The irony about my posting a good old fashioned rant on Tuesday is that I found an inadvertent response from YouTube.
Oh, not an actual response, but one that did mention seasonal content in passing as part of a larger video about whether MMOs were fun.
Yes, this is from Pint. You may know them from their YouTube video about WoW Classic Mages*...
Or maybe their video about attempting to beat all of the Elden Ring bosses in alphabetical order**...
Anyway, the video they posted yesterday was about their experiences with playing MMOs, and how they lost the fun in them, only to slowly regain the fun later.
I thought it a fitting counterpoint to my dislike of seasonal content in that this is what MMOs have become, and Pint's just coming in here and there in MMOs for bite sized content to avoid burnout is actually a pretty good thing.
I can respect that. And it's good to see you're still kicking around, Pint.
*I'll be completely honest in that I recognized all of the stereotypes in this video, and there were points where I laughed my head off, especially their escape from the max level Rogue in Un'Goro Crater. I've SO been there when I was first starting out playing on Stormscale-US back in 2009, and I counted myself incredibly lucky to merely escape with my life from certain encounters.
**I know I'd be abjectly terrible at 'souls' games, but I can appreciate their determination to prove their worth by setting off on a relatively insane quest to do all the bosses in order like that. It got even weirder when they made it harder on themselves by... You know what? Go watch the video, and you'll understand.
Sometimes, I like to wander around MMOs and people watch.
Not in the same way that people like to show off their gear and/or mounts, but just to see people out there and what they're doing.
It's not strictly limited to WoW, but other MMOs can be a bit of a challenge to stay somewhere and just watch the crowd.
Take Guild Wars 2, for instance.
Divinity's Reach is just so large that people there are really spread out, even where the bank is. So, when I want to see a bit of a crowd I go to somewhere smaller (relatively speaking), Lion's Arch.
Not that big of a crowd, but definitely some interesting people. Especially the one twice my height.
There was a crowd here, but by the time I figured out how to hide the UI for a screencap, they'd left.
People pretty much scurry from place to place in most MMOs, with a few just hanging out. Doesn't matter if it's GW2 or even Elder Scrolls Online: people are going to chill and do their thing.
Such as visiting the bank.
Or crafting.
Classic WoW may have more people in the central watering holes, such as Stormwind on the Anniversary servers...
I didn't bother hiding the friendly toon names.
But for my money the place that I find most bizarrely fascinating is on Retail WoW. Specifically, Goldshire in Moon Guard.
It may not be quite as busy as SW as seen above...
But that's because the party is inside.
In a very real sense, the inside of The Lion's Pride reminds me a LOT of Atlanta's DragonCon SFF convention. The saying "If you not getting laid at DragonCon you're not trying" is a very real one.
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2024.
Still, Goldshire on the Moon Guard server is the sort of place where you just kind of run on through rather than stop to gawk at the sights, lest you actually get hit on for some ERP action. And believe me, there's plenty of WTF stuff going on to gawk at. Here's just a few things I saw the past couple of days when I buzzed back and forth between Northshire and Stormwind:
Tons of dead bodies, just lying there.
Then whatever the hell this is.
And WTF is THIS??
By comparison, the few people I saw in Stormwind were relatively normal. Like stumbling in on some legendary questline ending (or something like that):
And then there's the holy-crap-are-THEY-oversized people:
I only came up to her waist.
And on this one I was thigh high.
There's got to be some sort of buff/potion/spell that does this, and I was quickly inspecting the toon on top to see what sort of buff she might have on when I realized she was looking at me, so I quickly ended THAT and just ran onward. Now, I know that you can tweak the game to make yourself absurdly large for brief periods, such as using Spellsteal against the Winterspring Furbolgs to steal the Winterfall Firewater buff, because I've done that before:
Here's Neve after playing around with the Furbolgs.
The thing is, that buff is very temporary, on the order of a few minutes, so that doesn't last long. Whatever those two toons were up to was not that.
Anyway, there were a few "normal" looking toons in Retail Stormwind, but nowhere close to the crowd in Goldshire:
I ought to get onto LOTRO and see how Bree is doing these days. It used to be busy, no matter the time of day.
Alas, I did not win the $1.80 billion Powerball jackpot last Saturday.
Of course, there's the small matter of actually purchasing lottery tickets if you want to have a chance at winning.* I'm very much in the "if the winnings are high enough I'll buy a few tickets" camp, but that mentality also wars with a line an old friend from college used to say about lotteries: "Lotteries are a tax for people who can't do math." I'm an irregular-at-best lottery player, although I did buy a few tickets on Saturday.
Even if I had won you probably wouldn't have noticed any changes to the blog, because I'm not the sort of person who runs around showing off what riches they have. (And before you ask, no, I'm not rich.) Luckily for me, I live in a state where the identity of major lottery winners can remain private, so there's that at least. I used to joke that the way you'd find out if I won the lottery was not because I bought a new car or something like that, but that I finally got some major repairs done to the house.
Growing up and living in the Midwest has given me a very specific set of values where the ostentatious display of wealth and/or success is frowned upon. Obviously, that Midwestern mindset has declined a bit over the years as pop culture has penetrated even the most remote parts of the country, but at the risk of sounding once again like an Old Man Yelling 'Get Off My Lawn (tm)', I'm a not a fan of the "Oh, look at me!" sort of mentality.
Sure, dress the way you want. I'm fine with that. Hell, I admire people with a fashion sense (such as Kamalia) that I don't have; if you want to see what you can do with fashion in an MMO such as WoW, go read her blog Kamalia et Alia, because she is amazing at what she can pull off. But if you go running around acting "Hey, look at ME!", I'm more likely to grouse along the lines of quite a few old football coaches (I'd heard it said by Paul Brown) by thinking to myself "Act like you've been there before."**
It needs to be said that I'm not immune to that "look at me" mentality.
Every time someone comments or whispers to me when I'm on Joanofdark about how much they love the name, I get this small flush of pride. Then I frequently tell them that a friend came up with the name and I just ran with it. Okay, I don't have to do that --and I've simply accepted the compliment as-is a lot of times just like above-- but I do feel guilty otherwise.
***
A lot of multiplayer video games tend to utilize the peer pressure inherent in groups to sell things to their players. Okay, this isn't exactly confined to video games since you see it everywhere, even in what smartphone you use, but since I play video games more often than I use my cell phone*** I see it there more often.
It's just like people showing off their mounts in MMOs:
Although I'd hesitate in calling a giant, floating, cigar-chomping face a "mount".
And yes, definitely a mount, but I was never really a fan of their brethren back in Wrath days. All it takes is one mounted toon standing on top of a mailbox, blocking your access, for you to understand.
It's not merely a Retail WoW thing, because I've seen people showing off their gear and mounts in all sorts of other MMOs where people congregate. Oh, and there's plenty of MMO pundits out there who love to mention that a big motivation to getting gear is to show it off. (You know who you are, YouTube creators who never read this blog.) To me, that's akin to going out on a date with your spouse or significant other primarily to show off how great a catch they were. Which says a lot more about you and your priorities than it does anything else.
In the end, this is just me grumping a bit about priorities. I can't make people change, and really I shouldn't be able to anyway. I guess it's an acknowledgement that I'm going to do my own thing, other people will do theirs, and that'll be that.
*That reminds me of an old joke I once heard that goes something like this version I got from the Harvard website:
A deeply religious man, whom I will call Dave, finds himself in dire financial trouble. He prays earnestly to his God to help him out of his predicament. "God, I'm about to lose my car. Please help me. Let me win the lottery." Lottery night comes, but sadly, Dave is not the winner.
Things go from bad to worse. Without a car to get to work, Dave loses his job. Without a job, his mortgage is foreclosed on, and he loses his home. Without a home, his wife leaves him, taking the kids. After each horrible step in the mounting crisis, he pleads with God to let him win the lottery, but he never does.
Finally, broke, hungry, living on the street, he tries again. "God, please, my life is a wreck. I have no car, no home, no family. Please let me win the lottery just this once so that I can turn my life around. I beseech you."
Suddenly, a flash of light rends the sky, and the voice of God echoes down from the heavens. "Dave, meet me halfway. Buy a ticket."
**The late North Carolina University head basketball coach Dean Smith built a culture that emphasized teamwork. After one of his players would score, that player would turn and point to his teammate who passed him the ball. It was a visual acknowledgement that the basket was a team effort, not simply an individual one.
***No, I don't play games on my phone. To me, my phone represents the 24x7 on-call nature of my work, and I try to use it as little as possible. However, my kids are far more used to utilizing their phones for keeping in contact than I am, so I've grown used to smartphones in my life more than I'd like. Although I primarily use a smartphone to listen to music and/or podcasts when I can't have access to my stereo or PC.
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.
The other day I received a request via email to fill out a survey for Blizzard.
From the email I received.
I figured, sure, why not, so I logged into the survey website* and pulled up the survey to fill out.
The first question, about whether I played World of Warcraft, elicited a "does a duck like water?" response from me. I was in the process of clicking "yes" when the brief thought of "what if they meant Retail as opposed to Classic?" crossed my mind, but I ignored it and finished clicking. After all, I had actually logged into Retail on Tuesday or so to check out something from Neve**, so I could truthfully say that I had "played" Retail.
I should have listened to my inner voice, since the next question made it plain they were talking about Retail WoW: it was a query about what I thought of The War Within. (And going back later to take that screencap above confirmed that yes, it was about The War Within and I completely missed that.)
Well, I thought, I'd just select the "Does Not Apply" or "No Opinion", and...
There wasn't an option for either of those responses. Just a number scale.
I wasn't going to be one of those people who assign terrible responses just because I don't play the current expac, so I just selected the "Mediocre" responses and kept going.
More and more numerical rating questions came at me, all about aspects of The War Within. Although at one point the questions turned to the various types of activities I could participate with in-game and I truthfully answered "No" to all of them. Then, for some reason, the survey believed I was a PvP-er and gave me a bunch of those questions too.
It wasn't until questions finally surfaced about the latest patch (Undermined) --and what patches The War Within I have played before-- did I finally have the option to select "Did Not Play" or an equivalent.
Then I received an open ended question about repeat activities in Retail and what would encourage me to participate in those activities, and I finally got the chance to explain a few things. Yes, I wrote, I play WoW, but I'm primarily a WoW Classic player. If I play Retail, it's usually just to login and putz around a bit. I'm not interested in repeat activities because I hate it when a game becomes a job. I learned this in TBC Classic, when due to external pressure Dailies turned the game into job, and I play WoW to have fun, not because I don't have enough work in my life.
I also got an open ended question about what to change about the experience that could be improved, and I certainly had an answer to that one given that I did just run the gauntlet of crap you have to work though when you come back after being away for months (or years). I suggested a button you could click on the Warband login screen where you can prevent all of the login pop-ups from happening. If all you want to do is login and explore, having to get rid of "do this" and "do that" is annoying and makes me want to logout and do something else.
After submitting that last response, I got a "I'm sorry, it seems you're not the primary person for this survey."
"I could have told you that," I grumbled.
The survey then ended abruptly, and that was that.
***
If there's one thing that Blizzard seems to have trouble with, it's the concept that someone might play WoW but not the current Retail expansion.
That was pretty obvious by the lack of options to simply respond with "Did Not Play" or "Not Applicable" or "No Opinion". You'd also have thought that the option of saying "Do you mean Classic or Retail WoW?" at the beginning would have provided a proper clarification to the survey, but they didn't. So either they were lazy or they didn't consider it to be a real option. I'd like to think it's the former, but it's most likely the latter. People who design surveys ought to be able to provide sufficient clarifying questions to weed out people earlier than at the end of the survey.
This leads into another another issue that the survey highlighted is that Blizz isn't sure what to do with people who play Retail WoW in a non-standard way. Sure, those people play Retail WoW and likely even own the current expansion, but they don't actually "play the game". When people say that, what they really mean is "play the game properly" or "play the game as-intended".*** Blizz can't seem to break out of that trap themselves, despite them harping on how important the world itself is to the game. From what I saw, the focus of the survey wasn't what worked and what didn't (despite the email), but "How do we get you to try all of the things? Is it you don't know where to go? Do you need reminders? Do we need to make it easier to get to the repeatable activities? Can we improve the UI so that it's easier to do all the things?"
The final issue I see Blizzard having trouble with is that they're stuck in Diablo-style tunnel vision: quickly get to the end, then do repeatable things. Whether you call them "repeatable activities" or "dailies" or "world quests" doesn't change the result: all Blizz seems to know what to do is to create things you do in WoW over and over and over. And Raids/Mythic+. That's partly a player driven issue, because the player base expects it. Hell, I look at the number of times my Questing Buddy or I have gone into instances, hoping for that elusive gear drop --over the course of a single day-- and I realize that we are part of the problem too.
But could you imagine a World of Warcraft expac leveling experience that takes 100 hours to complete? Or more? I'm pretty sure the collective heads of the player base would explode, because as a whole they're not interested in a deep immersive experience, but different types of speed running to get to the various forms of endgame as quickly as possible.
Here's the thing: my first experience leveling in WoW took me well over 150 hours to go from L1 through L80 back in Wrath of the Lich King as (mostly) a Holy Paladin. And I loved it. That long journey shaped my opinions of MMOs, fair or not, and it impacts what I've done since. I've found I prefer the long game, with self-directed play exploring the nooks and crannies of the world, rather than playing optimally. It's kind of sad that even the development staff simply don't appreciate that aspect of their own game.
*After having had friends recently get hacked and one of my own cards end up on a dark web site, I've decided to be more cautious about email than I usually am and skipped clicking on links like this. I've found that if companies want me to fill out info, I can go to their website independently and find it there.
**I can't remember what it was, honestly. It wasn't anything she had in her bank or gear, that's for certain, but it might have been something like what quests she still had in her Quest Log. Whatever it was, the results weren't interesting enough for me to follow up with a post on it. (Yet.)
***What I've found over the years is that the quickest way to get a person to show their biases in WoW is that when they ask what I do, I tell them "Not much; I just goof off for the most part. Don't raid, don't PvP, don't RP, don't bother with the quests or story." There are people who say "Hey, good for you! Have fun!" But then there are a subset of people who simply can't fathom that and try to get me to do different things. "Hey, let's go do this! Let's do that! You HAVE to try this other thing!" And I've seen more than my share of YouTubers talk up the vast number of things to do in WoW, but when the rubber hits the road they're all about the Endgame in it's various forms (I include alts as an Endgame activity).
This past week I wasn’t at home. No, I wasn’t at the hospital again, and nobody that I knew was in the hospital either.* I also wasn’t on vacation.
I was traveling for work.
It poured in Charlotte on Monday and delayed my connecting flight by about 45-50 minutes.
If you know anything about me, I’m not a big fan of travel. A lot of that has to do with the cost, because we really couldn’t afford to take regular vacations while the mini-Reds were growing up, but there was also the proximity to other people and the overall lack of actual “relaxation” when on “vacation”. To me, vacation was a thing you do to just not be in any hurry. To unwind. If you want to do nothing, do nothing. To others --glances sidelong at wife-- vacation is more about going places, seeing things, and above all keeping to a schedule to see said things. When you’re waking up at 6 or 7 AM because [insert locale here] opens at 9 AM and “we’d better be ready to go ASAP!!!”, that’s not a vacation to me. That’s work in just another form.
(My dad insisted on that sort of vacation too, because he loved to golf and wanted to make his tee time when we were on vacation, so maybe that resistance to having a regimented vacation is deeply ingrained in me.)
I never really travelled for work in the past, either. For starters, I never had to. The closest I ever came to having to travel for work was when my old team over 20 years ago had a Disaster Recovery drill and we were going to have to travel to the East Coast to conduct it at a remote site. I was slated to go until I got bumped for another person, which was fine with me.** I was then slated to go on the next DR drill, until I got moved into another team (much to my surprise). And that team –and line of work—never required me to travel at all.
So, when I was told I was going to have to travel for work for this past week, it caught me by surprise.
I’m not here to talk about the work itself, because that’s a big no-no, but to muse about other things regarding travel from the perspective of someone who simply doesn’t travel that much. And maybe I’ll tie this into gaming or something.
***
The last time I flew on a plane, I was one of the first people to get patted down by the new rules regarding air travel in a post-9/11 world. That was to attend a friend’s wedding down in Houston, and we struggled to come up with the money to pay for the plane ticket and the hotel room. If I were at the software development job I held in the late 90s, I wouldn’t have been able to afford to go, but where I was employed at by then I could afford it --barely. Outside of the wedding itself, my traveling partner and I didn’t do that much. We saw the Fellowship of the Ring in the theater***, we went to the wedding, and we kind of just hung around the hotel room. And that was it. Beyond that, I had more memories about the new-fangled Garmin in the rental car than I did of Houston itself. The city was just so large and so spread out that I really had no memories of the place.
I had more memories of the airport, because at the time the Greater Cincinnati International Airport (CVG)**** had our flight at a separate terminal for a low cost carrier far away from the rest of the airport itself. You had to take a bus from the main terminal to get there.
And like I mentioned above, it was on the flight home from Houston that I got the detailed pat-down process.
So, with all those memories in my head, I got authorization from work to travel and booked a flight, a rental, and a hotel room.
***
Without further ado, here's my notes...
Tech Has Transformed Travel -- Much Like Everything Else
Well, duh. Tell me something I didn’t know.
I just didn’t realize just how much tech has transformed things. Even 23 years ago I was going online for air tickets --Orbitz, anyone?-- but now I can perform all the functions of a travel agent far easier than I ever could in the past. Travel agents still have their part to play, but they’re more of a niche market than they were before.
Still, tech has also transformed the travel experience in other ways. The number of people I saw using their phones or tablets during a flight was simply staggering. When I last flew smartphones and tablets didn’t even exist, and yet at the airport and in flight they were everywhere. People no longer had to be glued to the arrivals and departures screens at the airport, their phones could provide them an up to the minute status on their flights, and even if their flight was rerouted to another gate. With all this tech, the flying experience became very, well, ordinary. Everything was presented to you to allow you to operate in the most efficient manner possible, in much the same way that some addons such as Questie do in MMOs. Trying to avoid the “easy mode” version of doing things takes more effort now than simply just going with the flow.
I Now Know Why Noise Cancelling Headphones are a Thing
I had a connecting flight at Charlotte, North Carolina, to my final destination in Florida.***** That meant I had flights between Cincinnati and Charlotte on an Embraer/Bombardier CRJ900. I knew next to nothing about the CRJ900, so I discovered that some people disparagingly refer to the plane as a “flying trash can with wings”. This did not inspire any confidence in me, but at least there are tons of them flying, so… How bad could it be?
Not that bad, but that’s because I had really low expectations based off of reading the info I found online. The seats were not very good, but they didn’t make my butt ache, and I could at least relax a bit. One of the armrests wouldn’t go up to let me get out more easily, but at least it was in the correct position for flying. The person in the seat next to me said something about the lack of comfort, but I mentioned “it could be much worse” to which he heartily agreed. I was also able to fit easily into the seat without feeling squished, thanks no doubt to my overall weight loss. Like I said, not bad.
Except for the cabin noise. Holy crap was the noise bad.
The culprit.
I had my earbuds snuggly in place, but that cabin noise generated by the jet engines was pretty horrific. I could barely hear whatever I was playing –it was a podcast about the history of kissing, of all things—unless I turned the volume way up. It was then that I realized that noise like this was what led people to creating noise-cancelling headphones, not the press of crowds at malls and other enclosed places.
When we landed, I took note of the various shops in the concourse at Charlotte and just how many of them had headphones for sale. And not just headphones, but the expensive noise-cancelling variety. If nothing else, those shops do know their clientele.
My other flights were on newer Airbus jets, and while those jets were significantly quieter, my old Honda Accord is quieter than these jets were. (If you’ve ever driven a ‘90s era Honda, you know it is NOT quiet.) If I do this sort of thing again, I might have to get a pair of noise-cancelling headphones just to preserve my ears.
All These Lists and I Still Forget Things
I’m pretty sure this isn’t limited to me, but I’d made lists to check off prior to my departure to prevent the one thing I was most likely to do: forget something. While it was plenty obvious that I needed to have enough underwear or shirts packed, other items such as my mouse and my battery for my laptop might easily be missed if I hadn’t written them down, so I made a point to put them on the list. When I finally got settled in my hotel room for that first night I’d congratulated myself for a successful first part of the trip when I realized I’d forgotten my toothbrush.
Yes, I was able to easily obtain another toothbrush from the front desk, but since I actually HAD ‘toothbrush’ on my list, you’d have thought I’d have actually PACKED it away. But I didn’t. So I spent most of the rest of the trip wondering just what else I’d forgotten in spite of putting everything I needed down on the lists.
So far, I haven’t found that out yet, although I did forget to bring my laptop charger with me on my last day at the client office. That made things a bit dicey on making my laptop last for 5-6 hours on one charge, but I somehow pulled that off.
I Can Tolerate Being in a Sardine Can for a Little While
See my comments about the Embraer/Bombardier CRJ900 above.
What, you want more? Okay, right.
I’m not a germaphobe by any stretch of the imagination, but being shoehorned into a jet plane –no matter how luxurious or spacious—doesn’t endear me to my fellow man. Little eccentricities, such as an occasional tic-tic-tic sound made by one passenger who can’t sit still or that teenager hunched over, hoodie pulled up, playing a video game on their phone, can get under my skin. Putting on earbuds and losing myself in music or a podcast helps a lot, but that immersion is lost when you open your eyes and a woman in front of you starts watching one of the Puss-in-Boots movies.
The flight was just long enough, however, for that to not be a problem. If the flight were much longer… Maybe not so much. The seats were hard and had little padding, so my butt was falling asleep just as we descended to land (each way). If we had to wait in the air, it would have been kind of miserable. The two Airbuses were much more comfortable to sit in, although there were more seats from side to side, and because of the increased width there was greater overall headroom.
I’m Happiest with a Book
I knew I would likely get air sick if I tried to read on the flight, but I brought a couple of books with me to read. One was that Ham Radio License Manual I’ve been studying, and the other was The Color of Magic, Terry Pratchett’s first Discworld novel. I spent most of my down time before bed and at the gate waiting for my flight reading the latter, so expect a post out of that fairly soon. However, after my last work day, I discovered a bookstore near my hotel. So how did I spent that last evening?
Yeah, you knew that was coming.
I didn't buy anything, but I certainly enjoyed the time I spent there.
You Can Find Inspiration in the Most Crowded Spaces
In the middle of Charlotte’s concourse there’s a food court. And in the middle of the food court, an airport employee played the piano.
He played some show tunes and popular hits, but I finally spoke to him after he played the Theme to Hill Street Blues. I’m old enough to remember when that show was on NBC back in the 1980s, and its theme music, by Mike Post#. I walked up and gave him a tip and thanked him for that piece. He told me that once in a while he gets some recognition by a passerby when he plays that tune, so he was glad he made my day.
I then asked him what he liked to play. Some James Bond among other movie themes, because people liked to hear it here.
“But what about at home? What do you play when nobody’s listening?”
“Oh! I mostly play religious pieces.”
“Yeah,” I mused, “I can see where that might be a bit obscure to be played here. Then again, Hill Street Blues is pretty obscure nowadays too.”
I thanked him and headed on to my gate with a bounce in my step.
I realize he was paid to play for the crowd, but it was nice to have a personal touch when walking through an impersonal (and under construction) transportation hub.
The TSA Lines aren’t that Bad
There, I said it.
I was thinking I was going to get held up in the same manner I did back in the day, but that didn’t happen. The TSA line went quickly, and I did what I should always do: just tell them the info that they want to know, and don’t do anything else. If they ask, THEN you can say something.
It only took me 50 odd years to figure this sort of thing out.
Still, I did have issues in that no two TSA lines at different airports are alike.
At one location, the TSA checkpoint didn't bother having laptops out of the bags, and they took your photo ID and ran it through their system. At the other location, the TSA chekpoint had you remove your laptop and you had to run your photo ID through their system yourself. Oh, and the place to put your photo ID in was different than the other location. I spent probably a good 20 seconds before the TSA guy explained exactly where to put your card in. And then I felt quintessentially stupid.
For a guy who actually works in IT, I have major blind spots with using tech.
The Airline People are Tired of Your Shit
Or maybe it was because they had to deal with some less-than-charitable people in front of me, but I took note of how they aggravated the AA employees as the desk and kept my conversation to a minimum.
Bing bang boom. Done.
I didn’t get a smile even once, but to be honest I was just happy to not get harangued.
I want to make perfectly clear that I was not picking on American Airlines employees here: I did note that other airlines’ employees had the same “we’re DONE with this” look on all their faces, so it wasn’t just American Airlines for certain. And it could have been that at 10:30 AM the morning rush was over, so they had just begun to unwind a bit after the stress of the morning. Still, I made a point to not piss off those in power.
And don't get me started on the airline employees who got (rightfully) pissed off by people dropping travelers off/picking them up in the "drive only" lane. Or other shenanigans that I watched while I had free time. When it was time for my wife to pick me up after I returned to CVG, I prayed hard that she would just pull in to the side and let me hop right on into the car, which she did.
I Am Not Familiar with Modern Cars
You may laugh, but our “new” car is a 2010 Honda CR-V. Backup cameras weren’t standard until 2017, and large giant infotainment screens weren’t standard on non-luxury or sport vehicles until around the mid-2010s. My own car wasn’t even built in this century, as that old 1997 Honda Accord just keeps right on chugging along and will not die.
So, what did the rental agency give me?
A brand new Toyota Prius.
This thing. From Fremont Toyota.
I got into that car, sat down, and couldn’t figure out the gear shift for a good 3 minutes. Once I got to the hotel, I spent a couple more minutes trying to figure out how to put the damn thing into Park.
Narrator: It was a button he had to push. Same with the parking brake.
Cardwyn: So, he was as clueless as I would have been! And I didn’t grow up around those things!
Me: SHUT UP, both of you!! I don’t want to have to tell my therapist that I’ve been hearing voices again!
Cardwyn: What voices?
Me: …
It took until mid-week before I felt comfortable driving the car. Luckily for me the thing sipped gasoline, so filling up the tank before I dropped it off was no big deal, but I really had a hard time dealing with the sloped windshield and rear window. You’d think I was driving a Lamborghini the way it was angled, but no, that was done for aerodynamics. The interior was both spacious and cramped due to the seat angles and the roof aerodynamics, and that also bothered the hell out of me. Still, given the number of hybrids and true sports cars on the road where I was at, driving a Prius kind of blended in.
The Bag Self Check-In System Defeated Me
You know how I said above that for a guy who works in tech I sure have problems with it? Yeah, this again.
I successfully avoided the self check-in system when I traveled out of CVG, but when I went to return home, there was no avoiding it. I was directed to it straight away, and once I received the tag, the instructions weren't exactly clear as to whether I would need to peel off all of the backing or only part of it. Thanks to the helpful airline employee hovering over me --she must have sensed a tremor in the Force-- it was only a partial removal. Then I had issues putting the damn suitcase on the scale at the right angle. Again, read the effing instructions, Red.
The airline employee admitted it was a new system and people were slow in adapting to it, but if I have to travel again I'd better get used to it.
***
In the end, I'm glad I got that experience out of my system, and outside of my inherent paranoia I think I managed.
But.
I really prefer driving by car. REALLY prefer it. While jets and trains can get me there quicker, cars allow me to be completely in control. And if speed isn't an issue, car travel allows me to feel the scope of the world a bit better than flying by jet ever would. If anything, flying by jet makes the world feel smaller; that's what it's supposed to do, but I don't know if that's necessarily a good thing. Having a feel for the true scale of the world means that you can understand how people may be the same but they are also far more different than we care to admit.
The easiest way to describe it is to look at MMOs: fast travel is more convenient and if you're under time pressure it's much better to utilize, but if you want a feel of the true scale of the game world, slower methods of travel give you that in spades.
*At least as of writing this post.
**My son was about 3 months old and his big sister not quite 3 years old, and I wasn’t about to leave my wife for a week when it took both of us to keep things going at the house. Plus we were having issues with our neighbors, and I wasn’t about to let that get out of hand while I was away.
***The second time for me; my wife and I saw it a few months before then.
****I still kind of refuse to call it by its official name –The Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky International Airport—because that was put in place by the airport board. As the airport is just across the Ohio River in Kentucky, the airport board is primarily stocked with individuals from Northern Kentucky. The city and Ohio in general have mere token representation on the board, so they have no real say in what’s going on. In a way, that’s a good thing, because the airport board is kind of infamous locally for being greedy and short-sighted when it comes to managing the interests of the airport and the region.
*****Astute and air travel-savvy fliers will note that means I flew American Airlines, since Charlotte is a major AA hub.
#Mike Post also wrote the theme music to Law and Order, Magnum P.I., The Rockford Files, Quantum Leap, The A-Team, L.A. Law, and The Greatest American Hero among others. My freshman roommate at college had a Mike Post CD which featured both his television work and his “regular” pieces. I really wish I knew what happened to my cassette copy of that CD.
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?
We are now into September, but as far as weather goes that doesn't mean much.
What it does mean is that Blaugust is over, and I participated without ever signing up or mentioning it directly in a post.
Yeah, it's kind of hipster-ish to participate by not participating, but I've found that when I do explicitly participate in something by signing up for it --I'm looking at you, NaNoWriMo-- I never actually get close to actually doing much. Therefore, I decided if I was going to try to post once per day for an entire month, I was going to do it my way and without drawing any sort of attention to myself.
When you throw in the several trips that I've had this month, including the Big One up to Milwaukee, I'm surprised that I pulled it off. Another funny thing is that since I don't play Retail WoW, I didn't rely upon the new expansion's release to fill my content. Based on the tags I put out, I only had four posts that referenced Retail WoW, the second one being the only one that addressed my dislike of the direction the Modern game has taken.**
I kind of wrote about things that were of interest to me, such as re-discovering some of the radio material in storage and some of the adventures I had as people returned to Classic Era and began playing Alterac Valley once more.
What you don't see very much of are adventures pertaining to more "traditional" MMO activity, such as leveling, questing, raiding, dungeon running, etc. I don't level alts much at all, which I already covered, and I don't really want to bother with a regular raiding schedule either. I'm fine with simply hanging around and not doing much; this is a form of social media that I'm fine with. If I did play Retail WoW right now, I'd probably be one of those people who would just level a toon by fishing, because I really don't need to rush out and do all the things (or see the content).
I mean, I am that guy who leveled a toon to max level in TBC Classic by not setting foot in Outland.
I still have the proof of that.
Actually, that does bring up the question as to how slow can you intentionally level in Retail WoW and still be considered to be "leveling"? I know of DoubleAgent and their factionless Pandaren who has leveled to max level by just gathering herbs and ore in the Pandaren starting zone, but is that really the slowest way to level? Can you go even slower? If you go even slower, you could probably level so slowly that by the time you get to the starting point for the current expansion the price of The War Within would be 75% off or more. When I last was in Retail, I leveled the original Azshandra from scratch at the beginning of Mists, and by the time I was ready to head out to Pandaria it was nine months or more after release. Actually, if you level slow enough, you could level so slowly that you don't even have to pay for The War Within, because the pre-patch for the next expac would be released.
Hmm... I wonder...
Of course, I could just fish in Classic Era and do effectively the same thing.
***
Still, looking ahead, September is going to be busy all by its lonesome. I'll be working on the deck some more, probably going to at least one of my youngest's concerts down at UofL, and my wife is already getting itchy to visit our oldest up in Milwaukee.
And somewhere in the middle of all that I'd like to actually relax a bit.
**As for the 'Green Eggs and Ham' crowd of 'try it and you might like it', I've seen enough cutscenes to know that I don't like it without playing the game at all. (In fact, I didn't 'play' the game much from early Cataclysm until I officially stopped playing in 2014, but I instead only played Battlegrounds.) My dislike of the PvE game has nothing to do with how a class feels or the quest design or systems or anything like that; I'm sure if you play that you'll like it. I simply don't like playing a godlike character. Well, that and after 20 years I begin to ask the "doesn't this seem like an awful lot of world-ending events to happen to one world over the course of 20 years?" type of questions. I'm sure there's some in-game handwaving there too, like "well, all the other titans are dead so Azeroth is this one special place where they can be birthed once more." (I'm going off of The Last Titan as the name of the last of the trilogy of expansions; I have no understanding of anything regarding the story since... probably late Cataclysm?)
EtA: Grabbed the wrong screencap. The original screencap was for me hitting L68, as proof that I could go to Outland. I replaced it with the one for L70 itself.
I realize that the title of this post isn't exactly a new sentiment, but I was thinking about it while I was watching a YouTube video over lunch.
Yes, Megan's posts on social media had started popping up in my YouTube feed, and the "Life of an English Teacher in Japan" shorts were incredibly quirky and fun to watch. That Megan was another member of Team Red ("Go Team Red!") also endeared me to her.
Well, today she dropped the video you see above, and it's a ~21 minute video about why she left what seemed to be her dream job.
The TL;DR is that yes, it was her dream job, but it wasn't what she hoped it would be.
From housing issues --and issues left by her predecessor-- to dealing with the loneliness and the bureaucracy (not to mention the language barrier), there was a lot to work through.
I always had a lot of respect for people who left what they'd known to come to a foreign land and make a new life for themselves, but for every success story there are a lot more stories that are like Megan and Ben's. When you couple that to the knowledge that no matter what you do and how much you succeed you are still considered "the other"... Yeah, that is something that can be hard to accept.
***
To bring this around to gaming, these are themes that can be explored in any rich game world. Now that I think about it, they have been explored in the Dragon's Age and Mass Effect games, but in MMOs not quite so much.
The thing is, I'm not quite sure whether it would be better to be explored in fiction or in an MMO itself. If you put in quest chains in an MMO, you run the risk of simply telling rather than showing the problems that are faced by people who are The Other. And MMOs aren't typically well known for showing rather than telling, because they do often seem to subscribe to "The School of Massive Info Dumps" when presenting quests.
I honestly don't know the answer to this conundrum.
I've been asked this question periodically in MMOs by a variety of people, especially when we need someone like a tank or healer in a group format, and I've typically waved the question off with a "I just like playing Mages".
Of course, when I started playing WoW back in 2009, the answer would have been that I just liked playing Paladins --I think I have three in Retail at this point in time*-- but by the time I quit playing Retail in 2014 I'd switched to playing Rogues. That style of toon persisted through Age of Conan, Elder Scrolls Online, and into my early forays into Classic WoW, but I have since returned to being primarily a Mage or Mage-like player and I don't deviate from that very much at all.
If you'd have given me the opportunity to play an Elemental Shaman in TBC Classic --and I did request that-- I would have likely continued playing that Shaman a lot longer. After all, of the three specs a Shaman has, Elemental is the DPS caster type**, the most Mage-like of the Shaman specs.
But when I hear about people who, to get ready for a new expansion to whatever MMO they're playing, plot out the leveling and preparation process for all of their toons, I simply don't grok that. If you like that, great, but to me that looks too much like work.
Maybe it's because I simply don't love these games as much as other people do.
Me: We've discussed this already, Card. I'm not saying I dislike you.
My reasoning for that conclusion stems from my deck work.
In order to figure out how to renovate the deck, I had to do quite a bit of research to make sure that not only could I accomplish this task, but the order in which I was going to accomplish it. As my kids have pointed out to me on numerous occasions, I do love to research a topic when I'm going to do something.
On Friday, I was at the auto dealer while our old '97 Accord was getting regular maintenance taken care of***, and I was writing out what steps I need to perform to complete the deck renovation sometime next year. After that was finished, I began jotting down other projects that I'll be working on the next few years --there are quite a few-- since the kids have left the house and I don't have to worry about waking them up in the morning while I'm working. Before I finished, I'd already plotted out a basic timeline and potential costs and pitfalls before judging the priority of each project.
So why do I research projects such as these, I thought suddenly, but I refuse to do so for video games?
Well, that one's kind of easy: I'd rather figure that out myself since, by and large, whether I fail or succeed at a video game won't directly affect my life.
But screwing up a deck rebuild just might, especially if it collapses while I'm standing on it.
That's fair, I decided as I left the dealership. Despite the opinions of a certain subset of gamers, games don't rise to the level of seriousness found when you're doing repairs or a project around the house. If you've ever had to pay a plumber to show up and fix your fuck-up, you know what I mean.
By extension, if I like playing MMOs, why don't I do more than play one or two toons?**** I just play pretty much one character in a type of game that encourages multiple playthroughs with different types of characters, so why don't I follow along?
Looking back on my game playing, once you get beyond my stand by games such as Sid Meier's Civ series, some of the Total War games, and some other city or civ builder games, I really pretty much stick to a couple of characters. The only real exceptions to this are Stardew Valley and SWTOR; the former you could argue doesn't rise to the story level of a BG3 or World of Warcraft, and the latter I did play through (almost) each class once just to see all of the stories.
(Confession time here: I never finished the Imperial Agent's story in SWTOR; I'm at the end of Taris as far as the story goes, and I kind of left it at that and haven't been back since. So... 8-10 years, maybe? Then again, the reason why I don't play SWTOR much at all has to do with the broken companion pathing, and since that hasn't been fixed in at least 5 years I doubt it will ever get fixed.)
***
The funny thing is, I don't feel like I'm not enthusiastic about video games, it's just... Well, if everybody does it, why should I do it?
It's not as if I haven't leveled new characters before. I went through the stage of starting a new toon for each new expansion in WoW, and I quickly discovered that if I wanted to examine content solo, that was the way to go. By the time the two toons I was leveling in Cataclysm reached their first L80-81 zones, they were mostly empty. And Mists... Well, Pandaria was worse, because Pandaria really was empty. The only exceptions to that were the areas where there were farming dailies and location of that Black Dragon who gives out the legendary questline (whose name escapes me); beyond that there were times when the number of people in a zone were less than 5. Believe me, that starting area once you land in Pandaria would have been a lot easier if I had some more bodies around, but starting out with quest greens from Deepholm and Uldum (which was where I dinged L85) and jumping straight to Pandaria wasn't a fun time either.
I suppose that my experiences leveling those toons in a post-Cataclysm world may have something to do with my lack of desire to level multiple alts, but at the same time game companies have come up with all sorts of ways to speed up the leveling experience itself. Less pain all the way around, right? That might work if you're inclined to level multiple toons and the leveling itself is getting in your way, but... I'm just not really interested.
***
I've seen it bandied about that when you play WoW, you're a WoW player. There's not much room for another game when you play WoW, because playing WoW will consume all of your available time. I do have a bone to pick with that assertion, as I know plenty of people who play multiple MMOs and play other video games on a regular basis. That being said, there's more than a kernel of truth to that statement. If you plot out leveling all of your alts so that you have all of your professions covered and/or all of your potential mains raid ready, well, that takes time. And all of the speedy leveling experiences in the world won't eliminate the time sink of maxing out a half dozen or more toons over the course of an expac.
(Somewhere an altoholic laughed until they wheezed, because they likely have 30 toons to level in the upcoming Retail WoW expansion.)
I guess it comes down to what I want to do with my time. Do I enjoy the leveling experience so much that I want to repeat it a dozen times over? Or even a couple of extra times? And even if I do, will I want to speed along at the pace offered me, or do I want to poke around, doing it my way?
Bender is missing that middle finger, and we're missing "Don't You Forget About Me" playing in the background, but you get the idea. From Tumblr. And The Breakfast Club.
*In an era of dozens of potential toons 3 may not sound like a lot, but when you consider that the toons I've played to a significant degree in Retail WoW are only 6, then 3 is about 50% of my WoW toons.
**The other two being melee DPS (Enhancement) and Healer (Restoration/Resto).
***Before you ask, while I'd like to do this stuff myself, I don't have the tools to make it happen. And I'll be honest in that a car built in October 1996 could decide to give up the ghost at any moment, so I'd rather bring ol' Putt-Putt to a shop that actually has people who have worked on this generation of Hondas before.
****Or replay long story driven video games like other gamers do? Such as finishing Baldurs Gate 3 then restarting the game with a different main character and a different class. Or one of the Mass Effect stories, but with a different person to romance. Or replaying one of the Diablo games ad infinitum.
EtA: Not sure what happened, but was missing half of a sentence. Corrected. Also, corrected a formatting error.
