With Tabula Rasa, I had the same problem getting into the game as I did with all other sci-fi-oriented or alternative MMORPG’s that tries to defy the traditional fantasy convention. There are a lot of game-related knowledge that doesn’t have to be explained in fantasy-based RPG’s. A lot of conventions are inherited, preached, rehearsed from years and years of fantasy literary work. Even those who aren’t into the whole RPG scene, understand the basic nature of the medieval-derived culture.

Here’s a pack of hungry wolves, they’ll probably bite me. Here’s a dragon, that’s really bad. I have just acquired a new plate mail armor, which is definitely stronger and sturdier than my previous chain mail armor. Picking up a bigger, two-hand sword probably means I do more damage than a one-hand sword, but swings much slower. Learning a new fire spell that shoots out a bigger fireball, is probably better than the one that shoots out a smaller one (unless, the smaller one is a completely different spell with a bigger concentration of heat in a small package!). Lastly, a blacksmith does exactly what a blacksmith does, and a leatherworker or an alchemist is unlikely to be taking care of farm lands anytime soon.

These are all conventions that one can easily assume when stepping into a fantasy world, and fantasy based MMO’s doesn’t have to explain those items & mechanic in as rich or deep of detail for the gamers to just step into the game to understand. One of the elements that made World of Warcraft so immensely successful, is the speed you can get into the game without having to read or think much about it. Hey, pick up a quest here, it’ll teach you what you need to know. Go find this trainer here, and they’ll teach you what you need to know. Combine that with the normal conventions that you’re used to, it makes for a game that works without having to pick up an instruction manual and dig through forums of information before you even start playing.

With a game like Tabula Rasa, I get the exact opposite feeling. Sci-fi thrives on inventing new terminology and technology. While this works extremely well in other entertainment mediums where the explanation of the technology is a part of the story, it really suffers in games, especially a MMO where there are massive amount of knowledge that has to be acquired already. The preference is that these knowledge will be slowly acquired over time, as in: What does 1 point of strength do for my character development? Exactly how much +hit% do I need? Those are the detailed, geeky math that you get into once you’re really deeply involved with the game. On the outset, you want the basic information to be taught to the gamers as soon and as easily as possible.

Without prior knowledge and conventions, a sci-fi MMO has a much larger task ahead of itself when it comes to the education of its populace. It has to teach you that one type of armor is better than another, what this weapon does versus another. Is a plasma rifle really as useful as a shotgun given your training & talent point allocations? Even the very basic neccessities of the game has to be “taught” somehow transparently to the gamers. If you had to force the community to reach to an outside source to understand what’s going on inside the game, even at the very beginning, then you would’ve created a huge barrier of entry and preventing you from ever building a large & successful community.

I’ve only played Tabula Rasa for a total of 2 hours on my character. This is exactly how I feel.

I don’t understand what’s going on, I don’t understand all the conventions & technology. I can’t even figure out how to equip spells that I supposedly had already trained, then had to take my web browser to a wiki site to figure out how to activate my abilities. Even after learning what I have to do, I failed to do so because by that point, I’m too annoyed by the game to want to play it. Lastly, of course without understanding the conventions and technologies, it makes crafting an impossible variety of jargons that I can’t even start to think about.

The combat system lacks a certain amount of involvement that’s required to keep me interested. What WoW did very well, even with its bloated number of spells & ability in the game now, is making sure that each spell & abilities you used had a purpose of some sort, and you had to use a combination & variety of them to be successful. This was evident very early in the game. This is not quite so evident in Tabula Rasa, where I am not sure why I would use spells versus armed weapon in different situations, or whether there would be any value to ever use one or the other. What I choose to do, seems completely random and have very little effect on the outcome unless I’m specifically told to “use lightning spell on this boss.”

That is not to say that these spells & combat system will become more purposeful as you get to higher level, but if I don’t sense that amount of clarity now, there’s no reason for me to progress beyond the current tedium. It’s more likely for me to think, “OMG, there are how many more of this pointlessly-firing-at-whatever I have to do? For how many levels?” than to consider the fact that the game will expand into some richer & more satisfying.

So, I guess I won’t be playing Tabula Rasa when it reaches final release. Here’s hoping Hellgate: London turns out much better.

Full 2.1.0 profession patch notes

Then there are some comments that Tigole apparently posted on the Elitist Jerk forum here, that talks about reducing the effectiveness of flasks and retuning the raid bosses. Lastly there are also some tidbits about new Darkmoon Faire cards that’ll be much better than the level 60 trinkets & items.

Most importantly:

Changes to fishing -

• The fishing timer has been reduced from 30 to 20 seconds and it now takes less time to fish.
• The fishing timer can no longer run through its duration without a fish biting.
• Fishing has been removed from Arathi Basin and Alterac Valley.
• You can now fish in Underbog.

Now the world is a better place.

Instead of going for the usual hunter staples of agility, intellect and attack power, Grimhorn has invested entirely in green plus stamina armor… This has given him a whopping 1074 stamina, which means he has 17134 health (at last count.)

OMG… are you kidding me?!

Following that into the forum thread where he talks about how he plays, you can expect that his pet does most of the killing; but several good points were also made, that many of Hunter’s abilities doesn’t really scale with their stats. For example, all of their stings are just as usable, and even Aimed Shot doesn’t scale much with AP.

This goes to show, with some classes, thinking outside of the box really works well. Perhaps more than anything, it also shows how overpowered Hunters are, in that they actually have the flexibility to persue such an endeavor.

Via WoWInsider

A high school English teacher I once had, made it a point to have a 40-minute class dedicated to the differentiation of the common usage of irony as we know, versus the literary device & meaning of the word. Perhaps it was only fitting, that this particularly bright & dedicated teacher was fired at the end of the semester, due to many student issued complaints about her moodiness; ironic indeed.

Either way, I’m not sure if these particular events in my life qualifies as irony, or maybe coincidence, and for those of us who has more faith in the unseen, perhaps we could call it fate.

As I’ve mentioned before, a surgery scheduled around Christmas was what started me off on World of Warcraft two years ago. That surgery, was a combination of chance, timing, and my own choice. I could’ve had the surgery earlier, or later, but the only time slot that seemed to make sense, was to throw it into the middle of the Christmas season.

However, it also is not the first time I’ve had surgery during the festive seasons. My first surgery (and only other surgery in my life) was also performed around the same time. It was a case of appendicitis that started rearing its head around the 27th or 28th, and eventually grown into body-spasm inducing pain as it ruptured.

Not to delve into the complicated living arrangements that was my youth, but I was staying with my aunt at the time. None of us realized how dire my illness was at the time. Needless to say, I didn’t have much to say about the timing of this procedure. Even less had I to say about the series of mis-steps that eventually led to the surgery room. Besides the extremely delayed diagnosis, we had also made the mistake of not calling an ambulance, opting instead to drive into the emergency room on our own. As a result, I was treated alongside patients with slight fevers and cold, instead of proper treatment for a life-threatening infection that is now spreading through my body. Of course, that mistake was not ours alone, also as much as the hospital workers who simply stashed me into the back of the line.

It was a nurse that was about to go off-duty that noticed me. She had examined me earlier and determined that I probably had appendicitis, and urged the others to get me into a room as soon as possible. Of course, the ball was dropped, and I was sitting in the waiting room for a solid three hours or so before I was finally admitted by her personally. Had she not seen me on her way out of the door, I probably wouldn’t have survived at all.

That is the closest I came to facing death, a fact confirmed by my surgeon days after the surgery. “You were only about another hour or so away from an irreversible infection, you know? Once the infection penetrates the diaphram and reaches your lung, that would’ve been it,” he would later on relay to me with a proud smile on his face. Another life saved, but it never had to be that close if it wasn’t for the incompetency of the hospital to begin with.

However, those hours spent in the waiting room wasn’t wasted. I was very well aware of my own mortality, as the pain grew and festered. It was a pain that wouldn’t give way even to the multitude of pain medication and morphine I had later on. Although the drugs did create a psychological disassociation with the pain, I would be laughing and joking as they’re taking my x-ray, while I can barely move around and stand up due to the pain & muscle spasm. The combination of pain, realization of my fragility, perhaps to a point of how little control I had over the current situation, forced me to re-evaluate my life at that young age.

That event alone, would indeed reshape my life down a direction that I never before considered. In hindsight, it was perhaps childish of me, in both the world I had created for myself up to that point, as well as the epiphany I had from that point on. None of that realization seems significant now that I’m in my later 20′s, or perhaps they’re so ingrained into who I’ve became, that it no longer seem to carry any significance.

It’s been two years since my last Christmas procedure, just as it’s been two years since I first picked up World of Warcraft. As I celebrate this Christmas, a dear friend that I’ve met through World of Warcraft, and then in real life as well (we have almost weekly gatherings at her place), is having a surgery of her own.

The short and happy story, is that she’s safe and sound, with a good amount of weight removed (quite literally). For me though, this special sort of coincidence carries more meaning than just a friend getting over a surgery, but the timing of it, the connection that’s established through both the events in my own life and how I came to meet this person, all makes it seem as if a larger force is at work.

The life threatening operation I had when I was 14, the procedure I had two years ago (almost to the exact date to which my friend entered the hospital), picking up World of Warcraft to pass time while I recovered from surgery… All eventually led to me being a supporting character of some sort in her life, as she is getting her own special Christmas surgery.

I don’t know if this can be categorized as irony, but I had long ago, forgotten the exclusive definition insisted upon by that endearing, if not moody, English teacher.

For example, a very popular addon, Decursive, no longer works. Which doesn’t bother me a bit, not because I don’t often play a class that needs to cleanse/decurse; but there was a long standing tradition for hardcore raiders to not rely too heavily on addons that make choices for you. Decursive was one of those addon that clearly would deteriorate a player’s ability to play the “right way” if used too often. I never used it even when I played my Priest, running through Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. In fact, I much appreciate the fact that Blizzard finally made a strong stance on how people should have to learn certain skills to advance in the game, rather than relying on addons that will perform the duty for them.

What really grinds my gear, in a Peter Griffin-like fashion, is that the patch has been out for almost a month now, and there still isn’t a single reliable and flexible actionbar addon.

The previous “king of actionbar” addon has to be Discord ActionBars. Which is all but defunct given the release of WoW 2.0. The author of Discord decided to create a completely different addon architecture that can modify the entire UI in-game. I’ve tried the beta version of this for a bit on The Burning Crusade test realms, but the interface is so complex and obtuse, that I couldn’t find my way around it. Discord ActionBar was no simple matter to configure & customize, requiring dedicating at least 20 minutes of my life to it every time. Discord UI Builder was even worse, and not even close to being complete.

There are other very simple bar mods that just aren’t flexible enough for me. They can clean up the actionbar a bit, compact some of the elements, but they don’t allow you to build everything from the ground up. Then there are mods like Bongos and Trinity Bars, which gives you extremely high amount of flexibility in contructing your actionbars from the ground up, but both has some very annoying, and potentially game breaking bugs. Here are the problems with each as of the writing of this post:

Trinity Bars
Much prettier than Bongos, has multiple bar arrangements in different shapes (circles, semi-circles, columns, vertical & horizontal), and allows a few different types of button textures. A little harder to configure than Bongos, but looks much, much better.

On other hand, buggy as hell. Keybindings not saving between game sessions, stances not swapping correctly. All sorts of other problems.

Bongos
Ugly, ugly ugly, but functional. Configuration is easier than Trinity Bars, but doesn’t allow for bars over 12 buttons. Only one glaring bug in sight, it seems to lose stances after a while… for no apparent reason.

That, ladies & gentlemen, are really the only two available choices we have with the “new WoW”. There are a few other odds & ends out there, but none of them are as flexible as either of the two mentioned here. It’s a sad state of things, and maybe they’ll eventually get all the bugs & kinks fixed… or maybe Bongos will get prettier.

I have no qualms about getting rid of addons that plays the game for us, instead of helping us play. However, missing critical mods that provides better “basic” functionality to the game, such as just being able to arrange buttons how I want them, and have them look pretty, is extremely frustrating. Makes me not want to pick up the game for a while. Just hope that everything gets fixed before the expansion hits the shelves.

Knowing that I wouldn’t have very much physical activity for a while, I decided to give World of Warcraft a try. WoW had already been released for several months, and garnered many good reviews. I haven’t been a steady gamer for quite a while, although I dabbled in various MMORPG for a bit (anything from the pre-alpha, beta of Ultimate Online, to a few months in EverQuest amongst other various MMO’s that came and went), I’ve never found any of them to be a satisfying experience. I liked Blizzard’s games from before, and WoW was getting enough good press to garner my interest.

To my surprise, WoW was not only a great MMORPG, but it was a great “game” by any standard. Up to that point, MMO’s has always played second fiddle to your regular PC games. Yes, they have a huge community that may suck you in, but generally the grahpics and gameplay was sub-standard compared to what you would get from a single player experience. WoW was really the first MMO to bring it altogether, great interesting play on a single-player level alongside of the massive world and community. Before you know it, I was sucked into the game, deeply entranched in its social atmosphere, spending hours a night leveling and running new instances and challenges.

I think the biggest misconception about a game like this to the outsiders, is that a game is just a “game”. There are many often heard, cliched complaints about people who are dedicated to WoW. For example, people who wanted you to do something else instead of playing the game may say something like, “Why don’t you just save the game?” To these people, it isn’t obvious that WoW is more than just a game. As with all MMO’s, a huge part of the attraction is the social atmosphere that is established over this virtual environment. Having a game-based objective helps bringing people together via providing them with a common interest. However it is the social interactions and obligations that makes the game as important to people who are playing it, as much as their other, non-game space related social obligations.

In the two years I’ve been in WoW, I’ve gone through the transitions of being a casual player, to a hardcore raider, then toned back down to a semi-hardcore casual player. Through the journey I’ve met a lot of people from all different facets of life. There are your high school and college students who are so addicted to the game to the edge of dropping out of school (which I highly recommend against). There are the working class folks like me. Then there are the independently wealthy folks that doesn’t have to worry about other things in life except to play WoW (I wish I was one of these folks). What’s even more surprising, especially for a person from my perspective of a single, working professional, is that for many people WoW is a family activity rather than an individualistic endeavor. I’ve ran across more than a couple of gamers whose spouse, children, some even grandparents that all played WoW as a part of their daily social interaction.

What is also interesting, is that the older, more mature the gamer is behind the character, the more likely that WoW carries more meaning than just being a game. It is easy for some of the younger kids to dismiss WoW as “just a game” and the social community they work within, whether a pick-up group or a guild, are just means to the next great loot. The older the gamer is, the more cognizant they are of social ramifications of the community they are involved with.

To those uninitiated, it may seem ludicrous to treat the friends that I’ve made in a “game” to those whom I’ve made in real life. The reality is that our social behavior is changing rapidly by an entire generation at a time. Just as kids who make friends via MySpace, communicate to each other by IM and text messages, WoW is no less a social atsmophere within the context of a game as MySpace is a social atmosphere within the context of Web 2.0. I think this behavior is also proven through Second Life, which is a virtual environment without a hint of the game-induced, goal-driven context; unless the goal is of the individual who wishes to participate in such a virtual environment on their own accord.

It also makes me wonder, what if World of Warcraft fails us one day, either by not living up to our expectation (The Burning Crusader expansion is just around the corner, and we’ll see how the critical mass respond to it), or just shutting down operation in transition to another game (perhaps, World of Starcraft one day?). What will be the next destination for our mass social gathering?

Read the whole story here.