Journey's End... And Beginning

Well, this happened:

If only the light would chase away
the gloom around here.

Yes, Cardwyn has reached L68, grinding her way there without having set foot in Outland.

I was planning on sitting on this until I could spring it on my questing buddy as a surprise, but the stinker had the Guild Roster Manager addon and so she already knew I hit L68 without me telling her.

(Have I mentioned before that I hate addons like that?) 

***

Before anybody brings up the obvious, yes, I spent the time after Cardwyn got her Frostsaber mount (a little bit into L66) until now grinding in the area outside of Karazhan. So yes, people who would be "yes but" about her grinding in a zone that had its mobs adjusted to an "Outland" type of level --from L60 to L69-L70-- making this moment possible, I will say this: I'd be here outside of Karazhan whether or not the mobs had their levels adjusted. Once you get up to L66, your opportunities for finding L60 mobs shrinks to very few locations: Silithus (Staghelm Point and Silithid caves), Winterspring (the Giant area in the south), and outside of Karazhan.

I did spend a few bars' worth of grinding in Silithus a couple of days when the crowd outside Kara began to grow when people dropped by to farm greens and Netherweave cloth*, and while yes, it can be done exclusively in Silithus and Winterspring, it would have taken about 2-3 times as long to level from L66 to L68.

That being said, while the "issues" I had training seem to have gotten fixed by the time Neve hit L64 --I was unable to train at all from L60 through L64 for some strange reason until the trainers suddenly allowed me to at L66-- I refused to update my talent tree at all. Therefore, my talents were exactly the same as they were at pre-patch at L60. That was a deliberate choice, because while I hoped I could utilize the mobs outside of Kara to level I wanted to compensate for that advantage by not utilizing other talents available to me. 

***

When I arrived outside of Karazhan at L66, I was uncertain whether I'd even have a chance at downing mobs 3-4 levels above my own. Much to my surprise, however, I was able to clear the mobs without dying once. There were plenty of times where the mobs resisted my attacks --oh boy, were there plenty of those-- but I was able to down all of them if I took my time and ate/drank after every other pull. 

I will also freely admit that if I tried to do this grind on just about any other toon, I'd likely have not been able to make it to L68. Part of that is due to the glass cannon nature of a Mage, but also the fact that I had a full T3 set at the end of Classic. The T3 set has been surprisingly good all the way to L68, and at this point I see no reason why I should replace it with anything BC related at all while we're counting down to Wrath.

***

A few other notes about the journey...

While I proved that this can be done --and one guildie mentioned to me that they'd never heard of anyone actually pulling this off-- this grind is not for everyone. 

All of those people who did quests at L60 for extra gold would have been severely hamstrung in trying to do this, because I got two levels worth of the grind completed because I did all of those L60 quests that I never bothered to do on Card. Another level came from completing Fire Festival quests, and three levels came from the Frostsaber grind. So... if you were a completionist --or gold/mount hungry-- and did all of that before TBC Classic dropped, well, good luck with that grind. 

Yes, I was able to hit L68 and technically will be able to go to Northrend when Wrath Classic drops**, but were it not for the mobs outside of Karazhan that'd probably be the upper limit Cardwyn could attain. The only mobs that are available for Card to grind right now for XP are those that are a minimum of L60, which makes the grind much much worse. Any zone you'd be considering grinding at would have at least half of the mobs not granting any XP at all, and I don't think you'd be able to get very far at all before Wrath Classic dropped. However, since the L69-L70 mobs outside of Karazhan exist, I ought to be able to grind Card all the way to L70 before the pre-patch for Wrath Classic.

***

This completes one of the three main goals I had for TBC Classic. At least this one was a goal I could achieve without the aid of others, which is why I was able to finish it. The other two, which were to get a full set of one of the T4/T5/T6 gear for Brig, and to finish Phase 2 for Brig with a Kael'Thas kill so I could get the achievement/title for doing so, are going to be unresolved at this point. Nobody does Gruul/Mags anymore, so my closest shot at a full Tier set (T4) isn't going to happen. And nobody does Tempest Keep either, so the closest I'll have gotten to a Kael'Thas kill was when we got him down to 10-15% the week before I had to stop raiding.*** Even if there was a TK run available, my gear is such that it would feel like a carry, and I positively HATE being carried. I wanted to earn those goals, not have them handed to me as a charity case. So no, if offered a chance to go at this point --even in a pug-- I would give a hard pass. And I don't care who knows my feelings on the matter.

I'll still be putzing around in TBC Classic at this point, but not because I have any real goals to achieve. Mainly just to play around, I suppose. While I tend to be a private player, I also tend to be social in the right setting. I'll just continue to seek those situations out and work from there.

*I've been surprised and pleased by just how much Netherweave drops outside Kara. Having watched my questing buddy level Tailoring more than once, and seeing just how much Netherweave she went through each time... Yeah, it's a good thing to know.

**The looks Card would probably get after disembarking at Boring Tundra while wearing her T3 gear would be worth it. If I were on an RP server, the "Hey, who's the fossil?" commentary would have been really amusing.

***My replacement was there at Tempest Keep the last week of January when the Monday raid finally downed Kael, but she had already been locked out of SSC so she couldn't go. Since I had moved myself to the Bench so that she could go to the raid, I filled in for her on the SSC portion of the raid. And the fact that we couldn't down Vashj with me there as opposed to her being there for TK is all you need to know about the difference in DPS she brought to the table.

EtA: Corrected grammar issues.

Now I Know How Jerry Renault Felt Like

The steady drumbeat is relentless.

Doesn't matter if I'm on a new toon or an old toon. Whether I'm on Myzrael or Atiesh or even on the Season of Mastery server I'm on.

You can't escape it.

"Do your dailies!" is the cry from people in a guild discord or an LFG chat. Or even randomly shouted in a zone.

"Complete the war effort!" is the slightly different --yet ultimately similar-- comment on Season of Mastery, which is in the Ahn'Qiraq War Effort mode.

"DO YOUR DAILIES!!!"

I feel like I'm in a Robert Cormier novel, The Chocolate War, where instead of refusing to sell chocolate for a 1970s era Catholic boys high school fundraiser I'm harassed about doing dailies so that more parts of the Quel'Danas zone are unlocked with more dailies to do.

If I ever wondered about how gated progression in Retail is like, this is likely it.

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.