When Thought Experiments Get Out of Hand

Speaking of anachronisms...

Given how Retail WoW has developed over the years, why is leveling still a part of the game? 

That has been one of the items I've been pondering over the past several days. It's not a new opinion by any stretch of the imagination, but the leveling experience ceased to be a focus of Retail WoW players for as long as I can remember. 

If the Old World zones back in 2009 were as populated now as they are on the 20th Anniversary Classic Servers, I'd have likely found leveling incredibly difficult. Remember, I began playing WoW on a PvP server, and if every zone had a crowd like Hillsbrad Foothills had, I'd have spent most of my game time running for my life. 

Or dead. Yeah, I'd be dead.
I pulled this out of my archives just because.

Since those zones weren't that populated --because most people were at max level in 2009-- that made my original leveling experience easier.

Yes, I do love the leveling experience in Vanilla Classic. While I dislike the XP boosts that the Classic team regularly puts out, at least they do pay lip service to the time honored tradition of actually leveling a character.

But that's the pre-Cataclysm WoW environment. Since that time, as WoW's game world has become bigger and the level cap has grown larger, the actual process of leveling itself has become more and more streamlined. Paradoxically, the emphasis placed on the current expansion --and getting players as quickly as possible to the level cap-- has skyrocketed as well.

So that begs the question: why have people level in the traditional way at all when a new expansion drops? 

***

It's not as if what I'm suggesting hasn't been thought of before. After all, Blizzard loves to roll out level boosts late in an expansion --frequently with gear upgrades to help you once you reach the level cap-- for at least several years now. What I'm asking, however, is why are they even bothering with the leveling journey in the first place if the entire focus of the game is at the level cap. 

If people are zipping through the leveling zones to get to max level as quickly as possible --or the actual leveling process is so streamlined as to be little more than a visual novel with a few "kill ten rats" quests-- then why not eliminate the leveling process itself and start everyone at max level when they purchase the expansion? 

I'm not saying to eliminate the leveling zones themselves, but to essentially make them optional. If people are zipping through quests, not bothering to even read quest text, then why not leave the quests for people who actually want to read them and let everybody else just rocket on ahead and do what they really want to do? 

***

Am I playing Devil's Advocate here?

A bit, I'll admit.

There are days when I feel like I'm the only person in the world who enjoys the leveling process itself, and during the last Retail expansion I played --Mists of Pandaria circa 2013/2014-- it actually took an effort to slow down my leveling so I could enjoy the game. It also took a bit of an effort to handle the Mists intro areas when the gear I was wearing were Cataclysm quest rewards and random drops from the mid-Cataclysm zones such as Uldum; I could tell that the development staff expected the average Mists player to have at least a full Heroic dungeon set when they crossed to Pandaria*, and there was at least one mini-boss quest that was effectively a gear check in the Pandaria intro zone that you had to pass before you progressed further in the story.

Nostalgia aside, however, I think the time has come for Blizzard to seriously consider eliminating the leveling process from Retail. If enough people are blitzing through the zones (or really don't care about the story except for the "get gear/renown/etc." part), why not give the players what they want and just let them skip the leveling process entirely? Or, knowing how Microsoft and Blizzard thinks, offer players the opportunity to skip the leveling for a price. Instead of Early Access, allow those players the opportunity to start the next expansion at max level for an extra $30. All the try-hards can go straight into their gearing process while those that actually care about the story and the questing zones can go do those. Blizzard can even institute layering to separate the paid boosts from the levelers, so you can prevent the boosters from farming all of the World Bosses and gathering nodes.

Before anybody brings up the elephant in the room --PvPers and gankers-- institute a simple change to the PvP rules: for the first month of an expansion's release, max level toons can only engage in PvP with other max-level toons. Not with NPCs. Not with lower level toons of the opposite faction. That keeps those who paid for the privilege of skipping the leveling process from interfering with the fun of those who did not. 

Anyway, that's my thoughts on the matter. As for me, I'll be back on the Anniversary servers, leveling at my own pace.

*It's not an accident that the level boosts provided to players have included a set of basic gear so that the boosted players aren't too underpowered in the current expansion.

Meme Monday: Anachronism Memes

I've been thinking a bit about anachronisms lately, so I figured I might as well lean into it and provide a few memes about anachronisms from all over.

Some anachronisms are out in plain
sight. Such as that the Trojan Horse
was actually a jet. From Memedroid.

Oh, and speaking of The Iliad...
From Imgflip.

/snicker. From the Triablogue Wordpress blog.

Anachronistic memes can be found even in the Bayeaux Tapestry.
From Pinterest.

Okay, I laughed. Although to be fair,
I could see this in an episode of Doctor Who.
From Memedroid.

Aye, thou mayest be a star.
From Imgflip and timfall,wordpress.com.

Adventures in Righteousness

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention something on my last Operation Spread the Love update: two weeks ago, Linna did complete one Paladin quest chain.

I'd forgotten how long of a grind it was to complete this questline. It's probably half as long as the Paladin mount questline is, but it still takes you far afield for a low level Paladin. The initial portion of the questline, defending Daphne Stilwell from the Defias, does take a minimum level to complete in the same way that a Mage's wand questline does**, but as long as you don't do anything stupid such as hit the wrong button you can complete it quickly enough.

This was before I hit said "wrong button".
It wasn't until I was reviewing screencaps for this post that
I realized that Daphne's hairstyle is the same as Cardwyn's. Go figure.

::ONE DEATH AND SEVERAL DAYS LATER::

At least she doesn't have the same hair color as Cardwyn.

If you've not done the quest chain before**, you'll be pleased to know that Daphne is not some helpless "damsel in distress". She has already been defending her and her husband's farm from the Defias Brotherhood for a while, and during the fight she is alongside you, taking potshots at the Defias with her gun. Given how cut off their farm is from the main rallying point at Sentinel Hill, she has to be tough enough to stand her ground. 

Anyway, once that quest is complete you might be tempted to believe that's the end of that, but your superior, Lord Shadowbreaker, sends you up to Ironforge where Daphne's husband is stationed to inform him of the events back home. In gratitude for helping to defend his farm and Daphne***, Jordan offers to forge you a weapon worthy of a wielder of the Light such as yourself. 

There's only one little problem: Jordan doesn't have what he needs to finish the job.

The solution? Well, you can handle a little shopping trip, right?

Apparently Linna could, because Jordan provided Linna with said shopping list, and she then went all over tarnation, from familiar places such as Dun Morogh and The Deadmines to farther away locales such as Darkshore and the Silverpine Forest.

There's a bit of a crowd at the gates of Shadowfang Keep.
And yes, I took this screencap originally for that
guild name, which reminded me of an ongoing joke
in The Elder Scrolls Online, The Lusty Argonian Maid.

The labors weren't exactly the Labors of Hercules by any stretch, but it did involve some patience. While the Kor Gem you seek can drop off of the naga that roam the underground tunnels before you reach the instance itself, they're all elites and it takes some patience to kill them. To be honest, it's more effective to simply get a group for Blackfathom Deeps and just go run the instance.

Shirtless Kaldorei looks better than
Shirtless Kirk, that's for certain.

Once you've obtained a corrupted Kor Gem and Thundris helpfully purifies it, you can then make the trek back to Ironforge**** and provide Jordan with the entire contents of his grocery list. In Vanilla Classic, there was no option to turn in parts of the list beforehand, you had to get the entire list first and then turn it all in. When your bag space is kind of limited, that's a bit of a commitment.

Still, Jordan is grateful and you do get the satisfaction of watching him work:

Completing an involved class quest is far more satisfying than, say, some of the one-off Mage class quests. I'm looking at you, Jennea, and your insistence on collecting water from Mirror Lake for a reason you refuse to tell me about. (Cardwyn still believes it was a test to see if you'll do whatever you're told to do without question, which irks her to no end.) Yes, you might get a good weapon at the end of it, but the journey is also very much worth it as well.

Now, about some of those Druid and Warlock quests...

*Trudging through the swamp to where Tabetha lives is pretty much a death sentence to any Mage attempting to do it the moment you get the initial quest. In Vanilla WoW, Mages don't have the ability to turn themselves temporarily invisible, so any critter within a mile of you in southern Dustwallow will be coming for you. (Don't ask me how I know that one.)

**I can't recall if it was removed from the post-Cataclysm Old World, but while there are entries in Wowhead it appears that if you bring up Verigan's Fist there's a line that says "This item's source is no longer available/removed."

***More like 'assist Daphne in her slaughter of the Defias', but I digress. If I ever get in a fight in a back alley, I want her on my side.

****I like to take a long trip back rather than use the Hearthstone to return to Stormwind and take the tram. So sue me. 

Because I Don't Have Enough Irons in the Fire

So.... I did a thing...

Her looks aren't exactly right, but close enough.

Yes, after a purchase on sale from what seems like an age ago, I finally got around to creating a toon or two for Hogwarts Legacy.

This is... actually pretty close to what I'd look like back
then. The hair would have been not quite so wavy, but
the coloring and shape of the face are about right. Can't turn
those glasses into 80s style metal frames, however.
(I went with Miller because it's a pretty generic name.)

The irony is that while I first created a toon that looked like me --not out of vanity, but just something I do because I can't not make decisions as if I were doing them-- I went full Mage and created Cardwyn, as if she were plucked out of Azeroth and dropped straight into the Wizarding World.

See? I got her hair right!

If she were 15 or 16 years old, that is.* The story begins with you as a new student going to Hogwarts, but with the specific tweak that you're a Fifth Year student, something almost never done before. I suspect this plot device was conceived to not spread out the plot too much. If you're a First Year student, your abilities are a bit limited, and Portkey Games doesn't really have the time to play the long game, plot wise. There's also the additional bonus of being able to insert into the game themes better handled by a mid-late teenager than a tween of 11 or 12.

Although I played through only the Intro Zone (as it were) of the story, I couldn't exactly tell what the time frame for the story was. Given that the visual cues I've seen so far it very much fits within the Steampunk-ish vibe that the original series had, it seems that the Wizarding World doesn't exactly change that much in aesthetic. Meeting M. Weasley at Hogwarts made me think that this was a continuation of the original story, set some years later, but the more I think about it (and the hair design of the students) I think it might be earlier, from anywhere between the late 19th Century to the early 20th Century. 

Geez, Card, you ought to be able to see the Arcane flows.

Okay, confession time: I've only read the first four books in the original Harry Potter series. The fifth book had come out when I originally read the first four, but I held off in case there was a cliffhanger at the end of the fifth book. Given that the sixth book was a year away from publication at the time, by the time the sixth book was released I just never got back into reading the series. Given that there apparently was a cliffhanger at the end of the sixth book, it's probably for the best that I stopped reading the series when I did. I don't take cliffhangers well.

Still, I was interested enough in the worldbuilding behind the series --whether it was created by the seat of her pants or not-- to see what Portkey did with the world. 

That's not a really good excuse to buy a game, especially one with a premium cost such as this one. I'll readily admit that. However, it's also a third person single player RPG in a development paradigm where more and more RPGs are either isometric or first person. Looking at all of the RPGs that I'd love to play that I simply can't --Cyberpunk 2077 and The Outer Worlds to name two-- it's nice to actually have a game that I can play. That it was massively on sale when I bought it (something like 50% or more off) doesn't hurt either.

So we'll see where this leads me. I have no idea when I'll finish it, given that I've not progressed in Baldur's Gate 3 since March 2024 or so, but at least it's an option on the table.

*Having raised three kids, I can tell you those 2-3 years can be quite huge for a person's physical and mental development. 

Yeah, I'm Back

No I'm not.

Husky is not amused, either.
What, you expected John Wick? From YouTube.

But I am close to the so-called halfway point overall on Operation Spread the Love.

Shaluna was first created in Classic Era so I could see if
someone could dance on top of the Stormwind fountain
in skimpy attire and get tips, but I chickened out before I put my
plan into action. Ironically enough, Shaluna's Corsair Overshirt 
has generated... commentary... from passersby. (But no tips.)

As you can see, 4 of the toons are at L30 and 4 are at L29. 

In Vanilla WoW, when you hit the low L30s the leveling speed slows down a lot, and there's a 3-4 level gap before you can really keep questing going. When TBC came around, Blizzard fixed that by adding more quests --and a neutral quest hub-- in Dustwallow Marsh, but this is Vanilla and so you have to get creative if you want to level in the low-30s until Arathi and Desolace become viable questing areas. 

Oh, I suppose you could just run instances such as Blackfathom Deeps or the first Scarlet Monastery wing on repeat, but I was swept up in that one evening when I was leveling the original Cardwyn in 2019, and doing Scarlet Monastery's Cathedral wing 3-4 times in a row wasn't the most fun I ever had in game.* Sure, I went up a level and a half over the course of a couple of hours, but I was on my toes and struggling to keep up the entire time. 

At times like this, you create your own fun. Such as what I posted about the other day when I crept through a zone filled with enemies about 20+ levels higher than me. 

If you're expecting me to go off on a screed about how Retail doesn't allow you to just go and do your own thing, you're sadly mistaken. Retail may not want you to go and simply do some unstructured play --and the majority of Retail player-focused content certainly emphasizes that fact-- but you can just screw around on Retail. You just have to put in more effort to disconnect from everything there.

Unstructured play is not what Blizzard or folks such 

as Mike Bell are selling, that's for sure.

One of the things I used to do during my last year of playing Retail in Mists was to sneak through the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor on the original Azshandra, creeping up into Eversong Forest or Durotan, just to look around. On a PvE server it wasn't that dangerous per se, but it still was a bit of a thrill just stealthing my way across multiple zones while lowbies did their thing, blissfully unaware I was there. 

I used to also return to Hellfire Peninsula in Outland, because it remained untouched by the changes wrought by Cataclysm, and it had more of a Vanilla-esque feel than Northrend did. I wasn't the only person to feel that pull, as we had periodic incursions of max level Horde into Honor Hold, and I was more than happy to help defend the keep from them. 

***

Under the header of "unstructured play", I decided last week to start pushing my toons to run through the Feralas wilderness to get to Feathermoon Stronghold out on the western islands. Running south from Desolace isn't difficult in theory, but trying to make that run when you're in your L20s can be similar to Azshandra's little adventure to Dire Maul. 

But you do get to say hello to Rexxar.
Yes, I still have a certain fondness for him.

While I'm happy to report there were no untimely deaths on the three toons who made the run --thankfully Frost Nova actually worked on the skull level toon that was chasing Cardwyn-- there were a collection of bodies along the road, indicating that something had been killing players out there.

But going forward I intend to lean more into unstructured play in Vanilla WoW so I can keep all 8 toons going. The decentralized nature of Vanilla WoW is ideal for that sort of thing.

*Even if --as I found out later-- I was in a guild group from the best guild on the Myzrael-US server. I was merely happy to just keep up, given that they were in Discord and obviously coordinating while I wasn't. I just had to watch for cues based on what they were doing so I didn't do anything too stupid. 

Sometimes You Just Want to do Something Stupid

Really.

As in, let's go visit a high level area as a low level toon and try to sneak into an endgame instance zone.

Such as sneaking through the Feralas wilderness and arriving at the entrance to Dire Maul.

Dare I go in?

It doesn't always go so well...

Just one of many deaths. But I persisted.

The thing is, the more times I died at the hands of max level ogres, the more it pushed me to get into the entrance area...

"What, you again?"

And I persisted...

There were a lot of people running the various wings
of Dire Maul. Enough so that I saw a lot of dead people
running back to the instances.

And I finally made it through.

Really, the stealth was just for show. If I got even
vaguely close to an Ogre they were going to attack me.

I think I'd need another 10-15 levels before I could stealth into the area without aggroing any of the baddies, but that's just a guess on my part. Still, it was a fun little excursion just to see how it would work out.

Meme Monday: Gardening Memes

Okay, it technically isn't safe to plant outside yet where I live --that date is May 15 in Cincinnati*-- but everything has greened up and that's when your mind turns to gardening. Even if you play RPGs/MMOs too...

Pretty sure this is the house up the street.
From Facebook's IFLRoleplaying and Cheezburger.

Because this is what a DM does when they
garden. From Memedroid.

This is the fun part about playing a Rogue in WoW Classic:
you can make your own poisons. From Reddit.

Reddit can be crazy at times.
"At times?"
"Oh, shut up."
From Reddit.

With gardens, there are Garden Gnomes.
And with Garden Gnomes, there are passive-aggressive
ways of waging what has become known as "The Gnome Wars".
From Reddit.

*I used to think that date was a bit overblown, but several years ago we got a hard frost on May 5, and all of my neighbors lost a lot of their plants, so...

Being Present in the Moment

One of the things I've had to adjust over these past several months is to embrace the slow and steady pace of things. Not in World of Warcraft, per se, but in life as well.

For a guy who has been tinkering around with electronics since the late 80s*, I've had a reckoning while studying for my Technician's license. While I realize that for some people memorizing the questions in the potential question pool for the test is the way to go, that's not me. I prefer to learn how to do something so I can then figure it out every time. Sure, it'll slow me down on my test completion, but it's not like this is a timed test in the same vein as the SAT or GRE. 

But still... Holy crap have I forgotten a ton of stuff over the years.

Yeah, that. Wait, what was I talking about?
from Cheezburger.

This has been an exercise in humiliation. I can't tell you the number of times when a concept was presented in the study guide and my initial reaction was "Oh yeah, I remember this! It's... uh... It's..."

What's sad is that I've built a power supply and
antenna tuner before, so you'd think I'd remember this.
From The ARRL Ham Radio License
Manual (5th Edition), page 3-16.

I then have two directions I could take: tell myself that I know this and I'll be fine on the test, or admit that I don't really know it and that I have to study and review and practice more. 

While I really really want to take the former route -my ego wants me to go that way too- I've been forced into the realization that the latter is the better choice in the long run. Yeah, my ego drives me just like it drives everybody else, but even more than my ego is my fear of looking like an idiot in front of everybody else.**

Speaking of idiots, having this photo of Richard Garriott in the
book did not age well. And no, I'm not putting this here to try
to get a response from Wilhelm Arcturus, either. From
The ARRL Ham Radio License Manual (5th Edition), Page 1-7.

So I've been proceeding a lot slower than I hoped. 

***

If you play video games or are a fan of logic puzzles, you know that typically the best solution is to perform actions in a specific order. This kind of goes without saying for anything in life, from putting together IKEA furniture to cleaning out the garage to engaging in relationships.***

This includes figuring out my outside projects for this coming year.

The most critical part, replace the deck boards, was completed last year. Now I have to stain the deck once the overnight temperatures reach over 50 F (10 C) as according to the stain instructions. There's also the consideration that if I'm not careful, the stain will have a ton of pollen embedded in it as well. 

But there's the next phases to consider, and they involve replacing the stairs and the railings. And the skirting around the deck.

That's just the deck. I also want to paint the exterior of the porch, which involves me getting up on a ladder to paint the top portions of the porch. And that involves me clearing out enough of the garage so I can get to the ladder...

You get the idea. 

I have to figure out the order to attack all of these projects in the same way my Questing Buddy attacks her goals in WoW Classic, but I have to temper this with the knowledge that I don't have all the time in the world to do this, either. Some of these will get bumped to next year (or the year after), and I have to be willing to accept that.

(Yeah, right.)

***

Speaking of next year...

I reviewed the vacation days I've taken for this year so far, and all but two of them involved doctor's visits. And those two vacation days involved my travel for work, so they technically don't count.****

Admittedly, 3 of those doctors' visits involved me getting vaccines, so they're a once every several years event, but even then I'm starting to feel a bit run down by the constant drip of doctor visits, along with the knowledge that this is going to be my life going forward. 

All of these visits are starting to impact other things as well. For example, I'd like to take some time off to just rest and recharge, but the more time I take off for a doctor's visit means there's less time for other things. (See my projects above.)

The irony that I kind of need some time off to recharge but that my time off is already being taken up by health issues hasn't been lost on me. I've also had a nagging concern that the longer my life has gone on I've lost the ability to relax. Consider it an unfortunate byproduct of being on-call 24x7 for close to 30 years, but even when I have a couple of days off it takes an effort to not check work email. Or join a daily review session. Or... Well, you get the idea. 

I began to realize I might have a problem with relaxing when I sat down in a chair on the newly replaced deck surface and no more than five minutes later I got the urge to go work on another project.

This is not good, I thought, and got up and went back inside after trying to push those feelings away.

So yeah, I need to relearn how to relax. Be present in the moment. Maybe that's why I've been enjoying fishing this much lately.

Good luck with that one.
From Tumblr and Star Wars.

*Not to mention my bachelor's degree.

**I'm not talking about 'an idiot versus a know-it-all', but 'an idiot versus being actually competent'. If there's one thing I have learned over the years, being a know-it-all serves as a lightning rod for everybody who hates/bullies smart people, so blending into the background by not being a know-it-all is typically the smarter move.

***Figuring out what that order is in a relationship frequently is the hard part. Everybody is different and responds to things differently, although some general concepts are pretty universal. Otherwise, Psychology would be a crap shoot.

****And I ended up working while traveling anyway, because of course that's what happened.

Meme Monday: Screwing Up Memes

In honor of the fact that I completely forgot to put a title on last week's Meme Monday, I figured I ought to make that a highlight of this week's entry.

It's not a screw-up per se, but if you see
my damage meters... Yeah.
From Cheezburger.

I've been both the DM and a player in this situation.
Makes you want to bang your head on the wall.
From Thunder Dungeon.

That happened in the second MERP campaign I ran.
Had an NPC in Bree to provide the players with 
a hook to investigate the Barrow Downs, and they
got that NPC killed. From Pinterest.

Did you have to ask? This is SO me. My very first
character in D&D missed their attack rolls and died.
Okay, so my Level 1 Cleric died to a
RED DRAGON, but... Yeah. From Cheezburger.

"It's one of the classic blunders, such as never get involved
in a land war in Asia!" --Vizzini, probably
From The Gamer Image.

Changes Afoot

In case you ever wondered how long it would take for games from other Microsoft game studios to appear on Battle.net, here you go:

The Doom prequel appeared first, and given that it's a Bethesda game I guess it's a no-brainer. But this one just appeared a day or three ago, which did cause me to sit up and take notice:

Given that I watch Tim Cain's YouTube videos, I was surprised to see The Outer Worlds 2 show up on the Battle.net front page.

That immediately got me to hop over to Steam just to check to see if both games were able to be purchased over there --they were-- and then I began wondering just where this will end. You don't see any non-Call of Duty Activision games on Battle.net, but if these two end up on BNet, does that mean more will follow? And what about the backlog of titles from these and other Microsoft studios? Will we see Minecraft show up soon? Or will we actually see a purchasable skin for Minecraft of various Blizzard properties?

Maybe there are some things that man was not meant to know...

By The Way... Here's the CASH SHOP!!

Do you think I'm being snarky? Well, here's what the login screen looks like after Tuesday's patch cycle in WoW:

Yeah, Hoots again. No biggie.
This is what the stable of toons looks like
on April 8th, 2025.

See that bar on the top? If you select the Mode button, you get this:

Five separate "Classic WoW" modes.

The Shop (thankfully) doesn't have anything for the non-progression WoW Classic modes:

Soon.... Right?

Well, given that the Cash Shop button used to be inconspicuously in the bottom left of the loading screen, such as what you can still find in Cataclysm Classic...

Ta da!

That tells me they're aiming to utilize the Cash Shop in WoW Classic Era and its clones.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Operation Spread the Love update...

***

As you can see, I did not reach the so-called midway point in leveling any of my toons this past couple of weeks. Part of that is due to the slowdown in leveling itself, but another part of it was due to my interest in fishing.

I guess I should be happy that Card took advantage
of that free port to Moonglade during the Lunar Festival.

Since my toons were all over L25, they could spend a gold --not a cheap endeavor in a Vanilla Classic environment like the Anniversary servers are-- and get a book you can read to gain access to the next level of a lot of secondary professions: Cooking, Fishing, First Aid, etc. So Card picked up the Fishing and Cooking upgrades and then set about leveling both.

If you've never played Old World style of WoW, the process of leveling Fishing and Cooking is pretty much symbiotic: you fish to raise your Fishing skill, but also for the raw fish you can then cook to raise your Cooking skill. Once I got my Fishing skill high enough, it was late enough at night for me to go ahead and see if I could fish in Moonglade for that classic catch, the Nightfin Snapper. 

Nightfin can only be caught at night in certain places around Azeroth, but as long as you have access to Moonglade, it's at least safe to be fished for there. Most other places are in high level zones, the lowest being Feralas with the upper L40s / lower L50s mobs, so that's definitely not safe for a lowbie toon like my stable. Nightfin can also be cooked to create a food beneficial for casters, so they tend to be in high demand by the raiding community and min/maxers.

How high? Right now 5 raw Nightfin sell for about 2 gold 50 silver to 3 gold, which is an enormous sum to someone still leveling.

I discovered that as long as Card added a bobber to her fishing pole, she could fish for a stack of 20 Nightfin over the course of about 45 minutes. Therefore, she spent several evenings fishing up a stack or two so I could build up a bit of a war chest for when these toons need a huge influx of cash.

The funny thing is, I enjoyed the fishing a lot more that I thought I would. 

Usually, I fish because I need mats for a raid --well, not anymore-- or I'm waiting around before I go and do something else. This past week, however, has re-exposed me to the joys of in-game fishing once more. It also calms me down, because I don't have to spend time thinking about where to go next or what to do (or what a particular toon has already done); I can just relax and chill for a while. It may slow down my leveling, but given that Blizzard is now expecting TBC Classic to release in Q1 2026, I'm still in no hurry to get to L60.

Okay, that's not quite true, there are days when I want to get a toon to L60 so I can get into some of the L60 instances or run a Battleground. Then again, I see the stress that my Questing Buddy is under* to try to find more inventive ways to get gear, and I just shake my head.

I do fish a lot in Stardew Valley, though!
From IGN. Alas that I have no screencaps of my
variations on Red fishing.

On those days, fishing sounds like a good idea.

*I should clarify this. She puts herself willingly under that stress, because that's the sort of person she is. I think that's the difference that the 15-16 years of age between us makes: I no longer care to chase after that sort of hardcore play (if I ever did, honestly) because I realize that it will only fuel my Imposter Syndrome. And I really don't need any extra help from that angle.

EtA: Corrected some grammar and reinserted another half of a sentence that I mistakenly deleted.

Attack of the Anti-Pugger

Like it or not, the main driver of play in World of Warcraft is group activity. Whether you raid, run 5-person instances, or PvP in various forms, WoW revolves around the "multiplayer" in the MMO acronym. Easing the access for multiplayer activity has been a driver of the more controversial changes to WoW over the years, from the automated group finder to LFR (LFD's raid level equivalent). 

Given that Blizzard has stoked the FOMO furnace over the years, it's no surprise that raid and dungeon teams have spent a lot of time trying to find the "right" player to help them clear content. We're not talking about friends and family raid teams who raid in a more social manner, but raiders who have aspirations of Heroic and maybe even Mythic clears of content.

Oh, and then there's puggers, who don't belong to a regular raid team for various reasons, yet still want to experience group content. It goes without saying that pugging is a bit of a hit-or-miss activity in MMOs in general without even taking into consideration any "requirements" placed on the prospective raid leads. 

The WoW community has responded to those needs --and the FOMO driver-- by creating addons and websites to "assist" people in finding the best players for their needs. To say that these have been controversial has been a bit of an understatement.

Anybody remember the initial release of GearScore back in Wrath?

There it is, in all its glory.
I had this from another post; I can't
remember which one now.

The GearScore addon caused a huge row in the WoW community by attempting to reduce a player's raid usefulness to a single number --the GearScore itself-- which led to entries such as this in Trade Chat:

"Need 2 DPS for ICC 25 GS 5000+ req"

The irony about gatekeepers using GearScore as a barrier to entry is that all it provided was a compilation of the iLevels of your gear, not whether you were any good in a raid. I mean, by the end of Wrath of the Lich King my Ret Paladin, Quintalan, had a GearScore of something like ~5200 and he never set a single foot in a raid instance. All that gear he got by grinding badges by running random Heroic Instances. 

Could I get into some of these raids with these GS requirements? Certainly. 

Did it mean I was a good raider? Certainly not.

***

Why dredge up GearScore again? Didn't we have a repeat of GS in Wrath Classic? Oh yes, Wrath Classic, where people swore right and left that they weren't going to use it... Until it came out and people used it like crazy once more. 

The thing is, GearScore is just one incremental step along the way to the current status of pugging in WoW. Parse Culture has always been around to an extent, but ever since GearScore and the rise of FOMO, Parse Culture has been pushing the envelope of what it means to be a "good player". Notice I didn't say good raider, but good player. If you raid or run instances and you pug, you have to deal with people who think all of your qualities as a WoW player can be reduced to a single number, a color, or a summary chart.

And now here comes Archon.

From the Archon website, as of April 7. 2025.

Archon is brought to you by the same team that created the Warcraftlogs app and website, and the TL;DR is that it takes all of the searching through Warcraftlogs and places it into a tooltip addon, so you can perform real time analysis of who to take as a pug in your raid. 

GearScore on steroids, basically.

***

This addon has been the subject of quite a bit of discussion on MMO Champion and has seen its share of YouTube videos:

Of course, Archon has been around in Early Access for months now, but a wider release apparently happened last week (ish). The current version everybody can use, but if you subscribe (as in pay real money) you can get more info than what the free users get.

It's not as if gatekeeping is new, but this is making gatekeeping easier than ever before.  Just rolling up and hovering over players allows you to see at a glance what it would have taken people a lot longer to review manually on Warcraftlogs.

Even then, it still doesn't tell you everything. Archon can't tell you if you do the mechanics right in a raid, and if you perform a critical job --which typically also means having a lower parse-- you're punished for it. Look at Vanilla Naxx as an example: I was on Wall Duty on Maexxna and would be tasked with calling out and freezing the scarabs on Anub'Rekhan, both of which are critical tasks for success on those bosses. Both of them also required me to be basically giving up on my parses for the good of the raid. With Archon, however, I'd be punished for such behavior, with a lesson to be learned is that I need to play less as a teammate and more of an asshole. And who wants to play with someone like that?

Needless to say, there have been some interesting takes on this...

From the comments from Bellular's video above.

From the MMO Champion thread linked to above.

I tried to avoid some of the more toxic responses in those threads, especially when you see people pooh-poohing the whole thing as "it's easy to to get XXX parses", basically trolling everybody. And it kind of spiraled out of control in spots from there.

Still, if the best advice to give people is "join a guild and raid with them", well, I have some experience there.

No, this was not me.
From the comments from Bellular's video above.

My own experience with guilds over the past 15+ years of playing MMOs hasn't been that inspiring. The guilds I've been in the longest over this time have been --by quite a wide margin-- the guild the kids and I have in LOTRO (Heroes of the Old Forest on the Gladden server) and Rades' old blogger guild Puggers Anonymous on Moonrunner-US.* The Retail guilds from back in the day either imploded with the the force of a thousand suns or faded away to nothing. The guilds I've been a part of in Classic WoW either faded away or swung heavily toward hardcore to the point where it was unbearable to remain. 

'We want to raid with friends', indeed.

After years of those shenanigans, I fail to see why I'd want to sign up for it all over again just to raid or run dungeons. And let's be honest for a minute: if my experience is pretty typical, I'd say that joining any guild will have issues because of the cliques that have developed over the time the guild has been around. Unless guild leadership makes an actual effort to include new people in group activities, any new guildie will find themselves it a double bind, where they can't get into guild runs and they can't get into pugs.

And really, if the solution is continuously guild hop until you find one that you like, at what point to you decide to go and do something else?

That aside, I think this is just more of the same as far as WoW goes. For the people who seek out drama, they'll find it in spades with this addon. For the people who are part of a guild of any real cohesion, then this is a non-issue for them. For people who stick to LFR and normal/heroic mode instances (and Delves), this won't affect them at all. It's only the people who want to try something different, to push themselves beyond the basics, that will find issues exacerbated by this addon. If Blizzard wants to turn the casual crowd into something more, then this addon --and the community culture-- will torpedo that. 

But maybe Blizzard doesn't want to bother trying any more, because that's not what they measure success at in Microsoft. There, it's all about whether you met your profit numbers, and if another mount or two in the cash shop will get them there, that's what we should expect.

*I had to go login to Retail to make sure I had the server right.

EtA: Corrected grammar and some wording.