MoP Beta Brief; Diablo III's Rotten Excuse for DRM

One unexpected beta mystery: These two armadas that are taking up space off the coast of Lor'danel in
Dark Shore. There is nobody on board but definitely looks like the Horde and Alliance are having a
naval clash. 

It's a small problem but I realized this week that in the past I have labeled entries "beta." Just "beta." and so people are Googling "WoW Beta" or something similar and being directed to my posts from two years ago, regarding the Cataclysm beta.

To anybody getting so far as to read a new entry when they're disappointed with what they were directed to: I apologize and am probably going to go back and fix this. You might also try "MoP beta" or "pandaria beta" instead. Or something like that.  But hey, there will be more MoP beta here too.

That said, beta is a frustrating place right now. I took my Pandawan Warrior through the remainder of the Wandering Isle. It's OK. Most things work alright. The story is about what you'd expect of it. It is pretty though.  My "cutsieness" detector is at full strength and the presence of what looks like elemental babies who one has to play with, or wake up, or rescue from... I dunno what I rescued that one from, seems like Wowcraft Lite in comparison to Cata's elemental menace.  Remember: franchises die when they start introducing the baby versions of beloved characters. Baby Muppets. Baby Looney Tunes. Just saying. If some Caverns of Time thing happens and suddenly I have to put up with Baby Varian or (/shudder) Baby Thrall, I'm gonna damn well puke and cancel my account.

MoP Beta: First Glance

Ooooooooooh. Aaaaaaaaaaah.

And boy, I tell ya, this is only a glance. In the few days that beta has been available to me, it seems like everything got broken. Merinna has spent a combined 25 minutes trying to TP to the new continent so far, during three different log in sessions. That lil' load bar has gone further than it ever has before as I start writing this post. We'll see if it makes it this time.

Pandaland:  The pandas animate very very nicely. Honestly, there is more character in the way these characters move than just about any character models I have seen in the game. On the slight downside, even a Pandarian warrior looks like Kung Fu Panda, which is to say the Pandarens are stereotypically unacceptable to me.

My adventures through the Wandering Island came to a screeching halt at Level 2 when I found the "Edict of Temperance" to be unburnable due to the fact there are 146,354 other player characters trying to do the same thing at the same time and even a /tar Edict macro won't let you connect with the damn thing. (and no, the "/c interact Edict of Temperance" macro that is being spammed on site will not help either).

Stop ... Beta Time!

Whoa-oooh! Whoa-oooh! Whoa-oooh!

Argh. Like sand in an hourglass, so go the days of our lives ...

I can't begin to sum up how much I'm not playing WoW these days. Instead, I'm writing my thesis and working my butt off at school. In my spare time, I like to sleep.

The ugly truth is that I really don't have time for WoW anymore, and yet I don't feel like I'm really done with Azeroth. So, I lurk out and read blogs far more than I the game.

I keep writing blog articles as well, but rarely post. Honestly, I think I'm stuck in a negative mindset about WoW right now. Honestly, Cataclysm is not the best work Blizzard has done. And since I can't play the way I'd like in Azeroth either. I sometimes write a blog entry that I go to revise and it sounds like an icky screed of QQ and Blizzard-hating. There's enough icky screeding and Blizzard-hating on the interwebs already, and I'm trying not to recklessly add to it.

A bunch of the officers in my guild got it in their heads that we needed to transfer servers to get better raiders. When the rest of the officers said, "That might be a good idea, let's hear a plan for that." the ones who wanted to transfer just left. Apparently, they have problem constructing simple sentences in support of an idea. The second graders I teach have that problem too. What a disappointment. But that has left my guild crippled and it hurts because I have felt so strongly about my guild and there are good people still there and I'm so totally not in a position to do anything with the situation.

But, Warcraft continues onward. The MoP Press Tour came and went. The beta started cooking. They revealed the final raid of the expansion and let me just point out what I wrote on June 14, 2011 about that.

Talents In Depth? No Need.

No more of this it seems.

I sat down to do an "In Depth Analysis" of the new NEW NEW!! talent tree unveiled at Blizzcon for Shamans, and somewhere around 2000 words, I realized that there was just no need for anything like that.

I thought for a bit that it might be ennui causing me to think this way, but once I examined things further, boredom is definitely not a problem. In fact, I think Blizzard may have jumped forth and put together a masterstroke in shaking up the game. It is still somewhat flawed, but all this analysis the WoW community has traditionally put into talent analysis is at an end.

It occurred to me that chosing talents is about to become far less important than it used to be. I'm not sure about it yet, but talents may be less fun as well. They will certainly be something we think about a lot less than we do now.

Do you remember how there's somebody you know who didn't understand about talents the first few months they were playing WoW? (No one ever admits to actually doing this themselves). They complained about everything being so hard and taking so long to kill things. And then you would ask them what specc they chose and they'd go, "Huh? Specc what?" And once you explained it to them, they would have a much better time of things and kill stuff quickly.

The new talent system isn't going to do that. There are no inherent gains in this new system to the major three roles of tanking, healing or damage dealing, or anything else that will really make or break your ability to play your character for keeps.  I suspect that one would be able to ignore this new talent system and though you'd probably have less fun, you wouldn't really suffer very much in PvE.

And therein lies a catch:  It seems to me that new talent system will affect PvP infinitely more than it does PvE. And it troubles me that the developers seem to be in denial about this.

Things They Should Do to Fix Archaeology

Even if you look through the scope,
you won't find any fun.

Ah, Archaeology, one of the least satisfying things to do in WoW. Patch 4.3 came recently and brought with it a change in the number of pieces one may unearth at any particular digsite from 3-6 to 5-12 and ... that's not much of a change at all.

Archaeology had a lot of potential. Potential that got buried in the sand, thanks to the tediousness of the operations of doing this profession, which was basically a non-starter.  The patch fix earlier this month was a quick simple adjustment that the developers could tweak with about 14 seconds of effort. Changing one variable makes a significant difference in how long we go digging, and yet, it doesn't make archaeology really any more fun.

There needs to be a overhaul that includes the following:

A Smaller Junk:Treasure ratio
Apart from new mounts and pets, I have yet to find anything with archaeology that is really worth keeping.  I have found a number of low-level epic weapons and pieces of gear that I would use if I had an alt in the right range with the right class and specc. But I don't. I can't give them to anyone who does either. I may as well stick these items back in the ground.

Even the blue toys I found... I was looking at those this week trying to decide if I should put them in void storage or just throw them away.  Most of them were amusing for a few seconds but none of them were anything so incredible that I was going to haul them around. Although these items are "rare" their resale value is non-existent as well.

Blizzard is continually saying how they don't want professions to have any profound effect on endgame performance, but they seem to be flying through interesting toy concepts too quickly. More mounts? I coulda sworn I read Ghostcrawler say that they were running out of ideas for new mounts. What else is left?

So, with so little really worth holding onto in the entire archaeological oeuvre, shouldn't that be changed?

WoW Has Spoiled Me for Skyrim

It looks peaceful enough, but a dragon is about to drop out of the sky, and your
housecarl will run right in your way when you try to attack it. No orcs will be
harmed during the duration of the event.

I, like much of the rest of fantasy nerd-dom, recently shelled out the cash to play Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim on my X-Box this past weekend.

Most of what they say about the game is true: that it is a wide open beautiful expanse of game full of nooks and crannies for exploring, interesting stories to learn and ridiculous amounts of game to play.  Really, it's pretty neat.

But, there are aspects of the game I find frustrating and I realize, in part that this is largely because I have become so accustomed to gameplay in Azeroth.  There are things, in Skyrim, that can be kind of frustrating at times. Things like...

Not knowing if I can kill a mob or not.
I am so used to being able to get a measure of myself against the Mobs in WoW that I desperately miss it in Skyrim. For example, creeping over the plains near Whiterun and seeing what looks like an ogre or a giant or something-- a tall lanky dude dressed in a loincloth and with a club over his shoulder.  "He can't see me," I think. "So I'll go backstab his butt!"   Only I do that, and it barely scratches his health bar, and he turns around and knocks me with his club so hard that the display times out long before my corpse has completed sailing through the air.

Similarly, climbing a mountain towards a temple and this white yeti-looking troll thing rushes out to get me. "There's only one of them," I think, so I get off my horse and the thing tears me to shreds in two blows before I have managed to even unsheath my weapons. I try sneaking up on him and it doesn't work. I try perching on a rock directly over his head where he ought not be able to hit me and he tears me several new orifices. Finally, I make a long circle around that spot on the map and keep going.

It's nice to see WoW's Elite and Skull markers so that you know what NOT to pick a fight with. I wonder if Skyrim might patch this feature in?

Why PokeWoW Makes Me Feel Old

I'm having a hard time deciding if this is more disturbing than Kung Fu Panda or the other way around.

It's been a few weeks now but I have been thoroughly unable to dredge up any enthusiasm for the "Pet Battle System" announced for Mists of Pandaria. It seems very closely based on the gaming principles of Pokemon, I somehow picture a Blizzard developers' meeting where somebody stood up and shouted, "Now we have something for those free-loading companion pets to do!"

But Pokemon is a toy franchise guaranteed to bring a sneer of disgust to about 50% of the people I know, comeplete disinterest from another 49% and wriggles of excitement from the 1% like my nephew who is nine. Granted, the whole Poke-franchise has been around for probably close to 15 years now, so there are probably college graduates who grew up with these things now, but these things are not still so popular, are they?

Pokemon is a wildly sucessful franchise for a lot of reasons but I think part of its success is that it works very well for the market it is aimed at: young children. The characters stepped into by players do not technically fight. They just train little pugilists for a good clean fight in the ring. As a parent, I might not like having my young children play a game in which their self-identified characters "fight."  But, having them play a character in which they have little surrogate fighters that they "train" would give a modicum of distance from that violence that might be healthier for those little tykes. Might. I'm pretty sure the research is still out on that question.