Losing interest

Well, it's finally happened: I am losing interest in World of Warcraft. It's been a couple of years, and at last I am beginning to feel like there is nothing left to keep me engaged. There is an expansion due to be released sometime next year, and perhaps that will re-spark my interest, but in the meanwhile I need something new.

Can anyone recommend a new video game? I like the RPG genre, but I am open to others as well.

Gold Farmers

As I've posted about before, I am an avid World of Warcraft player, and a rising problem in games such as WoW (MMORPGs) is gold farmers. Gold farmers are those people who run programs known as bots to continuously automate a player in an area, killing all of the creatures in the area hoping for good items to drop to sell them for in game gold, which they can in turn sell for real money.

Personally, I don't care about people buying the gold--it's just a game and it's their money to spend, but I don't like the fact that gold farmers basically wreck the in game economy, and also interfere with actual players who are paying to play the game.

The reason for this post is to let people know that the last of the good WoW databases has sold out to a gold farming company. The first database to sell out was Alakazam (I probably mis-spelled that), then Thottbot, and now Wowhead has sold out.

There is hope though: a new database has been started by a company that has been around for a few years and has not sold out to gold farmers. Wowdigger.com is trying to get their database established, so if you play WoW, head on over to www.wowdigger.com, sign up for an account and download their client, and do your part to support a non-gold farming company.

Clowns in the IT industry

Warning, this post contains profanity.

Can the IT staff at UBCO do anything right with their wireless network? Being disconnected eight times a day gets to be pretty damn frustrating. If this happened even once a week I would be much happier, but these clowns can't keep the thing solid for a single day. Not to mention that their "secure" wireless network just decided to stop validating me one day. This brings up a real problem with the IT industry as a whole: morons getting good jobs that require someone who knows what the fuck to do.

Since the late 90s I have seen so many fucking idiots come into this industry as "programmers," "webmasters," "network admins," and more. A common thread with these fools is that they just don't get how things work, and how to figure out how to make them work. I don't know if it's lack of training or sheer stupidity, but it's a god damned epidemic that is sweeping across the IT industry of the world. Whether it's the fucking moron at the help desk at your Internet provider, or the network admin(s) at your university campus, they're everywhere, and it's getting worse.

Why Blizzard, why?

As I have mentioned previously, I am an avid World of Warcraft player, and while I appreciate what Blizzard has done with the game--man can they be frustrating. For the longest time Blizzard had weekly down-time every Tuesday. Recently they have kind of improved upon that by making the down-time a bi-weekly event. But now they can't even get the maintenance done in their window of 8 hours!

Now, I am fully aware of what maintenance can take, but all too frequently the servers come back online being far flakier than they were before they brought them down. I don't play other MMORPGs right now, but I have heard that other games require ZERO down time. Why can't Blizzard make this happen? My guess is that they just didn't design their server application to behave that way. Hell, I don't even mind the down-time (it gives me a chance to do some actual work :p ), but when the down-time is extended and the servers come back up in a flaky state, it gets pretty frustrating.

Yes, I'm an addict.

World of Warcraft's Downfall

I've been an avid player of World of Warcraft (WoW) for about a year and a half, and the first eight months of the game was great. But, now that I have three characters at or near the maximum level in the game I am losing interest. This isn't the first time either: before Blizzard released the WoW expansion pack, The Burning Crusade (TBC), I was about ready to hang up my MMORPG gloves for a while. With TBC I was given hope anew, but alas those hopes were for not.

You see, I am the type of person who doesn't really like people--stupid people in particular--and it seems that WoW attracts just those. I play this type of game for the adventure, and I like to play with a select few individuals: my wife, my best friends, and my brothers. Of course, we're all adults with real lives outside of the game, so our play times don't always line up. This means that if I want to get ahead in the game, I must group with the stupid people mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph. The reason for this is that in WoW, getting ahead means getting better gear, and getting better gear means having to face challenges that require more than the two or three people (whom I like) that I find online when I'm on.

So because of this I am relegated to either "farming", or playing a character who isn't quite at the maximum level in the game, which means repeating a bunch of game play that I've already done. What I wish WoW offered was something more than the end game that all players of the game know, but I really don't think that this is going to happen. I found a really good write up on the WoW forums that summarizes how I, and many many others feel about WoW. I am going to quote it here, as the moderators over at the WoW forums have a tendency to kill threads that say mean things about Blizzard. The thread, by Lilyth of the Feathermoon server, is titled How to Kill a Game in 15 Easy Steps.

15 Easy Steps:

1. Ensure that only warriors specialized in protection can tank, and that every group/raid instance requires at least one protection warrior. You are certain that players love to be pigeonholed.

2. Ensure that protection spec'ed warriors cannot do any significant damage to mobs or other players, effectively eliminating all enjoyment from the toon outside of MT in a raid setting, and ensuring the player has to either level an alt for making money, or depend upon the charity of a guild for repairs/pots.

3. Ensure that all four classes capable of casting a heal have a "dps tree" for leveling, but make equally sure that it's unviable for end game raid use so that they will be forced by the player community to stay specialized for healing. You are certain that players love to be pigeonholed.

4. Ensure that those players specialized for healing classes cannot do any significant damage to mobs or other players, effectively eliminating all enjoyment from the toon outside of healing in a raid or instance setting, and ensuring the player either has to level an alt for making money, or depend upon the charity of a guild for repairs/pots.

5. Create four DPS classes. Make them compete for raid spaces in a limited number of raids which are largely limited by the number of available and interested heal-bot-spec healers per server. This ensures that they are on a never-ending quest to frantically up their DPS by whatever means possible (including attempts at marginalizing other competitive classes), to ensure they retain their raid spots.

6. Fail to create a valid, plottable path for growing characters outside the initial "leveling" process. Implement convoluted attunement chains with the intention that players see this as "advancing".

7. Fundamentally change character classes *after* your customers have put significant time and energy into their characters. Shrug and tell them to start over - if you tell them anything at all.

8. Amidst all the pigeonholing and forcing of dps-less specs for warriors, priests, druids, paladins and shaman, implement a PvP system into your PvE game that pits these players against the DPS classes. Subsequently spend most of your time buffing and nerfing classes for PvP reasons, while blowing off balance in the PvE game.

9. Fail to recognize that at the core, despite any protestations, human beings play games to "win", and to enjoy the process/anticipation of winning. In a never-ending MMO, "winning" is defined as "improving my character, whether it's a level up and a new spell, or a new and better item". Consequently, be sure you upset as many players as possible by putting little "progressively better" gear into the game, thus ensuring people are only getting side or downgrades even from the most difficult raid encounters available.

10. Itemize your instances so sparsely that player communities are forced to set up convoluted rules for distributing the items amongst their raid memberships, and spend many an hour tallying and tracking said loot systems, as well as managing the attendant conficts.

11. Ensure the encounters in your raid instances are so stupidly difficult vs. available gear that your playerbase has to use artificial means to defeat the encounters. Frustrate your players by requiring them to spend many hours "farming" materials for these artificial performance enhancements. Turn your game into a part time "farming" job, ensuring that DPS classes have it easiest and prot/healing classes have it worst.

12. Develop in a vaccuum. Never under any circumstance establish dialog with the enemy- er I mean customer. Studiously ignore unsolicited feedback, after making sure you don't solicit any. Don't assign liasons to player groups. And if you ever do venture out into the real world, remember to remain very vague and use phrases like "we never intended that" and "working as expected" to spout off regardless of the subject of discussion. Play dumb if anyone asks how/when you tested the subject of the discussion before implementing it and/or changing it.

13. Educate your customer service personnel in the fine art of insulting your customers. Ensure that the people who pay your salary feel ignored and marginalized.

14. In particular, do whatever you can to forment conflict between the customers (because naturally, if they’re largely occupied fighting with each other, they won’t have much time to complain to you or about you, will they). The PvP system is a useful tool in this regard.

15. Through a combination of the first 14 steps, ensure that your customers get a bigger kick out of discussing a competitor's upcoming product than they do discussing yours. The killing blow, as it were.

15a. Polish your resume and send it to the developer of the competing product.

15b. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Even though this was likely intended to be somewhat humorous, there is also a serious side to it, and it really does a good job of summing things up. It is primarily for the reasons above that I am turning to Warhammer Online on its release day.