WoW Journal - 7-Jun-2005

My choice of server nowadays is pretty much following what my D&D friends are doing that evening, which means regular switching between Runetotem and Khaz Modan. Well, the advantage is that I'm nearly always playing with a good buffer of rest xp bonus. Last night we were on Runetotem, doing the second part of Maraudon.

Our group consisted of my level 57 warrior, and 4 lower levels, from 47 to 51. Two more warriors, one rogue, and one shaman. Not quite an ideal group, but workable. We had some problems at the start, with one of the warriors being a big fan of charge, and charging mobs without looking around for roamers first. But after we got wiped out, I was able to persuade him to let me pull the mobs, and he'd charge in a few seconds later, which worked a lot better.

Using the sceptre to teleport to the middle of Maraudon, the way to reach the final boss, the princess, is quite short. Our group not being all that powerful, and this part of Maraudon being rather tough, I simply took the shortest way to the princess, ignoring all the other bosses. The princess has some mean knockback attack, and brought all down to low hitpoints and no mana for our only healer. But by some miracle none of us died, and the three group members who hadn't been there before got their quest done. My warrior is still using the Thrash Blade from that quest, so this is really something to do if you are a 1H sword user.

After the princess we still had some time, although the rogue had to leave. With just 3 warriors and a shaman we wanted to try another boss, the rock elemental. But while we were still fighting his bodyguards, roaming stone elementals attacked us from behind (they must have respawned, we had cleared that part earlier), and we got wiped out. So we decided to call it a day.

There are still a number of level 50+ dungeons I want to do. I haven't finished the Sunken Temple, and my quest log is full of quests for Blackrock Depths, where I only went with a raid and thus couldn't do quests. And I've never been to Stratholme, Scholomance, Dire Maul, Blackrock Spire, Molten Core, or Onyxia's Lair. But I'm not sure which of these dungeons are still "classical", in that they have quests and you can do them with a single group. It seems all the level 60 in my guild only want to do raid groups. That is fine for them, if they already did all the quests and they don't gain xp any more. But as I still want to finish quests and gain xp, single group dungeons are preferable for me.

I really wished there were more dungeons below level 50 in the game, as dungeons are the best part of WoW in my opinion. But of course that is an eternal problem of MMORPG, that you can consume content faster than new content is added, and that everybody would like different sorts of content added to the game. Blizzard is obviously concentrating on adding PvP content, in the form of the battlegrounds, and not working that much on adding new dungeons, new zones, or new quests. Unless they are secretly working on an unannounced expansion set as well, which would be clever of them, as they could easily sell a million copies of an expansion set at christmas. But the silence about that is worrying me, Blizzard is known for producing high quality, but at a rather slow pace. Would be a pity if the expansion set only came out christmas 2006.

By working on battlegrounds, Blizzard is following one of the oldest ideas of the genre: Instead of producing new content, let the players produce their own content in the form of PvP. That is obviously cost effective, and in a game with "Warcraft" in the title you need to offer PvP. But a lot of people found out by now that MMORPG PvP has not much to do with the much more balanced and strategic battles of a Warcraft game. Even in a perfect implementation the best you can hope for with battlegrounds is a kind of sword and sorcery version of first person shooter (FPS) game like Counterstrike. That is very much different from the PvE part of the game. And as PvP in MMORPG depends strongly on level, you need people that both like the PvE part so much that they are willing to level to 60, and also like FPS games so much that they are willing to switch from PvE to PvP at level 60. People that only like PvE won't use the battlegrounds much, and people that only like FPS won't ever get high enough in level to enjoy battlegrounds.

That is why I personally prefer MMORPG developers to add "more of the same", more content in the form of new zones, dungeons, and quests, instead of grafting a second game on top of the first.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:46 AM Permanent Link