Category Archives: wow

Thought for the day.

Allow players to make hero classes in World of Warcraft by combining any two level-capped classes they have into a new character which shares core features from each. I was quite intrigued by the idea of the Palalock; the Shamage (pronounced similar to Michael Jackson’s cha’mone) might be fun; I imagine the Hunterogue would be king of PvP; and Death Druids and Warrior Priests would probably be quite popular too.

Curiously enough this came from my Lord of the Rings Online play, where I’ve been avidly levelling a Hunter, and dreamed of merging my Hunter with my Warden to create a hero class with the ranged bow damage, traps and tricks of the Hunter, and the self-healing avoidance tanking of the Warden. I don’t want much, eh? Just a character class so overpowered that it forces bits across the network hard enough to bring down the server hardware.

Still, this MMO fanatic can but dream fanciful dreams.

A good description is a magician that can turn an ear into an eye.

At some point yesterday evening, during our weekly sojourn to the lands of Middle Earth, the thread of discussion began to wrap itself around the curious issue of the names of our skills and abilities, and subsequently tied itself in ten different kinds of knot. The naming of skills and abilities is a curious thing, some MMOs, such as WoW, take the prosaic route of explaining what the skill is: Fireball; Fireball II – The Revenge of Fireball; Fireball IV; Fireball III Sir! Whereas other MMOs, such as LotRO and Guild Wars (specifically the Ritualist class), adopt a more flowery naming convention that attempts to invoke the essence of the skill rather than the ability itself: Attuned Was Songkai; In Defence of Middle Earth; Every Sperm is Sacred.

Not entirely sure about the last one.

I’m not sure which I prefer to be honest; they’re like disparate cooking styles, with WoW and company being your traditional home-cooked meal – honest and hearty but unexciting and predictable – whereas LotRO’s chefs cook up something a little more exotic, more nouvelle cuisine, where you marvel at one another about the subtle flavours and aromas of the skill name, how clever the thing is and how delightful it is to look at, and then you all have to admit that you have no idea what the hell it’s supposed to be and have to ask the waiter to explain it. I picture the tooltip in LotRO as a slightly haughty French maître d’ who explains in exasperated tones just what the skill does, whilst heavily hinting that you can’t possibly appreciate its subtle layers, being the cultureless nincompoop that you are.

If you listed all of the Captain’s skills in LotRO by name only and asked me to explain what they do, I’m pretty sure I’d only get a few right. To save face I’d probably have a stab at guessing their meaning, sure, like some hapless Englishman in a foreign restaurant, red cheeked and stubbornly refusing to ask for help in translating the menu, and after a lengthy act of pointed deliberation that would have made the RSC proud, he confidently and loudly orders two platters of “Please do not smoke in the restaurant, thank you” for himself and his wife.

The Captain has a few iconic abilities that I know the name of: IDoME the aforementioned In Defence of Middle Earth, a legendary trait that is probably one of the best buffs in the game; Words of Courage, a single target heal, which I remember because the name evokes an image of my Captain giving a pep talk much like a boxing coach at ringside, the fellowship’s Guardian sits on a stool with a towel around their neck, and I give their shoulders a massage as they gasp chestily between sips from a water bottle “Now e’s a big fella this troll, so yarve got ter get in closer, don give im the range on yer. Keep in tight and slap im wiv yer shield an yer’ll be peachy”; and Rallying Cry because it’s the skill I use the most and the one I’m always trying to activate as often as possible. I’m sure I could stumble through a few others, but generally though the skills along my bar are placed in such a way as to make sense to the way I play, and in my mind they’re named after what they do in the most basic fashion, such that more professional players would sneer the sneer of the maître d’ who was asked for some of that cold leek soup, were they ever to hear me describe them. There’s the stabby one; the stabby one with a DoT bleed; the stabby one that heals someone; the stabby one that gets aggro; the stabby one that I can only use when an enemy has been defeated; and there’s the shouty one that lets me use the other stabby ones; the shouty one that boosts attack speed; the shouty one that stuns; and the shouty one that grabs aggro. And so on. I remember more of the gambits on my Warden, but that’s only because I have to keep looking them up every five seconds to remember how to execute the pattern of attacks required to activate them. And I don’t look up Exaltation of Battle, I look down the list for the ‘big AoE morale draining thing that’s really quite cool’, and then see the name and go “oh yeah, that’s what it’s called”, and then forget it again five seconds later.

Does it matter, this thematic naming of skills over a more practical but immediately comprehensible system? I don’t think so: I quite like the flavourful approach in the main, and although it makes returning to my alts a little more tricky after having been away for a while “Hmm, this character has a skill called Gust of Wind. What does it do? Do I need to hold my nose?” it’s not as though it presents a major hurdle to getting back up to speed with the class in fairly short order.

I did wonder how I’d choose to name skills in the Melmoth MMO, and I further wondered how I’d go about coming up with the names, but in the course of writing this post a very elegant solution came to light. It turns out that the lyrics to the chorus of the Chicken Song lend themselves perfectly to skill descriptions as I think you’ll agree:

Hold a chicken in the air

Stick a deckchair up your nose

Buy a jumbo jet

Bury all your clothes

Paint your left knee green

Form a string quartet

Pretend your name is Keith

Skin yourself alive

Learn to speak Arapahoe

Climb inside a dog

Behead an Eskimo

Eat a Renault Four with salami in your ears

Casserole your Gran

Disembowel yourself with spears

I leave the tooltip descriptions of what the skills actually do as an exercise for the reader.

Eyeing-up a storm.

There’s already been much gnashing of teeth over the recently revealed Priest abilities in World of Warcraft.

Leap of Faith (level 85): Pull a party or raid member to your location. Leap of Faith (or “Life Grip”) is intended to give priests a tool to help rescue fellow players who have pulled aggro, are being focused on in PvP, or just can’t seem to get out of the fire in time. Instant. 30-yard range. 45-second cooldown.

Inner Will (level 83): Increases movement speed by 12% and reduces the mana cost of instant-cast spells by 10%.

I don’t see what the problem is myself, clearly someone on the Blizzard developer team has simply had one too many Eye of the Storm battleground flags poached out from under them by travel-form Druids and Shamans, so now they can whip those bad boys out of the way and beat them in a race back to the flag and glory!

Or instant death if they’re playing as Alliance.

I’m still working out the logistics of a Warlock-summon/Priest-pull combo. that will send unsuspecting running players off the edge of high places to their doom. Or maybe we could get Priests to stand on the other side of portals and yank players through!

Best skill ever, and therefore it will never make it into the game proper. For shame.

An interface is worth a thousand pictures.

The major observable difference between Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online is with the pace and flow of combat. That and the largely instanced world of Eberron versus the more traditional open world of Middle Earth. And, of course, one is free to play with a Store of Pixelated Delights (Will save DC 30 to resist), where the other is subscription based.

I’ll start again.

The major observable similarity between Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online is that they both have dwarves. And rubbish beard options.

I play a Monk in DDO, and the primary mechanic of the class is a combo system that is very similar to that of the Warden in LotRO, where the player has a number of abilities to choose from that will perform combat manoeuvres, and at the same time the order in which these abilities are performed will also activate a more powerful ‘finishing’ manoeuvre. The Monk has a limited set of finishing manoeuvres compared to the Warden, and where the Warden has numerous effects both personal and group wide, the majority of the Monk’s finishers consist of one minute duration group buffs or targeted debuffs. The interesting difference, however, is the pace at which combat takes place in each game, and I think that it’s because of this that the Warden works as a class where the Monk feels a lot more awkward and, to some extent, frustrating to play.

I use pace to describe the difference in the combat between the two games, but it’s not really the whole story, although DDO definitely feels faster, with mobs dropping quickly – sometimes going down in one almighty burst of a critical attack roll – the flow of the game is also more dynamic, with caster mobs dropping back out of melee range to cast, melee mobs running past the melee front line to get to the PC casters, the combat feels more… fluid.

I was stunned and somewhat frustrated in LotRO the first time I entered the Barrow Downs in a group, coming fresh faced and level capped from World of Warcraft I was used to the power of predictable and consistent aggro generation that the tanks in that MMO provided; compared to WoW, LotRO at that time was a different world entirely. WoW’s tanks were giant electromagnets, so powerful that they could draw mobs to them from half way across the dungeon and hold them there indefinitely, and as long as an enemy caster had a few buttons on their robe that were made out of metal, they too would be drawn inexorably in. So a WoW instance run generally consisted of a giant ball bristling with angry and somewhat compacted mobs, around which several melee PCs would stab periodically while the ranged types stood back and lobbed spells at it. After a minute or so of this regimented attack formation a tank would appear from out of the resultant debris, brush off a few extraneous bits of metal that were still stuck to their armour, then trundle their way into the next pack of mobs until they looked like a hamster in a rollerball made from orcs, before rolling back and bumping to a halt on the skirting board of melee DPS. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that tanking was easy in WoW but, given an accomplished player, the level of control afforded tanks in WoW was an order of magnitude greater than that of LotRO, where every care had to be taken by the DPS not to over-nuke and for the healer to carefully balance their healing output in order not to draw aggro. Even so, mobs in LotRO would run around a fair bit compared to WoW, and most fights were hectic; picture the resultant chaos from releasing a couple of agitated bats into your average teenage girls’ midnight slumber party and sealing the doors, and you have an idea of the high-pitched screaming flailing combat that occurred.

Now take that same scenario and replace the bats with a pack of terminally-rabid Fox Terriers, and you have combat in DDO.

As such you can’t rely on standing still for a moment in DDO and just punching the abilities on your hotbar, you need to be on the go all the time. There is also no auto-attack, you either have to constantly mash, or simply hold down, the left mouse button to attack, and this ‘basic’ attack in DDO constitutes the majority of damage for most classes. For those of us with only two hands, this makes hotbar activation a little trickier. Even with my key-binds set up to place the abilities I need within easy reach of my ESDF-movement hand, it’s somewhat tricky to be on the move almost non-stop and at the same time activate other abilities. I may have to look into making more use of my extra mouse buttons perhaps, but even so there’s also another limiting factor which causes a clash in combat, an area where I feel a lot of MMO developers fail to innovate when they have evolved some core part of the MMO design – the UI.

DDO sticks to the traditional ‘hotbars with cool downs’ UI design, where ability icons are greyed-out if they can’t be used, be it because they are on cool-down, the target is out of range for the ability, the PC doesn’t have enough spellpower/endurance/ki to activate the ability, or any number of other reasons. The problem I find is that, given that the combat in DDO has been changed from the traditional electromagnetic-hamster-rollerball of WoW to a more rabid-Fox-Terrier-in-a-room-full-of-hysterical-teenagers design, it seems that the traditional UI design of WoW, with its hotbars and party frames and various elements that require your concentration to be away from your character for split seconds at a time, should have been eschewed for a more Head-Up Display sort of design.

Being that my primary area of work is the software for Head-Up Displays of various types, I can quite happily relate to the need for information to be available at all times in an unobtrusive manner, so that split-second decisions can be made without having to rely on the human body’s ponderously slow response to changing focus between various display items. I’m not saying the timing requirements in DDO are nearly so stringent or critical as those we have to deal with in aviation, but at the same time it seems obvious that in a game where a mob can have moved out of attack range in the time it takes you to check to see if an ability is off of cool-down, the need for a change in the fundamental philosophy behind the UI and why it exists is evident. This problem is exacerbated when playing the Monk because they have numerous moves, all with independent cool-downs, the order of activation for which is important to get a valid combination to trigger a finishing move, and on top of which they have to have generated enough Ki to power each of these moves. That’s a lot of looking at hotbars and not looking at your character.

An instant solution to the problem would be to drag the hotbars up towards my character on the screen so that they are always within my field of view, but who wants to play a game through a viewport of hotbars and party frames? Well, some people it seems: just look at the many raid UIs in evidence on various WoW AddOn websites, where the actual game world is hidden beneath what essentially amounts to a dynamically updating Excel spreadsheet with heavy Visual Basic graph scripting. Yet on the same sites we can also find some of the neatest innovations in MMO UI design; indeed, there are even popular Head-Up Display-a-likes, with health bars, mana bars and other information presented around the character in a way that is designed to interfere as little as possible with the player’s view of the game world, after all, what’s the point in having these three dimensional DirectX 11 marvels of graphical splendour if all we’re going to do is cover them up with bar graphs and slide rules?

I think Heavy Rain has recently shown the way that UI design can be taken. It’s a splendid example of thought and attention to the user interface experience because it does the basic thing right and doesn’t get in the way, and it may be that many players will hardly even notice the clever nuanced feedback that it provides to them as they play, which is as it should be. The very best user interfaces are like the steady and dependable butler from Jeeves and Wooster: never fully appreciated by the user, they’re the ones that don’t frustrate or confuse or obstruct, while at the same time providing more information than the user might have otherwise expected to receive. They’re also the ones most likely to slip under the radar of others, because nobody notices the silent stalwart butler subtly guiding his master to victory from out of the shadows of servitude.

Despite the frustration, however, I’m not going to stop playing DDO any time soon, there’s something compelling about running around a room, leaping on to furniture and heaving ineffectually at locked windows along with a bunch of other screaming teenagers in their pyjamas, while small frothing yappy-type dogs with blood-shot eyes try to bite your ankles off.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

I’ve been pondering World of Warcraft’s quest hub design, in which many NPCs are clumped together in a location such that a player can roll around and gather a huge katamari of quests, undertake the quests in the local area, before handing them all in for that rush of experience, the digital equivalent of juicing your pituitary gland in a blender with milk and ice and then injecting the resultant smoothie directly into the head for a buzz and a brain freeze all in one. It’s the perception of progress that interests me, where a player may be earning no more experience per hour than if they had to perform quests in a singular manner whilst running around all over the landscape, but the fact that the experience bar noticeably jumps in a very short period of time when handing in a bunch of quests often results in a greater feeling of progress and satisfaction than a gradual unobserved progression. That’s not to say that there’s no pleasure to be had from noticing that you’re only a smidgen away from the next level without having realised you were even close, there’s definitely satisfaction to be had from simply playing the game as its own reward and with the experience gained being an added bonus, but I think there’s a heightened rush when it comes to seeing that experience bar fill faster than a mercury thermometer in a boiling kettle.

The cause for my thinking upon this was the fact that Lord of the Rings Online now seems to have two independent systems of experience gain that run in parallel, one that gives this burst of experience, with the other giving the more traditional steady and reserved progress, where playing the game is more the focus of things. LotRO’s skirmishes give really quite generous experience the first time you run them each day due to their having an automatic daily quest associated with them that boosts experience and token gains; running the four skirmishes open to my character at the moment can net the best part of half a level for little more than an hour’s play, something that is much harder to do with standard questing due to the travelling involved in getting from the quest givers to their objectives and back again. The fact that I can get this boost of experience from the skirmishes means that when it comes to the standard questing I don’t feel as though I’m stuck in some sort of Travelling Salesman Problem, where I need to optimise routes such that I don’t waste precious time retreading old ground, I can sit back and relax and enjoy the questing and exploration of the land knowing that I’ve made a significant amount of progress in getting to the next level already.

World of Warcraft provides this sense of progress by creating islands of experience, those small self contained areas of questing, never more obvious than in the Burning Crusade expansion where each experience island slams jarringly into the next with little feeling of worldliness about the place, as though each zone were a floor of a department store; and just as you could have the department store’s elevator doors close on a view of cheese counters and meat selections, only to open on the jarringly contrasting sight of women’s lace underwear and silk nightgowns, the zones of the Outlands similarly contrasted with one another in a curious and unworldly manner. It’s possible that it’s this partitioning of progress into pockets with such obvious delineations that caused the theme park feeling, which in turn caused people to ignore any pretence that there was a story or adventure to be had, and realise that the whole questing game was really just paddling through waves of highs and lows in order to be able to catch the ultimate endorphin rush and ride the raiding wave back to shore.

Lord of the Rings Online has always attempted to focus on story, it being based on an IP that constantly lurks in the background angrily waving a placard with “Keep Including Story, Stupid!”. The various ‘book’ content that progresses the player character’s own tale in LotRO is intertwined with the main LoTR story and offers strong plot-based game-play which is entirely independent and optional to the progress-based levelling content. As such the levelling content was still a harried hurtle of heedlessly running around trying to make progress quickly, a goal often obstructed by zones such as the North Downs and the Lone Lands (prior to its recent revamp) which required the player to run back and forth across the zones for little experience gain, thus causing a noticeable trough in the progress curve of a character and resulting in more than one player quitting the game in despondent frustration. Now LotRO has an alternative option, a player can turn to skirmishes to satiate their desire for progress, which is often left unfulfilled by the lengthy roaming nature of questing within the game. This also means, however, that players can now relax and enjoy the many meandering paths that they must follow while questing, and can thus take the time to revel in the incredible atmosphere of the beautiful world that Turbine has created.

I think that variety, in addition to quality, is a path that developers could definitely take further in MMOs in order to smooth out the frightening pace at which players consume the current design of MMO content. Offering alternative paths to quick but daily-capped experience gain within the context of the game, such as LotRO’s skirmishes, is a good way to keep players invested in the levelling system without feeling the need to blitzkrieg their way through the quest-based game-play that makes up the majority of the content.

Levelling the playing field.

Could Blizzard compress the ‘levelling’ component of World of Warcraft into the first ten levels?

Let’s face it, the levelling game these days is just a very long-winded way to introduce a set of abilities and talents to a player without swamping them with information. Could a character be given all of their abilities, graduate if you will, in the first ten levels and the player still be expected to play that class with some level of competence?

If so, would it then be possible to have three paths of ‘end game’ content: raiding, PvP and adventuring. Level ten and higher zones could be revamped to present quest and exploration content of varying difficulty for graduated characters and also provide rewards that are equivalent in power to those found in raiding and PvP. Trying a new class would be trivial, as would finding other players to group with for quest content, since you’d all be the same level.

Raiding follows the generic arcade game design: a static playing piece that moves from game level to game level, repeating that level until perfected and then moving on. PvP arenas and battlegrounds follow the generic board game design: static playing pieces and a static board, with random chance and the players’ decisions making each play through unique. Currently WoW’s adventuring game is a legacy of the generic RPG design, where a character gains levels slowly, out-levelling one set of content (some of which may not even have been played through) whilst levelling into range of another set, and subsequently gaining new abilities slowly over a long period of time; this slow bloom is pronounced in WoW, where many classes really only gain some of their more powerful signature abilities in later levels, often feeling underpowered or lifeless before that time.

I think the introduction of the Death Knight class shows us the way, and games like Guild Wars show us that a relatively short levelling component to a game does not preclude players from going out and enjoying general PvE content, doubly impressive when the game’s main focus is PvP. So it is possible to have a much shorter curve of character graduation and still provide PvE content that keeps players interested and adventuring within an MMO, but alas I imagine that it would take an event of cataclysmic proportions for Blizzard to repurpose their game in this way.

The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair.

Dateline Internet, February 2010. Hot on the heels of the announcement that they’ll be opening the auction house in World of Warcraft to people from outside the game, Blizzard have been quick to respond to the inevitable and probably fictional forum outrage that has erupted.

Ground zero for the fat-tongued whininess appears to be centered on those people who are able to sit around all day, every day, playing the game, and who therefore find this introduction of greater access for all to be a massive disadvantage to their AH-flipping monopolies. Outrage has been expressed in poorly spelled words of no more than two syllables that something needs to be done to redress this balance of equality, so that it is once again fairly balanced in favour of the AH campers.

This reporter is able to disclose that earlier today a high ranking inside source at Blizzard has exclusively revealed that, towards the end of the week, they intend to take measures to answer these criticisms by announcing the imminent release of an official in-game web browser for World of Warcraft that will allow players logged-in to the game to pay to access the auction house via the Blizzard armoury pages too, thus creating balance and equality for all.

More details on this and other theorised stupidity as we get them.

Reporting live for Oh MMO Emo News, I’m Melmoth Melmothson.

A fishing pole is a stick with a hook at one end and a fool on the other.

Take a large sample of generic Skinner Box mentality and place it into a one hundred centilitre beaker filled with a solution consisting of two parts OCD to one part stubbornness and one part high boredom threshold. Boil over a Bunsen flame until evaporation takes place. Distil the resultant condensate through a filter of monotony crystals and then gently reduce the liquid for what seems like an eternity until you slowly feel yourself losing the will to live. What you are left with is the pure undiluted essence of painfully tedious yet strangely compulsive game-play. Or fishing, as we call it in World of Warcraft.

Why I am I levelling fishing? It’s a question I am often found to ponder when I have the time, which is usually, somewhat ironically, while sitting on the Stormwind docks and fishing. Like no other activity in World of Warcraft, fishing is the absolute epitome of tedious, solitary grind for no tangible benefit other than seeing a small number ever so gradually increase to a slightly larger number. Oh it becomes a useful buff and money provider at the end-game, I grant you, but I can only tip my hat to those players who can maintain focus on that leagues-distant finishing line; all I can see is a bobber sitting in the water, not doing very much, as a cast bar counts down in seconds from twenty to some random number which seems to fall below ten seconds far more often than above. Actually the average amount of time it takes to count down from twenty seconds seems to fall somewhere in the six to seven minute range, but that might just be a side effect of time appearing to be dilated. If you’ve seen the film The Black Hole you’ll know the scene where they pass through the titular hole of blackness, and time and space goes, in technical terms, a bit bloody weird. If you haven’t seen that film, then think of the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey after Dr. David Bowman approaches the Jupiter monolith. And if you haven’t seen either of those two films, shame on you, but hopefully you’ll be able to think of the scene in Barbarella where Jane Fonda gets naked and does rude things to herself; it won’t help with this example of time dilation at all, but it’s Jane Fonda, naked, and doing rude things to herself. Mmmmmm.

Where was I? Oh yes, masturbation. No, wait! Fishing. The eyes dilate and you drop out of time and space as the bobber sits there not doing much, and the cast bar sits there counting down and, every so often, counting back up a little bit, or so it seems. And you sit there not doing much, and you think to yourself “my God, I’ve been here for an age of man, if I look outside the window what wonders will I see? I imagine flying cars will be passing up and down the street. No! It’s been longer than that; they’ll have advanced so far that they will have flying cars that move along the ground. And people will wear strange outfits, and they’ll look like curiosities to my eyes.” And you dare to sneak a look out of the window, and sure enough you see that it’s all true, the amazing flying ground cars, and the young people wearing stupid impractical clothes.

And then the bobber dips and makes a splash, and you miss it and don’t get the catch.

Somewhere in a distant neighbourhood a young person in stupid clothes pauses in terror in the middle of the street upon hearing what they imagine can only be the screams of a murder victim suffering death by cheese grater.

That’s the worst bit, isn’t it? It’s a battle of wills: you watch and watch and watch the bobber, and it sits there all puffed-up and stubborn in its self importance “Nope. No. Not going to dip. I won’t. I refuse. Sorry old boy, you might as well go and do something else, I’m quite adamant that I shalln’t be dipping under the water today. Come back again tomorrow won’t you?” And as you continue to watch it your eyes begin to dry out slightly, but you daren’t blink. You think “I will not be beaten by you, Bobber. I will not fall for your petty tricks of the mind. I am the player here, not thee. The line flows from me to you, not the other way around. Or does it? A line can go both ways. And none. Did I cast you into the water, or did you cast me out onto the land? Am I the bait that you use to catch others?” and as you rock slowly back and forth, your partner walks past the computer and asks if you’re ok, because you’re muttering to yourself again, and you turn and smile and answer in a slightly absent, lobotomised sort of voice that everything is fine, at which point the bobber dips and you miss it. And then you spend the rest of the evening trying to avoid lengthy and painful divorce proceedings by convincing your partner that your guttural screams weren’t directed at them. Well, not entirely at least.

And yet there is some truth in the madness that the bobber casts the player: sit in any populated area and start fishing and sure enough, every time, a player will run past you, stop, turn around, and then sidle up next to you and themselves start fishing – caught line and sinker by you, your bobber’s bait. They grin at you knowingly in a ‘look at us two, here, enjoying this ancient art; isn’t life grand?’ sort of way, and they radiate peace and happiness and well being. They never last, of course. They are not dedicated to defeating Bobber, the greatest boss mob that World of Warcraft has ever known. You see them all jolly and happy “well that fishing looks like a lark, I’ll try that too”, and they whip out their rod and cast away, but you see the change almost instantly: they stand still, holding their line, but the smile on their face is now drawn tight and the corner of their mouth starts to twitch slightly. By the second or third catch sweat has formed on their brow. By the fourth or fifth catch you can see them visibly wilting, the rod is held limply in their hands as if it lifted a terrible weight, as if it were trying to draw up the whole world on its hook. Then their eyes start to glance to the side to see how you’re doing; that’s when they see your crouched and haggard form, shoulders hunched forward and arms drawn in rigidly at your side, elbows locked in tight, a look of grim determination on your face, a maniacal smile showing through the gritted teeth of a locked jaw. Your bloodshot eyes flick towards them and in that instant they see through the portals of your soul into the very depths of Hell itself. Which is usually the point at which they look at their watch and slowly back away, with “Oh my look at the time”s and “I really must be somewhere… else”s. You look after them as they run away into the distance and you are bolstered by the fact that yet another passer-by has fallen lightly to Bobber, and you take delight in watching them dash hurriedly away, bumping into a passing merchant and crashing head over foot, like a ragdoll in a tumble dryer, around the next corner and out of sight. At which point your bobber quickly dips and you miss it.

Raid-based fishing. That’s all I’m saying. Someone tanks the bobber, a bunch of others to try to distract it with a various assortment of confused and increasingly frantic crowd control and DPS strategies, and approximately seven hundred healers stand by in order to heal the resulting fatigue and wounds. After several nights of wipes, the tank’s fishing skill finally ticks over from 123 to 124 and Vent. explodes with cheers of rapture and joy.

And yet players will level fishing. I level fishing. I do it knowing full well that I probably won’t use it in anger at the end game, what with not being a raider and thus not really needing any of the benefits of buff that it provides. Sure you can earn some money from it, but I can earn money in other ways, ways that aren’t, you know — fishing. It’s an activity that is both tediously uninvolving and yet requires your absolute attention: try to start a conversation with a friend in guild chat and the moment you’re half way through a sentence the bobber will dip. Or you wait for the bobber to dip before responding, and your friend logs off assuming that you’ve gone line dead or that you’ve put them on ignore. You can listen to a podcast while you fish, but later when you try to remember anything that was said in the show, all you can think is that they talked an awful lot about fish, and how they wished that bobbers would bastard-well dip more often. Which is a bit strange for a podcast about beard husbandry. Which has to be pretty blarmed strange, considering it was a podcast about beard husbandry in the first instance.

Ok, that isn’t a real podcast. But admit it, you’re intrigued. Maybe I should start one. Beardcast: Making the most of your whiskers and fuzz. Why does that sound as though it would be rated as adult content on iTunes?

Anyway.

I think fishing is possibly the epitome of Bad Crafting in MMOs: it has token interaction, and yet that interaction requires you to be focussed primarily on the task at hand; other crafting options may be dull and pointless grinds, creating items that you sell to the nearest vendor for less than the cost of the materials harvested to make them, but at least you can set a batch of them running and go and do something else in the meantime. Other crafting skills are cooking by microwave – set your time, hit ‘start’, put your feet up in front of the telly and wait for the result, whereas fishing is cooking on the stove (“fishing is cooking on the stove”? You’ve hit a new low, Melmoth) – constant attention is needed, albeit in only short bursts, to stir something or add in a teaspoon of something else. Except that the results are inverted, because when cooking on the stove you are rewarded with a superior meal to the microwaved one for your efforts (unless you can’t cook, but let’s not shag this analogy up any more than it already is, eh?), whereas in fishing you are rewarded with a significantly inferior skill gain compared to the person who just fired-off their crafting run and forgot about it. Yes there is the gathering to consider for the other professions but, while levelling at least, this goes hand-in-hand with adventuring and doesn’t encroach prohibitively on the player’s time.

Yet if fishing is a pointless lesson in the frustrations of character building, why do my characters feel empty and incomplete unless they have this skill maxed-out?


While writing this post Melmoth missed the bobber an unprecedented twenty seven times.

Bobber went on to take a leading role in a very boring West End adaptation of a Henrik Ibsen play.