Wednesday 22 July 2009

Laying It Down

I was reading about Tigule's (Jeffery Kaplan) discussion about some of the problems with WoW's quests, and started reading the comments. One comment that caught my attention was this, by WildDanimal,
"This is the main reason why I don't play WoW any more. It gets to be a pain in the ass and sucks way too much time for not enough actual enjoyment. Even I don't have time for that, just because I have classes to go to, and I can actually get laid sometimes."
Something I've noticed that seems to occur in most WoW discussions - including the Chuck Norris-ridden ones in Barrens chat, is that someone inevitably ends up gloating about the fact that they can get laid, and always that term, gee, be more creative, at least! First of all, this is World of Warcraft we're talking about, if you're going to brag about anything, brag about some new purple you just got, because otherwise, most people aren't going to care - and even if you were to brag about that, I'm pretty sure most people wouldn't care anyway, unless you were the first one on the server to get it, etc.

Secondly, and this is probably because I'm female, but personally, I don't think it's something worth bragging about, and to be perfectly honest, a guy like that is a real turn-off. If you think it's something worth bragging about, then chances are, you're not getting it very regularly, or you're an ass, which probably explains why you're not getting it very regularly.

I was reminded about another tidbit of conversation from Barrens chat, where a guy said that he told his roommate that he was tired and going to bed because he wanted to play WoW instead of going out to a pub. A few people laughed at that, which was to be expected, but then a few more people chimed in saying that going out and getting drunk was overrated.

I think it's awesome, that WoW geeks can admit to being geeks, rather than feeling like dorks for not having a social life - or at least the social life that go-out-and-get-drunk people consider a social life. Before MrMan5.5, I thought maybe I could meet someone at a bar, but I was so uncomfortable there, that the possiblity of being with someone who considered that their primary form of entertainment, and still enjoying my time with them seemed pretty improbable.

On a completely unrelated to guys, but related to MMOs note, I've been trying to think about what makes a good MMO. I guess this is the topic of discussion for a lot of people, considering the new MMOs that are in production at the moment, and it seems WoW gets a lot of crap from players of other MMOs, but you can't argue with the fact that it does have a very high subscriber base. Whether or not some of those subscribers are just people wanting to play both factions on a PvP server is irrelevant, it's the fact that people are still coming back for more.

One thing I always thought contributed to it, was the way which it allows people to come together, and interact in an environment without it being too overcomplicated. In my opinion, the best MMO would be one in which the players are allowed to play the part of anything, and there would be no NPCs, kinda like the way EVE is run, but you get the problem in that nobody wants to play the boring characters, just like how if you really had the choice, would you prefer to be doing the job you're doing, or be out there in some other glamourous job? There was a slashdot post about how one of the players in EVE was entrusted with an EVE bank, and he was actually stealing money from the in-game bank (money that belonged to other players), and was selling it to players in exchange for real money. I'm a crafter at heart, and so I'd like to be able to sit in a city and craft to my heart's content (Charles keep yelling at my for fishing instead of levelling my priest, but then he heard that there's a water mount that you can only get by fishing - so there!), but I'm terrible with selling my stuff, so I don't think it's something that's sustainable without having to go out and farm materials.

I imagine an MMO without the level grind would be awesome, except for the fact that the level grind teaches you how to play your character. Tsuruya was complaining about how most people don't even bother to level in instances anymore, so when they group together with others for end-game content, they're usually noobs who have no clue what's going on. Unfortunately, I hate the level grind, and I'm so terrible at it. I level so slowly, it took me ages to get my shaman to 60, and even now that I've started playing on Barthilas again, I still can't seem to be able to get my shaman to 70, even though I know where all the quests are and stuff like that. In Guild Wars, there's an option to create a level 20 (the level cap) character as a PvP-only character, which I think is cool, except you can't get all the spells possible, because some spells are only attainable through PvE experiences, and you only start out with a small number of spells, and the only way to unlock more is to have another character unlock them through PvE. I guess one of the benefits to this, is that you can try before you commit hours of your life levelling the character up. Also, I've mentioned this before but GW needs to have jumping. T_T

Player interaction is important, and I know I haven't levelled a PvE character to 20 in GW yet, but one of the things I noticed was how hard it was to find the other people in your party. When they're outside your minimap, your UI doesn't display their location at all, and it requires some combination of either of you pinging and drawing lines all over the minimap, or a poor attempt at describing your location, in order for you two to find each other. Not to mention the fact that you never bump into people outside of cities (both a good and bad thing). I can't even begin to recall the number of times I've been saved by a wandering healer in WoW who decided to chuck a heal just as I was about to die from having pulled too many mobs, but there's no chance of that in GW - which I guess means you should be more careful, but I like the idea of saving someone (maybe that's why I prefer to play healer classes, so I can be the hero! >_>)

Anyway, I think I've given my blog fingers a bit of a stretch, so I'm going to continue this later, if I'm not lazy!

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