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.

Who Wants to Live Forever?

Okay, the reference to both Queen and the movie Highlander aside, nobody lives for that long. Even with today's medicine, the oldest verified* living person was (according to Wikipedia) a touch over 122 years old. Life and death are a natural cycle, and while that has been long known we also have a long history of wishing for immortality. (Or at least a much longer lifespan.)

I'm not going to get into the weeds as to why we as a species tend to collectively want that --whether here or in an afterlife-- but instead I want to look at how we write about species/races with vastly different lifespans than ours.

Let's get the big one out of the way, shall we?

This was the version I had as a kid.
I have no idea whatever became of it.
From Ebay.

We write what we know, so we project our lives, our understanding, and our emotions onto anything we create. Frequently that includes animals that don't live as long as us. Anthropomorphizing dogs and cats and other animals that we know and love is pretty typical for us as a species --101 Dalmatians, anyone?-- and in terms of aging we basically compress our own human experience into the lifespan of said animals assuming it's a direct 1:1 correspondence.** 

Of course, that's not exactly the case. Other animals are not us, and while they may have individual personalities, they don't have the sense of impending death that we have. That means our understanding of the eventual end of life doesn't impact what other animals experience; while we may not know exactly what your doggo is thinking about things, it's pretty likely that they don't have any real thoughts of the Rainbow Bridge like we do.***

***

Okay, that's us looking at the lifespan of animals, but what about our examination of other races/species that are much older than us?

There's a quote by the Science Fiction writer/editor John W. Campbell****  about approaching alien intelligence that applies here: “Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man or better than a man, but not like a man.”

The "other" big one that we might as well talk about are the Elves and Dwarves of Middle-earth.

Alan Lee's cover of The Tale of Beren
and Lúthien by JRR Tolkien. Star-crossed
lovers from two separate races, Beren
and Lúthien represented Tolkien and his wife, Edith,
as they came from two separate worlds.

Elves are immortal, assuming they don't die due to violence or merely wasting away,***** and while Dwarves are mortal their lifespan is much greater than that of normal humans. Even the Númenóreans, descendants of Men who fought alongside Elves in the Elder Days, have a much longer lifespan than that of the "regular" folk. 

Our experiences of Elves in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings really was that of wise counselors and background commentators for the main characters. They provide the world's exposition and a sense of the weight of tasks ahead; think of Dumbledore's "here's what happened" part at the end of the first few Harry Potter books and you get the idea. 

I've mentioned this before --unfortunately since Google doesn't have this blog indexed I can't easily find it-- but when Fantasy authors put together timelines stretching thousands of years as if it's not a big deal, we are doing ourselves a disservice. Think of it this way: the entirety of Middle-earth's Third Age was over 3000 years, which puts the equivalent in our time to be ~975 BCE. The Zhou Dynasty in China, divided rulership in Egypt, splitting of the Kingdom of Israel into two, the gradual rise of the Assyrian Empire and decline in the old Babylonian Empire, and the rise of the Olmecs. So, looking at all the upheaval that's happened from that time to today, the timeline presented by Tolkien in the LotR appendices is incredibly simplistic. No country/nation has lasted 3000 years in our world (the current nation of Egypt bears no resemblance to the Medieval Mamluks, much less the Hellenistic Ptolemaic or the New Kingdom), yet Gondor and the Elven kingdoms remained (relatively) intact and with a similar political structure over that time. Sure, some empires have come and gone, but nothing even close to what we've seen in the real world.

However, as time in Middle-earth has progressed, the Elves gradually retreated from view and the political stage as they left Middle-earth for the Undying Lands. Even the threat of Sauron didn't mean armies of Elves marching against him in the War of the Ring --Peter Jackson's movies notwithstanding-- and the Battle of the Five Armies from The Hobbit was the Largest military action the Elder Race performed in the latter half of the Third Age.

In one sense, the gradual retreat of the Elves from view, leaving the world to the mortal races, is rather natural. If you're an Elf you don't change, but everything else around you does. Men, Dwarves, Hobbits, and woodland creatures all grow old and die, and you don't. In the Elves, that manifests in terms of grief and weariness#, which is why they're drawn to the Undying Lands where they'll find a respite from the world's mortality. 

"My son, years come when hope will fade, and beyond them little is clear to me. And now a shadow lies between us. Maybe, it has been appointed so, that by my loss the kingship of Men may be restored. Therefore, though I love you, I say to you: Arwen Undomiel shall not diminish her life's grace for less cause. She shall not be the bride of any Man less than the King of both Gondor and Arnor. To me even then our victory can bring only sorrow and parting - but to you hope of joy for a while. Alas, my son! I fear that to Arwen the Doom of Men may seem hard at the ending."

--From The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, The Return of the King, Appendix A

Tolkien obviously put in a lot of thought to the immortality of the Elves on a racial and personal level, particularly in regards to the personal cost of what immortality (and the rejection thereof) brings to a person and their family. However, I think he missed the mark on the resulting societal impact of immortality. In the end, the Elves' society didn't really grow or change over time, but rather tended toward stagnation and calcification. 

***

Now that I think about it, if there's one common thread among immortal or extraordinarily long-lived people in fiction or gaming, it's that we really don't know what it would be like from a social or societal aspect to have a race of extremely long lived or immortal people around. Or even a couple of people, for that matter. Would they calcify and be gradually consumed by grief and weariness, such as Tolkien's Elves? Would they dominate society like the Emperor of Mankind in Warhammer 40k? Would they become more rigid and black/white in their worldview?

Would they lose what makes us human: the ability to connect on a personal level to someone, to feel intense emotion, to love and grieve, to emphasize, to be willing to sacrifice for the betterment of others?

While there's a lot of Fantasy and Science Fiction that does grapple with what it means to be immortal, in pop culture there's frequently a lot of hand waving about immortality as this weighty topic gets in the way of the story, but I think this is something that can't be avoided forever. Merely hand-waving a character as immortal and yet having them act like, well, a regular person is missing the boat. 

Yes, I pulled this out from my Meme Monday
on Age Disparity Memes. From Imgflip.

Obviously, the physical part of being immortal is one thing, and the impact of immortality is most often presented that way in stories and video games. 

The elves parted, and out of their midst came an elfmaiden who walked forward to stand beside the Speaker. At sight of her, Caramon's mouth sagged open. Riverwind's eyes widened. Even Raistlin stared, his eyes seeing true beauty at last, for no hint of decay touched the young elfmaiden.

--From Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, pg. 323.

That impression by Raistlin, where his eyes could only see the gradual decay of all living things, really hit home the concept that Elves had such a long lifespan in AD&D 1e that Laurana appeared to have no decay at all. Back in those days, the lifespan of AD&D 1e Elves were about 4000 years, so yea, point taken.

"The more you know...." From 9GAG.

And given that the average video game player doesn't really think too much beyond stats and physical attributes when creating a character, I guess it's not a very great surprise that pop culture focuses on that the most. 

If you're one of those in the back raising their hand and saying "Yeah, but I do!! I care!!" I'm right there with you. After all, I played tabletop RPGs, and I've read a metric ton of SF&F, so yeah, I've got opinions about excessively long life or immortality.

Another way of looking at intra-species
romances. From the Pathfinder comic Hollow
Mountain, posted on Reddit.

The problem is, we look at it purely from the angle of physical lifespan and who will outlive who, but a larger question is how does the longer-lived person behave toward others? Do they look at their short-lived brethren as merely cattle? As playthings? As children to be parented (either strictly or gently)? As the Great Unwashed, who need religious and social purity imposed upon them? As agents of chaos, to be destroyed? Or an annoyance, to be either disposed with or ignored at your whim?

For me, one thing is certain: people who have abnormally long or immortal lifespans behave significantly different than everybody else. 

Garion looked at the old man whose white hair and beard seemed somehow luminous in the morning sun. "What's it like to live forever, Grandfather?" he asked.

"I don't know," Wolf said. "I haven't lived forever."

"You know what I mean."

"The quality of life isn't much different," Wolf said. "We all live as long as we need to. It just happened that I have something to do that's taken a very long time." He stood up abruptly. "This conversation's taken a gloomy turn," he said.

--From Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings, pg. 258.

As you could probably figure out, I disagree with David Eddings' presentation of Belgarath in The Belgariad. From a story standpoint it works fine, but I'm under no illusions that The Belgariad is anything other than a fun romp of a story. If a person is 7000 years old, I have a very hard time believing that they would behave no different than any other human. If we are the sum of our experiences, hundreds or thousands of years are a LOT of extra experiences that literally nobody living (or dead) could possibly comprehend. Plus, memory is a bitch and that's when people live our current lifespan. Can you imagine trying to remember something that happened 500 years ago, or 1000? We don't even remember what we had for breakfast a couple of months ago, much less things far longer ago than a human has ever been alive. 

There's also something to be said about how our experiences shape us as people, and if we've done one thing for a long time we tend to look at everything through that restrictive lens. That's just for those of us with a normal lifespan, so extend that out several centuries and what have you got? Someone who strictly adheres to one singular viewpoint to the exclusion of all else. If you think it's hard for a normal human to break out from their prejudices and perceive other points of view, just try to do that if you're 1000 or 5000 or 10000 years old and have had centuries or millennia to build up your worldview. 

At least he admits it. From Reddit.

***

I was thinking about this when I realized that the freakiest thing that any NPC ever said to me in WoW was this:

Yeek.

Think about the implications of power and vision that statement had. In the hands of anybody else short of a god it would be hubris at best and insanity at worst. But only someone with the age and prestige and power of the Dragon Queen could pull that off. Even then, becoming all chummy with you later on just kind of lost the plot as far as the immortality of Alexstrasza is concerned. In terms of age and power imbalance, it's a lot closer to one of us befriending a dog.

Which reminds me...

From Reddit.

Yeah, sounds about right.

*There's plenty of unverified ages over 122 in history, but given what we know about physiology that's likely inaccurate, to put it politely.

**Stick a pin in that; we'll see that again later.

***Given that the so-called cognitive revolution (roughly 50k-60k years ago) gave us the capacity to perform imaginative thoughts, we'd have been in the same boat as our canine friends were it not for that. I realize it can be a bit dense and a harsh authorial voice at times, but Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari covers this cognitive revolution fairly well in the initial part of the book. 

****Most well known for his decades of running Astounding Science Fiction/Analog Science Fiction during the Golden Era of SF, Campbell can be a bit of a controversial figure. I was first introduced to him throughout the essays in Isaac Asimov's Asimov on Science Fiction. If you can find a used copy around, it's very much worth a read.

*****It feels weird reading in stories and in biographies about "wasting sickness" and only later realizing that the author or biographer likely was referring to what we now call cancer.

#I've read a ton of Tolkien over the years, and so the only book I can definitively point to for some of this is The Silmarillion, although Unfinished Tales might have parts of it.

This'll Be Your Big Chance To Get Away From It All

Outside of checking out a few cities in Retail (as seen in the previous post), I took the past several days off from playing WoW.

I'd like to say that I had projects that had priority over any video game playing, but that wasn't the case. I simply didn't feel like logging in and playing on my Alliance toons. I did check the bank alts a couple of times to make sure I wasn't losing anything via in-game mail*, but beyond that, I didn't do much.

This is but one page of my "junk" mail.

This sort of break is a necessary part of any endeavor, and because I have no external pressure to complete anything in-game** I can take as many breaks as I need. This was something I sorely missed in 2021, and I fully intend to take advantage of my lack of commitment right now.

So. 

What have I been doing?

Thinking about this...

No, this is not my house. From a
reviewer at The Home Depot's website.

Yes, it's creeping toward gardening season, and I've already obtained some seeds for this year. And this year, I'm actually going to put in a couple of raised beds in the backyard so I can plant a vegetable garden in the yard, the first one since the mini-Reds were little. (Here's to hoping the deer won't be that hungry...)

Outside of that, I've just been taking a mental break. Goofing around, doing this and that, and catching up on some of my writing.

By the time this posts I might be back into WoW, but whether or not isn't that great of a concern. What's important is that I enjoy what I'm doing.

*If you're like me and have far too much accumulated junk for a bank alt or two, you just move stuff around via in-game mail. In WoW at least, you have 30 days before the mail (and attachments) returns to the sender, and then 30 days it can sit in the sender's inbox before it's automatically removed. So, if you keep up with juggling in-game mail, you can move a ton of stuff around.

**Relatively speaking, of course. My friends group would want me to get to Outland and level faster --it's not quite so overt right now but it's one of those generally understood things-- but I'm being my contrarian self right now and am actively resisting that.

Setting Expectations

If you want to know the difference between Retail and Classic in two screenshots, here you go:

Classic:

Note: I like the purple robe better. It harkens back to Dalaran
and the Royal Purple of the Mages of that City.

Retail:

The blue and white robe a Retail Mage starts with
is closer to the Blue and white robe a Priest starts with in Classic.

Both are a Blood Elf Mage with the same name (Drak -something, can't remember what it is offhand), and their respective starting zones. If I'd have chosen Sunstrider Isle for the Retail toon, it would have looked exactly like the Classic version, but the Exile's Reach intro area highlights the differences much better.

Yes, that's Thrall. You know, The Once and Semi-Future Warchief of the Horde. And there's two dragons (!) for escort. 

Of course, a new player won't know diddly about who Thrall is*, but this intro is all about setting expectations. You're on a ship with an Orc in charge, and there are dragons escorting the ship. If you're a recruit, that image implies that a) Orcs are in charge, b) creatures such as dragons are your friends, and b) this is normal.

The Classic intro, by comparison, shows the entire stretch of the Blood Elf starting zones and then centers upon you as a "recruit": a survivor trying to make sense of it all. No dragons, no orcs, just some fellow Blood Elf NPCs and a few other players** 

Like the Exiles' Reach intro, there are expectations set. This time, however, they are that a) you're pretty inconsequential, b) there are no gigantic fantastical creatures in your corner, and c) this is normal.

***

If you've played both the Draenei and the Blood Elf starting zones that were introduced in The Burning Crusade and remained largely unchanged over the years, there are two things that stand out between them:

The Draenei antagonists are the ecological disaster of their own making when The Exodar crash landed on Azuremyst and Bloodmyst Isles, and the Blood Elves themselves. Make no mistake, the Blood Elves are out to get them by any means necessary, and they're under the command of an Eredar named Sironas.

The Blood Elf antagonists are the Amani Trolls on the eastern borders of their lands, and the undead Scourge and the remnants of their homeland destroyed by Arthas Menethil before he became the Lich King.

The expectations are that Draenei will hate the Blood Elves and their Demonic masters, and that the Blood Elves will hate the Scourge and the non-Darkspear Trolls. It is by design that the Blood Elves never encounter a Draenei out in the Old World*** until they arrive in Outland and discover that the propaganda of Outland spread by their leadership to be a lie.

Neve: Paradise, my ass. What idiot do they take me for?
From April 2022.

Likewise, the Draenei don't re-encounter Blood Elves out in the wild**** until they also reach Outland, but they knew what they were getting into because they'd actually fled the damn place not so very long ago.

***

Now, why do I use TBC as a reference? Because this setting of expectations is very important. It gives you a chance to understand what you ought to care about, what is considered to be a normal baseline, and where do you go from here. 

Taking that comparison from TBC and applying it to Classic vs. Retail, the expectation is readily apparent: in one, while there are fantastical elements, the basics are pretty recognizable to anybody who has played a Medieval-based Fantasy RPG, read a Fantasy novel, or even watched a (relatively) low Fantasy television show or movie. You're starting at the bottom where things are more or less non-magical, and you're going to have to work your way up. In the other, the Fantasy elements are much higher, which might indicate you're of higher status than average, but if you're just a raw recruit then you have greater access to what is typically thought of as High Fantasy than your typical Fantasy novel.*****

If you'd not have looked at the title, you'd have thought they were two different games. And, for all intents and purposes, they are two separate games these days: while the art and class design are similar, they are distinct enough that a player won't confuse one with the other. The gameplay may superficially look similar, but the differences quickly become apparent once you begin to level a character.#

Is one better than the other? Despite my own personal preferences, not really. One is a refinement of the original MMO design that Everquest popularized, and the other is a lot closer to an Action RPG. In one you're a nobody, in the other you're the Champion of the World. In one you can have a house, in the other you have to make do with the occasional empty building. 

And in both, at the intersection of seediness and desire, lies Goldshire, the Fever Dream of Azeroth.

Or maybe Sanctuary, the city found in Thieves' World.
From Etsy, of all places, because I'm lazy
and don't want to hunt down my own copy.

*Okay, it's entirely possible they might have heard about it, especially from some friend who'd been trying to convince them to try WoW and peppered them with all sorts of lore as "enticement". Thankfully, when Souldat's wife convinced me to try the game back in 2009, she didn't have to twist my arm very much.

**The Exiles Reach boat I was on had literally no other players on it. So... I was the only person on Moon Guard taking the boat, I guess.

***As an NPC or an enemy, not a player, of course.

****Save for those old Blood Elf quests in Azshara, which actually date to Vanilla WoW and had nothing to do with the TBC expansion. In fact, those Blood Elves are hostile to both Horde and Alliance, and Blizz obviously didn't clean that up very much before TBC released back in the day.

*****Unless this is Pern. Or Navarre. Or the Alternate Europe from Naomi Novik's Temeraire series.

#When I encounter a Retail player who came back to try the Anniversary servers and they ask where a specific ability is, I have to explain that that ability or capability or whatnot was added in [insert expansion here] so instead you have to do [insert original design here].

The Effect of Retail Early Access on the... Activity... of Moon Guard (and Other Hot Takes)

I'd mentioned to Kurn's most recent post (yes, she's back!) about how I'm just an observer in Retail, and even then mostly on Moon Guard-US. I can now safely state that upon release of Early Access for the newest Retail expansion, the RP activity in The Lion's Pride Inn is at its lowest in quite a while. 

Other people noticed too...

Compare with just six days ago...

That was my cue to skidoo...

So yes, apparently the default state of Retail WoW is that most people bought Early Access. Don't be surprised if Blizzard eliminates the Basic purchase option and goes hard on the Maximum cost option, especially since AI Executive Asha Sharma is now in charge of XBox and will likely push for more AI usage in game creation and maximum profits. I'd simply ignore her first pronouncement that "As monetization and AI evolve and influence this future, we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop. Games are and always will be art, crafted by humans, and created with the most innovative technology provided by us."

My hot take: I don't buy her statement one effing bit. That's just said to placate the gamer base, who would likely leave en masse if she said "we're going hard on AI" in her first big statement, and it would be a dark spot on her resume if "Destroyer of XBox Games Division" was her legacy. 

My second hot take: Major Microsoft investors neither play video games nor give a shit about video games, only that "line go up", so they won't care if XBox goes away as long as that sweet sweet AI money keeps rolling in.

So... my third hot take is that Microsoft will sell off their XBox Games Division to a private equity firm. Who that is remains to be seen, but horrible options include an equity firm run by Bobby Kotick, The Embracer Group, or the Saudi Investment firm. Or, god forbid, Elon Musk, who already is on record wanting to create games exclusively using AI. Which begs the question: if AI makes the games and bots play them, does that means video games are no longer for humans?

A Compliment is Sometimes the Best Thing

There are days when you just feel too ordinary for an MMO...

Whether you're just wandering the streets...

Or maybe just speaking to an auctioneer...

Or maybe you're just not exotic enough in all the right wrong ways...

But sometimes, you get a compliment that makes your day.

Yes, that 'epic sham' is me. 

And yes, I'd been out of mana on that 4+ minute fight since about 40-45 seconds in. This was a fight nobody wanted, because we kept getting runners that kept pulling other mobs, and things got out of hand really fast. I'm still not sure how we made it through that one.

Considering I was merely doing my job and trying not to get killed in that dungeon*, it's nice to see that someone thought I did pretty good.

And before anybody asks, I'm doing fine leveling Briganaa. I'm not pushing myself at all: I'm just relaxing and leveling at my own pace, which has been faster than I expected, but I'm not letting that get to me.

*This was Razorfen Kraul, if you're interested. There are plenty of spots in that dungeon where things can get so spicy that you'd think there were ghost peppers in that salsa.

Signs of the Apocalypse, Part Whatever

I guess I should be happy that Google can't really figure out if this blog exists, because AI bots are starting to become a real problem. 

(As if they're not one already.)

Yes, the number of indexed pages on this blog
actually went down over the course of the
past month. I guess Google kind of lost
the plot. Graph as of February 17, 2026.

Tech engineer and Raspberry Pi enthusiast Jeff Geerling experienced problems due to AI swamping his GitHub and AI agents causing disruption in the open source community:

And the popular LINUX distro, LINUX Mint,* had their forums swamped with AI bots back in January, nearly bringing down the entire system:

These are just two that I'm aware of; I'm almost certain there's more out there that I haven't observed yet.

This bubble can't pop quickly enough.

*I found out about LINUX Mint while researching a LINUX OS to install on my mom's old laptop that doesn't support Windows 11 yet is perfectly fine for use.

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.