Gnomercy:  Hi there.

Guild: (no response)

Gnomercy: So what? Is this a voluntary vow of silence from everyone?

Guild: (no response)

Gnomercy: I’m riding my mechanostrider and I’m naked.

Guild: o.0

Gnomercy: You know I have been dating King Bronzebeard.

Guild: (no response)

Gnomercy: But I think I may have to break it off. I think he’s been cheating on me with Thrall.

Guild: (no response)

Gnomercy: O.K. I will be back later, but try and keep it down in hear will you? The noise is deafening.

 

 

     

This last Saturday, Saylah from Mystic Worlds, my co-host Fran and I whiled away an hour or so discussing World of Warcraft  (WoW) and why people hearken to its siren call, returning time and again.  In the early days of Warhammer Online, then Mythic Entertainment chief Marc Jacobs got into a tiff online with Blizzard execs over virtual tourists from WoW playing Warhammer Online – in retrospective it looks like Blizzard was right. Still, even Rob Pardo once attributed the large player base of World of Warcraft to an ever revolving player base, rather than a static one.  Whether WoW has a static player base, or one that rotates so fast it could break the sound barrier, there is no denying that it has more staying power than Barry White .

So while Ravious from Kill Ten Rats has his day in front of the microphone (show 63 being edited now), E3 gets into swing (I wonder if EA will have any phony demonstrations this year) and the Lotro free 2 play model becomes old news (which means this is about the time the magazines pick it up) – I decided to “take a walk on the wild side.”

Mind you most of my life has been on the wild side to begin with. However, the particular side I am talking about is the Alliance side.  Yes, as most of our listeners and readers know, my mainstay of play in WoW has been horde for some time now.  This is, of course, why I have been want to quote the following phrases …

Once you roll horde you never get bored.

Once you roll troll you never re-roll.

 

Ah my friends, there was a time when the horde was merely a mystery.  There was a time when I was firmly entrenched in place with names like Stormwind, Ironforge, and the flames of Molten Core ensconced many a player as it was the highest instance in the land. Then came the fateful day when I rolled up a hunter and entered a battleground. And the rest, as they say, is history. I do, of course, have alts (including one named Vashj who is forever stuck on the Whisperwind server). There are even a scant few Alliance side alts that languish forgotten, never having seen the process of changing factions (and believe me I would rather pay the 25 dollars than go through the Everquest 2 betrayal process again for the umpteenth time).

So it is with some trepidation that I stepped outside the boundaries of the horde and stepped into the shoes of my gnome warrior Pharthing (below)

 

My first shock was that after over a year I was still in the same guild. The first play session (see above dialogue (or lack thereof) showed a possible reason why.  Since I found myself in Booty Bay anyway I decided to start my short time in short shoes wandering the woods of Feralis.  The saddest sight was a barren Barrens – totally devoid of any life that was a collection of artificially intelligent pixels.  No, the land that was once the home of the now infamous “Barrens Chat” is now so empty you could shoot a cannon down the middle and not hit anyone.

O.K. that I half expected – but as I wandered the wide world of the pre-Burning Crusade WoW that some call “Classic” or “Vanilla” WoW I found the only life where I expected to find it…outside of the banks in Ironforge and Stormwind. After all, “bank sitting” is a long time tradition that heralds all the way back to the days of Ultima Online when it was a market place because no one had yet thought to include an auction house in an online game.

And so my great Alliance side experiment ended with a whimper and not a bang.

Still, it gave me pause for thought of the fate of what was once a vibrant (albeit virtual) land full of pixilated players. This, of course, is fuelled by the fact that the NDA for a recent press event concerning the next WoW expansion (Cataclysm) was recently lifted and is covered here. The news has brought about a bit of ballyhooing by some of my favorite bloggers. (Well, perhaps more of a “downroar” than an uproar). The big news here are the words “Path of the Titans has been scrapped.” Instead the good folks at Blizzard (and here I exclude Messer Bobby Kotic – Yes I know he’s Activision but I had to fit that in somewhere) have chosen to “overhaul” the glyph system instead.  The welcome news (at least from my point of view) where those that followed on the heels of this news…

“Medium glyphs will be fun/cosmetic glyphs.” – Blizzard

If nothing changes with Cataclysm but what we see in the video above, and being able to play a goblin, I will be one happy camper.

You see, from my perspective, not everything has to be an uber sword of uberness in order to be desirable. It doesn’t always have to enable me to sink the Aircraft Carrier Nimitz in a single blow.  Sometimes it’s good to remember why we play games in the first place. Now I do understand that there are many players into the minutiae of pvp that play to dominate people that might otherwise hand them there ass if they were to meet the player in person.  But for me the goal has always been to have fun. Sometimes fun is just charging into someplace like Molten Core with forty drunken dwarves seeing how long they can all survive. Sometimes fun is just zipping around Northrend and Outlands on the back of a broomstick cackling gleefully while you threaten to “get” players and “there little dog Toto too”.

More importantly it goes to show that Paul Barnett was right (gasp!) when he was on our show and talked about revealing plans for future development too soon.  He told us that as a developer, if you tell players you are “working” on something they will tell themselves (and everyone else) “O.K. it will be released next Thursday.”  Grandmother put it another way…Never count your chickens before they’re hatched.

So if all  Blizzard does (and here I use the term “all” facetiously) is re-cast the old world in a new light, with new art, a new landscape and 2,000 more quests I will be overjoyed.  But that isn’t all…oh no.  As I have always maintained (and said so on previous shows before Cataclysm was even announced) if Blizzard brings goblins to the game I will come back to WoW. Now, of course, our claim is that Blizzard is creating goblins as a playable race because Rob Pardo listens to our show.

That’s our story and we are sticking to it.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

(posted by the Webmaster for Julie Whitefeather)