PvE to PvP

Choices are good. Personally I'm semi-interested in taking advantage of this new ability. I'd like to try out a PvP server again, but I'm sick of releveling.

Still, it's true that it's harder to level on a PvP server than PvE. I've done both several times and I have little doubt of this. This is a bit unfair to those who leveled on PvP, dealing with the harder leveling for the benefit of open PvP at 70.

How about a compromise? Only allow PvE->PvP if the player has at least one max-level character on a PvP realm.

Arenas and Nerdrage

I decided to take a crack at arenas again, after several months of none and barely even any BGs. We did a 3v3 with a rogue, ret paladin (me), and prot paladin pretending to be holy. It seems to be a pretty awful setup. It's pissing me off and the worst part is that it's pretty much my fault. I just grabbed whoever would join for the 3v3 (the prot paladin) and I'm not exactly amazing at PvP.

So far the method that works best is for me to go beat up the squishiest DPS while the rogue goes after the healer and keeps it locked out. Sometimes I'll shift over to help drop the healer. Unfortunately we seem to either end up with a DPS loose on our healer or a DPS screwing up the rogue's stunlock. Priests aren't too bad, druids we can kill with difficulty, shamans are tough. Paladins are actually the worst since we're melee heavy (plate ftl) and can't do anything about DS or their seemingly unlimited mana.

If we could get a resto shaman for our healer I think that would work well. Bloodlust and WF totem would help our damage a lot. Purge would help with druids. Maybe if our healer was holy it would go better, which I'm hopeful about since that's the prot paladin's main spec.

Still, I can't shake the feeling that I might be the weakest link. No interrupt, CC, healing debuffs, or purge mean that I end up doing a lot of swinging madly and hoping I hurt someone enough. I'd try my shaman except that his gear is painfully bad and I'm honestly afraid to try PvP on him again.

Well, at least I had fun in AB before we started arenas. I feel a lot more powerful in them. I also like the second chances, how dying isn't the end of the game. You just res and go back, so it's the overall strategy that matters more. Maybe people have worse gear or skill, but I just generally feel like I can take on any class except maybe a resto druid.

Stop gemming and enchanting gear before selling

It's a waste.

Oh sure, on the slight coincidence that you gemmed/enchanted exactly how I want, then it isn't wasted. But how likely is that?

Consider the opposite case, you don't get it all right. I'm not going to pay extra for the enchant that I don't want. I'll just buy the one with a smarter seller. If I do buy from you it will be because you are the one that ate the cost of the enchant. Either way, someone loses.

I can't quit

I'd lose my forum access. Then I'd have to find a whole new forum to yell at idiots. Or if that fails, I'd have to go out on the street and yell at people. That might not go well.

[edit] I logged on, looked around, switched characters a couple times, and then logged off. Nothing seemed to have the right combination of interesting and people in LFG. I'll try tomorrow since it's a bit late tonight. I think I just want WotLK with all the new content. Sure 3.0 is looking like it will be great, but fixing classes doesn't make the actual game more fun.

Is this withdrawal?

I stopped playing about two weeks ago, give or take a few days. At first I noticed almost nothing. I didn't care one way or another about WoW. I didn't want to play, but it's not as if I thought I didn't want to play, it just never entered my mind.

Now it's different. I sort of want to play, but that's not my issue. I'm restless, feeling like I should be doing something. This isn't entirely negative. It's making me go out and do homework when I normally wouldn't. This isn't as great as it sounds since at the last minute I have nothing to do when normally I'd be doing homework.

So here's what I can't figure out: am I restless because of WoW, directly? In other words, is this a symptom of withdrawal? Or am I restless because now I have a lot more time and no standard filler activity? Or was I restless before and that's what made me quit?

Since I quit I've actually logged in twice. Once was to clean up my mailboxes. The other time was because a friend was wondering about my character to compare someone in his guild. He wanted me to tank for his guild on Sunday, but then I forgot. I suppose I didn't care enough.

How do you create endless content?

WoW is clearly intended to last forever, or at least the game equivalent of more years than can be counted before getting distracted by shiny objects. To do this it needs endless content, something either new or forever (or close enough) repeatable in order to keep people paying.

Obviously content must be created at least as fast as it is consumed. This gives two strategies: create content faster and/or slow the speed of consumption. The former is expensive or may result in a lot of crap. The latter is cost-effective, but can also result in crap.

What's the crap that is risked? Grinds. Make everything take a long time, lots of play time, and you can create many playable hours for comparatively small investment of time. Want to buy more time? Take the current rewards, bump the stats up 5%, and add another level to the grind: more gold, reputation, tokens, whatever. Grinds are efficient: easy to make but taking as much time as the developers want. They're perfect except for being absolutely no fun.

What's the alternative? PvP. Give teenagers fake guns and they will shoot each other all day for years, even without new maps or guns. Look at Halo. PvP can last almost forever since it brings a few tools and then lets natural competitive drives do the rest. The biggest risk is that something better will come along. Of course this example isn't perfect since Halo doesn't have a monthly fee. Still, it shows the possibility of endlessness.

Unfortunately RPGs and PvP don't get along well. RPGs like gear. They like people getting stronger and stronger as time goes on. PvP doesn't like it so much. It works better when new people have a similar footing to those who have been around for a while (excluding personal skill of course). Gear imbalances keep out new people and eventually time will take away the old players, leaving no one at all. But PvP which ignored gear would, well it would do exactly what I said, it would ignore gear. What's the point of gear if not to better crush foes? It could be hard to sell the idea that you only get to be a total badass in the NPC world, but you're as puny as anyone else when you attack another player. It doesn't even make much sense from a RP perspective.

WoW seems to have tried to work around this a bit with arenas and BGs which slowly, but steadily reward losers. This way even a person at the bottom can work up to the top; given enough time they can get the gear they need. But isn't getting slaughtered over and over just a grind, except with other players instead of NPCs? Grinds aren't fun, especially when they involve repeated punches to the ego.

I've not been able to figure out how WAR is tackling this issue. I've had trouble getting interested enough in it. The trailers haven't seemed all that exciting, almost like a bad kung fu flick where it's obvious that no one is actually hitting anyone and you can see the guy jump back into a wall after a light kick. Gameplay didn't seem to catch me either. The graphics were pretty, but somehow the animations seemed lacking. They didn't seem better or worse than WoW, which is exactly the problem, I'd expect more from a game which is much newer and clearly is going for a higher visual standard, at least as far as stress on a graphics is a good measure.

New Raids, Old raids

I decided to pull some of the tangent out of my previous post. It might not make sense with it missing, if it even would have with it still in.

From what I've heard, new servers have their gates open automatically. This suggests that Blizzard intends to make it easier to get into the old raids. They are making them more accessible, since let's be honest, can anyone imagine the supplies being gathered now? It took a long time even back when people were motivated and the proper level. But what was the point? Blizzard should have recognized by now that people will go through horrible grinds for the slightest upgrade. Easy or hard, tedious or convenient, it doesn't matter much as long as the end reward is good. What is there for AQ? No upgrades, with the exception of one extremely rare shadow damage enchant of which Blizzard did not make a TBC version. Still, some people do go into AQ, I've gone myself, even got some funny-looking gear, so perhaps the automatic gates weren't wasted.

MC wasn't for noobs while Kara is. Sure, MC was easier and you could drag 20 noobs through, perhaps even more if they just went AFK and caused no trouble. But MC was the raid. Kara was never the raid. It was always the introduction. In terms of player's attitudes, MC was put on a pedestal labeled: Badass, while Kara was on a little platform that said: for ages 7 and under. How did that happen? It's about how the raids were given out. MC was alone and the top for it's time. Then BWL, then AQ40, then Naxx. Each had its time to be badass and so they could get and keep those labels.

TBC raids came out almost all at once. With the exception of BT, they were all there at release (I really hope I'm not forgetting something, I hate being wrong, especially when it's written down). Any badassness was only a temporary label due to the highest guilds being there at the time, quickly thrown away a couple weeks later when they were cleared and farmed.

It's stupid to have set out the raids that way, clearly showing them to be nothing more than stepping stones to the next level, insignificant except as a source of gear, and even then only leading to another source of gear, never anything impressive. They weren't even fully debugged. I wonder how much better raiding would have turned out if there had been gaps between raids. Not a year or so like vanilla, but a month or two, time to build anticipation, make current raids seem more impressive, and give a chance for more guilds to get to the top.

Certaintity into Doubt

When I quit, I was certain that I would return for WotLK. Now I have my doubts. I think ignorance may be removing my belief that WotLK will fix anything. It's hard to get excited about a game that I'm not playing, so I've not been following the development of WoW, current or beta, as closely as I used to. Because of this it's nearly impossible to see any improvements, since I see almost nothing at all. Will WotLK fix the reasons that I quit?

I doubt it. I don't see the gear dependence going away, or lessening since I don't know that I'd want a gearless game. Crafting is still based on identical plans. Customization seems to mean nothing more than new hairstyles.

I hold out hope for better story-telling.

But back to gear, it's not new to TBC. I've played for about three years and for all of that time the game was gear-based. What made me care enough to quit now? I suppose early on I just didn't notice. I leveled slowly and was a genuine noob for many months. I made alts. Gear never became a major thing. It's also worth considering that back then there was no Naxx and even BWL was fairly new. AQ wasn't out for months after I started playing and I mostly saw it as a chance to make some gold from all the lowbie crap that I gathered. It also had an element of anticipation and really seemed amazing seeing such a massive effort, even cross-faction.

Back to the matter at hand: I didn't mind being a noob back then. Now I'd hate to be stuck in Kara and occasionally wiping in ZA. Back then I spent months in MC and died a few times in BWL. What's different?

MC wasn't for noobs while Kara is. Sure, MC was easier, but it was The Raid. Kara was never the raid, justthe introduction. In terms of player's attitudes, MC was put on a pedestal labeled: Badass, while Kara was on a little platform that said: for ages 7 and under. How did that happen? Vanilla raids came out one at a time, giving all of them a chance to become "serious business," with the exception of AQ20 since it was very clearly set up as an easier, smaller counterpart to AQ40. Even ZG had its challenges and time in the sun. TBC did not give that time.

I wonder if Blizzard will do that again. I get the feeling they will. They want to make the expansion feel like it has more to it than just a couple new instances and a raid or two. Vanilla came out with only a single raid and it worked. Why did TBC need five all at once with another coming down the pipeline in only a few months? They should have spaced them out more. Instead they shoved a bunch of content at raiders, then made them wait what seems like almost a year for the next big raid. I didn't forget about ZA. And a single instance. They didn't even add a new Dire Maul, a set of cool instances, just one. And a single new arena.