Both tables have now been updated with the correct numbers.

This was a post from Altitis.

LotRO: Woodworking Apprentice and Journeyman – Erratum

“The valuable resource you just found can only be collected by your one alt located on the other side of the world.”

True fact.

This was a post from Altitis.

The MMO Law of Gathering Professions

To wit: 
Yes, unfortunately, that live embodiment of a complete lack of fashion sense in the middle happens to be my Runekeeper, waiting for a cooldown to finish to go and dispatch some undead creep. And apparently the undead are also immune to displays of bad taste.

LotRO offers a solution in the form of dyes that can be applied but I’ll have to confess that yours truly is a bit too stingy to spend money on that. The gentleman to my left, a guardian four levels above me at that time, was wearing a set. The lass on the right was level 40, go figure what fashion outlets they get in Rivendell.

Completely mismatched gear seems to be a common trait of several MMOs (and don’t get me started on the Subligar Men in FFXI…), almost to the point of becoming a reassuring feature that transcends many settings.

Food for thought: in the fiction works inspiring our MMOs, the protagonists usually start and end their adventure in the same armour (and often with the same weapons). In LotRO, players eventually get access to Legendary Items, a weapon and a class-specific accessory, which will level, can be imbued with effects and reforged as needed (but, I gather, still get replaced every so often).

I for one would be keen to see a game system where you start by creating the looks of your armour set at toon creation, then keep the same throughout your career, with enhancements no longer in the form of wholesale armour pieces dropping (hey, look, that tiny goblin just happened to have a blue mailshirt that amazingly fits my elf three times the size perfectly!) but rather an expansion of enchanting and gemming systems, where over time you reforge and mend and add in and gradually replace materials to your taste.

One can always dream. In the meantime, walking around like a poor impression of a clown or buying dyes off the AH seems to be the only way to ward one’s innards against unwanted spilling out.

This was a post from Altitis.

From Azeroth to Middle-Earth: United Colours of Clown Outfits

Leveling from Creation to Mid-level

The first half in terms of levels (the game currently caps at 65) is very straightforward. After creating a new toon, an optional tutorial will be proposed, followed by a prologue. The tutorial is specific to each character race but its story links to the introduction, which is common to two races each time: hobbits and humans share their intros, while dwarves and elves share theirs.

Who levels where - the level flow for all new toons in LotRO

Tutorial and Introduction are instanced – the tutorial is a solo instance, which means no other players will be present. The Introduction is shared with all other new players of the same racial pair.

Which leads us very nicely into background lore. Lord of the Rings Online is sustained by an Epic Storyline centered through a series of quests that players can follow. Through the Epic quests, the player character shadows and supports the Fellowship of the Ring as they progress towards Mordor. The tutorial and Introduction give some backstory for each race, and it is highly recommended to play all four tutorials and both Introductions to get the full picture.

After the Introduction, your character will begin the Prologue in their respective starter areas. Those aren’t instanced, but each race will begin their Prologue in a different area (though Elves and Dwarves merely begin at the opposite ends of the same zone). It’s also worth noting that nothing really stops you from hopping over to a different Prologue zone and start questing there instead of where the game places you by default – in fact, there are some distinct advantages to broadening your horizons, as we’ll see in a latter post.

If you stick to your starting area, the Epic quest line will eventually send you over to Bree, where all character converge at last, questing in Eastern Bree-land until about level 20. From there, depending on your account type, you will have two options. The Lone-lands is available to all players for free, while the North Downs require either a VIP account or unlocking through the LotRO store, with Turbine Points. North Downs is likely to be less crowded and thus offer better mob spawns for specific kill quests. If you’re more after immersion and following Frodo and his band of merry hobbits, though, the Lone-lands is where they passed through on their way to Rivendell.

Boars - a staple of many MMOs, are also on LotRO's most hunted species list

Fellowship and Instances

After completing the tutorial, as seen previously, characters will be joined with other players, which opens up group play. Groups, or more accurately fellowships as they are called here, are quite an informal affair (which leads to a perpetuation, in LotRO, of that seemingly universal bad habit, blind invites) – in fact, there seems to be, at least in appearance, a higher readiness for players to group whenever they have to kill specific quest mobs, in particular named ones on a fixed respawn rates. Of course, there’s also a counter-example in the Elven / Dwarf introduction, which at one point asks the player to kill four sickly bears, which have exactly four spawn points, about a minute respawn rate each, and are fought for by every single player in the area on that specific quest leg. Can you even build a fellowship during the Introduction? To be honest, I have no idea, and have to admit that I just ran around that specific frozen lake for 10 minutes like a headless chicken, trying my best to tap a bear before anyone else. But then again, I’m a bit thick myself, as any reader from two years ago will remember.

The first group instances, the Great Barrows (advertised as GB in the LFF – Looking for Fellowship – chat channel), will unlock for your character at level 20. Those first runs are designed for a full 6-man fellowship, whereas later ones, starting at level 32, will support “small fellowship” play, aka 3-men teams. Once a fellowship is assembled, an interface allows one of the members to create an instance, and upon accepting the invite, all members will be ported in without any further ado.

Of Crafting

As most MMOs, Lord of the Rings Online has crafting. Unlike many others, though, players don’t select individual crafts but instead take up a bundle of three, called a vocation, which groups one or two gathering crafts (Farmer, Forrester, Prospector and probably also Scholar) with production crafts (Cooks, Jeweller, Metalsmith, Scholar, Tailor, Weaponsmith and Woodworker).

Again without any surprises, the gathering professions are the money-makers, whereas the production crafts are more of a money sink. But since every vocation has at least one gathering skill in there, it remains up to the player to decide what to make of what he collects. Done properly, money is really easy to come by in LotRO, much easier than in WoW. For reference, I just broke the Premium account gold cap two nights ago, at 5 gold, without even trying, just by selling unneeded ores, after buying two horses and a house, which amounts to another 2 gold, while I had a lot more issues getting money in Azeroth.

Each craft is separated in several tiers, and you can craft any recipe within a specific tier without any other requirements (provided you have the ingredients of course). Once you have completed a tier, a quest will unlock the next tier (very short for gathering, increasingly long for production crafts), and also enable to work on mastery on the previous tier. Mastery will produce critical results when crafting – for gathering professions, 3 of the intended products instead of 1, and for production crafts, a higher quality item.

What craft is good for my character?

Beyond the obvious choices – cooking is good for everyone, tailoring produces light armor & medium armor while metalsmiths produce heavy armor and so on, a few points to consider:

• Farming grows ingredients for cooking
• Woodworking produces shields, bows and musical instruments, which is interesting to tanks, hunters and minstrels
• Jewellers produce rings, trinkets and baubles for everyone, but also the weapons for Rune-keepers and special trinkets for Captains
• Scholars produce scrolls and potions good for everyone
• Leather used by tailoring is first tanned using the Forrester profession.
• Fishing isn’t a profession at all, but a hobby that can be taken up by everyone in addition to the rest.

Three more things to note:

• Each craft requires an appropriate tool to be equipped (there’s a special slot for tools so you don’t need to swap your weapon for a pick-axe), and the default tools you get when you pick a vocation are more or less worthless – better to get at least the appropriate Bronze tool off the AH as soon as you can (or better yet, pick Armoursmith as your first vocation, create the tools for your intended vocation, then change vocations).
• When you change vocations, you keep the mastery level of any crafts that are common to both vocations. You will lose mastery and recipes in all others
• In the later tiers of production crafts, several high-end recipes are single-use only.

And this concludes today’s entry on the “From Azeroth to Middle-Earth” series. In the next post we’ll talk about character builds and much more.

This was a post from Altitis.

From Azeroth to Middle-Earth: Of Levels and Crafting

Cataclysm has come, and my inability to give a damn about it has persisted. Oh, I still read some Azerothian bloggers from time to time, but in reality, I only care about the meta posts, the ones focusing on the social aspects of the game.

Closure is due, and in that spirit, I decided it is high time to do some pre-Spring cleaning, dust off the cobwebs, and see whether I still have any live audience at all, or whether the 142 feedburner subscribers are nothing but spambots waiting for a new post to open.

Cleanup also brought me to my blogroll, and it’s at that stage that I took stock of just how many warcraft bloggers have stopped writing. When I last updated it, in Summer 2008 (in other words a couple of decades in ‘Net time), every one on there was active.

Today, I pruned 71 Wow-related blogs from the roll. All of those had no post more recent than last Fall. And while the Blog Azeroth community still gets many new blogs introducing themselves every week, it seems only the most dedicated are still around from the founding days.

I also cleaned up my links page, and found out in the process that my item tooltip provider had ceased their service. So if for whatever reason you were reading old warcraft related posts of mine and get error messages while hovering over an item link, my apologies. I’ll probably need to find a suitable replacement for all wow posts. Eventually.

And this cleanup marks the final closure on the World of Warcraft as far as yours truly is concerned. Since I last posted, I spent many bucks on Steam games, catching up on some great titles both single and multiplayer that I had missed while focused on WoW. Well, catching up is an overstatement, at the time of this writing, I probably have another 20 games or so that I have yet to play from the previous sales. I take great comfort in the fact that others are afflicted by similar troubles, most notably another former WoW blogger who expanded his focus to other (and wider) horizons a long time ago, Andrew of Systemic Babble.

It has been much quieter on the MMO front: while I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying out other things, nothing really had any lasting impact. I have tried out several of those fancy new Free to play + microtransaction MMOs over the past year and a half, in no particular order:

• Wizard 101, cute, interesting combat based on building card decks, but became quite repetitive and grinding before reaching level 10 to me
• Free Realms, another entry on the cute factor, too much limitations on F2P even early after their launch, even more, I understand, nowadays
• Dungeon & Dragons Online – a trip down memory lane for sure. Quite nice for casual players actually, since you can play most if not all instances in solo mode. I again eventually found it a bit grindy for my taste. DDO is also a world built on loosely connected instanced areas with relatively long loading times in-between, and for some reason that eventually turned me off, perhaps more than other elements of the game. I found that in MMOs, I apparently need to keep a certain sense of seamless connection between areas in order to feel immersed. Lacking that, I’d rather play Neverwinter Nights offline.
• Final Fantasy XI, take 2: Wow, talk about radical changes. FFXI was my first MMO, long before WoW. In the 5 years since stopping it, the game has undergone several important changes making it more casual friendly. Most amazing was to find out that several of the people from my old linkshell still played the game, and catching up and saying hello was definitely a plus. On the other hand, at this time I found out that experience hits upon death are no longer suitable to my playing time, habits and expectations. Good to revisit an old and previously beloved place, but at the same time, it felt a bit like visiting your childhood bedroom 20 years later.
• Battle Forge: I quite like playing RTSes, I quite like the notion of building and playing decks of cards, so an MMORTS that uses trading decks as a way to build your army sounds great. Played for a while, then had a total hard drive crash, and never reinstalled. The reality is, I probably don’t really like the Real Time in Real Time Strategy. I’m not that good at twitch and fast paced reactions, and it turns out that what I really like are PE-RTS – Pause-Enabled RTS.

Mind you, none of the above are bad games, and if you’re looking at a change of pace, I would recommend you give any of them a try if it sounds fancy to you.

And so I was eventually bound to end up in Middle Earth.

Lord of the Rings Online is made by Turbine, the same developers who worked on Asheron’s Call 1 & 2 and DDO before that. And while many companies who have published and operated more than one MMO out there seem unable to really capitalize on their previous experiences, Turbine, according to those who have tried out all of their games, definitely seem to be learning and producing games that are more polished and offer more robust gameplay every time. A game perfect for casual players: Free to play with microtransactions means I can unlock content at my own pace. Loose and informal grouping. Able to provide ok challenge without at the same time having punishing penalties for failure (like others before, you get a hit to your equipment durability rather than experience points, there’s no corpse walking). At the stage I’m at, it’s definitely not a game designed for the hardcore players, and I have to confess that I haven’t yet spent any time looking at the raiding scene at all. I doubt there’s any bosses that take over 18 hours to defeat though (and here’s my parting shot to the WoW hardcore crowd: compared to FFXI’s endgame, you’re just scrubs anyway, regardless of how dumbed down both games have become recently). A good social climate, at least on my server (playing on Imladris-US). And many, many features that make the game interesting so far.

Speaking of the social climate, the only really annoying discussions on public chat channels seem to involve WoW (as in “-WoW is so much better than this! -Oh really? Why are you here then?”). And while my current Kinship (that’s Guilds in LotRO) isn’t necessarily the most chatty one, I got invited to a friendly and helpful bunch.

The opening of the LOTRO chapter on this blog definitely deserves its own posts, but in the meantime, there are two resources needed for players who want to give it a go:

• MMORSEL for Lords of the Rings Online is a well organized and comprehensive information resource on the game.  Not sure what account model is right for you? How core game mechanics work? Whether a quest pack is worth purchasing? Mmorsel has the answer.
• A Casual Stroll to Mordor is a multi-author blog and podcast that has a ton of information, guides, updates, and other useful resources.

Last but not least, a word of caution. The main LotRO servers are run by Turbine in the US, but in Europe, the game is operated by Codemasters. Depending on the ping you have, it may not be a good idea to play overseas. I found out when I already had a toon in my 20ies, a house and enough cash to pay for a mount or three that I was playing on the “wrong” servers.

And that’s enough for now. Need some screenies to illustrate the next post. Soon. I swear.

This was a post from Altitis.

Closing the Warcraft Book, Opening Lord of the Rings Online

Ironically, despite writing about the shameful display of court action (that would continue for a long while) a couple of years ago, I almost missed that the race has taken place last week.

I wasn’t alone.

The America’s Cup used to be one of the most popular sailing contests the layman knew of, and being Swiss, I had been caught up in the enthusiasm of the 2003 win that helped capture the people’s imagination here.

When the next edition was held in Summer 2007 and Alinghi successfully defended their title, the mood in the country was the one you’ll see in any place when your favourite sports team is in a final and has solid chances to win the contest, no matter the sport itself.

At my workplace, for instance, we had an overhead projector showing all races live, and most of my co-workers (the vast majority of them who wouldn’t otherwise give a damn about sailing, and for good reason – for those among us who aren’t sailing aficionados, watching a regatta on TV is often barely more exciting than watching grass grow) would regularly mill around between their desk and the recreation area to watch the races, or at least part of it.

The contrast couldn’t have been more stark with what happened last week. Before even the first race saw our “champion” Alinghi severely spanked by its challenger, you’d be hard-pressed to find people giving a damn. The talk of last week, in terms of sports, was about the Olympic games and in what disciplines “we” would have chances to bring home a medal (incidentally, at the time of this writing, Switzerland didn’t just win the first gold medal of the games, we secured our third gold a few moments ago, marking this the most probably only time we’ll be #1 on the medal table. Woot. Ahem. Where was I? Oh yes).

Only the one colleague I know for participating in local sailing competitions himself admitted having watched both races. Everyone else was ‘meh’.

And the reality, plain and simple, is that the figureheads of both teams, billionaires Larry Ellison and Ernesto Bertarelli, have pretty much ruined everything that could even remotely be thought of as “sportsmanship” for this 33rd contest.

Spending more than 30 months fighting it out in courtrooms, both teams have first and foremost demonstrated that winning at all costs was way more important than the sport itself. Both teams have fought teeth and nails, with all means at their disposal, to try and win by default, disqualifying their opponents or running the clock so that they would not be able to compete. Setting totally unfair rulings favouring the defender, having these tossed out by the court in favour of an even more outrageously unfair counter-rule that would itself be overruled, most of the 33rd America’s cup was actually fought in the dirtiest arena in the world, a court of law, by the most dishonourably unsporting contenders, two armies of lawyers intent on only one thing, to crush the others, no matter the consequences.

At the end, two impressive looking boats were produced, in a size and format more removed from every day sailing than F1 is removed from a normal family car. The first two races had to be cancelled, one because there wasn’t enough wind to move those juggernauts, the second one because the waves were too high for these beasts.

What won on the water, in the end, isn’t even clearly to be attributed to the skill of skippers and crew, but first and foremost the prowess and the flair of the engineers who made a far superior technical decision.

Of course, what heavily contributed to the loss of Alinghi, beyond the inferior technical design, was also the unbelievable hubris of the very man the country had admired for making the two previous victories happen, Ernesto Bertarelli, who tried to helm the boat himself and mostly demonstrated that he lacked any skill on the water, just like he had shown, together with his opponent, that he knew no shame and no move so vile that he wouldn’t have his team try to win before the race could take place.

The disgust I’m expressing here isn’t just mine alone. For instance, the 32nd edition in 2007 attracted over 200M € worth of sponsorships. The 2010 disgrace just about 11M, and no matter how you slice it, the financial crisis isn’t the only factor to blame for this.

And speaking of the crisis, in the end, the amount of money thrown away in the court contest but also those two completely uneven boats, in the face of the crisis, is nothing short of obscene. A sporting event is something that very much can lift the spirit of the world even in the darkest of times, but the shameful spectacle that led to this underwhelming race pretty much achieved the contrary: It is, in the end, the mirror image of what led the world into economic downturn, greed without restraint, a will to win at all costs without regard to ethics nor consequences, a take-no-prisoner dog-eat-dog contest that leaves the bystander exhausted and thoroughly disgusted by what the rich, powerful and depraved billionaires are doing.

Oracle won fair and square on the water, but they won a pyrrhic victory. The reputation of America’s cup is in shambles, and nobody trusts the future to reintroduce “fair play” and “sportmanship” in the event. Only the insanely wealthy stand any chance of running another race of the same format, and the vast majority of the public is most definitely not going to care about a 34th edition if that, too, is held after the courts decide on every minute detail while the competitors try to out-cheat each other.

Is the event salvageable? Perhaps. It would require nothing short of a totally neutral and balanced set of racing rules where every boat is to be constructed within the exact same specifications (ideally under a similar budget) and not a single line exists to favour either the defender or the challenger.

Only under such conditions will the next edition pit sailors against sailors and decide what racing team is actually the best in the world, instead of who has the better lawyers and smarter engineers. But just as the early warnings in 2007 and 2008, like the January bust of French trader Jerôme Kerviel, went unheeded by the finance world, there is little hope to see that happening. Team Oracle has most definitely demonstrated that victory could be acquired by extending every mean no matter how low or dirty (and again, Alinghi’s approach was the very same on the other side of the Atlantic), and I’d be highly surprised that they would suddenly look at restoring honour to their disgraced cup.

And coming full circle with the long series of posts that occupied my Warcraft gaming days, where in retrospect PvP completely fails is in the possibility to build totally unbalanced match-ups where superior gear and the right team composition removes most of the player skill before the match has begun.

Truly meaningful PvP would require that the teams duking it out be as evenly matched as possible before the gates open, including wearing the same level of preset gear as everyone else. That would of course be a lot less attractive, because people aren’t looking for a fair and challenging fight, the vast majority is playing to crush at any cost.

And therein lies the misery of these contest. In the immortal words of XVIIth century author Pierre Corneille, “A vaincre sans péril on triomphe sans gloire” – “Triumph without peril brings no glory”.

So it was on the Sea near Valencia, and so it is in our MMOs.

This was a post from Altitis.

33rd America’s Cup: Thanks God it’s Over

But in the latest economy-is-down-let’s-reinvent-ourselves, my role has changed, and heck, training has changed a lot too. Among things done differently is shifting much of our training from classroom-based to online.

That concretely means two things. I normally no longer travel around, and several hundred of our colleagues now have to put up with my funny accent over a phone line while watching a slide deck instead of having to deal with my antics on a whiteboard and flipchart.

Of course, they get some advantages out of that, the first thing, I’m actually not really good looking so they can concentrate on what’s on their screen, the second thing, they are actually shielded from my endless questions (I used to be a firm practitioner of the socratic method of transferring knowledge through questioning), and last, they probably are checking their e-mails and doing their normal daily jobs during most of the conference calls we’re holding.

I suspect it’s also less enjoyable, but heck, it’s work, we’re all here to make money, for having a good time, the after-work-drink-bar is thataway. And after all, the tenants also need to make a living, so relieving you of your hard-earned money right after you’re done earning it is, at the very least, both convenient and efficient.

But this week I’m back in Ireland to go through a training myself (which was pretty interesting BTW), and when I’m flying I’m usually reading.

For this trip, I picked up “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by a fellow called Bill Bryson. The book itself is a bit of an oddity, because Bryson pretty much built his reputation on writing travel stories – as an American expatriate to the UK for a longer part of his life, he got around, and he has a very engaging, and humorous way, of recounting his adventures and discoveries in the wide, vast world. I first was introduced to Bryson’s “Neither Here nor There” account of a youthful trip across continental Europe by a British acquaintance who was himself following in Bryson’s footsteps and had stranded in Geneva on a miserably rainy Sunday where pretty much everything was either closed or soaking wet.

“A Short History” is not exactly your standard travel book. As he recounts in the preface, Bryson was traveling by plane earlier this decade and suddenly realized that while he had visited plenty of amazing places, he knew (in his eyes) remarkably little of how our planet works. He therefore spent the next couple of years pestering scientists in countless fields to find out, and “A Short History of Nearly Everything” is the result of his relentless inquiries.

Before you get the wrong impression, it’s not a science textbook, rather, an amazingly entertaining and well written history of science. Written in an accessible prose and a wit I could only dream of possessing, the key figures in all of the major scientific fields of the past half millennium come back to life as the actors of a fascinating tale of how we went from believing completely wrong things to knowing that we were ignorant of much (but at least having dispelled certain of the now more scurrilous-sounding myths like Earth being only 7 millenia old or so in the process, probably a net benefit in the grand scheme of things).

It is also a constantly renewed exposure of the endless tragedy of the true discoverers of much we now take for granted. Indeed, by painting all of these countless portraits, Bryson makes it abundantly clear that if you’re really the first genius to make a revolutionary discovery, you are most likely to be rhetorically challenged, end up broke, divorced and alone, die and remain forever unnoticed by the rest of the world (unless you become the victim of backstabbing and deceit, which is also a very frequent occurence) and your contributions to the advancement of human knowledge attributed to someone who is by necessity less brilliant than you, came to the same conclusions as you did several decades after you, stole your ideas and never credited you for it, or was able to turn whatever you had written in a way so obscure and unintelligible (remember, rhetorically challenged is a common trait among geniuses) that nobody understood it into concepts so clear and simple that nobody would believe it was actually just a reformulation of your original ideas.

Unless you’re Albert Einstein, of course. Still, even when discussing those rare scientists, inventors or discoverers who managed to combine inventiveness with originality and dodge the bullet of ruin and misery, Bryson will be quick to remind you of their humanity, exposing, to the reader’s utter delight, various character flaws marking them as utter jerks, or, just for fun, rubbing in the one most glaring mistake they made in their life.

Under his artful pen, the history of science unfolds as a joyous and deeply enjoyable gallery of portraits that explains what we know today and how we found out. Fascinating and at times so hilarious that people sitting across the aisle start looking at you funny wondering why you’re laughing out loud at cruising speed and 10’000 meters of altitude, I just cannot recommend “A Short History of Nearly Everything” enough.

But whether you’re a nerd, a geek, or just a normal person, this is a highly recommended read, if only for passing the time of the next server maintenance. The only danger ahead is that you may actually miss the moment the servers come back online, and keep reading, and reading, and reading.

This was a post from Altitis.

Pure Offline: Must Read for Both Nerds and the Rest of Us

So, what happened to Altitis?

Real life, that’s what happened. While I don’t want to dwell on things too much (or turn this into a “fishing for sympathy” post), I went through a situation not unlike what Big Red Kitty went through. Oh, the circumstances were different, and WoW was a mere symptom of what had gone wrong in my life, but the background is similar.

Except in my case, I went a bridge too far, and almost failed to mend and amend what I once thought would be lasting for the rest of my life. My family was on the brink of dissolution, and I moved out for about six months, convinced it was the end. And while I used to qualify blogging as cathartic, I never found the strength to blog about that at all. That explains the long hiatus.

In the middle of it, I thought I would be able to resume blogging, but for some reason, I never managed to do so since that cryptic one-worder a few months back.

Against my pessimistic outlook six months ago, though, events took a turn for the better, and we finally worked things out.

This isn’t however a sob-story serving as the testimonial on how MMORPGs have ruined (or almost ruined) the life of yet another family. As I said, it was a mere symptom of things gone wrong – spending too long in the game, investing too much into the completely wrong thing. And it wasn’t just gaming either, my job had taken an overblown importance too. What happened is probably just one in a million similar stories, where the people change, the context changes, and the symptoms change, but to keep this short, where we went wrong was that my significant other and myself started to take each other for granted and stopped communicating on tiny issues at first, and then on bigger and bigger issues, and this almost brought our couple down.

So the only advice I can give to any gamer out there, in particular if you’re in a stable, long term relationship, and more so if you have kids: you may want, periodically, to examine your gaming habits and ask yourself if they are an innocuous hobby or have become escapism for you. If it’s the latter, it may be worth taking a honest look at your life,  figure out what you’re fleeing, and address the issue, because trust me, leaving your home while your 4-year old daughter starts asking “why is daddy taking his pillow with him?” is not an experience you will enjoy.

But that’s enough background already. This was then, and as I said, we finally worked it out a couple of weeks ago.

What is going to happen to Altitis?

Frankly, I don’t know really. When crap hit the fan, I jokingly remarked to my friend Adventsparky that at least I’d be able to play during raiding peak times. In reality, that never happened.

I continued playing WoW pretty casually for a while, first on my mage, and then I picked up my shammie and eventually reached level 80 with her.

At the same time, for the first time since joining in May 2005, I actually let my subscription run out, and didn’t notice for several weeks. And it happened a second time more recently – a few weeks ago, before moving back, I wanted to check out something in the game and found, again, that I could no longer do so.

I haven’t resubscribed since.

Interestingly enough, Adventsparky once asked me whether I was still playing the game, explaining that some evening this Spring he just logged out after a raid, and never logged back in. The heart isn’t in it anymore.

Oh, I read the cataclysm announcements, but they failed to raise any kind of enthusiasm. I think the only thought that entertained me was when reading about the split of the Barrens zone, I started wondering whether this would be the end of the Mankirk’s Wife jokes.

In reality, like many other commentators on the blogosphere, I now find myself playing various different games extremely casually, either purely single-player games, or trying out one of the several viable Free2Play MMOs out there: From Wizard101 to FreeRealms, over Jade Dynasty, World of Kung Fu and Runes of Magic. I’m currently exploring Dungeons and Dragons Online (which recently went Free2Play) a bit, when I have time. I’m not really far in the game.

World of Warcraft? A while ago, I pondered resubbing for the anniversary pet and the headless horseman event. I probably won’t do that any more. In reality, the Free2Play games out there, and their microtransaction schemes allowing you to buy and consume content at your leisure, represent simply much more entertainment value for my money than shelling out 15€ / month for WoW when I might play it for little more than a couple of hours at best, if at all.

And while I could definitely afford it, I also find that the subscription fee actually participates in generating a compulsion to play in me, at the exclusion of other games, becoming enough a narrow focus that it might again draw me in and provoke another spiral that may, next time around, no longer come with a happy ending.

So the future of Altitis is similar to what a few other former WoW bloggers have done – altitis no longer confined to one game, but offering, perhaps, comments, reviews but also broader thoughts on several games.

Or maybe not. Time will tell.

In the meantime, the tagline of the blog has changed (I actually changed it when I posted the “Soon” message already), it has now become “Seeking Better Worlds”.

It is a combination of Dr. Richard Bartle‘s continuous action to try and push developers and players alike to create and demand better, richer virtual worlds. At the same time, it is also a play on the fictional Weyland-Yutani (of the Alien movie series) corporate slogan, “Building better worlds”, as a reminder that the quest for better virtual worlds in itself may very well become perverted if it turns, again, into a threat to my real life.

This was a post from Altitis.

Phoenix Reborn?

This was a post from Altitis.

Soon…

I’m therefore always quite wary of my surroundings when engaged with some NPCs when alliance shows up.

Today, deciding to clean up my dragonblight quest log of the remaining group quests I never managed to do before, specced tankadin for a change to see where my ragtag offspec looting left me (532 def, 50% avoidance ex holy shield), it was no different, or so I thought.

I had an appointment in New Heartglen, to put an end to the High General in charge there.

After clearing around and waiting for the general to show herself, I quietly engaged her and calmly worked her down. And suddenly, behind me, a lower level alliance death knight shows up.

One of 73 seasons would probably have been manageable in tank spec – after all, it’s not as if the fight were taxing me to the limit, only my mana pool was something to keep an eye on from time to time.

The Death Knight engaged in combat too – with the general. So once my affair was over, and he picked his own fight, I gave him a hand in return. Death Knights may be powerful, but soloing the general at level 73? Nah. She was having him for dinner. The most difficult part? Not using any AoE abilities for fear of killing the DK.

We parted ways after exchanging salutes. Would the outcome have been different if he too were level 80? Possibly. Still, the human Death Knight Horcan was honourable in battle, and Honour I returned.

This was a post from Altitis.

Honourable Foes