When I first started playing WOW, during Wrath of the Lich King, the previous expansions weren’t yet bundled. This meant that I had to purchase each expansion if I wanted to enjoy them. Because both myself and my husband were playing, this was a bit expensive as it meant buying each expansion pack twice.

So, we decided that our best course of action was to play each expansion to it’s fullest before purchasing the next one. It worked out great for us. Since we didn’t yet have Burning Crusade, our level was capped at 60 until we bought it. Once we hit level 60, rather than immediately purchasing the next expansion we continued to quest and do content available to us in order to fully experience things. Granted it wasn’t exactly a vanilla experience, but it gave us time to enjoy things before moving on and being inundated with new zones, crafting, and features. It was actually quite an enjoyable experience.  We got to enjoy the storylines and dungeons without fear of quickly out leveling the content and we maxed out our characters as best we could before moving on.

I specifically remember have a blast in Burning crusade, the stories have stuck with me and the hours we spent exploring the various zones in outland were very memorable. We didn’t feel pressured to move on since our levels were capped at 70 anyway and we were able to take our time and really get a feel for that part of the game.

I don’t recall exactly when Blizzard began bundling previous expansions into the base game, however what I do know is that this bundling had the effect of removing an obvious solution to problem that some new players face, leveling too quickly & missing content.

While the option exists to go to Stormwind or Orgrimmar and disable experience gain, it is not at all obvious to new players and for players leveling alts its inconvenient. I can’t help but wonder if there shouldn’t be an easier way to disable/enable leveling built into the user interface.

Personally, I know I enjoy the leveling experience and I enjoy it most when it’s not a cake walk. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. Given the option the disable leveling in an easily accessible way I would most likely use it much more often to enjoy the available pve content before moving on to higher level content. Level scaling is great at giving you the option to level in a variety of more places, but it also compounds the issue of missing out on content because it’s no longer relevant to you. Recently while leveling an alt, I was able to skip the whole of cataclysm because I chose to spend that time in Pandaria. Had I been a new player I would have never really even known about those zone because they were made irrelevant to me.

I understand that a lot of players simply want to get to the most current content and that’s fantastic, however, I believe that some tools for those of us who enjoy the journey a bit more, should be made more easily accessible and explained it bit better.

Perhaps upon reaching level cap for a certain expansion you get a notification informing you that you can disable experience gain in order continue the zones with an easy to toggle option in the character panel.

WOW has a ton of content and seeing it now, even if it isn’t the most recent or current content, is still an amazing experience for new players as well as those of us who really enjoy journey, giving us the ability to disable experience gain in an easily accessible way would really go a long way to ensuring some of the content is enjoyed by at least some new players as well as those players who still really enjoy experiencing the content (even for the 50^th time).

Posted On July 15, 2019 4:00 PM  by: Angel Categories:  From the mouth of Angel, Games, The Daily Tags: game, Games, gaming, MMORPG, world of warcraft, WOW ·	No Comments

Trying to find a tank and/or healer when your DPS is a pain in the ass. That said I do love playing….

Posted On February 5, 2017 1:11 PM  by: Angel Categories:  Games, The Daily Tags: game, gaming, Life, world of warcraft, WOW ·	No Comments

Why Don’t Video game dev’s Put screenshots into the Windows Pictures folder? I mean wouldn’t that be the logical location for screenshots?

Posted On October 16, 2016 6:41 PM  by: Angel Categories:  From the mouth of Angel Tags: Angel's Google Plus, gaming, Google Plus, JustTechThings, Life ·	No Comments

Guild Wars 2 ….YEAAA…….Ohhhhh maybe not.

For those that may be wondering why I have not been playing GW2 lately, I will explain.

When they first announced they would not be doing a new expansion for GW but instead apply their efforts into a new game GW2 I couldn’t wait. Years went by with little to no word about it from Anet. Finally they announced a release date. This was amazing news.
I got in on the beta and started playing. The graphics were fantastic. The movement was very fluid. The world Anet had designed was gorgeous as usual. The ability to dodge/roll was a blast and oh yes dare I forget we could finally jump…woo hoo lol. But as I played (even from day one) I knew there was something wrong. Can you guess what it was?

Before I tell you I feel I should explain something up front. I came into this game with the highest hopes and the greatest respect for Anet and their work, I played this game day in and day out for months and months and months in the hopes that I could work through this. Thinking maybe it would grow on me and it was just because it was new , that I was having an issue with it. I still love the rest of the game but unless they make a change to this area, I do not see myself playing it very much at all. Ok well here we go.

The skill system in this game is absolutely horrendous. There is no flexibility in it at all. It is designed to be nothing more than a “set your monkey in front of your keyboard and spam” play style. I feel like they took GW and dumbed it down so even your pets can play. Oh and before I start hearing the “there was only a few great builds in the system in GW. The rest was just crap” bullshit, I have this to say. For people with the inability or drive to actually want to learn their class to the best of their ability, only want to ever use what they can find on PvX etc. or are just too fucking lazy to actually make an attempt to see if this is true (which it absolutely is not) before just spouting off…….save your bullshit for someone that doesn’t know any better.

GW actually required talent to play and survive and succeed. Sure you had your fuckin’ “so dipshit proof a moron could do it” farm builds but when it came to actual questing/playing the game, each area had to be approached differently. You had to stop, think about what you were going to be fighting, plan your skills and your strategy on how best to use them in the coming fight. You couldn’t just run through the game with the same build, spamming the same skills from beginning to end and if you did ( and I am sure some fucktard will claim they did) then you probably only were able to because of people you were playing with who were actually using a wide base of their skills, doing the adapting for your lazy ass and making up for the dead weight that was you. I really feel that skill/combat wise GW2 as taken a serious leap backwards. They have stupified game play to a level as to appeal to the lowest common denominator and until I See this change I don’t see myself returning to it with any excitement or thrill that I had every time I logged into GW. Then again if this isn’t improved upon I may not see myself returning at all. I waited years and years for this game. I tried so hard to love this game like I did GW. I just can’t fool myself any longer.

Posted On June 30, 2013 3:04 PM  by: Mark Categories:  Uncategorized Tags: gaming, guild wars, Guild Wars 2, MMORPG ·	No Comments

So I spent all day trying to get Guild Wars working with wine and then cedega . I installed and uninstalled it a whole bunch of times, tried tweaking the settings in both wine and cedega and nothing. I just kept getting a black screen, then my mouse would be trapped and the only way to get out of it would be ctrl-alt backspace.

In the end what worked and I mean just quite simply worked was Play On Linux. I had actually given up on trying to make it work, I downloaded Play on Linux and just wanted to check it out, and was surprised to see guild wars on the list. So I said What the Hell and decided to give it one last try. I clicked the install, and a little window popped up asking me if I had a dvd, I was slightly discouraged as I didn’t I had a CD. So I clicked no then it asked me if I had a cd (ah ha I thought) so I clicked yes. POL then asked me to put CD 1 in the drive, and I did. Then it asked me where the CD was located giving me three options to choose from.

cdrom
cdrom0
other

I chose cdrom0 as that’s where my disk was, and POL proceeded to copy files. Then we went through the same thing with disk 2. After that was done the guild wars installer popped up and POL’s window asked me to click next or ok when the installer asked me for disk 2. When it came to that point and the installer asked me for disk 2, I was slightly confused as the guild wars installer has an “OK” button, which I attempted to click a few times at first but that didn’t work. finally I decided to click the forward button on POL, then the installer happily continued on it’s way to completion. During the final bit of installation I took note of the fact that the POL window told me to close the game to continue once it automatically popped up. (Guild Wars opens Automatically upon install completion). So once the game opened up I had a complete black screen, but due to my previous attempts I had found a forum post at the cedega forums, which said to try pressing ALT+enter to switch to window mode, this worked and I was now able to see the game. So then I closed it and finished the task of deciding whether I wanted Icon’s on my desktop, menu or both (I chose menu only as I like a clean desktop).

Play On Linux was simple and easy, and even gave me a nice update button so I didn’t have to wait for the game to update once it was loaded. I also was able to play in window mode which I like. I spent several hours tonight enjoying myself in Guild Wars!

So that’s my success story for the day I hope this post in the least has entertained you, or at the most enlightened you to a very handy piece of software.

Angel

Posted On September 27, 2008 4:38 AM  by: Angel Categories:  Ubuntu Tags: gaming, guild wars, linux, Open Source, Ubuntu ·	No Comments