The Effect of Retail Early Access on the... Activity... of Moon Guard (and Other Hot Takes)

I'd mentioned to Kurn's most recent post (yes, she's back!) about how I'm just an observer in Retail, and even then mostly on Moon Guard-US. I can now safely state that upon release of Early Access for the newest Retail expansion, the RP activity in The Lion's Pride Inn is at its lowest in quite a while. 

Other people noticed too...

Compare with just six days ago...

That was my cue to skidoo...

So yes, apparently the default state of Retail WoW is that most people bought Early Access. Don't be surprised if Blizzard eliminates the Basic purchase option and goes hard on the Maximum cost option, especially since AI Executive Asha Sharma is now in charge of XBox and will likely push for more AI usage in game creation and maximum profits. I'd simply ignore her first pronouncement that "As monetization and AI evolve and influence this future, we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop. Games are and always will be art, crafted by humans, and created with the most innovative technology provided by us."

My hot take: I don't buy her statement one effing bit. That's just said to placate the gamer base, who would likely leave en masse if she said "we're going hard on AI" in her first big statement, and it would be a dark spot on her resume if "Destroyer of XBox Games Division" was her legacy. 

My second hot take: Major Microsoft investors neither play video games nor give a shit about video games, only that "line go up", so they won't care if XBox goes away as long as that sweet sweet AI money keeps rolling in.

So... my third hot take is that Microsoft will sell off their XBox Games Division to a private equity firm. Who that is remains to be seen, but horrible options include an equity firm run by Bobby Kotick, The Embracer Group, or the Saudi Investment firm. Or, god forbid, Elon Musk, who already is on record wanting to create games exclusively using AI. Which begs the question: if AI makes the games and bots play them, does that means video games are no longer for humans?

A Compliment is Sometimes the Best Thing

There are days when you just feel too ordinary for an MMO...

Whether you're just wandering the streets...

Or maybe just speaking to an auctioneer...

Or maybe you're just not exotic enough in all the right wrong ways...

But sometimes, you get a compliment that makes your day.

Yes, that 'epic sham' is me. 

And yes, I'd been out of mana on that 4+ minute fight since about 40-45 seconds in. This was a fight nobody wanted, because we kept getting runners that kept pulling other mobs, and things got out of hand really fast. I'm still not sure how we made it through that one.

Considering I was merely doing my job and trying not to get killed in that dungeon*, it's nice to see that someone thought I did pretty good.

And before anybody asks, I'm doing fine leveling Briganaa. I'm not pushing myself at all: I'm just relaxing and leveling at my own pace, which has been faster than I expected, but I'm not letting that get to me.

*This was Razorfen Kraul, if you're interested. There are plenty of spots in that dungeon where things can get so spicy that you'd think there were ghost peppers in that salsa.

Meme Monday: Catch-Up Memes

I suppose when I say "Catch-Up", I could go in a ton of different directions. I could be talking about catching up with friends...

From makeameme.org.

Or maybe I should have said "NOT catching up with friends..."

I'm not a fan of the Duck Dynasty show (or the
people), but this meme is pretty much me.
From Pinterest.

I could also have meant catching up to what's going on in an MMO if you've been away for a while...

That's me in pretty much every MMO
these days... From Reddit.

Or when NPCs in game tell you something that
supposedly happened three expacs ago that you weren't
around for and had no idea you'd done.
From Facebook's FFXIV: A Meme Reborn group.

Or worse, things that make your brain freeze.
From swtor-life.

Or maybe, I'm talking about making sure I'm maintaining my health properly and it's been not a very kind winter...

No Cheetos here, honest! But I will admit I haven't
been eating salad as much this past winter as 
I ought to have... From Pleated Jeans.

Time to Visit Another Old Friend

Last afternoon, I was noodling about on Quintalan when I noticed that Ancient, of the blog Tome of the Ancient, was on. Since she'd invited me to come and see her house, I figured I'd whisper her and take her up on the offer. I figured that my last Retail toon I'd leveled to (what was then) the level cap would be appropriate to visit with her. So, I pulled Azshandra out of storage and got a hold of Ancient.

Hey, Catwynn can be a sneaky druid...

And away I went...

Knowing Ancient's Druid, Catwynn, there were two things that stand out the most about her: she likes peaceful, wide open spaces, and she likes to fish.

She did not disappoint.

Here's a few screencaps of my time at Catwynn's place...

She does like to look at the stars, like
all Night Elves...

And she has a relaxing hot tub to hang out in...

For flowers and fishing... Check.

The house is a nice little rustic bungalow.

But Catwynn's home is a lot like the TARDIS:
bigger on the inside!

And like the TARDIS, it certainly seems to
be able to warp space and time. See above.

And even a drafting station! This was something
I didn't know about Ancient, that she used to do
drafting work.

All in all, if I closed my eyes and imagined Catwynn's
(and Anicent's) house, this is what I'd picture it as.

Thanks much! But there's just one more thing...

WoW! That was one hard to do achievement, and
really worthy of the title!

Okay, two things... A doggo!

I took waaay too many screenshots to fit into this post, but believe me it was all forth it. Thanks to Catwynn for showing me her home, and it was great to see it!

Some Things Never Change

Last night I figured that I'd take Briganaa into The Stockades, since she was about at the right level and I knew that there were plenty of toons around to run the instance. 

Don't quote me on this, but Blizzard had apparently made some changes to how damage and experience are calculated if someone who has a much higher level is grouped with you, specifically designed to stop the Classic WoW practice of boosting by a max level toon basically pulling and killing off low level dungeon baddies while everybody else stays at the entrance.*

So theoretically there ought to be plenty of unboosted players wanting to get into a Stockade run, and it only took me about 5-7 minutes before I got a whisper.

Typically it's a "Want to run Stocks?" or something to that effect, but this one was:

"Spec"

I blinked. I mean, Deadmines is commonly the second dungeon that an Alliance player would run; would what spec my Shaman is really matter?

Oh why the hell not. "Enh," I replied, meaning I was the melee Shaman subclass, Enhancement.

I immediately got an invite to group.

"If this guy thinks that I can put down a Windfury Totem at L26, he's in for a surprise," I grumbled.**

At least this tank didn't ask me about it, so I threw him a bone and instead of providing a totem giving a bonus to armor, I put down a Strength of Earth Totem (which gives a bonus to Strength and consequently damage) and just rolled with it. 

Okay, I'll admit the dungeon run was fast, and the only death was at the end where the healer had been stunned and couldn't heal the Mage to save her***, but I was constantly drinking trying to get mana back while the tank kept running ahead. It's one thing if you're a Mage and you have to stay back anyway to cast spells from distance, but it's bad form if you're melee DPS is constantly running up about 5-10 seconds after you've pulled. Sure, I didn't have to worry about pulling threat, but come on, man. It's not a big deal to finish a few seconds slower.

As soon as humanly possible I dropped group (after thanking people, because that's how I roll). I honestly don't think the tank really learned anything about patience, but attempting to min/max a low level dungeon like this is... well, really quite ridiculous. When I grumped about this to my friends who were online tonight, my Questing Buddy agreed said that no, it didn't make sense in such a low level instance. 

*I understand the desire to stop boosting of bots and whatnot, but it isn't really a good look if you ban boosting but turn around and say "you can legally boost to L58 as much as you want for $60 a boost".

**A Shaman doesn't get access to the Windfury Totem until L32. Windfury is a buff prized by melee and tanks because of the often extreme bonuses to melee attacks it can generate.

***For the record, I rezzed the Mage while the healer ran out of the instance. Bad form in my book.

One Step at a Time

If you'll recall, my time in the 2021 version of TBC Classic did not end well. I got a "promotion" to one of the raid leads, which necessitated some changes in how I approached playing WoW Classic. When you throw in that I switched from a Mage to a Shaman as my raiding toon --which in turn forced me to level extremely quickly*-- yeah, there was already a lot of stress from the beginning, and it got worse as people left the raid team because "we weren't raiding enough"**.

Oh, and I had my little hospital adventure in the middle of this, which forced me to reevaluate how I approached all aspects of my life.

And my job changed, which meant I could no longer be functionally brain dead the first hour or two in the mornings (having done the same job for 20 years has its advantages), so that was the final push that led me to giving up progression raiding.

I still lingered on, raid leading a Friday Night Karazhan run, which was stressful mainly because it was difficult getting 10 people together on a regular basis for that raid on a Friday night. Once the raids began, it typically was a chill time and a blast, but actually getting to that point was the source of far too much stress.

There was also a few weeks where we tried Saturday afternoon Zul'Aman runs, and to be completely honest that bombed big time. We never had the right composition of classes to make the runs a success, people who signed up didn't make the raids, and some people would show up in quest greens expecting Zul'Aman to be just like Karazhan in terms of difficulty. Hell, even I was undergeared for those Zul'Aman runs because I mainly had Tier 4 level gear on my Shaman, which may have been fine for Karazhan but most definitely NOT fine for Zul'Aman. 

So yeah, I was wondering why I was back here in 2026 on the Anniversary Servers' TBC Classic implementation. Am I just a masochist or something?

You and me both, Brig...

I will freely admit that part of the reason why I'm here --a big part-- is that I like my friends' group. Yes, we all have our quirks which means there are parts of them I might not agree with, but all-in-all we get along well together. Once they finally understood that I wasn't going to go rush out to Outland and get involved in the leveling experience just yet, things settled down a bit. 

***

Last night I'd taken this new Anniversary version of Briganaa to The Deadmines, and my Questing Buddy was surprised there were even people running Deadmines in the first place. She told me she figured everybody was in Outland.

"Oh no," I replied, "I had no trouble getting into a run at all. I've even had no trouble getting into a Ragefire Chasm or DM run on the Horde side."

As I've said numerous times, "it's not a dungeon
run until the Mage bites it." As our healer didn't have
the ability to Rez, Neve had to run back to the dungeon.
Thankfully the graveyard she spawned at was the closest
to the instance, and not close to the closest Horde settlement.

I guess the legendary end-game bias that WoW has, coupled with the ability in the Anniversary servers to use paid boosts on Blood Elf or Draenei toons, meant that people exclusively in Outland think that everybody is there. The thing is, there were 12 active layers in Westfall alone, so you just need to know where to look to find the players leveling out in the Old World. 

***

Despite everybody's first impressions, I'm not anti-social when playing MMOs. I do tend to immediately reject random people if they simply throw me a grouping-up invitation without asking first, because I strongly believe in following social conventions rather than blithely assuming everybody is trying to rush through leveling. However, if I'm out leveling alone, I tend to prefer playing alone unless I need to group up. 

Solo play has allowed me to survive my expected PTSD leveling Briganaa to a surprising degree. When I ran RFC on my Orc Shaman when the Anniversary servers first dropped, it was not a pleasant experience at all. It felt like I was back in Serpentshrine Cavern, struggling to maximize my damage output despite juggling many hats and raid drama and everything else. When I got out of that last RFC run, I had the shakes and I decided to shelve that Shaman. 

This time around? It was a bit chaotic as I needed to get back into the groove of dealing with totems, but I was happy just being a regular player. With all the sweaty players already in Outland, those of us left behind in the Old World tend to not be min/maxers, so nobody cares if you're not doing things exactly perfect. 

And to those who might read this and say that "your friends don't care about how you play and you can go into Outland and not have those issues", I have a one word answer: bullshit.

You see, what may be said and what is done are two entirely different things. If I held a mirror up to my friends and their style of play, most of them are min-maxers and all of them play in a sweaty manner. They know what gear they need, they go after said gear, and they're pretty straightforward in what they want to do and where to go. And yes, they may say they they want to play with me, but if I'm not going to min-max that will be a source of friction when we play together.

They also play and quest faster than me, because they all use the Questie addon (something I refuse to utilize along with most other addons), and I tend to take my time and read the quest text as well as take my time to restock and do other things in between questing hubs.**** So, when I'm grouped up, my lack of Questie works to my advantage and I simply stop working on my own quests so I can keep up with them, then I'll go back later when I'm solo questing and finish them at my leisure. 

***

Another thing that has saved me (so far) is that I'm not exclusively leveling Briganaa, either. I've been working on trying to get some of the professions on my already L60 toons to the max for the Old World (300). Of course, that does mean fighting gold farmers for things such as herbs and mining nodes, but outside of the first couple of days when the Dark Portal opened it hasn't been that bad.

I've also been re-engaging with my first max level toon, Quintalan, in his Anniversary Server edition:

Yes, he's a bit of a cad. And he knows he's got
the looks (and the locks) to match.

Amazingly enough, he hasn't died yet. I figured he'd be dead already, but he's at L15 and still hanging in there. 

IIRC, the first time I did this quest back in 2009
I died on it. So... that he survived is a testament to
how much I've learned in the 17 years I've been
playing MMOs.

I'm definitely taking my time with Quintalan, because I want to see how far I can go before I kick the bucket. That might mean delaying the last quest in The Ghostlands for a while, as Dhar'khan is a bit of a tough guy to kill at-level, even in a 5 person group.

But I've got time. I've got 8.5 months before whatever happens next will happen. I know that PTSD is still out there, lurking about, but as long as I stay true to my goal of taking my time and not rushing, I think I'll be okay this time around.

*At the rate of 3 levels/day just to get to L60 and then head out to Outland. When you couple that with almost no support ("New phone, who dis?") from the guild once the Dark Portal opened, it was a stressful and grating experience. It was then that those of us who leveled Shamans (or BE Paladins) back then realized what their guilds really thought of them.

**Despite our official 1 day/week raiding schedule being completely present from the beginning, from the start we had members of the raid team agitating for us to switch to 2 days/week. It was as if they felt that once we got started we'd switch to 2 days/week just to keep up with everybody else. The Raid Leadership held fast to that 1 day/week schedule, and we lost a lot of our best raiders who jumped to more sweaty raid teams. I'd say "good riddance", but we had an increasingly hard time finding good players as the expansion went on as people began fleeing the server for more populated servers, and a lot of those that were left congregated in the sweatiest of the hardcore raid teams.

***The astute among you will recognize that the chestpiece she's wearing in the first screencap is the quest reward from killing the end boss in that dungeon.

****Such as take screenshots. LOTS of screenshots. I really ought to figure out a way to copy them regularly to a location that's backed up with the rest of my data onto a separate hard drive. No, I don't trust OneDrive at all, since it's not a true backup solution, but rather a "cloud solution" where all your data is stored in a central location for all your devices. As long as you know that's what it is and that's what you want, fine, but I don't want that. I want backups of my local data, not a replacement of my local data with cloud storage that can go *POOF* if I decide to stop my subscription. 

EtA: Fixed a few pronouns.

Signs of the Apocalypse, Part Whatever

I guess I should be happy that Google can't really figure out if this blog exists, because AI bots are starting to become a real problem. 

(As if they're not one already.)

Yes, the number of indexed pages on this blog
actually went down over the course of the
past month. I guess Google kind of lost
the plot. Graph as of February 17, 2026.

Tech engineer and Raspberry Pi enthusiast Jeff Geerling experienced problems due to AI swamping his GitHub and AI agents causing disruption in the open source community:

And the popular LINUX distro, LINUX Mint,* had their forums swamped with AI bots back in January, nearly bringing down the entire system:

These are just two that I'm aware of; I'm almost certain there's more out there that I haven't observed yet.

This bubble can't pop quickly enough.

*I found out about LINUX Mint while researching a LINUX OS to install on my mom's old laptop that doesn't support Windows 11 yet is perfectly fine for use.

Meme Monday: Introvert Memes

I am an introvert.

I mean, if you couldn't have figured that out after years of blogging --and enjoying the fact that less than 50 people read the blog regularly-- that I'm an introvert, well, I'm sorry to disappoint you that I'm not an extrovert.

After 30 years of marriage, my wife has figured out that just leaving me to do my thing in the evening, with me occasionally popping into the TV room to see what she's watching, is the way for us to operate. Sure, I play board games with her and I have some occasional RPG games with a game group, but my hobbies tend to not be of the face-to-face variety. 

So, in honor of all of us introverts, here you go...

Yes, this is me at parties. While I can interact with
people well enough, my brain is freaking out the entire
time. From Thisismyrandomlife via The Minds Journal.

This is me to a 'T'. I had an awkward interaction
last week and I simply.cant.stop.thinking.about.it.
From Thunder Dungeon and X.

This is also me. The skills are similar
to that of stalkers, but the result is one
of active avoidance of certain people. It
is not a requirement that we don't get along,
as I also do that so I don't have to interact with
people I do know and like because... reasons.
From X.

Yep. I'm not fond of spontaneity. In my experience,
things get awkward far more often than not. 
The plot of Martin Scorsese's After Hours is
pretty much why I would never go and embrace
spontaneity. From The Minds Journal.

Yes. This. From Sarah Andersen.

Yeah, my introversion is very much on display
when my friends group wants to go and do things,
whether IRL or in WoW. When you dread that
"XXX Invites you to group" pop-up, you might be
an introvert. From The Minds Journal.

A Short Visit

Fellow blogger Kamalia, of Kamalia et Alia, posted yesterday about wanting friends to hang with her at her house for a weekly quest. Since she plays solo for the most part, she'd prefer it be Battle.net friends, but if that wasn't happening she'd be open to grouping.

Well... that intrigued me a bit, so I asked a few questions in the comments, and then one thing led to another, and...

Surprise!

Yes, I pulled out my first max-level toon from 2009, Quintalan, for the visit. It's been a while since he's been out and about, as he's wearing his Tier 9 armor and wielding Quel'delar, but I thought it appropriate that he be the first toon to visit.

Kam showed me around...

From the foyer...

To a parlor/reading area, complete with a floating
book. That book tickled my funny bone.

Cardwyn: "Hey, me too!!"

And it wouldn't be Kamalia's house without several
Tauren-themed rooms.

She even had a laundry area put together, which
given I was actually finishing up a load of
laundry at the time, this was perfect.

This is the kids' room, complete with bunk beds.
And Ancient, if you're reading this...

All in all, she's done an amazing job of decorating.
But if you've ever read of my admiration of her
innate sense of decor and fashion, it's not a surprise.

We went to the edge of her property, complete
with tallstriders. No hawkstriders around, alas.

I had to admit that I wasn't sure if Quintalan even
had flying in the Old World, but at least the 
Community Center is reachable by ground mounts.
From there I could take a portal to Orgrimmar.

I took a lot more screencaps than I posted here, but this should give you a feel for what it was like visiting Kamalia's house. I told her that if she just needed a body to hang around every so often, I was more than up to the task. After all, I'm not raiding or anything, and it'd feel good to reconnect with more of my blogger friends in-game.

Sir, He's Dead Already!

Well, my Hardcore experiment didn't last long.

My reincarnation of Neve didn't even get out of Eversong Woods. She got caught by multiple respawns in the Scorched Grove at Level 8. Briganaa at least lasted into the second Draenei zone, Bloodmyst Isle, but one of her Fire Totems inadvertently pulled multiple nearby mobs and she died at Level 14. 

This was, ironically enough, about 1/2 hour
before the fatal blow.

The Blood Elf Paladin Quintalan still survives, but he's Level 7 right now. His long term future is in doubt, because he has a tendency to overpull even when I specifically don't want to.

He's also into being a therapist, for some strange reason.

***

While there are still around 20 or so layers' worth of players out there, the Old World (except for the Capital Cities) has emptied out. You can find gold farmers around and there are people leveling, of course, but the swarm has moved on to Outland. 

I had to turn off the nameplates for NPCs to show
just how few people are at Light's Hope Chapel.
A week ago, this place was still packed.

My Questing Buddy has already reached L70 --I think she reached it two evenings ago-- and I'm sure she was just in the vanguard of that first wave of toons rushing to the end and now on their attunements. Most of the rest of our friends' group are around L62-63, although I do see a lot of people I've put on my Friends' List sitting in the mid-L60s at the moment. I guess that's overall not much of a surprise, as the raiding content opens on February 19th, less than a week from now. I guess we'll see how that goes and whether the player base continues to engage with the game, especially since the Tier 4 raids are launching in their post-nerf state. I can easily see this backfiring on Blizzard, because if the raids are too easy some people will get bored and lose interest, but more people overall might get a chance to raid from the get-go, so.... I guess we'll see.

I presume that the results of this experiment will influence the difficulty of subsequent raid tiers.

***

For me, what will be most interesting is how guilds handle the reduction from 40 people per raid to 25 (not counting the bench). If history is any guide, people are likely forming into cliques already, and that could prove disastrous to guilds and raid teams going forward. Hell, it could prove disastrous to even friends' groups. I guess we'll see how this all pans out.