BlizzCon News - Official Vanilla Servers Inc.!

I'll admit that even though I haven't (officially) played a Blizzard game in years, I still like hearing the news coming out of BlizzCon. Blizzard knows how to put on a good show, and the trailers are often neat to watch even if I don't play the game they are for. However, this year, something was actually of interest to me.

First off, as expected, they announced the next WoW expansion. That wasn't what interested me, but I wanted to say something about it anyway.



"Battle for Azeroth" is probably the most uninspired theme for an expansion they've come up with to date. Pretty much anything people were speculating about before the announcement would have been more interesting.

It also made me think about just why I find it so uninteresting. I often see people complain that factions are an outdated concept and should just be done away with, and I always disagree. I love factions as a narrative device. When I rolled my first Horde character back in the day, it was literally like a whole new world. The other faction presented a totally different culture that was so at odds with the Alliance way of doing things that they pretty much couldn't help being hostile to each other.

Yet at the same time, they weren't openly at war. There were areas where open fighting was happening, such as Ashenvale, but at the same time there were also groups/personalities that were striving towards peace, such as Thrall and Jaina. It struck me as realistic that attitudes towards the other side weren't unified, and it made for an interesting environment that was always on the edge of war, yet not quite. It's like "will they or won't they" in romance. The tension is what's interesting, and never quite knowing which way any given situation might swing. Open war, with people just bashing each other's heads in while shouting "For the Horde!" or "For the Alliance!" is not.

That said, going by the YouTube comments on the trailer, there seem to be a lot of people for whom this is exactly their idea of a good time. Good for them, I say.

No, what really interested me was this:



Yes, Blizzard has actually committed to creating their own Vanilla servers! I once said that I couldn't ever see them doing this, but I'm absolutely thrilled to be wrong, even more so after my recent disenchantment with the private server community. I will definitely be playing this when it opens. I don't mind playing a sub and will be happy that Blizzard is finally offering something again that I'm interested in paying for.

As for how long it will last? We'll see. If I end up playing it the same way I have been playing on private servers in the past few years, on and off for a couple of months throughout the year, it will feel like a good deal. I'm not looking to go back to "no-lifing" it.

That said, it's advisable not to get too hyped just yet. We don't have a release date yet and they said that they want to take their time to get it right. While they won't have to come up with content and art assets, which should save a lot of time compared to an actual new expansion, getting the coding just right will certainly be a challenge. I won't be at all surprised if we won't see this for another year or even longer. Not that I mind - gives me more time to "forget" my recent experiences and dive in fresh when the time comes.

The other big caveat is of course: "What is Vanilla WoW?" In the private server community, the most common model seems to run on patch 1.12 mechanically while introducing content such as dungeons and raids slowly over time, but there's nothing to guarantee that Blizzard will emulate that. Not to mention that there will probably be a certain temptation on their part to meddle with "quality of life features", for example by using the new character models or bringing in achievements, which could be disappointing for those of us who don't like these things. We'll just have to wait and see. It's still hugely positive news.

The Trouble With Private Servers

I said in my previous post that I've repeatedly lost my lustre for levelling characters at around level 30 and that I was hopeful that this wouldn't happen with my druid, but it seems that fate has conspired against me.

A few days ago a commenter asked what I thought of the "recent development with Elysium". I had no idea what he was talking about so I had to go look it up first. As it turned out, the server had shut down pretty much overnight ... again. This time it had nothing to do with Blizzard though, and everything with the unregulated and drama-prone environment in which private servers operate.

I remember when I first started doing research on private Vanilla WoW servers, I came across this video by dodgykebaab on an event he called the "Molt Down". The story was about a private server called Molten, one of whose contributors decided to steal some money as well as the server's character database. I was strongly reminded of this as I pieced together the Elysium story from various reddit threads.

Oh sure, the details are different. Here it's two of the previous server owners who are being accused of stealing money and selling gold. This is used to paint the database thief as a sort of rebel hero... but the result is the same. The old server is gone and you're supposed to go somewhere else, where your characters and account still exist because hey, the guy literally took everything with him when he left.

I knew going in that you can't rely on these servers to be stable. However, I guess my time on Kronos lulled me into a false sense of security. The people running that have always come across about as professional as it gets in these circles, and I suppose it makes sense seeing how they are part of a larger collective and open about taking money for certain things. That sort of environment fosters a certain sense of professionalism.

However, most of the private server scene is and remains a Wild West. How can it be anything else when they operate outside of the law and there is real money to be made? Sure, there are good people who volunteer their time for free and genuinely just want Vanilla WoW to survive as a hobby, but it only takes one bad apple giving in to the temptation of money or power to ruin it for everyone who plays on that server.

At least for now, my enthusiasm has been deflated. It doesn't look good for Elysium as they're frantically scrambling to restore some semblance of their community with month-old database backups yet haven't made any visible progress in days. Meanwhile, the rival server is up and running already, and all it takes to join in is a quick edit of the realmlist.wtf file.

I've said before that I try not to let this sort of drama affect me too much. As someone who has been playing for free the entire time and was only really interested in levelling, without any competitive streak, what did it really matter to me if someone took money out of the donations account for private purchases or sold gold to a max-level character? I'm not saying it's right, but it's the sort of thing I wouldn't even notice or know about if I was just playing the game and not reading reddit. However, someone stealing my account data to set up a rival server? Somehow, that feels oddly personal and I find it really off-putting, leaving me with no desire whatsoever to play on the new server, even if it now has my previously created characters on it. If only Kronos had a PvE option...

Re-exploring Night Elf Lands

Once again, much faster than I expected actually, I've hit the milestone of reaching level 30. Does that mean that I'll lose my drive again soon? Hopefully not... I do have plans for the near future at least, such as revisiting Razorfen Kraul. I've seen enough LFG requests for it in world chat that I think it might actually be possible to get a pug for it.

I've been surprised by how much I've been enjoying redoing those low level night elf zones on Kalimdor. It's been long enough that my memory is very fuzzy and it feels exciting to re-visit all those stories, even if at times I've wanted to slap myself for making the exact same mistakes I made back in the day all over again (such as searching for a quest item in the wrong place and not realising it until I brought up a guide).

Stonetalon Mountains in particular has been a pleasant surprise. My memories of it back in the day mostly have it feeling very empty. It wasn't until I rolled my first Horde alt that I even realised that Sun Rock Retreat existed. As Alliance I don't really remember doing any quests there, just being confused by my druid friend being able to talk to an NPC that wouldn't interact with me, probably because she had found a breadcrumb somewhere that I had missed.

This time around I engaged in a whole chain around the Venture Co. loggers that had me fetching magical ingredients for a gnome all the way from Stormwind, and I could hardly believe my own eyes when I ventured forth into the Charred Vale with something like five different missions in my log that pretty much required me to kill everything in sight.

I think once I wrap up Ashenvale however, I'll probably want to switch over to the Eastern Kingdoms for a while. My memory of Desolace is relatively fresh thanks to questing there on my paladin, but I never did much on her in Hillsbrad and Arathi...

I also got into Gnomeregan already, once again as a healer. That run was kind of funny in a way, as I realised pretty much the moment we set foot into the instance that there was no way we were going to complete it with that particular group composition, as the last boss is level 34 and we only had a single damage dealer above 30 - a warlock who didn't really seem to understand English very well and kept meleeing things with his staff. The tank eventually got sufficiently annoyed with him to kick him from the group. (I get why someone like that might end up in your group in an average MMO... but on a private server for a ten-year-old game it's rather bewildering.)

However, that same tank was also very determined to finish the dungeon despite of being only level 29 and pushed onward with great care. I swear I've never killed this much trash in Gnomeregan just to avoid pulling it by accident. We found a treasure chest behind a pillar relatively near the entrance that I didn't even know existed. And remember those tunnels with walkways on two different elevations, where you'd traditionally take the upper path while sticking as close to the wall as possible to avoid pulling the mobs on the lower half? We tried that at first and after it didn't work out for us, we kept jumping back and forth between the two lanes to clear both of them in their entirety.

We did remarkably well like that (the kicked warlock was quickly replaced by a rogue), but the final tunnel with the Dark Iron dwarves did us in one too many times. I mentioned that during my previous visit they didn't appear to be laying mines as they should, but this has clearly been fixed in the meantime so we kept dying to too much damage. (I'm still not sure the mines were behaving entirely as intended though... I had to laugh when at one point after I died, a mine "ran away" from me back towards the remaining dwarves.)

After the third wipe on the same pull or so, the replacement rogue abandoned us, but this actually worked out in our favour as we somehow ended up with a level 35 paladin tank instead (6 levels higher than anyone else in the party) who managed to carry us through that last bit until the end. In the end the run took up the entirety of my afternoon, but at least I managed to finish all my Gnomer quests in one go, including the escort. Of course one of them has a follow-up that asks you to go right back in there...

Tirri's Dungeon Journal

Just like during my previous nostalgia trips back to Vanilla WoW, I only really find the time to do dungeons on the weekends, which strongly limits how many of them I can do, but even so I've managed to squeeze in four runs on my druid so far. I thought I'd make a short post about them, since in Vanilla WoW, no two dungeon runs feel the same and it's always interesting to talk about your pugs.

Part of the idea of rolling a druid this time around was that I would have an easier time getting into groups, since tanks seemed to be in much higher demand than healers while I was levelling my priest. It hasn't quite worked out as expected.

I tried to put my first Deadmines group together myself, but despite of my (what I thought were) inviting shouts that a tank OR healer would be fine for the last spot, nobody took the bait. Suddenly a level 60 night elf hunter whispered me and offered to simply run us through. I've never been a fan of dungeon boosts, as they kind of defeat the point of having fun with the group gameplay, but at that point I was getting sufficiently tired of spamming LF1M that I accepted his offer (once I had checked with the rest of the group that they were OK with it too). The result wasn't very exciting and gave little XP, but I did get all my quests done in record time and the last boss dropped his Blackened Defias Armor for me, so I called it a win.

Later I joined another run as tank, and things went well enough until our healer suddenly disconnected while we were on the pirate ship and then never came back. We managed to clear a couple more trash pulls with the use of crowd control and by having me back off to heal myself when needed, but Captain Greenskin proved too much for us without a healer, which eventually forced us to call it a day. I would have been more disappointed if I hadn't already completed all my quests and also scored Smite's Mighty Hammer on this run.

Up next was Blackfathom Deeps, this time as a healer. Fortunately I do enjoy healing as well and had made a point of starting a set of healing gear early. This was a very smooth and fun run with a pleasant group, with the only disappointment being the realisation that the quest Twilight Falls is simply impossible to complete as a healer. I had the same issue on my dwarf priest earlier in the year. The problem is that quest items for some reason seem to ignore the normal loot rules on this server and are always treated as free for all, which means that they inevitably get picked up by the tank and melee dps before anyone else can get to the dead mob, and there aren't enough cultists in the instance to produce drops for a full party all on the same quest. If I happen to get into another run I'll give it another go (maybe if I can tank that one so I can hog all the drops for myself), but if not I'll just have to dump it - again.

Finally I picked up all the quests for the Stockade except the one from the Wetlands that has a prerequisite chain. The nice thing about the Stockade is that due to how short and easily accessible it is, people run it all the time and at all times of day. I actually logged on with only about an hour to go until bedtime and simply watched general chat for a few minutes - and what do you know, "Anyone for the Stockade?" popped up within five minutes. I was initially asked to heal again, but then the party leader (a paladin) suddenly decided that he'd rather heal himself, and we already had a tank, so I actually ended up doing kitty dps! Not my favourite thing ever, but if it gets the job done...

It amuses me that with a character specifically designed to make use of the apparent tank shortage I experienced previously, I only actually tanked one out of four runs so far. But then that's part of the beauty of rolling a druid - being able to play whatever role is needed.

Druid Life

As I expected, with things in my life calming down a little after the summer, I eventually found myself bitten by the WoW nostalgia bug again (admittedly watching a lot of YouTube videos about the game hasn't helped). Somehow I had no interest in revisiting my dwarf priest however, so I decided to roll up new druid on Darrowshire instead. She's somewhat reminiscent - but not a complete clone - of a night elf druid I used to play on retail, mostly during late Burning Crusade and Wrath.

While I never played one in Vanilla, I consider druids one of my favourite classes, because I like both their role versatility as well as the whole guardian of nature theme. Also, while I didn't play druid myself until later in my time with WoW, the class had a strong impact on my early days in the game as my first levelling partner was a druid, and her class quests were constantly driving both of us forward. I still remember when I was told that we really had to get to Westfall (for her seal form quest) without even knowing where that was on the world map...

I think I've said it before, but one of the nice things about Vanilla WoW is that rolling an alt is just such a totally different experience. Class balance was poor back then, that's true, but on the plus side both the play style as well as the race/class-specific narrative for each one (not to mention professions) made levelling each new character distinctly different from the last.

To learn how to shapeshift and how to cure poisons, druids for example have to go through separate quests chains for each one, because how could you expect something this core to your class to simply be trained via the press of a button (or worse, like in current WoW, to just appear on your bar without explanation)? I enjoyed the bear form quest in particular - I initially had to retreat in shame after my first attempt, because the moonkins around the cave I had to enter were too strong for me, but once I had gained another level, I managed to make it through - you bet that I felt that I had truly earned the strength of a bear after all that! It's best not to think too much about the seal form quest though... if this is really a test that all young druids have to undergo (as one of the quest givers explicitly states), the Cenarion Circle must be expending a stupendous amount of effort and resources on hiding precious treasure in faraway and hard to access underwater locations over and over again...

My talents gave me reason to pause because I had forgotten how confused druid talents were in Vanilla. I know that I want to be feral first and that's fine, but I'm used to it having great synergy with the resto tree... except that before BC sorted things out, several of those really nice talents were actually tucked away under balance, making me unsure of which one would be the better secondary. I also can't believe anyone ever thought that it would be a good idea to give a healer a dot as a high-level talent. Insect swarm in the resto tree, really!

As my primary professions I chose herbalism and alchemy this time, which turned out to be an even better fit for the class than I expected/remembered, as one of the steps of the quest to learn how to cure poisons requires you to fetch some herbs - the quest giver even says something along the lines of how unlucky it would be if you weren't a herbalist yourself, hah. It also makes levelling seem faster somehow, since there are herbs everywhere and you end up running all over the place and killing lots of extra mobs just because you really want to pick that flower. At this point my druid's already halfway through level 18 and I only just started picking up the Deadmines pre-quests (because night elf or not, you've got to go to the Deadmines).

Aside from that I've been happy to ignore unrelated quest givers in those areas though, as my current plan is to stick to Kalimdor as much as possible, because neither my paladin nor my priest have done much there, so it's all still pretty fuzzy in terms of memory and will feel much fresher. At the same time I also feel a lot of nostalgia for Darkshore, Ashenvale and Stonetalon in particular, as these zones left strong impressions on me during my formative first weeks in WoW.

As for the general state of the server (since several commenters on my last post asked about this), it still seems healthy. Things have of course calmed down since the craziness surrounding the launch (and thank god for that), but /who still shows over a thousand players per faction online seemingly at any time of day, which I would consider quite a thriving community. I was just surprised by how quiet chat seemed initially, until I remembered to join the custom world channel. For some reason people really don't seem to care much for talking in general chat on Darrowshire.

Gnomeregan and Gnolls

I feel like I might have hit a crossroads. My priest hit level 30 last night, but I'm not really happy with the way her levelling is going right now, as my plan to level mostly via dungeons hasn't been working out very well. For one thing each run gives even less XP than I anticipated, but more importantly I'm finding it harder than expected to find groups. It's actually kind of absurd, considering that part of my reasoning for rolling a priest was that it should make it easier to find instance groups, but for some reason there seem to be way too many wannabe healers levelling on Darrowshire (as the Elysium PvE realm is now called), at least around my level range on Alliance side. Almost every time I play, all I see in world chat is "LFM tank (and sometimes dps)", with the occasional "healer LFG" cry from a lonely healer thrown into the mix. I should have screenshotted the one who was trying to make a case for why she was the best choice to heal a level 30 instance because of her raid experience and mana management skills. This is the kind of competition I'm dealing with here.

Mind you, I did get a Gnomer run done not long ago, and that pleased me very much as I completely skipped that instance while levelling on Kronos. It was super smooth as well, even though I was only level 27 at the time, which is... six or seven levels lower than the final boss? We only had one near-wipe on the very last pull before the end, but fortunately I survived with a sliver of health left and was able to res all the others. I did notice that the scripting didn't seem entirely true to the original, as we only encountered a single one of those alarm bots that could quickly get you into trouble, and I remember that the biggest issue with the tunnel of Dark Irons near the end was that they put down mines, which they didn't seem to do here either. Still, it was a good run. Hard to imagine that this dungeon used to give me such nightmares back in Vanilla.

I also tried to get another BFD run in to finish the one leftover quest I still had there, but unfortunately that one turned out to be doomed as a server shutdown was announced shortly after we had started the instance, so we only had time to make it up to the murloc boss before getting kicked off for an unspecified amount of time. I also learned that Elysium is rubbish at doing countdowns, as their server shutdown countdown went from twenty minutes left to five minutes left in the space of four minutes.

I tried my hand at PvP for a change of pace but remembered why I hated it on Kronos too and almost made a post about that at one point. First off, crowd control without diminishing returns is totally out of control as a sufficiently bored mage can literally keep you sheeped indefinitely, but more than anything the UI is just totally useless. "Just install some add-ons, everyone does," you might say, but this is one area where I've been spoiled in the last five years: If an MMO can't present me with a UI fit for purpose right out of the box, I simply cannot be bothered. And the Vanilla WoW raid UI is just a hopeless mess. Specifically the lack of any sort of range indicator makes it impossible to keep an eye on who's even near enough to be healed by you. Just terrible.

This was my Kronos PvP experience. Been meaning to use that screenshot forever.

So I've been spending the last one and a half levels farming gnolls in the Wetlands. Yes, I actually found a spot that was quiet enough that I could have a bunch of mobs all to myself. Mostly I wanted them for their cloth, to work on my tailoring and first aid. It's actually been pretty zen, just killing gnolls while I put a podcast on in the background. It's not really what I want to play Vanilla WoW for though.

Maybe it's time to take a break again. I think it's just something about that level range, as I lost steam for a few months when my paladin on Kronos hit 30 as well.

Dungeons and Drama

Happy New Year, Everyone!

I'm continuing to level my dwarf priest on Nostalrius Elysium PvE, but progress is slow. One of the downsides of Vanilla WoW gameplay that I absolutely admit is there is that it doesn't lend itself very well to short play sessions, so I only really play on the weekends when I have the time to play for several hours at once. Unfortunately one or two such play sessions don't necessarily provide me with enough content for a proper blog post, so the blog stays silent even if I'm happy with having made a level or two of progress, especially since there isn't as much novelty to the process as there was when I rolled my first character on Kronos.

I'm currently sitting at level 25 and have only really quested in Redridge since leaving Westfall and Loch Modan behind, with all my other experience having come from dungeons.

First I tried to give the Deadmines another go, but that run was pretty awkward and ended up getting aborted halfway through. I should have known that it wasn't a good group considering that the leader was advertising via /yell instead of general chat. Still, the real problem wasn't anything anyone did... as far as I could tell anyway. We'd had a wipe in the forge and had just run back in, then had to run back out again when someone pulled a nearby patrol before we'd all reassembled, and the next time I ran in, it suddenly said that everyone had left the group simultaneously, which was way too much of a coincidence to have occurred naturally. Some sort of group disband bug? I don't know. Either way, since things hadn't been going so great anyway, I made no effort to whisper anyone about putting the group back together, and they didn't contact me either.

Then there was Blackfathom Deeps. What was funny about that one was that we spent ages looking for a warrior tank since the group leader (a ret paladin) insisted that this would make for the smoothest run. Then we finally found one, but the moment we actually stepped into the instance it turned out that he had neither a shield nor any interest in tanking. I don't know if he was intentionally deceiving us, didn't know what he was doing, or if the invitation issued by the paladin had been unclear, but nobody made a fuss and we just moved on with the hunter pet tanking. (Could have had that experience without waiting for half an hour, that's all I'm saying...)

Ironfur the bear was actually doing a pretty decent job at it for most of the instance too, but when we reached the part with the Twilight cultists, our pally DCed, never to return, forcing us to continue with one man down. This did not go well on the part with the braziers, where we wiped on every single one as far as I recall, and on some of them more than once. When we didn't wipe, I at least still died on every single pull (since I instantly got healing aggro from everything and the hunter was the only one trying to get things off me) and had to make the long corpse run from Darkshore every time because nobody had a res. By the end my armour was nearly broken and I was seriously losing the will to live, but at least I got a Rod of the Sleepwalker out of the whole ordeal.

In contrast to these, running the Stockades was a breeze, with a tank who seriously knew what he was doing and made it a great experience. I happily joined him for another round when it turned out that his friend had forgotten to pick up some quest items and needed to go again. I was disappointed only when I got my Seal of Wrynn at the end of the lengthy quest chain, as it was only a pesky green! I can only guess that this is another one of those "back in patch 1.x it hadn't been upgraded to a blue yet" things that the Nost team seems to love...

Speaking of the Nost team though...

The Vanilla WoW community continues to provide endless entertainment in the form of pointless drama. Remember how this whole Nostalrius relaunch came about? Because the Nost devs were ticked off that Blizzard wasn't responding to them and released their code and database to former rival server Elysium to recreate Nostalrius. While many were happy to get the server back, people were also shaking their heads at the Nost team's behaviour, as acting like that was an obvious slap in the face of Blizzard after they had considered themselves the champions of getting official WoW legacy servers previously.

Well, it seems that a couple of months later, they've finally realised this too, and are akwardly backpedaling by asking the Elysium team to stop using the code and data that they've been given only a few months prior. Unsurprisingly, the Elysium team replied with what can be summed up as: "Sure, we'll change the name from Nost to something else and go back to using our own core. Thanks for gifting us this massive community!" So nothing really changes except that the former Nostalrius team has officially disavowed private servers I suppose? One can only guess that this has something to do with Blizzard, whether they privately expressed an unwillingness for any further talks because of what had happened, or whether the Nost team is actually dealing with legal action that forces them to officially cut all ties with the project.

Little to nothing should change for those of us who are simply playing on the servers. Maybe my Seal of Wrynn will actually turn blue. And I guess I'll have to go back and re-tag the previous posts about this project "Elysium" instead of just Nostalrius.