I took a break for a few years and just this month got back into the game and holycrapwhatthehellhappened. I remember it being a chore to go from getting your bear form at level 10 to getting your cat form at level 20. You had to grind away in darkshore for an eternity with the only break being the letter you get from the arch druid to begin the quest line for your aquatic form… and even then you had to make the debate whether you wanted to spend 30 to 45 minutes to make the run to westfall… But since I got back into the game I progressed really quickly, in fact it seems like Blizzard made getting through the lower levels easier. In just two weeks of play I’m already level 53 – well past where I left off and I even started a new character on a different server.

It got so bad that at level 45 I was still wearing equipment I earned when I was level 30. It was a rush and I didn’t have time to really learn my way around some of the new spells and mechanics, but thankfully for druids it’s still basically the same, just with a different order. So when I got to about level 45 and realized I was still wearing horrible gear, I decided to take a look at what other gear was out there and what would best compliment my play style. That’s when I had the same realization that your younger self did about chess. I knew when I first played there was a wider world of players out there all debating play style and I knew that there was a whole realm of level 60 characters that looked down on me the same way professional athletes look down at amateurs, it’s not always bad, but there is a noticeable difference in how far the two can see from where they’re perched. And now that I’m starting to look around at what can I do, what should I do, I’m realizing that there’s an entirely different game to play.

In some ways I’m new to World of Warcraft. For example, I still haven’t upgraded to Burning Crusade (I keep meaning to) and I have no idea what BoT means or where it is. I know Onyxia is a dragon and it has a lair, but it’s about as real to me as someone talking about Draco from Dragonheart. The cataclysm is some vague event that resulted in Darkshore being ripped a new one and a bunch of lava suddenly sprouting up everywhere. Also, it made the turrets of Stormwind really cool and put in a boat there from Rut’therand village (thank god). I’m so new that when someone said, “You don’t need intellect or spirit as a feral druid, just agility and stamina”, I was baffled, “What about when you have to throw around some Rejuvenations or Healing touches? What about if you suddenly have to hit a few mobs with Moonfire or hold off someone with entangling roots? What about versatility?” The response I got gave me chills, “Dude, you’re a dps feral druid, why do you need to be healing or casting spells?”

In any rate, you’re right, there’s a -ton- of information out there, and there’s no real time to just sit back and figure out things on your own. But as someone who’s relatively new to this, I’ve decided to make time. The game will still be there in a year from now, and for now I’m not ready to play in the big leagues, so I’m just trying to figure out how I play. I’ve paid more attention to the tooltips, and am just trying to get a very firm grasp of the basics, and then I start making my own decisions. It’s easy to play chess once you learn how the pieces move, but it gets harder when you start to think about why the pieces move. For example, with the druid talent tree, I started off picking up the same talents I would have picked when I first started, but that wound up not working very well. So I looked up what a talent tree should look like for a feral dps druid – I didn’t really agree with some of the picks but decided to try it anyway. That didn’t work because I wasn’t playing the way that the OP for the talent tree played. So I said to hell with it and went back to carefully reading and thinking about my choices.

So now I’m in my fifties and it’s time to upgrade. I’ll probably plunge all the way in and get the Cataclysm bundle, though I’m still not sure. When I realize that players have the coinage to plop down 50,000 gold for items in the auction house and have an item level of 359 whereas I’m lucky to have an item level of 45, I kind of get that feeling of being lost in a tide of athletes and I’m still an amateur. But then I stop and say “fuck it” and keep doing what I’m doing. I don’t have to be the best there is, I just have to be the best I can be. I take it one step at a time and look into things that interest me. Right now I’m in winterspring helping a baby frostsaber grow up into an epic mount.

In most ways, you’re right, there is an overabundance of information and anyone starting out will look at it, say “screw that” and head off to something else. Other times, we just have to remember that discoveries still happen. Sure they’re not the earth shattering “I’ve just broken the auction house with a white kitten” discoveries, but they’re the discoveries one makes about one’s self and play style. I know for example that while I’m a kitty dps, that I don’t have the ability to do a ton of damage, so I pick of spell casters and keep an eye on the mana bar of the healer, if it drops to zero, I back off, enervate him, throw around some rejuvenations and get back to killing things that move. I made that up myself and so far it works. When it doesn’t, I’ll look up some hints, learn some more, and go back to experimenting. I think that that’s the advantage of having a ton of knowledge available to you – the ability to experiment safely. It’s like being in a physics lab; everyone already knows what will happen if you do something, but you haven’t experienced it yet, so go on ahead and do it. It doesn’t cost anything… well, except 15 bucks a month.

-_- Coming from someone who was a vanilla and TBC raider, skipped WotLK and played 1 month of Cata before unsubbing, with no plans to return to WoW, but who watched the vids, did the research, tested her own stuff, and even came up with a couple of new things WoW wise…

I’ve dipped a toe or two into quite a few different MMOs since ditching WoW (and then falling in love with Guild Wars).

Off the top of my head:

Chronicles of Spellborn
Pirates of the Burning Sea
That Russian One with The Insanely Overpriced Bags that Looked Like a Disney Film (lol sorry, don’t remember the name)
Free Realms
Heroes of Three Kingdoms
Jade Dynasty
City of Heroes
Atlantica Online
Dungeons & Dragons Online
Forsaken World
Guild Wars
(probably others but I don’t recall them atm)

The only three where I actively did research were Jade Dynasty, Forsaken World, and Guild Wars.

Guild Wars – bit of a given. I fell totally in love with this game. Fits my tinkering tendencies to a T. Iterate iterate iterate test test test iterate some more! All without cost! OMG tinker madness. Of COURSE I’ll devour stuff out there, then start madly making my own Frankensteinian monsters. XD

Jade Dynasty – Oh so pretty, oh such a lottery, oh such a grind. The main reason I did research for Jade Dynasty was because changing specs (iirc) cost US$20-40. -_- Wasn’t willing to drop the cash on THAT, so I just looked up all those who had Bravely (and Expensively) Gone Before, and attempted to navigate a decent build I wouldn’t have to drop money on outta that.

Forsaken World – Oh I LIKE this game. I like it very much. I like it as much as I liked vanilla WoW. It satsifies ALL my rat pellet urges. Like JD, talent specs are costly to change – but PWE has done very interesting things with the economy, so much so that it’s at least viable to change talents using in-game gold to buy the talent-changing items from other players, rather than having to drop cash on it. That is, no need to play 15 hours a day, every day, in order to be able to afford stuff in-game without the cash shop. My research in FW is a bit different from JD, because although the fights are (so far) ridiculously simple, the character class construction is really rather fascinating. It has all the fiddly happiness that vanilla talent trees had, where you could make ridiculous AND ridiculously good things, if you had a good enough idea that bore fruit.

I came to FW when it was more or less first launched in English (not the closed beta), and GW YEARS (3? 4?) after it was launched, and while there’s a certain headiness to the ‘new game smell’, so that there are less people running around yelling NOOB! at the top of their lungs… the contrast with my experience in GW has me convinced that that’s not the only factor (at least for a nugget) when it comes to research and experimentation.

I suppose when it comes down to it, I think there are a few major factors that really stand out when it comes to seeing how much research and experimentation someone will do in an MMO context that have nothing to do with how young or old the game is.

a) Personality type: does the person LOVE to tinker, or prefer to take something ready-made that is proven to work? BOTH will result in research… but the former will result in more exploration.
b) Motivation: Do they just want to have a good time and see the world, or are they min-maxers who compete with themselves, with others, or both?
c) Engagement: How much do they LIKE the game? Does it give them enough warm fuzzies to warrant thinking (and reading) about it outside of playing it?
d) Cost: What kind of cost is attached to changing talent specs, builds, whatever you want to call them? High costs will result in more cookie-cutter conservatism, low/no costs encourage experimentation.

~_o anyone else observed this? Or am I batter-gazing again?

You Betcha! Every single person I talk to is SICK of all the Wow geezers lording over anyone who “didn’t raid vanilla or TBC etc etc etc”.

The neat idea that SWTOR brings is that there will be Millions of brand spankin’ new MMO players (Star Wars fans, other Bioware fans etc). That will probably be a significant part of the user population. Combine that with everything being new… well you have the opportunity to have a great time with almost NO ONE telling you are not playing right (until of course the Wow snobs come over).

I really think that the wow community as it stands today is behaving badly these days. It will be great to have a new game where most players have a chance to be just as up on game mechanics as any other Elitist Jerk out there.

Fun times I think

I learned to play chess at a young age because my father and brother both played and they taught me the rules. I have NEVER beat my brother and I’ve beat my father once – and I was on the chess team in high school (though my skills weren’t as good as that makes it sound). I too looked into books on chess – though not as young as you were – and was overwhelmed by the amount of information.

I feel, largely, the same way about WoW. The more you learn the more you realize there is to learn – though maybe not quite as much as with chess. I spent a large amount of time in Vanilla WoW just learning my class and, as a Druid, every 10 levels or so I realized that I had NO idea what I was doing despite the entirely new paradigm I’d adopted 10 levels earlier. At 60 things like enchants were for the rich, for raiders, and for people who had hundreds of gold – looking back I realize how much better of a healer I would have been if I had made gear wishlists and found some way to make money to buy enchants. Since then, I’ve grown every expansion and learned how to use my new skills/spells. It’s all been built, however, on top of the existing knowledge and I think that is where the high barrier to entry lies. Sure, it might be better to come in as, say, a brand new hunter with Cata and not have to carry all the baggage of “bad” habits from 1-80 in previous expansions but 60-70 was where a lot of folks learned how to trap, kite, chain-trap, etc.

p.s. As amazing as Kara was, I don’t really buy 100% into the theory that it was so much better than anything else. For me, at least, I’ve had to realize that it wasn’t MC or Kara or Naxx that was so much fun as much as raiding with friends (many of which have quit playing) was. I’d rather have the fun and camaraderie more than any given raid instance.