One of the things that I've been doing since my oldest moved out is clean.
Part of it is simply cleaning the areas where the guinea pigs once had their cages, but beyond that I've begun moving stuff around as I clean so that I can finally give the house a thorough cleaning it's not had in at least a decade.
Normally this is a Spring Cleaning sort of thing, but since I'm taking a short break from working on the deck --and given the heat this week, that's very much a good thing-- I've channeled my energies toward making my space that much cleaner instead.*
Alas for me, that means I've been hit with nostalgia of a different sort.
Right now, I've got this out of the basement, cleaned up --thank you, isopropyl alcohol-- and currently scanning away:
It's a Radio Shack Pro-2035.
I acquired that from a yard sale before I began playing WoW, so probably sometime around 2006 - 2008, for the grand total of $35. Considering the original list price of $449.99 in 1995, that was a pretty damn good deal.
For a while I wondered why the person was selling it so cheaply, but a few years afterward I discovered why he sold what was at one time the top of the line scanner that Radio Shack had: Cincinnati Police and Fire were moving toward a trunked system, which this scanner could not receive.
Still, there are quite a few broadcasts in my local area that can be received by this scanner, so this afternoon I've been hearing about all of the paramedic and fire department activity within several miles of my house.**
***
I was never really a scanner listener, although when I did that 8 month stint at Radio Shack we did have our (then) top of the line scanner up and running, which made for very interesting listening when there was nobody in the store. There was a McDonalds about a football field away, and the things people said into the hot mic while waiting to order at the drive thru made me realize I should keep my mouth shut while in a drive-thru lane.
For a while, these scanners used to be able to listen in on old style cellular phone calls; that became a bit of a political problem early in the 90s when a scanner listener happened to listen in on a conversation between top level Republican Congressmen discussing strategy via cell phone, and as a consequence of that leaked conversation a law was quickly passed banning the cell frequencies from these scanners. That's not an issue now, given that digital communications have advanced significantly since those days, but it did highlight digital privacy issues even way back when.
***
I don't really have a listening station in the house these days, since I no longer work out of the basement, but I ought to consider making one somewhere. Right now, if I want to listen to shortwave I bring the radio upstairs with me and place it in a room away from my home office, as the computers there interfere with reception.
No, this is not me. I only have a couple of radios. From Wikipedia, and this is the attribution: By Mw0rkb - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24682534
I guess I ought to add an outside antenna (or two) to the project list...
*This was all part of my project plan I had been working on while I was figuring out costs associated with the deck, as mentioned here.
**That's interesting, but it can be morbidly so. I had to get up and go do something else away from my work desk when a call for paramedics for a suicide attempt came over the air.
While my teenage years were in the early to late 80s, my formative childhood years as a kid born at the end of the 1960s were in the Era of Plaid.
The 1970s were so damn long ago...
How long, you ask?
In two years it'll be the 50th anniversary of the release of the first Boston album.
My first copy was a cassette from the mid-80s, long enough for the album to be classified as Classic Rock by some stations. From Spotify.
How long?
The US Bicentennial fell in the summer between my First and Second Grade.
(Yeah, I'm old.)
So, in honor of that dubious distinction, here's some 70s memes. And no, none of those "The 70s were better!" memes, either.
I disagree, btw. And to be fair, most of these all-in-one cabinet systems were purchased in the 60s but we all grew up with them in the 70s. Except me. My parents didn't have one. We had a Centrex by Pioneer* that they bought in 1978. From EdnSarna.
Yes, my parents' house, built in 1976, still has the paneling in the basement, despite my arguments with my mom to finally get something brighter in there. From Sheila Creamer Bidon.
Remember, these were the people who looked at the punks and new wave crowd and said their fashion sense was terrible. From EdnSarna.
Let's kill three birds with one stone: Bad clothing, WKRP in Cincinnati, and the Cincinnati Reds (aka The Big Red Machine). From Ridiculous 70s Memes.
Oh, and there were blockbuster movies, movies that people watched all summer and stayed in theaters for more than three months. From YouTube.
Again, another item my family never had. I really need to create a Meme Monday on memes about things my parents never owned. From The Gamer.
And finally, one more meme:
It might be cheating, combining CB Radio and Star Wars like this, but if loving this is wrong, I don't wanna be right... From Imgur.
*For clarity's sake, Centrex was a sub-brand of Pioneer Electronics for their all-in-one stereo systems. If you ask an audiophile, they're not as good as the "Receiver Wars" receivers of the 70s, but if you had a good pair of speakers they punched above their weight class.
This is the model my parents had, the KH-5511. It had a cassette, not an 8-Track, and they got it in 1978, so cassettes were hard to come by for a few years since the 8-Track market dominated so thoroughly. From EBay.
I have been enjoying the opportunity to play Alterac Valley this past week, and Friday night my Questing Buddy and I participated in something I haven't in quite a while...
The summoning of Ivus, the Forest Lord:
Needless to say, we won this one.
Yeah, I didn't make the leaderboard, but I also was holding down Iceblood Graveyard so that we could keep our side in the fight. Sometimes, the smarter thing to do is do the small things so that the team can win.
Thursday night I was visiting my local game store, perusing the shelves,
The silver dragon has a few friends now!
when the Lofi music played over the speakers by the dragon began playing a familiar tune. "Hey, that sounds like Silvermoon City!" I thought. As I'd played Blood Elves the 3-4 years of my WoW career, I became quite familiar with that seven note theme.
Here's the original...
The music quickly moved on to something else, but when I got home afterward I hopped online to see if I could find the Lofi version that I just heard.
I think this is it.
My first thought was that Blizz had released more lofi beats in advance of their next Retail expansion, TWW*, but it was released by a third party instead. Lofi isn't the most difficult music style to emulate, but it does take skill (technical or whatever) to transcribe the score into something else. Yes yes, I know that generative AI and other software programs can assist in this, but it does also take critical listening to get the sound "just right", in the same way that writing fiction using generative AI doesn't really have a good voice (yet).
Anyhoo, I'm typically in my happy place when I'm perusing a game store, so hearing the strains of Silvermoon City just kind of made my evening.
***
Oh, and while I was there to peruse RPG materials, such as this:
I could not find this at Gen Con, as the Kobold Press area looked like it was completely wiped out by the end of Sunday.
I did discover that a game discontinued back in 2010 was making a comeback:
You can get the unpainted ones too if you want to paint the minis yourself. From Boardgamegeek.
Yes, Heroscape is hitting the stores after a 14 year hiatus. Well, I am surprised.
*The World Wound? No, that's a Pathfinder thing. The World Within? Sounds like a description of The Underdark from D&D. The War Within? Yeah, that's it, but everybody types TWW as if they were repeating corporate jargon: "Okay, we need to complete the prework for the CAB and then once that's done we need to focus on the RDT and weekly SDT, then on Monday we handle the DR issues in the DSR." (And yes, those are all real corporate acronyms.)
I realize that the title of this post isn't exactly a new sentiment, but I was thinking about it while I was watching a YouTube video over lunch.
Yes, Megan's posts on social media had started popping up in my YouTube feed, and the "Life of an English Teacher in Japan" shorts were incredibly quirky and fun to watch. That Megan was another member of Team Red ("Go Team Red!") also endeared me to her.
Well, today she dropped the video you see above, and it's a ~21 minute video about why she left what seemed to be her dream job.
The TL;DR is that yes, it was her dream job, but it wasn't what she hoped it would be.
From housing issues --and issues left by her predecessor-- to dealing with the loneliness and the bureaucracy (not to mention the language barrier), there was a lot to work through.
I always had a lot of respect for people who left what they'd known to come to a foreign land and make a new life for themselves, but for every success story there are a lot more stories that are like Megan and Ben's. When you couple that to the knowledge that no matter what you do and how much you succeed you are still considered "the other"... Yeah, that is something that can be hard to accept.
***
To bring this around to gaming, these are themes that can be explored in any rich game world. Now that I think about it, they have been explored in the Dragon's Age and Mass Effect games, but in MMOs not quite so much.
The thing is, I'm not quite sure whether it would be better to be explored in fiction or in an MMO itself. If you put in quest chains in an MMO, you run the risk of simply telling rather than showing the problems that are faced by people who are The Other. And MMOs aren't typically well known for showing rather than telling, because they do often seem to subscribe to "The School of Massive Info Dumps" when presenting quests.
I honestly don't know the answer to this conundrum.
If you're busy in Blackrock Depths, you just might know the answer to that question...
Good ol' Private Rocknot, he of the "I love my ale so much I assault kegs for more" behavior in the watering hole in Blackrock Depths, seems to have found his love.
Although... a Succubus?
I mean, Mistress Nagmara does seem to be nice enough, and we did help her out with that love po...
::BLINK BLINK::
Oh.
Now that I think about it, how is it that the Private didn't drink the love potion and fall in love with the kegs of ale instead?
I've been asked this question periodically in MMOs by a variety of people, especially when we need someone like a tank or healer in a group format, and I've typically waved the question off with a "I just like playing Mages".
Of course, when I started playing WoW back in 2009, the answer would have been that I just liked playing Paladins --I think I have three in Retail at this point in time*-- but by the time I quit playing Retail in 2014 I'd switched to playing Rogues. That style of toon persisted through Age of Conan, Elder Scrolls Online, and into my early forays into Classic WoW, but I have since returned to being primarily a Mage or Mage-like player and I don't deviate from that very much at all.
If you'd have given me the opportunity to play an Elemental Shaman in TBC Classic --and I did request that-- I would have likely continued playing that Shaman a lot longer. After all, of the three specs a Shaman has, Elemental is the DPS caster type**, the most Mage-like of the Shaman specs.
But when I hear about people who, to get ready for a new expansion to whatever MMO they're playing, plot out the leveling and preparation process for all of their toons, I simply don't grok that. If you like that, great, but to me that looks too much like work.
Maybe it's because I simply don't love these games as much as other people do.
Me: We've discussed this already, Card. I'm not saying I dislike you.
My reasoning for that conclusion stems from my deck work.
In order to figure out how to renovate the deck, I had to do quite a bit of research to make sure that not only could I accomplish this task, but the order in which I was going to accomplish it. As my kids have pointed out to me on numerous occasions, I do love to research a topic when I'm going to do something.
On Friday, I was at the auto dealer while our old '97 Accord was getting regular maintenance taken care of***, and I was writing out what steps I need to perform to complete the deck renovation sometime next year. After that was finished, I began jotting down other projects that I'll be working on the next few years --there are quite a few-- since the kids have left the house and I don't have to worry about waking them up in the morning while I'm working. Before I finished, I'd already plotted out a basic timeline and potential costs and pitfalls before judging the priority of each project.
So why do I research projects such as these, I thought suddenly, but I refuse to do so for video games?
Well, that one's kind of easy: I'd rather figure that out myself since, by and large, whether I fail or succeed at a video game won't directly affect my life.
But screwing up a deck rebuild just might, especially if it collapses while I'm standing on it.
That's fair, I decided as I left the dealership. Despite the opinions of a certain subset of gamers, games don't rise to the level of seriousness found when you're doing repairs or a project around the house. If you've ever had to pay a plumber to show up and fix your fuck-up, you know what I mean.
By extension, if I like playing MMOs, why don't I do more than play one or two toons?**** I just play pretty much one character in a type of game that encourages multiple playthroughs with different types of characters, so why don't I follow along?
Looking back on my game playing, once you get beyond my stand by games such as Sid Meier's Civ series, some of the Total War games, and some other city or civ builder games, I really pretty much stick to a couple of characters. The only real exceptions to this are Stardew Valley and SWTOR; the former you could argue doesn't rise to the story level of a BG3 or World of Warcraft, and the latter I did play through (almost) each class once just to see all of the stories.
(Confession time here: I never finished the Imperial Agent's story in SWTOR; I'm at the end of Taris as far as the story goes, and I kind of left it at that and haven't been back since. So... 8-10 years, maybe? Then again, the reason why I don't play SWTOR much at all has to do with the broken companion pathing, and since that hasn't been fixed in at least 5 years I doubt it will ever get fixed.)
***
The funny thing is, I don't feel like I'm not enthusiastic about video games, it's just... Well, if everybody does it, why should I do it?
It's not as if I haven't leveled new characters before. I went through the stage of starting a new toon for each new expansion in WoW, and I quickly discovered that if I wanted to examine content solo, that was the way to go. By the time the two toons I was leveling in Cataclysm reached their first L80-81 zones, they were mostly empty. And Mists... Well, Pandaria was worse, because Pandaria really was empty. The only exceptions to that were the areas where there were farming dailies and location of that Black Dragon who gives out the legendary questline (whose name escapes me); beyond that there were times when the number of people in a zone were less than 5. Believe me, that starting area once you land in Pandaria would have been a lot easier if I had some more bodies around, but starting out with quest greens from Deepholm and Uldum (which was where I dinged L85) and jumping straight to Pandaria wasn't a fun time either.
I suppose that my experiences leveling those toons in a post-Cataclysm world may have something to do with my lack of desire to level multiple alts, but at the same time game companies have come up with all sorts of ways to speed up the leveling experience itself. Less pain all the way around, right? That might work if you're inclined to level multiple toons and the leveling itself is getting in your way, but... I'm just not really interested.
***
I've seen it bandied about that when you play WoW, you're a WoW player. There's not much room for another game when you play WoW, because playing WoW will consume all of your available time. I do have a bone to pick with that assertion, as I know plenty of people who play multiple MMOs and play other video games on a regular basis. That being said, there's more than a kernel of truth to that statement. If you plot out leveling all of your alts so that you have all of your professions covered and/or all of your potential mains raid ready, well, that takes time. And all of the speedy leveling experiences in the world won't eliminate the time sink of maxing out a half dozen or more toons over the course of an expac.
(Somewhere an altoholic laughed until they wheezed, because they likely have 30 toons to level in the upcoming Retail WoW expansion.)
I guess it comes down to what I want to do with my time. Do I enjoy the leveling experience so much that I want to repeat it a dozen times over? Or even a couple of extra times? And even if I do, will I want to speed along at the pace offered me, or do I want to poke around, doing it my way?
Bender is missing that middle finger, and we're missing "Don't You Forget About Me" playing in the background, but you get the idea. From Tumblr. And The Breakfast Club.
*In an era of dozens of potential toons 3 may not sound like a lot, but when you consider that the toons I've played to a significant degree in Retail WoW are only 6, then 3 is about 50% of my WoW toons.
**The other two being melee DPS (Enhancement) and Healer (Restoration/Resto).
***Before you ask, while I'd like to do this stuff myself, I don't have the tools to make it happen. And I'll be honest in that a car built in October 1996 could decide to give up the ghost at any moment, so I'd rather bring ol' Putt-Putt to a shop that actually has people who have worked on this generation of Hondas before.
****Or replay long story driven video games like other gamers do? Such as finishing Baldurs Gate 3 then restarting the game with a different main character and a different class. Or one of the Mass Effect stories, but with a different person to romance. Or replaying one of the Diablo games ad infinitum.
EtA: Not sure what happened, but was missing half of a sentence. Corrected. Also, corrected a formatting error.
Saturday night, I wasn't doing much, just hanging out in Darnassus in between Alterac Valley runs.
Or a raid. Or a dungeon run. Or... You get the idea.
Until this happened...
I looked up from my typing and found this:
Yeah, your eyes don't deceive you, she was up close in my grill:
I wasn't planning on moving, but I certainly entertained the thought. Of course, that could be what she wanted, so I flirted back just to call her bluff.
But nothing happened. She didn't respond, and neither did I. Since I knew the Alterac Valley Battleground was going to pop in probably 5 minutes or less, I decided to just stand there and watch a YouTube video with WoW up in the background until that happened.
It was an uncomfortable silence.
But then the BG finally alerted, so I winked and went to the Battleground:
Since my oldest is now going to be a Wisconsinite*, I figured that this Meme Monday ought to deal with some of the quirks --gaming and otherwise-- from my fellow Midwesterners.
Yes, we passed Lake Geneva on the way to Milwaukee. Lake Geneva is the home of Gary Gygax, the co-creator of D&D, and the original home of both TSR (the publisher of D&D) and Gen Con.
That's a 'Draw Four' I could get behind. From The Chive.
Yes, it's funny, but it is also not a joke. I've seen it done. From Cheezburger.
Yeah, tornadoes and other severe weather events (minus hurricanes) are pretty much a staple here. From Cheezburger.
This week, we moved my oldest and her partner up to Milwaukee.
Her partner had gotten a job up in Milwaukee, and so they both moved north of Chicago farther up along Lake Michigan.
My job was driving the U-Haul from Cincinnati --where we added some of my oldest's stuff-- up to Dayton, where we loaded her partner's boxes and whatnot.
This was early on in the loading process.
I was met up in Dayton* by my youngest, who was lugging up from Louisville an old kitchen table her boyfriend was unloading, and we put that in the truck as well. Then we went back home to Cincinnati, leaving the truck up north, to get some rest before the epic trip.
Early in the morning on Wednesday we drove up to Dayton, and I settled into my seat for the next several hours.
It's a Ford E-Series engine (something you'd find on a Ford Econoline). It's not well known for being a quiet engine, and the sign saying "the floor will get warm" didn't endear me to the cabin.
Having driven a U-Haul across town back home when I moved my son into his and his partner's apartment, I knew what awaited me: noise.
Sure, THAT U-Haul was a Dodge and this was a Ford, but it still was going to be a noisy ride. I did have one saving grace: I put on my earbuds and plugged into my smartphone, so if people tried to get a hold of me I could talk without fumbling for the phone. The earbuds cut out most of the noise, and I could listen to music and podcasts along the way.
Gentle, my ass.
We took off, and my oldest and her partner, her partner's sister, and the guinea pigs quickly pushed ahead. My wife and youngest were in our Honda CR-V and followed suit, and I lumbered along behind in the U-Haul. At least the U-Haul had air conditioning and automatic transmission, because it was not the most pleasant thing to drive. There was also no cruise control, so between the rough steering and constant need to put my foot on the accelerator, I had no opportunity to get distracted.
Okay, I wasn't driving a big rig, nor did I have
a CB radio, but it certainly felt like what I was
doing as I followed the semis heading west.
The trip west to Indianapolis, and then north to Chicago, reacquainted me with the Indianapolis highways in a way that the trip up I-74 to Gen Con never did.
THIS!!
As soon as we crossed the border from Ohio to Indiana on I-70, the roads almost literally went to shit.
I bounced along like I was driving a trampoline, and I was eternally grateful that I moved the container of cleaning materials from the top of a mountain of boxes to the floor, right next to the truck's sliding door. And what had to have been a cruel joke, all of these signs along I-70 kept proclaiming that Indiana was building "Next Gen Roads".
"How about making your roads CURRENT GEN instead of these pieces of shit!!!" I shouted more than once.
Nevertheless, I pressed on while listening to an episode about Elizabethan Spycraft from Professor Suzannah Lipscomb's Not Just The Tudors podcast. Yes, I am SUCH a nerd.
Somewhere before I reached Indianapolis itself, I discovered another truth about U-Haul trucks: they are thirsty bois.
Putting it on the truck doesn't make it true.
I filled up the gas tank before I reached Indy, and again before I reached I-94 up at the northern edge of Indiana. Holy crap was that tank gigantic, and even more than that was the hole in my wallet after each pit stop.
After that last pit stop --with a short break for lunch sandwiched in between at the exit for West Lafayette, the home of Purdue University-- I spent a miserable time driving through mid-afternoon traffic in Chicago.
There wasn't a point where I was at a standstill, but I crept along just slowly enough so that I couldn't take any pictures of the sights, such as the downtown skyline or a view of Lake Michigan. Or this building:
I was not expecting to see this in Chicago. From LinkedIn.
I knew Steelseries is a Danish company, so when the Steelseries building in Chicago appeared in front of me, I was surprised. Again, I had to fight the truck the entire way through Chicago, so there was no moment where I could take a pic of the building itself.
My drive through Chicago was made more painful by the reality that I didn't want to deal with the toll roads. If I were driving my own car I'd have no issues paying the tolls, but I was driving a rental and I wasn't dealing with anything that might cause me to have to pay U-Haul some extra money. So... I ended up getting off of I-94 out of Chicago and onto US Route 41 until we reached the Wisconsin border. Once there, no tolls awaited us so we got back onto I-94 and away we went.
***
Even though Wisconsin and Ohio are both part of the Midwest, you knew you were in Wisconsin when the first billboard I saw was for a place called "On The Border", a "Gentlemen's Club" in Franklin, Wisconsin.
"Wow," I said to myself. "You don't see that in Ohio."
Not that those clubs don't exist in Ohio, but that they had actual billboards for them on the highways. At worst you'd see the occasional billboard that says --and I kid you not-- "Love Stuff up ahead". I always imagined 'Love Stuff' being said with Isaac Hayes' low voice, which is something I simply can't imitate.
There's another thing that let me know that I was in Wisconsin:
Yes, they take their cheese seriously in Wisconsin. Again, too busy to drive to take a pic. From Wikipedia.
The Mars Cheese Castle is very much a thing --we visited it once when we were up for a friend's wedding back in 2004-- and given that my oldest loves cheese, she'll likely become a regular customer.
Milwaukee itself wasn't what I expected. Throw out any images in your head that were driven by old episodes of Laverne and Shirley --or even the knowledge that breweries such as Miller, Pabst, and Schlitz call Milwaukee home-- because they don't really fit the reality. The downtown skyline doesn't look as impressive as Chicago, Cincinnati, or Cleveland, but the layout is much nicer and cleaner, and there are tons of old buildings still around. The weather was in the upper 70s with a nice breeze blowing off of Lake Michigan, and people were out and about in both downtown and along the lake shore. Parks covered the shore, as well as marinas and a beach and the Milwaukee Art Museum, and joggers and families were enjoying the early evening.**
I took this photo of the Milwaukee Art Museum after we dropped off the U-Haul. Yes, your eyes don't deceive you, it looks like a yacht.
The apartment itself was in the upstairs of a renovated building that dated from 1913, less than a mile from Lake Michigan. The first floor contains shops while the upstairs floors all had been renovated into modern apartments. My oldest completely lucked out in how nice the entire neighborhood looked. Sure, there's the obligatory Starbucks, but there was also a small bookstore, several nice restaurants, some quirky shops, and even a small repertoire movie theater. Oh, and a hospital is about 1/2 mile away, so there's that as well.
Now, all I had to do was park the damn truck.
It took a while to find a spot, and I became very acquainted with the narrow roads and the beautifully maintained century old houses ringing the neighborhood, but I finally "created" one by parking in a "private parking only -- violators will be towed" spot behind the apartment and emptied the truck. Then a short trip back through downtown Milwaukee --which included the beautiful Historic Third Ward-- and to the U-Haul spot to drop the heap off, and that was that.
***
The guinea pigs did survive the trip, although the weren't so sure about the new place until the very end of our stay. By then, they were happily munching on treats and begging for more.
As for us, we grabbed some dinner at the end of the block at a local bar, and set out for home.
We originally intended to get through Chicago and then grab a hotel for the night, but after making it that far, we decided to rotate drivers and just push on to home. I won't bore you with the details, as it involved a lot of dozing along the way when I wasn't driving, but we made it back home at around 8 AM EST. My youngest and my wife grabbed showers and then slept, but I simply konked out. Several hours later, my youngest went back to Louisville, where she was working that evening assisting with the front ensemble for one of the local high schools' marching band, and we began our career as (semi) empty nesters. I say "semi" because our youngest is still in college and may yet come back home after graduation, but we'll see.
***
So now you know what I was up to this past week.
Since I was determined to basically keep a low profile, I wrote up a bunch of posts beforehand and scheduled them to post over the course of the week.
Now, when we go back to Milwaukee to visit, I ought to see about getting a six-pack of Schlitz just to say that I tried it. And for those who remember how Schlitz' owners pretty much destroyed the brand by trying to go cheap with the brewing process, the original recipe is back and is being made in small batches.
*Technically speaking it was Huber Heights, a suburb just north of Dayton, but nobody outside of SW Ohio knows much of anything about Huber, so let's just say it's Dayton and leave it at that.
**Not to put a damper on this, but I'm sure that by winter this weather will be rather brutal.
EtA: I corrected some grammar and the missing link to Laverne and Shirley's theme song, which includes highlights from the show. In case you didn't notice, Laverne and Shirley worked at mythical "Shotz Brewery", a riff on Schlitz Brewery.
I've played my share of RTS games such as Age of Empires and its descendants, and while some require more hands-on activity* than others, I've found that the RTS that focuses on civ and/or city/settlement building is the right sort of RTS for me.
Part of my first base in Planetbase. I need to design better so that I don't have too many chokepoints.
Dawn of Man is pretty much as it sounds: an RTS where you guide a settlement from the Paleolithic through the Iron Age. In addition to the traditional RTS problems with occasional baddies showing up to attack your settlement, there are issues with food, shelter, clothing, wild animals, and religion to contend with.
My little settlement is doing so well it now has a satellite fort to the north.
Planetbase is actually older than Dawn of Man and it involves building a settlement on a remote planet. The difficulty can scale up if you unlock enough gameplay in your current difficulty level, but I don't think it's necessary to do that to enjoy the game.
I know the biggest downer that people have with both games is that the pacing may be so relaxed that you have to frequently speed up the game to keep moving forward. Yes, you can manually switch the game speed, and if you've got downtime of a season or so in Dawn of Man, for example, speeding up the game is a really good idea.
Another issue you have to manage that I forgot to mention is that of resources: mines can get played out and crops can contract diseases. People can become sick and die, and if they're a critical person (such as the only person who knows how to repair a robot in Planetbase, for example) that becomes a huge problem that could sink a settlement. Or, perhaps most insidious of all, is having too much of a good thing and have so many people come to join your settlement that your production and crops can't keep up.
Still, for those who --like me-- are happy with a relaxed pace to a game, both titles are worth pursuing. I'd pick them up when on sale --as always-- just to see if it's worth the purchase.
*And stress, especially when there's a zerg rush going on and you don't have quite enough defenses ready to handle it.
Here's an interesting thought: what if Blizzard simply eliminated leveling entirely in Classic Plus and made everything skill based?
As in: if you do something --blacksmithing, fighting with a sword, casting spells, etc.-- your skill ranks go up. If you get high enough skill ranks, you can wield better gear, but that gear doesn't impact your abilities nearly as much as your own skill ranks do. The primary focus of the game is doing things so you get better at them.
But here's the kicker: you can't get better at those things in instances or in PvP. You have to get better at your skills by doing quests out in the open world. Each quest is assigned a skill level --for example, the quest to kill Defias Pillagers in Westfall would be a skill rank of 30-- and if your weapon skill you're using to kill the Defias Pillagers is less than 30, it would be harder to accomplish because the Pillagers would have more weapon skill than you. But if you head back to beating on lesser enemies for a while to get your skill up, you'll find that those Pillagers are a lot easier since you are now equal to or higher than their own weapon skill. In one respect your skills are similar to class levels, but your skill ranks don't go up after completing a quest (you do get gear and/or gold for that). You go up in skill ranks by performing actions out in the world irrespective of whether you're doing the quests.
If you want gold or gear, do the quests. If you just want better skill, go beat on enemies out in the field.
If you want to gain skill ranks faster, kill enemies above your skill rank or perform actions that stretch your capabilities. People are used to that if they try to farm something in WoW (such as ore or herbs) and fail. If you only stick to killing enemies worse than you, you gain skill ranks more slowly or not at all. And if you're grouped up, the number of hits you make on an enemy determines your skill rank adjustment, so you can't join a group where one person pulls the entire dungeon, killing enemies so you get the XP.
That would eliminate the boosting process, because the only way you would be able to get better and yet not be the person doing the work would be to have someone take over your account and do it for you, which would not only be dangerous to your personal finances but likely a violation of your Terms of Service.
However, that would also require compelling gameplay and story to drive people's interest in playing, and let's be fair, Blizzard has had its ups and downs as far as crafting a good story.
I'm probably overthinking this, because Blizz is never going to deviate from their tried and true methodology of levels and XP acquisition, because there are too many people who like it just the way it is. They may complain about it --okay, WoW players complain about everything-- but when push comes to shove they aren't giving it up one bit.
The main reason why I enjoy WoW's Classic Era is that the leveling process is slow and steady.
Yes, it can be grindy, but the basic design of Vanilla WoW was that leveling was a good portion of the game, and the WoW community in general has moved on from that perspective to a primary focus on Endgame. If that weren't the case, in-game boosts and leveling guides and even externally paid level boosts* wouldn't exist.
For all people like to claim that it's not the destination, it's the journey, we certainly see plenty of people ignoring that journey in their rush to get to the end.
Thank you, Prince Humperdinck. From Imgflip and The Princess Bride.
But for me, the slow yet steady leveling pace of Classic Era takes all of the pressure off of me. I know where I'm going, but I already have been to the mountain, so I'm not worried about how quickly I get there.
And besides, I only know how to play two classes in Era --Mage and Rogue-- so I'd have to start from scratch to learn how to play a new class.** Nowhere better to start than in a game that has the journey as one of the key design pillars.
***
I realize that even in Classic Era I'm in the minority, judging by the number of people who get boosted or advertise for boosts. The reality is that I can't make somebody like a leveling experience if they're predisposed to not enjoy it, and it is foolish to try. All I can do is point out that the pace of leveling in Classic Era is perfect for Classic Era. Accelerating it, as has been done in Season of Discovery, only served to push people to whatever the Endgame was at each phase of the seasonal release. Given that Classic Era doesn't have all that many things to do at Endgame, there's an increased risk of losing your players because "there's nothing to do!"
Still, I need to point out that the leveling environment in Classic Era just works. You get a few levels, you have to spend gold to train. Your gold is depleted, so you go craft or gather and sell on the market, go out and quest some more, and go up a few levels. Rinse and repeat.
There's only one major area where this breaks down, and it's the low L40s. Questing kind of dries up for a while because the quest chains out of Dustwallow Marsh and Azshara were left in an incomplete state, and the major instance to visit, Uldaman, has low L40s content only in the first half of the dungeon. Once you hit the mid-L40s, the rest of Uldaman becomes viable and Zul'Farrak and Maraudon open up.
But I'm willing to give Blizzard a mulligan on that gap, because overall the game simply works.
Life is a journey too, and I'd hate to wake up one day at 80 years old, look around, and say, "What did I miss?"
*Whether to Blizzard or some nebulous third party.
**I did that in TBC Classic as an Enhancement Shaman, but only at a highly accelerated rate. Were it not for those low levels, however, I'd not know how to play Enhancement at all.
Under the header of "Everything is Cyclical", people are returning to WoW Classic Era.
How do I know, you might ask?
Because we actually have Alterac Valley Battlegrounds being played when it isn't even AV Weekend.
What you see here are the number of Alterac Valley Battlegrounds in the mid-afternoon on a Monday.
For six months or more, the number of AV Battlegrounds you'd see --no matter the time of day-- would be ZERO. Unless, of course, it's AV Weekend, where you get bonus honor for playing Alterac Valley on those days.
This past weekend was most definitely not AV Weekend, yet there were on average three or so AV battlegrounds happening concurrently. Even at 1 AM Server Time. It felt good to see that BG window pop within 15 minutes, whereas it had been simply not popping at all.
I don't know the reason why people are coming back to play in Era once more (go ahead and post your wild speculations in the comments if you're inclined) but it is good to see them here.
While I realize a lot of people my age are very fond of certain classic video game themes, such as that of Super Mario Brothers, I was a bit too old for the original NES and Super NES. So, Mario and The Legend of Zelda never really resonated with me.
I suppose you could say that I was of the Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man era, where the music was limited to a 4-5 second ditty at the beginning of the game:
As well as the intermission themes:
Still, you get the idea. Things were a bit minimalist back then, and not because the creators didn't want to add music, it's just there were limitations to the technology (and the associated cost).
Well, and that for a lot of arcade video games found at the check lane area of grocery and discount stores the sound was actually turned off*, so unless you went to an actual arcade you may not have heard the music at all.
My first real encounter with a video game's soundtrack beyond a short little ditty was that theme for Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar.
This is the version I was familiar with, for
the Commodore 64.
It's not a very deep theme by any stretch of the imagination, but when my college roommate began playing the game for the first time, the sound was a revelation.
You could draw a straight line from an Ultima IV through games such as Wing Commander and X-Wing, through Diablo and Baldur's Gate, up through Civ IV's Baba Yetu to today's games. There's always something in there to draw inspiration from, and while some people play video games with the soundtrack muted, the music is well worth a listen.
***
I guess that it was inevitable, but all the above was prelude to the announcement that the (now) venerable Battle Bards podcast has ended. Eleven years is a long time for a podcast's run, and Syp, Syl, and Steff gave us years of great video game music. I know it was only Syp and Syl for the past few years, but I'll always think of the three of them when I think of Battle Bards.
My personal favorite of their podcasts was very early in their podcast career: their interview with Chance Thomas, the composer of LOTRO's Riders of Rohan Soundtrack. Were it not for that interview, I'd not have gotten up the nerve to contact Mr. Thomas and see how I could purchase the score to Theme for Rohan, as it seemed to me that it could be adapted to a high school orchestra.**
I'm amazed how young Taylor Davis looks
in this video. I guess we've all gotten older in
the 12 years since this video first aired.
I wish the Bards luck in their future endeavors, and I'll miss their voices.
Now to listen so some more music...
*I don't know if my experience was the same as others, but there were always complaints about the noise from arcade video games, so the sound was frequently turned down/switched off at the request of the store owners.
**Mr. Thomas did confirm that the piece could be adapted for high school (or even middle school).
As I've gotten older, I tend to have... aftereffects... when I perform physical labor.
Working on the deck has reacquainted me with an aching back and arms, and ripping out the invasive honeysuckle that were crowding out our shrubs gave me sore shoulders that lasted a week.
So, I turn this week to aging in a gaming context.
I owned an MMO mouse for a little over a year before it broke and I went back to a simpler one. I found that a trusty basic style works better for me. From Reddit.
Just remember to bring the Tylenol and the heating pad for afterward. From Pinterest.
Sure... And I like Civ IV too... From Facebook's RPG Lovers group (and FF XII memes).
I can identify with both panels now. From X. No, not Xavier University, but that other thing.
Yesterday was a beautiful, sunny day. Not humid at all, and a pleasant breeze coming from the northwest.
A good day to finish off this batch of wood for the deck:
10 year old grill not included.
I flipped over and began working on the side of the deck closest to the porch, so I could exploit the wood I had left. I could cut out the bad sections of the replacement decking and still have enough left to replace these small pieces. That photo is kind of deceptive, however, as the board lengths rapidly grew to requiring 12 foot boards.
I have now exhausted that first batch of wood and have about 60% of the deck rows left to replace. The length of the rows isn't nearly as important as the number of rows, because the number of cuts on the saw will be the same for most of what's remaining. I'm thinking of getting one batch of wood in September and then another in October, and that ought to finish up the decking. All I'd have to do then is wait until Spring or early Summer to paint the deck.
Oh yeah, and begin Phase 2 of the rehab: the railings and stairs.
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