Massively^™

Well, it seems I may have been too hasty in jumping on the 'omgblizzardgmsaretehsuckzorz" bandwagon last week. Merely a handful of hours after logging back on to my World of Warcraft account and submitting a GM ticket after reformatting my PC, not only had my deleted characters been restored, but all of their gold and items had been recovered.

Colour me chuffed.

I was correct in my suspicions, and whoever had managed to compromise my account had indeed stripped and deleted two of my level 70 characters. The last time I had logged on, I had three characters at level 70; a Horde Druid and Priest and an Alliance Warrior. On checking the Armoury, both the Priest and Warrior were missing, and the Druid was naked – which, as I'm sure any other Tauren player can attest, is rarely a good look.

Now, as much as I deplore it, I can understand the concept of hacking a person's account in order to sell their gear, then pass that money along via a Goldseller – that's simply business, but I don't understand why you would delete a character completely – while the first is an undeniably rotten thing to do to a person, it's generally something that can be recovered from, or (in the worst-case scenario) rebuilt. New gear can be acquired, gold can be earned once again, and if your guild happens to be chock-full of good folk like mine, you'll maybe get some help along the way.

It's official – my guildies are 'teh awesomez'. The reason? My World of Warcraft account was hacked yesterday afternoon, and I've already been inundated by offers of assistance and gold from my friends, should things go South once I log back into my account.

To clarify – I came home from work yesterday evening to find a nausea-inducing email from Blizzard informing me that my account had been suspended due to activities which made them suspect it has been compromised. They advised that they had reset my account password, and suspended the account for three hours as a precautionary measure. Unable to actually access my account in-game, I check the Armoury to see what state my characters were in, only to find that of my three level 70 characters, only one is now showing up, and he's completely naked. So it seems that not only have all my items been sold off, but at least two of my characters have been deleted. It's that last part that really annoys me.

What is it that keeps us playing, months and years after our first trip through the character generation screen?

The obvious answer is that we're still having fun. Maybe you've been playing World of Warcraft since release or earlier, you've got an alt of every class, epics to make a GM weep with envy, but you still get that little tingle of excitement every time you log on, that keeps you coming back for more.

What kind of enjoyment do you get from your MMO? Hopefully you are actually having fun with it. If not, I suggest you seek help, or go play Vanguard. Just kidding, maybe.

That being said, how do you quantify 'fun'? Exactly what is it about WoW or EVE Online or any other MMO that keeps you coming back for more? The steep climb to yet another epic flying mount in WoW has pushed me perilously close to burn out over the past few weeks (the impending release of the new 40K rulebook may also be a factor) so I've been thinking, more than usual, about what keeps us going in situations like this.

How often do you your social experiences in MMOs actually satisfy you? How many times have you been part of a PUG that lasted longer than the bare minimum of time it took to finish the instance and left you with the feeling that you'd met some decent people, instead of with a headache from grinding your teeth in frustration for the past hour and a half?

Despite the fact that I'm in a guild full of great people whose sole concern is not being top of the damage meters or who has the most DKP stored up, I still spend a fair amount of time playing solo. Sometime I feel like I'm cheating myself a little bit by intentionally missing out on the social side of World of Warcraft a lot of the time. I guess time is a factor more often than not; being a slave to the evil, capitalist ways of the decadent West, I work a full-time job which involves a fair amount of commuting each day, so on most weeknights I have to juggle what time I have at home, and sometimes I simply can't squeeze in a run through any instance, and I refuse to be the player who skips out of the instance half way through.

What would it take for you to cancel your subscription and jump ship to another MMO? If Blizzard announced World of Starcraft as their next-gen MMO at Blizzcon this year, would you stop playing World of Warcraft in favour of it?

Let me share a little story with you. A few year ago, I was a fairly 'hardcore' Star Wars Galaxies player. My main character had a Master Doctor/Master Teras Kasi Artist spec, I was powering up through the Rebel ranks, and I was working my way through the quest chain to unlock my Jedi character. Then, in April of 2005, the Combat Upgrade came along. The Combat Upgrade completely changed how combat worked in Galaxies, and despite what the prevailing mood may have been at the time, it wasn't all bad. The Upgrade changed the HUD in the game, changed the way special attacks and actions were queued up and paid for (previously, you could kill or incapacitate your character through using certain moves too often) and also changed how mob and player level balanced out against one another; a side effect of which was that soloing suddenly became much harder than it had been before. Essentially, it completely changed the way combat on the ground worked.

Picture the scene – you're at a family gathering, or maybe you're meeting your significant other's friends and family for the first time, and the conversation turns interrogative. Questions are asked about your hobbies; what you do to relax and how you spend your spare time.

What do you do? When put on the spot like that, it's natural for gamers to feel trapped, to feel like admitting to playing MMOs would be tantamount to admitting to a rather kinky fetish or confessing that you've got a rather embarrassing disease – it might not be catching, but there's a chance that you'll get some funny looks, and you may just lose some credibility points.

What about job interviews and applications? These invariably have a point where questions are asked about you hobbies and leisure time. While there are good arguments that putting down strong examples of guild leadership might work in your favour – owning up to the fact that you play an MMO upwards of 15 hours a week might not be the smartest thing career-wise.

Don't get me wrong – I am proud and happy to be a geek and a gamer, and I've never wanted to be anything else; the wall above my desk sports a rare Akira poster I picked up on holiday France a while back; I own the complete boxed set of the original Transformers series; and much of my wardrobe consists of t-shirts from ThinkGeek and the Penny Arcade store. People ask me what I do in my spare time, and I look them straight in the eye and tell them that I'm a gamer, and while I'm not ashamed of it, I can't help but wince a little when I see most people's reaction to it.

Having been trapped in the Hell that we call flood recovery SLASH redecorating over here in noble Caledonia, I have had precious little time to play anything this past week other than 'World of Pry the cat free from the slowly drying gloss paint Craft', so forgive me is this week's column is a little unfocused.

Still, as I was slopping on the third coat of paint on one particularly irritating wall, something MMO-related managed to penetrate the paint fume-induced fog in my brain, and I began to wonder about how the ease and difficulty of accomplishing certain tasks in MMOS – how hard are they really, and should they be easier of harder than they are?

We all know that MMOs can provide you with plenty of emotional experiences. The MMO genre – generally – is one in which the slow burn is the norm. We'll spend weeks, months, maybe years working on our level 70 characters, our fleet of ships, and our guild. We know this and we expect it. We are rewarded with a warm sense of wellbeing, of a comfortable achievement. We're happy when we beat an instance, down a boss or win an Arena or Battleground match, but what about the other side of emotions?

Has an MMO ever made you afraid? Have you ever been truly scared of what might happen next, of what might be round the next corner?

I love the Stratholme and Scholomance instances in World of Warcraft. The former is a ravaged, ruined city, home to hordes of the Undead Scourge, and a small but fanatical cult of insane ex-Paladins. The buildings which line the street are smashed and burned; they lean at precarious angles, with fire still licking hungrily at their walls – what few remaining signs there are outside the houses remind you that people once lived here, before Prince Arthas Menthil slaughtered them.

The Scholomance instance is a sprawling journey through the catacombs of a dark castle in the middle of a dead, poisoned lake – a place given over to the instruction and Necromancy and the Dark Arts. It's based on an old Transylvanian folk tale, and features the spirits of dead servants of the previous masters of the castle, tortured to death by the sadistic scholars within. As you run through its corridors and vaults, you come across the remains of people, perhaps innocents used as fodder for lessons, perhaps students executed as examples.

Both instances are two of my favourite in the entire game. Given the opportunity, I'll still run through them now. Not only are they technically well designed, but the lore behind them is excellent, hinting at the fate that befalls the innocents in WoW, the peons, farmers and sundry other NPCs we barely glance at.

Should MMOs give us a more 'epic' feel to our experiences? In the past, when I've explained the time I spend in-game to friends and relatives, one of the common complaints or opinions that I hear a lot is that it never sounds very exciting.

While I know that I've been saving a future Warchief from slavery, or putting to rest the spirit of a lost fiancée, some people are always going to see it as me just killing some more anonymous monsters that will be back in five minutes' time.

"This is boring!" they cry, "How long does it take you to kill a boar!?" I have to explain to them, again and again, the genre staples – incremental gear upgrades, starting from pathetic, finally getting up to ridiculous pieces of gear that make other players weep with envy. When they turn round and say, "Okay, show me the cool gear then, go buy some and use it instead." I have to explain, once more, that that kind of gear is only rewarded after you've spent weeks, months even, in the game, working your way up to them. It's about this time that disgust and terminal boredom sets in, and they drift away to their own pursuits, convinced that I'm slightly mad.

On the first episode of Massively Speaking, Krystalle mentioned that she joined the EVE University in EVE Online. For those of you not in 'the know', EVE University is a neutral training guild - or corporation - which takes new players, trains them in how the game works, then sends them on their way. It's a laudable endeavour, and one which I have, sadly, yet to see in World of Warcraft.

In the past couple of weeks, I've had a fantastic group with a Priest whose idea of efficient Healing was to stand right next me (the Tank) on the front line and spam Prayer of Healing over and over, then screaming at me for not Taunting mobs off him, and another with a Rogue who (I presume) had a broken space bar which made him jump constantly, ignored the marks I set over mobs and thought it was a bright idea to chain-pull mobs regardless of the group's health and mana status.

Now, I'm a nice enough guy, so I tried to explain to these players what they were doing wrong, and asked them politely to change their ways for the good of the group. The Priest simply called me an idiot while the Rogue just ignored me completely.

Still, I started to wonder about how people learn, not just how to play games, but how to behave in games. I know I wrote a while back about various resources of in-game knowledge, but let's face it, simply handing someone a manual - virtual or otherwise - and telling them to start reading isn't normally the right way to go about things.

One cry I hear a lot during my travels is that we need more realism in MMOs. Greater realism, I have heard it argued, will give a greater sense of immersion, a sense of belonging somewhere, and would make it easier for people who are traditionally non-gamers to join in with us, the enlightened ones – a 'realistic' MMO, I've been told, would be the MMO for people who normally avoid MMOs.

I wonder if people use 'realism' where they really mean 'detail'. I don't want too much realism in my MMOs – imagine Orgrimmar with a 'realistic' downtown area that your character refused to enter after dark? If Shattrath was made more realistic, the Lower City would be rife with dysentery – just how many toilets have you counted down there?

How nice are you in-game? Are you nice at all? Does your choice of characters reflect your personality in any way?

I recently managed to get through to Outland with my Warrior in World of Warcraft, and I was tanking my way through Hellfire Ramparts with a PUG *shudder* when I got talking with the Priest who was healing us, and I was honestly shocked to realise that he was a complete tool. Not only was he a poor healer, he was rude, ignorant and refused to listen to friendly advice.

I was shocked because I realised that I really do think that certain classes attract certain types of players. Simply because this person was playing a healing class, I expected them to be pleasant, polite and reasonably intelligent. The more I thought about it, the more shocked I became – not at the Priest, but at myself, at my stereotyping of people, at my naivete.

It got me thinking – why would I think like that? Does it make any kind of sense, and what basis do I have for thinking it in the first place? Do certain classes and archetypes naturally attract certain personalities?

So here's a thing – I don't use Voice Chat in my MMOs. I understand why people use it, and why some guilds view it as a tool they simply could not function without, but I just don't enjoy using it.

For all that MMOs are a primarily visual medium, there's still something powerful about the written word. While text-only chat can sometimes pose a problem and a barrier to communication – sarcasm, for example, rarely translates well on forums or in Guild Chat – what text does allow is the chance for everyone to have a near-level playing field. Typing out what you want to say gives you a buffer, a small delay between what you think and what you say, it allows you to choose your words carefully. I may be over-stating the case for text here, but I've had a lifelong love affair with words and language, and it's not a relationship that I'm likely to break up any time soon.

That being said, it's one of fate's cruel jokes that I should love the written word so much, yet be forced by my hobbies and interests to spend so much time in online environments where the poor, unfortunate apostrophe is treated with cavalier disregard.

I'd like to give you fair warning before we start– the following article is based entirely on my own opinion and impression of players I have met in passing, spoke with, read interviews with and grouped with. I haven't canvassed for opinions, scoured message boards or conducted interviews. I may be well off the mark with said opinions and impressions, but I don't claim to be the font of all knowledge, so I guess you'll just have to live with it, won't you? Enjoy.

I just wanted to share my thoughts on the whole Casual vs. Hardcore debate – you see, I've never been comfortable with the Casual and Hardcore labels in MMO games.

As I said last week, I disagree with the idea that you suddenly become Hardcore when you pass a specific number of hours played. I used to argue with guildies that the Casual and Hardcore labels were meaningless, and we should invent new ones, but as I've thought about it more I realise that the labels themselves are valid, but just not in the way they are commonly accepted and applied.

Loot should always be a secondary concern in MMOs. The modern MMO is a virtual space that allows people to communicate and share experiences in a way that no other medium does, but I've been seeing more and more, the idea that developers should put the concerns of those players whose sole or primary concern is the acquisition of loot above the concerns of other players.

It's the old hardcore vs. casual argument of old – one that I honestly don't think we'll ever see the end of, for the simple reason that applying a hard and fast label of 'hardcore' or 'casual' is fundamentally flawed. There is no magical line that you cross, and in the space between one day and the next suddenly become 'hardcore' as opposed to 'casual', and the idea that you must belong to one of those two groups is fallacy, pure and simple.