Tuesday, March 17, 2009

People Outside WoW

If you have played World of Warcraft and have played in a raiding guild you understand that its more then just a game. It's a second life with a second set of friends. The people that you are constantly playing with have their own unique personalities and you look forward to "hanging out" with them in game. Whenever these players have hardships in their real life you feel bad for them. You rely on these people to be there and have your back in a dungeon and they expect the same from you. It fosters a different relationship then in real life because you are friends because not only personalities but a level of trust to perform.

How do you explain this to someone who doesn't play World of Warcraft? When you are tired but its time for raid you still show up. Even if you are not in line to get a piece of loot you still will feel obligated to show up because you have built these friendships. Sometimes you stay on a little longer to help get a new boss down even though you know you should get to bed.

Sometimes you live a double life. You have your standard day job, your friends and family that you spend time with and you have all the responsibilities that you routinely take care of. After all that real life stuff is taken care of you have your free time and you decide to play World of Warcraft. People wonder why you spend most of your time playing 1 single game when you can be outside playing sports, hanging out with people, or do normal stuff like watch TV. When you tell them that you are gonna be online playing a virtual game they wonder if you should seek professional help.

Then you have the people who understand gaming. You'll go play Halo together or talk about the new features this years madden game has. They understand why you choose to play video games and how good they are at passing time and relieving stress. But sometimes they can't understand the idea behind a raiding schedule. They can't understand needing 25 dedicated people every week to make a raid happen. They don't understand the concept of going through a dungeon, then coming back the next week and doing the same dungeon again and what you fight doesn't change.

So what is a WoW player to do. We do what we always have done. We live our 2 lives. We go on and act as we always do because we are just like everyone else. We have our lives that we live and we do it just like everyone else does. We will continue to go out and watch movies like Watchmen with our friends. We will continue to have Sunday dinner with our family. We will still go out and have fun with our girlfriend. We just hope that when we do decide to go play Warcraft the people that we care about don't look down on us and allow us to be ourselves and enjoy what it is in life that we enjoy.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

What keeps us playing?

I am an avid gamer to the point where I consider myself hardcore. I remember playing final fantasy 7 4 times because it was such an incredible game. Hitting level 99 and making sure every hit I landed was 9999. The amount of work it took to get the summon "Knights of the Round" was silly. When Halo came out me and my friends would obsess over that game and play non stop multiplayer sometimes til the sun came up. I ended up buying a second x-box, second copy of the game, and owning about 7 controllers for that system just to get an insane multiplayer round going.

When a game has the ability to grab me it grabs on and doesn't let go. I have a very obsessive personality when there is a goal I usually think about how to plan my free time around how to get what I want.

What is it about World of Warcraft that keeps us playing? When I started playing the game back in Christmas of 2004 I was still very noobish on how MMO's worked. I remember running around Northshire Abbey on my Paladin and being so excited to see a grey mail boots drop off a lvl 4 mob and equipping them because they gave me more armor then I already had. You could imagine how I felt when I got a green which actually had stats on it. It didn't matter if it was a cloth robe with +1 spirit it was still an upgrade. As I gained levels I felt my attacks get stronger and stronger. The trainer always had something new for me every 2 levels that made me wanna just play a little more to get to the next level.

Blizzard has done an amazing job in making the player feel more powerful and rewarded for accomplishing things in the game. Running through Darkshore I felt like I had taken down one of the most powerful creatures in the game when I took down Morbent fel. I got up into the high 30's and could just feel how close I was to begin able to ride on a holy Warhorse. Being a paladin, the game made you feel special even though they were probably one of the slowest classes to level once you got into you 40's.

I eventually ended up leaving Warcraft in April of 2005 because I could see how my obsession would hinder my schooling. I was a senior about to graduate and I had a lot of clinical time to finish up. I knew if I continued to play the game at the rate that I did i would probably run into some issues especially int eh department of sleep. I was able to see a potential problem before it arose but how many people out there weren't able to make that distinction? Even is people saw the amount of hours logged in did they just not care and continue to play? We have all had those nights where we just wanna get in 1 more heroic, or kill 1 more boss in the raid before we were willing to call it. We all know how it felt the morning after during work sleep deprived but knew we were gonna do it again the following night.

So what is it that keeps us playing? In the beginning it was exploring new places, getting new loot, and i think for most people it was seeing those bigger crit numbers. That's what starts it all off but that only gets us so far. Once you hit your late teens you start getting quests for dungeons you can't handle on your own. Somebody is broadcasting to the zone that they need a few more for deadmines so you decide it would be great to try out this group stuff. You start clearing out the trash and you start talking about random stuff. Every so often you wipe and sometimes people get angry and start yelling at each other.

You start interacting with different personalities and you start getting in game friends. The next time you log in you might get a whisper from one of the people you played with before and start questing together. Those friends might be in a guild and they tell there guild leaders to invite you. Now you are in guild chat talking about random stuff and finding groups becomes a little easier. You develop a close relationship with these people and everyone starts hitting the highest level and everyone wants to start raiding. You now have a vested interest in how well your fellow guild mates perform. If they do well they help you acquire the epics you desire. If they were great as a group of people to bullshit with but not so good with getting together to kill bosses you decide to put an app out there into a guild who shares the same goal as you. You develop a new family and learn all the new personalities. They learn who you are and start relying on you. You show them you play well and they get sad when you won't be able to make a raid. You feel for each other when real life tragedies strike. Some people go as far as to have guild meet ups.

So why is it that I am still here after 4 years? Its the same reason I bought 2 xbox's to play the original halo. That desire for social interaction and competition in a battlefield where you come out the victor. Being able to take out the enemy or finally destroying the boss who wiped the floor with you day in and out. But that's not enough. Being in there for the social aspect of it can only get so far. Its the spoils of victory that keep us coming back for more. The chance to get "helm of awesome" and to be recognized for the amount of work it took to actually get that. To become better and take down further challenges while doing it with your "second social group".

A lot of the reasons we keep playing is the same reason we do what we do in life. The people who make the most money usually show it with the "suit of awesome". To belong to a social group where you are recognized for what you have and what you accomplished in life. World of Warcraft found the way to exploit what it is that makes us human. They know how to play on our desires.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Dual Specs

With Patch 3.1 Blizzard will be releasing the ability for all classes to be able to have 2 talent specializations to switch between. In addition whenever you switch specs you will have you action bars and glyphs switch over to the new spec. I have tested this out on the PTR today and I have to say Blizzard made it real easy to understand how it works and be able to switch on the fly.

A couple of sitatuations come to mind once this all comes out live. First as a raider everyone picks a main spec that they want to play and on any given night you usually stick to that spec for the entirerty of the night. I have a wide variety of gear due to the nature of there being a lot of loot going to offspec so my gear is pretty close to what our main spec holy and ret pallies have. When I do respec to help out the raid I do really well on the healing and damage meters so I feel confident on knowing how to play my class.

This will be helpful once we start raiding in 3.1 because if there is a 1 tank fight any of our tanks will be able to switch to a secondary spec and dps or heal for that fight. The problem is not everyone has really been gearing up for a secondary spec. While it is still going to be better then dpsing in a non dps spec we will have about 15 people ulduar geared dps and about 3-4 not so geared dps. In the end it is still positive.

Another issue will be the fact that dkp becomes an issue. A lot more people are gonna be gunning for the secondary set of gear. Since people will be using this gear during a raid do you charge them the dkp for it or do you just let all offspecs roll? If you have to spend dkp you have the issue of hybrids always being much lower on dkp then characters who dont need an offset of gear. What about people who want to be a certain spec such as tanking and they're asked 75% of the time to play a dps or healer roll? Is tanking still considered their main spec even though they heal more? Should that person not be allowed to roll on that gear because it is considered their offspec? Will they get yelled at because they are not doing as well due to it not being their primary spec?

I know a lot of hardcore raiders, especially tanks will use their secondary spec as a special way of doing their primary spec. I know a lot of warrior tanks who will probably have a boss tank spec and a trash tank spec. Some people love to pvp/arena and I am one of them. What if someone wants to have a pve dps spec and a pvp dps spec? Will a raid force members to have 2 raiding specs so they can maximize what they can accomplish? Also if a tank has 2 specs that are for tanking will they always be asked to tank over someone who decides to have 2 different roles since they can bring more to the raid then that tank? Also will "pure" classes be asked to sit out for hybrids since they bring more to a raid?

As far as I go I am kinda annoyed by only having 2 specs. I actually have 5 specs that I will jump back and forth from. I will have my tank spec, raiding ret, raiding holy, arena holy, and arena ret. I more then likley will have tank spec as my main spec and raiding ret as my secondary spec. Its gonna be upsetting when I go to the trainer and pay 50g so I can go play my arena games for the week.

With all things said playing World of Warcraft will be a lot more enjoyable come 3.1. I enjoy the variety my class provides me and it'll be more fun when I throw my shield on and take it in the face on one boss and smash the next bosses face in with a big 2 hander. With our tanking corps we like to rotate on every boss so no one feels left out. This way the raid wont be hurting for bringing 4 tanks since we can all switch to our 2nd favorite thing.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Welcome

Welcome to my Blog everyone. Let me start by introducing myself. My character name is Bladez and I am a lvl 80 Protection Paladin on the Thunderhorn US server.

I started my character back on Christmas of 2004 when me and my friends all created characters to play together. Before this point my MMO experience includes playing a Text MMO called Emerald City. At least that is what I think it was called. It was a wierd experience. Everything you did was controlled by commannd such as go north, start attack, look at rat. It was definatley an interesting experience and hard to get into. As I continued to play the game I learned the lingo,how to contorl my character, and how to play the game. One thing I definatley remember about this game is that it put a lot more emphisis on role playing and spending more time in taverns.

I didn't play Emerald City for all to long but it layed groundwork for me to get intersted in more games similar to that style. After a couple years I get a job at my local Electronics Boutique. While working there we had regular customers who were into Everquest. After they convinced me to purchase the game I installed and rolled a human style fighter class. I'm not really sure what was going on but I practically spent about an hour trying to find something to do. I just remember running through a city forever trying to find something to fight. Once I did find something to fight it kicked my ass. I ended up uninstalling the game that night. After a couple months I decided to give the game a shot again. At this point I decided to try a wood elf ranger of some type. Luckily I found some rats to kill and just remember swinging my sword a lot until it died. I learned enough about the game to get to about lvl 18. It took me forever to get to this point but remember killing a lot of gnolls.

After I got bored with it I moved back to playing a bunch of console games. After a couple months there was a big uproar for the release fo Dark age of Camelot. I decided to try it out and rolled a human looking paladin character. Luckily I had some experience with MMO's at this point so I was able to understand training skills, how to kill stuff, and how to regenarte life/mana. I had a lot of fun with Dark age and ended up getting up to the mid 20's before it became very mundane.

The one thing I realised about both Everquest and Dark age of Camelot was that it required a descent ammount of grouping to be able to be able to accomplish anything worthwhile. But the worlds that they did create were beautiful and fun to explore. Even though the worlds had a lot to them I never felt like there was a story to explore. All that changed once I started playing World of Warcraft. The story was interesting and fun. The gameplay kept me intriguing and getting to the next level was always something that you reached for.

I'm not sure what I'm going to be doing with this Blog but I have a lot of ideas about raiding, theorycrafting, and what Blizzard changes to make the game better.