Codas and Retrospectives

Every so often, the YouTube algorithm pops up something that I really love.

This time, it's the kinda-sorta Beatles song, Now and Then.

Yes, it's the last of the pieces that Yoko Ono had found on a cassette that John Lennon had been recording prior to his murder. The other two songs were in better condition and could easily be filled out by the three remaining Beatles at the time into released songs, but this last one proved to be beyond the reach of the technology of the mid-90s. Apparently George Harrison also thought the song was rubbish when they were working on it in the mid-90s; whether it was the low quality recording or the song itself was up for interpretation. Still, with new tech brought to Paul and Ringo by Peter Jackson, they were able to get a usable extraction of John's voice and finish the song.

It's by no means the best Beatles song out there, but at this stage in my life I find it wistful, a longing for people in the past that you had a friendship with and are no longer around. In its own way, it's a perfect coda for the band.

The music video for Now and Then does highlight the irreverent and funny personalities of the band, which reminded me a lot of something my Questing Buddy and I were chatting about earlier this past evening. 

We were talking about our experience raiding in TBC Classic, and before that our Vanilla Classic experiences. Her journey ended up being much better this time around on the Anniversary servers, because her guild doesn't take themselves entirely seriously. They do want to raid well, and they do push themselves, but that's more on the individual members to basically have their stuff ready to go rather than some Raid Lead wielding a clue stick to get everybody on the page*. What I highlighted was the espirit de corps of the Mage team, and how we were all a tight knit bunch and truly enjoyed each other's company. Raike would talk about her music playlists for the raid, Zwak would crack his sarcastic Dad jokes, and Haldol would somehow make it to the raid despite keeping a crazy work schedule. Raike and I would create fake music lyrics to commemorate our Mage Misadventures, and Iceboom would talk about his watercolor painting and encourage me to give it a try.** We all kept track of who died, egged each other on if they had a chance of ripping threat from the tank, and we'd talk about the most inane topics that we could come up with. Given that the three Mages ahead of me were three of the best Mages on the server, I didn't mind that I was in fourth place on the overall DPS meters. What mattered to me was the amount of sheer, unadulterated fun we were all having, and that's something I do truly miss.

I don't think that sort of connection will ever come again in an MMO for me, because it was my first time truly being part of a progression raid team and the stars aligned to provide me the best possible time in a multiplayer game. Like John sings in Now and Then, I do miss you, old friends.

*Or, as in the case of the franken guild I left, having weekly "performance reviews" of your parsing that they instituted in Wrath Classic.

**If you're reading this, Iceboom, I still have to buy some paints and get to work. Your biggest piece of advice, to keep painting no matter how lousy it looks, is advice that I've taken to heart on all sorts of endeavors.

False Positives

There are times when I really really dislike bots and web crawlers.

This is what I discovered when I looked at the results for the past week on Blogger:

Observed on November 20, 2025.

As you can see, the number of people who actually read my last post is around 29, which is on the low end but it hovers typically between 20-50 views. I'm used to that.

But look at the numbers for the site as a whole, and things are a wee bit out of whack.

Almost all of that I can attribute that to bots and crawlers, as it gives the false impression that people are swarming all over the blog. If they were, I'd expect to see more comments this past week than I have.

This stuff comes in waves, so we're in yet another wave that'll likely end around Black Friday. 

EtA: The number of views were originally 22, but by the time I got to a screencap they were 29. Corrected in the post.

A Bit of Humble-ish Pie

Did I say something about no paid boosts yet?

Well, this dropped later in the day yesterday....

This was captured 11/19/2025.

And yes, there's a paid boost involved because of course there is:

This was captured on 11/19/2025.

The Outland Epic Pack --including the Boost and 30 days game time-- is $80 US, while the Outland Heroic Pack* is $40 US. Back in 2021, the paid boost to L58 was $40 US, and most of the commentary in the Blizz Forums centered on the "value for the money" for the two packs. More than one person thought you had to buy a pack to even play TBC Classic on the Anniversary servers, so they didn't read the post thoroughly. One person did request the "/spit" emote be restored to the game, indicating that they were not happy with these boosts existing at all.

Captured on 11/19/2025.

However, almost nobody mentioned the real issue here: the bots.

I sincerely doubt that the bot brigades will care about throwing $80 at Microsoft to have a legion of L58 boosts for farming Outland. They're just a higher class of locust, I suppose.

Another other notable item that I've seen out and about is that the Hardcore servers will not progress into TBC Classic, as per this YouTube video by WillE:

However, the biggest change aside from the $80 paid boost is that the TBC raids will all be in their post-nerf settings. I presume that's because they want everybody to blitz through TBC Classic in one year, and the difficulty of some of the raids were simply too much to be able to pull that off. Still, Karazhan especially turned into a cakewalk by the end of TBC Classic back in 2022, because we frequently had very few toons (yes, they were alts) more well geared than my Shaman back then, and she was (at best) partially Tier 5 geared.

This doesn't entirely shock me, but I figured they'd wait until the next Phase's raids became available before they nerfed the lower Tiers of raids. Silly me, I suppose.

WillE highlighted some other things, such as Guild Banks being available at launch instead of when they were first released into WoW back in the day, and that the UI changes found in Retail will make their way to the Anniversary servers. There's also that Dual Spec and the Dungeon Finder will appear in Classic Era as well, so butter my butt and call me a biscuit. 

At this rate, we'll be seeing the WoW Token on Classic Era sooner than I'd have thought.

*Minus both boost and game time.

Well Well Well...

I go and work at the car dealer's repair shop for the day, and I come back to find this in my mailbox:

On November 18, 2025.

I clicked on the link, and discovered that yes, the pre-patch is going to drop in January:

Found here on Blizzard's website.
November 18, 2025.

So, they're not going to hit the anniversary date of the TBC launch, but close enough for government work.

The Classic Era team will be allowing transfers to Classic Era realms from November 25th 2025 through January 12 2026. At present, no paid boosts are observed, but we'll see. 

I guess that means I've got until mid-January to finish getting my four toons to L60.

Meme Monday: Amateur Radio Memes

Well, since the cat is out of the bag, I figured I might as well use this Meme Monday for amateur radio. 

The hardest part of this Meme Monday was selecting memes that weren't too obscure. Believe me, I could have done much worse...

Well, kinda. CB Radio enforcement is notoriously
lax, so there are people out there with kilowatt
broadcasts going on. From Reddit.

This was entitled "Old Wives' Tale", and
I have to agree. Kind of like a similar one about
gamers. From QRZ.com.

This is actually a bit more accurate than that second one.
From Reddit.

Isn't this JUST like one for video games?
From QRZ.com.

I'm afraid it's too late for me, Sgt. Friday.
I work in IT. From Reddit. (And the show Dragnet.)

Uh, yeah. Kinda. Okay, maybe I did.
From imgflip.

Highs in the 50s Today

Given that the past couple of weeks have been pretty eventful (see my previous posts this week), I'm kind of happy keeping the pace I have been:

As Linna gets more powerful chestpieces, her
protective area continues to shrink. Hence I put
on a blue shirt to at least make her look like a Knight
in blue and silver. The status as of November 13, 2025.

I'm finally getting some gear on Linna replaced that she's been wearing since The Deadmines. Yes, that's right. The freaking Deadmines. 

Or, as I like to call it, my dice rolls SUCK.

That notwithstanding, I've been keeping up steady progress given that I've only been on for an average of an hour a night. Two levels per week ain't that bad. I kind of expect to be hitting L60 on these toons around Christmas, which is perfect. Why? because I won't have to worry about doing any gearing up or anything, because I expect the prepatch for TBC on the Anniversary realms to hit in January, and TBC Classic to arrive in February. 

Not too shabby, really.

People Watching

Sometimes, I like to wander around MMOs and people watch. 

Not in the same way that people like to show off their gear and/or mounts, but just to see people out there and what they're doing.

It's not strictly limited to WoW, but other MMOs can be a bit of a challenge to stay somewhere and just watch the crowd.

Take Guild Wars 2, for instance. 

Divinity's Reach is just so large that people there are really spread out, even where the bank is. So, when I want to see a bit of a crowd I go to somewhere smaller (relatively speaking), Lion's Arch. 

Not that big of a crowd, but definitely some
interesting people. Especially the one twice my height.

There was a crowd here, but by the time I figured
out how to hide the UI for a screencap, they'd left.

People pretty much scurry from place to place in most MMOs, with a few just hanging out. Doesn't matter if it's GW2 or even Elder Scrolls Online: people are going to chill and do their thing.

Such as visiting the bank.

Or crafting.

Classic WoW may have more people in the central watering holes, such as Stormwind on the Anniversary servers...

I didn't bother hiding the friendly toon names.

But for my money the place that I find most bizarrely fascinating is on Retail WoW. Specifically, Goldshire in Moon Guard.

It may not be quite as busy as SW as seen above...

But that's because the party is inside.

In a very real sense, the inside of The Lion's Pride reminds me a LOT of Atlanta's DragonCon SFF convention. The saying "If you not getting laid at DragonCon you're not trying" is a very real one.

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2024.

Still, Goldshire on the Moon Guard server is the sort of place where you just kind of run on through rather than stop to gawk at the sights, lest you actually get hit on for some ERP action. And believe me, there's plenty of WTF stuff going on to gawk at. Here's just a few things I saw the past couple of days when I buzzed back and forth between Northshire and Stormwind:

Tons of dead bodies, just lying there.

Then whatever the hell this is.

And WTF is THIS??

By comparison, the few people I saw in Stormwind were relatively normal. Like stumbling in on some legendary questline ending (or something like that):

And then there's the holy-crap-are-THEY-oversized people:

I only came up to her waist.

And on this one I was thigh high.

There's got to be some sort of buff/potion/spell that does this, and I was quickly inspecting the toon on top to see what sort of buff she might have on when I realized she was looking at me, so I quickly ended THAT and just ran onward. Now, I know that you can tweak the game to make yourself absurdly large for brief periods, such as using Spellsteal against the Winterspring Furbolgs to steal the Winterfall Firewater buff, because I've done that before:

Here's Neve after playing around with the Furbolgs.

The thing is, that buff is very temporary, on the order of a few minutes, so that doesn't last long. Whatever those two toons were up to was not that.

Anyway, there were a few "normal" looking toons in Retail Stormwind, but nowhere close to the crowd in Goldshire:

I ought to get onto LOTRO and see how Bree is doing these days. It used to be busy, no matter the time of day.