Cross-Realm Mail?

So I was talking with Askevar (from You Yank It, You Tank It) and the more we talked the more I came to a stunning revelation. Keep in mind that this is all pure speculation, but I’m pretty sure that the big unannounced feature that everyone will be excited about in 5.4 is… BLIZZARD HAS SOLVED THE CROSS-REALM MAIL ISSUE. No, seriously, check it out…

Virtual Realms are sets of realms that are fused together, and will behave exactly as if they were one cohesive realm. Players on the same Virtual Realm will be able to join guilds, access a single Auction House, join arena teams and raids, as well run dungeons or group up to complete quests. (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/10158897/)

I’m guessing there’s more than meets the eye to that simple little post. The part that got me thinking was “behave exactly as if they were one cohesive realm.” I mentioned that I had been thinking about it and that while I was excited about the merged Auction Houses and Cross-Realm Guilds, I couldn’t see any way these could function without Cross-Realm Mail. She couldn’t come up with anything, either. The AH is what kind of sealed the deal for me, as far as thinking that they have finally solved the issue. I don’t see any way at all that the AH can function without at least some sort of viable cross-realm mail system. If I’m buying and selling things from a unified AH, it has to have some way of taking things from my server and selling them to another server (and vice versa). So, again, this is pure conjecture, but I’m cautiously optimistic that Blizzard has worked out some sort of cross-realm fix.

What do you think, fellow bloggers? Could there be something to this, or am I just wishing into the wind?

Patch Notes from 5.4

There is some exciting news in the world of 5.4 patch notes, with new additions coming out all the time. In case you missed them, you can view the most recent ones here:  http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/10158897/54_PTR_Coming_Soon-6_11_2013.

Three of the big features of 5.4 are very interesting/exciting to me: Flex Raiding, Virtual Realms, and Proving Grounds.

New Feature: Flex Raiding (see also: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/10175200/)

The new Flexible Raid system is designed to allow social groups a close-knit raiding experience outside of the usual 10 and 25 player formats.

This new raid format is intended to appeal to players who enjoyed the 10-player normal format in Wrath of the Lich King. It’s something players can enjoy doing for fun on off-nights with their Real ID or Battle.net friends. There isn’t an ilvl requirement for Flexible Raids, so new alts can tag along too!

This should also be a welcome alternate to LFR, where players can run through easy content solely with their friends and don’t have to rely on PUGs to round out 25 players. Rewards are also slightly better in this format–higher ilvl gear, and the chance to complete achievements and win mounts.

• A raid’s difficulty will scale based on how many players are in the Flexible Raid. Between 10 and 25 people can be in this raid.
• This raid format has a separate lockout than LFR, and Normal/Heroic. You can also complete achievements on this difficulty level.
• Gear rewards will be between LFR and Normal quality. Players can also get some items not available in LFR.
• There’s no ilvl requirement for Flexible Raids, and raids can include Real ID or Battle.net friends cross-realm.
• Players will acquire loot via the Raid Finder’s “per person” loot system.

This feature isn’t immediately useful to me. Most of my problems in terms of getting raids off the ground has been in the “can’t get 10″ range rather than the “I have too many raiders” range. That being said, the dynamic scaling as applied to raids is a rather exciting new feature. I really like the idea of a dungeon/raid that scales to your group. This is something that I’ve wished WoW would incorporate since I first experienced it in Dungeons & Dragons Online. I’m hoping that this feature will be successful enough at the 11-25 level to apply it to the 5 and 10 man settings, as well. More flexibility in groups is always a good thing. If it is indeed an attempt to recreate the flavor of Wrath raiding, then IMO it is a VERY  good thing.

New Feature: Virtual Realms

Virtual Realms are sets of realms that are fused together, and will behave exactly as if they were one cohesive realm. Players on the same Virtual Realm will be able to join guilds, access a single Auction House, join arena teams and raids, as well run dungeons or group up to complete quests.
Players belonging to the same Virtual Realm will have a (#) symbol next to their name.

This could potentially be exciting to me, depending on how the mashups work. On the one hand, I always scout for and choose low-to-medium population realms because I enjoy my player community on the smaller side. I’m willing to make raiding (a once or twice a week activity) more difficult in exchange for making everything else (that I do every day) a more enjoyable experience. Virtual server merges will almost certainly result in ridiculous amounts of overcrowding as Blizzard gets things balanced where they want (“where they want” generally being “standing room only”). So, if CRZ is anything to judge by, this feature has great potential to really, really suck. On the other hand, I am intrigued by the idea of cross-server guilds and cross-server AHs. We already have all the downsides of this sort of feature, I’m anxious to see if having the benefits might balance out the crappiness of CRZ a bit. I have alts scattered (and abandoned) throughout several realms. It would be interesting to reclaim them (and their vanity guilds) under the same umbrella via merged realms (assuming the stars align enough to have those realms merged with mine).

New Feature: Proving Grounds

Proving Grounds is a new feature for individual players to test and improve their combat skills.
At the Proving Grounds, players may undertake trials, designed for Damage, Tank, or Healer roles.
It provides a great opportunity to learn how to Tank or Heal, without the need of a group.
Each trial is available in four separate difficulties: Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Endless. Harder difficulties include more difficult and varied enemies.
Endless mode allows you to test your mettle against increasingly difficult enemies. Compare your best scores to friends and guildmates!
[PTR]: Access to the Proving Grounds and more information is coming soon.

This is just flat out exciting. I’ve wanted a “practice mode” since the beginning of time. While this isn’t exactly what I wanted, it’s close enough for the time being. I will probably spend a great deal of time testing myself with the more challenging and endless settings. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years it’s that no matter how good you are at a class, you can always get better.

One feature that I really hope makes it in is a “viewer/observer” setting. As someone who has been tasked with training recruits in more than one guild, a feature like this would prove invaluable to me in that role. I could just start up the Proving ground with the recruit and watch him go, giving tips and pointers while correcting mistakes as they happen in a private and (IMO) far less stressful environment than a random PUG group. While the practice mode itself will provide some manner of feedback, I’m sure, an experienced hand to help translate and focus that feedback into a usable (for the uninitiated) format would take it to the next level.

Here We Go Again

We thought we had found a happy home in Devoted and for awhile things were working out great. Unfortunately, things changed. The members that used to make up the bulk of the guild slowly drifted away to other servers or other guilds.  As has always been the case, the Guild Masters were pretty inactive and not very take-charge even when they were around. We got new members to replace those who left, but at the end of the day, the core had changed. The guild was less active, less friendly, and more demanding. The Guild Chat channel went from being “hellos” and “congratulations” to being nothing but attention-whoring, gear bragging, and various “I’m a better player than you” pissing contests. We went from being valued core members of the raiding team to the people they only tell about the raid if they need an extra body. We, my sister especially, were becoming more and more uncomfortable in what was quickly becoming a toxic environment. Certainly not the worst one we had ever seen in a guild, but having been down that road before, we knew this was nothing that we wanted any part of.

Unsurprisingly, we packed up our heirlooms and left. We’re now back over on ThoBro, and working with a new guild called Knights of the Ghani. We already have one friend in there and the rest of the guild seems friendly enough. No one seems bent out of shape about progression, everyone seems at least semi-competent as a player, and nobody has gotten their panties in a twist that I’ve seen so far. So, here we go again, I hope things work out for the best this time. As someone who has now spent nearly 5 years roaming the dusty roads of Azeroth looking for a place to call home, I hope this is the one. I’d really like to put down some roots and settle in.

Alt Update

Finally finished off getting my other shaman to 90, which is something I had been neglecting for far too long. That’d be 90 number 9 so far. More to come.

On the Pet Battles front, I have a nice little stable of 25s, now, and am enjoying fleshing out the achievements and trainer quests as I get time.

The Problem With Alts

There has been a lot of talk on both sides of the divide when it comes to the “alt friendliness” of the MOP expansion. In one camp, you have people claiming that this is one of the most alt-friendly expansions ever, on the other you have people claiming it is one of the least. So which camp is right? Well, like most any divisive issue, there is some merit to both sides of the argument.

On the one hand, MOP has added features that have greatly improved the alt friendliness factor (hereafter referred to as AFF). Things like account-wide pets, titles, and mounts have made the AFF soar in certain aspects. Things like the MOP reputation commendations have made rep grinding easier and quicker than it was at the beginning of the expansion. Reduced XP (in 5.3) is going to make those last 5 levels faster and easier than they were before. Tweaks like improved drop rates in LFR and more/easier ways to acquire elder charms, as well as lowering the price of Mogu Runes have helped alts and newcomers alike to gear up faster. “So what’s the problem?”, I imagine you asking.

The problem is, the vast majority of those changes are only in comparison to the beginning of the expansion, and the beginning of the expansion marked an enormous step backward in terms of AFF. Account-wide content is a plus, sure, and you won’t hear me complain about those changes. In that aspect, Blizzard has made great strides in making accounts feel more like accounts. But let’s look at everything else I mentioned…

• Reputation commendations double the reputation for alts (assuming you’ve already reached Revered once), but the entire rep grind process is more cumbersome than the Tabard method employed in Wrath and Cata, even after doubling the rep. Combine that with the fact that reputation is less optional than ever before (i.e. VP gear is gated behind rep) and you get a double-whammy that knocks AFF down so far that even the “fixes” employed can’t begin to fix it.
• The gear grind is in a similar situation. Since LFR has taken up the role that used to be filled by 5-man content, getting bonus rolls on your weekly lockouts is less optional than Blizz assumes. Catch-up 5-mans didn’t just take less time to run, they also allowed you to roll on gear each time you did them. There’s a world of difference between getting 1 or 2 rolls on a weekly lockout and getting 3 rolls per hour with no lockout. In terms of getting geared up and staying raid-ready for the latest tier, MOP is hands-down the worst expansion since BC’s attunement fiasco.
• The Valor Point grind is just more of the same. LFRs have replaced 5-mans as the primary way to gain VP, but each section of LFR offers less VP than LFRs used to do (90 in MoP vs 250 in Cata). Moreover, LFRs offer less VP per section than a 5-man dungeon did in Cata (90 in MoP vs 150 in Cata). You have to run more LFRs now than you had to run dungeons then. Add in the fact that LFRs now take an average of an hour or more while dungeons then averaged 20 minutes, and you get that double-whammy effect again. Even scenarios and the Valor of the Ancients buff can’t compensate for that.
• The XP reduction is a nice boost, but it doesn’t address an actual problem. While the XP grind does take an unprecedented amount of time to complete, it isn’t a serious roadblock to leveling alts and it never was. As any altoholic can tell you, the leveling journey isn’t the big obstacle in creating an alt, if anything it’s part of the fun. Shaving a third of the XP (and thus time) needed off will certainly be nice, but that’s the sort of thing you only have to do once. The real issue is how much of the time sink has been shifted to things you have to repeat every week.

Which pretty much sums up the other hand. The current problems with alt unfriendliness don’t have anything to do with reputation grinds or how much XP you have to get in those last few levels. The real problem is that Valor Capping and/or gear grinding takes 4-5 times as much time as it did before. That’s the issue that makes people have trouble keeping up with alts.

In Cata, a person could have their 2 LFRs out of the way in an hour or two and the 4 dungeons needed to finish off the VP cap would also take an hour or so, for a total of 2.5-3.5 hours of “maintenance” per toon per week. After which, you could do whatever you wanted with your time (generally, play an alt since we’re talking about altoholics, here).

In MOP,  VP capping takes much more time. Let’s say that you can run all 9 sections of LFR, and that you have done so. The catch is, assuming an average of 1 hour per LFR, you’ve spent 9 hours getting 810 VP. You’ve already spent about three times as much time grinding content compared to previous expansions, but you’re not yet VP-capped. It already sounds like a rip-off, and that’s without figuring that you’ve had fewer loot rolls than you would have had under the previous model.

That’s why people are having trouble maintaining an army of alts like they used to. Everything from rep to gear to VP takes more time and effort to get and to use.

To put it into perspective, in this expansion, I can VP cap a toon by Thursday, and with the help of the  Valor buff, maybe I can get 2-3 more toons capped by the end of the week, depending on my schedule, so long as I don’t do anything else. I’ve VP-capped 4 toons per week for a big chunk of the expansion and it’s an extraordinary amount of time and effort to do it. Compare that to Cata, where I could have had at least 6 toons (and up to 9) capped by Thursday, and still have the rest of the week to do whatever I wanted, be it working on still more alts, doing achievements, running old content, etc.

Now, I understand that if you focus on only one or two toons, the pacing feels quite nice, and the overly large time sink isn’t as much of a burden. The problem is that altoholics simply don’t operate this way. If there was a class or two that we liked so much better than the rest, then we’d have a main and an alt or two instead of an army of alts. The playstyle we have become accustomed to and enjoyed for years is to sample the content from multiple perspectives, playing it from multiple roles and classes so that the altered perspective keeps the content fresh.

The biggest problem with MOP (so far as alts go) is that they have taken the sampler platter off the menu, making it impossible for altoholics to enjoy all of their toons. Anyone who tries just gets crushed under the ridiculous time sink and ends up feeling unsatisfied and burnt out. Even the most ridiculously hard core altoholics of this expansion are putting in more time with less to show for it than ever before. If Blizzard wants to remedy the problem with alts, they need to drastically reduce the VP grind or add in more shortcuts for alts, or both.

Don’t get me wrong, Blizzard has added in a bunch of fun stuff this expansion, from Pet Battles to Scenarios. Those things would have been awesome during Cata, when I actually had time to enjoy them. As it stands, they have put in a ton of stuff for people to do in their down time, and then made the weekly maintenance grind take so much more time that down time is no longer a thing you have.

General Update

Alts:

Still only 8 level 90s, but now only 2 of them are not yet LFR-ready (one on each server).

Still toying around with alts, but now waiting on 5.3 to knock 1/3 of the required XP off of those last few levels.

Pet Battles:

Despite my earlier misgivings I’m finding myself having fun with the pet battles in small doses, and have been working on them every now and then (they’re not a bad way to kill queue time).  My first set of pets are nearing 25, with most of them in the 19+ range.

I’ve been working on collecting a lot and have captured a lot of cool pets, but am still nowhere near the 400 pets achievement. I did manage to get Raiding With Leashes, though.

Other Random Projects:

I’ve been continuing to work on various other projects, such as Reps, Achievements, and Mounts and have made some headway in filling out the gaps in those.

Alt Update

I now have 8 level 90s, covering 7 classes.

Alliance:

Night Elf Hunter (BM / MM)

Human Mage (Fire / Frost)

Gnome Rogue (Assassin / Combat)

Waiting in the Wings: 5 more toons level 85+, 2 level 80-84

Horde:

Orc Warrior (Prot / Fury)

Blood Elf Death Knight (Blood / Frost)

Goblin Shaman (Resto / Elemental)

Troll Druid (Balance / Resto)

Troll Hunter (BM / Surv)

Waiting in the Wings: 2 more toons level 85+, 1 more toon 80-84

Yes, some of them need some work on their gear, but only 3 of the 8 are not yet LFR ready. (By Comparison, 3 are able to queue for the ToT LFR.) I need to get back to gearing/ valor grinding more often than I do now, but I’ve been having so much fun with alts that I’ve been letting most of my LFR lockouts slide by.