07.29.06

Bodies At Rest

Posted in Gaming, The Unbelievers, World of Warcraft at 1:22 pm

[Note: Hah, the sun is shining and there's not a cloud in the sky. There are no fiber-seeking backhoes within ten miles of me, and I've sacrificed several small animals to Lord Jobs and W'oz-Loggoth. Let's see the power go out THIS time. This update is going to happen if I have to sit next to an Ethernet port with a spark plug and a battery.]

Session Time: 3h40m spread between last night and this morning. Logged off at 10:00p, resumed at 10:30a. Advanced Ceilai from 4 to 8. Rest state indicated one and a half “bubbles”.

I’m not exactly sure what it is, but I honestly think I’m not doing something right when I play an MMO. Or rather, this MMO in particular. I have found that the quests I’m offered have become much, MUCH more lucrative once I get out of the noob garden and into what might be considered a “real” area. We’re talking jumping from rewards of 10 copper for collecting 9 items to 1 and 3/4ths silver (equivalent to 175 copper) for collecting three things. Also, I’m more apt to take a quest that has me delivering something or collecting items gained from non-combat situations than I am to take one that says “go into the den of scary monsters and slay them all”. I get more fun out of not fighting than I do out of fighting. Why the hell do I play MMOs, then?

Jonny brought up an interesting point. A lot of the reasons I said I wasn’t thrilled with WoW so far are reasons he doesn’t care for CoH. The problem, I think, is that we’re both working from different definitions and tolerances for “grinding”. So, to try to get a better idea of where he was coming from, before I logged into WoW this morning, I jumped onto my primary City of Heroes character and started going through old missions that I had never bothered to finish. Basically, I went ahead and turned the game into the most boring waste of two hours possible, because not only did I not accomplish anything, I actually managed to break the game temporarily (one of the missions was, in fact, bugged). I’ll give him that– both games have an abundance of boring stretches of just killing monsters. However, usually when I say “grinding” I’m referring to a “street sweeping mission”, where you’re charged to defeat X number of enemy type Y.

The reason I equate the two– because let’s face it, there’s not really a whole hell of a lot of difference between the two– is because those types of missions only serve to break up the long, winding level treadmill into smaller chunks. Also, they force the player to space out their exploration or utilization of some of the game’s more tailored aspects.

In CoH, instanced missions usually correspond to the level of the player (though you can outlevel the missions if you ignore them long enough– which is what I did this morning). This basically means you always have available a set of enemies at or near your level to go through. These aren’t the entirety of the missions, though, as CoH does feature “kill X of Y in common area Z” missions (but less frequently now than before). Is an instanced private mission grinding? Yes. Do I like it better than WoW, where you’re competing with every other yahoo in the world for seven Gnarlwood Mystics? Yes, because in CoH at least I know they’re MY seven Mystics, and not “whoever gets there first”. That said, I have to admit that the spawn rate in WoW does manage to keep the zones relatively populated with challenges. I had to hunt down a named monster– something Dreameater– and after I killed him, I was slain by the four Mystics gang-banging me from behind. ANYWAY, once I ran back to my corpse and revived, Dreamwhatever was back and being killed by someone else.

Now might be a good time to mention something on death. I died for the first time today. And the second. And third, fourth, and fifth times, too. Death in an MMO is a trivial thing, and I’m not complaining that I died at all. I’m actually somewhat impressed with death in WoW. There’s no penalty if you revive yourself save for the fact that you’re going to die immediately after being revived because your corpse is still being used as a chew-toy by the nine monsters what killed you.

I’m getting more used to the UI than I was before. Most of my complaints are just “I’m not familiar with it” rather than “it’s broken”– aside, of course, from the “you can’t move windows” thing. The G15 LCD does give me a slight advantage in that I can see how many inventory slots I have available to me, as well as the durability of all of my stuff at once.

As for the “sameness all over” of the environments, Jonny has it right in one as for CoH. I’d be a bit remiss if I said City of Heroes was an exemplar (ha ha) of excellent city planning. It’s piss-poor in some places. First off, there are no street names! Gah… this isn’t a criticism of CoH. What was bothering me about World of Warcraft, though, is that apparently you are the only person who is a cartographer. There’s no way to easily navigate through the areas (though in the game’s defense it might not have been bright of me to pick the darkest most confusing starting area, either). There are signposts along the road, but that’s no replacement for a waypoint system. You can apparently click on the mini-map to make a funny little noise that does nothing.

To try to see if my difficulties with players not having more clues than buttons on their mice, I decided to willingly go to the so-called “infamous” Dark Iron server. Dark Iron, it shoudl be noted, is home to several webcomic artists’ guilds including Penny-Arcade and the like. I started up a Dwarven Paladin on Dark Iron and prepared myself for the worst. There was nobody there. Might have just been the noob area, or odd timing on my part, or it could have been something else, but I saw all of three other players while wandering through and doing my first couple quests in the tundra. Including one guy who challenged me to a duel, beat the snot out of me, and then said, “heal me”. So, my choices are “idiots” or “nobody”. At least until I start teaming up, though, I’m going to refrain from any more generalizations about the populations of the servers because quite frankly, any game is going to have huge numbers of morons. There’s a relatively small number of “good” people to play with in CoH, too, and they don’t exactly make their presence known unless you know where to look.

So, that said, I’ve got to go and register for the WoW forums now.

The Good: Getting more used to the UI; good habits are starting to form. I’m more comfortable with the control scheme and gameplay flow; there are a couple more interesting quest templates (harvest X, reclaim Y which was stolen by Z). The commerce system kinda sorta works.
The Bad: The average player thus far is an unhelpful jerk who’ll attack your target for no reason other than he thinks you’re in trouble or he wants the monster for himself. Rewards seem to be uneven; i gained 850 from a single quest but 350 from another somewhat more difficult task. Scarcity of money as well as steep prices means players have to make very tough choices about their training early on before they understand the impact of those choices. You should never have to choose between armor/food and learning a new skill.
Opinion Change? Slightly better. The game still hasn’t done anything to piss me off too royally, and some of the things I ragged on it for are remarkably similar to what I liked about CoH. I suppose it’s a “deja vu” thing– I’ve already done it once, why should I do it again?– but I’ll try to curb my comparisons to CoH from here on out because they’re too similar. Instead, I shall judge World of Warcraft as it compares to Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls.

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