Like, WoW. This is a bit of a pain…
As I mention many posts back, I’m playing World of Warcraft with some of my free time these days. I was thrilled with the execution of the game when I began playing it, and loved the way it sucked one in early on. The fact that it ran well on my older-but-upgraded Mac was a real plus, too.
I’m beginning to have a few problems with the game, however. I’ve reached level 23 with my mage, and I solo a lot. Not because I don’t know others who play, or even because I don’t belong to a guild, but because I’m online when I’m online, and for only an hour or maybe two at a time, and it just seems rude to keep asking people to drop what they’re doing and help me with my quests. It doesn’t make it any better that the experience rewards drop dramatically when one has help; and the monsters I am capable of killing, even with assistance, don’t provide huge experience rewards to begin with.
Add that to the fact that the game is expensive. Repairing all one’s gear after being killed costs money. Learning spells costs money. Travel, unless one’s willing to hoof it for hours, costs money. Learning to cook, or deliver first aid, so one’s character recovers health faster, costs money. My savings are steadily eroding, and that’s even including my repeated (expensive) trips to the (single) Auction House on the continent to sell a few items at above vendor price. Sure, there are quests with money rewards, but they usually barely pay for themselves in terms of character expenses. Honestly, I’m not sure what I’ll be doing about my backup character who is on the wrong continent for her faction’s Auction House.
WoW has a color-coded system for rewarding experience; critter levels are marked in grey if they are so pathetic they won’t reward you, green if they are somewhat below your level and provide sparse experience, yellow if they are close to you in level and provide moderate experience, orange for above your level and high experience, and red for “you’ll die, but if a miracle occurs, the experience will be excellent”. The only problem with this system is that in actual practice, with a mage character, I have an excellent chance of being killed by a yellow, and the greens give me very little… so I must spend hours upon hours upon hours accepting tiny rewards to get anywhere. Otherwise, it’s back to the graveyard for me, and another expensive trip to the armor repair guy.
Again, I could party up, and be confident of killing yellows (unless we accidentally attract more than one at a time, in which case I’m dead again), but the party system reduces my XP award to the point where I might as well go back to soloing greens. I know this, because I’ve been trying it.
*shrug* I’m not trying to say that this game sucks, or that Blizzard doesn’t know what they are doing, but I’m beginning to wonder if it’s going to continue to be as fun for me as I thought it would.
Oh, and anyone playing a MMORPG should read about EVE Online’s The Great Scam. After investing massive amounts of time in this game playing fair, only to be continually sent back to square one by people playing pirates and Player Killers, a player resorts to unsavory methods to beat the game. While I can’t approve of his methods, I have some sympathy for his frustration. I don’t think it’s practical to have law-abiders and law-breakers as characters in the same online-universe. In any game universe where the law-breakers are attractive to play, they will have the advantage; and by natural selection, the law-abiders will dwindle away and leave for other games.
Tags: philosophy, videogames, world of warcraft
I’m not sure what’s going on other than maybe a time investment thing, but one thing I’d recommend is creating a level 1 character to stand at the auction house and run all the auctions for you. This requires that this character have a certain amount of cash on hand for deposits and mailing, which might be a problem. One of the guys in my guild even made a token effort to make it make RP sense and named his bot Servitas as if he’s a servant to this player’s characters.
I had alot less problems with cash once I got into higher levels, and I’m not specifically sure what that is about either, other than the fact that I might have been grouping more and thus while killing, say, green guys, we were killing a LOT of them and thus constantly getting a flow of cash. I’ve found that was also equally effective to soloing higher level stuff for more xp. But then, I took a druid to 60 and let me tell you less than 5 percent of my time was spent solo. Druids are hell to solo.
I’ll shut up now. š It makes me sad when someone doesn’t enjoy the game, which is stupid and irrational!
The auction house tip is a very nice thought – thanks for the suggestion. Considering that it’s 5-10 silver these days for me to get back to Ironforge from wherever I’m playing, 60 copper for a a pair of mailings makes a lot more sense.
The backup char I mentioned is a druid, and I’ve been noticing how hard it is to solo her. Again, I don’t blame Blizzard – they designed it as a Multiplayer game, after all – but I have to be very sneaky and careful with yellow quests, and can only relax a bit with green ones.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to quite playing, I just needed to let off some steam š
I think that I found the game slowest in the 30-40 level range. It picked up again thoroughly after that (esp. once I got a horse). I’ve been playing a paladin, too, which means that unless I’m really in over my head, I don’t die a lot.
I think that the mage must be very hard to play solo. It’s also why the high level mages are in high demand. B’s got his up to level 51, but he had to play nearly twice as many hours to get there as I did. It also helped that I played a LOT with another character who was 3 levels higher than I was early on.
Which server are you playing on?
Money thought
I had another thought after I posted.
I’ve noticed that “stuff” is getting more and more expensive in the AH. I think it’s because those of us with high level characters are starting low level characters and want to boost their skills as fast as possible with rapid infusions of cash from the main character can do it. This is nice in that the harvesters make money faster, but it makes it hard for genuine newbie characters.
At least, this is my conjecture for why mageweave was more expensive than runecloth for awhile.
My chars are on Uther, at the moment.
Mirandala is my lvl 23 gnome mage (miner, engineer).
Avrela is my lvl 11 night elf druid (herbalist, alchemist).
Grethon is my lvl 5 human warrior (big dumb guy with sword).
Baldricus is my new lvl 3 dwarf rogue (just sits at AH waiting for mail).
Baldricus made me laugh a lot. Thank you.
My characters are on Medivh, or I’d send you lots of money. (Funnily, B’s primary is a gnome mage (miner, engineer. It’s a good combo.)
Could be worse, you could be on FF with us. Damn near impossible to solo there, and it’s designed that way.. Although they just introduced an NPC helper you can earn that will fight with you for a while every day, with a decent spell ai if you put them into “healer” support mode, which is kinda cool.
I would love to see that in WoW. Regular healer support would make a lot of these quests much more practical!