Another Hump I'd Forgotten About

You know how leveling slows down tremendously in Vanilla WoW in the mid 30s and the mid 40s? Well, there's apparently another speed bump in the mid-L50s too.

I have discovered this the past month while I've been leveling the four toons, but especially Joan and Hoots.

Listings as of December 26, 2025.

Going from L54 to L55 took an absurdly long time from my perspective, but once I got over that hump the leveling from L55 to L56 seemed to go more quickly. 

Of all the four toons, Hoots was actually the slowest in leveling from L54 to L55. Part of that I chalk up to bad luck, where respawning mobs caught me multiple times in various zones --apparently quick respawns can also be observed other places than Felwood's Shadow Hold-- but I also didn't have to grind nearly as much to get some of these quests completed. If the RNG rolls go your way when you're looking for XX items, you don't have to kill that many mobs. Which also means less grinding, resulting in less XP per quest overall. I don't know the ratio of XP garnered by killing mobs versus completing quests in Retail, but I've found that in Vanilla Classic you get a lot more XP if you're grinding a lot of mobs just to complete a quest. Sure, it's not "fun" from the standpoint of wanting to get from Point A to Point B quickly, but it is a low stress way to level. You don't have to engage while level at the same depth in Retail --although Retail fans probably would point out that leveling in Retail is so quick it's not deep either-- but Blizzard designed Retail leveling to progress multiple stories. Outside of a few overarching questlines, there are very few newer-style MMO stories in Classic WoW.*

So I can grind while listening to a podcast, chatting with friends, and not really paying too close attention to what I'm doing in-game. Which is good, since I play a game to have fun and relax, not be hyper-focused.

***

My questing buddy is logging on far less often these days. She completed her Atiesh --oh wait, I didn't mention that she got selected for one, didn't I?-- and I think she only really needs one or two more items and her gear will be good throughout most of TBC Classic leveling. Therefore she's been taking a bit of a break, playing games with her husband, and when she's on she's basically pre-loading stuff for when the Dark Portal opens. 

I'm thinking that once the pre-patch drops in mid-January, she'll be leveling a Draenei Priest (basically the same one she used to help me level my Shaman in 2021's TBC Classic and she mained in Wrath Classic), but we'll see how things go.

*Those long burning questlines that are there, however, do tend to be epic in their own way. Everybody knows the Defias questline, but there's also the Marshal Windsor questline and some of the Class Quests (Paladin and Warlock epic mount quests, for example). The biggest difference between Classic and Retail is that as quest design progressed, every single (non-gray) thing you see out in the game world can be traced back to a quest objective, whereas in Classic WoW there's a metric ton of items and mobs out there that have absolutely nothing to do with anything. (Black Diamonds, anybody?) And that's fine. Not everything has to mean anything at all --in real life that is frequently the case-- and a lot of game designers (and fiction editors) seem to have forgotten that simple fact. 

Meme Monday: Christmas Memes for 2025

Yes, it's four days early, but it's the Meme Monday on Christmas week. So here, have a few Christmas Memes for your holiday cheer!

I'll be doing that, but I don't mind. I could be
working on a printer. From EJAW.

Okay, it's a nerdy coder geek thing,
but it's legit. Octal 31 converts to Decimal 25.
From EJAW (again).

Yeah, I'm not a fan of that song of hers.
From Reddit (and Imgflip).

I SAID...
The irony is that Blood Elf has the same
hairstyle that Neve has. Neve's hair is brown,
however. From Instagram and Blazing Boost.

Truth. From Instagram.

I totally cackled at this one. From Instagram.

FWIW, there were quite a few of these together,
and some of them were really adult in nature.
So... You're welcome? From Instagram.

Uh, I'm not exactly sure I want to read
any fanfic where this is an illustration.
From Reddit.

It's All a Numbers Game

If anybody ever thought that Blizzard looks at Retail and Classic as two separate entities, we have a bit further proof.

Yesterday, Blizz announced that the Midnight Pre-Patch will drop on January 20th, 2026.

In case you were keeping track, the TBC Classic Pre-Patch for the Anniversary servers arrives on January 13, 2026.

It used to be that when a pre-patch event for any Blizzard product happened, Blizz made sure to clear the calendar of other games so they could maximize player activity. But now, we're seeing two distinct versions of World of Warcraft dropping their own separate pre-patches within a week of each other. 

Some, such as Wilhelm, believe this is a sign that Blizzard doesn't care about TBC Classic. To be honest, I also harbor thoughts along those lines, but I believe there's also something else afoot. Blizzard wouldn't deliberately sabotage subscriptions, so I suspect that what these dates ALSO say that WoW Classic Anniversary players simply don't play Retail. The Venn Diagram of WoW players probably looks something like this:

Pretty self-explanatory, if you ask me.

Even my occasional forays into Retail have centered upon merely observing others and sticking to the post-Cataclysm Old World starting zones. I'm the sort of Retail player that Micro-Blizzard doesn't like very much, because I only subscribe and don't buy expansions or Cash Shop items. They'll take my money, because they're a corporation and some money is better than none, but I'm not the focus of their interest.

Perhaps that's the root of the problem: because Classic Anniversary players are resistant to playing Retail, they won't buy things in a Cash Shop and have no WoW Token to purchase, so Blizzard doesn't care about them. If Blizz wants to hit that 30% profit target that Microsoft's C-Suite set for the XBox division, they simply can't afford to give any time to the Classic Anniversary crowd. 

It does make me wonder whether Blizzard is hoping the Classic crowd goes away, so they can cut that staff and be done with it. They won't sell WoW Classic at all, because they're not going to try to compete with another version of their game. Just ask Wizards of the Coast how THAT went over when they came out with D&D 4e and most of the D&D 3.x crowd instead migrated to Paizo's Pathfinder game (which was colloquially known as D&D 3.75). D&D became second banana in tabletop RPGs to another version of their own game.

Maybe that's the real Endgame for Classic WoW: kill it off due to a lack of support, but then sue any private servers to keep newer versions of Classic WoW from coming out. It's all a numbers game, which means that it's more cost effective to kill the game off than support it for a player base that won't buy any of the extra trinkets Blizzard is peddling.

"You think you do but you don't" indeed.

EtA: Added quotes at the end.

Meme Monday: Winter Camping Memes

This weekend we got a real blast of Winter: 5 in/12.5 cm of snow followed by icy temperatures of -1F/-18C. (And that was without adding in the Wind Chill, where it was -20F/-29C.) When you couple that with one of my WoW friend group going out camping with his son on a Boy Scout camping trip this past weekend, you end up with a Meme Monday that focuses on Winter Camping Memes.

Having camped with my wife back in 1996
when the temps were 15F/-9C (plus whatever the
wind chill was), I can confirm this.
From Peanuts or Pretzels.

Ha! From Facebook.

...made glorious summer by this sun of York.
Sorry, got Richard III on the brain.
From So Much Pun via Memebase.

From Beyondthetent via Pinterest.

...and then there's the video game version of camping.
From AOC Gaming and Pinterest.

Oh, Look at the Time!

It's been an interesting couple of weeks since I last posted an update on Operation Spread the Love:

As of December 12, 2025.

Although I haven't been playing that much --especially this week-- I have gotten some leveling done. Just not as much as I'd hoped.

The first thing you'll notice is that Card is now L57, which kind of goes against what I'd been doing the rest of this time: level all four toons a pair of levels at a time. The reason for that is simple: I was asked to come along for a couple of Scholomance runs, which resulted in that extra level. One thing is certain: Card did more damage as an L56 Mage than some of the other DPS who were all higher than her. Go figure.

I got Linna to L56, and when I have played this week I was working on Joan, but I haven't gotten her to L55 yet. While she is able to down some mobs by herself (such as the Drake in the initial quest for the Marshal Windsor questline), she's incredibly ill-suited toward other mobs. Linna has the reverse problem that Joan has, where she can take down other mobs, but that Drake hits way too hard for her to simply stand there and take it at the level she's at, compared to non-elite mobs of the same level.*

What have I been up to when I've not been playing? Holiday stuff, as well as, um, that other hobby I've mentioned a bit here and there. Pallais wants me to continue writing about my adventures there, and so I'm working on a post about that will likely drop in the early part of next week.

I guess I should be happy that Blizz decided to put the TBC pre-patch in January, which as things are going will be when I finally get all four toons to L60.

*At least in the gear she's at. That has quite a bit of impact on her ability to down some of these mobs as well.

Attack of the Murder Floofs

In case you aren't aware, Bhagpuss of Inventory Full has an annual Advent Calendar of music, culled from all ends of the Internet. I honestly don't know how he teases out all of the weird and obscure Christmas music he does, but I'm always grateful to enjoy the fruits of his labor.

So, in return, I'd like to provide him with a musical Holiday gift.

The origin of this particular piece of music lies in the Yule Cat of Iceland, discussed here on PBS' Monstrum:

As I watched the video, I noted that Björk had sang a cover of a poem about said Yule Cat, and set out to find it. There's a few copies out on YouTube, but I got this one from the "official" Björk channel:

Although I admitted expected something more modern and Pop-oriented --it is Björk, after all-- the song is most definitely neither Pop nor Rock, but a folk tune. And I found it really cool to listen to.

So, Happy Holidays, Bhagpuss!

***

Oh, you want another Christmas monster?

How about Krampus, then?

At Least I'm Recognized in China

Call me amused, but it seems that while Google can't figure out that Parallel Context exists, Chinese web crawlers can.

I was alerted to this little item when I received a Google Notification about the blog that there was a spike in activity on the 6th:

As of 12/8/2025.

Of which was primarily from China:

As of 12/8/2025.

And yet when I got onto the Google Search console, this greeted me:

As of 12/8/2025.

So you can see that Google still refuses/ignores the presence of Parallel Context, while the Chinese web crawlers seem to have found PC. Once again, I've found that Google's search engine isn't really as impressive as they like to think. They can't even blame it on Blogger, which is owned by Google itself, because Bhagpuss' blog Inventory Full is easily found via Google Search:

As of 12/8/2025.

This is starting to get to ridiculous levels of incompetence, because there's no apparent reason why the blog doesn't show up in Google's direct search results. After all, PC continues to show up in Microsoft's Bing Search console:

As of 12/8/2025.

And in true Microsoft fashion, they want me to pay to "improve" my visibility on search results, 

As of 12/8/2025.

But I think I'll pass. Just goes to show that Microsoft is leaving no stone unturned in their quest to monetize everything so they can then pump that money into AI (and Satya Nadella's compensation package). But at least their own search engine, Bing, can actually find a 16 year old blog that has almost 1700 posts on it, whereas Google stumbles over itself in the dark, claiming that a Blogger-inserted mobile option "https://parallelcontext.blogspot.com/?m=1" causes a Redirect error...

Again, as of 12/8/2025.

...when you can click the link above and see that the link works perfectly fine in bringing up a mobile-friendly version of the blog. If Google wants to bitch about that, they should talk to their Blogger division. But then again, since Inventory Full is working fine and it's a Blogger blog, I'd say that the problem has less to do with anything Blogger does and more between the chair and keyboard on Google's search division.

At least I know that Google won't enact any retribution on PC, because they'd have to FIND IT FIRST, and they've already proven they can't do that.