Shortcuts in instances – a complete waste of time

It’s Friday night ladies and gentlemen! It’s time to grab a drink of your choice, look up your favourite armchair, sink into it and relax, listening to the rain outside. I’ve got enough of wood to keep the fire going all night, so we’ll be fine in here.

Tonight I’m in the mood for a half-of-half annoyed little rant about something that has bugged me lately, namely the obsession that some players seem to have for taking shortcuts in instances.

What’s the rush?
I honestly don’t get it. Why is it so important to skip as many packs of trash as possible these days? It isn’t as if we’re running Shadowlab or Shattred halls, is it? I mean, all the Wrath instances are fairly quick and short even if you kill every single mob in them. And still, apparently it isn’t quick enough for them.

I don’t know what they’re expecting to win by taking those manoeuvres. Even if everything works perfectly well, you won’t “win” more than a minute or two. And exactly what important and interesting task had you in mind for those minutes? What astounding activity is it that can’t wait? You want to run ten extra tours around Dalaran while queuing in the LFD tool? You don’t want to miss out the brilliant conversation in the Trade channel? Really? Wouldn’t it be more fun to actually be in an instance, killing bad dragons, and like… playing the game?

What makes it even more ridiculous is that those “shortcuts” tend to backfire and end up in wipefeasts. I swear that I’ve seen runs taking an extra fifteen minutes compared to if you had just done it the normal way that it’s supposed to be done. And I just don’t want to think of the repair bills.

Pit of Saron
There is one instance that more than any other is the paradise for shortcut morons, namely Pit of Saron. I’ve been pugging it quite a bit lately, as I’ve been gearing up my resto druid. And I tell you, there are many ways that a group can screw up there.

Right from the beginning there’s a pack that hardly anyone does. Instead you’re supposed to stick to the right side and jump up on some cliff, where you risk falling down a steep on the other side if you’re not careful. Most of the runs manage as by a miracle to get by that pack. But if anyone in the instance dies once, making a corpse run, you can bet that he or she will forget about that pack and run straight into it.

And that’s just the start. Everyone seems to be just obsessed with not killing the patrols and packs along the following road. I’ve even seen people jumping up and down on the cliffs on the left side, making enormous efforts to just avoid killing anything, with the risk to fall down to an immediate death if you just move one step to the wrong side. Which of course happens all the time.

I can’t help wondering: “Hey guys, what’s up with you? Are you into some kind of pacifist manifesto, levelling without killing and now trying to complete instances in the same manner? Are you going to try to talk the boss into kindly dying and give away loot without anyone going violent about it? Just asking.”

The worst part however is no doubt the “tough” packs that spawn on the road that leads up to the tunnel after the second boss. Jeez.

It doesn’t matter if someone needs healing after the previous boss, maybe even a rez, or if the loot distribution still is going on. Some players just HAVE to mount up and rush up, trying to beat the timer and pass the spot where the mobs will spawn shortly. And many times they don’t even bother about communicating their intentions, just taking for granted that everyone else is rushing right behind them, which they may not be doing. Especially not the healer, who still has her hands full with the aftermath after the bossfight.

Bad comedy
Yesterday that’s exactly what happened to my PoS pug. A ret pala ran away before anyone had noticed, heading up the hill as if he was in some kind of horse race. We ended up with a group split up on three different spots, mobs cutting us off from each other. The paladin died quickly and couldn’t be reached for resurrecting; a mage just went invisible, literally, he probably went AFK, assuming that we’d die. So we ended up three-manning one of the groups. Strangely enough this incident didn’t deter them from trying to sneak by the next pack, sticking to the left side. But at the next pack, someone fell down the cliffs and couldn’t be reached for resurrection, and had no way to get back to the rest of us with a couple of packs still standing up, waiting. We ended up wiping it so we could conquer the hill as one party.

It was like a bad comedy and finally I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. All those silly deaths came from some players’ obsession with taking shortcuts. If we’d done it properly we would have been done and over with it ages ago. I don’t have the habit to rage quit groups, but if someone had started to blame the healer for the debacle, I swear I would have done it. However they were at least decent enough to admit when they were at fault.

Oh well. Actually there’s no need to go into details about how much pain those shortcuts cost us. I think anyone who’s ever pugged an instance that offers shortcut versions have been there and done that.

When to use shortcuts
Does this mean that Larísa hates shortcuts and demands that Blizzard removes them from the game immediately?

No, by all means no. I think shortcuts serve a purpose in the manner that they make you feel a little bit clever. It’s nice to know something that not everyone else knows. You can feel a bit cunning and sneaky, playing a trick on the mobs and it might give you a little bit of variation when you’re finding out about a new shortcut you didn’t know of before.

There have been shortcuts back in time that I just loved. One I was particularly fond of was of course when you had a rogue in the party, which saved you from wading through the pesky oozes back in Shattered halls. (I wasn’t too pleased though when I found out that the rogue hadn’t bothered to level his lockpicking.)

Shortcuts can be fun. But to get it right you need to be in a party with people you know and communicate with, like a guild run. In an LFD group it's normally the road to disaster.

You might pull it off occasionally, if you're lucky enough to end up in a group that clicks. Someone picks up the leadership, giving timely and precise instructions in the party chat, that people pay attention to. But thinking about the defening silence in the pugs I join these days, it's more likely that the tank will just headrush into a cleaver path that only he knows of, without any previous warning. And that, my friends, is to ask for problems.

Wow, that was a long rant, but I wanted to get it off my chest. Enough is enough though. Grab your glasses and bring out a toast! We have a lovely weekend incoming. And I’m planning to enjoy it fully. No shortcuts in this case.

Cheers!

Why the beta will be better than the release version

I’ve always been a firm no-sayer to beta testing.

No matter how done and over with we are with the current content – I can’t see how anything would become better by starting the next expansion in advance. It’s like ripping up every single Christmas present at Thanksgiving, leaving nothing for Christmas day. You’ll just get bored with the new game quicker, starting to crave for the next expansion (Emerald Dawn?) even quicker. It’s an evil, evil circle. Don’t enter it!

A reason to play the beta
That has been my standpoint until now. But as I read a paragraph in a recent post by Syncaine at Hardcore casual, a new thought crossed my mind.

I could have been wrong all this time. Maybe there’s actually a good reason to play the beta. Maybe the beta is where you get the best gaming experience?

Yeah, I know: it’s buggy as hell and anything you “achieve” will be vain, for nothing. And as it isn't finished yet, you can expect the classes to be rather unbalanced. But let’s assume the bugs aren’t worse than that you still can find fun things to do. And the argument that you can’t keep your character – well, that’s not much different from your “real” character, is it? In the end it’s just a bunch of 0s and 1s in Blizzards servers. Nothing in this is real or lasts forever anyway. And balance... well, they'll never make that perfect anyway, will they? There's always one class that is OP or at disadvantage, either it's in beta or live.

So, what exactly is it that changed my mind? What is it that the beta servers can offer that the normal game can’t?

The answer is: Innocence. Lack of knowledge. The state of mind when you're fumbling in the dark, leading to a playfulness that at least I fail to maintain in the real game most of the time I’m online nowadays.

Playing for fun
The quote from Syncaine comes from a post which in fact was about the planned XP cap in Final Fantasy that I wrote about the other day. So yes, I’m taking it out of context, but I liked the way he put the words and thought it was worth to spread:

“when you DON’T offer a direct path to a shiny (or it’s not yet know what’s the most effective/painful way to get it), MMO players actually, wait for it, play for fun. And, even more shocking, actually HAVE fun. The hour before UO servers went down (they did not record that hour), the first week of a new MMO (before the ‘optimal’ path is discovered, wiki’ed, and youtubed), the final days before a server wipe or a game shutting down, etc; all of this leads to the drones waking up and doing what they find fun. Amazing how that works eh?"

The first week of a new MMO before the optimal path is discovered, wikied and youtubed.

So true! But actually I wonder if it isn’t too late even during that very first week. A lot of the wikis and optimal specs and paths and the min-maxing and the guides will already be in place by then, thanks to the generous contributions by them members of the beta testing squad.

The closer you get to the release date, the more likely is it that you’ve already done your research, chosen the optimal spec and made up your mind what will be the quickest and most efficient way to level.

I know I will do that at least, even with the knowledge that it will take away a little bit of the magic. It probably sounds a bit weird. If I don't enjoy indulging all that information at once, I could easily chose to stay away from it, not taking part of any blogs or websites or video guides. But it’s easier said than done.

Boosting XP/hour
I know myself too well. When the expansion hits I’ll immediately start worrying that I’ll fall behind all those who can take a week off from work and just level up, getting ready for the next raid tier, while I – if my predictions about the release date are correct – will be in the middle of the pre-Christmas frenzy, and also planning for a two week trip to India. Which will be totally cool and amazing, but not helping a bit when it comes to keep up the pace of leveling with everyone else in the guild.

So I will look up the advice and I’ll try to boost my XP/hour as much as possible.

Now don’t take this from the wrong side. I'm not negative about Cataclysm and I'm looking forward to finally take part of it when it goes live as much as anyone else. But after reading Syncaine I’ve changed my mind about the value of participating in the testing.

In the beta you don’t need or want any guides – there aren’t even any around yet. You can be as clueless as you want to and just let yourself become enchanted and immersed as you conquer the world in your own random way. I would be irrational, guideless and absolutely thrilled.

I wouldn’t even look at my XP bar, anxiously wondering how long it would take to get me to max level, because it wouldn’t’ matter. The leveling would just be a side effect of what I was doing in the game and not my main goal of everything.

I don’t believe it would go on being “fun” like that forever. Finally it would start to itch and I would get raiding rashes. In the end that's the essence of WoW playing to me. Even if it includes using the optimal path that others have discovered on my behalf.

But from some aspects I definitely think that the beta, for all its imperfections, is more fun than the release version. There's a crispness and freshness over it that the finished game will have lost.

How I wish I was there!

PS. Another reason to want to be in the beta: it has turned out that half of my guild is hiding there. In the beta. No wonder Stormrage feels empty and lonely these days. :(

Who's the coolest player? A post about ranking

Did you know that shamans are the coolest players, while hardly anyone would admit playing a hunter, since they're so hopelessly uncool?

I didn't until recently, when I read a blog post by Sven at Fail PUG! He has come to this astonishing conclusion by combining two different sources of data. To be honest I don't think this "investigation" would hold evidence in any courtroom, but regardless of this, it's fun to look at (as long as you manage to forget that you're actually playing a mage, a class which is almost as much of a loser as hunters. Doh!)

Raiders looking down on others?
Sven is not the only one who has talked about ranking among players lately. Yesterday Copra at BullCopra wrote a post where he claimed that raiders look down on people who play the game for lore, world or quests and stories, and asked why they did this.

In my answer to Copra I questioned if he really was right about this. Do raiders look down on non-raiders? Or isn't it just a cliché, something that you might expect raiders to do?

Speaking for myself, the thought has never ever crossed my mind to rank players in that way. Certainly not on the base of which class they play. I don't even jokingly bash on warlocks, as mages are expected to do. That says something, doesn't it?

And I don't evaluate players on the basis of how they spend their time online either.

Raiders aren't superior to PvP players or Roleplayers or Altoholics or AH junkies in my world. We have chosen to focus on different aspects in the game, and overtime we'll - in the best of worlds - get better at what we're doing.

A dedicated raider who never has paid a second of attention to make up a background story for his character, is probably not as good at improvising an in-character encounter as a die-hard roleplayer would be. And the reversed: I don't expect someone who spends the entire nights roleplaying in the streets of Stormwind to shine the first time he enters a raid. Neither deserves to be frowned upon and despised by the other.

If there is any kind of ranking among players, it would be within the category of players. Raiding guilds tend to pay a glance to the realm ranking lists to see how they're doing progressionwise compared to other guilds. Rohan at Blessing of Kings did a classic post on this last year, where he classified guilds in different levels, from "royalties" to "proletariats", and it was easy to recongize yourself in it.

But the idea to rank players who are engaging into different aspects of the game on the pure basis on what they're doing, is just stupid to me.

Players I admire
I admire players who are talented and put their heart and a big effort into becoming skilled within their chosen area regardless of what they're doing. Players who show superior skill in PvE or PvP, rocking the charts without forgetting to be a good team player at the same time.

I admire players who challenge themselves and are making more out of their gameplay than you could expect. People who don't let physical or psychological handicaps stop them from trying to reach their full potential. Players who play onehanded, players who follow their hearts, ignoring stereotyped expectations on what they "should" do. Players who stand up as leaders even if they're naturally shy and feel terrified as they do so.

I admire players who leave the beaten paths, who are creative and make use of the sandbox possibilities WoW still offer, not just mindlessly using the premade theme park.

If you're a raider or not is a non issue. It's not about what you're doing. It's about who you are.

Players I look down on
What about the opposite then? Are there any kind of players that I look down on?

Well, again it's not about preferred activity. And actually not about skill. Even if I can admire a skilled roleplayer or raider or PvPer or someone with impressive achievements and titles, this doesn't mean that I look down on those who are low performing. Because you never know. They guy who does 2k dps in your LFG 5-man may be excellent in another area. Life has learned me to not be too quick when I judge other people.

Generally I don't walk around despising people, but if you insist on it, I would probably put homophobics, rasists and sexists lower than any. You can be as skilled or high ranked PvPer/raider as you like, if you're a jerk and an idiot, my admiration for you is zero.

That's how Larísa ranks players. But what about you? Is there any class or any kind of player that you think is a bit cooler than the rest of us? Who would you put at the bottom of your ranking list?

I'm curious to hear about it! And don't shy away from sounding like an elitist jerk if that's what you are. I want the truth, ladies and gentlemen, the truth!

Parental controls for everyone? No thanks!

I didn't read books when I grew up. I devoured them.

Oh, those summer vacation days in our cottage in the mountains, where the only access to the outer world we had was a radio which barely could receive the late night weather report. Telephone and TV was out of my reach for weeks and no one had yet any personal computer at home. So much time! So little to do.

On rainy days I could easily read two novels a day. Asimov. Clarke. Bradbury. Lewis. Heinlein. LeGuin. Tolkien, of course. Sometimes I cried when I finished them because I didn't want them to end. My solution was to immediately start them over again, reading them a second time. It wasn't as good as the first time, because of the diminishing returns effect. But it was good enough for me to enjoy them.

Did I ever think that there was a problem with that I got so immersed into those books? Did I ever wish that my parents had put some kind of control over my reading, forcing me not to read more than at most an hour a day, to let the books last longer? Of course I didn't! And I don't think anyone else did either. We all knew that there was a natural limit to this excessive reading. Soon enough I would be back to school and I couldn't spend entire days in my bed just reading. (Only the nights, since my parents had a stay-up-as-long-as-you-like-as-long-as-you're-reading-policy, but that's another story.)

Final Fantasy
I come to think of this as I read last week about the player restrictions that are planned for Final Fantasy XIV. You won't be able to get full XP for your character more than 8 hours a week. If you still want to play after that, you're better off playing something else.

Some bloggers were critical, but quite a few seemed to think it was pretty much OK. It will even out the conditions that different players have, making it easier for players with a casual schedule to keep up with players who have a lot of time at hands. And it might also, according to some, help to prevent unhealthy addiction, which ever so often is brought up as an argument against gaming.

I'm not planning to play FF for my own part, but I'm definitely not a fan of this kind of constructions, where you're imposing versions parental controls on the players, using the carrot and the stick to direct them towards a certain pattern of how they spend their game time.

WoW has a way softer approach to this with the XP system, offering extra bonuses instead of putting up a limit like FF. But the game isn't free from parental controls. There are ways which will steer players into the assumption WoW should be played in small, regular chunks and nothing else. Log in every day. Spread the time, don't let it stack up on one day. Because such behavior will be punished! It will cost you frost badges and it will make some of the seasonal achievements impossible to complete.

A question of fairness?
You could ask why they're doing is. Fairness has been mentioned. I don't know. Is it fair that someone who can't spend a single hour on WoW during the week but can play all day long on Saturday, only will be able to grab two frost emblems that week, regardless of how many 5-mans he runs that day? Is it fair that players who are on a job schedule where they work intensively for three weeks but have one week off the fourth week, only can play those 8 hours on their favorite character in FF?

I remember that Gnomeaggedon, who was one of those who suffered badly from this, only playing WoW for one or two nights a week, campaigned about this in the past, demanding a more flexible system that would acknowledge that players will locate their gaming hours differently depending on their life situation. Some play rarely, but a lot once they're online. Other play in small chunks regularly. There's no reason why one should be punished over the other.

Actually it seems as if Blizzard has listened to Gnome. When they announced the new point system in Cataclysm that will replace the badges of today, they said that they'll change it. There will be a cap on how quick you can earn them, but the limit will be set per week instead of per day. A big improvement if you ask me! It won't increase the rate at which the players consume the game in the aspect that they're gearing up their toons. But it will add more freedom, which is about time.

In a world where more and more jobs are done on a flexible schedule, where you work more or less hours depending on the current situation, it seems out-of-date to clinge to a strict only-once-a-day-system. They've even found ways to soften the once-a-week lockouts from raid intances. It's a natural development.

Why they're doing it
Back to Final Fantasy. Tobold was a on the fence in his post, waiting to give his judgement on the design of the XP system until he's seen it in action.

I will take sides though. I just don't like it when you build in parental controls to a game that is intended for an adult audience. We should be able to decide for ourselves how much time we want to dedicate to a game and where in the week we want to put it.

I devoured books as I grew up and I don't believe it made me any harm, as I don't think anyone will be hurt from spending a rainy weekend day devouring a video game. If someone has an unhealthy addiction they'll find a way to work around it anyway, raiding an army of alts. Artificial limits won't help.

So what is the real reason for game companies to maintain this kind of constructions? For a subscribed MMO there's no doubt about it. It's about money. Subscription fees. If players can't maximize their character in XP and gear from dailies, it means that they'll have a reason to play the game a little longer. They can sell you another subscription month.

There are reasons to introduce patronizing limits. But I suspect that it's more motivated by profit than by concern about the players.

Preparing for a brutal wake-up in Cataclysm: Time to suffer!

I had almost forgotten about how it used to be to level a mage a few years back in time.

Do you remember? I always spent half of my time online in a grey blur, trying to find the way to my body (and inevitably bumping into some wall you couldn’t climb).

If I was lucky enough to last longer than the mob I was attacking, I had to sit down to drink and eat before I could think of assaulting a new one. “One mob at a time”. That was my mantra.

And oh, the horror if two mobs turned out to be linked to each other, and they were of the unsheepable sort! You had only one option: Run away little girl, run away!

Survival strategies
As I grew more experienced I became better at avoiding those situations. Some quests required you to kill mobs that were annoyingly grouped up, three of them helping each other out, assembled around a little camp, like the gnolls in Redridge. I learned the hard way to not even think of attacking those. I was way more efficient to be patient and wait until one of the solo strollers respawned again, the one you knew you could bring down without any problem.

I also got the hang of some handy mage moves. Frost nova-blink-turn around. Throw a frostbolt to slow them down, run away, fireball, frostbolt again. It wasn’t fast, but at least I survived.

All this drinking. All this eating. It bored me to death but what was a gnome supposed to do when the self bandaging and evocation was on cool down?

It wasn’t until much later on that I realized that the mage experience was different from how the game appeared to almost everyone else.

Some classes had pets to tank for them! Some classes had armor that actually protected them against damage. I don’t say anything about frost mages, because they had their own ways. But as a fire mage you were utterly fragile. Call it unfair if you want to, but that’s how it was.

Turning into a killing machine
With the arrival of Wrath we entered a new era. Suddenly I could take out not only one, but several mobs, without hesitation, chain pulling as I was questing my way through Northrend.

You’ve probably forgotten it, but at least on my server, the frostweave cloth was insanely exclusive during the first few weeks. Unless you were dirty rich you couldn’t really afford to make bandages out of them, when you could sell them at AH at 40-50 g per stack. This meant that I had to level without having any powerful bandage available, but this turned out not to be such a big problem. In Wrath you didn’t bandage, even as a mage. You were a killing machine.

As time passed, I started to take this for granted. It was easy to play a mage and the harsh life of a cloth wearer turned into a distant memory. I don’t think I’m alone in this.

A brutal wake-up
To be honest we’ve run on auto pilot for an entire expansion. But now, my friends, it’s time to prepare for a wake-up that will be brutal.

Recently Blizzard increased the damage that the creatures do in the beta significantly. And with significantly I’m talking about doing four times the damage they used to do.

I’ve been following the reports about what this means for mages at The Mana Obscure with increasing anxiety. Here’s a little example of what Gazimoff has to say about it:

“The other big change is that creature damage has been heavily ramped up from level 65 onwards. Level 82 outdoor creatures now do four times as much damage as they used to, which is horrendous news for cloth classes with little to no damage mitigation.

Currently, solo questing involves constant use of mana shield, counterspell and frost nova. And that’s for every single pull, just to stay alive. Going toe to toe with mobs in Deepholm is an excruciating experience – you have to work hard to take down a single mob. If you have anything add to the fight, you’re toast. Don’t forget that Polymorph won’t help you there as almost everything you fight is an elemental of some description.”

Ouch.

Like anything in Cataclysm it isn’t set in stone yet. They developers are still asking for feedback. Apparently the increase of damage is intended, as expressed in this blue statement:

[...] The idea isn't for you to be in Godmode, mowing through everything in your path. The idea is - in fact - for you to have to stop to rest, bandage, heal, every once in awhile. If you are reckless you will absolutely die. This is intended.”

On the other hand they say that the intent not is to force players to rest after every single solo pull. Maybe it won’t turn out quite as bad as it looks now in the end. I trust on the beta testers to give developers adequate feedback in the discussion thread.

My views on it
So what’s my personal view on making the mobs more lethal? Am I actually complaining about it, arguing that things should stay as they were in Wrath?

No, definitely no. It’s a wake-up and it will be a bit of a shock, but I think it’s a good step.

Levelling becomes more fun and interesting if you’re required to use a few more of the tools you have in your mage arsenal. I’m looking forward to sheep one mob so I can take down the other one, to frost nova and blink away. This makes me feel like a mage and not just like a generic cast-damaging-ball-of-something machine.

However I think it’s important to balance it well and not go from one extreme to another The scenario that Gazimoff describes, where you barely can take down one single mob doesn’t sound much fun to me. Running abut in the mists of death gets old quickly. And I cringe at the thought of spending excessive amounts of time just sitting on my ass, drinking and eating – especially if other classes with self healing and defense mechanisms will be better off.

Having a meal together with the rest of your party is one thing; I can put up with that. But I hate it when everyone else have to wait for thast slow mage to finish her recovery. Like I don't appreciate when other classes can level up way quicker, taking down several mobs at a time when a squishy barely can take down one.

If I’m going to struggle and suffer as I'm levellinging in Cataclysm, it should be the same for everyone else. Give me a better protecting shield or let the mobs hit harder on classes that have more protection than cloth. Whatever that makes it even.

I'm mentally preparing myself for hard times, the brutal wake-up in Cataclysm. Are you ready?

Old legendaries will count!

Last week I was a bit worried at a blue post, which implied that only legendaries you had acquired after the launch of Cataclysm would count towards the guild achievement “We are legendary”.

Now it turns out that there was no need to worry.

Mumper, Lead Content Designer at Blizzard, posted:

“We are making a exception for this guild achievement. Any legendary items you have already earned will count.”

That should settle it. There are still a few things that are unclear. What happens if someone who has a legendary joins your guild? Does that count? Or if you got a legendary back in time, but that player has quit the guild? Will it or won’t it count?

The logical solution to me would be that you won’t get the achievement just because someone who carries a legendary joins your guild. You should have to be a member of the guild at the point you get the legendary. That’s the entire point of the achievement – to reward guild efforts. If someone leaves the guild with the weapon I think the achievement still should stay in the guild.

But you never know. I suppose it depends on what’s possible to track from a technical point of view.

Anyway, I was glad to learn about this exception. Guilds that have worked hard and stayed together for many years will have an advantage and already be far on their way towards the legendary achievement at the start of Cataclysm. That’s only fair.

Blizzard’s Maestro Speaks Up

If you ran a podcast and were offered the opportunity to get an interview with someone in the Blizzard staff – completely at your own choice, who would you pick?

I bet many of you would answer “Greg Street, a.k.a. Ghostcrawler”, without thinking twice. Thanks to his active presence in the community forums during the last few years and his rather open attitude – not always as polished you might expect – he has reached a top-of-mind position in the community. Speaking for myself I can immediately picture him if you mention his name – but if you ask me about how Michael Morhaime looks, I honestly don’t know.

As a podcast producer, you would know that Ghostcrawler would be a safe card to play to get a huge audience for your show. There’s no one out there who doesn’t care about what that guy has to say.

The choice of The Instance
Recently the grand old WoW podcast The Instance, still going strong after several years in the business, was given this choice, as they were preparing for their 200th episode and wanted to celebrate it in style.

I don’t know of any other WoW blog or podcast that would get such a thing, but The Instance has a special position. They’ve got an official approval, as a member of Blizzard’s fansite program, and it appears as if they also have a lot of personal connections to people on the inside. And apart from that, I think they’re doing this at least on a half-pro basis, but I might be wrong there.

Anyway. The Instance is huge, respected, popular and loved by Blizzard, so they could pick whoever they wanted. But to my surprise, they didn’t ask for Ghostcrawler (or at least that’s not what they say.) They asked for someone who isn’t as high profiled as many of the others, but who never the less has a huge impact on how we perceive the game, even if we don’t think about it.

Instead of going for one of the highest profiled developers, The Instance went for an interview with Russell Brower, who is ultimately responsible for all music in WoW and some other Blizzard games as well. It was a bit unexpected, but also a very good choice.

Getting the player perspective
There are no revolutionary news released in the interview, and Russell dodges elegantly any question about the “secret MMO project”, which was to be expected. But nevertheless, the guy is just nice to listen to, and I found it especially interesting to hear about the creative process going on in the sound team, which consists of no less than 16 people.

There’s more thought put into this than you might imagine and Russell stresses how important it is to see the game from the perspective of players of all kinds as you’re composing the music. It shouldn’t just enhance the experience of a new raid instance or a questing zone, it should also work for someone who mainly plays the AH.

What I found especially cool was to hear that Russell Brower has been listening to The Instance ever since he started his job at Blizzard. He hadn’t played World of Warcraft before, and he wanted to quickly get into the feeling of how the players think and what they experience in the game, see the game through their eyes. Listening to the podcast helped him to get a better understanding. And who knows, maybe there are more ears in the Blizzard HQs that are listening to and reading our stuff than we imagine?

Russell concluded the interview, saying that this appearance in The Instance was a “dream come true” to him. Maybe he was just polite. However, he really sounded as if he meant it, and I actually believed Scott when he described him as “The Nicest Guy at Blizzard”.

By the way – now I know how he looks, thanks to listening to The Instance. He’s a look-a-like copy of King Theodren in the Lord of the Rings movie (after the curse has been cured, I should add.) It’s true! Pictures on the webs confirm it.

My congratulations
So. I think it’s about time that I come to the actual point of this post, namely to tell you to go and download and listen to the 200th episode of The Instance.

If you haven’t heard the show before, I can tell you that it’s always a nice listening, since the hosts Scott and Randy have a special chemistry between them that sets a nice and cosy atmosphere. There are so many blogs and podcasts out there that spend most of their energy on complaining about things. (Yeah, I too do that sometimes, getting a little jaded, grumpy and whiny.) The Instance is different. Their lighthearted and relaxed attitude towards the game and the community is contagious and I often find myself smiling as I listen to their banter.

Episode 200 is extra long, about 2.5 hours, and has several special appearances for the occasion. Apart from Russell Brower, there is for instance an interview with no one less than Felicia Day, the woman behind the wonderful series The Guild. Go listen to it. You won’t get disappointed.

And finally I’d like to grab the opportunity and congratulate The Instance on their Big Day. Doing 200 shows is awesome, especially since they hold such a high quality (at least the later ones; I can’t speak for the first 100 episodes, which I haven’t listened to). As if this wasn’t enough, they’ve also managed to create and maintain an iconic, flourishing guild consisting of 3 000 people. Don’t ask me how. It sounds like a nightmare to me, but it seems to work.

You guys are imba. Here’s to you and to the next 200 episodes (you promised!):

Cheers!