Mists of Pandaria

One death knight per realm restriction limit lifted! I know for certain some players around here are happy to know that.
I'm gonna check myself to be sure.

Yaaay...

Pfff, I had loads of DKs before it was cool.

I've enjoyed MoP so far. Admittedly I'm not a fan of the daily-oriented structure because my attention span sucks. But the game feels a lot less clunky. There's more to do. Plus, I feel the story is much stronger than its been as of late - there's a lot of stuff to be involved in on an RP level! In Cata, I found it very difficult to get involved in the story because it felt like my characters did not 'belong' there, in the quest zones - apart from the twilight highlands opening, maybe. Deathwing, as a villain, summed up Cata's story for me.

Lame.

Zaraj wrote: story should always come second to gameplay.

......you disgust me.

Welcome to video games. Of course story comes second to game-play. It's a game, not a book.

A good story can be ruined by bad gameplay, but bad stories can ruin good gameplay as well. A bit of balance is needed to get the best of both, which sadly many developers miss out.

Good game writing is in service of game-play, always.

Story and gameplay need to go hand-in-hand, in an MMO especially.

WoW pokémon is a good example of failing in this. They sacrificed some of the setting's last vestiges of internal consistency in order to scrabble for player numbers, and it seems to have done their numbers no good whatsoever.

Thrakha wrote:WoW pokémon is a good example of failing in this. They sacrificed some of the setting's last vestiges of internal consistency in order to scrabble for player numbers, and it seems to have done their numbers no good whatsoever.

Care to explain why you feel the pet battle system is a prime example of this?

I thought I just did, but I'll go into more detail:

Pet battles do not work in the setting. They make no coherent sense (and before anyone pipes up with the usual 'fantasy world so anything goes' rubbish, internal consistency isn't the same as absolute realism).

It's essentially derailing the story in order to clunkily insert a new game mechanic. The game mechanic itself can be quite fun, and is based on a solid, tried and tested concept. However, it has no place in the setting and as such, it interferes with the player's experience of the world.

Pet Battles don't even interact with the story.

That's kind of like saying cooking is derailing the story, because it is supposed to be focused on war, not cuisine.

Hell Pet Battles are as optional as optionality gets. When quest NPCs start telling you "Before you go forth and steal the Kro'kon's resources, make sure to demoralize them by challenging their champion to a Pet Battle, crushing their feeble pets in merciless combat!", I can sort of see your point, but not before.

...Hell, I could go on, do Auction Houses derail the story?

Or how about the Trade channel?

I think you've misunderstood what I meant by derailing here.

Cooking, as a concept, makes sense in the setting. So does having auction houses.

The trade channel sits neatly OOC and doesn't genuinely interact with the IC experience.

However, when a player's wandering their character through the world, interacting with interesting people, foiling evil plots, etcetera, and suddenly they run into some lady who wants to set her snakes on their dog - and this is apparently all entirely accepted within the setting...what the actual f***? Engagement with the character and their experiences instantly goes out the window.

I don't see pet battles having any influence on anything. Never saw them being the cause of a drop of numbers either.

There are other gameplay mechanics that get much more inbetween story and game than that, such as.... Horde not knowing common? That would be one of the oldest ones, I'd say.

I see where you're coming from Thrak, it does alter the world as a whole and how things should be treated...

However, I don't think I've seen someone take pet battles IC in the same way they're represented by mechanics. I have, however, seen pet battles done through back alley gambling which is totally believable and great for the setting of WoW. (Pets that die, that is!)

At the end of the day, as much as I'm not a fan of it, WoW isn't merely a fantasy setting. It's a high concept fantasy which actively interacts with modern culture through humour/quests. That's the world we RP in!

As long as they don't say the next big bad is a 25 man pet battle with a snake called ViperPainShadowSlayer then all is well. The pet battles don't interfere with the main story.

That's a bit of a spurious link, Melnerag. Cockfighting and suchlike is a nasty, bloody sport. It's not something you do with animals you like - as is implied in the way pet battles are presented - and it certainly isn't a happy bit of fluffy fun where fish blow magic bubbles at cats until one of them faints.

@Thrakha:

This is a clear case of something, that "something" in this case being pet battles, not fitting into your notion of what does and what does not fit the setting. I, for one, find pet battles to fit in perfectly fine.

I've heard the same argument against the Pandaren, and heck, the whole of Pandaria. That they don't fit the setting. But how can they not?

They are the setting.

Pet Battles, are a part of this setting. Of the world. You can personally think they don't fit in with what you like to see in Warcraft, but they're here. As such, they belong.



There's also people that think Draenei don't fit in. There's people that think machine guns don't fit in. Thankfully, as role-players, we can choose to step away from certain aspects of the setting and generate our own stories that do not include these elements.

Allonia_Miral wrote:I don't see pet battles having any influence on anything. Never saw them being the cause of a drop of numbers either.

There are other gameplay mechanics that get much more inbetween story and game than that, such as.... Horde not knowing common? That would be one of the oldest ones, I'd say.

Ya mon! Fo' example, when de trolls be speakin' like dis, dey prob'ly be speakin' low common radah dan Orcish, mon. Game mechanics, an' all dat.

erwtenpeller wrote:@Thrakha:

This is a clear case of something not fitting into your notion of what does and what does not fit the setting. I, for one, find pet battles to fit in perfectly fine.

I've heard the same argument against the Pandaren, and heck, the whole of Pandaria. That they don't fit the setting. But how can they not?

They are the setting.

Pet Battles, are a part of this setting. Of the world. You can personally think they don't fit in with what you like to see in Warcraft, but they're here. As such, they belong.

Spot on with this.

I'm totally with you in one sense, Thrakha. I hate the Draenai space travel crap and preferred them as the secondary race from Outland. I really don't like Pandaria as a whole. I'm not fond of a lot of smaller things in WoW (time travel done wrong) and overall, I think they try and appeal to too many audiences by pulling every single type of fantasy world into one big one. That's my personal opinion though. I like the rest of WoW lore enough to just look past those things and try and avoid them with my everyday RP, yet I won't ignore them. I believe they have dilluted the main narrative of WoW but some will think they enhanced it.

I always thought of pet battles as a mini-game. After all, would I really pit a little Deathwing v. A little Kel'Thuzad? I think it's just a bit of fun. That said, an IC cock-fighting guild would be... Interesting!

The Forlorn Cartel do in-character back-alley pet battles.

I'd imagine it'll be way more interesting now you can see let battles taking place, apparently... I can imagine it now! Maybe they should get some geezer with a really thick cockney accent to get the betting on.

@Vaell & Erwtenpeller:

I can't agree. Just because Blizzard has put them into the setting, doesn't mean they fit. The world hasn't even been modified so that they fit at all; they're just awkwardly wedged into the world.

Blizzard are capable of making mistakes in their design. I feel that - like the overwhelming presence of specific pop-culture references in the early human areas - this is one of them.

@Allonia: I don't think the pet battles have reduced numbers. They've just had no apparent effect on increasing numbers, or halting recent declines.

As for the whole Common/Orcish thing; I can accept that, just as I can accept old Van Cleef dying several times a day and dropping up to 5 heads each time, because it's a faff in order to overcome issues with the game mechanics. There's no such excuse for pet battles.

Thrakha wrote:I feel that

Exactly.

Your likes and dislikes are legitimate, everyone has them. They do, however, not determine what does and does not fit into world of Warcraft. Only one divine force determines that; and that's Blizzard.

This is a fact. Something that can not be refuted or changed. It's not something you can agree or disagree with.