Meme Monday: Winter Steam Sale Memes 2024

Instead of generic video game Winter Holiday memes, I figured I'd go for what PC gamers really wait for: the annual Steam Winter Games sale.

Given that the majority of the items I've Wishlisted are Early Access games, I don't expect to spend a lot of money on video games this year. I have this rule I put into place years ago that I was not going to either preorder video games or purchase a game listed as in Early Access, and that has kept my purchases down quite a bit. It has also saved me from purchasing a game that based on Early Access reviews I might like, but the farther along the development cycle the game got the worse the game seemed to me. Or maybe not "worse" per se, but not the sort of game I'd actually like playing. 

(Holding out the vain hope that a game would be switchable between First and Third person perspective is one of them. I'm looking at you, Cyberpunk 2077 and The Outer Worlds.) 

So, for this Winter Holiday season, let's have some fun at the expense of ourselves and the Steam Winter Sale!

I finally got the reference a month ago, where
David Beckham called out his wife for her
claiming to have a "Middle Class" upbringing.
Apparently this unscripted moment really grounded
the documentary about David's life.
From Reddit.

Uh, I'm pretty sure half of 59.99 is NOT free.
From 9GAG and Reddit.

Yeah, I get this.
From Reddit and Imgflip.

There are those who love to "just look" at what's
on the Steam Sale, and.... OH, LOOK AT THE TIME!!
From Ragebuilder.com.

My big rule is to buy any games after
Christmas itself, so I don't end up like this guy.
From MemeCenter.

A Snapshot of Classic Fresh Guild Names Part 2

I thought I'd have enough for two of these posts, but let's just say that people are creative. So be prepared for more posts along these lines...

This is in here not because it's amusing or anything, but
it's also the name of Vidyala's guild back in Retail.
I wonder if some of her old guildies are now playing
the Classic Fresh servers...

"I---mannuael Kant was a real pissant..."

"Feral Kittens"

I think I found the guild that my Hunter ought to belong to.

"House of Bread"

With a toon name that recalls Ronnie James
Dio's first album, the guild "Disco For Life"
does kind of stand out.

Not These Idiots Again

Have you ever had that situation where you exit/logout from a video game in a certain location and when you login again you forget what you were doing?

Yeah, that's been happening to me quite a bit with this project of mine.

I'd swear I've seen this thing before...

Oh, right.

With only a certain number of starting zones, I've found myself doing repeat work in most locations. That's not a bad thing per se, but I do lose track of which toon has done what thing when I login to one. The easiest solution to this issue is to simply concentrate on few toons to level, but I know that will tempt me more toward accelerating my leveling, and I don't want that at all. 

I suppose I could simply write down "to do" lists for each toon, but that seems kind of silly. This isn't that important, after all, just an annoyance.

Anyhoo, here's the current status of Operation Spread the Love:

As of December 17, 2024.

Again, the Shaman doesn't fit into the loading screen without me scrolling down, so I left him off, but he's at L14 as well.

As an aside, I play that Shaman when I'm not logged into Battle.Net, because he's my "I'm going to go hide and play for a while" toon. However, one disturbing thing happened last night. While I was logged into my Shaman for a bit before bed, I was heading back toward The Crossroads when I got a sudden group invite by a player name I'd never seen before. I figured it was a random thing so I rejected it. Then I got a whisper from the toon: 

"I see you."

I quickly did a /who and discovered they were an L26 Hunter. I then checked Battle.Net, and none of my friends from BNet were logged in as this toon. After verifying that I was not visible via BNet, I swtiched over to my Alliance bank toon and verified that they were all logged in on Alliance toons.

Who was it? Hell if I know, but I did go back and check to see if I'd accidentally made the Shaman's name visible at some point on the blog, but nope. Not there. And whomever it was had already gotten ahead of me to L26, which is well beyond the level cap for a "Free Account", so if it was one of them that meant they were spending a very unhealthy amount of time playing on these Classic Fresh servers. I mean, they're all in the mid-upper L30s to the mid-upper L40s, so yeah.... That's a lot of time spent in-game.*

The L24 toon is an alt. Their main is in the
upper 30s/low 40s. That player also raids Naxx
twice a week, BWL and MC once a week, and
the occasional AQ40, so that's why they're not higher.

As I alluded to above, my friends are all far ahead of me in the leveling process, even the slowest of them is in the low-mid L30s on their main toon, and plenty of them already have alts that are higher than my brood of toons. That suits me fine, because I'm actually leveling at a lower speed than I thought I would. Either that or they're going faster than I expected.

I originally thought that they would get to L40 --and a mount-- before I got to L20. Well, most of my friends got to L40 (not all of them have mounts yet), and I'm not even at L15 yet. My prediction may eventually hold, but they might all be at L50 before I hit L20 with my stable of toons. 

***

It's kind of funny, but if I had tried to do this in Retail WoW, I would have actually had to put in a lot more effort at slowing down my leveling than I put in actually leveling in Classic Fresh. That may go against what you'd expect, because process of leveling does require me to exert effort, but Blizzard has spent so much time and development at making it so easy to get to max level in Retail that you have to be creative if you want to NOT level that fast. As it is, I've had to be creative enough to slow myself down in the Anniversary servers, and that's in an environment in which the Journey is the main selling point of the game. Imagine trying to do this in an environment where "The Game Begins At Endgame" is the driving focus.

You need a beard, Steve. And red hair.
From all over the internet.

*I should point out that my Questing Buddy has informed me that her new guild that she is going to raid with already has groups spamming Stratholme and Upper Blackrock Spire dungeons, so they've got enough max-level toons in the guild already to accomplish that. That's... kind of nuts, as that's at the speed of my leveling experience as a Leveling Shaman in TBC Classic. 

Meme Monday: Nostalgia Memes

If you're like me, you're the target of some of these 70s and 80s nostalgia memes floating around on the internet these days.

Funny, my childhood wasn't awesome, especially
considering I was frequently on the "loser" side
of these sports matches. From Pinterest.

All those memes that are supposed to make me feel better because I lived in a "real" generation often tends to celebrate things that are sketchy at best, and dangerous at worst. Like the ones who say "we survived lead paint", which makes me think "If you're more stupid because of lead paint, how would you know?"* 

As for me, I knew people who did some of the dangerous stuff celebrated on those memes who either got seriously hurt or killed. No, not the ones mentioning "drinking from a hose"**, but the ones about riding without a helmet or being in a car without a seatbelt or those exposed to a lot of secondhand smoke and developed respiratory problems.

Still, there's a point about nostalgia that I can choose to be amused by, which is nostalgia for video games. Unfortunately, most memes these days are for the NES or later, completely avoiding us older folks who survived the Video Game Crash of 1983.

I always thought the dragons from Adventure looked stupid,
and when my kids began to play it they called them "mean
ducks", which really fits. From Reddit.

Atari had more games, but Intellivision
had more complex games. Of course,
my parents got us a TI-99 4/A home
computer instead. From Imgflip.

In my day, everything was "Atari", but
you get the idea. From Gameintensity.

This should be "over 50", but it's a minor quibble.
Us older folks led the way to making gaming
an acceptable hobby. From greenstudio.

And the truth is that you'll still end up playing just
a few of them. Like, oh, Civ IV. Or WoW Classic.
From Reddit.

I wanted one of these so badly as a kid, but I
never got one. I had to budget for what I was
allowed to have, and Mattel Electronics Football
never made the final cut. Still, my wife and kids
got me one for Christmas two decades ago, and
I still have it today. From Imgflip.

*My dad drove a 1972 Chevy Nova for 8 years, and because the engine had issues, he used premium octane gasoline. Back then, the only gas that had the high amount of octane still had lead in it, so we drove a car meant for unleaded gas but with leaded gas. Ever since I learned of the dangers of leaded gasoline I've wondered whether my and my brother's development were stunted in any way due to my dad's usage of leaded gas. It's something I'll never know, as any residual lead will have leeched out of my system by now, but I also wonder just how many of my fellow members of Gen X unwittingly were impacted by the use of leaded gas.

**I mean, kids nowadays --including my own-- were allowed to come in and get a drink whenever they wanted. The cachet of drinking from a garden hose simply isn't there any more.

Festina Lente

"Make haste slowly" is a Latin phrase that's been around since antiquity*. I was first exposed to it back when I was reading Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars --which is also referenced in the Wikipedia entry-- basically referencing Augustus' dislike of rash commanders. So a George Patton would probably not been on Augustus' favorites list.

Basically, the point of the phrase is to balance out the extremes of caution and aggression when pursuing a task. Choose a middle path, if you will.

If waffling somewhere in the middle is an ideal, I think I've achieved that while playing on the WoW 20th Anniversary server.

Given that Card is from a (relatively) poor upbringing
and that I tend to play in a "gold poor" manner, her
clothing right now kind of fits.

What I've done is configure my leveling to first get everybody to L10 then progress increments of five levels at a time. (Yes, even the Shaman, who is not on the loading screen above.) So, right now I'm progressing everybody to L15, although in a kind of haphazard manner.*** 

While the leveling pace has slowed significantly since I started --from L1-L5 taking about 20-30 minutes and L5-L10 about 1-1.5 hours-- there are a few interesting notes that I've come across. Even without getting their full toolkit, I can see some classes progressing faster than others**** which has thrown me for a bit of a loop when I look up and discover one class is at L12 while another is struggling to get to L11. 

Really? I have to bust my ass to go all the way
to Orgrimmar to train skinning? I mean, have you
seen the sheer number of animals around here?

Some of that discrepancy is how a class plays. A class that can avoid fighting a lot of mobs all the time won't be generating XP at the same rate that other classes do; in a game based around completing quests and fighting mobs for XP, if the mobs aren't there or are avoidable that's simply XP that won't be obtained. I discovered that issue when first leveling a Rogue back in Mists, as her stealth ability meant she could simply avoid a lot of crap when questing, but unlike a tabletop RPG the game doesn't reward you with XP for your ingenuity. As a consequence, if you want to keep the leveling pace going, you have to race through quests faster than other classes. 

I'm not willing to do that, so I'll likely move at the pace of the slowest leveling toon.

I think I found my problem; too many
alehouses and taverns for this guy.

Before you point out the obvious, yes, I could use boosting or dungeon running to get my XP up on those slow classes, but that's not my playstyle. I've already heard of people using the Spellcleave strat in instances --4 Mages and a Healer-- to rip through dungeons in Classic Fresh the same way that people used that strategy for farming trash mobs in the Sunwell raid, but I look at that as less of a leveling tool and more of a gold farming one. 

There's also the matter of grouping up, and I am quite aware that my friends would be happy to do so, but I also know that they want to go much faster than I do, so... No. That's just a recipe for frustration on my part. I know that most of them simply don't understand why I don't want help in the same way that I gave them help, but I have tried to explain that the temptation to powerlevel is too great if I'm focusing on one toon. I even explained my so-called Bataan Death March leveling a Shaman to L60 --mostly solo-- doing a pace of three levels a day while still working a full-time job and being a husband and father, but I don't think they really got it.*****

Shenanigans like this little breakdown
from the TBC Classic servers didn't exactly help.

That being said, my brain has been taking some time to adjust to completely different playstyles. 

I don't know how people who play a ton of alts do it, but it frequently takes me about 10 minutes of active gameplay before I get back into a full understanding of how to play a class. I have caught myself on numerous occasions switching from playing, say, a Paladin to a Priest only to discover about a half an hour later that I've not been throwing a Power Word: Shield on myself before engaging a mob. It may not sound like much of a gameplay issue until you realize that PW:S is there to keep you from dying when mobs attack you. Another example is switching to a class with a pet --such as a Hunter or Warlock-- and forgetting to, oh, let the pet go in first and get a hit or two in before you start attacking. The whole "let your pet build up aggro first" thing.

What gets me is that people seem to play far more alts quite effectively on Retail, which is a more complex game --attack rotation-wise-- than Classic.****** I know that some players such as Kayrliene with a metric ton of alts are an outlier, but I've seen so many bloggers over the years bring up various alts in Retail that I know it's far more popular there than I'd expect. The problem I have an issue wrapping my head around is that I'm struggling to keep a more basic game such as Classic straight, so how do Retail players keep their stable of alts all straight while playing? Or is it just a question of all the classes having similar abilities, in Retail, so just aligning your bars so that the similar abilities all are in the same location (such as big AoE damage on Button 6, and a shield on Button 10) so you are "close enough" while playing to keep things straight. 

Of course, long time Retail players probably are so used to playing various classes that it's kind of deeply ingrained into their gameplay. If you've been playing a dozen classes for over a decade, you've internalized the gameplay to such a degree that you never really noticed it until someone points it out to you. 

***

All this is pure speculation, because I've got my hands full as it is trying to figure out all of these classes I've never played before. At least I've got enough time to figure them out, and since there are some classes I'm never planning on grouping up for (such as a Warrior, because people would simply assume I'm going to tank things), I don't have to worry about being perfect.

*According to Wikipedia --yeah yeah, I know, not necessarily that accurate in general-- the original Greek is σπεῦδε βραδέως speũde bradéōs. I didn't know that and always assumed it was Latin until this research, so I kept the common nomenclature as "Latin" above.

**If you played old school D&D --such as 1e AD&D-- the amount of XP to level between classes is vastly different. The idea is that some classes were much more powerful at higher level than others, so the amount of time it took to level that extra powerful class (Magic-Users, for example) was much longer. I believe that TSR/Wizards of the Coast got rid of that in the designing of D&D 3.0 in the late 90s, so you don't see that artificial XP tweaking much anymore. 

***Right now I expect to try to hold this entire stable together as I level, but I can also see where in the near future there begins to be a bit of separation of some of the toons from the main pack. My guess is that once I hit L25 or L30 I'll begin to break out 4-5 toons to focus on while leveling. Still, the overall goal of getting the stable to L60 over the course of a year is doable for now.

****For example, the Hunter progresses much faster than a Warrior.

*****Except for my Questing Buddy, who did what she could to help me out, and I provided emotional support for her dealing with the leveling process in what was for her a new guild with new people to play with. 

******I guess here is where I'd also bring out from the archives one of the rotations from FFXIV to show it's not just Retail WoW that has complex rotations...

EtA: Corrected grammar.

EtA: Corrected some more grammar. Sheesh.