Be Excellent To Each Other

EVE?

'Oooh look a planet! And another one! It looks just the same as all the others. Oh yes and there's an asteroid, I might do some mining.'

In WoW, you follow some one else's story. In EVE, you write your own. In some one else's blood.

Which is great if you like PvP, but I don't, which kind of made EVE a bit of a busted flush for me, even though I gave it a very substantial crack of the whip. (And even bought a 2560x1440 27 inch monitor to get the UI under control.)

Hey cool, I just saw this intelligent quip from Hearthly's link. You're super-clever myp.

I managed to play on a laptop.....

The next expansion for this game is imminent, so I've decided to take a gamble on Blizzard not repeating the travesty of the pandas. (I quit the game last December, the pandas were fucking shit.)

As such I've dropped £34.99 to pre-order the Warlords of Draenor expansion (released in November), and £27.60 for a three month subscription - I reinstalled the game over the weekend.

There's nothing new to do from when I last played in December 2013 (which is very poor), but there's always a period of re-familiarisation to go through anyway, and I've been enjoying breaking myself back in with some tanking on my Paladin, I left him at Level 88 so I'll get him to 90 before WoD is released.

It's like a comfortable old pair of slippers, although I'll be maintaining my Hearthstone activity as well.

Even you must chuckle at your OTT meltdown in retrospect?

It was hardly a meltdown. I was happy playing the game, writing my own story if you like, before Mali decided he wanted to set a load of EVE trolls on me to fuck up what I was doing. As he wasn't actually playing the game, he wanted to live vicariously through my experience by trying to make me become a 0-sec pirate or some shit. It was a dick move in the extreme.

Since those aforementioned trolls immediately start to stalk their target both and on off the game, it seemed very logical at the time to remove myself and my previous EVE posts about my play, area, tactics etc. from the thread here.

At which point Grim... decided to add his name to the mega-dick list by further incentivising my in-game harassment with some kind of reward for my death. All in the name of further trolling and upsetting me.

So you might regard the incident as an hilarious meltdown on my part, but I don't really think I came off as the worst person in the exchange.

None of it came to anything in the end because:

a) At that point I was basically only logging in to flip skill training anyway.
b) The harassment negated my enjoyment of the game to the point I stopped playing it.

Bravo all round. Chuckle chuckle chuckle.

[edit]Shh, Grim...

Oh go on, you know you want to. I won't be offended if you say mean things to me.

So then, WoW, eh?

New expansion coming!

I really can't be arsed. I was vaguely tempted, but then thought on quite how much effort it would take to get up and running again, redo all my mods I used, learn everything etc... All the while paying for the privilege, all that done while I can only dedicate a few hours a week to it these days.

I don't think I could gather any enthusiasm to go back to WoW. I am however enjoying what I've played of Guild Wars 2 (I picked it up while it was half price at the weekend after the "free week" thingy).

I'm sure I'll get bored of it after a month or so like I do with most MMOs but so far I like what I've seen, there always seems something to do and most importantly no trekking backwards and forwards as once you've explored somewhere you can fast travel there.

I don't think I have the time to get in WoW. I think if I'd caught hold of it when I was a student I could have put down poor degree results to that, but I avoided it even back then because I knew that's what it would be like. Now the prospect of playing anything for such a concerted amount of time just seems like too much grind. Too many quests, too much catching up to do. At least playing cards is usually a 10 minute commitment.

Well I've left it alone for fully ten months and haven't felt the urge to return at all literally until the last seven days, a couple of the chaps never quit, and a couple of the other chaps have recently got back into it, so we were talking around getting together a 5-man team to take on the new expansion and work our way through the instances as a team, on-level with marginal gear, to really challenge ourselves a bit.

From there we can do the heroic versions and then the challenge modes.

I can't imagine me getting MASSIVELY INTO IT like I did in the past, not least because it's vying for time with Hearthstone, but it was rather pleasant to log back in, have a look through my characters, and have a little potter about, before queuing my Pally up for a bit of tanking.

At £8 per month it's not hugely expensive, even if I won't be putting in the hours I used to. Even when I'm not playing the game I do maintain an interest in it, and by all accounts Blizzard have realised the pandas were a horrendous misstep and they're trying to get back to a real fire and brimstone vibe for Warlords of Draenor.

Make no mistake though, if they've done a pandas again I'll be out of there pretty damn sharpish.

Did a few panda five mans with the group last night - (we've been playing games online together since forever, one of the chaps I raced in the original Codemaster TOCA using a direct modem-to-modem to connection, would have been back in about 1997!) - and it was good fun.

No real challenge as two of them were endgame geared 90s, (it was just an XP boost for two of us to ding 90), but it was nice to play as a group again, have a laugh together, take the piss a bit, and so on. (We were all on our Teamspeak server.)

TBH I'd have no interest in the game were it not for the fact it's looking good for us having a pretty solid group of 5-6 people to do stuff with, so going into the new expansion we can do it all together, which is particularly handy when you're learning new instances and suchlike. (And it completely removes the trash-talk kiddies you can get in LFG from the equation.)

I'd also forgotten what a damn pretty game it is, and this is before the graphics engine upgrade hits in the next patch.

The pre-expansion patch is now live, and by crikey Blizzard have shaken the game by the scruff of its neck once again. (Whilst the expansion isn't live yet, the major class changes, gear changes, stat squish etc etc are all live, so there's a bit of time to get acclimatised to them. There's a pre expansion quest chain to go through, and on top of that there's a new Level 90 dungeon to have a crack at.)

Graphics engine has had an update too, and character models have been improved, a 25 man raid really is something of a thing of beauty.

The changes are so massive and wide-ranging it's hard to know what to single out for some attention, so because I'm lazy....

An official Blizzard video here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsjBrL5qw4U

Plus the official patch 'notes' here which really is like fucking War & Peace, but quite a good read if you're into that sort of thing - http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/156825 ... 10-13-2014

Big changes though, to the extent it's hard to believe some of the stuff they've seen fit to toss overboard, but having given the game a reasonable amount of play under the new system, I'm liking it.

Not a massive amount to do in all fairness until the expansion hits, but me and the chaps are really looking forward to it, WoW may be about to start to get interesting again, after the fucking abomination of the pandas.....

Eurogamer still haven't reviewed the WoD expansion for some bizarre reason but it has made one of their games of the year, so I'll direct you to the excellent write-up by Oli Welsh there - http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014- ... of-draenor

Me and the chaps have been back into the game since the expansion launched on November 13th so we've had over six weeks at it now, which I think is time enough to form a decent opinion about the game in its current state. (It should be noted here that we started playing in Burning Crusade so whilst we technically missed vanilla the original vanilla zones were still untouched in Burning Crusade so in that regard we've pretty much been there since the start.)

To avoid going TL:DR I'd say that WoW has never been better than it is now in WoD, it's like the atrocity of the pandas never happened and the game is right back to its fire and brimstone roots, in fact, it's arguably as good as the Lich King expansion, and that's saying something.

The Draenor zones are great fun to quest through, I levelled one of my characters from 90 to 100 exclusively through questing so I saw every new zone to completion, to the extent that I finished off the final zone despite having dinged 100 with loads of quest chains left to complete, because I wanted to see how it all panned out.

The dungeons are pitched somewhere between Cata and LK difficulty I'd say, normal modes can be pretty challenging, heroics can be brutal, and challenge modes demand a very together group (you can't really get golds with randoms, it needs a good guild or friend group). Looking For Raid remains a bit of a clusterfuck IMO, you just have to look at it as a loot machine, normal raids however offer a solid and substantial challenge.

Professions have been massively overhauled in conjunction with the new garrisons. Every character gets their own Level 1 garrison at the end of the opening quest chain at Level 90, and as you level up to 100 you can upgrade the garrison to Level 2 and then 3, and within the garrison you can create a number of buildings of your choice to assist with professions, gear, or just stuff for fun like the Goblin Workshop which produces a new invention every day to have a play about with. You also get your own mine and herb garden which has basically rendered the gathering professions dead in the water and destroyed the gold farmers.

TBH the garrison is pretty much a whole game within a game so I'll not bang on about it too much here, sufficed to say there's a whole section dedicated to it at Icy Veins. One of the results however is that you can 'do' all the professions to an extent without actually being trained in the profession, so for example if you make an Alchemy Lab in your garrison you can issue work orders for potions and flasks even if you don't have the Alchemy profession.

(The long and short of it is that garrisons allow near total self-sufficiency for just about everything, albeit with time-gating, so if you're not one for getting involved with the economy of the game and the auction house, you don't have to. But those things are still there for folks who like them.)

For someone who doesn't like MMOs I can't see the new expansion converting anyone to the cause, at its heart it's still an MMO with MMO mechanics, but for folks who do like the genre but have fallen out with WoW and/or other MMOs over the years, I'd say that WoW in its current iteration is as good as it's ever been.

We've got a fairly fluid group of six/seven people but we always manage to get together a five-man group for Saturday nights and we're putting ourselves up against the heroic and challenge mode dungeons with gear that's 'just good enough' to really push ourselves, and thoroughly enjoying it. Besides that we're doing regular tourist runs through old raid content for achievements, mounts, transmog gear and stuff like that.

I was so disappointed with the pandas that I wasn't keen on returning for WoD but was eventually talked into it, so I agreed to give it a go but with the disclaimer that if it didn't really impress me, I was going to be straight back out again. Now six weeks into the expansion I very much suspect I'll be fully subbed up for its entire duration and keen to see next one too.

As a final note the game has put on over three million subscribers since the expansion launched, to take it back over ten million again for the first time in a long time.

A new first for me in the game, over 100K in gold earned totally without any gold-buying shenanigans. (I previously peaked at around 40K.)

I came into this expansion totally skint, having sold all the gold I had on my account to a mate before quitting last time. (I was basically playing for free a lot of the time, as every time I earned 10-30K I'd sell it for £8-£10 per 10K to one of my mates who was playing the game, as they didn't do the whole economy side of the game but still wanted gold, so that paid for a decent chunk of my subs.)

Obviously in-game inflation has ramped up again with the new expansion, but 100K is still a pretty substantial chunk of gold, if one were to purchase that much gold from a commercial gold seller you'd be looking at £50-£60, with potentially lengthy delivery times too.

With my current set up I can do maybe 50K-60K per month (it's taken me a while to get it all refined and sorted out, but I'm running at nearly full chat now across four level 100 characters, and my time investment per day for this is around 20 minutes on average), and a 'cash rich time poor' mate has offered to take 100K off me every time I get that much for £60, so I'll be playing the game for free and actually have some cash left over too!

As such this 104K will be back down to practically bugger all very shortly, but I'm churning out 2-3K profit per day so it'll build back up again fairly sharpish.

It's finally happened, Blizzard are now selling gold! (Well, they will be shortly.)

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/181411 ... n-3-2-2015

I don't see a problem with this in all honesty, gold selling already exists but it's illegitimate and dodgy, there's no good reason for Blizz not to just do it themselves.

I'm very curious to see what the price ends up at though, they need to compete with the gold sellers and at the moment £15 gets you 20K, so it'll need to be in that sort of ballpark.

I might give wow another go for a bit, if there are any deals going at the moment for getting a subscriber back into the game?

I don't think there are any deals as such, there's Recruit-A-Friend of course but that's aimed at new accounts.

The WoD expansion will set you back £35 from the Blizzard Store but you may be able to get cheaper elsewhere I suppose. (It comes with a Level 90 boost.)

Also the subs went up last November, £9.99 per month now (a bit less if you go for 3 or 6 months at a time.)

It's a good expansion and worth taking a look IMO, definitely a lot better than the pandas, not as good as Wrath (but then that was a stunning expansion which I doubt will be bettered), probably about as good as Cataclysm.

I've eased up on it a lot as I got four raid geared 100s, but Mrs Hearthly and Hearthly Jnr have their own accounts now so the three of us are playing it together which has given the game a whole new flavour for me - Hearthly Jnr in particular is enthralled by the game.

There is a 10 day trial of WoD. That'll either be enough, or get me back into it

What (if any) are the limitations on the trial? Can you do all the garrison stuff and what-not?

Do you have a Level 90 you can start with straight away on the Draenor zones?

Unfortunately not, as I skipped MoP. I have a few 85s to play with.
I know MoP was a bit crap, but it'll give me an idea about all the new skill and tree stuff they did that I missed.

The pandas seem to be very popular with women and children, if my family are anything to go by.

Splendid music though.

Skills/talents/glyphs have all been much simplified, as has the stats on gear.

Hmmm... Installed, loaded it up, stood there in Org... and just could't be arsed. So I turned it off.

I guess that tells me everything I need to know!

Well if you've no friends or family active in the game I guess it'd be hard to get motivated. At any given time I've got a few mates playing the game and am in an active guild, plus with Mrs Hearthly and Hearthly Jnr playing now that's a whole new layer of stuff to do as well.

So yes, my reaction would probably be the same if logged into a server, all alone

Next expansion has been announced, ('LEGION'), and for one I'll be glad to see it as after a very promising start WoD turned out to be a bit crap.

The questing through the zones was fantastic, and the first batch of dungeons were superb. It just turns out that they were, erm, the only dungeons.... Yes we got Mythic difficulty but there was nothing like the later-expansion dungeons that we got in Wrath and Cataclysm. They did open up the final questing zone of Tanaan Jungle but after a decent opening quest line that turned out to be nothing more than rep grinds via dailies, very dull - I didn't even bother with them.

Timewalking dungeons have been added, and they are on one hand a cynical way of recycling old content, but it has been fun to revisit previous expansions' dungeons and play them 'on level' as it were, but with Level 100 appropriate loot.

LFR is the random clusterfuck it's always been, a nice way to see raid content but as ever, only about half the raid only need to know what they're doing to progress, I find tough five-mans more challenging and interesting. Then again I have neither the time or the inclination to commit to a proper raiding guild or calendar, so LFR is at least a doorway to the content.

The garrisons ultimately ended up being a rather tedious grind, and sucked the life out of a lot of the rest of the economy, the shipyards were more of the same, except with boats. (It also led to a lot of players simply living in their garrisons, which are instanced away from the rest of the world, so the cities were a lot emptier.) They were very lucrative though, I earned something in the region of 500,000 gold out of mine before I couldn't even be bothered with that any more.

I haven't been playing in any serious capacity for months, but have retained my account to play with Mrs Hearthly and Hearthly Jnr as they're still having loads of fun with the game and Hearthly Jnr hasn't even got a character to Level 100 yet.

We're going to need three copies of the expansion, Hearthly Jnr is eyeing up the digital deluxe edition as she wants the pets and mounts, so that'll be £50 + £35 + £35 (!) on top of the £30 per month we're paying for the subs on three accounts.... Blizz are already doing the pre-order even though it's not out until next September.

The subscriber numbers say it all, after peaking at just over 10 million in the wake of the expansion's launch, they've plummeted to 5.5 million and Blizz now say they won't report the numbers from now on. (Although 5.5 million active subscribers is still a very healthy number overall.)

I'd bet on the game having at least another decade in it yet though.

The current expansion LEGION has been with us for a while now, and it's really good.

We've got three accounts on the go (me, Mrs, Jnr) so that's £30 per month, and it was £35 per head for the expansion itself as well. I am freeloading Hearthstone extra-hard to try and compensate a bit.

In some regards it's 'more WoW' but they have made some bold design choices. For example all the Level 100-110 content now dynamically scales to your level, so whereas in previous expansions there'd be a clear zone progression to get from the previous level cap to the new level cap - (and zones you were over-level for were rendered trivial, and under-level for effectively inaccessible) - now you can do the zones in any order you want and they just scale to your level. (The loot drops scale too, so you're always getting meaningful drops or rewards from quests.)

This carries over to the dungeons as well, so instead of a dungeon dropping off your list as you become too high level for it, you can cheerfully make a group of five people with levels of between 100-110 (there's a minimum gear level required at Level 100), and it chucks you into the dungeon together, and you all see appropriately scaled baddies for your level, which take and deal appropriate damage. (As per the open world stuff, the loot drops scale too, so you're always getting meaningful drops or rewards from quests.)

One way of looking at this is you're all basically just 'Level 1' as the game dynamically scales its content around you, as if you were a Level 1 character doing Level 1 quests, but we're all very much of the opinion that it's a great change.

At Level 110 there is a specific zone to go to, a load of Level 110 quests and dungeons and raids and so on, which you can gear up for and ultimately overgear in the traditional sense, but the overall levelling experience to get to that point is much improved. (The first major content patch to add new stuff for 110s has already landed, and Blizzard are promising a far better management of this aspect of the game than they did in Dreanor, and have held their hands up to having made a mistake in that regard.)

It's been great for our group because historically we've had to say stuff like 'Everyone get to at least 92 for Saturday, but no higher than 94' - whereas now it really doesn't matter, we can just rock up with any character we like between 100 and 110, and run dungeons together.

Quite dramatically, weapon drops, craftable weapons etc have effectively been removed from the game, every Level 100 now gets an 'Artifact Weapon' questline to complete, and the resulting weapon then levels with them from 100-110 and then beyond that in terms of iLevel, and there's a unique 'currency' called Artifact Weapon Power to customise it.

Excellently, not only is there a unique artifact questline for every class, but for every spec of every class too, so the early game at the start of levelling from 100 is different every time. (You can go on to complete the two other spec questlines, and get the other artifact weapons, from Level 102.)

The garrisons have gone, to be replaced with an 'Order Hall, which is a bit like a garrison but has loads of other players in it of your class. The mission and follower system has been massively streamlined too, on the 'less is more' principle and it's a far better system.

The feeling amongst us is the game is now the best its been since Wrath Of The Lich King, and that's really saying something. Whether or not Blizzard can maintain the momentum through the two year expansion cycle is another matter (Draenor started off incredibly strongly but lost itself with an absolute drought of content from the mid-point onwards), but we shall see.

I'd recommend giving it a go, it still runs really nicely on a lower-spec PC, Jnr's i5+750Ti can handle it at 1920x1200 with settings at about '8 of 10' and maintain 50-60FPS most of the time - so you don't need a mega-PC to have a try.

Black Friday sale sort of thing now available on the full WoW game less the latest expansion.

£4.99 gets you everything up to and including the previous expansion, Warlords of Draenor, and your first month's subscription.

Cheap way to give it a try likes.

https://eu.battle.net/shop/en/product/world-of-warcraft

Is there still a monthly subscription?

There is yes, ranging from £9.99 down to about £8.69 depending on how long you renew for.

The point with that offer is you get the entire game (less one expansion), and a month's subscription, for a fiver - which is a decent chunk of time to get a good feel for the game and whether or not you'd like to play on an ongoing basis, for really not much cash.

To be fair I would expect the game for free, if I was paying over £100 a year in subs....

Yeah, it's a disgraceful business model.

I find it substantially less disgraceful than what seems to pass for the 'AAA' games business model these days, which is to sell broken games at full price, repeatedly shunt out multi-gigabyte patches for months that may or may not fix everything, whilst selling multiple DLC bundles that add in stuff that should have arguably been present at launch, with an extra layer of micro-transactions added in for extra giggles.

Yes WoW costs a chunk of cash to play, but you're getting the most comprehensively and well supported game in the world for your money, that is constantly being actively developed and improved, with patches, changes, new content, and full expansions.

It has a development team that numbers in the hundreds, working full time on the game, all the time - and that isn't cheap.

So yes, to play it's a tenner a month and then £35 every two years for the next full expansion, or if you're prepared to be an expansion behind the game is a tenner (or even a fiver, as above), plus your tenner a month.

One can choose to vote with their wallets however they wish, of course

Worse than netrunner

I think you missed the point by a country mile.....

EVE has a monthly charge but the game is free to play. If I remember most MMos have that model.

it is a bit cheeky to charge £35 for an expansion as well as a monthly charge

What you have to remember with WoW is that they don't just push an expansion out of the door and then leave the game alone for two years, with everyone on the WoW team immediately starting to work on the next expansion.

The current expansion, Legion, was released at the end of the August, and has already received its first major content update, with many more in the pipeline over the life-cycle of the expansion, before the next full expansion is released (this is usually a two-year cycle, or thereabouts).

As well as these major updates, each expansion receives constant tweaks, patches, hotfixes, minor content updates, seasonal events, and so on.

If you don't mind being an expansion behind, the game is damn near free to play ('buy') (the £5 deal above is a drop from £10, so it was hardly mega-expensive beforehand), and the only ongoing charges are indeed the subscription. If you want the latest expansion then yes they do cost £35 at launch and usually for the first year or so, after which point they generally drop down to £20 and then lower as the expansion gets older.

It's hard to over-emphasise just how vast WoW really is, this is perhaps unsurprising considering the game is now over twelve years and six expansions old, but nonetheless it's a massive world to explore with a huge variety of things to do, and all of it actively and constantly curated, maintained, and improved.

I can completely understand folks looking at the headline numbers and baulking, '£35 for an expansion AND a tenner a month? Fuck off!', and that's fine, hence my suggestion that the £5 for the full game up to Draenor and including a month's subscription, might be a good way for people to investigate without a large commitment of cash, and then subsequently decide if they think it's worth continuing or not.

I've lost count of the AAA games me and my mates have tried over the years, MMOs and otherwise, with and without monthly subscriptions, and in terms of a game you can play on a long-term basis and continue to get enjoyment and satisfaction out of - nothing has ever come close to WoW.

My point is....

The subscription should be enough to keep the game going and fund expansion. There should not be a need to pay for an expansion.

My first ever legendary item, and I've been playing the game since July 2008!

Well I was quite excited at least

Six months into the new expansion and there's a consensus amongst us that the game is currently the best it's ever been.

Blizzard have really nailed the endgame now, so that even if you're not a hardcore guild raider, there's loads of stuff to do at the level cap, and there's a constant stream of new content coming onstream as well. (Blizzard admitted they fucked this up in the last expansion.) There are a load of new tools built into the game which make grouping up for world quest/group content quick and easy for when you're playing by yourself, so you'll routinely find yourself in groups doing stuff (if you want to), all the way up to 40-man groups taking down world bosses and suchlike.

Our group is currently working on 'Mythic Plus' dungeon progression, which is the hardest 5-man content in the game. Dungeon difficulty goes Normal > Heroic > Mythic > and then Mythic Plus +2, +3, +4 etc up to +11. We've currently managed a +2 run and will be attempting a +3 run later in the week.

On a family level Mrs H and H Jnr are really loving it too, and the three of us play together daily doing more 'family friendly' pursuits in keeping with H Jnr's limited tolerance for stressful situations. (She's very fond of questing and levelling, and doing some of the easier world quests to gear up at Level 110.)

None of you care, you won't install it, you won't try it, even though it's free-to-play up to Level 20. All I'll say though, is there's a really good game just going begging here.

Correct. But I do enjoy reading about it.

Christ no. I already have one MMO time and money sink and that's one too many.

I think there were probably three reasons I've never played WoW. The monthly subscription and the PC specs aren't as much of an issue now, but the last still remains - I was terrible for getting hooked on Diablo II and I think I'd be the same with this. It's bad enough that I haven't weaned myself off Binding of Isaac yet, let alone adding an RPG into the mix too.

https://motherboard.vice.com/amp/en_us/ ... pe-problem

There are often lots of people in their underwear in the Goldshire Tavern, although it's never gone as far as ejaculating Paladins in my own experience, then again we don't play on RP servers.