The Passage of Time Can Be a Bitch

Yesterday I spent the afternoon getting my eyes checked out. I'm nearsighted and have been wearing bifocals for about a decade or more now, so I make a point to have my eyes checked regularly anyway, but ever since my Type 2 diagnosis these visits have taken on a greater amount of importance. 

The TL;DR is that my eyes are fine, and no evidence of deterioration due to diabetes. Thanks for asking.

That being said, being "normal" in your mid-50s means your response times aren't what they once were. One of the eye tests involves me looking through an eyehole at a square dot on a screen, and when squiggles become visible around my peripheral vision I'm to use a clicker in my hand. I don't believe I missed any of the squiggles, but I did notice that my response wasn't what it had been in the past. I was assured I was well in the normal range for my age, but if you're a gamer or an athlete you're used to comparing yourself against people who are decidedly NOT normal for their age.

From Reddit.

I came out of the appointment with a serious case of mixed emotions. Yes, it's good to have eyes that aren't showing signs of diabetic deterioration, glaucoma, and anything of that ilk, and my prescription didn't change enough that I didn't have to get a new pair of glasses this year. (Yay!)

But.

It's also depressing to know that what is "normal" for my age is the equivalent of "git gud scrub" in gamer terms.

Remember how I'm not a fan of Heroic or Mythic/Mythic Plus modes of group content in MMOs? The knowledge that I simply no longer have the physical skill to perform at a level necessary to be competent at them is the depressing part. When I read or watch videos online about Mythic+ this and Mythic+ that and the people are all about "this is too easy" or "this needs to be tweaked" or "I got [fill in the blank] achievement" or "we downed XXX on Mythic", all I can think of is that they're talking about a part of MMOs I simply can't play. It's not a matter of choosing not to play that, but that I simply can't do it at all.*

This was me at times in progression raiding during
TBC Classic. Sometimes, The Simpsons hits the
nail on the head. From Pinterest (and The Simpsons).

It's akin to the time I was attempting to repair my wife's old Kindle and I discovered to my horror that my eyes could no longer focus close in for me to do the job; I had to give up and get a magnifying glass to attempt to complete the repair.** For a guy who prided himself on his ability to tinker with electronics, it was a real blow to have to rely on magnifying glasses to see details properly. What's next, needing one of those light up magnifiers to read a menu?

The Light Up Menu Magnifier does exist.
"AS SEEN ON TV!" From Amazon.

Or worse, using The Clapper to play video games?

I guess this is a reality about aging that people have to come to grips with, not just gamers. It's easy to forget this when you're in the middle of something, and you don't notice the long term gradual deterioration of skills. It's only when you go away from something and come back some time later that you realize just what had happened. Or if you're a data nerd and have kept track of details for so long that you can see the gradual deterioration in your own data. (Seriously, that'll take years, and good luck with keeping that data collection going for that long.)

An ex-coworker of mine is the father of a famous League of Legends player, and he once told me that his son realized that he has maybe 4-5 years at best of being in the position he's in, so he was saving all of his salary so that he can do what he wants (such as go to university) when his skills deteriorate. At age thirty at latest, or most likely in the mid-late 20s.

I'll get over this, but it was still a nice kick in the nuts for a Wednesday and I needed to vent a bit.

*This also begs the question just how much of MMO game design is for people both skilled enough and young enough to perform well enough in that high end aspect of the game? If you watch YouTube videos you'd get the impression that this subset of the game is all that's important about World of Warcraft. Those content creators --and the high end guilds-- are the loudest voices in the room, and they undoubtedly have an influence over WoW's game design. It also becomes a feedback loop where the game is tailored toward people who play in that niche so they attract people who only play in that niche and demand more content for that niche, and so on and so forth.

**I did not succeed in repairing said Kindle. That was also a blow to my ego.

Well, THAT Didn't Take Very Long

I sat down for lunch yesterday, opened my personal mail, and....

"Oh, this ought to be good," I thought, and opened it.

It kept going after this part...

I mean, I know it's an automated system to detect when a certain amount of time had passed since a subscription ended, but I was still surprised they didn't give me a full day. My game time ended at 7:30-ish in the morning yesterday, yet I kept noticing the "Time Left" marker bouncing around with "XX Hours Left" growing and shrinking at-will, which I thought considerably odd. At one point I did login just to see if I got to the loading screen, and yeah, it actually worked about six hours past when it should have stopped. 

At that point I just shrugged and let it be, and several hours later Battle.Net finally admitted my time had logged out. I did note there was some maintenance going on Monday, so that might have been it. However, it also wouldn't have surprised me if Blizzard had configured people's accounts to actually grant a few extra hours just on the off chance that someone had messed up and wasn't paying attention to their looming ending time. 

Well, you can't say that Blizzard doesn't try to keep people subscribed, because they started throwing mounts and pets at me in the latter half of the email:

Apparently Era and the Anniversary Servers
are known as "World of Warcraft Classic games",
and the version currently on Cata Classic is called
"World of Warcraft Classic Progression realms".

If they only knew I really don't care much about mounts or pets, but since that takes an absolute minimum amount of effort to hand out to people, that's why they're acting like it's Halloween candy.

I wonder what Blizzard would think if they knew that when I play SWTOR I use a speeder I've had since 2011 or a regular horse in LOTRO and ESO in the same way that I use a basic mount in various versions of WoW since 2010? I'm the sort of player who if I played a Battle Royale game I'd use the default skin because, if nothing else, it means that other players would underestimate me.

The Winter of our Discontent

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York
--Richard, Duke of Gloucester, from Richard III by William Shakespeare

My Questing Buddy has had a bit of a rough time on the WoW Classic Anniversary server lately. She wanted to raid but she lives in the Pacific Time Zone, so she wanted to join a guild that raids on PST evening hours. Luckily for her, she found one, so she joined the guild and pushed to get raid ready by their start date.* Despite my reservations at how she was pushing herself --and believe me, I'm kind of sensitive to that sort of thing now-- she managed to pull it off and also get most of her pre-raid BiS gear** prior to going to her first Molten Core and Onyxia raids.

She's a very experienced Classic raider, so other than the "herding cats" portion of 40 person raids, she knew what she needed to do. Oh, and she's a damn good healer too,*** so no issues there. Given that the guild wanted to operate in a semi-hardcore manner, I figured that everybody going in was experienced in the early Vanilla raids.

Oh, how wrong I was.

The day after her first raid with them, I asked her how it went. "It was a shitshow," she replied, and then proceeded to discuss in detail some pretty standard rookie problems in Molten Core, such as line of sight issues and whatnot, but to top it off there were some questionable raid team decisions, such as taking your world buffs out of the Chronoboon**** before Garr, a boss well known to wipe undergeared MC raids. As you can guess, that exact thing happened, so everybody lost their raid buffs in one fell swoop. Well, except for my Questing Buddy, who sensed disaster looming and refused unboon her buffs as asked.

This is actually Baron Geddon, not Garr, but
you get the idea. I think they wiped on Geddon
too. From The Lurker Lounge.

There were also petty issues with loot, because instead of using DKP or Loot Reserve or even Main Spec rolls they went with a variety of Loot Council called "That's My BiS". Knowing that Loot Council was involved was bad enough, but the raid itself not going well kind of exacerbated loot issues.

After unburdening everything about that first raid night, she told me she'd give them two weeks to clean up their shit or she was leaving.

The next week, I was surprised to hear from her that the raid went really smoothly. I chalked up the first raid night to just getting people on the same page, and figured things would continue to get better.

(I did mention about being wrong, correct? Yep, I did.)

This past week was another shitshow, with similar line of sight issues, tanks yelling at healers (and vice versa), and DPS pulling bosses or not knowing where to stand, and then to top it off there was even MORE loot drama, but this time with the That's My BiS system itself and how the Guild Master let friends change their loot lists after certain loot had already dropped. It's more complicated than that, but the gist of it is that a lot of people were really upset that some people were allowed to change things after they saw what other people had wanted for their loot lists. 

Yes, I know, it's petty, but that's MMOs for you.

So, over the weekend, there was a guild meeting to see if they were going to disband or not, and the net result was that the worst offenders were given the boot and a new guild created with most of everybody else --my Questing Buddy included-- joining. I guess we'll see how that goes.

***

As for me, things have been slow.

Unlike some other versions of Linna, she's got
a serious look. That was a mistake as I was in a hurry
to make sure nobody took the name, but I do kind
of like it. When Paladins are "working", they tend
to be pretty serious. This is a listing as of January 27, 2025.

Not slow as in "not leveling fast" --okay, there's that too-- but slow as in "not doing much". 

I spend a bit of my time moving from place to place, doing this and that, but just am not really feeling into playing the Anniversary servers very much. Or truth be told, WoW in general. I had 1.5 days off last week, and you'd think that I'd have gotten online and played a bit, but... nah, I didn't. I did other things, such as cleaning. Or napping.

Or, worse, upgrading my PC to Windows 11.

No, I'm not thrilled about that, but if we were going to be forced into it by Microsoft, I was going to be the one to go first and upgrade my kids' laptops later.*****

When I am online, I've discovered I've leveled so slowly that even people I've had conversations in Westfall about taking their time while leveling are in their upper L30s and lower L40s now. As you can tell from the loading screen above, my highest toon is L22. I can now spend an entire evening on a single toon and not get that toon to go up a level once. I don't mind the lack of progress, but I do mind when people want to help me out. I get where they think they're helping or they just want to play with me, and there are times when I wonder if I'd still be kind of meh about WoW if I were closer to max level.

You apparently get a mustache too.

This old chestnut came out in March 2014.

The in-game boosters do play on this FOMO, but I don't think that's it. I've even begun avoiding my friends' alts when I play, because I'm just not really feeling it and I don't want to be a Debbie Downer.

Well, there's also the likelihood that my friends will want their alts to be boosted, but I have enough toons I'm working on that if I did get a boost run somewhere on one of them I simply won't play that toon until my other toons catch up. Given the slowness of the leveling pace, it may be a couple of weeks between playing on the various toons.

***

Just when I wasn't really feeling it, my game time expired on Monday. 

This was the first time in about a decade  --and the first time since August 2019 when WoW Classic launched-- where I sat there and gave serious thought whether I should purchase another 60 days' worth of game time or not. I've toyed with it in the past, but I don't think I ever really thought about it that seriously until now. In the end, I decided I was going to just let it lapse for a few days. I imagine that there's going to be a rush of FOMO at first --it happened when I unsubbed in 2014 before Warlords of Draenor came out-- but after that dies down in a few days if I still kind of feel like I want to play, I'll go buy another 60 days' worth. 

We'll see how it goes.

*Obviously, it was going to be much faster than I wanted to get to level cap.

**"You lucky bastard!" was how I put it when she described how many attempts it took to get her "blue dress" from UBRS. Something along the lines of 2 or 3 tries. And yeah, our other friends have been getting drops like the Hand of Justice out of Blackrock Depths or the Recipe for the Crusader Enchantment with such ease that it makes a mockery of the incredibly bad luck I have in getting gear and/or drops.

***Which is kind of funny, given that we met when she was tanking on her Druid, and she also raided on her Warlock in TBC Classic.

****Blizzard created a Chronoboon, a device used to store world buffs, as a single use item sold by a vendor in the Western Plaguelands. While not found in original Vanilla WoW, it was created to combat the problem generated by people who would accumulate all of their world buffs prior to raiding and then simply log out for several days until raid night. This way, a player could store the world buffs until they were ready to use them in the raid.

*****Things went very smoothly, to my surprise. There's a bad driver here and there, but nothing I can't fix.

EtA: fixed "over" with "other".

Meme Monday: Frozen Winter Memes

This past week we had temperatures hovering around 0F/-18C; very cold for us, but where my oldest lives (up in Milwaukee) the wind chill was reaching -30F/-34C, which is kind of nuts. Oh, and Northern Florida and New Orleans --definitely not snow territory-- had 8 to 9 inches (20-22 cm) of snow.

I believe the proverbial "cold day in Hell" happened last week.

Anyway, here's some frozen wintery memes to cover this...

Yep. From BoardGameGeek.

On the other hand, I'm not going to like
next month's electricity bill.
From makeameme.org.

Winter is like that.
From Pinterest.

I'm not sure it'll do any good.
From Pinterest.

Keeping that Sense of Mystery

I make a point to watch long standing developer Tim Cain's Cain on Games YouTube channel. He has decades of experience creating video games, and as a long time player/coder myself*, I really enjoy his insight into designing and creating games. Today, his post was a quick world building tip:

For those unwilling to watch a less than 10 minute video, the TL;DR is to give just enough worldbuilding to complete the game, but no more than that. In other words, leave a lot of mystery in your creation. 

This is something that it seems a lot of MMOs have issues with in their storytelling. 

Maybe it arises out of a realization that min/maxers will distill everything into a mathematical analysis and they have issues with anything resembling a sense of mystery, or that a subset of people have to know exactly everything about a game/world or they're not satisfied, but it certainly seems to be a trap that game developers fall into. It's not something about video games specifically, because tabletop games have this problem too, but I do tend to see it a lot in video games these days. Look at how the storytelling in games such as WoW or even in the average D&D or Pathfinder campaign books have progressed over time, and you'll find more and more that everything is spelled out for the player/DM. Everything is knowable.

You'll see this in book series too, where more of the world the protagonists inhabit is revealed with more mystery stripped away. 

That's not to say the reveal of a game world is bad, since you have to reveal a world as you progress in a story or game, but there's a fine line between revealing and oversharing.

Tim's point is to reveal just enough to tell the story, but no more than that. Maybe you, the author/developer, know more than the player ever will, but leaving a lot of mystery out there will not only fuel more stories in the future but allow player speculation to direct further development as well. 

One thing I've complained about with stories over the years, both in video games and in fiction, is the constant raising of stakes. It seems that many games/books/comics are engaged in a constant level of one-upmanship where the stakes in the current iteration absolutely have to be higher than the last iteration. The thing is, you can only dip into this well so often before it starts to become ridiculous. By leaving mystery in place in your work, you can avoid that one-upmanship trap by leaving a lot of mystery in your game so you have plenty to mine without constantly raising the stakes.

And maybe, just maybe, knowing when to walk away and say the game or story is complete --despite all that's left unsaid-- is good enough. (If only the suits knew this as well.)

*Okay, my coding this past several years has been limited to the occasional shell script, but once a coder always a coder.

Finding that 'Aha!' Moment

Sometimes it takes looking at a game through fresh eyes to appreciate what we've got. 

I'm not sure how this appeared on my YouTube feed, but this relatively short video is worth a watch:

Back in 2009, I think my "aha" moment was questing through The Ghostlands on Quintalan, my Paladin, and finally building up to Deathholme. I happened upon another player struggling through that place, and we teamed up to finish off Dark'Khan Drathir. Neither of us had played before, so it took us a try or two, but we figured it out and defeated the traitor. Coming back from that part of the zone forever changed the game for me, because I finally began to understand the story and what had happened there.

For Vanilla Classic in 2019, being the first time I'd ever played the "original" version of WoW, it was a different moment. It was exploring my way through Wetlands to the Arathi Highlands, to Hillsbrad Foothills. Up north I went, and I found myself quite by accident in the Western Plaguelands. I had... experiences... with doing this before, but while I was stealthed and kept to the mountains, I found I was able to sneak all the way up to the entrance to Scholomance. I had absolutely no business being where I was, as a L28 Rogue, but sneaking there and into other places just whetted my appetite for more. 

In LOTRO, I know where my aha moment was: reaching Evendim and looking up at night and discovering The Pleiades in the sky. SWTOR was a bit different; I think it was when I arrived on my Smuggler at Coruscant and there was a custom cutscene of me slicing a terminal to get into the spaceport unnoticed. It wasn't much, but it was a helluva touch, given that I was trying to get my starship back.

What about you? What was your 'aha' moment in an MMORPG?

Meme Monday: Grinding for Stuff Memes

It's part and parcel of playing RPGs and/or MMOs that there will be min/maxers. And an outgrowth of such mix/maxing is that there's an optimal set of gear or pathway to get what you want to achieve. I mean, it's pretty unavoidable in a game that is mathematically and probabilistically based that there will be a "best way" of doing things. 

Since I'm doing my own version of this while prepping for the Spring to work on the deck once more, I thought I'd take a look at the gamer version of this phenomenon. After all, I've been watching my Questing Buddy scamper this way and that, typically going into multiple dungeons a night, trying to get her BiS gear and materials for raiding.

From Mematic.

It's not just for hardcore players any more!
From Imgflip.

There are people who are like that.
I've learned to not do that. From Reddit.

I don't know the details about shards and
DS gears, but I get the gist of this. From Reddit.

And yes, This is very much a WoW Classic
thing, getting the best gear frequently means
not getting a cool looking set. From Reddit.