State of The Redbeard, Summer Edition 2026

I spent this weekend at ARRL Field Day 2026, which is put on by the American Radio Relay League, the largest Amateur Radio organization in the US. I'll post more about it later this week, but the TL;DR is that it's a contest/activity that's intended to get hams and clubs out into the field and away from their home locations to try to make as many contacts as they can. Just like guilds in MMOs, some clubs are far more hardcore about this than others, but I'm grateful my club is NOT one of those.

Anyway, I wasn't playing MMOs much this weekend --only a couple of hours playing WoW this afternoon-- so I got the opportunity to take a step back and consider what I want to do with my MMO playing.

Well, the first thing I did was to admit that I haven't really been playing LOTRO much at all since the great 64-bit server migration. My oldest, who also had been playing LOTRO far more than me, hadn't been playing much either. We haven't set up a new Kinship house --and in my case I haven't even bothered with setting up a new personal house-- and all I've done the past few months was to login and wander around Bree for a few minutes at a time. 

This theme also follows what I've been doing in ESO, where I'm so out of practice that when I do go out and about and fight any sort of enemy I almost end up dying. That's kind of embarrassing, given that I really used to love ESO's and GW2's limited ability bars, but that's the reality of me not effectively playing either game over the past 6+ years. 

I'm the plain looking Dunmer to the side.
All sorts hang out around a bank vault, I guess.

That leads me to SWTOR, where I bowed to reality here and decided to cancel my in-game subscription. I've gone from logging in once a week and doing stuff in the Vanilla SWTOR zones to logging in more like once a quarter. I can trace my decline in interest with SWTOR directly to the change that impacted companions' pathing, but I also think that the success of Classic WoW lead to the realization I liked the pre-expansion Vanilla version of SWTOR more than its current iteration. If the dev team were to come out with a "SWTOR Classic" with a pre-Rise of the Hutt Cartel version of the game available to play, I'd be all for it. I still love the Vanilla storylines, and I'll miss them a lot,* but paying a subscription to a game I'm not playing is pretty silly.

Some of the other games I've played in the past, such as Neverwinter and Age of Conan, I've uninstalled from my PC. I'd login, look at my toon for a moment, and just logout. The former I couldn't get into after a certain level (I think it was mid-20s) and the latter is still a buggy mess that requires grouping up to finish the main storyline, and I honestly don't know anybody who plays it anymore. That the talent tree for AoC is so obnoxiously huge --it makes Rift's talent tree look really basic by comparison-- I have absolutely no idea what my options really are. If you've ever heard about analysis paralysis, I met that head-on in AoC.

Speaking of Rift, there's so few players --especially in the low level zones-- that you really can't do much. You can quest in a zone to an extent, but the grouping that is expected to happen in fighting Rifts or whatnot in the open world simply doesn't happen. You need a critical mass of players to do that, and that's just not happening anymore. I haven't tried their automated LFD tool, but given my experiences with automated tools in other MMOs I'm very reluctant to try it and group up for their equivalent of a dungeon.

Like most days when I poke my nose in Rift,
nary a person in sight.

I do login to Star Trek Online a bit, but like LOTRO, I just wander around and maybe take a trip from Earth to Vulcan. If I were subscribing to STO, it would have also been on the block for unsubscribing.

And now let's circle back to the elephant in the room, the various forms of WoW.

At this point in time, WoW is the only MMO I'm actively subscribed to. Well, kind of: I buy 60 days' worth of WoW at a time, which forces me to review whether I'm enjoying myself every couple of months. And so far, that has been the case.

Among the versions of WoW I've played, the Classic Anniversary servers are what I've played the most. I still poke my nose into the Retail and Era servers, but I've not touched the 2019 WoW Classic progression servers since 2023 or so. About the only thing I did do there was to occasionally login so I knew what my toons originally looked like when I recreated them on the Anniversary servers. 

***

So, that begs the question: what have I been doing?

The most obvious answer is that I've been doing non-gamer things: amateur radio, gardening, repairs around the house and cars. And eventually I'll get back to making more outdoor furniture since the weather has finally heated up.

But what about gamer stuff?

Oh, single player games: Civ IV, Stardew Valley, Stellaris, Age of Empires.

There's a few other games scattered in there, but I've stayed away from long games that require a lot of attention, such as any of the isometric RPGs (Baldur's Gate 1/2/3, Icewind Dale, Divinity Original Sin 1/2, Disco Elysium, etc.). I simply don't have the time to devote to those games, and I realized that when I came to the conclusion that my BG3 playthrough was long enough in the past that I can't even remember what I was trying to do at the time. Maybe I'll get a chance to play these longer form games another time --I'm looking at you, Planescape: Torment-- but that's not about to happen right now.

Yeah, buddy. I'm done with trying to figure it
out, so you'll just have to wait and I'll recreate you later.

That's the biggest drawback to video games made over the past 10-15 years or so: the hours to completion has become so large that you'd have to devote a significant amount of your free time to playing them, and that in the end works against my enjoyment of the game. While I no longer have kids around the house, that doesn't mean I'm swimming in spare time. And these 100+ hour video games demand enough of your spare time that it becomes increasingly difficult to justify devoting that much time to a single endeavor. If I read a book about an hour a night, for books not named Don Quixote** that'd take me about 40-50 hours to complete. So, somewhere between 1-2 months. But a game such as BG3 or The Witcher 3, with their playtimes of well over 100 hours each***, can take me a lot longer than that. I think that when I played the original Baldur's Gate back in 1999 it took me somewhere around 4 months, and that didn't include the expansion.**** 

There are other games I do want to play, such as Dispatch and Stray Gods, but I suspect that I'll get so invested in the story that when difficult choices come along (and from what I understand, you're given a very short period of time to make a choice in these Telltale-type games) I'll likely freeze and simply stop playing. The old line from the Rush song Freewill "If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice" looms large over me whenever I play one of these games. Maybe its my acknowledgement that there are no objectively good or bad solution in these games that causes me to freeze like that, but I do feel bad for all participants in a video game when push comes to shove and I have to let someone down.

I believe this is one of the "easier" choices
in Dispatch. I mean, you could be a selfish jerk
with the left option or have an overinflated ego
in the mid, or just propel the story forward on the right.
Screencap from Dispatch.

***

Does that mean my MMO playing days are winding down?

Not really. Just like everything else, it evolves around here. I expect that as Fall heads toward Winter my MMO playing will go up a bit as I'll be doing less and less outside. Still, you never quite know around here. Who knows what Microsoft might be up to this Fall? More cost cutting? Same thing goes for all of the other game companies, as the "good times" in the post-pandemic world come to an end.

I guess we'll see.

*You know, I still never finished the Agent's storyline. I got mid-way through Chapter 2 and... Just stopped. That's when the pathing issues kicked in, and I couldn't stand it.

**Unabridged version. The abridged version is significantly shorter.

***And I'm here to tell you I do NOT operate at the same speed as the "average" player; I spend way too much time enjoying everything and contemplating my choices before I move forward. What, you thought that I only did that in MMOs? 

****I was loaned the copy of BG1 that I played, so I returned it when I was finished. The guy who loaned it to me kept pestering me to finish it, but I was like "Dude, I have a newborn at home, I'm working 50 hours a week, and I'm wiped. I'm moving as fast as I can."

Now Here's a Pertinent Question

I haven't watched Wowcrendor much the past decade or so, because I'd just not engaged with Retail WoW much since Mists. However, something caught my eye today, and I thought I'd share.

He posted it yesterday, and it can be turned into a broader question about MMOs in general. 

Why do we login to these games and play? Is it inertia, friendship, curiosity, addiction, the goal-oriented nature of things, or something else?

For me, I'm not exactly sure why I login. 

Does that sound strange to you? It sure does to me.

I mean, I may chat with my friends group on the WoW Anniversary servers, but I don't actually play with them. They'd all reached max level ages ago --and some have multiple toons at max level-- while my own toons are L66-L67. And I've already decided that once ny toons start reaching L70 I'm going to probably not play them much at all and instead play other toons. Perhaps that's borderline insanity to the average Anniversary server player who's got multiple raids already under their belt, but I'm kind of happy that I've never pushed myself to that route. Hell, I probably won't even get epic riding at all on any of them*, much less flying. But getting that stuff isn't why I play. (At least I know that much.)

Maybe it is exploring the world that I'm attracted to the most. When I get on LOTRO or SWTOR, I spend more time just putzing around and looking at places than anything else. ESO is the same way. I can engage at my own pace without worrying about catching up with the Jonses or feeling like I'm missing out. I also did a ton of simply exploring places my last year of playing Retail back in 2013-2014, because the Battlegrounds only made me angry and most people I'd known had quit the game. It was pleasant; empty, but also pleasant.

I think I'll turn the question over to you, the reader: What's your reason for playing?

*One L67 toon, my Shaman, doesn't even have "basic riding", because she's got Ghost Wolf form. Sure, it's not as fast as basic riding, but it's free and it's an instant cast spell that has gotten me out of jams numerous times in the past.

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.

What is Valuable and Who Decides it is?

Luke: Is the Dark Side stronger?

Yoda: No... Quicker, easier, more seductive.

--From The Empire Strikes Back

Okay, after being a Classic Andy for what's likely the millionth time since roughly July 2014, I began to have some second thoughts. 

What if I am not remembering things correctly? What if what I like about Classic WoW has an analogue in Retail? What if I'm letting my dislike of the state of the game over a decade ago color my opinions too much?

Well, the TL;DR is that I decided to do something about it:

This screencap is obviously not when she was
brand spanking new. You'd have thought I'd have
remembered to take an initial screenshot, but nope.

I believe this is called "putting my money where my mouth is".

For the record, Livona here was created on Wyrmrest Accord-US, an RP realm with a "High" population. In the era of shared (aka "dynamically merged") servers, this may not mean much. From wowrealmpopulation.com, Wyrmrest Accord has ~10.5k active characters...

Snapshot from wowrealmpopulation.com
as of May 11, 2025.

Although given the current state and capability of Retail WoW to create innumerable alts, this might represent only 500 individual accounts. Okay, I'm kidding, but you never know.

As you can see, Wyrmrest Accord is roughly 33% Alliance. So, not a 50/50 split, but decently sized enough that I ought to expect to see some bodies out and about. Look, I'm no dummy, and Wyrmrest Accord has been around as an active server since 2009, so it's likely that I shouldn't expect that many people in any starter zone. My previous foray into Retail with new toons confirmed that, but I decided I was going to try this for more than just a few minutes.

I figured I'd go to a zone that I was intimately familiar with, and one that hadn't changed since Cataclysm: Elwynn Forest.

It still feels weird entering into Goldshire and seeing
a Flight Point there. I mean, it's a ~3 minute run up
to Stormwind, so you're not saving that much time.

Now, I knew that the Cataclysm changes meant things were different in Elwynn as compared to the OG Vanilla version, but I couldn't remember just how jarring things were. Therefore I decided to approach this as if I were brand new to the game and didn't go to Exile's Reach (or did it once and wanted to start over with the "original" experience). What would make sense? What wouldn't? How would I feel as I played the game?

I discovered very early on that I wasn't going to be able to remain objective, because I did have opinions, and those opinions came to the forefront from practically the 3rd or 4th quest:

You're kidding me, right? Have you seen how full my
health bar is and how little effort it took to revive you?

I mean, look at the comment by the NPC that I healed on the battlefield.* I had hardly even done anything in the game and I was being called a hero. For a person who prefers IRL to fly under the radar, this is somewhat disconcerting; I kept expecting someone to pop out from behind the tree in the screencap and say "HA!! FOOLED YOU!!"

But beyond that, what stood out to me the most about the very beginning in Northshire Abbey was that the quest text there implied you knew things about the pre-Cataclysm era of World of Warcraft**. A new player won't know that, and if you relied too much on what might have been there originally in-game, you'd only confuse a new player further. 

Before you point out that a new player might have been expecting to go straight away and play The War Within, I'm not going there. I don't think that's likely to be the case. A new player to WoW probably has the vague idea that the game is OLD now and they will likely have to start off somewhere else first before they can get to the current expansion. They're called expansions for a reason, and they don't replace the old game, only add to it. 

I did notice that the number of quests in Northshire Abbey were cut by quite a bit, despite all the trainers and other original NPCs still present in the game. Yes, there aren't a lot of quests around the Abbey to begin with, but the speed of completion was still record breaking for me. It usually takes me about 20-30 minutes to be off to Goldshire in Classic Era, but even with me loitering around a bit I was out of there in about 15 minutes. If I'd have pushed it, I could have been done with Northshire Abbey in about 6-7 minutes, and most of THAT would have been spent running back and forth from the nearby vineyard.

So, I was off to Goldshire, and since I was on the way, I thought it a good idea to go visit Stormwind's bank to drop off some of the initial gear that I already had replaced. In Vanilla Classic, if you were lucky you might have gotten a couple of pieces replaced by quest rewards, but in Retail everything was replaced by the time I reached The Lion's Pride Inn. 

I'm not sure what I expected to find in Stormwind, but looking like Classic Era servers right in the middle of TBC Classic wasn't it:

I saw the same toon by the same NPC over the course of
a couple of hours. No, I wasn't playing straight over those
few hours; I just did a half an hour here and there over the
course of the entire day. I had things to do, after all.

I eventually found a few toons around:

Note the Naxxramas Tier set on that Caster beyond
the Darkmoon Faire Mage on the right. I think it's the
Discount Naxx reskin from Wrath of the Lich King,
But I wasn't paying too close attention at the time.

But they never lasted long. And to be fair, they were the only people I actually saw in the game up to that point. I didn't see a soul in Northshire Abbey or Elwynn Forest at first, even though I spread my game time over several hours and a couple of days.

(I will come back to that later.)

After leaving Stormwind...

I see they finally repaired the damage caused
by Deathwing to the entrance. I think it was still in
a state of disrepair in Mists in 2014.

...I resumed questing in Elwynn Forest.

Even though I was L6-7, the "Report to Westfall" quest was already available if I wanted it --I didn't-- so I continued to accumulate the "traditional" Elwynn quests: the Maclure and Stonefield farms, and the nearby Fargodeep Mine. Instead of the giant pig named Princess being halfway across the zone as in Classic WoW, Princess is right in the field beside you as you're talking to the quest giver. Also, unlike Classic WoW, she's not accompanied by two extra members of her "entourage", which means the fight is actually quite simple, despite her size:

Somebody has been feeding that pig Miracle Gro,
because she's a lot bigger now than in Classic WoW.

What got me was that the turn-in text block doesn't look like it had been changed from Vanilla WoW:

"Ma'am, she's right behind me. Can't miss her."

Despite that, the quests I ran into were largely the same as their Vanilla counterpart. Thankfully, you didn't need any knowledge of Vanilla WoW to understand the context, so that worked. But there was one big difference between the Vanilla WoW and Retail WoW versions of the zone:

"What on earth are you doing out here?"

In Vanilla WoW, the mini-boss Goldtooth is at the back of the Fargodeep Mine, which makes it a challenge to get to. Before I hear any complaints about how easy Vanilla WoW really is from a complexity standpoint, I have to point out that typically the Fargodeep Mine is where a toon will likely die for the first time.*** Respawns and the narrow passages make any mine dangerous, but to get to Goldtooth you have to go all the way to the back. Oh, and you likely have to fight a few adds when you pull Goldtooth. Here, being outside the mine and off without any nearby adds, he's pretty much a sitting duck. Even if Goldtooth were at the back of the mine, I doubt he would have posed much of a challenge. Hell, my health bar didn't go beyond the halfway mark until I decided to test how much of a wrecking ball you are with WoW's greatest enemies, Murlocs.

I had to actually go back the other night
to get this screencap, because I was kind of busy
when I last went through here.

Like the jingle for DoubleMint gum, murlocs like to double (or triple) the fun by having multiples attack you. In Vanilla WoW, if the mines don't kill you in Elwynn, the murlocs likely will.**** The Retail WoW version of the Elwynn Forest murlocs did not disappoint me, as I fought packs of 2 or 3 at once. While I didn't die at all, that pack of 3 that jumped me before I could eat and regain health very nearly did me in. If I were more cautious, and if I hadn't had the experience of invincibility up to that point in Retail WoW, I likely wouldn't have pulled that many murlocs.

So there I stood, at L9, after about 90 minutes of actual playing the game, although I might be generous on the 90 minute mark as I was screwing around a bit, making trips to Stormwind to dump stuff into the bank, taking screenshots, and hunting for other people in the area.

I did finally find a few people in Goldshire:

"Love me two times girl
One for tomorrow, one just for today
Love me two times
I'm goin' away...."

I caught these on screencap just before they went "WHOOSH!" up and out of sight.

"Oh, right," I mumbled. "Flying is allowed everywhere."

That being said, I didn't see a single low level toon in Elwynn Forest at all. 

***

So... What did I think?

Let me describe my experience leveling 8 toons at once in Anniversary Classic: when you do the same quest 6 or more times, you find it hard to sit there and read the quest text again. Really, after about the 3rd time doing the same quest I just kind of click through to the end, because unless I want a specific screencap or something, I know what's happening. There have been weeks where I've been doing the same quests in the same zone on ALL of the toons, and it blurs together after a while.

Now, switching to Retail WoW and intentionally wanting to read the quest text to see what differences there are between Retail and Vanilla did not help me. In fact, I felt a stronger pull to simply skip reading the quest text than if I'd been playing Vanilla. Why, you may ask?

This:

I was going to crop it, but you know, it works fine as-is.

Everything I need to know is right on the map, and if I don't care to pull that up on-screen most of the relevant information is up on both the mini-map and the quest tracker on the right. I've never used the Questie addon, so I can't tell you if it has the same information, but this kinda-sorta pushes you into going faster than you may want to. Providing the data to a player without any expectation is one thing, but there's an implicit expectation here that the player will utilize the info to progress as quickly as possible. 

The removal and/or streamlining of quests in Northshire and Elwynn wasn't designed to explicitly unclutter the old zones, it was to provide the player with an overall improved experience. Taking Goldtooth out of the cave means you don't have to risk anything to go in there and eradicate him. You also don't need another body to go in there with you in case you get jumped by 2 or 3 more kobolds. The zone becomes more solo-friendly and faster to progress through as a result. 

By comparison, if you go to Elwynn on the Anniversary servers or Classic Era servers, you'll always find people asking to group up for Hogger. In Retail there's no need, as everything is soloable. Group content is segregated in a separate area, and while you can manually group up the expectation is that you can use the automated processes to handle the group creation. 

And let's talk about the elephant in the room: Retail WoW is old. I mean, really old; like "Morrowind was the current Elder Scrolls game in 2004" old. And the Wyrmrest Accord server, having opened about 16 years ago, means likely 95% or more of the server population is at or near max level. Still, I wasn't expecting there to be nobody in Elwynn Forest. Blizzard could have simply turned off access to the zones entirely and nobody would have noticed. If this were Classic Era --and the lack of population was the reality for Classic Era a few months into TBC Classic-- I'm sure there was an internal drumbeat within Blizzard to simply turn those Classic Era servers off. Nobody was playing, so why keep them turned on?

The thing is, Retail's design provides an outlet for collectors and completionists to go back and poke around and do all the things.

Oh, and allow the rare newbie to come along and try their hand at the game.

I used to rail about how Blizzard, by reworking the Old World for Cataclysm, inadvertently cut off their own pipeline of new players into the game. Instead of a natural progression from Vanilla -> TBC -> Wrath -> Cataclysm, what ended up happening was Cataclysm Vanilla -> Old TBC -> Old Wrath -> Cataclysm. The timeline got screwed up, and the game no longer made internal sense unless you had played the game prior to 2010. Now, I'm not so sure that's the case. 

From what I've played and observed, Retail WoW is relying less on the world and a cohesive story to bring in and keep players and relying more on what has been WoW's traditional strength: its gameplay.

Whatever you may think of the storytelling in Retail WoW, gameplay can make up for a host of sins. WoW's gameplay is far smoother in Retail than in Vanilla; the drops come more quickly, you know what to do without having to engage your brain and figure it out, the feedback loop of quest acquisition and completion is finely tuned, and the game world is designed to progress you through it faster. Hell, as a Rogue I discovered that stealth meant almost no penalty to my traveling speed at all. I was zipping through the Fargodeep Mine --because OF COURSE that's what I'd do-- as if I was running through the thing. I know how long it would take a Vanilla Rogue to make it through (assuming that a Kobold didn't see through my stealth), and here in Retail I was cruising along as if they weren't even there. 

You could say the game doesn't waste your time, because the game doesn't value the time spent in the old content. And if Blizzard doesn't and the existing player base doesn't, why shouldn't you? 

Or maybe, to turn it around, why should you value the old content? Take away the transmog and the achievements, and what do you have? Without external rewards, why go?

Classic WoW has that "why go" question already answered: people make their own fun. The players came up with Hardcore WoW Classic and made it popular before Blizzard jumped on the bandwagon and created official hardcore servers. Classic Fresh became a player driven thing on a Classic Era RP-PvP server before the announcement of the 20th Anniversary servers. I still recall the New Year's Eve 2023 gathering on the Season of Discovery RP server in Stormwind, with people basically having a good time while the countdown to the 2024 was underway.

The thing is, I never hear about people doing goofy things or making their own challenges for old content in Retail WoW. That doesn't mean it's not there, but outside of a few things --such as that Pandaren who makes it to the level cap by picking flowers in the Pandaren starting zone-- all you hear about in Retail WoW is about what's going on in the current expansion. What is keeping Retail WoW players from following in their Classic brethren's footsteps? Nothing, really. 

This loops back to the title of this post. While I progressed through Retail's Elwynn Forest, I kept wondering why the Retail community doesn't consider this content to be valuable. Is it purely conditioning, or is it a "follow the leader" mentality that keeps people from doing things if there isn't a reward attached? Without achievements or transmog, is there no interest?

I'm uncertain you can say this about other older MMOs. I've been on SWTOR and LOTRO --the old LOTRO servers, not the new ones-- and judging by the activity in both MMOs, the intro zones remain very active with new toons. If you told LOTRO players that Ered Luin or The Shire isn't valuable to LOTRO any more, I'm pretty sure there'd be a riot.***** But in Retail WoW, there'd likely be a lot of agreement with the sentiment that Elwynn Forest is no longer valuable to the game.

I don't know the answer to make old content more valuable beyond the carrot approach that Blizzard already has tried. It could be that all of the people who see the old content as intrinsically valuable have migrated off of Retail WoW and onto Classic WoW, and those remaining in Retail don't see the value in old content beyond the metagame rewards that Blizzard offers. If anybody has ideas, I'm all for it, because there's all this content that is basically unused, and it certainly seems like the people most likely to utilize it don't even play this version of the game any more.

***

Oh, and one more thing. I discovered that collecting herbs gives you more XP than fighting enemies at level:

Now I know why that Pandaren thought leveling via gathering herbs was a good idea.

*Because the Priest wasn't doing much of anything, mind you, and sent me in his stead.

**For example, Milly Osworth's initial quest text for Extinguishing Hope starts with "Times like these make me long for when the Defias were still around. The cataclysm has opened a pathway from the Burning Steppes and now Blackrock orcs pour into Northshire Valley!" (From Wowhead, because I forgot to take a screencap.) You would have had to have known about the Defias, or at least be familiar with them to truly understand Milly's comment, and if you were paying attention to the quest text you'd likely have pulled up the map to try to figure out what Milly was talking about. But of course a new player will have Burning Steppes as a big ol' blank space once you found it because you haven't revealed the map yet. The quest text could have easily been tweaked to make it more understandable to a completely new player, removing some specifics that old players knew and just emphasizing the criticality.

***I've played Hardcore WoW Classic. I KNOW.

****And if you survive that, then the Defias Pillagers in Westfall are waiting for you.

*****Assuming people didn't think you were one of several well-known shit-stirrers on the Gladden-US server and dogpile on you for causing trouble.

I'm Just Playing With My Dolls Again

Okay, I don't have any dolls, or what adults would call "action figures".

From TheGearPage. And Spaceballs.

But I do have MMO toons. 

I spent a bit of time yesterday visiting some of my old characters, just to check them out for a bit. Such as Dalaak here, my original SWTOR toon.

Hello, big fella.

Or my original LOTRO toon, Aranandor, when he's not lounging around Bree.

There's also my GW2 toon, Mikath...

I still think that the toons and NPCs in GW2 all look
like the Beautiful People, with flawless skin and
impeccable grooming. The beat up outfit notwithstanding.

Or my friendly Vulcan from STO...

And his entire officer corps, too!

And there's also that crazy Dunmer from ESO...

Those loading screens show the actual armor
worn, not the outfit she actually has on. That's one thing
that Retail WoW does better, at least.

But I guess that this wouldn't be a post about MMO toons if it didn't include the instigator of this post, WoW:

Hey, Lady. Long time no see.

Or even longer, really.

Okay, that wasn't the actual version of WoW I was talking about, but this one...

I occasionally go to the loading screen just to see how long it's been since I last logged into Retail. If I see "Gear Update" listed on all of these toons, I know it's been some months, and likely at least one major/minor patch in the interim.

Those are four of my most played toons on Retail --the original Azshandra isn't there-- but given how things progressed in Classic WoW, it just didn't feel quite right. Therefore, I tweaked the composition a bit:

There. That's better.

The gear (and levels, to be honest) are all wrong from my perspective, but I'm not planning on doing anything about that. At least now the names are correct on that Warband.

There are other toons I have from MMOs I no longer play* such as Age of Conan, Rift, or Neverwinter, that would require me to install the games again to simply take a screenshot of the loading screen. And then there are games that no longer exist, such as Wildstar, ArcheAge, or TERA. I do miss Wildstar, but not the other two.

Even though I really have no desire to play some games (or specific toons), it's nice to pull them up on screen every once in a while just to enjoy how they looked, and the memories they recalled.

*Again, I'm surprised that Age of Conan is still hanging on after all these years.

EtA: Corrected grammar.

EtA: And corrected some more grammar. Sheesh.

Finding that 'Aha!' Moment

Sometimes it takes looking at a game through fresh eyes to appreciate what we've got. 

I'm not sure how this appeared on my YouTube feed, but this relatively short video is worth a watch:

Back in 2009, I think my "aha" moment was questing through The Ghostlands on Quintalan, my Paladin, and finally building up to Deathholme. I happened upon another player struggling through that place, and we teamed up to finish off Dark'Khan Drathir. Neither of us had played before, so it took us a try or two, but we figured it out and defeated the traitor. Coming back from that part of the zone forever changed the game for me, because I finally began to understand the story and what had happened there.

For Vanilla Classic in 2019, being the first time I'd ever played the "original" version of WoW, it was a different moment. It was exploring my way through Wetlands to the Arathi Highlands, to Hillsbrad Foothills. Up north I went, and I found myself quite by accident in the Western Plaguelands. I had... experiences... with doing this before, but while I was stealthed and kept to the mountains, I found I was able to sneak all the way up to the entrance to Scholomance. I had absolutely no business being where I was, as a L28 Rogue, but sneaking there and into other places just whetted my appetite for more. 

In LOTRO, I know where my aha moment was: reaching Evendim and looking up at night and discovering The Pleiades in the sky. SWTOR was a bit different; I think it was when I arrived on my Smuggler at Coruscant and there was a custom cutscene of me slicing a terminal to get into the spaceport unnoticed. It wasn't much, but it was a helluva touch, given that I was trying to get my starship back.

What about you? What was your 'aha' moment in an MMORPG?

Finding People in that Mushy Middle

 Okay, I’m going to say something that ought to be patently obvious: visible activity by other players in an MMO is critical to an MMO’s success.

It’s a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised at the number of games that struggle with that simple notion.

"Hello??!! Anybody here??!!"

I remember when I first started playing WoW, there were people running to and fro in Eversong Forest; not that many, mind you, but enough to get the feeling that there were others inhabiting the world. Then I was taken/escorted to Orgrimmar and… Holy crap was it crowded.* 

But as I leveled, outside of a few critical places that were busy, such as Hillsbrad or Stranglethorn, the number of other players I encountered dwindled until I barely saw another soul in Outland or large sections of Northrend. At the same time, I began to see “Dalaran” more and more as the location of people I encountered and put on my friends list. It wasn’t until I reached where Dalaran floated above the Crystalsong Forest in Northrend that I truly understood just how many people played WoW on my server. 

And, more importantly, where they all were.

After that revelatory moment, I began to keep a closer eye on how MMOs handled the “multiplayer” aspect of their games. 

***

It’s a rather common problem that over an MMO’s lifetime people will gather at watering holes where the current content is located. The problem is that is not where the new players are, so to a new player it certainly seems like nobody –or nearly nobody—is playing the game. 

If you don’t want people around, that’s fine; I’ll be honest in that I kind of prefer the isolation to an extent. However, if you want to do any form of group content, well… Good luck with that.** It’s just that you need people out there and visible in the world to give you the impression that the game is viable.

***

By all indicators, WoW Classic Era doesn’t have a large population. The server selection screen identifies the East Coast Cluster as having a low population, and if you look at the raiding population it’s not exactly overwhelming.

However, if you enter the two capital cities in Classic Era, you’re going to find a decently sized group of people just hanging around, even at 1 AM server time. Given that you periodically return to a class trainer to train, you’re always returning to a major city while leveling. Additionally, the leveling process itself funnels you into the capital cities early on, acquainting you with the fact that this is where people go no matter their level.

The impression it leaves on a new player is that the game is active even at the beginning.

***

Lord of the Rings Online does something similar in that your intro zone and first leveling zone –for clarification purposes they are distinct zones based on your race— may be active, but they all funnel you toward Bree. Bree becomes a major hub within LOTRO itself that is always active, no matter the expansion. While the leveling zones have fewer and fewer players in them, Bree is always omnipresent as a watering hole. Sure, the central location of whatever the current expansion is gets the lions’ share of players at max level, Bree is probably one of every player’s top three hangout locations. Bree shows a new player that yes, people do play the game, and some of them are even at max level out there. LOTRO may not have the activity of even WoW Classic Era, but it is active in its own way.

***

When you get to Retail WoW, however, a lot of the systems put in place back in the Classic game are no longer present or no longer needed. 

Blizzard quickly discovered that people at max level congregated at a central location in the current expac zones, abandoning other areas. Shattrath City and Dalaran was where the people went, and the major cities became ghost towns. History repeated itself in both TBC and Wrath Classic, only more so, as there were very few new players out leveling in the world. Blizzard's solution was to put the focus back on the capital cities in Cataclysm, but it didn't exactly work as intended. Automated systems, declining subscriptions, and server transfers all meant that while some servers had active players where Blizzard wanted them, others did not. And to make matters worse, servers marked "New Players" were frequently those with the lowest population in the WoW ecosystem.

Instead of server merges, Mists of Pandaria introduced connected realms, clustering servers with low population together so that the world would feel like an active world. Blizzard abandoned the idea of returning max level players to the capital cities where low level players could see them, and as time went on more systems were created to get people to max level as quickly as possible. If you were new and wanted to feel like part of a living world, you had to skip over all of the "old" content to get to the new stuff.

***

When J1mmy put out this video:

There was a particular sentence that resonated with my experience in many MMOs since 2009: 

"...but sure enough the second I hit 60 right on cue my pager's going off and I'm getting contacted from people in Stormwind begging me and pleading me to return and start the Dragon Chronicles and so I went back to Stormwind, I got to the dragon place, I think I leveled up like once or twice and then I logged out cause I realized that through that entire experience [of leveling through Battle for Azeroth to Dragonflight] I had yet to talk to a single other human even once."

It's kind of ironic in that for many MMOs the most active you see players out in the world are in the starter areas and the main hubs in a current expansion. 

The starter areas are where new players inevitably begin play***, and the hubs at the current expansion are where all of the max level toons go. But it's once you leave that starter area where things get mushy, and if you don't see anybody around the promise of seeing other people at Endgame can seem like so much vaporware. 

To combat that emptiness you need good gameplay, good systems, and a story that remains valid throughout the leveling experience. And all three demand one thing that a lot of game companies don't want to utilize: a development team's time. It costs too much time and money to make sure the mid-game is taken care of, despite it being a critical part of keeping a player playing your game. It costs far less money --and is more profitable-- to simply put new items in the cash shop rather than plan for the long term.

*And more than a little intimidating. Ironically enough, as soon as I arrived, I was accosted by someone looking for guild signatures. Having someone come up to me out of the blue kind of froze me in my tracks. I have since gotten over my fright of that sort of behavior, but it did take quite a while to do so.

**And the overall lack of players available to perform group content at level is one of the reasons why automatic group finders are a thing.

***Unless you pay to skip those areas.

#Blaugust2024

Time Past

I was eating dinner out with my oldest last night, and talk turned to MMOs. We'd discussed LOTRO for a bit --she mentioned that our house was out of storage-- and about several of the changes made to legendary weapons. Because of the changes, you didn't have to swap out your weapon every so often; you could keep that same weapon as long as you wanted. 

"I still have my original weapon," I mused. "I doubt I'll ever get rid of it."

We covered some of the other changes made to the game over the years, as she'd continued to play LOTRO actively long after it became a niche event for me, then we discussed another MMO we'd played a lot in the past.

"I miss SWTOR," I said, "but that bug keeps me from playing it."

"The companion bug?" she asked.

"Yeah, that one."

"I have that bug too, and it drives me crazy."

"It's the only game I see where a companion just simply does not keep up with me over time. I typically last as far as Alderaan until I can't stand it any more."

"That's a shame," she replied, "because I loved the story in Alderaan."

"I used to think it was a problem with the Radeon graphics cards," I added, "but when we bought my current PC it runs on an NVidia card that's far more advanced than anything we had in 2012 and it still does it."

"I wondered if it had something to do with server congestion."

"There was more server traffic back then, so I have no idea what the problem is. I have seen it on two separate installations of the game, and now three if you're seeing it too. It's not like Bioware hasn't made games with companions before or after, so I don't know what the issue is with this one single game of theirs."

After a brief pause, my oldest added that if there were Classic SWTOR servers ever created, she knows several people who would jump at the chance to play those again.

"Like your brother?"

"Yeah, he disliked how easy the game became."

"I miss the difficulty," I said, taking another bite of my salad. "The Consular end boss in particular was originally really tough until they nerfed it. And even after it was nerfed it was a hard fight."

"Remember the final zone in the Tatooine story?" she asked. "You kept going through this long maze until you got to the end, and now it's 'you take an elevator and you're there.'"

"Yeah. Or remember accidentally touching something out in the field and discovering that was a World Boss spawn point? Or when you'd be assembling a group to take on a World Boss and someone from the other faction would run up and cause the WB to spawn, grabbing it for the other faction?"

"I remember that. Or those Heroic 4 zones out in the field. They're all 2+ Heroics now."

"I haven't set foot in a Flashpoint since they changed the design so that you didn't need a healer or a tank," I confessed, "and you have those self-administered healing points scattered around the instances. But boy did I love the original Flashpoints they had." 

"Yeah."

You know you're getting old when your daughter starts reminiscing about how things were back in the day, I suppose.

There's the Offiicial Reason, and then there's....

Nothing like stirring the pot, I suppose.

One of my side comments in the discussion surrounding my last post alluded to me not playing SWTOR very much was because of the broken companion pathing whenever I play it.  I've switched PCs, replaced CPUs and graphics cards (and manufacturers), and I even have the game installed on an NVMe SSD drive --a far cry from the slowpoke 5400 rpm mechanical drive it was once on-- but all to no avail.

My old Sith Inquisitor is still somewhere in
Chapter 10 of the KotFE expansion.

Here, I started at this entrance area in Nar Shadda, right after you disembark from your ship, and I ran toward the taxi. Literally all I did; no attacking, no shenanigans, no nothing:

Okay, so Senya is now just out of view...

If you look closely at the map, you can see that
she moved about half speed from the screenshot
just above this one.

And now, having arrived at the taxi, I can swing the camera
around and watch her go "Oh shit! I'm coming!"

Imagine if I were in a fight and she were dilly dallying around far behind me. In the original implementation of SWTOR, where some of the story fights were really hard (I'm looking at you, original difficulty of the final boss of the Jedi Consular story), I'd have been dead by the time my companion would have decided to show up. As it is, I haven't died due to these sort of problems, but I can only stand to have to play nursemaid to my companion for as long as it typically takes me to reach the end of Chapter One of the SWTOR Vanilla areas.

There's other changes over the years that irk me, such as replacing the original in game map with that map reminiscent of the map in TERA --and believe me, combat aside, you don't want your MMO to ever be thought of as similar to TERA*-- but that can be remediated by customization. But the companion issue? Despite years' worth of efforts, I can't fix it. I even have a second account that the mini-Reds used to play SWTOR with, and that account has the same damn problem.

***

Why bring this up?

Because I wanted to highlight some reasons why I no longer --or hardly ever-- play some MMOs that really don't end up on people's reviews or blog posts about the games.

Petty? Maybe. They're definitely not in the realm of "I just don't like the direction the story is going" or "the combat is clunky".

Accurate? For me, absolutely. 

Since I've already mentioned SWTOR, let's delve into a few others...

***

Age of Conan's issue is simple: lack of responsiveness when pressing a button.

For all of the issues that Age of Conan has, and believe me, the grindy nature and the bugs do factor into anybody's ability to play the game, the main reason why I don't play Age of Conan anymore has to do with the game's lack of responsiveness when you go to select an action.

Maybe it's because my first MMO was World of Warcraft, which is famous for its smooth user interaction, but there's more to it than just that. Almost every other MMO has no delay between pushing a button and performing the action on screen, but Age of Conan somehow manages to have a noticeable delay between when you select a combat action and your toon actually performing said action. Combat itself is straightforward: you select a certain combo of buttons and then your toon performs the action, but there's just enough of a delay between the selection and the action that makes you think that there's lag in the system. This happened when I first tried the game out back in 2010 or so, and it persisted through the years even though all other MMOs I've played have overcome any lag issues with respect to combat. It's not even a matter of the couple of servers left in AoC being located far away, as they appear to be located in Newark, New Jersey, and the latency I was seeing was around 100 ms. I've played other MMOs with a 100 ms latency without any issues at all, so I don't believe it's the latency either. I think it has to do with the lack of optimization in AoC's code, and for me that's a deal breaker when you're expected to perform more and more complex maneuvers quickly.

***

Lord of the Rings Online's UI is a nightmare for visibility.

As much as some people want modern screen sizes to be supported by LOTRO, I want something a bit more basic: more easily readable UI icons.

If there's one thing that MMOs such as WoW and SWTOR have figured out, it's that making unique enough and easily visible buttons in the UI make for a better playing experience. This is something that Standing Stone has yet to figure out, apparently, as every time I boot up LOTRO and login with the intention to do something more than just wander around Bree and listen to the Friday evening band play on the Gladden server, I'm presented with the blasted icons that tell me absolutely nothing at first glance.

Or second or third glance for that matter.

From my foray last Spring as a High Elf.

It's bad enough that they're various shades of red in my example above, but this is what you get if you've been playing for a while:

This was my old main on LOTRO.
It's been a while since I last played him, and
as you can see some commands have been
removed and I need to correct things.

The washed out coloring matches the rest of the LOTRO color scheme, but given that I have to pay close attention to the details of the icons to distinguish between the various red ones and green ones, that does me no favors when performing actions. 

And can you imagine the nightmare if you were red-green colorblind? (I'm not, for clarity's sake.)

Then we have to talk about the in game maps.

The maps are kinda sorta faithful to the old Pauline Baynes map of Middle-earth (my own copy was passed down to me from my mom, and I gave it to my son):

I was surprised to find that
museoteca has an interactive map
on their site. This was the map that
inspired my exploration into SF&F.

The thing is, there's a difference between being faithful to the original map and making an in-game map actually usable:

This is light years better than what it used
to be, but even when I had a smaller monitor
nothing was sharp.

The original map design was much worse, where everything was washed out brownish colors, and trying to distinguish details was... poor at best. And the quest markers? They were all various colors of rings (for The One Ring) but they were too hazy and poorly placed to make any details out either.

I know that I was looking forward to an overhaul of the UI (as was Wilhelm Arcturus), but more for overall improvements of the clarity of the design. Until then, why bash my head against a wall (metaphorically speaking) when I try to play the game? In as much the same way as I love SWTOR's story, LOTRO's story is extremely well done, and I miss being able to progress in it, but for me it's not worth it to keep playing in earnest when I have these visual issues.

***

Doom and other FPS games have a "simple" problem: I get nauseous when I play them.

From Memecrunch and Step Brothers.

I know I'm not the only one out there that gets motion sick when playing some types of video games, and there's articles out there with advice on how to deal with the problem (such as this one). Still, the only way I've been able to successfully combat this motion sickness is to use Dramamine in the same fashion that I'd take Dramamine before riding on a train or a plane.

Still, I made the decision a long time ago that if I was going to have to be medicated in order to play a video game, I probably shouldn't be playing said video game. It does save me money in the long run, as I don't purchase FPS games, but it does make me sad that I can't play a specific class of video games.

I recently discovered --much to my horror-- that the NASA Moonbase Alpha video game gave me the same motion sickness as FPS shooters did, so what looks like a rather good lunar base simulation is sadly unplayable for me. Thankfully it's free to play, so I didn't lose any money buying it only to discover I can't play it, but still it's a tough pill to swallow.

*I'm pulling this out of my archives just so you know why you shouldn't want to have your game compared to TERA:

Uh, yeah. Interesting enemies you got there.

And no, I'm not posting a pic of the Elin.
I have standards.