Making Sense of Incomprehensibility

Sometimes I wonder just how traffic flows on the internet.

Oh, not the technical version, mind you, because at one point I could tell you precisely how networking via TCP-IP actually worked*, but I meant in terms of why traffic flows to a specific location.

If you know the name of this character that Peter
Falk is playing, you might want to go schedule
a colonoscopy. From Tenor.com.

I keep up with the Meme Monday posts for a couple of reasons, namely to push myself into posting more often by having a regular column and having an outlet for my snarky sense of humor. However, another reason to post Meme Mondays is that --by and large-- more eyeballs look at those posts than any of my other ramblings on this blog. That shouldn't be a surprise since those posts have the broadest appeal as opposed to the gamer-geek centric fare typically found on the blog.

Still, I can be surprised by what takes off and what doesn't.

When a post takes off within gamer space, that's typically driven by eyeballs on a post itself. What I mean is that traffic goes directly to that post because it got a bump from somewhere out there in the blogosphere, such as the times when a post from PC would get a mention on the now-defunct WoW Insider. The first time that happened, on the series of posts I made comparing Blood Elves and Draenei back in December 2011, caught me by surprise. All I knew at first was that our traffic had spiked from a dozen or so views to 2000 or more, and I had no idea what the hell was going on. It was only after I dug into the data that I realized almost all of the traffic was coming from WoW Insider, whereupon following it back I discovered we'd gotten a mention in their weekly blog spotlight column. The traffic eventually reverted back to normal levels, but for a week or so PC got a nice boost.

This sort of behavior has happened from time to time, based primarily upon getting a mention in other blogs or websites with readership far greater than our own, but it could also be due to pertinent data appearing in a post. Such as Souldat's post on How to Effectively Tank the Lich King from 2010, which remains our single most viewed post on the blog. It didn't get a spike in viewership, but it had a steady number of views for several years. That it used to get on the main page of Google Search results didn't hurt.**

That being said, by and large the majority of spiky traffic that does come to the blog goes to the blog's main page rather than a specific post, which tells me that that traffic isn't driven by the gamer geek ecosphere.

Here ya go; the last three months' worth of traffic.

While I can guess what might have driven some traffic --the spike at the end is likely due to the magic words "Discworld" and "Kickstarter"-- a lot of those spikes come from way out of nowhere. I can't assume that a single post drove traffic to the blog, because the spikes in July, September and October show up during my "dead time" between posts. Blaugust is also no help, since you can't look at an individual post and say "yeah, that's brought people here". There's also the undercurrent of web crawlers and whatnot that will flow through all of your website creating a higher base level than what I'd call the true number of regular readers.

***

I've always known that the internet is a fickle beast, but blogging over the past decade and a half has reinforced those opinions. I still laugh at people --typically business types and marketers-- who think that "making something go viral" is just what internet creators do. "We need you to create a viral video for this" is a query I've heard on occasion***, as if you can snap your fingers and views will magically appear, but it's the sense that some people who "get" the internet and can manipulate it to their own ends that drives me batty. 

The internet doesn't work like that; what goes viral and what doesn't is pretty much an unknown. So I'll just continue to wonder just what the hell it is that occasionally makes PC's viewership spike.

*If you gave me an hour or two I could refresh my memory on all of the details beyond the basics of hubs, routers, setting up a local LAN behind a firewall, etc.

**In case you're wondering, the advent of Wrath Classic and the opening of Icecrown Citadel did not result in a corresponding spike in views. I presume everybody ran to Wowhead to find out what the currently accepted strat is for the Lich King fight. Since I never actually got to raid ICC, I couldn't tell you whether the current meta matches what Soul had written down over a decade ago.

***Never directed at me, thankfully.

Sometimes, It Doesn't Mean Anything

In the years that I've been blogging here, I've watched this medium's popularity peak and decline.

To be fair, in 2009 blogging had likely already peaked, but in MMO space we were still riding the high point of the MMO wave with WoW's Wrath of the Lich King and the impending release of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Parallel Context was just one of many MMO (and WoW specifically) oriented blogs out there; if you went to any of the big MMO sites back then, it certainly seemed like there were a lot of people starting up or maintaining blogs. I guess it feels kind of weird when I sit back in 2024 and realize that PC is a survivor.

Blogging is, at it's heart, a solitary kind of experience. When you write, you don't get much in the way of feedback until you actually post.* After a while, that can get kind of old. Here we are, blogging about a genre that is at its heart a social endeavor, and yet we operate in solitude while writing.

It takes a certain type of person to keep blogging, year in and year out.

From wpbeginner.com. Yes, there's a site for
purchasing tutorials on how to blog using Wordpress.
Not sure how I feel about that one, given the
complaints I read about WP from my friends.

This isn't a lead-in to me saying how wonderful I am at blogging, because most days I'm just happy if I can get something off my chest and posted here. And really, if people actually knew how to write something that was guaranteed to go viral, they would go and do just that. Human psychology being what it is, you can't operate with certainty about anything. You can establish trends and have a really good feel on tendencies, but prediction is an inexact science.

And people's tastes can be fickle and change on a dime. (Just ask Billy Squier and his sudden plummet from popularity after Rock Me Tonite.**)

For me, the head scratcher is that while I've been doing Meme Monday for close to 1.5 years now, the Meme Monday about Playing a Female Toon is the one that by far got the most eyeballs to Parallel Context.

The memes themselves were kind of tame, because I didn't want to retread the same old female armor memes or the sexy fun times memes that are all over the place on social media, but for some reason that post got people to the blog. 

Go figure.

***

I will admit that blogging in the age of streaming and Tik-Tok does feel kind of weird. I thought of this while I've been reading Pride and Prejudice, because I can see the forms that modern novels take in the story, but the novel is most definitely a product of a bygone era. But if an author writes what is important to them, so do bloggers today. 

That's not always the case, given the metric ton of "how to write for profit" books/websites/etc. that are out there, but when you get to the heart of it all we do tend to write what we like and what we want to say. 

And what do I want to say? I'm not sure, really. I just write about things that pop into my head. Are they interesting? To me, yes. 

For example, reading Jane Austen has given me a bit of a window into what she found interesting over 200 years ago, and in turn I wondered what someone would think of my own output if they were to read this blog in 2224. How much could that reader glean from my posts?

It's a question that I can't really answer, because I think I'm too close to the blog to be able to stand back and take a more critical approach without coloring my opinions. But I do wonder what authors thought their work might appear to people in the future, or whether they were more concerned with simply providing a living for themselves and their family to worry much about what future generations thought.

I certainly hope that they won't think that the high point of my output is a Meme Monday on playing a video game as a Female avatar.

*Unless you bring other people into the writing process, or have multiple bloggers for one blog, such as what PC originally had. 

**Whether or not the video played a part in Billy's fall from grace is debatable, but what isn't is that Rock Me Tonite was Billy's last charting single in the US, and he suddenly vanished from the pop charts after that single.

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.

To Chase or Not to Chase

I have a cousin who writes for a video game site --none of the ones in MMO space, in case you're wondering*-- and back in 2015 the pageviews frequently reached the 50,000-100,000 mark. Given the average pageview of an MMO blog is measured by a much smaller number (and PC, in particular, seems to have a relatively loyal audience of 30-40 people), I was curious about how the site he writes for got that big.

"I don't know," he said, "we just write about what people want and we promote ourselves a bit, and things just took off."

In 2015, that meant MOBAs and console games. But still, the sheer size of pageviews caught my attention.

And really, if I thought that was big, I hadn't seen anything yet.

***

I'd been reading up a bit lately on Influencers and "Influencer Culture"**, because I've been trying to understand the appeal that influencers draw upon. They aren't celebrities in the purest sense, but some of them have become de-facto celebrities in their own right. They have their own followers and detractors --I mean, look at Asmongold for one obvious example-- but a lot of the influencers', well, influence comes from being perceived as a source of trust.

Truth is somewhat malleable, depending on the influencer, but trust is the engine of the influencing process. You don't even have to trust in what the influencer says, to put it another way, but you have to trust that you'll be entertained in some manner. Quite a few people may put eyeballs on controversial influencers, not because they believe in what bill of goods they're being sold, but because the influencer can pull on their emotions.

That's why, love him or hate him, people watch Asmongold's videos. If you didn't give a whoop about him, you'd not be watching.

***

But I think one thing that my cousin mentioned, about writing what people want, is highly important.

In an age of AI generated posts based on what will generate the most clicks, finding what people want isn't exactly rocket science. The blandness that permeates most AI created written content, however, will turn people off. I know I don't like anything that resembles a poorly written technical manual, no matter how tailored the content is toward my interests, and I work in IT. 

What my cousin missed was that it's more than just promotion and writing relevant content, but writing relevant content that people enjoy reading. It's that human element***, the writer's voice, that will keep people interested and coming back for more. 

Yes, there's a "lightning in a bottle" aspect to some website or person hitting it big, but that emotive element has to come from somewhere. And once people know they can expect you to provide that element, that's when you've got them.

***

Sounds easy, right? Heh. If you've ever tried to make creative content before, you know how hard it can be. Or how much self doubt can cripple you. I can actually speak to this with some experience here, given that PC is pretty long in the tooth as far as continuously active creative content goes. So if you think I can look at the success of my cousin (or others) and only feel jealousy, you're sadly mistaken. I have a lot of respect for what they accomplished, and I realize that what they've been able to do does come at a cost. My determination to do things my own way is a reflection on what I feel the personal and professional cost might be if I decided to start chasing clicks and generate content at a level I don't feel comfortable with and with a personal slant I disagree with. And those that actually can pull that off and generate eyeballs? My hat's off to them for what they've accomplished.




*Not my place to say which one, because he goes by a pseudonym.

**Sadly, MMOs were not on the radar. That would have been in 2005 rather than 2015. But the book that kicked off this interest is Influencer by Brittany Hennessy.

***For the time being, anyway.

EtA: Corrected the "**".

The Blogging Version of Sitting on the Fence Returns

Apparently there's some blogging thing that's starting today in our little corner of the internet. 

Given that blogging is now so passé that it's due to come around and be ironically trendy again*, that some of us old farts have kept up with blogging all these years means we're either persistent, delusional, stubborn, or a combination of all three. 

Either way, giving a bunch of MMO players --who are used to min-maxing the hell out of everything**-- the opportunity to post for a "celebration" of blogging and potentially win prizes in the form of badges as proof of, oh, I don't know.... "winning at blogging", that's certainly going to bring out some people to post a lot.

Or, if you're like me, refuse to formally participate yet go ahead and post a bunch anyway.***

***

Am I going to post a lot? Mmmmmaybe?

It's still too early to say, because 31 days is a long time, but we'll see. 

#Blaugust2023

*In the same manner as cassette tapes have been. Sure, there were good cassette tapes made, but from a record manufacturer? Oh hell no; you had to make copies off of records yourself onto quality tapes, such as Maxell or TDK, if you wanted a quality cassette made. Ironically enough, the best tapes were made from CDs in that period when CD players were a rarity in cars and you wanted your collection of CDs copied onto tape.

**Or know that everybody else is min-maxing the hell out of everything.

***If you want to call me hipsterish for behaving like that, go for it. I've been like that since before the current hipsters were even born. For example, the summer after my Freshman year of college I spent working at my Dad's office for one of his friends. When the time came for me to leave and go back to university, my Dad's friend wanted to take me out to lunch. I passed, because I didn't really feel like I earned anything special. He tried to convince me otherwise, but I held firm.

That's my secret: I'm always motivated

(Apologies to Bruce Banner for that modified quip.)

Something that nobody --and I do mean nobody-- has ever asked me in my years of writing is how I stay motivated.

Probably that has something to do with the size of the reader base of this blog, which I'm pretty sure is around 30-ish regular readers, when you filter out the web crawlers, spambots, and the individual spikes due to someone linking a post back to PC. Sure, a lot of the articles may eventually reach about 100 hits, but that's a long, slow drip-drip-drip over the course of months.

We used to have more regular readers, back when the major WoW/MMO watering holes were active*, but you could tell almost instantly when a site went dark because we'd see a corresponding drop in traffic. In my experience, people didn't migrate from a central watering hole to a Feed Reader, they simply stopped reading. People didn't come here for WoW (or MMO) news, for that they'd go to Wowhead or WoW Insider/Blizzard Watch or Massively/Massively Overpowered.

I've said numerous times over the years that if you're looking for validation by having people read your blog, you're going to be disappointed. Once you make peace with the reality that blogging is a niche format and very few people break through into the greater consciousness by blogging in this day and age, you'll be fine.

***

So that does beg the question: why keep blogging? Why stay motivated?

Well, I'd be lying if I said that I don't get any gratification at all from PC. When I see the page views go up after I posted something, I get that good ol' dopamine rush of "Hey, somebody wants to read this!" It's similar to that initial high you get when you discover that someone you've developed feelings for actually reciprocates. It's somewhere between "YESSS!" and "How did I get so lucky?", but before those doubts of "Okay, this can't really be happening, can it?" creep into your head.

That first time that Tam from Righteous Orbs commented here on the blog, I was about over the moon with excitement. Or when WoW Insider linked to a series of posts I made, I had to be walking on air for an entire week.

Personal gratification notwithstanding, I have a confession to make: I've always wanted to be a writer, and blogging gives me that outlet.

I can turn my head from where I'm sitting right now and see this up on a bookshelf:

This wasn't the first book on Science Fiction and Fantasy that I'd read --Lord of the Rings and The Sword of Shannara had that beat by a few years-- but this was the first collection of short stories that I owned. I devoured the stories within and began hunting for more. When I realized that there were actual magazines that published F&SF short stories**, 

Some publications lasted only as long
as the driving force was alive, such as
Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine.
Given how well MZB's reputation aged over
the years, it's probably for the best.
(From ebay.com.)

and that publishing three short stories would qualify someone membership in the Science Fiction Writers of America, I made it a goal to try to get published. 

I should add, this is despite my mother's obvious distaste for my dad's mother being a regular reader of Reader's Digest and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, as if both were inferior products. My mom loved the cozy type of Mystery novels***, and I guess between the two major mystery magazines her tastes would have run more toward Ellery Queen than Alfred Hichcock's, but I interpreted her dislike as a putdown of the short story format itself, which motivated me all the more to try to write better. 

***

Here I am, over 40 years later, and I'm still not a published author.

There was a time when I used to get
a copy of this from the library
on a regular basis, so I knew what
the submission requirements were
for all of the F&SF magazines.
(From amazon.com)

Writing fiction, especially short fiction, is harder than it looks. 

Okay, I should qualify this a bit. 

Writing fiction is easy; writing good fiction is hard; writing good fiction that is publishable is harder still.

If you want to find out how easy it is to write fiction, go check out the fanfic websites. (I'll wait.) A lot of SF&F fiction put out on the web isn't very good, and that has nothing to do with the nature of fanfic itself. I've wondered about why the writing isn't that good, but having gone back and read some of the novels and short stories I read as a kid, I think I can understand why: the quality of stories back in the "golden age" of SF&F overall wasn't really good.

Oh, don't get me wrong: I loved those stories, but the writing itself needed work. 

A lot of SF&F writing back then had, well, a ton of info dumps. The concepts of world building were such that in order to set the scene, authors basically spent pages setting up the world rather than simply letting the story fill in the gaps along the way. There was also such an emphasis on getting the science right that the quality of the writing suffered as a result. 

And the Mary Sue/Marty Stu protagonists. Hoo boy, there were a ton of them.

That's not to say that I don't like a heroic character, because I do, but some of the protagonists in the stories back then were so perfect that I have a hard time going back and rereading them.**** I like characters who do heroic things, not heroic characters doing, well, their thing.

Because I internalized a lot of these stories in my youth, when I started trying to write my own fiction, it just didn't sound right. The flow wasn't there, and the info dumps didn't mesh well with how I wanted stories to proceed. The characters were either too good and perfect, or I'd swing too hard the other way and torture the characters for no good reason other than "the characters have to suffer or have angst" for it to be legitimately good fiction. And I'll be honest in that I hate that. As I've said many a time, if I want that out of a story, I'll watch the news.

"What about catharsis?" someone once asked me.

Thanks for saying so, Mr. Crews.
(From Brooklyn Nine Nine, meme from GetYarn)

"Catharsis is fine, so long as tragedies and black comedies aren't the only things you're consuming," I replied. "After a while, reading all that will merely get you depressed."

And when life is going shitty for you, or even just kind of shitty, reading tragedies --or their close cousins, the stories where tons of main and secondary characters die-- isn't exactly a big pick-me-up.

***

My writing foibles aside, when Souldat asked if I wanted to blog about WoW, I felt that at least here was my chance to actually write something and get it out there without any internal pressure to get published. I could just write, and by writing, improve my craft.

I'm grateful that over the decade plus I've been writing PC I haven't had people tell me that my writing sucks, or been critical of the overall quality of my work. And I'm doubly grateful for that because I've read some of my old stuff, and boy does it stink.

Truth.
(From youngwriterssociety.com.)

I have no idea what made me think I was "writing gooder" back then, because I wasn't. And I realize that a few years from now I'll look at these posts and groan to myself about how terrible they are. I mean, I do that already with One Final Lesson, and that's the only story of that length I've ever finished and released into the wild. 

But that's the thing that keeps me motivated: the knowledge that I'm improving with every post I write. It may not be obvious to me now, but it will show up some years later. 

It's something that keeps me posting, because even if I never get published I'll at least have a body of work I can look back on.

"Well yes, but not in the traditional sense...
Wait, are you in Eversong?"

"Oh. Well, it's nice of you to keep up
with your Instructor's relatives."

#Blaugust2022

*Blogs such as Righteous Orbs, MMO Melting Pot, The Pink Pigtail Inn, Orcish Army Knife, and when WoW Insider (now known as Blizzard Watch) used to have a weekly update of activity in the WoW Blogosphere. All of these are either defunct (Righteous Orbs and MMO Melting Pot), have bloggers fall away from blogging (PPI), pass away (Orcish Army Knife), or just shut down their regular articles highlighting bloggers (WoW Insider).

**And still publish, despite the decline in circulation among paper magazines. Venerable names such as Analog (launched as Astounding Science Fiction in 1930) and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1949), and more recent fare (in a relative sense) of Asimov's Science Fiction (1977) still are kicking around. There are others out there as well, but I can always count on these three to be on the shelves at my local independent bookstore, right next to the two long running Mystery magazines Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (1941) and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine (1956). 

***I remember one time my mom's mother, my wife, and I had a conversation about books. Grandma told me about a book she was reading, and that my mom was interested in what it was like. "Oh, you wouldn't like it," Grandma had told her, "because there's sex in it." The fact that my grandmother knew her own daughter was too much of a prude to enjoy a novel she obviously liked tickled me to no end. That was when I realized that my grandmother was far more comfortable with sex and modern society than her own daughters were.

****This is a problem even with current fiction. There was a novella in one of the magazines I have from the mid-2000s --I think it might have been Analog-- who had a protagonist that was smart, scientifically trained, witty, and athletic. I struggled to find any flaws in him at all. Ironically enough, I found a novelette in a 1986 Analog magazine, The Barbarian Princess by Vernor Vinge, that turned the Mary Sue concept on its head. 

I think I still have my copy
around somewhere, but this came
from abebooks.com.

Even though Tatja Grimm was definitely the Mary Sue type, that didn't mean she was perfect. And seen from another character's point of view, which is how the novelette is told, their own internal biases against the "barbarians" played heavily into making that an enjoyable story.

EtA: Corrected some grammar. As usual.

Taming the id

I've occasionally touched on this in the past, but one nice thing about blogging in this (electronically) written format is that it avoids what I call the "unrestrained id" found in other forms of social media.

This was on my mind when I was listening to the interviews in Josh Strife Hayes' YouTube video I posted about yesterday, particularly how streamers are basically caught in the moment when they comment on something that they're asked about while streaming. It also jogged my memory about a comment that Kaylriene made about Taliesin and Evitel, and how he was a fan of their YouTube videos until he saw some of their livestreams, and then.... Oh well.

A huge part of why I don't like being on Twitter* or livestreaming is that the immediacy of the apps means that there's no time for contemplation before committing to a comment. You see something, you open your mouth (or your keyboard/smart phone), and out it goes. The only restraint is that little voice in the back of your head saying "NO DON'T!!!!!" as you hit "send" or just let those words come out.

Even in a conference call at work there is a thing called a mute button, which comes in awfully handy when you're in a meeting and to save your blood pressure from skyrocketing you let loose with some invective. Not necessarily aimed at anyone, just blowing off steam, but...

"Bumpuses!!!"

And if you've ever actually missed that the mute button was off, and you say anything, it's one of the more embarrassing things that can happen to you.**

Still, the lack of filter beyond your own internal one can become a huge liability if you can't keep your mouth shut. And let's be honest: a lot of the appeal of watching a streamer isn't just what they're doing, but what they're saying. It's all unfiltered, and a livestream only tends to encourage that lack of filtration. 

***

Is it the shock value that people want to see, or something witty and clever? 

Reaction videos are just that --a reaction-- and people will watch them more than regular videos put out by the same person. Asmongold admitted as much in Josh's video, where he spends a lot of time putting together a "how to do X" video and it only gets a fraction of the views than a "TBC Classic is better than Shadowlands" video. It's a shame, really, but I guess people are coming for the drama and the affirmation that they're right (or the YouTuber is wrong).

Maybe I'm just an old fuddy duddy or something, but I fail to see why the immediacy is needed so much. In a world where your reputation --and online even more so-- is everything, why risk it in an emotional outburst? Why risk being rounded up and crapped on by an internet hit squad because you couldn't keep your mouth shut?

From where I sit, it's not worth it.

#Blaugust2022

*For the record, yes, I --as Parallel Context's Redbeard, not for me as, well, me-- do have a Twitter account. I never use it, as I only created it for a very specific reason (to DM someone), and it sits there, unused. So if you ever pinged me on a Tweet, I'd never see it.

**No, I did not curse. I asked my youngest if she needed a ride to something. Still, it was plenty embarrassing.

Being a Content Creator in a Niche Market

If you have a passing interest in MMO blogging --or in this case, vlogging-- you might have heard of Josh Strife Hayes. 

This guy. You can almost hear his
British accent from the screenshot.
(From pcgamer.com.)

The fact that he used to teach drama at school* does not shock me at all, as he has a camera presence that I can only wish I had. And compared to my "no accent" Midwestern accent**, Josh's has an authoritative sound that can make him instantly believable and effortlessly charming.

All that aside, Josh has spent some time putting together YouTube videos examining the MMO world --and, to a lesser extent, the gaming world in general-- and his videos are truly top notch both in quality and how he presents and defends his opinions. 

Well, he's done it again with a nearly 2 hour long tour de force about MMO content creators...

Josh went out and interviewed close to a dozen MMO content creators and got their responses on a variety of topics. Josh's point is that he as well as the other content creators he interviewed really want more MMO content creators out there, but he wants people to understand what they're getting into before they make that jump.

The interviews were edited for brevity, but the edited version still clocked in at almost 2 hours.

My immediate takeaway from the interviews is that I need to watch more of these creators. Holy crap are they articulate and thoughtful. And yes, I'm including Asmongold in this, because one thing that stands out to me about Asmongold's interview is that he put a lot of thought into his responses, proving inadvertently that the "Asmongold" seen on his channel is basically a "stage version" of himself. The real Asmongold isn't like his stage self --well, not totally so, anyway-- which kind of surprised me. I mean, I should have known that he has a stage version of himself, but for some reason I thought he was so open book that what you saw was what you got out of him.

If you've got the time, you should seriously give a listen to the YouTube video. It's not only a good watch, but it also gives you a glimpse of what it's like to be an MMO content creator in today's world.

And if you happen to find this post, Josh, thanks for all the effort! I truly appreciate all the work that you put in. 

#Blaugust2022

*I'm having issues finding independent verification, but I swear I heard it on one of his YouTube videos.

**That's because the Midwestern American accent is closest to "General American English", the sort of English you get out of newscasters and whatnot that doesn't really have an accent that you can place anywhere. Or, as my friends and I would put it, "The Accent that is no Accent". Only in the Midwest would you find an American accent so non-committal that it's, well, kind of boring.

EtA: Corrected a misspelling. 

All About that Approach

I remember when Rades spent several posts* showing how he does his screenshots, and I kept thinking that's a lot of work for just a few pixels.

Of course, I don't know beans about Photoshop --or the free competition, GIMP-- so that might have something to do with it. It's not that I didn't try to learn GIMP (free is free, after all), and I discovered pretty quickly I was in over my head. An old version of Paint Shop Pro for $5 proved pretty damn inadequate for doing much, so I fell back on my old standbys --Paint and MS Office-- whenever I need to tweak things graphically.

But here were a set of instructions on how to do things that look pretty damn good.

There's a catch, however. (There's always a catch.) It required me to actually learn Photoshop or GIMP to do some of the advanced techniques, and given the breadth of my hobbies learning GIMP instead of blogging was a hard pill to swallow. So I basically internalized some of the cheaper ideas, such as framing a shot, to improve my screenshot capability from the early days. 

That's a pretty big catch if you ask me.

Other ideas, such as using a second account to get some of those multi toon shots, were things that while sounded good I simply couldn't pull the trigger on. Yes, I know you can have a free account up to a certain level, but.... No. Too much temptation to use that second account as a full account. 

My screenshots did end up improving a bit over the long run, although I'll also admit that they tend toward the basic end of the spectrum. If you're looking for fantastic screenshots, you need to look elsewhere. Getting the concepts down, however, was a huge step forward. 

***

It's kind of like that with playing MMOs. Or blogging, for that matter.

There are going to be some items and techniques that will simply be out of reach unless you want to spend a lot of capital, whether it's time, money, in-game gold, or whatever, but you can do reasonably well enough with some basic principles and practice. 

Lots and lots of practice.

But you knew that, right? 

Just like in any other form of practice, however, there's a right way and a wrong way to practice. Sure, about half of practice is just showing up, but if you show up and start with bad habits, then that practice will go to waste. 

Back when I was a kid and I played basketball, a lot of practice was spent learning how to handle defense and offense. Our teams played a lot of zone defense, which requires you to know where to go when the ball is at various locations on the court. As I was a backup player who sat on the bench a lot, I could be inserted into either a guard position or a forward position, so I had to learn up to four different positions** while I was out there during practice. On some types of defense, such as a 2-3 defense, the two guard positions (and the two forward positions) were interchangeable, so it wasn't as hard as it sounded. But on a 1-3-1 trapping defense, only the wings (shown below) were interchangeable.

The basic 1-3-1 setup.
From this, a lot of coaches have
devised some truly esoteric defenses,
such as John Chaney of Temple with
his infamous matchup zone.
From basketballforcoaches.com.

To not only learn your position, but play it well enough with the rest of the team so that each person could depend on everybody else in a game, you had to practice.

And practice.

You don't have to practice like this to play an MMO for certain. I'm certainly not advocating for a starters/bench method that my old guild was pushing heavily toward, especially when you're a person likely to be sitting on the bench week in and week out, but it does help to work on figuring out what your rotation ought to be, based on what you value.

Such as with Linna. 

A Knight in her natural habitat.

When she's out in the field, her priorities are:

• Maximize mana efficiency.
• Keep your health topped off when you can
• Keep using Crusader Strike on cooldown

Maximizing mana efficiency can take many forms. Sometimes it's Judging Wisdom on an enemy and then using Seal of Wisdom once more, mainly to keep your mana pool as high as possible. Sure, you're losing damage while doing that, but on the flip side you have mana you can access for damage as well as your second priority, healing yourself.

Just as often, however, Linna will Judge Wisdom and then cast Seal of Command, Judging that on cooldown. That helps a lot with DPS, especially with higher powered mobs, at the cost of some of the mana pool. 

If you notice, I didn't put Consecrate into any of my priorities. That's because it's an AOE attack, and depending on the situation presented to you casting Consecrate can backfire big time. I'd say that about 6-7 times out of 10 it's perfectly fine to cast Consecrate before going into Crusader Strike, but when there's a wandering enemy out there, casting Consecrate can accidentally pull that enemy, especially if Linna moves away and brings the enemy she's fighting with her, leaving an empty Consecrate out there for anybody to stumble into. It's at points like these where situational awareness is highly critical.

Now, if we turn this whole thing around and stick Linna in a 5-person dungeon, her priorities change a bit:

• Before starting, make sure there's enough water for drinking and consumes for buffing.
• Watch your threat.
• Provide interrupts as needed.
• Judge Crusader on the primary target and then cast Seal of Command, Judging that on cooldown.
• Be ready to pick up adds and/or enemies if the tank goes down. 

In a dungeon, mana efficiency isn't a big deal. Paladins tend to be drinkers, and making sure you have enough water to drink between pulls is a thing. If we're talking about Quintalan, well, he does have the Blood Elf racial abilities of Mana Tap and Arcane Torrent to help out with the mana pool, but typically Q will hang onto Arcane Torrent for interrupting purposes rather than boosting Ye Old Mana. 

But outside of that, watching your threat as a DPS is THE thing to do. If you think you don't have to worry about that, trust me. You will. And you'll live to regret it otherwise.

Okay, all this aside, how does Linna (or Quintalan) work this all out? 

By practicing on mobs out in the field.

That's the beauty of an MMO: you can work on a rotation out in the field without causing any problems to anybody but yourself. And while you're out there, questing, gathering, or whatnot, you can work out the kinks in how to down an enemy as best as you can.

***

Okay, given that this is Blaugust, what about practicing writing?

Well, the best way to practice is to write. And write. And write.

Without listening to your inner critic.

If you're like me, you write something and then your brain goes "Wait, I think it'd look better if we said it another way. How about this...." and then you're stuck rewriting the same lines over and over again. Or your brain goes "This sucks. This whole post sucks. This story sucks. You need to start over. Do something better. Like, say, literary. You need more depression and angst, the literary types all like to wallow in people's depression. You know what, maybe you should stick to IT work." And then you can't write anything at all.

Which sucks.

What I've seen in books on how to write --both fiction and non-fiction, but especially fiction-- is to set a timer for about 10-15 minutes, and you just pour your fucking heart out on the (virtual) page. Don't worry about grammar, don't worry about whether it sounds "right", or any of that crap. Just write. Force your way through your inner critic, running it over with a 2 ton pickup truck. 

After those 10-15 minutes, take a break. Peruse your email or something. I have writer friends who are in a chat channel, the "War Room" they call it, and during that little bit of downtime they just chat amongst themselves. They're not allowed to critique things, to edit things, or anything of that sort. Editing is for later. Then they start up another 10-15 minute push when their downtime is over.

It's frankly quite amazing how well that works in terms of silencing your inner critic. 

***

Now, after having gone down the rabbit hole of basketball, which led me to watching videos breaking down St. Peters' amazing run in the NCAA Tournament --hey, any team that beats Kentucky I can get behind-- I really need to get back to focusing on some writing. 

How did this get here? Oh look, it's
Dayton beating Kansas at the buzzer last Fall...
(Photo from CBS Sports.)

After I bask in that moment of basketball glory for a bit.

/sigh
Okay, okay, I'm going...

#Blaugust2022

*Starting off with a guest post from Hugh of the late lamented MMO Melting Pot. And before you complain about where the pics are, remember: Rades passed away last year. I presume the pics vanished into thin air because of that.

**Nowadays, the guards are known as positions 1 and 2, the forwards are 3 and 4, and the center is 5. This way you can swap out guards and forwards as needed, so you could go small with a three guard lineup --1 through 3 are guards, with 4 and 5 as forwards-- or go tall with 1 as the guard, 2, 3, and 4 as forwards, and 5 as the center. If your team is in foul trouble or has injuries, you just have to wing it and adjust your personnel as you can. The beauty of basketball is being able to think on the fly and adjust to the situation on the court at all times, just like in a raid you have to be on your scramble game when shit goes sideways.

EtA: Corrected some grammar.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

 Today feels.... Weird.

And no, I don't mean April Fool's Day sort of weird.

This is the first time in over 20 years that I no longer work at my old job.

Oh, I work for the same employer overall, but from 2001 to yesterday I worked in pretty much the same job for the same company. Admittedly most of that time was spent as a contractor, but still it feels weird to not have that anchor to my life.

At the same time, I'm completing my 2nd full week at my new job location, so at least I've got some continuity.

I'm not used to having my work day start later than 7:30 AM. Or that some of the meetings I'm in last an hour when in the old job they'd last half that. Or that I no longer have access to servers, so I can't just hop on to find things out myself. 

***

Which brings me to recurring urge to discover what I'd find if I were to hop on one of my old toons. Just because, I suppose.

I can't go back in time to see what I did at jobs in the 1990s, but I can see what I was doing in Retail when I unsubbed back in 2014.

I had a brief discussion with Shintar today about somehow playing together, and she'd mentioned that she'd created a free account on the Americas servers, so I thought "Maybe I should do that for the EU servers." That morphed into "Maybe I should reconnect with my old toons and see about what I can do with them." And so I hopped onto several toons.

Well, that was the idea, anyway, but the second or third toon I logged into was the original Balthan, and I discovered that the old bloggers' guild that Rades had created --Puggers Anonymous-- was still active with Balthan as GM.

 

Yep, Ironforge. Wait....

Then I saw it.

Yes. Those were Rades' toons.

Back in the days when Vidyala's guild, Business Time, was a top guild on Strict 10s progression*, Rades had created Puggers Anonymous on Moonrunner-US just so several of us bloggers could hang out together. Alas that almost all of those bloggers are gone from the game now, and the only toons left in the guild are Rades' and my own. 

And Rades will never login again. 

After staring at the screen for a few minutes, my curiosity evaporated and I quickly logged off.

I'm the GM of a dead guild started by a dead friend for friends that no longer play a game that is no longer recognizable to me.

It's hard to describe my feelings better than that statement, although "profoundly sad" does come to mind.

***

But.

There is a balancing out of things in MMOs.

Last Friday, one of the regulars that would attend our alt runs in Classic and is now part of the Monday raid joined the guild. I asked her what happened, and after Karazhan finished she pulled me into a private conversation and we talked. I can't divulge what was said, but let's just say she was given a raw deal.

But, she told me, she's much happier to be in a place with friends.

I definitely agreed with that one.

Then she said that people come to the Friday Karazhan raid because they love me and the way I run things.

"Uh...."

"You don't feel it? You're really well loved within the guild."

And here I was mostly feeling sorry for myself.

So... Maybe that's a hint that I should shut up a bit about some things.

*For those interested, what was meant by "Strict 10s" was that you raided only 10 person raids and equipped gear only from 10 person raids. Nothing from 25 person raids was allowed, and a raider from a Strict 10s raid team couldn't even venture into a 25 person raid at all. This meant that Business Time was really good at progression within the strict confines of 10 person raids. I still remember the time when, back in Mists, my Rogue --the original Azshandra-- was progressing through Pandaria and needed an assist on a pair of mini-bosses. Vid happened to be on, so we grouped up and she wiped the floor with those bosses. Az, in her green questing leather gear at L88 or so, had only half of the health of Vid's Mage, Millya, who was tricked out in full raid gear (I think 5.2 patch's raids at the time). If you ever wondered whether raid drops from Strict 10s was good enough to be a top progression guild, that should answer your question.

B.F. Skinner Would be Proud

Last Monday night I was woken up by a ping on my phone.

I'd gone to sleep --again-- after another Monday evening spent with an early-ish bedtime followed by waking up at around 11:15 PM and then a second time around 1:00 AM, from which I couldn't get back to anything resembling slumber until 3 AM once more.

This has been kind of a constant theme lately, where I wake up involuntarily and can't get back to sleep while the Monday raid is going on. It kind of puts a lie to my excuse of needing to get more rest because of the new job, but it appears to be something I simply can't control. 

"You miss us," my questing buddy whispered to me while I was --naturally-- on WoW, waiting to get tired enough to go back to sleep. 

I wasn't doing much --just some reading for work as well as questing and grinding so I could level my weapon skills and get enough gold for a flying mount for Linna*-- but this happening for much of the past month has forced my hand.

"Okay," I replied, "I'll admit it. I miss y'all."

"Hehe... win!!"

"A true win would be to come back."

"Do you want to? We're 1 short tonight."

"But I'm the kid from A Christmas Story with his face against the glass window. Can't. No Kael kill."

"I know. :-("

She then asked, "Is it the Kael kill keeping you from BT?"

"Without a Kael kill, no Hyjal. Without Hyjal, no BT."

"Ah, right."**

So, with that on my mind, I finally was able to get to sleep right after the raid concluded. If I were in the raid, however, my night wouldn't be over until after 4 AM EST, when the raid lead team would have finished their analysis of how things went. So while I do miss the raid, I don't miss the afterparty that much.

***

When my phone went off, I was certain it was work.

And I was totally ready to be able to tell people at my old position to basically "fuck off", because I had a little over a week left in my old job and --with the blessing of my administrative manager-- I could tell them to contact my successor instead.

Politely.***

Instead, I discovered it was from Shintar, who contacted me directly about a comment I made on Kaylriene's post about whether the WoW Community itself is doing okay. (Spoiler alert, it's not.) 

You see, Shintar had commented about one regular commenter on her blog(s) who only would come on to comment about how the game sucks and that it used to be good but it isn't now. Not mean spirited, mind you, and polite about it, but it wears on a body to see that all the time.

And yes, I thought that person was me.

Because of that comment (and the post itself), I began to do some soul searching about why I feel the way I do about WoW --both Retail and Classic-- as well as other MMOs. Shintar's comment via Discord led to a relatively short conversation that I honestly hardly remember at all were it not for the entire collection of text in Discord itself.

One of the things that stood out to me the most about the conversation, reading it in the morning while drinking coffee, was that I said that Kaylriene is right; I really wanted WoW to get better, but I didn't know how to do so. I also mentioned that every time WoW is at a juncture, it makes a turn to embrace the hardcore raiding crowd. And that after a certain point, [the game] can't find [its] way back to anything else.

Shintar disputed that, saying that she does not get the same vibe out of Retail playing now as a non-raider.

That being said, my observation was that everything was oriented toward a raid at the end, and WoW's design was to get you into a raid. Unlike, say, Wrath, where you'd get new instances as well as new raids with each major patch, as well as new non-raid content (such as the Quel'Delar questline).****

But Shintar pointed out two things that I thought, upon reading them again, were quite important: that Retail has tourist mode raids so that more people can see the content, which Wrath definitely didn't have, and that we're seeing the same player behavior in TBC Classic as we saw in Retail, so in her opinion raiding hasn't changed much over the years other than the fact that Retail allows people to see the raid with minimal effort nowadays.

But that, and my reaction to that, makes me think of conditioning.

***

It may sound like a simple question, but it is at the heart of why MMOs --and to a lesser extent a LOT of other video games-- operate: do we play the way we play because we have been conditioned to play that way? The positive reinforcement of how MMOs are designed, with the "do this get a reward" does hand things out bite sized chunks, but it also conditions us to expect those things. And not just the rewards, but how a game is supposed to be. 

The joke about all of the Zelda games is that Link goes around smashing pottery, and there isn't a piece of pottery throughout the kingdom that is safe from him. But when you think about it, have we as players come to expect to have to smash pottery in a Zelda game? That smashing pottery is the way to find rupees and items? And that if Link doesn't go smashing pottery, is it really a Zelda game? That if the next installment of The Legend of Zelda didn't allow Link to smash pottery willy-nilly, would the fans of the game raise havoc?

MMOs have their own conditioning based on how "things have always been done" in game worlds. Things such as:

• Quests follow a specific cadence, in packs of 3-4 quests of increasing difficulty, until you the final quest is a mini-boss.
  
• Speeding through content to get to Endgame.
• The game begins at Endgame.
• MMOs must have raiding as the primary focus of Endgame.
  
• How other things to do in an MMO, such as crafting, side quests, and reputation grinding, affects raiding.
• To be a good player, you must follow the metagame.
  

Or, for more game specific conditioning:*****

• WoW must always have a Horde vs. Alliance conflict.
• Once you reach Endgame, you're expected to run dailies and grind to gain access to raids.
• Every major content patch in WoW must have new gear to grind/raid/whatever for.
• The only real raiding in WoW is Heroic or harder.
• Each new expansion in WoW must have new systems, so that you start the grinding/learning rotations/etc. all over.

Perhaps this is why things remain the way they are in MMOs, and WoW in particular, because we as players are conditioned to expect things and do things in a specific way, and we see those patterns even when they weren't fully fleshed out back in the day. Which would explain a bit as to why people are playing TBC Classic as if they were playing Retail: we were conditioned to do this over the decades of MMO playing.

***

Subverting the conditioning, however, is hard.

Some games, such as Elden Ring, can pull it off despite deviating from the expected open world formula we've come to expect. The articles that swept gamer space a week or two ago, about how Horizon: Forbidden West developers threw shade at Elden Ring for quest development, shows how ingrained the conditioning is.

And no matter how many new things there are to do in WoW, ostensibly designed to let people do things other than simply raid, people feel obligated to do all the things because they're conditioned to believe that's how it's done. There is no easy way out of that mentality.

It would be one thing if video games themselves were performing the conditioning process, but with the advent of social media, the behavioral reinforcement comes from a myriad of places. If you put "things to do before the next patch drops" into Google, you get a ton of results from all sorts of places that look something like this:

• "Things to do and NOT to do before Patch 9.2 Drops"
• "What things can I do before pre-patch drops?"
• "4 Goldmaking Things to do before 9.1!"
• "7 Things You Need to Finish Before FF XIV Endwalker"
• "First Things to do at LVL 60 in Classic WoW: Get Raid Ready!"

Yes, these were all real article names, taken across YouTube videos, Reddit posts, blog posts, and gamer website articles.

This isn't limited to MMOs mind you, because just about any video game has this sort of output, whether it's tutorials on how to play, how to get good, how to win, or just how to do things the way you're expected to.

I remember back in the day when I frequented Boardgame Geek, there was a certain subset of Eurogame player who would rip a new person playing Puerto Rico for "not doing it right" if you didn't play the game the "right way". Some of that is based on the metagame for Puerto Rico, but other parts of it was due to the conditioning behind how things were supposed to flow in a game of Puerto Rico.******

***

As for what to do about this I have no good answer.

I can sit here, typing away, missing the raid, but realizing that I don't miss a lot of the work that I would have to do to actually raid in progression.

Lot of people are perfectly happy to play the way they have been playing, and get the game they have been expecting, and I can respect that. 

But for those who see problems with their favorite game, whether it be an MMO (like WoW), an RPG (like Assassin's Creed), or a boardgame (such as Puerto Rico), it's a fair question to ask whether the conditioning has locked us into an unsatisfying realization:

Is the problem not with the game, but is it us?

*I have a goal of 1200 gold before I spring for basic flying for her. I don't want her to be so cash poor afterward that she can't buy food/water (or other things) on her own, and 1200 has a nice round number to it. Of course, having said that, I'll probably end up getting close and telling myself I could wait until she has 1500 gold. Or make up some other excuse to delay the inevitable, I suppose.

**I corrected some of the grammar during the exchange. I suppose I can't help myself there either. And yes, I'm completely aware that --supposedly-- the attunements were removed for Hyjal and BT, although it wasn't mentioned in the official post.

***I can be polite whenever I need to, but I really really wanted to let certain people know what I really felt about them going around behind everyone's back and backstabbing me.

****I found it interesting that TBC did NOT add any new instances or non-raid content that didn't end in a daily grindfest until the last patch, with the addition of the Magister's Terrace instance. I'd taken my cues from Wrath, having been my first exposure to WoW, so it seemed natural to me that the Serpentshrine Cavern instances would drop when the SSC raid would, etc.

*****Some of these are more generic as well, such as the Sith Empire vs. Republic in SWTOR. Well, except for Knights of the Fallen Empire and it's immediate successor expansion, that is.

******And yes, a good portion of it was people just being assholes.