Tag: shared topic

Encounters That Rock!

Posted on by Gazimoff

Earthen Pantheon after their first Lich King 10-man kill

There’s a great shared topic over at BlogAzeroth right now: Naithin asks what causes an encounter to ‘click’ in our minds. When do we reach that point when a boss fight switches from being a difficult challenge to possible, then to trivial? It’s a good question, but I don’t think it’s just down to preparation, planning and persistence. There’s something else besides.

For me it’s the music.

I’m not talking about the melodies playing in the background, serenading us from the moment we’re greeted with the login page to the point we click the Exit button.  I’m talking about the soundtrack that plays in my head.

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Mementos and Keepsakes

Posted on by Gazimoff

I think that as much as I hate to admit it, I’m a creature of habit. Over the years I’ve managed to collect vast quantities of technical gubbins that I keep thinking will be useful “one day”. The gizmos that were once geek fashion items, but have since been consigned to the plastic crate of a gadget graveyard. And it’s not just smartphones that have lost their shiny sheen – all manner of clips, cables and converters are lying around just waiting for a chance to become useful again.

Separate from all this electrical junk are the things that help to mark parts of our lives. Things like my collection of collector’s editions. Things like the architectural schematic of a lighthouse that hangs on the wall, marking the place where my wife and I married. Things like the huge Lego kit that I bought with my first paycheck. Stuff that probably has little monetary value, but are still things that are very important to me.

It’s not just in the real world where I have my keepsakes or mementos. The BlogAzeroth Shared Topic this week was about these virtual items that take up space in the back of our bank vaults or the bottom of our bags. The stuff we can’t bear to part with, even though it’s no longer useful. I’m no exception, so let me show you the stuff that a mage carries around through the expansions.

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Games Within Games Within Games

Posted on by Gazimoff

I used to exclusively play single-player games, drifting from title to title from month to month. After I’d finished eating through the content that the developers had created, the game was finished for me. Achievements or multiplayer modes didn’t exist nearly as much back then, so there wasn’t really anything else left to play for.

Singe I started playing Warcraft, I’ve bought what, maybe a handful of games? All of them titles that I’ve wanted to try out, that have looked cool, that have felt right.

Know how many I’ve completed? Zip. Nada. Zilch.

I must suck as a gamer or something.

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Getting Ready for Cataclysm

Posted on by Gazimoff

At the moment there’s this imaginary calendar inside my head. It’s telling me that sometime before the end of the year, Cataclysm will be released. It’s the kind of thought that brings a smile to my face, like remembering that I’m going to have steak for dinner tonight. It’s not quite up there with the feeling I’d get if I had… say two tickets to see Ramnstein, but it’s in that rough ball park.

I have this kind of ritual that I go through when preparing for an expansion and Cataclysm is no exception. It’s also something that came up with Blog Azeroth’s shared topic this week. Going through three phases of preparation for a computer game expansion is probably a bit extreme, bud didn’t you hear that Warcraft is Serious Business?

The first one always starts with me trawling round the computer game stores twice a week, asking if they’re taking preorders. This goes on until they’re either sick of the sight of me or they’re finally taking them. And not just any order – I want to lay my hands on the Collector’s Edition. I’m not happy until I have the piece of paper in my hand telling me that it’s preordered. I also make sure I have preorders with about three or four different stores, just so that I can improve my chances of getting a copy.

As soon as a release date is announced, I book time off from work. The expansion is serious business, and I want to make sure I can enjoy it without interruptions! It also means that I can be one of the first to have the expansion installed, patched and running. At least that’s the theory.

The second phase starts around six months before the expansion when I realise that my bank is full to the seams with crafting materials that I’m never going to need or use. I’ll make some kind of noise about having a bank clearout, but it never happens until everyone else has done it and the prices have fallen through the floor. Anyone for a Frozen Orb, stack of twenty for five gold?  How about frostweave, fifty silver a stack? Maybe a few eternals?

I’ll also start looking at my characters, thinking about which one I want to get to level cap first (my mage) and get all the new recipes (also my mage). I’ll be taking a look at which characters would give me a good range of abilities on each server that I play (or which ones will help my mage the most) and make sure they’re prepped and ready. If there’s any gear that I can pick up for the alts, I’ll have a look at creating it. This’ll usually happen just after I’ve had my bank clearout, so I’ll end up buying it back and making a huge loss.

I’ll also make plans to clear out my PC and make sure it’s running smoothly as my third phase. I’ll promise to uninstall some games, delete some crap and maybe do a system reinstall in order to make sure everything’s sweet. I’m even thinking about picking up a copy of Windows 7 this time just to get off the concrete boot that is Vista. Of course none of this happens until the day of release when I’m holding the shiny disc in my hand and it’s telling me I don’t have enough space. Cue swearing, shuffling things around, more swearing and finally getting the thing installed. It’s then that I find out that it runs like a slug because of all the new effects and I end up playing it in 16-bit Sega Mega Drive mode until I fork out for a computer upgrade.

The upgrades also sting me. They’re never on sale, even though I’ve been browsing and passed up on a ton of special offers. I also have to choose the “ship it to me by rocket car or faster” delivery option. It usually costs me almost as much as the upgrade, but I tick it because I’m an impatient sod who has to see these crazy new effects immediately. This is also accompanied by comments from the Significant Other who’s still making do with the same machine she had five years ago and is wondering when it’s going to be her turn to upgrade.

So yes, I *am* getting ready for Cataclysm, just like I was getting ready for the previous expansions. But I’m also realistic – I’m lazy and easily distracted and will probably be cursing again sometime near the end of the year.

(Photograph of Palermo Airport’s luggage carousel by Bjs)

Injecting Chaos

Posted on by Gazimoff

I’m a big fan of Lego. I like to buy the big Technic sets – the ones with pneumatics and gears and motors and so on. When I buy a set, I open the box and meticulously follow the instructions, sorting the pieces by size and colour before assembling whatever was on the front of the box. It gives me a sense of satisfaction, building a machine that does something.

Point is though, it’d probably be a bit boring to blog about. You can imagine what it would be like – going through the same motions and doing the same kind of things week in, week out. It would get old, fast.

It becomes much more fun when you throw away the instruction book, take a hammer to the car or whatever it was you made and inject a little bit of chaos. Doesn’t matter what it is. Just the mere act of playing around and making something new from the pile of bricks you have is enough. It’s a lot more fun as well – the challenge moves from being “what set of bricks do I buy next” to “what do I want to make that’s fun?”

It’s even better when you get feedback. Other ideas pop up – people suggest ways of improving the model, of other things that you could build, or share what they did that was similar. It’s also a bit of a loop – ideas create ideas.

So why am I talking about Lego on this blog? Well, it comes from Anea’s idea for this week’s Shared Topic. Would having no comments at all make us better bloggers? Would it leave us free to pursue our whimsies and desires? Or do we rely on the comments and feedback – are they integral to the creative process?

Just like buying a box of Lego, I could write about Warcraft in exactly the same way. But wouldn’t it be a boring, just reading about what quests I’d done or how my raidgroup was doing? Wouldn’t it be better if I talked about the quirky things I’d got up to with other people, what opinions I held about aspects of the game and where I’m heading next? Wouldn’t it be even cooler if it started a discussion, where we bounced ideas and thoughts around, and I used them as the basis for new topics every so often?

It’s why I write – I like to think that a new post that I write is the start of a discussion, not the end of it. I don’t like to provide the definitive answer or the conclusive proof in a blogpost, just an opinion of what’s worked for me.

For me, getting feedback on what I write is essential to this process. It might be about a problem that I’m facing, in which case I might be given a solution. It might be about an idea, in which which case others might chime in with theirs. It might be about something I’ve experienced, which might encourage people to share theirs. All of this creates positive responses, which in turn generate new posts, which generate new responses, and so on.

Besides, a little bit of chaos is a good thing.

The Flow of Gold

Posted on by Gazimoff

Gold is something that we pretty much take for granted. We get rewarded when we turn in quests, we loot it from our fallen enemies. We spend it when we want to buy something from the auction house or when we want to get our equipment repaired. It’s all automatic – a few mouse clicks and we’ve either earned or spent thousands of coins. But do you ever think about where the gold you have comes from, or where it goes to?

I started writing this as a response to Tarinae’s Shared Topic, about how Blizzard is pushing account security and how it seems to be matched by the efforts of gold sellers. But in order to explain why gold selling is wrong, it’s worth explaining the problems it causes in the first place. Before getting into the meat of the topic, there’s a few things you should consider:

  • If you are a Guild Master or Officer, you owe it to your guild to ensure that you have an authenticator registered to your account. You should also ensure that anyone with access to anything of value in the guild bank also has an authenticator. If there is anyone in these positions that does not, you should revoke their guild bank access immediately.
  • You should ensure you practice good computer hygiene. Ensure that you have a virus checker installed on your computer and make sure you keep it up to date. If you use FireFox, install the NoScript addon. If you do click on a dodgy link by mistake, NoScript will make sure that the site cannot install anything onto your computer.
  • If you are a Guild Master or Officer and see one of your members get repeatedly hacked, question their computer hygiene practices. If they don’t do anything about it, you may want to consider suspending them. Do your best to help them, but ensure that they take responsibility for their situation.
  • If you use an email address for your World of Warcraft account, don’t use the same one when posting on blogs, registering on Warcraft-related/Guild forums signing up for other game betas and so on. Hackers harvest these sites for addresses to send scam emails to. Keep your Warcraft email address to as small a number of people as possible.
  • Get an authenticator. Seriously. Either get the key-ring, the free iPhone app or the cheap mobile phone app.

In almost any MMO there are two economies working in parallel. The server economy is designed to regulate the flow of gold into and out of the game. Gold enters the game when you vendor an item, when you loot gold from a creature or when you get rewarded for completing a quest. It also exits the system in much the same way, in repair bills, food/water purchases and so on. By contrast the player economy is based on the trade of gathered materials and finished items, either via the auction house or a fee/tip for crafting. The theory is that the server economy should provide a steady inward trickle of gold, while the player economy should ensure a constant circulation of gold in exchange for goods and services.

The theory is that the two economies work at an even pace to keep the player economy relatively constant. The price of materials stays relatively static from one day to the next, meaning that the price of crafted items is fairly easy to predict. Although the price of goods would tend to decline as demand gradually dries up, the constant of influx of gold from the server economy provides a steady rate of price inflation.

All well and good you might think, but what happens when you start to disrupt the economy by introducing gold farmers and hackers? It’s worth splitting out the two here, as they have a subtly different effect on the economy.

A gold farmer is interested in maximising the amount of gold they accumulate while spending as little as possible on armour repairs and consumables. Although this might mean that they don’t consume much (if anything) from the player economy, they do want to make sure that their auctions sell for the best possible price. They’re unlikely to severely undercut existing server prices, instead making sure that their materials are competitive. Of course if gold farming gets out of control then it heavily deflates prices, meaning that players can’t compete against the gold farmers.

It may also mean that players struggle to gather materials themselves as they’re forced to compete with gold farmers. As resources are limited, a high number of gold farmers means that there are fewer resources available for players to harvest. It can become so problematic that players are forced to buy materials from the gold farmers at the auction house purely because they are unable to gather them themselves.

A hacker by contrast wants to sell everything as quickly as possible before the account owner regains control. Anything that they sell at auction will be priced up to shift quickly, and can often crash a market. Think of the times when you’ve seen titanium ore or eternal elements being sold at a very low price – chances are they were being offered by a hacker. On a server where hacking is a regular occurrence the market can be continually flooded by “fire sale” items.

You might think that this isn’t really a big deal. You probably play the game in a specific way – you might be a pure-bred raider or a determined PvP’er. You barely touch the economy – only picking up the occasional flask or uncut gem from the auction house. But by the same token, you want to be able to make sure that the cost of what you’re doing stays roughly the same. It’s great to know that 50g this week will buy the same number of flasks as 50g next week, or that the gem you need for your latest gear upgrade will cost roughly the same. If you need a quick bit of cash you’d like to know that your spare herbs or ores will sell for roughly the same amount, week in and week-out.

Why do the gold sellers bother to hack at all? Surely they know that they’re damaging their own reputations and annoying the very people that they hope to sell their services to? It’s true that some gold sellers do take their reputations seriously, but not all of them. Eurogamer recently ran a series of articles on gold trading, explaining how the industry was structured.

A hacker or gold farmer will sell accumulated gold to a Collector. The gold collector might employ farmers or hackers directly, or they might subcontract or freelance it, paying the agent a fixed value for the gold they provide. The collector then passes the gold on to the Seller, again at a fixed value. Once the seller has the gold, they then offer it to the player by running a website through which gold can be bought, as well as customer support. As a result the person you see spamming trade chat might work for a completely different company to the gold farmer or hacker.

The increase of account hacking guides on the internet means that the person stealing your account could come from San Francisco instead of Shanghai. Either way the effect on the economy of an account hack is the same – freefall prices, guild disruption and loss of an account for several days. The gold might not end up being sent to a gold seller, but might just as easily end up in the coffers of a rival guild on another server.

Finally, hacking a computer is a crime. In the UK the Computer Misuse Act covers everything from unlawful access to obtaining information. From there it becomes a grey area – the gold you buy from a seller may have been partly obtained through illegal channels. There’s the potential of being in receipt of stolen goods, or of complacency or conspiracy to commit a crime. It’s not been tested in court, but in these litigation-happy times it probably won’t be long until we see the first account-hack related lawsuit arrive. By buying gold, you run the risk of leaving yourself open to being sued later down the line. Regardless of the legal risks, it also perpetuates and endorses the damage to the economy, degrading the game experience for both yourself and other players.

So there you have it: why gold selling damages the game, why hacking increases the problem and why buying gold is legally dubious. I’ve also covered what you can do to ensure than your guild and it’s members are protected, and what you should do to maintain their trust in you.

Still feel the shortcut is worth it?

Hitting the Reset Button

Posted on by Gazimoff

Videogames seem to be full of choice these days. It could be the moral choices presented by games like Mass Effect 2, or the theoretical choices of gear selection in World of Warcraft, Heck, it can even be something as straightforward as choosing a driver in Mario Kart. But if you lost your saved game or started a new account, would you make the same choices? Would you choose the same character and take the same path, or would you try your hand at something new?

I’m trying to tackle this question for the BlogAzeroth Shared Topic this week. For me it breaks down into three chunks – would I still play a mage, would I still do the same things at endgame and would the character be roleplayed differently? I’m only going to try tackling the first one this time round – I’ve already covered how my playstyle has changed, while my roleplay histories would be another post entirely!

I’ve tried three other MMO’s while I’ve been playing Warcraft, and with each of them I tried something different. My mage was sitting unloved and unplayed while I saw healers and tanks become the heroes and stars. I decided that when I started a new game that I’d play one of these roles – that I would be the one that everyone would be wanting in their party or raid. As a result, with Lord of the Rings Online and Age of Conan I thought I’d try and be clever.

With LOTRO I tried playing a healing Minstrel, while with AoC I rolled a tanking Dark Templar. Both ended up as dismal failures – my minstrel felt unwieldy under my fingers, while the Dark Templar didn’t have many opportunities to actually tank leaving me with a boring solo grind.

After three months of play in both games I ended up cancelling my accounts. To this day I don’t feel that I gave the games a fair chance. I’ve since tried to go back and give LOTRO another go since but keep on getting stuck on a known issue between Windows Vista and the client software.

Aion was a different story. I rolled a mage and had a great time. I levelled up, specialised for even more damage and killed things even quicker. I felt like I was in my element, and general game engine clunkyness aside it kept me entertained for a while. The problem emerged when I started looking outside of magecraft and towards other areas like professions, crafting, dungeoneering and so on. It’s strange, but although the “mage” aspect was solid, the other aspects of the game weren’t sufficient to hold me. As with the others, I eventually unsubscribed.

So if I had to start over, would I stick with what I have or would I try something new? To me it’s pretty clear that when playing MMOs I have an affinity for a particular role. I’ve even played all the other classes in Warcraft to some degree and still keep coming back to my mage. That’s not to say that the other classes aren’t as good, but it’s because I know who I am as a player. I’ve tried to prioritise other roles in other games and it’s harmed my enjoyment of that game as a result. I’ve come to learn that being honest about what I prefer to play is better than trying to be tactical about what role I select.

I think that there are other players who feel the same –who have a core role or class that they’re happiest playing, but might occasionally dabble in other roles in order to try something different. Even though we might be playing a priest or a paladin, we always know that there’s a class that we’ll go back to.

Standing in Awe

Posted on by Gazimoff

There’s an old saying that we experience entertainment with all of our senses. We might watch in amazement at a breathtaking movie, or rock out with a CD from our favourite artists. We might enjoy the smell of a rich cup of coffee or a freshly baked loaf of bread, or savour the taste of a succulent steak or fine wine. The theory is that by tickling the senses, we generate an emotional response – we cheer at a movie, cherish the coffee. The question is, can the same be said of videogames? Moreso, can those feelings be rekindled time and again?

This shape of question was set as the BlogAzeroth shared topic this week, and it’s a tough one to tackle. This is partly because trying to recall the experiences I felt five years ago when the game launched is a struggle in itself. But also there’s the bigger question – does a game need to continually need to entertain us in order to survive? Or does it become like a soap opera – we log in, we see the same familiar names and faces and feel warmed by just by being part of something?

To tackle the first, I’ll go back to where my videogaming was at the end of 2004. I’d been cajoled into playing an MMO called Horizons (now Istaria) by my girlfriend. It was a clunky experience, but provided a contrast to my usual fare of first-person shooters. I’d been brought up on the rich visual fare of Quake (proper 3d!), Unreal (emerging from the crashsite-wow!) and so on.

In the lead up to the European launch of World of Warcraft, I’d been getting heavily into Half-Life 2. If you’ve played this game, you’ll know that it’s a visual feast. You’ll also know that it’s jammed full of loading screens – go down a pipe: loading screen, open a door: loading screen. Even so, you get the idea – I liked to go stomping around places while being hideously overpowered.

Once I’d got past the installation-patching-account creation-character selection malarkey, my patience was wearing pretty thin. I remember thinking that this game needed to impress me a ton if I was going to stick with it.

The strange thing was that I did. There were so many things that impressed me about the early days of the game – the flight from Thelsamar to Ironforge and back was spectacular, really showing off what the game was capable of. It didn’t bother me that the graphics weren’t up to my usual fare – the atmosphere and style had been loaded in by the bucketful.

I remember being taken on a journey by the guild I was with to the Shimmering flats, running through Dustwallow Marsh and the Thousand Needles just to make it to the raceway. I remember climbing the mountain in the Barrrens just to see the Shrine of the Fallen Warrior. The little touches, the way the world had been crafted, it constantly amazed me.

Of course, there comes a time where you’ve seen every location. You’ve seen the sun set over Freewind Post, or the hidden treasure of the Crystal Cave. The awe started to fade, the novelty to wear off. It was just at this point where my game changed.

My girlfriend told me that there was a raid forming to Molten Core, and that they were looking for mages in Ironforge. If I was quick, I might be able to get invited. I’d never raided before and was only dimly aware that it happened, but I was keen and adventurous (and importantly, attuned to the dungeon!) so I contacted the raidleader. I instantly got an invite and got told to head out there.

The next five hours were some of the most intense, chaotic and riotous that I’ve ever spent inside any game. It was also a ridiculous amount of fun and I’d definitely caught the bug. I’d walked away with the Arcanist Belt and was determined to collect the rest of the set. Two weeks later the girlfriend joined me on a raid and won the Core Forged Greaves. I phoned her afterwards and all she said for half an hour was “Shooooess!” For a self confessed pure roleplayer, she was thrilled to bits to have earned them.

I’ve seen this cycle repeated in the subsequent expansions. The initial discovery of new content will always be a visual feast, from the lush plains of Nagrand to the lore-rich steppes of Zul’Drak. The excitement of getting new spells is never something that will wear off, particularly when it’s things like Spellsteal, Invisibility and Mirror Image. But like anything, this awe fades over time, until the arcane becomes the mundane.

In between the content patches and expansions when there’s nothing new to explore or experience, it’s what’s created by the players that keeps a game fresh. People to team up with and raid with, friends to have a laugh and joke with. Podcasters that remind you why you’re playing the game, or bloggers that share their own tales. In the end, it’s all this that keeps filling me with awe and surprise long after the novelty fades.