Frikkin boats!

The lull does strange things to you. For example you might read a post by Tamarind about switching from Horde to Alliance and you might find yourself wondering whether trying to go back to the Alliance side of life for a bit yourself wouldn't make for a fun distraction. The short answer so far is yes - even though I don't know anyone on my old Alliance server anymore, the dungeon finder has made it wonderfully easy to just jump into a run and have some fun even without having any connections.

The longer answer is... I'm distracted, but more than anything by the fact that I absolutely hate what Blizzard has done to the Alliance's public transport system since I left, specifically to the boats.

You see, once upon a time, when I was but a wee little newbie night elf who had just discovered Auberdine, boats were very confusing. I mean, here I was, only just exploring my surroundings not that far from the starter zone and feeling relatively safe, and suddenly there were these things that could transport me to places on the other side of the continent - or another continent altogether - where the monsters were level "skull".

Yet at the same time boats made a certain sense in that they were very newbie-friendly. Since all the Alliance ports were connected, strictly speaking there wasn't such a thing as getting on the wrong boat. You might not immediately end up where you intended to go, but if you just kept jumping from boat to boat at each harbour you'd eventually get there.

Auberdine - Menethil Harbour - Theramore

Makes sense, right?

When I made the switch to Horde I discovered that their zeppelins worked in much the same way:

Orgrimmar - Grom'gol - Undercity - Orgrimmar

I often ended up hopping onto the wrong one initially, but it wasn't too big a deal because in the end I'd always get where I wanted to be; it just took a bit longer.

Then WOTLK came, and with it the need to establish connections to Northrend. The Horde dealt with this by erecting extra zeppelin towers in both Orgrimmar and Undercity. This struck me as pretty sensible because it only expanded on the existing blimp network. If say, you accidentally ended up in Warsong Hold even though you wanted to go to Howling Fjord, you could just take the zeppelin back to Orgrimmar, fly from there to Undercity, and then take the flight from there to Vengeance Landing. Everything was still connected.

Now, I was vaguely aware that the Alliance had changed things around a bit more with the addition of Stormwind Harbour, but I fully expected the old adage that you can get anywhere and everywhere by boat to still hold true. My night elf priest's hearth stone is still in Shattrath, so I portaled to Stormwind and made my way to the harbour. A guard informed me that there were boats going out to the Borean Tundra and to Auberdine. Hmm. I wanted to go to Howling Fjord, so I jumped on the boat to night elf lands, firmly convinced that eventually I'd end up at Valgarde, somehow. Until I got off at Auberdine and realised that I had run into a dead end unless I wanted to go to Darnassus or the Exodar. Crap.

This WoWWiki page eventually enlightened me on how to get where I wanted to go, which required me to sail back to Stormwind, fly up to Menethil and then take the boat from there. But really? Considering how extremely large and pompous they made Stormwind Harbour, I really expected it to offer more connections. There are three different boats stopping in Auberdine for Christ's sake, but Stormwind can't handle that kind of traffic? And why oh why did they have to ruin that nice circular system of boat connections that could take you anywhere? The Horde got to keep theirs after all.

Travel with the goblins today! Because humans apparently have no common sense.