Blessed by the Potato

Wow, I haven’t had much luck with raids in the World of Warcraft lately.

Let me start you in slowly, just in case you’re one of the few people left in the world who hasn’t given their money to Blizzard: most of the content of the game is inside dungeons, which you run in groups of 5-40. Most of the dungeons you can just find any group of yahoos online, run through and do just fine — and I’ve run all of them hundreds of times, except for LBRS, which I’ve only hit a few times, and Scarlet Strath, which I’ve never done. It’s cursed: my groups for it always fall apart before we even zone in. For the larger, harder dungeons (which also have the best loot), you need a really big group of reasonably well-coordinated people to pull them off. To add to the requirements, you can only do them once a week (or once every 3 days for Zul’Gurub), so you don’t just grab any group of 40 people and go: you wait to do it with your friends.

Having gotten a little bored of the 5-15 man dungeons I’ve been signing up for some raids into ZG and Molten Core. Fortunately, my priest has much better luck getting into those sorts of things than my Pally did last winter. So, in order to get a group of 40 people together for a MC run, you generally get a larger group of 50-60 players interested, and then have a signup on your forums. That way you can have some people opt out, or forget to show, and still get your raid going. Unfortunately, it also means you sometimes have people get stuck on the waiting list (which is made more unfair if they play a Pally who isn’t needed so much).

But I’ve just had rotten luck in there. I haven’t gotten any loot yet (except for a bit of Dark Iron Ore), although I did almost win a roll on the fancy epic crown for my priest (I had the highest roll and the loot master was about to give it to me when one more priest was like ‘Oh yeah, me too!’ and rolled 99. Grrr.) And to make matters worse, I haven’t even gotten to go on the last few! I was the 2nd to sign up for our guild’s foray into ZG, but I made the mistake of saying I was sick and might have to AFK a lot (see kidney problems below), so the GM put me on as the first alternate. The raid was supposed to start at 7 pm, so I got on a few hours early early, collected the quests, parked my priest in front of ZG, and started playing on an alt. I was waiting for a whisper or a message in the channel that the raid was starting, and kept an eye on where everyone was located. Suddenly, at 6:50 I notice a few people leave the major city of Ironforge and start to zone towards ZG. So I switch back to my priest and ask for an invite… the GM says “LOL, you’re late, I gave your spot away.” Turns out two people on the list never made it, so I should have been in there as first alternate, and I was still 10 minutes early, but for whatever whacko reason someone else got in anyway (turns out it was a RL friend of theirs — more on that later). No apology, nothing. Fortunately, it sounds like that raid went to hell anyway (ironically, from a lack of healers). Oh, I should mention that this isn’t the first time this has happened. While it was a few months ago, I also got left behind on an IL raid I signed up for because I was on a different character waiting for an invite (that time, I signed up for an alt and was sitting on my main!).

And now, as I’m typing this, I got left out of a MC raid with DAOC. We go with them every week, and even though their guild master tends to automatically sign up the regulars (including me) every week, I still go to the forums and am sure to say that I’ll be there (or, if I can’t, to tell them not to expect me). Again, I was logged on an hour before the raid (this time not on an alt since it’s a different guild), and doing a bit of PvP. We’re supposed to start invites at 6:30 and the raid at 7 (it takes a while to get 40 people up and going), but in practice the invites don’t come until 6:45. So I’m in a PvP instance, which finishes at 6:35. I figure perfect timing. I drop my group and whisper the raid leader for an invite.

I get a DND message from her.

No problem, I fly to MC so I’ll see who’s standing outside and get an invite from them… oh, the place is swarming with a Horde guild waiting for their run, I can’t pick anyone out of the crowd. Again, no problem, I go through my friends list and start asking people if they could invite me or know who has invite privledges, and since it’s 20 minutes before the raid, everyone’s AFK. Finally I get someone who’s on teamspeak (a voice communication program similar to Roger Wilco) who gets the raid leader to turn off her DND flag so I can talk to her. She tells me she sent me an invite at 6:30, but that I was in a group so she went and got one of the alternates, and that the raid was now full, being 10-to. I mean seriously?! You couldn’t have whispered me to see what I was doing or told me that the raid was forming and that it was time to drop groups? At least she was sorry about it.

Anyhow, I mentioned that the person who replaced me was a RL friend of one of the officers, which brings me to another problem I’ve been having in WoW: our guild. We started off after release in House of Llyorian, a guild full of great people that Netbug knew in closed beta. And I mean great people: of the ones who didn’t quit, most have gone on to become some of the top players on the server. But unfortunately, it was too small a guild to even do the 10-man endgame dungeons without getting pickups (at least at the time, since a few people raced to 60 pretty fast). So we found another group of good players with Infinite Luck, and started merging away. The merger was a little rushed and sloppy (boy, were some of those people desperate to run Stratholme!), but it worked fairly well.

While Infinite Luck was also fairly casual and friendly, it was not a guild of people that primarily knew each other from WoW, but a multigame guild and moreover, a guild of people who know each other in real life. This lead to some problems. First off, there was an inordinate amount of resistance to the idea of making anyone formerly from House of Llyorian an officer. There still is, which baffles me (after all, the more officers you have, the easier it is to recover if one of them does something stupid, and the livelier the /o channel becomes). This actually, and sadly, was part of the reason my good friend Reggie decided to leave the game. He played far too much to be healthy, and in the mornings too. The guild needed a morning officer, so they promoted Myzerie, a nice enough girl I’ll grant, and one who did spend her playtime in the mornings… but one who has something like 7 kids and is only on for a half hour at a time (and who, a year later, still doesn’t have a single character at level 60). That was a bit of a snub to poor Reggie, who was one of the driving forces behind the HoL merger in the first place.

So then, a real-life couple who formed two more of our officers left the server for the more exciting world of PvP, and it was admitted that we needed some to replace them. Despite the larger size of the guild, they wanted to stick with just 5 or 6 officers (and no amount of arguing on my part changed their mind). Not wanting to split the “HoL” vote, we rallied behind Bug and Abe (again, poor Reggie didn’t even get nominated). Bug won… and promptly left for Neph :)

Then we realized we needed yet another guild merger to do the endgame, so we got together with AoV. Neither guild wanted to disband and join the other, so instead we formed an alliance (as I had originally proposed for HoL). Oddly enough, the reason given for not merging was that since IL was a multiple game and RL friend guild, we couldn’t lose the name since people wouldn’t be able to find us (which is a load of crap, since people will need the website or their friends to decide which of the over 100 WoW servers to create their character on). In the end, we absorbed some AoV members, some stayed where they were, and others got sick of the whole thing and joined 60’s only guilds.

A bit later, the former guildmaster had to leave for RL reasons. We had another round of officer voting, and Cyberblade, formerly of AoV, was elected an officer and then promoted to guild master after the former one left. This was a bad choice. Sure, at first Cyber did a fairly good job… but Cyber had something like 4 level 60 characters, only one of which was in IL. He had better things to do, and since he was already doing MC runs with one of his characters, he had no motivation towards helping IL form alliances or recruit more members (even after I pointed him towards two guilds that had broken up or hemmoragged members after internal scandals: lots of good people looking to help build a guild were out there just waiting for a chance…) Eventually, Cyberblade decided to change the guild tabbard without telling anyone, just to experiment a little. Unfortunately, he left his experiment at the end of the night on a horribly ugly colour, which caused our own internal scandal, and some overly harsh words were said, and Cyber left.

Once again, IL had a power vacuum. We elected some more officers, and that time around I made the nominations (but I lost by one vote — ironically, I chose not to vote for myself). Nightvision was elected the new GM. I’ve had bad experiences with Night in the past, but for the most part he’s a good guy, and had been nothing but nice for the month or so leading up to his GM status (though it seems to have gone to his head afterwards).

We got some end-game stuff going with DAOC (the group that just forgot to whisper me to break group so I could go tonight), and things have been looking up. There have been some downsides to our MC runs with DAOC: since they’re a new guild, and since the roster isn’t quite the same week to week, we’re rusty. We make lots of mistakes, lots of stupid deaths, and we haven’t gotten nearly as far as many other guilds have, even given a few weeks’ learning curve. We were talking about this one night in guildchat, but since only at most 10 people from IL go to MC, we decided to take the chat to the officers’ channel. I was promoted to officer temporarily so I could participate.

After that night, they forgot to demote me, and I stayed an officer for a few weeks. People came to accept it, and the guild could use more officers anyway (especially since Myz is essentially gone now). Then last week, out of nowhere, they demote me, saying that it was an oversight that had been corrected. Fair enough, I guess — except that the real life couple I was talking about earlier, who left for PvP? They came on right afterwards and even though they had been replaced as officers, they were still left with full privledges. Personally, I wouldn’t worry about the guy who’s been helpful & loyal and an officer for 2 weeks and caused no trouble… I’d worry about the people who left and have fully established characters on another server. While none of us have the reason to be petty and spiteful (kicking newbies from the guild after hours when noone else is on or somesuch), they have the means to get away with it.

Anyway, I’m getting a bit over-dramatic here, so I’ll unstaple my hand from my forehead and move on. I suppose the reason I’m getting into all this is that I’m just not very satisfied with WoW right now, so little things are bugging me more. I’ve been playing on the test server a bit, and the Pally changes don’t look good at all. Everyone’s going to need to farm new gear, since the old stats you valued (stam, int, and strength, in roughly that order) will be changed (to int, stam, and +spell damage/+healing). It will involve more button-mashing, so I suppose that’s more interactive… but we’re spending more mana just to get back to where we were before. Farming/grinding is still fairly slow, except now we have downtime, too.

I’m feeling quite a bit better today (unlike yesterday, where I started to feel better, then felt worse, then better again). I’ve gone 3 solid days without throwing up now, and I think I’ve had something close to 6 meals in the last 3 days, too. Kidney stones are awful, and there’s only like 2 people I would wish them on.

So in the time that I’ve been sick, I’ve mostly been strung out on pain killers playing computer games or sleeping. In addition to World of Warcraft, one game I played for a bit was Starscape. It’s a small shareware game that I got hooked on by following an ad from Penny Arcade (and while I do check the site weekly, it’s not in my links section since they’re probably the last folks to need a link from me!). Just download the game, pay your $30 registration fee by credit card, and you’re good to go! Perfect for the immobile gamer.

The gameplay is very simple: you fly a ship around in a top-down view and shoot asteroids for materials to haul back to your space station to research and build further upgrades for your ship. Every now and then you shoot enemy fighters, too. It’s very bare-bones: there are 3 types of energy weapons, each with 4 levels of refinement, blandly named “ion cannons 1-4”, “blasters 1-4” and “beam lasers 1-4”. Oddly enough, the ion cannons have the reflect ability I would expect from a laser. Even the different types of minerals you collect are simply referred to as “resource 1” (or in my head: yellow, green, and purple). The graphics are nothing to ooh and aww about, though the cartoony sprites are fairly well done.

So you collect your minerals, perform your research, and pimp out your fighter (you can also add mines, drones, and missiles, but there’s so much shooting involved that it all comes down to your beam weapons). You can tweak the components (generators, engines, shields, and a neat addition of batteries so you can put on more energy weapons than your generators can handle and just go for short bursts of brilliant activity), and again, each has 4 levels of refinement to research.

Then you set out and follow the loosely-scripted linear storyline, killing the various enemy motherships one component at a time (the weak points even flash when you shoot them!) to recover the stolen dimensional hyperdrive your space station needs to return to Earth.

Overall, it’s a fun little game, despite the fact that all the while you’ll be wondering where you’ve played this game before (it reminds me of a cross between R-Type and some other top-down space shooters). I’d love to recommend it to everyone, except for what boils down to one problem: it’s hideously overpriced. At $30 for a download (over $40 if you get them to ship you a CD), I don’t expect much. The graphics and basic interface are fine for me… but there’s no replayability. There’s no random galaxies to take over, and there’s no multiplayer. You play through the storyline (killing a grand total of 5 enemy motherships, and upgrading your basic fighter 4 times), and then you’re done. There’s an instant action mode, where you jump in a fighter and try to survive for 5 minutes (or set it to unlimited time!), getting automatic upgrades as you collect minerals. That only goes so far — another hour or so of replayability. We’re still not even cracking 8 hours here, which is pretty bad for this genre of video game.

I also find their self-promotion on the website is spawned from pure insanity (or just wild fancy), touting features I don’t believe exist. For instance, on the reviews page, they have some choice quotes about the game, including:

“3D effects you would expect from a top of the line space sim”
“you can also play the game again… and again”

It’s a 2D game with sprites, so I’m not sure what top of the line 3D effects they’re talking about (unless it was the way the sprites were rendered in the first place?), and I’m pretty sure that the second quote is a reviewer, such as myself, being sarcastic about the lack of replayability.

And don’t be misled by the features:

Make alliances with friendly aliens and trade technology

–
SPOILER WARNING
–
There are only two alien races, one that you fight, and one that you are automatically allied with, who unlock new trees for you to research in each zone (ion cannons, beam lasers, mines, and shields). You do all the research once the tree is unlocked, and there’s no diplomacy involved: it’s a simple script that you watch your “Captain” recite when you bump into them. So while I suppose the promotion is technically true, it is really misleading if you’ve played other games similar to this, such as Protostar (is that what it was called? I know I have the floppies for it around here somewhere…) or Master of Orion where you can make real alliances (or choose not to!).

This is a small game from a small company, so maybe they’ll fix some things and let me download a new version. I’m positive if they even just add a multiplayer component, it’ll be an underground hit. For now, I’ll tell you this: it is fun and it is addictive your first time through, but when it’s done, you’ll be sure to think you’ve been ripped off.

Edit: Found Protostar!

Hi guys, I’ve had a few people mention this, so I figured I’d say something about it.

The company I have my domain registered with (Domain Direct, formerly part of Rogers/Excite before Rogers merged with Yahoo) simply offers domain forwarding, so when you type in www.holypotato.com it sends you to IP/blog where IP is the current IP address of my server. That’s not very appealing, so I enabled a function called “URL Keeper” that keeps the holypotato.com up in the address bar. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work the way I’d like, so it doesn’t put up the subpage addresses (like IP/blog/2.php) , and worse yet, if you click on an external link that opens in the same window, it’ll keep the address for my site there.

It’s not perfect by any means, so I’m thinking of taking it off and just letting the IP get thrown up there. Go ahead and use the comments page on this post to vote for that one way or another. Also, if anyone knows how to properly register my server’s IP (or IP/blog) as holypotato.com instead of using this URL Keeper thing, I’d be interested in hearing it!

Wow, I think I’ve just experienced what must be the worst pain in the world (or the worst pain I’ve ever had).

I woke up this morning and everything was hunky-dory… then bam! out of no where I get hit with this huge pain in my back and side. It was so bad I threw up (thankfully I hadn’t eaten since dinner last night). Wayfare was very worried about me, and asked if we should go to the hospital. I said yep, grab your stuff and call a cab. Which gives you an indication of how bad this was — I’m usually a wait and see and don’t bother the healthcare system kinds of guy (see my stroke suspicion below).

So we get to the hospital and we get really lucky, as emerg. is practically empty. I get to see the triage nurse right away, who tells me I probably have a kidney stone. After some more throwing up, they take me back to get an IV hooked up and take my history and stuff. Even more lucky, I got a private room (shortly thereafeter, I’m told emerg filled up, and everyone else got put into those large rooms with curtains dividing them.

Eventually they give me some drugs for the pain, and some gravol for the nausea, at which point I start drifting in and out of consciousness (mostly in, as it still hurt pretty bad with the drugs, just not quite the worst pain in the world). Then I had to go up for an ultrasound. There was a class of kinesiology students there watching me, trying to come up with ways of improving the ergonomics of the system. Unfortunately, they wanted to take an image with a full bladder, which I just couldn’t do, it was hurting and I kept needing to go to the washroom.

Anyhow, in my mind this took about an hour or two, and when they finally got me back down to emerg., I immediately asked if they could let Wayfare in to see me, as I’m sure she was worried sick. Turns out it had taken more like 4 hours and she was about ready to bust the door down and come a looking! (She also managed to read through every magazine they had down there). After that, I spent about another hour in emerg while they wrote me a perscription for codeine, checked my blood pressure a few more times, and went over the ultrasound results.

So right now I’m in a lot of pain and doped up, so a big apology to those who I said I’d meet on the weekend — I’m not going to make it.

As for the rest of you (well, the first group’s included too) I hope you never have to deal with a kidney stone!

Oh, I almost forgot: the thing that made me feel really old was the fact that my doctor was the same age as me. Damn, Doogie!

Wow, it’s been a year of WoW. And I can’t log into the servers. Not much has changed, eh?

The Paladin revamp has been not so much announced as snuck in on the test realm. It looks like Bliz is ashamed of it, and they should be. I’ll do a more in-depth review of the changes and the game on its anniversary later tonight.

For now, back to thesis revisions! (Will they never end?!)

Edit: Oh, I’ve been playing around with pages, trying to get all my recipes back up as a start to migrating the old site. It’s not quite what I was expecting. But check out what’s there on the right…

Edit2: Here it is, A Year in the World of Warcraft.

So in a nutshell, WoW is a massive multiplayer RPG. It’s cartoony and tons of fun, but it was seriously over-hyped and has had tons of issues that haven’t been resolved, no matter how simple they may be to fix (which is despicable, given the amount of money it makes).

I got into open beta, and played the crap out of the game: and with good reason, as just a year ago I had confirmation that I wouldn’t get a chance to defend that year (also with good reason, as I can see in hindsight, but it really really sucked at the time, and losing myself in a video game for 2 weeks was just what I needed).

My first character was a Dwarf Paladin named Potato (a very fitting name, I thought). In many games I tend to play the hybrid/paladin character. You get to fight the hated undead, heal the sick, and protect the weak. And that’s pretty much exactly how the Pally was hyped by Blizzard. The class, in a word, fails.

Sure, at the early levels it’s fantastic (and I only hit level 20 in the beta). There’s all kinds of power there, both offensive and defensive. But things really begin to taper off in the 40’s, and when you hit level 60 (the maximum level, and the point at which most of your time in the game is actually spent) the class is very lackluster. Combat consists of seal (sometimes judge) and wait. Maybe mix it up with a stun or heal now and then.

But since it was my first character, I just thought it was a slow game (and it is, but more due to slow mounts and flightpaths). It was only later with my priest, mage, and rogue that I realized how much potential is there to control the flow of combat, what the creeps do, how much damage you do and when…

Anyway, back around release there were tons of problems with the servers, like queues to log in, random disconnects, huge lag spikes, weird bugs (especially with mining nodes and getting stuck kneeling after looting — there was a great animation about this :)

Bliz worked hard (or claimed to) so that by Xmas the servers were stable enough to actually plan to go on and play. The cost was weekly maintainance, but we paid… For the next few months, the servers were actually fairly reliable, until patch 1.8 hit in October, and it’s been bad ever since. The login server dies almost daily, and random (and large) lag spikes hit, making the game unplayable some nights. Nice to know not too much has changed.

The game itself has some assanine mechanics to it. Like the spell damage armor — the amount it adds to a spell depends on the cast time, rather than the damage done or any other logical basis. The result is that most +ability gear pieces don’t add nearly as much to the gear as you might think. It also means that damage doesn’t scale well into the end game (WoW suffers a lot because most things don’t scale well as your gear improves… but some things do. By that I mean as you get the uber sword of head removal, a +9 to damage becomes less and less noticeable, whereas a +5% to damage always gives you that noticable 5%. Some things scale, most don’t). Or take mage water summoning. Mages have as part of their repetoir, oddly enough, the ability to summon water (which restores mana) out of nothing. But because the water only gives back a set amount of mana, as you get larger and larger mana pools with better gear, you find yourself drinking more and more water. The twist here is that as you learn a new type of water, you only cast a few at a time, and as that water becomes more obsolete, you get more water per cast, up to a maximum of 20. But at lvl60 when you get your final rank of summon water, you only summon 4 per cast (since it’s a new spell to you at that level). Yet since you spend most of the game at lvl60, it becomes highly annoying. Some mages have to log in 30-60 minutes before a raid so that they can summon enough water, 4 bottles at a time. That’s 30 solid minutes of pressing the same button over and over and over again. Obviously not a fun game mechanic… yet Blizzard thinks it’s all well and good, and actually tries to put up a face of having a deeper reason for limiting that sort of cast. (note, they did recently mention that it will soon get bumped up to 10 per cast… but why take so long to make such a simple change?).

More annoying is how they drag their feet on changes, no matter how painful the bug may be. Yet if there’s a bug that a player can use to their advantage, it gets “hotfixed” overnight.

Anyway, back to my Paladin whining. You see, in other classes, the healers are boring to play: you’re extremely vulnerable to being killed, and you just spam whatever healing ability you have until you run out of mana, and maybe throw a buff or two while you’re at it. To avoid that, Blizzard gave priests shadow abilities, so they could do decent damage (essential for soloing and PvP) as well as some neat additional spells (mind control being one of my favourites). But the Paladin fell into that roll. I don’t know why, but they changed the way the Paladin worked just a few days before release; from my understanding, they removed a lot of the melee abilities.

I can’t say I didn’t have fun with WoW playing my Pally — it was very addictive. But I can say that the class is the worst of any I’ve played, and I’ve enjoyed my priest much more. In hindsight, I should have rolled a druid, who are true hybrids. Coming up through the levels we had a decent seal (ability) available that buffed our attack speed… and that allowed us to have damage about equal to that of a warrior. But apparently that was a bug, because it got fixed and we’ve just never been the same. The next seal up was Seal of Command, which was essentially a bonus attack at random times. Since it scaled with your weapon damage, it quickly became our best ability to use to increase damage, even if it was kind of boring (there wasn’t even any point to judging it).

So anyway, the class came up for review, we gave our feedback on the forums, and the devs came back with “STFU, working as intended.” There was a huge outcry from Paladins, and after much waiting and hand-wringing, we finally got a review to try to improve the class. There were 4 main items on the agenda to be fixed. First was the utter tedium of our blessings — recasting every 5 minutes on 40 people took up most of our time in big instances like Molten Core. Next were our heals, of which we have 2: one is a decent heal, but is too slow for snap healing (PvP, emergencies). The other has good mana efficiency, but lousy healing per second (it’s too slow for what it does, and in an absolute sense, doesn’t do enough). We would have liked to see an instant cast heal, even if only as a talent, since we are supposed to be able to heal while taking a beating. Thirdly was our damage, which was the worst in the game (even below true support classes like priests and druids in caster form — though that last one was arguable rather than absolute), which we could live with if we could tank or heal decently, but to add insult to injury, it was entirely beyond our control. Cast a seal and wait for the random number generator to do its thing. Ugh. Finally, despite being one of only two classes that can wear plate armour, we can’t actually tank very well because we don’t have the ability to generate hate (that is, to get the monsters to beat on us rather than our squishy friends). There is some rudimentary ability there, and with a good group who works with you to keep the hate on you, you can tank as a pally… but it really could have used an improvement.

Now it’s one year later and our changes have finally been announced… and hardly anything of substance changed. Healing is no better (in fact, it’s worse because the talents that did improve it are buried deeper in the holy tree, preventing you from getting them and something else). Our overall damage looks to have improved slightly, but with only miniscule extra control, and I don’t think our ability to tank has improved at all.

It’s as though there were two completely separate companies behind WoW: the one that almost finished it and made a really fun & addictive game, and the one that completely bunged up releasing and maintaining it. That might not be too far from the truth, since rumour has it that many of the core developers and designers left shortly before the game hit retail.

But it is fun for the most part. I especially like getting to play with my RL friends. The best times were in Loch Modan with Reggie. We both played pallies, and he would start off tanking on a fight while I healed him, and then we’d instinctively change roles when my mana ran low or what have you. No communication necessary :)

Sadly, much of that is gone now. Many people have left the game, or almost as bad, left the guild to do the “hard core” endgame stuff. I just don’t have the time to devote to that kind of stuff, and every time I get spam for gold buying sites, I think of selling my account (I could likely make enough to pay for the the cost of the subscription so far). But we’ll see how it goes. I had Wayfare hooked for a bit, but she doesn’t seem to enjoy it as much (largely because the trade skills & fishing suck, and she’s not a big dungeon runner).

As for the hype, unfortunately I don’t have records of what WoW was going to have exactly, but I remember reading about the cool things, like Hero units and Life Quests (basically quests you would work on throughout the life of your character to give them some added abilities). There’s virtually no customization aside from a few talent points and gear — one level 60 paladin performs much like the next. I thought that it wasn’t going to be like that…

But I think by far the biggest disappointment has been the Player vs Player content in the game. They have languages and faction reptuation, which seems perfectly primed to align yourself based on your actions… possibly even betraying the race you started with to go work for the other side. That sort of thing was hugely common in the RTS versions of Warcraft, and the background lore indicates that as well, seeing as how this is supposedly a bit of a cold/early war period. But instead, you are permanently locked in battle with the other side. There are “dishonourable kills” that should take away your reputation, even with your own side, but in reality just affect your “rank”.

One thing I was really looking forward to was participating in “epic” battles to claim towns, fighting against other players and NPC town guards to overthrow the mayor/general, raise the flag, and watch as NPCs from my faction streamed in to rule the place. I have no idea what happened to that, if it was ever truly in the game, or if that was just from a preview I saw. It sounded like a neat idea, anyway. Of course, I can see it being a problem, since most servers have an imablance in terms of the population that is loyal to each side (for the most part, Alliance outnumbers the Horde).

So, one year later, and I think that the game could be much better than it is. It certainly opened my eyes (and my wallet) to the monthly subscription format, which on its own almost killed my willingness to get the game. But despite the flaws and the obvious places for improvement, the game is oddly addictive, and I still play it, and probably will continue to play it as long as I’ve got friends in there (or until I get a good enough offer on my account :). Overall though, I think I’d rather be back to 2 years ago playing WarCraft III with Rez, Netbug, and Inx (plus occasional cameos by Gloth and Gutter, and almost Reggie). I actually installed it during the summer and played a few games. It was fun, and part of me missed it more… but the other part realized that we all quit right around the time the expansion came out, and a lot of things changed in The Frozen Throne, and it’s not really the same game (I know I’m no good at it anymore, and I used to be).

So guys, let’s get together sometime and play something together. I’m not too picky. StarCraft’s always good, as is WarCraft III. Empire Earth was fun with the guys from work… or, since we all have fairly new computers, we could actually try a new game.

Edit3: Oh, I forgot about the last thing to complain about! The PvP system was much hyped but didn’t make it into the retail release. Instead a very different system came in sometime in the winter months (February?). It introduced ranks (from Private through Knight and Grand Marshall) that depended on the number of kills you get in PvP combat. And that’s it, just kills. You could get 100 kills and die 1000 times in the process (which would indicate you’re a lousy PvPer) and get exactly the same rank as someone with 100 kills and 10 deaths. To add insult to injury, you only get credit for a kill if you’re alive at the time: so if you and a buddy are both beating on an enemy warrior, and the warrior kills you just before dying himself, you get no credit for the kill.

It’s a system that heavily favours so-called “DPS” classes (that is, classes designed to pump out damage rather than heal or defend; heavily offensive classes). Which is very odd considering how in almost all of Blizzard’s other games (and several other RPGs) going for a healer, defensive, or offensive character are all equally viable options. On top of all that, the ranking system requires exponential increases in kills to get to the highest ranks. And since your record has nothing to do with it (unlike WarCraft III), the person to be dubbed “highest ranked” on the server will simply be the one with the most time available to devote to aquiring kills. Entire guilds get behind an effort to promote one of their members to Grand Marshall, and even with underhanded tactics such as making agreements with players of the other faction to trade kills as quickly as possible, it takes something like 12 weeks of playing the candidate character for 12-16 hours a day (often in shifts, with multiple players playing the same character). So far, no one I know who’s reached Grand Marshall has said the effort was worth it, and all of them have required at least a short break from WoW after the ordeal.