Moonfang and Modern Manners

At midnight server time last night I and quite a few others were loitering in Goldshire waiting for the stars to align and those pesky Darkmoon folks to hurry up and drag their island into position. Once the portal was up, it didn’t take us long to spawn Moonfang and slaughter her.

It was only afterwards whilst I was kiting around a pack of hungry wolves angry at their Den Mother being so horribly murdered in front of them, that I started to think of the implications of the way in which we’d zerged her down. No grouping up to kill means that many people are purely focused on themselves and their loot which is why during my dance of potential death I got sworn at by a “corpse” who wanted ressing NOW!!!1!. I didn’t really have the time nor the desire to point out that I’m not a Druid (even though I’m wearing Wildheart knock offs) and thus can’t res whilst wolves are trying to eat my toes. I know people have experienced issues on the Timeless Isle if they release during a kill but asking someone who is fighting not just one wolf but an entire pack is stretching it a bit. However my issue doesn’t just lie with him but with the twenty to thirty others who were quite happy to loot and either play with their new toys or mount away whilst I struggled to survive. It didn’t matter that I’d helped to keep them alive during the fight nor that my current predicament was purely down to class mechanics (this is one place where passive healing as you nuke is a pain in the neck), they got what they wanted and as we weren’t partied up, I might as well have been invisible to them. My second kill highlighted another issue with this new system. As I and a handful of others were busy fighting elite mobs, there were around fifteen other people sat on mounts at the spawn point demanding we hurry up and kill things because as one person put it he had “limited time”.

WoW is a multiplayer game and almost every aspect of it works best when we cooperate and play together. Yes there were a few exceptions, including a sub 90 Mage who almost died horribly trying to get that pack of wolves off me but it felt like we were a disparate bunch who would have been just have happy soloing wolves in Duskwood if they happened to drop decent rewards.   Yes, this system works great for people like me, whose anxiety and shyness makes grouping akin to stabbing myself repeatedly with a knitting needle but I feel that the game could ultimately suffer because of it. It feeds into that toxic behaviour we’re so fond of discussing because when you don’t “need” other people, for many there is no point in treating them fairly or decently.

That said, RNG has treated us rather well as you can see from our little wolf family screenshot below.

I also like the fact that there seems to be no limits on about the amount of loot you can potentially receive per day. Given that the Darkmoon Faire is such a temporary event I think restrictions would be annoying and from my experience at least, the drop chances seem quite high and I’m up to two pets and an item which turns me into a baby wolf for 10 minutes out of every hour and which more importantly doesn’t break on combat.

I love Moon Moon’s animations too and now I just need to find a better name for him.