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.

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.