Confessions of a Recovering World of Warcraft Addict or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Gold Farmer…

“Hi my name is Trasken and I have played World of Warcraft.” Yes, I like the rest of the freakin’ world have played Blizzards substitute for crack. I’ve played and loved it. The world was rich with places to explore and many a wolf-pelt to collect. WoW was fun and engaging in a very specific way and this synergy has yet to have been matched by any game I have yet played. But this massively multi-player aspect of the game continues to be World of Warcraft’s greatest strength and its’ most pronounced weakness.

I have been a rabid consumer of Blizzard’s games since almost since they started making them. While I may have missed out on some Lost Vikings action, I can proudly say that I have owned every single Blizzard game that has made its way onto the Macintosh platform. I started in the winter of 1996 with Warcraft II: The Tides of Darkness. Now as a child, and a boy-child at that, who doesn’t look at a game with the sub-heading “Tides of Darkness” and just go “I must have this game.” Just say that name out loud. It just oozes cool. There were other aspects of the game that made it enjoyable, but if Blizzard went back to naming the games like they used at least some of the shortcomings would be overlooked. TIDES OF DARKNESS!!! Erm… Sorry, just a little bit of nostalgia overload. The larger point of this, if there ever was one, is that Blizzard games used to be about great story. No there wasn’t necessarily a lot there, but it was good and captivating and entertaining. There was something around the vicinity of seventy pages in the Warcraft II manual and a good half of that was dedicated to the story of Orcs and Humans.

Despite reaching its pinnacle in Warcraft III, there was a strong motif of betrayal carried through the entirety of the game. It wasn’t quite as fun as the previous game, but that is mostly because of the nuance allowed to the characters in WC III. Many people find that the story of Warcraft III was when Blizzard came off the rails and started to introduce too many different angles and reference too many different aspects of previous ideas, from Tolkien to Dungeons and Dragons. However, Warcraft III had the distinct advantage of playability and the introduction of role-playing elements into the real-time-strategy universe of Warcraft played rather well. This was all well and good considering that World of Warcraft was due out in two years after the release of the Frozen Throne expansion pack and had been under development for several years. I, and as I suspect many players, were not initially interested in the whole MMORPG concept. We had played Diablo and its’ wonderful sequel, but the prospect of always having the be online and reading about what a mess that EverQuest was in, was not terribly excited that Blizzard’s next foray into gaming was through the venue of the MMORPG.

So I was convinced that I would never buy World of Warcraft. Then several things happened in relatively short succession. Firstly, I acquired a new computer. A G4 PowerBook 12 incher. A sweet machine in its day and still kicking around doing light duty work here and there. Secondly, I moved to an establishment with a dedicated broadband connection. I will admit that the prospect of playing a game where you would have to be connected to the internet the whole time on flaky dialup did not appeal. I have since played the game on said flaky dialup and it’s really not that bad. Finally, I tried out the World of Warcraft Stress Test. For those of you who don’t remember it lasted about the last week of November of 2004 and allowed anyone who dounloaded the demo to create a character in the world of Azeroth. I was hooked in about three hours of play. In short order I had convinced I needed this game and when the Stress Test beta expired I drove out to the local Best Buy and collected a copy. It was off from there.

The experience was overwhelming and exciting at the same time. I can remember my first visit to Stormwind. So many of the little details that many players now overlook struck me as fantastic. The clock tower sounding the hour (which was correct amazing times that we live in), the hammering on the anvils in the Dwarven Quarter, hidden warlock coven in the Slaughtered Lamb, and the magnificent Stormwind Keep. Leveling and running quests was fun at first because the gathering of wolf-pelts was actually bringing clear and obvious character advancement. This is still the major strength of World of Warcraft. It is ridiculously for new players to start and have that little fuzzy feeling that they could run up the ladder quite quickly and see all of the world. Slowly the engulfing feeling of the first few zones and levels was out and the heroic player character is falling into the grind.

Still I persevered with the help of a friendly guild, but soon good story arcs and challenging, yet not impossible quest items were few and far between. The story which had so attracted me to the Warcraft universe in the first place was falling prey to repetition and the traps of many successful franchises. Blizzard didn’t know where they were coming from or often where they were going with any given story element. Thus become the grievous and often very avoidable storyline fuck-ups that only serve to aggravate the loyal and shall I say very OCD fan-base of many MMORPGs. Not to say there weren’t good stories there, but therein lies the second problem that I have with World of Warcraft; the lack of good easy to access story content.

There is no way in the Seven Hells that anyone could collect all of the particular story elements for any one of the massive quests that frame the end-game material in World of Warcraft. The dilemma then becomes, as someone who is interested in that portion of the game, how does one enjoy it? Most guilds are not going to let you lollygag around in a hard instance reading all of the books in the library or the plaques in the statuary. They want loot and at the very least to escape with minimal repair costs. Thus the only real way to experience the good story is to try to brave it solo or to find guild willing to cater to your desires. Having searched far and wide and not finding a solution that I wanted I am pretty much ready to deem this a near impossibility at this point. Even getting to see the end-game content requires more that just a successive period hammering at a mission to beat it, it requires time and effort the likes of which have never been seen before in an electronic format. To acquire keys and potions, there are an elaborate number of steps to follow and traveling half-way across the world to collect these items becomes quickly irritating. Now one could argue that there would be little point to a powerful dungeon and thus a great reward without a little bit of the epic quality to a quest that people have come to expect from Hollywood, but I say that if the main motivation for the characters is clearly not the plot then why should the game designers make the plot choose so many of its’ settings for them? Why should the key need all of these ingredients from far flung places if the only reason to do so is to further a plot which no one cares about?

And therein lies the biggest challenge for the World of Warcraft. You can’t beat the game. There is no end to it. And eventually I lose interest in even the most compelling game, even if there are new things to do and more time to waste. I say that Blizzard is fortunate that I played World of Warcraft for almost 12 months straight, that has seriously eclipsed the amount of time that I have ever spent upon any game of theirs combined. But that begs the question of what made me stop playing? The answer is trifold: Repetition, Repetition, Repetition. The dull and repetitive nature of World of Warcraft wears very thin very quickly and makes the game almost unplayable at points. Everything from quests to the crafting requires so much time upkeep that it it really is absurd the amount of time that can be easily wasted doing this. Add to this a game environment that is frozen in realtime and there really are some very unpleasant aspects to World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft is exciting and fun to play, to a point. I wholeheartedly agree with the way that Blizzard implemented the character system for early players. It encourages newbies to become a part of the game rather quickly and the interface has really simplified the actions of the new player. Based upon reports and other personal experience I believe that World of Warcraft has the best early game of any other MMORPG. But I realized that the late-game problems of the quest for the best sword and not really for the challenge of beating the best monster or coming up with a new and different way to accomplish things, leaves me waiting for Diablo III or the next off-line hack-and-slash RPG. This realization lead World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade to be the first Blizzard game that did not grace my game rack. I hope it and its’ companion to be the last such instances.

The Cat is Out of the Bag

I’m sure that I won’t be the first to use that turn of phrase, but it’s October and we all know what that means. No it’s not that Major League Baseball is heading into the playoffs, nor is it that the National Hockey League has started its’ season with several excellent games, The Big Cat is on it’s way at the end of the month. Woot, the cat has finally arrived. OS 10.5 offers what seem to be a number of startling and excellent improvements in the way that we Mac users interact with our machines. From where I sit Leopard has some very big shoes to fill. Tiger (OS 10.4) is perhaps the most stable and one of the more intuitive operating systems that I have had the opportunity to use. The mere fact that Tiger has been around for almost two years signifies two things:

1. Apple has not seen the need to push along an update to fix some key issue with the OS (alá 10.1 in September of 2001 just six months after initial OS X release).
2. Something big must be coming along in the next iteration.

So what are we getting with Leopard? That is a great question. Apparently there are some fantastic developer tools shipping with Leopard. Support for 64-bit applications is a big deal (I waited to buy a new Mac until there was again a processor that was 64-bit) ZFS, which I think is about the greatest thing since sliced bread, will make it in to 10.5 at some point. It is quite a feat for people to get excited about ZFS, mostly because it involves getting animated about file system which seems almost oxymoronic in its complexity. More additions to the Core frameworks are also good news for devs, as is garbage collection though I’m not quite sure what the hell it is, but if Siracusa is excited about it so should we all be. All in all the feeling that one gets from the knowledgeable about Leopard is that it will be a huge developer release but will not feature all that much to call home about at the end of the day. I will have to be unreasonable and go against the popular sentiment and say that Leopard is perhaps the most interesting release of the OS since the first one.

Apple is slowly revolutionizing the way that we interact with our computers. Many many years ago computers used to just be considered type-writers, in fact I remember reading a book by Robin Williams and though her point was on how to get good typography from a Mac it still works as a glib truism. Even today there are many people who consider computers as big expensive and complicated pieces of technology that are good only for outputting documents and spreadsheets. If you follow this philosophy, which clearly many in the Mac community do not, you are bound to end up with thousands upon thousands of files and documents. Hell even a few semesters at any good university and you’ll probably end up with a dozen papers all labeled “Paper 1″. This is where I think that the more important end-user features of Leopard will shine through and make this more of a requirement than an upgrade that can be skipped.

From what I have heard through reputable sources and through the little I have experienced there will be five killer features of 10.5. Quick Look, Time Machine, Stacks, Spaces, and screen sharing in both Finder and iChat. These are implementations of concepts that have been floating around for many years and implemented in typical Apple fashion; relatively easy to use and integrated across the board. Take Quick Look for example. As his Steveness pointed out in the WWDC keynote, Quick Look is a great way to page through thousands of documents, PDFs, photos, and even videos with live previews. Not sure what presentation that is? Just tap a key and you get a preview that accurately reflects the item that you’re viewing. How fucking cool is that? Not sure which episode of Dexter you’re looking, just press a key and you can watch five minutes or even the whole thing at full screen size. Possibly the best thing about Quick Look is that it works in other applications as well as in the Finder. This just enhances its’ usability and its’ power as a tool. Use it with another one of the killer features Time Machine to find that one photo of the dog that you accidentally threw away, but keep the rest of that roll in electronic purgatory. Just that simple and just that cool. No caveats that I can see this looks to be an amazing feature that will become like second nature to many Mac users, much like the Quicksilver shortcuts have to me.

Time Machine. What else is there to say that hasn’t already been said? It would be nice if it worked with ZFS snapshots, but that was pretty much pie-in-the-sky thinking by Mac nerds anyway. It provides the Apple solution to one of the most important problems of the digital age. When one uses their Mac to create all that great media, like home movies, photos, and webpages, what do we do when we lose it? There are two ways that data loss happens environmental and accidental and Time Machine covers the both of them. First it creates a backup of your drive and then does incremental backups based upon what other applications have done for years like Dantz Retrospect and SuperDuper. The most interesting part though is the actually putting a user-interfact on the front of the file management in such a way that they mythical computer-illterate family member can retrieve those precious photos of Rover that accidentally ended up in the dustbin. Never before has a the metaphor “searching through the dump” felt germane to to a conversation about data recovery, but I do believe that this is the first time that Aunt Flo can drive up to the dump in her F-150 and look herself. It used to require someone with a bit more technical knowledge and training to pull o the data recovery.

Who will this help? Steve Jobs had the numbers. He talked about them. Anecdotally I’m sure there are many people out there without adequate backup solutions and I’m one of them. I have been considering purchasing a large hard-drive for other reasons and I will definitely keep a backup of the boot drive of my iMac on it in case there is failure of the regular drive. The only downside that I can find in this whole approach for Apple is that a good part of the great features and security coming from Time Machine comes from requiring that external hard drive. Now while most Mac, and indeed computer, people will have little trouble finding a cheap and reliable hard drive, I feel the impact may be missed on John Q. Mousepad. The only thing I wish Apple would do is to sell Apple branded hard drives, call ‘em Time Capsules for all I care, and offer them with new Macs at a discounted price. Something relatively large and it must be reliable; also make it work with the Time Machine software. Bring up Time Machine every time the hard drive is plugged in to make the process even more streamlined.

Stacks: a wonderful idea to replace the screamings for spring-loaded Dock folders with something original and clever. Just mouse over it and boom there is all the stuff that you must have at a finger tip. The only thing I’m not sure about is the usability when the Dock is in the side position. I started using Dock on the left side of my screen when I had an old Beige G3 running 10.2 and quite frankly I never liked the dock at the bottom on the other computers I have used. Aside from the Leopard Dock Problem the other concern for me is Stacks and side Dock. I like the way that Stacks run in a curve because it fits with the way the human hand moves a mouse from the bottom of a computer screen to the top of one, but I don’t quite see how that translates into being useful in side Dock position.

Spaces is VirtueDesktop 11.0. A hundred times more useful than any other virtual desktop manager ever created for the simple reasons that it can be activated and navigated any way that the user wants it to be. Add to that the ability to create many more virtual workspaces and anyone who has had to work on a paper where they need to look at the notes that they took in class, an online article, and to manage working music will be drooling at the thought.

Speaking of managing projects screen sharing is one item that people with parents who have computers should be on their knees begging for with all due humility. Aside from the obvious ability to fix Ma’s computer with a few mouse-clicks, screen sharing could have numerous uses for working on collaborative projects like photo editing. Think of it like a more productive, though much less entertaining, version of Layer Tennis. Oh the possibilities!

The Big Cat will have a big impact on the Mac scene for many reasons; and be you a dev or be you a member of the great unwashed, you should be excited. If Leopard is anything like the last few revisions of OS X, it should be at the very least faster and better performing, as well as introducing the joy of OS X upgrades to thousands of switchers whose only experience with the word “Upgrade” tends to rather negatively associate with the words “re-format”, “De-fragment”, and “Data loss”. Even if for that reason, we can be excited about the new cat in town.

American Idiot

With all that has happened in this modern America, one would think that people would be just a tad more observant about themselves and what they do in public. It goes all the way back to 1963 with the Kennedy assassination, then the race riots of the late 1960’s, then the high profile bombings and downing of several passenger aircraft in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Then there was Oklahoma City in 1995, Unabomber throughout that era and the Olympic Park bombings by Eric Rudolph. The culmination comes in 2001 when the World Trade Center fell during the attacks of 9/11 and the anthrax attacks shortly thereafter. What do all of these incidents have in common? They all broke Americans out of a feeling of relative peace, security, naiveté, and innocence about certain aspects of American life. The Kennedy assassination proved the security around the president could never be too tight and in the decades following there have been hundreds of reports of the United States Secret Service doing their jobs by investigating all threats against the president. That’s why if I were to type “I will kill the Queen” erm… I mean “I will kill George Bush.”, I could expect some kind of contact from the Secret Service. Not that they are fascists crushing every aspect of a free-society, no they are doing their jobs. The Secret Service takes its job very seriously as well they should.

That’s why people like Star Simpson bother me. Here is a bright kid. She’s in MIT, working on several group-think projects and teams there, and is generally liked by people who know her. So it baffles the mind how she can walk into Logan Airport with some blinking circuitry attached to her torso and not expect to be shot in the head. Now I understand that this is part of the MIT culture with electronics and the display thereof and it’s a part of fee-expression; that’s cool, just don’t be a moron about it. Not only was the Massachusetts State Police action warranted, but Ms. Simpson is very lucky to be alive. You don’t have to be in an airplane to kill lots of people at an airport as the unfortunates in Edinburgh learned earlier this year. Today’s airports are not places of free-expression especially when said free-expression could be easily mistaken for an explosive device.

That said, I don’t want Star Simpson thrown in federal prison for the rest of her life. Just a simple ticket and a fine for disorderly conduct and an from her apology for not thinking clearly and scaring the ever-loving-fuck our of many airline passengers. I respect the fact that MIT students do weird things and that often we should reward the odd ones, because they are the ones who think up the next supercomputers or the next teflon-coated must-have item. Still, even since the mid-1970’s walking into an airport with flashing circuitry probably wasn’t the smartest thing that one could have done.

Of course during this entire debacle the incident with the Mooninites was brought up. In case you’re unfamiliar in January of this year two young men were charged with the rather ridiculous “possessing a hoax device” charge as a result. Now lets assume that the Boston PD aren’t retarded and haven’t actually seen the device close up. It’s still pretty obvious to those who pay half of a lick of attention that what is essentially a glorified LiteBrite is not going to explode. One might call shenanigans especially considering the stance that I took with Star Simpson. There are several key differences.

Firstly, is the way that the other cities in the viral ad campaign reacted. In Chicago, New York, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco there were virtually no complaints and police departments did not respond. These things only really came to a head when the ruckus in Boston hit the newswire and other cities started examining the situation. Police did not consider them a threat. The biggest confirmation of this was this quotation from Seattle Police Department spokesman John Urquart, “To us, they’re so obviously not suspicious … We don’t consider them dangerous. In this day and age, whenever anything remotely suspicious shows up, people get concerned – and that’s good. However, people don’t need to be concerned about this. These are cartoon characters giving the finger.” Only Beantown went apeshit over a few blinking lights. I can hear it now… “How,” you say, “is that any different than running into an airport with blinking lights and not expecting to get shot at?” The difference, as it so often is, is context. In the context of blinking lights on a highway overpass and a pizza restaurant is fair sight less concerning than wearing blinking lights in a crowded airport lobby. Yes, it was quite possible that the Mooninites were bombs or intended to be bombs and it was quite a shame that Boston PD wasted many millions in dollars on this mis-interpreted threat, but all in all a few moments of analysis warranted a shrug and a laugh rather than shut down the entirety of the central highway system in Boston

Clearly some more thought could have gone into the placement of these Mooninites. Putting them on an overpass is not the brightest idea in the world, but still if one cop can recognize them as a cartoon giving the world the finger then why can’t the good folks of Boston? I like to think that Boston and Massachusetts have learned from this whole debacle. Overreactions, as silly as they can be, are much better than underreacting to a possible threat and getting people killed. Finally one would like to think that with all that has happened in the last 30 years regarding homeland security that walking into a crowded airport with electronics strapped to your person would not be the first option in anyone’s playbook. Even if it was “art day” at MIT.