Not Addicted

I've been out of the loop with WoW, caught up in Warhammer, but I logged into it the other day to chat on vent with a few friends on an old PvP server I left behind long ago. They asked me to bring a toon back, but the only one I could bother moving was locked away on a PvE server. Much to my surprise, they told me that Blizzard has opened the floodgates from PvE -> PvP server transfers.

Coming from their numerous adamant threads that they're 'strongly opposed' to it (forum topics decay, and I couldn't find the "never gonna happen" ones that I remember from the past), I was surprised to hear them flip a 180 on the topic.

I know this is supposed to be an MMO site or whatever, but I’ve basically just begun to think of it as my personal blog since I’m the only one who posts with any regularity, so suck it up, buttercup. I wanna talk about Little Big Planet, because frankly, that shit be off the heezy, yo.

Ah, tanking. The thankless task of getting beat in the face repeatedly for the good of the group. There’s no such thing as tanking solo; there has to be some other group member you’re protecting for it to technically be called tanking at all. Warhammer announced that old world class pigeonholes such as tanking and healing were going to be pretty much eliminated, and that everyone would be able to just put out huge damage when needed. While I suppose my black orc can do some damage if he straps on a 2-hander, that’s really nothing new. My tank in WoW could do the same, but my entire talent spec is still “increase my hitpoints, reduce incoming damage”. That doesn’t scream ZOMG DPS to me. The worst part about this is that Public Quests refuse to award tanks like you wouldn’t believe, and so tanking them (which someone has gotta do at one point) is just actively shooting yourself in the foot if you hope to earn any bags at the end.

I know Gold Farming in WAR is pointless, but hey... the Public Quests are too good to ignore.

With the release of Warhammer, comes their new and shiny public quest system. A system by which you can easily join in on the action, stay for a while and get some nice phat lewt for relatively little effort. No need to spend hours screaming on LFG channels for a raid group, no need to beg your guild leader for a raid spot, just rock on up, smack whatever is running around and you too can be getting a nice white/green/blue/orange bag of goodies for your time spent.

"It all seams to easy" you may say, however there are a few tips you have to keep in mind when running from PQ ( Public Quest ) to PQ.

Man, like here’s a topic that hasn’t been done TO DEATH a million times over, yet still manages to pop up every now and then, and people get all shocked and up in arms over it, and then a week passes or so, and along comes isobelle to bring it up again. Fuck you all, I hate you, and this is your punishment for living.

Warhammer suffers from gold spam overload right now, but many people can’t seem to understand why. By the time I was level twenty, and able to purchase my new mount, I already had over thirty pieces of gold on my toon, and the mount only costs 15g. Gear in the auction house is pretty underwhelming, as public quest influence points and renown points award the best gear as it is, and they’re guaranteed drops. Hell, they aren’t even drops at all, you just go to the vendor and get it.

I’ve had a chance to dive into some player versus player conflict in Warhammer, and have got to say that they seem to have a clear vision of what they wanted to do with regards to this. Whether or not that vision is fully realized or not is up for debate, though. It reminds me of my brief stint at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. My father is an illustrator, and I went to art school for two years before I decided it wasn’t my thing, and then went into IT for a while. At the academy, there were hundreds of kids complaining that they didn’t get any hands on lessons with Photoshop, and instead were ‘wasting all their time in Figure Drawing classes, drawing people’ or ‘dragging their heels in Analysis of Form classes, drawing bowls of fruit’. The point is that companies like Pixar don’t care if you can apply a lens flare filter; they’re more impressed if you can hand draw a walk cycle animation that looks believable. Fancy effects don’t mean much if the underlying principles are flawed. In that respect, Warhammer has pulled it off with their PvP. The soul is present. Now they need to patch it up and work on frame rates and the finer polish.

I’m prepared to catch hell for this, and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. If you go back and read anything I’ve written about Warhammer on this website, you can find in every article a sincere hope that the retail game will come out and be worth playing. That said, in the two days or so I’ve had with the game, I can say pretty honestly that yes, it’s a pretty fun game to play. It isn’t going to beat up WoW and take Blizzard’s lunch money, but in the time I’ve been out of beta they’ve honestly gone through and tweaked enough of the game to make it enjoyable.

I’m playing a Black Orc who isn’t high enough for talent points yet (level 9 atm), and has admittedly seen very little of the world. I played a Black Orc in my time with beta, and back then it was painfully apparent that they had a ridiculously long way to go before the game would be something viewed as entertainment instead of punishment. A few gripes still stand, but overall, I would give the final product a thumbs up.

Err.. Yeah. Not sure if we can chalk this up to a complete rethinking of the encounter, SoE’s nerfing of the fight, or the two combined (I’m leaning on the latter), but Absolute Whatshisface is down. IN UNDER A MINUTE.

Shin-Ein from Kotaku's comment section explains:

it was a bunch of Dark Knights with haste builds Souleater Zerging Absolute Virtue. A Dark Knight's Souleater Zerg does an insane amount of direct damage in just a short amount of time.

Souleater = converts 10% of your hit points into direct damage for 45 seconds. They were also mostlyl using Gloom Breastplates that turns the 10% into 12% damage. They all used their 2 hour abilities called Blood Weapon which drains all dmg done by melee attacks into hit points for 30 seconds.

I don’t have the game yet, and haven’t played it since I was famously booted from beta for breaking the NDA in a pretty long rant that got some attention here on NotAddicted. That said, they have my money already, and I’m eagerly looking forward to playing it again tomorrow when I get into the preorder head start thing. I’ve been combing forums in the meantime trying to figure out if the game is living up to the hype so far, and this article will be a summary of what I feel I can realistically EXPECT from an MMO backed in funding by the world’s biggest gaming superpower, and created by a non-newcomer to the genre. I think it’s fair to say this isn’t the entry to the market by Ted and Sally from down the street working out of their basement.

After a long, long, long wait, Blizzard/ActivisionBlizzard/Blactivision/Actlizzard or whatever you would like to call them these days, have finally announced the release date of Wrath of the Lich King.

Whether it be in one of their Famous Splash Screen ads, or from an Offical Press Announcement, it does not come off any less robust. This announcement is long overdue. Players have waited a good long time since the launch of Burning Crusade. But, as is Blizzards habit, they will surely deliver a finely polished product.

Anyone else find it odd, though, that all of the big announcements for Wrath are handed to the public in the exact same week that Mythic is set to release Warhammer Online? Marketing conspiracy I tell you!

..or ‘Why does Direct2drive hate Japan’?

I’m trying to buy Warhammer Online. This is a problem, since apparently with a copy of it in my hand over here in Nippon, I would be able to build dirty bombs and wipe out western civilization once and for all. Terrorism would win the day, and everyone in America would suddenly realize what fools they were wasting all that time in the airports making you take you shoes off when they should have just been concerned with the exportation of MMOs to foreign countries housing expatriates. Thankfully this is not the case, and everyone can sleep peacefully at night knowing that I’ll never get my hands on a copy of the game through the nefarious INTERNET. I’ll have to resort to torrenting the actual data and having a friend physically walk into Best Buy and get me a copy, and then email me the serial number. Capitalism thrives on, communist Japan loses the war on terror, and Timmy is safe to slay orcs in Arena with cherry pie smeared all over his face, reruns of Jerry Springer playing softly in the background.

Apparently there’s a new type of item in the beta purchasable for some sort of Token Drop that allows you to buy items that are Bind on Account, and actually scale with your level. You can use the same item all the way from 1 to 80, and then pass it off to another alt on the same account. I would imagine it’s restricted to a server, I mean… it would have to be. There's all kinds of stuff, from weapons to armor, with more being added I'm sure.

When you think about this on a grander scale of things, I… uhhh… have no idea what they could possibly be thinking. A single weapon that you can use for the entire climb to 80? Why bother forcing people to level at all?

The entire story is courtesy of mmo-champion. Go check it out.

 

...because no one else gives a shit if you stop. Don't think otherwise. I mean, it seems pretty obvious, but I think sometimes we lose track of that. Here’s a funny little story. I played WoW since retail release way back in February of 1987. Back then Franklin Roosevelt was president, Vietnam had just ended, and although the Great Depression was just getting started, WoW was fun and exciting, and I really had a good time playing it. MMOs were a whole new can of worms, and I would happily slay wolves all day looking for those oh-so-elusive wolf noses. I played with a roommate, then joined a guild, then stayed with that guild for a while. None of this is news. It’s not even remotely interesting. I KNOW. SHUT UP.

A funny thing happened, though, on May 20th 2008. My account, which I had logged over 8 zillion hours on and had three level 70 ‘mains’ (lol alts are for noobs) got banned because I began to tire of the grind associated with raiding, and finally just downloaded Glider one day and set that shit up to run while I slept, yo!

There’s a dog that lives next door. His name is “Bz”, pronounced like a swarm of insects that wants to sting you. Bz is a small dog that, as far as I can tell, stays locked in a cage for twenty four hours a day, and only exists on this planet to annoy me. He barks and barks and barks, and sometimes even makes little guttural snarling noises like he really wants me dead. This would be horribly amusing if it weren’t so annoying for two reasons: I’ve never seen him out of the cage, and even if he were to escape and try to attack me, I could just step on him, suffering minor injury to my ankle. Probably the act of stepping would pose more of a threat to my ankle’s well being, as this dog is roughly the size of a football, and wouldn’t require any Holy Hand Grenades to vanquish.

It is always fun to look into the future and see what may or may not happen.

So with the current state of flux in the MMORPG gaming market, lets take a stab at where we may be at the end of 2008. I will start this exploration into the future by taking a look the future of, arguably at best, the top 3 MMO titles today.

#1 World of Warcraft
The game that keeps on keeping on. Even with the release of Warhammer in but a few weeks, the short term outlook for this game is pretty stable. Sure it might loose a few thousand players to Warhammer, as they have a look at the next new shiney, but overall it is just business as usual. Battlegrounds will be fought, factions will be ground, phat lewt's will be dropped, all in all nothing really will happen with WoW, up until very late into November.