11.5 million players. 74 Big Love Rockets.
Category: meta
Achievement metagaming
I’m plodding around Azeroth on Kodo in pursuit of my Elder title, visiting all sorts of far flung places with nary a soul around. Other than other Achievement seekers, of course. Which is kind of sad – Ashzara for example is a beautiful zone, populated by precisely no-one, all the lonely NPCs in tears waiting for someone to kill or appreciate them. Thankfully Cataclysm brings the Bilgewater Cartel goblins to Ashzara, who make their home there.
In any case, the Lunar Festival is a nice leisurely journey, and it certainly brings home the ginormous size of the world. It also illustrates one of the fundamentals of playing: the metagame. The idea of attempting the Lunar or any other festival without resources like wow.com or Wowhead is frankly unimaginable:
Bane: Hey there, guy-with-a-great-huge-halo-shooting-up-in-the-sky, how you doing?
GWAGHHSUITS: *spinning around with enthusiasm* Hail oh great PC! Thanks for visiting me. In fact, you know what – have this artfully crafted coin!
Bane: Whoa, thanks old guy! Hey – are there more of you ‘Elders’ around?
GWAGHHSUITS: Sure are – and they’ll give you free stuff too!
Bane: Great! I should go visit them. Um, where are they?
GWAGHHSUITS: There’s one somewhere in a dungeon somewhere. And another in a place you’ve never heard of. Just nearby. Kind of. *looks shiftily around while scuffing the ground with his worn leather boots*
Bane: Ummm, can you be more specific?
GWAGHHSUITS: Nope! Good luck! /ignore*quickly turns his back on the annoying PC*
Bane: …
Of course it would be possible to find all the Elders, but it would be a royal pain too. I guess someone once did it da solo, and more power to them, but players with that much perseverance are few and far between.
Whilst you could argue this means the game isn’t complete somehow, it seems more likely that this enormous community pool of knowledge that has formed around Warcraft is one of the things that makes the game, as BigBearButt observed. It’s social networking, and it’s been around since before that term became the property of Big Business™.
The amount of free info and time that people have committed to Wowhead and Wowwiki is phenomenal. It’s created a community of contributers, bloggers, editors, Auctioneers and passionate players. I barely move in game before referring to LightHeaded, zooming off as directed via TomTom, or using the Lunar Festival pack for TourGuide.
In many other games this would be cheating. And maybe the boss encounters suffer a bit from needing guides rather than teaching. But I’d argue that overall, the metagame makes WoW miles more fun – it doesn’t reduce the challenge, just the frustration.
‘It’s very rude of him,’ she said, `To come and spoil the fun!’
Question of the day: do you watch the LK cinematic or not?
On the yea side of the argument, our Guild is so far from actually doing this encounter ingame that it may as well be a different game. By the time we do get there, there’s not going to be anything to spoil, because it will all have been out in the open for months. So why not watch it now, while the buzz is alive.
On the nay side, seeing the Wrathgate cinematic while levelling was epic and great. I didn’t get to it until way after most, but managed to quarantine any advance info or spoilers. The problem is that the Fall of the LK is a much bigger deal, and I can’t imagine it not being common knowledge no matter how hard you try. Kind of like trying to not find out the winner of the Superbowl until you’ve watched it a day later.
Luckily, for now anyway, Blizzard have pulled the video on copyright grounds, so I can ponder a little longer (before giving in!).
Corporatespeak
Is it just me, or does Blizzard sound suspiciously like Microsoft in their latest twitter chat? “Trust us, the next release (Win7/Office2010/Cataclysm) will fix everything…”
Mind you, Cataclysm still sounds great – especially Goblins and Archaeology. And here’s hoping the Epic Moose Mount makes it in for the Winter Olympics.
Weekly Marmot
If you’re not watching Lore’s weekly Marmot videos on Tankspot, you should. Even if you’re not a tank. He’s hilarious. Last week was a classic.
(In)fidelity
Syp’s /played list is constantly surprising. How can one player switch between so many MMOs? There can only be one answer: there’s more than one of him!
More likely he’s just really good at playing mmo’s the way you’re meant to – that is, making in game friends quickly, finding a guild, jumping into pugs, etc. Not relying heavily on playing with people you already know. And certainly not playing just to compete for end game status, which pretty much requires commitment to a single game.
I can only keep up with my WoW guild because they are (mostly) as casual as me. So there’s no progression raiding (other than Blackrock Depths this week!), and hence no pressure.
Even so I can’t imagine dropping WoW for a month or two to try Fallen Earth, then hopping over for some quick STO, back to WoW, then a taste of SW:TOR. Even finding the time for single player games is challenging when you’re hooked into the MMO feed.
Penny-Arcade nailed it, as they often do.
I WoW mostly with people I know IRL, which makes MMO fidelity more compelling. If I wanted to make and play with virtual friends, I guess hopping around would be easier.
I did play Warhammer for about 30 minutes, and dipped into LotRO too, for 90. On both occasions I was pretty quickly overwhelmed with the task of re-establishing ties to friends in game. Or should I say, selling them on the idea of moving to something new, and retiring or abandoning a game we had all invested a lot of time in – and still enjoyed.
It seemed that it was either/or in terms of other MMOs. Either play LotRO, or play WoW, but not both.
Having said that…TOR is going to require some careful consideration. A sci-fi setting is less appealing than high fantasy (despite my reading preference being totally the other way around – other than A Song of Ice & Fire, great Fantasy fiction is pretty rare), but the Bioware polish and depth of Star Wars lore could – should – be a killer combo.
Wowkindy
A while back, before quitting for good, BRK started a great series of “Video Hunter Guides”. You can still download them from his old site, or view it on the (frustrating) Project Lore site.
They are great because they start from the assumption that you know nothing about being a Hunter. Nowt. Zip. He introduces each skill or talent that you get, explains what it does, and shows you how to use it. Even skills you don’t actually ‘get’ – like kiting, jump shooting, etc. There’s a video every two levels or so, each one adding a little more to The Knowledge.
It’s great content, and it’s surprising that there’s so little of it about. There’s plenty of “how to nail boss x” strategy videos, and places like Tankspot are invaluable sources of end game strategies. But there’s very little in the way of video guides to starting out, class basics, and how-tos.
One reason is videos are painful to produce, take hours longer than you expect, and (at least here in 64k-if-you’re-lucky upload country) days to upload to YouTube etc. Another is you have to really know your stuff to make it worthwhile, and be a good teacher at the same time.
But there’s 8 quintillion WoW players out there, there’s people doing incredible machinima, and there’s plenty of great teachers.
Imagine a site with video guides for each class, taking it slowly and teaching people how to play by showing rather than telling. Introducing each skill, demonstrating it, building up to rotations, glyphs, talent builds, the works. It would be an invaluable resource, a Wowhead/Wowwiki for how to play from the ground up. A WoW Kindergarten. Wowkindy.
Make it so!