This is a promotion for World of Warcraft I saw in the battle.net launcher tonight. I assume a lack of proofreading here, or my concept of BEST VALUE is different from Blizzard’s.
Fake edit: I checked and both the 6 and 12-month deals save you 13%, so the 6-month deal is just secret best value.
I am not resubscribing to WoW, BTW. But I still have all of my magical memories.
I never actually logged back in and the three day free trial expired.
This concludes my return to WoW.
I’ll next have a look when they launch the “classic” server expected this summer. With lots of grind and all the rough edges lovingly restored, this promises to be a good bludgeoning of nostalgia. I think it may be worth one month’s subscription.
Before I stopped playing WoW last time, I moved the game off the SSD and back onto my old-timey HDD. It definitely loaded faster on the SSD, but performance otherwise seemed to be about the same on the hard disk.
Tonight I logged in after many months away, the game fully patched and shiny. I then experienced some of the worst non-network related lag I’ve ever seen in the game. The framerate went from a high of 60 to as low as 18. Your framerate should never dip below legal gambling age. It was unplayable bad, which prompted me to stop playing. It’s possible the game was caching files after being moved back to the hard disk, but whatever it was, it did not leave me with a burning urge to try again.
But I will, for science!
Tomorrow.
This weekend World of Warcraft is free for previous players–like me!
I’ll probably poke around, but I think it will only remind me of how I hanker for a massively multiplayer game world that is like WoW, but somehow better. Less focused on combat, more focused on just doing stuff and exploring the world.
Or maybe I just want a good single player RPG.
On a semi-related note, I’ve had several dreams about City of Heroes (2004-2012) recently. This is weird because I pretty much never dream about games and nothing has happened lately to prompt me to have dreams about it. Maybe seeing Captain Marvel triggered the dreams. Maybe my brain is just weird and random.
I’ll report back on my WoW revisit after the weekend. I expect minor shenanigans at best.
Fizzled after a few weeks. I realized I hadn’t logged in for the better part of a few weeks and canceled my subscription.
Unlike days of yore, the cancellation process no longer makes you go through a series of steps that gently plead with you to change your mind. Instead, you click Cancel Subscription, get a Yes/No pop-up to confirm and that’s it.
I certainly can’t say I didn’t get plenty of enjoyment out of WoW, but one of the main attractions of MMOs for me is the early (yes, early!) character growth and exploring the world and these things have grown very stale in WoW, through a combination of the game not changing much for my playstyle and me just playing the heck out of it for nearly 14 years.
I’d like to find another game with a big world to explore, but I’m not really sure there’s one out there that would fit what I’m looking for, because I’m not even sure what I’m looking for. I’d like a game with other players around–like an MMO–but not too many to make it feel crowded. I don’t want to have to line up to kill ten bears. I don’t actually want to kill ten bears particularly, either.
I know there are online survival games and a nigh-endless sea of clones building (ho ho) on what Minecraft started, but I’m nearly as out of touch with gaming as I am with pop music.
I am old.
Maybe I’ll just start drawing more. It’s simple, kind of soothing and doesn’t require a subscription.
Any game is bound to have a few graphical glitches. It is my task to capture as many of them as I can for posterity.
The ones below are from World of Warcraft.
Six players (including my human rogue) waiting for Guard Thomas to respawn in Elwynn Forest so we can turn in quests. He was killed by a Horde (opposing faction) player. There is no reward for killing an NPC like this, nor any challenge–you just click a button and the NPC obligingly keels over, taking several minutes to magically spring back to life. There’s also no real way to stop this from happening.
This is the regular low level experience in World of Warcraft, an ongoing opportunity to observe sociopaths in the wild, as it were (or more accurately, their aftermath).
Patches are an inevitable part of any MMORPG as the developers push out nerfs, buffs, additional or revised content and of course, fixes. This week two games had patches released that worked in reverse, seemingly breaking more than they fixed.
WoW Insider succintly sums up the latest patch to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft with The disaster of patch 3.0.8. Among the highlights: server-crashing bugs that forced them to shut off the entire PvP zone of Wintergrasp and access to the arenas. Major patches are something veteran WoW players have learned to anticipate with dread. On the plus side, lag-induced deaths are less painful now thanks to the addition of over 60 new graveyards and a buff to ghost run speed.
Meanwhile, the dev team for City of Heroes made the curious decision to push an 80 MB patch live the day before the twice-a-year and incredibly popular Double XP Weekend begins. This thread outlines the many things that weren’t fixed, error-riddled patch notes (a CoH tradition) notwithstanding. Unfixed powers, new features that aren’t actually there and the Virtue server having fits are among the highlights. Also, don’t wear our clothes!
Maintaining a sprawling and gigantic mess of ever-expanding code for a live game is not a simple task and any reasonable player will expect a few bumps along the way but these two examples seem to reflect a growing inability to just get the basics right without screwing something (or many things) up. This is why it’s best to have a diverse gaming library. when your favorite online game goes haywire, you can turn to the ever-reliable alternatives like Solitaire and Minesweeper. Oh Minesweeper, I’ll beat you this time!
As my level 18 paladin flies over Goldshire on a griffon:
Goldshire is the undisputed Duelling for Dummies capitol of WoW.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said to myself, “I should create a new character with a totally meta name, walk him to Goldshire and duel another meta-named character.”
