content of the game is lost that even for free you aren’t getting very much at all, especially when the download for the game is over 9GB. After I quit the game, for a brief period of time I played on a private server but it was nothing compared to the retail version and I soon stopped that habit. Nowadays only my older brother plays a private server occasionally I managed to get some screenshots of the game. Well, this post perhaps begins my line of posts generally about computer games; they are a fun pastime for me and will enjoy sharing my nerdy experiences with you guys.