What Goes on in My Head, Part Whatever

Yesterday I passed a milestone of sorts.

Oh, it's not that I had my birthday --that was a bit ago-- or that I passed my six month mark since my brush with the hereafter* --again, that was a while ago-- but that I finally got down to only one of these left in my possession:

The names have been changed
to protect the innocent.

As you may have surmised, my wife went to Kinko's --they're called FedEx Office now-- and had a lot of these printed out. She conspired with one of my co-workers to chop these up into small cards and distribute them at my work** for... Well, it's pretty obvious, right?

My wife discovered that instead of printing up, say, 25 or 50, she could only get these printed in stacks of 500. So she bit the bullet, had a stack of 500 printed up, and then gave about 30 or so to my coworker, who cut them up and distributed them to the people on our development team as well as people I knew on other teams. All told, she distributed about 100 or more cards to people.

I, of course, was kept in the dark about all of this, and all I knew was that my parents were going to be over while we celebrated my birthday. My wife, however, had briefed my parents and that they should expect that a lot of people would be calling in to wish me a happy birthday.

***

Well, the big day arrived, and my parents came over, and I started grilling as usual.***

About an hour later, I got a call from a coworker and friend --whom I'd gone up with to the Dayton Hamvention the day before-- and he mentioned that he might have left his keys in my car. Sure enough, they were there, and he wished me a happy birthday.

"Oh, thanks," I replied, and told him I'd give him his keys tomorrow at work, which was fine with him.

A half an hour later, I got another call from another friend and co-worker, wishing me a happy birthday, and he added "I guess the phone's been ringing off the hook, huh?"

"Uh, no," I replied. "Just you and Rob, and he'd left his keys in my car by accident."

"Oh," my friend said in response, and he quickly finished the call.

By then, my wife had been looking kind of crestfallen but had perked up at the second call. I suspected she'd done something, but I wasn't going to say anything just yet.

But after another hour or two, including dinner, and no phone calls, she finally confessed what she'd hoped to do, and how it became instead a huge disaster. And this happened in front of my parents no less, who'd hoped to see this outpouring of affection for me from my coworkers.

I can't figure out to this day what was worse: that it hurt my wife who'd come up with this grand plan, or that I found out just what my coworkers thought of me the hard way.

And there were all of these fucking sheets still around, over 400 of them.

Given that they had my name and phone number --and my birthday-- on them, I'd have to shred them all if I wanted to be secure about it. That wasn't exactly going to be a fun afternoon, being reminded for an hour or two how shitty my 30th birthday turned out to be.

I decided to shove them into our desk at home and deal with it later.

Fast forward a decade and a move into our current house later, I stumbled on those cards while hunting for some scratch paper to use. "Well," I decided, "I might as well go ahead and use them for scratch paper and shred them when I'm done."

So for the past 13 years or so I've been steadily going through these as scratch paper. It was from a time --and a company-- I wished to forget, and I've long since put that time in the rear view mirror. But the thing is, you never quite forget something so humiliating like that, and the constant stream of these sheets has been a reminder for me to never do this to someone else. 

***

The thing is, it still hurts after all these years, because it wasn't the first time this sort of thing happened.

Back in college, my friends and I had agreed to put together a series of dinners for each other as a fun thing to do. Several of my friends lived in the Dayton and Cincinnati area, so it was relatively easy to set these up. Back then, I didn't have a car on campus, so I was reliant upon those who did to get to these dinners, but it never seemed a problem. 

However, on an upcoming dinner at a friends' house I didn't have a ride to get there, and I asked several of my friends if there was a dinner that we'd be going to, and they all kind of stayed mum on the subject, so I let it drop. 

I found out later from my friend who hosted the dinner what had happened.

They all arrived --and we're talking something about 6-10 people-- and the host looked around and asked "Where's Red?"

"Oh no," they exclaimed. "We didn't think he was invited."

"Of course he was invited! We were all invited to each other's houses!"

Did they go back and get me? Nope. They ate the dinner, and the one person from the group who said "Hey, we should check to make sure Red was invited before we leave" kept needling everybody else who was there. 

Some hours later, they all showed up at the door to my dorm room, but I kind of politely told them to get lost. And I rather quickly and efficiently began putting some distance between myself and them.

***

When the kids would have a shitty time of it in middle school, I knew exactly where they were coming from. I mean, I've lived that before.

And the memories of these sort of humiliations has also influenced my MMO playing, where I want to help out people who feel alone or ostracized from the group. I was reminded of that the other day, when one of my guildies found out that I was not planning on moving to Atiesh and she was not a happy camper. She whispered to me on Discord that I was the first person to reach out and befriend her in the guild (and raid), and she'll always be appreciative of that.

I just wish I could explain that I have these trust issues, and that no matter how hard I try I'll likely continue to have them for the rest of my life. It doesn't matter how good of a time I had in a video game, or playing board games, or in a face to face RPG session, some time later the whispers begin again in my head: you're no good, nobody likes you, and they're all leaving you behind to do things without you because you're not good enough. They all know you're a lousy player or a lousy person, so why try? You should go hide and do something else.

The best I can do is beat those whispers back for a little while, and I hope that's enough.

Maybe shredding that last sheet will help.

 

*I finally looked up the data write-ups found from my hospital stay, courtesy of an online application that the hospital and health network uses, and I discovered that I was in much worse condition than the nurses and doctors let on. They probably did that so I wouldn't freak out or anything, but it was a very sobering read.

**This was back when I worked as a QA Software Engineer.

***Yes, grilling during the summer is pretty much a thing for me.

EtA: Corrected a grammar error.

But It Was A Beginning

“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose above the great mountainous island of Tremalking. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.”

--Robert Jordan, The Path of Daggers

 

Last Monday, on June 27th, there was to be a proverbial "big announcement" about the future of our guild moving forward into Wrath Classic.

I already had a clue as to what was likely to happen, but when the news did drop there were actually two big announcements:

• The guild was moving to Atiesh-US.
• The guild was merging with another raiding guild.

While I believed that Atiesh was the likely landing spot, the merger took me by surprise.

I'm still not exactly sure why the merger happened, because if guild leadership felt that they were going to have trouble recruiting, I thought that's why the move to Atiesh was needed. I suppose that leadership felt that since there was some decent overlap between the two guilds/raids already they might as well make it official, but to my mind that's a pretty poor reason to actually merge guilds.

But more on that later.

There was also another announcement --of a sort-- in the Monday raid: the remaining members of the Monday raid's lead team will be stepping down from raid leading in Wrath Classic. 

Now this I knew was coming, because I'd seen the discussions in the Monday raid lead Discord, and I knew how beaten down the main raid lead had gotten over the course of TBC Classic. But there were also other factors involved that I'm not at liberty to discuss, but I will say that there was a breach of trust involved that left a sour taste in the Monday raid leadership.

***

So.... What to make of this?

The moment I read the announcement, I exhaled with relief.

I'd been wondering how to just go and leave the guild without a lot of drama, and suddenly the solution was presented to me gift wrapped with a bow. 

I would simply leave the guild by standing still.

Now, the announcement included information that the raid teams' mains would remain on Myzrael-US until the pre-patch for Wrath is announced, then the progression raiding will stop and those toons will migrate to Atiesh-US. That means that alts would be free to migrate to Atiesh-US, which conveniently was during the big mid-Summer sale by Blizzard.

All those players who'd amassed a lot of gold on Myz were going to have to find a way to move that gold over, and the guild had set up a channel to allow people who didn't have a lot of gold to volunteer to be mules to migrate those players' gold over.

Sure, since I have very little gold compared to people who'd been doing dailies diligently*, I could be a mule, but I decided that if I was going to migrate any toons over, it'd be on my terms and when I felt I was ready. I already have Cardwyn 2.0 over on Atiesh, so Card wasn't going to land there anyway. And since most of my other toons are tied to her in one form or another, I didn't see a reason to move them over either. 

***

This whole turn of events brought a sudden halt to my Friday Night Karazhan runs, because with one or two exceptions (such as Briganaa) all of the toons in there were alts. I never got a chance to execute Pallyzhan, and I'm not going to migrate Linnawyn over to Atiesh just so I could do it there. There are people in guild who are aware I have Deuce** already on Atiesh, but I've already begun blocking guild invites, so I have no qualms about her going forward.

I remembered Larisa of The Pink Pigtail Inn, and the drama and agony she went through when she got "the talk" about her lack of raid performance that led to her brief departure from her guild, and I was determined to not deal with that. When I left, I wasn't going to have that drama follow me around. 

The more I've heard from my questing buddy about what the "new" raiding rules would be, the more I'm confident in the knowledge that I made the right decision. I'm sorry, but having the "bench" clear trash until the "real raiders" show up to replace them in the raid smacks of something out of Animal Farm: all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. The "you'd better perform or we'll replace you immediately" vibe that they're projecting means that they've swallowed the kool-aid whole and are going full hardcore. 

And to me, that's completely and totally stupid, because they then become no better than any of the other 40-50 hardcore raiding guilds on Atiesh-US, without any other distinguishing characteristics. 

The one thing that Valhalla had that other guilds didn't was that they acknowledged that people had families and real life and that came first, no matter what. That was why the raiding times were later than other guilds' raids, because families came first. Well, that entire modus operandii --along with the associated guild culture-- seems to have been thrown right out the window in pursuit of.... what, exactly? Is leadership so myopic that they truly believe they could be the top guild --or one of the top five guilds-- on Atiesh? The only reason why the Tuesday/Thursday raid was in the Top 6 in Sunwell Pleateau was because of all the other guilds that left Myzrael. To be a Top Five guild on Atiesh, they have to throw away the soul of their guild in pursuit of something that --at best-- they'll have only a year to a year and a half to enjoy before Cataclysm Classic appears.

There are other things I know of that I'm not liberty to discuss that I believe could fracture the merged guild before it even gets off the ground, but we'll see how that plays out. I'm staying out of it, because my time with Valhalla is at an end. 

My opinion on this merger can be summed up with a quote from Rebecca West that my fellow blogger Spinks used deep in the darkest days of Gamergate: "Women, listening to anti-suffrage speeches, for the first time knew what many men really thought of them."

*As I alluded to in a previous post, one of those same people who was diligently getting all the gold + mats so they could speed level their professions on their new Death Knight was the one who'd informed me in guild chat that doing the dailies may be boring and repetitive but "the gold you get means you never have an excuse to not have gold in game." I presume he meant that to me because I was the only other guildie online at the time, so that was his way to tell me "don't bitch about a lack of gold".

Narrator: Briganaa never bothered to accumulate gold.

Of course, now that he has to migrate all of his gold and mats over to Atiesh-US, I kind of chuckled at his predicament.

**That's what I've taken to calling Cardwyn 2.0.

An RPG From the Past: Middle-earth Role Playing

During the height of the Satanic Panic in the 80s, my parents decided --with the help of some "encouragement" from watching The 700 Club* and from hearing some of my mom's hardcore evangelical in-laws-- to get rid of all of my brother's and my D&D material. 

Looking back on it now, I still get angry about the whole affair, especially knowing what an original Deities and Demigods (complete with the Michael Moorcock section) is worth nowadays, but in a bizarre way it pushed me into other RPGs that I would have ordinarily never tried. So... I guess I have to thank my parents for expanding my RPG horizons a lot.

Such as Middle-earth Role Playing by Iron Crown Enterprises.

ICE put out Middle-earth Role Playing --MERP for short-- in 1984, basing the game on a streamlined version of their Rolemaster system. ICE put out a Second Edition of the game in 1986 --functionally the same, but cleaned up in presentation-- and continued to release supplements and support MERP up until they lost the license granted by Tolkien Enterprises in 1999.

This is probably about half of ICE's output.
And no, I'm not selling any of them. I've had
most of these for 25-30 years.

I realize some people prefer The One Ring or the D&D version of a Middle-earth RPG as their go-to for adventuring in Middle-earth, but for me MERP was it. From practically the moment I spied the MERP RPG materials at our local Waldenbooks and opened up a few of the splatbooks, I fell in love with the game.

***

Okay, you have to be wondering how on earth I managed to hide a boxed RPG set --never mind the REST of the splatbooks-- when my parents were incredibly anal retentive about controlling major aspects of my life.** Therefore, I ought to take a step back and describe exactly what went into my thought process when I finally decided to pull the trigger.

Having attempted to toe the line for a couple of years, I began to look into RPGs again. I mean, I thought the entire "Roleplaying is Satanic" thing was bullshit***, but since I wanted to keep my continuing interest in Science Fiction and Fantasy novels/short story collections alive, I figured I had to toe the company line for a while. And believe me, when I bought the Dragonlance novels that was truly put to the test, as my brother conspired to use the fact that they were printed by TSR --the same company that put out D&D-- against me in an argument with my parents. Luckily, my parents didn't take my books away, but I knew I was walking on eggshells.****

Still, I wasn't going to give up on this. I knew I had to wait until I got to college to be more open about playing RPGs, which is rather ironic given the extremely low social status RPG players had on the teenager social scale, but I'd seen through the bullshit and I figured there had to be a way to pull off playing RPGs.

Normally, you'd just find someone playing D&D and sit in on their game, but the people I knew who played D&D had discovered girls and cars, and that was that. So if I wanted to play, I'd have to get a game group together myself.

So all of this was on my mind when I stumbled across the MERP materials at the bookstore, and I thought that this could be exactly what I needed. The books were all soft cover, the boxed set was the size of the old D&D Basic set with the Errol Otus cover art, and because of the (relatively) cheap production values the books were much cheaper than comparable D&D books. That they were softcover meant I could hide them inside my copy of this game without anybody noticing:

There was a LOT of extra space inside
once you put the ships together.
From Mandi's Attic Toys.

Between that and my copy of Risk, I could hide the boxed set and a couple of expansion settings. 

I then targeted my friends who loved reading SF&F, and I got a couple of people together for regular game sessions. They all knew my parents' opinions on role playing, so they were more than happy to be the hosts for the games. 

There were more than my share of close calls with my parents, but once I got away to college --and bought myself a footlocker to carry my books and whatnot back and forth from college over the summers-- I was set. Once my girlfriend got an apartment nearby for grad school, I just moved my MERP collection over to her place and I was set. Looking back on it, I'm shocked I wasn't caught with my hand in the cookie jar, because my 50+ year old self looks back at the risks I took and think that I had to have been out of my mind to think I was going to get away with it.

I mean, I did all the following:

• Created a false bottom in the drawer in my old wooden desk
• Built a false bottom underneath one of the shelves of my bookshelf  (I got cold feet putting the books there, so I put some of my old classwork from high school there instead. If it was found, the fact that I didn't want my old classwork thrown out would have worked in my favor.)
• Hid some of the books under my dresser
• Put some of the books between the box spring and the frame of my mattress

All of which sound on the face of it that I was hiding marijuana or condoms or Playboys.

***

The TL;DR of that whole thing is that compared to D&D, MERP was modular, cheaper, and had much better splatbooks than D&D had. The ICE team worked their collective asses off on MERP (and Rolemaster), and it showed.

And, in my opinion, until D&D 3e came along, MERP was the superior game.

If you looked at a MERP character sheet, it looked a lot like a D&D 3e character sheet. 

This is a scan of a character I created
when I was learning the game. The
photocopy came straight from the
core rulebook itself.

I absolutely love this version
created by Tensen01 on DeviantArt.

You see skill ranks, character stats, languages, and a few other odds and ends. Instead of the modern MMO nomenclature of "Mana", you have "Power Points" for casting spells. The Stats and rolls are all based on the d100 system, so no other dice are needed other than a pair of d10s. Oh, and those Languages? Yes, they have skill ranks as well, from 1 (can say a couple of words) to 5 (speak like a native). Each level you go up, you get a certain number of skill points to distribute, no fuss no muss.

All of these skill ranks and the d100 system made so much sense that I wondered why D&D bothered with all the assorted dice. And until 3e came along and basically took a lot of the MERP/Rolemaster system along for the ride, D&D felt weak by comparison. 

MERP did suffer from one major drawback, which was that the game went up until 10th Level. If you wanted to utilize higher levels, you had to use Rolemaster for that. But given that Rolemaster, or RM for short, was also straightforward I didn't have any issues with using RM on an as-needed basis.

But the sheer joy in MERP lay in the splatbooks and modules. And oh, were there a ton.

I found a couple of copies
of this in the box set.

I even kept track of what I was missing.

I'm biased, but I really liked Lorien a lot.

***

The default setting for MERP was in the mid-Third Age, while there still was a Kingdom in the North (Arthedain), the Balrog hadn't been unearthed yet in Moria, Rohan hadn't been founded yet (but the Horse Lords roamed south of Mirkwood), Minas Ithil was still intact, and there was a King in Gondor. There's plenty of opportunities for campaigns in this era, and if you wanted to run a campaign in another era, the books were easily adapted to those. Well, within reason: Minas Ithil was not going to be the same once the Witch King got a hold of it. The Balrog the same with Moria, but the largest difference between the two is that we know --courtesy of The Fellowship of the Ring-- that the rooms in Moria were largely intact, if unused or had signs of fighting in them.

The sad thing is that ICE lost the Tolkien license right before the Peter Jackson LOTR movies came out, because it would have been a huge shot in the arm to the system. Then again, people would have wanted to play in the era of Lord of the Rings in the same way as people do in LOTRO, so the concept of a mid-Third Age setting wouldn't necessarily have worked as well as I might have thought. But still, that the game is a love letter to Tolkien's works is something that can't be overlooked. The world of Middle-earth is so diverse that you could spend an entire campaign in the area around Bree, or maybe have an urban campaign down in Gondor, or even a wilderness campaign out in Mirkwood. 

Faerun ain't got nothing on Middle-earth.

***

It's a shame that the used prices for these splatbooks can be pretty high, because they're very much worth a perusal if you're a Tolkien fan. I'd checked out some of the splatbooks I was missing in my collection, but when I saw they were over $100 for a "meh" quality version, I took a hard pass. Finding PDF files of these rulebooks and systems are very much worth pursuing, however, because that's one way of keeping costs down.

If you happen to come across some of these books at a yard sale and you're interested in an RPG based on Lord of the Rings, I'd recommend picking them up. 

*Commence groans. Oh yes, I had to defend my listening to Rush of all things because they showed up on one of Pat Robertson's lists of "Satanic Heavy Metal". (At least Triumph avoided that listing.) If anybody knows anything about Heavy Metal, maybe --maybe-- you could count Rush's self titled first album, but that's it. 

**This absolute need to control my life fueled my desire to go to college away from home. Admittedly the University of Dayton was only 54 miles away, but it was just far enough away in the days of a 55 MPH speed limit that my parents weren't going to drop in on me unannounced. However, I found out a couple of decades later that during my Freshman year my father did just that, dropping in on the Physics Department and asking the Department Chair how I was doing. "We don't discuss such things with parents," he stonily told my Dad and showed him the door.

***I once had a huge argument with my mom over this, saying it was the same as acting, as playing a role is what actors do, but I swear the mental gymnastics on this she used to try to split hairs was absolutely ridiculous. "Playing a role" was fine, she said, but "role playing" was Satanic.

****My brother also tried to tie my interests in music to Satanism, but given that I didn't have bands like Ozzy or Black Sabbath in my music collection at the time, that failed as well.

EtA: Cleaned up some grammar.

Blizz Cut the Ad Budget, I See

That snarky little comment is because of the WoW Classic announced XP buff for the four weeks prior to Wrath Classic's launch.

The buff's name?

Joyous Journeys.

Sometimes you can't just make this stuff up, because when I read that my first thought was "So... when you finish a Joyous Journey, is there a Happy Ending?"

In case you have no idea what a "happy ending" is, go look it up in the Urban Dictionary. I'll wait.

Okay, maybe I have a twisted sense of humor, but it just tumbled off the tongue so easily that someone inside Blizz just had to have pointed this out to management.

***

Humor aside, I suppose that's my cue to push forward and finish Card's journey to L70, because I want to complete that before I get any unintended "boosts" to her. I'd like to think that the Joyous Journeys 50% XP buff is going to be a clickable buff, but I kind of doubt it. 

For a quick update, Card is sitting at L69* and about 50% through to L70. Neve is presently breathing down her neck at L69 as well, and about 40% of the way through to the end. It's gonna be a race to see who finishes first, and it'll depend upon how busy I am early in the day when I tend to grind some mobs on Card. 

And Neve's brother?

The hormonal scamp is busy hanging out at Lord Saltheril's party in Eversong forest.

Sigh. Must be the hair.

But that's not all he's been up to. Apparently some of Neve's friends were unaware that her younger brother was all grown up...

I've had this conversation before with
friends of my own brother.

And he still carries good wishes from Neve's old Magistrix when he visits Fairbreeze Village.

*Yes yes, I know. Insert crude joke here.

Speaking of Endings

The elephant in the room finally materialized on Myzrael-US.

The top guild on the server, Variance, is planning on leaving for Atiesh-US on July 1st. 

Variance is not merely the top guild on Myz, but it is also one of the top guilds in all of TBC Classic. I've occasionally referred to the Myzrael progression raid scene as "Variance and then there's everybody else". Until they ran into Sunwell Plateau, they were able to down every single raid they came up against the first night. (It took two nights for them to finally finish the job on SWP.) Yes, that included Naxxramas and their full complement of bosses. 

They are that good.

What's more, there's likely about 200-300 raiding toons in Variance, so when they leave the Alliance raiding toon listings will take a 20-30% hit. 

***

What this means for the server is... Not good.

Well, if you're doing progression, anyway.

The problem about that is that progression is the straw that stirs the drink in TBC Classic*, and without a healthy amount of raiding toons, guilds will leave the server for greener pastures. This began in early TBC Classic when Imperium --the #2 guild on Myzrael-- left. Then the drip drip drip began.

Nox Terrorem (Horde) left.

Infernal hit the road.

Midnight Souls imploded and many people in that guild left the server.

Conquerors dissolved. 

Limelight moved on.

Anubis migrated off.

As did Carnage Asada. 

And there are a bunch of smaller guilds who have also migrated off, seeking their fortune elsewhere.

But losing Variance? That's something the server may not recover from.

***

There was a short but vigorous discussion about the server's fortunes in our guild's Discord, and the overall sentiment is that the guild ought to move sooner rather than later, because it certainly seems that if Myzrael as the #2 sized US-West PvE server is getting ready to implode, we shouldn't wait for the fallout to hit an unsustainable auction house or anything else.

One of the options? To move to Pagle-US, which is almost 100% Alliance. It is also gigantic with over 10000 raiding toons. The other potential option Atiesh-US, where Card 2.0 resides, has about 6000 Alliance raiding toons, but an 80:20 Alliance:Horde split.

I will be watching this with great interest, but given that the only raiding I'm doing is the Friday Karazhan raid, I might be seeing it's last days if the guild decides to migrate off of the server. After all, I haven't decided what to do, and I'm not deleting Card 2.0. I've invested too much time in her now.

Shintar, we haven't reached the "Blizzard destroyed my server" point yet, but right now their inaction on propping up the smaller PvE servers in the Classic environment speaks volumes.

*And WoW in general, but I digress.

Creating Wilderness When There Is None

One day, a couple of decades ago, I was working away at my job as a Software QA Engineer*, with the NPR interview program Fresh Air playing through my headset. 

The subject of Terry Gross' interview that day was Jon Krakauer**, the author of Into The Wild. For those unfamiliar with the story, it's about 22 year old recent college grad Chris McCandless, who grew disenchanted with his family and decided to basically take off on his own. He abandoned his car, gave his entire savings to charity, and even burned the cash in his wallet, and set off into the unknown. Eventually his body was found in the Alaskan wilderness, having starved to death. Jon originally wrote an article for Outside magazine about Chris, and later expanded it into the book we know of today.

After listening to the interview, I made a point of stopping by our local bookstore on the way back home and picking up a copy. After a week or so of staring at it, wondering whether I was ready to read it, I finally gave in and devoured the thing in a day. Today, you can find Into the Wild --and Jon's most well known book, Into Thin Air-- in summer reading lists for high schools and universities. When I last visited my local bookstore, Into The Wild was on the large "summer reading list" shelf, surrounded by more classic fare such as Dune and The Aeneid.

Into The Wild is a tragedy caused by hubris, but a fascinating one nevertheless. 

When I read the book, one thing kept coming back to haunt me: just how, in the age of maps and global knowledge of entire areas, did Chris McCandless get lost in the wilderness? Even in the 90s, before smart phones that were more powerful than the best PCs of the era, you had access to everything you needed to survive in the Alaskan wilderness: where you were and where to go. Chris wanted to go to a blank spot on the map, and without any of those left, he decided the best way to achieve his goal was to simply get rid of the map.***

***

I've thought a lot over the years about that decision Chris McCandless made to throw away the map, because it has a certain amount of appeal. While it is frequently construed to sticking your fingers in your ears and going "LALALALALA I CAN'T HEEEEAR YOU!!!!" if you want to test yourself without relying upon modern conveniences the cheapest way to do so is to remove those conveniences. How much of a challenge is the challenge if sensors and monitors tell you everything you need to know in the same way a GPS vest is worn by footballers these days? Certainly even with all of the advanced tech in the world there's still plenty of challenge, and in quite a few endeavors that challenge can still prove fatal.****

I suppose that is the same sort of impulse --and hubris-- that causes people to ignore instruction manuals when installing/building something, only with potentially far more disastrous results.

The thing that gnaws at me about Chris' throwing away the map is that I do that sort of thing in some of my own endeavors. 

When I was about 13 or so, my parents drove the family up to Indianapolis to visit the Children's Museum. (If you ever are in Indy, it is worth a visit.) 

If your kid (or you) likes dinosaurs...
From theculturetrip.com.

One of the exhibits there was about gears and levers, and among the interactive displays they had there were two differing gears with their teeth intertwined. The idea was to provide an example as to see which could move first: the smaller or the larger. If you know your mechanical engineering, or you've ever ridden a bike with multiple gears, you ought to know that the smaller gear has the advantage here. And yes, even back then, I knew that courtesy of 6th Grade science class. But when my father offered to compete against me, I chose the larger gear.

Why? Because I wanted the challenge to see if I could win through physical strength even though all the advantages were with my dad. 

Of course I lost, and as he began to point out why based on the display I said, "I already know that."

"Then you shouldn't have chosen the wrong gear," he snapped and walked away.

Yes, I was an arrogant adolescent teen, but how could I explain to my dad that I deliberately chose the larger gear because I wanted a physical challenge rather than the safe --and smart-- option? He was in absolutely no mood to hear about that, and to him I just proved my stupidity by choosing the wrong gear rather than using my mind to choose the correct one.

***

Compared to this stuff, the way I play video games is pretty much small potatoes. 

However, my approach to video games --and to a lesser extent boardgames and pencil and paper RPGs-- is to eschew the optimal or smart option and instead deliberately choose other options because... Well, just because.

Like, say, leveling Card via the Old World instead of going to Outland.

Okay, that's not a fair assessment, because that was a very specific challenge. But I'm thinking in terms of playing as a Frost Mage when Frost is considered the "inferior" Mage spec when compared to Fire and Arcane. Or ignoring the allure of all sorts of "required" addons and playing with as few addons and/or Weakauras as possible. After all, I didn't even install DBM at all in WoW Classic until my first foray into Zul'Gurub, and I learned to expect different boss mechanics the old fashioned way, by watching for visual and audible cues from the bosses themselves.

But by far, the biggest addon I refuse to use is the one that I think of first when I think of throwing away the map: Questie. 

I will admit that there is one thing I completely enjoy about Questie: that I can tell exactly when other people I'm grouped with are done with a quest. It allows me to make an informed decision as to whether I want to continue grinding toward my own quest completion or just go with the flow and follow the others and work on their completion at the expense of my own. 

Before you say it, I'll insert a frustrated reaction from my Questing Buddy to cover it for you. 

/sigh

I've had this conversation with people before, so don't bother. I really don't care about whether I complete quests when I'm grouped with someone: that's not why I'm grouped with them. If I do ask to group with someone so I can complete a quest, that's a different story, but when I'm just grouped with them to go "questing" or be social, I really don't care if I complete any quests.*****

The thing about addons like Questie is that it also defeats the purpose why I play video games. I don't play for the end, but for the journey. In a video game, throwing the map away by eschewing addons --or not looking at a map too hard when you can't turn that stuff off in game-- means I explore and take my cues off of what is presented to me. Sometimes it takes me a while to find what I'm looking for, but you can bet all the in game gold or credits you have that I'll remember where it is the next time I pass through. I'll look at road in LOTRO before you reach the Ford of Bruinen and go "Okay, this is where those trolls caught me at night; I'll have to go around right *here* to avoid them." Or, in TBC Classic, "This is where those Bog Lords have a bad habit of respawning quickly, so I'd better be ready for a rapid exit if that happens while I'm fighting these two out there now."

Events like that are why I play video games; the questing and raiding and instance running are all incidental to that. So why would I want to use something that minimizes my enjoyment and wonder to reach the end quicker? 

Now, I get that for a lot of people, the end IS the goal, so addons like Questie or Dailies or Attune make perfect sense. As a guildie put it --and I suspected that he said it to tweak me, since there were only three of us online at the time-- "Sure, doing dailies is boring and repetitive, but you never have an excuse to not have gold ever again." But for someone who revels in the challenge of the journey, forgoing these addons is akin to throwing away the map and proceeding onward into the wilderness. 

There's a whole world out there waiting.

Is that arrogant? Yeah, probably. 

Not very smart? Oh, definitely. 

Does it give me a sense of accomplishment in an era of FOMO and rushing to the end? Hell yes.

*Yes, that was the real title. Considering that I did just as much coding --albeit for the test harness and to integrate the testing designs properly-- as a regular developer, I certainly earned that "Engineer" moniker.

**Jon is probably more well known as the author of both Into Thin Air and Under the Banner of Heaven, but his entire catalogue is worth perusing. Here's the audio archive of the interview, which based on the date means I likely heard the interview on a Friday, which is when Fresh Air repeats previous interviews from that season. Why Friday? Because the air date was in January, and I started that job in February.

***Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer. Hardcover edition, 1996. Pg. 174.

****Such as what happened in Jon Krakauer's book Into Thin Air, which details his account of the disaster on Mt. Everest in 1996. Jon was actually there at the time, climbing Everest as part of an Outside article about companies that will essentially escort you to the top of the mountain, when the weather disaster unfolded. In spite of all of the advanced tech of the time, 8 people died. More would have died were it not for the heroics of fellow climbers (including an IMAX team present for a separate assignment) and a Nepalese helicopter pilot who pushed his craft to the limit to reach crippled climbers and get them to safety. When Jon came through Cincinnati next year on a book tour for the release of Into Thin Air, his presentation was gut wrenching. Here's his interview with Terry Gross about it.

*****Last night my questing buddy was NOT having that. At all. So I had to complete at least a few quests with her and her husband while I was grouped with them, or she'd get that Mom voice out and boy, would I be in for it.

When the Game Betrays You

Okay, that title may sound melodramatic, but hear me out on this.

As everybody knows, WoW Classic and its descendants aren't exactly graphics heavy. As a salesperson at Microcenter snarkily put it, you could use a graphics card powered by a potato and some metal strips and run WoW Classic. Still, you can crank up the graphics and get a rather nice modern experience while running Classic. Everything is sharper, the woods and fields are denser/fuller, and even the obnoxious parts of the gear are, well, more obnoxious.

"Indeed." --Cardwyn

But there are times when the graphics make what is on the face of it a simple quest into something far more difficult.

I've explained this to in-game friends more than once, but it's better understood seeing it instead.

In the Nagrand zone of Outland there's a quest, called A Rare Bean, you're sent on to do something pretty disgusting: hunting through animal scat for undigested caracoli.* Now, on the face of it, the quest is simple: find animal scat that is conveniently located near to the quest giver, click on it, and get the caracoli. This is out in the plains, so it should be easy to find, right?

Well....

This is at max graphics setting.

One is right in front of me. Do you see it?

What? Kind of hard to find?

Okay, let's lower the graphics to the "Classic" setting:

There we go. Better?

Or, you could lower the graphics alllll the way down and get this instead:
 

Yep, it's right in front of me.

Now you see --or rather didn't at first-- what the problem is. 

The graphics look fantastic until you have to go hunting around on the ground for the scat and there's no little *sparkly stars* floating above where the scat is to find it easier. Then you have a couple of options: lower the graphics until you can easily find it, create a macro you spam while running around the fields to target the scat, or utilize and addon --such as Questie-- that makes the scat stand out. 

When I was out by myself, it was a no brainer: I just dealt with it as a side effect of having nicer graphics. However, when I was grouped up I quickly discovered that my friends thought I must have been going blind or crazy (or both) because HOW COULD I MISS THESE RIGHT OVER THERE??!!!

"AND WHY AREN'T YOU USING QUESTIE??" 

At that point I had to explain the graphics was too good and it hid the stuff. 

"Not on Questie!"

/sigh

I would much rather lower the graphics until I could see it rather than use an addon designed to get me through quests more quickly without trying to solve anything. Sure, A Rare Bean is supposed to be an easy quest, but when the graphics give you lemons, you make lemonade. Adjusting the graphics fixes the problem for this quest without sacrificing my entire philosophy of playing the game.

And now you know I'm not crazy.

This time.

*And if you thought hunting through scat for caracoli like a parent hunting for a penny that a kid swallowed is bad enough, you probably don't want to know what the Shaman does with those caracoli afterward.