We've Gone to Irrelevance Speed

I suppose that it's inevitable that I would have more thoughts about being in Outland for the third time.

Okay, it's not the third time ever, to be certain, but going there fresh as part of either a first time through WoW (back in 2009) or through WoW Classic when the TBC portion was current (2021 and now 2026).

It's definitely not my first rodeo in Outland, but it's my first time going there in a fresh context in almost 5 years. This is also the first time I'm heading to Outland --period-- without a further goal in mind. In 2009 it was to get to Northrend and to the current expansion to meet up with Souldat and his wife who got me into WoW in the first place, and in 2021 it was to get to max level and ready for the initial tier of raiding within a specific time limit. Here, in 2026, I don't have any further goal other than exploring Outland and just getting to L70. No raids, no Endgame, no Heroic Instances, nothing more than the Journey itself.

Late Sunday I got Briganaa 2.0 to Zangarmarsh, the second zone in Outland. There's one questline I refuse to do in Hellfire --the one that eventually leads me to killing Maghar Orcs-- so I was largely finished with Hellfire Peninsula. I arrived at the Cenarion outpost in the marsh, collected a bunch of quests, and ran up to the initial Alliance base in the zone and did the same*, then a strange sensation began to take hold of me, so Monday over lunch I dusted off Card and sent her over to Outland to see if that sensation went away.

Yes, getting the Robe of the Archmage sewn
was one of the goals I'd set before she crossed over.

The Burning Crusade questing feels like it's designed to push me into going faster, and I can't shake that.

It's all relative, of course, but it certainly feels less organic than Vanilla questing does. Some of this is explicit to the Anniversary servers, where the sparklies that indicate that something is the object for a quest is now present on the Anniversary servers**, which completely eliminates the need to look around with your eyeballs on the screen and remember what the quest text said. Considering that I'm practically the only person on the Anniversary servers to not use Questie*** I'm probably the only person to notice, but it's pretty obvious to me that Blizz said "here you go: you want it, you got it" and there it is. Quest markers all pop up on the mini-map just like they did in Wrath Classic, so I've suddenly found myself staring at the mini-map far more than actually paying attention to where I'm going, which is never a good situation to find yourself in when there's Fel Reavers wandering around. 

When you combine those quality of life changes with the questing hub changes, it's become far more explicit that Blizz is streamlining the leveling process further than in 2021. Wrath brought in the concept of the zone stories, complete with phasing, so that's not present in TBC, but it's only when you decide the journey is the destination do you begin to realize that the pace of the journey changed. 

***

It did feel that while Brig was leveling in the Old World she was almost effortlessly moving forward, but not so quickly as to outlevel her ability to pay for training, gear, and consumables. When the Joyous Journeys buff made an appearance in late TBC Classic in 2022, it was tuned to level you so quickly that you'd outstrip your ability to make gold to pay for those associated costs. I found that similar to the leveling process on the original WoW Classic Seasonal servers, Season of Mastery. When you can't afford even the basic spells for L10 because you leveled so damn fast, then yeah, you've got a problem. Apparently Blizz tuned the Anniversary servers better without creating an explicit buff, so that while the leveling was faster in the Old World, it wasn't so fast that you couldn't afford to level so quickly. 

But now, in Outland, everything seems tuned just enough to make it easier and quicker to go through the leveling process. Mobs do seem to respawn faster (except named mobs, as one of my friends noted the other day), they go down quicker, and the XP feels... chunkier, maybe? That last one I'm not sure of, but I do know that when you combine these changes with the TBC-specific tweaks to the concept of quest hubs****, boy do I get the urge to just keep going and not pay attention to things such as sleep, food, etc.

At first I wanted to describe the leveling in Outland Anniversary Edition as hollow or boring, but that's not it. It feels like the leveling is being pushed toward irrelevance by speeding it up. Given that TBC Anniversary will only be around for a year, I guess it's not that great of a surprise, but it certainly shows that speeding up the leveling process doesn't make for a better experience by itself. Leveling on these Anniversary servers is merely a means to an end, and you're in the wrong place if you want to enjoy leveling itself.

If there's a Wrath Anniversary Edition coming this Fall, then we can expect some further streamlining going forward. It wouldn't surprise me if the concept of Follower Dungeons gets ported back to the Anniversary edition, in a bizarre reversal of Retail being the testing ground before being added to the Old Game. However, that will only come into play if we have a repeat of the collapse of instance grouping as happened in 2021, and the No Changes crowd has sufficiently been cowed into submission.

***

*Blink blink*

I just thought of something. 

Could it be that the "big thing" that Holly Longdale teased in the Community Update video be a release and support of "official" private servers for Vanilla WoW?

It's most definitely NOT Classic Plus, but it would eliminate the private server problem in one fell stroke.

*Plus getting the flightpoint.

**It was in Wrath where that first began showing up.

***If there's somebody out there who doesn't, I've not seen it yet. Whenever I'm in a group, and I'm talking about every single time, if someone gets all the items for a quest the Party chat immediately is spammed with an announcement saying that they're done. Another reason to not want Questie is that it can snoop on you and share your progress with others in your group, providing they also have Questie installed. 

****Unlike Vanilla WoW, the quests are congregated more completely into centralized quest hubs. If you go into Ashenvale as Alliance in Vanilla, quests are scattered throughout the zone and you're constantly running back and forth across the entire length of the place. However, if you go there in TBC and Wrath, several of the quests for the eastern part of the zone are moved out of the Shrine of Aessina area and to Forest Song, which becomes a fully developed quest hub. Blizzard centralized things further in Outland, where the questing equivalent of "one stop shopping" allows a player to blow into a quest hub, grab everything, and head straight on out into the field.

Meme Monday: Car Memes

We've come to the realization (meaning I've come to the realization) that my old 1997 Honda Accord is probably headed for the end of its life. When the repairs are no longer just "routine maintenance" and more like "well, this nearly 30 year old part just wore out", it's time to start looking at replacements. I'd have considered keeping the car around longer were it not for potential repair bills in the next few years being more than what the car is worth.

You get the idea. From pleated-jeans.

So... I've come to the reluctant conclusion that it's time to start looking around again. 

In honor of that experience, I figured a few car memes were in order...

This is a warning to all potential car buyers.
From pleated-jeans again.

So there are pitfalls when looking at a used car... 
From of all sites The National Kidney Foundation.

But I do have to maintain a budget.
From Bored Panda.

I guess he likes the old movie Death Race 2000.
From Wrench.com.

I'm pretty sure I would have had an accident
from laughing too hard if I'd have seen
that on the road. From pleated-jeans.

Uh.... OUCH. From Instagram.

Space Goats Coast-to-Coast

Thankfully, I've not run into my griefer the past several days.

That doesn't mean I've not been in instances over that time --I have been in two-- but my little friend was not a participant.

However, Briganaa 2.0 has made it to L60*, and after working on getting a few skills up to snuff, this happened early on April 1st:

Some things never change.

Given that the date was April 1st --aka April Fools Day-- I avoided posting anything yesterday lest people think I was pulling their leg.

I've noodled around Hellfire Peninsula a bit...

It almost got me, but here's proof that it didn't.

Killed a few things...

Sorry I didn't get a more dynamic screencap, but
I was a bit busy actually killing him. That green thingie
is an moustache-twirling Villain saying "You killed
my minion! I'll get you next!"

And I have a few thoughts.

• Outland is easier in 2026 than in 2021.
  
  That's not just a generic impression left to the nerfing of the Heroic 5-person instances and the raids, but fighting out in the field. As I explained to my Questing Buddy, whereas she had PvP gear when she crossed over (her Tier 3 gear was all healing stuff so it wasn't useful for questing) I had pretty much the same gear when I crossed over in 2021: a mix of quest greens with a decent amount of dungeon gear from Zul'Farrak, Maraudon, Sunken Temple, and Blackrock Depths. And about half of those items have already been replaced by quest greens from Hellfire Peninsula, so I'm definitely on similar footing with what I had back then. I even have the same Class (Shaman) and Spec (Enhancement) that I had in 2021.
  
  And to me, it's pretty obvious that the mobs aren't as difficult as they were in 2021. 
  
  The Expedition Armory, the ghost area directly south of Honor Hold, was a place that bedeviled me back then. This time around, I have no issues single pulling an enemy at a time, and even holding my own with two of them at once. The road toward Shattrath City, which is crawling with Ravagers, were also no problem at all.
  
  Could this be simply due to experience? Perhaps, but I doubt it. It's been 5 years since I last was in Hellfire Peninsula, and I have forgotten a few things in the intervening time.** I have been playing as if I were in 2021, taking my time and being cautious, but I certainly feel like I can move faster if I chose to. I also suspect the XP rewards are higher than in 2021, because the leveling seems quicker as well. I'm almost to L61 and I'm not even halfway through the zone itself.
  
  
• There are people here, but not even close to what you'd expect in the early part of an expac.
  
  Seriously.
  
  
  
  
  
  The only place where I was constantly running into too many people were in the initial quests just outside of Honor Hold, where I found an L70 killing mobs for an L58-L60 toon --who said boosting was dead?-- and over on the path toward Hellfire Citadel. Aside from that there was plenty of space to spread out. I also noted plenty of queries for group quests in Gen Chat, but not so many that it was overwhelming.
  
  There was also ample evidence that during the day the crowd was not very large, as the layers were about 6 deep:
  
  
  
  
  But did balloon back to 10 deep at night:
  
  
  
  
  There were some people who were hanging around, showing off their flying mounts (no, I didn't get a screencap of them), and there was a steady flow of activity around the PvP locations in Hellfire Peninsula***, so when you add that activity and the L70s going to raid or run instances at Hellfire Citadel, it seems more active than it is. Most L70s are likely raid logging at this point, although once I reach Shattrath City I'll get a chance to test that theory.
  
  
• Finding some gathering nodes are easier than others.
  
  Brig 2.0 is a Skinner/Leatherworker --and, uh, I need to work on the Leatherworking side of things-- so she doesn't have any issues killing beasts and then skinning them as part of her questing activities. I've also seen plenty of herbs around, just waiting for people to pick them.
  
  But mining nodes? Good luck with that.
  
  Every time I've been close to a mining node, someone comes swooping down from above and farms it within a few minutes. That's kind of crazy, given that Hellfire Peninsula isn't exactly where you'd expect the Miners to be congregating at right now; they're probably at Blade's Edge Mountains or Shadowmoon Valley if I'd a guess.
  
  I'm also aware on an existential level that the bot farms are fighting back against the current state of anti-bot behavior with the WoW Classic team by mass reporting so-called "legitimate" farmers as bots, and letting the (presumably) Copilot-driven AI automatically ban them. At least one member of my Questing Buddy's guild has been banned (and then unbanned when he complained) by a bot farm for farming the same area the bot farm wanted for themselves.
  
  
• The more I read Gen Chat in Outland, the happier I am not joining the Rat Race.
  
  If there's one thing I've learned over my raiding experience from 2020-2024, it's that raid teams and raiding philosophies are always in flux. No matter your stated goals for a raid, they never remain static. There is always a trend toward either more hardcore raiding or being a "farm team" for another raid. If you're a good raider, you'll get contacted by someone from another raid to snap you up and join their raid team as that raid team loses people to other raids. 
  
  That's the lie that nobody talks about: you can play with friends, but how long will those friends play with you if they hear the siren song of faster progression or a better raid team? I've watched my raid team fall apart due to regular defections from the best players, who even though they knew the pace we were going to run at decided to push for changes almost immediately after joining the raid. I've also seen friends leave because they were also members of another raid team and that raid team demanded faster progression out of them. So, when push came to shove, friendship wasn't quite as important as that other raid team.
  
  Maybe after a decade of raiding with the same people (as in well-established raid teams in EQ/Retail WoW/etc.) you have had all of those issues shaken out, but I've yet to see that happen. 
  
  As much as I hear my Questing Buddy downplay how hardcore her raid team is, I can speak as someone looking in from the outside that they are very hardcore. While they may not have explicit raid materials requirements that other raid teams do, the expectation is implicit because they utilize Loot Council to distribute gear: If you're not pulling your weight, you won't get gear. It's quite amazing how that tends to focus the mind if you want to progress. 
  
  Are they a top guild on the server? No, absolutely not.
  
  Are they hardcore enough that the only places that people can go to are either sideways (skill-wise) or to a top guild? Yes. There's not very many levels between them and the top guilds, so if you want to leave their raid team to go to a "better" one, you're going to end up on one of the top guilds' raid teams. They also have an advantage in that they're one of the few raid teams that raid on Pacific Time as opposed to Eastern Time (or China Standard Time), so they will attract the top players for their time slot.
  
  Now, the $100,000 question: would I like to raid again?
  
  Yes, but only on my terms. 
  
  I know what the pressure of expectations are, and I'm sick of it.**** I don't play video games to get all the best gear, I play for the satisfaction of having done a good job my way. (Or, given the circumstances, a good story.) I'm not interested in speed runs or what the meta is, because both of those assume you can not only understand what needs to be done (yeah, I can do that) but have the physical skills to accomplish that (I'm in my upper 50s; I know my limitations). I was one of the oldest raiders on the Valhalla raid teams, and despite my Mage Class Lead being happy with my performance, I used to get harassed by people who wanted to "help" me play better because I was always a step or cast slower than the others.***** And my experiences in Wrath Classic with our little 10s social raid taught me that --no matter what-- I was always going to be a step slower than everybody else. Therefore, I'm not going to force myself past my limits just so I can raid and make my friends uncomfortable with my inability to keep up with them. 
  
  But would I like to put my ghosts to rest? Absolutely.

I've successfully navigated things this far, and once I crossed the Dark Portal and settled in, I began to relax. Another ghost vanquished.

This encounter was even closer, as I had to
transform into a Ghost Wolf and run away from
a fight, but the Reaper er, Reaver never got me.

And it needs to be said, I'm glad I haven't ended up on a Fel Reaver's specimen listing...

*I didn't get the "Ding!" screencap because I forgot.

**I don't use Questie or any other quest aids, so I'm utilizing only the game's default settings.

***There were pretty regular complaints in Gen Chat about "The Horde is not playing by the rules", to which I laughed. I've seen the same complaints on the Horde side in the past, so I think it's safe to say that both sides are violating The Shattrath Convention, as I tongue-in-cheek call it.

****I get that IRL at work, so why should I want that at home?

*****This continued into my progression raiding in 2021 TBC Classic. I was always middle of the pack in DPS, and always a cast or physical attack slower than the other Shamans on the raid team. The only one who was comparable to me quit pretty early on in the Phase 1 raids in 2021, because TBC Classic didn't turn out what she hoped it would be. And she was one of the few people in my age range (she was a few years older).

EtA: Corrected a couple of misspellings and some grammatical errors.

Meme Monday: Griefer Memes

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, I dedicate today's Meme Monday to the practice of griefing.

If you want to know why, just look at the last three posts I made.

The certainly are, Buzz.
From Imgflip.

I sometimes wonder if that's how they look.
From Reddit.

You do yeoman's work, sir. Just accept that
you did it for the greater good. From Reddit.

Yeah, imagine that.
From Imgflip via Reddit.

This is Getting Ridiculous

Last night I happened to be in Western Plaguelands, finishing up the Key Quest for Scholomance, when I got a whisper out of the blue.

"Hey, our Mage split, are you interested in joining a Scholo run?"

I didn't hesitate.

"Ironically enough, I just finished up the key quest for Scholo. Sure."

After I received the invite and joined, it occurred to me that they might want a Mage after all, especially given that zombie room at the end of the instance.* I offered to switch to Cardwyn, and the Lead (a Paladin) said he was fine with me as-is. So I took a quick peek at the classes we had while I ran over: Paladin, Warlock, Shaman, Hunter...

Hunter? Wait just a fucking minute. Is that...

I bit back a scream. 

"You have got to be kidding me!" I growled.**

Yes, it was that Hunter. Again.

Since I'd not been here at the beginning of the run, I couldn't demand that the Group Lead get rid of the guy, and since my immediate dropping would be a bad look in general, I decided I was merely going to keep an eye on that Hunter and call out any shenanigans. Besides, the rest of the group seemed decent enough.

The group had already cleared through to Rattlegore, so that made things pretty straightforward. We go kill the lich Ras Frostwhisper, head back to the last section where the final seven bosses are, and finish things up. That was when I discovered that for a few people in the group it was their first time: first time tanking in Scholo, first time healing (ever), and my first time in Scholo on this toon. The Warlock was there for the stage of the Warlock's mount quest (something I've never done), and thankfully for us she was L61. That meant we had someone who could bring decently big damage numbers to the group.

It was then that I made the decision to help out the tank by describing the mechanics for each boss and room so we wouldn't wipe. It also meant that once I put the right mechanics out there, if the Hunter did any crap it would be caught immediately. 

Bottom left. That's the guy.

We muddled through, with only two of us surviving the zombie room, and we eventually managed to down Alexei Barov with only the healer still standing. I kept telling the ranged people to move farther back***, but the Hunter kept moving in close --taking a lot of extra damage-- and distracting the Healer.

Still, we survived the rest of the dungeon and I complimented the group for their work. "Especially since we were a bit underpowered for run," I added.

The group lead whispered me:

After the Lock had left, I whispered to the group lead to kick the Hunter, and then I explained to the two remaining what my experience was in BRD with that guy. It turns out our "friend" had been doing terrible numbers again all night, so we were effectively 4-manning Scholo with only one group member able to bring big damage numbers. Also, while I was a group member I noted that the Healer got their healing upgrades without any surprise Needs from the Hunter. I'm sure that my presence helped a bit, because he likely knew he wasn't going to get away with misbehavior from that end. 

Still, I have to stop running into this guy. It's not good for my mental health.

*For the uninitiated, there's something like 20-30 so-called "Unstable Corpses" in one of the rooms, and if you attack one they all come after you. They don't have a lot of health, but when you kill them they go BOOM! and explode for lots of damage. So yeah, not a very fun room to do if you don't have the ability to dump a lot of damage.

**Not that loud, because it was after 11 PM and my wife had gone to bed.

***Alexei has an AoE damage that radiates from himself; the farther away you are the less damage you take. The tank and I had to be in close to melee attack him, but everybody else was ranged so they should moved way back to minimize the damage.

Is This Groundhog Day or Something?

Maybe I shouldn't have posted yesterday about my experience in Blackrock Depths.

Last night's BRD run ended up only slightly farther than the one before it, but we had an issue in the Tavern once again. This time we somehow had the entire bar aggro against us, which led to several wipes until we finally cleared the entire tavern. During this time one player would repeatedly drop and we'd have to replace them, which led to one disgruntled person whispering me that our group leader was an ass. If there was stuff going on via whispers, I wasn't seeing it, but I did know that our Healer and one DPS were L50, both of whom could only be carried so far. 

However, at one point during the eternal replacement process a new player joined and I immediately bit back a scream.

It was the Hunter from the night before. 

I immediately whispered the group lead to dump that guy, and he obliged. I had been telling the group about that Hunter the night before, so when I mentioned in group chat that THAT was the guy, the tank spoke up that the Hunter was a known griefer.

So. Not a bot, but someone worse.

Oh yay.

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.