The other faction: my friend or my enemy?

This post contains minor spoilers for the quests in Deepholm and Vashj'ir. They're nothing major, but if you wish to avoid them, here is your warning.

As I have already written about, WoW circa Cataclysm has been less than consistent with its storytelling, and the same sort of mood-whiplash I wrote about before relating to our motivations in Uldum compared to our motivation in Cataclysm's other zones has shown up again. This time, it has shown up in how inconsistent Cataclysm's storytelling is in terms of how we should view the other faction: the Horde. Different people may have different opinions on how the other faction should be viewed, but I think we can all agree that if Blizzard wants us to feel a particular way about the other faction, they'll be much more effective at making us think a certain way about them if they can be consistent in enforcing that viewpoint. Now, Blizzard has said that they want there to be more faction conflict than there was in Wrath of the Lich King, so you would think that, with Cataclysm being a complete redesign of WoW, they would design the game to foster that kind of combative atmosphere, yet Cataclysm hasn't been very consistent with that goal.

This inconsistency shows up best (for the Alliance, anyway) if you quest in Vashj'ir first and then move on to Deepholm. In Vashj'ir--from the Alliance perspective, anyways--your entire reason for going there is to fight the Horde, for they have attacked us in our attempts to scout out a new land mass. But after finishing up Vash'ir, you go to Deepholm, where while searching for a fragment of the World Pillar, you discover that the Horde ship that was delivering it might have been attacked by the Alliance. Upon returning with this news to Stormcaller Mylra, she has this to say:

"The Earthen Ring is a neutral organization, [name]. We cannot pick sides in the war between the Horde and the Alliance. Look around you -- our members come from all backgrounds. Our mission would be compromised should racial tensions be put above our goal. Let's try to keep this under wraps until we have more information."

So in two sequential zones, we go from being entirely motivated by the need to fight the other faction to being expected to cooperate with them. Something just doesn't add up here.

The animosity in Vashj'ir was to be expected. Like I said, Blizzard has said that they want Cataclysm to reignite the fires of war between the Alliance and the Horde, and they have shown some effort towards making that happen. The Worgan starting area is an example of this kind of effrt, for it contains much Forsaken aggression against the innocent Gilneans, the kind that makes me as ready to fight them as they clearly are to fight me. This is exactly the kind of animosity that it seems Blizzard wants players to have for the other faction, and yet when we get to Deepholm, we are asked to put that animosity in check for the sake of saving the world. Many players have expressed their desire for the factions to stop their bickering and come together to save the world, and for once, we actually get it. But why now? Why, after so many instances of being told that we should hate the other faction, do we get to cooperate with them now?

We saw this inconsistency in other parts of the game, too. Northrend featured the event that forever cemented that the Alliance and the Horde would never cooperate again (the Wrathgate), yet also includes numerous examples of the players putting aside their differences to help out one of the many neutral factions on Northrend (the Kirin Tor, the Argent Crusade, the Sons of Hodir, etc.). And yet, in addition to this cooperation, we also saw many examples of faction animosity in Northrend (the quest Catch More Dispatches, the Gunship Battle in Icecrown Citadel). In Hyjal, we rallied behind the Guardians of Hyjal to save the mountain, and in Deepholm, we rallied behind the Earthen Ring to save the world. Yet in the face of trying to take down one of the biggest threats to Azeroth at the time (the Lich King), the factions still had an air battle. So it seems as if the only time we can get the Alliance and the Horde to cooperate is when we have a third party that they are both rallying behind; in other words, having a common enemy just isn't enough to get the Alliance and the Horde to put aside their differences. I guess that's just what it takes to get the two to cooperate.

As a non sequitur, I have often noticed that if you read the story that unfolds in WoW like a novel, it seems that the theme of that novel would be the destructive nature of faction conflict and how much good can be wrought when the two sides put aside their differences. In Hyjal and Deepholm, the Alliance and the Horde work together and save the mountain and the world, respectively. In Vashj'ir, we ride into battle ready to face some Horde scum, and we are attacked by a kraken and almost die. When we cooperate, good things happen, and when we don't, bad things result. Perhaps that's the whole moral of WoW, that cooperation is good and needless conflict is bad. That could explain why we veteran players often complain about the damage wrought by faction conflict: we have already learned that moral, and to see new content that is still trying to teach it to us means the game is re-teaching us something we already know. When that thing we already know is a moral lesson, and the game tries to teach us that lesson through demonstration, watching those demonstrations of why faction conflict is bad long after we have realized this fact is just frustrating.

The curse of being genre savvy

This post contains spoilers revealed during the Lich King fight in Icecrown Citadel. At this point, I consider said spoilers to be fair game, but if you are trying to avoid them for some reason, you have been warned.

On my recent post about the seeming lack of panic in our post-Shattering world, Tesh of Tish Tosh Tesh left a comment which gave me quite a bit of food for thought:

"What strikes me as odd in the whole thing is that yes, it's later, but instead of prioritizing defeating the dragon, Varian and Garrosh are playing the whole "Orcs vs. Humans" game again.

I want a third, neutral faction for playable characters. The Horde and Alliance are both being led by dimwits."

Preach, brother! As I have said before, we can't influence our leaders in WoW the same way we can influence them in the real world, which leads to some very frustrating results as we see Azeroth suffer for their incompetence. In the face of these disappointments, it is tempting to wish we could strike out on our own, ignore this destructive faction conflict, and actually do some good for the world. It's tempting to wish such a thing, because we players are cursed with being genre savvy.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, genre savvy usually describes a character in a fictional universe who, if not knowing outright that they are in a work of fiction, at least know enough about the rules of that fictional universe to avoid some of the most common pratfalls characters in that universe would otherwise make. Scott from the Austin Powers series is a good example of a genre savvy character, endlessly mocking his father's overly elaborate plans, constantly asking why he doesn't take the simple routes that would guarantee him success. The Lich King is the closest thing World of Warcraft has to a genre savvy character (aside from the players, of course), in that he knows that if he lets "Azeroth's greatest champions" get stronger and more powerful by facing his best minions, they'll simply become even more powerful minions when he eventually kills them and enslaves them, making them even more useful. You can find more examples on the page linked to above if you still are a bit iffy on the concept.

So how does the idea of genre savvy play in to our frustration when we see the leaders of the Alliance and the Horde ignore the significant threats in favor of old conflicts that serve no purpose? As I mentioned briefly just now, we players are extremely genre savvy, pretty much by definition. After all, the definition of a genre savvy character is one who does all of the things the viewers know are the intelligent things to do in a given fictional situation, so you can't get much more genre savvy than the viewers themselves. As such, we knew that the conflict between the two factions is largely pointless and serves only to distract us from the more important threats, like Deathwing's return. We know this, and thus we are genre savvy, but our avatars do not, and thus they are not.

As I said in my post about the doomsday cultists who showed up before the Shattering, what we players know and what the characters we control know are two entirely different sets of knowledge, and this includes our knowledge about faction conflict. We know that the there is no reason to fight the Alliance or the Horde (depending on what side you play), because we know players on the other faction and know that they are good people too. Our avatars, however, are not privy to this knowledge, and their only experiences with the other faction are in battlegrounds, hardly the place for building camaraderie and friendship. It is this disconnect between our knowledge and the knowledge of our characters that creates the frustration we feel due to being genre savvy. Though we know what we know, we cannot impart our knowledge to our characters and make them act in a way that would be more conducive to a beneficial outcome. In other words, we cannot make our avatars genre savvy.

Now, this is typical of 99% of media. Most media simply doesn't contain particularly genre savvy characters, because those characters would know how to circumvent much of what creates tension and conflict in those universes, and the same can be said for WoW. And yet, as we control our characters going through this evolving world, we wish we could make our characters genre savvy. We wish we could do things like break off in to our own faction and make the world right again by disregarding faction conflict entirely. Yet this is not something I see as often in the communities surrounding other games. There are plenty of other video games that are story driven, with equally dedicated communities surrounding them, following their story lines with bated breath. Why don't they have the players of those games have the same reaction to genre-blind characters as we WoW players do to our game?

In my eyes, the biggest reason for this difference lies in the way that story is presented to us. Most games don't constantly evolve the way WoW does, with constant updates to the game and the story. In most games, the story is written, put together, and shipped complete to the customer, climax and all. All console games are like this; players simply experience a story that has already been written, and if they don't like it, tough, it's already been determined. In WoW, however, the story is constantly evolving right in front of us, and with as big of a community as WoW has, we often find out about changes to the story long before their consequences have been fully realized. If Cataclysm were a console game, we would boot it up, find out that Garrosh and Varian are acting really stupid, then experience the consequences of that as we play. As it is now, however, we see them being genre blind, and it pains us because it is happening now, and we know the consequences are going to be bad, but we can't do anything about it. Playing a console game with a plot determined long before the player starts playing is like watching a news story about an event that has just happened; we may not like what happens, but there's nothing we can do to change it. Watching the evolving story of WoW, however, is like watching live coverage of a tragedy half way across the world; we want to do something about it, and we think we can, because it is happening right now, but we are really powerless to change the course of events.

So not only are we cursed with genre savvy while our characters are not, but we are cursed to watch the story take place right before our very eyes and be unable to do anything about it. That is the true tragedy of being a WoW player who is invested in this game's storyline; we can only watch as the world goes to hell right before our very eyes, for we are powerless to do anything about it.

Why we'll probably never have neutral playable races in WoW

Anne Stickney's most recent Know Your Lore post on WoW Insider about the Pandaren got me thinking about something I often wished for in my earlier years as a WoW player: neutral playable races. The idea appealed to my carebear sensibilities (I am not ashamed to admit that I am a carebear); I didn't care for PvP, and I was also interested in seeing what the quests were like on the other side. I also thought the precedent was already there; we had the goblins of the Steamwheedle Cartel, who are certainly willing to ally with anyone for the right price (this was way before we knew that goblins were going to be the new Horde race). The furblogs of the Timbermaw tribe were also willing to trust anyone who earned their trust, and more recently, the tuskar seem to not be big on this whole faction conflict thing. The pandaren, too, would probably make a good neutral race. So there are (and were) certainly enough races to make it happen, so I thought, why not let me experience both sides at the expense of being able to engage in PvP?

Well, as I became more experienced with the game, the reasons why Blizzard couldn't do such a thing became more and more apparent to me. The most obvious reason why we couldn't have neutral races in the game is that PvP is just too integral a part of the game. Aside from the inevitable regret of players who rolled a character of a neutral race and then wished they could get into PvP, but couldn't, there's also the issue of PvP being required for some PvE oriented parts of the game. The neutral races would either be cut off from completing What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been due to not being able to complete the achievements that require killing other players, or they would have to be made exempt from completing those achievements to get the meta, which would cause the players who play non-neutral races to cry foul. Either way, cutting off a player from PvP would probably result in some form of complaining about the holiday PvP achievements, in addition to the player regretting his choice when he wanted to try out PvP, so that makes the possibility unlikely.

But issues of game mechanics aren't that difficult to overcome, and the precedent for a solution already exists with a mechanic found in Grizzly Hills. When killing the Frostpaw and Redfang furblogs for the quest A Possible Link, killing furblogs from one tribe causes you to be covered in their blood, making furblogs of the other tribe neutral towards you. Of course, killing a furblog from the other tribe switches the effect. Perhaps this could be applied to players of neutral races, as well. Upon killing enough Horde or Alliance NPCs (killing players could count, too, but players on PvE realms would be hard pressed to find enough players of the opposite faction to kill for this purpose), the neutral character would gain a temporary debuff that would decay in real time and allow them to fight for one side in battlegrounds, though at the loss of being able to interact with the other faction. Fighting in battlegrounds could reset the debuff for convenience sake, and allowing time to pass without fighting anyone would cause the debuff to fade, returning the character to his/her previous neutral state.

Of course, while the mechanics might exist to support the inclusion of neutral races, the lore precedents, to my knowledge, do not. Of all the neutral races and factions out there in WoW and the Warcraft universe, the ones I know of fall into one of two categories, neither of which players would fit in to:

1. Races that keep mostly to themselves. These include the aforementioned Pandaren, who, though they do occasionally ally with a member of one faction for some reason or other, don't do so on a large enough scale or often enough to draw the ire of the other faction. Players of neutral races, though, would be doing numerous quests for the Alliance and the Horde, rather than keeping to themselves. That's the draw of playing a neutral race, after all. As such, players would not be keeping mostly to themselves (or, as a logical extension, limit themselves to doing quests only for neutral factions), and this would inevitably draw the ire of whatever faction the player wasn't doing quests for.

2. Factions that gives quests to players from both sides. This category included the goblins of the Steamwheedle Cartel, in addition to many other factions like them. These factions work with players from both factions without drawing the ire of the Alliance or the Horde, so why couldn't they serve as a precedent for neutral races? The key thing that would differentiate these factions from players of neutral races is that these factions accept help from members of both the Alliance and Horde without declaring an allegiance to one or the other. The reason neither the Alliance nor the Horde are hostile towards the factions that fall in this category is that they simply have no reason to be; the factions in this category never help out nor hinder the Alliance or Horde. We players, on the other hand, would be helping out the Alliance and the Horde whenever we do a quest for them, so we wouldn't be so exempted from the ire of the main factions.

Now, while there are some factions that do offer assistance of some kind to both the Alliance and the Horde, these factions don't provide the precedent for neutral playable races. The dragons of the Wyrmrest Accord, for example, helped both sides during the battle at Angrathar the Wrathgate, but they did that at a rare moment of Alliance/Horde cooperation. The Cenarion Circle might seem to help both factions, but they really enlist the help of players from both factions to fight for a cause that benefits both factions equally. The fact is that most factions are recruiting members of both sides to their cause or to help them, rather than providing that help to factions of both players. Thus the precedent doesn't exist.

Of course, that doesn't mean we'll never see these supposedly neutral races as playable races. The goblins were once completely neutral, and now a new cartel of goblins is joining the Horde. There could be other lore events that cause one of the neutral races (furblogs; pandaren, even?) to ally with one side for convenience and safety's sake (likely whichever side helps them first), so who knows? Maybe in WoW's fifth expansion pack, we'll see two new races we never thought would ally with one side become playable.

On the origin of Alliance faction animosity

As you might already know if you have been reading my blog for a while, I hold no animosity towards the Horde and its players, and it seems I'm not the only one who doesn't, yet it seems the Horde holds a disproportionate amount of animosity towards us Alliance players. There has been quite of bit of speculation as to why this is, with explanations ranging from, "The Horde was once the minority, so they developed pride and resentment of the Alliance," to the surprisingly insightful, "The back stories revealed by their intro cinematics are much more about conflict and war than those of the Alliance." But either way, something about the imbalanced nature of faction animosity within the community makes me seriously wonder whether Blizzard could be doing a better job of encouraging it.

It's certainly no question that Blizzard does want there to be faction animosity in the game. That fact can plainly be seen by the fact that it's against the terms of use to engage in any attempt to speak with the other faction. Entry 9.B.viii states, "When engaging in Chat, you may not... Communicate directly with players who are playing characters aligned with the opposite faction (e.g. Horde communicating with Alliance or vice versa)..." Considering that verbal communication is what has allowed us human beings to progress as far as we have evolutionarily and is one of the defining aspects of our species, there are few more effective ways to dehumanize a group of people than to prevent communication with them (and, conversely, few more effective ways to humanize them then to allow communication with them). We can also see evidence of Blizzard trying to add some more faction animosity to the game by generally ramping up the Horde vs. Alliance conflict in Cataclysm by implementing quests that put the player at the front lines of this battle. Whether Blizzard is doing this to encourage war or to give the players the war they want is debatable, but if my poll is anything to go on, it appears the majority of players don't have any animosity for the other faction (I'm going to assume that those who play both sides don't have animosity for one of them, or else, why would they play both sides?)

So it seems Blizzard wants this animosity to exist, yet if the numbers are anything to go on, they haven't done that great of a job of making it happen. But perhaps the direct creation of animosity in the Alliance isn't their intention. Though I don't know much about lore, I know that when WoW first came out, the conventional wisdom was that the Alliance races all had their dark spots and weren't paragons of good, while most of the Horde races were just victims of unfortunate circumstances. It seems, however, that as WoW has continued, the Horde has been pulling ahead in terms of its place in the world. Sure, they've been through some hard times between everything Garrosh and Putress has brought on them, but the Horde players themselves have certainly moved up in the game. The fact that the faction balance is almost even should be evidence enough of that. Thus I propose a potentially radical theory: what if Blizzard wants the Alliance to feel like the victims now?

This possibility was brought to the forefront of my mind by one description of a quest on the Cataclysm beta:

The story [of the Worgen] from beginning to end is about unchecked, unbounded Forsaken aggression against a people who had never fought them, never attacked them, never tried to invade Lordaeron or claim lands held by them. The people of Gilneas had gone out of their way to avoid the Forsaken, and it was Sylvanas (and behind her, Garrosh Hellscream) directly attacking a neutral nation purely out of naked lust for conquest and territorial acquisition. By the time you're done playing a worgen through the starting zones, you will be ready to put orc babies on spikes. It may be the first time I've ever felt the factional hatred entirely from the game instead of from other players.

In my own comment on that post, I noted that the quest seems to parallel my own experiences with Horde animosity, which I have already detailed in the past. I also noted in my post that my experiences with Horde animosity had successfully created a bit of Alliance pride and Horde resentment in me; truth be told, they are the only thing that has ever managed to do so. Perhaps Blizzard has caught on to this phenomenon and is trying a new approach to create more Horde-oriented animosity within the Alliance, by making us the victims. I mean, it worked with the Horde, so it might work for us, too. Why would they want to create this Alliance animosity? Well, without animosity on both sides, any conflict between the two factions would be very one-sided, and the Alliance would likely view the whole thing as silly (as quite a few of us do now). Considering that the storyline of Cataclysm will be more focused on war than the storylines of expansions past, they need us to be ok with that war, and faction animosity is one way to make that happen.

Some actual numbers on faction animosity

A month-and-a-half ago, I posted a rant of sorts about how I, as an Alliance player, always felt marginalized by Horde players for my choice to play Alliance in spite of the fact that I held no such animosity towards them. Though I did my best to avoid generalizations in my post, I did fall into their alluring trap more than once, so I decided that, since my blog now has a readership and occasionally gets linked to by major sites (i.e. WoW Insider), that I would set up a poll to see how the two sides really view each other. The poll generated a moderately impressive (in my mind, at least) 76 votes before WoW Insider linked to my post on the absurdity of feat-of-strength panic, at which point the number of results in my poll instantly shot up to more than four hundred in one night. Now, with the other three polls I put on my blog in the past, I was only trying to get a better idea of what kind of players comprised my readership, so I never talked about them. This one, however, deserves some discussion.

The most obvious conclusion we can make the majority of those who voted who play Alliance exclusively do not hold any animosity towards the Horde at all. Almost sixty percent of Alliance players who voted in the poll are like me, and have no issue with Horde players. Among that remaining forty percent, there is an even split between those who feel superior to Horde players and those who flat-out dislike them. This data stands in pretty stark contrast to the votes from Horde players, who had an approximately one-third-each split between indifference towards Alliance players, feelings of superiority to Alliance players, and flat-out animosity, with slightly more players leaning toward hostility than indifference. This means the ratio of Horde voters who weren't indifferent to a player's faction choice to Alliance players who weren't indifferent to a player's faction choice was more than three to one. In other words, it seems the Horde voters were more than three times more likely to judge a player for choosing Alliance than the Alliance voters were to judge a player for choosing Horde.

What interested me more, though, was that players who play both factions were also almost evenly split between those who like the Alliance more, those who like the Horde more, and those who like them both equally (there was a slight leaning towards the Horde, but it was still much more even than I expected). While my initial impression was that this means that the two factions aren't that different after all, if that were the case, there would have been many more votes in the "I like both sides equally" option (an option which I just realized has a horrendous typo in it; the horror! the horror!). The fact that there was an even split tells me that the two sides are, in fact, quite different, but not different in such a way that one is clearly superior to the other. Which one voters like more seems to be just a matter of preference. While I'm quite interested in knowing what those who chose either the seventh or eighth option prefer about their respective preferred faction, we can't make any conclusions about that from the poll alone.

You'll notice that in discussing these numbers, I always talk about the people who voted in this poll rather than WoW players at large; that's because we can't make any significant conclusions about the general WoW-playing populace from this poll. The people who voted in the poll are comprised entirely of people who read WoW blogs, which is the only way they could find it in the first place, and are likely comprised mostly of people who read WoW Insider. While WoW Insider is a pretty faction-neutral website, the general attitude of the readership it cultivates could certainly have a big effect on how those readers voted when they came to my blog. After all, I have never seen many posts on WoW Insider encouraging people to have more faction pride and trying to cultivate faction animosity, while I'm sure there are other WoW websites that do encourage that kind of thing. There are probably also websites that cater to players of one specific faction and make no attempt to hide their animosity for the other faction, which would certainly cause their readership to be comprised mostly of people who would pick option one or option four in the poll. Had one of those less neutral websites linked to my blog instead of WoW Insider, the results of my poll could have been very different indeed.

Another hint that this poll doesn't reflect the general WoW-playing populace is that 24% of those who voted play Alliance exclusively, while 40% of those who voted play Horde exclusively, yet according to Warcraft Census, there is an almost even split between total Alliance characters and total Horde characters. If the poll truly reflected the general WoW-playing populace, then shouldn't those numbers have been closer? There must be some sort of explanation for the inconsistency. A few pop into my mind upon some basic reflection; the cause of the inconsistency between my poll's data and Warcraft Census's data could be any one of them or a combination of some of them.

One, voters who play both factions tend to have more Alliance characters. If this explanation alone accounted for the difference between my data and Warcraft Census's date, this would mean that, assuming Alliance voters, Horde voters, and double-dippers have the same average number of characters per an account, the double-dippers would need to have, on average, about seven Alliance characters for every two on their account, or two and a half for every one Horde character. While I could see this happening if the double-dipping voters liked Alliance players more, and thus favored the Alliance in general, the fact that the double-dipping voters seemed to like both factions equally makes this possibility unlikely in my mind.I f this possible explanation had any impact on my data, I predict that it was minimal.

Two, the Alliance voters have more characters per account than the Horde voters. By my data, if we assume that double-dipping voters have, on average, equal numbers of Horde and Alliance characters, then that means the Alliance voters would need to have almost twice as many characters per account as Horde voters, on average (the real number is closer to seven characters per Alliance account for every four on a Horde account, so like I said, almost twice as much). This is an explanation I find somewhat more believable; if the stereotypes about the Horde being a more close-knit community than the Alliance are true, there would probably be more incentive for a Horde player to keep playing his high-level character. A cohesive community means more successful raiding, giving the high-level character more longevity after he reaches the level cap, and if Horde players just like talking and being around each other more than Alliance players, well, they certainly don't need to roll a new character to do that. Conversely, if it's true that the Alliance tends to have a less cohesive community, that would imply that raiding would be less successful on the Alliance side, giving players less incentive to stick to one character and keep him well-geared. With less incentive to keep playing at the level cap, it's easy to see how Alliance players in this situation could find leveling alts more attractive than sticking with one character. Now, it would be a converse error to assume that, because these conclusions make sense, the assumption they are based on must make sense too, but it's still an interesting possibility to ponder.

Three, voters lied in their answers. Since the poll is anonymous, I don't imagine people would have been motivated to lie about which side they play, though I could see the subjectivity of answers seven through nine creating this unbalance. Allow me to elaborate: if being an Alliance player is viewed by the blog-reading community as being more shameful than being a Horde player, as my results seem to indicate, then perhaps the Alliance players who happen to have one Horde alt that they don't play all that often were more likely to vote as double-dippers than the Horde players who have one Alliance alt they don't play all that often. Conversely, if being a Horde player is something to be proud of, then perhaps Horde players who have one Alliance alt voted as full Horde players for that reason. If this were the case, however, it would mean that more of the double-dipping voters should have, theoretically, favored the Alliance, since that would mean that more of the double-dippers would have been players whose primary faction was the Alliance than players whose primary faction was the Horde. Since this wasn't the case, I don't find this explanation very likely.

The fourth explanation, and the most intriguing and likely one in my mind, is that players involved in the WoW blogosphere are more likely to be Horde players. This is certainly supported by the old stereotypes that Horde players are more serious about the game than Alliance players, since serious players are more likely to be involved in the WoW blogosphere and the WoW internet-community at large. After all, if they are serious about the game, they probably seek out information to help them become better players. Since many sources of information about WoW have associated communities (the comments section of blogs or the forums of informative websites), it's not a big jump to make that serious players are more likely to become involved in WoW-based communities than less serious players. It could also be that Horde players are more likely to be opinionated and seek out the opinions of others than Alliance players, since opinions are what differentiates blogs from other online WoW resources, like databases. This would certainly help to explain why Horde players seem to have more pride in their choices than Alliance players, since being opinionated would support that kind of pride.

Again, this is all conjecture, as we can't make any definite conclusions from this data alone. However, my own guess is that the inconsistency between my data and Warcraft Census's data could be explained by the fact that Alliance players are more likely to roll alts and/or the fact that there are more Horde players in the WoW blogosphere than Alliance players. Another poll could certainly tell us just how much that first possibility factors into the difference between my data and Warcraft census's data, but that would be too specific of a poll for my sensibilities, and the fact that it would involve a different pool of data (i.e. votes from different people) could lead to it telling us less about the original voters than we think it would. And truth be told, such information gathering is beyond the scope of this blog and my intent for it. I do these polls as a diversion from writing, and a follow-up poll like that would turn this issue from a diversion into a full-on project. While that might be something good to do to occupy my time in between now and Cataclysm (as well as giving me something to write about), it's not something on my radar for now. Maybe some day, though.

New poll: faction animosity

Having writen about the animosity between the Alliance and the Horde recently, I am now curious as to just how much the two factions really dislike each other. I know, the blog-reading WoW populace is hardly a good representative cross-section of the entire WoW-playing community, but considering the purposes of this poll (the satisfaction of my own curiosity, and perhaps the ability to speak accurately about the way my readers view the opposite faction), I don't think it needs to be exhaustively accurate. Anyways, there is now a new poll on the side of my blog asking which faction (or factions) you play and what your feelings are of players of the other faction. I would go into further detail, but I fear I will sway the results one way or another if I do, so I'm keeping this brief. You can expound upon your choice in the comment section on this post if you so wish.

For the Alliance! or: Why I'm proud to play the pretty faction

Allow me a bit of catharsis in today's post. The comments on Thursday's WoW.com breakfast topic about the possibility of cooperation between the two factions brought up many memories of being ridiculed by my "friends" for being an Alliance player, and even if the animosity I feel towards those who seem to have animosity towards me is unreasonable, it's time I finally get those thoughts all down on paper... er, cyberpaper, so I can finally let the topic go.

I play Alliance. Why do I play Alliance? Because Druids can only be two races: Night Elves, and Tauren. I use Shadowmeld more than I would use War Stomp. As a tank who has always liked taking less damage more than being able to take more damage before dying, I like Quickness more than I like Endurance. And while Cultivation would only prove beneficial to me while I was still leveling up herbalism, I'm never going to stop dying, so Wisp Spirit will always be useful. Thus I rolled a Night Elf, and now that all of my wealth is on the Alliance side, all of my alts are Alliance, too.

That's all there is too it: I like the Alliance racials more (Heroic Presence, Gift of the Naruu, Expansive Mind, Diplomacy, and Every Man for Himself speak for themselves), and I find the races and the architecture more pleasant to look at. And for some reason, making this choice has opened me to supposedly fully-excusable ridicule from those who choose to play as Horde characters. All because of some self-serving misconception Horde players have about Alliance players. What misconception, you might ask? The idea that the Alliance is full of little kids, trolls, and noobs, while the Horde is for the real players. I give no credit to this idea, for while I can't speak from personal experience, all of the people I have talked to who play both sides say that the two factions really aren't that different. Both have their jerks, both have their serious players, and at the end of the day, noobs will be noobs, whether they fly the Horde's banner or the Alliance's. It's also notable that all of the reports on wowjackass.com for my realm are about Horde players, which doesn't exactly make me eager to faction change for the community.

Besides this false idea of the relative qualities of the communities, there's also the idea that, because the Alliance are the "good guys" and Horde are the underdogs, somehow, everyone who plays Alliance does so because they believe they are the good guys, and that makes them acceptable targets. Considering the events that have transpired during Wrath of the Lich King and the events that are set to transpire during Cataclysm, the Horde are quickly losing their underdog label and gaining the "just plain evil" label, making it much harder to be sympathetic towards them as a faction. But for the longest time, the two factions were approximately equal in terms of the potential for player sympathy for them. The Alliance was hardly a spotless group, and the Horde really were just underdogs.

But while those new to the game may have easily mistaken the Alliance for good guys and the Horde for bad guys, there is one undeniable fact that favors the Horde; when the game was first released, the Horde races was much more badass than the Alliance races. So while it's easy to make fun of people who picked the Alliance because they thought they were the good guys, it's just as easy to make fun of people who picked the Horde because the Horde races were more badass, and I would imagine there were many players who did that. Both reasons are equally inane as reasons to dislike the other faction, so the idea that the Alliance are the good guys, and thus Alliance players are acceptable targets, is hardly a convincing point.

However, what really irks me about the Horde vs. Alliance mentality is something that WoW.com commenter Ophelia captured quite when when he/she wrote in a comment on that breakfast topic I mentioned before:

Ouch. The replies to this post make me want to bury my head in the sand for playing Horde. Seriously, guys? :|

"I think we should get along. I have no dislike for you :3"

"WE R TEH WHOOREDD~~!!111ONE ALLIANCE PANZZYYY~~!!"

Oi [sic] vey.

Oy vey, indeed. Somehow, the unique combination of elements within World of Warcraft has created an Alliance community that has little animosity for the Horde community and a Horde community that looks down on the Alliance community with the utmost condescension and ridicule. (If you are a Horde player who has no such thoughts about Alliance players, please don't comment just to say that you don't hate the Alliance; I know that many Horde players, possibly most, don't hold this kind of animosity. Unfortunately, the most vocal members of your community do, as does every single Horde player I have ever met in real life.) And somehow, in this community where the Horde freely disses the Alliance while the Alliance does not provoke the Horde, the Horde still views themselves as the underdogs, the ones who made the less popular choice, which is why they feel justified in having this attitude.

With all due respect, Horde players, give me a break. When was the last time an Alliance player ever showed the kind of disrespect or flat out aggression towards a Horde player that Horde players show to us on a regular basis? I have never seen a single bit of animosity towards players who choose to play as the Horde, and the only time I ever heard Alliance players mention the Horde is to say either, "They keep beating us at [X battleground]," or "I've been thinking of transferring to the Horde." We Alliance players view the Horde as just another group of players, albeit one we cannot communicate with in-game, while the Horde seems to dislike us and somehow perceive themselves as the downtrodden ones. Maybe that's why this issue is so irksome for me; the Alliance-hating Horde players seem to think that we somehow deserve their hatred, and yet we have done nothing to deserve it.

I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that the Horde has much more pride in itself than the Alliance; the same conditions that would lead to a dislike of the Alliance would natural lead to the creation of faction pride on the part of the Horde, so it's not a jump to say that the lack of animosity towards the Horde on the part of the Alliance and the lack of faction pride on the part of the Alliance would go hand in hand. However, in the face of all of the negative reactions I get when I proclaim that I play the Alliance, I am beginning to develop a bit of Alliance pride. Now, it's not the fact that I chose to play Alliance that I am proud of. My Alliance pride is the same kind of pride that a woman develops when she is told she is of the inferior gender, or an African American develops when he/she is told he/she is of an inferior race, or a gay man or lesbian develops when he/she is told that he/she has an inferior sexuality. The pride I am developing is not pride in the fact that I chose to play as an Alliance race; it is pride in the fact that, though I am told constantly that my choice was the inferior one, I am at peace with my choice. I am not proud to be an Alliance player; I am proud to be at peace with my choice in spite of the overwhelming pressure to regret it.

To what does Blizzard owe their loyalty: the player-base, or the lore?

I know I usually post my philosophy posts on Friday, but this edition of WoW.com's Know Your Lore really got me thinking about an issue I am now so eager to write about that it just can't wait, leaving me no time to work on my miscellany post, so my miscellany post will need to go on the back burner until Friday. That's just the way the cookie crumbles.

Anyways, the post in question talks about the history of Thrall, Garrosh Hellscream, and the politics of the horde in general. What really got me thinking was the final point brought up by Anne Stickney's amazing post: the reason Thrall is losing control of the horde, and the reason Garrosh will gain control in Cataclysm, is that Thrall is an orc with human tendencies, while Garrosh is an orc with orcish tendencies, and to the orcs, his way of going about recent WoW politics is much more akin to their nature, as opposed to Thrall's peaceful diplomacy. Thing is, it was Thrall's human-like ways that made the players so sympathetic with him. Players love him because of his identity as a "noble savage," but that made them forget what the orcs truly are. Players hate Garrosh because he is the exact opposite of Thrall; he is the opposite of everything that made it possible for players to fall in love with a race of savages in the first place. That, however, makes his ideals much more in line with what an orc would actually believe. Put simply, Thrall is everything the players wish the orcs could be, while Garrosh is everything the orcs wish they could be.

This will make things difficult when Cataclysm comes along and Garrosh becomes the new Warchief. While the orcs are struggling with their inevitable civil war between those who believe in Thrall's peaceful ways and those who believe in Garrosh's truly-orcish ways (that's Stickney's prediction, anyways), players will be fighting their own battle, too. It may be an internal conflict, but it will be a conflict nonetheless. While I can't imagine what it must be like to be a loyal Horde player and know that this is going to happen, I'd imagine the hordies (orc-players in particular) would be caught between two options: one, stay loyal to the horde, even if it wasn't exactly what they thought it was or could be; or two, leave the horde (switch races or maybe even factions) and show no support for this not-so-new horde. (I say not-so-new because, according to Stickney, Garrosh personifies what the orcs always were, so while his violent tendencies are new to us players, they are not new in general.) I know that's probably more role-play-ish thinking than most people will apply to this situation, but if my watching the WoW.com comments sections has taught me anything, it's that Horde players love them some Thrall, and I'd imagine they also love the things he stands for.

This brings me to the dilemma I want to look at. By putting Garrosh in power, Blizzard will be advancing the lore of Warcraft in a believable way. Though Thrall's ideals were nice, he was raised by humans, and they are, in the end, human ideals. The Horde couldn't keep up the pretense of following those ideals for very long, so Garrosh going into power is really the only logical conclusion of the events that have lead up to this point in the lore. The one difficult point is that the players, the driving force behind many of the contemporary events of Warcraft, hate Garrosh. Unless they are really willing to suspend their real-world sensibilities and take up the mind-set of an orc, players simply can't identify with Garrosh. One of the things that made the Horde so attractive as a faction was that they were not the typical bad guys; they were really just victims. Under Garrosh's leadership, however, we can expect the Orcs, if not the whole Horde, to become a much more violent, impulsive, and generally villainous group. This would take away much of what made the Horde popular in the first place, and take away almost all of the sympathy players have for the Garrosh-following Orcs. It would make playing an Orc... difficult, to say the least.

However, I am not here to argue Thrall vs. Garrosh vs. Basic Campfire; this debate is simply an example of the real dilemma I want to look at, a dilemma that can best be worded thusly: Should Blizzard be more loyal to their fan-base or their lore? As much as it pains me to say this, I think that, in matters of story, Blizzard owes their loyalty to the lore, not us players. I say that it pains me because it means that I inherently agree with Garrosh being promoted to Warchief, but that's just the way it has to happen if Blizzard is going to stay loyal to the lore.

One might say that, since we pay Blizzard to keep this story going, they should think about what we want when they write the story, but one could just as easily say that it's the story that justifies the game existing in the first place, so we really owe it to the lore to let it evolve naturally. Also, to expect the epic storyline of Warcraft to follow the whims of what we players want just because we supply the money to keep the story going would make us no better than studio executives who stifle an artist's creativity for the purpose of making a work potentially more profitable. (Executive meddling, as it's called.) Now, granted, the contention that Blizzard should tailor their story to what we players like could be differentiated from executive meddling by saying that we players are only looking out for our own enjoyment, while studio executives are trying to maximize their profits, which surely must be a less ethical motivation. Regardless, the outcome is the same--art is watered down to appease the masses--so I see no practical difference between the two.

Of course, disproving a contention doesn't prove its opposite, so why should Blizzard remain loyal to the lore, rather than the players? How about this: video games are art. Though many don't see them that way, video games are a medium, especially when they involve a story as long, involved, and epic as Warcraft's. As an art form, it is the responsibility of a game like WoW to challenge our perceptions, our beliefs, and make us ask questions about ourselves. Promoting Garrosh to Warchief will certainly accomplish all three of these purposes. We already know that our perceptions of the orcs as a race capable of human ideals of peace and diplomacy could be false, and Garrosh's promotion will cement the breaking of that idea. While we may believe that it would be better for the orcs to try to be more like Thrall, we may be deceiving ourselves by thinking that is possible. So what questions will this plot point make Horde players ask themselves? Many, certainly, and interesting ones at that: Do I feel comfortable with this not-so-new Horde? Will the loyalty I've developed to what was largely an illusion carry me through this part of Warcraft's story? Can I follow a leader with few qualities I find redeeming? Is the Horde becoming the villain, and am I ok with that? I'd be surprised if there aren't already players asking these very questions.

But what if Thrall stayed in power and Garrosh remained an underling or was booted out entirely? That really wouldn't do us any good. Considering how fickle the fan-base can be, to base the plot of Warcraft's story on the whims of the masses would result in a largely unbelievable story that would probably not satisfy the player-base anyway. If Blizzard keeps Thrall in power, then all of the previous lore about the orcs is worth nothing. Considering all that has lead to this moment, keeping Thrall in power would be even more of an odd move than putting Garrosh in his place. Blizzard would be betraying their lore, their fans, and themselves if they kowtowed to the desires of the players to not be lead by Garrosh.

As I said, though, this logical conclusion leaves us with many unsettling questions that make the future uncertain. Will the player-base move away from the Horde as an act of rebellion against Garrosh's rule, or will they continue playing as if it isn't happening? Will players be able to ignore the forced revelation of the Orcs' true nature, or will they adapt and adopt Garrosh's philosophy? All we can be sure of is that Cataclysm will surely bring about great changes to this game we all love, and the way we respond to them will likely shape the plot of the game and the entire Warcraft saga. It's going to be an interesting expansion.

About me

I decided to finally write this post, since its really silly to not have an introduction of some sort in my blog. My WoW name is Ardol, my real name is Owen, and this post is about me.

Note: My blogger name was once O-Digga, so any comments that appear by that name are mine.

History of Ardol
My first character was an undead warrior. I decided to be a warrior class after I had seen an episode of Cheat on G4 about WoW and they recommended a warrior for anyone starting out, since they could take a lot of damage. Some of my newbie-er habits included only having one quest in my quest log at a time (so that I could focus on it) and selling my ore and skins to vendors (I didn't know about the AH). I got him to level 13, and when I joined a guild, I saw that the GM was a rogue. I had heard all about how awesome rogues were, so I rolled a troll one. He only got to level 8, when I decided to try a paladin, since Cheat had referred to them as a hybrid class, and I knew I wanted to be a hybrid. He was very boring, though, so I dropped him and rolled a hunter on a new server with one of my friends. He was alliance, so rolling on that server made my transition from horde to alliance complete. I got my hunter to 22 before my friend left the server and I decided to reroll to start fresh. I left the horrors of the RPPvP server and rolled a druid. I played my druid on and off and simultaneously sampled every class in the game before realizing that the druid class was for me. It took me a year and a half from when I started playing to get him to 70 (he was 46 when BC came out).

What attracted me to the druid class was the idea that they could tank and DPS with one spec, and since I wanted to be a hybrid, this was perfect for me. I leveled my druid feral and only had a brief fling with resto during BC. Aside form that, I was feral only until dual specs came out, when I made my second spec resto and put together a healing set. Since then, the healer shortage on my realm has become a tank shortage, so I have shifted my focus from healing back to tanking, a focus I will probably retain through Cataclysm unless healers are in short supply again. For the longest time, my healing set was better than my tank set, but now my tank set is better than my healing set, since that's the one I focused on after the healing shortage became a tank shortage again.

Why the name Ardol? Well, when I rolled my hunter, I named him Arder. Don't ask why; I thought it was cool. When I rerolled, the name was taken, so I chose Ardol instead. Why do I keep it? Meh, I'm too lazy to change it, even though I have a shaman named Ollendi so I'll always have that name reserved in case I ever decide to spend the ten bucks. (If you don't understand why I want "Ollendi," just read it aloud. Still don't get it? It reads, "I'll end thee." I know, it's a name more suited for a PvP'er, but like Arder, I thought it was cool.)

History of Owen
Due to the inherent risk in putting anything too personal online, I will simply tell you that I am currently a full-time student studying mathematics. I play video games in my spare time, including WoW and Rock Band, and I also enjoy biking, reading, drumming, and, of course, philosophy.

Achievements I am proudest of:

5. Cooking with Style 10 (11-15-2009)

4. Hail to the Chef 10 (02-13-2009)
3. Traveler's Tundra Mammoth 10 (11-08-2009)

2. Lil' Game Hunter 50 ( 11-22-2009)

1. What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been 50 02-15-2010

What I think Wrath of the Lich King did right

Judging by my previous philosophy posts (this one and this one), you can probably guess that I feel that Wrath of the Lich King is a fairly flawed expansion pack. That said, there are very few dark clouds with no silver linings (just as there are very few silver clouds with no dark linings... work with me people), so I want to talk about what I think Wrath did correctly and talk about all of the good things it did for WoW, and believe me, there are many.

Although I do believe that Burning Crusade was not as bad for class balance as people say it was (see my second post that I linked above), it was far from perfect, as any feral DPS who tried to move beyond tier 4 content will tell you. When Wrath was released, all of the classes found themselves on more or less equal footing. Sure, its still not perfect, and death knights were pretty overpowered when they first came out, but any veteran player will readily tell you that class balance is a hell of a lot better than it used to be. In fact, in the class Q&A's, Blizzard flat-out admitted that class balance was not a concern of theirs in vanilla WoW. Luckily for all of us, that has changed.

I also think that championing was a good addition to the game. It allows for much more flexibility in how one gets to exalted with a faction, and it forces Blizzard to make dungeons interesting, rather than requiring players to run certain difficult or boring dungeons in order to get rep with a certain faction. (Steamvaults, I am looking at you.) It also allows players to choose to run dungeons based on gear, and though that could be seen as a way to force players to run a certain dungeon, at least there is more flexibility in gear than there is when it comes to factions. You can't really make the comparison between gear and factions, since you can eventually replace your gear from heroics, but certain reputation items like head enchantments remain necessary no matter how good your gear gets. As such, getting reputation with factions is less negotiable than getting good gear, so making the factions easier to get exalted with is a good change in my book.

An even bigger change, however, was the switch to make all raid dungeons either 10- or 25-man. This allowed players to run raids the way they want to, and allows more casual players to see the content. Like I implied above, it's a really good idea for Blizzard to try to make content for as many players as possible, and having two versions of each dungeon prevents players from needing to overcome the raiding hump encountered in Burning Crusade, where many guilds couldn't make the jump from 10-man Karazhan to 25-man Gruul's Lair. Thanks to Wrath of the Lich King, they don't need to make such a jump.

Another good thing I think Wrath brought to WoW was the addition of hard modes, which I already covered in this post. To give you the TLDR version, the presence of hard modes allows more players to see content without taking away the challenge that hard-core raiders look for in their raids. As I said in the first post mentioned in the first paragraph, many of the changes in Wrath seem to have been aimed at getting players in raids sooner, and the idea of making raids challenging but not difficult while allowing hard-core players to still have their difficult content definitely fits in with this idea. It allows more players to see the content that Blizzard put so much effort into making, which makes sense from a business standpoint; after all, why spend so much time on something so few players will see?

As for achievements, while I don't see them as a particularly outstanding addition, I do feel they added something positive to the game. If nothing else, they give players something to do, and reward them for doing things in the game. Thanks to the achievements, raiding and PvP are no longer the only ways to gain titles. (I wear my chef title with pride.) They also make it easier to look back on your past accomplishments and feel proud of them, since you have a tangible manifestation and record of said accomplishments that you can peruse with ease. Besides, if nothing else, that ding makes everything feel a bit more satisfying.

So there you go. I have opened up and shown that my opinions are not as one-sided as my previous posts seem to suggest. That said, I am looking forward to Cataclysm because many of the features being added will change many things I perceive as flaws with Wrath of the Lich King, like Path of the Titans, which will give solo-players a way to make their characters more powerful, and Reforging, which will give the armor-making professions some use again. Yep, it's going to be a good time.

How to level Northrend reputations without championing

As I mentioned in my last advice post, it is possible to get exalted with all of the Northrend factions without entering an instance. The easiest way to gain reputation with many of these factions is championing, wherein you where the tabard of the faction you are championing in a level-80 5-man instance and gain reputation with them as a result. However, this approach requires to you have good gear (the main purpose of raising your reputations) and be subjected to PUGs, which are really hit and miss. This guide is concerned with getting exalted with each of the Northrend reputations, including the ones that can be championed, without resorting to championing. Some are harder than others, but it is possible to get exalted with all of these factions without entering an instance, and that's what this post concerns.

Alliance Vanguard/Horde Expedition
These two are pretty easy. The Silver Covenant/Sunreavers dailies that you get from the Argent Tournament are one way to raise your rep. You can also do the dailies on your faction's floating ship in Icecrown, The Skybreaker and Orgrim's Hammer, respectively. That should be enough for you to get exalted in a timely manor.

Argent Crusade
This faction used to be much harder to reach exalted with without championing, but it's easier now. Before, the only repeatable way to get Argent Crusade rep was the daily Troll Patrol, but now the Argent Tournament quests also give Argent Crusade rep, making this grind much easier. If you are a Death Knight, however, then the Argent Tournament quests with give you rep with the Knights of the Ebon Blade, leaving Troll Patrol as your only option.

Frenzyheart Tribe/The Oracles
Nothing special here; just do the dailies.

Kirin Tor
Whoo-boy! This is not an easy faction to get exalted with without championing. Make sure you use wowhead to find all of their one-time quests so you can make this grind as short as possible. Once you have exhausted that option, you have only three left to you:
1. Fishing dailies (given by the Dalaran fishing trainer)
2. Cooking dailies (given by the Dalaran cooking trainers)
3. Jewelcrafting dailies (given by the Dalaran jewelcrafting trainer)
If you ever needed an excuse to level your cooking and fishing, here it is. You can also watch the auction house for a Sealed Vial of Poison, which can be turned in for 250 rep, but it is really expensive (at least on my server) and uncommon, so don't count on buying a lot of these for easy rep.

Knights of the Ebon Blade
Once you complete their Icecrown questlines, the Knights of the Ebon Blade will have two areas with dailies for them. Three dailies can be found in the Shadow Vault in northern Icecrown. Three more can be found on Death's Rise, a little ledge part-way down the cliff southwest of Jotunheim. Doing all of them will net you 1500 rep a day. If you are a Death Knight, then the Argent Tournament quests will also net you Ebon Blade rep, making this grind much faster.

The Kalu'ak
This little faction does have some nice goodies to reward those who get exalted with it. They have quests in Borean Tundra, Howling Fjord, and Dragonblight, and each area has a Kalu'ak daily quest, each of which gives you 500 rep. The daily quests are unlocked as you complete the questline in each area. You can use the turtle boats to shuttle between the three areas if you don't want to spend the money to fly there.

The Sons of Hodir
In order to even start gaining rep with these guys, you need to do a long quest chain starting with They Took Our Men! Once you finish the quest chain, you can do dailies to get rep with the Sons of Hodir, and you unlock more as your rep gets higher. Individual quests will unlock similar dailies, so make sure you do all of the one-time quests they offer. You can also look for Everfrost Chips in The Storm Peaks, which can be turned in for Sons of Hodir rep, as can Relics of Ulduar, which can be bought on the Auction House.

The Wyrmrest Accord
Aside from their one-time quests, these guys have three dailies you can do. Two are in Coldarra in Borean Tundra, and one is in Dragonblight. The two low-level ones are unlocked after quests, but the level-80 one can be started almost immediately. They are Drake Hunt, Defending Wyrmrest Temple, and Aces High!
Note: Aces High! starts with the quest Corastrasza, which is started in the Transitus Shield, the same area where you start Drake Hunt.

There you have it! Some factions are easier than others to gain rep with without championing, but only the Kirin Tor is really difficult. Good luck!

How to pick a side hobby

WoW is a big game. There is a lot to do in this game, and though you should experience all of it in some respect, it's good to have one activity to fall back on when you just want to pass some time. Raiding, battlegrounds, and arenas are nice focuses for your game, but when you have a few hours before your guild's Ulduar run is scheduled to start or your full arena team isn't on yet, it's nice to have something to do on your own. That's what this post is concerned with; side hobbies. Here I will discuss various side activities and whether or not you will find them fun. I will also link the associated meta-achievement or max achievement.

Pet Collecting
Non-combat pets are those little companions that follow you around wherever you go. They are quite nice as a flavor item, and as a pet-collector myself, I can tell you that collecting them is an enjoyable pastime. In the days of pre-Wrath, when pets took up space in our inventory, pet-collecting was not a very lucrative hobby. Each pet you had took up one space in your bank or bags, thus making them rather cumbersome. With the new pets interface, that has changed for the better, and you can now have as many pets as you like without running out of bag space.

One of the nice things about collecting pets is the variety of activities involved in pet collecting. Some are gained through reputations, while others must simply be ground for. (I think that's the past tense version of grind. Edit: Confirmed) Many holiday events also give you a pet of some kind, which gives you even more motivation to participate in them. It you want a more focused activity with a more tangible reward, then you may not like pet collecting. Then again, most of these activities won't have tangible rewards. If you want to do something with valuable rewards, run some 5-mans or do some dailies. Also, pet collecting isn't something that you can really brag about, so if you want a hobby that will bring you fame and glory, look elsewhere. It's a shame that you can't display more than one pet at a time, but it is still nice to have many to choose from, especially when a pet showoff session happens in your raid. In the end, if you like varied activities with frequent rewards, pet collecting is a good choice for you. A good database for the dozens of pets available in the game is WarcraftPets.com.

Mount Collecting
Mounts are an important part of the game. They get you from point A to point B faster than hoofing it on foot will, and some even allow you to fly. Thus, collecting them can become a fun pastime. Since mounts are a good deal larger than pets, it's easier to show off your rare mounts than your rare pets. Like pets, mounts once took up space in your bags, which means you wouldn't want to have more than two; one for the ground and one for flight. The new pets interface also has a pane for mounts, which makes collecting them even easier.

Unlike pets, mounts often take more effort to get but come in groups. For example, many mounts require long reputation grinds, but once you finish those grinds, you get six or eight mounts that you can buy. Some mounts are also rare dungeon drops and take even longer to farm than rare pets. Of course, this means that getting one of those mounts can be a real status symbol. If you want something that requires more effort than pets but has more impressive rewards, mount collecting could be for you. Warcraftmounts.com is a good database for mount collectors.

Completing Old-world Quests
There is a lot of lore to be found in WoW, and most of it is found in the quests. Some give you engrossing storylines that also motivate you to go through those old-world dungeons that you missed, while others are just plain fun. Of course, some will make you pull your hair out with their low drop rates, but overall, old-world quests are worth doing. They give you reputation to help you get your crusader title, and though the money you make with them may not off-set the repair bills you build up, it's still worth seeing what you missed if you decided to grind through your levels like I did.

It can be difficult to remember which zones you cleared out in terms of quests, as well as which quests you did that were started by a zone drop. This can lead to long hours spent searching zones for quests you already did or grinding for items you already got. Still, doing old-world quests is really it's own reward. These quests were put in the game for you, so you may as well try them out. Although I don't know of any resources that allow you to see which quests you have already done, I know that wowhead is a great resource for finding quests that you may not have known about.

Exploration
Filling out your in-game map is a simple task that lets you see parts of the world you may not have seen otherwise. You will probably complete some of the exploration-related achievements by doing all of the old-world quests, but exploring for its own sake can also be rewarding. Aside from the title and tabard, you also get to see all of the effort the art team put into this game. Although, to be honest, aside from Jenkins, The Explorer is one of the most unimpressive titles in the game. Just saying...

Fishing
Although I did list the meta fishing achievement, fishing in general is a fun activity. You get to catch fish which can be turned in valuable food for raids, as well as some other interesting things. It's a relaxing activity that I myself enjoy a lot. In the olden days, fishing was less rewarding than it is now and was only a source of food. You may have been lucky enough to win the Stranglethorn Fishing Contest or fish up the 1 Ring, but aside from that, fishing was rather one-dimensional. These days, not only is fishing a source of some fantastic buff food, but you can also strike at rich with the dailies involved in fishing.

One of the nice things about fishing is that it's low key and peaceful (for the most part), and thus won't incur any repair bills. It's also possible to fish while waiting for other things. You can fish on a dock while waiting for a boat or fish next to a dungeon while waiting for your group to get there. Fishing is one of the few activities that you can do almost anywhere, making it quite a versatile hobby. If you seek something more action oriented, then fishing isn't for you. Also, though there are a variety of locations you can fish in and things you can catch, the basic motions are still the same. Still is you want something relaxing to do that you can do almost anywhere, you'll like fishing. A fantastic resource for fishing is El's Extreme Anglin', which has information on anything and everything fishing related.

Reputations
This is probably the most time-consuming hobby in the list. Many people grind reputation to some extent, but some are obsessive about it. Some get try to get exalted with as many factions in the game as they can. The rewards of reputation grinds aren't as great as they used to be, but back in the old days, you could acquire many things by being liked by the right people. There are also some reputations that don't really have great rewards, but people still grind them just so they can have another "Exalted" on their reputation tab. Those of you with no life could also go for Insane in the Membrane, if you really think it's worth it.

Although the ways you gain reputation with different factions vary quite a bit, they all have one thing in common: they take a long time. Grinding reputations as a hobby is not for those who play casually. This is an activity for those who really have nothing else to do and who just want to do something that takes a long time. Again, I don't know of any resources specifically for grinding reputations, but wowhead can probably help you. WoWWiki also has some good guides on effectively grinding various reputations.


It's worth noting that some of these hobbies bleed into one another. For example, pet collectors trying to get the Mechanical Chicken will need to do the old-world Distress Beacon quests, and as I mentioned, doing old-world quests will fill out a large portion of your map. You can also gain some of the rarest pets in the game by fishing. And, of course, many factions gives pets and mounts, so you will probably need to grind some reputations for those two hobbies.

So there you have it! Whatever your hobby may be, just remember to enjoy it. There's no point in playing WoW if you aren't having fun.

On the homogenization of Wrath of the Lich King solo content

If Burning Crusade was Blizzard's attempt to homogenize World of Warcraft in some way, Wrath of the Lich King was their success. We could see the beginnings of homogenization in BC: all elemental items were now primal [element], which were obtained by combining motes; starter gear could be obtained from badges of justice, gotten from any heroic instance; and many reputation grinds were done in instances, not by grinding various mobs. (There were exceptions, of course.) We also saw the advent of dailies, a reliable, albeit repetitive way to make money. Class balance was brought into sharper focus and actually attempted by Blizzard, and most classes had something unique to bring to the raid. Profession balance also become a concern, and Blizzard tried to give every profession something special to make it different from the rest and worth taking.

The problem with Blizzard's design philosophy during BC was that it was near impossible to keep all these things balanced. Some reputation grinds were immensely harder than others with worse rewards, some classes were more useless than others in raids (although, as I discussed here, I think that was a mistaken assumption), and some professions were much more useful to the crafter than others. Despite their best intentions, Blizzard wasn't able to balance everything in BC, but it was certainly a start.

Wrath of the Lich King changed all that. "Bring the player, not the class" became Blizzard's new design philosophy. Their goal was to make each class equally viable so that raids would choose to bring people based on the player's skills, not their class and spec. It was a noble pursuit, and for the most part, it was successful. Frost mages still fall behind in DPS and ret paladins were overpowered for some time, but most classes were on equal footing. Not only were the classes now performing more or less equally, but they were also given new abilities that had been exclusive to other classes for the longest time. For example, Leader of the Pack was one of the main draws of bringing a feral druid to raids. With the release of Wrath, however, warriors were given the same ability. This was one of many examples of class exclusive buffs being given to other classes. With these new buffs was added a new buff mechanic: identical buffs no longer stack. If you bring a feral druid with LotP and a fury warrior with Rampage, your raid members will only get a 5% bonus to their melee crit chance, not a 10% chance. Since buffs like these were also made raid-wide, there was no longer a benefit to bring multiple members of the same class to give the same buffs to different groups in your raid. Thus many classes lost the unique things they had previously brought to raids, and these buffs became viewed as mandatory, rather than a nice bonus to bringing along an atypical DPS'er to your raids.

Blizzard wasn't done there, though. They made reputation grinds more similar as well. Most factions now have their own dailies which grant rep, and for some you can also don their tabard and gain rep from any heroic or level 80 instances you enter. Compared to the old days where only certain instances gave rep with certain factions, this gives players much more flexibility in how they gain rep. I have bad memories of grinding Steamvaults to get rep for my Earthwarden. It was not a fun instance, and the only thing that kept in bearable was the fact that it dropped two pieces of the hunter dungeon set, as well as two pieces of the mage set, so I had a constant supply of DPS. With the advent of Warth, you can now run any instance you like and gain rep, allowing you to choose to run easy ones or ones which drop gear you want. All these changes makes grinding reputation easier, and as a result, the rewards from reputation grinds are less remarkable. Still pretty good, but not as remarkable.

It was worth it, though.

Speaking of dailies, they became a lot more prevalent in Wrath. Once the exclusive right of those with flying mounts, these repeatable quests were revered for the amount of money you could make with them. (120g was a lot back in those days) With patch 2.4, new dailies were added with the Isle of Quel'Danas, as well as the cooking, fishing, and PvP dailies, all of which did not require a flying mount. There were now dailies for everyone, but they were still a distinct, separate part of the game.

Nowadays, dailies are everywhere. Almost every faction has daily quests now, and most of what you do at level 80 that doesn't involve a group involves daily quests. Trouble is, there are only really two rewards from daily quests: rep and money. Once you have gotten your rep as high as you can with the various factions, the only reason to do dailies is for the money. (With the exception of the Argent Tournament dailies, that is, which also reward Champion's Seals, but those are incredibly boring. Patch 3.2 can't come soon enough.) The problem with this is that the different sets of dailies award vastly different amounts of money, so unless you have a lot of time to spend on them, you're only going to spend your time doing the ones that reward the most money. Thus you spend your time doing the same dailies over and over and over again, and unfortunately, they haven't got any more fun since Burning Crusade. Since there weren't as many dailies in Burning Crusade, they didn't need to be as fun and varied, and yet Blizzard still put in the effort to make them interesting. Now we have more dailies than we could ever have dreamed of, and yet Blizzard hasn't tried too many new things with them. I'd even go as far as saying they are less fun than they were before. Perhaps I just have rose-tinted glasses, but I miss the days of Bomb Them Again! and Disrupt the Greengill Coast. The only daily that really compares is Thrusting Hodir's Spear, though it is a pretty awesome quest.

Yes, that dwarf is in the dragon's mouth. This quest is a far better reward for getting honored with the Sons of Hodir than those shoulder enchantments are.

Burning Crusade also brought a lot of changes to professions that made them more viable and useful. However, this caused a lot of players to take professions only for their own self benefit and drop them when they were no longer useful. (Case in point: tailoring and leatherwoking had good starter armor for raiding that only the crafter could equip, but this armor was quickly made obsolete by raid drops.) When Wrath was released, the crafter only benefits were radically changed. There was no more starter-set BoP crafter armor and many of the old exclusive benefits were removed or made less useful (Example: with the advent of potion sickness, which prevents people from using more than one potion per battle, the Alchemist's Stone and its upgrades lost much of their appeal.) New items were added to most of the professions that gave stat bonuses that were exclusive to the crafter. They weren't that exclusive, though, in that with the exception of tailoring and engineering, they all give more or less the same stat benefits. The only thing that differs is how those benefits are conferred; enchanters get exclusive ring enchantments, leatherworkers get bracer enchantments that are better than the equivalent enchantments, jewelcrafters get gems which are better than the gems they can give to everyone else, alchemists gain improved effects from their elixirs and flasks, blacksmiths get to add extra gems to their gear, and inscribers get shoulder enchantments that are better than their Sons of Hodir counterparts. And unlike in the days of BC, these effects no longer apply to you if you drop the profession, so you can't level up each profession and then drop them to get all of their buffs on your gear, which most min-max'ers did back in the day.

What this means is that, with the exception of tailoring's cloak enchants and all of the engineering benefits being added in 3.2, professions are now less about what they give you and more about what you can give others. The unfortunate part of this is that some professions just aren't as useful as others. Alchemy sees a lot more use than leatherworking, and ditto for enchanting compared with tailoring. More importantly, the professions are all much more similar now. That's really the point I am getting at with this post: everything is much more similar in Wrath of the Lich King. Everything has been streamlined, simplified, and almost dumbed down.

How you acquire your profession's recipes is a perfect example of this change. With rare exception, all recipes for all of the professions are either obtained from a trainer or obtained from another NPC by trading for them with some sort of token or material you usually use. New research mechanics have also been added, but these are guaranteed to give you a new recipe, unlike the days of BC when you could discover a new recipe every time you made something. Gone are the days of checking wowhead to see which vendors strewn over the land sell recipes or plans that you need to buy. Factions also play less of a role in our professions. Maybe I feel that more than others because I am an enchanter and we get no recipes from faction quartermasters, but I find it a bit disappointing that getting all of our recipes is so simple and... well, boring.

That's really my main problem with the homogenization of Wrath of the Lich King. Everything is more boring now. I still find raiding and instances to be fun, but all of the nuances of solo-ing have been lost. I find this especially ironic since this expansion was supposed to be the one for the casuals. From all of the changes made, I'd wager that Blizzard's intention was really to get casuals into instances as soon as possible, rather than improve their old stomping grounds. After all, the sooner we start raiding, the less time we spend on our own, and the less time Bizzard needs to spend on developing solo content.

In fact, all of these changes can really be traced back to Blizzard trying to get people to raid more. All classes were made raid viable, so no players can blame their class for not raiding. Reputations were made easier to get exalted with, so players can spend less time getting their raid starter gear and get into raids sooner. Dailies became more prevalent so that we would always have something to do to make a bit of money for the repair bills. Professions were homogenized so that players could pick a profession they liked rather than one that would have a positive impact on their raiding. It seems to me that all of these changes were made for the raiders, and not us solo-ers.

I see a parallel between these changes and the arena fiasco. When arenas were released, they brought class balance into sharper focus. Previously, the classes' individual strengths and weaknesses in PvP were glossed over by the fact that battlegrounds were so huge that players' individual contribution or lack thereof weren't easily perceivable. With arenas, however, classes were pitted against each other in a very direct way, and the sad state of class balance was brought into sharp focus. Because of this, Blizzard began to balance classes around their performance in arenas. This became a problem as classes that were perfectly balanced for raids were nerfed because they were doing too well in arenas (such as resto druids). This also applied to battlegrounds, where the battles are more objective based and longer, and thus emphasize survival rather than rapid killing. Because of this difference, some classes lost effectiveness in battlegrounds because they were too good in arenas.

This kind of thing still goes on, and what makes the situation ironic is that arenas are the part of the game with lowest player participation. There are even many die-hard battleground fans who hate them. Arenas used to be more popular when they were a source of easy epics, but now that all arena gear requires good ratings, those days are gone.

In the same way that PvP was balanced around arenas, I think that PvE content has been balanced around raiders. While this could be seen as a good thing for players who want to get into raids as soon as possible, those of us who don't are left more or less in the dust. Don't get me wrong; I do enjoy raiding, but some people just don't have the time for it, and it is those people who suffer the most from these changes to PvE. Solo end-game is dying. I would like to think that the new Argent Tournament dailies we are getting in patch 3.2 will change that, but even if they do, it's such a shame that they will only be available to people with the Crusader title, which will force players to play inferior content in order to get to good content. If these new dailies disappoint like the last ones did, we solo players will just have to go back to levelling alts; there's just nothing fun left to do.

Edit: Patch 3.2 has been released, and I have to say, I am pretty disappointed with the new dailies. With the exception of Get Kraken!, they are all typical, predictable, and boring. Come on, Blizz! Challenge your quest designers. Give us something new!