Tag Archives: shared topic

My Dream MMO

5 Replies

This is a Blog Azeroth shared topic, originally found here. You can find other replies at Violet Scribe and Tank Out Of Water. The question is:

“If you didn’t have to worry about finance, what MMO would you make? What lessons would you take from WoW or other games? What would you do to attract players?”

I’ve wanted to do a post on this very topic for quite a while, in fact, Naithin tagged me ((Okay, so that was the settings rather than the mechanics, but that’s a much bigger topic! For settings, I like something semi-original.. We’ll exclude LotRO from that statement because playing in a fantasy world I’ve been in love with since I was about, what, 13? Is fantastic and full of fangirly moments.)) to do it back when I was pondering and I even saved a draft to remind myself, I just never got around to doing it. I have been keeping my eye on the shared topics since I came back incase anything caught my eye. Up until now I’ve had nothing really to say on any of them, but this is one I had been pondering. My biggest issue is story and how to keep the players gripped, and I suppose this is more of a mish-mash of the things I’ve liked from other games, but it is my dream MMO. These are the features that I’d like to see in my imaginary favourite game.

Genre

I’m starting with the genre because all games need a starting point. It’s all well and good saying “we’ll get rid of quests!” but if you don’t even have a genre, then it isn’t much of a starting point because you can’t decide what you’re going to replace the quests with. I’m not sure what my story would be, I’m not actually a game developer so it’s not so important, but I’m definitely thinking of a fantasy MMO here. Perhaps an urban fantasy, but still a fantasy nonetheless. It’s just my personal preference. I love magic, and big two-handed axes, and riding around on fantastical creatures, and internet dragons too much to move away from that genre, I’m just not sure how to make it different. How about a steampunk urban fantasy with an anime-esque feel, kind of ‘Full Metal Alchemist’ style? I fully believe that a deep and rich storyline, and a sense of humour is one of the most important aspects of a good MMO.

Progression

I adore Guild War 2′s ideas of a much more dynamic levelling experience. I like the idea of using exploration, finding ancient cairns on mountain tops that you have to really work hard to find your way up, and when you get up there find the most amazing views, and great secluded spots for group roleplay. Then you explore some more, and come across a village under siege and instead of static quest givers saying, “Please help me, my house is on fire, there’s a water bucket here, you just have to run over there and throw it on!” (Which I always found lazy) The NPCs in the area are already getting stuck in, and instead of quests, they shout for your help, and can either move along and leave them to it, or you can join in and get rewards and experience. There would be different levels of these opportunities. The bigger events rewarding more experience and items would be rarer, as opposed to the small events which would be just as common as quests, just a lot less static feeling, a lot more like the newer WoW quests, and you could level from doing these things. Though if you wanted there would be instances and PvP and perhaps there could be experience given for completing different exploration tasks. There would be no more, “Kill 10 pigs over there, they’re eating ma lettuces.” It’s dynamic, fun content that changes. More like an instance, or a single player RPG like Dragon Age than an MMO, but you could group with people. The tougher the ‘event’ you’re trying to do, the more you benefit from grouping with people. It would take a little longer to reach max level than it does in Rift or current WoW, but that’s all part of the game, the journey. The faster it goes, the faster people get bored. Keep it going and keep it interesting.

Activities

If there’s nothing to do at max-level from the get go, people won’t stick around. My MMO would of course focus on making the levelling experience as fun as possible first but there would also be different things to do once you reach the end. For an MMO to be and remain fun, there needs to be choice. Incorporate dungeons, heroic dungeons, raids, battlegrounds, arenas, rated arenas, rich lore and places for players to use for roleplay, achievements, things to explore, pets and mounts to collect. It would have cross-server battlegrounds for better queue times, and a dungeon finder more like an announcement board than anything automated. You could sign up as interested for whatever dungeons you want to do and write a note for anybody who might be looking for people for a group to see. Equally, if you’re a group leader looking for members, you could sign up with your group and put a notice up with any specifications you might have. There would need to be things to aim for: plenty of gear to go after, appearance clothes to find, pvp gear to get, interesting things to craft which perhaps require rare materials to make. Then there are titles and mounts and such that really make your character feel like your character, rather than another one of the masses. If there isn’t enough to aim for, then the end game just wouldn’t be worth it.

Professions

As for professions, I actually really liked the way Aion did professions. Okay, it could be a bit of a pain finding the right items if you wanted to craft something, and often the materials were overpriced on the auction house, but they had repeatable workorders that scaled with your skill level and everytime you crafted something it would give you a tiny bit of experience. My MMO would probably use something similar. It would give you a bit of experience, enough to level if you really wanted to, probably the equivalent of how much you get in WoW from mining a node, so enough but not too much. It would use the repeatable workorders idea – you could pick up 2 or 3 workorders at a time, buy the items from a vendor in the same room, craft them, hand them in (again for a small amount of experience), and you would gain skill points and a reward bag which might give you recipes/patterns, materials, maybe a rare chance for a companion pet, a flavour item, or maybe some appearance gear depending on the profession you’re working on. If that’s too tedious, you could level by crafting items as and when you have the materials, though unlike in Aion, these would be a fair bit easier to get your hands on.

Variety

My biggest gripe with any MMO is variety. This is in reference to hair, facial expressions, skin colour, tattoos, body size, height, clothes, basically anything that differentiates one character from the next. My MMO’s character creation screen would have all of those options. There would be presets to choose from and a randomizer for people who don’t care what size their character’s nose is, and a name randomizer as well. For those of us it’s important to, there would be plenty to customise, everything I mentioned above, plus you could choose between a few, maybe 2 or 3, starter gear sets and choose what colour your starter gear set would be. Each class would have different options, but different races would share the same choices, or perhaps there would only be the colour changing choice and each race would have a different option as well. I like the idea of characters looking different from the get go. If you wanted to, you could easily spend a couple of hours perfecting your character. And once you’ve finished creating your character, each race would have its’ own starter zone with its’ own lore. Perhaps there would be slight differences in how people treat you depending on your class.

Once you get further in the game, you have the issue of appearance homogenisation. Everybody starts to look the same because they’re in the same levelling gear and riding the same faction mount. I’ve already mentioned mounts, but there would also be companion pets to go after. There would be a barber shop in which you can change hair and makeup, but nothing related to physical appearance because that would require plastic surgery. There would be both armour dyes and appearance slots, because it’s nice to be able to really customise your character, and for people who really like to collect gear sets for appearances or off-specs, a wardrobe feature. This would initially have a limited number of slots, but you could perhaps provide ingame currency to up it, the same way you can with bag slots.

So, what about you? What would be your dream MMO?

First Day of Cataclysm

15 Replies

I did enter initial thoughts on Cataclysm as a Blog Azeroth shared topic so feel free to go see what everybody else is saying. :)

Around 1 or 2 in the afternoon yesterday, I went downstairs to watch the last episode of Merlin and wait for the hopefully arriving soon City Link van. As I went to grab a drink, guess who pulled up outside? Yeah, so I never got around to watching Merlin in the end but my Collector’s Edition arrived and my God I wasn’t prepared for how huge this thing is! I got the game (obviously), the mouse mat because I had a tiny crap little thing because I’m too stingy to pay £20 for one, and the Landro’s Gift lootcard (eeh!) which for some reason I couldn’t redeem, have opened a ticket about that but that could be a while before it’s answered, not to worry, it’s not *too* important. Anyway, so I installed the game after much squeeing, and went off to Hyjal.

Initial thoughts: Oh my God it’s pretty and there’s Ysera oh my God and the faerie dragons and the flying and the – I’ll stop there, that could go on for a while really. I was going to go to Vashj’ir first but as Hyjal has Guardians of Hyjal rep, which is where I’ll be getting my helm enchant from, I went over there. After completing the zone (and oh my God, if you haven’t yet – DO IT! So much lore, the last few quests are amazing) I was a little bit into revered, I’ll keep the tabard on until exalted just to get the reduced price on the helm enchant but the quests really are a nice big rep boost. And did anybody else find themselves doing this?

TWO SPEEDY'S

We did a Blackrock Caverns, which is pretty cool, reminds me a bit of Forge of Souls and I love Beauty’s pups. We also did a Throne of the Tides which had a Slave Pens feel to it, I thought. Both were good, but I can see them getting repetitive after a while no doubt.

After I’d finished in Hyjal, I decided to run around and get instance entrance discoveries. I didn’t bother with Grim Batol yet, but I grabbed The Stonecore and the 3 in Uldum and I had a fly around Uldum. Oh. My. God. Uldum is amazing. It’s big, and epic looking, and well designed. It’s also the next rep I’ll be going for, so I can’t wait to start there, but once I’d finally found The Vortex Pinnacle I headed back to Deepholm to quest there, because at this point I was only 82. Still am in fact so time for an abrupt end to a blog post.

Where did you start? Anything that has stood out in your mind?

IRL Ding

7 Replies

Originally, this post was going to be written for a Blog Azeroth shared topic about how real life interrupts your game life, suggested by dragonray, but when the date was moved to the 13th-19th, I decided it would be best to just post it on the 7th as I had planned.

It’s my birthday, if I want to post a cat, I can post a friggin cat!

I’m not going to talk about my work life. Plain and simple, I don’t have a job. I volunteer in a charity shop around 7 hours a week, which is barely enough to affect anything, really. I’ll do 3 hours on Monday morning, and 4 hours on Saturday afternoon. With Cataclysm released on Tuesday, I’m fairly certain I’m safe to not need any time off for Cataclysm, and if my CE arrives late *cry* it arrives late.

The thing about today is that to you guys, it’s the Cataclysm release date. Woohoo, etc. Back in September, when the release date was announced (during my site’s downtime when I was in Wales, I remember that clearly), I was just a little bit miffed about the date. Out of 365 days in a year, they had to pick my birthday, didn’t they? Today I turn 22. No major milestone, by any mark, but I’ve always made a point of not playing WoW on my birthday. Just turning off the computer and watching a movie, go out for a meal, all that jazz. However, this year, I was met with a dilemma. The first day of the new expansion, do I stick to my guns and not play? Just watch TV and greet family members? Or do I do the birthday celebrations on the Monday, sod the birthday, and go see the new shinies?

Well, I suspect you know the answer already. There’s nothing better than getting on with new things on the expansion release date, it feels like being a child at Christmas again and hell if I’m going to miss out just because of a silly old birthday. We went out for a Chinese last night in my favourite restaurant, I talked to my dad this morning, if anybody pops over later I’ll go and say hello, sure, but the rest of the day is reserved for me. I do wish the release date was on a different day so that I didn’t feel like I couldn’t not log in, but it’s not, so sod it.

And a cat bus, for good measure.

So yes, today is my birthday. I have cookies. Happy Cataclysm!

WoW In The Workplace

2 Replies

It has come to my attention that I haven’t joined in with shared topics for a while now. I like to get involved, however, I haven’t really thought of any responses recently. I’d actually had the idea to write a post about the things WoW can teach you that would seem great to potential employers, though if they found out where the skills had originated from they perhaps might not be so supportive. Well, I think that slots in quite nicely with this week’s shared topic:

What has the World of Warcraft taught you? Did you learn about economics from playing the Auction House? Or learned the value of household chores from doing dailies? Or maybe WoW has impacted your real life in some other way. Maybe you even met your significant other in Azeroth! Write about something you’ve learned from WoW, or some other way it’s affected you in the real world.

Recommended by Sindei.

I’d first like to mention that employers differ. Some will be quite open to gaming, after all, it’s hardly an activity that requires sacrificing lambs in the name of Beelzebub. On the other hand, some will remain fairly archaic in the sense that gaming is something for children and teenagers, it doesn’t belong in the workplace. Whilst I don’t believe that mentioning that gaming is a favourite pastime, I also don’t believe that going into detail about the following skills being learnt as a result of heavy game playing would be particularly rewarding either. I am going to talk about a few skills, which are widely regarded as excellent skills to take into a job, or anywhere else in life for that matter, and how exactly they relate to the World of Warcraft.

Tolerance

We’ve all been witness to the immaturity present in trade chat, pugs, and sometimes even in guild chat. However, after time, you learn to just deal with it, it’s a part of any multiplayer game. If you want to play the game you enjoy, sometimes you just have to tolerate the stuff you might not otherwise want to. The existence of this immaturity is particularly obvious when it appears within guilds. You enjoy raiding with them, there are some great people, but one or two people might spoil the fun. A lot of people decide that it is worth ignoring the bad stuff to stick around in the guild they like.

Of course, in the real world, we may encounter people whom we find insufferable on a daily basis. It’s a part of being human, but do we attack these people or just smile and tolerate them, for the sake of a job, a friend, family, whatever may be at risk if we choose to act on our dislike. I feel that there are many situations in WoW which help us to tolerate people a bit more.

Patience

Tolerance goes hand in hand with patience. We need patience in order to tolerate the idiots. This skill is especially great if you’re working in customer service, as I’m sure many of us have discovered, the general public can be dicks. If they’re particularly stupid, you may be able to slip in a little sarcasm which will probably go unnoticed but that’s never really recommended. It’s always best to take a deep breath, smile, let them rant, and so on. Keep your cool.

Doing dailies, levelling your 5th level 80 alt through the same zones you’ve now completed repeatedly, grinding just about anything from reputation to herbs, all of these things require an immense amount of patience, and music/podcasts/vent. Not only this, but doing the same mundane tasks day after day must in some way prepare you for a 9 to 5.

Problem Solving

Problem solving is another very important skill for the workplace, and life in general. Often we are met with difficult tasks, whether we choose to flail around in a state of panic, or calmly take things step by step in order to overcome the problem is upto us, but it is possible to learn this skill whilst playing WoW.

Okay, so, this skill is a little more based within the refines of raiding and PvP, perhaps even in RP. In raids, Blizzard have given us a variety of problems to solve, also known as bosses and their strategies. It is mostly the raid leader’s job to think of a tactic to best overcome the boundaries put in front of us, though at some point, any of the raiders can step up. Rogue adds hitting the healers can be misdirected away by a Hunter, the boss standing in bad stuff hurting the melee can be moved away by a tank, there are many examples of problem solving within raiding.

In PvP, particularly in arena, the enemy players become our problem and we have to use our offensive and defensive abilities to best overcome them, perhaps even using the environment around us to make it a little more difficult for them.

Roleplay was also mentioned, and you may be wondering how on earth roleplay and problem solving can mix. Well, occasionally we meet new people, and we have to devise ways to interact with them. Sometimes, they may even force situations on us that we are not comfortable with which we have to find ways to escape from. This will tend to happen much less if you roleplay with friends but it definitely counts.

Teamwork

This skill I think you can work out for yourselves. In fact, I may already have touched upon it in the previous examples. However, I’m not bailing out. Teamwork. Working as a part of a team. This is a term that employers love. They lap it right up along with good customer service and a lot of patience. In fact, there was a great scene in the IT Crowd that summed this up quite well ((chances are this is only viewable in the UK, sadly I couldn’t find another clip on YouTube that wasn’t in Russian)) (just incase you guys outside of the UK can’t view that clip, here‘s a different clip, thankya Mork, completely unrelated but I can’t leave you guys out now can I?)(oh look, another one, more related to teamwork).

I believe I just went off on a footnotes vs. bracketed rant. Right, teamwork. Whenever we group with people ingame, that’s teamwork right there. Raiding, 5 mans, group quests, arena, premades, roleplay. Know what else? Vehicle mounts. You have to put your trust in somebody when they’re riding you around that they won’t eject you in some strange place, like jumping off of Dalaran and watching you fall to your death while they parachute down, or perhaps you’re a passenger in their rocket, they could eject you in midair any time. That takes trust, which is pretty useful when you’re working with other people.

Business

Have you ever put anything up for sale on the auction house, or perhaps advertised it in trade chat? Could be an item, or offering your professions for a fee or tip. Was it a lot of items? Did you undercut the competition by a lot or just a little? Did you use your professions to make things to sell? Buy something for cheap and sell it for more? Whatever you did, you were making gold on your own initiative, rather than just doing dailies and quests which are there, you’ve thought about it a little bit. The more you do it, the more you think of new ways to make gold, different strategies. New skills. Business skills.

Management Experience

I’ve left this one until last because this won’t relate to everybody, but if you’ve ever lead a guild, or been an officer in a guild, or lead a pug, that is giving you a little management experience. Why? You’re leading people! Thinking of the best ways for people to work as a team, hoping they have patience and tolerance for one another, in order for the team to work a lot better, using your problem solving skills and hoping that others step up and use theirs if need be.

Whilst an employer more than likely wouldn’t accept management skills learnt from a game, in leading people within WoW, you have picked up a few tricks, and demonstrated that you have enough patience to work in management.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could put down ‘a few years of MMO playing’ on your CV as a part of your experience?

The Best & Worst: Cities/Towns

7 Replies

Yet another Blog Azeroth Shared Topic, this time suggested by the most delightful and lovely Windsoar.

First off, I need to make it very clear: I’m not a fan of the Alliance cities. They’re boring to me. Stormwind? Every Human city in a fantasy land looks like this, cobblestones and cathedrals, seen it all before, not for me. Exodar? I know I’m supposed to be a Space Goat and all that but.. it’s sickeningly pink. Yeah, I’m a girl, but that much pink and purple is enough to put you off. Not to mention I always get lost in there, or stuck behind something. Darnassus? At the beginning of my WoW playing, I had quite a soft spot for this city, however, as time has moved on I’ve learnt that again, it’s nothing really special to me. Trees, trees, elves, trees, wisps, trees, and where the heck is the auction house again? Ironforge? Yeah, okay, this is the city that I can stand the most out of all of the Alliance cities, but still, lava, grates, not to mention it’s FULL of Dwarves and Gnomes. When you spend maybe 3 years with green people and cows, a girl gets used to a bit of mess.

I’ll start with Thunder Bluff, because in the past I always hated the place. However, after a while, you get sort of used to the wooden maze that is Thunder Bluff, and quite enjoy the company of big fluffy cow people. It feels kind of cozy. Silvermoon, while it isn’t my favourite city, is lovely. I’ve played endless amounts of Blood Elves for so long that I can’t not like the place, I’ve spent so much time there in early levels, and some of the bars and shops are really cool looking. Undercity is another place I used to hate. It’s so dank and dreary, full of slime, and in the past abominations (which by the way, used to REALLY freak me out. GUTS!), not to mention, again, I used to get so lost here. I’ve come to realise that Undercity is basically like a compass, divided into 4 sections and if you do happen to go to the wrong one it’s easily remedied. That and the scenery looks pretty Tim Burtonesque. That leaves me with Orgrimmar, to longtime Alliance players I can imagine Orgrimmar being one of the blandest cities, but not to me. It’s so big and majestic! Yep, I called the city of the Orcs majestic. The shape of the city itself is interesting, I reckon it’s difficult to get lost there as long as you ask a guard, the stealthed Trolls on the auction house roof, the zeppelin high above your heads, the drag, I love it. Really do.

So am I a Hordie at heart? Of course I am, I was always Horde in the past of course I’ll have a soft spot for the large bunch of misfits. It won’t stop me liking the Alliance mounts and races.

Starting Over

4 Replies

This week’s Blog Azeroth Shared Topic, suggested by Fiorentin, is:

If you had the chance to start all over again in WoW, but your char is already level 80, or level 1 depending on if you like to level or not :>. What class would you pick? What race? What faction? Why would you pick that class/race/faction?

And most of all what would you plan to do with it? Raid, PvP or just hang out in Dalaran?

Let’s just imagine that my account is gone. Space aliens came down to Earth, tamed a bunch of elephants, and stole my WoW account. Thus leaving me with the need to start all over again if I still wanted to play WoW.

The first thing I’d have to do would be to decide my faction (after of course buying a new copy of the game and installing it and banging my head against the desk for a bit while it patched). At the moment, my main is on Vashj, I’m having some fun on Argent Dawn with SAN, and I have a few friends on Terenas. I’d have to make a Horde alt on Argent Dawn anyway, to say hey to the guys in SAN, but realistically I’d want to be Alliance, so I’d head over to Terenas and stare at the character creation screen a little.

Here is where I would really have to decide which race and class I want to be. I’d probably spend a little time creating female Dwarves and giggling at how silly they look, maybe play a bit with the female Human model, then eventually settle on the race and class combination I’m so attached to: Draenei Hunter. Of course, those who know me should know how badly I’d like Fae to be a Draenei. The waggle has a certain charm I tell you and they have the best hairstyles. Hunter is just a given fact by now, I don’t need to explain that one. According to maths, they are the least faceroll class in the game, so obviously that means they’re the most fun, right? Okay, I get to have an attack bear. Hush. I would tame the polar bear from Dun Morogh and call it Patrick, named after the large cuddly polar bear that lives on my bed.

Then I’d have to log in, skip the intro, sort out my settings, get the video and sound settings to exactly how I like them, and add people to my friends list and throw them a poke. Also perhaps grab a couple of mods, but these are the boring bits so I won’t go into too much detail.

Levelling is okay for me, I don’t mind it. I get to do something that’s not raiding, see the old world, enjoy being a lowbie, and get used to the character. Terenas is a PvE server so she wouldn’t need a personality or a backstory, but I would work hard on her to earn some gold, level a her professions, grab a few achievements, and gear her up a little. Once I hit 80, I would spend most of my time doing Loremaster, working through my achievement panel, and collecting mounts and vanity pets, occasionally popping over to SAN to say hello. Perhaps I’d level a Mage or a Death Knight over there, they’re pretty enjoyable classes.

Overall, it wouldn’t be so bad, and it wouldn’t be a whole lot different to what I do with my time now: levelling, collecting, and achievement whoring. The only thing that would be different really would be the confusion over why the heck the aliens decided to tame elephants and steal a World of Warcraft account.

Positive PuG

4 Replies

Shared Topic courtesy of Kin at Altoholics Anonymous. You can find other responses in this post at Blog Azeroth.

I’ve been playing my mage, Twylite, a fair bit lately. It’s fun when you’re feeling a bit blah about the game to pop on an alt you haven’t really explored yet, get her spec, glyphs, gear just right, and attempt to top the meters in every random you do as Frost. Maybe that’s just me, I like damage meters, they make DPS classes fun for me.

Well, when I was about level 35 and Scarlet Monastery was all the rage, I queued, got in a group and lo and behold the warrior tank could hold aggro! I Blizzarded my little Blood Elf heart out, and we started chatting, the tank, me and the druid healer. We decided to stick with that group and re-queue for a few. The druid healer was a really nice guy, he gave both me and the tank some friendly advice, not the kind of advice you expect to find in a pug these days. He told me to try single targeting the mob with the most HP in a pack of 4 or less, I think it was along those lines, I’ve since adapted it anyway, and it has helped me in dungeons with my mana issues.

It was a lovely group and unusual to find that and have everybody want to stick around, well, everybody who counts. The silent hunter left at the end of the first one. The warrior was on my server, I added him to my friends list and chatted a little after we had finished. Shame he hasn’t really been online at the same time as me since because it would have been quite cool to queue up again together. Keep trying guys, there are good pugs out there!

WoW Outside of Azeroth

7 Replies

I haven’t participated in a Shared Topic in a while, so I’ve browsed the forum, selected a few which are sitting in drafts waiting to be written, and my first is Oath’s idea:

Have you ever been out and about, minding your own business, having a casual conversation with a friend and fellow WoW player about the latest patch or last night’s dungeon, then some random stranger comes up to you and says something like, “Hey, I’m sorry, I couldn’t help but overhear, but do you guys play WoW? I’ve got a level XX [race] [class] on [server]“?

I’ve probably had two handfuls of people come up to me in real life, either overhearing I play WoW from conversation, or seeing that I’m wearing my Warlock shirt or Horde sweater, and strike up a conversation with me about the game.

While places of congregation abound, such as a gaming convention, comic book shop, or GameStop, the topic persists more of an unprecedented setting. I ran into an Alliance member at a mall outside of the restrooms and we had a heated debate about Varian Wrynn. A guy started a conversation with my cousin and me at a sushi bar because my cousin and I were discussing ICC. A friend and I were at dinner at an expensive restaurant, and I was telling her about my spec, as she was leveling a warlock, and our waiter chimed in about his warlock.

Have any of you out there in the blogosphere had this happen? If so, what was your experience like? Was it just a pleasant conversation or did you face off with a passionate member of the opposing faction?

Well, I can’t recall any eavesdroppings, from my part or anybody else’s, but I do remember a particularly nasty train journey, or as much as my terribly bad memory allows me to remember…

This was back in TBC, I was playing my shadow priest in Supreme, and my relationship with Dan was at this point long distance. Okay, compared to some I can’t complain, but a 7 hour train journey did suck a fair bit.

I think this particular night it had been snowing in some places, or more possibly raining quite heavily, so when I got to Cardiff the bloke in the orange coat who I asked which platform I was on, or God knows what now, told me the train to Birmingham was cancelled or heavily delayed, or something, so I’d need to get the train to Bristol and change there to get to Birmingham. So, I listened, at this point I just wanted to get home, I was cold and tired and didn’t particularly feel like sitting on trains, I wasn’t in the best of moods. Got to Bristol and the train was cancelled! I broke down, thinking I’d be stuck in sodding Bristol all night with no money or anywhere to stay, not a particularly nice train station either. I was wrong, a train came along to take us to yet another station to get us to Birmingham, I forget which, where I sat waiting rather impatiently for this, by now, doubtful train to Birmingham.

I sat next to a girl who was quite friendly and started talking to me. I’m usually quite a shy person, so it’s probably a good job she spoke to me, else not only would I have gone insane that night but I definitely wouldn’t have a post to write about this topic.

We talked about why we were stuck getting these stupid trains, me on my way home from visiting my boyfriend, her on the way to visit hers. I asked, “Oh, cool, how did you meet?” And she blushed.

“Just some online roleplaying game, heh, bit lame.” I became curious. At this point we had something in common, both meeting our other halves online.

“Really? Which one?”

“World of Warcraft.” She blushed harder.

“Really? Same here! We were in the same guild together! What server are you on?” Suddenly she stopped blushing and we got talking even more.

Sadly, I did finally get to Birmingham, but the last train back to my town had gone, so I had to get a taxi to my dad’s friend’s house to stay the night. That was a stressful night, but bumping into her really helped, it’s a shame we didn’t keep in touch.

After Arthas

2 Replies

As usual I’m late to the party, this shared topic is one I wanted to get involved in and in all my IRL stuff, managed to forget. Ringo from Flinthammer Hall suggested the following topic:

What now? What happens to the world of Azeroth? What happens to the people, the factions. How does this affect the relationships between the Alliance and Horde? What does your character think happens next? Is this the end for you, as a player, especially if you started, as I did, with Warcraft III? Is this the “end of history?”

Other responses from: Zan, Littlebark, and Ophelie.

What happens to the world of Azeroth?

Arthas is dead. Not too soon after, Deathwing breaks free. The world of Azeroth is once again torn asunder (the first time by the destruction of the Well of Eternity), races are left stranded (goblins), entire zones changed by the extreme power of Deathwing. That’s for a different topic, another time.

Looking at the undead armies and the Lich King, as Uther said in Halls of Reflection, Azeroth needs a Lich King. If we didn’t have a Lich King, there would be nobody to control the scourge and stop them from swarming Azeroth. Somebody will need to replace Arthas, and my money is on Bolvar Fortdragon. They don’t necessarily have to be evil, in fact, it’s going to be a huge sacrifice, but a necessary one. For the future of Azeroth.

What happens to the people, the factions. How does this affect the relationships between the Alliance and Horde?

The Alliance and Horde will have to work together to not only defeat Arthas, but decide who the next Lich King will be. Bolvar has lost so much, he has nothing left to lose by making the sacrifice. This causes a temporary truce, though I don’t think it will last long. There will be issues leading upto Wrath which again will cause disagreements between the Horde and the Alliance, at the moment, we only know rumours, not facts.

What does your character think happens next?

My character figures that so much has happened, that it has to come to an end now. She expects that after Kil’jaeden has been defeated, the Lich King, Yogg Saron, and so on, that really, what else could happen? With this thought in mind, you can imagine she gets quite pissed off when Death Wing pops up, determined to give Azeroth some peace.

Is this the “end of history?”

No, of course not. There is still a lot to deal with. Deathwing, the rest of the black dragonflight. The Emerald Dream and what exactly is the nightmare. There are still Old Gods locked away, not to mention the Elemental Lords and Sargeras, if Yogg Saron and C’Thun managed to corrupt people from their prisons, I’m sure others can also. There are endless pieces of lore with loose ends, just because the RTS games haven’t shown it yet, doesn’t mean it isn’t being planned or written. This part is surely more exciting, not knowing exactly what’s around the corner.