I hate dungeon instance loot. Ok, that’s not entirely true: we loves it, we wants it precious. What I hate about dungeon instance loot is the way, like so many other things in MMOs, its awarding is perfectly designed to make one or more people in the group feel rubbish about their evening, and how it turns nice normal people into quietly seething Sméagols or outwardly furious frothing Gollums. I hate it most when it does such a thing to me, especially when I’d promised myself that loot did not matter and I was only there for the companionship of others and to enjoy the World of Warcraft. Yet it manages to do so, loot distribution in WoW is like the One Ring of Middle Earth, it has a will of its own and evil intent.

We’d finished a run of the Deadmines and I’d upgraded my character with two pieces of Defias leather armour, making out like the proverbial bandit. I’d rolled Need on the items, and professed the niceness of them on our VoIP channel, but only because they were, indeed, nice. Our healer, who can also wear leather, did not roll on the items, and I was pleased with my new preciouses for a short while before being hit by a wave of guilt towards the end of the run when I considered that my proclamation of their niceitude had perhaps put the healer off of rolling on the items at all, which was not my intent. Indeed, I was still in my premeditated mindset of The Loot Does Not Matter, and frankly there’re very few healing leather items at this level so any leather loot is free game, although I obviously wouldn’t roll on anything that was clearly healer loot. Things will even out a bit at level forty, as my Shaman moves up to using mail armour and the only other mail armour wearer in the group will move up to using plate armour at the same time, thus making the loot boundaries fractionally easier to determine.

We moved on to Shadowfang Keep, and still feeling a bit of loot windfall guilt (which I think afflicts some players more than others), I passed on the leather pieces that dropped there, one of which was blatantly a healer piece anyway, and the other was a nice upgrade for either of us, it having a chunk of stamina on it. The other two members had grabbed a few useful drops by this point too, and it was all looking like a fairly balanced evening of loot distribution. But the loot system is treacherous, it will betray you, and it is always trying to find a way to ruin an evening’s play.

So a really shiny two-handed axe dropped. I’m currently using two-handed axes until the point I can dual-wield in twenty levels or so, and this item was a huge upgrade for me, with its lowest damage range number being greater than the highest damage range number on my current weapon. That’s a pretty tasty boost in DPS. I think we all professed the shininess of it at the point, and I apologised for rolling Need (why do I feel the need to apologise each time I roll need on something, is this just me?) and rolled for it, so did the Paladin tank. And of course they won.

I think I hid my frustration quite well, and again I like to think that my Loot Does Not Matter mindset at least partially brushed it aside as just one of those things, but as we continued through the instance the loot system pulled at me, taunted me, and drove me to dark thoughts.

(I had posted my reasons for being annoyed here, but I was informed that it looked like a castigation of that person, and that’s not the purpose of this post at all. It’s the loot system that is primarily at fault.)

I wonder if the healer felt the same way about me rolling on those leather pieces, and whether they felt that I expected them to be mine and shied away from rolling. I wonder if I would have been annoyed to not win those pieces either and have come out of the evening with nothing, or whether, having gained a couple of nice items, the loot system took over and twisted my thoughts towards expectation and rightful ownership, exactly the things that I’d sworn to avoid, having been on the receiving end of such rolls in the past, and had evenings ruined by what I perceived as… no, not unfairness, what happened was fair by all the rules. Perhaps thoughtlessness? It’s all very subjective, and that’s the biggest issue with these loot systems. The boundaries of who has a claim to what are often blurred, grey and misty, like putting on the One Ring and trying to see clearly.

I wonder if anyone else even cares about this, or if I’m just someone who spends too much time reading things into situations that don’t exist. I’m not writing this to try to shame that person into giving me the weapon, hell, they may very well have a point of view that, when explained to me, will make me realise that they had just as much claim on the item as I felt I had. And I most definitely wouldn’t want the item now, there’s something odious about getting an item from someone because you whinged about it: it’s just what the loot system would want. No, I’m genuinely writing this because loot systems in most MMOs are utterly rubbish, and instead of just copying the Need/Greed system and forcing the players to come up with DKP and other overlaid systems in order to make things more fair – and often still failing and causing grief between players – developers should really put some effort into coming up with something that is an enabler of group play, not something that causes discord and resentment between otherwise friendly and reasonable players. At the end of the day your character in most modern MMOs is nothing, gear is everything, so why is the gear distribution system in most MMOs such a hideous archaic throwback that has probably never once worked well.

Developers wonder why so many people will happily Play Alone with Others in MMOs, and yet when you look at the odds stacked against having a good time when playing with other people, even people you consider friends, it’s no wonder that more and more players switch to solo play wherever they can.

Firstly you’ve got to be on the right continent as your friends. Then you have to be on the right server. Then you have to belong to the same faction. Then you have to be of a comparable level. Then you have to have the same quests. And if all of that comes together and you can finally run an instance together, you have to hope that the loot which drops is easily apportioned and that nobody is going to feel that they deserved the piece more. Which when it comes to players and loot, is an almost certainty no matter how good their intentions, the loot system bends all to its will eventually.

I’ve resolved to do what I normally do in these situations, and that’s to not give the loot system a chance. Let’s face it, nobody outside of the end-game in WoW (PvP twinks excepted) needs to care about gear, I could probably perform well enough as a meleer in a set of cloth caster gear that we’d still make it through an instance, but quest items are plentiful enough that I will be able to pull my weight with ease. Yesterday I was tempted again, and though my brooding Galadriel-like thoughts almost brought me to a bad place, I think I have resisted the temptation well enough, and hopefully this will allow me to not worry about the loot and just enjoy the dungeons of WoW and the companionship of others.

No longer is the loot is precious to us, we don’t wants it no more; nice friendses, that’s all we wants.

Tiger Ears has been documenting our recent foray back into the world of Warcraft, where we have decided to take one last look at the lands of Azeroth from the perspective of a character at the correct level for the content, before Blizzard performs its latest party trick of whipping away the table cloth of original content, leaving the cutlery of players untouched but now standing on the shiny and polished table surface of new content.

Our initial expedition went well enough, I was determined to get a Hunter to the level cap having tried several times and failed for some seemingly unknowable reason that to this day still eludes me. The Hunter is a class that should be effortless and joyful to play, with a pet that can tank and which you can heal, combined with the not inconsiderable damage you both can put out, it’s a class that is definitely overpowered for solo play. As such I actually found it a little dull. It’s my own fault to some extent, I quickly wrote a macro that performed the major cycle of commands that are undertaken every fight – Hunter’s Mark, Pet Attack, Sting, Arcane Shot, Arcane Shot, Sting, and bake in an oven at 180 degrees Celcius for twenty five minutes or until the target is a nice golden colour – and bound it to one key. So thereafter my every fight went R, R, R, R, R, R, R, R, R (I use the ESDF keys to move, so R is my default attack key). The problem for your average player of the class comes from going from that mode of play into the style of play required for a group, which transforms from pressing R a lot into the more freeform style of Hunter’s Mark. Pet Attack. Patrol! Freezing Trap! Wrong target! Pet Change Targets! Noooo not that other group of mobs! Come Back Pet! Argh, Get It Off Me! Disengage! Into Another Patrol! Crap! Heal Pet! Too late! Run away! Run away! Run away!

I really did have the ‘running away’ down to a fine art.

Ok, so admittedly I had tried to jump my skill level from ‘Press R’ up to ‘Tank multiple mobs, CC others, Heal pet, Do some damage, Compose poetry, Solve world hunger’ and that’s probably stretching my skill level a bit, doable no doubt (although I’m not entirely confident about the poetry), but expertise was required in multiple areas, most of which I hadn’t practised at because I was too busy out there in there world, running around and ‘R’ing entire zones to death whilst reading a good book. One can certainly see how the Hunter class quickly gained a poor reputation in the early days of WoW based on this experience. That and the obvious fact that they won G*ld Farmer Monthly’s Editor’s Choice Award for five years running. The fact of the matter is that, when in a group or undertaking quest tasks that would make other grown classes weep, the Hunter is actually a class that requires a high level of skill and understanding to play well.

Having suffered a bit at the hands of the endlessly refilling population of the Stormwind Stockades (I like to imagine it’s where they put all the chat spammers), we decided that a more traditional Tank/Healer combination would work better for the pair of us, enabling us to visit the various dungeons of Azeroth with far less trauma, each of us filling in our more familiar group roles, he of tank and me of healer. It turned out to be a fortuitous time to re-roll because around the same time a couple of Tiger Ears’ readers had ventured forth and asked whether we had room in our little nostalgia troop for a few more. The more the merrier, I say, and so on Wednesday night we had our first weekly static group run.

We all got our new characters to level six such that we were out of the very initial starter areas, our characters had just started to lose that new character smell and were run-in enough that we could rev them all the way up to 60 XP per second without the XP bar exploding and leaving us with an expensive repair bill from the local service centre. We met in Stormwind, made the customary introductions, ‘how do you dos’ and ‘wtf do we do nows’, before our glorious leader made a positive decision and we set off to Goldshire to grab some quests on route to giving Hogger a damn good thrashing. This is where the point of our sojourn started to stab at us a little more soundly: almost everyone who has played Alliance, and many who are Horde for Life, will know of Hogger because he’s one of the earliest points in the game where you get to meet an elite mob. He’s a notorious gnoll who lives in the same area as a pack of lesser gnolls and is only really distinguishable by the fact that his character model is slightly larger than the others. All sorts of DANGER! and BEWARE OF THE GNOLL! signs pop up in your tooltip when you hold your mouse cursor over him, however. Many an unwary adventurer has fallen to him, and his reputation is such that new characters will test their mettle against him, and in fact whole forty man raids formed entirely of level one characters have gone up against him. He’s one of those infamous icons of WoW, they’re not the ones you’ll see on box art and in glossy magazine articles, but everyone who has ever played the game with any conviction will know about them. I have one Horde character at level sixty, but at heart I am a player of Alliance characters, and yet I still know all about Mankrik’s wife. If you have invested any time in WoW at all, how can you not?

And here’s the thing: these icons may soon no longer be. In the forthcoming cataclysmed world of Azeroth, Hogger might no longer exist. I may have bested him for the last time – and best him our little group did, multiple times, and once more around the block for another besting – and you know what, it felt great. It felt like it did the first time we organised a group to go and tackle him back on launch day. Curiously though, I was suddenly made aware of the actual Hogger again. I realised that he had become this dull and lifeless entity, so many times beaten and then forgotten that his memory had become more fearsome than he ever was. I could have drawn a fair approximation of what he looked like, drawn a map for you as to his rough patrol area, described his ability to stun and his uncanny knack of sneaking up on you while you were fighting a pack of normal gnolls, but all this was substituted for the real experience. Even if Hogger exists in the next expansion for World of Warcraft he won’t be the same. If the character model and abilities remain unchanged, he won’t be the same. He is part of the world, and changing the world that he exists in changes him. It’s the same for Mankrik’s wife. I imagine that the WoW developers, having their finger on the pulse of pop culture and never ones to shy away from self-reference, will now hide Mankrik somewhere. There will be a whole new generation of “Where’s Mankrik?” and for a while it will be genuine and funny, because nobody will no where he is. Where is Mankrik’s wife, though? In your mind, if you’ve ever quested for her, you know she’s in a camp with a couple of tents. What do those tents look like, what pattern do they have on their exterior? The camp is near a bridge, what is that bridge made from? If you stand in the camp and look south, what do you see? How about to the east? If you can’t remember, or the memory is vague, and you are a fan of World of Warcraft, go and have a look. Remind yourself, because soon it will be gone.

This is the reason for our return to the lands of Azeroth: to cement people and places in our mind’s eye, to remember the great feats and greater falls, and to pay our last respects to this land as we know it, a land that has given millions of players many years of entertainment.

Mor’Ladim you’re next.

There is returning to WoW in order to be reminded of the good times that you had, and there is returning to WoW in an attempt to relive those times.

They are two different things, and it would behove you to confirm which is being undertaken before being smarmy about it.

If after being proffered the former option you still think it is a waste of time and foolish, you have my deepest sympathies; and tell me, when exactly did you last have contact with your soul? Perhaps we can help you find it.