Tag Archives: mmo

Kick! Punch! It’s all in the mind!

For obvious reasons Dwarfs make the best Brewmasters, so when Pike and I rolled a couple of Monks I chose Dorf as my race. I quickly found that the best reference to anything in WoW is sitting down there in Coldridge Valley.

This is a reference to Parappa the Rapper in the Year of Our Lord 2012.

Based on this alone I’d be quite happy to call Pandamans a shining success, but as it turns out absolutely everything about this expansion I’ve seen so far is solid goddamn gold. I’ve no doubt my dear co-blogger Pike will have a lot more to say on the subject seeing as she is the one who is actually good at this videogame, so I shan’t go into it in too much detail, but I cannot stop playing this freaking game. Would you like to know more? Well then, let’s consider that the Panda Inn music is peerless:

Just wait until the kazoo kicks in.

Oh, and Pokewow? The thing I long scorned as a shameless gimmick intended to bring in people who would otherwise have no interest in the game? I was COMPLETELY WRONG in every way. Pet Battles is absolutely freaking insanely brilliant and addictive and anytime I find myself at a loss for other stuff to do, welp, time to set REAPER PRIME on some chumps. (REAPER PRIME is a Tiny Harvester about ten inches tall.) And I think that’s the key to what MoP has done right – there’s a huge variety of things to do open to you and a lot of them require minimal investment of time to get started. For all the old man “danged kids” lamenting Pike and myself do I have to admit I’m pretty glad to see the narrow idea of what endgame is in the past.

I should go play some bad games so I stop fanboying over stuff but, heck, I just want to enthuse about how great videogames are so here we are, with constant posts about great games!

Oops! I Did It Again

If you are anything like myself or Mister Adequate, then you will be well-acquainted with that obnoxious insect that comes around every six months or so and nibbles on you and makes you nostalgic for World of Warcraft and won’t stop nibbling until you actually re-sub. This invariably results in a few weeks of playing little else but WoW until the bug is satiated and flies away– for the time being, anyway.

I was visited by this bug about a week back and after several days of trying to ignore it and swat it away while it hummed the Karazhan theme in my ear, I recently caved and re-downloaded the game. I know, I know.

Now I haven’t played in months and months and one of the things that I always felt bad about was that I left my long-time main, Tawyn, rather unceremoniously dumped in Stormwind in a bunch of greens from the new Cataclysm content– basically I played for about a month after Cata launch and then realized “You know what, I’m still bored of raiding and heroics” and logged out and didn’t return. So poor Tawyn wasn’t retired in her level 70 epics or her level 80 epics– no, she was retired wearing [Boring Uldum Pants of the Whale] and such. Obviously this wasn’t going to do, so the very first thing I did was transmogrify into old stuff from my favorite ever raid instance, Karazhan, and various assorted BC heroics. For the first time in years, Tawyn matched my figureprint of her and the mental image I have when I think of her. I… really can’t express how good this felt.

Suddenly, playing my character was fun again. Because suddenly, I didn’t look like a scrub in greens. Nor did I look like a mishmash of epics from the current content. Rather, I looked like my character— something I was proud of.

Don’t get me wrong. I still don’t feel like raiding or doing heroics or really any sort of endgame. But at least I can deal with dailies and things like leveling once MoP comes out (should I get the expac– I’m still not sure if I will.)

The new patch comes out tomorrow and it gets rid of hunter stat sticks, which means I’ll lose my lovely Sonic Spear and I won’t be able to sport my Legacy in the future. But you’ll have to pry Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle out of my cold, dead, purple hands.

World of Warcraft on Your Resume

So Europa Universalis IV has been announced, which is something that we’ll no doubt be talking about in greater detail within the next few days, but for today’s Friday post I want to share a video I found the other night.  Basically it’s a guy talking about how an MMO guild or raid leader is probably better equipped for a leadership position than someone who has just gone to school and has no other experience, and how the guild/raid model could be applied to businesses.  In other words, he’s reiterating stuff any MMO player has already known for years.  It’s kind of nice to see other people realize it, though.  Now if only we could clone this guy and put him in charge of employment around the world, right?

Playtime Confessions!

Yesterday I officially joined the 300 club in Civ IV.

This isn't counting about a dozen hours of vanilla Civ IV before jumping up to BtS, nor is it counting about a dozen hours of a particular mod that Steam wouldn't track properly.

Ahh, it feels good. I love statistics like this. I love them to the point that I have been known to buy games on Steam that I already own just so it can start tracking my playtime. (It’s like Gaben really knows how to reel us obsessive-compulsives geekwads in!)

A few other games I played a lot tracked your time as well. I was really close to 300 hours in FF Tactics Advance. I’m also relatively sure I was close to it in my original Pokemon Red file, before it was inadvertently deleted.

Of course, MMOs deserve to be in a tier all to themselves when it comes to playtime. If I recall correctly, before quitting, I’d clocked up about 220 days played in WoW across all of my characters.

That's well over 5000 hours!

I think over half of it was spent on my main, Tawyn the Night Elf Hunter. As time went on and Blizzard bumped experience rates and made questing and LFG more streamlined, and as I got more experienced at the game myself, I’d spend less time on an individual character. For example, I think my resto druid had a mere 12 days or something similarly miniscule for her /played, despite the fact that I got her to (then) endgame and was raiding with her for a little while.

So yeah, I doubt any other single game I’ve ever played could come close to what I dumped into WoW. Like I said, MMOs deserve their own tier in this “game”.

And I still wish I could see an accurate playtime counter for everything I’ve ever played. That would be fascinating.

Okay, lay it on me. What are your most played games, gentle readers?

Raging Misanthropy or, How I Never Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Multiplayer

I’ll cut right to the chase: I really don’t care for multiplayer most of the time. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not as though I’ve sworn a vow against it or anything, I enjoy a good game of Team Fortress or Halo as much as the next person. But it’s just an aside, something that I do now and then for fun, just as every now and then I play some co-op with my good friend Barry Manilow (long story). But there’s a whole segment of gaming that seems to be almost exclusively or exclusively caught up in the multiplayer side of things. And I mean, I can grok that. Nothing better than a real human opponent (Not yet, anyway, and this doesn’t count in chess) for matching wits against – and yet I don’t care to. Which, if you’ll let me indulge my ego, isn’t to say I can’t. Back when I played Red Alert 2 I was horrendously good at it. It just doesn’t really appeal to me, and I’m not entirely sure why, but I have an inkling.

See, I'm just too cool for school (and for sayings that were in date at any point after LBJ was in office)

Here’s the thing: I like to play games my way. I like to derp around, to explore here and there, to try stupid things with weapons, to experiment with different strategies and whatnot. This is all well and good with friends, but in any game where other people are expecting me to do something productive, it just doesn’t seem to work out so well for me. I feel rather constrained by it all, and I don’t particularly like other people being dependent on me when I’m just wanting to mess around with some ridiculous glitch I’ve discovered or something. Interestingly I still like MMOs a great deal; I’ve played my share of WoW over the years, and a fair bit of EVE Online and City of Heroes too, as well as dabbling in quite a few besides. But I’m always solo in these things; I don’t want to have to worry about keeping others alive or what have you, because when I screw it up I feel really bad! Contrary to the title of this post, I don’t actually mind if others mess up unless it’s making the same mistakes repeatedly or something.

I was wondering how others feel about all this sort of thing. Do you prefer single player or multiplayer? Do you care at all? Do you worry about letting the side down to a point of excess?

It’s Not You, WoW, It’s Me

As I’m sure most of you know, I hail from the vast and amazing World of Warcraft blogging community. I love this community and everything it entails and I’m proud I was able to share a corner of it with everyone for so long.

Likewise, I love World of Warcraft. I don’t even care if that makes me a cooped-up nerd with no life or whatever that makes me, I love it. (Besides, I already am a cooped-up nerd with no life, so).

I think Cataclysm did a lot of really great stuff. I love the zone revamps. I love the new Cataclysm zones. The few new instances I did were pretty great. I love that Blizzard is trying to take the best stuff from both Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King and weld them together into something great. How much they succeeded at this is up for debate, I’m sure, but the intentions are there and I appreciate it. As far as I’m concerned, WoW is in pretty good shape right now.

But I’m not playing.

You know, I’ve quit and returned and quit and returned to WoW so many times at this point that you’re probably getting sick of hearing about the details, so to make a long story short let’s just say that I really consider myself to have quit WoW back in early 2010. I’ve had stints since then where I’ve briefly returned to flirt with the game and in general be the very definition of casual, but I really haven’t done anything like I used to. I did play rather solidly for a few months late last year. But even that went something akin to this: Got Cataclysm, leveled to 85, glanced around, decided it was a job well done, and then logged out and pretty much didn’t log back in.

So I quit. Again.

A few weeks later, Mr. Adequate and I both re-subbed specifically to make tauren paladins and geek it up together. We had a blast. We ran around and smashed things with our hammers and we PvP’d and we did Shadowfang Keep (during which I fell in love with tanking) and we giggled over the Azshara quests and all in all we had a great time for about, oh, a week or so.

Then we quit again. And that’s where I’m at currently.

And you know, when I try to explain all of this, it’s really difficult to articulate how or why, exactly, I fell off that treadmill. There was a time when, if I wasn’t playing WoW, I was probably thinking about it or writing about it or reading about it. Obviously that isn’t the case anymore. Which is ironic, because these days I think the game is better now than it has ever really been before. But a certain spark is missing. And you know what? I don’t think that’s Blizzard’s fault. Rather, it’s mine. I had my fun, I changed, and I’ve largely moved on. Nothing wrong with that.

All around, I seem to see concerns and/or rumors that WoW is dying and people are leaving in droves and whatnot. Perhaps it’s because I still hang out with the WoW blogging community on Twitter, and most of these are people who grew up alongside me as a part of my blogging/WoW generation and many of us all sort of reaching the same stage. That’s my theory, anyway.

Or maybe I’m entirely wrong and WoW really is dying.

I don’t think so, though.

I’d like to think the game will still be there next time I suddenly get the urge to roll up a new character and level and explore and tame rare pets and play lowbie Arathi Basin just like I used to.

Because the details may have changed, but the spirit is still there, of this I’m sure. I know this because sometimes, even lately, even with how jaded I am over here on the porch with my rocker and my cane-waving and my “When I was your age we didn’t get mounts until level 40 and we had to run up and down Stranglethorn Vale for ten levels”– sometimes I catch a glimpse of that spirit, and then it reminds me why I dumped well over half a year into WoW playtime across all my characters.

Keep doing that, Blizzard. I’m sure I’ll be back. It’s not you. It’s me.

We’re still friends. Right?