Attack of the Murder Floofs

In case you aren't aware, Bhagpuss of Inventory Full has an annual Advent Calendar of music, culled from all ends of the Internet. I honestly don't know how he teases out all of the weird and obscure Christmas music he does, but I'm always grateful to enjoy the fruits of his labor.

So, in return, I'd like to provide him with a musical Holiday gift.

The origin of this particular piece of music lies in the Yule Cat of Iceland, discussed here on PBS' Monstrum:

As I watched the video, I noted that Björk had sang a cover of a poem about said Yule Cat, and set out to find it. There's a few copies out on YouTube, but I got this one from the "official" Björk channel:

Although I admitted expected something more modern and Pop-oriented --it is Björk, after all-- the song is most definitely neither Pop nor Rock, but a folk tune. And I found it really cool to listen to.

So, Happy Holidays, Bhagpuss!

***

Oh, you want another Christmas monster?

How about Krampus, then?

False Positives

There are times when I really really dislike bots and web crawlers.

This is what I discovered when I looked at the results for the past week on Blogger:

Observed on November 20, 2025.

As you can see, the number of people who actually read my last post is around 29, which is on the low end but it hovers typically between 20-50 views. I'm used to that.

But look at the numbers for the site as a whole, and things are a wee bit out of whack.

Almost all of that I can attribute that to bots and crawlers, as it gives the false impression that people are swarming all over the blog. If they were, I'd expect to see more comments this past week than I have.

This stuff comes in waves, so we're in yet another wave that'll likely end around Black Friday. 

EtA: The number of views were originally 22, but by the time I got to a screencap they were 29. Corrected in the post.

Still More Technical Silliness

An addendum on my post on Tuesday...

Is there some circle of hell where Microsoft is better than Google at something? Asking for a friend.

I'm not being (very) facetious, because Microsoft's Bing Webmaster Tools has accepted Parallel Context's sitemap.xml file, but Google has not:

Microsoft's Bing Webmaster Tools...

Google's Search Console...

I even looked at the XML file just for curiosity's sake and discovered there are so many posts on PC that there's three sub-XML files. So, I tried uploading them directly to the Google Search Console with the same result as you see above. At this point I'm tempted to think that the problem is with Google, not with the XML file. After all, the sitemap.xml file is created by Blogger, not me, and last I checked Blogger is owned by Google.

Oh, and I got yet another response to my request for indexing after fixing my "Redirect error".

This came in on September 24, 2025.

Yeah, right. I followed their analysis tools linked in the help section and discovered that they're being redirected to the mobile version of the website. Yeah, so... There's a mobile version. That's a problem how? If you're running a version of Chrome that is mobile in nature, you're going to get the mobile version.

/sigh

Anyway, I apparently had poor ratings for Accessibility, so I had to change PC's layout to one of the "new" standards, which is a slightly different colored version of the original, and got this:

This is for desktop, as of 9/25/2025.

And mobile as of 9/25/2025.
Note the comment about redirect in the listing.

I had to change the mobile settings to show the full website, which I really dislike. The whole point of a mobile setting is to make it easier to read on a mobile device. So after some more tweaking and switching it back to what I consider a "better" mobile setting, I got this:

As of a bit later in the morning on 9/25/2025.

Accessibility went down, but the other scores went up. 

Still, there was one last trick to pull off, and one that I'd been meaning to do anyway, which was to change the main art piece.

It'll do for the time being.

However, the result in the tools was a whole lot of "meh"...

Well, I like it...

Anyway, I'm no longer in the red for any of the scores, so I'm going to give it another try.

How Do You Fix Something When You're Already Dead to Google?

Curiosity can be a real bitch at times.

After I’d made this post about how Shintar had discovered that Parallel Context wasn’t showing up in Google’s search results, Bhagpuss’s comment led me to investigating what the Google Console was all about. For a guy who likes to pride himself about being on the internet before the first browser was invented, the fact I never knew the Google Console or its Bing equivalent existed was a blow to my ego. Still, I swallowed my pride and poked around.

Once I started looking over the Google and Bing consoles, that was it. Like any kid who read his share of Encyclopedia Brown books (and Sherlock Holmes stories) I love a good mystery, and on the consoles I found mysteries in spades.

For starters, why was the Google Console telling me that I had a security alert on my blog?

I knew I hadn’t deliberately done anything stupid such as linking to a picture from a sketchy website –I’d gotten tired of picture links vanishing underneath me so I simply made local copies with citations—so it had to be a link to a website that had gone bad. Or worse, something about Blogger that had raised the ire of Google.* The Google Console was completely unhelpful as to which post or link was the offender, so I was left to my own devices to try to puzzle through this.

The best course of action was to start with the links on the main page, because those are found on every blog page. If that didn’t work, then I was going to have to slog through every single post to find the culprit. I began with the blogs with the longest period of inactivity and worked my way back toward the newest, and I eventually found the culprit: it was Hawtpants of the Old Republic, Njessi’s SWTOR blog. She’d had periods of inactivity followed by a few clusters of posts, but the last post on her blog had raised my eyebrows because it didn’t have Njessi’s authorial voice. I’d even fired off an email to her asking if her blog had been hacked, but I never got a response. This time when I clicked on the link, however, her blog simply exploded with all sorts of spam pop-ups and stuff completely unrelated to an MMO blog (such as online gambling). I cried a little inside, removed the link to Hawtpants of the Old Republic, and submitted the blog for security review to Google Console.

It took a few days, which surprised me given how quickly Google tends to yank people's access to things, but I got this emailed response:

This was on September 3, 2025, for the curious.

Okay, so I then submitted the site for indexing, and several days later I got this response:

This was on September 14, 2025.

WTF, Google. I tried hunting down what they meant by that, and at that moment I learned something important: Google's help pages aren't worth crap. There was very little in the way of anything resembling constructive assistance, probably because Google, like Microsoft, wants you to pay for the privilege of fixing your website. Eventually I figured out that there was another problem on the blog, likely a link that is going to a different location than what the link expects.

Well, this is going to suck trying to figure out which link is the problem. Just because the link doesn't go to where you expect --yet is NOT a link to a security risk-- shouldn't be a reason to not index the blog. My disgust with Google's lack of assistance aside, I started poking around once more. 

"URL is not on Google". No shit, Sherlock.
From September 20, 2025

Turns out it was this little widget that was the problem:

NOTE: This is the correct widget, not the one
originally posted here.

Despite the description, the RSS feed has long since gone away, one of those few times that Blogger has actually been proactive in removing something that was being sunset. That left Atom and links to Yahoo and Netvibes (or something like that). Atom worked, although it wasn't in "normal" HTML format, but Yahoo and Netvibes went to each website's 404 address.

Surely, this couldn't be the root cause, could it? Could it? I tested the live URL, and...

It's the same result as I got a few days ago.

Okay, we're getting somewhere. So I resubmitted the page for indexing and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And I finally got a result:

Really? I mean, REALLY?
From September 21, 2025.

Basically they didn't index the page because the page hasn't been indexed. If that wasn't a truly abominable case of circular reasoning, I don't know what is.

So... I pretty much have gone as far as I can with indexing, because Google will eventually fix the "Crawled - currently not indexed" issue when it gets around to it.

At least on the bright side I cleared up a security issue and a couple of bad links, but nothing resembling a positive result. Parallel Context is still dead to Google.

*Oh, the irony of THAT one. If Google were complaining about its own Blogger service, someone should get these two to talk together. Well, maybe not, now that I think about it; Google might decide the easier course of action would be to kill off Blogger instead.

EtA: Corrected the "Feed" widget with the "Subscription Links" widget, which is the actual widget used. 

More Silence on the (Guild) Banking Industry

I figured I ought to provide an update on the Great Blizzard Bank Heist. Kurn dropped yet another YouTube video Monday evening,

Basically, Blizzard hasn't done much of anything, despite Kurn trying to stir the pot to at least get some visibility on the matter. She's also tried to get some visibility by going to Bellular Gaming, Wowhead, and Blizzard Watch (among other people) without so much as even an acknowledgement response. Blizzard saying nothing I pretty much expected --anybody who has had to try to navigate Microsoft's helpdesk knows how frustrating that can be-- but I at least expected better from Michael Bell and Blizzard Watch.

The Retail WoW community in general has collectively shrugged and moved on in the same way that people not directly affected have moved on after Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.

Other than that, I don't have much to add. I guess there's a big patch coming up in the next day or two which also includes some changes to the banks, so... Uh, good luck with that.

No FDIC Insurance for Your Guild Bank

Kurn posted an update on the Great Blizzard Bank Heist:

The short summary is that no new items were restored, and she provided commentary on the comments from her first video.

That Blizzard hasn't provided any communication on this issue isn't surprising to me, because a huge monolithic corporation --Bobby Kotick's version or Satya Nadella's-- has other things to worry about if the contract doesn't call for their explicit attention. Put another way, the people who lost items are too small in stature for Micro-Blizz to care*, and it also wouldn't shock me if Blizz never bothered with a proper restoration because that cost money (in terms of people and space).

The longer this has gone on, the more it seems to me that changes under the hood that led to the deletion of massive amounts of items from some guild banks was actually a data wipe; items that were no longer in the game or may have had some potential data corruption from years of activity were simply removed, and that was that. I've seen "database cleanups" that have had this sort of effect before, particularly on unstable databases. At those times, you have to do a manual dump of the database contents and potentially clean up the database by hand. It is by far a miserable task, but cleaning up a database like this is something that ought to be done. It will take a ton of time, but there also needs to be a full amount of transparency involved with the customers (us).

I'd actually respect Blizzard a lot more if they were up front about what they were doing instead of this whole "too bad, so sad" non-response after items were removed. If the answer to "fixing" the data meant removing all the items from a guild bank into a temporary guild bank and then putting items back into a rebuilt guild bank to fix any potential corruption, that should have been done.

***

Oh, and once again, a Season of Discovery rollout affected Classic Era. As of a week ago, all of our bars were reset, so you have to go back into every toon on settings and re-enable your action bars.

One of my WoW friends was in Blackwing Lair on Thursday night, and the drakes in there were massively bugged. They hadn't wiped to them in ages, and yet they kept wiping due to wonky drake behavior. I didn't get any real details other than "this crap sucks!", but let's say she's not a fan of SoD impacting Era's raids.

And some pull down menus, like that found on your toon to reset a dungeon, have that table's font and font size absolutely huge compared to the rest of the UI. Given that Blizz has implemented "some changes" into Era in the past few months, I'm not confident that this will ever get resolved.

*If you think that if you were a larger customer you'd get better customer service, well... Let's just say that some Fortune 500 companies are beginning to discover that Azure Cloud and AWS don't really give a crap about any special services for them, unlike when they might have gotten that extra service in the past from outsourcing firms that had their own datacenters. 

EtA: I meant to write action bars. Corrected.

The Great Blizzard Bank Heist

I kind of keep an eye on Retail WoW, but I don't follow much in the way of details. For example, I couldn't tell you the names of any of the zones from areas after Mists of Pandaria (and probably only half of Mists itself), or any of the bosses in raids since Wrath.*

However, Kurn of Kurn's Corner had a post this morning about what she's calling The Great Blizzard Bank Heist. She also posted a video on YouTube describing the situation and what she'd lost out of her own personal guild bank. A lot of items you simply can't get anymore, such as the various dragonscales that would drop from drakes throughout the pre-Cataclysm world and in Blackrock Mountain instances/raids.

Being a bit of a packrat myself, I can feel for her and for all of the others who'd been squirreling away rare and no longer obtainable materials/gear/patterns only to find them all wiped out by the data changes made by Blizzard in prep for The War Within.

Yeah, it's all just pixels. I get that. And yes, I'm sure that Blizz has hidden away in their Terms of Service some language meant to protect themselves from problems such as this, describing it as "Best Effort".

That doesn't mean you are immune to the emotional impact of the loss of items you'd been collecting for years --or well over a decade, in Kurn's case-- and being without any recourse other than maybe getting a few items back really sucks. That's the real tragedy here: the accidental reveal by Blizzard that you really own nothing, and despite what we may believe and what attachments we have to in-game items and achievements, they're all just a misclick away from it all vanishing into nothingness. Blizzard pulled that curtain back, and we can't unsee what they showed us. Even if people were to get everything back like they ought, nobody will ever forget that Blizzard could take it all away again in the blink of an eye.

*To be fair, I didn't know the names of many raid bosses at all until I started raiding in Classic WoW.

Speaking of Pandora's Box

Long time blogger Kurn has tried out Follower Dungeons in Retail WoW recently, and wrote about her experience with it on her latest blog post. To say she was impressed with the NPC groups she had is an understatement.

My original comment on her post, that it was a technical solution to a people problem, is likely the most obvious take. After all, MMOs in general --and WoW in particular-- is infamous for toxic behavior toward tanks and healers in instance and raid groups. This solution, presented in Retail, is an obvious way toward allowing people to see group content without actually fixing the toxicity itself. 

The more I've thought about it, however, the more I wonder whether this will become the ultimate goal toward making an otherwise dead or empty location in an MMO feel alive. 

If you go to a place such as Silvermoon City or The Exodar --both out of the way cities that first saw light in WoW's Burning Crusade expansion-- other than a few bank alts and some new toons running here and there both cities are dead.

Blizzard tried to make them seem more alive by having a few groups of NPCs roam both cities, but the paths followed and statements made are pretty much on repeat. There are similar instances of in-game NPC interactions throughout Azeroth that are gradually more elaborate but still on rails throughout all of the expansions I've played. While I give Blizz credit for trying, it isn't even close to what it's like to having a real vibrant community.

If you hop over to Guild Wars 2 and Divinity's Reach, that's a bit more of what I believe Blizzard is attempting to do. By comparison, Divinity's Reach is a lot more "alive" with NPCs --namely that there are more of them around so that the place feels less empty-- although NPC interactions with the game world are still pretty limited. 

But what if you programmed NPCs to act more like what you find in Follower Dungeons, but interacting in the game world itself?

You know, a step or two away from Westworld...

It's from Pinterest, but it's a screencap
of HBO's Westworld.

Of course, Westworld is what you'd get if a Renaissance Faire were entirely composed of robots who never broke the fourth wall (or never were aware there was a fourth wall).

The bane of MMOs isn't toxicity, but apathy. If there's nobody to interact with, the main selling point of MMOs is dead. But if a game company can fill a game world with NPCs that interact with the game world as if they were real players (minus the toxicity) then you can negate the worst problem of the MMO genre.*

It's a tempting proposition, isn't it?

And holy crap, I just realized how this could be used in "adult" MMOs. (Again, just like Westworld.) 

Yikes.

Whether or not we like it, I think that there will be some game companies that will move video games toward truly immersive experiences, with NPCs that interact in a more lifelike fashion with each iteration of generative AI. 

And I'm not exactly sure what I think about that.

*I guess the bots would quickly follow suit and up their own game, wouldn't they?

EtA: Corrected a sentence from "to to" to "to do". Got all that?

Keeping the Fire Going

Sometimes the inspiration for a post comes from out of left field*, and this certainly fits.

Zinn over in Jinxed Thoughts --yes, Zinn's back!-- had a post this evening about a Choose Your Own Adventure book series, called Dice Man:

From Jinxed Thoughts.

Zinn is a fan of Judge Dredd, and so that cover caught her eye. Only one of the stories covers ol' Dredd, but that's fine. That post she wrote jogged my memories about the Choose Your Own... style books that I'd bought back in the 80s while I was forbidden from playing RPGs, and I have no idea where they are now: Tolkien Quest/Middle Earth Quest series and the Lone Wolf series.

***

I had the top three books, but this is
a sampling of what was put out.
From u/aelphia on this Reddit thread.

Let's talk Tolkien first, shall we?

This was my gateway drug into the Middle-earth Roleplaying System by Iron Crown Enterprises, but I'd almost completely forgot that little factoid. Back in the 80s when I was banned from RPGs, the first book appeared at one of our local bookstores,** so I naturally snapped it up. 

Inside the book looked a lot like the traditional Choose Your Own Adventure books, only there were fights and skill checks involved, and for those checks you could either close your eyes and point a pencil at a page in the back with random numbers on it or you could get out some dice and ...you know... roll for it. There was even a miniature character sheet in the back, as I recall, and the story itself was well done.

I know now that the book, being produced by Iron Crown Enterprises, meant that the quality was bound to be high, but I had no idea what to expect. I mean, the old Choose Your Own Adventure books themselves suffered from uneven quality from book to book, so I had kind of steeled myself for a potential let-down.

But the best part? It looked like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, so it passed whatever invisible inspection my parents' had, and besides it was the size of a paperback***, so I could easily toss it in a book bag or in the middle of some other books and nobody was the wiser.  After the third book I didn't see any more being published, but that was okay by me; by then I'd moved on to hiding the MERP RPG books themselves in my room.

Having done some short research, it appears that the series was restarted when I was away at college, which is why the actual number of Middle-earth Quest books is much larger than the three I remember.

***

There was also another reason why I was okay with the Middle-earth Quest series ending, and it was this series that I stumbled upon at that same bookstore:

From the Lone Wolf Fandom Wiki.

I knew from the moment I saw it that I was too old for the target audience, but I quickly snapped it up and skimmed the inside anyway. There was a similar system in place to that of the Middle-earth Quest books, so I acknowledged that it was more for elementary and middle-school kids and swallowed my pride and bought it. 

Looking back on those Lone Wolf books now, I can see the obvious kid-oriented plots, but I was still happy to feed my RPG habit with these supercharged Choose Your Own Adventure style books. The funny thing is, I tired of these more quickly than the Middle-earth Quest books, mainly because after the first story arc finished, the author Joe Dever went back and started another story arc with your character essentially starting all over again. In an echo of complaints about every MMO expac ever, I wasn't so thrilled to essentially toss out all of my old abilities and weapons just because. Still, I have some very fond memories of these books that kept the RPG flame alive for me in the 80s when things looked bleak for me.

#Blaugust2023

*A slang term referencing baseball. The outfield in baseball is the farthest away from home plate, so "out of left field" is slang for "from out of nowhere".

**It feels so weird saying 'bookstores' these days, but when I look back on it, the 70s and 80s were 38-48 years ago. We even had a bookstore at the local strip mall a short bike ride away from my home, and that's something my own kids would never ever comprehend. To them, going to a bookstore is a "pile into the car and drive for 20 minutes" event, especially since the Borders 10 minutes away closed back in 2011. And that was the summer before our oldest mini-Red began Seventh Grade; she'll be 25 this Fall. (!)

***And cost as little as one, too!

It's All Filler in the End

Given that for almost a decade I never bothered to update the header to Parallel Context, it feels a bit weird to have people comment whenever it changes.

To be honest, I'd really like to have a series of headers that are rotated through every time you access PC like what Rav has on her blog Ravalation*, but I also recognize that it's likely a Wordpress plugin that she's using. And Blogger gets less than minimal support from Google anyway, which drives me nuts because if there was even a little bit of support Blogger would be a fantastic platform. Of course, if Google actually did what they usually do they would have pulled the plug after a couple of years when they realized they weren't gonna make a quick buck on the platform, over a decade ago. 

So.... Yay that they're not paying attention to Blogger?

Without a plugin to use I've tried building a GIF that cycles through 3 or 4 screenshots, but if you want something resembling decent quality you have to pay for it. And really work your ass off to get over the learning curve (::cough:: Gimp ::cough::). Besides, I'm not dropping a ton of money on something like Photoshop just to make a few GIFs. 

This would have been one of the pics
I'd have used in that GIF or plug-in.
If nothing else, Guild Wars 2 has some
fantastic graphics. And yes, Mikath
is yet another redheaded bearded guy.

***

All that's past is prologue, I suppose.

I changed the header of Parallel Context this time around because I wanted to distance myself from Wrath Classic a bit. No, I'm not planning on dropping Wrath Classic, it's that I'd rather see something on the header that brings back fond memories rather than resentfulness. I had to learn that one the hard way by stubbornly sticking to my TBC Classic header cadence just because that was the current phase of the expansion. So this time, since I'm not planning on raiding anymore** I decided to plop in a graphic from a more pleasant memory, Blackwing Lair. Blizzard's Season of Mastery used that graphic when BWL was released, so while it's not from an actual raid the picture still brings back a memory of the time when our best Mage pulled threat on Chromaggus and wiped the raid. We collectively laughed our asses off when that happened, because no more than 5 minutes beforehand the tank had boasted that he wasn't gonna have any problems with threat on ol' Chromag, and one of the Mages proved him wrong in the blink of an eye.

It was also a time before TBC Classic, when the raid split up into two and both doubled down on the hardcore route. Compared to TBC and Wrath Classic, those WoW Classic raids were just, well, fun. 

Feels kind of weird seeing this graphic.
I tried using this as a background for a short
while but it was far too busy. This was even
before my (brief) raiding career.

***

One thing that I have found is that I still enjoy the Classic leveling dungeons far more than I have a right to. Kind of like how if you're in a group that isn't wearing a ton of heirloom gear*** you can't simply steamroll over the content, you have to work at it. Plus the background to a lot of these Classic dungeons are fantastic, such as the quest lead-ins to The Deadmines or exploring an entire freaking city in Blackrock Depths. Now that I've been around the block more than my share of times, I do find that some of these old leveling instances in MMOs to be the most fun for me, such as Mandalorian Raiders and Athiss in SWTOR, the Garth Agarwen and Great Barrow instance clusters in LOTRO, and The Sanctum of Burning Souls in Age of Conan.

Sith Inquisitors are the Warlocks
(aka Purple Mages) of the SWTOR universe.

Maybe I should stop being so narrow-minded and spice things up a bit with a greater variety of headers from a greater variety of games. And not just MMOs, either...

The inner cover of the old Moldvay
D&D Basic Set. Willingham's artwork still
holds up to this day.

*If you reload her blog you'll see the header pic changes each time. I'm jealous. (Oh, and yes, it's HTTP, not HTTPS. Rav is still around, but hasn't updated the blog in ages.)

**Maybe the occasional Vault of Archavon, because it's pretty simple to do.

***Until I finally reached max level for the first time back in 2009-2010, I used to complain about the unfair advantage that heirloom gear gives a player compared to those without heirloms. I mean, you not only have to be max level to buy them, but you have to have enough badges from running heroic group content at max level to afford them; you can't just walk in and buy them with gold. Then, when you get them, you have a built in advantage of having gear that "levels" in quality with you. Still, a couple of my toons do have heirloom gear because they do make it easier to forget about trying to scrounge for the best gear on several of your item slots while questing out in the field. And this is coming from someone who tends to forget about selecting talents on a talent tree for, oh, five levels' worth of talents at a time.

EtA: Corrected some grammar.

An Homage of Sorts

When I first started poking around on Atiesh-US, I thought about resurrecting the old guild name I was a member of on Ysera-US, Is Up To No Good. Instead, I created that guild on Myzrael-US as a home for some of my alts, such as Az and Linna. 

Something about Linna's Mona Lisa-esque
smile fits that guild name perfectly.

But if nothing else, I wanted to put a guild together on Atiesh-US for Deuce. I'd discovered the joy of having an entire guild bank to yourself, and I figured that if I was going to have an alt over on Atiesh it'd be nice to have a mammoth amount of space for oddball junk as well.

I try not to be a packrat, but with WoW
you never quite know when some of this
stuff might come in handy.

My questing buddy and I got to talking about this blog, and I mentioned about how the MMO blogging landscape had changed over the years. 

"There's a lot of blogs that were watering holes for the community, and they're no longer around. Places like Tam and Chas' Righteous Orbs, Rades' Orcish Army Knife, and Larísa's The Pink Pigtail Inn were the places to go, not to mention WoW Insider."

"What was that?"

"What? WoW Insider?"

"No, The Pink Pigtail Inn."

"Oh, Larísa ran that. She stopped blogging long ago, 2014 maybe?"

My questing buddy began gushing about what a great name PPI was, and then she mentioned something I hadn't considered. "That would be a great guild name!" she added. "Hold on."

"Okay..."

"There!" she said a few moments later. "I reserved it. Want to sign the charter?"

"Sure!"

Alas, that charter then proceeded to languish for some months, as we moved on to other things. 

Fast forward to this past week, and I logged in on Deuce to find this:

"Yes, Mistress Elsharin. I like it too."

So Larísa's blog now lives on in game.

Larísa, I know that you've moved on and don't play any more, and I'm pretty sure you've put your gaming days behind you, but in case you come across PC again I wanted to let you know that you were an inspiration to me and a lot of other bloggers over the years. This small thing, a guild name for a few people, is just one way of saying thanks for your writing and community way back when. It still means a lot to me, and I hope I'm not the only blogger who thinks so.

EtA: I had "gushed" in there twice. That looked weird, so I fixed it. No more gushers here.

Security Alert

Today I had to move a blog off of the MMO Blogroll, but not for the traditional reason of the blog going silent (or vanishing).

Tobold's blog was flagged by Bitdefender for being an infected website.

I checked the alert more fully, and yeah, there's a definite infection there:

Oof.

Alas that I'm unable to contact Tobold, since doing so would require me to visit his blog to then find his email, so I'm kind of stuck here. So, here's hoping that Tobold actually reads blogs and will find this. Or, if someone knows Tobold's email they can contact him about this.

#Blaugust2022

Someone Picked at a Scab

I saw this video today about "what's going away when Wrath Classic drops"

And I was sufficiently annoyed at his flippant "if you're one of the 4 or 5 people on your server who doesn't have an Amani Warbear" that I felt it merited a response.

If you've got Hyjal / BT gear, then yes, Zul'Aman is "a pretty chill raid." Even if you're in SSC/TK gear, you should be fine. But if you're in a raid with primarily Phase 1 gear or quest greens + pre-BiS, ignore what WillE is saying. It's a raid that is highly dependent on gear checks and having the right composition --such as having a Priest to do periodic mass dispels on the raid during the Vol'jin fight-- that if you don't have those you're not going to finish the raid. 

And god forbid if your raid is caught in between about 6 other ZA raids --not to mention the other progression raids of other major guilds-- so most of the personnel for the critical slots (Tanks, Healers, the aforementioned Priest, Shamans) are already either locked or are busy. And those roles are ones that I have no desire to pug. I've been in enough pugs that I know that those roles are ones I want people I can trust with, and a random pug --assuming you can even put one together right now on the server-- isn't where you're gonna typically find them.

I suppose that the entire tone, which is a breezy "oh, this is some box you can check off before Wrath drops but everybody will have this anyway", really ticked me off. 

Probably a good deal of it was because I'm not going to get the "Hand of A'dal" title because I never got a Kael'Thas kill in Phase 2. I never show my "Champion of the Na'aru" title anyway, and I'd certainly never bother showing a "Hand of A'dal" title if I got it, but the fact that I did get it would mean something to me. And here was yet another reminder that one of the few personal goals I had in this expac --to raid up until Illidan was downed in Black Temple-- was not going to get completed just kind of set me off.

***

I guess what drives my obsession about this is something I remembered back in original Wrath.

Remember the blog I Sheep Things/Oh My Kurenai? I certainly do. 

And I remember Rhii's steady stream of updates on her guild's attempts to kill Arthas in ICC before Cataclysm dropped.

But more than anything else, I remember her despair at her realization that her guild wasn't going to be able to do it, and her GM --of all people-- took off to run with another guild and down Arthas instead of trying to finish the job in their own guild. 

As I wasn't a raider at the time, I could only offer some sympathy to her plight, but I didn't really experience it firsthand. When I was a guest on the Twisted Nether Blogcast back in ancient history, there was some disbelief that it was a big deal to down Arthas by the end, with the hosts thinking it wasn't that hard by then because of the buffs and whatnot, and because I knew Rhii's struggles I disagreed. Now I have found myself in her exact same situation, knowing that one thing you wanted to get but you aren't going to get it, that hurts. It's not like a kick in the shins, because that is intense for a brief period of time and then fades, but it's closer to a long, slow burn, like when you've got acid reflux. Even when you think you've put it behind you, it's still lurking to spring out when you least expect it. 

Like now.

A Brief Glimmer

Shintar, over at Priest with a Cause, posted today about her experiences lately in TBC Classic. In their own way, they provide a counterweight to my own impressions of the expac, given that while I started from L1, she was able to go to Outland from the moment the Dark Portal opened only to discover some of the same feelings of FOMO that I was experiencing. But as she explained in her post, what she thought initially was just FOMO has turned out to be something else, where her relationship with her guild has not been what she thought it would be when TBC Classic dropped. In its own way, her guild and my own are doing similar things, where they spend most of their time working on their individual checklists rather than enjoying the game as it is. 

And in both of our cases, it can be an alienating experience, realizing that your relationship with your guild isn't where you thought it was.

In her case, she feels she's treated as just another flavor of the month Hunter, and some people in guild can't even remember her name right. That matches a similar situation I find myself in, where people can't remember that Card is no longer my main. 

Once every couple of days I get a whisper from somebody saying that they miss running or raiding with me, but then in the next breath they say they're just too busy with other things. Well, out of game issues I understand, but in game? That's a choice that you make. You can make yourself feel better by a drive by hello, but the reality is that you have control over what you do in game. To have all of your boxes checked prior to entering Gruul's Lair or Karazhan is placing a lot of pressure on yourself.

Of course, there are limitations to that. A Mage will have to acquire tanking gear before they step foot into Gruul's Lair, and a tank will have to get enough of the right type of gear to make it even worth their while entering into the Phase 1 raids. But chasing 9/9 pre-raid BiS slots with a vengeance? Or getting all the patterns for Enchanting? Or who you hang with in game? That's a choice you make.*

***

I have some friends in game that I miss, not because they're not playing or anything, but because they server transferred. I was assured that they left because they felt the larger server would work better for them, but I can't help but think that if I had the chance to spend more time with them they might not have considered transferring so much.

At the same time, there's only so much of me to spread around. I have to make decisions based on the time I have, and I have to live with them.

***

I was contemplating all that when we were preparing for last night's Karazhan raid. We had almost enough people for two raids, but we ended up having to get a couple of puggers to fill the last two slots. We were trying to find a healer when I ran into one of our regular raiders from our Saturday Night Blackwing Lair runs. We hadn't spoken since the series of raids had ended, so we were catching up on what we'd been up to and I noticed that she was at L70, so I asked if she'd gotten into Kara yet. 

"No," she replied, "I'm geared and ready to go but no luck."

I blinked. 

"You know, we're in need of an extra healer for Monday night," I said. "Would you be interested?"

Her reaction was somewhere along the lines of "hell yes!", so she hopped onto our Discord and immediately signed up. 

Shortly thereafter another regular from our BWL and AQ20 runs also hopped on to sign up as melee DPS. 

Problem solved.

But as the raid approached, I grew nervous. This was not only going to be my second time entering into Karazhan, but a first as an actual lead for the place. And you can only read/watch so much before you have to go out there and actually get into the raid and do it. Thankfully, however, the overall lead was the lead for all of those ZG/AQ20/BWL raids I'd done over the last several months, and once we started I began to relax. It wasn't the same raid, but it was the same person. 

She did a fantastic job distilling a fight to the most basic components, and while it was a learning experience for about close to half of the raid, it felt so much better and smoother than last week's run. Even when a disconnect zapped my macro for handling loot, we just rolled with it.

We got what is supposedly hardest opera event, the Wizard of Oz, and wiped twice, but the third attempt was as smooth as butter. We accidentally pulled Moroes early and wiped, but we recovered the next time. 

And there was one memorable trash pull where everybody went down except for the Warrior tank, the Pally healer above, and me. We had three of those arcane creatures on us, and the tank kept aggro while the Pally healer kept him alive, and I improved my positioning enough that I didn't take damage so I could DPS down the trash. "I thought we were going to have a wipe," the raid lead admitted. 

"I thought so too," I replied. "But that was an awesome job tanking!"

"An awesome job healing, you mean," the tank replied.

"Hell yeah!" And if I hadn't run into her randomly out in the Old World, that pull would have turned out completely different.

At the end, we hung around late --because of some trash wipes-- and we killed the Prince on our second try. It felt.... well... like we knew what we were doing. Even though I'll admit that I didn't.

Afterward, I sent the raid lead a message via Discord that she did a great job, and that I really missed this over the past month of leveling alone. I got a thanks as an acknowledgement, but really that message was as much for me as it was for her. I really had missed our regular raids together, with some of the regulars across several guilds, and how we came together and had fun.**

***

It felt... good.

Like I wrote to the raid lead, it was the best I felt in game in a month.

It doesn't cover up a host of faults I've discovered about this expac and how people are pursuing it, but it did provide a welcome respite from the in-game shenanigans. It also gave me some hope that perhaps I won't have to take the drastic route and leave the guild (at minimum) just to find my place in TBC Classic. There's still a couple of months of Phase One ahead of us, but this is the first glimmer of hope I've had in a while, and for now I'm holding onto it.

*One of the people I knew from Classic, upon hearing a gratz aimed at everybody in his guild who made it to L70 within two weeks, quipped about "that was only the 'no life' crew that sprinted to L70." To which I laughed.

**This doesn't mean I suddenly started liking Karazhan; I haven't. It's just that I liked the raid itself rather than what we were raiding.

One Last Update

This morning I woke to receive a "re-evaluation" notice from Blogger, which said they didn't find any malware, so they restored the posts.

Hell, I could have told them that.

What I don't get is if they get a report about malware they don't have a quick scan of the offending pages. That'd shake out any malware present and not force them into a manual re-evalutation.

But hey, I only work in IT Security.

Oh, How Nice

Apparently PC has been reported as a "Deceptive Site", so I filled out a form to Google to dispute this.

This blog is so freaking old that I'll have to go back and see which link is the "bad one", which is likely an old blog that no longer exists.

Oh. Yay.

It is Mine Now

When I discovered there was no such thing as Azeroth After Dark as referenced in yesterday's post, I decided to jump on it. 

I am now the proud (?) owner of azerothafterdark.wordpress.com. 

What I intend to do with it I have absolutely no freaking idea, but at least it won't suffer the fate that internet users in the 90s will remember with whitehouse.com. Or that time when Dick's Sporting Goods didn't own the dicks.com website.

***

Oh, and Happy St. Patrick's Day! Now you can go have a good cry first....

And then cheer yourself up with a few happy jigs and reels....

A Short Mid-Week Boost

Courtesy of Shintar of Priest with a Cause (among other blogs).....

She sent it to me with the comment "Everybody who raids Naxx needs to see this..."

And she's absolutely right.

Partway There

Before you ask, no, the blog hasn't been hacked.

And no, I don't believe this is the end point either.

I tried to put a background together, but Blogger just did not like the dimensions of my uploaded graphics, so I've got to come up with something that works.

But yes, after 2012 (roughly) I'm starting to make major changes to the blog design.

Back when black was edgy, the blog looked roughly current. But now, in the Age of Covid, it just looks like a funeral. And I've been to enough funerals this year.

So this is what I've got so far. 

It's.... okay. Serviceable, brighter than before, and something I can work with for the time being while I clean stuff up. I've never been able to get a GIF that I liked for the title graphic because it costs money to buy a product that allows me longer frame times, so I'm going to have to pick something out of my screenshots and run with it.

And, truth be told, I need to clean up the sheer size of the sidebars and make it a bit more PC friendly rather than it looking like a MySpace page.

But hey, the black is gone, and that's fine with me.

Years in the Bunker

In case you hadn't noticed, Ophelie of Bossy Pally is back posting after an extended hiatus. She's been focusing on single player games these days, and she's been working her way through the Mass Effect series.

Her most recent post was about single player versus multiplayer games, their profitability, and the potential future of Mass Effect titles. While I think that ME will make a return after the bones of the system (the Frostbite engine in particular) are fleshed out enough to accommodate the RPG that Bioware wants to create, the lure of cashing in on ME style multiplayer might pull the game in a direction that fans of Bioware RPGs might not like.*

That said, a link to this article by Kotaku author Jason Schreier really caught my eye. It was a detailed article on the development process for ME:A, and everything that went wrong in development. (TL;DR: a LOT went wrong.) Schreier even mentions in the article that it was amazing that ME:A actually shipped at all, given all of the issues with the development process.

But for me, reading the article felt like deja vu.

***

As I alluded to in a previous post about the potential issues of new software releases, I worked for several years in a software development house. Those five years were some of the best years of my life, when I worked hard for bosses that both pushed me beyond what I thought my limits were and yet respected my effort and output. I made some friendships that are still going strong today, and the skills I learned during my years in the barrel (so to speak) still serve me well today.

But those five years were also among the most stressful I ever experienced.

When you're on the inside of a development house there is an occasional tendency to get consumed with the work that's right in front of your face. Teams who work together day in and day out develop the feeling that their (piece of the) project is the most important part and frequently miss warning signs. But if you can break out of that silo, you can also see a train wreck coming a mile away. Sometimes it's salespeople who overpromise to critical customers without asking in advance "can we do this?"; sometimes it's the defection of critical personnel that a company had relied upon for years as a hero to fix the emergencies at the last second; other times it might be the promotion of people who prove to be incompetent at managing a development team; and then there's the occasional directive from the top to change direction in a project. Sometimes you might just get three or even all four.

I've been in good releases and bad releases, but the one that still haunts me is the last release I was involved in, which was a real shitshow.

This particular release was a perfect storm of overcommitments to customers, loss of senior staff to higher paying jobs**, an inflexible deadline set by said commitments, and major stability issues with the development environment. In spite of all of the (new) development staff we had, there were personnel shortages during the entire release cycle as the company had underestimated the new devs' capabilities.*** I was our team's representative on the weekly release meeting, and every week there were major complaints from all of the QA teams about the quality and stability of the product. We felt that the product needed at least 2 months to straighten out all the bugs, but we were informed by upper management that was simply not possible.

Things were so bad that they had to create a tiger team dedicated to simply having a workable daily environment for devs to code with, because every other day it seemed like some new code change would crash the entire system. I got drafted into that team for a couple of months, and I lost a lot of sleep because my pager (remember them?) would go off multiple times a night letting me know that a build had failed and we needed to find what code change broke the system.

In the end, you can kind of guess what happened: the product shipped, it was incredibly buggy, and the company took a lot of flak for it. A year and a half later, the company was gutted of "overpriced personnel" and sold to a competitor.****

So yeah, I know what it's like to be in Bioware's shoes with the result of the ME:A release.

***

The thing is, the development cycle didn't have to be that way.

Blizzard is practically alone in not announcing a release date until it feels that the software is ready to go. But that's because while Blizzard has given themselves a ton of goodwill from the gaming community over the years, they have also their reputation as a producer of good and stable games at stake. Of course, they have had their share of release fiascos lately --such as Diablo III and Overwatch-- so they're not immune to problems either. But I do believe these issues also stem from the pressure that Activision is placing on Blizzard to release on a regular schedule, in much the same way that ME:A would have benefited from an extra year of work rather than release on a date set long in advance (whether internally by the staff or externally by the suits).

The ME:A release disaster was another perfect storm of staffing, management, focus, new tech, and time. And the Bioware Montreal office paid the ultimate price by being shut down and absorbed into EA Motive. But this disaster should be used by Bioware to focus on the weak points and improve them, not to go and hide. Shelving the (single player) Mass Effect franchise would be the wrong solution to the problems of ME:A.

Now, if only the suits would let Bioware work out the solutions...





*Think of it this way: Blizz was known for the Diablo, Warcraft, and Starcraft franchises. Now, along comes Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone, and Overwatch. The money that Blizz gets out of the latter three have muscled aside the original three, and so guess where the development dollars go? While WoW still pumps out content but it is no longer the star of Blizzard's lineup, and that means that WoW will take a back seat to content for the new titles, which are correspondingly cheaper to develop and maintain. (Such as a lack of story content to the level that WoW/Diablo/Starcraft have.)

**This was the late 90s, when the original dot com bubble was inflating rapidly. I knew several of these people very well, and almost all of them cited the desire to a) make more money and b) feel appreciated. While this may sound at odds with my statement as to how I was respected, you have to realize that these people had been taken for granted by management that they'd be around to clean up everyone's messes. They'd been around for a decade or longer, and they'd realized that the internet revolution was passing them by, so they jumped ship.

***The new devs also had an alarming lack of discipline. If they were assigned to work on boolean logic issues, we'd frequently find them deep within the mathematical algorithms instead, claiming that they wanted to see where the bug led them. We had to explain numerous times that it's not your job to worry about the algorithms, we have an entire math team to handle that. Hand the bug off to them and let them deal with it. Curiosity is one thing, but when you've got 10 bugs to work on and you need to get them fixed in 3 days you don't have the luxury of drilling down past the code you know.

****By then I'd already left the company, as everybody could see that the CEO was going to cash in by selling us and getting his golden parachute.