Generation Leeroy

Our fathers, as well as their fathers before them, have shunned the idiots of their generations. We, on the other hand, build them monuments.

I am, of course, referring to this guy here:

Remember those days? When UBRS was a small raid (small by vanilla standards) and you actually fought 1-2 mobs at a time, polymorphed the rest, proceeded very carefully, as one false move could have resulted in death?
What Leeroy is doing in that video has made him a complete and utter moron back then. He ran inside a room full of baddies, pulled every single one of them without waiting for his group to get ready, forcing everyone to run after him. Naturally, the healers couldn't keep up, the tanks couldn't contain all the aggro and a minute later, everyone ended up dead.
If you do the exact same thing today, not only will you be rewarded with an achievement and a title, but you'll also be doing 'your job'.

I won't lie to you: I've been a bit of a clueless idiot with the current state of dungeons. I've been playing my warrior since release and none of my alts ever made it past level 20. So, the occasional horrible, HORRIBLE random Cataclysm heroic aside, I don't get to see many dungeons and since I'm on a pvp realm, I spend most of my time in the arena. Works for me.

Until last weekend. Last weekend I had decided to roll a new toon and forced myself through the horrible pile of garbage, which is the Gilneas tutorial. Yes, I know - how dare I call that part of the game horrible? Well, have all your fellow NPCs despawn in the middle of the fight against Sylvanas, effectively killing you and forcing you to restart the whole damn event, paired with bugged quest rewards such as invisible weapons and you'll feel my frustration. Besides, the whole place is so unique in terms of visuals, audio and artwork, that it feels strangely disjointed from the rest of Azeroth.

But once you get to level 15, you can sign up for random dungeons and the next few hours take you around Ragefire Chasm and the Deadmines and the whole experience is more or less what you'd expect at that level. A whole lot of chaos, confusion, random insults and with a lot of luck you might bump into the occasional bunch of semi-intelligent players, who get the job done.

But once you get anywhere close to level 30, the whole thing turns into a grotesque reenactment of Wrath of the Lich King: Without bothering to type even a quick 'hi', let alone waiting for everyone to be there and ready, the tank rushes off, pulling as many enemies as somehow possible on the go. The damage dealers try to keep up and everyone ends up running and fighting at the same time. The group never really stops, everyone just runs after the tank and the healer is spamming like there's no tomorrow. Nobody stops to pick up any loot and you may consider yourself lucky if the group decides to not skip any bosses.

I have watched in horror, when a feral druid charged all across Stratholme while the rest of the group was still getting their quests, then ran back with 25-30 zombies chasing after him, our healer suffering a medium heart-attack whilst trying to keep the whole damn group alive. I dare not say whether the whole group turned out to be insanely talented, or if the game has just become incredibly easy, but for some strange reason, we just about managed to kill the huge onslaught of foes our glorious tank had dragged along with him. And all he said was, "that was epic lol".

Epic. Not only is grabbing every single monster, skipping all the loot and risking mass wipes a perfectly viable 'strategy' today, but it's apparently epic, as well.
Okay, I rolled that toon on Saturday and I'm about to hit level 50 while I'm writing this. This is the most insane level progress I have ever seen in WoW. And more often than not, this stupid tactic actually works out, people manage to get through the dungeons relatively unharmed and at the end, everybody gets one random piece of blue armor. Needless to say there's no chance in hell your professions, first aid and whatever stuff you'd like to level up on your toon will never get off the ground, forcing you to catch up much, much later.

I suppose you can love or hate the whole thing. Some might say that players have reached a skill level, which allows them to pull entire rooms full of baddies and kill them all with massive AoE-spam while the healer keeps everyone alive. Others might say the game has become so easy and characters have become so overpowered, you can now play like a complete idiot and get away with it.

No matter which of the two you tend to agree with, it does explain why random heroics suck. They don't just suck - they fucking vacuum! And that's not really a big surprise.
Provided, your group isn't completely overgeared on maximum tier raid stuff, you won't just run off pissing off every single monster in the area and then expect your healer to take care of it. Suddenly, the whole thing is a tad more old-school: One enemy at a time, use crowd-control against larger groups, whip out the good old polymorph, ice traps and sap and watch as the mage doesn't even know he can only morph one enemy at a time and as the Death Knight whacks the freshly-frozen monster right out of its ice trap and unleashes it upon the group.

And, for as sad as it may be, it's not really the fault of your group members if they suck. They suck because they don't know any better. They have spent 85 levels zerg-rushing through every instance, skipping bosses, ignoring tactics and just spamming the shit out of every single encounter. And suddenly they're supposed to use abilities, which many of them probably haven't even put on their hot bars.

Sure. You can tackle all of these challenges with relative ease, simply by playing with people you know and love, sticking to guild mates and staying the fuck away from the dungeon finder. But in the meanwhile, this handy little utility is breeding a whole generation of rushing, zerging idiots with zero sense of tactics or communication. A generation of Leeroys.

Still, I don't want this entry to end all doomy and gloomy, as there is at least a tiny light shining in the darkness: RealID groups. Having spent countless hours teaming up with hundreds of random players, I did manage to befriend some of the more pleasant and talented ones. Being friendly and helpful and actually doing your job finally pays off again. And having enough like-minded allies available for random dungeons makes the ever-growing army of Leeroy just that much more bearable.

-Cat

Rate me, damn you!

We've all been there: You're ordering at some delivery place named Luigi's and it turns out that the guy on the phone was born somewhere in the Italian part of Pakistan. The whole order turns into a bit of a lottery: How many of your ordered items is he gonna understand, how many of them will be either wrong or missing upon delivery? And then there's the delivery guy. That incompetent moron, who took 90 minutes to find your house, despite it being his fourth delivery there this month. The pizza is cold and soggy and the toppings are stuck at the top of the box. If there was any justice in this world, then he'd tip you. But you're tipping him anyway - you don't want to piss off the guy who touches your food. Ever.

But lo and behold, it's the 21st century! I order my pizza online and I pay online, too. No more misunderstandings, no misplaced orders and if they screw up, then you have proof that the mistake is on their end. And with no cold, hard cash to hand to a delivery guy, there's usually no tip involved, either. Of course that means there's gonna be a little spit on your pizza the next time you order there, but at least it's the stuff you've asked for.

Everybody shops online. There's probably nothing you can't buy on the internet. And it's a very simple process, too: You click on the stuff you want, send your money and a day later your order is sitting on your porch. It's not rocket surgery. And that's great, because there are certain items, which I just don't want to buy 'in person', if I can somehow avoid doing so.

You see - I happen to be blind like the proverbial bat. Now, all of this stuff about how all of your other senses reach superhuman strength when your eyesight sucks is a load of crap. And until I can figure out how to review video games with my incredible sense of smell, I'm gonna depend on contact lenses.
Have you ever bought a pack of lenses in a shop? Before they even give you what you want, they will give you a free checkup on your eyes. Which sounds nice and convenient, but that's where they usually find out that there's something seriously wrong with your retina and they cannot in their right conscience sell you regular contact lenses. You need the special stuff, which is about four times as expensive as the cheap crap you were planning to buy.

Long story short - not only do they rip you off by charging at least twice the amount of money you'd pay online, but they *always*, without fail, find some reason to sell you something special, something just for you, which is even more expensive.

Of course retailers have also noticed how more and more people are taking their business online and that's why online shops try really, really hard to stand out, to make you feel wanted and appreciated as a customer, up to a point where their user-friendliness reaches grotesque levels. Let's stick to my example of contact lenses here for a moment.
The other day I have received an automatically generated email from the online store, where I bought my contacts. "Your last order has been X months ago. You will need new lenses, soon!"

It's very nice of them to remind me that I'm running out of lenses here, because without their help, I sure as fuck wouldn't have noticed. It's not like I *depend* on the damn things or put them in my eyes every single day, right? I do appreciate what they're doing here, but you really, seriously don't have to remind people that they're running out of their everyday items. Do you need somebody to tell you that you're running out of toothpaste or toilet paper? Actually, that would be kind of funny. Imagine a text message on your mobile while you're on the crapper. "Two more sheets and you'll be wiping with your bare hand!"

But it doesn't stop there. Thanks to eBay and Amazon, it has become some kind of strange tradition to ask for a review. Online stores beg you for a rating!
"Lenstore UK has invited you for a testimony. Please let us know how satisfied you are with our service."

Okay, let's see: I have selected a pack of contact lenses, I have sent them my money, they have sent me the lenses. What do they want me to rate there? What's that 'service' they're talking about? Why is there some scale from 0 to 5 involved and how am I supposed to gauge their performance? If getting what I have ordered means 5 stars and not getting the thing I paid for means 0 stars, then what's 3 stars for? They did send my stuff, but their guy in the shipping department was having a bad day and drew an intimidating frowny face on the box?
Maybe I should do the same thing, email their customer service and tell them to rate me. "On a scale of 1-20, how much did you like my money? How satisfied were you with my chosen method of payment?"

On an unrelated note, how do you like my blog on a scale of 0 to 100? And please let me remind you that you're probably running dangerously low on butter. You might want to change that.

-Cat

4.3 - how dare you look awesome?

I already chose my look for 4.3 - did you?

Isn't it funny how one update announcement can cause such a massive stir? So we're officially getting the possibility to transfer the appearance of our favourite weapons and armor onto our current gear in World of Warcraft. Big whoop.

At first it might seem a little odd how a feature, which is so perfectly common in almost every single other MMORPG out there, can possibly cause so much excitement in WoW. But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. We're talking about a game here, which sports a whopping twelve tiers of raid armor sets, ten seasons of pvp gear and a whole lot of personal MMO-history that goes along with these sets and their respective owners.

There are item sets, which I simply love to see - the unavoidable Judgement-set being one of them. I'm making a pretty safe prediction when I say there will be entire legions of paladins bringing this one back. Or take some of the old dungeon sets, such as the rogue's Shadowcraft-armor and its midnight-blue lookalike. And being located on an RP-PvP-Realm, I'm going to see a whole lot of the classic level 60 Horde and Alliance themed armor sets. And I can't wait!

Sure - not everybody has started off back in the over-glorified days of 'vanilla'. And now that our characters can change their sex, name, faction and just about any possible detail imaginable at the swipe of a credit card, there are folks out there, who aren't really attached to their virtual alter egos or the stories they tell. And there are people, who define themselves solely based on their item levels, their achievements and their raid progress. They couldn't care less about transmogrifying - in fact, many of them hate the idea, because now they might not get as much attention for showing off their endgame armor sets as believe they're entitled to.

Many outraged posts contained flames about how "every scrub can now run around in their precious T6" and "back in the day we still had to work to get those sets." Well, boo fucking hoo. The basic complaint here is how pretty much every not so hardcore player can now just walk into the old raid dungeons and grab any set they desire with just a few quick runs, as opposed to the oh so glorious days, where it took 39 idiots you hated, months of repetition and DKP-farming and a whole lot of blood, sweat and tears to obtain those very same sets of gear. Awww!

I'll level with you here: Sometimes I like putting on my old S1 arena set and I enjoy the messages and comments I get when I show it off in town. Because it says: "Yeah baby, I went to the arena before you knew this game existed!" And come 4.3, anyone who enjoys the looks of these old items will grab a few points or tokens and put on those sets, not to show off or to inflate their fragile egos, but simply because they look cool to them. And that's perfectly alright.

I like having a few treasured items, which have become insanely rare and used to be hard to obtain. Stuff, which some folks have never seen on their travels around Azeroth. But I'll gladly give up on that idea for the possibility to change the looks of my current gear - and the possibility for everybody around me to do the same.

Transmogrifying is one of the best things to ever happen in Azeroth. Log on to your server and look at Orgrimmar and Stormwind. What do you see there? Attack of the clones! Warriors with fireplace-helmets and WWE championship belts. Druids clad in dull, brown robes. Rogues that look like fucking Nascar racers. And hunters, which look like they got teleported from their favourite Asian F2P-Grinder to Azeroth. Not only do they all look entirely alike - most current tier items simply look shit.

So fucking WHAT if I had to work for some stupid old armor set eons ago and now everyone gets to use the same stuff? First of all, every single class out there will get TONS of different sets to choose from, not counting all the greens and blues, which aren't even part of any official set. And according to these guys, there's a fair chance we'll even get to use white and grey items for transmogrifying at some point.

Okay, so if you're a rogue, get ready for a whole lot of people donning their old bloodfang set. But guess what? No matter how awesome you may think you are - there have been other rogues around you wearing the exact same set back in the day. It's not exclusively yours, it never has been and it won't be, just because some 'scrub' might be farming BWL at level 85 this very moment, planning on completing the very same set. And guess what else? There's a ton of rogues out there, who don't even care about your favourite set, no matter how much you love it. And they're gonna use something completely different. So stop pissing yourself!

Ever since the announcement of 4.3, me and some of my guild mates have started paying regular visits to some of the raids now, just for the sake of getting neat-looking items. Is it new content? Of course not. Do we get any kickass gear out of it? Hell, no! But it's fucking hilarious to farm for the same old crap we always wanted back in our 60s and 70s. When's the last time you actually cheered after looting some ancient Tier 2 crap? Or some fancy cloak on a Kara-raid?

Not only does transmogrifying lure many veterans and newbies back to the old dungeons and raids, but it gives the eternal hunt for gear a whole new twist. All of a sudden, stats don't mean a thing. There is no pressure, no chasing after crap, which will become obsolete with the release of the next content update. You're just collecting stuff, because it looks nice! Because it might be of sentimental value.

You don't like a freshly-dinged level 85 toon in crappy quest blues running around in kickass armor sets, which used to be the absolute top of the range a couple years ago? Well, put on a fucking dress, you whiny cunts! Because that's what transmogrifying is all about.

-Cat

Transmogrifuck me - finally some GOOD WoW-related news!

My previous entries might have given me away: I hate WoW with a passion. I don't actually want to play it, but not doing so will hurt my relationship. Yes, I'm that kind of a wuss. And one of the many reasons for me to hate this game is how WoW takes most of the coolest features from every MMORPG out there and uses, sometimes even improves upon them, yet there is no cosmetic armor. And that's something you find in even the cheapest Asian F2P grindfests out there.

But lo and behold, several years, hundreds of threads (some of them weighing in at over 400 pages!) and a whole lot of begging later, they have now announced transmogrifying. What a difference a little pressure and competition makes.

Oh yeah, there's also gonna be a new raid and dungeons or some shit, but let's ignore that for now. Transmogrifying - transfer an armor piece's appearance on to another bit of armor, i.e. make your fugly current-tier paladin gear look like the pretty T6 raid set. Neato!

Right now they're still being a bit hush-hush about it. What's known so far is that you can only transfer the looks of gear if it's the same kind of armor, meaning cloth will always look like cloth, plate will look like plate and so on. Also, the whole thing will be restricted to stuff you can actually use, so don't expect to make your warrior look like a death knight anytime soon.

Most importantly, they haven't actually decided whether or not you must obtain an item, before you can put its looks on your gear. In other words: It might be possible that you can put the looks of just about any raid or dungeon set on your current stuff, even if you have never actually collected these items in the first place. That would be a little too generous in my opinion - making people go collect the coolest-looking stuff in the game rather than just offering it to absolutely everybody with zero effort might be convenient and it might suit Blizzard's new "everything for everyone" approach, but I could see myself going back to some old dungeons and raids, just to loot some old raid sets for their cool looks alone. So please - make us fight, search and farm for our stuff and only make items available for transmogrifying, if we have actually managed to find them in the first place, mkay?

Of course there is always some potential to fuck this up. Am I gonna be one of the select few on my realm to don the looks of the good old season 1 arena set? What about the tier 3 dungeon set or the T0.5 stuff? These items can no longer be obtained and being able to use their looks would make their proud owners stand out from the crowd. I'd love that - however, I can see Blizzard bringing back those items for everyone, be it for tiny amounts of honour/justice points or even real cash in their online store. And while that would be great for everyone who want to use the looks of these items, it would feel like a kick in the nuts to me, having collected that stuff when it was still "hard to get".

Also - why use a transmogrifying feature in the first place? Is the convenient appearance/cosmetic/vanity item tab they use in just about every other MMORPG out there not good enough? Having to physically change the appearance of each item instead of just putting your favourite cool-looking stuff in a separate tab seems rather awkward and unnecessary.

Some of the coolest pets and mounts are cash shop only right now. I'm not sure I'd like to see special offers on cosmetic armor on there now, too: "Unlock all dungeon, raid and pvp tier items at the transmogrifier for only $XX!" Don't even think about it!

But let's remain perfectly realistic here: No matter how limited or even overly generous this whole thing may turn out to be when patch 4.3 goes live - it's a huge step in the right direction! Sure, I can already see legions of paladins running around exclusively in T2 and T6 stuff, but is that so much worse than what we have now? I don't know what your realm currently looks like, but people all look exactly the same where I'm playing. I could really use some variety.

-Cat

How morons, Titan and Diablo 3 fuck WoW

I can't help but wonder about the things I see in Azeroth these days. Last night I had the pleasant company of an arms-spec warrior, let's call him Bob, who was wielding a dagger. You know, one of those small, pointy, one-handed things with lots of agility on them. Probably, because it was epic. Nothing ground-breaking, mind you - just the basic crap you'll get your hands on as a freshly-dinged level 85. And guys like him are today's gamers. Guys like him are the industry's target audience.

Bob obviously lacks the ability to read and understand basic text. You see, when he picked his character's skill tree, the game actually highlighted a certain talent: Two-Handed Weapon Specializaion. That's right, Bob - choosing the Arms tree means you're good at using two-handed weapons. Is a dagger a two-handed weapon, Bob? I don't think so. Let's not even get into the large damage penalty you're dealing to yourself there or how agility doesn't do shit for you. Let's not even begin thinking of all the stuff you could do with your empty off-hand. You're too stupid to read, too stupid to understand your class, yet you're level 85 and you're clad in epic gear. Because WoW is for you, it caters to you, it wants to make sure you can get all the stuff you could ever dream of, no matter how slow you are.

Does anyone remember the time where you actually had to understand what the fuck you're doing in order to get anywhere in a game? Do you remember where obtaining powerful items actually meant something, where you could feel a sense of reward and achievement? When I see Bob next to me, a drooling idiot, who couldn't wipe his own butt without help, wearing nothing but epic gear and a fucking dagger, I start losing ambition.

Sure, I get to use fancy arena gear, so I'll always be a step ahead of Bob. But in all honesty, getting that stuff requires about 20 minutes of effort per week, add your daily or rated BG for a couple extra points and that's all there is to it. There's no real effort involved, I don't really feel like I've achieved anything when I grab yet another ridiculously powerful piece of gear and to be brutally honest, I'm hating every minute of it. The only reason I'm doing this to myself is my better half, who insists in having me as her arena partner. And since I've grown quite fond of the sex we have, there is little I can do other than shut up and tag along.

Okay, there are heroic dungeons and hard mode raids, many of them being so brutally tough, that they feel entirely dijointed from the rest of the game. I guess that's what WoW is all about: Relativity. If a huge portion of the game is too fucking easy and another is insanely difficult, then on average it's probably just right.

But it's not just the idiots, the way everyone can have everything, the way the game practically plays itself by now. It's not even the fact that Blizzard can't be arsed to moderate the RP-Realms or the god damn trade channel or get rid of the botters, cheaters and AFKers in pvp. It's how they seem to completely neglect the game, because they're busy playing Diablo 3 or working on Titan.

Take the newest range of armor sets, for instance. They look as though they were taken straight out of some crappy Korean F2P-grinder:

What the fuck happened here? PINK burning spikes? Fire on a helmet, right in front of the fucking face? What the hell were they thinking, if anything?

But it's not just the utterly stupid armor sets, the WWE-style championship belts or how they come up with more and more "premium" items and services to nickel and dime you to death on top of your monthly subscription. It's the actual content - or lack thereof.
Why do we have to fight Nefarian AGAIN? Why Ragnaros? We had the Burning Steppes, the Searing Gorge, the whole damn Blackrock and don't get me started on Molten fucking Core! Do we *really* need even more crap full of fire and lava and orange baddies? Do we really have to repeat the same old bosses we grew tired of all those years ago? So what are we gonna fight in the next content update? Illidan Stormrage?

But the one thing that puts me off and drives me away from WoW more than anything is the ever more apparent lack of love and polish. Remember when everything on there just worked? If you sign up for BGs these days, the notification will pop up again and again and again, 38 quazillion times, producing the annoying popup sound every single time and forcing you to hammer away at the Okay-button like an idiot until the damn thing finally registers your click. It's not game-breaking, but it's been there for how many months now?

If you spend some time doing arenas or BGs, you will also notice how the countdown timer will slowly wander a little closer towards the bottom of your screen at the beginning of every match until it disappears altogether. That problem had been there for just as long as the actual onscreen timer, but nobody cares to fix it. Add the occasional display bugs that make your arena teams invisible or show offline guild members active and playing all week long or how Strand of the Ancients randomly forces you into 1st person view and you can't help but wonder why nobody ever cares to look into that crap. They're probably too busy thinking of expensive new premium services. Or they're too damn busy working on games, which are obviously not World of Warcraft.

-Cat

Farm, raid and pvp your ass off - why "endgame" sucks for anyone but the "hardcore"

It doesn't matter whether you play WoW or one of its many clo... ahem, competitors: After a while you will reach a point, where your character stops getting stronger, more talented and experienced and ceases to learn new spells and skills. From here on out, you gauge your character's strength solely on gear and meaningless ranks, mounts and titles. Welcome to the level cap!

The level cap is a weird thing. While some of the more dedicated online gamers out there, god bless them, strongly believe that the real, the actual gameplay starts after the cap, another, equally large amount of players finds themselves forced to do things, which have absolutely nothing in common with the quests and tasks they had to face so far.

Life from 1 to 85* is pretty sweet. You can choose whether you want to explore the world alone or with friends, you don't really depend on anyone and it doesn't really matter whether you're checking out all the dungeons. It doesn't even matter whether you spend 2 or 12 hours a day leveling up. Either way, you'll grow stronger and better at your own pace, feeling progress and unlocking parts of the game world, which had been too dangerous for you not long ago. Chances are, you're not entirely familiar with "DPS" or "gearscore", as nobody really gives a crap at your level. 

*or whichever cap your MMO of choice has

Dungeons and the majority of quests at your level are piss-easy, now that every MMO has its own wiki, strategy-guides and walkthrough-videos. If you're playing WoW, you can see every single boss encounter on your map, enemy special attacks generate huge on-screen warnings and you even get a loot preview with every dungeon now, so you can decide whether or not you want to go there in the first place. Perhaps you're not even familiar with the basics of tanking or crowd-control at this point, but there's usually some high level player around to boost you through, should the going get too tough.

But at some point, no matter how much you're enjoying the trip, taking your time and avoid rushing through the quests and dungeons, the inevitable happens: You will turn from a nicely-equipped, pretty tough and cool level 84 character into a useless, weak, puny level 85 maggot. Just like that. And the community will work really hard to make you feel just how weak and useless you are!

In the example of WoW, the first step to gearing up at level 85 might be spending some ungodly amounts of gold for purple crap on the auction house. And in the unlikely event, that you really do (legally) own the 30.000 or so gold people charge you per current-level epic item, wearing them will help with that annoying gear score, but by no means will it stop your fellow adventurers from being assholes about it. In fact, they'll point out that you're clad in "welfare-epix" - epic items, that every idiot can obtain with absolutely no effort.

Assuming you're not rich or stupid enough to take such drastic steps, let's say you do the next logical thing and queue up for random battlegrounds or heroic dungeons to gear up. While they can't do much about your green and blue level 84 gear in a BG, they will moan, complain and insult a lot, telling you to "fuck off and gear up". Ironically, it has proven to be rather difficult to obtain better pvp gear without actually taking part in, well, pvp.

Things tend to get slightly more dramatic when joining a random heroic dungeon. You don't have epic gear on you? You have bever been here before? You don't know how to deal with all the bosses? People will kick you out faster than you can say " ".

Of course, the experience varies a bit with the game you play. I have reached the level cap on Age of Conan just recently, joined a pvp minigame (the AoC version of Battlegrounds) and my entire team refused to fight and just stood completely still and let the other team win, because they refused to play with a noob (me). You can earn a shit ton of insanely powerful pvp gear and new abilities, skills and resistances by spending countless hours with the game's pvp content. And that's what pretty much everyone around me had done. Except for myself, obviously. At the end of the BG I received several messages kindly asking me to never queue up for pvp again and informing me that I'm a fucking bastard for ruining it for everyone. Because none of those guys had to start with no pvp gear, no pvp rank and no pvp abilities, I suppose. Or because Funcom couldn't be arsed to create pvp-brackets based on ranks or gear.

The maximum level divides most modern MMORPGs into two entirely different experiences: The time before and the time after you hit the cap. Suddenly, people will refuse to invite you if you're not using voice chat. Suddenly, you no longer have to team up with 4 or 5 other people, but 9 or even 24. Suddenly, you're supposed to know the entire dungeon ahead of you in your sleep, no matter whether or not you've actually ever been there before.

And most of all: You're supposed to repeat that shit over and over again. Until you throw up. Fight the same battles, endure the same insults in the same battlegrounds, fail the same random heroics and get kicked out of the same raids so many times, you're starting to ask yourself whether acquiring the exact same epic gear that every moron, their mothers and their dogs around you already have is really worth all this trouble. And when you spend a minute to think about it, it really isn't - by the time you've finally managed to get all the epic gear there is, you'll have about 2 more weeks until the next content update or a new expansion, which make all the crap you've slaved to obtain utterly useless.

Of course I'm being a tad overdramatic here. Of course some people love their endgame more than anything and I won't deny that, should you be fortunate enough to be part of a helpful, active guild, some of the raids might even be entertaining once or twice. But twenty times? 

And if gameplay pre 85 is so extremely different from the post 85 stuff, then maybe something isn't right here. Maybe the leveling experience is a little too easy, a little too user-friendly and not challenging enough. Maybe the endgame content is a tad too hard if people refuse to let you join unless you're fully kitted out in gear, which you could only obtain by beating the dungeons they won't let you enter - because your gear is still too crappy. See the problem there?

Why does the entire game have to change at this point? Why does the whole thing turn into an ever-repeating grind fest, a race for insanely powerful items, which are ultimately going to become obsolete with the next update? And what's the alternative?

I've been through the Molten Core with 39 people I loathe, spent more than five hours on the first raid there, I've fought tens of thousands of battles in the arena, had some of the most powerful stuff half a decade ago and I have some of it right now. And I wonder. Why the hell am I doing this to myself and why am I paying monthly fees for something I have never enjoyed in the first place? Peer pressure? Nothing better to do?

I'm not sure whether I'm getting too old for this or whether MMOs have simply stopped being innovative and I grew tired of the same old mechanisms in every single one of them. But I can no longer be bothered to go the extra mile in Age of Conan, suffer through another thousand pvp sessions to obtain meaningless purple items, just so some 12 year old French kid will stop calling me a fucking bastard. I just no longer care enough.

-Cat

2 weeks into Age of Conan: Bugs, flaws, chain-crashing

Despite the scary title of this entry, let me say that AoC is still one of the best MMOs I've ever played - my main character is level 75 now and I'm looking forward to grinding my way up the PvP ranks once I've hit the level cap. However, I keep tripping upon more and more bugs ranging from midly annoying to game-breaking. Add the complete lack of proper support and the whole game experience can quickly become a rather frustrating and punishing one.

Let's start with the small time stuff: Broken, crappy pets in the cash shop. The newly-introduced AoC item shop sells all kinds of rabbits, wolf pups and even bare-breasted priestesses to make your travels across Hyboria a little less lonely. The cheapest pets start somewhere at around 5 Euros, the most expensive ones may go all the way up to 20 Euros. Let me paraphrase their description: "Summons a social companion to follow your character."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this suggests, that the companions work exactly the way you know it from MMOs like, say, World of Warcraft. Right? Well...

Let's say you shell out a fiver on a wolf pup, summon the little bugger, then start your next journey across the beautiful world of Hyboria. You will soon notice that, should you happen to run a lot or even be the proud owner of a mount, your companion cannot keep up with you. In fact, if you were unfortunate enough to buy a priestess, she will just plain refuse to follow you at all and vanish into thin air. If you zone into another area, which happens pretty much every 10 or so minutes (Hyboria is heavily instanced and split into tons of separate zones), your companion will also vanish. Get dragged into a fight and, you guessed it, your companion disappears.

Basically, you've just wasted a ton of money on a pet, which disappears so much, it's entirely pointless to summon it in the first place. Does it say so in the item description? No. Are there refunds? Of course not.

Social companions aren't the only (broken) pets you can buy with cold, hard cash. There are also the ebony and ivory ravagers - as their names suggest, the former would be pitch-black, the latter is snow-white. These cute little fellows are battle companions, which can be used to pull baddies and who will actually support you in a fight - they don't despawn when you leave the area, either.
The black ravager costs a little over five Euros, the white one costs nearly 15. He's not any better or stronger or different; you simply pay more because he's white.

Okay - so you have a combat pet, whose main specialty is the colour of its skin. Fair enough, you get to show it off to people, right? Well... problem is, the damn thing changes its colour every single time you zone into a dungeon, a different area, a town... you get the idea. And suddenly, your special pet turns into a regular brown or blue ravager. Which is a bit of a kick in the nuts, if you've just shelled out 15 Euros on the damn thing because it's supposed to be WHITE. The only way to fix the colour is by re-summoning the stupid thing EVERY SINGLE TIME you enter a new zone. Once again, the item description says no such thing in the cash shop and there are no refunds.

Let's say you're not a complete idiot like me and you don't spend money on the cash shop. Let's say you want to try one of the awesome new Khitai solo dungeons: The Forgotten City. And I won't lie to you - this thing is absolutely amazing! The landscape, the battles, I could do this thing over and over again! In fact, the dungeon is supposed to reset every 20 hours and scales to your character's level, so you can do exactly that! Problem is, I played it once with my character about a week ago and it has not reset ever since.

All the monsters remain dead, the bosses are gone, I cannot repeat the quests and epic battles there, no matter what. When I submitted a ticket about it, the GM suggested to delete all related quests, wait 24 hours and try again. So one quest-wipe and 24 hours later, I submitted another ticket, because the dungeon still refused to reset. This time, another GM teleported me into *his* instance of the dungeon, so I could finish my quests and kill my baddies in his name. He literally sat and waited 20 minutes while I finished his dungeon. Which was terribly nice of him, mind you, but it didn't fix my problem. The next day I was stuck in my own instance again, which is entirely devoid of monsters. What am I supposed to do now, grab a GM every single day?

Naturally, I have posted about this on the forums and I had a few people telling me about how their guild mates had similar issues or how they hope I can fix this, but I got zero support from Funcom, no suggestions, no fixes, no nothing.
Sure, it's just one dungeon, but every single day I'm missing out on awesome loot, expertise points and a lot of fun. And nobody seems to care enough to help fix my problem. Not very fun.

My main problem right now is how I die about ten times a day, because the game just freezes and entirely locks up my whole computer, forcing me to reset the machine. I can play just about any game out there in full HD with maxed out settings (it's my JOB, remember!) without crashes or freezes, but for some weird reason, Age of Conan loves to kill my computer, seemingly at random. And of course there is yet another ton of threads about that on the support forums and of course there is absolutely no response to be found from Funcom. There is, however, one workaround, which had been figured out by the community: Disable DirectX10, disable the 3.0 shaders and the game should stop crashing. Which really does seem to work for lots of people, including myself, but it's simply not an acceptable solution. Right now I get to choose from crashing over and over again and making my game look like crap.

Don't get me wrong - I love this game or else I wouldn't get so pissed off about all the stupid bugs, crashes and shitty support in the first place. I'd just play something else. But if the guys working on this thing don't get their act together, then I don't think there's much hope for an AoC revival here, F2P or not.

-Cat

High Fantasy Nudity

If you're familiar with the world of Warcraft, which is just about as likely as you being familiar with breathing or taking the occasional dump, then you already know about the fact that shape-shifting druids don't wear pants in their animal forms.

This isn't such a big deal in a PG-rated game, what with the obvious lack of genitalia and everything, but it still makes me wonder. Do feral druids ever feel self-conscious? Basically, whenever you prepare to pounce an enemy in cat form, you're flashing your saucy bits at your team mates. Unless you're usually hanging out with a bunch of messed-up furries, they will probably feel offended at best, but it still feels somewhat inappropriate. And what are you gonna do when that cat-druid chick in your group raises her butt in the air to prepare for a massive, deadly leap at some far away foe and suddenly the large, frustrated Tauren warrior yanks her tail, pulls her back and makes her his epic mount?

Maybe druids are just a bit pervy. How different are nature-lovers from naturists, really? Maybe they're into this whole showing off thing. Maybe it's just too damn difficult to put pants on a fucking bear. They put pants on John Goodman, though, so size can't be a problem.
The whole thing might lead to a feud between shammies and druids. A spirit wolf shaman lifting his leg on a tree druid. And since I'm already going there - do Worgen tree druids frequently wet themselves? If Worgen girls lived in Hyboria, how many tits would they have, exactly?

But Azeroth isn't the only place where magical, mystical beings refuse to cover their modesty. Think Norrath, Guardiana and of course ancient Greek mythology. Think centaurs. Those guys look perfectly human all the way down to the waist, but their lower half is that of a horse - four horse legs, horse butt, horse everything.
I've played RPGs like Shining Force, where it's perfectly normal to have a whole lot of those guys in your party. They. Don't. Wear. Pants. Ever. You just googled that game, didn't you? Freak!

Once again, it's probably a bit awkward trying to fit a pair of those on a horse, but doesn't courtesy suggest to at least, you know, cover things up a bit with a blanket or something? Then again... would you even want to cover things up when you're a horse... you know... down there? Maybe centaurs are the real pervs of high fantasy. Heck, I'd probably run around showing it off to everyone. "Yeah, baby! Look at my massive horse dick!" Maybe beat someone to death with it in the arena as a finishing move of sorts.

The whole thing is a bit like poking a dead animal with a stick. Creepy, but strangely fascinating.

-Cat

Diablo 3 - RMT goes legal

If you start a multiplayer Session of Diablo 2 today, you will notice something equally curious and unnerving: Every couple of minutes, random bots will join your game and start advertising websites, which sell powerful weapons and armor for cash. So powerful, in fact, that many people could spend an entire lifetime hoping to acquire them with absolutely no luck.

One has to wonder how the creators of these websites manage to get their hands on entire piles of such mighty artifacts. But one thing is for sure - even over a decade after the initial release of Diablo 2, spammers, botters and goldsellers are making a ton of money with the crap they advertise so aggressively, it has ruined large parts of the battle.net experience.

As a consequence, Diablo 3 will feature a mechanism so evil and (from Blizzard's point of view) so brilliant, it melts the brain: Legally buy and sell items for cash on the auction house. Is this gonna get rid of the spam-bots? Most likely. Will this put an end to cheaters, who will always find means and ways to create shit-tons of all the powerful gear you could never get your hands on unless you quit your day job and devoted your life to item farming? Yeah, right...

For Blizzard, this actually a pretty sweet deal - they know they can't stop the farmers and goldsellers, so instead of preventing them from doing their dirty deeds, they now offer them a platform and get their own nice, big cut out of it. You, however, are about to get fucked. And not in a nice way, either.

Think about it: People spend TONS of money for vanity pets, mounts and other shit on the Blizzard shop to kit out their toons on WoW. Will they spend 20, 30, 50 Euros for epix on Diablo 3? Fuck, yes! "Pay 2 Win" all around. And either you pay up, as well, or you won't stay competitive.
"Nope", you might say. "I'm just gonna play for fun and won't care about cool items." Right. Let's see how much fun you're gonna have when every idiot around you is showing off their awesome gear and when that shit is all over the auction house. You *CAN'T* ignore it, because you CAN'T play offline. Neat, huh?

And there's yet another problem right there: A huge part of the fun behind the Diablo games lies in the never-ending hunt for ever more powerful gear. Now you can legally buy a shortcut, get all the most powerful stuff right off the real-money-auction house and that's where the fun ends. What are you gonna do when your toon is capped out and you have all the stuff you ever wanted?

And don't even think that *you* could possibly ever make some real money with this system. There are whole legions of goldsellers out there, farming 24 hours a day, botting, cheating, exploiting in every way they can. They will flood the auction house, they set the price and they control the market. Nobody is gonna by your Booger-encrusted Leather Jerkin of the Noob +3. 

Remember when you just paid for a game ONCE and then just played it and had fun with it? No fucking expensive DLC, no monthly fees, no added bells and whistles, which cost you a truckload of money? Well, move along, because Diablo 3 is not going to be that game.

-Cat