State of The Redbeard, Summer Edition 2026

I spent this weekend at ARRL Field Day 2026, which is put on by the American Radio Relay League, the largest Amateur Radio organization in the US. I'll post more about it later this week, but the TL;DR is that it's a contest/activity that's intended to get hams and clubs out into the field and away from their home locations to try to make as many contacts as they can. Just like guilds in MMOs, some clubs are far more hardcore about this than others, but I'm grateful my club is NOT one of those.

Anyway, I wasn't playing MMOs much this weekend --only a couple of hours playing WoW this afternoon-- so I got the opportunity to take a step back and consider what I want to do with my MMO playing.

Well, the first thing I did was to admit that I haven't really been playing LOTRO much at all since the great 64-bit server migration. My oldest, who also had been playing LOTRO far more than me, hadn't been playing much either. We haven't set up a new Kinship house --and in my case I haven't even bothered with setting up a new personal house-- and all I've done the past few months was to login and wander around Bree for a few minutes at a time. 

This theme also follows what I've been doing in ESO, where I'm so out of practice that when I do go out and about and fight any sort of enemy I almost end up dying. That's kind of embarrassing, given that I really used to love ESO's and GW2's limited ability bars, but that's the reality of me not effectively playing either game over the past 6+ years. 

I'm the plain looking Dunmer to the side.
All sorts hang out around a bank vault, I guess.

That leads me to SWTOR, where I bowed to reality here and decided to cancel my in-game subscription. I've gone from logging in once a week and doing stuff in the Vanilla SWTOR zones to logging in more like once a quarter. I can trace my decline in interest with SWTOR directly to the change that impacted companions' pathing, but I also think that the success of Classic WoW lead to the realization I liked the pre-expansion Vanilla version of SWTOR more than its current iteration. If the dev team were to come out with a "SWTOR Classic" with a pre-Rise of the Hutt Cartel version of the game available to play, I'd be all for it. I still love the Vanilla storylines, and I'll miss them a lot,* but paying a subscription to a game I'm not playing is pretty silly.

Some of the other games I've played in the past, such as Neverwinter and Age of Conan, I've uninstalled from my PC. I'd login, look at my toon for a moment, and just logout. The former I couldn't get into after a certain level (I think it was mid-20s) and the latter is still a buggy mess that requires grouping up to finish the main storyline, and I honestly don't know anybody who plays it anymore. That the talent tree for AoC is so obnoxiously huge --it makes Rift's talent tree look really basic by comparison-- I have absolutely no idea what my options really are. If you've ever heard about analysis paralysis, I met that head-on in AoC.

Speaking of Rift, there's so few players --especially in the low level zones-- that you really can't do much. You can quest in a zone to an extent, but the grouping that is expected to happen in fighting Rifts or whatnot in the open world simply doesn't happen. You need a critical mass of players to do that, and that's just not happening anymore. I haven't tried their automated LFD tool, but given my experiences with automated tools in other MMOs I'm very reluctant to try it and group up for their equivalent of a dungeon.

Like most days when I poke my nose in Rift,
nary a person in sight.

I do login to Star Trek Online a bit, but like LOTRO, I just wander around and maybe take a trip from Earth to Vulcan. If I were subscribing to STO, it would have also been on the block for unsubscribing.

And now let's circle back to the elephant in the room, the various forms of WoW.

At this point in time, WoW is the only MMO I'm actively subscribed to. Well, kind of: I buy 60 days' worth of WoW at a time, which forces me to review whether I'm enjoying myself every couple of months. And so far, that has been the case.

Among the versions of WoW I've played, the Classic Anniversary servers are what I've played the most. I still poke my nose into the Retail and Era servers, but I've not touched the 2019 WoW Classic progression servers since 2023 or so. About the only thing I did do there was to occasionally login so I knew what my toons originally looked like when I recreated them on the Anniversary servers. 

***

So, that begs the question: what have I been doing?

The most obvious answer is that I've been doing non-gamer things: amateur radio, gardening, repairs around the house and cars. And eventually I'll get back to making more outdoor furniture since the weather has finally heated up.

But what about gamer stuff?

Oh, single player games: Civ IV, Stardew Valley, Stellaris, Age of Empires.

There's a few other games scattered in there, but I've stayed away from long games that require a lot of attention, such as any of the isometric RPGs (Baldur's Gate 1/2/3, Icewind Dale, Divinity Original Sin 1/2, Disco Elysium, etc.). I simply don't have the time to devote to those games, and I realized that when I came to the conclusion that my BG3 playthrough was long enough in the past that I can't even remember what I was trying to do at the time. Maybe I'll get a chance to play these longer form games another time --I'm looking at you, Planescape: Torment-- but that's not about to happen right now.

Yeah, buddy. I'm done with trying to figure it
out, so you'll just have to wait and I'll recreate you later.

That's the biggest drawback to video games made over the past 10-15 years or so: the hours to completion has become so large that you'd have to devote a significant amount of your free time to playing them, and that in the end works against my enjoyment of the game. While I no longer have kids around the house, that doesn't mean I'm swimming in spare time. And these 100+ hour video games demand enough of your spare time that it becomes increasingly difficult to justify devoting that much time to a single endeavor. If I read a book about an hour a night, for books not named Don Quixote** that'd take me about 40-50 hours to complete. So, somewhere between 1-2 months. But a game such as BG3 or The Witcher 3, with their playtimes of well over 100 hours each***, can take me a lot longer than that. I think that when I played the original Baldur's Gate back in 1999 it took me somewhere around 4 months, and that didn't include the expansion.**** 

There are other games I do want to play, such as Dispatch and Stray Gods, but I suspect that I'll get so invested in the story that when difficult choices come along (and from what I understand, you're given a very short period of time to make a choice in these Telltale-type games) I'll likely freeze and simply stop playing. The old line from the Rush song Freewill "If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice" looms large over me whenever I play one of these games. Maybe its my acknowledgement that there are no objectively good or bad solution in these games that causes me to freeze like that, but I do feel bad for all participants in a video game when push comes to shove and I have to let someone down.

I believe this is one of the "easier" choices
in Dispatch. I mean, you could be a selfish jerk
with the left option or have an overinflated ego
in the mid, or just propel the story forward on the right.
Screencap from Dispatch.

***

Does that mean my MMO playing days are winding down?

Not really. Just like everything else, it evolves around here. I expect that as Fall heads toward Winter my MMO playing will go up a bit as I'll be doing less and less outside. Still, you never quite know around here. Who knows what Microsoft might be up to this Fall? More cost cutting? Same thing goes for all of the other game companies, as the "good times" in the post-pandemic world come to an end.

I guess we'll see.

*You know, I still never finished the Agent's storyline. I got mid-way through Chapter 2 and... Just stopped. That's when the pathing issues kicked in, and I couldn't stand it.

**Unabridged version. The abridged version is significantly shorter.

***And I'm here to tell you I do NOT operate at the same speed as the "average" player; I spend way too much time enjoying everything and contemplating my choices before I move forward. What, you thought that I only did that in MMOs? 

****I was loaned the copy of BG1 that I played, so I returned it when I was finished. The guy who loaned it to me kept pestering me to finish it, but I was like "Dude, I have a newborn at home, I'm working 50 hours a week, and I'm wiped. I'm moving as fast as I can."

I'm Sure There was a Door Here

At the University of Cincinnati, among the often bizarre and quirky campus buildings, is the building that houses the College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning (DAAP).

This is a small portion of the overall building.
From the University of Cincinnati.

The old building that existed prior to this one was a nasty piece of work whose windows leaked, the colors were abhorrent, and the thing looked like a design nightmare out of the 1950s/1960s. This new building was completed in 1996, when my wife was still a graduate student at the university. Her office overlooked the new building, so one day she took an opportunity to go explore the place out of curiosity. She'd heard the gossip that the building had no right angles in the classrooms at all and that there were stairs that went nowhere, so here was her chance to see for herself. 

She was unable to confirm that first rumor, although the classrooms she did view certainly had non-standard corners in them,* but in a way she did confirm the second rumor. She followed a set of stairs down to where she thought it would lead her to another floor, but much to her surprise when she opened the door it led directly outside, locking behind her so she couldn't get back inside. I'm sure that someone will point out that technically speaking the door DID lead somewhere, I'd argue that a one-way ticket outside is not what most people have in mind when they mean "somewhere".**

I got to thinking about my wife's experience with that building when I began thinking about design goals for dungeons in World of Warcraft. This came out of previous post, when I pointed out the vendor just outside of the exit of The Deadmines' dungeon. That exit from The Deadmines is designed to be a one-way exit, as when you leave you're immediately dropped down a wall to where you simply can't re-enter that nice, swirly dungeon entrance. That's by design, of course, so that you don't skip all of the dungeon just to go to the end. 

Likewise, there's other dungeons that if you run right up and engage the final boss the entire area of trash mobs comes running and will beat you to a pulp. The most obvious examples are Scarlet Commander Mograine and High Inquisitor Whitemane in the Cathedral portion of Scarlet Monastery and Eranikus in Sunken Temple, although I believe it also happens with Emperor Thaurissan in Blackrock Depths. I have never "poked the bear" with Thaurissan, but I've been in the other two instances where someone pulled early either by accident or on purpose.

Yeah, this entry into SM: Cathedral ended
about as well as you'd expect.

When you think about it, those examples emphasize a dungeon design that reflects the dungeon as a "real place": when a boss is attacked, everybody comes running to defend the boss. Other parts of that design philosophy are evident in these Vanilla instances, such as:

• The tendency to not have a single pathway through a place.*** Sure, there's a single path through the various Scarlet Monastery wings and The Deadmines, but Scholomance is an actual house with multiple levels while Blackrock Depths and Stratholme are actual cities with no truly defined pathing.
• Dead ends with no real purpose other than to make a place feel "lived in". Think of the "living quarters" in Blackrock Depths, where there may be some mobs present but they really don't have anything there other than actual beds, dressers, etc.
• Instances buried deep in an external area. Deadmines, Razorfen Downs, and Maraudon are the most obvious examples.
• Instances that have a wide range of enemy levels, so they're designed to be returned to as you gain levels. Uldaman, Scarlet Monastery, and Maraudon are the most obvious examples, although Blackrock Depths and Blackrock Spire also qualify.

***

This also jogged my memory because of my running some of the TBC instances on the Anniversary server and how much the design philosophy had changed from Vanilla to TBC. Gone are the multipath instances; all of the instances have a single path through them (although it could be argued that The Steamvault has multiple paths to complete the first section that opens up the last portion) with the pathing itself cleverly disguised by twists and turns to hide the single path through the instance. While there are some dead ends to the instances, there are far fewer of them than in Vanilla****. The instances themselves are easily accessible via the main entrance, except for the few endgame instances that require a key to unlock, but even then if someone else has the key you can still enter because they can unlock it for you.***** Finally, the instances in TBC are designed with a specific level range in mind; there's no wide range of enemy levels to be found in a single instance of TBC.

Naga... Nazis... Same difference: I still hate them both.

The change in design philosophy not only highlights the change in instances being less of an immersive RPG experience and more of a stepping stone, but also a change that emphasizes the desire of players to rerun instances, looking for specific gear and drops (and in the case of TBC Classic and later expansions, reputation/renown). Even I'm not immune to rerunning instances, because if it's fun I'll do it again. That's why I still go visit Blackrock Depths so often; it has NOTHING to do with hunting for the Hand of Justice drop that has eluded some of my melee toons for years. 

(Lies! It's all lies, I tell you!)

But still, the shrinking of size and time spent in an instance is somewhat secondary from my perspective because there's less of an opportunity for exploration and immersion while inside an instance. Of course, you'd need a group conducive to such a thing, but even wandering around solo in an instance like I did in the Vanilla dungeons back when I first began playing in Wrath on my first max level toon was quite an experience. 

***

You know, back in 2014 when I was finishing up my original time with Retail, I spent some time in some of the Wrath instances, soloing them just to see what I missed when followed the group (which followed the meta). What surprised me the most were some of the intro areas in the ICC 5-mans that I never encountered, particularly in the Pit of Saron, because there was a specific path all groups took when running the instance so I never knew about other parts of that big open mining pit in the beginning. I didn't feel cheated, exactly, just disappointed. 

That being said, even I can get sick of a place. I remember doing the Loremaster achievement back in 2010, and to complete that it mean I had to go into some instances such as Stratholme and Sunken Temple so many times I got sick of them. Given that you had no in-game maps available, especially for Sunken Temple and the two Blackrock instances, it was an eye-opening experience getting lost to the point where my head hurt. It was at that point that I wished that those instances had modern LFD equivalents. But as the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for...

*Fun fact: professors don't like it if you wander by the classroom they're lecturing in and peer through the door. I discovered that one the hard way, although the first time I found this out was in grade school, when I was picked up early by my dad to go to the doctor for an allergy test (the kind where they prick your back about 20-30 times and smear different allergens on the open cut to see which ones you're allergic to). Leaving my grade school, he made a wrong turn and instead of going toward the exit he went toward a 5th grade classroom. I tried to stop him but he ignored me and opened the door, only to find himself the target of the ire of one of the nuns. I wanted to melt into the floor.

**Apparently the architect of the building, Peter Eisenman, did have a stairwell that lead nowhere --as in it ended at a wall-- in the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University. 

***Yes, the player base has created their own optimal pathing through a lot of these instances, but you're not locked in to a very specific path in the same way as The Deadmines or the Scarlet Monastery wings are. 

****And they're almost non-existent in Wrath and what I remember of Cataclysm instances.

*****I think this is even the case in Karazhan, the intro 10-person raid in TBC. At least my friends seem to think so, because they've made it plain that they want me to join them in a Karazhan run. But let's be honest, they'd essentially be carrying me because I have quest greens and a few low-mid level instance drops among my toons.

What If Everybody Else Was a Bot?

I spent another hour last night fishing in Elwynn Forest. Not a lot going on last night, for the most part...

Except for that guy who literally flopped in the
water there, stayed for about a minute, and then
flew up and away.

And that one Hordie trying to pretend he's not
really there.

Oh, and there were people griping about duels and doing the same old "anything you can do I can do better" refrain, although here it's female toons beating up on male toons.

I was only partially fishing, as I was watching a few videos with interest, such as Pointy Hat's discussion of the D&D setting Ravenloft, its history, and the new D&D splatbook Ravenloft: The Horrors Within.*

Antonio Demico does a great job with his videos, and even this old D&D player learned a thing or two about the most well known Horror implementation in D&D.

But really what captured my attention was this video by Angelikatosh:

I have advocated for more NPCs in-game in the dead areas of Azeroth, but the concept of a WoW private server populated by ONE real person and over a thousand bots generated using Deepseek is taking things to a completely other level. 

And while I share Angelika's concerns about how this will impact our ability as humans to interact with each other, I do wonder whether we're already at that point. I mean, we're seeing the loss of attention spans and issues interacting with people of the opposite sex already**, so this is just a natural extension of those initial problems. 

It does remind me of my parents demanding that I turn off the television and go outside to, you know, go play. Sure, it could also mean interact with people, but I also spent significant amounts of time roaming the woods near our house by myself, riding my bike to play video games down at the local Kmart, or going to the library or the bookstore down the street. All of these activities were solo, but a few of them were at least out in the world where while I wasn't interacting with them directly, other people were present in the background. 

So, I'm not sure what to make of these private servers that people have cooked up. On the one hand, it could be fun having a thriving game world with more realistic NPCs, but on the other it could also be a prelude to a real life Westworld.

Oh, and for the record, I think I've found my new favorite spot to fish in Retail's Old World:

*I kept wanting to correct him that it's THE WAR WITHIN, but that's a "me" problem.

**Although to be fair, part of that stunted development could be laid at the feet of the pandemic.

Something I Can't Unsee

This... feels weird.

Yes, it's a short of the most recent Superman movie (2025), but what's so weird about it is that the interior is that of Cincinnati Museum Center.

My wife used to work there in both the Natural History Museum and the Cincinnati Historical Society, and we used to take the kids there on a regular basis when they were growing up. 

So yeah, I know nothing else of the movie or the scene, but looking at the interior of the rotunda like that is... Well, it's a bit much.

In case you're wondering whether they touched up the rotunda very much, here's a video of a performance of Debussy's Arabesque No. 1 on the Wurlitzer organ at the Museum Center. The pipes are hidden from view, but the main portion of the Wurlitzer is right on the border from the rotunda to the walkway that leads towards the Omnimax Theater and the Amtrak station.

As you can tell, the Winhold Weiss murals were changed from this:

From WVXU's 2023 article.

From the same WVXU 2023 article as above.

To this:

From Reddit. Here's a better set of pics from
James Gunn on Facebook. Not sure how long it'll last.

We Are the Limitation

In the era of LLMs, you can't hide.

Whatever you say will be pulled out from the internet and presented to you, so you might want to be a bit wary about that.

Of course, Google still doesn't know PC exists, but hey, nobody's perfect.

Data as of June 1st, 2026.

List of Indexed Pages, as of June 1, 2026.

As you can see, Google has completely wiped out all of the "Indexed" web pages owned by Parallel Context, as if Google decided they didn't really exist. They are presently listed as "Scanned, Not Indexed", so if you can imagine the warehouse scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's a bit like that.

Google: "Top men are working on it."
Indiana Jones: "Who?"
Google: "Top. Men."

So when Google decided to announce changes to their search interface on May 19, 2026, I made a collective yawn. It doesn't matter how fancy the interface is, if Google itself isn't finding or indexing the data, you're not going to find it on Google.

I have been amused by the fact that Google and other AI companies might just be missing a major problem with their push to make everybody irrelevant: their own data pool. 

Copyright issues notwithstanding, if your search engine's webcrawlers aren't providing you with data --and I presume that a small blog like mine isn't the only website that has issues appearing on a normal google search-- then your AI isn't really being trained as effectively as you think.

Results using a private browsing window
on Firefox on June 1, 2026.

 And just for completeness (and, well, to rub Google's nose in it), Microsoft Bing knows I exist:

Results using a private browsing window
on Firefox on June 1, 2026.

That's damning with faint praise, as I'm really sick about Copilot this and Copilot that. Even though Microsoft threw in the towel and is beginning to back off from pushing the Copilot button so aggressively, they're not exactly giving up on Copilot either. 

And remember Google Glass? The eyeglass wearable that ended up being pulled by Google because people who wore them started getting beat up by people who resented being on video without consent? Well, fast forward to 2026, and Meta, Apple, and Amazon have made eyeglass wearables a thing now. And nobody cares anymore that they're being recorded.

Given that I can go to the grocery store and (unintentionally) be following someone up and down the aisles and hear both sides of their entire conversation for 40 minutes, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I don't think any of the people who behave like this --and there are far far more of them than I'd ever have believed-- realize that anybody could record them and then use their discussions against them because they are holding a conversation in public. 

This goes on all the time, and I'm the one who gets funny looks when I put my earbuds on when I'm at the grocery store, although that might be due to me using wired earbuds more than anything else. No, I don't hold phone conversations at the store, although I have been known to call home to ask whether Brand X or Y is fine since Z isn't in stock. No, I put on my earbuds to keep the noise at bay (I have tinnitus) and so I don't have to listen in on whatever the latest gossip that some fellow customer is insisting I hear by talking loudly into a phone a couple of feet from me.

I guess it's only a matter of time before all of these wearables such as the eyeglasses become used by Big Tech to feed LLMs. And I'd bet money that even then, Parallel Context won't show up on a simple Google search.

Connections to the Past: Some Music You Don't Hear Now on the Radio from 1983 and 1984

There are studies* that suggest that music we listen to in our teens sticks with us forever. If that's the case, for me my critical years were 1983 and 1984, where I moved away from New Wave music and firmly planted myself on the Rock side of things. 

I spent the past couple of days listening to music from that time period, some of the stuff you never hear much today that got plenty of radio airplay back then and had a huge influence on me. No, I'm not going to pull out The Raisin's Fear is Never Boring again; it's in this post from some months ago.

I figured Planet P's Why Me is a good start. Although originally known as Planet P, Planet P Project is an alter ego of Tony Carey. This got extensive airplay on rock stations, and I think it actually made its way into an 80s compilation or two, but good luck trying to find it on a Classic Rock station today.

Given their outsized influence, The Yardbirds didn't actually play for that many years. But when three of the original members got back together and created the band Box of Frogs, rock stations took notice. Back Where I Started got extensive local airplay and featured guitar work from another ex-Yardbird, the late Jeff Beck, but hell if I could not find the album on cassette anywhere. 

I know that Bhagpuss will know this song, because it's Slade, but people my age in 1984 knew Slade more for being the band who originally wrote Cum On Feel The Noize that Quiet Riot covered and conquered the American Pop Charts with. So when Keep Your Hands Off My Power Supply** released here in the States, the album shot up the charts. Between Run Runaway (above) and My Oh My, the songs were in heavy rotation on rock radio as well as MTV.

Russ Ballard's Voices got airplay on MTV, but what really got people into this song was when it was featured in a 1984 episode of Miami Vice. 

Before you ask "how the hell can a Jefferson Starship song be considered obscure?", well... I give you No Way Out. It was the first song that I listened to on my brand new boom box back in 1984 by pure coincidence, because I turned it on and tuned it to the local rock station and there it was. Obviously today it's very much in the shadow of other Jefferson Starship songs, but it struck a nerve with me that continues to this day.

The Tubes' She's a Beauty was a one-two punch with Planet P's Why Me, because I frequently heard them close to each other on radio playlists. To a nerdy, shy, adolescent kid just exiting his tweens, it certainly seemed like they were singing directly to me with lines like:

You can look inside another world

You get to talk to a pretty girl

She's everythin' you dream about

Well, at least I can say that I know how to talk to women now.

 

*This one, from the University of Jyväskylä, I found quite fascinating. What they call the "cascading reminiscence bump" highlights that kids often form bonds with music and songs a couple of decades younger than them, which to my mind makes sense because they're listening to music their parents liked, which happen to be that average time differential. 

**That was the American title of The Amazing Kamikaze Syndrome, that was released in 1983 in the UK and Europe. It was released in 1984 in the US with a different name.

Here's my copy that I picked up in 1989
at a second hand store near the University
of Dayton that were selling old LPs for $2.

Now Here's a Pertinent Question

I haven't watched Wowcrendor much the past decade or so, because I'd just not engaged with Retail WoW much since Mists. However, something caught my eye today, and I thought I'd share.

He posted it yesterday, and it can be turned into a broader question about MMOs in general. 

Why do we login to these games and play? Is it inertia, friendship, curiosity, addiction, the goal-oriented nature of things, or something else?

For me, I'm not exactly sure why I login. 

Does that sound strange to you? It sure does to me.

I mean, I may chat with my friends group on the WoW Anniversary servers, but I don't actually play with them. They'd all reached max level ages ago --and some have multiple toons at max level-- while my own toons are L66-L67. And I've already decided that once ny toons start reaching L70 I'm going to probably not play them much at all and instead play other toons. Perhaps that's borderline insanity to the average Anniversary server player who's got multiple raids already under their belt, but I'm kind of happy that I've never pushed myself to that route. Hell, I probably won't even get epic riding at all on any of them*, much less flying. But getting that stuff isn't why I play. (At least I know that much.)

Maybe it is exploring the world that I'm attracted to the most. When I get on LOTRO or SWTOR, I spend more time just putzing around and looking at places than anything else. ESO is the same way. I can engage at my own pace without worrying about catching up with the Jonses or feeling like I'm missing out. I also did a ton of simply exploring places my last year of playing Retail back in 2013-2014, because the Battlegrounds only made me angry and most people I'd known had quit the game. It was pleasant; empty, but also pleasant.

I think I'll turn the question over to you, the reader: What's your reason for playing?

*One L67 toon, my Shaman, doesn't even have "basic riding", because she's got Ghost Wolf form. Sure, it's not as fast as basic riding, but it's free and it's an instant cast spell that has gotten me out of jams numerous times in the past.

Smile, You're on Candid Camera

Would you believe me if I told you I didn't know who (or what) Mr. Beast was until June of 2025?

Apparently Mr. Beast is the most followed YouTuber, and despite that I'd never run across anything related to him (or his organization) until I discovered this video by Jaiden Animations:

This was when I first discovered Jaiden (after discovering Rebecca Parham's YouTube channel first) and a couple of her videos referenced how absolutely crazy some of Mr. Beast's followers were. However, even after watching Jaiden's video I didn't have any desire to go and hunt down Mr. Beast, so I tucked that little bit of knowledge away and just went on with life.

Then two things happened. First, Dan Olson dropped this video:

If you've got the time, it's worth a watch as Dan was most definitely NOT the sort of influencer that someone of Mr. Beast's ilk would typically be interacting with. I mean, Dan does long form video essays about deep topics --gaming related or not-- and is the polar opposite of Mr. Beast's stuff. 

After watching Dan's video, I still had no desire to go visit Mr. Beast's site on the internet. I mean, Dan had pretty much reinforced my opinion that Mr. Beast was NOT for me.

Finally, I opened up my email last morning to find this from (of all places) Lowe's Home Improvement:

This arrived in my INBOX on 5/18/2026.

You're kidding me, right? 

Lowes? The hardware company that partners with the NFL and sports figures like Messi?

No, I'm still not interested in seeing Mr. Beast's stuff, and after having watched Dan's video, I think that Beast Industries is throwing jello at a wall to see what sticks. After all, I'm about 45 years too old to be Beast Industries' target audience.

***

The presence of Monsieur Beast in my email provided me a necessary intro into something that I'd been thinking about after my attendance at the Dayton Hamvention: the prevalence of YouTubers and other influencers.

Outside of Salty Walt, I noted the presence of several other YouTubers at the Hamvention. One of the first people who came by our tables on Friday I recognized immediately.

"Hey, it's the CB guy!" I exclaimed.

"Yes it is," he replied with a slightly sheepish grin.

It was Erik of Farpoint Farms, whose YouTube channel focuses a lot on CB radio with a side helping of shortwave and scanner radios, solar power, and other items he uses at his farm in the mountains of North Carolina. He was a pretty genial guy, so he was exactly like he presented himself on his channel. That morning he was just rummaging around for anything interesting to purchase, not record for the channel.* Alas, one of our club members tried hard to sell him on items rather than let him look in peace, but at least Erik took it in stride.

However, as the Hamvention progressed, I noted other YouTubers around, some livestreaming with cameras and some without, but obviously all looking at things with an eye toward content. There was one moment where I was walking in one direction of the flea market, saw a well-known YouTuber with phone on a selfie stick, recording, and I spun around in the opposite direction and "noped" my way out of there. When I was looking at antennas with one of the indoor vendors --hey, I'm a ham, what do you expect?-- another guy appeared at my elbow and began talking to the vendor, explaining he was a YouTuber, and wanted to ask him some questions. After a quick side glance to make sure he wasn't recording at just that moment, I skipped out again.

I get it, people are creating content for a living. That's the name of the game. But holy cow did there seem to be so many of them around. And given that while the Dayton Hamvention has attendees worldwide, there are only ~730,000 hams in the US. (Yes, it's on the public record; as the link shows.) There were around 36,000 Hamvention attendees, and probably 25,000-30,000 of them were actual amateur license holders.** So the size of the potential audience in a YouTube channel isn't all that great to begin with, and it certainly seems that a lot of folks are fighting over that smallish slice of the pie. 

But you know, that's okay. I can just do my thing as long as they don't intrude on it, and I'll let them do their thing. 

***

I do realize that I'm griping a bit about this on a blog, which is the older form of social media. I have enough self awareness that I can acknowledge that, but there are two significant differences: scale and goals. as my other influencer post pointed out, I'm not even close to their league in terms of visibility. And for someone who prefers to keep himself largely out of the spotlight, that's perfectly fine with me. The second is that I'm not doing this to generate clicks and/or income. I'm doing it as an outlet for my urge to write. I don't have to worry about critiques, rejection letters (if I'd even merit one out of a slush pile), and god forbid any chaos that'd arise out of any potential professional publications. 

Isn't blogging a form of self-publishing?
From Imgflip.

The YouTubers do put themselves out there in a way I never do, and consequently open themselves up to criticism I don't receive. For that, I salute them, and yet I'm glad I am not them.

(Also, I have now developed what appears to be Con Crud, that low grade cold that afflicts people when they have been to a conference of any sort. I was just telling my wife this past evening that this was the first real "cold" that I've had since my health scare in 2021. Not sure what kind of record that breaks, but for me it feels like forever. And I simply hate hate HATE a sore throat.)

*That came later. Judging by the footage, I was not around the booth at the time; probably at a forum or something. Oh, and for the record, while I might disagree with some of Erik's stances on things, he is living proof that people can disagree without being disagreeable.

**For example, I only got my license in the Fall of 2025, and I'd attended around 5 times or so before this year.

Wanted: A Living Breathing Instance

In the MMO world where it seems that speed (and loot) is king, my fondest memories of dungeons/instances are those that simply feel alive.

I've made my feelings pretty clear on how game developers simply don't make instances on the size and scale of a Blackrock Depths (Classic WoW) or Garth Agarwen (LOTRO) anymore. Instances are now designed as bite-sized chunks for a quick dopamine rush, where the fun is less an experience of an epic place but more of a test of skill in your speed at completing the instance. 

I was thinking about this last night when I responded to Kurn's blog post from Sunday, in which she asked what was people's favorite Classic WoW instance. While I ultimately chose Deadmines as my favorite because of its status as a gateway drug (and the conclusion of the main Defias story throughout the Stormwind territory), I have to give plenty of props to the "big guns" of Classic WoW instances: Stratholme, Blackrock Depths, and Blackrock Spire.

By comparison, Scholomance is a short instance.

Compared to modern instance design, those Classic WoW instances --well, most of them save for Dire Maul and Scarlet Monastery-- are gigantic places that were meant to be living, breathing locales. The devs took their cue from RPGs and the big dungeons found in tabletop games, such as Expedition to the Barrier Peaks or The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, and created expansive places to explore. Yes, you had to make multiple forays into a lot of the instances to complete quests --not just for loot-- and more than one of them were informally gated by level difficulty, such as Uldaman, where if you did the early portion at-level you'd find yourself vastly underpowered at the end of the instance. 

Over time, however, these strengths of the older instances grew to be looked at as less than a key feature and more of a bug, and were consequently smoothed out of dungeon design. I suppose you could say that as MMO design focus changed from the leveling journey to endgame raiding, instances grew to be looked at as a stepping stone for the player. With the introduction of timed challenges (Retail WoW's Mythic Plus) and perpetually increasing difficulty modes, instance design is now far more about the mathematical and skill-based exercise of speed and precision rather than the integration into a game world. At that point, instances have grown to be looked at as an endgame in itself, complete with a story-mode (with or without AI-assisted NPCs) all the way to a perpetually increasing challenge mode (Mythic+). 

***

For all the speculation of a Classic Plus to Vanilla Classic WoW, and for the record I am still highly skeptical that a true Classic Plus is coming*, one of the hallmarks of anything that would classify as Classic Plus would have to be a return to grand, sprawling instances. If Blizzard were to put all of the Classic Plus content after the Naxxramas raid, then the vertical progression would kill off any real sense of a Classic Plus. It would just be an alternative to the official WoW timeline but keeping all of the problems contained therein. 

Of course, I am in a pretty small minority here, because the popularity of the modern instance design speaks volumes. When most people talk about Classic Plus, they speak of "NOT the official timeline" rather than "more stuff for the leveling journey" in Vanilla. It's a reaction to how things are now and deciding that taking another fork in the road is a better idea.

From  the Star Trek: The Next Generation
episode "Relics". (via Tenor).

Answering the question "What does Classic Plus mean" will go a long way toward understanding what Classic Plus we might get, and knowing the Blizzard of today I'm not sure I trust them to answer it in a way I'd like. 

*I believe that it's equally likely that Blizzard would announce the ability for people to purchase their own private server software so they can host "official" Vanilla WoW versions. Blizz might even allow those purchasers the ability to manipulate some things, such as difficulty levels and buffs/debuffs to players and mobs to make the experience easier or harder. If there's one way to kill off the private server market, it's that.

Definitely Not Something New

It's kind of funny that after I posted about walkthroughs and whatnot last Wednesday and Thursday, Tim Cain's YouTube video today was about a question he received about how the Internet changed game design and game dissemination to players.

This isn't the first time he's tackled a similar query, and he has those answers in links in the Description*, but one thing that stuck out in my mind was how the rise of Influencers and Influencer Culture has shaped people's opinions about games. The longer his video went on, the more I thought of that line from Citizen Kane...

From Citizen Kane via Yarn.

That reminds me that we've come full circle in what Influencer Culture really means: there have always been people who tell us what to think and what to buy, it's just that the nature of that delivery has changed over the decades** to being more immediate, requiring a more immediate response. 

Well, we can control our response, and that's where hitting the pause button isn't a bad idea.  

*Tim is awfully good at providing links such as that.

**Or centuries.

What Is The Goal, Anyway?

Bhagpuss commented on yesterday's post about walkthroughs and solved games that "following guides are just more fun", to which I snarkily replied that "are you really playing the game, though?"

That little exchange kept rolling around in my head all night, and I decided to delve deeper into it, because I don't think I was right to simply dismiss Bhagpuss' point.*

In my response, I likened following a walkthrough or merely utilizing the optimized meta to playing connect-the-dots or watching a movie or television series, but upon reflection I don't believe it's just that.

A game is active entertainment. No matter anything else, if you're playing a game of any sort, you're choosing to engage with it. While we can also choose to engage in more passive forms of entertainment, such as watching television, you still have to interact with the game. AI hasn't progressed to the point where it plays the game for you**, so that mere act of physical interaction raises it above the level of watching reruns of MASH.***

However, the operative word isn't 'active' per se, it's 'entertainment'.

Yes, I went there. From the movie Gladiator (via Tenor).

I forgot to ask that basic question: "Are you having fun?" Or maybe a better one is "What is your goal?"

While the former question is the one most people ask, maybe your goal isn't to have fun at all. Let me explain.

***

Walkthroughs are very common in teaching. They provide students with a process to understand a concept with known starting and ending points, and if you get stuck during homework or a test you can fall back to that walkthrough as a guide to help you work through your issues. For example, my Advanced Lab 1 and 2 classes in Physics at UD relied heavily upon you as a student to study and reproduce journal articles, then write up the results as a formal 10-20 page lab report.**** My third lab experiment was provided to me by the professor showing me the lab equipment and the basic design, handing me the requisite journal article, and then said "Now, go and reproduce The Photoelectric Effect."

While some lab experiments are more simplistic than others, they are all walkthroughs. However, I would argue that "entertainment" isn't the typical reason why people utilize them. Yes, there are those who find it fun --and I'm one of them-- but the primary reason why they exist is for instruction and understanding.

Likewise, walkthroughs are found in various other sporting and hobbies. They provide a basis for understanding, a learn-by-doing methodology, and a foundation to build upon. I'm thinking of the karate-do kata that the kids (and my wife) used to perform for their karate class, and you get the idea.

I recognize this kata from their classes.

From the standpoint of games, for some people walkthroughs are the best way to learn to play the game. They provide you with the understanding of the logic behind the game, where the pain points are, and how to solve the problems presented. 

***

So, assuming that the answer to "What is your goal?" is to have fun or be entertained, then we can proceed to "Are you having fun?"

That answer is completely on you. If by "having fun" you go do your own thing, then go do it. If to have fun you follow a walkthrough or the meta, then do that too. 

However, that doesn't mean that people won't judge you because of what you do. People are people, and I've found over the years that the people who love to say "I won't judge you" often are judging you, just not out loud. And yes, I'm guilty of that too. I'm not going to deny that.

If people react negatively to you for not following what they perceive is the "correct" way of playing, don't be surprised. But it also needs to be said that you don't have to yield to their pressure. If they want you to play a specific way and if it's a requirement for your participation with them, then you have to decide whether it's more important to play your way or play with those other people. If others can't respect you for the way you want to play a game, I think there's your answer.

So for me, "having fun" means doing my own thing, trying to puzzle out answers on my own, and not utilizing walkthroughs or a published "best method". To those who use those because they've got other things to do, such as raiding, then that's fine. You do you. 

*Yes, I realize it's my blog and I can do what I want with it, but I try to avoid being an asshole.

**It could be argued that botting software for MMOs is rapidly approaching this tipping point.

***Even then, it must be said there are greater and lesser degrees of engagement while watching television or a movie. If you're in a movie theater watching a movie, the crowd can be more engaged than if you're watching alone at home. The same thing goes for the shared experience of watching a sporting event in a bar or a stadium; you may not be playing the sport itself, but you're engaged with the shared experience of watching and cheering on the participating teams.

****I've told this story before, but I'll mention it again. The night before all of our Advanced Lab 1 lab reports were due, I was working on one of my last lab reports when I somehow nuked the floppy disk my lab reports were on. I had to scramble and rewrite 4 lab reports, a total of 80 pages worth, over the course of 8 hours. I somehow managed to finish it in time, my memories of that caffeine and terror fueled night are pretty hazy.

A Solved Game Forces You to Respond to It -- Whether You Like It or Not

In the midst of planning the construction of some raised garden beds, studying for the Amateur Radio Extra Class License*, and handling family-related activities, I've had plenty of time these past few weeks to do some thinking. 

The biggest thing on my mind was why I actively avoid trying to follow the crowd and follow the clearly defined optimal game path when playing any video game. 

Am I committing self-sabotage by doing this?

When I play a single-player game, it's not a big deal because there's nobody looking over my shoulder to tell me I'm doing it wrong. I'm quite aware that just about every video game, from Baldur's Gate 3 to Oregon Trail** has wikis, walkthroughs, and meta-builds out there for people to use, but unless you're actively streaming your gameplay*** people will be none the wiser. 

But in the case of an MMO, there is always a best way of doing something --courtesy of algorithms and mathematics-- and if you're not following that meta build that's going to be a bit of a problem. Maybe not if you're playing the game solo, but if you want to do any group content there's always somebody who will be annoyed if you're not "doing things properly".

That's one of the big reasons why I never played what was at one time THE best rated boardgame on Boardgame Geek: Puerto Rico. Aside from being a Eurogame with a pasted-on theme designed to hide a mathematical exercise, Puerto Rico suffered from what for me was a fatal flaw: if you follow everything perfectly the winner will be explicitly determined by your initial turn order. Some Puerto Rico fanboys were so into the meta that they'd absolutely flip their shit if you didn't play exactly according to the meta.

Eurogamers aren't very fond of randomness
in boardgames either. From Pinterest.

If you play MMOs, does that sound familiar?

***

Here's the thing: whether or not you play according to the meta of a game, the mere existence of an easily obtainable meta for a multiplayer game means that you have to deal with the consequences, even if you consciously ignore it. Other players will expect you to play it, and if you don't that will impact their opinion of you as both a player and a person. Ignorance is unfortunately not an excuse for a subset of MMO players, and once you become aware of the meta**** you really have no alternative but to deal with it. 

Yes, I deal with it by actively ignoring it, but that's also because I kind of figured out a lot of the meta playstyles in my Classic WoW toons through experimentation while questing. Sure, I'm not aware of the entire meta of a particular class, but a short jaunt to Icy Veins or Wowhead will present it to me in full gory detail. I guess you could say that I'm happy I got 80% of the way there by myself, and it's frequently enough for the pugging I do (or casual play). Raiding would certainly put that philosophy to the test, because a) I don't want to look like an idiot and wipe the raid*****, and b) I have a certain amount of pride in playing well and not being a liability. At the same time, I know that looking at the meta is opening Pandora's Box, akin to downloading and utilizing your first Damage Meter addon: once you see how you're really doing there's no going back.

There's a post by Shintar on her SWTOR blog, Going Commando, that's 4 years old this month about this very phenomenon. Titled My DPS Is Bad and I Can't Look Away, it has been living rent-free in my head ever since I first read it. That it came out 3 months after I gave up my progression raiding career certainly had something to do with it, and I completely sympathize with her opinion. At least with SWTOR the game culture doesn't trend toward hardcore that the versions of WoW do, but for me, that post was uncomfortably close to the lead-in before I'd have another "discussion" from a raid lead about "getting my DPS up". 

But that's the thing: we're all responding to the very nature of a solved game. Consciously playing a different way from the meta is as much a response to the meta as embracing it. 

***

I was thinking about this when my Questing Buddy spent some time playing Stardew Valley over the past Winter. In her usual way, she went out and found a playthrough so she could follow the best path to completing the game. I counseled her to just go and explore the game; sure, you get a "score" after two years but you can keep playing indefinitely after that. Unless you're deliberately trying for something very hard to do, such as completing the original storyline within one year, there's no real reason to follow a playthrough guide.

But you can guess the outcome, can't you? She kept up with the guide.

*Yes, I'm studying for the highest level of Amateur Radio license available in the US. It is certainly much more technically oriented than what I found in the other license coursework; while I originally thought I could be ready to take the exam by April, I have since come to the conclusion it'll be more likely late Summer before I'm really ready. 

**Seriously, there's walkthroughs on how to win a game whose whole purpose is to get you to understand how migration on the actual Oregon Trail was like. Talk about missing the point.

***I'm very glad I'm too shy to consider streaming, because I would not be amused by such commentary.

****Typically having been told of its existence by another player wanting you help you get better at the game. I'm going to be charitable and it was a positive interaction, but if you know MMOs it's equally likely it was a variety of "git gud scrub" followed by a group kick.

*****OF COURSE I've done that before. Do you have to even ask?

We've Gone to Irrelevance Speed

I suppose that it's inevitable that I would have more thoughts about being in Outland for the third time.

Okay, it's not the third time ever, to be certain, but going there fresh as part of either a first time through WoW (back in 2009) or through WoW Classic when the TBC portion was current (2021 and now 2026).

It's definitely not my first rodeo in Outland, but it's my first time going there in a fresh context in almost 5 years. This is also the first time I'm heading to Outland --period-- without a further goal in mind. In 2009 it was to get to Northrend and to the current expansion to meet up with Souldat and his wife who got me into WoW in the first place, and in 2021 it was to get to max level and ready for the initial tier of raiding within a specific time limit. Here, in 2026, I don't have any further goal other than exploring Outland and just getting to L70. No raids, no Endgame, no Heroic Instances, nothing more than the Journey itself.

Late Sunday I got Briganaa 2.0 to Zangarmarsh, the second zone in Outland. There's one questline I refuse to do in Hellfire --the one that eventually leads me to killing Maghar Orcs-- so I was largely finished with Hellfire Peninsula. I arrived at the Cenarion outpost in the marsh, collected a bunch of quests, and ran up to the initial Alliance base in the zone and did the same*, then a strange sensation began to take hold of me, so Monday over lunch I dusted off Card and sent her over to Outland to see if that sensation went away.

Yes, getting the Robe of the Archmage sewn
was one of the goals I'd set before she crossed over.

The Burning Crusade questing feels like it's designed to push me into going faster, and I can't shake that.

It's all relative, of course, but it certainly feels less organic than Vanilla questing does. Some of this is explicit to the Anniversary servers, where the sparklies that indicate that something is the object for a quest is now present on the Anniversary servers**, which completely eliminates the need to look around with your eyeballs on the screen and remember what the quest text said. Considering that I'm practically the only person on the Anniversary servers to not use Questie*** I'm probably the only person to notice, but it's pretty obvious to me that Blizz said "here you go: you want it, you got it" and there it is. Quest markers all pop up on the mini-map just like they did in Wrath Classic, so I've suddenly found myself staring at the mini-map far more than actually paying attention to where I'm going, which is never a good situation to find yourself in when there's Fel Reavers wandering around. 

When you combine those quality of life changes with the questing hub changes, it's become far more explicit that Blizz is streamlining the leveling process further than in 2021. Wrath brought in the concept of the zone stories, complete with phasing, so that's not present in TBC, but it's only when you decide the journey is the destination do you begin to realize that the pace of the journey changed. 

***

It did feel that while Brig was leveling in the Old World she was almost effortlessly moving forward, but not so quickly as to outlevel her ability to pay for training, gear, and consumables. When the Joyous Journeys buff made an appearance in late TBC Classic in 2022, it was tuned to level you so quickly that you'd outstrip your ability to make gold to pay for those associated costs. I found that similar to the leveling process on the original WoW Classic Seasonal servers, Season of Mastery. When you can't afford even the basic spells for L10 because you leveled so damn fast, then yeah, you've got a problem. Apparently Blizz tuned the Anniversary servers better without creating an explicit buff, so that while the leveling was faster in the Old World, it wasn't so fast that you couldn't afford to level so quickly. 

But now, in Outland, everything seems tuned just enough to make it easier and quicker to go through the leveling process. Mobs do seem to respawn faster (except named mobs, as one of my friends noted the other day), they go down quicker, and the XP feels... chunkier, maybe? That last one I'm not sure of, but I do know that when you combine these changes with the TBC-specific tweaks to the concept of quest hubs****, boy do I get the urge to just keep going and not pay attention to things such as sleep, food, etc.

At first I wanted to describe the leveling in Outland Anniversary Edition as hollow or boring, but that's not it. It feels like the leveling is being pushed toward irrelevance by speeding it up. Given that TBC Anniversary will only be around for a year, I guess it's not that great of a surprise, but it certainly shows that speeding up the leveling process doesn't make for a better experience by itself. Leveling on these Anniversary servers is merely a means to an end, and you're in the wrong place if you want to enjoy leveling itself.

If there's a Wrath Anniversary Edition coming this Fall, then we can expect some further streamlining going forward. It wouldn't surprise me if the concept of Follower Dungeons gets ported back to the Anniversary edition, in a bizarre reversal of Retail being the testing ground before being added to the Old Game. However, that will only come into play if we have a repeat of the collapse of instance grouping as happened in 2021, and the No Changes crowd has sufficiently been cowed into submission.

***

*Blink blink*

I just thought of something. 

Could it be that the "big thing" that Holly Longdale teased in the Community Update video be a release and support of "official" private servers for Vanilla WoW?

It's most definitely NOT Classic Plus, but it would eliminate the private server problem in one fell stroke.

*Plus getting the flightpoint.

**It was in Wrath where that first began showing up.

***If there's somebody out there who doesn't, I've not seen it yet. Whenever I'm in a group, and I'm talking about every single time, if someone gets all the items for a quest the Party chat immediately is spammed with an announcement saying that they're done. Another reason to not want Questie is that it can snoop on you and share your progress with others in your group, providing they also have Questie installed. 

****Unlike Vanilla WoW, the quests are congregated more completely into centralized quest hubs. If you go into Ashenvale as Alliance in Vanilla, quests are scattered throughout the zone and you're constantly running back and forth across the entire length of the place. However, if you go there in TBC and Wrath, several of the quests for the eastern part of the zone are moved out of the Shrine of Aessina area and to Forest Song, which becomes a fully developed quest hub. Blizzard centralized things further in Outland, where the questing equivalent of "one stop shopping" allows a player to blow into a quest hub, grab everything, and head straight on out into the field.

Early Saturday Musings

I was at our local indie bookstore last night, and I came across this magazine:

Bhagpuss, this one's for you.

That --and the other magazine I found below-- got me to thinking about how different we looked in our youth.

I can't get over how young Sammy
Hagar and the late Eddie Van Halen looked.

I was at the car dealer the other day to get one of our cars worked on* when a woman sat down in the cubby next to mine. I was focusing on a conference call at the time, so I didn't really pay attention at first, but then I realized I was looking at a blast from the past. Her hairdo looked exactly like Suzanna Hoffs in The Bangles...

Circa mid-1980s.

I hadn't seen that sort of hairstyle in person in at least a few decades, but there this woman was, working away on her laptop while also examining her phone for data. I made a point not to stare, because that's just creepy, but I took enough in to know she was likely half my age.

Did I just miss something and that 40 year old fashion and music are coming back?

Nah, not likely. I'm just imagining things. 

What I'm not imagining is that 50 years ago, this album was released:

Had to chase down a good looking cover from
Amazon of all places.

Or this album:

And this one came from Facebook.

I've known this was coming for a long time, because I'm in my upper 50s, and I've been watching albums that formed my youth reach these major milestones. There's also Hotel California --of which my freshman college roommate went to hear a preacher "deconstruct" that album to prove it was Satanic-- Bob Seger's Night Moves, KISS's Destroyer, The Ramones' self-titled First Album, Peter Frampton's Frampton Comes Alive, and Queen's A Night at the Opera. 

We are now 50 years away from 1976, which is farther away than 1976 was from the Big Band Era of the mid-1930s through the late 1940s. It's amazing to me just how far we've come, from music, fashion, and other things. (Just remember, kids, next year is the 50th anniversary of the Atari 2600, which got a lot of your parents interested in video games.)

My own hair has receded and thinned a bit --the kids poke fun at me for that-- and my beard is now mostly grey rather than red, but I don't feel massively different than I did 20 or 30 years ago. Obviously, that has more to do with gradual changes over time, just like how I never noticed that I lost my ability to hear 15,000 Hertz until a couple of years ago when I was running a sound check on the speakers I'd built. 

Just a few thoughts about how things have changed. One thing that hasn't changed, however, is that I'm still listening to music from 1976. Not exclusively --Bhagpuss sees to that with his regular music posts-- but those albums are still in regular rotation.

*Just an oil change and tire rotation. No new issues were discovered this time around.