Great Blogs and the Important of Reciprocity

For some time now I have been reading Tobold's excellent blog on World of Warcraft. In theory it is a blog about multiplayer online games in general, with specific attention to whatever game Tobold is currently playing. In actuality, he isn't playing other games and the focus has become almost exclusively about Warcraft, referenced with his MOG experience. If you are not familar with the blog, by all means check it out. His insights are usually keen and it helps that I often agree with his thinking.

However, I must take him to task at this point for something I consider a rather serious character failing. In recent posts he has mentioned the high traffic volume he gets not and how this is partly due to the many blogs that link to him. Yet he does not maintain a link list and only links to other blogs if he is specifically mentioning them.

Personally I could care less if he maintains a link list. But he has attributed  blog links as a factor in the readership he now has, without any reciprocity. In the world of blogs, this is a major failing in my opinion. Ordinarily I would just exclude the blog from links and be done with it. But the blog is just too damn good to not mention, so I highly recommend it with the above reservations noted.

While I am recommending blogs, I would also direct your attention to Blessings of Kings, with reservations of an entirely different sort. The blog is about the Paladin class, which means it is an alliance blog. However, it is another example of the sort of writing I wish there was more of about warcraft. Many blogs are basically loot logs and that holds my interest for very short periods of time. Considered and thoughtful writing about the game and the different aspects of Warcraft will hold my attention for considerably longer.

BOK's recent post about Shamans and Paladins is interesting and worth a look for all the shaman out there.

Gearing Up

Greig has been level sixty for some time now. With a few weeks of raiding under his belt, he is fairly well-equipped. In fact, the only gear he can't get now better than what he has will be found in the main raiding instances, ZG, Molten Core, BWL and AQ. Which means that character development will be a slow process until level becomes possible again with the release of Burning Crusades. 

It occurred to me that there might be crafted items that would allow a little more flexibility in the upgrading Greig's equipment. My hunter, Stomp, is a 300 blacksmith now and has some pretty good recipes. However none of these are as good as the gear Greig has now. I began researching recipes that would provide improved gear and quickly found out two things; there are not very many recipes to be found and the ones that are available require materials impossible to acquire outside of an instance. 

That is, if you can even get the recipes. Many blacksmith recipes require a certain level of reputation before your can purchase them. Faction reputation can be gained through a fairly lengthy process of grinding, but it does not require raiding. As Stomp is revered by Cenarian Circle, there are several recipes he could acquire but the vendor is located within AQ. Furthermore, the material for these recipes can only be gotten by running the instance. These recipes in essence are simply unattainable. It seems clear that crafting is a very real viable means for casual players to acquire epics. Whether the crafter was a player or an NPC, a player could complete a series of quests or adventures that would provide them the required materials. The length and complexity of the quest series would reflect the quality of the reward item. However, every player completing the chain would receive a tangible upgrade of their equipment. 

Blizzard is starting to do some of this. The Tier 0.5 upgrade quests are an example of how this would work. But the approach needs to broadened significantly, and there needs to be content developed that would allow casual players to earn gear that rivals the gear found within Molten Core and Black Wing Lair. 

The Field of Duty quests are a step in the right direction, yet getting more than one at a time is difficult and the quests are elite and require small groups to complete. A casual player could not solo these quests expediently. The rewards are significant and there are genuine epic items that are obtainable. Refining the process further could make it possible for a casual player to solo a quest series and still earn epic gear. 

Obviously, raiders will have strong objections if they feel that casual players are getting epics without the effort. So attention should be paid to the effort involved in complete quest chains. 

Beyond the Field of Duty quests, there are other quests that provide epic items. The Shaman Skyfury Helm is an epic item quest reward. In this case, the difficult of the quest is not that difficult, but then the item does match the effort. With further refinement and attention to content, the dilemma of the causal player could be resolved without alienating hardcore raiders. 

Along with tweaking the quest chains and the rewards that can be obtained, the crafting professions should be expanded so that more items are craftable and that the materials are obtainable without the difficulty of running a 40 person raid. Items could be made available that actually required a player to earn reputation with the particular vendor. These quests could be actions conducted on behalf of the NPC and the player is rewarded with the materials needed to make the specific item. The material gather could also be made part of the quest chain.  Yet at the end of the series, the crafter has a new item to create and has gained the ability to obtain the materials on their own. If the crafter wanted to make another of the same item, the quest chain could be repeated. 

There are probably many different ways to address the problem. These are some of the most obvious to me and seem to require little development. Quests and quest rewards are already part of the game's fabric. Cutting that fabric to fit multiple styles of play is what needs to happen now.

Shaman Review

For the most part I am quite pleased with the announced changes from the shaman review. With the exception of changes to windfury, all the changes are improvements. The reduced mana cost of totems is particularly nice. I have yet to fully study the adjustments to the talent tree, but I see nothing to get riled up about. In fact, the totemic focus talent makes a great deal of sense. So in all, the changes seem to be helpful. Given the grumbling I have heard from other reviewed classed, I was surprised that almost all the shamans I know are fairly pleased with the changes. Change can be good.

The Problem of Grouping

Everyone who plays World of Warcraft should be familiar with the problems of pick up groups. After spending an hour or more putting the group together, the odds are quite good one of the players is a complete numbskull and will find an endless variety of ways to get the entire group killed repeatedly. This will also be the person who ninjas the best loot and suddenly remembers an aunt is flying in and they have to go the airport. Or the dentist, or chemotherapy. Whatever the reason, the blue item drops, they need after everyone else chooses greed and then poof, they are gone. 

Sometimes those are the good pick up groups you get. 

Recently I joined a larger guild and I was hoping that this would make working in groups less painful. In fact, things are worse. 

Even with a hundred players in the guild, putting together a five man group is only slightly easier now than it was before joining a raiding guild. There is the added dimension of guild dynamics that are never a factor in pick up groups, and there is no way for a new guild member to know the sordid history of the guild they just joined. But after a few raids, you will know all too well. 

As of this moment, I have gone on four raids with my new guild. One of those raids was AQ20, the others were all Zul Gurub. The total time I have spent grouped with this guild is close to 25 hours now. By my rough calculations, less that half the time has been spent actually fighting mobs; much less that half. The rest of the time has been spent either waiting for the raid to fully form, or just standing around inside an instance for up to two hours waiting for new members to arrive after a wipe. 

After four runs with this guild we have killed only two bosses. Even worse we have at least three wipes per boss even when we did manage to kill the boss. This past weekend we made five attempts before killing a boss that everyone swore they had killed scores of times before. People do dumb things sometimes during raids. Sometimes it accidental and sometimes its just a stupid mistake, and I find both easy to forgive. But this weekend, a player actually was running his pet towards a Boss while we were waiting for a new member to arrive just to see how close he could get the pet without it being attacked.  

What is really disturbing to me, however, is that during one of the raids where we killed a boss, I won an epic mace. Somehow, this made up for all the insipid bullshit I had to endure. Am I really that easy?

The Lost Opportunities of Small Instances

Instances are the primary way to get better gear in World of Warcraft. Actually, it is the only way. While you can craft gear yourself or buy from a crafter, the items are not as good as what you can obtain in an instance. Before level 60 it is easy to get crafted gear or dropped items at the auction house that are superior to what you get from grinding or through quests. But this is not true the last three or four levels before sixty. After hitting sixty, instances are the only way to upgrade your gear.

This is another drawback to Blizzard's insistence upon using instances for the end game. Crafting is pretty much rendered useless unless you are an enchanter or alchemist. As the server population ages, most people will get all the high end enchants for their gear. The market eventually evaporates. Alchemy remains viable in that the items are consumable and as long as people are running instances, players will be consuming potions.

In order to run instances, this means working in groups. This is not such a bad thing in theory, particularly if you are in a well run guild. However, most guilds are not well run, much less organized at all. As a result, guilds convenient for recruiting group members just before you start spamming the chat channel.

Even in a guild with one hundred players, I have yet to run a five person instance with more that three guild members. The guild does not organize instance runs beyond Zul and AQ20, and there is no system in place for group development. I don't see how a guild can aspire to running Molten Core without first developing a system for running smaller instances.

Obviously there is no glamour in running Black Rock Depths or Sunken  Temple repeatedly. But the skills necessary to run Sunken Temple with out any deaths are exactly the same it takes to run Molten Core. The only thing changes is the scale. A guild that cannot or will not put together a system for completing quest chains that prepare the guild for running Molten Core has little chance of succeeding in Molten Core.

What is amazing is that no one seems to realize this. I imagine even a small guild could achieve a great deal by putting together successful runs in many of the smaller instances repeatedly. A guild that can run five and ten man instances repeatedly as a group will not only have better equipped players, but they will develop the cohesion and the organization it takes to run twenty and forty man raids. What is startling is how few guilds are able to do this.

There are a large number of players who are level sixty on my server. Some players are sporting epics, but I haven't seen very few full sets of Tier 1 epics. In fact, I can only recall seeing three players with full Dungeon 1 sets for their class.

My experience with guilds is limited. Yet, I am constantly surprised that guild leaders are not aware of the valuable experience they could be gaining by using smaller instances as training grounds for the instances that everyone wants to run. They also don't understand that a great deal of success in the smaller instances can be a powerful recruiting tool. Imagine entering Origammar and riding up to the bank and seeing four or five players decked out in full sets of Dungeon 2 armor. Maybe that guild only has twenty players, but their numbers will certainly grow. I sure as hell would want to join.

Herb Collecting

I have wanted to do some dedicated herb gathering for sometime now. Specifically, I want to gather some Mountain Silversage for Greg to use making potions. I checked a couple of online databases and decided that Unger Crater was the best place to start. However, after 45 minutes I had only found one spawn for Mountain Silversage and gave up on Unger. I went back to the database and found that the Ironwood Stompers drop silversage with some regularity.

This reminded me that the stompers actually drop a variety of herbs with some frequency, so I grabbed the next flight to Felwood. I spent the next two hours grinding all the elementals in Felwood and was fairly pleased with the results. I obtained multiple specimens of seven different herbs in that time, as well the normal cash and vendor items that drop. While moving between mobs, I was also to collect herbs that available in the area in addition to those that dropped from mobs. Beyond that, I was further rewarded with an Essence of Water and a Living Essence. Altogether it was time well spent.

From a practical point of view, gathering herbs for potions makes a great deal of sense. It takes only time to collect herbs and if you have a sense of where different items bloom, then you can reduce the time it takes looking for them. Purple Lotus, for example, tends to bloom in nooks and crevices. They rarely bloom in the open, unlike Sungrass and Gromsblood which are most often found in grassy meadows.

The downside though is that gathering herbs is very time consuming. A region usually spawns three or four varieties of plants at best, so making a complete set of potions often means traveling to several different regions.

The other option is to just buy the herbs from the auction house. Quite often this is an acceptable alternative. Sungrass and Blindweed average 3 to 4 gold for a stack of twenty. But several of the pots that have value in the retail market, require Mountain Silversage. This particular herb is hard to find and prices reflect this, average 13 to 15 gold for a stack of twenty. That is, if you can find a stack of twenty on the auction house.

Now that I have been thinking about it, there are several locations where elementals drop herbs. These mobs are farmed far less frequently than elementals which drop the essences of earth, fire, water and air. Tanaris,

Swamp of
Sorrows, Felwood and Ungoro Crater all have elemental mobs that drop multiple essences. The next step is to do some dedicated farming of these mobs and see if this doesn't prove to be a more time efficient method of gathering multiple herbs.

The Patch

After a full week of playing with the changes in patch 1.10, I feel that little has changed in the game. At least there aren’t any changes to the game that I find beneficial.

One of the first things I noticed was the prices of many things skyrocketed literally overnight. The cost of an arcanite bar at the auction house has been consistently averaging 23-24 gold per bard for several weeks. Last Tuesday, the same bar of arcanite was nearly 50 gold.
Stonescale eels quadrupled in price to 4 gold apiece and stonescale oil is selling for 40 gold a stack. The same stack of 5 was about 15 gold before the patch.

I havent worked any of the new quests for armor upgrades, but I have been told they are expensive and not easy to do. Not that they are particularly difficult, but that they are tedious. My game friends have been grumbling almost non-stop about the quests themselves and the strong, mostly negative impact they have had on the economy.

Elixir of Superior Defense was no bargain at 13 gold for 5 pots, but at 40 gold they are bordering on ridiculous. Likewise, the cost of arcanite makes many of the items that call for arcanite bars in the recipe absolutely unattainable. When I had my Invulnerable Mail chest piece made, the cost of arcanite bars was 640 gold. Those bars would cost over 1200 gold today. Which means that the chest piece I had made for 750 gold including labor would not cost over $1,600 gold to have crafted.

So it seems that the cure is worse than the disease. In creating quests to help more casual players achieve improved equipment, Blizzard had driven demand for the materials in those quests through the roof. This not only means that these quests are expensive to pursue, they may be beyond the means of many casual players. Beyond that, those same players will be able to afford fewer items at the auction house, further limiting the gear they might have access to.

Which leaves me wondering if anyone on the Blizzard development team understands anything about casual players, let alone have a clue about how to make the game more engaging for them.

Great WOW Blogs

When I am not playing, working or sleeping, I read as much about the game as I can and how other people experience the game. Loot logs are of limited interest to me, but some of them are interesting reads.

More interesting to me are blogs about other people's insights into the game and what it's like for them in the MMO world. In particular, role playing intrigues me and I was happy to find this very well put together blog.

It is definitely a shame that role players do seem to have it hardest in the game.

A Bit of a Let Down

After 29 days of game play, Greig reached the level cap of 60. Considering the sheer time involved, it is no small achievement. Obviously, the first character takes longer to level and there was a fair amount of time wasted running silly raids and exploring things that I would later be taken to anyways by the game arc. I also anticipated it being a bit anti-climatic, but I was still a bit disappointed in the days immediately following the moment Greig hit 60. After many days and night of working on countless quests, Greig reached a major milestone in his career and literally nothing happened.

Except for the obligatory "gratz" messages that popped in chat from friends and guild mates and the occasional WOOT!, the culmination of a long process slipped by without notice.

It seems to me that Blizzard is missing a real opportunity here to not only reward a significant investment of time, but also to reward the achievement with a bit of spectacle that would make hitting level sixty more fun for the players and give them something tangible and valuable for that effort.

Here's one way to make hitting sixty fun and a bit more worthwhile:

After a player hits sixty, the next time they go to the game mail, they find an embossed letter in their inbox from the leader of their race. It is congratulatory and thanks them for commitment and the sacrifices they have made. It also invites the player for a meeting for a more personal expression of appreciation. Well, that player jumps on the next bird to wherever, and they meet personally with their leader. Another expression of congratulations and praise is showered upon our hero. Their chief then offers them a token of appreciation. Maybe they get a voucher for trade goods at the local vendors or even a significant increase in reputation with that race; an increase big enough that it might push some players to exalted status and help them get a big discount on their epic mount.

As all the backslapping is winding down, the chief then reaches into his pouch and produces another letter. This one is a summons from Thrall himself, or whoever it is that leads those pesky alliance guys. So our hero catches the next bird out and heads to Origammar for his audience with Thrall. Heady stuff.

Another "job well done" pep talk. Maybe the whole thing is done with a voice animation. At the end of the ceremony Thralls decides to bestow up his quest another token of appreciation. Maybe it's something really cool, like being able to choose from Thrall's personal collection of weapons. The weapons could be class specific, so the players that would get something that's actually useful to them. After all the work getting to sixty, is a nice blue item you could actually use too much to ask for?

We could go one step further and play off the twink factor a little bit. Thrall offers you a class specific item from his personal collection, but the items drop randomly. Some players might get a weapon, some might get mail pants or the shoulders Thrall wore when he was hunting down Bristlebacks as a young warrior. But everyone would get something blue, something cool and something that not everyone else would have. No one could collect a set, and ultimately the gear that is available later will be better. But it still could be a nice touch that would give players something for their efforts and let them know that Blizzard understands what a ball-busting grind it is to get that far in the game. The basic idea is that hitting the level cap could actually be something fun and rewarding. It is milestone that every player reaches who sticks with the game and it's as far as anyone can go currently. Beyond that it's good place to play off the game's backstory and give every player some reward for their efforts. For a some players, it a close to an epic as their are likely to get. That is, if Blizzard cared about that sort of thing.

Some Thoughts on Ganking

Wikipedia defines ganking thusly: Gank is also used in relation to Player vs. Player games where a group of 2 or more people gang up and kill another player, especially if they have an unfair advantage over the person being killed, and is an abbreviation for Gang Kill. Popularized by the MMORPG Ultima Online, it is now often used in any situation where the person being killed is at a significant disadvantage to the person killing, as in "That jerk just ganked me!” It is looked upon and seen as a dishonorable tactic. Please do notice however, that one person with a significant advantage is not a ganker when he attacks one or more enemies alone, he is a slaughterer. Ganking solidifies the fact "Gang vs. one".As with many words, the usage has broaden considerably over time. In my experience, the ganking refers to one or all of the following behaviors.

1. Ganking in its purest form is a band of players prowling for single players or less powerful groups of players in order to kill them. The victims typically are engaged in travel or activities related to a quest, and in the latter case often engaged in combat with a mob and unable to adequately defend themselves. Sometimes the term is used to describe ambushes or hit and run tactics, but these activities are not necessarily ganking in my view.

2. Ganking also refers to a more common practice of a player, often times of a higher level, attacking an enemy player while they are engaged in combat with a mob. This also includes players who are away from their keyboard or seated and restoring health after a fight. In all these cases the victim has a diminished ability to defend themselves, if they can do so at all. A seated player is going to take an auto-crit when attacked, and if they are at half health they are already a corpse, but don't know it yet.

3. A less accurate usage, but one that seems to be growing, is to describe behavior where a player is attacked and they feel they should not be. "That bastard ganked me when I got off the zep."

My own thoughts on ganking have evolved over time and with increased game experience. It is also true that my thoughts on ganking are different now that I play several higher level characters than they where when I was leveling my first character through the low twenties. The universality of the experience is interesting enough, but when I consider how my own reactions and choices regarding ganking have shifted and morphed, and how the practice of ganking seems to change depending on the region and situation you are in, it seemed an obvious choice for my first post.

After several months of playing, I have become comfortable with the ideas that ganking is part of the game. On PVP servers it is a stone cold fact. My own working definition of a gank is an attack upon an opposing player where the attacker enjoys a considerable advantage that predetermines the outcome. In other words, a gank is an assault upon a player who cannot defend against it.

The only form of ganking I actively discourage and avoid personally is attacking players far below my own level. There are no hard and fast rules on how to define "far below," so I have adapted Blizzard's experience model as my rule of thumb for attacking or not attacking
Alliance players. If a mob of the same level won't earn me any experience points, then I won't attack that level player. That makes it easy. I go one step further though, and cut off attacks on players where I would earn less that 200 experience points from and equivalent mob. I don't kill mobs at that level unless they attack me first, and I try to give Allies the same courtesy I extend to other beasts.

At the level I start earning at least 200 xp from a mob, an equivalent level player becomes fair game. A low level of guerilla warfare is at the heart of the game and I personally have embraced this theme. Beyond that, experience dictates that if I am fighting a mob, most enemy players will not hesitate to exploit the situation and attack me. With that in mind, the only factor that is relevant is my own mood; do I want to bother with it. Because the truth is, there is no real challenge or skill involved in attacking a player who has a mob on them and their health is diminished. A secondary consideration is the likely possibility that I will anger this player and they will then be determined to seek revenge. If I am intending to quest nearby, it is very possible they will set upon me at the first opportunity, and perhaps every opportunity. The class and level of the player become major factors. I may well set upon a player one to three levels below me, confident in my ability to handle future attacks. However, having encountered a rogue who is three levels above me, I will sometimes join the attack in hopes of gaining forbearance from a superior enemy. I have died many times from this choice. Less frequently, it works and I quest in peace. When it comes to players equal to me in level, mood becomes the predominant factor again.

Obviously, I avoid giving players of far superior advantage any reason to pay attention to me. This includes getting within the players line of sight and waving. Whenever I see this I always think it means "Hi. Come kill me." My own rule of thumb is to keep moving to where I am going and hope for the best. It is always helpful for me to remember that the Allies are enemies, and I can't blame them for treating me like one. It is sometimes hard to remember that when I log on for thirty minutes to finish up a quest "real quick." That seems to be and Invocation of Doom.

Now, there are always exceptions to rules. What I have outlined above would not meet the requirements for even being guidelines. But no mater, there are still exceptions to my own rather sketchy code of conduct.

Any
Alliance player on Horde land is dead. Now, occasionally I will come across some knuckleheaded 22 pally running across the Barrens intent on doing who knows what. Mostly like I will follow him and broadcast on general chant and give other guys the chance to kill him. If no one responds or it looks like he will get away, I kill him. This is probably the most fixed of my views in this regard.

I will not attack an
Alliance player who aids me or has helped me in the past. There aren't many of those, but I remember most of them. Even if they don't recall our previous encounter, I will not fight them. Beyond that, if attacked I most often will kneel down. It's my only nod to chivalry, but beyond that I just feel weird about fighting someone who previously saved or spared me. Occasionally, this has kept me alive too. More than once, the
Alliance player gives up the attack when he realizes I will not fight him. What they don't know, however, is that I would not extend them the same kindness. If choose I to attack, one of us is going to die unless the other guy runs away.

There has only been one time where I attacked a player who aided me, and that was a situational decision. I was fighting an add and was losing health quickly. An
Alliance rogue approached me and I mentally wrote myself off as dead. But she joined the fight, helped me kill the mob and then saluted me. She was five levels below me, so immediately chalked it up as an attempt at self-preservation. I have done the same thing. Regardless of her motives though, she saved me and put her life at risk in doing so. She made the no-kill list.

We both worked our quests in Desolace within eyesight of each other for the next five minutes. A second
Alliance player entered the area and he was my level. I set upon him immediately and he was about dead when the first ally decided that faction mattered more. She attacked me. I was happy to kill them both. For good measure, I killed them both again when they resurrected themselves to seal my claim on the quest area for the moment.

I find it interesting when people get bent out of shape over behavior that is not true ganking, but wherein they feel they have died unjustifiably. I have sympathy for how they feel. Sometimes I just want to log in and work couple of quests and maybe hit the next level. I don't want to deal with fighting allies. Well, then I should log on to a PVE server, because the two sides are at war, and ultimately rules mean little in war.

Ambushing is a common and legitimate warfare tactic. While superior numbers, gear and tactical surprise create a sometimes insurmountable advantage, bushwhacking the enemy is not ganking. Now if four level 50's are hiding behind the tree and have decided that they are killing every lowbie that runs past them, this falls into the category of gang killing. Now if that same group of players has decided they want to create a fight, and kill passing players in order to fight higher level players who get called in to help, this clearly becomes an ambush and no longer is a gank in my mind. But tell that to the level 22 laying in the road.

Similarly, a party that has positioned themselves at a strategic point and is attacking all approaching parties are engaging in legitimate combat and are not ganking. Most commonly I have seen this at the entrance to

Booty
Bay and at the first intersection after entering Duskwood. I have been in several parties where we have either placed ourselves in the middle of the road, blocking passage and inviting a fight, or we have found suitable spots to ambush from. The key difference here is that the goal is not to engage in a cheap kill, but rather to create a real fight with the enemy. Some of my most exhilarating moments playing have been when actively engaged in an all out battle where there is no clear advantage to anyone and the outcome is completely unknown. Dead or victorious, a well fought skirmish is a real opportunity to gain skills, learn about your character and have fun just fighting your ass off.

Which I think is what the developers had in mind when they made it impossible for the two sides to communicate.