Mystic Worlds

From Free Realms to World of Warcraft. How Many More?

I didn’t know there were adults left in the world that wanted to play World of Warcraft and hadn’t yet.  This weekend I learned that they exist.  One of my female cousins called me Saturday afternoon.  We’re not on phone call terms.  I see her at family outings and we chat but we’re not close.  Distance is the primary reason we’re not more like friends.  I grew up in New York City.  She grew up in Oregon.

She got my number from my mother after hearing somehow that I play games on the internet.  Come to find out that she plays The Sims and her recent foray in a massive title, Free Realms, piqued her interest to play another game she’s heard people discussing at work.  Now that she’d bought a new PC, she really wanted to give the “other” game a try.

I did my best to convince her that she should try Runes of Magic.  Warts and all, you can’t beat the value of it as a free-to-play MMO.  I suggested that she test drive that to know if she’d even like a traditional MMO, which Free Realms isn’t.  “No,” she replied, “I have my heart set on trying Worldcraft.”  Conversation freezes.  With an eyebrow raised to my hairline, I turn into the camera for a Ferris Bueller sidebar response with the audience, “Oohkay.”  She knew what she wanted.  Who am I to tell her otherwise? 

PVE + PVP + CC = Years of Tears

Wow, Blizzard is still finding new and exciting ways to nerf the Fear mechanic?  That saying about how "some things never change" certainly applies in this case.  Good Lord, why hasn't it been removed and replaced with something more palatable.  How long can you really have people crying over a crowd control mechanic before you just say...  I won't say what came to mind.  LOL

Should I be surprised that it’s been years of tears about a crowd control mechanic in World of Warcraft?  As someone who played a Warlock from BETA, to release and then as my main for three years before choosing another class, I’ve heard all there is to hear about Fear.  I played on a PVP server from day one and I’ve experienced more than I want to know about being stun-locked.  No one complains about these mechanics in a PVE context.  It’s all about how they play out in PVP that pisses players off. 

I was not a "lead with Fear and DOT until you die" sort of Warlock, unless I had no other option.  I played a Warlock back when they were a joke and the first thing dead on the field.  I stuck with it because casters with pets are my favorite class and the Warlock was fun to solo.  Playing with one doing PVE content was great.  Fighting one was annoying once they became a wee bit OP, if I wasn’t on my own Warlock at the time.  *Smile*

WAR Crafting: One Down. One to Go.

Last night I completed my  first Warhammer Online profession, Cultivating.  I could have been done last week.  I was sitting at 195 but didn’t bother growing the final five seeds needed to finish it out.  I’ve been a bit miffed at being stuck in the 130s in Apothecary due to a lack of the correct level of water.  As a result, finishing Cultivating felt rather pointless.  The deciding factor to finish it out was that my bank vault is completely full of herbs for Apothecary, so the seeds just had to go.  It was either grow them and hope they sprouted something that would add into one of the existing stacks of components, sell them on the AH for a pittance or simply chuck them.  I opted to finish it and and be done with it.  I feel confident that Mythic will get around to bolstering the deficient aspects of crafting and when they do, I'll already be set.

I was however, surprised not to see a Tome unlock?? I looked through the Tome three times but didn't see any sort of entry related to crafting.  I find that odd in a game that marks so many of your milestones including a laundry list of crazy and frivolous notations.  It's strange not to have one for the crafting professions.

Paladins Don't Live Here Anymore

Paladins must be the new flavor of the month in World of Warcraft.  Over the past sixty days I’ve noticed a huge increase in the number of people reading Paladin articles I posted back in January of 2007.  Trust me folks, anything that I wrote about Paladins that long ago is no longer relevant.  Unfortunately, these posts are stuck in a self-perpetuating nightmare.  The more people click them the higher they move up in Google’s rating/relevance rankings so the more people click them.

Visitors who are looking for information related to “Paladins” or “best Paladin professions”, "Paladin gear" and “good Paladin specs” should visit The Blessing of Kings.  Shoo - go that-a-way and find some useful information.

WAR: Casualties of War Gudbad Outtakes

COW Gundbad Outtakes

Things have been noticeably quiet in Warhammer Online this past week.  I don’t know if people are busy with work, school and/or family but it’s very unusual for Casualties of WAR Vent to be this empty.  Even when the late evening players come online we don’t seem to be bursting at the seams like we were two weeks ago.  I’m starting to wonder if some people have gone to pay a visit to the World of Warcraft 3.0.2, Pre Lynch King Patch.  *Shrug*

My own playing time has slowed down a little.  Work was busy and I was tired.  I spent more than a couple of nights lounging on the sofa with a movie instead of gaming.  Despite my best attempts at self discipline, I often get caught up in the late night crowd’s shenanigans that run rampant until 1 AM CT.  I owe my being exhausted this week to playing way too much and way too late last week and over the weekend.

This week I’ve spent most of my time in Scenarios.  It’s the easiest thing to do when you need some XP and Renown.  In between I farmed a few PQ areas but not as much as I have in the past.  I did two Chapter 12 INFs solo and am finding a noticeable difference in the drop rate for loot and crafting items that’s not pleasing.  Given that farming mobs is the only way to get these items, from my perspective, Mythic may have dialed the drop rates down too much.  I haven’t been able to craft at all this week which is what I enjoy doing in my piddling around time, so I’ve done more Scenarios than normal.

Official Adieu to World of Warcraft

I’ve said goodbye to WOW before.  I stop playing for periods of time but continue paying.  I move characters from one account to another and close one account, while leaving something subscribed that I can come back to when the feeling hits.  When I’m bored, I play one of the other toons, roll an alt or level someone else’s alt.  I craft, I PVP but its all space filler now.  More often than not, I’d rather read a book, watch a movie or do most anything other than log into WOW.

Playing since BETA, we’ve gone from an all time high of five accounts in our household down to one.  Over the past few weeks I’ve moved the remaining outlier high level characters on to a single monster account.  However, no one has the slightest interest in playing on it at all.  My nephew has moved on to Wii pastures while my son and I are combo’ing thru Age of Conan.  In the fall or winter of this year, Warhammer will release – the game I’ve been waiting for and I’ll be playing there.  Whether or not I stick to AOC or WAR, I have no interest in continuing to play WOW.  I’m more likely to return to EQ2 or EVE.  I might even try Chronicles of Spellborn if it releases in my life time.

For the first time ever, I’m going to shut down the final account. It’s just stupid to keep playing for a game that we’re not playing.  At this point, I have no interest in coming back for WotLK.  I’ve loved WOW.  I’ve hated WOW and Blizzard.  From day one, WOW has been the most thrilling, sweeping and angst filled MMO ride I’ve had the pleasure to experience.  But the time has come for me and mine to move on.

Bye-bye WOW and take care.

PS – No, you can’t have our stuff!  KK.  Tnx.  Buhbye.

PVP for No Honor or Reward – Come Get Some Son

Even though I don’t consider myself a hardcore PVP player, I do enjoy the excitement, danger and adrenaline rush from being on a PVP server.  I did a tiny bit of Kingdom vs. Kingdom (KVK) in Asherons Call 2 (AC2).  It wasn’t until very late in my game play that I started going there with the guild.  There were no rewards to be gained other than bragging rights.

The initial implementation of WOW PVP didn’t have any rewards to be gained by engaging in World PVP and all that existed was World PVP.  I know that I’m not alone when I say, those were the glory days of PVP.  It was frantic, exciting and complete chaos in the hotly contested zones.  Lagfest and Illidown instability aside, it was as much fun, as any 40-man raid Blizzard ever designed.  The unpredictability of facing off against other players in a freeform manner just can’t be replicated in a Battleground or Arena.  There were no rules about what you could and could not do.  There were no contrived objectives.  The rule of law was, if it’s red make it dead.

Dual-Boxing Experiment

I spent three evenings looking into the mechanics of how to dual-box two characters using the same computer in World of Warcraft.  Thanks to the Dual-Boxing Portal and WowWiki, it was a piece of cake – sorta.  If this piques your interest and you’d like to give it a try, just get yourself a trail WOW account to use.

The software side of things was very easy.  I read several posts suggesting that you make a copy of your WOW gaming folder to avoid conflicts which might cause the game to crash.  I was going to do that when I saw how friggin’ large the folder was and immediately nixed that idea.  I just wanted to experiment so I didn’t really care so much if the game crashed a few times.  As luck would have it, it never crashed even when I wrote all the macros needed to pull it off.  *Shrug*

My first decision was which software to use for sending duplicate keystrokes to the two independent session of WOW.  My first attempt at dual boxing was done my actually clicking things on the separate session back and forth – definitely not the way the pros do things.  I downloaded AutoHotKey first as it seemed a popular choice on the forums.  But after starring at the scripts needed just to get started, I quickly abandoned it.  It offers more flexibility but the posts about having to code in ways to pause it so you can chat or interact with the game in other ways other than sending duplicate keys, convinced me that it would be too much work just to mess around.

Two-Boxing and then Again, Not

One of the things I enjoy about WOW Radio is the diversity of podcasts for World of WarCraft.  Hardcore or casual, raider or not, you can find a show that talks about how you play WOW.  Catching up on some the WOW Insider podcasts hosted by WOW Radio, I listened to a show about two-boxing in games.  I'm familiar with the concept having run into couples that were doing it in AC2 on a casual basis.  Run spouse through <insert name> dungeon because he/she is cooking, doing laundry, dealing with the kids, etc.

I've done short spurts of two-boxing to mule items across our WOW accounts, give a toon a healthstone or soulshard or apply some priest buffs, but mostly to enchant items.  In the past I couldn't do it on the same computer for more than a few minutes before my system blue-screened - a VERY scary thing when you're messing with Bill Gates and his infamous Windows OS. :-)  But it was doable in very short durations for very specific needs.

Before I continue too much further let me back up a bit and define two-boxing for those who are not familiar with the concept.  Strictly speaking, two-boxing is when a single person is operating two sessions of the same game and controlling two characters at the same time.  These days we could probably say multi-boxing and not limit the idea to just two.  WOW has a few rather famous multi-boxers - someone does 5 Mages, someone is doing an Arena team with Druid, Priest and Mages I think...blah...blah, I'm not up on the whole scene.  Bottom line - for the real multi-boxers it is the act of multiple machines running the same game while they control multiple characters within that game.  Another variation on the idea is running multiple instances of the game on the same computer.  I would still consider that multi-boxing even though there is only a single set of hardware involved. 

Go Go, Druid Boy!

Gamer geeks are really hysterical.  This is the funniest machinima I've seen in a while.  Here's a lil rap love for Boomkins.