Layers Upon Layers

Fantasy RPGs and MMOs have a problem with clothing.

No, I don't mean overtly sexy clothing, although there's plenty of arguments around for armor that makes you wonder what the artists were thinking, but rather the design aesthetic itself.

I look at clothing found in games and I wonder how to properly describe them. Part of that is trying to properly describe them in writing, but also just trying to understand what the inspiration was and what time period was the clothing designed to evoke.

For example, LOTRO zooms in on what I'd call your standard Fantasy aesthetic, shooting for a Medieval look in spots and a Renaissance look in others. Think of the differences in clothing in the Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy with the Rohirrim and Gondor, never mind the differences in The Shire and Bree-land.* Even The Elder Scrolls kind of subscribes to a traditional Fantasy look.

It's in games such as WoW, with heavy Steampunk and SF influences mixed in with Fantasy, where I have issues trying to understand the aesthetic.

(I'm not going to throw in mounts and whatnot here, because this is about clothing. Just sayin'.)

Video games often tend to hew to what Blizzard has defined as the "Rule of Cool": cool people doing cool things. As a corollary, you have to look cool while doing those cool things. So, if there was a design decision on gear/clothing, Blizzard would go with what looked coolest. 

But.

How the hell do you describe the clothing? How would it work? 

To be honest, I never really considered such things until I realized just how many layers people wore in prior centuries. A modern person would consider "layers" as throwing on a sweater before adding a jacket when going outside, but to someone from, say, the 1700s, that's just a start.

Thanks a lot, Shrek; onions and people are the same.
From Yarn (and the movie Shrek).

Part of my interest in Renaissance Fairs, living history locales, and Medieval re-enactment organizations (such as the SCA) are how people lived back then. Any student of history could tell you that a lot of literature and art depicts how the upper classes (nobility, religious, and even rich merchants) lived; by comparison, there's scant space devoted to how the vast majority of people in any given time period lived. 

Still, I get it. People who play MMOs end up playing characters that rise to the ranks of the great and powerful. At the same time, very rarely do people who begin a tabletop RPG or an MMO start at such lofty heights. Your gear changes as you rise in the ranks, but not always. The leader of a Thieves' Guild, for instance, would not want to attract attention to themselves by living it up and wearing extravagant clothing. The same would go for a spy; their job is to inhabit the role they've been chosen for, whether servant or concubine, courtier or merchant. If there's one thing that RPGs and MMOs kind of miss out on, it's that you're not going to be wearing the same clothing all the time. For ease of plot (and to be honest, the ease of the Art and Graphics Departments) you just tend to keep the gear you're wearing all the time. But if you're entering into hostile territory, odds are good that unless you've got an army at your back you're not going to be wearing a uniform or gear that screams "Hey, kill me first!"**

Anyway, back to clothing in general.

When you delve into clothing as, say, a member of the SCA, when you have about 1000 years of history to choose from to make your character and then clothe them, there's going to be a bit of chaos involved. The similar thing happens in RPGs and MMOs, where artists draw what looks cool but isn't typically confined to a specific period or aesthetic. Even then, you have to make design choices. 

For example, in some of the fiction I've played with I decided that it was a good idea for Squires among the Knights of the Silver Hand to embrace a monastic look, evoking the inspiration for the Paladin, the Military Religious Orders...

If you stop at the 14th century version of the kirtle --and potentially the surcoat as if it were a tabard-- you have a suitably monastic look which is quite distinct from others you might encounter around a city such as Stormwind or even Silvermoon City. It is also quite practical and essentially a unisex look, so it would work for all Squires.

From the Etsy store for SPESMedievalMarket
as a Wool Cotte for Men - 13th and 14th Century
Woolen Kirtle. Uh, don't look at the price, but if it
is hand-made, that explains a lot.

Once you start getting later than the 14th century, the unisex look gave way toward tailored clothing toward both sexes, so sticking with the version above makes sense for your average RPG or MMO.

Leaping forward several WoW expansions, you have the Neo-Victorian look of Gilneas, where Victorians and late-Medieval to Early Modern looks are found in Stormwind and elsewhere.*** Trying to make sense of a world where the Victorian and the Late Middle Ages' clothing coexisted would make your head hurt --I know it does mine-- but I think the reason why I have issues with this is because I look the two styles as points in time from the same culture. In a fantasy world, there can be no assumptions that the two styles are part of the same culture, because they can co-exist without much of an issue. After all, just look at the clothing styles for various cultures even today; there's absolutely no requirement that all cultures maintain the same clothing designs, and to assume such is to be pretty myopic.

I guess with the mish-mash of clothing aesthetics I ought to just give up trying to define everything and just learn to enjoy the ride. Still, I know my desire to define everything will just annoy me to no end. 

Besides, there's an opening to create a story point for your character that just fits. Like this from Dungeons & Doodles: Tales From the Tables...

Here's the Patreon link. Seriously, the
webseries is really well written.

*I'm leaving Dwarves and Elves out of this because they're purely fantasy races. Since Tolkien modeled Hobbits off of the country folk he knew, I'm lumping them in with Men for this exercise. If I were using David Eddings' Belgariad, for example, things would be a wee bit different as the various nations have distinct dress and stereotypical attitudes. Nobody ever confused Eddings' works with deep philosophical and historical themes, however.

**Mages know all about that; even Nefarian can be heard yelling to his underlings in a fight in Blackrock Spire: "Foolsss...Kill the one in the dress!"

***And you thought David Eddings' nations from The Belgariad were a hodge-podge of various tropes. Chereks were Vikings, Tolnedrans were Romans, Asturians were Robin Hood and the Merry Men, while Mandorians were Arthur and his Knights, etc.

Meme Monday: May the Fourth Memes

You knew this was coming, didn't you? Meme Monday falling on May 4th is just serving up an easy score...

Catholics would have as well until the early
2010s, when they changed it for something like
"and your spirit" or something like that.
From Lutheran Memes on Facebook.

And yes, I chose this one specifically because it
calls back to that old GEICO insurance commercial.
"Mike Mike Mike Mike... Guess what DAY it IS??"
Hope you enjoy the earworm. From No Guilt Disney.

Yes, yes it does. 
Alas, the original on Facebook Star Wars Memes is gone.

Only thing missing is Harry Potter. Or maybe
Red Dwarf. From Bertmanderson.

I guess "Cinnabons" was trademarked.
From Bertmanderson again.

As long as that chocolate milk isn't the full sugar
variety, thanks. From LinkedIn (of all places).

Definitely Not Something New

It's kind of funny that after I posted about walkthroughs and whatnot last Wednesday and Thursday, Tim Cain's YouTube video today was about a question he received about how the Internet changed game design and game dissemination to players.

This isn't the first time he's tackled a similar query, and he has those answers in links in the Description*, but one thing that stuck out in my mind was how the rise of Influencers and Influencer Culture has shaped people's opinions about games. The longer his video went on, the more I thought of that line from Citizen Kane...

From Citizen Kane via Yarn.

That reminds me that we've come full circle in what Influencer Culture really means: there have always been people who tell us what to think and what to buy, it's just that the nature of that delivery has changed over the decades** to being more immediate, requiring a more immediate response. 

Well, we can control our response, and that's where hitting the pause button isn't a bad idea.  

*Tim is awfully good at providing links such as that.

**Or centuries.

Somebody's Following Me

I can't go anywhere in Outland without running into someone on a nether drake mount. 

It began the moment I set foot in Outland at Hellfire Peninsula...

And it's continued throughout my experiences here so far...

Being able to walk on water has its advantages.

At least in Shattrath City you can find people on other mounts, but still the nether drake is by far the "standard" mount found on the Anniversary servers. 

These are just a few of the times I've seen nether drakes around. It's so ubiquitous that one could be forgiven if you'd have thought they simply gave you one once you unlocked flying. But no, there's a long grind to get a nether drake mount. I did it once during Cataclysm simply because I wanted to see how it was done, and while it's not the worst grind in the game it didn't engage me either.

That being said, seeing all these players with their nether drake mounts, I'm reminded of Syndrome's quote from The Incredibles...

From The Incredibles vis makeagif.com.

Meme Monday: Spring Cleaning Memes

Yes, I've been doing some Spring Cleaning. Well, among other things, but I'm sure you understand. And I do mean around the house, not cleaning out my pile of memes.

Yep. Sad to agree.
From Someecards via Pinterest.

I sometimes wonder if the squirrels in our
yard do spring cleaning too. From makeameme.

Yes indeed. All those brooms around Silvermoon,
just working their asses off. From Reddit.

The curse of being a reader. From bookbub.

Indeed. From Imgflip.

Just hedging my bets, that's all.
From Imgflip.

What Is The Goal, Anyway?

Bhagpuss commented on yesterday's post about walkthroughs and solved games that "following guides are just more fun", to which I snarkily replied that "are you really playing the game, though?"

That little exchange kept rolling around in my head all night, and I decided to delve deeper into it, because I don't think I was right to simply dismiss Bhagpuss' point.*

In my response, I likened following a walkthrough or merely utilizing the optimized meta to playing connect-the-dots or watching a movie or television series, but upon reflection I don't believe it's just that.

A game is active entertainment. No matter anything else, if you're playing a game of any sort, you're choosing to engage with it. While we can also choose to engage in more passive forms of entertainment, such as watching television, you still have to interact with the game. AI hasn't progressed to the point where it plays the game for you**, so that mere act of physical interaction raises it above the level of watching reruns of MASH.***

However, the operative word isn't 'active' per se, it's 'entertainment'.

Yes, I went there. From the movie Gladiator (via Tenor).

I forgot to ask that basic question: "Are you having fun?" Or maybe a better one is "What is your goal?"

While the former question is the one most people ask, maybe your goal isn't to have fun at all. Let me explain.

***

Walkthroughs are very common in teaching. They provide students with a process to understand a concept with known starting and ending points, and if you get stuck during homework or a test you can fall back to that walkthrough as a guide to help you work through your issues. For example, my Advanced Lab 1 and 2 classes in Physics at UD relied heavily upon you as a student to study and reproduce journal articles, then write up the results as a formal 10-20 page lab report.**** My third lab experiment was provided to me by the professor showing me the lab equipment and the basic design, handing me the requisite journal article, and then said "Now, go and reproduce The Photoelectric Effect."

While some lab experiments are more simplistic than others, they are all walkthroughs. However, I would argue that "entertainment" isn't the typical reason why people utilize them. Yes, there are those who find it fun --and I'm one of them-- but the primary reason why they exist is for instruction and understanding.

Likewise, walkthroughs are found in various other sporting and hobbies. They provide a basis for understanding, a learn-by-doing methodology, and a foundation to build upon. I'm thinking of the karate-do kata that the kids (and my wife) used to perform for their karate class, and you get the idea.

I recognize this kata from their classes.

From the standpoint of games, for some people walkthroughs are the best way to learn to play the game. They provide you with the understanding of the logic behind the game, where the pain points are, and how to solve the problems presented. 

***

So, assuming that the answer to "What is your goal?" is to have fun or be entertained, then we can proceed to "Are you having fun?"

That answer is completely on you. If by "having fun" you go do your own thing, then go do it. If to have fun you follow a walkthrough or the meta, then do that too. 

However, that doesn't mean that people won't judge you because of what you do. People are people, and I've found over the years that the people who love to say "I won't judge you" often are judging you, just not out loud. And yes, I'm guilty of that too. I'm not going to deny that.

If people react negatively to you for not following what they perceive is the "correct" way of playing, don't be surprised. But it also needs to be said that you don't have to yield to their pressure. If they want you to play a specific way and if it's a requirement for your participation with them, then you have to decide whether it's more important to play your way or play with those other people. If others can't respect you for the way you want to play a game, I think there's your answer.

So for me, "having fun" means doing my own thing, trying to puzzle out answers on my own, and not utilizing walkthroughs or a published "best method". To those who use those because they've got other things to do, such as raiding, then that's fine. You do you. 

*Yes, I realize it's my blog and I can do what I want with it, but I try to avoid being an asshole.

**It could be argued that botting software for MMOs is rapidly approaching this tipping point.

***Even then, it must be said there are greater and lesser degrees of engagement while watching television or a movie. If you're in a movie theater watching a movie, the crowd can be more engaged than if you're watching alone at home. The same thing goes for the shared experience of watching a sporting event in a bar or a stadium; you may not be playing the sport itself, but you're engaged with the shared experience of watching and cheering on the participating teams.

****I've told this story before, but I'll mention it again. The night before all of our Advanced Lab 1 lab reports were due, I was working on one of my last lab reports when I somehow nuked the floppy disk my lab reports were on. I had to scramble and rewrite 4 lab reports, a total of 80 pages worth, over the course of 8 hours. I somehow managed to finish it in time, my memories of that caffeine and terror fueled night are pretty hazy.

A Solved Game Forces You to Respond to It -- Whether You Like It or Not

In the midst of planning the construction of some raised garden beds, studying for the Amateur Radio Extra Class License*, and handling family-related activities, I've had plenty of time these past few weeks to do some thinking. 

The biggest thing on my mind was why I actively avoid trying to follow the crowd and follow the clearly defined optimal game path when playing any video game. 

Am I committing self-sabotage by doing this?

When I play a single-player game, it's not a big deal because there's nobody looking over my shoulder to tell me I'm doing it wrong. I'm quite aware that just about every video game, from Baldur's Gate 3 to Oregon Trail** has wikis, walkthroughs, and meta-builds out there for people to use, but unless you're actively streaming your gameplay*** people will be none the wiser. 

But in the case of an MMO, there is always a best way of doing something --courtesy of algorithms and mathematics-- and if you're not following that meta build that's going to be a bit of a problem. Maybe not if you're playing the game solo, but if you want to do any group content there's always somebody who will be annoyed if you're not "doing things properly".

That's one of the big reasons why I never played what was at one time THE best rated boardgame on Boardgame Geek: Puerto Rico. Aside from being a Eurogame with a pasted-on theme designed to hide a mathematical exercise, Puerto Rico suffered from what for me was a fatal flaw: if you follow everything perfectly the winner will be explicitly determined by your initial turn order. Some Puerto Rico fanboys were so into the meta that they'd absolutely flip their shit if you didn't play exactly according to the meta.

Eurogamers aren't very fond of randomness
in boardgames either. From Pinterest.

If you play MMOs, does that sound familiar?

***

Here's the thing: whether or not you play according to the meta of a game, the mere existence of an easily obtainable meta for a multiplayer game means that you have to deal with the consequences, even if you consciously ignore it. Other players will expect you to play it, and if you don't that will impact their opinion of you as both a player and a person. Ignorance is unfortunately not an excuse for a subset of MMO players, and once you become aware of the meta**** you really have no alternative but to deal with it. 

Yes, I deal with it by actively ignoring it, but that's also because I kind of figured out a lot of the meta playstyles in my Classic WoW toons through experimentation while questing. Sure, I'm not aware of the entire meta of a particular class, but a short jaunt to Icy Veins or Wowhead will present it to me in full gory detail. I guess you could say that I'm happy I got 80% of the way there by myself, and it's frequently enough for the pugging I do (or casual play). Raiding would certainly put that philosophy to the test, because a) I don't want to look like an idiot and wipe the raid*****, and b) I have a certain amount of pride in playing well and not being a liability. At the same time, I know that looking at the meta is opening Pandora's Box, akin to downloading and utilizing your first Damage Meter addon: once you see how you're really doing there's no going back.

There's a post by Shintar on her SWTOR blog, Going Commando, that's 4 years old this month about this very phenomenon. Titled My DPS Is Bad and I Can't Look Away, it has been living rent-free in my head ever since I first read it. That it came out 3 months after I gave up my progression raiding career certainly had something to do with it, and I completely sympathize with her opinion. At least with SWTOR the game culture doesn't trend toward hardcore that the versions of WoW do, but for me, that post was uncomfortably close to the lead-in before I'd have another "discussion" from a raid lead about "getting my DPS up". 

But that's the thing: we're all responding to the very nature of a solved game. Consciously playing a different way from the meta is as much a response to the meta as embracing it. 

***

I was thinking about this when my Questing Buddy spent some time playing Stardew Valley over the past Winter. In her usual way, she went out and found a playthrough so she could follow the best path to completing the game. I counseled her to just go and explore the game; sure, you get a "score" after two years but you can keep playing indefinitely after that. Unless you're deliberately trying for something very hard to do, such as completing the original storyline within one year, there's no real reason to follow a playthrough guide.

But you can guess the outcome, can't you? She kept up with the guide.

*Yes, I'm studying for the highest level of Amateur Radio license available in the US. It is certainly much more technically oriented than what I found in the other license coursework; while I originally thought I could be ready to take the exam by April, I have since come to the conclusion it'll be more likely late Summer before I'm really ready. 

**Seriously, there's walkthroughs on how to win a game whose whole purpose is to get you to understand how migration on the actual Oregon Trail was like. Talk about missing the point.

***I'm very glad I'm too shy to consider streaming, because I would not be amused by such commentary.

****Typically having been told of its existence by another player wanting you help you get better at the game. I'm going to be charitable and it was a positive interaction, but if you know MMOs it's equally likely it was a variety of "git gud scrub" followed by a group kick.

*****OF COURSE I've done that before. Do you have to even ask?

Meme Monday: Writer/Blogger Memes

After some work I've been doing for some upcoming posts, I figured I'd circle back to one of my favorite exercises in self-flagellation: writing.

Writing is kind of in my blood, because right now I'm actually doing that. I've been doing that on this blog since 2009, and I don't see me giving this up any time soon. I've been writing fiction off and on since high school --I was serious enough about it that I photocopied the submission info for Science Fiction and Fantasy magazines out of Writers' Market back in the 80s and 90s-- and the bug still has a hold of me. Today (Sunday), while I put this post together I went back to a story I'd been working on and tinkered with it a bit and tried to figure out the direction I wanted to take it, a rut that I need to simply just tell my inner critic to shut up and just write myself out of.

Anyway, here's a few writerly (and blogging) related memes...

Guilty! From Someecards.

Sorry about that; couldn't resist.
From bhargavkesavan.wordpress.com.

Yeah, been there. This past week, in fact.
From Bang To Write.

I keep thinking that my plot twists are so obvious
that a truck could drive through them. From Autocrit.

This is also me. From Instagram.

Well, that's not gonna happen. If my mom found
this blog, I'm pretty sure she'd think I was about
to be damned to the fiery pit of hell or something.
From SEOptimer.

A Tale of Two Extremes

One of my unwritten rules about pugging is that I don't go all in until I get a feel for how a tank and healer operate together. It obviously goes without saying that such a conservative approach would not be good if I were to ever get the urge to run Mythic+ instances in Retail, but it's served me well over the years. My credo boils down to "Don't do anything stupid, pull threat, and wipe the group while people are feeling each other out."

Well, I figured I hadn't been on my two Horde toons in a while, so why not pull Neve out of the garage and go visit Scarlet Monastery? Neve is a Frost Mage*, so she consequently has a lot of utilitarian/crowd control abilities. When you combine that with my 'starting off slow' approach, what could go wrong?

Almost from the beginning, the Healer kept pushing us to go bigger. "I can heal through it," she said.

When I used single target for the first couple of mobs, she said "Mage, AoE to save mana instead of single targeting when over 3 in a mob."

I was annoyed at that because we originally had three in the pull but two additional enemies came wandering in midway through that fight, and I mentioned as much. 

"I main a Mage," the Healer replied. "I'm used to it."

"I main a Mage too," I replied, "and I want to make sure how well tanking is working before I go ham."

"You'll pull threat. It's what we do, get used to it."

I grumbled at that. There's enough tanks I know who dislike that belief and the behavior it encourages that I was immediately sympathetic toward the tank, who said nothing.

We got partway through the instance, and then the tank said "brb 5 min" and then stayed put.

Well, the Healer was having none of that, so she started pulling mobs one by one and we slowly worked our way forward. I suspected the tank was just going to basically go AFK and then vanish, and sure enough he did just that. So the Healer got another tank and we continued on and finished the run. 

Once we finished it, the Healer dropped and we got a new Healer. The tank, after the first few pulls asked me to go single target because he was having trouble keeping threat with me constantly AoE-ing so much. "I know you want big numbers and all," he began...

"I'm fine with single target. Whatever you need," I finished. "We don't have that first Healer around, and that's fine."

"Whew," our new Healer said. "I'm still learning healing." 

"No biggie. I want to go at a pace you're comfortable with."

***

It goes without saying that while that first Healer was definitely skilled, I preferred the second Healer because I worked at the pace that the Tank and Healer were comfortable with. I didn't need any extra drama, and I think that's a problem that some people seem to relish causing. 

This reminded me of the time back in 2021 when I attended an AQ20 raid where our Raid Leader had pugged one of the two tanks, who turned out to be from the top raiding guild on our old Myzrael-US server. Yes, the guy was good at what he did, but he wasn't interested in listening to what the Raid Leader wanted, which drove all of us nuts. He began freelancing his way through the raid, ignoring our Raid Lead and essentially directing people to do it his way.

Well, our Raid Lead kicked him, top guild member or no, and our Guild Master also kicked him from our Discord. Sure, the tank we got as a replacement wasn't as good, but at least he could work within the raid team paradigm.

There comes a point where you have to relinquish your desire for big numbers to work with the rest of the group. MMOs have "multiplayer" in the acronym, after all, and the entire point is to work with people to accomplish a singular goal. If you're not interested in that, maybe finding a group of likeminded people is best for you, so that I can grab a bowl of popcorn and watch the fireworks when they start.

*Cardwyn: "I approve."
Me: "That's nice and all, but I'm pretty sure she doesn't need your approval."
Cardwyn: "We mages stick together. End of story."

Me: ::sigh:: "Why can't the voices in my head be more normal?"

EtA: Corrected the year of that AQ20 run. It was a couple of weeks before pre-patch for the original TBC Classic in 2021.

Second Verse Same as the First

After my previous post about how leveling seems to have been subtly speeded up, I decided I was going to make some changes how I was going to approach leveling in Outland.

As of April 15, 2026.

I was originally planning on leveling Briganaa all the way to L70 and then go back and level other toons one at a time. After the process of slowly leveling what eventually became 4 toons at once, I figured changing the methodology was in order. 

Well, then I met the speed of leveling in Outland.

In the two weeks that I've been enjoying the view in Hellfire Peninsula, I now have one toon at L62 and two at L63. I suppose it's slipping back into old habits, but I discovered the quickest way to combat a game that insists on pushing me faster toward max level is to simply spread out the leveling process among several toons. At the moment I intend to stick with three, but I think that I'll eventually bring five into Outland.

Something I have been wondering about is what I intend to do once I start getting toons to max level. Even if the leveling slows down the farther in I go, I expect some of these toons to be getting to L70 by July. What to do then?

Well, the first thing I've thought of is to simply not get flying. 

Blizz opened up the quest chain for the nether drake mount
right when the Dark Portal opened, so you can't go a couple
of minutes without seeing a player on one. It's almost
as bad as seeing the paid boost ground mount "reward"
everywhere as a reminder that people paid money to
skip playing the game.

I don't need it to get to max level, and since I'm not raiding I don't need to do the Tempest Keep instances as part of any attunement quests.* I don't intend to impoverish myself just because, and I'm still expecting  a lot of players to stop running instances as time goes on. Other than getting to Tempest Keep, there's no real reason to get basic flying: a fast ground mount is quicker, a Druid's fast flight form is much quicker at diving in and obtaining gathering nodes**, and it does cost a bit of gold.

Is it a hipster move? I'm sure some people would say yes, but I pushed back on it even in 2021 and then in late 2022 in Wrath Classic. I simply don't want to be a slave to having to make gold just to get a mount that I won't really use, and I don't like standing around somewhere, preening and showing off my new fancy mount and/or gear.*** 

If I'm not doing flying, and I'm not raiding, I'm starting to think about running some Alterac Valley battlegrounds. I'm not interested in Arenas because I know I'm not good enough for them, but I would like to go out and play some AV for a change. I could also run some instances, so long as I'm not required to utilize flying for them.

And, oh yeah, I've got a couple of Horde toons around. I ought to work on them too.

*You need flying to get to the Tempest Keep instances. No way around it, as the time of posting you can't even summon a player in front of the instance entrances themselves. I do think that'll change as time goes on, but I'd not count on it just yet.

**That happened in 2021, where Druids with fast flight form would frequently pick entire zones clean of gathering nodes because they were so fast compared to anybody else. So, why should this be any different once a Druid's fast flight form becomes available in Phase 2?

***Yes, I'm the sort of guy who, when presented with a cost-is-no-object choice, would likely end up buying a decent quality-built sedan to drive around with. I don't want to be seen, and I don't want anything flashy. In my experience, people noticing you isn't really a good thing; as I like to tell people who I am introduced to in meetings, if you don't know my name it's because I'm doing my job well, and if you know my name it's probably because people were shouting it during emergencies.

Meme Monday: Work Intruding on Real Life Memes

Yes, yes, I know: work IS real life.

Yeah, but on the argument of "live to work" vs. "work to live", I'm definitely on the side of "work to live".  I can be a workaholic as necessary, but I prefer to keep work to a minimum. I have work acquaintances and friends, and I have acquaintances and friends outside of work (in various hobbies). Never the twain shall meet, and I prefer it that way. 

I've learned that even though I work in a "geeky" job, that doesn't mean that people in that career are into geeky hobbies. Quite frequently, the people involved are as anti-geek as you can possibly imagine, almost to the point as if they were deliberately trying to prove they were NOT geeks.

But no matter, these memes are for those times when you want to do your geeky hobby but work intrudes...

Pretty sure this started out life as a TikTok meme.
From Instagram.

Been there. This past week, in fact.
From Instagram.

I have had bosses who told me I didn't have the fire to
go all in on whatever the job I had was. Well, call me
crazy, but I think I get more motivation out of my hobbies
than most work. Period. From Reddit (and Mematic.)
 

I've heard that one before. Still, on a Mac? Impressive.
From Memedroid.

Yeah yeah yeah. From Reddit (and Imgflip).

Uh....
From Memedroid.
Although originally from
Pizza Cake Comics.*

*Reference courtesy of Shintar.

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.