I hadn’t much interest in coming back to Warcraft. I had invested what I consider obscene amounts of time into a variety of characters, and untold hours of social interaction had been lost as a result (not to mention potential job and education opportunities). But this new system, the LFG System as it has come to be called, sparked a renewed interest in me, as one of the chief problems with WoW when I had left before was simply being able to find a suitable group for a dungeon when time presented itself to play. If the promise of the LFG System worked, this problem would be entirely alleviated.

Almost immediately after renewing my subscription (actually, activating the seven-day trial), I realized that the system more than delivered on its promise. Seris, whom I’d left at level 75, was inside of a dungeon with strangers within moments of logging in, and seconds after exclaiming “Hay guys!,” she was slaying a variety of presumably evil monsters and fully succumbing to the promise of easy-access rewards.

At the time, I wasn’t quite aware of what those rewards really were. Emblems of Something or Other, the small currency bits rewarded upon the completion of heroic-difficulty dungeons – more difficult version of normal dungeons – were doled out regularly and easily, and could be turned in for a variety of awesome armor, trinkets, and jewelry. This much I remember from the previous expansion. What I also remembered from the previous expansion was how painfully long it took to acquire them, and the slow process of attaining upgrades from them – as well as their somewhat lack of variety.

But things are different now; there are not only dozens of options of Emblem items, most of which quite good, but there are, and I cannot stress the importance of this enough, dozens of opportunities to attain these Emblems. A run through a heroic dungeon, with each boss granting an emblem, grants an average of three emblems per dungeon – but each LFG System group also rewards the player with an extra two Emblems, as well as a bag of gold. With Emblem items ranging from costing thirty to seventy-five, and fifty emblems attainable in a mere few hours, getting awesome gear became almost painfully easy – alleviating one of the major issues with The Burning Crusade.

Although WoW is in a better state now than it has ever been, particularly for the casual player without time to dedicate to raid, I can’t help but find some aspects of this system troubling. An idea that I’ve subscribed to for quite a long time is that WoW is the arcade version of other online games; things are faster-paced, more straightforward, and often simpler than in other online games, and I believe that this is, in a large way, responsible for the game’s overwhelming success.

The LFG System has further emphasized this arcade nature of WoW over other games, and has, I believe, diminished the single best aspect of Warcraft; that of the social. No longer do players need to cultivate a good reputation to ensure invitations into groups, as what happens inside of groups generated by the LFG System are, for all intents and purposes, anonymous. This is because any given group might consist of five players from five different realms whom, in addition to not having encountered one another previously, are effectively barred from ever doing so again. This entirely precludes the need for common courtesy and the forging of friendships; although people are, in general, pretty decent, there is very rarely any actual social interaction between them. The five come together for a particular task, namely the crawling through of a dungeon, and disband immediately after. Aside from making jokes and explaining encounters to players new to the dungeon, there is little reason to attempt to cultivate new friendships.

Which, really, is what made WoW shine so brightly for me when it was released. Within hours of the servers coming online, my room mates

DOS Command grew in this fashion until it eventually merged with another guild, and then later developed into an entirely different guild dedicated towards raiding the high-end content of the game. While the guild was never quite on the bleeding-edge of progression, we did quite well for ourselves, and I still consider many of the players I was involved with to be among my closest of friends, favored over many of the people that I know in real life.

I do not believe that I am unique in this regard; to use another entirely anecdotal example, my brother followed a similar path in Warcraft, and some of his closest real-life friends he actually met in the World of Warcraft. I’ve met them too, but his personality is more compatible with theirs than is mine. But then, I tend to be an antisocial prick sometimes, so this isn’t terribly surprising for me. Moving along.

So then – it appears, to me, that Warcraft has traded this wonderful element of potential social cohesion, which arises from small groups of strangers banding together to defeat the Sons of Arugal and results in what I hope to be lifelong friendships, for easier access to the rewards of ever-increasing numbers, to use Kieron Gillen’s perspective on online games.

The LFG System has seemed to have an impact on the isolated community of my server as well; sure, people are more geared and perhaps playing more than ever, but they’re doing so often without their friends. Although entering the LFG System with friends can make the process easier (guaranteed access to an effective tank, healer, DPS, etc.), it is by no means necessary and seems to add an extra layer of complication to the dungeon-running, Emblem-acquiring process. Sure, Seris will group with guildmates for quick runs (as you can enter the system with a full group of your pals), but this does nothing to alleviate the problem of not being able to make new friends in the process.

I think that the other aspect of this problem – of furthering Warcraft as essentially an arcade-game MMO – is the nature of content and what it has come to mean. (The labeling of hard-mode difficulty dungeons as “Heroic” is highly indicative of this issue, but I’ll return to that shortly.) Generally speaking, the first time or two that I entered a dungeon I hadn’t been to before, my eyes were wide with what new treasures and encounters would be found within. Fights were challenging, bosses were something to be taken seriously, and the dungeon was a reward unto itself.

However, Blizzard has created a system in which these dungeons are not in any way a reward unto themselves – they’re merely an obstacle that must be overcome to acquire the real reward, which are Emblems of Something or Other. This might not be true to the leveling individual, but is most certainly true for players at level 80 entering exclusively into heroic-mode difficulty dungeons. Damage classes with insufficient gear are ejected by vote, as well as tanks without X health points, or healers without X level of mana. The actual experience of the dungeon is rendered entirely irrelevant, and is instead something to be pushed through as quickly and efficiently as possible – and essentially something that is never to be enjoyed or savored. Certain dungeons, like the Occulus, actually trigger a response in many players that ought to be anathema to designers – they immediately leave the instance, willing to accept a 15-minute penalty before they can enter the LFG System queue because they despise the dungeon so thoroughly. As an aside, I find it one of the more interesting dungeons; players have to ride around on dragons and use an entirely new set of abilities, but because this takes a bit longer than other dungeons, players refuse to even participate.

“With that said, we plan on making some changes to The Old Kingdom in the next minor patch. For instance, Elder Nadox will only get one Ahn’Kahar Guardian and Jadoga Shadowseeker will only use her Ascend ability once during their respective encounters. In addition, a couple of the stagnant groups of bad dudes between the Befouled Terrace and The Desecrated Altar will be removed, while some of the roaming groups will have their pathing altered. These changes are not to make this instance easier, but rather to make it a slightly quicker run and more in line with some of the other Wrath dungeons.”

In other words, this change isn’t being made to make the dungeon more interesting, more entertaining, or more in line with the difficulty of other dungeons – but simply to make it faster, to lower the wall in front of the player to achieve their rewards. The actual object of the instance, the progress through it slaying spider-things and their overlords because they are evil, and even just simply to have fun, is marginalized in favor of how bloody long it takes. As an aside, this dungeon takes about twenty-five to thirty minutes, compared to fifteen to twenty minutes for other heroic dungeons. Entertainingly, and perhaps damningly, these dungeons, not played for their challenge or lore or entertainment but the speed at which rewards can be achieved, are called heroic.

Still, I am conflicted. I get to do more of the stuff that I love – hurting monsters with swords and killing bosses to get bigger swords – than ever before, and the process is more streamlined than it ever has been. At the same time, the other key component of online games (for me, anyway) – social interaction and making new pals – is almost entirely removed from the gameworld. It’s a difficult struggle; I feel more engaged than ever before (thanks not only to the LFG System but to a plethora of other improvements to the game), and yet I feel more socially isolated than ever before.

I’m not sure if there are many other players that feel similarly about this. A resurgence of old-school guilds with old-school players engaging in the game casually has allowed the social element – at least in guilds – to remain. Perhaps those players are content not to make new friends by playing with them, and to rather keep close those ones they’ve had for years.

How about myself? Well – I don’t know. The claws of the Lich King seem to have wrapped themselves around my greedy, big-number-loving throat, while my heart weeps at the loss of new and engaging social interaction outside of /trade while simultaneously praising my brains for letting it hang out in private chat lobbies with old Warcraft friends. Which will win out?

I’ll think about it later, as my LFG System queue just popped and more Emblems are calling.

But none of them – whether it be another rogue, an implacable paladin, or even the dreaded hunter – could instill in me the raw, unrelenting hatred that seeing a warrior could.

Not just any warrior, but one armed with an axe. And not just any axe, no, but a terribly particular one – the Arcanite Reaper. For a time, the Arcanite Reaper was the penultimate weapon of the warrior class. It was, at the time, ludicrously expensive to craft, requiring not only a host of rare and exotic materials, but also access – and coin to pay – to a blacksmith that knew how to forge the beskulled weapon. Neither the materials nor the blacksmiths capable of forging the thing were easy to be had, yet every warrior quested, fought and killed relentlessly to procure one.

Looking back on the item now, it doesn’t appear to be a terribly powerful weapon: 53.8 dps, +13 stamina, and +62 attack power. When viewed in light of the obscenely-powerful weapons found in Wrath of the Lich King dungeons, the Arcanite Reaper appears a paper clip with a rock stuck to it at best – but Azeroth was a much different place then. Due to a mechanic that was later changed, the speed of a weapon – 3.8, in the case of the Arcanite Reaper – influenced in an enormous way how hard a triggered ability could strike an enemy. Essentially, the slower a weapon was, the harder it could hit somebody – and the Arcanite Reaper was, and remains, among the very slowest of weapons in the game, with the total number of 3.8 speed weapons being easily countable on one hand. The other dominant factor in this calculation was the attack power of the warrior in question – but, generally speaking, if a warrior had the finances for an Arcanite Reaper, he probably also had the time and money to boost his other stats to Seris-killing proportions.

The warrior could not see Seris when she crouched in stealth. The warrior could not stop her from escaping into stealth. The warrior could not even stop the rogue from moving for long enough to kill them. But what the warrior could do was terrible indeed; even with relatively equal gear between an enemy warrior and I, he could kill me in as few as three swings of that axe – and both of us, no matter the warrior that I faced, always knew that. While I might manage to reduce the total health of the warrior by as much as half with luck, I knew that within ten seconds of leaving the comforting, black safety of stealth that I would be dead.

That’s why I decided to make a warrior.

To kill the hell out of rogues.

I never did get Icthus – the warrior – to the highest level. He never did get an Arcanite Reaper – by the time I began heavily investing time into Icthus, Blizzard had changed the way that weapon speed influences damage, so it was no longer the end-all-be-all weapon. This was also because, as I said, I never made it to the level cap with Icthus; rather, Iparked him at level 39 and fought with him in battlegrounds, which limit the teams – an enemy team and a team you were on – to ten players, each being in the level range of 30-39. Ironically, rogues wound up being perhaps my single most dangerous rival on the field of battle due to the way that high-level magical enhancements add to the class, but that’s a rather in-depth discussion poorly-placed here.

While I couldn’t necessarily kill rogues as easily as Seris had been killed, I was still fully capable of annihilating

almosteverything else in the battlegrounds. I was engaging in the practice known as “twinking,” which means that Icthus didn’t get any of his gear on his own – rather, my high-level characters got it for him, and then paid enormous sums of money to place magical enchantments on his gear to make him far more powerful than any level 39 character had a right to be. This had the result of making him vastly more powerful than any enemy found in the battlegrounds, barring those that were “twinking” themselves – and even then, none could compete with Icthus.

Except rogues.

This experience, and indeed set of experiences, I found to be among the most entertaining and adrenaline-inducing that I encountered in World of Warcraft. While my rogue had good gear and weapons, and ran with a pretty solid group of players, she never shined with the burning intensity that Icthus rather regularly did – and it never felt as though she shined as brightly. I believe that some measure of this was due only to my playing the warrior – that absolutely hated thing, that thing I’d been trained to despise, fear and hate since Seris was level 1 – that abominably powerful, bastard thing, the warrior.

But it wasn’t the warrior in and of itself; while a class able to dominate those around him, the warrior’s skillset, his appearance, his attitude – these weren’t the reasons would glow and burn with life while playing Icthus. That reason, I realized years later, was pretty simple: I was playing the hated thing.

I was the hated thing.

Recently, I’ve begun noticing that I often play classes, teams or factions based on similar reasons. While learning to play a new game, I inevitably learn to despise one or two of the class/factions/etc. Sometimes, it’s because they kill me repeatedly, and like Seris and the warrior, I simply cannot find an effective strategy and am thus forced to flee. (I did ultimately find one, but it required that the warrior and I be completely alone until I could bleed him to death with surgical precision – a very rare circumstance.) Sometimes, it’s because their skillset – when effectively utilized – enables them to be so slippery and quick that they are impossible to kill, and able to harry me until I die.

In Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, this Hated Thing came in the form of Choppas and Chosen. Due to how racial factions were designed in WAR, I was unable to play a Choppa or a Chosen – so instead, I played the Knight of the Blazing Sun, counterpart to Chosen, and the Slayer, the counterpart to the Choppa. Although both were axe-and-sword frontline fighters, they fell on opposite ends of the spectrum; Chosen/Knights were incredibly difficult to kill, and Slayers/Choppas were incredibly powerful.

Neither the Slayer nor the Knight were among my first, or even primary, characters – that honor fell to Bloodmoney the Warrior Priest. She was a healer, and died regularly to Slayers, and frustrated herself often trying to kill Chosen. While I enjoyed playing her, absolutely nothing I experienced in WAR brought me the raw, unrelenting joy that Othered Again – my Knight of the Blazing Sun – brought to me when he stood straddling the world like an unkillable titan, laughing as he deflected blows and spells with shield and sword.

Sure, Othered Again could take a lot of damage and hold a line and ensure his allies could annihilate his enemies from the safety of being behind him. Sure, Spacetiger Spaceslayer – the Slayer – could leap into a group of enemies, howl with rage and swing his two axes with a fervor only dwarves could muster, killing everything around him. But neither of these character-defining aspects were why I so thoroughly enjoyed Othered Again and Spacetiger Spaceslayer.

I adored them both because, as with Icthus, I was the Hated Thing.

To borrow a device from Kieron Gillen: Ser1s was the first one that made it.
I had spent the gaming hours of the better part of a week before I had managed to create a character in the wonderful Mount & Blade that survived for longer than a week of in-game time. Ser1s’ creation – which was done quickly, as I assumed that she would be destroyed as quickly as any of the tens of others that had come before her – achieved two things that her priors had not, and each lead equally to her survival in Calradia.

This allowed me to quit the game without saving it – and reload an older save. Although an old, time-proven method of cataloguing game progress and repairing terrible player errors, I initially chose “Realistic Mode” during the creation of each character. Some motivation about challenge that it turns out I wasn’t quite up for.

2. The choosing of character creation attributes based on how entertaining they sounded rather than the stat benefit they provided.

In Mount & Blade, character creation is accomplished by way of a series of questions pertaining to how you spent certain portions of your life. For example, choosing “Son/Daughter of an Impoverished Noble” will not only net you strength, but also a sweet emblem that would appear on your banner and on the shields of your soldiers. Initially, I’d built my characters around either strength or agility. Windir, for example, began the game with as-high-as-possible strength score and solid skill development in pretty much all weapons – although very poor, with nary a cent nor fur to his name. He, like so many others, more or less died in captivity, poor, depraved, and without companionship.

Note that killing wasn’t listed among the terrible acts of barbarism that the NPC hordes just loved executing upon my poor, earlier characters. That’s because they couldn’t – instead, upon losing a battle, the defeated character is captured and taken hostage, and forced to move around with the brigands for a period of days. Although not necessarily a bad thing on its own, the effects are terrible – you lose a great deal of money, items in your inventory and, worst of all, your Characters and soldiers leave your group in varying degrees. While it’s possible to find them again, it is not always easy – they return to a certain city, at which they will appear at random, and it can be a pain to track them down.

If the player is captured several times – or even only once very early in the game – then that character becomes more or less ruined. Without money, one cannot recruit an army, or even pay the one that you have. Without money, one will not be able to replace the horse that the bandits surely stole. Without money, one cannot have success in Mount & Blade.

So victory on the field depends on a wise hand at the coinpurse – and at least something of an initial vault to pull from. However, all of the money in the world wasn’t going to save Ser1s from a string of kidnappings and thuggery. What would was being able to screw up and not necessarily have to deal with the consequences.

Ser1s complained to me that it felt like cheating – I tried to convince her that it was rather hedging our bets and taking necessary precaution. She tried to tell me that by removing the potential sting of defeat from losses, motivation for performing at peak output levels was diminished, and all hazards in foolhardy gambles removed – which, according to her, diminished the brilliant flavor of victory when it came. My response to her was that I was more interested in experimenting and seeing what I as a player could accomplish, and that being annihilated for seeing if I could prevail against four-to-one odds seemed unreasonable without at least getting a second chance.

The two of us managed to come to an agreement: there would be no repeated attempts at non-crucial battles and events, like tournaments held in cities and major conflicts with enemy states. We agreed that, in situations where she was fairly likely to lose, then multiple attempts could be had – if only to attempt to find a solution to the riddle of steel. It was determined that, in the interest of fairness, quest failures and botched financial gain attempts would not be attempted multiple times. Where we did not come to an agreement, however, was concerning financial loss. Not the sort that comes from stealing trade goods from villages and getting caught, but rather the kind that comes from prolonged imprisonment.

Ser1s began her glorious campaign humbly and perhaps barbarically: by hunting down small groups of brigands and, instead of slaying them, knocking them unconscious. This enabled her men to capture them, whereupon they could be sold into slavery. This provided finances far and beyond those necessary to pay and recruit soldiers, and Ser1s quickly had a reasonably large amount of money. With the peace of mind that comes from limited wealth and expanding power, Ser1s decided that the life of a thief-catcher and brigand-slaver was beneath her. Ser1s wanted nobility, lands, and peons.

And lands she would have! Ser1s set out to Reyvadin, seat of King Yaroglek, and swore fealty to him. Well, she tried to – the king would have none of it, having only heard of Ser1s in passing, and did not believe that Ser1s would be a noble and righteous addition to his coterie of lords. So she did what any good soldier does when faced with layers of beauracracy in their way: she went straight to his wife. His wife, Lady Seomis, had been grievously offended by another lord of the kingdom, and needed a champion to clean her good name. Righting the wrongs done to her would bestow some prominence upon Ser1s, and she set out for Castle Rhadogir to seek the craven scum.

Lord Vlan presumably had brutally oppressed his people and neglected their needs – every town under his control was miserably poor, and brigands roamed the countryside just outside of the viewable range of Castle Rhadogir. Gaining entry into the castle, Ser1s laid out the rules real clear and calm-like for Lord Vlan – apologize publically to the Lady, or be humiliated by a commoner in a trial of arms. His arrogance, which I had been warned of, came through in spades – he wouldn’t even consider an apology, and even insisted that he had nothing to apologize for, claiming that every word he uttered about the Lady was a truth. Ser1s does not deal with insults well: she removed her iron gauntlet, swung it brutally across his face, and left his hall and went straight to his tourney grounds.

Lord Vlan did not disappoint her, and made himself present in the tourney grounds shortly after.

He should not have, as he was defeated soundly – although his horse was of excellent meat-stock and his lance of top-quality oak, he brought the wrong weapons to bear against Ser1s. A natural with a greatsword and warspear, she made short work of the lord – Ser1s and the lord charged one another atop horse at the beginning of the trial, and Ser1s’ lance proved to be the more true, outright slaying Lord Vlan’s horse from beneath him, sending him tumbling. She then refused him the dignity of fighting him on equal ground – although it is customary to unmount oneself after dehorsing an opponent, Ser1s felt that Lord Vlan deserved no such honor. She instead circled the tourney grounds multiple times before charging him and running him down as a dog.

She chose the resplendent unicorn affixed over purple, and was given the town of Fisdnar.

Having sworn fealty to the Vaegrian Crown, it was now Ser1s’ responsibility to not merely be a vaguely decent and noble woman before the gods of Calradia and the crown, but also to wage war against her enemies – most notably, the Nordic Kingdoms, and to never rest until the foul King Ragnar had been slain.

The king must not be too serious about the no-rest bit, because Ser1s reined horse at her fief, Fisdnar, and took a much-needed rest before going to war.

Next: Horse-Based Stabbery, Part II: King Ragnar Must Die!