Updated Warcraft Thoughts

It's been a long time since I posted my pet peeves and favorite details with regard to World of Warcraft, and the game has changed an awful lot since then. It's constantly being updated with changes and new content. And of course, the server you're on, people you play with, guild you join, etc. have a strong impact on your play experience.

New Top Pet Peeves:

• Self-centered players who think that the only thing that should be catered to is their needs. These are the people who think all gameplay should be customized specifically according to what they like to do. They're the people who think a guild should rearrange everything it does to accomodate what they want to do, whether or not it inconveniences anyone else. These people can single-handedly cause huge upheavals in any given part of the community they choose to participate in, often because they wait to express these single-minded needs until they're entrenched in that part of the community, by which time people feel they should try to accomodate them.
  
• Players with a sense of entitlement, who simply don't understand why every other player shouldn't hand them whatever they want on whatever terms they feel are appropriate. Often these players are perfectly nice right up until the moment they realize you mean it when you say, 'no,' at which point they can become very abusive.
  
• Players who "steal"--i.e., they ninja loot, they kill-steal (attempt to do just enough damage at just the right time that they tag your target but you get the aggro and/or do the killing), they sneak up and grab a resource you've just cleared your way to while you're fighting the last guardian, etc.
  
• Players who bring their significant problems into the game and their guilds, making what should be a fun experience into something much less fun for those around them.
  
• Players who "mass-farm" areas, grabbing every single mob they can and killing them in as large numbers as possible, making it impossible for anyone else to do much of anything there.
  
• Lag and disconnection problems. It's frustrating to get repeatedly killed because of lag, or to wipe in a dungeon because people get disconnected in the middle of a boss fight. The issues aren't big enough to be a deal-breaker for me the way they are for some people, but I'd like to see them get better again.
  
• A lack of tools to help guilds function. It seems to me that with better support a number of the problems that seem fairly intrinsic to running guilds could be eased, and this would make the game much better for almost everyone involved.
  
• Patches that break all the really cool UI mods--not just every now and then, but significantly often. This makes it a tiring proposition for people to keep these mods maintained, which causes a lot of people to give up eventually.
  

New Favorite Details:

• In-game events and holidays. Nothing like being an adult and being able to hide behind your toon to go running around like a little kid looking for brightly-colored eggs on Easter!
  
• Wide variety of items. I once said that high on my wish-list was a wider variety of looks for low-level items so not every low-level toon looked the same. Blizzard delivered, and did the same for the entire range of items in game. The amount of variety has increased absolutely stunningly.
  
• Professions. I just love playing around with developing a character's professions. My favorites these days are Alchemy and Engineering (both Goblin and Gnomish).
  
• Wide variety of areas, ecologies, appearances, etc. There's even weather now such as rain, snow, and dust storms. I love the fact that herbs have their own sort of ecology--purple lotus are found near ruins; wild steelbloom is found in hilly crags; kingsblood is found in meadows; earthroot likes small hills; etc. And many of the creatures are the same way. I remember working on a hunting quest once for which part of the challenge was that they don't tell you how to find the creature you're hunting. We found them because we understood and remembered enough of the ecology of the type of area they tended to inhabit that we deduced where they'd probably be.
  
• The economy. I love the fact that it's a "live" economy, where people can try to buy and sell things for whatever they want. You can try to buy things cheap and sell them higher if you want, and people can try to go out and get things for themselves if they think your prices are too high. The only thing I don't like about the economy is all of the people who seem to have an expectation that it "should" be one way or another, and that people are somehow ruining it by participating in it. Truthfully I think there's less reason to complain about prices in Warcraft than in any real-world situation, since by the nature of the game world at least you can go out and try to farm what you want, and since it's a game it could be argued that there's nothing you "need" so badly that you're being forced to buy it.
  
• Sense of humor. I absolutely love the sense of humor in the game. There's a quest, for example, where someone asks you to go get something for him. The quest then goes on to detail how and where you should obtain these items, as quests often do, and for explanation as to how you know all this additional detail says simply, "you know this because you are psychic."
  

New Wish List:

• Less lag and fewer disconnection problems. I know there'll always be some, but it would be nice to see less.
  
• More tools to help out guilds. Blizzard has started a forum to encourage discussion about running guilds, so maybe they're heading in this direction already.
  
• A continuation of the gradual addition of new content, new features, new variety, and so on. Speaking of which, looking forward to that expansion!
  
• More concern for making things easier on mod developers, so they can keep up with changes without having to do so much work.
  

I very nearly have my first character on the new server up to 60. I think playing a priest I'm going to be more interested in doing the end-game instances than I was as a warrior. I find it easier, as long as I'm in a decent group, and we've got a good guild with folks we enjoy grouping with. Most of them are on east coast time, unlike the last guild which was largely on west coast, so it's easier for us to find a group in our time frame. I also seem to be having some really nice drop luck. Got a glowing brightwood staff as a random drop in Felwood, so I got a 22 int enchant put on it. Whoo!


Warcraft, World of Warcraft