I'm Just Playing With My Dolls Again

Okay, I don't have any dolls, or what adults would call "action figures".

From TheGearPage. And Spaceballs.

But I do have MMO toons. 

I spent a bit of time yesterday visiting some of my old characters, just to check them out for a bit. Such as Dalaak here, my original SWTOR toon.

Hello, big fella.

Or my original LOTRO toon, Aranandor, when he's not lounging around Bree.

There's also my GW2 toon, Mikath...

I still think that the toons and NPCs in GW2 all look
like the Beautiful People, with flawless skin and
impeccable grooming. The beat up outfit notwithstanding.

Or my friendly Vulcan from STO...

And his entire officer corps, too!

And there's also that crazy Dunmer from ESO...

Those loading screens show the actual armor
worn, not the outfit she actually has on. That's one thing
that Retail WoW does better, at least.

But I guess that this wouldn't be a post about MMO toons if it didn't include the instigator of this post, WoW:

Hey, Lady. Long time no see.

Or even longer, really.

Okay, that wasn't the actual version of WoW I was talking about, but this one...

I occasionally go to the loading screen just to see how long it's been since I last logged into Retail. If I see "Gear Update" listed on all of these toons, I know it's been some months, and likely at least one major/minor patch in the interim.

Those are four of my most played toons on Retail --the original Azshandra isn't there-- but given how things progressed in Classic WoW, it just didn't feel quite right. Therefore, I tweaked the composition a bit:

There. That's better.

The gear (and levels, to be honest) are all wrong from my perspective, but I'm not planning on doing anything about that. At least now the names are correct on that Warband.

There are other toons I have from MMOs I no longer play* such as Age of Conan, Rift, or Neverwinter, that would require me to install the games again to simply take a screenshot of the loading screen. And then there are games that no longer exist, such as Wildstar, ArcheAge, or TERA. I do miss Wildstar, but not the other two.

Even though I really have no desire to play some games (or specific toons), it's nice to pull them up on screen every once in a while just to enjoy how they looked, and the memories they recalled.

*Again, I'm surprised that Age of Conan is still hanging on after all these years.

EtA: Corrected grammar.

EtA: And corrected some more grammar. Sheesh.

When Thought Experiments Get Out of Hand

Speaking of anachronisms...

Given how Retail WoW has developed over the years, why is leveling still a part of the game? 

That has been one of the items I've been pondering over the past several days. It's not a new opinion by any stretch of the imagination, but the leveling experience ceased to be a focus of Retail WoW players for as long as I can remember. 

If the Old World zones back in 2009 were as populated now as they are on the 20th Anniversary Classic Servers, I'd have likely found leveling incredibly difficult. Remember, I began playing WoW on a PvP server, and if every zone had a crowd like Hillsbrad Foothills had, I'd have spent most of my game time running for my life. 

Or dead. Yeah, I'd be dead.
I pulled this out of my archives just because.

Since those zones weren't that populated --because most people were at max level in 2009-- that made my original leveling experience easier.

Yes, I do love the leveling experience in Vanilla Classic. While I dislike the XP boosts that the Classic team regularly puts out, at least they do pay lip service to the time honored tradition of actually leveling a character.

But that's the pre-Cataclysm WoW environment. Since that time, as WoW's game world has become bigger and the level cap has grown larger, the actual process of leveling itself has become more and more streamlined. Paradoxically, the emphasis placed on the current expansion --and getting players as quickly as possible to the level cap-- has skyrocketed as well.

So that begs the question: why have people level in the traditional way at all when a new expansion drops? 

***

It's not as if what I'm suggesting hasn't been thought of before. After all, Blizzard loves to roll out level boosts late in an expansion --frequently with gear upgrades to help you once you reach the level cap-- for at least several years now. What I'm asking, however, is why are they even bothering with the leveling journey in the first place if the entire focus of the game is at the level cap. 

If people are zipping through the leveling zones to get to max level as quickly as possible --or the actual leveling process is so streamlined as to be little more than a visual novel with a few "kill ten rats" quests-- then why not eliminate the leveling process itself and start everyone at max level when they purchase the expansion? 

I'm not saying to eliminate the leveling zones themselves, but to essentially make them optional. If people are zipping through quests, not bothering to even read quest text, then why not leave the quests for people who actually want to read them and let everybody else just rocket on ahead and do what they really want to do? 

***

Am I playing Devil's Advocate here?

A bit, I'll admit.

There are days when I feel like I'm the only person in the world who enjoys the leveling process itself, and during the last Retail expansion I played --Mists of Pandaria circa 2013/2014-- it actually took an effort to slow down my leveling so I could enjoy the game. It also took a bit of an effort to handle the Mists intro areas when the gear I was wearing were Cataclysm quest rewards and random drops from the mid-Cataclysm zones such as Uldum; I could tell that the development staff expected the average Mists player to have at least a full Heroic dungeon set when they crossed to Pandaria*, and there was at least one mini-boss quest that was effectively a gear check in the Pandaria intro zone that you had to pass before you progressed further in the story.

Nostalgia aside, however, I think the time has come for Blizzard to seriously consider eliminating the leveling process from Retail. If enough people are blitzing through the zones (or really don't care about the story except for the "get gear/renown/etc." part), why not give the players what they want and just let them skip the leveling process entirely? Or, knowing how Microsoft and Blizzard thinks, offer players the opportunity to skip the leveling for a price. Instead of Early Access, allow those players the opportunity to start the next expansion at max level for an extra $30. All the try-hards can go straight into their gearing process while those that actually care about the story and the questing zones can go do those. Blizzard can even institute layering to separate the paid boosts from the levelers, so you can prevent the boosters from farming all of the World Bosses and gathering nodes.

Before anybody brings up the elephant in the room --PvPers and gankers-- institute a simple change to the PvP rules: for the first month of an expansion's release, max level toons can only engage in PvP with other max-level toons. Not with NPCs. Not with lower level toons of the opposite faction. That keeps those who paid for the privilege of skipping the leveling process from interfering with the fun of those who did not. 

Anyway, that's my thoughts on the matter. As for me, I'll be back on the Anniversary servers, leveling at my own pace.

*It's not an accident that the level boosts provided to players have included a set of basic gear so that the boosted players aren't too underpowered in the current expansion.

Meme Monday: Anachronism Memes

I've been thinking a bit about anachronisms lately, so I figured I might as well lean into it and provide a few memes about anachronisms from all over.

Some anachronisms are out in plain
sight. Such as that the Trojan Horse
was actually a jet. From Memedroid.

Oh, and speaking of The Iliad...
From Imgflip.

/snicker. From the Triablogue Wordpress blog.

Anachronistic memes can be found even in the Bayeaux Tapestry.
From Pinterest.

Okay, I laughed. Although to be fair,
I could see this in an episode of Doctor Who.
From Memedroid.

Aye, thou mayest be a star.
From Imgflip and timfall,wordpress.com.

Adventures in Righteousness

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention something on my last Operation Spread the Love update: two weeks ago, Linna did complete one Paladin quest chain.

I'd forgotten how long of a grind it was to complete this questline. It's probably half as long as the Paladin mount questline is, but it still takes you far afield for a low level Paladin. The initial portion of the questline, defending Daphne Stilwell from the Defias, does take a minimum level to complete in the same way that a Mage's wand questline does**, but as long as you don't do anything stupid such as hit the wrong button you can complete it quickly enough.

This was before I hit said "wrong button".
It wasn't until I was reviewing screencaps for this post that
I realized that Daphne's hairstyle is the same as Cardwyn's. Go figure.

::ONE DEATH AND SEVERAL DAYS LATER::

At least she doesn't have the same hair color as Cardwyn.

If you've not done the quest chain before**, you'll be pleased to know that Daphne is not some helpless "damsel in distress". She has already been defending her and her husband's farm from the Defias Brotherhood for a while, and during the fight she is alongside you, taking potshots at the Defias with her gun. Given how cut off their farm is from the main rallying point at Sentinel Hill, she has to be tough enough to stand her ground. 

Anyway, once that quest is complete you might be tempted to believe that's the end of that, but your superior, Lord Shadowbreaker, sends you up to Ironforge where Daphne's husband is stationed to inform him of the events back home. In gratitude for helping to defend his farm and Daphne***, Jordan offers to forge you a weapon worthy of a wielder of the Light such as yourself. 

There's only one little problem: Jordan doesn't have what he needs to finish the job.

The solution? Well, you can handle a little shopping trip, right?

Apparently Linna could, because Jordan provided Linna with said shopping list, and she then went all over tarnation, from familiar places such as Dun Morogh and The Deadmines to farther away locales such as Darkshore and the Silverpine Forest.

There's a bit of a crowd at the gates of Shadowfang Keep.
And yes, I took this screencap originally for that
guild name, which reminded me of an ongoing joke
in The Elder Scrolls Online, The Lusty Argonian Maid.

The labors weren't exactly the Labors of Hercules by any stretch, but it did involve some patience. While the Kor Gem you seek can drop off of the naga that roam the underground tunnels before you reach the instance itself, they're all elites and it takes some patience to kill them. To be honest, it's more effective to simply get a group for Blackfathom Deeps and just go run the instance.

Shirtless Kaldorei looks better than
Shirtless Kirk, that's for certain.

Once you've obtained a corrupted Kor Gem and Thundris helpfully purifies it, you can then make the trek back to Ironforge**** and provide Jordan with the entire contents of his grocery list. In Vanilla Classic, there was no option to turn in parts of the list beforehand, you had to get the entire list first and then turn it all in. When your bag space is kind of limited, that's a bit of a commitment.

Still, Jordan is grateful and you do get the satisfaction of watching him work:

Completing an involved class quest is far more satisfying than, say, some of the one-off Mage class quests. I'm looking at you, Jennea, and your insistence on collecting water from Mirror Lake for a reason you refuse to tell me about. (Cardwyn still believes it was a test to see if you'll do whatever you're told to do without question, which irks her to no end.) Yes, you might get a good weapon at the end of it, but the journey is also very much worth it as well.

Now, about some of those Druid and Warlock quests...

*Trudging through the swamp to where Tabetha lives is pretty much a death sentence to any Mage attempting to do it the moment you get the initial quest. In Vanilla WoW, Mages don't have the ability to turn themselves temporarily invisible, so any critter within a mile of you in southern Dustwallow will be coming for you. (Don't ask me how I know that one.)

**I can't recall if it was removed from the post-Cataclysm Old World, but while there are entries in Wowhead it appears that if you bring up Verigan's Fist there's a line that says "This item's source is no longer available/removed."

***More like 'assist Daphne in her slaughter of the Defias', but I digress. If I ever get in a fight in a back alley, I want her on my side.

****I like to take a long trip back rather than use the Hearthstone to return to Stormwind and take the tram. So sue me. 

Because I Don't Have Enough Irons in the Fire

So.... I did a thing...

Her looks aren't exactly right, but close enough.

Yes, after a purchase on sale from what seems like an age ago, I finally got around to creating a toon or two for Hogwarts Legacy.

This is... actually pretty close to what I'd look like back
then. The hair would have been not quite so wavy, but
the coloring and shape of the face are about right. Can't turn
those glasses into 80s style metal frames, however.
(I went with Miller because it's a pretty generic name.)

The irony is that while I first created a toon that looked like me --not out of vanity, but just something I do because I can't not make decisions as if I were doing them-- I went full Mage and created Cardwyn, as if she were plucked out of Azeroth and dropped straight into the Wizarding World.

See? I got her hair right!

If she were 15 or 16 years old, that is.* The story begins with you as a new student going to Hogwarts, but with the specific tweak that you're a Fifth Year student, something almost never done before. I suspect this plot device was conceived to not spread out the plot too much. If you're a First Year student, your abilities are a bit limited, and Portkey Games doesn't really have the time to play the long game, plot wise. There's also the additional bonus of being able to insert into the game themes better handled by a mid-late teenager than a tween of 11 or 12.

Although I played through only the Intro Zone (as it were) of the story, I couldn't exactly tell what the time frame for the story was. Given that the visual cues I've seen so far it very much fits within the Steampunk-ish vibe that the original series had, it seems that the Wizarding World doesn't exactly change that much in aesthetic. Meeting M. Weasley at Hogwarts made me think that this was a continuation of the original story, set some years later, but the more I think about it (and the hair design of the students) I think it might be earlier, from anywhere between the late 19th Century to the early 20th Century. 

Geez, Card, you ought to be able to see the Arcane flows.

Okay, confession time: I've only read the first four books in the original Harry Potter series. The fifth book had come out when I originally read the first four, but I held off in case there was a cliffhanger at the end of the fifth book. Given that the sixth book was a year away from publication at the time, by the time the sixth book was released I just never got back into reading the series. Given that there apparently was a cliffhanger at the end of the sixth book, it's probably for the best that I stopped reading the series when I did. I don't take cliffhangers well.

Still, I was interested enough in the worldbuilding behind the series --whether it was created by the seat of her pants or not-- to see what Portkey did with the world. 

That's not a really good excuse to buy a game, especially one with a premium cost such as this one. I'll readily admit that. However, it's also a third person single player RPG in a development paradigm where more and more RPGs are either isometric or first person. Looking at all of the RPGs that I'd love to play that I simply can't --Cyberpunk 2077 and The Outer Worlds to name two-- it's nice to actually have a game that I can play. That it was massively on sale when I bought it (something like 50% or more off) doesn't hurt either.

So we'll see where this leads me. I have no idea when I'll finish it, given that I've not progressed in Baldur's Gate 3 since March 2024 or so, but at least it's an option on the table.

*Having raised three kids, I can tell you those 2-3 years can be quite huge for a person's physical and mental development. 

Yeah, I'm Back

No I'm not.

Husky is not amused, either.
What, you expected John Wick? From YouTube.

But I am close to the so-called halfway point overall on Operation Spread the Love.

Shaluna was first created in Classic Era so I could see if
someone could dance on top of the Stormwind fountain
in skimpy attire and get tips, but I chickened out before I put my
plan into action. Ironically enough, Shaluna's Corsair Overshirt 
has generated... commentary... from passersby. (But no tips.)

As you can see, 4 of the toons are at L30 and 4 are at L29. 

In Vanilla WoW, when you hit the low L30s the leveling speed slows down a lot, and there's a 3-4 level gap before you can really keep questing going. When TBC came around, Blizzard fixed that by adding more quests --and a neutral quest hub-- in Dustwallow Marsh, but this is Vanilla and so you have to get creative if you want to level in the low-30s until Arathi and Desolace become viable questing areas. 

Oh, I suppose you could just run instances such as Blackfathom Deeps or the first Scarlet Monastery wing on repeat, but I was swept up in that one evening when I was leveling the original Cardwyn in 2019, and doing Scarlet Monastery's Cathedral wing 3-4 times in a row wasn't the most fun I ever had in game.* Sure, I went up a level and a half over the course of a couple of hours, but I was on my toes and struggling to keep up the entire time. 

At times like this, you create your own fun. Such as what I posted about the other day when I crept through a zone filled with enemies about 20+ levels higher than me. 

If you're expecting me to go off on a screed about how Retail doesn't allow you to just go and do your own thing, you're sadly mistaken. Retail may not want you to go and simply do some unstructured play --and the majority of Retail player-focused content certainly emphasizes that fact-- but you can just screw around on Retail. You just have to put in more effort to disconnect from everything there.

Unstructured play is not what Blizzard or folks such 

as Mike Bell are selling, that's for sure.

One of the things I used to do during my last year of playing Retail in Mists was to sneak through the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor on the original Azshandra, creeping up into Eversong Forest or Durotan, just to look around. On a PvE server it wasn't that dangerous per se, but it still was a bit of a thrill just stealthing my way across multiple zones while lowbies did their thing, blissfully unaware I was there. 

I used to also return to Hellfire Peninsula in Outland, because it remained untouched by the changes wrought by Cataclysm, and it had more of a Vanilla-esque feel than Northrend did. I wasn't the only person to feel that pull, as we had periodic incursions of max level Horde into Honor Hold, and I was more than happy to help defend the keep from them. 

***

Under the header of "unstructured play", I decided last week to start pushing my toons to run through the Feralas wilderness to get to Feathermoon Stronghold out on the western islands. Running south from Desolace isn't difficult in theory, but trying to make that run when you're in your L20s can be similar to Azshandra's little adventure to Dire Maul. 

But you do get to say hello to Rexxar.
Yes, I still have a certain fondness for him.

While I'm happy to report there were no untimely deaths on the three toons who made the run --thankfully Frost Nova actually worked on the skull level toon that was chasing Cardwyn-- there were a collection of bodies along the road, indicating that something had been killing players out there.

But going forward I intend to lean more into unstructured play in Vanilla WoW so I can keep all 8 toons going. The decentralized nature of Vanilla WoW is ideal for that sort of thing.

*Even if --as I found out later-- I was in a guild group from the best guild on the Myzrael-US server. I was merely happy to just keep up, given that they were in Discord and obviously coordinating while I wasn't. I just had to watch for cues based on what they were doing so I didn't do anything too stupid. 

Sometimes You Just Want to do Something Stupid

Really.

As in, let's go visit a high level area as a low level toon and try to sneak into an endgame instance zone.

Such as sneaking through the Feralas wilderness and arriving at the entrance to Dire Maul.

Dare I go in?

It doesn't always go so well...

Just one of many deaths. But I persisted.

The thing is, the more times I died at the hands of max level ogres, the more it pushed me to get into the entrance area...

"What, you again?"

And I persisted...

There were a lot of people running the various wings
of Dire Maul. Enough so that I saw a lot of dead people
running back to the instances.

And I finally made it through.

Really, the stealth was just for show. If I got even
vaguely close to an Ogre they were going to attack me.

I think I'd need another 10-15 levels before I could stealth into the area without aggroing any of the baddies, but that's just a guess on my part. Still, it was a fun little excursion just to see how it would work out.