No Pressure. Absolutely None at All.

None indeed.

It was even larger earlier.
Last night, November 7, 2026.

Kudos to the lone Retail person there. 

Where am I, you may ask? 

I don't want to hear about the Wanderer's Stitched
Trousers. I know what they look like. And so does
Neve, who bitches about them every chance she gets.
Little does she know that the Dragon Queen herself
wears a version of them, but that's an expansion off.

Fel Reavers notwithstanding, I'm going to forge my own path. 

The Morning After

Throughout the WoW Anniversary servers, there was peace and quiet.

Just the way I like it.

It was this morning, but it was just as empty
last evening.

And here's Orgrimmar for reference purposes.

I found a more people out in the wild, questing, but a complete dearth of farming bots. (Good riddance, and have fun in WoW Forever.)

My friends' list last night was completely swamped with people on WoW Forever, and if that's any indication a lot of people from Retail were there as well. My suspicion is that the Retail players will gravitate back to Retail first, but it'll probably take a few months or more before the Classic players start to fade away.

I'm going to make a prediction, merely based on past performance, but that in about 3-4 months the Era servers will experience an uptick in interest due to players either missing the old Vanilla Classic or disliking the changes made to Classic. You can't please everybody, so whether WF* is what people expect in Classic Plus or not remains to be seen. 

As for me, I've decided I won't need to reserve names because of the last name capability. I've discovered in the past that the only toon name of mine has been used throughout Retail or Classic is "Azshandra", and all I need to make mine unique is to use a decent enough last name. So, I'm good. Maybe I'll create a toon before Christmas, maybe I won't. Odds are good that I'll be busy with other things.

*I've got to come up with a better way of shortening WoW Forever that doesn't just say "Forever", because it still feels damn pretentious. The problem with WF is that it is also shorthand for Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

The Empty Zones are Coming...

That's my snarky take on the next 3 minutes and change, because of this...

From my Battle.net front page.

For those that will imbibe, have fun!

Forget about the Bots, The Agents Are Here

Okay, let's talk about agentic AI and gaming.

People are talking about agents cloning software, including games, to the point where Anthropic is attempting to build in guardrails so that Claude Code won't make clones of already existing software.

By the time this post is released, things will have changed, so just keep an eye on the news.

But I'm here to talk about something that will become a greater and greater likelihood: agents playing games for you.

Maybe we could have laughed it off before where you are easily able to identify bots in-game, but I think that it's not going to be a laughing matter much longer. It's only a small leap from an agent such as Muse going out and ordering takeout for you, obtaining tickets to a Taylor Swift concert, and texting a potential date to healing in a raid.

Imagine losing a Call of Duty match to this thing
and having it talk about having marital relations
with your mom. From Meta via The Wall Street Journal.

And if you thought Blizzard had issues before with keeping people engaged in the leveling process, look out...

***

Okay, that pretty much begs the question: why are you playing a game at all if you're letting an agent do it for you? It's pretty much the same thing as paying a person to level your toon so that you can take over when you're at max level. Or if you feel like your physical skills aren't as good as they used to be, let the agent go into the raid and get the gear for you. 

No fuss, no muss.

Or, in a PvP game such as EVE Online, some wealthy individual attempting to create a ton of agent-driven clones to augment a fleet action. (Aside for EVE players: given that EVE is famously an "all's-fair-in-love-and-war" kind of game, is that a violation of the TOS? Or would that be applauded as a "solution to a problem" in-game? And if agents get good enough at playing, would Fenris even recognize that agents are running accounts?)

The last time I thought about this, there was the guy who created a WoW private server with 1800 bots, but that was prior to the release of Muse. The existence of a Muse demonstrates that you can have an agent do so much more than was possible only months ago, and it's only a matter of time before agents are directly adapted to gaming.

I wonder if we're going to be seeing the eventual endgame of some of these multiplayer games if agents get good enough at behaving like real human players that basically we'll see agents playing against agents, with no real humans involved. About a year ago I would have laughed at the idea, since the entire point of playing a game is for you, a human, to enjoy yourself. Now, I'm not so sure. The ease at which a Muse can simply keep you from having to deal with other humans is quite astonishing*, and the temptation is there to say "I don't really want to run Sunken Temple myself, but I need the gear in there. Maybe I'll let Blizzbot (tm) run it for me." I know people who simply despise certain instances or questlines, so letting an agent do it for you will become a viable option really soon. Once that happens, the dam has burst and it becomes easier and easier to let the agent basically run your account for you.

Before you say I've been taken in with all the hype, I haven't. I still think the AI bubble is real, and I still am betting on it bursting sooner rather than later. I also think that a lot of the tech bro community underestimates just how much ire is focused in their direction with data centers and prices being out of control for consumers. When you're wrapped in your own little hype bubble, you don't see what people out in the rest of the country are saying and thinking, and I believe there's a reckoning that will be coming soon. That, however, doesn't preclude me from realizing that these agents are getting "smarter" at an incredible rate, and things that we used to believe were years or decades off might be arrive much sooner than we realize.

*This is me making a value judgement based on the articles I've read about Muse. There's no way in hell I'd let Meta have access to all of my finances and emails and whatnot. You don't even need to have any skeletons in your closet to realize we're talking about huge blackmail potential. I wonder if Zuckerberg is so sold on Muse that he'd let it control all of his finances and personal interactions (such as his private email) without any qualms whatsoever.

Meme Monday: Antenna and Dish Memes

A week ago last Friday we finally got our roof replaced. Yes, yes, it looks great, and surprisingly enough the roofers only found one rotted wooden board that needed replacing.

However, as part of the installation the roofers had to take off our satellite dish*, so that led to this week's Meme Monday: antenna and satellite dish memes.

My parents never put up an outside antenna.
Still, given how "all thumbs" my dad was,
he would have been risking his life back then.
From Instagram.

Yeah, right. We all know how THAT works out.
From Facebook.

This is my personal nightmare.
No way in hell would you catch me up
on the roof doing this. From Imgflip.

Truth. From Facebook.

This was found on the amateur radio subreddit,
but it applies to anyone with an HOA.

Watching the roofers and the DirecTV
tech work on ours got me to thinking about
this little chestnut. From Imgflip.

*DirecTV, if you're wondering. We've used it since we moved to our current house, over 20 years ago. Why not cable? Well, back then Time Warner refused to provide you with pricing; you had to call them up and talk to a salesperson if you wanted the pricing for cable. If they were not going to bother providing me with straightforward pricing, I wasn't going to use their service.

Stars in the Firmament

This week the world of Star Trek and Science Fiction in general is a bit emptier, as both Walter Koenig and Sir Patrick Stewart passed away.

Koenig's Pavel Chekov, the so-called "Nutty Russian" on the original Star Trek, was both comic relief and provided a baseline for everybody to understand what might be going on in episodes he was featured in.

Kirk: All right, here we are, birds in a gilded cage. The question is, how do we get out of here?

Chekov: I don't know, sir, but it's a very nice gilded cage. 

--From Star Trek S2, E8: I, Mudd 

 

I suppose most average moviegoers saw Chekov in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, given it was by far the most popular Star Trek movie. His humor played well there, because the overall comedic tone of the film led to broad audience appeal.

It feels weird to see both Nichelle Nichols and
Walter Koenig in this still from Star Trek IV, because
both have passed away. From Screenrant.

Like many genre actors, Walter found himself typecast into SF roles throughout his career. One of his later roles was in a show I didn't watch yet has a cult following: Babylon 5. 

I can't talk about Walter without acknowledging the tragedy when his son, the actor Andrew Koenig, committed suicide in 2010. This is something I really have trouble wrapping my head around, because I don't think I would handle it well if I were in the same situation. Walter turned his tragedy into another mission, to educate people about mental health and suicide prevention, for the rest of his life.

***

It feels weird seeing the outpouring of emotion for Sir Patrick Stewart, given that I first encountered him in the David Lynch adaptation of Dune:

Patrick Stewart as Gurney Halleck.
From X.

Before that, my mom knew him as Lucius Aelius Sejanus in I, Claudius (courtesy of the PBS rebroadcast*):

From Reddit.

For a man who so embraced his roles in the Royal Shakespeare Company, pop culture had to have been a bit of a shock.

I remember when I heard that Star Trek: The Next Generation was coming out I was hopeful yet quite concerned it would be terrible. Anybody who watches the innumerable reboots of intellectual property these days probably understands my trepidation, but back then in the 80s this was kind of new territory. Who knew what we were going to get?

Apparently, that concern was shared by Patrick Stewart, who was hesitant at accepting the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Yet accept it he did, and we are all the better for it. 

In its own way, his later role of Professor X in the X-Men movies, acting opposite other stage actors Ian McKellen and Hugh Jackman, were closer in theme to his love of Shakespeare. Marvel's X-Men was originally conceived as shining a mirror on the two main reactions to the quest for Civil Rights in the 60s, with Charles Xavier embodying the side of Martin Luther King Jr.'s non-violent approach and Magneto's side embodying Malcolm X's Black Power movement, and both Stewart and McKellen embraced those opposing views in several iconic scenes.

Patrick and Ian developed a very close friendship over the years, where Ian officiated at Patrick's wedding and they shared the stage in Waiting for Godot:

***

I guess I'm at that age when more and more of the people who I grew up with or informed my earlier adulthood are passing away. I'll miss them both, but I can also rest easy knowing both Walter and Patrick lived a full life. 

*PBS rebroadcasts of British productions are how I was introduced to Roger Rees (The Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby), David Suchet (Poirot), Joan Hickson (Miss Marple), Peter Davison (All Creatures Great and Small), Jeremy Brett (Sherlock Holmes), Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man), and James Burke (Connections and The Day the Universe Changed). I guess you can tell that mysteries and documentaries were big in my past.

A Late October Overview

It's been a while since I actually posted about my own gaming.

To be honest, I'm not certain that the post from September 9th actually counts, as it was a complaint about a bizarre dungeon run that never happened. So, I guess it may have been since August 20th that I provided a real update on what I've been doing.*

***

The short answer is "not much". 

Okay, see you next Meme Monday.

You're still here? You actually want some info?

Okay, fine. 

I don't drink much, Balthan. Type 2 and all that, so shush.

I still play video games, and I still play on the WoW Anniversary Servers. I separate out MMOs versus the rest of video game playing because MMOs are a time sink unto themselves. It's just that I keep my video game playing down to bite-sized chunks, so I don't spend all of my spare time consumed by the hobby. That way I can actually work on other hobbies, housework, or family stuff. 

My single player games, Civ IV, Stellaris, Stardew Valley, Age of Empires, and Planetbase, do keep me busy. I can tinker around with them for a while, and I can get a game of Civ IV and Age of Empires done in an evening session. Yes, I would like to play some RPGs, but I also know it will suck up far more of my time than these old standbys will, so I'm very careful about that.

***

Now, about WoW.

As of October 28, 2026.

As you can see, Neve finally reached Outland, and my Hunter, Hoots, is about to reach max level in probably about a week. Like all my other toons, once a toon hits max level I effectively retire them and I switch to another toon on the same faction. In this case, it'll likely be Az, my old Rogue and the namesake of the first toon I made in WoW Classic in 2019.**

"Remind me again why Sindorei leadership calls this
a green paradise." 

Nothing says "strange land" as much as floating
islands does, I suppose.

And for the record, I still haven't named Hoots' owl. It just fits as-is, I suppose.

I don't see my WoW friends very much right now, as work and family activities (it's Fall, so football season for those with high school kids) keep them busy. My Questing Buddy does login, but she typically gets on after I've gone to bed, so I don't see her quite as much as I used to.

Also, I should mention that I do occasionally login to Retail to fish for a bit...

"Sittin' on the dock of the bay
Watching the tiiiiide roll away..."

There are times when I want to passively observe the crowd, whether it's in Stormwind...

Or during an event...

When did the devs add a Burning Man just outside
Stormwind? That's not there in Classic, and in fact it's
location near the Undercity is the object of both
Alliance and Horde quests.

Or, god forbid, Goldshire...

At least my lowbie Rogue can fit under that brontosaurus
there. Mmmm... brontosaurus burgers... I've been
watching too many old Flintstones episodes again...

I still haven't heard anything new about WoW Classic since the opening of Zul'Aman, but I intend to hang around there as long as possible and just let the crowd steamroll their way to max level in Forever. Once people begin to drop there, because that's what WoW players do, I'll actually consider going over.

Which reminds me: I expect the Blue Elves to make an appearance in Retail before the end of Midnight. Midnight is the Elf expansion, so why not? Forever might be a separate leg on the three-legged stool that is World of Warcraft, but that doesn't mean it will have different races from the Retail game.

*Apparently the bots that tend to far outnumber the actual readers of the blog don't mind, since I had that bubble of "views" that appeared in early September. It's still ironic in the extreme that Google and Gemini still don't recognize the blog exists, but I digress.

**Azshandra was also the name of the last main I played in Retail back in 2013-2014.