Okay, Break's Over

One thing I learned while I was away from MMOs for a week was that the world doesn't end if I stop playing.

Okay, that's a bit of hyperbole, but given how FOMO-driven video games tend to be these days, you'd be forgiven if you thought that the weight of the (virtual) world rested on your shoulders.*

That's the sort of quip that I could see Seth
McFarlane make. From Reddit.

I have wondered whether I have the willpower to give up playing WoW again, especially given that I do have an active circle of friends in-game, which is something that simply did not exist in 2014.** That wasn't why I took the break, but the knowledge that there were people who would notice if I weren't around certainly kept me on edge to a degree. 

Sure enough, after the weekend I got pinged by my Questing Buddy to see if I was doing okay. While we hadn't actually played together in-game for close to a year now --she having gone down the hardcore route to complete all the raids (and even managing to get an Atiesh)-- we do still chat regularly, and she and the rest of the group had noticed my absence even though it was only 3-4 days at that point. After assuring her I was fine, just doing other things for a while, I concluded that I couldn't simply vanish unlike 2014 (and to a lesser extent in 2022). 

From The Simpsons (via Tenor).

So when I felt ready to login once more last Friday evening, I discovered a few items of note: my friends were doing their own thing as they always had, and that the active population on the Anniversary servers had shrunk.

The former wasn't a surprise to me at all, since everybody in our friends' group has their own goals and are currently pursuing them, but the latter was. After a few weeks of upwards of 20 layers' worth of active players on the Anniversary Servers, we were down to 9 or 10 layers over this past weekend. 

The layers as of 6:51 Server Time
on Dreamscythe-US on March 16, 2026.

Now admittedly I'm not sure if people in instances count against layers, but given that players were chain-running 5-person instances once the Dark Portal opened, I really doubt there'd be much of a change in population simply because Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, and Magtheridon's Lair had opened up. I think what is currently happening is that people either burned out rushing to L70 and getting attuned as quickly as possible, or that people are merely raid logging because they can. 

I haven't been to Outland yet, but given that the main hub there, Shattrath City, is connected to the other major cities via Trade Chat, I know that people haven't been pulling out the "I'm Bored" complaint as is often found in MMOs, so I suspect it's merely raid logging for now. 

***

Well, I'm refreshed. 

And I'm back to doing the same thing I had been doing, which was leveling Briganaa 2.0, and to a lesser extent my Blood Elf pair of toons. If the in-game population of the Anniversary servers continues to decline, by the time I reach Outland I will have the place to myself as everybody will be raid-logging and not doing much else. I won't know for certain until I get there, but I expect that the people running TBC 5-person instances will have dried up just like in 2021, victims of burnout due to following the meta. 

To be honest, that would suit me just fine. I don't need the crowds, and I'm happy doing what I should have done 5 years ago. Live and learn, I guess.

*I'm quite familiar with how FOMO is used to make people play and purchase in-game currency with my limited experience with mobile games. There was a mobile game --whose name escapes me now-- that I played via PC that I simply refused to purchase anything for, but the psychological tricks utilized to try to entice me to purchase currency to buy better items for defense gradually ratcheted up to the point where I simply had to walk away or I knew I'd have broken down and bought stuff just to try to keep up with other players. I'm sure my castle or city is a smoking ruin right now, years later, because of other players who ran roughshod over it in the intervening time. But it was incredibly hard to both walk away and not buy things to improve my standing in the game. And that was.... 2014? 2015? Mobile games have gotten MUCH worse in that regard in the past decade.

**Yes, I had my blogger friends, and you know who you are, but except for the rare direct interaction we didn't play WoW together. Vidyala once offered me a spot in her guild, but as I was quite aware that she'd be making an exception for me as a non-raider I turned it down. I didn't feel it was right for the rules to be bent just because she and I knew each other outside of the game itself. 

Meme Monday: Taking a Break Memes in 2026

All in all, I took over 8 days off from MMOs. It was very much needed, and gave me the chance to recharge a bit. It may sound funny saying so, because a video game ought to be fun, but try telling that to people who are on progression raid teams. Oh, the participants may claim it's fun, but the effort it takes to do raiding and/or Retail-esque Mythic Plus dungeon runs is not a trivial enterprise.

For some people leveling another alt IS
the break. From Facebook's Warcraft Memes group.

Yeah, this is not unheard of in WoW.
From Reddit. (And Twitter.)

To some people, this IS how they get breaks
from MMOs. From meme-arsenal.

It goes without saying that everybody needs a break
from time to time, whether or not Oprah is the provider.
From Twitter and Webengage.

Ha! I'm probably going to be struck by
lightning for this one. From Reddit.

See? Taking a break is a good thing and should
be encouraged. From Memedroid.

This'll Be Your Big Chance To Get Away From It All

Outside of checking out a few cities in Retail (as seen in the previous post), I took the past several days off from playing WoW.

I'd like to say that I had projects that had priority over any video game playing, but that wasn't the case. I simply didn't feel like logging in and playing on my Alliance toons. I did check the bank alts a couple of times to make sure I wasn't losing anything via in-game mail*, but beyond that, I didn't do much.

This is but one page of my "junk" mail.

This sort of break is a necessary part of any endeavor, and because I have no external pressure to complete anything in-game** I can take as many breaks as I need. This was something I sorely missed in 2021, and I fully intend to take advantage of my lack of commitment right now.

So. 

What have I been doing?

Thinking about this...

No, this is not my house. From a
reviewer at The Home Depot's website.

Yes, it's creeping toward gardening season, and I've already obtained some seeds for this year. And this year, I'm actually going to put in a couple of raised beds in the backyard so I can plant a vegetable garden in the yard, the first one since the mini-Reds were little. (Here's to hoping the deer won't be that hungry...)

Outside of that, I've just been taking a mental break. Goofing around, doing this and that, and catching up on some of my writing.

By the time this posts I might be back into WoW, but whether or not isn't that great of a concern. What's important is that I enjoy what I'm doing.

*If you're like me and have far too much accumulated junk for a bank alt or two, you just move stuff around via in-game mail. In WoW at least, you have 30 days before the mail (and attachments) returns to the sender, and then 30 days it can sit in the sender's inbox before it's automatically removed. So, if you keep up with juggling in-game mail, you can move a ton of stuff around.

**Relatively speaking, of course. My friends group would want me to get to Outland and level faster --it's not quite so overt right now but it's one of those generally understood things-- but I'm being my contrarian self right now and am actively resisting that.

Some More Exploration

I suspect that I'm the sort of player that Blizzard likes to pretend doesn't exist. Or, if we do exist, my sort of player is in such few numbers that they don't pop up on their activity data in a meaningful way.

I mean, I prefer visiting this place in Retail:

I think there might have been a toon or two around here,
but I didn't poke my nose into the bank area so wasn't certain.

Or this place:

Running around on March 8, 2026, I was literally
the only player here.

Or this place:

Nobody here either.

Here's the screenshot that shows I was in the
Cataclysm version of Theramore, not the Mists
or later version. Those tanks only appeared in Cata,
and if you got through Mists and the Event, there's
just rubble here. (I think; I never did it.)

There were some new toons I saw at the place shown below, however...

Which is to be expected given that Blood Elves
got an, uh, extreme makeover for this expac. But
this version of Falcon Watch is one of my favorite
spots in Eversong, right next to Fairbreeze Village.

If you're like me, you can still visit the old BE areas all you want without ever having to think about anything post-2007:

I had to manually accept the "catch up" Dragonflight quest so I could hide it from my screen --you simply can't hide it any other way-- and I finally figured out how to turn off the "You HAVE to select a combat specialization" persistent pop-up (HINT: It's buried in the tutorial settings). Now I can sightsee without the constant prodding to go and progress, level up, or just do something other than what I'm currently doing. 

If there's a reason why I'm reluctant to go to Outland in the Anniversary Edition of TBC Classic, it's the constant prodding to "Do your dailies!" once you reach max level. Not by the game itself per se, but by everybody else in the game. And once Quel'Danas opens up in probably September or October, there will likely be people loudly banging a drum to do the Quel'Danas dailies (to unlock more content) wherever you go. It's as if in the carrot vs. stick argument on how to get people to do things, Blizzard prefers using the carrot while the player base uses the stick.

***

This expac-sized phasing in various locales, which is what it really is when you break it down, demonstrates that Blizzard could bring back the pre-Cataclysm Old World into Retail if they decided to make an effort at it. They wouldn't get the Classic crowd to return to Retail, because the elephant in the room is that the Classic crowd prefers the gameplay of pre-Cataclysm WoW, so the only people a pre-Cata restoration would service are those Retail players who want to go back to see the early days without losing all of the conveniences and gameplay of Retail WoW. And as my explorations demonstrate, there's almost nobody in Retail who's interested in the Old World anyway.

This does make me wonder just how much longer some of these old zones will remain active and visitable. All the processing power and storage involved in these areas that nobody visits do cost the Blizzard Division of Microsoft a certain amount of money, and if push came to shove I could see Blizzard deciding as a cost-cutting measure just going ahead and archiving these old zones to be spun up when they put on a special limited-time event. 

I can't keep these areas alive just by visiting, so I'm going to enjoy them while I can. 

***

Oh, and this is just a non-gaming related bonus.

Last week on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, the in-house band (Louis Cato and the Great Big Joy Machine) played with Hozier and Lake Street Dive in a rendition of A Little Help From My Friends...

Meme Monday: Rainy Memes

This past week has been a wee bit rainy.

It's not monsoon levels of rain --far from it, in fact-- but we got about two months' worth of rain in one week. There was enough rain that I half-expected to see somebody constructing an ark, but nobody was that enterprising of a soul in my neighborhood. We did get a bit of water in the basement, but my redirecting the drainage around the house last Fall apparently was a good enough of a job that the amount of water was pretty minimal compared to last Winter. 

Still, that got me to thinking about rain in gaming. 

A lot of times, rain is a minimal inconvenience; a bit of background flavor. However, if you've ever been caught out in the rain, it can suck if you're not prepared. And then try to imagine being caught in the rain in armor --modern or medieval or ancient, doesn't matter-- and slogging through the mud and the muck to get to wherever you're going, and yeah, rain is a bigger deal than we tend to think it is.

I thought that the beginning of Helm's Deep
was a master class in the impact of rain.
From Reddit and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

Therefore, in honor of that past week's worth of rain --thankfully it's sunny as I write this-- here's some memes about rain in RPGs and gaming.

I have to admit it's one of the more unique
ways of introducing everybody in a new
RPG campaign. From Instagram.

It's a D&D meme to have a Cleric bless
the clouds so that they'll rain holy water,
but this takes that meme to its logical
conclusion. From Imgflip via Twitter.

I guess you could say I'm glad I'm not in it.
From Twitter.

And yes, there's always that Tauren joke
about rain. From Twitter.

How to Spend a Saturday Afternoon

This past weekend my wife and I visited the Cincinnati Art Museum. She was there to see the What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine exhibit* and I was just there to enjoy the regular exhibit halls.

The view from the grand staircase to one of the
second floor alcoves. I just love the quirkiness
of the place. And yes, that's all marble.

The regular part of the Art Museum is free to all attendees, and has been free since 2003. So from my perspective there's almost no reason to not go, unless you're not really fond of art. 

***

One of the things that I've pondered while wandering the halls is what the subjects of the art were thinking about while the creation process unfolded. 

Now, admittedly the subjects of modern art don't necessarily need to be the center of attention for more than the minimal amount of time it takes to take plenty of snapshots, but in previous centuries, that was not the case. The subject of a painting or sculpture may have had to pose for hours or days or more at a time before the artist no longer needed the subject, and in some of the paintings I wondered how on earth they kept the kids still, let alone the adults...

Self-portrait of Erasmus Quellinus
with his wife Catherina de Hemelaer
and son Jan Erasmus Quellinus.
Found in the Dutch Gallery at CAM.

Portrait of The Hodges Family, circa 1766,
by Nathaniel Dance-Holland.
Found in the British Gallery at CAM.

And then there are scenes from life, and I couldn't help but wonder how much of this was purely the vision in the artist's head and how much was something they saw that they wanted to capture...

The Music Party by Gerard ter Borch,
circa 1670. The young man's heart is in his eyes
while he watches the young woman playing.
Found in the Dutch Gallery at CAM.

Two Girls Fishing by John Singer Sargent, 1912.
Despite clothing definitely not suited toward
fishing (at least from today's eyes), the girls
are bound and determined to have a good time.
Found in one of the American Galleries at CAM.

The Italian Comedians, by Philip Mercier,
circa 1735-1740. And I have NO idea where
he's looking at... /snicker
I believe I found it in the French Gallery at CAM.

And then you get to some paintings that are just purely out of the mind of the artist. You can't say that and not pull out this Hogarth:

Southwick Fair by William Hogarth, 1733.
No, this is not the original, as it is supposedly
held in a private collection, but this is one of the
prints found here and at other major art institutions.
Found in the British Gallery at CAM.

***

Paintings are one thing, but sculpture? That's quite another. Sure, there's a vision in the marble that the artist wants to come out, but often there's also a model involved. 

Dour is a good description of this
bust of The Reverend Lyman A. Beecher
by Caroline Wilson (~1860). And yes, if that name
rings a bell, he was a prominent abolitionist
and the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who
wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. Found in one of 
the CAM American Galleries.

When I think of Prosperine, the Roman
Goddess of the Underworld, I don't think
of such a thoughtful gaze as that found on
this bust by Hiram Powers (~1843).
Found in the Cincinnati Wing of CAM.

Eve Disconsolate, by Hiram Powers
(1858-1860). Given that the alternate
title is Paradise Lost, I get the reason for Eve's
expression, but when I gaze upon her I often
wonder what the model for this statue was
thinking when Hiram began his work.
Found in the Cincinnati Wing of CAM.

The Last Arrow by Randolph Rogers, (1879-1880).
There's also a casting at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York City. Found in the American Wing of CAM.

***

But perhaps my single favorite piece of artwork found at the Cincinnati Art Museum is a rather unassuming still life painted by Pieter Claesz in 1641...

Still Life (Ontbijtstuk with Berkemeyer) by Pieter
Claesz (circa 1641). Found in the Dutch Gallery of CAM.

I mean, there's not a lot to the painting, but the simplicity of the still life says so much about Pieter. They could afford citrus fruits, as the lemon in front and the fruit in the cobbler can attest, and it just radiates a simple meal that one might enjoy on a Sunday for lunch. It's the sort of meal that someone could have even today and not feel out of place. 

***

I don't have the inspiration or talent that the artists whose work populates the Cincinnati Art Museum or any other innumerable galleries around the globe, but I can enjoy their work. Actively seeking it out brings a sort of exhilaration to me, that the fruits of inspiration are here for all to see. I also get such a rush from seeing live concerts or wandering parks and gardens, but there's a special place in my heart for an art museum. And there always will be.

*Growing up I didn't read MAD Magazine that much, but Cracked instead. At our Catholic grade school, copies of Cracked were passed around as if they were copies of Playboy. To be honest, from the nuns' perspective the subversiveness of both MAD and Cracked were just as dangerous as any copy of Playboy or Penthouse.

EtA: Corrected a misspelling and restored "young" to a description.

EtA: Corrected a further grammatical error. Whoopsie.

News and Notes From My Adventures

Alas, Quintalan's hardcore run on the Anniversary servers has come to an end.

RIP...

He made it within a half a level of 20, which exceeded the other two. I knew he was in trouble when I had two Scourge from the Dead Scar on me and I missed 2-3 times in a row on attacks. For the record, the pair of baddies were lower level than me, but when you miss enough times in a row you're going to be in trouble. I'd already used my "Get Out of Jail Free" ability, so when I was at 50% health I faced a decision to either cut and run or heal myself.

I tried healing myself, but I kept getting pushback while casting to the point where I had to try to bolt and run when I was at much lower health. And... that was that.

***

My Enhancement Shaman, Briganaa 2.0, continues to level much quicker than expected. 

That's all relative, of course, because if this were 2021 she'd already be in Outland, but compared to my experiences in the Vanilla version of Operation: Spread the Love she's positively rocketing forward at L36. Part of the reason why she's leveling so quickly is that she has absolutely no problems at all finding groups to get into dungeons with. That doesn't mean I'm leveling using dungeons, but I only consider it when I reach the correct level range for a dungeon and have done enough quests out in the world. Still, being an Enhance Shaman means that tanks love me for the bonuses I can bring to the team, and casters love the Mana Totems I can put down. 

And what's most important is that nobody bitches about whether I'm optimizing myself or not. 

From The O.C. (and Yarn) Remember that show?

***

When I'm not putzing around on the lowbie toons, I've been prepping the L60s for when they go to Outland.

How, you may ask?

Cue Theme from The Andy Griffith Show.

Or this...

Yes, doing quests that I'd left in my Quest Log.

Now, to be fair, I'd have put "Cooking" or "Leveling First Aid" here, but the "Person is Cooking" or "Making Bandages" animations don't look very exciting. (So, they are not here.)

I'm also trying to get all of my professions to their max level --okay, not Enchanting, because if I wanted to do that I'd be stuck in the Old World until November-- but everything else is fair game. Hmm... about Blacksmithing... Uh, yeah, maybe I'll add that to Enchanting.

It works for me, and keeps me from crossing the Dark Portal until I'm good and ready. 

***

As far as Retail goes, Stormwind on Moon Guard is still really empty...

As of last night.

But I did see this little item in my chat window, which amused me to no end...

Considering I was running from Goldshire to Stormwind, I had a good laugh. 

And let's just say that most of the Lion's Pride crowd must be at whatever the new max level is, as they were back. 

No, I didn't take a screenshot this time, and let's just leave it at that. There were... reasons... why I didn't take a screencap.

EtA: Corrected a formatting error.

EtA: Corrected some grammar.