Wait a Sec... Just HOW Long?

One thing I've discovered about writing fiction that I've never much thought of before was that it focuses me on just how long it takes to perform certain actions.

I don't mean how long it takes to cast a spell, for instance, or even how long it takes to travel across land or sea. The first is completely arbitrary, and the second is configured this way to make the game practical.* But I mean something a bit different, and the older I get the more ridiculous it sounds.

I mean just how long between events in the Warcraft universe versus what we're seeing in game.

***

The reason why I'm picking on the Warcraft universe as opposed to other MMOs I've played is because it's the one MMO whose game release schedule matches the MMO world's real time environment. Other MMOs don't try to tie down in game changes from expac to expac to a specific timeline like WoW (and Warcraft before it) does, so that creates issues of believability.

Okay, look, I know we're talking about a fantasy game that includes Orcs, Tauren, Elves, Spellcasting, Undead, Dragons, and Male Humans who look like they're all Arnold Schwarzenegger clones with a steroid problem.

And yes, the Warcraft story frequently devolves into plotlines that would do a soap opera proud. You don't think so? Go read up on the Lo'gosh plotline from the WoW comics, and try to explain to me why the two Varians story doesn't make for a perfect WWE or soap opera plotline.

But the thing is, the more I've delved into timelines the more I look at the game world and say "this is simply NOT possible."

***

For starters, let's use the 'unofficial' WoW timelines found on various places like WoWWiki and WoWpedia.

Now, there are variances between the unofficial WoW timelines, and the "official" one that used to be on the World of Warcraft website was taken down years ago when Blizz moved to Battle.net, but there's enough overlap to make it usable.

For starters, let's see the "official" one that WowWiki preserved, and I'll focus on the big items:

0      Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (PC game)
6      Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness (PC game)
8      Warcraft 2X: Beyond the Dark Portal (PC game)
20     Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos (PC game)
21     Warcraft 3X: The Frozen Throne (PC game)
25     World of Warcraft (PC game)
26     World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (PC game)
27     World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (PC game)

Now, the official result of Warcraft 1 was that the Kingdom of Stormwind (and Stormwind itself) was destroyed. It was only at the end of Warcraft 2 were the Kingdom and City of Stormwind re-established and then Stormwind was rebuilt.

I'll be charitable and say that Warcraft 2 ended around year 7.5, giving WC2 about 1.5 years worth of fighting instead of 2. But what that means is that WC2 effectively ended and people could return to Stormwind around Year 7.5.

Putting that into more important terms, the time between Stormwind's reestablishment and the beginning of WoW Classic/Vanilla is 17.5 years, and that's being generous.

So what that means is that if a Human player was 18 years old when they left home and began adventuring, then you were one of the first kids born after Stormwind was reestablished. If a Human character started at 21 years old, then you likely have vague memories of being a refugee. Your older brothers and sisters were all refugees and likely had bad memories of this. Your parents were refugees and/or veterans of the First/Second War, and were likely scarred by the conflict. On top of it, either date is not enough to get Elwynn Forest back to a pristine condition, Redridge to seem so wonderful (as if it were Autumn), or even Westfall or Duskwood to be as alive (or undead as in Western Duskwood) as all that.

However, if you read quest text in the Human areas, you don't get those impressions at all. The area around Elwynn Forest, and even Duskwood and Redridge, are filled with quest text about "normal" things, not "boy, am I glad that we survived the Wars!"

It's as if there's collective amnesia about WC1 and WC2.

And believe me, people in Westfall would absolutely remember the Horde invasion, because based on the timeline they would have just gotten back on their feet when the Defias cut their legs out from under them.

If you thought that timeline might be off, here's the one from WoWpedia**:

0      First War
4      Second War
8      Warcraft 2x: Tides of Darkness
20     Third War
23     Warcraft 3x: The Frozen Throne
25     World of Warcraft
26     The Burning Crusade
27     Wrath of the Lich King

As you can see, the dates are pretty similar except for WoWpedia moving the Second War back two years.

***

You might look at that timeline and think "yeah, that seems about right."

But you know what I see?

The Thirty Years War.

It was one of the most destructive conflicts in history, went from 1618 - 1648, and was responsible for the death of 1 in every 5 German language speakers*** in Europe. Wikipedia puts the number of European deaths at 8 million, and although I'm not completely certain it's accurate, it's good enough for me.

The sheer brutality of the conflict made the Thirty Years' War one of the first that you could arguably call "total war", where entire regions were laid waste and depopulated, and entire nations mobilized.

You know what I don't see?

Evidence of the Thirty Years War --Warcraft Style-- in WoW Classic.

Bucolic. That's a good word for this, and there's nary
a sign that a short time ago this was supposedly
all devastation. Those certainly don't look like 15-20 year
old trees, even if you have rapidly growing ones such as silver maple.

And before you say Burning Steppes, Searing Gorge, or Desolace, all three happened prior to the timeline above. The only regions that you could safely say fall under the "entire region laid waste" designation are the Blasted Lands (home of Ye Olde Dark Portal), the Plaguelands, Tirisfal Glades, Felwood, and the southernmost part of Winterspring, where the Burning Legion is still present along the border with Hyjal. And of those, only the Blasted Lands stretches back to the Second War; all the others happened only a few years before Classic, in the Third War.

Azshara? Been that way since the War of the Ancients.

Silithus? Been that way for thousands of years, since the Kaldorei and their allies shut the Qiraji inside their prison.

Stonetalon Mountains? It's not so much as laid waste as an ecological disaster brought on by the Venture Company.

I find it hard to believe that the Cataclysm expac had a greater impact on the Eastern Continent than the Wars between Orcs and Humans.

***

And don't get me started on the buildings.

I knew that castle building was a huge endeavor that drained the coffers of more than one monarchy (Edward I of England for one), so the reconstruction of Stormwind being hugely expensive doesn't shock me. But building a castle in Medieval times took anywhere from 2 to 10 years, depending on the size and complexity of the job.

But an entire city?

A decent comparison is how long it took to rebuild London after the Great Fire of 1666, and it took about 50 years.****

And that's with mainly wooden structures, not stone.

Compare that with Stormwind's less than 17.5 years --probably more like 10 given it takes time for the Defias afterward to take root-- and you're left scratching your head.

10 years? Yeah, but if you had far larger population
than what the ravaged Human lands --Stormwind +
Lordaeron + the rest-- have.  It took a far larger English
population 50 years to rebuild London after the Great Fire.

And don't forget that on top of that, there's places such as Menethil Harbor, Lakeshire, Goldshire, Darkshire, Sentinel Hill, Theramore, and the (now abandoned) areas of Raven Hill and Moonbrook. Oh, and the towers scattered throughout the area.

Don't forget that Dalaran was rebuilding within its bubble too.

And somewhere in all that Nethergarde Keep was built, manned, and then was the staging area for the invasion of Draenor.

***

Speaking of buildings, let's talk about the Horde cities too.

The Undercity, well, that was always there underneath Lordaeron, so let's just assume it was made (un)livable with minimal effort.

But Thunder Bluff and Orgrimmar? They just sprang out of the ground within 2 years? Looking like that? And while the Tauren encampments around Kalimdor were built (and designed) for a nomadic, Native American asthetic --which are believable-- but the size and scope of constructing Orgrimmar alone, particularly while the newly reformed Horde with the Frostwolves in charge were constantly under threat, makes me raise my eyebrows.

I don't have an active Horde toon, so this one is from
Blizzard Watch. BTW, if you want info on all things
Blizz, they're the one to to go check out.

I could see this in 2 years, but that's only if Thrall and Co.
weren't constantly fending for their lives.

So yeah, call me skeptical, but I look at that timeline and think "Nah, not happening." Even if you enlist the help of Mages to build all of this, the sheer volume of activity might require every single Mage found in Azeroth to get it done properly in such a short timeline. And believe me, any Mage worth their salt would make sure that YOU NEVER FORGOT THAT.

And remember, all this construction had to be completed early enough so that it feels like all of these buildings have been there for quite a while, because nobody surely talks about the "before times". Hell, there are quests in Elwynn Forest that imply that people grew up and grew old on the farm. (It's the lover's questline.)

***

The only difference in the timelines that makes any sort of sense is the time between the end of the Third War and WoW Classic/Vanilla. Everything else, well, it doesn't really make sense.

If you extend the time between the end of the 2nd War and the beginning of the 3rd War to about 30 years, that makes the reconstruction and fading memories more realistic, but it then proceeds to throw off the personal timeline of major NPCs, particularly Thrall, Jaina, Vol'jin, Arthas, and others.

I can see why Blizz would want to keep the timeline intact for the NPCs' sake, but they could have easily altered the world they built in WoW to reflect the true state of affairs rather than present a bucolic countryside that they did in the starting zones for Tauren, Orcs, Trolls, Humans, Gnomes, and Dwarves.

And I'll be frank, I'd never have noticed how off the timeline really was until I went and looked up the timeline because I was writing fiction. When I figured out the true timeline based on what was found on the original WoW website, I blurted out "Bullshit! That is not what is presented in game!"

Oh, hey, Kira. Card says 'hi'.

*Movement at the speed of plot and all that.

**I removed every little detail that was provided in the Wowpedia version and instead matched the major events with the "official" version.

***You can't really say Germans, since Germany as a state didn't exist until the 19th Century.

****The Museum of London has a great pdf file on the Great Fire, which I won't link to because of potential security risks. However, if you type in "how long did it take to rebuild london after the great fire" it'll pop up as being one of the first hits.

EtA: Corrected a few grammar issues. That's what I get for changing my mind on how to present something and forgetting about the grammar leading up to those changes.

EtA: Forgot Felwood in the list of regions affected by the WC1 through WC3, but my premise still stands, as Felwood happened during WC3.

At Long Last

It only took from the beginning of Classic until now, on both co-mains, but this finally happened:

It was one of those epic 3+ hour AV fights that you hear people who used to play in Vanilla brag about. The battleground started like any other, where the Alliance held off the horde for a while but eventually we lost the Stonehearth Graveyard. That usually signals the beginning of the end, because the Horde gradually accelerates their gains from there. But something unusual happened: the Alliance was able to push back and eventually --after an hour-- to retake the Stonehearth Graveyard.

During this time I --on Az-- found myself with only another rogue for support, so we both sent back the Wing Commanders* and then I took the southern mine. That mine capture is typically a love-it-or-hate-it move, with very few people on the Alliance side in the "meh" camp. Luckily this time our side was happy for that, and I quickly gathered the 10 resources, killed off some wolves for the pelts, and made it back up north just in time to become a member of the backcap crew.

And there I spent the vast majority of my time in-game, part or a 2-3 man crew defending the Dun Baldar bunkers and graveyard from Horde who'd outflanked the main force.

During this time the main force continued their unusally strong push and had a breakthrough by capturing the Snowfall Graveyard. We were able to hold both graveyards, and in the process kill off the Horde Wolfriders and their Shamans.

When the Horde lost their Shamans, their morale broke.

We were then able to capture the Iceblood Graveyard, and our gains accelerated rather quickly until we finally downed Drek.

I've been waiting for what felt like forever for this, as this is the typical result we see:

So a victory like this, hard fought from beginning to end, was something to savor.

*Two of them made it back, which was unusual in itself.

Let Me Expand on That

Not too long ago, I mentioned that I'd gotten into my first true raid.

Ever.

That was a Zul'Gurub run that, looking back on it, was a fairly wipe filled run that lasted almost 4 hours.* However, I will say that the raid leader was a real saint; he kept calm and never raised his voice, as he patiently explained and reexplained how to handle each boss.

In that raid I learned three things:

• For a raid to be effective, you have to be in a voice app of some sort. You may not have to talk --I saw people reply in raid chat to requests-- but you must be able to respond to the raid leader's (and others) directions. We had one person in the ZG run who was not in chat, and that person was simply not following instructions, even the written ones.
  
  As a sub point on that, everybody not only has to be in a voice app, but be able to understand the language spoken. Being in a voice app does you almost no good if you don't understand what's being asked of you. And yes, that 4 hour ZG run had at least one person in the raid who didn't understand English, and also didn't know the raid. It made things difficult at times.
  
• I like to perform interrupts and stuns on Az as part of my work in regular 5-man instances, and that part of being a Rogue becomes important in ZG. In the ZG run Az was literally the only rogue, and I got assigned the job of interrupting the healer in the Raptor boss when he (it?) splits into three people. Once that boss was burned down enough, I and the off tank were the only ones on that boss for a large part of the fight, with me eschewing anything resembling DPS in favor of watching for the healing action and then delivering a solid kick to stop it. While my job in ZG overall wasn't very taxing --mainly don't stand in the bad, do what the raid leader says to do, and just keep my DPS Slice and Dice ability running-- at this one point I had the big job to make sure we don't make a boss fight that much more difficult. And I was able to do the job because I enjoy those little things about being a Rogue.
  
• Raids in Classic take about as long as the longer instances in WoW. If you compare a Classic level raid (Molten Core, Zul'Gurub, etc.) with the longer Classic instances (Blackrock Depths, Maraudon, etc.) the Classic instances are either as long or longer than the Classic raids. So the time commitment by me would be pretty much the same. The only thing that the raids have over instances are the buffs and the consumables, where Mages, Alchemists, and others who handle both items spend considerably more time in preparation than the people who don't have those classes and/or professions.

But despite my initial concern about what to do in ZG, I found the explanations easy to follow. And I learned very quickly that "bat riders go boom" as I put it in guild chat afterwards.

***

What?

Oh, that.

Yeah, I joined a guild. It's a small one, and not even close to being in the same orbit as some of the huge guilds on Myzrael-US, such as Sunrise or Stance Dance Revolution, both of which have over 400 members. 

More on this another time.

***

Anyhoo, I went on another ZG run a week later, and that run was as smooth as butter. It clocked in at just under two hours, and we only had one wipe, on the trash leading to Hakkar. We even handled the Jin'do fight without any problems.

So fast forward a couple of weeks, and a friend who I'd run quite a few instances with over the past months whispered me on Friday. One thing led to another, and this was the result.

Yep, still running with that BRD Green drop
for my chestpiece. Still, Card only died once,
the Majordomo teleported her up front. Twice.

It was an alt run put on by two guilds, and they pug the extra people.

The most amazing thing to me was that when I zoned in, I discovered that I knew about 1/3 of the people there. When I mentioned it to my friend, he laughed and said "that's the Vanilla experience for you."

Maybe I can do this raiding thing after all.





*This ZG run was on Az, for clarity's sake.

Well, That was Unexpected

Back in pre-history, when people still loved the live action version of Game of Thrones on HBO, the question arose what would happen when the showrunners ran out of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice as source material. After all, George wasn't known as the speediest of authors, and anybody could see that the series on television was going to finish long before the books were.

Well, it was revealed back in 2014 that the showrunners had met with George and already knew the broad strokes going forward, including how the series would end.

And while Season 7 had its moments --including the Hodor masterstroke that the showrunners confirmed was George's idea-- we all know how Season 8 ended the series.*

I was thinking about that debacle, where there were only broad sketches of what came after the books ended, when I read Kamalia's post about the existential horror surrounding WoW retail's upcoming Shadowlands expac reflecting on Battle for Azeroth. Namely, exactly how much of the Warcraft/WoW story is planned out ahead of time?

And when I mean planned out, I don't mean for an entire expac, but rather years in the future.

***

As I commented on Kamalia's post, back when I was in college --and even before the red beard itself-- I'd read about how soap operas were plotted out. I was curious about this because I developed an addiction to Days of our Lives my sophomore year in college**

Yes, it was really this cheesy.

and I wondered just how much of the plot was planned in advance and how much was just made up as they went along. In spite of the "bad acting" that goes on in those shows --and when you consider that they film/record them day in and day out with very few outtakes due to the schedule, it's actually pretty good-- the plots, stories, and scripts are written months in advance of actual filming. Add to that the shows frequently had months of filming already "in the can" as the saying goes, the storylines were frequently plotted out about a year or more before airing. While this isn't saying a lot for a regular prime time television show, a soap is broadcast almost without fail, five days a week, 52 weeks a year. At maximum, that's 260 possible episodes, but in reality --due to holiday programming and other factors-- the number is somewhere between 200 and 260. For a 24 episode prime time season, that's 10 years worth of episodes, and for a BBC or cable type of series that's more like 20 years' worth.

To keep everything straight, therefore, long term plotting is essential.

Now, let's translate this into video games.

An MMO such as LOTRO, which is based on a completed series of fantasy novels, has a great advantage over MMOs that are on the Game of Thrones plan. You know the plot, you know the characters, and you even know the geographic locations and the potential for in-zone quests. All you have to do is fill in some of the details and extrapolate based on the author's works (and in Tolkien's case, both finished and unfinished). While I'm not saying it's easy mode, for a developer it's far less stressful to fill in a portion of Middle-earth than it is, say, the Star Wars universe with SWTOR.

Sure, there's a lot of potential reference material out there for SWTOR, but there's also a huge amount of freedom for a developer to change things around. The Old Republic era of the Star Wars universe doesn't have to tiptoe around the old Expanded Universe novels (outside of the Revan ones, obviously), it doesn't have to worry about any of the movies in terms of settings and plot, and it certainly doesn't have to worry about the vast majority of Star Wars fans upset with either the jettisoning of the EU or the direction the prequels and/or sequels took.

But it is under constant scrutiny by everyone and their grandmother for whether SWTOR is "Star Wars enough" to be considered Star Wars.

Between that and the constant pressure SWTOR's development staff is under, courtesy of Bioware executives and EA overall, it's no wonder that the direction of SWTOR's story has swung wildly over the years.

***

Warcraft and WoW fans may not be as rabid as the Star Wars fanbase***, but they do have definite ideas on how their beloved franchise should progress. However, unlike SWTOR and LOTRO, WoW's fanbase dictates a bit of a different focus than what you'd come to expect.

Remember the maxim "the game starts at max level"? For WoW, that means the focus is on Endgame more than anything else. However, I personally don't think that Endgame itself is Blizz' focus, narratively speaking.

If you look at the expacs for WoW --at least the ones that I've played up until I dropped by subscription-- it seems that Blizz's focus is toward specific set pieces, and plot/narrative is driven in service of those specific set pieces.

From Burning Crusade --with the dramatic conversion of Lady Liadrin prior to taking up the leadership the Shattered Sun offensive-- through Wrath with the Wrathgate event, and even into Mists with its multiple video cut setpieces (and the Siege of Orgrimmar), that seems to be what drives the WoW expac.

But for me, the question is whether there's an overall narrative plan stretching across multiple expacs, or whether their service to the set piece means that the set piece is developed first and then the expac is developed around it.

***

The reason why Kamalia's post is so important is because she lays bare that the upcoming Shadowlands expac takes all of those dramatic death scenes --or moments of sacrifice/suicide missions-- and makes them horrifying because death isn't the release people thought it was.

And yes, I agree with her completely on her point.

But I don't believe that was a primary objective of the expac; it was merely a side effect of the WoW expac development process.

I find it very hard to believe that all of those raids, starting from Wrath onward, that have bosses who die and exclaim that "[insert end boss here] controls me no longer", would have led to this existential moment where death turned out to be a horrifying alternative. Instead, I believe that Blizz said "Okay, let's do [XXX] set piece. Cool, isn't it? Now, how do we get to there?"

That's the thing about these set pieces: they only work if they are part of a cohesive whole that extends from expac to expac as part of a long term story that Blizz wants to tell. Right now, it certainly seems that Blizz is creating these set pieces without any sort of long term plan.

Why would I say that? Because if the set piece creates some jarring plot holes large enough to fly a zeppelin through, then maybe the set piece is the one that needs to change.

Speaking of set pieces that
drive expacs (or movies)...
From wikipedia.org.

For example, in the lead up to Mists there was the "mana bomb destroying Theramore" set piece. On the face of it, a major Alliance city so close to the Horde capital city would naturally be a military target in an Alliance vs Horde war. However, if you played the Horde (post-Cataclysm) questline in Stonetalon Mountains --which made use of another mega-sized bomb-- the total destruction of Theramore makes absolutely no sense, as Garrosh (in an earlier set piece) executed the Stonetalon Horde leader for displaying a lack of honor in slaying non-combatants. And, as everyone knows, there are plenty of non-combatants in a major Alliance city --with a sympathetic Alliance leader-- that had in the past sided with Orgrimmar over their own faction's potential interests.

Because someone decided edgier is better.
Hmm... There's something about that statement
that fits right in with the DC Universe....
(From metacritic, of all places.)

But when set pieces (and to a lesser extent the endgame) rules the decision making process, plot holes happen.

Just ask all those Daenerys fans about Season 8 of Game of Thrones.

From Vanity Fair.

Or maybe not.

*And that's coming from a guy who had no interest in reading or watching either version. George takes maniacal delight in killing off characters, so I took a wide pass on any of his writings.

**I only overcame this addiction when I was watching an episode and blurted out loud after a supposed major reveal "That was incredibly stupid!!" It was then that I realized bad storylines couldn't keep me engaged forever.

***I'd imagine that Blizz employees would beg to differ on this point.

Saturday Morning Amusement

I saw this on Reddit, and I was amused.

"Mommy, where do Druids come from?"

I tried chasing down the original, and this is actually a screenshot of a screenshot. Therefore, I'm not exactly sure who truly created this, but as a pencil and paper RPGer I found it the sort of "D&D legalese" way of getting out of the price of a Fey's pact.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go drive 6 hours each way to get the rest of my son's dorm stuff, as the county in Pennsylvania that his university is located opened up and the university is allowing us on campus to go get his gear.

The Hidden Nemesis

I've been pondering something a bit while I've been working on my fiction, and that is how MMOs translate things such as death into a game.

An MMO is a strange beast in its own way: by design it is a multiplayer sandbox where people get to experience all sorts of interactions (such as quests) in their own time. Sure, you can group up, but the multiplayer nature of the game means that death --for both the baddies and you-- isn't permanent.*

You die, you respawn. They die, they eventually respawn.

Items such as phasing as implemented in WoW with the Wrathgate event, as well as other MMOs' version of such phasing, is an attempt to alleviate this. Making it seem like you truly have an impact on the environment is the goal.

But what I've been thinking of is something else entirely: what is the psychological and physical impact of death on people in an MMO? And how did people deal with this in real life when they were drafted, given some basic training, and then shipped out to go kill people?

***

In an MMO we can make light of death, given that to the player it's an obstacle to overcome. Listen to MMO players talk about wiping in raids or instances, and it's just no big deal. You can even hear bosses express relief at their death, meaning that "Hakkar controls me no longer".**

But nevertheless, "Kill Ten Rats" is just a stone's throw away from "Kill Ten Kobolds" and then "Kill Ten Defias."

I choose the Defias for this because of their origin story, which is something that a lot of people would identify with.

Since there are a few people --including the mini-Reds, who I know occasionally read this blog-- who don't know the Defias origin story, I'm going to put this behind a big ol' cut:

Spoilers ahead

Friday Musings

Yes, I get a bunch of these "thinky thoughts", as my wife calls them, from time to time. Stuff not worthy of a separate blog post, but also things that make me go "hmmm...."

So here we go, a compilation of curious thoughts that I couldn't quite get rid of.

***

What is the appeal of The Cult of the Damned?

I get that there are some people who are psychotic and are so in love with death that they'll seek the Cult* out, and that there's the occasional person who wants power so badly they'll sacrifice everything about their human form that they'll willingly become a lich, but come on. All these people in Scholomance, the Plaguelands, and supposedly throughout Azeroth as Cult members?

What is it; do they throw great parties or something?

Looks like they could use a keg
of beer and some red solo cups.
Or at least a television with Mario
Kart running in the background.
From thelurkerlounge.com.

***

Black Diamond would make a great name for an 80s rock band. I've mentioned that in a few Blackrock Depths runs, but only us old folks find it amusing.

***

If there was one thing that a Mage in WoW would dispel, you'd think it'd be a Magic debuff. But no, it's "Remove Curse". Go figure...

***

Every time I play Star Trek Online, when you talk to an NPC for a quest, there's just something about their eyes that is so unnatural that it creeps me out.

When the eyes shift from left to right...
It just looks like an alien pretending
to be human. From Playstation Nation.

***

People who write quest text should be forced to read it out loud as if they were talking to someone. If nothing else, it would force them to write quest text that actually sounds like a conversation rather than what passes for quest text these days.

Have you ever tried reading quest text out loud? It can be an incredible struggle to do just that. At the same time, it's supposed to be a conversation, so it should just flow properly like as if you were speaking to your buddies.

But you know what? It only rarely sounds normal.

If there's one thing that the SWTOR writers nailed, it's the quest interactions. Those cutscenes for questing are absolutely dead on, particularly in the original "vanilla" SWTOR areas.

*No relation to Blue Oyster Cult or even The Cult, both damn fine rock bands.

Notes from Nowhereland

I took the weekend off.

Oh, not from playing games or anything, because there were plenty of things that went on:

• I got stomped pretty badly in a game of Settlers of Catan.*
• I got into my first raid since my Horde guild back in the day did a 10 man raid of AQ40 in Late Wrath.
• I'm seriously considering joining a guild. (Yes, this and the raid bullet point are related.)
• I ran Dire Maul - North with someone as tank that I've not run an instance with since Az was last in Razorfen Kraul. (He is still as good a tank as ever.)
• A person on my Classic server (Myzrael-US) passed away and his guild honored and remembered him by a long slow walk to the entrance of Molten Core.

 But I took the weekend off from the entire blogging process.
I even ignored my email, Reddit, and Facebook for the weekend, and the latter two turned out to be a very good thing because I would have been driven nuts by seeing all the lack of social distancing going on.**

It was freeing to not have to worry about coming up with anything for the blog, because suggested posts kind of fell in my lap regardless, but the one thing I couldn't seem to get away from was the endless parade of "Why aren't you in a guild?" questions.

***

On a very early Saturday morning, I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep, so I figured I'd get on WoW Classic and do some rep farming until I felt sleepy again. While I was perusing Cardwyn's current rep status and quests, I discovered I'd never finished the Marshall Windsor questline on her. I had the last quest in the Windsor portion of the chain, but I never completed the event. Therefore, I rode down to the entrance of Stormwind, waited for the person currently on the event to finish, and started it for Card.

About partway through Stormwind --for those Horde players who never performed the Alliance only questline, you end up walking rather than running-- a priest decided to tag along. She buffed me --and I returned the favor, because that's the polite thing to do-- and as we walked along she checked to make sure that I was aware of what I was getting myself into. After exchanging pleasantries and discussing WoW lore***, she then asked the inevitable question that people quiz me over: why am I not in a guild?

I explained the usual situation, about how I've been burned in the past and I'd really not deal with the drama in my gaming any more than in real life, but she made a point that stuck with me: I'm not obligated to remain in a guild if I don't like the drama. She herself had left a previous guild because she wasn't interested in drama, and the guild leadership was basically a generation younger than herself****, so she didn't have those social touchpoints to connect with people either.

Perhaps the reason why it resonated with me so much was because when I join a group such as a guild, I try to make it work. I put in time to be social, to help out in farming mats, and doing other (non-raiding) activities when I can. And I guess that makes me more loyal than it should. Certainly, if a guild's members or leadership don't reciprocate, I'm not obligated to remain with that guild. At the same time, I hate to leave people I like behind, but nothing says that I have to break ties with them just because I left.

Yes, you'd think that this is Adulting 101, but at the same time my tendency toward loyalty does become a problem this way. Even if I don't like a situation I'm in, I'd prefer to not rock the boat until things simply become untenable.

Or they blow up.

***

Because of this, I've spent a lot of the rest of the weekend thinking.

It's easy to tell others that they have to grow up and act in a more mature fashion, but not so much to shine the harsh glare of reality on yourself and practice what you preach.

And one of the things I've decided was that I invested so much time in my independence while gaming that it's become a large part of my identity, and likely to my detriment. That while it is fine to be independent, I shouldn't shy from making connections. I shouldn't reject everything because of a couple of bad experiences, and instead I should approach this in a more nuanced fashion.

This should be an interesting week. We'll see how things land.





*That's what I get for playing the percentages rather than "trusting my feelings".

**I saw the lack of social distancing in action on Friday when I "noped" out of walking around in the small town the oldest mini-Red's university is located. I drove through, saw all of the people hanging out and congregating in big groups, and said "oh HELL no" and took a pass.

***I mentioned that Christie Golden is a friend of a friend of mine of Facebook, and she got all excited as Christie was her favorite of the WoW authors. I did confirm that she seems nice on FB, but I don't really have any interactions with her. So beyond the occasional comment on our mutual friend's FB page, I don't really talk to her.

****She was my age. (Or at least she said she was, and to be fair if she was lying I don't know many people who'd lie and say they were older than they really were.)

The Smell of Burning Solder in the Morning

One of the things I like to tinker with is electronics.

Yes, I used to listen to shortwave radio back in the day, but these days old stations such as the BBC, Radio Nederland, and Radio Deutche Welle either no longer broadcast at all or broadcast to other parts of the world, not North America.

That doesn't mean that the itch to smell burning solder* ever really fades from someone who likes nothing more than to crack open an old radio and see what's inside.

Over a decade ago, I'd acquired a 1970s era Sony AM/FM radio for my son so he'd have a radio in his room. At the time he liked to have some music on overnight while he slept, and a radio like this one:

Sony ICF-9650W, from radiomuseum.org.

for just a couple of bucks at a yard sale was pretty much a no brainer. Nice and solid feel, with only a couple of knobs and a single switch for small hands to play with, it was fairly kid proof.

So, for several years it stayed in his room until he acquired a modern boom box, complete with Bluetooth, and I relocated the old radio to the garage where I'd blast local stations when I was out working there.

The past several months, however, I'd noticed that the radio frequency would drift a bit, and the sound quality was degrading, so I figured it was time to crack open the radio and see if any of the parts needed replacement.

Well, this is what it's supposed to look like:

Again, from radiomuseum.org,
because my pic looked pretty lousy.
There's actually two more circuit
boards underneath the main one.

But instead I found quite a bit of corrosion coming from leaking capacitors.

See the two cylinders? Ignore the
dust and you can see the corrosion
at the bottom. It was even on the red
wire next to it.

So, once I found a schematic online I realized I had my work cut out for me. Sure, it wasn't going to be as exhausting as working on a classic 70s era receiver, but the circuit board design did not make it easy to access without taking apart and unsoldering several parts. But with the schematic I had a parts listing, so off to Mouser Electronics (yes, that's the name of the online store) to order a bunch of replacement electrolytic capacitors.

The caps arrived on Monday, so I took the better part of all of my spare time on Monday night and Tuesday pulling apart the radio and replacing all of the caps on the board. I probably didn't have to do so, but given that the radio was 42 years old I wasn't going to risk it.

I also had a hard deadline of finishing this before dinner on Wednesday, because I was using the kitchen table as my mad scientists' lab.

Still, I was on quite a high, tinkering with stuff I'd not touched in at least a decade or more.

I finished my work around 6 PM, spent about 20 minutes putting everything back together, and then fired it up.

Nothing.

I unplugged the radio, checked to make sure nothing was obviously wrong, and tried again.

Still nothing.

Muttering a few choice curses, I began checking to see if there was something fried on the board.

Yep, there was: all four diodes used in converting the power from AC to DC on the circuit board had blown. If you look at the second pic above, you can see that little stretch of parts in the bottom center that are covered in some tan goop; the green cylinders are ceramic capacitors that hardly ever are damaged, but the tiny black cylinders are the diodes that blew.

The good news is that their replacements (the originals are no longer made) only cost something like $0.04 or $0.10 each. The bad news is that I have no direct way of knowing if they blew because of something I did (which is likely) without more test equipment than what I have.** So I could simply buy a bunch of replacement parts once more, but I should also go over in detail everything that was replaced to make sure I didn't do something stupid.

And that --right now, anyway-- is something I don't have time for.

So I've got a torn apart radio sitting in my garage, taunting me every time I see it.

But I've not given up. Not yet. I'll get you, my pretty!

*and the occasional burning flesh accompaniment.

**I do have a digital multimeter, but I don't have the ability to check capacitors or signals or whatnot.

And I'm pretty sure my wife would not be pleased if I decided I needed an oscilloscope.

EtA: replaced the links with copies. For some reason the links broke some hours later.

Coming Soon to a Table Near You...

I'm just gonna put this here....

Before you ask, no, I've never played Small World before. Published a year after Pandemic (the board game, not the event*), I know it was covered by Wil Wheaton in his TableTop series, and it does remain popular, but I've never actually played it.

That might have to change.

*And when you hear somebody say "Nobody ever thought a pandemic would happen!", remember that enough people DID to create a boardgame franchise out of it.

MINE!!!

One unintended side effect of Blapril has been that I get this twitchy feeling that I should be writing when ordinarily I'd be relaxing or gaming.*

So, this post is the result.

And its all about understanding patience.

No, really.

You see, I've spent the past couple of days grinding both Timbermaw and Argent Dawn rep, and even in the best of times it's a long slog. Maybe not nearly as bad as Cenarion Circle rep in Silithus, but it's up there.

But what I've witnessed is how people approach grinding, and whether they really have any patience or not.

For example, today I spent some time grinding because I simply didn't have the time to fit an instance run before work. There I was, getting feathers from Felpaw Village, and for about 15 minutes there was nobody around.

Quiet, there was.

Slow, the respawns were.

Then an Orc Warlock arrived and started killing mobs near me.

"No big deal," I thought, so I moved to another section and began there. I wasn't going to complain about this guy killing "my" mobs because I didn't know how to share.

The Orc finished his side and then swam across the lake (?) and started killing the mobs on my side.

I shrugged, said okay, and then moved back to the side he recently vacated and began killing the mobs that were now respawning more quickly.

The Orc came back and started killing the mobs again.

I moved back to the other side and began the process again.

Rinse, repeat.

After about the third time he did this I wanted to point out that he didn't have to come over to my side because mobs were already respawning on his side, but the Warlock had it in his head he had to get ALL OF THEM, which mean crossing over to my side.

Now, to make this perfectly clear, there was no time where I had to stop killing mobs at all, because there were plenty of respawns happening all the time. But it was the approach to things, where the Warlock simply couldn't run back to the end of his area and start all over, that got to me.

I'm pretty sure I could have devised an Aesop's Fable about this, called "The Warlock, The Rogue, and the Felpaw Village", except for what happened in Winterfall Village afterward.

***

I'd set myself an internal clock of gathering 25 sets of feathers before crossing through to Winterspring and acquiring the quest to go kill eight of three separate Winterfall Village groups, and by the time I left Felpaw Village the Orc had been joined by a couple of like minded rep farmers who spent more time running around than actually farming at that point.

So when I arrived at Winterfall Village, I noticed almost immediately that every single Winterfall Villager had been killed. It would have been the site of a mystery, "The Winterfall Massacre", were it not almost immediately obvious who'd been doing the killing. While I stealthed around, investigating, I was passed by at least four other toons, riding around and hunting for available Winterfall to slay. At the top of the ridge, I found some Winterfall Ursa with nobody around, so I began work on the quest at hand. I got about halfway through killing the first Ursa when a Dwarf Paladin rode up, got in my face for a half second, then rode around, drawing aggro of all of the remaining Ursa nearby.

I wouldn't have been shocked to have seen him yell "MINE!!" on top of it. (He didn't.)

Really, dude?

He could have just as easily whispered if we could group up for faster rep grinding (or in my case questing), but he chose to be an ass about it.

And I could have been just an ass by pulling Winterfall firbolgs near him when I saw him working on some Winterfall a couple of minutes later, but I chose not to. I simply worked around everybody else, stealthing as much as I could, and getting my quest completed the hard way.

***

As much as the previous post was about how reaching out to others worked, this post ended up being about how greed slows everybody down. It would have been better in the long run to share, because a group could easily have covered a lot more ground and gathered a lot more rep than a person working alone, but nobody took that chance. In fact, people were so wrapped up in "me" and "mine" that it worked against everybody's goals.

Funny how WoW mirrors real life like that. Aesop would have been proud.

*Or doing anything other than writing, I suppose.

"Time for Sharing, Class"

I'm not one to bug people online, particularly when I really ought to ask someone for a favor.

I suppose that some of that is my natural introversion, but a lot of it has to do that I was raised in the US Midwest. Pestering people, or calling them up and asking for a favor, is not in your typical Midwesterner's DNA. Saying hello, talking about pleasantries, and maybe agreeing to get together to game or just hang out is just fine. But favors? I'd rather have a root canal instead.

I've been a fan of Dar Williams's work for a couple

of decades now, and when in the song Iowa she

talks about how "we never mean to bother", she's got

the Midwestern ethos nailed.

So when Cardwyn joined a group for Scholomance and we needed a tank, I kind of hoped someone else would come up with one. Typically the tanks I do know and are acquainted with are already busy in a raid or running a 5-man, so I've never had to worry about reaching out like that. But this time, I did actually know someone who was available, and was mentioning to me the other day that they'd not mind tanking for me. Their main is a raid Healer, and he doesn't get a chance to tank that much.

The group leader asked if anybody knew a tank, and after a few moments of wrestling of whether I should bug my friend, I spoke up and said I know one who looks available. The group leader gave me the go ahead to reach out and ask if he was interested, and sure enough he was happy to join. He just needed a few minutes.

Now, to also add to this, I knew the Healer and the Warlock in this group from other pugs I've done, so this felt like one of those awkward social moments that you dread about in middle school: when a member of one friends' group meets another friends' group. When you consider that I was inviting a tank to join, if things went south it would also reflect poorly on me.

I shouldn't have worried.

We had a couple of wipes in that first area in Scholomance because of the group being feared into other mobs, but once we settled on clearing most of the middle mobs by doing pulls up the stairs, things went well. In fact, the only other wipe was when we tried the event for the Paladin fast mount: the first couple of waves went okay, but then --as the group leader put it-- it got "stupid hard real fast".

I actually got to see something I never had before, where the lich Ras Frostwhsiper was turned back into a human. And he was a lot harder to kill than when he was a lich. (Just sayin'.)

The most important part, however, was that the group meshed well, except for the Warrior DPS' tendency to take over aggro by not waiting for the tank to build up enough aggro. Card even got two pieces of L60 gear out of the deal. But I think the biggest part of that evening was that my friend the tank volunteered to heal Dire Maul - East so that I could get that Crystal Water quest done. (Any gear there would be a bonus, really.)

***

"So kids, what have we learned today?"

That it's fine to ask people to help out. They might just appreciate the ask.

This knowledge doesn't necessarily make it a cakewalk to ask people, but it does make it easier to do so.

Darn Midwesterners.

*The composition of the Midwest varies, but the term broadly encompasses the old Northwest Territory ceded to the new United States by Britain in 1783. From that territory, north of the Ohio River, west of the Allegheny Mountains, and east of the Mississippi River, came the states Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Iowa, Nebraska, and the Dakotas are frequently added to the list, but from my perspective they are more properly considered Plains States that came from the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon in 1803. Still, the Midwestern ethos thrives in those states too.

Just One of Those Days

The other night I had one of those runs that you'd prefer to forget.

A day or two before, this had happened:

Okay, so I'm a bit of a minimalist,
add-on wise.

so I was kind of itching to finally get access to the Crystal Water that L60 Mages can create. Sure, you can use that skill to make a bit of money in-game*, but I'm not one to monetize something that ought to be freely given to people who need it.

Now, I'd not been in Dire Maul North at level before --and not inside it at all since Cata dropped and reworked Dire Maul to a much lower level instance-- but I knew that after it was over the Crystal Water walkthroughs all pointed to getting to the Shen'dralar area for the quest. I did read up on DM-North, just to make certain what I was getting into after a near disastrous run of DM-West on Az, and I kept thinking that a bunch of Ogres should not be that hard to deal with. Unlike the various mobs that gang up on you in DM-West, the variety of mobs in DM-North are pretty vanilla. So when an opportunity opened up for a DM-North run I jumped at the chance.

To make matters even better --from my perspective-- Cardwyn had run with the healer before in an absurdly long Maraudon run and a very well done Blackrock Depths run, so I was confident in how things were going to go. This was primarily a guild group --except for Card-- but in general the guild group runs I've been in have worked out fairly well. When guild group runs talk among themselves in Discord that can be an issue as I don't use Discord***, but I figured that wouldn't be a problem here.

We wiped on the first trash pull.

Well, there were additional issues there. Just as the tank told me to sheep the moon, another mob came at us from behind so right after casting all hell broke loose.

Oh well, just like my first run in DM-W, I thought. No worries.

We proceeded to get ourselves clear of the first area, crept over to the second, and eventually made it through the door. The main concern I had was that we were performing sheep pulls, and before I could get close enough to sheep the ogre in question I'd aggro the rest of the mob. Therefore, I'd cast and haul my butt back to the rest of the group with ogres right on my heels. Since this wasn't working so well, we switched to the tank pulling and I'd sheep before the mob would arrive. We cleared a mob or two, then on another pull we were in the middle of a fight when another mob from over in the corner aggroed on us too.

We wiped there.

We cleared another mob, but I died when the ogre I'd sheeped suddenly popped back up and blasted me before I could sheep it again. I grumbled at myself a bit, but I got a battle rez from the healer and we kept going.

Hugging the wall, we went around the bend toward the next trash mob in the far corner, but before we could get even close the mob across the hall aggroed on me and two hits later I was gone.

With the Druid healer's battle rez on cooldown, I had to run back. By this time I was starting to wonder when I was going to see the "gear in danger of breaking" figure on screen.

The group said they were going to wait for me, which was a good thing as I had to wait while a wandering ogre first blocked my way at the entrance and then he blocked my way at the raised platform. After I finally made it through that, I joined the group while they were in the middle of another pull. I got up there and tried to sheep the caster, but he resisted. I sheeped him again and this time it stuck, but right after I turned to help the rest another group aggroed and that was that.

On the runback I noticed in the group chat "sheep the caster" from the healer. "I did sheep him, but he resisted, so I did it again," I replied.

"I know, I just panicked," the healer replied.

We eventually got all the way up to the top floor and another door, but we didn't have the key. We had to go get the key from a boss outside, so down we went. Somewhere in the middle of that running around the DPS Warrior aggroed a mob on the floor below us --which we were able to dispatch-- but it made me feel a little better that the ogres didn't explicitly have it out for old Cardwyn.

We ran through the second area, but I thought when they said they needed the key from the boss outside I thought they meant here, so I hung back with the Hunter as the boss was moving back right to where we were.

You can kind of guess what happened.

On my runback I was kicking myself for not just following the tank like I usually do.

Well, we took care of the first boss who had the key, but I was following the group back when a mob aggroed on the Hunter and me. He feigned death, and I died. It was only after I died when I noticed "stop" in chat.

"That was my fault," the healer said. "I was saying 'stop' in Discord, forgetting you weren't in there."

"No worries," I replied.

After this, well, the rest of the instance was pretty anti-climactic. Killed mobs, killed the boss, got into the Shen'dralar area, and got the quest for the Crystal Water.

But after it was over, I apologized to the group for my poor showing, as it was easily the worst job I've done in ages.

"Don't worry about it," the healer replied. "There was plenty of blame to go around."

Still, I felt badly about doing such a terrible job. I know those things happen, but I don't want to be known as "that guy" who can't be trusted to do well in group setting.

But I did learn one important thing: those ogres have an obscenely wide aggro radius. When I read about the DM-North tribute run, I thought that it wasn't going to be a big deal, but now I see with the aggro radius those ogres have it'll be quite the challenge.

Oh, and my repair bill? Well, I kind of earned that bill given my poor performance, so I'm okay with it.

***

And oh yeah, the kicker on this was that I explicitly turned off "auto loot" to check the reward gear and yet it still auto looted.

"WTF, I turned that off!" I said.

I have actual independent proof that I did it, because my oldest was watching the last part of the DM-North run and she saw me turn "auto loot" off.

"Hey," she said, "I saw you turn that off. What the fuck?!"

Luckily I killed the auto loot before the greens were looted and I gave the water and healing to the people who requested it. Along with a bit extra.

*When you're L55 and up, the struggle is real when you're constantly trying to drink with L45 water and you're sucking wind with mana because a single fight with a couple of uses of Blizzard can wipe out about 2/3 of your mana. Unless you get lucky at constantly getting best in slot items out of instances, you're going to not be totally optimized until much later, once you have run multiple instances to get "raid ready." I for one am not fond of slowing down the group by constantly having to drink, so I just try to get "reasonably close to 2/3 mana" and then catch up with the group once the tank has a good lock on aggro.

**Creating a portal, however, is a bit different as you need a Rune of Portals to create a single port, and I don't have any issues recouping your losses there.

***My voice carries even at normal volume, so accidentally waking the entire house up because I got excited isn't necessarily a good idea.

Being a Slave to the Mantra

Remember Blizzard's mantra, "bring the player not the class"?

The seeds of that mantra lay in their design for Vanilla, and you can see that in operation whenever the raiding guilds put out ads in game. Guilds looking for Warlocks, Holy Paladins, etc. are currently seen all over Myzrael-US, and are typically accompanied by "will take any class with exceptional players" as a catch-all just to make sure they're getting the best potential raiders possible. Raid composition is important for the success of the raid, and that unique composition requirement can be found even in 5-man instances.

Take Sunken Temple, for one well known instance.

Sure, you can have a primarily ranged DPS group and do quite well in almost all of Sunken Temple, but when you get to the Shade of Eranikus at the end, his sleep action pretty much requires an off tank to pick up tanking while the main tank is out cold.* I was part of a group without a tank spec (yes, a Healer + 4 DPS run because the tank had to bug out midway through) who managed to take out Erkanikus, but we got extremely lucky in the process that we had another DPS who could effectively off-heal (Shadow Priest), so we were able to heal through the designated tank's sleeping.

The same thing goes for Blackrock Depths, where you put two or three Mages in a group and you can clean up on the Lycaeum (aka the "group check") room filled with rapidly respawning Anvilrage Reserve enemies. Even if you don't have such a composition, having a Stealth class being able to roam through the room and mark the few Flame Keepers out there can be priceless to the success of a BRD run.

What got me thinking of the "Bring the player not the class" mantra, however, was a Lower Blackrock Spire run I was in the other day.

***

I hadn't been in LBRS since, oh, 2012 or so, and my first run through it (using Az) was pretty rough. It's not that the players weren't skilled, but since none of us save for the Healer had been in there since forever, it took us a long while to get into a groove. Still, we were highly dependent on the Ret Pally for any rezzes, because a Resto Druid only has a Battle Rez.

The second time I got into LBRS however --with Cardwyn-- turned out to be the equivalent of a speed run. It's not that we were trying to do a speed run, because we were chatting and having a good old time, but it just ended up that way. Only one player death, and even when we had an extra mob crash into us during a fight or two we turned out okay.

I mentioned how smooth the run was to the Healer afterward, and he said that the group composition was really good. Several players could remove various debuffs** which took the pressure (and mana usage) off of the Healer, and the ranged DPS (Card and a Warlock) could trade off of each other and mostly keep any ads or runners at bay.

That brings me back to the Blizzard mantra, because these experiences highlighting the utility of certain classes over others is likely what drove Blizzard into eliminating the unique capabilities of each class over the years' worth of expacs out there. If it was perceived as a limitation to bringing a class to a raid, it was eventually removed. Such as the Battle Rez only capability of Resto Druids I mentioned above. Or eliminating the ability of the Rogue to select various poisons for various situations. Or extending classes (such as Druid, Shaman, or Paladin) to other races, so that Horde and Alliance essentially have the same makeup, class-wise.

Some tweaks to the class structures from Vanilla to Burning Crusade were inevitable, and many people I've run with in instances keep saying how BC was their favorite expac for various reasons. But at the same time, they've also said that Blizz has gone too far relying upon their mantra, and that class uniqueness should matter.

And the more and more I've delved into Classic, the more I've come around to that idea. "Bring the player not the class" works to a point, but when it becomes the be-all-end-all of class design you lose sight of what makes a class unique. And for my money, uniqueness matters.




*Unless you have a Shaman who can counter that sleep action, something the Alliance doesn't have in Classic.

**At one point during the run, the Healer asked whether I could counter a Magic debuff. "No," I said. "I only have Remove Curse." "That doesn't make any sense," he replied. "If there's one class that you'd think would be able to remove a Magic debuff, it'd be the Mage class."

I Need a Vacation from my Vacation

Well, Blapril is over.

And if you want a quick "lessons learned" response to Blapril, then it's this: Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

I posted 18 times in April, by far my largest individual output in any month for PC. At the same time, the sheer volume of posts wore me out because I spent more time writing than enjoying myself. And when writing ceases to be enjoyable, that means the quality of output inevitably declines.

What also declined were the number of pageviews to PC for individual posts.

Sure, the total pageviews to PC went up, but the number of eyeballs on a specific post went down as the month wore on. Given that most of PC's regular readers are also bloggers, it only goes to show that the grind was getting to them too.

***

And, I have to admit, that Blapril pretty much didn't make a blip outside of the merry band of MMO/Gamer bloggers out there. It's not like I logged into WoW or LOTRO and found people talking about Blapril at all. It was pretty much an exercise in posting among a small group of people, no more no less.

A good portion of why it didn't make much of a blip outside the blogger community is that, well, blogs are pretty much on the outs these days as far as social media is concerned. It used to be that you'd go to blogs to get info that you can now find better at other locations. But blogs are also about telling stories --fictional or not-- and in a Tik-Tok world we're writing manuscripts on vellum.

At times like this, grabbing an ale at a local

tavern with friends sounds like a good idea.

This pretty much leaves that doing Blapril for reasons other than your own is that you're setting yourself up for a letdown.

***

Was I let down by this?

Not really. I mean, I knew going in that I was trying to see if I could do it. And, for the most part, I was able to get reasonably close to a goal of posting once a day. Well, I came twice as close as my closest month of output, and I'm not including last month's fiction boosted output. After a certain point I decided it was best if I just posted every other day, as otherwise I'd have no time for any actual gaming. And no gaming means Red isn't a happy person.

Additionally, I don't have people randomly coming up to me in-game and saying "Hey, are you that Redbeard guy, the blogger?" Which would be mildly embarrassing, to say the least. After all, I think Ancient is the only other blogger I know who is on Myzrael-US, and while I still do have toons on the SWTOR server that Shintar plays on I'm rarely on that particular server.

But I do believe that --for personal reasons-- pushing myself harder at blogging was a good thing. It makes me respect published authors that much more, because they frequently hold down another job (at least) in addition to writing. That doesn't mean that I think I'm as good or any better than they are, because there's a reason why they're published and I'm not*, but I can see how dedicated they were toward realizing their dream of being published while managing job, family, and other time commitments.

So, thank you, Blapril, for the motivation. And thank you, other bloggers (and other authors), for showing what the end result can be.

And thank you, readers, for hanging in there. (You know who you are!!)

#Blapril2020



*Hint: the quality of writing plays a large part in that.

A Musical Finish

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

You know, Ronnie James Dio.

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

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

80's Metal lives on.

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

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

Now I really feel old, because I remember

watching this on MTV.

So here's to the end of Blapril!!


#Blapril2020

What's Shakin', Mr. Peterson?

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


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

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

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

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

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

Yes, I'm old enough to have watched

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 "Az!!"

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

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

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

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

***

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

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





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

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

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

Blurring the Lines

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#Blapril2020




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

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

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


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