A select few people may choose to read the short story “Barn Burning” from an Eskimo perspective (at least according to one of my college English literature professors), but most people are going to take it at face value: it’s a short story, set in the Midwest, about a guy who always blames others for his problems, and takes revenge on them by burning their barns. If you don’t know what a barn is, the story isn’t going to mean that much to you. It’s all about context. And in the context of MMOs, most players aren’t looking for an intricately crafted play experience, they just want to go somewhere, kill virtual things, and get appropriate virtual rewards. It really is that simple, sometimes….

So yeah, Bartle was right when he said that there were probably only 20 other people on the planet who would “read” that zone that way ;^)

AMIB, actually I am a carebear. I always laugh at the “must have pvp, pvp is cool” crowd. The moment they experience what they wanted they usually get cold feet..!

Ardanna :
@Bethryn
Plainsrunning was the Tauren equivalent of a mount, so they would not have got it in Mulgore.
Because of whatever issues arose Plainsrunning was done away with and their mount became the Kodo.
I don’t think Mulgore is any more daunting in terms of size than Durotar (for example).

Players in beta begged for kodo mounts for taurens, and Blizzard finally gave in. That’s what happened to plainsrunning.

It could have been overpowered in PvP anyway, as Sheepherder noted.

Was this an artful design or to compensate for the solo player? Could be both.

I give credit where it’s due: later on Blizzard did start ’suggesting’ the number of players needed to complete a quest, so you didn’t bang your head too long.

Personally, I think someone in charge cut through the overthinkers and said ‘look, questing needs this to work right in this zone. Period.’

But if you want to pontificate and overthink it, I guess that’s what blogs are for.

Ardanna :
Because of whatever issues arose Plainsrunning was done away with and their mount became the Kodo.

Ten seconds to “mount up” and dispelled as soon as you are in combat. A normal cast/activation time would have made it obscenely powerful for running down people in pvp (because it doesn’t require you to stand still), and a normal dismount condition (dazed/stunned) would have been brutal against kiting classes.

Overall I remember hating the forced grouping here even though I played one of the few classes that could solo the group quests (with the better power of new players now I imagine most could). The problem as I saw it (and still do) was that the forced grouping was the main solo quests chains capped off with a group quest. Nothing against grouping but this design of implementing the pivotal encounters of solo quest chains with group events cheapened the experience. Invariably people would form groups just to knock these out and then hastily retreat to solo play as the design of the game demanded that for efficient xp.

The travel here was particularly bad and as noted is better now with more flight points and earlier mounts. I remember staying and farming for xp because going back to the quest hub was too far; I’m not certain that’s the type of play you want to encourage.

On release, yes, it was a level 40 skill (trainable from the patrolling Tauren in STV, coincidentally). I read a blue post ages back indicating it was otherwise at design time, explaining part of the reason for the exceptionally poorly distributed (and large) lowbie Kalimdor zones.

Mulgore is roughly the same size as Durotar, but has a much worse layout (see the post about hubs above). On average it takes two or three hours longer than Durotar to hit level 12, most of which is time wasted travelling between the central village and the various questing areas, or time travelling between sparsely populated monsters in the northern half of the map.

Actually, I might as well link MapWow here, since it’s an excellent illustration of just how ridiculously large the Kalimdor lowbie zones are. For all the mention here of STV’s size, you’ll see it’s actually only a little larger than Mulgore.

Plainsrunning was the Tauren equivalent of a mount, so they would not have got it in Mulgore.

Because of whatever issues arose Plainsrunning was done away with and their mount became the Kodo.

I don’t think Mulgore is any more daunting in terms of size than Durotar (for example).

“So all that talk we hear of Blizzard’s legendary polishing, of their not releasing product prematurely – that’s all hogwash?”

Depending on how you define polish, and what standard of polish you’re using by way of comparison, that could very well be the case for vanilla WoW.

I can give one very definite example of poor polish by almost any definition, and that is Mulgore. The zone was designed when Tauren all had the Plainsrunning ability, allowing them to move much faster on foot than other races. It was therefore designed to be of a certain size so as to make travel times comparable to those found in other starting areas. Plainsrunning was removed due to balance issues, but Mulgore was left the size it had been designed as. It is consequently a very unpleasant starting area, and most sensible cows brave the Barrens to move swiftly to Durotar.

There are a lot of other non-functional issues with the original game, but to be fair, many of these are because designing an MMO was still fairly unrefined process at the time, and the target playerbase and their expectations were not particularly transparent.

What bothers me most about Dr. Bartle’s post is this entire net-to-catch-players-unawares line of reasoning. For my part, I barely recall Nesingwary at all, because I had little to do with this net. This was, along with the yeti cave in Hillsbrad, the most notorious ambush point in the game, especially for Horde players (for the record, I played Horde as well), as others pointed out. I recall turning in a few of the quests that send you to him, but not taking quests from him. That you have quests specifically sending you to him, by the way, is just the subtle equivalent of a big yellow neon sign as to where you should go next, and it’s just plain offensive because you know there’s a net, and it awaits you.

Second, and at a most down-to-earth level, Hemet Nesingwary is a design failure because it is Hemet Nesingwary, another lore-breaking WoW real-life tongue-in-cheek reference that, albeit more literary than dear Haris Pilton, still destroys any immersion you may have had in the game. They could very well have had the archetype of the big-game hunter (a threadbare cliche), but they did not need to include all those winks at real-life identification. They could, in other words, have made one up completely, but they didn’t.

-Reading Dr. Bartle’s blog entry just confirms to me that WoW is just one large hand-holding exercise, so on this point I agree with him, but I don’t see it as a good thing, as he seems to do. Is it really about Stranglethorn specifically? No, I wouldn’t say that. Yeah, sure, I was inside that great funnel that would force me to go to Booty Bay. But I tried to avoid it as much as possible, doing every green-colour quest in Stonetalon or the Thousand Needles that remained in my quest book to make sure I could spend as little time as possible in Stranglethorn. But I couldn’t escape it altogether.

Which in the end speaks of something else: level-limited play. I have very little patience for it nowadays, and WoW was the worst offender in the way it was encouraging instant gratification while fostering a sentiment of overwhelming inadequacy in its players (aka, your gear is the best in the world, until next level where you will suck, or, in layman’s terms, the treadmill). So you might have avoided Stranglethorn (if such a thing were possible) and moved on to Dustwallow or even Tanaris as quickly as possible, you’d still be stuck with the basic problem of getting killed by NPCs seven levels above you, not to mention anything of the ganking on PvP servers.

That’s why Nesingwary is a design failure, too. You cast a net for level-30ish players, and inevitably you get the bored level-80s, who know this, maintaining a watch on the place. If this was an intentional aspect of WoW’s design, it is sadistic (because WoW PvP is all about levels and gear, and not even about RvR despite all the game’s claims to this effect); if it isn’t intentional, it failed to acknowledge what would come out of it. And somehow “this is PvP, go back to a PvE server” doesn’t quite cut it as an excuse.

By all means, there should be some tension. There should be strategic points on the map, which Alliance and Horde should fight over — even though this comes in the most artificial setting, the number of quests being given there. I’m all for the PvP-ambush adrenaline rush, but I don’t think WoW is the game for it; Shadowbane and such are far more appropriate, because of design choices. Sure, PvP-ambush situations in Stranglethorn sound nice, until you realize it just means that a level 80 can show up and kill with one blow all those who came to the zone to legitimately level up. So your own side gets its level-80’s to Stranglethorn to protect its own. And soon it’s a bunch of maxed-out characters duking it out in Stranglethorn while the lowbies turn in their quests. Intended gameplay? I don’t think so. Acceptable gameplay? No, because, as I said above, WoW isn’t the game for this.

Sure, you might say that the WoW player loses nothing in PvP, except his time. True. But this is precisely why WoW is inappropriate for such a purpose. The PvP is gratuitous, and because the PvP loser is no worse off than before, it automatically makes any criticism of the PvP irrelevant, and the developers can just brush it off. (And I could mention here the faction imbalance on some servers, which probably makes the game unplayable for the smaller faction.)

@Brask Mumei
I find that there is much in literary criticism that is hogwash. The author is dead, okay, I’m willing to concede that. But for every dismissal of the author’s intent comes a critic who will impose his own idea of what the work means — and promptly blame the author for it (ie., “I don’t care what you actually mean, because what I think you mean is always better”). In other words, say that the author’s actual intent is irrelevant, and substitute your own idea as the greater truth. It might have been a novel idea when introduced, but why has it not so much made the critic independent from the author as superior to him, in every context, while at the same time blatantly pushing an agenda? (See: Dale Peck.)

I’m all for admiring a Shakespearean sonnet, but the fact that it was composed by a monkey clanking away on an Underwood at random ought to account for something.

As for the art versus fun debate, I’m tempted to agree with Wanderer about “art for art’s sake”, where functionality stops being a main consideration because it’s Art. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then Dr. Bartle is more than welcome saying that Stranglethorn was art, even though its creator might have been the same monkey as above getting an internship at Blizzard. But art and functionality are two separate spheres, and on the second, I cannot side with Dr. Bartle.