In defense of big, bright exclamation points

QUEST HERE! I HAVE A QUEST FOR YOU! MAKE SURE YOU GET MY QUEST HERE BECAUSE I HAVE A QUEST!
are you done yet? you don't look done. maybe you need to kill some more bears.
YOU'RE DONE! THAT'S SO GREAT! I AM VERY HAPPY THAT YOU ARE DONE AND I AM GOING TO GIVE YOU A REWARD IF YOU COME TALK TO ME!

Let's ditch that weirdo and instead get into the world, yea! Let's go talk to this guy, see what's up with him. It is nice weather indeed. That's cool. It's like a world. In the real world no one has quest markers, you have to talk to them to get a job. How about this guy? Kids died in the war. That's sad. I wonder if I can visit his kids' graves and drop off flowers for him or something? No? I guess I am a complete stranger. That's realistic that he has nothing for me. Maybe this guy. How's it going? Need to me to shoot any bears? Yes? Great, I'll get right on that.

Yep, these bears are so dead and this world is so awesome. I mean, none of those weirdos with the shouting and then whispering and then shouting some more. Pretty great. I kill those bears, sir. Thanks for the firewood, I mean family heirloom.

Hi! I'm an adventurer in search of adventure. Do you have any for me? No? Okay. Hello over there. You don't talk, got it. You, fellow, how are you today? Winter is coming? Yes sir, it is. Hello ma'am, do you need any help with anything? Going to the well? I could carry some buckets for you? No, you have it covered? No one fell in?

*unsheathes sword*

LISTEN TO ME: I am not here to socialize with a bunch of scripted idiots. I am here to get excuses to kill stuff. Unless you are going to give me something in exchange for killing something else, I do not want to talk to you. I'd prefer to not even look in your direction. The next person who looks at me and doesn't have a quest to kill stuff or carry stuff past people who I get to kill will die.

QUEST HERE! I HAVE A QUEST FOR YOU! MAKE SURE YOU GET MY QUEST HERE BECAUSE I HAVE A QUEST!

Thank you, insane shouting man.

Quote of the Day: Where's Waldo and the MMO

I found this in a recent Slate column about using analysis to optimize the search for Waldo. With just a few word changes it would apply perfectly to MMOs.

If you’re foolish enough to pull out your tape measure and use my guide to Waldo-hunting you’ll not only subject yourself to confused stares—trust me—you’ll also be missing out on hundreds of clever visual jokes (the finish line of a race with runners approaching from both sides, an ark filled with two of every animal floating away from a zoo), which are as much a part of the Where’s Waldo experience as finding the man himself.

Explorers are an elitist waste of money

I submit to you a theory: Explorers are an expensive, perpetually-unsatisfied group that are more profitable to ignore than to cater to their endless appetites for stuff that no one else cares about.

Explorers like to explore. It can be places or rules. In fact, I'd suggest that the key thing they seek to explore is not a place, but a rule. Consider a universe with instant teleportation to anywhere. In effect, everywhere is here, so therefore where is there to go? Nowhere. It is the rule set that makes it exploration. It is rules such as gravity that make it a meaningful experience to climb a mountain or look over a hill. In effect, the rules are the places.

Consider World of Warcraft before flying mounts. While it would seem that there were fewer places, there were, in fact, more. With the greater rule distance came more places to explore. To fly over on your mount is meaningless, but to figure out the oddities of terrain or the limits of tools such as flow fall or parachute cloaks, those meant something. The player had overcome an obstacle.

I'd add behavioral norms to this as well. We commonly move in certain patterns, moving from quest hub to quest hub along predictable routes. If, for some reason, we take a different route, then we may find something. The place itself may be nothing in particular, but breaking the rules on travel makes it seem like something more. Consider, for example, my delight at finding absolutely nothing in Icecrown. I found nothing hidden, in fact I went nowhere that I hadn't been before, but I used different rules.

Anyway, getting back to bashing explorers: places and rules are expensive. Most players want terrain that works smoothly. They don't want random holes in the ground that kill them. They want to have some clue to where they're going. It has to look pretty, or at least look like it is supposed to look the way it looks. Case in point: World of Wacraft looks like a weird cartoon, but it is supposed to look like that, but terrain textures should be consistent and not suddenly break halfway down the hill.

Rules are even more expensive. As cool as it must have been to discover it, it's probably better for raiding if throwing saronite bombs not rebuild the Lich King's platform (can you tell how long I've been out of the raiding scene?). Try doing bug testing and catching all that. You can't. Yet people will complain, and for good reason, if you don't.

Explorers make all of this harder. Other player types are more likely to leave these things alone. They see a wall and leave it at that. Only a weird person sees a wall and thinks, "I bet there's a way to walk straight up that." And then they go and do just that and someone's stuck figuring out how to fix it. That's the difficulty with explorers: they need rules to break. Maybe these are rules that you're supposed to break, such as wandering around on a ground mount, in which case they can be safely ignored as harmless lunatics. Maybe they're rules that you're not supposed to break, that crash servers or break encounters.

But let's get back to the places. It's not so bad just generating random terrain. Of course then explorers catch on and whine about it. So you give it the personal touch, creating places to find. But not be led to. Explorers hate if you act as if you expect them to find it, despite making it for them to find. Or you make it by accident and good luck producing those on a consistent basis without simultaneously destroying your game with low testing standards.

This is where the cost-effectiveness comes in.

Socializers can get by with a chat function. Or forgo that and have them use a third-party program so they can chat during your game that they pay for for no apparent reason. It's like printing money without the Secret Service hunting you down.

Killers are fine with a system that lets them kill each other. Some modicum of fairness may be needed. Or, sucker the achievers and socializers into being their prey and throw fairness out the window.

Achievers can be summed up with one concept: 0. Take anything in your game and count it. Stick a zero after it. You've just created content for an achiever.

Then there are the explorers. They need actual content. Maybe its a place that is hard to get to, or at least somewhere that people won't commonly go. It could have something novel about it. At the very least it needs to exist. Content is way more expensive than zeros, mindless slaughter, and talking.

But it gets worse. Achievers don't mind if everyone knows about something. They might even prefer it; they're trying to find things to achieve. Giving them a guide may even be something they want, so they can achieve more. Those explorers though, giving them anything more than a piece of paper and a pencil may be too much information. They want to wander blindly in the darkness and maybe stumble across something. The in-game guide that the achiever uses to more efficiently achieve is poisonous to the explorer, who, the more you tell them the less there is for them to explore. God forbid your game generate any sort of community that offers advice to anyone or else it's entirely out of your hands as a developer.

In this way explorers are elitist. They don't want the nice zeros and death that you made for everyone else. They want this expensive, customized content, just for them. And you can't really tell anyone about it, or else it won't be exploring anymore. They're basically virtual hipsters who are never happy unless they're talking about how they found something before it went all mainstream.

You might remember the statistics: only a few percent of players saw the original Naxx. The devs didn't like this much. No one was seeing their amazing work. Who sees the troll village? Few people. Not so many fly over it, and how much can they see from there anyway? People tend to tab out when flying anyway. I imagine just as many people saw Naxxramas floating in the sky, but that's hardly equal to fighting in it. Naxx was remade in an expansion and many more people saw it. I've heard that the troll village is also being tweaked, opened up, and so people will see it.

The unspoken implication, which I get to claim is there because I wrote it, is that it was better when people weren't seeing it, that it was better when getting there meant exploiting terrain glitches in Winterspring rather than following a quest line in Darkshore. For us explorers it was better. We had to figure out rules, and then break them, to be rewarded with something that has no apparent reason for its existence, except the remote chance that some explorer will break those rules and find it.

And then they got rid of the rules altogether with flying mounts. There are no hills if all dimensions are open to you. Alas, that was all back in another reality. I do miss it.

Columbus DID discover the New World

Oh sure, some Asians wandered across a bridge to Alaska.  Maybe some Polynesians sailed all the way across the Pacific (quite a feat!).  Vikings settled all over the place.  And of course that dope thought he was in Asia.

Yet he was an Explorer.  An explorer doesn't need to find something first.  They merely need to find it, themselves, without a map telling them it is there.  To suggest otherwise would mean that it is impossible to explore, or at least to know we are doing so.  Much of the Earth has been seen before, by someone.  Maybe aliens have seen it all, and the rest of the universe.  There may be nothing that has never been seen before by conscious minds.

New is relative.  New is new to a person.  Columbus found a land that was new to him.  It was new to Portugal.  Of course he didn't quite know it yet, but someone else figured out what it was, and for that person it was new.

On the flip side, you can't explore something if someone just handed you a detailed map of it.  That's tourism.  Throw out the map and wander, see what you find, and then you are an explorer.  Maybe it's not the most exciting exploration ever, but it is exploration, for it is discovery done by you.

Lobby-likeness of WoW over time

A common refrain I hear is that WoW has degraded into a lobby-based game.  You wait for the queue, teleport to somewhere entirely unconnected to the world, and then bounce back at the end.  That sounds rather lobby-like to me.

But is it new?  Is it more lobby-like than it was in the past?

The teleportation and automatic queueing certainly makes it look like a lobby-based game.  Players may find themselves waiting around, passing time with a chat function.  What a bore!  Or that could be quite fun.  For me, it depends on my mood, and in general I think it is more a matter of preference than an objective better/worse.

Contrast this with the past.  Once upon a time you formed groups manually.  You got to the instance manually.  There was even a time when flight paths were not automatic: you'd land and have to pick the next destination.  That certainly doesn't look like a lobby-based game.

Yet I think people miss something important: the lobby.  Where are you waiting?  In the old scenario, with manual grouping tools and limited communication, you either had a guild/friends group or you were in a city to find it.  That last part is the key: the lobby in which you waited was a particular place, bounded, with limited activities.  You could do some crafting or auction house activities, but mostly it was chatting.  Waiting around chatting while you tried to form or find a group.

Contrast that with the present.  What is the lobby now?  Everything and everywhere!  You're not in Stormwind, Ironforge, or Orgrimmar staring at trade chat.  You're anywhere.  You're out questing, farming, exploring.  The entire game world is the lobby.  At some point I think that means it ceases to be a lobby.  It's not a waiting area anymore.

While the teleportation and automatic grouping features may make current WoW seem like a lobby-based non-MMO, that's merely a product of the mind.  Open it up a bit.  Remember that the world is still there, the entire world, not just the few cities where people gather to form groups.  That's the great irony of the teleportation: while it removes the sense of travel and location that once came from instance runs, it also means that you can travel to any location.  You're unshackled.  For some players (such as me) this may make the world seem smaller, since everywhere is equally accessible.  For those who weren't so willing to forgo grouping for exploration this removes the tradeoff, so that they to may see the world without wondering which groups they are missing.

When the lobby is the world, maybe we've got it backward, and it is the instances that are the lobby.  They are the generic places we stay while waiting to go out into the wide world beyond.

Minecraft: Upon Pillars of Sand

NPCs are idiots. They built this really nice village, then apparently fled, despite having more than enough torches to keep away hostile mobs. Except in the biggest house which had one torch, not enough to prevent a creeper spawning inside. And what I suspect was their watchtower or church, or both (though it lacks bells), which also had insufficient lighting on the upper levels.

This isn't the full stupidity. There is also the location. I haven't fully explored it, but on at least two sides of it, there are caverns. This means that the sand that is the basis of the desert can, if disturbed, collapse, into a cave that players need to dig out of. I'm actually understating it. On one side it's a small cave, apparently too narrow for hostiles to spawn inside. On the opposite side, there is a larger cave system, mostly unexplored by me, which extends an indeterminate distance under the town. What I have found suggests that it goes very far in several directions. The sounds I hear under the sand in other areas suggest that the cave system may go entirely under the town, possibly at a very shallow depth.

The town is built on pillars of sand.

I'm currently leveling it all out, to get flat roads, though is a major slope on one side and so I have to let it be a bit higher. Stage two is going to be digging out the bottom of the town and adding a foundation of stone, layered again with sand and gravel. This is to ensure that I don't cause a major cave in while trying to explore the caves. Instead I'd cause the major cave-in while digging at the surface, which I think might be better.

Future stages will call for the repair of a farm plot that fell victim to a creeper attack and the dynamiting of some nearby hills that overlook the wall. I plan to fill the resulting irregular holes with water. The ocean isn't far away and I have a bit of iron for buckets.

In the meantime, while I work up the will for a major project like digging up the entire town, I built another small house for storage and added a basement to the biggest one, with lots of windows so it doesn't feel closed-in.

As part of the beautification effort, I will, someday, clear out the valley being created by my excavations, smoothing out the bumps and opening it to the sun. Then I will line it with dirt, drop some water in, and plant trees. It will be a valley of life next to my strangely deserted town.

Minecraft: A Retraction

I would like to offer a partial, sort-of correction to my earlier post The weakness of Minecraft as an explorer game.

I had not been keeping up well with the changes coming out, partly because when Minecraft updates, unlike WoW, I am not stuck sitting staring at an update screen with ample time to read the patch notes (mage armor has a new, unique icon). So I miss stuff. And the new stuff often doesn't appear in old worlds, since they have already been generated.

Well, I made a shiny new world and let's just say I was wrong.

Minecraft locations lack a significant sense of uniqueness. While they are all different, most places of the same biosphere look essentially the same.

Let's see, to start off, I have never started in a tree. Or on top of a tree. In the middle of a very dense forest. I am going to have a hell of a time once I make a flint. From there, I wandered my way toward what I am pretending is north (this is not based on looking at the sun, but off what my subconscious decided; H0 d=north) and there I found mountains of great mountainousness. And cliffs. After some digging the night came and creepers came and my unfortified position got blown up and I fell very far. Somehow I thought the first night had been changed to be safe, so I'd not bothered to wall off my stairs.

So already stuff looks different different. That was before I went out to the desert. Not so far away I found a town. A town which I initially suspected was filled with zombies, based on the zombie sounds. It turns out there is a cave system directly underneath the town. I'm in the process of excavating it, a process I began because initially I assumed the sandstone was a sign of buried Egyptians (my world education is a bit limited, but as far as I can tell, Egyptians turn into sandstone when buried). If I had read the patch notes I would have known that sand compacts into sandstone after 4-5 blocks. Anyway, town with scary things under it, much more interesting than the usual barren world.

Minecraft doesn't do beauty. This isn't a knock on the graphics; it just isn't a game that generates beautiful places.

Sunrise over the dense forest actually seemed a bit beautiful. And the town was sorta nice. I'm surrounding it with sandstone walls in the hopes of creating a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Also, so I can dig out under it and just worry about scaries in the caves without also worrying about scaries from everywhere else.

There are no people in Minecraft. There are none before you and none after you. What you find is the result of chaos and is meaningless.

Technically still true (in single player), but the NPC towns do imitate some sort of people having been there. T addition of Enders, a new type of mob which moves around blocks and may decide to attack you if you stare at it [insert feminist joke] adds some sort of pretend intelligence shaping the world, albeit randomly.

A pile of rocks and ancient ruins are different because of the human element, even if both are essentially just piles of rocks.

The piles of rocks have been supplemented with pretend ancient ruins, and not just the empty villages (why are they empty? SCARY! Real answer: Notch is busy). There are also, or will be 'soon', secret stongholds of the Enders, places of mystery and unknowns, both known and unknown, as well as unknowns knows and known knowns.

Minecraft is still a randomly generated world of random stuff, but it doesn't look quite as chaotic as before and imitates the existence of intelligent life, becoming a stronger explorer game in the process.

The weakness of Minecraft as an explorer game

Minecraft has one really big advantage over any other game for explorers: no one can spoil it for you. No one can pressure you to spoil it for yourself either. Everything is yours to find.

But what is there to find?

Obviously there are minerals and a few neat places. And the edge of the world where everything goes crazy.

Beside that, what is there to find?

I think the fun of exploration comes from three areas. First is uniqueness: what we find is different from what we have seen, and as an added bonus we may feel that we are one of only a few to have seen it. Second is beauty: the place we find, perhaps a view, is beautiful. Third is humanity: A pile of rocks and ancient ruins are different because of the human element, even if both are essentially just piles of rocks.

Minecraft locations lack a significant sense of uniqueness. While they are all different, most places of the same biosphere look essentially the same. Only rarely will anything really strange appear. Maybe that's actually a strength. Beyond this, the "no one else has seen this" element is missing, because while no one else has seen it, much of it isn't worth seeing, and that condition applies equally to everything from the first tree you see to the very furthest edge of the world.

Minecraft doesn't do beauty. This isn't a knock on the graphics; it just isn't a game that generates beautiful places.

There are no people in Minecraft. There are none before you and none after you. What you find is the result of chaos and is meaningless.

P.S. You might have noticed that this is the second post today and the first one has mysteriously vanished along with Kring's comment. The first post had some excessively large inaccuracies, so it may come back later after I fix it.

What is Exploration Anyway?

One of the recent comments to Tobold caught my eye: "I do not agree that wow is remotely "exploration-driven". It's linear, it's streamlined it's candy coated."

Is linear the opposite, or at least incompatible, with exploration? To determine this, we need to define exploration. First, what is the actual physical act, how does one explore? Second, what does it cause, rewards, sense of pride, Dora the Explorer title?

What are you doing?
Initial exploration is often non-linear. We don't know where we're going, so we hit dead ends and loops and in general we can't follow some optimized pattern. At least we couldn't until we started flying everywhere. So in this initial phase of exploration, it does seem incompatible with a linear design. If it were linear, then it would be pre-optimized, essentially giving us information about the path, and therefore reducing the amount to find.

But that initial wandering doesn't cover ever single little bit. There's still that one area that we didn't have time to get into, what with being filled with elites, so we'd want a solid bit of time for fighting or sneaking in. At this point it may be semi-linear. We know approximately where we want to go, but we have to decide how we will get there. For example, before the Shattering, Grim Batol wasn't open yet, not even all the gates, but a player could run quite a ways up toward the entrance, dodging dragons along the way. It was literally linear (okay literally slightly curved, but alliteration is more fun). And yet it was also exploration.

What's in it for Me?
Ah that old problem of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. We meet again!

Exploration isn't purely intrinsically rewarding. My proof? Minecraft. It has a whole lot to find, to discover, to dig into and extract, and explore. But it's a terrible place for exploration. Why? It's meaningless. Exploration isn't the simple process of seeing something that you haven't seen before. It has to have some sort of meaning. Finding history, treasure, something. It may not be profitable in the strictest sense, but it has to be something. The next hill over, or the next half-dozen digs through a dozen blocks, will certainly be profitable, but they will be meaningless.

This is the strange strength of WoW has an exploration game. While it sticks us on rails and make everything inevitable, thereby discouraging the process, it also has something at every end of the path. There are no random areas of nothing. It is all crafted, created, meaningful. Oh of course there are little bits of nothing here and there, but the world overall has a whole lot in it.

But I suppose I just evaded the question. Is history an external reward? I'd say so. But I think we can differentiate between learning something and getting something. A scholarshop vs. a winning lotto ticket.

I wonder how much I have contradicted myself in that post. Hey, a challenge for you all. Have fun.

What's Under Scarlet Monastery?

This.





And here's a mage fleeting from his attempt to solo some trash in Maraudon. Don't worry, he survived.



Then he got ported out into a half dozen angry air elementals with only 50 health left.

Running screaming in terror

What are your strongest memories from before the level cap?

Mine tend to involve running in screaming terror.

A young shaman was wandering the Barrens, lost, which is a local term for "being in the Barrens". He was being attacked and attacked, so he did the sensible thing: he ran. Specifically, he ran south. As a general rule, mob levels go up as you go south. So I was not helping my situation. Finally I saw safety: a gigantic hole, into which my enemies surely would not follow. I'm not sure if they did.

Oh, I survived the fall. Don't worry about that. What I didn't survive were two dozen angry dwarves throwing torches at me, which due to my high rate of speed, since 40% was a big deal back at level 20 or so, appeared less like torches are more like rockets. I begged a friend to get on his main and save me from the "dwarves with rocket launchers".

I eventually moved on to Ashenvale, a land of birds and bears and dark purple trees. Also hostile elves. Well, mostly they stood around. But they didn't seem to react well to me going near their bases. I somehow managed to find somewhere around ten dozen hostile-elf-defended places, from which I would then run, screaming in terror.

If I knew the lore, I'd have also had some vague idea that to the north of Ashenvale is a land scarred and corrupted by demonic invasion and bombardment. Said land and its corruption results in various forms of diseased wolves of the 40s range. These wolves take great interest in shamans half their level running across the border into Felwood. By take great interest I mean "bite". And so a low level shaman found his corpse and ran screaming in terror back across the border and did not stop until he had run into another camp defended by hostile elves.

Of course I never ran from the devilsaurs. I never had the chance.

The Barrens are never a finished story. while running around the south, this time at the proper level, a young shaman stumbled across a small group of Alliance. Very suspicious! He went to investigate. At which point they got off their mounts and killed him. Thus he was taught what an elite tag means.

This shaman was one day sent to Swamp of Sorrows, a place reachable only by a trip through Duskwood, and the town of Darkshire. He ran and ran and ran. But he was not yet screaming in terror, for during most of the trip he was along a lonely road. An Alliance happened to run by and appeared to scream in terror while running, but the translation was spotty. So he ran along his way until he saw a town. He tried to go around, but the guards were less blind than might be expected given the dark and his semi-transparent state. And so he carried on tradition, running, screaming in terror, out of Darkshire while followed by a dozen or so Watchmen and guards.

He saw Deadwind Pass and he saw a Sky Shadow. He ran screaming in terror.

Where else have I run screaming in terror?
Theramore, Ratchet, Stormwind, Elwynn, Stonetalon, Wailing Caverns... perhaps I should ask where I have not?

I also remember being afraid to respec because I didn't want to unlearn everything. I wasn't sure what it meant. It meant I was part resto for most of my levels before finally ditching all my points in elemental the day I realized that I was afraid to cast, since I might need the mana for casting. I tanked Scarlet Monastery: Cathedral more than once. Oh glorious aggro-added rockbiter weapon and earth shock.

What are your strongest memories from before the level cap?


Speaking of running screaming in terror, here's a blog which seems to have shown up recently: Raging Monkeys. You've probably seen her commenting EVERYWHERE. It appears to be an utterly useless blog, which is why I am willing to endorse it.

Why I enjoy exploring

When was the last time you found something actually new? Possibly never. Whatever you've found, someone probably beat you to it. Of course I'm no different. The odds just aren't on our sides: too many other people.

We're not going to figure out the first strat, the best DPS rotation, the new loot, the coolest quest chains. Someone will get there first. Someone else will also find the troll village and the airport and the strangely obvious and trivial path from Swamp of Sorrows to Redridge Mountains. But there is something different.

It's useless.

So?

So useless information is free to be found as we desire. We will never be steered to the wowiki page for the strat for jumping to Ironforge. We're free to not know it and until we want to know it, we won't. Words seem to be failing me here, let me take another shot at it.

If you don't know your spell rotation, you're a noob. Someone will probably say it. Someone beside me, I mean. It's negative information, in the sense that you don't reach a new peak by knowing it, instead you only are gimped, stuck in a valley, by not knowing it. Knowing it is the default.

In contrast exploration is mostly unknown. The default is to know nothing, so every little bit you find is new to you. And likely new to many other people. You'll never get rich off it or kill a boss with it, but you'll know it. It's intrinsically rewarding.

When I found that most of Icecrown and Storm Peaks could be traveled by land mount, I was excited. It was utterly useless. Who knew? Who cared? Almost no one at all. But I knew, and that was exciting.

Remember when you first started playing and everything was new? The most irritating quest could still be fun if it was new, if it took you somewhere new, showed you a new land, a new story, a new idea. That's hard to get anymore: newness. You've done it all, read the guide for it first, and it's old even before it's new. Except exploration.

Since I wrote this, over at That's a Terrible Idea a post has come up about fun, which I think is perfectly relevant to what I was trying to say here.

P.S. Having to spirit res isn't fun.

Exploring Dun Morogh

If you've played a dwarf or gnome I'm sure you're familiar with this zone. Or are you?

Did you know there's a huge area that you normally wouldn't go to, possibly not even see? Ironforge has a roof and on that roof are many things.

I'm sure you've heard of the airport. I'd gone there a while back, back when I played Xolithe and was assaulted by a paladin. Up there I saw a battle between trolls and dwarves, an endless struggle without end. And then I fell off the roof. I'm pretty sure I remembered to wear a parachute cloak.

The devs seem to put a lot of time into places they don't expect us to see, such as a certain troll village.

There's a troll save near the airport, that's where the trolls come from. But elsewhere, in the direction of Gnomergan (if I wasn't disoriented), is another cave with a few trolls standing around, and one on a wolf. A small operation with a couple cages and knicknacks. Elsewhere are a few explorers at a little tent, apparently exploring a campfire.

It's better to see than it sounds, a vast sloping up and down expanse of snow. Here and there a stone tower sticks up, yellow windows glowing. I wonder what the dwarves inside think of seeing Horde riding past. But at least they are warm and safe. There is a lone Ironforge guard who spawns up there, wandering the snow. I feel sorry for him. He must be lonely. It's inevitable up there, being alone and all, especially knowing that there's a busy airport not so far away, a city below, and gryphon riders going overheard, pooping on him constantly. Poor guy.

The wrong step will kill you, or at least drop you on top of some very confused Alliance lowbie.

I never managed to find a way to Gnomeregan. Perhaps some other time from some other direction.

Where have you gone?

Where's there to explore?

A long time ago, on an account far far away, I did some hopping. And more hopping. And then I discovered the Land of Broken Terrain Textures. It was in this land that I eventually made my way to the airport at the top of Ironforge.

I had a grand time. This was a new place to me. I'd read no strategy guides, I'd seen no quest givers, nothing was there except pure, uncut world. This was discovery! Adventure! Exploration! Up there is a battle between trolls and dwarves and a few planes and runways. How grand!

Ah, but for risk of the ban. Blizzard doesn't much like people going to these areas. We're not supposed to peak behind the stage. I cannot claim that people have been banned for such exploration, but I have heard of GMs booting people out. As time goes on they patch up more and more areas. At one point there was an 'easy' path from southern Winterspring to Hyjal. You can find screenshots around; it is a grand area, which I've never been fortunate enough to see for myself.

I also did some hopping in Winterspring and found my self near, but not quite in, Felwood. The view was magnificent. A bit more hopping and running took me off a very long cliff, dropping me somewhere in Darkshore, but not Darkshore, surrounded by trolls. You can see it flying overhead. What a strange place. It made me think of Naxxramas.

You might remember the statistics: only a few percent of players saw the original Naxx. The devs didn't like this much. No one was seeing their amazing work. Who sees the troll village? Few people. Not so many fly over it, and how much can they see from there anyway? People tend to tab out when flying anyway. I imagine just as many people saw Naxxramas floating in the sky, but that's hardly equal to fighting in it. Naxx was remade in an expansion and many more people saw it. I've heard that the troll village is also being tweaked, opened up, and so people will see it.

But I ask, why? I understand the desire to display one's creation. That is not my question. But why hide it in the first place? There are many places in the world which are as well-made as any we would ride past on a quest, but they are closed to us; behind walls and up cliffs. Explorer types search for ways in, breaking into Ahn'Qiraj before Brann did, before Silithus was remade. It isn't easy and it results in to tangible rewards. So few people go there. Those who do, find what they seek: the joy of discovery. Is anything else needed? I think not. It's the only truly optional content: no artificial rewards, no grinds, nothing except what players find when they seek.

Artists want their work to be seen. Or at least their work which they think is good enough to be seen. You might find an artist who refuses to show work but insists it is worth seeing. That is actually just a crazy person pretending to be an artist. It is best to move along your way and not get lost in analogies, which I'm pretty sure I didn't use in this paragraph. This leads to the question: why is the art of Blizzard being hidden? There are three possibilities: they feel it is incomplete and not worth seeing, they are crazies pretending to be artists, or some outside malevolent force blocks it regardless of their wishes. Some people call that management.

The incomplete art theory is backed up by the construction signs in Hyjal. However that seems like a rather half-ass solution. We know WoW can have invisible walls. Why not set one around Hyjal? It sounds simple enough, but if I know anything about programming and design, it's that things never are. However I am currently wearing my Ignorant Commentator hat, so I get to claim that it would be simple and Blizzard is just lazy and stupid for not doing that. But lazy and stupid don't really explain much. It's like claiming that speeding causes cars to crash, forgetting the importance of the existence of things to crash into, so speeding is helpful, but not sufficient.

The sanity of Blizzard is something one could question. They did, after all, create quite a few insanity mechanics, a god of insanity, a metal of insanity, an insane god, an achievement, another achievement, and mechagnomes. However insane people tend to be shitty artists, whereas Blizzard has created quite a bit of good art. I cannot claim that they are insane people pretending to be artists.

That leaves the malevolent bureaucracy, management, authority, The Man, whatever you wish to call it. This appears to be the most complete explanation. It explains why areas are deemed off-limits without being properly blocked. Only an entity of evil would create a world nearly devoid of exploration (it's too damn small and we get pushed everywhere by quests), with the exception of a few strange areas, which are then used as excuse to attack the account. In other words: It's a trap. This leads to the logical solution: We must destroy the Death Star and kill Emperor Palpatine so that we can once again explore Azeroth and dance with Jawas. Blizzard, tear down this wall.

In the meantime, we must content ourselves with moving about the world in a way which is unexpected and unintended, but not quite against the rules. Get off your flying mount and see the world on foot. Stop flying over the troll villages of Storm Peaks and Icecrown. They're figurative villages, so don't go claiming they're not there. Look at them up close and see how different the world looks when you're not zipping over it in half a second.

Optional Exploration

My shaman finally trained cold weather flying. I pressed jump and took to the skies, soaring.

And then landed and decided I didn't like it much. So now my shaman mostly rides around. It's slower and inconvenient, but I feel much more connected to the world.

I mentioned this to Iapetes and we ended up talking about Icecrown. He didn't think you could ride everywhere there. I suspected you could. Obviously this doesn't include the flying bases. The coastal areas can be reached, one-way. This isn't supposed to sound like he said this I said that he's wrong I'm right. It's not as if he was very insistent, it's just a perfectly reasonable doubt, since the zone is clearly designed with flying in mind.

Exploring Icecrown
I decided to try it out, see where I could ride. It turns out: pretty much everywhere, it's just inconvenient. The paths are not always obvious. Some are loopy or nowhere near a convenient spot. They are mostly unmarked, existing as just open areas in mountains. Finding them was a little bit like the old world exploration: ride until you can't, then try the next branch, see if you can hop over that (jump jump jump jump jump, nothing). The zone map is completely useless, which I loved. The area which looked like it was open was completely blocked.

Getting to Jotunheim (Vrykul area on the west coast) was a matter of finding some unmarked route through the mountains. When I did finally find it, I got that little thrill you get from a first boss kill (not the one you've been wiping on for a month, but maybe a first Attumen kill). I also found routes to all the elevated gates/walls and the DK area. Those weren't very difficult to find, but weren't entirely obvious either and certainly not short,direct routes.

Exploring Storm Peaks
The bigger surprise was Storm Peaks. Most of it can also be navigated by riding. Some quests cannot be done, neither faction base can be reached (Grom'Arsh Crash Site and Frosthold), and obviously no Ulduar; but all the rest can be reached. However the area with K3 is cut off from the rest. Some of the paths are obvious and even marked on the map, but I found a few which were unmarked and hard to find. Some paths also go through elites and overall the travel time is much higher; it could take fifteen minutes to do what normally takes one. If anyone else is able to find more paths, I'd love to read them.

Optional Exploration
This got me thinking of a new idea: Optional Exploration. It's what it sounds like. You can fly all over, but there are paths to discover if you want. Finding them doesn't give rep or XP or gear, but just a little bit of satisfaction. You'll see the zone in a new light, as connected and as more than just a place to do quests, but also as a place where beings live. I felt like I was wandering around like the NPCs might have done while searching for where to make their bases.

I hope to see more zones which are designed for flying, as Icecrown and Storm Peaks clearly are, but which can be ridden around. They are ideal for optional exploration. It's a start, but it could use a bit more.

Go forth and explore optionally! See new sights and wonders! Do what is entirely purposeless, except that it is fun and this is a game!