I am still very much lagging behind my peers in World of Warcraft, but I am hoping that the long holiday weekend will fix that. Last night I hit 12 on my Undead Warrior and am about halfway into that level towards 13. I have officially completed all of the quests in the Brill area and wrapped up the last quest chain between Undercity and the Tirisfal this morning. I have no clue what level Grace or Mor or Tam are at this point, but based on my figurations once I hit 13 I might be viable to start tanking Ragefire Cavern, which I am hoping for maybe tonight.
In other news… House Kraken has exploded, and I mean that in a good way. As of last night we had 43 members of the guild with only a couple of those account for alts. I believe there are still several people who won’t be creating characters until the weekend. That said I also started up a chat channel this morning and am going to try and get everyone joining it, and conversely snagging people as they group up with good folks. The idea being that if and when we actually decided to entertain raiding, we will have a social channel that we can operate out of.
I am a huge proponent of non-guild-based raiding. Most of us in AggroChat cut our teeth doing that in either the Late Night Raiders or Last Horse raids on Argent Dawn. I really like that clear delineation between what is “Guild” stuff and what is “Raid” stuff and as a result I have always had a bit of a distaste in my mouth towards “Raiding Guilds”. I feel like the social interaction of the guild suffers for the sake of the raid. This is different than a casual guild who happens to raid together like Facepull. Maybe the distinction doesn’t mean anything to anyone but me… but it does me. Also it makes it way easier to pull in random people from other guilds that they don’t want to leave for the purpose of clearing content.
Last night would have been more productive were it not for a few points where I needed to log out either to swap machines, or to come back upstairs to help watch the print jobs. This is the absolute worst I saw the server queues last night for Bloodsail Buccaneers. This is not a sign that I want everyone to swap over to it and roll on our server, because I rather like having small queues and being on a chill Roleplaying server. I am extremely happy that unlike Cactuar in FFXIV we can at least reliably get our friends onto the server to play with us.
WoW Classic: A thread.
What is this phenomenon? Why do people want to go back to the place that everyone agrees was terrible in so many ways?
Tam posted a massive thread on twitter yesterday which is worth a read, and highlights a lot of my own experiences about coming back to classic. The one point that I really feel hits home though is that Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes and early World of Warcraft were story engines in a way that modern games just are not. The frustration and friction often times turned into these elegant stories about how you overcame adversity to push through the process of completing a specific task.
When I look back upon my Everquest days for example, it is moments like clearing The Hole with nothing but rusty weapons to get back or corpses, or getting called in the middle of the night to come rez someone who got killed in Kael Drakkal. When I look back upon Dark Age of Camelot it is stories of us accomplishing things through perseverance and many corpse runs that we should not have been able to accomplish with way less than a full party. When I talk about City of Heroes I am going to talk about the stupid things I managed to accomplish with my Katana Regen Scrapper and some of the horrible deaths that I took when things went wrong… that and the horrendous rubberbanding.
I also wonder if this lack of generating stories is why that MMORPG blogging has been a dying art over the last decade. These games used to give us a constant font of tales to tell, that were actually often times humorous or interesting to read. Tam and I have talked about this many times, but gamers love to tell tales of things that happened in games. The problem is most games just don’t really give us an interesting story to weave anymore. “I spent my night pushing through ten levels without encountering any obstacles” is not exactly a compelling tale.
However if you have to tell a story about how you weaved your way through a camp carefully body pulling enemies, and then getting completely overwhelmed right before you got to the final boss. That is a tale of defeat but it is an interesting tale nonetheless, and I have already had several versions of this tale in my memory. I’ve grouped up with so many random people to work together on shared objectives and in some cases this has worked out swimmingly… and in other cases we have died horribly. I’ve also gone out of my way to be that random stranger who saves people from death when I happen to notice that their health is a wee bit low.
I’ve missed the era of MMORPGs as Story Engines, and I think this along with many other reasons are why I am having a blast right now. If you are one of the Anti-Classic folks that I am seeing pop up in my timelines… I am sorry. You are going to be getting a lot more WoW Classic discussion from me over the coming weeks… and hopefully coming months. The Kraken has risen and now we are slowly conquering this forsaken land.
