Null Signifier

14 years ago Raph Koster, author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design, lead designer of Ultima Onlineand creative director of Star Wars Galaxies, penned an article called Declaring the Rights of Avatars. In this article he conducted a thought experiment in which he created an avatar's Bill of Rights, using the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man as his template. In this experiment he penned an alternative version in which he substituted avatar for citizen, and imbued avatars with a host of rights approximating the human rights articulated in the original bill. This bill states that "avatars are created free and equal"; that such avatars have inalienable rights to "liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression"; institutes habeas corpus; protects freedom of speech and assembly; and so on.

My intent in this article is to criticise the bedrock of this virtual bill, namely the concept that all avatars are created free and equal. I would also like to question the wisdom of becoming a virtual citizen, and argue that it is better to remain as a player/consumer rather than to adopt a social contract as envisioned by such a Bill of Rights. Koster's essay was brought to my attention by an article penned by Doone of XP Chronicles, who uses Koster's name as an authority in order to promulgate his own version of an avatar Bill of Rights both on his blog and on the NBI Couch Podtatoes podcast. After reading both articles carefully, however, it is clear that their arguments are substantially different from each other. While Koster ultimately comes to the conclusion that an avatar's Bill of Rights is untenable and incoherent, Doone embraces it wholeheartedly and without reservation. Koster writes:

But there's also some other folks who think that this exercise is plain dangerous. As an example, let me take a co-worker of mine to whom I showed an early draft. He pointed out that virtual world servers run on somebody's hardware. And that most declarations of rights give rights over personal property. By declaring that avatars have rights, we're abrogating that administrator's right to personal property.

Others point out that it's superfluous. After all, if virtual worlds are just extensions of the real world, then surely all the rights we already have apply?

What about if the virtual space in question is a game? Doesn't it, by its nature, obviate some of these rights?

And the biggie: what if you don't accept the basic premises in the prefatory paragraphs?

I, for one, do not accept the basic premises outlined in this virtual bill, and in the course of this article, I hope to show you why.

Human Rights versus Avatar Rights

I was interested in reading Doone's article because I was hoping for a systemic rebuttal of all the objections raised by Koster and the developers he had interviewed for his paper. After all, 14 years have passed and even Koster leaves open the possibility that changing circumstances could invalidate his initial conclusion:

I'm not seriously proposing that we declare the right of avatars. The doc is, as has been shown, riddled with gotchas and logical holes. It's a hypothetical exercise.

For now.

Instead, Doone's argument completely ignores all of these objection (his sole reference to these objections is a single line saying that “the idea seemed far-fetched at the time”), and adopts a humanistic argument as a means of justifying an avatar Bill of Rights. This is what Koster does, too, but unlike Doone, he realises that this proposition is highly problematic. Doone argues that we are people behind avatars, that avatars haveimplications on our physical well-being, and that emotions are real. In short, he is using our universal humanity as a basis for fundamental rights in the virtual world much in the same way the authors of the Declaration of Man used it as a basis for fundamental rights in the real world.

Avatars are Contingent on Developers

This idea is misconceived in my view, due to the fundamental differences between the nature of avatars and our “meatbag” selves, as well as the differences between virtual space and the real world we live in. An obligation of rights, as set out in Koster and Doone's document, isn't simply a code of conduct. It re-conceptualises avatars as citizens in a synthetic world, with rights and responsibilities. I find it difficult to accept the underlying premise behind an avatar Bill of Rights, namely that “avatars are created free and equal.” If each of us were entitled to make one (and only one) avatar to represent ourselves in onevirtual world this Bill might have more substance, because it would more closely reflect the existing conditions which frame human rights in the real world. Human rights are a powerful idea because the axioms underpinning them are universal – we are all the same species, we only have one life, and we live it together in this world. Avatars, on the other hand, are numerous, disposable, have different justifications for being, are created across multiple worlds, and their existence is contingent on the continuing operation of the servers which house their data. Ask the avatars of Warhammer Online, City of Heroes and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes where their rights went. Into the ether when their MMOs were shuttered, that's where. Avatars cannot exist outside the imaginary world which brings them into being, and these imaginary worlds in turn are dependent upon real life considerations such as continued server operation and support from “meatbag” space. Our mundane real life selves, on the other hand, exist beyond the boundaries of these virtual worlds, which is all the more reason why any discussion on player rights should ground themselves in our status as players/consumers, rather than in our avatars.

Avatars are Contingent on Players

Avatars are also contingent on a far more fundamental sense in that they require our focused attention to achieve things in the game world. Avatars require animus, a driving spirit to give them agency and purpose. Without our real selves our avatars are puppets without puppeteers, as useless as marionettes with their strings cut. It is the work that we do in real life which imbues our avatars with value. Left to his own devices, my paladin in WoW would sit next to the mail box in Stormwind until the server collapsed around him, inert, mute, and utterly useless. By contrast my body is always inhabited by my consciousness. There is a continuity and singularity in my experiences which avatars don't have, which is another reason why we should privilege player rights over avatar rights, and why human rights are important while avatar rights are not. Given the disproportionate time I spend between not just alts of the same game, but also between avatars in other games, I find it hard to take seriously the notion that all avatars are created free and equal. If we look at avatars this way it can be argued that avatars are just a series of sock puppets which require a puppeteer to give them motive and motion. Why give them rights at all? The common sense approach is to bestow rights on the motivating force behind the puppets, namely the puppeteer him/herself.

The Price of Virtual Citizenship

Koster recognised the contingent nature of avatars in his original paper, and in fact incorporates this idea into his version of an avatar Bill of Rights. He states:

Article 3 (Koster): The principle of all sovereignty in a virtual space resides in the unalterable fact that somewhere there resides an individual who controls the hardware on which the virtual space is running, and the software with which it is created, and the database which makes up its existence. However, the body populace has the right to know and demand the enforcement of the standards by which this individual uses this power over the community, as authority must proceed from the community.

Contrast this with Doone's summary, which completely omits any reference to the contingent nature of avatars:

Article 3 (Doone): Authority of the virtual community must proceed from the community; server admins shouldn't see themselves as gods or tyrants.

On what basis can we argue that authority must proceed solely from the community? After all, there wouldn't be a virtual community if developers didn't spend money and time to create these virtual worlds. Presumably developers are humans, too, and enjoy the same rights and privileges that players have. On what basis can we impose on their rights? Because we're people? Developers are people too, so don't these two ideas cancel each other out? On what basis do we privilege the player's humanity over the developer's humanity? After all, they risk more in terms of time and money invested – check out this article on the trials and tribulations of an independent developer for an inside look at the costs associated with game development. On the other hand, no one disputes a gamer's right to pick and choose the games they want to play. It smacks of entitlement to impose further obligations on developers while maintaining the freedom of players to move from game to game with impunity. Active citizenship in the real world is not limited to rights, but also encompasses the related notion of responsibility. I cannot see how we can impose further obligations on developers without imposing a correlating duty on the players themselves. If a developer acts in good faith and upholds the rights outlined in this Bill, does this create an obligation on players to maintain their subscription in a game? What if I don't like the game anymore? Can I just leave? Surely that makes a mockery of the notion that I am a virtual citizen with rights, since I can just leave anytime I want? Can I have rights without responsibility? I certainly don't think so.

There's also the problem of transience and obsolescence. It makes no sense to create a social contract in a game I'm only going to play for a few days, discard, and then never play again. It is an inevitable fact of life that games grow old and obsolete. Do developers have an obligation to maintain dying, unprofitable and unpopular games by virtue of player's rights? More importantly, should players be obliged to support an ageing game because they are virtual citizens? Are we willing to relinquish our freedom to pick and choose what game we want to play in exchange for a social contract envisioned by an avatar Bill of Rights? The issue of Free to Play games also adds an interesting twist to the idea of equality. Should players who pay to play (and therefore help support the infrastructure of the game) be given proportionally more rights? Consider this:

Article 13 (Koster): A common contribution may, at the discretion of the individual who maintains the hardware, the software, and the data that make up the virtual space, be required in order to maintain the existence of avatars who enforce the code of conduct and to maintain the hardware and the software and the continued existence of the virtual space.

Why should non-paying players be given the same rights as paying subscribers who arguably do more to keep the servers running and the game alive?

Do We Want A Social Contract?

A social contract is a weighty thing, and it requires concessions from both sides. The question then becomes whether or not both sides are willing. If there is one thing that is clear from the developers interviewed in Koster's paper, it is that developers DO NOT want to cede any ground at all, and if they do so, it is usually because they are compelled to by outside factors such as economics, politics and law. More fundamentally, however, I do not see any kind of wide-spread grass roots movement on the part of gamers to create a type of social contract envisioned by this virtual Bill of Rights. I certainly don't want to become a citizen in a virtual world because I want to preserve my status as a player/consumer. Simply put, I have more power as a consumer than I would have as a virtual citizen. There is a reason why we privilege players over the developers but this reason is not rooted in human rights. It is rooted in the capitalist relationship between buyer and seller, producer and consumer, and developer and player. Human rights in the real world are precious and worth fighting for, simply for the reason that real people cannot choose to log out of their lives (except as a tragic and wasteful final act of dissolution), and the world they are trapped in is the only one they have. Gamers have the luxury of picking and choosing their worlds, and as one developer pointed out in Koster's essay, “the one real right they incontrovertibly have is the right to log off.” Out of this truism flows a tremendous amount of power. Developers cannot make you play a game against your will, and in fact, compete with one another for your time and money.

If we choose to remain as players and consumers we maintain a number of advantages while remaining under the protection of the rights we already have in the real world. We stay beholden to no developer, we remain unshackled, unfettered and completely free to migrate from game to game. A consumer has more power than a citizen – we are completely free to walk away from oppressive, totalitarian regimes with impunity. Article 3 in Doone's declaration states that “developers cannot be gods or tyrants.” Is it possible to be a god or tyrant when your subjects can just say “kiss my ass” and walk away? If a citizen under the regimes of Pol Pot, Stalin, or Kim Jong Il tried to say the same thing, they would have ended up in a mass grave with a bullet to the back of the head. More fundamentally, however, games remain a domain of expression, and their variety and scope are not limited by a universal document which, depending on the severity of its terms, may preclude certain types of gameplay or virtual worlds.

Freedom of Choice

Some people find certain types of gameplay unpalatable to their tastes, and many times appeals to universal principles are actually just thinly disguised attacks on specific types of games. Doone calls all EVE players sociopaths, has a binary “you are either with me or against me” outlook (i.e. you're a cynic if you don't look at games the way Doone does, and if you're not socially active in the spheres Doone considers important then you are part of the problem), and despises open world PvP. My own approach is more to let the players decide what they want to play, and let market forces and player tastes govern the virtual worlds we inhabit. The results might not pan out according to your own preferences (i.e. the most popular game in the world is a PvP MOBA with a reputation, deserved or otherwise, for toxicity), but isn't that democracy and freedom of expression at work? I can't stand Justin Bieber, but I don't begrudge people who like him and his brand of crappy music. Whatever happened Voltaire's 17^thcentury maxim, “I don't agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it?” Couldn't we expand this maxim to include games, and come up with a re-purposed statement of freedom of expression which reads, “I don't agree with what you play, but I will defend to the death your right to play it?” As long as I don't hurt anyone else, and consume my own brand of poison with other consenting adults, then you have no right (there's that word again) to tell me what to play, or how to play, or who to play with. Even trolling is protected by the tenets of free speech, even if it is idiotic, ignorant and devoid of any redeeming qualities. The price of freedom is having to put up with morons and slackers, as Gevlon would put it. If you think having to put up with dissenting, contradictory and inflammatory opinions are the sole province of the Internet, you are dead wrong. Politicians, lawyers, scientists, journalists, philosophers and the like have been trolling each other since time immemorial. Two time British Prime Minister Disraeli once said of his opponent Gladstone (himself a four time British Prime Minister): “The difference between a misfortune and a calamity is this: if Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, that would be a calamity.” It's a little more verbose than the common Internet epithet “die in a fire”, but this kind of discourse has been going on since the birth of democracy and free speech, and society has not yet crumbled into a heap because of it.

A Universal Bill for a Multiplicity of Worlds?

Virtual space at this point is not a unified realm sitting parallel to reality, but rather a series of fragmented spaces governed by wildly different norms. The cultural norms governing A Tale in the Desert are completely different from those that are commonly found in EVE Online and Darkfall. There are a multitude of possible virtual worlds out there, and they vary widely in scope, setting and expectations. Why then, would we try to impose a universal document on a multiplicity of worlds, each with their own norms and justifications for existence? A corollary of our right to log off is our right to choose the virtual worlds which appeal to us, and the people we associate with. There are no real impediments to people creating the kind of communities within virtual spaces which promulgate a world view in accordance with their own. Every modern MMO offers a variety of social tools such as guilds, friends lists, ignore lists, reporting systems and specialised PvE/PvP/RP servers to allow players to develop communities according to their tastes. This doesn't mean however, that these kinds of communities should be adopted universally across virtual spaces, because it would actually serve to limit the scope of the virtual multiverse. I always prefer to err on the side of freedom of expression, and I fear that a universal document may be anathema to this.

I can understand the argument for codes of conduct tailored to specific worlds, and which incorporate both the player and the developer in its clauses. This is, in fact, what happens in the real world. Human rights as we know them evolved in very specific circumstances, namely in the backdrop of our shared humanity and the singular nature of the world we occupy. There are so many fundamental differences between the real and the virtual that a basic importation of rights from real to virtual doesn't always make sense. I'm pretty sure the sanctions placed on murder would be relaxed in real life if all of us just respawned at a shrine point whenever we died, while the ancient prescription of "Thou shalt not kill" would seem ridiculous in Destiny, Titanfall or Planetside 2. A better way is to approach each world on a case by case basis, and hammer out a negotiated settlement which pleases the majority on both sides. Once again, the prescient Koster incorporates this into his own bill:

Article 6 (Koster): The code of conduct is the expression of the general will of the community and the will of the individual who maintains the hardware and software that makes up the virtual space.

Contrast this to Doone's version:

Article 6 (Doone): The code of conduct is the will of the community.

Once again Doone completely omits developers in his “summary”. For someone who trumpets human rights he is awfully quick to trample on the rights of developers by writing them out of his version of the Bill. Doone makes two mistakes when citing Koster. The first is completely writing developers out of his version of an avatar Bill of Rights. While Koster's version sounds like a reasonably inclusive document, Doone's just reads as a statement of player entitlement. The second mistake he makes is that he believes that Koster was in earnest when proposing an avatar Bill of Rights. What Koster is arguing is that following a code of conduct based on the principles similar to those espoused in avatar bill of rights is good business for developers because they “are solid administrative principles in terms of practical effect”. Koster writes that "having a clear code of conduct for both players and admins has been shown to make running the space go smoother overall."He is not arguing for an avatar Bill of Rights per se, nor is he advocating player rights at the expense of the developers, something which seems to have sailed over Doone's head when he quotes the article. Koster writes that “the real point of a document like this would be to see how many admins would sign, not how many players”, and concludes that “I'm not seriously proposing that we declare the rights of avatars” because the concept is “riddled with gotchas and logical holes”. As a developer Koster knows that players are an entitled bunch, and his concern is on how to convince developers on his side of the fence to adopt a set of principles, which in his view, make good business sense. It amuses me to see Koster's foresight in predicting that "I don't doubt that there's some folks out there right now seizing on this as an important document" without actually understanding what Koster is actually trying to achieve. Doone does just that, picking out the bits he liked, then using Koster's name as an authority for his own version of avatar rights without ever addressing any of the objections raised by Koster himself, or actually understanding what Koster was trying to do.

Player Rights, not Avatar Rights

I'm not arguing that players don't have rights. They certainly do, and in the future when I have the time and inclination I would like to look at the source of these rights and their application in virtual spaces. I don't disagree with Doone when he says that there are real people behind avatars, and yes, people have feelings and they can be hurt during the process of online interactions. I just wanted to focus on one of the “gotchas and logical holes” Koster refers to, namely the proposition that all avatars are created free and equal. They are not, and any argument which depends on this axiom fails to understand the fundamentally contingent nature of avatars and the virtual worlds which they inhabit. There may come a time where the proposition may not be so far fetched, and that will be the day when our online activities are pooled under the auspices of one easily identifiable avatar which is linked irrevocably to our personal identity outside virtual space. This is another argument entirely, but even in this scenario it seems more efficient just to extend rights and protection from our "meatbag" selves into virtual reality, rather than doubling up and creating a redundant set of rights for our avatar as well. Avatars, in their most common incarnation in games to date, aren't free – they are contingent on both the player and developer and the continued running of the servers which house their data. Nor are they equal – we allocate our time between our avatars differently, and even in the same game not all avatars are treated equally. The cost of maintaining an avatar also varies from game to game, as evidenced by the differing pay models of F2P and subscription. I'm not against the idea of a type of social contract, specific to each game and tailored to the demographics which inhabit that particular universe. What I am against however, is a universal contract based on a maxim which fails to take into account the multiplicity inherent in virtual worlds, and the fundamentally contingent nature of avatars themselves.

Much has changed since I last wrote about TESO. I lack the discipline to churn out regular blog posts, preferring to play rather than write about games, and when I actually do write, I end up creating massive, turgid and long-winded posts about issues which seem trivial in hindsight. Ah well, no one is forcing anyone to read this, so I will just potter along and write about things which interest me. Once an idea gets in my skull it festers in the back of my head, and only the act of publishing it liberates my mind from the fixation. It's quite a relief to get a post published and to forget about it.

The Siren Call of Archeage

I have been sorely tempted by the lures of Archeage. It has many features which interests someone of my background. One of the recurring themes of this blog is the quest for meaningful open world PvP, and AA appears to be one of the few titles that have incentivized it correctly and given it purpose beyond meaningless griefing. A game has to be doing something right if it is able to attract both self-defined "carebears" such as Aywren of Clean Casuals Gaming, and hardcore PvPers like Syncaine of Hardcore Casual. On the other hand, the horror stories about the prevalence of bots and hackers, Trion's unwillingness or inability to deal with them, and the controversy regarding the use of a rootkit program called HackShield are all red flags which dampen my interest in the game. I've already taken the plunge and joined Syncaine's guild on the Ollo server, but have yet to actually play the game online with my new guild. My AA avatar is in her 20's, and is a neophyte in all things AA related, so I don't expect to go on any roams with the guild for at least a couple more weeks. It's actually quite fun to be a stranger in a strange land - to not know the landscape intimately, to be unable to comprehend the meaning of the abbreviations in zone chat, or to know the potential strengths or weaknesses of my character's build. My avatar has simply been questing, following the bread crumbs like Hansel and Gretel in the big bad woods, except that the big bad woods so far have been non-PvP zones and have been quite uneventful, peaceful areas. I'm sure a rude shock awaits once she enters the contested zones, but it is something I am looking forward to. For now my avatar Hatakeyama is learning how to plant flowers and trying to wrap my head around how the crafting system works. No guides used as of yet - that will come once someone flattens me in PvP - but she is learning as she goes. At the moment of writing she has planted a bunch of lilies behind a non-descript barn, and is hoping that the flowers will still be around when she logs on later this evening. It is a joy to be able to interact with the world, and to see the mark of player agency everywhere, from the player-owned and tended fields, the vast melange of houses and the occasional convoy that come rumbling along the dirt roads. TESO is a far more beautiful game - look at these amazing screenshots of the in-game engine - but its beauty is akin to that of painting locked away behind a glass case, pristine but forever beyond alteration. AA is a rough work in progress, but more importantly it is a communal effort, and one that springs from the players themselves.

Single Player Diversions

I'm still subscribed to TESO, but my avatar has stalled at Veteran Rank (VR) 6 (out of a possible 14), and levelling her to cap via questing is a concept that fills me with horror and trepidation. I'm pretty much with J3w3l of Healing the Masses on this one - I think I'd prefer to eat broken glass rather than do another quest, regardless of how nicely the graphics are rendered and how well the voice acting is performed. Instead I play around with my Templar alt, and occasionally do some PvP in Cyrodiil on my main. I am now very much out of touch with the situation within the PvP campaigns. The only time I play TESO is when I can organise a time when I can play with Rykester and Sally Mander, and those times are becoming fewer and far between due to Rykester's ongoing studies and Sally's new baby girl. Nowadays I am devoting much more time to activities outside gaming, and the time I do spend in gaming is spent on single player titles such as Civilisation V, Hearthstone and Wasteland 2. I finally beat Civ 5 on the hardest difficulty setting, and have no plans to ever return to it outside of multiplayer games. Unfortunately Beyond Earth is on the cusp of release, and I fear that this will be another title which will consume much of my leisure time. I started playing Hearthstone in August when I went back to Australia for holiday, and this title has scratched an itch for competitive play which WoW Arena and Rated BGs used to fill. I would like to become good at Hearthstone, and try to attain Legendary rank, much like Matticus in World of Matticus has done. This requires practice and study, however, and it might be something that is beyond me anyway. For now, though, Hearthstone is like Arena without the movement and the twitch requirements, and I am thoroughly enjoying learning and playing the game.

State of the Campaigns in TESO

The PvP landscape in TESO has changed significantly since Part IV of this series. For one, the original ten 90-day campaigns in Cyrodiil have been compressed into five - a non-VR five day campaign, a VR only five day campaign, two 7 day campaigns, and an open 30 day campaign. Another alteration occurred in September, when the Veteran campaign of Bow of Shadows was replaced by another open 30 day campaign (Azura's Star). I've relocated my toons to Thornblade, the first of the two possible open 30 day campaigns, and any subsequent posts about Cyrodiil will take place here. The rough chronology of the campaigns I have been involved with since the April release are as follows:

i) 90 Day Campaign (Wabbajack April-July 2014) - the first, and best campaign in my humble opinion, and I will always have fond memories of the great war in Wabbajack. The story of this campaign can be found here;

ii) Truncated 90 Day Campaign (Wabbajack July-August 2014) - this expired early when the campaigns were compressed into their present day versions;

iii) 30 Day Campaign (Thornblade August 2014) - won by the Altmeri Dominion;

iv) 30 Day Campaign (Thornblade September 2014) - won by the Altmeri Dominion;

v) 30 Day Campaign (Thornblade October 2014) - scheduled to end in just over a week, but it is CLOSE - any of the three factions can still win it.

In addition to the consolidation of the campaigns Zenimax has instituted a 50,000 AP minimum to be eligible for the rank of Emperor, as well as a 3 day lockout when switching campaigns. The horse has bolted however, as the title of Emperor is completely meaningless now given the prevalence of Emperor farming in the weeks prior to the implementation of patch 1.3. The only Emperors I have respect for are the ones I have seen on a regular basis on the other side, and who have been crowned legitimately in CONTESTED campaigns. Zenimax has also begun awarding items for players in top 10% of the leaderboards (top 2% get a gold item, 2-10% get a purple) in patch 1.4. Previously all you received from the campaigns was gold, the sum total of which was determined by your activity and how well your Alliance did in the campaign. Now being active in the campaign has more tangible inducements, and given the balance changes I see this as an overall positive. And finally in the upcoming 1.5 patch campaign buffs will be localised to the campaign you are physically in. There will no longer be instances where players set their home campaign to one where their faction is dominant, and then guest into other campaigns using the buffs they have in their home campaign. The reign of the Dominion Emperor-Farmers will finally be over - if people want buffs they have to earn it in the campaign they are fighting in.

Overall there have been a vast plethora of changes in TESO, and all for the better. Patch 1.5 promises to add a whole host of quality of life changes. Dungeon scaling is on the cards, Veteran Points will be abolished, and the experience requirement to go up levels has been reduced. Thank the Divines for that. Better facial animations will also be implemented in 1.5, which goes to show where the developer's hearts are in this game - they love their aesthetic, and will spend countless resources improving the lighting, particle effects, and now facial animations over the things I myself would be prioritising - the Imperial City and the justice system all come into mind. For me, however, the best thing Zenimax has done to date is the minor miracle they have wrought on Thornblade. Somehow the three factions are almost completely balanced, as by evidenced by the evolution of the campaign score below.

Even now in the last week of the campaign the result is poised on a razor's edge, as any of the three factions can still win:

Unfortunately the balance in Thornblade is in sharp contrast to the one sided dominance of EP in Azura's Star, the other 30 day campaign. This probably goes to show that these types of factional balance are always in unstable equilibrium, and hitting the sweet spot is more a case of luck than anything else. I just accept that asymmetry is part of these type of open world games and deal with it. If I want balance I play instanced games like WoW Arena, Starcraft 2, or League of Legends.

An Interlude

I plan to remain a TESO subscriber for the foreseeable future, but my attentions will be diverted to AA for the next few weeks. It's too late for me to return to the current Thornblade campaign and be in the hunt for top 2-10% of the leaderboards until the campaign restarts in November. I am really looking forward to the opening of the continent of Auroria in AA, because this is when we will see guilds claim castles and territory and engage in some real large scale skirmishes ala Cyrodiil in TESO. I look forward to seeing which guilds become the top dogs, and who their rivals will be. MMOs are blank canvases on which players can create their own stories, and while AA has its share of challenges to overcome, the battle over Auroria and dominion of the high seas is a player-generated story this old role-player can get into.

It's tough to be an immigrant.

Stranger in a strange land. It's just Hatakeyama and her beast - mount - thingy - in a hostile world.

You're a stranger in a strange land. You don't know the language, or in the case of MMOs, the peculiar shorthands which spring up to describe the various dungeons, raids or what-not. The geography is confusing, and the road ahead is murky - you don't know what activities are level-appropriate, or what the best route to the power cap is. You are ignorant of the norms governing the space, nor do you know who the influential guilds are, a factor which becomes important if you want to dive into inter-guild warfare. The vast multitude of crafting materials and harvestable goods on offer present an intricate interlocking jigsaw that defies easy assimilation. The plethora of NPCs and their titles mean nothing to you as of yet, and the simple act of drawing water has you in a tizzy trying to remember where the last well you stopped at was.

As a tourist, however, you do possess a number of advantages. You have travelled through similar landscapes before, and there are many elements which are familiar. The tab targeting CD based combat is like a second skin, and soon the neural pathways begin to be mapped and reinforced by hundreds of key presses against generic mobs doomed to wander in circumscribed areas like lambs awaiting the slaughter. Skill trees are easy to comprehend, and you find yourself peering at the tool tips to try to winkle out synergies and combos. The gold sellers and bots are a familiar blight, as are the trolls, the idiots, the know-it-alls, the lost and confused, and the occasional wits with the genuinely funny comebacks and one-liners.

Yuri Hatakeyama, in yet another incarnation in another virtual world.

This is the situation faced by my avatar Hatakeyama in Archeage, now level 36, currently guild-less (actually now a member of Unreal Aussies - why do I always find these badly named guilds?), friend-less, and somewhat hapless in this brave new world she finds herself in. AA has had its share of detractors, most recently Syncaine of Hardcore Casual and J3w3l of Healing the Masses, and their most biting criticisms have been aimed at the (to use Syncaine's term) pay for power (P4P) elements of the game. While J3w3l is quite happy enough to continue playing despite Trion's dubious payment model, Syncaine has thrown in the towel and cancelled his sub. This has led to, somewhat interestingly enough, a spirited debate on his own blog where his buddy Mobs accuses Syncaine of not giving the game a fair shake. Not knowing either of the two protagonists I stay out of the argument - but it has led to a new resolution to view the game with my own eyes rather than taking at face value everything that Syncaine has to say on his blog regarding AA.

So this posts, and all other posts marked with the pre-fix "Adrift in Archeage" will detail the tales of this wandering Haranya. In her travels she has noticed a few things, chief most being the different caste of citizens which exist in AA. The lowest caste are the people who play for free. They are unable to own property, and earn Labor points at a reduced rate. Labor is the bedrock of crafting in AA - all crafting actions cost Labor - and this caste only earns Labor while they are online, which led to some interesting ramifications during launch. On the upside, they have the chance to play without shelling out any real life currency before deciding whether or not this game is for them.

The second tier of citizenship belongs to subscribers. They have priority queuing. They earn Labor at a higher rate, but more importantly, they also earn Labor while they are offline and have a higher Labor cap. They also have the ability to own property. Property allows you to grow crops, raise livestock and builds houses on protected land - while anyone can plant or raise livestock pretty much anywhere in the world, these items are vulnerable to depredation from other players who chance on these items growing in the wild. Crops or livestock on protected land cannot be plundered, although I have to confess that I only know this to be true for "protected" (i.e. non-PvP) zones. Whether protected land in PvP zones offer the same guarantees is something I have to discover once I venture forth into these areas.

The very top tier of citizenship in AA belongs to the "whales" who are subscribers but are also willing to shell out extra cash for P4P items in the cash shop. While being a subscriber in WoW, Eve Online or TESO gives you access to the complete game supplemented by a cosmetic cash shop, Trion has taken the somewhat dubious road of implementing a cash shop which sells not only vanity gear, but also items which boost a player's power. These items include Labor boosts, crafting boosts, better gliders, and items which dramatically remove the RNG factor in the upgrading of gear.

So the question for me is whether I am willing to put up with this kind of blatant cash grab in order to play the game. In many ways AA is a strange beast - it forces PvPers to play PvE until level 30, and it forces PvErs to adjust to a PvP end game beyond 30. PvP can be avoided entirely by staying in protected zones and venturing into contested zones during times of peace only, so it is conceivable to play AA as a PvEr only, much like how high-sec industrialists do it in Eve Online. As a PvPer though I do have legitimate concerns as to whether or not I am willing to face players who can spend wads of real life cash to get a gearing edge on me in PvP.

The short answer is yes, for now. Quite a few reasons spring to mind, the first being the lack of alternatives. Single player games which I have been looking forward to have not met my expectations - Jagged Alliance: Flashback, by all accounts, is a steaming pile of manure, while Beyond Earth has been damned with faint praise, with one reviewer comparing it to a Civ 5 mod without the actual charm of historical leaders, units, wonders, religions and cultural works. I have no doubt I will buy and play this game one day, but coming off a Civ 5 marathon game on a Huge map on Deity difficulty which took about two weeks to complete, it is the last thing I want to do at the moment. I have TESO burn-out thanks to the immeasurable grind required to level Veteran ranks, and am willing to put off levelling until patch 1.5 goes live, and the experience requirement becomes drastically reduced. Being a long time WoW player I thought WoD would tempt me, but strangely enough it hasn't. When I was a WoW subscriber I didn't play WoW the MMO, but rather WoW the MOBA ladder tournament of Arenas and Rated BGs. The only reason for returning to WoW would be if the old gang decided to assemble one more time, but given that my team mates have scattered all over the world this has become increasingly unlikely. Corona is off on deployment, Rykester is doing his Masters, Sally has a new baby, Tamati has moved to the United Arab Emirates, and even Ratsac is focusing more on RL diversions. This is actually the first time I have really played an MMO on my own - I'm used to having Sally and Rykester having my back, and when we're together the thousands of Arena games we have played together means we can give as good as we get in the vast majority of encounters against other players in both WoW and TESO. Focusing targets, quick swaps, synchronising CDs and peels are second nature for us, and usually means we can leverage our years of teamwork against disorganized mobs of players. No longer. I'm just one guy now, and an ignorant neophyte at that. I tried joining Syncaine's guild in Ollo, but given that the guild has disintegrated prematurely that idea is still-born. If I'm going to play AA I'm going to have to start from scratch, with nary a friend in sight, but this isn't a prospect I am facing with dread, although I do miss my long time intrepid companions.

Seeing a skyship for the first time, Hatakeyama looks on with awe.

The more fundamental reason as to why I'm OK with playing in an environment like AA's is that I hold with the idea that asymmetry is a fundamental aspect of open world PvP. The distinction between symmetrical and asymmetrical games are very clear in my own mind - I place discrete, balanced and instanced games like WoW Arena, League of Legends and StarCraft 2 in one category, and persistent open world games like EVE Online, Darkfall, TESO and now Archeage in another. Each style of gameplay has its own appeal - in balanced PvP all things being equal the team with greater skill will win, which is why this type of gameplay has to be scrupulously balanced in order to ensure that player ability is the primary determinant of victory. In persistent world PvP there are so many variables that winning is not always determined by skill. It can be influenced by level/gear differential, state of readiness, time spent in the world, time zones, and even by the amount of friends you bring to the gunfight. I have written copious amounts of words on this topic here, and I don't intend to rehash it. Suffice to say that I understand that AA belongs to the latter category of PvP - open world PvP - and understand that I will be outgunned and outgeared by people who are willing to spend tracts of cash to obtain a gearing edge. I don't expect balance, nor will I be weeping and gnashing my teeth on the forums when I eat gank after gank while I level up in the contested zones. I will simply collect my bruised avatar at the Statues of Nui, and head off again and try to use my wits to avoid a similar fate. The trade off for me will be to live in a world that is alive, where people till and work their fields, and trade convoys go rumbling along the dust-beaten tracks on route to far away lands. I have yet to venture onto the open sea in Archeage, yet watching from the cliffs as convoys prepare to embark to distant shores I have to confess to a romantic stirring in my breast. The landscape of AA is an exotic one, born from the shores of Korea, and now transplanted uncomfortably to the west. Like J3w3l, I love the Korean speaking NPCs, but more than this I like the guild advertisements that scroll in zone chat looking for people in several different languages. I have seen Russian, Filipino, Portugese and French so far, and this adds to the feeling of living in a strange land far different from anything I have experienced to date in a computer game. MMOs are best when they convey the feeling of organic, shifting life, and this world, for all its perils and the all too-common brutish idiocy associated with F2P and OWPvP, is alive.

I really thought that I was done with WoW.

I penned a series of posts last year entitled Diaries of a Ganker, and in these posts I gave the account of my shenanigans as a ganker on Illidan, as well as my team's attempt to push rating on the Arena and Rated BG ladders. In March, however, I cancelled my subscription and called it quits for good, or so I thought. The fact that Warlords of Draenor was coming did nothing for me. Nor did the announcement that Australia was getting their own servers fill me with excitement. As a resident of Japan my latency on Australian and American servers are about the same, clocking in at roughly 120 ms. There are two other MMOs vying for my time - TESO and AA - and as I said in a previous post, the only reason why I would return to WoW is if the group of players I used to play with decided to jump back in the saddle again. Given that we have all splintered into differing pursuits the probability of this happening equated to the proverbial snowball's chance in hell.

The first inkling that the snowball might survive came when an old comrade-in-arms Sorgon appeared on Battlenet when I was playing Hearthstone. I haven't seen this guy for almost a year, and he is one of the two really excellent warlocks I've met on my old server. He is also an old Arena team mate and a 2k Rated BG player. We exchanged some light banter, and he surprised me by saying he was thinking of returning to WoW. I wished him luck, told him I had too many things on my plate, and said farewell.

The second hint that the universe was coming into alignment was the appearance of Tamati on Battlenet, a Kiwi team mate who had moved to the United Arab Emirate. After months of silence, he appeared, told me he had a stable Internet connection, said he was thinking of diving back into WoW rated play, and asked whether I was thinking of running Rated BGs this coming expansion? I said no, wished him well, and we went our separate ways.

The third revelation occurred when Rykester. a good mate in real life who called WoW quits at the end of last year, asked me whether or not I would be playing the expansion. I said no, then queried, are you? He said, well we have Aussie servers now, latency isn't going to screw us over anymore. We won't lose games based on bad ping.What about TESO, I asked. He said, the AvAvA is fun, but it's not Skyrim, which is what I really wanted. You should play AA, I said. It's more Skyrim than TESO is. Really? he replied. I might give it a bash someday, but WoD looks really fun. You know they are letting us transfer our toons over for free, right?

Really?

And there's a free week of subscription available?

Dang.

At this stage I realised that the world was moving in mysterious ways, and conspiring to return me to WoW. I messaged a friend and team mate Ratsac on Battlenet. You playing WoW? Ratsac has been busy in real life building a new house over in Perth, and his reply was curt and to the point. Fucking oath, bro. He then went on, I've been playing boomie on the Oceanic servers, and owning everyone. It's a different game on 20-40 ms. You should listen to all the Americans QQing in Oceanic BGs about the bad ping, bitching that the game is unplayable. Now they know how us Aussies feel. Ratsac recently got his 2k achievement in Rateds at 200+ ms, so I shudder to think how much carnage he will wreck at 20 ms.

The final revelation occurred when I conversed with my sister on Skype recently. Known as Lelle in WoW, and Sally in TESO, she just had a new baby and being a new parent is consuming almost all her time. She asked me, so are we going to play WoW? I was rather taken aback by this question. What about the baby? And TESO? I can't play as much as I used to, obviously, she replied. But we can work around the baby. And I can play my warrior without lag!!! Hurrah!!! She was positively beaming with enthusiasm. I can't recall her being so excited for a game for a long time.

What finally sealed the deal was watching Blizzcon and the WoW Arena World Championships, which were the closest and most competitive series I have seen in the history of the competition (the semi-finals and the final are all embedded in this post). Both semi-finals had the winners coming back from a 2-0 deficit to take the series 3-2, with the title eventually being taken in 4-2 in a best of seven series. I also saw what may be the changing of the WoW guard - anyone who follows WoW Arena will know the names Cdew, Venrucki, Snutz, Talbadar and co., and I found it very interesting that long time stalwarts Skill Capped and Three Amigos tumbled to a new European team called Bleached Bones. Lazerchicken was a revelation, playing his hybrid boomkin class beautifully, putting out constant damage pressure, kiting in tandem with his healer when trained, and supporting his team with off-heals and peels to alleviate pressure when required. Watching these games rekindled the old love for this format, and a desire to mix it up and try again to hit that holy grail of PvP for me, a 2k rating. This is something I have never been able to do despite years of trying, and while I have come agonisingly close, I have never reached this milestone.

I have cancelled my TESO subscription after eight months in the game, and designated it as a title to return to in the future. I will keep pottering away in AA because it is the most alive persistent world I have been to despite its repeated attempts to scuttle itself by inept customer service. But my friends and family are going back to WoW, and they are doing so with big happy smiles on their faces. At the end of the day all the thousands of words about meaningful persistent sandbox worlds means nothing in the face of the bonds between friends, family, and old comrades. The stars have aligned - the signs in the tea leaves are clear - the augurs have spoken. WoW is beckoning.

Who am I to argue with the universe?

So I'm back in WoW, much to my surprise, and I have to say that I am really enjoying it. The game is like a comfortable pair of slippers, easy to slide back into it and gentle on the soles of the feet. There have been some issues with massive log-in queues, but they seem to have been fixed as of last Saturday. It's very comforting to see some old faces, and to exchange in good-natured banter with team mates, guild mates and the like. My gaming circle has transferred en-masse to the PvP Oceanic server of Gundrak. We left our old guild behind, which was an occasion for a little bit of remorse, given that we have been there since vanilla. Cross-realm grouping allows for us to stay in touch and play with people we left behind however, so it's not goodbye for good.

Tientzo in Shadowmoon Valley.

Season 16 kicks off on December 2nd, and as a PvPer pretty much everything I am doing is geared towards getting ready for the 10-15 week grind for full Conquest gear. It takes about 27,000 points to get full Conquest, which equates to 15 weeks for someone at 1800 cap (1700 in WoD), just over 12 weeks for someone at 2200, and even less for players with higher caps. My approach to this season will be the same as it has usually been for previous seasons - accumulate gear by hitting Conquest caps on a weekly basis via Arenas and Rated BGs, and then push for rating at the end of the season. First things first, however - we all have to first hit the level cap, and that requires questing. Ugh. TESO has inculcated a deep and abiding distaste of questing for me, and I had to say that I wasn't looking forward to grinding to 100 in WoW. I have been pleasantly surprised however - maybe it's just nostalgia, but I am having fun levelling in WoD. Can I just say that levelling in a PvP server is a frenetic free for all in contested zones? The Horde outnumber the Alliance two to one on Gundrak. To make matters worse, the Horde outnumber the Alliance more than two to one on Jubei'Thos, and since these two realms are linked, it has created an overall population imbalance of more than four to one in favour of the Horde. Not that it matters - I actually like being outnumbered, even if it means that I will spend a lot of time corpse running. As I have mentioned in previous posts, I spent a great deal of time being a ganker on Illidan, where the Horde outnumbered the Alliance a ridiculous 35-1. It's a little different on Gundrak, given that I chosen to main my monk this season. No stealth, Vanishes or Shadowmelds this time around - instead I have to be aware of my environment, group up when necessary, use the monk's amazing mobility to get out of trouble, or be flexible about where I can level if things get too hot in a given zone. I never read quest text in the best of times, but OMG turning in becomes Mission Impossible unto itself if there are Horde about. Killing quest mobs sometimes becomes a frantic case of darting in, getting the mob down ASAP, and then getting the hell out of there. It certainly keeps me on my toes, and I'm quite happy to relinquish a degree of control over my levelling experience to have this sense of constant danger around me. Sometimes there are periods of uneasy peace, where a bunch of Horde and Alliance stand nervously around a quest giver, but all it takes is one hawk on either side to start attacking, and the whole thing devolves into a massive brawl. There are more unspoken truces in one on one encounters - players circle around each other warily and go on about their business - but as soon as numbers begin to pile up in any given location, the odds of a peaceful resolution drop dramatically. You can inadvertently hit someone with an AoE spell while hitting mobs (I've done it a few times with Chi Wave), and this can constitute the provocation which sets off the ensuing bloodbath. "You dare poke me with your Chi Wave? I'll eat your heart, Alliance scum!"

The real meat of the season occurs when our team start actually pushing for rating. Everything else is just practice. Traditionally pushing for rating comes in two flavours. You can either push at the beginning of the season, and sit on your rating for the remainder. The pro teams do it this way, and there are some advantages associated with this. By pushing hard to a high rating you increase your Conquest caps, so much so that you can be 1-4 pieces of gear ahead of the opposition who only play to the regular cap. By the end of the gearing period everyone will be wearing the same gear, so the rationale behind this approach is to go hard early, get high caps and therefore get a gearing advantage, and then exploit this advantage to get higher ratings on the ladder before everyone else catches up to your level of gear. If you're going to go down this route you have to make sure that you start the season with full Honor gear before the Rated season begins. Some people are lazy about their Honor grind pre-season, and you may start with a gearing advantage if your opposition didn't bother grinding. I've attained the best ratings I've ever had by this method (1900+), going hard in the very first week of the season with a team of like-minded individuals with only Honor gear and one piece of Conquest. The gear differential may be miniscule, but in tight situations these disparities might be all that stands between the way of a guaranteed kill or a recovery by the enemy team.

The second way is the way I have usually done it, which is basically use the gearing period to practice and learn your class and spec before finally pushing for rating at the end of the season, once all your team mates are decked out in full Conquest. The teams I have played in usually reserve the last 4-6 weeks of a season to push rating, and it is a better fit for the people I play with, given that we all have varying demands on our time and schedules. I've been out of the game for eight months, I'm playing WoW PvP with a Razer Naga for the first time, and there have been massive changes to the meta. All of these factors require a learning period which I would prefer to spread out over 2-3 months rather than compressing into a two week period before Season 16 begins. Given what I know of the changes to the PvP meta it would seem that melee will be the king of this expansion. No more disarms, the pruning of instant cast heals, and less CC equals more uptime for melee to stay in the face of their target. MoP was unquestionably dominated by spell casters, with locks, mages, shadow priests, druids and shamans making up the bulk of high end tournament play. WoD looks like it might be the era of melee. Fitting, too, given the theme of the expansion. I was going to roll shadow priest this time around - I used my free 90 boost to level one - but when I looked at his defensive CDs I thought to myself, "How in the name of the Light am I going to get melee off of myself?" No more Psychic Fiend. Psychic Scream and Void Tendrils share the same tier talent, and given that most melee I know have at least two escapes from Fear (all have trinket plus DK's Desecrated Ground, ret pally's bubble, Warrior's Berserk, and a Windwalker's Nimble Brew) without taking into account defensive dispels from their healer, it looks like it's going to be a long season for priests. Can anyone say Choo Choo Train? These guys are going to be trained into the ground by melee teams, and their survival is going to be heavily dependent on the quality of the peels and heals from their team mates. This is the case for every class - this is why Arena and Rated BGs are a team e-sport - but there is a threshold where the advantages your class offers is offset by the disadvantages, and it looks like shadow priests might have crossed it. They'll still be great in Rated BGs, because offensive dispels, off heals and multiple target DoT pressure is still valuable in this setting. Arenas might be a different story, but who knows, my knowledge of the new meta is in its preliminary stages at the moment.

So rather than going priest, I'm going to main a monk, either as a healer or a melee dps. I will decide once Rykester, Ratsac and Lelle decide what specs they will roll - I don't have to decide until I ding 100, and the Honor grind begins. Even then the choice is not irrevocable, not until the purchase of my first Conquest piece. This initial purchase determines my spec for the season. For now I am questing as a Windwalker, and learning how to play him with a Razer Naga. As retarded as it sounds, I have only played Arenas and Rated BG's as a keyboard turner, and the difference is night and day - I hope that this transition to mouse based control will be the catalyst that will put me over 2k in the coming seasons. Fortunately I've become more proficient with the Naga, which I bought in March just when I was quitting WoW. I used it in TESO and AA, and my hand has finally adapted and learned the position of the keys, even the keys located in the most difficult hand contorting positions. In a way it was good for me to take a break from WoW. It erased my memories of my previous keybinds, and allowed me to remap them onto a control method which I had finally become comfortable with. One day I will level my rogue, and I will compare my footage as a keyboard turning rogue with that of me playing with a mouse.

I'm using questing as a way of practicing, assigning keybinds to mouse button, and learning their location via repetitive use. I aggro two mobs at a time, Paralyse one, and then practice unloading burst on the other. I'm trying to winkle out what my burst combo is, and am disciplining myself to pool my resources. PvE is different to PvP in that PvE requires you to dump resources before you cap, because sitting at full means a net DPS loss. In PvP you are required to sit on fully pooled resources a lot of time to ensure that when your team mate says go, you can put the pedal to the metal and unload coordinated burst on your kill target. The discipline part comes in when you are not bursting, and just putting out light pressure - it's hard not to dump all your resources into your current target, and then suddenly find that when it's time to swap you have your trinket and CD buffs but no resources to apply maximum pressure. In my monk's case, I need to have all my Tigereye Brew stacked and ready to go, as well as having a full pool of Chi. My preliminary burst combo is hitting trinket + brew, starting with a Rising Sun kick (the monk's hardest hitting ability with a healing debuff), then spamming Blackout Kick. I also need to practice kiting, which is something that monks excel at. If I can kite well I will have the option of two jobs in Rated BG play - one as melee DPS, and another as a FC (flag carrier). Not to mention heals if I roll Mistweaver. A lot of this is really simple in theory - the trick is to make these moves instinctive, fluid, and automatic through thousands of repetitions in a vast array of situations. This means duelling constantly against every possible class and spec, practicing in random BGs and Arena skirmishes, and finally playing lots and lots of Rated games.

Tientzo solos an elite in Gorgrond...by kiting him to the NPC guards. Hey, whatever it takes, right?

I never thought I would say it, but it's really good to be back. Moreover, it's good to be back with people who I enjoy playing the game with. None of this really matters - the grind, the gear, the ladder, even the rating itself - I proved that to myself when I walked away from the game. You don't miss it when you're gone. It's just something to give you focus while playing, and it is a worthy end in of itself, because it requires discipline, skill and team work to achieve. Nonetheless, ladder achievements all pale into comparison with the company you keep, and the comrades, friends and family you play with. Nothing beats the feeling of achieving goals with people you like, and hopefully there will be plenty of shared laughs, groans of agony, cheers of victory, agonizing defeats, and ridiculous out-of-your ass plays in the coming season. I'm sure there will be dummy spits and moments of self-doubt, too, in which I question my ability to play the game, but we've been playing together for literally thousands of games in both formats, and if we're still playing together after all the arguments, frustrations, and setbacks we've had then nothing in the future is going to stop us.

Bring on the new season, and let the games begin.

I'm now a proud landowner of a scratchy 8 by 8 plot in the northern foothills of the Windscour Savannah, courtesy of a helpful guildie named Promac, who pointed it out to me when I plaintively asked for help in guild chat locating a suitable site. It's no piece of paradise – the land seems more suited to lantana (a vicious, noxious, invasive, scrub and thicket forming weed I've had the misfortune of having to clear vast tracts of when I was a youth) than anything else, being set an alarmingly steep 45 degree angle and located at the foothills of a ring of mountains. It's at the very edge of a large player settlement north of the Windheart Lake, miles away from amenities, vendors and the like, and located in a PvP zone which cyclically erupts into open war. Like an immigrant to a new country, my avatar has to begin at the margins of established society, to fill vacancies and do jobs shunned or avoided by the mainstream. If the established players of AA are the landed gentry with plush homes, fast gliders and sleek seafaring vessels, then my avatar Hatakeyama is a penniless immigrant, with more in common with the thousands of folks that poured into America and Australia during the days of the gold rush in California and Ballarat respectively. I can visualise her going to sleep at night with her belongings tucked carefully underneath her, her Gildas rattling in a can, counted and recounted numerous times. In the morning she climbs the mountains north-east of Anvilton to mine for ore. It's backbreaking work, but she does it dutifully, humming a tune in an exotic tongue, to the mild bemusement of her fellow miners. On the way home she walks past the row of beautifully appointed homes in quiet envy, and in her heart of hearts resolves to one day have a house like this.

It's no piece of paradise, but it's hers.

Before finding her plot Hatakeyama had to resort to planting “illegal” farms all over the world, and hoping that her produce wasn't pilfered before she was able to return to harvest her crops. This led to a kind of twisted game of hide and seek, as I found out to my chagrin that there are players out there who specialise in finding and uprooting these types of plots. The very first time I planted out in the world was around the corner from the crafting vendor behind a nearby barn. When I returned my pumpkin and lily patch was gone - instead, the ground around the area was littered with red footprints. Some cheeky bastard had stolen them, but thanks to the footprints I could actually see their name, as well as report the thief to the judiciary. Undeterred by this initial failure I decided to try my luck again, by finding a spot a little further secluded and out of the way. Once again I sowed, watered and congratulated myself on my cunning, then logged off. On my return I found that the pumpkins and lilies had been carried off again, and not only that they had been carried off by the same guy. It made me wonder if he was running some kind of script which allowed him to find these farms.

As a last ditch attempt Hatakeyama resolved to find the most remote, inhospitable, out-of-the way locale she could find, and try to raise some crops there. She found it in this abandoned mansion below – a quest area some distance from the nearest settlement, populated by man-eating plants and bots. Behind a stand of bushes at the rear of the mansion, Hatakeyama found a secluded spot far away from normal transit routes and questing pathways.

Here, in this eerie and forbidding location Hatakeyama found the ideal location for her “illegal” farm. These farms are "illegal" in the sense that people pay no taxes on them. Player owned property guarantees security from pilfering and theft at the cost of a tax upkeep. Planting crops or raising livestock in the wild avoids this tax entirely, but your produce is vulnerable to the predations of other players, although there is a deterrent in the form of the justice system, which catalogues these types of actions as a punishable offence. Whether they get punished or not is up to the jury they draw in their trial. For Hatakeyama, however, this haunted manse gave her a place to grow crops and raise a gaggle of geese in relative obscurity.

The site of Hatakeyama's secret farm - a dark and foreboding manse on the edge of nowhere.

Her secret garden was only discovered once in the three or four days she spent there. While feeding her geese another player walked into her patch, leading to a tense confrontation. She was unsure as to what to do – this area was, after all, a PvP zone, which meant either player could flag and attack each other, despite being on the same faction. Hatakeyama was prepared to defend her ducks to the death, but it didn't prove necessary. The other guy backed off. Hatakeyama followed, like an angry bear whose cub had been threatened, but to her surprise, he didn't go very far. She found him at the far corner of the estate, and there, behind some cottages, was another illegal farm, much more substantial than hers. The other guy didn't realise he had been followed, and an awkward silence ensued when he realised that she was there. From his buffs I could tell that he was not a Patron – he was a F2P player who could not own private land.

“I'll leave yours be if you leave mine be,” I offered.

“Deal.” And with that an agreement was reached, and both of us were able to farm in peace for the remainder of the week.

Hatakeyama tending to her flock of geese.

Those days are over for Hatakeyama, given that she has her own plot of land now. She actually has two plots – Promac showed me two places where I could place an 8x8, and I claimed both using both Hatakeyama and my alt Beorn. Beorn's journey to claim the second plot is an odyssey in of itself – he travelled across 40+ PvP zones as a level six avatar, dodging mobs and flagged enemy players before finally descending down a sheer cliff face to get to his destination. He made it to the plot and was able to claim it, but was then subsequently ganked by an irate purple (same faction) player who perhaps had designs on his land. Too late, bud – once Beorn planted his farm it would remain his as long as he remained a subscriber and paid his taxes on time. So now Hatakeyama has access to two small plots of land (you have free access to your alt's land as well, although you have to pay taxes separately). When she left her “illegal” farm for good, Hatakeyama debated whether to butcher her remaining geese, but decided against it. Game mechanics dictate that these geese would eventually starve and die if not looked after, but I like to imagine that Hatakeyama released them into the wild to hopefully thrive and raise further generations of geese. In the grounds of a haunted manor. Occupied by man-eating giant plants.

I have never played Ultima Online, or Star Wars Galaxies, and thus my only experience with player housing up until now has been the instanced type typified by SWTOR (player spaceship) and WoW (Halfhill farm, and now the WoD garrison). I've never played Minecraft or EQ Landmark either, so manipulating the environment is a new thing to me – in my limited experience the world has always been just scenery, not something a player can interact with in a meaningful way. I love the non-instanced housing in AA, and the fact that crops and livestock can be raised anywhere. I think I understand why AA has a half-finished feel to it now. Perhaps it was a design decision to leave vast tracts of land open, for the pure purpose of allowing players to modify it in their own way. Last week in the region of Ynstere, there were cherry trees as far as the eye can see, travelling the length of the road from Glitterstone in the mountains to city of Carnord on the coast. Some areas in Ynstere have been converted from barren hills into dense woods composed of hundreds of cherry trees. The screenshot below shows a battle at the Crimson Rift (a raid level world event against hundreds of AI soldiers) taking place underneath the boughs of this man-made wood. Player reaction to this has been mixed – some players have been cooing at how beautiful the wood is, while others are annoyed at the disruption to the Crimson Rift event. It's a mystery to me how the wood survived the week – I would have thought that a bunch of avaricious players would have taken an axe to these trees already. The presence of this wood is a clear mark of player agency made manifest in the persistent world. I don't know how long the wood stood, or if it still there now - I wrote this post in early November, just prior to the launch of WoD. But the fact that people can alter the persistent world in such a fashion has opened my eyes to the possibilities of virtual worlds beyond the instanced, phased, and carefully sub-divided versions typified by WoW and its clones.

This beautiful wood composed of cherry blossoms is completely player made, and in this screenshot is a site of an ongoing battle.

Archeage is dying a death of a thousand cuts, roundly criticised by all and sundry for the inept mismanagement shown by the stewards of the Western version of the game. The consensus on AA seems to have been that Trion had a rough gem on their hands, but any attempts to leverage this into mainstream success has been torpedoed by their failure to clamp down on the rampant hacks, the botting, and the flagrant "double dipping" epitomised by their subscription fee and the P4P cash shop. I can't tell you how disappointing this is, because I really do like this game. It is the first game of its type I have played, and I am hoping to see more MMOs like this in the future.

So December 2nd has come and gone, and S16 has commenced in earnest. Season 16 has been renamed Warlords Season 1, as befitting an expansion whose underlying theme seems to be the reboot of the WoW franchise. I still can't quite believe I am back, doing exactly the same thing I have been doing in WoW since the days of the Burning Crusade. I must be mentally defective or something - isn't that the definition of insanity, doing the same thing every time and expecting a different result?

My first level 100 - Tientzo the Mistweaver.

I have just finished levelling my 3rd character - my paladin - and have a mistweaver monk and a feral druid already at cap and wearing full Honor gear. The information I posted in my last post RE acquiring the Conquest cap is out of date and incorrect, which should teach me to research my facts before posting them publicly. Apologies if I misled anyone. The Conquest cap, previously 2200, has been dramatically slashed to 1700. 1500 is the soft cap for Arenas and Rateds, with an additional 200 points available from Ashran quests. Given that my servers (Gundrak/Jubei'Thos) are outnumbered over 4 to 1 this makes it very difficult to get the cap if acquiring points are dependent on victories in Ashran, but we shall see. I haven't delved deep enough into Ashran to learn the ins and outs of the questing mechanics there, but at first glance it appears that this clumsy attempt to incentivise world PvP penalises players who belong to less populated factions. The smaller weekly cap extends the gearing season to about 16-18 weeks, as opposed to the 12-15 week duration which characterised earlier seasons, although as per previous seasons, you can increase your weekly cap by increasing your ratings. I've also noticed that the Blizzard catch-up mechanism is still in effect, in which toons have their cap increased by a 1000 for every week they miss. This means that you only lose 700 points of potential Conquest for every missed week, although you will still have to play your games to get the points.

The good news is that Blizzard has largely done away with the gearing grind. You can literally gear up your toon in one to three nights, as each win in a random BG will award you a tithe of Honor and a strongbox, which more likely than not will contain a piece of blue Honor gear. A friend of mine also mentioned that having the Gladiator's Sanctum in your garrison will allow you to gear up in a few hours - work orders placed in this building apparently generate blue level PvP gear. Blue level PvP gear comes in three flavours - Aspirant, Combatant, and Warforged Combatant, and there are incremental differences between the three, but they can all be won through lockboxes dropped in random BGs. All of them are still superseded by purple Conquest gear. It is no longer mandatory to win a Rated BG to cap Conquest, although the substitute, a requirement to do win battles in Ashran, is unsatisfactory because outnumbered factions are largely at a disadvantage. On the plus side, Blizzard has given the players the freedom to cap any way they want - it is possible to cap through Skirmishes (random Arenas with no rating), Arenas, random BGs, Rated BGs, Ashran quests, even through work orders from level 3 Gladiator's Sanctum buildings in the player's garrison. As a way to incentivize Rated BG participation (aside from rating pushes), the player's first three wins each week will give the player a chance to roll for a piece of purple Conquest gear. The rolls can be modified via the use of Seals of Tempered Fate, which gives PvPers an incentive to farm what once were items only important for PvE.

My second WoD 100 - my Worgen druid transforms into his true self under the light of Draenor's twin moons.

The further I go into this expansion the more the gearing landscape becomes clearer. In subsequent seasons a possible gearing strategy for super fast PvP gear acquisition begins to present itself, which would allow an early season push based on farming Seals, winning three Rated BGs each week, PvPing/questing in Ashran and pushing Arena rating as high as you can as early as you can. This would give the player an early season gear advantage which they could try to leverage into higher ratings at the beginning of the season. Unfortunately given the state of my server in Ashran this strategy is not viable, but other players whose faction dominate Ashran could conceivably do this now and in future seasons. As for me any rating push I undertake will have to be done at the end of the season, when everyone will be wearing the same gear. I'd already committed to this approach prior, so it really doesn't change anything for me. At the end of the day any gearing strategy is secondary to simply becoming a better player via practice, meta acquisition and developing team synergy.

My first forays back into the Arena scene were not pretty - I felt like I was moving and reacting in slow motion while my opponents were zipping around in fast forward around me. I started my Arena season with my mistweaver monk, having decided during the levelling process to switch him from DPS to heals, and to use my feral (and later my ret paladin) whenever I felt inclined to DPS. The very first game I played I ran into a melee cleave composed of a warrior and a ret paladin, and it ended quickly with my poor panda sprawled out comatose on the ground. The next five, ten, twenty games went on in a similar vein, with my face getting pounded into the dirt, but little by little I am learning my keys, and learning how to react in specific situations. I made the dumb mistake of putting my sprint keybind for my druid on the same button as my monk teleport, which invariably led to me push teleport whenever I actually just wanted to roll forward. I also found out to my chagrin that the mistweaver is the weakest PvP healer in this expansion, at least according to the learned contributors on Arena Junkies and Skill Capped. No matter - it's not like I'm ever going to be a top tier player. I just want to improve my personal best, and get over 2k if possible.

All the characters I have levelled so far in WoD don't feel unduly different to when I played them in MoP. The removal of Disarms across the board impacted monks most of all. Previously universally hated by all melee in MoP because of Disarm and Ring of Peace, monks have become a juicy target for any psychotic, axe-wielding close combat class. The loss of Dematerialise also compounded the woes of the monk class, because this ability used to give monks a 2 second damage immunity whenever they got stunned every 10 seconds. In MoP melee were leery of stunning monks, because those 2 seconds represented the loss of a valuable 2 seconds of burst. Now we just eat stun after stun after stun. In fact, in a lot of games I basically end up counting stuns while I sit in them, just so I know when diminishing returns immunity will kick in, and I can have some space to cast or move or do something apart from being a big fat target dummy. It's not all bad, however. To compensate monks for their losses, Blizzard gave monks instant teleports on a 25 second CD, and a lot of a monk's survival nowadays relies on exploiting this ability to the utmost. This means intelligent placement, and calculated kiting designed to pull opponents away from your portal in order to give yourself the maximum amount of time possible to top yourself or your team mates back up. It's great against lower teams, but higher rated players are aware of this trick and sometimes even split when I am low to give me no respite. Another addition to the monk arsenal is the shorter CD on Life Cocoon (55 seconds). This is pretty amazing, because if used intelligently you can keep this ability in tandem with the enemies' burst. All in all, I think our losses have been made up by our gains. It just means that monks have to play differently to survive and be effective.

Ferals and ret paladins are much easier to play now given Blizzard's commitment to simplify play and reduce button bloat. Let's face it, ret pallies were never the most complex class to play rotation wise, and their current incarnation might make them the simplest class in the game to play. Ferals went from being one of the more complex melee classes (slightly below rogues in difficulty) to being one of the easiest, just being edged out by ret pallies in terms of simplicity. The only real difference between them in my opinion is that kitties sometimes have to juggle Savage Roar when it falls off (even it then, it is auto-applied when opening from stealth, so it's not difficult at all), and time Tiger's Fury to optimise its use in conjunction with either Ferocious Bite or Rip. Ret pallies don't have to worry about Inquisition anymore, so for them the game is just basically whack a mole - hit whatever button comes off CD first, and people will die.

My latest 100 - Theodorius returns to WoD as a balding, avenging and hard hitting ret paladin. For Sigmar! Erm, I mean, for the Light!

The trend towards simplicity doesn't unduly bother me, and is in fact a welcome development, because anything that makes the game easier makes it easier for me to play better. On the face of it MOBAs are exceedingly simple games to play - each character has perhaps 1/4th of the buttons that a WoW avatar has, if that, and yet games can become highly tactical affairs because of the teamwork required and the overarching meta. The same applies for WoW, even for the simpler, sleeker WoD version of PvP. Not everyone feels the same way about this, of course - the forums on Arena Junkies and Skill Capped abound with people complaining about the removal of the skill cap for their favourite classes. For me, however, this is a good thing, as advancing age slows down my reflexes and reaction time. I can always study the meta, and my team work and communication is quite good (I think?). Twitch, however, deteriorates with age, and anything which mitigates against this is good for me. At this point in time WoW requires you to push a button roughly every 1.5 seconds, with a few buttons interspersed here and there off the GCD. If concert pianists and similar musicians can continue their excellence into their advancing years then there is no reason why we can't enjoy playing competitive games into middle age and beyond. We just have to compensate for deteriorating reaction time with comprehensive meta knowledge, practice and team synergy.

Note: This post was written in early November, during my first run in Archeage - I'm now in my second run, having picked up from where my toon had stalled (41) when WoD was released.

I've now stood trial on two occasions in Archeage, and in both cases the jury has found me innocent of all charges. “Innocent” is actually a misnomer in AA – the game keeps a perfect log of your behaviour in the game, and the jury's role is not to ascertain whether or not you did those things, but rather to determine if your offence is pardonable (“innocent”) or punishable (“guilty”). I haven't been a juror yet, but the impression I'm getting is that the jury has the option to apply a sliding scale of sanctions based on the severity of the charges. Every time you steal, assault or murder someone in AA, you leave behind bloody footprints as “evidence” of your misdeed. Any player can come along and click on these, and once done, your crimes are added to an online rap sheet. You can tell if you have been reported by players by the accumulated Crime and Infamy points on your character sheet. Once these numbers begin to rise it means there have been “witnesses” to your crime, although they may not have actually seen what you did first-hand. They have an option to write an account of what they actually saw, but most of the time they have simply chanced upon a blood spatter on the ground, and clicked on it.

My first ever trial, in the main court. The NPC judge sits in front, the jury sits behind (in this picture we are waiting for two more jurors to port in for a total of five), and spectators can wander in from the outside to watch proceedings. The court room is not instanced, it is part of the persistent world at large.

In my first trial I was accused (and rightfully so) of stealing crops and livestock growing in the world at large. There was no need for the prosecution to prove that I had done the nefarious deed - the computer with its all-seeing eye had recorded my misdeeds, although it did need someone to click on my bloody footprints for my crime to be reported. This means that AA requires players to be active citizens if they want to uphold “the rule of law”, because unreported footprints eventually fade away and the offenders escape “justice”. It would be an interesting experiment to see how many people actually take the time to report crimes in AA. I used to do it religiously, until the presence of bots changed my mind. Because you can kill members of your own faction, you can effectively kill bots in PvP zones by flagging yourself purple. The downside is that this is considered a crime, and you will have to convince jurors that you were, in fact, killing bots as opposed to innocent friendlies.

My second trial in AA, in Court Room B. I was wondering if there was only one courtroom in the game, but clearly there are quite a few, as this one was different to my first. It's actually below the one depicted above.

In my defence I didn't originally set out to be a thief. I just chanced upon some plants growing in the world and pulled them out. I only realised that they belonged to another player when I started to leave a trail of bloody footprints behind me. A cursory mouse over is more than enough to reveal the status of a plant or animal, so ignorance is only an excuse in the first few instances until you become familiar with the mechanic. In my second AA post I mentioned my difficulties in establishing an illegal farm, and how my makeshift plots kept being plundered by other players. I no longer uproot or harvest plants or animals I chance upon the world, given my epiphany about F2P players not being able to own land and being forced to plant in the wilderness to do any kind of farming. But in the early days of scrabbling for crops I undertook in some tit for tat behaviour, uprooting and harvesting other crops which didn't belong to me because my own farms had been subject to depredation. It took that encounter in the haunted manor to make me change my behaviour (see last post). I'm not saying I won't steal crops I see in the future – but for now, whenever I see plots of illegal farms I leave them be. I have to confess that the prospect of spending jail time acts as a mild deterrent, although I'm sure I won't care should I chance on an Archeum tree growing in the wild.

Killing bots. In this fight, Xigfsm feels the wrath of Hatakeyama. Luckily they don't fight back!

In addition to the thefts, I was also charged with several counts of murder. AA is one of only a few games I know which allows you to flag and kill members of your own faction. This has several interesting repercussions. As mentioned earlier, you are able to kill bots on your own faction – something which every gamer has had dreams of doing, I'm sure. While farming in the haunted manor, I noticed that I wasn't only the one who had noticed the seclusion of this place. There were also about three to four bots merrily farming the man-eating plants roaming the manor grounds. Bots in PvP zones have to choose the most secluded, out-of-the-way places in order to run their scripts to avoid being ganked. When the light bulb went on in the brain I went on an orgy of bot-killing, using them as moving target dummies to test out combos and to measure my damage output relative to an enemy player's health bar. Despite being a PvP game I have seen almost no PvP at all in AA – levels 1-30 are spent in protected zones, and even the contested zones, despite my earlier trepidation, are fairly tame compared to the carnage happening in the levelling zones in the opening days of WoD. This bout of bot killing represents the high point of PvP for me in AA to date – all the other times have involved a level 50 running by and swatting me down as a casual afterthought, or being completely ignored. There was one occasion where I blundered into the war in Halcyona by mistake, looking for a quest turn-in which also happened to be the enemy objective. I was trampled by over a hundred red enemies, and had to rethink this plan. Before I could do anything, however, I was teleported away from the battlefield, and I suddenly found myself in a packed courtroom filled with AFK players, a solemn judge with a funny looking hat, and a jury panel behind, which filled up as the jurors arrived. A rap sheet appeared in the middle of the screen detailing a list of my offences, the times and dates, as well as commentary written by “witnesses” who had reported my crimes. My first trial had begun.

So there I was, looking for a quest turn in over on the Western continent - that is, the enemy's continent - and I found it. Along with about a hundred reds who ran over me, and whose actions sent me to court. Once you have 50+ Crime points, being killed in PvP will send you to trial for your crimes.

In AA players become eligible for trial once they have accumulated over 50 Crime points, and are initiated the first time the player dies in PvP combat after this threshold is reached. The aforementioned rap sheet appears before the "accused" as well as the jurors to help them in their deliberations. Before long the entire jury had been assembled - five players picked at random – and I was asked to plead my case. I played the wide-eyed newbie card, which wasn't far from the truth.

My rap sheet, where all my heinous deeds are recorded by Big Brother. I ask you, members of the jury - is this the face of a murderer?

“Does the defendant have anything to say?”

“Oh wow, this is cool – court room and everything.” I went with the wide-eyed and bushy tailed approach.

“First time?”

“Yes, sir.” Best to be respectful to people who hold your fate in their hands. And hope this juror isn't a woman, lest I offend her with my presumption of her maleness.

“Do you want to experience jail life?” Hell, no – I was looking at maybe an hour of downtime here. And thank God it's not a girl.

“If that is your decision.” Have to stay humble.

“All the PKs look like bot kills to me. Innocent!” My heart leapt.

“Lots of uproots, though. He should do some time for those.” Oh, shit. I willed for this guy to have a disconnect or something, lest he influence the rest with his clear-headed, rational thinking.

The jury deliberated. After a few minutes, the verdict came in – innocent. I had gotten away with my stealing because bot killing is an approved activity amongst the general player base, and in my case, the amount of bots I had killed outweighed the crops I had stolen. This would vary from jury to jury of course, and there is no way of knowing the character and the composition of the players judging you. In my second trial my defence was curt and succinct. “I killed bots. That's all I did.”

“How do you know they were bots?”

“Look at their names on the rap sheet, please.”

I received my second innocent verdict without further deliberation. Bot killing is a publicly approved activity in AA it seems, although I believe if you roll the dice enough you will find a jury that will convict you anyway. Jury trials are broadcast in zone chat, so it is interesting to see how these player trials play out and the vast array of defences put on offer by the defendants. Some defendants come out transparently humble and apologetic like myself, only to turn nasty when convicted. Others are courtroom lawyers, using logic and precedent to plead their case, only to find to their dismay that logic and precedent don't always have a place in MMOs. The funniest moments for me occur when one defendant is acquitted for a series of crimes, and the subsequent defendant gets hammered for an identical one simply because he/she drew a belligerent, irrational or simply apathetic jury. I can sympathise with the subsequent defender, who can rightfully complain, "Wait a minute...the last guy killed more people than me, and he gets off scot-free? WTF is this?!? I only killed people in self-defence!!!" You can imagine hearing them screaming in outrage as they are clapped in irons and dragged away to the prison. It makes me chuckle every time.

Justice is served - not guilty!

One particularly memorable defendant was a player who jumped on the podium and went on an long-winded tirade against the jury, saying, “Fuck you all, you bunch of baddies. You lot are a bunch of sorry excuses for players. What a joke. Learn to play you useless twats. Go ahead, do your worst. This is all you losers can do. ” He got hammered with a three hour sentence, so clearly that defence didn't work out so well for him - however, there is something slightly inspiring about going down in flames unapologetically. There are also cases of brazen corruption, in which the defendant offers gold for an innocent verdict. They sometimes get it, too, which makes me wonder how the jurors get their assurances that they'll receive their bribes. It's not all one way traffic either – unscrupulous jurors will sometimes put their hands out and ask for gold in return for a not guilty verdict. Sometimes prominent or infamous members of the community, or players associated with hated guilds are put on the stand, and people in zone pipe up with comments like “Innocent!” or “Free him!” Alternatively, there can be cries of “That bastard killed me”, “he's a Pker – put him away!” or “he belongs to a pirate guild - max sentence!” It's a great feature of AA – it really makes the world come alive, builds or destroys player reputations, gives context and consequence to “illegal” acts, and allows players to make the decisions whether to commit, report, and convict acts which would otherwise be meaningless in less layered MMOs.

It's such a shame that the game is plagued with such chronic P4P issues, because AA is a rough but unmistakeable sandbox belonging to the same species of games as EVE Online. However, I don't play AA the way I play instanced, balanced PvP games like SC2 or WoW Arena, and I don't have the same expectations - namely, the requirement for scrupulous balancing to ensure that skill is the primary determinant of victory. In sandboxes like these I accept that asymmetry is a fundamental characteristic of persistent open world PvP, and just accept the real money element as another factor similar to levels, gear, state of readiness, group size, political affiliations, time played, individual player skill, etc., which can contribute to unbalanced encounters in the virtual world. The onus on me as a player in these type of games is to maximise the factors which work to my advantage (i.e. practising, joining large social guilds, taking advantage of surprise, etc.), while mitigating the areas in which I am weak. Of course, some players take exception at the intrusion of real world asymmetry (money) into the virtual world, and I can't say I blame them. At this stage however, I am willing to overlook these to take part in an interesting virtual sandbox - at least until i) TESO releases their Justice system (and open world PvP) and/or the Imperial City; and ii) Camelot Unchained is released.

This post was written during my second run at Archeage, the first having been terminated prematurely by the advent of WoD. Now that all my toons in WoW are at max level and geared, I have much more free time to devote to other pursuits - I only need to log onto WoW once or twice a week to grind Conquest. I decided to give AA another bash - despite all the negative reviews surrounding the game my experience has been nothing but positive, and I wished to at least hit the level cap before calling it quits. My first run in AA ended with my avatar owning two small 8x8 farms at the foothills of the Windscour Savannah, and her progression halted at level 41. The first three posts of this series chronicled Hatakeyama's wanderings during the first run - the subsequent posts will detail her adventures in the second.

Hatakeyama returns to AA during the festive season.

When Hatakeyama returned to her small dusty holdings at the foot of the Windscour Mountains, she found to her dismay that they were no longer hers. She had been evicted for failing to pay her taxes, so she was once again a landless, penniless vagabond, a rough miner by trade without clear prospects or direction. Forearmed with knowledge now, however, she wasted no time in riding her Leomorph around the circumference of the savannah, looking for places where she could replace her farms. Fortunately the Windscour Savannah seemed to have gained an ill reputation amongst the denizens of general chat, as evidenced by the transcript below. Compounded by the fact that many players had deserted AA for the cultural juggernaut that is WoW, I reckoned her chances of finding a suitable spot were much better now than in the early land rush which accompanied the game's release.

Hatakeyama's search was not in vain. Windscour's reputation meant that there were vacant plots available here and there, and it didn't take long for Hatakeyama to find a new spot to put down two 8x8's (her plot and her alt Beorn's). She couldn't believe her good fortune - in contrast to her previous holdings, which were situated miles from any available amenities, these two farms were literally beside the vendors and the warehouses. She wasted no time claiming them, and as a celebration, she planted a few stands of cherry trees around her plot to thank the capricious gods of Archeage. She was then ganked by a passing red, but she didn't care - she was a land owner again, even if it this province was considered to be the ghetto. She was an immigrant after all, and immigrants historically begin their journeys in places disdained by the middle class and the well-to-do. This was an advance on scrabbling and scratching a living on hidden farms in haunted manses, and Hatakeyama was happy to have it.

Hatakeyama's new holdings in the Windscour Savannah. The vendors and amenities can be seen in the top right, just over the celebratory cherry trees planted all around her humble plots. They didn't last long - they were chopped down by a passing player less than a day later.

It was during this time that Hatakeyama finally met Noisy (Adam from The Noisy Rogue). Despite having played on the same server since October, December was the first time that our paths had crossed in-game. We had both followed Syncaine of Hardcore Casual into the game, joined his guild, and then watched with bemusement as Syncaine fell out of love with AA as quickly as he had fallen in love with it. From initially labelling the game "the spiritual successor of Ultima Online" he has since concluded that "good design can't overcome a bad business model and stupidity" and takes pot shots at AA at every opportunity. He's not alone - J3w3l of Healing the Masses has also fallen out love with the game, despite lavishing it with early praise, and Alysianah of Mystic Worlds, while not giving up on the title, has changed her status to F2P as protest for what she sees as the game's many ills. I'm not going to argue with their criticisms, because a lot of it is justified. I have since concluded however, that the perfect MMO in my brain will never likely be made, and nowadays I now try to weight the pros and cons of each title to see whether it is worth my time. AA has pulled me back in, which means that there is something I like about this game despite all the bad press surrounding it.

So Hatakeyama is back - for now, at least. She was given a re-invite back to <Unreal Aussies> after being kicked out for inactivity. AA is an old school MMO, which means that socialisation actually improves and enhances your gameplay. People who think PvP games are anti-social are flat out wrong - shared danger and mutual gain are powerful factors which compel socialisation, and are much more natural drivers than LFG and OQueue. For now though I have little to offer my guild - I hope to become a decent healer one of these days, and join the guild on a trade run or roam so I can be of some use. It's funny how you can tell what game players come from from the vocabulary they use. I instantly pegged a guildie as an EVE player due to his use of the word "primary". WoW PvPers use the word "focus" or "train" to express the same idea. Being a member of <Unreal Aussies> also introduced me to the phenomenon of cross-gaming guilds, something which I have seen but have not been part of yet. As a relative newcomer I'm focusing on soaking up information, keeping my ears open, and trying not be annoying. You never want to be that "guy" - the annoying newcomer who always has their hand out. So far however my new guild has been quite helpful - I'll detail more in later posts, because I don't want to get ahead of my narrative. Noisy also offered to take my avatar out on the ocean for the very first time on his brand new clipper, an offer which I gladly accepted. He even turned over the wheel to this landlubber, who repaid him by driving straight into a naval battle in progress.

"Erm...are those bad guys?" I asked, peering at the ships in confusion.

Fleeing from pirates on Noisy's clipper.

"Yes." Noisy replied. I had to admire his restraint - if I had been him I would have been shitting myself and screaming turn the boat around now FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. Instead, he very calmly said, "Just turn around, and head straight for the coast." Which I did, as best I could. Which was not as easy as it first appeared, as I had removed my turn left and turn right keys from my keybindings, in an attempt to transition to mouse turning. Luckily, Reck, another Kiwi on TeamSpeak, told me I could navigate with the arrow keys. Boats handle fairly realistically in AA - they don't turn on a dime, and you have to gauge the degree of your turns to get the boat going in the direction you want. I managed to get the boat on the right heading, and after a few tense moments, we were once again back in the safe waters of the coast.

This encounter did nothing to dampen Hatakeyama's love of the sea, and in fact, only fuelled her desire to get a seafaring vessel of her own. Noisy was able to give me some advice on how to acquire the plans on the AH, and how to raise some gold. He also alerted me to the fact that Hatakeyama was unwittingly sitting on a fortune of raw stone.

"You're a miner, right?" he queried.

"Yah."

"Stone bricks sell for about 45 gold per stack."

A cursory check of my inventory revealed that I had over 10 stacks in my inventory, and after a brief and anxious struggle with the AH interface, Hatakeyama was transformed from a penniless pauper into a woman with a stake. Mining serves two purposes for me in AA - as a way to gain experience (I'd levelled from 35 to 45 chiefly by logging on and mining), as well as a means to dump Labor. Who knew that the humble raw stones accrued along the way were going to become her main source of revenue? I guess when people are building houses and consuming Hereafter Stones to teleport from zone to zone it creates an endless demand for stone. All those hours spent mining in the Anvilton mountains had been worth it. Just pure dumb luck that I had chosen to mine as a way of levelling.

Hatakeyama constructing her very own clipper.

Hatakeyama knew exactly what she wanted to do with her newly won gold. She acquired the plans for a harpoon clipper from the AH, and then set about buying the materials required to fabricate her very own seafaring vessel. She made her way to the port of Austera, created her own dry dock, and set about manufacturing her own ship. There was another anxious moment when she brought the packs down to the dry dock in the wrong order, and she was forced to stash her fabric pack at the end of a dingy alley and hope that no one would find and walk away with it. She quickly created an iron pack and hauled it down to the dock as fast as her donkey would allow, then darted back to the alley, recovered her fabric pack, and then brought it to her ship.

The clipper takes shape after Hatakeyama lugs shipments of iron, lumber and fabric to the dry dock.

The ship was completed shortly thereafter, and Hatakeyama was now a proud owner of her very own seafaring vessel. It cost her around 150 gold (50 for the plans, and a further 100 for mats) which for Hatakeyama, translates to about one and a half hours of mining - not really a grind at all, especially compared to some of the rep grinds I have undertaken in the past. According to my own limited knowledge, the harpoon clipper is one of the fastest ships in the Archeage armada. Unlike her sister, the adventure clipper which sports a single cannon on her starboard side, the harpoon clipper is armed with a harpoon which is used to anchor itself to enemy ships and to keep them from escaping or despawning. They serve the same function as tacklers in EVE Online. One of my AA dreams is to become involved in a naval battle - the larger the better. That would be an MMO dream come true.

One of the proudest moments for this young Harani, as her new clipper slips her berth from the dry dock, and enters the sea for the very first time.

Every ship needs a name however, and I played around with a few before finally deciding on the Miyagi. Japanese convention named battleships after provinces in their nation, and so I called the new ship Miyagi, after Miyagi-ken in the north-east part of Japan. The real Hatakeyama was born in Miyagi, and while the clipper is no battleship, it seemed to fit nicely. Besides, I also like how the name coincides with the name of Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid. Serendipity all around.

Now that Hatakeyama has a ship the world is her oyster, and immediately a course of action came to mind. She still had to complete one more trading quest to acquire her free 16x16 plot, and this entailed crossing the ocean and delivering a pack to a trader on hostile shores. I was going to swim it, the same way Noisy had, but now I had a ship of my own. Noisy and a couple of other guildies had already offered to take me there and to provide an escort, but I fobbed them off with excuses. This one she was going to do on her own.

The Miyagi sets sail for lands unknown.

Ever since Hatakeyama reached the shores of the great sea in Archeage the beautiful blue waters have held a deep and abiding fascination for this young Harani. Born and raised in the orange, dusty savannah of the Arcum Iris, she had little knowledge of the sea as a youth - the idea that a body of water could encompass the entire world seemed fantastical to her. But when she finally reached the coast for the first time, and saw the azure waters stretching to the horizon, she was smitten for good. She would love the sea until the day she died, and beyond.

The sea in Archeage is both beautiful and perilous.

It was for this reason that I was resolved that her first oceanic crossing would be done under her own power. She still had her final trading quest to complete - this quest would award her a free 16x16 plot, but it entailed crossing the channel separating Haranya and Nuia and delivering a trade pack to a trader in a hostile port. Noisy had offered to run me across and act as escort/bodyguard, and while I told him I was keen, I was already making preparations for a solo crossing. I gathered up all the mats for crafting my pack, consulted the map numerous times and tried to pick a route which seemed the safest to me. Ollo is a North American server, and so I planned my run during evening my time, which would translate to early morning for the Americans.

Zero hour arrived, and Hatakeyama made her way to the specialty work bench in Mahadevi and duly constructed her pack. Trade packs have heft and weight and severely restrict your movement - they can also be stolen and plundered. This is a nice compromise between the very light death penalty imposed by WoW in open world PvP (i.e. a short res timer at the graveyard) and the total loss suffered when you lose your ship in EVE or when you are killed in Darkfall (all your gear is dropped where you died). In Archeage your gear and your progress as a character remain unaffected by death, but losses can be incurred or windfalls gained when undertaking in commerce in AA via the mechanism of trade packs. Trade packs can be expensive to make, require varying degrees of time and material, and constitute non-trivial losses, thereby giving meaning to these trading runs for both merchant and pirate alike. In my mind I was already adopting the EVE mindset of "don't fly it if you can't afford to lose it" - I mentally prepared myself for the worst case scenario, in which pirates boarded my ship, murdered me, tossed me overboard, plundered my pack, then set fire to my ship and sent it to the bottom.

The journey begins in this deserted cove on the Blackrock Coast in Mahadevi.

Which is not to say that I didn't want to succeed. At the time of crossing I was in my mid 40s, which meant that I was completely defenceless. Any 50 on the prowl would have taken me apart with ease, and so any plan involving combat was out of the question. If I did encounter hostiles my contingency plan was based on outrunning any hostiles, making wide, looping detours if necessary to avoid danger. If outrunning was out of the question I would despawn my ship before combat was initiated (once combat begins your ship is unable to despawn until the fight is over), hit stealth, and dive to the bottom. Yes, I would swim with speed of a constipated elephant, and have the manuovering abilities of the same, but the sea is deep and big, and stealth can be refreshed every 30 seconds. What I envisioned would ensue would be a demented MMO re-enactment of Das Boot, in which I play the part of a U-boat pursued by Allied destroyers. The destroyer (played by the enemy ship) would steam to my last sighted position, and drop depth charges (in the form of enemy players) who would spam AOEs in the vicinity. The danger for me would be the brief interval between stealth and re-stealth - if the enemy got a fix on me I was as good as dead. The speed at which I would swim at with a trade pack on my back meant that as soon as someone saw me they could power to my position, unleash some AoEs and force me out of hiding. But if it came to that I would go to the bottom and drown intentionally. If they want the pack they'll have to bring scuba gear to retrieve it.

Seagulls whirl about off the starboard bow.

As plans went it was pretty shithouse, and not based on reality - I have no idea how pirates pursue their prey in AA, and whether a lone runner in a clipper is a target even worth attacking. But making contingency plans gives you the illusion of control, and is better than just mumbling a few "Hail Maries" under your breath as you cross hostile waters. For good or ill, that was the plan, and Hatakeyama set about putting it into motion. She brought her trade pack to a deserted cove on the Flotsam Shore, and spawned her ship. There she practiced manuouvering in and among the jagged inlets, and also did some mock "abandon ship" drills in which she practiced quickly despawning her ship and diving off the side. After a few minutes of this I was bored senseless, and so I abandoned the drills and pointed the Miyagi seaward to set sail for the Nuia continent. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Who knows what monsters lurk in the depths of the ocean, watching and waiting for the careless or the unwary.

The first few minutes were nerve-wracking to say the least, but nerves soon gave way to exhilaration. The sea in AA is beautiful, perilous, and alive - sea gulls circle above the waves, and sharks and other sea monsters lurk beneath. I've been told that the best gear in the game drops from the mythical kraken, which prowls the deep waters of the central ocean and requires a large armada to defeat. The first hiccup of the voyage occurred when the Miyagi ran afoul of floating sea bugs. Much like packs of jellyfish or blue bottles in Australia, these creatures float together in shoals, and while a single one is just a nuisance, a group of them can pose real problems. Especially if you are just a lone sailor manning the wheel, unable to defend yourself. Unwittingly plowing through a pack of these parasites, they swarmed all over Hatakeyama's ship. A single one affixed itself to Hatakeyama much like the dreaded facehuggers from Alien lore, and started chewing her face off. I was in a quandary. Did I stop the ship, and try to clear the decks of these sea-borne vermin, or did I just keep on pushing ahead at flank speed? I was paralysed with indecision. It seemed that the maiden voyage of the Miyagi was about to come to an ignominious end. Just when all seemed lost, the bugs started falling away. The one affixed to Hatakeyama's face hung on the longest, but it, too, was eventually dislodged. She was at 20% health and badly shaken, but still alive. After that close call Hatakeyama took great care to spot and circumvent these shoals of bugs. She also spotted a shark or two, and these she gave a wide berth - if a pack of mutant sea bugs almost tore her face off, then she didn't want to know what damage a shark could do.

The second hiccup of the trip occurred soon afterwards. The glorious blue of the virtual sky gave way to grey and gloom, and soon flashes of lightning began to light up in the distance. No one I'd talked to had prepared me for bad weather at sea in AA, and what the possible ramifications were. I was reacting on a visceral level - being caught in bad weather in the open sea is never a good thing in real life - but fortunately in this virtual world it was merely smoke and mirrors, and it didn't impact upon my vessel in the slightest. In fact I believe that the doom and gloom had been precipitated by my vessel straying too close to a mysterious island, whose approaches were guarded by tumultuous storms akin to those found in classical Greek mythology. I wondered what secrets the island held to be warded by such dramatic weather, but it was a mystery that would have to be solved another time. Once the Miyagi pulled away, the darkness gave way to blue skies and calm seas once more.

The weather takes a turn for the worse.

With the inclement weather behind her Hatakeyama turned her attention to the dangers posed by enemy players. She was now near the enemy coast, and there would be reds about. In AA you are either a green (same faction), a blue (someone in your own party/raid), a red (a member of the enemy faction), or a purple (a player who is flagged to be able to kill members of the same faction). Doone of XP Chronicles once argued that OWPvP is "thin" content because it doesn't happen 24/7, and the Nosy Gamer tried to use the same reasoning to argue that EVE is not a PvP game because PvP only happens sporadically. Both commentators are wrong in my opinion, because they limit the impact of OWPvP to the act of PvP itself, while failing to take into account the ramifications on player behavior and the virtual world based on the mere possibility and threat of OWPvP. In EVE the destruction of ships from PvP is the engine which drives the game's economy, and the threat of PvP is leveraged into null-sec politics and diplomacy. OWPvP adds layers to the world, imbuing it with a human element of danger in addition to the PvE hazards. The sea becomes a much more dangerous place in AA simply because of the potential for conflict, loss and gain. I don't have to fight a single pirate to feel danger - just knowing that they are out there made my journey much more immersive and exciting, and turned what would otherwise be a dreary and tedious boat ride into a calculated gamble with something on the line.

The enemy coast is in sight.

Fortunately for Hatakeyama no black sails materialised on the horizon. The coast was now in sight, and another dilemma posed itself. The trader was located on the main docks, and the question now was whether to brazenly sail the ship into the dock, or disembark and despawn some distance away and stealth walk in the rest of the way. Hatakeyama decided to sail the ship by the docks, and make the call depending on how busy the docks were. To her delight she saw that the dock was deserted - she wasted no time in heaving to, despawning her ship, and walking unmolested to the waiting trader. Mission accomplished.

Seconds after turning in her trade pack and completing her quest, a pair of hostile vessels steam into the harbour.

To her chagrin, however, mere seconds after turning in her pack two fishing trawlers filled with reds docked behind her. The trawlers launched harpoons to pull themselves into the dock, and several reds leapt off the side of the vessels and glided in to land beside Hatakeyama. There would be no return trip - there was not enough time to respawn her ship and sail away, and she didn't want to give the enemy the satisfaction of watching her trying to open a portal and escape. There was not enough time for the latter even if she wanted to, and so she just sat on the dock, surrounded by a dozen reds, and waited for the end with dignity.

Surrounded by enemies, Hatakeyama prepares to meet her end with dignity.

The end came swiftly. Despite the presence of the NPC guards, the nearby reds dispatched Hatakeyama without undue ceremony, and escaped reprisal by gliding away from the docks. But unlike real life, death doesn't mean the end in virtual worlds, and soon Hatakeyama awoke to find herself on an unknown beach studded with wrecks. She had accomplished her mission, and in this simulation of reality all her death meant was a loss of time. Her gear remained intact, and the one thing they could have stolen from her, her trade pack, had been safely turned in already. All that remained for this virtual version of Hatakeyama was to open a portal back to her homeland of Haranya. But she tarried awhile, captivated by the lonely, windswept beauty of this beach at the end of the world. Walking from wreck to wreck, and occasionally wading into the surf to place her hand on the barnacle-encrusted remains of these shattered hulks, she eventually returned to the beach and built a bonfire from the pieces of driftwood littering the sandy dunes. Here she waits - but for who or what, she can't really say.

Life beyond death. Hatakeyama awakens on a lonely beach studded with wrecks.

The real Hatakeyama has been gone eight years now, and while by all appearances I have moved on in life, body and spirit, I catch myself occasionally thinking of the girl I once loved, and wonder whether I will meet her again when my time comes. I have long since ceased talking about her with close friends and family, and now only I am privy to how profoundly and tenaciously this memory clings to the essence of what makes me who I am today. It makes me sad to think that her memory only lives on in the minds of a small few, and that eventually all recollections, thoughts and fragments that try vainly to encapsulate the person that she was will be obliterated by the relentless tide of time. An undercurrent of sorrow runs through the sum of all our experiences, and while that is not the be all and end of all of the human condition, it makes the mind reel at the thought of how many ties, connections and bonds have been forgotten, lost and buried in the swirls and eddies of history. Since she passed all my female avatars have been named Hatakeyama - my EVE avatar, my WoW rogue, my TESO Nightblade, and my AA Harani all sport her namesake in a clumsy, makeshift and fruitless attempt to remember. My world view is rooted in empiricism and the scientific method, and so I harbor no illusions about what dreams may come when we finally make the final voyage over the great ocean of the unknown. But even science doesn't hold all the answers, and my layman's knowledge of physics, relativity and quantum mechanics all tell me that there is much more to reality than meets the eye, and that the nature of the multiverse may be beyond our limited understanding as a species. Who knows? Perhaps one day I will wake up on a deserted beach much like this one, and there, in and amongst the flotsam and wreckage there will be a Japanese girl warming herself by a large bonfire on the beach. Time will have no meaning in this place, and she will spot me and shake her head and grumble, "Osoi yo! Doko ni itteta no?"I think that I would be too full of emotion for words - contrition and joy would render me speechless, and in this dream I can see the look of displeasure on her face giving way to concern, before she finally laughs at my maudlin sentimentality. I've always been the sentimental one, and she the pragmatist. Still chuckling, she takes me by the arm, rests her head on my shoulder, and together we start walking inland into the green of the undiscovered country.

Back in 1974, in an open workout before the seminal fight of the 20th century - Muhammad Ali versus George Foreman - the older, wiser, but ever mercurial Ali strode into the gym, and started drumming on a pair of bongo drums, chanting, "The champ is here! The champ is here!" George Foreman was the reigning champion, but Ali was the challenger in name only. In the hearts and minds of the majority of the public Ali was in Zaire to reclaim his crown, which had been unfairly stripped from him because of his stand as a conscientious objector against the Vietnam War. Boxing experts of all stripes however, predicted a crushing defeat for the uppity Ali, citing Foreman's demolition of opponents which had given Ali trouble in the lead up to the fight - Joe Frazier and Ken Norton - as proof of the incumbent champion's devastating power. If Foreman could knock out both Frazier and Norton in two rounds apiece, then the ageing Ali, who had been beaten by both men in the past few years since his return from boxing exile, would have no chance at all. Or so everyone thought.

The fight didn't play out that way. Ali not only went on to win, but he won in convincing style - he never looked hurt, and he let Foreman wear himself out with the now famous "rope-a-dope" tactic, laughing at Foreman's attempts to knock him out and taunting him with words such as "show me something, George!", "you ain't popping popcorn, George!" and "George, you ain't nothing but a sissy." The enraged Foreman tried to knock Ali out for five rounds and in doing so eventually punched himself out. The sixth and seventh saw Foreman moving in super slow motion, leaning against Ali and trying to get his wind back. In the eight round, however, Ali applied the coup de grace with a combination that floored the soon-to-be former champion. Foreman was able to get up before the end of the 10 count, but the referee waved the fight off prematurely. It didn't matter in the end - there was no protest from Foreman when he was shepherded back into his corner. No histrionics about a premature stoppage - he had the look of a man who was well and truly beaten.

This past year has seen not one, not two, but three aspiring challengers to a champion supposedly in decline. One by one all these challenges to WoW's crown as the world's most successful MMORPG have been decisively rebuffed. 10 million subscribers, without counting the Asian markets of China, Korea or Taiwan. Some people accuse Blizzard of massaging the numbers, but show me an MMO who doesn't do this, and I'll show you a marketing team in denial. Others also point out that this spike is a temporary aberration, and that subscriber numbers will eventually drop. They would be right, but it is irrelevant. What other MMO can do what WoW has done? Breaking the 10 million number not once but twice, and peaking at 12 million during the days of WotlK. Final Fantasy XIV is the only other MMORPG that has come even close at 2.5 million, which makes WoW almost a full order of magnitude bigger than its nearest competitor. If this game was a country it would rank in around the 80th most populous nation on Earth, beating out Hungary, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates, to name a few. This feat is also all the more impressive given that it achieved its 2nd 10 million milestone on its 10 year anniversary. There is only one other game - EVE Online - which has been able to maintain and increase their subscriber population over the duration of a decade. Other 10 year old plus titles such as Dark Age of Camelot and Everquest 1 and 2 are shadows of their former selves, and even in their heyday never scaled the amazing heights that WoW has. Finally, if these two facts were not impressive enough, WoW did this in a year where not one, not two, but three AAA titles were released in direct competition, and in a fully saturated market awash with rival titles such as Guild Wars 2, SWTOR and The Secret World.

WoW. Literally, wow.

TESO

TESO was the first challenger to WoW in 2014. It was released on 4 April 2014 to a lukewarm and an even outright hostile reception. The virulence of the anti-TESO sentiment can be measured by the hostile reviews collated here on my first post on TESO, with the pick of the bunch being Paul Tassi from Forbes Online, who predicted that the game would be the biggest video game disaster of 2014. Time has since proven him wrong and full of hyperbole. TESO could claim over 750,000 subscribers in June last year, but who knows how many subs they have now, and whether or not this number represents the apogee of their mainstream appeal. Nonetheless, this figure beats every other MMO except for WoW, Final Fantasy XIV (over 2 million) and SWTOR (which raced to 1.7 million subs in its honeymoon period), which puts it in very good company - hardly the disaster the pundits were hoping for. The big news for TESO of course is their transition to B2P and its release on consoles on 9 June this year. The end of the subscription model puts paid to the predictions I made back in March last year, in which I stated that TESO would not go F2P one year after release. B2P is not F2P, but the spirit of the wager was more on TESO sticking with the subscription model, and in this sense I was incorrect. I now eat vast helpings of humble pie garnished with crow's feet for being so wilfully blind, and admit that yes, I was wrong. Despite this I remain cheerfully optimistic about the title's future. FFXIV has shown that there is a massive market for MMOs in consoles, and its imminent release on the XBox and PS4 platforms, along with the removal of the subscription model, ensures that the title will get tremendous exposure and a good chance at retaining a significant proportion of players who enter Tamriel for the first time.

TESO was my adopted title for most of 2014 - I gave up WoW in March 2014 to play this game, and was even able to convince my gaming circle to migrate with me. My verdict on it remains pretty much unchanged - theme park style quest mechanics with high production values, extensive use of phasing which occasionally posed problems for group play, and great tri-partite world PvP in Cyrodiil. It was not Skyrim turned MMO - the NPCs stayed in fixed locations, they did not have Radiant AI or their own schedules or agendas - but rather it was an iteration of the WoW model, with prettier graphics and voice acting, complete with dungeons, raids and an LFG finder. There was no player housing, instanced or otherwise - the world was simply scenery, and zones become abandoned and desolate as they were outleveled and rendered obsolete. Changes in the world were rendered via phasing, and occurred at the pace in which the player completed their quests. Despite megaserver technology, TESO was a prime example of the single player MMO, in which players play alone together. Only in Cyrodiil could player agency interfere with other player agency, and this zone was safely fenced away from the rest of Tamriel. With the virtue of hindsight I can see that I was guilty of imbuing TESO with qualities that it might not have necessarily have possessed out of sheer contrariness. Nonetheless I plan to return to the game in March - there are many good things about TESO which would justify a second look, and I am also looking forward to the implementation of the Imperial City and the Justice system.

Wildstar

I never played Wildstar, seeing it as the chief rival of the horse I had chosen to back, and watched with glee when it started going down in flames shortly after its release. It took the writing of bloggers who believed passionately in this title to shake me out of this phase of petty one-upmanship, but being the shallow human being that I am, I have to fight this impulse at every opportunity. I know that it's not a zero sum game, but I have to confess that bloggers that i) panned TESO, ii) praised Wildstar, but iii) don't play Wildstar anymore in its hour of greatest need are the ones that raise my ire the most. I have to admire people who are passionate advocates of the game without being unfairly critical of TESO, and put their money where their mouth was by playing the game and supporting it despite its rapid fall from grace. I have less admiration for people like Scree from The Cynic Dialogues, who tear into TESO and come up with declarations such as "I am entirely opposed to this game succeeding", go on to play Wildstar and spout high-minded rhetoric like "what's a bigger testament to a game's success and justification for your passion for a title than to see it succeed and its gaming population flourish" without stopping to think of how that sentiment could be applied to people who actually like TESO, before finally leaving Wildstar five months later, citing "I'm not as hardcore anymore" as the excuse for abandoning the game. So much for passion for a title. Not that I'm much better mind you - I talk TESO up, play for eight months, and then abandon it for Archeage. I guess we're both just hypocrites.

Tobold made the estimate that Wildstar had around 450,000 subscribers in June 2014, but there seems to be no doubt that subs are now a fraction of this number, and the initial acclaim and fanfare surrounding its release have given way to pundits making bets on when this title will go F2P. At least Wildstar supporters can say that their title outlived TESO in the subscriber stakes - TESO will have been a subscriber title for 11 months and one week (TESO was released on 4 April 2014) by the time it transitions into B2P on 13 March, and Wildstar will beat this mark in early May this year (Wildstar was released on 3 June 2014). The ominous news regarding Wildstar lies with the figures released by NCSoft for 2014, which show that Wildstar sales are down 500% from the quarter of its release. At this rate a transition to F2P may be the least of their worries - there is a distinct possibility that the title may go the way of Warhammer Online and City of Heroes, and be shuttered for good. Wildstar, out of the three AAA titles released in 2014, most closely resembled WoW in terms of its cartoon art aesthetic (despite the sci-fi setting) and both its endgame PvE (dungeons and raids) and endgame PvP (Arenas and BGs). The fact that it singularly failed to challenge WoW and is now struggling to stay afloat is the final death knell to the aspirations of any publisher who ever had faint hopes of out-WoWing WoW.

Archeage

I had no intentions of playing AA until my interest was piqued by articles written by several bloggers, and I thought, what the hell, it's a F2P title, I have nothing to lose. I downloaded the game, booted it up, and immediately fell in love. I'm a latecomer to the genre - I have never played MUDs, nor have I played influential titles such Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies or Everquest. Persistent, non-instanced housing was a new phenomenon for me, as was the player's ability to "terraform" the world by raising crops and livestock, and by building farms, cottages, houses, manors and castles in the world itself. My favourite memory of AA will always be the massive cherry forest planted by a number of departing players on the Ollo server. Their efforts changed the world completely, and it was strange to see what was once a barren plain completely transformed into a deep and extensive wood which almost covered the entire zone.

AA has many things going for it which should have ensured a bigger success than the one they currently enjoy. The tab targeting combat system, while not especially innovative, is made interesting by the fact that players can mix and match the 10 talent trees into 120 possible combinations, giving variety and depth to class make-up. The crime and justice system is interesting and well thought-out, and the ability to become a turncoat and attack your own faction gives a new lease of life on the old and tired concept of two faction warfare. This was OWPvP with consequence, as traitors to their faction accumulated Crime Points and were eventually exiled to eke out a living on the high seas as pirates and buccaneers. The game boasts a very deep crafting system, and the incentivization of trade creates traffic on the roads and seas, and keeps zones which would otherwise be bereft of players productive and relevant. The crown jewel of the world, however, is the great ocean separating the continents. It will be a long time before another MMO creates an ocean zone which is remotely similar to the sea in AA, which is in equal parts beautiful, wide, deep and perilous. Ever since I crafted my boat in AA I have been content simply sailing the seas in my clipper, dodging hostile vessels, and imagining coming upon unexplored islands and exploring their interiors. Alas, the reality of the game never actually squares up with the wild flights of fancy that take place within my head, but sailing the seas in AA almost makes me believe I am in another world, a quality which most MMOs lack these days.

The verdict on AA however, based on Syncaine's blog, J3w3l's, Aywren's and Alysiana's, to name a few, is that the game's good points are overshadowed by the unscrupulous F2P model used by Trion, and the rampant use of cheats and hacks in almost every facet of the game. I've seen this now at first hand, being present when a bunch of guildies and myself were waiting around to claim an expiring plot, only to see it snatched away by a housing hack when the plot was vacated. It's a real shame, but there is a silver lining in the cloud in that it shows that there is a market for this type of open world sandbox fantasy game. AA's failure is a market opportunity for a team savvy enough to see it, and at this point in time it looks like Camelot Unchained is best positioned to exploit this in 2015. They may never reach the heights of WoW, but if there's a lesson to be gleaned from all the bloodied competitors left in WoW's wake, it is this - don't take on the gorilla at his own game, but rather carve out a niche for yourself. For all the criticisms bloggers, writers and academics levy at the concept of theme parks, it is unquestionably the most popular MMORPG paradigm in the world, and WoW excels at making them.

WoW

So TESO, Wildstar and AA all tumble before the cultural phenomenon that is WoW. The magnitude of WoW's triumph can be measured in how its greatest critics are playing the game despite of themselves. One of the reasons why I started this blog was to respond to Gevlon's continued attacks on WoW as a game for morons and slackers back in 2013. It absolutely boggles my mind that Gevlon is now playing WoW again in his old role as a healer, although I do suspect that a lot of the reason of why he plays is because his girlfriend is a devoted WoW tank, and you can never underestimate the "social" pull of friends and family as a catalyst for bringing people back to a title. He has since cancelled his subscription again, but I was amazed to hear him say that "without M&S WoW isn't a bad game", which is something I would have never picked that hoary old goblin of ever saying. The venerable Raph Koster, an early pioneer of MMO design, calls WoW "the biggest game design achievement in all of virtual world history." The young but articulate Murf calls WoW the "greatest online RPG of all time" and makes a similar observation that "I am not sure it is massively multiplayer anymore, but a decade of success, an incredibly well-received new expansion, and newly re-assembled fan base of ten million hungering for more make that opinion a non-factor." The best posts are the ones expressing awe, bewilderment and consternation. J3w3l's post made me laugh the most, because it encapsulates the bewilderment of people who don't like WoW, and cannot fathom why such a game has such amazing mainstream appeal. Nobody knows - least of all me. My friends and I don't even play WoW as an MMO - we play it as a MOBA, spending the vast majority of our time in instanced Arena or Rated BG matches, and consider the rest of the game as an added bonus.

WoW's continuing success is especially galling to its critics because a number of people have laid the demise of the genre as a whole at the feet of WoW. Wolfhead's blog should be entitled, "Why Everquest Is The Best Game Ever, and WoW is the Spawn of the Devil." Wolfshead takes great pleasure at levelling scathing broadsides at WoW with epithets such as "the once mighty Blizzard Entertainment has had to suffer the embarrassment of years of declining subscriptions" and "the massive and aging ship USS: WoW lurches toward the iceberg of its obsolescent doom in a sea of ice cold reality". I wonder what Wolfshead thinks of WoW's rebound back over 10 million. The silence on his blog is deafening at the moment, but I'm sure that when subscriptions start to fall again the attacks will resume in earnest. Another clanger belongs to Keen and Graev, who wrote that "I still believe Blizzard is phasing out WoW" in August of this year. Erm, no. If that statement seemed far-fetched in August 2014 (who in their right mind would want to phase out 6.6 million subscribers, which is still three times the size of its nearest competitor), it seems positively ludicrous now given the light of recent events. Thousands of bloggers, writers, players, forum posters, academics and developers (Roger Edwards, Sig, MrBTongue, Mark Kern, Riot55, Seanxxp, and Ionomonkey are random samples drawn from a cursory Google search) have made claims to the effect that WoW has ruined MMOs. In fact Raph Koster's thesis in a nutshell is that WoW redefined a genre that was already over a decade old by the time of its inception, and by virtue of its success changed the meaning of MMOs from the "virtual worlds" represented by Ultima Online and MUDS, to effectively mean games "similar to WoW." This is why he concludes his argument with the words "WoW effectively made MMOs perfect, and in the process, it killed them."

WoW simply doesn't care. It just steamrolls past bloggers, opinion pieces, and academics, swatting them aside like flies. I don't disagree with people who criticise WoW - I am one of WoW's critics, too, and I have critiqued WoW for its use of the "hero narrative", its compartmentalisation of play styles, and the sterility of its virtual world amongst other things. Nonetheless, WoW's success seems to indicate that the opinions of bloggers and writers such as myself only represent a tiny minority of what the world likes in an MMO, which is why Blizzard completely ignores whatever we say or write. We are irrelevant. The vast majority of the world seems to like theme parks, group finders, questing, instancing, worlds as scenery, tab targeting combat, play style compartmentalisation, easy and accessible game play which can be turned up to higher tiers of difficulty for those so inclined, and bite sized chunks of content. Which, come to think of it, seems pretty sensible really.

I claim no prescience with regards to WoW's astonishing return to form. I am flabbergasted just like everyone else, and my initial reactions are best reflected by pieces which express their disbelief and astonishment at the number of returning subscribers. NO ONE PREDICTED THIS. If you can find an article that predicted "WoW will rebound from 6.6 million to over 10 million subscribers with WoD" I will eat my hat. When WoD was released they picked up more subscribers than all the subscribers in TESO, Wildstar and AA combined. That's mind-boggling. I'm completely surprised to find myself playing the game again, and I can say with all honesty that I had no intention of returning until about one week prior to the launch of WoD. That's when I was deluged by messages from friends, family and old comrades returning to WoW, and being the social person I am, I was happy to join them. I can't believe that I am doing the same old routine that I have done since vanilla. I've done this for almost a decade now - that's just bloody insane. Why? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHY? I'm never going to bet against WoW again. That game is a monster.

Back in Zaire 1974 Ali and Foreman had to share the same gym, and so the rival camps coordinated their schedules so that the two fighters would never have to meet. Ali, upon learning this, deliberately came to the gym early so that he would meet the champion just as he was finishing his training session. He did this to demonstrate that he wasn't afraid of Foreman, whom the press had labelled invincible and unstoppable, and to show his disdain and contempt for the current champion. WoW's approach to the MMO battlefield is equally disdainful. Blizzard remained confident enough in the appeal of their product despite declining subscription numbers to wait two years before releasing an expansion. They gave no sign of ever reacting to the release of TESO, Wildstar or AA, but rather marched to the beat of their own timetable, and released WoD to coincide with the game's 10 year anniversary.

In the words of the great Muhammad Ali - bow down, chumps! The champ is here!

2015 has been a year of firsts for me. It is the first time I have paid money for an incomplete game, which is what I did when I plonked down $20 to enter the H1Z1 alpha. Early access is fast becoming a dirty word amongst bloggers, but its ubiquity suggests that this disdain is not shared by the masses who flock to early access titles in their droves. Not yet, anyway. I have to confess that I felt foolish after spending my money and then finding myself not being able to log into H1Z1 for the first few days of early access. When I mentioned I was in early alpha my WoW team mate Rykester said "What's that?" My gaming circle is delightfully naïve in many ways - they don't read blogs, they don't follow MMO websites or keep up with the latest trends in gaming - in fact for most of them the only game they play is WoW, and/or whatever game I manage to convince them all to play. So when Rykester asked me what early access was I replied to the effect that it was like a form of game testing, in which the general public were asked to play the game and give feedback based on their experiences. Rykester then said, "Nice! Do you get paid for doing that?" After a few seconds I had to reply no, and then added "Erm, I actually paid them to get in."

"Didn't you say this zombie game was going to be free?"

"Umm...yeah."

"So you paid $20 for a free game which isn't even finished? Why?"

I felt like an idiot.

I don't know when the paradigm shift kicked in, and it became acceptable for consumers to pay money in order to play a game in the early stages of development. Nonetheless it's here and apparently here to stay. Steam has an entire section on games in early alpha, and I have became one of many damned fools who have fallen hook, line and sinker for promises and potential rather than actual concrete product.

H1Z1

Fast forward a month later, and now I find myself again forking money over for a game which has not yet been completed. Crowfall is in an even earlier stage of development than H1Z1 - it's in Kickstarter, which means that we're really only at the concept stage of the game, despite assurances from the developers that the core modules are mostly completed. I forked over money for a concept of game and became a backer, all without even seeing how the game plays. So what's up? Am I just being a sucker again?

There is a difference here, but I'm finding it hard to articulate why I regret my H1Z1 Early Access purchase, but feel proud to be in on the ground floor of the Crowfall hype train. In the first case it felt like a lapse of will - I was always going to buy the game given my love for things zombie-related, and I guess I just lacked the self-discipline to wait until the game was released. There were less selfish reasons to buy the game, too. As I said, I rope my gaming circle into games I'd like to play, and I had told them about this really cool FPS style zombie game in which we could emulate the exploits of Rick Grimes and company in The Walking Dead. I cajoled the guys into playing TESO without really knowing it well enough, and every bug, every broken quest, every crash and everything that was wrong with that game in the first month of its release felt like a betrayal of the group's trust in me. This time around I was going to do my due diligence in H1Z1 before I made any kind of recommendation, and this, I thought, was sufficient cause to drop $20 on the title. I still regret it, however, because I would have been better served waiting until the game went live and testing it on live servers rather than rushing headlong into early access where none of the features have been finalised anyway. Paying money to test a F2P game in alpha is plainly ridiculous, and I don't know when my common sense understanding of this was subverted by having my head too deep into the gaming/blogging meta.

Crowfall

In the case of Crowfall however, it felt like I was doing something positive by supporting developers get the game off the ground. Unlike H1Z1, which was a guaranteed title in production and the only thing up in the air was the release date, Crowfall is explicitly asking for backers for a crowd funding project. Nothing particularly novel about this, except for the fact that after perusing their "prospectus" I was completely sold on their vision and concept of the game. I am squarely in Crowfall's target demographic - I like MMORPG's, strategy games, and open world PvP. You can't get any more specific than that in terms of target audience. I've become a bloody MMO tourist, and it's all because of this blog and being a part of a blogsphere that writes about MMOs. How can you write with any authenticity on MMOs if you don't play them? In the same vein I don't feel like you can advocate a specific style of MMO without putting your money where your mouth is when the opportunity presents itself. Anyone who knows me would immediately realise that the gameplay concepts used to describe Crowfall would appeal to my particular tastes. If I was ever going to back a Kickstarter it would be to back a game much like Crowfall.

The crucial difference between H1Z1 and Crowfall, for me at least, is that I bought H1Z1 hoping for a finished game because I didn't have the patience to wait for it. I fell for the hype, ignored the alpha disclaimers plastered all over Steam and the H1Z1 home page, and jumped in hoping for an immersive survival experience right off the bat. That I was disappointed is totally on me. I invested in Crowfall, however, because I want this game to be made, and if my support helps it get over the line, then it will have been worth it. Small differences to be sure, but it is on these small differences that ideologies are split and battle lines drawn. Just ask Protestants and Catholics, or orthodox and secular Jews, hell, ask the Australian Labor and Liberal parties - I can no longer tell the differences between their political stances nowadays. In the same way I believe that my motivations for H1Z1 and Crowfall are starkly different, and despite being outwardly similar - i.e. forking over money for an incomplete game - they constitute two different cases as to whether it was a good decision to invest or not. One was in pursuit of instant gratification. The other was to help developers create a game that, on paper, would be fun for me to play.

Even then this explanation is unsatisfactory to me, because Camelot Unchained pushes all the same buttons as Crowfall for me as a player, yet I did not give them a single dime. So why back Crowfall and not Camelot Unchained? I fully intend to give Camelot Unchained a shot when it is released, but if I'm supposedly supporting MMOs that espouse a playstyle which appeals to me then why didn't I back it at the beginning? Doesn't that contradict all that high minded rhetoric I just spouted in the previous two paragraphs? More importantly, am I obligated to support every OWPvP game that comes out because I have argued in favour of OWPvP both here and in other sites?

I'm overthinking this, and I'm also holding myself to a ridiculously high standard of behaviour, especially since we are talking games here. In the final analysis it may be as simple as just being convinced by the pitch put forward by Walton and Coleman on their website. There's also that psychological hurdle of never having paid money into an early access or Kickstarter scheme before. Given my background as a gamer I was an ideal candidate to be a Crowfall backer, and the quality of the pitch tipped me over the edge. Not the marketing rhetoric which Bhagpuss and Syl seemed to have taken so much offense to - i.e. "Something deeper than a virtual amusement park. More impactful than a virtual sandbox." - but rather the enthusiasm of Walton and Coleman, the transparency of their funding model, and most importantly, the concept of their game. I find it interesting that Bhagpuss, who I consider to be one of the most level-headed of all bloggers, really seems offended by Crowfall's opening taglines. I react to them the same way I do to Saul Goodman's jingle on Breaking Bad - "Better call Saul!" - tacky and tawdry but essentially harmless. Offensive? I personally find nothing wrong - they seem to be on par with TESO's "Live Another Life" and Wildstar's"MMO's with attitude!" Then again I am already pre-disposed to these types of games. If you don't like the core game then no amount of spin is going to endear you to a title, and may in fact, push you the other way.

Great Expectations?

I'm not saying that the game is going to be good. I'm hoping it will be, but as the saying goes, there's many a slip twixt cup and a lip. Multa cadunt inter calcium supremaque labra. Unlike Scree, who is already making plans for his new Crowfall guild, I am trying to maintain some perspective on this one. That's a turn up for the books, by the way, the fact that Scree and I are backers and fervent supporters of this game after our difference in opinion regarding TESO. I'm sure we're both very happy that they have reached their funding goal, but there are still a plethora of things that can still go wrong. Let's have a look at them in no particular order:

i) The game developers, concerned at the excess number of titles containing the word "fall" (i.e. Darkfall, Firefall, Titanfall, now Crowfall) decide to change the name of the game to something more original and less derivative. They rename it the Game of Crows.

ii) A late flurry of support balloons Kickstarter contributions to over $50 million, and thus encouraged, Warcraft...erm, Artcraft decides to implement a plethora of stretch goals, including dinner with the developer's second cousins, new spaceships, and space combat. When asked about the relevance of space combat to fantasy worlds, the developers simply reply, "Believe." They rename the game "Starfall Citizen" but are immediately hit with a "cease and desist" injunction by Chris Roberts' lawyers.

iii) Peter Molyneux takes over the project and promises the winner of the first campaign perpetual sovereignty over Great Britain and the title "King of Kings."

iv) Walton rips off his face like Nicolas Cage in Face Off, revealing that he is in fact Brad McQuaid in disguise. McQuaid promptly changes the name of the game to Pantheon: Rise of the FALLen, and says mockingly, "You should have known you fools! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

Lame jokes aside, the possibility of Crowfall not fulfilling the promise laid out in its conceptual pitch is very real, and it's a risk I am willing to take as a backer. Maybe it's going to be a turkey, with sluggish combat and lag spikes up the wazoo. Maybe the project will be hit by interminable delays. Worst case scenario, the game doesn't get made, but here my time in EVE has helped me. Don't fly it if you can't afford to lose it. I've already written off my own modest contribution and am trying to simply forget about Crowfall until I get a message in my in-box giving me access to alpha testing. But for better or worse I've chosen to back it, and so I'm in its corner, willing it to do well and succeed.

I don't know if I'll pay for another early access or help crowd fund another Kickstarter. Never say never, I guess. Unlike J3w3l, however, I have not sworn off early access or crowd funding just yet. I am not completely convinced that either are inherently bad. I am also in the unique position of not having been burnt yet, unlike those poor bastards with Godus. H1Z1 didn't burn me, because they delivered exactly what they promised - an incomplete game replete with bugs, crashes and game-breaking issues. It's not their fault I expected something different. Crowfallcould burn me - but for now, I am willing to make a leap of faith and put some trust in the developers. What they do with that, and with the trust reposed in them from the thousands of others like me - well, that's completely on them.

It's been a long time since I went ganking, and I feel like the title of this series has become a bit of a misnomer given that I spend most of time in ranked matches rather than out in the open world looking for Horde to gank. Even in Archeage, I could never claim to have been a ganker but the inverse, a somewhat hapless gankee travelling a treacherous open PvP world exploiting peace time rules, time zones, Nui shrines and situational awareness to mitigate the dangers posed by reds and factional traitors. I didn't stay long enough in AA for the wheel to turn, but nonetheless I am happy to report that I took my licks with equanimity during the times I got struck down by enemy players. There were numerous times where I had adjust my timetable and activities due to enemy player activity, but I accept this as part and parcel of the type of games I like to play. Some people can't tolerate pressure from other players, preferring total control over their play time, and who am I to say that this stance is wrong? I, however, do not belong to this category, and am willing to exchange a modicum of agency for a heightened sense of virtual peril, for factions to matter, and for a deeper, more immersive world where PvE mobs aren't the only threat to my avatar's well being. I want human bad guys in my virtual world. I like player associations to matter, and I like either aligning with, or opposing such factions.

My main for this expansion - Tientzo the Mistweaver monk.

I had ceased ganking and griefing in WoW a long time ago, not because I felt like it was somehow immoral or repugnant, but rather because open world PvP (OWPvP) in WoW is guilty of a far more serious transgression. Simply put, it is boring and meaningless. In TESO open world PvP occurs within the greater backdrop of the tri-partite Alliance war, which gives meaning to the skirmishes, encounters and battles that occur within Cyrodiil. In Archeage open world PvP occurs along trade routes on both land and sea, and is incentivized for both parties by the pursuit of wealth and commerce, as well as being subject to a rough form of "player justice" in the form of Crime points and trial by player juries. In WoW no such incentives exist - open world PvP is a feature which seems to have been simply glued on without any real thought behind it, and as a consequence "player boredom or random mischief" becomes the primary motivation for PvP interactions. In TESO a ganker is a soldier, a scout or a skirmisher - in Archeage they are pirates, privateers or highway robbers - in WoW they are simple murderers and psychopaths, with no real rationale behind their attacks on other players other than arbitrary factional designations.

Factional designation still constitutes just cause to attack someone, especially on PvP servers, because otherwise it begs the question of why people are on such a server in the first place. There are no excuses to be on a PvP server unless you are willing to be involved in non-consensual PvP, given that players have the option to opt out in virtually all MMOs that currently exist. A rugby match goes on for 80 minutes and you probably only spend a miniscule amount of that time being tackled. The rest of the time you are running, passing, kicking or tackling yourself, yet any rulebook lawyer would find it difficult to argue the legitimacy of being tackled unless it was dangerous or illegal. It is part of the rule set, and the infrequency at which it occurs does not render the rule invalid. Nonetheless implied consent doesn't do much to conceal the barrenness of such a playstyle, especially in the absence of greater incentives. It's still defensible to attack someone because they are red - but it seems a thousand times more palatable if you are attacking someone to seize territory, acquire plunder, defend your lands, or advance your faction's score. Being killed in Cyrodiil while defending your faction's keep, or being robbed and killed by highwaymen while trying to smuggle lucrative trade packs in AA is a thousand times more preferable than being abruptly being killed for no apparent reason while questing in WoW, because we can rationalize our foe's actions better. They may still just be fucking with you - but their actions become contextualized within the greater game and becomes a much easier pill to swallow.

I haven't engaged in world PvP in WoW for a long time, aside from the massive and bloody skirmishes which characterised levelling in the opening days of the WoD expansion. Those battles were great fun, which shows that, contrary to everything I just said in the previous paragraph, even in the absence of a greater purpose PvP fights can still be fun in of themselves. Those days were characterised by a curious egalitarian quality, however, which makes that period atypical to world encounters which happen nowadays. Back in November 2014 we were all new - we were all levelling - we were all on a new world whose secrets had not all been laid bare, dissected and displayed on numerous websites and guides. Asymmetrical fights were OK, because we could call for help on chat, and since we were all levelling together, there were plenty of Alliance who were willing and eager to heed the call to arms. Nowadays the zones are suffering the fate of all theme park style areas - players outlevel the zones and render them deserted and obsolete, except for the transient alts passing through on route to 100. Two types of fight are possible in these zones - one in which levelling toons encounter each other and clash, and another where a dedicated ganker like myself actively hunts down and attacks players travelling through the world. The former is more organic, and more in the spirit of the factional strife which characterises Horde and Alliance relations - the latter, given the lack of external motives for doing so, "appears" motivated purely out of mischief or spite.

I use the word "appear" because there can be a disconnect between the intentions of an attacker and their perceived motivations from the viewpoint of the victim. Victims often take their attacks personally, and ascribe all sorts of sinister motives to their attacker. They can be right - there are some angry people out there - but it fails to take into account differing motivations for engaging in world PvP. The most glaringly obvious is that people are playing the game as intended, and questions of "morality" need not even be considered. It's like accusing a chess player of murder when he/she captures your pawn. Another common chestnut trotted out against OWPvP is that it robs people of agency. Does the act of my killing your avatar rob you of your inalienable right to choose a game that suits your particular tastes? Of course not - you are completely free to choose a game, or a server, or a mode that is explicitly non-PvP based. But you can't complain about being ganked in games that are clearly delineated as having non-consensual PvP. Your agency is intact - you can exercise it anytime you like by leaving and playing a game more suited to your tastes.

Hey, S.E.L.F.I.E!

OWPvP games are not created equal, and one of the key factors which determine their quality is the holistic characteristics which contextualize virtual world encounters. Eve has null sec politics, TESO has the Alliance War, and Archeage incentivizes PvP for both pirates and merchants alike with the carrot of commercial gain. The problem with WoW's open world PvP is that stripped of all the external stuff that better games like Eve, TESO and Archeage have, all you have left is factional loyalty as an excuse for initiating hostilities. In a funny way the design of the game has an impact on the "morality" of an action, because an evil ganker in WoW becomes i) a loyal line member in Eve protecting their sovereignty; ii) an intrepid scout cutting off enemy reinforcements in TESO, or iii) a swashbuckling privateer plundering fat merchants plying the trade routes in AA. The shifting perceptions of ganking suggests to me that ganking is essentially a null signifier, only given meaning by the nature of the game itself, the motivations of the ganker, and the perceptions of the gankee. The act of ganking is neither intrinsically righteous or evil, or good or bad, or right or wrong - it is the context of the game which determines its relative worth.

Can't very well call this series Diaries of a Ganker and not gank, so therefore, given that all my toons are fully Conquest geared and require no further grinding for the remainder of the season, I've decided to sally forth into the world and cause some mischief. This was far easier said than done though, as I would soon find out. In sharp contrast to Archeage, where players till non-instanced fields, tend livestock. build houses and populate the roads and sea lanes with trading traffic, the primary purpose of the world in WoW is to provide a zone for levelling. The WoW experience is now perfectly compartmentalised. It's like one of those beautiful specialty cookie stores, where you grab a bag at one end, and walk past the beautifully appointed rows of cookies, each separated and clearly labelled, and pick up the ones that look appetizing with a pair of stainless steel tongs. No rough edges, or stray crumbs to ruin your snacking experience.

Travelling through the lands of Draenor I am struck by how empty the virtual world is. I am on the Gundrak server, which is connected to Jubei'thos. Both servers are supposedly full, but you would never know it by travelling through the zones of Shadowmoon Valley, Gorgrond, or Nagrand. Even at peak Oceanic times these zones are empty, save for the occasional toon puttering away to 100. I have no desire to attack people below 100 - what I am looking for is a zone similar to either Halfhill or the Timeless Isle in MoP, where 100s congregate to do dailies, farming, mining, herbing or whatever. The most obvious choice is Ashran, the new PvP zone introduced in WoD. The problem with this idea is that Ashran, despite its nominal designation as a "world" PvP zone, is actually an instance with a limit of 100 players on each side. Waiting times on my server is about an hour on average, which nixes that idea. Playing on Oceanic servers gives us better ping, but I do miss my old US servers because I never had to wait for anything. Queues were non-existent. In Gundrak I have to cool my heels in the Alliance stronghold of Stormshield while waiting for the queue to pop. It was at this juncture a few nights ago when I realised that the Horde were doing the same thing at the opposite end of the island at the Horde base of Warspear, and that gave me an idea. Back in Cataclysm, my feral druid used to haunt the streets of Orgrimmar and provoke unflagged Hordies into fighting me on their own streets. In the Mists expansion I transferred my rogue to Illidan and ganked around the village of Halfhill with my rogue. This expansion I really didn't know where to go - as far as I knew every player in WoD now just live in the hermetic bubble of their garrison. There's no reason to leave - most content is instanced now, and only require you to join a queue to partake. Dailies have fallen out of favour due to their negative Skinner overtones, and raw crafting materials are produced in such abundance by each player's garrison that there is no point going out into the world for them. Aside from levelling and a few side things here and there like pet battles and rep grinds, there is really no purpose to the greater world of Azeroth. After seeing the bustling and organic lands of Archeage I now know how sterile and lifeless the WoW virtual world is in comparison. There is literally no one left in the world to fight - except in Warspear.

The world PvP zone of Ashran.

Warspear is the Horde "capital" for the WoD expansion. During the Burning Crusade it was Shattrath, in Wrath it was Dalaran, in Cataclysm it reverted back to Stormwind and Orgrimmar, and in Mists it was the Shrine of the Seven Stars and the Shrine of Two Moons for Alliance and Horde respectively. Warspear is situated on the northern end of the island of Ashran, Blizzard's designated world PvP zone. It stands in opposition to the Alliance stronghold of Stormshield at the southern tip of the island. There's only one way to get to Warspear, and that's to swim there. Actually, there's two, but the second one entails being able to enter the Ashran battle itself, and as stated earlier, that requires queuing up for an hour to become eligible. An invisible boundary surrounds Ashran, and once you cross that border you are automatically queued for the battle. If you stay within this boundary you will be automatically ejected back to Stormshield if you have not yet been called in.

A direct approach is therefore unfeasible, which means it's time to don my goggles and swimwear. Fortunately I'm a druid, and one of our class perks is our ability to shift into an aquatic travel form. The trip to Warspear is straightforward but is somewhat long - it takes about five minutes to swim all the way there as a baby orca. There are no hazards in the water to worry about - the only concern is making sure that I stay well away from the invisible Ashran boundary so as not to be queued accidentally. If I'm queued and within the boundary I will be summarily booted back to Stormshield after about 30 seconds, so it was simply a case of swimming further out whenever the queue popped. After an uneventful journey I soon arrived at the western approaches of Warspear, and there I paused to consider my next move.

Bjørn considers his next move as he surveys the Horde stronghold of Warspear from the jagged outcrops of the west coast.

Surveying the stronghold from the jagged rocks at the western side Warspear didn't look so formidable, but looks were deceiving. My first attempts to penetrate the interior were foiled by the cramped architecture and the numerous NPC patrols guarding the approaches. These NPC guards are almost invisible when they're your own faction, but as an intruder in my enemy's capital they were a formidable hazard to be overcome. They have a fairly large aggro range, they respawn quickly, and some of them are able to see characters in stealth. If you've never prowled around in your enemy's capital before you will not have seen these patrolling NPCs with "eyes" above their heads doing the rounds. I find it helpful to raid mark these scouts with symbols so as to see them coming more easily. Despite my best attempts, however, I found the western side to be very difficult to penetrate. The guard placement and patrol routes were just too densely packed, and I found myself being "made" and having to flee into the sea to escape. As a druid I no longer have the luxury of a rogue's Vanishes - as soon as I am caught I am stuck in combat until either my assailant or I am dead. I'm also a Worgen druid, which means no Shadowmeld - on the upside, however, I do have the extra sprint, which gives me some extra mobility. If I get "made" my only option is to finish the fight quickly, or run into the sea, shift into orca form and swim away until I shake the aggroer.

Having no luck at the western approaches I decided to try to infiltrate from the northern side. I found more success here - there were larger gaps between the patrols, and much to my surprise I found an enemy shadow priest AFK by himself near the bluffs overlooking the ocean. I quickly dispatched the priest, and displaced to the eastern side immediately. My goal was to conduct reconnaissance, so I didn't want to get into a protracted fight. Once the priest returned from being AFK he would alert the garrison to my presence, and I had no wish to be around that area when the Horde started to sweep for me. Death mechanics on Ashran are different to those of Azeroth - when you die you rez at the graveyard at your faction's base. There is no corpse running involved, which means you can't just die, run back to your corpse, and resurrect back at the scene of the fight. In Ashran, much like in BGs, once you die you have to start again from the graveyard all the way back in Stormshield. This made dying an expensive business in terms of time, and as a consequence I was much more wary and risk-averse.

Moving to the eastern side I found more space to manoeuvre, but again penetrating into Warspear's interior proved difficult. There was space to move here, but it appeared to be a locale not frequented by the Horde, which made it useless for ganking purposes. I really wanted to get into the interior, and wreak havoc amongst the folk who thought themselves "safe" in the heart of their stronghold. While I was ruminating, however, a Horde hunter suddenly appeared at the east side and began talking to one of the NPCs. I didn't like the match-up - good hunters are impossible to beat one versus one, at least in Rated play, but I had surprise on my side and there is always that better than even chance that the player isn't that good anyway. So I thought, why not, I'll have a go.

When you open on people in Arenas and Rated BGs they already have a plan in mind, and their response is automatic and honed over hundreds and hundreds of games. They may sit your opener, trinket immediately or use some kind of class escape, or holler for their team mate to peel immediately. In world PvP however, it may take a second or two for what is happening to register, and this is what I was counting on when I opened. Kitty burst is also fearsome - the combination of Incarnation of Ursoc, Berserk and burst trinket allows you to put out ridiculous amounts of damage. Before the hunter knew what was happening he was almost dead. He popped Deterrence, but it was too late - he had both my bleeds (Rip and Rake) already ticking, and as soon as Deterrence went down I simply charged him and finished him with a pair of Shreds.

Once the hunter went down I displaced immediately to avoid reprisals. I kept moving south along the eastern edge of Warspear, probing for a path inside. I found a promising route atop a crumbling wall, but it terminated in a drop into the heart of Warspear. This was a one way ticket - I would be in, but I would also be trapped inside. The removal of flying in Draenor has once again made terrain relevant - penetrating Orgrimmar was a cakewalk by comparison, as all I had to do was fly in. I also recall having to watch the skies back in Cataclysm - once people in Orgrimmar were alerted to my presence the Horde used to sweep back and forth overhead on their mounts while my druid tried to tippy toe away and move to another area. No need for Z-axis considerations in Draenor - here the threats were in front, behind, and to my left and to my right. No paladin hot drops or death from above by mages or shadow priests.

I decided to drop down, and try to work my way from the inside out. If things went south and I was found then my plan was to simply bolt for the sea while shrieking in abject terror. Mouthing a silent hail Mary my druid landed inside, right in the middle of the Horde's training dummy area. Pulse racing I padded away as fast as possible from the Hordies practising their rotations on the mechanical dummies. I felt like I was playing a 3D version of the game Frogger - like the protagonist of that ancient arcade game I was frantically weaving back and forth to dodge oncoming traffic. I finally found a spot where I could rest and catch my breath, which oddly enough happened to be the exact centre of Warspear.

Bjørn in the heart of Warspear, apparently checking his inventory. Where the hell are those agility flasks?

Now the problem was going to be to figure out how the hell to get out of here without being detected. After a moment's reflection I realised that this was not a problem at all. I could literally just run away in any direction I wanted and my druid's fleet of foot would ensure that I would outstrip any pursuit. Once I was in the ocean I would shift into aquatic form and only other druids would be able to catch me. My druid can breathe underwater - non-druids could choose to chase me into the depths and drown if they liked. With entry point and escape plan now determined I began looking around for chances to make a nuisance of myself. The crowd around the training dummies had thinned down to one solitary warlock, and so I picked him as my next target. I crept behind, looked around one more time and determined my escape route, then pounced.

This fight was tough. The dude reacted immediately, and used Blood Horror to shake me. I trinketed and got back on him, trying to do as much damage as I could. The lock started casting Fear to get some distance, and I reacted by using my Skull Bash interrupt. Too quickly - the lock had juked me. Juking is the practice of fake casting in order to draw out interrupts by casting a spell and then quickly cancelling it. Healers use it, as do spellcasters, and it is the difference between life and death in tight matches in Rated play. In this case the lock had drawn out my impetuous interrupt, and started casting Fear again. Fear is the worst CC for me in this environment, because my character would flee and start aggroing NPCs and guards all over the place. Worse still, it would be a full duration Fear of 8 seconds, because Blood Horror (Incapacitate) and Fear (Disorient) have separate diminishing return (DR) categories. In WoW CCs of the same family diminish the duration of each subsequent CC by half if cast within 15-19 seconds of a previous one. Thus three Fears back to back would last 8, then 4, then 2 seconds respectively, with further Fears being completely ineffective for 15-19 seconds after the final cast. CCs belonging to separate categories however, do not DR each other, which is why Arena compositions are so heavily determined by the type of CC each class brings to the table. A team of three druids, for example, would be sub-optimal because every Cyclone cast by any of the team mates would DR the others. A perennially strong composition has always been RMP - rogue, mage, priest - and one of the reasons is because this team brings every class of CC to the fight and consequently have a lot of non-DRing control to set up kills.

The lock didn't need all those Fears to kill me. He just needed one, and my trinket was already down, having used it to break the Blood Horror. In hindsight it would have been better to sit the Horror, as it only lasts 4 seconds, try to interrupt Fears, and then use the trinket if I did get caught. As they say though, hindsight is always 20/20, and now here I was in a position where I really needed to stop this Fear. I used Might Bash to stun him, only to have him trinket that immediately, and resume his Fear cast. He knew I couldn't interrupt him, because interrupts have a base 15 second CD, and my Mighty Bash was gone.

Crap, this guy was good.

There was only one option left, and that was to use my combo points to Maim him instead of landing a Rip. Doing this sacrificed damage for control - instead of landing a vicious bleed, I had to settle for a much smaller bleed and a stun. Even worse this stun was DRed by my previous Mighty Bash, which is also a stun, so instead of landing a 5 second stun, it would last a paltry 2.5 seconds. More importantly, thought, it stopped the cast, so in effect I bought myself 2.5 seconds plus the time it would take the lock to cast a Fear once out of the stun. Approximately four seconds to lay into this guy, and four seconds closer to having my interrupt come off CD. I piled into the guy, trying to get as much damage as I could before I became Feared.

When the Fear came all my "fears" came true - my druid started aggroing guards and NPCs as he ran hither and tither. The lock placed a portal down and dotted me up (i.e. cast a bunch of damage over time spells on me), and my druid began to melt in that slow agonizing way affliction locks dispatch their victims. But it also meant I had some time. The DoT damage broke the Fear prematurely. It was now or never. I popped Survival Instincts to mitigate the combined damage from the DoTs and NPCs, hit my burst button and went HAAM (Arena speak for burst - "hard as a motherfucker") on the lock. The lock popped his defensives, which mitigated my damage somewhat, but kitty burst is vicious, and his only real chance would have been to either kite me with the portal, or get another Fear off. He bought himself a few seconds with a Shadowfury stun (3 second duration), and used that time to cast another Fear. Sitting in a stun I could only watch helplessly as the Fear came, but fate intervened. Instead of being sent fleeing to the hills in terror, the NPCS beating on my druid broke the Fear prematurely, and I was immediately able to get back on the lock. He used his portal to get some distance, but he didn't have the time to place it behind a line of sight obstacle (due to him being ambushed and all) and so it was easy to close the gap with a charge. He tried to juke another Fear, but I had learned my lesson. I didn't bother trying to interrupt until the casts were almost done, and so he wasted valuable seconds with two fake casts before finally trying to get the last cast off. This final cast was interrupted by a Skull Bash, and that sealed his doom.

With the lock down and me almost dead it was time to GTFO out of Warspear. My druid cast Mass Entanglement to root the NPCS, popped Dash and ran for the coast, bolting past guards, NPCs and startled Hordies while trying to keep myself alive with instant Rejuvenations. A DK hit me with a Chains of Ice which slowed me down, but I just powershifted out of the snare and kept running. My health was so low that any number of finishers - Execute, Kill Shot, Shadow Word Death, or Hammer of Wrath - could have killed me. None were forthcoming however, and soon the blue waters of the coast were within reach. I dived off the cliff, shifted into orca form, and swam into the big blue. I had escaped.

It had been a very near run thing, and I was lucky to have made it this time. There will be times when I won't be as lucky, or when I will met players who are better than me and put me down. Nonetheless, I will be back - I have found my world PvP zone for this expansion, and I intend to make myself a regular nuisance on the streets of Warspear.

What's better than ganking alone?

Ganking with friends.

Or with family, as it turned out. My sister and I logged on one evening, found no one on, realised that all our toons were Conquest capped and scratched our heads and pondered on what to do. We didn't want to do 2s - while it was good fun to cap with 2s, at higher and higher rankings they become real stamina-sapping battles which can go on forever, especially with healer/DPS teams. My sister doesn't play for rating anymore - she just logs on to PvP casually with my mates and I, and so I don't like to put any pressure on her whenever she is online. We ruminated on what would be a relaxing evening of PvP with just the two of us, and we were actually on the verge of trying a Heroic dungeon for the first time when suddenly it dawned on me.

"Hey, we can go ganking in Warspear."

Lelle and Bjorn pose before making the leap into the waters off the western side of Stormshield.

Lelle was sold. As far as OWPvP goes she is more gung-ho than I am, often starting more fights than I would. She's never malicious about it - she spent most of her WoW life on a PvE server, so she was always grateful whenever the Horde "came out to play" - that is, voluntarily flag and engage in consensual OWPvP. Since our transfer to a PvP server she has been like a kid in a candy store, attacking every red on sight. She rolled a mage for the first time this expansion, and our levelling was often interrupted by her chasing after Hordies that crossed our path. Either that, or hollering for back-up while being chased by irate Hordies hell bent on taking her out. Never a dull moment when she was around.

So it was decided - it was off to Warspear we would go. My sister's druid and mine have a long history together - back in the Burning Crusade we were "twink" team mates in the level 40-49 bracket. The practice of "twinking" has sadly died out due to changes in game mechanics, but back in the day it was common practice to kit out toons to compete in specific BG brackets. My sister's great nemesis back in those days was a rogue named Skillhoutte - twink brackets were composed of a limited pool of players, so you got to know your team mates and the opposition quite well. Skillhoutte knew Lelle was the Alliance's team main healer, and he hunted her mercilessly every BG we played. Back in those days my druid was a female night elf named Seylune on Garithos. She has subsequently had a sex change, grown fur and fangs as a Worgen, and bounced around from server to server before finally coming to rest in Gundrak and changing her name from Seylune to Bjorn. During the Burning Crusade, however, she was recruited to be Lelle's bodyguard on the twink team, and her job was to prowl around Lelle and pounce Skillhoutte whenever he opened on Lelle. Of course, Skillhoutte adapted as well, and learned to look for me first. He eventually started bringing friends to help him out, too. By the end of our twinking time, Skillhoutte and his mates had become our friends, which goes to show that not all PvP is all about power and domination - sometimes it is just a contest, and people can see beyond the death of their avatars and appreciate the skill and tenacity of their opposition.

Lelle and Bjorn swimming to Warspear.

Modern day PvP in WoW has lost that personal touch, however. Region-wide queues have been an amazing step forward in dramatically reducing waiting times and increasing player pools, but the cost has been the loss of player reputations, vendettas and rivalries. During the days of vanilla BGs were fought against the same group of foes on the same server, and I recall fondly the back and forth on the forums from both factions. There were heated arguments and flaming aplenty, but in the end when people departed from the server they were saluted and given a warm send-off more often than not by those who used to oppose them on the battlefield. There is community in PvP, but if you are not naturally inclined to this playstyle you will not recognize it for what it is.

Back in the present day my sister and I made our final preparations for our ganking trip, consuming food and flasks to buff ourselves before departing. We jumped off the western edge of Stormshield and made our way north to Warspear, taking care not to breach the invisible boundary surrounding Ashran. Upon our arrival I immediately circled us around to the north while telling Lelle what I had learned about the layout on my first visit here. Of course my sister being my sister she insisted on ascertaining the lay of the land herself, and so we parted for an interval so that she could conduct her own recce. It was at this point that I realised that the Horde Auction House was completely accessible from the northern side. The last time I was here I had ganked a shadow priest and hurriedly displaced from this location, and in my haste I had missed this most perfect of openings. There were guards at the entrance, but the building was accessible via the windows in the back, and the approach was completely clear of NPC patrols. What's even more interesting was that all the NPC auctioneers were clearly visible from the outside. This presented us with a golden opportunity to provoke a fight with the Horde on terms that were advantageous to us.

Lelle and Bjorn ponder survey the Horde Auction House in Warspear. The back of the building can be approached from the northern side of the island, and the route is clear of any NPC patrols.

When my sister returned I told her of my discovery and we quickly made a plan of action, working out places where she could line of sight enemy spells, and what our escape plan would be if things escalated out of control. Then giggling like a naughty school kid, I blasted all the auctioneers with Moonfire and aggroed them out of the Auction House back to the rocks where we were waiting.

Sneaking right up to the open windows of the Auction House.

The auctioneers were simple NPCs with fairly low health pools, and it didn't take much to kill all three of them. I didn't use any CDs, saving them all for the inevitable reprisals that would follow. It didn't take long. A warrior and a ret paladin came tearing out of the AH, and I bolted and ran for the shore line. They followed me around the corner of some big rocks, and in the lee of this virtual boulder, out of sight of the AH, I turned to fight. He was red and angry - he'd popped his burst trinket and was going HAAM on my furry ass, so I was doing my best to stay out of contact by stunning and rooting. I knew Lelle had my back with heals, but there's no sense in making the healer's job harder by wilfully sitting in someone's burst. I was trying to either stun or root then follow it with a Cyclone, but the warrior was decent, and kept closing the distance and snaring me. In Arena I can't just hardcast a Cyclone against good warriors. As soon as they hear a Cyclone being cast they'll immediately pop Spell Reflect or Mass Spell Reflect, and you'll end up eating your own CC. What you have to do is to juke a Cyclone - start casting it just to trigger the Cyclone warning on most Arena add-ons, and immediately cancel the cast. This hopefully makes the warrior pop Spell Reflect, which you then remove by throwing out a Moonfire. The Moonfire will be reflected back onto you, but at least you're now free to Cyclone the warrior.

While the warrior and I played tag amongst the rocks, the ret pally came around the boulder and immediately popped wings, but then much to his surprise, he immediately ate a Cyclone courtesy of my sister coming out of stealth behind him. He trinketed it but then ate a second Cyclone literally one second later - Lelle had pre-emptively started casting a second Cyclone in anticipation of a trinket. The pally, rather than waiting out the DRed Cyclone (it would have only been 3 seconds long due to diminishing returns) then showed his greenness by bubbling out of Cyclone (now possible in WoD) and wasting his second escape.

The warrior, in the meantime, had spell reflected my clumsy attempt to Cyclone him. I didn't juke the Cyclone and I paid for it - sometimes I don't want to waste my time juking, and I just cross my fingers and hope the warrior is not good, or has bad reflexes, or bad latency. This guy did not belong to any of those categories, but fortunately it didn't matter. He could no longer attack me either while I sat in my own Cyclone, and he lacked the situational awareness to notice that his buddy was being played with by Lelle so he never switched targets. We just stared at each other through the Cyclone, and when it fell off we went at it again. His burst was petering out, so therefore it was time to pop mine. He was soon in deep doggie doo, wracked by vicious bleeds and eating Ferocious Bite after Ferocious Bite. He tried to escape back to the bluffs above by using Heroic Leap, but the terrain around the northern shore is jagged and uneven, and his mighty leap became a faltering hop that traversed all of 10 metres instead. He was dispatched moments later. I then turned to the paladin, who was chasing Lelle around the rocky beach without much success. A single healer is designed to tank a single DPS indefinitely, and so I wasn't worried about Lelle as long as only one DPS was on her. She can take care of herself. I jumped on the paladin and started bleeding him. It took longer, because my burst was gone and my energy pool depleted on the warrior, but in the end the paladin fell, too. He prolonged the fight with a Lay On Hands which surprised the hell out of me, since that ability is not permitted in Arenas and Rated BGs, but once I realised it was just that ability and not some Horde healer entering the fray, we just focused him down again.

Bjorn stands over the corpses of the warrior (Mudkoh) and ret paladin (Aresz), and thanks the WoW gods that he has a pocket healer.

We quickly scuttled away like a pair of evil hermit crabs, and re-stealthed. The warrior and the pallie were back in moments - their graveyard is literally 30 seconds away, and death was just a minor inconvenience for them. For me and Lelle a death would mean being sent all the way back to Stormshield, and so we agreed that if one of us went down the other would endeavour to get away in order to cast a rez later. If we both went down then our trip would be over. This gave the whole sortie a real sense of danger and excitement, as well as a definite "lose" condition. There is nothing at stake in world PvP in WoW - you have to set your own parameters and bring your own reasons for engaging in this type of gameplay.

The warrior and ret pally started sweeping the beach for us, and Lelle and I obliged again by fighting and killing them. Again. And again. And again. After the third or fourth death the ret paladin had had enough, and he retired from the fight. The warrior, however, brought friends. A feral druid and a hunter waded into the fray. Even three on two we were able to wipe them, not because Lelle and I are particularly good (our highest achievements are 1750+ in all Arena brackets), but because we had played together for so long and our enemies were uncoordinated. Things started becoming bad when an enemy priest joined the fray, however. With a healer in play I had to train the healer, which meant that Lelle would be tanking three people by herself. I could peel occasionally with Cyclones, Mighty Bash and Mass Entanglement but in all reality I needed to stay on the priest to put enough pressure to kill him. As I said earlier, competent healers should be able to tank one DPS indefinitely. Anything less and the healer is a liability to a team. I was hoping that this particular healer was of that kind.

A silent battle rages in the deep waters off the coast of Warspear. The priest Täldur in the top left is keeping the Horde in the fight.

After about a minute of training the priest I had to admit defeat - I couldn't take him down. Lelle was doing a mighty job holding off a warrior, a feral and a hunter, but she was fast running out of CDs. It was time to run. I switched to peel mode, rooting the warrior and Cycloning the hunter, and said, "Let's get out of here!" We both jumped into the water and shifted into our aquatic forms, and dived for the bottom. Lelle kept us both up with Lifeblooms and Rejuvenations. The warrior stuck with us tenaciously - he'd been killed about five times and wanted revenge. As we went deeper and deeper however, he realised his predicament. The feral, on the other hand, was a druid like us, and he had no problems sticking with Lelle and I as we plunged for the bottom. The hunter stayed in the hunt as well - he was ranged and so he could shoot us from the shallow waters, and pop up to take a breath whenever he needed to. The warrior could not, and he eventually disengaged and swam for the surface, and left the fight. The odds had improved tremendously for us with his departure, and Lelle was able to stabilise the incoming damage from the hunter and the feral.

Engaged by a warrior (Mudkoh), a feral druid (Doball) and a hunter (Ramishen - out of screenshot, but his wolf pet is chewing on my furry hide). Apparently there's a DK somewhere, too, because I can see a DK debuff on me.

The hunter and the feral kept pursuing us as we moved further and further away from the coast of Warspear. We were in a deadlock - the warrior was actually the danger man, and without his damage the feral and the hunter were just nuisances to Lelle's healing output. I, on the other hand, couldn't kill either of them either, because the priest was near the surface spamming heals. We just kept moving further and further away from the coast in a type of twisted underwater waltz, wondering how this would all end.

Then the priest decided he'd had enough, and turned and began to swim back to shore. His buddies didn't notice at first - I did, however, and took this opportunity to pop my CDs on the druid. The druid, thinking the priest had his back, ignored me and kept chasing Lelle. He suddenly realised he was dying, looked around frantically for his healer, and died. The hunter realised that he was all alone, and began retreating - unfortunately for him he moves at half speed in water while both Lelle and I had the Aquatic Form glyph which boosts our submerged mobility. He tried to create some distance by using Disengage, but that ability is nigh useless in water - you literally disengage about 1 metre and come to an abrupt halt. Guess all that virtual water has heft and weight. At any rate, there was no way the hunter was ever going to escape from a pair of free swimming druids, and he was soon at death's door. The hunter, in a fit of pique however, voluntarily disconnected himself rather than take a killing blow. I don't know why people do that - as far as I'm concerned, voluntary disconnects are a sure sign that a player is pissed off, and are worth than just kills if "harvesting tears" is the goal. Everyone dies in PvP - but only irate and discomfited players pull the plug on their game. Lelle and I had a little laugh about it, and breathed a collective sigh of relief at having escaped. We were about to go in again and prepare for round two, but at this point real life intruded when Lelle's baby woke up. We called it at that point, and logged our druids off at a small island north west of Warspear. We had achieved nothing - won nothing - gained nothing - and by most standards we had just wasted two hours of our time. Nonetheless, we had a few laughs - exercised a skill set which has no bearing on real life - and we both logged off in good spirits. If that is not the essence of play then I don't know what is.

Now that all my toons are Conquest geared I'm finding myself at a bit of a loss at what to do. My original plan was to push for rating at the end of the season, but I'm finding that I lack the drive (or the team mates) to do so. I returned to WoW because of friends and family, and now those same people have abandoned WoW again, leaving me marooned in Azeroth. Lelle has her baby, Rykester is back at university completing his Masters, Ratsac is building his new house, Corona has foregone WoW in favour of a 3rd person MOBA called Smite, and Sorgon - who the hell knows what he is doing, apart from getting high somewhere. Of the active people I do know, none of them are viable team mates. Greyscorn, Odie and Hazeraxe are great guys, but they're just not very good I'm afraid - it's fun to cap with them, or to do world PvP with them, but as partners for rating all I can say is been there and done that, and don't want to do it again. Odie is a prime example of someone who was "good" in the grindy vanilla WoW PvP system, but couldn't make the transition to the more skill-based era of Arenas and Rated BGs. He earned the Field Marshal title back in vanilla - for those unfamiliar with the vanilla WoW PvP system the best thing that can be said about it is that it rewarded bloody single-minded determination to accumulate as many HKs as possible on a weekly basis. You couldn't take a week off, because your ranking would decay - apart from this consideration, it was all about farming HKs to maintain your position on the player distribution curve. The Field Marshal rank nowadays translates to a 2300+ rating in Rated BGs - in modern day Arena though Odie is simply terrible, and he doesn't even have the most basic Arena achievement of 1550+.

Of all my remaining active WoW friends, only Ratsac and Tamati are left - as I said, however, Ratsac is spending less and less time online as his house takes shape over in Western Australia. Tamati is unavailable as a team mate, because he is sitting on his rating of 2.2k in 3s and is on the cusp of getting the Arena Master (2.2k in all brackets) achievement. I have to admit to pangs of jealousy when I heard this - Tamati and I started out together with no rating, and while I have run headlong into the 2k wall, he has gone and crushed it on multiple toons. He's better than me, but I don't think that the gulf between us is that great - if he can get 2k I should be able to as well. Of course I could just be deluding myself, but oh well, we all need our illusions.

The last time I'll be paying for a WoW sub with real money. I bought a pile of tokens using my stockpiled gold for 21,428 gold apiece, and will leisurely earn my gold back in the interval to keep the sub going if I keep playing.

Since everyone else seems to have moved on I was to about to unsub, but the advent of the WoW token has given me a reason to extend my stay in Azeroth. I have a ridiculous amount of gold stockpiled, just under half a million or so, so I'm thinking that this month will be the last month I pay for a subscription. I used to have more, but WoW has a rule that each toon can only transfer 50,000 gold with them, and so the most I could take when I migrated my 10 toons to Gundrak during the free Oceanic transfer window was 500,000. The rest I ended up depositing to my old guild on Thorium Brotherhood. I don't need gold for anything - my toons are self-sufficient. PvP gear has no gem slots nor do we use consumables like flasks or food, so the only real expense comes from providing enchants for all the relevant pieces on all my active toons. Apart from this gold has no use for me - I'm not interested in mounts or vanity pets, so it makes sense to use the gold to offset real money subscription costs. I'm not going to "work" for my subscription either - with a 10 month head start I can easily re-make the gold doing garrison quests and selling crafted gear at a leisurely pace. If the gold price of the WoW token does inflate to ridiculous amounts which make it necessary for me to "work" for my monthly gold subscription cost then I just won't bother. I'll just resub. That is a conundrum at least 10 months further down the track, however. The WoW token will have an interesting effect on assessing subscription numbers, because who knows how many subscribers will be real money subscriptions as opposed to those financed by gold. By the same "token" however, it's easy to forget that every WoW token I buy with gold has been bought and paid for by someone with real money, so does it all even out revenue wise for Blizzard? I'll leave that for better minds than mine to puzzle out.

Being the miserly bastard that I am, I'm going to extend my sub in two month bursts - I'll reassess at the end of this period if I want to keep my sub going. My sub no longer costs me real money, but no sense wasting tokens if I don't feel like playing either.

So now that I am here to stay, I've been looking around for a Rated BG team to join in the hopes of finding one which can take me all the way to 2k. Since coming to Gundrak my toons have joined three guilds (four, if you count Ratsac's holding guild called <Unique Snowflakes>) - <Zero Style>, <Next Level> and finally <Jim's Mowing>. <Zero Style> and <Next Level> have died quiet ignominious deaths and have been abandoned and deserted. <Jim's Mowing> on the other hand, is perhaps the most organized PvP guild I've been a member of despite its unfortunate name. Ranks are determined purely on your PvP achievements, and they hold four to five PvP events on a weekly basis catering to differing levels of achievement. They hold Rated BG events, world PvP events, and unique events like Royal Rumble style eliminations and duelling tournaments. I've somehow snagged a spot on their core team which plays on Monday nights, and I've convinced Ratsac to join as well. I'm surrounded by awesome players on paper, and they all hold lots of shiny Arena and Rated BG achievements, which makes me a very sad panda. I also realised that I may have the lowest level of achievement on the team - my guild rank corresponds to my highest Arena achievement, which is 1750+, while the rest of them are rocking 2k or above - which makes me an even sadder panda, and also designates me as the "waterboy" of the team. To cap it all, one of their best players is a 13 year old kid named Chubbydruid, who is an Arena Master and Lieutenant-Commander (2.2k in Rated BGs) which makes me the saddest panda of all, and makes me wonder why I bother chasing rating at all. Self-determination theory ascribes three rationales for intrinsically driven behaviour - competence, autonomy, and relatedness - and I guess I must fall in the first and last categories - because according to my way of thinking, if I don't try to better myself (i.e. push for higher and higher rating) there is no real point in continuing to play at all. Even if 13 year olds can kick my ass without even really trying. It's amazing how much deference Chubby gets by virtue of his achievements, but the young tacker is a WoW prodigy - in Rated BGs he heals, dispels, CCs, and moves like lightning all around the battlefield, being Johny on the spot in crisis situations and always communicating effectively over Skype. You remember that he is just a little boy though, when someone cracks a stupid joke and he bursts out in in high pitched pre-pubescent laughter. I worry about kind of influence this team is exerting on his development as a young adult, but at the very least it must be empowering in some way. In this field, at least, he is the equal or the better of his adult compatriots.

Life on a PvP server - while buying up tokens, a group of three Hordies blow through and slaughter the helpless NPCs, including the auctioneers. Sitting on my AH toon all I could do is watch. Those bastards. How dare they interfere with my game time. Wait a minute, is that hypocrisy I'm feeling?

All these shiny achievements don't hide the dysfunctionality which exists within this team however. For starters, the raid is led by a paladin called Pallypwnftw who tries to do his job, but is consistently undercut and undermined by the guild leader (a.k.a. Jim of <Jim's Mowing>) who occasionally butts in and contradicts him on strategy and composition. Jim insists on playing but lurks in the corners of the raid without speaking, but then chiming in whenever it suits him if he disagrees with something Pally says. On one occasion Jim demanded raid lead and used it to kick a priest who was irritating him, then asked Pally to find a replacement. To make matters worse, Jim usually refuses to play with a microphone, and spams his demands either on guild chat or raid chat. This kind of behaviour wouldn't be tolerated on any other team but because he is the GM his guild somehow just puts up with it. What's even worse is that he plays a hunter most of the time, which means he is allocated guard duty on node maps. Without a microphone. This is just bizarre, and has led to predictable results, in which the node Jim is guarding is overrun because no one saw Jim's call for help on raid chat. Since I am the newest and lowest member I just shut my mouth and roll with it, even though it drives me up the wall. I even started putting Jim on focus so I could see when he takes damage and then call for him (i.e. "Jim's being attacked at ST, he needs help."). Lately however he has begun using a mike reluctantly, and that's because he had a minor mutiny from some of his guildies who rightfully called him out on his behaviour. Jim is like the hated uncle in family reunions - we have to invite him because he is family, but nobody likes the old geezer because he's an asshole.

The guild master isn't the only thing dysfunctional about this team. Pally talks himself up constantly, and traditionally this has been a part of "leetbro" culture which annoyed me the least. Yes, yes, I saw it. Yes, that was a great play. Yup, yup, you owned that DK. Yeah, buddy, you are awesome. I feel like someone faking an orgasm. Nonetheless, I do it as it's all part of my Machiavellian plan to integrate myself into the team. Unfortunately Pally can go beyond self-praise and go into the realm of sniping at others to make himself look better. If I'm the target I stand my ground, and I link Recount statistics to defend myself if necessary. "Why are your heals so low, monk?""Well, next time let me heal offence and you can sit with the FC.""Why didn't you dispel me, monk?""My dispel was on CD, but if you like I can link overall Dispel count, in which I doubled yours. I can even link you how many times I have dispelled you in the game, which is - let me see - 13? Now how many times have you dispelled me - oh. Once. You dispelled Frost Fever. Cheers, bro." There's a fine balance of being an ass kisser and someone who stands up for themselves, and it's walking this tightrope that is the essence of realpolitik, albeit on the micro level of computer games. I want to be part of the team, but I'm not willing to be a punching bag either.

The other healer in the team, Asheboyswag, is also an Arena Master but is a reluctant healer, much preferring to play shadow in Rateds. Ash constantly whinges about how much he hates healing, and in one game was so bored that he broke from strategy and just started running the flag himself instead of handing it off to our designated FC (flag carrier). We still won, but this type of retarded selfish play wouldn't fly in normal teams, and is somehow tolerated for whatever reason. This team really needs a strong leader to sort them out. As it stands we're stuck in the 1700-1800 bracket despite having a team filled with great individual players with much higher achievements. Even my team of neophytes, filled with people with no achievements (at that time), managed to get 1900+ in Season 13 simply because we were a great team and we worked together as a unit. If this was a PuG team I would have been out of here long ago, but the fact is that this guild represents the best opportunity for me to play in a stable team filled with good players. At least these guys have trials and regular events, unlike other guilds out there. Despite Ash's whinging, Chubby's youth and Pally's self-promotion they are all awesome PvP healers. Chubby is like the Flash - he is everywhere, and invariably always the first to any node in trouble. Pally is a decent raid leader but has problems overriding Jim or other established players. Ash is always nagging his fellow healers for dispels, but whenever I get CCed and I'm near him he dispels it almost instantaneously so what he asks for he also gives back in return. In a Silvershards Mine game I once rolled off the side of the track and fell in the water by accident in the middle of a big fight. I didn't tell anyone out of embarrassment, and started swimming for the shore to get back to the fight above. Without missing a beat Ash pulled me back up with Lifegrip (a.k.a. Leap of Faith). So OK, he's occasionally annoying - but the dude can play, and as I've said before, competence trumps good manners for me up to a certain point.

Having spent over a decade living in Japan, I've had to assimilate the conventions of aisatsu (ritualised greetings) and learn the inflections of keigo (formal speech) in work and casual situations. You don't really know a Japanese person from first impressions. The day they actually start bitching and complaining to you is the day you know you have penetrated past the layers of socially conditioned politeness and have started to meet the real person underneath. This is the case for most cultures - we all have our public and private personas - but the difference in Japan is so stark that they have words for it. Tatemae (public facade) and honne (true feelings and desires). This is a gross generalisation of course, and I have met Japanese people who eschew this type of public persona. The reverse is also true - I've met quite a few two-faced bastards back home in Australia back when I was practicing as a solicitor (my scumbag clients, mainly). No culture has a monopoly on good people, or bad people. There are two types of drinking parties in Japan - the ones where everyone really lets their hair down (I call them honne parties), and the ones where it's really just an extension of the hierarchical stratification that characterises Japanese culture. Last week I had to pour beer for my boss, my bosses' boss, and finally pour beer for the mayor, who being the highest ranked dignitary in the room was the focus of obeisance for the whole function. Of course, as a concession to egalitarianism you're also supposed to pour beer for everyone else, which leads to the situation in which everyone is standing up with a bottle of beer in hand trying to pour beer for people who also have bottles to pour. No one is sitting down, no one is having fun (but they're pretending to), and I find the whole ritual exceedingly painful. There was a time when I got a kick out of having a pretty young intern pour my beer for me, but since Yuri passed I don't think that way anymore. It just makes me sad, and reminds me of the day we first met. She hated those stupid functions, too. Sometimes I get the irrational impulse during these functions to strip and run around naked and do star jumps in front of everyone with my junk flopping around in people's faces. One day I might snap and this day may come to pass - unfortunately that will also be the day when I get fired from my company and get my ass sent home on a plane with the proviso "Never To Return" stamped on my passport.

In short, if I can put up with navigating honne and tatemae in my working life then integrating into this Rated team should be a piece of piss by comparison. Much in the same way you have to wade through the layers of tatemae and formality in Japan to find the real person beneath, you have to do the same when you are trying to establish yourself in a Rated BG team. Beyond the "leetbro" culture and the posturing there are real people underneath, and I just want to dispense with the BS and start becoming part of a real team and kicking some real ass. The true beauty of team play in Rateds is when you start being able to rely on your team to have your back, and we are so far from this point at the moment it's laughable. There are moments during Rateds where you are literally helpless to do anything - silenced, stunned and rooted, with five, six, or seven DPS on you trying to rip your face off - and your life is completely in the hands of your fellow healers and team mates who can peel for you. I'm not comfortable yet putting my virtual life in the hands of these strangers - but this is the point I would like to get to. The point in which you know you actually belong to a team rather than a group of individuals is when you are able to call out mea culpa, or admit your mistakes, without fear of being of given excessive grief for it. Light hearted ridicule or friendly sledging is par for the course, and is a given. A real team however, is able to freely admit their mistakes while at the same time exhibiting a willingness to learn and improve from them. For now, however, I'll simply have to observe the rituals of male bonding (akin to aisatsu), use the lexicon of "leetbro" speech (akin to keigo), and hope that one day we actually pierce the veil of tatemae and start forging some real team bonds.

Addendum - above is a video of one of our better matches against a 1600+ team. We still won comfortably thanks to the vicious efficiency of our DPS who chewed through the enemy every time they made contact, but the problems besetting the team are apparent. In this game Ash decides to run the flag by himself after the first cap, leading to a sub-optimal situation where all three healers are stuck on defence. You can see me dithering in the flag room not sure what to do - our opening strategy called for Pally and I to drop back to support the FC with a hunter, but when Ash took the flag it left our offence without heals, who wiped as a result. Jim the GM is on his mage and as per usual is refusing to talk on Skype, instead opting to spam chat with his demands. He also inexplicably drops the flag for no reason in our flag room, either because he was getting pissed at people telling him to give the flag to our DK FC, or he just cocked up a transfer. Without a mike no one knew what the hell he was thinking, and the end result was that the opposition scored a cap. Pally was doing a great job raid leading I thought, but he had problems putting his foot down with Ash, who outranks him, or was getting drowned out by Mpsmash, our target caller (TC). We still won, but It was far from the kind of performance one would expect for a team filled with 2k+ players.

Over a month ago, Bhagpuss of Inventory Full nominated me for a Liebster Award. I have to confess I am not a big fan of the Liebster, which as others have already pointed out is a cunningly disguised chain letter, but I don't want to be rude either, especially to Bhagpuss who I have always considered to be one of the more moderate, articulate and courteous bloggers in this particular corner of the Internet. I apologize for the excessive delay, and without further ado, here are my belated responses.

1. Are MMORPGs getting better all the time or going downhill fast?

MMORPGs are definitely getting better - we have more choices than ever before. I feel that there is an MMO for every demographic now - sandboxers have Eve, theme park lovers have WoW and FFXIV, and story-minded folk have SWTOR, TSW and TESO. The PvE and PvP demographic are all catered for, and there are a bunch of new MMOs on the horizon eschewing the WoW/FFXIV model and going down the fantasy sandbox EVE route. The idea of a persistent world is also expanding beyond the boundaries of what traditionally have been called MMOs - H1Z1 and Destiny are prime examples of titles which have incorporated MMO elements into different types of gameplay (survival and FPS respectively).

2. Which cancelled MMO do wish you'd tried when you still had the chance?

City of Heroes. I'm a comic book geek, and it would have been cool to be a superhero. Or even better, a super villain.

3. And which cancelled MMO (including ones that never made launch) do you wish was still up and running?

Same as 2).

4. Flying mounts or underwater zones?

I've always had a thing for underwater zones. I think that flying is cheap and makes terrain irrelevant. Underwater zones however, can be greatly evocative, especially Atlantis-like zones which showcase the ruins of fallen civilisations.

5. What I.P. from books, movies, comics or T.V. would you most like to see turned into an MMORPG?

I would love a GTA style MMO, with the ability to control city blocks, initiate turf wars, and join factions like the cops, city hall, gangs, rival corporations and so on. Ideally this game would be set in a dystopian, cyberpunk urban setting much like Blade Runner, Shadowrun or Deus Ex, filled with neon lights, acid rain, dark streets and teeming hordes of humanity with stories to tell.

6. MMO cash shops: a welcome opportunity to give yourself a treat or a pathetic attempt to wheedle money out of the weak-willed? Or does that depend entirely on whether they sell anything you actually want?

Nothing against cash shops, as long as they only peddle cosmetic gear. Cosmetic fluff is totally cool, but P4P items are a definite no-no. As far as I can see, there are three types of outside asymmetry which people can import into the virtual - skill, time, and money. The first one is an inevitable part of life, the second I think is quite acceptable, and the third I dislike. People being better than me I accept as the natural order of things. People who can get better rewards than me because they spend more time in-game seems fair - perhaps it appeals to my egalitarianism, and to the naïve concept of a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. People who can buy power via money touches a nerve. I can't articulate why it makes me disgruntled, but I suspect it might have something to do with the idea that money corrupts the purity of the game. If people can buy power then the game is tainted. Nonetheless, I can tolerate it up to a certain point if the gameplay is good - I did play Archeage for a little while - but I would much prefer cash shops to stick to hats, mounts, costumes and the like.

7. Geez! Haven't we seen enough dragons already?

Lies. Dragons rock.

8. Has playing MMOs had any noticeable effect on your physical or mental health, positive or negative?

Around 2007-2008 I played a little too much due to personal issues, and I started getting back and neck problems, all to do with sitting hunched over a monitor for ridiculously extended periods of time. Those symptoms disappeared once I started regulating my playtime and exercising regularly.

Mentally playing MMOs has been a mixed bag. MMOs can be a good diversion, but I have had obsessive compulsive episodes like those detailed by Mesmer and Jeromai which were definitely not good for my well-being when I was younger. Thankfully those days are over, and now I play games in short bursts rather than in marathon sessions which I was wont to do when I was an undergraduate.

9. Do you PvP? Did you always? Or ever? If you changed your mind, why?

Always been a PvPer - prior to MMOs I played Street Fighter, Tekken, Mortal Combat, Halo, Counterstrike, Battlefield, Warcraft 3 and StarCraft so playing against other players seemed quite natural to me and never a reason to turn me off any particular title. The first asymmetrical persistent world PvP game I played was a browser game called Evony, and I immediately fell in love with the lawless world in which the weak had to band together in order to survive in a world filled with bigger and sometimes hostile coalitions. This naturally led me to EVE Online, and I've been looking for a fantasy sandbox MMO to replicate that experience ever since. It's fair to say that I am big fan of both symmetrical, instanced and balanced PvP, as well as its far less popular asymmetrical persistent cousin.

10. Would you put "playing MMORPGs" on your resumé/C.V.?

I wouldn't, but not because I'm ashamed of my hobby. It just wouldn't be relevant.

11. Do you play "in character"? Sometimes? Always? Never?

When my sister is not around I am a completely rational player, but when she is we sometimes revert to the mindset we had when we were kids. It's an embarrassing fact that most of our avatars are based on the stuffed toys we had when we were children. I play more in character when my sister is around, because we bounced around from home to home as kids, and our stuffed toys were our constant companions growing up. Her main characters, Lelle the resto druid and Qualar the warrior, are based on teddy bears named Little and Koala. My old main in WoW, Theodorius, is based on a stuffed bear named Teddy. Even my current main, Tientzo the monk, is based on a bear named Biggy. Each of these toys had a distinct personality which we jointly developed when we played as little children, and they definitely come into play when we play together as adults in MMOs. Whenever my sister plays Qualar she is impetuous, impatient and eager to fight - whenever she is on Lelle she is patient, calm and non-confrontational. As for me, I would like to think that when I am ganking someone and then running off giggling I am just channelling my inner Teddy, who is mischievous, impudent and full of mischief.

These series of posts are intended to cover my thoughts on Blizzard games other than WoW - at the time of writing I am playing both Heroes of the Storm (HotS) and Hearthstone (HS), and I intend this heading to become the repository of my figurative scribblings on these titles. I'm also a long time StarCraft (SC) player, and I fully expect to play the snot out of Overwatch (OW) when it is released. If I ever write about those titles they'll also fall under this heading, and prospective readers can make informed decisions as to whether or not the remainder of the post is worth reading based on their like or dislike of these non-WoW Blizzard titles. I also own Diablo 3, but for some obscure reason (perhaps linked to their initial attempts to monetize the game) that game never took with me, and it has been subsequently banished to purgatory on my hard drive. However, if Diablo makes the ascent from the gaming underworld back into my active game roster, then my thoughts about it will also be collated here.

This post is about Hearthstone, which I started playing on and off from August 2014 when I was vacationing in Oz last year. Having never played collectible card games (CCG) I was dubious at first, but was roped in by Rykester and his brother, both of whom are avid players. Rykester's brother Luke was a tournament level Magic: The Gathering (MTG) player, and for a brief period after finishing his university studies he supported himself by playing MTG on both the Australian and the US circuits. I've never played MTG, but from what I've gathered from critics of HS, HS is a lite version of the original breakout CCG. "It's perfect for you," I was told. "It's simple." Failing to register the backhand I tried out the game, and was immediately hooked. It's easy to understand, the games are short, and the meta-game isn't demanding. There's also enough downtime between turns to intersperse chores, work or conversation while playing the game. It became the perfect casual game for me, even more so now that it is available on iPhone.

I've never seen Voltron played before, so when this mage tried to play it I didn't try to stop him. It was early in the ladder anyway, so I didn't mind losing. BUT ZOMG MEGA-WINDFURY - 4 attacks!

After playing casually for about eight months and building up my deck I made a conscious decision last month in April to push as high as I could go. This was brought on by the diminishing activity of players in WoW PvP, as well as the dearth of available team mates I could run with. You don't need anyone else for HS, so it suited me just fine. I started by going to Icy Veins, and picking a deck to push with. No sense in reinventing the wheel - I wanted to play with decks that have been proven to reach Legendary, and learning their ins and outs by playing them. I eventually chose Face Hunter because it was cheap and easy to construct, and supplemented it with Mech Mage Rush to switch things up in case it got a little too boring. Both decks are aggro decks, meaning that they try to secure victory in the early and mid game, but go about it in slightly different ways. Face Hunter piles relentless damage to the face and almost never gets into minion exchanges. The opponent is forced to initiate the exchanges in order to mitigate the damage the Face Hunter is putting out. It's also one of the most despised decks in the meta-game, because of its effectiveness and ubiquity, and it's no longer the force that it was once because everyone hates losing to it and have adapted their decks accordingly. Check out this exchange below with one ex-opponent:

When people ask to be your Friends in Hearthstone after a loss it's because they want to abuse the shit out of you. I should have taken the high road and ignored the request, but I'm a shallow individual so I wanted to see what insults he was going to sling my way.

My second deck is one which gained popularity after the release of the Goblins versus Gnomes expansion, and it relies on the synergy of mechanical units to create overwhelming early pressure to flood the board and win the game. I had a great deal of success with this deck in April, at least until I went below rank 10 and started running into what seemed like a veritable legion of control warriors and control priests. If I'm not poised to win before turns 7-9 my chances of victory drop away dramatically. In fact with both my aggro decks I can accurately gauge whether I will win or not depending on the configuration of my starting hand and how the first two to three turns play out. That's the RNG factor of HS - it's not in the individual cards themselves, but rather in the composition of your opening hand, especially with aggro decks.

My best achieved rank to date (7), and the decks I usually run with, as of April 2015.

I have a third deck, and I like it because it plays so different to the aggro decks I usually run. It is the Druid Fatigue deck, and it works by playing from behind, weathering all the enemy's attacks, and killing them with fatigue once they run out of cards. It works beautifully against control decks, but requires really careful planning and a judicious assessment of what cards your opponent has to be effective. Your cards must be able to weather everything the opponent can throw at you, so your board clearances have to be greedy - that is, you have to make a lucrative trade as possible with the cards that you have. Out of all three decks I am currently running it is the one that is the most demanding in terms of gameplay. The aggro decks almost run themselves, as the choices on what to play are so obvious. The fatigue deck, on the other hand, requires you to make hard decisions usually centred around whether to spot clear (kill one minion), board clear (clear the board), wait one more turn by doing nothing, or to stall by healing up. The most devastating combo in this deck is the Poison Seeds and Starfall combo, which turns everything on the board into a 2/2 minion and then subsequently clears them all with the Starfall 2 damage AoE. This combo is an almost guaranteed clear - even minions with Deathrattle abilities usually spawn minions which have 2 or less health, making them vulnerable to the follow up Starfall. The problem with this combo is threefold - i) it requires both cards to be in your hand; ii) it requires 9 mana to cast; and iii) even if you have the cards and the mana it is always a tough call deciding when to unleash this combo. Because it is a guaranteed clear you want your opponent to have lots of expensive minions on the board to maximize the value of the trade. Unfortunately however, there is also such a thing as waiting too long, or being too greedy - I have lost many games by waiting one turn longer than I should have, and then being killed by minions buffed by Blood Lust or Savage Roar. Loatheb is another killer, because it stops your ability to cast the combo stone dead, and leaves you facing a hostile board full of enemy minions with your pants down.

Final rank in April 2015.

The deck is really fun and engaging, and I find victories using the fatigue deck are the most rewarding. The problem with the fatigue deck is that games take so long to play, even when you win - since your strategy is to chew through all your opponent's cards to kill them with fatigue this is inevitable. And it's not an aggro deck where your opponent can clearly see that they have lost and resign - all your plays are reactive, which means you usually have nothing at all on your side of the deck and as a consequence your opponent keeps plugging on and on, trying to re-establish board supremacy after every clear. To be honest, that is the main attraction of playing the fatigue deck - leading your opponent on and on and on until they realise they have nothing left to throw. If aggro decks are like lions or tigers charging out of the gate then fatigue decks are like boa constrictors slowly crushing the life out of the opposition. Fatigue decks are not unbeatable, however, and I find that aggro decks usually have too many minions for me to clear them all. They do shine against decks that counter aggro, however - hand locks, control warriors, control priests, Grimguzzle warriors, and oil rogues are all good match-ups for this deck. Fatigue also works well against Face Hunters, because their minions are easy to clear - you just have to mulligan for some early heal spells in order to keep you out of lethal range, and he/she will eventually run out of damage.

Final rank in May 2015.

My best achieved rank to date is 7 in April 2015, although I ended up finishing the April season at 9 and May at 8. Rykester's best rank is 4 and Luke's is 3 so there's a friendly rivalry going between us, despite the fact that Luke as a Magic player considers the game the equivalent of Go Fish or Snap. He's not alone in this assessment, but whatever - I find HS fun, diverting, and demanding enough to require you to know the meta to do well. For me the real fun in HS is in learning the deck types, and tweaking them to adapt to the prevailing trends in the ladder. It kind of reminds me of the days when I played Warhammer the miniatures game - for me then the fun was constructing your army, then winding it up to see how it would fare against other people in a tournament setting. HS reminds me of those bygone days - the game might be simple on paper, but like poker, because it is played against people who adapt, modify and innovate their decks it becomes much more than just a card game and more like a battle of wits between you and the meta-gamers duking it out on the ladder.

This will be my last WoW-related post for some time, as I have decided to hang up my WoW boots for the immediate future and return to TESO. I had already stopped playing WoW and am now just a subscriber in name only, albeit one financed by the piles of virtual gold I had amassed over a decade of playing the game. Prior to this my only form of regular activity was playing Rated BGs with my current PvP guild <Jim's Mowing> - I used to play Rated BGs regularly every Monday night with this guild, and it might be fair to say that I was one of their more regular members, with the rest of the roster being extremely volatile. The guild has become victim of the attrition that comes with long PvP seasons - generally speaking people usually stop playing once they hit a rating they are happy with, and they sit on their achievements until the next season begins. Week by week more and more people lapsed into inactivity, until in late May many of the weekly Rated BGs were cancelled. I am writing this post in mid-June, and nowadays there is only one event running per week where once there had been four to five back in March and April. This post is an account of a Rated BG in early May, just prior to the lapse into inactivity which characterises the guild at the moment.

In my last post I talked about a few of the characters in the guild - Pallypwnftw, Chubbydruid, and the GM himself, Jim - but on this night none of them were present. Jim the GM had ragequit one evening the week prior over some trivial crap, and he has basically taken a sabbatical from the game. I can't say that I miss him, as all he seems to contribute to the team is strife - his refusal to use a microphone, and his inability to stop meddling with the people he designates as raid leaders only serves to undermine and undercut the poor bastards saddled with the job. Pally finally stepped down as raid leader, and I can't say I blame the guy, especially after all the crap he was forced to endure with Jim lurking in the wings. Chubby, the 13 year old WoW prodigy and probably the best healer in the guild, was unable to play because his Mum had grounded him. Poor Chubby. He's a PvP monster in the virtual world, but just a kid in the real one. We had an interim raid leader step in for a couple of weeks (Pallyroll), but he was also stymied by real life shackles, and he was involved in an embarrassing episode which destroyed all his credibility as a raid leader. During the middle of the game in the midst of "chewing" out the team, his mother came into his room and went on a tirade to which the whole raid was unfortunately privy to on Skype. Gathering from her outburst Pallyroll is an university undergraduate living at home who neglects his chores, has a WoW addiction, and is in immediate danger of being evicted by an irate mother "who is sick of this obsession." There's no coming back after that, and the following week Pallyroll stepped down from the raid leading position. We then had an air force officer come in and claim that he was qualified to lead the team due to his real life background, only to have him degenerate into a whinging loser who blamed everyone but himself when we went on a losing run. He transferred from the Horde to the Alliance thinking it would be easier to get 2k on this side of the factional divide, went on a losing run, and has now since returned back Horde-side after complaining loudly and longly that the Alliance "suck".

I've finally cottoned onto Jim the GM's recruiting strategy. He spams Trade chat with recruitments advertisements, takes anyone with no questions asked, thrust responsibility on them, and hopes for the best. My inclusion into the core team now seems like a trivial achievement - it's hard to feel pride when the only criteria for inclusion is having a pulse. I'm also somewhat disenchanted by all these "elite" players around me - sure, they all have nice PvP achievements but there's no team here as far as I can see, just a gaggle of individuals who were once pretty good at WoW PvP. So once again I find myself questioning why the hell I am still playing this game, and why I bother playing with this group of misfits, and the answer I get back from myself is that I still like the core PvP game, and I want to continually push rating. I'm past my tipping point though, in which my like for the game and my desire to push rating is outweighed by the sheer inanity I have to put up with. The best era of WoW PvP for me was when my friends and family were heavily into WoW, and although we could be fractious at times, we were held together by deeper bonds than just a desire to climb the ladder, and thus losses became minor setbacks and wins were cherished shared experiences. I have to face up to the idea that that era is over, and it might be time to move on - not just from WoW, but from gaming in general.

So with the regular "leadership" out for the evening, it fell upon Asheboyswag and Mpsmash to lead the group. I like both players - Mpsmash has proven to be sensible and level headed, and there's no denying that Ash is a great player despite being very annoying on chat. The game I recorded took place in Twin Peaks, which is a classic capture the flag (CTF) map. For the benefit of non-WoW PvPers, the object of this game is to grab the flag in the enemy's base and bring it back to yours. Teams are unable to cap the flag unless their flag is also at their home base - in other words, you can only cap the flag and score if the enemy isn't in possession of yours. The battle takes place in a valley bisected by a river, with the opposing bases located at the top of the hills on either side. There is a nice summary located here for those interested learning more.

The strategy employed by Ash in this map was to send the rogue to sneak into the enemy base, grab the enemy flag, and then bring it back to middle and reunify with the rest of the team who would be attempting to wrest control of the field. I was given the duty of peeling out once the rogue had the flag, and escorting him back to the middle. Once our team was all together we would wipe the enemy team - the whole point of fighting together as a group in the middle is that we would have a numerical advantage if the enemy team had already split into offensive and defensive teams. Ideally the enemy team had already gone into a 7/3 split - 7 on offence, and 3 (the enemy flag carrier and two healers) heading back to their base. If this was indeed the case their 7 on offence would be facing our combined 10 in midfield. We would wipe them and then split, with the rogue FC, myself and one more healer dropping back to our base while the remainder of the team pushed forward to kill the enemy flag carrier. Our 7 would engage their remaining 3 (plus whatever rezzers straggled in), kill the FC, and allow our rogue to get the cap.

They say that no plan survives contact with the enemy, and the truth of this adage was about to be amply demonstrated. Usually it's because of something the enemy does that disrupts our plans. Tonight though, we decided to disrupt ourselves instead. Prior to the game starting the two warriors on our team - Mpsmash and Thisisagirl (who was not) - decided to get into an argument. Mpsmash called Thisisagirl out on his overall damage, which he felt was on the low side. Thisisagirl countered by saying that he hated that particular statistic because it detracted from his positional play and his team focus (and I agreed with him). Mpsmash kept at him and at him, and suitably provoked Thisisagirl challenged Mpsmash to a duel and won. This should have settled the matter, but Thisisagirl also vowed to "forget tactics if damage is all you guys want" and lapsed into a sullen silence which boded ill for future team play. When the game started someone other than our designated lock snatched the berserker buff as we all charged into midfield. The berserker buff is usually reserved for DoT classes to maximize their spread pressure, but tonight some idiot decided to grab it to pad their stats without having the gumption to own up to it on Skype. Because of their recent spat I suspected Thisisagirl, but video review completely exonerates him, as he rides ahead of me the whole way.

Still it was just a minor hiccup, and our plans proceeded apace. We had just made contact with the enemy and I was healing in the middle, still waiting for the signal from the rogue to peel out when disaster struck. The enemy had two shadow priests and a destruction lock, and they were about to give us an awesome demonstration of what was possible with disciplined focus fire and combined burst. In mid-heal I was globalled - full to zero health in one global cooldown (or approximately 1.5 seconds). I saw the chaos bolts coming, but I was confident that I had HoTs, shields and health enough to survive the incoming damage. Erm, nope. One second I was a happy panda, waiting for the call from the rogue to peel out and assist. One second later I was a sad DEAD panda, wondering what the hell just happened. Being globalled isn't so strange in Rated BGs - there is so much damage flying around that if a team gets in sync and bursts at the same time the combined damage can be devastating. What made this display by the enemy so awesome is that one of our other healers died at the same time. So they didn't just global me - they globalled two healers at once. The lone surviving healer, Ash, who is no slouch, could only splutter in disbelief. Three seconds after the both healers went down, a third, Thisisagirl also died.

Three men down in three seconds. We had been well and truly rocked. Check out 2:20 in the video if you don't believe me.

With two healers down and the enemy possessing incredible burst damage there was no way that we were going to be able to hold the middle. We wiped in short order. All was not lost - our rogue still had the flag, so an enemy cap was still preventable if we could rez in time and if we could rally around him. Unfortunately at this point in the game I turned into a wet noodle - that chaos bolt was so devastating that it must have reached through the monitor and rang my meatbag brain, too. That's the only excuse I can think of to explain how badly I was about to play for the next ten minutes or so. On the replay I can clearly see our rogue FC valiantly running past our graveyard - in real time, however, I must have failed to see him, and when I rezzed I started galloping towards the enemy FC thinking that he was our rogue. When I realized my mistake I turned back, just in time to see the whole enemy team descend on our lonely rogue and eat him alive.

1-0.

This wasn't the end by any means, but we were in disarray. Someone piped up that it was only 1-0 and we were still in it - in the event of a draw the team that caps last wins the game, so capping second would effectively put us out in front. He was right, but he was interrupted by one naysayer who started saying that we were outclassed and it was only a matter of time. Ignoring him we kept plugging away. The flag was picked up by Thisisagirl, and we started to form around him in an attempt to regroup into a semblance of a formation. We were in midfield on the enemy's side, but our route forward was blocked by the enemy, who held the bridge in the centre of the map. I think Thisisagirl was still seething at the criticism of his damage, because rather than staying at the back of the team fight he decided to plunge headlong into the massive melee swirling around the bridge rather than staying behind with the healers. He was immediately targeted and killed, and with our flag down the enemy was able to cap.

2-0.

At this point Ash lost his rag, and started tearing into the warrior for piling into the middle of the enemy team. I wanted to blame the warrior too, but on watching the replay I believe that the healers all could have done a better job at keeping him up. I saw the warrior go out of range on my heals but I foolishly assumed that the other two had him covered. This is a common mistake with healers who haven't healed together for a long time - back when Rykester and Lelle were still playing we would be yelling on Skype, saying "I don't have range on FC!", "Do you have him? Do you have him?" or "I got him, I got him." More importantly, we would have been communicating with our FC who was was usually Hazeraxe, and telling him "I don't have range! Come back to me!" and he would Heroic Leap back or charge backwards at a convenient enemy. There was no such communication between any of the three healers or the FC, and so we must all shoulder the blame for Thisisagirl's demise.

Courtesy of WoW-Battlegrounds. Shows the locations of buffs on the map which do not change in this particular BG. 1 and 6 are speed buffs, which are handy for FCs either going in or escaping; 2 and 5 restore health and mana, and are better for healers and take less time than having to sit down and drink; and 3 and 4 are damage buffs which are generally reserved for DoT classes like locks and boomkins in order to maximise their spread damage.

With the second cap Ash went into shutdown and stopped talking on Skype, leaving the raid leaderless and adrift. The same went for me - with our FC dead I went into "fuck you" mode, and started trying to live just to spite the enemy. All teamwork went out the window - I found myself alone and surrounded by enemies in midfield, and with my pride still stung after being globalled, resolved that I would not go down easy. I ran around the massive tree stump lining (using obstacles to block LoS) the lock and the shadow priests, using CCs to break up their damage, and then diving back around the stump to make them chase me. I ran around the stump a few times, then broke for the bridge to try to link up with the rezzers coming from our graveyard, all the while being pursued by the bulk of their team. On the bridge I started eating some major damage and so I put my portal on the bridge, then jumped off and swam underneath it. The enemy jumped into the water also, intent on the kill, and as soon as they were under the bridge with me, I ported back up, leaving them stuck in the water below. Take that, scum buckets.

Luckily for our team our rogue was still doing his job, grabbing the flag and running it, and his Quixotic dedication to his duty shook me out of my funk. Realising that the rogue was still chugging away I abandoned my self-serving antics in the middle, and peeled to him. The team had ceased talking, and all was quiet on Skype, but to their credit most of us were starting to come to our senses and were resolving to play this game out to the bitter end, even if team communication had broken down and a humiliating loss was on the cards. Ashe was still sulking, and Mpsmash had also ceased talking, but the rogue, bless his heart, was asking for back-up in a non-petulant way which galvanized most of our team to do the right thing and rally around him. I also started CCing much more, wary of the enemy's damage, as well as calling my CCs and talking to fill the void on Skype. I also began communicating with the rogue FC, telling him to line the lock and the shadow priests, and to keep moving at all costs.

The rogue's running had not been in vain - suddenly on Skype came the call "Cap cap cap!" Despite the deficit our offence was still gamely plugging away at the enemy FC, and had put themselves into a position to land a kill. Unfortunately at this point the rogue was miles away from the cap point. Individually we had a team filled with good players, and it was their individual skills in small group fighting that was keeping us in the game, despite the fact that as a unit we had broken down completely. Defence and offence were both trying to do their jobs without actually talking to each other at all, and so when the offence had gotten their act together to land a kill our FC team were busy running rings around the enemy trying to buy time and avoid being cornered and killed. A simple message such as "We're going in the enemy flag room now" would have sufficed for us to turn around, and get into a position to cap. Alas, such a step appeared to be beyond our team tonight, and so when offence was about to effect a return the defensive team was out of position. This was a fumbled chance, and it was compounded soon afterwards by our rogue being surrounded and killed at the top of the ramp.

Still, we had shown that we were more than capable of scoring, and despite a round of acrimony following the fumble we pushed again. Thisisagirl grabbed flag and our team rallied around him, moving together as a group through the middle. We managed to blast a path through the middle, and once clear our team split into offence and defence. Thisisagirl made it safely into the flag room, and there the FC, our resto druid and I waited. Once you're in the flag room you can't see a bloody thing, and you are dependent on your team outside to feed you information as to the enemy's movements. Given the state of comms that night no info was forthcoming, but the job was simple really - it was now a race to see which offence would kill the enemy FC first. It didn't take long for the enemy to appear at the gates, and soon we were fighting for our lives. My monk was whirling around like a furry pinball, stunning and paralysing every target he could see to break up the incoming damage, and blowing all his escapes to counter the fears and stuns being thrown out by the enemy. We held out long enough for our offence to kill the enemy FC - however, Thisisagirl was not standing on the cap point and we failed to score. He missed the cap by literally a second - he heard the call and began to Bladestorm towards the cap, but was beaten to the punch by the enemy DK who reacted just a smidgin faster. Two seconds later he ate another massive chaos bolt from the enemy lock which dropped him. Watch his health drop from 3/4 to zero at 12:44 of the video.

2-0 down and two flag returns fluffed - things were looking grim for us. After Thisisagirl went down I peeled out of the flag room and ran for my life, all the while being pursued by the enemy. Once outside I hurled myself over the precipitous drop - Pandaren have the bouncy trait, which means we take less falling damage, and I exploit this in BGs to escape bad situations. In this case I fell right into a pitched battle occurring at the base of our base, and I started healing people around me. Once again it was Twinkytoes the rogue who kept the team together. After Thisisagirl fell he had gone back, grabbed the flag and had made it all the way back to midfield. In midfield a confused fight was taking place, as we were trying to clear a path for our FC while simultaneously trying to run down the enemy FC. By some miracle Twinkytoes made it into the base through the front door unmolested and unescorted - I'd peeled back to support, but I was too late to offer any meaningless assistance. It was all Twinkytoes, and by some amazing stroke of luck the enemy FC died just as he trundled into the inner room of the keep.

2-1.

I was incredibly chuffed, and stated on Skype, "Six minutes! We can do this!" In soccer as in Rated BGs the most dangerous score to lead by is 2-0, because it is a big enough lead to make the frontrunners relax, yet not such a high enough differential to put the game out of reach of the team behind. The enemy had relaxed and lost their cohesion, and by some miracle we were back in the game. As I said earlier, the team that caps last in the event of a draw wins the game, and so all we needed was one more cap to win. The flag cap was a shot in the arm - suddenly Skype was alive, and people were starting to communicate again. Ash was also back in the game - good old dependable Twinkytoes had grabbed the flag, and Ash was running escort and was talking to his FC this time, telling him to come back into healing range. Ash doesn't ask for help or organize ahead of time - instead he looks around, expects people to be there, and complains if no one is around. I heard him on chat say "Fuck it I'll take these two by myself" which I translated to as "Can I get another healer back here as soon as possible?" I belatedly peeled out to assist, but they were in good shape despite having a warrior and a DK in pursuit. Ash and Twinky were way out ahead of me out of my healing range, but I could still render assistance by peeling, and this is what I did, paralysing the warrior and trying to stun the DK. Unfortunately the DK had seen me closing in for the stun and had popped Icebound Fortitude to give himself stun immunity, and thus my stun was wasted. Still my presence at close range and my Chi wave bouncing around kept the trio of us in combat, which meant no mounting and more time for Ash and Twinkytoes to get clear. I shadowed the DK and the warrior all the way into the flag room, and was able to paralyse the DK inside once my Paralysis came off CD. Our efforts had not been in vain - offence had run down the enemy FC and landed the kill. Twinkytoes capped the equaliser, and we were effectively ahead.

2-2.

Jubilant exclamations filled Skype, but we weren't done yet. The opposition had fallen apart - at the start of the game they had been grouping together and blasting us in the team fights with their coordinated bursts, but now for whatever reason they were fighting in scattered groups with varying degrees of effect. The warlock was always dangerous wherever he was, but we were onto him now, and he ate CC after CC everywhere he went. I reckon I paralysed him at least 5-6 times during the whole game. We had them by the jugular, and we resolved to get the final cap to capstone the win for us. Thisisagirl grabbed the flag and made it out of the enemy base, but without healer support he was in dire jeopardy, so much so that people in the flag room were saying to let him die and let another grab it. I managed to get to him in time, and managed to top him up, ignoring the calls to let him die. We started moving back towards our base, trying to push past the scattered remnants of the enemy in our path. We ran into the bloody warlock again and I CCed him immediately, only to have Thisisagirl charge him and break it. The lock tried to cast a chaos bolt but I was in melee range and interrupted the cast. I told Thisisagirl to keep going, and he complied, breaking off and heading towards our base. The lock, once out of the interrupt silence, hurled a chaos bolt at Thisisagirl's back which smashed him for half his health. I immediately cast Cocoon on him, and watched as he ate another incoming chaos bolt. The cocoon held, but now we had a shadow priest putting damage on Thisisagirl and snaring him. It was no problem - these guys were amazingly dangerous when grouped together and coordinating their burst, but in singles and pairs I can maintain against their damage all day long. I cleared the snare on Thisisagirl with Tiger's Lust, and he was finally in the clear, Heroic Leaping into the base just as our hunter came out to provide cover. Offence dispatched the enemy FC once again, and Thisisagirl scored the final winning cap.

3-2.

We had won. What an incredibly glorious and downright frustrating comeback, in which our team once again shows how our amazing potential is hamstrung by our inability to work together. Many of the individuals are proven players, and the team can be so much more than this gaggle of individuals all hooting and hollering in different directions - but all of it is scuppered by their inability to set their egos aside to work towards a common goal. This team, if it had a tad more stability and stronger leadership would hit 2k easily - even in our current fractious state we have enough individual skills to hover between 1700-1800 without even really trying. As for me, I can see that I have quite a ways to improve (especially with battlefield situational awareness and strategic focus), but I know that I can hang with these guys as I am now, and I can get a lot better. I regularly top overall heals, overall dispels, and my CC count is consistently high and on par with the DPS. I'm also one of the more mentally stable members of the team - I complain excessively on my blog, but in game I usually shut my mouth, do my job, and work as a team player. That's the good thing about recording your games - you can objectively see your mistakes from third person, even if it makes you wince at some of your own ineptitude. I made quite a few clangers in this game which made me embarrassed about posting the video, but ah well, it's all a learning experience. If we can win with the vast majority of our team (myself included) playing as poorly as we did, then this team would absolute crush most opposition if we ever got our act together.

To spend a WoW token or not to spend - that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of terribad RBG teams / Or to unsub in the face of a sea of troubles / And by logging end them. To fly or to sleep / Perchance to dream of other virtual worlds.

As I've said, however, I'm past my tipping point - for now I'm going to say goodbye to WoW again, hoard the WoW tokens I have remaining, and return if and when WoW becomes interesting again. Tientzo has always been one of my more humble avatars - the persona he is based on is an old, peaceful and unassuming bear, happy to stay away from the limelight and quite content in his own skin. I can see him in my mind's eye shouldering his pack and grabbing his staff, and wandering away back to the mists of Pandaria, whistling an ancient tune and following the road to wherever it may take him. I'm sure Tientzo is quite happier sitting on the banks of a river somewhere, or dozing sleepily beneath the shade of a tree than going into battle with a bunch of angry strangers with no sense of camaraderie or team spirit. Thus I have no qualms about leaving him to his business wandering the wilds of Azeroth - he never really liked the stuffy confines of the garrison, and flying scares the crap out of him anyway.

One year ago the Imperial province of Cyrodiil was home to three massive factions engaged in a titanic clash of arms. The Altmeri Dominion, the Daggerfall Covenant and the Ebonheart Pact battled each other in the best rendition of virtual fantasy warfare I have ever had the good fortune of being part of. The Wabbajack campaign was waged over three months, and involved hundreds of players on each faction. Nothing I have ever played has come close to emulating the ebb and flow of that fantasy war - at one point or another each of the combatants held the overall lead, and the final victory by the Pact was almost undone by a desperate, last ditch gambit by the Covenant which ultimately fell short. EVE Online has the record for the biggest number of players in a single battle, but the battles which characterised Wabbajack were the biggest fantasy land battles of their kind I have seen. While TESO can never claim to always have been a smooth, lag free experience, I still clearly remember the massive encirclements, the desperate last stands, and bloody arm wrestles that characterized those early days of TESO PvP. Zenimax made good on their promise of having 2,000 people in Cyrodiil at any one time, and their pre-release boast of being able to render 200 people on screen at anytime was fulfilled on my computer at least half a dozen times during that campaign. I remember the names of all the prominent guilds in my faction, and had the good fortune of fighting with most of them. I learned the names of our bitter enemies through repeated clashes, and grew to respect the most intransigent of them. Together we created a narrative, an emergent story of us written by hundreds of player-authors, which ranks up there with my best memories of gaming.

Yuri Hatakeyama, back in the lands of Tamriel.

That was Cyrodiil then. If you go back to Cyrodiil now, all you will find are a handful of players roaming the empty expanse of this massive battlefield. The province, once full of armies clashing by day and night, is now eerily deserted, and the keeps stand still, manned by automata following the rote instructions of their creators. Now that the lifeblood of the game has deserted it, the very size of Cyrodiil - the attribute which gave it heft and status - now works against it. Nothing is sadder than a space bereft of the thing which gives it purpose. Like empty schools without the laughter of children, Cyrodiil without players bickering, fighting or cooperating takes on a haunted hue. Where guilds once stood together back to back, where armies once stood on opposing sides of a breached wall, and where dozens of siege engines once thundered together in unison, all that is left is silence, and the ghosts of those who once passed through these spaces.

Current scoreboard of the campaign in Thornblade at the top. The history of the Thornblade campaign since its inception in August 2014 at the bottom. The blue line represents the Daggerfall Covenant, and as evidenced by the graph, DC have come so close to winning on a number of occasions, and there have been some very close campaigns. Nonetheless DC has never won the campaign in Thornblade, which is something the graph doesn't make clear.

My Redguard is back in TESO as of two weeks ago, brought back by a massive influx of hits on a post I wrote almost a year ago. My recollections on Wabbajack are being used by DC diehards to rally support to the Covenant cause, and I as a loyalist feel compelled to pick up my bow and healing staff and return to the fray to help my faction. My avatar is still only VR6 out of a possible 14 - I still have eight more Veteran ranks to grind. This is not WoW, or Archeage - in both these games it is possible to grind out 2-3 levels an evening, even more with bloody minded determination. TESO is an altogether different beast - since I've returned I have been able to advance to VR8 after two weeks of on and off gaming, at about an hour or two per night. I believe the VR system is one of TESO's most notable failures - the grind to endgame is an onerous one at best, but TESO takes an archaic system and makes it even more taxing and time-consuming. I am chiefly interested in the war in Cyrodiil, which means I grind for the sole purpose of gaining access to VR14 weapons and armour just to put me on par with the opposition. At this rate it will take me a further six weeks of on and off playing to attain this goal. I will not devote any more time than that, and it is still undetermined whether I will see this through to the bitter end, or just throw my hands up in disgust and walk away.

If I fixate on the VR14 goal I am going to go insane, but luckily TESO has thrown me a few bones to help ease the pain. You can earn veteran points via the staple tropes of MMO gameplay - questing, dungeons, raids and also PvP. Questing in TESO is horribly tedious - the quests themselves are better than your standard MMO fare, but what stuck in my craw was the realisation that once I completed the main quest I would be required to complete the Altmeri and Ebonheart quests in linear sequence in order to progress further along the questing track. It didn't have to be this way. They could have just opened the world to me, and let me go wherever I wanted. As it stands, I must complete all the Altmeri quests before I am given access to the Ebonheart ones. Furthermore, the Altmeri and Ebonheart zones are instanced zones which are shared only by members of my own faction. How bizarre and counter-intuitive it is to travel in the lands of my enemy, yet never see a single human player of that faction. In Archeage I knew where I was by the number of reds and greens and purples around me, and it gave meaning to the world, rendering it safe and dangerous in equal parts. Even in their absence I could see their presence in the fields and houses they made, in the trees and crops they left in the wild, in the juvenile and occasionally amusing sparring on chat, and in the corpses and bloodstains they left in the wake of battles, skirmishes and ambushes. In TESO we stumble along in an illusion of a world, whose hollow beauty is stripped bare as people outlevel and abandon these zones. It is other people that give MMOs life - no amount of artifice can change this fact.

The status of Thornblade as of 23 June 2015 - completely dominated by the Dominion. The Covenant don't have a single keep to their name, save for the starter keeps which cannot be taken.

Levelling up in PvP would be ideal - I would be doing something I like anyway. Despite my concerns about not being at the VR cap, you can PvP without being at max level at a fairly high degree of effectiveness. You will still be handicapped by the inferiority of your gear in one on one encounters, but you are far from useless - one avatar can still man two siege engines at the same time, freeing others to fight or heal or support. One avatar can still repair the damage done to a wall. One avatar can still act as the eyes and ears of a larger force, relaying enemy troop movements on Teamspeak and on general chat. One avatar can still heal or play support away from the front lines, acting as force multipliers for your team mates by healing or placing siege shields over trebuchets and ballista. And if nothing else, one avatar can act as cannon fodder, acting as a meat shield while your higher level brethren do all the heavy lifting. That's the good thing and bad thing about open world PvP - quantity has a quality all of its own.

These are the roles I took for myself when my avatar fought in the war in Wabbajack last year, and I came back to TESO hoping to join the great guilds of the Covenant in helping them win the new war in Thornblade. Wabbajack is gone now, consigned to the dustbin of gaming history. Ninety day campaigns no longer exist - the longest campaigns only last thirty days now, a change which was wrought from player feedback no doubt, but something which is not to my own tastes. I like my virtual wars long and epic, and with consequences. Upon reviewing the history of Thornblade on ESOStats one thing struck me which appealed to my underdog inclinations - despite having come painfully close on many occasions, the Covenant has never won the campaign since its inception in August 2014. This month a Covenant victory appeared on the cards, but these hopes were dashed last week when the Dominion, led by their Emperor Mojican, seized the whole of the province and maintained control up to the time of writing. Only a late rush by the Covenant can salvage the campaign now, but it appears unlikely. Everytime I log on in the evenings (Oceanic time) there have been a handful of DC online at any given time, barely enough to fill a dungeon group. Every time I entered Cyrodiil I would ask "Any groups?", and in 7 out of 10 occasions my question would be met with resounding silence. Last night I logged on and saw Fort Rayles under attack. Eager to join a Covenant pushback I rode to the keep and found the attacking force - a single Dragonknight with a lonely siege engine slowly and painfully chipping away at the walls. In the spirit of factional brotherhood I set up two trebuchets and helped him bring down the wall - he clearly didn't know how to man two siege engines at once, a standard trick learned by all of us who fought together back in the day. Together we were able to bring down the outer and inner wall against no resistance, but that would be the extent of our fightback. The NPCs guarding the castle would require more than the two of us could hope to overcome.

Reduced to a handful of siege engines, two lonely Covenant lay siege to a keep defended by AI and are unable to take it. This is what TESO PvP has been reduced to on Thornblade.

This description may not be typical of the TESO experience. I can only speak for the campaign I am currently part of - Thornblade - and the status of the rest may be polar opposites of the desolation of Cyrodiil I am currently experiencing. I know that it was luck that made me join Wabbajack and let me take part of that great inaugural war. There were so many campaigns to choose from in the early days of TESO, and most of them were so one-sided that the losers eventually left, leaving an empty husk behind. This phenomenon is not new and is a recurring problem for games such as these - perhaps I am just seeing the other side of the coin for the first time. But it's not in my nature to abandon things at the first sight of trouble, and if Hatakeyama is going to stay and fight she will do it here in Thornblade, even if it condemns her to a furtive existence beneath the heels of the Dominion. I am envious of the console players entering the Alliance War for the first time - for them the experience will be shiny and new and all the more memorable for it. For the remainder of us on our PCs and Macs the world has moved on, and Zenimax's attempt at simulating fantasy world conflict will soon be made obsolete by the next generation of open world PvP games such as Albion Online, Camelot Unchained and Crowfall. Nonetheless it doesn't invalidate the early glory days of TESO PvP, and for a brief period in its inception it had its day in the sun.

On The Virtual Rights of Avatars, Part I - Avatars are Not Free and Equal

Letters from Tamriel, Part V - A Brief Interlude

Adrift in Archeage, Part I - Immigrant Blues

Diaries of a Ganker, Part VI - A Return to Azeroth

Diaries of a Ganker, Part VII - Gearing Up For WoW

Adrift in Archeage, Part II - Squatter's Rights

Diaries of a Ganker, Part VIII - Embracing the Grind

Adrift in Archeage, Part III - Crime and Punishment

Adrift in Archeage, Part IV - Of Soil, Stone and Sea

Adrift in Archeage, Part V - Crossing Over

Make Way For the Heavyweight Champion of MMOs

A Murder of Crows, Part I - Kickstarter and Early Access

Diaries of a Ganker, Part IX - Inside the Mind of a Serial Ganker

Diaries of a Ganker, Part X - Recceing Warspear

Diaries of a Ganker, Part XI - Two Druids Walk Into Warspear

Diaries of a Ganker, Part XII - Confessions of a Waterboy

A Very Belated Liebster Response

Tales from the Blizzard, Part I - Hearthstone Shennanigans

Diaries of a Ganker, Part XIII - The Battle for Twin Peaks

Letters from Tamriel, Part VI - All Quiet on the Western Front