Expansion Retail Forgot

Expansion Retail Forgot

Yesterday was of course the launch of Legion, or more so the first full day of the expansion.  I have a lot of memories of acquiring copies of World of Warcraft throughout the years.  When it launched in 2004, I was firstly in the “never pre-order anything” camp, and while there was a line out the door and down the sidewalk at Gamestop… I was able to stroll into Walmart at midnight and pick up my copy.  I remember Walmart having this huge display in electronics, the size you would have expected for a major movie release.  With Burning Crusade, getting a copy was significantly more difficult, but I still managed to roll into Walmart at midnight and snag one.  I did however spent the next few weeks going out at lunch trying to find copies for folks who could not for whatever reason seem to get it in their area.  When Wrath was released, once again I did the Walmart at midnight thing… and this time there was actually a line.  I had an awesome conversation with another warrior tank while standing in line waiting on our boxes.  However by the time Cataclysm came around… I believe that was the first expansion you could purchase a digital collectors edition and I did so happily because I was getting “too old” to be doing this midnight madness.  I had reached that point in my life when I just wanted to be able to log in and play, and didn’t care too much about how that happened.

With Pandaria I somehow ended up with another physical collectors edition, and at this point I don’t even remember how or why.  Now traditionally speaking around here… World of Warcraft Collectors Editions rot on the shelf.  Not in a large quantity, but up until recently there have been a couple of physical copies of Warlords of Draenor available at various stores.  I have a second account, and could use a second key… so yesterday I checked a few places to see if there happened to be one available.  The idea was that I would ultimately trade that CE key with a friend who just got the normal copy, given that I already have the digital entitlement on my battle.net account.  That plan however backfired in the most spectacular of ways because no one seems to have Legion in any form, let alone Collectors Editions.  Throughout the day yesterday I heard tales of Amazon switching orders to arrive on September 29th, and listened as several friends had to dodge and weave to get around this delay.  Throughout the day I checked Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and Gamestop…  none of which had so much as a single copy.  When I looked up Legion on the Best Buy website, it stated that there were no copies available in a 250 mile radius.  250 miles includes the Dallas Metro, Kansas City Metro, Fayetteville/Bentonville Arkansas area, Wichita Kansas, and Oklahoma City.

I refuse to believe that every single copy sold out, because that just seems impossible.  What seems far more likely is that there has been some massive shipping mishap, that involved delays to the central southwest.  The result however is that it feels like Legion was the expansion that retail somehow forgot.  While Warlords of Draenor was supposed to be this expansion to invite people back that had been gone a long time…  it feels like Legion is actually delivering on that promise.  It is going to be sad if it somehow misses its opportunity simply because the copies of the game are not available.  The truth is… my only interest in a physical Collectors Edition is the fact that it includes the soundtrack.  I wish that they would add that to the list of digital entitlements that you get when you buy the collectors that way.  I can also always use a new mouse pad at work, so there is always that bonus as well.  I however more than anything wanted to walk into Walmart and see a big display of pretty new copies of the game, in the hope that it might entice players to return.  It has been great seeing players coming out of the woodwork for the first time in years, and I guess part of me wants to see that continue.  Pretty boxes sitting on a shelf taunting you when you go to get groceries… seems to be an awesome way to guilt players into coming back.

Expansion Retail Forgot

As far as the expansion itself…  so far I am enjoying myself.  It is a much slower paced expansion, but that is precisely what I had wanted.  I spent all night playing the game, from the time I got home around 5ish until when I finally went to bed around 10:30.  During that time I managed to make it to level 101 and about 15-20% into level 102.  As I had originally planned I went Fury this time around… which is quite honestly the first time since the launch of the game that I will not be leveling my Warrior as Protection.  I am sure somewhere something is turning over in its grave…  but more than likely it is just the old me that used to take pride in saying “Real Warriors Level Prot”.  Fury is fun as hell, but there was a period when I started on the artifact quest… that I questioned my decision.  I am guessing that maybe these quests are just a little “overtuned”… because I remember in beta thinking they were rough.  I died probably no less than a dozen times when I tried to do this as a Deathknight, and I probably took a half dozen deaths as a Fury Warrior.  Towards the end I was super carefully picking my way through the zone a single mob at a time, and kicking myself for not bringing any food into the quest.  That was ultimately the hardest part was that I had no real way other than bloodthirst to get back my health.  I finished it however and once I started Stormheim… everything leveled out and I have had no problem taking down any of the starred mobs solo.  So far I am enjoying the hell out of myself, but I don’t feel like I have spent enough time in game yet to give it much more than a thumbs up.

Valor and Bribery

Valor in Name Only

Valor and Bribery

One of the big struggles I have had coming back is wrapping my head around the current state of Valor currency.  There are many times in playing World of Warcraft where actually having a large volume of ancestral knowledge about the game…  makes it a severe detriment.  One of the big things that interested me in WoW was the fact that they were supposedly resurrecting the concept of Valor points earned from doing things.  In the past this was important because ultimately you were able to purchase raid quality gear, and they served as a sort of “bad luck token” as my friend Rylacus and I thought of them.  While they always sort of half assed the implementation, it did provide you with a bit of a way to offset your bad loot roll luck, by purchasing much needed tokens from saving up valor for several weeks.  Granted it could have been a better system all along had they just offered all of the drops from raid bosses, on a vendor somewhere for varying prices to denote the importance of the drop.  There were expansions where this token was done extremely well, and others where all you could purchase were a sequence of frustrating “offbrand” items that were never quite as good as the ones that came from the raid.

However as a raider… I always appreciated the fact that there was generally some upgrade path that I could take without relying purely on my luck.  It never bothered me that those “damned dirty casuals” were able to get the same gear I could from out of the raid.  In fact I liked the fact that there were many paths to end game viability, and I always thought this was one of the things that World of Warcraft struggled with.  Apexis was supposed to be the solution to all of our gearing problems, or at least it seemed like that was intended to be the case.  The problem is that the items purchaseable from Apexis crystals were significantly worse in every possible way for certain specs.  Maybe this was just something that I experienced in playing Gladiator, one of the Warlords expansions special snowflake classes… but none of the gear from the Apexis vendor was in any way viable.  As a result I simply ignored most of it and stockpiled my tokens hoping that at some point they would be useful.  Now we zoom ahead to this patch cycle, and I am raiding on both my Alliance and Horde characters…  so I kept thinking that surely I would be swimming in Valor by now.

Currency of Bribery

It turns out that is absolutely not the case, and the new version of Valor while similar in some fashions… has some fairly stark differences.  In the past the best method of Valor acquisition was simply doing the raid every week.  Each boss downed gave you a bit of Valor which added up quickly… and often times capped you without much effort.  Now however the priority is massively different, and it feels like they are doing something that Square Enix is the master of.  Bribing players to do community focused content.  I finally looked up what actually awards Valor and it was a surprisingly small list of things.

  • 100 Valor of the first Heroic of the day.
  • 300 Valor for per mythic dungeon each week.
  • 500 Valor for completing the weekly bonus quest.
  • 150 Valor for completing each wing of Hellfire Citadel on LFR.
  • 75 Valor for completing each wing of Highmaul and Blackrock on LFR.

So essentially this is no longer the currency of raiding and has instead become the currency to bribe players to participate in group content through the party finder.  I am not sore about this or anything, because it makes sense.  If you want to fix the queues… you need to get people into the system and what better way to do that then dangling something over their heads.

The only slight problem I have with it is that in theory they should have just introduced a brand new currency.  Valor has a very specific meaning to me, as being the highest tier of raid currency.  Justice points similarly has a very specific meaning to me… with them being the lower tier of activity currency.  For me at least there has been a significant amount of cognitive dissonance in trying to adjust to Valor simply being this upgrade only currency.  There is no gear purchasable with Valor, and instead everything you can purchase still relies on Apexis crystals… a currency that I am pretty certain will ONLY exist while we are on Draenor since lore wise they simply would not make sense anywhere else in the setting.  What makes this doubly confusing is that we still have two different PVP currencies, being Honor and Conquest… and they still function in the same roles as Justice and Valor once did.  Honor being the generic activity currency, and Conquest being the rationed and limited… and therefor more powerful currency.  It just feels like they uprooted Justice and Valor for no reason… especially if they are going to further confuse things by introducing it in a completely watered down version later.

Late to the Party

I realize I am bringing this up a month late, and as such my discussion loses a lot of its validity in the eyes of many people.  When patch 6.2.3 initially was released… I was fighting the desire to come back to the game.  Then upon returning, it took me awhile to get adjusted to everything that happened in 6.2 let along the new patch content.  So as often I am lagging behind.  Largely I am not really that frustrated, but mostly pointing out my thoughts on the matter.   As always I get to this point where I feel like a tweak here or a tweak there would greatly improve the game play experience.  Where I am standing now however is that I feel like even though I really have no more upgrades available, in order to be the best player I can be… I really need to be running LFR every single week on every character that is available.  If I do this however I am absolutely certain to burn out and be discarding this game into the waste bin once again.  As awesome as I think Hellfire Citadel is as an actual and genuine raid… it is equally horrible in the LFR experience.  So I am at this wall of… do I just accept that I won’t be progressing as quickly as I could be… or do I keep throwing myself against some content that I am not enjoying that much.  I have to say…  I am actually finding myself missing daily quests that I could do for Valor points.