Altitis

It most definitely was a Blizzardish soon, but there we go. A new post after a semester-long hiatus.

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.

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I’m currently training & travelling quite a bit, which seriously hampers my playtime (and explains my utter lack of relevant posts lately).

My mage is therefore pretty much stuck at level 53, waiting for a Plaguelands push all the way to Outlands when I have some spare time. On the other hand, at least she builds some rest XP to speed the whole thing up.

But as usual when I lose the opportunity to focus on one toon, alts happen. Sometimes it is out of necessity. The guild my mage is a member of had a month of massive member bleed, with most players having a high-end toon listening to the siren calls of Kara raiding and moving to some 250+ strong guild to visit the Big Gray Guildbreaker.

Which pretty much left me with two other not-so-casuals occupying guild chat.

And no rogue to unlock my chests. During summer slump.

Sometimes, alts happen out of necessity. I rolled my 5th rogue. She’s alive dead & kicking, and as you will have guessed, came to a semblance of life for the second time in her history in Deathknell.

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Until last Fall, I’ve always looked at WoW’s seasonal events as a bit of a waste of time, mainly because they only offered mostly cosmetic rewards.

Only the Lunar Festival initially had a specific boss, and one without a loot table. Fortunately, this changed with last years’ Hallow’s End and the introduction of the Headless Horseman, which had a loot table combining the fun / cosmetic and pretty useful stuff for level 70 characters for what was, essentially, a pretty trivial effort (more so since you could actually raid him).

After the addition of Lord Ahune to the Midsummer festival, it appears that the Brewfest will also feature an event-specific boss of its own.

Adding these event bosses not only provides a nice complement to the usual mix of food, fancy clothes and non-combat pets, they also drop some nice epic loot to extend the arsenal of the freshly minted level 70 player.

In short, a welcome addition, and I hope they’ll extend it to the other festivals still missing their own seasonal boss.

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One of the gripes most often heard during Arena Season 2 and Season 3 from part of the hardcore raiding crowd was about the fact that Arena gear was recoloured tier gear, so that an Illidan-killing hero wouldn’t really appear remarkable when walking in areas where arena dancers gathered.

In Blizzcast 3, Tigole announced that this part of the disagreement between arena players and dedicated raiders will be a thing of the past in Wrath of the Lich King:

PvP armor will be different from the PvE armor entirely in looks and colors this time.

Of course, to some people this might be a trivial issue, but for all the people to whom recognition is also part of the values driving their gameplay, this is a welcome change.

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As I mentioned previously, I’m currently leveling a mage on a new (for me) realm. I picked mage for its fast pace and ease of getting to 70, because for many other classes, having a little stash of gold to buy the best gear available at the AH can make a lot of difference.

Turns out it will be even more so, at least on the realm I’m on. Aside from a steady supply of spirit greens, the AH is desperately devoid of usable kit. Nobody’s really running Azeroth instances any more, and world drops still are heavily tilted in favour of the most useless leveling stat for anyone but priests.

I still believe Blizzard could provide a simple and painless remedy by replacing most of the spirit-based suffixes by the new BC-introduced stuff. That would actually help. It’s something I was thinking about a year ago, though, and I’m not holding my breath. But I digress.

In terms of cap level gameplay, druids and paladins offer the most versatile classes for the casual player who wants to join into group activities with a couple of friends. Groups will always require at least a healer and a tank, and these two can fit the bill. I loved tanking as a pallie, and didn’t mind healing as one either. But that toon is sitting on a PvE realm, and I’m currently playing on PvP.

I’ve never managed to stick to druids beyond level 21. Both classes are toons I’d love playing at level 70, but in both cases, leveling another one up all the way is something I just cannot stomach, at least not for the time being.

While my ideal scenario would be to have Blizzard actually unlock the option of rolling ANY class at level 55 with Wrath, it’s not going to happen in a hurry, because that would officially mean they are admitting old Azeroth is dead and done with. There’s an awful lot of content in there, and I just don’t see them officially putting a nail in its coffin (which they would be doing in that case).

So my plan is to have the mage provide the material support for the rest of my toons on this realm. Once she reaches 70 (assuming she makes it before wrath gets released), I’ll start up on another shammie to eventually have a healer handy.

And the DK? Pretty obvious, of course. It will provide me with a tank for those level 80 group activities. It’s simply going to be the most efficient way to have as many options as possible at my disposal, and starting at level 55 will remove 54 levels of grinding and redoing the quests I start being able to do in my sleep.

And I’m looking forward to it. I just hope the class will be well designed enough to hold its own in that tanking role from go-live onwards, instead of the 3 years of adjusting and tweaking it took for the druid and the paladin to be both viable and accepted as such.

Call it Welfare Leveling

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But Death, Taxes and an infernal dropping at the wrong moment.

My casual-as-dirt guild has started doing Kara for fun. Don’t worry guys, the Random Number God doesn’t hate you personally. You’ll get him next time.

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As most of you will have seen already, Kil’Jaeden is down, and the PvE content of the Burning Crusade is now complete.

Two things strike me, first, it was SK Gaming who got the world first, putting an end to 25 months of Nihilum dominance. Congratulations.

The second thing is that KJ fell (again) in less than one week. Thanks to the gate system, Blizzard basically ensured that Sunwell Plateau would artificially remain unvanquished for 10 weeks, but in practice, the instance would probably have been cleared within 4 weeks without gates.

Now a couple of years ago, I would probably have jumped to the conclusion that spending all that development time on the top content to see it eaten up in a month was overkill, catering to 0.1% of the playerbase for very little additional content. But in reality, this kind of discourse is almost always tied to the notion that the casual content comes up short (something I may have been guilty of myself in the past), a notion which is only true in the eye of the beholder. In practice, lots of content has been added for casual players as well, and while old Azeroth isn’t really being given much love these days, little touches here and there still happen.

In SK Gaming’s own assessment, despite falling in 5 days, Kil’Jaeden is the hardest boss in the game, and perfectly tuned to demand the best a player can give. Contrast this with Naxxramas, which took a couple of months to clear, how do you reconcile that difference?

Well, I do believe the relatively short time between a boss’ gate opening and its first kill is actually speaking less about blizzard’s devs and more about top raiding. Let me venture an educated guess here, but to me the 10-20 guilds forming the world first contenders have mostly reached the game engine’s limits itself, a point where no matter what combination of methods are being coded, they can recognize the pattern, relate to a previous boss fight, and devise the appropriate counter almost naturally (if I liken this to the Treck borg, I’m gonna sound like the ultimate geek). There’s probably a point where stuff like not standing in burning vortexes, clicking on spawned thingies, dealing with nasty adds, handling aggro resets, positioning the raid properly, not staying around your guildies when you’re about to explode, managing fear, composing with an  enrage timer, decursing, healing and dpsing according to whatever situation becomes natural.

In a similar vein, one thing about having Altitis is that the newbie zones is probably what you will have visited more often than anything else – I sure did. The draenei and blood elf starter zones are something I’d qualify as both very well done and faster to finish even on the first run-through than the original ones. And that isn’t just because the zones were done with a lot more polish than their predecessors, but also because there’s only so much you can do in terms of newbie quests before the player recognizes and reacts to patterns. Let’s face it, there’s only one single questline in the draenei and belf zones which provides original components, the Stillpine Furblog chain in Azuremist Isle, and even that one, in the end, amounts to little more than fedex and kill.

I think (but feel free to tell me just how much I’m talking out of my arse) it’s pretty much the same with boss fights. The limits nowadays are the game engine proper, but also the imagination of the devs – there might still be some mechanisms to be devised to innovate on boss fights, but in the end, it probably becomes harder and harder to find new stuff which can be countered with more than one specific raid composition, allows for more than just one set of cookie-cutter approaches, and is more than “chug enough of the right type of consumables to beat”.

The bottom line is that this relatively short time to clear the hardest bosses in the game demonstrates, in practice even more than in marketing speak, that we have indeed reached the end of TBC, in the sense that only the new skills and talents WotLK will ship with could provide room for new mechansism and types of boss fights.

Even then, I’m not sure there will be enough novelty and variety available to dispel a feeling of “more of the same”, a complaint I’ll go on record predicting will become much more pervasive in the top raiding circles once Wrath is live. Something which, unfortunately, will probably not be fixable within WoW, independently of the quality and challenge Wrath could provide. Should any of the competitors in the MMO market provide a decent endgame, I expect a good portion of the top raiders to leave for pastures providing a different shade of green.

Makes me pretty glad to have Altitis, actually. I’m nowhere near the point where I could reach the limit of what the game has to offer.

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As most of you will have noticed by now, Blizzard, in yet another clear demonstration that the hardcore whining raider-fabricated myth of the complaining casuals is just that, a myth, kowtowed to the tiny but vocal minority and added arena rating requirements both to most S4 arena gear but also, in a slightly more surprising move, to the S4 honour gear.

As had to be expected, the catassing few are very happy about it, to wit, everyone’s favourite faux hardcore raiding blogger is gloating with Shadenfreude.

Aside from reminding the overeager that S4 is still a while off and things may yet change, I’m quite happy about this myself. As things will stand, looks like the only gear to which you can apply the moniker Welfare Epics is the badge loot, which is obtained through PvE only. In one of those delicious bouts of irony, the very term coined by the catassers‘ role model and lead developer Tigole to mock the PvPers now strictly applies to PvE, his very own area of competency in WoW.

What will this change, if it goes live as announced? Well, for the casual arena player, he will actually start and play in the 1300-1700 range and face opponent teams which do not hopelessly outgear him (especially if you combine these rating requirements with the new mechanisms introduced in 2.4.2 to fight point selling). The casual gamer who does arena because it’s one of the activities available to him due to the limited organization and scheduling required will benefit from more competitive gameplay, where mainly S2 and S3 gear balances itself out with the respective skill of all the contenders.

The competitive PvPers will find themselves in the 2000+ range, just as today, not feeling any particular impact except that they won’t be able to get 3 pieces of S4 the day the new season starts. They’ll also fight with their peers and compete for the honours of top rank. Nothing changed here.

Where there could be a difference, a gear aristocracy of sorts, is in the 1700-2000 range, where the teams trying to move upwards will find themselves matched against those from the bracket above who regularly stay around the fringe. Whether this will really create a 2-season gear gap in practice remain to be seen.

As Stop puts it, there’s no fast track through PvP for late level 70 joiners or alts anymore, which means the raiding gear-up game will start again with renewed strength. I expect there to be more drama generated, again, by top raiding guilds poaching geared members of mid-progression guilds, probably just what we need to offset the lack of popcorn moments generated by the pre-WotLK fatigue WoWInsider keeps telling us has already settled in.

All in all, for the casuals, it changes nothing. They will get S2 and S3 gear with no more efforts than what they need to invest today for S1 and S2 gear, but they can start with S0 blues since patch 2.4. That’s enough to enter entry level PvE content with casual guilds if they so desire – at least for DPS and healers. Tanks have, as always, no alternative solutions or fast track to gearing available to them. For the truly hardcore, it changes nothing. Season gear has always been inferior for top PvE content, and that doesn’t change. The only people this will really affect are any PvE players who face itemization gaps, in particular in the weapons department (or runs of bad loot dropping luck), making it harder for them to switch to a different progression path to compensate. Considering it’s that same crowd who appears to be most happy about the change at present, that shouldn’t be an issue either.

In other words, Blizzard chose wisely with their pandering to the loudmouthed crying hardcore minority.

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Kirk at Priestly Endeavors (again, two links a day keeps the boredom away) wrote about Training Guilds last Friday. This struck a chord with me because I originally founded our current guild with that very objective in mind.

The Initial Plan
When TBC hit the market, I decided to re-roll on a new server and on horde (I had been playing mostly alliance before that), together with a couple of officers from our previous social / raiding guild. TBC drama as well as a late evening schedule not really fitting raiding basically barred me from envisionning even semi-casual raiding, so I was looking into creating something both different and still rewarding.

The idea behind creating a Raiding School came together based on pre-TBC raiding experiences. My previous guild had been founded through a peaceful merge (yes, some of them actually do work out) of two relatively similar-minded semi-casual guilds who started having several players reaching level 60 and didn’t want their friends scattering all over the server. We actually created a brand new guild, made sure officer positions were equally distributed between both, and hit the road.
One month later, the people reaching level 60 were enough to start some decent raiding and off we went to ZG, soon killing the first bosses, getting the first loot and gearing our raiding force into something ready for more.
As I mentionned, we were a rather casual bunch, with two raiding nights a week only, a zero-sum DKP with a couple of rules hastily put up by yours truly, and no big constraints on the membership.
What happened then, within a month of our first success, was (and still is) a classic. Our MT decided we weren’t moving fast enough for him, so he secured a spot as OT in a guild in the middle of MC progression – with the gear he had earned on our ZG runs and the Dark Iron kit crafted for him in part on guild resources. Our progression came to a halt, and we had to find another MT. Then a couple of healers left in a similar fashion, and again even good ole’ Venoxis became hard to beat for a while.
We eventually stabilized a 20-man team and resumed our progression. We struck an alliance with another alliance of two smaller guilds also running ZG to get into MC and ran together for a while, tackling the first 5 bosses pretty fast. And then came summer.
While the GM was on vacation, some officers were approached by the GM of another smallish guild who proposed an absorption on seemingly generous terms, and albeit the officers eventually declined, we lost our geared MT, OT, two healers, three officers and a couple of DPS in the process. Back to square one again – this time, it was our GM himself who’d become the MT to avoid any further risks of losing a geared tank.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, what happened to us, after reading several other accounts, was a classic of the issues with pre-TBC raiding.
During the last year before TBC, a food chain had set in place which would have the top guilds (those finishing AQ40 and working on Naxx) grab the best players of the second-tier guilds (those finishing BWL and starting on AQ40), who would in turn leech off vital blood from the more casual, third-tier guilds.
The whole mechanism was particuliarly painful for these third-tier guilds, or at least, it was for ours. As a social / raiding outfit, our aim had always been to enjoy the game at our own pace, but in the company of the friends we had been making on the journey. The various leeching moments, in particuliar when it was a sizeable portion of our raiding crew who’d just vanish during the witching hours (you know, 4-5am) tended to generate much drama and of course hurt everyone’s morale, not to speak of our raiding progression.
At the same time, this whole food chain ecosystem was enforced, game-wise, by the gear gap.
No Tier-1 guild would recruit players wearing anything but full T2 (and later T2.5), and no Tier-2 guild would take any players with less than T1-grade kit. Fresh level 60 players simply had no other choices than joining the more casual / social guilds and use these as stepping stones to go further.

The Raiding School we planned to build was meant to address exactly that issue. To bridge the gear gap between brand-new endgame players and second-tier raiding guilds, teaching them the necessary core raiding skills in the process. We meant to achieve that with having a group of experienced players, our Faculty, guiding raid newbies. The Faculty themselves being pretty well kitted out, we then thought that classes lasting for 3 months or so would be enough to do the job. We had planned out a couple of aggro-games, and then a couple of visits to level 60 boss encounters before moving to level 70 stuff just to show everyone the ropes.
We then hoped we could get some form of cooperation from the other raiding guilds while establishing our reputation as the Raiding School – the idea being that someone who spent a class with us would get a seal of approval, and upon request, a direct recommendation to a class officer in a recruiting guild.

That was end of January 2007. That vision never came to be.

Biting Reality
The vision we had failed on several levels. First and foremost, we had rolled on horde on a new post-TBC server. There’s little non-guild activity in general, so little room to recruit the missing Faculty, and to gear ourselves up to a point where we could actually do some coaching ourselves.
Then there is Kara. Kara attuning, and Kara itself is the biggest roadblock to guild progression and guild survival. First and foremost, in order to begin raiding, you have the whole key quest to complete – contrary to old WoW, there’s no ZG where you can take a class of 6-8 new players with 3-5 coaches and start teaching and gearing people from the get-go. Even the more motivated players in our guild will eventually tire of running SL and Arc over and over for the key quests before going back to teaching Kara to a group of new players.
And last but not least, our little friendly levelling support guild was hit by its own share of drama, dwindling to near nothingness. These days we’re down to two level 70 players, Steptoe and me, myself far from Kara-attuned. And we’re not motivated enough to go back to recruiting, instead, we’re talking about transferring out to a more populated place to actually get groups to gear ourselves up for… what exactly? Arena. And probably heroics.
My playtimes haven’t changed, and Kara is as newbie-unfriendly as it was. Talking to other GMs, especially of those rare surviving Tier-3 guilds who still haven’t left Kara (or just did within the past month or so), building a proper Raiding School as envisionned is simply not possible in TBC, the game’s design is too hard to overcome, here as well.

I still like the old concept we put on paper back in January. Maybe, just maybe, we can open our drawers and start anew with WotLK. Though I don’t have my hopes too high on that.

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