Scout said:

Reading people discussing WOW amongst themselves is like intercepting alien radio broadcasts. It's cool to listen to though I haven't got a bloody clue as to what they are talking about. Some sort of group activity, like bowling I think.

It's pretty much a superset of Guild Wars, except for the NPCs to hire. They're not interchangeable and I love both but over time they bled into the others' territory. GW became an MMO, sorta, and WoW became casual and solo friendly, mostly. A recruit-a-friend WoW character could be half max level in a few hours if really pushed.

My lonely max level pairs are mage & shaman. Was mostly fishing for interest to finally force myself to try healing. Keep making characters that can heal and never, ever doing it. Too chicken!

I grabbed the ten day Cat trial. So far I've only been trying to sort out old add ons (I used dozens) and poked my head in to check if my guilds were still around. Nope. [Image Can Not Be Found] The game still has its weird mix of hideous and gorgeous visuals and the client still runs like a hog in a wallow.

It was fun to get whispers

With the guilds gone much of the incentive to buy is gone. Playing alone or re-entering the painful hunt for a guild of competent non-assholes is not appealing. A friend recently got hooked on the game...on EU servers. He was a long time WoW hater but now has that new-convert Happy Smell. So adorable. It'd be fun to romp with him but rebuying everything is not happening.

Anyway... go the nine days remaining. If anyone's playing US I'll reroll and come say hi. I want an excuse to buy Cat.

Loading all my old toons to get them back into the Armory was a riot. Current max level players ran over to stare at the gear, much of it no longer available. Where did you get that? Lich King invasion event. That?  BC world boss. How'd you turn into a dragon whelp and breathe fire?  Made a disguise to buy from a merchant hidden in BC + a trinket from vanilla Stratholme quest.

Since the last post I managed to offend one member. Ah well, knew it was coming.

I'm still chewing over a big write up of my thoughts on MMOs but here's some of the raw thinking.

WoW is currently a Frankenstein and the stitches may as well have quest item sparkles on them. Keep in mind there's much--most--of the current game I've not yet seen.

Setting aside PvP (player vs player), which is an enormous exclusion, there seem to be three or four types of MMO players with some overlap. I don't have snappy Friendman-esque coinages to tie to everything in sight. (Am I the only one wanting to smother him with a pillow?)

1) Initial impression people who keep making new characters to see the early content. These play MMOs as a single player RPG and each reroll is a new little game. Or they do one of the starts once and done.

2) "Serious" players (my rant about the word casual... for another time) who get hooked and play a game through its bulk and may or may not do the end game. They may or may not move on to another game later. These tend be the ones who yell "I'm quitting WoW for X"...and are back weeks later.

3) Folk playing every MMO released, like our resident Tap guy. For them, MMO as a category, not a specific game, IS gaming.

4) People who push through the content as quickly as possible to reach the end game and couldn't care less about the earlier details.

I'm firmly a number two [pause for laughter] and this colors all my thinking. If the MMO isn't good from start to ever extending end [pause for laughter] I'm not going to bother. If I'm plunking down 30, 40, 50 bucks for an RPG I'll do it on an inherently more complete, intentionally self-contained RPG than the MMO version of same. And I write this as a by nature anti-social MMO player. I join guilds, I chatter with folk, but until end game I almost always PLAY solo.

Early impressions of MMOs are useless, except for spying glaring problems, for those not in camp 1 or 3. There's simply no way to judge the longer term middle-meat [pause for laugh] and particularly the end game.

And that's the weird place WoW is now. The two new race start experiences give a great first impression. They'll review amazingly well. On rails with just enough illusion of freedom. They're single player chunks.

The phasing (player does stuff, forever changes that player's gameworld) in later zones is widely varied. It's what many have always wanted in an MMO but it begs the question: do you want a group world or not? Redridge, always the game's worst zone, is now a rail ride of A-Team, Contra, and Rambo gags. It is was amusing (I was exhausted by all the pop culture references but there was one sight gag that made me laugh aloud in shocked surprise) but would I ever want to do it again? Is this how you make your game sticky instead of just getting the 1 and 3?

Phasing is also a technical mess. Quests break--whole zones can break--if you dare do stuff out of order. You know, muck around in an MMO. Explore, discover. Farm even. While I don't want to be forced to farm, JRPGs can screw off and die, there's a certain insomniac itch I get scratched by barely consciously parking on a nifty pocket of high value critters. Oops, turned in a quest and they're all gone forever. Yup, I'm nuts. Shockers.

The disjunction between phased and on phased is also jarring. Old chunk old chunk ack even the sky changes new chunk old chunk as you fly over. Looking squarely at you Westfall. That'd be the stitches showing but it's incredibly jarring even for me, and I'm not an immersion guy.

Some zones are barely phased, too (more stitches on a broader scale) so it's jarring to go from rails to open and back again.

What do people want from an MMO? Millions of dollars spent making a great doll creator opening? I've an ever sinking feeling about the Star Wars MMO. All voiced dialog! plays like a real RPG! Great, so make an RPG instead. MMOs are different. What makes WoW sticky like burst buboes is different.

Ramble over and out