My home isn't just my proverbial castle. It is also my workplace. And when I'm at work (i.e. playing video games or making fun of them), I don't want to be disturbed. People disturb me. And so do pants. This is my home, this is where I live and this is where my wang shall never be constricted by pants. In fact, we do have a rule around the house, which says that my significant other has to make a phone call and warn me 30 minutes before she brings any visitors. Otherwise, I will not be wearing pants. Which doesn't bother me in the slightest.
One potential threat to my pantsless workplace castle freedom is the existence of neighbours. There is a flat right on top of our own and over the years, our living experience has varied greatly with each set of upstairs inhabitants. The current pair would be Fat Chick and Monkeyboy. Fat Chick probably has a real name, but I choose to call her that, because she has no other apparent qualities. She's about as entertaining to talk to as a bottle of 3in1 Shampoo and even less pleasant to look at. The first thing that jumped into my mind whenever I see her is, "Wow! She's FAT!" So there you go.
She used to live with a strange creature I like to call Monkeyboy. By their loud arguments I derive he must be old enough to earn money, but he has the voice and looks of a 12 year old boy and he rides around on one of those little monkey bikes. It's what kids do around here: They wear their pants around their ankles and expose their butts like somebody in jail willing to sell it for a bowl of soup. And they ride around on shitty miniature bicycles.
Fat Chick & Monkeyboy were the most tolerable neighbours we've had so far. Which doesn't mean I don't hate them. I really do. But after living with a dipshit, who practiced with his guitar at 3 in the morning and a bunch of stoners, who made the entire block smell of pot, this latest couple of mutants were a welcome change. Sure, their absolute lack of talent didn't stop them from singing at the top of their lungs all day and listening to them playing their shitty old N64 games at maximum volume until midnight each day wasn't the most pleasant experience I could ever imagine, but it was tolerable. Most of all, they left me the hell alone. Eventually, Monkeyboy left Fat Chick and never showed up anymore and Fat Chick has been evading me ever since she had a nice long stare at my wang through the living room window. I didn't force that stupid old cow to plant her fucking flowers right in front of my damn window and I'm not gonna put some fucking pants on, just because she's hanging around outside. So there's that.
Sadly, the days of peace are about to come to an end. Monkeyboy came back this morning and the Bear and I woke up to one of the more entertaining upstairs arguments. "You're disgusting", I heard him shout in his 12 year old voice. I was really getting my hopes up there! Thought maybe she took a massive crap in the litter box or something. But then he said she's disgusting when it comes to money. What a stupid choice of words! You can be disgusting with food, fetishes, kinky habits, but money? Lame!
He spent the next 20 minutes shouting at her for wanting all the money back he spent on their bills, food and every other thing. I wasn't exactly dying to know all the details, but it's a nice, hot summer day, all the windows are open and he was beeping and squeaking with all the noise he could make, so it was rather difficult to ignore.
He was also slamming doors with the rage of an angry kitten. Or maybe they were playing ping pong the whole time, but her screaming at him to stop slamming doors after every gentle 'tink' suggests he must have been raging with all his teenage might. And then she puked her guts out. Here's a fun fact for ya: When you pour a liquid down the drain of your sink or your tub around here, i.e. water or vomit, it doesn't just disappear the way you might know it if you live in a country where people know shit about plumbing. It flows through an outdoor pipe along the wall of the house and gathers in a sinkhole in the backyard, which happens to be right in front of our bedroom window. It's a very cool thing to wake up to: We could hear Fat Chick cough and gargle upstairs and all the puke came down through the pipe downstairs. Whee!
I don't think they'll be living here for much longer. Fat Chick's mail has been piling up in the corridor for a few weeks now. Angry letters. Somehow you can always tell payment reminders and bills from regular mail. They look official. Threatening. Maybe it's just how they tend to come with big, red exclamation marks on them or how nobody dares pick them up, but there's a bit of a scary aura about them.
Yes, I know. None of my business and all that. But come on. Those fucking letters are there, right in our corridor. And it's a bit difficult to avoid hearing all those arguments. And the puke. Might as well take pleasure in it. Because that's what we did. We held hands, looked at each other, laughed for a while and went back to sleep with a happy sigh.
I wonder what the new neighbours are gonna be like. And whether we get to nick another cool high-tech microwave oven, when the current neighbours disappear without a word of warning or paying any of their bills. I just hope they're gonna leave me alone. Well... I guess I can always show my dick if they piss me off.
-Cat
Freitag, 25. Mai 2012
Donnerstag, 24. Mai 2012
It was fun for a week, now gimme Torchlight 2
I know, I know. Diablo 3 is fucking what little there is left of my sanity. For the best part of a decade I was hyped about it, preordered it about five or so years ago, then I stopped caring the more I heard about what it was gonna be like. Told everyone I wasn't gonna play it much. I even wasted a ton of money by refusing to write any guides or articles about it, because I simply didn't care about the game enough.
I was still getting the game, of course, what with me being a monthly pass idiot and all, so when it went live, I gave it a try. Well, several hours after it went live, because the Blizzard servers didn't work too well and you can't actually play Diablo 3 unless the servers are up, even if you just intend on having some singleplayer fun. That's like being forced to wait until the missus comes home before having a wank.
And it was fun. Sure, it's all candy-coloured, it really looks ten years old and the soundtrack... well, let's just say it's not as good as the music in the original games. Not by a long shot. As I played through the piss-easy normal difficulty, I thought maybe I was just that good. First time I ever died on my first ever character was at level 21, while I was rubberbanding like mad and lagging like crazy (yes, insane lag in a singleplayer session, which other game offers that?), I couldn't get away from a boss baddie and - WHAM! That was the end of me.
I came to terms with the oversimplified character-progression long before launch (no more manual stat increases, no stat requirements on items, it's all super casual now), I got some fun out of the simple skill-system, which had replaced complex talent trees and before I knew it, I was well on my way through Hell difficulty. The game still felt insanely easy and D3 Hell simply isn't anywhere near as tough as Hell is in Diablo 2. But that didn't bother me - Inferno mode was on the horizon. Even the somewhat dumb and predictable storyline wasn't a big deal. So the Diablo 1 hero wasn't just the 'wanderer' now, but suddenly became Leoric's eldest son Aidan, apparently he shagged Adria the witch and she gave birth to Leah, who - GASP! - eventually becomes Diablo.
It's all a bit weird. Tyrael and Adria have new voice actors and sound nothing like they used to, Tyrael is a black guy and Diablo is a girl. It's kind of a 21st century equality thing or summat. I mean, everyone is either black or a chick or a combination of these two now. It doesn't bother me, but that kind of thing stopped being unique, cool or surprising quite a while back. Of course there's also a lot of soulstone talk going on. You know, trapping the souls of Diablo and pals in a soulstone, so they may not be reborn and all that? Well, turns out that after killing Diablo at the end of the game, there is no soulstone around, they just do a quick Osama on his body and say evil is dead now and everyone can live happily ever after. Erm... huh? What? But didn't they kill Diablo exactly like that in that weird anime teaser and then he was reborn? So why is this no longer a problem? Hellooo?!
Okay. So the story is a bit shit, the music is shit, the visuals are a bit dated, the game is a bit too easy... oh and did I mention there are no more rune words or any rune enchantments for that matter? No horadric cube and all that? I know, 15 year old Diablo 1 didn't have any of that, but at least it had stats allocation and... well, character progression was probably a tad more complex back then. But oh well, I was having fun, I was leveling up like mad, I absolutely destroyed the first three, stupidly easy difficulty levels and then I got started on Inferno. Heh... yeah.
I'm playing a barbarian. I'm not a huge fan of the barbarian, but it was the one of the five boring classes in this game I could tolerate the most. According to my stats, I have about 70% resistance vs absolutely every form of damage, both physical and magical, I have tens of thousands of hit points and just as much DPS, all the most powerful gear one could farm on hell difficulty and none of it matters. Because on inferno difficulty, you run into packs of elite mobs, who will trap your character and hold them in one spot, then either kill them with a single melee attack, nuke them with stupidly powerful pink lasers or they just surround you with minions, which happen to be invulnerable, yet they're insanely efficient at stopping you from running away or grabbing health pickups.
The most popular strategy to defeat those guys is "kiting", which is a fancy expression for "running away like a pussy". Basically, you're supposed to run away for 20 minutes and only attack whenever your most powerful, 2 minute cooldown abilities become available. If you take too long to beat a particular baddie, the game will put a curse on you and you will lose health over time.
They said inferno was going to be incredibly difficult. I suppose they got that part straight. Alas, none of this is actually challenging or fun in any way. It's not difficult in a way that you could overcome these baddies by getting better at the game or mastering your character. It's difficult in a way that enemies use a selection of incredibly cheap, stupid, frustrating and blatantly unfair abilities to humiliate you in every way imaginable.
I don't mind baddies with obscene amounts of health, who dish out massive damage. I don't mind monsters with nasty special attacks, for as long as they can be countered or evaded in some way. But enemies, who just create magical walls around you or simply immobilize your character from a distance, then take you out in a single shot, aren't fun. This isn't clever gameplay, it's not brilliant design, it's not "getting more complex with every level" as had been announced at Blizzcon. It's cheap. It's cheap, unfair and nothing but that.
The main problem, however, is how the entire game becomes centered about these broken, annoying groups of "rare" baddies. They drop all the good loot. They buff your chance at finding more gold and better items up to 75%. They drop more stuff than Diablo and all the "regular" bosses combined, they're ten times more powerful than Diablo will ever be, they make all other enemies and bosses completely redundant. Which would all be nice and neat, if they were actually fun to kill. If you've played Diablo 2 on Hell difficulty, then you've probably spent a LOT of time killing Diablo (or Baal) for loot. And they generally dropped some nice stuff. The fight was actually pretty fun, everyone was getting excited over the impending loot drops, it was repetitive, but strangely addictive at that.
The rare baddies on Diablo 3 aren't fun. Not remotely. And their loot, whilst nicely colour-coded in blue and yellow, is rarely ever worth the effort. Why oh why do enemies on a level 60 mega hard difficulty setting drop level 56-59 items half of the time? What the fuck am I supposed to do with a wizard staff, that has shitloads of strength and dexterity on it? Why do I have to spend an eternity farming those fuckers, dying fifty times per pack, only to get a bunch of insanely useless loot, which goes straight to the vendor at 250 gold a pop?
Don't get me wrong. I don't want the first monster I run across to explode in a cloud of epic, super-powerful gear that will make the rest of inferno a cakewalk. But in its current state, there is no fun to be had on inferno. Risk vs reward isn't just fucked up, it's simply not there! Die over and over again against stupidly powerful enemies, grit your teeth, force yourself to kill them no matter how frustrating the process, get rewarded with useless trash.
Diablo 2 was tough on hell. It took a lifetime of farming (or 20 monies at any Chinese D2 website) to get all the best gear. But it was actually fun! It was hard, but it was doable and it was fun. Diablo 3 isn't. Normal - Hell are a joke and Inferno is a kick in the nuts.
It's a nice game, sure. I think it's worth the money. I had fun getting where I am. But now I have zero motivation to keep playing. Even if I keep trying until eventually they may or may not adjust this crap, the impending real money auction house pretty much ruins the fun. So I could spend all day farming the most powerful stuff if they ever manage to make it playable. Or I could just leave 100 Quid at the RMAH, get all the most powerful stuff and be done with it for good. Hurray.
I dunno. I think I'm just gonna wait for Torchlight 2 now.
-Cat
I was still getting the game, of course, what with me being a monthly pass idiot and all, so when it went live, I gave it a try. Well, several hours after it went live, because the Blizzard servers didn't work too well and you can't actually play Diablo 3 unless the servers are up, even if you just intend on having some singleplayer fun. That's like being forced to wait until the missus comes home before having a wank.
And it was fun. Sure, it's all candy-coloured, it really looks ten years old and the soundtrack... well, let's just say it's not as good as the music in the original games. Not by a long shot. As I played through the piss-easy normal difficulty, I thought maybe I was just that good. First time I ever died on my first ever character was at level 21, while I was rubberbanding like mad and lagging like crazy (yes, insane lag in a singleplayer session, which other game offers that?), I couldn't get away from a boss baddie and - WHAM! That was the end of me.
I came to terms with the oversimplified character-progression long before launch (no more manual stat increases, no stat requirements on items, it's all super casual now), I got some fun out of the simple skill-system, which had replaced complex talent trees and before I knew it, I was well on my way through Hell difficulty. The game still felt insanely easy and D3 Hell simply isn't anywhere near as tough as Hell is in Diablo 2. But that didn't bother me - Inferno mode was on the horizon. Even the somewhat dumb and predictable storyline wasn't a big deal. So the Diablo 1 hero wasn't just the 'wanderer' now, but suddenly became Leoric's eldest son Aidan, apparently he shagged Adria the witch and she gave birth to Leah, who - GASP! - eventually becomes Diablo.
It's all a bit weird. Tyrael and Adria have new voice actors and sound nothing like they used to, Tyrael is a black guy and Diablo is a girl. It's kind of a 21st century equality thing or summat. I mean, everyone is either black or a chick or a combination of these two now. It doesn't bother me, but that kind of thing stopped being unique, cool or surprising quite a while back. Of course there's also a lot of soulstone talk going on. You know, trapping the souls of Diablo and pals in a soulstone, so they may not be reborn and all that? Well, turns out that after killing Diablo at the end of the game, there is no soulstone around, they just do a quick Osama on his body and say evil is dead now and everyone can live happily ever after. Erm... huh? What? But didn't they kill Diablo exactly like that in that weird anime teaser and then he was reborn? So why is this no longer a problem? Hellooo?!
Okay. So the story is a bit shit, the music is shit, the visuals are a bit dated, the game is a bit too easy... oh and did I mention there are no more rune words or any rune enchantments for that matter? No horadric cube and all that? I know, 15 year old Diablo 1 didn't have any of that, but at least it had stats allocation and... well, character progression was probably a tad more complex back then. But oh well, I was having fun, I was leveling up like mad, I absolutely destroyed the first three, stupidly easy difficulty levels and then I got started on Inferno. Heh... yeah.
I'm playing a barbarian. I'm not a huge fan of the barbarian, but it was the one of the five boring classes in this game I could tolerate the most. According to my stats, I have about 70% resistance vs absolutely every form of damage, both physical and magical, I have tens of thousands of hit points and just as much DPS, all the most powerful gear one could farm on hell difficulty and none of it matters. Because on inferno difficulty, you run into packs of elite mobs, who will trap your character and hold them in one spot, then either kill them with a single melee attack, nuke them with stupidly powerful pink lasers or they just surround you with minions, which happen to be invulnerable, yet they're insanely efficient at stopping you from running away or grabbing health pickups.
The most popular strategy to defeat those guys is "kiting", which is a fancy expression for "running away like a pussy". Basically, you're supposed to run away for 20 minutes and only attack whenever your most powerful, 2 minute cooldown abilities become available. If you take too long to beat a particular baddie, the game will put a curse on you and you will lose health over time.
They said inferno was going to be incredibly difficult. I suppose they got that part straight. Alas, none of this is actually challenging or fun in any way. It's not difficult in a way that you could overcome these baddies by getting better at the game or mastering your character. It's difficult in a way that enemies use a selection of incredibly cheap, stupid, frustrating and blatantly unfair abilities to humiliate you in every way imaginable.
I don't mind baddies with obscene amounts of health, who dish out massive damage. I don't mind monsters with nasty special attacks, for as long as they can be countered or evaded in some way. But enemies, who just create magical walls around you or simply immobilize your character from a distance, then take you out in a single shot, aren't fun. This isn't clever gameplay, it's not brilliant design, it's not "getting more complex with every level" as had been announced at Blizzcon. It's cheap. It's cheap, unfair and nothing but that.
The main problem, however, is how the entire game becomes centered about these broken, annoying groups of "rare" baddies. They drop all the good loot. They buff your chance at finding more gold and better items up to 75%. They drop more stuff than Diablo and all the "regular" bosses combined, they're ten times more powerful than Diablo will ever be, they make all other enemies and bosses completely redundant. Which would all be nice and neat, if they were actually fun to kill. If you've played Diablo 2 on Hell difficulty, then you've probably spent a LOT of time killing Diablo (or Baal) for loot. And they generally dropped some nice stuff. The fight was actually pretty fun, everyone was getting excited over the impending loot drops, it was repetitive, but strangely addictive at that.
The rare baddies on Diablo 3 aren't fun. Not remotely. And their loot, whilst nicely colour-coded in blue and yellow, is rarely ever worth the effort. Why oh why do enemies on a level 60 mega hard difficulty setting drop level 56-59 items half of the time? What the fuck am I supposed to do with a wizard staff, that has shitloads of strength and dexterity on it? Why do I have to spend an eternity farming those fuckers, dying fifty times per pack, only to get a bunch of insanely useless loot, which goes straight to the vendor at 250 gold a pop?
Don't get me wrong. I don't want the first monster I run across to explode in a cloud of epic, super-powerful gear that will make the rest of inferno a cakewalk. But in its current state, there is no fun to be had on inferno. Risk vs reward isn't just fucked up, it's simply not there! Die over and over again against stupidly powerful enemies, grit your teeth, force yourself to kill them no matter how frustrating the process, get rewarded with useless trash.
Diablo 2 was tough on hell. It took a lifetime of farming (or 20 monies at any Chinese D2 website) to get all the best gear. But it was actually fun! It was hard, but it was doable and it was fun. Diablo 3 isn't. Normal - Hell are a joke and Inferno is a kick in the nuts.
It's a nice game, sure. I think it's worth the money. I had fun getting where I am. But now I have zero motivation to keep playing. Even if I keep trying until eventually they may or may not adjust this crap, the impending real money auction house pretty much ruins the fun. So I could spend all day farming the most powerful stuff if they ever manage to make it playable. Or I could just leave 100 Quid at the RMAH, get all the most powerful stuff and be done with it for good. Hurray.
I dunno. I think I'm just gonna wait for Torchlight 2 now.
-Cat
Samstag, 12. Mai 2012
Farewell, Libranzer
I don't wanna go into that whole 'WoW sucks and is full of idiots' kind of garbage all over again. Or how I'm not a fan of pandas. Plenty of blogs about that, really. Done my fair share of bitching about it, as well. Thing is, I have friends who are actually crazy about the whole thing, one of which happens to be a GM and... well, let's just say he seemed awfully hurt when I kept on bitching about the game. I'm a troll at heart (the flaming type, not of the tusked variety), but even I get older, wiser and more mature. At a much slower rate than most people, but there ya have it. Friends working at Blizzard don't enjoy my bitching about WoW. Kinda like a certain friend at Frogster doesn't appreciate it when I crack jokes about Aion or Tera. Fair enough - I don't like any of them making fun of my work or the magazines I write for. Respect and friendship 101. Or something. I dunno... it's not the point of this entry, anyway.
Something has happened today. Something I wasn't expecting to happen in a lifetime. The end of an era. At a very early stage in our relationship, I have introduced my significant other to WoW. Just plain old vanilla, BC wasn't even out. Feels like eons ago now. She never played any computer games before and turned with her arrow keys like the complete noob she was. My old man was there, my brother played it and it all felt unlike anything we had played before. The enchanted teletubbie forests around Darnassus actually still felt magical and wondrous back then, my old man's dwarven hunter, Redbeard, felt so incredibly fitting and my night elf warrior was the biggest asshole on all of Alleria.
I had experimented with Ultima Online before, I used to play Ragnarok Online like crazy, but completely unfamiliar with the holy trinity of MMOs I was entirely oblivious about the concept of tanking or how that was supposed to be my job when I first stepped into the Deadmines. The first cape that actually resembled a, well, cape... the first gold coin in my inventory, the first pair of pauldrons... countless little milestones, everything was all nice and new - one of my friends wrote a rather witty blog about it a while back, comparing these experiences to the first time you ever get laid (and you're in the unlikely and fortunate position of stuff actually going as planned). You never forget these moments and as time goes by, nostalgia will make them even better and more exciting as they ever really were.
I remember our first little guild. 'Die Glücksritter'. Loved the name and the idea behind it, but the whole thing eventually fell apart when our more ambitious members decided to join the bigger, more powerful raid guilds. Nowadays, that's perfectly normal - you join a leveling guild for their bonuses and benefits and as you grow up, you leave them for a raid group, a band of pvp nuts or whatever floats your boat. And then there were the Goatbusters. Fun, tiny guild I had started with Claire after we had infected the entire family with WoW fever.
I don't wanna get too boring with all the details here, but we did have lots of fun, went on some incredibly exciting dungeon runs and even a few raids here and there and we've got quite a few stories to tell. You can probably relate if you've stayed with the same guild for several years. There is something undeniably fun about the whole thing: You know a bunch of regular people in real life, they're average Janes and Joes like everybody else, but on WoW, we've all slipped into our roles, everybody had their one favourite main character. It's a bit like a bunch of people with secret identities, with alter egos, boring office guy turning into a blood-thirsty orc at 8 every night. You get the idea. Like those cheesy super hero families. Everyone had that one silly character that best suited their personality. It was all just fun and games, but it was a neat little escape from real life.
The best part about it all was leading the guild, taking care of things along with Claire's druid: Libranzer. Yeah, I know. And don't ask me. Something about her being a Libra and what have you, I don't know, she's my partner, you don't criticise that kinda stuff, let's move on. And we'd decide where to go, what to do, one of us would do the tanking for the rest of 'em, we'd help with basic gear setup (i.e. what gems, enchantments etc. to use) and show off with 2on2 arena ratings higher than anyone else's - for as meaningless as they most certainly are.
But as time went on, I gradually lost interest in the game until it turned into nothing but a chore. Claire wanted her arena gear, so I'd log on to cap conquest points with her. Raids? Seen 'em all. At least the ones our guild could actually handle. Dungeon runs with the guild? Again? For the 20th time that month? Not in the mood. I really just showed myself to help Claire get her stuff and logged off again right after. At some point, even Claire got bored of the arena, of constantly grinding for stuff that would become obsolete after the next patch. So I stayed away and she only logged on 'for fun' and to chat with the family.
And tonight it finally happened. She mentioned it on several occasions, but I didn't believe she would ever do it: She passed on guild leadership to her sister. She is not going to renew her subscription after it runs out, she's not buying MoP and even though she had beta access for about a month now, she has not actually looked at the beta. Not once. And for reasons I cannot quite explain, I feel rather sad about the whole thing. Not sad enough to be wanting to stop her in any way, of course. But this is it. This is actually it.
You see, I have quit WoW plenty of times. And most of the time I had zero intention of coming back, but it's hard to live in a relationship where your partner spends up to 8 hours a day playing that stupid game. In a way, she was my anchor - she'd discover some cool new features that came with some new update or an expansion or what have you and she'd drag me back. And I won't lie to you: For as much as I hated the farming, the grind, going after some stupid mounts, sets and achievements I never really gave a fuck about, there was something incredibly fun about these days, as well.
Claire and I simply kicked ass. We tackled dungeons together that nobody else in the guild could finish. We were unstoppable in duels, we topped the scoreboards in pvp, we ran a nice little guild and we explored Azeroth side by side. It's one thing doing all of this stuff with friends, with a guild, with people you enjoy hanging out with. It becomes a lot more fun and meaningful if you're doing it with someone you love. I know it's all a bit cheesy, but what's the most heroic thing most of us will do with our partners in real life? File a tax return?
On WoW, we fought side by side, beat countless opponents in the arena, helped each other through the toughest dungeons, saved each other's lives countless times and faced all kinds of crazy challenges together. And eventually, you start caring about your partner's character just as much as you'd care about your own.
Alright, alright. I know there's a whole bunch of people out there, who don't know shit about RPGs and who just play whatever class is considered most OP at the time. People, who change race, gender and faction more often than their own underwear and who don't actually get attached to their toons. I hope you're all gonna die of ass cancer, but that's a different story. But Claire and I (and everyone in the guild, really) love our characters and we hate leaving them, for as much as WoW bores us these days. So seeing her pass on guild leadership, knowing she's gonna park her ass in Moonglade to 'settle down' and end her adventuring days once and for all, watching as Libranzer takes her well-deserved rest... it's sad. It's also incredibly cool, because I don't have to feel guilty about emptying those 40 gigs of space this monster of a game was occupying on my HD, but it's mostly sad. I'm gonna miss her. I'm gonna miss those days where her and I would slay dragons, keep the squishy guild mates out of harm's way and brag about our stupid arena rating and the new gear we'd obtain faster than anybody else.
Those are some of the coolest gaming memories I have. And no matter how much WoW may change, whether it remains the most successful game of all times for another 8 years or whether upcoming new titles will eventually render it outdated and obsolete, no matter how annoyed I am at the bunch of drooling idiots, who call themselves gamers today (did you SEE those mutants at Blizzcon?), I will always treasure those days, those adventures and all the fun and excitement we've had.
And even though Libranzer and Sabreclaw will finally settle down for good, there's already a new, eager young pair of adventurers eager to explore a whole new world. Tyria awaits, Guild Wars 2 is on the horizon and we can't wait to write a whole new story on there, obtain a whole bunch of new fond memories and fight our way through dungeons and legions of foes, which we've never encountered on any other game. And we're bringing a whole lot of friends, who will join us when we create our next little guild...
So fare thee well, Libranzer. Rest well, Sabreclaw. Azeroth is in the hands of a new, more panda-friendly generation of heroes now as our old heroes finally retire. But our next big adventure is only about to begin.
-Cat
Something has happened today. Something I wasn't expecting to happen in a lifetime. The end of an era. At a very early stage in our relationship, I have introduced my significant other to WoW. Just plain old vanilla, BC wasn't even out. Feels like eons ago now. She never played any computer games before and turned with her arrow keys like the complete noob she was. My old man was there, my brother played it and it all felt unlike anything we had played before. The enchanted teletubbie forests around Darnassus actually still felt magical and wondrous back then, my old man's dwarven hunter, Redbeard, felt so incredibly fitting and my night elf warrior was the biggest asshole on all of Alleria.
I had experimented with Ultima Online before, I used to play Ragnarok Online like crazy, but completely unfamiliar with the holy trinity of MMOs I was entirely oblivious about the concept of tanking or how that was supposed to be my job when I first stepped into the Deadmines. The first cape that actually resembled a, well, cape... the first gold coin in my inventory, the first pair of pauldrons... countless little milestones, everything was all nice and new - one of my friends wrote a rather witty blog about it a while back, comparing these experiences to the first time you ever get laid (and you're in the unlikely and fortunate position of stuff actually going as planned). You never forget these moments and as time goes by, nostalgia will make them even better and more exciting as they ever really were.
I remember our first little guild. 'Die Glücksritter'. Loved the name and the idea behind it, but the whole thing eventually fell apart when our more ambitious members decided to join the bigger, more powerful raid guilds. Nowadays, that's perfectly normal - you join a leveling guild for their bonuses and benefits and as you grow up, you leave them for a raid group, a band of pvp nuts or whatever floats your boat. And then there were the Goatbusters. Fun, tiny guild I had started with Claire after we had infected the entire family with WoW fever.
I don't wanna get too boring with all the details here, but we did have lots of fun, went on some incredibly exciting dungeon runs and even a few raids here and there and we've got quite a few stories to tell. You can probably relate if you've stayed with the same guild for several years. There is something undeniably fun about the whole thing: You know a bunch of regular people in real life, they're average Janes and Joes like everybody else, but on WoW, we've all slipped into our roles, everybody had their one favourite main character. It's a bit like a bunch of people with secret identities, with alter egos, boring office guy turning into a blood-thirsty orc at 8 every night. You get the idea. Like those cheesy super hero families. Everyone had that one silly character that best suited their personality. It was all just fun and games, but it was a neat little escape from real life.
The best part about it all was leading the guild, taking care of things along with Claire's druid: Libranzer. Yeah, I know. And don't ask me. Something about her being a Libra and what have you, I don't know, she's my partner, you don't criticise that kinda stuff, let's move on. And we'd decide where to go, what to do, one of us would do the tanking for the rest of 'em, we'd help with basic gear setup (i.e. what gems, enchantments etc. to use) and show off with 2on2 arena ratings higher than anyone else's - for as meaningless as they most certainly are.
But as time went on, I gradually lost interest in the game until it turned into nothing but a chore. Claire wanted her arena gear, so I'd log on to cap conquest points with her. Raids? Seen 'em all. At least the ones our guild could actually handle. Dungeon runs with the guild? Again? For the 20th time that month? Not in the mood. I really just showed myself to help Claire get her stuff and logged off again right after. At some point, even Claire got bored of the arena, of constantly grinding for stuff that would become obsolete after the next patch. So I stayed away and she only logged on 'for fun' and to chat with the family.
And tonight it finally happened. She mentioned it on several occasions, but I didn't believe she would ever do it: She passed on guild leadership to her sister. She is not going to renew her subscription after it runs out, she's not buying MoP and even though she had beta access for about a month now, she has not actually looked at the beta. Not once. And for reasons I cannot quite explain, I feel rather sad about the whole thing. Not sad enough to be wanting to stop her in any way, of course. But this is it. This is actually it.
You see, I have quit WoW plenty of times. And most of the time I had zero intention of coming back, but it's hard to live in a relationship where your partner spends up to 8 hours a day playing that stupid game. In a way, she was my anchor - she'd discover some cool new features that came with some new update or an expansion or what have you and she'd drag me back. And I won't lie to you: For as much as I hated the farming, the grind, going after some stupid mounts, sets and achievements I never really gave a fuck about, there was something incredibly fun about these days, as well.
Claire and I simply kicked ass. We tackled dungeons together that nobody else in the guild could finish. We were unstoppable in duels, we topped the scoreboards in pvp, we ran a nice little guild and we explored Azeroth side by side. It's one thing doing all of this stuff with friends, with a guild, with people you enjoy hanging out with. It becomes a lot more fun and meaningful if you're doing it with someone you love. I know it's all a bit cheesy, but what's the most heroic thing most of us will do with our partners in real life? File a tax return?
On WoW, we fought side by side, beat countless opponents in the arena, helped each other through the toughest dungeons, saved each other's lives countless times and faced all kinds of crazy challenges together. And eventually, you start caring about your partner's character just as much as you'd care about your own.
Alright, alright. I know there's a whole bunch of people out there, who don't know shit about RPGs and who just play whatever class is considered most OP at the time. People, who change race, gender and faction more often than their own underwear and who don't actually get attached to their toons. I hope you're all gonna die of ass cancer, but that's a different story. But Claire and I (and everyone in the guild, really) love our characters and we hate leaving them, for as much as WoW bores us these days. So seeing her pass on guild leadership, knowing she's gonna park her ass in Moonglade to 'settle down' and end her adventuring days once and for all, watching as Libranzer takes her well-deserved rest... it's sad. It's also incredibly cool, because I don't have to feel guilty about emptying those 40 gigs of space this monster of a game was occupying on my HD, but it's mostly sad. I'm gonna miss her. I'm gonna miss those days where her and I would slay dragons, keep the squishy guild mates out of harm's way and brag about our stupid arena rating and the new gear we'd obtain faster than anybody else.
Those are some of the coolest gaming memories I have. And no matter how much WoW may change, whether it remains the most successful game of all times for another 8 years or whether upcoming new titles will eventually render it outdated and obsolete, no matter how annoyed I am at the bunch of drooling idiots, who call themselves gamers today (did you SEE those mutants at Blizzcon?), I will always treasure those days, those adventures and all the fun and excitement we've had.
And even though Libranzer and Sabreclaw will finally settle down for good, there's already a new, eager young pair of adventurers eager to explore a whole new world. Tyria awaits, Guild Wars 2 is on the horizon and we can't wait to write a whole new story on there, obtain a whole bunch of new fond memories and fight our way through dungeons and legions of foes, which we've never encountered on any other game. And we're bringing a whole lot of friends, who will join us when we create our next little guild...
So fare thee well, Libranzer. Rest well, Sabreclaw. Azeroth is in the hands of a new, more panda-friendly generation of heroes now as our old heroes finally retire. But our next big adventure is only about to begin.
-Cat
Mittwoch, 2. Mai 2012
Turning assholes into allies
Something weird has happened to me during the Guild Wars 2 beta weekend. Something that has not happened to me in any mmo since... gee, I don't even remember. Final Fantasy XI about a decade ago? I was happy to see other players, who were finishing the same quest that I was working on! Can you believe it?
You all know what people say about the community on WoW. How it's bad, full of jerks, everyone is a selfish prick, yada, yada, yada. When you think about it, that's the game's own fault. It teaches us to be assholes. You have all stood and watched as some other player attacked a boss or some kind of rare baddie, watched the player's health go down, stood there as he got in trouble... and you didn't help. In fact, you wanted him to get it over with and fucking die already. And when he finally did, you stood on the player's corpse and claimed the monster for yourself, showing that noob how it's done.
Why? Because you don't get any experience for helping random players, your quests won't update, you get absolutely nothing out of it. All you see is some random prick killing your fucking monster and you want him to suffer for it. Of course you could have just invited him to your group, but he had already tagged the monster and besides - come on! He's in your damn spot, fighting your damn quest mobs! There's no way in hell you wanna help that sucker!
That very same thing happens all the time, to every player in one variation or another. You're running for some glittering object on the ground, which you need to pick up to finish a quest and some asshole druid appears, shifts into travel form and outruns you, because he too needs that item. One of my friends has spent ages camping a rare baddie she wanted to tame with her hunter and some other player popped up, demanded a thousand gold and when she didn't respond, he killed the critter in the middle of the taming process.
Every other player is an enemy. Pandaria will eradicate the fight over items by moving boss loot directly into people's inventory and skipping the need and greed rolls, but all the phasing, cut-scenes and Asia-flavoured stereotypes in the world won't stop other players from going after exactly the same quest items, the same quest mobs, waiting for the same stupid respawn.
Now, let's move the whole thing to Guild Wars 2. You're watching another player, who is fighting a boss baddie. You jump in to help him and as the two of you fight, help each other, maybe even throw a heal and a buff or two, more and more people join in until eventually, with everybody's help, you have managed to defeat the bad guy, the event is finished, everybody gets experience points and loot. You don't even have to invite any of the other players - they're all free to join the fun and they all get rewarded according to their contribution. And suddenly, you don't want them to stay the hell away from your kill. In fact, you welcome them, because the whole thing is quicker and easier with more people. Quest difficulty scales up with the amount of participants, so more people usually means more action, more fighting, more experience and more loot. More people = good!
Here's another thing: Reviving other players = good. Everyone gets to resurrect fallen players and doing so will earn you titles, achievements and experience points. Go and ask for a revive in the local chat channel when you die on WoW. I dare you! Yes I know, graveyard is just around the corner and all, but when a paladin walks right past your corpse and you're politely asking for help and they tell you to fuck off, it does somewhat hurt the gaming experience. On GW2, people will give an arm and a leg just to bring you back to life. Sure - they're doing it for nothing but selfish reasons, but they're still helping.
And while I'm at it: Your character's personal story is not as moving or detailed as the story you get on The old Republic. You don't really make any decisions, you don't choose to be good or evil, it's all pretty much pre-scripted. But it's your fucking story. You get to watch your own character talk and act and come to life. When is the last time you've experienced your own story on WoW? For the past couple of years all we do is tag along with Blizzard's pre-defined heroes, watch the story of Thrall and his buddies unfold and nobody gives a fuck about our characters, their own stories, about us - the players. And while I can appreciate that lots of people love the novels and comic books and stories about these characters, I just don't care about their heroes all that much and I don't want to play a game to experience the story of someone else.
-Cat
You all know what people say about the community on WoW. How it's bad, full of jerks, everyone is a selfish prick, yada, yada, yada. When you think about it, that's the game's own fault. It teaches us to be assholes. You have all stood and watched as some other player attacked a boss or some kind of rare baddie, watched the player's health go down, stood there as he got in trouble... and you didn't help. In fact, you wanted him to get it over with and fucking die already. And when he finally did, you stood on the player's corpse and claimed the monster for yourself, showing that noob how it's done.
Why? Because you don't get any experience for helping random players, your quests won't update, you get absolutely nothing out of it. All you see is some random prick killing your fucking monster and you want him to suffer for it. Of course you could have just invited him to your group, but he had already tagged the monster and besides - come on! He's in your damn spot, fighting your damn quest mobs! There's no way in hell you wanna help that sucker!
That very same thing happens all the time, to every player in one variation or another. You're running for some glittering object on the ground, which you need to pick up to finish a quest and some asshole druid appears, shifts into travel form and outruns you, because he too needs that item. One of my friends has spent ages camping a rare baddie she wanted to tame with her hunter and some other player popped up, demanded a thousand gold and when she didn't respond, he killed the critter in the middle of the taming process.
Every other player is an enemy. Pandaria will eradicate the fight over items by moving boss loot directly into people's inventory and skipping the need and greed rolls, but all the phasing, cut-scenes and Asia-flavoured stereotypes in the world won't stop other players from going after exactly the same quest items, the same quest mobs, waiting for the same stupid respawn.
Now, let's move the whole thing to Guild Wars 2. You're watching another player, who is fighting a boss baddie. You jump in to help him and as the two of you fight, help each other, maybe even throw a heal and a buff or two, more and more people join in until eventually, with everybody's help, you have managed to defeat the bad guy, the event is finished, everybody gets experience points and loot. You don't even have to invite any of the other players - they're all free to join the fun and they all get rewarded according to their contribution. And suddenly, you don't want them to stay the hell away from your kill. In fact, you welcome them, because the whole thing is quicker and easier with more people. Quest difficulty scales up with the amount of participants, so more people usually means more action, more fighting, more experience and more loot. More people = good!
Here's another thing: Reviving other players = good. Everyone gets to resurrect fallen players and doing so will earn you titles, achievements and experience points. Go and ask for a revive in the local chat channel when you die on WoW. I dare you! Yes I know, graveyard is just around the corner and all, but when a paladin walks right past your corpse and you're politely asking for help and they tell you to fuck off, it does somewhat hurt the gaming experience. On GW2, people will give an arm and a leg just to bring you back to life. Sure - they're doing it for nothing but selfish reasons, but they're still helping.
And while I'm at it: Your character's personal story is not as moving or detailed as the story you get on The old Republic. You don't really make any decisions, you don't choose to be good or evil, it's all pretty much pre-scripted. But it's your fucking story. You get to watch your own character talk and act and come to life. When is the last time you've experienced your own story on WoW? For the past couple of years all we do is tag along with Blizzard's pre-defined heroes, watch the story of Thrall and his buddies unfold and nobody gives a fuck about our characters, their own stories, about us - the players. And while I can appreciate that lots of people love the novels and comic books and stories about these characters, I just don't care about their heroes all that much and I don't want to play a game to experience the story of someone else.
-Cat
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