Retail WoW & Me in 2024

Comparing the previous post and this one, I spent about two to three times as many hours in retail in 2024 than I spent in Classic. The uncertainty in the numbers mostly comes from the fact that I revived a lot of old characters this year for which I don't know how much of their /played actually happened in 2024 vs. ye olde days, but either way, the difference is pretty stark.

I just really enjoyed both the end of Dragonflight and the first few months of War Within. Aside from running dungeons with my guildies once a week, my play style tends to be somewhat on and off - I'll go through several weeks of binging quite hard and doing something or other on every single alt, to barely logging in outside of our scheduled dungeon runs for the next few weeks after. I know a lot of Classic players tend to think of retail as having lots of daily/weekly chores you "have" to do, but from my personal experience at least that's an image that's about two expansions out of date. Sure, there are lots of things you can do, especially as a more casual player, but I've found most of it to be very low pressure nowadays.

The two events that had the biggest impact on my stable of characters this year were MoP Remix, which resulted in me levelling five new characters to the level cap from scratch, and the introduction of Warbands with the War Within pre-patch, which suddenly gave long-forgotten characters relevance again now that cross-server and -faction play is almost fully supported and they all share an inventory via the warband bank.

Basically, aside from Shinfur the monk, all characters on this list that aren't on the Azjol-Nerub/Quel'Thalas server cluster were old favourites that got a revival this year.

Shindragosa - Azjol-Nerub

• Level 80 dracthyr evoker (+10)
  
• 24 days, 13 hours /played (+9 days, 18 hours)
  
• War Within professions: 83 Leatherworking, 100 Skinning, 73 Cooking, 144 Fishing
  
• Other professions (changed from 2023 only): Dragon Isles Leatherworking 100 (+10), 129 Classic Skinning (+129), 61 Outland Skinning (+61), 75 Northrend Skinning (+19), 23 Cataclysm Skinning (+3), 85 Legion Skinning (+4), 30 Kul Tiran Skinning (+23), 30 Draenor Cooking (+15), 300 Classic Fishing (+267, had to level that for the fishing pole, lol), 10 Cataclysm Fishing (+5), 30 Kul Tiran Fishing (+15), 855 Archaeology (+756, I randomly decided to max it out one day but gave up because of how terrible the last 50 skill-ups are) 

My preservation evoker remained my main throughout Dragonflight. With War Within, I had a feeling early on that I'd probably want to change roles in group content but I wasn't entirely sure yet, so because making decisions is hard, I still ended up levelling this character through Khaz Algar first and did all the story content on her. When there isn't new story to check out though, she's mostly chilling now.

Milita - Quel'Thalas

• Level 80 draenei warrior
  
• 4 days, 17 hours /played
• War Within professions: 83 Blacksmithing, 100 Mining, 36 Cooking, 48 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 300 Classic Blacksmithing, 295 Classic Mining, 13 Cataclysm Mining

The warrior I levelled during Remix ultimately ended up becoming my new "dungeon main" as I became the tank for our little group of friends doing M+ once a week. It's been... surprisingly chill? I mean, I only play with friends, not pugs, and we only do pretty low keys - I'm sure things become more demanding in high keys, but as it is, I'm finding it to be surprisingly low-stress. I learned to tank during Burning Crusade, where threat was a bitch and losing aggro on a single mob in a heroic could result in a dps or the healer getting insta-gibbed, so just pulling and AoEing things at a good clip while also rotating through my defensives doesn't feel very demanding in comparison.

Tilarea - AN

• Level 80 lightforged draenei priest (+10)
  
• 8 days, 9 hours /played (+2 days, 23 hours)
  
• War Within professions: 65 Tailoring, 61 Enchanting, 21 Cooking, 33 Fishing
  
• Other professions (changed from 2023 only): 300 Classic Tailoring (+200), 31 Northrend Tailoring (+26), 45 Cataclysm Tailoring (+43), 74 Dragon Isles Tailoring (+10), 15 Cataclysm Enchanting (+4), 21 Pandaria Enchanting (+1), 74 Dragon Isles Enchanting (+10), 39 Dragon Isles Cooking (+23), 59 Dragon Isles Fishing (+22)

My hobby priest continues to be just that: not my main and not really played a lot in group content, but I just like having a holy priest to do stuff on.

Hekatie - Earthen Ring

• Level 80 undead death knight
• 11 days, 23 hours /played
• War Within professions: 100 Herbalism, 71 Inscription, 31 Cooking, 42 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 300 Classic Herbalism, 75 Outland Herbalism, 75 Northrend Herbalism, 75 Cataclysm Herbalism, 300 Classic Inscription, 75 Outland Inscription, 75 Northrend Inscription, 75 Cataclysm Inscription, 300 Classic Cooking, 75 Outland Cooking, 75 Northrend Cooking, 75 Cataclysm Cooking, 300 Classic Fishing, 75 Outland Fishing, 75 Northrend Fishing, 75 Cataclysm Fishing, 180 Archaeology

This was one of the old characters I revived after the Warband patch and levelled to 70 via the Radiant Echoes event (you can kind of tell her age based on her having all profession skills up to Cataclysm maxed out). I wasn't actually that keen on death knights when they first came out (the first three posts about them on this blog were all about how death knights suck, lol) but I did eventually manage to get this one levelled up by the end of Wrath and then continued to have some fun playing her in Cata. In TWW so far, frost death knight has been pretty fun to play too - I wrote more about that here.

Tharisa - AN

• Level 80 human hunter (+10)
  
• 4 days, 15 hours /played (+1 day, 21 hours)
  
• War Within professions: 56 Leatherworking, 100 Skinning, 26 Cooking, 33 Fishing
  
• Other professions (changed from 2023 only): 140 Classic Leatherworking (+21), 42 Dragon Isles Leatherworking (+24), 6 Outland Skinning (+6), 75 Northrend Skinning (+5), 49 Legion Skinning (+16), 175 Classic Cooking (+46), 32 Dragon Isles Cooking (+18), 76 Classic Fishing (+76), 45 Northrend Fishing (+45), 46 Dragon Isles Fishing (+23)

I allowed my hunter to grow her hair out this year, but that's about as exciting as things got. I wrote more about my ambivalent relationship with retail hunters in this post. I'm also a bit worried about what the new year will bring as Blizzard is currently looking to take marksmanship hunters' pets away in 11.1, which is so utterly insane I don't even know how anyone could've thought that would be a good idea. There's still time to change course, Blizz!

Berrine - QT

• Level 80 night elf druid
  
• 1 day, 11 hours /played
• War Within professions: 100 Herbalism, 100 Skinning, 16 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 15 Classic Skinning

It's the druid I levelled in Remix. As mentioned in this post, she's kind of "my other tank" and I haven't done much with her other than level up her gathering skills and casually gear up a bit.

Helena - Darkspear

• Level 80 dwarf paladin
  
• 3 days, 14 hours /played
• War Within professions: 100 Mining, 100 Skinning, 4 Cooking, 9 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 300 Classic Mining, 55 Outland Mining, 3 Northrend Mining, 300 Classic Skinning, 74 Outland Skinning (I should really go get that last skill point), 12 Northrend Skinning, 300 Classic Cooking, 75 Outland Cooking, 135 Classic Fishing, 50 Archaeology

This is another old alt that got revived. I created her way back in the day, just to stall out at level 15. I then revived her in Cataclysm to explore some of the revamped levelling zones. Her professions seem to indicate that I did also spend some time in early BC content, but I've got to admit that I have absolutely no memory of that. This year, I levelled her to 70 via Radiant Echoes, and I wrote about what it was like to level from 70-80 as holy in this post.

Shinfur - ER

• Level 80 pandaren monk
  
• 1 day, 4 hours /played
• War Within professions: 100 Mining, 83 Engineering, 6 Cooking, 4 Fishing
  
• Other professions: 6 Classic Cooking

It's the monk I levelled in Remix! You can read more about my monk experiences in War Within here. Not much else to say about this one, other than that thanks to the inventing mechanic, engineering is by far the easiest crafting profession to level for some reason.

Groghue - AN

• Level 80 worgen rogue (+10)
  
• 2 days, 22 hours /played (+1 day, 4 hours)
  
• War Within professions: 87 Herbalism, 70 Skinning
• Other professions (changed from 2023 only): 267 Classic Herbalism (+8), 100 Dragon Isles Herbalism (+13), 184 Classic Skinning (+9), 43 Northrend Skinning, 33 Cataclysm Skinning (+10), 19 Dragon Isles Cooking (+15), 60 Dragon Isles Fishing (+25), 116 Archaeology (+9)

It's my rogue who I still don't particularly enjoy playing but hey, I need her to be able to open lockboxes. More about my experiences with rogueing in War Within can be found here.

Willowie - QT

• Level 74 human warlock
  
• 13 hours /played
• War Within professions: 48 Alchemy, 62 Herbalism
• Other professions: none

It's the warlock I levelled in Remix! I had to relog to take this screenshot because for some reason on the first attempt, the game had forgotten that she owns an incubus and was displaying the succubus instead. Now it's showing the correct pet but I don't know what's up with his wing appearing to go behind the tree in the background?! Small indie company, as the saying goes.

I was also shocked by how many herbs alchemy uses these days. I thought I had a good number of them saved up, but then I was like: "You want me to burn how many of these for each skill-up?!" I also still have no idea how to play this one and have died to random mobs that I aggroed while picking flowers. Part of me keeps thinking that I should just bite the bullet and look up a guide, but another part remains stubborn and maintains that if a class is this clunky to figure out, maybe it deserves to be played less. Make this nonsense easier to understand in game, Blizzard.

Mehg - AN

• Level 72 night elf demon hunter (+2)
  
• 10 days, 21 hours /played (+17 hours)
  
• War Within professions: 30 Mining, 25 Jewelcrafting
• Other professions (changed from 2023 only): 27 Cataclysm Mining (+10), 74 Legion Jewelcrafting (I don't think this is new, I must have forgotten to write down her old JC skills last year), 100 Shadowlands Jewelcrafting, 79 Dragon Isles Jewelcrafting (+10), 83 Dragon Isles Cooking (+15), 75 Dragon Isles Fishing (+23)

My demon hunter, who was my "main alt" in Shadowlands and remained one of my most played characters throughout early Dragonflight just quietly fell by the wayside towards the end of the expansion and I've only barely started levelling her in War Within. I'm not entirely sure why, though I think at least part of it was due to how much of a pain it was to sort out her inventory and the bazillion types of different ores and gems she'd accumulated over time. Once I also accidentally clicked the "clean up my bank" button and there are few things I've done in a game that I regretted as much as that one button click. I should be in a better place now though.

Shimeri - AN

• Level 70 dwarf shaman
  
• 4 days, 8 hours /played
• Professions: none

The shaman that was my "Remix main" has oddly ended up being the last of my Remix characters to get levelled in War Within, even though resto shaman is the healer flavour of the month right now. I'll get to it when I get to it.

Daerys - DS

• Level 70 draenei mage
  
• 30 days, 9 hours /played
• Professions: 300 Classic Mining, 75 Outland Mining, 75 Northrend Mining, 75 Cataclysm Mining, 305 Classic Jewelcrafting, 80 Outland Jewelcrafting, 70 Northrend Jewelcrafting, 32 Cataclysm Jewelcrafting, 300 Classic Cooking, 75 Outland Cooking, 75 Northrend Cooking, 300 Classic Fishing, 75 Outland Fishing, 3 Northrend Fishing, 11 Cataclysm Fishing, 7 Archaeology

This used to be my "main Alliance alt" back in the day. I wrote a bit more about her history and how I ended up reviving her for the draenei heritage quest in this post. Again, you can kind of tell that this is an old character that saw a lot of play up to Wrath from the profession skills. I plan to take her to 80 eventually.

Shinlu - AN

• Level 68 human monk (+7)
  
• 22 days, 14 hours /played (+5 hours)
  
• Professions (changed from 2023 only): 160 Kul Tiran Leatherworking (+10), 54 Northrend Skinning (+3), 100 Legion Skinning (+20), 29 Dragon Isles Skinning (+24), 63 Kul Tiran Cooking (+15), 16 Draenor Fishing, 690 Archaeology (+12)

My old Shadowlands main still hasn't really seen much love, but apparently gained seven levels in only five hours of play time, because that's how retail rolls these days. I remember trying out the follower dungeon feature on her when it came out, but other than that I don't think I did very much, though those profession skill-ups must have come from somewhere I guess.

Tidella - AN

• Level 54 Kul Tiran shaman (+6)
  
• 1 day, 21 hours /played (+4 hours)
  
• Professions (changed from 2023 only): 77 Outland Mining (+77), 3 Outland Engineering (+3)

Similar story here, with six levels gained in four hours of play, all of which were me going on a mining spree in Outland because I was after some old mats for some reason at that particular moment.

Isadora - Norgannon 

• Level 19 human paladin
  
• 1 day, 22 hours /played
• Professions: 130 Classic Blacksmithing, 121 Classic Mining, 109 Classic Cooking, 97 Classic Fishing

This is the very first character I ever created, a paladin on a German server. Like several other old characters, I decided to take her out for a spin after the Warband patch. It's kind of funny that I remember her being in her mid-20s before the level squish, but post-squish she got to quest through some of the human starter zones all over again, which was a nice nostalgia trip even with all the post-Cataclysm changes.

Eartha - AN

• Level 26 earthen shaman
  
• 2 hours /played
• Professions: none

I wasn't that keen on the earthen when they were first announced, but I did end up liking them in the story, so after I'd unlocked them I decided to make one just for the heck of it. Also, they have a racial that gives a massive boost to exploration XP... but that's a topic for another post.

Classic WoW & Me in 2024

It's once again time for my by now annual look back at my relationship with WoW (Classic, there will be a separate post about retail), through the lens of which characters I've made any progress with this year and how much.

The main thing that immediately became apparent when I started putting the numbers together for this is that I spent a lot less time in Classic in 2024 than I did in 2023. Based on my 2023 review, about 50% less in fact. That still left me with more than ten days /played, which is not nothing, but for comparison: in 2019, the year when Classic first came out, I spent more time than that on a single character over the course of only four months.

When I did play Classic, my focus this year has generally been on rolling up new characters for novelty, with the occasional check-in on old favourites for some routine gameplay or the odd adventure here or there.

Season of Discovery

I'm going to start with Season of Discovery, which got the largest chunk of my play time as far as I can tell, though the numbers might be a little skewed as I'm pretty sure I created most of these characters at the end of last year and they just hadn't reached a high enough level yet for me to want to include them in my end-of-year round-up. I then still played quite intensely for the first two months or so of 2024, before getting utterly disenchanted with the state of SoD and giving up on it. It wasn't until the other month that I felt inspired to dip back in, but it's actually been quite nice to get to the party late and not feel like I have to give a fig about whatever's going on at endgame.

Shintar - Wild Growth

• Level 37 Priest
• 2 days, 23 hours played (+1 day, 11 hours)
  
• 188 Alchemy (+48), 205 Herbalism (+55), 204 Cooking (+54), 201 First Aid (+72), 174 Fishing (+52)

Raiding in SoD phase one, even if only did BFD twice or something, turned out to be an unexpected boon as I reckon the gear my priest got from it might well last her until the level cap at this point. She's currently leading the charge of my alt brigade with the goal of seeing Demon Fall Canyon some time next year.

Shintroll - WG

• Level 35 Hunter
  
• 1 day, 21 hours played
• 154 Leatherworking, 225 Skinning, 205 Cooking, 115 First Aid, 153 Fishing 

My hunter is an interesting contrast to this because she hit level 25 only just before phase two came out and has been wearing mostly the same greens since then. Levels come fast with the XP boost, but gear not so much. It's starting to become somewhat noticeable at this point, but fortunately hunters are sufficiently OP that she's still managing to get by.

Shindig - WG

• Level 28 Mage
  
• 1 day played
• 98 Enchanting, 125 Tailoring, 103 Cooking, 75 First Aid, 75 Fishing

Mages have an interesting concept going on in SoD with all the books you can find and the scrolls you can decipher, but sadly most of them haven't seemed particularly useful to me so far. We'll see whether that changes at some point.

Shikana - WG

• Level 24 Shaman
  
• 18 hours played
  
• 129 Engineering, 111 Mining, 103 Cooking, 77 First Aid, 91 Fishing

I think I created this shaman with the goal of trying out shaman tanking, but with the changes to runes I'm now too worried about being considered "suboptimal" for group content without all my runes purchased from the vendor. This was very much driven home when I did a Ragefire Chasm on another character with a shaman healer who was only level 8 (TIL that you can enter RFC at level 8; I always thought the minimum was 10) and he basically did all his healing with spells from runes. Her gear is also starting to fall behind rapidly and I'm thinking I may have to take some time out just to hunt down both some gear and runes.

Shinlu - WG

• Level 21 Druid
  
• 1 day, 12 hours played
• 89 Herbalism, 90 Skinning, 71 Cooking, 52 First Aid, 34 Fishing

This druid hasn't had a chance to do much yet... I think I've only found something like four runes so far as well. Much work to do either way.

Tirr - Lava Lash 

• Level 32 Priest
• 1 day, 19 hours played
• 104 Enchanting, 140 Tailoring, 180 Cooking, 114 First Aid, 205 Fishing

This was the character I made on the RP server with the goal of "rerolling" there for phase two, just for the server to die the "free transfer death" shortly after. I was honestly surprised to see that it was still up when I logged back in last month. I did a bit of solo questing there, but a completely empty world doesn't hold that much appeal to me right now. That was a fun experiment last year, but for the time being I'm kinda over it. 

Hardcore

Shintar - Nek'Rosh

• Level 22 Priest
• 23 hours played
  
• 96 Alchemy, 140 Herbalism, 100 Cooking, 115 First Aid, 136 Fishing 

While hardcore isn't really my (primary) jam, I did decide to revisit it briefly in spring by creating a priest on Horde side this time around. That character is actually still alive, I just lost interest in the low 20s as I so often do because I felt I should run Wailing Caverns for the quests but also struggled to find a group until my interest just kind of fizzled out.

Classic era - Alliance

Tirr - Zandalar Tribe

• Level 20 Hunter
  
• 22 hours played
  
• 141 Herbalism, 101 Skinning, 136 Cooking, 115 First Aid, 140 Fishing 

The most invested I got into Classic era this year was probably when I checked out the "community fresh" project on Zandalar Tribe in summer. Even so, that still resulted in less than a day of play time from me, so that should give you an idea of how inactive I've been on era in general this year. Also, when I logged in to check this character's /played, there were only two other people online on the entire server. No need for "community fresh" when there are actual Blizzard-run fresh anniversary servers.

My existing Alliance characters saw a little bit of... not really play, but active time as I started making money over on Alliance side at one point. Earlier in the year, a guildie needed help transferring an expensive recipe from Alliance side to Horde via the neutral AH and I was happy to help him out. He reimbursed me of course, but the whole thing did make me realise how poor my Alliance characters were in comparison to my Hordies, so I decided to try and make some easy money by actually regularly using my cooldowns to refine Deeprock Salt and create Mooncloth. Nothing to write home about, but I'm just going to list the overall stats in bullet point form for my own future reference:

• Tirr - Nethergarde Keep: 36 days, 9 hours played (+3 hours)
  
• Sarelle - NK: 20 days, 14 hours played (+1 hour)
• Faly - NK: 8 days, 22 hours played (+1 hour), 292 Cooking, 225 Fishing
• Jehna - NK: 7 days, 16 hours played (+3 hours), 300 Tailoring (+5, from making Mooncloth), 252 Enchanting (+2), 281 Cooking, 122 Fishing
• Razorr - Pyrewood Village: 2 days, 8 hours played (+4 hours... I have no idea what I did in that time as she gained no levels or skill-ups - it's possible I just made a mistake in my calculations last time), 160 Mining, 235 Skinning, 162 Cooking, 196 First Aid, 65 Fishing
• Shintar - PV: 2 days played (+0), 125 Mining, 172 Engineering, 181 Cooking, 145 First Aid, 126 Fishing

Classic era - Horde

Shintau - PV

• Level 56 Shaman (+3)
• 8 days, 18 hours played (+19 hours)
  
• 268 (Tribal) Leatherworking (+3)

My only Horde character to achieve anything noteworthy this year was my shaman, who gained three levels. Still not 60 after more than five years though, hah! I just did a bit of questing and ran both Sunken Temple and Maraudon. The Mara run didn't give me much XP, but it allowed me to play with a friend from OG Classic that had finally decided to start playing on era and we had a good time.

The rest of my stable didn't do much either, so again I'll just list them in bullet point form for my own future reference:

• Shika - PV: 33 days, 16 hours played (+1 day, 5 hours) - I think I may have attended one or two raids at some point in the year, I got to be part of Bracken's Atiesh adventure, and I did spend some time farming ore on occasion. Mostly I just logged in to put stuff on the AH though.
  
• Shilu - PV: 16 days, 7 hours played (+3 hours) - I don't even remember what I did on this one
  
• Shinny - PV: 4 days, 14 hours played (+10 hours) - my mage appears to have lost two levels since I wrote down that she was level 44 last year, and she's only 42 now; as this isn't Everquest it seems safe to say that was just me getting it wrong. She maxed out her tailoring due to me deciding to regularly craft and sell Mooncloth on Horde side as well: 300 Tailoring (+12), 143 Enchanting, 272 Cooking, 263 First Aid (+7), 178 Fishing (+1)
  
• Fooba - Mirage Raceway: 1 day, 12 hours played (+1 hour), 133 Mining, 97 Blacksmithing (-27? clearly another mistake in my notes last year), 76 Cooking (+56), 110 First Aid (+17), 77 Fishing (+70)
  
• Gemba - MR: 1 day, 4 hours played (+0), 97 Herbalism, 150 Skinning, 2 Cooking, 113 First Aid, 80 Fishing 

Once again I'm ending the year with no real idea of what next year will bring for me in Classic. Season of Discovery has given me some goals for the time being but that mode has a very uncertain future. I might revisit Hardcore again at some point, but beyond that I have no real plans, so my play time may well continue to decline until/unless we end up getting some kind of Classic-related surprise reveal that appeals to me.

WoW Memories #12: December 19th, 2006

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

The following was originally posted on December 19th, 2006 under the title "Gender-Bender":

In my WoW guild there's been a trend to create alternate characters¹ lately and I decided to join in...² and do something different for a change by creating a male warlock called Wilson. I had read this interesting study about gender-bending in MMORPGs in the past, and while that was about EverQuest I figured that the basic principles would apply to WoW too.

Playing as a male did feel different right from the start...³ no random people hitting on you for example, and I automatically found myself trying to restrain my use of emotes and such - too girly.⁴ Still, I'm afraid I can't really report more interesting experiences yet since I soon switched to questing with guild mates who knew my real sex anyway and now I'm mostly spending my time cracking jokes about my manliness. "There's nothing as unmanly as failing to pick a flower." (Herbalism for the win!) "Let me give you a manly hug!" "Just look at my manly ponytail sway in the wind!" etc. ;-)⁵

Of course Wilson's current outfit doesn't help me take the experience of being a male more seriously:⁶

Let's just say that I wasn't the only one who was in stitches when I put this on... just goes to show that the makers of the game don't discriminate against either sex as far as ridiculous outfits are concerned!⁷

¹ I'll be honest, until reading this, I'd kind of forgotten what "alt" is actually meant to be an abbreviation of.

² This series is approaching its end, and it's worth noting that after this post about alts, there are no more entries about me levelling my main. In the previous installment it sounded like my priest was approaching 50, and then I just didn't mention anything I did on her ever again (or at least not for a while, until after Burning Crusade had come out). This is interesting to me because it seems to match my vague recollection that I didn't particularly enjoy what counted as endgame in Vanilla. Obviously I was still invested enough to finish levelling and keep playing, but I remember finding the zones unbearably dreary and the dungeons increasingly difficult (I think the last instance of which I saw the final boss was Sunken Temple. I did join runs for places like BRD, Stratholme and Scholomance several times, but didn't see much success in any of those places at the time.)

³ Eighteen years later... I did write a longer post about my strange struggles with playing a male character in Star Wars: The Old Republic, which you can find here.

⁴ The "emotes=feminine" idea is something I haven't thought about in a long time, but I suppose I still see it as true to some extent. It depends a bit on the type of emote I guess... I don't tend to think that anyone who uses a friendly smiley face in chat is a woman these days, but I do remember it still feels a little strange to me to be more openly friendly to strangers while playing a male character, because there's some deeply tainted part of my brain that thinks males aren't "supposed" to behave that way for some reason.

⁵ I've got to admit this whole paragraph makes me cringe heavily nowadays. Not so much because of the bad jokes themselves, but because I clearly thought I was being incredibly clever and hilarious making them.

⁶ I believe I've identified the main pieces that make up his ensemble as a Barbaric Linen Vest paired with Ancestral Woolies.

⁷ I was at least partially wrong about that in the sense that these particular pieces were the exception rather than the rule for looking equally ridiculous on both female and male characters. A lot of other armour pieces that looked like normal shirts or vests on males actually turned into tank tops with exposed belly buttons on female characters (or worse).

More Levelling in SoD

I mentioned last month that I was getting back into Season of Discovery with the goal of eventually seeing the Demon Fall Canyon dungeon. Over the past couple of weeks, I got a bit distracted by some things in SWTOR, but I haven't forgotten about this project, so I wanted to jot down some notes about my most recent adventures.

In general, I've continued to be surprised by how not dead the SoD servers have remained after the launch of "Classic Classic". According to my census addon, there are pretty consistently about 1000 players online on Wild Growth Horde side, which is actually pretty close to my personal sweet spot in terms of server size: enough people to keep the auction house replenished, make it easy to get into a group for most dungeons and see plenty of activity out in the world, but not so many that you can no longer gather or quest without perceiving other players as a constant competitive nuisance.

The economy is a bit less good and feels quite inflated to me. People trying to charge one gold for a single Green Hills of Stranglethorn page feels quite ridiculous to me for example. I sometimes see complaints that prices on the era servers are inflated due to the servers' age, but at least on the PvE cluster, most things are pretty fairly priced even after more than five years. Occasionally someone will try to drive the price of certain goods up, but the thing with era players is: they've got time. If you charge too much, they can always wait and/or go farm for themselves. On seasonal servers there's more urgency to get stuff now and it's noticeable.

I also remember hearing that certain activities in earlier SoD phases really cranked up inflation (incursions awarding lots of gold or something?) and that's probably part of it as well. Either way the end result is that as someone returning after several months of absence, I find a lot of things on the AH quite unaffordable. If I find one of those lost supplies boxes, if I can't fill them with my own gathering and crafting skills, it's basically a no-go. I have managed to make a bit of gold by occasionally flogging some goods for (to me) rather silly prices as well, but opportunities for that are somewhat limited and partially luck-dependent so not really a reliable solution.

I think there's also bots? It's probably not as bad as on the anniversary servers, and I've stated in the past that people are way too quick to cry wolf about people supposedly botting, but sometimes you can definitely tell. (I remember one time in Elwynn when I saw a whole stream of low-level humans leave the village zig-zagging along the exact same path; that was eerie.) I haven't come across a lot of such cases on SoD myself, but definitely at least a suspicious number of hunters with unnamed or scrambled pet names.

As for myself, I continue to rotate through all my alts to use up some restedness and try to have them quest in different places for variety. My priest also healed a Razorfen Kraul and my mage did a Wailing Caverns and a Shadowfang Keep. The latter was a bit funny to me because I actually used the group finder tool for the first time and saw a group that was just missing a tank - with the three dps being a warrior, a shaman and a warlock, all three of which can tank in SoD. I sighed and just listed my mage by her lonesome... but within less than five minutes the other group had invited me anyway and we were off to the races.

It's also been fun to do more "discovering" of content and mechanics that are unique to SoD. The other day, I was in Stranglethorn Vale during the Blood Moon for the first time, and while I had the immunity buff on me, it was still a slightly odd experience. I didn't actually see any fighting for example, but lots of max-level allies running around killing my quest mobs. Does that give them rewards? I couldn't be bothered to do any deeper research on it. I did also run into this boss-type mob that was yelling and taking a swim in Lake Nazferiti for some reason.

In terms of questing, my hunter has offered the most interesting experience. I only noticed the other day that it's possible to place traps in combat now for example, something I'm pretty sure wasn't possible in the earlier phases. She also kind of struggles with the massive XP bonus, since it doesn't apply to pets, meaning her little tiger is currently three levels below her. I've tried to get him caught up by focusing a bit on mob grinding while unrested, but then I hand in one quest and bam, suddenly I'm another level ahead again. It's a bit annoying to be honest.

Another questionable adventure she had occurred around the AQ gate opening event. I mentioned previously that it worked a bit differently in SoD compared to normal, with the war effort completing automatically on a timer, but apparently the ten hour war - or at least the events tied to it - were extended significantly as well. I kept running into giant floating Qiraj crystals in levelling zones for days, which I think made farming Brood of Nozdormu rep a lot easier for people, but I'm not sure Blizzard fully took into consideration what this would mean for levellers. For example one of these crystals spawns right in the middle of Camp Mojache, so when I tried to pick up the flight path there, I swiftly got stomped into the ground. I couldn't even res and quickly click on the flight master, as I would instantly get put into combat and killed again. I think in the end I had to accept a spirit rez and use my hearthstone.

The other day I saw a video by WillE about what's new in SoD, and he mentioned that there are now vendors that sell all the runes for one copper each. I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I was a bit concerned about how much of a grind it would be to find all the runes at this point, and this is definitely a nice solution for people who want to level more alts to raid. But I'm not looking to raid, and finding more runes was kind of part of the journey I was looking forward to? I mean, I can still gather them myself over time, that hasn't been disabled as far as I'm aware, but it does make me a bit worried whether people will be shirty in dungeons if you haven't just bought all your runes. Then again, so far everyone I've grouped with since my return has been very chill, so one can hope.

WoW Memories #11: December 3rd, 2006

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

The following was originally posted on December 3rd, 2006 under the title "Another WoW Tale":

This entry is a bit anachronistic since this actually happened on Tuesday, not Sunday, but I think it works for a Sunday entry. :-P

So, Khytez and I were in Booty Bay for one reason or another, and our friend Excelior¹ complained about not being able to find the second Stranglethorn troll legend², even though I had told him where it was. Since I was already in the area, I said I'd just show him myself. Upon my arrival at the underwater ruins, he's just about to be beaten into a bloody sea lion pulp and I can save him just in time, aggroing all the elite Murlocs in the area in the process. As I blast and whack them like mad, Excel swims up to me and... just stares. My health bar goes down pretty low, prompting a worried "Tira???" from Khytez (cause nothing says "What the hell are you doing?" like three question marks) but I survive. At least the Murlocs are out of the way now and Excel can get his legend. "That was well-hidden!" he claims. I roll my eyes. ;-)

As we bound along the beach afterwards he complains that me and Khytez being fifteen levels ahead of him now makes him depressed.³ But you know, maybe I want to help him anyway? With finding the remaining legends? Sure, why not. Immediately the level 34 kitty rushes off right into the middle of a level 35-37 troll camp, and of course I have to follow in hot pursuit to save him from being killed. As I step over a dozen troll corpses I tell him not to do that again... "But it's fun!" he yells and runs off again. His health goes down faster than I can run, so I try to cast my shield on him... and get the message that his level is too low. D'oh. He dies, all the remaining trolls attack me, and I barely survive with the help of a health potion, while Khytez is yelling something about wanting to jump off his gryphon to save me.⁴ How heroic. ;-)

"Okay. Let's try this again." I resurrect Excel, he runs off, just to get killed again by another dozen trolls. I fight them off, resurrect him again, he runs off... can you see where this is going? I actually felt kind of bad about him dying over and over again, but he thought it was absolutely hilarious and eventually I was in stitches too. It was just too silly. Just as we find the last troll legend, Khytez finally makes an appearance too. Obviously we should have waited for him, then Excel wouldn't have died as much - or so he claims. "Oh yes, he would. He's very talented." As if to prove my point, Excel runs off right into the middle of a patrol and before I can blink he's dead again. Comment from Khytez: "... amazingly talented." I was laughing so hard by that time... and Excel claimed that all those deaths had been the most fun part of his whole evening.⁵

Also, being in Stormwind just before server shutdown was an interesting experience. General chat got spammed with goodbyes and goodnights in a dozen different languages, not to mention comments like: "In 2:45 you'll have to get a life. Nooo!" People were running around like mad, trying to get things done at the very last minute, and the usually empty beds in the inn were all occupied.⁶ Yay for patch day!

¹ Excel was a male night elf druid and was introduced to us by Khytez. To this day I'm actually not sure whether theirs was just another random friendship struck up in game or whether like Nemi and I they actually knew each other from outside the game.

² To be fair, that quest was brutal and another one that I think really stood out in people's memories as taking a lot of time and effort back in the day.

³ I mention in the next sentence that he was level 34, which means our own characters were around level 49 by this point. I do seem to recall Excel losing interest in the game soon after since he wasn't motivated enough to level by himself and we were just too far ahead to do anything useful together anymore.

⁴ The implication being that he was travelling towards us on a flight path and was alarmed by my rapidly dropping health bar.

⁵ I do think there's something very sweet and innocent about this story and it's a good representation of how none of us were really worried about things like efficiency at the time. We just had a good time goofing around with like-minded people in a virtual space.

⁶ Ye olde server shutdown experience is admittedly something I do look back on with fondness nowadays. It really made the server as a whole come together in a strange way, as we were all sad that we were forced to stop playing. That said, I'm not sad that maintenance windows tend to be much smaller now than they were back then.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One word: Awwwkwaaard. :-P³

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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