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.