World of Warcraft

Departing Azeroth

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After almost 10 years, today I deactivated my World of Warcraft account.

I’ve played the game precisely once since the birth of our baby – which was about 5 months ago now. I haven’t logged in once during that time. Playing games has dropped down my priority list and I just don’t have time anymore.

There are other reasons. It costs money to pay and we’re a bit short of that at the moment, following another couple of recent household expenditures and the fact that Christine’s earning less due to being on maternity leave. It’s an expense that we can do without.

But I’m also not enjoying the game as much. The ‘golden years’ for me where 2007 to 2009, when I played alongside my then girlfriend and in an active guild. Most of my fellow guildmates have since quit, or are spread out across different servers. Most of the time, I’ve been playing on my own or in ad-hoc ‘pick-up groups’ (or ‘PUGs’) which aren’t always a pleasant experience.

There’s also the issue of the next expansion, Legion, which is due to be released later this year. Normally I look forward to expansions – especially with there having been no new content in the game for months now. But my 6 year old Mac Mini won’t be able to run it, and I’m getting too bored with the game as it is to keep playing without upgrading. And again, it comes back to money – I don’t have the spare cash for a new computer, as much as I would like to upgrade.

My account is still paid through to the end of June – annoyingly, I bought another 6 months in December thinking I’d have loads of time to play whilst on paternity leave. But I doubt I’ll have the time to log in before then. Thankfully, cancelling your subscription merely freezes your account, so my characters will still be there waiting for me should I ever return to the game in future. But, for now, it is farewell to Azeroth.

Distracted in Draenor

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Oops, looks like I forgot to post any new blog entries last week. This is mostly because a lot of my free time has been spent playing the new World of Warcraft expansion, Warlords of Draenor.

I didn’t play it much in the first week following release, which is probably a good thing as it meant that I avoided the worst of the launch issues, although it was almost two weeks’ after the expansion became available that the game settled down reliably. Apparently a higher than expected number of former players have returned to the game and Blizzard Entertainment hadn’t foreseen this, so there have been capacity issues. A few weeks on and the game is now playable without queueing, disconnects or lag, for the most part.

During the last expansion I effectively retired my main character, a human paladin called Hexorious, and mostly played on a shadow priest. Because it’s been so long since there has been any new content, I managed to level four characters to level 90, and another one was boosted using the offer that came with the purchase of the Warlords of Draenor expansion. However, I decided to go back to my main for this expansion and now he is level 100 – the other four still at 90.

Indeed the player character development features of this expansion make it less-alternative character friendly, in my view. The big new feature of the expansion is Garrisons – your own base of operations where you can construct buildings and gather resources. Building this up is a major time investment and not one that I’d necessarily want to repeat on another character. This is not to say it isn’t fun and I spend quite a bit of time every day tending to my garrison – starting and collecting work orders, sending followers on missions and building up resources to expand. My garrison is level 3 – maximum level – but the buildings are all level two as I haven’t come across any level three plans yet.

I think I would have enjoyed Warlords of Draenor even if it wasn’t very good, because it’s the first major bit of new content in the game for over a year and overcomes the staleness. But it is a really well-done expansion. So far I don’t quite think it’s my favourite – that would be Wrath of the Lich King – but it’s probably a close second, and certainly far better than Cataclysm which didn’t feel very immersive despite the decent story lines. I particularly like how we get to see the planet of Draenor in a different timeline – some bits still recognisable from Outland and some completely different but still familiar. And the non-player characters have a more defined back story – without wanting to reveal too many spoilers, Alliance characters should pay attention to Vindicator Maraad, especially paladins.

I’m still questing through Nagrand and have a number of bonus objectives to complete too, so even though my character is at the maximum level there is plenty more to do. And I’ve only just started setting foot into dungeons. So far, I’m really enjoying it, although hopefully I’ll have time to write things here too…

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft

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Screenshot of the game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft

Some months ago, I was given access to the then-closed beta of Blizzard Entertainment’s new game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. If I’m honest, I didn’t really bother to play it until a few weeks ago.

The open beta cycle is now coming to an end, so presumably the final release of the game is imminent. Unlike other Blizzard games it’s expected to be free to play, but with in-app payments to be extras. It integrates with Blizzard’s Battle.net service so you can chat to friends playing other Blizzard games like World of Warcraft, Diablo III and Starcraft II whilst playing.

Hearthstone is, essentially, a turn-based card game. It can be played either against the computer, in practice mode, or against other players – either friends or random matches. So far, I haven’t ventured outside practice mode so I haven’t played against any other real people as yet.

The basic premise of the game is that you have a deck of cards, which belong to a class from one of the original nine World of Warcraft classes (i.e. no death knights or monks), and you play a hero of that class. As I started with the Mage deck, I played Jaina Proudmore. You then play against another hero of a different class – so choosing a Warrior opponent will give you Garrosh Hellscream. As you defeat other classes, you get access to those decks, until you can choose any of the nine class decks to play.

In the games, you start off with several cards, and receive at least one more card with each turn. Some cards produce minions, which can attack or defend you; others enable spells and abilities. You also gain a mana crystal with each turn – the number of crystals you have for each turn budgets the number of abilities you can use. If you defeat the opposing hero, you win.

It’s very similar to real world table top games, but with the bonus of having the computer enforce the rules. I occasionally play table top games but sometimes the rules can be bewildering, and some games have a steep learning curve that puts off more casual gamers like me. So I appreciate having my hand held by the game in this way. It’s also nice that it uses a familiar universe of characters, as all of them have appeared in the Warcraft game series at some point.

Hearthstone itself is relatively easy to play, and is controlled entirely with the mouse. I’m pretty sure it’s been designed so that it can be easily ported to tablets, although as yet it’s only playable on Windows and Mac OS X. Hopefully Android and iOS versions will be forthcoming when it’s finally released, as I think it would lend itself well to casual play on a tablet.

If you want to try Hearthstone before it exits beta, you’ll need to download it now. A Battle.net account is required, but it’s free to play.

Exploring a new realm

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A screenshot of Hexorious, my World of Warcraft character

Around two weeks ago, I finally lost patience with the queues for the World of Warcraft realm that my main characters were on, and took advantage of an offer of free transfers to another realm.

Originally, when I started playing World of Warcraft almost eight years ago, I was on a ‘medium’ populated realm. This was where my then-girlfriend Hari and her friends had her characters, so I joined her there.

Fast forward a few years, and following the release of the Cataclysm expansion my friends all jumped ship, to a high population realm. I followed a few weeks later, firstly with my main character and then one of my ‘alt’ characters, paying £15 each time for the privilege.

Being on a high population realm has its benefits – a very active economy on the auction house, lots of guilds to join, and plenty of people to group with. But recently the population has continued to grow, to the point where the realm servers were running at capacity. This means that players have to queue until enough other players log off, and at peak times on week-nights these queues could be as long as half an hour.

If I was able to get home from work early then this wouldn’t be such a problem, but I don’t get home until the start of the peak period. Consequently, it just wasn’t possible to quickly log in for a few minutes on an evening – I’d have to wait in a queue, and then once connected, not log out because I wouldn’t be able to get back on again.

And, by now, most of my friends who I used to play with have either quit the game, or gone to other realms. So, all in all, I had no real reason to stay on that realm.

Thankfully, Blizzard Entertainment are all too aware of the issue with the realm (and others in the same situation). The realm has been ‘locked’, to restrict the creation or paid transfer of characters, and they are offering free character transfers to other realms. I decided to take advantage of the latter; by now I had three characters on this realm (plus a low level bank character) and I didn’t want to spend £15 per character to go somewhere with greener grass.

There are some restrictions for free character transfers. First of all, they can only be between selected realms, so I had to choose one of four destination realms. WarcraftRealms.com is useful for population estimates, and so I picked the one with the highest population and best Horde to Alliance ratio. Since I would be moving to another Player-versus-Player (PvP) realm, I didn’t want to choose one where Horde characters significantly outnumbered Alliance – I’m a big, wet, useless scaredycat when it comes to PvP.

There are also eligibility criteria for your characters. There were three main characters I wanted to transfer: my paladin (my main since 2006), my priest, and a rogue which I’ve recently levelled up. These were all fine – I just had to ensure that they had empty mailboxes and no outstanding auctions. But I also had a ‘bank’ character which I used for storage. This character was too low level – characters need to be level 10 to be eligible, and my bank was level 1. So, I spent about half an hour levelling it up.

The next issue was that this character was also a guild leader, with a guild bank full of various crafting materials. Guild leader characters are ineligible for transfer; as this character was the only one in the guild, I made the decision to sell just about everything in the guild bank on the auction house. This took a few weeks, but eventually just about everything sold and it netted me a few thousand gold in the process. I then had to disband the guild.

Finally, there are also limits on how much gold characters can take with them when transferred, which vary by level. My three high level characters were fine, and well within the limits, but my bank character had way too much. Level 10 characters should have less than 300 gold; mine had more than ten times that, thanks to all of the auctions. Of course, this was easily solved by distributing the money amongst my other characters before I transferred them.

So, I made the transfer, and have been playing on my new realm ever since. I’m pleased that I don’t have to queue any more, and I’ve been able to find a reasonably nice and active guild to be a member of. It hasn’t cost me anything, and means I can play the game more often and get more value out of my £9 per month subscription. Indeed, I would not have bothered transferring my bank character had the transfer not been free. Generally speaking the transfers only take around an hour to complete, so there’s not much downtime away from the game either.

If you play on a realm with queues and are offered a free transfer, then unless you have ties with people on that realm, I’d definitely recommend moving. After all, you’re paying for the game – so why not make the most of it?

Parting the Mists

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The login screen for World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, showing a 15 minute waiting time to login

I’m writing this blog post whilst waiting to connect to play a bit of World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria. Although the game has been out for several weeks, a combination of a lack of spare time and the server being full (as shown in the screenshot) with queue times exceeding an hour, has meant that my main character is only level 86. That said, I’ve managed to get around 12 hours of playtime in the new expansion, and, generally, I like it.

As you will know, if you’re a long-term reader, I’ve been a World of Warcraft player since June 2006, although I’ve not played as much since 2009 when I quit regular raiding and decided to just become a casual player. I’ve therefore played every expansion, and also the classic pre-expansion game as well.

Prior to Mists of Pandaria, the second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, was my favourite. It built on the improvements of the first expansion, The Burning Crusade, but had a much better story, and some great quests – the Wrathgate and ensuing Battle for Undercity being especially memorable. The third expansion, Cataclysm, wasn’t quite so good; there wasn’t much to it in terms of max-level content (the release of the expansion coincided with a complete rework of the original game content, so resources would have been split), and it felt disjointed as the new zones were spread out without a strong consistent story between them.

I’m therefore glad that Blizzard has reverted to its classic expansion formula for Mists of Pandaria, where there is plenty of new content, on one new continent. And there certainly seems to be plenty of content – I’m about 39% of the way to level 90 and I’ve only managed to finish the first zone and a bit of the second; there are seven new zones in all. And the quests in that first zone, although less strictly linear than before, all led to one big plot moment at the end which was great. Like with the first two expansions, you can’t use flying mounts until late on in the new content, which also helps to provide the immersive experience that Cataclysm lacked. Although I’m a long way away from level 90, I also gather that there’s a lot more to do when I get there.

…And now I’m connected. It took 20 minutes rather than 15. The screenshot lies.