Various Thoughts
Here are some WoW-related things I’ve been thinking about for the past few weeks, but haven’t had the time to sit down and write out a full article on. I might come back later and do an article on some of them, but I want to go ahead and post some thoughts.
Raiding
I’m now raiding on two different characters - Warlock and Warrior - with two different guilds. Adrenis is pretty much done with Karazhan. There are a few more drops that I could get for him, but for the most part he’s ready to move on to the 25-mans. The most valuable thing I can get from Kara now is really the Badges of Justice.
I took McGraken into Kara for the first time about a week ago. My Alliance guild, Paradox, doesn’t have a great need for more tanks, so I decided to go with a Fury spec and be a DPS warrior. I went with this build here - I did put a few points into Prot because I sometimes am asked to off-tank (on Moroes for instance) and I usually still tank when I run 5-mans.
I’ve been in an interesting situation both times that I’ve started raiding in BC. On both Adrenis and McG, my gear was not really up to par for Kara, but my guild had been running it for a while in both cases and invited me to come along anyway. On the one hand, that’s fantastic for me because it lets me go ahead and see new content and get better gear. On the other hand, it’s a bit daunting going into a 10-man dungeon, knowing that I won’t be able to pull my weight as I should.
The first night on McG I came in dead last in DPS, beating only the tanks and healers on the charts. I think the guild leaders knew what to expect, and we’re pretty casual anyway, so it wasn’t too big of a deal. All the same though, it’s been very nice to get some good gear upgrades and be able to help out more in the raid.
Since I’m DPS on both Adrenis and McG, I’m able to compare the results I get on both to see how I can improve. First thing I noticed was this: Adrenis can break 900 DPS on non-AoE bosses fairly regularly. McG is around 350 to 375 DPS at the moment. There’s a large gear gap between the two, but I don’t want to DPS on McG unless I can kick butt at it. So that is now my goal for McGraken: 900 DPS before WotLK comes out.
One other thing to mention about raiding is that the more that I raid, the more I realize how much time is required to be a raider. Aside from the three hours each night required for the actual raid, you have to be playing a ton at other times to make enough Gold to support your raiding habit. Potions, Elixirs, Enchantments, Gems, Repairs, Gear Upgrades… it all costs lots and lots of Gold.
I only raid a couple of night a week, and I still have to make a good bit of Gold to keep up with it. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy what I’m doing in WoW, or I would make a change somewhere, but I can see how it could easily get out of hand.
Daily Quests
Has the proliferation of dailies changed how you go about things in WoW? One of the recent gear upgrades I got on McGraken was finally getting all of the mats to craft my Fireguard. Among the required mats are 20 Primal Mana and 20 Primal Shadow.
I farmed a good bit of the Primal Shadows, but eventually I realized that it would probably be more efficient to do my dailies on the Sunwell Isle, and then just use that Gold to buy the Primals from the AH. Even with the recent price bump on Primals that came from the 2.4 Patch, I think I still came out ahead. Have you noticed this on your server?
Another thing I’m pondering is when I upgrade my Fireguard to Blazeguard, whether it would be better to run Heroics for the Primal Nethers, or if I should just buy them as well. In that case, I think running the dungeons will be the best method, as I will get BoJs as well, but it’s an interesting question to think about.
Other Things
Egwene works in an office in real life, and they have a number of tech support guys there who run the computer network. She was talking to one of them a few weeks ago, and mentioned that I play WoW. (She may have been staying late that night to work because I was raiding. Have I mentioned she’s awesome?) Anyway, the tech guy said that he had heard good things about WoW and had a number of friends that played it, but he didn’t because he refuses to play a game that he has to pay a monthly fee for.
I thought that was a very interesting perspective. I’ve been paying a monthly fee for gaming for several years now. Not only WoW (2.5 years roughly), but I used to play a lot of games on Xbox Live, which required a monthly fee as well. As more and more games start to have an online/multiplayer component to them, I think we’ll start to see more and more monthly fees being charged in some fashion. There are a number of MMOs that are free to play, but they are usually smaller, less popular games. I don’t foresee any MMO with WoW’s popularity being free to play.
***
One advantage that consoles definitely have over PCs for gaming is the fact that you never have to fiddle with the hardware. I’ve just spent the last three weeks trying to get a working video card ordered and installed, and I’ve been about ready to break something at times. I think I’m finally done messing with the insides of my PC, but I’ve thought that more than once over the past couple weeks.
***
“Honey, since we’re leaving town tomorrow for four days to go to your brother’s wedding, I’m going to get up early and do my dailies before we go.”
Umm… I’m going to file that under “Things Not To Mention To Your Wife”.
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I’ll just make a quick comment here about the fee for MMOs and leave it be. Simply put, the idea of not paying monthly fees for MMOs started (I think) over in Korea. Regardless of where is started tho, it’s spread over the Asian block of gamers and has proliferated to the point that Asian gamers REFUSE to play an MMO with a monthly fee. WoW has all but dropped off the map there. The top games in the Asian areas are all free to play MMOs. Now that said, “free to play” MMOs are a misnomer. They are not “free”, only free of the monthly charge. They require real money for in game ITEMS. Sure you don’t have to, but if you want the “Ub3r L33t” gear, you’re gonna pony up some cash, not gold. Basically people who put their cash down for the gear will have an advantage over the guy not paying a dime.
The upshot of all of this is that in the Asia block for Video games, and also growing in the European block of gamers, is a complete intolerance for the “monthly fee” style of charging for an MMO. We here in the US are the only ones seemingly happy with the monthly fee set-up. Now, seeing as how video games seem require world-wide success to really make money, this is problematic for companies like Blizzard and what-not. I fully believe WoW is completely safe, simply because of how huge the installed base is/was before this trend came about. However I do believe this is PART of where the problem lies with other start-up MMOs. With the monthly fee structure, they literally aren’t being adopted in any other country, and with WoW so dominant here in the US, the install base for an MMO is far too small for the makers to get a decent income to keep the game going.
So the upshot of all of this is basically this: We in the US don’t mind the monthly fee. Overseas however, the trend is dying a horrible death and forcing world-wide manufacturers to start creating on a different payment structure. The Asian block for gamers is the LARGEST block in the world. The US is second. Thus without a solid hold in both territories, an MMO often fails. More, the expectations of MMOs seem to differ vastly between these cultures as well, beyond payment schemes. I still remember vividly a question posed to a Japanese video game reporter (I don’t remember the name, I apologize. I only know he worked for one of Japans larger gaming magazines) about why games in Japan didn’t feature the ability to create your own characters. The Asian man looked shocked and asked in an increadulous voice “Why would you want to do all that work?!? You put the game in to play, not to sit there and work!!” (This is paraphrased, it’s been a few years, but the answer was similar. The big thing that stuck out to me tho was how the Japanese man responded, that the idea of customizing your character was “Work” and not the least bit enjoyable). The specific implications of that aside (Like why so many spikey haired idiots are forced down our throats in JRPGs) the overall suggestion is that the culture and community is radically different enough to be major hurdle for a game producer as well. One only has to look at one of the last surviving Monthly Fee based MMO in Asia to see that clearly. Last I saw it was still #1 over there, and doing to competition there what WoW does to it here in the states… Lineage II. Lineage 2 barely did anything here in the states and Korean maker NCSoft still can’t figure out why we in the US don’t like it.
Okay, I rambled form my point a bit so I will wrap it up here and kick myself for going so far astray. The point is, the free to play, pay for items design is growing in popularity, and spurned by the Asian block of gamers who are swapping to it not only happily, but to the exclusion of the old system. The Euro market is seeing a shift to that as well, but I personally wager for a different reason (I know a guy who lives there. Games are massively expensive. 2 to 3 times as expensive as they are in the States so IMHO, for them free to play is a real breath of fresh air form the gouging they’ve been getting). Thus that leaves makers with a problem. The US is slow to adopt the Free to Play system, but the other markets are adopting it, and in Asia, to the growing exclusion of the previous style. Thus, in my opinion, I don’t think we’ll have a choice sometime in the future. LARGE MMOs need a worldwide install base to be successful, and as such will need to modify their charging strategies to fit what the majority of gamers worldwide will accept. That said tho, I think we’re a little ways off from it. Just look at the production values of WoW or City of Heroes over the free MMOs out right now. There’s a massive difference. I think when that closes is when the US will be willing to shift over too. We’ve always been willing to pay a little more for quality and reliability here.
- Polecat
That’s very interesting, Polecat. I knew the fee structure is different around the world - I believe in China they pay to play WoW by the hour (around 10 cents/hour I think) - but I didn’t know it was so diverse. The idea of paying for good items seems very strange. I wonder how that will affect WAR and AoC when they are released.
Probably WAR and AoC will face the same problems every other MMO has faced that’s not EQ or WoW… failure due to lack of a large install base. City of Heroes, to it’s credit, has survived this long despite not being able to keep up even close to WoW. But CoH was made by Cryptic for NCSoft… the makers of Lineage 2. To them, it was their attempt to capture part of the US market through a US maker. I read somewhere (Totally forget where) about NCsoft specifically looking for a game for the US market because Lineage was doing so poorly here. The person they spoke to (and the writer whose name I forget)said they lacked character customizability, and that’s something we in the US put a lot of stake in. It further amplified my point on the differences between the cultures, because the idea of that sort of custimization was as foreign to them as we ourselves are.
As for the fee structure, yeah the Pay for stuff model sucks sometimes. But sometimes It’s okay. i do have one game of that model I play on and off… tho admittedly it’s a Golf game.
- Polecat