Lipstick on a Pig

I still remember my first time with a Looking for Group automated tool.

Maybe because my anxiety at meeting other people was so high that it was burned into my head, but I remember it well. It was an Ajol'Nerub run, a 15-20 minute affair, and I'd recently switched from Holy to Retribution on my Paladin, Quintalan.

Ajol'Nerub is a pretty straightforward instance, and by far the biggest issue with the instance is figuring out where to go because the graphics kind of make it hard to figure out. 

"You just follow the webs and...." I was told once when I couldn't make heads or tails of the graphics on screen. 

Surely I must be nuts because there was no obvious path. "...and what? It can be hard as hell to distinguish differences in the webs."

"Well, just follow everybody else."

I rolled my eyes back then, but going in solo? You don't want to project "noob-ness"; you want to be seen as cool, calm, and collected. In short, anything but a noob.

For a brief foray into Heroic Wrath of the Lich King LFG queues, it was pretty much a non-event, but mentally it was like my first time venturing into Orgrimmar, only without the random person coming up to me and asking for a guild signature.

Ever since, I've had the same stomach flip-flops whenever I grouped up for any PUG, whether it be using the automated tool or not. 

You can dress them up as much as you
want, but they're still Pugs.
(From The Spruce Pets.)

Being in WoW Classic --and avoiding the automated queues of more "modern" MMOs-- has helped to an extent, because bad behavior in PUGs will earn you black marks among people. While I know that among a couple of thousand players on a server an individual is hard to remember, it's far easier to remember the asshat than the person who did a good job. 

Having the perspective of over a dozen years playing MMOs, I'm all the more impressed by my old friend Vidyala and her pugging experiment, as chronicled in her (now retired) blog, Pugging Pally. It did make fodder for plenty of posts, but I doubt I would have had the mental fortitude to do what she did and PUG her way to L80.* From that viewpoint, I understand why people prefer to run instances within the confines of a guild. They're people you know (minimally, at least), and they're people you can trust.

***

That being said, I had a conversation with some people in Classic about Wrath Classic which is on the horizon. It was kind of funny in that people were talking about how hard killing Arthas was, and the breakups of guilds over ICC raids, but there was nary a mention about the automated LFG tool. I found that conversation somewhat odd, given the poor reputation the LFG tool has, but I kept quiet about it. 

But the LFG tool is out there, lurking, and while I'd prefer that the tool never make an appearance in Wrath Classic I do believe that it will show up eventually.

In a bizarre way, I'm watching the rollout of Classic --and it's associated reactions-- as a repeat of what happened in the original WoW rollouts, only the timeline has shrunk a bit.** I remember the blogger debates over the LFG tool rollout, and how it was largely greeted as a positive development, and I hear the arguments now about how hard it is to get a PUG run together and think that people will --by and large-- have a positive reception of the Classic version of the LFG tool. Which seems silly to me, given the long term effects of the tool on the in-game community, but I guess I've played WoW long enough to see history repeat itself.

But still, I do believe that the problems created by the Meta in TBC Classic will also carry over to Wrath Classic, turning Wrath Classic into a weird reflection of both Classic and Retail at once. For me, having been on the short end of the stick in TBC Classic, I am leaning toward taking a hard pass on progression raiding in Wrath Classic. I'm not planning on sprinting to L80, maxing out reputations, and other bullshit that the Meta foisted on people just so they could min-max their way through progression raids. I did not have anything resembling fun in the first half of the TBC Classic Phase 1 experience, and I'm not intending to repeat that at all. 

I guess that's not a big surprise, but I'm putting it out here now before I forget and/or get talked into progression raiding after all. And I'm not making this decision while I'm in a bubble, either: of the Leveling Shamans, both the Leftovers and those that managed to sprint quickly enough to L60 so as to not get left behind when the Dark Portal opened, there's only 3 of us left. The others are gone, having burned out on the game and either left it behind entirely or stopped progression raiding and are on other toons doing anything other than Shaman work. And to be fair, once you get to progression raiding, parsing well as a TBC Classic Enhancement Shaman is hard, so the pressure doesn't really let up once you get to progression raiding. As much as I like Briganaa personally, the Enhancement rotation, coupled with totem twisting and shock twisting and swing timers, really really sucks. It's twice as difficult as the Rogue and Mage rotations in Classic, as the sheer number of irons in the fire you have to maintain are nuts.

There will be another post on my foibles getting the Shaman rotation down --or rather NOT down, as it were-- but I will say that rotations for raiding are a totally different animal than anywhere else. Just setting up your rotation in a lot of non-boss scenarios takes enough time that the fight is over once you're "ready", a problem I found in a lot of nerfed raid trash as well. While other players' DPS may go down over time, an Enhancement Shaman's DPS may actually go up because that initial burst that a Mage or Rogue might have doesn't exist for an Enhancement Shaman. There's reasons, of course, but that'll come later. I promise. 

But yes, there are times when I miss Card for her relatively high output and uncomplicated rotation. At least when I got into PUGs with her, there wasn't any extra anxiety over trying to maximize my DPS; that pig didn't require more makeup than some lipstick.

 

*We were on different servers --and on different factions back then-- or I'd have helped her out from time to time. Well, I'd like to think so, but I also believe I would have been too shy to ask her if she needed an assist because... Well, that's how I am: not exactly a pillar of confidence. (And before anybody gets in their head "Just how on earth did Red ever meet his future wife if he's so damn shy?" the answer is that she made the move first.)

**Or at least it feels that way.

Other Things I'm Not Good At, Part Whatever

When I was a kid, everybody (and it certainly seemed like everybody) had an Atari 2600. If their parents decided that the Atari was too "inferior" --which meant that they listened to George Plimpton's commercials-- those kids had an Intellivision instead.

My parents, despite my brother's and my pleas, had neither system in our house.

We did have a basketball net, however, and since I played basketball in grade school* I played a LOT of basketball during the summers. One day, as motivation, my dad said that if I could make 10 free throws in a row, I could get an Atari.

"Cool beans!" I thought**, and proceeded to miss several free throws in a row. 

This was not gonna be easy.

Yeah, kinda like this. Only that
I'm not an NBA caliber player.

 

I spent the entire summer shooting free throws as often as I could, and finally one day in late September I made all 10 with my dad watching.

"Woo!" I exclaimed. "We're gonna get an Atari!!"

"I never said that," my Dad replied.

That brought an end to my celebration real fast. "What?? You said that if I hit 10 free throws in a row you'd get us an Atari!"

"I never said that," he repeated.

And that was that.

Nursing my resentment, I made a vow to never do that crap to anybody else. It meant I was never going to be a good salesman, but I could live with that. The casual half truths that salespeople tell*** drives me bonkers, and I could never do that.

I was thinking about my Atari misadventure when I was perusing the Steam sale listings a few days after Christmas. Not because I was hunting for Haunted House --we do have an Atari 2600 now in storage, with a ton of cartridges-- but because of the decisions that go into buying a game these days. 

Despite the Steam sale, video games aren't cheap. 

Look at The Sims 4 as an example. The base game on sale is under $5. Great deal, eh? Well, look at all of the addons for it, including ones (such as Cats & Dogs or Get To Work) that you'd think would be part of the base game, but it isn't. When you add up all of the addons, the price for The Sims 4 is over $500. Which is kind of nuts for a life simulator that The Sims 4 is.

Awkward first date or sticker shock
from the price of what The Sims 4
really costs? You decide.
(From the Steam Store sample pics.)

 

Of course, here I am talking about that while I pay a subscription fee for playing a couple of MMOs, but I digress. The point is that even when things seem cheap, the reality is something different. It's like the bait-and-switch at a car dealership, where you go in with a checklist in hand, a loan pre-approved, and a car make and model in mind, and the salespeople try their damnedest to get you to over commit so they can maximize their profits. The difference is that there's no visible salesperson there, prodding you to plunk down your money on video games. There's only you, the Steam app, the "reviews"****, and the ticking clock on the upcoming end to the Steam sale. It's all in your head, but you're conditioned to "seek a bargain", and seeing the posts for "50%" or "70%" off, you get this urge to pull the trigger and reel that bargain in.

Not everybody has that willpower.

This kind of bothers me, not because I feel superior or anything, but because people who shouldn't be blowing money on a Steam sale (or whatever sale, whether it's at a car dealership or Amazon) are out there doing it. As if we never learned anything from the last debt bubbles.***** I'd see this sort of behavior at gaming conventions as well, where people would think nothing of blowing several hundred dollars on games and gaming material, or to bring things closer to home people dropping a couple of thousand dollars on fireworks for the Fourth of July.

Remember to shoot those
fireworks off safely....
From makeagif.com.
(or someplace like that.)

 

Oh yes, I've neighbors who do the whole "we're gonna blow close to a month's worth of salary on fireworks" thing. And yes, several thousand dollars' worth. And I just shake my head and say "at least I'm getting a show out of it".

***

But to tie this whole thing back into gaming, from another angle, there's the whole in-game economy thing that goes on. Unless you do what I did in late Classic and basically made all my own potions to save on gold from the AH,  you're going to have to spend gold if you're a raider.

Or if you want epic flying in TBC Classic, you have to get 5000 gold.

In both cases, that means you have to make some gold somehow.

Unless you're like me, who is notoriously uninterested in being a slave to the Metagame, and instead tries to skate by doing as little gold farming as possible. 

Seriously. I'm practically the only person left in the raid team who doesn't have a fast mount on their main, and I wear that like a badge of honor. After all, I made the choice that if I had a couple of thousand gold in my pocket, why push to get fast flying? So I could get to the raid faster? So I could then farm for materials quicker? So I could spend more game time doing things I'm not that keen on doing?

No thanks. I'd rather do things on my own pace. And dailies? Please. I'd rather read something, or go for a quick walk, or even chill before raid time. I'm so anti-Dailies that I've never even completed the seed quests for Ogri'la and The Shatari Skyguard. I did the dailies thing back in Wrath, and I'm good.

To me, the acquisition of gold isn't very interesting --or important-- because in the end it would kind of suck for people to say of my time spent playing as "Well, Cardwyn knew how to make a lot of gold." I'd much rather be known for other things, such as being a friend or helping people out. 

But you know, some people want to be known as the Greedy Goblin type. Gevlon certainly did.

*I was good enough to be on the "A" team from 5th through 8th Grade, but I sat on the bench for the most part. My 8th Grade year, due to a leap in physical performance and a sudden ability to actually make some shots, was shaping up to be very good for me until I broke my collarbone during school recess. I was out of commission for almost two months, and by the time the brace holding my shoulder together came off I was relegated back to the bench.

**Hey, it was the 80s.

***With many of my so-called friends in high school having salesmen for fathers I got to see this in action all the time. Well, that and their parents' explicit racism too.

****Most of those reviews are totally worthless. You can spend more time combing through the reviews than actually playing some games. 

*****Like the people who went out and spent over $50,000 on a half ton pickup truck and are now complaining about the price of gasoline to fill those gas guzzlers. If you need one for work that's one thing, but you should have known going in that gas prices weren't going to stay historically low forever, and they still haven't hit the high points of the mid-2000s yet.

2021: Running to Standing Still

It's the end of the year, and I've been wondering exactly what happened to me, gaming wise, these past 12 months. 

Whiplash is one way of putting it. 

In case you ever wondered what
Card's robe from Evelyn looked like...

I started the year as part of a raiding team that was dipping its toes into Naxxramas, and ended it as a raid leader in two raids (three, if the Classic raid gets off the ground). I began the year feeling a bit like the odd person out, survived a bout of depression and the stress of speed leveling TBC Classic, got heart failure along the way, and ended it.... feeling a bit like the odd person out.

The year began with me dialing back my login time on my main but not really desiring to play much other than some lowbies with my oldest, and ended with me spending as little time as possible on my main and leveling a Horde alt instead.

Neve definitely has opinions about
things. And she's not afraid to declare
what she wants. (If someone catches
her eye, they'd better look out.)

It's just that who the main was changed.

Hey, Bright Eyes.
You have caused me no end of
conflicting emotions; not on purpose,
but just because of what had to be done.
I still like you, though.

 

***

It could be worse, I suppose.

I was talking with my questing buddy last night, and one of the guilds that her friends had moved to had blown up*, and those friends had ended up taking their mains to other servers. Considering that the guild in question was a mainstay of the Myzrael server scene, this upset me to no end. I realize that things happen --and my questing buddy said as much-- but I still recall the friends I'd made in Classic who just simply vanished without any notice and wish that things weren't like that. 

My questing buddy admitted that if she'd not joined our raid team, she'd likely have unsubscribed by now. And were it not for her, I'd have likely either quit before Briganaa even got to Outland (much less L70) or I'd have faction changed and just started over with Neve.

***

To be fair, I didn't realize just how much of an impact I made on things until I wasn't there.

Oh, this isn't some self serving bullshit where I can stroke my ego and say "hey, I was the best Loot Master ever" (I'm not) or "I'm too important to the raid's DPS to be missed" (again, I'm not).** But it was made plain to me when I spent the week in the hospital by the people who reached out to me when they discovered why I wasn't at that Monday's raid. Or the people who reached out to me to wish me Merry Christmas in game. 

When I talk to people in game who are feeling down and they need some cheering up, I typically say that "they matter". But this past month, people have been telling me that instead, and I don't quite know what to say. Other than "Thank you."

***

But this year has been so eventful it's almost surreal to realize that I'm pretty much back where I started when 2021 began, only with a different main. Still have lots of conflicting feels, and I still have me wondering where I fit in overall.

People do have my back, however, and I'm eternally grateful for it.

*Internal drama caused by raiding, and to be perfectly honest bad management as well.

**In fact, you could make the argument that trying to keep all the irons in the fire on Enhanced Spec --Swing Timers + Totem Timers + Totem Twisting + Shock Twisting-- that unless your gear is top notch it's a royal pain in the ass to keep going. By comparison, Mage rotations are MUCH simpler and do MUCH more damage.

No King Rules Forever

MadSeasonShow, the YouTube content creator, gave us a Holiday present on the 24th when he dropped a 2 hour epic on the history of World of Warcraft:

I put it on while I was sorting medical bills --and the affiliated insurance results-- and it kept me entertained throughout the long arduous process.*

It does have WoW's Greatest Hits, such as Leeroy Jenkins, the infamous Memorial Service on a PvP server, the "You think you do but you don't" and "Do you not have phones?" comments, as well as the sordid events of this year. I realize that his videos aren't for everybody, but Pandora's Box is really worth a watch. 

If there's a theme to the video, it's how Blizz turned away from the community in favor of short term convenience and monetary gains, and that once gone Blizz couldn't get it back.

Still, definitely worth a listen or watch (your choice).

*So far, so good. I believe the saying is "it could have been much worse" as far as bills went.

When Life Gives you Malt...

We are presently hip deep in the holiday season, with Christmas and Hanukkah past, Kwanzaa just starting up, and the New Years less than a week away.

I hope the gifts you received (and gave) were all what were hoped for. Sometimes my own gift giving knocks it out of the park*, and other times it's, well, kind of meh. 

But by far the best gift I received this year came a month ago, when I was given a second chance at life. And for everybody who helped give me that gift, I don't intend to squander it.

I am still the same person I was, however. I can't look at these commercials for European river cruises or vacations abroad without thinking they are the height of extravagance. Sure, I'd love to travel, but money (and medical issues) restrict me from doing so. As does my Midwestern upbringing in not drawing attention to myself; and let's be honest about travel: the farther away from home you go, the more likely you draw that attention to yourself by merely being there. Your accent and mannerisms will draw the eye as you do not fit in.

It may be funny, but also cringe
inducing for Midwesterners with
neighbors who think Gatlinburg is exotic.

So, my life changing goals are a bit less exotic and more along the lines of "let's work on the house a bit more and get things done that you said you were going to get done all those years ago". Or perhaps revisit a hobby because of my now incessant need to know just what is going into my body when I eat or drink something:

Cardwyn: "Oh no..."
Me: "Oh yes. And you're still a figment
of my imagination."
Cardwyn: "We'll see about that."

Sorry, I'm not a hophead, and I can't stand IPAs**. But I do like other beers, so I'm going to return to a hobby I abandoned a couple of years before I took up MMOs and start homebrewing again. I don't intend to go bananas, but I do intend to brew about 3-4 batches a year. I can drink beer and wine, but I have to strictly monitor my intake. And with homebrewing, I can control exactly how many carbs are in my beer.

I've already reviewed my 20+ year old equipment and replaced most of the food grade plastic with new material from Northern Brewer --the glass and metal stuff is still in good shape-- and I've already got a basic recipe obtained, so I think shortly after New Year's I'll hold my first brewing session since what, 2005 or 2006? Probably 2006.

If I can't visit Great Britain, at least I can brew an English Bitter and drink that. 

Hmm.... I wonder if someone had created a homebrew version of Shindigger Stout....

*For the unfamiliar, some baseball slang referencing a home run. The equivalent in futbol of kicking a goal from the midfield.

**India Pale Ales.

Some Monday Updates

Well....

The first Classic Throwback raid was a bust. 

Too many people said "hey, great idea, but I can't attend this week," and that lack of signups killed off the BWL run.

So, I'm going to give it a try in January.

***

In other news, the holidays are almost here, and that means Winter festivals galore in MMO space.

I still am somewhat ambivalent about those, but I have to acknowledge that a festival or celebration around the time of the Winter Solstice has been around in our (real) history for thousands of years, so we pretty much expect one when we participate in something akin to an MMO or RPG. 

I still enjoy this.

And yes, the Elf reference still makes me chuckle.

***

Finally, the gang is all here.

My youngest arrived back home just before midnight on Saturday, straight from Chicago and a music convention* there, so now the entire family is back together. Just in time for me to get a cold.

Oh yay.

I've finally turned the corner today, but it still sucked to have to isolate myself for a couple of days.

But hey, we're all back together --until the UofL bowl game, that is-- and I'm going to enjoy this time with all seven of us.

Seven?

Yeah, seven. Because we now have two extra family members:

Amazingly enough, they stood
still for this photo.

Say hello to Athena and Artemis. My oldest adopted them late last Summer, and I am now a guinea pig grandpa. I've gotten used to this concept, and after my hospital stay the three of us now compete for the same leafy greens that are stored in the fridge.

I guess that makes me part guinea pig at this point.

*Her major is Music Therapy, and she is also a member of the University of Louisville Marching Cards. So we have two mini-Reds who have been part of a university marching band as well as wind ensembles and chamber orchestras. Yes, I'm a proud papa.

Fun is a Relative Thing

Next week, I'm going to flip the script.

I'm going to take my raid back into the Classic past and our first Throwback Friday Classic raid.

Instead of running Karazhan every Friday of the month --and struggling to keep the same number of tanks/healers-- every third Friday I'm going to run a Classic raid instead. The poll on the channel currently shows Blackwing Lair leading the vote, which means we'll need a few tanks with a fire resist set*, but given that Naxx was originally leading the poll I'm fine with that.

Still, this will be a new (old?) experience for me. 

I mean, I know what BWL is like. (The goblin packs alone make that obvious, you know.) But still, this will be a major endeavor, because I'll likely be leading a raid with a significant number of non-guildies for the first time. If our forays into Naxx for Atiesh completion is our guide, non-guildies will come out of the woodwork for a chance to go back to BWL and pick up various and sundry gear for RP purposes. And for the chance to get Neltharion's Tear, too.

So this will be my maiden voyage into 'herding 40 cats'. Ought to be fun, I suppose.

*Still need one, as far as I know. I can't assume we'll just overcome it by sheer force of will. Or idiocy.