The Reincarnation

A couple of days ago I made a decision.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: "Why not run dungeons?" 

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

Who's Training Who?

If you're like me, you've recently had to have some "training" at work concerning AI.

I'm not talking about the training my son had when he first arrived at grad school, where he learned how to spot AI generated work that students would pass off as their own, but the basics of using AI to "improve workflows" and to "increase productivity".

Oh yes. I believe it's a sign of the apocalypse that when your employer wants you to learn something, said something is about to implode.*

Anyhoo, I was thinking about all of that training over the weekend when this YouTube video dropped in my lap:

Now, I'll be up front is that I find Brandon Sanderson likeable and engaging as a person, or at least how he presents himself online, but I'm not the biggest fan of his work. I liked Mistborn and The Well of Ascension well enough, but the concepts that he'd put forth in The Stormlight Archive really don't appeal to me. We also disagree on the genius behind Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, because he really thought those middle books --where I and a bunch of other readers finally had enough-- were much better than we gave it credit for.**

I'm not personally acquainted with Brandon either, but I have enjoyed his class on writing SF&F. There's actually two versions of the class on YouTube, last years and one about 3-4 years ago. To be honest, both are worth watching if you want to get a feel for the nuts and bolts (and the business) of writing in my favorite genre.

All that being said, I really found his keynote address from the Tailored Realities release event at Dragonsteel Nexus 2025*** quite interesting, and I found I did agree with it on a lot of points. I'm more of a Original Series Star Trek fan myself, but I do appreciate his comparisons of Data and his ongoing desire to become human in the series as a reference point to what separates current levels of pseudo AI from what most people would consider art. But more than anything else, what resonated with me was that art is a transformational process: the creation of art also changes us, and the more we remove ourselves from that process by the insertion of AI into the mix the less we are transformed as well. 

That doesn't mean that we can't be transformed by creating AI art, but our isolation from the creative process makes it harder for us to be transformed. After my "training", I've compared what's known as vibe coding as basically what a non-technical boss thinks that coders do when they provide a design document. Instead of taking a framework created by your prompt and then coding in all of the details, vibe coder instructions are to instead "refine your prompts so that you get what you want that way". To me, that's equivalent of the old Pointy-Haired Boss from Dilbert trying to tell the engineers how to do their job.

Holy crap. This was in 1995? Yikes.

It also gives new engineers and coders a false impression of how to write code. You need to learn to fail before you can succeed, and vibe coding bypasses all of that knowledge by eliminating the skill development process. It's great if you're an experienced coder, you're in a rush, and you already know what you want, but to do regular work on an ongoing basis? You're reducing the code writing process to "just give it a few words and let it do the job". 

I suppose I could boil down a lot of the "promise" of AI to this: it lets MBAs think they can be engineers or scientists, without them realizing that the their own job could be replaced as well.

*Back in 2000, my then employer's CEO called all of the development staff together for an all-hands meeting. The late 90s, if you'll recall, were the high-flying days of the OG Dot Com boom, and it was all "internet this" and "internet that". So, when we were brought together despite the push to get the current version of our software out the door, we joked half-heartedly that the CEO was going to announce we were going to be an internet company.

Lo and behold, he actually did just that. We were going to put our mid-range CAD/CAM/CAE software, which was so hefty that it could barely run on the best Windows XT servers at the time, on the internet as a browser-based product.

We were all stunned. The network throughput on the internet wasn't up to the task, and more importantly neither were the browsers themselves. It was an idea 20 years ahead of its time, perhaps, but it was also a harbinger that within the year the Dot Com bubble burst and the stock market imploded.

**I also thought that Robert Jordan could have used an editor who reined some of his worst impulses in, such as his tendency to overdo it on the language and description. I mean, I'm not the greatest writer of description in the world, but I really do think that RJ was really just padding his page count at times.

***In case you wondered where the Keynote part of the title is about; I know I sure did. Here's a blog post of the speech itself from Brandon's website.

Gaining Perspective Years Later

Once in a while I'll hear a song I haven't heard in decades, and I'll suddenly realize that I'd missed a critical part of what the song meant. 

Take for example, the Michael Martin Murphey song Wildfire...

This song came out in 1975, and it was one of those Folk songs that skirted the edge of the Country/Western genres and Folk Rock genres. I'd heard it on the radio in the 70s, but outside of the refrain it never resonated with me very much. Until I stumbled on it a few months ago, I probably hadn't heard it at all since the early-mid 80s, because the only person I knew who listened to Country on the radio was my dad's mom, and I tried my damnedest to avoid listening to it whenever I visited.*

It had popped up on my YouTube feed, and I stared at it for a good 5-10 minutes, trying to remember the song, but I finally gave in and clicked it. 

The song sounded familiar, but the lyrics certainly weren't. It was only when the refrain came on that I realized I did remember the song after all.

Even more than that, after a few critical listens, I realized it wasn't a love song at all, but a ghost story. The first verse doesn't give anything away, but that the lyrics are in present tense imply something current. It's when the second verse kicks in and switches to past tense that you realize that the girl and horse mentioned in the first verse are actually ghosts. The third verse provides the grounding of a failed crop, and as the cold (and presumably hunger) has crept in, the owl heralds the ghost horse and rider coming for the singer as essentially a harbinger of death.

Pretty grim stuff wrapped up in a mellow sounding song.

***

Sometimes I'll hear a voice or an instrument in a song, and I'll say "I know I've heard that before, but I don't know where."

Again, I'm going to pull the 80s out of a hat and mention late Genesis guitarist Mike Rutherford's band, Mike + The Mechanics. 

I could have picked out any of their songs, but I figured that The Living Years would do. Mike's guitar is pretty identifiable, but I want to focus on his vocalist, Paul Carrack. 

Paul had a nice solo career, and I had recognized his voice from the song "Don't Shed a Tear" that was released a year earlier in 1987...

...and he's also known for his time in the band Squeeze, but I was completely unprepared for something over three decades later.

For some strange reason I'd fallen down the rabbit hole of listening to what was then called Soft Rock and is now called Yacht Rock when I stumbled across this song...

I knew that song by heart, because my parents would only play Soft Rock in the house when I was growing up.** However, when I listened to it a couple of years ago for the first time since the late 80s, I realized I knew that singer's voice. It took me a few months of rummaging through my CDs and songs on YouTube, but when I realized that it was the same Paul Carrack from Mike + The Mechanics, I was completely floored in the same way when I heard Bad English in the late 80s for the first time and I instantly recognized John "Missing You" Waite's voice.

Funny how that works.

*Because I was into all sorts of Rock, Heavy Metal, and New Wave at the time. 

**Yes, it was Cincinnati's WARM 98, WRRM-FM 98.5.

EtA: Mike Rutherford is actually still alive. It was the manager for Genesis, Richard Macphail, who'd passed away in 2024. Whoops. I have since corrected the post.

Wall-to-Wall Whelming*

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

You know, this thing.

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's Not About Green Eggs and Ham

If there's one consistent piece of advice I've given to my kids as they've entered into the dating/relationship stage of their life, it's this simple dictum: don't try to change people as you'll end up disappointed.

Over my life I've seen people get into a relationship, and one of the pair says "they're perfect except for [INSERT ISSUE HERE], but I can work on that." And I've never ever seen someone get "fixed" the way their partner prefers. Even when it appears on the surface that they've been "trained" by their partner into the approved behavior, the reality is that it's an act. The other person just does it to preserve the peace, and it only comes out much later, in a quiet conversation with someone else under the condition to keep their confidence.

Inevitably, this doesn't end well. The couple either continue in a state of quiet dissatisfaction or there's an eventual blow-up and... that's that.

Not bad, but #3 on "Worth Fixing" is highly
dependent upon what the issue is. And #1 on "Deal
Breaker" can easily be manipulated into really silly stuff.
From @drelizabethfrederick via Instagram.

What I've impressed upon my kids is that you have to either accept the other person for who they are or you have to eventually walk away. Obviously, some flaws are quite fatal to the relationship --justifiably so, in my opinion-- while others are minor and can be easily overlooked. Everybody has their own breaking point, and while it might be worthwhile to try to help someone get over their issues, don't expect to "fix" anyone who doesn't want to be fixed.

***

A corollary to this is something that still bugs me to this day. Back in my college days, there was this one girl I knew who dated a guy briefly, then after they broke up she schemed to try to get him back. On more than one occasion I got roped into her schemes, and after a while it really began to annoy me. Right before my (now) wife and I began dating, this girl and I were walking back to a group study session after we stopped to pick up some food for the gang, and once again she was contemplating some sort of plot when I finally decided to tell her that she needed to move on. I explained that she was really attractive and she was also quite smart, but chasing after one person while ignoring everybody else meant she was missing out on someone that would be better for her in the long run.* Unfortunately, she then began asking me about what I thought of her physical attributes and whether some of the various people we knew would be interested in her. I wasn't about to provide details on what our male friends thought of her, and I didn't want to find myself the object of her interest given that she spent too much time trying to play hard to get while simultaneously chasing someone. 

Looking back on it, I wish I had the clarity to explain to her that she would have been much better off not playing games but rather just being honest and walking away if someone says 'no'. I don't know a single guy who enjoys these sort of games, and to be fair I wasn't even sure she did either. I suspect she was taught this behavior by either her friends from high school or her family, and if they did they did her a disservice. Of course, knowing my luck she might have interpreted my candid response as interest in her on my part, and I'd have gotten no peace. Still, some part of me kind of wishes I'd have said what needed to be said before we had a falling out later that year. 

She blamed it on my now wife, but from my perspective I simply had to walk away because I grew tired of being part of her manipulative games. Even if she came clean and tried to turn over a new leaf, she'd spent so much time being manipulative and playing "love games" that I don't think I could ever have really trusted her. There was no way I wasn't going to have anything resembling a heart to heart conversation with her about my girlfriend, for example, because I felt she would have used it as leverage to make me do something for her. 

No thanks.

***

In the end, I guess you could say that while the old "try it, you might like it" credo at the heart of Green Eggs and Ham is still valid, recognizing the futility of certain other interactions is also valid. Sure, there will be regrets, but I've come to recognize that regrets are a part of life. 

*For the record, I did think she was really attractive and had the sort of physical qualities I liked, but she spent so much time being needy and chasing after this one person that there was no way I'd ever consider dating her. I didn't need that sort of drama in my life.

Cranky Red Being Cranky

(You have been warned.)

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

I hate Seasons.

Not these Seasons:

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

I mean these seasons:

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

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

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

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

But.

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

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

From The Office. And Yarn.

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

I Hate the Rat Race.

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

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

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

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

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

The Unintended Side-Effects on Social Interactions

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

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

--Princess Leia, Star Wars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do you not have phones friends?" 

--Possibly apocryphal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, and actually that's the problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***And blood pressure.

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

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

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

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

The State of the Redbeard in 2026

Truth be told, I’ve not felt much like writing the past few weeks.

I guess that’s to be expected, since I wrote more posts for the past year (187) than I have at any other year during the blog’s existence while at the same time working on personal writing projects. And that doesn’t even count the writing and reports I put together for work.

While I understand the allure of using tools such as Chat GPT and others to compose for you, I really dislike the lack of control that those tools encourage. While I’ve seen those tools likened to using a car’s automatic transmission or other time saving tools, none of those other tools replace the human as the center of the creative process quite like the so-called generative AI tools do. It could be argued that you have full control over the editing process, but I’ve found from watching people at work that once the AI tools get their hooks in, you begin to simply accept their suggestions more and more without a critical eye. 

That’s the long version of saying that I’m going to keep writing the way I always have been –with me composing at the keyboard— without any reliance upon generative AI in the creative process.

***

As I’ve approached 2026 with some weariness on the writing front, I’ve also come to a bit of a crossroads with my gaming. Perhaps its more of a recognition that my physical skills never were as good as I wished they could be,* and that the reality of retirement being a little over a decade away has lent a bit of weight to my end-of-year musings. 

It’s now four years on after I cheated Death,** and I have found it more of a struggle to maintain my numbers than before. Oh, I still make my numbers well enough, and my doctors are happy with how I’m doing, but I’ve come to recognize over the past 3-4 months that it’s not quite so easy as before to maintain my weight and blood pressure while eating the same amount of food. There are two obvious answers here, to exercise more and to eat less, but I have enough foresight to recognize that there’s only so much I can do before things start to decline again. As one of the Diabetes team members told me, what I’ve got are progressive diseases, and you can only hold them off for so long. Not exactly the most positive assessment of my situation, but probably the most realistic.***

Still, the knowledge that my time is finite has changed what I want out of gaming. I was never one to chase highs from defeating bosses or in PvP, although I’ll freely acknowledge the rush in doing so, but I’ve pulled back from that in general. I get more out of playing with people, enjoying their company, than I get from competing with people. I am less tolerant of drama when it detracts from my long term enjoyment of a game, although there have been times when I’ve thought long and hard about stirring up some crap when I thought some asshat truly deserved it in Gen Chat in an MMO. 

I’ve also become more and more interested in the types of connections that people make within video games. Perhaps that’s been piqued by my own experiences, making firm friendships within MMOs and the blogging community,**** but it could also be due to my fascination with how the RP community operates in Retail WoW (and to a lesser extent LOTRO and FFXIV). 

Yes, yes, I know: that fascination can fuel an unhealthy relationship with… players… in Goldshire’s Lion’s Pride Inn on Moon Guard-US. And I have to admit that I’m still stunned whenever I poke my nose in there by the sheer number of people getting their freak on.***** It’s slightly more normal when you go into Stormwind, but even then let’s just say that there’s always something there when I run through to the bank or the Auction House that makes me go ‘WTF?’

Yeah, this certainly did.

And run into a light pole, too.

*CLANK!!*

I’m not about to deny people their fun, because I’ve lived the Satanic Panic and am extremely wary of people claiming moral authority and informing me what I can and can’t do, but I do wonder about the connections we make in games, and where some of these more extreme personal expressions fit into the gaming spectrum. 

Definitely puts a crimp into me working the AH.

For all the people who brush those weighty concepts off, saying “Nah, Bro, it’s all just joking around,” I think they sell themselves short. From the benefit of having watched the internet rise into its current form over the past 35+ years, I don’t think we can brush off the connections we make as “not being important”. In the end, these connections are all we have that stand a chance at outliving us, because most of us will never paint a Mona Lisa or construct the Notre Dame. And in the case of video games, a company could decide to pull the plug on a live service game tomorrow, and what would you be left with then? Memories of the game and the connections we made. 

***

Yeah, I’ve been pondering some deep issues this past month or more, and I don’t have a clear resolution to them. I watch some of my in-game friends chase raiding in TBC Classic, and while I wish them well, I’m not following in their path. I’ve no desire to deal with drama, the need to push yourself hard to keep up, and following the gear treadmill to validate my playing a game. It’s not a matter of the old accusatory line “If I can’t keep up, I’m taking my ball and going home” that I know my decision could easily be interpreted, but for me it’s more of a “If I can’t keep up, I need to find a different way to have fun and remain valued.” 

*There, I said it. I'm not as good as I ever thought I was; if I were, I'd have a bit more success under my belt than I have. I recognize that external success with dexterity-heavy systems such as video games and sports such as soccer or basketball is highly dependent upon who you play with in addition to innate skill, but I now have enough hard-earned knowledge to admit I was never as good as I hoped. And Father Time hasn't exactly done me any favors over the past decade and a half, either.

**Or rather, my doctors cheated Death. 

***As I cynically used to put it, “We begin to die as soon as we’re born.” I’ve seen that quote attributed to various people, from The Bhudda to Bret Harte, so I have no idea who first said it, and I’m not inclined to spend a few hours or more chasing that down.

****Given what I know of my readership, if you’re reading this and this post gets the average number of pageviews there’s a greater than 70% chance you and I already are acquainted in the community. Now watch this post blow up and make a liar out of me. 

*****Sure, there could be mere bystanders, like me, but I doubt we’re even close to a quarter of the people in there at any given time. And if you are a bystander and are in there for more than a minute or two, you’re likely propositioned at least once. I know I have, and in my most recent encounter I wasn’t in there for more than a handful of seconds to turn in a quest and sell some stuff. Yes, despite appearances, there’s still a quest giver inside the Inn.

Now That Winter Hath Come

The past few weeks have been a whole lot of "not much" regarding posts. There's a reason for that, of course: the holidays and family getting back together. Our daughters (oldest and youngest, for those keeping track) came down from Milwaukee and up from Louisville respectively, and my son came over from the east side of town. This included my oldest's three guinea pigs* and my oldest's and son's partners. 

I've also been navigating the potential land mines of extended family gatherings, but thankfully no land mines have been stepped on yet. (A few guinea pig poops, sure, but that's not a big deal.)

My youngest is getting settled into her first post-university apartment, and she starts her first job on Monday. My son has been working his tail off as a seasonal worker and is hoping he gets picked up after the Holidays are over. My oldest completed her first semester of going back to uni for another degree, and is looking forward to next semester. 

So yeah, a lot going on, and that's without me talking about any of the gaming that's been going on. 

You know that I've been playing on the WoW Classic Anniversary servers, but I've also poked my nose into Retail to just watch. No real desire to level or do anything else, but just observing the chaos without getting hit on too much...

It's kind of like looking at the sun: you can't
really stare at it without it hurting your eyes.

This was in Ironforge on Boxing Day on
Moon Guard-US. This is easily the most
people I've seen in Retail Ironforge over the past
few months. COMBINED. On the Anniversary servers,
there's always a bit of a crowd here.

The more I think about it, I stand out in the
Lion's Pride crowd because I'm fully clothed.
And I look, well, normal.

Chaos, indeed.

But I've also been playing a bit of Stardew Valley here and there. I get the urge to do another playthrough every several months or so, and once I complete the basic 2 year portion of the game I'm good for another half a year or more.

Yes, for a farming game I made Cardwyn.
Who grew up on a farm.

Beyond that, I've not been doing terribly much, video game-wise. I've been delving into this other hobby a bit more often:

Yes, that's my hand. And my
Yaesu FT-70D, as well.

It keeps me busy and has gotten me to thinking ahead as to where I want to take this amateur radio hobby. I believe that Pallais has suggested that I continue writing about this new hobby, so I need to write a follow-up.

Anyway, catch you all on the flip side of the year.

*If you thought having a dog is like having a toddler around, guinea pigs will see you and raise you a few "wheeks!"

Another Hump I'd Forgotten About

You know how leveling slows down tremendously in Vanilla WoW in the mid 30s and the mid 40s? Well, there's apparently another speed bump in the mid-L50s too.

I have discovered this the past month while I've been leveling the four toons, but especially Joan and Hoots.

Listings as of December 26, 2025.

Going from L54 to L55 took an absurdly long time from my perspective, but once I got over that hump the leveling from L55 to L56 seemed to go more quickly. 

Of all the four toons, Hoots was actually the slowest in leveling from L54 to L55. Part of that I chalk up to bad luck, where respawning mobs caught me multiple times in various zones --apparently quick respawns can also be observed other places than Felwood's Shadow Hold-- but I also didn't have to grind nearly as much to get some of these quests completed. If the RNG rolls go your way when you're looking for XX items, you don't have to kill that many mobs. Which also means less grinding, resulting in less XP per quest overall. I don't know the ratio of XP garnered by killing mobs versus completing quests in Retail, but I've found that in Vanilla Classic you get a lot more XP if you're grinding a lot of mobs just to complete a quest. Sure, it's not "fun" from the standpoint of wanting to get from Point A to Point B quickly, but it is a low stress way to level. You don't have to engage while level at the same depth in Retail --although Retail fans probably would point out that leveling in Retail is so quick it's not deep either-- but Blizzard designed Retail leveling to progress multiple stories. Outside of a few overarching questlines, there are very few newer-style MMO stories in Classic WoW.*

So I can grind while listening to a podcast, chatting with friends, and not really paying too close attention to what I'm doing in-game. Which is good, since I play a game to have fun and relax, not be hyper-focused.

***

My questing buddy is logging on far less often these days. She completed her Atiesh --oh wait, I didn't mention that she got selected for one, didn't I?-- and I think she only really needs one or two more items and her gear will be good throughout most of TBC Classic leveling. Therefore she's been taking a bit of a break, playing games with her husband, and when she's on she's basically pre-loading stuff for when the Dark Portal opens. 

I'm thinking that once the pre-patch drops in mid-January, she'll be leveling a Draenei Priest (basically the same one she used to help me level my Shaman in 2021's TBC Classic and she mained in Wrath Classic), but we'll see how things go.

*Those long burning questlines that are there, however, do tend to be epic in their own way. Everybody knows the Defias questline, but there's also the Marshal Windsor questline and some of the Class Quests (Paladin and Warlock epic mount quests, for example). The biggest difference between Classic and Retail is that as quest design progressed, every single (non-gray) thing you see out in the game world can be traced back to a quest objective, whereas in Classic WoW there's a metric ton of items and mobs out there that have absolutely nothing to do with anything. (Black Diamonds, anybody?) And that's fine. Not everything has to mean anything at all --in real life that is frequently the case-- and a lot of game designers (and fiction editors) seem to have forgotten that simple fact. 

It's All a Numbers Game

If anybody ever thought that Blizzard looks at Retail and Classic as two separate entities, we have a bit further proof.

Yesterday, Blizz announced that the Midnight Pre-Patch will drop on January 20th, 2026.

In case you were keeping track, the TBC Classic Pre-Patch for the Anniversary servers arrives on January 13, 2026.

It used to be that when a pre-patch event for any Blizzard product happened, Blizz made sure to clear the calendar of other games so they could maximize player activity. But now, we're seeing two distinct versions of World of Warcraft dropping their own separate pre-patches within a week of each other. 

Some, such as Wilhelm, believe this is a sign that Blizzard doesn't care about TBC Classic. To be honest, I also harbor thoughts along those lines, but I believe there's also something else afoot. Blizzard wouldn't deliberately sabotage subscriptions, so I suspect that what these dates ALSO say that WoW Classic Anniversary players simply don't play Retail. The Venn Diagram of WoW players probably looks something like this:

Pretty self-explanatory, if you ask me.

Even my occasional forays into Retail have centered upon merely observing others and sticking to the post-Cataclysm Old World starting zones. I'm the sort of Retail player that Micro-Blizzard doesn't like very much, because I only subscribe and don't buy expansions or Cash Shop items. They'll take my money, because they're a corporation and some money is better than none, but I'm not the focus of their interest.

Perhaps that's the root of the problem: because Classic Anniversary players are resistant to playing Retail, they won't buy things in a Cash Shop and have no WoW Token to purchase, so Blizzard doesn't care about them. If Blizz wants to hit that 30% profit target that Microsoft's C-Suite set for the XBox division, they simply can't afford to give any time to the Classic Anniversary crowd. 

It does make me wonder whether Blizzard is hoping the Classic crowd goes away, so they can cut that staff and be done with it. They won't sell WoW Classic at all, because they're not going to try to compete with another version of their game. Just ask Wizards of the Coast how THAT went over when they came out with D&D 4e and most of the D&D 3.x crowd instead migrated to Paizo's Pathfinder game (which was colloquially known as D&D 3.75). D&D became second banana in tabletop RPGs to another version of their own game.

Maybe that's the real Endgame for Classic WoW: kill it off due to a lack of support, but then sue any private servers to keep newer versions of Classic WoW from coming out. It's all a numbers game, which means that it's more cost effective to kill the game off than support it for a player base that won't buy any of the extra trinkets Blizzard is peddling.

"You think you do but you don't" indeed.

EtA: Added quotes at the end.

At Least I'm Recognized in China

Call me amused, but it seems that while Google can't figure out that Parallel Context exists, Chinese web crawlers can.

I was alerted to this little item when I received a Google Notification about the blog that there was a spike in activity on the 6th:

As of 12/8/2025.

Of which was primarily from China:

As of 12/8/2025.

And yet when I got onto the Google Search console, this greeted me:

As of 12/8/2025.

So you can see that Google still refuses/ignores the presence of Parallel Context, while the Chinese web crawlers seem to have found PC. Once again, I've found that Google's search engine isn't really as impressive as they like to think. They can't even blame it on Blogger, which is owned by Google itself, because Bhagpuss' blog Inventory Full is easily found via Google Search:

As of 12/8/2025.

This is starting to get to ridiculous levels of incompetence, because there's no apparent reason why the blog doesn't show up in Google's direct search results. After all, PC continues to show up in Microsoft's Bing Search console:

As of 12/8/2025.

And in true Microsoft fashion, they want me to pay to "improve" my visibility on search results, 

As of 12/8/2025.

But I think I'll pass. Just goes to show that Microsoft is leaving no stone unturned in their quest to monetize everything so they can then pump that money into AI (and Satya Nadella's compensation package). But at least their own search engine, Bing, can actually find a 16 year old blog that has almost 1700 posts on it, whereas Google stumbles over itself in the dark, claiming that a Blogger-inserted mobile option "https://parallelcontext.blogspot.com/?m=1" causes a Redirect error...

Again, as of 12/8/2025.

...when you can click the link above and see that the link works perfectly fine in bringing up a mobile-friendly version of the blog. If Google wants to bitch about that, they should talk to their Blogger division. But then again, since Inventory Full is working fine and it's a Blogger blog, I'd say that the problem has less to do with anything Blogger does and more between the chair and keyboard on Google's search division.

At least I know that Google won't enact any retribution on PC, because they'd have to FIND IT FIRST, and they've already proven they can't do that.

Just Come On and Burst, Already

Okay, this is now getting ridiculous.

Multiple websites and YouTube channels --here's a link to Rock Paper Shotgun's article-- reported that RAM manufacturer Micron is shutting down their Crucial consumer division to essentially go chase AI and Datacenter work.

If you've been keeping track, Micron is the third largest manufacturer of RAM after Samsung and SK Hynix. The loss of Crucial means that there's going to be one fewer player in the RAM market, and more loss of choice among consumer PC buyers. Yes, that includes gamers, too, as we tend to push the envelope of PC performance than the average PC user, but given the spiking of RAM usage in "normal" software such as browsers, video streaming, and Office-esque applications, this is going to hurt us in the long run.

And for what? To try to get some of that AI bubble money?

Yeah, this isn't going to end well...