Restoring the Balance

I was due for a bad experience, I suppose.

After all, I'd been playing on the Anniversary servers since late 2024, and I'd had overall a good time grouping with people for instances. Unlike the pugs I'd been in from TBC Classic and Wrath Classic from 2021-2023, I found it far more enjoyable in a relaxed setting since the crowd that rushed to the end had already gotten to max level ages ago. Even now on the Anniversary servers with the Dark Portal having only been open a short time, that crowd was already steamrolling Karazhan instead of working a new toon up to Outland. 

So I was a bit unprepared for what happened last night.

I'd gotten to the point where Briganaa 2.0 could finally go to Blackrock Depths*, so I started looking for a group. Within 10 minutes I found myself in one, and I headed over to Searing Gorge to lope to Blackrock Mountain.

The first indication that something might be amiss was when I began seeing "No, you're summoning me, summon Brig" in Party Chat. Then a minute later, "No, NOT me. Click on Brig, then click the stone."

I eventually did get a summons to inside the mountain, and we waited on the tank to go repair and our healer to get some more water. Both tank and healer reappeared, and we all ran down together and into the instance. 

Except for the Hunter.

"Help me," the Hunter eventually called out.

So we ran outside, expecting to see Dark Iron dwarves beating on him just outside the instance, but nope. Instead of following us down, he ran up and was wandering in the outer ring at the entrance of Blackrock Mountain.

Uh oh.

I had no idea why he decided to wander off, but there it was, Strike One.**

We eventually corralled our wayward Hunter and restarted the instance.

The group was doing okay, making progress, but I did have my concerns. We didn't have a lot of AoE damage in the group, which meant that the quick respawn room, where hordes of Dark Iron conscripts wandered about in packs of about 8-10, would be a big issue. But before we could even think about getting there, however, the Warrior whispered me, "Shouldn't the Hunter be at the top of the meters?"

Knowing how Hunters as a group tend to be infatuated with big DPS numbers, frequently to the point of ripping threat away from the tank, I replied with an affirmative.

"He's only doing 78 DPS right now."

Now, for full disclosure, while I use the Details DPS Meter add-on, I typically use its TinyThreat option to manage my own threat. I've learned since 2019 to not bother looking at my DPS output, because it would merely depress me, but at that moment I thought about switching back to the DPS tab just to see what our Hunter was doing.

But still, our slow but steady progress suddenly made sense. If the Hunter was putting out barely any damage, we were effectively 4-manning a 5 person instance. 

I thought about inspecting the Hunter, just to see what his gear was, but I became too focused on keeping up with the group and managing totems that I let it slide.

That was Strike Two.

Then the Hunter started rolling Need on gear that was most definitely NOT for him.

The Hunter won some Leather gear that multiple people could have used --myself included-- so I didn't complain about that. Hey, that's the breaks of rolls, right? But when the Hunter rolled need and won a pair of Leather healing gloves, I said something. 

"Hey, that's Healer gloves, not Hunter gloves."

I got no response.

After that point, I began keeping a close eye on what the Hunter was rolling Need on. We didn't have any obvious gear that the "Everything is a Hunter Weapon" stereotype would have rolled on, so I began to consider this just a mistake and that the Hunter simply didn't have English as his first language.

Then this dropped off of Golem Lord Argelmach:

I hadn't seen this drop since I first began
playing Classic in 2019, which is saying something.
I have seen Hand of Justice several times, but not this.

I immediately congratulated the Healer on his luck, because this thing has something like a 3-5% drop rate, and is a fantastic trinket for Healers.***

Then I saw "Unc NOOO" in the chat, and I realized what had happened: The Hunter had rolled Need on the trinket and won it.

Strike Three.

The rest of us immediately began telling the Hunter that was simply not a cool thing to do, and I floated in whispers the idea of kicking the Hunter, because he seemed to simply have no remorse at all. He eventually said "sory" (spelled like that), but I didn't buy it. The only real problem was getting another player as replacement, since it was well past my usual bedtime and we were pretty far into the instance. 

We reached the tavern in Blackrock Depths, and we ran over to the storeroom where Hurley Blackbreath's casks of ale were stored. You can start the Hurley fight by destroying the casks, or you could start a fight with the Goblin Ribby Screwspigot and pull him into the storeroom to prevent him from aggroing the nearby bar patrons. The tank ran out of the storeroom to pick a fight with Ribby, and just as he came back inside I suddenly saw our Hunter begin destroying the nearby casks. 

"NOO!!!" I yelled. "STOP!"

The Hunter ignored me and destroyed the rest of the casks, and Hurley ran in while we were up to our eyeballs with Ribby. 

Oh crap.

The Hunter then proceeded to shoot at and pull a bunch of nearby Bar Patrons and then dropped group. 

We might have been good enough to handle some Bar Patrons and one boss, but not both bosses and the Bar Patrons. It was about 12 versus 4, and we quickly wiped.

"Why did he do that?" The tank asked.

"That [expletive redacted] did that on purpose," I replied. "We called him out and he wiped us in response."

"He was barely doing any damage at all," the Warrior added. "The healer was doing more than him."

"More than me? I wasn't attacking at all!"

"Probably totem damage," I added. "Besides, he stole that trinket from you."

"I lost the trinket and the gloves to him."

We gamely made an attempt to finish the Hurley Blackbreath fight, but we discovered that he runs out the back of the Tavern if he defeats you, and by the time we got to the Tavern the random mob that shows up at the back entrance was already there. We tried to kill the mob, but we inadvertently pulled more Bar Patrons, and that was that.

***

I was initially certain all of this was done maliciously and from the standpoint of pure greed, but after a night's sleep I now think that the Hunter was actually a bot. 

The lack of damage output, the rolling Need on blue items that a Hunter could use (but not on gear a Hunter could not equip), the lack of response other than "help me" or "sory" or "lol" out of him, and him following very specific patterns (starting the Hurley Blackbreath fight instead of Ribby, which is the "traditional" pattern for a BRD run), and using multi-shot which pulled nearby Bar Patrons are all things a bot could now be programmed to do. 

After the group broke up, I'd checked to see if the Hunter had vanished completely, but I noted he'd immediately gone to Felwood, not only a level-appropriate questing zone but also a zone where bots are well known to farm Felcloth and other materials.

So yeah, I think we were taken in by a bot who did just barely enough to keep us guessing. None of us also wanted to jump to the immediate conclusion that he was actively sabotaging our group, and our initial reaction to the gradual escalation of anti-social behavior was that it was a language barrier. It was only when it had become obvious did we call him out, and I guess the bot's controller decided it was better to split before anything else. 

Or, as the Warrior put it, "He took advantage of us trying to be nice."

I did tell the rest of the group that I enjoyed running with them, and hopefully I'll see them in Outland. 

Just not that Hunter.

*I typically look for a group to run an instance when I've accumulated enough quests to visit the instance. In the original Vanilla leveling design, you gain access to the quests (and are marked as "yellow" on the Quest Log) when you're the right level for a dungeon. The biggest exception to this rule are the Scarlet Monastery instances for an Alliance player, because the Alliance gains access to a seed quest that leads to Scarlet Monastery at Level 35, easily past the level requirement for the first wing of SM (Graveyard) and on the high side for the requirement for the second wing (Library). Ideally, you'd want to visit Graveyard around L30-32, not L36 (which is what you'll end up at by the time you complete the seed quest on the other side of the planet and head over to Southshore). Library is more about L33-36, so while L36 fits it just barely does.

**The baseball analogy is highly appropriate today, as it's Opening Day for Major League Baseball in Cincinnati. Being the home of the oldest professional baseball franchise, the Cincinnati Reds (Est. 1869), Opening Day includes a parade and all sorts of pagentry. Kids frequently skip school to go to downtown with their parents to watch the parade, see the game, and (hopefully) celebrate an Opening Day victory.

**I don't care if the "official" drop rate is something about 8-12%, because my experience is that it's more aligned with what the community sees as 3-5%.

The Joy of Random Encounters

It's kind of strange how fast I'm leveling on the Anniversary servers given that I'm not actively trying to slow it down. I'm not trying to affect how I play, either, it's just happening on its own.

"If I could walk on water..."
I'm sure Eddie Money never thought of this...

Of course, this is all relative. Being at L51 right now in late March, about 1.5 months after the Dark Portal opened on the Anniversary servers would be considered frightfully slow if this were Retail WoW or even among those who wanted to raid on the Anniversary servers, but compared to how I've leveled in the past* it seems extremely fast.

I'm doing this while still finding the time to just do stuff I find interesting.

The other day I was heading south from Desolace to the primordial forests of Feralas when I came across a Blood Elf Hunter well under the average level for the zone. She appeared to be heading toward Camp Mojache, the Horde base in the center of the zone, which I can completely understand. I personally would have approached this from the east, where the lower level mobs for the zone were, but I can't assume that this player would have known that. 

So anyway, she was riding south and I passed her not too far away from the Ruins of Ravenwind when she'd paused for a moment. For some reason my Spidey-sense went off and I swung the camera around just in time to see her get attacked by a bear out of the brush. She was Horde, but she was also about 8 levels under that bear that jumped her. 

I quickly realized she was in deep trouble, so I went back and attacked the bear, ripping threat away from her and dispatching the bear in short order. 

What to do now? 

Well, I switched back to ghost wolf and escorted the Hunter all the way to Mojache.

I love the name Callindaria. It feels like
a fantastic name for a Sindorei.

At first I think she believed I was waiting for an opportunity to attack her, but eventually she just kept going once she realized I wasn't turning off to go to either Feathermoon Stronghold or Dire Maul. The ghost wolf form isn't as fast as even a basic mount, so when she'd get decently far in front of me she'd pause to let me catch up. When we were close to Ogre camps along the way, she let me take the lead until the danger was behind us.

We passed several other Horde players heading the other way, but nobody turned around to help her along the road. 

Once we got close enough to Camp Mojache where I could see the pair of Tauren guards at the entrance, I stopped and waved goodbye. I think she was confused, as she turned back and looked at me for a few moments, but I sat down and waited until she swung around and rode off toward the base.

"Go on, kid. It wouldn't end well if I got any closer."

It's just little encounters like that, which only take about 5-10 minutes tops, that make my day. I get far more out of a random encounter than any other aspect of an MMO.

***

In other news, I've been a baaad WoW player. 

I have had the music turned off for the longest time; not because I don't like it, but because I listen to other things while playing. Sometimes I'm in Discord, and others I'm just listening to a podcast or other music. 

To be fair, sometimes your encounters in-game don't really mesh with the game music, such as the music for The Lion's Pride Inn not exactly meshing with the reality of Goldshire in Moon Guard.

I sure hope that the pink glow is accompanied
by a healthy dose of Lysol to clean the place.

And there are times when music I find online actually fits much better for my mood. 

Leyna Robinson-Stone is a tin whistle musician on YouTube who has plenty of music videos for the tin whistle. When I became re-acquainted with the whistle a couple of years ago I discovered her work and subscribed to her channel. 

This particular short is a duet with another whistle player,

CutiePie, who also has a a LOT of instructional videos.

One of her posts from over a year ago recently appeared in my feed, and I found her original piece fit the wilds of Feralas incredibly well. 

Going from Eddie Money to atmospheric tin whistle in one post. Go figure.

*Even back in my time on Retail in 2009 - 2014. My first experience on WoW, I literally didn't know any better (and I was leveling a Holy Paladin, so a big strike against me), but my later experiences were leveling to pursue different goals that were most definitely NOT optimal. Nobody goes leveling via Battlegrounds thinking it was going to be quick and easy.

Meme Monday: Miscellaneous Memes for March 2026

As usual, time to go and rummage through my pile of memes that I haven't used yet. So... Have fun!

Yeah, it's a problem that MMOs tend to have.
From Imgflip.

Because meeting at a tavern is so blase.
From Quickmeme.

I laughed when I saw this. From Facebook.

From Tiktok.

Ha! I'd be buff too! From Shen Comix.

Me too... Yes, me too...
From Tumblr.

Early Saturday Musings

I was at our local indie bookstore last night, and I came across this magazine:

Bhagpuss, this one's for you.

That --and the other magazine I found below-- got me to thinking about how different we looked in our youth.

I can't get over how young Sammy
Hagar and the late Eddie Van Halen looked.

I was at the car dealer the other day to get one of our cars worked on* when a woman sat down in the cubby next to mine. I was focusing on a conference call at the time, so I didn't really pay attention at first, but then I realized I was looking at a blast from the past. Her hairdo looked exactly like Suzanna Hoffs in The Bangles...

Circa mid-1980s.

I hadn't seen that sort of hairstyle in person in at least a few decades, but there this woman was, working away on her laptop while also examining her phone for data. I made a point not to stare, because that's just creepy, but I took enough in to know she was likely half my age.

Did I just miss something and that 40 year old fashion and music are coming back?

Nah, not likely. I'm just imagining things. 

What I'm not imagining is that 50 years ago, this album was released:

Had to chase down a good looking cover from
Amazon of all places.

Or this album:

And this one came from Facebook.

I've known this was coming for a long time, because I'm in my upper 50s, and I've been watching albums that formed my youth reach these major milestones. There's also Hotel California --of which my freshman college roommate went to hear a preacher "deconstruct" that album to prove it was Satanic-- Bob Seger's Night Moves, KISS's Destroyer, The Ramones' self-titled First Album, Peter Frampton's Frampton Comes Alive, and Queen's A Night at the Opera. 

We are now 50 years away from 1976, which is farther away than 1976 was from the Big Band Era of the mid-1930s through the late 1940s. It's amazing to me just how far we've come, from music, fashion, and other things. (Just remember, kids, next year is the 50th anniversary of the Atari 2600, which got a lot of your parents interested in video games.)

My own hair has receded and thinned a bit --the kids poke fun at me for that-- and my beard is now mostly grey rather than red, but I don't feel massively different than I did 20 or 30 years ago. Obviously, that has more to do with gradual changes over time, just like how I never noticed that I lost my ability to hear 15,000 Hertz until a couple of years ago when I was running a sound check on the speakers I'd built. 

Just a few thoughts about how things have changed. One thing that hasn't changed, however, is that I'm still listening to music from 1976. Not exclusively --Bhagpuss sees to that with his regular music posts-- but those albums are still in regular rotation.

*Just an oil change and tire rotation. No new issues were discovered this time around.

I Don't think I Could Sit for That Long

Over the course of the past several days, I watched Jeff Kaplan's interview with Lex Fridman. I was clued into it by Josh Strife Hayes, and after his commentary about it I searched and found the full 5+ hour interview on YouTube:

Yes, it's 5 hours 10 minutes.

And yes, it's worth the full time. 

But yes, that full length meant I broke down the interview into 1 hour chunks. (Your mileage may vary.)

From my perspective, there are three big takeaways from the interview:

• He's seen some shit.
  
  

  

  "That was just the biggest 'fuck you' moment I had
  in my career. It felt surreal to be in that condition..."
  Screencap from the interview.

  
  Maybe I'm reading too much into the look on his face, but he gives off that thousand yard stare at times. I look at him and think that this is what I'd look like if I hadn't changed jobs back in 2001. (My kids would say that about some of my more recent foibles, but I'm not so sure. I guess it's left as an exercise to the people who know me to provide details.)
  
  
  
  
• The corporate execs at the end were complete idiots who only saw things through the lens of dollar signs.
  
  Yes, you can say that any business is in it to make money, but when some of the shenanigans that went on with Overwatch went down, Jeff had finally had it and left. I'll leave it to you to find the spot in the interview, because the full interview provided the amount of heft of what leaving Blizzard meant to Jeff. Lex did bleep out some specific numbers to protect Jeff's NDA, but regardless I felt like punching a wall or something when I saw that part. 
  
  
  

  

  From Rick and Morty.

  
  Jeff had every right to be upset, and I'm sure that I could find out exactly who he was talking about in that part of the interview, but I'd really rather not dwell on the injustice of it all. Jeff wasn't the one overpromising on the Overwatch League, and he was the one caught in the crosshairs of trying to keep riding the Overwatch wave and keeping it fresh while working on Overwatch 2. 
  
  
• Jeff is proof that you do not need an IT or a business degree to leave your mark in gaming. His degree is in creative writing, and it was his passion for gaming that eventually led to his employment at Blizzard. While yes, he's often poked fun of for making the original Green Hills of Stranglethorn questline in WoW (he talks about that in the interview, by the way) I'm also confident that he had a big hand in the Defias questline that I love so much. In the interview, he mentioned that Pat Nagle worked on quests for Elwynn Forest and he took Westfall, which meant that he was working on quests in the heart of the Defias territory. 

It's a fascinating interview, and I'm glad that Jeff seems to be slowly coming out of his funk after leaving Blizzard. Now I really want to read Play Nice by Jason Schreier, about the rise and fall of Blizzard Entertainment.

Who Wants to Live Forever?

Okay, the reference to both Queen and the movie Highlander aside, nobody lives for that long. Even with today's medicine, the oldest verified* living person was (according to Wikipedia) a touch over 122 years old. Life and death are a natural cycle, and while that has been long known we also have a long history of wishing for immortality. (Or at least a much longer lifespan.)

I'm not going to get into the weeds as to why we as a species tend to collectively want that --whether here or in an afterlife-- but instead I want to look at how we write about species/races with vastly different lifespans than ours.

Let's get the big one out of the way, shall we?

This was the version I had as a kid.
I have no idea whatever became of it.
From Ebay.

We write what we know, so we project our lives, our understanding, and our emotions onto anything we create. Frequently that includes animals that don't live as long as us. Anthropomorphizing dogs and cats and other animals that we know and love is pretty typical for us as a species --101 Dalmatians, anyone?-- and in terms of aging we basically compress our own human experience into the lifespan of said animals assuming it's a direct 1:1 correspondence.** 

Of course, that's not exactly the case. Other animals are not us, and while they may have individual personalities, they don't have the sense of impending death that we have. That means our understanding of the eventual end of life doesn't impact what other animals experience; while we may not know exactly what your doggo is thinking about things, it's pretty likely that they don't have any real thoughts of the Rainbow Bridge like we do.***

***

Okay, that's us looking at the lifespan of animals, but what about our examination of other races/species that are much older than us?

There's a quote by the Science Fiction writer/editor John W. Campbell****  about approaching alien intelligence that applies here: “Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man or better than a man, but not like a man.”

The "other" big one that we might as well talk about are the Elves and Dwarves of Middle-earth.

Alan Lee's cover of The Tale of Beren
and Lúthien by JRR Tolkien. Star-crossed
lovers from two separate races, Beren
and Lúthien represented Tolkien and his wife, Edith,
as they came from two separate worlds.

Elves are immortal, assuming they don't die due to violence or merely wasting away,***** and while Dwarves are mortal their lifespan is much greater than that of normal humans. Even the Númenóreans, descendants of Men who fought alongside Elves in the Elder Days, have a much longer lifespan than that of the "regular" folk. 

Our experiences of Elves in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings really was that of wise counselors and background commentators for the main characters. They provide the world's exposition and a sense of the weight of tasks ahead; think of Dumbledore's "here's what happened" part at the end of the first few Harry Potter books and you get the idea. 

I've mentioned this before --unfortunately since Google doesn't have this blog indexed I can't easily find it-- but when Fantasy authors put together timelines stretching thousands of years as if it's not a big deal, we are doing ourselves a disservice. Think of it this way: the entirety of Middle-earth's Third Age was over 3000 years, which puts the equivalent in our time to be ~975 BCE. The Zhou Dynasty in China, divided rulership in Egypt, splitting of the Kingdom of Israel into two, the gradual rise of the Assyrian Empire and decline in the old Babylonian Empire, and the rise of the Olmecs. So, looking at all the upheaval that's happened from that time to today, the timeline presented by Tolkien in the LotR appendices is incredibly simplistic. No country/nation has lasted 3000 years in our world (the current nation of Egypt bears no resemblance to the Medieval Mamluks, much less the Hellenistic Ptolemaic or the New Kingdom), yet Gondor and the Elven kingdoms remained (relatively) intact and with a similar political structure over that time. Sure, some empires have come and gone, but nothing even close to what we've seen in the real world.

However, as time in Middle-earth has progressed, the Elves gradually retreated from view and the political stage as they left Middle-earth for the Undying Lands. Even the threat of Sauron didn't mean armies of Elves marching against him in the War of the Ring --Peter Jackson's movies notwithstanding-- and the Battle of the Five Armies from The Hobbit was the Largest military action the Elder Race performed in the latter half of the Third Age.

In one sense, the gradual retreat of the Elves from view, leaving the world to the mortal races, is rather natural. If you're an Elf you don't change, but everything else around you does. Men, Dwarves, Hobbits, and woodland creatures all grow old and die, and you don't. In the Elves, that manifests in terms of grief and weariness#, which is why they're drawn to the Undying Lands where they'll find a respite from the world's mortality. 

"My son, years come when hope will fade, and beyond them little is clear to me. And now a shadow lies between us. Maybe, it has been appointed so, that by my loss the kingship of Men may be restored. Therefore, though I love you, I say to you: Arwen Undomiel shall not diminish her life's grace for less cause. She shall not be the bride of any Man less than the King of both Gondor and Arnor. To me even then our victory can bring only sorrow and parting - but to you hope of joy for a while. Alas, my son! I fear that to Arwen the Doom of Men may seem hard at the ending."

--From The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, The Return of the King, Appendix A

Tolkien obviously put in a lot of thought to the immortality of the Elves on a racial and personal level, particularly in regards to the personal cost of what immortality (and the rejection thereof) brings to a person and their family. However, I think he missed the mark on the resulting societal impact of immortality. In the end, the Elves' society didn't really grow or change over time, but rather tended toward stagnation and calcification. 

***

Now that I think about it, if there's one common thread among immortal or extraordinarily long-lived people in fiction or gaming, it's that we really don't know what it would be like from a social or societal aspect to have a race of extremely long lived or immortal people around. Or even a couple of people, for that matter. Would they calcify and be gradually consumed by grief and weariness, such as Tolkien's Elves? Would they dominate society like the Emperor of Mankind in Warhammer 40k? Would they become more rigid and black/white in their worldview?

Would they lose what makes us human: the ability to connect on a personal level to someone, to feel intense emotion, to love and grieve, to emphasize, to be willing to sacrifice for the betterment of others?

While there's a lot of Fantasy and Science Fiction that does grapple with what it means to be immortal, in pop culture there's frequently a lot of hand waving about immortality as this weighty topic gets in the way of the story, but I think this is something that can't be avoided forever. Merely hand-waving a character as immortal and yet having them act like, well, a regular person is missing the boat. 

Yes, I pulled this out from my Meme Monday
on Age Disparity Memes. From Imgflip.

Obviously, the physical part of being immortal is one thing, and the impact of immortality is most often presented that way in stories and video games. 

The elves parted, and out of their midst came an elfmaiden who walked forward to stand beside the Speaker. At sight of her, Caramon's mouth sagged open. Riverwind's eyes widened. Even Raistlin stared, his eyes seeing true beauty at last, for no hint of decay touched the young elfmaiden.

--From Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, pg. 323.

That impression by Raistlin, where his eyes could only see the gradual decay of all living things, really hit home the concept that Elves had such a long lifespan in AD&D 1e that Laurana appeared to have no decay at all. Back in those days, the lifespan of AD&D 1e Elves were about 4000 years, so yea, point taken.

"The more you know...." From 9GAG.

And given that the average video game player doesn't really think too much beyond stats and physical attributes when creating a character, I guess it's not a very great surprise that pop culture focuses on that the most. 

If you're one of those in the back raising their hand and saying "Yeah, but I do!! I care!!" I'm right there with you. After all, I played tabletop RPGs, and I've read a metric ton of SF&F, so yeah, I've got opinions about excessively long life or immortality.

Another way of looking at intra-species
romances. From the Pathfinder comic Hollow
Mountain, posted on Reddit.

The problem is, we look at it purely from the angle of physical lifespan and who will outlive who, but a larger question is how does the longer-lived person behave toward others? Do they look at their short-lived brethren as merely cattle? As playthings? As children to be parented (either strictly or gently)? As the Great Unwashed, who need religious and social purity imposed upon them? As agents of chaos, to be destroyed? Or an annoyance, to be either disposed with or ignored at your whim?

For me, one thing is certain: people who have abnormally long or immortal lifespans behave significantly different than everybody else. 

Garion looked at the old man whose white hair and beard seemed somehow luminous in the morning sun. "What's it like to live forever, Grandfather?" he asked.

"I don't know," Wolf said. "I haven't lived forever."

"You know what I mean."

"The quality of life isn't much different," Wolf said. "We all live as long as we need to. It just happened that I have something to do that's taken a very long time." He stood up abruptly. "This conversation's taken a gloomy turn," he said.

--From Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings, pg. 258.

As you could probably figure out, I disagree with David Eddings' presentation of Belgarath in The Belgariad. From a story standpoint it works fine, but I'm under no illusions that The Belgariad is anything other than a fun romp of a story. If a person is 7000 years old, I have a very hard time believing that they would behave no different than any other human. If we are the sum of our experiences, hundreds or thousands of years are a LOT of extra experiences that literally nobody living (or dead) could possibly comprehend. Plus, memory is a bitch and that's when people live our current lifespan. Can you imagine trying to remember something that happened 500 years ago, or 1000? We don't even remember what we had for breakfast a couple of months ago, much less things far longer ago than a human has ever been alive. 

There's also something to be said about how our experiences shape us as people, and if we've done one thing for a long time we tend to look at everything through that restrictive lens. That's just for those of us with a normal lifespan, so extend that out several centuries and what have you got? Someone who strictly adheres to one singular viewpoint to the exclusion of all else. If you think it's hard for a normal human to break out from their prejudices and perceive other points of view, just try to do that if you're 1000 or 5000 or 10000 years old and have had centuries or millennia to build up your worldview. 

At least he admits it. From Reddit.

***

I was thinking about this when I realized that the freakiest thing that any NPC ever said to me in WoW was this:

Yeek.

Think about the implications of power and vision that statement had. In the hands of anybody else short of a god it would be hubris at best and insanity at worst. But only someone with the age and prestige and power of the Dragon Queen could pull that off. Even then, becoming all chummy with you later on just kind of lost the plot as far as the immortality of Alexstrasza is concerned. In terms of age and power imbalance, it's a lot closer to one of us befriending a dog.

Which reminds me...

From Reddit.

Yeah, sounds about right.

*There's plenty of unverified ages over 122 in history, but given what we know about physiology that's likely inaccurate, to put it politely.

**Stick a pin in that; we'll see that again later.

***Given that the so-called cognitive revolution (roughly 50k-60k years ago) gave us the capacity to perform imaginative thoughts, we'd have been in the same boat as our canine friends were it not for that. I realize it can be a bit dense and a harsh authorial voice at times, but Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari covers this cognitive revolution fairly well in the initial part of the book. 

****Most well known for his decades of running Astounding Science Fiction/Analog Science Fiction during the Golden Era of SF, Campbell can be a bit of a controversial figure. I was first introduced to him throughout the essays in Isaac Asimov's Asimov on Science Fiction. If you can find a used copy around, it's very much worth a read.

*****It feels weird reading in stories and in biographies about "wasting sickness" and only later realizing that the author or biographer likely was referring to what we now call cancer.

#I've read a ton of Tolkien over the years, and so the only book I can definitively point to for some of this is The Silmarillion, although Unfinished Tales might have parts of it.

Okay, Break's Over

One thing I learned while I was away from MMOs for a week was that the world doesn't end if I stop playing.

Okay, that's a bit of hyperbole, but given how FOMO-driven video games tend to be these days, you'd be forgiven if you thought that the weight of the (virtual) world rested on your shoulders.*

That's the sort of quip that I could see Seth
McFarlane make. From Reddit.

I have wondered whether I have the willpower to give up playing WoW again, especially given that I do have an active circle of friends in-game, which is something that simply did not exist in 2014.** That wasn't why I took the break, but the knowledge that there were people who would notice if I weren't around certainly kept me on edge to a degree. 

Sure enough, after the weekend I got pinged by my Questing Buddy to see if I was doing okay. While we hadn't actually played together in-game for close to a year now --she having gone down the hardcore route to complete all the raids (and even managing to get an Atiesh)-- we do still chat regularly, and she and the rest of the group had noticed my absence even though it was only 3-4 days at that point. After assuring her I was fine, just doing other things for a while, I concluded that I couldn't simply vanish unlike 2014 (and to a lesser extent in 2022). 

From The Simpsons (via Tenor).

So when I felt ready to login once more last Friday evening, I discovered a few items of note: my friends were doing their own thing as they always had, and that the active population on the Anniversary servers had shrunk.

The former wasn't a surprise to me at all, since everybody in our friends' group has their own goals and are currently pursuing them, but the latter was. After a few weeks of upwards of 20 layers' worth of active players on the Anniversary Servers, we were down to 9 or 10 layers over this past weekend. 

The layers as of 6:51 Server Time
on Dreamscythe-US on March 16, 2026.

Now admittedly I'm not sure if people in instances count against layers, but given that players were chain-running 5-person instances once the Dark Portal opened, I really doubt there'd be much of a change in population simply because Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, and Magtheridon's Lair had opened up. I think what is currently happening is that people either burned out rushing to L70 and getting attuned as quickly as possible, or that people are merely raid logging because they can. 

I haven't been to Outland yet, but given that the main hub there, Shattrath City, is connected to the other major cities via Trade Chat, I know that people haven't been pulling out the "I'm Bored" complaint as is often found in MMOs, so I suspect it's merely raid logging for now. 

***

Well, I'm refreshed. 

And I'm back to doing the same thing I had been doing, which was leveling Briganaa 2.0, and to a lesser extent my Blood Elf pair of toons. If the in-game population of the Anniversary servers continues to decline, by the time I reach Outland I will have the place to myself as everybody will be raid-logging and not doing much else. I won't know for certain until I get there, but I expect that the people running TBC 5-person instances will have dried up just like in 2021, victims of burnout due to following the meta. 

To be honest, that would suit me just fine. I don't need the crowds, and I'm happy doing what I should have done 5 years ago. Live and learn, I guess.

*I'm quite familiar with how FOMO is used to make people play and purchase in-game currency with my limited experience with mobile games. There was a mobile game --whose name escapes me now-- that I played via PC that I simply refused to purchase anything for, but the psychological tricks utilized to try to entice me to purchase currency to buy better items for defense gradually ratcheted up to the point where I simply had to walk away or I knew I'd have broken down and bought stuff just to try to keep up with other players. I'm sure my castle or city is a smoking ruin right now, years later, because of other players who ran roughshod over it in the intervening time. But it was incredibly hard to both walk away and not buy things to improve my standing in the game. And that was.... 2014? 2015? Mobile games have gotten MUCH worse in that regard in the past decade.

**Yes, I had my blogger friends, and you know who you are, but except for the rare direct interaction we didn't play WoW together. Vidyala once offered me a spot in her guild, but as I was quite aware that she'd be making an exception for me as a non-raider I turned it down. I didn't feel it was right for the rules to be bent just because she and I knew each other outside of the game itself.