I went from "Things are kind of getting back to a new normal" to "Well, THAT's gonna leave a mark" real fast.
Oh no, I didn't have any issues with my health this time, but things are about to change at my job.
As in, my entire job is about to change. And not by choice.
No, I'm not getting let go. Okay, kind of, but I have places I can land at work, so the old adage about when one door closes another opens isn't too far off the mark. And yes, there's internal politics involved, but there's also the knowledge that my bosses have my back, and they're in favor of a scorched earth policy regarding the people behind the shenanigans.
What this all boils down to is that the job I've had in one form or another for about 20 years is going to be upended, and I'll have to start from scratch. Which means that raiding until midway through the night on Mondays isn't going to be feasible.
***
I recognize that people might ask when progression raiding until 3 AM local time ever was feasible, but I could do it because I knew my job inside and out, and I could do my job with my eyes closed. That might have meant I needed newer challenges, but it also meant that I could handle other duties at work than strictly what I was supposed to be doing.
Or that I could be a zombie for an hour or two in the morning and still work at a high level.
Since I'm starting over --albeit in a similar position but at for new customers-- Redbeard the Zombie is going to have to shelf progression raiding.
***
Like I said, this all came rather fast.
I knew a change was coming, as I have ears to the ground, but I wasn't expecting it to be this soon. I was expecting it to be at least through the end of Phase 2 and the beginning of Phase 3 in TBC Classic, and even into March, but that didn't happen.*
And because of the shortened timeline, I'm going to have to devote a lot of time toward my new position, and that will mean I simply won't have time to devote to trying to get my DPS up to acceptable levels.
So....
Tonight's raid is going to be one of my last in progression. I can still run raids on Friday and Saturday, because it's the weekend, but my current main raid I'm going to have to walk away from. The Lead meeting after tonight's raid isn't going to be a pleasant affair.
When you play an RPG --video game version or not-- you are frequently out in the world, adventuring. You leave home --whatever it's defined as-- and do your thing.
But what is a home to an adventurer?
Are they just dopamine junkies, moving from one experience to the next, without something to anchor them? Or is their wandering a subliminally driven search for a new home? Or do they have a home they want to get back to, but can't for some reason or another?
Deep thoughts for a Friday Sunday, I suppose, but this invaded my head when I considered the plight of the Draenei and the Sindorei while I was doing other things.
In both cases, their original homeland has become untenable, so they flee to what they consider a better alternative: Draenei to Azeroth, and Sindorei to Outland. In both cases, they discover that their new, adoptive home isn't what they thought it was. The Draenei discover that the isles The Exodar crash landed in have enemies that followed them from Outland as well as the ecological disaster caused by The Exodar's crash. The Sindorei arrive in Outland to discover their leaders --and a lot of their best and brightest-- have betrayed the rest of their kin and sided with either Illidan the Betrayer or the Burning Legion itself.*
***
Where does Brig consider her home to be? Shattrath? The Exodar? Somewhere else? Nowhere?
It's kind of hard to say, because WoW --both Retail and Classic-- doesn't have that sort of grounding for a player. It can be both simultaneously freeing and terrifying, because the player is free to do whatever.
And to be fair, most players don't give a crap about existential issues such as finding a home; they'd rather do other things such as raid, PvP, run dungeons, or quest rather than muse about their toon's home or backstory. But there are those --especially those who have played pencil and paper RPGs, who are used to this sort of thing-- who DO care. And I'm one of them.
That doesn't mean that I'm in favor of player housing. WoW tried their own version of that once already, in the Warlords of Draenor expac, and it was widely panned for being more isolating than anything else. My personal opinion is that the isolationist trend was already present in WoW, and the implementation of Garrisons merely encouraged it. After all, there's been a big trend in WoW for quite a while now to login, do your dailies, raid if it's the time and date, and log. There isn't a lot of lounging around; even if you don't do the minimal amount described above, you're likely leveling an alt and/or doing the same thing there. There is a subset that are checking the PTR for info and raid strategies, min/maxing, and other highly obsessive items, but that is a very specific subset.**
***
What I am in favor of is some player grounding.
In BC (and BC Classic, apparently) if you're Exalted with the Cenarion Expedition and you arrive at their home base, some of the guards will acknowledge you as you pass by. I thought this was introduced only in Wrath, but it's an occasional nice reminder of your reputation. Now, what I'm not suggesting is to have everybody acknowledge how great you are, but occasional interactions/commentary from NPCs in locations that, well, you exist. Well, exist without the "sales" angle that you see from that Troll in Lower City, who is constantly trying to sell you trinkets, or "Topper" McNabb trying to shine your shoes for a copper. Kind of the "Hello, Cardwyn, good to see you again," you'd expect when you pass by the guards at the checkpoint in Elwynn (near the logging camp) after you completed quests for them. Or if you hit a certain number of logouts in a specific inn, the innkeeper greets you as a regular. Small stuff like that which are fairly easily implemented.
Kind of like this. Sorta.
Of course, I'm talking about this like it's going to happen in Classic, but a guy can dream, right?
But please, no more ego trips about how awesome the player is. After a while it feels, well, ridiculous.
*I could easily see both Card and Neve yelling at those Blood Elves "You are a disgrace to your ancestors!" It's personal for both.
**To that crowd, even our Turkey Award, given out to the player with the most deaths in a raid, detracts from the emphasis on "winning" the raid. I've seen killjoy comments after a Turkey Award posting and it's affiliated banter saying "remember, the point is to avoid deaths" and "it's good to see the number of deaths go down". To me, those comments strike me as tone deaf and missing the point of the Turkey Award: everybody knows you're supposed to not die, but nobody --and I mean nobody-- sits around and says "Hey, remember that time we ran Naxx and had only about 4 deaths at most?" When people remember raids, they remember memorable boss kills, raid drama, or memorable player deaths. This is just like real life: if you're doing your job, you're kind of invisible.
EtA: I started this post on Friday, but finished it on Sunday. So I replaced one with the other.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
