In response to a post over at The Light’s Vanguard. This is all stream of consciousness, just throwing out ideas to see what sticks. Been a while since I did anything other than tweet, so bear with me.

Can you imagine how far away the endgame in World of Warcraft will be after the next expansion or the one after that? Bringing a new Ninja or Rune Knight up to level 1000 in Disgaea is frightening enough, and you can get levels by the tens and twenties in the Cave of Trials. The fact is, I want to start a rogue or hunter. I feel like I should start sometime before there are 100+ levels to grind through.

I definitely see the point about marginalizing new characters at least, and definately new players. A new character still needs to do the Old World and Outlands before they are even slightly relevant, and OW Azeroth is the lion’s share of your play time. The huge amount of experience you get from questing in Outlands and Northrend make the run from 60-70 and 70-80 faster than the 1-60 grind, even though they individually require more experience for their ten level runs than the entirety of the run to 60. I’d like to see less begging and more genuine aid from older players to new ones, and I can only think of one way to really work that angle: appeal to the player’s greed. There needs to be some tangible reason for 80’s to be hanging out in the Old World, and some reason for them then to help people. To that end, I would support restructuring crafting to require old world mats at all skill levels, and adding level equivalent loot to each dungeon boss.

Changing crafting would get some higher level people back physically into the Old World. There would still need to be an increased relevance of crafting to the endgame. Would this lead to the oldschool reliance on Pots/flasks or the TBC thing with Drums? I don’t know. I love crafting though and would enjoy seeing it be a part of the game again. That would give players a reason to be back in Kalimdor/Eastern Kingdoms that benefits them directly and isn’t a title or mount. An example: remove Fel Iron and Cobalt bolts from the game and replace them with the low level Copper. This creates a market for Copper Bars and makes the previously useless after Skill Level 50 Bolts useful to players of all levels. There is a side point about the ease of Jewelcrafting, but I’ll make that a post for later. This would keep players coming back to the Old World.

Additionally, put in some kind of tangible reward for higher level players helping out lower levels. If I’m running somebody through the Hell-that-is-Gnomer, I want to be compensated for doing so, at least as much as I’d be getting for my dailies. A dude from the Horde Guild was on me to run him through SFK and what I wanted to say was “Forget low level dungeons. The Blues can be completely replaced in less than a session of playtime (even if you get them at the lowest level possible). That is how easy leveling is.” I said nothing, because I am a jerk. Blizzard need to add in some stuff where if you are in a party and you kill a low level boss then you get some kind of “Satchel of Spoils” that would hold world-drops/gold/gems/profession mats/badges/something good. Level appropriate for the person picking it up, no getting level 80 drops at 50 for helping some dude through Gnomer. This would require a per-day cap, or people would exploit the system. Something like “Kill a boss where another player in your party gets experience or honor and you get the bag, but only 20 a day.” sort of thing. I don’t know, it is an innaccurate solution.

What I don’t want to see is what Light’s Vanguard called “The Death Knight Solution” where you would start a character at an advanced level with good gear and bypass the entirety of the entry levels. The Old World is a great area. It has many varied zones, great writing, multiple seemingly unrelated plotlines that intersect and intertwine. You spend more time there than in Outland or Northrend. The fact that once you leave Westfall you never look back is a weakness not a strength. I would love to see more high level characters running around remembering how impressive BRD was, especially now that you have whole groups of people who never ran Mara or even Stratholme.

One problem I forsee, is that higher level players would be at an advantage versus lower levels in gathering and exploting resource nodes. The advantage over starting players lessens after level 20 with mounts being available shortly after your average person has run Deadmines/Wailing Caverns. Additionally, this would make leveling on a PVP server heinous beyond belief. I can only hope that people from both factions would be helpful to their respective Noobs. I’d love to see more World PVP. I actually enjoyed Southshore vs. Tarren Mill. Really enjoyed it, not just Rose Colored Glasses enjoyed it.

ASIDE: The Rogue looks like a fun class, but leveling him would be FAR harder than a hunter.

Seriously. Nerdgasm. I’m a bit annoyed at the Ret Pally nerf that just hit, but man that’s some good cinematic. Watch it in High-Def.

Warcraft has one overriding source of stress and annoyance, and it isn’t farmers driving the prices of primals through the roof. It is loot. Right now you get 5, 10, or 25 (or 40 if you’re nasty) people together and you go kill between one and twenty boss monsters (along with an avalanche of trash mobs, but who cares about them) and get something like three pieces of loot per boss. Then you’ve got to split those pieces between the people who may or may not be able to use them, and who may get greedy for off-spec items. Right now there is one big system to clear up a lot of the annoyance and confusion. It goes like this: a token drops and is then used to purchase from a vendor the loot that you like. Basically Archimonde drops a Helm of the Forgotten Conqueror, and all the priests, warlocks and paladins roll on it. They then take it to Tydormu who lets them pick between any of the three Lightbringer Helms (if they are paladins). With this, Blizzard has made a single drop work for nine specs of players, cutting down on loot drama. They are pretty certain they’ve created a decent system to make look work.

I’d agree with that. But, an even more comprehensive token system would certainly cut down further on the “Dang, no BP of Many Graces” problems I ran through with my Holy Pally’s many SLabs runs. The only problem is that the token system delays gratification: you don’t get any loot, you get currency that helps you buy things. I’d like to see a system where you’d get “Blue Boots of Tanking” that could be worn (and would actually be decent on their own) but could be “transformed” into more usable items by non-tanks, to continue the example above.

I’d see several ways of transforming loot. First, you could turn them into faction NPCs along with some other resource (IE Sunmotes) and just get the boots you want. This is pretty good, but still somewhat un-interactive. Otherwise you can use them as crafting mats, sort of like the Broken Blade of Heroes from Old World Azeroth. This is pretty cool, and it gets crafters in on it. The only problem is you’d have to have the specialized crafting skill, though there is a way around that. I’ll get to that later. Finally there is an idea I’m borrowing from D&D. Back in the Book of Exalted Deeds there was a system where you’d take the Big Bad Evil Guy’s suit of Demon Armor and perform rites of purification on them and transform them into Hound Archon Armor. Sort of a “This Item Begins a Quest” system where you can wear the boots however long you want them, then do the quest for the off-spec you want to transform them too.

The way I came up with around having specific crafting requirements would involve a third party environmental object. Say you could “Use” an anvil at the same time as your crafter friend, allowing them to craft using soulbound equipment that isn’t bound to the crafter. Sort of a giant “Will not be traded” area that counts as part of both player’s inventories for the purposes of crafting. Hopefully there wouldn’t be a way to dupe items, or we’d all be up to our baldrics in Obsidian Rings of the Zodiac three weeks after introducing the new loot system.

I can think of one problem with the questing idea. First, that the quests would all devolve into “Bring the boots + these three rare drops to the head of the Mithril Order in STV” over and over again. This basically accomplishes what the crafting system does, it just does it solo. I’m pretty sure that we wouldn’t want that, but if the quests could be used sparingly and more interestingly than “Dip this staff in the Moonwell, just like your did with your last seven Evil Staves” then it could be a cool addition.

Finally, I’d imagine that people would resent turning their tanking boots into DPS boots eventually when they wanted to PVP or respec or whatever. This brings the token vendor guy back, I suppose. Personally if I could be assured of having one set of “Tier 9″ gear that I could swap from Ret to Prot to Holy at will providing I have enough Sunmotes (or whatever) would make my bags quite a bit slimmer.

The fact that he thought to video this, or the fake gangsta nicks for his friends.

If you have any hope of reading Walking Dead unspoiled, please skip this post.

*SPOILER*

When I said I wanted Kirkman to kill off a major character or I wouldn’t take him seriously, I didn’t think he’d actually DO it. Jeezus. And Tyreese. I mean he could have killed a more annoying character, like Patricia or something. He still had a lot of story to tell with Tyreese. OK, so it wasn’t a member of the Grimes family, or Andrea. But still, I don’t think I’ll be able to look at the group the same way again. Killing Andrea would break my heart though, that girl is a badass.

That is all. I’m going to go drink to the memory of one bad mother.

*/SPOILER*

Y’all remember the old Molten Bore. I know Tim and Sandy were there. I wish I knew what I was doing back then, but the Paladin class was such a mess that I don’t think that I could have done anything worthwhile without going full on clothadin. Anyhow. Blizzard’s April Fools rules all.

And I have stuff for March, just give me a minute.

And now we are sixty. Sullivan has hit the once-epic milestone and is now technically ready for Outland. However, I’ve still got some Jame circuits to complete in Azeroth, and I’d be insane not to jump on it. The way I see it, the more quests I complete in the Old World the more quests I’ll have left in Outlands and the more gold I’ll get from completing them at 70. Also, padding of a few levels has never hurt quest difficulty, right? I’m of two minds with this character. Do I go for the Epic Flyer for speed and clout, or do I save my cash for more important things. I won’t be able to use the Flyer in Wrath anyway, so why not just hold off until 77 and have cash for leet BoEs?

I think I’ll just see where it ends up. I mean if I end up with enough for an epic flying mount after accomplishing most of my monetary goals, then I think I’ll splurge. If not, who cares? I’ll have seven levels without the use of it anyway. I’ll be back on my Orc War Dog (which I haven’t purchased yet anyway) so it isn’t like I’ll be without 100% land transport.

I’m sorely tempted to jump into Outland though for a little while and do some quests for the insane Oudland gear. That stuff is crazy awesome and would really make running around in Azeroth easier. I just don’t trust myself to go back to the Old World after I knocked out some of the well-designed Outland quests.

I’m enjoying running around in the Plaguelands though. I mean I’m a Paladin, right? Aside from that, I enjoy the epic feel of WPL and EPL. Less so Silithus. I’m really not sure what they were thinking when that came up. I enjoy Winterspring though. I just find the snow covered forest to be very relaxing. I’m looking forward to Wrath of the Lich King as it will probably feature lots of snowy forest land. But yeah, the Plaguelands are probably my favorite zones of old Azeroth. It just feels like I’m working for a big goal and helping to safeguard the peace of the world (for a while, anyway). I’m going to have to switch my original thought of “Leave Azeroth as quickly as possible” to “Complete as much as you can. The money is good, though the quest rewards are somewhat garbage.”

I’m also saving up cash for future Death Knight stuff. I figure I stock up on stuff on Horde an Alliance side so I can have a good head start when I make the guy. Of course, knowing Blizz they’ll have incredible starting questline stuff that will make almost anything obsolete. I should probably just save money.

Wow. That’s just really wooden. I mean I’ve heard of phoning this shit in, but that is ridiculous.

I’m at my wit’s end. I loved my Media Center Extender, but I was sadly running on a less-than-legal evaluation copy of Windows Media Center. So eventually the lack of security patches caught up to me and I had to stop using the thing. Now I’m stuck using Windows Vista DVD Maker to get my Bleach and Top Gear on the TV where they belong. This is a sad state of affairs. I need to come up with a plan to make DIVX watching on the TV less of a PITA.

There are a few options, as far as I see it. I can put XPMC on the Redserver, get an XBOX/XBOX360, or build a HTPC. All three of these options have their ups and downs.

Buying an XBOX is a bit of a poser. Firstly, if I was to pick up a first gen XBOX for media center purposes, I’d be wasting my money. Without a decent library of games, I’d just feel like a fool every time I started it up. Now a 360 is a bit of a more tenable idea. It has almost all of the games I want with the exception of Valkyrie of the Battlefield, Final Fantasy, and Disgaea. It does have Fallout 3 though and that is one of the big ones I want to get to playing. The Elite is pretty expensive though, but it isn’t the most expensive plan.

That honor goes to the HTPC plan. I’d have to build a new PC (fanless, natch) from scratch and get a legit copy of Vista/XPMC to get the thing working properly. I don’t know about you, but HDMI video cards are pretty expensive where I come from. And no, I’m not using Composite. The whole point of this thing is to do it right. It looks like a good Mini-ITX board is nearly $200, with a case and ram equaling that. We’re in the Elite price range without even looking at the video card, or the storage solution we’d need. Of course, We could always go with a NAS, which would confuse the issue even further. But it might look cool in my entertainment center so there is always that.

Then finally there is the upgrade-in-place plan. Where I swap XP for XPMC on the redserver and use the existing extender. That is what looks like the cheapest plan, and it appears that I have almost everything I’d need for the dang thing. The only real problem is that the Redserver is so dang loud that I’d love an excuse to turn the thing off. Also, it is far away from my TV. I’d have to run Ethernet all the way from upstairs where the server is to downstairs where the TV is. I wonder if powerline networking is really good enough for a consistant 10/100 connection.

I think that the clear “winner” is the HTPC plan, it is a dang shame that it is the most expensive of all the plans. Once lack of resources is factored in, then the big winner is XPMC on the redserver. Bah. So many choices.