Meme Monday: Love Memes

Oh, this could go in several different directions. I mean, just "RPG love meme" or "MMO love meme" alone brings up some rather adult results. But hey, let's live a little, shall we?

When couples play online.
My wife is not one of them, so
I have no reference point here.
Power-something's tumbler.

Uh... No reference here either.
From Stephen McGee.

Reading some of the r/ClassicWoW
posts on Reddit can give me a warped
sense of what's important.
From Memecenter.

And then there's the guy who
turns MMOs into Ladies' Night
at a disco.
From WoW Amino.

Bonus: Not technically an RPG or MMO Love Meme, but it popped up and I was amused:

Maybe someday. Then again, I saw my
wife play Breath of the Wild; it wasn't pretty
and she gave up despite a ton of help
and encouragement from the kids.
From Griffon Ramsey and Luke McKay.

Fumbling Around With Social Engineering

My old WoW Classic server, Myzrael-US, had rallied in population when Wrath Classic was released. It was to be expected, I suppose, given how people wanted to return to see the content. 

That bump in population apparently has not lasted.

On January 26, unknown to me, free server transfers opened up from two of the small West Coast servers, Myzrael and Azuresong, and to Old Blanchy.

Old Blanchy? The smallest of the three? REALLY?

Well, that is certainly no longer the case as some of the remaining Alliance guilds have moved off wholesale to Old Blanchy-US, and the population dropped to Low once more. 

I swear it was Medium a week ago...

My suspicion was piqued when I noticed that we'd dropped to Low, and a couple of people whom I'm BNet friends with moved their toons to Old Blanchy, which I thought was a strange location to move to. Back in Vanilla Classic and TBC Classic, Old Blanchy had a small server population, much smaller than Azuresong and Myzrael, but once Wrath Classic released the population swelled to where Myzrael-US was during Vanilla Classic. And while Azuresong-US has remained steady with about 1000-1500 raiding toons, Myzrael's Alliance population plummeted once more to where it's a majority Horde server.

The thing is, the Horde population on Old Blanchy is roughly the same as on Myzrael, so really, unless the Horde guilds on Myz start migrating over, there's no real incentive for me to move any of my toons over unless Blizzard announces Myzrael's server shutdown or something. 

And for the record, I'm not going to move toons from Myzrael-US to Atiesh-US, because while the Horde population there is twice the size of what it is on either Old Blanchy or Myzrael, it's still miniscule compared to the Alliance population on Atiesh. 

My Alliance toons on Myzrael? 

/shrug

I mean, I've got 2.0 versions on Atiesh already, so I'm not moving them there, and I wasn't planning on raiding with them on Myz anyway, so I'm not going to chase the population exodus there.

And I'll be honest: my experiences pugging on Myzrael vs Atiesh have been rather enlightening. 

On Myzrael, the pugging scene for Neve has been pretty low key. I get into an instance, whether it's Heroic or the new Heroic Plus, and I don't have any real issues with people getting frustrated or trying to go faster faster FASTER. Or people aren't being asshats when things don't go well.

On Atiesh, however... It seems that the puggers and instance runners there are all far more hardcore in outlook and who they select for their pugs: Gearscore has made it's return to World of Warcraft Classic in a big way. People demanding minimum Gearscore levels for instance runs or easy raids --such as Vault of Archavon-- are very much a thing on Atiesh-US, and I can only shake my head and sigh at this behavior.

All that's old is new again, I suppose.

***

In light of these developments, I'm planning on staying put on Myzrael for the time being, at least until I get a feel for where the Horde population is (or isn't) going. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if Myzrael-US folds, I'll likely take my toons to a server that I know isn't going away because it serves a unique player base: Bloodsail Buccaneers, the only PvE-RP server in North America. 

Hooray for the Roleplaying community!

Meme Monday: Groundhog Day Memes

I'm old enough to remember a time before the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day.

Okay, it was only 1993, but it's still a year older than my marriage.

Back in the Before Times, Groundhog Day was a kind of cute but meaningless holiday in the same vein as "National Cheesecake Day" (July 30th) or "National Bratwurst Day" (August 16)*.

Then that movie came along, and... Well... It's now a meme all on its own about reliving the same day over and over and over...

Being from Ohio, I kind of like this.
From Pinterest.

From imgflip.

From redbubble.

From keenanraynor.blogspot.com.

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

*I was actually surprised that National Bratwurst Day wasn't every weekend during football tailgate season. Maybe that's because I live in the Midwest, but brats are a staple of tailgating here.

Meme Monday: Groundhog Memes

I'm old enough to remember a time before the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day. 

Okay, it was only 1993, but it's still a year older than my marriage.

Back in the Before Times, Groundhog Day was a kind of cute but meaningless holiday in the same vein as "National Cheesecake Day" (July 30th) or "National Bratwurst Day" (August 16)*.

Then that movie came along, and... Well... It's now a meme all on its own about reliving the same day over and over and over...

Being from Ohio, I kind of like this.
From Pinterest.

From imgflip.

From Redbubble.

From keenanraynor.blogspot.com.

*I was actually surprised that National Bratwurst Day wasn't every weekend during football tailgate season. Maybe that's because I live in the Midwest, but brats are a staple of tailgating here.

In Case You Ever Wondered Whether Game Companies are Soulless Corporations...

...I give you the latest little brouhaha from Blizzard.

I give major props to Brian Birmingham, the now ex-Activision-Blizzard manager, for his principled stand against the stacked ranking corporate policy at A-B, but as soon as I read the words "stacked ranking" I knew he was swimming against the tide.

For the life of me, I have no idea why executive corporate management loves stacked ranking among those other "corporate trends" --I'm looking at you, open office floor designs*-- but that it was popularized by GE's Jack Welch says a lot. 

I've been in the work force full time since 1991, and yes, I've encountered stacked ranking before. Numerous times. And its basic principle, that teams should be shoehorned into a bell curve and that the bottom 10% are poor performers, is something I despise. There is very little nuance to the stacked ranking system, where the best performer on a crappy team is given a higher ranking than an average to poor performer on a fantastic team. The stacked ranking system also encourages cutthroat behavior among peers, which includes such items as coworkers sabotaging projects to make their own work look better. Again, I've seen such behavior in the past among coworkers. The focus isn't on putting out good work, but playing the system to maximum advantage. 

From AD&D Dungeon Masters
Guide (1e), Page 111.

So yeah, I have a history with stacked ranking. 

And if you're playing politics with the system, you're not spending time putting out a good product. And in the case of Blizzard, you're not developing bug free, well designed games.

*I'm incredibly grateful I work from home, because if I had to work at the office, it would have been in an open office design. Even in a post-pandemic world, corporations still love the open office design for some strange ungodly reason. I work in IT Security, so by nature I tend to have sensitive material up on screen a lot of the time. If you're thinking "Hey, wait a minute, if it's up on screen and you're in an open office, anybody can walk by and see that!" then you'd be absolutely correct. Without any privacy whatsoever, there's little ability to securely handle sensitive data. I didn't say there's no ability, because you still can, but proper handling of sensitive data out in the open also involves additional cost, and cost is the antithesis of corporate life.

Must Be Something about Changing the Title Pic

I haven't been talking much about raiding in Wrath Classic, mainly because there wasn't much to report.

After all, I was part of a rather casual 10 person raid team, and we'd been clearing Wrath's version of Naxxramas, the Eye of Eternity (aka "The Malygos raid"), and Obsidian Sanctum (aka "The Sarth + Drakes raid"). We'd hit a wall trying to down Sartharion with all three Drakes alive, but given that apparently the 10s version of Sarth + 3 Drakes is much harder than the 25s version, I wasn't too concerned about it. I mean, I felt bad that we weren't downing the 3 Drakes on 10s when 25s teams were doing it with aplomb, but apparently teams with full 25 BiS Phase One gear were failing to down the 10s version, which made me feel much better about the supposed "EZ Mode" that 10 person raids are in Wrath Classic.

With Ulduar opening up, all this was destined to change.

Oh, so THERE it is!

As I'd never raided in the original Wrath, I never knew where the entrance to Ulduar actually was. After all, it's not something you can ride to from the flight point, unlike the Halls of Stone and Halls of Lightning 5-person instances. And yes, I got lost trying to figure out where the entrance to Ulduar was on that first night's worth of raiding. I guess that is the same sort of thing that would have happened if I actually was able to raid Black Temple in TBC Classic, because I once spent a half an hour flying around, trying to figure out the entrance to Black Temple, and I still don't know where the entrance is.* I think I used to know, because I have a hazy memory of soloing BT back in 2014 or so, but burn me if I can't find it now.

And I thought the entrance to the original Naxxramas was a puzzle.

Ulduar is the instance where Steampunk and World of Warcraft collide in a big way. While there's a ramp up in TBC Classic --such as Netherstorm or my questing buddy's 'copter, which she absolutely loves-- it was Wrath of the Lich King where Blizzard went all in on a steampunk setting for World of Warcraft. From the design of Warsong Hold --my oldest explicitly mentioned to me the Steampunk elements to the complex the first time she saw it-- to the vehicle oriented World PvP in Wintergrasp** you can't avoid the overt Steampunk to the game. But really, once a player reaches The Storm Peaks with its Marvel-esque Nordic vision of the Titan Keepers, down to names such as Freya, Loken, Mimrir, and Thorim, you realize that the Steampunk in Azeroth wasn't just a "flavor of the month" design but rather Blizzard consciously deciding that Azeroth was created by tech beyond what the current inhabitants could achieve.

Kind of like an MMO version of Anne McCaffrey's Pern, complete with dragons.

The cover art for Dragonwriter, a tribute
to Anne McCaffrey. Art by Michael Whelan,
who painted almost all of the Pern cover art.

The centerpiece of The Storm Peaks is Ulduar, what appears to be a titan city, but is in fact something else... 

Oh come on, I'm not gonna spoil it for you, despite Ulduar having been out in Retail WoW for over a decade now. 

But that time interval also means that Ulduar is --like almost all of WoW once something is released into the wild-- a solved raid. There are already tons of articles and videos on how to optimally raid Ulduar, from the raid composition to the Best in Slot (BiS) lists to even the boss order you should take to blitz through the content.

Due to that, and since I wasn't doing as much DPS as Fire Spec compared to Arcane Mage in the raid, I was asked to switch to Arcane in early January. 

I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as to where this might be going. I knew that my Fire Spec for a single target boss isn't as good as Arcane Spec, although AOE damage for a Fire Mage is superior to that of an Arcane Mage, but I liked playing as a Fire Mage. The way a Fire Mage has to run into melee range, drop some casts in the scrum, then blink away so I can then rain fiery damage from distance just suits my playing style. But even the difference between Arcane and Fire aside, my fellow Mage had been running 25 person raids and whose gear was decently superior to my own, so it was only natural that her damage was also greater.*** 

But like a good teammate, I set aside my internal concerns about the raid creeping toward the hardcore, saluted, and switched to an Arcane spec.

We were then dealt a blow when we lost our Warlock, who decided to play fewer characters in Wrath Classic, and our raid got the short end of the stick.  Still, we had 11 players on the team, so despite missing a Lock we could still field a full raid. That was good for us, since the raid leads had personally reached out to people that they liked to raid with and had agreed with our focus for this particular raid team. While most people raided with other toons, 25 person raids, or both, a few of us --myself included-- kept to only this particular raid team. After what I dealt with in TBC Classic, I was happy to have low expectations and a casual attitude toward raiding. This time around, I was not going to get sucked into the Meta and hardcore progression grind.

And I thought our little raid team was insulated from that grind.

We got into Ulduar last week and... It felt weird. I'll have to go into it more on another post, but unlike Karazhan --whom I have issues with the internal logic of the entire place-- Ulduar just feels like an inflection point in WoW's history. 

***

I was online, doing something on Neve, when the post appeared in the raid's Discord on Saturday night. 

The Pally Healer and the Hunter were leaving the raid team.

They were running 25 person raids together, and they wanted to also push into 10 person hard modes**** much faster than we were. For our raid team, hard modes were something we'd like to eventually do, but it wasn't a priority; we had people in raid with young families, and people like me who burned out on the hardcore progression, so getting all sweaty in pursuit of the hardcore wasn't something we were interested in doing.

Since our raid team wasn't going to progress into hard modes fast enough, the two decided to leave our raid and join an "in house" raid team composed of members of their 25 person raid. Several classes have BiS items that are found in Ulduar's hard mode 10 person raids, so if your 25 person raid demands you get your BiS gear you have to get as quickly into 10 person hard modes as possible.*****

The Meta caught up to our little raid team after all.

Monday evening before the raid we had a meeting with the raid leads. The Pally healer was there for one last time, but we were still a person short: our Shaman.

It was then that the raid leads had announced that our Shaman had begun ghosting them over the week, and didn't bother signing up for tonight's raid. My heart sank.

Based on all that and that neither raid lead wanted to spend time recruiting, vetting, and bringing new raiders into a raid that was designed to be pretty laid back and a friends' raid, they decided to shut down the raid instead. Given that we only had 9 people we went into Naxx, Eye of Eternity, and Obsidian Sanctum one last time, but that was the end.

***

And so ends my Wrath Classic raiding.

I have not much desire to go raid any further, as it seems that even casual raids have to work hard to keep from backsliding into a more hardcore stance. I do know that my old friend Jes has been running 25 person pug raids of her own, and I know she'd be happy to have me sign up, but I really have no desire to join a raid that is nominally hosted by the franken guild, pug or not. Even if I was so inclined, I noticed who was signing up for the raid and some of those are people I don't care to ever raid with again.

It's not as if I'm giving up on Wrath Classic. The new Heroic Plus 5-person instances --what I've dubbed the "Mythic Plus of Wrath Classic"-- are sufficiently difficult enough that I'm happy to run some of those and scratch that group content itch. Beyond that, there's plenty of things that I can do that have nothing to do with raiding, so I'll be fine. In spite of what the majority of the Classic playerbase seems to think, endgame raiding isn't why I play Wrath Classic. It never was.

*No, I didn't break down and look up where the Black Temple entrance was on Wowhead, either.

**For Wrath Classic, Wintergrasp became an instanced battleground, but originally it was designed as a World PvP event where the winning faction gained access to the Vault of Archavon mini-raid. If you were on an imbalanced server --and most people were-- if you were on the wrong faction you never got into Vault of Archavon. Of course, now everybody can get access to VoA, because all it takes to gain access to Vault of Archavon is having exactly one person on your faction on the server having won Wintergrasp to gain access to VoA for your faction.

***In Wrath Classic, both sets of raids --10 person and 25 person-- drop their own gear. Due to the supposed increased difficulty of 25 person raids --and more people to gear for-- the 25 person raids drop gear with supposedly superior stats. That doesn't mean that an item from a 10 person raid might not be BiS for your toon and your spec, but a 25 person raider going down to a 10 person raid is going to have better gear than someone (like me) who kept to 10 person raids. The two types of raids don't share the same lockout, so Cardwyn could theoretically join both a 10 person raid and a 25 person raid of Ulduar that same week without issue.

****Wrath of the Lich King saw the beginning of hard modes for raid content. You could flip a switch in the raid and suddenly the raid entered an increased level of difficulty with the promise of better loot overall for each class of raiding. 

*****Okay, one thing needs to be said: if you want to go all in on hardcore, and apparently a ton of people do, that means you're running full Ulduar raids --one 10 person raid and one 25 person raid-- twice a week on your main toon. And if you've got multiple toons, you can easily see where you spend every night of the week raiding in some form or another. I was listening to a YouTube video when it was mentioned that Warcraftlogs had announced that the first week of Ulduar had the most registered parses of any raid, my first thought was "Duh." Alas, I've not been able to confirm that mention independently, so I'd place this as "not surprising but unconfirmed".

EtA: Fixed a formatting issue.

Meme Monday: Monday Memes

This is kind of an obvious theme for Meme Mondays, and I've been remiss in presenting it. So, while you're waiting for your coffee or tea to finish brewing, here you go:

Yep. Yep yep yep.
From Pinterest.

Sometimes Hoth is the perfect
metaphor for Mondays.
From Tumblr.

I vote for the former.
From memegenerator.net.

Every freaking weekend.
From Cheezburger's Memebase.