L2P ROUGE LAWL

For a course this semester, I was asked to spend some time familiarizing myself with some kind of Internet-related technology that I wasn’t previously adept with, and track some of what I did in learning how to use it. Since I was already experienced with most of the topics covered in the course (blogs, duh, but also wikis, social networking sites, etc.), I initially planned to focus on a technology fairly far afield from the topics covered in the course: Installing Linux on my office desktop machine. However, that proved to be a bit difficult and, go figure, not terribly fun. So, instead, I decided to focus my energies on World of Warcraft (WoW), with the goal of playing far enough into the game that I could achieve my “mount,” which is earned at level 40.

A bit of background: To put it mildly, I have struggled with this game (and all MMOGs that I have tried). Previous to this semester, I had never leveled a character past the low 30s within WoW, and always had a great deal of difficulty in understanding how to simply play the game. This semester, however, our research team began our afterschool MMOG group with a set of 12-14 year old boys, and I was motivated to give it another shot. Playing with people seems to have made a big difference — not a surprise, really, but I’m pretty stubborn and prefer to solo whenever I can.

After a month and a half of diligent play on the warlock, I am up to level 42, and have my mount:

That’s my character, weeping atop his brand new “Felsteed,” hanging out in Dustwallow Marsh. (He’s weeping only because it makes for a more entertaining picture, he’s actually quite a happy zombie).

I noticed several things about my gameplay and the experience of working towards this goal that struck me as interesting:

First, the choice of character class made this much easier than it could have been — my character, an undead warlock, gets a “free mount” (costing 85 silver, as opposed to the going rate of 100 gold) at level 40. This altered my gameplay somewhat — since I knew that I wouldn’t have to earn a great deal of money in the game before being able to achieve the mount, I was able to focus on leveling the character through questing. This, I suspect, sped up the process quite a bit.

Additionally, though I had a lot of trouble leveling earlier characters past the mid-20s, I do appear to have internalized some basics about the game which I hadn’t consciously realized, ranging from interface issues (paying attention to the color of quests was something I hadn’t done in earlier attempts to play), as well as the geography of Azeroth (e.g., remembering that all of the troll-related quests in the blood elf areas are on the eastern coast of the continent). Read: “lol i, nub, l2ped.”

Finally, again, playing with that group of kids — a more-or-less persistent social group in which, by virtue of my age, I was positioned as an expert — helped to motivate me to continue playing. I genuinely enjoyed helping the kids learn the game and passing on whatever meager knowledge of it I had. This, I suspect, drove me to continue playing, as well as refining how I played by modeling it for the kids in the group. Some of them have now lapped me, but I don’t much care, at least I met my goal of getting past where I’d been before.

Yet…

Though I met the goal I wanted to reach for this semester, I still found myself wanting to explore a number of classes, and though making “deeper” progress within the game (by leveling past 40 on a single character) has been rewarding, I’m beginning to understand that perhaps I just enjoy different things than leveling in the game. My warlock (pictured above) is only one of my characters, and I have had fun recently playing other classes, rogues in particular. I’ll convey one odd story that seems to sum up, for me at least, the experiences I’m interested in having in this virtual world.

After my undead warlock was leveled to the mid-30s, I decided to roll a troll rogue, just for kicks. I found learning a melee DPS class to be challenging (given that I was so used to playing a casting class, and one which relied on pets), but terribly fun. Just the simple fact that you need to do more with an Assassination-specced rogue than with a Demonology-specced warlock made it immediately interesting, and a lot of fun (e.g., Gouge + jump + turn around + Backstab vs. pet + DoT + DoT + Drain; the jumping and spinning around is significantly more fun than just casting spells from afar, as I do with the warlock). I quickly leveled the rogue to the high 20s, and then began to flounder a little (I ran into the boring parts of the game, and was not thrilled with the idea of doing Ashenvale and Hillsbrad yet again).

Several weeks later (after neglecting the rogue a bit), the son of one of my colleagues asked me to run him through a dungeon in order to get gear for his rogue alt character. I happily obliged, as he’d done the same for me with his high level characters. The twist was that we played Horde characters and the dungeon he wanted to be run through was “The Deadmines,” a low-level instance deep in Alliance territory. In other words, an area I’d never really been to (especially not as a member of the opposing faction), and a dungeon I’d never run.

I ran him through, and found that there was a unique item that dropped in the dungeon — the “Red Defias Mask.” A “grey” drop, this item served no purpose other than a cosmetic one, and provided no additional armor, nor stats benefits. Yet, uh, it looked awesome!

I found myself excited about getting an item for my own troll rogue which was (1) was relatively unique looking and (2) to be blunt, indicated to people that I had to haul my characters to a hard-to-get area. Since the mask is “bind on pickup,” that meant I had to drag my level 28 troll rogue to the dungeon, ran part of it solo until the object dropped, and, voila, I had a Red Defias Mask within a few minutes.

However, here’s where the story got a little weird. Alas, the Red Defias Mask looks pretty stupid on a trolls. Given the way Blizzard designed the troll physiology (tusks, pointy noises), there’s an added patch of red cloth on the mask which makes it look … wrong? Oh, just take a look:

Isn’t that goofy looking? So, okay, I had the silly, useless object I’d been coveting, but it wasn’t terribly good looking after all. I couldn’t change the object, so I did the only rational thing and changed my character. I pretty much ditched my level 28 troll rogue, and rerolled an undead rogue last weekend.

Now, rerolling isn’t that strange of a thing for me — I’m quick at leveling characters from 1-20, and my major problem with the game is that I find myself wanting to do this more than many other players. I find the early levels to be enjoyable to do over and over again, just to see if I can do it better. My goals are odd, given the structure of the game leading players to level so they can partake in high-end play, but I found compelled to try a new race for a rogue, simply because I was enamored with the Red Defias Mask, and realized that it looked better on an undead character than on a troll.

I quickly leveled a new undead rogue to level 14 over an evening and a morning (around the level where it’d be difficult but possible to make the trek to Westfall, where the item drops), then researched online to see the best way to get the mask. The mask seemed to drop fairly regularly within The Deadmines, but at level 14 there was no way I could solo the dungeon, and getting low-level Horde players to go with me all the way to The Deadmines would be difficult. So, I decided to try to “farm” the item — which, if you click on the wowhead link above, indicates has about a 2% drop rate. So, I realized that for around every 50 Defias characters I killed, I should be able to get a mask.

Getting to the area where the Defias reside was a bit of a challenge. I’ll just dump out a lot of WoW locations and lingo here for anyone who already knows this stuff, as there’s no easier way to describe it — I had to take the zeppelin from the Undercity to Grom’gol in Stranglethorn Vale, and then try to walk up through STV, through Duskwood, and into Westfall, where The Deadmines and a number of Defias reside. The monsters surrounding Grom’gol were the most daunting part, as they were level 27 or so and up, and would be able to easily kill me at level 14.

So, after a number of tries, I figured it out and used this successful strategy: I took off all of my armor so that when I inevitably got killed, I’d minimize the damage on the gear a little (imagine a mostly-naked zombie running around amidst ravenous dinosaurs, and you can see why I’d enjoy this). My aggro radius at level 14 was huge, so I got killed pretty quickly, and then my spirit popped up in the STV graveyard. The nice thing was that this graveyard is on the border to Duskwood (to the north, the path I needed to take), so I just “spirit healed.” That is, I resurrected in the graveyard, which nearly incapacitates my character for a few minutes (I was happy to wait it out), and damaged all of my gear significantly. But, it was a shortcut past the high level monsters I had trouble with, and pushed me further on the path to my destination, Westfall.

I ran out of STV into Duskwood, and as long as I stayed on the road (and applied the rogue “Sprint” ability to get out of the way of the occasional monster), I did okay. I ended up in Westfall, then Stealthed (went partially invisible, another rogue talent), and worked my way up to a hidden vendor near the Deadmines who could fix the armor of Horde characters (a rarity in that area, which I discovered poking around WoWhead). I stealthed back out of the Deadmines town, and was set — now I could “farm” the Defias characters for the mask.

Long story somewhat shorter, after about six hours of farming for this thing (and killing around 100-110 Defias NPCs), I ended up getting it. I leveled from 14 to 16 just from the experience gained from killing those 100+ characters.

I commemorated the momentous occasion with several screenshots. Of the object dropping:

… and my undead rogue immediately putting it on:

So, now I have a Red Defias Mask. And a new rogue, which I’ve also now leveled up to level 28 after about a week of playing. I had no real reason to do this other than it seemed fun to do — but, really, isn’t that a significant reason? Y’know, it’s a game and all, and aren’t games supposed to be fun, occasionally? What’s ironic is how fun I found the most un-fun grinding I’ve done yet. Spending six hours killing the same NPCs over and over and over again is, on the face of it, the most boring thing one can do in a videogame, but I found it totally hilarious and strangely satisfying.

Rerolling characters is a way for me to both explore different classes/races, but also to hone my skills playing (at least at the n00b level I seem to be mired in). Similarly, I learned more about how to play the undead rogue and really refine my gameplay via the “boring” activity of grinding than I had learned on my previous, troll rogue. What initially motivated me rerolling the rogue as undead was rather silly and cosmetic, but appearances apparently do matter to me in this game. I love playing undead characters not only because they have the best Horde racial abilities (”Cannibalize,” while disgusting, is literally a lifesaver), but because I like their shambly gait, their dances, and the design of their areas. I actually found the experience of getting the mask to be more fun than leveling to get my mount — even if that’s considered “spinning my wheels,” according to the design of the game.