I'm Sure There was a Door Here

At the University of Cincinnati, among the often bizarre and quirky campus buildings, is the building that houses the College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning (DAAP).

This is a small portion of the overall building.
From the University of Cincinnati.

The old building that existed prior to this one was a nasty piece of work whose windows leaked, the colors were abhorrent, and the thing looked like a design nightmare out of the 1950s/1960s. This new building was completed in 1996, when my wife was still a graduate student at the university. Her office overlooked the new building, so one day she took an opportunity to go explore the place out of curiosity. She'd heard the gossip that the building had no right angles in the classrooms at all and that there were stairs that went nowhere, so here was her chance to see for herself. 

She was unable to confirm that first rumor, although the classrooms she did view certainly had non-standard corners in them,* but in a way she did confirm the second rumor. She followed a set of stairs down to where she thought it would lead her to another floor, but much to her surprise when she opened the door it led directly outside, locking behind her so she couldn't get back inside. I'm sure that someone will point out that technically speaking the door DID lead somewhere, I'd argue that a one-way ticket outside is not what most people have in mind when they mean "somewhere".**

I got to thinking about my wife's experience with that building when I began thinking about design goals for dungeons in World of Warcraft. This came out of previous post, when I pointed out the vendor just outside of the exit of The Deadmines' dungeon. That exit from The Deadmines is designed to be a one-way exit, as when you leave you're immediately dropped down a wall to where you simply can't re-enter that nice, swirly dungeon entrance. That's by design, of course, so that you don't skip all of the dungeon just to go to the end. 

Likewise, there's other dungeons that if you run right up and engage the final boss the entire area of trash mobs comes running and will beat you to a pulp. The most obvious examples are Scarlet Commander Mograine and High Inquisitor Whitemane in the Cathedral portion of Scarlet Monastery and Eranikus in Sunken Temple, although I believe it also happens with Emperor Thaurissan in Blackrock Depths. I have never "poked the bear" with Thaurissan, but I've been in the other two instances where someone pulled early either by accident or on purpose.

Yeah, this entry into SM: Cathedral ended
about as well as you'd expect.

When you think about it, those examples emphasize a dungeon design that reflects the dungeon as a "real place": when a boss is attacked, everybody comes running to defend the boss. Other parts of that design philosophy are evident in these Vanilla instances, such as:

• The tendency to not have a single pathway through a place.*** Sure, there's a single path through the various Scarlet Monastery wings and The Deadmines, but Scholomance is an actual house with multiple levels while Blackrock Depths and Stratholme are actual cities with no truly defined pathing.
• Dead ends with no real purpose other than to make a place feel "lived in". Think of the "living quarters" in Blackrock Depths, where there may be some mobs present but they really don't have anything there other than actual beds, dressers, etc.
• Instances buried deep in an external area. Deadmines, Razorfen Downs, and Maraudon are the most obvious examples.
• Instances that have a wide range of enemy levels, so they're designed to be returned to as you gain levels. Uldaman, Scarlet Monastery, and Maraudon are the most obvious examples, although Blackrock Depths and Blackrock Spire also qualify.

***

This also jogged my memory because of my running some of the TBC instances on the Anniversary server and how much the design philosophy had changed from Vanilla to TBC. Gone are the multipath instances; all of the instances have a single path through them (although it could be argued that The Steamvault has multiple paths to complete the first section that opens up the last portion) with the pathing itself cleverly disguised by twists and turns to hide the single path through the instance. While there are some dead ends to the instances, there are far fewer of them than in Vanilla****. The instances themselves are easily accessible via the main entrance, except for the few endgame instances that require a key to unlock, but even then if someone else has the key you can still enter because they can unlock it for you.***** Finally, the instances in TBC are designed with a specific level range in mind; there's no wide range of enemy levels to be found in a single instance of TBC.

Naga... Nazis... Same difference: I still hate them both.

The change in design philosophy not only highlights the change in instances being less of an immersive RPG experience and more of a stepping stone, but also a change that emphasizes the desire of players to rerun instances, looking for specific gear and drops (and in the case of TBC Classic and later expansions, reputation/renown). Even I'm not immune to rerunning instances, because if it's fun I'll do it again. That's why I still go visit Blackrock Depths so often; it has NOTHING to do with hunting for the Hand of Justice drop that has eluded some of my melee toons for years. 

(Lies! It's all lies, I tell you!)

But still, the shrinking of size and time spent in an instance is somewhat secondary from my perspective because there's less of an opportunity for exploration and immersion while inside an instance. Of course, you'd need a group conducive to such a thing, but even wandering around solo in an instance like I did in the Vanilla dungeons back when I first began playing in Wrath on my first max level toon was quite an experience. 

***

You know, back in 2014 when I was finishing up my original time with Retail, I spent some time in some of the Wrath instances, soloing them just to see what I missed when followed the group (which followed the meta). What surprised me the most were some of the intro areas in the ICC 5-mans that I never encountered, particularly in the Pit of Saron, because there was a specific path all groups took when running the instance so I never knew about other parts of that big open mining pit in the beginning. I didn't feel cheated, exactly, just disappointed. 

That being said, even I can get sick of a place. I remember doing the Loremaster achievement back in 2010, and to complete that it mean I had to go into some instances such as Stratholme and Sunken Temple so many times I got sick of them. Given that you had no in-game maps available, especially for Sunken Temple and the two Blackrock instances, it was an eye-opening experience getting lost to the point where my head hurt. It was at that point that I wished that those instances had modern LFD equivalents. But as the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for...

*Fun fact: professors don't like it if you wander by the classroom they're lecturing in and peer through the door. I discovered that one the hard way, although the first time I found this out was in grade school, when I was picked up early by my dad to go to the doctor for an allergy test (the kind where they prick your back about 20-30 times and smear different allergens on the open cut to see which ones you're allergic to). Leaving my grade school, he made a wrong turn and instead of going toward the exit he went toward a 5th grade classroom. I tried to stop him but he ignored me and opened the door, only to find himself the target of the ire of one of the nuns. I wanted to melt into the floor.

**Apparently the architect of the building, Peter Eisenman, did have a stairwell that lead nowhere --as in it ended at a wall-- in the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University. 

***Yes, the player base has created their own optimal pathing through a lot of these instances, but you're not locked in to a very specific path in the same way as The Deadmines or the Scarlet Monastery wings are. 

****And they're almost non-existent in Wrath and what I remember of Cataclysm instances.

*****I think this is even the case in Karazhan, the intro 10-person raid in TBC. At least my friends seem to think so, because they've made it plain that they want me to join them in a Karazhan run. But let's be honest, they'd essentially be carrying me because I have quest greens and a few low-mid level instance drops among my toons.

My Not-So-Secret Spot

The other day, when I mentioned that I'd found another fishing spot in Retail and posted this pic...

Shintar of Priest with a Cause (among other blogs) asked me where it was. Well, it was here:

See that circle in the bottom of the map of Westfall, slightly left of center? That's where.

That's the location where, if you come out of The Deadmines, you'll see a dock off to the left, and a vendor there who also sells some cooking recipes. That vendor has remained in place through the Cataclysm reworking of the zone, and he's a handy person to have around if you want to keep questing out here (or running DM again). I suppose you could consider him a vestige of the original Westfall, but since I knew you could stand on the dock and fish without being interrupted by any mobs, I figured it was a good place to try out.

When I went into the Lion's Pride Inn to park for the other night, I was greeted by a disco ball. 

Yes, really:

Told you so.

That's when I decided right then and there to go try my spot in Westfall.

The run there was pleasant enough, and I learned something about the leveling environment in Retail: while the mobs scale up to match you while you're out questing, they also scale DOWN.

Or at least I think they do.

You see, I expected the mobs out there to be in the mid-teens, like they are in Classic, but every mob I encountered on the run out there was L12, just like me. Especially the ones over by the Lighthouse, which in Vanilla Classic are L17-L18. But since they were L12, it was a piece of cake to run over and not be jumped by mobs coming from over the hills after me. 

The thing is, I'm not sure with the level squish if what the actual level is out here, but you know, it didn't matter in the end. I was able to get to my watering hole without incident. So I settled down to fish with nary a soul in sight, and Gen Chat was blessedly silent.

When I logged in yesterday to take a screenshot of the map, I was really surprised when I was logging out that I noted some telltale signs of Paladin activity. Sure enough, there was someone out on the edge of my vision, killing mobs:

Unlike some other servers, on Moon Guard it seems I can't have the entire zone to myself, but at the same time, at least they're not in my business or anything.

Meme Monday: Aging Memes for a Gamer

This past weekend I spent some hours ripping out weeds and weedy shrubs from our yard, then followed by trimming the shrubs that are still around back into a usable shape.* Not exactly the most fun thing in the world, but it had to be done. However, when I finished, I discovered that the muscles in my arms were having difficulty holding something steady, given that I was lifting and moving stuff for quite a long while. 

From Blazing Saddles via MakeAGIF.com.

I know that by tomorrow morning it'll be fine, but it's still an annoying reminder that I'm getting older.

So, I figured I'd soothe my annoyances with a few memes about aging.

Given that our local library branch has D&D afternoons
for teenagers, I can see this happening. I think we'll need
to wait for the Satanic Panic crowd to die off first, though.
From Reddit (and X, most likely).

I was having to explain something to Shintar
last week when I realized that it really made me
sound old in a way I never quite thought of before.
Yikes. From Imgur.

I at least know what Fortnite is, but ask me
to provide details about Roblox and you'll get
a blank stare. From Pinterest.

Kind of ironic they used Linus of Linus Tech Tips
for this meme. From programmerhumor.io.

If you think it's bad in your 30s, wait'll you hit
your 50s and 60s... From Facebook.

And yeah, it can feel like this at times...
From Facebook (and Coraline).

Yeah, this. From couldbeworsecomic from
Instagram via Reddit.

*In this case, "usable shape" meant trimming so that I can actually see out of the windows in the front of the house. Left to their own devices, the shrubs would have completely covered up the front windows within a couple of years. I personally would have preferred some boxwood bushes in front, but the evergreens were in place when the house was built and I have no reason to remove them unless I have to fix cracks in the basement. And yes, that's a project to eventually work on, but hopefully I can put that off as long as I can. (Because costs.)

What If Everybody Else Was a Bot?

I spent another hour last night fishing in Elwynn Forest. Not a lot going on last night, for the most part...

Except for that guy who literally flopped in the
water there, stayed for about a minute, and then
flew up and away.

And that one Hordie trying to pretend he's not
really there.

Oh, and there were people griping about duels and doing the same old "anything you can do I can do better" refrain, although here it's female toons beating up on male toons.

I was only partially fishing, as I was watching a few videos with interest, such as Pointy Hat's discussion of the D&D setting Ravenloft, its history, and the new D&D splatbook Ravenloft: The Horrors Within.*

Antonio Demico does a great job with his videos, and even this old D&D player learned a thing or two about the most well known Horror implementation in D&D.

But really what captured my attention was this video by Angelikatosh:

I have advocated for more NPCs in-game in the dead areas of Azeroth, but the concept of a WoW private server populated by ONE real person and over a thousand bots generated using Deepseek is taking things to a completely other level. 

And while I share Angelika's concerns about how this will impact our ability as humans to interact with each other, I do wonder whether we're already at that point. I mean, we're seeing the loss of attention spans and issues interacting with people of the opposite sex already**, so this is just a natural extension of those initial problems. 

It does remind me of my parents demanding that I turn off the television and go outside to, you know, go play. Sure, it could also mean interact with people, but I also spent significant amounts of time roaming the woods near our house by myself, riding my bike to play video games down at the local Kmart, or going to the library or the bookstore down the street. All of these activities were solo, but a few of them were at least out in the world where while I wasn't interacting with them directly, other people were present in the background. 

So, I'm not sure what to make of these private servers that people have cooked up. On the one hand, it could be fun having a thriving game world with more realistic NPCs, but on the other it could also be a prelude to a real life Westworld.

Oh, and for the record, I think I've found my new favorite spot to fish in Retail's Old World:

*I kept wanting to correct him that it's THE WAR WITHIN, but that's a "me" problem.

**Although to be fair, part of that stunted development could be laid at the feet of the pandemic.

How to Find Yourself in a Video

Well, I guess Nixxiom has been paying attention to my WoW playing habits.

Hoo boy.

I think I'm an amalgam of a few of the types listed, but I am not the "Blizzard Hater". If anything, I'm more of a Bobby Kotick hater than a Blizzard hater. 

Still, that did get me to thinking. How much is my current playstyle influenced by my health concerns, and how much was a reaction to my MMO experiences over the past 16+ years? I think that it's a mix of both, but as time has gone on and my health scare recedes into the past, that has less of an impact than the weight of experience. I don't think I'll go completely solo in MMOs anymore, because I apparently like casual conversation too much*, but I can see myself trending more and more in that direction. I did find my solo experiences throughout many MMOs immensely satisfying, and there's no shaking that. Casual conversation aside, dealing with the unknowns of grouping up has shown to be more problematic than I care to admit. I still try to do group content, but I know there will eventually come a day when I'll simply give up and go solo on everything. 

But I'm not there yet. 

*Which is really weird given that I'm an introvert, but that's what it is.

Finding My Happy Place

The last time I did something other than be a passive observer in Retail was about a month or two ago, when I got a toon to L12 over the course of an evening. Still, it wasn't an urge to actually do much of anything, but kind of just sit around doing the modern equivalent of "nothing": fishing.

I haven't fished in Retail since that time back in 2024 that I'd speculated whether you can level while fishing in the same manner that you can gain XP by gathering ore and herbs.* It had been a while, and my fishing experiment back then was limited to one of my old Horde bank toons and a visit to the pond just outside of Silvermoon**, so I figured why not go fishing at the pond near Goldshire? 

If there's one thing I've discovered about fishing in Retail, it's that you have to pay attention to the mobs near you. You can't simply outlevel them and their aggro radius then shrinks to nothing; that'd be too easy. No, you have to find a spot where you know the mobs aren't going to be close enough to aggro you as if you were either at or slightly underleveled for the area.

Hence the pond outside of Goldshire. 

If it were Classic, as soon as possible I'd be over at the creek near the logging camp for the peace and quiet, but some of the mobs there do wander close enough to the Alliance guards near the road that I'd have to pay attention rather than simply relax, so the outskirts of Goldshire it was.

Of course, that did come with some risks. 

Such as dodging a bunch of Horde who'd decided to drop in and say hello...

I guess they wanted to have some fun too...

And then once I arrived at my spot, I discovered that I hadn't trained fishing yet...

This is after I "trained" Classic Fishing.

The old system still found in Classic WoW is really simple: line go up. Once you reach that maximum for an expansion, go train and you can make the line go up even more. This new system? It confuses me, and no amount of explanation can soothe the disquiet in my soul that says "nothing in this game matters except where they want you to be."

At this point, why don't they simply have a "Train Fishing" selection to train the skill itself, and eliminate the leveling process entirely? The cost in gold is absolutely minimal*** so why not do away with it entirely for the secondary skills in the same way they eliminated weapons training in Cataclysm, over 15 years ago?

But I digress.

Once I trained Classic Fishing, I then had to actually find the skill to add it to my bar.

It's not where it usually is in Classic.

It's in its own separate selection button. Before
anybody says that it makes sense this way, I'd
like to point out that the option above this one is
still called "Spellbook" even though those selections
have absolutely nothing to do with spells at all.

Okay, after having found the Fishing option and added it to my bar, I had to go back to the vendor and acquire a fishing pole, then return to my spot. Again, the Horde made it entertaining, because I was obviously not flagged for PvP**** but they did try to encourage me to do so by waggling in front of me. If I were truly a new player, that would have freaked me out in as much the same way as it did back in 2009 when an Alliance max toon found me while questing in Tirisfal Glades on the Stormscale PvP server and weaved around me to the point where I simply hearthed out of there. But now? Eh, no big deal. And besides, if I'd have given them a few rude gestures that might have encouraged them to follow me.

I finally arrived at the dock once more and began fishing.

I spent a good half an hour just casting and relaxing. Of course, the Horde did try to intrude a bit...

The fighting got close enough that I even acquired a Moonkin buff...

Is this a global buff that is proximity related?
I obviously wasn't grouped with anyone, so I did wonder.

And once in a while an Alliance toon just popped up next to me, curious as to what I was doing, but since I never got a whisper or an emote I ignored them, and they went away.

Were it not for the ongoing PvP just next to me, I'd say that it was fairly quiet overall, and that suited me fine. I might level this toon a bit more just so I can go over to the dock in the far SW of Westfall (assuming it's still there) and fish there, because it's not only out of the way but also far enough from any mobs that they're not going to crash my party. At least I hope so.

*Spoiler alert: you can't. Fishing does not grant you experience in Retail.

**Saying you're visiting Silvermoon is now as complicated as visiting Dalaran. If I'd a dollar every time I saw somebody I knew on BNet playing Retail being in "Eversong Woods" or "Silvermoon" and thinking they were starting a new Blood Elf, I'd have paid off the mortgage on my house. 

***See how my L12 toon without any amount of trying at all has almost 5 gold? If this were Classic, you'd be lucky if you had ONE gold by the time you went to Westfall.

****Or warbands or whatever they call it now; it'll always be PvP in my book, because it's pretty self-explanatory.

EtA: Corrected grammar.

Meme Monday: Father's Day Memes for 2026

This coming Sunday is Father's Day in the US, so I figured that sharing a few memes for Gamer Dads would be a good idea. (Maybe.)

Well, I'd like to think so. From Pinterest.

True story: I was supposed to watch my oldest when
she was a few months old and napping in her car
seat. So I took the car seat upstairs and began a game
of Sid Meier's Colonization (the original one). 
I ended up with a stiff neck because I kept twisting
it around every few seconds to see if she'd woken up.
From Meta PCs on X.

Sheesh. It's not that bad. After all, we're all gamers here.
From Bored Panda.

/snicker. From Reddit and Breaking Bad.

Okay, I laughed. From Reddit.

Then, of course, there's World of Warcraft.
From Reddit.