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Lichborne: Why I play a death knight
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. You know, starting at level 55 and not being a vanilla WoW class, you arguably have to go through a unique process to decide to play this class. It's true that you make a conscious choice to play what class you play, but somehow, starting from level 1, it's as much a dabbling as anything, a solid start point that could branch off. With a death knight, you're already in the game. You make a solid choice to leap from one class to another. It's probably more true of those of us who started at the beginning of Wrath, deliberately choosing to leave our mains to start anew, but on some level I think it can apply to just about anyone who plays a main death knight. With this in mind, I thought it might fun this week to establish why we play our class, focusing on my own reasons for playing it and sticking with it. A storied history I will admit, I tend to be sort of a sap when it comes to stories. I like stories that are clashes between good and evil, with defined boundaries. I like my knights in shining armor fighting the forces of darkness. Some people find that too simple and tidy, but if I want shades of gray, I can find plenty of that in real life. Sometimes, I just want to kick some evil ass.
Chasing carrots, and why we do it
A while ago, Kill Ten Rats advocated a rather interesting approach to solving the problem of any tedious grind: cheat. More viable in a single-player game (but still possible if you're willing to use methods of dubious legality), the reasoning was to cut away the reward portion and see if you were enjoying what you were doing on its own merits. Two follow-up posts have been made since then, further extrapolating the question and getting into the way our brains fire in response to anticipation of reward. Grind, of course, is both a dirty word and a quintessential part of any current MMO, which means that we generally aim at games with the most enjoyable grind. But are we focusing on an enjoyable grind, or just one that's not too painful as we head toward the end goal? Is the problem with Aion (to pick a game routinely raked over the coals for its grind) the basic structure, or could the grind become irrelevant if it were just a hair more enjoyable? The very structure of MMOs encourages a certain amount of grinding, and it's interesting to take a look at whether we're doing it because the grind is fun, or just because we've tricked ourselves into thinking it's not all that bad.
