It may surprise you, but I don't actually subscribe to WoW.
Yes, I'm aware that I could save a few dollars by subscribing for 3 or 6 month intervals, but because I buy 60 days' worth of game time every couple of months, it forces me to evaluate as to whether I'm having enough fun in-game to continue paying for it. In my experience, when I subscribe it takes more effort to actually decide to discontinue a subscription than actually keep subscribing, so by reversing the process and making it more effort to continue playing the onus is put on Blizzard to create a better experience.
It also means that I actually engage with the cash shop on a regular basis, so I can see exactly just what Blizz is up to.
Such as this little surprise when I bought 60 days' worth of game time yesterday:
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot...
Do you see it?
In addition to the Retail character boost and the Cataclysm Classic Blazing Heroic Pack, there another little addition to the cash shop: a Level 80 Character Boost for Wrath Classic.
You can now bypass the entire leveling process in Wrath Classic and go straight to Endgame.
Of course, that also means you're effectively paying for gold as well, given that you can go back and do all of the Northrend quests and just get gold as a reward instead.
Yeah, right. Graphic from The Simpsons, and the Comic Sans courtesy of MS Paint.
I wasn't planning on getting into the Season of Discovery servers when they opened.
If nothing else, I learned that my favorite Mage names --Cardwyn and Nevelanthana-- are never taken by someone else, so I shouldn't have to rush to get a toon created. I could create something different, I suppose, but for me playing a Mage is second nature*, so I knew I was going to go in that direction.
But the lure of playing is strong**, so...
Oh.
Okay, that's not too bad. I mean, I did choose the RP server, which was "High" and not "Full" like most of the other servers...
???
What is this, Gorak's Guide come to life?
This went on for over 1/2 hour, where I lost track of time. (I told my questing buddy last night it was 1/2 hour, but honestly that's the absolute minimum time I could think of. It might have been closer to an hour for all I know.)
It looked worse when I started running around.
I see that people go naked even in the starting area. Oh well.
I quickly realized I wasn't getting anything done in the starting zones, so I decided to go collect a few flight points.
I did make a short stop in Goldshire, since Lava Lash is an RP server, and I was curious as to whether there was a crowd at the Lion's Pride Inn already. (Narrator: There wasn't.) So I set my Hearthstone to the Inn and took off for Stormwind.
While I don't have any screenshots of Stormwind, it was as you expect it would be: empty.
It was then that I got it into my head to go to Ironforge and from there....
Well, it isn't a Hardcore server, so why not see how far I could get to Menethil Harbor?
While I ran through Dun Morogh, people were discussing the merits of leveling in Teldrassil versus Elwynn Forest.
"Northshire is an absolute nuthouse," I commented. "I figured I'd rather visit Darnassus right now."
"Yeah," a Gnome added. "At our size, all those Night Elves look hawt."
Oookay...
I mean, I'm not going to dispute that, since I've not played a Gnome before, but it's not like we've not seen Night Elves before.
My major contribution to the Gen Chat discussion was something much more mundane:
"LFM Ulduar"
"Ha"
"lol"
"wrong server"
***
I made a wrong turn in Dun Morogh and ended up taking the North Pass by mistake, so when I left the Pass I had to turn south to reach Thelsamar.
"Ding!" Okay, that was a bit late, but you get the idea.
I was chased by spiders part of the way to the town, but I made it there before I died.
As you can see by the screenshot, there were far fewer people in Loch Modan than anywhere else that I'd been. That was not the same I could say about the Wetlands, which contained my goal of reaching Menethil Harbor:
Druids. LOTS of Druids.
Alas, the pass through Dun Algaz was not very safe for lone travelers.
Shortly after I took that screenshot, I left another stretch of the pass only to get killed by Dragonmaw Orcs, who were camping in the hills above the path I was on.
It was then that I discovered that my graveyard I released to was waaaay back at Thelsamar, in Loch Modan.
I thought of having to run all the way back just to respawn and decided that discretion was the better part of valor, so I just hearthed back to Goldshire and logged from the Season of Discovery servers for the day.
Maybe I'll give it a try sometime later, when I put a few levels on me and have some silver to cover my repair bills.
*I want to give a shout-out to Vidyala, of the late blogs Pugging Pally and Manalicious, and the webcomic From Draenor with Love for being the person who taught me how to play a Mage in WoW. I don't think she even realized she did that until I mentioned it to her years later.
**I know: "If if's and but's were candy and nuts we'd all have a happy birthday." That's the G rated version of that saying, and no, I'm not going to put up the PG-13 version.
It's kind of weird, really, that the Steam Autumn Sale came and went and... I just kind of shrugged.
Oh, plenty of games were on sale, and quite a few in my wishlist, but I just wasn't interested in buying anything. I mean, that's good for my bottom line (particularly given just how many car repairs I've had to make this past year), but when push came to shove, I just didn't want to buy anything.
Yes, I did have Baldur's Gate 3 on my wishlist, but a) it wasn't on sale, and b) I just don't have the time to devote to playing it. Even if I gave up playing MMOs and all other video games to play BG3, I just don't have the hours in a day to play the game to the extent I want to.
There's also the matter of me wanting to go back and finish BG1 and BG2 once more before delving into BG3, just for continuity's sake.
Yes, I am that sort of player. I mean, you do read the blog, don't you?
***
Some months ago I stumbled on an old Blizzard gift card the kids gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago, and given that Blizz was running one of their sales at the time, I used said gift card to buy Diablo II Remastered. I figured why not? I was essentially getting the game for free, so it made sense to try the game that people still say was the best in the Diablo series out before delving into Diablo 3 and Diablo 4.
So.... Does that count as a new game purchase, despite the gift card itself being at least 2 years old?
Eh, whatever.
Now that I think about it, that's the exact same reaction I had when I played it for 4 hours some weeks ago.
Your character is your character, just like if you were playing Gauntlet back at the video game arcade*
"Warrior needs food badly!" From the WMS Gaming channel on YouTube.
And if you don't like your character's appearance, well... That's tough luck.
Believe it or not, there's a screenshot there.
Hmm... Now that I think about it, from what I can tell there's not much more story here than what was in that old Gauntlet game back in the day.
Or The Bard's Tale, for that matter.
Back when the name Electronic Arts meant something good. Yes, kids, that actually was a thing: EA being a good company.
I did discover that if you died in D2, you lost all your gear and you have to run back to get it. Which can suck.
But in the end, there's really not a lot of "there" there. Run around, kill things, take their loot, use it. Rinse and repeat.
So.... Gauntlet, anybody?
*Boy do those two things take a body back to the 1980s!
For those not in the know, the term Black Friday doesn't have anything to do with a stock market crash or even a reference to the Supernatural, but rather is about finance.
(Really!)
Black Friday refers to the first shopping day in of the US Christmas season --between the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays-- as the day when a lot of retail stores sell enough that they turned their balance sheets from losing money (aka "being in the red") to making money (aka "being in the black"). No more, and no less.
Of course, the chaos that tends to show up on social media regarding customers behaving badly is, sadly, not too far off the truth of things. Having a spouse who works in retail, I'm familiar with stories of people who are assholes during Black Friday.
That being said, I can't help but post a few memes on this somewhat bizarre shopping holiday...
Leave it to the Star Wars prequels to put a bow on this. From Imgflip.
Warhammer being in the thick of Black Friday is oddly appropriate. From Reddit.
A WoW friend works at Walmart. I might want to share this with her for her thoughts. From Pinterest.
I had a good laugh at this with some of my WoW friends last night, until one of them pointed out that this wouldn't work in the South, as they'd just shoot the "bear" and stick their head on a wall. From Pinterest.
I've already got the turkey thawing in the fridge this time, so I won't spend very early in the morning on Thanksgiving with a frozen turkey in a sink filled with cold water, thawing it.
Will wonders ever cease?
Without further ado, here's this year's Thanksgiving memes!
That's... an interesting turkey you've got there, gang... From Pinterest.
Urg. Yeah, I've been there. Not since my hospital stay, however. From Askideas.com.
For all my Star Wars fans. From deavita.
At least I don't have to deal with this. (Any more.) From hercampus.com.
"if you're looking for Classic Plus, it ain't happening. when you clear Naxx in Era, that's it."
"nothing here will roll into anything else"
"but I want a boost and can pay"
"you could just play the game"
***
I was reminded of that chat from a few months ago (heavily edited to remove the call outs for WTB/WTS stuff) when I saw this shortly after Blizzcon's announcements:
And the other day, while waiting for my questing buddy to arrive for a Scholomance dungeon run, the tank said "Hey, are you seeing this?"
I looked up from typing away on my Great American Novel* to see toons appearing at the entrance to the instance and popping in.
Lots and lots of toons. With weird names that didn't quite make any sense.
"Looks like bots and boosts," I said.
"Yeah."
"Like right out of TBC Classic. I've seen videos of stuff like this." I was a fountain of deep insight, I tell you.
"That's crazy."
I couldn't disagree with this assessment. I'm very much a 'diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks' kind of person, but such an obvious attempt to bypass most of the game irritated me to no end.
It reminded me of something I once read, that Fines due to breaking the law are only a deterrent for poor people; for rich people they are just a fee for doing whatever they want to do.
Is a rich person concerned about a $500 fine for violating a curfew law or a noise ordinance? No, they'll just pay the fine and keep right on doing it.
Think of Steve Jobs and the loophole he exploited to never have to put a license plate on one of his cars, and you get the idea.**
***
This brings me around to the whales that some gaming companies chase after with those boosts and cash shops.
There's that infamous video posted about how to chase after whales by monetizing things in video games, but I'm thinking of the side effects of those whales.
It's like chasing after that one big business deal for a small company. Or a community getting a new factory (or Amazon facility). Or the government building a military base nearby. You get this sudden windfall that boosts your bottom line, and you become addicted to it. But you also become dependent upon it.
One of my ex-bosses used to say that he'd prefer to land a thousand small deals than two or three big deals. Sure, the big deals looked impressive, but those deals come with outsized demands. And if you lost one of those big deals, the impact on the company is far greater than if you lose one of the small deals.
There are also other, unforeseen side effects. Such as the one that Dan Olson mentions in his (relatively) short video about what happened at the Darkmoon Faire at the 2023 BlizzCon:
The TL;DR is that there were several poor decisions that, when combined with the underestimation of whales doing, well, whale things, caused the gigantic wait times to get into the Faire portion of BlizzCon.
***
Was there any real point to this post other than free association? Not really. It just seems to me that the business model for a lot of video games is based on the same model that a lot of communities use in chasing after that big automotive factory or gambling casino***, hoping the influx of cash will solve all of their problems. The reality, however, is that there may be an influx of cash, but also an influx of potentially devastating side effects.
Is the lure of all that money worth it in the end?
*That was sarcasm. I don't write that much angst to ever consider any of my mediocre scribblings anything other than just something for fun.
**Although as ITWire's David Heath was quoted in the article, "One might also assume that the leasing company was happy -- they had an endless supply of luxury cars to on-sell with the previous driver being none other than Steve Jobs," I would personally never buy such a car. There's absolutely no telling as to how that car was treated if the driver knew he was going to trade it for another in less than six months. That's a big reason why buying used rental cars aren't considered a good idea, and having driven my share of rentals over the past six years taking my kids back and forth from college, I have to agree. Some people simply look at a rental (or a lease to a lesser extent) as an excuse to treat a vehicle poorly.
***Probably closer to a gambling casino than the factory, to be honest.
Okay, that little thing about curiosity... Well, at least I'm not a cat.*
I was curious about whether people would abandon Blizzard's official WoW Classic servers when Cataclysm Classic comes out, and that led to an even more basic question: are there any Cataclysm private servers out there?
Uh... I have no idea.
In the interest of answering that question, I decided to turn to search engines to find out the answer.
That led me to dkpminus.com**, which actually has listings of private servers from all sorts of expansions from World of Warcraft.
Yes, even Shadowlands.
The homepage as of 16-Nov-2023.
The site claims that they keep it up to date, but obviously someone who spins up their own private server for themselves and their friends won't likely be represented here. Still, it does give you some idea as to what might be going on in the private server community.
What I'm going to do is provide a quick chart as to the numbers of WoW servers per expansion. Obviously I'm reliant upon what dkpminus.com provides, and not all private servers are alike in terms of faithfulness to the original content, but hey, it'll give you an idea as to where the popularity resides.
Okay, here's the WoW private servers per expansion as of November 16, 2023:
You'll probably want to click on the graphic to expand it.
The "Promoted" servers don't show numbers on the lists, so I've kept them separate. Also, some sites have multiple servers and are counted individually. For example, among the several Warmane servers there's Warmane - Lordaeron (PvP - Blizzlike) and Warmane - Blackrock (PvP - Custom Style) in the Wrath listings, so each Warmane server is counted separately.
If you click on a server name, you get more details:
Warmane - Icecrown is the most populated server in the Wrath listings.
...and the Classic Plus server that people tend to mention the most, Turtle WoW.
***
I was actually surprised that there was a single Warlords of Draenor server out there, although it's very sparsely populated.***
But one thing I also found interesting were the people who frequent that (relatively) large RP-PvE Shadowlands server. I guess Shadowlands has its fans after all, albeit from the RP community.
A lot of the private servers are PvP oriented, so if you're not into that... Oh well.
While perusing the comments section, I see that the private servers are very much a "play at your own risk" environment. There are numerous complaints of misbehavior and bots throughout, and on some listings the occasional positive comment can feel like it was planted there by that server's team.
So...
My question as to whether there even are Cataclysm private servers has been answered. The Wrath private servers are by far the largest contingent, but Cataclysm is represented.
*Hey Wilhelm, did you know that if you put "you know what they say about curiosity telestra" into Google search, that one of your graphics is the third one that appears in the "Images" tab?
**As in "THAT'S A FUCKING 50 DKP MINUS!!!!" from the infamous Onyxia Wipe Animation video from back in the day, detailing a raid leader's meltdown on an Onyxia wipe. The original was removed by YouTube for graphic or violent content, so I found the original here on Rumble.
***I guess those people are hanging out in their garrisons.
