Filed under: Analysis / Opinion

I'm making a direct plea to Ghostcrawler and the other designers: take a hard look at the other games out there, and look at how everything is just the same. You start with no gear, you get some starter gear, you get better gear, and you kill a boss. Rinse and repeat. The story plays itself a thousand times in a thousand different worlds.

WoW tells the gear story better than any other game on the market. No game has the balance that WoW has, and no game as the ability to gear up in the overall fun way WoW lets you. However in my opinion, that story is getting old. The gear grind needs to be ground to a halt, and a new era focused on skill and teamwork needs to be ushered in.

WoW is ripe for this kind of dramatic change. Blizzard isn't afraid of taking risks, and taking such a step like this would be a risk. After all, the game would be placed not in the hands of time players spend grinding gear, but instead in the skill that they have. Gone would be the unskilled player with great gear getting into raids over the skilled player with bad gear, elevated would the overall discourse on encounters, and gone would be the endless problems associated with finding the perfect balance of loot.

While I'm under no impression that Blizzard will actually take these suggestions and use them, I do have hope that they can adequately contribute to the discussion of WoW's future.

What is the current gear model?
As I questioned yesterday, the current model is one of confusion between gear being functional (used for increasing stats), formal (making you look more aesthetically pleasing), and psychological (you must have the better gear, because your brain says so). While lately the trend is to have truly functional and aesthetic gear, the psychological factor still creeps in there. Many players still need that best piece of gear to feel complete.

And in the current model, we never feel complete. There's always something better, something more advanced. The grass is always greener on the more heroic side. So we do strange things.

Such as...

A lot of us here at WoW Insider have been playing WoW for a long time -- and we suspect most of you have, too. A long enough time that parts of the game are, dare we say, boring. So while doing our dailies (again) or grinding an alt through a zone we've done half a dozen times before we admit, we're usually multitasking. Sometimes we'll have a movie or television show on, and others we might be reading email or catching up on RSS feeds in another window. It's not that we don't still love the game -- it's just how we stay sane while leveling our dozenth alt.

So, fellow WoW players, we pose this question: what else are you doing while you play WoW? Do you have a favorite television show to put on? A much-loved playlist? Twitter or Facebook in another window?

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The other day Olivia asked if you cheated on your faction, and we found a bunch of you were two-timing the Alliance (which I mean, is totally understandable, since that one GM you spoke to seven years ago said lok'tar at the end of the conversation, clearly showing the horde bias Blizzard has) (p.s., that GM was Mike Sacco), (p.p.s., plot twist: it was really Zarhym). This got me thinking, if everyone is jumping ship to the other faction once in a while, what about another game?

For me WoW is always there, but I often do find myself grabbing the latest attempt at an MMO, or the newest RPG, FPS, or 4X strategy game (I hear that StarDrive is fun, planning on grabbing that soon). These other games keep me entertained through for a month or two, but I always, without fail, end up going back to WoW. And it's not that I stop playing WoW while these other games are going on either, I just won't be as dedicated to it as I am normally.

Other games are a necessary component of any gamer's life cycle, especially as it relates to playing a game like WoW long term. There's a lot of major effort we have to put into WoW in order to play it like many of us do, and just like everything else in life, a change of scenery is good for the soul. We are, after all, closely related to the nomadic roaming tribes of prehistory, not too far removed in actuality. Our genetics is not to stay at one place, with one thing, too long -- just as we roamed the plains, so too must we roam the games.

But we always return to that special spot, that special place we've marked as home -- the inn off the bank in Stormwind for me. It'll be there when I log in for five minutes tomorrow to check my AH dealings, and it'll be there when I raid full time again over the summer months.

There are a lot of other games I play than WoW, a lot of times I'm sneaking around behind it's back. But what about you, do you cheat on WoW?

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In my ponderings over gear and the state of WoW recently, I came to a central question that needs an answers: what is the point of the gear now, and what should the point of gear be?

In an editorial last week I opined that the biggest mistake WoW made was the constant and never ending gear grind, and I hinted at that I've got a longer idea for a solution in the works, removing all gear as we know it; but in writing that article I realized that I was fundamentally missing part of my logical argument: the point of gear isn't at all clear in WoW.

I don't believe that this obscurity is a fault of communication or use, but through the basic structure of the gear system itself. As such, much of the issues of WoW's gear grind can be traced back through the power structures from the forced paradigms gear inherently provides. Gear makes us stronger, and then we need to fight stronger enemies, from which we get better gear, and so on and so forth. The cycle continues, the gear grind never stops. As the Cylons would say, it has happened before and it will happen again.

Given that we have the gear grind, and putting aside the academic ethical right or wrong for a moment, let's think about what the gear is actually used for. As I see it, there are three primary purposes.

Functional
When gear provides a meaningful stat increase and causes your character to be able to do meaningful things that it wasn't before, it serves a function purpose. Note the word in italics -- the increase or ability has to be meaningful. It can't be just a +50 to stamina, it needs to actually account for a large difference.

Life happens; we all get that. But should your life be happening to the 24 other people in your raid group? We (and your 24 raidmates) think not. After all, if you're here to play World of Warcraft, why do you keep going AFK?

The need for and the etiquette of going away from the keyboard (AFK) was stronger in WoW's earlier days. During classic WoW, 5-manning places like Blackrock Depths was an all-night affair. Players were more forgiving of a quick dash to the bathroom, and groups doing longer content tended to schedule natural breaks along the way. Today's WoW is a much more terse affair. Scenarios, group instances, and raids are likely to be over long before your bladder is. It's not so difficult to simply plan ahead or wait for a group to come to a natural conclusion.

Yet people don't always do that. Like That Guy who's always texting and checking his Twitter feed instead of looking you in the eye during a conversation, That Guy in game is likely to wander AFK just when you need him the most. Tuning out the people you're with, online or off, simply is not socially acceptable behavior. (You've heard what they're calling those tuned-out types who'll be wearing Google Glass, right? It's not a complimentary term.)

The best way to handle going AFK is to avoid it in the first place. For the rest of those moments when something comes while you're grouping that's beyond your control, let's look at the best ways of managing the interruption and getting you back into the game.

• Slot 1 Metal Fist or Batter
• Slot 2 Siphon Anima or Touch of the Animus
• Slot 3 Extra Plating or Interrupting Jolt

Sunday Morning Funnies is your weekly list of WoW-related web comics.

Each week on SMF, we're highlighting a regularly updating comic from our list. This week, we're focusing on Guilded Age:

Guilded Age is inspired by WoW, and much more loosely based on Azeroth than most of the other comics on the list. It is written by T. Campbell and Phil Kahn and illustrated by John and Jason Waltrip. It is heavily story-based and features beautiful artwork.

It takes place on the continent of Arkerra. The Kingdom of Gastonia and the World's Rebellion (dubbed "The Savage Races") are at war. Gastonia hires a select group of adventurers (the "Peace-Makers") for diplomatic and reconnaissance missions, as well as criminal investigations.

Meanwhile, on Earth, a man is CEO of a major corporation. He devotes himself to working on a virtual world that he insists is real; he claims to have bridged Earth and another realm.

Read all about the characters or learn more about the crew behind the scenes.

Guilded Age updates every weekday.

It's another weekend of fun and games for the intrepid staff of WoW Insider. But we just got our shot at buying BlizzCon tickets and we're all pretty excited.

Our bonus question this week: What are you hoping to see at BlizzCon? A new game? The new expansion? Or perhaps just some intriguing insight to the world of Blizzard?

Anne Stickney (@Shadesogrey) I am going to be writing like a maniac. If I'm lucky, I'll get some time to do LFR. If not, I'll ... well, I'll be writing like a maniac all weekend. As for BlizzCon, I'm hoping maybe we see the reveal of some of the new character models they've been talking about doing -- or a new expansion announcement. Or something, ANYTHING about Titan.

We talked recently about what makes WoW a great game, but sometimes being a great game isn't enough. After all, many players have been in World of Warcraft for years now and some of us have played other MMOs before, after, or between our WoW sessions, which all adds up to a lot of game time. It's hard for any game to stay fresh after so many hours played, and sometimes you just get tired and other times you get outright burnt out.

So what do you do then? Maybe you roll a new character, start on a new server, or join a new guild, but it's just as common to walk away from the game entirely -- sometimes that's the only way to keep things fun for you. But a lot of us -- myself included -- keep coming back to WoW. So just why do we keep ending up back in Azeroth? For me, it's the people -- I keep coming back to play with friends. And, while I imagine a similar story applies to many who leave and return, that's the question I'm posing to you this morning: why do you keep coming back to WoW?

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TradeChat's Panser returns with this week's WoW Insider news recap, where we look back at the hottest news from the past week and whatever other kickin' rad things may have come our way. This week's topics include:

• Blizzard's new Hearthstone shoutcast
• First round of BlizzCon tickets sold out
• Your guide to Children's Week
• Icy Veins just got a new stamp of approval
• Transcripts of the Dev Q&A
• Bar Crawl in 2013!

If you enjoyed the show, make sure to subscribe to TradeChat, leave a comment, and come back next week for the next episode!

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I ask this question philosophically: What is WoW's greatest mistake and greatest triumph? It's a philosophical question that deserves deep thought and logical ideas; any other treatment and the response ends up trolling. And this is not meant to be a trolling article, nor question, so let's start off by refraining from that.

Blizzard is known for being super critical of itself, from my vantage point I don't see anyone beat themselves up more over game decisions than those connected with the design and development of Warcraft. Yes, WoW trolls are a ruthless bunch, but so is the responsibility to millions of well-meaning players. In asking this question, which I'm sure others have contemplated before, we can get at the very root of why this game has the particular unique nature of having so many lovers and haters all at once.

For me, the greatest mistake and triumph are closely tied together. The mistake is gear progression, and the triumph is the random dungeon group finder.

Let's examine both and how they lead to much of what we love, and hate, about this game.

Sure, we all love to play WoW with our friends, but sometimes schedules don't match up or we just don't have the time to play with a group. So what's there left to do? Solo! It may be different than group challenges, but WoW is full of quests, achievements, dailies, crafting, playing the auction house, and even lower level content you can solo for the for the fun or the challenge. Plenty of these are perfectly practical, netting you gold, experience, or reputation, we find soloing old dungeons are raids to be some of the most fun. Not because it nets you anything useful (because it usually doesn't), but because it's a challenge and an interesting way to revisit parts of the game that we leveled past ages ago.

And, obviously, because when you first played through Scarlet Monastery you probably couldn't pull the whole cathedral at once. And pulling the whole cathedral at once is just plain fun -- at least when it doesn't kill you.

So what about you, Breakfast Topicers? Do you have a favorite WoW solo activity? A dungeon or raid you like to run on your own for the heck of it?

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Not too long ago, Arenanet recently made an update to Guild Wars 2. One of the included features is a set of guild missions that organized guilds can go out and complete. To be fair, World of Warcraft does have its own set of guild challenges:

• Complete 15 scenarios
• Complete 1 raid encounter
• Complete 3 PvP battlegrounds
• Complete 7 heroics
• Complete 3 challenge mode dungeons

Throne of Thunder has added raid challenges within the instance itself. Every week, there's a quest that you'll encounter at random assigning you to kill specific trash.

It seems more of a laundry list of guild chores for gold than anything else. It's a cool way to help fund the guild bank and it does encourage players to do various activities together. But can we take it a step further? Let's look at the guild missions recently introduced in Guild Wars 2 and how they might translate into WoW.

There is some scaling technology in the game. The targets could get scaled up based on the size of your current raiding party. Or to make it even more interesting, every player's item level gets scaled down.urrent).

@stephenreis123 Hmm. I'd say two things off the top of my head. 1) We wanted to offer options but didn't offer *enough* options (e.g. GL).

- Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) April 24, 2013

@stephenreis123 2) As many difficulty levels as we offered, it wasn't enough.

- Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) April 24, 2013

@stephenreis123 I said 2, but also we didn't do a good job of providing direction at L90. Also wish we had added some dungeons in maybe 5.3.

- Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) April 24, 2013

Firstly, one of the great things about Ghostcrawler is how readily he owns up to the team's mistakes here. There's no shame in getting things wrong, but maintaining that you're infallible is both irritating and generally untrue.

It appears that WoW Insider's illustrious editor-in-chief Alex Ziebart is afraid of bears. While acknowleding their real-world badassery, he still seems confounded by their power.

Bears should not be stronger than dragons!

- Alex Ziebart (@AlexZiebart) April 24, 2013

Bears? Really? But players chimed in: Bears are notoriously tough, from Azeroth to Earth and other worlds online. I'd agree that bears are tough cookies and I give them wide berth, but they don't inspire the same fear in me that skeletons do. There's no getting around the unnatural aggro radius of even a garden variety skeleton. Oozes are like that, too; my head tells me I'm not afraid of them, but they aggro and gank me in some pitiful, overbalanced way every single time.

Confess: Is there some type of monster you're irrationally afraid of and avoid on principle, no matter what level it might be? Is it unique to Azeroth, or do you find that that particular beastie remains your nemesis in every game you play?

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