World of Warcraft: A 2016 Beginner's Guide

So everyone who goes to see Warcraft: The Beginning is getting a free copy of WoW. I don't know how many people are out there will take advantage of this deal, but I think it is safe to say we may be seeing some brand new players on our servers. This could be great for the game. It could also just reinforce gamer stereotypes, as new players are pummeled with, "Ur gear blows kill yursef noob lol"

So first, a call to WoW veterans. This is an opportunity to give a little back to the community. When the film releases, keep an eye out for folks asking questions, struggling with quests, or being abused by other players. I plan on turning trade chat on for the first time in years. Maybe even general if I can stand it long enough. With little else to do in game, I may just hang out in low level areas trying to be friendly and helpful while I play another game on my phone. Think about doing the same, even if it cuts into your Overwatch time.

And for new players, some unsolicited advice and a few affirmations:

• You have found an amazing community. Most of the people you will eventually interact with will be awesome. But like any large group of humans, we have to put up with some very vocal assholes.
• You are not bad. You are new. Regardless of whispers you may have already gotten, we know you aren't bad.
• Turn off general and trade chat. There is an awesome database called Wowhead that can help you with quests and stuff. The comments page can be particularly helpful with quests.
• If you're struggling with Wowhead, feel free to tweet me for help.
• Stay out of battlegrounds for a while. People are really mean in there. Same with Looking For Raid. Also, the official forums.
• Don't accept an invitation to a guild that nobody has chatted with you about. It's just a spam add on.
• Do try to find a guild. The right group of friends can elevate WoW from a video game to an alternative lifestyle choice. Finding the right guild is probably the most important thing you can do as a new player. My guild, Convert to Raid on the Aerie Peak server, always has room for more people.
• Leveling is pretty broken right now. Don't judge a class too harshly based on the leveling experience. It's a serious problem, but there isn't anything to be done about it until August. Don't even try to level as a healer right now.
• Every single class will change significantly at the end of August. You picked a great game, but a bad time to start it. The bright side is come September, people who have been playing for 12 years will be learning the same stuff you are. The playing field will be somewhat leveled.
• Abuse is very much against the Terms of Service. If someone is abusing you, you can report them. It's usually a ton easier to just /ignore them and go about your business.
• If you're a woman, you may want to keep that information to yourself. It's shitty and unfair, but that is unfortunately life on the Internet right now.
• Did I mention that you aren't bad and most of us are really nice?

So welcome to WoW! We are truly glad you are here. Readers, let's get all the advice I forgot in the comments.

Puzzle Solved..I Think

I have been confused for a while now. After saying at Blizzcon that players will have access to all their classes' specs in Legion, various barriers to spec switching have rotated in and out of the alpha/beta. We have artifact weapons that restrict switching specs. Then, for a suspiciously short time, there was the old-school gold cost for spec switching. About an hour later Blizzard had a post ready to go that removed the gold cost, but added a required reagent to switching individual talents. Think, Tome of the Clear Mind, but much more expensive and not available from a vendor mount.
I have been baffled. As a BM hunter who primarily raids, I make 1 or 2 talent changes in a night of raiding. I couldn't figure out why Blizzard thought this change was necessary. I never find myself waiting on people to change talents. Looking at twitter and the bolgosphere, it seems I'm not alone. This seems, according to the overall voice of the community, like Blizzard "fixing" a non-problem. It was perplexing. Then Fiannor at Misdirections commented on one of their posts about Mythic+ dungeons, and it all became clear to me. Swapping may be a non-issue NOW, but in Legion ..
I speculate swapping could become a problem in Mythic+ dungeons (if you are unaware, dungeons in Legion will behave like Diablo rifts). I would absolutely switch between BM and MM when going from trash to bosses, for example. Got the debuff that puts out constant damage? No problem, throw on Spirit Bond! Movement increase between packs? Heck yeah! I finally understand why Blizzard has been trying so hard to lock us into one spec via the artifacts.
I can't prove it, but I absolutely convinced Fiannor was right. And this is crazy. Blizzard is going to break the best version of the talent system they have ever had over one small aspect of the game that frankly nobody asked for. When I want to run a Diablo rift, guess which game I launch? Diablo. Anybody who wants that style of play can get it. Hell, most of us WoW players got it for free from the Annual Pass! If the current spec and talent system really will break these Mythic+ dungeons, they should just make talents locked WHEN YOU ARE IN THE DUNGEON! I imagine that is what they would really prefer, but technical issues compounded by a release date forced them to create this convoluted "reason" why we shouldn't really change specs and talents. Well guys, figure it out. This proposed system is ridiculous. Here is MMO Champion's data on how many people did endless proving grounds (the closest thing we have to Mythic+). Maybe we don't need them at all..

Going Free to Play

I'm going to start this post off with a story:

The same summer that I got my driver's license, the most important bridge in my hometown needed to be rebuilt. It was the kind of construction project that had everyone talking. Literally a half million people would be required to drastically alter their daily routines. A friend of mine even quit his job in lieu of tripling his commute time. This major transport artery was so close to my father's business, we had even more serious concerns at home about how traffic would be affected. Anyone who knows much about public construction projects, especially in areas that get ice and snow, will tell you to double the time they are supposed to take for a conservative estimate. I was 16 when the project started, and my father half-jokingly told me we would be lucky to use the new bridge to take me off to college. We did use it to take me to college. And to visit the college my senior year. We were using that bridge six months after construction began. Six months ahead of schedule. When the announcement was made that the project was completed, everyone in the community was surprised. Except my father. He told me about how this project had a contract that was unique at the time. For every month that the project was late, the contractor had to take $1 million off of the price. And for every month that the project was done early, they got to charge an additional $1 mil. The government agreed to this deal in a heartbeat because no one thought the project was even possible in a year. I'm sure someone literally laughed out loud when they heard about the clause for finishing early. And yet, we all got our bridge back early, and under budget even with those bonuses. Your econ teacher was right: people respond to incentives in a market economy.

You probably already figured out what this has to do with World of Warcraft. I'm honestly surprised that we are in yet another huge content drought, and I shouldn't be at this point. But, our community has been told a number of times that expansions will be roughly annual. They have publicly lamented content deserts (we're beyond drought at this point). Even worse, the last two expansions were horribly front-loaded. We got more content than most could handle in the first 6 months, and then, not much. And then nothing. And here we are.

So it is time for Blizzard to put their money where their mouth has been for years. While I would like to propose WoW going free to play any time a year goes by between expansions, that isn't likely. What may be more feasible is any time a year goes by without new content of some kind, we all stop paying a subscription until the content goes live. It still probably won't happen, but I think it should. Keeping players playing during these content deserts is very much in Blizzard's interest. As it has gone, tons of players unsub during these times. Then a new xpac is released and some of them come back. But not all of them. I don't know how many of my friends have left promising to return and are never heard from again. At least not in WoW. They are still gaming, many in Battle Net. But they don't come back to WoW or it's subscription. And at this point it's hard to blame them. If there were no subscription, I bet at least half of them would still be showing up to raid, if not playing the entire game more.

At the very least, this kind of arrangement would compel Blizzard to space the content they do have for us more judiciously. WoD would still be rather thin, but imagine if MoP or Cata had been under this arrangement. We could have gotten new raid tiers, or new troll dungeons, spaced out evenly over the course of the expansions. We wouldn't have had year-long periods with nothing other than Dragon Soul or Siege.

Ok, that last paragraph is what my history professor would call "counterfactualism." That aside, if you are Mike Morheim and Hazzikostas tells you, "We could make some new dungeons for them or give up $45 million in revenue each month for a while, what would your decision be?

At a Crossroads

About 8 months ago I committed to writing a series of positive blog posts in an attempt to counteract what I saw as a pervasive negativity in the WoW community. It lasted for one installment. I gave Blizzard the benefit of the doubt regarding their development cycle, and I assumed I would have a lot more nice things to write. I was wrong. And with the information we currently have about Legion and hunters, I have never been so unsure about my future blogging about WoW, playing a hunter in Legion, or even continuing to play the game at all. This will NOT be a particularly positive post.

I never started this to become a WoW "personality." I started this site because I found myself chiming in regularly while listening to The Hunting Party podcast. I can TALK about hunters all day. Ask my friends. Writing about them, without echoing other writers, proved much more difficult. But it was a different era when I started this blog. Today, it's all about the stream, or at the very least, videos on YouTube. The blog format itself is pretty dated, and not an ideal medium for covering a video game, when you weigh it against the other available options. So there is that.

I also wanted to be a voice for the survival spec itself, which I had loved since Vanilla and was virtually ignored by the hunter community until Cataclysm. Well, even I don't play survival anymore. I switched to my SV spec over the weekend. First, the only reason I did was to make it Marksman. Second, I still had the Lucky Coin on my bars. That's how long it had been since I even went into my SV spec! I just don't play it anymore. And that isn't likely to change.

If you're into hunters enough to read this neglected blog, you already know that SV will become a melee spec in Legion. I think that is fine. I agree with Blizzard that three ranged  hunter specs are redundant. Between hunter changes, and the Demon Hunter, I suspect that if they could design WoW again Blizzard wouldn't feel the need for every class to have at least three specs. So while I have no problem with the SV change, I won't be playing it. I've never really enjoyed melee, but if I chose to play it, I'll be playing an established melee class. While it's early, even if I wanted to play melee, the Legion info coming out isn't very exciting. I'm not dealing with pet pathing issues ever again. Been there and done that. To an old fart like me, hunters are ranged. With a pet.

If I play a hunter in Legion, it will be as Beast Mastery, as I have for virtually all of WoD. Bendak accurately called BM, "the last bastion of the classic WoW hunter." I totally agree. The whole dark ranger thing they have cooking for Marksman sounds interesting and fun, and I will probably check it out if the artifact system doesn't make dual specs prohibitive (we desperately need more info on this system). But I need a pet. So BM it is..if I play a hunter.

I have a Priest. Both shadow and discipline sound fun in Legion (the hybrid aspect of disc is especially intriguing). I have a monk. And a rogue. And a warlock. I have not used my 90 boost yet. If I buy Legion that will give me another boost. All these options means there is a LOT riding on Beast Mastery being fun and competitive for me to stick with my favorite class. If it isn't, with the little information about artifacts that I have currently (basically none regarding off specs) I keep thinking I may just have to go with one of my other classes or boost a new one. If I play Legion.

The ONLY reason I'm playing WoD at all is I found a super fun raid team with the perfect schedule for me. I was an inch away from unsubbing when I found them. But I have ridden my 2009 iMac as far as it will go for gaming. There is no way I can run Legion on it. As I was contemplating the purchase of a new system, I remembered almost doing the same for WoD. If I had, I would have been PISSED about it. Let's be honest: Warlords of Draenor sucked. It was the least amount of content for the most amount of money that World of Warcraft has ever sold us. There absolutely were good things about it. But I have never in my life been so disappointed with a video game purchase. So, while I am happy to keep paying my sub while I have this amazing team, buying new hardware just to run what could be another WoD is less than appealing. I am anxious to hear details about Legion's number of raid tiers, dungeons after launch, and again how artifacts will allow/prohibit alts and off specs. Someone recently described WoD by saying Blizzard basically gave up on it. I totally agree. There are plenty of hints that this is what happened. Remember the island inhabited by ogre pirates? WTF happened to that? I was dying to see that! Two raids, no new dungeons, and an ugly Timeless Isle rehash doesn't make for much of an expansion. At least we got a new, interesting final boss. Oh wait, nope. Killed him already. In two other games. And it was more expensive than all the previous (good) expansions. I understand inflation and a price hike was of course inevitable, but pairing it with the thinnest expansion ever was a public relations disaster. Warlord would have been really disappoing at $40. The extra $10 added at least $25 worth of insult to injury.

So I'm at a crossroads. I have a neglected blog named for a spec I may never play again, in a subscription game that does nothing for me outside of three hours every Thursday. To be fair, $15 a month is still a value for 12 hours of quality entertainment. But this game, and the hunter class, used to mean a hell of a lot more to me.

Public Relations 101

Ask any politician or public relations professional, and they will tell you damage control is done on Fridays. If circumstances are forcing you to drop bad or embarrassing news on your audience, you do it on a Friday. Always on a Friday. The Friday of a holiday weekend is even more preferable. See, people don't usually watch the news on Fridays, or the weekends for that matter, so the hope is that by the time people come back from their weekends things will have moved on. Maybe other news will eclipse the bad news, or people will be more interested in talking about the new movie they saw, etc.

Blizzard announced the death of flying on, wait for it, a Friday. A Friday that began a holiday weekend in the US. Personally, I'm not that upset about the flying decision. I feel like it is a decision that has been settled at Blizz HQ for a while, and they have been putting off making the announcement because they feared the blowback. The way they used common damage control tactics such as the timing reinforces this point.

I don't bring this up to criticize Blizzard in any way. They pay PR people to do exactly this kind of thing, and there is nothing wrong with it. I bring it up to show that Blizzard knew a long time ago how this decision would be received by their customers. They knew that when they eventually had to tell us that flying was gone, it would be a shit show. Because, contrary to what you have read over the weekend, they do in fact listen to us. The merits of flying or no flying aside, I keep reading that Blizzard is out of touch, doesn't listen to the players, and has no idea how to make a good game anymore. They do listen. They knew how much Twitter rage, I quit manifestos, and personal attacks they were about to endure by announcing the removal of flying because they are aware of the WoW player base. Just because they didn't do what you asked does not mean they didn't listen to you. They listened to you enough to know to announce bad news on a Friday like the pros that they are.

Burnout Is Like Aggro

If you get it, it's your fault. Not your raid leader's fault. Not your garrison's fault. And it's not Blizzard's fault either. Take some responsibility for your actions. If you are burnt and not enjoying the game then it's time to change your behavior instead of bitch about game design or content release cycles.

Ok, this is the post I'm sure every Community Manager at Blizzard has written at least once and then deleted so they could keep their job. But I don't work at Blizzard so can write it for them.

Stop it. Stop. Now. Whatever part of WoW you're still doing even though you don't enjoy it anymore-stop. It's really that simple. I was burning out on raiding during MoP. So I took a very long break from it. Now I'm having more fun raiding (with a much smaller time commitment) than I ever have before.

You should know better. If you're old enough to read you should already realize that doing the same thing over and over again (with a few exceptions) GETS BORING! I am so fucking sick of seeing on Twitter, blogs, and in chat some version of "OMG I just got my 9th lvl 3 garrison and can't take it. Garrisons are broken. They are a prison!" Garrisons aren't broken. You are. What the hell did you think was going to happen? Are you really, truly, surprised that doing 9 sets of missions and work orders and daily quests is kind of repetitive and boring? If you honestly didn't see that coming you're a moron. Sorry, but sometimes the truth hurts. And the whole "prison" metaphor has to be really insulting to the millions of nonviolent Americans currently in real prisons. There's no fucking Pepe in prisons, kids.

Same with the legendary quest. While there are some very legitimate complaints about the quest itself, if you're on your second, third, or fourth character doing it, you have no right to complain and I don't want to hear you do so. You knew exactly what you were getting yourself into. My alts will never have the legendary. It would be nice, but I know I would detest doing it. So guess what? I'm not doing it. And when I log into my alts I enjoy doing so. I got bored with playing the auction house, so I scaled back my auctions considerably. Now, when I do auctions on the weekends I have fun. Notice a pattern here?

Many players, including myself, have spent a lot of energy criticizing this expansion. And we have had some very good reasons. But burnout isn't one of them. And it isn't new or tied to garrisons (remember daily quests in MoP or reputations in Classic?) If you are burned out it's your fault. The good news it it is also easy to fix. Think about what parts of the game you still actually enjoy. Keep doing them. Stop with all the other stuff at least for a while. Harness some personal responsibility for your actions. At the very least if you can't show some restraint at an all-you-can-eat fish fry, don't blame someone else for your stomach ache.

A Server Transfer Cost Me $285

I've earned a million gold in World of Warcraft. Twice. That doesn't mean I got up to two million. It means I got to a million, had to walk away from half of it, and earn that 500k again. A couple of years ago Blizzard had a "sale" on character severs. Faction, race, and server changes were all 50% for one week. This was amazingly timed with the end of my long time guild disbanding, and many of us were already in conversations about moving to a bigger server. All of sudden we had a week to decide on a destination, organize our bags, and transfer for a more reasonable price. As a player of two characters, it was essentially a two for one deal. Not bad. So I spent a day or two liquidating assets I didn't want to transfer and getting all my various heirlooms to the characters I was going to move. There was probably another day or so spent researching destination realms and comparing notes with my comrades. So with decisions made and things in order I logged into battle net to move my characters to their new realm. And then I got this error message. The gold cap for transferring servers is 50k per character. I was stunned. 50k? But I have 900k that I worked damn hard to accrue! I'm sure 50k seemed reasonable when server transfers were first implemented. But we are now in an era with mounts between 40 and 100k. I spent 70k on a single Darkmoon trinket at the beginning of MoP. 50k?! Seriously? I was in disbelief. And running out of time.
So I frantically raided the auction house. I was looking for anything of higher value that would stack in my bags for the transfer. Primal Diamonds were good. I bought a few choppers (I know they don't stack, but still a decent way to convert some gold). It was working. I had fairly quickly turned more than 300k into things in my bags that I knew I could sell on the new server. Even if some of it sold at a loss, that was better than leaving gold on the table. But my old server was small. The same factors that let me corner the jewelcrafting market and earn a million gold were limiting my supply of available goods to "smuggle" across servers. I had to laugh when someone in trade asked why the price of Living Steel had quadrupled overnight. Because I bought literally all of it. And would have bought more if it had been there. I quickly realized that my little server's economy wasn't going to allow me to get all that gold converted. At least not while the sale on transfers was still happening. A friend and I looked into splitting a guild transfer, but details I can't remember now (guild level?) made that a non-option. And guild transfers weren't half-off anyway. I was starting to get pretty upset with the transfer gold cap. Having a degree in economics, I understood why one exists. I just couldn't/can't fathom why it is still so damn low. 50k was a lot in TBC. It really was. But today? Epic flying is 10% of that! I wasn't happy about it, but I couldn't see any solution. I kept telling myself Earth money is more valuable than Azeroth money. Over and over. Then I dropped 400k into my guild's bank and transferred immediately. My way of just ripping off the Band Aid. Eventually I got over it. I sold all that stuff in my bags, got my production system in TSM going again, and got back to making gold. I eventually peaked at 1.3 million before I started spending. While I was never ok with the transfer cap, I just kept telling myself it wasn't real money.

But now it IS real money. Now I could be using that gold to pay my subscription. And I'm kind of pissed about it. Beside the fact that I had to forfeit a major component of my personal character progression, the reason I had to do it is no longer valid, if it ever was. The only reason to have a cap at all is so somebody like me can't move to a server like my old one and disrupt the whole economy with their deep pockets. I understood that at the time even if I thought 50k was way low. But the WoW token is being sold region-wide. Large amounts of gold are now moving between server economies in 20-30k chunks. In a sense, there is only one economy for the entire region now. The AH is no longer faction specific, and we have been able to move battle pets across servers for years now. The old definition of a server economy has broken down. It's time for the transfer cap to disappear as well. Or at the VERY least be raised into the millions. Because of the 50k cap, I essentially paid $285 for a server change. And at the time I thought $25 was bad! My gold is gone, but maybe we can get the cap raised or removed now that gold is literally worth real money.

Update: The transfer cap is now 150k. That probably would have been enough before garrisons..

Extreme PvP

Blizzard got me thinking. A week or two ago one of the PvP designers asked the community why people play Heroes of the Storm but not World of Warcraft PvP. The common answers were unsurprising to anyone who has tried to get into PvP: gear is a barrier to entry, way too many abilities, etc. The community painted a pretty clear picture that the HotS experience, made from the ground up as a competitive PvP game is far superior to WoW PvP, which was essentially an afterthought for a game designed as an RPG (I'll try to never ever put that many acronyms in a single sentence again).
So with HotS and Overwatch both on the horizon, not to mention all the mobas from other companies out there, what should Blizzard do with WoW PvP?

Kill it.

You heard me.

At 10 years old, it is time for bold decisions regarding World of Warcraft and I say it's time for PvP to be done. I am so tired of abilities being changed in PvE to balance PvP and I have to assume serious PvP players feel the same when the opposite occurs. And I really have to wonder how many serious PvP players are left in WoW when it seems the whole world is playing LoL and Hearthstone for competition. I say it's time to draw a thick, clear line in the sand regarding which games are going to be supported for PvP (HotS and Overwatch) and which are not. If people want to do world PvP or duel, that's fine. But it's time to get rid of BGs, Arenas, PvP gear, and any sort of ranking system. Don't get me wrong, I love the occasional BG. World PvP can be a blast at times. But I think for the health of all of Blizzard's involved games, it is time to make WoW a purely PvE experience. At least in terms of content and balance.
This would obviously upset a lot of people. Bold, meaningful decisions always do. Maybe Blizzard could define the "serious" PvP players in WoW (total HKs, above rank X, wins in rated battles) and give those people a free copy of HotS or a special skin that nobody else has or early beta access to Overwatch. Something to placate the folks who will be most affected by this. I know when HotS and Overwatch are both out I won't be doing my PvP in WoW anymore. I doubt I am in the minority. Let's kill PvP for the good of the game as a whole.