A Musical Finish

In honor of the end of Blapril, I thought I'd post a music video from the past with heavy fantasy overtones.

You know, Ronnie James Dio.

The man himself.
Pic is from The Guardian,
attributed to Yui Mok/PA

But when I was searching for the right video to post, found this cover of Dio's Holy Diver by the band Burning Witches:

80's Metal lives on.

I was very impressed by their sound. How on earth haven't I heard of them before?

Anyway, here's the original Ronnie James Dio version:

Now I really feel old, because I remember

watching this on MTV.

So here's to the end of Blapril!!


#Blapril2020

What's Shakin', Mr. Peterson?

Woody: What's Shakin', Mr. Peterson?
Norm: All four cheeks and a couple of chins.
--from Cheers episode "Snow Job", 1984


One of the big reasons why I haven't joined a guild since my original time in WoW Retail has been the spectacular implosion of a guild I was in.... Twice.

Yes, the same guild blew up not once, but twice.

I wasn't one of the people directly involved or instigated the destruction, but after the second implosion I took Quintalan and Neve and split. Were it not for the Alliance guild that my other toons were in*, I'd have been guildless since roughly mid-Cataclysm onward.

I had absolutely no desire to get in the middle of --or, for that matter, be the adult in the room-- what seemed to me to be middle school drama. After all, I get enough drama at home, in the my neighborhood, or at work, so why have it in my gaming?

For the most part that has worked out well for me, especially since the MMO experience in ESO, LOTRO, and SWTOR isn't very dependent upon guilds at all. However, there are times when I do miss logging in and being greeted with "Red!!!" from about a half dozen or so people.** That connection of being with people who like you just for who you are is priceless.

Yes, I'm old enough to have watched

Cheers when it was first on television.
This supercut of Norm's quips when
entering the bar has always stuck with me.

Last night, I'd made plans to connect with another player to run an instance at 8 PM server time. He, like myself, is guildless, but we tend to get into groups together and we accumulated a friends list that is pretty similar. So when I logged in he whispered me and we grouped up to hopefully get a run in.

Well, that didn't work out so well. We quickly got a group of four together, needing only a tank (as usual), but then the DPS Warrior dropped group without a word and then a few minutes later the Hunter begged out.

So we decided to simply work on his quest for the Abyssal Dukes in Silithus.

I'll be perfectly honest: as a Wrath baby, I'd never seen more than maybe a dozen people at one time in that zone until last night. The place was a nuthouse, as both Horde and Alliance groups were rep grinding in advance of the AQ Opening event. That made acquiring the gear to summon the elementals a bit harder than usual, as everybody was competing for the same Twilight's Hammer cultists that dropped the gear. But eventually we got through enough of the grind that my friend decided he was going to go to the auction house and get the last piece or two so we could summon the Abyssal Duke.

Yes, we were intending to try to two man it, as we didn't have any issues taking down the lesser elementals as a Resto Druid and a Rogue. However, before we could bug out to the AH, we paused to watch another pair (Warrior tank and Mage) in the process of taking on one of the Dukes.

When I saw the Warrior tank get launched by the Duke about a good couple hundred feet (in game), I said in chat "There's no way we could pull this off with just the two of us."

Apparently my friend thought the same thing, so he reached out to the two of them to see about joining up. He dropped group, got invited, and then he in turn invited me to the group.

It was then when I realized who the Warrior and Mage were.

I'd run with them back when we were all in the L20s and L30s through several instances.

"Hey guys! I've not seen you two in months!"

 "Az!!"

"Hey Az!! How've you been?"

We spent a minute or two catching up and then we proceeded to summon and then take down the Duke, completing a quest that we started on 3+ hours ago.

We chatted a bit more then waved goodbye, going our separate ways.

It was then that I realized that I'd missed those guild type interactions.

***

To answer the obvious question, no, I'm not planning on joining a guild anytime soon. Not for a lack of invites, but because I'm trying to play on my terms. I'm not really interested in raiding, although I would like to follow the Onyxia line all the way through, and there are enough players out there that seem mystified by that premise*** that I'm not really interested in having to deal with that in a guild.

And there is still the matter of that middle school drama that even erupts on the LookingForGroup chat. I know enough good people throughout all of the major guilds on the server that when somebody trashes the guild on chat I have to resist the urge to step into the drama and tell people to not trash an entire guild based on the behavior of one or two people. "I'm not an assistant principal," I have to keep telling myself, "The guild can take care of themselves." Then I imagine what it'd be like having that guild name above Az or Card, having to defend myself from that crap, and I take a deep breath and say "no thanks" to joining a guild.





*This was pre-Azshandra (Retail Version) for reference.

**None of the guilds I was in was ever very large, so the concept of gigantic guilds of 200+ people just seems to be almost obscene. By comparison, the mini-Reds' elementary school consisted of roughly 450 students from Kindergarten through 5th Grade, so when you get to guild sizes of beyond 40-50 people you start to lose a connection to everybody in the guild.

***"You don't want to raid? But this is WoW!" was the answer I got when somebody asked me about joining a guild. Yeah, that guy didn't end up on my friends list.

Blurring the Lines

Sunshine has streamed through our house the past few days, lightening the mood here in Chez Redbeard.

You never quite realize how much the lack of clear skies can depress a mood until you find yourself mired in the middle of it.

Back in 1997, I spent an entire Summer working through my own version of crunch, arriving at work at 4 AM and leaving at 8 or 9 PM. Wash, rinse, repeat. At one point I joked that I could walk out the door in mid-October and not return until after New Years, and still have enough excess hours left over to take another week off.

I'd leave in the morning before dawn and go home as the sun was setting in the west. The hours in between were spent in a desperate rush to try to stay one step ahead of the developers as I was building testcases, testing code against them, and then debugging the results. On top of that, I was converting the homebrewed test harnesses and reporting scripts --typically written in Korn Shell-- into Perl and then into C just so I could get enough throughput to keep up with the demands of the job.

At one point in mid-July I sat in a co-worker's empty window cubicle, sipping coffee and watching the sun creep over the wooded hills in the distance, and I wondered just what the hell I was doing here anyway. Sure, management had promised bonuses and an extra week of vacation for the project I was working on*, but a few weeks prior --on a week that I'd worked 89 hours ahead of a holiday weekend-- the exhausted technical lead had left after pulling an all-nighter, fallen asleep at the wheel of his car, and crashed into a parked car on the side of the road. Luckily for everybody concerned he emerged without a scratch; he told me later that one moment he was driving into the community square and the next thing he remembered was the airbag deflating. But still, it was a sobering moment for me.

I've been wrestling with the question of what the price of work is ever since.

***

Two years later there were similar demands made of my time, but with an infant in the house I finally found some measure of spine to push back on what management's expectations were of me versus being there for my wife and daughter. Maybe reducing my hours to a "manageable" 55-60 hours/week doesn't seem like much, but compared to the 80 hour work weeks I had been pulling that Summer of 97 it was heaven. But the realization that the crunch would never truly go away is what motivated me to find a new job, which I eventually landed a couple of years later.

Fast forward from then to now, and those days truly are a fading memory.

There are some nights I wake up in a cold sweat, believing that I have reports to get out and the app build had crashed in the night, and I had to figure out which code change broke the app before the devs got to work. Then I'd remember where I was, breathe a sigh of relief, and roll over.

But still, the balance between work and play has blurred over the years. Certainly this has been accelerated for many people by the ongoing pandemic, but I've had this issue ever since I began to work from home. My work and home life have sufficiently blurred that my boss is constantly pestering me to shut off the laptop when I reach 5 PM, but there's always just one more thing to take care of before I finish.

***

And now we come to my other "job", the blog.

I knew what I was getting into when I signed up for Blapril2020 --or at least I thought I did-- but I've found the dedication to this a lot more than I ever did for NaNoWriMo. Right now I'm on target for writing a post on 17/30 days in April, which is the busiest this blog has been since May 2010**, and back then we had three writers at PC. (Please don't read them. They're really badly written.) I wasn't sure I'd be able to maintain that output, but once I got started my notion of duty kicked in, and you can guess the rest.

I've wondered just how much this Blapril will change things about my approach to blogging; for a while I was concerned that I'd not have enough things to write about, but that doesn't seem to be the case.*** I was also concerned that the blog would simply turn into a "Travels with Red" event where PC becomes a personal self-absorbed blog in the same manner that some influencers have, but I hope that hasn't been the case. But about 15 days or so ago I was thinking to myself  "I don't think I can keep doing this" and now the end is in sight.

Is the slog worth it? I'm not sure.

It's not like I've experienced demands placed on my time before. After all, I have plenty of experience dealing with insane work experiences (see above), and by comparison this isn't that big a deal.  But still, this does turn gaming into a version of work, and that's something I've become acutely aware of this past month.

As my blogging output has gone up, my enjoyment with gaming has gone down a bit. Not that I don't have a good time goofing around in WoW or Stardew Valley or any other game, but I'm always looking for an interesting story to write about. In as much the same way that someone who gets really good at music never really approaches listening to music the same way again, I've found a similar experience with gaming.

I think that when this is over I'd like to go back to a more normal level of blogging, which for me is 1-2 posts per week. I can handle that amount of demand on my writing, and it also means that I can spend more time simply enjoying games for their own sake rather than always looking for that angle to write about. Plus, it also gives me time to tinker with some other writing I'm doing, because Cardwyn can be a pretty harsh taskmaster when I'm not writing about her.

Maybe with some more distance from Blapril I'll be able to answer the "is it worth it?" question better, but we'll see.

#Blapril2020




*And yes, they did deliver. This post would have an entirely different feel to it if they didn't. Trust me.

**There were 22 posts that month, which is the current record for posts on PC. The only times we've come close to that were March 2020 --driven primarily by One Final Lesson-- and this month.

***And I did it without resorting to politics or name calling, either.


EtA: Cleaned up some grammar and restored half of a sentence that I'd accidentally deleted.

Weariness in the Long Journey

Since I work from home, that part of my life has adapted well to the current state of lockdown we've found ourselves in. For an introvert such as myself, I've found that I don't miss the lack of outside commitments very much. Sure, I'd prefer to have seen the oldest mini-Red's junior recital and the  various music commitments for the youngest mini-Red at high school*, but I'm not missing items such as lessons and large family get-togethers over Easter and birthdays so much.

What I do find myself missing, however, are the hours of solitude while I work.

As I've mentioned before, my wife works for a corporation with a bullseye as its logo, so she's frequently gone either during the day or in the evening. Even with the lockdown in progress that hasn't changed. The day before Ohio's lockdown was to go into effect, she was pulled aside at work and given her "essential employee" papers to present to the cops should things get bad enough that she'd have to present proof that she was supposed to be out and about.

But with in-person school cancelled, I've found that sharing the house on an ongoing constant basis with the three mini-Reds for the past 1.5 months to be draining.

***

Oh, it's not them per se who are the problem, it's the constant managing of my online presence as well as what my online bandwidth that gets to me after a while. I feel like we're back when only one of them was in high school yet all three needed access to the internet to complete their homework. Back in those days I had a 5:0.7 internet connection, and if one of them was online watching YouTube it would in turn impact everybody else's connections. And if anybody was using YouTube to stream music, all hell would break loose in the house.

While my internet connection is better (20:2, and without switching to Time Warner/Spectrum that's the best I can do until our local telecom gets around to running fiber to our neighborhood), all three of them have classes utilizing Zoom and other video conference software. And that doesn't even take into account my own work, which frequently involves (audio) meetings. So while I'm not having to play peacemaker for internet bandwidth, I'm constantly on edge for what might be coming my way.

For example, we had issues with our internet about 3+ weeks ago, and it turned out that when the house was originally built the buried telephone line put in by the local telecom was cut by the builder in two separate places and subsequently repaired. Well, over the years those connections had deteriorated and needed repairs. However, the repair on the section closest to the house failed because a bird was picking at the line, which destroyed the repair by letting moisture into the line. The telecom repair person discovered the bird by having the bird dive bomb him while he was fixing the line.

Or, as my Grandfather (the original Red) would have grumbled, "Dumb bird!!"

As a result, the telecom has placed an order to replace our phone line with a completely new one. That's usually a cause for celebration, but when they're going to do it is sometime in the next few weeks. When it happens, I can't move to the library or a local coffee shop to work, and neither can the rest of the mini-Reds. So I have to explain to my boss that I have to take an "unforeseen" off day when the telecom decides to show up.**

The mini-Reds won't be so lucky, and I'll likely have to burn through my cell phone's bandwidth by creating a temporary hot spot just so they can work.

***

That brings me to the other problem: gaming.

I've grown used to spending some time at lunch blowing off steam by getting on an MMO for an hour or so, but with bandwidth at such a premium I've been forced into what my old gaming routine was: taking advantage of the really early or really late hours.

And I've since discovered that I can no longer game in the wee hours like I used to for extended periods of time.

In my younger days, I had no issues doing group activities until 2 AM or getting up at 5 AM to have a couple of hours to myself, but I've found that I can no longer do that; the next day at work I get wiped out by noon. The solution is either a) drink more coffee, or b) take a nap. I've discovered that too much coffee gets me jittery these days, so a nap it is. And "poof!" there goes my lunchtime stress relief.

***

I believe I'm at that point in the lockdown where a good ol' primal scream would do the job and clear out all of the "blahs" out there. The only thing is that I'd only do something like that when alone, and I'm anything but alone these days.

Who knew that introverts would be having issues too?

#Blapril2020





*The middle mini-Red is not playing any organized music in his freshman year at college, although it wouldn't shock me if he decided to get the itch to play sometime later.

**And in traditional telecom/cable company fashion, it'll be "sometime in the next 30 days".

Serendipity in the Morning

Sometimes, you actively seek out new experiences.

Sometimes, they seek you out.

And sometimes, you make lemonade out of lemons.

My day began more than a wee bit early when my cell started rebooting at 4:15 AM.

Every five minutes.

Since I'm on call 24x7, my work phone is always with me, and is right next to my glasses when I go to sleep in case I get awakened due to an emergency. So when my phone began it's shenanigans, it woke me up.

I ended up having to fiddle around with it --forcing updates, removing some unused apps, clearing space, and rebooting-- until I noticed that the phone was really hot, so I said to hell with it and popped out the battery and let it cool for about a half an hour.

By then I was already awake, so I took care of some housekeeping, checked my email, and decided there wasn't anything at work that couldn't wait for normal business hours. That meant I might as well boot up the main house PC and get onto Classic for a little while.

4:45 AM EST on a West Coast server is basically dead time: few people are loitering around the capital cities, almost nobody is chatting on LookingForGroup, and if you see people out in the world they're likely people who just got off work on the night shift or who start a 6 AM EST work shift.

In other words, it's prime time for anybody who wants to farm, say, Timbermaw reputation.

So Cardwyn decided that she needed a change of scenery and left the Plaguelands in search of Felwood.

***

Unlike Az, Cardwyn can't sneak her way through Timbermaw Hold, so she needed to grind enough Timbermaw rep to get to at least Unfriendly.*

Courtesy of previous grinding she was pretty close to getting to Unfriendly, but I figured that between the two Firbolg zones in Felwood the northern one was going to be the one most people in-zone would be at. After all, it was closest to both the Alliance flight point as well as Timbermaw Hold itself. But just in case, I decided to do some grinding there to start and then move south if things got too busy.

The only other player in the northern zone was a Pally, who almost immediately ran up to me and whispered a piece of gear to me. "Do you need this?" he asked.

Momentarily taken aback, I checked and discovered that this green actually beat the green piece that I'd gotten in Sunken Temple. "Actually, it does," I replied.

He opened a trade to give me the gear, and in return I gave him some water. "Have a great morning!" he said and was on his way.

This reminded me of the time back in Wrath when I was on Quintalan, leveling in Desolace, and an L80 Pally rode up, told me he was unsubscribing, and offered me tons of gear and gold. Obviously this little kindness wasn't on that level, but the randomness of it all touched me. So when a Warrior posted in LFG about looking for help in Duskwood with Morbent Fel and Bride of the Embalmer, I whispered that I'd help if he didn't get any at level takers.

"You're the only one who replied," he said, so he invited me to a group and I ported down to Stormwind.

***

The last time I visited Morbent Fel I assisted someone when Cardwyn was in somewhere in the L40s. But when you're sitting at L57, I figured this would be a pushover. All I had to do was wait for the player on the quest to use the magical device to render Morbent Fel vulnerable, and that would be that.

But wouldn't you know that bastard resisted at least three or four of my Frostbolts.

After the first two in a row, I thought that maybe I'd forgotten that he was resistant to cold spells and switched to a Fireball, but that didn't help much. Switching back to a Frostbolt I gave him some damage, but then he resisted me again. I gritted my teeth and just kept slogging away, and he finally dropped.

"The damn bastard kept resisting me," I said in chat.

The Warrior laughed, and I grumbled something about no good deed going unpunished.

The Bride dropped in almost no time at all, so I felt much better when I waved goodbye to the Warrior and headed back to Felwood to continue my grinding.

 ***

When I finally logged to get ready for work, I felt good. The day may have started lousy, but it also gave me the chance to give as well as receive some random act of kindness.

Now, if my phone will merely behave....

#Blapril2020




*Or she could make a run of it, but come on. I wasn't about to strip Card down to her skivvies and do the corpse run routine if I could avoid it. Az already did that, and I'd rather not become known as "the guy who strips his toons and runs around in the snow".

Connections

Vizzini: I can't compete with you physically, and you're no match for my brains.
Westley: You're that smart?
Vizzini: Let me put it this way. Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates?
Westley: Yes.
Vizzini: Morons.
--From The Princess Bride


I was commenting on an unrelated matter on Wilhelm Arcturus' The Ancient Gaming Noob when I was struck by a thought: are there any real people left in Azeroth? My comment there briefly touched on it, but I felt this an interesting enough question that it deserved a more fully fleshed out blog post.

I'm not going to dispute that, at heart, an MMO lives and dies by the people who play the game. No players = no game. However, fleshing out a game world is what separates some MMOs from others. This was most clear in the dead WoW cities --namely The Exodar and Silvermoon City-- in Wrath and later expacs. You could wander both cities and hardly see a soul; and if you did, they were just new toons passing through to other places.

And without those players, both locales were almost totally empty. In Silvermoon City especially, the NPCs were so spread out that any flavor they gave to the game was diminished to almost nothing.

Compare the dead Silvermoon City to, say, Bree in LOTRO.

Complete with one Elf in a fancy cloak.

Even when no players are around, Bree is a place. Villagers come and go, congregate in The Prancing Pony, and show up in the jail.

The attention to detail is something else.

It feels alive in a way that Silvermoon City never seemed to be.*

***

Still, that doesn't really answer the question per se.

I'm also thinking about how removed the players are from the non-players --the common people as well as the nobles-- in a game world.

Consider LOTRO.

At the beginning, just like a lot of MMOs, you're just a commoner who got sucked into events out of your control. Yes, your intro zone has Aragorn (Humans/Hobbits) or the Sons of Elrond + Dwalin, but once your job in the intro zone is done, you're back to being a regular schmoe again. Notably, things don't exactly go well in either intro zone**, so those failures do end up powering your overall quest arc through the low-mid level zones.

Still, you are just a regular person who has "risen to the occasion". Even your interactions with Gandalf, Aragorn, Elrond, and others don't rise to the level of "Woo, Great Hero!" or "Greetings, fellow mighty person upon Middle-earth!" They're more counselors than leaders, nudging you to do what needs doing.

And the "regular person just helping out" theme continues through Moria and into Dunland as well as the outskirts of Rohan, where my story in LOTRO stands at the moment.

***

Now, look at WoW Classic.

The beginning is about as humble as you can get. You're a volunteer to just help out your locality, with the literal Kill Ten Rats (or Kobolds) quests to get you started. There's a gradual overall theme to the quests --Defias in Human zones, corruption of nature in Tauren and Night Elf zones, etc.-- but they remain the "local guy helps out and roots out problems" variety. By the time you get to the mid-level zones, you're fairly skilled and you've already gotten the core of the potential endgame questlines in hand, but you still don't interact much with faction leaders at all. People don't start quest text with "Heroes!! We need your help!!" (Except the Argent Dawn, but they're an odd bunch.) There's still plenty of examples of "regular people" NPCs out there that you interact with and can still feel a connection to.

When you get to max level, you're a cog in the endgame quests/raids, just a member of the army. Hey, maybe a Faction Leader gives you an attaboy from time to time, but you're definitely not part of that crowd.

***

Okay, now what about Elder Scrolls Online?

Well....

Almost from the beginning you end up ingratiating yourself to a faction leader, and you quickly become that faction leader's trusted advisor/fixer/best friend, and in spite of the wealth of commoners around you're almost immediately separated from them by your interactions with the mighty of ESO. I mean, how many people count Lord Vivec or Queen Ayrenn as good friends?

It's pretty obvious from the get-go that your character is meant to hang with the high and mighty, and people all over Tamriel know your name (or they think they do). Even the Daedric princes know your name, which isn't necessarily a good thing. You're about as far removed from the common folk --and the nobility, to be honest-- as you can possibly be in an MMO. I'm kind of waiting for you to ascend to the rank of "honorary Daedric Prince" or something.

***

And now we turn to Retail WoW.

By nature of the expansions, I suppose, we've gone from being "a member of the army that stormed Onyxia's Lair to finally end the threats from within" to "possibly one of the most powerful heroes who ever existed."**** Although it took longer than ESO, Retail is at that point where you pretty much exist on an entirely other level than the rest of Azeroth. And really, given all the rest of what has happened to Azeroth over the expacs, just how is there anybody even left outside of said heroes? You think some farmer in Elwynn or hunter in Mulgore managed to be untouched through all of these years of total warfare? At this point, if Azeroth simply blew up into chunks and your players had to traverse the void to find a new home, I'd not be shocked. Nor would I be shocked that it's also the home to a metric ton of Old Gods as well as --no nobody's surprise-- your opposing faction who just happened to find the same random world out there.

***

I guess my point is that the farther you're removed from where you came from, the harder the question "what are you fighting for?" is to answer. It's the same problem that people who have been fighting all of their lives eventually confront: they've spent so much time fighting that their understanding of why they fight becomes merely an abstraction, and in turn they lose a part of their humanity.

Is that the sacrifice some make so that others can live in peace? Yes. I'd also argue that not many do so realizing what the true nature of that cost is: they may think death is the worst thing to happen to them, but maybe living becomes a crueler fate than death.

But at the same time, MMOs present a conundrum: you need to keep people interested by showing off "more" and "better" and "cooler" with each new expac, but what keeps a player grounded? Where is the slave whispering to a Roman general "Remember, you are mortal" as the general is given a Triumph? Where are the regular people that make your world real enough to be worth fighting for? Where is your connection to the game world?

#Blapril2020





*There are parts of Darnassus that feel that way too, but they're compensated for by NPC activity connected by the bridges throughout the central location. It's only when you get out by the Warrior Tier and those outer rings that Darnassus approaches Silvermoon levels of emptiness.

**That's putting it mildly.

***I'm still building up deeds to pick up Riders of Rohan itself, and yeah, I know that it's all free for the moment, but I'll get around to it.

****Pretty sure Vizzi would say he was even better, tho.

The "Multiple" Part of MMOs

One thing I've noticed over my time in WoW Classic is that I've been able to connect with a wider group of people than I ever did in LOTRO, SWTOR, or ESO.* Yes, there's Retail WoW, but outside of the guild(s) in my Retail years there's a diminishing return on reaching out to people outside of your guild.

Part of this is, I suspect, the lack of an automated LFG/LFR in Classic. This, along with no server merges/crossovers means that you have to look for players on the server when you want to run an instance or PUG a raid. This is a pretty well documented feature of Classic, and when you're on the short end of the stick --such as not being a tank when putting a group together these days-- the automated LFG feature can look like a godsend. However, as someone I ran an Uldaman instance a couple of weeks ago put it, that automated feature simply aggravated the situation by making people care less about the people you ran with, rather than more.

"If I had a dollar the number of times I ported into The Old Kingdom only to have at least one or two people immediately drop, I'd have thought I won the lottery," I quipped.

After some thinking about the matter, I do believe that there's another reason why I've been more social in Classic than just the memories and shared experiences.

I've run into tons of people who said to me "I'm a bit rusty here, as I've not run this instance since 2007," and I've not cared a whit. Other times, people have said "Shouldn't we do [tactics] instead of [other tactics]? We did this the other day and it seemed to work," and I've been fine with either.

But there's more to it than just being tolerant of fellow players.

I've been in runs in the other games with assholes, and I've been in runs with fantastic people. But except for Classic, I've never seen people sacrifice one toon's run to help the group.

***

The other day in Blackrock Depths, I was in with Cardwyn helping people complete the Jailbreak escort quest --we were on the "kill both Angerforge and the Golem Lord" portion-- when we hit a stone wall. We couldn't unlock the door to get to either boss without the Shadowforge Key, and nobody had it. "Hey," I said, "I'll drop from the group, log into my main, and you can add her."

"Does she have the key?" one of the group asked.

"No, but she's an L60 Rogue," I replied. "She can pick the lock. Just like how she can pick the lock to the back door of Stratholme."

"You'd really do that?"

"Sure, it's not an issue at all. Az is stuck in Silithus, however, so it'll be a few before I get to BRD."

If you think about it, in other MMOs people would have dropped group once we hit a roadblock. After all, there's the quick and easy solution of using the automated tool. But if you're in a group and you invested time and energy putting the group together, you're not going to let a roadblock be an issue.

And the thing is, I was merely paying it forward for a BRD run that Card was in a couple of days before that. Due to our tank dropping (time factor), our Ret Pally was promoted to "honorary tank" and he tanked most everything except for the Golem Lord. For that, he dropped group, switched to his Warrior Tank toon, and tanked the Golem Lord. He then switched back to his Ret Pally so he could complete the run.

***

Because of these shared experiences with grouping, whether in a zone for a quest or in an instance, I've found that I've made more connections in Classic than I have in quite a while. Some of these players are guildless (like me), and others already belong to guilds. But when your guild is so large that you turn to another member of an instance run and say "Oh, I had no idea we were in the same guild," it becomes hard to think of a guild as an extended family.**

I've had extended conversations with some other MMO players that I've not had --outside of some blogger friends, you know who you are-- in years. And I discovered that I missed that aspect of the game.

Does this mean I'm going to suddenly join a guild? Um, no. I'm perfectly happy being independent, chatting with a slowly expanding group of friends. Celebrating with them when they finally land in a guild that is welcoming and allowing them to run instances and raid without feeling marginalized. Commiserating with them when they get out of a bad run, or they're not getting any luck on their drops. Making them laugh with my "Dad joke" level quips. Or just listening as they tell a story about their life.

You know, things that breathe life into an MMO.

So here's to MMOs and the connections they bring. Here's hoping you find your connections.

#Blapril2020





*There's also Age of Conan, but what happened there was that the few people that I did connect with over there either turned their accounts into bots, vanished, or were hacked and turned into bots. AoC is also one of those MMOs where if you're not in a huge --and I do mean huge-- guild there's almost no interaction with other people outside said guild. It's kind of an ArcheAge vibe over there with heavy PvP orientation of the guilds and their fortresses. Because of that, I was only interested in the storyline behind AoC as well as the atmosphere there.

And yes, Guild Wars 2 is a bit of an odd duck. The game encourages grouping for the dynamic in-zone group events, but you're not required to form an official group to participate. Most of the rest of the time, you're off by yourself doing single-player things, and then a dynamic group event pops up and people come from out of the woodwork to help out.

**I asked the guildies in that run just how big their guild was, and it turns out they had 240 active members. I think the largest guild I was ever a member of was back in Wrath, and I think we had about 40 active members for a brief period of time. And a rigorous application process, because they didn't want people getting in and causing chaos.