Alas, Poor Decor Duels

In unexpected news, Blizzard announced on Tuesday that Decor Duels will be going away with the launch of patch 12.1 in August. They were only added in April, as one of the new side activities to do in patch 12.0.5. I did say at the time that they were fine but that I could've done without them, however a few weeks later, I randomly got really into them and ground out enough matches to get all the achievements and buy all the cosmetic rewards, including the mount. I would've bought the decorations too, except that the disguised decor vendor was too well disguised for me and I didn't realise it existed.

What do you mean, I was supposed to talk to the chair? 

So the feature getting removed now shouldn't really affect me, but I've got to say I'm still somewhat dismayed. It was a fun little mini game, and most importantly I don't think Blizzard actually ever announced it as a limited-time event (until this recent shutdown notice). Maybe it was always meant to be, as its achievements sit under the "events" category of the achievement panel, but it certainly wasn't obvious. In fact, when there were conversations at 12.0.5's launch about how Blizzard was maybe trying to push out too much content too fast, one of the counter arguments I heard was that there can never be too much content and there's no need to stress about any of it because it's all evergreen stuff that's going to hang around forever and you can always do it later. That argument sure has aged like milk!

I've also heard speculation that maybe Blizzard were thinking about keeping it around originally but ultimately decided to phase it out because queue times were getting too long. Which sounds reasonable on the surface except that apparently plenty of old queueable content that rarely pops is still around, such as warfronts from BfA (not that I've ever done one of those). If queues are something the devs are worried about, there are really other things they should fix first.

In fact, let me go off on a little tangent here for a moment: After my Decor Duel spree, I decided I might as well go back to doing a bit of casual normal PvP, like I'd done at the start of the expansion. Just whatever the weekly quest for battlegrounds told me to do each week - and it turned out to be largely impossible because nothing would pop. I did eventually get a few epic battlegrounds done on weekends, but I've not seen a single one of the weekly PvP brawls for example, even after hours and hours of queueing.

I started googling what was going on and found out that there are apparently separate queues for "newbies" and "veterans" and everyone with an honour level of less than 30 counts as a newbie. Since I did most of my PvPing back in the days before they introduced the current honour level system, my level in it is only 11... and apparently the newbie queues rarely pop, creating a catch 22 where you can't PvP regularly until you're honour 30, but you can't get to honour 30 because you can't get into any matches. There's a queue problem you should be worrying about, Blizz, not about Decor Duels taking fifteen minutes to pop! Honestly, this whole situation was pretty shocking to me because I always used to think of WoW as the game that could make queues pop for everything at any time. How the mighty have fallen.

Anyway, back to Decor Duels. I decided to do a few more matches before they're going away, just for fun and to also buy the decos I'd missed until now. Fortunately they are much cheaper than the cosmetics were, plus coin gains have been doubled for the remaining duration of the event.

I've seen people criticise the mode as "not good for a prop hunt" while drawing comparisons to how other games handle their own versions of the same thing. I can't judge that because Decor Duels have been my first and only experience with a prop hunt, but I really quite enjoyed the mode. By the time I got into it, queues had already gotten a lot quieter, and it was interesting to see how a sort of meta was evolving from match to match.

The first time I saw a hider get revealed on one of the floating platforms at the end of a match for example, my jaw dropped - were they cheating? How could you get up there? Naturally, the next time it was my turn to hide I made a point of finding out how to get up there, and it was where I successfully managed to remain unfound for the rest of a match myself. But then people caught on to that being a popular strategy, and a seeker would leap up there almost first thing every match. It was always interesting to see others succeed in new hiding places that I'd never even considered. 

With the announcement of the impending shutdown, people's FOMO receptors have been activated and queues are back to being almost instant. A lot of the players coming in now have clearly not played before or very little, so the meta is all over the place again, especially since Blizzard also made changes to make seeking harder and hiding easier, so that's kind of fun in its own way. I can personally recommend at least checking it out while it's still around (if you haven't yet done so).

A Peculiar Casual

I've been kind of fascinated by Data for Azeroth ever since I found out about the site via a Bellular video. What blew my mind at the time - around halfway through War Within from what I recall - was that it claimed that I was among the rare five percent who had completed the Khaz Algar Diplomat achievement (to max out your reputation with War Within's four base factions). The reason this was shocking to me was that it's something that's extremely easy to do, as every piece of casual content (quests, world quests, delves) awards reputation with at least one of these factions. I get that this isn't something raiders would spend time on, but I'm a casual and lots of other people are casuals like me, right? Right?!

As far as the Khaz Algar Diplomat achievement goes, my assumption did eventually bear out, kind of - now that War Within is in the rear mirror and all subscribers have access to its content even without shelling out extra for the newest expansion, Data for Azeroth says that more than 50% of all its tracked accounts have completed this achievement. I guess I was just ahead of the curve, so to speak.

Looking again more recently, I've once again been surprised by what sorts of achievements of mine are classified as super rare. Here's a list of my currently rarest achievements according to their database, as of today:

1. A Hal'hadar Walks into a Swamp - complete a quest line in Naigtal
2. Lorewalking: The Loa - complete the lorewalking quest about the Loa
3. Disguised to the Nines - complete all Decor Duel achievements
4. Omnium Folio Studies - complete the Omium Folio quest line
5. Doing Your Share - smelt 5 Enchanted Elementium bars
6. Prey: Hard Mode III - kill all Prey targets on hard mode
7. Champion of Ulduar - completed a deathless 10-man Ulduar run back in Wrath
8. Destined to be Legendary - craft a Sulfuron Hammer
9. Abyss Anglers: Jeju's New Rival - complete most Abyss Anglers achievements
10. Abyss Anglers: Top of the Class - swim through 250 schools of fish
11. Null and Avoided - get found but not tagged in Decor Duel five times
12. Prepared for a Showdown - complete quest lines on Val and Naigtal
13. Abyss Anglers: Myths from beneath - catch a mythic creature six times
14. Deployed to the Void - tag five players while seeking as a Nullifier in Decor Duel
15. Midnight Delver III - complete every Midnight delve on tier 11 with lives remaining as every role
16. Grand Magister's Sommelier - drink a lot of different wines during a rare Midnight world quest
17. The Ancient Keeper - acquired Rhok'delar before the Cataclysm
18. Bringing Order to the Isles - completed all order hall campaigns during Legion Remix
19. Midnight Delver II - complete every Midnight delve on tier 8 with lives remaining as every role
20. Abundance: Ain't Dun Till It's Dun - complete all the Abundance achievements
21. Heroic: Worlds Ahead - complete 15 different world quests on heroic Naigtal or Val
22. Collector's Edition: Netherwhelp - have the pet from the BC collector's edition
23. Abyss Anglers: Certified Depthdiver - earn 250k cumulative points in Abyss Anglers
24. Midnight Delver - complete every Midnight delve on tier 4 with lives remaining as every role
25. Amani War Bear - earned the Zul'Aman timed run mount back in Burning Crusade
26. Abyss Anglers: Pearls to the Abyss - acquire all the diving upgrades for Abyss Anglers
27. Tagged and Bagged - tag five players while seeking as an Arcane Ranger in Decor Duel
28. The Balance of Light and Shadow - acquired Benediction/Anathema before the Cataclysm
29. Abyss Anglers: Vintage Collector - collect 250 treasures
30. Abyss Anglers: Reservation for One - do a dive and do nothing but kill a mythic creature
31. Abyss Anglers: Pahk Trench Fins - buy an upgrade and catch 500 fish
32. Abundance: Artisan - earn 10k points from artisan nodes during an Abundance event
33. Flame Warden of Midnight - honour the flames in Midnight zones
34. Pinnacle Ritual Work - complete both ritual sites on tier 6 with all challenges active
35. Abyss Anglers: Now That's Anglin' - catch 100 fish from bubbles
36. Abyss Anglers: The Finest of Fish - catch a mythic creature three times
37. Sunreaver Onslaught - maxed out the Isle of Thunder rep on Horde side during MoP Remix
38. Abyss Anglers: Delicate Diver - catch all small creatures with nets
39. Kirin Tor Offensive - maxed out the Isle of Thunder rep on Alliance side during MoP Remix
40. Midnight Lumberjack - harvest 250 Thalassian lumber
41. The Whole Kit and Caboodle - unlock all upgrades in Decor Duel
42. Rise of the Ultradon Slayer - kill the enemy Ultradon in the Slayer's Rise epic battleground
43. The Key to Madness - open 500 bountiful coffers in delves
44. T-A-G that spells "Gotcha!" - tag five players while seeking as a Spellbreaker in Decor Duel
45. Algari Master of All - raise all War Within professions to max skill
46. Abyss Anglers: Luck of the Loa - catch an epic fish from a bubble
47. Putting Wilhelm Out of Business - return all of Omarion's notes from Naxxramas (part of unlocking the old Naxx resist gear to craft)
48. Showdown Success: Val - complete 8 different world quests on Val
49. Algari Delver II - complete every War Within delve on tier 8 with lives remaining as every role
50. Showdown Success: Naigtal - complete 8 different world quests on Naigtal

All of these are only owned by 3% of the player base at max. Some of them make obvious sense of course. Anything that's old and/or no longer obtainable is bound to be rare - 7, 17, 18, 22, 25, 28, 37 and 39 fall into that category.

Similarly, I wouldn't put too much stock into the rarity of anything that was only released as part of the most recent patch (12.0.7) about a month ago, because it makes sense that most people wouldn't rush to do every new thing on launch day. However, even if they did, Data for Azeroth only refreshes character data every few weeks (unless you request a manual refresh) so a lot of these probably wouldn't be nearly as rare if the data was truly up to date. That applies to 1, 2, 4, 12, 21, 34, 48 and 50.

The first big surprise to me were the number of Abyss Anglers and Decor Duel achievements on this list. Now, I'll fully admit that I did get a bit more into these than the average Joe after my initial feeling of simply feeling whelmed by their addition had faded. But uh... being a top 1%-er for casual mini games in WoW feels weird.

In a similar vein, I was surprised by some of the delve achievements that are apparently rare - not the one to open 500 bountiful coffers, that clearly required some level of grinding - but that even completing delves on tier 4 as every role is this rare surprised me. Looking at my achievement list beyond the 50 I reproduced here, it seems that people don't like doing delves as healers, as even the "do every delve on tier 4 as a healer" achievement has only been completed by 4% of players. Tanks and damage dealers have nearly double those completion rates. Still, while there are clearly a lot of people who've engaged with delves in some way (the "complete a delve" achievement is apparently owned by 92% of players), I once again appear to be among the most hardcore for this casual content.

There are a few more achievements that fall into this category: I won't deny that I clearly like the Abundance event more than the average person, and the Sommelier achievement does require you to have more than a passing interest in world quests. Flame Warden of Midnight was only available for a limited time, but I'm still surprised it's so rare, considering that there were only five new fires in obvious places, and it's basically free gold for a click. Then again, I'd managed to fly past the Harandar flame repeatedly without noticing it I guess...

For most of the profession achievements on the list it does make sense for them to be rare in my mind. Learning to craft a Sulfuron Hammer and getting all the mats for it is not difficult but definitely qualifies as an obscure old-school grind nowadays, and most players won't have any reason to learn how to smelt Enchanted Elementium bars, never mind actually doing it. Maxing out all the War Within professions was something that actually took a lot of effort and that I was actively proud of.

The 250 Thalassian lumber is not difficult either but I guess requires both at least a passing interest in housing (to learn how to gather lumber) and a love for gathering in general. I haven't gone out to "grind" lumber at any point but will happily grab a piece here or there as I see it, and over time that has simply added up.

The Naxx recipe gathering is definitely an obscure thing to do, something I didn't even see discussed on any news site when it came out and that I had to actively look up after learning of its existence.

The two (to me) funniest achievements on the list are probably Rise of the Ultradon Slayer and Prey: Hard Mode III. The former I got for the one and only time I got into a Slayer's Rise epic battleground, and I had little idea what was going on in it at any point, so I couldn't even tell you whether this is rare because it's hard or just because not a lot of people have even set foot into this battleground.

The Prey achievement is funny to me because it's three times as rare as the equivalent achievement for nightmare mode, even though it's easier - but I guess more people felt motivated to do the nightmare version for the gear rewards. The equivalent normal mode achievement is even rarer and I don't have it either because normal mode preys just give terrible rewards.

Still, I think what ultimately got me about all of this is the rarity of all of these achievements compared to some of the more common ones. Sure, you can say that almost every activity in WoW is only done by a (relative) minority, so it shouldn't be surprising that only 10% of players have a single Decor Duel achievement of any kind. But then I look at stuff like Myth of the Dawn, for which you needed to have done either mythic raiding this tier or a lot of M+ at level 10 or higher this season, and apparently one in five WoW players has this achievement. Or look at the achievement to beat the final encounter in the Voidspire raid on any difficulty (which does include LFR and the solo story version) - more than 40% of WoW players have done this! How have less than 20% of players ever clicked on all the Midsummer Fires in any expansion but 70% have timed an M+ key on level 10?

It's just wild to me that the WoW player base as a whole seems to be so endgame progression-brained that being someone who focuses on casual content seemingly makes you a rare weirdo in comparison.

The War Within Recap

I have seven characters at the Midnight level cap right now, and I've hit that point where I feel the itch to do some more levelling again but at the same time don't really want to do it in Midnight. While Blizzard have made improvements over the years to make levelling alts less repetitive, I still think it's a weakness of the modern game that the last ten levels always have to be done in the current expansion (or in timewalking dungeons).

Therefore, I was quite delighted when I logged into my level 70 Worgen rogue the other day, still stationed in Dornogal, and was prompted to do the War Within recap. Something different to do! I was very curious how much XP it would give me, as well as what it would look like gameplay-wise.

I don't know about you, but when I hear the word "recap", I tend to think of those brief snippets at the start of a new episode of a TV show, where they say something like "previously on [show]" and then cycle through a few clips from previous episodes that will be relevant to the current episode. I knew that an expansion recap in an MMO was bound to be more meaty than that, but I couldn't really wrap my head around how it was going to work.

It quickly became clear that a perhaps more appropriate title for the experience would've been something like "The War Within abridged", as the "recap" is basically the expansion's main storyline with a good chunk of gameplay chopped out of it, while still leaving you with a pretty considerable amount of content to go through. I didn't time myself, but it still took me several hours (which included watching a lot of cut scenes; it's probably quicker if you skip them) and my rogue gained two levels throughout the whole thing.

In terms of gameplay, the conceit is similar to lorewalking in that a narrator tells you the gist of what's going on but you are given some of the old quests to play through certain events yourself as well. Instead of Lorewalker Cho (or now Li-Li), it's just a magical flying book, which also serves as a taxi between locations sometimes. Where parts of a longer story are skipped, the book just gives you a brief narration along the lines of "then this thing happened" and off you go to the next step.

The first section on the Isle of Dorn is pretty lengthy and includes the destruction of Dalaran, meeting the Earthen, learning about the Unbound and the big fight at the Meadery. I was wondering just how long this whole thing was going to be if they only took so (relatively) little of the storyline out, but in subsequent zones things sped up considerably.

In the Ringing Deeps we are briefly introduced to High Speaker Eirich , get the cut scene where Magni becomes fleshy again while saving the Awakening Machine from corruption, fight Eirich and that's largely it. Nothing about kobolds or anything like that.

In Hallowfall we are introduced to Faerin and the Arathi but then move on to fighting the Order of Night very quickly, passing through the zone without really engaging with the Arathi's background and culture at all. I also found it noteworthy that the whole bit with Faerin helping Anduin find his connection to the light again was not included either.

Azj-Kahet is again glossed over pretty quickly, and you mainly just play through the section where Alleria, Anduin and you disrupt Ansurek's speech, and then the final confrontation with Xal'atath at the end of the main campaign. As far as the Haranir go, you get to play through the quest where you first meet Orweyna and then they are never mentioned again.

The major patch zones are included in the recap as well but are even quicker affairs, with Undermine being reduced to the few quests where you try to get the Dark Heart from the goblins, and the story on K'aresh basically just telling you that you have to work with Xal'atath for the Reshii wraps before throwing you into the single-player version of the Dimensius fight.

It felt like all the focus was on Alleria and Xal'atath, with everything else taking a backseat. I guess in some way that makes sense, especially if the goal of this recap is to prepare players for the start of Midnight, but I've got to admit it also felt a bit weird, because to me at least, the dynamic between these two was possibly the least interesting thing about the War Within and I cared much more about the parts of the story that told us about the cultures and different societal developments in each zone.

Also, while the argument can be made that a lot of the stuff they cut out was "fluff" or grindy quests, I've got to admit that being left with gameplay that's mostly just listening to narration and watching cut scenes is a bit dull in WoW; it's not really optimised for that kind of experience.

When I first read about the recap on reddit, word was that it was decidedly not good, mainly because of how buggy it was. I'm happy to say that I didn't encounter any major stumbling blocks myself at this point, though it still wasn't exactly a smooth experience. I think I had to relog once to unbug a phase, and while I did get confused a few times because quests disappeared from my quest tracker and I was unsure whether I'd lost the plot, that's a bug that I've also encountered in the regular game several times and which is not limited to the recap experience.

The thing that did disappoint me at the end was when I found out that the recap is a lot more like lorewalking than I expected, in the sense that it's completely self-contained and not connected to the actual War Within campaign at all. So while the game makes you feel like you're getting a speed run through the story, the open world isn't actually updated as it would be if you had done the campaign properly. You may have been to K'aresh to do quests there, but the K'aresh portal will not be unlocked when you finish for example, and you'll still have to go through the proper K'aresh starter experience to unlock it, which is just... why?

The most comical example of this for me was that Dimensius dropped a quest item which the game said I wasn't eligible to use. It turned out that in order to be allowed to turn it in, I had to go back to K'aresh the normal way and do the Dimensius quest again outside of the recap, which just felt bizarre and nonsensical.

I guess I could see the recap experience being okay for players who just want to understand the very basics of what happened in the story, but to me personally it was pretty unsatisfying. At the very least it should count as a proper campaign skip and unlock all War Within content/portals etc. in the open world. As it stands, it left me with the feeling that I'd rather have redone the campaign "properly".

Why Is Fishing So Weird Now?

I mentioned in a previous post that my fascination with Midnight professions made me pick up fishing again for the first time since Shadowlands, motivated by a desire to gather all the fish required for my skinner's majestic beast lures. Since then I've maxed out Midnight fishing on two characters and many more are on their way towards the same. As I've learned more about the uses of fish in this expansion, my desire to fish has only grown, even though I'm simultaneously vaguely confused and annoyed by the whole thing. Fishing is so weird now compared to how it used to be!

Fishing in Vanilla was primarily a slow activity that rewarded patience and persistence. It took long to level up, you had to work on your skill in the right zones for your level, and most of the stuff you caught in open water wasn't actually that valuable or useful. For the good stuff you usually had to hunt down specific pools, which were limited and required even more skill. (There've been times in Classic when my character more or less lived in the Bay of Storms, swimming slow laps around the spawn points for patches of elemental water.)

Even though I enjoyed the change at the time, I think things already became a bit unbalanced when Blizzard changed it so that fishing in pools would always succeed, meaning they went from a reward you had to work for to the opposite: an easier way to level your skill. Nonetheless I'd say that by, say, Mists of Pandaria things still had a certain logic to them (as I've had a chance to re-experience in MoP Classic recently): open water was a bit "meh" and fish from pools were more desirable and something you'd specifically hunt for and farm. 

The thing that immediately threw me off about fishing in Midnight is that all pools contain a selection of fish now. So if you fish in a "Bloom Swarm" for example, you're slightly narrowing down what kinds of fish you'll catch compared to open water, but it's still no guarantee you'll get anything you actually wanted.

Pools have a higher chance of containing rarer fish (as Midnight fish also come in the classic white-green-blue rarity colours) but this actually only adds an extra layer of confusion in so far as more rare doesn't necessarily translate to more valuable. A few weeks ago I did a quick price check of all Midnight fish on the auction house and came away with the following:

Common:

• Arcane Wyrmfish - 90g
• Gore Guppy - 32g
• Lynxfish - 8g
• Root Crab - 5g
• Sin'dorei Swarmer - 1g

Uncommon:

• Bloomtail Minnow - 54g
• Fungalskin Pike - 90g
• Hollow Grouper - 50s
• Restored Songfish - 1g50s
• Shimmer Spinefish - 80s
• Shimmersiren - 52g
• Sunwell Fish - 1g50s
• Tender Lumifin - 3g

Rare:

• Blood Hunter - 2g
• Eversong Trout - 46g
• Lucky Loa - 1g50s
• Null Voidfish - 173g
• Ominous Octopus - 42g
• Twisted Tetra - 32g
• Warping Wise - 29g

Prices have probably changed again since then, but the point here is just to illustrate the huge variance in price in each rarity group. White, green or blue, each group contains both fish that sell for barely a gold and fish that sell for close to one hundred or more. This can lead to the bizarre scenario that in some zones, one of the supposedly more common fish is actually more valuable than the rare ones, meaning you're better off fishing in open water and/or using an alt with lower fishing skill as they are less likely to fish up the (less valuable) rare catches. It's wild to me!

Now, you might argue that this sort of variance is just a normal part of the game, as if you look at gear for example, not all items of the same rarity are of the same value either, and that's true, but in general Blizzard has always worked towards streamlining that. If you get an epic drop at max level, there shouldn't be any situation where your old green is actually better, even if the purple item's stats aren't 100% optimal for you. Why make fishing more confusing and complicated by adding indicators that don't actually relate to value at all?

The many different ways in which fish can be used don't help either. Again, in Classic fish were either for cooking/eating (most of them) and some rarer ones were required for alchemy, but it was all fairly straightforward.

The first thing that threw me off about cooking with fish in Midnight is that you can "fillet" any given fish to turn it into the fillet cooking ingredient, but then some recipes still also require whole, unfilleted fish. So you better make sure to only fillet the most worthless ones - check the AH before getting that knife out!

Next we have lure-making, which is what started me down this whole rabbit hole, and here the value of each fish involved varies greatly based on which beast it lures, what those beasts drop, and which recipes those ingredients are used for in turn. 

As far as I can tell, fish are no longer used in any potions, but my mind was blown when I found out that alchemists can turn fish into gems now. I've been doing that a lot since I learned about it, since my jewelcrafter's gains from prospecting ore have been so anaemic. Getting about ten guaranteed gems out of a bunch of fish feels like an amazing deal in comparison. But I wouldn't exactly say that's intuitive.

Then there are additional "fun" items like fishing lures, but most of them are only for worthless fish so why would I want to lure more of them? Or the Aquarius Bloom item which turns any Midnight fishing pool into a "Bloom Swarm". The description for these says that they have a higher chance to contain rarer fish, but again, I wouldn't necessarily want that! When I consulted the Wowhead comments to find out what I could possibly want with that item, the most upvoted comment stated that they just used it to clear some unwanted pools away more quickly (as Blooms Swarms disappear after a single cast, so even if you don't care about what you get, it makes the pool go away and another one, one that you might like better, can respawn elsewhere). There's even more random stuff like that going on that I won't even get into but I still wonder how we ended up in this place.

What's funny to me though is that I'm not even sure whether I like or dislike it. I think the way I described things above, they sound kind of bad and confusing, no? Yet at the same time, it seems to be exactly that friction and strangeness that has led to me being more motivated to invest time in fishing than I've been in in a long while, similarly to how I like the way primary professions are in Midnight for all the same reasons that make many people hate them.

That Infernal Blue Dot

Believe it or not, I'm pretty happy with what Blizzard is doing with WoW right now. Do I love and agree with every single decision they make? Of course not. I think the anniversary servers are everything I don't want Classic to be for example, but I just don't play there. There's enough going on that I can just focus on the things I enjoy and get good value out of my subscription.

I'm also not exactly a hater of cash shops. If given the choice, I'd rather MMOs didn't have them, but I know that money needs to come from somewhere, and as long as they don't actively annoy me, I'm like... fine, do what you must. Sometimes I'll even buy something myself.

However, there's something Blizzard did to their cash shop recently that annoys me big time, and as far as I can tell I'm literally the only person on the internet bothered by this. It may be that the search term "Blizzard shop blue dot" is too vague, but I've also tried different variations of the search, even different search engines - and yet, I couldn't find a single reddit or forum post talking about this. And by "this", I mean what you can see below:

Basically, a couple of patches ago, Blizzard decided to add a fake notification to the shop button every so often, to make you click on it and open the shop if for no other reason than to make the highlight go away. And yes, it is indeed a fake notification as it doesn't even only appear when there are new items in the store. Sometimes they've rotated what's on the front page, but even that hasn't consistently been the case when the blue dot appears as far as I can tell.

The reason I hate this so much is that I strive to be an inbox zero person. I don't always succeed, but I do try to keep my emails and notifications clean, and it doesn't take much for me to take the sledgehammer out and revoke all access for an app or company that's consistently bothering me about nothing just to get my attention. It's what first made me hate Facebook, when they started sending me daily "notifications" about stuff like "a person made a post", which was absolutely not notification-worthy.

I know that not everyone is sensitive to this kind of stuff - when I look over my husband's shoulder he always has 99+ unread notifications on YouTube and Discord and seems completely unfazed by that. He's fine with ignoring all attempts by anyone to get his attention. However, that I literally couldn't find a single other person talking about this is still wild to me. I tried to see whether there's maybe an addon to "mute" shop notifications but had no luck on that front either.

If you have any knowledge of how to make this go away (other than replacing my UI entirely), please let me know!

Midsummer & Darkspear Dashing

I've said in the past that I tend to run somewhat hot and cold as far as WoW's in-game holidays are concerned. Sometimes I'll really get into one, but most of the time I'll largely forget that they exist. Even if I do notice the seasonal decorations, I'll usually just go "huh, it's Brewfest again, is it" and then do exactly nothing about it.

Right now, Midsummer/Fire Festival is on, and I was going to ignore it once again, but then I heard Taliesin on the T&E podcast talk about how there was a new quest line that was very fun, so I decided to check that out.

And indeed, it was quite fun! There's a new daily quest to fly through flaming blossoms above Silvermoon or your faction capital, but it also comes with a one-time chain that sends you flying all over Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms while a Fire Festival NPC tells you about a bit of human, dwarven and tauren lore related to the festival.

I then went back to also do some of the old dailies and slay Ahune, the Frost Lord ("The ice stone has melted!" will forever be a meme to me.) While doing the torch-tossing and catching dailies, I was surprised to see that at some point, Blizzard apparently decided to simplify these - the tossing quest has about three times as many markers going up now, allowing you to finish it much more quickly than in the past, and during the catching quest I noticed that my torch's shadow was very visible and I could no longer see other people's torch shadows, which was what used to make the quest difficult to complete in the past (since you could get confused, accidentally run after someone else's torch and fail - it used to be a hot tip to do this daily on the Exodar where nobody else was there to distract you).

I then did the same dailies in MoP Classic for comparison, but I couldn't really tell whether that expansion already had the update for the catching quest or not, as nobody else was around doing the quests when I was there. I also queued for Ahune there and the wait seemed to take forever compared to retail. When I finally got a group I found that the boss was hilariously undertuned, to the point that you could nuke him down from range most of the way right through his damage reduction. In general, the experience in MoP felt weirdly lonely. I always like to point out that MoP Classic still has a lot of players, but it does seem very raid-loggy. You don't really see a lot of players out and about doing lower-level or more casual content much.

Anyway, aside from Midsummer, there's also a two-day "micro holiday" this weekend. I'm even worse with these than with the regular holidays, in the sense that I don't think I've ever actually taken part in one other than free t-shirt day, which I just happened to notice in Stormwind at the time and which really grew my shirt collection.

The news about this newest addition caught my attention because it's called "Darkspear Dash", featured lots of rainbows and I saw some comments about it being a case of Blizzard adding support for something that was previously a community event. I think the main reason I lingered on the news was that it actually confused me at first: Wasn't that event the running of the gnomes? Why make the official version trolls instead?

Fortunately the answer was only a quick Google search away. The running of the gnomes is in October, for breast cancer awareness, and already has its own micro holiday (the Great Gnomeregan Run). The Darkspear Dash was in fact dreamed up by the same person, but it's on Horde side with trolls (they have a bit more explanation for "why trolls" on their website) and benefts the Trevor Project instead. Mystery solved!

I then heard a few more people talking about taking part and thought "eh, why not". My old main was a troll after all, even if she's only level 32 these days. So I logged her, found the starting point on the Echo Isles and went for a run. Blizzard really was quite considerate of runners' needs, with a barber and a transmogrifier right next to the starting line to make sure everyone can look their best while running. While you can technically fly to go as fast as possible, I opted for my old ground mount myself, a compromise between wanting to enjoy the experience and not wanting to be too slow.

For most of the run I was by myself - in the Plaguelands I saw someone on a Brutosaur behind me for a bit, but they fell off the horizon again after a while. At the entrance to Eversong I ran into two other players, one of them on foot, and we slowed down for a while to all run together. At one point I had to AFK for a bit and set myself to auto-run, and when I came back I was dead in a ditch, eaten by one of those nasty skull level cats in new Eversong. Oops! No big deal though, I just picked myself up again and rode the rest of the way by myself again. It did make me think that I really should level an alt through the Midnight story on foot because the views are so much more impressive at ground level.

Anyway, that would've been it, except... in the late afternoon I spotted someone on Bluesky posting about the fact that the actual community run (which still exists as well) was about to start on Argent Dawn-EU. Apparently this year was also going to be the first time it happened on the EU servers! I looked at the clock and went "snap, that's in only twenty minutes"... and remembered that I did in fact also have a low-level troll alt on Argent Dawn, from back when Cataclysm first came out. So I logged into that one and made my way to the Echo Isles a second time.

What a difference that was! This time the place was absolutely packed, with people spamming rainbow toy effects everywhere. I made use of the transmogger to make my Cataclysm levelling gear look a bit more put together and the barber to change my cat form back to its old colour (at some point my troll druid's cat form had turned white and I don't know why, I just know from screenshots that this wasn't her original colour).

The run was originally meant to start at 5pm my time, but minutes before the scheduled start, some yells were going out that the launch was supposed to be delayed. Clearly not everyone got the memo though as a large crowd still set off at the original time. As someone commented, people getting spread out a bit might not have been the worst thing as it should make the experience a bit less laggy. I set off at the new start time with a still pretty sizeable crowd, though we got more and more spread out over time. By the Plaguelands the trail of runners was spread thin enough that I was largely running by myself again, though I could still see more runners behind and ahead of me this time.

On my first run I'd simply followed the road to new Silvermoon, but this time around I learned that the event was inclusive to people who didn't have the expansion and that you could also go through the portal to old Quel'Thalas and finish the race there. Instructions from the organisers were to go through that portal, so I opted for the alternative route this time. I was happy when I reached the goal in Silvermoon, where it was properly crowded again and people were partying. All in all, a really fun and wholesome experience. 

Project Camelot and Other Crazy Blizzard Leaks

About a week ago, the Classic WoW-o-sphere was getting all excited about dataminers finding information about a new WoW project called "Camelot", which was largely thought to be a code name for whatever Classic Plus type thing Blizzard is cooking up right now. I did briefly consider writing about that, but to be honest there wasn't that much to say; it's not really telling us anything new if we already take the mere existence of such a project for granted.

The most meaningful thing I could think of saying about the name "Camelot" is that it's an excellent choice in so far as there are many different things you can read into it based on your own hopes and expectations. For me personally, the word association went something like this: Camelot → medieval low fantasy setting → something similar to Turtle WoW, which stays more grounded in the world of Azeroth without all the interplanterary shenanigans. That said, I also saw someone say that it reminded them of Dark Age of Camelot (another classic MMO), so maybe it was a sign that Classic Plus would have three factions. I'm sure you, dear reader, can come up with plenty of dramatically different interpretations of your own.

However, today things got more interesting! Due to a disruption on my commute I found myself on trains for three hours in the morning, and as I was browsing reddit I found that apparently someone had gone trawling through old leaks tied to the Camelot name and found one from over a year ago that at the time, was likely dismissed by most as just another attention-seeking fake, but which has now suddenly gained a lot of credibility with hindsight. 

This is your cue to stop reading by the way, if you're worried about potentially being spoiled for Blizzard's future plans for the Warcraft franchise (there's nothing about specific expansions or anything like that though). The leak could still be fake, or even if true, outdated - after all, plans change all the time - but if not, we've got some interesting things to look forward to in the coming years beyond WoW itself.

You can enlarge the above image by clicking on it, but regardless, I'll also describe it in detail below:

It's a photo of a screen showing most of a slide labelled "Franchise Slate - World of Warcraft", tagged with the word "confidential" and a Blizzard logo in the corner. At the top it has a timeline going from Q3 2024 to at least Q3 2030 (there might be more that's cut off).

The first row under the timeline is labelled "modern/mainline expansions" and shows War Within coming out in Q3 2024, Midnight in Q1 2026, The Last Titan in Q3 2027 and the next two expansions labelled as "TBD" but scheduled for Q1 2029 and Q3 2030 respectively.

The second row is labelled "Classic/Camelot" and contains two separate lines, one called "Progression (expansions)" and one called "Era/Camelot". The first line has a lot of entries that we already knew about: Cataclysm just before Q3 2024, Classic Fresh in Q4 2024, MoP in Q2 2025, TBC in Q4 2025... and then WoTLK in Q4 2026, Classic Fresh again in Q2 2028 and TBC again in Q3 2029.

The Era/Camelot line only has one highlighted dot, Camelot in Q3 2026, followed by a little text box that just says "Live ops".

The third row on the slide is labelled "RTS" and indicates plans for a new real-time strategy game called Warcraft Chronicles, set to launch in Q3 2028 and meant to be accompanied by an anime series.

The fourth row promises an Arthas ARPG (I assume the A stands for "action" here, not "augmented"), slated to launch in Q3 2029 and meant to coincide with the release of a live action series.

Finally, there are two more rows called "CN mobile" and "Arcade", which are both just labelled TBD.

Reddit has additionally dug into the credibility of the now deleted account that originally posted this, and apparently the person claimed that the source of the picture was an ex-girlfriend that used to work for Blizzard but was laid off and had been exposed to these slides by accident - which, you know... "I know someone who works at Blizzard" is an age-old preamble to all kinds of BS, but at the same time it is also how this kind of stuff really can get leaked.

The biggest strike against the person's credibility in my eyes is that they also left a comment in another thread saying that "[t]he next expac will return to Black Blood/Worldsoul with Azeroth being final Titan and coming to life to cleanse the planet (including players) - last expac will wrap up with us having to kill Azeroth to restore her. Then off to WoW 2.0" which does very much sound like nonsense to me, but to be fair, that comment was in another, unrelated thread and has no actual connection to the screenshot so may just be an unrelated, unsourced opinion.

The image itself does look very credible to me personally, with the information we have now, over a year after it was originally posted. Blizzard wanting to milk people's nostalgia with repeat releases of the first three expansions sounds very on brand, and the fact that there's nothing after MoP would back up the notion that they themselves weren't sure how far that particular classic train should feasibly go.

A new RTS and an Arthas RPG would make parts of the fan base very happy for sure, and plans for multiple new TV series to go with them are also believable to me. Holly Longdale has been very consistent in her messaging about how she wants Warcraft to be more than it currently is, and it was always a bit strange to me how easily Blizzard seemingly just gave up and rolled over as far as multimedia goes when the Warcraft Movie wasn't a smash hit. Plus they've been doing a lot of experimentation with traditional 2D animation lately, such as with the animated shorts about Alleria, Liadrin and Arator or the A Place to Call Home music video - a lot of the comments on these also expressed the sentiment that people would like to see a full animated show in the same style.

Without taking anything shown in the image as gospel, it does fill me with hope and excitement that Blizzard's plans for the Warcraft franchise are ambitious in a good way - how well any of that will work out is a different question of course, but I'm curious to find out now.