Wednesday 31 July 2013

A Strange lethargy

This was meant to be a post about Levelling that i promised last time out however, that is turning into a bit of brute and will require a large section of my weekend to finish. Instead I'm going a Little off topic here. Over the last month or so i have seen a odd change in the way i play Wow, Join me after the break as i go through it all.


So for a while now i have been playing a lot of other games, in the last week or two i have played. In no particular order, Borderlands2, Call of Juarez the Gunslinger, EvE (14 day trial), Dota2, Civ 5, Football Manager 2013, LoL and Stronghold. The thing that struck me as odd though is the fact that i haven't had massive amounts of free time recently, with work and summer and a lot of reading to do. It dawned on me a couple of days ago that largely i have been playing all these games when i would normally play Wow. I still am playing Wow but not a massive amount.

Its odd its not that i have a major desire to stop playing Wow, i did my week "cold turkey" when my psu blew up. I use the addiction metaphor very aptly in this case as Wow may as well be a drug, it is very impressive at being able to Lure you in and suddenly a 15min session becomes 2 hrs. The whole package is meant to keep you hooked from making alts to the Damn achievements. I'm not hating on Wow here just to be clear. Its that i find it interesting that after spending a week without playing, i would have assumed that i would be playing like mad to catch up. Instead its like other stuff has raised its hand to fill the void and now Wow has to compete for my affections  all over again.

This leads me to my next point point, i have been quite vocal on here about how much i support the idea of giving us more content faster. However it is also possibly having a adverse effect on how i play the game. For Example at the moment i am not Raiding other than some fun runs in ToT norm on a Saturday. The only section of the game that is majorly important for me at this moment is finishing off collecting my http://www.wowhead.com/item=94594 so that i can be ready for 5.4 to drop. And knab my legendary cloak nice and quick. Likewise i am still 2 pets short of the 30 lvl 25's i need to enter the tournament. Aside from this there is nothing pressing that i want/need to complete.

This is the subtle irony of having more content and more specifically having the catch up mechanics. In 5.4 you can get BoA gear of a 490ish Ilvl from the new island, on top of this you will also be able to collect all parts of the legendary from ToT (This i find odd as it means there is no reason to run the first tier of lfr after 5.4) There in is the crux of the matter previously in older patch's i would be spending the time gearing up my alts maxing reputations, and also capping VP or JP so i coud splurge out on gear when the patch dropped. To put this into perspective my main has all the reputation factions of MoP maxed out, the only one of my toons that has maxxed a MoP rep is my Pala and he has two. Because there is no point there is always a new means of gearing or catching up being added, why bother grinding GL rep in the vale when i can send that toon gear that is better my main is farming on the Celestial isle next patch.

Its very odd at the moment and leaves me feeling quite conflicted about the game. I agree with the new Legendary system, giving one to anyone prepared to spend the time all expansion working through content. However i cant understand the need to speed up the drop rates etc for items for parts of the Quest chain. I know the http://www.wowhead.com/item=94594 are a bitch to get, but  if you speed the process up there is no achievement if say you go into ToT and you get all 12 in one week. (hypothetical situation there) The catch up mechanics while nice also seem to render parts of the content obsolete to Quickly in my opinion.

I read a while ago a post in the forums where the writer was asking for Lfr to be delayed by a whole patch so that people were running Lfr for Msv, HoF and ToeS when ToT was released or when 5.1 was launched. While this may be a bit extreme especially with the legitimate place that Lfr has in gearing now, though with Flex raiding maybe this could happen. I like the idea of delaying a feature so people clearing Normal/Heroic mode are not met with people wearing the same game in trade withing a few weeks. I think that all catch mechanics should be delayed by a patch, or should be added in the Non raid patches. It would ensure that older content stays fresher for longer as there is no real way to bypass it immediately.

Finally a quick word on Virtual realms, i see there is a lot of Questions flying around as to when, how and what virtual realms will be like. But the way i looked at the feature i felt that it was basically a server merge, you would log in on 5.4 and your server would be merged with a suitable other low pop realm. There would be more people more stuff on the AH and better faction balance. There wouldnt be a choosing of sorts there is no electing to go on a virtual server you just are on it. For example of the virtual servers were simply you Battlegroup. You would log in there and everyone in your BG would be on your server etc. Also it amuses me when people ask if they will join PvP with only other PvP severs etc. Of course they will it would be completely stupid and a sure fire way to wind the community up if they didn't.

Well there we go a slightly longer blog than intended buy meh meh :P


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