What Awaits Blizzard

I read with interest the experiences of Bethesda's disaster of a game, Fallout 76, in an article just published on Wednesday by Kotaku. While the article itself could have used better editing*, the basic premise remains the same: Bethesda refused to listen to the multi-player part of the studio, used crunch needlessly on QA and dev staff, refused to let the release date slide, utilized a game engine not built for what it was being used for, and relied upon snitches and bad management to deal with a project that chewed up and spit people out.

It sounds a LOT like what happened to Bioware with Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda, doesn't it?

But for me, the most interesting part of the article was how the QA and dev staff thought they were gonna be saved when Microsoft bought the game studio, and once they came onboard they were sadly mistaken.

Microsoft operated in a "hands-off" policy, mainly because they feared too much corporate interference would disrupt the "secret sauce" of the creative nature of game development.

“The impression that I got was that Microsoft would not make big changes unless they needed to,” one staffer told Kotaku. “Simply because they’re like: We hired you to be excellent. And if we touch you, it could be like a house of cards situation where you just fall apart [as creatives]. I don’t think health benefits are going to do that to anybody.”

Microsoft did not address a request for comment by the time of publication.

A former Bethesda employee told Kotaku, “[Xbox CEO Phil] Spencer’s word when picking up Bethesda [and ZeniMax] is largely that his preference is that studios be let to operate as they always have, let the talent be the talent.”

One source spoke cynically about Bethesda’s potential for changing from within: “It would be great if something like [Activision Blizzard worker advocacy group] A Better ABK existed for Bethesda, but everyone is terrified...because [Bethesda] HR is super cutthroat.” A current employee agreed it did not feel like Bethesda HR was actively interested in addressing “any real employee concerns.” Similar cynicism is reflected in the company’s Glassdoor reviews.
--From The Human Toll Of Fallout 76’s Disastrous Launch

My big takeaway from this is that if people thought that Microsoft would "right the ship" with Blizzard's handling of World of Warcraft or any of their other franchises, they are being naive.

There isn't going to be a big cultural shift at Activision/Blizzard, and there isn't going to be a sudden improvement in the quality of the work done on WoW. The stories aren't going to get better (or worse, I suppose), and the focus on WoW isn't going to change from raiding and Mythic+. And Diablo Immortal? It's not going to change from it's own insidious version of gambling mechanics.

Unless Blizzard itself wants it to change.

 

 

*Having blogged for almost 13 years has given me some appreciation for that part of the creative process. I mean, I read an old post I'd made and cringe at the grammatical errors I find, years later. And don't get me started on One Final Lesson; every time I go back and reread it I find new areas I could rewrite and improve the flow of the story.

A Short Run

Yesterday, I thought I'd login to Retail just to look around a bit.

I wasn't planning on doing much of anything, just wandering around Stormwind and Elwynn, just to see how things looked. There's been a lot of times in Classic when I'd drop into Goldshire as Cardwyn and wander around for a bit, soaking up the scenery and checking out the sights. After all, Darkmoon Faire is in Elwynn on Myzrael this week, so it just feels good to get a glimpse of some of what the Goldshire Harvest Festival might have looked like.

The toon I found was a lowbie Paladin that I'd created and really not done much with, so he was pretty much perfect for the area.* He was still in Stormwind, and as I logged in he was at what was my favorite spot, right under the tree where --in Classic, anyway-- it's right next to the Auction House.

So I ran down from Stormwind, eschewing the flight path, because... come on. Using the flight path to Goldshire from Stormwind is like watching one of our newish neighbors zip around the neighborhood on their golf cart; if you can't handle walking around the neighborhood, maybe you've got bigger problems.**

But as I approached Goldshire, I noticed that things were, well, off.

Let's see if you can spot the motorcycle,
the dinosaur, the celestial mounts, the
flying mounts, and the pack horse type
oversized riding mount. There was also
a spider-ish mount that skittered away
when I took the screenshot.

I just kind of looked around and thought, "Well, there goes my immersion."

All I could think of as I took it all in was this video:

More specifically, the 1:39 mark.

Well, at least it's not TERA.

*I think; with the level squish I'm never quite sure as I haven't internalized it yet.

**Last night while I was doing yard work, I saw one of the 20-something adult men popping wheelies on a mini-bike --and smoking like a chimney-- while the golf cart trailed behind with 4 40-ish women on it, all of whom (including the driver) with alcoholic drinks in their hand. You couldn't get much more stereotypically white trash if you'd tried; the only things missing were the cranked up Country music blaring from speakers and the occasional "yee haw!" out of them, not to mention having political bumper stickers on the golf cart.

EtA: Apparently I accidentally removed "this week" about Darkmoon Faire. Fixed.

A View from the Other Side

"I have seen the enemy, and it is us." --Pogo

 

Given that I've been enjoying myself more on the Horde side of the fence as I've been leveling Neve, I suppose it was inevitable that I'd try out what's going on in a far more populated server as well.

My questing buddy, as usual, led the way when I logged in last evening and found her on a new toon on Atiesh-US. When I whispered her a 'good evening', she invited me to create a toon over here and explore like she was doing. "Hop into the Discord with the rest of us!"

Rest of us? Just how many people were over there?

Turns out there were 4+ people from an old guild she still has a toon in, and I was already in their Discord, so I put on my headset and joined their group. 

And what did I do?

Create another Cardwyn, because I am so original.

"At least people will know it's me,"
I said to myself.

As soon as I logged in, I discovered things were different than on Myzrael.

"Hey, there's toons here!" I exclaimed as I got started around Northshire Abbey. Outside of when I created Briganaa, these were the most new toons I'd seen in an intro zone at one time in quite a while.

"Wait'll you see Stormwind!" another friend --who also raided with the Monday team-- replied. "It's the most people I've seen in Stormwind since Classic!"

Given that I knew that Atiesh was roughly 5 to 6 times the size of Myzrael*, I wasn't exactly surprised, but when I went there a couple of hours later I was shocked. It was far more than just 6x the toons; it was actually active in a way I hadn't seen since.... Maybe circa AQ40? Oh, definitely not on the level of when the Ony buff would drop --as the place would explode with people during those times-- but at that time of night, much larger than a predicted "6x the size of what you'd see in Myz". 

As my questing buddy is a bit of a social butterfly, she'd already joined a leveling guild that yet another friend of hers was a member of. I was then informed that their guild regularly purges their ranks of people who haven't logged in 30 days. "Do you mean individual toons or people in general?" I asked.

"They try to keep track of alts, so people in general. But if they miss someone you can always whisper when you get back online to get an invite again."

"Makes sense."

It turns out that this guild had well over 40 people online the other night, which as my questing buddy put it was more than she'd seen from Valhalla even on raid nights in a very long time. I'd found similar logins on my Horde leveling guild compared to Valhalla although to a lesser extent --around 25 to 30-- even though that Horde guild doesn't raid at all.

I did point out that it doesn't mean that people aren't on; after all, I typically am online, just not on a Valhalla toon. But still, the size of this guild on Atiesh threw me for a loop.

It's kind of like Texas, I suppose. Everything is bigger over here on Atiesh.

The next couple of hours were spent grouped up and questing in Northshire Abbey and Elwynn. I'd like to say there was a downside to this, but it was an enjoyable couple of hours being a lowbie and exploring the Old World again. But here's the kicker: there were other people around. Were it not for those others, it would have been what has become a pretty typical experience: a largely empty world, devoid of flavor, with people clamoring for boosts in LFG. But I actually found people wanting to run instances without boosts in LFG chat, which meant that others were leveling just because, rather than raiders rushing to get to endgame.

***

What does that mean going forward?

Well, I'm not planning on moving any of my toons over to Atiesh unless it's a free transfer, so there's that. I'm not made of money, despite what Blizzard thinks, so my old stable of toons will remain on Myzrael for the time being.

However, this is the closest I've been to the original Classic experience in a long time. 

Obviously the Old World is not current content, so I have no idea what the crowd is like in Outland. Given the sheer number of raiding toons listed in ironforge.pro, you'd think that the size of people just hanging around Shattrath would be gigantic. It could be that once we get to Outland, we'd discover what the downsides to a server this size really are. Or that just like Myzrael, toons are raid logging and suffering from burnout from following the Meta too; it's still an unknown, and I'm not likely to get to Outland on this version of Card until Wrath drops. 

Still, this provides an alternative to my current Alliance stable of toons, with a more active Old World going forward.

***

I don't have an idea as to what I'm going to do in Wrath, but I do know that I'm not planning on doing any progression style raiding. I did all of that for half of an expac, and I saw what the "chasing the meta" is like, and I'm happy to not be on that treadmill any more.

And, from what I can tell, more and more people are indicating to me via private conversations that they're at least considering stepping back as well; while they've not totally burned out on progression raiding, the state of chasing the bleeding edge in TBC Classic has soured them on that for Wrath. I've even heard/seen a few things in just idle chat that makes me think there's also going to be a shake-up in raid leadership for Wrath, which doesn't surprise me much given that as much as the meta is for the raiders, for raid leadership it's even more so. 

For all of the people in guild who are clamoring for automated LFD, I'd say be careful what you wish for; if there's an easy alternative to endgame progression raiding in Wrath, the number of people who are wanting to raid will likely plummet. If nothing else, this is what chasing the meta in TBC Classic will likely lead to: a similar situation to Retail, where you have a smaller amount of progression raiders pushing content and a larger group that will unsub and sub based on access to new content. 

It won't have been the Classic Team that will have "Retail-ized" the Classic experience, it will be the Classic players themselves.

*Just checked, it still is, but due to the declines in Myz's raiding guilds it's now much closer to 6x.

...To the Happy Home with Trees and Flowers and Chirping Birds...

This is a bit of an unusual post for PC, but I was inspired by conversation in the typically maligned* LFG Chat Channel. The other evening, I was on Neve, questing away, when conversation in Horde LFG Chat turned to music. I can't remember the exact exchange, but I think it involved someone saying "Who?" to a comment I made about how someone was almost as old as the Violent Femmes' first album.

 

"Please tell me you're joking," I replied.

"No, I'm not."

"Crap. I just suddenly felt really old." I reached into the back of my mind and tried to figure out what would be roughly a contemporary of the Violent Femmes, but would be lighthearted enough --and common enough-- to discuss in LFG. 

And I struck gold. 

"Instead of the Femmes, do you at least know of Doctor Demento?"

Now THAT got a conversation going.

First there was Napoleon XIV with "They're Coming to Take Me Away",

Then I mentioned "Rock and Roll Doctor", which is spoken word, but it rang a bell,

And then someone mentioned that they had that first song stuck in their head, so I countered with the Weird Al classic "Yoda",

Which inevitably led to The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins, sung by Leonard Nimoy...

"No, Spock! WHYYYY" was the response.

It's right up there with William Shatner singing "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"

We kept on going for the next 15 minutes, covering a lot of ground, from The Frantics' Roman Numerals

to Polka-dot Undies, which sounds like a Bob Dylan song:

 

to the Chuck Berry classic, My Ding-a-ling:

 

I could have kept going for a long time. My roommate my freshman year of college used to tape Doctor Demento's radio show --we didn't have it locally-- so I used to listen to his tapes throughout my freshman year. Given the transition from high school to college was rough at times, being able to laugh was a premium.

Eventually the conversation switched to something else, but for a short period of time LFG Chat was glorious.

*And with good reason!!

Entering the No-Judgement Zone

(Apologies to Planet Fitness for co-opting their slogan.)

 

Here's a question that I've been wondering about lately:

Can you even play Retail these days without an external guide?

Or maybe a better question is whether you can play either Retail or the current iteration of Classic without external guides, but the Retail version of the question came out when I began contemplating what it would take to begin playing again before Dragonflight.

I'm still on the fence about it, especially given the experience this YouTuber had picking up the game.

"With that being said, I plan to talk about my adventures through the story as the narrative is very important to me in video games such as World of Warcraft. I'd expect the story itself would keep a hold on me, but what I found out while playing through Shadowlands and BfA was something I can personally compare to was jumping in the middle of new playing film which is on its fifth sequel."

And I thought, "Uh oh."

Apparently he had the extremely bad luck to choose the three class/race combos that don't start in Exile's Reach, but that's on Blizzard for making those decisions. If you want a new player to start in Exile's Reach, don't give an out for a few class/race options. That's a huge mistake.

The Blizzard Forums thread about WoW and casual players where I found the YouTube video shown above began with this YouTube video being posted,

and reading through set of forum comments that was enough to make me wonder whether it was worth it to try to catch up in Retail at all. I mean, Shintar was able to pick up Retail fairly easily after having been away even longer than I have, and she is enjoying the game as a casual player, but she also wasn't fazed by all of the systems that had sprung up since, well, Cataclysm. (Mists doesn't count, since I'd kind of mailed it in on PvE content --and especially group content-- at that point.) She also has the advantage of being a long time raider and officer in a raiding guild on SWTOR, so she's far more used to picking up the complex end of MMOs than I am.

Which is when I realized that I'd need to do a ton of out-of-game reading to try to figure everything out.

Hence the question.

***

I suppose that the question itself is a bit of a bait and switch, since I'm about 95% confident that the answer is "no".

As I mentioned in a comment on one of Kamalia's recent posts, I was helping my questing buddy make the transition from Enchanting to Tailoring and so I hit Wowhead to see if my memory was correct in where the best places to farm Silk and Mageweave were. That was when it hit me: I already had done this for Neve (and Cardwyn before her) by memory and educated guesses, confirmed by Wowhead, just a month or two ago. I've also been playing Classic since launch --and then the pre-Cata Retail back in the day-- so why should I feel the need to look it up?

But I did anyway, approaching the question like I do most other research topics.

That experience does beg the question I asked in the comment: why should we feel the need to do this in the first place? Have we been conditioned to look at guides for the meta on various things in MMOs so much that we never realize that we're basically utilizing unofficial third party documentation as manuals?

And how on earth did we let game companies get away with letting their fans write the manuals for their games without the game companies paying them?

After all, that's what Wowhead and Icy Veins and other websites are: the game manuals and reference manuals for WoW. The meta that I beat on quite frequently is basically the "how to do it" manual for WoW.*

***

I'm old enough to have PC video games in storage that not only came with a real manual, but a manual filled with historical details, such as the Lawrence Holland developed video games from LucasArts. 

Those manuals were more like a textbook, complete with references, and developers spent a ton of time working on them.

And for popular games, there were also the third party "how to do it" manuals, like this: 

I have a copy around somewhere.
From eBay.

Given that --comparatively speaking-- the manual for Civ was pretty thin, having a guide along from people who loved the game** was a godsend. 

And I suppose these sort of manuals were the genesis of the current phenomenon of requiring a visit to Wowhead before you can do pretty much anything in game.

***

So I guess it's not a matter of these external guides being a requirement to play the game, because you can try to play without any guides at all, but if you want to do any form of decent group content you're pretty much going to have to follow said guides. 

And you thought peer pressure was merely part of your growing up. 

For example***, one of the most recent times I was in an instance on the Alliance side, our guild group was joined by an unguilded Warlock. More than once, one of the guildies commented on his rotation, wondering why the Lock was doing some of the things they were doing. 

"They could have learned to do this out in the field, where you do things differently than in group content," I posited. "When you're a Fire Mage in group content, you lead with different spells than when you're out questing where survival is more important."

"Maybe."

"You could provide some guidance," another guildie added. "If they joined the guild they could find out how things worked in group content."

"....Nah. Not worth the trouble."

Okay, maybe not all guilds have those sorts of discussions when running group content, but having seen how the sausage is made in both these sorts of runs --or in reviewing personnel to join a raiding team-- you can't unsee it. The lead team examines gear, raiding logs, and rotation before they make a decision to give someone a tryout. Sentiment and emotion aren't allowed into the review process when you're trying to stay on current content.

From the movie Invincible (2006).****

It can be soul crushing at times, and it frequently feels like the managing by spreadsheet crap which I rail about at work all the time.***** There's no room for hunches or for how well people fit into a group environment; if they don't follow the meta why should you take a chance on them?

***

I guess the answer to the overarcing question as to why we use these third party guides all the time is because of the age old problem of peer pressure. It may not be obvious to the uninitiated, especially if you've been steeped in the game for so long, but the pressure to conform if you want to do anything beyond solo content and some basic group content is a constant. The desire to not look like an idiot can be a big motivator to conform to what the guides tell you to do, especially if content in those guides are what the team/raid leaders for high end content are looking for. 

For a non-conformist, who zigs when everybody else zags******, that can be the death knell of interest in a game.

Does it mean that I'm going to set aside my interest in Retail? Not yet, but I'll admit that my interest is dimming somewhat when I realize just how much work I'd have to do just to get current with things. Because I'd like to do some group content, and realizing that I've just as much work ahead of me as if I were going progression raiding does not endear me that much to the process. Add to that I'm apparently supposed to do BfA content to get to Dragonflight isn't a favorite topic of mine, either.

From Blizzplanet's interview with
Jackie Wiley and Tina Wang.

*For all those posts in forums and elsewhere about how "casuals don't even know Wowhead exists", I call bullshit. If you play the game for any length of time and look at in game chat channels, you'll see people told to look at Wowhead, typically in a condescending fashion. Or if you have a question about the game and do a quick search, Wowhead inevitably comes up. It's not like other games --especially RPGs and MMOs-- don't have their Wowhead equivalents. So I'm not buying that crappy "casuals don't know" excuse. It's just that people who say that about casuals have their heads in the sand; people know about Wowhead, they just don't really care about slavishly following everything it suggests.

**And with an official imprimatur from Microprose, too.

***Again, paraphrasing. I don't have all the conversation written down, and I don't turn on recordings while on Discord.

****Vince Papale (Mark Wahlberg) noted his name was spelled wrong in his locker after being granted a tryout as a walk-on with the Philadelphia Eagles NFL team. The equipment manager wasn't exactly concerned about that, given he believed Vince was going to be cut from the team in a week or two.

*****Part of the reason why this is bugging me so much is that I noted that --in pursuit of the meta-- the 2x/week raid team began putting one of their two Mages on the bench in favor of pulling in an extra Warlock, who used to be a Warrior but then changed to a Ret Pally before they had a Ret Pally join their team. So nothing personal, buddy, but we only need one Mage now and you're out of luck. Which drives me bananas, because I wanted so much to make sure that all of the Mage crew from Classic had a landing spot for TBC, and despite all that one of them is getting put on the bench for Sunwell. 

******Guilty as charged. I still haven't regularly done any of the dailies in TBC Classic aside from the occasional PvP daily, and for the dailies from places like Ogri'la, Terokk, and Quel'Danas, I haven't even picked up the seed quest for them. The easiest way to get me to NOT do something is to be loudly told by everybody in every single channel I'm in --guild, global, or whatever-- to DO YOUR DAILIES.

Because I Enjoy a Good Spanking

I guess I should feel grateful that I'm small potatoes --okay, more like the size of a single french fry-- in the MMO blogosphere.

After reading this post over on MassivelyOP and then Wilhelm Arcturus' rebuttal, I was certainly happy to not be in the crosshairs of the very vocal pro-LFG tool crowd. But then again, more than a few bloggers I follow have had commentary regarding the latest tempest in a teapot that is TBC Classic, so why bother posting about it this far after the announcement?

Catharsis, perhaps?

Indeed!
From Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

 

***

The automated LFD tool, when it was first released, was a godsend for people who --like me-- operated at off hours. Trying to find a dungeon group in the early morning or late at night was painful at best, and if you weren't on when your guildies were on, well... That kind of sucked. But with the tool, when you were on was suddenly no longer an issue.

Oh yeah, it still kind of was, given that the available pool of players shrank in off hours, but it was certainly better than just about nothing at all.

But like anything else, what you get out of the tool is a direct correlation to what people put into the tool. And if people are being asshats because the tool allows them to, well...

Garbage in, garbage out.

***

Perhaps it's better to step back and look at things from a larger point of view. Just what would the automated LFD tool solve in today's Classic community?

The tool as created in original Wrath was set among battleground groups* --a subset of servers in a region grouped together for random Battlegrounds-- and matched players to a selected instance, or a random instance, in either Normal or Heroic mode. Furthermore, players wouldn't have to use the meeting stones to be summoned to the location, the players would automatically be ported to the beginning of the inside of the instance itself. 

Convenience, we are it.

Regardless, the biggest problem the original LFD tool was meant to solve was getting players grouped and into instances painlessly, which most people took to mean avoiding the Trade Chat cesspool. And that's putting it politely, given that Trade Chat back then was a haven of racist and sexist material.

Think about that for a minute: WoW's Trade Chat back then, when Admins were far more numerous and attentive to players, was worse than LFG Chat in Classic is now.

Were there server balance issues? Yes, there were, but WoW was still in a growth/expansion mode, so the Battleground Groups evened things out a bit. It was only in a post-Cataclysm world, when the WoW population began to shrink, did server balance issues become a problem. I still remember how stunned I was when in 2014 I discovered that Ysera-US, one of the old WoW servers and where my Alliance toons resided on, had shrunk so far in population that it was a recommended landing spot for new players.

But before there were balance issues, grouping balance issues became a thing. As in, if you weren't a tank (or, to a lesser extent a healer) you were going to wait. A lot.

Yes, yes, I know, some things never change. 

But still, the tank problem from Cataclysm onward was severe enough that waiting for upwards of an hour or more as a DPS for a queue to pop could be maddening. And then if you ever thought about tanking so that you could avoid the wait, the abuse heaped on tanks --and to be fair, the tanks/healers would heap on DPS too-- could get pretty extreme.

I pretty much gave up on heroic instance runs in Cataclysm based on the crap slung around in normal instance runs, and by the time Mists dropped I found Battlegrounds preferable to running instances where everybody was expected to know everything and "lol L2P noob" was one of the nicer refrains I heard.

So why would we want to return to that?

***

I suppose that people in Classic who are in favor of a return of the automated LFG tool have forgotten what it was like to be learning the fights via said tool.

In my personal experience, zoning in and declaring that hey, I'm still learning this instance could be enough for at least one person to drop. Or that someone would initiate a "vote kick" against you. It might not be as bad as to have that happen all the time, but I'd say that about 1/3 of the time when I did that in Cataclysm --as a DPS-- I'd see someone attempt one of the two options. And that was for a normal instance, mind you, not a heroic. I have absolutely no idea how people behave in normals and heroics instances these days in Retail, now that mythic+ exists. I suspect that based on this thread, M+ and other instance runs are not a lovey dovey place at all. 

If everybody knows the fights and has at least a decent set of gear, then yeah, the tool can be useful for getting your badges and gearing up, but notice the "decent set of gear" part. Where to you go if you need gear to get to that "decent" level? It becomes a circular problem.

Yeah, like this.
From the Blizzard Forums.

And if your entry into running a normal instance --again, so you can learn the fights in a practical manner and get gear-- is toxic, why stick around? 

***

As a tool, the automated LFG tool does make the process of getting into an instance relatively painless. But the tool also operates as, well, an accelerant. It takes a potentially combustible situation and pours gasoline on everything, because it eliminates any sense of responsibility for your actions. 

I also believe that it is easier to overlook the problems with the LFG tool when you're in a guild. If you're in an active guild, you can get a group together, punch in the tool, and away you go. No fuss, no muss. Even if you need a single DPS, no big deal. You get in a lot quicker, you can do whatever while you're waiting, and it's a rather painless affair. 

If you pug, however.... That's when the problems begin. You have to prove yourself time and again,  and constant usage of the LFG tool is an accelerant on the process.** Make a mistake, and some people will judge you faster than middle school kids at lunch time. When it is soooo easy to just kick or leave instead of working through problems, you can bet that people will choose that option.

***

The automated LFG tool, if they were to implement it covering "Battleground server groups", would also mask other problems with the WoW Classic community, allowing them to fester without a long term resolution.

Such as server imbalance.

It needs to be said, but in the WoW Classic community the Battleground server groups are practically all the servers in a specific time zone. Which is great and all for the automated LFG tool, but when you transition to raiding.... Not so much. I've covered this before, but the reality is that the raiding scene on the smaller servers has been declining close to the point of no return, while a couple of gigantic servers are so huge because layering hides problems normally associated with them being too big: being unable to farm materials and the consequent inflation of auction house prices.

Spreading the server population out would help a LOT, because it would prevent the brain drain that is currently happening throughout TBC Classic and stretching back to the last few months of Vanilla Classic. It's one of those "it sounds great in theory" solutions that nobody seems to want to tackle head on, because it means that Blizz would have to confront one of their big cash cows: paid server transfers.

***

Do I know the answer to the automated LFG tool conundrum? 

No, but I do know that installing the solution implemented in Retail Wrath is a disaster in the making. 

What we know now about WoW as implemented in Classic, courtesy of 50 million walk through videos/podcasts/blogs/websites, would likely make people less tolerant of others, and that accelerant capability that the automated LFG tool has could be the spark that the community might not recover from.

Remembering the old definition about insanity as "performing the same actions over and over, and expecting a different result" is worth remembering right now.

Something different is called for here. Perhaps server merges, perhaps bans on toon creation/transfer to the giant servers, perhaps free transfers off of said giant servers or servers with huge faction imbalances, or even perhaps some combination of both, is worth trying. But what I do know is that simply going down the same old path and then expecting it'll all be fine is being incredibly naive.

*Thanks to Shintar for reminding me of this. I thought for the longest time that it was on individual servers, even though I did know it was among Battleground groups when it released; selective memory, I guess. I do know that with Mists and the coming of "don't-call-them-server-merges" the automated tool's reach did expand.

 

**Once, before I joined my current guild, I tagged along on an instance run of theirs. "I'm so glad we're all friends," one of the people in the run said, "because I absolutely hate pugging instances." I could understand the sentiment, but given that I got to know most of my in-game friends via pugs I felt somewhat slighted.

Letters from Outland, Part 4

Dear Sis--

I'm writing this while I'm taking a break from the fighting. It seems that the Burning Legion has a never ending supply of infernals to drop on both the Alliance and Horde fortifications in the poorly named Shadowmoon Valley, and both factions are hard pressed to keep the supply lines open.

Here at Wildhammer Hold, I can only dream of the hellscape that greeted me when I first crossed the Dark Portal and think "Ah, for the good old days." I'm sure the contingent at Honor Hold would disagree, but when the sky is on fire you tend to have a different outlook on life. 

A pleasant land this ain't.

Any other name would have likely been a better one than Shadowmoon Valley, which sounds closer to something near Astranaar than Outland, although I'm told by an Orc whom I knew back in our Argent Dawn days that the Valley takes its name from the Shadowmoon Clan, who led the Orcs straight into the Legion's lap all those years ago.

Vindicator Aluumen has told me he feels that Illidan will strike more directly against our fortifications in the coming days, but he also thinks that Illidan is caught between a rock and a hard place. As hard as the Legion is hitting us, they're also preparing to strike against Illidan himself. I guess with a name like 'The Betrayer', Illidan has a certain reputation to uphold, and he appears to have double crossed the Burning Legion too. 

Every time I turn around, the uglier
Illidan's troops get. At least they all die.

Even if we overcome the odds and hold our ground, we need to break both of our enemies before we have a chance to bring a measure of peace to Outland.

Hmm... Since I name dropped the title "Vindicator", I guess I should explain a few things about Draenei society that I've learned over my time spent here. The Draenei have their equivalent of the Knights --the Vindicators-- and the Priests --The Anchorites-- but they also have their version of military commanders, the Exarchs. These roles used to be allowed to specific genders only, such as that up until recently had been the case with the Night Elves and Tauren, but the need for bodies has broken down their rigid conservativism.* The fact that my friend Zarlie is an Anchorite is now by choice rather than by societal expectations. She informs me that her sister is yet another classification, a Farseer, who follow the ways of the elements akin to the Shamanism of the Orcs, Tauren, and Trolls.

I've also heard whispers about the Draenei Keepers of the Dead, the Auchenai, but only from the Lower City. While apparently they do exist, the great City of the Dead, Auchindoun, was destroyed in a disaster only a few years before I crossed the Dark Portal, and the Auchenai who survived have, well, gone a bit crazy. I don't know if it's the "everybody died and I can't handle it" sort of crazy or not, but what I've heard is that the Auchenai have been experimenting with things that you'd find more out of the Cult of the Damned than any Draenei organization.

Draenei may have a distinctive outlook on life, but they are by no means a monolithic race. The only thing that truly unites them is their hatred for the Burning Legion. Well, not hatred per se, but probably closer to disappointment. Apparently many of their brethren were tempted by the "gifts" offered by the Legion and chose to join the Legion instead of rejecting them, and those fallen Draenei are now commanders and leaders among the Legion's forces. 

Uh.... I was in the crate.
"Please don't look... Please don't look..."

Despite all that, I've grown to like them during my time here. I now know how you feel being the "shorty" of the household, as I've discovered that when you're surrounded by Draenei even the Kaldorei can appear small. The Draenei may at first glance seem overly pious and sanctimonious, but once you get to know them they open up quite a bit and are quite capable of incredibly bawdy behavior. Like the Elven kindreds, they have an unconscious grace and strength that can be quite stunning. 

I'm not entirely convinced they're so
uptight that they won't drink, but it's
worth a try sometime.

Either way, the Draenei have decided that the Alliance is their future, and so we have to learn to live with them. They have suffered under a certain amount of suspicion by our troops because people know their brethren from the Legion, but it's also intimidating to meet someone who is smarter, stronger, faster, and more graceful than you, who is also more sanctimonious than High Priestess Laurena. (Don't tell her I said that!)

Now that I've been on assignment here in Shadowmoon Valley, I can say that despite first impressions the place has not been totally abandoned by people. I know of a few scattered farms here and there, particularly on the northern edges of the Valley, where some Orcs refuse to leave and instead eke out a living. I've become rather fond of one Oronok who has a ranch high up away from roaming elementals; I can tell he took up ranching late in life as he still makes some basic mistakes, but I've learned not to pry too much. Like many Orcs, he has demons in his past that he'd just as soon forget, and if keeping a watchful eye on his helboars helps, I'm not one to tell him otherwise.

Angry elementals are everywhere. An organization of Shamans called the Earthen Ring has been trying to placate them without much success, and given the response from our leadership --which is mostly "get out of here, I'm busy"-- I can see why. I've been helping to get them some answers from the elementals, but not much has come of it so far. 

...except for the case of heartburn
I've got right now. Another Fire Lord?

Nonetheless, we've also had our run-ins with more of those avian types. Apparently one of them turned traitor, which is good for us, because their companions were going to try to summon forth what looks like an Old God straight into Outland. Given how much trouble they gave us at Ahn'Qiraq, I was more than happy to take on that assignment and destroy their summoning attempt.

That certainly matches a description
I'm sure you're familiar with.

Good riddance.

One more thing. I realize that this will probably hurt Elsharin, but I've encountered many of her ex-brethren here in Shadowmoon Valley as well. The Sindorei who still follow Kael'Thas have a base here --originally they had two, but the Sindorei following the Na'aru took over one of them-- and I've had to kill more than my share of this Sunfury regiment. I've even had to go undercover for a while, and thank goodness that I got to know your teacher, or I'd never have been able to pull it off.

I actually look pretty good as a redhead
and wearing pointy ears. Don't ask
where the ears came from; I'm not proud of that.

It's all in the walk. And the attitude.

The more I've seen these Sunfury Elves in action, the more disgusted I am with them. Have they all been duped? Do they honestly feel that they are on the side of justice? Do they simply not care and just want power any way they can get it? If it's that last one, they're likely going to end up allying with someone who can claim they provide it, and I'm afraid I know who that is. 

Elves and Draenei. These two should have been allies from the start, but Illidan and the Legion --and truth be told, us Humans kind of messed up a bit too-- got in the way. I'm rambling at this point, so I ought to finish up and go to bed soon. I've a long patrol tomorrow that takes me near Illidan's stronghold, nicknamed The Black Temple.

Be well, and give everyone my love!

--Linna

*Again, Mistress Evelyn's grammar lessons came in handy!

EtA: Corrected a grammar issue.

Card--

If you are reading this, you saw my hidden message and guessed how to bring this out. 

I am being stalked. 

I don't have any proof of it yet, but I have this uneasy feeling that my movements are being closely watched, and someone is waiting to strike. It is not simply paranoia at work out here, although at first I thought it was the case, but I know that someone is after me for my knowledge.

A short time ago, I discovered something that could potentially tip the balance of this whole campaign in our favor, and I've been keeping this secret ever since. About a week or two later, I started noticing small things around, like evidence that my bags had been sifted through or that my gear wasn't put back exactly the same way I usually do, and as a test I deliberately moved something in my pack to another location, and when I returned from patrol I found that thing in not the same place. 

As of now, I can't go to my commander without divulging the secret I'm sworn to keep. If you don't hear from me after 2 months, something likely has happened. I don't think whomever is tailing me will kill me, as they likely want to get information out of me. But if you don't hear from me, I need you. This is more important than me or my life; when I took the Oaths to become a Knight, I swore to uphold certain things, and this is one of them. I need you to do two things. First, contact a Broken in Shadowmoon Valley named Olum and tell him "The Light provides." He will know what to do. The other thing is to contact Zarlie; she will have knowledge of where I have been, and if Olum can't be found you should be able to piece things together with what she knows.

I believe in you, Sis. You can do this. So give Naxxramas the middle finger and get out here. There's a job that needs finishing, and a Songshine's word is always good.

--Linna