Whitemane Frostmourne Experience

I’ve found another Wow Private Server. For Wow, this one looks, and works very nicely. I’ve played it for a few hours. But I’m going to move on from Wow. I’ll get to that later.

Whitemane can be found at Whitemane.org. I was most interested in the Wrath of the Lich King [WotLK] expansion since it adds the Northrend continent, and flight in both Outland and Northrend. I found the Frostmourne experience very stable. No constant reboots as with Project Ascension. No crashes. There were a couple of funny behaviors but only a few in the week or so that I played.

The signup is a little odd. You sign up at PlayerID.me, whatever that is, and you must have either a gmail or another well known email – I forget which one. And they send a message to verify your email. No surprise. But it went smoothly.

Project Ascension is a Waste of Time

First Discovery

About a year ago or so I found the Project Ascension private server and played it for a while. This server is a Burning Crusade Classic server with class changes and other innovative changes.

https://ascension.gg/en

I like several things about their ideas for a Wow Server:

Extremely flexible class idea where you can pick and choose skills from any of the classes.
Ability to tame pets from Elemental, Dragonkin, and Demonkin as well as Hunter Pets.
Easy and free rank up of your skills.
Reasonably fast progression – at least at the time of my starting.
Good population so dungeon queue times were reasonable.

However, after a few weeks, I stopped playing. After I was able to level a couple of characters to level 70, and obtain flight in Outland, but then something changed and progression was so slow that everything felt like a grind. When I play a private server on any game, I don’t necessarily want an instant progression or boost to max level, but I don’t want a grind either. I expect a better progression than the original / retail game tho. If I were wanting a normal level of progression then I would just play the retail game. I didn’t figure out what changed at that time. So I know there are folks that enjoy the “Hardcore” experience where one death ends the character and you start over. I’m not a Hardcore kinda guy.

Wow Ascension Private Server

Wow Ascension Review

Wow Ascension Web Front Page

Download and Install on PC

Overview

Wow Ascension is a World of Warcraft Private Server. <Insert Legal Disclaimer Here> Let’s review briefly. For more information do a google search for “Wow Private Server Legal”. As I recall, in about 2018, there was a big brouhaha about Blizzard taking some private server folks to court and shut them all down, but the private server folks went to Blizzard and had a meeting and they decided to call a truce. If the Private server companies [Groups or whatever you‘d like to call it.] did not “Charge Money” for playing, then Blizzard would “Look the other way”. And based on the obvious popular appeal, Blizzard dug around in their old backups and recreated the original Wow, which they released as Wow Classic in 2019. So Private Servers are effectively “Legal” although technically against the “Terms of Service”. But if you are playing Wow, and paying for it, then you are subject to any TOS, and if you are not playing the official Wow, then how are you subject to any TOS? I’ll leave that question for some lawyers. I’m sure that for legal reasons, Blizzard needs the TOS to forbid private servers, but has decided to “Look the Other Way” for community reasons. Now on with the show.

Wow Ascension has some interesting ideas, and if you played Wow for years as I did, it has a powerful nostalgia value. Wow Ascension is essentially Wow The Burning Crusade Classic, with a novel class system and about 5x XP leveling boost.

Quick Overview of “Classless”

The “Classless” system allows you to learn spells from any class to mix and match to make your own class. This is available from level 1. They are two tracks: Pick a pre-built combo of spells, or roll your own. Personally, I can see the appeal of using Pre-Built if you are already max level and understand the system. But a whole setup will not work if you are just starting out and don’t have enough Spell or Talent points to do the build. So I always have “Rolled My Own”. More on that later.

So let’s talk in detail about the features Good then the Not So Good.

As MMOs Age

I’m an MMO addict. Let’s forget about Wow and ones before that. Recently I play Elder Scrolls Online, Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2. Recently I got bored and went back to Guild Wars [1], but let’s ignore that in this comparison.

In these games I have many characters:

Elder Scrolls Online – about a dozen
Final Fantasy XIV – about two dozen
Guild Wars 2 – about two dozen

Each game has lots of choices for classes and races and so there are lots of combinations to try. Some I don’t find that interesting – Cat People [Khajiit] in ESO for example just aren’t that interesting to me personally. All the races in ESO are just head changes on basically the same body with or without fur. And new classes appear with new expansions. We just got Arcanist with the Necrom expansion recently.

For FFXIV, all classes [ jobs ] are available to all races and in every character. So you don’t have to make a new character to try a new job. So there aren’t so much as “Combinations” as just all the race choices. And more races and jobs with each expansion.

For Guild Wars 2, all races can play one of any of the classes [Professions] and each expansion brings along new “Specializations” for the classes.

So what happens as a game ages. All these game are more than or almost 10 years old at this point. What happens to the games over time and what does that mean for new players.

What Wow Gets Wrong with Dragon Mounts

World of Warcraft has been accused of copying Guild Wars 2 mounts for the upcoming Dragonflight expansion. Let’s review Guild Wars 2 mounts for those who don’t know. Mounts were added to Guild Wars 2 in Path of Fire. Before that travel was limited to Teleporting to Waypoints, and Gliding. There were some other things like mushrooms and lava tubes in some limited zones.

Guild Wars 2 Mounts

There are a few mounts in Guild Wars 2 and they each have their special abilities that are increased with Masteries in the game. All mounts and mount skins are account wide in GW2, just like Wow.

Mounts in Different Games

I recently ran across a Youtube video where someone was complaining about the long effort to get a Griffon in Guild Wars 2. Griffon is the first flying mount in GW2. I won’t link the video as I’m sure he’s moved on and is now struggling with the many times longer process to get a Skyscale mount. I starting working on getting Skyscale in November 2020 and finally got it in January 2021.

As we know, different MMOs have different requirements for the use of Mounts. Let’s review:

Why Not Just Fly?

I’m working my way through Path of Fire to get the Griffon mount. It’s the first mount that looks like it’s flying, but it’s not.

The second “Flying Mount” introduced into GW2, Living World Season 4 is the Skyscale. This has enhanced flight mechanics, but still can’t really fly.

There must be some “religious objection” to flight. Ever since Gliders were introduced in Heart of Thorns, we could only “Glide” while all other popular games in the genre have True Flight. Well, not really…

WOW Pre-Patch Starter

Ok. I admit, I’m just a lurker. I don’t pay for Wow any more, I just play the starter or trial or whatever they call it. Yep. Recall that I played it for years and left when in Legion they did the “Universal Level Scaling”. That ruined it for me. Anyway, I check in periodically to see how things are doing, and of course yesterday was the big “Shadowlands Pre-Patch”. So I logged in, made a new toon and ran through the tutorial. I’m not going to spoil all of it. But you can do it too for only about a two hours investment. And you’ll wanna check out the new character customization options, although after FFXIV, I find those completely underwhelming.

Some shots from my Exile’s Reach experience

You are led by the hand, literally, through the experience on Exile’s Reach. It’s a common trope, nothing original here, Blizzard:

The ship to far off lands
The catastrophe that washes you up on the beach
The buddy that’s going to walk you through the whole experience, step by step.

But there are a few Wow specific tropes here too:

The obligatory “Bomb the masses from some sort of airship”, although this airship was just a little rotor and you dangle from a rope. Come on Blizz, the Goblins and Gnomes have better little one-man airships than this.
The “dress up an on Ogre” quest, or dress us as anything else, to sneak into the fortress, after which everybody ignores you anyway as you walk around with no costume.
and the minor dungeon tutorial where the NPC acts, or says she is acting, as your tank while you kill some trash and a boss.
Minor spoiler – watch out for those treasure chests lying around. They keep getting bigger and bigger as you go.

FFXIV vs WoW

There have been plenty of articles and Youtube videos comparing Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft. I’m not trying to do a comprehensive guide to the two games, but compare them on two key areas that I find interesting. I played Wow for many years. I finally left in December 2017 when Universal Level scaling was introduced. But with all the hype surrounding the upcoming Wow “Shadowlands” expansion, I’ve had some thoughts about how FFXIV and Wow compare and how I think Blizzard is messing up again with their designs.

I’ll talk about two key areas and compare the two games:

Gear Upgrades and New Expansions
Class Specs and Talents

There are some important differences between the games that World of Warcraft could learn from as they move forward to Shadowlands and beyond.

Rise of the Player

I think we will look back on 2019 as the Year of the Rise of the Player.

There were several things that happened in the world of video games this year. In no particular order, and without links since they are easy to google:
The Failed announcement of Diablo: Immortals as a mobile game at Blizzcon. The jeerz from the crowd was loud and emphatic.
The failure of the Anthem release and the player outcry that followed.
The continuing slip of World of Warcraft from the top of the stack of games folks want to play.
The announcement of ArcheAge Unchained as a separate but equal pay once to play release in response to the overwhelming panning of ArcheAge as “Pay to Win”.

The universal dislike for Loot Boxes, both by the players and by governments around the world who have called these out for what they are, gambling which is made available to minors. While some countries do not classify these as technically “Gambling” due to a technicality in the wording of the laws, most folks see the hidden, and very small odds, real monetary costs, and designed in addictive nature of these schemes as predatory on the players who have large amounts to purchase the games or pay subscriptions for the games.

Youtube, Twitch, Reddit, Twitter and other venues are full of reactions by commentator / players who voice their repeated loud analysis of these and other issues in the gaming industry.

Continue reading “Rise of the Player”

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