Blizzard is getting their communication act together

Mike Morhaime, president of Blizzard Entertainment, finally communicated a bit more with the players, on the
WoW General Discussion forum. He gave out another 1 free day for people who were affected by this weeks extended maintenance time on some of the US servers, plus they get full xp rest bonus as if they had logged out in an inn/city, even if they didn't. Nothing new there, Blizzard is a firm believer in recompensation for lost play time, we Europeans just got 2 free days for the extended Good Friday patch.

But what *was* new is that Mike gave more details on what the problem was, and how they are fixing it. The problem is, who would have guessed it, overpopulation. Several servers share the same backbone, and if all of these servers are relatively full, the backbone infrastructure begins to creak. First solution was offering server moves, where people could move to a less crowded server. That worked, but not for long, as WoW is still attracting lots of new customers. So (quote:)

Once it was shown that the character transfers did not sufficiently disperse the population, we began to modify the hardware backend for the affected realms. The most recent and substantial step of that process involved transferring the realm data to a new hardware setup. The goal of this procedure is to decrease the overall load on the infrastructure that the affected realms share.

The new hardware infrastructure was completed yesterday, and we are currently copying the character data from eight of these realms onto the new hardware. This transfer will significantly decrease the load on the current infrastructure, which should result in improved performance on all of the realms listed below. The data transfer is taking us longer than expected, but it is vital for providing stability to these realms.

We are totally committed to providing our players with the best play experience possible, and we will continue to streamline our code and add new hardware to our infrastructure until we accomplish that goal. We once again thank you for your patience during this time, and wish you continued good fortunes on your adventures in Azeroth!

Well, that gives me some hope for my European server, Runetotem, which has become a bit laggy recently as population increases. And communicating with the players this way is a big step forward by Blizzard, who risked to become known as "the MMORPG company that managed to have worse customer service than SOE".
- posted by Tobold @ 6:59 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 29-Mar-2005

A long easter weekend lies behind me, and as you can imagine, I played a lot of World of Warcraft. I dinged twice, so I'm level 44 now, and I did a couple of dungeons. But the most significant result of the weekend, which will alter the way I play in the future, was a change in crafting professions. But lets start at the beginning.

The long weekend started badly, with the extended patch on Friday being late for over 4 hours. Fortunately my US account was still active, due to the extra days Blizzard had handed out for previous problems I still had play credit until Sunday. And on the US server the patch had already been done Tuesday, so I was able to test the patch in advance.

Unsurprisingly the result of the test was that the revamped Blizzard user interface clashes with the UI mods, especially with Cosmos. And because the standard WoW now has the features which made me install Cosmos in the first place, I uninstalled Cosmos, and used the additional hotkeys, buff timers, and quest tracker of Blizzard instead. I kept Gatherer, and I installed Telo's InfoBar, SimpleMail, and QuestLevels. (Found all these at Curse Gaming). I checked that everything was running well in this configuration, and then I copied the files into the European WoW directory as well. Worked perfectly, when the European servers finally came up, I already had a working set of UI mods.

I also tried LootLink and Auctioneer on the US server, two UI mods that gather data on all the items you come across, and scan the auction house for average prices. But I decided to not use it on the European servers, because it handles a lot of data, and thus ends up slowing your game down. I am also slightly sceptic of every mod that isn't just modifying the UI, but somehow automates the game. What is the point of writing a macro or mod that effectively plays the game for you? I enjoy "playing" the auction house, I don't want that automated.

Then I mentally said goodbye to my level 41 druid on the US server, and sent all my money to a guild mate. The alchemy stuff I had already given away before. It was probably fate that Waldin the druid thus ended his career in the low 40's. He was named after my Everquest druid, and that one likewise never got past level 42, albeit for different reasons.

Finally the European WoW servers came up on Friday afternoon, and I could start to play my troll warrior, Raslebol. I start gathering materials for the weaponsmith quest: Lots of mithril from Alterac Mountains and Badlands, Black Pearls from the auction house, the other gems I have in stock. Gathering metals is getting less and less pleasant, there is far too much competition, but I manage to do it. The reward for the quest is the title of weaponsmith, and four recipes for rare, "blue", weapons. Hmmm, three of them are two-handed weapons, which I don't use. But the Phantom Blade doesn't look bad, and has slightly better dps than my Sword of Omen. So my next goal is to make one of these.

For making a Phantom Blade I need six Breath of Wind. According to Thottbot these are found as rare drop on Gusting Vortex wind elementals in the Tanaris desert. Which reminds me of another tradeskill quest I have, speak to the cook in Gadgetzan about getting cooking skill past 225. The cooking quest needs Giant Eggs from Tanaris too, plus Zesty Clam Meat and Alterac Swiss cheese. So I head into the desert hunting rocs for eggs and elementals for Breath of Wind. The rocs are okay, there is a hill with huge bones, where fire rocs and hyena gather. But the elementals are highly frustrating. Not only are they rare, but they are also roaming all over the place and are hard to find without tracking skill. And when you find one, he doesn't drop the Breath of Wind. I don't manage to find a single one. And there are none in the auction house either.

The next day I look up the other ingredients for the cooking quest, and find that Alterac Swiss is a cheese which drops either from much higher level monsters, or is sold by several Alliance vendors. That does it, I'm creating an Alliance character on my wife's account and travel with him to Gadgetzan. Using her and mine account and the Gadgetzan neutral auction house I transfer money from my horde character to the alliance character, by buying something worthless from him for lots of money. He then buys the cheese in Theramore, and "auctions" it back to Raslebol. By the same way, and with the help of another Alliance character in Ironforge, I buy 6 Breath of Wind from the Alliance auction house. Their AH is much better stocked, due to them having twice as many players.

I spend some more time gathering more mithril and the other components for the Phantom Blade, and finally smith it. Yeah, the highpoint of my blacksmithing career. I smithed a sword which took me more time and gold to smith, than getting an equivalent sword from a quest or instance would have cost me in effort. And for the next sword I need to wait another couple of levels, and then somehow first get a rare drop recipe, and then probably some even rarer drop monster parts. Did I mention how I hate crafting with rare loot drops? In short, I'm completely disillusioned with the smithing profession, and well fed up with it.

So after long deliberation, I decide that in spite of all the effort and money I already sunk into blacksmithing, it is time to give it up. I look up the recipes for engineering and alchemy, and decide that alchemy is more useful for Raslebol. So I unlearn both mining and smithing, and learn herbalism and alchemy instead. The advantage is that potions are consumables, and I like to use them. They give me abilities my warrior doesn't have, like healing myself, breathing under water, or making myself invisible. And as far as I experienced with my US druid alchemist, potions never need rare loot drop ingredients, they only need herbs, the occasional fish, and rarely a common enough loot drop, like a dragons flame sac.

I start collecting herbs in Tirisfal Glade, and later in the Barrens, and quickly get past skill level 75. There doesn't seem to be much competition for the herbs, at least not for the low level ones. And with the experience I have from my druid, on where to find what herb, and being high enough in level, the herb gathering is easy enough for now.

But WoW isn't all about tradeskills. I did a lot of other things this weekend. Most of them related to my goal of emptying my quest log, before accepting the next batch of quests. Many of the quests I solo, especially the quests that are in my quest log for some time, and are now relatively low level to me. I manage to finish the Stranglethorn hunting quests with a guild mate and some guys who was looking for help for that quest in the looking for group chat channel. And then there are the dungeon quests, which since the patch are actually marked "dungeon", as opposed to quests that involve killing elites, but which are outdoors.

I get one guild group together for Razorfen Downs, with 4 of the 5 group members being the same group which failed to finish that dungeon before. But now we are higher level. We first fight our way towards the end boss, and kill him, thus taking care of that quest. Then, because that went so well, we visit the "rock concert" in that dungeon. That is a huge skeleton boss mob on a mound of bones, and lots of small skeletons before him, all doing the undead "air guitar" dance animation. Looks very stylish, and scary, because there are so many. But the small skeletons aren't elite, and we manage to kill them and their boss after a hard fight. Time for the ultimate challenge of Razorfen Downs, the escort quest. We need to escort a prisoner to a huge oven, which he wants to shut down with magic. But while he does that, for a full five minutes there are waves and waves of monsters coming to try to kill him and us. Surprisingly we manage to keep him alive for 5 minutes, and complete the quest, although we get killed shortly afterwards. A big success all in all.

The other dungeon on my quest list is Uldaman. Over the weekend I go there three times. Not only because on the first time we don't manage to win the final fight, and the second time we are only three people in the group and only do half of the dungeon. I do Uldaman three times, because you *have* to do it at least that often to finish the main quest. It is a quest in multiple steps, where the first part you can finish at the start of the dungeon, the second in the middle, and the third by killing the end boss mob. But between these steps you always have to go back to the quest givers, which is a bit annoying. And the final fight is very hard, on my third Uldaman we only manage on the third try for that combat, and then still only barely manage it with half of the group dead. And that is with two rogues in the group which are higher in level than my 44. But as always, doing dungeon instances with guild groups is a lot of fun. And my quest journal is slimmed down to only 7 unfinished quests, and I'll work on those this week.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:06 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Europe extended downtime

When one day I retire from my day job and become consultant for the MMORPG industry instead, I am going to make a PowerPoint presentation of 50 pages, all with the same text: "Do no keep your customers from playing!". There is absolutely nothing which is more frustrating for a player than to be unable to play. And Blizzard hasn't understood that any better than the competition.

Today there was a scheduled downtime from 5 am to 11 am, so that they could patch the European version to 1.3. That was already a bad idea, because it is Good Friday, a public holiday for most of Europe. But now it is already 2:30 pm and the servers *still* aren't back up.

The Realm Status page from Blizzard is completely useless. It often shows all servers as up, even when they are down. The Realm Status Forum is not much better, because it only has a post saying that the server maintenance is "extended", without giving any hint for how long.

Even SOE does a better customer service when their servers are down, giving more information, even if it is just an hourly update saying that they still don't have an ETA. It isn't surprising that SOE is now making advertising claiming "SOE Subscribers Can Play the Game They're Paying to Play, When They Want To" and "Unmatched Customer Service". Veterans will laugh about the idea that SOE could have good customer service, but they *did* learn a little bit in the last 6 years, and they are now beating Blizzard in that field. You wished SOE would learn how to program a fun game. Or that Blizzard would learn the basics of customer service, communication, and how not to mess up on patch day.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:31 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments

 
WoW Journal - 24-Mar-2005

I had bid for some reasonably priced mithril bars in the auction house, and when I logged on I found the mithril in my mail box. Sometimes I just get lucky. Then I just had to do a quick trip into the Alterac Mountains to get 4 more mithril to get all the metal I needed for the Mithril Order quest. I make all the parts for the 3 quest, fly to Gadgetzan to hand them in, and ding 42 on the quest reward. I also get 3 recipes for mithril armor and the Glimmering Mithril Insignia. That is a highly useful trinket which makes you immune to fear effects for 30 seconds, as well as increasing your armor by 50, and all resistances by 10, usable every 10 minutes.

Then I find out what Alan commented on yesterdays journal: The Mithril Order quest has absolutely nothing to do with becoming a weaponsmith. Doh! In fact you need to talk to an unmarked orc standing near the forge, who gives you the choice between weaponsmith and armorsmith. Once you made that choice, the orc marked will give you the quest for the specialization. Which, who would have guessed, involves making lots of mithril weapons. And me fresh out of mithril, and not in possession of the Black Pearls needed to make Big Black Maces. Something to do this long easter weekend, if the patch on Friday doesn't mess up my game.

But today I've had enough of smithing, and I turn to bashing monsters instead. I gather some guild mates to do the third part of the Scarlet Monastery, the Cathedral. This turns out to be fun, but a bit strange. Can you believe we managed to bring *too much* crowd control? The group has one rogue who can sap, one warlock whose succubus can mez by flirting (showing cute red hearts above the thus immobilized enemy), and a priest who can mind control. And me, who knows a thing or two about pulling, and often pulls just one or two mobs, and never more than 3, even from the cathedral, which is crowded with enemies. So there is nearly always only one enemy who isn't mezmerized, stunned, or mind-controlled, and that makes the fights rather easy.

We clear out the cathedral, on of the group tells me that there is a secret door in one corner, and I manage to find the switch to open it, netting us a boss mob who drops three green items. And then we do the final fight, which also doesn't pose much of a problem. But unfortunately the scarlet commander doesn't drop his shield, for which I had hoped. Well, we can always repeat the expedition. The xp wasn't bad, and the loot was okay.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:38 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 23-Mar-2005

I'm beginning to have doubts on my career as blacksmith. I'm trying to become a weaponsmith, and progress is slow. I finished one series of three quests last weekend, but that just opened another batch of three quests. And these quests need a total of 114 mithril bars, plus some other resources. And gathering mithril is getting harder and harder.

I usually mine iron and mithril in the Alterac Mountains, where they are guarded by level 35ish ogres. Ogres are nice to kill, as they don't have any nasty special attacks, and they don't run away to call their friends. And the density of potential ore spots in the Alterac Mountains is very high. But this week gathering metals there takes forever. Meanwhile lots of players, even from the slower-leveling Alliance side, have reached level 35. And whenever I arrive at a resource node, there is already some dwarf or night-elf mining it. If you have to share the nodes with lots of other players, you get a lot less ore per hour.

Another problem is that about two thirds of the nodes are iron, and I don't really need iron. I made a bunch of green iron weapons and put them in the auction house, but they don't sell, although I put buyouts just a fraction over the preset minimum bid price. There are now so many loot drop weapons around that are better and cheaper, that there is no profit to be made out of smithing.

I buy some truesilver gauntlets and breastplate from somebody who became armorsmith, as I won't get those recipes when I become weaponsmith. I talk to the guy to ask him if there are truesilver boots, bracers, or a belt. But he complains that he only got those two recipes for becoming armorsmith, and sales are slower than slow, even for the blue truesilver armor.

So I seem to have a profession in which a) I can make very few items for myself, and which b) isn't very profitable any more, after the server reached a certain age and saturation with loot drops. The only use right now is making weapons for the lower level guild members. I should have taken Alchemy again, where I have a constant use of potions and have problems getting them. But I already did take Alchemy with my US server druid, and wanted to try something new. Now I'm reluctant to switch, as I already spent a fortune on smithing recipes and quests. I think I'll grit my teeth and stick to it. Maybe the rare and epic drop recipes at the highest level are worth it. And I've read of a smithing dungeon, where you need a group just to mine and reach a special forge at the end, which sounds interesting.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:28 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 20-Mar-05

This weekend I'm on a roll, and I level like crazy. I start on Saturday by finishing the quest for the Nifty Stopwatch, with the help of a guild mate who is on the same quest. Nice to have an emergency speed boost to run away now, without using Swiftness Potions. I finish another Badlands quest, then move to Stranglethorn to get some more quests done. Killing trolls I notice that I get parts for two different quests, the one I'm after, and the long forgotten warrior level 40 quest, which I received at level 30. But before I can finish that one, I ding 40. And of course I have to rush to Durotar first, to buy myself a raptor mount. In emerald green, very stylish.

Then I ride back to the trolls and collect the tusks from them for the level 40 warrior weapon quest. I also need 8 Liferoot, but a guild herbalist provides me with those. Last part is three times 8 charms from the elementals in Arathi Highlands. Which combines well with my quest there to free Princess Myzrael. Only that the keys to free the princess are a lot easier to get than 8 charms, which don't drop that often. Well, at least I'm making good xp there. Finally I got all the ingredients. The last part of that warrior quest involves summoning a big air elemental and killing him. The reward is a blue weapon of your choice, but choice is limited to the three types of 2-handed weapons. So I can only sell the reward.

I spend some time gathering mithril and iron for the level 40 smithing quest then, and make good xp at the same time from killing the ogres in Alterac Mountains. I manage to finish the first triplet of the smithing quests, which cost 120 mithril in resources, plus 40 iron, and some other stuff. Pretty time consuming, and the next part needs more mithril, so I postpone that.

On Sunday I join with some guild mates to finish the quest series that frees Princess Myzrael in Arathi Highlands. Long series. During the step that leads us into the Badlands I ding 41. Up to now the quest series is enjoyable, but then we come to the last step, and it turns out that the princess is evil, and we need to kill her. And she is level 50 elite. As the rest of the quest series went from level 37 to 41, the step to 50 elite is rather harsh. A design flaw in my opinion. We get a level 50 from the guild to help us, but we get wiped out three times before we kill her on the fourth try. Well, at least I get 7,100 xp and a Pulsating Crystalling Shard necklace.

On the bad news side it seems that smithing isn't all that profitable any more, due to lots more competition. I used make a bundle selling Green Iron Hauberks for 6 gold, but now I see lots of those for 2 gold or less in the AH.

I finish the weekend with an expedition into Razorfen Down with a guild group. I get one quest outside finished. But the escort quest inside is insanely difficult, you probably need at least 10 people for it. There is a great looking skeleton rock concert in that dungeon, but we don't dare to attack those undead. We make our way to the final mob, but get wiped out. And one of the group needs to leave, so we abandon this dungeon.

In spite of the bad end, I'm quite happy with the weekend. Made 3 levels, helped by one level at double speed from xp bonus. And I'm the proud owner of a raptor mount.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:44 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - 18-Mar-05

After a week of forced absence, I'm eager to play. Raslebol is level 38, and has spent much time mining and smithing to get enough money for a horse, so my goal is to reach level 40 this weekend.

I start with a quest in the Swamp of Sorrows. Kill lots of dragon whelps to collect dream dust. These dragons don't breathe fire, but some sort of green ball of nature damage. That makes them very easy to farm. The breath attack counts as spell, thus my warriors shield bash can interrupt that attack, and stop the dragon from using it for another 6 seconds. And I have nature protection potions for emergencies, when I'm attacked by several dragons, which totally absorbs their breath attack damage. On advise of a guild mate I then do another quest in the swamp. The quest is marked level 43 elite, but what you actually have to do is to collect 10 artifacts under water. And you can do that without getting into a fight with the level 43 elite dragonkin mobs, which makes the quest easy and profitable.

After the swamp, I decide to do a quest which leads me into the Badlands. But on the way I first tag the flight path in Hammerfell in Arathi Highlands, and then do a quest there. I have to kill a bunch of kobolds in a cave, and make my way to a crystal at the end of that cave. The kobolds are rather annoying, because they tend to run away and get help. But with my bow I can pull them away from the others, and then hamstring them to prevent them from running. I reach the crystal, and the quest reward makes me ding 39. A second later my computer freezes. I have to reboot, and by the time I can get back, the cave is full of respawned kobolds. I try to run, but die just as I leave the cave. And the program crashes again. I update Cosmos, which disable the QuestMinion UI mod, which the patch note says is causing problems.

Back in the game, I leave the Arathi Highlands and run through Wetlands and Loch Modan to the Badlands. There I first tag the flight path. This is an important flight path point, because it connects the northern part of this continent, the area around Undercity, with the southern part, Booty Bay. So now I can fly over the dwarven and human areas, without getting into trouble with the alliance guards.

Some friends log on, and we group. I lead them to the Badlands, so they get the flight path too. And we start doing a series of quests which according to Thottbot should end us earning the Nifty Stopwatch, a trinket which can be activated every 30 minutes to give a short boost to run speed. Good to have if you need to run away. I knew we needed to hand in frost oil and a gyrochronatom, so we came prepared. We then also need to hand in healing and invisibility potions, but one of my friends is alchemist and we can do that too. But the next part of the quest is collecting a lot of stones from different rock elementals. And as I'm still jet-lagged, and it is getting late, I stop here for the day.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:16 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW hits 1.5 million subscribers

Back home from my trip to the US, I arrive in the middle of the scheduled server maintenance. So I still can't get my WoW fix, and read the game news instead. There is a Blizzard press release announcing that World of Warcraft has now passed the 1.5 million subscribers mark. 800k in the US, 500k in Europe, and the rest in Korea, although the numbers there are murky as usual, because online games are nearly exclusively played in internet cafes over there, so the "subscribers" are the internet game room owners, and the players buy slices of time from them.

If we just look at North America and Europe, WoW is the single most successful game by a wide margin in both continents. Not bad for a first try at doing MMORPG from Blizzard. Although the experience with single-player games and Battle.net certainly helped.

This is going to cause some profound changes in the MMORPG industry. You don't need much math skill to multiply 1.5 million with the price of the box, or the cost of the monthly subscription, and see that World of Warcraft is a gold mine. And although the first wave of "EQ clones" wasn't always successful, the second wave of "WoW clones" is sure to hit us in two or three years. Even if not all of these games will be good, they will at least provide us players with more choice. The success of WoW will also affect games already in development. Game developers will try to analyze what it is that makes WoW such a bestseller, and then try to incorporate these features into their own games. Look forward to a lot of quest-based games, and more "accessibility", however you want to define that.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:00 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW patch delayed

I'm still traveling, but I found a computer with free internet access in the business lounge of my hotel, and this is the first free evening not taken up by some business dinner. So I'm surfing the web for news on the WoW patch 1.3, because I figured that it would have gone live by now in the US. Turns out they first tried the patch on the new test servers there, and it didn't run all that well. So the patch, which was originally announced for Friday on the Euro servers, is now being delayed to some unspecified date. There will only be the normal weekly server maintenance on Friday morning.

Well, that is what test server are for. I'd rather wait and get something that doesn't crash.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:06 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
One month of WoW Europe

I'm now playing World of Warcraft on the European servers for one month, so it's time for a look back. Just some thoughts in random order:

In one month I reached level 36 with my main character, and have a level 10 and a level 8 alt. No other MMORPG I played offered that sort of speedy advancement. Up to now I like this speed. But I know that some people are "stuck" at level 60 (mainly on the US servers), unwilling to start over, and complaining there isn't enough to do at the end level. I consider that only as a minor problem. I think Blizzard is losing less customer that get bored at level 60, than SOE is losing customers which get stuck half-way up the level curve. "Lack of end game" is less bad than "treadmill grind".

This morning, before I went on a shopping spree for resources, I had 40 gold pieces. More than I ever had on the US server, and mainly earned with selling smithed goods. I don't know if that will keep on earning me money as the economy evolves, but it is already a good step towards the 90 gold I'll need at level 40 for a mount.

The mounts are probably the main driving force of people buying WoW gold for real world money. IGE just started selling gold on the European servers. 100 gold on Runetotem, PvE, Horde, cost $119.99. 100 gold on my US server, Icecrown, PvE, Horde, cost $29.99. Age difference between these two servers is 3 months, so in 3 months gold is losing three quarters of its value. That is a 3-month inflation rate of 300%, or 1200% annualized. Not a stable economy. IGE/EBay is just a way to measure this inflation, the effects of this inflation are hitting people that never buy or sell gold as well, in the form of higher auction house prices.

Up to now my server has been remarkably stable and free of lag. But I got French speaking friends who are playing on my English language server because they say the French servers are overcrowded. And apparently the PvP servers are a lot more crowded and have problems with lag and login queues. But no major server outage in Europe yet. Meanwhile Icecrown, being part of "the 20" servers which have most of the problems on the US side continues to be highly problematic. Well, my account there runs out end of this month.

It is hard to say which of my two guilds is nicer, the US guild The Echelon, or the Euro guild The Order of the Rose-Croix. But the Euro side wins hands down in the "more fun" category, just because they are in the same time zone as I am. Thus I'll stay on the Euro servers, and ditch my US characters and account.

I have heard people say that WoW is not a very social game, because it doesn't force players to group, thus leading to everybody just soloing. I can't confirm that. While the game *can* be played in a completely unsocial way, that would be the unsocial players fault. It is easy enough to find a group, will get even easier with the next patch, and the game does not put up too many obstacles in your way if you want to group with your friends who don't have the "right" level or "right" class. And if you join a good guild, like I did, World of Warcraft becomes a very social experience indeed.

I infected at least 4 people who never played a MMORPG before with the WoW addiction. My wife, and 3 guys of my D&D group. That never happened with any other MMORPG I played, and is a clear indication of how accessible World of Warcraft is in comparison with the other MMORPGs.

World of Warcraft is patched rarely, but then with huge patches. The next patch, v1.3, is announced for next Friday, the 18th of March, on the Euro servers. Probably next Tuesday on the US servers, as Tuesday is their regular maintenance day, and Friday is maintenance day in Europe. I'm looking forward to the patch because it brings a good number of improvements to the warrior class, which will make me gain more rage in a combat, and also will give me more damage when I spend this rage. I'm also looking forward to the meeting stone system, which will try to get groups for instances going. In principle I'm all for the UI improvments, but these improvements are all features that I already have installed via the Cosmos UI mod. Thus I'm a bit anxious of how much work it will be to sort this out on my computer.

So, all in all, the first month of WoW Europe for me is a huge success. I can't remember when I last had so much fun in a game, or was so addicted to one.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:28 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal 10-Mar-2005

The recent short play sessions left me with some unfinished business. So I started the evening by collecting the rewards for two quests that I had already finished, but hadn't gotten around to cash in. And the xp reward made me ding 36. I also got around to learn artisan blacksmith, so I can increase my blacksmithing skill to 300 now. Unfortunately the items that advance my skill beyond 225 are around level 40, so I can neither use them myself, nor is there much of a market for them yet.

After training my level 36 skills, of which there were just 2, and not the most interesting ones, I head over to Stranglethorn and join a guild group. That turns out to be a mistake. Groups are great for instances and against stationary overland targets. But hunting, lets say tigers, in a group is horrible. It's like herding cats, with all the group members running in different directions. One spots a tiger here, the other there, while the third rushes off to pick a flower with herbalism.

At least with the "kill 10 tigers" type of quests, a group is helpful, because every kill counts for every member. But we also have quests of the type "collect 10 tusks", and there a group isn't any faster than soloing. If the monster part drops only from one in four mobs, getting ten of them for each of the five group members means killing 200 monsters. In that case the speed how fast the group can kill the monsters becomes irrelevant, it is only a matter of how fast the monsters respawn. So it might even be faster to solo such quests.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:06 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Change of pace

Incredible as is sounds, but I *do* have a life outside of virtual worlds. A this Real Life ® is currently bombarding me with work-related stress. I wasn't able to play WoW for more than half an hour the last two evenings, and from next Sunday to Friday I'll be on a business trip to the USA, and I won't be able to play there either. And if I don't play World of Warcraft daily, I obviously can't keep up a daily WoW journal.

I'll still be writing about my adventures on Azeroth for some time, but starting from now the format is changing. I'll write when I found the time to play, and something to write about happened. The journal entries will be marked by date instead of with a continuous day count.

One episode I forgot to mention from my adventures last weekend was traveling from Booty Bay to the Swamp of Sorrows. The main purpose was to tag the flight paths in Booty Bay, Stranglethorn, and the Swamp, so I could travel there faster in the future. I'll still need to tag the flight path in Badlands to connect the north and the south of that continent by flight paths.

Anyway, arriving in the northern part of Stranglethorn, I suddenly remembered that the Kurzen Medicine Men live there. At that point I was level 33, which is just the good level to fight them. And while as Horde I can't get the quests against the Kurzen camp, the medicine men still drop the Jungle Remedy, a potion which cures both poison and disease. Very useful, especially for a warrior. I'm able to cure poison with the First Aid skill, if I have the components, but didn't have anything to cure disease yet. So I stayed there a while and killed medicine men, until I had a full stack of 10 Jungle Remedy.

Interestingly there were also a number of alliance players around, because, as I mentioned, they get quests for that place from the alliance rebel camp. But as this is a PvE server, and them and me were busy fighting mobs, we didn't fight each other. You can't talk or group with them either, although you can communicate with the /emote command. But even without talking, we ended up working together sometimes. When they or me pulled a too large group, the other picked one or two mobs away, making life easier for everybody. I prefer it that way.

Another spot I'd like to mention is the Alterac Mountains, which I visited in my short play session last night. Me now being level 35, the ogres there make good enemies. They are slow, and while they hit hard, they don't have any nasty special effects, and they don't run away to alarm their friends to your presence. Of course that is only true for the normal ogres around the Alterac Ruins, inside the ruins are elite ogres which are a lot nastier. I used to hang out in the Alterace Mountains with my druid on the US server a lot, as it was a good place for herbalism. Now with my warrior it is a decent place for mining, having both iron and mithril. Though I should go there in the early morning on the weekend, on weekday evenings there are too many other players mining there.

I was looking for mithril because I just spent nearly 8 gold on some rare smithing plans for mithril spikes. These spikes can be attached to a shield, which then deals 16 to 20 points of damage on every successful block. A nice addition to my shield from the Scarlet Monastery. The only problem I have is that the utility which parses your log and measures your damage per second, which is included in Cosmos, isn't working since the last patch. I'll have to check whether I can update or replace that somehow, I'd like to know how much damage I'm dealing with my different attacks.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:04 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Darniaq's Archive of Blizzard's Posts

As a game company, Blizzard has been around for quite some time, and is known for the quality of their products. As a MMORPG company Blizzard is inexperienced. And one of the results of this inexperience is how badly they communicate with their players. Basically what they do is answering some questions on their message boards. But as that message board is rather crowded, and the search function doesn't work, the answers are usually very hard to find. Patch notes are also hard to find. This has lead some people to believe that Blizzard isn't very active in improving their game. When in fact they are, people simply often don't notice.

Darniaq has created an archive of Blizzard's Posts in the form of a phpBB forum. Not really a discussion forum, but a good place to look for interesting tidbits of information from Blizzard. For example about upcoming changes to the warrior class, which are all improvements. More damage from Heroic Strike, the main "added damage" special ability, better Thunderclap, and a bug-fix to Execute.

My Heroic Strike is already better than many other warrior's Heroic Strike. I noticed the difference recently (before I got the Sword of Omen), when I switched from one sword to another one. The first weapon was slower, but did more damage, the second weapon was twice as fast, and did half the damage. In damage per second the two swords were very similar, but on the Heroic Strike the change had a huge impact. Heroic Strike is an ability with no cooldown timer. Instead you "flag" your *next* normal attack to be a Heroic Strike, dealing more damage, but costing some rage. The amount of additional damage is fixed, and only depends on the rank of your Heroic Strike ability. So basically with a faster weapon, you can use Heroic Strike more often. That *will* cost you more rage, so the faster weapon isn't strictly better if you just consider overall damage. But the fact that you can use it more often enables you to deplete your stored rage pool faster, if need be. I'm a big fan of tactical fighting, I like to keep my rage pool at least half full as long as the fights are easy. And when there is a problem, additional monster joining the fray or something, I have a rage reserve to expend. For this, faster Heroic Strike is a huge plus.

I certainly don't have the fastest weapon available. The Sword of Omen with 1.90 second per swing is slower than the Knightly Longsword with 1.50, and a Dagger can be even faster. But I noticed that many of my fellow warriors are using two-handed weapons, 2h axes or 2h swords, and these usually have around 3 second per swing. That means they can only use Heroic Strike every 3 seconds. Sure, the 2h weapon you can get for a level 40 elite warrior quest, like the Whirlwind Axe is dealing a huge amount of damage with every hit. But the damage per second with 35.6 isn't that much more than the 29.7 of my Sword of Omen, and I would lose over one third (1051 of 2871) of my armor. No thanks, I'll stick with one-handed weapons.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:35 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 23 and Day 24

Having posted my analysis of the WoW quest system yesterday, I'm bunching the WoW Journal entries for the weekend into one post. Saturday I'm eager to do some adventuring, as Raslebol didn't level much the whole week long. Continueing from Friday, I finish my quests for Thousand Needles. I solo most of the time, just doing some short term duos for the quests where I have to kill some elite mob. Progress is good, but nothing exceptional. But as an added bonus I discover where in Thousand Needles the iron deposits are, which is good to know.

In the afternoon I group a bit with my guild. In Stonetalon Mountains we do an expedition into the Grizzled Den. Elite mobs, but not an instance, just the standard night-elf type of dungeon full of bends and roots. Not really my favorite, and the reward isn't great either. Afterwards another guildie is having problems with a quest in Hillsbrad. He is level 27, and has to kill level 30 murloc and nagas. No problem for my level 33 warrior. As an added bonus I collect a bunch of tangy clam meat, which brings my cooking skill up to 170.

The evening I'm soloing again. One of my favorite spots, the Shimmering Flats in south Thousand Needles. This is a salt flat, on which the goblins and gnomes have built a big race track. Now they are running races against each other there. So there are lots of quests to kill the local monster population to clear the track, or to gather monster parts that serve to improve the race cars, or gather car parts from the wrecks you can see everywhere. Too funny, the goblins have a chariot pulled by two huge rockets, and at one place you can see one of these chariots stuck and exploded in the canyon wall, ten meters off the ground. I do all the quests there that can be done without leaving the flats, and ding 34.

Sunday morning, I'm still an early riser, and there are only 40 people playing on the Horde side at 7 am. So I go mining, while there is few competition. I gather lots of iron, tin, and copper in Thousand Needles, and even a bit of mithril. Then I spend all my money in Ogrimmar for coal to smelt steel, and get up my smithing skill up to 220. I don't even have enough left to put everything up on the auction house. So during the day my smithing moves into phase 2: money making. I'll be blocked at 225 skill anyway, I'll need level 40 to advance beyond that. So now I don't smith for skill rises, I smith for profit. Another Green Iron Hauberk sells, which gives me enough money to put everything I smithed up on auction. I also have a lot of loot I put up on auction on Saturday selling during the day. With Green Iron Hauberks selling at 6 gold, and me being able to smith some very nice weapons that sell for 1 to 2 gold, and level 30ish loot also selling around 1 gold, I end up the day richer than I ever was: 25 gold. Suddenly having 90 gold at level 40 for a mount doesn't seem impossible any more. Although I'm sure that business will be a lot slower during the week, there are a lot of weekend shoppers around.

Sunday afternoon a guild mate of mine which whom I often group logs on, he wasn't on Saturday. As during the week I didn't have time for instances, with me playing my Alliance gnome, now we gather a group and go on an expedition to Gnomeregan. Funnily you not only get a quest for there from the goblin engineers in Ogrimmar, they also direct you to "Chief Engineer Scooty" in Booty Bay, who will beam directly into Gnomeregan. The other end is operated by "Spocky ". I love these out-of-game references, although I know not everybody finds them funny.

While we have only one quest at the start for Gnomeregan, we pick up some more inside. There is an "event" in there, events being similar to quests, but not going into your quest journal, and not having a reward beyond the loot of the boss mob who appears at the end of the event. The Gnomeregan event is about helping a dwarf engineer blocking some tunnels with explosions, preventing an invasion of troggs. The chief trogg *can* drop some blue stuff, but we aren't lucky and only get some green loot drop nobody wants. We do another quest to escort a goblin out of the instance. We also find lots of gem encrusted objects, which have to be cleaned in a gnomish machine. For the Alliance the place with the cleaning machines is a safe haven, with a mail box and a vendor. For us Horde the gnomes there are hostile, we need to kill them, and the mail box doesn't work for us. The cleaning machine is kind of a slot machine, each operation costs 3 sp, and the gem encrusted object often is a worthless stone, rarely a valuable gem, and ultra-rarely a magic item. But at least the first operation of the machine is a quest which gives good xp. The same machine is used for another quest with a gem-encrusted ring, again good xp, but the ring you get from that isn't really good. You can get that ring upgraded for some materials and 30 silver, but the resulting ring isn't worth 30 silver either.

But it is simply me who hasn't got luck with loot in Gnomeregan. For our mages we find some very nice blue boots. And then we procede to the hard part of the instance, fighting our way towards the big boss Thermaplugg. We get wiped out once on the way, because we didn't see the alarm robot hidden on a lower ledge who summons lots of mechanical sentries who swarm and kill us. But I ding 35 shortly before we reach the final boss mob. And the group is well organized and we kill Thermaplugg on the first try. Me and a level 33 warrior tanking him, a level 33 priest to heal, a level 38 mage to deal damage, and the level 33 mage doing a good job of running around and pushing the buttons that stop the walking bomb attacks. The mage wins the roll for Thermapluggs good blue ring. Well, at least I get some blue pants as quest reward. They don't have stats, but over 100 armor class more than the green iron leggings.

In the evening my bad luck with gear turns dramatically. A guild group is heading for the Scarlet Monastery, and lets me tag along. At level 35 this is like cheating, the main quest for the monastery is level 42 and red to me. The Scarlet Monastery consists of 3 separate instances, and frankly I'm only useful in the first one. The rest is about fighting level 38 to 40 elite mobs, with level 42 end boss mobs. Most of the time my attacks simply don't connect, and if they do they deal minimal damage. And my taunts are resisted as well half of the time.

The crazy thing is that for not being able to do much, I'm excessively rewarded, being the only warrior in the group. Although I lose the roll, my guild mates let me have the Steelclaw Reaver axe, much better than my Knighly Longsword of Power. I switch to this axe, but as my axe skill is a bit lower than my sword skill, I hit even less with it for a while, until my axe skill catches up. The group also lets me have Herod's Shoulder, which I can't even use yet. And in a short break we take between the instances, I hand in a Scarlet Monastery quest in Thunders Bluff, and receive a Vile Protector shield with over 1000 armor. I now have a total of 2871 armor class, which translates to absorbing 46% of the damage dealt by an attacker of my level. Plus whatever the "block 17" of the shield is able to block, I admit I'm a bit hazy about how exactly shield blocking works. A true tank.

But the highlight comes from finishing the last instance of the Scarlet Monastery, and getting the reward for that level 42 elite quest: The Sword of Omen. Wow, that's one wicked beast of a sword. From the Knightly Longsword with a bit over 20 damage per second to the Sword of Omen with nearly 30 damage per second (and better boni) in a few hours is a huge step. My character damage per second, which adds the effects of my weapon skill and my strength, is now at just over 50 damage per second. And that is without using any special attacks.

So while I felt a bit useless in the Scarlet Monastery, I am very grateful to my guild mates that walked me through this, and got me all this very nice equipment. That is what a guild is all about, mutual help. I'm doing my part as well, helping lower level players with quests or instances, and providing people with smithed weapons or armor, cheap or even for free if they are broke. In the end it all balances out, and everybody wins.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:59 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Crowd Control

Almost everybody loves the quest system of World of Warcraft. But if you have a closer look, it is actually very hard to describe what exactly makes the WoW quest system better than those of other games such as Final Fantasy XI or Everquest 2. In this article I argue that the WoW quest system is all about crowd control, dispersing the players over the game world, and preventing camping. This results in a more dynamic game experience, where you often move before getting bored with a spot, thus being more fun.

In the numerous reviews of World of Warcraft, nearly every reviewer has something nice to say about the game's quest system. Unfortunately these nice things are usually terms like "immersive" or "fun", rather slippery descriptions. From the point of view of a developer who wants to create a new game with quest system as good as or better WoW’s, it is difficult to pin down exactly where the "fun" is coming from.

One can for example easily argue that the quests of Final Fantasy XI are more immersive than the quests of World of Warcraft. FFXI has several quests in which the story is told with a cutscene. And these are not just prefab movies, but are created on the spot, showing *your* character talking to the quest giver. The best WoW can do is addressing you by name or class in a scrolling quest text, which isn't half as good. EQ2 improves on scrolling text with voiceovers.

An alternative explanation is that it is the sheer number of quests that makes WoW so special. This argument also fails. Everquest 2 has at least as many quests as World of Warcraft, if not more. In fact, EQ2 allows you to hold 50 quests in your journal vs. 20 in WoW. And managing your quest journal in WoW can even become more of a source of annoyance than of fun; for example if your journal fills up with elite quests, you might both be unable to do them now due to lack of a group, nor be willing to delete them, as when you eventually find a group you won't have the time to go visit all the quest givers again.

Are the World of Warcraft quests fundamentally different from the quests of other games? Not really. Most of them are about killing monsters, with either the kills being counted, or your having to loot quest items from them. A few quests involve clicking on objects, but usually involve killing the monsters around that object as well. Everquest 2’s quests fit exactly the same mould. If you are lucky, you get an escort quest in World of Warcraft; these are slightly different, but still mainly involve killing all the monsters on the path taken by the NPC you have to guard. Really innovative quests like Counterattack, where you have to participate in a big battle between the Horde and the centaurs, are few and far between.

So what differentiates the World of Warcraft quests from those of other games? The first thing you notice if you start a point-by-point closer comparison is that WoW quests are much better rewarded than quests in other games. If a quest sends you to kill ten wolves, you will probably get as many experience points from the quest reward as from killing the wolves, plus probably as much money as their loot was worth. And while the wolves might potentially drop a useful item, it would be a stroke of luck if the dropped loot were actually something you were looking for. In contrast, the quest reward item is predictable, so you can quest for what you need.

The bigger quest rewards have a huge impact on the way people play the game. In games where quests only provide a small portion of the experience points needed for each level, two phenomena appear: camping, and player concentration. Camping is the act of staying in the same area for a long period of time, killing the same monsters over and over, every time they respawn. If killing monsters is your main source of experience points, this camping might well be the optimal strategy. Killing the same monster repeatedly is easier than looking for new monsters. You not only save the time of actually hunting down the next mob, your fights also get easier because you learn very well how to beat this specific monster. Unfortunately, while being optimal in some games from the point of view of experience points per hour, camping also can become boring very quickly.

It gets even worse when player concentration appears. It is impossible for a game developer to perfectly balance all monsters. Some of them will be slightly easier to kill, or yield slightly more experience points than others. And then word gets around, that at level 10 the best xp can be gained by camping the orcs in West Commons. Now not only are people bored in static camps, they also risk strife with other players who want to camp the same "best spot". Groups that force players into groups add to this effect, because finding a group is obviously easiest at the most popular spot. If you want to be original and hunt somewhere else, you won't be able to find a group there, and thus might not be able to kill anything. Final Fantasy XI suffers extremely from this.

As Geldonyetich likes to mention, experience points given for each kill are something that went wrong in the transition from pen and paper roleplaying games to MMORPGs. World of Warcraft's large quest rewards return to the original idea of D&D in which experience points were mainly awarded for finishing an adventure, not for repeatedly killing monsters.

While in games with small quest rewards you basically have the choice of camping for maximum xp or doing a quest for some money or item, in World of Warcraft these two choices align into one. Doing the quest not only gains you the money or item, but it is also the optimal strategy for gaining the most experience points. And with one magical snap of the developers fingers, camping and player concentration are gone. You killed your ten wolves, so why would you want to stay there and slay more wolves? Instead, it’s better to move on and kill ten bears, which get you another quest reward.

Now all Blizzard had to do, and they did that quite well, is to cover every corner of the world, and every monster, with a quest of an appropriate level and reward. Players are so busy moving from one quest to the next that they don't even notice that they aren't camping. The game play of World of Warcraft is naturally dynamic. And while you still might collide with people hunting for the same wolves as you are, these people will be gone off to the next quest quickly enough. There are no "best spots" any more; players are far better distributed over the different corners of the world, and the game's content is far better utilized.

This article has also been published on Grimwell.com
- posted by Tobold @ 8:35 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 22

Today is an 8-hour maintenance downtime of the European servers. Yippee, it's from 7 am to 3 pm, where I am at work anyway. One more advantage for me of playing on the Euro servers.

I start the evening with Raslebol. Mission: Get my quest journal a bit emptier. I have lots of quests in Thousand Needles, so I head there. As the quests are around level 28, and I'm level 32, I solo them quickly enough. And thereby ding 33. One quest is really hard, killing a level 30 elite panther, but luckily I can group with another warrior who happens to be on the same quest, and together we manage it, although it is close. Not many hitpoints left at the end of combat.

I don't finish all Thousand Needles quest, because my D&D friends log on, and the Alliance beckons. We hit the Wendigo cave near Kharanos together. They don't have the habit of sticking together yet, so we all die once, but that doesn't really matter. XP are good in a group, as we are killing at a very fast pace. I end the day with level 8 on my gnome rogue.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:50 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 21

I start the day with an adventurous journey: Travelling with a level 4 gnome rogue from Dun Morogh to Gadgetzan. It turns out that the only difficult part is getting through the wetlands. The crocodiles in the swamps are close to the road, and have a huge aggro radius on low level characters. I die three or four times, but of course every death brings me a bit closer to Menethil Harbor, where I eventually arrive. I take the boat to Theramore. Looking at the map I decide that swimming along the coast to Tanaris is a lot safer than crossing the Barrens and Thousand Needles. Good call, it turns out that there are no monsters whatsoever on this part of the coast, and I arrive in Gadgetzan without further deaths.

As you might remember, the idea is to put up my worthless newbie loot, a primitive rock tool, for 2 gold on the auction house, and then buy it with my troll warrior, thus effectively transferring gold from Horde to Alliance, which is otherwise impossible. I put up the item, camp, log in Raslebol, bid on the rock tool, and get an error message: "You are not allowed to bid on your own auctions". Clever. Probably implemented to prevent people from bidding up their own goods with a mule, but it also works against my idea.

I refuse to give up. Fortunately there are nice people in my guild. One of them comes to Gadgetzan, I give him 2 gold, and he buys the primitive rock tool in the auction house from my gnome. I log on my gnome and receive ... 1 gold 70 silver 20 copper. The 20 copper are the fee the gnome had payed in advance. Looking up the info on the WoW website I find: "All auctions will be initially charged a deposit fee. The deposit fee is refunded upon the successful sale of the item. All successful sales are charged an auction consignment fee which is extracted directly from the final sale price. All fees are higher in Gadgetzan.". Seems the fee in Gadgetzan is 15%. Well, 1 gold 70 is still a lot of money for a level 4. Aeh, level 5, the exploration xp on the way here made me gain a level. :)

So Atchoum, my gnome, uses his hearthstone to teleport back home, and goes to Ironforge for some shopping. I bid on the lowest level dagger in the auction house, but that is level 9. And I buy tons of bags. A 10-slot and three 8-slot bags for me, and a load of 6-slot bags for my friends. Can't afford 8-slot bags for everybody. As I'm now level 5 and in Ironforge, I go and train two professions, herbalism and alchemy. Then I go back to Kharanos and buy a complete set of level 5 leather armor. And start collecting herbs. I seem to be the only herbalist around, there is an abundance of herbs to be picked, with seemingly no competition. Nice change from mining, where the ore nodes are few and far between.

I switch character back to Horde, Raslebol. He has 4 deviate fish in his mailbox, we he bid on in Gadgetzan. I cook them into Savory Deviate Delight, for which I had a recipe, but didn't know what it was good for. I eat one of them, and it transforms me into a human pirate for 60 minutes. Lol! Thottbot says it produces random effects, all of which are more or less harmless. A bit like talking to the apprentice witch doctor in Senjin village. Very funny, I like it.

Now being a pirate I run around in Ogrimmar, and then to the Barrens, confusing a lot of people on the way. I visit the pirates south of Ratchet, to see if they are still aggressive to me when I'm a pirate. They are, it is just my looks that change.

Meanwhile my D&D friends arrive one after the other, so I switch back to Atchoum and we play in a group on the Alliance side. I give them their bags. We finish all the quests in the gnome/dwarf newbie area, and head over to Kharanos. There we take the quest for the beer basted boar ribs and start hunting boars and other animals. Not really a success, the boar ribs drop only rarely. The main problem is finding enough boars to kill, and in a group of four the quest is four times more difficult instead of easier. But at least we all level to 6, head back to Kharanos for training, and call it a day.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:59 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 20

Day 20 brings a big change in the game for me. I start the evening as usual with Raslebol doing some auction house transactions, and some smithing for guild mates. Out of metals again, I'm going mining. But I don't get far before the three guys from my D&D group appear one after another. We organize a private chat channel, which is very easy in WoW, just /join channelname, with the channelname being something agreed upon via tells. We spend some time chatting and planning, and the result looks like this:

We create one new character each, which will be dedicated to playing only in a group consisting of us four. As our "solo" characters are Horde, and the other guys haven't seen the other side yet, we create these new characters on the Alliance side. And all in the same starting zone. The starting zone that offers the greatest variety of possible classes is the one for the dwarves and gnomes, due to having two possible races. So we end up with me as gnome rogue, plus my friends as dwarf paladin, dwarf priest, and dwarf hunter.

This evening we play them up to level 4, which isn't all that much. But Real Life ® intrudes and calls one of my friends away, and we have been slow getting things organized. Still lots of things to discuss and to learn for them, for two of them it is their first day in the game.

I then spend some time running with Raslebol to Gadgetzan, because I have a plan. Normally there would be no way to transfer money and items from my rich Horde character to my poor Alliance character. You can't send mail between the sides, and you can't open a trade window either. But there is a neutral auction house in Gadgetzan. So I wonder what would happen if I put up something completely worthless on auction there with my gnome rogue, and then buy it for 2 gold with my troll warrior. That should effectively transfer 2 gold, which for a level 4 rogue is a princely sum. Only problem will be getting the level 4 character to Gadgetzan, because that means crossing several high level zones. I'll try that tomorrow.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:59 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
WoW Journal - Day 19

Day 19 starts well, with one Green Iron Hauberk sold last night, one selling during the day, and a third one at least being bid on. I blow the money on gems and some iron, to keep the economy rolling. I'm at 190 smithing skill now, and still level 32 with Raslebol, my warrior. I need more iron, so I decide to head towards Desolace. But while riding the manticore to there, I get disconnected. Just a minor upset of the connection, but as I haven't logged off in the regular way, it always takes some minutes before I can log the same character back on.

So instead I log on another character, Tobold, my undead warlock of level 7. Hmmmm, I haven't played him for quite a while. And as I explained in my post about the WoW experience point bonus, the bonus for not playing a character is capped at 1.5 levels worth of double xp, which you get after 10 days. So I decide to play Tobold tonight.

I had started skinning and leatherworking with Tobold, just to gain some light leather for Raslebol's smithing. That is a bit outdated now, my smithing now needs heavy leather, and I'm far from being able to skin that. But Raslebol sent his excess linen and wool cloth to Tobold, so I got many stacks of that. I drop leatherworking and start tailoring instead. Always useful for making bags, and a warlock is wearing cloth armor anyway. With the linen I have I reach skill 60 in tailoring, enough for linen bags, not enough for working with wool yet. And I see that to advance tailoring beyond 75, I need to be level 10. So I start adventuring, to use up my accumulated xp bonus.

Playing a warlock is much different from playing a warrior. Even with a twinked dagger, I'm not doing any significant damage with my weapon. But I got lots of damage over time spells, and one direct damage spell. Plus I got the imp pet, who is throwing firebolts as well. But I have to play a lot more careful, pulling from maximum distance. And whenever I get attacked by two mobs, I better run. Three and I'm dead. The only advantage is that running away is easier, as the imp often acts as dummy target, dying for me. And he is easily resummoned.

I do a number of quests in Tirisfal, most of them against the "evil" humans, who just won't let us peaceful undead alone. :) I quickly reach level 8, where I gain a fear spell. Helpful when attacked by several people. I could probably try fear-kiting, but I don't bother with that yet. That is a bit the disadvantage of easy games, advanced strategies like kiting are rarely used, because they take too much time and aren't really necessary.

I do more quests, and level to 9, then 10. I end the day with a trip to Undercity, where I get the quest that will eventually get me my level 10 pet, the voidwalker. But as it is getting late, I decide to leave that for another day.

Outside the game, I experience the effects of viral marketing. I had given my buddy key from the collectors edition of WoW to one of the guys I'm playing D&D with, so he could try the game for free for 10 days. He liked it, and decided to buy it. And of course we talked about it during yesterdays D&D session. So today I get two more or less identical mails, from two other guys of the D&D group, saying they bought the game as well, and which server am I on? Hehe, the plague spreads. Note that the three guys never played a MMORPG in their life, always being discouraged by the monthly fees. But WoW was able to overcome that hurdle.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:59 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments