Adventures of Taas

I’ve decided I’ve cleared my head enough and reprioritized to slowly introduce a little MMO action back in to the mix.  I’ve decided that because from here on out I plan on playing extremely casually (no event scheduling if I can avoid it – I run the MMO schedule not the MMO runs my schedule) that I would give World of Warcraft a go for my return.

If you are looking for casual it doesn’t get much more casual that World of Warcraft.  I’ve set a few ground rules for myself on this return to ensure I stay casual:

1. One MMO at a time – period. the end.
2. No scheduling / signing up for events.  If/when I hit end game this might change to one scheduled event a week kind of deal – but for now I come and go as I please.
3. No playing until the baby is in bed for the night including weekends.  Usually I’d play on the weekends while the baby napped – I found this was prime productive time for other tasks I was pissing away.

I have a few challenges going forward the primary of which is that WoW is not exactly my favorite MMO.  My friends play Horde (which I seriously dislike) on a PvP server (double gah) so from the get go there are a few things playing against WoW but we’ll see if I can get by them.

If World of Warcraft doesn’t work out for me I’m not sure what I’ll do.  But we shall see…  For now I’m a Blood Elf Paladin on Daggerspine.

I haven’t been posting much on this blog lately and its not just the hecticness of the Christmas season that is to blame.

No – I am in an MMO rut. One of those really bad MMO-depressions that hit everyone at one time or another. I’m feeling burn out in three different games and that is really making it hard to focus on any MMO or getting much of anything accomplished. I spend the time I have available to play games thinking about the three games that are haunting me and eventually I get frustrated, give up and fire up my Playstation 3.

The three games I am torn between at the moment are World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online and Everquest 2. I really want to enjoy at least one of them but splitting my energies between them is not working out for me. I’m also having specific issues with each of the games that is really preventing me from saying THIS IS THE ONE, THIS IS WHAT I AM GOING TO PLAY.

With World of Warcraft I can’t exactly place my finger on the issue. Its a lot of ‘been there done that’ (I’ve leveled so many characters from 1-50 I don’t even want to think about it) with a side of ‘everyone is bigger than me’. With WoW I have a sincere desire to hit 80. I.REALLY.WANT.TO.RAID.WOW. The journey is really killing me though. I’m an accomplishment driven gamer to a certain extent and there is very little sense of accomplishment in the early and mid game of WoW. I’m old school MMO – and WoW doesn’t offer much to my kind in the early levels. I haven’t given up on this yet but something has to give or I don’t see this happening for me.

In Warhammer Online there are a few issues. The first and foremost is that for the first two months (plus beta) of the game being out I was one of the primary people behind the 4th largest guild in Warhammer Online. And let me tell you – guild officers in guilds this large work their asses off for you – go kiss your guild leader now. It was a lot of work and I fell in to the trap of running events and attending to administration with 100% of my game time when I should have said “no, instead of leading a keep raid on Wednesday night I’m going to do something I want to do – Other Officer XYZ you run the Wednesday Keep Raid”. I genuinely love my role in Aureus Knights and I have no intention of stepping away from it to any extent but next game we start in I’ll be doing more to spread the work load around.

Warhammer Online itself is a game with flaws – that actually isn’t fair to say because what game isn’t with flaws? But with WAR there are a few things that stand out that make the game difficult to fully embrace as a main game. I find the PVE lacking. Now when most blog-commentators point out the PVE factor they say the game doesn’t have enough raiding or dungeons or whatever and I actually am not talking about that. I think the dungeons WAR does have now are great (public quests being integrated in to dungeons is truly game changing for MMOs and I expect to see it in many future titles). No when I talk about PVE in WAR I think that the questing is just damn boring. It is a fairly linear solo experience that just isn’t rewarding once you’ve done it to level 30. It just offers so little – and I’m a huge PVE gamer.

The second flaw that nags at me with WAR is that the best way to advance your character (in the widely accepted opinion of min/maxers and now the community has fully embraced it) is to scenario grind. One of WAR’s greatest strengths is that it allows you to experience several different facets to advance – this is the sphere system that Vanguard promised (but didn’t especially deliver on) on crack. In WAR you can advance your character through PVE Questing, PVE Public Questing, ORVR or Scenario RVR. Awesome, bang up job… good stuff. Right, until after the first month everyone realized you could get more XP and PVP XP (Renown) by doing nothing but scenarios and do nothing but scenarios they did. Even on some of the busier servers now the world is a ghost land as people sit in war camps queueing for scenarios.

So I don’t know – WAR is fun. There are some fun classes and the Open World RVR is amazing when the sides are balanced or are balancedish. But there really are some nagging flaws. It just won’t click with me.

That brings me to my gaming-love. Everquest 2. EQ2 is now 4 years old and I’ve been fairly dedicated to the game for around 3 of those years (having started in early beta and taking a break pretty early on and then coming back with a vengeance) and I think I’m finally hitting the end of the “primary game” cycle with EQ2. You know that point you reach after the peak of playing a game where you start to look back from the end game and think “how much longer can I beat up on the same tried and true content?”.

I can’t really point to any particular mechanic in EQ2 that is a causing my doubts about the game. Arguably The Shadow Odyssey, the expansion just released for EQ2 is a dream come true for me – it is primarily group based, it is based on the mechanics of my favorite Everquest 1 expansion (Lost Dungeons of Norrath) and it offers a tonne of highly replayable game play that is engaging and at times plain difficult. So I have no excuse here – I can only think of being at that point in the MMO life cycle where enough is enough, you just can’t do game XYZ as your primary game any more.

So I’m not sure where that leaves me. This blog post obviously didn’t help me answer any questions as I’ll be concluding here in a few lines feeling no better about where I am at. But I know many people have been here before – do you have any strategies for coping with burn out like this? I think my medium term future with gaming involves a whole lot of single player experiences on the consoles – maybe I’m just overdue for a bit of a genre break.