The Joy of Random Encounters

It's kind of strange how fast I'm leveling on the Anniversary servers given that I'm not actively trying to slow it down. I'm not trying to affect how I play, either, it's just happening on its own.

"If I could walk on water..."
I'm sure Eddie Money never thought of this...

Of course, this is all relative. Being at L51 right now in late March, about 1.5 months after the Dark Portal opened on the Anniversary servers would be considered frightfully slow if this were Retail WoW or even among those who wanted to raid on the Anniversary servers, but compared to how I've leveled in the past* it seems extremely fast.

I'm doing this while still finding the time to just do stuff I find interesting.

The other day I was heading south from Desolace to the primordial forests of Feralas when I came across a Blood Elf Hunter well under the average level for the zone. She appeared to be heading toward Camp Mojache, the Horde base in the center of the zone, which I can completely understand. I personally would have approached this from the east, where the lower level mobs for the zone were, but I can't assume that this player would have known that. 

So anyway, she was riding south and I passed her not too far away from the Ruins of Ravenwind when she'd paused for a moment. For some reason my Spidey-sense went off and I swung the camera around just in time to see her get attacked by a bear out of the brush. She was Horde, but she was also about 8 levels under that bear that jumped her. 

I quickly realized she was in deep trouble, so I went back and attacked the bear, ripping threat away from her and dispatching the bear in short order. 

What to do now? 

Well, I switched back to ghost wolf and escorted the Hunter all the way to Mojache.

I love the name Callindaria. It feels like
a fantastic name for a Sindorei.

At first I think she believed I was waiting for an opportunity to attack her, but eventually she just kept going once she realized I wasn't turning off to go to either Feathermoon Stronghold or Dire Maul. The ghost wolf form isn't as fast as even a basic mount, so when she'd get decently far in front of me she'd pause to let me catch up. When we were close to Ogre camps along the way, she let me take the lead until the danger was behind us.

We passed several other Horde players heading the other way, but nobody turned around to help her along the road. 

Once we got close enough to Camp Mojache where I could see the pair of Tauren guards at the entrance, I stopped and waved goodbye. I think she was confused, as she turned back and looked at me for a few moments, but I sat down and waited until she swung around and rode off toward the base.

"Go on, kid. It wouldn't end well if I got any closer."

It's just little encounters like that, which only take about 5-10 minutes tops, that make my day. I get far more out of a random encounter than any other aspect of an MMO.

***

In other news, I've been a baaad WoW player. 

I have had the music turned off for the longest time; not because I don't like it, but because I listen to other things while playing. Sometimes I'm in Discord, and others I'm just listening to a podcast or other music. 

To be fair, sometimes your encounters in-game don't really mesh with the game music, such as the music for The Lion's Pride Inn not exactly meshing with the reality of Goldshire in Moon Guard.

I sure hope that the pink glow is accompanied
by a healthy dose of Lysol to clean the place.

And there are times when music I find online actually fits much better for my mood. 

Leyna Robinson-Stone is a tin whistle musician on YouTube who has plenty of music videos for the tin whistle. When I became re-acquainted with the whistle a couple of years ago I discovered her work and subscribed to her channel. 

This particular short is a duet with another whistle player,

CutiePie, who also has a a LOT of instructional videos.

One of her posts from over a year ago recently appeared in my feed, and I found her original piece fit the wilds of Feralas incredibly well. 

Going from Eddie Money to atmospheric tin whistle in one post. Go figure.

*Even back in my time on Retail in 2009 - 2014. My first experience on WoW, I literally didn't know any better (and I was leveling a Holy Paladin, so a big strike against me), but my later experiences were leveling to pursue different goals that were most definitely NOT optimal. Nobody goes leveling via Battlegrounds thinking it was going to be quick and easy.

Okay, Break's Over

One thing I learned while I was away from MMOs for a week was that the world doesn't end if I stop playing.

Okay, that's a bit of hyperbole, but given how FOMO-driven video games tend to be these days, you'd be forgiven if you thought that the weight of the (virtual) world rested on your shoulders.*

That's the sort of quip that I could see Seth
McFarlane make. From Reddit.

I have wondered whether I have the willpower to give up playing WoW again, especially given that I do have an active circle of friends in-game, which is something that simply did not exist in 2014.** That wasn't why I took the break, but the knowledge that there were people who would notice if I weren't around certainly kept me on edge to a degree. 

Sure enough, after the weekend I got pinged by my Questing Buddy to see if I was doing okay. While we hadn't actually played together in-game for close to a year now --she having gone down the hardcore route to complete all the raids (and even managing to get an Atiesh)-- we do still chat regularly, and she and the rest of the group had noticed my absence even though it was only 3-4 days at that point. After assuring her I was fine, just doing other things for a while, I concluded that I couldn't simply vanish unlike 2014 (and to a lesser extent in 2022). 

From The Simpsons (via Tenor).

So when I felt ready to login once more last Friday evening, I discovered a few items of note: my friends were doing their own thing as they always had, and that the active population on the Anniversary servers had shrunk.

The former wasn't a surprise to me at all, since everybody in our friends' group has their own goals and are currently pursuing them, but the latter was. After a few weeks of upwards of 20 layers' worth of active players on the Anniversary Servers, we were down to 9 or 10 layers over this past weekend. 

The layers as of 6:51 Server Time
on Dreamscythe-US on March 16, 2026.

Now admittedly I'm not sure if people in instances count against layers, but given that players were chain-running 5-person instances once the Dark Portal opened, I really doubt there'd be much of a change in population simply because Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, and Magtheridon's Lair had opened up. I think what is currently happening is that people either burned out rushing to L70 and getting attuned as quickly as possible, or that people are merely raid logging because they can. 

I haven't been to Outland yet, but given that the main hub there, Shattrath City, is connected to the other major cities via Trade Chat, I know that people haven't been pulling out the "I'm Bored" complaint as is often found in MMOs, so I suspect it's merely raid logging for now. 

***

Well, I'm refreshed. 

And I'm back to doing the same thing I had been doing, which was leveling Briganaa 2.0, and to a lesser extent my Blood Elf pair of toons. If the in-game population of the Anniversary servers continues to decline, by the time I reach Outland I will have the place to myself as everybody will be raid-logging and not doing much else. I won't know for certain until I get there, but I expect that the people running TBC 5-person instances will have dried up just like in 2021, victims of burnout due to following the meta. 

To be honest, that would suit me just fine. I don't need the crowds, and I'm happy doing what I should have done 5 years ago. Live and learn, I guess.

*I'm quite familiar with how FOMO is used to make people play and purchase in-game currency with my limited experience with mobile games. There was a mobile game --whose name escapes me now-- that I played via PC that I simply refused to purchase anything for, but the psychological tricks utilized to try to entice me to purchase currency to buy better items for defense gradually ratcheted up to the point where I simply had to walk away or I knew I'd have broken down and bought stuff just to try to keep up with other players. I'm sure my castle or city is a smoking ruin right now, years later, because of other players who ran roughshod over it in the intervening time. But it was incredibly hard to both walk away and not buy things to improve my standing in the game. And that was.... 2014? 2015? Mobile games have gotten MUCH worse in that regard in the past decade.

**Yes, I had my blogger friends, and you know who you are, but except for the rare direct interaction we didn't play WoW together. Vidyala once offered me a spot in her guild, but as I was quite aware that she'd be making an exception for me as a non-raider I turned it down. I didn't feel it was right for the rules to be bent just because she and I knew each other outside of the game itself. 

This'll Be Your Big Chance To Get Away From It All

Outside of checking out a few cities in Retail (as seen in the previous post), I took the past several days off from playing WoW.

I'd like to say that I had projects that had priority over any video game playing, but that wasn't the case. I simply didn't feel like logging in and playing on my Alliance toons. I did check the bank alts a couple of times to make sure I wasn't losing anything via in-game mail*, but beyond that, I didn't do much.

This is but one page of my "junk" mail.

This sort of break is a necessary part of any endeavor, and because I have no external pressure to complete anything in-game** I can take as many breaks as I need. This was something I sorely missed in 2021, and I fully intend to take advantage of my lack of commitment right now.

So. 

What have I been doing?

Thinking about this...

No, this is not my house. From a
reviewer at The Home Depot's website.

Yes, it's creeping toward gardening season, and I've already obtained some seeds for this year. And this year, I'm actually going to put in a couple of raised beds in the backyard so I can plant a vegetable garden in the yard, the first one since the mini-Reds were little. (Here's to hoping the deer won't be that hungry...)

Outside of that, I've just been taking a mental break. Goofing around, doing this and that, and catching up on some of my writing.

By the time this posts I might be back into WoW, but whether or not isn't that great of a concern. What's important is that I enjoy what I'm doing.

*If you're like me and have far too much accumulated junk for a bank alt or two, you just move stuff around via in-game mail. In WoW at least, you have 30 days before the mail (and attachments) returns to the sender, and then 30 days it can sit in the sender's inbox before it's automatically removed. So, if you keep up with juggling in-game mail, you can move a ton of stuff around.

**Relatively speaking, of course. My friends group would want me to get to Outland and level faster --it's not quite so overt right now but it's one of those generally understood things-- but I'm being my contrarian self right now and am actively resisting that.

News and Notes From My Adventures

Alas, Quintalan's hardcore run on the Anniversary servers has come to an end.

RIP...

He made it within a half a level of 20, which exceeded the other two. I knew he was in trouble when I had two Scourge from the Dead Scar on me and I missed 2-3 times in a row on attacks. For the record, the pair of baddies were lower level than me, but when you miss enough times in a row you're going to be in trouble. I'd already used my "Get Out of Jail Free" ability, so when I was at 50% health I faced a decision to either cut and run or heal myself.

I tried healing myself, but I kept getting pushback while casting to the point where I had to try to bolt and run when I was at much lower health. And... that was that.

***

My Enhancement Shaman, Briganaa 2.0, continues to level much quicker than expected. 

That's all relative, of course, because if this were 2021 she'd already be in Outland, but compared to my experiences in the Vanilla version of Operation: Spread the Love she's positively rocketing forward at L36. Part of the reason why she's leveling so quickly is that she has absolutely no problems at all finding groups to get into dungeons with. That doesn't mean I'm leveling using dungeons, but I only consider it when I reach the correct level range for a dungeon and have done enough quests out in the world. Still, being an Enhance Shaman means that tanks love me for the bonuses I can bring to the team, and casters love the Mana Totems I can put down. 

And what's most important is that nobody bitches about whether I'm optimizing myself or not. 

From The O.C. (and Yarn) Remember that show?

***

When I'm not putzing around on the lowbie toons, I've been prepping the L60s for when they go to Outland.

How, you may ask?

Cue Theme from The Andy Griffith Show.

Or this...

Yes, doing quests that I'd left in my Quest Log.

Now, to be fair, I'd have put "Cooking" or "Leveling First Aid" here, but the "Person is Cooking" or "Making Bandages" animations don't look very exciting. (So, they are not here.)

I'm also trying to get all of my professions to their max level --okay, not Enchanting, because if I wanted to do that I'd be stuck in the Old World until November-- but everything else is fair game. Hmm... about Blacksmithing... Uh, yeah, maybe I'll add that to Enchanting.

It works for me, and keeps me from crossing the Dark Portal until I'm good and ready. 

***

As far as Retail goes, Stormwind on Moon Guard is still really empty...

As of last night.

But I did see this little item in my chat window, which amused me to no end...

Considering I was running from Goldshire to Stormwind, I had a good laugh. 

And let's just say that most of the Lion's Pride crowd must be at whatever the new max level is, as they were back. 

No, I didn't take a screenshot this time, and let's just leave it at that. There were... reasons... why I didn't take a screencap.

EtA: Corrected a formatting error.

EtA: Corrected some grammar.

A Compliment is Sometimes the Best Thing

There are days when you just feel too ordinary for an MMO...

Whether you're just wandering the streets...

Or maybe just speaking to an auctioneer...

Or maybe you're just not exotic enough in all the right wrong ways...

But sometimes, you get a compliment that makes your day.

Yes, that 'epic sham' is me. 

And yes, I'd been out of mana on that 4+ minute fight since about 40-45 seconds in. This was a fight nobody wanted, because we kept getting runners that kept pulling other mobs, and things got out of hand really fast. I'm still not sure how we made it through that one.

Considering I was merely doing my job and trying not to get killed in that dungeon*, it's nice to see that someone thought I did pretty good.

And before anybody asks, I'm doing fine leveling Briganaa. I'm not pushing myself at all: I'm just relaxing and leveling at my own pace, which has been faster than I expected, but I'm not letting that get to me.

*This was Razorfen Kraul, if you're interested. There are plenty of spots in that dungeon where things can get so spicy that you'd think there were ghost peppers in that salsa.

Some Things Never Change

Last night I figured that I'd take Briganaa into The Stockades, since she was about at the right level and I knew that there were plenty of toons around to run the instance. 

Don't quote me on this, but Blizzard had apparently made some changes to how damage and experience are calculated if someone who has a much higher level is grouped with you, specifically designed to stop the Classic WoW practice of boosting by a max level toon basically pulling and killing off low level dungeon baddies while everybody else stays at the entrance.*

So theoretically there ought to be plenty of unboosted players wanting to get into a Stockade run, and it only took me about 5-7 minutes before I got a whisper.

Typically it's a "Want to run Stocks?" or something to that effect, but this one was:

"Spec"

I blinked. I mean, Deadmines is commonly the second dungeon that an Alliance player would run; would what spec my Shaman is really matter?

Oh why the hell not. "Enh," I replied, meaning I was the melee Shaman subclass, Enhancement.

I immediately got an invite to group.

"If this guy thinks that I can put down a Windfury Totem at L26, he's in for a surprise," I grumbled.**

At least this tank didn't ask me about it, so I threw him a bone and instead of providing a totem giving a bonus to armor, I put down a Strength of Earth Totem (which gives a bonus to Strength and consequently damage) and just rolled with it. 

Okay, I'll admit the dungeon run was fast, and the only death was at the end where the healer had been stunned and couldn't heal the Mage to save her***, but I was constantly drinking trying to get mana back while the tank kept running ahead. It's one thing if you're a Mage and you have to stay back anyway to cast spells from distance, but it's bad form if you're melee DPS is constantly running up about 5-10 seconds after you've pulled. Sure, I didn't have to worry about pulling threat, but come on, man. It's not a big deal to finish a few seconds slower.

As soon as humanly possible I dropped group (after thanking people, because that's how I roll). I honestly don't think the tank really learned anything about patience, but attempting to min/max a low level dungeon like this is... well, really quite ridiculous. When I grumped about this to my friends who were online tonight, my Questing Buddy agreed said that no, it didn't make sense in such a low level instance. 

*I understand the desire to stop boosting of bots and whatnot, but it isn't really a good look if you ban boosting but turn around and say "you can legally boost to L58 as much as you want for $60 a boost".

**A Shaman doesn't get access to the Windfury Totem until L32. Windfury is a buff prized by melee and tanks because of the often extreme bonuses to melee attacks it can generate.

***For the record, I rezzed the Mage while the healer ran out of the instance. Bad form in my book.

One Step at a Time

If you'll recall, my time in the 2021 version of TBC Classic did not end well. I got a "promotion" to one of the raid leads, which necessitated some changes in how I approached playing WoW Classic. When you throw in that I switched from a Mage to a Shaman as my raiding toon --which in turn forced me to level extremely quickly*-- yeah, there was already a lot of stress from the beginning, and it got worse as people left the raid team because "we weren't raiding enough"**.

Oh, and I had my little hospital adventure in the middle of this, which forced me to reevaluate how I approached all aspects of my life.

And my job changed, which meant I could no longer be functionally brain dead the first hour or two in the mornings (having done the same job for 20 years has its advantages), so that was the final push that led me to giving up progression raiding.

I still lingered on, raid leading a Friday Night Karazhan run, which was stressful mainly because it was difficult getting 10 people together on a regular basis for that raid on a Friday night. Once the raids began, it typically was a chill time and a blast, but actually getting to that point was the source of far too much stress.

There was also a few weeks where we tried Saturday afternoon Zul'Aman runs, and to be completely honest that bombed big time. We never had the right composition of classes to make the runs a success, people who signed up didn't make the raids, and some people would show up in quest greens expecting Zul'Aman to be just like Karazhan in terms of difficulty. Hell, even I was undergeared for those Zul'Aman runs because I mainly had Tier 4 level gear on my Shaman, which may have been fine for Karazhan but most definitely NOT fine for Zul'Aman. 

So yeah, I was wondering why I was back here in 2026 on the Anniversary Servers' TBC Classic implementation. Am I just a masochist or something?

You and me both, Brig...

I will freely admit that part of the reason why I'm here --a big part-- is that I like my friends' group. Yes, we all have our quirks which means there are parts of them I might not agree with, but all-in-all we get along well together. Once they finally understood that I wasn't going to go rush out to Outland and get involved in the leveling experience just yet, things settled down a bit. 

***

Last night I'd taken this new Anniversary version of Briganaa to The Deadmines, and my Questing Buddy was surprised there were even people running Deadmines in the first place. She told me she figured everybody was in Outland.

"Oh no," I replied, "I had no trouble getting into a run at all. I've even had no trouble getting into a Ragefire Chasm or DM run on the Horde side."

As I've said numerous times, "it's not a dungeon
run until the Mage bites it." As our healer didn't have
the ability to Rez, Neve had to run back to the dungeon.
Thankfully the graveyard she spawned at was the closest
to the instance, and not close to the closest Horde settlement.

I guess the legendary end-game bias that WoW has, coupled with the ability in the Anniversary servers to use paid boosts on Blood Elf or Draenei toons, meant that people exclusively in Outland think that everybody is there. The thing is, there were 12 active layers in Westfall alone, so you just need to know where to look to find the players leveling out in the Old World. 

***

Despite everybody's first impressions, I'm not anti-social when playing MMOs. I do tend to immediately reject random people if they simply throw me a grouping-up invitation without asking first, because I strongly believe in following social conventions rather than blithely assuming everybody is trying to rush through leveling. However, if I'm out leveling alone, I tend to prefer playing alone unless I need to group up. 

Solo play has allowed me to survive my expected PTSD leveling Briganaa to a surprising degree. When I ran RFC on my Orc Shaman when the Anniversary servers first dropped, it was not a pleasant experience at all. It felt like I was back in Serpentshrine Cavern, struggling to maximize my damage output despite juggling many hats and raid drama and everything else. When I got out of that last RFC run, I had the shakes and I decided to shelve that Shaman. 

This time around? It was a bit chaotic as I needed to get back into the groove of dealing with totems, but I was happy just being a regular player. With all the sweaty players already in Outland, those of us left behind in the Old World tend to not be min/maxers, so nobody cares if you're not doing things exactly perfect. 

And to those who might read this and say that "your friends don't care about how you play and you can go into Outland and not have those issues", I have a one word answer: bullshit.

You see, what may be said and what is done are two entirely different things. If I held a mirror up to my friends and their style of play, most of them are min-maxers and all of them play in a sweaty manner. They know what gear they need, they go after said gear, and they're pretty straightforward in what they want to do and where to go. And yes, they may say they they want to play with me, but if I'm not going to min-max that will be a source of friction when we play together.

They also play and quest faster than me, because they all use the Questie addon (something I refuse to utilize along with most other addons), and I tend to take my time and read the quest text as well as take my time to restock and do other things in between questing hubs.**** So, when I'm grouped up, my lack of Questie works to my advantage and I simply stop working on my own quests so I can keep up with them, then I'll go back later when I'm solo questing and finish them at my leisure. 

***

Another thing that has saved me (so far) is that I'm not exclusively leveling Briganaa, either. I've been working on trying to get some of the professions on my already L60 toons to the max for the Old World (300). Of course, that does mean fighting gold farmers for things such as herbs and mining nodes, but outside of the first couple of days when the Dark Portal opened it hasn't been that bad.

I've also been re-engaging with my first max level toon, Quintalan, in his Anniversary Server edition:

Yes, he's a bit of a cad. And he knows he's got
the looks (and the locks) to match.

Amazingly enough, he hasn't died yet. I figured he'd be dead already, but he's at L15 and still hanging in there. 

IIRC, the first time I did this quest back in 2009
I died on it. So... that he survived is a testament to
how much I've learned in the 17 years I've been
playing MMOs.

I'm definitely taking my time with Quintalan, because I want to see how far I can go before I kick the bucket. That might mean delaying the last quest in The Ghostlands for a while, as Dhar'khan is a bit of a tough guy to kill at-level, even in a 5 person group.

But I've got time. I've got 8.5 months before whatever happens next will happen. I know that PTSD is still out there, lurking about, but as long as I stay true to my goal of taking my time and not rushing, I think I'll be okay this time around.

*At the rate of 3 levels/day just to get to L60 and then head out to Outland. When you couple that with almost no support ("New phone, who dis?") from the guild once the Dark Portal opened, it was a stressful and grating experience. It was then that those of us who leveled Shamans (or BE Paladins) back then realized what their guilds really thought of them.

**Despite our official 1 day/week raiding schedule being completely present from the beginning, from the start we had members of the raid team agitating for us to switch to 2 days/week. It was as if they felt that once we got started we'd switch to 2 days/week just to keep up with everybody else. The Raid Leadership held fast to that 1 day/week schedule, and we lost a lot of our best raiders who jumped to more sweaty raid teams. I'd say "good riddance", but we had an increasingly hard time finding good players as the expansion went on as people began fleeing the server for more populated servers, and a lot of those that were left congregated in the sweatiest of the hardcore raid teams.

***The astute among you will recognize that the chestpiece she's wearing in the first screencap is the quest reward from killing the end boss in that dungeon.

****Such as take screenshots. LOTS of screenshots. I really ought to figure out a way to copy them regularly to a location that's backed up with the rest of my data onto a separate hard drive. No, I don't trust OneDrive at all, since it's not a true backup solution, but rather a "cloud solution" where all your data is stored in a central location for all your devices. As long as you know that's what it is and that's what you want, fine, but I don't want that. I want backups of my local data, not a replacement of my local data with cloud storage that can go *POOF* if I decide to stop my subscription. 

EtA: Fixed a few pronouns.

Sir, He's Dead Already!

Well, my Hardcore experiment didn't last long.

My reincarnation of Neve didn't even get out of Eversong Woods. She got caught by multiple respawns in the Scorched Grove at Level 8. Briganaa at least lasted into the second Draenei zone, Bloodmyst Isle, but one of her Fire Totems inadvertently pulled multiple nearby mobs and she died at Level 14. 

This was, ironically enough, about 1/2 hour
before the fatal blow.

The Blood Elf Paladin Quintalan still survives, but he's Level 7 right now. His long term future is in doubt, because he has a tendency to overpull even when I specifically don't want to.

He's also into being a therapist, for some strange reason.

***

While there are still around 20 or so layers' worth of players out there, the Old World (except for the Capital Cities) has emptied out. You can find gold farmers around and there are people leveling, of course, but the swarm has moved on to Outland. 

I had to turn off the nameplates for NPCs to show
just how few people are at Light's Hope Chapel.
A week ago, this place was still packed.

My Questing Buddy has already reached L70 --I think she reached it two evenings ago-- and I'm sure she was just in the vanguard of that first wave of toons rushing to the end and now on their attunements. Most of the rest of our friends' group are around L62-63, although I do see a lot of people I've put on my Friends' List sitting in the mid-L60s at the moment. I guess that's overall not much of a surprise, as the raiding content opens on February 19th, less than a week from now. I guess we'll see how that goes and whether the player base continues to engage with the game, especially since the Tier 4 raids are launching in their post-nerf state. I can easily see this backfiring on Blizzard, because if the raids are too easy some people will get bored and lose interest, but more people overall might get a chance to raid from the get-go, so.... I guess we'll see.

I presume that the results of this experiment will influence the difficulty of subsequent raid tiers.

***

For me, what will be most interesting is how guilds handle the reduction from 40 people per raid to 25 (not counting the bench). If history is any guide, people are likely forming into cliques already, and that could prove disastrous to guilds and raid teams going forward. Hell, it could prove disastrous to even friends' groups. I guess we'll see how this all pans out. 

The Reincarnation

A couple of days ago I made a decision.

For some strange reason, I didn't get an initial
screencap. Oh well. Yes, this is a new Briganaa.

I decided that one way to combat the desire to rush to the end with four toons and do all the things was to start over with a toon that was most definitely blitzed through the process in 2021 and do it right this time in 2026.

After all, I have 9-12 months to go up 10 levels on 4 toons. So what's one or two more toons?

"Two. No more than two." --Gully Dwarf saying

As of Monday evening, my Questing Buddy was already at L68, so she basically went almost all the way to L70 in 4 days, most of that by spamming dungeon runs. By comparison, I'm happy to just be noodling around in the Old World, not rushing through anything. When I was asked when I was going to go over to Outland, I replied maybe in a couple of months. By then, everybody will be raid-logging, so I'll have the zones to myself.

That's not just hyperbole, as there's well over 20 Layers going in the evenings, which is kind of nuts.

This is what Nova World Buffs was able
to identify as separate layers on February 9, 2026.
The maximum number of layers they can observe
is 20, but given that this toon didn't have a layer assigned
meant there was ABOVE 20 layers active at this time.

***

If Blizzard wanted the WoW Classic community to put more money in their coffers, offering unlimited paid boosts was apparently the thing, as there were tons of L58 - L60 Blood Elves and Draenei out and about in the Old World prior to the opening of the Dark Portal. There were so many out there that I'm sure I was very much in the minority leveling a toon from scratch instead of simply boosting and heading out to Outland when the clock struck 6 PM EST on February 5th. 

This was right on top of of the Battle.net shop.
"Inspired by" my ass; they knew exactly what 
they were doing. This is as of February 9th, 2026.

Of course, Retail has Classic beat on the boost department, as unlimited paid boosts have been around for quite a while. 

I actually had to hunt for it in the Cash Shop, as it
was underneath the Pets, Transmog, and (in-game) toys.

However, the upcoming release doesn't have any new races or professions to power level or boost through paid services, so... I guess Classic's BE and Draenei invasion is "taking one for the team" in Q1 2026. 

I'm kind of prepared for the first time someone asks me why I didn't boost either of my toons. While it would be completely accurate to state that my budget won't allow it --$60 per boost is waaaaay too expensive for my taste-- my stock answer will be "If I'm not going to raid, why should I pay money to not play the game?"

Q: "Why not run dungeons?" 

A: "I don't run dungeons to power level. I run it to have fun, and my fun is not 'How fast can I make the thing go away', but to actually enjoy the scenery, the music, and the people while killing the baddies."

Q: "You'll be left behind if you don't."

A: "I was left behind the moment the Dark Portal opened and I didn't load up on a ton of quests to turn in like all the other min-maxxers. Unlike 2021, I was ready for the separation this time. I have accepted that."

***

You'd think --at least I did-- that my WoW friends wouldn't have prodded me about joining them in Outland like they did after the release of the Anniversary servers in November 2024, but nope. I had to have that conversation already once, and I expect I'll have to do it again once they reach max level and they start attunements for raiding. I expect them all to go and raid (my Questing Buddy will likely go all the way to Sunwell), but I've had my fill of raiding. In my experience, anybody who tells me they're a laid back and chill raid group are either self delusional, going to backslide into semi- to full-on hardcore raiding, or will get stripped for their best players by more hardcore raiding teams. I've played that game already and I'm not about to get emotionally invested only to get my heart ripped out again. 

(Or worse, watch a guild get torn apart by drama because people can't treat each other like adults. Or maybe that is the default behavior for adults these days. I sure hope not.)

Hmm... I kind of hope there will be a TBC Classic Era server or two, so that people like me who will stick around after the mob moves on can actually do some end-game content without any external pressures.

EtA: Apparently I can't spell 'pressures' right. Corrected.

The Crazy Still Lives

Yesterday, the WoW Anniversary Servers saw the Dark Portal open at 6 PM EST, heralding the start of TBC Classic, Anniversary Edition.

So... What did I do?

Stare at a Loading Screen for a while, because when you're playing around in the Blood Elf or Draenei Starting Zones, you're technically part of Outland.

And Outland was simply overwhelmed by people to the point where I was repeatedly kicked offline or had 10-20 second lag.

I don't even have a screencap of those (rather typical for Blizzard) moments because all of the screencaps I took didn't register. However, you'll have to understand that The Ghostlands were pretty empty compared to what Outland itself must have looked like.

Therefore, I shrugged and logged onto Azshandra for the first time in several months and screwed around a bit.

And gawked at some of the guild names people came up with:

Yes, that is a thing IRL. No, I'm not going to
tell you how I know, but when fifty something years
you reach, forbidden knowledge gained you have.

After roaming around for an hour or two and doing a few quests, I hung around in Stormwind to watch the substantially reduced crowd. Apparently nobody got the memo that world buffs were no longer quite as useful once you hit... L62? L63? because they were dropping like Halloween Candy. I joked that if you could simply stack world buff times on top of each other, at the rate the buffs were dropping I'd have well over 8-10 hours of a buff each.

My Questing Buddy was busy running dungeons*, and she claimed she was going to be doing it overnight, and others of my friends group were trying to pick up flight points in Outland and complete what quests they could. Only one other person was hanging around in the Old World, finally having the ability to level his Mining skill uninterrupted by swarms of bots and gold farmers.

But I was bored, and so I begged off after a while.

I've grown used to doing things my way, and I really don't like the crowds because all they do is get me agitated at the relentless pace. There really is no rush, but trying to tell MMO players that is an exercise in futility, so I don't.

At least not in Gen Chat or Trade Chat.

We've got some family activities planned for part of the weekend, so if I do get on the Anniversary Servers, it won't be for very long. I might even retreat to Classic Era for a while until the crazy dies down a bit and the lag is no longer so bad in the TBC zones, so I can go back to leveling a toon or two out of the Starting Areas and back into the Old World.

*She informed me that these dungeons were much easier now that she was in Naxxramas gear. Given that if my memory is correct that you don't replace Naxx gear until the very end of the leveling process (yes, it's that good), then she'll be able to store up a lot of gold simply by selling a ton of items to vendors.

EtA: Corrected some grammar.

Wall-to-Wall Whelming*

I did not watch the Blizzard update today; I only read the highlights, officially known as "Catch Up on the State of Azeroth in our Recap".

You know, this thing.

Good thing I did, because the overall lack of WoW Classic information wasn't that great of a surprise. To me, anyway.

The 2019 Classic Train is still in Mists, and that was highlighted in the roadmap along with the Anniversary Servers currently on a somewhat watered-down TBC Classic that's designed to be blasted through in less than a year.

To see this better, click on it to see the full-sized version.
From Blizzard.

Basically, the WoW Classic train got some vague promises of wanting to stay true to the community, and there will be surveys heading out over the year to gauge interest in various things and how you want to play.

Oh, and there's now a WoW Ambassador Program, that's supposed to be the community helping the community. Given how some people play, I'm not so sure this will work out very well --or maybe about as well as other community initiatives, which is damning by faint praise-- but at least they're trying.

***

Oh, and did you know that there's Player Housing in Retail WoW?

Oh yes, housing alone got about more of a mention in the recap than all of the Classic WoW versions combined, which also speaks to the fact that Blizzard devoted 2/3 of the recap (and likely the video itself) to Retail WoW. Bully to those who play Retail, but that also says to me that Classic WoW is definitely the red-headed stepchild of the WoW community. Which is honestly just fine for the Classic WoW players, who are going to do their own thing.

How do I know this? The Classic community is already reviving the community-driven Hardcore mode, this time for TBC Classic Anniversary Edition.

This is in direct response to Blizzard deciding to pull the plug on official Hardcore Anniversary servers when the TBC Classic pre-patch dropped. And I'd bet a couple of doughnuts** that TBC Hardcore will be far more popular than people expect. Even if Blizz didn't throw a bone at the Hardcore community by allowing for a buff/debuff identifying those Hardcore players, they'd be out there anyway. 

***

One thing that people will point out is that there's still a gigantic black hole for what will happen to WoW Classic once both Mists Classic and TBC Anniversary Classic reach their conclusions at the end of the year. I presume any news there will happen at BlizzCon, which is smack in the middle of September, right around the time when the WoW Classic Anniversary servers were announced in 2024.

I guess that the reckoning will be put off a bit longer, but if I were a betting man this is what I'd expect:

• Warlords Classic will be a thing as the Classic train will keep running towards an eventual merging with Retail WoW, likely sometime around 2029-2030.
• TBC Anniversary Classic will progress to Wrath Anniversary Classic around mid-Q1 2027.
• No Classic Plus will be announced, but Blizz will tinker with another Seasonal server along the lines of the Chinese Titan Reforged servers.

Yes, yes, I know, they teased "more" with this line:

Still, I don't expect Classic Plus at this point. Given everything that's "all Midnight all the time", and that the Classic team is really operating on a "balled string and a couple of tin cups"-sized budget*** it'd take them years to create a wholly-independent Classic Plus now. So, they'll do what they can by tweaking the Classic formula as much as they can safely dare without bringing the entire house down. 

I guess my reaction to all this was: don't get your hopes up. After all, there's likely more layoffs in the XBox Games Division coming.

*I'm borrowing "whelming" from Josh Strife Hayes, who uses "it was whelming" in place of the more standard "it was meh".

**To me in my current state of health, that's a pretty serious bet.

***Didn't you ever play "telephone" using a couple of cups and a string connecting the two? Well, shit, I guess I really AM old.

A Short Addendum

It's a bit earlier than my usual updates, but this happened over the weekend:

On January 24, 2026.

So the four have crossed the finish line.

There was something else I was doing on Saturday afternoon, related to my other recent hobby:

From Icom America's Instagram feed.
Uh, and apparently an AI generated pic
with an Icom amateur radio. Who'd have thought?

Winter Field Day is one of the big contest days in the US Amateur Radio community. Typically, clubs will get together and go outside somewhere to make as many unique contacts as possible; some clubs really get into the competition of it, while others simply are there to enjoy their time together and do some radio stuff while they're there. 

Luckily for my club, our facilities at the Red Cross building count as being away from your own home for purposes of the contest, so I got to experience Winter Field Day without freezing my ass off. (Or getting snowed in, which was also a possibility this weekend.) As the weather got progressively worse Saturday night, the club made the decision to go home and call it for Sunday, because the weather had just become too untenable.

So I dabbled in two of my hobbies on Saturday, which worked out well overall.

Almost At The End

Well, right on time for the TBC Classic v2.0 pre-patch, toons have crossed the finish line.

The listings as of January 22, 2026.

One got there shortly after the pre-patch...

Boom.

And the other two this past week.

(Sorry, no pics of the leveling graphic for the other two; I was busy killing mobs at the time.)

While I don't think the reworking of things in the pre-patch helped with Card --the Frost Mage was relatively unaffected by the pre-patch changes-- it did help a bit with Linna and Joan. Paladins got some extensive talent tree reworks in the pre-patch, and the net result was that Retribution Paladins have a bit more damage output than before. Same survivability, but with more oomph when swinging a sword. Joan's biggest change wasn't with her talents at all, but that her Voidwalker (aka "the Blueberry") could hold more threat, so she was able to deal more damage on mobs. So, for the latter two, they were able to kill more mobs before stopping to recoup mana and health, which to my mind was a good thing.

I look at it this way: even without the pre-patch changes, Card and Linna would have made it to L60 in the past two weeks regardless, but Joan would have been somewhere at either L58 or L59. 

In the end, I'm sure that Hoots will make it in the next week or so, and my goal of getting all four toons to L60 before the Dark Portal opened will have been accomplished. 

So... what now?

I'm not sure, exactly. I could start all over with a Blood Elf Mage or a Draenei Shaman, or I could keep going with these four to L70 before shelving them. I already know that my friends' group is going all in on raiding, and as I've already indicated I don't intend to raid in TBC Classic v2.0* I'm free to go and do my own thing. Luckily, L60 -> L70 doesn't take that long in general, so I'll have plenty of time to just goof around and do things at my own pace. I could even start this version by leveling a new toon from scratch just until I'm sure the insane wave of try-hards rushes through to the end, and THEN I'll switch back to level in Outland. 

I've got a year, right?

*The irony is that I got more whispers on Joan this past week than I did on the other two toons. I realize that Warlocks are more in demand in TBC Classic than Mages, but this was getting ridiculous.

Cranky Red Being Cranky

(You have been warned.)

Buckle up, because I've got a doozy for you:

I hate Seasons.

Not these Seasons:

No, not these seasons, although this is pretty accurate.
From Reddit, ifunny.co, and NBC 4 in Columbus, OH.

I mean these seasons:

This is ESO's 2026 Seasons road map.
From neowin (and Zenimax).

I'm using the Elder Scrolls Online's seasons graphic as a punching bag here, but pretty much all of the major MMOs do them: ESO, GW2, SWTOR, and the various versions of WoW, among others. Of the WoWs, Retail WoW is by far the most explicit in organizing the game completely around seasons, but if you squint you can see the seasonal format in the Classic varieties too: they're just not called "Seasons" but "Phases". 

Seasons are not limited to MMOs, either, as most live service games have organized themselves into seasons to keep people logging in and playing. Some are called Battlepasses, some are Seasons, but you get the idea.

I'll acknowledge the good things about seasons first: they demonstrate that a live service game of any sort is being actively supported, they do keep customers logging in and playing, and in general the seasons format lends an air of predictability to these games. In some of the seasonal formats, everybody pretty much starts out the same in terms of needing to gear up and/or obtain in-game currency, so there's no built-in advantage to having done well in the last season. A returning player can start over in a new season and not feel that far behind, which is a nice bonus. Another thing is that the seasonal format does seem to be pretty popular; popular enough that most of the blogs I read that talk about them speak of them in generally positive terms. We bloggers can be a pretty cantankerous bunch, so something that gets more praise than not is worth noting.

But.

I hate them. I mean, I REALLY hate them.

I hate them enough that I actively avoid playing games' seasonal content. Which, in the case of MMOs that basically organize themselves around such content, is a wee bit of a bummer. If you're a long time reader of PC, you can now tune out and wait for the next post, because it's not like I've been shy about this opinion.

From The Office. And Yarn.

Oh, you stuck around? Okay, here's why I don't like seasons:

I Hate the Rat Race.

You see, I've dealt with "seasons" before, in Retail WoW. When you run Battlegrounds like I did in Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria, the gear grind was organized around gear acquisition (and rankings). I never bothered with rankings and arenas/rated battlegrounds, because I was more of a casual PvPer. However, when people would sprint ahead and acquire gear quickly (due to winning regular/rated BGs) and you were merely doing your thing, playing in random BGs was a nightmare for a few months until you started to get the PvP gear that you needed. It always seemed to me that once you became barely geared enough to survive without getting one-shot, the PvP season would end and a new currency/gear set would open up and you'd have to start over. This led to one of two options: Git Gud (play more), or Drop Out. Given I didn't have the time to play to such extreme levels to effectively 'git gud', I eventually dropped out in frustration.

Since that time, I've come to understand that the way the seasonal content is designed, this is a feature and not a bug. Companies want you to login as much as possible (and spend real life money on stuff in cash shops too), so seasons are designed to maximize FOMO without turning off the player base en masse. There's a fine line between utilizing FOMO to get people to constantly login and buy stuff without pushing them at all or too much, and over the years the more successful games have figured out where that happy medium is. 

HINT: That happy medium is much too FOMO-driven
for my liking. From Dean Signori.

It's the consumption-based society placed in a video game. However, instead of keeping up with the Joneses with cars or computers or power tools or spouses*, it's skins and bling and pets and gear and mounts and weapons. And titles; can't forget the titles part.

If you like that, great. Have at it. Apparently you're very much in the majority here. But for me, I'm tired of it. 

The Unintended Side-Effects on Social Interactions

I'm tired of the naked manipulation by game companies to profit off of psychological tricks. I'm tired of the systems and FOMO-driven seasonal activities being first and foremost, and items such as story and the world being the afterthoughts. I can't tell you the number of times I've heard in an MMO the equivalent of "I really don't care about any of this shit [the story or the lore], I just want to kill things and get my loot." And for me, nothing is a bigger buzzkill than hearing that from someone I'm playing group content with.

"If money is all you love, then that's what you'll receive."

--Princess Leia, Star Wars

I realize that game companies are giving people what they want. If people --or the right sort of people-- didn't want that, they wouldn't make it. They can justifiably say they are responding to player feedback. But at what cost? I look at MMOs as these big, expansive worlds/galaxies, but seasons tend to reduce the scope of an MMO to that of a lobby game or focusing on fewer, specific activities that are part of the current season. This is heightened by the time-limited nature of the seasons, which can not only focus on the tasks at hand but heighten FOMO as much as possible. For example, I couldn't login to Retail WoW for the past few months without seeing this pop up:

It's nice that at least they let you know how much time you have left, but this specific implementation was also done to artificially heighten the FOMO behind the Remix environment. After all, which item gets the largest font size? The time remaining, not what this little box actually is about (WoW Remix: Legion).

Social media hasn't exactly been helping people cope with FOMO, either. There were YouTube videos that came out around the same time as that screencap above that said "Is It Too Late to Start Playing Legion Remix?"**

I know people are doing this for clicks, but still, it's abject lunacy all around. If it's too late to start and you're over two months from the end, then that's absolutely terrible game design and the devs should have locked character creation when it was effectively "too late". If it's NOT too late to start and you're over two months from the end, then the community is actively sabotaging itself. 

Yes, I considered the trolls, but I also look at the players who only consider engaging in something if it's not "too late" to do something as a problem in itself. It's never "too late" to try something out, but if you won't do it if you can't get a certain specific item or title, then there's a wee bit of a problem here. Having raised three kids, I know better than to give in when one of them threw a temper tantrum. And people who throw temper tantrums because they didn't get the thing they wanted (or those who would take their ball and go home if they didn't win) don't amuse me. Still, it's extreme FOMO set in motion by the design team if the only way to achieve certain things is to login practically every day. That's part of the reason why WoW's player base melted down in BfA and Shadowlands: pressuring a player --whether by peer pressure or in-game pressure-- to login and do certain activities every day. 

If You Don't Play with a Circle of Friends, You're Kind of Screwed

If there's one constant in the positive commentary I've seen from bloggers and online forums about seasons, it's that it's great to play seasonal content with your friends. It certainly appears that when someone complains about seasons in any forum-based environment --Reddit, Discord, Game Company Forums-- the solution most often presented is "go find a guild or a circle of friends and play with them". 

So basically what people are saying is that the way to fix problems in the seasonal format, whether exacerbating already extant ones or creating new ones, is to... avoid the problem entirely. Go find some friends and do the content with them.

"Do you not have phones friends?" 

--Possibly apocryphal

I find that answer extremely disingenuous for two reasons: it doesn't actually address the problems, and if you play at a different pace or style than your friends, you'll create fractures in your group of friends and you'll be unconsciously pressured into operating at the speed of play that your friends are operating at. 

In my years of playing MMOs, every guild I ever joined imploded or changed to where I or my style of play was no longer welcome. I honestly envy people who have no qualms about jumping to another guild at the drop of a hat (or joining a bunch of guilds), because I simply can't. When I commit to a guild, I commit to playing with people who I at least consider acquaintances. For me, it is not a lightly-held commitment, and I don't leave a guild without some serious consideration. 

Likewise, I've experienced the gradual fissures in my own current friends' group because most of them pushed far ahead really fast in the current Anniversary servers while I deliberately chose to not get swept up in the euphoria of progression raiding in Vanilla WoW again. Sure, their rewards were great, including one of them landing an Atiesh, but I was adamant in pushing at my own pace for my own sanity***. I was talked to by them about how they just want to go do stuff with me, and that they'd be happy to boost me, I basically said "thanks but no thanks" and that was that. I very rarely directly interacted with them in-game save for general chatting, and I ended up having to go the pug route whenever I wanted to run instances or do group content. I was fine with that, but I did miss running content with them. In the end, I guess you could say that they were all more hardcore than I was.

Looping back to seasonal content, if you operate at your own pace or you simply don't know people and aren't inclined to randomly join one of the many guilds who try to chat you up with whispers****, you're left with random pugs. And we all have our horror stories about toxic pugs in MMOs, all the more so when the limited nature of seasonal content means that puggers want to go harder and faster than what they explicitly state. Add to that (in Retail WoW at least) the very real potential that if you screw up in a Mythic Plus run***** by a lack of understanding/lack of skill, the person whose key it was loses their key. Let's just say that people can get cranky about that, which adds to the toxicity of doing pug runs. 

Hence the evergreen "Play with your friends!" suggestion that bypasses the toxicity problems without actually addressing them.

To me, this is akin to an ostrich sticking their head in the sand and pretending everything's fine.

Too few people use the full meme.
From KC Green and The Verge.

The Short Term Nature of Seasons Means the Long Term is Rendered Less Important

We've all had our posts or commentary about "Why does the story in X suck now?" Or maybe "Why isn't company Y putting out new story for their game?" Well, game companies aren't made of money, despite what it certainly seemed in Blizzard's case 17 years ago, so if they're pumping out things to do in seasonal content, guess what typically gets the shaft? The overarching story/game. 

Being focused on the short term so much means that resources aren't being allocated to the long term, and that poses a problem for the overall success of the game. This is not exactly a new phenomenon, since it certainly seems that most publicly traded companies (or those owned by private equity firms) operate on a quarter to quarter basis. I've personally seen my own company (or one of its predecessors) basically use financial funny business like "temporary pay cuts for one month" to make the quarterly bottom line look better,# so I'm quite familiar with how such a short term focus causes long term problems. People notice a decline in quality, employees get frustrated with the lack of pay or working conditions and leave, or management lays off all of the people with institutional knowledge in favor of cheap labor who make the same mistakes that were done years ago. 

So yeah, such a focus on short term seasons, whether there's an overarching road map or not, means the overall plot can get lost. 

Playing Single Player Instanced Content in an MMO is a Band-Aid on a Community Problem

Oh yes. I figured I'd address the other suggestion I'm sure people will promote, at least from a WoW perspective: if you can't do group content, go solo stuff in Delves. That's always reworked for each season.

After all, that's what it's there for, isn't it? 

Yes, and actually that's the problem.

Delves are an admission by Blizzard that it's cheaper to devote money toward creating a single-player instanced experience in WoW than it is to clean up the toxicity in the WoW community. 

Let me put it this way: every company has to devote resources in such a way that provides the most short term profit. Not long term, because a company that's publicly listed on a stock market or owned by a private equity firm has to show maximal quarterly profits. Cleaning up an in-game community takes a firm commitment from a game company (and the community itself), and more importantly it takes money. Frequently more money than a game company wants to spend for an intangible benefit of having a "good community". And let's also be blunt, losing the bad actors in a toxic community also means that the game company is losing those players' money. 

So, to a lot of game companies, creating a single-player experience to circumvent the toxic community in the pugging scene is the way to go. It only costs some developer time as opposed to a lot more money invested in admins and enforcement, and voila! You get a workaround for those left out of group content to do instanced content of their own. Never mind that it is the gaming equivalent of "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain," here's a shiny new thing that you can play with.

From Choice of Games. And the Pythons, of course.

It's not a matter of whether it's fun or not, that it exists annoys me. It also feels like it's a game company patting you on the head, telling you to go play and leave the other content to the "Big Boys and Girls".

That single player instanced content is popular is kind of an understatement. And yes, I'm quite aware of the Green Eggs and Ham nature of my dislike, but I do know that the nature of my dislike is Grinch-y enough that I would never even admit to liking it if I did try it and like it.##

***

I could probably delve deeper (::rimshot::) and provide more reasons why I dislike seasons and seasonal content, but I think that I've beaten this topic enough. And like I said above, I don't expect people to agree with me on this, because they have different experiences and they do have a tight knit group of friends/guildies that play at the same pace as them, so many of the potential pitfalls with the seasonal format don't manifest with them. And that's fine with me. I'm glad they're having fun.

But for me, I dislike it when not everybody is having fun, when people don't find the seasonal format to be an enriching experience. It doesn't matter if it's in WoW, SWTOR, ESO, or any of the other MMOs out there: I don't consider a marker of success to be whether merely enough people are having fun, but whether those that aren't can find their place at the table as well. Maybe game companies can only do so much, as the community's own behavior has its own part to play, but game companies can create the conditions that a better in-game community can arise. Or they too can focus on the short term and worry about the long term ramifications next season. Always next season.

*Or ham radios. I guess it's a sign that this is everywhere, and not just in gaming communities.

**Seriously. Do a short YouTube search and it'll pop up.

***And blood pressure.

****It happens to me all the time.

*****This is my understanding, as I've never played Retail since Mists so it might have changed. (My watching the crowds at the major cities and Goldshire don't count as "playing", IMHO.)

#Except for the executives. Because of course that's the case.

##It would also require me to engage more in the Retail WoW story, and that is simply not happening.