This is Getting Ridiculous

Last night I happened to be in Western Plaguelands, finishing up the Key Quest for Scholomance, when I got a whisper out of the blue.

"Hey, our Mage split, are you interested in joining a Scholo run?"

I didn't hesitate.

"Ironically enough, I just finished up the key quest for Scholo. Sure."

After I received the invite and joined, it occurred to me that they might want a Mage after all, especially given that zombie room at the end of the instance.* I offered to switch to Cardwyn, and the Lead (a Paladin) said he was fine with me as-is. So I took a quick peek at the classes we had while I ran over: Paladin, Warlock, Shaman, Hunter...

Hunter? Wait just a fucking minute. Is that...

I bit back a scream. 

"You have got to be kidding me!" I growled.**

Yes, it was that Hunter. Again.

Since I'd not been here at the beginning of the run, I couldn't demand that the Group Lead get rid of the guy, and since my immediate dropping would be a bad look in general, I decided I was merely going to keep an eye on that Hunter and call out any shenanigans. Besides, the rest of the group seemed decent enough.

The group had already cleared through to Rattlegore, so that made things pretty straightforward. We go kill the lich Ras Frostwhisper, head back to the last section where the final seven bosses are, and finish things up. That was when I discovered that for a few people in the group it was their first time: first time tanking in Scholo, first time healing (ever), and my first time in Scholo on this toon. The Warlock was there for the stage of the Warlock's mount quest (something I've never done), and thankfully for us she was L61. That meant we had someone who could bring decently big damage numbers to the group.

It was then that I made the decision to help out the tank by describing the mechanics for each boss and room so we wouldn't wipe. It also meant that once I put the right mechanics out there, if the Hunter did any crap it would be caught immediately. 

Bottom left. That's the guy.

We muddled through, with only two of us surviving the zombie room, and we eventually managed to down Alexei Barov with only the healer still standing. I kept telling the ranged people to move farther back***, but the Hunter kept moving in close --taking a lot of extra damage-- and distracting the Healer.

Still, we survived the rest of the dungeon and I complimented the group for their work. "Especially since we were a bit underpowered for run," I added.

The group lead whispered me:

After the Lock had left, I whispered to the group lead to kick the Hunter, and then I explained to the two remaining what my experience was in BRD with that guy. It turns out our "friend" had been doing terrible numbers again all night, so we were effectively 4-manning Scholo with only one group member able to bring big damage numbers. Also, while I was a group member I noted that the Healer got their healing upgrades without any surprise Needs from the Hunter. I'm sure that my presence helped a bit, because he likely knew he wasn't going to get away with misbehavior from that end. 

Still, I have to stop running into this guy. It's not good for my mental health.

*For the uninitiated, there's something like 20-30 so-called "Unstable Corpses" in one of the rooms, and if you attack one they all come after you. They don't have a lot of health, but when you kill them they go BOOM! and explode for lots of damage. So yeah, not a very fun room to do if you don't have the ability to dump a lot of damage.

**Not that loud, because it was after 11 PM and my wife had gone to bed.

***Alexei has an AoE damage that radiates from himself; the farther away you are the less damage you take. The tank and I had to be in close to melee attack him, but everybody else was ranged so they should moved way back to minimize the damage.

Is This Groundhog Day or Something?

Maybe I shouldn't have posted yesterday about my experience in Blackrock Depths.

Last night's BRD run ended up only slightly farther than the one before it, but we had an issue in the Tavern once again. This time we somehow had the entire bar aggro against us, which led to several wipes until we finally cleared the entire tavern. During this time one player would repeatedly drop and we'd have to replace them, which led to one disgruntled person whispering me that our group leader was an ass. If there was stuff going on via whispers, I wasn't seeing it, but I did know that our Healer and one DPS were L50, both of whom could only be carried so far. 

However, at one point during the eternal replacement process a new player joined and I immediately bit back a scream.

It was the Hunter from the night before. 

I immediately whispered the group lead to dump that guy, and he obliged. I had been telling the group about that Hunter the night before, so when I mentioned in group chat that THAT was the guy, the tank spoke up that the Hunter was a known griefer.

So. Not a bot, but someone worse.

Oh yay.

Restoring the Balance

I was due for a bad experience, I suppose.

After all, I'd been playing on the Anniversary servers since late 2024, and I'd had overall a good time grouping with people for instances. Unlike the pugs I'd been in from TBC Classic and Wrath Classic from 2021-2023, I found it far more enjoyable in a relaxed setting since the crowd that rushed to the end had already gotten to max level ages ago. Even now on the Anniversary servers with the Dark Portal having only been open a short time, that crowd was already steamrolling Karazhan instead of working a new toon up to Outland. 

So I was a bit unprepared for what happened last night.

I'd gotten to the point where Briganaa 2.0 could finally go to Blackrock Depths*, so I started looking for a group. Within 10 minutes I found myself in one, and I headed over to Searing Gorge to lope to Blackrock Mountain.

The first indication that something might be amiss was when I began seeing "No, you're summoning me, summon Brig" in Party Chat. Then a minute later, "No, NOT me. Click on Brig, then click the stone."

I eventually did get a summons to inside the mountain, and we waited on the tank to go repair and our healer to get some more water. Both tank and healer reappeared, and we all ran down together and into the instance. 

Except for the Hunter.

"Help me," the Hunter eventually called out.

So we ran outside, expecting to see Dark Iron dwarves beating on him just outside the instance, but nope. Instead of following us down, he ran up and was wandering in the outer ring at the entrance of Blackrock Mountain.

Uh oh.

I had no idea why he decided to wander off, but there it was, Strike One.**

We eventually corralled our wayward Hunter and restarted the instance.

The group was doing okay, making progress, but I did have my concerns. We didn't have a lot of AoE damage in the group, which meant that the quick respawn room, where hordes of Dark Iron conscripts wandered about in packs of about 8-10, would be a big issue. But before we could even think about getting there, however, the Warrior whispered me, "Shouldn't the Hunter be at the top of the meters?"

Knowing how Hunters as a group tend to be infatuated with big DPS numbers, frequently to the point of ripping threat away from the tank, I replied with an affirmative.

"He's only doing 78 DPS right now."

Now, for full disclosure, while I use the Details DPS Meter add-on, I typically use its TinyThreat option to manage my own threat. I've learned since 2019 to not bother looking at my DPS output, because it would merely depress me, but at that moment I thought about switching back to the DPS tab just to see what our Hunter was doing.

But still, our slow but steady progress suddenly made sense. If the Hunter was putting out barely any damage, we were effectively 4-manning a 5 person instance. 

I thought about inspecting the Hunter, just to see what his gear was, but I became too focused on keeping up with the group and managing totems that I let it slide.

That was Strike Two.

Then the Hunter started rolling Need on gear that was most definitely NOT for him.

The Hunter won some Leather gear that multiple people could have used --myself included-- so I didn't complain about that. Hey, that's the breaks of rolls, right? But when the Hunter rolled need and won a pair of Leather healing gloves, I said something. 

"Hey, that's Healer gloves, not Hunter gloves."

I got no response.

After that point, I began keeping a close eye on what the Hunter was rolling Need on. We didn't have any obvious gear that the "Everything is a Hunter Weapon" stereotype would have rolled on, so I began to consider this just a mistake and that the Hunter simply didn't have English as his first language.

Then this dropped off of Golem Lord Argelmach:

I hadn't seen this drop since I first began
playing Classic in 2019, which is saying something.
I have seen Hand of Justice several times, but not this.

I immediately congratulated the Healer on his luck, because this thing has something like a 3-5% drop rate, and is a fantastic trinket for Healers.***

Then I saw "Unc NOOO" in the chat, and I realized what had happened: The Hunter had rolled Need on the trinket and won it.

Strike Three.

The rest of us immediately began telling the Hunter that was simply not a cool thing to do, and I floated in whispers the idea of kicking the Hunter, because he seemed to simply have no remorse at all. He eventually said "sory" (spelled like that), but I didn't buy it. The only real problem was getting another player as replacement, since it was well past my usual bedtime and we were pretty far into the instance. 

We reached the tavern in Blackrock Depths, and we ran over to the storeroom where Hurley Blackbreath's casks of ale were stored. You can start the Hurley fight by destroying the casks, or you could start a fight with the Goblin Ribby Screwspigot and pull him into the storeroom to prevent him from aggroing the nearby bar patrons. The tank ran out of the storeroom to pick a fight with Ribby, and just as he came back inside I suddenly saw our Hunter begin destroying the nearby casks. 

"NOO!!!" I yelled. "STOP!"

The Hunter ignored me and destroyed the rest of the casks, and Hurley ran in while we were up to our eyeballs with Ribby. 

Oh crap.

The Hunter then proceeded to shoot at and pull a bunch of nearby Bar Patrons and then dropped group. 

We might have been good enough to handle some Bar Patrons and one boss, but not both bosses and the Bar Patrons. It was about 12 versus 4, and we quickly wiped.

"Why did he do that?" The tank asked.

"That [expletive redacted] did that on purpose," I replied. "We called him out and he wiped us in response."

"He was barely doing any damage at all," the Warrior added. "The healer was doing more than him."

"More than me? I wasn't attacking at all!"

"Probably totem damage," I added. "Besides, he stole that trinket from you."

"I lost the trinket and the gloves to him."

We gamely made an attempt to finish the Hurley Blackbreath fight, but we discovered that he runs out the back of the Tavern if he defeats you, and by the time we got to the Tavern the random mob that shows up at the back entrance was already there. We tried to kill the mob, but we inadvertently pulled more Bar Patrons, and that was that.

***

I was initially certain all of this was done maliciously and from the standpoint of pure greed, but after a night's sleep I now think that the Hunter was actually a bot. 

The lack of damage output, the rolling Need on blue items that a Hunter could use (but not on gear a Hunter could not equip), the lack of response other than "help me" or "sory" or "lol" out of him, and him following very specific patterns (starting the Hurley Blackbreath fight instead of Ribby, which is the "traditional" pattern for a BRD run), and using multi-shot which pulled nearby Bar Patrons are all things a bot could now be programmed to do. 

After the group broke up, I'd checked to see if the Hunter had vanished completely, but I noted he'd immediately gone to Felwood, not only a level-appropriate questing zone but also a zone where bots are well known to farm Felcloth and other materials.

So yeah, I think we were taken in by a bot who did just barely enough to keep us guessing. None of us also wanted to jump to the immediate conclusion that he was actively sabotaging our group, and our initial reaction to the gradual escalation of anti-social behavior was that it was a language barrier. It was only when it had become obvious did we call him out, and I guess the bot's controller decided it was better to split before anything else. 

Or, as the Warrior put it, "He took advantage of us trying to be nice."

I did tell the rest of the group that I enjoyed running with them, and hopefully I'll see them in Outland. 

Just not that Hunter.

*I typically look for a group to run an instance when I've accumulated enough quests to visit the instance. In the original Vanilla leveling design, you gain access to the quests (and are marked as "yellow" on the Quest Log) when you're the right level for a dungeon. The biggest exception to this rule are the Scarlet Monastery instances for an Alliance player, because the Alliance gains access to a seed quest that leads to Scarlet Monastery at Level 35, easily past the level requirement for the first wing of SM (Graveyard) and on the high side for the requirement for the second wing (Library). Ideally, you'd want to visit Graveyard around L30-32, not L36 (which is what you'll end up at by the time you complete the seed quest on the other side of the planet and head over to Southshore). Library is more about L33-36, so while L36 fits it just barely does.

**The baseball analogy is highly appropriate today, as it's Opening Day for Major League Baseball in Cincinnati. Being the home of the oldest professional baseball franchise, the Cincinnati Reds (Est. 1869), Opening Day includes a parade and all sorts of pagentry. Kids frequently skip school to go to downtown with their parents to watch the parade, see the game, and (hopefully) celebrate an Opening Day victory.

**I don't care if the "official" drop rate is something about 8-12%, because my experience is that it's more aligned with what the community sees as 3-5%.

The Joy of Random Encounters

It's kind of strange how fast I'm leveling on the Anniversary servers given that I'm not actively trying to slow it down. I'm not trying to affect how I play, either, it's just happening on its own.

"If I could walk on water..."
I'm sure Eddie Money never thought of this...

Of course, this is all relative. Being at L51 right now in late March, about 1.5 months after the Dark Portal opened on the Anniversary servers would be considered frightfully slow if this were Retail WoW or even among those who wanted to raid on the Anniversary servers, but compared to how I've leveled in the past* it seems extremely fast.

I'm doing this while still finding the time to just do stuff I find interesting.

The other day I was heading south from Desolace to the primordial forests of Feralas when I came across a Blood Elf Hunter well under the average level for the zone. She appeared to be heading toward Camp Mojache, the Horde base in the center of the zone, which I can completely understand. I personally would have approached this from the east, where the lower level mobs for the zone were, but I can't assume that this player would have known that. 

So anyway, she was riding south and I passed her not too far away from the Ruins of Ravenwind when she'd paused for a moment. For some reason my Spidey-sense went off and I swung the camera around just in time to see her get attacked by a bear out of the brush. She was Horde, but she was also about 8 levels under that bear that jumped her. 

I quickly realized she was in deep trouble, so I went back and attacked the bear, ripping threat away from her and dispatching the bear in short order. 

What to do now? 

Well, I switched back to ghost wolf and escorted the Hunter all the way to Mojache.

I love the name Callindaria. It feels like
a fantastic name for a Sindorei.

At first I think she believed I was waiting for an opportunity to attack her, but eventually she just kept going once she realized I wasn't turning off to go to either Feathermoon Stronghold or Dire Maul. The ghost wolf form isn't as fast as even a basic mount, so when she'd get decently far in front of me she'd pause to let me catch up. When we were close to Ogre camps along the way, she let me take the lead until the danger was behind us.

We passed several other Horde players heading the other way, but nobody turned around to help her along the road. 

Once we got close enough to Camp Mojache where I could see the pair of Tauren guards at the entrance, I stopped and waved goodbye. I think she was confused, as she turned back and looked at me for a few moments, but I sat down and waited until she swung around and rode off toward the base.

"Go on, kid. It wouldn't end well if I got any closer."

It's just little encounters like that, which only take about 5-10 minutes tops, that make my day. I get far more out of a random encounter than any other aspect of an MMO.

***

In other news, I've been a baaad WoW player. 

I have had the music turned off for the longest time; not because I don't like it, but because I listen to other things while playing. Sometimes I'm in Discord, and others I'm just listening to a podcast or other music. 

To be fair, sometimes your encounters in-game don't really mesh with the game music, such as the music for The Lion's Pride Inn not exactly meshing with the reality of Goldshire in Moon Guard.

I sure hope that the pink glow is accompanied
by a healthy dose of Lysol to clean the place.

And there are times when music I find online actually fits much better for my mood. 

Leyna Robinson-Stone is a tin whistle musician on YouTube who has plenty of music videos for the tin whistle. When I became re-acquainted with the whistle a couple of years ago I discovered her work and subscribed to her channel. 

This particular short is a duet with another whistle player,

CutiePie, who also has a a LOT of instructional videos.

One of her posts from over a year ago recently appeared in my feed, and I found her original piece fit the wilds of Feralas incredibly well. 

Going from Eddie Money to atmospheric tin whistle in one post. Go figure.

*Even back in my time on Retail in 2009 - 2014. My first experience on WoW, I literally didn't know any better (and I was leveling a Holy Paladin, so a big strike against me), but my later experiences were leveling to pursue different goals that were most definitely NOT optimal. Nobody goes leveling via Battlegrounds thinking it was going to be quick and easy.

Meme Monday: Miscellaneous Memes for March 2026

As usual, time to go and rummage through my pile of memes that I haven't used yet. So... Have fun!

Yeah, it's a problem that MMOs tend to have.
From Imgflip.

Because meeting at a tavern is so blase.
From Quickmeme.

I laughed when I saw this. From Facebook.

From Tiktok.

Ha! I'd be buff too! From Shen Comix.

Me too... Yes, me too...
From Tumblr.

Early Saturday Musings

I was at our local indie bookstore last night, and I came across this magazine:

Bhagpuss, this one's for you.

That --and the other magazine I found below-- got me to thinking about how different we looked in our youth.

I can't get over how young Sammy
Hagar and the late Eddie Van Halen looked.

I was at the car dealer the other day to get one of our cars worked on* when a woman sat down in the cubby next to mine. I was focusing on a conference call at the time, so I didn't really pay attention at first, but then I realized I was looking at a blast from the past. Her hairdo looked exactly like Suzanna Hoffs in The Bangles...

Circa mid-1980s.

I hadn't seen that sort of hairstyle in person in at least a few decades, but there this woman was, working away on her laptop while also examining her phone for data. I made a point not to stare, because that's just creepy, but I took enough in to know she was likely half my age.

Did I just miss something and that 40 year old fashion and music are coming back?

Nah, not likely. I'm just imagining things. 

What I'm not imagining is that 50 years ago, this album was released:

Had to chase down a good looking cover from
Amazon of all places.

Or this album:

And this one came from Facebook.

I've known this was coming for a long time, because I'm in my upper 50s, and I've been watching albums that formed my youth reach these major milestones. There's also Hotel California --of which my freshman college roommate went to hear a preacher "deconstruct" that album to prove it was Satanic-- Bob Seger's Night Moves, KISS's Destroyer, The Ramones' self-titled First Album, Peter Frampton's Frampton Comes Alive, and Queen's A Night at the Opera. 

We are now 50 years away from 1976, which is farther away than 1976 was from the Big Band Era of the mid-1930s through the late 1940s. It's amazing to me just how far we've come, from music, fashion, and other things. (Just remember, kids, next year is the 50th anniversary of the Atari 2600, which got a lot of your parents interested in video games.)

My own hair has receded and thinned a bit --the kids poke fun at me for that-- and my beard is now mostly grey rather than red, but I don't feel massively different than I did 20 or 30 years ago. Obviously, that has more to do with gradual changes over time, just like how I never noticed that I lost my ability to hear 15,000 Hertz until a couple of years ago when I was running a sound check on the speakers I'd built. 

Just a few thoughts about how things have changed. One thing that hasn't changed, however, is that I'm still listening to music from 1976. Not exclusively --Bhagpuss sees to that with his regular music posts-- but those albums are still in regular rotation.

*Just an oil change and tire rotation. No new issues were discovered this time around.

I Don't think I Could Sit for That Long

Over the course of the past several days, I watched Jeff Kaplan's interview with Lex Fridman. I was clued into it by Josh Strife Hayes, and after his commentary about it I searched and found the full 5+ hour interview on YouTube:

Yes, it's 5 hours 10 minutes.

And yes, it's worth the full time. 

But yes, that full length meant I broke down the interview into 1 hour chunks. (Your mileage may vary.)

From my perspective, there are three big takeaways from the interview:

• He's seen some shit.
  
  

  

  "That was just the biggest 'fuck you' moment I had
  in my career. It felt surreal to be in that condition..."
  Screencap from the interview.

  
  Maybe I'm reading too much into the look on his face, but he gives off that thousand yard stare at times. I look at him and think that this is what I'd look like if I hadn't changed jobs back in 2001. (My kids would say that about some of my more recent foibles, but I'm not so sure. I guess it's left as an exercise to the people who know me to provide details.)
  
  
  
  
• The corporate execs at the end were complete idiots who only saw things through the lens of dollar signs.
  
  Yes, you can say that any business is in it to make money, but when some of the shenanigans that went on with Overwatch went down, Jeff had finally had it and left. I'll leave it to you to find the spot in the interview, because the full interview provided the amount of heft of what leaving Blizzard meant to Jeff. Lex did bleep out some specific numbers to protect Jeff's NDA, but regardless I felt like punching a wall or something when I saw that part. 
  
  
  

  

  From Rick and Morty.

  
  Jeff had every right to be upset, and I'm sure that I could find out exactly who he was talking about in that part of the interview, but I'd really rather not dwell on the injustice of it all. Jeff wasn't the one overpromising on the Overwatch League, and he was the one caught in the crosshairs of trying to keep riding the Overwatch wave and keeping it fresh while working on Overwatch 2. 
  
  
• Jeff is proof that you do not need an IT or a business degree to leave your mark in gaming. His degree is in creative writing, and it was his passion for gaming that eventually led to his employment at Blizzard. While yes, he's often poked fun of for making the original Green Hills of Stranglethorn questline in WoW (he talks about that in the interview, by the way) I'm also confident that he had a big hand in the Defias questline that I love so much. In the interview, he mentioned that Pat Nagle worked on quests for Elwynn Forest and he took Westfall, which meant that he was working on quests in the heart of the Defias territory. 

It's a fascinating interview, and I'm glad that Jeff seems to be slowly coming out of his funk after leaving Blizzard. Now I really want to read Play Nice by Jason Schreier, about the rise and fall of Blizzard Entertainment.