I am out of here

[Jarulf]

Well, first of all, I assume most people don’t agree with me, or the game would not be as popular as it is, but even then, I assume at least some of my criticism is valid even for those that play it. Of course, some like another type of game than me, who knows.

So what makes the game turn boring and not fun any more to play when I reached level 60, yet most people tend to claim the game doesn’t really start until you turn 60? Well, I would say that the areas were Blizzard has failed are the boring repetitive game play, lack of alternatives (yes, bare with me, I will explain) and a complete failure as far as item and item creation goes in the game, especially when you hit level 60!

I have enjoyed playing my characters (mainly my now level 60 hord Priest and before that my level 37ish alliance Druid but also a few level 1-25 chars of various types). It has been fun, even if frustrating at times, and there has always been options, real alternatives and fun areas to visit. Even the items themselves, although with problems even before you hit level 60, has been an enjoyable part. Of course, I take much of my ideas on how good and nice items can be used in games from the Diablo series (which also has flaws of course) and from private role-playing as well as a host of other computer games of the RPG type.

So what problems do I have now? What makes no alternative seem attractive? Lets take my Priest, who is the only level 60 character, what should I do with it? Apart from the fact that I just ditched a bunch of items, quests and such from events that apparently was of a “one time type” only and are now useless, what should I do?

Areas to visit
Sure, there are no real new ones, I have “done” even the level 60 ones. Yet, those last several map areas of the game were I have spent my time since, say, level 50-55 has probably been the most boring, badly done and lacking in atmosphere, creativity and finish of all in the game. I would attribute this to the fact that Blizzard seems to believe that post 60, you should spend time grinding instances, preferably the raid ones! The normal outdoor areas are badly done, lack all those final touches that exists in the earlier ones, there is no real plot or stories for them, typically they are wasted land (in a brown or grayish colour map) further disguised by having mist/fog so that you really don’t see much and wonder weather your monitor needs dusting. The exception is Winterspring which at least look beautiful. Still it fails pretty much like other end areas in that it is mostly void of any content except for random walking monsters. There is a town or hub to visit (usually with limited vendors, trainers, or other interesting people, Silithus being an exception) but that is pretty much it. Since there is no difference at this stage any longer regarding being horde or alliance (except not being able to interact), there is no longer any sense of “we” or “them”, you find you walk up to night elves in the field to get a quest without wondering what on earth is going on. Put simply, Blizzard stopped tending to the map areas that people reach when they turn, say 50, disguising it all by steering people versus instances which leads to the next problem.

Casual play/Exploring/Outdoor fun
At this stage in your character’s life, you are supposed to be in a guild, teaming up for instances (shifting into raids). You should never go around yourself alone and you should stop forgetting about having short casual fun outdoors, it is all instance play now. Quests are all elite if outdoors and very few of the quest lines are completable solo. Yes I know it is a multiplayer game, but up until level 50 or so, the game has lots of content that can be fun experiencing on your own when there is no scheduled guild content going on. This stops when you hit 60 (basically), the ONLY way to progress is by playing with full teams in instances with the possible exception being reputation grinding until you puke to be able to purchase that one extra recipe or item.

Trade skills
Trade skills are fun, I have tried most of them, but have come to the conclusion that most are only ever usable to either fuel lower level characters with temporary items for quick leveling. Apart from perhaps potion making and making bags, I have yet to find the crafting skills of much for myself or any other character of similar level to me. This is connected with bad item creation in the game, see below, my main gripe which strangely comes at the end. I can tailor tons of items out of which I wonder if 80% of them has EVER been crafted and used much by anyone in the game. A few of the worthless items have as the only good thing that they can be used to level your skill, they are themselves of no use. If you don’t do much instances, you can find some crafted items relatively useful although you will of course be far behind instance people in items. As for items found “in the outdoors”, well, after level 10, you hardly ever find anything much of use with the exception of not doing instances and not crafting, then they can be of some use for another 20 levels or so.

The biggest problem is though, that once you hit around 230 or so in the skills, you are not supposed to progress much any more. Of course, the exception being if you care to grind hopelessly for the ingredients (and the recipies themselves). Trying to get tailoring to 300 and actually use some of the high level recipies means you need rare materials (for example felcloth and mooncloth (which you get at a slow rate from the felcloth which requires hours upon hours of grind of a few specific monsters, not even sure you get reputation at the same time).

All well, except that you don’t need 2 mooncloth, you need 5 or 10 or a gazillion of them, plus several other rare items like essence of some strange sort and so on. To get them, you need to kill another gazillion monsters since the drop rate is, of course, extreme low. Typically to make 1 (!!!) item of say some mooncloth or whatever type, I need more strange and rare ingredients than I have yet to come across in my entire career with the level 60 char, many also, it seems, mostly gotten from instances (see, you are not supposed to be out there in the wild). Trying to raise any crafting skill beyond 230 or so simply means horribly boring grinding for ingredients, doing useless crafts (since they require less ingredients) and even when you do so, you end up with being able to do items that has no particular use anyway, since you can instead spend a few nights repeating an instance until you get the far superior alternative instead.



Skills
Other skills, spells and such are completely tied to your leveling, when you can just buy them. Once you hit 60, there is no more for you with the exception to save money for a slightly faster mount or grind instances for versions of some spells that affect all players in your group. That is it, this is not an alternative for a level 60 character, to improve on, since there are no existing improvements.

Reputation
So, unless you have hours upon hours each time/evening to set up instances and raid groups, are bored with wondering if your eyes are turning bad from all the dim views of outdoor areas voided of content and don’t like to grind those void areas for random monsters to increase your crafting skills resulting in basically no reward, what can you do? Gather reputation! Seems fun and good although a bit tiresome, but sure, gathering up 3000 reputation to advance a level seems at least doable. Sure, you are level 60 so you probably get like 5 from each monster and every now and then can collect drops that if you collect a few hundred gives you a few hundred more points. Yeah, seems doable at least. *BAM*, the mighty “you shall not progress stick” of Blizzard hits you right in the face before you even start. Turns out to really get some rewards, you usually needs to level several tiers in reputation, although the first one was 3000 points, you soon start to look at 12000 and 21000 points (that is 4200 monsters at 5 rep a pop!!!!!) Gosh! So one expect there to be some super rewards. Not so, you typically can then buy some cloth glove that turns out to be far worse than the worthless glove you already crafted. Much better to enter an instance with the proper boss and get your uber set glove instead. You can also get some recipies at times. Of course, you need to grind up your skill enough first and then, well, the item you craft might be of some use, but nothing fantastic. Sorry to say so, reputation is a complete disaster in the game.

PvP
Yes, I am completely out of PvP so that area is closed, although I guess there is a bit to do there.

Items
So, about every other idea of what to do with your level 60 character out of the door, lets go the way one do in many other games, look for nice good items to improve your character. Sure, all the other alternatives about, are ultimately to get better items, but it turned out they were not so good at it, you simply won’t get fantastic items, ever that way, and it takes forever.

So were do one get nice items, because the game has fantastically good items for everyone to use. Actually, using programs to look at all items in the game, there are fantastically many looks of items out there. Hmm, yet, most people seems to run around with more or less the same item. What a shame. Well, lets go for them anyway and see. Turns out there is really one way to go and one way only. You collect your classes only set. Each item has a pre determined spot to find it (a specific monster usually in a specific instance). When you have your set, you start collecting the next better set, exchanging each item. One can apparently go on doing this several times until one reach the current uberset which is apparently rendered useless by the next instance Blizzard release were you should again go to each specific monster to get your new set items. For slots were you don’t have set items, you still don’t worry, there is this non set item that is THE item to get and you consequently go to the instance with the monster in question that drops it and do it until it drops.

Of course, there is no point (except for the sake of completing all quests, but see below) to do instances that lacks your set items or the uber wand or whatever, since the only reward is items that are inferior. All items drop at specific monsters only!! The exception is useless crap that drop randomly. The only time such random items are of any possible use is until you are level 20 perhaps. After that, they could just replace it all with “useless crap equipment” adding “random” at the front of some of them. Random items are basically never of any use, often more crappy than crafted items (or no one would use the crafted or whatever the reason, but since the designated set items are better anyway, no one goes for crafted items either).

Is this fun? There must be some randomness and excitement in it at least? No. The only randomness is how many times you need to kill a particular boss in an instance before you get lucky and get the specific set item you are currently looking for. But at least they have some random stats on the items, I mean like +10 to +12 int so that there is some excitement or even point in redoing a boss after you got lucky? Nope, none whatsoever!!! Only random items are the crappy one that gives you +2 int when you are looking for your next set item that gives +12 int (plus a bunch of other stuff), you would never waste yourself on that. There aren’t even special abilities only on random items. The set items are the best in all aspects, period, end of story and they drop from specific bosses in specific instances only. End of story again. Yes, item hunting just turned so fun, not!

Turns out all usable items are predetermined and redesigned and preset to drop at a specific place only. Randomness is only believed because most junk is randomly created so they CAN create random items, they just won’t do it for usable items. Even such a thing as weapon type is predetermined. So a specific item is always, say a sword, never a sword or a mace, or an axe and so on, not even such a thing is left to the luck.

But surely, there must be more than one staff or one helm or one whatever findable to be judge to be of the correct level for you at a given time? So that you can go either to boss A for shield 1 or to boss B for shield 2 and possibly hope for a “random” shield 3 from monster type C? Well, even if there is, the difference is bordering a difference in millimeters when we are discussing meters or tens of meters. The game creators are apparently fanatically and ruthlessly applying some algorithm to their non randomly created items so that there can’t be even the slightest deviation in “goodness” of an item comparable to the boss or monster, instance and state of character looking for it (that is, if you are currently equipped by tier 2 set looking for tier 3). Even a variation of, say +10 to +12 would apparently wreck havoc in the universe of Warcraft and is not tolerated, hence, there is really not much difference what item (of your designated equipment level to wear depending on what instance you can run) you actually DO equip, but since there is no randomness to start with and since you know exactly what monster drop what item, why go for monster A when you know that you never get the item with one extra int when you can get that for sure from monster 2 (if you kill it a few times, not for sure every kill).

So Blizzard has created a completely brainless, boring, non varying system of items, with no excitement or surprises were you basically progress from monster A to monster B as soon as you find the desired item from monster A (you typically don’t have a chance for monster B until then) and then after that to monster C (when Blizzard releases that instance) and so on with each new instance. Of course, everyone ends up wearing these very same set items. Random items or crafted items doesn’t fit in. Possibly with some exceptions now and then, at least at the beginning when you still look for your first set item (which is why crafting skills, even though horribly grinding in nature of leveling, has no real reward anyway). Killing random monsters, or even quest monsters outside instances is, from an item perspective as useful and rewarding as selling sand in Sahara!

Yet, Blizzard have at least some knowledge on how to create random items in random ways that are at least some fun through their Diablo games. But apparently they decided that instead they wanted the “here is your next ultimate item all should try for” (or you can’t progress in the dungeon) and it is found in one place only. After that, there is the next item and so on. Talk about boring before one even start.

Recently I found the apparent “algorithm” on creating items, which of course is just a disguise, since if it actually would have worked, we would have random stats on items, we don’t, it is all pre set (following extremely specific rules on what is possible or not) which makes it all boring. Why not let it lose and create random items? Would be so much more fun and interesting. So what if there is a small chance to find the same item with 2 extra int on it, would the whole world collapse? Of course not, but would be far more interesting and fun and you would not see everyone running around in the same set either.

Oh well, how can one mess up so horrible?


Quest problems
So, I have one more gripe that I will put forward that I can think of right now. That one of limited quests at once. For some reason Blizzard decided that their servers can’t handle you having more than 20 quests at once. End of story. Doesn’t matter how much hardware upgrades one do, that seems to be like a law of nature. “No, no” someone always chime in, it is not only that (even though Blizzard state that as one reason, which is silly but OK), “you are supposed to make decisions on what quests to work on”. Huh? Yeah, I tend to do that by going to the place were one can complete the quest typically traveling around the world 10 times once you hit level 30-40 or so, and then, because you can only have 20 quests at once, you need to travel around again 10 times to complete a few more quests, even if it is about the same travel.

I call Bull on that excuse, it is simply not valid and adds nothing, yet causes frustration and anger. What happens is that instead you end up dropping quests, many of which you will never remember you had and if you do, you have absolutely no clue were you got them, you usually tend to fill up your bank with items from them though, not knowing for sure if it was from that quest you DO remember to pick up when you sometime in the future get to that place were you think had a quest not done.

Obviously you also want to do instances and instance quests. Typically though, those are several for an instance, so you want some good chunk of free quest slots. Some are quest lines though and you have to remember those. On top of that, most later instances has quests that you get from all over the world, some in obscure places in the middle of monsters. You try to collect those at once and keep them. If you have 4 hours to play a night and manage to get people to play an instance an one agree on “Sunken Temple”, you don’t want to say “OK, now, just wait 3 hours while I find out what quests I have seen for this in the past, were I need to go to pick them up, and then actually go and pick them up, lets see, the first is from an NPC far out from the flashpoint among monsters in some troll area up in Hinterland, should take me 10 minutes only to fly up there, another 15 to travel to the NPC and back and then the next quest was on the other continent……” Well, the instance run is over before you even figure out what you are supposed to do. Keeping them all in your quest log (excluding the ones picked up “close” to the instance and keeping a note by the computer what quests you actually have seen for the instance) helps. Of course, that mean that you have some 10 or more slots taken by such “reserved for later when you play with others” quests. In addition, you have some unfinished quests from a few areas that you either also need others to help, or perhaps need to level a bit first but with you already have started, or perhaps needs to grind a gazillion monsters to complete and you decide to split it up in a few sittings. That leaves a few spots for actual quests you work on in an area, typically entering a new area at level 50-60 meant a bunch of new quests being available, some working well together, but you could only pick up a few, since you only had 5 slots free. Turns out the quest you skipped and pick up later, has a follow-up that required you to kill the exact same monster on the other side of the map that you just killed to complete a quest to get a free slot and so on. And don’t you DARE abort this area and go to another to play with a friend who just came online tonight, since then you must drop all quests here and go back there and find all the quests you dropped/skipped when you was last here since you wanted to have some variation. Sigh. Just hopelessly. Yet, I find the skills and its system a quite good part of the game (sure the ones requiring you to just kill 10 monsters or collect 20 items from a specific monster is a bit boring but there are many good quest lines, too bad you can’t experience many, at least not at the same time due to the quest limit and many times, you are a bit overlevelled anyway when you go back to do it because you could not do them at the same time).

So what was the technical problem that makes it impossible to test for more than 20 quests at a time when you kill a monster? (disregarding that not all quests require to keep track of kills or item drops and if you have several, the type of item/monster will probably not even exist close to the map you are in and can be removed when you enter the area). That would be the ONLY valid technical reason I can see, but who knows.

Well, in any case, I am out of it for now. I might be back to check out the expansion, who knows. Since the subscription fee was just paid the other day, I might be around another 20 days or so, probably playing some lower level character, but then I will definitely take a break. If I come back? Who knows.