Category Archives: The Android’s Mother’s Basement (MMO)

The Android's Mother's Basement (MMO)

Just when I thought I was out…

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… they pull me back in.

Yes, I’m talking about that old standby that nobody ever truly escapes from, the game that both codified MMOs and redefined what they could commercially and culturally achieve – World of Warcraft. Now, our dear Pike has as most of you will know been a very long-time player of WoW, and played solidly for years, which is of course where her delightful Aspect of the Hare arose from. In fact I first played the game considerably before she ever touched it (I got it just as Patch 1.6 came out.), but unlike her I come and go in waves. I play for a few months, then put it aside for a few months, repeat. Apparently ad nauseum. I had thought I had escaped for good; I last played in early Spring if I recall correctly.

But here I am, and I know the signs by now. I’ve started reading the WoW forums. I keep an eye on the patch notes. I’ve updated to the latest version. I’m looking for the best current plugins to use. Sooner or later, no matter how long and hard I resist it, I’m going to give Blizzard yet more of my altogether too scarce money and I am going to spend an extraordinary amount of time playing World of Warcraft.

Again. And I’m sure I’ll drag Pike along with me, because she’s susceptible to that sort of thing and hearing me ooh-ing and ah-ing over some mediocre Green I just found will make her itch to play it.

Goldshire, my body is ready!

Are there any games, MMO or otherwise, which just seem to always manage to call you back to them, an irresistible siren song that must inexorably conquer you despite your best efforts?

Also how is WoW these days, to those who still play?

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical), The Android's Mother's Basement (MMO)

Playtime Confessions!

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Yesterday I officially joined the 300 club in Civ IV.

This isn't counting about a dozen hours of vanilla Civ IV before jumping up to BtS, nor is it counting about a dozen hours of a particular mod that Steam wouldn't track properly.

Ahh, it feels good. I love statistics like this. I love them to the point that I have been known to buy games on Steam that I already own just so it can start tracking my playtime. (It’s like Gaben really knows how to reel us obsessive-compulsives geekwads in!)

A few other games I played a lot tracked your time as well. I was really close to 300 hours in FF Tactics Advance. I’m also relatively sure I was close to it in my original Pokemon Red file, before it was inadvertently deleted.

Of course, MMOs deserve to be in a tier all to themselves when it comes to playtime. If I recall correctly, before quitting, I’d clocked up about 220 days played in WoW across all of my characters.

That's well over 5000 hours!

I think over half of it was spent on my main, Tawyn the Night Elf Hunter. As time went on and Blizzard bumped experience rates and made questing and LFG more streamlined, and as I got more experienced at the game myself, I’d spend less time on an individual character. For example, I think my resto druid had a mere 12 days or something similarly miniscule for her /played, despite the fact that I got her to (then) endgame and was raiding with her for a little while.

So yeah, I doubt any other single game I’ve ever played could come close to what I dumped into WoW. Like I said, MMOs deserve their own tier in this “game”.

And I still wish I could see an accurate playtime counter for everything I’ve ever played. That would be fascinating.

Okay, lay it on me. What are your most played games, gentle readers?

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical), The Android's Mother's Basement (MMO)

Raging Misanthropy or, How I Never Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Multiplayer

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I’ll cut right to the chase: I really don’t care for multiplayer most of the time. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not as though I’ve sworn a vow against it or anything, I enjoy a good game of Team Fortress or Halo as much as the next person. But it’s just an aside, something that I do now and then for fun, just as every now and then I play some co-op with my good friend Barry Manilow (long story). But there’s a whole segment of gaming that seems to be almost exclusively or exclusively caught up in the multiplayer side of things. And I mean, I can grok that. Nothing better than a real human opponent (Not yet, anyway, and this doesn’t count in chess) for matching wits against – and yet I don’t care to. Which, if you’ll let me indulge my ego, isn’t to say I can’t. Back when I played Red Alert 2 I was horrendously good at it. It just doesn’t really appeal to me, and I’m not entirely sure why, but I have an inkling.

See, I'm just too cool for school (and for sayings that were in date at any point after LBJ was in office)

Here’s the thing: I like to play games my way. I like to derp around, to explore here and there, to try stupid things with weapons, to experiment with different strategies and whatnot. This is all well and good with friends, but in any game where other people are expecting me to do something productive, it just doesn’t seem to work out so well for me. I feel rather constrained by it all, and I don’t particularly like other people being dependent on me when I’m just wanting to mess around with some ridiculous glitch I’ve discovered or something. Interestingly I still like MMOs a great deal; I’ve played my share of WoW over the years, and a fair bit of EVE Online and City of Heroes too, as well as dabbling in quite a few besides. But I’m always solo in these things; I don’t want to have to worry about keeping others alive or what have you, because when I screw it up I feel really bad! Contrary to the title of this post, I don’t actually mind if others mess up unless it’s making the same mistakes repeatedly or something.

I was wondering how others feel about all this sort of thing. Do you prefer single player or multiplayer? Do you care at all? Do you worry about letting the side down to a point of excess?

The Android's Mother's Basement (MMO)

Hey guys, remember Steamvaults?

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So I haven’t played World of Warcraft in a few months now– my account expired sometime in February or March, and I hadn’t been playing for weeks before that– but I still follow a lot of active WoW players on Twitter by virtue of my background as a WoW blogger, so I hear a lot of game-related news simply through the grapevine. And one of the things that’s going to be happening soon, from what I hear, is the removal of the keyring and keys from the game.

Now if you’ve been following me for a long time, you can probably see where this is going. If not, I’m just going to leave this here:

Remember getting the Karazhan key? Remember ALL THOSE FREAKING DUNGEONS?

No? Lemme refresh your memory:

Remember Sethekk Halls, Shadow Labs, Steamvault, Botanica, Mechanar, Arcatraz, Old Hillsbrad Foothills, and The Black Morass? And how it took days to do all of these because you had to get groups together and stuff, because there was no Dungeon Finder? You’d wait and wait until your trusted guildies and friends were online before even thinking about making a group? Yeah.

It was such a pain but it felt so good to get that key at the end. These were some seriously hard dungeons, too. Remember freaking Shadow Labs? Remember when you would grind that thing for days just to get a blue?

Cause I do.

Back then, you needed keys for everything, and the Master’s Key was one of the big ones. After you spent forever getting that key, it was time to grind rep in order to get keys to get into Heroics, so you could get epics. Remember Heroic Steamvaults? What a pain in the butt dungeon. Heroic Mech, anyone? That fire chick, anyone?

I can still hear the "WE ARE ON A STRICT TIMETABLE"

Keys were a tangible reward showing that you’d been through the maze and done your time and had access to all those mythical places that you heard about only in whispers in trade chat. Hearing that they’re going away is… well, it’s not the end of the world and I’m not crying about it or anything. But it made me think back to those days when they and their partner “attunement” were a pretty big aspect of endgame. And that made me nostalgic. Hence this post.

I may not play anymore, but I’m going to miss my Master’s Key, I think. Just a bit.

The Android's Mother's Basement (MMO)

It’s Not You, WoW, It’s Me

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As I’m sure most of you know, I hail from the vast and amazing World of Warcraft blogging community. I love this community and everything it entails and I’m proud I was able to share a corner of it with everyone for so long.

Likewise, I love World of Warcraft. I don’t even care if that makes me a cooped-up nerd with no life or whatever that makes me, I love it. (Besides, I already am a cooped-up nerd with no life, so).

I think Cataclysm did a lot of really great stuff. I love the zone revamps. I love the new Cataclysm zones. The few new instances I did were pretty great. I love that Blizzard is trying to take the best stuff from both Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King and weld them together into something great. How much they succeeded at this is up for debate, I’m sure, but the intentions are there and I appreciate it. As far as I’m concerned, WoW is in pretty good shape right now.

But I’m not playing.

You know, I’ve quit and returned and quit and returned to WoW so many times at this point that you’re probably getting sick of hearing about the details, so to make a long story short let’s just say that I really consider myself to have quit WoW back in early 2010. I’ve had stints since then where I’ve briefly returned to flirt with the game and in general be the very definition of casual, but I really haven’t done anything like I used to. I did play rather solidly for a few months late last year. But even that went something akin to this: Got Cataclysm, leveled to 85, glanced around, decided it was a job well done, and then logged out and pretty much didn’t log back in.

So I quit. Again.

A few weeks later, Mr. Adequate and I both re-subbed specifically to make tauren paladins and geek it up together. We had a blast. We ran around and smashed things with our hammers and we PvP’d and we did Shadowfang Keep (during which I fell in love with tanking) and we giggled over the Azshara quests and all in all we had a great time for about, oh, a week or so.

Then we quit again. And that’s where I’m at currently.

And you know, when I try to explain all of this, it’s really difficult to articulate how or why, exactly, I fell off that treadmill. There was a time when, if I wasn’t playing WoW, I was probably thinking about it or writing about it or reading about it. Obviously that isn’t the case anymore. Which is ironic, because these days I think the game is better now than it has ever really been before. But a certain spark is missing. And you know what? I don’t think that’s Blizzard’s fault. Rather, it’s mine. I had my fun, I changed, and I’ve largely moved on. Nothing wrong with that.

All around, I seem to see concerns and/or rumors that WoW is dying and people are leaving in droves and whatnot. Perhaps it’s because I still hang out with the WoW blogging community on Twitter, and most of these are people who grew up alongside me as a part of my blogging/WoW generation and many of us all sort of reaching the same stage. That’s my theory, anyway.

Or maybe I’m entirely wrong and WoW really is dying.

I don’t think so, though.

I’d like to think the game will still be there next time I suddenly get the urge to roll up a new character and level and explore and tame rare pets and play lowbie Arathi Basin just like I used to.

Because the details may have changed, but the spirit is still there, of this I’m sure. I know this because sometimes, even lately, even with how jaded I am over here on the porch with my rocker and my cane-waving and my “When I was your age we didn’t get mounts until level 40 and we had to run up and down Stranglethorn Vale for ten levels”– sometimes I catch a glimpse of that spirit, and then it reminds me why I dumped well over half a year into WoW playtime across all my characters.

Keep doing that, Blizzard. I’m sure I’ll be back. It’s not you. It’s me.

We’re still friends. Right?