A Quiet Month & Arathi Basin

As you may have been able to deduce from the fact that I haven't actually posted about anything Classic in over a month, I haven't been playing it very much recently. It's not that I lost interest in the game or anything, but as I've learned in the past, I'm just not really able to devote time to more than two MMORPGs at a time, even in these exceptional times of having extra gaming hours available. I may still try to play as many as three simultaneously, but ultimately something always slides onto the back burner, and for the past month this has been WoW.

Right now its fortunes seem to be on the rise again however, as I recently finished the latest campaign in Neverwinter and don't currently feel motivated to spend all that much time on alts there, meaning that my playtime in that is likely to drop off again soon. Plus with all the (sometimes quite hectic) running of group content I've been doing in SWTOR, logging on my hunter to just grind some mobs in Tanaris has been positively relaxing in comparison.

That said, the only really noteworthy thing to report about my Classic activity in the past month or so has been that I tried out Arathi Basin. My hunter was approaching the end of level 49, and this seemed like a good time to have another go at a bit of midbie PvP, especially since I had fond memories of AB.

I'll admit that I was thoroughly wrong about that one. Or as someone in my most recent instance pug said in a completely different context: "Your opposite faction memories are bleeding through." Just like the map design of the original Alterac Valley quite clearly favoured the Alliance, classic AB gives an advantage to the Horde because of how much easier it is to defend the farm-blacksmith-lumbermill triangle than the corresponding Alliance mirror. In fact, I did have flashbacks to happier days in Cataclysm and how my rated battleground team would stand poised at the crossroads between the three bases to rush to the defence of any of them at a moment's notice.

This is not Cataclysm though, and I'm not playing Horde. Or in other words: With Alliance already having a reputation for being rubbish at PvP in Classic, having that situation exacerbated by the map design just resulted in a complete shitshow. We didn't simply lose all three matches that I played, but got completely roflstomped every single time. I think at one point we were even five-capped. It was... not very fun and left me with no desire to queue for AB again.

For all the things I love about Classic, I really don't think that PvP is one of its strong points, and I think I'll continue to scratch that particular itch in SWTOR instead. In Azeroth, I'll be back to chilling out while grinding bug parts.