Time To Dip Into Those Sports Analogies

"Franchise [Joe Burrow] says he is tried of that 'why not us' ****. It is us! We are these ****ers right now!! Let's ****ing go!! We're winning the whole ****ing thing!!"
--C.J. Uzomah, after the Bengals won a playoff game for the first time in 30 years

 

Blizzard could have been channeling C.J. for all I know.

If I squint, I can pretend that these didn't exist:

Cataclysm
Mists of Pandaria
Warlords of Draenor
Legion
Battle for Azeroth
Shadowlands

That works, right? That's how Blizz wanted us to pretend things are in Retail, right? That the previous expacs didn't exist, and we can skip right to the current expac?

Because I'm far more interested in Dragonflight than I ever was for all of those expansions listed above. 

Okay, that's not quite true, because I was hyped for Cataclysm until it actually dropped, and then I found out after a playthrough that I didn't like what Blizz actually did with the reworking of the Old World. But that's all old story now*, and Dragonflight seems to have a lot of potential.

 

Or, as we Bengals fans like to say before football season starts, we're "cautiously optimistic".**

***

But first, I wanted to talk about tone.

As I'd said in comments over on Kaylriene's and Bhagpuss' blogs, I was shocked to see Blizzard actually eating some humble pie for a change. Maybe the events surrounding Battle for Azeroth and their "traditional" response during the corresponding Shadowlands release blowing up in their faces had something to do with it, but you never know for sure.  I certainly did not expect a (relatively) contrite tone, particularly given that their community council is filled with hardcore raiders, the group that they basically pander to 24x7. If Blizzard had doubled down on what they did in Shadowlands because the hardcore scene wasn't that affected by "events", nobody would have been surprised. 

Well, call me surprised.

 

The tone expressed by the WoW team at the release was rather subdued compared to over the top stuff from reveals at BlizzCon, which was good, but it was also somewhat contrite, which was shocking. The presenters admitted --kinda sorta-- that things hadn't been going well and they'd made steps to fix them, and they're moving forward with more long term fixes. Multiple people have commented on the lack of any mention of borrowed power, but since that entire trend came --and apparently went-- without my ever playing the game at that time, I'm not missing anything.

The trailer at reveal was also notable in that there wasn't a peep of any of the following:

• The end of the world coming
• Any Big Bad
• Horde/Alliance conflict

Again, there was drama --it is a Blizzard trailer, after all-- but it was a subdued sort of drama. I got the impression that hey, the world has been crazy and we had to help it, but now we want to come back home. To fix things. To explore and build. All of which the game desperately needs, because this endless cycle of war will eventually end with nobody winning. Look at human history, and the worst of wars that were fought left wide swaths of land totally depopulated, and the victors themselves were weakened to the point where they were conquered a few generations later. That is the endgame that awaits Azeroth if the cycle isn't broken.  

As far as decor goes, the room has more
of a gamer's hidey hole feel than some
corporate office space, like what you see
in the front of Blizzard's offices.***
Oh, and "Go Team Red!!" --Redbeard
(This is a screen cap from the Reveal Livestream.)

 

I do have to wonder whether Holly Longdale's presence has helped to mitigate the Blizzard attitude a bit. She is enthusiastic, but as Wilhelm Arcturus put it so well on Bhagpuss's post, she presents it in the same vein of someone who actually plays and enjoys a variety of parts of the game, not just the raiding aspect. Too frequently we've seen parts of an expac where devs gush about how beautiful it is, and then.... Okay, onto the raiding part! 

Yeah, like this.

 

But I felt that Holly helped to keep interest on parts that have very little directly to do with raiding, such as crafting. "Can I wear a chef's hat?" she asked at one point****, helping to direct conversation to the fun RPG elements in the crafting overhaul.

To be fair, RPG elements have been kind of overlooked in Retail --not by players, mind you, as any perusal of Kamalia's blog will show you-- but by Blizzard itself. In their need to keep people "engaged" by "dailies, rep grinds, and gating!" any RPG elements have had to be provided by the players themselves. This time, it feels like Blizz finally got the message that not everybody is truly interested in raiding, and Holly was helping to direct conversation that way.

***

But it has to be said that WoW no longer being the Top Dog in MMOs probably had something to do with all of these changes. 

I asked in guild chat --and Kaylriene on his blog-- about whether FF XIV's influence could be felt in the wholesale UI changes and crafting overhaul. My guildies who play both games felt that FF XIV was more in line with the crafting overhaul, like the aforementioned Chef's Hat being something that they felt was straight out of FF XIV. The UI, they felt, was Blizz adopting aspects of the ElvUI addon, while others felt it was closer to GW2. (My opinion was that it did feel closer to GW2, but there were SWTOR elements in there as well.)

Other parts of the expac --the new playable race of Draconians Dragonborn Dracthyr, for one-- had me kind of shrugging a bit. It was controversial enough when Dragonborn became a playable race for D&D 4e, so seeing it here in Dragonflight is kind of an "okay, I've seen this already" thing. The single class dedicated to the Drakthyr is very unlike Blizzard, however, and graphically I felt they captured the hybrid fairly well. I'm sure that there are plenty of people who wouldn't care for the Drakthyr's looks, but to be fair I dislike the 'pandering' look of the Pandaren, so to each their own. I'm just glad they didn't create an actual dragon class that shape shifts into humans/elves/whatever, which if it were to be true to WoW's NPC dragons, would be hugely overpowered from the get go.# After all, you never see drakes or whelps shape shifting, only the adult dragons.

***

And yes, Wrath Classic was officially announced to drop in 2022, which doesn't shock me at all.

 

My expectation is that since Sunwell is now in the PTR, Wrath will likely drop in an August/September timeframe. It just feels way too fast to give enough people a real shot at downing everything, particularly since WoW Classic had close to two years to work with, and TBC Classic will probably get only 15 months in operation. Holly notwithstanding, this is being driven by the hardcore top guilds alone, not by the majority of the playerbase, which is going to bite the Classic team in the ass.

Additionally, since the Classic team announced that there will be no automated LFG tool, there's going to be Trouble in River City. There's a huge imbalance between the large pop servers and the smaller pop servers, and simply giving free transfers to the large pop servers isn't going to cut it. It's bad enough trying to get some farming in on the lower pop servers that I can't imagine what it's like on Pagle or Atiesh, which are 5+ times the size of Myzrael. "Something will have to be done about the lower pop servers," several guildies commented. I personally think mergers are the answer, but the two largest US servers are almost totally Horde or totally Alliance, and that's a problem that can't be handwaved away by mergers or free transfers. It might take account/user creation bans on the highest pop servers combined with server merges of the lowest pop servers to get guilds to move off and spread out, but it's just a guess on my part. After all, FF XIV had new users/accounts banned on a lot of their server equivalents because of the influx of new people --I know, because I tried to make a toon on my son's FF XIV server and couldn't do it-- and Blizzard might have to go that route too.

***

It's a long way between now and Dragonflight's release --Wrath Classic will come much sooner--  but I have to admit I'm, well, interested in what's going to happen now in Retail. Like I said, it's been a long long time since I looked forward to a Retail expansion, so this is unfamiliar territory to me. Blizzard has plenty of opportunity to screw this up, so my years of wandering in the wilderness as a Bengals fan has prepared me for this eventuality. Hopefully they won't let me down one too many times, like baseball's Cincinnati Reds have##, and turn me against Retail for good.

*Or, in another way of putting it, "It's not that deep, bro." Oh, I am so owning this line now, and no, not for snarky reasons. It's because I need the constant reminder without being hit over the head with a clue stick.

**Until last year, the preseason --and our corresponding cautious optimism-- would be the high point of every season. Now, after the surprise success of last year, I'm kind of adrift; this must be what it was like for Leicester City fans the year after they won the Premier League back in 2016, only we didn't actually win the Super Bowl.

***For the record, it's this:

Pretty standard office park stuff out front.
Orcs notwithstanding.
From Wikipedia.

****The answer is "yes", btw.

#A quick aside that while I appreciate being able to play as a High Elf in LOTRO, from a lore standpoint anybody playing a Noldor --the only High Elves who returned to Middle-earth in pursuit of Morgoth were Noldor-- would be drastically overpowered from the get-go. Standing Stone kind of hand waved that away by having your character be in suspended animation for centuries after the days of the Last Alliance, but come on. They'd have been better off choosing to allow you to play a Gray Elf --a Sindar-- rather than a High Elf.

##When the son of the team's owner gets on television for an interview and basically says to all those who saw the ownership sell off a ton of good players during the offseason that basically [paraphrasing] "Who cares what you think? Who else are you gonna cheer for?" you can bet your ass that people are calling for the owner to sell the team. 

 

EtA: Corrected a couple of grammar issues.

Corking the Bottle

So the latest WOW expac is likely to be Dragonflight, apologies to Anne McCaffrey I suppose. 

Want to discuss The Dragonriders of Pern?
I'm ready.

 

I am conflicted about this, but not likely for the reasons that you might expect.

You see, having been reintroduced to the dragonflights by way of Classic, I miss how they were presented there, and I long for a return to that level of storytelling in WoW, where the Dragon Aspects were these remote beings that were simply not seen or heard from directly.

Even in Burning Crusade, the dragons you met operated as their own agents, and always undercover, posing mostly as humans or elves. (Chromie is not seen in BC, although her flight did have a significant part to play.) At best, in Classic and TBC you met the prime mate or the matron protectorate of a flight, not the Aspects themselves. Even then, it was pretty explicitly stated that the flights were not to interfere with the affairs of mortals, and was only the depradations of the Black Flight (and the Gronn) that forced their hand. The best they did was provide some guidance and support; anything more direct seemed doomed to failure (see Sunken Temple and Blackwing Lair for example).

Even though I did like a lot of Wrath –it was my introduction to the game, after all—that expac began the shift in how the dragonflights and the Aspects were presented. The result was to make them more familiar and mundane, which kind of ruined them as a part of Azeroth.

It can be hard to express my sentiment here without an analogy, so let me put it this way. If you are an average French citizen circa 1700, King Louis XIV is some remote figure that you knew of but didn’t have a personal relationship with. The Sun King was no Prince Hal out of Henry IV. But if he did start hanging out with you, having you over for dinner and asking your opinion on the politics of the day (and not threatening to have to imprisoned if he didn’t like what you had to say) he would cease to be the Sun King and instead just be closer to “Lou the Baker” who lives next door. The mystique would be gone, and with it the familiarity that replaced it would make the storytelling less by comparison.

Which is what happened in Wrath and Cataclysm.

I will freely admit that the first time I was summoned to Wyrmrest Temple and flown up top was kind of daunting. 

Ever had that feeling you're in over
your head? Yeah, like right about now.

 

I just didn’t know how daunting that would have been to someone who’d been playing since 2004 (or earlier), seeing Alexstraza and company for the first time. Of course, the members of the Accord being 15 feet tall* didn’t exactly make them feel all that chummy either...

You were always the smarter sibling,
Neve. Kneeling is a damn good idea.

 

...but by the end of that entire expac you were on a somewhat first name** basis with the entire Wyrmrest Accord. Which when you think about it, is rather…. Odd.

You started off your career killing some imps in Durotan or Defias in Northshire Abbey, and now you’re talking to the most powerful beings on Azeroth as if you’re on equal footing with them.

Go figure.

Then Cataclysm came along, and while it is very much the Thrall story***, it is also the story of the dragonflights and their Aspects. Over the course of the expac you end up being very chummy with the Aspects, as in “we’ll have you over to dinner and gaming next week” sort of chummy.

I do have to admit there are a few nice
perks being friends with dragons.

 

Set piece-wise, very cool. But story-wise from a logical standpoint, that makes no sense at all. You are not one of the most powerful people on the planet; there’s a ton of others hanging around Dalaran or Stormwind or Orgrimmar right then and there, so either you’re far more powerful than you thought or the Aspects are far less powerful than you thought. Either way, this serves to completely undermine all of the storytelling that went on in Vanilla and TBC.

And I’m pretty sure that the WoW story team doesn’t see the problems inherent in that, but once you uncork that bottle, you can’t stuff the genie back in.

***

Heading back to Wrath, the entire subplot about Malygos going crazy was completely lost on me at the time, because I didn’t have the backstory or the weight of in-game history. But now I do, and I can now say with a degree of certainty…

WHAT THE FUCK, BLIZZARD?

You really took one of the four most powerful beings on Azeroth and just up and had him decide to go bonkers one day and decide to kill all of the arcane wielders just because? Except for those who hung out with Malygos, of course, because that was what he did: he wanted all the magic for him and his entourage. Hardly any explanation, and he was given an Onyxia-style one shot raid that was hardly worth it when compared to Discount Naxx, Ulduar, and ICC. Hell, Wintergrasp’s raid was more well attended in the guilds I was a member of than Malygos’.

So what was the point? That Malygos was out of the way so that Jaina could be making out with Kalecgos, the Aspect-in-absentia?

/sigh

Anyway, I’m aware that in Legion (or thereabouts) Ysera dies too, so I guess I should be glad I didn’t play that expac. It certainly seems that the in-game lifespan of a Dragon Aspect throughout WoW isn’t exactly very long. At times it feels like the Roman Emperor Commodus lived longer than some WoW leaders. Or the average Doctor Who companion in the New Who era. And yes, that’s a snap at the WoW story team; I didn’t sign up to watch leaders go crazy or die or whatever just because you needed a good dramatic setpiece. Work harder at crafting a plausible, well told story and you won’t have to rely upon a virtual bloodbath whenever you want drama.

***

But in the end the familiarity, the deaths, the inconsistent story, and a lot of other small things add up to the dragonflights not being a big deal compared to what they once were. And while I should be excited that the dragons will take center stage, I don’t know if there’s anything you can do to give them back their majesty and remoteness that they once had.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get the grill started. We’re having Alexstraza and her Consort over for steak and roasted vegetables, and we’ll be playing Concept afterward.

"The easiest route is to take I-75 north
across the bridge and get onto I-74..."

 

 

*I presume they could be any height they wanted to be, since dragons were master manipulators of the arcane even before the Highborne. It’s just that they chose to be gigantic to intimidate the lesser races. But as I’ve pointed out before, I suspect that at least someone on the WOW dev team had a thing for giantesses.

**When I was first typing this post out this little section autocorrected to “you were on a somewhat first base basis”. I snickered, because Jaina certainly was during the events in at least one of the books. 

"So you're the one that Jaina is shacking
up with? You know, you ought to do more
to disguise yourself. The super size
look and blue hair kind of gives you away."

 

And for people unfamiliar with the baseball analogy, each base corresponds to a certain level of physical intimacy. First base is kissing/french kissing. Go look up the rest in urban dictionary if you’re curious, because the quickest way to get me to blush and stammer is to have to explain to a girl/woman what second base and third base are, let alone a home run.

***I’m calling it here now, that if part of the expansion is the restoration of the Aspects and selection of new flight leaders, then Jaina will end up leading the Blue Flight. Because that’s a natural yang to the ying of Thrall being whatever the hell he is these days. And that Blizzard can’t seem to help themselves with the Mary Sue and Marty Stu that are Jaina and Thrall.

Before anyone accuses me of spoilers....

...there's a new expac announced for SWTOR:  Shadow of Revan.

Yeah, that kind of gives away certain elements of the mid level flashpoints, but I'm not concerned. Looks interesting indeed, that the Revanites will have a part to play.



EtA: Removed the "the" from the title.

A Miss in the Pattern

I find it interesting that we're on the last raid patch of Mists of Pandaria but we still don't know about the next expac.  Consider the following:

• Wrath was announced in August 2007, before the Sunwell and Zul'Aman raids dropped.
• Cataclysm was announced in August 2009, before the Icecrown raid dropped.
• Mists was announced in October 2011, before the Deathwing raid dropped.
• And now we have the Siege of Orgrimmar dropping, but no expac announcement as of this date.*

I presume that Blizz is waiting for BlizzCon to make the announcement on the next expac, but given that Blizzard likes to follow patterns, this isn't a good sign.

Unless, of course, the Siege of Orgrimmar isn't the last patch in the Mists saga.

If 5.4 is the last Mists patch, then Blizzard might be setting themselves up for a big problem:  a huge length of time where nothing is going on in-game.  Last time, Blizzard softened the blow to subscriptions by creating the annual pass, which included access to Diablo III.  What will Blizzard do this time?

1. Move up any release date to Q1 or Q2 of 2014.  This is the most likely solution, given that any expac Blizz is working on has been done in secret.  However, after the long lead in to Mists, including the massive beta, any push to release so early will be seen by some pundits as a sign of desperation on Blizzard's part.
2. Introduce a bridge raid (or two).  This is IMHO the second most likely solution.  The only thing that keeps this from being the most likely solution is the lukewarm reception the last bridge raid (Ruby Sanctum) received.  Blizzard would need to devote a lot of time to these raids, which would impact any release of the next expac.
3. Take WoW F2P.  An intriguing possibility, but one that I have to question in its soundness.  Blizzard makes a lot of money on WoW subscriptions, and taking WoW F2P would mean that they'd have to either eat that money or make up for it in other ways.  They'd have to severely restrict access to endgame content if they wanted to keep subs up, because WoW's model is based upon "the game starting at max level".  That would be at best a temporary fix, but an intriguing one nonetheless.
4. Announce Titan.  This is possible, but given the "back to the drawing board" announcement in August, I suspect this is the least likely of all options.

Anyway, this is pure speculation until the announcement comes at BlizzCon.




*Ha!  "By the powers of Murphy, I summon the expac announcement!"

PvP "Hybrids"

The thing that I do find most intriguing is the concept of the kinda-sorta PvEish version of BGs.  Imagine the PvPish zones in Grizzly Hills, and instead of a loosely connected set of dailies, convert them into an "event", and that's what you'll get in this new PvP hybrid.

In practice, I'm not sure how well this will work, and whether phasing will do the job as needed.  Think of Tol Barad, and how that has dropped off like a rock.

I was thinking about this, and how the smarter thing that Blizz could do would be to create a PvP option where --if selected-- you'd buff up the non-Boss NPCs in Alterac Valley and add NPCs as needed in the other moderate to large BGs.  That way the NPCs wouldn't be a pushover, and you could theoretically turn AV back into the epic battle of old.

Mists of Pandaria = PvP Land and Other Musings

The title is my first opinion in a nutshell.

If you don't like PvP, I suspect that you're not going to like this upcoming expansion quite so much.  PvP has been carrying the Alliance v. Horde conflict for quite a while now, and I don't expect that to change.

When the stated goal of an expansion is the conflict with the opposing faction, PvP will become more important, and possibly more important than raids.
The racials of a Pandaren are very interesting from a PvP standpoint too:

• Bouncy: reduces fall damage by half.
• Inner peace: double rested XP.
• Gourmond: +15 to cooking.
• Epicurean: double stats to food buffs.
• Quaking Palm (from the live stream): Puts a target to sleep for three seconds.

Quaking Palm is very PvP oriented, as is Inner Peace.  (Just wait around the Capital City and queue for BGs.  Watch the XP rack up!)  Bouncy is kind of meh, and Gourmond and Epicurean equally favor PvE and PvP content.

***

If we complained about Outland being out of date before, I guess we ain't seen nothing yet.

Outland will now be more out of date than the Old World would have been when Cata dropped.  Northrend almost as bad, and the Old World will be filled with Deathwing references.

***

In case nobody was noticing, Inner Peace means that Pandaren will rocket through the leveling system.  Add a few heirlooms, guild perks, and....

***

My previous post about "quests-on-rails" and the effect of making the leveling secondary is going to be even more pronounced in the upcoming expansion.  When Blizz explicitly mentions that they're focusing more on max-level content for this expansion, then you know that leveling has taken a back seat to the WoW experience.

***

WoW Pokemon?  Are you kidding me?

Is Blizzard losing subs to Wizard 101 or something?

If there's something that's going to land on the cutting room floor before the game goes gold, I expect this will be the one to get the axe.