Or: Why I can’t wait to play Valve’s first MMO.

I was sitting in my hotel in San Diego earlier this year, pondering a blog post and the day’s events. The sun was on the horizon and to keep the back of my mind occupied I popped on the television. Watching cable TV is a rare treat for me. Primarily I watch specific TV shows via iTunes or Netflix, so channel surfing is really only something I do for the 30 minutes or so I’m on the elliptical at the gym.

Animal Planet, Discovery, and other channels sometimes run shows on zookeeping or zoo design, and I just can’t get enough of that stuff. What can I say, I like animals and how stuff gets put together? In any case, that San Diego evening I entertained myself by occasionally looking up to see a hippo being fed or a bear cave being cleaned.

The thing of it is, in some ways those zoo animals have it better off than your average MMO player. I’m not just talking about free food and no rent - I’m talking about enrichment activities.

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Far be it for me to poke fun at SOE (heh), but I wanted to offer up my two cents about something that’s been bugging me for a while. The next expansion for EQ2 is, I’m sure, already well along in development. The last one was great, and I’m really looking forward to participating in that content. I do have a criticism, though, and I’m hopeful that the next big EQ2 content drop can avoid the mistakes of the past.

Rise of Kunark’s box is (to put it succinctly) not very good. I don’t mean it looks bad - it’s a fine looking box and all that. But the marketing folks on this particular project mashed together a bunch of stuff that’s downright confusing. It makes me very much question what the intent of the box was, and (because I’m that kind of guy) that makes me want to understand the intent of what I’m seeing. So today I have a dissection of the Rise of Kunark box … starting with that handsome Dark Elf gent on the cover.

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My general rule of thumb is that when I see something I want to comment on negatively out in the blogosphere, I tell my wife (she rolls her eyes) and I feel better. I’m an opinionated jerk but I’ve managed to keep some of my particularly assy tip-of-the-tongue snark to myself. But … I’m sorry, I just gotta vent a bit. On Thursday Tobold made me want to rip my eyes out of my head. He starts with a provacative statement, offering a possible future where Blizzard offers microtransactional autoleveling for World of Warcraft. It’s a joke, of course, but he follows that with:

“You were probably disgusted by the thought that somebody could pay dollars to reach a certain level or get a set of epic gear without playing the game. But the sad truth is that some people do exactly that. There are powerleveling services, honor point grinding services, arena point services, and anything else you can think of. If you wanted, you could create a fresh account, make a level 1 character on it, then give the userID and password plus a bundle of dollars to a powerleveling company, and receive the account back some weeks later with your character now level 70, having an epic flying mount, two tradeskills at 375, and a complete set of PvP epics.”

I know he’s making a point here, and my eye-ripping isn’t directed at Tobold per se. That said … the level of bigotry, snark, and close-minded aggression people have towards the idea of microtransactions and alternative business models is staggering. While I’m not sure I buy Cameron’s ‘rent a friend’ idea, it’s a pretty compelling argument. Even on top of that why would it be a bad thing, exactly, for Blizzard to offer up special servers that had a buy-your-own-70 service? They’re already offering characters on the Arena servers for a low, low cost; that gives you one specific slice of the WoW experience, at high level, on a microtransactional level. What would be wrong, exactly, with extending that to the raiding experience?

A green-decked 70 would get a ton out of mechanical utility out of high-end raiding, on top of the personal satisfaction from taking on that content. All Blizzard would be offering would be another way to experience a slice of Azeroth. The best thing to do would be to keep those characters locked at 70, too, and offer a bump to 80 (for a fee) some predetermined time after Lich King content is generally conquered.

I think they’d make a bundle on this service, and if the price was right I’d probably even partake. This would be the perfect way to get a static instance group going; everybody chips in to kit out a group, you grab your gear and go. Meet once a week to take on a new instance, and enjoy all the fun of that content without the months of grind to get there.

I really hope they offer this someday. It’s obvious that Blizzard is intent on the max-level experience being ‘the game’, and every barrier between players and that goal seems to be made to be broken. They’ve already reduced the time investment required … now all that remains is to demolish that fence completely.

Weak sauce this week, and I apologize for that, but whatchagonnado? I played plenty this week but have no video evidence to back it up. Instead, I’m going to offer you the usual sextet of screenshots along with a unique live-action video.

Enclosed, Scary Door-style, is a short clip from a session of the Shadowrun tabletop game … probably circa 2004? This slice of gaming bliss is one of the things I just freaking love - me and a bunch of my friends around a table with some dice. To give you a sense of who is who, when the camera settles down we have the following: directly in front of the camera to the right (the elbow) is Kathleen, further along the table is her husband Brian, at the far end is Ben, out of sight to the left is Alan, directly left of Alan is my wife Katie, and I’m behind the camera.

To set the scene a bit, they’ve just come back from an extended period away from Seattle to find that things have gone badly. Their apartments and vehicles are bugged, people have been ‘checking in’ with acquaintances, and Katie’s character’s mother has gone missing under strange circumstances. That’s about all you need to know; they’ll sort of work through some interesting ideas over the course of the video.

Let me know what you think of this randomness; Hope you’re looking forward to a good weekend.

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So today was a big day for me, in a good way.

• The first Massively Speaking podcast went up on the website. No RSS feed or iTunes yet, but there will be. Go check it out, I think it went really well for a first offering. Yes, I still have a podcast here. Expect to hear from that feed again soon.
• We had an amazing day in general on the site. A video exclusive, a couple of great features; Cameron continues to rock so hard it hurts. I was generally very proud to be working at Massively today.
• I won not one, not two, but three Alterac Valley rounds. Warsong Gulch is this weekend, and I’m looking forward to it. Horde pwns our battlegroup in the bracket Hackworth is in right now.
• Today was also my last day at Slashdot.org. It’s like, for real now. My Facebook page says so and everything. You know it’s serious. Since I’m not going to have a lot of opportunities to talk about my time with the site, I’ll say this: Working at Slashdot was a singular experience. I’m really glad I had the opportunity to do it. I’m thankful to Rob Malda and the other editors for giving me the chance to do it. I feel lucky that I can say I participated in a site that’s - kinda - a part of Internet history.
• Final Score: 12761 posts. That’s about 11 a day over the course of three years.

Hope your day was good too, blog readers.

Yeah, yeah, lore is fluff. But a lot of people (myself included, actually) find WoW’s backstory kind of interesting.  I certainly agree with David’ assessment over at Timesink - WoW has more compelling lore than EQ2 as an example.

I am fully aware that a lot of this is completely subjective, and people’s opinions will vary. I love EverQuest II, it’s a great game, but when compared to WoW, EQII does not feel like a “world” as oppsed to a bunch of loosely connected zones. I’m not criticizing EQII’s use of zoning, that never really bothered me, rather, EQII’s zones feel like zones. They feel like arbitrary areas created to adventure in with no connection or relation to any other parts, nor do they evoke any sense of historical importance.

I try to unravel the complicated threads of the Alliance racial backstories in my weekly WoW Exposed column for GameSetWatch.

While sci-fi’s played-out tropes have been rehashed and thinned down somewhat in recent years, we haven’t had a truly great genre shake-up for fantasy fans. The result is that even World of Warcraft, as successful and entertaining as it is, bogs down with an endless amount of backstory and genre cliches. Despite that, the lore of Warcraft is interesting stuff. There are a lot of compelling elements, individual tales that you can follow along through the thousands of years of sketched out storyline.

If you ignore the clap-trap about who specifically did what when or the endless back-and-forth between all-powerful entities, there are interesting characters and situations to focus on. Consider this the first in an ongoing series of articles looking at the backstory of Warcraft, with an eye towards making the material as approachable as possible.

I have another piece up on GWJ, a little rant that sort of all tumbled out in one go on Sunday. I’ve um, been watching a lot of Ron Moore’s show. Right now just working my way through early season three. I expect to be caught up soon so I can start working through the current season. Oh Baltar. When will you ever learn not to trust the crazy Robo-females? There’s a life lesson in there somewhere I think.

“Battlestar Galactica” is important. It’s not just a fantastic television show, a landmark series in the history of the medium. It’s not just a high water mark for the concept of ‘reimagining’ older stories. It’s important because Ron Moore and the show’s production crew absolutely destroy the crufty sameness of what ’sci-fi television is.’ The tropes of Star Trek and Star Wars are so familiar, so well-tread, that they’re almost played out. Sci-fi TV shows are still being made as if one mediocre show from the 60s is the template for modern storytelling.

In many ways games are operating in the same model.