One of them, a Dr Richard Graham is very concerned about the imaginary condition of World of Warcraft addiction. So concerned in fact that he has appealed to Blizzard to give him and his various colleagues free or reduced price access to the game so that they can treat patients inside the game.

Hang on a sec. How much do these guys charge an hour? They can’t afford a measly US$15 a month subscription?

Anyway. Dr Graham reckons that a true WoW addict is hard to treat because they pretty much forsake the rest of their life to be in the game. They don’t eat, sleep, bathe, go to work or school, or socialize outside the game.

So the only solution is to meet them inside the game. Makes sense I suppose.

But hang on. I smell the real reason that the good doctor wants to deal with the imaginary WoW addict inside the game. THEY DON’T BATHE.

Of course, dealing with a WoW addict in the office, or through a house call, would simply be too smelly.

Or maybe, just maybe, Dr Graham and his psychiatrist buddies just want to form a raiding guild. What side would they take do you think. Alliance or Horde?

The Doctor Is In

And the MMORPG blogosphere erupted into speculation.

Not being above a little speculation myself, as well as not being above a little smart-arsedness, I suggested that the term Cataclysm sounded like something that would be used for an expansion. The smart-arsedness came in with the speculation that WoW: Cataclysm could be about the destruction of the old Azeroth and a increase in starting level because Blizzard were sick of maintaining the old world and wanted to concentrate solely on adding levels to WoW. (That was the smart-arsedness btw.)

Of course, everyone else said that it was about the swirly thing in the middle of the world map, and they’ve probably got it right.

But today in the comments on the WoW: Cataclysm post, Kiryn of the Eleven-Four blog, suggested that Cataclysm also sounded like it could be a sequel where the old world was destroyed and where everyone had to (from Outland) retake their old, shattered lands.

Hmmm. Now that sounded familiar.

Everquest 2 is based exactly on that premise. Old Norrath was destroyed when the gods left (also destroying the moon Luclin) as they were upset at being continually ganked by the players. (I wonder if one of them was Twixt?)

Big chunks of Luclin rained down upon the world and (I guess) the change in tidal forces ripped the continents apart. Residents of EQ2 are now basically rediscovering the old world through each expansion.

Now given Blizzards aptitude for taking what others have done and then improving on it through polishing it out the wazoo, it may be that they are looking (as Kiryn suggested) to be taking what EQ2 has done and adding the unique Blizzard/WoW touch.

So here’s what to expect from WoW2: Cataclysm.

• The game will be set 500 years after the events of World of Warcraft 1.
• Several player species will be lost and will need to be rediscovered through quests, world events, and expansions.
• Some player species will be renamed. Expect Tauren to be renamed Minotauren.
• All of the player cities will be consolidated into two remaining large cities, one for each faction. Other old cities will be rediscovered over time.
• Players will be able to collect shiny objects on the ground.
• A butterfly winged race will be added. Probably Furbolgs will evolve wings over the 500 years (making them even more annoying.)
• Crafting will be added made more relevant and fun.
• Housing will be… err… Housing probably will never be added.

Release date: When it’s ready.

World of Warcraft 2: Cataclysm

This sounds more like the title given to an expansion than a full game, so the speculation that World of Warcraft’s next expansion will be titled Cataclysm, or possibly something along those lines.

Let’s do a little more speculation about how the next expansion will shape up.

The two main continents of Azeroth will be destroyed. That’s the cataclysmic event that the title portends. It won’t be a complete destruction, only the areas level 50 and below will be destroyed.

It’s no secret that Blizzard have gradually been reducing the importance of the original game for some time. Leveling has been sped up in order to get players to the high level raid content, and let’s face it, no-one goes to the original WoW dungeons (raid or otherwise) anymore.

So this will give Blizzard a chance to get rid of all that pesky low-level content in favor of the high level stuff.

Of course this means one of two things must happen.

1. All new characters created will start at level 50 or above.
2. Blizzard will subtract 49 from the character level, effectively scaling everyone back down 50 levels, but with all the old attributes and gear intact.

Some of the old content can be repurposed for high-level use. After all a cataclysmic event often brings new and more serious challenges to a population. But much needs to be destroyed otherwise there will be too much new high low-level content and we know Blizzard doesn’t want that.

Cataclysmic

The Halasian Empire is a long established guild, and has the added advantage of having a few Aussie members. It’s nice to be able to be online with a folks from my own timezone. It’s also includes a few blogger friends, some of whom I met in the Casualties of War.

Of course, none of the characters I’d previously rolled were on LDL, so a new class was necessary, and having not played a healer for a long long time (barring a stint as a Warrior Priest in WAR) I thought I might give the classic cleric a try. My side motivation was that clerics are often sought after for groups, and I’d definitely like to do some grouping, even if it’s a majority of PUGs that I end up in.

I’m also trying a different style of play.

Normally I just rush to the level cap. Well, perhaps rush is the wrong word, but in essense I just tend to go where the levels are. But in Everquest 2, one can turn off adventure experience and quest experience in order to remain at the current adventure level. That can be pretty useful if you’re doing a static group with friends and just want to play your character while your friends are offline. That way you never outlevel them.

But this has another advantage with EQ2. You can still earn AA points by completing level 10+ quests, killing named NPCs, or by exploring new areas. Those points can then be invested into various attributes and such in order to make that character more powerful.

So by stopping and smelling the roses, and visiting every zone that caters to my level and doing the rounds there, I’ll end up with a stronger Templar when I’m grinding through the middle levels.

If I feel like I need some level advancement, I’ll simply switch the adventure XP back on.

I’m also spending more effort crafting, and this is good because crafting in Everquest 2 puts the crafting in World of Warcraft and, dare I say it, LotRO to shame. I honestly have never seen the point of a crafting system where you just feed in a bunch of mats, press a button, and go make a cup of coffee. Macro much?

I picked the Sage profession for crafting mainly because I’ll be able to create all the spells I’ll need later on up to the Adept 3 level. Although that’s changing in the latest Game Update. According to the GU52 patch notes the Apprentice 1 to 3 spells will be renamed to Apprentice, Apprentice 4 will be Journeyman, Adept 1 is Adept, Adept 3 is becoming Expert, and the Masters 1 and 2 will be called Master and Grandmaster respectively.

Unfortunately, SOE are also dumbifying (or perhaps I should say WoWifying) the spell names. Instead of a unique name for each level of a spell, they’re just going to use the same name and number them sequentially. So the healing range of spells will simply be called Healing I – IV (or whatever the max is.) It’s a real pity because it just seems SOE is catering to the lowest common denominator here when they don’t really have to.  (As an aside, even in WoW I have always thought the sequential number of spells and abilities is lame. It’s always struck me as lazy and unimaginitive. Sad to see EQ2 pandering to that.)

Anyways, back on track. Sage. Right. Over the weekend I leveled him up to 20 tradeskill level. The first ten levels are a snap. The crafting tutorial quests do all the work really. The next ten levels are a bit harder. The trick here is to craft something you’ve never made before each time since you get bonus XP for doing so. It took somewhere between two to three hours standing at the engraved desk in the guild hall, but I did hit 20 which makes me eligible to do crafting writs and earn a bit of status, both for myself and the guild.

So there you go. My current gaming status.

Oh, and one other thing. I cancelled my subscription to World of Warcraft.

That little duty has been on my mind for a couple of months now, since the bottom has fallen out of the job market especially. I’m saving pretty hard right now as my contract completes at the end of August (unless I get another extension.) Worried? Yep a little. I’ve even had a bit of insomnia as a result. So I’m cutting excess costs, and even though a sub to WoW is on the low end of expense, it’s something I can’t justify at the moment. And since I’m not playing much Eve at this time, that will probably go too.

At least resubscribing is an option when times get better.

Everquest 2, Adventure, Advancement, Sages and WoW Status

One of the commentors on that post, Dylan, made the statement that he believed that Blizzard has ruined World of Warcraft by taking what, upon release, were a blend of complex game mechanics implemented in a simple manner, excellent content, and a good PvP game, and have dumbed it down into a far too casual game that has effectively eliminated all need for grouping (except for raid content.) — Paraphrased.

So what do you think, has WoW been nerfed into oblivion?

If that’s the case, why is World of Warcraft still the king of the MMORPG hill?

Let’s discuss.

Has Blizzard Ruined WoW?

Since I’m going to hook up with the WoW chapter of the Casualties of War guild, I needed to pick an Alliance race — I think it’s a pity they didn’t allow the Death Knight’s races to have a bit more freedom and cross faction lines — so I chose the most ridiculous race for my DK.

Meet EvilMo, the Gnome Death Knight. And with a Dastardly Dan style moustache like that, how could he not be evil. See the resemblence?

So with moustache all ready to go, EvilMo set off on his journey of, well, evil.

On the way he encountered a bunch of nice pleasant folks who were, for some reason, slightly unhappy to see him.

This made EvilMo very unhappy. Especially the comment by the guy who pooped himself. So he killed them. This made EvilMo feel better.

After a little while EvilMo was asked to steal a horse, and for a reward he was given a wonderful little pony. EvilMo had always wanted a horse, so this was the fulfilment of a lifelong dream. Of course nothing in life, or death for that matter, is perfect and EvilMo immediately noticed the saddle’s design flaw.

But having a pony was worth it. And being an undead horse, there was the side benefit of not having to feed it, which led to the even greater benefit of not having to own a shovel. Of course a Death Knight wouldn’t clean up his horse’s leavings anyway, and he’d laugh deeply when someone trod in it.

EvilMo went on to have many other adventures in the Lich King’s service, including sitting atop a dragon while directing it to fire on the hapless humans of the Scarlet Crusade far below. Hiding in a mining cart to get behind enemy lines, and even dressing up as one of those humans and taking a stroll to meet one of their generals. All in a days work for an eager young Death Knight.

Of course all good things come to an end, and EvilMo was forced out of the Lich Kings service. He even suffered the indignity of having rotten fruit and vegetables chucked at him while he delivered a missive from the new leader of the freed Death Knights.

But now he’s in tight with the Alliance.

Or is he? The moustache is still evil.

A Day In The Life Of A Death Knight

Apparently the patch allows some important things like:

And by "important things" we mean changes like allowing players to create a Death Knight on any server, so long as they have a level 55+ character on at least one server.

I didn’t really want to spring for $25US — which with the Aussie dollar hovering around 66 US cents translates to around 40 AUD — to transfer my Paladin. It seemed like an awful lot of money just for someone to hit an approve button on an admin screen somewhere.

I guess now I have no excuse!

Wrath Patch Frees the Death Knight Within

Okay. Maybe it’s not quite that bad. I am being a little facetious.

There are a lot of similarities between Warhammer’s Tome of Knowledge and Warcraft’s Achievements. But then, there are similarities between the system Warhammer uses, and the Lord of the Rings Online Achievement and Title system.

Even LotRO doesn’t get off cleanly regarding plagiarism charges. They are certainly not the first gaming system out there that has titles based on in-game achievements.

But… I reckon Lord of the Rings Online has the best achievement system I’ve seen in a MMORPG.

In LotRO, not only do you get a title from an achievement, you get a trait that you can apply to your character development. While Warhammer Online has the Tome, all you get is a title that you can give your character. I’m not sure what Warcraft’s achievement system achieves.

So yeah. I’m being tongue in cheek when I charge WoW with plagiarism. For players, it’s not a bad thing for developers to take good ideas from other games, and then give us a better version.

World of Warcraft Copies Off Warhammer Online

Google provides a handy little tool called Google Trends that uses their historical search data to produce a series of graphs showing where different search terms stand in relation to each other. BTW, a search term is the text that you type into Google when doing a search. That’s all there is to it.

Anyhoo. I thought it would be interesting to have a look at the numbers and scales of people performing searches for the big three games of 2008: World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, and Warhammer Online.

The Google Trends tool allows you to select a time frame for the graphs. I picked on three: All Time, 2008, and the last 30 days.

On all three graphs, The blue line is Warhammer Online, the orange line is Age of Conan, and the red line is, of course, World of Warcraft.

Trends for All Time (since 2004)

Trends for 2008

Trends for the Last 30 Days

As you can see, World of Warcraft remains the eight thousand pound gorilla for searches. In terms of search volume, there’s only one time when they weren’t the most searched for in the MMORPG world, and that was when Age of Conan was released.

Unfortunately for Age of Conan, the spike in search terms appears to resemble the stats that XFire put out for their members who were playing the game. Shortly after launch, when everybody was keen and interested in the game, searches for info on the game skyrocketed. But when players started leaving, interest waned and  the search volume plummeted. It’s now almost to the point where it was before the game was released. Not good.

You can see a similar pattern starting to happen with Warhammer Online in the 2008 trends graph. With the announcement of a release date interest in the game is starting to rise. I expect a rise similar to Age of Conan around the time when the game is released. I reckon it will then settle down at about 50 percent of the peak search volume… more or less. Providing the game is in a good release state.

One interesting thing, if you like graphs and statistics I suppose, is that the search volume for each game is remarkably consistent and low level until the game is released. There is a small amount of increase in the last year, but then at release, boom, everybody’s searching. It seems to be true for all three games charted here.

The final trend I’ll comment on is that it appears that the search volume for World of Warcraft is waning somewhat. This could be due to a number of factors.

• WoW Players are getting bored with the game and leaving. I don’t think this is the case. It doesn’t gel with the fact that World of Warcraft has 10 – 11 million players.
• WoW Players no longer need to search for information. This is more likely. After four years and few expansions, most players know a lot about the game, and have their sources like Wowhead, Wowwiki, and various other sites and blogs bookmarked. No need to search.

If the trend of players searching on release continues, I expect we’ll see a rise in World of Warcraft searches at that time.

What does the data tell you?

MMORPG Search Trends

Absolutely marvelous I say.

One of my pet peeves (okay so that was a bad pun) with the whole hunter pet system in World of Warcraft is that the final product gets nerfed. I’m not so much talking about fighting ability here, but about appearance.

I’m not sure about the reason, but once a nice fightin’ beastie is tamed, it shrinks down in size. Large critters become a whole lot smaller. Perhaps more understandably, the new pets stats are normalized for their class — cats get standard cat stats, raptors get standard raptor abilities, you get the picture.

It appears that for Wrath of the Lich King, players are now able to tame the mighty Devilsaur. Now that’s a pretty cool pet. And while it still shrinks down once tamed — I guess it’s hard to justify having a 50ft devil compressing itself into tiny passages — it still stands head and shoulders above its new master.

Just a thought. I’d be happy if the Devilsaur kept its original size and could only be used outdoors. It would be so special to let him loose in the battlegrounds.

Wrath of the Lich King Tames The Devil