The Remarkable Life of Ibelin

Right, I know I'm quite late to the party in writing about this, considering the movie came out close to two months ago now, but I still wanted to jot down some thoughts about it.

Fun fact: The first mention of this film I recall seeing was this post from the WoW Bluesky account, and at the time I was totally confused and thought that it was just some strange meme that I didn't understand. (In my defense, posting one random meme every three months was about all the effort they put into that account at the time.)

Later, I saw someone yell in Dornogal that we should all buy the "Revan" pack and support a good cause, to which my reaction was 1) what does Revan have to do with WoW, and 2) why are people trying to get others to spend money in the cash shop now?

Yeah, I'm not always the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to making sense of unexpected new information, but I got there eventually.

In case you also still don't know what I'm talking about, "The Remarkable Life of Ibelin" is a movie that was recently released on Netflix and documents the life of Mats Steen, a Norwegian WoW player who died at a young age but also became famous posthumously once his parents found out about his "second life" in World of Warcraft and how much of an impact he'd had in that virtual world, which was such a stark contrast to his real life and how he was largely housebound there due to a severe disability.

The BBC actually printed a long article about him five years ago, which I read at the time and found touching then too.

I actually resubscribed to Netflix specifically to watch this film (though knowing that Arcane season two was meant to come out shortly after helped with my decision as well) and it definitely felt worth it. I wanted to show it to my mother too (since I was visiting her at the time and she really dislikes everything to do with "online", so I thought it might be useful for illustrating what it means to make friends on the internet) but she didn't feel like watching something so sad and I can't blame her for that. You'll definitely need to be armed with some tissues, especially for the beginning and end, but it's not all depressing; don't worry. 

I was obviously familiar with the basic "plot" from the BBC article, but where the movie really expands on things is just how much Mats got up to online, as the RP guild he was in saved a lot of conversations on a forum somewhere, and the film-makers used this to reconstruct some scenes and had them animated using WoW models, which adds a lot to the storytelling. You really get a much better idea of everything he got up to and how he interacted with his guildies, and that was quite enjoyable to learn more about.

The devs also erected an actual memorial for him in Elwynn Forest that resembles his real-life gravestone. I visited it in game afterwards and lit a candle.

Oh, and that "Revan" pack is actually called "Reven Pack" and gives you a pet and backpack, with 100% of the proceeds going to the non-profit Cure Duchenne, which is dedicated to battling the degenerative disease that cut Mats' life short. I bought one of those as well.

I think everyone who's built real relationships with people they met in an MMO will be able to relate to Ibelin's story, but I've got to admit that beyond that, it also got me wondering whether I've met people similar to Ibelin without even knowing it. For example there's this one guy with whom I've been playing for many years who's often made us wonder... things. We know nothing about his real life other than what country he lives in, and he's never once spoken on voice chat, even though he's always happy to come on and listen. He does communicate by typing, but rarely even that, and when he does, it's often very slow and deliberate. He never seems to have any obligations that keep him away from gaming. He's extremely good at what he does while playing with us, yet also accepting and tolerant of other people's failures and faults to an almost inhuman degree. We used to joke sometimes that we can't really know for sure that he's not an alien, a robot or a hyper-intelligent cat, but I've got to admit that the thought has certainly crossed my mind that he may simply be a person who has some bad stuff going on in real life, from which he's intentionally escaping online. It'd just feel kind of rude to press the issue when it really doesn't matter to our relationship.

Anyway, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is an excellent movie and I can recommend it. If you can't or don't want to pay for Netflix, reading the BBC article will still give you at least the basic gist of the story. And remember to cherish and look after your online buddies. You'll never know what tomorrow will bring and how much of a difference you might be making to someone else's life hundreds of miles away.

WoW Memories #10: November 26th & December 2nd, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.

Today I'm combining two posts into a single entry since they were both very short.

The following was originally posted on November 26th, 2006 under the title "Strange WoW Moment Of The Day":

Paraphrased, as usual, as I don't have a proper chat log and all the superfluous chat speak would only kill your brains anyway.

In the jungles of Stranglethorn, two adventurers spy a familiar name...

Me: Hi Para!
Parachel: Hi guys! How are you doing?
Me: Oh, we're levelling up nicely...
Parachel: So I see.
Khytez: And how are you?
Parachel: Oh, just running around, killing stuff...
Me: Gotta love WoW small talk. What do you have to do here?
Parachel: Oh, just kill a regular level forty, nothing fancy.
Me: Ah, that's good. We have to find a troll.¹
Parachel: Did you ever kill that level 42 elite in Arathi?
Me: Which one?
Parachel: This giant...²
Me: A giant? No, I'm sure I would remember that.
Khytez: Yeah, we nailed him.
Me: What? You do all the fun stuff without me! :o
Khytez: But you were there!
Me: No, I'm pretty sure I wasn't...
Khytez: Ok, maybe you weren't there after all.
Me: Then again you may be right, I probably won't remember tomorrow what I did today...
Parachel: You two sound as if you're married. :D
Khytez: ...
Me: lol

One word: Awwwkwaaard. :-P³

The following was originally posted on December 2nd, 2006 under the title "Arma Virumque Cano":

Ugh, nobody should have to get up at eight in the morning on a Saturday. The streets were practically empty when I left home, but I had a tutoring appointment at ten.⁴ [...]

While eating breakfast I quickly logged onto WoW just because I was curious whether any of my friends would actually be online at such a crazy time. One guy was, so I started a conversation with: "Haha, I didn't actually think anyone would be online at this crazy time!" :-P I proceeded by mentioning that I'd have to tutor someone in Latin in an hour, to which he replied with "arma virumque cano..." (the first three words of the Aeneid), which made me squee because it's rare enough that I meet someone else who had Latin in school and as it happens this is also the work my tutoring focuses on this time. We continued to chat and as it turned out the guy is actually a German living in Holland. "Warum sprechen wir dann Englisch?" - "Gute Frage."⁵ :-D Knowing me, you can imagine that I was quite pleased to find someone on an English server who speaks both German and Dutch (and Latin). It was only a small thing but it totally made my morning.⁶

¹ Saying that you're in Stranglethorn to look for a troll is such an incredibly vague statement that I find it quite hilarious in hindsight, and yet... considering the rest of the conversation implies that we were probably past level 40 at this point, I'd venture that we were looking for Mogh the Undying for The Star, the Hand and the Heart. Some quests really were that memorable back then.

² This was in reference to Fozruk, the elite giant that patrols a good chunk of the zone and is part of a fairly long quest chain.

³ As someone who's loooking back at these posts with an interest in what I thought of the game in those early months of playing it for the first time, it's mildly infuriating how little past me actually talked about the game itself. Instead you get entries like this, which are just about some banter with a guy we'd done some group content with. Though I guess that is telling in itself, in the sense that at the time, my focus wasn't on the world and its contents (though I did love it) but rather on all the people I met in this strange new online space and how we interacted with each other. I do seem to recall that Parachel was a male human mage.

⁴ I was giving private Latin lessons at the time to earn a bit of cash on the side.

⁵ "Why are we speaking English then?" "Good question."

⁶ And yet, I didn't even record the guy's character name...

Housing Comes to WoW: Some Educated Guesses

I've been meaning to write more about the prospect of housing coming to WoW. We've had a few dev interviews that cleared up a couple of questions since the Warcraft Direct stream, but overall, we still don't know a lot, and I'm probably not the only one who's wondering about both the possibilities and potential problems. Overall I'm still excited about the prospect of housing, but I can definitely see some issues with it too.

First off, I'd like to quickly address a few things that I've seen people bring up and that I actually don't think will be problems.

Will housing be a one-expansion feature?

I can't blame anyone for being cynical about Blizzard's intentions, but the people whom I've seen express this fear usually haven't played retail in at least a couple of years and are a bit behind the times so to speak. The devs have since acknowledged that players didn't like the pattern of them constantly adding new features just to discard them two years later, they've vowed to do better, and we've seen them live up to that promise in Dragonflight and War Within so far. Everyone can have their own standards for how much it would take them to be convinced, but I've seen enough to believe them on this.

Plus, by all indications this housing thing has been in the works for at least three years, which to me indicates that this isn't something that Blizzard is taking lightly. In fact, the addition of Warbands retroactively makes additional sense now, as purely character-bound houses would've been a logistical nightmare at this point and they clearly needed to sort out how to make more things account-wide before giving us housing.

They're just going to put all the housing stuff in the cash shop!

Again, I can't blame people for being cynical, but I just don't think this assertion fits Blizzard's current MO. Housing is likely to introduce a huge number of new items into the game (or at least repurpose a lot of existing items so they can also be placed inside your house too), and considering that the WoW cash shop is relatively light on direct sale items (at least when compared to other MMO cash shops I've seen), suddenly stuffing it with microtransactions for every possible piece of furniture would seem rather out of character.

I'm not claiming that the Blizzard devs are too "good" for this either, but they simply don't need to do it that way to make money off housing. They'll just need to make it a gold sink, and since the WoW Token exists, people buying tokens to finance their new furniture addiction will generate extra income for them automatically. I mean, I could see them putting one special house in the shop for launch or something, but I think in general they'll be happy to let the extra cash roll in through WoW Token sales.

Isn't this likely to just be Garrisons 2.0?

So I think this isn't likely to happen either, mainly because Ion has outright said that they've learned their lessons from Garrisons and won't repeat the same mistakes. He's categorically stated that there'll be no player power tied to housing, and that Garrisons were never really meant to be housing anyway, just a riff on classic Warcraft base-building. The latter made me raise my eyebrows a little but I can't be bothered to go back and try to research whether it was the devs or fans who first referred to Garrisons as WoW's version of housing.

Anyway, I believe Ion when he says that housing won't be tied to player power, and just based on the short teaser trailer, I think the devs also understand that proper housing needs to allow for far more customisation than Garrisons did. However, there were other things wrong with Garrisons, and I'll concede that we'll need to wait and see whether the dev team has really learned all the lessons from Garrisons' mistakes. After all, they are very prone to over-incentivising new features in some way to make sure everyone engages with them (*cough*delves*cough*) and there are ways other than player power that could make housing feel mandatory as something to have and spend time on, for example if there's too much convenience tied to your house that you can't get elsewhere. I'm not yet convinced that the WoW devs are truly brave enough to just add housing and let it be like transmog, something that people just engage with for fun and because they enjoy looking at pretty things on their screen.

Is WoW housing going to be instanced or not?

I've been surprised to see people even ask that question. Wasn't WoW one of the pioneers of making instancing for dungeons and raid bosses commonplace? A lot of MMOs have housing, but the number of them that have non-instanced housing is comparatively small, and it pretty much always seems to cause issues. I have no doubt that WoW housing will be instanced, though how these instances will be set up exactly (e.g. whether there'll be something like neighbourhoods) remains to be seen.

How could they possibly satisfy everyone?

I think the biggest challenge that Blizzard is going to face with implementing housing at this point in WoW's life is that they've never been quite so behind the times with adding a desired new feature, which means that players have literally had several decades of building houses in other MMOs and developing expectations based on that. Not to mention that WoW itself has had decades of its own content that should all be integrated into the system somehow when it launches.

No matter how much effort the devs put into housing's launch, I think it's pretty much destined to feel lacking in some way at first, because people will want different houses and furniture in the style of every playable race, they'll want to be able to collect trophies from every dungeon and raid in the game, they'll want to display each and every one of their hundreds of mounts and pets, they'll want new professions that gather wood and craft furniture... you get the idea.

Free-form or hook-style?

One thing opinions are already split on is how placement of furniture should work. Many people will want to be able to place things completely at their own leisure to fully unleash their creativity... but to be honest I think there'll be some limitations on that. I can see the devs opting for something like the flexible hook system used by SWTOR's strongholds, mainly because like Star Wars, Warcraft is a pretty strong IP with a unique visual identity, and I don't think they'll want people posting pictures of their WoW house containing a giant dick built out of chairs, or having to deal with reports of oh so funny players painting swastikas on the floor via strategic placement of candles (and you just know that WoW players would absolutely do both of those things if left entirely to their own devices).

What else can go wrong?

Finally, and this is a point that I have to admit hadn't occurred to me until I saw someone else mention it: there are practical risks to trying to retro-fit such a giant new system into an old game on a tight schedule. I think I mentioned in a previous post that Blizzard seemingly decided recently that it's better to release content on a quick cadence and let a bunch of bugs slip through, rather than to stick to polishing things until they're as bug-free as possible and make people wait for next patch. To be clear, they'd already lost their reputation for "Blizzard polish" some time ago, but it's definitely gotten worse with The War Within.

And I've got to admit that so far, that trade-off has felt worthwhile to me personally at least, as I haven't run into any major issues myself. When I see stuff like a shaman's totems floating off into the distance during the Dawnbreaker dungeon, it just makes me laugh, but not everyone's been this lucky. The introduction of Warband banks led to some people losing the contents of their guild bank for example, to which Blizzard's ultimate response was basically "too bad, so sad". That's something that may technically be covered under their terms of service, but it's also led to some pretty unhappy customers, and I can't blame anyone for worrying what's going to come next, now that they've established a precedent for accidental data loss on a large scale being something that players just have to put up with.

All in all, I remain optimistic and interested in seeing WoW's implementation of housing, but let's just say there's a lot of room for things to go wrong and it remains to be seen whether the launch will be an unequivocal success or end up being more of a calamity.

WoW Memories #9: November 18th, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.

The following was originally posted on November 18th, 2006 under the title "WoW Weekly":

Time for some WoW observations made in the past week again! ;-)

When Darkspear was down on Wednesday¹ I decided to play with Isadora on Norgannon again - the first character I made, a paladin that has practically been reduced to being my twink² seeing how I'm always using Tiranea to play with Nemi & Co. Not having any friends to play with on that server seriously takes away a lot of the fun, but that night wasn't so bad because I finally joined a proper party for once. I wouldn't say that I got along with them as well as with some of the people I've met on Darkspear, but for what it was worth we bonded. It started after we had finished the quest that originally brought us together³ and we were wondering what to do next and one of the guys said that there was an elite bear he wanted to kill. I asked whether he had a quest for that and he said no, he just wanted revenge for getting killed by it earlier. That was a feeling I could relate to only too well from some experiences I've had on Darkspear, so we went and slew that bear - twice even.⁴

It was also interesting to be the leader of the group for once, as I always tend to trail somewhat behind when playing my priest. As a paladin among three warriors - who were two, four and six levels below me respectively - things were quite different though and I was constantly busy trying to draw the mobs at me instead of away from me. At the same time I was still the healer of the group as well, mostly busy trying to save the "baby" of the group from dying, with the main difference being that I could just let the enemies hack away at me while healing the others, 'cause unlike a priest a paladin can take quite a lot of damage. Makes me wonder whether I don't actually like that class better than the priest...⁵

Anyway, in Darkspear news: We have now reached a level at which encounters with Horde members are becoming more or less regular, and I find them quite interesting personally. Officially we're supposed to be enemies and can't really interact with each other in any other way than fighting (when in PvP mode). We can't trade or anything, and speech gets garbled by the filter. However, just like in real life when you don't understand each other you can always resort to body language. Yesterday I watched two Horde warriors duel on the road and jumped around to cheer them on. An undead rogue in PvP mode taunted Nemi and our friend Kites once, which promptly made them kick his behind. Another undead guy saw Nemi and me fight a whole bunch of enemies in the ruins in Stranglethorn and actually joined in to help us. I saluted him and he bowed. Who needs words?

On the whole I think we've also had more friendly encounters with Horde members than hostile ones, saving several Hordies that were on the brink of death by killing the mobs that were attacking them. It would be too cruel to just stand by and watch, you know? And as Nemi put it: "This ain't a PvP server."⁶ I already joked that our newly-formed guild "The Dark Crusaders" should be called "The Nice Crusaders" instead.⁷

And finally, only one reason why questing with several druids at once is fun:

There's nothing like several bears doing a synchronised jig!⁸

¹ I repeatedly noted in other (non-WoW-related) entries that I was unable to play that day because the server was down. I'd forgotten that even back in 2006, servers being down for hours on end was still a pretty regular occurrence.

² I meant alt, not twink. It's an interesting curiosity of language to me that the word "twink", which in an MMO context stands for an alt that has been geared to the teeth with the help from a higher-level character, came to mean simply "(regular) alt" in German.

³ Based on the screenshot and my memory, that would've been Gathering Idols in Loch Modan.

⁴ There is actually a quest for Ol' Sooty, called Vyrin's Revenge, but at the time I didn't even know the Farstrider Lodge existed. I don't remember when I first came across it, but I know it was several years later, which at the time made me wonder how the heck I'd managed to miss a whole quest hub in the corner of Loch Modan for that long.

⁵ I did grow to like paladins a lot too, though I wouldn't necessarily say more than priests. It does strike me as interesting that I showed an instinct to "protect" my fellow players so early on.

⁶ I think it says a lot about my nature that the very idea of wanting to fight the other faction was so utterly foreign to me to begin with. I just saw them as strangers I couldn't talk to and was curious to find other ways of communicating.

⁷ I like how quickly I brushed over us becoming part of a guild here! From what I remember it started with us befriending a human warlock called Khytez (pronounced "Kites") in Duskwood. I have this vague memory of grouping with him to help him summon somebody. Soon we were getting invited to join his guild, which was called "Knights of the Light", which is a very stereotypical classic WoW guild name. However, we'd been in the guild for no time at all when I was told that some people were going to leave to form their own guild and that Nemi and I should join them. I had no idea about anything yet at that point, what guilds were even about or why we were doing any of this, but I just did as I was told. The new guild was called "The Dark Crusaders", which is another very stereotypical classic WoW guild name. We had a pretty good time for several months, until one day I logged on to find that the GM had disbanded it in a fit of rage over something unknown. We tried to gather the survivors in the newly formed "The Happy Lemmings" but it was never quite the same.

⁸ Imagine if there was no /dance emote in WoW. Would there have been as many people making videos of their characters, considering how many of those videos involved people dancing? I wonder if the game would've evolved differently if they hadn't cut the dance studio from Wrath...

Another Five Down, Four More to Go

Back in September I wrote about how I've felt encouraged to experiment with alts in The War Within. This eventually escalated into me deciding that I wanted to have a max-level character of each class this expansion, a prospect that actually wasn't all that daunting considering I had one of each class at level 70 (the old level cap) by the end of Dragonflight. I've reached 80 on five more characters since then and wanted to jot down a few more impressions of the different classes I've levelled.

Until I took this picture, I hadn't realised that the Warband screen also follows the day-night cycle.

Marksmanship Hunter

My fifth character to 80 was my human hunter, and I'm honestly not even sure why. I think I wanted a character for easier solo farming and hunter kind of fits the bill. That said, I feel a bit ambivalent about the hunter class in retail. I've long loved the classic hunter with all its challenges of micromanaging ammunition and taking care of your pet, and I never quite got over how all of that was taken away in Cataclysm. In terms of pet interaction, the modern hunter feels more like a Pokemon collector (no actual investment in the pet needed, you can just collect as many as you like and I guess there's some appeal in hunting down rare models), and the supercharged shooting animations look a bit ridiculous to me in the way they make your character treat their bow and arrow like a machine gun.

I'm Marksmanship spec because I was never a huge fan of BM (while I liked taking care of my pet, I never liked the idea of my pet doing all the damage for me - I still want to be the hero myself, OK?) and being melee as a hunter still feels like an abomination to me. That said, I can't say that Marksman feels all that great to me right now either. It doesn't actually seem to me that it has too many buttons, but I don't like that you're basically not supposed to have a pet at all (I tend to just not take the Lone Wolf talent) and it does still feel to me like there are probably too many complexities involved in having a good damage rotation. I thought I had a pretty good idea of which buttons did the most damage, but when I did an LFR wing on this character, even though I was mashing my buttons like crazy, my damage output ended up around the same level as the tanks - way, way below the other hunters in the group.

I also don't have much to say about the hero talents for hunters, because they feel designed around the idea that you're an elf and want to cosplay as either Tyrande (who isn't even a hunter!) or Sylvanas, and I want to do neither. I did pick Dark Ranger because it sounded slightly more appealing, but just as I thought I was getting an idea of what to do with it, Blizzard completely revamped the way its main ability works and I'm once again back to square one. In summary: the class still lives up to the hunter's reputation of being decent for soloing stuff, but feels too fiddly for me in group content.

Guardian Druid

This would be the druid I levelled during Mists of Pandaria Remix. I still love watching her cute and fuzzy bear butt, but the way druid tanking works still feels a bit weird to me. I was initially a little confused why she seemed to be taking so much more damage than my warrior, until I realised that you're supposed to be using self-heals all the time (something which the warrior doesn't have as much).

I also don't really like the way the Ironfur buff works, expecting you to constantly pump rage into keeping up this mitigation buff that only lasts a few seconds. It was only later that I realised that protection warrior actually has something similar going on, I just hadn't been using it because at low difficulties you basically take no damage as a warrior anyway! I've only slowly started to adjust to that as we're starting to crawl our way up the M+ ladder. Still, the point remains that I'm not a fan of having this sort of "mitigation rotation" where you're supposed to constantly be mashing defensive buttons to keep all your buffs rolling.

Regardless, like the prot warrior, a druid tank is really good for soloing as well, so I've been using her to tank some easier content like Timewalking and sometimes to solo delves (tank who can also stealth and sneak past mobs = OP). 

For her hero talents, I went with Druid of the Claw because I bear, I maul things. Why would I want to shoot moonbeams or whatever?

Holy Paladin

Unlike with some other classes, I never know quite which spec to choose with paladins since I do actually somewhat like all three, but I figured I'd stick to healing with this one and see how paladins are doing these days. Funnily enough, I found it very pleasant to quest as holy - I'm starting to think I like levelling as tank or healer in WoW because they have such simple dps rotations - things may die more slowly but at least I feel like I know what I'm doing, as opposed to many dps classes where I mash buttons that look like they should be doing good damage but then don't because I either didn't string them together in the exact correct order or because I'm missing some crucial talent without which the whole build is destroyed.

Anyway, as I was feeling a bit insecure about my abilities as a paladin and knew that regular pugs could generate quite insane healing requirements, I decided to practice my healing by doing some follower dungeons first. Sadly, they turned out to be of limited usefulness for that purpose as Captain Garrick pulls quite conservatively, to the point where the required healing is minimal, and I didn't quite have it in me to try and "ninja-pull" more trash onto her to make things more challenging. Also, even when there was already almost nothing for me to do, the elemental shaman NPC would actually feel the need to throw off-heals around too? Bitch, let me do something here!

In search of a slightly more challenging environment I eventually healed some LFR wings, but there I once again couldn't quite shake the feeling that I was doing something very wrong because my healing was very low compared to other healers. That said, I also couldn't be bothered to do any research into how to remedy that. I may want to level every class to 80, but I have no interest in playing them all in endgame content.

As an aside, this character also taught me that it's possible to lock yourself out of choosing certain hero talents if you don't make the right talent choices because I was "only" allowed to choose Lightsmith. This should probably tell me that I'm not good at making my own choices when it comes to filling out the new talent trees, but if Blizzard is giving me all these choices I'm damn well going to make my own!

Windwalker Monk

Levelling my pandaren monk from Remix was a pleasant surprise, because I initially wasn't sure about all the changes that had been made to the class since Shadowlands. (During Shadowlands, my human monk was my main and was primarily a Mistweaver, but occasionally I'd spec Windwalker for questing and a lot had been changed since then.)

Unlike most of the other classes whose play styles I bemoan in this post, monk has been delightfully easy to pick up and play. I didn't put any more effort into learning the class than with the others (meaning I read all the talent tooltips and picked what I personally thought sounded most useful) but for some reason my monk seems to do decent damage even with me mashing buttons semi-randomly. I don't know why more classes can't be like this.

I was even more surprised when I looked up their current standing in terms of raid dps and Mythic+, and they're apparently... not very good? I can't say I got that impression at all while soloing.

Subtlety Rogue

Rogue's a class that has never vibed with me, but it's worse in retail than in Classic. At least I found my AoE finishing move again... at one point during Dragonflight, Black Powder disappeared from my bars and I still don't know whether that was an intentional change or me messing something up... either way not having an AoE spender for several months was super weird. It's back now, but sadly just alternating between Shuriken Storm and Black Powder on dungeon trash still leaves me barely outdamaging the healer.

Similar to death knight, rogue feels built around the idea of constantly having some sort of short-cooldown dps booster up, but for some reason where on death knight this feels fun to me, on the rogue it feels bad. My combo points always seem to fill up either instantly or incredibly slowly, with no in-between, and I just can't wrap my head around it. There literally isn't a single button that makes me feel like I'm doing good damage, it's always either just "virtually no damage" or "you just hit a cooldown, now have a little bit of damage". (While editing this, I actually decided to quickly google a guide for this one just to get an idea of how badly I was going wrong and... yeah, not happening!)

In terms of hero talents, I picked Deathstalker over Trickster because I thought it sounded a bit cooler, but ultimately it's another choice that didn't feel very meaningful to me. I know I won't be playing this character very much, but let's be real: The main reason I wanted a rogue at 80 was just to finally be able to open those damn Bismuth Lockboxes, so I don't really need to know how to play.

Now I only have warlock, demon hunter, mage and shaman to go.

Rediscovering Season of Discovery

I wanted to take some more notes on my experience picking up Season of Discovery again:

One of the first things the game reminded of was that I made a whole bunch of alts in phase one that were all between level 10 and 20. Now, playing alts won't help with my goal of getting a single character to a high enough level to be able to do Demon Fall Canyon, but it's also fun and alleviates bag space issues (since I can just send all the cloth to my tailor and so on and so forth), so I spent some time burning through restedness on all of them anyway.

The world was busier than I expected - I'd figured that pretty much everyone but me would abandon everything they were doing on other classic realms to join the rush on the anniversary servers, but Wild Growth still seems plenty busy. Also, people were dropping Rend and dragon heads in Orgrimmar at seemingly all hours of the day, which kind of surprised me.

While going out to quest, I made the odd discovery that gathering nodes and chests were respawning at absolutely stupid rates for some reason. I first noticed it when I found a chest on my druid in Mulgore. I looted it, went to kill a nearby gnoll, turned around, and it was back! I looted it again, killed another gnoll, and the same thing happened again.

Later I was questing in the Barrens on my shaman, who is a miner, and I would almost get stuck in a loop running back and forth between the same couple of ore nodes that just kept coming back almost immediately after being mined out. As this was on the night of the anniversary server launch, I couldn't help but wonder whether some hyper-spawn setting intended for the launch day crowds was bleeding through to other servers.

The launch itself certainly had an impact as I got booted out of the game with the message "world server is down" (truly a classic) multiple times. At the time I had just killed Kreenig Snarlsnout, and coming back online in the middle of a fully respawned quillboar camp was not very fun. However, before I could properly fight my way out, I got disconnected again. This happened about five times in a row, until I decided to give up on fighting and just made a run for it. As it happened, this was also the time the server finally stayed up and I was able to make a close getaway.

My shaman also got an invite to heal Ragefire Chasm, which she accepted. I was told that the tank was new, and it was very noticeable as I did a lot of face-tanking while healing, but hey, people gotta learn somewhere. Plus it was only RFC and nobody died (I'm not counting the druid who somehow managed to fall into the lava on the way out). The group asked me afterwards whether they could add me to their friends list and I said sure, though I'm not sure how likely it is that we'll meet again with me playing my alts only in short bursts.

In terms of grouping, I noticed that there's now a manual group finder in Season of Discovery that's similar to the one we had in original Burning Crusade. I was always quite fond of that one, even if seemingly not a lot of people used it, but personally I always got good results with it. That said, I haven't really had a chance to put the SoD version to the test yet.

Another thing that happened was that I realised that with the lauch of the anniversary realms, Blizzard had also launched the AQ war effort in SoD. For a brief moment I got all starry-eyed, remembering the wonderful memories I made of the AQ gate opening event on Hydraxian Waterlords, and even wondered briefly whether I'd have enough time to level up high enough to witness the ringing of the gong on Wild Growth too. Sadly I quickly found out that the war effort in SoD is "fake" in the sense that your contributions don't matter and it just auto-completes after a week. While I can kind of get wanting to speed things up on a seasonal server, I still think that fully automating the process sucks, and I will of course not be able to see the event. Though to be fair, it's not why I came back anyway; it just would have been a nice bonus.

WoW Memories #8: November 13th, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.

This post is a bit different from previous ones as it doesn't actually talk about my experience playing the game itself, but rather contains a collection of links to WoW fan videos that I discovered at the time. In the original post, every single link was broken by now (some of them didn't even go to YouTube yet, but to the old Google Video site) but I was pleasantly surprised that I managed to locate re-uploads of all but one of videos (so the links work again). Get ready for some stamp-sized, 5 frames-per-second, incredibly cheesy nostalgia!¹

The following was originally posted on November 13th, 2006 under the title "Billy Maclure Has Got Some Trouble...":

For once I have to thank my brother for introducing me to a great source of entertainment: World of Warcraft music videos. On Sunday he asked me what kind of character I played and such, and when I told him that I was a Night Elf he told me that there was a video on Google of Night Elves dancing to YMCA that I should definitely check out.

My brother's taste and mine don't always overlap, but I decided to humour him and have a look... and ended up finding this. Not the most well-made video ever, but the sheer silliness of it still made me laugh, not to mention that I was amazed by how well the dancing was synchronised. And of course there's the fact that these people actually named their characters Tha, Vil, Lage, Peo and Ple...

But this was only the beginning. I soon discovered that there are a lot more WoW music videos like that out there, such as this version of Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy" or this vid to the Pet Shop Boys' "Go West". I watched, I giggled, and the more I searched, the more creative the work I found became. I mean, if I were to make a WoW music video, Weird Al's "Hardware Store" wouldn't exactly be my first contender for the song to use... yet someone still pulled off the amazing feature of making an excellent vid out of it (made in the EU, I'm also proud to say). And there's just something strangely right about Al's part being played by a troll... *snerk*

And yet the best was still to come, namely videos for which people had actually written and performed their own songs too, such as The Ballad of the Noob and my absolute favourite Billy Maclure, a parody of Michael Jackson's "Billy Jean". I have to admit that I've watched that one over and over again and still laugh at some of the jokes... cause yes, I also killed legions of hogs and swine for those damn pork pies. Not to mention that it's simply amazingly well done. If I read correctly, the guys who made it were later also involved in the making of the South Park WoW episode.²

And finally, honourable mentions go to two German contributions I stumbled upon by accident: Dwarves dancing to Dschinghis Khan's "Moskau" (nothing really special, but nicely synchronised and Dwarves are funny, period) and the plainly named WoW Song³, which doesn't even have a proper video so I don't know why it was uploaded to Google Video, but the sheer geekiness of the singing still cracked me up. Now if someone could only tell me which song it's based on, cause I know that I know the tune but I can't remember the original title and lyrics...

¹ I do miss the days when people made this kind of silly content for no other purpose than to have fun, and others also enjoyed watching it. These days it's hard to find WoW content that isn't guides or news trying to capitalise on clicks.

² I don't know about that, but I do know that Terran Gregory ended up working for Blizzard that same year and still works on WoW as Cinematic Narrative Director to this day. To think it all started with a humble quest in Elwynn Forest...

³ This was the one video I couldn't find, probably since "WoW Song" is not a very unique search term and my description of it is kind of vague. I did find this entry on the Wayback Machine, but it doesn't appear to contain a copy of the actual video, and the video title stored there, "Der neue Deutsche WoW Song" didn't yield any search results for me either.

A Return to Season of Discovery

I haven't talked about Season of Discovery in about eight months. I had an absolute blast with its launch, but almost the moment phase two unlocked, my enjoyment pretty much fell of a cliff. I seemingly wasn't the only one who felt that way either (even if many likely had different reasons for their discontent), as the mode's population continued to decline. Last week's Warcraft Direct dedicated less than a minute to talking about Season of Discovery, and the 2025 road map for Classic just kind of fizzles out for SoD, with the last item being "new endgame content..." at the end of this winter. A blue post has since reassured players that SoD characters won't be deleted, and that they'll have more to share about the future of the mode "Soon™".

Still, at least in the short term things don't look good for SoD as it feels like the announcement of fresh vanilla servers has sucked all the air out of the room, and I expect the SoD servers to see an even sharper decline in activity from tonight onwards. So what's the best thing to do if you're a Classic hipster like me who doesn't care for fresh and doesn't want to be where everyone else is? Get back into SoD of course!

To be clear, I don't necessarily expect to be playing it a lot, but I've actually been thinking about at least temporarily getting back into it for a while. Why? To see the new dungeon! If you're asking "What new dungeon?" I can't blame you, because I myself wouldn't even have known about it if it hadn't been for a complete throwaway comment in a WillE video. If you ever needed any evidence for why "Classic Plus" would never work it's that Blizzard actually creating an entire new dungeon for SoD generated so little interest that it's something most people probably don't even know about.

For me, ever since I heard about it though, I've been thinking about returning to level my characters some more, if for no other reason than to check out this dungeon. I don't know whether it's any good, but I want to find out! Unfortunately "Demon Fall Canyon" apparently requires a character to be level 55+, and considering that I left my SoD toons in their twenties, I knew I would have some work to do, but you've got to start somewhere, right?

Just returning to the SoD tab in the Classic client, I was surprised to see the Lava Lash server still there, if marked as "locked". I would've expected Blizzard to close it down and fully merge it into Wild Growth by now. Wild Growth itself was marked as having "medium" population, but when I logged into my undead priest, Orgrimmar still seemed plenty busy. She was still wearing the red winter hat she acquired last Christmas too.

I logged out again and decided to check on my dwarf priest on Lava Lash, whom I'd actually got to 30 before quitting. A quick scan revealed an active population in the single digits, but I decided to do a bit of questing on my own anyway. At least I'd have no competition for mobs (something that had been a royal pain in the butt last time I played SoD) and I could always still take the free transfer later.

I've got to admit that gameplay-wise, it was fun to have my runes back. I'd forgotten how amusing and useful my little homonculi were, making solo questing as a priest a breeze compared to regular vanilla. The rune on my chest had been marked as "faded" though, which initially confused me, but it didn't take long to figure out that some runes had just been moved to different gear slots since I last played.

I was kind of stunned by how fast the XP was rolling in. Sure, I was rested, but even so - as it turns out, the XP boost I'd bemoaned at the start of phase two has been increased to 150% bonus XP since then, meaning that less than half a dozen quests in Duskwood were enough to net me two full levels.

I later returned to my undead priest to do some questing in Hillsbrad and had a similar experience there in terms of levelling speed. While pausing to cast my line into a fishing pool south of Tarren Mill, I spotted a night elf hunter interacting with a strange crate, which summoned an elite turtle that she ended up fighting. This reminded me that disregarding the way that both community and devs have been obsessing over raiding, seeing strange new things in the world that I knew weren't there in Vanilla was one of the things I really enjoyed about SoD. We'll see whether I'll get some more of that over the coming weeks, now that I no longer feel the need to keep up with anyone else and worry about raiding.

The Zones of The War Within

This is a post that I've kind of been meaning to write ever since the expansion launched, but I wanted to take all the quests into consideration as well, and it took the husband and me some time to actually get through all the side quests, one weekend play session at a time. Then other things came up that caused me to delay publishing this... but with the expansion's first new patch zone on the horizon, I figured it was way past time for me to actually get this out.

In Dragonflight, Blizzard decided to mix things up with their zone design compared to previous expansions, designing the environment and content with flight in mind from the beginning. This was something they had never done before, but in terms of the zones' general feel, they were relatively conservative. Personally, I kind of got the impression that they were trying to earn player goodwill by creating zones that were reminiscent of a "best of" of some of the most popular zones. The rolling green hills of the Ohn'aran Plains reminded me of Nagrand, and the Azure Span definitely had some Grizzly Hills vibes. The Waking Shores were somewhat unique in their particular combination of biomes I guess, but in general, I'd describe the overall vibe of the Dragon Isles as "Remember all the places in WoW you loved in the past? This is similar, just bigger."

In War Within with its underground theme, the zone designers had to be a bit more daring, and it shows.

Isle of Dorn

First off, am I the only one who keeps wanting to call this place "Khaz Algar"? I know that's the name of all the zones combined, but in my head I keep wanting to use that name and Isle of Dorn the other way round. Anyway...

This is probably the most conservative of TWW's four launch zones, as it's basically a bunch of green hills. I don't want to downplay the designers' efforts and how they tried to add distinction to different sub-zones (the forest with the giant elite bees is definitely one to remember and navigate carefully), but at its heart this zone recalls other dwarven settlements such as pre-Cataclysm Loch Modan and the non-destroyed parts of Twilight Highlands, just with more of a titanic twist in the architecture.

It also houses the expansion's main hub, the Earthen city of Dornogal, which is very open and inviting. (My only problem is that with all the buildings looking kind of blocky and similar, I often forget where I am when I log in and need to open the map to orientate myself.) I think this was an intentional choice as the other zones have us descending into increasingly uninviting territory underground, so there's always an aspect of "coming up for air" to returning to Dornogal.

Story-wise, the zone is all about the Earthen, which I thought were going to be very boring but actually turned out to be quite interesting in my opinion. They have this theme of being machine-like and mostly speak in kind of robotic voices, but the ones that have broken free of their programming/"directives" talk in a more animated way. Also, for being this robotic people strictly bound by ancient traditions, they also have a surprisingly... twee side. There's this village called Rumbleshire whose vibe somewhat reminded me of a hobbit town, what with being sent out to look for lost rock-sheep and the like.

The Ringing Deeps

The first zone you enter as you descend down the Coreway is the Ringing Deeps, and I think this is probably my least favourite zone so far. It's still solid, but I don't consider the scenery particularly pleasant and it doesn't really have a strong unique vibe either. Of all of the underground zones this one's probably the closest to feeling like "Zeralek Caverns 2.0", just with more browns and greens instead of blues.

The dominant theme of the zone is more Earthen, who are even more robotic than their cousins upstairs and look after the ancient titanic machinery, but at this point I was just kind of like... "okay, whatever". The devs did what they could with that theme but it just didn't grab me. All the areas are more mines or ruins, and tend to feature different types of annoying wildlife including "that one area with the elites where nobody goes unless the big world quest is up", which is another thing that feels very Zeralek 2.0.

Hallowfall

This is the zone that everybody's been talking about even since before launch and I can see why. Despite being underground, it kind of pretends to be an overground zone by having a sea shore and a fake "sun" in the sky in the form of the giant crystal Beledar, which alternates between glowing with friendly yellow light and taking on a voidy, dark purple hue. I've got to admit I initially didn't get what all the hype was about because I originally only witnessed this change during the storyline, so I genuinely thought it was just a one-time event for that... but no, once I spent more time in the zone, I realised it happens on the regular and it's always awe-inspiring to hear the bells ring and the music change as the sudden darkness descends - or the relief when Beledar lights up again. It's kind of funny actually because even in its "dark" state the zone doesn't really get that dark... but all the other environmental changes combined can really send a chill up your spine.

Aside from that, I think a lot of the zone's appeal comes from its resident faction, the Hallowfall Arathi. When I first heard about these guys being a long-lost expedition, I thought they were from the Arathi Highlands... but no, apparently they're from the Arathi Empire somewhere else on Azeroth where we haven't been. An interesting example of how the game can actually make up wild new lore after twenty years but people won't mind as long as it superficially looks and sounds like something they think they already know. I can recommend this Platinum WoW video on the subject if you want to learn more.

What makes the Arathi appealing (in my opinion) is that they subtly recall beloved parts of the original game. The theme of helping farmers on the frontiers reminded me of the original Westfall even if the context was quite different, and the fact that the Arathi are basically an army of paladins wielding the light and have constructed all these grandiose buildings kind of portrays them as what the Scarlet Crusade could've been if they hadn't gone evil. I get why people dig that!

I also do like this zone both for gathering purposes as well as its general look and feel, though I've got to say that for me it really suffers from its positioning, in the sense that it's the zone that's effectively the furthest away from the capital (while Azj-Kahet is another level down, you immediately get a direct portal to Dornogal when you arrive there in the story, making it much more convenient to travel to and from than Hallowfall).

Azj-Kahet

And yes, Azj-Kahet! The best way to describe this zone in my opinion is that this is the Azjol-Nerub zone that was cut from Wrath of the Lich King, fourteen years later at last. It's big and creepy and yet has surprised me by not feeling all that hostile for being the classic endgame zone occupied by the baddies. Mob density isn't that high in these new, bigger zones, at least when compared to classic endgame zones like the Plaguelands, Shadowmoon Valley or Icecrown (something I actually consider a positive) and the Nerubians are also characterised as not universally evil, but rather as suffering from leadership that has been corrupted by Xal'atath. You immediately make contact with a bunch of rebels that want to work with you to overthrow said leadership, so it's made clear that there is a lot of nuance going on with the different factions instead of all of them just being a race of baddies.

You even get to freely walk around their capital, the City of Threads... which I've seen some people compare unfavourably to Suramar, something I don't know how to rate as I didn't play during Legion and I assume that questing through Suramar in Chromie time doesn't have quite the same level of threat to it. The City of Threads isn't that bad to traverse, largely thanks to flight, but even if a disapproving guard does catch you and throws you out, it's mostly just kind of amusing. Personally I'm happy with that though - I appreciate that this endgame zone isn't overwhelmingly dark and hostile, but still a place where you can quest without feeling like you'll have to fight for your life at every given moment.

---

I'm not sure how I'd rank these four zones, other than that Ringing Deeps would be last. All the others each have their own unique appeal that I appreciate, despite not being a huge fan of the underground theme. In general, Blizz have tried hard to make things fit the themes of verticality and being underground as much as possible while at the same time really downplaying those very same features, if that makes sense. All three underground zones are huge and well-lit so never feel that oppressive, and there are "slipstreams" that easily allow your flying mount to ascend from a deeper zone to a higher-up one without having to worry about vigour. (Something I totally didn't manage to figure out by myself and hadn't even noticed until someone else told me.) It's an interesting design and just about works for me right now, though I do wonder how I'll feel about it after spending the next twelve months mostly underground...

Warcraft Direct: MoP Classic, Fresh Servers & Housing Confirmed

Last night we were treated to Blizzard's "Warcraft Direct" stream, which was generally seen as a sort-of replacement for BlizzCon this year. And they still know how to draw numbers - I was watching on Twitch (because I could earn some free mounts in the process) and the viewer count sat pretty steadily at around 170k concurrent... and that's without counting those who were watching through other channels, such as YouTube and TikTok.

I'll start off by pointing out the one thing that kept bugging me stylistically: whenever they kept changing the camera angle without changing the way the speaker was facing. That was just such a weird artistic choice and constantly distracted me. It's strange when someone talks to you on screen, seemingly addressing you but staring off to somewhere vaguely to the right! Stop doing that!

Anyway, with that out of the way, the announcements started with the more boring stuff first (no offense to anyone who was thrilled by more Hearthstone expansions) - I guess they knew that the vast majority of people were there for WoW and therefore saved that until the end. Early on we got a shout-out for The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (about which I still mean to write a separate post) and its associated charity drive, which I thought was sweet and in which Holly revealed that she personally met his parents.

In terms of actual game news, Mists of Pandaria Classic was confirmed for next year with its own launch trailer. I already mentioned a few weeks ago where I stand on this one.

However, there will also be "Classic Classic" launching in only a week! I guess the "fresh lovers" got their wish at last, though it's also been confirmed that these servers will be progressing into Burning Crusade, which may muddy the waters for some people? Because once again, where do those characters go after? Interestingly, a new hardcore server will be launching at the same time, and that progressing into BC would be something new for sure. Can't wait to see the clips of someone suffering permadeath at the feet of a fel reaver or something.

Again, as I said previously, this isn't really for me. I can't deal with the rushing, FOMO and mega-server environment any longer, but it'll be interesting to observe for sure.

On the retail front, it was confirmed that while we're still awaiting patch 11.0.7, 11.1 after that will take us to the underground goblin capital of Undermine, something that had already been speculated about for a while. I can't say that this sounds like the most appealing location to me, but we'll see.

What intrigued me about this one was that there was talk about us getting a special car ground mount which sounded like it will feature dynamic ground riding, which was another one of those things dataminers had found hints about some time ago. Curious how that will pan out.

At this point in the stream I was kind of like: okay, all of that sounds decent but I can't say I'm actively excited about any of it. Then Ian concluded his segment by saying that there was just one more thing they wanted to show us, and a little trailer began playing, showing a male human warrior in the new tier two armour entering a house. "Now what's this," I wondered, and it slowly dawned on me as the camera showed him walking past a bunch of decorations including an Ony head on the wall.

The trailer then shows him comfortably sitting down with a mug that says "home sweet home" and we get the tag line "your next adventure begins at home", followed by the logo for the next expansion (Midnight). I was keeping some notes already and just wrote down "HOUSING" in all caps. Good job, Blizzard, for saving the biggest hype feature until the end.

It's funny because I'm not even the biggest housing enthusiast myself, but it's just felt way overdue for the game at this point. Ian Hazzikostas actually commented in an interview a few years ago that they were finally looking into it, and I already half-expected a housing announcement at last year's BlizzCon; it just felt like it had to happen eventually, and here we are now.

WoW Memories #7: November 11th, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.

The following was originally posted on October 11th, 2006 under the title "More WoW Talk":

After a week of frustrating uni work it was good to be able to just spend a whole day playing again. Mind, I still have work to do for next week, but just for this one day I got to enjoy pure bliss again.

As such I think it's time for some WoW observations again - randomly illustrated with pictures that have little to do with what I'm talking about, but I just like taking screenshots, and what's the point of taking them if nobody is ever going to see them?

First off, I think it's interesting to note that even though I've been playing for almost a month now, I've still made almost nothing but positive experiences with the game. Considering the kinds of stories I've heard from some people that's pretty damn impressive. I mean... yes, I have seen people pretend to engage in sexual acts.¹ I've also seen people beg, be careless, rude or generally unkind, but those are the exception rather than the rule. On the other hand I've teamed up with a lot of random strangers from all kinds of places - England, Poland, Italy, Romania, to name just a few - who were really nice, made me laugh and generally made my time worthwhile.

²

Getting used to all the game-specific lingo can be quite a challenge at times. Of course there's a fair deal you pick up automatically, other times you just ask nicely and people are more than willing to explain things to you, but there's just so damn much of everything... If I look at a random post in [a WoW forum community I had joined] you can bet that there'll still be a lot of comments including acronyms and other game-specific terms that mean absolutely nothing to me.

³

Also, while virtual realities like this allow for a lot of deception, allow you to be prettier and more talented than you'll ever be in real life, there are some personality traits that just show through no matter what. Case in point: my klutziness and dorkiness. I wish that some of the conversations I've had in game could have been saved to illustrate my point, but I'll just have to paraphrase:

Me: Where's the Howling Vale? I can't find it!
Friend: A little west of where you are right now.⁴
Me: *goes west, fights monsters* Does it actually say Howling Vale? Cause I see lots of monsters but it doesn't say...
Friend: Yes, it does.
Me: *runs in circles some more, killing some more monsters* I can't find iiit!
Friend: *comes over, points to the right of where I'm standing* Over there.
Me: ... oh.

I also have the most disconcerting habit of falling off things⁵, which manifested itself as early as Teldrassil (the starting area of the Night Elves), when I fell off the edge of the world a huge waterfall while trying to look over the edge. And died. Only yesterday I was going to take the ship from Booty Bay with Nemi and another guy, but somehow I managed to walk off it, and by the time I had climbed out of the water and came running back I could only yell "Nooo!" in a dramatic manner as the ship left without me. Not much later our party was leaving Ironforge, I ran ahead with an encouraging "I'm ready, let's go"... and promptly fell into one of the lava flows around the city. Fortunately it was covered by a net or something, so I didn't die, but it was still very embarrassing. Needless to say that Nemi was in stitches.

⁶

I also called the city of Auberdine "Aubergine" once. *shifty eyes*

On the whole I find the most fun part of the game so far to do challenging quests or instances together. It's fascinating what amounts of teamwork being stuck in a cave together can inspire (if you don't happen to stumble upon any of the aforementioned unkind exceptions). The only downside of the whole thing is that these things are often simply damn hard. I've tried to do Gnomeregan twice in the last couple of days and both times my group failed (meaning we died halfway through and then gave up because it had gotten late). Yet I still can't wait for the next time we get to try it. And then of course it's on to the next one! Am I a masochist or what?⁷

¹ I remember someone who was playing a male character asking me to do the /kneel emote (innocent ol' me complied of course), just to then stand right in front of me and do a /dance emote involving a lot of hip-thrusting... you get the idea. Obviously this stuck with me as rude, but on the whole I was significantly less bothered by this kind of thing back then than I would be now I think. I don't think it's uncommon to develop less tolerance for people giving you crap as you get older.

² I took that screenshot while our little group was auto-running from one end of Ashenvale to the other. This felt like it took up a lot of our time early in the game.

³ I remember in those early days I would often go into an inn and actually have my character lie down on a bed before logging out because it just seemed right. Definitely one of those aspects of innocence and immersion you can't go back to.

⁴ I find it interesting that I threw the names of friends around left and right without explaining to my readers who's who, but in this particular exchange I opted not to name the person and just put "friend". I wonder why. Also, I remember having this exact same problem with finding the Howling Vale while questing in Classic...

⁵ Now there's something that hasn't changed in almost twenty years!

⁶ This screenshot was taken inside the Stockades. I really wish I'd written down more about all those dungeons runs I did...

⁷ Okay, I guess this hasn't changed either.

The Big Birthday Bash

I held off a little on writing about WoW's 20th anniversary celebrations in retail because they were off to a bit of a rocky start but I had a feeling that things were going to get better. And they did!

Basically, the problem during the first week was simply that acquisition of the anniversary currency was throttled to an insane degree. I have no issue with devs preventing people from being able to grind out everything on day one, but that first week, even if you did every single activity that awarded bronze celebration tokens, you still couldn't earn enough of them to buy even a single one of the reimagined tier two sets that had been promoted as the main reward to earn during the event. So that sucked.

However, Blizzard saw the feedback and immediately course-corrected in week two, massively increasing token payouts from all sources and it's been fine since then. I've acquired most of the new sets already, but there are plenty more rewards to earn and I'm having fun.

The celebratory activities are very varied and I've been kind of surprised by how... self-directed some of them are. Sure, there are plenty of quests to be completed and achievements to be earned, but there are also a lot of things that don't seem to serve any particular purpose other than to have fun - something that's quite rare in modern WoW - such as rare clickables scattered around the area that temporarily grant you the appearance of popular NPCs and allow you to say some of their voice lines. I wouldn't even have known that these existed if it wasn't for Arlaeya Explores on Bluesky posting about all the different costumes she keeps finding. When I started to look around for myself, I managed to turn my hunter into Jaina.

Most of the time however, I've been busy taking part in the more "directed" activities. First off, there are three very open and casual events constantly rotating around the area: Storytime, Mount Mania and Fashion Frenzy.

Storytime is Lorewalker Cho telling you a story similar to what you got to witness after collecting all the lore scrolls in Pandaria, while you sit in the audience and cheer or boo as appropriate. I think these are nice, it's just a shame that there are only three different ones because that makes the event become repetitive quite quickly. Hearing C'thun get called a "giant creepy artichoke" made me laugh out loud though.

Mount Mania is basically an official version of the "mount-offs" that were popularised by streamers over the years and is easily the most popular of the three activities. To be honest, I can see why! Even though there are no prizes, it's just fun to join in and see how many of the mounts that get called out you've got yourself. It's also kind of humbling as a long-time player who might feel that you've got quite a few mounts to repeatedly be reminded of just how many you don't have.

Finally, there's Fashion Frenzy, which I believe is similar to the Trial of Style. People are invited to take a couple of minutes to create a transmog that goes with a certain theme, then everyone gets to cast votes, and winners are briefly announced on stage (though again, there are no prizes or anything). This doesn't seem that popular to me, I think mainly because of the time pressure. I like me a good transmog as much as anyone else, but I wouldn't be able to throw something together so quickly. Since voting is also something that gives credit towards a quest and achievement, people also tend to just show up and throw their ribbons at random people, regardless of whether they were even trying to take part and match the theme. My priest was once declared one of the winners just for standing nearby in her tier two outfit.

But really, all that's just the "background noise" to all the dedicated events you can take part in for rewards.

The BRD raid was a nice trip down memory lane, but I was a bit disappointed to find that you seemingly can't get all the related achievements done in LFR, or at least not without great difficulty. The final fight at the Imperial seat was interesting from a lore perspective as it makes sense that Moira nopes out of watching you kill her husband again, but the devs also gave him some voice lines that feel like they are trying to retroactively make him into a more sympathetic figure. Ragnaros also gets summoned in during the fight, because I guess you can't have any nostalgia-related activities in WoW without him.

Classic Timewalking was slightly disappointing to me in the sense that most of the dungeons featured in it are just the already neutered Cata versions (though I still found all the Strat runs I'd done in Classic to be beneficial in terms of knowing what the different trash mobs do for example). They did bring back the original Deadmines though, which I appreciated, even if you can't queue for it specifically and just have to cross your fingers that the randomiser will put you in there at some point.

The biggest disappointment to me personally though was the Chromie activity that had been promoted as being about "time tours of the opening of the Ahn'qiraj gate", as it doesn't really have much to do with that at all, other than being set in old-school Silithus. It's still a fun little scenario (I particularly enjoyed the activity where you have to find the NPC that matches your class - once I figured out what I was supposed to do that is); it's just not at all what I thought it was going to be.

The thing that surprisingly caused me to fall down a bit of a masochistic rabbit hole was Korrak's Revenge, the Alterac Valley mode with vanilla mechanics, including all the different quests and NPCs. AV has always been one of my favourite battlegrounds, and one I even enjoyed in Classic (even though I think PvP in Classic in general is pretty bad).

There is a weekly quest to earn 500 honour within that battleground, but once inside I also found that some of the quests within the valley itself, such as to capture a bunker or graveyard, also award bronze celebration tokens, plus there was a ram mount to be acquired for earning 200 timewarped badges from doing quests within the valley over a longer period of time, both of which encouraged me to keep queueing beyond the requirement for the main quest.

Interestingly, it was nothing like the quick rushes I'd experienced in Classic. Instead I lost every single match I joined, and many of them took over an hour (may have been longer, since a couple of times I also just deserted after a while - something I usually never do, but I honestly hadn't been prepared for how long these were going to last and needed to do something else). It was always the same scenario of an awkward stalemate at the Dun Baldar bridge, with the Alliance occasionally pushing forward as far as Icewing bunker but then quickly losing ground again.

That's pretty old-school and I guess I wouldn't have minded so much if I had the feeling that anyone at all actually understood what was going on or cared about winning the battleground, but I distinctly got the impression that the Alliance side at least was full of PvErs who just wanted to do the quests for rewards and had no clue what was even going on. This was most obvious at the start of a match when the majority of people rode southwards to Snowfall graveyard to cap that, but then just awkwardly stood there, not even trying to go any further. Once I saw a small group of about five players dare to venture a bit further south and ran along with them to provide encouragement and heals, just for them to decide to try to take on Galvangar with five people - I even tried to warn them in chat but they clearly had no idea what awaited them inside that building and it was just pointless carnage.

Where it gets really frustrating though is when you hit that stalemate at Dun Baldar because the thing to do when that happens is to get a small group of people past enemy lines and start capping things down south - you'll probably still lose, but at least you'll get some honour and break the stalemate. However, the NPCs in this version of AV hit so hard that you can't really take anything but a mine by yourself, and often times when I would try to sneak south, literally not even a single other person would want to come along, preferring to just get slaughtered over and over by the bridge. Or on the rare occasion when someone would come along, they would once again not really understand how hard the NPCs hit and charge head-first into a group of guards just to get insta-gibbed. It's just a kind of painful and bizarre parody of what PvP is supposed to be like. I wonder what the experience is like as Horde.

Finally, there's this thing called Secrets of Azeroth or Guest Relations, which is basically like a bunch of quests without quest markers that expect you to actually read the instructions and put some clues together by yourself. On paper, that sounds like something I should really like, but in practice my experience with it has been so-so. I managed to work my way through the introductory quest by myself, just using the in-game hint system once or twice, but eventually I hit a point where I just had no idea what was going on and had to look up help. The instructions are just too vague in some parts, and I simply don't have the patience for this kind of thing any longer, especially when so much of these quests seems to require you to run around on foot (Azeroth is big, y'all) and look for tiny things to click on on the ground. When I'm not even sure anymore whether I'm even remotely in the right area, I definitely just want to get on with it at some point.

Still, all in all I've been having fun with the varied activities. What's been your favourite thing to do so far?

WoW Memories #6: October 29th, 2006

I'm celebrating WoW's 20th anniversary by looking back at my own early experiences with the game 18 years ago, as documented on a personal blog that I was keeping just for myself and some friends at the time.

(By the way, if anyone's wondering how many installments of this series there are going to be, the answer is: I don't know either. Last time I tried to eyeball it, I figured there was material for at least 15 parts though.)

The following was originally posted on October 29th, 2006 under the title "Rez Plz":

I actually did some university work today but... really, what is there to say about that?

So, some more WoW tidbits:

I spent some time on the German server again today and made the discovery that English chat speak is running rampant among German speakers. I stood out like a sore thumb by saying "danke" when someone helped me among all the "thx" and "cu"s of other people. For some reason that made me sad.¹

Nemi keeps getting me into larger quest parties. I have to admit that this is actually loads of fun, even if I sometimes couldn't tell what the hell was going on, with eight people squished into a tiny chamber hacking away at a whole bunch of enemies...² I barely managed to keep track of my fellow party members' health by looking at the little pictures on the side.

Health? Yes... I don't think I mentioned it here before, but my Night Elf character is a priest.³ It's an interesting class; I'm not sure yet whether the good things outweigh the bad for me yet. You can feel really big and important when you resurrect people - not that it's really such a big deal, seeing how people can resurrect themselves in this game, but people really appreciate you saving them some time.⁴ And you can have big moments such as I had today - Nemi and I were in this ridiculously underpowered party with only one reasonably strong tank.⁵ Everyone died except him and me, but as I saw the enemies try to get me too I cowardly made a run for it... and it worked! As soon as they let me off I ran back and kept healing the remaining team member so he could finish off the remaining baddies all on his own.

The bad side is that you're weak, weak, weak, and some monsters have an affinity for spotting that even if you try to stay behind.⁶ And the rest of your party usually has other things to think about, so it can happen that they let you get killed, which, strangely enough, soon results in their own deaths - how come? Have to give Nemi credit for not doing that though - but then we are friends outside of the game and have to look out for each other, right?

¹ I'm kind of surprised by past me's emotional response here, probably because nowadays I'm much more open to the concept of languages intermingling I guess.

² Once again I didn't call it out by name, but I can deduce from context that this was about doing the elite quests in Stonewatch Keep, still in Redridge. The specific mention of eight people has me raising my eyebrow a little since I don't think we would have been able to do those quests in a raid, but I think what's more likely is that we were two groups of four loosely working together. In those days we weren't really worried about losing out on XP due to only one group being able to get a tag at a time; we just wanted to work together and survive!

³ Actually, I literally mentioned that I was playing a priest in the previous post. My past self's lack of continuity is maddening to look back on.

⁴ Looking back at this close to twenty years later, it seems funny that resurrecting of all things seemed like such a big deal to me, but I guess in other, non-MMO multiplayer games I'd played before, if you were dead, you were dead, so it was a kind of novel concept to me.

⁵ "Only" one tank? I can't fathom what kind of party composition I expected to have back then. I can only imagine that from my squishy point of view I considered every melee a tank in those early days.

⁶ I had no concept of threat yet, and thought that the mobs were just a lot more intelligent than they really were, honing in on the healer in the back as they were.