Silly times in WoW

In no particular order, some silly things I've seen or done in WoW. First, fun gnome dancing time:

I guess they're not all blood thirsty barbarians after all.

Possibly the coolest mount in the entire game, the elusive and very rare White Ivory Raptor:

This was one of the options for the troll epic mount before patch 2.0 came out - that changed all of the epic mounts to be re-skinned versions of the honor mounts. People with the older epics mounts could trade them in for the newer, re-skinned versions, but very quickly the novelty wore off, even though the Black War Kodo continues to be a very ugly fashion accessory to this day. The White Ivory Raptor, rare to begin with due to the unpopularity of trolls, is very rarely seen. I bet this is the only guy on the server with one.

For whatever reason this weapon never properly shows up for me:

No matter who has it, it always shows up as an untextured green axe.

There's apparently tribute NPCs to the band Level 60 Tauren Chieftains or whatever they're called now. /wave at them and they'll turn and wave at you.

There's a quest NPC called Princess Poobah. I don't know why but I find it funny.

I'm also rocking the Shadowform here.

Can't imagine what this NPC is a reference to.

Gen and the entire population of SM Cathedral. Tedious to loot them all.

Ah WoW, all of your glitches and Easter Eggs help make this game a little more fun.

Alternative World

The alternative world I chose to explore was Dungeons and Dragons Online. I chose this because I don't really know much about Dungeons and Dragons, though I do know they got much of the inspiration for their ideas from Tolken, and Blizzard got many of their ideas from Dungeons and Dragons. I wanted to experience WoW's grandfather, even if it wasn't traditional D&D. I know one of the primary goals was to get past the newbie area and explore elsewhere, but true to its namesake, leveling is very, very slow.

First impressions were not terribly positive. I have limited experience with any MMO other than WoW, save for a few hours jaunt into Guild Wars and feeling brave enough one to install the EVE Online demo - that didn't last long, I opened the title screen, decided it wasn't worth the time or effort, and uninstalled it. Basic UI and the way the basic gameplay handled though was just like WoW - granted, I do mean using WASD to move, mouse to look around, and the number keys to use spells. Anything that was too much a derivative from that would probably be very clumsy, I think.

I played as a Warforged monk - pretty much a robot that punches and kicks things, occasionally I could use a staff as well. It sounds a lot more awesome than it actually is. Race means a lot more in Dungeons and Dragons online than it does it in WoW; in WoW the primary reason to pick a race is aesthetics. While all races have racial abilities, they aren't something anyone relies on by a long shot, they're more like little extra bonus spells if anything - especially since a lot of them eventually scale so badly they're useless, like the Blood Elf and Dranei abilities. The race I chose (normally a race you have to buy extra, but I borrowed a friend's account) was immune to many things that non - robots are susceptible to, like drowning, poison, sleep, paralysis. On the downside, normal healing spells didn't help much, but the 'repair' skill did. Other classes are traditional D&D fare, dark elves, dwarves, humans, elves, and halflings - all lifted from Tolken, but that's not really the point.

I was honestly hoping to see more of the origin of some parts of WoW, but like I said I didn't get that far into it. I probably should have also played a more tradition race / class, like a human mage or a dwarven warrior, but I really wanted to be a robot. With my limited experience as a rogue / druid in WoW, I can say the combat felt similar, as a high - dps melee class limited by the weapons it can use. DDO - or at least the starting city, is very small. I got the impression everyone starts there, and virtually all fighting / questing seems to be instances. My first quest and venture into the game was to go into a cellar and kill rats. The originality of this was astounding, I could barely contain my enthusiasm. I partied with some random person to see what the party system is like - you can still see the hp and mana off your party members like WoW, so that's nothing new. Granted, anything different would be pretty dumb. The quest was actually surprisingly difficult - I probably could have soloed it if I had a better idea what I was doing, but I turned off the tutorial out of habit and to also learn the hard way. I started with more abilities - I don't really want to call them spells, but that is pretty much what they are - than you do in WoW, and not being familiar with how to play a monk I basically button mashed and hoped I didn't die - which I didn't.

Graphically, the game also looks radically different. WoW is brightly colored and cartoonish, with DDO is all about the rust, brown, and grey. Overall, I think WoW takes itself significantly less seriously, while DDO is meant to appeal to the tabletop players who are, on average, more hard core than the average WoW player.

/hug Adventures

For the /hug assignment - detailed here, I teamed up with a level 33 cat druid who goes by the name of Lkt, Tony in real life. We played at roughly similar times - 10 pm to 2 am most weeknights, and agreed to idle in Vent if we were playing to make it easier to find each other. We found Arathi Highlands to be the most convenient place to meet, with Tony already have the flight path and Tarren Mill being relatively close. We met at the wall. Apparently, we had one of the easiest times meeting, some people I talked to later took a half hour or longer to find each other. I ran to the Horde outpost Hammerfall to get the flight path; after which we decided to go kill some trolls straight south of it. It was relatively late server time, so I didn't expect to run into many people - one of the advantages of playing on an east coast server. Just in case, I made a couple of macros, one beseeching fellow Horde to not kill Lkt, as he is a friend, another that could be spammed and would rotate between /hug, /welcome, /wave, /hello and /cry. Surprisingly, I only needed each once.

The only Horde encounter we had was outside of a cave full of two types of trolls Tony needed to kill for a quest that weren't found anywhere else. As we were running out after a bad pull, we ran into a shaman and a mage. They were surprisingly amicable, and cheerfully left us alone, as seen here:

Not a great screen shot I know, but I didn't think about it until several seconds after they ran off to kill other trolls, and had to chase them down to at least prove we saw them. Afterwards, we continued killing trolls until Tony finished, and we were about to leave - until a paladin decided to get up in our business. He was a level higher than me, and though I probably could have taken him - I used my heart wrenching macro to try to convince him that I was a friendly, nice undead priest. (It's true, I'm totally a care bear, the affectionate term for a player who doesn't find great joy in tracking down and ganking member of the opposing faction. I'll even help them given a chance.) Tony tried telling the paladin that I was his friend, and I was helping him with quests. According to Tony, the paladin said little more than 'No f*** her, she's f***ing Horde!' Sadly I forgot to get a screen shot, though everything he yelled would have looked something like 'heth awolk garrrosh' or whatever. Luckily, he found camping my corpse boring and wandered off after my first and only death.

Afterwards, we killed some raptors together, I needed them for a quest. As always, the baffling part is I needed eyes, but it was something like a 30% drop rate. The age - old MMO question gets asked: how are all of these raptors blind yet they manage to find and kill me?

In either case, I had a lot of fun. It was a little annoying partying with someone and only getting half of the XP since we took turns - at a certain points Tony needs more drops off of the trolls than I did, so I let him have at it. The fact that the members of the Horde we ran into were willing to leave us along is probably because of the severe ratio imbalance of the two factions; the paladin had probably suffered plenty at the hands of bored death knights and rogues, while at best what the horde has is Justinblade. Sadly, because of the pretty heavy hit to XP and the inability to do instances, I would not call this a viable leveling strategy most of the time.

Auction House Fun Part 2: Actually Selling

Alright, now you have your two gathering professions. What does this have to do with the Auction House? Well, several things. First of all, level 80s are lazy. Really lazy. Lazy enough that when they switch professions there is no way that they are going to farm up their skill. After a year or longer of playing, many of them have quite a bit of cash laying around, and they're perfectly willing to drop what seems like a large amount of cash on low level items.

Also, on older, more established servers, there aren't too many new players; most of the low level characters running around are usually alts. As a result, they also have large amounts of cash and are less than inclined to farm up skills as opposed to just trying to power level as quickly as they can. Therefore, a lower player actively trying to level up skinning, herbalism, and mining has a valuable resource. Level 80s don't want to spend time on alts gathering items while a lower level is going to do that anyway; so it is not a waste of time for the lower level.

Anyway, enough about the justification, it's time to take it to the Auction House. A general rule of thumb is do not sell incomplete stacks of any item, unless it is extremely rare and / or valuable, like gem stones. Otherwise, no one is going to waste time even looking at a incomplete stack of eighteen Light Leather. (On a side note, as a beginning skinner I've noticed Ruined Leather Scraps almost never sell; best to vendor, smash, or give to a leather working friend. If they do sell it is never for very much, since technically it is a half - stack of Light Leather.) Gems can be the exception to the rule, in general people don't need twenty moss agates. Usually stacks around four or five sell well.

An important thing to do before selling is checking the prices of the other same items for sale - this particular part will deal with production items, like herbs and leather. If prices are wildly fluctuating - like a stack of Peacebloom going for 2g, 5g 10g, 25g, and the odd weirdo that posts it for 100g - I recommend not selling. Look for times when most of the stacks - there will always be very overpriced stacks by ambitious people not really looking at the auction system - an undersell, only by a little. AddOns like Auctioneer help keep track of the average price of what items are going for, though I've yet to find a decent AddOn that consistently shows the overall average.

If a stack of , say, Peacebloom again is going for a bid of 3g 50s and buyout is 5g, the best was to sell it is first make the bid very cheap - in this case, make it go for around 1g. The bid amount should be cheap because then it shows up higher in the list, making it more likely your item will sell sooner. People very rarely just bid on items, especially for crafting items which they normally need right away, and they're more willing to spring for the extra buyout cost because of its instant delivery. The buyout for this example should be something like 4g 84 s. Rounding up, it is also nearly 5g in cost. But, the 84s makes it not quite close enough to 5g that it makes it seem like a better deal. Keeping it in the 90's does not work as well in my opinion, and a loss of less than 10s is negligible, especially if your item sells on a consistent basis.

This is a strategy I've used the entire time, and the only time I've had trouble with it is when I'm attempting to sell rare times like Arthas's Tears, because there is rarely any examples of the item available to compare costs, let alone entire stacks. I pretty much go for what I think is a silly buyout cost to 'test' what people are willing to pay - let's just say inscripters and alchemists must be desperate to get Arthas's Tears.

My Leveling Flowchart

Hey guys! You know what's fun? Leveling! And you know what's even more fun? Leveling on a PvP server as an under represented minority!

I kid, nice being on a server with an 80/20 ratio. To all of my ally buddies, I'm a care bear, I'll even give you a hand if needed :)

But in all seriousness, this has been my experience on every PvP server; some people just need to grow up. That's why I switched to PvE.

Auction House Fun Part 1

One thing I've had a lot of fun with is the Auction House. A lot of people that have played WoW before in this class all seem to have specific goals - a few want to get to 80, a few want to explore the entire world - I want to make a ton of gold with the Auction House. I originally set the goal of 1,000 gold for when I sat down to write this article a few weeks ago with about 150 in the bank, as of now I have 1100 gold, and have given around 150 to classmates for new skills and mounts. I think something like 2500 is a reasonable goal by the end of the quarter.

I've been trying to approach it with a more scientific, critical eye, bent towards making a profit and making as much as possible. At level five I picked up two gathering professions - Skinning and Herbalism, and from then fastidiously skinned as much as I could and ran out of my way to grab a few more Peaceblooom. Friends were giving me a hard time at the beginning - why do you keep running away? You're always the last person to arrive someplace. What are you doing? That's stupid, it's a waste of time - They've gone strangely quiet now.

The beginning trick is to not fall prey to the 'well gee if I get and I'll be able to make LOADS of money, right? Wrong. Unless you're incredibly hardcore, and love griding more than classwork or going outside, you'll never catch up to the 14 year olds and the foreign stationed military people. They have lots of free time. The absolute WORST combination of this fallacy is tailoring and enchanting, because at least with the average gather and production combo there's cloth piles to fall back on; not so much if the person is disenchanting everything they make to level their enchanting. The exception to this rule are engineers, engineers will never make money; and they know that. They just want to make robot butlers and motorcycles, because it's fun.

The golden combination is skinning and either herbalism or mining. Both herbalism and mining is ill advised because they require a 'tracker' of sorts; while the tracker is running everything that falls under the category of it - be it mining or herbalism - shows up as little yellow dots on the mini map. Only one tracker can be activated at a time though, which is why the skinning / herbalism or mining combination is recommended. Hunters will have a hard time with that however, since the tracker takes the place of their normal tracking abilities. While it is very doable to constantly switch between the options, it gets tedious.

These are just beginning steps. I'll have more soon.

My experience with World of Warcraft

I started playing World of Warcraft in the early Beta days. I remember when instead of riding Kodos, Tauren instead got 'Plains Running' and would get on all fours and run. Blink was a talent point, and Arcane Explosion wasn't an instant cast. Hunters were the worst class in the game, and out of combat rezzing was a viable raiding option. Needless to say, the game has changed a lot in the three years I stopped playing.

My brother and I shared an account, partially because we had delusions of being a hard core raider and two people playing the same character would be more efficient, partially because we had one computer in the house for four people and our parents were less than sympathetic if they wanted to check their email and we wouldn't get off 'because we're about to take down Majordomo and I get dibs on the Eye if it drops!' We mostly played as a priest, but also had a hunter and mage alts that were 60 as well as loads of 20-40 alts of pretty much every class.

We both thoroughly enjoyed PvP, we didn't play on a PvP server because how hard it was to level, but the battlegrounds were always a source of great fun. In the old days of the ranking system, we got to level 9 out of 14. I don't really know what the equivalent would be anymore.

Eventually we both lost interest, him first then me. Real life friends quit shortly after going to college as did I, as new experiences that college offered overrode retreading the same old three year old content. He eventually got pneumonia and had a month where he was stuck at home and got Burning Crusade as something to do, but I never really played it. The only thing I really miss about the game is PvP, I really like multiplayer games and the experience WoW offered in its battlegrounds is radically different from a game of Counterstrike or Halo, where having a hair-trigger reflex is not as important as understanding your class, and your enemies.

So far, my second romp with World of Warcraft issimilar to the days when I used to play. There are still radical changes, such as mounts at 20 and 40 and they don't cost 45g or 900g anymore, drastic improvements to the UI and talent trees again getting restructured, but at the heart, the game is still the same. Barrens chat is still silly, Channel 2 is still useless and filled with arguments about religion and Chuck Norris jokes. If anything, the game seems easier. Maps show where quests are, there's the 'buddy leveling' system, players get mounts earlier and cheaper. I'm not complaining, it does apply more to the 'casual MMO' player, but the older, more 'hardcore' version I started with compared to the modern WoW makes everything feel less like an accomplishment. Granted, an 'accomplishment' in an MMO is really nothing to brag about, I can't put in on as resume and it's not a story worth telling my grandkids. I guess it's just another does of the 'heroin content' that keeps games like this going.

Not all is bad though, I've done the majority of the leveling with other people I know and see on a daily basis. It's also quite interesting observing people with limited or no experience with the game. Playing through a different perspective, less like a gamer and more as an observer / scientist / artist has offered a new perspective but does not completely freshen the game for me. I am still enjoying the experience, I'm just not as seriously invested in it like previous times.