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.

Weariness in the Long Journey

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

That brings me to the other problem: gaming.

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

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

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

***

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

Who knew that introverts would be having issues too?

#Blapril2020





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

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

Serendipity in the Morning

Sometimes, you actively seek out new experiences.

Sometimes, they seek you out.

And sometimes, you make lemonade out of lemons.

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

Every five minutes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

 ***

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

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

#Blapril2020




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