Beta Testing

Everyone and their surprisingly computer-savvy dog knows that the public testing phase for Cataclysm is starting in the near future.

Imminent!

I am very interested in news about and previews of the expansion. When MMO-Champion had leaked screenshots, models, and information from the pirated friends-and-family test client available, I spent a lot of time looking over it all. I'll be following all the news that comes out before the launch of the expansion, eager to hear about cool new places to see, things to do, and people to set on fire.

One thing I won't be doing, however, is playing the beta test myself.

Even I think it's a bit of a strange dichotomy. On the one hand, I enthusiastically seek out spoilers and previews, and I get excited to see screenshots of radical changes to the world I've been playing in for five years, or models of the new creatures and zones. On the other, I have exactly zero interest in actually seeing any of this stuff for myself in game before the official launch.

I think, for me, it's similar to the difference between a trailer for a film and the film itself. No matter how many trailers a film studio releases to get the prospective audience excited to see their movie, they never show you everything (even when it seems like they're trying to!), The experience of sitting down in the cinema, or in your living room with a DVD, and actually watching a film is very different from watching a trailer even a dozen times (and there are some movies, like The Dark Knight, where I probably watched the trailers three or four dozen times).

Likewise, as exciting as it is to see the new look for Orgrimmar or the ruined portions of Stormwind, it's just a teaser. It gets me excited to see it for myself. The difference, however, is that the beta test for Cataclysm, as close to final as it might be, is not going to be the "real deal".

I had some experience of this when my wife, Lexa, acquired an invite to the beta test for Wrath of the Lich King. Of course, I was excited to watch her explore Northrend, and even tried out a death knight for myself - but that quickly made the downside of beta testing evident. Not everything worked as it was intended to. When it did, every quest popped up a feedback form that seriously interfered with my experience of the game. I'm not the kind of person who gets "immersed" in my character even at the table for a face-to-face game of Dungeons & Dragons, much less in an MMORPG like World of Warcraft, but I do like the experience of the game to be interrupted by "outside" things only when I choose.

The other reason I'm not interested in the beta test is that, frankly, I want what I do to count. When I create my worgen rogue, I'm not just doing it to experience the new starting zones and then put that character on a shelf or even delete him; I'm doing it because the new starting zones and race give me an opportunity to level a character of a class I haven't successfully played before. I don't want to do all that and then have the character wiped away at the end of the beta test! Likewise, I don't want to explore all the new zones with my mage and then have him reset to level 80.

To return to my film analogy, playing in a beta test is like watching a "screener" cut of a film before all of the visual effects have been completed. Yes, it's 90% of the final film, but I'll never feel like I've actually seen the film properly until I've seen the final version - but, having seen the "screener", my experience of watching the release version of the movie will never be as satisfying. So it is with Cataclysm; I want to know what to expect and will be following all the spoilers and previews as they come out, but for me that's about building anticipation and excitement for the day when I can play the finished version of the expansion for myself.

Raiding in Cataclysm

I'm sure that we've all seen the announcements from Blizzard regarding the changes to raid sizes, lockouts, and rewards in Cataclysm.

Different!

From my personal perspective, I welcome the changes wholeheartedly.

I'm not interested in 25-player raiding. I've done my fair share of it, during The Burning Crusade and even up through Ulduar in Wrath of the Lich King. My preference, though, is strongly for 10-player raiding; I prefer the camaraderie of a smaller group anyway, and since I don't really enjoy playing with strangers all that much - there's a reason I've barely taken advantage of the Dungeon Finder - the fact that my guild isn't large enough to run 25-player raids suits me very well.

In all honestly, although I said that I welcome the changes, they're not going to make very much of an impact on me at all. If the current system continued, I still wouldn't be raiding 25s, and therefore I wouldn't care that the people who did were getting better gear than me. The fact that Cataclysm raiding will give me the same rewards as people who raids 25s is a nice bonus - I'm not being "penalised" for my preference for 10-player raiding.

If Blizzard can get the difficulty tuned to the same level between 10- and 25-player raids, I think this is eminently reasonable. It's clearly part of their recent "play the way you want to play" philosophy.

The other side of the coin is the change from the current emblems/honour points/arena points system to the new system of PvE and PvP rewards.

I really like these changes too. Maintaining the same two-tiered system throughout every new . . . tier . . . of raiding and PvP content makes a lot of sense, and certainly avoids the problems of the current system where we have five different kinds of badges, three of which only still exist in the game for legacy reasons - they don't drop, and you can only acquire them in order to spend them by going to an NPC. True, it's not exactly hard, but what it is is unnecessary.

I also approve of the weekly cap on Valour and Conquest points. Anyone who has given it any thought at all will realise that when you can earn rewards for logging in every day and doing a random heroic, that becomes a strong pressure on players until they feel like they must do so in order to "keep up". Now, as I alluded to before, I'm not one of those players; you can count the number of random heroics I've done without taking off your shoes and socks. I do, however, have friends whose desire to be "competitive" means that they end up running dungeons every single day, even when they don't want to be doing that.

In Cataclysm, these friends of mine might end up just doing their normal weekly raiding, the weekly raid quest, and a couple of heroics - leaving them more time for other hobbies, or (more importantly from Blizzard's point of view) giving them an incentive to devote time in World of Warcraft to other forms of content, like rated battlegrounds. Many of my raiding friends are also interested in PvP, and I predict that my guild is probably going to have a regular rated battleground night just as we have a regular raiding night today.

In other news, I think my next post will probably talk about what I'm specifically up to in the game these days. Hopefully it won't be delayed too long.