The Opposite of 'Nobody Cares'

I think I'm at that stage in my MMO career that what attracts me, more than anything else, is playing with other people.

There's always the automatic dungeon
finder, dude. I hear people who use it
are absolutely fantastic to play with.
Just ask Reddit. From Imgflip (and Reddit.)

I guess I'm just kind of done chasing the next new thing, whether it's a new expansion or a new raid or a new instance or new gear.*

There's only so many times you can be asked to keep running on that hamster wheel before you start to question why you're doing it in the first place. This is particularly the case if you're also questioning the quality and direction of other aspects of an MMO, such as the story or class design. 

But.

I can throw all that whining out the window, since I have a group of friends I play with regularly and I value their company. 

It is not a coincidence that I continue to both play WoW Classic Era and have a small group of friends to play with. If it weren't for them, I'd have likely not renewed my WoW game time when it ended back in early 2022, after I walked away from progression raiding. Hell, were it not for the Friday Night Karazhan Run that I raid led** until the guild up and moved from Myzrael-US to Atiesh-US, I'd have probably not made it until March, much less June of that year.

Yet here I am, almost two years later, and I'm still logging into Classic Era regularly. 

***

It is also not a coincidence that in the age of people predicting WoW's demise --myself included-- that the power of friendship keeps World of Warcraft and other MMOs afloat.

No, I'm not talking about the Retail WoW team's recent storylines, although judging by some of the commentary surrounding them I can understand why some would feel that way.

So... Who are the Bronies in this scenario?
From Reddit.

But the reality is that while you can play MMOs solo --and "playing solo" while in a group via the automatic dungeon or raid finder is very much a thing-- MMOs are built upon group content. And you don't have to be in a guild to find friends to play with. 

I mean, that's how I found most of my friends in WoW Classic.

Ancient of Tome of the Ancient was the only friend I knew who not only was playing WoW Classic at launch but was also on the server I played on.*** Sure, I knew a few people in the blogosphere who were going to play WoW Classic, but most of those whom were friends were over in Europe. The people from previous guilds that I could have considered friends at one point had either drifted away from the game or vanished from view in one of the couple of guild blow-ups that I've had the dubious privilege of witnessing. 

So... outside of Ancient, I was pretty much on my own as far as making my way was concerned.

***

I was fine with that. I'd been effectively playing MMOs solo since about 2011, when the Alliance guild I was in basically faded away to nothing in late Cataclysm and then after a burst of activity early in Mists proceeded to do a repeat performance. The only group content I participated in were the Flashpoints in the "vanilla" portions of SWTOR, and by 2016 or 2017 I moved away from even that.

Given that I wasn't raiding, and --outside of the mini-Reds and my blogger friends-- I knew almost nobody who actually played MMOs, this wasn't a surprise.

But the surprise was that I began to make acquaintances and then friendships with people in Classic WoW.

Look, I'm tellin' ya, that's what happened.
And no, people weren't asking my toons
to strip or anything.

It was a natural outgrowth of manual group creation and obeying Wheaton's Law: "Don't be a dick." I would get into a group, behave nicely and not try to pull threat from the tank, and at the end I'd thank people for the group and if they ever needed a Rogue (or Mage), to hit me up. Most people wouldn't whisper me again, but a few did. From those initial connections grew some of my longest lasting friendships in the game. 

While I had acquaintances in Classic WoW that have fallen by the wayside as interests diverged or people unsubscribed, other friendships persisted. It is those friendships that keep me playing WoW Classic Era more than anything else. So when I see that subscriber numbers kind of float between 4 to 8 million --and I'm assuming that paying for game time as opposed to an actual subscription qualifies-- then yeah, there's far more here than just approval and love for the game and its content. 

Yes, that's 4 to 8 million players spread across (effectively) 5 games: Retail, Wrath/Cataclysm Classic, Classic Era, Classic Hardcore, and Classic Season of Discovery. I get that it's not the same as 4 to 8 million players that were playing a single game (Retail WoW), but money is money to Microsoft and it pays the bills.****

I realize that friendship isn't impervious to anything video game related, just as in real life, but MMO creators would do well to realize that fostering and maintaining friendships are likely the smartest thing they can do when designing and building an MMO. After all, it is an armor stronger than any plot armor out there, and can keep players subscribed even when the product stinks and the development team make horrible decisions. Okay, maybe not, but when people still play after a bad expansion, I believe there's more at work than that the WoW community are just a bunch of "sheep" who blindly continue to play the game. 

And for pete's sake, don't expect the sanitized group and guild recruitment tools to do the heavy lifting of interacting with people for you. I'm almost 100% certain that if I relied upon an automated dungeon finder to enter into Classic Era dungeons that I'd not have made the connections I have. That doesn't mean that there aren't problems in a purely manual system --there are a truckload-- but by minimizing interpersonal contact the WoW team(s) have inadvertently exacerbated the problem of people forming bonds in the game. And online want-ads aren't the answer.

Uh, that person spamming a level
boosting service in Mandarin notwithstanding.

At least I'll admit that the guild name "Frequently Reported" is kind of funny.

*That doesn't mean that I'm not interested in trying new games, because I am. It has far more to do with games I'm already playing that rely upon people constantly ponying up money for more things --whether it's an expansion or some cash shop item-- than getting a chance to try something completely new. I'm looking at you, Paradox, who either give up on a game after a very short period of time or will simply throw "expansions" at you ad-infinitum until you cry 'uncle'. It seems that every time I turn around there's a new addition to Stellaris or Europa Universalis IV, while on other games Paradox simply gives up on those that need bug fixes and tweaks to make them shine (Imperator: Rome).

**I found out much later from a friend who remained in the guild and in a semi-leadership position that the franken-guild's leadership expected me to run the "social" raids in the same manner as I ran the Karazhan raid, and they were surprised when I refused to move to Atiesh-US with the rest of the guild. Given that my orphan raid was pretty much independent of any guild leadership input or oversight for over half a year, they kind of screwed that up pretty badly given they never bothered to ask me my opinion on things.

***To be fair, I chose Myzrael-US in part because Ancient had decided to play on that server, as I figured that I at least knew one person on there.

****If anything, Microsoft is disappointed that I don't pay for more via the Cash Shop, because there they get maximum profit for minimal effort.

Meme Monday: Moooommmm! Memes

In the US, Mother's Day was yesterday. 

For all those gamers out there who are also moms, here's a few memes for you.

I LOVE THIS!
This is from AtomzFamilyGaming on Etsy,
but you should also just go to Etsy and
search "DnD Mothers Day" and look at all
of the awesome stuff there.

This was extra funny because my wife
works at Target. From Imgflip.

I mean, you knew that Alextrasza was going to
show up here, given that she's the Lifebinder and all.
But the reason why this one is here is that she's got
the "I'm so fucking DONE with your shit!" look
I've seen out of my wife (and other moms).
From YouTube and Krimson KB.

And a little something from Wizards of the Coast,
circa 2015. Happy Mother's Day!

Meme Monday: Edgelord Memes

I've been amusing myself lately by watching D&D oriented videos by Antonio Demico, aka The Pointy Hat. (Here's his Artstation page as well.) His YouTube videos take an aspect of D&D, examine it with a high amount of snarky humor, and make a few tweaks and twists to change the class to make it more interesting to play. Being a long time player, I've been chuckling along with his videos, as he skewers a lot of stereotypes within D&D (and roleplaying in general).

In case he changes it in the future, I wanted to make sure
I saved it. From Pointy Hat Studios.

What caught my eye the most was this one about Rogues:

That Rogues or Thieves (or Shadowblades, for you ESO fans) attract an edgy type of person is an in-joke for RPGs and MMOs since forever (although in AD&D 1e the truly edgy played Assassins), and I'll admit I had my own Batman phase of sorts*. Still, the Edgelord player that plays Rogues is very much a thing, so why not poke some fun at them?

As long as they only simply stay brooding in the corner, mind you...

Yeah, this. Something about Fire Nation
that brings this out in people. 
From Facebook's My DND group.

Wow. That hurts. Also accurate.
From d20dndmemes.

And this is why I don't play Forsaken.
From Reddit and aitipse_Amelie.

Sigh. Yeah, that. I feel ya, Geralt.
From Reddit and The Witcher.

Okay, one more, from one of my more favorite webcomics:

You have to click on it to see the full thing, but
yeah. I've been in campaigns with that one player...
From Jonboy2312 on DeviantArt and
Tales from the Tables.

*Although I suppose you could say I was too nice to be Batman.

EtA: Corrected grammar.

Uh... About that Pre-Patch

When the pre-patch for Wrath Classic dropped, everybody in my BNet list --and I do mean everybody-- was in Wrath Classic.

This time, in Cataclysm Classic?

As of 9:30 PM EST, there are exactly four.

There's also two in Season of Discovery, and one in Classic Era.

Of a BNet list of 26 regular Classic players who were in Wrath Classic at pre-patch at this time of night back then, less than 20% is not a good look. 

I was curious about people whom I'm not BNet friends with but have had direct messages via Discord, and unlike that first night, very very few people are on World of Warcraft right now. Especially those that I raided with in Vanilla and TBC Classic. 

So, while there may be activity in Cataclysm Classic, among the people I played with in earlier instances of WoW Classic Cata does not have any draw whatsoever.

At least for now.

Meme Monday: Pollen Memes

Yes, in Ohio it's that time of year: when you come out in the morning and your car is covered in pollen. If you wash your car, it'll be covered in pollen the next morning.

Oh yay.

In dubious honor of the flowers here going bananas, I figured I'd spend this Meme Monday on the bane of my existence, pollen.

And both blow things up, too. 
In the case of the former, my eyes and nose.
From Memebase.

Yeah, I know. I get that.
From Cheezburger.

Makes me wonder if that death mask found
at Mycene merely had allergies. From Pinterest.

Truth. From depositphotos.

And one bonus pollen meme:

Wow. I never noticed...
From click2houston.

Some Short Ponderables For a Saturday

None of these items are enough for a post on their own, so I strung several that have been living rent free in my head into a single miscellaneous post.

***

In World of Warcraft, main raids typically have a gear set for each class known as a Tier set. In Vanilla WoW, there's even a pre-raid Tier set, known as T0, that you can accumulate via dungeons.* However, why is AQ40's Tier set considered T2.5 and not T3? It's not a set that came along later and was shoehorned in to give people a chance at better gear, like the T0.5 questlines, so why is it colloquially known as T2.5? 

You'd think that going from Molten Core -> Onyxia/Blackwing Lair -> Temple of Ahn'Qiraj -> Naxxramas would be Tier 1 through Tier 4, but noooo....

***

Ex-Blizzard head honcho Mike Ybarra has this idea in his head to allow paying customers to tip game devs. Given that while he was in charge at Blizzard he had the ability to pay the development staff --all of them-- more money if he liked their work, why is he even suggesting this?

Apparently tip jar stickers are a thing
that you can buy. From superostmk.live

Because he wants to turn game development into the equivalent of the wait staff at American restaurants, who survive on tips because of the low pay. 

I mean, I get it if there's a tip jar out for free-to-play games, since that could make sense if you don't want to buy stuff from their cash shop (assuming there is one), but when a guy who was in charge of a game development studio makes these suggestions, it certainly seems less like he's trying to say "game devs deserve extra for a good game" and more like "I really want to find new ways to pay people less to increase my profit margins".

***

One thing that always puzzled me about the Plaguelands in WoW is how the land is so obviously diseased and plagued --both there and in the Ghostlands in southern Quel'Thalas-- but the NPCs and the players seem to be immune to the Plague itself.  You see this in Northrend in Wrath of the Lich King as well, where in the Troll city of Zul'Drak has Plague Spreaders everywhere, but the Crusaders and the players are effectively immune to that. I would have thought that anything who stays long enough in Plague infested lands stands a very high chance of contracting the Plague themselves, but I guess plot armor is stronger than the Plague of Undeath.

Thought I'd go with a Ghostlands screenshot
for a change. Even in broad daylight it looks like this.

***

I'm not the brightest bulb in the universe when someone tries to subtly tell me something.

If you ever read some of those Reddit threads about guys totally missing out that they were being hit on, yeah that'd be me.**

For some reason I was thinking about the term Netflix and Chill, and it occurred to me just what other "come hither" signals in the past did I miss. I knew of "come up for a cup of coffee", but I personally never encountered that one, but beyond that outside of the stereotypical 'booty call' --calling someone up after midnight to ask them to come over to your place-- I don't know of any. And I certainly don't know of any references used by people playing various video, pencil/paper, and board games, for certain. 

Still, maybe it's something to pursue for a while. Yes, I am such a dweeb. Or maybe I just want to look back on my past and smack my forehead and go "Oh CRAP! How did I miss that one??!!"

Sometimes being middle age is a bitch.

*Yes, I know that they're not all that good in terms of what your class is best at, Blizzard was still figuring this stuff out in Vanilla, you know, so it's not perfect. Still, the Rogue set and the Mage set do look nice from an aesthetics standpoint.

**There's a ton of them out there; I only linked one but if you want to read more, go ahead and search for "clueless guys reddit thread". Trust me, they'll pop out.

Reminiscing

It's kind of funny how life works out.

When I went away to college, I was a kid who listened to Rock and Metal, but also enjoyed Classical music. I had a thing for Canadian power rock trios, as my collection of Rush and Triumph cassettes proved, but I also would listen to the Classical LPs that my parents had in the basement*.

As far as I know, they're still down there.
This pic is from Etsy, but this was
the first album in the set.

I knew that Alternative --aka Modern Rock-- was out there, as was New Wave, but when I was in high school I wasn't really exposed to it at all. The legendary WOXY, 97.7 FM, was up in Oxford, Ohio, and while we could (barely) pick it up back home, it was more well known locally as the station used in the movie Rain Man.

The tagline was created for the movie, and

the station loved it so much they adopted it.

I knew of punk, and what I heard I liked, but it never got on the radio back home. Top 40 dominated the airwaves, and big corporate radio companies (Jaycor, a predecessor to IHeartRadio, began in the late 80s in Cincinnati) were just starting to make inroads on homogenizing what you could hear over the air, so I expected that going away to college would expose me to far more of what I liked than what I could hear locally.

But of all the things I expected to be exposed to, this certainly wasn't on the menu:

My new roommate was from Chicago, and I quickly learned a few things when we moved in together: we both shared a love of D&D and Doctor Who**, he certainly loved his Chicago Cubs and Chicago Bears, no city in the US was as good as Chicago, and that he was fine with putting up posters that would have given my parents a heart attack.

We both contributed to the decor in our dorm room. My posters were more along these lines:

Mine was a 5 foot version of this, which
I still have stored away in the basement.
(From Ebay.)

But these were more of my roommate's taste:

I had no idea who Samantha Fox
was until he put this 5 foot tall poster up on
the back of our door. This caused... drama...
when my parents picked me up for
Thanksgiving. (From Worthpoint.)

Oh, and he had eclectic taste in music.

He had an actual CD player --a portable model, and the first one I'd ever seen-- and about a dozen CDs. Sure, I'd seen a few CDs at stores, but compared to albums and cassettes there were very few of them. But I was surprised at what he had on his collection. Amy Grant? Stryper? He didn't seem like the sort for Christian music. He also had Genesis' Invisible Touch, a greatest hits compilation of The Young Rascals, and...

It might have been Fresh Aire III, but
This was a better quality photo. From Discogs.

Fresh Aire? What the hell is this? And...

From Discogs.

"Windham Hill?" I asked.

"Yeah, it's pretty nice music. I'll put it on later."

Given his other geeky pastimes, I was willing to give it a try. And I surprised myself by actually liking both CDs, although I'll freely admit the sound quality of the CDs alone probably had an impact. By October, I'd heard enough to know two things: I actually liked this "New Age" type of music, and I wanted a CD player for Christmas. Given that I didn't have a receiver but I did have a boom box with AUX inputs, that's saying something. 

***

Fast forward to today, and the past couple of months I've been spending time re-ripping my old CDs at a better bit rate than before***, so I've reacquainted myself with my old Windham Hill and Mannheim Steamroller CDs. I mean, I still play them from time to time, but one thing about re-ripping means I'm hearing everything again, listening critically, to make sure that the CD was ripped properly.****

Because of this exercise, I've been struck by how greatly my roommate from 37 years ago influenced my musical tastes of today. 

And now, I've got online friends to thank for influencing my musical tastes again.

Found this at a bookstore. This one's
for you, Bhagpuss.

*My dad did NOT listen to Classical music; my mom got the Funk and Wagnalls collection --one week at a time as they were released-- from our local discount store down the street. 

**When he was moving his stuff into our dorm, I noticed this magazine on the top of one of his boxes:

Took me a while to find this out of the Parallel
Context archive, but here it is.

I immediately recognized it as TSR's Dragon magazine, so I pretended I didn't see anything so as not to attract my parents' attention, but if I had any doubt that I had found another one of my people, this dispelled it. He also had a signed black and white photo of Tom "The Fourth Doctor" Baker on his desk, next to the prom photos with his (then) girlfriend. So yeah, a nerd through and through.

***Yes, it's still MP3s, because I don't have that much in terms of disk space for storage to handle FLAC. Besides, being in my mid-50s means that my ears aren't as good as they once were, but they're good enough to hear the difference in some pieces of music in a 192-bitrate versus a 320-bitrate MP3. You just have to know where to listen --and have the right sort of music-- to make it noticeable. Sure, FLAC or WAV files are better than MP3s, but MP3s are pretty universal, so I don't have to worry about not having a format that won't play (I'm looking at you, Samsung Music).

****Alas, after 35+ years, a handful of my CDs no longer play. It's not because they're scratched, but it looks like it's a failure of the metallic material comprising the CDs. Among those CDs were The Eagles' Hotel California, The Cult's Sonic Temple, a Greatest Hits compilation from Golden Earring, and Alice in Chains' Dirt.