Catchy Name Needed

Loooooot!
Although sometimes you can get a cool title (like in Lord of the Rings Online) or new abilities or something like that.

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Oh, not even free games. You get an in-game item that you can't get any other way - a weapon, here. In some games, as I understand it, this kind of item might actually have significantly better stats than other weapons, but not in GuildWars. It's just a max weapon with a different skin, usually. It's a status thing. Silly, really, but I still want the damn thing. Gotta have some kind of proof that you actually finished!

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profrobert.livejournal.com

But if the game is finished, what good is the weapon? How can you use it? Or is it basically like getting a gold star?

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Well, "finished" doesn't mean we quit playing. There is more stuff to do. And I left out the whole topic of "hard mode" which is opened up when you finish a campaign. You can re-play the whole game, except it's way harder and supposedly you get extra loot. It's so hard that we haven't even tried it much, actually. Apparently we are not quite masochistic enough.

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I'm masochistic enough but there aren't enough hours in the day.

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Woot! I never had the patience to continue playing GuildWars (says the woman who has two level 70 toons in WoW and has done tons of raidin). I envy the folks that have played through it because some of the later stuff looks cool.

I have absolutely no idea what the "transition" film will be like. I figured that they would take the Hobbit and split it in half. In any case, for me it's two of my favorite filmmakers (del Toro and Jackson) coming together in this mashup of awesome collaboration. It makes me squee! Hee hee.

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Mel and I are changing over to WoW for a brief time soon, it appears. I'll be interested to see what she thinks of it, since it does so many (in my opinion) irritating things that GW doesn't do.

One big difference is that in GW it is easier for two humans to do things, because of the henchmen and heroes. You left GW before the advent of heroes; they're like henchmen, but actually useful. (GW really hit its stride with the third campaign, Nightfall, which is where heroes were introduced among other things.) I'm going to miss them tremendously. In WoW it's just you, any other humans you are fortunate enough to be able to get along with well enough to group with, and maybe a pet, so the difficulty rises much more quickly for parties of one or two live people.

I mean, yeah, you can make it pretty deep into WoW by yourself (I know - I was to Un'Goro Crater when I stopped), but it's clearly not what it was designed for, whereas GW acknowledged that people do play in ones and twos and accommodated that.

I suppose we could find some TOG people in WoW as well, but since I'm hoping to pick the world that has the fewest people on it, that may not work. One of the things I like least about WoW, in retrospect, is that all areas except instances are shared (in GW everything but the towns is essentially 'instanced'), so emptier worlds means less chance of finding a good party, but more chance of getting the materials in all WoW's stupid gathering quests before someone else gets them all. (GW has very few "please fetch me seventy-five of these things that only drop every ten kills" quests, thank god.)

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so emptier worlds means less chance of finding a good party, but more chance of getting the materials in all WoW's stupid gathering quests before someone else gets them all

To be honest, a fuller, older world would be better, I think.

Fuller worlds don't have a lot of new, low level toons.
Seriously.

After I had leveled both my toons from 60 to 70 when the expansion came out, I plopped out a little low level Blood Elf to see what the new starting area was like.

TOTALLY EMPTY.

I hardly saw anyone because everyone else was at level 70 and doing the 70 grind or had their new Blood Elf toons were already at 60 moving to 70 so there wasn't a lot of folks on the server. But, because it's an older server with a lot of players, the economy was stable and there were a lot of people who were available to help us out since they've Done It Before.

And gathering quests have generally much improved since the expansion. Really.

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Oh, that's very interesting. Do you think the vast majority of WoW players by this point are up in the higher levels? I was tending to assume a continual influx of newcomers but maybe not.

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Yes, there is a continual influx of newcomers. Where do they go? They get shoved into the new servers with lower populations. In general (at least my personal observations tell me this is true).

This means that newer, less populated servers are populated by folks in general that Haven't Learned Stuff yet. Their behavior tends to be... more problematic than the folks in the older servers, who tend to only get aggravated at noobishness. Does that make sense? New servers = newer players = folks who don't understand the concept of grouping, of reciprocal assistance, etc. Older servers = long-time players = folks who tend to group well, understand how to be efficient in questing, etc.

The biggest problem with TOG is that a majority of those folks have moved on. Or they have had over three years of dealing with noobs so they aren't the best of folks to turn to for assistance (they had problems at the year and a half mark trying to make it fun for the new players, I don't even want to think what they are like now).

If I was you and I wanted to start afresh on a new server, I'd pick an old one. YES it will have a larger population and it will be busier, but it will be busier in Outland, not in the new areas. Every once in a blue moon, you'll run into some level 70 who is totally doing the mining/picking thing on their mounts and being an ass because they just dropped a profession and are levelling up a new one again, but really, there isn't much of that going on. At least, not the last time I played WoW, which was about 6/9 months ago.

(Also, I'm sort of itching to try to play WoW again, even though I'm trying to commit myself to not play until the next expansion comes out. Start new but this time with Horde or something, since I never got that experience. I'm sort of flailing around until another MMORPG comes around that I will throw myself at its mercy (see: Warhammer Online), but right now I'm sort of playing around here and there. I've even picked up freaking Puzzle Pirates again for those quick 30 minute game-plays here and there.)

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This is mostly the same thing that has happened with the TOG Guild Wars folks as well - the people who had been members the longest just got plumb wore out, and many of them have moved on (although they will all come back when Guild Wars 2 is released). Frankly, one reason I'm willing to dabble with WoW is that I'm getting a bit burned out with GW myself, even not having done everything I could do.

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PS - You can totally play with just two IF (this is the BIG IF) you pick good classes that balance each other out. Mike and I? Prot-specced warrior and fire mage = AWESOME for 60 to 70 leveling. Not necessarily awesome for other things, but pretty good for that 60 to 70 leveling.

Instancing is a big part of the game, but it really isn't necessary TO enjoy the game. If you're the type to feel "left out" because there is instanced content that you really need a group to experience, then... I'm not sure what to say about that. Getting five people of a somewhat good balance to make it through the instance is important because the fights are designed to take maximize what the individual classes bring to the table. But do you need to instance to move forward? Nope! (But the fights ARE fun, even if you're high leveled and the fights are easy. They are really scripted events that are pretty cool.)

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Man, I will have to leave this stuff up to Col. I took a look at the TOG WoW Forums - bewildering.

I am excited, though. This will be fun.

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It's a cinch. If you'd like the possibility of interacting with other TOGgers, see this thread, and pick one of the US worlds/servers named there which has PvE after it (i.e. Proudmoore or Runetotem). If you don't care about whether we ever play with other TOGgers, then we can pick any US PvE world that ain't full up. The only really important thing is that we both pick the same one.

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(And if you are interested in a third... if you play Horde and your play schedule isn't like OMG LEVELLING OMG OMG OMG, I'd be interested in restarting my account again and leveling a bit with you. I don't care what class I play, so I'll be happy to round out whatever classes you play to make the threesome more balanced. I just got really burned out last year with leveling and raiding. Two and a half years of pretty hard playing took a lot out of me but I'm sort of getting a bit itchy to try playing a little.)

(PS -- Please don't be afraid to say "no thanks!". I'm cool with that. ;) It was just a thought that came to me having this discussion.)

Edited Date: 2008-04-25 10:32 pm (UTC)

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I have no idea about whether we'd be playing Alliance or Horde (I do know what that means, though, which is progress, I guess!) but we certainly are not the power-leveling types. So yeah, if we end up playing Horde, we'll let you know!

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Oh? And last weekend? My sister and I played a little bit of Warhammer Online.

Guess who is planning on getting her copy on opening day? AYEAP. It was totally fun, but I'm not 100% sure yet if I will like the emphasis on realm vs. realm play.

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maribou

Happy birthday!!

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