If you post coffee memes, beware: your readership will explode.
Given that there's literally hundreds of coffee memes out there, why on earth I got a sudden explosion in views on PC when I posted a few of my favorites is beyond me. It's not like they're that new, either, but oh well.
I'm not above using one of the ones that missed the cut for a few extra pageviews. What I find disturbing is how close the 'After' picture looks like David Tennant. From Laugh Lore.
***
Under the header of 'video games getting a board game treatment', there's a beloved Bioware franchise that has a boardgame in the works:
This landed in my Inbox on Monday from Modiphius.
Yes, Modiphius is going to publish Mass Effect: The Board Game, a cooperative and story-driven boardgame designed by Eric M. Lang and Calvin Wong Tze Loon for 1-4 players. It sounds interesting at first blush, and given how Modiphius tends to have high quality plastic pieces in their games, this ought to look pretty too. Here's the signup page for more info and to receive emails about the release of the game itself. Just make sure you fill out the correct info for US vs UK/Europe so you end up with the correct website.
***
You know, the Dracthyr race in Retail World of Warcraft has taken some lumps for it's decidedly un-dragonkin-like look.
From Wowpedia.
I was perusing some RPG sites the other day, and I came across some artwork from RuneQuest that made me go "hmmm..."
Look vaguely familiar? Found on Glorantha Bestiary, Pages 36-37. Verified with my copy. Also found here at Artstation.
These are Dragonewts, as drawn by Cory Trego-Erdner back in 2016-2017, for the RuneQuest Glorantha Bestiary.
In RuneQuest, Dragonewts claim to be the oldest sentient species and are one of the races found in the main starting area in RuneQuest, Dragon Pass. Now admittedly there's only so much an artist can do with the basic dragon design, but the reason why I don't mind the look of the Dracthyr is that they do evoke a similar look as that found in RuneQuest. The lore is obviously very distinct, but given that nobody seems to bitch about the lore of Dracthyr so much as that they don't look "cool enough", that's my two cents on the matter.
***
Finally, I wanted to mention a long departed podcast that really sucked me into RPGs back in the day.
Before "modern times" and the proliferation of podcasts in their current monetized form, Chuck Tinsley and Lonnie Ezell created the Dragons Landing Inn podcast back in 2005. They kept it going for about 126-130 episodes, and then Steve and Rob kind of picked up the mantle for a dozen episodes or so in a relatively unmoderated format until the podcast faded away. When I asked my brother-in-law what good RPG and gaming podcasts were out there, he said without hesitation "Dragons Landing Inn".
I've tried to find a better version of their graphic to no avail.
With the tagline "Gaming Goodness", Chuck and Lonnie would espouse on RPGs, whatever the news was in RPG space, and eventually would broach RPG specific topics on running a campaign and having a rules set fit the type of campaign you wanted to play. Although the news is quite dated --it began in a time before D&D 4e and Pathfinder existed-- the old podcasts are still available via the Internet Archive at this link. I don't believe they're complete, as the original podcasts start at Episode 27, so you'll have to search the Internet Archive for individual episodes to complete the entire run of DLI.
I still have my old downloads of DLI on my desktop. I've dutifully backed up and transferred them over the almost two decades that they came out, and have no intention of ever deleting them. Given how podcasting has evolved as a format since DLI's heyday, it's refreshing to find a podcast in a raw, unmonetized state (and low bit-rate) still providing entertainment.
Of course, that question is predicated on a lot of assumptions, such as "Why do people play the game?" and "What do the developers believe the players want?"
A college acquaintance had the LP and insisted I listen to it (among other LPs of his.) I'll admit I listened to part of it.
Although it wasn't a Legendary item in and of itself, my first experience with an item that "everybody" seemed to want actually predated MMOs and video games by years: the +5 Holy Avenger from AD&D.
Among players of 1e AD&D, the +5 Holy Avenger was the ultimate weapon in the hands of a Paladin, at the time one of the hardest classes to roll for --and play-- in AD&D. Sticking to the straight and narrow of Lawful Good --in TSR's original Deities and Demigods sourcebook, Galahad was considered a 20th Level Paladin and Lancelot a former Paladin and now merely a 20th Level Fighter-- meant that you couldn't really participate in anything resembling a heist adventure. Or really, depending on how strict your DM was, anything that involved stealth. You were very much the stereotypical Knight riding up to the cave mouth to challenge the Red Dragon inside.
The Paladin's quest* for a Holy Avenger, either the sword itself or something earth shaking enough to warrant the sword as a reward, was one of the high points of an AD&D campaign. The adventure Fedifensor in Dragon Magazine #67 --reproduced here on Wizards' website in PDF form**-- was notable in that it was one of the first published adventures featuring a Holy Avenger (Fedifensor) as well as the first adventure featuring Gith (Githyanki in this case) as the baddies who stumbled upon the sword in the Astral Plane.
The first page of the Fedifensor scenario by Allen Rogers, from Dragon Magazine #67 Page 37. (November 1982)
Still, despite the (supposed) rarity of a +5 Holy Avenger, it wasn't nearly as rare as the Artifact/Relic section in AD&D. Those were one-of-a-kind items that had boatloads of special powers but equally risky side-effects. The Hand and the Eye of Vecna --back in the day when Vecna was merely a powerful Lich who was supposedly dead-- were two artifacts whose first side effect upon grafting them to your body was to turn you immediately Neutral Evil. And the problems only got worse from there. Artifacts and Relics were nothing to be trifled with, even among mortals.*** By contrast, the Deck of Many Things was just a rare Miscellaneous Magic item, not a Relic of considerable power by itself that merited an entire D&D supplement.
Having the ultimate item in an RPG adventure has persisted through the years --what Witch or Wizard wouldn't want the Elder Wand, for example-- and so I suppose it's only natural to covet what is best. But if everybody has one, is it really something to covet versus just something to just acquire as part of the normal progression of things?
And what are game designers to do with game balance when accommodating an item of legendary power?
***
MMOs have a particular problem with this design, because the persistence of the game world and the constant addition of new content mean that what is currently game breaking may be no better than a basic quest reward a few years later. Or, worse, due to game design, that game breaking item might actually be worse than a basic quest reward.
Yes, I'm bringing out the old Nerfnow.com comic again for this post.
This was a particular problem in Vanilla Classic WoW, where it turns out that some quest rewards or dungeon gear drops were better for your class and spec than the raid specific "Tier" gear. For example, while the Mage's Tier 0 or Tier 1 set might look pretty, a variety of crafted gear and dungeon drops were better for Mages overall. This had its drawbacks, as the three piece Bloodvine set had no Stamina bonuses which meant a Mage or Warlock wearing it was extra squishy in a fight****, but there was no denying the superiority of the damage potential for that set.
However, there were two items that it seemed everybody coveted: the legendary items Thunderfury and Atiesh.
This meme is so old hat that you can now get it on a t-shirt. Yes, really. From Redbubble.
Thunderfury looked awesome, but Atiesh, not so much. It looked like a sulphur ball set atop a cane unless you looked closely.
I was not impressed. From Wowhead.
Still, there was the general perception that since the work involved to get either item was involved --and in the case of Atiesh it came in the Naxxramas raid, which very few raid teams back in the day completed-- only a few people ever got either item. Even in Classic WoW, guilds usually designated a few select people to be those to work on either questline.
Between that scarcity and the potential for guild drama, both items were rarely found in WoW.
I'm not sure where things changed, but gradually the desire for an item of legendary rarity became normalized to the point where access to such legendary items became easier to obtain.
When I started playing WoW back in 2009, I became aware of legendary items as a "well, unless you raid and you're of the right class and status within a guild, you're not going to get one" sort of item. However, by the time I reached max level the "Fall of the Lich King" patch was released. Yes, everybody remembers the Icecrown Citadel raid, but I remember the decidedly unsexy Patch 3.3 name for two items: Shadowmourne and Quel'Delar.
That first item, Shadowmourne, is the two-handed legendary axe that people could obtain after completing quests in Icecrown Citadel. I can't speak of the scarcity of Shadowmourne, but one of the last things to do before completing the questline and obtaining Shadowmourne was to actually kill Arthas, the Lich King. Given that took a while for a lot of guilds, and I've mentioned numerous times how smashing your head against ICC for months on end ruined guilds (including mine), I can't imagine a lot of people obtained a Shadowmourne in original Wrath.
Quel'Delar, on the other hand, was more obtainable although still a bit of a rarity.
***
While not a legendary item per se, in order to obtain Quel'Delar you had to complete a questline once you obtained the ol' Battered Hilt, which was a rare drop in the Heroic ICC 5-person instances.
Although the Wowhead entry for the Battered Hilt mentions a 1-2% drop rate, due to a bug in Patch 3.3 the initial drop rate was a bit higher, and a ton of Battered Hilts dropped before Blizz fixed the bug. I wasn't high enough, gear wise, to get into the instances where the Hilt dropped before the fix, so I had to wait for said Hilt to drop at the "proper" drop rate.
And wait.
From Wowhead.
And wait.
After several months of only seeing exactly one Battered Hilt drop (and losing that roll), I finally got tired of waiting and scraped together the 5000 gold necessary to buy one off the Auction House. It took me a month of steady dungeon running and selling ore to do so; I was going to buy Epic Flying then, but... To me, the questline was very epic, and since my Paladin Quintalan was a Blood Elf it fit perfectly into my race's lore.
Yes, I'm pulling out this old screencap from Eversong as proof.
***
Judging by how the game has progressed since December 2009, it seems that while Quel'Delar wasn't a legendary item in the same vein as Shadowmourne, Quel'Delar was enough of a success that it seems that Blizzard decided to move more in the direction of using the sword as a model for how to handle legendary items in WoW.
And with that has come a sense of entitlement from some MMO players that I find both confusing and off-putting.
If a legendary item is supposed to be rare and difficult to obtain, why does it seem that a lot of players expect to obtain one over the course of an expansion?
Perhaps Blizzard is at fault for this sort of behavior, because a lot of their modus operandi in WoW's design is "Awesome players doing awesome things", and what isn't more awesome than having a legendary weapon?
Well, the funny thing is, if Blizzard designs its systems around teams having one or more legendary items, if you don't have one you suddenly feel like you're behind the curve.
This really just covers commentary around
this phenomenon, so you don't have to read it.
This isn't just a Retail WoW phenomenon, because Classic WoW is infested with it too. Just look at all the people who lusted after Thunderfury or Atiesh or Shadowmourne and went back to Classic WoW just to get that. Or their Scarab Lord title and associated mount.
From Reddit. (And SpongeBob Squarepants.)
***
I guess the ultimate question is "Why should we care about motivations when playing an MMO?"
Well, ordinarily I'd be saying that it doesn't matter what others want to do, what you do matters, but when the game design focuses around certain game behaviors, it does matter.
Think about the Legion expansion and the Artifact Weapon:
Yep. Another blast from the past.
The concept of everybody getting an Artifact Weapon didn't appear out of nowhere. If you're going to be an awesome player doing awesome things, what better way to combat the (then) ultimate power in the WoW-verse than for everybody to have their own Ashbringer (or equivalent)? It was the desire for a Legendary item for everybody baked into an entire expansion. While that fed the desire for a legendary item, it also introduced the so-called Borrowed Power systems into Retail WoW, which had a huge impact on the game's enjoyment and understanding.
Good luck trying to explain Borrowed Power to a new player, for instance.
From Reddit.
So... What now?
Hell, I don't know. I'm just gonna do my own thing, but I worry about whether the player base in general --and Micro-Blizzard# in general-- aren't repeating old mistakes with each new expansion. Why would I think that?
Oh, no reason...
*Yes, Paladins would call them quests back then, denoting their outsized importance to the Paladin. Nowadays, people just call any task a "quest" of some sort, but back then a quest was very much in the realm of "rescue the maiden from the Evil Big Bad" sort of thing. No Kill Ten Rats here.
**I saved a copy locally on my PC just in case Wizards ever yanks the adventure, so I can upload it for future use.
***And yes, in the era of Elves living 4000 years, they were considered mortal.
****I was once in a Blackwing Lair Raid while wearing my Bloodvine set, and I kept dying during a specific set of trash pulls. A healer whispered an apology to me, saying that she'd keep throwing heals on me but I'd die before they landed. I told her I wasn't angry or anything because the Bloodvine set, while powerful for damage, meant I had absolutely no extra health to me at all. She was much relieved that I wasn't one of those asshole Mages who demanded that healers TRY HARDER for something out of their control.
While tea has it's afternoon slot, particularly within British culture, coffee is first and foremost a morning ritual. Bowing to our caffeine overlords is a rite of passage in both school and work*, so in honor of coffee's importance in American culture, here's a few coffee memes...
When people ask how are you feeling in that meeting at 7 AM... From sheideas.
Self-explanatory. From dump-a-day.
I also drink coffee on the weekend when I have to get up early for some project. From Voltage Coffee.
If a woman told me that, my curiosity would know no bounds. Alas, my wife only drinks tea. From Ruin My Week.
And one bonus meme:
I knew a guy my Freshman year of college who drank coffee and took No-Doz to stay awake studying for a test the next day. He looked a bit like this the next morning. From Remote Tools.
*True story: when I was in high school, one of the people campaigning for Student Body President ran on the platform of having coffee introduced into the cafeteria. He was laughed at back then --it was the 80s, after all-- but now? In the era of a Starbucks on every corner, he'd likely win the election on a platform like that.
I was commenting on Shintar's latest WoW Classic Season of Discovery post when her reply gave me some food for thought:
She's right; I haven't been talking very much about what I'm up to, game-wise. Especially compared to the first four or five years' worth of this blog --or even the first three years' worth of WoW Classic-- I've gone mostly silent on my actual video game activity.
Well, I can answer the question "What have I been up to?" pretty succinctly: not much.
Seriously.
This is my spot.
Ever since WoW Classic's Season of Discovery dropped, a lot of people have abandoned WoW Classic Era and jumped on the SoD bandwagon. The resulting emptiness in Classic Era, while not nearly as bad as it was when Burning Crusade Classic came out, is very noticeable. And it suits me just fine.
I suppose I could level an alt or try to get into a raid or something, but I've found myself not really interested in doing that. Over the past few months one of my Classic Era friend group pulled me into a Molten Core raid, but that experience was soured by that raid's leadership giving a piece of tank gear my friend could have used to a spellcaster alt of one of the raid team's guildies, in explicit violation of the gear distribution rules.
Main Spec over Off-Spec my ass.
Several people in the friend group have joined other raids and raid teams, and some even go into AQ40 and Naxxramas (the last two raids of Classic Era), but I've just not been that interested in doing so. My Questing Buddy does want to join some raids, but her raiding requirement is in the evening on Pacific Time (US West Coast), which most raids in the server cluster don't do. There is one guild that does, however, and she briefly joined that guild only to discover she was unceremoniously benched to make way for another guildie to attend. No apologies or anything, just a "you're benched" from that guild's raid team right before the raid was to start. It'd be one thing if they said that she was being benched for another Hunter, but they instead brought an 8th (or something) Warrior instead to Zul'Gurub, a 20 person raid, where you want Hunters to do certain pulls or be damage soakers or whatnot.
So yeah, I'm not interested in any of that petty bullshit.
With the dearth of people in Classic Era, it's also been difficult to get into any Alterac Valley Battlegrounds, as most of the Horde players are (you guessed it) in Season of Discovery.
I do help out my friends by running their low level alts through instances or questing, or if they need a body for a dungeon run, so there is that, I guess.
However, for the most part I just stand around in Darnassus, doing random buffs to people who run by, and providing portals to people who need it.
***
What about Season of Discovery?
Well, I was happy to move at my own pace, and explore just for exploring, and I'd even created a Horde Mage just to play with my Questing Buddy who'd never played Horde before. I honestly had a good time watching Barrens Chat* and figuring out where all the quests were out there.** Hell, I even got into a Ragefire Chasm group or two, which I hadn't done on the Horde side since... 2010?
I got said Mage up to L22 or so before Season of Discovery's Phase 2 dropped, but my interest in SoD evaporated when Blizzard decided to provide all sorts of information about the upcoming Phase and then stuck Phase 2 in the Public Test Realm before release, which kind of defeats the entire purpose of, you know, discovering things. Some websites have at least paid lip service to the concept of letting people discover things on their own, but once Phase 2 dropped my YouTube Main Page was overwhelmed with "Here's Everything You Need to Do in SoD Phase 2" videos.
When I did login after Phase 2 dropped, I found that Blizz had added a 50% XP buff to push people into the new content more quickly. I figured that in order to delete it I'd have to do what I did with that Joyous Journeys buff and talk to an innkeeper, but since Blizz couldn't stay with the actual theme of Season of Discovery and instead turned Phase 2 into a "normal" mini-expansion, I abandoned Season of Discovery.***
***
I've logged into other MMOs, such as Elder Scrolls Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic, but...
Let me put it this way: I've logged in, started a character (or logged into an existing one) and... I just kind of hung around, doing nothing. Just watching people run here and there.
And then I log off.
Yes, I've played a bit of the original Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 3, but... I've reached a certain point in both games where I'm fine with where I'm at. I don't feel like pushing very hard, and I don't feel like starting over. In BG3 I know what I need to do to keep moving forward, but... that requires me bashing my head against a virtual wall for a while until I figure out how a clever way of solving a few quests. Despite a lot of temptation out there in the form of guides and whatnot, I want to figure the game out for myself, without any help.
I'm not saying I don't believe you, but I've played my share of CRPGs over the years, and I've learned to never trust people who say that. (No spoilers, thankyouverymuch...)
***
What have I been doing?
Work, I guess.
I'm up to my eyeballs in work, and even though my hours are still roughly 40-ish hours per week, the timing of that work is impacting my down time. For example, I've had a meeting scheduled for very very early morning, and that same meeting has been delayed several times. The problem is not only that I have to go to bed very early to make this early morning call, the delays usually come in when I'm asleep, so I wake up for the meeting only to discover the meeting had been delayed. Again and again and again. So I've not been on much in the evenings because I've got to get to bed.
While I wrote this post, I set up the timer on my coffee machine because I don't want to follow that 10th voice and sleep in. From Grab Your Coffee Facebook group.
When I'm not doing work, I'm running to and fro for various family obligations and whatnot. I haven't had this many family obligations to go to since more than one of the kids were back in high school, and I can't really explain why.
I would say that I need a vacation, but every time I think of taking a couple of days off from work, more stuff comes in --both personal and work-- that kind of have to get done. If I took time off from work, the extra work would still be there (and I'd already be behind in getting it done) and the personal stuff would have had to be finished while I was "on vacation".
While I'd like to say that I'm overworked, I'm not. My Questing Buddy's husband is really slammed at his job right now, which is why I don't complain about my work. I guess there's nothing really exciting me right now, and that is reflected in my lack of video game activity.
***
Okay, I do have to set one thing straight: even if I were busily playing video games, I'm not so sure I'd even bother to post about it anyway.
Remember how I've said (numerous times) that I'm a private person and don't open up much? Well, I've been in one of those moods over the past several months where I'm just not interested in opening up, period. Sure, there's the blog and all, but beyond that I'm just not into talking about my activities. I push myself to posting about such things because it feels like I ought to be at least a bit social, but I also know that posting about what I'm playing doesn't generate much interest compared to other topics.**** It's kind of funny how a blog is social media, but when I post about social things, those posts are very often the least read on the blog.
So... If I'm not enjoying writing those posts, and people aren't reading them, why should I force myself to do it?
Good ol' Arsenio Hall. This was probably what, 1987 or so? My freshman year roommate and I used to watch his show and then turn on Late Night With David Letterman. From imgflip.com.
I'll probably post about my goings on from time to time, but not nearly as much as I used to. I'd rather talk about other things than making the blog about me, honestly.
*Except for one evening where some people decided to talk politics and the Middle East, and let's say it did not end well.
**In case you're wondering, by the time a Blood Elf character is finished with the two Blood Elf specific starting areas --Eversong Woods and The Ghostlands-- said character is about L20-L22 already and can pretty much skip The Barrens entirely. So the WoW Classic version of Neve never quested in The Barrens at all, but instead went straight to the next zones after them.
***I will give Blizz some kudos for banning GDKP raids/groups on Season of Discovery servers, which for the uninitiated are raids in which people bid for gear that drop off of bosses with in-game gold. And yes, the GDKP raids are the big reason why gold farmers and (technically illegal) gold selling goes on in WoW Classic servers. But if you ask me, I doubt Blizz will stick to their guns for very long. I mean, just look at how quickly they abandoned the "discovery" portion of Season of Discovery.
****My first post about my hospital stay notwithstanding.
I'd been considering a few other subjects for Meme Monday, but for some reason I kept running into memes concerning min-maxers. Of course, min-maxing isn't a recent phenomenon --just look at the strategy discussion surrounding chess, for example-- and even in real life people will use what is "best" to get a leg up on the competition.
My decision to make this Meme Monday about min-maxing was solidified when an acquaintance asked in chat the other day what 'parsing' is. Yeah, about that...
This is why players will do all the things in an MMO, even when they were put in the game to provide something to do for everyone. From ifunny.co.
Video games aren't the sole domain of min-maxers. There's a ton of memes in pencil-and-paper RPG about min-maxers too. From Reddit's dndmemes.
Sometimes, you have to admire how some min-maxers think outside the box. From Reddit's dndmemes and Ghastfighter392.
In the years that I've been blogging here, I've watched this medium's popularity peak and decline.
To be fair, in 2009 blogging had likely already peaked, but in MMO space we were still riding the high point of the MMO wave with WoW's Wrath of the Lich King and the impending release of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Parallel Context was just one of many MMO (and WoW specifically) oriented blogs out there; if you went to any of the big MMO sites back then, it certainly seemed like there were a lot of people starting up or maintaining blogs. I guess it feels kind of weird when I sit back in 2024 and realize that PC is a survivor.
Blogging is, at it's heart, a solitary kind of experience. When you write, you don't get much in the way of feedback until you actually post.* After a while, that can get kind of old. Here we are, blogging about a genre that is at its heart a social endeavor, and yet we operate in solitude while writing.
It takes a certain type of person to keep blogging, year in and year out.
From wpbeginner.com. Yes, there's a site for purchasing tutorials on how to blog using Wordpress. Not sure how I feel about that one, given the complaints I read about WP from my friends.
This isn't a lead-in to me saying how wonderful I am at blogging, because most days I'm just happy if I can get something off my chest and posted here. And really, if people actually knew how to write something that was guaranteed to go viral, they would go and do just that. Human psychology being what it is, you can't operate with certainty about anything. You can establish trends and have a really good feel on tendencies, but prediction is an inexact science.
And people's tastes can be fickle and change on a dime. (Just ask Billy Squier and his sudden plummet from popularity after Rock Me Tonite.**)
For me, the head scratcher is that while I've been doing Meme Monday for close to 1.5 years now, the Meme Monday about Playing a Female Toon is the one that by far got the most eyeballs to Parallel Context.
The memes themselves were kind of tame, because I didn't want to retread the same old female armor memes or the sexy fun times memes that are all over the place on social media, but for some reason that post got people to the blog.
Go figure.
***
I will admit that blogging in the age of streaming and Tik-Tok does feel kind of weird. I thought of this while I've been reading Pride and Prejudice, because I can see the forms that modern novels take in the story, but the novel is most definitely a product of a bygone era. But if an author writes what is important to them, so do bloggers today.
That's not always the case, given the metric ton of "how to write for profit" books/websites/etc. that are out there, but when you get to the heart of it all we do tend to write what we like and what we want to say.
And what do I want to say? I'm not sure, really. I just write about things that pop into my head. Are they interesting? To me, yes.
For example, reading Jane Austen has given me a bit of a window into what she found interesting over 200 years ago, and in turn I wondered what someone would think of my own output if they were to read this blog in 2224. How much could that reader glean from my posts?
It's a question that I can't really answer, because I think I'm too close to the blog to be able to stand back and take a more critical approach without coloring my opinions. But I do wonder what authors thought their work might appear to people in the future, or whether they were more concerned with simply providing a living for themselves and their family to worry much about what future generations thought.
I certainly hope that they won't think that the high point of my output is a Meme Monday on playing a video game as a Female avatar.
*Unless you bring other people into the writing process, or have multiple bloggers for one blog, such as what PC originally had.
**Whether or not the video played a part in Billy's fall from grace is debatable, but what isn't is that Rock Me Tonite was Billy's last charting single in the US, and he suddenly vanished from the pop charts after that single.
On more than one occasion I've had ex-military personnel explain to me what it's like coming down from being on active duty. I'm not talking about whether you've seen combat, which is a whole other matter, but just the routine of military life. By far the biggest difference between military and civilian life, they've said, is dealing with the freedom to do whatever they want.* They're so used to having their lives planned out in detail that the concept of "eh, do whatever" becomes foreign to them.
This isn't exactly a new phenomenon, given how monks' lives were planned out in meticulous detail back in the Middle Ages ("Hellooo, St. Benedict!"), but I was thinking about this tendency toward specific goals and rules as the crux of the difference between Classic and Retail World of Warcraft.
Or, in an MMO versus an RPG, such as Baldur's Gate.
It's... not too far off, if I had about 30 fewer pounds on me. Alas that this is about as "aged" as I can make a toon without turning them gray. And yes, Lucius is the name of my Cleric from that now ended D&D 3e campaign, although this fellow is a "I hit it with my sword" Fighter.
When I finally broke down and bought BG3 as part of the Winter Steam Sale --likely the last sale on that game for a while-- I started playing the first Baldur's Gate again and got as far as reaching Baldur's Gate itself. The siren's song of temptation finally proved to be too much for me, and so I created ol' Lucius above and started poking around.
In the case of both games, there are obviously some differences --the different D&D rulesets notwithstanding**-- but in general there are timers involved in-game that keep you pushing forward. In the original Baldur's Gate they are more overt and party driven, such as having to get certain quests done or else party members will either leave or attack you. In other RPGs, such as The Witcher, if you try to collect quests and try to get everything good and ready before you "continue" a quest (such as what you'd do in an MMO), you might discover that the timer for that quest has already expired and you've got some NPC mad at you for dithering when they needed help.
The concept of just wandering around and doing whatever is pretty much lost on the player, as the story is paramount.
By comparison, Retail WoW is very forgiving. You can do quests (or not); you can do dailies, run dungeons, raid, etc., but there is very little that's actually required of a player when you play the game. And unlike an RPG, where once you kill enemies others don't respawn after a set timer, you can pretty much go ahead and deal with whatever whenever you want to.
The irony is that all of those items in-game in Retail WoW become "required" by the player base, who enforce a "correct" way of playing based on whatever the min-max numbers say, so it ends up that we, the players, turn a self-directed environment into a regimented game all by ourselves.
***
And, of course, that mentality has trickled down to WoW Classic, where I am resisting it's pull with all my might.
I think it needs to be said, however, that after some sessions with Baldur's Gate 1 and 3, I've discovered that it is very freeing to login to WoW Classic Era and just, well, hang around without needing to actually do anything at all. Once you tell the collective min-max crowd to go piss off, playing an MMO such as Classic Era is, well, fun in a way that story driven MMOs and RPGs aren't.
That's not to say I suddenly don't like RPGs, but it's a different kind of fun than that found in WoW Classic Era. Sure, Era can feel kind of empty in terms of "things to do", but sometimes that's exactly what you want out of a game. And sometimes you want to do some things here and there that you can't do in Classic/Classic Era but you find in Retail. Or another MMO. And then, you want a story that keeps you moving, and there's one of several RPGs to choose from.
It's all different, and that's okay. And I think I need to be reminded of that on a regular basis.
*A very distant second was dealing with all the rules. And the bureaucracy. If you thought academia or government had a ton of arcane rules and regulations and absurd bureaucracy, wait'll you meet the military. Of course, being in the private sector my whole life, I often say the same thing to people who bitch about "waste in government", and they're offended for some reason that capitalism hasn't wiped that waste out. I'm personally of the opinion that it's just a reflection on human nature, and you just have to live with it.
**I'm still having issues dealing with Short Rests that exist in the modern game. I'm so used to hoarding supplies such as healing potions that the concept of a Short Rest --where you can get a bunch of your hit points back twice in a day-- before you need what I'd term a "regular" or Long rest is confusing me. I try to figure out how to win an encounter without needing as many healing potions or spells as possible, but the encounters are designed for people to expect those "mini mass heals".
