F*!#in' Up

What does World of Warcraft have in common with Microsoft? A general inability to do good expansions/OS releases one after the other. Using my rough calculation starting at Windows 95:

Windows 95 - The Burning Crusade
Windows 98 - Wrath of the Lich King
Windows ME - Cataclysm
Windows XP - Mists of Pandaria
Windows Vista - Warlords of Draenor
Windows 7 - Legion ???
Windows 8 - ???
Windows 10 - ???

Before you all complain about my computing timeline, it is the general gist that Warlords of Draenor is the Windows Vista of expansions. I still fix PC's with XP installed, but nobody in their right mind would use Vista.

Part of the problem is Blizzard's in ability to fix a problem with a moderate solution.

1. 5 Man dungeons are too easy - lets make them really tough - then make them irrelevant
2. Reputation too easy - lets hide the goodies behind another rep grind that will slow them down - make reputation about vanity items not raiding progression
3. Raiding sizes vary from raid to another - lets introduce two tiers 10 and 25 man - use variable sizes between 10 and 25 man
4. Badges multiple levels for each patch - lets slide it down with each patch - get rid of entire system introduce several new currencies before returning back to Valor
5. Bag sizes too small, increases incrementally - lets  fill those bags by having hundreds of different ingredients for cooking, give them a huge refrigerator for storing food - allow crafting materials to be used from a massive storage structure held in the bank, and then fill it with 3 tiers of fish small, normal and enormous.

This of course is the tip of the Iceberg. I have not even dared to mention ***Flying***. These decisions are evolved over relatively long periods of time if you consider that the average expansion is around 2 years. The assumption is that Devs make these decisions by committee and they like to swing from one extreme to another. Cataclysm was a complete Flyingfest and Warlords of Draenor was a no fly zone. It is easy to see that we will return to a 3rd way with something in between for the Legion expansion.

Warlords of Draenor, as predicted was "An Orc Too Far". Too much of the same thing is never a good thing. Ask yourself how many Dragon bosses have you killed on the way up to Level 100? Blizzard have used many different techniques over the years, but how many more times can they come up with new and improved Dragon abilities? If the only mobs you ever killed were Murlocs and Naga, I would have been out of here years ago. To be honest I had more than enough of killing Orcs in Pandaria, without another entire expansion devoted to them and with a storyline written on the back of a cigarette packet.

The launch of Warlords of Draenor was an utter disaster in my opinion. I know that many of you have long since forgotten, but just remember there is another launch around the corner. I wonder sometimes how Blizzard did not know how many expansions it had sold, a large percentage would have been conducted electronically, it is not like Game stores were withholding the information. Blizzard pride themselves on their metrics and the ability to analyse how the game is being played.

If Millions of returning players was a shock to the system, it must have been utterly galling for them to discover that they had lost the ability to retain it's player base. The issue is such an unmitigated disaster that Blizzard have since stopped telling us how many people are currently playing. None of us know because we don't actually see anybody's avatar roaming the streets, because we are all cocooned in our little Garrisons, too afraid to venture out, or more likely nothing to venture out for. One by one our cities have fallen silent, with only the metronomic conversation from the Trade Chat alerting us to the fact, that we are not totally alone.

That Smell

It is two weeks since I last wrote, and so much has happened in the interim, like the small matter of Blizzcon and the launch of a new WoW expansion in the shape of Warlords of Draenor.

I like many was excluded from the Beta testing so the last four days have consisted of me and 7+ Million people all wanting to occupy the same small space. I am writing today about the expansion as I have so far found it and please forgive me if I ramble and meander on a myriad (not a Vindicator or an NPC on Draenor) of different topics. So without further ado here is my list of 9 normal days for Blizzard and a world of pain for the rest of us.

Blizzcon

It might come as a shock to many, but I actually like Blizzard, but I am not a fan boy and I don't play every game that Blizzard wafts under our noses. I have admittedly played all of their current games but I only play one game and have done for the last decade.

This was a Blizzcon decidedly short on WoW news and with a new expansion so shortly after the Blizzcon. Who cared anyway, you can keep Overwatch and the Manga styled shoot 'em up, where you can leap around like a PvP rogue all you want, because I am old and have the reactions of an oil tanker which is heading in the wrong direction. Thanks Blizzard, but no thanks.

Launch Night

For the second expansion in a row I was definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time. Having not been in the beta, I might know where I am going, but I have no idea how I am supposed to get there.

As usual I chose badly and opted for the portal from the mages tower. I then wasted precious time at the site of the pre-expansion instead of being in the thick of it outside the Portal. Needless to say I was far from alone. That mistake would cost me dear and by the time I arrived at the right spot it looked like a Mardi Gras (without the oversized dragon mounts and Tundra wide load vehicles).

The result of this chaos was that I took another player for a spin around the Timeless Isle on my own and did some dailies for XP and then went to bed

Launch Day Carnage

I managed to sneak home for a crafty play at lunch time, having been forced to go to work by my darling wife. The numbers playing was heavily reduced from the evening before and I was able to sail through Tanaan Jungle before grinding to a halt where garrisons should be.

Part of the problem for the player is knowing when something is a Realm issue or in this case is a game issue. We have endured logon queues, no instances, horrendous lag, random reboots, scheduled maintenance, unscheduled maintenance and in general a very poor release.

Friday

A holiday from work for the sole purpose of playing WoW. If I had known in advance I would have left the expansion for a week and sailed through without any issues. The game was actually relatively stable during the day, as long as you exclude Garrisons. What am I saying Garrisons is the expansion, everything else is the same fluff we have had for a decade only with nicer decoration.

Of course as soon as the European school kids came home, everything went South again and the evening was totally unplayable.

Saturday

More of the same, everything was busy all day as people tried to put long stretches of play together between the disconnects and reboots.

Sunday

At last we finally had a game worth playing. It is still not perfect but it would have been acceptable to have this level of performance on Launch day. It is obvious the Blizzard team have worked tirelessly to fix these problems, but it also true that this expansion was not ready and not tested to the required standard.

I have not kept up with many blog posts during the last few days but the following was a gem from Alternative Chat.

"The use of the area as an Instance is beginning to cause more than a few issues: add to that the obviously phased content that exists in the World and... well, this is the issue I never saw coming, because I assumed Blizzard would understand the interest in the feature, and have learnt the obvious and well-reported complaints from Beta. I find it rather dismaying therefore that no-one does seem to have grasped just how many people would want to play this on release, and that the same issues that crippled the Beta servers still exist on Live, but in greatly increased levels."

This is very interesting because I don't remember reading about big problems of phasing on Beta, and if this is correct (I have no reason to doubt Alternative Chat) then Blizzard have been exceptionally negligent. If it didn't work with a few thousand playing how the hell did you expect it to work with 7 Million people all wanting the same content at approximately the same time.

Smart arsed comments about Blizzard not being able to nip out to the nearest computer hardware shop and purchase a few more Blade servers does not cut it. They knew it was coming and chose to buy their collective heads in the sand and hope that the live servers would be more stable than the Beta realms.

Alternative Ways of Playing

Being able to only play for 30-45 minutes up to the establishment of Garrisons forced me to play with my entire cast of characters. Priority always goes to my Hunter main, but why keep trying to flog a dead horse when I can be in a position to have 12 Garrisons creating resources and sending the Followers out on extra missions. Right now I would be happy to be able to scroll through all the Garrisons assign the followers missions, then logout. Rinse and repeat every hour or so.

I know it is all shiny and new and in 6 months time I will not be doing Missions, but right now it is the game. Levelling, Dungeons and Raiding can all wait until I am in need of a change of pace. The Sunsong Ranch was exciting to start with but this takes the meta game to a new level. It reminds me of a very early version of Football Manager, in which you would setup your team taking hours to prepare for a match and then the computer would go off and generate a summary of the game. Somehow Real Madrid would manage to lose to Accrington Stanley 4 - 6, even when the real score is more likely to be 10-1 to Real Madrid.

It is ironic that non of my Alliance are Epic, but the second follower on my solitary Horde character is Purple. I am honestly surprised that it is not Legendary (I am guessing there is no such thing) just to rub more salt into the wound..

Blizzard Loves Horde

What I have seen of the game and to be honest it is not much is that the Horde Garrison is far nicer than the Alliance base. The snowy environment the undulating surface, the whole zone seems better. Is it not bad enough that Blizzard writes Horde centric storylines without giving them a better landscape, better quests and infinitely better heroes.

The Horde have Duratan for godsake, who is so much cooler than Maraad, who is a little sad and a little mad. Duratan wears a Wolf on his head and back, and if I am not mistaken has a zone named after him.

No Flying

It is normal behaviour for Blizzard to restrict Flying, but in this case I can totally understand. On the other hand the landscape is mountainous with rocky cliff faces and caves and ridges with small pathways. The result is huge amounts of wasted time plotting the best route around an obstacle. I ended up in the sea for 10 minutes trying to find a way to get back on the shoreline and I have done huge detours when the only way across is to find the rock that acts like bridge. There is Fortress Anquish which is a nightmare to traverse. I appreciate the No fly zone, but I would appreciate less confusing maps.

Realms, Instances and Connected Realms

As a regular player it became obvious a long time ago that various continents and Instances are not on the same server as the Azeroth Realm that you provisionally sit on. During The Burning Crusade it was not uncommon for Outlands to be unavailable but if you had a character in Stormwind or Ironforge you could quite happily play. With Connected Realms I have that Anachronos can have World Server is down and Alonsus is working fine. My advice is to not have all your eggs in one basket and keep some of your characters on different servers for times like this.

I assume that the problem with Garrisons is connected to the message, "Unable to find Instance" I assume this to be like running an application in Citrix and when the Citrix server is full the performance becomes unstable for those in it, and non existent for those without a session. The only solution is to add more resources and extra servers to the Citrix farm. This is exactly what Bashiok was saying on Saturday.

What is most perplexing is that the problem occurred on Beta and the demand forecasting on Blizzards behalf appears to be very poor. They should know exactly how many copies of the expansion have been sold and of course they have regular feedback on subscription numbers.

DDoS

As I understand it was only an attack on North America, and in some respects Blizzard should be well versed in dealing with these internet bandits, and especially should have expected an attack on a launch day, for the extra publicity.

Unfortunately with all the issues that have come with this launch, it makes you wonder what effect it had. I am guessing it was nothing more than an additional nuisance factor.

Where Were You Hiding When The Storm Broke?

Sorry, big apologies all round, the real life patch that dropped last year, caused a huge change in my mood, lifestyle and my willingness to read and write about the World of Warcraft. In the 5 months since I last wrote anything sensible on this blog, not a lot as happened in game. There is no new content and a lot of hot air. I even stopped reading other peoples blogs so in reality I have no idea what is going on, but I get the feeling I have not missed much. My only sources of information have been the Godmother, The Instance Podcast and occasionally WoW Insider.

The good news is that I am back in employment after suffering an enforced vacation over the month of December. This was not a good time for me and the people around me. I might have been rather unpleasant to live with for a period of 6 weeks and the effect of not being able to provide a good Christmas for my wife and children.

After several months of attending terrible interviews, I was asked to go and have a chat with a local company, situated about 10 minutes walking distance from my house. I was late Friday afternoon and started work on the following Monday morning. Not only is work very close to home, but there is talk of Business trips to exotic European locations including Paris, Madrid and Milan, it sounds like a fashion show, but in reality the company makes rivets

In my absence I have mentally written hundreds of posts, but I have not had the time or the focus to give them the attention they require, but I am hoping that recent changes in circumstances will allow for resumption of usual service.

The low point in between expansions is a strange to start writing but that is exactly the point that I picked up my keyboard 2 years ago. There is still much to discuss and I wanted to pickup the baton laid down by the Godmother and her faffing campaign.

Faff means - "To spend time in ineffectual activity". It is an English word derived from the North of England and is commonly used only in the UK. There is a time when I would have described the bulk of my game time in Azeroth to be "faffing about". I would love to support the Godmother but I have made a discovery that on the surface our activities may appear to be ineffectual, but in reality the opposite is true.

With additional time on my hands in December I decided to organise my game time so as to make optimum usage of short periods of play between job applications. The result was a spreadsheet to monitor my key goals and routines, and I remembered in the process that the Godmother had already created The Ultimate Form of Faffing. The result is the antithesis of faffing and results in huge improvements in the attainment of objectives. The activities might be inconsequential to anyone else but this is anything but faffing.

In my own form I highlight the following key activities:

1. Darkmoon Faire - Monthly activity for 5 points of fishing skill.
2. Weekly Timeless Isle Quest - Collect 50 Epochs for 200 Valor
3. Celestial Bosses - Leg and Gloves (Now dropping 550 PvP gear)
4. LFR Siege of Orgrimmar - Just in case they drop secrets and titan runestones for the Legendary Quest.
5. Warforged Seals - Pickup 3 bonus Seals or 40+ Gold not a lot of effort (weekly)

The matrix was ultimately a tick box of which characters needed what activities in any given week. I can quickly logon to any alt if I find a Celestial Boss has been attacked without wasting any time. 90% of Celestial Boss kills occur on reset day and armed with this information it is possible to chain kill for between 5 and 11 characters in a two hour period. Prior to having a spreadsheet I would logon to the wrong character and miss the end of the fight on far too many occasions.

The idea that end game is all about Heroic Raiding, Maximising Honor Kills and the accumulation of gear is only partially right. Every player has their own agenda, and with a lack of new content we are left to do achievements, clear out our bags, and put our characters into stasis waiting for a date sometime between September and December when we can experience something new again.

The development time for Warlords of Draenor is not a surprise that is would take around 12 months from Blizzcon to a release date. The only surprise in the MoP expansion was the time of expansion dropping to the first major patch. Everything else is firmly in Blizzard timelines of 2 year expansions. The time from last patch to new expansion is bad for both player and Blizzard. Killing Deathwing for 12 months was not fun, and the same is going to be true of Garrosh. What makes matters worse is that he is going to escape (oops spoiler).

Recently I started to do Pet Battles, fundamentally because I could not face another night of waiting around for a LFR. LFR is set so damn low in terms of gear that the only reward possible is the dropping of bits for the Legendary Quest. The RNG for these items is sickening low, leaving me doing something I don't want to do, for a very slim chance of a 8% advancement in one quest. Fully flexible raiding cannot come round quick enough in my opinion. In case you think I am over doing my sob story, I have killed 60+ bosses in Siege of Orgrimmar in various Raid types for 5 Titan Runestones. I would prefer to know that I am required to do 4 Raids a week to achieve one Runestone than a random system that can churn out 4 rewards in a row and then nothing for 3 months. Random is useful for some aspects of the game, but for others we need to see definitive rewards for our toils.

For all the talk of a welfare Legendary, I respect anybody with one cloak, never mind multiple cloaks on alts (Kudos to Grumpy).

***Update***
Catching up my reading I found How to get a Legendary on a Boosted Alt. Apparently I have been doing it wrong for months.

Anyway back to Pet Battles, when does something stop being fun and turns into just another grind?