Some More Exploration

I suspect that I'm the sort of player that Blizzard likes to pretend doesn't exist. Or, if we do exist, my sort of player is in such few numbers that they don't pop up on their activity data in a meaningful way.

I mean, I prefer visiting this place in Retail:

I think there might have been a toon or two around here,
but I didn't poke my nose into the bank area so wasn't certain.

Or this place:

Running around on March 8, 2026, I was literally
the only player here.

Or this place:

Nobody here either.

Here's the screenshot that shows I was in the
Cataclysm version of Theramore, not the Mists
or later version. Those tanks only appeared in Cata,
and if you got through Mists and the Event, there's
just rubble here. (I think; I never did it.)

There were some new toons I saw at the place shown below, however...

Which is to be expected given that Blood Elves
got an, uh, extreme makeover for this expac. But
this version of Falcon Watch is one of my favorite
spots in Eversong, right next to Fairbreeze Village.

If you're like me, you can still visit the old BE areas all you want without ever having to think about anything post-2007:

I had to manually accept the "catch up" Dragonflight quest so I could hide it from my screen --you simply can't hide it any other way-- and I finally figured out how to turn off the "You HAVE to select a combat specialization" persistent pop-up (HINT: It's buried in the tutorial settings). Now I can sightsee without the constant prodding to go and progress, level up, or just do something other than what I'm currently doing. 

If there's a reason why I'm reluctant to go to Outland in the Anniversary Edition of TBC Classic, it's the constant prodding to "Do your dailies!" once you reach max level. Not by the game itself per se, but by everybody else in the game. And once Quel'Danas opens up in probably September or October, there will likely be people loudly banging a drum to do the Quel'Danas dailies (to unlock more content) wherever you go. It's as if in the carrot vs. stick argument on how to get people to do things, Blizzard prefers using the carrot while the player base uses the stick.

***

This expac-sized phasing in various locales, which is what it really is when you break it down, demonstrates that Blizzard could bring back the pre-Cataclysm Old World into Retail if they decided to make an effort at it. They wouldn't get the Classic crowd to return to Retail, because the elephant in the room is that the Classic crowd prefers the gameplay of pre-Cataclysm WoW, so the only people a pre-Cata restoration would service are those Retail players who want to go back to see the early days without losing all of the conveniences and gameplay of Retail WoW. And as my explorations demonstrate, there's almost nobody in Retail who's interested in the Old World anyway.

This does make me wonder just how much longer some of these old zones will remain active and visitable. All the processing power and storage involved in these areas that nobody visits do cost the Blizzard Division of Microsoft a certain amount of money, and if push came to shove I could see Blizzard deciding as a cost-cutting measure just going ahead and archiving these old zones to be spun up when they put on a special limited-time event. 

I can't keep these areas alive just by visiting, so I'm going to enjoy them while I can. 

***

Oh, and this is just a non-gaming related bonus.

Last week on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, the in-house band (Louis Cato and the Great Big Joy Machine) played with Hozier and Lake Street Dive in a rendition of A Little Help From My Friends...