Enjoyable WoW Videos on Exploration

One of the things that sometimes frustrate me about WoW is that in spite of how huge it is, I find it quite difficult nowadays to find like-minded people who enjoy the game in a similar way to me - not even necessarily because I need more people to play together, but just to chat and occasionally exchange some thoughts. There are tons of WoW content out there, but so much of it is just ruthlessly streamlined for clicks and monetisation: guides on how to play, what to do when the next patch drops, 10 reasons why whatever Blizzard is doing next is a terrible idea.

I'm not saying those things are bad or shouldn't exist (well - maybe that last category), but I yearn for more people to just share their love of this virtual world, bits of silliness, and just what they are getting up to in game. So I wanted to highlight three YouTube channels that do scratch that itch for me to some degree, in case there are others looking for the same.

(Wow)crendor

Crendor is actually an old hand at WoW YouTube content as he became well-known for his goofy machinimas around Wrath of the Lich King and was one of the first WoW YouTubers that I'm aware of that managed to turn his hobby into a job. He branched out into other games, sold merch etc. but unlike many others, he never gave me the vibe of having fully "sold out". (Look, I don't think there's anything wrong with making a living off making YouTube videos or other content, but let's not pretend that depending on it for your livelihood doesn't change your incentives and behaviour to some degree.) There's a reason his avatar is a sloth, and his attitude has always remained that he wants to be chill and just do what's fun.

He's produced lots of different WoW content in that vein over the years, but the series that's my personal favourite and that still gets regular updates is "Pointless Top 10". In this, he picks a random thing in the world (of Warcraft), whether it's caves, mailboxes or rivers and creates a top ten list of his favourites. I always love these because they tend to highlight weird little details to me that I missed and teach me more about parts of Azeroth that I'm maybe less familiar with, all in a casual tone that includes all kinds of silly tangents as well.

Jediwarlock

Let me just start by saying that I immediately considered this guy's channel name a good sign as he clearly likes both WoW and Star Wars, like I do! I think the first video of his that I saw was probably "The Greatest Adventure in World of Warcraft" about a year ago, in which he talks about the storyline that winds its way through the first 25 levels or so of the human starting zone in WoW Classic.

I've since come to enjoy other lore videos of his, specifically for the way he talks about it. I feel like many more popular lore YouTubers are very focused on the grand design and the lives of major NPCs, but Jediwarlock talks about the quests we actually do as players, what we see in the zones, NPC dialogue and how it all ties together to create a certain experience for the player (in Classic).

Lani Gray

Lani is a very new YouTuber, but by chance I ended up seeing her very first video about Azuremyst Isle when it had only about 100 views, and I just immediately loved it. Her goal seems to be to document levelling through WoW (the modern version that is, not Classic) and talking about everything she sees along the way. She talks about every zone in incredible detail, including things like the personalities of different NPCs, environmental storytelling, and just what kind of feelings the zone invokes in her. She does all this with an incredible fangirlish energy that I love and that feels like a friend just telling you about some new cool thing they saw and adored. Naturally she doesn't have that many videos up yet, but if what I just described sounds like your cup of tea at all, consider giving one of her videos a watch.

The Midnight Expansion Reveal

I'm glad I didn't try to watch the Midnight expansion reveal live, because from the sounds of it they abused WoW's popularity to the maximum possible extent this time - which is to say, they knew that people were primarily watching for WoW, so they crammed in two hours of Call of Duty ads and the like beforehand to keep everyone online.

I did hop over to the official WoW YouTube channel later to watch the announcement videos and... huh.

Back when the Worldsoul Saga was first announced, I wrote the following: "I applaud their long-term thinking for planning the next three expansions in advance, but to be honest I'm not sure it was a good idea to reveal all this to the public, as by doing so, they've basically spoiled their big BlizzCon reveals for the next several years."

I think the Midnight reveal has proved my theory correct in so far as I've never seen so many people react with a kind of "meh" attitude to a new expansion announcement. There are always those who'll love it no matter what and will be hyped, and there'll always be those who hate everything Blizzard does no matter what. But those in the middle can be swayed either way, and I've never seen this much apathy from the masses before.

There are probably a number of different reasons for that, but I reckon the fact that everyone already knew roughly what was coming must have been a major contributor. "It's gonna be about the void and about elves, something something Silvermoon." So when the trailer showed us elves fighting to defend Silvermoon against the void, that was at best exactly what everyone expected, and at worst a bit of a let-down in the sense that people wanted more (as MMO players always do the moment you tell them about anything).

There was something else about the trailer though. I liked it well enough, but something felt ever so slightly "off".

At first, I thought it was just the fact that Liadrin had been given a new haircut. Seriously, the first thing I did after watching the cinematic for the first time was google pictures of Liadrin's current player model, because I kept thinking "She didn't always have a tight braid, did she?" - and no, she did indeed not; they are giving her a new haircut for Midnight which will be reflected on her in-game model as well.

However, when looking around to find out whether anyone else had the same reaction, I actually found a lot of complaints about the trailer's visuals, which I believe is a first. In the past, even if players hated a trailer for what it conveyed, it was pretty much universally agreed that it was still impeccably animated at least. Not with this one! I don't think all the criticisms are necessarily equally valid, but let's just say that after people pointed out that Liadrin in this looks more like the Elven Hero from Elder Scrolls Online or Tauriel from the Hobbit movies than a Warcraft elf, I haven't been able to unsee that.

After comparing to the Battle for Azeroth trailer (which does feature a similar situation including a city siege), I also found it noticeable how many unique characters were featured in the BfA cinematic - while Sylvanas and Anduin are the focus, we also get shots of Saurfang, Zekhan and Greymane, as well as a number of different "generic units", from undead archers to dwarven riflemen. In the Midnight trailer, we have exactly three focus characters and everyone else is an indistinguishable melee soldier covered from head to toe in armour like they are a bunch of stormtroopers, which I hadn't really picked out before.

I think the biggest thing though is that the pacing/scripting feels slightly off and fails to reach a proper climax. I'd say it's fine for most of the cinematic actually, but when Liadrin returns with the help from the Sunwell it ends too quickly without letting us fully feel the triumph, while also just getting plain confusing because the help are also just a bunch of armoured mooks. I've looked around online and even the most passionate lore nerds are unsure of who these are actually supposed to be (though there are seemingly a million theories, from Guardians of the Ancient Kings to the Army of Light to the Arathi to representations of us, the players).

The gameplay reveals suffered from a similar mix of "well, we knew that was coming" and muddled messaging. Yes, housing is a big deal, but we've known about that for almost a year, and there's been a constant drip-feed of more details since then. You can't expect people to suddenly gasp and be super-excited about hearing the exact same thing again.

I also used to think it was kind of funny how they'd include things like "level cap increase" or "new dungeons" as major expansion features to be excited about, but this time they didn't and it was actually kind of confusing. I saw people ask questions like "Will there actually be a level increase this time?" (yes) and only later found out all kinds of interesting stuff that they didn't actually put into the features trailer, such as that Valeera Sanguinar will be the new delve companion or the major changes coming to transmog (huge!).

My personal takeaway is simply that Midnight will continue the War Within, which was kind of what we knew was going to happen. I'll be happy to buy it because I'm enjoying my time in retail right now, but I'm not sure it really delivered in the hype department the way these expansion announcements are usually expected to.

Comparing Zekvir and the Underpin

Towards the end of War Within season one, I made a whole post about my journey into Zekvir's Lair, from being largely oblivious to what it was all about to finally beating him on double question mark difficulty. I figured that season two was going to be less exciting now that I knew what this whole challenge mode thing was all about, and that turned out to be true, but that's not to say that it wasn't interesting at all.

Fighting the Underpin (the season two delve boss) on normal mode did admittedly turn out to be a bit underwhelming, as I defeated him on my warrior on what I think was only my second or third attempt. I wouldn't say that's because he was much easier than Zekvir though, it's just that it made a big difference that I actually had some gear from the previous season as well as a better idea of what I was doing.

The Underpin also seemed to be a lot more imbalanced in terms of how the fight played for different roles, and playing tank was actually one of the easier ways to do it. Based on how easy of a time I'd had, I immediately jumped back in on a healing alt and was horrified at how different an experience it was. I think I wiped about half a dozen times and then just gave up, because it was impossible for me to break his healing shield with my piddly healer dps, and dps Brann's AI was seemingly not smart enough to help me focus on the shield, instead getting distracted and shooting at adds instead. I was really put out by that and there was little helpful advice on this problem to be found online at the time, so I kind of just left things there and largely forgot about the Underpin again.

But of course! We're now at a point where the next major patch is barely two weeks away, bringing with it a new season and the removal of a bunch of content and achievements that are currently still live. With my FOMO kicked into overdrive, I remembered that I had yet to beat the Underpin on hard mode, and that I should better get to it.

I don't know exactly how long or how many attempts it took me, because the attempt counter is part of Deadly Boss Mods, which for some reason I just couldn't get to work on this encounter. Reading around, it sounded like there should've been a module for it, but even though I had the latest version installed, the Underpin just wasn't on the list of available delve fights in the addon. I made do anyway.

I still spent more than a few hours wiping on ?? difficulty and trying to improve my gameplay, but compared to the weeks-long project that was Zekvir ??, I got there relatively quickly. I wouldn't say the fight is necessarily easier than Zekvir, but it helped that this one actually played to the strengths of my warrior main, and that she was about as well geared by this point as a character not doing M+ or raids can be (not counting her cursed boot slot). This meant that unlike last season, I didn't have to worry about learning to play a different class/spec or gearing up an alt.

I managed to record my victory again and uploaded it to YouTube since I did the same last season:

You can see that I was still far from perfect, and there's one point around the 4:11 mark where I ate a huge chunk of damage that probably would've been a one-shot in lesser gear or on a non-tanky spec. But still, it was good enough and I'm happy that I was able to check this particular achievement off my list.

So how do I think the Underpin and Zekvir compare? Honestly, I'm a bit conflicted. Thematically, I found Zekvir kind of annoying and loved the Underpin. Zekvir wipes were really frustrating to me because I hated the way he went "Yeees, she will be pleased" whenever I died, because I didn't want Xal'atath to enjoy my wipes! (I guess that's a credit to Zekvir's voice actor though.) Meanwhile the Underpin was the complete opposite in that I loved the goofy music and all his silly voice lines. ("Tick tock, tick tock, ya interlopin' mooks!" is without a doubt my favourite.)

Also, it may sound a bit lame, but I can't deny that I liked the fact that he didn't take me as long to kill and that the fight was actually very doable on my main, even if that feels more like luck on my part than anything to do with good balancing and encounter design (refer to my horror at what it felt like to do even the normal fight as a healer as mentioned above).

Purely in terms of mechanics, the Underpin was a lot more messy and random, which I don't necessarily consider a good thing, though it did feel to me like there was also a bit more leeway there than there had been on Zekvir - on the latter, a single mis-timed interrupt could mean that it was a wipe. I did enjoy that the Underpin's "dance" was a little less rigid and more fluid in comparison.

That said, one thing it really suffered from was the fact that it forced you to spend a lot of time fighting your UI instead of the boss. The mechanic that requires you to kick bombs into the adds is just extremely clunky, as it's literally impossible to mouse-target them sometimes due to boss and camera positioning, meaning you had to enable the "interact key" to be able to kick blindly sometimes, and even then - well, it's right there in the last sentence, kicking the things around blindly was not very satisfying or fun.

Nonetheless, all in all I still enjoyed this encounter as well, and I've now made it my new goal to at least do the normal mode on all classes again, like I tried to do with Zekvir. I do kind of have to wonder how sustainable this "delve challenge boss" model is going to be in the long run though. I mean, isn't it bound to get kind of repetitive? I suppose you could say the same about raids, but at least there you have different roles and a much larger number of players to mix things up mechanically, while any fight that's meant to be something to do for solo players of any class is by necessity always going to be much more limited in terms of what it can demand. 

Ion Hazzikostas on WoW's Game Design

The other day I found out that WoW Game Director Ion Hazzikostas gave a presentation at Nordic Game less than two weeks ago. Even though I personally don't recall hearing about it before, Nordic Game touts itself as Europe's leading games conference, and handily, its various talks are available on YouTube for free. So I went ahead and watched Ion's.

It's a little less than an hour long but seemed to go by really quickly as I found it very interesting. Mostly he explains just how much WoW's design philosophy has changed since 2020, when retail's subscriber numbers plummeted during Shadowlands and Classic surged with popularity. He talks about how he was originally tasked with preserving "the vision" above all else, with Shadowland's widely lambasted covenant system having been the last gasp of that, and how they've come to appreciate since then that when you maintain a live service game that's this big and this long-lived, the players own it just as much as the devs and it makes no sense to try and force things on the players that they say they don't want. (I wonder how much Holly Longdale had to do with that change of heart.)

He talks about how even if you change absolutely nothing, player attitudes and interests change and you've got to be reckoning with that. He talks about how new systems will always benefit from a sense of novelty, but that even something that is loved at first will get boring and disdained after a while.

Another part related to that which I personally found particularly interesting was that he said that in the past, they were too obsessed with future-proofing everything, at the cost of making things actually fun. The example he gave of this was the Mists of Pandaria talent trees, which could have been built on for several more decades because of just how little they gave you, but that this also made them really boring and uninteresting while levelling (which I heartily agree with).

The contrast to this are the new talent trees added with Dragonflight, which are more similar to the old ones - and are even more complex than the old trees, in my opinion. I did also worry when they decided to add hero talents on top of that for War Within, that it was all getting a bit too complicated again already. His response to this was that they are well aware that it will all get out of hand at some point and will need tearing down again, but that this is a problem for the future, and that they don't want worries about ten years down the line to stop them from doing fun things now.

I think it's clear that he's very passionate about what he does, and I think it's also obvious that he strongly believes in this new strategy - and it has played out positively in the last two expansions so far! Nevertheless, I have to admit I also remained a bit sceptical of the things he said because they sounded a bit too simplistic sometimes. Listening to your players sounds great, but as he admitted himself, sometimes they want diametrically opposed things and you can't keep everyone happy - so how do you decide which way to go? And making things fun now without worrying too much about the future... again, I do get the idea behind it, but as an MMO player I've also seen my fair share of systems that were clearly built with that same attitude, that a certain result needed to be achieved now, and which then continue to be an albatross around everyone's neck because people didn't think enough about how they should continue to fit into the game's framework in years to come.

Either way, I can heartily recommend watching the video for yourself if you have any interest in why the WoW devs have made certain decisions in the past few years, as there's a lot more in there than just the examples I picked out.

(Ever wondered just how fast retail levelling is nowadays? Well, straight from the horse's mouth, it's "literally ten times faster" than it was in Vanilla.) 

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.

WoW Memories #8: November 13th, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Joy of Exploration in Modern WoW

One of the things I love about the vanilla World is how utterly explorable it is. You've got these huge land masses full of interesting things to discover everywhere, and even after years of playing that version of the game, I have no doubt that there are still some quests and hidden surprises that I've never come across. The sense of wonder this created was amazing.

Sadly, this is also something that kind of fell by the wayside in the expansions that followed. The artists still created beautiful environments, but you weren't really meant to spend much time in them; they were increasingly just a backdrop for the quests you rushed through on your way to the level cap. Just today I did a few low-level Cata quests on an alt, and while mining an ore node, I accidentally got into combat with an elite. It was surprisingly powerful and took me a while to whittle down... just to then drop nothing, and not even give XP, presumably because it only exists to be blown up with a quest item in one specific quest.

Fortunately Blizzard has backtracked on this in recent years, and both Dragonflight and War Within are full of all kinds of neat things to find if you only allow yourself to look. Sure, you can never be that same wide-eyed newbie again, but there are still new vistas to marvel at and fun secrets to discover.

On that subject, I just wanted to share a couple of YouTube videos I saw recently and that really resonated with me. First we have small YouTuber ButchX3's series about playing World of Warcraft for the first time.

The first part with the title "I played World of Warcraft for the first time EVER" showed up on my YouTube feed when it came out, but I've got to admit I ignored it at first. The thumbnail hinted at him having difficulties, and I figured I'd seen enough videos of people struggling to figure out basic mechanics or not understanding the story recently.

But then part two showed up, with the title "FIRST TIME Player Discovers the SECRET of World of Warcraft", with a thumbnail of him gaping in awe at a purple flower in his hand, at which point I was like "fine, I'll click, let's see what a new player considers the secret of WoW". And I was not only surprised, but positively enchanted. The purple flower in the thumbnail even turned out to be relevant! I immediately went back to watch part one afterwards, and found that there was a third part as well.

In a nutshell, he started by playing through Exile's Reach and had a fun time, but once Azeroth fully opened up to him, he forgot all about questing and got completely distracted by other players and the sheer size of the map, embarking on an epic adventure to immediately travel as far as the game would let him, which he conveys with appropriate excitement and sense of grandeur.

He got a lot of help from newcomer chat as well, which really impressed me, as until now this was a feature that I was vaguely aware of but hadn't really given much thought. I felt inspired to sign up as a guide myself after that. I wonder if there'll be any more installments in this series, now that he's explored the world in all three dimensions.

The other video that showed up in my feed one day and really surprised me was "DragonNoFlight: A love letter to ground travel" by tiny YouTuber FaroraSF, which caught my eye with both its title and the lovingly hand-drawn thumbnail.

Unlike Butch, Farora is an old hand at the game, but clearly loves to explore. In this nearly two-hour long video, she decided to randomly quest through Dragonflight without flying, documenting along the way the kinds of challenges she'd come across. Spoiler: For an expansion all about flying, the Dragon Isles turned out to be surprisingly accessible on foot!

At various intervals, she takes a break from her current adventures to look back on older versions of the game, going over fond memories and analysing different expansions' zone designs. I found this really eye-opening, as she points out a lot of things that I'd kind of noticed sub-consciously but had never really thought about myself.

Finally, she also made a shorter sequel about exploring War Within without flying. Seriously, the way she did that quest with the pipes!

Anyway, I just really wanted to give these two creators a shout-out as examples to show that modern WoW still has room for exploration and a sense of wonder as well, and because I found all their videos thoroughly enjoyable.

Xal'atath Does YouTube

Three days ago, Blizzard dropped another War Within cinematic on their official YouTube channel, called Threads of Destiny. While featuring less visual detail than their last cinematic, it actually gives some background for one of the villains of the upcoming expansion and I recommend watching it. It's in line with the kind of character vignettes that they've been doing pre-launch for several expansions now and which I've always quite enjoyed (though anything's yet to beat BfA's Daughter of the Sea, a seriously incredible musical number whose success is also reflected in it being one of the most watched videos on WoW's YouTube channel, even above some of the official expansion cinematics).

Threads of Destiny is a solid addition, but I've got to admit it does nothing to assuage my worries about the story returning to old tropes, seeing how it shows how one of the first villains we'll encounter in the new expansion is evil because she was ambitious and got corrupted through a bargain with (an agent of the) Old Gods, a WoW villain arc we've dealt with about about a hundred times before. Though I liked that several of the most upvoted YouTube comments drew a parallel to Arthas with phrases like "succeeding you, mother"; I had not thought of that one myself.

Anyway, the agent of the Old Gods in question (even if she might not be working for them anymore) is of course Xal'atath, and she's been very active on YouTube in the past few weeks. I first noticed it in this Taliesin and Evitel video, where around the 12 minute mark Taliesin is about to launch into a long soliloquy about the latest cinematic when he suddenly gets drowned out and disappeared by Xal'atath, who comments: "Welcome to the real weekly reset. Taliesin and Evitel are sadly indisposed as they are busy being consumed by the Void, like you all soon will be!" However, the video then just resumes as normal by cutting to Evitel's next bit. I wasn't quite sure what to make of that to be honest, as their videos are always full of jokes and little skits, plus Tali has been a proud self-professed Xal'atath simp since Legion, so my first thought was that maybe it was just another one of their bits - though I did notice that Xal'atath's real voice actress was being used, not some goofy voice-changer.

It was more obvious that something was going on when I encountered the same thing around the 2:15 mark in a Preach video a couple of days later - and one that had nothing to do with The War Within at all, as it was about the history of the guild Paragon. Xal'atath seems to briefly almost possess Preach while also taunting him about how "you and your world will be mine" - but again, the video just resumes as normal immediately afterwards. I went to the comments to see whether people were talking about this strange interruption, but at the time couldn't find anything. People only seemed to care about the actual content of the video, not this weird interlude. A bit of googling surfaced a forum thread where someone noted that they'd noticed Xal'atath cameos in multiple people's content recently, and others were chiming in with additional examples that they'd seen. Eventually Wowhead did a full news post summarising all her known appearances. Apparently she also speaks Spanish and Portuguese!

Since I work in marketing in real life, I thought that was a really interesting thing for Blizzard to do - clearly it required some effort and a solid degree of collaboration with all these content creators. I'm just not sure I get the "why" exactly. People watching these guys will already be aware of the expansion and of Xal'atath as a character (even if they don't know much about her) and is having her wax poetic about her evil plans really going to make much of a difference to anyone's perception here?

My best guess is that someone in the WoW marketing team was like: "Remember Wrath of the Lich King? People loved how Arthas was everywhere, constantly taunting the players. Nobody had anything bad to say about that. We should do something like that again, and make it even bigger. Maybe we can even take it outside the game itself!" And yeah, you can find my own thoughts on that in the linked sentence, which goes to a post on this blog from 2009, in which I talk about how Arthas became a bit of a joke over the course of Wrath of the Lich King, constantly showing up to make speeches while coming up with excuses for not fighting you at that particular moment.

However, I think that was not the majority opinion at the time, and many players still consider Wrath their favourite expansion in all aspects, so maybe the WoW marketing team isn't entirely off with their thinking there. The only difference being that Arthas was a character with a lot of history behind him, while Xal'atath is not - I guess it remains to be seen whether the power of "sexy elf lady" on its own is enough to make the masses love her. I'm already kind of tired of her myself to be honest and the expansion hasn't even launched yet. I want to see villains with interesting plans and personal interactions, not endless cartoonish speeches about what a badass you are and all the evil things you're totally going to do later (not now though, bye!).

Pre-Expansion Doldrums

The War Within is less than a month away and I'm not at all hyped yet. If anything, it's kind of the opposite and I'm feeling rather down on the whole prospect of the expansion right now. I'm mostly just logging into Remix to finish up my last few goals for that mode but otherwise Classic has been a lot more fun recently than retail.

All my reservations about what we've seen of War Within so far are still in play, but more specifically, I'm looking at the expansion looming in the distance and I just don't know what I'm going to do with it, as in: what class I'm going to play. I miss having an undisputed main. I had one from Burning Crusade through Cata, but ever since I returned to retail properly at the end of BfA it's all felt a bit fuzzy. My monk was my main throughout Shadowlands, but with how little time it takes to level a character in retail nowadays and how little you actually see of the world during your adventures, I'm finding it hard to get as invested in new characters as I used to.

Changing to evoker in Dragonflight came kind of organically, and I only realised in hindsight how lucky I was in that regard, as I both liked the class's gameplay and it slotted into the expansion story really well. Like demon hunters in Legion, evokers were designed to transition straight from their starting area into the story of Dragonflight, and everything actually made sense.

But now we've got this new, supposedly story-heavy expansion looming, which is all about characters from older expansions that none of my own characters have any connection to and I can't quite wrap my head around it. It's funny because I don't think I was that fussed about the story in retail, but the thought of going into an expansion to do tasks for NPCs that my characters have technically never met in game while treating them as if they were old friends really puts me off.

When I logged in yesterday, I was surprised to be greeted by a new cinematic that Wowhead called "Previously in World of Warcraft", though I'm not sure if that's supposed to be the official name. Either way it tries to summarise the most important events from the last four expansions that are relevant to War Within over the course of three and a half minutes - something that I think is actually a really good idea, but at the same time also puts a spotlight on the problem I mentioned above, seeing how the video name-drops no fewer than eleven different characters throughout its runtime, while showing and featuring even more. If you weren't around for the introduction of those characters and/or aren't too well-versed in WoW lore in general, I'm not sure a bunch of disconnected one-liners about how "x did so-and-so" are really going to make things that much clearer for you.

I just really feel like I'm missing an in-game "hook" for War Within so far. A few days ago, the official WoW YouTube channel also dropped a second cinematic for War Within, and I was surprised to see that it currently has more dislikes than likes. I thought it looked very good visually, but after reading some of the comments it became clear to me that this is a sign of the expansion struggling to pull people other than me in as well. A lot of commenters noted that "it doesn't look like WoW", which I don't really agree with, but it certainly lacks a clear hook for you as the player. There are some cool characters and locations on display, sure, but what do any of them have to do with me? The only reason I know anything about who/what any of them are is because of watching content creators talk about beta content - the trailer itself certainly doesn't make it very clear. As it stands, I worry a bit that Blizzard's ambitious new story plans may be built on a foundation of sand.

(I've seen some comments about the new trailer being a throwback to the original WoW trailer, which didn't have an overarching narrative either, but I think that is missing something important: the original WoW trailer had narration setting the scene and showed you different roles you could play in that setting. The new War Within trailer has neither of those.)

Finally, the cherry on top of my cake of expansion uncertainty recently came while doing M+ with my guildies. A couple of them have been really hyped about WoW and the expansion recently, which you know... good for them, but my ears perked up when conversation about "what I personally want to do in the expansion" turned into "how we're all going to do M+ in the expansion". I've had a decent enough time getting to know the M+ system in Dragonflight, but the idea that this was supposed to automatically have locked me in for the entirety of the next expansion as well and that class choices should be made based on potential M+ comp set off massive alarms in my head, because it's something I hadn't even thought about. I tried to express this to the group but we were so far apart in terms of expectations that I think people didn't quite get what I was saying. (Me saying that I wasn't sure I even wanted to do M+ at the start of the new expansion somehow got turned into "of course we're not going to do it immediately, we've got to gear up and unlock it first").

All I know is that thanks to Remix, I'll be going into the War Within with close to a dozen level 70s, none of whom feel like a great fit for this new storyline as they have barely interacted with the relevant NPCs - if at all - and a burden of expectations from guildies who seem to picture us running M+ every weekend in the expansion with no consideration for how much a WoW expansion can change things... both in terms of gameplay as well as in terms of people's enjoyment of the game. I once again remember Kordac, the holy priest who was an absolute pillar of our raid team in Burning Crusade and quit the game a few weeks into WotLK because he hated the levelling. Never underestimate how dramatically a WoW expansion can change everything for people.

I Got To See Atiesh Get Made

Vanilla WoW is full of content that was only ever experienced by a small minority of players when it first came out. One of the great things about Classic was that it allowed more people to see and experience things that they missed back in 2005. I didn't go into Classic with any intentions to raid for example, but it was cool to get to do it in the end and to experience the epicness of 40-man raiding for myself. Similarly, I felt privileged to take part in the forging of the legendary Thunderfury more than once.

One thing that I hadn't seen yet after almost five years of Classic was the creation of the Naxxramas legendary Atiesh, Greatstaff of the Guardian. Atiesh never became as widely popular as Thunderfury, partially I think because it's quite drab-looking compared to the flashy Thunderfury, partially because the fact that it comes from the last raid of the original game meant that fewer people really knew about it. Working on getting it also requires even more of a time-commitment than Thunderfury, as you need to collect forty randomly dropped splinters of the staff from bosses across Naxx, then kill C'thun in AQ40 and Kel'thuzad in Naxx once more, just to then finish off with an extremely demanding five-man boss fight. The latter also goes to why I hadn't seen that part before myself - it's one thing to be in big raid group gathering in the sands of Silithus, helping to take down a giant wind lord, but when the presumptive staff-bearer can only take four of their trusted friends (of the right classes) into an instance for the final step, that does kind of limit who can go.

I was therefore extremely flattered and excited when a friendly druid from my era guild messaged me the other week to let me know that she had nearly collected all the splinters for her own Atiesh and to ask whether I wanted to come along to the final fight when the time came. It's really hard for me to capture how meaningful this simple offer was to me, as I haven't really been online much in Classic era for several months now, even if I do keep logging in to do my auction house stuff and try to stay in touch via Discord. It's still not the same as actually being there for the raids every week.

I was initially nervous that I might miss the whole thing since a holiday took me out of the game for a week, but in the end it worked out so that I came back just in time for Bracken (my druid friend) to collect the last pieces she needed before the five-man fight. Thursday night I logged on excitedly after the guild had finished an AQ40 run, even spurning my husband (there are some occasions that are too special to miss!), and it was only while I made my way to Stratholme that I finally learned what was going to be involved in the fight, partially from people talking about it, partially from looking things up.

Atiesh is a demon that looks like a dreadlord (though I'm not sure whether he's actually supposed to be one, lore-wise) whom you summon on Festival Lane in Stratholme and who hits like an absolute truck. Key to the seemingly intended strategy for the fight is to have a warrior in the group to disarm him, which will cause him to drop his sword as a temporary item that you can pick up and use during the fight to do insane dps, kind of like the weapons of Kael'thas' advisors in Burning Crusade. On top of that he has a constant shadow damage aura akin to that of Baron Rivendare, which combined with the damage on the tank makes it recommendable to bring two healers. Oh, and he pulses an AoE curse on everyone that reduces physical attack power by 1000 (!), which also makes it advisable to bring someone who can decurse.

Our group did contain two of the best-geared priest healers in the guild, but we had neither a warrior nor a decurser, as my friend was tanking in bear form and the other dps was one of the officers on his rogue. This was, frankly, an utterly terrible setup in terms of guaranteeing success, as it meant the boss's damage output on the tank was entirely unmitigated and our dps was perma-nerfed by the curse. (Unbuffed, losing 1000 attack power reduces my hunter's overall AP by about two thirds!)

We gave it one go without world buffs, which ended with our poor bear going squish with the boss at only about 75% health. After that, we decided to pop our chronoboons, which helped a lot. Things still got tense however when a stray wandering ghost got pulled into the fight (not even by me) and started whacking one of the priests. We eventually killed this unexpected add and got things under control, but the fight is so tight that this distraction had caused the tank healing to fall somewhat behind and healers to run out of mana a bit earlier than expected. With the boss at about two percent health, our tank died again, immediately followed by one of the priests, and for a nerve-wracking few seconds we didn't know whether we were going to make it. Fortunately, the rogue managed to pull off the classic manoeuvre of evasion-tanking the boss for his last sliver of health so we could get him down.

The actual hand-in for the quest after that is with Anachronos at the Caverns of Time in Tanaris, so we had a little guild assembly there to cheer for the guild's newest "Guardian". The fact that they were letting a druid build Atiesh should give you an idea of how many versions of this staff there are in the guild by now... one of the fun perks of the never-ending Classic era.

She then made her first portal to Karazhan (it's an on-use effect the staff has) and we all took it and did a bit more silly bouncing between portals in front of Kara before calling it a night. I made a 14-minute video to commemorate the event as well:

I'm Not Sure How to Parse This BlizzCon

In my post looking ahead towards BlizzCon about a month ago, I stated that I expected it to have a pretty binary outcome: either Blizzard would surprise and delight with something unexpected, reinvigorating a jaded player base, or they'd deliver more of the same, causing WoW to continue to stagnate and decline.

So of course what we got was... weirdly in-between? There was definitely some business as usual in there, but also a couple of genuine surprises, so I'm not quite sure what to make of it. I shall go into more detail as to why.

Retail WoW: Worldsoul Saga

On the retail front, Blizzard surprised by announcing not one, but three new expansions that will be thematically tied together under the name "Worldsoul Saga". Coming up first we have "The War Within", which will have us going underground to deal with Azeroth's injuries from the giant sword (I think) while running into Earthen and Nerubians, followed by "Midnight", which looks like it will have a void theme and will supposedly have us returning to the Eastern Kingdoms to do stuff with elves. The trilogy will finish with "The Last Titan" which will see us returning to Northrend. It's unclear whether these will follow the existing two-year expansion cycle. Apparently Metzen did mention wanting to deliver them a bit faster, but Blizzard tried that several times in the past and always failed.

I applaud their long-term thinking for planning the next three expansions in advance, but to be honest I'm not sure it was a good idea to reveal all this to the public, as by doing so, they've basically spoiled their big BlizzCon reveals for the next several years. Plus what happens if parts of War Within turn out to be not so well received, e.g. because people don't like certain character or story developments? Harder to pivot when you've already publicly locked yourself in until the end of the decade.

Also, the overall theme of the trilogy seems to be to tie up a bunch of existing loose story threads - not gonna lie, leaning into the "What sword?" meme making fun of how everyone seems to have forgotten about the giant sword stuck in Silithus was well done here. However, that aside, I can't say that any of it has me particularly enthused. I'm not against wrapping up old story threads in principle, but a lot of it seems to reference events and themes from Legion or BfA that I didn't personally experience when they were current and that are hard to make sense of if you're coming to the content later.

For example there seems to be much excitement about the character of Xal'atath, who I know virtually nothing about. I think her spirit lived inside the artifact weapon for shadow priests during Legion or something? I also seem to remember finding her in a possessed knife on the shores of Stormsong Valley in a BfA side quest, but nothing really came of that... so basically I feel lost because I don't really know who she is or why I should care about anything she does. Never been a huge fan of dwarf, void and titan lore either, so the notion that this is gonna be WoW's focus until 2030 or so is a bit oof.

On the plus side... the cinematic was really nice. When it first played, I was actually a bit distracted and not listening, so I was unsure who the human was that Thrall was talking to. Then I rewatched it properly and was like "Whoa, that's Anduin?!". I saw people joking that this is what doing Maw dailies for several years does to a person and got a good chuckle out of that.

Also, in an interesting twist, the "systems" panel for War Within seemed to get the most enthusiastic cheers out of all the announcements as far as I could tell from home, as the devs reiterated that they want to keep improving the game in permanent ways with no more temporary additions that end up being abandoned a year later. This includes dragonriding becoming available for more mounts and being rebranded as "dynamic flying", an expansion of the new talent tree introduced in Dragonflight, a new type of solo to small group open world content called delves, and a whole bunch of new account-wide features such as shared reputations, shared transmog and a shared bank. This is all good stuff, but I'm not sure it'll be enough of a draw if the main theme of the expansion(s) doesn't really appeal to me.

In summary, I'll probably play this if the husband and friends want to, and I do think some of it definitely sounds interesting, but I'm not particularly enthused right now.

Classic WoW: Cataclysm and Season of Discovery

I expected the Classic news to be underwhelming and was mostly curious to watch the bizarre level of hype that the Classic WoW subreddit had worked itself up into, where some people seemed to think it was an absolute certainty that Blizzard was going to announce their personal pipe dream of Classic Plus despite of no evidence for this whatsoever. It was honestly approaching conspiracy theory levels of delusion.

That said, what we got was actually quite interesting. First off, Cataclysm Classic is indeed going to happen, with "some changes" but nothing too dramatic based on what I've heard so far. As expected, this was not received with too much enthusiasm by the crowd, and I felt a bit bad for the lady who had to present the panel on the subject as the crowd refused to laugh at any of her jokes until she was allowed to make a few comments about hardcore at the end. I guess at least there was no outright booing? There'll be people who'll play it no doubt, and the Hurricane cinematic was once again very well done. Does this guy just officially work for Blizzard now?

More interesting though was the reveal of the much-anticipated "Season of Mastery 2", which is not going to be a Season of Mastery. While the original SoM was basically a fresh Vanilla server with some raid-focused changes, they decided to go into a completely different direction with this new one, called Season of Discovery. This one will instead be focused on levelling, with the level cap initially locked at 25 and then gradually increasing over time, plus a bunch of new open world content to explore and "runes" to collect that will grant abilities from later expansions. There'll be low-level raids (apparently Blackfathom Deeps will be a level 25 raid for example) and no open PTR, to make sure everyone discovers the changes together on launch, with no possibility to prepare guides in advance.

I'm sure some of this is going to turn out to be broken as hell, but honestly, I think for a seasonal server that's probably fine, as no long-term harm will be done if things don't work out. In the short term, raiding BFD at level 25 with a shaman tanking and a mage healing honestly sounds like a chaotic bit of novelty fun. I might want to check this out - it already launches at the end of November too!

Finally there was a brief mention of them adding a self-found mode to hardcore, which will give people the option to have a "more hardcore hardcore" experience like with the original addon that prohibited grouping and the use of the auction house. No further details so far.

Conclusion (for now)

I'm slightly unsure how to feel about the path forward for retail and while Blizzard did deliver something surprising on that front, I'm somewhat sceptical about this particular surprise right now. Meanwhile Season of Discovery sounds surprisingly intriguing and like it could be up my alley in a way I didn't expect at all. I guess that's leaning closer to the success side of things for Blizzard than the "same old, same old" failure state I originally posited.

Top Ten Causes of Death in Hardcore

I quite liked it when Blizzard released statistics about deaths on hardcore shortly after launch, so two months later I was kind of wondering when/if they were going to post some sort of update... so I was most pleased when one appeared in my video recommendations yesterday:

It's less than five minutes long and well worth a watch, but to provide a written summary anyway:

At this point, nearly 3 million characters have died on the hardcore servers, and the top ten causes of death at the time of the video were as follows:

1. Falling
2. Kobold Miner
3. Voidwalker Minion
4. Defias Trapper
5. Wendigo
6. Defias Pillager
7. Other players
8. Drowning
9. Porcine Entourage
10. Kobold Tunneler 

The thing that immediately stands out is that seven of these are low-level mobs, while the other three causes of death are level-neutral and can theoretically affect a character at any level. So a lot of people died early on - which is unsurprising - though I think percentage-wise this will go down over time as fewer inexperienced people try out hardcore for a laugh.

The next thing you'll probably notice is that six of the seven mobs are from Alliance starting areas, and only one from Horde. Judging by the comments, people read this in a variety of ways, from "nobody plays Horde on hardcore" to "Alliance players are bad" to "Horde starting zones are just easier". My favourite take was that Hordies are too busy falling to their deaths in Undercity and Thunder Bluff to have time to engage with mobs. There's probably at least a grain of truth in all of these.

Still, I also find myself agreeing with the comments that state that it would be interesting to see more videos like this, but filtered by faction or level for example. Since they do provide the actual death count for each source in the video, we know that the top ten are "only" responsible for about 14% of all deaths, which leaves a lot of room for other ways to die.

To talk about the items on the list in specific, well... I'm still surprised by how high falling and drowning rank, despite of being level-agnostic. It's not that I don't "get" how you can die to these things and I've certainly had my fair share of deaths from these way back when I was noob (e.g. by accidentally walking off one of the bridges in Thunder Bluff), but once you get the general idea of which heights are dangerous and how quickly you run out of air underwater, it's not that hard to take a bit of care in my opinion. It's not like you'll ever find yourself at the edge of a cliff or underwater unexpectedly.

Most of the mobs are not a surprise, as many of them are located in caves and can gang up on you due to fast respawns. I guess it's a little surprising that murlocs aren't on there, and that Defias Trappers rank above Defias Pillagers. I guess the trappers can net you when you try to run away (which isn't even mentioned in the video, which is quite an oversight in my opinion)... plus pillagers and murlocs are well known for being deadly at this point, so maybe their numbers are somewhat suppressed by people actually taking greater care around them now than they did twenty years ago.

The one that surprised/impressed me the most is the Porcine Entourage, because there are only two of these out in the world and they are neutral, so dying to these is never a pure accident but always overconfidence. Though I do get that people may not realise that they come as a package deal with Princess or just how hard they hit.

Nothing's as interesting about hardcore as hearing about how people die.

Classic Era Goes Viral

I haven't actually been playing that much Classic WoW for the past couple of weeks, as I've been more focused on SWTOR for a number of reasons. However, that doesn't mean that time has stood still for Classic era in the meantime - in fact, it's been quite the opposite: A lot has been happening while I've been gone. For example <The Old Raiders>, the guild in which I had placed two of my Alliance alts, exploded in a massive drama bomb and then reformed under a new name. I didn't witness any of this; I just found the Discord completely empty one day and then got the scoop about what had happened through the grapevine.

However, the really big thing that happened was that Classic era went kind of viral last week. It started with a video from medium-sized WoW YouTuber Metagoblin, someone with whom I'm mostly familiar due to an old guildie who used to constantly link his videos at the start of BC Classic to justify dumb takes about what "the meta" was going to be. A day later, streaming behemoth Asmongold "reacted" to said video on his stream.

Yesterday popular WoW Classic YouTuber WillE - someone who contributed a lot to the "Classic era is dead" narrative last year - released a video in which he admitted that era is alive and that he was wrong to write it off the way he did. And Asmongold actually logged into era himself and took a bit of a look around.

All of these videos raised era's profile massively within a matter of days. The community Discord was flooded with hundreds of new members, which was mostly nice to see, though the way some of them skipped straight past the FAQ to ask the same couple of questions over and over and over was a bit aggravating.

The effect was visible in-game as well, as the European PvP cluster (not sure about the US one) reached a "medium" population rating for the first time. Incidentally, this also showed that the community has been mistaken about how the population display works... we'd assumed that the cluster effectively had medium population already, and that it just wasn't showing because every individual realm was considered to be low pop on its own. However, when Firemaw ticked over to medium, all the realms connected to it ticked over at once, which shows that the indicator takes the whole cluster into consideration after all.

It's an exciting time to be a Classic era enthusiast for sure. Mind you, I don't think the game is in any danger of becoming the next big thing. With no more content progression it will remain niche, and to be honest the videos I linked above are hardly the greatest promotion for it either. Metagoblin and WillE mostly seem kind of confused by era being a thing, and Asmongold gets weirdly focused on a tangent about how he thinks Classic should be free-to-play... no, it won't really make much more sense if you watch it yourself. To them, the game remains an oddity that none of them really care about beyond using it as a subject to generate views.

However, considering that we know that many people - including those who actively play other versions of WoW - didn't even know era existed, this kind of exposure is still extremely valuable, because while era clearly isn't going to be for everyone, the current state of affairs feels like there must still be a lot of gamers out there who would enjoy it but simply don't know about it. I don't need or even want it to become huge - but I'd love it if the EU PvE cluster would grow to medium pop as well, as that seems to be my happy place. While high is too busy for my liking and low is okay, having a bit more players than we have right now would be great.

By the way, while I linked all the videos I mentioned above to give credit where credit is due, I don't think they are actually that interesting to watch if you have even the slightest idea about Classic era already and are actually interested in playing it. If you'd like a bit more information about what it's actually like to play on era, I recommend watching one of these two videos by active era community members JayTV and Morphious instead:

Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft

Dan Olson's Folding Ideas channel has become one of my favourite destinations for watching long-form philosophical videos about random subjects, from flat-earthers to online grifts involving audiobooks. He also plays WoW though, and today I found a new video of his in my recommendations that I knew I'd love: Why It's Rude to Suck at Warcraft.

To be honest, the title alone was kind of enlightening in a way, because as much as I've chafed against some of the modern WoW community's social norms, it had never crossed my mind that their annoyance at people not following every meta is rooted in them perceiving it as "rude" when you don't play the way they expect you to. I mean, the opposite seems obvious, someone saying "you suck" is rude no matter the context. But being offended by others not following certain norms - even if the result has no practical effect on you whatsoever - is something I've always considered strange and off-putting.

Anyway, I won't talk too much about the content of the video itself; just watch it yourself. It approaches the topic from several interesting angles, such as how it's actually quite odd that WoW has become so competitive, considering that it's not really designed for it and allows addons that in most other competitive games would be considered "cheating".

The thing that really hit home for me personally though was when at 2:37 he starts showing screenshots of comments (presumably in response to a previous video) that criticise him clicking on his abilities instead of keybinding them, because this has been a personal bugbear of mine for literal years.

You see, I'm well aware that keybinding your abilities is more "optimal" in the sense that it increases your reaction time and actions per minute. However, it's also objectively more demanding in that it requires setup and memorisation, as opposed to just being able to click whatever button is in front of you. Naturally, the latter is much more appealing to new and casual players, and that's fine. I'm not in an arena or mythic progression team. I play WoW Classic, where even the hardest PvE content only really requires me to press two or three buttons in combat while occasionally taking a few steps to the left or right. Speed and split-second reactions are not really required.

And yet, ever since I started uploading the occasional WoW Classic video to YouTube, I started getting comments that had nothing to do with the actual content of the videos but would instead focus on my UI and mouse cursor, condemning me for clicking instead of keybinding. Even if the video is me on a level fourteen warlock, killing four zhevras. How dare I do that non-optimally?!

Even the Forks weren't immune to this, which was so weird. Here was a guild that was super casual, never talked about dps and happily carried multiple ret paladins through Naxx that (due to the limitations of their class) struggled to out-dps the tanks. Yet I'd post a boss kill video on the guild Discord and people would ask me whether I'd heard of our lord and saviour, keybindings, as if this must be an entirely new concept to me.

No matter how many times I told them that I simply didn't care to keybind, no matter that I was one of our better damage dealers regardless, people would bring it up again and again with an almost religious zeal. It almost makes you feel gaslit after a while, when you know it doesn't matter to the way you play, and yet people keep telling you that it does because even just knowing that someone is questing in the Barrens on a low-level alt without keybindings is somehow strange and offensive to them. It's utterly bizarre.

Dan doesn't come to any real conclusion in his video, merely commenting that all of this has been a natural evolution of things and that trying to fight it (e.g. by removing addons) has its own pitfalls, which is true. However, I would argue that game developers do have an interest in fighting back against the most extreme manifestations of this sort of maths-based elitism. Players who are in favour of it will often argue that everyone's allowed to self-select, and if you don't want to play with people who are too demanding, you can simply create your own group/guild or whatever. Never mind that certain types of gaming prescriptivists will actively hound you day and night with their attempts to make you play their way as mentioned above.

However, the more important thing to keep in mind is that if the whole point is to play casually, to not go beyond a certain kind of effort to appease other players, then saying you should simply work harder to isolate yourself from the rest of the community is missing the point. If the only solution to being "allowed" to continue to play casually (in whatever way) is to work harder on some other aspect of the game, it's much easier to just quit and do something else. If a lot of people are not great at WoW and this mere fact is considered rude and "offensive" by a very vocal subset of players, then a lot of people are going to find some other game to play (even if the gameplay itself would be perfectly accessible to them). Having a community that's constantly raising the bar for what's considered an acceptable minimum and then antagonises its fellow players about this does not make for a healthy game in the long run.

The (Lack of) Allure of Classic Wrath

Ever since I decided that I definitely wasn't going to bother with Wrath of the Lich King Classic, I haven't really been keeping up with the latest news about it. However, with the launch being only a few days away now, it's been kind of hard to escape the subject as someone who's still involved with and plays other versions of WoW.

My old levelling buddy decided to resubscribe and run endless AVs on all his alts to gear them up just before the expansion, which has been kind of baffling to me. Bloggers I follow who don't always play WoW have jumped back into Classic for the Wrath pre-patch. Blizzard's promotional emails have been trying to lure me in with interesting behind-the-scenes videos about subjects such as designing the continent of Northrend, death knight class design, or the making of the Wrathgate cinematic.

WoW's official social media accounts have seemingly been all Classic, all the time for the past week or so. Today I marvelled when they shared a video called "Wrath of the Lich King Classic Journey Trailer", which looks pretty amazing. I learned that it was done by a fan called Hurricane, whose work I'd actually encountered years ago in promotional materials for the private server Kronos, such as this AQ trailer. His style is very distinctive as he drains a lot of the colour out of his videos (presumably to make WoW look more "serious" or adult), which is actually an artistic choice I don't agree with as I think WoW's bright colours are a big part of its charm, but that aside he definitely does some fantastic work and it was actually nice to learn who'd created all these amazing clips that I'd seen previously.

To get back to the subject of Wrath however, Blizzard is even offering people a free mount for retail if they complete the death knight starter zone in Classic... and I have to admit that was probably what pushed me over the edge. I mean, I'm playing retail at least casually now, right? And getting a throwaway death knight through the starting zone takes like no time at all, right? So I re-installed Wrath Classic today and created a night elf death knight on my old home Hydraxian Waterlords. The server was actually meant to be on the chopping block back in August, but for some reason Blizzard changed their minds about that, and after previously emptying the server out by offering free transfers away from it, there are now free transfers available onto it from selected realms. Have I mentioned yet that Blizzard have really fucked up managing server populations in Classic?

Anyway, I was actually surprised to find the server not completely dead, with some chatter going on in the LFG channel, including some server personalities whose names I recognised from back in the day but who I thought had transferred away. Still, I wasn't here to socialise but rather to get a job done.

I'm kind of relieved to say that the whole experience did not leave me with an overwhelming urge to suddenly play Wrath Classic after all. I know people are gaga over death knights because of how OP they were at launch, but for me the class never really did that much personally, probably because melee dps is my least favourite role. I mean, it felt okay to play, but not amazing.

In a similar vein, I can appreciate on an intellectual level that the death knight starting zone is a pretty well-crafted experience, but playing through it doesn't exactly fill me with joy - or any other emotion really. (Except that part where you have to execute the prisoner; that one still tugs at my heart strings every time, not gonna lie.)

Instead, I often found myself cynically noticing small flaws or inconsistencies, such as that several quest givers addressed my character as "Unknown" (but who reads quest text anyway, right), or that the Battle of Light's Hope Chapel was a rather annoying affair in practical terms that involved mobs getting punted all over the place and evading all the time. When I arrived in Elwynn Forest, I also had to chuckle at the fact that Brewfest was being celebrated right next to a Scourge invasion. The descent into nonsense starts with small things...

Anyway, I got my mount and I'm glad I satisfied my curiosity. All the hype was starting to affect me, but that little play session was a good reminder that I decided not to get invested in Wrath Classic for good reasons. I hope that those who do decide to play it have fun, though I maintain my suspicion that a large chunk of the community will soon find out that what many consider WoW at its peak does perhaps not hold up as well on repeat as they remember. But I guess we'll see.

What's Really Going on with Classic Era?

When a few thousand people are happily playing an MMORPG, but none of them post about their experiences online, how does anybody else even know about it? Aside from exploring Classic era by playing it myself and paying attention to in-game chat, I thought I'd also do some research online, and it's been quite interesting.

I mentioned previously that there've been a lot of public declarations floating around of how dead Classic era is, not just on the official forums but also from actual content creators, such as WillE putting out this video called "Classic Era Servers Are OFFICIALLY Dead" in May, which has nearly 300k views at the time of writing this.

However, while era players have mostly been quiet and kept to themselves, more recently there appears to have been some pushback against this "era is dead" narrative. Only a week ago, someone made a massive megapost on the WoW Classic subreddit that explains in detail how the era servers are structured, who the major guilds are and more. I thought it was funny that the most upvoted comment to that was someone asking what era servers actually are; they didn't even know!

I also found two small YouTubers who've been reporting on Classic era - they are also referenced in the reddit post, but I actually found them before seeing them mentioned there. First there is Morphious, who - by his own admission - initially did the same thing as many other YouTubers or streamers and logged into era for just a few minutes to have a look around and then declared it dead. However, when people told him that this wasn't true, he looked into it some more and quickly became part of his server's local community, leading to a follow-up video proudly declaring "Classic Era is Back" in the thumbnail, which is now the most viewed video on his channel. He also has a video answering some frequently asked questions about era.

The other YouTuber is DwarfLord, who most notably released a video only yesterday in which he interviews a bunch of people on his server about why they play Classic era, and also includes some little comedy skits.

There are multiple references to era having a "small town feel" to it, where people know each other and help each other out. Which sounds great and is one of the things I wanted out of Classic from the beginning. Of course for someone who's not comfortable on a server with fewer than 10k concurrent players, this is probably more or less equivalent to "being dead" anyway, but for those of us who're looking for more of a community feeling and are okay with not being able to anonymously queue up for a battleground or join a pug at all hours of the day, there's definitely something there.

Interestingly, a lot of people talking about their experiences on era also mention that it's been growing recently, which I can definitely see being a thing. I may be part of a minority, but surely I'm not the only one who'd rather go back to Classic than forward to Wrath of the Lich King, and whenever Season of Mastery ends, that might also provide a small influx of additional players. Which is kind of funny in that it's the opposite of WillE's video and his bold declaration about era servers being "officially" dead now.

Of course, one thing to keep in mind is that up until now, people have still been able to buy clones of Classic characters that previously moved on to BC, but in only a few days, that will come to an end and all dormant clones will be deleted. I went ahead and cloned a few more of my lower-level characters, just because Blizzard drastically lowered the price of the cloning service and I'd rather have those characters available if I become more invested in era than regret not unlocking them later on.

Once that's gone though, levelling a brand new character from scratch will be the only way to join the action in Classic era, and we'll see how that's going to affect the population. On the plus side though, deleting all those tens of thousands of dormant clones that have been taking up names will make it a lot easier for players to find names for new characters that aren't already taken.

Videos as Scrapbooking

In about one and a half months, it will have been exactly a decade since I was given my first piece of video editing software for my birthday. It wasn't a surprise gift, but one of those "a family member really wants to get me something for a special occasion so I'll have to think of something that vaguely interests me but that I've never really looked into getting myself" things.

A few days later, I uploaded my first public video to my YouTube channel: a three-minute clip compilation of me playing Huttball in SWTOR, set to a K-pop song. Honestly, that is pretty representative of the sort of random nature that my videos have retained since then. (I don't even particularly like K-pop, I'd just stumbled across that one song somewhere and it got stuck in my head. Using it in a video was a way of helping to excise the earworm.)

Throughout those ten years, I'm happy to say that while I've kept uploading semi-regularly (my channel contains over 300 public videos at this point, which averages out to two to three videos a month), I've never felt any real desire to become a professional YouTuber. I continue to be amazed by how many kids apparently find that job aspirational nowadays, considering that it's always looked pretty tedious and unrewarding to me.

The closest I've ever come to trying to make content for a wider audience was when I created a series of videos about levelling a character in SWTOR purely through pugging instances, which was fun for a while but also extremely time-consuming considering that the videos weren't even anything particularly fancy. Plus it made me realise that talking to an invisible assumed audience wasn't really a strength of mine. It did make me relate more to why so many YouTubers have a desire to monetise their work - considering how much time it takes to record and edit videos, it must be a hard hobby to maintain with any sort of frequency while also being bogged down by a day job.

That said, there's something very liberating about not having to worry about monetisation on YouTube. You'll often hear YouTubers complain about their battles with YouTube's copyright detection for example... but I am blissfully carefree in that regard. I use famous songs in my videos all the time and am perfectly fine with the original owner asserting their copyright and claiming the non-existent ad revenue. My videos have less than a hundred views on average anyway, and I always use an ad blocker while watching YouTube. I'm just happy to be able to legally share random vids that use someone else's music with my friends.

The main purpose of my videos over the years has quickly become memory preservation. When I got my first camera at the age of eleven, I used to take photos of everything and diligently sorted them into albums. With everything going digital and more of my life moving online, my focus moved more to taking and saving screenshots of my adventures in MMOs. Videos turned out to be a nice complement to that, in the sense that they are great for preserving memories of events where sound or context matter a lot, such as everyone whooping on voice chat after an exciting boss kill or people having a laugh about someone doing something particularly silly.

When I joined <Order of the Holy Fork> in Classic, it did not take long for me to upload my first video of my adventures with them - the adventure in question being a small raid storming Undercity to steal a quest item for our prospective Scarab Lord while someone played the soundtrack from Apocalypse Now over Discord. I was just laughing so hard throughout the whole thing, I had to preserve it... and I think I knew right then that this guild was a keeper. (It still makes me laugh on re-watching because of the sheer absurdity of it all.)

I soon found myself with plenty more material and ended up making more videos about my adventures with the guild - some random "outtakes" compilations featuring gems such as me accidentally getting a bunch of people killed the second time I went to pick up buffs from a Dire Maul Tribute run. I had fun making them and my guildies loved them too. In fact, I soon had more funny clips than I knew what to do with... I held a lot of them back with a thought to maybe using them in a more specific way later - e.g. I had quite a few recordings of people falling down into the eggs in Upper Blackrock Spire, and had this vision of one day perhaps making a video consisting of nothing but that.

But then... well, Classic Burning Crusade came and things weren't so great anymore. I initially found few opportunities to experience and capture the same kind of fun I used to have. I recall at least one guildie asking me when I was going to finally make a new video... but I just wasn't feeling it. At the same time, the old clips increasingly started to feel like an albatross around my neck - they were like a stack of old photos spread across a table in the corner of the kitchen, something that makes you feel like you should really tidy it away, but at the same time you kind of don't want to look at it.

Remembering the happy times just emphasised the contrast with how much things had changed, and reminded me of people that had left the guild or stopped playing and whom I missed. At the same time, I realised that the longer I waited to do anything with those video recordings, the less likely they were going to be relevant or interesting to those who still remained in the guild. It just added another aspect of sourness to the unhappy feelings I was already having about goings-on in the game.

But well... the guild is gone now. I wasn't playing in a way anymore that was going to add new material to the pile. In fact, I wasn't playing much at all, so I finally found the time and energy to go through with the clean-up throughout the past month. All the OG Classic clips went into a video that I ended up simply calling "Classic WoW Endgame Memories" - most of them are from our time in Naxx, but there were also some much older recordings in there, such as the aforementioned occasions of people falling down in UBRS. I just put all of it together into one video, sorted it a bit and threw it out there.

This weekend, I finally went through the much smaller number of Burning Crusade recordings I had of fun nights in dungeons, and compiled those into a single video as well - again, there was much in there that made me smile:

I think this one is going to be quite relatable to anyone who's done a lot of BC Classic dungeons...

Either way, getting this done has felt very good. Aside from the general good feeling you get from tidying up a bothersome mess, it also gave me a chance to relive many of the happy times I had with the guild and to preserve them in a format that I'm satisfied with. This has provided me with some closure and I feel ready to move on to whatever will come next.