Plunderstorm Redux

Plunderstorm is back (for a bit) and it's been updated. Kaylriene is quite enthused by the changes, but to me, they've been more of a mixed bag. I like that they added horses out in the open world that work like a temporary speed boost, and the fact that regular mobs respawn now is great in so far as I've been able to hit level 10 for the first time ever. (In the past, even if I lived quite long, by the end the map used to be completely scoured of all NPCs and treasures, so it was no longer possible to gain experience past a certain point.) Blizzard also added a training lobby, which is a nice enough idea but is basically just a copy of the pre-match lobby that doesn't time out.

Some new abilities were added as well, and while that's interesting in principle, it also feels to me like it's made it harder than ever to actually upgrade your weapons throughout the match as the odds that you'll just get a dozen different abilities drop at level one are also increased.

In addition, you can now queue up for Plunderstorm while you're logged into one of your WoW characters, which is a thing some people wanted I believe, but I didn't particularly care for. When I log in to play Plunderstorm, I'm often quite happy to just do that and don't want to do anything in "regular" WoW anyway, so I still prefer going in from the character selection screen as it is. In fact, I was rather miffed when I couldn't find that option anymore after a couple of days and appeared to be "stuck" being unable to change the look of my Plunder character (as you don't get access to the character customisation option when queueing from within WoW itself). It was only about a week later that I realised you could still select Plunderstorm from character selection, they just hid it away in a drop-down menu for some reason.

You also get to choose a colour-coded "drop zone" at the start of the match now, and you'd think that having more choice like that would make the game better, but to me it's honestly just made things more boring. It feels like the population self-segregates very heavily now, which makes matches a lot more predictable. As someone who's not good at the PvP part and just enjoys collecting shinies for the rewards, I tend to choose one of the "green" zones, and they do indeed tend to be pretty empty or at least few people that land there will immediately look for a skirmish. This makes it easier to get your daily objective done, but it's honestly also a bit boring. Yet if I try to "mix it up" by choosing one of the harder zones, that just means that I get ganked moments after landing and get nothing done. It makes me miss the chaos of players of different types all getting jumbled together randomly.

Fortunately I don't need to be too excited about the mode this time around, as Blizzard massively ramped up the rate of plunder acquisition, which I do think is another good thing, even if I found it slightly amusing. It's as if they really did hear all the feedback after the anniversary event about how they are always too conservative with rewards at the launch of something new and decided to go "OK, allow them to go all out and be done within a few hours this time if they want; let's see how they like it". I only play about a match a day but am able to buy something from the new Plunderstore after almost every match, and since there are more returning rewards (which I all earned last time) than new ones, I don't even have that many items left to chase after two weeks. But hey, it is what it is; I'll continue to play in small doses for the duration of the event. I just think it's actually a little less fun now than it was.

ALL The Addons!

A few weeks ago, Wowhead drew my attention to a YouTube video called "What happens if you install EVERY ADDON for WoW Classic?" by Baltoboulbobbi. I clicked because the title intrigued me, but by god, I was not ready for what it showed me. It's not a very long video, only about seven minutes, but that's still a pretty long time to keep laughing, so my husband eventually grew concerned about what had me quite so amused.

At the time, the video had about 80k views, and I noticed that the pinned comment by the creator was "If this gets 20k views I'll do a 1-60 all addons challenge on a hardcore server". Someone asked whether he was seriously planning to do that, and he replied that he'd already started.

Needless to say, I immediately proceeded to his stream archive and started watching that too. At the time of writing this, I've watched about four hours of him streaming like that, and while it's been both funny and fascinating, I'm not sure I'll be able to take much more of it.

If you've ever watched someone else play a game awkwardly and found yourself fighting the urge to give them advice and tell them to do things differently, watching this stream is similar but ten times worse. The whole experience is just so painful to watch, Balto must have extraordinary patience to deal with it as calmly as he does, and it's rare that you notice any kind of annoyance sneak into his voice at all.

It's really quite astounding just how awkward the game is to play with all those unknown addons stacked on top of each other. Aside from the fact that all the extra windows mostly obscure his view of the actual game, they also break all kinds of other game functionality in unexpected ways.

For example he has no mini map, and the map addon that asserted itself always opens the map with a single view of the full continent, so that he then has to scroll about twenty times to get to the right corner of the actual zone he is in. With his visibility so limited and navigational tools largely out of action, he managed to get lost more than once even just trying to navigate the dwarven starter zone. He states early on that he's never actually played a dwarf before, which manages to make everything even worse as he doesn't even have the "legacy knowledge" of where the quests are and what they require.

Inventory turned out to be another tricky matter, as all the different bag addons created a situation in which he couldn't actually view or interact with anything in his inventory. He eventually figured out that he could get it to open any time he interacted with a vendor, but that was kind of it. At one point he also managed to somehow accidentally unequip his weapon, which started to sink in only slowly once he noticed that his little dwarf paladin was now punching things to death with his fists. Just locating his weapon again and getting it back into his hands was almost a mini adventure in itself.

It's not all doom and gloom, mind you. The addon that announces "You may now drink" in a weirdly snooty tone every time his character gets out of combat never gets old, and another one plays the sound of a metal bar clanging on certain occasions, though I don't think anyone's figured out yet what triggers it. Another one starts playing a repeating "sproing" sound at intervals that goes on for some time and then stops again, sometimes getting faster for a while... but again, it's open to interpretation what it all means. It just gives the notion of "coming up with new ways of playing the game" a whole new meaning.

Levelling Through Raiding in Season of Discovery

I've kind of stopped caring so much about my alts in SoD and have been more focused on just continuing to level my priest at the moment. I hit level 40 during a Scarlet Monastery run that was funny because in Cathedral, we had so much dps that we bugged out the last fight and Whitemane died from dots and totem damage before she could actually revive Mograine, something I didn't think was possible. This bugged out the fight so we only got one piece of loot and no quest completion, but most of the group was happy to just reset the instance and go again.

Also, I noted in my last post about SoD that buffing a full group with fortitude "still takes more than one full mana bar even in SoD", so I was rather chuffed when one of the bosses in SM dropped a priest scroll that reduced the mana cost of fort by 50% while also extending its duration by the same amount. This is the kind of change I can get behind!

Once we were done in SM, I manually legged it back to Brill in anticipation of getting my ground mount. I wasn't sure whether I was actually going to be able to afford it since I didn't have 90 gold yet, but I was hopeful that with how much certain things had been streamlined and sped up in SoD, the price might have been reduced and I would be able to afford it anyway. This turned out to be correct.

At this point I thought I should maybe start focusing a bit more on getting my professions and runes caught up before doing more questing, but I hadn't yet been fishing for half an hour when a warlock whispered me to ask whether I wanted to go to Gnomeregan (the raid). I replied that I hadn't done it before but was up for it and quickly got an invite, which was followed by a summon only a few minutes later.

We killed the first boss with no issues, but wiped on the second one due to massive AoE. The warlock (who was also the main tank - what is it with warlock tanks in SoD?!) just went "adds?!" and rage-quit the group. I thought that was quite funny, considering he'd been the one to actually put the raid together and didn't seem to have any issues with inviting people who openly said that they'd never done this before. Talk about giving up quickly.

The rest of us hung around and tried to get a replacement, but without a summon we knew it would take a while for them to arrive. We spent about fifteen minutes sitting around waiting for this shaman to make it to Booty Bay for the teleport, just for them to notice the level 60 we had in the group and go "oh, never mind, I just wanted to come for the XP" and leave again. (I think they were worried that a 60 in the group would nerf their XP too much?) We just nine-manned it in the end and had another wipe, but once people finally understood that the adds had to die, the fight was easy-peasy and we were able to move on.

Crowd Pummeler seemed pretty straightforward, and I commented that the XP was pretty good even with the level 60 in the group. That remark clearly jinxed it for everyone, as on the next boss, everybody but the level 60 died, and he shaved off the last sliver of the boss's health all by himself, which meant that none of us got any XP for it, being dead at the time.

On Menagerie (an encounter completely new to SoD) we wiped once because people didn't make sure to get the bosses down at the same time. On the second attempt we were successful, but then Thermaplugg spawned right in the middle of the room and even though we'd been warned about that, someone immediately aggroed him and we wiped again. At this point the level 60 and two others quit the group, but the new raid lead valiantly made an attempt to find a few more replacements, including another level 60. In the end we gave Thermaplugg a few more tries with nine people, but we only got as far as the third phase with basically no mana and immediately dying to massive damage at the start of the phase, so we eventually called it there.

I didn't get any loot but was still happy to have had the opportunity to see the raid. Even though I recalled Blizzard buffing XP gains in BFD when phase two launched, I wasn't sure how common it was for people to actually run the low-level raids as levelling content. The XP was indeed very good, even with the level 60 in the group and me only being alive for four boss kills, as I gained more than a full level of experience from that run. I'd kind of like to go again at some point to see whether another group might be a bit more successful (and with me having the advantage of actually knowing the fights now) but I probably won't put too much effort into finding a group since there are plenty of other sights to see still.

Siren Isle Is a Bit Boring

I'm a bit behind in terms of talking about what's new in retail, partially because I wanted to prioritise wrapping up my end-of-year summaries and my WoW Memories series, partially because what's been going on hasn't been terribly interesting to be honest.

War Within's patch 11.0.7 came out a month ago now; the husband and I didn't bother to even visit the new place that came with it until about two weeks later, and we were basically kind of bored with it after a single afternoon of playing there. I feel a bit bad saying this because I do appreciate the way Blizzard have been trying to give us these smaller content patches with world content between the larger ones since Dragonflight, and someone clearly tried to make the best of it by coming up with all these toys and gadgets that you get to play around with on the island but it just wasn't compelling to me at all.

The most obvious comparison that comes to mind is with the Forbidden Reach, which was 10.0.7's "patch island", but still managed to have quite a bit more going on. Most importantly for me, it was an actual part of the Dragon Isles that was connected to the expansion both in terms of lore and land mass - you could fly there straight from the Waking Shores without a loading screen. Comparatively, Siren Isle is tiny and nobody really knows where it is, as you get there by talking to a goblin on a zeppelin and bam, one short loading screen later you've arrived.

You can't fly on Siren Isle, and to be honest it wouldn't make sense to do so because you'd barely be able to lift off without already overshooting it. (Edit: I just read that we'll unlock it in another two weeks, but to be honest that still feels a bit pointless.) It's a tiny, barren piece of rock without any gathering nodes and barely even any plants and animals. I read somewhere that it was actually created from an Island Expedition map built during BfA that the devs didn't end up using back then. That certainly explains why it feels so disconnected from the rest of Khaz Algar and has dead Kul Tirans on it.

When we first arrived it actually seemed crazy busy because there were constant NPC shouts all around us, but we quickly learned that the three rotating mini bosses just come with a lot of noise attached. Beyond that there are just some weeklies that basically ask you to run around the isle and kill everything in sight for twenty minutes. Woo.

Like I said, I actually feel a bit bad about being so "ungrateful" for this new content, but it's just kind of underwhelming for what it is. I guess I appreciate that the new ring with unique gems (a feature that I didn't love in the Forbidden Reach either and could've done without) at least doesn't come with quite the same level of inventory clutter as the last one.

WoW Memories #14: January 16th, 2007

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 January 16th, 2007 under the title "Burning Crusade!": 

So today was WoW expansion day! We saw the first Blood Elves being made at midnight¹, but that was about the most exciting thing that happened then. (Though we were all surprised that the servers didn't collapse right away.) I had preordered my own copy of Burning Crusade from Amazon but didn't expect it to arrive on release day, so I was pleasantly surprised when I found a parcel in the hall when I came home from uni this afternoon.

Installing it was quite annoying though. The installer froze up every time it reached the point where I was supposed to insert the second CD, but fortunately for me plenty of other people had the same problem and there was a thread on the support forum telling people that copying the CD contents and installing from the hard disk would circumvent the problem. Of course I had to reinstall two patches after that while my internet connection was extremely erratic and kept cutting off every other minute, so...²

Don't really have that much to say about the new content yet. I didn't much fancy questing in Outland alone, though I did eventually go through the Dark Portal after a friend kept linking me to some of the new items. I hadn't quite believed Mecha when he predicted that there'd be greens in Outland better than the old epic stuff, but it looks like he was right. I couldn't quite believe my eyes when I saw the green wand you get as reward for one of the first quests I accepted...³

Also, Draenei > Blood Elves. From what I had seen of them on screenshots and such I thought that they were both nice-looking races but I didn't have any strong feelings about either. After fiddling around with the character editor for a bit however I really fell in love with the Draenei and their strangely twisted spines and legs (even if they walk funny) while the Blood Elves only struck me as pretty but bland.

I couldn't resist making a little Draenei mage of my own⁴, even if I don't know what I'm going to do with her and only got her to level six so far. The starting area was just so flooded with people fighting over quest mobs and spamming the chat that I couldn't stand it for long.⁵ Will see how long it takes for that to cool down.

¹ By that I meant that I was questing in Ashenvale on my tauren hunter and opening the /who window around midnight, constantly refreshing a "/who blood elf" query (or something like that) and watching the first results appear.

² Ah, the good old days of installing MMO expansions from physical media. Can't say I really miss that part.

³ I think that would've been the Desolation Rod. Doesn't look that impressive now with retail stats, but back then it probably had two or three times the number of whatever blue I'd last gotten in a Vanilla dungeon, so it seemed absolutely jaw-droppingly powerful.

⁴ That's this one!

⁵ This was actually kind of comforting to read because it shows that my disdain for the mega-server crowds that have come to dominate Classic is not just me being a grumpy old lady shaking her fist at the kids these days, but something that does go way back.

---

This seems like a good point to end this series for now, with the launch of the first expansion and the anniversary event in WoW also just having ended. This wasn't the last entry about WoW on my old personal blog, but they did become more irregular over time and also... changed a bit in nature I guess? A lot of posts were just random screenshots, and aside from marking some milestones that I was particularly proud of (such as when my guild cleared Gruul's Lair for the first time or when I got my first talbuk mount), they became more about my relationships with the people I was playing with than the game itself, and I'm not actually sure that would make for great material for this blog.

Not that I never talk about the people I play with nowadays, but a lot of those old posts definitely seem like "you had to be there" material on re-reading, such as when I talked about our GM tanking heroics for us late at night while drunk, or about how I met a shadow priest from another guild in real life and laughed at him while he threw up on the street. I might re-evaluate that at some point in the future, maybe when the Burning Crusade turns twenty or something. In the meantime, thanks for joining me on this trip down memory lane; I hope you found at least some of it interesting!

Anniversary Success

After the bad pug story from a few days ago, today I have a tale of a good one! From retail even...?!

However, first things first: The big event for WoW's 20th anniversary finally came to an end this week. I wrote about what I thought of all the different activities involved back in early November, including the fact that currency payouts were initially very restricted. Once the devs fixed that, I kept collecting celebration tokens for about a month until I'd gotten everything I wanted, and then I kind of lost interest.

That was until someone reminded me at the end of my Christmas holidays that the event was almost over, and I decided that I'd probably like to still polish off the remaining achievements that I hadn't completed yet. These basically fell into two categories: Secrets of Azeroth and the BRD raid.

With the Secrets stuff, I'd done a few of the Guest Relations quests but stopped at some point because I'd found them too tedious to figure out. This time around I just looked up some guides and powered through everything that was left with instructions up on my second monitor. So many of these puzzles were just way too fiddly and obscure. Ticking all the boxes still took some time (the story quest about the feast recipe for the pirates was absolutely diabolical, especially if you didn't want to just buy all the ingredients off the AH) but I got there over the course of one day, finishing off my hunt for crates in the early hours of New Year's Day.

The issue with the raid was that I had done it multiple times on LFR, but the two achievements for it required you to go into areas where a raid finder group usually wouldn't go, so I figured my only chance to get them done was to join a normal mode pug. Even though I hadn't set foot into anything beyond LFR since mid-Cataclysm (not counting the craziness of Pandaria Remix), I strangely enough wasn't too worried about that, as I'd repeatedly heard from credible sources that normal mode raids these days aren't really much harder than LFR. I invited my husband into a party on New Year's Day and suggested that we look to join a BRD normal raid together.

We only had one problem: there wasn't a single listing for BRD that evening, just Nerub-ar Palace runs as far as the eye could see. So I decided to be brave and simply create my own raid. I named it "BRD normal full run" and set the description to: "Let's get those achievements!"

You might think this foolish, considering that I didn't really know what I was doing, but I had faith that at least a couple of people willing to join our pug would know what to do and would speak up if we went grievously wrong. And... it worked out alright! After accepting absolutely everyone that applied over the next fifteen minutes or so, I realised that we were still a tank short, so I relogged from my evoker to my own prot warrior because I'm a glutton for punishment I guess I also had faith that the other tank would know what to do. First thing I did on zoning in was to hand them raid assist and they did seem to take charge quite happily, so all I had to do was help with rounding up adds, soak damage and taunt swap where appropriate.

We did have a couple of wipes, and one guy left after the first three bosses, but overall we progressed at a good clip, and my description had clearly attracted the right kind of people as at least half the raid piped up about missing the exact same parts of the achievements that we also needed and everyone gently herded each other towards them when we got to the right area.

It was also quite apparent that at least a few of our dps were even more clueless than I was (I'd at least watched a brief guide!), which usually became evident when someone was targeted by a soaking mechanic and ran for the hills to die alone in a corner instead of stacking up to survive. However, we were generally able to power through those losses just like you would in LFR, and the couple of times when things got too crazy and we wiped, someone did indeed speak up to inform us about just what had gone wrong, and people listened and did better next time. Everyone was friendly enough, and when we finished it was all "gg"s and thank yous.

I won't lie, I felt kind of proud that my first normal raid, my first pug raid, and my first raid organised by me - all rolled into one - went so well. Sometimes someone being willing to start the group is really all it takes.

When You're the Bad Pug (in RFD)

Last Sunday I healed a Razorfen Downs pug with my undead priest in Season of Discovery. It went... awkwardly.

I felt chipper enough when I first joined the group - I was filling the last spot, so we were immediately ready to go. The group had been listed for several dungeons, so I asked what the ultimate destination was meant to be and was told that it was Razorfen Downs. I could see that several people were already on their way to the entrance, and the tank was a warlock, which meant that I could simply await a summon, which was nice as I was very far away.

The tank asked whether we were all okay with doing the escort quest after the first boss, and I said "sure". I mostly took it as a given that the escort and its associated boss encounter would be included in an RFD run, but there's nothing wrong with making sure that everyone's on the same page! The warlock wasn't appeased that easily though - he insisted that each individual member confirmed in writing in the chat that they were okay with doing the escort, and that they would wait for everyone to hand in the previous quest before picking up the next one (the actual escort). A rather unexpected degree of paranoia I guess, but I wasn't put off just yet because I was well aware of how much of a pain that escort could be. (I mentioned it in this post from 2011!)

Anyway, eventually a summon arrived for me, and the moment I loaded in, someone shared the quest you can pick up just outside the instance with me. I thanked everyone around me and started buffing everyone with fortitude, something that still takes more than one full mana bar even in SoD. I hadn't even buffed everyone yet when the tank was already off to the races - and thus began half an hour of me frantically chasing after him, trying to sit down to drink every now and then but barely getting above 20% of my mana at any given time.

At one point before we even got inside the instance, the tank died because he had charged so far off, I hadn't stood a snowball's chance in hell at getting in range of him in time. He put "mb" in the chat but didn't seem to learn a lesson from it as he still didn't slow down in any way the moment he was back on his feet. Eventually I did put "oom" in chat myself because I really wanted a moment to drink, but this still wasn't enough to stop the tank. One of the dpsers took pity on me and handed me a mana potion though. At one point we spotted a chest and a few people rolled on it - I won but again didn't have time to actually grab it because the tank was running and pulling again and I had to race after him in turn to keep him alive.

When we reached Belnistrasz, the tank was very firm that we should all "just accept, don't talk". Frazzled as I was from the constant running and barely being able to keep up, I quickly accepted the first quest, hit complete and then accepted the second quest, which immediately started the NPC running. "Who hit accept?!" the tank roared, and it took me a moment to process what had even happened. He'd said to just accept, not talk, which was what I'd done... but then I opened my quest log and could see that I was the only person on the escort quest. It was only then that it came back to me that of course, that's why it was so annoying, because there is no separate dialogue option to start the escort, it immediately starts the moment you accept the quest. Why had he said "just accept, don't talk" then though...?

Anyway, the tank kept demanding to know who'd ruined everything while we ran back to the entrance to reset the instance. I wanted to be honest and confess, but he seemed so mad, and someone else piped up with a comment along the lines "somebody probably had auto-accept on" (in an addon). I of course had no such addon installed, but the temptation of blaming an unspecified person's addon was just too great and I said nothing.

When we got outside, the tank again made each of us confirm individually that we didn't have any auto-accept function on (anymore) before resetting the instance. As we fought our way through the same bunch of pig people a second time, he also kept putting "alfa" in chat repeatedly. I didn't know what that meant, but already racked with guilt and nervous as I was, I worried that I was missing something important and eventually asked whether that was a SoD thing. Someone simply said yes and the tank repeated "alfa" a few more times. But who was he talking to? I searched Wowhead for "alfa" on my second screen and got no useful results. Was I doing something else wrong now? Fortunately it eventually turned out that it was the shaman he'd been pestering, namely for the buff "Spirit of the Alpha".

Anyway, we got back to Belnistraz again, and it was once again emphatically repeated not to start the escort quest until the tank officially called for it. I meekly hung my head and waited. When I noticed level-up type sparkles around people's heads as others handed in the pre-quest, I started to sweat again. What if people were paying attention and noticed that I wasn't visibly completing the pre-quest just now? Would that give away my bad deed from earlier? However, even as I wondered about that, I suddenly got the pop-up to say that someone else had started the escort quest and whether I wanted to accept it too. I clicked yes of course, and there was once again raging about how someone hadn't waited, though at least I knew it wasn't me this time. There was also no threat of a reset as only one guy had been unable to pick up the escort, and the tank was like "screw that one guy" I guess.

The silver lining of the run was that the boss at the end of the escort dropped Scroll of Shadowfiend for me, which I took with some delight. I had no idea you could even earn extra non-rune abilities like that too!

Anyway, we continued the run as before, crazy rushing included. One of the bosses dropped a really nice caster cloak, but I saw the tank roll need so I passed, guilty conscience still gnawing at me, plus I had got the distinct impression that this tank had very strong opinions about getting what he wanted.

He also died two more times on trash, even though I was able to keep everyone else alive. He hadn't run out of range either, I just... wasn't able to keep him up? He seemed to take crazy amounts of damage sometimes, but I have no experience with warlock tanks so I couldn't judge whether this was normal or whether he was effectively doing the warlock equivalent of tanking in battle stance and without a shield when you're under-levelled for the dungeon. I just felt like I was failing as a healer, even though nobody said anything. At one point after I'd resed him again, he just stood there for a minute not moving, and I imagined him telling his guild mates about how trash the healer in his RFD run was.

Eventually we got to the end of the dungeon. We ran past another chest, which nobody but me even attempted to roll for this time, so I just looted it after everyone else had left. Amnennar the Coldbringer dropped his Coldrage Dagger, on which the rogue in the party rolled need... but so did the warlock, and he was the one who won. The rogue just put a ":/" in chat, understandably not pleased with a caster needing on a melee weapon. I felt bad for him, but that last incident also made me feel a bit better about my own failures, knowing that the warlock wasn't just bossy and in a hurry but also a ninja. Didn't need to feel quite so bad about him dying then I guess.

I hearthed back to Undercity and did my quest hand-ins. I then opened the group finder one more time just to see what else was happening, and saw that the warlock was already in the process of forming another group for Scarlet Monastery, this time with a druid healer that was only level 33. I silently wished that guy good luck in my head and logged off for the day.

WoW Memories #13: December 25th, 2006 & January 14th, 2007

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 December 25th, 2006 under the title "Christmas Night":

As usual my Christmas Day was very non-Christmassy, cause by then the celebrating is over and everyone's just enjoying being a lazy bum.¹ In anticipation of Benny² forcing me to go to bed earlier than has become my habit I also decided to spend one more long night with my WoW friends before his arrival³, and I didn't regret it even though it involved lots of virtual death. Somehow it was all just too funny, I was constantly worried about waking someone with my laughter.

When I told Benny about this later the following conversation ensued:
Him: So you had like... a virtual stag night?
Me: Yeah, I guess.
Him: ...
Me: ...
Him: That's disturbing.
Me: Well, maybe, but knowing me... I could totally see my real hen night one day also...⁴
Him: DISTURBING!

Heehee.

The following was originally posted on January 14th, 2007 under the title "Moo! I'm A Cow!":

And I like synchronised dancing!⁵

Sorry, really didn't have anything informative to say today. ;-)

¹ In Austria (and many other European countries), the actual Christmas celebration takes place on Christmas Eve.

² My boyfriend at the time.

³ He was from the UK and as mentioned previously, I was still living in Austria myself. We had a long-distance relationship and tended to visit each other during school holidays, as we were both at university. Also, I kind of joke about it in this post, but me staying up late to play WoW was actually a point of contention between us more than once. He was a gamer but had no love for MMOs, and even though I tried to be quiet if staying up past his bedtime, me being on the computer in the same room that he was also sleeping in still woke him up more than once.

⁴ Actually, my real life hen do involved two friends from Austria taking me to an escape room. Not too crazy but good fun!

⁵ This marked the beginning of me slowly switching to Horde side (though I still continued to play Alliance too for quite some time). In the screenshot you see my hunter Pukaja on the left, and the other two are Matje on a shaman and Nemi on a druid. We'd at some point decided to make alts on Matje's main server, Earthen Ring, where he was also raiding as a resto druid. Nemi and I would eventually end up levelling all the way to cap and ended up joining his guild during early Burning Crusade, but I can't recall whether that was already on our minds back then. It might have been on Nemi's, who was always way more organised about these things and actually researching things like which classes were in demand. We didn't last long trying to level together in this setup as she quickly got away from me in levels, and Matje wasn't that invested in his shaman and soon lost interest from what I recall. While Nemi's druid ended up becoming her main on Horde side, I would later reroll as a troll priest (though I did eventually get Puka to level cap too).