A Bit of Humble-ish Pie

Did I say something about no paid boosts yet?

Well, this dropped later in the day yesterday....

This was captured 11/19/2025.

And yes, there's a paid boost involved because of course there is:

This was captured on 11/19/2025.

The Outland Epic Pack --including the Boost and 30 days game time-- is $80 US, while the Outland Heroic Pack* is $40 US. Back in 2021, the paid boost to L58 was $40 US, and most of the commentary in the Blizz Forums centered on the "value for the money" for the two packs. More than one person thought you had to buy a pack to even play TBC Classic on the Anniversary servers, so they didn't read the post thoroughly. One person did request the "/spit" emote be restored to the game, indicating that they were not happy with these boosts existing at all.

Captured on 11/19/2025.

However, almost nobody mentioned the real issue here: the bots.

I sincerely doubt that the bot brigades will care about throwing $80 at Microsoft to have a legion of L58 boosts for farming Outland. They're just a higher class of locust, I suppose.

Another other notable item that I've seen out and about is that the Hardcore servers will not progress into TBC Classic, as per this YouTube video by WillE:

However, the biggest change aside from the $80 paid boost is that the TBC raids will all be in their post-nerf settings. I presume that's because they want everybody to blitz through TBC Classic in one year, and the difficulty of some of the raids were simply too much to be able to pull that off. Still, Karazhan especially turned into a cakewalk by the end of TBC Classic back in 2022, because we frequently had very few toons (yes, they were alts) more well geared than my Shaman back then, and she was (at best) partially Tier 5 geared.

This doesn't entirely shock me, but I figured they'd wait until the next Phase's raids became available before they nerfed the lower Tiers of raids. Silly me, I suppose.

WillE highlighted some other things, such as Guild Banks being available at launch instead of when they were first released into WoW back in the day, and that the UI changes found in Retail will make their way to the Anniversary servers. There's also that Dual Spec and the Dungeon Finder will appear in Classic Era as well, so butter my butt and call me a biscuit. 

At this rate, we'll be seeing the WoW Token on Classic Era sooner than I'd have thought.

*Minus both boost and game time.

That Was Annoying

As a matter of course, I don't have my video settings to automatically play. There have been plenty of times in the past when I've been doing some research or prepping for something and a video automatically plays on either my phone or my computer, disrupting everything and everyone. Of course, advertisements are the worst offenders, so I very rarely open YouTube on my phone because I won't pay for YouTube Premium and adblockers don't work on YouTube's mobile phone app. 

So, imagine my surprise when I got the Battle.net alert last evening on my phone that said something along the lines of "Adventure is Calling You Home", and before I basically swiped left and ignored it, I thought "You know what, I might as well see what ad they're sticking on people's phones first."

It was this:

I took this after I stopped the video.

Yeah, I was not pleased.

The trailer started playing straight away, ignoring my settings, and I was definitely not a happy camper. The only thing that would have made this more annoying was that there were video ads before the trailer played, which I'm surprised wasn't the case.

You know, I should have known better, but given that the Battle.net app tends to be pretty well behaved overall I was thinking it wasn't going to go full Google on me. But nope, not the case.

Oh well. Live and learn.

#Blaugust2025

Changes Afoot

In case you ever wondered how long it would take for games from other Microsoft game studios to appear on Battle.net, here you go:

The Doom prequel appeared first, and given that it's a Bethesda game I guess it's a no-brainer. But this one just appeared a day or three ago, which did cause me to sit up and take notice:

Given that I watch Tim Cain's YouTube videos, I was surprised to see The Outer Worlds 2 show up on the Battle.net front page.

That immediately got me to hop over to Steam just to check to see if both games were able to be purchased over there --they were-- and then I began wondering just where this will end. You don't see any non-Call of Duty Activision games on Battle.net, but if these two end up on BNet, does that mean more will follow? And what about the backlog of titles from these and other Microsoft studios? Will we see Minecraft show up soon? Or will we actually see a purchasable skin for Minecraft of various Blizzard properties?

Maybe there are some things that man was not meant to know...

That Time When Red Filled Out a Blizzard Survey

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). 

All That's Past is Prologue

Sometimes I wonder if Blizzard's legacy of an RTS game developer has unduly influenced their World of Warcraft expansion design.

Oh, not that WoW is going to turn into an RTS, despite what a subset of the player base might want, but where --or more precisely who-- the emphasis is on in an expansion.

Compared to some RTS games, such as Age of Empires, Blizzard's RTS design incorporates leaders into a story and makes them the central part of the story the Warcraft and Starcraft games told. Sure, you're there as the player, but the story revolves around these central characters. 

From Starcraft Remastered, you can
see that the leaders are incorporated into the
mission design and not just cutscenes.
From resetera.

Not only did the polish and gameplay set Blizzard's RTS games apart, but the stories they told influenced their design of the Diablo games as an action RPG with a defined plot.*

From Diablo 2 Resurrected.
Screencap from Ars Technica.

Blizzard's second last RTS game, Warcraft III, went all in on the story and leaders, where more RPG elements were added into the RTS design than ever before, more tightly integrating the story with the RTS game itself. 

So Blizzard did something unexpected, they pivoted and created an MMO that doesn't have any of those central design tenets.

***

The release of Vanilla World of Warcraft was not only a departure from Blizzard's RTS core, but a change in design emphasis. Sure, there are faction leaders and other important personnel around throughout Azeroth, but the game design didn't revolve around them. There wasn't a main story in the same way that other Blizzard designs had, but a bunch of smaller stories that were strung together with quest chains. Instead of a tightly integrated story with an emphasis on the leaders as main characters, the player was the main character in a vast world with minimal emphasis on the heroics of the few people in charge.

I guess that wasn't bound to last, because a decentralized game world wasn't in Blizzard's DNA. 

It took a few expansions, but by Wrath of the Lich King WoW had pretty much returned to the Blizzard fold in that the leaders and a central story were tightly integrated into the game, and it's been that way ever since. This is what Blizzard is most familiar with developing, and your job as the player is to basically facilitate the story that the faction leaders are involved with. Like or hate the story, this is the pattern that formed in the Warcraft and Starcraft games, and that is what Blizzard knows best. 

People --myself included-- rail against the so-called lobby-based nature of Retail WoW, but when you consider it is the spiritual successor to the earlier RTS and ARPG games that built Blizzard's reputation, it's not a great surprise. When you throw in the lobby-based story found in shooter games such as Call of Duty, Blizzard is providing what they believe gamers expect out of a game. 

In the same manner that turn-based isometric RPGs are tightly integrated into Larian Studios' business, what we are seeing out of Retail WoW is in Blizzard's. It would take a monumental effort to break out of that design philosophy, and I'm not altogether sure it would be a good idea for Blizz at this point to do so. As much as I prefer Classic Era, Blizzard's fanbase doesn't expect that decentralized, non-story-driven design out of them. They expect lobby-based story beats with an emphasis on the faction leads and the other chief protagonists. If anything, the leveling process in the game world is the anachronism here: it's a nod to an era when Blizzard broke out of what they did best as a company to try something new with different design parameters, and Blizzard can't bring itself to shed that vestige of it's old MMO design. Instead, Blizzard uses the leveling process to move the story from the introductory phase to the "why" of group content at the end; it's not an end in itself, as it was in Vanilla WoW, but in service to the endgame, which is where the real story in Retail WoW begins.

No, I was NOT going to put that line from
South Park in here. If you want it, you can go
find it via a quick search. From YouTube.

It is kind of funny in its own way that the Retail WoW player base argues about details in expansions such as systems, whether the group content is any good, or the quality of the story, but they have simply accepted the larger design philosophy as-is. What you see out of Blizzard now is what you will get, because they have no incentive to try anything truly new. Even Season of Discovery isn't that new; it's just a reshuffling of the cards, as it were, but keeping the same basic design in place. Since Blizzard is now the "MMO and Action RPG developer" in Microsoft's stable**, they are most likely destined to stay in their lane and only work on those items. If you've a dev team that wants to try something new, don't expect to find yourself under the Blizzard arm of Microsoft Game Studios; you're better off going independent.

*Yes, I know, I'm not that fond of the plot in Diablo. There's a lot more "action" and a lot less "RPG" in the Diablo games. That doesn't mean there's no plot, however; "no plot" is more akin to playing Gauntlet than Diablo, despite the mechanics' similarities.

**Apologies to The Elder Scrolls Online, but Zenimax/Bethesda is known for first person RPGs, not MMOs. In my opinion, it wouldn't surprise me if ESO eventually gets moved under Blizzard because "they're the MMO developer" for Microsoft. Never mind the game world or the corporate culture; there's always a bean counter somewhere who wants things to align perfectly under their proper silos.

Just Living in Interesting Times

Oh yay, Microsoft got rid of more people from XBox.

And, as Michael Bell pointed out, Microsoft just announced a $60 billion stock buyback at the same time.

So.

I don't think I'll ever pine for the days of Bobby Kotick, but Microsoft is basically claiming "poor" and cutting people at the same time as they're pumping in tons of cash to prop up the stock price. Given the (lack of) tremendous cost savings you get from laying off 2550 people --hint, it's not $60 billion-- it certainly seems like Microsoft is trying to starve Activision Blizzard into.... Something.

Submission, maybe?

I'm not sure what Microsoft is thinking about XBox long term, because they're struggling to compete with Sony's Playstation. I do know they're going all in on Copilot, as I can't open up my work email without seeing another missive from Microsoft about how awesome Copilot is. Maybe they're hoping that customer service for XBox games will get so bad that Copilot will seem to be an improvement. But I doubt Microsoft is even thinking that far ahead, given that publicly traded corporations have an obligation to "maximize shareholder value" to the exclusion of all else. 

***

On the flip side of publicly traded corporations, there's private equity.

Basically, it's all of the greed and short-sightedness of publicly traded corporations but in a private format where their activity is hidden from public view.

You know, everybody's favorite business: the Embracer Group.

Well, Juraj Krupa of AJ Investments is going after Ubisoft and wants to take the company private.

I have no pity for Ubisoft itself, but I also have little time for corporate raiders. They call themselves "activist investors" now, which makes them sound like a do-gooder, but the reality is they want to take control of a company, maximize their profit, and then get out while profits are at their highest.

What does AJ Investments want to do? Oh, not much. Just run Ubisoft like how Bobby Kotick ran Activision Blizzard, complete with a focus on only a few properties that pump out products every year and maximize cash shops and in-game purchases.

Ay-yi-yi.

May you live in interesting times, my ass.

Speaking of Mother's Day...

This arrived in my email inbox last night:

Pretty sure my mom doesn't look
like this, even in the morning.

I looked at the full ad --I cut off the rest of it when I took that screenshot-- and just kind of shrugged.

That's nice and all, but the thing is I tried Diablo II Remastered once last November, and I haven't touched it since. I'm glad that it was basically free (courtesy of a gift card the kids gave me a few years ago), because I was disappointed in how little the game resonated with me. 

And that was supposedly the "best" Diablo out there. 

When I played D2 through the beginning zone, I kept remembering commentary that D2 was supposedly the best storytelling that Blizzard did in Diablo, but you could have fooled me. It was "kill this" and "do that", and I kept wondering whether I should have known any of these people before in the original version of Diablo. 

***

I couldn't quite describe my experience with Diablo until I saw this YouTube video recently by Day9TV, chronicling his experiences of trying Retail WoW for the first time.*

When Day9 was saying "I am so confused!" I nodded along, thinking about trying to figure out Diablo 2**, and replied "Yep, I know where you're coming from, man." If you're not part of the ecosystem, trying to figure things --including story and people-- out is really daunting. The question becomes "Are you curious enough to try to push through your confusion?"

Maybe I ought to give Diablo II another try, but if I can't really get into that game, playing D4 is probably out of the question. The concept of re-running the same game with a harder difficulty simply doesn't appeal to me, so I'm pretty reliant upon gameplay and story to resonate with me. If this becomes a "oh, it's not great now, but 50 - 100 hours in it gets good" scenario, I'll pass. 

*When he mentioned watching characters from Frozen yelling at each other, I chuckled. I figured he had to be talking about Jaina, given that she does kind of have that Elsa look about her. Not sure about the other person, tho.

**Or Age of Wonders 3, Elder Scrolls Online, ArcheAge, Pillars of Eternity, Black Desert Online, or any number of games where I'm just starting out and the info dump or expectations of understanding is quite large.

Video Game Art: World of Warcraft

I was perusing Batttle.net's launcher the other day because the launcher is heavily promoting the somewhat controversial Plunderstorm event in Retail* when I was struck by the artwork:

The presence of a Draenei in pirate regalia makes
this event seem flirty and fun. Screencap from Battle.net.

While I have no real opinion on Plunderstorm itself, as it's a Retail only thing and I don't play Retail, I had to admit that Blizzard's art team does a fantastic job of selling the event. 

That was when I got the idea for this series of posts, which is intended to be an occasional event meant to highlight the artwork in and about video games. 

My sister-in-law's husband received a coffee table book as a present some years back of the artwork for the games for the original Atari 2600, such as this box cover for Atari's Haunted House:

We have this in a box somewhere, but
this graphic from Giant Bomb is much better
than I'd ever be able to scan.

Whether or not the game matched the artwork is kind of irrelevant, since the artwork is meant to evoke a specific emotion and intice you to purchase the game. Beyond that, it's really damn good all by itself.

So, I thought, why not highlight a slice of some video game art that I've found that I really do enjoy? I'm not an art museum or gallery, but it's something I want to present here to demonstrate that, well, video game art is just as much art as that found in any physical gallery.

This first installment of artwork comes from screencaps I made from of Battle.net's launcher --which is why there's the 'X' and the 'Back' buttons visible on them-- and show that the Blizzard art team is still at the top of their game. Alas that these aren't the full artwork, because the news entries only show part of the full piece, and if there's an attribution other than 'Blizzard' I can't find it on Battle.net's launcher. I realize that Blizzard likely did that on purpose so that their art team wouldn't be poached by other game developers or graphic art teams, but the artists who worked on these pieces deserve the recognition.

When the sky is shattered and looks like it's on fire,
that's not a good thing. Yes, this is from Shadowlands,
which is to show that no matter what you thought
of the expansion itself, the art does a great job
of showing a shattered world.

Yes, I used a cropped version of these two clowns
as a header for this blog for a while. I still have
mixed emotions about this graphic, because the art
is great but the memory of my progression raiding
ending without ever finishing Tempest Keep
still hurts over two years later.

Yeah, don't remind me that I only set foot in
Ulduar once. The artwork is still great,
because I can appreciate the Lovecraftian nature
of the Old Gods.

I'm still of the opinion that dragons --even in
WoW-- are not to be trifled with. They have
their own agendas, and woe to that person
who crosses them. That said, if you've got
one in your corner, you can sleep well at night.

Yeah, the fight at the Gates of Ahn'Qiraq was
kind of like this. Cardwyn took a bit of a beating
there in the fight --I seem to recall her getting
stomped and kicked into the next county--
but I'm glad I was there for the battle.

I believe this is inside the Icecrown Citadel
raid itself, because it doesn't look like
the entrance to the 5-person instances plus
the raid. Unlike Ulduar and the TBC raids,
I'm actually okay that I never made it here.

Sunrise over Thousand Needles.

Remember what I said about not quite
trusting dragons? How about dragons disguised
as gnomes? That's about as close as you can get
to someone holding up a sign that says
"Danger, Will Robinson!"

As much as I ended up disliking the Cataclysm
expansion, I can't deny the power of the artwork.

It's that "We are not amused" look that gets me.

Oh, look; the demon found himself a new
pet. While seeing the artwork for Serpentshrine
Cavern and Tempest keep hurts for me,
this likely would hurt my questing buddy, as
our raid team in TBC Classic fell apart
when they pushed to Sunwell Plateau right
before the guild transferred servers.

And finally, this stirs a lot of emotions in me.
Not bad ones, to be certain, but old memories
of my first Paladin in AD&D in the early 80s
taking on evil in all its forms. There's also more
than a bit of Arthur vs. Mordred at the Battle
of Camlann here as well.

*I know that Blizz wants to call it Modern WoW, but I prefer Retail since it also implies that you have to have bought the current expansion to be current with the present version of WoW. Modern WoW sounds like it covers everything from Legion onward, and at the rate Classic WoW is being released it'll reach Legion in a few years.

Getting Back on That Horse

"[Now, there are two ways of learning to ride a fractious horse.] One is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met; the other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast a while, and then retire to the house and, at leisure, figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks. The latter system is the safest, but the former, on the whole, turns out the larger proportion of good riders. It is very much the same in learning to ride a flying machine; if you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds; but if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial."

--Wilbur Wright, 1901.  From The Wright Brothers, by David McCollough, pp 67-68.

I've been thinking about what works and what doesn't work in a story lately.

(Yeah, it's gonna be one of those posts, so buckle yourself in and hold on tight.)

Normally, I'd start writing something about this, get partway through, and then shelve the post for an indeterminate amount of time. I sometimes come back to them --like this past Meme Monday-- but a lot of times they just sit there in the Draft portion of the blog, never to see the light of day again.

This is a screenshot of some of the posts still in draft form from early 2023. Some of them are musings, some are fiction with placeholder titles, and oh look, there's an RPG From the Past still in there.*

However, I've more of a mind to plow though this, since I've been in more of a contemplative mood lately.

My first contemplation, that work sucks and takes up too much of my time, is hardly a new revelation. Those people who absolutely love their job genuinely worry me, because it feels that they've got blinders on and fail to notice the reality and drama of day-to-day life working with people whose goals are different than yours.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about. It's about stories and what makes them tick.

Kaylriene had a post yesterday about what worked and didn't in the story/lore for Retail WoW's Dragonflight expansion, and that got me to thinking that what ails Retail WoW isn't something that could be fixed by returning Warcraft to its "more manly" roots or any other politically charged bullshit, but rather by going out and actually stepping away from Warcraft itself.

No, I'm not talking about any bullshit such as when people who want to break into upper management go to get their MBA**, but actually going out and working on their craft the only way you truly can to improve yourself: by expanding your horizons.

As I mentioned in my comment on Kaylriene's post, my high school guidance counselor back in the 80s used to constantly tell me to go and read more. "It'll help you get into college," he added, and whenever we met*** he'd check in to see what I was reading and how much I was reading.

Did he care about the quality of the books? No, not really. I mean, he knew me well enough that I wasn't going to read middle or elementary grade material****, but he wanted me to get out and simply read. And before you ask, I could tell he had absolutely no clue as to Science Fiction and Fantasy novels that comprised the bulk of my reading habits, but that wasn't the issue for him. 

Now, my senior English teacher in high school --it would now be considered AP English, a combination of English Literature and English Composition-- did care about the quality of my reading, because it reflected in the quality of my writing. He and my other English teachers insisted I keep writing, because the more I wrote the better I wrote. This was reinforced by, of all people, one of my Physics professors. 

No, really.

He was my professor for Advanced Lab I and II, which were Junior and Senior level Physics lab courses. Unlike a lot of the Engineering labs that my friends had which were cookbook in nature, my Advanced Lab's experiments were along the lines of the professor saying "Here's some journal articles and literature, go and reproduce the Photoelectric Effect with the lab material in Room 101B."

Given that I had to write an average of 15-20 pages per lab report, my professor would push me to write better. "The only way you'll get better at it is to do it more often," he told me. I certainly didn't see how my writing improved over the course of those two semesters, but he did and told me as much.

Why bring all this up? Because from what I've seen, Blizzard's story team needs to break out of their rut and do the two things that will truly improve their writing.

***

It's far too easy to claim that Blizzard's story team as a whole was better back in the days when gaming was far more a masculine endeavor or some other politically charged bullshit*****, but my opinion is that they were better because they abided by the 'less is more' dictum. But the longer they worked on their games, the more internally focused they became and the more the writing became bloated.

Their writers need to write more, and not simply Warcraft. Or Diablo. Or whatever.

Stop abiding by the Rule of Cool.

Stop trying to shoehorn in a backstory that's simply not there.

Stop writing cutscenes that have nothing to do with the player. 

Stop writing novels and other media that end up being a requirement to understand what's going on in a game. If you can't follow along in a game without leaving the game, there's a problem with the game.

Stop trying to write cutscenes and story text with gigantic info dumps and passing it off as being normal. As one of my English teachers once told me, people don't talk like that. If they're giving a lecture, sure, but if they're just talking to people? Come on...

Info dump aside, they're freaking DRAGONS.
Why are they in, well, our form? I think we could
cut Blizz some slack if they were in their 'normal'
form for these conversations.
Pic from GameRant of a Dragonflight cutscene.

But more than anything else, they need to read more than just Blizzard material. Or other material written for video games. Break out of your rut and try different genres.

***

I can actually speak to that last one from experience.

Last April, when I posted about my experience reading a Romantic Fantasy novel written by a friend of mine, I mentioned that I'd not read very many Romance novels. I think Sharon Shinn's novels count, and I've read Jennifer Crusie as well, but beyond that, not very much. I mean, the novels I have read have had sex and romance in them --to varying degrees of authenticity-- but not nearly enough to qualify for the Romance genre. 

But I know enough to know that I need to read more to be able to write better dialogue and human interaction, and while I'm comfortable in my own skin for the most part, I have perused the Romance section of our local bookstore and... Yeah, I'm kind of lost. At least with the Literature section I know what I'm getting into with the mishmash of classics with purely literary stuff with popular novels, and I've a working knowledge of the Mystery section as well given that I do read Mysteries from time to time. But Romance?

Sorry, couldn't resist. This was all over
social media last Fall.

Well, I figured that if I was going to do this right, I ought to go back to the original Romance novelist.

Jane Austen.

My mom, the one who gets flustered by anything in a novel beyond a PG rating#, requested a Regency Romance novel for Christmas, so when I bought the novel I kind of slid on over and took a look at what Jane Austen novels were available.

From the Amazon page for the Oxford World Classics
edition of Pride and Prejudice. No pressure. None at all.

I knew going in that while Jane Austen is highly regarded, she's very much a creature of her time. To be blunt, writing has evolved mightily over the couple of centuries since Pride and Prejudice came out, so using Jane to improve my writing is kind of like taking editing lessons from Herman Melville. (Or Tom Clancy, for that matter.)

So I bit the bullet and did this:

And oh look, an excuse to pick up an issue
of BBC History Revealed. Yes, I am SUCH a nerd;
I swear Dan Snow's History Hit and PBS'
NOVA and Secrets of the Dead
were made for people like me.

***

Now, tying this back to Blizzard's writing team, if I can go out and break out of my comfort zone so I can write better, surely they can as well. 

This isn't something that can't be fixed. It really can be fixed, but you can't simply take a seminar and suddenly everything is better, despite what advertisements for LinkedIn Learning or Brilliant would have you believe. You have to put in the time to read more diverse works and write more.

But for all of those who are celebrating that Chris Metzen is back at Blizzard, I have to ask: did he learn the writing and plotting lessons that are necessary for the ship to be righted at Blizzard? Will he allow the Blizzard writing team to do the necessary work to improve their craft? Or did he merely go to CEO School just to make investors happy?##

*I ought to do something about Pendragon, since Chaosium has the new edition coming out soon and they already released the Starter Set for Pendragon last Gen Con.

**The people involved are long retired, so I can actually tell this story. This happened upwards of a decade ago. The company I contracted for --and was outsourced from, BTW-- had an all-hands meeting at 8 AM for all of us contractors. Those of us who worked near their company headquarters came into the hall, sat down, and we met with one of the Executive VPs for the company, who proceeded to give us a pep talk about how well we were doing and how much she enjoyed working with us, her "favorite account". I may have made a few whispered snarks to people around me about that, given that she was my boss two levels up when we were outsourced, and she managed to jump ship from being outsourced herself to being safe on the "mother company". But when talk turned to the new CEO, who returned to his old role to help the company regain financial footing, she described him as being a totally new person. "He'd gone to CEO School and now he knows how to lead this company like a real CEO," she enthused. Given that their "new" CEO's first two orders of business were an announcement of impending layoffs and a gigantic compensation package, I thought the entire thing was bullshit. 

***Which was about 3-4 times a year. I don't know how it worked for you, but for me he'd send an invitation to the high school's main office, and they would track me down as to what class I was in and forward the request along. As long as I didn't have a test that day, I would then inform the teacher and show them the scheduling slip and then head on out to meet with the guidance counselor. Hey, I got out of class for upwards of half an hour, so I was fine with this.

****Remember, this was before the Young Adult genre explosion of novels, so novels that today would be classified as YA --such as the five books of David Eddings' Belgariad-- fell under the fictional genre or in the generically "Adult" section. Yeah, there really wasn't even a YA SF&F subgenre, either. 

Also it needs to be said that I was exiting high school when the original Watchmen comics and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight were coming out, so if you want a delineation of when comics suddenly swerved into being "serious" and "adult", I was a teen during that time. It's all bullshit, since comics had been covering adult themes since forever, but it was in the mid-80s when some critics finally "discovered" what comics had been doing all along.

*****I'm starting to throw around "bullshit" in this post like Holden Caufield tossed around "phony" in The Catcher in the Rye. Sheesh.

#I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but one time my mom was visiting her mom --my grandmother-- and noted a novel on the table. Inquiring as to how good it is, Grandma quipped that it was good but "Oh, you wouldn't like it. It's got sex in it." And this was when Grandma was in her upper 80s. I still sometimes wonder how on earth my parents had my brother and myself, given how icky my mom is about sex, especially when compared to her own parents.

##See ** for the CEO School comment.

The WoW Classic Token was Just the Beginning

It may surprise you, but I don't actually subscribe to WoW.

Yes, I'm aware that I could save a few dollars by subscribing for 3 or 6 month intervals, but because I buy 60 days' worth of game time every couple of months, it forces me to evaluate as to whether I'm having enough fun in-game to continue paying for it. In my experience, when I subscribe it takes more effort to actually decide to discontinue a subscription than actually keep subscribing, so by reversing the process and making it more effort to continue playing the onus is put on Blizzard to create a better experience. 

It also means that I actually engage with the cash shop on a regular basis, so I can see exactly just what Blizz is up to.

Such as this little surprise when I bought 60 days' worth of game time yesterday:

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot...

Do you see it?

In addition to the Retail character boost and the Cataclysm Classic Blazing Heroic Pack, there another little addition to the cash shop: a Level 80 Character Boost for Wrath Classic.

You can now bypass the entire leveling process in Wrath Classic and go straight to Endgame.

Of course, that also means you're effectively paying for gold as well, given that you can go back and do all of the Northrend quests and just get gold as a reward instead.

Yeah, right. 
Graphic from The Simpsons, and
the Comic Sans courtesy of MS Paint.

My, how the Wrath Classic player base has fallen. 

Welp, Now We Know

The first impact of Chris Metzen's hiring as a Special Executive Something-or-other by Blizzard has been felt, and it is somewhat underwhelming.

Sorry kids, this is a facsimile.
From the Blizzard store.

Yes, it's a limited edition print of Grom Hellscream signed by Chris Metzen.

Sorry, it's already sold out.

I have to imagine some marketer at Blizzard is counting the profit from these cash store items, thinking that this is like shooting fish in a barrel. Or to put it another way, there will always be whales around in Blizzard's space, which also explains the success of Diablo Immortal.

A Side-Eye at 4Chan Rumors

I'm not exactly a fan of 4Chan.

Okay, that's not news; the few times I've ever been over there I've come out of that place and felt like I needed a shower, not to mention a full AV system scan of my PC*.

That being said, someone claiming to be a Blizzard insider posted some "leaks", and it was quickly picked up and distributed via Reddit:

You'll have to click on this and get to the original
if you want to be able to read it.
From Reddit (and, you know, that place).

Some of this appears to me to be blatantly false.

I mean, the whole "Cataclysm Classic is not in the works" is not the case. The surveys that Blizz put out --and I'm one of the recipients about 9 months ago-- all indicated that Cataclysm Classic was a done deal. There were no options in the survey I received to say "I'm not playing Cata Classic". It was all about "what features did you like in Cataclysm that you're looking forward to in Cata Classic". One of the items, interestingly enough, that wasn't even an option was "the World revamp". I kind of expected that to at least be there, but I was surprised when that wasn't even on the list of items to look forward to.

Another item that I consider to be false is the interest that Microsoft has in "breaking up Blizzard". Now, I would totally agree with Microsoft deciding to move toward a more work-from-home environment and selling off some of Blizzard's high cost property in California, but breaking them up completely? I don't think we're at that point yet. I could see Diablo Immortal (or is that Immoral?) being moved over to King, because it's a mobile title and it should go to the mobile studio, but Blizzard's classic properties will, for the near future, stay within the Blizzard house. Judging by how Microsoft has handled Zenimax, as in "they didn't touch it at all", I presume they'll do the same for Activision Blizzard. At least at first.

That being said, some of these assertions do ring true. 

The most obvious one to me, and probably drives certain Retail purists nuts**, is that "WoW Classic has moder [sp] players than Retail World of Warcraft right now."

I mean, duh. Between Hardcore Challenge servers --which are always full-- and the steady play of people in Era and Wrath Classic, Retail's appeal is to a smaller slice of the overall WoW pie. 

Another item I find to be (mostly) true is the assertion that "Dragonflight is the remains of a cancelled mobile game co produced with chinese [sp] partners that was bolted onto World of Warcraft to pad a massive gap after the catastrophic response to patch 9.1. This lead to a ship [sp?] in tone that the players have noticed and found off putting." Oh, not that all of Dragonflight is from a mobile game, but that the Dragonriding portion is. Given how much promotion that Dragonriding has gotten --and continues to get-- it's pretty obvious it's a core part of Retail's experience right now. If you told me that the Crafting Orders system is also from a WoW themed mobile game, I'd believe that one as well. I could easily see a WoW Dragonriding mobile game, with Crafting Orders being a way to "improve" your dragon and provide an impetus for microtransactions. As for the change in tone, well... people have been complaining about the ever increasing power of the "big bads" in Retail WoW, and Dragonflight (at least at first) seemed like a bit of a soft reset in that area. If the Retail community in general is conditioned to fight "the big bad that the previous big bad was scared of", then Dragonflight definitely can be off-putting. 

But hey, if nothing else, this little kernel of.... something.... from 4Chan got me interested enough to post about it.

*I would set it up and let it run overnight and check in the morning.

**I'm pretty sure that if I say his name three times, like Beetlejuice, he'll appear and tell me that I'm an idiot for liking an old version of the game. So, I'm going to keep my mouth shut in that regard. At least Gevlon won't suddenly appear and rain on everybody's parade, since we're all slackers to him.

Because I'm Getting Old and Have Seen It All

The other day, I was querying my Questing Buddy how the Friday raid went. "It went well," she said. "We downed Ony first and then got a group for TotC."

"Did you get an Ony bag?" I teased, as that was one of the reasons why people would continue to run Onyxia even late in Vanilla Classic. The "revived" Wrath Classic version of Onyxia returned in Phase 3, a month or two ago.

"Oh, I got it the other week, but I won the head!" (That's the other big reason why people would run Ony.)

"Wait, what?" I was not expecting that reply. "There's an Ony Bag in the L80 version of Ony?"

"Oh yeah! It's a 22 slot bag."

"Huh." I just got outfoxed by Blizzard, as I wasn't quite expecting that they would put an updated Ony Bag in the loot. "I kind of expected it to be a 24 slot bag."

"No, it's like the bag out with the dragon area," she replied, referencing The Obsidian Sanctum raid from Phase 1, which also dropped a 22 slot bag. 

"Hmm..." I replied, trying to remember. "I can't recall if I got that bag or not." Given the amount of effort people put in back in TBC Classic to min-max everything, including bag space, I kind of tuned out these sort of reward drops. I looked at it as representative of the problems afflicting the Classic community, and my appetite for these little quality of life rewards from TBC Classic onwards turned into revulsion instead.

My Questing Buddy, of course, didn't know about any of this. "You DIDN'T?" she said incredulously.

"I just really didn't care if I won it, so I skipped rolling a lot of times."

I could almost see her rolling her eyes. "Why am I not surprised?"

I went back through some notes I made on those Phase One raids. "Oh wait," I corrected myself. "I did win it on the last time we went through that raid. I waited until everybody else had won it and then I got it."

My Questing Buddy sighed.

***

There's another reason why I mentioned this story, and it's this:

If you need to click on the pic to bring up
the original size, that's fine. But it's
pretty obvious that I'm not talking about
the regular maintenance window here.

Even if I didn't have some revulsion toward Blizzard courtesy of their corporate behavior, the "fund raising" pet sale in support of Ukraine would have generated a ton of ick all by itself.

Not that I'm anti-Ukraine or anything, because I'm most definitely not, but because of the corporatization of doing something for a good cause. 

It's not any sense of purity that I feel this way --okay, maybe a little, if I'm being completely honest about it-- but that I know that very very few corporations look at something as an altruistic endeavor. Over the years I've seen the man behind the curtain, and I know that at their heart most companies put only profit. Not good deeds, not society, and most definitely not people. So when I see something like this, where Acti-Blizz recruited Mila Kunis* to promote pet sales in support of BlueCheck for Ukraine, I simply can't see the altruism.

At this point, I'd much rather that companies simply stop trying to put lipstick on a pig about their corporate altruism if they're going to prioritize profits over everything else. That's their prerogative to do so, but they're definitely not fooling me into thinking that somehow Blizzard has turned a corner and will behave like a responsible corporate citizen. Maybe when the wheel turns and shareholder primacy yields to another form of corporate activity I'll change my mind about this, but until then I'll do my good deeds out of the public view and not in service of a corporate master.

#Blaugust2023

*Holy crap, she's matured. I don't know why, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that she's grown up and reached the cusp of 40. Before you accuse me of being ageist or something, I think that she looks absolutely stunning, and not just "for her age". Of course, me being in my 50s, I still think of her as being young, but that goes with the territory.

EtA: Corrected spelling.

How Did the EU End Up Being the Odd One Out?

That's the question I have when both the UK and now the US' Federal Trade Commission are suing to block the Microsoft acquisition of Blizzard.

Typically the EU is the one these days who is less of a paper tiger for mergers/acquisitions than the UK and US are, but I suppose that everybody is allowed an outlier.

Or maybe the EU plays more Diablo 4 than we guessed.

In Case You Ever Wondered Whether Game Companies are Soulless Corporations...

...I give you the latest little brouhaha from Blizzard.

I give major props to Brian Birmingham, the now ex-Activision-Blizzard manager, for his principled stand against the stacked ranking corporate policy at A-B, but as soon as I read the words "stacked ranking" I knew he was swimming against the tide.

For the life of me, I have no idea why executive corporate management loves stacked ranking among those other "corporate trends" --I'm looking at you, open office floor designs*-- but that it was popularized by GE's Jack Welch says a lot. 

I've been in the work force full time since 1991, and yes, I've encountered stacked ranking before. Numerous times. And its basic principle, that teams should be shoehorned into a bell curve and that the bottom 10% are poor performers, is something I despise. There is very little nuance to the stacked ranking system, where the best performer on a crappy team is given a higher ranking than an average to poor performer on a fantastic team. The stacked ranking system also encourages cutthroat behavior among peers, which includes such items as coworkers sabotaging projects to make their own work look better. Again, I've seen such behavior in the past among coworkers. The focus isn't on putting out good work, but playing the system to maximum advantage. 

From AD&D Dungeon Masters
Guide (1e), Page 111.

So yeah, I have a history with stacked ranking. 

And if you're playing politics with the system, you're not spending time putting out a good product. And in the case of Blizzard, you're not developing bug free, well designed games.

*I'm incredibly grateful I work from home, because if I had to work at the office, it would have been in an open office design. Even in a post-pandemic world, corporations still love the open office design for some strange ungodly reason. I work in IT Security, so by nature I tend to have sensitive material up on screen a lot of the time. If you're thinking "Hey, wait a minute, if it's up on screen and you're in an open office, anybody can walk by and see that!" then you'd be absolutely correct. Without any privacy whatsoever, there's little ability to securely handle sensitive data. I didn't say there's no ability, because you still can, but proper handling of sensitive data out in the open also involves additional cost, and cost is the antithesis of corporate life.

"I'll Take 'Not What I Was Expecting' for $200, Mayim..."

I was busy working away with my headset on, listening to music, when I heard a "bing" come across.

Being not the standard alert that I get for email or a meeting, I looked up to see a fading visual alert on my desktop PC screen. Something about a "gift".

"What on earth..." I began, and hunted for the Battle.net window.

Quickly locating the little gift box icon on the screen, this is what was inside:

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot...

Um, yeah, this is awkward. I mean, do they even know that I'm a blogger, and that I've not done diddly on Retail in ages? Sure, I've hopped on and tooled around Stormwind --or Dalaran 1.0 (I think that's 1.0) or whatever the base of operations in Mists is-- but I've not done a single quest, much less anything more interesting than a few screenshots. They have to know that Classic and TBC Classic are my jam these days.

Since I'm overly cautious, and my line of work is in security, I went ahead and opened a support request to verify that these were legit. I'm pretty sure I'll get a "Yes, they're legitimate, don't worry so much!" as a reply, but this just seemed too much of a coincidence that a few days after I'd done some poking around in Retail I suddenly get this dropped in my lap. Surely there's an automatically generated "gift" that appears like this when certain conditions are triggered.

Now, if only Blizz read my blog and would actually provide me with the info I'd really like to see, about how many accounts actually do various activities in-game....

#Blaugust2022

What Awaits Blizzard

I read with interest the experiences of Bethesda's disaster of a game, Fallout 76, in an article just published on Wednesday by Kotaku. While the article itself could have used better editing*, the basic premise remains the same: Bethesda refused to listen to the multi-player part of the studio, used crunch needlessly on QA and dev staff, refused to let the release date slide, utilized a game engine not built for what it was being used for, and relied upon snitches and bad management to deal with a project that chewed up and spit people out.

It sounds a LOT like what happened to Bioware with Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda, doesn't it?

But for me, the most interesting part of the article was how the QA and dev staff thought they were gonna be saved when Microsoft bought the game studio, and once they came onboard they were sadly mistaken.

Microsoft operated in a "hands-off" policy, mainly because they feared too much corporate interference would disrupt the "secret sauce" of the creative nature of game development.

“The impression that I got was that Microsoft would not make big changes unless they needed to,” one staffer told Kotaku. “Simply because they’re like: We hired you to be excellent. And if we touch you, it could be like a house of cards situation where you just fall apart [as creatives]. I don’t think health benefits are going to do that to anybody.”

Microsoft did not address a request for comment by the time of publication.

A former Bethesda employee told Kotaku, “[Xbox CEO Phil] Spencer’s word when picking up Bethesda [and ZeniMax] is largely that his preference is that studios be let to operate as they always have, let the talent be the talent.”

One source spoke cynically about Bethesda’s potential for changing from within: “It would be great if something like [Activision Blizzard worker advocacy group] A Better ABK existed for Bethesda, but everyone is terrified...because [Bethesda] HR is super cutthroat.” A current employee agreed it did not feel like Bethesda HR was actively interested in addressing “any real employee concerns.” Similar cynicism is reflected in the company’s Glassdoor reviews.
--From The Human Toll Of Fallout 76’s Disastrous Launch

My big takeaway from this is that if people thought that Microsoft would "right the ship" with Blizzard's handling of World of Warcraft or any of their other franchises, they are being naive.

There isn't going to be a big cultural shift at Activision/Blizzard, and there isn't going to be a sudden improvement in the quality of the work done on WoW. The stories aren't going to get better (or worse, I suppose), and the focus on WoW isn't going to change from raiding and Mythic+. And Diablo Immortal? It's not going to change from it's own insidious version of gambling mechanics.

Unless Blizzard itself wants it to change.

 

 

*Having blogged for almost 13 years has given me some appreciation for that part of the creative process. I mean, I read an old post I'd made and cringe at the grammatical errors I find, years later. And don't get me started on One Final Lesson; every time I go back and reread it I find new areas I could rewrite and improve the flow of the story.