Boooooo hissssssss
I logged on one of my toons and got its gift from Father Winter from the mailbox. It was a Tailoring recipe. Then I logged on another toon thinking I would get its gift from Father Winter, too–but there was no gift there. Nor was there a gift from Father Winter for any of the other toons I logged on.
At least there were no rocks.
So, I’m trying to figure out what to do about WoW.
I’m on Horde Argent Dawn. This is pretty much a dead server. I have one 110 (hunter) and 3 level 100s (not counting my DH). My guild moved servers and I have zero intention of following them. The guild before them moved servers as well. I can’t afford to, and don’t want to move the Horde toons off AD. I occasionally play with one RL friend. At the least, it’s nice to pass someone you know in a zone. Given my crap luck with guilds, rather than search one out I’m just going to accept the next spam guild invite I get and try that out. It’s telling I haven’t gotten one since I left the wreckage of my old guild.
I also have two Alliance 100s (again, not counting the DH) on Steamweedle. Also a deadish server. In this case, with two 100s, no ties to the server, and the rest of my characters in the 50s and 60s, I’m less opposed to moving a couple of them. Stormrage has a good alliance pop so it’s a possibility. A friend also plays on Medivh, but I’m less likely to move to a server for a specific person.
My gut instinct is to not move anyone. I don’t have the time to join a raiding guild. It would be nice to hook up with a group that did Mythic dungeons. My main horde toon I’m working through the bits I need for Legion flying and that’s my priority now.
That said, I miss Alliance a little, and I definitely miss running through a main city and seeing people.
Any advice?
I’ve been raiding pretty hard core on Legion, but I’m just burned out at this point. The daily grind has caught up with me, and now I am really only logging in on raid days. I am filling my off time with other endeavors like Horizon, Stardew, and… Elder Scrolls Online. My advice would be have you tried Elder Scrolls? It’s refreshing, different, you can play it like a solo game or a MMO given your tastes, and it’s a very competent game today (more so then when it came out for sure). From your post, it doesn’t seem like you are all too excited about any of the prospects you have in WoW, other then playing with a friend…
I’ve tried Elder Scrolls but it just didn’t grab me. I’m not a big fan of the Skyrim interface. I’m less of a fan of modding the hell out of my interface. I might give it a try again. I also have A Secret World I need to get back into.
I’m still relatively happy in WoW. It’s more that I’ve given up starting characters on servers just because a friend plays there. After they quit, I go “well, fuck, what now?” It’s still my MMO of choice.
With LFG/LFR and the like, I’m not sure server pop and guilds matter as much as they used to.
I’m an analyst prone to overanalyzing, so figuring this stuff out is kinda fun for me.
I completely understand where you are coming from Mark as I was also on a server from launch that I felt very mixed feelings about leaving. I was on Feathermoon server from vanilla, and was able to continue to raid there through Mists of Pandaria, when gradual realm depopulation and changing availability windows left me without a raid. In MoP, I only did the occasional pick-up-group (some with my old guild who were raiding starting at 1am – incompatible with my real life schedule but I could make it once every blue moon) and LFR until Siege of Orgrimmar launched.
After SoO launched I switched servers to join a specific raid group - moving to Hyjal which has the most populous Horde population and most active raiding scene for a Pacific timezone server. I only moved my main and left my other characters in my old guild on Feathermoon. Even though the specific group I moved for didn’t work out – being on Hyjal was definitely a good move. And keeping some characters on my old server has allowed me to stay in contact with the friends I’ve had from vanilla on that side.
I think it depends on how important having a regular raid group is to you. If that’s important, I’d recommend switching a single character to an active server on which you have already found a raid group you are interested in trialing with that works at your time. That will allow you to “test the waters” at limited cost and risk of not switching all your characters over.
If having a regular raid is not that important to you, then I think with group finder, it’s a great time to be able to PUG, even on low pop servers.
I start my Master’s Certificate most likely in a month, so I won’t have time for a steady raid group.I do have an app in on a guild via Guild Finder that has the most members.
Argent Dawn just feels dead in ways the other servers don’t. I’ve been unguilded for a few days and haven’t had one spam invite. The global channels are just dead also.
After I get the bits for the flying achieve (or at least the parts I can do) I’ll think about moving. The likely thing I’ll do is move the two alliance 100s.
I wish Blizzard would just do another server squish.
I skimmed through the post waaay too fast, and for a split second though “Oh my god, you’re Double Agent?!”
Argent != Agent. Sigh.
Restart a new class on a highly populated alliance server? I did that a few years ago, and it was actually pretty fun.
I’ve thought of it. I have a level 37 on Stormrage I play now and then. The thought of leveling a stable of toons from level 1 isn’t that interesting.
So, you’ll laugh at this, and at me.
After bouncing around between various servers, I noticed that I wasn’t seeing any trade or general chat on Argent Dawn. No spamming of Guild Recruitment, insults in trade etc. Clearly something must be broken on how I’m filtering.
So, I deleted all my cache, wtf and etc folders. Still not much for global chats on Argent, Steemwheedle or Medivh. So, I asked a friend of mine: is Trade Chat just dead on this server?
Turns out, yep. Argent Dawn’s global channels are pretty damn quiet.
I’m on Medivh-Exodar and can attest that it’s a pretty active server. There always seems to be about 50 people standing around the Stormwind bank / AH area.
If you want an active server with huge login queues every expansion, you cant go wrong with Silvermoon for alliance and Draenor for HOrde.
I have a friend on Medivh and it’s a move candidate. If I know more than one person (@belasarius) it’s moved over Stormrage
God help me, but I’ve just got a free WoW account and I’ve started a Draenei Shamaness.
Last time I played the game was the Burning Crusade days, got something to lvl 40 or something, but some other shiny thing passed my vision and I dropped it.
I do remember it being a rich, fun, highly polished and functional game though, and though I’ve only just started a character, reality seems to be holding up to the memory so far.
Well, this is a ridiculously late comment on WoW, but having just been totally absorbed by it for the past week or so, I’d just like to say that it’s made me think twice about my love of visual realism in videogames (it’s actually what drew me into them once they’d passed the Doom threshold, and psychologically I’ve been largely driven by wanting more and more visual realism).
It seems that a cartoon art style can be actually more realistic in emotional impact, if the amount of detail in other ways, particularly conceptually (and, not least in importance, from audio effects), matches the blocking-out of character visually.
What I mean is, with a cartoon style, you can flesh out the world to the same level of detail in everything - world itself, mobs, clutter, etc. - so that every “thing”, every entity you encounter, whether it be a mob or a locale, has a pronounced boldly-drawn character.
When you’re living in a virtual world of such pronounced and distinctively drawn “things”, with such tremendous attention to detail for every little thing in the world, the immersion factor is much greater than it would be where you have visual realism, but everything else sort of lags behind. The brain buys into an integrated illusion more wholeheartedly.
But of course the simplicity of the elements means the world can be bigger. You can have an entire forest of a zillion simple square trees.
If there’s any secret to MMORPGs proper, it’s got to be this: that the world itself has got to be the main star of the show, it’s got to feel like a real, and a really BIG, place. When I think of all the failed “WoW beaters” of the Noughties, that’s where they all fell down.
It’s by an order of magnitude the most addictive game I’ve ever encountered in almost 4 decades of playing videogames. I’m very glad not to be stuck on it anymore.
It truly is an amazing game, and even though it’s past its prime in terms of it being the biggest game in the world, there are still tons of people playing it and I’m having an absolute ball.
(Note, I forgot to say that responsiveness is another hugely important factor in the game’s popularity, of course, but I thought that was kind of the no-brainer that everyone tries to achieve. But come to think of it, it might have something to do with the art design choices as well, because you can have artificially faster animations without it seeming odd, when you have that cartooney style - so again, it all hangs together, it’s all of a piece.)
Also, I laugh at myself for the probable redundancy of this recommendation (I’m sure there’s tons of info in WoW threads here), but as I got mad into addons (now have about 100-odd ) and found them weighing down performance, this forum page from a guy who tested all the big name addons for CPU usage was the most important I’ve found. I’ve switched from the addons I’d been using (most of which are the often community-favoured, “feature rich” ones the author of the post politely mentions as having great functionality) to the ones the author recommends, and found a marked improvement in performance from the accumulation, and actually some of the addons he recommends are even better function-wise than some of the more famous ones I’d been using, having selected them on the basis of venerability, features and up-to-dateness.
Basically, if anyone’s interested the suite of addons at that link is golden, they’re all superbly functional and don’t weigh my computer down (although I suppose it wouldn’t matter if you have a nuclear reactor instead of a toaster like me :) ).
Oh and one last thing - the graphics updates they’ve done are really quite excellent. All the textures are the same, more or less (apart from higher rez versions of the characters), but what they’ve done is add a lot of bells and whistles (shadows, grass physics, etc.) that, again, cumulatively add to quite an improvement from when I remember first trying the game back in 2008 or so.
I have given serious thought to resubscribing. There are a fair number of dungeons and raids that I never saw that I am sure I could solo (ex. Black Temple). The only thing holding me back is the price. $50 for the expansion and another $15 for the first month is pretty costly all things considered.
So, let’s say I haven’t played since 2011. My account is a ‘starter edition.’ What do I need to buy to get up-to-date on expansions?
Are there any special deals including server transfers and the like?