Some Short Ponderables For a Saturday

None of these items are enough for a post on their own, so I strung several that have been living rent free in my head into a single miscellaneous post.

***

In World of Warcraft, main raids typically have a gear set for each class known as a Tier set. In Vanilla WoW, there's even a pre-raid Tier set, known as T0, that you can accumulate via dungeons.* However, why is AQ40's Tier set considered T2.5 and not T3? It's not a set that came along later and was shoehorned in to give people a chance at better gear, like the T0.5 questlines, so why is it colloquially known as T2.5? 

You'd think that going from Molten Core -> Onyxia/Blackwing Lair -> Temple of Ahn'Qiraj -> Naxxramas would be Tier 1 through Tier 4, but noooo....

***

Ex-Blizzard head honcho Mike Ybarra has this idea in his head to allow paying customers to tip game devs. Given that while he was in charge at Blizzard he had the ability to pay the development staff --all of them-- more money if he liked their work, why is he even suggesting this?

Apparently tip jar stickers are a thing
that you can buy. From superostmk.live

Because he wants to turn game development into the equivalent of the wait staff at American restaurants, who survive on tips because of the low pay. 

I mean, I get it if there's a tip jar out for free-to-play games, since that could make sense if you don't want to buy stuff from their cash shop (assuming there is one), but when a guy who was in charge of a game development studio makes these suggestions, it certainly seems less like he's trying to say "game devs deserve extra for a good game" and more like "I really want to find new ways to pay people less to increase my profit margins".

***

One thing that always puzzled me about the Plaguelands in WoW is how the land is so obviously diseased and plagued --both there and in the Ghostlands in southern Quel'Thalas-- but the NPCs and the players seem to be immune to the Plague itself.  You see this in Northrend in Wrath of the Lich King as well, where in the Troll city of Zul'Drak has Plague Spreaders everywhere, but the Crusaders and the players are effectively immune to that. I would have thought that anything who stays long enough in Plague infested lands stands a very high chance of contracting the Plague themselves, but I guess plot armor is stronger than the Plague of Undeath.

Thought I'd go with a Ghostlands screenshot
for a change. Even in broad daylight it looks like this.

***

I'm not the brightest bulb in the universe when someone tries to subtly tell me something.

If you ever read some of those Reddit threads about guys totally missing out that they were being hit on, yeah that'd be me.**

For some reason I was thinking about the term Netflix and Chill, and it occurred to me just what other "come hither" signals in the past did I miss. I knew of "come up for a cup of coffee", but I personally never encountered that one, but beyond that outside of the stereotypical 'booty call' --calling someone up after midnight to ask them to come over to your place-- I don't know of any. And I certainly don't know of any references used by people playing various video, pencil/paper, and board games, for certain. 

Still, maybe it's something to pursue for a while. Yes, I am such a dweeb. Or maybe I just want to look back on my past and smack my forehead and go "Oh CRAP! How did I miss that one??!!"

Sometimes being middle age is a bitch.

*Yes, I know that they're not all that good in terms of what your class is best at, Blizzard was still figuring this stuff out in Vanilla, you know, so it's not perfect. Still, the Rogue set and the Mage set do look nice from an aesthetics standpoint.

**There's a ton of them out there; I only linked one but if you want to read more, go ahead and search for "clueless guys reddit thread". Trust me, they'll pop out.