Meme Monday: More Gardening Memes

This past Thursday was the official planting date for my part of the Midwest, so I thought I'd honor this with some more gardening memes. These don't have any relation to gaming, but I figured why not?

This meme is the reason why I decided to do another
Meme Monday on gardening. From memegenerator.

We don't have a dog, but if we did I'm sure they'd
love to help out in our garden. From thefragrantgarden.

Yes, weed is legal in Ohio. From veggiegardener.

My sister-in-law does have rabbits, and I'm sure
they'd be doing this if she gave them half a chance.
From imgflip.

Yes, I snickered. From Boredpanda.

And finally, something for people from my
generation. Or maybe slightly older. From imgflip.

"You had Love in your hands, and you gave it up!"

I returned to Retail WoW's Elwynn Forest on Wednesday so I could say that I finished up a zone in Old New Azeroth. I picked up where I left off, in Eastern Elwynn, visiting the guards near the Lumber Mill.

Again, they condensed the running back and
forth into a bulletin board. The James Clark quest
was new to me, so since I hadn't run into it before
I decided to ignore it.

A lot of the denizens of the Lumber Mill are still there, from the Supervisor:

And the lumberjacks. Can't forget them.

To the Seamstress and her family:

Angelic glow not included.

That brought up one of the weird things that I had to get used to in Retail WoW. If I thought the changes Blizzard made in Wrath Classic made it easier to quest out in the field, the current state of Retail made those old Wrath changes look draconian by nature. If I had to click on something it was patently obvious by either the glow surrounding the NPC (as seen above) or item (seen below):

Having seen all three versions --the Retail glow, the Wrath sparklies, and the "absolutely nothing" Vanilla Classic-- I kind of prefer the Vanilla Classic version. If you're not in any particular hurry, hunting around and finding it on your own presents a certain sense of achievement once you succeed in finding what you were hunting for. The kicker here is the qualifier "If you're not in any particular hurry", as it seems that questing is something to be gotten through rather than enjoyed for what it is.

Or that people want the quick dopamine hit to keep on rolling. Whichever.

Somewhere in the forest surrounding the Lumber Mill, I dinged L10 and two things happened. First, my toon became eligible for that leveling buff (which I honestly forgot about), and second...

"I'm sorry, who are you and why are you calling
me a champion? And with those eyes, are you
on drugs or something?

I muted Wrathion's invitation, since my in-game character didn't know who the fuck he was, and even out of game I recalled him in Mists as a spoiled-rotten asshole. I have absolutely no desire to deal with him, and I'm not about to pretend 8-10 years' worth of in-game stuff went on just so I can be "current".

But now that I think about it, a third thing happened when I reached L10 that was more annoying than either of the two things listed above:

See that? You can't get click on it and get rid of it. Blizzard really really WANTS you to make a specialization choice, and I really didn't feel like doing that. I mean, if I'm going to examine only a few zones, why make a choice? There's no real reason for it, and judging by what I've been playing already I ought to be fine in generic fashion. At least in Classic WoW, you can ignore talent trees as much as you want, and I certainly do just that for 3-4 levels at a time. 

The thing is, Blizzard makes you pissed off about it by letting it block your bags:

At that point my stubbornness really kicked in and I guess I should be glad my wife wasn't around because I used some pretty colorful language when I told Blizzard they could do with all of their pop-ups.*

While I was running through the Lumber Mill, I remembered that the Horse Breeder for Elwynn Forest was nearby, so I stopped and said hello. I was curious since I knew that it was always a big deal in Vanilla Classic to reach L40 and finally get your first mount (once you could afford it, of course). Additionally, I kept seeing a pop-up telling me some mount or so was added to my collection, so I wondered what that was up.

Those prices were off by a factor of 100
in Vanilla gold.

What the hell? How is it possible that I already have that mount known and in my collection if I never played this toon until this previous weekend? And those prices were so low that I thought that surely the horse market had collapsed or something.

Well, in true Vanilla fashion I eschewed the mounts in favor of running around everywhere, which meant it was time to go visit Western Elwynn and say hello to Hogger.

In Vanilla Classic, Hogger is an elite that unless you're the right class and get high enough in levels you're not going to solo him. There's also the issue of Hogger wandering around the area he spawns in, which frequently means he either jumps on you when you're not expecting him or he pulls adds from the gnoll encampments whenever he attacks you. It's a meme in Vanilla Classic that there's the occasional "Hogger Raid" where you get 40 L1-L5 toons together to fight Hogger. I've never participated in a Hogger Raid, but I do appreciate those who put them together.** 

Retail, however, has a different ending to the Hogger fight:

Yes, I let my opinion be known.

With Hogger dispatched, I headed out to Westfall, where I encountered what I knew and dreaded awaited me:

Again, I let my opinion be known. I'm almost 100% certain Blizzard did this to get us to care about what happened to the Furlbrows and their horse Old Blanchy, but all it did was make me mad enough to simply stop playing their game. The devs cared enough to give Old Blanchy a back story where you could find "Young Blanchy" outside the inn in the intro area for the Wrath Classic instance The Culling of Stratholme, and this is how it ended for the beloved old horse? And with dad jokes too?

This was obviously written with returning players in mind, since a new player will only see a murder mystery without any frame of reference. They won't know that the Furlbrow's deed, which is easily obtainable as a clickable item next to Hogger in Retail, is a drop in Classic that you might or might not get. About half of my Classic toons have the Furlbrow's deed quest completed, which is fine. I don't need it to enjoy Westfall and its storyline.

With that I went back to Stormwind and found a few more people in town than I did over the weekend. Not many, but a few. I did discover those Drac-whatevers that I thought were in-game toons were actually NPCs, so I kind of just shrugged and logged off.

I suppose I could have danced atop the fountain,
but The Macarena isn't that appealing to me.

And that's that, I suppose.

Is the game easier? Certainly.

Is the gameplay smoother? Absolutely.

Does the story work? Eh, maybe? If you're not invested in the story, yes. If you never saw what was there before, yes. If you never question as to why it effing took the Stormwind constabulary until the moment you defeated Hogger to show up when they could have captured him without any issues whatsoever before then, then sure it's fine. But if you are prone to questioning things and preferred the old NPCs the way things were, then yeah, it might not appeal to you. 

And let's be honest: if you're being called a hero when you've obviously not done that much in Azeroth, I guess being called Champion once you reach a certain level isn't that surprising. What is surprising is that people aren't calling you a god or something.

*It involved Blizzard and that place where the sun doesn't shine.

**That thing about "making your own fun" in the game again.

EtA: Corrected grammar.

What is Valuable and Who Decides it is?

Luke: Is the Dark Side stronger?

Yoda: No... Quicker, easier, more seductive.

--From The Empire Strikes Back

Okay, after being a Classic Andy for what's likely the millionth time since roughly July 2014, I began to have some second thoughts. 

What if I am not remembering things correctly? What if what I like about Classic WoW has an analogue in Retail? What if I'm letting my dislike of the state of the game over a decade ago color my opinions too much?

Well, the TL;DR is that I decided to do something about it:

This screencap is obviously not when she was
brand spanking new. You'd have thought I'd have
remembered to take an initial screenshot, but nope.

I believe this is called "putting my money where my mouth is".

For the record, Livona here was created on Wyrmrest Accord-US, an RP realm with a "High" population. In the era of shared (aka "dynamically merged") servers, this may not mean much. From wowrealmpopulation.com, Wyrmrest Accord has ~10.5k active characters...

Snapshot from wowrealmpopulation.com
as of May 11, 2025.

Although given the current state and capability of Retail WoW to create innumerable alts, this might represent only 500 individual accounts. Okay, I'm kidding, but you never know.

As you can see, Wyrmrest Accord is roughly 33% Alliance. So, not a 50/50 split, but decently sized enough that I ought to expect to see some bodies out and about. Look, I'm no dummy, and Wyrmrest Accord has been around as an active server since 2009, so it's likely that I shouldn't expect that many people in any starter zone. My previous foray into Retail with new toons confirmed that, but I decided I was going to try this for more than just a few minutes.

I figured I'd go to a zone that I was intimately familiar with, and one that hadn't changed since Cataclysm: Elwynn Forest.

It still feels weird entering into Goldshire and seeing
a Flight Point there. I mean, it's a ~3 minute run up
to Stormwind, so you're not saving that much time.

Now, I knew that the Cataclysm changes meant things were different in Elwynn as compared to the OG Vanilla version, but I couldn't remember just how jarring things were. Therefore I decided to approach this as if I were brand new to the game and didn't go to Exile's Reach (or did it once and wanted to start over with the "original" experience). What would make sense? What wouldn't? How would I feel as I played the game?

I discovered very early on that I wasn't going to be able to remain objective, because I did have opinions, and those opinions came to the forefront from practically the 3rd or 4th quest:

You're kidding me, right? Have you seen how full my
health bar is and how little effort it took to revive you?

I mean, look at the comment by the NPC that I healed on the battlefield.* I had hardly even done anything in the game and I was being called a hero. For a person who prefers IRL to fly under the radar, this is somewhat disconcerting; I kept expecting someone to pop out from behind the tree in the screencap and say "HA!! FOOLED YOU!!"

But beyond that, what stood out to me the most about the very beginning in Northshire Abbey was that the quest text there implied you knew things about the pre-Cataclysm era of World of Warcraft**. A new player won't know that, and if you relied too much on what might have been there originally in-game, you'd only confuse a new player further. 

Before you point out that a new player might have been expecting to go straight away and play The War Within, I'm not going there. I don't think that's likely to be the case. A new player to WoW probably has the vague idea that the game is OLD now and they will likely have to start off somewhere else first before they can get to the current expansion. They're called expansions for a reason, and they don't replace the old game, only add to it. 

I did notice that the number of quests in Northshire Abbey were cut by quite a bit, despite all the trainers and other original NPCs still present in the game. Yes, there aren't a lot of quests around the Abbey to begin with, but the speed of completion was still record breaking for me. It usually takes me about 20-30 minutes to be off to Goldshire in Classic Era, but even with me loitering around a bit I was out of there in about 15 minutes. If I'd have pushed it, I could have been done with Northshire Abbey in about 6-7 minutes, and most of THAT would have been spent running back and forth from the nearby vineyard.

So, I was off to Goldshire, and since I was on the way, I thought it a good idea to go visit Stormwind's bank to drop off some of the initial gear that I already had replaced. In Vanilla Classic, if you were lucky you might have gotten a couple of pieces replaced by quest rewards, but in Retail everything was replaced by the time I reached The Lion's Pride Inn. 

I'm not sure what I expected to find in Stormwind, but looking like Classic Era servers right in the middle of TBC Classic wasn't it:

I saw the same toon by the same NPC over the course of
a couple of hours. No, I wasn't playing straight over those
few hours; I just did a half an hour here and there over the
course of the entire day. I had things to do, after all.

I eventually found a few toons around:

Note the Naxxramas Tier set on that Caster beyond
the Darkmoon Faire Mage on the right. I think it's the
Discount Naxx reskin from Wrath of the Lich King,
But I wasn't paying too close attention at the time.

But they never lasted long. And to be fair, they were the only people I actually saw in the game up to that point. I didn't see a soul in Northshire Abbey or Elwynn Forest at first, even though I spread my game time over several hours and a couple of days.

(I will come back to that later.)

After leaving Stormwind...

I see they finally repaired the damage caused
by Deathwing to the entrance. I think it was still in
a state of disrepair in Mists in 2014.

...I resumed questing in Elwynn Forest.

Even though I was L6-7, the "Report to Westfall" quest was already available if I wanted it --I didn't-- so I continued to accumulate the "traditional" Elwynn quests: the Maclure and Stonefield farms, and the nearby Fargodeep Mine. Instead of the giant pig named Princess being halfway across the zone as in Classic WoW, Princess is right in the field beside you as you're talking to the quest giver. Also, unlike Classic WoW, she's not accompanied by two extra members of her "entourage", which means the fight is actually quite simple, despite her size:

Somebody has been feeding that pig Miracle Gro,
because she's a lot bigger now than in Classic WoW.

What got me was that the turn-in text block doesn't look like it had been changed from Vanilla WoW:

"Ma'am, she's right behind me. Can't miss her."

Despite that, the quests I ran into were largely the same as their Vanilla counterpart. Thankfully, you didn't need any knowledge of Vanilla WoW to understand the context, so that worked. But there was one big difference between the Vanilla WoW and Retail WoW versions of the zone:

"What on earth are you doing out here?"

In Vanilla WoW, the mini-boss Goldtooth is at the back of the Fargodeep Mine, which makes it a challenge to get to. Before I hear any complaints about how easy Vanilla WoW really is from a complexity standpoint, I have to point out that typically the Fargodeep Mine is where a toon will likely die for the first time.*** Respawns and the narrow passages make any mine dangerous, but to get to Goldtooth you have to go all the way to the back. Oh, and you likely have to fight a few adds when you pull Goldtooth. Here, being outside the mine and off without any nearby adds, he's pretty much a sitting duck. Even if Goldtooth were at the back of the mine, I doubt he would have posed much of a challenge. Hell, my health bar didn't go beyond the halfway mark until I decided to test how much of a wrecking ball you are with WoW's greatest enemies, Murlocs.

I had to actually go back the other night
to get this screencap, because I was kind of busy
when I last went through here.

Like the jingle for DoubleMint gum, murlocs like to double (or triple) the fun by having multiples attack you. In Vanilla WoW, if the mines don't kill you in Elwynn, the murlocs likely will.**** The Retail WoW version of the Elwynn Forest murlocs did not disappoint me, as I fought packs of 2 or 3 at once. While I didn't die at all, that pack of 3 that jumped me before I could eat and regain health very nearly did me in. If I were more cautious, and if I hadn't had the experience of invincibility up to that point in Retail WoW, I likely wouldn't have pulled that many murlocs.

So there I stood, at L9, after about 90 minutes of actual playing the game, although I might be generous on the 90 minute mark as I was screwing around a bit, making trips to Stormwind to dump stuff into the bank, taking screenshots, and hunting for other people in the area.

I did finally find a few people in Goldshire:

"Love me two times girl
One for tomorrow, one just for today
Love me two times
I'm goin' away...."

I caught these on screencap just before they went "WHOOSH!" up and out of sight.

"Oh, right," I mumbled. "Flying is allowed everywhere."

That being said, I didn't see a single low level toon in Elwynn Forest at all. 

***

So... What did I think?

Let me describe my experience leveling 8 toons at once in Anniversary Classic: when you do the same quest 6 or more times, you find it hard to sit there and read the quest text again. Really, after about the 3rd time doing the same quest I just kind of click through to the end, because unless I want a specific screencap or something, I know what's happening. There have been weeks where I've been doing the same quests in the same zone on ALL of the toons, and it blurs together after a while.

Now, switching to Retail WoW and intentionally wanting to read the quest text to see what differences there are between Retail and Vanilla did not help me. In fact, I felt a stronger pull to simply skip reading the quest text than if I'd been playing Vanilla. Why, you may ask?

This:

I was going to crop it, but you know, it works fine as-is.

Everything I need to know is right on the map, and if I don't care to pull that up on-screen most of the relevant information is up on both the mini-map and the quest tracker on the right. I've never used the Questie addon, so I can't tell you if it has the same information, but this kinda-sorta pushes you into going faster than you may want to. Providing the data to a player without any expectation is one thing, but there's an implicit expectation here that the player will utilize the info to progress as quickly as possible. 

The removal and/or streamlining of quests in Northshire and Elwynn wasn't designed to explicitly unclutter the old zones, it was to provide the player with an overall improved experience. Taking Goldtooth out of the cave means you don't have to risk anything to go in there and eradicate him. You also don't need another body to go in there with you in case you get jumped by 2 or 3 more kobolds. The zone becomes more solo-friendly and faster to progress through as a result. 

By comparison, if you go to Elwynn on the Anniversary servers or Classic Era servers, you'll always find people asking to group up for Hogger. In Retail there's no need, as everything is soloable. Group content is segregated in a separate area, and while you can manually group up the expectation is that you can use the automated processes to handle the group creation. 

And let's talk about the elephant in the room: Retail WoW is old. I mean, really old; like "Morrowind was the current Elder Scrolls game in 2004" old. And the Wyrmrest Accord server, having opened about 16 years ago, means likely 95% or more of the server population is at or near max level. Still, I wasn't expecting there to be nobody in Elwynn Forest. Blizzard could have simply turned off access to the zones entirely and nobody would have noticed. If this were Classic Era --and the lack of population was the reality for Classic Era a few months into TBC Classic-- I'm sure there was an internal drumbeat within Blizzard to simply turn those Classic Era servers off. Nobody was playing, so why keep them turned on?

The thing is, Retail's design provides an outlet for collectors and completionists to go back and poke around and do all the things.

Oh, and allow the rare newbie to come along and try their hand at the game.

I used to rail about how Blizzard, by reworking the Old World for Cataclysm, inadvertently cut off their own pipeline of new players into the game. Instead of a natural progression from Vanilla -> TBC -> Wrath -> Cataclysm, what ended up happening was Cataclysm Vanilla -> Old TBC -> Old Wrath -> Cataclysm. The timeline got screwed up, and the game no longer made internal sense unless you had played the game prior to 2010. Now, I'm not so sure that's the case. 

From what I've played and observed, Retail WoW is relying less on the world and a cohesive story to bring in and keep players and relying more on what has been WoW's traditional strength: its gameplay.

Whatever you may think of the storytelling in Retail WoW, gameplay can make up for a host of sins. WoW's gameplay is far smoother in Retail than in Vanilla; the drops come more quickly, you know what to do without having to engage your brain and figure it out, the feedback loop of quest acquisition and completion is finely tuned, and the game world is designed to progress you through it faster. Hell, as a Rogue I discovered that stealth meant almost no penalty to my traveling speed at all. I was zipping through the Fargodeep Mine --because OF COURSE that's what I'd do-- as if I was running through the thing. I know how long it would take a Vanilla Rogue to make it through (assuming that a Kobold didn't see through my stealth), and here in Retail I was cruising along as if they weren't even there. 

You could say the game doesn't waste your time, because the game doesn't value the time spent in the old content. And if Blizzard doesn't and the existing player base doesn't, why shouldn't you? 

Or maybe, to turn it around, why should you value the old content? Take away the transmog and the achievements, and what do you have? Without external rewards, why go?

Classic WoW has that "why go" question already answered: people make their own fun. The players came up with Hardcore WoW Classic and made it popular before Blizzard jumped on the bandwagon and created official hardcore servers. Classic Fresh became a player driven thing on a Classic Era RP-PvP server before the announcement of the 20th Anniversary servers. I still recall the New Year's Eve 2023 gathering on the Season of Discovery RP server in Stormwind, with people basically having a good time while the countdown to the 2024 was underway.

The thing is, I never hear about people doing goofy things or making their own challenges for old content in Retail WoW. That doesn't mean it's not there, but outside of a few things --such as that Pandaren who makes it to the level cap by picking flowers in the Pandaren starting zone-- all you hear about in Retail WoW is about what's going on in the current expansion. What is keeping Retail WoW players from following in their Classic brethren's footsteps? Nothing, really. 

This loops back to the title of this post. While I progressed through Retail's Elwynn Forest, I kept wondering why the Retail community doesn't consider this content to be valuable. Is it purely conditioning, or is it a "follow the leader" mentality that keeps people from doing things if there isn't a reward attached? Without achievements or transmog, is there no interest?

I'm uncertain you can say this about other older MMOs. I've been on SWTOR and LOTRO --the old LOTRO servers, not the new ones-- and judging by the activity in both MMOs, the intro zones remain very active with new toons. If you told LOTRO players that Ered Luin or The Shire isn't valuable to LOTRO any more, I'm pretty sure there'd be a riot.***** But in Retail WoW, there'd likely be a lot of agreement with the sentiment that Elwynn Forest is no longer valuable to the game.

I don't know the answer to make old content more valuable beyond the carrot approach that Blizzard already has tried. It could be that all of the people who see the old content as intrinsically valuable have migrated off of Retail WoW and onto Classic WoW, and those remaining in Retail don't see the value in old content beyond the metagame rewards that Blizzard offers. If anybody has ideas, I'm all for it, because there's all this content that is basically unused, and it certainly seems like the people most likely to utilize it don't even play this version of the game any more.

***

Oh, and one more thing. I discovered that collecting herbs gives you more XP than fighting enemies at level:

Now I know why that Pandaren thought leveling via gathering herbs was a good idea.

*Because the Priest wasn't doing much of anything, mind you, and sent me in his stead.

**For example, Milly Osworth's initial quest text for Extinguishing Hope starts with "Times like these make me long for when the Defias were still around. The cataclysm has opened a pathway from the Burning Steppes and now Blackrock orcs pour into Northshire Valley!" (From Wowhead, because I forgot to take a screencap.) You would have had to have known about the Defias, or at least be familiar with them to truly understand Milly's comment, and if you were paying attention to the quest text you'd likely have pulled up the map to try to figure out what Milly was talking about. But of course a new player will have Burning Steppes as a big ol' blank space once you found it because you haven't revealed the map yet. The quest text could have easily been tweaked to make it more understandable to a completely new player, removing some specifics that old players knew and just emphasizing the criticality.

***I've played Hardcore WoW Classic. I KNOW.

****And if you survive that, then the Defias Pillagers in Westfall are waiting for you.

*****Assuming people didn't think you were one of several well-known shit-stirrers on the Gladden-US server and dogpile on you for causing trouble.

Meme Monday: Bird RPG Memes

Courtesy of being serenaded at midnight the past few nights by a mockingbird, I conceived of this particular penance to get the damn bird to shut up.

Yeah, if only that worked IRL.
From Imgflip.

Oh, I GET IT. The early bird gets the worm...
From @swordscomic and dndgear.com.

I dunno. This would be pretty epic if they were geese.
From Camp Dragon.

Well, that's really intimidating.
From Pinterest.

For all of the people who wondered how an ancient
dragon deals with kobolds and whatnot around them...
From Imgflip and @chickenthoughtsofficial.

And Travis Hanson can draw RPG comics for
me ANYTIME. From Travis Hanson (naturally)
and his Life of the Party.

They're a What, Now?

Well, that was my reaction to Nixxiom's latest video on ranking Allied Races from Worst to Best.

Okay, just to get the obvious out of the way, I am aware that the concept of Allied races popped up in Battle for Azeroth (if not all of them), but beyond that I was rather blissfully unaware about anything beyond a couple of names. (::cough:: The Vulpera ::cough::) 

Vulperas. You know, the fox people.
From Facebook and Disney. (Naturally.)

At least in terms of races, I've run into Kul'Tiran and Highmountain Tauren courtesy of Kamalia's blog, but beyond that* a lot of these allied races were kind of just lore points in the past. They were NPCs and whatnot that you encountered along the way, you saw them in an expansion, and then left behind.

Or they were turned from "good" to "bad" (or "bad" to "good") in some weird soap opera-esque manner.**

I guess that means that the Zandalari are the Millhouse Manastorm of the WoW races.

Et tu, Millhouse? I should have just left you
in The Arcatraz to rot. From Wowpedia.

Still, watching this video left me confused. If all they are is simply reskinned other races --Vulpera notwithstanding-- then why not have them as cosmetic options from the get-go? If they are more than a simple reskinning, then hasn't Blizzard made their balancing attempts all the more difficult due to all of these new races to work with?

Eh, whatever. If it works for people, it works. I just look at it as the Paradox of Choice writ large.

From LinkedIn about The Paradox
of Choice by Barry Schwartz.

*And Void Elves, because I can see at least one of them in every graphic concerning Retail's current expansion.

**I'm looking at you, Marlena Evans from Days of our Lives. Am I still salty about that? Uh, kinda, yes.

When Exploring is the Expectation

Not that much to really talk about for this update, aside from the fact that all of the toons involved with Operation: Spread the Love are now at L30 or L31. Which makes it just past the halfway point in levels, but in terms of the leveling process, it's likely more along the lines of 1/3 of the way through to completion. 

Nice to see you, Az. At least you're not threatening me
with bodily harm for the lack of good daggers you've got.
This listing is as of May 7th, 2025.

Why do I say 1/3 of the way through?

Because the amount of XP per level increases by a lot from here on out, and the corresponding speed of leveling slows down quite a bit. Back when I leveled Briganaa for TBC Classic, I did have one great advantage over Vanilla Classic leveling: the mid-30s and mid-40s doldrums were smoothed out in TBC Classic by the addition of more quests and a quest hub in Dustwallow Marsh and an enhancement of the quests in Ashenvale.* With those additional quests in place, and a couple of extra Flight Points sprinkled throughout the two continents, it became easier to get around the world. 

I'm of two minds on the speed of transportation around Azeroth with TBC Classic: a few places that from a game perspective truly needed Flight Points got them --Emerald Sanctuary in Felwood for one major example-- but with those additional Flight Points came the drumbeat for more FPs to be added to the game, which ultimately led to what feels like 10 million of those things in the post-Cataclysm revamp of the Old World. The world shrank and became less about leveling being a major part of the game as the focus shifted strictly toward whatever the current expansion was and explicitly toward Endgame.

I'm also at the level where ranging farther afield becomes the norm, as quests take you all over Azeroth. Sure, you could spend your time in limited locales on the Eastern Kingdoms or the Kaldorei lands of Kalimdor, but beyond the run to Gnomeregan (for the Horde) or to Shadowfang Keep (for the Alliance) you don't have to get out much until quests push you into exploring the opposite continents more thoroughly. 

I remember back in 2009 when I got my first quest to visit Booty Bay and I thought "Where the hell is THAT?" I was determined to figure this out on my own, so by the time I actually got to Booty Bay for the first time it felt like I'd stumbled across this near mythical place. In reality it was very much less so, but nobody told me I could take a boat from Ratchet to head to Booty Bay, so I never knew that. I mean, the Horde used Zeppelins, it was the Alliance that used boats. Hence, I never put two and two together that Goblins of the Steamwheedle Cartel would allow all players to utilize their ships to travel between continents. Given that when I visited Ratchet there typically wasn't a ship there, so it never occurred to me to loiter around to see what happened when one arrived. I mean, I had Mankrik's wife to find, and on a PvP server I very much avoided any contact with Alliance personnel.**

That spike in tension whenever you saw a member of the opposing faction --particularly if they had a Skull where their level number would be-- can only be likened to being ambushed in a survival horror game. Such as what it's like if you get blown up by a Creeper from behind in Minecraft.

HOLY CRAP do I hate these monsters.
From Exitlag.

Oh yeah, I've been noodling about Minecraft lately, but that's neither here nor there. The "Normal" survival game world is the closest I've been to those early days playing WoW, where you're minding your own business and then BOOM you're dead, and there's some Rogue teabagging your body.

It's a nice complement to me fishing to end my game time on the Anniversary servers, as if my heart needs the exercise or something.

Now, where will I end up in two weeks' time? No idea, but I doubt I'll be much farther along than what I am right now. I've got until Q1 of 2026 before TBC drops on the Anniversary servers, and what I'll do once that happens is pure speculation at this point. Maybe I ought to do more speculating while I fish a bit.

*Particularly at the "alternate" locales for quests: Forest Song for Alliance and Zoram'gar Outpost for Horde.

**Remember, I played Horde back then.

Meme Monday: Playing with Family and Friends Memes

Oh, I have my share of stories playing games with the family. Sure, there's the MMO runs with the mini-Reds, but there's also the times playing games where things go crazy or people get upset. Because you family knows how to push your buttons, after all. Then again, playing with friends can end up the same way...

From Pinterest.

Uh, my warm summer nights would be spent
with mosquitos biting me. From Imgflip.

Okay, that was a bit much.
From Reddit, of course.

I have never flipped a game board. However,
I've been playing games where someone DID
flip a game board. That was NOT fun.
From Memesmonkey.