Regret Not Trying a WoW RP Server

Every so often I'll be talking with a friend and the topic of WoW will come up.  It usually goes the same way every time too with us talking fondly of memories playing with friends and shit back in Vanilla or Burning Crusade days and then getting pissed off with it some time shortly after that and begrudgingly giving up on it.

While thinking about WoW I realized that while I don't have much urge to ever return to it, I do sort of regret never playing on the games RP servers.  I always played on a PVP server and admittedly at the time I didn't "get" RP servers like that.  I just wanted to play the game, kill shit and get sick epic gear and that kind of thing was reserved for the kind of fat acne ridden, basement dwelling nerd with no real friends.  (I was a horribly judgemental teen, sorry)

Once I got to university though I started playing Dungeons and Dragons and I came to the realization that role playing was actually really fun ESPECIALLY if you've got a good group of friends and a few drinks to help things get a little silly.  It made me think though that I sort of regret not giving the RP servers a chance back when I was at the height of my WoW playing time.

In case you're not familiar with what this entails, an RP server is a place where you don't just play the game but you actually have to play your character as if it was a real person in the world of Azeroth and not just a loot collecting machine.  This of course includes stuff about the way you talk to other players but also how you move around the world and things like that.  I have friends who have tried RP servers before and they said the one of the best things about it was that the main town chats actually had conversations going on in them rather than just people spamming for groups or to sell items.

I would never go back to WoW now, my backlog is so huge that playing an MMO is probably a bad idea but I'll always kind of regret not giving that side of the game a go.  Then again, if I had done it I probably would have been all grimdark and shit so for my own sake maybe it was a good thing I didn't.

MMOs From My Youth

I don't play many MMORPGs any more unfortunately due to a combination of not having much time and a backlog of games in the triple digits.  However, back in my teens I played a hell of a lot of World of Warcraft starting with vanilla and quitting at the tail end of Burning Crusade.  However, before I gained some financial independence and I was able to pay the monthly fee for the game, I used to seek out free MMO games so I thought I'd share with you some of my old, F2P MMO experiences from back in the day.

1) Sword of the New World

Sword of the New World was an MMO me and my friends played over one summer holiday from school.  It was released in 2006 in Korea and had English versions going live in 2007 and it had an interesting gimmick of multiple character control.  Most of the time when you think about MMOs you imagine controlling one player and then if you want to group up you have to find other players, right?  Well in this game you controlled up to 3 and from there you could party up with people for quests and stuff so even our small group of 4 players looked like a huge group of people in game.  That said though, aside from the multiple player control and the interesting world set in a sort of fantasy take on the Americas during the age of exploration, I can't really recall much else.

2) Rappelz

A friend of mine once introduced me to Lineage 2 back before it became free to play except instead of actually paying for it he showed me a private server that allowed us to play for free, it was a good time.  However, as you would expect, the private server got shut down and it was really that first experience with Lineage that gave me my first MMO itch.  Rappelz attracted me because, at least graphically, it reminded me of Lineage so I thought this might help scratch my grind itch.  It did for a while, the game play was nothing special but it played fairly well and it's gimmick was something involving pets that you had to collect and level in order to help you in combat and stuff. 

Interestingly it seems like this game is still available to play so you can check it out if you have a weekend to waste on an MMO from 2006.

3) Trickster Online

A very cutsey online game that I remember very little of which looked sort of similar to that other isometric MMO that almost everyone played but the name I can't remember right now.  Anyway, the thing I remember most about this game is digging. You could dig to get items and a lot of the quests I vaguely remember involved digging up stuff.  While it wasn't the best game I've ever played I was looking for something to go hard on the grind with and this said that it had a level cap of 300 which just blew my goddamn mind.  I didn't play it for very long and I probably got no higher than about 25 but it was the thought that counted.

I thought that Trickster went down for good years ago but a quick google search for the image revealed that the site is still up, the client is (probably) still available and the level cap is now 400.  I would kind of like to try it again but a grind that hard would mean I'd have to sever all ties with anything else I think so I'll stick to working on my endless backlog.

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It would be nice to one day find time or not have a backlog so huge that I could really sink my teeth into another MMO.  That said, I'd probably be staying away from the Korean F2Ps and trying something like Final Fantasy 14.  Maybe one day.

Hooked on Hearthstone

I remember when I first saw Hearthstone, I laughed a hearty laughed and said that the idea of a World of Warcraft trading game game was stupid.  Now look at me, sat in front of my computer logging onto Hearthstone daily for a quick round before work every morning like a big fat chump.

Seriously though, I like trading card games like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh but the idea of having to drop large amounts of money on little bits of paper really turns me off.  That's why this kind of thing in video game format is so appealing; I get to play the game but don't have to drop as much money on it.  However Yu-Gi-Oh games tend to be full of stupid crap and I find the Magic: The Gathering games to be extremely limiting.

Then Hearthstone comes along, which to most TCG snobs may be rather simplistic but it's fast, fun and best of all completely free.  All you have to do is download some Battle.net thing and you're pretty much good to go from there, just log in and get playing.

The game of Hearthstone is rather simple.  You pick a character based on a class from World of Warcraft and use your deck of minions and spells to drain their health from 30 to 0.  Each card has a mana cost from 1 to 10 and each hero has a special skill that costs 2 mana to perform.  For example the Mage can cast a fireball that will deal 1 damage which is great for a little DPS boost if you have some spare mana at the end of your turn.

Every single card available in the game is available for free, there is no jumping through pay gates to get more cards in Hearthstone.  For 150 in game gold you can buy a booster pack that contains 5 cards.  If you want to buy more packs at the same time it costs money, but the game doesn't limit you to how many packs you can buy.  It's a little annoying that you can't stack gold purchases but it's a small inconvenience.  You earn this gold by just playing the game, there is no way to buy gold from the in game store.  Every 3 wins in normal play mode, ranked or not, nets you 10 gold.  This sounds like getting a booster is a slow process but the game gets around this by providing the player with "daily quests".  A daily quest may be something like "win 2 games with X class" or "Kill X Minions" and each completed quest nets you 40 gold.

On top of that you can spend 150 gold to enter The Arena to get even better prizes such as more gold, boosters or dust for crafting.  You keep playing games until you hit either 12 wins or 3 losses, whichever comes first and you have to do it with a deck built out of randomly selected cards.  Even if you don't own the card you can use it in arena mode if you get lucky with the drafting, so really it's up to luck but your rank or anything like that is unaffected and the prizes are really good so it's worth doing.

Finally you can craft cards using some weird crafting system that I've not really used much since I started.  Basically you can disenchant cards you don't want into dust and then use that dust to craft new cards that you do want.  I've not yet played the game long enough to know what specific cards I want for my deck but I imagine this system will become very useful to me later.

So if you like card games I'd absolutely recommend Hearthstone.  Even if you don't like Warcraft, the game itself is fun to play so if you can get over the theme there's a good game here.  Best of all, you have absolutely nothing to lose.  You can play the game for hours and hours and spend 0 money like I have or you can drop a few bucks and get a nice handful of extra cards, but don't be disappointed if those cards don't give you much of an advantage.

Easily one of my favourite games of the year so far.

Paying to NOT Play with World of Warcraft

Well I didn't think I'd ever be talking about this game again.  I still remember back when I was in high school, just after I finished my GCSE exams, coming home and loading up WoW for the first time.  I remember back during Burning Crusade, when I said "fuck it" to study during my A Level study leave and just whittled away the hours on this game.

Now, World of Warcraft is a completely different beast.  From what people who still do play have told me and from what I've read, it's been dumbed down a great deal and it's only a mere shell of that game that I once had rather fond memories of.

I suppose this post is a kind of extension of the money grubbing rant I made a while ago, so before I even start talking about this stuff, if you want to know how I feel about cash shops and microtransactions, then you can get a general idea from this video.

Now, World of Warcraft isn't exactly new to the idea of nickle and diming its customers.  I remember just after I stopped playing Blizzard released some kind of mount that looked like a bunch of stars in the shape of a horse or something.  People were laughing at it and calling it a piece of shit because there wasn't any way to earn it in game, you had to BUY it from a cash shop.

The reason it was met with such negativity from the player base is because the whole reason you play subscription based MMOs is so that you don't have to deal with this cash shop dog shit.  You buy the game and pay £7/month or something and you get access to everything for that.  In a genre like this where the developer is CONSTANTLY expected to create new content for an ever expanding world, then I won't begrudge them for a subscription fee, but a cash shop is taking the piss.

But times have changed and by the looks of things it seems like all the smart players have fucked off to other games because recently THIS happened.

That picture is from the in game cash shop and is giving players the option to BUY a max level character for $60!  Why would anyone do this, really?  You could buy a NEW game for that much money but Blizzard expect (and people will) people to shell out $60 for a max level character, I mean Jesus Christ.

But I'm not mad about this, why would I be? I don't even play the game anymore.  I'm genuinely confused as to why this is even a thing though.  Part of the fun of playing an MMO is the journey to the end game.  Levelling with your buddies, doing quests and learning the lore of the land as you go, it's great fun.  But instead Blizzard are expecting people to just cut ALL of that shit out and just jump straight into level 90.

I get that people want to PVP and stuff, but what's the point of playing an MMO if you're just going to skip the levelling?  Especially when your skipping out on this much content, it's like your paying to not play the game, I'm genuinely confused as to why anyone would want to skip it when they are already paying a pretty sizable amount of money just to play.

Maybe one day someone will explain what the appeal is, but until that day I'm just going to blanket label you all as nut jobs with more money than sense.