Yeah, I know.
WoW has been sort of the EVERYBODY’S PLAYING IT, SO YOU SHOULD PLAY IT megalithic giant that people either love, or love to hate, or both. Maybe it’s still cool or maybe it’s not, but it still has 9 million subscribers or players or some metric that means a lot of people play it.
I dabbled briefly with WoW over at Lee and De’s house, oh, about seven years ago (while trying to decide if this new “City of Heroes” was thing was where I wanted to be, when I heard all these great rumors about “World of Warcraft”). Under Lee’s tutelage I rolled up a Tauran warrior and went hallooing off into the wilderness.
And, about an hour later, decided I’d had enough cross-country racing when I was in junior high, so I darned well didn’t need it for my MMORPG. Plus, kinda dull and boring missions. Plus weird stuff about being dead and either having to run (again) back, or wake in the graveyard and have something bad happen to your stuff, or something.
WoW became the online gaming Microsoft (or IBM or Apple, depending on your hi-tech era of Nine Hundred Pound Industry Gorillas), and I enjoyed making fun of it and not giving it a second thought.
Until Les, of Stupid Evil Bastard fame, offered, in my CoH Grieving, to introduce me to the game and escort me from first level.
So … WoW is free and pretty un-gimped up to Level 20. So, good for toying with.
And having someone experience to walk me through (chatting via Skype) worked out okay, though, to be honest, I think I could have figured most of it out. WoW uses a lot of industry standards (many of which, in fact, it probably set) in terms of interface and the like.
We rolled up a couple of Pandarens because, well, who wouldn’t? I played a Hunter, Les a Monk. My female Pandaren was nicely zaftig. Les opined his male one actually mirrored his own body structure.
And, y’know what? I had fun. The basics are pretty familiar, the intro zones in Pandaria are nicely laid out, with good stories. I like the graphics. It seems like they’ve filed off some of the dullness and grindiness that the game used to have for beginners. We played for a couple of hours, dinged to 6th level, and parked it (I had other plans), and I really enjoyed the mix of missions and activities. And the setting /story was also quite nice.
Too early to apply my checklist, but things look fairly promising.
I think I’d like to play some more. I don’t know if it’s The Game I’ll Be Playing, but I definitely want to play more (and get Margie trying it out, too).
Not sure if I should be thanking Les, or plotting some dark and bitter vengeance toward him … but I’ll settle for a thanks for the moment.
Why don’t you load it up on my machine?
Well, yeah, I could do that … but … that’s just what you’d be expecting me to do!
ONE OF US! ONE OF US! ONE OF US!
*Ahem*
What I mean to say is I’m glad you enjoyed your time in the game. At level 6 we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s in store. At level 10 you pick your specialization for your class (not as big a deal for hunters as some others as all three are DPS specs, but still a big new feature). At 15 the first dungeons open up along with the Dungeon Finder allowing you to queue up for a random dungeon (where upon you’ll be transported directly in when your group is assembled) or you can chose one in particular (random has the added bonus of awarding you a goody bag at the end). Also at 15 you pick your first talent. Then at 20…
Well, you get the picture. It quite literally is almost an entirely different game than it was 7 years ago. It still has its grindy bits here and there (if you care about earning Faction Reputation and the like), but there’s so much to do in the game that you can ignore the bits you don’t care for without really impacting the overall experience.
So one big question/concern is that Margie and I really have little to no interest in Guild activities, at least not as I’ve heard them described and written about. So, how essential is guild participation to the game (content, advancement, whatever)?
I confess I did hop on a bit later and run through 5 levels with one of the Draenei, just to get a sense of a different zone. Not nearly as interesting as Panderia, but moderately entertaining as far as it goes.
One thing I found interesting was all the mechanics stuff I was already familiar with — autofire build-up powers like in CO … crafting / harvesting seems to play a lot like LotRO …
Guilds are entirely optional. Since the release of Cataclysm there are definite advantages to being in a guild, especially a high level one, but you can progress through the game just fine without one. With Cataclysm guilds got their own leveling system and achievements and related goodies. Some of the perks include things like bonus materials looted from Mining, Herbing and Skinning, giving a small boost (15%) to mounted speeds, lower cooldown on the Hearthstone (15 minutes between uses instead of 30 mins), and (in a level 25 guild) the ability for any class to do a Mass Resurrection for recovering from party wipes in dungeons and raids (a player can only be mass resurrected this way once every 10 minutes or so). Always nice when you accidentally caused a party wipe. That’s just some of the benefits, there are also non-combat pets and mounts associated with guild membership as well.
I would encourage you not to rule out guilds entirely. They come in all shapes and sizes and the one I’m in on Durotan (Knights of the Shadows) is pretty laid back. I’ve never been pressured to participate in Raids (something I rarely do) or anything else I didn’t want to do, but when I felt like running a dungeon or learning how to tank or even a little world PVP (another rarity for me, but there’s two that I do enjoy from time to time) it’s nice to have others around to hook up with. Being in a guild is probably the best way to do Raid level content, but even that has a Finder feature these days to help you hook up with random strangers if you want. That said, they’re still entirely optional. None of the benefits are unbalancing to the point that not being in a guild holds you back in any way.
The Draenei (and, on the Horde side, the Bloodelves) were the first new races added to the game in the first expansion (Burning Crusade). As a result, their storylines are centered around the big baddies of that expansion (the Burning Legion and Illidan Stormrage). One of the quirks of WoW is that there’s so much content that the storylines in some of it don’t get updated with every expansion so, at this point, when you get to the areas that are part of BC the story suddenly shifts to the Burning Legion until you hit level 70 and move on to Wrath of the Lich King and which point all the quests are about the battle against the big baddie at the end of that expansion (Prince Arthas/The Lich King). Cataclysm revamped the Old World (levels 1-60) and had Deathwing as the big baddie at the end so if you start any of the other races (Dwarf, Night Elf, Human, Gnome, and Worgen) then the storyline is post BC/Wrath and all about Deathwing and starting a Pandarian is post all of that (as they’re the latest addition).
So your Draenei will have some Burning Crusade story until he gets to around level 12 to 15 and leaves their starting zone for the Eastern Kingdoms/Kalimdor (Old World) where it’s suddenly the Cataclysm storyline until level 60 when you’ll go to Outland and it becomes the Burning Crusade again and then at 70 you go to Northrend and the storyline becomes Wrath of the Lich King and then at 80 you back to the Old World and Cataclysm’s story until 85 when you head off to Pandaria and that storyline. Whew. Start as a human/dwarf/worgen and it’s Cataclysm -> BC -> WotLK -> Cataclysm -> Pandaria. Pandarians start with the Pandarian storyline, natch. This is something Blizzard would really love to fix, but there’s so much content after 8 years they’d have to revamp that they feel their time is better spent coming up with new content instead of worrying about it. One of the side effects is that the Draenei and Bloodelf starting zones are one of the few places in the game where flying mounts won’t work. They show up as part of the two main continents, but are actually instances similar to a dungeon and as such didn’t get revamped with the rest of the Old World in Cataclysm. It’s not often that high level characters with flying mounts visit either area, though, so it’s not a huge problem.
I played a little LotRO when it came out and I seem to recall it borrowed heavily from WoW. Then again, so did Everquest II. To be fair, many of the mechanics in WoW were well established long before WoW arrived on the scene. Crafting used to be quite a bit more involved, but these days there are very few things that require a crapload of materials. Usually no more than two mats for most things unless it’s a Blue (rare) or Purple (epic) and most of those aren’t as much of a PITA as they used to be.
Cool — thanks for the info, Les.
My concerns with Guild stuff are threefold:
1. Not being required to Raid and participate in massive Guild activities (of the “Okay, all you Clerics stand here and do this activity for the next hour … all you Fighters do this other thing … you’re in the Army now” sort).
2. Not committing to a group and be unable to fulfill my obligations (this is the “guilt” side of #1).
3. A reflexive avoidance of Guild Drama Llamas, having gone through my own Supergroup / Coalition Leadership soap opera in my own time.
None of which are of a concern, it sounds like, if one is careful in picking (or being picked by) a Guild.
I find the space-time complexities you mention pretty amusing, too, Les. We were beginning to see that happen in CoH, as the past few issues had brought invasions from, then war and cataclysm within, the parallel Praetorian world. But even though Praetoria was left in nuclear ashes by the end of that high-end level content … it was still in business as a Shiny Dictatorship for Lvl 1-20 characters to start in.
One rising guild trend I’ve been seeing is friends and family playing together in their own little custom guild. They tend to be small so it takes a lot longer to level the guild up, but it’s more just an easy way to have a dedicated chat channel with friends and family plus extra (guild bank) storage.
In other news, Mechwarrior Online dropped its NDA today. Should be interesting to see what the reports have to say about it.
As to industry standards of WoW, it pretty much ripped off everything from EQ1 and 2…and and made it run on your grand parents 386 and that’s about it. Remember, CoH is older, better, and better graphics than WoW and EQ2.
I would also suggest checking out EQ2, very douable, with the exception of the Heroic Quests (the boss fights take a raid usually, but since folks are always looking to do them, not to hard to get in on one) all the way to level cap.
As Les said, Family Guilds are a popular thing, and not only in WoW. Mark and Alita have a WoW guild that they run around with Alec in.
I’d actually been going to ask about minimum Guild size. Margie and I did much the same with Supergroups in CoH, which gave us a variety of QoL bennies. (*sigh*)
(Speaking of which, I’ve received over 200 hits on my NCSoft article from last night, largely because the Tweet got posted at the Titan Network page in their Twitter widget. Yikes.)
If I recall correctly you have to get 10 signatures on a Guild Charter to form a guild, but once formed you can kick out anyone you don’t want in it. It’s not uncommon when in capital cities (where the Trade Chat Channel kicks in) to hear people offering small amounts of gold in return for signing a guild charter just to get it up and running (10GP for your signature and you can quit once we get it going!). So the minimum number of people a guild can have is 1 after it’s formed.