Trash – thumbs up or thumbs down?

A trend that has been taking over WoW since its creation is optimization and efficiency.  We want to find an optimal talent build, optimized reforging, and optimal gear.  We want to find the most efficient gearing path to get us through our raids as efficiently as possible.  In the early days of WoW, this was an ongoing process.  Now, with online tools, optimizing is just a few clicks away.

How much does the game benefit or suffer from this?

This tendency toward optimization has been adopted throughout WoW by Blizzard.  They call it “quality of life” improvements, and they are changes put in to make the game play more smoothly and with fewer frustrations.  Some are awesome, but others can oversimplify the game and (in the minds of some) de-emphasize things that once made the game fun.

What does this have to do with trash (the title of the post)?

This all came to mind when I was reading some other blog posts about trash mobs in raids.  The posts in question had complained about trash pulls in MoP raids.  That got me reminiscing.  Skipping past raiding in vanilla WoW, which everyone agrees was over-the-top, I used to enjoy trash pulls.  As time has gone one, it seems like a lot of people would prefer to get rid of trash.  That, to me, is just another aspect of the optimization trend.  Trash doesn’t drop epics or get you an achievement, so any time spent on trash is time not spent on progression and therefore it is undesirable.  Blizzard has followed these desires by changing trash in raids over time.

Burning Crusade

Karazhan trash was really fun and challenging.  The way the respawn rate on the ghosts before Attumen pushed you to pull quickly.  The mix of elites and non-elites in the packs of dancers before Moroes.  The ghosts that could almost one-shot a careless tank in the hallways outside Nightbane’s area.  The pairs of trash mobs that were immune to CC and would freeze the tank in the hall before Opera.  Exploding ghosts.  Mana drains.  Sometimes a trash pull took as much strategy as a boss fight.  Those were great.  However, they did take a long time.  You couldn’t just nuke them down the way trash is usually done now.  This was in the tail end of the age when raiding was still though of as something for the elite players, although Karazhan did a lot to overcome that mindset.

Later BC raids had a lot of trash (not counting the shorter Gruul and Magtheridon raids), often very challenging and time consuming.  Upper tier raids like Black Temple, Hyjal Summit, and Sunwell were generally only for dedicated raiders, though, and time-intensive trash was considered just an unpleasant part of the raiding process.

Wrath of the Lich King

The raiding model changed a lot during Wrath of the Lich King.  This is when Blizzard took steps to make raiding accessible to all.

Trash in Naxxramas (v.2, in WotLK) was not terribly challenging, although early in the gearing process it could slow you down.  It wasn’t so hard that it was a roadblock, but it took some time and pulls had to be planned.    There was less of it than in Karazhan, and some of the trash packs had unique abilities (I hated the Dark-Touched Warrior in the construct quarter).  It almost seems like the trash was there in quantity similar to prior raids, but undertuned to make it less of an obstacle.

Ulduar – considered by some to be the best raid Blizzard has ever made – had much smaller amounts of trash.  Most trash pulls between bosses were short (except before Freya).  They introduced unique mechanics like the vehicle combat before Flame Leviathan.  Typically, though, there were only 2-3 trash pulls between each boss encounter.  This is less than Naxxramas had and much less than the BC raids.  Ulduar’s boss fights are memorable, but most of the trash is not.

This push for efficiency came to a head in WotLK’s Trial of the Crusader raid, which was all bosses, no trash.  Not only was this a total departure from previous raid models, it also fit very poorly into the storyline (in the middle of a war with the Lich King’s army, lets have a tournament!).  It was received very poorly overall.  So there is a point where too little trash bothers us.

Icecrown Citadel moved back toward Ulduar’s model – a couple of trash packs between each boss.  One aspect I liked about trash in ICC’s was that it sometimes helped prepare you for the boss’ abilities.  In some cases, the trash mobs before a boss would have abilities that mirrored those the boss would use.  This is the concept that Blizzard seemed to like.

Cataclysm

Bastion of Twilight had some interesting trash.   There were a few pitfalls for the unwary if you took them lightly.  That was fun.  There were some areas where the trash was plentiful – at the start of the raid and before Twilight Council and even before Cho’gall.  Most of it was just AoE nuking, though.  In contrast, Blackwing Descent had almost no trash, but Blizzard pulled it off better than they had in previous raids with little trash.

Firelands followed the Bastion of Twilight model, where there were lots of trash pulls, but they were not terribly difficult.  This frustrated some people.  I remember a lot of complaints about all the trash pulls before you could even engage the first boss of the raid.

Cataclysm eventually introduced the Raid Finder, which (in my opinion) was the death knell for interesting trash.  Since you never know what type of player you’re going to get in the random group, the developers can’t expect a raid to have coordination, concentrated dps, or viable crowd control.  Thus, raid trash is now dull and uninteresting.    [As an aside. the trend away from CC had already happened in 5-mans due to the Dungeon Finder.]

In Dragon Soul, the groups before Morchok were just group AoE.  The tentacles before Zon’ozz were easy.  The only trash that carried any kind of unique challenge in DS were the slime packs before Yor’sahj and, for groups with low dps, the dragonlings before Ultraxion.  On top of that, after Ultraxion, there was no trash at all between Ultraxion, Warmaster Blackhorn, Spine, and Madness.

Mists of Pandaria

I’ve only personally done Mogu’shan Vaults and the first boss of Heart of Fear.  MSV trash seems almost like an afterthought.  The AoE trash packs before Stone Guard, the packs of trolls before Gara’jal, then the groups before Spirit Kings are all non-events, there to be nuked down.  Only the last pulls before Elegon have any risk to them.  They seem to be there just because they are expected, not because there is any development behind the trash encounters.

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My personal opinion is that I liked the trash in Karazhan and in ICC.  The Karazhan trash was interesting and varied.  I’d rather do that than nameless mass AOE trash.  In ICC the trash mobs were not as plentiful but had a definite connection to the boss that followed them.  At times they seemed like part of the story.

What do you like?  The extensive, challenging trash in Karazhan and BC raids?  The plentiful but easy trash in Bastion and Firelands?  The non-existent trash in Trial of the Crusader?

Negative Stigma from Playing WoW

There’s some buzz in the gamer community about politics in Maine.  It seems that a Colleen Lachowitz, a Democratic candidate for state office, plays WoW in her free time.  The Republican Party there is using that to portray her in a negative way leading up to the election.

The Maine Republican Party created a web site that details a lot of posts that Ms. Lachowitz has made on some game-related forums.  Some of it is actually relevant to the political discussion.  She makes comments about politicians and political parties, probably feeling that the anonymity of a forum allowed her to state her true feelings without sugar coating them.  To call her out on that is appropriate.  We should all know by now that usernames and other internet handles do not give you carte blanche to say whatever you want.  Your words never go away.

However, if you look at all of the things posted on there, it also highlights her gaming as if it were a negative in its own right.  They highlight her statements like “I went heavier into the assassination tree” and “I did dungeons” and “I spent my day leveling an undead warlock” as if these were somehow inherently bad.

It goes without saying that the authors of this attack are woefully uninformed about a huge part of culture in the world today.  This attack on Ms. Lachowitz is, of course, without merit.

That doesn’t mean that it won’t work.

Does gaming have a negative stigma?  Clearly, it does.

I know a lot of gamers who have two distinct sets of friends.  They have their “gaming friends” with whom they talk about their boss kills, their kill/death ratio, headshots, and late night Mountain-Dew-fueled gaming sessions.  Then they have their “other friends” with whom they would never bring up those topics because its viewed as strange or weird or immature.

Doesn’t this indicate that gaming is still not an acceptable social activity?

I’m a high school teacher, and I make an effort to never discuss gaming with my students.  I don’t want them to know that I play WoW.  Its not that I am embarrassed of my gaming.  I do think that people have a specific stereotype of what a “gamer” is, and I don’t want that label.  I try to be professional in front of my students, and the gamer image does not fit with that persona.  Also, I would rather not have their parents know.  Call me a coward, but its easier to keep it a secret than it is to explain the truth to those who have certain notions about gaming.

There was one time that I did let on to a few students that I played WoW.  Within a few days, someone had tracked down my character on the armory.  Then it was printed and copied and passed around with the label “This is the REAL Mr. [my name]” written across the bottom.  This was distributed among my students.  Clearly the intent was to portray me as something other than who I appear to be at school.  Its not that different than what is happening to Ms. Lachowitz.  The difference is the scope – for me it was only within a few hundred students, while for her it is regional and, to some extent, national.

I know that I am preaching to the choir here.  Those who read this are gamers and will, of course, defend gaming.  Do you feel self-conscious about how the outside world views you?  Do you hide your hobbies from non-gamers?

Thoughts on the trinity of roles

After six years of playing mostly dps, in this expansion I’ve done some fair amount of raid tanking (paladin) and raid healing (priest and druid).  I’ve watched as Blizzard has tried time after time (unsuccessfully) to balance the number of tanks and healers with the number of dps.  Its really made me think about those roles and how they play.  To me, playing a tank vs a healer vs a dps are like playing three completely different games.  There is very little in common.  Thus, its not surprising when people who play only dps aren’t considerate of their tanks or healers, healers don’t heal the way tanks and dps want, and tanks don’t always maneuver the way that dps likes.

Here are the three different games that are being played:

As a Tank: You vs the Game Designers

There was once a time when tanks had to be proficient at generating threat and holding aggro, or quickly picking up multiple mobs.  In today’s climate of infinite threat and AoE tanking abilities, those skills are gone.  Instead, tanks have to learn to dance and taunt-swap.  I consider this, “playing against the game designers”.  A tank has to go through a prescribed set of maneuvers and movements as set forth by the designers to accomplish the task.  The tank can largely ignore what other players are doing, except in fights with adds who have to be taunted off of the healers.

As a DPS: You vs Yourself

DPS has the reputation of being the easiest role.  That’s because very few fights have strict damage output requirements.  Most of them can be completed if you are down a dps, or if one is underperforming.  I’ve done 99% of my raiding as dps.  When a dps plays, he can mostly ignore what the tanks are doing and completely ignore what the healers are doing.  While there are some dance moves to learn, the majority of a dps’ job is to use his abilities in a way as to maximize output.  I call this, “playing against yourself” because you know you’ve done well if your output is greater than the last time you did the fight.  You’re always competing against your own past performance.  In most cases, other than some buffs/debuffs, the other players have very little to do with your performance.  Its not a “team” role.

As a Healer: You vs the Other Players

Healing is completely unique.  Not only do you have to do the dances that the designers have put in, but you also have to do it while watching what everyone else is doing.  Healing is the only role that can be made significantly harder based on the actions of the rest of the raid (you could argue that tanking has some of that as well, but not to the extent that healing does).  If players stand in bad stuff, if they fail to use survival cooldowns, if they ignore important mechanics – all of that puts the onus on the healer to “fix it”.  I refer to healing as “you vs the other players” because they can make your job easier or harder by their actions.

Its no wonder that the number of people who play tanks and healers is so low.  DPS is almost a solo game, and puts the least responsibility on the player.  Healing is the one most impacted by “bad” players.

How can this be fixed?  Other than wholesale changes to the game, I don’t think it can.  If healers had a passive healing model – like the more damage they dealt the more healing they did (much like Atonement), then that might be a progressive change to break out of the current roles.  Or if more classes could take a beating, even for a short time (like Rogue evasion) then tanking might not be so stressful.  Other games have tried, but I haven’t heard anyone raving about how a game has truly broken out of the trinity of roles.

So as we move forward into MoP, we’ll have more of the same.  I do think that every DPS should try leveling a healer and a tank, for a better perspective on those roles.

Is the LFR expected or optional?

I was reading and posting in an online forum on a WoW-related topic.  In the discussion, someone spilled the beans about the ending of the Dragon Soul raid and storyline.  Another person said, “Dude, put SPOILER ALERT on that so we know not to read it if we haven’t done it yet.”

At this point, the person who had asked for the spolier alert was raked over the coals in the way that WoW trolls really know how.  They accused him of being a failure at the game because, at this point, only a total loser has not cleared the Dragon Soul in the LFR.

I stepped in to disagree, saying that I preferred to raid with my guild and so I, also, have not done the LFR raids yet.

Then the tide of opinion turned against me, saying that I should be running LFR to get gear to help with normal mode raiding.  The fact that it is super-easy was the main argument for its necessity.

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I feel like I’m part of a dying breed in WoW.  The main joy of raiding for me is playing with my long-time gaming friends.  There is no thrill in loot.  Loot lost its appeal to me back in BC when epic purple gear became more common than rare blue-level gear.  My joy comes from the shared experience of overcoming the obstacle that the devs have set before us.  For that reason, I’d much rather run the raid in normal mode, using gear I got in normal mode Firelands and by running heroics.

Basically, I see the LFR as a nice alternate path for those who want/need it.  I don’t see it as a necessary part of the gearing-up process.

Am I the minority here?

Add-On dependence

Since I’ve had trouble with Curse Client this week, its made me realize what a large number of add-ons I use.

This is not intentional.  Its just “add-on creep” – meaning that over my 6+ years of playing I have gradually added more add-ons while not removing many.

Here’s what I use right now:

• Dominos for my bars
• X-Perl for unit frames
• SexyMap to move and configure my minimap
• Elkano Buff Bars for my buffs/debuffs
• ChocolateBar (replacing FuBar) for my indicators across the top of the screen, including
• Fubar2Broker to make my FuBar add-ons functional
• MoneyFu to track my income
• PerformanceFu to monitor my game performance
• ReputationFu to track my faction reputations
• GarbageFu to automatically get rid of crap that I loot
• DurabilityFu to automate my gear repairs
• OmniCC to put a timer on my cooldowns
• Outfitter to manage my gear sets
• Arkinventory to organize my bags
• GoGoMount to use a different mount each time I mount up
• Archy for my occasional dabbles in archaeology
• FishingBuddy and FishermansFriend to make my time fishing go smoothly
• IronChef to help my cooking go faster
• SleekFreeBagSlots to show my free space on the toons that don’t use Arkinventory
• StealYourCarbon to simplify restocking of basic reagents
• SpamMeNot to block annoying goldsellers

Then there are the add-ons I use to raid.

• PowerAuras to tell me about important procs
• SmartBuff to remind me to rebuff or repoison
• Deadly Boss Mods for raid encounters
• Omen Threat Meter
• Nug Combo Bar to show my combo points in my field of view
• Event Horizon as a timer for my abilities
• Recount with several plug-ins for damage/healing tracking
• EnsidiaFails to see who messed up after a wipe
• BigBrother to make sure that everyone has food/flasks
• Clique and Grid on my healer characters
• Decursive on any characters than can decurse or dispel
• Tauntmaster on my tank toon
• KAHolyPower for my paladin

Then there are my auction/gold-making add-ons

• TradeSkillMaster for sheer awesomeness
• Enchantrix to automate prospecting/milling/disenchanting
• Postal to quickly send/receive my hundred of mails from the auction house.
• MillHelp to see what my herbs will mill into

Plus many of these add ons use libraries which also need to be updated.

Very few of my add-ons actually have a direct impact on my game play.  On my rogue, its basically NugComboBar and Event Horizon.  On my priest and druid healers its Grid, Clique, and Decursive.  For my paladin its KAHolyPower, TauntMaster, and EventHorizon.  And DBM, of course, on any characters in a raid.  Other than those, the vast majority of the add-ons are for convenience and to automate everyday tasks or to reorganize my UI.

To keep this up to date manually would be a huge chore.  Now that Curse is uninstalled, I have to decide what to do.  How many of these can/should I remove?  How much frustration will I feel when I have to remember to do things that used to be automated (like rebuff or repair or empty my bags of grey items)?  How annoyed will I be when I start getting goldselling spam or forget to restock my poisons?  How long would it take me to get used to a simpler, more vanilla UI?  I’m so used to these things as part of my game experience.

 

Dinaer casts Mass Resurrection on “Forever a Noob”

Its been over a month since I posted anything here.

Its not that I went away or stopped playing.  It was really two things…

• Demands on my real-life time were so great that I barely had time to play the game, and never has a moment to write about it
• I used to write some posts during down time at work, but my schedule this year has prevented that
• There has been nothing compelling going on in the game that has me excited enough to write about

I’ve been playing the game about 3-4 nights a week (down from 6-7), mostly just logging on to raid, and then logging off after the raid had completed.  I was tired of the troll heroics and had nothing to gain by accumulating JP and VP.

My guild has continued to raid.  We just killed Ragnaros (10 man, normal) this week, which was a great achievement for us.  The guild has two raid groups going.  My group is moving on to Dragon Soul now, and the other is still finishing Firelands.  We didn’t manage to get the caster legendary staff from Firelands yet, but we’re going to continue working on it (we’ve never gotten a legendary while it was current content, so the fact that we’re close is exciting).

I won’t be playing SWTOR.  A lot of my guildies will, so my fingers are crossed that we don’t lose them.

The only non-raiding activity that was really keeping my interest was making gold.  I’ve had a glyph business since Wrath, but I have been slowly ramping up my JC/Enchanting activity.  I did a lot of work to prepare for patch 4.3, and I’ll probably pull in almost 100k in the span of the week following the patch.  I’m at over 300k gold now.  Go for a million?  Probably not, unless the next expansion offers some exciting new markets.

Patch 4.3 has brought new attention on rogues due to the presence of the Rogue legendary daggers available in Dragon Soul.  A lot of people have rolled rogues lately, so there are a lot of new backstabbers trying to learn the craft.  Also, there are a lot of experienced rogues aiming for those daggers.  Those are the issues which have brought me back to the blog.  I’ll try to post more… at least during the lull in school/band/little league baseball seasons while I have some free time.

 

Blizzcon Quick Impression

Opening ceremony and the big WoW announcement is, as expected, the next expansion.  And, also as expected, its the Mists of Panderia, with Pandaren as a playable race.

Immediately, a lot of players boo-hooed this as the death of the game and claimed that they were not going to play a game with pandas.

My first question is, why are pandaren any worse than werewolves?  Are there a lot of closet Twilight fans out there that really liked werewolves?  Would this announcement have been better with sparkly vampires instead of pandas?

Anyway, on to serious impressions.  I think this could be a good thing.

The past few expansions have been leading more and more to WoW being a pure endgame treadmill.  They follow a similar pattern…

• expansion comes out, people powerlevel as fast as they can to level cap
• jump into endgame, where most bosses are the target of complaints that they are either rehashes of old bosses, or too gimmicky
• stay in endgame for two years until burnout ensues
• next expansion, start over

This model cannot continue.  I think that repeating the same ideas for another expansion would have been much worse.  Since this expansion doesn’t have a big-name end boss, I am hoping that the pattern will be different this time around.

We need more things to do when not raiding.  We need a reason to leave Stormwind/Orgimmar.  We need more interaction between players.  Whatever may come of this expansion, if its not all endgame-focused then I have hope that Blizzard is ready to try and break the mold.  Perhaps it will keep my interest for another few years.

Blizzcon is coming

…and once again I am not going.  But I am going to watch online.

I think this is a make-or-break moment for WoW.  They need to generate some excitement, because its getting a little old.  This always happens late in the expansion cycle, but I think more so this time because (1) the game is almost seven years old, and (2) there are more high-quality competing MMORPGs out or coming out than there have ever been.

I worry that they will focus most of Blizzcon on Diablo and Starcraft.  In that case, I think that WoW’s death spiral may begin in earnest.

I think the biggest mistake they made with Cataclysm was that their changes remove or changed rather than added.  Previous expansions added not just zones but also new avenues of gameplay.

• Burning Crusade added new races (Draenei and Blood Elves) and playable classes (horde got paladins, alliance got shamans).  It also added expanded talent trees and new talents.
• Wrath of the Lich King added a hero class (Death Knight) and expanded talent trees and new talents.
• Cataclysm gave us no new races and no new classes (they did give us worgen and goblins.  I overlooked them since they were purely cosmetic additions).  It shrunk the talent trees and decreased the number of talent points.  I know they had good reason, but it still becomes a “taking away” action rather than “adding”.  It had only 5 new levels, which re-emphasized how the leveling game was being pushed aside in favor of endgame.

Because of this, I really think that the next expansion needs to add more than some new levels and zones.  I think that it needs at least a new class and/or race.  I also think they need to add some kind of new mechanic in the game that is new.  I can’t imagine what it could be, but I think we need some kind of departure from repetitive  instances/raids with the holy trinity.  I won’t even speculate, but Blizzard has very well-paid developers who spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff, so I am hoping they will surprise me.

Finally, a graphical upgrade is vital.  WoW has survived this long on its cartoony graphics because it was still the only big game on the block, and the expanse of the world superceded any graphical complaints.  Also, the low hardware requirements made it accessible to the masses.  Now that Rift has taken its best shot and Star Wars is coming, I think that WoW needs to grow up a bit and realize that they can’t continue to survive on gameplay alone and formatting the game to be playable on 5-year old hardware.

We’ll see how it all plays out.  Maybe some of this is planned but it won’t be announced this week.  By next week either our excitement will be renewed, or we’ll all be disappointed.

What are the oldest WoW blogs left around?

We’ve seen a wave of notable WoW bloggers hanging up their keyboards lately.  It got me to thinking – how many old WoW blogs are still left around?

Playing WoW in the early days was quite a different experience than it is now.  There were not countless online information sources for you to browse through to learn every little detail about the game.  Your information came from Thottbot, or maybe Allakazam.  Wowhead came much later.  There were almost no YouTube videos.  There was no accessible Elitist Jerks forum.  If you wanted to learn about your class or a raid boss, your best bet was to read blogs.

WoWInsider goes back to November of 2005, so its the grandfather of WoW blogs.  However, none of the original authors are still with them.  Their structure makes it so they can be continuous even with frequent writer turnover.  Tobold goes back even farther but his blog is not just a WoW blog.  There was a huge surge in the number of personal WoW blogs in 2007, which is when I discovered the expansive depth of the WoW blogosphere.

I remember the first few blogs I encountered and read by in my early days of WoW – Resto4Life, Parry! Dodge! Spin!, BigRedKitty, and Frostbolt.  All  of those have long since shut down.  However, Frostbolt is still viewable, even though it is not being updated.  I started my historical research project there – looking through antiquated evidence on the corpses of dead blogs.  I decided to check out Frostbolt’s blogroll.  It is still listing the blogs that he read back in those days.

I went down his list of blogs, and the only two that were listed there that are still posting now are Kinless’ Chronicles and Gray Matter.  Kinless has switched to Rift.  Does that mean that Gray Matter is the oldest from the wave of early WoW blogs?  His archives go back to September 2007.

On a hunch I went to check Big Bear Butt.  I know I’ve been reading his stuff for a long while.  His archives go back to August 2007, so he started just before Gray Matter.  Maybe his is the oldest personal WoW blog still running.

Looking further, I found that one of my favorite bits of WoW entertainment, Need More Rage, has posts going to July 2007.  Could this be the oldest active WoW blog?

Nope.  Checking around some more, I found that Mania’s Arcania has posts going back to April 2007.  Mystic Chicanery has posts from February 2007.  Leafshine goes back even farther – to January 2007.

Kaliope’s WoW Crafting Blog goes all the way to November 2006.  I remember reading that blog when I first disocovered online WoW research tools.  I was kind of surprised to see it still up and running.  I know that WoWHead has satisfied all of my crafting research needs.  Its neat that she has kept her niche in the online community.

After lots of browsing around, the longest-running personal WoW blog that I could find is Blessing of Kings.  Coriel started the blog in December 2005 and has continued to post regularly until now.  That’s a pretty amazing feat of longevity, especially when you consider that the focus and high level of content has not diminished in all that time.

Have I missed any?  Are there any that have been around longer than Blessing of Kings?

The Perfect Age for WoW

Recently, Larisa at the Pink Pigtail Inn wrote a post about being an older player (which she defined as being in her 40′s).

I am the same age as Larisa, and the majority of the core of my guild is within +/- 10 years of that.  I don’t really consider myself an older player.  In fact, I feel like this game was written for my generation.

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This game has its roots set firmly in the high fantasy genre.  The presence of fantasy in literature goes far back in history.  While there are examples found as long ago as Shakespeare, the sword-and-sorcery archetype traces most directly to works such as the Chronicles of Narnia (published in the 1950′s) and The Lord of the Rings (also published in the 1950′s).  As these works gained in popularity, the generation that followed was the first to be regularly exposed to high fantasy authors.

Those who grew up in the 1960′s and 1970′s were the first generation that could easily find Fantasy sections in the bookstore and the local library.

Those folks would be in their 50′s now.  We see a lot more players in WoW in their 40′s than we see players in their 50′s.  I think that is due to a major development that connects the fantasy genre to gaming…

Dungeons and Dragons was released in the mid-70′s but really hit its stride in the late 70′s and early 80′s.  Dungeons and Dragons combined the high fantasy genre with interactive elements and created a game, much like WoW, where the players used magic and might to fight dragons and other creatures.

To recap:  anyone who was in their teens in the late 70′s and early 80′s had been raised  among the growing presence of high fantasy literature, and then had Dungeons and Dragons dropped into their lap.  That specific group of people would be in their 30′s -40′s right now.

But that’s not all.  People in that age group have had the chance to live through the rise of the personal computer.  The 1980′s saw the release of the Apple II and Commodore 64.  Before long, games such as Wizardry and The Bard’s Tale became extremely popular.  These games brought visuals to what had been a pen-and-paper activity before.  They had no animation to speak of, but the still images used to illustrate the action added a new aspect to fantasy gaming.

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To summarize so far:

If you were born in the late 60′s or early 70′s then you

• grew up with readily available fantasy literature
• were around for the creation and rise of Dungeons and Dragons
• lived through the introduction of the personal computer and the creation of fantasy computer games which followed

There’s yet one more factor that I’ll throw into the mix here.  That same generation went away to college in the late 80′s or early 90′s.  At this time the idea of computer networks was young but growing.  There was no internet (as you now know it) at this point, but there were things like IRC chat and BBS forums.  And from that framework came MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons).  These were text-based games that could be played by hundreds of people at once from remote locations.  This was the progenitor of the MMO.  DikuMUD, in fact, can be directly traced as the basis for Everquest, which has obvious links to WoW.

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Now I can connect this to myself.  I lived the timeline detailed above.  In my youth I ate up fantasy novels as fast as my allowance could buy them.  When Dungeons and Dragons came out, my friends and I played a continuous campaign for all of my high school years.

I had a Commodore 64 as a teenager, I cut my teeth on programming with it, learned to love the fantasy games, starting with text-based games like Zork and moving up to still image games like A Bard’s Tale.

I played MUDs in college and was amazed at the added dimension of playing with hundred of other people simultaneously.

When Everquest came out in 1999 it was as if everything I had ever loved were wrapped up in one package and presented to me.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time or finances to play EQ, with a new job and new family at the time.  However, when WoW came out, I was on it immediately.

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World of Warcraft was written for ME.

My life experience is not unique, though, so I’d extend it to say that World of Warcraft was written for all the nerdy kids of my generation.  All of us who imagined ourselves as Frodo with the One Ring or Shea Ohmsford wielding the Sword of Shannara or Garion trying to learn his powers from Polgara and Belgarath.  Those of us who guided their fighter/thief through battles with bugbears in D&D, who sat in the tavern in the town of Skara Brae to get a new quest in Bard’s Tale, and who meticulously assembled their party in Pool of Radiance.

The younger kids who play WoW are certainly having fun, and I don’t begrudge them their enjoyment one bit.  But they are Johnny-come-lately to the party.  People in their 30′s-40′s are the ideal audience for this game.

P.S. – The stuff about older players having slower reaction time is nonsense when it comes to WoW.  This isn’t a twitch reaction game or a FPS.  A 40 year old can bang on the numbers 111111111222222222111111333333 on the keyboard just as well as a 13 year old.  Server lag is a much bigger factor than reaction time in this game.