My Forever Social Conundrum

As part of being excited for WoW Forever, it was natural for me to start thinking about questions such as what I'll want to play and how... which quickly made me realise that I'm actually facing something of a conundrum in terms of what I want out of this game.

What originally enchanted me about World of Warcraft back in the day - and also worked its magic in Classic to some extent - was the vastness of the world and the social interactions: seeing the same people repeatedly and making new friends, but also just sharing funny moments with random strangers and silly pugs. Pretty much all my best and most memorable moments in WoW have involved other people in some fashion.

So naturally, I'll want to lean into that in Forever too, right?! Well, yes, but... then I think back to Classic Burning Crusade and remember that my worst moments in WoW also involved other people. I don't want to keep harping on about this because it feels stupid to act as if I was "traumatised" by something as frivolous as a video game, but the events of Burning Crusade Classic really left a mark on me. It wasn't all bad, but the bits that were bad, felt very bad.

I don't ever want to relive the experience of an MMO making me feel like I'm in a race that I can never win. I don't want to try and keep up with people who selectively no-life the game until they've ticked all their boxes and then log off, not to be seen again until the next raid. That's why I gave the anniversary servers a wide berth from the beginning, because I knew they were going to be full of exactly that kind of experience.

WoW Forever promises to be different of course, but will it? One can certainly hope that the way Blizzard has been promoting it will attract the right kind of audience, but I have no doubt that the usual suspects will also be there on day one, racing through Forever as if their life depended on it, whether it's streamers for whom it literally is their job to play all day or merely their followers. Ironically for me, this means that at least in the beginning, I'll be better off playing the game in a more guarded way, just doing my own thing and not paying too much attention to what anyone else is doing.

Real life should help with that, as I happened to already have a holiday booked from which I'll return only the day before Forever's launch, which means that I have to be back to work the following day and will likely be too busy and too knackered to spend too much time thinking about WoW. November is also a busy month at my job in general, so I don't expect it to be the ideal time to binge on any form of entertainment. Which is to say that while I do expect to be playing from launch, it'll probably be in limited bursts.

With all the new content present from the very early levels, I'm also kind of tempted to go for my own horizontal progression right from the beginning, rolling up lots of different alts to see the changes to all the starter zones, and then levelling them up via different paths to see what new things there are to explore in different levelling zones as well as the new low-level dungeons that have been added. That would also naturally make it harder to keep grouping with the same people repeatedly.

That said, I can't deny that I'm feeling quite excited by the prospect of seeing some of my old guildies from Classic again. (I'm aware that at least a few of them have expressed an interest in giving Forever a spin.) I'll just have to make sure to remain steadfast and not let anyone rush me at the beginning. After all, that level cap isn't going anywhere.

A Second Look at Housing

For all the fun I've been having with Midnight, its main new feature, player housing, has largely fallen flat for me. I made a few posts in which I talked about why, and then I moved on, because I'd rather focus on the many things that I have been enjoying.

However, I did want to use the release of 12.1 as an opportunity to take another look at housing and how it's been coming along. To be clear, nothing has been done to address the major criticisms I had with the system, but my opinions on some things have at least become a bit more nuanced.

For example, while I still don't care much about decorating, I did eventually go and decorate my house a little bit. I do enjoy collecting decorations regardless of whether I plan to use them or not - I'm the same in SWTOR; there's just something satisfying about claiming new decos and adding them to my stash. And after accumulating a certain number in WoW, it felt only natural to actually place at least a few of them. It's nothing exciting, just a basic house with some simple furniture, but I have started to feel at least a little bit of a connection to it. Even though I've reached housing level 10 from my various housing-related activities, I've stuck to the single room because I don't like the Tardis aspect of the whole thing and this way my sense of how warped the whole house is isn't too bad at least.

I do visit the neighbourhood at least once a week because in a typical case of Blizzard logic, after being extremely shy about giving the houses any utility whatsoever because they didn't want anyone to feel "forced" to use them, they also added a repeatable quest that rewards currency to gear up and requires you to go to your neighbourhood and do some simple task there every week, such as helping someone find some lost animals. It's just funny to me.

I will say that I really like the variant of the quest that asks you to attend a gathering of at least five players in a player house, because it's served as an opportunity for everyone in the guild to take turns visiting other people's houses, and there are nice spontaneous random groupings for it as well. One week when I couldn't get it done with guildies, I ended up joining a party via the group finder where someone was showing off their insanely detailed wizard tower interior - I quite enjoyed hanging around for a bit and having a look around. I also took a screenshot of my character sitting in their custom-made bathroom.

 

In general I do appreciate how much joy people who really like building and decorating purely for the sake of it get out of the system. Nobody in my immediate circle of friends is really into it, but I don't need to cast my net very wide on social media to come across players who are having an absolute blast with their house. Just take a look at the WoW Housing subreddit and get ready for your jaw to drop. I do at least get a bit of happiness by association out of that.

Oh, and remember endeavours? It did indeed not take long for Blizzard to nerf the requirements for public neighbourhoods to complete their endeavours, but the devs basically swung so hard the other way that they now basically seem to complete themselves. I just have to remember to check in at some point to collect my free housing coupons.

I do like how they make the neighbourhood look a bit different when your visitors change, though the randomisation aspect of that may still need some work. While some people were complaining that they'd already seen all the available endeavours and were now bored of them, the Grummels camped out in my public neighbourhood for three months in a row, meaning I didn't get to see anything else for a quarter of the year. When the system finally switched to Ethereals I had some fun with the jumping puzzle they added, and I'm kinda enjoying the Amani-themed one that's going on right now as well. The weird circular gift-giving thing with Griftah made my head spin a little but I was proud that I was able to figure out all the relevant neighbourhood NPCs organically. 

I reckon overall, housing is probably shaping up to be a success for Blizzard - the "usage" metrics must be decent thanks to the weekly quest for gear rewards, and I'm sure all the decor they've added to the shop has made for some nice supplementary income for the game. Housing enthusiasts in MMOs always seem to be quite happy to spend on the cash shop without complaining too much.

Alas, Poor Decor Duels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Midsummer & Darkspear Dashing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why I Like Midnight Professions

Back in March I wrote about how after the initial levelling frenzy that followed Midnight's release, I ended up turning my attention towards professions. This is an interest that hasn't dropped off since then. Sure, I also do other content such as delves, but the first thing I do after each Wednesday's reset is log into my (currently) seven profession alts and do their weekly profession quests. I didn't think too much about that at first, but after a few months of doing it, it does seem like I'm rather in the minority in enjoying the profession system this much.

Flying across Eversong in search of copper, like I do every week 

I hesitate to put too much stock into the WoW subreddit because it's hardly representative of the player base as a whole, but it does tend to give at least vague insights into what a lot of players are happy or unhappy about at any given time. The profession system seems to be fairly solidly in the latter category, with threads decrying its terribleness receiving thousands of upvotes, while one I found that said it was great was sitting at a rating of zero, with over a hundred disagreeing comments.

After a bit of reflecting, I think the reasons I've come to like the current iteration of the profession system so much and why so many people on reddit seem to hate it are probably the same: it's honestly more reminiscent of the way a lot of things worked in Classic than modern retail's general design philosophy.

I suppose you could argue that the way the acquisition of knowledge points is time-gated is very un-Classic-like and you wouldn't be wrong about that, but I'm less talking about the nitty gritty details and more about the overall vibe of the system.

One part is that you are forced to make choices about what to prioritise that you can't take back. Sure, eventually you'll be able to fill out all the profession skill trees if you grind long enough, but if you pick one tree early on and then wish you'd chosen another one instead - tough luck, no resets. (Though I seem to remember that they are going to implement a once-per-expansion reset opportunity or something.)

On my tailor, I made a similar mistake as the guy who wrote the second post I linked above, specialising into profession equipment at first, only to find out that the epic pieces I wanted to craft all required me to have dozens and dozens of bolts of a special rare cloth that I couldn't even loot until I'd gone halfway down a completely different skill tree - that sucked, and is one of the reasons my tailoring is one of the professions on which I'm still more behind than some others.

However, I don't feel like I'm in a race and my error is something that will be rectified over time, which brings me to another big "Classic-like" positive about professions from my point of view: that the work you invest into them isn't tied to the whole seasonal cycle that constantly obsoletes your gear every major patch. (Let me knock on wood and hope that Blizzard has no plans to change this.) It's very grindy and you have to keep coming back to it week after week, but the benefits remain and accumulate over time.

Thanks to the spark system, crafted gear is relevant each new season without you necessarily needing to learn a lot of new recipes, so if you put the time into learning how to craft gear for every armour slot under the sun - that will still be useful as the expansion progresses! Same with gathering professions, where the benefits of grinding out those knowledge points are very noticeable - when I started on my blacksmithing in Midnight, I was constantly short on copper (another callback to Classic if I've ever seen one) and the output of each mining node felt absolutely anaemic, with many of them only yielding one piece at a time when I needed dozens to create a single alloy bar. But as I've filled out those skill trees and the yield of each type of node has increased, I could feel the pain easing, and now it actually feels like I'm already in a pretty good place in terms of raw materials, helped by the way the weekly knowledge point unlocks encourage me to keep gathering and not just stop the moment I have enough for my current project.

It's basically slow and grindy but rewards you in a way that is consistently useful throughout the expansion and to some degree even past it, now that housing exists and some decor items can only be crafted. A few months ago I levelled Cataclysm blacksmithing and now I can make pitchforks - not the most popular thing ever, and also only tangentially related to the new crafting system in particular, but it's something, and it's a big contrast to the way any gear you earn will be worse than a random world quest item by the time the point one patch hits.

I wonder if this old-school feel of the post-Dragonflight profession system was an intentional decision to bring a bit of classic flavour back to retail and appeal to different player types, or whether the devs will eventually decide that it was an accident that needs to be rectified and streamlined, considering how much pushback there has been against the way things work from more entrenched retail players.

Turtle WoW's Final Farewell

As of today, the Turtle WoW private server is no longer available. I was able to make it to the final shutdown event last night, and I'm glad I did because it certainly was a unique experience.

I originally logged in about an hour beforehand, because I wasn't 100% certain of the exact time and didn't want to accidentally miss it. There were already plenty of people in both Stormwind and Moonwhisper Coast (at the Farewell Faire) and GMs were walking among them openly while spawning in some strange NPCs, such as a giant white cat.

One thing I think I never mentioned before was that Turtle WoW also had an in-game radio station. The reason I didn't mention it was that I never used it. I basically tried to connect once but nothing was playing, so I figured it was only active on special occasions. Plus, to be honest I wasn't that keen on having some modern music blasted into my ears while playing WoW anyway - I prefer the in-game music for immersion.

Either way, that evening I clicked the button for the radio again as there was a DJ playing for the final shutdown, and it worked. From my understanding he was also hosting some community run event on the Ambershire server.

Still, as there was still over an hour to go and I didn't care to just hang out for that long, I took some screenshots and then went away again to do something else for a while, only logging back in about ten minutes before the real shutdown.

It was nice to see how many people had shown up for the final farewell. As mentioned previously, the population had dropped down to a couple hundred concurrent players after the shutdown announcement, but for the party we were back to several thousand online on Nordanaar alone, and I'm sure there were just as many if not more on Ambershire, plus I imagine even some on the smaller Tel'Abim PvP server.

Some were sitting quietly on the beach and staring out into the sea, others were dancing, others were bouncing around like rabbits on crack. Chat got so busy that I was no longer able to read anything because the text was scrolling past so quickly - it was like in one of those Twitch streams where you get nothing but a vague impression of sentiment as hundreds of people spam yells in ALL CAPS.

Along the beach a line of people riding their turtle mounts had formed, and after riding back and forth along the line a couple of times, I planted my own among them. The DJ put on Semisonic's Closing Time as the last song to play before the shutdown and I've got to admit I was definitely feeling some feelings, having that in my ear as I sat among the turtles with fireworks going off around us and chat spam flying everywhere.

And to think I had only come here after the lawsuit, knowing full well that it was all going to go away! I'd only wanted to have a brief, curious peek, but even though I wasn't looking to make friends, it was hard not to get engrossed and feel part of something bigger. I'd always scoffed at the idea of a "Classic Plus" but what I saw on Turtle WoW really did bring back that feeling of old school excitement for me, of not knowing where that boat was going to go, being giddy about making it to the next zone to see what was new, and of eagerly thinking about what I was going to do the next time I logged in even when I wasn't actually playing.

For my own reference, here's how much progress my little high elf made over these last few weeks (since I last wrote down her stats in my 2025 end-of-year post):

• Level 45 Hunter (+7)
• 5 days, 15 hours played (+1 day, 12 hours)
• 225 Jewelcrafting (+24), 250 Mining (+24), 261 Cooking (+36), 221 Fishing (+16), 270 First Aid (+58), 1 Survival (-97 since they reset it)

The DJ did his job well in terms of timing, so the song ended and then it was over as we were all disconnected.

I have my blog to record my personal adventures, but the Turtle WoW devs also put up a website for people to share their own most memorable moments on the servers, which can be found on theturtlegrove.com. I do think this server will stand up there with Nostalrius as one of the big WoW private servers that really made an impact. We'll see whether there'll be any traces of it in what Blizzard does next for Classic, though I'm not particularly hopeful, not because I don't think the devs are capable but because I simply don't think Blizzard is interested in catering to this particular niche.

One thing I haven't changed my mind about in regards to a potential Classic+ is that it will be impossible to make everyone happy, and that applied to Turtle WoW as well! It just happened to really hit the points that I personally love. While they also created new raids and did things for PvPers for example, you didn't hear nearly as many people talk about that because it simply wasn't as popular. If all you wanted to do was PvP, there were probably better places for you to do so. You just didn't hear that much negativity about Turtle WoW because if someone didn't like it there, they just moved on to somewhere else. It's not like with official WoW, where there's a whole economy around publicly ranting about how terrible everything is and people can make a living off that.

Turtle was focused on the world, the old Warcraft RTS lore, roleplayers, community and levelling above all else, and they did those things exceptionally well. I don't think anyone currently in power at Blizzard shares those interests in the same way, so I suspect it's unlikely that we'll see anything close to this level of investment in those areas again.

Not that nobody is going to try at all, of course. People have been joking that surely the server will spring up again somewhere else as soon as it's shut down. I'm not on the Turtle WoW Discord, but I've seen some comments about how people should keep an eye on it for some sort of special announcement about the future later down the line.

Meanwhile I've also been hearing talk about a server called "Octo WoW" run by different people, which is based on a leaked older version of Turtle and apparently they've been trying to get some of the newer content back onto it as well. I've not got any personal interest in that, but I'm sure some people will jump right onto it. Plus there are the usual rumours about a rogue dev running off with the code and wanting to spin up his own project.

For my part, I'll just have one more "post mortem" post about Turtle WoW so to speak, to talk about my experiences with the last custom zone I played through, which was their version of Gilneas. Then I'll close the book on the subject of private servers again for the time being. That said, I've certainly made a lot of memories on this one for the relatively short time I played there.

Turtle WoW: Notes from a Dying Server

At the time of me writing this, Turtle WoW has less than a week left to live. I haven't dropped everything to binge Turtle above everything else, but I've been happy with the number of hours I've been able to get in. My high elf hunter is level 43 and I'm hoping to wrap up one last custom zone before the server goes down.

The moment I hit level 40 I bought my blue racial mount. Call me basic but I enjoy an elf on a unicorn.

After the initial wailing and gnashing of teeth that followed the shutdown announcement, the server has been getting a lot quieter. Nordanaar used to have thousands of concurrent players, but within days it was down to a few hundred whenever I checked, and has remained at that level pretty consistently since then. To be clear, I've played on servers that size before and it's actually a perfectly fine population level to have a good time with - it's just sad here in the context of how quickly and sharply activity dropped off. The same applies to the auction house, which still had 50k+ listings the day of the shutdown announcement, then half of that, then half of that, and with only a week to go we're down to about 5k active auctions.

The people who were already pretty invested in the server and its community have mostly tried to pack up and move somewhere else as a group from what I can tell. The guild message of the day has been "AQ40 8/9 - Great Job - C'thun kill Monday" for weeks. I wonder whether they ever did go back for C'thun, but I kind of doubt it. The one officer (?) who still checks in did a bunch of promotions the other day, which resulted in my level 43 becoming a "Core-Raider", which amused me. I'm guessing it was just a simple way to increase everyone's guild bank permissions for the final weeks or something.

I think most of the people who remain are in a similar situation to me and just want to see some more of the content/enjoy some more of the vibes before it all goes away. I'm grateful for those who still put things up for auction, not to get rich but to help out other adventurers who might still benefit from certain items on their journeys. I remember when I used to vendor all my iron ore because there was just too dang much of it circulating - over the last few days I went back to listing everything I mined and sold all of it for a decent profit, though I primarily hope that it's simply been useful to someone. I've also been on the other end of this as I had to buy some green trousers after accidentally vendoring my previous pair, purchased an enchanting material I needed for a quest, and a player-crafted item that was required to continue levelling my jewelcrafting.

In general, while my focus has been on doing some more exploring, I haven't been "min-maxing" the experience in that respect. I still pause to fish here and there and do some crafting. At one point I did the quests to unlock the last rank of cooking and first aid. For what purpose? Because it was fun.

Touring some of the old zones for the cooking quest was a reminder of just how much Turtle WoW modified in those as well. In the Hinterlands I found a narrow mountain path that led me all the way up to a troll village that was located on a sort of overhang from the Hinterlands into Arathi, which did make me a bit wistful about the many more things I now wasn't going to get a chance to see.

A few days ago, the Turtle WoW devs also launched the "Fantastical Farewell Faire", a little event to allow players to get together one more time for the server's shutdown. A faire barker in town will offer to teleport you to Moonwhisper Coast, another custom zone, this one located north-east of Winterspring. They put up some Darkmoon Faire style tents and activities there that allow you to earn a currency called "Turtle Coin", with which you can buy some random items like pets and mounts.

I'm sure many must wonder why people would bother with any of that at a point when the shutdown is so near, but I found it a nice gesture. There's also a vendor who sells all kinds of raid consumables for cheap, presumably to help those players who are trying to get a few more clears in and might find the auction house no longer a source of sufficient supply. Additionally, there are a couple of quests, including one to light the way for the "Great Turtle Spirit", which actually made me tear up a bit.

I'd kind of like to be there when the server shuts down for good, to take one last screenshot and see who else is there for one last hurrah, but I don't know if that will align with my work hours. We'll see.

The Twilight of the Turtle

When I decided to get back into Turtle WoW for one last hurrah before the project gets shut down (for real this time), I still remembered exactly where I'd left things off last time and what I wanted to pick up again. However, I was surprised to find that my hunter's talent points had been reset, a couple of my abilities had gone missing, and my tent-making profession had been reset to one. I guess that's one of the risks of playing a variant of Classic WoW that's not static but receives (or used to receive, anyway) continuous development. Things can change. Though resetting a profession that I'd invested time and money into levelling still sucked in my opinion.

Anyway, last time I played I'd just started on the custom zone Grim Reaches, and was trying to get into a run for the custom dungeon Stormwrought Castle. So... I went right back to that! I'd had good luck with the game's automated dungeon finder in the past, so I put myself in the queue for Stormwrought and started questing. I figured that there'd still be plenty of people around, wanting to make the most of Turtle WoW's remaining uptime to see more of the content unique to the project.

After about one and a half hours of questing with no signs of life from the queue, I decided to try my luck in the LFG channel. Silence. Maybe it was /world where the action was? I couldn't quite remember as I tend to leave or hide public channels where people talk too much nonsense. It turned out that the world channel was indeed the place, though not in the way I'd expected. 

I'd seen people in guild chat talk sadly about the server's shutdown, while also discussing what other private servers everyone was planning to move on to next. (I learned the names of a lot of new ones I'd never heard about before in the process.) However, I was not ready for the level of dooming in /world. It was all the emotions I'd seen in guild chat, but amped up to eleven. Some people were saying rather uncough things about Blizzard that I'd rather not repeat, and from what I can gather, were even encouraging others to harass Blizzard employees with email spam, which was just not cool.

In more amusing developments, there was talk of a "flesh road" between Goldshire and Stormwind, which is to say that people were paving the path with the dead bodies of characters they were no longer going to play. As you do. I hearthed back to Stormwind to check this out and they were not kidding.

I don't recall whether I mentioned previously that Turtle WoW allowed hardcore characters to mingle with regular ones, and that if a hardcore character above a certain level died, they left a little gravestone behind, whose size and ornateness depended on what level the character died at. People had made use of this feature to go out with a bang (as I'd noted the night before) by building a mini Stonehenge inside the bank, and a tower at the gates that others could use like a sort of jumping puzzle.

It was certainly... something. Someone compared the situation to one of those disaster movies where the world is ending and while some people go crazy, others just continue to go about their day as normal, and that certainly seemed apt. I got kind of fed up with all the complaining and the more toxic comments though, so I soon logged off again to take a break.

When I returned later to resume my questing and try queueing for Stormwrought Castle again, I wasn't too hopeful - were there even any others like me left who still wanted to do some of the content unique to Turtle WoW while they had the chance, or was everyone just dropping the server like a hot potato? I'm all too familiar with how quickly a community can abandon a server en masse. However, I did end up getting into a dungeon run fairly quickly that time, so the server isn't entirely dead just yet and I should be able to at least get a couple more posts out of it.

Exploring Midnight (Professions & Abundance)

I've got to admit, after finishing the Midnight campaign and hitting the new level cap on my warrior, I initially felt a bit lost. Not in the sense that there was nothing to do, but in the sense that I wasn't entirely sure what it was I wanted to do next. I already knew that I was going to spend some time going through all the side quests with the husband later, but activities to gear up initially felt quite limited due to access to a lot of expansion features being more time-gated than ever. (There are two whole delves that you can't even access yet, at all, and I only found out because I googled them after I couldn't find their entrances on the map.) However, I also wasn't sure whether I really wanted to get back into the gear grind just yet anyway - and levelling my army of alts towards an uncertain future at the level cap didn't seem particularly appealing either.

Eventually it hit me that what I really wanted to do was level professions on my alts. The Dragonflight profession revamp didn't really work for me when it first happened, but something about the tweaks Blizzard made to the system in War Within just made everything fall into place all of a sudden, and as a result I had a lot of fun spending time gathering and crafting throughout that expansion.

With me being armed with a better understanding of how things work right from the start in Midnight, I decided that the next alts to follow my mining and blacksmithing warrior should be my hunter (skinner/leatherworker) and my warlock (herbalism/alchemy). Well, those two and my tailoring/enchanting priest, but I've mostly used her to dip my toes into healing some random dungeons. I can't tell whether people are genuinely a little less unpleasantly rush-rush at the start of a new expansion or whether I've just become desensitised to the whole experience by now, since I simply know that I need to constantly be running in order to keep up. Regardless, those few normal mode pugs I've had were all pretty okay.

But primarily, I've spent time on my warrior, hunter and warlock flying around and simply gathering. I like the system with the "special" gathering nodes, but I feel like it must already be getting difficult for Blizzard to keep coming up with new ideas for them every expansion. I'm not sure anything will be able to top the explodey ones from War Within for me, which I genuinely came to enjoy once I'd gained the ability to mine them a lot faster.

In Midnight so far, my favourites are the "wild" nodes in Zul'Aman, which spawn little rock elementals (ore) or lashers (herbs) when you gather them. Fighting those is extra work, but since they also drop extra resources it feels to me like you actually get more bang for your buck on each node. (Initially the lashers were much less lucrative than the rock dudes, but just this morning I did another round of herbing and it seems that Blizzard has now buffed their drops to be more competitive.)

Unfortunately, the overload effects that I've seen so far all seem pretty boring. I don't think I've tested all the herbs yet, but not a single one of the ore effects actually felt worthwhile to me, which was disappointing. Maybe once I've upgraded my skill tree for the special nodes a bit.

The most delightful surprise however has been skinning. I love skinning for the soothing "swish swish" sounds and for the fact that you can basically do a lot of gathering as you go along, without having to go out of your way for it. The problem I had in War Within was that once I was done with questing, farming more leather always felt like a chore, since I basically either had to go out and kill things specifically just to skin them, or keep an eye on opportunities to skin other people's kills (such as when certain world quests were up).

In Midnight, Blizzard introduced a new feature called "high value beasts", which show up on your mini map as little knife icons. Skinning one of these marked creatures will yield much more leather than normal. I've really enjoyed flying laps around Eversong and Voidstorm looking out for these little treasure troves, since it makes for a farming experience much more similar to a classic mining or herbing round. The only slight disappointment I've had with the system so far is that it seems to be completely random which animals get the buff, and sometimes it's given to something like a neutral eagle soaring so high up that you can't actually attack or otherwise aggro it.

Professions aside, another thing that's been interesting to me have been the new open world activities. I loved almost all of these in Dragonflight, and still enjoyed most of them in War Within. Midnight so far seems a bit... eh. Sartheril's Haven and the different factions there are a nice callback in terms of lore but gameplay-wise it just feels like an old-fashioned daily hub to me. Stormarion Assault looked like a chaotically fun group event at first but in reality just seems to come down to several minutes of AoE spam. We'll see whether my opinions on these change as the weeks go by.

The one thing that immediately charmed me was the Abundance event. When I first did it in duo mode with my husband, it didn't seem that exciting, but I soon heard whispers that it was great in a group so I decided to sign up for a raid one night - and it was insane!

To take a step back and explain what it is, it's basically just a timed mini game where you run around a cave gathering resources (mostly little bubbles that you simply run through, but there are also some things to tap regardless of your profession, like ore nodes or plants) and depositing them at the altar of Dundun, the loa of Abundance. There's probably a whole sub-genre of single player games like that, but in WoW it's just this little side activity.

Anyway, what made it so funny in a raid group was that the altar has a shared progress bar, and every time it gets filled up, Dundun yells about GLORIOUS ABUNDANCE and unleashes some kind of bonus that lets you gather even more (such as additional bubbles falling from the sky). With enough players in the raid you could trigger a cascade where people would basically deliver resources almost faster than the bar could deplete itself again, so that it was constantly going up and down like a yo-yo, with Dundun yelling and spawning extra treasures non-stop.

Also, did I mention that Dundun is voiced by Darin de Paul? As a SWTOR player, that's just a whole extra level of bizarre.

Anyway, this madness was incredibly fun, and not even that overpowered because there was a pretty low hard cap on your personal rewards anyway, so it's not like we were unduly enriching ourselves. The problem was just that since the cave wasn't an instance, the whole zone would lag like hell, much to the chagrin of people who weren't busy worshipping Dundun.

So I can't say that I'm entirely surprised that Blizzard quickly ended up nerfing the whole thing, though it's still sad to me. You can still do it in a raid group and Dundun still triggers more bonus events that way, but they aren't even remotely as crazy and entertaining as they were beforehand. Oh well.

Running Out of Steam in MoP Classic

I got back into MoP Classic around Christmas one and a half months ago, and while I was initially surprised by how much fun I was having, it looks like my enthusiasm may already be on the decline again.

I got to exalted with the Golden Lotus, saw the relics of the Thunder King get stolen (no surprise there) and got to defend the Vale against a big Mogu incursion with the aid of the Celestials. I'm glad I got to see all of that, but I've found little reason to keep going afterwards. There was a small incentive at least as I picked up a few Skyshards during my time doing dailies in the Vale, and I was always curious what was up with that big hostile cloud serpent that's generally un-attackable (turns out you need 10 Skyshards to dispel the shield, and then it drops a mount on defeat), but the drop rate of the shards is so low, who knows how many months I'd have to keep grinding to get ten.

There are only three or four Tillers with whom I'm not quite best friends yet (can't be long now though), and I'm close to maxing out all my cooking skills as well. Then the only thing left to do on the farm would be to keep planting crops for other Pandaria reputations, which is not as interesting. Plus I learned that apparently things like the plow, sprinkler system etc. all came in with a later patch, and having to till every spot on the farm manually every day is getting a bit tiresome.

I've also been doing the Anglers dailies for a few weeks now, and happened to fish up the Sea Turtle mount on one of these days. I don't have that in retail, so that's another +1 for having this character merged into my retail stable one day I guess.

My enthusiasm for the other factions has been more limited though. I've done a bit of work on the August Celestials, but being sent to a different corner of the continent every day gets old quickly. I also did the Klaxxi dailies for a few days but just didn't enjoy them, even though I think they're a faction with an interesting story. Just never liked the Dread Wastes I guess.

I started the legendary cloak quest chain with Wrathion, another piece of content that's no longer accessible in retail, but I've got to admit I don't find that nearly as interesting as I found exploring the old Vale. It's just so grindy, even if the devs made it a bit easier in Classic by also allowing you to progress certain steps through dungeons, without needing to raid. The first stage felt like it took forever, and then it was immediately on to "earn 1600 valor", ignoring the thousands of valor I'd already ground out previously, which just made me sigh.

I did actually get into the dungeon endgame for a bit and did every dungeon on Celestial difficulty. It took me three runs to realise I was supposed to talk to a Celestial at the start of the run to get a buff, and I only did that after I saw someone complain on reddit about stupid slackers who nerf their whole group by not picking up their buff (oops). It didn't take too long to get the hang of what the different buffs do though, and ultimately the gameplay isn't really that different from heroics.

After my initial experiences with dungeons in MoP Classic were pretty mellow, zoning into any Celestial is full rush-rush mode by this point though. The tank will pretty much always pick up all the trash at once and drag it to the next boss to AoE down. If they die while doing that, they'll blame the healer. If it's after the second boss in Shado-Pan Monastery, it's almost guaranteed to result in a wipe regardless, but that doesn't stop people from doing it. I can just about keep up with the madness most days, but I've got to admit I don't find it very fun.

Curiosity and gear were enough of an incentive at first. The special currency that drops in Celestial dungeons lets you buy pretty high level gear pretty quickly. While I didn't need any of it, it was still nice to grow more powerful, and while doing dailies it was very noticeable when my kill time on a named elite went from several minutes down to a single full skill rotation. At this point I've got 502 gear in most slots though, and while there are more things to buy, such as a goodie bag that drops rare pets and mounts, I just don't care enough about any of that.

At one point I saw a familiar name online - my 2020 guild's Scarab Lord, a fellow hunter. We chatted a bit and he's basically kept playing and raiding all this time, now a member of a guild that has also been around since Classic's launch and that I was friendly with back in the day. He said that if I was feeling lonely, I shouldn't hesitate to give the GM a poke for a guild invite.

I thought very long and hard about this. Part of me was amazed that there was an opportunity here to come back to the game after several years of absence and potentially fit right back into an old and at least somewhat familiar structure. I thought of the potential fun and companionship, and wondered whether I would maybe even want to try attending a casual raid or two. However, ultimately I decided against it. I already have enough going on in SWTOR and other modes of WoW without attempting to put down roots in MoP Classic again. I think I'll be happy to just drop it again in a few weeks to be honest. 

A (Futile?) Endeavour

In my last post about first impressions of the Midnight pre-patch, I mentioned checking out endeavours and being disappointed that they seemed to consist of nothing but two new daily quests in the town centre. I wanted to write a follow-up since I've found that there is more to them than that, but they are messed up in an entirely different way.

First off, I learned that several endeavours are live at the same time, but your neighbourhood has to pick one (if it's managed) or gets one assigned randomly (if it's public). Mine was assigned the dracthyr (with a portal to the Forbidden Reach), but there are also ethereals (with a portal to Netherstorm), grummels (Kun-Lai Summit), mechagnomes (Mechagon) and niffen (Zeralek Cavern).

There is an endeavours tab in the housing window now, which shows you a bar to progress and activities to do so, similar to the Traveler's Log. Unfortunately the UI is not very intuitive. Still, once I understood the assignment, I travelled to the Forbidden Reach (now scaled to level 80) and went at it like it was 2023 again: chasing rares, mining Dragonflight ore, opening Zkera vault doors. Since the indicators on the UI weren't very clear, it took me a bit to figure out that the game discourages you from doing the same task over and over as there are diminishing returns on each completion, which is something that sounds sensible in theory but in practice there already aren't that many tasks to begin with, meaning you can quickly run out of things that give points.

Worse, a single person's progress is basically not even measurable. The overall endeavour progress gives you no details about how many "points" you need or have earned, it just has those milestones dividing the bar into quarters, and all my efforts seemed to do virtually nothing. There's also an activity tracker to show you who else has been working on the endeavour in your neighbourhood, and over the past day it's all been me. Before that I saw a few people getting credit for "killing a raid boss" or "doing a delve", which were probably not done specifically for the neighbourhood, and maybe one or two names actually doing things in the neighbourhood or in the Forbidden Reach. I'm guessing the complete lack of visible progress put them off after a while though.

Apparently the progression bar is supposed to have some sort of dynamic scaling, as people in small guilds were able to fill up the whole bar in a matter of days, but if you're in a public neighbourhood where most people don't really care about endeavours and only put down a house because the UI kept nagging them about it, it seems you're just out of luck. Five days into the forty-day endeavour, I reckon we've achieved less than five percent progress. If we wanted to hit the final reward in time for the end, we'd need to be at least halfway towards the first milestone already (12.5%?).

I'm not that bothered because I'm currently not that invested in this housing system anyway, but it's still a shame that the devs have been so far off the mark on this one. I'm sure the numbers will be adjusted eventually, but the whole thing just feels badly thought out. They wanted neighbourhoods to be a thing "for the social aspect" and gave us endeavours as something to work on together, but there isn't even a way to properly communicate with the people in your public neighbourhood.

So far, endeavours have only managed to make me feel more lonely in retail WoW than I've felt in a long time. It seems to be commonly agreed that retail is not good at fostering cooperation and community spirit, but it does generally feel lively enough to me. Dornogal is always busy, and I always see people out and about in the world, whether they are gathering, doing world quests or what have you. However, being the sole person in a public neighbourhood who's trying to progress the endeavour on their own while achieving absolutely nothing is a decidedly isolating experience. If they want this to be viable for public neighbourhoods with mixed engagement levels, they'll have to do a lot more than just tweak the numbers.

Level 90 in MoP Classic: What Is This Place?

The other night I felt like playing a little bit of Lemix before bedtime but for some reason all the retail servers were down. I heard mutterings about a DDoS attack? Either way, to get my fix of the particular flavour of WoW grinding that I craved at the time, I instead fired up MoP Classic for the first time in a few months.

The devs went pretty wild with server merges since I last played. Fortunately Mirage Raceway is still the same as it was, so I didn't have to move my characters yet again. I do appreciate that they finally put an end to the farce that were all those single-faction PvP realms and converted them all to PvE. Now there are no more PvP servers in the EU version of MoP Classic at all, while the US only got to keep its lone holdout Grobbolus, the RP-PvP server where people actually cared about community and things other than griefing and therefore managed to maintain a somewhat balanced population. Can we finally stop pretending that the masses crave world PvP now?

I've said it before, but logging into MoP Classic feels weird every time. When I've just been playing Vanilla, it feels strange and too modern. What are all these buttons? Where is my ammo? But when I've been playing retail recently it's the opposite and actually feels quite nostalgic with its enforced ground travel while levelling and a hunter skill rotation that doesn't feel like total crap. 

When I last abandoned my hunter in Pandaria, I was mired in how tedious it felt to level to 90 (even if I wrongly noted it down as levelling from 84 to 85 in this post). I guess that just underlines how meaningless that stretch of levelling felt, just an endless bar going nowhere and taking forever to fill up. Since then, I think the XP required has been nerfed, or maybe the XP rewarded from kills and quests has been boosted - maybe even both. Either way it didn't feel too bad to work my way through that final level via a mix of questing in Kun-Lai Summit and doing chores for the Klaxxi.

 

Fun fact: While doing this, I also installed MoP Classic on my laptop, and even though Classic has been in the Mists era for more than five months now, the shortcut it created on my desktop was still called "Cataclysm Classic". Small indie gaming company and all that. 

I should be able to conclude my Project Vale soon, and we'll see what else I'll feel up to now that max level has unlocked a few more options in terms of content.

MoP Classic is quite an enigma to me in some respects. Both Redbeard and Wilhelm were grousing recently that Blizzard seemed to show little consideration for the anniversary servers transitioning into Burning Crusade, considering how closely in time the devs scheduled the TBC pre-patch to Midnight's in retail. And I don't think that perception is wrong, but I think people also have a skewed idea of where the core of the Classic population sits. Wherever I see people talking about Classic in general, it's usually about the Vanilla anniversary servers, but based on ironforge.pro at least, that's not where most of the people are! For all the talk about how few people wanted it, the numbers show MoP Classic still sporting the biggest population of them all (over 100k weekly raiders), bigger than anniversary (~60k weekly raiders), the remains of SoD and Classic era put together.

I know raiding stats aren't everything and it sure seems weird considering that MoP Classic has no buzz around it whatsoever, but it's not unheard of for lots of people to play in quiet contentment without making headlines. It really does make me wonder about that Warlords of Draenor Classic though. I keep thinking that surely that's got to be where the Classic progression train stops, but if the majority of Classic players are happy to just quietly chug along through all the old expansions that Blizzard will give them, even the ones that weren't that beloved back in the day, maybe it's still a worthwhile thing for them to do? I guess we'll find out one way or another next year.

Living in the Moment

One thing I personally find kind of off-putting about the wider retail WoW community is how a large chunk of it seems to spend more time looking forward to the next thing than actually engaging with the current content. Where the Classic community sometimes gets bogged down by nostalgia and wishing they could play the game again like it's 2006, retail content creators often strike me as the opposite, always laser-focused on what the next patch will bring, seemingly in a race to be the first to report on what's new, and by the time it actually goes live, they've already moved on again.

I've been finding it particularly noticeable recently because while we don't have a launch date for Midnight yet, I'd say the expansion is definitely still at least three months away (probably more) but I swear anything WoW-related in my feeds that's not about Classic has been about seemingly nothing else for months already. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to pretend that I'm not at all curious about what the expansion will bring, but I don't want to hear about every time an NPC passes wind in the Midnight beta either. I like having a vague idea of what's to come, plus maybe a couple of more specific things to look forward to, but primarily I want to see things for myself once the expansion launches! The other day a weird headline popped up in my reddit recommendations and all I could think was: "That sounds like it must be alluding to some major story spoiler or something; I think I'll just scroll past as fast as I can." At times, it can feel like navigating a minefield.

It doesn't help that a lot of the expansion discourse I have seen has been extremely tedious as well. To give an example, as a more casual player who uses minimal addons, I really don't think the removal of combat addons is that big a deal. There are millions of us already playing that way just fine! It's obviously going to lead to some changes, but if this game is good at anything it's constantly changing things around, so hey, it's another day ending in y. Another example would be people getting extremely up in arms about Blizzard being open about wanting to monetise housing the way pretty much every other MMO with housing monetises it. I can understand feeling a degree of disappointment if you were hoping for something better/more generous, but let's not pretend that anything they've announced is hugely surprising if you know anything at all about how housing works in other MMOs.

Meanwhile, I'm finding it weirdly challenging to find people talking about things going on in the game right now. I'd like to hear how other people are experiencing Legion Remix for example! Or if you're not playing Lemix, what are you doing? I've picked up running a few delves a week on alts again and it's wild how absurdly buggy they've been for many weeks now (in a way that actually benefits players too). Brann has become stupidly OP as one of his abilities can one-shot an entire group on tier 11, and several of the delve-specific abilities have become similarly overtuned to a ridiculous degree, such as the phase cutter ability in Archival Assault or the footbomb dispenser you can get from treasures.

At first I shrugged it off as "haha, patch day, right" but it's been literally weeks now and I'm finding it weird how nobody seems to be talking about it. Are we just keeping quiet in hopes that Blizzard doesn't notice? I would have expected their "fun detected" sensors to go off pretty much instantly, and I keep thinking that surely they must at least be aware of this bug and have it their backlog somewhere. Are they just too busy with Midnight and Legion Remix to care about things being wonky in the mainline game, where it's presumably a bit more quiet at the moment?

The funny thing is that it's only because of this bug that I've actually started doing delves on my healers again - I'd previously stopped because while they were doable, they were just too slow and tedious. With Brann one-shotting things occasionally (not all the time, but frequently enough), the pace actually feels much better and fun. I now kind of dread Blizzard actually fixing the bug and taking that away again. With how long they've left it in the game at this point, I honestly hope they just leave it in for what remains of the expansion as well. When Midnight arrives with its gear reset, it's going to be enough of a slog to get geared up and powerful again anyway.