Change of Plans

Well this little blog has been pretty much beaten down to the ground. Not that I have nothing to write about WoW or Blizzard, it's just that I decided to move my "maging through Warcraft" efforts to my Russian blog (that I write for my guild mates). I still play the game every now and then, not as much though. Sometimes you just feel like none of what you're doing in the game is worth the time or the effort. Yep, yet another burnout. Only this time I'm not going to look for something else to play, I'm just going to take a break from MMOs altogether. Plus my WoW-friends (sounds kinda lame, doesn't it) have suddenly quit the game. So I soon realized that WoW for me was more about the people than the game itself.

The Magree Blog is going to become a general blog about real life things that fascinate (or infuriate) me. I don't really know how often I'm going to post stuff here, at least I hope that there will be enough things happening in my life to spark my interest. Or I can just through in the usual rotation of a daily routine "get up - go to work - work my pants off - go home - pet the cat - pet the dog - get a drink with a friend or two - sleep". Fun stuff!

But seriously, I'll try to keep the blog relevant. It's going to be about human relations, music, politics and whatever else that comes to my mind.

A Little PvE Can't Hurt

Well the Cataclysm excitement has worn out a bit. I'm still playing WoW and still feel pretty bored with WoW's PvP. The burnout has pretty much passed but I try to find something interesting to do in the game. Due to my blasphemous nature I decided to go PvE and through myself at the mercy of the deadly boss dolls (sorry, mobs). Instances in WoW are like Alterac Valley plus 10. Thanks to the recent changes in Patch 3.2 I can now get some nice PvE gear without actually spending too much time raiding. The Trail of the Champions is a big loot pinata, so I'm happy to say that gear isn't such a big deal anymore. Again thank you, Blizzard, for raising the quality of life in the game.

Hardcore raiders may bitch and moan about the game's turn to a more casual audience, but the majority wins, so put a sock in it. PvE, as most of the things in an MMO, is as good as the group of people you're doing it with. I'm back with my old guild and I actually have fun running heroics. It is an awesome thing that Blizzard decided to give the players a good reason to run the basic Northrend insctaces and experience the quality of these short and fun pieces of art. Raids are great and all, but there are basically three of them and despite the good look, it will get in your nerves after ten or so wipes, so you don't run around staring at the walls. Plus getting a handful of the Seals of Conquest in 15-20 minutes is a bargain.

Dwarfs with Rifles

As I delved deeper into my WoW-burnout, I decided to level my long-lost dwarf hunter. A level 43 character isn't a bad place to start something new in the game. XP for BGs is a very useful thing of course. And it is nice to try another class in PvP. I like the sound of a rifle along with the power to gain frags without doing a lot - my gorilla is such a better fighter than me! But running Arathi Basin with my dwarf hunter reminded me of another character I used to play. He also was short and solid, he had a rifle, but instead of a gorilla he had a turret that went ka-pow. My engy...

Well poopy! I really hate myself for this. I feel that I now miss Warhammer Online (just like I used to miss WoW once). I guess that my WoW burnout is doing its thing. I'm looking for something else to play. I remember the frustration I had with WAR after a few months of playing, the amount of lag, the bugs and exploits. Terrible PvE, zoned world. Order. But the thing is, I'm now so much sick of doing the handful of BGs and a couple of dailies, that I sort of want to do some of the stuff I used to do in WAR: namely, PvP my socks off and forget that PvE ever existed. And why not go to WAR for a couple of weeks or a month or two? Maybe it is polished enough for it to be the game it should have been from the start?

I'm still torn on this. I haven't made up my mind about going back to WAR, while I wait for Blizzard to shake WoW with the Cataclysm. The concept of completely redoing Azeroth fascinates me completely. But for now, I'm bored with Northrend. And with WoW's PvP. I do have my doubts about Warhammer of course. I wonder if there are enough players involved in the game? Will I be one of the few non-40 characters and be forced to be running around all by myself? Are there any substantial changes to the game? I've got some thinking to do. There is one thing for certain: I have to take a nice long(ish) brake from WoW in order not to burn myself out to the point of no return. It is either giving WAR another try or quitting MMOs altogether for a while.

But the engy does look sexier than the hunter. Hmm...

MMOs and You - The Burnout

Patch 3.2 got me giggling like a baby. I was simply overwhelmed with joy! I didn't (and don't, and probably won't) care a slightest bit about the new raiding content, however the the new BG - Isle of Conquest - got me extremely excited. It is full of fun toys like ehhh...pretty much every vehicle Blizzard can through at you. And I love it. The new BG is a nice break from Lake Wintergrasp, which started to really get to me (and I bet to every regular Wintergrasp-enthusiast). So I would step on it on my way home from work to get to the new "toy". All in all, Isle of Conquest is a work of art. And of course we can't forget mounting up. It is now fun! Some new pants and a ring you can buy in Lake Wintergrasp and some hot druids. And a new animation for fishing...I think. Anyway, thank you, Blizzard.

With that said, I still feel a sense of boredom with the game. Don't get me wrong, the new features are fun, but the new car smell will wear off soon enough. And it is wearing off. So I' m even thinking of laying WoW aside until the next expansion, which has me pumped out of my mind. Maybe I should contain myself for a year and a half only to prance on sweet new content rapaciously? WoW Cataclysm does sound a bit cheap to me actually. But I don't effin' care! Destroy the world to make room for new ideas? Knock yourself out, Blizzard! WoW does need some major reshuffling. But for now, I'm just bored.

The problem for me lies in the fact that I don't see any other MMO coming out in the near future that could draw my attention like WAR did. I'm simply playing WoW because I've fot nothing better to play. Single player games are practically dead for me, even though the experience in this type of games may be 10 times the Isle of Conquest, but playing alone and surrounded by nothing but NPCs is just sad. But I very often question the point of playing an MMO. If not for just leveling your toon. Gear gets redundant after a while and you'll never finish the achievements. So why spend your free time doing what ultimately proves to be pointless?

I guess it is human nature to socialise in different ways, even if those are based upon pissing off the opposite faction in PvP. But playing with/against other people is what makes MMOs so attractive to me. People shape the inanimate world of the game and give each realm a certain spark that fosters the development of the server. Even the fact that some dummy can drop the prices at the Auction House makes you want to log in just to keep up with things. And it doesn't have anything to do with the "I can be a hero in this imaginary world" crap. Yes, there may be some hardcore RPers who take on a personality, but for a vast majority of players their character is an extension of themselves. And you cannot take on a different personality in-game. The anonymity of the on-line world brings the real core of the people playing. You can try acting as someone you are not in the real world, but you are what you are in the MMO.

The whole division between RL and on-line is incorrect to my mind. That means calling YouTube unreal. Real people shape the "on-line world", while MMOs merely provide a certain framework for people to socialise in. Yes, that framework can bore you at times and it makes you take some time off the game. But if you are generally into gaming and gaming with other people, be it your friends or a PUG, you pretty much see the point of playing in the long run. An individual wants to be part of a team or community; doing stuff together and overcoming obstacles is what drives people to an MMO. That is the point - sharing you experience, your joy or frustration with others. It is kind of like when you are watching a really funny comedy alone, you wish there were somebody to laugh it out with.

And there are times when you want to do something else or just take a break from that which used to be fun. It is the natural course of events in society. But in the long run you will come back simply because humans are social creatures. We are addicted to other people and to keeping up with them or competing against them. MMOs are just another way of doing that. A comfortable and sometimes safer way.

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God, it's been too long...
After my final goodbye to WAR I kinda fell into a hole of MMO vacuum. There is just nothing to eagerly expect and nothing exciting to play. Well for me at least. WoW is still the big dog and I have to admit, it is the MMO. I've got to hand it to Blizzard, they are twisting and stretching the game to make it something more than just a PvE game, where phat epics make you king. PvP is getting some love. Even though Lake Wintergrasp is essentially a BG now, thus proving that massive PvP encounters are to big of a task for the devs, WoW is much much more PvP viable. Just don't try to shift the focus. Let WoW be WoW. And please, don't make the Icecrown Citadel into a the Land of the Dead. Or make it a PvP objective. And piss off the hardcore raiders that can't do jack in PvP.

What I want from Blizzard is more BGs, more Wintergrasps and more PvP-gear. I want ranks, different sets and maybe even trophies. Why not? Would it be such a big deal to just provide entertainment for both PvP- and PvE-players? I mean really, there isn't much to do at 80 except raiding, which I don't really enjoy. I don't know what's wrong with me, I just can't get myself down to doing it. I may want the loot, but the thought of spending 4 hours in an instance killing dolls just depresses me. So I focused on my PvP-gear and spent a ton of gold on enchants and stuff.

It is funny actually. I'm constantly demanding things from Blizzard. That doesn't really make me too different from the constantly nagging WoW-geeks, that are always pissed at some kind of imbalance in the classes. Oh, by the way - Paladins are still rolling their faces through BGs. I want some of that on my mage ;). I guess, what I really want from Blizzard is to come up with something so ground-breaking in their secret MMO, that it'll make me wish to spend my Friday night and the whole weekend indoors. I want the feeling of excitement, a new toy to make me jump all over the house in joy. Warhammer was that toy, but it ultimately turned out to be more of a disappointment than anything else.

I'm all over the place in this post. Well I just need to get myself back on track with MMOs and some real life issues in general. So I just hurled some thoughts indiscriminately (like I always do, but I like to think that I'm actually thinking stuff over before posting). The blog is going to be more just a big rant about WoW or WAR, I'm going to rant about real life too now. Maybe I'll intertwine RL with MMOs somehow - we'll see.

A Farewell to WAR

WAR is over for me. I haven't been playing the game for a while and I don't really feel like logging in anymore. I' m not saying that the game sucks and it doesn't deserve the 300,000 player base, but it just stopped being as fun as it used to be. In my previous post I have already written about the game being "shallow" in that there is really nothing else to do but grind through sieges. I guess, there is some fun in the sieges but after a while it gets repetitive and boring. You just want to get it over with and that's it.

Warhammer does have its strong points. The fight mechanic is great and I really enjoyed the abilities of my Engy and Squig Herder. However I haven't been really getting into other classes to get the whole picture, but as far as my experience with the game goes, most of it is pretty decent. The problem is that if a game has a fun fight mechanic it should make the content fun for it to make sense.

What bugged me about WAR was the lack of some in-game ways of coordinating the war effort. Yes, there is the alliance chat and you can schedule the events but most of the planning goes on guild forums. It is not much of an issue to take part in the forum activity but you have to log off or alt/tab out of the game to do so. And sometimes you just want to hop in and actually play. Sometimes you just don't have the extra time to do the offline planning for the city siege (which is still the worst part of the game). An in-game tool for proper coordination would make a big difference.

Mythic has advertised Warhammer as a casual gamer friendly MMO. In reality it demands more involvement and time than most of other MMOs out there. Talk about meeting the expectations. And that is just the issue with this game. It didn't meet the enormous expectations that it had built up while under development. It was supposed to be the next big thing after WoW and it failed. Mostly because of the game being released to early and some of the exciting ideas like a massive city siege being implemented in a twisted way that no one wanted it to be. The devs must have thought that the crafting system was something original and fun to do, and in the official podcasts it was indeed portrayed as something awesome. In reality it turned out just the opposite. I'd rather just have it completely remade.

The final nail was the fact that none of my friends stayed in WAR. It may be the biggest argument in favour of letting the game go. But this issue is the result of the foregoing. The fact that I've got I guild that I enjoy in WoW makes me stick with it. Even though Blizzard refuses to give some consideration to the Mages. And it made the Wintergrasp dailies weekly. And it gives Druids new skins while the Mage is stuck with the crappy looking fireballs.

P.S. I'm still going to keep my eye on Warhammer Online. Who knows, maybe in a couple of months it'll turn out to be a hell of a game. It still has the potential.

The Secret MMO

Blizzard has allegedly stated that their new top-secret MMO is not going to be anything Starcraft related. I say allegedly because I heard and read so much rumours that a don't know what to believe. Even if some Blizzard guy would come up to me and say that to my face, I would still question it. I any case I am more in favour of the new MMO being a completely new IP. That makes things even more exciting. For me at least.

The problem with the Universe of Starcraft (or whatever) is that it is to narrow for Blizzard, and if they want to "kill WoW" with the new MMO, they have to make it so that everyone would be interested. Personally, I'm not a big Sci-Fi fan, and even though I was pumped about the possible Starcraft MMO, I had (and have) my reservations about it. Dudes running around with swords appeal to me much more than marines with guns. Except the Zerg. Love me some bugs.

The MMOFPS is something people have been talking about recently. Despite the innovative tune to the genre, I don't think it is going to be it. Again, I just don't see Blizzard making an FPS, Valve maybe, but not Blizzard. I've been asking some people in my guild, and it turns out that most of us would still prefer it to be an RPG. But if the swords, spells and dragons with Lich Kings is a read book and Sci-Fi is to narrow, then what is left?

I know one thing, the current loot and gear system has got to go. You cannot expect people to keep doing the same old raiding, whining over loot and showing of the gear as a symbol of success in life. Please make it more skill oriented, Blizzard.