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.

It's That Midwestern Mentality

Alas, I did not win the $1.80 billion Powerball jackpot last Saturday.

Of course, there's the small matter of actually purchasing lottery tickets if you want to have a chance at winning.* I'm very much in the "if the winnings are high enough I'll buy a few tickets" camp, but that mentality also wars with a line an old friend from college used to say about lotteries: "Lotteries are a tax for people who can't do math." I'm an irregular-at-best lottery player, although I did buy a few tickets on Saturday.

Even if I had won you probably wouldn't have noticed any changes to the blog, because I'm not the sort of person who runs around showing off what riches they have. (And before you ask, no, I'm not rich.) Luckily for me, I live in a state where the identity of major lottery winners can remain private, so there's that at least. I used to joke that the way you'd find out if I won the lottery was not because I bought a new car or something like that, but that I finally got some major repairs done to the house.

Growing up and living in the Midwest has given me a very specific set of values where the ostentatious display of wealth and/or success is frowned upon. Obviously, that Midwestern mindset has declined a bit over the years as pop culture has penetrated even the most remote parts of the country, but at the risk of sounding once again like an Old Man Yelling 'Get Off My Lawn (tm)', I'm a not a fan of the "Oh, look at me!" sort of mentality.

Sure, dress the way you want. I'm fine with that. Hell, I admire people with a fashion sense (such as Kamalia) that I don't have; if you want to see what you can do with fashion in an MMO such as WoW, go read her blog Kamalia et Alia, because she is amazing at what she can pull off. But if you go running around acting "Hey, look at ME!", I'm more likely to grouse along the lines of quite a few old football coaches (I'd heard it said by Paul Brown) by thinking to myself "Act like you've been there before."**

It needs to be said that I'm not immune to that "look at me" mentality. 

Every time someone comments or whispers to me when I'm on Joanofdark about how much they love the name, I get this small flush of pride. Then I frequently tell them that a friend came up with the name and I just ran with it. Okay, I don't have to do that --and I've simply accepted the compliment as-is a lot of times just like above-- but I do feel guilty otherwise. 

***

A lot of multiplayer video games tend to utilize the peer pressure inherent in groups to sell things to their players. Okay, this isn't exactly confined to video games since you see it everywhere, even in what smartphone you use, but since I play video games more often than I use my cell phone*** I see it there more often.

It's just like people showing off their mounts in MMOs:

Although I'd hesitate in calling a giant, floating,
cigar-chomping face a "mount".

And yes, definitely a mount, but I was never
really a fan of their brethren back in Wrath days.
All it takes is one mounted toon standing on top of
a mailbox, blocking your access, for you to understand.

It's not merely a Retail WoW thing, because I've seen people showing off their gear and mounts in all sorts of other MMOs where people congregate. Oh, and there's plenty of MMO pundits out there who love to mention that a big motivation to getting gear is to show it off. (You know who you are, YouTube creators who never read this blog.) To me, that's akin to going out on a date with your spouse or significant other primarily to show off how great a catch they were. Which says a lot more about you and your priorities than it does anything else.

In the end, this is just me grumping a bit about priorities. I can't make people change, and really I shouldn't be able to anyway. I guess it's an acknowledgement that I'm going to do my own thing, other people will do theirs, and that'll be that. 

*That reminds me of an old joke I once heard that goes something like this version I got from the Harvard website: 

A deeply religious man, whom I will call Dave, finds himself in dire financial trouble. He prays earnestly to his God to help him out of his predicament. "God, I'm about to lose my car. Please help me. Let me win the lottery." Lottery night comes, but sadly, Dave is not the winner.

Things go from bad to worse. Without a car to get to work, Dave loses his job. Without a job, his mortgage is foreclosed on, and he loses his home. Without a home, his wife leaves him, taking the kids. After each horrible step in the mounting crisis, he pleads with God to let him win the lottery, but he never does.

Finally, broke, hungry, living on the street, he tries again. "God, please, my life is a wreck. I have no car, no home, no family. Please let me win the lottery just this once so that I can turn my life around. I beseech you."

Suddenly, a flash of light rends the sky, and the voice of God echoes down from the heavens. "Dave, meet me halfway. Buy a ticket." 

**The late North Carolina University head basketball coach Dean Smith built a culture that emphasized teamwork. After one of his players would score, that player would turn and point to his teammate who passed him the ball. It was a visual acknowledgement that the basket was a team effort, not simply an individual one.  

***No, I don't play games on my phone. To me, my phone represents the 24x7 on-call nature of my work, and I try to use it as little as possible. However, my kids are far more used to utilizing their phones for keeping in contact than I am, so I've grown used to smartphones in my life more than I'd like. Although I primarily use a smartphone to listen to music and/or podcasts when I can't have access to my stereo or PC.

Beware Strange People Bearing Whispers

I've been on a bit of an exploration kick lately in Retail, where I just poke around areas looking for people while I'm on my lowbie Rogue. This is all within reason, of course, since she's roughly L13, but I did poke my nose into Northrend and all sorts of other areas on the Old World. 

Needless to say, it's all pretty empty.

Eh, I took the portal anyway.

I don't know where half of these portals go nowadays.

Ever had the feeling that you're lost in your hometown? Retail is like that to someone who hasn't played since Mists (and even then mainly BGs). Oh, I did recognize a few people around...

Wait, I thought Cardwyn was your only apprentice.
When did all this happen, and does Card know about this?

And I couldn't go more than a few feet without it being suggested that I check out various things...

*SIGH*

But I found some Honor Hold personnel at the bottom of the Mage Tower and I saw they could port me to the Dark Portal. 

"Aha! I can go to Outland. That'll work!"

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot...

What the hell is going on? You know what, I think it's smarter to just go back to the old Lion's Pride Inn and call it a day.

Ahh... Much better.

Still, there was one thing on my mind. After the roleplaying post from the other day, I was reminded that the old Moon Guard - US server was where most Alliance RP took place. And yes, I'm quite aware of Goldshire and the Lion's Pride Inn's reputation. Well, the last time I visited Goldshire on Moon Guard, I wasn't that impressed. This was back in 2013 or so, and some of the worst offenders of ERP back then had been purged from the server, so it wasn't what I'd call "busy". Still, I've seen enough YouTube videos that show an active RP scene, so I got curious and made a toon on Moon Guard just to see what's going on.

Sorry, but she's not named Cardwyn. I did check to see
if Deathwyn was available, but alas it was already taken.
It actually took me about 10-15 minutes of hunting for
available names that I liked before I got to this one.

I wasn't planning on doing any RP myself; I don't have any RP addons installed on Retail, and if anybody were to whisper me I'd politely decline. Hey, it's their world and it's the proper thing to do.

Well, at least this looks normal.
Full Disclosure: I ran back last night to get this
screencap, because I forgot to take one on Sunday.

I did find actual people questing in Northshire Abbey, so that's an improvement over what Livona experienced.

Instead of doing those initial quests, I figured it was safe to run straight to Goldshire and see what I could find.*

Remember the proverb "Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it?"

Yeah, about that...

Holy crap.

I got over to the inn, saw THAT, and immediately logged for the day.

That was a bit overwhelming. The inside if the Inn had to have the most people I've seen in one place in Retail since... early Cataclysm, maybe? It certainly wasn't in Mists, because Ysera-US was pretty empty, even with the server "merges"; on Area 52-US --a 10:1 Horde server-- I think everybody was either raid logging or just hanging out in the Horde Pandaria hub, but since I never leveled a Horde toon to max level that expansion I never made it there. 

So, I decided it couldn't have been that bad, and that I just happened to show up at a specific event or something, so I checked Goldshire and the Inn again tonight...

"Do I really want to know what your rates are
for a room, Sir?"

And stepping outside, there was this:

I ran back to Northshire Abbey, because it was a LOT quieter, and it was there that I discovered two things.

The first is that it's now a default that if someone whispers you it's put in a separate tab, and two... well...

I'm almost 100% certain that person wasn't
talking about Enterprise Resource Planning.

I didn't respond, because at first I wasn't sure how long that whisper had been there --it could have been about 10 minutes old for all I knew-- and I'll be honest in that I should have known that sort of whisper would happen. But... Did you see the size of that crowd? Given the mob inside I figured it would have been hard to pick me out, especially without me having installed any RP addons and only running out of the place, but a female toon still managed it in the minute or so I actually spent in Goldshire. This kind of puts a lie to the concept of "If there's a crowd, nobody is paying attention to you." If there's a way to make my anxiety spike while playing a video game, that was it.

Well, I guess you could say I finally found where the people are in Retail when they're not sitting around wherever the endgame area is: they're in Goldshire on an RP server.

*You have to be paying attention if you do this in Classic, because the Defias and hostile animals lurking near the road could kill you. In Retail, it's not very likely.

EtA: Added the comment on the last graphic because I can't not see the business version of ERP when I see that acronym.

Does Romance Give you the Squick?

Well, it does for me.

Oh, not in real life. IRL, I'm a softie who enjoys romance. Not necessarily Romance novels, mind you,* but I meant the concept itself. Yes, yes, I know, somebody alert my wife.**

I also don't mind having romance in video games, because for me that's a personal choice. If you want to romance an NPC, go ahead. If you don't, you don't.

What I meant was romance in pencil-and-paper RPGs, although to a lesser extent romance between two players in an MMO as well.*** 

This was sparked by a video that popped up the other day concerning D&D and romance:

Yes, I follow Ginny Di's YouTube videos. No, I didn't get into her videos from Critical Role, but rather I stumbled on her channel when she progressed to other RPG topics. The algorithm looked at my viewing history and thought "You know, there's this woman who dyes her hair that you might find insightful..." and here I am. She does have some great and insightful comments on a variety of RPG topics, and between her, Pointy Hat, Stephanie Plays Games, Kelsey Dionne, Bob World Builder, and several other 20s and 30s content creators, I feel that our TTRPG hobby is in good hands for the future.****

***

I guess the reason why I watched Ginny's video was due to my own "experience" with romance in a D&D game.

If you've been around this blog for a while, you might recall I was part of a long-running D&D 3.0 campaign. As in a 20+ year old campaign. When our DM got together with us to hash out what the campaign would be about, there were a few ground rules we decided upon: low to mid level magic, use the Greek and Egyptian Pantheons for the campaign and world building, some roleplaying in character but not pure amateur thespian hour, and absolutely no romance. That last one was a hard no from us players, as we were all dating and/or married*****, and we really just wanted to focus on a campaign with no romantic escapades involved. We've had romantic subplots in our campaign back in college, and when it's involving people who are actually dating IRL who then break up, it gets really ugly really fast. Therefore, just keeping things platonic would make it easier for everybody.

We players figured that with the ground rules set, we were ready to play.

Things worked out okay for a while, and outside of us using IM to play (this was 2001-2 after all) things seemed to progress decently well. After a couple of years, however, our DM began trying to slip in romantic subplots. And the occasional Conan-esque nudity into the game. We all knew our DM, who was a bit of a horndog back in college, so we just figured it was him being him and we didn't take the rather obvious bait. 

We kind of kept things at bay until a new player joined the group for a few years. He was a coworker of the DM, and he wanted to play a Bard. 

You can see where this is going, right? 

Yeah, they both went there. The Bard started wanting to screw every woman he met, and this began to wear on us. This isn't what we wanted, and we definitely didn't ask for it, and it kept diverting us from the actual campaign. Then the DM started having NPCs hit on my character, and I began having to be more forceful in my nipping of those subplots in the bud. 

The rest of us began talking among ourselves about whether we need to take a stand with the DM, and then the problem solved itself: the new player had to stop playing, and just like that the division mostly evaporated.

Mostly.

The DM still would try to sneak in some opportunities for romance here and there, but we ignored them and kept the game focused on the campaign. In the last few months of our campaign before it ended, however, the DM began to ratchet up the opportunities and the PG-13 nature of those "encounters". I won't lie and say otherwise, but after 20 years we players had had enough. There were several other things that contributed to our decision to want to end the campaign, but one of the top complaints on our list was that the DM kept pushing the romance and sexual angles on us. 

I think it needs to be said that we're all adults, and we can handle adult themes.****** However, people have to buy into the concept of romance and shenanigans or you're risking a lot by trying to push it on people when they don't want it. I personally would have to be in the right frame of mind to accommodate an RPG campaign with romance, and I'll also freely admit that I am not an actor in that I would have issues separating the character(s) from the player(s). I probably could do it if I were in, say, a play or musical or something, but in a TTRPG? That'd be harder.

***

Okay, that's tabletop RPGs, but MMOs? 

Hoo boy. That's an entirely different kettle of fish.

If Asmongold's your dad, Nixxiom,

I'm a Jelly Doughnut.

Outside of occasionally being hit on by some oversexed player, I've never been in a romantic situation with another MMO player before. And you can't not realize that there's another player on the other end, which separates it from NPC romances, such as the companion romances in SWTOR. MMO RP romances are going to be with another character, and the specter of ERP (and Goldshire's Lion's Pride Inn) hovers over everything. 

There's this too. And yes, I've kept this from
an old Meme Monday just because.

 

Some people can make it work, but I'm almost completely certain that I can't. 

But if you (not me, for certain) want more detail about doing Romance RP in MMOs (yes, it's WoW but applicable in all of them), there's this:

I guess knowing my limitations is a good thing, and that I'm not planning on putting myself into a situation where they would get tested. If you can handle it, more power to you. I think I'll just go do my own thing instead and leave the romance in MMOs to y'all. 

Oh, and because I couldn't resist, here:

Now you'll never hear that old Sonny

and Cher song the same way.

*Although I have made some attempts to check out the genre, because the only way to know if you'll like it is to try it.

**Ironically enough, I think that between the two of us I'm the romantic one. That doesn't mean that I'm not as clueless as the next guy in trying to figure out if someone is hitting on me; actually my son --nicknamed "Mr. Oblivious" or "Captain Oblivious" due to his cluelessness about such things-- is a chip off the old block.

***Spouses and significant others who are playing the other toon you're romancing kind of get a pass on this, since you're obviously thinking of the other person who you're already romantically involved with.

****They don't need me to tell them that, but consider it just an observation that I'm happy the next generation has taken the reins from us older folks and run with it, in the same way that I'm proud my kids have engaged with the hobby over the years. For all of the "get offa my lawn!" sort of behavior from the old guard (who are as old or older than me), I just wanted to get it out there that I'm happy they're showing their love for the hobby and contributing to its overall success. And maybe this year I'll get a chance to run into one of them at Gen Con.

It also goes without saying that some of the Old Guard have opened their arms to the new generation of content creators. People like Matt Colville, Professor DM, and Baron de Ropp could have circled their collective wagons and been assholes toward the new blood, but they haven't. And our hobby is all the better for it.

*****The DM was married to one of the players, in fact.

******If you're NOT an adult, it goes without saying that parental guidance is strongly suggested. My oldest once attended an RPG game session in high school with some acquaintances, and ALL of the guys there tried to hit on her character (and by extension, her). She got really creeped out, and that was the end of THAT.

What is Valuable and Who Decides it is?

Luke: Is the Dark Side stronger?

Yoda: No... Quicker, easier, more seductive.

--From The Empire Strikes Back

Okay, after being a Classic Andy for what's likely the millionth time since roughly July 2014, I began to have some second thoughts. 

What if I am not remembering things correctly? What if what I like about Classic WoW has an analogue in Retail? What if I'm letting my dislike of the state of the game over a decade ago color my opinions too much?

Well, the TL;DR is that I decided to do something about it:

This screencap is obviously not when she was
brand spanking new. You'd have thought I'd have
remembered to take an initial screenshot, but nope.

I believe this is called "putting my money where my mouth is".

For the record, Livona here was created on Wyrmrest Accord-US, an RP realm with a "High" population. In the era of shared (aka "dynamically merged") servers, this may not mean much. From wowrealmpopulation.com, Wyrmrest Accord has ~10.5k active characters...

Snapshot from wowrealmpopulation.com
as of May 11, 2025.

Although given the current state and capability of Retail WoW to create innumerable alts, this might represent only 500 individual accounts. Okay, I'm kidding, but you never know.

As you can see, Wyrmrest Accord is roughly 33% Alliance. So, not a 50/50 split, but decently sized enough that I ought to expect to see some bodies out and about. Look, I'm no dummy, and Wyrmrest Accord has been around as an active server since 2009, so it's likely that I shouldn't expect that many people in any starter zone. My previous foray into Retail with new toons confirmed that, but I decided I was going to try this for more than just a few minutes.

I figured I'd go to a zone that I was intimately familiar with, and one that hadn't changed since Cataclysm: Elwynn Forest.

It still feels weird entering into Goldshire and seeing
a Flight Point there. I mean, it's a ~3 minute run up
to Stormwind, so you're not saving that much time.

Now, I knew that the Cataclysm changes meant things were different in Elwynn as compared to the OG Vanilla version, but I couldn't remember just how jarring things were. Therefore I decided to approach this as if I were brand new to the game and didn't go to Exile's Reach (or did it once and wanted to start over with the "original" experience). What would make sense? What wouldn't? How would I feel as I played the game?

I discovered very early on that I wasn't going to be able to remain objective, because I did have opinions, and those opinions came to the forefront from practically the 3rd or 4th quest:

You're kidding me, right? Have you seen how full my
health bar is and how little effort it took to revive you?

I mean, look at the comment by the NPC that I healed on the battlefield.* I had hardly even done anything in the game and I was being called a hero. For a person who prefers IRL to fly under the radar, this is somewhat disconcerting; I kept expecting someone to pop out from behind the tree in the screencap and say "HA!! FOOLED YOU!!"

But beyond that, what stood out to me the most about the very beginning in Northshire Abbey was that the quest text there implied you knew things about the pre-Cataclysm era of World of Warcraft**. A new player won't know that, and if you relied too much on what might have been there originally in-game, you'd only confuse a new player further. 

Before you point out that a new player might have been expecting to go straight away and play The War Within, I'm not going there. I don't think that's likely to be the case. A new player to WoW probably has the vague idea that the game is OLD now and they will likely have to start off somewhere else first before they can get to the current expansion. They're called expansions for a reason, and they don't replace the old game, only add to it. 

I did notice that the number of quests in Northshire Abbey were cut by quite a bit, despite all the trainers and other original NPCs still present in the game. Yes, there aren't a lot of quests around the Abbey to begin with, but the speed of completion was still record breaking for me. It usually takes me about 20-30 minutes to be off to Goldshire in Classic Era, but even with me loitering around a bit I was out of there in about 15 minutes. If I'd have pushed it, I could have been done with Northshire Abbey in about 6-7 minutes, and most of THAT would have been spent running back and forth from the nearby vineyard.

So, I was off to Goldshire, and since I was on the way, I thought it a good idea to go visit Stormwind's bank to drop off some of the initial gear that I already had replaced. In Vanilla Classic, if you were lucky you might have gotten a couple of pieces replaced by quest rewards, but in Retail everything was replaced by the time I reached The Lion's Pride Inn. 

I'm not sure what I expected to find in Stormwind, but looking like Classic Era servers right in the middle of TBC Classic wasn't it:

I saw the same toon by the same NPC over the course of
a couple of hours. No, I wasn't playing straight over those
few hours; I just did a half an hour here and there over the
course of the entire day. I had things to do, after all.

I eventually found a few toons around:

Note the Naxxramas Tier set on that Caster beyond
the Darkmoon Faire Mage on the right. I think it's the
Discount Naxx reskin from Wrath of the Lich King,
But I wasn't paying too close attention at the time.

But they never lasted long. And to be fair, they were the only people I actually saw in the game up to that point. I didn't see a soul in Northshire Abbey or Elwynn Forest at first, even though I spread my game time over several hours and a couple of days.

(I will come back to that later.)

After leaving Stormwind...

I see they finally repaired the damage caused
by Deathwing to the entrance. I think it was still in
a state of disrepair in Mists in 2014.

...I resumed questing in Elwynn Forest.

Even though I was L6-7, the "Report to Westfall" quest was already available if I wanted it --I didn't-- so I continued to accumulate the "traditional" Elwynn quests: the Maclure and Stonefield farms, and the nearby Fargodeep Mine. Instead of the giant pig named Princess being halfway across the zone as in Classic WoW, Princess is right in the field beside you as you're talking to the quest giver. Also, unlike Classic WoW, she's not accompanied by two extra members of her "entourage", which means the fight is actually quite simple, despite her size:

Somebody has been feeding that pig Miracle Gro,
because she's a lot bigger now than in Classic WoW.

What got me was that the turn-in text block doesn't look like it had been changed from Vanilla WoW:

"Ma'am, she's right behind me. Can't miss her."

Despite that, the quests I ran into were largely the same as their Vanilla counterpart. Thankfully, you didn't need any knowledge of Vanilla WoW to understand the context, so that worked. But there was one big difference between the Vanilla WoW and Retail WoW versions of the zone:

"What on earth are you doing out here?"

In Vanilla WoW, the mini-boss Goldtooth is at the back of the Fargodeep Mine, which makes it a challenge to get to. Before I hear any complaints about how easy Vanilla WoW really is from a complexity standpoint, I have to point out that typically the Fargodeep Mine is where a toon will likely die for the first time.*** Respawns and the narrow passages make any mine dangerous, but to get to Goldtooth you have to go all the way to the back. Oh, and you likely have to fight a few adds when you pull Goldtooth. Here, being outside the mine and off without any nearby adds, he's pretty much a sitting duck. Even if Goldtooth were at the back of the mine, I doubt he would have posed much of a challenge. Hell, my health bar didn't go beyond the halfway mark until I decided to test how much of a wrecking ball you are with WoW's greatest enemies, Murlocs.

I had to actually go back the other night
to get this screencap, because I was kind of busy
when I last went through here.

Like the jingle for DoubleMint gum, murlocs like to double (or triple) the fun by having multiples attack you. In Vanilla WoW, if the mines don't kill you in Elwynn, the murlocs likely will.**** The Retail WoW version of the Elwynn Forest murlocs did not disappoint me, as I fought packs of 2 or 3 at once. While I didn't die at all, that pack of 3 that jumped me before I could eat and regain health very nearly did me in. If I were more cautious, and if I hadn't had the experience of invincibility up to that point in Retail WoW, I likely wouldn't have pulled that many murlocs.

So there I stood, at L9, after about 90 minutes of actual playing the game, although I might be generous on the 90 minute mark as I was screwing around a bit, making trips to Stormwind to dump stuff into the bank, taking screenshots, and hunting for other people in the area.

I did finally find a few people in Goldshire:

"Love me two times girl
One for tomorrow, one just for today
Love me two times
I'm goin' away...."

I caught these on screencap just before they went "WHOOSH!" up and out of sight.

"Oh, right," I mumbled. "Flying is allowed everywhere."

That being said, I didn't see a single low level toon in Elwynn Forest at all. 

***

So... What did I think?

Let me describe my experience leveling 8 toons at once in Anniversary Classic: when you do the same quest 6 or more times, you find it hard to sit there and read the quest text again. Really, after about the 3rd time doing the same quest I just kind of click through to the end, because unless I want a specific screencap or something, I know what's happening. There have been weeks where I've been doing the same quests in the same zone on ALL of the toons, and it blurs together after a while.

Now, switching to Retail WoW and intentionally wanting to read the quest text to see what differences there are between Retail and Vanilla did not help me. In fact, I felt a stronger pull to simply skip reading the quest text than if I'd been playing Vanilla. Why, you may ask?

This:

I was going to crop it, but you know, it works fine as-is.

Everything I need to know is right on the map, and if I don't care to pull that up on-screen most of the relevant information is up on both the mini-map and the quest tracker on the right. I've never used the Questie addon, so I can't tell you if it has the same information, but this kinda-sorta pushes you into going faster than you may want to. Providing the data to a player without any expectation is one thing, but there's an implicit expectation here that the player will utilize the info to progress as quickly as possible. 

The removal and/or streamlining of quests in Northshire and Elwynn wasn't designed to explicitly unclutter the old zones, it was to provide the player with an overall improved experience. Taking Goldtooth out of the cave means you don't have to risk anything to go in there and eradicate him. You also don't need another body to go in there with you in case you get jumped by 2 or 3 more kobolds. The zone becomes more solo-friendly and faster to progress through as a result. 

By comparison, if you go to Elwynn on the Anniversary servers or Classic Era servers, you'll always find people asking to group up for Hogger. In Retail there's no need, as everything is soloable. Group content is segregated in a separate area, and while you can manually group up the expectation is that you can use the automated processes to handle the group creation. 

And let's talk about the elephant in the room: Retail WoW is old. I mean, really old; like "Morrowind was the current Elder Scrolls game in 2004" old. And the Wyrmrest Accord server, having opened about 16 years ago, means likely 95% or more of the server population is at or near max level. Still, I wasn't expecting there to be nobody in Elwynn Forest. Blizzard could have simply turned off access to the zones entirely and nobody would have noticed. If this were Classic Era --and the lack of population was the reality for Classic Era a few months into TBC Classic-- I'm sure there was an internal drumbeat within Blizzard to simply turn those Classic Era servers off. Nobody was playing, so why keep them turned on?

The thing is, Retail's design provides an outlet for collectors and completionists to go back and poke around and do all the things.

Oh, and allow the rare newbie to come along and try their hand at the game.

I used to rail about how Blizzard, by reworking the Old World for Cataclysm, inadvertently cut off their own pipeline of new players into the game. Instead of a natural progression from Vanilla -> TBC -> Wrath -> Cataclysm, what ended up happening was Cataclysm Vanilla -> Old TBC -> Old Wrath -> Cataclysm. The timeline got screwed up, and the game no longer made internal sense unless you had played the game prior to 2010. Now, I'm not so sure that's the case. 

From what I've played and observed, Retail WoW is relying less on the world and a cohesive story to bring in and keep players and relying more on what has been WoW's traditional strength: its gameplay.

Whatever you may think of the storytelling in Retail WoW, gameplay can make up for a host of sins. WoW's gameplay is far smoother in Retail than in Vanilla; the drops come more quickly, you know what to do without having to engage your brain and figure it out, the feedback loop of quest acquisition and completion is finely tuned, and the game world is designed to progress you through it faster. Hell, as a Rogue I discovered that stealth meant almost no penalty to my traveling speed at all. I was zipping through the Fargodeep Mine --because OF COURSE that's what I'd do-- as if I was running through the thing. I know how long it would take a Vanilla Rogue to make it through (assuming that a Kobold didn't see through my stealth), and here in Retail I was cruising along as if they weren't even there. 

You could say the game doesn't waste your time, because the game doesn't value the time spent in the old content. And if Blizzard doesn't and the existing player base doesn't, why shouldn't you? 

Or maybe, to turn it around, why should you value the old content? Take away the transmog and the achievements, and what do you have? Without external rewards, why go?

Classic WoW has that "why go" question already answered: people make their own fun. The players came up with Hardcore WoW Classic and made it popular before Blizzard jumped on the bandwagon and created official hardcore servers. Classic Fresh became a player driven thing on a Classic Era RP-PvP server before the announcement of the 20th Anniversary servers. I still recall the New Year's Eve 2023 gathering on the Season of Discovery RP server in Stormwind, with people basically having a good time while the countdown to the 2024 was underway.

The thing is, I never hear about people doing goofy things or making their own challenges for old content in Retail WoW. That doesn't mean it's not there, but outside of a few things --such as that Pandaren who makes it to the level cap by picking flowers in the Pandaren starting zone-- all you hear about in Retail WoW is about what's going on in the current expansion. What is keeping Retail WoW players from following in their Classic brethren's footsteps? Nothing, really. 

This loops back to the title of this post. While I progressed through Retail's Elwynn Forest, I kept wondering why the Retail community doesn't consider this content to be valuable. Is it purely conditioning, or is it a "follow the leader" mentality that keeps people from doing things if there isn't a reward attached? Without achievements or transmog, is there no interest?

I'm uncertain you can say this about other older MMOs. I've been on SWTOR and LOTRO --the old LOTRO servers, not the new ones-- and judging by the activity in both MMOs, the intro zones remain very active with new toons. If you told LOTRO players that Ered Luin or The Shire isn't valuable to LOTRO any more, I'm pretty sure there'd be a riot.***** But in Retail WoW, there'd likely be a lot of agreement with the sentiment that Elwynn Forest is no longer valuable to the game.

I don't know the answer to make old content more valuable beyond the carrot approach that Blizzard already has tried. It could be that all of the people who see the old content as intrinsically valuable have migrated off of Retail WoW and onto Classic WoW, and those remaining in Retail don't see the value in old content beyond the metagame rewards that Blizzard offers. If anybody has ideas, I'm all for it, because there's all this content that is basically unused, and it certainly seems like the people most likely to utilize it don't even play this version of the game any more.

***

Oh, and one more thing. I discovered that collecting herbs gives you more XP than fighting enemies at level:

Now I know why that Pandaren thought leveling via gathering herbs was a good idea.

*Because the Priest wasn't doing much of anything, mind you, and sent me in his stead.

**For example, Milly Osworth's initial quest text for Extinguishing Hope starts with "Times like these make me long for when the Defias were still around. The cataclysm has opened a pathway from the Burning Steppes and now Blackrock orcs pour into Northshire Valley!" (From Wowhead, because I forgot to take a screencap.) You would have had to have known about the Defias, or at least be familiar with them to truly understand Milly's comment, and if you were paying attention to the quest text you'd likely have pulled up the map to try to figure out what Milly was talking about. But of course a new player will have Burning Steppes as a big ol' blank space once you found it because you haven't revealed the map yet. The quest text could have easily been tweaked to make it more understandable to a completely new player, removing some specifics that old players knew and just emphasizing the criticality.

***I've played Hardcore WoW Classic. I KNOW.

****And if you survive that, then the Defias Pillagers in Westfall are waiting for you.

*****Assuming people didn't think you were one of several well-known shit-stirrers on the Gladden-US server and dogpile on you for causing trouble.

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.