Funny title, probably a useless article to you. But still … I try.

Even with the help of other players, making it to the top is long road. That journey is one to be enjoyed, as leveling a character in WoW is (for many people) the real game. That said, once you have your first character at max level, retaking those same steps to the top can be frustrating. Going over the same content for the second, third, fourth time is just never quite the same.

Today we have on offer a few simple tools to help you make it through ‘the grind’ in a reasonable amount of time with minimal hair-pulling. Some of these are technical in nature, some are simple techniques, and some are simple platitudes that we’ve found helpful in the past. Read on, and make sure to grasp the handrail tightly up the escalator.

As happens every week, prepare yourself for video and six scenic screenshots from my past week of MMO play. This week I’ve got a pair of videos, each with a tale associated with it.

The first (a regrettably silent film), shows myself and the Shortiez taking on the last threat in the long quest chain in Permafrost known as the ‘Statue Quests‘. Each one is obtained by clicking on a statue in this great room with a table and huge horn in the center. We did the last one this past week, ending with The Horn Sounds. Unfortunately we had to do it four times over because killing the four giants that spawn only counts for one person as quest completion. Lame. Sauce.

The other video is kind of a weird one. I meant to take a screenshot during an Arathi Basin match, and hit the video capture button instead. What I got is a sort of madcap caper flick as I try to defend a flag, get assaulted by a Paladin while futzing with my UI, and basically witness the end of the match (the 1800 resource howl). It’s actually pretty funny … check it out.

Read more

This week’s WoWE is all about the people behind the behemoth:

Day after day, hundreds of thousands of people across the globe play Blizzard’s ridiculously popular game. It’s kind of awe-inspiring to think about, the sheer number of humans all inhabiting the same virtual space.

Most are content to enjoy the experience of leveling up a character, raiding with their friends, or engaging in Player vs. Player combat. Some, simply by their actions or position in life, stand out of the crowd. Their influence has changed the face of the game, and in some cases shaped the game itself.

The word player, of course, can have more than one meaning. In this case, we’re talking about the movers and shakers that have made Azeroth what it is today. From literal individuals on the Blizzard development team, to player-run organizations, to other massively multiplayer games entirely many hands have shaped World of Warcraft’s success.

While I was working on that What You Should Know Before You Roll article the other week, I became interested in incorporating race/class popularity into the piece. I figured interested onlookers would want to know how common a race is, to add that data point into the mix of attractiveness/style/class choice, etc. To do that I referenced the Warcraft Census over at WarCraftRealms.com.

The census gets its data from a plugin, meaning that the information is from a self-selecting group. Only the folks who deigned to get the plugin were counted. By the very nature of WoW addons, I’m going to posit this means overall Warcraft Census has collected data from a more dedicated group of players. The average WoW player (less than 20 hours a week, no 25 man raids) probably doesn’t have any plugins installed.

That said, I thought it was useful enough information to include a few conclusions in that post. Data from over 6 million characters is still a decent-sized set, even if it is self-selecting. I find datamining endlessly fascinating. With that in mind, I thought I’d make some more obvious statements fueled by the service and try to guess at why some things are the way they are.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

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.