MUD2MMO : Virtual Science

I'll add some errata later, I know I mis-spoke on a few details but after it fought me for, umm, 12 hours I'm happy to get it done.

An Open post to World of Warcraft : Re Mists expansion

I had a long post, but I know the interwebs have the attention span of a ferret drinking Mountain Dew.  So I'll TRY to be brief.

Ghostcrawler's post made me want to reach through the screen and smack whoever that was.  I don't care if he's the head of the dev team and putting out a persona, abusing the hell out of your customer base isn't cool.

PvP is crammed down your throat.  There are several achievements and in-game rewards that can not be accessed any other way.  "School of Hard Knocks" is required if you want the title "Matron/Patron" and want to get the achievements involved.  And "Darkmoon Defender" as well if you want tickets for the faire.  And the fact is that at level 85, what else is there to do for these players?  The daily cap is 25, so after that then what?  Dungeons?  Sure, but the better (and faster) rewards are given to PvP.

So when I read "Ghostcrawler" say [i]"so even if you don’t care for PvP now, maybe we can get you interested in the future."[/i] that, to me, is a NOT SO SUBTLE HINT that the dev team is focusing on the PvP player base.  I may be jaded as a "casual player".  I may be jaded because, as a hunter, PvP sucks when all any toon has to do is run up into your face and rip the gun out of your hands.  I may also be jaded because last night I spent 90 seconds shooting an AFK player without scratching his armor, only to have him come back and obliterate me in 5 seconds based solely on gear.

Once a trigger jockey, always a trigger jockey.  Wanna make hunters PvP interesting?  Gimme a sniper rifle, the ability to shoot significantly more than 40M, a 10 second cool down on it and a ghillie in game, I'll show you what "hunters" should be in PvP.

I may also be jaded by the elitist gamer culture that I see rampant in this very thread.  case in point :

Heaters
i read this topic, saw a terribad pve'er complaining, and smiled. LET PVP REIGN SUPREME IN MOP.
ADAPT OR BE LEFT BEHIND

And this is the mentality of PvP players.  "OMG L2P!!!"  Well teach me.  "LURN 4 URSELF NOOB!!!!"  So what are you doing so I can learn how to do that too?  "FIGRE IT OUT 4 URSELF!!!!"  repeat ad-nauseum.

Personally, I do not like the direction that WoW is taking with Mists.  I do not like that I need to have a full command of knowledge on how to stack resilience to wade through damage like gnats.  I do not enjoy being demolished by people who simply have better gear than I do and the "skill" of playing the numbers better, and not because they have superior tactics.  And I think there's nearly 2 million subscribers who agree with me and have already spoken with their wallets.

Musical Interlude : Aerosmith "Fallin in Love (is hard on the knees)" video review!

If you're not on the TGWTG forum, you're missing out on a lot of fun collabs going on, and this is one of them.  ScooterMike challenged a lot of the reviewers to make reviews of Michael Bay music videos.  This is Aerosmith's "Fallin in Love (is hard on the knees)". Bring a lunch, it's pretty long, because I wanted to go into a LOT of depth here. Feedback is, as always, welcome.

Death of a Quest Chain, or "What happened to the Battle for Undercity?"

I need to say this, and here is as good a place as any

I just did a quest chain for the first time as an alliance toon. I'd done this storyline from the Horde side a few times, but this was the first time I got to see it from this side of the fight. The quest is "Return To Angrathar", and it's part of a rather epic quest line that ultimately used to end with "The Battle for Undercity". More on that in a few. The quest ends with a pretty cool cinematic, which I'll be kind enough to post here for it's raw epicness. It'll also bring you up to speed on the quest chain, or at least give you "The story so far" in a way.



But after this cinematic... That's it. Story line OVER.

tl/dr : this ending sucks.

The long explanation. Without the next few quests, there's a LOT of dangling problems here. I'm no red-shirt guy, but storyline wise this has created a huge consistency problems. Not to mention that Alexstrasza atill beckons you to come ot her, but only to re-show you the cinematic. This ending is, well, unsatisfactory at best.

The lack of an epic quest like "Battle for Undercity" aside, the storyline as it is now is just lacking. Honestly, it wouldn't take much for Blizzard to have made several workarounds to this whole thing. I'm going WAY far out there, bear with me.

We can start with a lampshading of the chronological problems of Northrend and Outlands. This would be pretty simple to address, simply have a keeper of time on the docks and the zeppelin bays. They could explain that it is of vital importance to go back in time and assure that things happen as they need to happen in the past to preserve the future. Problem solved. Heck, make it a plot point where you HAVE to talk to the keeper of time before you can go in there, at least then it's a speedbump that everyone slows down over and those interested could READ it.

Second idea would be a simple phasing issue. Phase the world for the player so they could do the last 5 quests of the chain, including battle for undercity. THEN add one more quest at the tail end, reporting to a keeper of time, and they could simply "correct" time, and you'd be back in Cata world and happy to know that you preserved the timeline as needed. And this could be done raid-party style in that "you begin this last part of the chain, you may not do any other quests until you are finished." Heck CHROMIE is in the region of this quest! You could talk to her (it?) to initiate this as a chain too!

REALLY! She wouldn't mind doing it!

Third is just a storytelling issue. If someone handed you a copy of, oh I'll choose something properly geeky here, "The Empire Strikes Back" and the last 20 minutes were removed, then a lot of "Return of the Jedi" simply wouldn't make sense. (spoilers here folks, you've been warned) Like the wholse scene where Luke calls Vader "father", or Why Lando is working with the rebels or... Ok you get the idea. They could have found a better way to wrap up the loose ends other than hacking them off with a machete. That's all I'm saying.

And yes, I CAN do better, thank you for asking. My JOB is to write schlock like this, I can do it in my sleep. I call those my nightmares. Blizzard has told me they don't want decent writers, so heck with them. And if they steal this idea, they could give me some game time as a thank you, but I won't expect it. Nobody ever thanks the guy who actually SOLVES these problems.

The Battle for Undercity (Horde / Alliance) had been one of the highest rated quests in the game. Seriously, it was the quest you looked forward to doing. You worked your tail off, grinded through almost two dozen quests to get there, and it was a quest you FELT like you just changed the world by completing. It also gave some rare insight to the motivations of the leaders of the horde and alliance. And now, just gone, cut off because they didn't take 5 minutes to think about it.

I play WOW for the story, and honestly this is more than a little disappointing. It's quite the storyline to get wrapped up in and then ultimately let down. I know that video games lately have this trend to make sucktastic endings, but this is pretty much the ultimate one for WOW. You guys can do better than this, I'm shocked you refuse to.

RELUCTANTLY I can understand abandoning this storyline, it doesn't fit with the Cata world because, in part, it involves THRALL who is now indisposed elsewhere. But on the other hand, Battle of Undercity was widely held as one of the best quests in the game. To trash it seems to be a waste, and a needless one at that. And far too many players will just roll over and say "oh well, it was cool, but they'll never put it back in." I think I demonstrated how htey could, if they chose to, but unless we demand it, they won't.

There. I said it. I feel better.

War Stories 25 : LAGS vs RPSIG



Going back to 1991 for this one, blame someone on facebook askign abotu the old days with only pistols!

I KNEW I forgot to do something!


This week's MMO show update, Explaning what an MMO is!

MUD2MMO : Transmogrification in 4.3 patch

yep, an MMO video. I wasn't gonna do this 'til I got flamed outta my boxers last night by "hardcore gamers", and my fingers just coulndn't keep up with the "rage of fire" these guys did, so yeah, make a video and explain rather than trash my hand. Paintballers can ignore this one, optional vid.