The Hell Just Happened?

A little over two weeks ago I had a conversation with one of my fellow "Leftovers" (aka the Leveling Shamans left behind in the Old World when the Dark Portal opened back in June 2020), which between the two of us became a grousing session on how TBC Classic went down, raid-wise. Given that the two of us were the only people online in Valhalla at the time*, we had a good long rant session in Guild Chat. 

I was kind of busy helping get
a waylaid pilgrm to Falcon Watch
at the time.

A day or two later, I got pinged in Discord by him. Would I be interested in joining a 10-person raiding team for Wrath led by himself and another of the Leftovers?

Given that my job situation is such that I could now raid at night, I was initially receptive to the idea, but I needed to know more about what they were looking at. And as I was not planning on joining the franken-guild in Atiesh, I definitely wanted to make sure that joining the guild wasn't a requirement.

Narrator: It wasn't a requirement.

The more we chatted, the more interested I became. I think the clincher was when he asked what level Deuce was and whether I'd be interested in using her in the raid team. 

• Getting a chance to raid on one of the two toons I'd consider taking into a raid**? Check.
• Me not having to raid lead? Check.
• Wanting a raid team that is "more chill" than having the same 2-3 people talking all the time? Check.
• A raid that has a built-in rotation and bench where everybody sits at one point or another? Check.
• A raid not built on either DKP or Loot Council, but instead a Loot Reserve system***? Check.
• A raid that they are reaching out to people they personally liked to group with? check.
• A raid that --unlike our experience with TBC Classic-- people aren't going to have deadlines to get toons leveled so raiding can begin ASAP? Check.
• A raid that won't harass you about getting your gear the optimal gems/enchants ASAP? Check.

They pretty much had me at the first item on the list, but still the entire thing read like a dream. The thing was, I wasn't totally sure if I was going to want to do this again. I didn't want to get my hopes up only to have them dashed by having someone I personally didn't like on the raid team. While I get that I have to tolerate such things at work, I don't consider playing games to be at that level. I'm not interested in dealing with people I dislike just because I want to see content.

But.

The people they were bringing on board read like a who's who of people I've missed playing with in WoW Classic. And it included my questing buddy!

***

Okay, what's the catch?

Well, that's what I was wondering, and I waited for that shoe to drop in a meeting on Discord last night. 

As far as that meeting went, I can safely say that everybody there was on board with the concept of 10 person raids with 2 more --maybe 3-- for a rotational basis. We have 8 already, and it's a matter of recruiting 4 more to round out our list. My questing buddy is currently bringing her Priest, and I my Mage, but we are both flexible as to whom we bring. I'm fine with switching to Ret, and she's fine swapping to Warlock, but we both want to make sure we have those holes plugged before we do so. Others are fine with moving a bit as-needed, but we all want to see this group succeed. 

My questing buddy already informed me that she will torpedo any attempt on my part to try to level another toon --a Shaman, perhaps-- from scratch. "You are NOT doing that again," she informed me.

One obstacle that I can mention is that the franken-guild isn't quite as enthusiastic about this raid's existence, because "blah-blah-blah it will take away from 25 person teams blah-blah-blah", but I'm pretty sure the act of trying to compress 3 25-person raids down to 2 will do that on its own. As my questing buddy pointed out to me later, when people discover that they're going to be on the bench --and clearing up to the first boss so that the real raiders can take over from that point onward-- they'll do a "peace out" quicker than you can say "The hell going on..."

Okay, so this is referencing
the NFL's bizarre offseason player
moves this past summer, but it still
is appropriate. From twitter.com.

Regardless, it was pulling teeth to apparently get a chat channel created in the franken-guild's Discord to even discuss the thing, so one of the orders of business last night was to have us move our discussions to a separate Discord without being concerned about any snooping going on by said franken-guild's leadership.

To be perfectly honest, I felt immeasurably better with that having happened, because I did not want to have to be in that Discord any more than absolutely necessary. I'd had one of the people in that guild reach out to me in-game to ask if I was going to join them on Atiesh, and I rather bluntly said "Not planning on it."

And I'm still not.

I don't want to be there when the drama goes down, and I don't want to be there when I know that the questions about "Why move and merge at the same time?" start showing up when people begin complaining about the excessive people signing up to raid. I don't want to be there when the clash of guild cultures ends and the other guild's culture wins.****

Not exactly the clash I was
thinking of. (From Twitch.)

And now my Horde guild is thinking of dipping it's collective toes into raiding in Wrath. Nobody there has asked me yet if I want to raid with them, but given that there aren't a lot of L70 Mages in the guild, I'm kind of expecting to be asked at some point. I'm not sure what to do there, exactly. I'd not mind raiding on Neve, but I also know I don't have the time for multi-day raids beyond what I've already committed to. So, I guess you could say that all that's old is new again.

"Did someone say something about Northrend?"
"Don't worry, Neve. We'll get to you soon."

*There are a few of us that are still in Valhalla on Myzrael-US. There's a ton of alts that never migrated --and I doubt they will-- as well as the people who burned out and left. I keep a close eye on who logs in on a regular basis, just to see if getting any groups together for things are a viable option on Myz.

**The other would be a Ret Paladin. Could be Linnawyn 2.0, or another Ret Pally. Not sure yet.

***I've run Loot Reserve systems in the past, particularly in AQ20 and Zul'Gurub, where people are allowed one soft reserve. It's worked out very well. This particular iteration allows people to take turns on who gets loot, so it's not a Soft Reserve with rolls to see who gets loot if there's more than one reserve, but instead each person who reserved an item --if it drops-- gets a turn at getting their loot. That way the entire raid gets gear together, rather than one person with lucky dice gets the lion's share of gear and the rest are left with scraps.

****What I've been told, that has pretty much happened already. I've been involved in too many corporate mergers over the years to not know how the culture clash will end: there's always a winner and a loser, and the corporate culture I've been on has typically been on the losing side. The lines from Pink Floyd's Time come to mind...

And then one day you find ten years have got behind you

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

Addendum to An RPG From the Past: Dungeons and Dragons (Moldvay Edition)

For the record, I never saw this commercial back in the 1980s...

After I'd posted the previous article about the Moldvay Edition of D&D, I realized that there's a simpler way to gaining access to copies of this edition: DriveThruRPG.

Well, duh. I should have thought of that.

So, here's a few links that would help someone pick up a PDF version of this classic RPG, that you can then print as you wish:

DriveThruRPG: D&D Basic Set Rulebook (B/X Edition)

DriveThruRPG: D&D Expert Set Rulebook (B/X Edition)

DriveThruRPG: B2 The Keep on the Borderlands (Basic)

DriveThruRPG: X1 The Isle of Dread (Basic)

Now, if you're interested in more detail about those two modules, as well as a conversion/update to D&D 5e as part of the deal, Goodman Games (of the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG) created several huge books covering various classic modules. These are likely available at your Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS), and they're absolutely worth the trouble.

There are six total (as of 09/2022).
Beware that The Temple of Elemental Evil
is two books! I've not sprung for that
one (yet). Maybe with some Christmas funds...

Goodman Games Original Adventures Reincarnated #1: Into The Borderlands

Goodman Games Original Adventures Reincarnated #2: The Isle of Dread

An RPG From The Past: Dungeons and Dragons (Moldvay Edition)

Back in the ancient days of this blog, I described my first time playing D&D with a friend named Rob who lived in the neighborhood behind our own. We went to school together, played on the same baseball team together, and played Atari video games together. Typical 70s/early 80s stuff. 

I mean, if you've seen Stranger Things, that was kind of my life. Well, except for the monsters from the Upside Down and characters such as Eleven with "powers". 

I swear I had a shirt just like the one
on the left. From cafemom.com.

That fateful day I'd never heard of Dungeons and Dragons before, but even though I got stomped like nobody's business when our first encounter was five Red Dragons, I was fascinated by the possibilities the game provided. 

Compared to how they're presented
in D&D 5e, dragons back then are far from
being a force of nature. They're still
frighteningly powerful compared to
a first level player, however.
From the Blue cover Holmes Edition
of D&D (circa 1979).

So, when Christmas rolled around, I asked for a D&D set. And this was what I got: 

The original copy is long since
gone. Because, well... Satanic Panic
and all that.

This version didn't look like Rob's, but the guts of the thing were still there. The same six stats --Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma-- the same funky dice, the same classes*, and the same monsters. Compared to some wargames such as Risk, the game seemed very complicated, but compared to modern RPGs, well...

Really? Really?

I honestly wasn't planning on posting today, because 31 days in a row is a record for me. As I looked at the number of posts for the year, the Blaugust body count shot me past the 2020 pandemic year for second most posts in a year. Right now, I'm trailing only 2010, where we had three (!) people blogging on the site, providing basically stream of consciousness thoughts on what we were doing in WoW at that time.

::looks at last dozen posts::

Oh. Right. Well, that hasn't changed.

But I can only shake my head at the people who --less than a day after the Wrath Classic pre-patch dropped-- already had a Death Knight up to L70. Yes, I ran into them while I was running a few Alterac Valley battlegrounds over lunch on Wednesday. 

And if they thought that they'd wipe the battlefield clean with Neve, they were in for a rude awakening. As one of my fellow defenders in Stonehearth Bunker put it, "This ain't 2008, asshole."

The fact that DKs were already at L70 still kind of irked me, even though we won that BG. I mean, I know there's that Joyous Journeys buff out there, and it's only L55 to L70, but come on. Just why on earth would you spend the entire time from 6 PM EST until Noon the next day leveling a DK, when you've got close to a month before Northrend opens? Your gear will get replaced pretty damn quickly in Wrath Classic anyway, and there's a bit of a delay until the first raids open as well.

What's the point?

I guess I'm getting old, because I play MMOs for the journey rather than the destination. And that seems to be very much the exception these days. The destination will still be there, whether I get there tomorrow, the next day, or even the next month. I can't control how other people play the game, but if by their behavior my enjoyment of Wrath Classic is cut short*, I will not be a happy camper. 

In this case, I'm actually hoping that the increased difficulty of Discount Naxx puts a bit of a damper on the overdeveloped sense of enthusiasm on some of these "high energy" players. 

*By pushing the Classic team to burn through Wrath Classic in about 14-15 months instead of the 25 months originally. Original Wrath dropped in 11/2008, and Cataclysm dropped in 12/2010.

The Accidental Hipster

I was on early yesterday, before work, and people were eagerly counting down the time before the extended Wrath Classic pre-patch.

Rather than living in the moment, I couldn't help but think that in a year from now people will be similarly eager, talking about the upcoming Cataclysm Classic, because of course they will. After all, we're way ahead of schedule for following the original TBC timeline, so why not the same for Wrath Classic? And I'm sure the apologists will be out for Cataclysm Classic too, because "Cataclysm: It Wasn't as Bad as People Thought" is likely to be a headline from a site such as Massively OP or Blizzard Watch.

But that's not what I mean when I said I was an accidental hipster; that's just being a cynic. 

Chris Knight, don't ever change.
From getyarn.com.

Last afternoon, after I got off a late call with a coworker, I noticed that the servers were now up. An actual extended downtime from Blizz for a prepatch that ended right on time? Amazing! So I looked at Discord and found an absolute ton of people on, even those I'd not seen online in months, all with "Playing World of Warcraft Classic" as their status. 

I switched to Battle.net, and found a metric ton of people with "Wrath of the Lich King Classic" as their status as well.

And... I just went and zapped Battle.net for the day and played a little Stardew Valley instead before hitting the hay early. 

***

If that were all I did that'd be one thing, and I'd write it off to merely an aversion to being around whatever the popular crowd is doing. After all, this is kind of my jam; back in the 80s, I used to like bands such as Toto, and then when Toto IV came out and they simply exploded in popularity I dropped them like a hot potato. Another band that followed a similar trajectory was Bon Jovi. I'd been a fan of their first two albums and liked their third --Slippery When Wet-- but when they suddenly became the most popular band in school* I stopped listening to them. 

If Simon and Garfunkel suddenly rocket

up the charts, I'll drop them too, I suppose.

If I'd have been exposed to punk back then, I'd have likely been heavily into punk until Nirvana came along and made punk inspired Grunge a thing. Instead, part of my 90s was spent exploring Jazz and Celtic music --until Riverdance came along, that is-- so I missed out on the worst excesses of the Boy Bands as well as some of the best of the Grunge bands.

And so it goes.

But for some reason, instead of simply not logging in and zigging when everybody else zagged, I just had to turn myself visible on Discord for a little while so that if anybody was actually looking they'd see that I was most definitely not in WoW Classic that evening.

It was the sort of behavior that was absolutely not necessary, and something I very rarely do, but I did it anyway.

After all, people likely didn't give two shits about what I was doing, since they were all focused on things in Wrath Classic anyway.

***

I guess you could say that this tendency not to do what everybody else is doing is part of the reason why I did Blaugust the way I have. 

Here I am, on August 31st, the last day, and I've written a post for 31 days straight.** I swore I would stop posting if the stress got to me, but... I haven't felt any stress at all. If anything it's been relaxing, knowing that I'm under absolutely no pressure to post and keep up appearances. I didn't sign up for Blaugust because I didn't want to toot my horn and wave a flag shouting "LOOK AT ME!", which is quite ironic since this is what I'm doing in this post right now. The thing is, I'm writing this post with the knowledge that only a handful of people will ever see it, so I don't really care. 

Even if I did sign up for Blaugust, I'd be only one of 68 blogs, which is miniscule compared to the entirety of the internet, but it would be also more than twice the core readership of this particular blog. We'd be back to territory PC hasn't seen since Righteous Orbs and the Pink Pigtail Inn were active. But it would also mean that I'd have to make a decision about what I want to do with PC, given that back then there were two of us writing and Soul was actively trying to grow the blog's readership.***

If I truly wanted to market PC, I suppose I could have done so by getting on Twitter and engaging with the community more. Or commenting on more sites and blogs. Or something more than what I've been doing (which is nothing). There's no guarantee that any marketing will bring eyeballs here to the blog --or any blog-- but it is certainly better than simply not doing anything at all. What might have happened, knowing me, is that I probably wouldn't have kept at blogging for this long if I felt like I had to keep posting. Without any pressure, I can post what I want when I want to, and the schedule is my own to keep. 

In a world where it feels like everything is dictated by someone else, having complete control over something is a rare luxury.****

***

If there's one thing that I don't like, it is the concept of the hipster as tastemaker and critic. Even though I only rarely engaged with the hipster crowd, I always felt that the things I liked --and by extension myself-- were considered "less than" by them as a way to make themselves feel superior. 

And now, here I am behaving in a similar fashion to them, and if I looked deep into my own soul I have those same feelings of superiority that they do. I'm not too proud to realize that likely they, like me, are probably nursing a severe case of insecurity that is actively masked by this behavior. This does not excuse such behavior, but I do understand some of the reasons why. 

There's more to it than that, of course. There's a certain level of resentment for all of those people who have no qualms about dropping subscriptions and restarting them on a whim, because Blizz has tailored Retail around spikes in subscriptions every time there's a content patch to the point where the grindy daily systems designed to keep you logging in --and subscribed-- became the raison d'etre for how Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands were designed, even more so than the tailoring of the expac toward the highest end raiders/Mythic+ participation. 

This spiking, the ebb and flow of an expac, isn't exactly unusual. I knew people back in the 90s who would change long distance carriers at the drop of a hat if another carrier came along with a slightly better deal. Hell, people even in our neighborhood changed trash removal companies if they saved about $5 a month. (Yes, that happened.) So this is not new, but knowing that companies such as wireless carriers today still tend to prioritize --and give better deals to-- new customers over existing ones leads to a certain level of behavior among the general populace.***** 

I realize that I'm old, and that I value loyalty to my detriment, but this behavior creates additional resentment in me because these spikes in subscriptions and activity also drive the desire by the Classic Team to push content harder and faster, to keep the subs up and to get to what? Potentially Cataclysm Classic and oblivion, I suppose. If anything, I'd prefer that the Classic team slow it down, because I know the end is coming next year, and I'd like to enjoy the ride as long as I can. 

***

But I need to do better. I need to stop being small minded and resentful when I should celebrate that so many people came back. Their fun doesn't directly impact me at all --well, considering the way I play it doesn't-- so I need to stop being an accidental hipster and instead enjoy the ride. 

This isn't how I expected to end a series of Blaugust posts, because nobody likes to be a downer, but I guess the prepatch brought up some thoughts that I needed to address sooner or later, such as the impending demise of WoW Classic next year (or very early 2024).

#Blaugust2022

*That was when Bon Jovi became known as "the 'metal band' your girlfriend likes".

**Well, I have, assuming my sudden aversion to actually posting this last post and completing things doesn't override my desire to just simply get it over with. 

***I took the more cautious approach of trying to write well and actively comment on posts that interested me. By engaging people that way, I developed friendships that have lasted until this day. "Hi, Gang!!"

****If anybody wants to take a lesson from this post --aside from "don't be a hipster"-- create a blog because you have complete control over it. People can try to tell you what to do, but in the end you have control. Absolute control. 

*****AT&T was heavily promoting their change in policy last year that they would give the same deals to existing customers that they gave to new customers because it was such a departure from the norm. And before you think I approve of AT&T over other carriers, I don't. I only use AT&T because my employer pays for my service; if it were up to me, I'd use another carrier because AT&T has several dead zones less than 2 miles from my home that they are quite well aware of but have done nothing to alleviate over the past 15 years. And for the record, I most definitely do NOT live in the boonies.

EtA: Fixed grammatical issues.

A Time for Visiting

I've been helping my questing buddy out with her Mage alt, and one of the fun things I've done is to do the Marshal Windsor questline with her. Part of what made it fun was that this is only the third time I've gone through the questline, as I have so few Alliance toons at L60 or above.

This was Linna's time to shine, and she didn't disappoint.

"Just sayin'..."

This is one of those quests that the
RP walk was made for.

"Like hell you will."

He may have known it was coming,
but it still doesn't make it easy to watch.

But the Marshal Windsor questline is merely the beginning. I know where this leads, having done it twice, but I'm still amazed at how Blizz doesn't give you any clues as to where to go next. This was truly a "get out in the world and explore" questline. When I first went through this questline, I didn't fall back on Wowhead or any guides. I had already been exploring on Az, and I happened to stumble upon a lone Queldorei out in Winterspring. So when I first was given this quest, she happened to be on the list of potential suspects to complete this quest. The leads in Swamp of Sorrows and Burning Steppes didn't pan out, so I went to Winterspring. And there, Azshandra and then Cardwyn found someone who would become an old friend...

"Card is doing well, thanks.
She sends her regards."

If there's one thing that I am pleased about in Retail, it's that the Cataclysm revamp kept Haleh alive. It could have been so easy for Blizz back then to have simply eliminated her as her quests became obsolete, but she's still alive and kicking. 

And she changed her outfit, too.

So on the day of the Prepatch for Wrath Classic, it's good to visit some old friends that have survived until today.

#Blaugust2022

Fate and Circumstance

(The genesis of this story was provided by my questing buddy, who was inspired by the Wrath Classic Beta Test. She provided part of the story as well as the overall plot, and I filled in the rest and edited the overall story. As the two of us collaborated on the entire thing, she and I share the authors' credit for the tale.

I wanted to release this before the Wrath Classic pre-patch, but trying to fit in the last bit of editing while being knee deep in Blaugust 2022 wasn't exactly the smartest thing I've ever done. Still, it's finished, and here it is. 

Some final notes: This is a work of fiction; any resemblance to any people, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Honest! Any characters created by Blizzard for WoW Classic, TBC Classic, and Wrath Classic remain their property. This work of fiction uses WoW Classic, TBC Classic, and Wrath Classic as the reference points, no other version of WoW. This was written by Redbeard of Parallel Context and Zargala-Myzrael, 2022.)

Fate and Circumstance
By Redbeard and Zargala

“Okay Lewys, once your mom uses the paddle to move the bread to the edge of the oven,” I instructed, nodding at Karyn who nudged a golden-brown loaf over, “then it’s your turn.”

My nephew Lewys stood atop a chair in the kitchen, knitted his brow in concentration, and whispered the short poem I gave him. We’d been practicing for this moment for a couple of weeks, and now all I could do was wait. I bit my lip as I stood behind him, watching helplessly as wisps of the arcane came to life and swirled around us. He finished, reached for the bread, and dropped it into the cloth covered basket beside him.

“I did it!” he shouted, jumping up and down on the chair. “It was just like you said, Aunt Cardwyn! Once I got done with the poem the bread was cool enough to move!”

“You sure did, kiddo,” I exhaled, grabbing him from behind and ruffling his hair. “It’s all in the patience and the poem. Do you think you can now help your mom and Grandmama out on baking day?”

“Yeah!” Lewys turned toward my brother’s wife and gave her a hug. “Mom, I did it! Woo!”

“Good job, Lewys!” Karyn smiled with relief as she set the paddle down and returned the hug. She then looked over at me with a question in her eyes.

“He certainly did it,” I echoed and nodded.

“Good,” Mom replied, tapping her foot. “Then the two of you can help us finish up faster.”

“Well,” I said, scraping my foot on the floor, “I don’t want to take away the job I just gave him.”

“Okay then, maybe you should go check to see if something needs doing, like turning the manure.”

“Mom!”

“Caaard!” she replied, a grin spreading across her face.

I sighed. No matter how old I got, I was always going to be her kid. “Okay, okay, I’ll go check it out. But Lewys,” I added, turning back to my nephew, “remember to whisper the poem after your mom moves the loaves over, okay? It’s all in the timing.”

“Got it, Aunt Cardwyn! You go turn that manure!”

“Uh… Right.” That kid was picking up all sorts of bad habits from Mom.