On Being Debriefed

Now that the story is fully posted, I can take a deep breath and relax.

Once I started in on the tale, I didn't expect to be flirting with a novella length story*, but that's what ended up. I know it's cliche to say it, but the characters themselves insisted on a manuscript this size, although I did chop off quite a few words during editing.** Cardwyn in particular shoved me out of the way and took over the keyboard, insisting that "this was how it happened".

I originally started this project writing in third person, but it just didn't feel right. I personally prefer third person, because you can get multiple viewpoints from scene to scene, but once I converted to first person the story flowed much better. There are events behind the story that Card was never going to know --at least at the time, anyway-- so I had to create a cheat sheet with a timeline to keep everything straight.

***

One thing I immediately decided upon, however, was to expand the size of Azeroth. As of now, in both Classic and Retail, Azeroth is just big enough to allow people to travel and keep things interesting going from point to point. In much the same vein that Turbine/Standing Stone took towards creating LOTRO, if Azeroth were as large as it really should be, there'd just be tons and tons of walking around with absolutely empty countryside. Think of it this way: in LOTRO, you can ride from Bree to Rivendell within a day of game time whereas in Tolkien's Middle-earth it would have taken close to a week's riding travel to get there.***

An ancillary point is that according to the map of Elwynn Forest, there's a grand total of four farms present in the zone, with one of them a vineyard and another a pumpkin patch. That's simply not enough farmland to feed all of Goldshire, let alone Stormwind. Walking (not jogging) from where Guard Thomas is stationed at the stream near the logging camp to Goldshire is something around 15-30 minutes of game time, which makes sense only from a plot/game perspective.

Based on all of this, I essentially blew up Elwynn Forest into a super-sized version --complete with many more farms-- which also means that Goldshire takes on more importance as a regional farming hub than the WoW Classic version would allow. Consider the difference between Troyes and Paris in Medieval France: while Paris was the center of the monarchy, Troyes was a major trading hub in the Medieval period, enough to command its own fairs and draw people from throughout the region. Troyes even has its own cathedral, which is a very big deal in Medieval Europe.

There were other items, however, that I did not tinker with.

I knew in general what Evelyn and the others could do, and also knew that the four veterans (Balthan, Daryn, Evelyn, and Mona) were considerably more experienced than the Defias they were facing. That also meant that in game terms they were significantly higher level than the Defias, so they should have been able to steamroll the Defias in a fair fight.**** The leaders of the Defias gang undoubtedly knew this, and even though they thought they were originally going to fight just Daryn and Mona, they decided to use as many dirty tricks for leverage as they could. But once the actual fight began, I had to keep in the back of my mind whether things that Evelyn in particular did were possible within the context of the game.*****

***

In addition to this being Cardwyn's story, I wanted to keep any involvement from the "main" WoW NPCs to a minimum.

If there's one thing that bugs me the most about the WoW stories that Blizz puts out, they always focus on the "big players" within Azeroth. What makes WoW --and especially WoW Classic-- tick is that it's us, the players, who have the direct involvement in the story. And WoW Classic in particular doesn't elevate us to the level of the power brokers in Azeroth, and it doesn't try to either. You might be part of the army --represented in game by 40 person raids-- that takes down Onyxia, but you're not Luke Skywalker or Aragorn. At best, you're somewhere around Fatty Bolger's level#, who had a part to play but was one of many.

But the WoW books spend so much time on the "big players" that they miss the point of what makes WoW interesting: us.

I was determined that Cardwyn's story would not involve the "big players" at all, because this is a story about, well, us. No nobles, no kings, no high priests, no faction leaders, just people. Even the NPCs aren't exactly high up in anybody's command structure, and although at least one mid-high level NPC is mentioned in the story, there's no guarantee that he'll play a part in any subsequent tale. Additionally, there's no guarantee that Balthan is as well connected as he thinks he is. After all, the guy drinks at taverns all over Azeroth, and I can't imagine a faction leader --or their immediate subordinates or even their subordinates-- doing just that.##

That doesn't mean that along the way Card won't run into some people who qualify as "big players", but the story won't be about them, but Card herself. And I'm happy with that, because while I can wander over to Stormwind Castle, I don't have quest markers over the big players in the throne room. At least at the same rate as you find in some of the later expacs, anyway.

But an astute reader will figure out who Card's older sister is, and yes, that was deliberate. I always thought there was a story there with her, and I decided to tie that NPC in with Card's story. In as much the same way as the Blue Recluse barker or Ol' Emma roaming Stormwind, these are the stories I really want told.

No more "big player only" stories in Azeroth, please.

***

There is one last item, and it is presently driving me nuts, but Cardwyn will simply. not. shut. up.

It was as if I'd opened the floodgates, as once I finished this story Card has been bugging me, showing me scenes for other stories and other people, and insisting that these stories be told as well.

That's great and all, but I don't think it's going to happen just yet. And besides, I don't want to turn this blog into a fan fiction blog. I am also aware of my own limitations. I'm not that great at description, and while I don't aspire to be a Robert Jordan with his walls of descriptive text it would be nice to figure out how to describe things a bit better than the spartan level I presently can attain.

And although I'm grateful that Ancient allowed me to use Kitwynn, I don't want to create the Kit and Az Show. I do admit that it could be hilarious in its own way, but I don't want to take creative control over Kit. She belongs to Ancient, and I really like it that way.

***

So there it is, my big debriefing about One Final Lesson, and I'm glad I wrote it. It's something so unlike the rest of PC's output that I understand that people may not be that interested in it, but the concept behind the story was something that had been bugging me for quite a while. While I'll freely admit that when I hear "fan fiction" I immediately have "Rule 34" pop in my head, I knew that if I was going to make this story work I wasn't going to come within 10 miles of anything like that type of fan fiction.

Thanks for being patient with me for putting the story out in several posts.




*According to SFWA guidelines for the Nebula awards, a novelette is 7500 - 17500 words, and a novella is 17500 - 40000 words. One Last Lesson clocks in at roughly 18975 words, give or take some 10 words as I'd made some last minute tweaks that I need to add back to the original Word doc.

**The original draft finished at over 20000 words. I guess I tend to be a bit wordy.

***I should point out that unless you've invented the Middle-earth Express, horses can't be expected to be pushed to their limits everyday without collapsing. The same thing goes for people walking from Bree to Rivendell; I can see 10 miles per day on a normal pace (and remember a "normal pace" also includes stopping time for food/rest/camp setup before dark), and maybe twice that on a forced march, but keeping a forced march up for weeks will not leave the army with enough energy at the end to fight in melee.

****And in the end it was.

*****Yes, it could be done, if she was a Frost Mage and blew all her CDs. The only item added for dramatic effect was the time it took for the frozen Defias Mage to thaw. Typically it takes much less time in-game than what it was in the story, but as Card said, she kind of overdid it.

#If there's one thing that drives me nuts about the LOTR movies, it's that a couple of smaller but memorable characters, such as Fatty Bolger, had to get cut. Don't get me wrong, I love the movies, and I'm not really complaining about Tom Bombadil either, but I felt Fatty got the short shrift based on how Peter Jackson put the four hobbits together as opposed to the books. It also made Pippin more of comic relief rather than simply naive.

##If you strip away their responsibility, I could see a few of them doing so --particularly Magni Bronzebeard-- but the thing is that they can't. Their situation does not allow them that luxury at all, and to be honest once they get far enough removed from the common people they lose all sorts of perspective. Think of Prince Hal in Henry IV Parts 1 and 2: he goes out drinking and has a grand old time, but once he becomes king he has to put those aside for the serious business of ruling. What he effectively tells Falstaff and his drinking buddies is "I don't know you" once he becomes king.

One Final Lesson -- Part 6/6

Previous Installments:

One Final Lesson -- Part 1
One Final Lesson -- Part 2
One Final Lesson -- Part 3
One Final Lesson -- Part 4
One Final Lesson -- Part 5

When I woke the next morning, I felt immeasurably better. Mom was up and moving, if slower than her usual self, but she told me she'll feel better the longer she follows her daily routines. Evelyn and the first Kaldorei cleaned up my blood in the hallway last night; when I asked the Kaldorei how she knew to do that, she said "You don't want to know."

After breakfast I sat down with Mom, Dad, and Mistress Evelyn.

"You're certain you want to go through with this?" Dad asked.

I nodded. "Yes."

"Very well. The three of us talked, and Evelyn believes you have the making of a good Mage. She also believes that you need more practice, and that reporting to Deputy Willem at Northshire Abbey would provide you with a good start. She also believes there is a Mage assigned to the detachment there at the Abbey, and that Mage can provide you with some basic instruction before you go to Stormwind."

"What about the message?"

"We agreed that you can deliver the message," Mom replied, "but only when the Northshire Mage determines it safe for you to reach Stormwind."

Where am I supposed to go, and what is SI:7 anyway?"

One Final Lesson -- Part 5/6

Previous installments:
One Final Lesson -- Part 1
One Final Lesson -- Part 2
One Final Lesson -- Part 3
One Final Lesson -- Part 4

Everything happened at once.

I cast the Frostbolt --well, not so much as cast but it escaped-- straight at the Defias Mage. No longer a puffball, it was densely packed iceball that shot straight ahead, leaving a long vapor trail behind it. 

The Mage jerked her arms upward as it smacked right into her chest.

A pair of shadows appeared right behind the two Defias holding Carys and Karyn, each plunging daggers into an arm and then the neck. I could see Carys and Karyn drop just as I heard the clang of daggers on cobblestone.

The Defias Mage hadn't moved. Bluish white ice spread from where my Frostbolt had hit her, encasing her in place.

As much as I wanted to jump up and down and cheer, I knew I only had moments. "Come on, Kit," I grunted as I burst out from the bushes. The throbbing in my head intensified as bile in my stomach lurched up toward my throat.

Evelyn raised her arms and the arcane burst forth in a blast of icy hell, freezing the Defias surrounding her. She then blinked out of view and I felt another burst of the arcane.

"Kill them all!" the lead Defias shouted just before he was bowled over by Dad. Balthan slammed into the Defias on the right and they collapsed on the ground.

"Get your weapons!" I heard Evelyn shout from somewhere to the left.

I reached the spot where Carys lay, still screaming. I flipped her over and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw there wasn't a nick on her at all. The Kaldorei was as good as her word. "Come on, Sprout," I said as I picked her up.

"CAR-WYN!!!" Carys shouted. "MAMA!! IT'S CAR-WYN!!"

I turned back to Karyn just as a Defias closed on her, dagger out. I tried to lunge for Karyn, but I was too slow; my head felt like it had split open, and while I managed to keep holding Carys I vomited all over the cobblestones.

A huge dark blur flew through the air and swatted the Defias away. The gigantic cat that nearly knocked me over in Stormwind let out a fierce roar and her jaws clamped down on Defias' neck. I heard a sickening crunch, and then another deafening roar from Kit.

My body was shaking uncontrollably as I wiped my mouth with my free hand. Something dark and red was dripping onto the ground next to me.

"Car-wyn, you're hurt!" Carys cried.

I nodded, unable to speak.

Karyn reached me and grabbed Carys, then offered an arm to me. I grabbed on and tugged in the general direction of the porch, and the three of us lurched over there like drunks leaning on each other for support. I collapsed on the top step and cradled my head in my hands.

"You're really hurt," Karyn whispered. "You're bleeding pretty badly." I heard cloth ripping, and then felt something pressed to my head.

"I'm supposed to be rescuing you, not the other way around," I croaked. I could hear sounds of fighting, punctuated with burst of arcane energy, but all I could do was moan a little.

"Oh Light," I heard Karyn whisper, terrified.

One Final Lesson -- Part 4/6

Previous Installments:
One Final Lesson -- Part 1
One Final Lesson -- Part 2
One Final Lesson -- Part 3

The wind whistled through the fields as I strolled, fishing rod in hand, to go down to the pond. Kira and Jas were out of sight ahead of us, but Linna was a step ahead of me, hopping along, as she was telling me she was going to catch a catfish as long as her arm. I grinned, as I knew she was lousy at fishing, but the day was young and we snuck out before Mom and Dad would notice. We reached the edge of the woods and I could hear Mom calling something, so I stopped and listened.

"Come on, Cardwyn!" Linna called out. "We're almost there!"

I heard Mom call again, and I waved Linna onward. If someone was going to get in trouble, let it be me first. What was she saying? 'Where's my makeup'? No, Mom never painted her face...

I concentrated harder.

Was it 'wake up'?  But I'm already awake.

Linna stomped her foot. "Cardwyn, let's go!"

"Wake up, Cardwyn, please wake up!" Mom's voice again. At first it was from across the fields, but now it sounded like she was next to me, closer than Linna.

The fields and the fishing pole and the impatiently waiting Linna all began to fade. I smelled iron.  

Wait. There was something here...

"Come on, Sweetie, please don't be dead!"

Dead? But I'm not.... Why would Mom think that? What was I doing? Was I in the fields? No, what was I...

THE DOOR. 

I threw the latch on the door and...

My eyes shot open.

One Final Lesson -- Part 3/6

Previous Installments:
One Final Lesson -- Part 1
One Final Lesson -- Part 2

Mistress Evelyn and Balthan wove through the crowded streets with such dexterity that I struggled to keep up, let alone follow their conversation. The dwarf's presence invigorated Mistress Evelyn, and she seemed younger than when she first arrived at our farm some hours ago.

"I don't know what happened to him," Mistress Evelyn was saying as we reached the bridge to the Mage District. "He used to always be out there in the field, working tirelessly to protect the weakest and most vulnerable."

"Give a man a little power and ye'll see what he's made of," Balthan replied. "Judging by his vestments he's not that high up in the Church hierarchy."

 "I just thought that he'd avoided the disease that afflicts the rest of the Stormwind nobility."

"There aren't that many that do, Evelyn. If those nobles aren't careful, someone's gonna chop 'em down to size. Look at Ironforge; there be just enough Dark Iron sympathizers out there to cause real trouble for the Bronzebeards, in spite o' all Thaurissan did. The Stormwind nobility is givin' some bad apples an excuse out there to rob the tavern, so to speak, and nobody has their watchful eye on the cask."

"Ah, Balthan, I've missed your way with words." Evelyn paused on the bridge to hug the dwarf, who looked embarrassed.

"I've missed ye, too, Evelyn. Where've ye been? I was hoping to see ye when I was last in Theramore."

"Retired. I was caught up in the Third War when I was visiting home and he came there, but aside from that I've taught quite a few of the children in eastern Elwynn and Lakeshire over the years. I wanted no more part in fighting caused by pride and stupidity."

The dwarf nodded. "Can't as say as I blame ye on that."

"So, I've been teaching all I can to try to rectify the 'stupidity' part. And also keep in touch with Daryn and Mona."

I felt there was an insult in there somewhere, but I wasn't exactly sure.

"How've they been?" Balthan asked.

"Really good, particularly given how things played out at the end. Daryn is still a bit bitter, but Mona has always been a hard read. This business might cause real problems for her."

"Speakin' o' stupidity," Balthan said, snapping his fingers, "I've been daft. I know someone who can help us out. She manages to get herself in all sorts o' trouble bein' in places she ain't supposed to, but she said she was gonna be here for another few weeks."

"Balthan, I've seen your so-called 'friends' before. How do I know she's reliable?"

"Reliable enough for me to trust her with running a message up to a friend in Southshore from Booty Bay. When I got here, I went to the Pig 'n Whistle, and sure enough the reply was waiting for me." Balthan turned back in the direction of the central part of Stormwind. "Lemme leave her a note and she'll catch up with us."

One Final Lesson -- Part 2/6

Previous installments:  

One Final Lesson -- Part 1

Traveling through the portal was one thing: first we were in our barn and then we stepped into a long room with stone walls and filled with bookshelves. But the sensation of moving was akin to a wave washing over me, stripping away all weariness and stress.

"Ah," Mistress Evelyn said. "That rush never gets old."

I felt around to be certain I still had my clothing, and just as I breathed a sigh of relief that I wasn't naked I realized we weren't alone.

Men and women in various colored robes milled about the room, some reading, others talking in small groups, and some few surrounded by larger numbers of people. All seemed to ignore the fact that two disheveled women --one old, one young-- just popped into their midst.

Evelyn tugged at my sleeve once more. "Let's move," she said. "It's not polite to block the portal."

I took a step or two forward, glanced behind me, and nearly tripped over myself. A huge ring of metal with glowing runes carved in it, at least 10 feet high, stood behind me. Within the ring was a swirling mist of green, brown, and white, obscuring anything else. Standing beside the ring was a woman in robes and holding an ornate staff, watching.

"Welcome to Stormwind," she said in a carefully neutral tone. "Please clear the portal for other arrivals."

"Thank you," Evelyn replied, and yanked at my sleeve a bit harder this time. "Try not to look like you were living out in the Hinterlands," she whispered to me.

I gulped and nodded.

"Just follow me," she said a bit louder. "I know the way."

We walked toward the far end of the room, where another portal awaited. To my right, staring at a bookshelf, stood an impossibly tall woman wearing a blue, black, and gray robe with gold trim. My head barely came up to her chest, but what drew my attention were the long, vertical ears that poked out from above her golden hair and angular face. She glanced our way and did a double take. 

"Evelyn!" she cried, crossing the distance between us in two long steps and embraced Mistress Evelyn. "It's been years! How have you been?"

"Elsharin," Evelyn replied with a smile. "My bones complain a bit more, but the years since we last met have been too long."

"I would imagine," Elsharin replied. She spoke in an accent I'd never heard before. "I can see you're in a hurry, so I won't keep you." She then turned to me, her grin turning mischievous. "Is this your apprentice? I thought you'd retired."

"I did retire, but I do still teach non-arcane subject matter for the most part. Cardwyn here is the daughter of friends."

"I'm sure she is. Greetings to you, Cardwyn," she added, folding her hands together in a formal manner.

I mimicked her action. "Greetings to you, Elsharin."

Her smile grew even wider and nodded, as if I'd passed some test. "I'm certain we'll see you two around here again. Please do stop by when you're finished with your business here; we've a lot of catching up to do, and I'd love to get to know young Cardwyn better."

One Final Lesson -- Part 1/6

(This is a rarity for PC: an actual work of short fiction. A month or two before I thought about writing this post, I pondered character motivation and backstory for my toons. Az would be a really tough nut to crack, given all sorts of contradicting issues regarding The Rogue Life with Darnassian society, but I thought there was something I could write about for Cardwyn. When the time came to actually start writing, I thought it would be a short piece in the same vein as my sole other work of fiction on the blog, but Card had her own thoughts on the matter. A month and a half and waaaay too many words later, this is the result.

Okay, part of the result. Rather than do a dump of the entire story, I decided to break it up into six parts so that any reader wouldn't be confronted with a wall of text. I also decided I was going to finish the entire story before posting, because I wanted to make sure I was going to see this through to the end. I inserted breaks because, well, it'd likely overwhelm the blog otherwise.

Some final notes: This is a work of fiction; any resemblance to any people, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Any characters created by Blizzard for WoW Classic remain their property. Kitwynn appears courtesy of Tome of the Ancient. This work of fiction uses WoW Classic as the reference point, no other version of WoW. This was written by Redbeard of Parallel Context, 2020.)

One Final Lesson

Mom looked out the window into the fields, her jaw set. Her hands kept up their steady pace kneading the dough, with only a slight tremor betraying their emotion.

Fold, turn. Fold, turn. Grab a scant handful of flour and dust the dough before folding once more.

I always wondered how she could keep up this work for what seemed like hours on end, as baking day wore me out by noon.

"We could use the gold, Mom," I began.

Her eyes flicked back to me for a moment, silencing me, before returning to the wheat growing beyond the fence.

I turned back to the oven, inserted the long wooden paddle, and nudged a rapidly browning loaf away from the coals. Tired or not, Mom would make me turn over the manure in the yard this afternoon if I burned one. "It's not like I was joining the army."

"Ah yes, the army," she spat. "Go and see the world, meet people, and get turned into a ghoul. Or worse."

My knuckles turned white as I clenched the handle. She didn't need to bring up Uncle Aeron this early in the argument.

"Where is the army, anyway?" she continued. "You'd think that they'd be back home now, especially since the Plague is now some someone else's problem."

I noted that her "someone else's problem" conveniently left out just whose problem the Plague was.

"But Mom," I said, "I'm talking about our home. With the army not here, we need all the help we can get. Did you see those people the other day? Even Dad was shaken last night. And Kira says—"

"I know what your sister says. I'm talking about our home too." She tore her gaze away from the window to set the finished loaf to one side, covering it with a damp cloth, before grabbing another wad of dough from the large bowl.

She dusted the dough with flour and began kneading. "Did Evelyn put you up to this?" she continued.

"No, Mom. I came up with it on my own." Well, that was only partially true, and we both knew it. Mistress Evelyn talked about Lordaeron and the gleaming towers of Dalaran whenever she would visit, and that the beauty of Dalaran put the Mage Tower in Stormwind to shame. Her faded Tirisfal accent made her stories more believable as well has her lessons more bearable: a touch of the exotic in a world of crops, food, family, and neighbors. The occasional trip to Goldshire was a poor substitute.

Mom grunted as she continued to knead.

"You can ask her, Mom. She'll be here this evening."

If anything, Mistress Evelyn would prefer I do something else entirely. "Very few outsiders ever joined the Kirin Tor, you know," Evelyn frequently said when I was younger, "but if you applied yourself to your studies, Cardwyn, I would sponsor you." I was skeptical as to how arithmetic and grammar would help me join the most powerful Mages in all of Azeroth, but I kept those misgivings to myself.

"Hmmpf." Mom attacked the dough with a vigor that said we'll see about that.

Despite her outward resistance, I felt that Mom was at least considering the idea. She and Dad, among many others in Elwynn, were veterans of the Second War, when we nearly lost everything to the Horde. The Third War was, to a large extent, someone else's war, despite us all being part of the Alliance of Lordaeron. Dad would be a tougher nut to crack, as he'd had his fill of fighting after the Second War and had a long and healthy distaste of what "those Light damned nobles" were cooking up in Stormwind. But if I could get Mom on my side...

"Hey!" Mom's shout shook me out of my reverie. "Get that bread out before it burns!"

I shoved in the paddle and pulled loaves out to the edge of the oven. My eyes narrowed as I focused on the bread and the oven's heat, whispering a sing-song that Evelyn had taught me. I then grabbed the loaves, which despite the shimmering heatwaves felt nice and cool, and tossed them into a basket. The scent of freshly baked bread filled my nostrils as I lugged my catch over to another table and set each loaf out. Steam curled off of the loaves as I flipped each over, inspecting them for blackened sections. Not too bad for someone who wasn't paying attention, I thought, nodding with satisfaction.

"We'll talk about this later," Mom said, dismissing me with a glance. "And go check the manure pit."

Conan Exiles -- TL DR: Wow, is this a Brutal Game

I downloaded and began playing Conan Exiles the other week.

When they say it's a brutal game, they're not kidding. I think I died more in two 1.5 hour sessions than Az died from her WoW Classic creation through Scarlet Monastery, and I'm not really exaggerating much.

And, I should mention, this was on the single player game.

Yikes.

If there's one thing I will say about Conan Exiles, Funcom got the Sword and Sorcery world of Conan pretty much dead on.

I'll have to collect my thoughts a bit later, given that I've not had enough time in-game to get everything squared away, and also that I have to go and read more online about whether my hunch of simply just killing animals and avoiding people for a long while is the right strategy. I suspect it is, because all of the NPCs seem to have metal weapons, and I'm stuck with pointy sticks at the moment.

I feel like I'm in a Conanesque version of Lord of the Flies.

Maybe I'm Overthinking This

 Okay, I KNOW I'm overthinking this....

One of the items that I've puzzled over the years were character backstories. I don't mean the multipage life history that some people write for their D&D characters*, but rather the motivation a character has to go adventuring in an MMO.

Now, LOTRO actually does a good job of this, because the entire intro zone --and the entire starting sequence-- for a player centers around why to go adventuring. The late MMO Wildstar also did a good job of this as well, but unless there's a private server out there Wildstar isn't coming back. But other MMOs kind of just plunk you into the starting zone --maybe with a brief narration, in the case of WoW-- and that's that.

Take the case of the Human starting zone: Northshire Abbey. You've answered the call for assistance as the army is elsewhere, yadda yadda yadda. But where's the motivation? The "why" behind the answering of the call?

For Humans, at least, there's the Three Wars, and for a Human adventurer the Second War is the War your parents would have fought in, and the Third War was only a few short years ago. But the Night Elves have a completely different motivation. I've not seen a Night Elf child throughout my wandering in Classic.** But I have seen Human and Orc children out and about. I suppose that means the focus is on Humans and Orcs, but given that Night Elves were (until the end of the Third War) immortal, if they had children at the rate Humans and Orcs had they'd be dealing with incredibly bad overpopulation problems.

So by extension, any Night Elf adventurer likely has been an adult for a pretty long time, and therefore has a different motivation for going out and adventuring than, say, a Human or Orc.

By contrast, some players such as Gnomes and Darkspear Trolls have built in motivations. Gnomes lost Gnomeregan, and Trolls are dealing with a potential usurper in the Echo Isles. A direct threat has a way of motivating people far more than a vague "come help us protect [insert locality here]". And once the direct threat is over, people who have had a taste of the adventuring life will keep going. Motivation solved.

But for me, the real conundrum is also the class itself. Warlocks are going to want power, Mages could go for power or knowledge, Warriors have that military/guard thing going, and Paladins have the Knights of the Round Table vibe. Druids have nature as their motivation, and Hunters... well... you kind of get the idea there. Priests do have the "tending the flock" prosleytizing motivation too. And Shamans I could see as a rough equivalent to Priests in that regard. But Rogues? They're a puzzle, especially once you try to combine a Rogue and a Night Elf. You'd think that any Night Elf with Rogue tendencies would have ended up in a Darnassian jail cell, and the same goes for a lot of the other races. There are those who go for the secret agent angle, but given that SI:7 is primarily a Human outfit, the non-Human Rogues really don't have an equivalent motivation until the Alliance ones (at least) get a quest to go visit SI:7.

I suppose these speculations are all just that, given that anybody can come up with a motivation and backstory for their character, but it does serve to make me wonder why Az does what she does.

And I can almost hear her say "I do what I do because I'm good at it," intentionally deflecting any attempt at understanding her.




*Not to downplay those, but I've gone back and reread some of my old backstories from my pencil and paper RPG campaigns back in the day, and boy do they make me cringe. I may have thought I was being edgy, but with the years of experience later what I thought was edgy was merely bad writing.

**Same with Dwarves, Gnomes, Tauren, etc....

We Pause the Blog for a Special Announcement

A year ago on February 23, my friend and fellow WoW, SWTOR, and Neverwinter blogger Shintar was married. I can't tell you how happy I am to wish her a Happy Anniversary!!

You know, I'm always surprised when
I see a real pic of Shintar that she doesn't
have the Cyber-thingie over her head.
From Shintar's Twitter feed.

Now, go wish her on her blogs (pick one, they're linked above) or her Twitter Feed (I linked that on her name) a Happy Anniversary!!

You Knew This Was Coming...

...when Warcraft 3 Reforged was released to a completely disastrous result. Here's the Honest Game Trailer of Warcraft 3 Reforged.

I Can Handle Low Key

The WoW Classic Valentine's Day event is pretty much low key, which is perfectly fine with me.

You're wondering if the Dwarf had
forgotten about you? And you're
dressed like that? Lemme explain
a few things about guys....

As far as I can tell, there aren't any raids to deal with, just general hijinks regarding giving the equivalent of Valentine's Day cards to people, a few candy-esque goodies, and a rather simple quest chain that ends with a short epiphany on seeing through the purely physical to the soul of what it means to love.

I'm not here to spoil the event, but I will say that it was kind of a fun, low key event that --at worst-- had some temporary items that took up bag space.* Not a big deal all around, but a brief diversion nevertheless. And yes, I did burn the temp items as quickly as I got them, because I wasn't about to lose out bag space for mats and other junk I can sell to vendors when I come back from questing/instances.

I guess you could opine on how love doesn't require people to have, well, stuff to make love work. People give candy and flowers for Valentine's Day all the time, and those are at best temporary. Even jewelry isn't that important if you really love someone, it's just an item that people don't frequently wear in their everyday lives** when you really think about it. But it's the thought that counts, I suppose, and that's what makes Valentine's Day meaningful to people.





*And one piece of non-stat gear formal wear, which is great for roleplaying or just hanging around one of the major cities. (Or Goldshire, I suppose.)

**Unless it was an engagement ring given as a gift!

Don't Wait! If You Act Now, We'll Add This Free Gear!!

If there's one thing that stays the same in Classic, it's change.

Or, more specifically, how I deal with guilds.

I'd gotten used to getting invites to guilds as just part of the game. I configured Classic to auto reject guild invites, but I would still get pings on the average of once a day. And not from people nearby or during 5-man runs (or other groupings), but just random guild invites. I treated those with politeness, and if they responded in kind I made a point to not specifically block them.*

The past few weeks, however, I've seen a complete sea change in guild invites.

The guild invites from grouping have pretty much dried up for now**, but the randoms looking to fill out raid slots have spiked. And since Cardwyn is in the low L40s right now, that means she's been getting no guild invites whatsoever. The guild invites that Az gets, as she's sitting at L54 as of this posting, include things like "we'll help you get to L60 so you can raid with us". Even after I point out that raiding isn't my priority, the guild invitees respond with "we've got raid gear for you, and we'll run PvP Battlegrounds as well!"

Now, I've not bothered to look at the needs for Onyxia, Molten Core, and UBRS runs, but I'm pretty sure that Rogues are kind of far down the list. After all, the best interrupt abilities of a Rogue don't necessarily work with non-humanoids, and one of the other abilities (Expose Armor) interferes with a Warrior's Sunder Armor and can cause a Warrior Tank to lose aggro during a fight.

Flattered? Yeah, sort of, but I'd rather not join a guild when they sound so obviously desperate.

Besides, I've kind of made it known enough times that I'm not that interested in joining a guild, because of my history of dealing with guild drama. I get that crap at work, and I don't need it following me home to my hobbies as well.

On the flip side, I do know at least one fellow player who is trying hard to find a guild that fits. She*** has been in a few guilds, but for some reason or another they simply don't work for her. All she really wants is a guild that she can run instances with at max level and just relax and have fun, but she hasn't found that yet. I've told her I'll keep an eye out, but I've not seen as many guild invites as before.

***

Guild invites are one thing that has changed, while another is that the Auction House has changed yet again.

When Az got her mount in the upper L40s, one sure way to generate gold was make Mageweave Bags and sell them on the AH. It wasn't a lot on Myzrael, but it was about 70-90 silver a bag. Silk bags went for about 40-50 silver, which was pretty good now. So among the fishing that Az performed --to get lockboxes and other assorted rarer fish used in cooking recipes-- I had Cardwyn make a bunch of Silk and then Mageweave bags, ship them over to Az, and have her sell them.

Now that it's time for Cardwyn to get her own mount, however, it looks like the Mageweave and Silk bag market has collapsed.

If anything, it looks like the mats market is doing better than expected, and I'm going to have to study it for a while. But it seems profoundly weird that I can sell bags to a vendor for more than what they're going on the AH right now. Runecloth is the major exception in the bag department, because unless you're willing to go with Mooncloth's pricing Runecloth is the best you can easily get.

I do suspect that part of the reason for the bag market collapsing is that enough people have alts that can easily create bags now, so there's not much of a need for bags from the AH. It also seems the same thing happened with lower level cloth gear, as I used to be able to sell some of that Cardwyn made gear for a decent profit and that has collapsed as well.

So.... Off to work on Cardwyn's fishing skills, I guess. Or start farming mats to sell on the AH.






*I only had to block one guy who simply wouldn't give up and take no for an answer, but in general they've been a decent enough bunch.

**Watch me get one the day this posts. It's just karma, you know.

***I'm going off of the toons she creates, as I've not actually heard her in Discord or something.

On Being a Student of the Game

There's an American sports term that's frequently applied to players who take the time to learn the nuances of their particular sport: "a student of the game". The term basically means that the player understands all aspects of a particular sport, and uses it to their advantage.* The hidden implication, however, is that the particular player in question succeeds because of their applied knowledge rather than their raw physical skills.

I was thinking of this when I was in yet another Scarlet Monastery run on Cardwyn the other day. For myself --and likely a lot of other people-- WoW Classic is familiar and comfortable. You don't have to have top flight physical skills to do a passable job as DPS in a dungeon, and due to how the data structures were configured for Vanilla (and now Classic), the abilities of bosses in both dungeons and raids were somewhat limited compared to, say, Wrath onward. For a person like me, who now qualifies for membership in the AARP**, this is a good thing.

Dungeons such as the Scarlet Monastery instances reward tactical skill and not strictly physical skill. You don't have to rely upon an MMO mouse such as the Razer Naga and then attempting to master it.*** to do well in SM; you need to know which baddie to kill first in a pack, how to perform LOS pulls, and the order in which you kill Whitemane and Mograine. (For the record, it's Him -> Her -> Her -> Him.) None of that stresses your physical skills. And for that, I'm eternally grateful.

Given that I've been wearing bifocals for most of the past decade and that I now require a magnifying glass for soldering electronics, I've been acutely aware of the gradual decline in my physical skills. Games that require tons and tons of button mashing in rapid fire fashion, such as MOBAs**** or an action RPG such as Diablo III, make my fingers and wrist ache after a short time. Inadvertent screw-ups, such as being late to an interrupt, plague me more than before. But a game such as Classic is more forgiving of physical limitations, especially given that I picked up the game at 40.

From that perspective, less is more, and I can focus less on the mechanics and more of the game itself.





*This isn't to be confused with university classes such as "Coaching Basketball". For those who are skeptical, yes, this is a thing, particularly if your university major is in something such as "Physical Education" or "Sports Management". Charlie Coles, the late basketball coach at Miami University in Oxford, OH, loved to teach that class. And because Charlie was a morning person, he had that class scheduled as the first one of the day.

**American Association of Retired Persons. To be a member, you have to be age 50+. You get some discounts at certain places, but the AARP is most well known as a lobby for senior citizens' issues. It doesn't have the clout it did 20 years ago, but it still does have some political power.

***I'd love to have a Naga, but my wife would not be able to cope with all the buttons. We have a Steel Series Sensei Raw, and while I love the mouse my wife forced me to lock most of the mouse buttons because she would constantly bump the buttons while using the PC and screw up her screen. Before you point out there are different profiles for mice, I frequently play games with browers and whatnot running in the background --because there are plenty of times when I'm on the PC and she comes over and decides she wants to use it at a moment's notice-- so I discovered those profiles were pretty useless. So if I wanted to use a gaming mouse to the fullest, I'd need an entirely new PC, which is a LOT more than the cost of a mouse.

****An ex-coworker of mine is the father of a well known elite LoL player, and he told me once that his son figured he had only a few years to be at the top of his game due to the demand on the body, and that he'd likely be gone from playing competitively at the highest level by age 28. Even discounting the fact that his son was playing at the highest level in competitive LoL play, you'd figure that most of the top raiding guilds in MMOs such as WoW constantly tweak their raid lineups and "retire" people whose physical skills start to drop off in their 30s and 40s.

A Few More Portia Thoughts

Even though I'm no longer playing My Time at Portia like a maniac, I still am playing to see where the stories go.

And, really, to see which NPC to romance.

I just kind of cringe at the "play date" portion of the game, because it feels like what a child would think that an adult "hanging out" or "date" would be like. Most adults I know wouldn't want to spend an entire play date swinging on swings or riding a seesaw. While those are obviously not required activities, you have to burn through a certain amount of activity in each play date, and that going back and forth from the game room area of the restaurant to sitting down and talking (either inside the restaurant or in the square) just burns up time you don't have.

I'm kind of a "bang for the buck" kind of person, and burning a lot of those "activity tokens" by traditional kid's playground activities delivers the most, so I end up using them a lot in spite of the "Really?? I mean REALLY??" aspect of them.*

One last thought about the play dates: why on earth would an NPC request to meet at one location and they say "Hey, let's do XXX!" which is about 1/2 hour walk away? Why not choose a better location for the starting of the play date in the first place? I get that it might be my choice when I initiate the request for a play date, but when the NPC initiates a date and selects a specific time/location, and then it's all on them to select an activity nearby.

***

There are some cut scenes that make me really want to push the game further, just to see what happens to the story. There's the main story, of course, and there's also the personal story of several characters. The thing that gets me is that only some of the NPCs you can romance have a fully interactive storyline, which kind of bugs me a bit. The ironic thing is that while the game kind of pushes you in the direction of one female and one male NPC --if you play the game you can figure out which is which fairly easily by the side quests they ask you to do-- one of the NPCs you have to actually go and seek out has a couple of cut scenes that are so fully fleshed out that it seems that at some point the devs believed most people would go and try to romance this character.**

I recognize that this is about as "romantic" as a G rated movie is concerned --no Mass Effect stuff (or even SWTOR stuff) here-- but in some ways the story is a bit more adult than I expected. It's a curious blend of kid friendly yet teen/adult-ish content.

***

My Time at Portia has the same save characteristic that Stardew Valley has: saves only happen when you go to sleep for the night, so you lose any activity if you quit the game during the day. This has led to me "pausing" the game by hitting the escape key or another key (such as i for inventory or m for map) and then doing something else around the house for a while because I don't want to lose my place in game. This has the unfortunate side effect of seeming to Steam like I'm playing it for a lot more hours than I really am. I think it told me I'd been playing it for over 100 hours by now, but over that time I think I've only truly played about 30 hours or so.

***

One final side note on MTAP: the adventurer's guild is known as The Flying Pigs. That might sound goofy to people, but me, I'm totally amused.

But not for the reason you might think.

My hometown of Cincinnati has a marathon that is known as The Flying Pig Marathon. It's called that because of Cincinnati's historical connection to the pork packing industry. In the 19th Century, so many hogs and pork processing was peformed in Cincy that it garnered the nickname "Porkopolis". To honor that part of the city's past, for Cincinnati's bicentennial back in 1988, the (then) newly created Bicentennial Commons had statues of flying pigs atop columns like so:

Courtesy of WVXU***

And so when I saw the posters and statue in Portia for The Flying Pigs, my first thought was "someone from Cincinnati must have worked on this project".


Not very likely, given that Pathea Games is a Chinese company, but still....




*Apparently play dates and dating options get better the farther you progress along the storylines, so we'll see.

**Maybe the baser instinct in me says that the devs figured this because "big boobs!", but it's not like she's the only character with a voluptuous build in the game.

***The article the pic came from is Cincinnati's Flying Pig Icon Wasn't Always So Beloved by WVXU and contains a 25 minute audio portion for those who want to listen to the story.

Finding Myself in Classic

Apparently I do exist in Classic....

Sorry, I'm not bald. And I haven't
worn my beard that long since
I attended college.

I can live with being a Dwarf.

Building for Fun and Profit

I've mentioned before that I play and enjoy the game Stardew Valley, which can be a welcome diversion from other games I play. It's definitely not a deep game by any stretch, but it is a fun and satisfying game. Well, I think I've found a competitor to the "let's play farmer" Stardew Valley.

In the last Steam Winter Sale, I acquired a few titles to play when I wasn't playing any of my "regular" games. Among them was "My Time at Portia", a game that I'd kept my eye on for quite a while. It hadn't been garnering the same overwhelming interest that Stardew Valley had, but the concept of a "builder" type of game in the same Stardew Valley genre, but in 3D* intrigued me. However, I'd been holding back from purchasing the game as it had spent a long time in early access. I do enough IT work for my job to not want to volunteer to be a beta tester, which is what early access effectively means, so I was content to wait for MTaP to officially be released before purchasing the game.

Well, it went live back in mid-late 2019, so when it went on sale in December I finally decided to pull the trigger. My Time at Portia sat around in my Steam Library for a few weeks, and I finally decided to download the game last week to see whether it meets expectations.

My answer is a "sort of yes", but I also haven't stopped playing the game this past week.**

***

My Time at Portia (MTAP for short) is set in what is described as a "post apocalyptic world", but it is far removed from the type of post apocalyptic world that, say, Fallout resides in. There are ruins a-plenty to explore, but most of the countryside and the area around Portia are pretty much an idyllic farming community. You learn over the course of playing the game that there was a 300 year age of darkness across the land after some cataclysmic war --likely a nuclear war with a Nuclear Winter causing the darkness-- and it was only after a plucky adventurer named Peach brought back the sunshine that the world began to recover.

Yeah, I know. 'Peach'? Really?

But regardless, that's just background so you'll find monsters and ruins and whatnot to explore out there in the world, ala D&D or any other setting of that sort.

I'm going to try to avoid some of the finer details here, since you have to discover the game yourself, but I can cover some broad strokes here about the game itself.

You are a builder, taking over your father's old shop that he'd left abandoned years ago. You never really knew your father, so you're just learning a bit about him and Portia, the community he lived in, as you go. The game itself is part construction game, part dating/getting-to-know-the-community game, and part story about Portia itself.

The basics of the game are pretty simple: You go get commissions to build things from either the Guild Hall or from townspeople who reach out to you directly. Typically you have a time limit on how long it will take to get something built, and the early game especially is spent trying to build up your equipment so that you can then actually build things for people. Oh, and acquiring the raw materials to do so from the surrounding countryside (and the ruins). There are abandoned ruins, which are great for ores, stone, and the occasional ancient relic you need to make something with; a countryside with trees, shrubs, and wild animals you can use to get raw materials from; and townspeople/farmers/ranchers who do own shops that might have what you need as well. As you progress, the requests get more and more elaborate, forcing you to upgrade and stockpile raw materials to try to stay one step ahead of the requests. Oh, and you can also upgrade your house and land as you see fit, so there's a metagame surrounding how you want to organize your pad.

Setting that aside, there's the metagame of the townspeople itself. You have a scale of diamonds (for townspeople you can develop friendships with) or hearts (for townspeople you can romance). Interactions with townspeople on a daily basis will raise their approval of you, and as you progress you learn more about them and you unlock the ability to hang out with them. For those who can be romanced, once you get high enough in the heart listings you can then confess your romantic interest in them and the "playdates" turn into "real dates".***

And above this lies the overall story that the devs wanted to present about Portia. When I think I'm at the point where things will slow down, storywise, it picks up again.

***

Okay, that's pretty much how the game goes, mechanically speaking.

Does it scratch my builder's itch? Yes.

Does it scratch my interest in the story? Yes.

Then do I give it a resounding seal of approval? Kind of.

Why the "kind of" response? Well....

1. The graphics, while pretty to look at, aren't designed to appeal to me.
   
   Oh, don't get me wrong, the landscape is really nice, and the buildings/stuff you build are rather nice in a cartoony kind of way. I'd describe that as Wildstar meets Thomas Kincaid, I guess. However, the character design has more than a bit of Rugrats style cartoon in them, and the Rugrats style did not appeal to me. On top of that, you can tell that the character designs were angling to try to appeal to both adults and kids, so some of the marriageable characters look adult (such as Arlo or Petra or Phyllis), and others look like adults with kid-style faces (Sam is the best example here). The character designs also had a certain "street caricature artist" aesthetic to them as well, which kind of bugged me from time to time.
   
2. It needs more polishing.
   
   Even after its official release, I find small bugs here and there, mainly in the writing.
   
   Let me put it out there before anybody else asks: I could tell that the development team's native language was not English almost from the start. There are certain speech patterns that native English speakers have that non-native English speakers have a hard time picking up, and once I noticed the first mistake I started finding them throughout the game. What makes it worse is that about 1/5 of the voice actors' lines are different than the lines on screen. You can tell that changes were made, but QA didn't align the voice actors' lines with the on-screen lines. Given that the voice actors' deviations typically made less sense than the written ones, I suspect that the written lines were the ones that got more polish**** than the spoken lines, and the dev team didn't have the budget to re-record the voice actors.
   
3. The path finding. Oh, the path finding.
   
   Have you seen videos of some of the worst Skyrim path finding bugs? Or maybe the Skyrim spoof? Yeah, it's like that. At one point you're on a quest with an NPC deep in one of the ruins, and I turned around, wondering where on earth the NPC had gotten. Turns out said NPC was underneath the catwalk I was on, walking through the instant death goo below. /sigh
   
   I've also seen bugs where an NPC keeps trying to get on a horse and the NPC keeps flickering between on the ground and on the horse. These are pathfinding issues that have seemingly been solved in most other video games, so the dev team really needs to tweak their code in this space.
   
4. The stereotypes.
   
   If you're looking for deep characterization, video games typically aren't people's first choice. That being said, the NPCs are a laundry list of stereotypes: The Hot Farmgirl, The Idealistic College Student, The Church vs. The Scientists*****, The Greedy Competitor, The Tomboy, The Sassy Waitress With the Brooklyn Accent, The Farmer's Daughter Living with the Elderly Grandma, the Hot Girl with the Mysterious Illness, etc. They even have seven brothers who look and sound like they came right out of an episode of The Sopranos.******
   
   The NPCs would also say the same couple of lines over and over again, depending on where you were with the story, so you quickly got used to the same thing over and over and over.
   
5. The Pacing
   
   At first I thought the game was going to be fairly slow paced, but once you get into the mid-game everything seems to have a timer on it and there seems to be not enough time for me to get into tweaking my house and workspace the way I like it. The game burns through a daily clock much faster than Stardew Valley does, and I have to constantly be on my toes to organize my build schedule properly.
   

Okay, given that list, it's a wonder why I'm still willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt. That's because the issues aside, it's still a fairly well made indie title. I'd be tempted to say that the dev team is likely more familiar with creating mobile games rather than regular PC/XBox/Playstation titles, and there are aspects of MTAP that seem to fit in better with mobile games --particularly the character graphics-- but it's still a decently built game overall. If the dev team continues to fix the bugs --and more importantly get an editor to clean up the language translation issues-- I think that MTAP will do fairly well for itself.

The game is obviously not for everybody, but when it's on sale it's worth a gander. If you like Stardew Valley you might like MTAP.

But I really need to get back to MMOs now....





*And in third person view, no less.

**I finally got around to logging back into WoW and also playing a few other games last night. Nothing fancy, just wanted to work on Cardwyn's Tailoring.

***Really, it's called "Play", and I'm not making this up.

****Although they could REALLY use a lot more polish than this.

*****Okay, this is still a pretty valid trope.

******True Story: Back when I was at college, I went with a group to a conference in New York City. On a Saturday night, we went into Little Italy to get some food. I kid you not, there were tons of little Italian-American restaurants there complete with a guy out in front --typically dressed in a loud suit-- who would try to get us to go inside. No matter which restaurant we passed by, the guy would also have that heavy NYC accent that made the whole thing feel like we'd stepped into a bad gangster movie.

Not Everybody Wants to Herd Cats for a Living

One thing I've noticed over the past couple of months or so in Classic is a general reluctance to actually start up and get groups together for runs. I've mentioned this before, but the reason why it came into sharp focus the other day was the following scenario:

• First person posts a "LFG Mara".
• Second person posts a "LFG Mara".
• First person posts a "LFG Mara".
• Second person posts a "LFG Mara".
• Third person jumps in and says "You both should talk".

I whispered the third person to agree with him, and we both expressed frustration about people not wanting to take the initiative. He felt it was laziness that led people to just posting and not initiating, but I thought that there might be an aspect of shyness to it as well.

In their own way, MMOs are an ideal game for a shy or introverted person to interact with the world. You can go about playing a game online under your own rules, without having to play with other people at all. At the same time, you reap the benefits of a living, breathing online world. Of course, there's that initial leap that you have to make in actually starting to play.

And sticking to PvE servers too.

I can't be mad at people avoiding the responsibility of putting a group together, because when I started WoW that would have been me. I still remember the emotions and almost terrifying hustle and bustle of a busy Orgrimmar the first time Soul escorted me in the gates, but what was even worse --for me, anyway-- was the first time I did it alone. It's like trying to find your way in a new city with a pretty rudimentary map, and the occasional "need a guild?" whisper buffeted me. It was like I was back in my first day of high school, trying to find my way around and realizing that those who I thought were my friends in elementary school were anything but.

If '10 year player' me were to just tell newbie me "just put yourself out there and LFG", newbie me would never have believed him. Even the LFG queue, which was designed to match people quickly with what they wanted to run, was a terrifying step. "What if I fucked up?" I thought. I'd quickly read over the online walkthroughs once more for the instance I'd selected, just to make sure I didn't screw up and get crapped on by the others in the group.

Kind of like this, but with MMOs.

Naturally, my first LFG 5-man would be Azol-Nerub, which is a (relatively) simple instance in theory, but the webs in the background kept confusing me as to where to go as they all seemed to blend together. But I somehow persevered, and I made it through that first time.

In the years since, I'd done enough instances that I know how these work --whether or not you have a walkthrough handy-- but those feelings of "please don't screw up" never really leave me.* And getting a group together means you're partially responsible for the group composition in the first place, so I have a tendency to blame myself since I was the one who "approved" everyone's entry in the first place.

In addition to the fear of reaching out an assembling a group, there's also the "tune out" part of playing an MMO: people who already herd cats in jobs aren't necessarily going to be interested in doing the same thing in an online game. Just like how some people don't want to be part of guild leadership because "they do the same damn thing all day long", people won't want to pull together a PUG just to go run Maraudon, for example. And if you've a hard time finding a tank, which is the current hard to find role on Myzrael, you can spend your entire evening just being frustrated.**

I suppose what I'm saying is to all the people who don't want to be Type A personalities and actively put together PUGs for the instances you want, I grok you.*** You've got your reasons, and while I don't know the specific ones, I understand. I'm fine with organizing our PUGs (now, anyway); just don't be a stranger.





*Particularly for wipes.

**Not that LFG is any better, mind you. I remember days when I wanted to get into a specific instance and waiting a couple of hours for it to pop, only to have the tank or healer drop as soon as we got to the instance. Given that I've seen this in both WoW and SWTOR, I believe this to be an MMO-wide practice where LFG queues are concerned. At least with a PUG via LFG or LookingForGroup, you're going to find people who actually want to be there, even though that may take a while.

***'Grok'. Wow, that's an entry for the Wayback Machine.

I'll Miss You, Neil

I apologize for interrupting the blog like this, but I wanted to at least pass along my condolences to the friends and family of Neil Peart on his passing this week.

Neil, the drummer for Rush, provided a huge part of the soundtrack of my youth*. When other rock and metal lyricists were getting airplay about getting hot and heavy with girls, Neil's lyrics were deep and touched on subjects from teenage angst to astrophysics to mythology to nuclear war to death and meaning.

Of course, Neil was most well known for his drumming prowess, and he was frequently praised as one of the greatest drummers of all time. When my youngest decided to take up percussion in school, I made a point of getting her a copy of Neil's "Anatomy of a Drum Solo" on DVD.

I'm sure I'll be able to put this in perspective later, but all I can think of now is "Fuck Cancer."

Neil's family --and his bandmates, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson-- asked that in lieu of flowers or anything else, just pick a cancer charity of your choice and make a donation in Neil's name.

From the CBC.

And from Rick Beato, whose YouTube channel I watch to help the eternally musically clueless Redbeard understand a fraction of what the mini-Reds and my wife understand.

*And to this day, even though they retired a few years ago.