Someone beat WoW. Yes, that’s right, on a Taiwanese server they have every single achievement in the game except BB King which was recently added to the game. That means it is possible to do everything in WoW and reach a point where the only thing left is to min/max gear and farm gold. Until you hit the gold cap, that is.
Of course, WoW is a big winner in that you can alt. Yes, that’s right, alt, and then all of a sudden all of those things you’ve done are now uncompleted and the cycle continues.
There is no news this week, other than a sparse telling or two. There were some server outages, the fifth year anniversary which we’ll talk about in the weekly musing, and the Pilgrim’s Bounty event. Oh and Mohawks.
Did you have fun with Pilgrim’s Bounty? My adventures led me city to city as a level 58 trying to sit in each seat, taking turns running myself and someone else through the instance wherein someone released when they died at the Talon King. If I was an angry person I would have went into their room and deleted WoW for something like that, because that instance is still painful 10 levels later.
Here is my review of the holiday. I find it to be a 7 on the scale of “the most fun you’ve ever had” sitting at 10 and “reading WoW erotica in front of a large crowd” at 1. Well, that’s a weird scale, but I found it to be the most rewarding for instant gratification. You instantly gain 320 cooking within no time, even if you don’t want the meta, and that itself means the most to me. Any holiday event where you get this instant sense of character development is really good.
However, there is always an issue. I’ll use the recent Halloween event as a comparison. The Halloween holiday requires persistence, yes, and requires travel. It’s time consuming, but in no way painful. You log in during your spare time and collect your goody bag. Within no time you’re loaded up with the items and call it a day. With Pilgrim’s Bounty, it’s a difficult and arduous journey through the world, sitting on tables and spamming buttons, and involves Darnassus which you’ve already heard my complaints about.
I relate this achievement to something between Brewfest and Halloween. It’s got a very high practical use to it, like Halloween, with free buff food and immediate cooking skill but it also has that high annoyance factor. Finding rogues is the hardest thing to possibly do when they’re either already turkeys or just not around. The trips to the enemy cities are annoying and some cities like Darnassus are impossible to get through to get to the tables for everyone but stealthers. I’m sure many will read it as whining, but I aim to have fun in my games. I don’t aim to hike it through an enemy city to sit on a stable or run the bird man instance again.
In other news, the Guild’s 3rd season ended with Codex going mental. Surprise.
I always join a guild made between me and my friends, but I went and did some research for this one. Here are my findings, published here in theoverpull.
Reality is subjective and in World of Warcraft we can often lose ourselves to thinking the game holds a static meaning. Sure, we all assume that raiding and purps are the endgame and that PvP is its own entire little minigame within WoW, but we would be wrong to assume that it was the end of the possibilities. There is a lot more life and depth in the game than the static world we often attempt to dictate that WoW has.
EVE Online has no real story nor does it have any instances or dungeons in the traditional sense. It doesn’t have an Arthas in space chilling in his house waiting on you to stop having a tournament and to come to him and fight. It just has space, spaceships, and the freedom to let players dictate their own game. WoW, on the other hand, does have Arthas, it does have a story, and it does have breadcrumbs leading to a life of arenas or raiding as your de facto “endgame” with farming (gold, achievements, whatever) as a secondary goal. Writers like me often wax poetic about how this is what makes WoW good (or to some bad) and is what keeps players going.
However, let me ask you a question. What if you were not in your guild right now that’s capable of raiding, even if it was Naxxramas? What if you were incapable of setting up a winning arena team? What if you were a step below a casual? Stuck in a world where even the welfare purps were overpowered. What if you were that guy, you know, the one you constantly gank with ease in the battlegrounds or just one of the filler people in Orgrimmar that no one knows?
They’re like ghosts and the world is full of them. You see their guild tag, but have no clue what the guild is. You see their gear and it’s a mix of blues and epics, epics you probably never even heard of. You see their achievements, they were 80 half a year ago, but there they stand a complete enigma. They’ve made no progress in the world. It’s as if they’re NPCs filling the world up to give it a sense of mass.
The truth is though, that these people play an entirely different game. They don’t play the game that you and I play. They don’t play World of Warcraft: Gear is Cool. They play a game where egos are set to fight, people are at war, and any second now they could lose everything. It’s not the story missions I’m referring to, they play a social game.
The rabbit hole starts eerily with those screams and shouts in the Barrens. You know the ones. They offer tabards and guild bank slots to any and all that would join. On the surface, I’m sure the majority of us ignore them and scuff them away as a joke. As a guild full of lowbies all aiming to take the first ginvite they get and leave around level 40 (assuming they don’t quit) when they make friends in Scarlet Monastery who invite them to their guild. In some cases it’s true, but sometimes it’s far from it.
I joined one of these guilds on a Priest I was leveling because the guy sounded genuinely desperate for friends and a guild tag would stop the invites. However, after joining, I soon found a world that exists separately from our own. A world filled with intrigue, mystery, and war.
I was soon to find out that these guilds are like jobs at mega department stores. The guild leader is the store manager, his officers are the department managers, level 80s are the full time workers, and the lower levels are the part time workers. Make anyone above you mad and you’re out. Fail to do your job within the guild and you’re out. Work hard and you’ll be rewarded – with little to no compensation and a job that feels like it’ll never be done.
The guild leader was a charismatic guy. He talked, a lot, and had a good head on his shoulders when it came to recruitment. After all, he recruited me of all people. The guild ranks were well established, and like I said they were the focal point to your work within the guild. You start at the bottom and if you do a good enough job you can get to the higher ranks. Higher ranks mean more bank access, more grepairs, and more trust.
Within a short period of time within the guild I was made aware of a war when someone screamed “those mafia guys are camping me!” in guild chat enough times that I was dizzy with the text movement. The guild leader ordered everyone to come to the barrens immediately. Curious to what the spectacle was about I made my way to the barrens from Orgrimmar. There, I saw it, their rival guild circling the defenseless noob on their mounts.
I stood and watched, then pondered what the problem was. They weren’t Alliance. They weren’t enemy creatures. They were just players on our side circling around this guy. However, to these guys, these people were the enemy. I was quick to find out that they were at war with this guild and this guild was at war with them. They had a few allied guilds to their cause, but this was personal. This lowbie was one of the officer’s alts and he was fuming.
Within no time, members of this guild went to action. They dispatched someone to Org to begin trade spamming that “The Mafia” (that’s not their name, but we’ll call ‘em that) were ninjas. That explains a lot of the ninja spam you can read in /trade these days. Then, they quickly began flinging insults back and forth like children, as if they were engaged in a turf war. Almost, as if, they were roleplaying.
Roleplaying they were, in a non-descript way. They weren’t taking on the role of anyone but themselves and there was no fictional story about it, but they were enacting a story. A story that was weaving right in front of my eyes. Before long, The Mafia was outnumbered, thanks to the guild leader’s latest efforts in recruitment, and ran away with their tails between their legs. In victory, the guild leader congratulated many of the members, many of whom received promotions. People were ecstatic, even the level 80s.
Now, much like a department store, the turnover rate was obscene. Promotions were required to keep the members happy. They worked hard, helping the guild master, running lowbies through instances, and more to achieve a higher rank. In reality, the rank means nothing. You don’t get anything tangible from it, except for a new note next to your name in the guild list. Yet, these players still strived to get it.
As a matter of a fact, not many things mattered to the players in the guild other than their guild rank. Gear didn’t matter and having it wasn’t a reason for a guild rank increase. After all, they’re not in a PvP war and an 80 can run alts though instances in greens and blues. Gold doesn’t matter either, unless it’s being poured into the guild bank which is perpetually in need of funds for repairs and more bank slots.
It’s as if the players get stuck, progression wise, and resort to creating their own new endgame. One where they’re at war with rival guilds and their worth is dictated not by gear score or arena points, but by their rank within the largest and most powerful guild. Like I said, reality is subjective and it’s all based on your perspective. To these players Arthas might as well not exist nor Yogg-saron.
In the end, the guild like many of these guilds, collapsed. The story being told ended as no one logged on and everyone fled to another guild to repeat the same begging for promotions and seeking more bank tabs that have nothing in them. In the end, I remain in the guild, a few people log on (even 80s) who I assume are too lazy to find another one. I sit there and think of all of the excitement and action that went on for one short week before the store closed shop and the employees went to the next place that’d hire them with no questions asked.
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