I don’t think any of us wanted it to end like this, saying goodbye to the Horde cities one last time before we faction-transfer over to join our other friends on the Alliance side, but it honestly feels like there’s no real choice anymore. The faction balance on European World of Warcraft realms — the PVE ones, at least — is absurdly biased towards the Alliance, with most being outnumbered by three or even four times, world PVP objectives such as Wintergrasp and the older Outland areas such as Halaa are what I bitterly refer to as perma-blue, a state where the Alliance simply swarm in with superior numbers every time the Horde make any attempt to capture, and time and time again, Blizzard have shown no particular willingness to even lift a finger to change the status quo.

Worse, the people we know who play the game are split across factions, some of them clinging vehemently to the Horde side with the Fluff guild, others occupying the Alliance as Steel Vanguard, both sides too staunch to change their position until now. With raiding possibilities looking bleak due to dwindling numbers and PVP being little more than a joke as the larger-sized Alliance faction facerolls everything with glutinous fury, it’s harder and harder to find reasons to keep playing Horde. I’ll miss being a Tauren and I’ll miss Thunder Bluff, Orgrimmar and the Undercity — never did like Silvermoon much — but I won’t miss being the underdog time and time again, and having the odds stacked so heavily against me.

That’s what got me thinking about gaming as a whole, and the bizarre system of effort and reward that we as gamers seem to impose upon ourselves. Of course achievements in games like World of Warcraft or on systems such as the Xbox 360 and Steam — or a rose by any other name, such as “trophies” on the PlayStation 3 — are the perfect example of this mentality in action, I feel it’s only a relatively new coat of paint on the surface of something much older. Remember when you were a kid hanging out in the video-game arcades of the 80′s and 90′s, marvelling at the high-score tables populated and dominated by those elite few with the seemingly unattainable skills needed to occupy such a throne? Or as a more domestic example, something every gamer should be familiar with: The urge to beat the level, defeat the boss, to press onward and explore new territory, or simply to beat a score and achieve some measure of satisfaction from the knowledge that your skill and dedication could be quantified by digits glowing on a phosphor screen.

This, I feel, is something endemic and intrinsic to the gamer mindset, and yet the intangible appeal fails to make any logical sense in my mind. We push ourselves to incredible lengths for the sake of achievement and improvement in an artificial system which exists solely for the sake of providing challenge where there would otherwise be none. An extreme case of this would be the Korean gamer who quite literally killed himself by playing too much StarCraft; more common examples can be seen all around us. Who out there wearing the moniker of “gamer” can honestly say they haven’t spent a weekend or more shut away in a darkened room, hunched over a screen, thoroughly absorbed in one of these faux-simulacra?

Is it simply human nature to constantly push ourselves further, so desperate for self-improvement and so eager for accolade that we are inherently drawn to such a medium? The overwhelming popularity of gaming as a whole on a worldwide scale would seem to imply a certain truth in this logic, though I can’t help but feel as though something is missing. Can it really be that simple? In the end, are we still just a bunch of apes who’ll push a button all day long if it means we’ll get a bunch of bananas and a pat on the head?

"My son, the day you were born, the very forests of Lordaeron whispered the name, 'Arthas'."

It’s no secret that I usually find myself rooting for the bad guys in movies and games, and there’s nothing I like better than a well-defined and likable villain — even if it’s one you simply love to hate. In lieu of decent content lately, I’ve decided to start a new section highlighting some of my favourite villains from TV, movies and video games, starting with one I’m sure many of you will recognize: Arthas Menethil, better known as the Lich King, whose exploits spanned no less than three games — starting in Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, stealing the show in The Frozen Throne expansion, and finally the rise and fall of his master plan in Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion to World of Warcraft. I think what makes Arthas such a great villain is that he’s both devious and cruel, tormenting and evading the players time and time again in Wrath, while at the same time being a truly tragic figure, manipulated and coerced into becoming a tool of evil while his intentions were originally pure — albeit misguided.

Arthas was the son of King Terenas Menethil and heir to the throne of Lordaeron, a paladin in training under Uther the Lightbringer, and an all-round pretty nice guy. There’s not a great deal to tell about this part of the story, but unfortunately for him — and fortunately, perhaps, for us — things weren’t always to be that way. Hot on the heels of the necromancer Kel’Thuzad and his demon-master Mal’Ganis, whose twisted plans included tainting shipments of grain with a deadly plague of undeath which would turn unfortunate citizens into grotesque ghouls, Arthas was faced with the ultimate dilemma: After arriving just a little too late to the city of Stratholme, where the infected plague had already been distributed to the peasants, he felt the only course of action was to purge the city before the citizens were turned, to spare them a fate worse than death and cull the undead threat before it got out of hand. Uther was understandably horrified by this, determined to instead seek a way to help the afflicted people, but nothing could sway the young prince from his mission.

"This kingdom shall fall, and from the ashes shall arise a new order that will shake the very foundations of the world."

Things went from bad to worse, and rather than regale you with the full story — which you can find more details on over here, if you so choose — I’ll wrap it up in a digest: Arthas pursued the demon Mal’Ganis with reckless fervour to the frozen shores of Northrend, stranded his loyal troops by burning their ships and then blaming the act on local mercenaries, inadvertently slew his friend and mentor, Muradin Bronzebeard while claiming the cursed blade Frostmourne, which then drove the prince to madness and the soul of the former Lich King, Ner’zhul — which was entombed within the sword — fused with that of the fallen paladin, creating not the first, but certainly the most well-known incarnation of the Lich King. He then found his way back home to Lordaeron, slew his father, and brought the kingdom crumbling down.

I feel that Arthas is one of the most memorable and influential villains in video gaming, partly because of how his story and actions can evoke such a variety of feelings from the player — he begins misguided but well-meaning, descends into the ranks of villainhood and builds up a great deal of animosity especially throughout the events of Wrath, tormenting and taunting the would-be heroes at every turn, a looming figure of doom whose machinations have wrought countless horrors and innumerable sorrows. It seems like it’s hard to go anywhere or do anything in Wrath without running into the Lich King himself, and while he has plenty of opportunities to simply end your attempts outright, he seems content to merely toy with the heroes, much like a cat playing with its prey.

"You speak of justice, of cowardice? I will show you the justice of the grave, and the true meaning of fear."

The greatest culmination of this is during the battle of the Wrathgate, a great siege at the very gates of his infernal citadel by the combined forces of the Alliance and the Horde, in an attempt to bring the villain to justice. Again, the Lich King displays his typical villainous arrogance, standing tall in the face of an army and mocking their challenge before being abruptly interrupted by a threat that none present could have expected (and perhaps the focus for a future Villain Spotlight). Still, he shrugs off the attack and retreats into his fortress, to fight another day.

However, in the words of the late Terenas Menethil, “No king rules forever.” The culmination of the Wrath expansion leads to a siege upon the lair of the Lich King and, after battling many of his unholy minions, the great villain himself is finally put to rest. For those who play the game and have not yet seen the outcome, I shall remain fairly coy with the details, though the events can be seen over here, for the curious. While wrapping up Arthas’ storyline, it also brings us full circle with regards to how we — the players, and observers of the story — feel about the villain. In his dying moments, he is finally freed from his curse and is portrayed once more as a tragic character who never intended to fall so far.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I personally felt a great deal of pity for the fallen prince, the one who I had grown to despise through my Warcraft adventures, but here at the end, realized that he was merely a pawn all along, being used by forces much greater. And this, I think, is what makes Arthas such a memorable and unique villain — how many others can you name, which manage such an extensive full-circle spanning many years, and after all of the relentless villainy and vexation, finally turns out to be a poor, misguided soul who deserves not hatred, but pity?

Other than Darth Vader, I suppose.

50 gold coins wasted and some bruised egos all around. It should have been an easy run — perhaps that kind of confidence had made us complacent; arrogant, even. It should have been easy, but everything went to hell for reasons that nobody could agree on. It’s easy to point fingers, of course, and everyone points away from themselves, but sometimes things just aren’t meant to be.

This is the point where I realized — or perhaps I should say, it was the last straw, the last thread on an ever-so-long rope — something which spans further than mere raid groups in World of Warcraft, but also extends to my out-of-game personality. By habit I tend to play a support role in online RPGs, most notably the archetypal healer whose job it is to keep the group alive — stemming, I think, from earlier excursions where the ‘group’ tended to just be a core body of 3-4 friends who’d play online games together, a team I was comfortable and happy enough with to easily support my compatriots.

Sadly, herein lies the problem, an issue which has been troubling me with increasing intensity for weeks, and finally culminated with the realization that no matter how hard I try, no matter what angle I look at the problem from, nothing can change the simple and undeniable fact that I’m simply not built for this — or, more specifically, not willing to put the responsibility and safety of others in my hands, even if only in the context of online games, tenfold when applied to reality. The expectations of others — and, indeed, myself — combined with what eventually becomes crushing stress and self-doubt, thoroughly abandons the realm of what should be considered ‘fun’ and enters into much less favourable places.

To clarify, while I wish I was and certainly try hard to be, I’m just not a ‘team player’; I don’t easily handle the responsibility of being the lynchpin of failure or success upon which others rely, and except when given fairly menial, low-risk tasks, the combined stress and self-doubt accumulate into what eventually becomes an aversion so great that I’m unable to react with anything but an overwhelming sense of avoidance. Indeed, I’m not much of a team anything, being a person who tends to flourish in very small groups, but when at large social gatherings or parties (and I would consider a ‘large’ gathering being that which has more than 5-6 people present), the urge is almost overwhelming to quietly occupy a corner and interact with others as little — and avoid drawing attention to myself as much — as is possible. Indeed, I’m even known to abandon a group entirely, when the combined weight of numbers becomes too much to bear.

The lesson learned, I think, is merely that the greater the concentration of people — whether be it a real-life social gathering or an online game — the less I want to play a prominent part. It’s less a case of apathy, laziness or unwillingness to contribute, and more that I’m just not comfortable leading the charge, having people rely upon me, or being the centre of attention during a group discussion. I mostly just want to do my own thing — the archetypal ‘lone wolf’, as it were — and when I do have to rely on others, do my part in the most subtle, unassuming, and unnoticable way possible. I don’t want praise for being a good team player — I just want to do my part in such a way that, failure or success, neither the blame nor thanks land on my shoulders.

Now, let me step back for a moment and say that I’ve generally had superb experiences when it comes to level 80, “endgame” dungeon-running, even despite the occasional player who displays, shall we say, less-than-stellar performance. People generally know the game, they know their role, and with very few exceptions, things tend to go pretty smoothly. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for misbegotten attempts at low-level dungeoneering, a tendency I’d blame simply on players being new to the game, but that pretty heirloom gear (adorned with Crusader, no less), tells a different story.

I wish I could make this shit up.

So, cue the contestants: Mentat, my freshly-minted (and already level 21) paladin, the obligatory hunter, and three druids. While normally not a major issue, I knew there’d be a problem with our furry brethren when the ‘tank’ (feral spec, natch) started casting Wrath, the healer used nothing but Healing Touch, the hunter’s pet growled, and Muggins here had to sort the whole mess out by flailing into action as a stand-in tank, despite the sheer ineptitude present. Just as I thought I was in some grotesque parody, things turned from bad to worse — the two druids decided to have a tank-off by both assuming bear form and attempting a most painful display of fighting over aggro — I say this, because the healer and hunter were taking more hits than anyone.

The loot rolling was a similar farce — a situation so laughably awful that it could only have been a cosmic joke, with each player a mere puppet playing a caricature. The hunter rolled need on a dagger with arcane damage, the flea-ridden druid rolled need on a shield, the other bear-druid rolled need one a one-handed DPS mace, and all the time I’m praising the god of random numbers for the fortune to bless me with the winning rolls on both Stinging Viper and Worn Turtle Shell Shield (I wanted Kresh’s Back, but that only ever drops when I’m playing a cloth-wearer). After an almost predictable moment of uncertainty, the group ‘leader’ unsure which direction to go for the seventh time, all proverbial hell broke loose and the fail-druids fell down the gap during an easy jump, and between the two of them managed to aggro half a dozen elites. I bravely jumped down to lend a hand, but of course the healer was nowhere to be seen, and I’m sure you can imagine the outcome of this most ill-fated excursion.

Much as I wanted to stay and collect my booty, I simply couldn’t handle it any longer, and bailed — perhaps some other poor fool would take my place, and learn the unfortunate truth of it all; that at the bottom of a barrel is another barrel, and at the bottom of that one is a trio of druids.

Icecrown, the home of the soon-to-be-dispatched Arthas, bane of Warcraft players everywhere: A frozen wasteland populated by all manner of twisted horrors, towering structures of blackened steel, and — perhaps somewhat eclectically — vikings. It’s not a nice place, and it’s not supposed to be a nice place. It’s not somewhere that you’d take your family for a summer vacation, setting up the beach chairs on the frozen tundra and basking under the plague-blighted sky. It’s the closest place to hell you’ll find in World of Warcraft — Molten Core excluded, I suppose — and it’s already well and truly frozen over.

This is nothing new, a zone which has been around since the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, though recently expanded in the form of three new 5-man dungeons and the long-waited Icecrown Citadel raids. Revisiting this frigid wasteland on my rather unpleasant quest towards Loremaster, I’m struck by a revelation: I honestly believe that Icecrown is the single worst thing to have ever happened to WoW, due to terrible design decisions, and I’m going to tell you exactly why.

First of all, it’s big. Really big. Imagine the biggest thing you can possibly visualise in your mind. Got something in mind? Okay, it’s not quite that big, but it’s close. Getting around this sprawling mass of an area can be tedious at best, even with a fast flying mount, and much of the space honestly seems wasted; it’s as if Blizzard simply tried too hard to provide a grand, epic experience of towering monuments, jagged hills, and sprawling tundra, and simply cranked the experience up to 11. I applaud the effort, but there’s such a thing as “too much of a good thing” — and this is most certainly not a good thing that’s being stretched out from one horizon to the other.

Secondly, and this is my main gripe, phasing. This technology, new with the release of Wrath, allows the world to change dynamically around each player depending on what events had passed in their personal timeline. One player may visit an area and see a village full of happy, innocent fools, ignorant of their impending fate — another player, who has finished the quest chain, may see a burning, ruined wasteland, with skeletons and husks of buildings abound. A great idea in theory, and it can really help bring the player further into the game, enhancing the ‘realism’ of it all; the problem is that it tends to segregate too much. Your friends have all done these quests, and you’ve done these other quests, and you’re all looking at different versions of the world, unable to properly interact with each other. Add to this the frankly abysmal decision to add in 5-man group quests — which are near-impossible to perform alone, and even a challenge for a duo working together — which are also dynamically phased, so you can’t even help out a friend if you’ve finished the quest or aren’t up to that point yet. It’s like playing a single-player RPG, except you can’t complete certain segments without the help of others. Catch 22, indeed.

Finally, the new dungeons — while I haven’t experienced the Icecrown Citadel raids yet, I must express a great deal of displeasure with the direction Blizzard have taken, which is to say, hand out high-level gear for minimal amounts of effort, and then build dungeons around the assumption that everyone is already heavily-geared so artificial difficulty must be imposed. One of the worst offenders is fear — a game mechanic that sends your character fleeing in abject horror, leaving them unable to perform actions, and yet can be countered in many different ways. Not so, say Blizzard, apparently diametrically opposed to such concepts that they themselves invented. Not so, indeed, as any and all fear effects in the Icecrown dungeons — of which there are many, I must add — have been replaced with a similar mechanic which has exactly the same effect, except is now impossible to block or dispel. Add in living bombs and a number of other “forced damage” mechanics and other unpleasant effects — Mirrored Soul and Overlord’s Brand being the sadistic older brothers of King Ymiron’s Bane, while Permafrost is an obnoxious evolution of Keristrasza’s Intense Cold.

Add all these together, and what do you get? You get a zone that hates you; a collection of 140-odd quests and a large selection of dailies, the final “endgame” raid instances before the release of Cataclysm, and a trio of 5-man dungeons, all of which seem to go frankly above and beyond in terms of sadism and artificial difficulty. This isn’t just a place in the game’s world that is difficult, it’s a place where the designers have gone out of their way to force excess difficulty and “challenges” in, using methods that often cannot be avoided or mitigated. This is a place where even the basic mechanics of the game — the rules of the world, as it were — have been twisted and modified, purely for the sake of adding extra forced lumps of adversity. Hell, it seems, truly has frozen over.

It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.

Now there’s something I never thought I’d see — thanks, perhaps, to my one ill-fated former experience in the Ahn’Qiraj region, with a pick-up group so mythically inept that it instilled a deep terror of that whole place in my mind, a group so thoroughly uncoordinated and inexperienced that I’m surprised they could even unsheathe their own swords without falling upon them. In retrospect, part of me wishes they had, but I digress.

While being somewhat of a self-indulgent segue and not entirely relevant to the point at hand, given Ahn’Qiraj was designed back in the days when level 60 was the highest rung on the ladder, it does seem like the game is changing — evolving, some may say — into something which is, to put it bluntly, easier. With a mass appeal that already extends across the globe to people who would never normally play an MMORPG, it makes perfect sense for Blizzard to cater to their biggest paying audience, that being the oft-derided casual gamers. As someone who has played WoW on-and-off since launch, and seen the ‘hard mode’ of things before the way became paved for the newer players, I can understand and even relate to the bitterness some feel, with newer players having their hands held through content that the older players had to slog through. We also had to walk to work uphill both ways in the snow, and all that.

In the years since launch, the world (of Warcraft) has changed around us in numerous subtle — and not-so-subtle — ways. With the upcoming expansion Cataclysm promising to rend the world into something new and unfamiliar, sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of the smaller changes that happened ‘under the hood’, so to speak. Once upon a time owning an epic mount was something of a badge of honour, an achievement in its own right, yet now we see freshly-rolled characters charging mounts through the jungles of Stranglethorn Vale with wild abandon, tearing up the roads as early as level 40 on cheaper-than-ever epic mounts, and even soaring through the skies of Outland shortly after their arrival.

Speaking of flying mounts, Hellfire Peninsula has certainly become a lot less of a headache-inducing nightmare compared to previous visits as older characters, and I’m sure Squick — my venerable shaman — has only the happiest Tauren feelings about the whole thing. Stranglethorn Vale and Desolace, once the banes of re-rollers everywhere, are now almost enjoyable. Heirloom gear with bonuses to experience provide a smoother run. City reputation is no longer the stuff of tears and misery. Even the classes are easier to play than ever — I for one am immensely grateful that, not only do shamans have abilities to provide a built-in totem bar, but we also have fewer, more general-use totems instead of a million and one to cover all the minutiae.

In a way, patches 2.0 and 3.0 were more than mere patches — it’s as if we’re playing World of Warcraft 2 and World of Warcraft 3 already, with changes and improvements to the game system happening fluidly and almost inconceivably around us, a perspective driven further home by Cataclysm’s promises to reshape the now rather dusty old-world, which is shoddy and outdated compared to Blizzard’s more recent offerings. Rather than other games — such as EverQuest, which attempted to re-make itself from scratch with a newer engine and modernized gameplay in EverQuest II — it seems as though Blizzard consider World of Warcraft a work-in-progress, a piece of art which is constantly being changed and improved, with the old, ugly parts cut out and replaced as seamlessly as possible to follow the game’s constant, organic evolution.

I can’t help but miss the old days, though. Sure, they were the days when only the best of the best could even hope to acquire any kind of good gear, back when trying to find a group was a case of standing in the middle of Orgrimmar yelling, “LF4M UBRS, NEED TANK!” But no matter how clumsy, how shoddy (at least, compared to Wrath and future promised offerings), how brutally unfair and obnoxiously limiting the old-world was, it’ll still always hold some small place in my heart — a very, very small place. In a crazy sort of way, some part of me will be a little sad to see it gone, when the world is broken and reshaped forever — or, at least, until the next expansion.