Operation "Spread the Love"

I kind of like that title; it's one of those things that may sound vaguely dirty or sanctimonious, but it's really a reference to leveling alts.

If there's one thing I've made abundantly clear while writing for Parallel Context, it's that I'm not that much of an altoholic. I think the most toons I've created on one server for a single MMO has been one of each class for SWTOR because I wanted to see each class story*, and WoW hasn't even come close to matching that.

No, several Cardwyns out there don't count, because there's only 6-7 of them out there (2 are placeholders to reserve the name on other servers), and 2 of them are effectively the same toon (the one I saved on Era and the one that progressed into TBC and then Wrath Classic). 

So if you know anything else about me, I tend to play one or two toons at a time, and that's that. I'm not one to have a toon for every profession, and my completionist streak is kind of limited to within a specific toon rather than having one of everything.

For the 20th Anniversary WoW servers, I was presented with a conundrum: how do I slow down my leveling to the pace I want without letting FOMO get in the way?

Or to put it more bluntly, how do I play on the WoW Anniversary servers with my friends without coming off as an asshole for not rushing through leveling?

Enter Operation "Spread the Love".

This isn't even all of them; more like half.

I went and created a ton of alts. Well, for me they're a ton, anyway.

There's my usual couple of toons, such as Cardwyn, Linnawyn, and Azshandra, and another incarnation of the Retail toon Balthan (as a Warrior for a change), but most of the rest are new. And I didn't try to make the names sound that impressive (or good enough to RP with); one name came from David Eddings' The Belgariad, another from Sesame Street, and one came from a prescription drug. But the idea is that by leveling a bunch of alts all at once, I'll be able to slow down my overall leveling process so that I won't be tempted to rush forward.

The first 5-7 levels of a WoW Classic toon take about an hour, and things slow down after that rather quickly. The leveling speed only becomes a crawl at certain choke points, such as the upper 30s and the mid-upper 40s, but since I'm in no hurry I can get about 5+ toons to the mid-upper 20s while most of the server sprints to L60.**

The goal here isn't to get to L60, run instances and raid, but to get to L60 in time for the Anniversary servers to get to the TBC pre-patch. Since the phase schedule is going to roll out for the Vanilla WoW portion over the course of a year, I have a year to get to L60. Not weeks. Not months. A year. Sure, I can eventually go faster if I want to, but the height of FOMO is right now, when everybody is pushing ahead, and it will peak again when people en masse (my friends among them) begin to reach max level.

I am not going to let FOMO win this time, and if Operation "Spread the Love" does it's job, it won't. But we'll see.

*I've been a very bad boy, as I still haven't finished the Imperial Agent's class story yet.

**There were already two toons at L60 as of late Tuesday/early Wednesday, which is kind of nuts. Those players must not have slept since the servers opened on Thursday the 21st. Given my age, I have to wonder just what the hell the point is, because I doubt anybody is ever going to remember who these players were, but that's just me.

EtA: Corrected grammar.

I'll Get Around to It

In the comments about my post on the now live Anniversary WoW Classic Fresh Servers, Shintar warned me about taking care of myself and not doing things I don't want to do. Considering we've both felt burnout from pushing too hard and doing things we later regretted, I truly appreciated her concern. I assured her, however, that I wasn't going to go gangbusters on this.

So far, I still haven't. In fact, I haven't even logged into a toon there as of writing this on Monday afternoon.*

Oh, I created the toons I wanted back on Thursday, and I even reserved the names for a few TBC Draenei and Sindorei toons, but that's about it.

It's been surprisingly easy to avoid playing on the new servers. Yes, a change to my sleeping habits brought on by my jury duty tenure helped, and we did visit with family over the weekend, but I have gotten on WoW during that time. Just not the Anniversary servers.

Sittin' on the dock of the bay,
watching the tide roll away...

I can tell there's a distinct amount of emptiness on the Classic Era servers ever since the Anniversary Fresh Servers opened up, but that's fine with me. I discovered I was able to farm Felcloth much more easily than in months because the hardcore farmers have moved on to the Fresh servers, and while the amount of people queueing for Alterac Valley have gone down, when I do get into a Battleground there's a lot more activity going on instead of the Horde's traditional strategy of zerging to the end and killing Vann as quickly as possible. 

As for the new servers themselves, I've noted that my little friend group has been exclusively on there since they opened, and given how they always seem to be on whenever I check Battle.Net, my guess is that the main toons are probably around L20 by now.

Do I feel left out? No.

Am I experiencing FOMO because of all of the activity on the fresh servers? A bit, but nothing I can't manage. 

Do I want to login to the fresh servers and get going? 

Uh... I don't know.

What I do want to do is level at my own pace, without any help, and basically doing it my way. That's what I liked the most in the 2019 release of WoW Classic, and what I missed the most in TBC and Wrath Classic. I have learned over my years of playing is that my leveling playstyle is not what the majority of the WoW player base likes, and I hate being pushed to go faster, whether due to explicit goals being set by a guild/raid team or simply by FOMO. 

I mean, have you even read the blog? This is basically a "how to do it" manual of giving the middle finger to the Metagame while still playing the game itself. 

So yeah, I'd like to login and play on the new servers, but I will only do it my way. And I don't think I'm ready yet. Maybe later this week, but we'll see.

*Early on Tuesday morning I did get on to move the bank alts over to their permanent locations, but that's been it as far as my involvement there goes.

EtA: Corrected grammar.

Meme Monday: Thanksgiving Memes for 2024

Yes, this week is Thanksgiving in the US. That typically means two things in my immediate family: listening to Arlo Guthrie's rendition of Alice's Restaurant, and a recounting of the classic WKRP in Cincinnati episode Turkeys Away:

Oh yeah, there's also that meal thing.

In honor of Thanksgiving, here's a few memes for Thanksgiving from a gamer's standpoint...

Can you believe it? You can get t-shirts of the Turkey
Drop from Etsy!!!

I chuckled at this one.
From the Wowhead Facebook page.

This came from Pinterest, so I have no
idea who made this outside of the art
references in the graphic.

Oof. Right now I'd be yelling "Roll high! Roll high!"
From the My DND Facebook page.

The Hurt Locker of MMOs

Let's wade into a minefield, shall we?

Okay, I didn't, but @shieldsftw from YouTube sure did with this video he released a couple of days ago:

At first I was going to pass this video by because I figured it was going to get pretty inflammatory really quick,

From Tenor.com and the movie Anchorman.

but it actually didn't turn out half bad.

I do applaud Shields for the intestinal fortitude to go asking questions of people on Reddit and the WoW Forums, and as someone who plays both Classic and Retail he kept an open mind about the Classic players' opinions on the matter.

Go watch it yourself if you want, because I'm going to briefly comment on the video.

I could get behind most of the reasons why people prefer Classic --I've mentioned quite a few of them myself over the years-- but I do wonder whether the "Warcraft Feel" complaint comes more from PvPers and Horde players than PvE and Alliance players. Most of the complaints I've seen about Retail from that angle come about when I'm in a Battleground, so I suspect that there's an inherent bias in that direction. Still, I can point to plenty of times in "Classic WoW" (such as TBC and Wrath) where NPCs are all about their feelings and/or coming together for the good of all, so the complaint about a "Disney-ification" of Retail kind of falls on deaf ears for me.

However, in the ending, where Shields simply says "there's no way for Retail to change to bring back Classic players" I do agree with. Retail has changed too much for someone who prefers an open world that isn't driven by an overarching storyline and a (relatively) low complexity for gameplay and design to find a place to fit in. There's all this game world that Blizzard is sitting on in Retail, yet everybody is funneled into the same few zones in the current expansion, and there's no encouragement to go out and explore unless you're out transmog or achievement hunting. You can't simply drop into a zone (such as, say, Ashenvale) and just do a couple of quests here and there because everything from post-Cataclysm onward* is designed with a purpose in mind. Blizzard has a story they want to tell, and that may not be the story you want, but good luck trying to avoid it.

Okay, this is an option, but trying to tell a
reader to "not read the quest text" is like trying to tell
the sun not to rise in the morning. From Reddit.

Since you can't turn back time and tell Blizz that maybe it's a better idea to not go all in on making sure there's a story everywhere, especially once an expansion is no longer current and the content becomes very dated, Retail is what it is. 

Just watch out for those landmines. 

*I'd argue from Wrath Classic onward, but the reworking of the Old World by Cataclysm largely wiped out the old unfocused open world that existed in Vanilla. If you want non-directed zones, you have to go to TBC's version of Outland, and that's about it.

May It Please the Court

Okay, I can now mention what I've been up to --or what I was supposed to be up to-- this past week.

I was selected for two weeks of Jury Duty.

In the US, all adult citizens who are active voters are thrown into a potential pool of jurors, and if your name comes up, you spend anywhere from two to four (or more!) weeks in jury duty. 

There's several types of jury duty, from the two main types at the county level as well as the special selections for major cases and those from the Federal courthouse. (If your city has a Federal District courthouse, that is.) At the County level, there's Grand Jury, which you are a member of for about four weeks at minimum reviewing criminal cases as to whether there's enough evidence to try the accused, and Petit Jury, which covers actual criminal and civil trials.

Over the years, I've been selected for Jury Duty three previous times: Petit Jury in the mid 90s, Federal District Court in the mid-00s, and as part of a huge pool of potential jurors (200+ people) for a First Degree Murder case in the mid-10s. For that first round of Petit Jury, I was an alternate juror on a criminal case and then a juror on a civil case. I was slotted to show up as a potential juror for a Federal case, but the parties settled at some obnoxious hour of the night (I think it was 2 AM when I received the phone call that my services were no longer required). For the Murder One charge*, my stance on capital punishment caused my dismissal from the juror pool. Before you say "oh, that's nice, just say you're against the death penalty and you can get out of it", I can tell you that I spent the next 30-45 minutes like I was being worked over by a couple of cops to get me to confess. The prosecutors basically wanted to make absolutely sure I wasn't just trying to get out of doing my civic duty, and it was... NOT PLEASANT.**

This time around I was back at my old Petit Jury summons, so I arranged with my employer to make sure they were aware I might be out for a few weeks or more, and readied myself for his past Monday.

To my surprise, I wasn't required to attend, so after my dismissal I just started up work as usual.

The next several days were the same: unless you're already attached to a case, you do not have to go to the Courthouse.

And tonight I received the following news:

Wow.

I was not expecting that. I fully expected to have to check in sometime over the next week --well, except for Thanksgiving Day, that is-- but I guess the case docket isn't very full right now.

And while I'm not superstitious, I sure hope I didn't burn all of my good luck this year having the easiest jury duty service ever.

*For those not familiar with First Degree Murder, it's premeditated murder, and it carries with it a potential death sentence.

**When I finally was released and went home, I casually mentioned to my wife the name of the defendant --who was present the entire time while I and a half dozen others were being grilled-- and she said "HOLY SHIT! You were going to be on THAT case??!!!" Turns out she'd been following it closely in the news.

Meme Monday: More Satanic Panic Memes

Because I dredged that episode of my life out of the corner in my mind where it slept, I figured I'd revisit some Satanic Panic memes.

From Reddit. You'll see a lot of these from there;
it's like therapy for old time RPGers.

I don't need to rehash the whole thing --it's all over the internet, so have a fun time hunting-- but let's just say that D&D and Heavy Metal music and all sorts of rebellious activity by kids back then were all gathered up and lumped into the "Satanism" camp. Throw in some court cases brought against some people due to "found memory hypnotism", and... Yeah. The Panic.

But hey, here's a multigenerational Starter Pack
for you. From Reddit.

Yeah, I can relate. From Reddit (and that other platform).

Anything to make them feel justified, I suppose.
From Reddit.

Yeah, it kinda was, and the people who believed
it then are also the people who believe fake news now.
From Imgflip.

Sometimes what set off people's Satanic
Panic detectors was weird. Some people
gave Lord of the Rings a pass, others didn't.
From Reddit.

But evidence of good things to come out of
tabletop RPGs such as D&D were denied by
the true believers. Such as my parents.
From Reddit.

And one last item about the Satanic Panic...

But you can buy the t-shirt from Etsy!!
From Etsy.

EtA: Corrected grammar.

What is Even Happening?

If the previously concluded election didn't prove we lived in interesting times*, I opened my email this morning to discover this:

I use Outlook for my email. So what?

Yes, the New York Times is covering WoW's 20th anniversary.

For independent confirmation that yes, the NYT is doing this, here's the cover of Sunday's Arts and Leisure section:

Any excuse to visit a bookstore...

You can see Vin Diesel on the cover, South Park, a very stylized Tauren who's more Minotaur than Tauren, a generic-looking Orc (sorry, NOT Thrall), and a Red Flight dragon. I get the feeling the artist is busy shouting "FOR THE HORDE!" somewhere...

But between this acknowledgement of WoW's continued existence, we also have had celebrations of the Granddaddy of RPGs, Dungeons and Dragons, and it's 50th anniversary. You know that D&D is finally big enough when it gets the Time Magazine special issue treatment:

I got it at Target --of all places-- about
a month or two ago.

I'm just not ready for this pop culture acknowledgement of our geeky pastimes. 

Poltergeist is kind of appropriate for
all of this. From tenor.com.

I still remember the Satanic Panic, and I know that there are still a significant number of people who still believe that all things RPG are Satanic (my own family included). People who think that those times are gone have never interacted with the Satanic Panic crowd; if given half a chance, they will attempt to assert their own morality on everybody else because they simply can't understand the concept of "mind your own business". Oh, they understand it, but only when it applies to them, not other people. They feel like they're doing the "proper thing" by attempting to impose their morality on others, because they want to share in the path to Heaven with everybody; the concept that religion and faith are a personal matter for other people as well as themselves just doesn't compute.

This. From Medium.com.

Here's to another anniversary in 10 years!

*As the saying "May you live in interesting times" implies.