Linear questing is not my favorite. While I’m not going to say I love being trekked around the world every five minutes, I like it when there’s a feeling of connectedness between zones (though that’s more a criticism of WoW, where the zones are actually next to each other, than it is of Star Wars, where the zones are actually PLANETS, and as such don’t really have a lot in common).

And while the linear style of questing does add a lot to the “big hero” style of play, it’s rough on replay value and rough on RP. Not everyone can be a big damn hero, and not everyone wants to be. If I have to suspend my immersion to be part of a great heroic quest chain, that’s time I’m not feeling lost in the atmosphere of the game and the mind of my character.

And frankly? That gets boring, fast. I don’t think you have to be a big hero to be connected to a zone or a world, or to feel immersed in a game.

I generally think Blizzard did a good job with Northrend’s zones. There were several hubs within each zone, and you could progress through them one at a time if you wanted. You didn’t need to go to Borean Tundra to finish quests in Howling Fjord. You could also skip areas you hated (the undead part of Zul’Drak comes to mind) or entire zones altogether. I’m pretty sure you can level without setting foot in Zul’Drak or even Sholazar Basin… or Icecrown, for that matter. There’s enough duplicate leveling content that you can pick and choose what makes sense for each character.

While the Cataclysm zones are somewhat like that, in that there’s enough content to be able to skip certain zones, the zones themselves are entirely linear. You can’t skip ahead and do only the Harrison Jones quests in Uldum or just the second half of Hyjal. The zones are linear, and they’re setting you up to be the big hero every time.

The new leveling zones have this same model, so it’s hard to skip areas or pick and choose. They’re also geared towards fewer levels per zone, meaning you get to see more zones as you level, but there are fewer to choose from (unless you’re leveling in heirlooms and with guild XP bonuses, where you’ll outlevel almost all the content very quickly). Combine that with the chronology issues that WoW currently struggles with in their leveling progression, and it makes even a die-hard altoholic like myself struggle with leveling new characters.

Star Wars is very similar to this model so far, and I’m told it doesn’t change much. While each character has their own class quests, which is nice, Coruscant goes from Merchant’s Gang to Black Sun to Justicar, no matter what class you are. I can’t speak to upper level areas that overlap, but I’m pretty sure the progression from planet to planet is pretty well secured.

And the Big Damn Hero complex is there too. It’s a little disconcerting, to be THE BEST at everything, instead of just part of a group. My Jedi Knight is THE MOST SKILLED Padawan, not just a skilled one. She’s also the second character I’ve pathed through Tython, and I can’t say it felt all that new and exciting, beyond the class quests.

So the jury is still out, for me, on the replay value of Star Wars. I like immersive rather than linear style questing – and I’ve always seen two as mutually exclusive. The use of class quests will hopefully help with replay value, but there are 4 sets of class quests and 8 classes, so perhaps I’ll have to explore the Empire side of things.

(I didn’t intend to be playing Empire side, but I do somewhat have an idea for a Sith Sorceror rattling around in my head.)

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Questing in Steps

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On Snow Crash, Virtual Avatars, and Warcraft’s Social Network Appeal

What really stuck with me, and tickled my brain cells, was the bit about guilds – beyond a general resonance that yes, what makes WoW (and other MMO’s) stick is the combination of social network and doing things. (See my earlier post on needing immersion and community - my versions of doing things and a social network.)

See, I don’t wonder if there’s a dichotomy between what WoW assumes guilds are about and how RP guilds work. Totally Raids was a way to raid beyond guild affiliation, because guild affiliation for roleplayers is about RP community, not about who’s a raid main and who’s an alt. So my raiding experience prior to 4.0 and the new guild achievement/ranking system was totally unrelated to my guild – in fact, I switched guilds a few times before settling in with the Wildfire Riders, all while still raiding with TRI.

Cyn also talks about the change from small server communities to a more global community – which is, I think, mostly a progression in the right direction. As much as we look with some nostalgia on the 3+hour wait times for Alterac Valley, back before cross-realm battlegroup PVP, it’s nice to be able to PVP whenever you want. You did lose the sense of server continuity though. Back in those days I knew who to watch out for in Feathermoon’s Horde PVP scene, and could generally tell pretty quickly who I was up against. Now you’re not likely to ever see the same players twice.

The same thing happens in LFG – which in its earliest days (back when I was leveling Annalira as a holy priest in 1.8 or so) was one of my primary ways of making friends on the server. Even of making roleplaying friends.

Now, in LFD, if I run into some roleplayers it’s a random treat, but I don’t use RealID (for a number of privacy reasons) so I have no way of connecting with any of those people again. And roleplay is really about being able to connect to people outside of just running dungeons or battlegrounds or raids.

RP guilds generally have different goals – but community is the biggest single goal that I’ve experienced. That community often (but not always) extends out of character, but in the end it’s about having a group of characters that relate to each other and tell stories together – all things that the “new and improved” guild system doesn’t measure. Which, in a way, means that RP can move out of guilds and into channels, but there is still something nice about being part of a community that has a guild tag, guild chat, a guild forum, etc.

Granted, my experience with TRI was the reverse of that, so it’s definitely possible to have cross-guild RP communities with chat channels and forums while still being part of a tagged raiding guild, if that’s what floats your boat.

But I don’t always think that the move to bigger and greater communities is one that is always good for RP

For one thing, a lot of RP is slow – it’s based around building trust and getting to know people.

The constant stream of players through LFD/LFR/BGs means you’re never seeing the same person twice – so you either have to jump to the idea that you can trust everyone, and give out relatively personal information (which comes at a cost, especially if you’ll only ever see that person in other dungeons and not out in the general world), or you enjoy a little pick up RP and move on. I almost exclusively choose the second option, simply because I don’t openly trust everyone I run into, roleplayer or not. I’ve been burned too hard for that in the past.

If I were to engage in larger community RP, it would require having some way to meet people and get used to them in “small” RP situations (like pub night) before diving into creating stories together. Most of the people I’d be interested in fostering that kind of relationship with are people I’ve met outside of WoW, usually on Twitter or through this blog. Meeting other like-minded RPers is harder than ever, now that there’s not really a lot of difference between RP-PVE and regular PVE when it comes to choosing servers, and server populations are enormous on most RP servers. Plus, your battlegroup makes a bigger difference in the people you run dungeons/battlegrounds with than your server, unless you are already cultivating a relationship …

A relationship with a guild.

RP guilds offer the opportunity to know that, at the very least, the people you’ll be socializing with are RP tolerant, if not outright roleplayers themselves.

So maybe Cynwise is right, and guilds are going to go the way of the dodo. But for those of us for whom guilds serve a rather different function than groups, raids, and battlegrounds, I don’t wonder if there will always be throwbacks to the current system. I realize that RP guilds are vastly in the minority for WoW guilds – most guild leadership guides don’t know heads or tails about what it takes to be a member or leader of an RP guild because they’re even more scarce now than they used to be. But we do exist, and it will be interesting to see where and how we fit into new systems in the future.

Whether or not future environments will be more or less RP friendly remains to be seen, however.

My gut feeling is that they will continue to be less RP friendly (as they’ve moved in that direction over time), but that is, as always, just my opinion. And probably the subject of another post.

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WoW, Social Media, and Roleplaying

What I’m learning, though, is what it is that makes an MMO “work” for me.

Turns out, I need two things. I need immersion, and I need community.

Immersion, for me, is the ability to “get lost” in a world, for it to kind of swallow you up so you become really involved in the world itself – regardless of quests really, though quests help. Community is both RP and OOC – both are important.

The reason I have learned this is because both games are feeling somewhat stilted on both counts right now.

In Star Wars, the community is squeaky and new, but also already established. I’m playing almost entirely with people I know already, but our characters are unfamiliar (to us and to each other) and there’s a good deal of “figuring things out”. The world itself is also giving me trouble, as it’s hard for me to get “lost” on Coruscant, since it’s essentially a technology warren instead of an outdoor “new world” like location. On top of that, people are generally quiet in channels – something that is also plaguing our WoW community right now. And I’ve had trouble, in general, with immersion in WoW since the world got rearranged for Cataclysm. It was easier once I was leveling a new character, but I still miss being totally sucked into the game the way I was in Wrath (and, to some extent, BC and Vanilla).

Neither of these have easy answers. I can’t change the game, and I can’t force my community to go back to what it was at an earlier date. I’m hoping, though, that with some emphasis on rebuilding RP and our OOC communication, I can at least re-engage with what we do have right now.

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Immersion and Community

While Hordeside it was all about Orgrimmar, for Alliance, Ironforge was the place to be in Vanilla WoW, because that’s where the auction house was (back before the auction houses in Stormwind and Darnassus even existed, let alone were linked to one another). I still have my banker there, because the Ironforge Bank and AH just seem like the place to be, even if that’s not the major hangout anymore. Ironforge was also conveniently located right nearby to Blackrock Mountain, home of both Ragnaros and Nefarian, so it was the primary Alliance “raid stockpile” spot and where you went to repair/buy more arrows (you know, back when hunters had to carry ammo and it only stacked to 200).

Of course, with Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King we had cross-faction capitols with portals  to all the other major cities, so you were kind of silly not to hearth EVERYONE to that location – even your lowbie alts could get summoned to Shattrath or Dalaran and then set up a hearthstone there. These major hubs were the defining spots of the expansions, located near most of the raid content, and there was a good bit of RP that happened at least in Dalaran. (I still maintain that Dalaran is an excellent city for RP, because of the variety of environments and taverns there.)

Now we’re back in the “old world”, and it’s Stormwind and Orgrimmar for the two busiest cities. Both have portals to take you to the new content areas like Vashj’ir and Twilight Highlands, and the booming trade market has moved from Ironforge to Stormwind now that there are two auction houses there. It makes sense to keep the Horde capitol in Orgrimmar, especially with the prominence that Garrosh has had in leading the Horde – it’s always been the central location for the leadership. Alliance side, things didn’t really solidify until Varian Wrynn returned, and so it made sense for the major city to switch to Stormwind, since that’s where he is (we first saw that switch with the attacks on Stormwind Harbor).

I’m curious how this will all shape up in Mists though, whether we’ll still have the major faction capitols (Stormwind and Orgrimmar) as the biggest hubs of activity, or whether there will be a new capitol city in the new content, more like Shattrath and Dalaran were.

Having a faction hub in the old world, with portals to the new content, worked well for Cataclysm because it was such a spread out expansion. Hyjal, Vashj’ir, Deepholm, Uldum, Twilight Highlands and Tol Barad are all spread out around the world, with no coherent “center” to them. There isn’t really a good place for a new capitol city that would work out, especially not from a cross faction standpoint.

For Mists, we’re looking at an entirely unexplored new continent, much like Outland and Northrend, so a “new” city capitol makes more sense, especially if Blizzard is going to put in teleporter locations back to the old world content. If so, it’ll be fun to explore that new city and find places for RP. While I don’t think the Riders will ever stop hanging around the Pig and Whistle (Tarquin DOES basically own the place…), it’s fun for new expansion RP to happen right in with the action when it’s action oriented.

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Capitol Cities

Last year my kitchen passed the “crazy test” – and this year will probably put it through its paces once again. Today’s meal is being hosted by SSH and I, for both my family and his, and it should be a wonderful time. I’ll definitely need a nap though!

I hope, regardless of the holiday, that today you enjoy good food and good company with friends and family (whether related by blood or by choice).

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May your Blessings be Bountiful