It turns out that the lunatics were right - video games can, in fact, kill you:

Video games are harmful to children: But not how you think. The paper's title suggests it's bad news, starting with the phrase "Dying to Play Video Games." But the harm turns out to be pretty indirect, as it comes from carbon monoxide poisoning. It turns out that, during the power outages caused by Hurricane Ike's landfall in Texas, the use of faulty generators sent about 20 children to the ER. In 75 percent of those cases, it turns out their parents started up the generator in order to allow their kids to play video games so they could while away their time in the dark.

Oh wait..... never mind. That wasn't the fault of the games. False alarm - again.

Writing for MMORPG.com, Dana Massey has an insightful article up this week. In his piece Dana explores the relentless grind to reach maximum level that the vast majority of players seem to be obsessed with, and how that effort is often less than engaging.

Almost all MMOs revolve around maximizing experience and loot en route to some mythical endgame. How people do it really doesn’t matter. Players, even when given the choice, gravitate to efficiency over fun.

Sanya Weathers mentioned this last week in her article on low level quest design. Many of the industry professionals she spoke to talked about how they tried to make more involved quests, but players reacted negatively, as these tended to slow down the XP gain rate.

[...]

Fact is, the players are as broken as the games they yell about.

Emphasis mine. Dana is correct, but only to a point: players whose sole goal is to reach the end game (whatever that may be) will often rush through all of the content as quickly as possible in order to get there, ignoring quest text, time consuming (although epic) quests, socializing, and other core MMO features along the way.

I witnessed this phenomenon first hand recently when Wrath of the Lich King was released for World of Warcraft: the vast majority of my raiding guild power-leveled their characters, grinding as efficiently as possible in order to be among the first to set foot in Naxxramas and conquer the content. Although playtime was certainly a factor, those of us who used our limited in-game time to read every quest and explored Northrend more completely missed a few weeks of raiding and seeing guild-first kills as a result of our less efficient play style.

Self-directed goals
While Dana may be correct in stating that the majority of MMO players - or at least the vast majority of vocal players - skip content in order to experience the end game, their chosen play style is not the only possible way to experience a virtual world. Tobold recently touched on this truth in his discussion of microtransactions and competitive gaming:


This is by no means restricted to World of Warcraft - in fact personal goals can be set in any video game, MMO or not, to add an additional layer of enjoyment that was not necessarily hardcoded into the experience by the game developers.

Instances of players setting non-end game goals for themselves can be found everywhere. A few Warcraft-inspired examples are: explorers, pet/mount collecters, twinks, role-players, achievement whores, traders, fishermen, altoholics, PvPers, or even in-game catering services.

Why the emphasis on quests?
Interestingly enough, with the possible exception of exploring the virtual world, none of the activities listed above involve a player enjoying the in-game quest lines for what they are: stories and lore.

In fact, developer-created quests offer the least amount of enjoyable replayability in most MMOs. While players often run the same quests over and over again, it is rarely because the quest continues to be fun, engaging, or fresh (if it ever was in the first place).

In WoW, players re-run quests on their alts because the experience they gain is superior to that obtained through grinding. Similarly, in Pirates of the Burning Sea players were constantly repeating quests because the loot was superior to what could be found in the open world (until the developers patched that issue). EVE Online and WoW offer (drab and boring) repeatable quests that allow players to gain enough currency and faction points to fuel their other adventures. In WAR, public quests and scenarios drop loot and tokens that are needed to gear up in order to perform effectively in RvR combat.

It seems clear that the element of MMOs that the developers have created to drive the plot line of their game is instead being perverted by the player base and used as a means to an end more often than not. What should be an enjoyable and engaging part of our games is simply another part of the grind.

Questing for the sake of questing
As a paradigm shift, Dana Massey suggests that the emphasis on levels should be reduced and instead players should be forced to complete epic quest lines in order to unlock access to gear, skills, and other goodies:

Make quests, dozens of quests, just like now. Let people have fun, explore and get little bonuses by doing side quests. But make your level, your access to items and areas totally based on where you are in an epic story driven game. It would require 100+ hours of content to even be viable, but once complete players would have access to the “endgame” content.

Players should not be forced to grind out a bunch of quests to move forward. They should have one core line to follow and the rest should be up to them. They move forward when they resume the core story.

These are kind of anti-MMO principles; I am aware of that. Everyone would be doing the same quest or a variant of it. Likely, it would also mean that the difference between levels is not how strong the player is, but how much different stuff they can use and where they can use it.

[...]

Make the difference between level 1 and 50 what areas you have unlocked and how awesome you look while killing things, not whether or not it’s worth your time.

Although certainly an interesting idea, I believe that implementing a system like the one that Dana suggests would only serve to turn quests into more of a grind, not less. Instead, consider Syp's much more elegant solution:

I have a proposal for a MMO that has yet to be made, and that proposal is this: separate tedious quests from story. Sure, still include the staples of kill/fetch/escort quests, but cut out the story from them entirely — just have players go to a bounty hunter NPC or mission vendor to pick up one of these odd jobs to fill some time. Then pledge to make all quests have a real story, a unique path, and a satisfying — perhaps persistent — conclusion. Forget MMOs that boast of 14,000 quests on the back of their box; I’d rather play a game with 50 meaningful, moving, exciting quests than 14,000 dull, trite and tired ones. Put a long timer on these quests once you complete them, and when the timer is up, offer players the chance to revisit them if they so wish.

Splitting plot-driven quests away from the level-up grind, if done properly, could allow players who are intent on maxing out their levels as quickly as possible to enjoy their favorite end game activity without necessarily missing all of the game's plot in their hasty rush. The journey would not necessarily be compromised by the final goal. Similarly, players with alternate goals (e.g. collecting mounts, exploring, etc.) could continue to approach the game at their own pace. Perhaps the biggest win would be for quest-driven players; with the main plot divorced from the leveling treadmill, they could enjoy a more thoughtful and inspired experience if the developers took the proper amount of time to craft compelling stories.

Parting shots
While it is tempting to claim that the vocal segment of the MMO community represents the views of the whole, not all gamers are focused on end game activities to the detriment of all other content. A large number of players are quite content to set their own personal goals, and work away at them at their own pace.

That said, since the main levelling mechanic in most western MMOs is questing, it seems like the time is ripe to start to reconsider how story line should be integrated into the gaming experience so that it can be enjoyed by as many people as possible, regardless of their specific goals.

Are you a feral Druid playing World of Warcraft? Were you disappointed when I recently canceled my subscription? Do you enjoy reading blogs that reference exactly two animal body parts in their name? Well do I have a treat for you!!

Aleanathem recently started up a feral Druid blog that is named rather similarly to this site. He already has some good information posted, so it's worth your time to check out if you fit his target audience.

Sorry.... I couldn't resist.

It's been nearly two weeks since I dropped WoW cold turkey and so far I haven't had any withdrawal pains despite my officemate continuing to discuss his raiding adventures with me most mornings. I expect that the itch will show up at some point, but hopefully I'll be able to resist it.

It helps that there are quite a few interesting other topics to keep my mind occupied. For example:

• Free Realms has hit two million registered accounts less than a month after their launch date. While there is no denying that this is an impressive feat, it says nothing about their player retention rate or the number of actively paying subscribers. Personally I played obsessively for a few weeks before scaling my game time way back, and now I haven't logged in since early last week.
  
  Game companies have a vested interest in making their games look extremely popular, and all of the fanfare surrounding the Free Realms numbers reminds me of EVE Online's breathless announcement that they surpassed 300,000 subscriptions in early May. While each of those EVE subscriptions is actually paid for (some with game in-game currency), CCP phrased their announcement as if to suggest that they had acquired 300k individual users. The truth is that probably somewhere in the neighbourhood of half or two thirds of that number of individuals play their game. (EVE's skill training system restrictions lead to rampant multi-account subscribers, with some on the extreme edge going so far as to paying for five accounts per month - two seems far more common, however.)
  
  Perspective, as always, is required to cut through the marketing.


• Plot and story seem to be a hot topic in the gaming blog community right now. Spinks has a good post up this morning that starts off explaining why villains always seem to have more exciting and consistent plots than the heroes that we typically play in MMOs, but then takes a sharp left turn and delves into a more general discussion of player-driven storytelling. A sample:
  
  

  Part of the appeal of sandbox games like EVE is that there are real players involved in each faction. So the game play is a lot more flexible than a storytelling game, but the actual story may not be as good. If you’re a minor peon in a big corporation, you may never find out what actually happened in that corporate takeover. Your whole game world may have changed and you will never find out why. No other player is required to tell you. There won’t be a helpful NPC explaining exactly why the Defias got kicked out of Stormwind. You just have to go.

  
  It's worth reading the whole thing.


• Over at Kill Ten Rats, Zubon examines the differences between value for money and value for time. He asserts that MMOs seem to be great at the former, but generally do a worse job in the latter category. Agree or disagree, you have to love Zubon's way with words:
  
  

  Increasingly, I do not want to crawl through barbed wire for my entertainment or spend an hour wringing the drops of fun from the latest time sponge. This does not mean that entertainment cannot be challenging or that everything must be spoon-fed. It means no filler. Most of the spoon-fed content has a lot of filler anyway, and the last thing I need is to spend a lot of time wallowing in the relative depths of an intellectual thimble.

And that's all I've got for now.

Over at Bio Break, Syp has posed the following question:

When is the last time a MMO story moved you in some way? I mean, really moved you to where you felt genuine emotion over the story (not just the game play) — anger, laughter, sorrow, regret, shame, joy?

Like Syp, I have to admit that none of the MMO story lines that I have read has ever managed to rise above being something more than an intriguing tale, and most fall far short of even this modest goal post. Don't get me wrong - Wrath of the Lich King had some really interesting quest lines, but none of them were moving in the least.

One proposed reason for the emotional void in MMO storytelling is simple logistics:

Part of the problem is that story writers in MMOs are limited by the game mechanics — instead of writing a grand epic, they’re providing countless cover stories for same-old fetch/kill/escort quests. And by the time we get to any epic tales, we’ve become desensitized to reading any actual quest text so that it doesn’t matter. And why the fetch/kill/escorts?

Apparently, devs have deduced over time that players don’t want stories, they want quick achievement. Thus began a chain of simplifying quest design to a preschool level, just to feed the appetites of instant gratification/power gamer lovers.

But even this doesn't seem to encapsulate the entire problem. Looking even farther backwards, I cannot remember a MUD story moving me in any meaningful way, and those games were pure text-based experiences that often featured some brilliantly written areas by very talented authors. Completing a one hundred room zone could easily involve reading a quantity of text equivalent to a small novel - especially if the NPCs and objects were lovingly described in addition to the rooms. The stories told in MUDs, however, still failed to reach the levels of emotion that I have felt in single player game experiences.

The persistence problem
One common thread that runs between the text-based MUDs of decades ago and the rich graphical MMOs that we play today is that the game worlds are, for the most part, static. With extremely few exceptions NPCs and monsters are locked in place and nothing that a players does, no matter how extreme, can change that fact.

Murder the entire population of a village? No problem, they'll be back in two minutes! Slaughter an epic boss? Whatever - you'll do that again next week too! Rescue a kidnapped child? Don't worry - he'll be back in the cage where you found him in a jiffy! Blow up the enemy's defenses so that your allies can assault their keep? Whatever - they'll be rebuilt before you can blink.

With player actions being so quickly washed away by the constantly resetting game world, it is little wonder that it is difficult to get emotionally invested in even the best written stories that our MMORPGs have to offer. Our virtual world's are trapped in time, and we are forever repeating the same sick actions over and over again. Single player games do not have this shortcoming - when Aeris died, she was gone forever - she didn't pop back up five minutes after you left and wait for the next adventurer to come along before dying again (and again, and again).

Were it possible to make a permanent imprint on the game world then players - especially those who love to role play - would be far more likely to get emotionally involved in the quest lines that they participate in.

A necessary evil, and some progress
Of course, it seems like a design limitation of our games that virtual worlds have to reset; if they did not, then the thousands of players that populate any given game server would quickly run out of enemies to kill, keeps to siege, and little lost children to rescue.

World of Warcraft has made some progress in this area by making fairly good use of phasing in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, especially in the Icecrown area. Blizzard's implementation allows a player to see the game world change according to his actions while leaving it intact for players who have not completed the same quests yet. The system is not without its problems though - players who have advanced into later phases are invisible to players not yet that far into the game when standing in a phased area, and it's impossible to shake the nagging feeling that you're just retracing everyone else's footsteps as you go along.

In fact, we may have to completely rethink the standard MMO model to conquer this immersion-breaking persistence problem. Were players able to permanently slay beasts or gather non-renewable resources (e.g. ore) then core concepts like leveling (either skill or character), questing, and crafting would all have to be revisited. Game resources would be far too scarce for the traditional MMO implementations of the game mechanics that we have grown used to.

EVE Online is the only game I know of that comes close to this, but the game comes pre-packaged with only a skeletal plot and even then resources respawn daily, and NPCs appear when missions are accepted.

There is a solid argument to be made that the player-created plots are the real allure in a system like EVE Online's - the intrigue, espionage, empire building, and outright wars fuel the virtual world, and give players a reason to keep coming back for more. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Mortal Online's persistent game world can deliver a comparable experience in a fantasy setting.

Other quick thoughts
There have been other ways proposed to attempt to improve storytelling in MMOs, although none of them address the core issue of game world persistence:

• Voice overs, when done well, can increase player immersion. Not only do they encourage players to absorb the story, but voice conveys much more emotion than plain text.
• Separate "quests" from "tasks". This was proposed in the comments to Syp's post - if players were presented with quests that were long and meaningful but not necessarily piggy-backed onto the "kill 10 rats" tasks then designers would not feel that they were always forced to make short meaningless experiences.
  

While I won't be holding my breath for an emotional MMO plot line anytime soon, I hope that one day I'll get as choked up with an online game as I did when Jade couldn't rescue Pey'j in Beyond Good & Evil.

Related:
- Gamers with Jobs, ep.136 also deals with the topic of storytelling in games

My timing, as always, is impeccable: New Druid forms coming with next WoW patch.

Now why couldn't they have done that six months ago? One of the most annoying things about playing a feral Druid was we all looked the same, and there was nothing that we could do to change it. Raid leaders forever mixed me up with my other feral raiding partners (first Dedbolt, then Flyv). No matter how much awesome loot was collected, Druids were still stuck with the same old skin that was acquired a bazillion levels prior.

It's about time.

As a part of the conversion of this site from a World of Warcraft blog to a general gaming blog, I have spent some time over the past few days tidying things up, and re-focusing the layout. Among the changes were the following:

• No more WoW character banner, and no more helpful Druid links.
• A new email address for you to reach me at.
• Updated reading list consisting of general gaming sites that I have been reading for a while, and some new ones that I have only recently discovered. (A few WoW sites do remain.)
  
• A listing of the podcasts that I subscribe to.
  
• A consolidation of my 'tag cloud'. I merged many similar tags to reduce the amount of WoW-centric clutter that I'd inadvertently created. It should be much more streamlined now.

If you have any blogs or podcasts that you think I'd get a kick out of, please feel free to leave a link to them in the comments. I'm still getting my feet wet here. Thanks!

My departure from World of Warcraft has left me with quite a bit of free time; no longer do I have the responsibilities that come with being a progression raider that managed to monopolize nearly three years of my online time.

While I do not begrudge the experience, I do recognize that Warcraft had one very negative impact on me: it dominated my gaming time to the point where I could not finish other games, and outright avoiding playing games that I'd normally love. In the past I have been a very dedicated to the games I choose to buy; unless I absolutely hated a game I would play it through to the end at least once. Warcraft changed all that......

I went through my catalog of games last night just to see the trail of destruction left in the wake of World of Warcraft. Here is a list of games that I purchased within the past three years and never completed:

Xenosaga (PS2) - A solid sci fi RPG with gorgeous cinematics. Abandoned before I got to disk two, although I loved the story.

Final Fantasy XII (Ps2) - To my shame I never reached the halfway point in this game; the Final Fantasy franchise has long been a favorite of mine, and despite not liking the auto-pilot combat in this version, I remember getting into the story before I "ran out of time" to play it.

Radiata Stories (PS2) - A game my wife bought for us to play together that we somehow never started. Oops.

Fable (PC) - I have twice started this game and then set it aside for WoW. TWICE. I have a huge problem re-starting a game from where I left off, so if I complete this game it will have to be a fresh run. Maybe I'll play as an evil bastard this next time.

Zak and Wiki (Wii) - An amazing puzzler that my wife and I played to death for a while before setting the game aside on the (presumably) last level. We really need to finish this.

Final Fantasy: Rings of Fate (DS) - Abandoned half way. I tried to play it a few weeks ago, but I couldn't remember what I was doing or even how to play.

Spore (PC) - I successfully got my species into space, and then promptly never played again despite being very intrigued to see how the game ended.

Call of Duty: World at War (Wii) - An impulse buy that I played a level and a half of. I'm not a huge shooter fan, but I have a fascination for war history, and this game is very gritty.

Dragon Quest V (DS) - A great remake of a classic JRPG that I was never able to play given that the original was only released in Japan. I believe that I'm halfway through, but I only play my DS immediately before bed, and my late night raids competed for time with this game.

As if this series of failures isn't bad enough, the list of games that I did not buy due to my Warcraft addiction is probably dozens long. Bioshock, Mass Effect, and Fallout 3 rank high amongst the games that I would have / should have / could have bought - but there are so many more I've looked at on the shelves of the local gaming stores.

I started playing Spore again a few nights ago (I created a new species from the cell stage, of course) and will see if I can play it all the way through. Hopefully WoW hasn't ruined single player gaming for me.

Last week I wrote about the curious trend amongst single-game bloggers to publish their work anonymously. The reasons I cited for using these masks could be considered to be fairly negative - they all centered around various forms of fear or distrust. My own reason for blogging under the 'Karthis' moniker was much more tame: I was simply following the lead of the big WoW bloggers that preceded me.

As readers pointed out, there are two other compelling reasons why single-game MMO bloggers may choose to write using their in-game name instead of their real name:

Immersion - Writing in the guise of your in-game persona allows you a much tighter connection to the virtual world that your blog was created to discuss. Stories can be told without needing to context-switch, and if you have any sort of roleplaying tendencies then they can flow naturally. Clearly this does not work for some blogs - highly technical articles on game mechanics already snap the reader out of the game experience - but for others it works perfectly.

Credibility - If an author's game of choice has an out-of-game method for viewing characters, like the World of Warcraft Armory, then presenting your character as the central figure of your blog allows visitors the opportunity to view your gear, achievements, etc. Using Of Teeth and Claws as an example, I routinely advised people how to play a feral Druid both in general and for specific fights. By making my toon name (and server) available, readers were free to view at first my gear ("yup, he has epics from Black Temple!"), and then with the advent of the achievement system, all of the bosses that I had downed and fights I had mastered. By writing as 'Karthis', I could provide irrefutable proof that I had accomplished what I said I had done.

So in closing I admit that I was wrong: writing a single-game blog under an alias need not only be a defensive strategy - it also has a couple of positive benefits as well.

For the past few years I have almost exclusively played World of Warcraft while one of my good buddies has been plugged into EVE Online. We both started playing our respective MMOs at roughly the same time, but for whatever reason kept our obsessions hidden from each other for a month or two, by which point we were deeply invested in startlingly different games.

Along the way Bill and I have taken turns sniping at each other's game of choice - the target audience for EVE Online does not naturally gravitate towards playing World of Warcraft, and vice versa. The battle lines are clear: sci fi versus fantasy, hardcore PvP versus hardcore PvE, sandbox versus guided tour, and the list goes on and on.

The recent cancellation of my World of Warcraft account has blessed me with much more free time, and so instead of engaging in drive-by criticism based more on hearsay than actual fact and experience, I had Bill fire me a 21-day buddy pass and dove into the EVE universe head first.

I have now played approximately six hours of EVE Online split evenly across the past three days - at this point I feel comfortable enough to pass along my first impressions of the game.

Where I'm coming from
Over the course of my gaming career I have played games set in all sorts of environments, however my favorite are those that incorporate elements of fantasy or steampunk. This is not to say that I don't appreciate a good space game: I loved Master of Orion and it's sequel (although MOO3 was a bust), Spore's space phase is good fun, and Alpha Centauri was excellent. Still, when looking for new games to play, space games are often not near the top of my list and usually get passed over for something more medieval.

Another concern is my approach to loss while gaming. To be blunt, I'm far more of a carebear than I am hardcore PvPer - even WoW's safe PvP failed to interest me at all. I have played plenty of MUDs and browser-based games with harsh death penalties to know that dying and losing hours (or worse) of hard work is not my idea of fun. What's worse, EVE Online seems to encourage players to behave badly towards each other - the cutthroat political metagame sounds downright vicious.


Needless to say I have approached my 21-day trial with a great deal of skepticism, and have a hard time thinking that I will ever enjoy a game this far outside of my comfort zone.

New player experience: the anti-tutorial
If there is one tidbit that every new player joining EVE Online should be made aware of it is that the game does not have a learning curve.... it has a learning cliff. This isn't a lighthearted fantasy romp you will be getting into; EVE is a number-crunching, excruciatingly complex, information overloaded, pop-up window-fest.

With this in mind it pays to do a bit tonne of reading prior to even downloading the game client. Personally I read the entire Hammer's Eve newbie guide which focuses on transitioning a WoW player into EVE, and thus uses a lot of familiar concepts to help explain the game play. I also had a few years of Bill's obsessed ramblings to ground me and give me a solid grasp of the fundamental concepts.

Like most games (both single player and MMO), EVE Online comes pre-packaged with a built in tutorial, dubbed the New Player Experience (NPS), that is offered to new pilots when they first log into the game. Unlike most games, the EVE's in-game tutorial is largely useless and sometimes even downright misleading.

Some examples of the frustration that I have encountered:

1. The only method of movement that the tutorial ever explains is autopilot. Unfortunately this is the slowest way to travel from system to system.
2. Use of the combat overview - which I'm told is the lifeblood of EVE players - is never mentioned. (You are told how to configure it, but never how to interpret the data or use it in a fight.)
3. Buying and selling goods is not covered (at least not if you choose to follow a military career path.)
4. The tutorial asks you to train two skills without giving any prompt on which might be useful to a rookie pilot.
5. New skill acquisition is not taught. (Hint: you need to buy skill books in the market.)
   
6. You are given a skill to train, then shortly thereafter you are asked to use items that require the skill to be completely trained.... except unless you're extremely slow the ten minutes required to fully learn the skill will not have elapsed, and thus you need to AFK for five minutes while training completes.
7. The tutorial hands you skill books for skills you've already trained.

I could go on.

With such a terrible new player experience, it is little wonder the the vast majority of the 1500-2000 trial accounts online at any given time never convert into long term EVE Online subscribers. The developers have really done themselves a disservice by making a rookie's young career a frustrating and confusing experience.

Combat: the numbers game
Over my short time in EVE I have developed a love/hate relationship with the combat system that the game uses.


On one hand it is simple and streamlined which allows the important decisions to be made at the tactical level instead of within the minute execution of an attack sequence. At the same time, however, EVE combat feels slow (relative to fantasy MMOs) and the overview-oriented implementation forces the player to look at the GUI elements instead of his ship, leading to a feeling of detachment.

Combat in EVE Online is neither PvE nor PvP - instead it is PvI: Player versus Interface.

Although the tutorial goes out of its way to avoid telling you this, the only sane way to engage your enemies is to use the Overview control (upper right corner of the screen) to select, approach, lock on, and destroy your opponents. While it is technically possible to perform all of these actions on the playing field, you need to be able to repeatedly right-click a fast moving tiny red plus sign on your screen and issue orders through the menus that appear. Headaches will ensue after a few minutes of attempting to play in this manner.

Unfortunately, by focusing on the overview all of the time you end up missing the space battle that you are fighting. All of the gorgeous graphics are wasted when a player is forced to stare at a text list 90% of the time. I find that this leads to me caring less about my ship and my enemies, and instead concentrating only on the numbers.


Furthermore, World of Warcraft players may have a hard time adapting to the pace of an EVE battle. Whereas in WoW I clicked a button roughly once every 1.5 seconds (the length of the melee global cooldown), in EVE Online destroying a ship consists of only a few clicks: pick a distance to orbit/maintain, lock on, enable gun(s), enable defense(s). Once all of those steps are followed, combat plays out on its own and it feels like there is precious little that you can do to change the outcome of the fight (whether or not this is true depends on the complexity of the battle, I assume).

That all said, while I detested the combat system at first, I find myself slowly making peace with it. Playing with numbers can be fun if that's your thing, and I'm not completely against it. It helps that as a player acquires bigger ships (two are provided in the military career quest) the number of offensive and defensive options increases. It's still not the frenetic pace and split-second decisions that made playing a feral Druid so exciting, but it's not entirely bad either.

Missions
EVE Online is not a PvE game, but like all MMORPGs it does supply some single player missions for solo pilots to run - they do, however, feel like an afterthought most of the time.

Newbie pilots are guided into one of three possible career quest lines: industry, trade, or military. I selected the military mission arc, which ended up being a linear series of ten quests that slowly unravelled a story of Minmitar agent gone rogue. Not bad, but not terribly engaging either.


In general quests will have a completion reward and a bonus reward for finishing quickly - so far the bonus timers have been roughly 1.5 hours in length (which is about 1.4 hours too long for the bonuses to pose serious challenges). In addition, some quests also grant you a reward simply for accepting the quest, which is a nice touch.

My major complaint with questing in EVE is that the missions make no attempt to introduce interesting game mechanics outside of the "kill 10 rats", "deliver this foozle to Joebob", and "go to this destination".

Another minor quibble is that the act of looting the wrecks (corpses) of the NPC ships that you blow up is an excruciatingly tedious process - you need to get close to each wreck, open it up, and drag the items from the wreck into your cargo hold; it's about ten times more painful than it sounds due to the distances between wrecks.

In the end, if you buy into the pure sandbox/PvP model that EVE Online is based on then the lack of engaging PvE content may be considered forgivable. Unfortunately since it forms the core of the introductory content that fresh pilots experience, more care should have been put into making the missions varied and interesting. Players unable to find a good group of people to play with will probably burn out on the PvE content extremely quickly - there is simply no apparent depth to the system.

Group Play
A couple of nights ago Flyv resurrected his old EVE Online account and joined me for a couple of hours of gaming. He had played the game for more than a year before joining World of Warcraft, and so had a character that was extremely advanced compared to my own.

In most MMOs this character gap would pose a problem - the level difference would have made it a waste of time for us to group. Thankfully EVE's level-free system shines here, and my two day old character lost nothing when Flyv and I created a fleet (group) to go hunt pirates.

Of course, the fleet experience wasn't all sunshine and rainbows - in fact trying to complete quests together turned out to be more work instead of less. Grouped players in EVE Online do not share quest progress; when both Flyv and I picked up the exact same mission, we had to complete it twice in order for both of us to turn it in... even when the quest was to kill a unique NPC! This was frustrating to say the least.

Another wrinkle was that pilots in EVE Online require training in a specific skill in order to form a fleet.... so I was unable to initiate the group, Flyv had to be the one to do it. Apparently this has advantages down the line - well trained fleet leaders convey bonuses to members of their group - however for new players trying to trial the game with their buddies it is a worthless obstacle.

Where do I go from here?
After three days of playing EVE Online I am feeling a lot better about the game than I was after day one, but I remain unconvinced that I want to continue with the game past my 21-day trial period, even on a casual basis.

There remain three big unknowns out there still, none of which can be rushed along:

1. Will I enjoy EVE Online PvP?
2. Will I find a Corp and enjoy being a member?
3. How will I react to losing a ship and the time investment that was wrapped up in it?
   

Only time will answer any of these.


For now I have set myself some small personal goals, and have a reasonable idea of a activity that I'd like to pursue to make some ISK (cash). I guess I'll just take the game one session at a time and see how it goes.

If you're an EVE Online player and see my in game, feel free to send me a message.... my character name is 'Sei Gun'. (Bonus points to anyone who can figure out the meaning of the name.... )

Observant readers probably noticed that my last article was signed 'Andrew' instead of the 'Karthis' alias that has adorned the previous 309 posts. With the change in blog focus I have decided that continuing to hide behind my Warcraft character name is no longer required, and really does not make a lot of sense either. I'll never reuse the name, so why continue to tie it to my identity?

A few episodes ago (ep. 45), the cast of Shut Up We're Talking delved into the issue of blogger privacy and discussed the various reasons why certain authors choose to hide behind a pseudonym, while others make no effort to conceal their real name and/or other personal information.

Of Teeth and Claws is the third blog that I have written, and the only one that I every used an alias for. My previous two blogs (one sports-related, and another political in nature) were written under my full name with no effort made to hide anything. In fact, since I owned my own domain for one of the blogs, a simple WHOIS query was enough to reveal my address and telephone number. Despite this - and despite writing confrontational articles on a frequent basis - I had no problems with my contact information being out there for the entire world to see.

So all of this begs the question: why did I hide behind the 'Karthis' alias for nearly three years? The answer, I suppose, is convention: all of the major World of Warcraft blogs that existed when I waded into the WoW blogosphere were authored by players using their in-game character names, and so to fit in I just followed along blindly.

This trend of anonymity has continued; I cannot think of a single prominent WoW blogger than writes under their real name - in fact, I cannot think of any single-game authors that go by their real name - privacy seems to reign supreme. (WoW Insider stands as a notable exception, however they are trying to be a professional-caliber news site instead of a blog.)

As discussed by the SWUT crew, the reasons for someone wanting privacy are varied. Off the top of my head, some of the major ones are:

• Gaming is not seen as a "professional" pastime, and in the age where prospective employers Google their interviewees sometimes it is better to be safe than sorry.
• The Internet contains some freaky people, and gaming culture can bring out the worst in the best of them. No one wants a crazy fanboy stalking them in real life.
  
• Parents want to protect their kids from the above freaks.

I can understand and even sympathize with some of there concerns, however personally I am more than happy to shrug off my 'Karthis' persona and resume blogging as myself. So here we go.....

I canceled my World of Warcraft subscription yesterday.

Those of you who have followed this blog for more than a year will realize that this is not the first time that I've stopped playing - last year in late April I took a summer-long break before returning to the game, revitalized. Whereas last spring I didn't recognize the signs of burnout until I was actively avoiding the game (and thus left all my readers hanging out to dry), this year it is all too obvious.

I haven't logged on except to raid in weeks, if not months. On raid nights I log in thirty minutes before start time, and leave immediately when the raid wraps up. Despite an awesome response to my PvP question, I just can't bring myself to log in and try it out - I sit down with full intentions of playing, but then fail to double click the WoW shortcut to launch the game. I read about the game more than I actually play it. I get angry at a lot of the WoW news I read.

What went wrong?
I don't want to turn this into a World of Warcraft bashing session, but I would at least like to take a post-mortem of why I'm finding so much less joy in the game that I have in the past.

1. Change in end game target audience. One of the key design goals of Wrath of the Lich King was to make the raiding end game "more accessible" to the player base. This involved removing attunements, creating intentionally easy encounters, and nerfing anything that came across as too difficult. As I have been told repeatedly when I complained about this shift in focus, I'm living in the past when I state that I want the TBC end game back - WoW has moved past that model and is now something different. Fair enough, I guess, but this new game is not the World of Warcraft that I loved.

While Que Sera Sera has not finished Ulduar (we are working on Mimiron), the end is three to four weeks away at most. After that point, all that is left is the hard modes, and I simply cannot get excited about those encounters because they present nothing new. In many cases it's just "kill faster", "heal harder", and "screw up less". Unique encounters suck me in.... rehashed encounters push me away.

2. Achievements instead of content. Since it was introduced, the achievement system has failed to grab me in the way that it has for many people. Unfortunately, achievements are now one of the core game mechanics in World of Warcraft, and are used by Blizzard to tempt people to do the same content over and over again.

Instead of creating challenging (heroic) dungeons that take time, skill, and effort to complete we have trivial 5-mans that contain tough achievements. Instead of engaging, time-consuming questlines that span Northernd we have exploration achievements. Instead of truly difficult raid content we have relatively easy fights that can be tough only if you strive for the achievements. The problem here is that if you don't like achievements, all of this planned replayability is lost on you.

3. Removal of attunements. In the past content has been gated by a series of attunements, which represented plateaus that players had to achieve in order to enter certain content. While not a perfect system by any stretch of the imagination, this forced players to experience one tier of content before moving on to the next and had the effect of slowing down progression.

From the view of bettering your character, the complete disappearance of attunements means that there is literally no valid reason to run any pre-raid content. If you're a good player the gear you gain from questing is sufficent to get you through Naxxramas, and loot upgrades fall like rain in that instance. This speeds the game up, and leads to faster burn out of raid-minded players.

4. No reason to farm. In the lead up to Wrath of the Lich King I farmed 5,000 gold so that I could purchase gear to help me get into raids faster. I shouldn't have bothered - by the time I was finished with the Northrend quests I had 25,000 gold in my pockets - and months later that total has only been reduced to 21,000.

While I never truly enjoyed farming, it was a necessary evil that I took as part of being a raider. I would fly around the Outlands herbing while chatting with guildmates for a few hours every week, and that would see me through the two or three raids that I wanted to attend. With so much gold I have zero motivation to farm - I'm not like The Greedy Goblin, amassing gold for the sake of it - I only obtain gold to use it for raiding.

To sum it up, the game has changed in such a way that I am no longer in the target audience.

What now?
First and foremost, this blog isn't going anywhere - I will be leaving all of the Druid information online because I still get a great deal of traffic through Google searches, and I hope that the articles people are led to are truly useful to them.

Over the next week or so I will probably play around with the blog's format a little bit, and start the transition from a WoW-centric blog to a general gaming blog. I've tried to go without blogging before (this is my fourth) and it just doesn't work for long.

So - you're welcome to stay on board for the ride, however if all you were here for was feral Druid news then I'll totally understand if you visit far less often; it's been an honor having you here while it lasted - I mean that.

Thanks to everyone for all of the questions, comments, and feedback over the past few years - it's been a blast. Now it's time for a change.....

I have nothing original to write about today for a variety of reasons, but I do have a pair of links to share.

I have never been shy about discussing how little enjoyment I get from World of Warcraft's PvP system - as a feral Druid it always felt like an exercise in self torture.  In fact, the only way I was able to tolerate the small amount of PvP that was mandatory for T6 raiders during The Burning Crusade was to strap on some healing gear.  Perhaps this was because I sucked, or maybe ferals were ill suited to battlegrounds - but either way it always left a bad taste in my mouth.

Flyv has already written a pretty good strategy guide for tanking Hodir as a feral Druid, but I just wanted to add a couple of suggestions that will ensure that your raid's melee classes love you.

Bird's eye view is best for Hodir - click to enlarge

A few times a month a reader sends me an email asking about the rotation used to obtain maximum threat as a feral bear while single target tanking. I cut my teeth on these sorts of questions back in 2007 (hell, I was downright obsessed with threat math), but have really not felt the need to write about them since WotLK was released. Simply put, before Ulduar threat was not a concern on all but a few encounters - tank threat generation blew away DPS threat by miles even with a poor rotation. Thankfully as DPS gears up that seems to be changing.

Auriaya is the crazy cat lady of Ulduar, and the first boss to stop my guild dead in its tracks despite a full night's work on her (pre-nerf). She roams the Observation Ring immediately behind Kologarn's platform and is accompanied by four nasty feline companions.

As many of you who followed my advice and installed RoguePowerBars have probably noticed, the add-on went flaky when patch 3.1 landed. It would still work - sometimes - however more often than not it was practically useless during a boss encounter.