Life as a Kindergarten Teacher, MMO Style

Several people in my friend group on WoW Classic Era have been leveling Mages lately, so they've prevailed upon me to help get them through some of the low to mid level instances. I may not run boosts for people for profit, but I can do this for friends. Since my gear is about as good as you can get without going into raids --more on that on another post-- I can solo up through about partway into Uldaman.* If the people I'm helping to run through instances are high enough level to actually be there due to quests, we ought to be able to handle all of Uldaman and most of Maraudon and Zul'Farrak.

Still, it's not a big deal and it does keep me in practice.

Inside Uldaman.

Did I mention that they were all Gnomes?

Oh yes, and the "herding cats" mentality runs strong in my friends, which led me to a revelation:

So what did I do? I took that and ran with it...

Having raised three kids, I know the drill.

My friends were only too happy to oblige:

*This is WoW Classic Era, mind you, and to reach the end in Uldaman you need at least three people in a group to start an event that opens up the last part of the dungeon. Still, I can do trash mobs and whatnot through most of the instance without dying.

EtA: Fixed a problem with one of the graphics.

That Day When a Dragon Ate the Sun

So. There was this event yesterday that might have been on the news...

Okay, it wasn't exactly like this, but you
get the idea. From the RuneQuest Starter Set
Book 2: Glorantha. Artwork is by Hazem Ameen,
found here on Artstation.

Given that Cincinnati is right on the edge of totality --if I drove about 15 minutes to the west I'd be in totality-- I decided to take the day off and enjoy the view.

I'd planned this well enough in advance that I'd bought a couple of packs of eclipse glasses and had distributed them to family and friends. We still had enough left over for my wife and myself, and I figured I'd use a third pair to try to get a photo via my smartphone. 

Wherever we ended up going to watch the eclipse, that is.

I wasn't exactly worried about where we'd end up, but my wife wanted things to go well, and so we ended up driving 50 miles north to Dayton. We left at 11:15 AM, with Totality set to reach the Dayton area at 3:09 PM. 

Traffic was expected to be heavy with people heading west on I-74 into Indiana and north on I-75 toward Dayton, and for midday I-75 certainly felt like Rush Hour traffic on the trek north.

Things began to clear out once we reached the Dayton city limits, and we got off the highway right by the University of Dayton*, thinking that maybe the UD Arena's parking lot might be available for eclipse watching.

It wasn't.

So, we drove into downtown Dayton and had lunch at a favorite haunt of ours from when we attended 33+ years ago, The Spaghetti Warehouse. For those interested in whether I could find something that fit my diet requirements, yes I could. (I had a salad.)

A little after 1:00 PM, we set out to try to find a place to watch the eclipse.

We knew some spots, such as the National Museum of the US Air Force, were not a good idea. That place was expected to be a nuthouse. We also knew that the Neil Armstrong Air and Space Museum, about 45 minutes north of Dayton in Neil's birthplace of Wapakoneta, was supposed to be swamped. Other places on our radar, such as local parks and even Woodlawn Cemetery (immediately next to UD, where the Wright Brothers are buried) were holding watch parties and you had to pay some decent amount of money just to attend. There's a Native American archaeological site nearby, SunWatch Village, but their watch party required payment of $500**.

Again, not happening.

We quickly realized that most of the city and surrounding area had cancelled classes and businesses, so a lot of people were simply home for the day. So... we decided to check out the area around the Dayton Art Institute (the Dayton art museum) to see if there was a crowd there.

No, not our car. It's not visible.

There wasn't.

We parked on the street and walked over to the Masonic Hall next to the DAI, found a cherry tree to sit under, and pulled out some books to relax with while the eclipse began.

As the eclipse came closer, the telltale crescent shape began appearing on the shade through the tree...

The eclipse glasses I'd bought did the trick, so we could take a look as the Moon slowly ate the Sun. The only bad part was that the filter on the glasses did their job too well, and I couldn't get a photo from my smartphone because the phone couldn't resolve to a sharp image. I decided I wasn't going to bother and left the phone alone.

Daylight slowly dissipated until the moment of totality, then everything dipped immediately into twilight:

You'd think this was after 8:00 PM here on
the edge of downtown Dayton.
Yes, this was during Totality.

The eclipse glasses even protected against the Sun's corona, so I had to take them off to steal a glance of the eclipse itself. Just a second or two, but it was quite a sight. I could even see Venus nearby, but since I wasn't in a dark sky area I couldn't see any other stars.

I can see why earlier civilizations thought a total solar eclipse was a sign from the gods --or a portent of disaster, your choice-- because it's one of those things that your brain has trouble processing while it's happening. When you've seen the sun in one state all your life and then this occurs it gives you pause, even though you knew intellectually that this was expected.

Can confirm it looks like this. From
a Facebook post by the Cincinnati and
Hamilton County Public Library.

Although it felt that time stood still, it was over all too fast. Just like someone flicked switch, the daylight returned.

The sky was still a brilliant and rich blue.

Most everybody else who came to watch the eclipse left soon thereafter, but we hung around for an hour to let the traffic on the highway clear out a bit. 

Then what did we do?

We went to a bookstore, of course.

I sent this pic to my Questing Buddy,
who has read both of these books, as 
I was amused by the small print on the poster.

*Yes, our alma mater. Class of 1991, thankyouverymuch.

**And yes, it was fully booked.

EtA: Corrected some grammar.

Meme Monday: How About More Miscellaneous Memes?

Yeah, I've got a lot of excess memes that I ought to unload, so no time like the present.

There's always one meme that screams "pick me" that I don't end up using...

Alas, poor Horshack...
From Welcome Back, Kotter, via MakeAGIF.com.

So these are from all over the internet that somehow just didn't make the cut on other Meme Mondays.

Obviously an IKEA spoof, but it came from a Discord
channel, so I don't know who actually created this.

That's.... a very 80s trap, I must say.
And yes, I'd probably roll a one on this one.
From Demotivational (I think).

I remember Sabrina from the 60s version
of The Archies, so I'm still kind of having
trouble squaring away this version of her.
From d20dndmemes.

Yes, this is me. I hang onto old weapons because they've
been well-loved.From Travis Hanson's
Life of the Party: Realities of an RPG'er.

Friday Musings: The Missing 90's

The 90s were, for me, kind of a lost decade.

I graduated from college, got married, and we began having children all during the 90s. I had a series of jobs, which included a stint as a Salesmaker at Radio Shack*, and only settled into a relatively stable position midway through the decade. We bought a house right at the time we became a family, and the last two years of the decade were spent learning both how to be both a father and a homeowner.

Because I was so preoccupied, I kind of missed out on a lot of touchstones for people who were in their 20s back then. While I kept my interest in Metal and Alternative, I developed an interest in Celtic, Folk, and Jazz, so I missed out on the major musical trends of the decade.** 

Alice In Chains' Dirt was released 32 years ago. Yikes.

As was this version of the song Kilkelly, from the

album Music at Matt Molloy's.

Gaming kind of followed in its wake, with me becoming interested in Euro-style board games when they first began appearing here in the US in the mid-90s. 

We still have our copy of Settlers of Catan
that we purchased in 1996. It's certainly
seen better days, but it's been well loved.

Their appeal, promising short game times yet with just as much deep gameplay as longer titles such as Avalon Hill's Civilization and Games Workshop's Talisman drew me in. That my wife was also willing to play the games was a bonus, because she simply wasn't interested in RPGs.*** And to be honest, neither was I at the time.

***

It wasn't that I was over pencil and paper RPGs, it was more that I'd left my old game group behind when I graduated from college and I had no real group to replace it. RPGs no longer had the boom of the late 70s-early 80s --or even the "bad boy" image from the Satanic Panic-- to fuel interest in them. The game store I frequented had a bulletin board for game groups, but they were all (or mostly) out of the University of Cincinnati or Xavier University, comprised of college kids looking for groups. And I, being a grad in my 20s, wasn't really the target audience.

I'd largely moved on from D&D and spent a few years DMing a Middle-earth Role Playing campaign, but that fizzled out by the mid-90s. D&D itself was slowly being weighted down by the tons of settings that TSR was cranking out, and they'd even lost their position as the flagship RPG to some edgy upstart published by White Wolf named Vampire: the Masquerade. V:tM captured all of the vibes that had previously been AD&D's until the Columbine school shooting in 1999 brought goth subculture (including V:tM) under the harsh glare of the media spotlight. 

While AD&D 2e moved away from controversy,
even renaming Demons and Devils to something
tamer, Vampire: the Masquerade reveled in its
association with horror. This even rubbed off on
it's predecessor, Ars Magica, in it's 3rd Edition
incarnation. From Wikipedia.

So for me, pencil and paper RPGs were not really on my radar.

***

What about video games, you may ask?

Well, we puttered along with an old 486DX66 machine (originally a 386SX25 that I scrounged for replacement parts for incremental upgrades) that I kept running throughout most of the decade, but most of my games were used. There were a couple of used PC games stores around town, and for a few dollars I could own games that were 4-5 years old. Given that I'd fallen in love with GEnie and then USENET, I was fine that my games were aging relics of the early 90s while consoles such as Nintendo's N64 and the original Sony Playstation were running rings around my own PC. 

Ah, the original Master of Magic.
Not only was it a Fantasy version of the
Master of Orion gameplay found later in Age of
Wonders, but the artwork in the game manual
had a lot of BDSM in it. If my parents had
ever seen that manual, they would have had
a heart attack. From Wikipedia.

***

I guess it's only natural that I've become interested in games from the 90's, given that 1994 was 30 years ago and I feel there are huge gaps in my geek cultural knowledge that I need to fill. 

Why bother? After all, I'm only vaguely involved with pop culture these days; if the hottest artists of today (and no, not the Rolling Stones) were to pass me on the sidewalk, I'd have no idea who they were.**** 

I don't think that it's because I miss the culture of the 90's, but rather it's because I want to keep myself from sounding like my mom when she starts waxing about how much better things were in the 50s. The pull of myopia is strong, and I know that despite it being a pre-9/11 and pre-Vladimir Putin world, the 90's weren't all that. Although the 90s were supposedly an economic boom time in the US, we personally struggled to get by. I'm still not entirely sure how we managed to afford a house, much less three kids. There was also dealing with what felt like the perpetual disappointment of my parents, who expected better of their own children.

Maybe it's about putting some ghosts to rest. The 'what if' that can haunt you at night, wondering if the decisions you'd made 30 or 40 years ago were the right ones. I don't know if that's something you can ever be at peace about, and it's not like my own parents have ever confided in me about these sort of doubts, so I guess the best I can do is simply muddle through and hope for the best.

*Yes, that was the official name. Oh, I could write lots of posts about Rat Shack. I was fond of some parts of the job, especially when one of the local amateur radio enthusiasts or the electronics hobbyists came in, but far too many of my hours were spent dealing with people who didn't understand what a CD was or what a home computer was. Or they simply wanted the monthly free battery.

**To be fair, when I heard the boy bands at the end of the decade, I certainly didn't feel like I missed anything.

***I still blame her ex, the boyfriend before me, and a game group who introduced her to D&D immediately before that. I've made a couple of attempts to reintroduce her to the genre without success.

****I'm not sure what those celebrities would think of that, but I'd like to think that they'd at least be somewhat grateful that they don't have someone staring at them or otherwise bugging them.

Meme Monday: RPG/MMO Cat Memes

It was inevitable that I'd create a cat version of Meme Monday, but that's simply because at least I can enjoy the memes without worrying about allergies.

Yes, I'm allergic to cats, so when I visit friends who have cats I make sure to take some meds. Frequently Benadryl, which also means there's those famous Benadryl side effects:

From Someecards.

That doesn't mean I dislike cats, I just have to be medicated around them. So, here's a few RPG and MMO related cat memes:

Cats can be damn cute. From Imgur.

They also have a habit of knocking things over.
From Cheezburger.

Like my sister-in-law, they have a tendency
toward naps. In the sun.
From Cheezburger.

Truth. From @strikestory on that Elon Musk app.

Uh... Yeah.
From quickmeme.

And one bonus cat meme:

I feel ya, kitty. I'm the same way, and nobody
can tell me otherwise. From Pinterest.

Video Game Art: World of Warcraft

I was perusing Batttle.net's launcher the other day because the launcher is heavily promoting the somewhat controversial Plunderstorm event in Retail* when I was struck by the artwork:

The presence of a Draenei in pirate regalia makes
this event seem flirty and fun. Screencap from Battle.net.

While I have no real opinion on Plunderstorm itself, as it's a Retail only thing and I don't play Retail, I had to admit that Blizzard's art team does a fantastic job of selling the event. 

That was when I got the idea for this series of posts, which is intended to be an occasional event meant to highlight the artwork in and about video games. 

My sister-in-law's husband received a coffee table book as a present some years back of the artwork for the games for the original Atari 2600, such as this box cover for Atari's Haunted House:

We have this in a box somewhere, but
this graphic from Giant Bomb is much better
than I'd ever be able to scan.

Whether or not the game matched the artwork is kind of irrelevant, since the artwork is meant to evoke a specific emotion and intice you to purchase the game. Beyond that, it's really damn good all by itself.

So, I thought, why not highlight a slice of some video game art that I've found that I really do enjoy? I'm not an art museum or gallery, but it's something I want to present here to demonstrate that, well, video game art is just as much art as that found in any physical gallery.

This first installment of artwork comes from screencaps I made from of Battle.net's launcher --which is why there's the 'X' and the 'Back' buttons visible on them-- and show that the Blizzard art team is still at the top of their game. Alas that these aren't the full artwork, because the news entries only show part of the full piece, and if there's an attribution other than 'Blizzard' I can't find it on Battle.net's launcher. I realize that Blizzard likely did that on purpose so that their art team wouldn't be poached by other game developers or graphic art teams, but the artists who worked on these pieces deserve the recognition.

When the sky is shattered and looks like it's on fire,
that's not a good thing. Yes, this is from Shadowlands,
which is to show that no matter what you thought
of the expansion itself, the art does a great job
of showing a shattered world.

Yes, I used a cropped version of these two clowns
as a header for this blog for a while. I still have
mixed emotions about this graphic, because the art
is great but the memory of my progression raiding
ending without ever finishing Tempest Keep
still hurts over two years later.

Yeah, don't remind me that I only set foot in
Ulduar once. The artwork is still great,
because I can appreciate the Lovecraftian nature
of the Old Gods.

I'm still of the opinion that dragons --even in
WoW-- are not to be trifled with. They have
their own agendas, and woe to that person
who crosses them. That said, if you've got
one in your corner, you can sleep well at night.

Yeah, the fight at the Gates of Ahn'Qiraq was
kind of like this. Cardwyn took a bit of a beating
there in the fight --I seem to recall her getting
stomped and kicked into the next county--
but I'm glad I was there for the battle.

I believe this is inside the Icecrown Citadel
raid itself, because it doesn't look like
the entrance to the 5-person instances plus
the raid. Unlike Ulduar and the TBC raids,
I'm actually okay that I never made it here.

Sunrise over Thousand Needles.

Remember what I said about not quite
trusting dragons? How about dragons disguised
as gnomes? That's about as close as you can get
to someone holding up a sign that says
"Danger, Will Robinson!"

As much as I ended up disliking the Cataclysm
expansion, I can't deny the power of the artwork.

It's that "We are not amused" look that gets me.

Oh, look; the demon found himself a new
pet. While seeing the artwork for Serpentshrine
Cavern and Tempest keep hurts for me,
this likely would hurt my questing buddy, as
our raid team in TBC Classic fell apart
when they pushed to Sunwell Plateau right
before the guild transferred servers.

And finally, this stirs a lot of emotions in me.
Not bad ones, to be certain, but old memories
of my first Paladin in AD&D in the early 80s
taking on evil in all its forms. There's also more
than a bit of Arthur vs. Mordred at the Battle
of Camlann here as well.

*I know that Blizz wants to call it Modern WoW, but I prefer Retail since it also implies that you have to have bought the current expansion to be current with the present version of WoW. Modern WoW sounds like it covers everything from Legion onward, and at the rate Classic WoW is being released it'll reach Legion in a few years.

It All Comes Back to Balance

With a few notable exceptions, tabletop RPGs are a cottage industry of sorts.

Sure, there's the 500 lb. gorillas known as Wizards of the Coast and Paizo*, but beyond that there's a lot of small operations out there. About the only "large" gaming operation not under Hasbro is the Embracer Group, which owns Asmodee, the French company that had been using Embracer's money to gobble up a lot of other gaming companies, such as Fantasy Flight, Z-Man, Catan Studio, and Exploding Kittens. Still, in tabletop RPGs Embracer really only owns the Star Wars RPG license (courtesy of buying Fantasy Flight) and hasn't exactly done a lot with it other than moving the property to Edge Studio.

Yes, the same (hated) holding company owns both Catan...

and Tomb Raider...

Yikes!!

This never gets old...

However, like I said, you're not going to find many rich tabletop RPG developers around**, so these companies are very often a passion project.

I was thinking about that when I noted that the latest Kickstarter for a Savage Worlds addition, the Science Fiction Companion, just ended.

From Kickstarter.com.

Savage Worlds is one of those universal roleplaying products that I ought to do an RPG From the Past on, but I was considering this Kickstarter as just one way that a small company can fund product releases that they're assured of people buying. If you set up your Kickstarter right --and also make sure you have your budget properly figured out-- you know you ought to at least break even on your product. 

GMT Games with their P500 program, which predates Kickstarter by at least a decade, is another game company that uses the crowdfunding model to create games that they know will have an audience and will break even when they release the game to the public.

***

For me, however, all of these small companies creating fantastic games and gaming products have one major drawback: I can't afford to buy all of them.

I'd love to, but I can't. I'm not made of money.

Additionally, I want to make sure that not only do the game companies get my money, but that I support the local game stores as well. 

This 20+' length silver dragon, named
Strategios Yottazar, takes up a good portion
of the wall at my FLGS.

Local game stores are kind of the forgotten person in this era of instant delivery. Sure, you may not technically need a Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS) to obtain games or even find out about them, but they are a watering hole for the community. Some stores have places for organized play, and others --such as mine-- help to organize game nights at outside locations.

So how can I reconcile all of these conflicting desires? 

Pick and choose, I guess. 

I can't be there for everybody, and I can't afford to give everything to everybody either. Control what I can, and accept what I can't. 

***

Basically, that's what I've been doing when I've been playing video games lately. 

If I subscribed to all of the MMOs that I like and play, I'd have no money left. Therefore, I limit my subscriptions to two at maximum, keeping my subs within my budget. For the longest time, those two were World of Warcraft (the MMO that got me into the genre) and Star Wars: The Old Republic. When I stopped subscribing to WoW after Mists of Pandaria, I didn't pick up another MMO to replace it. I was seriously considering adding The Elder Scrolls Online in 2018, but Blizzard announced WoW Classic and I resubbed in 2019. 

While I'd love to give other MMOs such as LOTRO some love, I simply can't without giving up something else. And given that I spend most of my MMO time in WoW and SWTOR, it makes sense that I'd keep a subscription for each.

So when I see blog posts in multiple locations that subscription numbers for World of Warcraft that show volumes that just feel higher than I expect from game traffic I observe, I have to remember that people will hang onto subscriptions even when they're not actively playing because that's where their social network is. 

One thing that I do wonder about is whether Blizzard counts people purchasing Game Time*** as subscriptions. If they go based on the strict understanding that only recurring subs count in their numbers, I do not count as a subscriber and haven't since, oh, 2011 or so. My guess is that they do count me as a subscriber, even though I would argue otherwise. 

In an automatically recurring subscription such as that found in a wireless or streaming service, it's actually harder to unsubscribe as you have to be the initiator, whereas if you purchase Game Time on a month-to-month basis it's actually harder to remain subscribed since you have to initiate the purchase each time. Obviously Blizzard would prefer me to set up a recurring service since they know this, but I've resisted over the years since it has forced me to ask every couple of months "Am I having fun?" and "Is it worth it to keep playing?" 

At any rate, the conjectures about subscriber numbers are believable, although I am surprised they are not lower. I would have figured that Blizzard would have been happy to maintain these subscriber numbers and announce them at quarterly intervals, but perhaps the reason why they don't post sub numbers has less to do with saying just how many people play WoW but rather they don't want people to know just how much money they're getting from the Cash Shop.  

I guess we'll never know now, since Activision-Blizzard is but a small line item on the overall Microsoft balance sheet.

*Yes, WotC is by far the larger of the two, but Paizo wields a LOT of outsized influence in the gaming world because Pathfinder is still incredibly popular among people who prefer the D&D 3.x style of play. They've also led the way in moving away from the Wizards' led Open Gaming License that Wizards and Hasbro attempted to modify last year to make it much harder for anybody third party in D&D space to make any profit at all. You'd think that Corporate America would understand and learn from previous mistakes, but apparently institutional memory is very very short.

**I presume the truism about wine, that if you want to make a small fortune in wine begin with a large fortune, holds for game companies as well.

***I'm keeping this capitalized in the post as Blizzard does, not for any other reason.