Who Dresses Up For Plowing the Fields, Anyway?

Waaay back when I first tried out Guild Wars 2*, one of the main complaints I had about the game involved fashion. Or rather, that the game was full of beautiful people wearing their Sunday Best clothing, even when they're out in the field farming and doing menial tasks.

Okay, so I'm in Divinity's Reach.
One of these NPCs actually said,
"He's going to look across a crowded
room and instantly be smitten."
So at least they're self aware.

To my mind, tasks where you get grimy are not the sort of time to be wearing your best clothing, and I likened it to looking at Medieval and Renaissance art depicting people farming in the clothes you'd wear to Mass. 

Take a look at the bottom right, and remember
that those are the peasants.
The Three States of Medieval Society,
from The Regime of Princes by Rouen,
Based on Gilles de Rome's work of
the same name. From classes.bnf.fr.

Fast forward to today, and I still have those opinions, although I can articulate them better now.

As much as I admire Kamalia's fashion design using WoW's transmog capability, I will be the first one to admit that wearing those outfits while "working", ala fighting and adventuring, is akin to those peasants in the painting above wearing their finery while being on the business end of a horse and plow. 

This is an entirely separate argument from the "boob window" and other sins of F&SF armor design, as while the boob window is designed to titillate, the fashion behind RPG gear doesn't really fit with the job description. After all, it's as if we're a modern soldier wearing our dress uniforms while on patrol in a flashpoint area around the globe. As much as camo is its own fashion these days --go to your average Bass Pro Shop or Walmart and you'll see what I mean-- its original and still most common usage is to blend in with the background while hunting/fishing or in active duty military.**

***

If there's one thing that's a trope of any society, it's that fashion matters.

As much as I've tried to dance to the beat of my own drum, even I have to conform to societal customs if I want to blend in and not be noticed.***

Are you going to work? Wear the clothes most commonly worn at work.

Are you going to a wedding? Dress up. In prior years that meant a sport coat and tie, but now you can get away with "business casual", especially if you're corralling a bunch of kids in tow.

Are you going to a funeral? Dress up.

Are you going to work out in the yard? Wear old clothes you don't mind getting dirty.

It's pretty much common sense, and if, for example, you go to religious services --pick one, any one-- you're likely to be dressed up to varying degrees. And if you're a kid and you come home from church and want to go play, well, you'd better change out of your church clothes before you do or you'll have to be really careful not to get those clothes dirty. 

Or you could have parents like mine who, after going to a Saturday evening mass (yay, Catholics) gave my brother and me the ultimatum that if we came inside (even just to change) we had to stay inside. And you can guess what I decided to do: stay outside even though I was wearing slacks/corduroy pants and a button down shirt. And you want to talk about standing out, especially in the Summer, that was definitely it.****

If society places certain demands on fashion now, imagine what that might have been like "back in the day". The scarcity of certain hues and dyes meant cloth made of such colors were reserved for highest classes; such as, oh, Royal Purple. (It's right there in the name.) And that's not even taking into account the types of clothing worn by the various classes of society.*****

***

Now, it's one thing if your toon looks something like this:

Been hanging around with those ne'er-do-well
pirates in Stranglethorn Vale, have we?

Obviously Card's wearing stuff that nobody would confuse with something formal, such as this:

Neve: "A Dawnweaver always presents well."
Me: "Yeah, whatever."

But which look would be more appropriate for getting in a mix-up with some nearby yetis?

Me: "You stay out of this."

I was thinking about the appropriateness of Neve's Robe of Power when I remembered an event well over a decade ago. Back before the woods near our house were torn down and houses went up, there used to be an old wooden shack back there. I used to hear from neighborhood kids at the bus stop while I waited with the mini-Reds about how the shack was haunted --typical kid stuff-- and that people would go back there and drink beer without being caught by their parents. I stuffed that knowledge in the back of my head but never thought much of it until one night in the Spring. It was roughly around midnight when I heard quite a few cars going by the house all at once. Our neighborhood used to have its share of people who would speed through as a short cut, so I poked my head out to see if it was enough of a problem to warrant calling the cops.

It turns out that wasn't what was going on at all.

A bunch of teenagers were parking their cars up and down the street and then walking up toward the woods, carrying six packs. All were dressed in very formal outfits, especially the girls.

"Huh, didn't know it was prom," I mused as I shut the door. I knew exactly what they were all up to that night.#

The sight of those girls in those big bright formal dresses and heels navigating the woods at night is what I think of when I see toons wearing gear that look like this out in Azshara:

Uh, yeah. Shouldn't Card be
at a dance somewhere?

***

We're obviously not playing Dragon Age; the gear isn't getting splattered with mud and blood, and we're not leaning into the grimdark aspects of gaming ala Dark Souls. I'm not advocating for gear that is a constant downer; people want their toons to look good and have fun playing the game. I guess that for me that means that --especially for the NPCs-- their clothing match the their activity. Or at least look like, well, what you'd expect people to look like. 

#Blaugust2023

*A decade ago if you were keeping track.

**I mean, duh. Camo is short for camouflage.

***As much as a red headed bearded guy can blend in, that is. After all, there aren't that many of us out there, and because of that we do tend to naturally stand out.

****I have a story about an event that occurred one evening while I was still in all of that church clothing, but it's one of those stories that requires a very specific topic to dredge up. Let's say it involves puberty, girls, relationships, and perceptions of the same, and it's a story I've never ever forgotten.

*****You know you've been playing too many RPGs and MMOs when I have to clarify what I meant by "classes".

#I know Bruce Hornsby and the Range aren't trendy --they weren't very trendy or popular among fans of the bands I listened to back in the 80s-- but I liked them. And really, if you like what you're listening to that's all that counts.

Because I'm Getting Old and Have Seen It All

The other day, I was querying my Questing Buddy how the Friday raid went. "It went well," she said. "We downed Ony first and then got a group for TotC."

"Did you get an Ony bag?" I teased, as that was one of the reasons why people would continue to run Onyxia even late in Vanilla Classic. The "revived" Wrath Classic version of Onyxia returned in Phase 3, a month or two ago.

"Oh, I got it the other week, but I won the head!" (That's the other big reason why people would run Ony.)

"Wait, what?" I was not expecting that reply. "There's an Ony Bag in the L80 version of Ony?"

"Oh yeah! It's a 22 slot bag."

"Huh." I just got outfoxed by Blizzard, as I wasn't quite expecting that they would put an updated Ony Bag in the loot. "I kind of expected it to be a 24 slot bag."

"No, it's like the bag out with the dragon area," she replied, referencing The Obsidian Sanctum raid from Phase 1, which also dropped a 22 slot bag. 

"Hmm..." I replied, trying to remember. "I can't recall if I got that bag or not." Given the amount of effort people put in back in TBC Classic to min-max everything, including bag space, I kind of tuned out these sort of reward drops. I looked at it as representative of the problems afflicting the Classic community, and my appetite for these little quality of life rewards from TBC Classic onwards turned into revulsion instead.

My Questing Buddy, of course, didn't know about any of this. "You DIDN'T?" she said incredulously.

"I just really didn't care if I won it, so I skipped rolling a lot of times."

I could almost see her rolling her eyes. "Why am I not surprised?"

I went back through some notes I made on those Phase One raids. "Oh wait," I corrected myself. "I did win it on the last time we went through that raid. I waited until everybody else had won it and then I got it."

My Questing Buddy sighed.

***

There's another reason why I mentioned this story, and it's this:

If you need to click on the pic to bring up
the original size, that's fine. But it's
pretty obvious that I'm not talking about
the regular maintenance window here.

Even if I didn't have some revulsion toward Blizzard courtesy of their corporate behavior, the "fund raising" pet sale in support of Ukraine would have generated a ton of ick all by itself.

Not that I'm anti-Ukraine or anything, because I'm most definitely not, but because of the corporatization of doing something for a good cause. 

It's not any sense of purity that I feel this way --okay, maybe a little, if I'm being completely honest about it-- but that I know that very very few corporations look at something as an altruistic endeavor. Over the years I've seen the man behind the curtain, and I know that at their heart most companies put only profit. Not good deeds, not society, and most definitely not people. So when I see something like this, where Acti-Blizz recruited Mila Kunis* to promote pet sales in support of BlueCheck for Ukraine, I simply can't see the altruism.

At this point, I'd much rather that companies simply stop trying to put lipstick on a pig about their corporate altruism if they're going to prioritize profits over everything else. That's their prerogative to do so, but they're definitely not fooling me into thinking that somehow Blizzard has turned a corner and will behave like a responsible corporate citizen. Maybe when the wheel turns and shareholder primacy yields to another form of corporate activity I'll change my mind about this, but until then I'll do my good deeds out of the public view and not in service of a corporate master.

#Blaugust2023

*Holy crap, she's matured. I don't know why, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that she's grown up and reached the cusp of 40. Before you accuse me of being ageist or something, I think that she looks absolutely stunning, and not just "for her age". Of course, me being in my 50s, I still think of her as being young, but that goes with the territory.

EtA: Corrected spelling.

The Blogging Version of Sitting on the Fence Returns

Apparently there's some blogging thing that's starting today in our little corner of the internet. 

Given that blogging is now so passé that it's due to come around and be ironically trendy again*, that some of us old farts have kept up with blogging all these years means we're either persistent, delusional, stubborn, or a combination of all three. 

Either way, giving a bunch of MMO players --who are used to min-maxing the hell out of everything**-- the opportunity to post for a "celebration" of blogging and potentially win prizes in the form of badges as proof of, oh, I don't know.... "winning at blogging", that's certainly going to bring out some people to post a lot.

Or, if you're like me, refuse to formally participate yet go ahead and post a bunch anyway.***

***

Am I going to post a lot? Mmmmmaybe?

It's still too early to say, because 31 days is a long time, but we'll see. 

#Blaugust2023

*In the same manner as cassette tapes have been. Sure, there were good cassette tapes made, but from a record manufacturer? Oh hell no; you had to make copies off of records yourself onto quality tapes, such as Maxell or TDK, if you wanted a quality cassette made. Ironically enough, the best tapes were made from CDs in that period when CD players were a rarity in cars and you wanted your collection of CDs copied onto tape.

**Or know that everybody else is min-maxing the hell out of everything.

***If you want to call me hipsterish for behaving like that, go for it. I've been like that since before the current hipsters were even born. For example, the summer after my Freshman year of college I spent working at my Dad's office for one of his friends. When the time came for me to leave and go back to university, my Dad's friend wanted to take me out to lunch. I passed, because I didn't really feel like I earned anything special. He tried to convince me otherwise, but I held firm.

Meme Monday: Blogging Memes

Given that the annual blogging event Blaugust* is going to start on Tuesday, I figured that a Meme Monday for Blogging itself is worth a go.

Truth! And I know I don't have
to worry about that one.
From imgflip.

I'd say that 3/4 of the time when I wake
up in the morning I have no idea what
to write about. So, yeah.
From quickmeme.com

Admittedly, I'm not trying to make a living
while blogging. It's more like I blog to
satisfy a need to write, because otherwise I'd
just write fanfic, and.... yeah. Let's not go there.
I know I can't pull that one off.
From wordsalad.com.au.

And finally....

Yes, yes I can. In fact, there are a few
of them on the blog itself. You might
not realize it, but yeah, they're there.
From memesmonkey.com.

*Is there a Trademark on Blaugust? One of these days I ought to find out.

All Hail Glorbo

With AI driving content at places such as Z League's The Portal --go read up on the Glorbo prank here from Ars Technica-- I have been wondering whether you can set one AI against other AIs. 

Bellular News' take on the whole AI thing.

The TL;DR of Glorbo is that The Portal uses AI to scrape Reddit for content, with AI-created articles that push what the AI believes will increase pageviews to The Portal. Several Redditors created a fake World of Warcraft expansion, Glorbo, and began posting about the "expac". Z League's AI picked up on those posts and began flooding The Portal with a lot of "Glorbo" related content. Only afterward did Z League realize their AI's mistake and they had to "correct" all of those posts to identify them as "satire" and then later took down WoW related content.

My thinking is that we could "seed" a second website with AI-generated articles based off of The Portal's content, potentially supplemented by posting AI-generated articles to Reddit, creating a feedback loop where the AI's basically feed off of each other in escalating content craziness.

If someone were to do this with AI generated art, I'm not exactly sure what might come out of it. Given the sameness a lot of the AI art from Midjourney, I suspect the "human" or "humanlike" art will give rise to an AI version of the "Hapsburg chin". 

It's all an interesting exercise, as long as said AI's don't become sentient and turn on us in revenge, I suppose...

Meme Monday: Health Memes

Okay, if you can't laugh at yourself, then I guess you're not me, because we're gonna have some health memes today.

Not Healer memes, but Health memes. 

I just finished the last of my mid-year updates, this time with the diabetes team*, and since they're happy with my progress, I figured I'd celebrate with a few health related memes.

(Yes, it's okay to laugh at them. Permission granted.)

That's one big problem with high blood
pressure: I take my evening's high blood
pressure reading after I've been gaming for
a bit. I'm sure that also colors my opinions
of group content. From Reddit.

I laughed at this, because it is so true!
(At least it's the case for someone my age...)
From imgflip.

On those days when you have low blood
sugar and you have to do something quick,
you kind of do look like a junkie hunting
for munchies. From imgflip.

And this is why you have to pay
attention to source material when
relatives try to be helpful and tell you
"about something about your health problems
I read on the internet." From quickmeme.

And finally, it's not a meme or anything, but I saw this when I was helping my son move into his apartment for grad school:

Yes, doughnuts stuffed with ice cream.
And yes, this is outside the Busken 
Bakery commissary. If the name "Busken"
sounds familiar, it's in the song M.A.G.E. by Nyhm.

*/waves  Hi, Dawn! You know, just in case you happen to be on this obscure little gamer blog on some weirdo corner of the internet.

I Will Gladly Pay You Tuesday...

One thing about WoW Classic Era that I've had to reacquaint myself with is just how poor a new player is in the game. 

Most MMOs don't have this issue. Creating a new toon on LOTRO or SWTOR, for example, will have a person poor, gold-wise, but they're still easily able to afford their training, regular mats, and their mounts. (Yes, even in SWTOR's original form, where you could select the Slicing profession and basically open lockboxes for free credits. #SWTORClassic)

My time spent in Age of Conan had limitations, of course, but most centered around mandatory grouping once you got out of the starter zone.* Other MMOs I've played extensively, such as Guild Wars 2, Elder Scrolls Online, and Wildstar, also don't have gold or monetary issues. Sure, there are other limitations to the games, such as gear or weirdness surrounding the auction house --I'm looking at you, ESO--  but money has never really been a problem.

WoW Classic Era, however, is an entirely different kettle of fish.

My first toon in Vanilla Classic, Azshandra, was so poor that she didn't get enough gold for a riding mount until L47-ish, and then I spent a lot of time fishing for lockboxes to open and sell the contents on the auction house. Before you ask, no, I didn't read "gold making" websites or watch any YouTube videos about it, because I wanted to experience Vanilla Classic without min/maxing my way to a ton of gold. Besides, I don't play video games to make a ton of virtual currency in the same way I don't work irl to amass a horde of cash.**

Progression raiding in Vanilla Classic did me no favors with my gold supply either, as the costs involved keeping Cardwyn raiding --particularly through Vanilla Naxxramas, where the potion/flask requirements for raiding were fairly high-- also kept me gold poor. I frequently found that scouring Azeroth for the mats myself was far more cost effective than being cute and trying to play the auction house as if I was some junior investor for Goldman Sachs. So when the time for TBC Classic --and my corresponding switch to the Shaman Briganaa happened-- I had little gold in reserve to afford mounts for her until well into Outland.***

Fast forward toward the end of TBC Classic and I'd created Cardwyn's clone, Deuce, on Atiesh-US. At first I thought that the ease of which I was able to acquire gold on a brand new toon on a new server had something to do with the knowledge I'd acquired over the years of playing Classic. 

Or maybe it had something to do with the population size. 

However, going back to Classic Era and creating yet another version of Cardwyn has disabused me of either of those beliefs.

Vanilla Classic is simply designed to keep a person poor so they will keep going out in the world.

There, I said it.

***

I mean, it's not a big surprise. The monetary rewards from quests are smaller, the costs associated with class training and everything affiliated with mounts are higher, and the failure rates at professions are also higher, so all of that adds up to a player having to pick and choose what abilities to train and level along the way. 

And if you select a profession such as, oh, Enchanting or Blacksmithing, be prepared to shell out gold**** for enough mats to finish the grind to max profession level. 

Now, there are some ways to generate gold that don't involve begging for gold in Stormwind or Orgrimmar --yes, that is very much a thing-- and they involve leveling a gathering profession. Herbalism and Mining do come in handy, but Fishing does give a player a good bang for the buck in the long run.

I'm sure I'm not giving out any secrets when I say that there's a trick to gaining access to Moonglade at a (relatively) low level if you're not a Druid. Why Moonglade, you may ask? Because the mythical home of the Druids and the Cenarion Circle is also the lowest level area where you can go fish up the Raw Nightfin Snapper. A cook can turn the Snapper into the Nightfin Soup, which is sought after by casters as a raiding buff, which is in demand on the Classic Era auction house. At the present, the Raw Nightfin Snapper is selling for about 6 gold per stack of 10 on the AH, and the Soup commands a higher amount for a stack of 5. You can put two and two together, of course: that's a pretty good gig for steady work. 

The thing is, there's only a few places around Azeroth where you can fish for Nightfin, and there's the issue of having to fish for it between the hours of Midnight and 6 AM Server Time. I mean, it is in the name: Nightfin. By far the lowest level area is in Moonglade, which if you're not a Druid is gated by having to run the gauntlet of tunnels commanded by the hostile Timbermaw Firbolg tribe. While you can eventually build your reputation with them, the Firbolg are all roughly Level 50 enemies, and the entrance to the tunnels is deep in Felwood, a L48-L54 zone, so if you don't want to roll up a Druid you'd either work on leveling a toon or... Get creative.

Besides, you're not old enough for the
shenanigans at Goldshire, Simba. And... Wait.
Why are they talking about Goldshire already?
Shouldn't Simba have "The Talk" first?
From imgflip.

That "get creative" means taking advantage of a glitch in the game where you enter into the low level zone of Darkshore, ride/run/walk all the way to the top of the zone --which abuts Moonglade's zone-- and swim north. Once you get far enough north, you enter into Moonglade's zone, and there you... die.

Seriously.

Once you die, the graveyard you respawn at is Moonglade's graveyard, so if you ask the Spirit Healer to rez you and accept the resurrection sickness debuff, you're smack in Moonglade. Go get the flight point, and you can fly to Moonglade whenever you want to.

Easy peasy.

***

So easy, in fact, it won't surprise you that I never used it.

Ever.

Yes, I drove my questing buddy batty by never taking advantage of this cheat to start fishing Nightfin at a much lower level but instead fished up Oily Blackmouth to sell at a much cheaper price, biding my time until I got to a high enough level to fish up Nightfin at another location.***** This, combined with me disenchanting every magic item in sight severely hampered my ability to accumulate gold for a long time. 

Why not take advantage of the glitch?

Because it's a cheat.

Sure, it's technically in the game, and no, people haven't been banned or anything for it, but to me it's against the spirit of the game in the same way that it's against the spirit of the game to farm mobs in Maraudon or Lower Blackrock Spire or Zul'Gurub for boosting purposes. If a friend asks me to run them through, say, Deadmines, I'm more than happy to. But I would never ask to have it done to any of my toons, and if offered I'm likely to refuse.

It's the same way why I won't go on Heroic Plus Plus dungeon runs, given the current Meta is to simply run past the initial bosses, allowing them to reset. 

I was chatting with my questing buddy the other day, and I saw (via a DBM alert) that she was fighting a boss. A few seconds later there was a "Zarlie has wiped on XXX Boss" announcement.

"Ouch," I responded. "Sorry about that [wipe]."

"It lies," my questing buddy whispered.

"What?"

"DBM. It lies. We ran right through the boss and it reset."

"Oh."

Why do this strat? Because the badges people want --and the loot people want-- only drop off the last boss. There is literally no reason, Meta-wise, to do any of the other bosses and most of the trash, so the bosses and as much of the trash as possible are skipped. 

I mean, at this point why even have the dungeon in place at all if people are simply going to skip to the end?

Impressive Clergyman: "Have you the wing?"
From imgflip.com.

And why do I get the feeling I'd despise Mythic Plus in Retail if it involved a metric buttload of skips and bypasses?

***

Ahem. I digress.

Where was I? Oh yes, about gold in Classic Era.

When you're that starved for gold, you have to be choosy about what abilities to train with when you level up. You start with your primary attack abilities --which for a Frost Mage those are Frostbolt, Frost Nova, Blizzard, and Cone of Cold-- and then select a few other critical abilities to keep current and then let everything else slide. So while the next rank of Conjure Food and Conjure Water may make the cut, Fire Ward and Frost Ward will not. On the original Cardwyn, I reached max level so far behind in a lot of my non-critical spells that I spent my first 120 gold after reaching max level just catching up on a lot of these missing spell ranks. 

This time around, however, I took the gains from my first few Nightfin sales on the Auction House and blew them all on catching up on my spell ranks.

ALL of them.

No, it wasn't ideal by any stretch, but it meant I had a full set of spells to work with. Such as, oh, Mana Shield, which might save my bacon in the Plaguelands. 

It was only after my training was complete and that I was caught up did I save up enough gold for a riding mount. But I haven't stopped there; I realize that I'm going to need enough gold to buy enough mats to finish Tailoring and Enchanting, so my Nightfin activities haven't stopped. If I want an epic mount it's going to take a lot more fishing than what I've accomplished so far, so I'm not in any hurry to get there. 

Maybe there's a purple kitty grind in my future, but I've already done that once. Not exactly the most fun thing in the world, if you ask me. But it is something that can't be skipped, so there is that at least.

*The starter zone, Tortage, is still probably one of the best starter zones I've ever encountered in an MMO. I suppose that the reversion to a "traditional" MMO once you leave that starter zone --not to mention the bugs-- was a huge part of the "bait and switch" impression I and a lot of other people felt the game gave to players.

**This is a US-specific issue, because most of my relatives died with barely a penny to their name. As their health declined, the federal government would only step in and support their stay at a nursing home or a hospice for their final months after they had depleted all of their savings. And the US healthcare system is perfectly happy to oblige in racking up fees and charges. Many of my relatives had a decent nest egg upon retirement, so watching all of their savings being sucked dry by a medical community that is at times part savior and part leech was disheartening to say the least. If nothing else, the lesson I learned from it is that if you die, make it quick so that the healthcare companies can't gain access to all of your money. 

***Trying to level fast meant bypassing extra quests and other activities --such as fishing or picking herbs-- that I could use to supplement Brig's income. When Brig crossed the Dark Portal, I had a total of 80 gold spread across all of my toons. Thank goodness for the Ghost Wolf form that a Shaman has, which allowed me to delay paying for a mount for quite a while.

****That's in addition to never selling any magic items ever again. You're always either keeping them to use, holding onto them to use later, or disenchanting them for mats to use for Enchanting. It's a grind that any Enchanter has to pay eventually, and in the case of the original Cardwyn I paid it later, after I reached L60. Going back and running low level instances just to get magic items to disenchant wasn't exactly a lot of fun, but at least I got to level weapon skills along the way.

*****There's a location in Feralas that worked, so Card needed to only reach the mid-L40s to safely fish there.

EtA: I corrected the grammar before posting but forgot to remove the "in". Oopsie.