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.

Accidental SWTOR

I was just reading some articles first thing in the morning before work when I stumbled across something odd.

From a Slate article about Chili's Restaurants of all things.

I did a double take and said to myself, "I can't possibly be reading that right. Just what are the odds that a brand name for tablets found at a chain restaurant are named the same as a planet in SWTOR?"

It was then that my brain caught up with me and I realized that I was thinking of Ziost, not Ziosk...

From Swtorista.

Ztill, it'z not everyday you zee zo many 'Z' wordz in a name, you know...

#Blaugust2025

Yes, I Do Actually Like Playing Them

While you might think that my Grumpy Old Man (tm) posts about World of Warcraft and other MMOs indicate I'm not having fun these days, I disagree.

I may not be having as much fun as I had while I was initially playing WoW back in 2009/2010, but to me it is... comfortable. I can laugh at MMOs now and not consider it 'srs bznss', but I can also enjoy myself while recognize it's limitations.

This is something that simply doesn't happen
in WoW since... Wrath, maybe?
From Know Your Meme and Justin Parks.

Yes, there are things that annoy me. I'm opinionated enough that I'll always find something to annoy me,* but finding and complaining about annoyances doesn't mean I think that a game is irredeemable. (Old Blanchy notwithstanding.)

One thing I have noticed the longer I've played video games in general is that I'm at my happiest when I'm playing my favorite parts of video games. For Classic WoW, it's in the leveling process and just hanging around various parts of Azeroth.** Sure, I also like running 5-person instances and a good match of Alterac Valley, but that's in smaller doses rather than repeat runs for a deeper goal. For example, last weekend was Alterac Valley weekend, so I got onto the Classic Era servers and ran Alterac Valley a handful of times, but that was it. I didn't have a need to do that more than just those half a dozen or so runs, so once I got that out of my system I was fine on not doing any others all weekend.

Or, in Retail, instead of grumping about Old Blanchy's demise, I decided to go exploring along the well-trod path from Stormwind to Theramore. The path is pretty traditional if you decide to not take a flight path straight to Menethil Harbor***:

• Tram Ride from Stormwind to Ironforge
• Run from Ironforge east through Dun Morogh
• Take the pass (either North or South) from Dun Morogh to Loch Modan. 
• Head north from Loch Modan into the pass down toward the Wetlands.
• run north and then east along the main road through the Wetlands to Menethil Harbor.
• Take a ship from the Harbor to Theramore.

Obviously, I chose running along the scenic route because it was an option. It gave me a chance to explore at a slow pace and enjoy the sights as I knew them in the pre-Cataclysm times.

Okay, that quest hub is new for Cataclysm...

I didn't see a soul along the way, but that was fine. 

To be fair, this is the fewest number of people
on a ship to Theramore that I've seen in quite a while.

What was even better was at the end:

Do I know you? You look familiar.

My lone toon that has reached max level in 2014 used to be able to fly through a Theramore that was devoid of NPCs and everybody else, because she never participated in the Destruction of Theramore event.**** It is nice to see that a brand new toon doesn't have a completely empty Theramore, but rather a Theramore that's as it was in Cataclysm. (And largely what it was like from the TBC Era.)

***

There's also a measure of comfort when visiting areas I have fond memories of.

I've been married for over 30 years, and I simply
can't comprehend why all these women would
accept hanging around and sharing Darmas like that.
Maybe it's transactional by nature, but...

The Vanilla SWTOR planets, particularly the low level ones, bring back most of my nostalgia for the game. The same goes for Vvardenfell and ESO:

I think the screencap is off a bit, as it looked much
more vibrant on the screen.

I've also been known to roam the halls of Spacedock...

I frequently get lost in this place. What a fine example
of Starfleet training I am.

Or just chill in town, whether it be Darkshire...

Or Stormwind...

I consider all of these (lack of) activities to be "playing the game", even though I might not have a specific plan at the moment. You don't have to have a specific plan to play MMOs, so why not lean into it if that's what you feel like doing?

Besides, it keeps me from complaining about whatever people are hyped up about these days, so that's a good thing.

*Even among my favorite bands. I read an article yesterday out of BBC Music that had a list of what the author believed were the top Prog Rock albums released in 1975. Among them he put Rush's Caress of Steel. "Uh..." I stuttered, not believing what I was reading. I mean, there was a reason why Caress of Steel's tour was informally described by the band as "The Down the Tubes Tour". In my opinion, Caress was the worst Rush album they ever put out, and it's not really even close. 

**That holds true for me in SWTOR as well, as I prefer the "Vanilla SWTOR" leveling experience more than anything else in the game. I can't say the same for LOTRO or ESO as I've not played multiple toons in either MMO, but I can say that I enjoyed the story in each that I've completed so far.

***It is also apparently a thing in Retail that a new toon has access to all of the flight paths that other toons have --at least in the Old World-- and for probably 1/10 the cost. I was quite shocked when I first clicked on a Gryphon Master to see what was available and this popped up:

Holy crap.

****That has since been corrected, as in preparation for this post I went back to Theramore and discovered that Az could see NPCs and everybody else in Theramore as it was. I guess Blizz finally corrected that gap in their event design.

EtA: Corrected spelling.

I'm Just Playing With My Dolls Again

Okay, I don't have any dolls, or what adults would call "action figures".

From TheGearPage. And Spaceballs.

But I do have MMO toons. 

I spent a bit of time yesterday visiting some of my old characters, just to check them out for a bit. Such as Dalaak here, my original SWTOR toon.

Hello, big fella.

Or my original LOTRO toon, Aranandor, when he's not lounging around Bree.

There's also my GW2 toon, Mikath...

I still think that the toons and NPCs in GW2 all look
like the Beautiful People, with flawless skin and
impeccable grooming. The beat up outfit notwithstanding.

Or my friendly Vulcan from STO...

And his entire officer corps, too!

And there's also that crazy Dunmer from ESO...

Those loading screens show the actual armor
worn, not the outfit she actually has on. That's one thing
that Retail WoW does better, at least.

But I guess that this wouldn't be a post about MMO toons if it didn't include the instigator of this post, WoW:

Hey, Lady. Long time no see.

Or even longer, really.

Okay, that wasn't the actual version of WoW I was talking about, but this one...

I occasionally go to the loading screen just to see how long it's been since I last logged into Retail. If I see "Gear Update" listed on all of these toons, I know it's been some months, and likely at least one major/minor patch in the interim.

Those are four of my most played toons on Retail --the original Azshandra isn't there-- but given how things progressed in Classic WoW, it just didn't feel quite right. Therefore, I tweaked the composition a bit:

There. That's better.

The gear (and levels, to be honest) are all wrong from my perspective, but I'm not planning on doing anything about that. At least now the names are correct on that Warband.

There are other toons I have from MMOs I no longer play* such as Age of Conan, Rift, or Neverwinter, that would require me to install the games again to simply take a screenshot of the loading screen. And then there are games that no longer exist, such as Wildstar, ArcheAge, or TERA. I do miss Wildstar, but not the other two.

Even though I really have no desire to play some games (or specific toons), it's nice to pull them up on screen every once in a while just to enjoy how they looked, and the memories they recalled.

*Again, I'm surprised that Age of Conan is still hanging on after all these years.

EtA: Corrected grammar.

EtA: And corrected some more grammar. Sheesh.

Hello, Old Friends

One nice thing about this short break from WoW is that I got a chance to play my favorite class in SWTOR for a bit: The Smuggler.

Oh, I've played SWTOR off and on the past several years, but for some reason I've ended up creating force users instead of a Bounty Hunter or a Smuggler.* My first toon was a Smuggler, and here I am playing a Smuggler once again.

Ah, Coruscant. Don't ever change.
Same goes for the Migrant Merchants Guild.

If you stick with the type of Smuggler I tend to play --the Gunslinger-- it's a pretty standard build. And in keeping with modern MMOs, new abilities simply appear on my bar without me having to go train somewhere. It's a bit disconcerting, but it is what it is.

Having returned to the Republic side for the first time in a while, I can see the bugs and roughness out there that haven't really been cleaned up over the years --or in the case of the companion pathing, bugs added over the years-- but the visuals and the sound are still fantastic. The sound alone makes you feel like you're outside in a city where the skyscrapers create canyons, and there's just that urban sound that you hear when you're walking around a downtown area. The sound at Ord Mantell is also excellent, and really immerses you in the game. 

And those cutscenes. Can't forget the cutscenes.
This one starring Senator Kayl.

The more I've gone into leveling this Smuggler, the more I realize that there's issues where a new player would get confused, such as getting a Training and Skills quest only to find yourself on the Republic Fleet long before you're supposed to arrive there. At least I knew how to get back to Ord Mantell, but if I'd been a new player, I'd have been screwed. 

Oh, and as you can tell from my top screencap above, I turned off that new map overlay and went with the traditional minimap, just like how I turned Corso into the Tank he always was meant to be. 

It was kind of like seeing old friends again, such as talking to Pat-aK once more:

And Senator Whats-her-name.
Yes, I'm ready to be your Black Bisector, Pat-aK.

Even when I return to WoW Classic, I have to keep this player going. Not sure how, but I've developed a better tolerance for the pathing issue this time around, but we'll see how long I tolerate it. If I get to Balmorra, that'll be farther than I've gotten in a long time.

*Creating that one Smuggler for the screencaps of the intro quest a year or two ago for a post here doesn't count. I went back and played a Jedi Sentinel instead and got as far as Taris for I grew tired of the pathing issues.

EtA: Corrected Pat-ak's name.

Finding that 'Aha!' Moment

Sometimes it takes looking at a game through fresh eyes to appreciate what we've got. 

I'm not sure how this appeared on my YouTube feed, but this relatively short video is worth a watch:

Back in 2009, I think my "aha" moment was questing through The Ghostlands on Quintalan, my Paladin, and finally building up to Deathholme. I happened upon another player struggling through that place, and we teamed up to finish off Dark'Khan Drathir. Neither of us had played before, so it took us a try or two, but we figured it out and defeated the traitor. Coming back from that part of the zone forever changed the game for me, because I finally began to understand the story and what had happened there.

For Vanilla Classic in 2019, being the first time I'd ever played the "original" version of WoW, it was a different moment. It was exploring my way through Wetlands to the Arathi Highlands, to Hillsbrad Foothills. Up north I went, and I found myself quite by accident in the Western Plaguelands. I had... experiences... with doing this before, but while I was stealthed and kept to the mountains, I found I was able to sneak all the way up to the entrance to Scholomance. I had absolutely no business being where I was, as a L28 Rogue, but sneaking there and into other places just whetted my appetite for more. 

In LOTRO, I know where my aha moment was: reaching Evendim and looking up at night and discovering The Pleiades in the sky. SWTOR was a bit different; I think it was when I arrived on my Smuggler at Coruscant and there was a custom cutscene of me slicing a terminal to get into the spaceport unnoticed. It wasn't much, but it was a helluva touch, given that I was trying to get my starship back.

What about you? What was your 'aha' moment in an MMORPG?

Economic Life Lessons from an MMO

If there's one thing about my leveling experience in Classic Fresh that's a truism, it's that I almost never run out of Rested XP while playing. When you think about it that's not a great surprise, given that I'm leveling 10 toons:

For Joan, I went with a vaguely unsettling look with
a shock of white hair and piercing blue eyes with her
mocha skin tone. In her red robe, she had that look.
She had to have been a Wednesday-esque sort of child
growing up. The listings are current as of January 14, 2025.

Right now, I'm at the point where I play a different toon every evening, so I might get around to them once every week or week and a half, and I can now go an entire evening session on WoW without leveling at all.* Admittedly, a bit of that is that I'm cheap and don't take a flight from a flight point if I can help it, because my lack of gold means every flight cuts into my money quite a bit. 

The economics of an MMO aren't exactly what people signed up for when they started playing --EVE notwithstanding-- but it's a reality that has to be addressed sooner or later. I've never played Everquest or any of the predecessors to WoW, but I have played several games released after WoW. I'm not sure whether the in-game economy of WoW necessitated changes or whether it was in response to other MMOs making life easier, but I never truly appreciated how easy it was to obtain gold by the time Wrath of the Lich King rolled around until I began playing Vanilla WoW in 2019. 

In Wrath in 2009, I discovered very quickly that the gold coming in was greater than what my needs were, and by the time I reached max level and started running dungeons I wasn't hurting for gold. I wasn't rich enough to by fast flying or the Battered Hilt at the drop of a hat, but I had a couple of thousand gold on me at any given time. I didn't have repair bills due to raiding (or enchantments or whatnot either), so just doing a dungeon or two per day was more than enough to keep my gold supply increasing. In other words, I never had to really think about how to obtain more gold. When I decided I wanted fast flying or that Battered Hilt, I just waited for my supply to get high enough and I bought it. 

Other MMOs I played had a similar approach: just playing the game and leveling meant I would have a supply of gold available to me. That supply was nowhere near what the likely "average" amount of money was out there, but I was happy with that because I didn't really use it that much. To use another game's currency as a reference, I get a supply of Cartel Coins per month from SWTOR for subscribing. That being said, I can't tell you the last time I actually used those Cartel Coins for anything.

Over 57,000 Cartel Coins as of January 14, 2025. Yikes.

I don't buy cosmetics, and I'm happy with the (relatively unfurnished) housing I do have, so I really have no need to spend that currency.**

But coming back to Vanilla WoW in 2019 and once more on the Anniversary servers is a bit of a shock to the system.

There's simply not enough money to be had while questing to cover all of your expenses, so you have to prioritize things a bit. You have to pick and choose which abilities to train, consumables to obtain, and even whether to take that flight point or not while out in the field. 

Now, multiply that by 10 and you can see where the problems are, especially if you never played the majority of these classes before and you're dead set on figuring it out by yourself. There have been evenings where I spent the majority of my time finding ways to make some gold, whether it be by fishing and selling my catch, grinding mobs for drops, or crafting to sell raw materials or finished items on the Auction House. If I'm not doing that, I'm basically making things for my own toons to use, because it's cheaper than buying it on the Auction House or from a vendor.

My insistence on following Operation Spread the Love means that I've hamstrung my ability to make gold as well, because people are making gold selling max level services, such as ports or water/food or highly desirable potions while I'm back at L20 making pretty basic stuff to distribute to my various toons. Even low-end magic items that drop off of mobs that I would ordinarily disenchant for Enchanting raw materials I instead distribute to my various toons because, well, they can use them. 

And so my penny pinching continues. 

***

Some of the people I played with back in my old Retail Orphans guild have returned to WoW and begun playing the Anniversary servers. I'm not especially surprised by this, because the Anniversary servers are explicitly going to The Burning Crusade expansion, and they've previously expressed to me their love for Karazhan, one of the first raids in TBC. The irony is that the last time I spoke with them I was powerleveling a Shaman and they were stunned at how rapidly I was leveling. Now, the tables have been turned as they're in the mid-L30s even though they started two weeks ago, while I started in late November and only have some toons at L20. 

I had a lengthy conversation with a player in Westfall while I was on my warlock, Joanofdark, the other week. He, like me, is a member of Gen X and we bonded over playing D&D back in the day as well as books we liked. He, like me, was taking his time leveling because he wasn't wanting to get caught up in the rat race. All in all, it was a pleasant hour spent just chilling with a random person in a 20+ year old video game.

*That's happened on my Warlock, my Warrior, my Rogue, and my Shaman.

**Obviously, this doesn't apply to real life, as I have enough projects around the house just to fix things up that there's a constant "gold sink" in my life. 

Time Past

I was eating dinner out with my oldest last night, and talk turned to MMOs. We'd discussed LOTRO for a bit --she mentioned that our house was out of storage-- and about several of the changes made to legendary weapons. Because of the changes, you didn't have to swap out your weapon every so often; you could keep that same weapon as long as you wanted. 

"I still have my original weapon," I mused. "I doubt I'll ever get rid of it."

We covered some of the other changes made to the game over the years, as she'd continued to play LOTRO actively long after it became a niche event for me, then we discussed another MMO we'd played a lot in the past.

"I miss SWTOR," I said, "but that bug keeps me from playing it."

"The companion bug?" she asked.

"Yeah, that one."

"I have that bug too, and it drives me crazy."

"It's the only game I see where a companion just simply does not keep up with me over time. I typically last as far as Alderaan until I can't stand it any more."

"That's a shame," she replied, "because I loved the story in Alderaan."

"I used to think it was a problem with the Radeon graphics cards," I added, "but when we bought my current PC it runs on an NVidia card that's far more advanced than anything we had in 2012 and it still does it."

"I wondered if it had something to do with server congestion."

"There was more server traffic back then, so I have no idea what the problem is. I have seen it on two separate installations of the game, and now three if you're seeing it too. It's not like Bioware hasn't made games with companions before or after, so I don't know what the issue is with this one single game of theirs."

After a brief pause, my oldest added that if there were Classic SWTOR servers ever created, she knows several people who would jump at the chance to play those again.

"Like your brother?"

"Yeah, he disliked how easy the game became."

"I miss the difficulty," I said, taking another bite of my salad. "The Consular end boss in particular was originally really tough until they nerfed it. And even after it was nerfed it was a hard fight."

"Remember the final zone in the Tatooine story?" she asked. "You kept going through this long maze until you got to the end, and now it's 'you take an elevator and you're there.'"

"Yeah. Or remember accidentally touching something out in the field and discovering that was a World Boss spawn point? Or when you'd be assembling a group to take on a World Boss and someone from the other faction would run up and cause the WB to spawn, grabbing it for the other faction?"

"I remember that. Or those Heroic 4 zones out in the field. They're all 2+ Heroics now."

"I haven't set foot in a Flashpoint since they changed the design so that you didn't need a healer or a tank," I confessed, "and you have those self-administered healing points scattered around the instances. But boy did I love the original Flashpoints they had." 

"Yeah."

You know you're getting old when your daughter starts reminiscing about how things were back in the day, I suppose.

There's the Offiicial Reason, and then there's....

Nothing like stirring the pot, I suppose.

One of my side comments in the discussion surrounding my last post alluded to me not playing SWTOR very much was because of the broken companion pathing whenever I play it.  I've switched PCs, replaced CPUs and graphics cards (and manufacturers), and I even have the game installed on an NVMe SSD drive --a far cry from the slowpoke 5400 rpm mechanical drive it was once on-- but all to no avail.

My old Sith Inquisitor is still somewhere in
Chapter 10 of the KotFE expansion.

Here, I started at this entrance area in Nar Shadda, right after you disembark from your ship, and I ran toward the taxi. Literally all I did; no attacking, no shenanigans, no nothing:

Okay, so Senya is now just out of view...

If you look closely at the map, you can see that
she moved about half speed from the screenshot
just above this one.

And now, having arrived at the taxi, I can swing the camera
around and watch her go "Oh shit! I'm coming!"

Imagine if I were in a fight and she were dilly dallying around far behind me. In the original implementation of SWTOR, where some of the story fights were really hard (I'm looking at you, original difficulty of the final boss of the Jedi Consular story), I'd have been dead by the time my companion would have decided to show up. As it is, I haven't died due to these sort of problems, but I can only stand to have to play nursemaid to my companion for as long as it typically takes me to reach the end of Chapter One of the SWTOR Vanilla areas.

There's other changes over the years that irk me, such as replacing the original in game map with that map reminiscent of the map in TERA --and believe me, combat aside, you don't want your MMO to ever be thought of as similar to TERA*-- but that can be remediated by customization. But the companion issue? Despite years' worth of efforts, I can't fix it. I even have a second account that the mini-Reds used to play SWTOR with, and that account has the same damn problem.

***

Why bring this up?

Because I wanted to highlight some reasons why I no longer --or hardly ever-- play some MMOs that really don't end up on people's reviews or blog posts about the games.

Petty? Maybe. They're definitely not in the realm of "I just don't like the direction the story is going" or "the combat is clunky".

Accurate? For me, absolutely. 

Since I've already mentioned SWTOR, let's delve into a few others...

***

Age of Conan's issue is simple: lack of responsiveness when pressing a button.

For all of the issues that Age of Conan has, and believe me, the grindy nature and the bugs do factor into anybody's ability to play the game, the main reason why I don't play Age of Conan anymore has to do with the game's lack of responsiveness when you go to select an action.

Maybe it's because my first MMO was World of Warcraft, which is famous for its smooth user interaction, but there's more to it than just that. Almost every other MMO has no delay between pushing a button and performing the action on screen, but Age of Conan somehow manages to have a noticeable delay between when you select a combat action and your toon actually performing said action. Combat itself is straightforward: you select a certain combo of buttons and then your toon performs the action, but there's just enough of a delay between the selection and the action that makes you think that there's lag in the system. This happened when I first tried the game out back in 2010 or so, and it persisted through the years even though all other MMOs I've played have overcome any lag issues with respect to combat. It's not even a matter of the couple of servers left in AoC being located far away, as they appear to be located in Newark, New Jersey, and the latency I was seeing was around 100 ms. I've played other MMOs with a 100 ms latency without any issues at all, so I don't believe it's the latency either. I think it has to do with the lack of optimization in AoC's code, and for me that's a deal breaker when you're expected to perform more and more complex maneuvers quickly.

***

Lord of the Rings Online's UI is a nightmare for visibility.

As much as some people want modern screen sizes to be supported by LOTRO, I want something a bit more basic: more easily readable UI icons.

If there's one thing that MMOs such as WoW and SWTOR have figured out, it's that making unique enough and easily visible buttons in the UI make for a better playing experience. This is something that Standing Stone has yet to figure out, apparently, as every time I boot up LOTRO and login with the intention to do something more than just wander around Bree and listen to the Friday evening band play on the Gladden server, I'm presented with the blasted icons that tell me absolutely nothing at first glance.

Or second or third glance for that matter.

From my foray last Spring as a High Elf.

It's bad enough that they're various shades of red in my example above, but this is what you get if you've been playing for a while:

This was my old main on LOTRO.
It's been a while since I last played him, and
as you can see some commands have been
removed and I need to correct things.

The washed out coloring matches the rest of the LOTRO color scheme, but given that I have to pay close attention to the details of the icons to distinguish between the various red ones and green ones, that does me no favors when performing actions. 

And can you imagine the nightmare if you were red-green colorblind? (I'm not, for clarity's sake.)

Then we have to talk about the in game maps.

The maps are kinda sorta faithful to the old Pauline Baynes map of Middle-earth (my own copy was passed down to me from my mom, and I gave it to my son):

I was surprised to find that
museoteca has an interactive map
on their site. This was the map that
inspired my exploration into SF&F.

The thing is, there's a difference between being faithful to the original map and making an in-game map actually usable:

This is light years better than what it used
to be, but even when I had a smaller monitor
nothing was sharp.

The original map design was much worse, where everything was washed out brownish colors, and trying to distinguish details was... poor at best. And the quest markers? They were all various colors of rings (for The One Ring) but they were too hazy and poorly placed to make any details out either.

I know that I was looking forward to an overhaul of the UI (as was Wilhelm Arcturus), but more for overall improvements of the clarity of the design. Until then, why bash my head against a wall (metaphorically speaking) when I try to play the game? In as much the same way as I love SWTOR's story, LOTRO's story is extremely well done, and I miss being able to progress in it, but for me it's not worth it to keep playing in earnest when I have these visual issues.

***

Doom and other FPS games have a "simple" problem: I get nauseous when I play them.

From Memecrunch and Step Brothers.

I know I'm not the only one out there that gets motion sick when playing some types of video games, and there's articles out there with advice on how to deal with the problem (such as this one). Still, the only way I've been able to successfully combat this motion sickness is to use Dramamine in the same fashion that I'd take Dramamine before riding on a train or a plane.

Still, I made the decision a long time ago that if I was going to have to be medicated in order to play a video game, I probably shouldn't be playing said video game. It does save me money in the long run, as I don't purchase FPS games, but it does make me sad that I can't play a specific class of video games.

I recently discovered --much to my horror-- that the NASA Moonbase Alpha video game gave me the same motion sickness as FPS shooters did, so what looks like a rather good lunar base simulation is sadly unplayable for me. Thankfully it's free to play, so I didn't lose any money buying it only to discover I can't play it, but still it's a tough pill to swallow.

*I'm pulling this out of my archives just so you know why you shouldn't want to have your game compared to TERA:

Uh, yeah. Interesting enemies you got there.

And no, I'm not posting a pic of the Elin.
I have standards.

Just Who ARE You, Really? Part 1 of 2

I recently volunteered to do a one shot RPG with a friend of mine, and I was allowed to use any existing PC I've created and are currently using in an RPG.

"Do mouthy WoW toons count?" I asked.

Oh, shush. That was a term of endearment.

Although this wasn't exactly what my friend had in mind, it was a player character for an RPG (of a sort), and as I am currently playing an iteration of this particular PC, my friend decided to allow it.

I will be the first to admit that I have had my share of RPG campaigns over the years, and plenty of PCs to choose from, but as far as personalities go, that's a big conundrum. Until my MMOs came along, my experiences in creating PCs with a somewhat divergent series of personalities was pretty limited.

Hence the reason for this post.*

***

When I first began playing RPGs, I was in 7th Grade and the concept of 'roleplaying' itself was reduced to "you enter a room with 5 Kobolds and 4 Orcs." Not exactly stuff that will engage with my inner Master Thespian, I can assure you. That didn't mean that I didn't dream of being the Knight (or Paladin, in this case) fighting evil wherever I found it.** That dream of inhabiting a character was there, it's that my "characters" were, well, me. The were simply extensions of me and my personality, no more and no less.

It was only when I was forced to go "underground" on my RPG playing and in turn embraced reading a lot of SF&F that I began to understand a bit more about how roleplaying could work. The PCs didn't have to be me with just different names, but they could be created and/or voiced by me. They could have different personalities, just like that found in the various novels I read.

So... A lot of my characters began to act similarly to those that I read out of Lord of the Rings, The Belgariad, or The Elric Saga. (Among others.) Not that much of a reach in terms of personal motivation, but when the alternative was "acting like me", it was a decent enough stretch for someone taking their first steps into a fictional world of their own making.

The summer of my Senior year in high school, I had a discussion with a couple of my co-workers about how an RPG campaign works. While they were proponents of the "you meet at a tavern and then go out and kill monsters", I went in a different direction. 

"Sure, you could initially meet in a tavern," I admitted, "but say you take a contract to do something small. You do it well, then that leads to another job, a bigger one. This continues until you begin to acquire a reputation, and you attract the attention of someone in power. They decide to take a chance on you, and whether you perform well or not means that they become either your enemy or your patron. Or, you could become the King's personal problem solver, a 'Mission: Impossible Team'***, ready for when he needs you to take on a big job."

Nothing much came out of that discussion, but looking back on it now it seems that was a sort of turning point. Between then and me heading off to college a short time later, I turned a corner in terms of what I wanted out of an RPG.

Well, kind of.

My first big RPG experience in college gave me an example of how a DM was restrictive because he wanted us to play things his way. He had designed this entire elaborate campaign and recruited about 14 people to play --at once-- but the campaign and his DM style left his players no room for role playing. It was "play the campaign the way I want you to or else". Well, without giving the players any real freedom to do much more than react to what he was telling your character was they were doing, it became all about him and his story. The fact that he had far far too many people playing in a single campaign at once became a recipe for disaster. 

The campaign lasted a grand total of one night, and somewhere about an hour into the game he came to the realization that he couldn't control the situation and left in an offended huff.

There were 5 of us who kind of hung around after, critiquing what the DM tried (and failed) to do, and we all wanted to still play. One of us piped up that he'd DMed back in high school, and he had some campaigns he could run. 

And our primary D&D campaign in college was born. 

This second RPG experience lasted much longer --it eventually evolved into the 20+ year campaign a decade later with a subset of players from that group-- but I reverted to form and basically played, well, a version of me. 

(Gotta go with the classics, I guess.)

Even its descendent campaign, the 20 year one, I ended up playing a version of me, personality-wise. Oh, he started out as an inquisitive type who was so wrapped up in their own studies that he only broke out of it when presented with a carrot on a stick in the form of a mystery to be solved, but ol' Lucius Raecius devolved into a version of me who would charge into battle, spear at the ready, because that was naturally what a Cleric of Zeus would do.****

I only began to break out of that when I was given a Wizard character to play in addition to Lucius: the original Nevelanthana. 

Yes, Neve started life as a D&D PC of mine, an L4 Wizard in D&D 3.0. I'd advocated for a magic wielder of some sort, because we didn't have any in our game group, and I could see the need for magic in a future campaign. 

The D&D version of Neve was snooty, somewhat arrogant, brilliant --and boy did she know it-- and really wanted to be the game world equivalent of an Elven Ranger like her father, but she wasn't good enough to join the corps. So, she became a Wizard instead, like her mother,, but she still kept practicing archery to prove that she was better than everybody thought. (Rejection can be a helluva motivating tool. Believe me, I know from personal experience.)

Oh, and one more thing: she spent several years of the campaign as a ghost.

Yes, she died not too long after she joined the campaign. It was a classic case of one of the party members being mind controlled by a harpy and turning and attacking the closest player: Neve. He rolled --in succession-- 20.... 20.... 20!!!

The DM decreed it resulted in an instant decapitation.*****

Rather than having Neve simply shuffle off the mortal coil, the DM kept Neve around as a ghost until we were able to figure out how to bring her back.

During that long period of "Ghost Neve", I learned how to work with a player with a distinctively different set of motivations than mine were. Ghost Neve couldn't fight, and she couldn't be heard by almost everyone, but she could still affect the game in some ways. Because of that, I couldn't fall back on playing Neve like an extension of myself. I was still me, and Lucius was still me, but Neve was definitely her own person. Her personality was such that I turned to my experiences writing fiction to try to keep her narrative fresh and interesting, and both my role playing and my fiction improved as a result. 

The irony is that were it not for a dead PC I wouldn't have learned how to play living ones better. 

***

And a further irony is that I needed to play single player story driven games to give my MMO players their own motivations and personality.

My original MMO, World of Warcraft, doesn't have a lot of story driven content from the standpoint that you get to choose how a player reacts. You roll on up, you get the quest, and you complete it. The original SWTOR had modifications to that formula as you could select various options, some of the Light Side and some of them Dark, but the net effect is that you don't affect the story nearly as much as you might think given some of the weight you may place on certain decisions. The Elder Scrolls Online is a similar MMO where the overall story moves in one direction, and while there are small decisions you can make the overall thrust of the story is predetermined. 

I suppose that's also the case with single player RPGs, the effects of various decisions in them can be larger, much larger, than that of MMOs.

Take The Witcher, for example. I've only played about half of the first game in the series, but that first game showed me what the consequences of my actions are. "Because I chose X, X enabled me to get to Y, and then I could reach Z," were the obvious connections the in-game narration provides. It might be beating you on the head with a stick, but those actions and the follow-up from the same provide the basis for a character's decision making. 

And from there, a personality can emerge that drives that decision making.

Of course, this can go awry, as "it's what my character would do" can be driven to extremes and ruin everybody's fun. Obviously being a Grade A asshole doesn't help anybody, and if you're going to have a character of yours do that, you'd better be

1. In a single player video game
2. Writing a story

because if you play a character that actively sabotage's the group, people won't want to play with you. As one of the replies in that Reddit thread I linked to pointed out, D&D is as close to a coop game as you can get. When you play as an asshole without regard for the group, then expect the group to rebel against you. 

Okay, I digress.

Due to those single player games and the sometimes uncomfortable situations a player may find themselves in, I learned how to evolve a personality which simply isn't an extension of my own. 

Does that mean my method of playing is superior to these others? No, it's just different. It's kind of hard to explain, but my understanding and satisfaction of roleplaying has changed over time, and each type of roleplaying from "extension of me" to " a fully fleshed out three dimensional character" give me a lot of satisfaction in their own way.

If you've got the time, Matt Colville has a great lecture about this actual topic:

So we have come full circle. As I began playing WoW Classic back in 2019 I began to have thoughts about why the toons I was playing were out adventuring. Vanilla Classic has some really good initial questlines for low level players, and the Defias -> Deadmines story is the best of the lot, but it was a new toon's initial arrival at the starting zone was what puzzled me. Those ponderings eventually lead to two offspring: this post about player motivation in general, and the creation of One Final Lesson.

In it's own bizarre way, were it not for Neve, I'd not have had Card to play with.

What sort of person is Cardwyn, anyway? Or the WoW version of Nevelanthana? Or Linnawyn? Or Quintalan? Well, that's where Part 2 comes into play.

#Blaugust2023

*And yes, my friend is going to see this post, because why not? It's not as if I want to hide any of this from her.

**Or a Jedi. Or a Cowboy, or a Naval Officer. Okay, that last one might seem like a stretch, but we had an old set of 1954-ish era World Book Encyclopedias at home, and I stumbled across what US military dress uniforms looked like. Lo and behold, the Naval blue dress uniform looked a lot like the sport coat in my closet, so... I'd dress up in my sport coat, attach paper "rank sleeve stripes" via scotch tape, and voila! Instant military uniform to play... uh.... Army with? Oh well, it wasn't perfect.

***Our boss was really into Mission: Impossible, so whenever we had team get-togethers, video recordings of M:I episodes found their way onto the television.

****Narrator: For a smart person, Lucius wasn't as wise as his Wisdom score would indicate.

*****I'm still pissed about that turn of events. Not the actual 20 - 20 - 20 combination, as that was just unlucky rolls distilled into their purest form, but that the player who did the rolling thought it was the coolest thing ever. The rest of us were horrified --or maybe said a few choice four letter words-- but he and the DM thought it was awesome stuff. And that sincere lack of sympathy even out of game pissed me off.