WoW [General Discussion]

[Grey Fox]

I left back in early November. The novelty had wore off & it was a just a grind.

[crazy canuck]

Haven't logged on in a while.  It was a lot of fun but now it has become repetitive.

I think what the game developers need to understand is that not everyone wants to rush to the end game.  Vanilla Wow was successful because there was a whole world to explore for a very long time before getting to the end game. 

My subscription will expire in a few days - Katmai do you want my stuff or are you also done?

[Sophie Scholl]

So anyone still playing?

Me.  Haha.  I never really walked away though.  I keep it in fairly steady rotation.  My compulsion to have a ton of alts and being involved in a rp guild keeps be coming back.

[katmai]

Haven't logged on in a while.  It was a lot of fun but now it has become repetitive.

I think what the game developers need to understand is that not everyone wants to rush to the end game.  Vanilla Wow was successful because there was a whole world to explore for a very long time before getting to the end game. 

My subscription will expire in a few days - Katmai do you want my stuff or are you also done?

im at point I want to raid ( and I mean real raiding not lfr), which would mean leaving vita. But the time expect ed by guilds for progression raiding is more than I have available. Which means only reason to stick around is leveling alts.

[KRonn]

So anyone still playing?

Still playing.

[Rex Francorum]

Still playing (Uther-Runetotem merged servers).

[Syt]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/12/19/back-to-warcraft-with-nostalrius/

Heading back to World Of Warcraft with Nostalrius

Last week saw the return of World of Warcraft's most controversial server, Nostalrius. It's a private server which aims to recreate the experience of 'vanilla' World of Warcraft – that is, WoW as it was at or shortly after launch, before being supplemented and re-shaped by a hundred updates and multiple expansions. Logging on, I'm told "Position in queue, 3801. Estimated time: 47 minutes", before being ushered into a world of lag and people complaining about random disconnects. So, uh... yeah! Congratulations to the team for perfectly recreating the vanilla WoW experience!

Seriously though, it's an odd experience going back to a game that's still ticking along. Nostalrius hit the headlines earlier this year when Blizzard put the kibosh on it. As kiboshes go, it was a friendly one, with the team invited to Blizzard HQ to discuss the matter, and even raise the issue of official 'legacy' servers not operating on the wrong side of World of Warcraft's terms and conditions. However, all of that came to nothing. After months of the silent treatment, the Nostalrius team opted to give the bear one final poke by giving their code to another legacy team, Elysium. The new Nostalrius now lives on its servers, with both PvE and PvP servers to choose from, ready to let players party like it's 2005. Again. With rather more General chat about Trump.

Private servers, also often referred to as 'shards', are nothing new of course. Ultima Online was the first game where they became a big deal, largely helped by EA turning a surprisingly blind eye to the whole thing. Many operate on their own rules, including instant max-level characters or crazy XP gain, while others have their own goals. As the name suggests, Nostalrius is primarily about preserving a snapshot of the past that is otherwise impossible to return to. Yes, World of Warcraft is still around, and at first glance may even look like the same game. Over the years though, it's changed in just about every way imaginable, not least that many zones got an overhaul during the Cataclysm. This is the only way to play World of Warcraft frozen as it actually was.

Oh, except that right now it's Winter Veil, obviously.

Start it up now for instance and gosh, yes, it's amazing how well the graphics hold up, but it looks old. There's no handy markers to show you where your next target is or where the current quest ends. Forget about flying mounts, or getting a regular epic one without some serious effort. In many cases, the march of progress did a fine job of filing the edges off things and making them easier. In doing so though, it's hard to argue that much has been lost. I always liked the ceremony of going back to a class trainer to get new abilities for instance, and the original game's willingness to do things like the Druid form quest that sends you through far too high-level territory. That was a real adventure, especially on the PvP server where I cut my first Level 60, rather than just another quest balanced to be basically effortless. Likewise, while there's no arguing that tools like Look For Group and Look For Raid are effective at getting into the action quickly, they and the new capital cities of every expansion largely emptied most of the world and turned it into a glorified matchmaking lobby. There's something pure about seeing someone running around Ironforge trying to get a group together to tackle Gnomeregan the old fashioned way. Or indeed, bother visiting Gnomeregan.

Certainly, just looking around is a nostalgic treat. Not being a particular fan of dungeons or raiding, I have no particular memories or opinion on the jump from Molten Core to Icecrown Citadel or the joys of 40-man assaults versus the smaller 5-man teams I personally prefer. I do have a deep fondness for the early years of World of Warcraft though, which like most, are as much down to the time as anything else. It wasn't the first MMO that I played by a long shot, but it was one of only two (the other being City of Heroes) where I had real-life friends and co-workers who also played, making it a social experience as much as a game. Exploring Scarlet Monastery with a high-level friend. Being the high-level friend whose Mage could literally blow away any 'high level' enemy that got in the way with a quick Cone of Cold.

Ah, memories. All that had largely faded away by the time Lich King came along, with most having drifted away and a few others having sunk into the hardcore world of raiding guilds and the like. Since then, I've not really had anything similar. I missed out on the MOBA craze due to it both being something played in other magazines' offices and then so tied to skill-level that the mere idea of inviting a noob to play along became almost statistically impossible. I didn't have a console for Destiny, which a lot of folks I know played over the last couple of years. Now, working freelance at the other end of the country from folks... or in a different country from folks... or folks having less time due to things like 'families' and all that nonsense, I just don't have the social circle to make something like Overwatch not just my game, but 'our' game. I miss having an 'our' game, a virtual Cheers of chat, adventure, murder and good times. But, that's largely impossible. You need an 'us' to make an 'our', and a game that, like World of Warcraft, at least feels like it will go on forever. How many games can you say that for?

Nostalrius obviously can't provide any of that. But to be sure, it's a reason for many players to be glad it exists. A warm moment frozen in time, like one of those 80s cartoon intro compilations over on YouTube. A game that is exactly what they want it to be and always will be. A community of like-wishers. A predictable, comfortable safe space where everything feels 'right', like a new Slanket on a cold evening. The plan is to keep stepping through time, opening up other legacy servers starting with The Burning Crusade, for fans who prefer a few more rough edges cut off, but again, those will be individual, isolated, separate places, where Dalaran is never going to fly free of its magic bubble overnight and where it's actually worth hanging around Ironforge, where mages with portals and warlocks with summons are actually worth their weight in gold again, and where the battle for Tarren Mill never, ever fades into irrelevance.

Purely on a historical basis, I think it's an interesting project. Love or hate World of Warcraft, it's a cultural phenomenon worth preserving, and that's something our industry does really badly. Just look at retro games. Sure, we've still got them, but look at how many people think that the mark of their graphics was crisp, pixel-perfect precision rather than the blurs of CRT monitors (and beyond that, the art design specifically made to make use of it, like King's Quest's dithered graphics – blurring together what few colours early graphics systems could handle in order to create a whole new palette of them.) With MMOs, the idea that a whole world should go away just because the creator flips a switch is personally something abhorrent. Whether it's a big name like Ultima Online or Everquest, or something less successful like Earth And Beyond or The Matrix Online, it's all worth preserving in whatever form we can.

Sure, it's technically against the terms of service. But at worst, it's a sub-subdivision of the fandom that players aren't going to stumble into by accident, meaning that any glitches or even toxic audiences aren't really going to affect Blizzard, and in any event, the idea of them actually running legacy servers has always felt a pipe-dream. Even if it happened, how long would it happen for? Fans are ironically much better equipped to handle this kind of project, thanks to a mix of being driven by passion, and not having to justify it in terms of profit. It's not as though plenty of the players wanting to go back in time aren't also playing the likes of Legion, if only to have new content between alts.

Besides, it's good to know that someone's still looking for Mankrik's Wife.

[Syt]

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/06/24/world-of-warcraft-level-90-neutral/

World Of Warcraft Player Reaches 90 Without Picking A Side

In case you'd forgotten, MMO players are crazy. I know: I used to be one. This, though, is a whole new level of dedication to a mind-numbingly repetitive task. A World of Warcraft player named "Doubleagent" (get it?) rolled a Pandaren character and never left the neutral starting zone. Somehow, though, they found a way to hit WoW's current level cap of 90. And by somehow, I mean they picked a lot of herbs and mined Azeroth hollow. This is not a task congruent with keeping one's sanity, but when somebody voluntarily sets out to do this, it makes you wonder if they were ever truly sane to begin with.

Now, quests got the character up to around level ten or so, but after that experience from enemies dried up, and herbs/ore were the only teets Doubleagent could reliably suckle precious, precious XP from.

In actuality, Doubleagent didn't find the process quite as boring as you might think. Despite the fact that it took 173.5 days' worth of playtime (dating all the way back to 2012), they found the process rather soothing:

"At times I can find it relaxing, a change from the normal. Plus it's pretty easy to do when I have TV shows or movies that I need to catch up on, moreso than trying to do that during a battleground or raid."

Which... actually makes a lot of sense. I mean, why not? To each their own, and say what you will but this sort of thing takes tremendous dedication.

Plus, now when somebody asks the age old question – Alliance or Horde – there's a fully viable third option to bellow (because the only time anybody asks that anymore is at BlizzCon): NEITHER.

He's level 110:

http://www.pcgamer.com/meet-wows-biggest-hippie-a-panda-who-reached-max-level-by-picking-thousands-of-flowers/?utm_content=buffer3693c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=buffer_pcgamerfb

Meet WoW's biggest hippie, a panda who reached max level by picking thousands of flowers

You merely adopted the grind. He was born in it, molded by it.

The Wandering Isle is a transient place. Sitting precariously on the back of the colossal turtle, it drifts from place to place across the seas of Azeroth. Likewise, its population is just as fleeting. As one of the starter zones in World of Warcraft, new pandaren characters begin their journey here before flying off to join either the Horde or the Alliance in neverending war. All of them but one.

'Doubleagent' has seen thousands of players level up and leave their homeland behind, but not him. For a normal player, the Wandering Isle is a kind of tutorial zone where pandaren characters complete easy quests and learn about their place in Azeroth. Once they level up enough, they're forced to choose a side to continue their journey.  But Doubleagent never made that choice. He's World of Warcraft's first and only conscientious objector—a neutral pandaren shaman who spends his time picking flowers and mining rocks instead of fighting and killing. And, amazingly, after roughly 8000 hours of doing just that, Doubleagent has reached the maximum level of 110.

But what would force someone to subject themselves to a life of solitude on an island most characters spend about an hour on? Simple curiosity. "When I heard that pandaren started out as neutral, I was curious if I could somehow manage to reach max level without choosing a faction," Johnnie, the player behind Doubleagent, tells me. "Once I discovered that there were herb and mining nodes on the island, I knew it was possible."

The conviction to abstain from Azeroth's world-ending conflicts means that Doubleagent doesn't have access to the quests, dungeons, and raids that normal players use to level up. Instead, he picks flowers and mines rocks. Each day that Johnnie plays, he logs in and begins a lap of the Wandering Isle, stopping to pick every flower and mine every ore he sees. By the time he finishes a lap, the nodes have respawned and he can start again. And again. And again. And again.

Fast forward for years and that routine has been repeated hundreds of thousands of times. Each node he harvests typically comes out to about 90 experience points a pop. Considering that getting to level 100 (which Johnnie did back during the Warlords of Draenor expansion) takes just over 100 million experience points, and you can understand the daunting journey it took to reach level 110. When I ask Johnnie why he keeps going, he doesn't really have much of an answer. "I just keep at it," he says. "I don't know why. It's definitely not a process for the average person."

Grinding the days away

You might think that such an obsessive conviction is reserved for a more eccentric person, but Johnnie doesn't strike me as one. Living along the Atlantic coast of New Brunswick, Canada, he is soft-spoken and reserved. Though his antics have garnered a lot of attention, Doubleagent's self-imposed exile isn't some abstract way of gaining attention. "I do it for myself," Johnnie says plainly.

In that vein, Johnnie won't even reveal how many hours he's invested. To reach level 90 took him 175 days worth of play time, but beyond that he won't say—though it's easy to run the numbers and guess somewhere just under a year total. "I get a lot of negativity when I give that kind of information," he says, laughing awkwardly. "A lot of people view it as a waste of time, so I really don't want to say what my play time is beyond what I've already announced. The community has been mostly positive, but it's the negative that sticks with you more."

Look at any of the threads mentioning him on World of Warcraft's subreddit, and you'll find a load of bemused and often critical comments. "Gotta say, he was about as excited as I am," writes another. "I kinda feel like this whole gimmick has served its worth the last [expansion]."

"This is one of the most weirdest things to me," writes one user. "For us it's entertainment. But for him to just sit there and do that stupid shit. I can't imagine how boring that must be."

Calling it entertainment, however, is a bit of a stretch. Instead of celebrating each milestone, Johnnie typically sends out a simple tweet or uploads a rough, unedited video. In the video showing him reach 110, he sits for a few moments and then, seemingly unsure of what to do now, sets out to gather more ore. There's no fanfare and no excitement, just a man staring with a blank expression at his computer monitor. He tells me he got permission from work to come home to finish that last stretch of grinding. Once he reached 110, he uploaded the video and returned to work like nothing happened.

It's only natural that some would want to criticize, but Johnnie feels it isn't fair. While the amount of time he's spent in the last four years is staggering, it hasn't been spent wholly focused on watching Doubleagent running from one flower to the next. At this point, he says the routine is almost entirely muscle memory, so he spends that time catching up on Netflix shows and movies he'd be watching anyway. To him, it's no different than knitting or any other passive hobby people invest in. Except, instead of a closet full of wool hats and mittens, Johnnie has the only max-level neutral character in all of Warcraft. "I definitely don't regret it," he says. "It's something that I'm glad that I did. It was something different and it was a goal I set for myself and I went ahead and did it."

No right way to play

Still, the journey hasn't always been easy—and not just because of the massive grind. Early in his life, Doubleagent raised a lot of eyebrows from other players who saw his high level and thought he must've been hacking. Most players leave the island and never return after level 10. "People were putting in [support] tickets and reporting me," he says. "I think they assumed I had gotten to the island in some way. They probably didn't realize that I had actually leveled without hacking myself onto the island."

Even Blizzard's moderators didn't know how to handle Doubleagent at first. One told him what he was doing was fine, while another told him he needed to pick a faction and leave the island for good. Johnnie filed a petition and Blizzard ultimately decided he could stay.

Since then, the company has embraced Johnnie's bizarre way of playing. With the release of Legion in August, order halls gave each class a place to call home in-between excursions to save Azeroth from the demon invasions. When the first monks stepped foot inside of their revamped version of the Wandering Isle during Legion's beta, they found an NPC named Venerable Shaman wandering around gathering herbs and ores wearing the same gear as Doubleagent. Even better, as Johnnie grinded his way up from level 100 to 110, his NPC doppleganger followed suit.

Blizzard never contacted Johnnie to let him know, so being immortalized in World of Warcraft came as a big surprise. While in truth it's just a subtle joke, he sees it as Blizzard finally validating the way he chooses to play its game. Like Star Wars fans lamenting that there's no middle ground between the light and dark sides of the force, Doubleagent has sat awkwardly between the Horde and Alliance. "It's nice that they showed that being neutral is a choice," Johnnie says. "It might not be the fastest way to level, but it's an option."

Now that he's level 110, Doubleagent's journey has come to an end. Johnnie is currently turning his grinding efforts towards obtaining the Red Winter Hat from Warcraft's christmas holiday, Winter Veil. Since most headwear is acquired in higher level zones, it's the only hat Johnnie can acquire while staying on the island. Once that's done, he'll retire Doubleagent for a few years until the next expansion is released and the level cap is once again raised. And just like the coming of spring or any other force of nature, you can bet Doubleagent will be back out on the Wandering Isle, picking flowers and mining ore, ignorant to whatever new dire circumstance faces Azeroth.

[crazy canuck]

I am a sucker for wow expansions.  I am going to play this one for a while.  I played a few hours in the content they created for the pre-launch and it was a lot of fun.

It looks like they have kept the parts of the last expansion I really enjoyed and got rid of the parts that were not as enjoyable (mainly related to leveling your artifact).  I am going to try a new class this time, a disc priest.  Yes still a healer but one who heals by doing dps.  If I can't master that mechanic then I can always fall back on the traditional healing of a holy priest and use the disc talents for solo play.

[Iormlund]

I used to do Atonement Disc back in the day. Was a really fun mechanic. I could do about half the damage of a dedicated DPS while getting almost as much healing as a proper healer, since Disc had amazing mitigation CDs you could rotate throughout the fight.

[crazy canuck]

Yeah, that is why I want to try it.  It is a bit boring spending my whole time just watching health bars. 

[Sophie Scholl]

I've got a druid tank, warrior tank, and pally tank at 110 currently waiting to dig into the new expansion.  I've also been mucking about with a monk healer and a disc priest.  Both make for a nice change of pace.

[crazy canuck]

Played the expansion for a bit tonight.  My initial impression is the opening sequences are well designed.  Also a pleasant surprise is that starting area I picked is not flooded with players.

[Solmyr]

I still have to play through Legion.

[Syt]

The last time I dabbled with the game was in 2008. And I did play it a bit in 2005/2006, but quit level 40-something because it became a bit grindy. "What do you mean, I should 'farm' Scarlet Monastery?"