Making the Auction House a Better Place

The auction house in my little corner of Classic era has continued to vex me. I wrote back in August about how having to farm things for yourself because you can't just buy them actually has a certain kind of charm to it - and I still think that - but with the recent surge in population, the shortcomings of the Horde AH on my cluster have come into focus even more than before.

It actually annoys me somewhat, because I don't think that "number of active auctions" should be this big thing to brag about, but the truth is, for the average player who doesn't run a census addon and doesn't do any deep research about population, looking at the auction house is one of the few ways to get some kind of indication of activity on the server. Looking at the sorts of numbers people have shared on the Classic era Discord, there even seems to be a roughly 1:1 correlation between auction listings and overall server population on PvP servers, which was kind of surprising to me. PvE players seem to be a bit more into friendly trades and charitable giving, which lowers the number of auctions relative to population somewhat, but there's still a clear correlation.

There's also the consideration that not everything is easily farmable for the solo player. I remember Hydraxian Waterlords immediately after the "transfer apocalypse" and commenting on how I couldn't even find any green gems to put into the sockets of my alts' levelling gear. Yes, that was BC Classic, not era, but the principle is still the same.

So at some point the low number of listings on our auction house started to bother me not because I was looking for things to buy for myself, but because it made me unhappy to think what kind of message this was potentially sending to new players. The mods of the era Discord asked people to include a screenshot of AH listings with their newest census scans, and I actually felt vaguely ashamed about the last screenshot I contributed because the number of items on the AH was tiny even for an already small population (less than a third of the number of active players). The only reason I still did it was that I wanted to show that there was some kind of life on Horde side on the EU PvE cluster.

All that said, the nice thing about era is that the smaller the community, the more power you as an individual have to make a difference personally. So I started to increase the number of auctions that I listed myself, and kept relisting things even if they didn't sell well, as long as I knew that they could be useful to somebody and I wasn't making too much of a loss on the constant relisting. I also posted on my guild's Discord and in trade chat to remind people to not let too much stuff gather dust in their banks but to instead try to make things feel welcoming and alive to the newer players.

And now I'm making this post, with some more tips on what sort of things I think we as a community should aim to keep on the auction house to make things easier for newer players in specific:

• Bags! Every player will eventually hit that point where they're looking for more bag space, and their non-crafted options in that area are extremely limited. Recently I've been turning spare cloth into mid-level bags on my mage and at reasonable prices they've been selling like hotcakes.
  
• Basic consumables: Obviously high-level consumables are useful to raiders and there can be a market for that, but I figure if someone is looking to raid, they'll end up joining a guild anyway and from there they can figure something out even if the auction house is empty. This is more about the little things that levelling players might find useful, such as lower-level health or mana potions. I always like to keep at least one elixir of water breathing listed as well, because I know some of those underwater quests can be a right pain in the ass without one (depending on your class).
• Crafted quest items: This is a big one that people don't often think about, but Vanilla has a number of quests that can only be completed by handing in player-made items. While they don't tend to be important in terms of rewards, it still sucks if you pick one of these up and then just have to drop it because there's literally nobody offering to sell the item you need to complete it. Examples that are needed by both factions are the Gryochronatom for that gnome in the Badlands, or the Mithril Casing for Chasing A-Me.
• Green Hills and (for Horde) Shredder Manual pages: I know it's tempting to vendor these because of how much bag space they take up while being worth very little, but you could really help out a lower-level player who's close to completing their set by putting your spare pages on the AH for a few silver.
  
• Mid-level gear: There usually isn't a shortage of the really low-level stuff, but from level 20 onwards the AH tends to thin out in my experience. This one's a bit trickier because the deposits on some of these can start to become draining if stuff doesn't sell after a few days, but if the stats on an item are good, at least give it a try before vendoring or sending it straight to a disenchanter.

If your auction house is still somewhat anaemic and you're also seeing an influx of newer players, maybe keep these in mind if you're someone who's a bit more established on the server and has both cash and spare materials lying around. The fact that the number of auctions on our cluster has been growing steadily gives me hope that Horde side might eventually be able to transition from an almost pure guild economy to more of a server-wide one too.

I Tried Mythic Plus

Mythic Plus has always been a strange beast to me. It was introduced in Legion, when I wasn't playing, and everything I heard about it just sounded incredibly alien. Over the years, retail WoW has sacrificed a lot of immersion on the altar of gameplay and convenience, but the very concept of Mythic Plus just seemed to take things to a whole new level: over a dozen difficulty levels, with mechanics that changed all the time? Seasons, scoreboards and timers? What does any of that still have to do with the World of Warcraft? I seem to remember reading that the whole concept was basically imported from Diablo 3, which I've never played - it certainly seemed like an odd transplant.

It also didn't seem like something that would ever interest me at all, not least because of everything being timed. I was already getting annoyed with WoW's "rush rush" culture by Wrath of the Lich King, and Torghast certainly didn't seem to get any better when they added a timer to it either. The thought of racing against the clock with a bunch of hostile pugs just sounded dreadful...

And yet... I've always been reading about Kaylriene's adventures in Mythic Plus with a certain interest, and from the way he described the whole experience, it struck me at some point that if circumstances were different, if I was fifteen years younger and playing with a tight group of friends, maybe I would have enjoyed Mythic Plus too. After all, if I'm being honest and immersion aside, it's not that different from something like the Zul'Aman bear run, right?

Now, Dragonflight has been a good expansion for me so far not just because I've personally been having fun playing it casually, but also because my friends have been playing too. My husband and I are in a mini guild with a few friends from SWTOR, and we've actually had four of us playing at max level consistently - which might not sound like much but has been unprecedented for our group. Naturally we worked our way through all the normal mode dungeons together, and when we hit heroics we soon realised that we already overgeared them, and that the next step up for us would be mythic - a mode we had never done at level before.

Last week one of the weekly quests in Valdrakken was to do four mythic dungeons, so we agreed that the time had finally come. One of our guildies also roped in his brother to help us, since he's a much more experienced modern WoW player than any of us and could provide guidance and instructions on how things worked. (Incidentally, since said brother played a blood elf this was also my first ever cross-faction group.)

So we went ahead and did some mythics! We started with a mythic zero Neltharus and Algeth'ar Academy, and then used the keystones that we received to proceed into a +2 Ruby Life Pools and a +2 Temple of the Jade Serpent, followed by a +5 Court of Stars and +5 Halls of Valor.

And somewhat to my surprise, it was good fun! Mythic zero wasn't really much of a step up from heroic, and the low keys also only increased the difficulty in baby steps, so it didn't feel like as big of a jump as I had feared. The timer was also just a formality at this level, as we beat each dungeon with plenty of time to spare while proceeding at a casual pace and slowing ourselves down by dying occasionally. I imagine it only becomes an issue once you're pushing higher keys or if you're wiping repeatedly. Also, I had often wondered how the hell people keep track of all these affixes and what's happening when, so I was relieved to see that there are actually some in-game indicators for that too.

We got some loot out of it as well, and earned credit for some more out of the Great Vault. I think that since we had a good time, we'll likely try this again some time, and maybe push ourselves a bit higher... though I'm very aware that there's a risk that being as casual as we are, we're likely to hit our comfort ceiling sooner rather than later. Still, it was a pleasant surprise that low-level Mythic Plus was this accessible at all as I always got the impression that it was a pretty "hardcore" game mode at all levels.

Population Management Is Challenging

I've given Blizzard a lot of crap for Classic's terrible population management, but I'll fully admit that it's not an easy task. This has been very apparent in era's recent growth.

When there was almost nobody playing era, it made sense for people to band together in any way they could, just to be able to play the game. As it happens, this led to the main PvP clusters in both Europe and the US to have almost perfect faction balance. The PvE clusters were more Alliance-heavy in both regions, which seems to be a general trend as I remember Pyrewood Village starting with a similar faction balance back in 2019 - but with no mandatory world PvP, this sort of imbalance isn't an issue on a PvE server as long as there are still enough people on each faction to do the content.

Accordingly, the natural advice whenever newcomers came and asked where they could find others to play with was to tell them to simply pick either the main PvP or PvE cluster according to their preference. However, with the recent increase in interest in era came a new kind of player - one who didn't simply ask where to play, but wanted to know which server had the most Alliance or Horde. Often they'd add that they didn't care about PvP or PvE; they just wanted to be where "everyone else" is. The "play what you like" answer was increasingly rejected as unhelpful, or replaced by enthusiastic recruiters simply wanting to make people come to their server, where their faction is huuuge, honest!

It's not hard to see how this can cause problems. Especially on the PvP servers it currently feels like there's a bit of a battle for the cluster's soul going on, with people being fearful of their faction becoming the minority and being declared dead. I don't play there but it still pains me to see faithful old-timers that have made their home there despair at new players being warned away from their faction just because its population may be marginally smaller than somewhere else.

For me personally it's been bittersweet because while I'm happy to see era thrive on any level, the new line of "which faction is bigger" questions means that Horde on the PvE cluster in both regions is left in the dust, because it's always been the minority and nobody wants to be that now.

I've got to admit I've been feeling extremely jealous watching basically all other faction-server combos post numbers to prove their massive growth on the era Discord pretty much daily. A thousand players online concurrently! Ten thousand auctions on the auction house! Meanwhile, there's been an increase in activity on Horde side on the EU-PvE cluster as well, and again, I'm thankful for that, but it's hard to feel pride in the auction house going from 300-500 auctions a day to 700-900 when others are bragging about how they have 10-12k auctions going on at the same time.

When I started playing on era I kind of assumed that its lack of mainstream appeal would make it a relatively safe haven from the kinds of shenanigans that ruined TBC/Wrath Classic for me, but I have to admit that the recent developments do have me at least a little concerned.

Return to Ragefire Chasm

I did two full runs of Ragefire Chasm this weekend. The first one was a boost, as a nice guildie offered to quickly run a bunch of new players and alts through the instance. As I've explained in the past, I tend to feel ambivalent about boosts, but in this case it was too good an opportunity to pass up, as my warlock was almost over-levelled for the dungeon anyway, and I was glad to just get the quests out of her log.

The next day however, I was fishing in the Barrens when I spotted some actual chatter in LookingForGroup about people wanting to do RFC on characters at the right level. Both a healer and a dps were involved in the conversation, so my thoughts immediately went to my little warrior, who was a few levels below the warlock - I could get out her sword and board and be the tank to complete the trinity! So I relogged, and not much later we were off.

The run itself was nice but unremarkable. We kept a good pace, nobody died and everyone was friendly. However, what made it stand out for me was that this was in fact my very first proper pug dungeon on Horde since since I started playing Classic era. I'd done a few on Alliance side before, but on Horde side with its much lower population, my dungeon runs had all been initiated and mostly comprised of fellow guildies, simply because the LFG channel was dead.

So this has been another lovely milestone for me, because while I obviously enjoy playing with my guildies, I don't want the world to feel like it just exists for my guild; I want to be part of something bigger, and encountering other players "out in the wild" is an important part of that.

Despite the recent virality of Classic era, population growth in our little neck of the woods has been slow, probably because playing Horde on a PvE server seems to be the least popular "combo" to pick for whatever reason (it's the same on the US servers). However, this past week it's really been picking up and giving me a lot of hope.

I saw it today while raiding Molten Core too. In the past, it hasn't been unusual for a lone leveller to pipe up with a dungeon request during a raid and get no response at all, until eventually a raider would reply that sorry, most of us were busy in a raid. But today I saw grouping requests get answered by other levellers even during the raid, and it just warmed my heart. It also makes me want to play my own alts some more to get in on some of that levelling and dungeoneering action. I'm always worried about jinxing things by being too optimistic, but it certainly looks like there are good times ahead right now.

What's Next for WoW Classic?

It seems to me that WoW players always concern themselves with future content more than the average MMO player. I suspect this is partially due to Blizzard's long but regular expansion cycles, partially due to the datamining and reporting industry that has grown around WoW and which relies on always being able to generate interest with something shiny and new. I'm certainly not immune to this myself - back in 2019, Classic was still weeks away from release when I wrote a post called "What Will Come After Classic?" for example.

For the past two to three years or so however, things have been pretty quiet on the Classic front. As soon as it became clear that Blizzard was developing Classic Burning Crusade, it was a no-brainer that Wrath would come after - there wasn't really any mystery about that. And the Season of Mastery servers were always meant to be a limited-time project with a defined end.

Now that this end is rapidly approaching though (at this point the SoM servers are due to shut down in less than two weeks), a lot of people are wondering: what's next? Many SoM players have found their way towards era, and while I've loved to see it grow, I think it's pretty clear that at least a sub-section of them is only seeing era as a way to pass the time until the next "fresh" server comes along. But when and what will it be?

Meanwhile in Classic Wrath of the Lich King, people are getting antsy about whether they'll have to deal with Cataclysm 2.0 soon. Blizzard sent out a survey back in September to gauge people's interest in a Classic Cata, which means they are definitely thinking about it, but at the same time that's all the survey questions really told us. This wasn't like the BC survey where it was obvious that they were already working on it and the question was just how exactly the transition was going to go down.

In some ways it seems like a no-brainer. People clearly dig this whole "reliving old expansions" thing, and Cataclysm is simply next in line. Presumably Blizzard has worked out a system by now that makes it relatively easy to revive yet another old expansion. Cataclysm maintains a bad rap, but people forget that for all that, Cata held on to more subscribers at its worst than Mists of Pandaria had at its peak, and many people look back at that expansion fondly by now, so there's likely to be a good chunk of players that would be happy to replay Cataclysm as well. Not to mention that even if you're personally not that excited about Cata, if you've made friends in Classic and they are okay with continuing into Cata, you may very well find yourself being pulled along by sheer momentum.

On the other hand... there is a lot of negative public sentiment surrounding Cata, so much so that annoyed forum threads and articles pushing back against the mere idea started popping up shortly after the survey came out. Even if you liked Cataclysm, it's hard to deny that the destruction of the old world kind of marks the end of the original "Classic era" (not to be confused with Classic era servers! 😉) and makes a potential re-run of the expansion seem a little less interesting simply because it wouldn't be as far removed from the modern game. I know there probably won't be another BlizzCon for a while, but can you imagine a live audience cheering for a Cata Classic announcement? The potential controversy it would create would probably not be Blizzard's favourite thing to deal with in their current position.

So... I'm honestly not sure about this one myself. At first it seemed like a given, but seeing a lot of the negative reactions around it and with Blizzard currently in desperately-trying-to-please-the-people mode, I'm not 100% sure they'll actually want to be that controversial.

What about Wrath Classic era servers that remain in Wrath of the Lich King forever? This is another subject on which my opinion has gone back and forth a lot. When Blizzard decided not to do permanent Burning Crusade era servers, I figured they were just going to plough onwards from now on and Wrath wasn't going to get era servers either. Then I saw people talking about them a lot and figured: hey, there's clearly more demand for these than there was for BC, maybe it'll happen. However, as I've spent more time on Classic era, I'm kind of doubting it again. As much as I've been enjoying my time on era, it seems very clear that from Blizzard's point of view, era is a bit of a nuisance: a game mode that doesn't have a lot of players but still requires resources to maintain (you'd be surprised by the amount of bugs that have been introduced to era by updates to other versions of the game and that then needed fixing).

WoW Classic producer Aggrend supposedly also told someone on the Classic era Discord that we're unlikely to see something like the Classic cloning option again going forward for technical reasons, so unless Wrath era was literally the only thing happening at the end of WotLK classic (which seems kind of unlikely), people would likely be forced to choose whether to stay or go forward, without any option to continue playing in more than one version of the game. I'm just not sure Blizzard is keen on adding yet another version of WoW which will only be played by a minority to their maintenance list. So I'm leaning towards no on this one, though one should never say never I guess.

What about the next Season of Mastery then, or other "fresh" servers of any kind? We haven't really had confirmation of that one happening either, and Blizzard devs that have been asked about it in interviews have been evasive, saying things like how much they loved SoM and how much they learned from it, without giving any clear indication of another one being in the works. I'll throw my hat into the ring for this one though and will say that I expect some sort of fresh start server to launch either around the time WotLK Classic hits Trial of the Crusader or when it's on its final patch. Whether Wrath transitions into Cataclysm and/or people get the the option to stay on a Wrath era server, there'll be people who'll find themselves longing for more of the "true" Classic experience instead, and yes, while that is available on era, the push for fresh servers and continuous progression is strong.

So I think there'll be fresh servers and a Season of Mastery 2 of sorts, though I think it will not be called that and will be quite different from the first one. Examples of what I could imagine happening here is a fresh Vanilla server but with Burning Crusade or Wrath talents, or a server with a three-year-plan to progress through Vanilla, BC and Wrath again in quick succession. Maybe even an actual hardcore server, what with how much publicity that has gotten recently! Basically nothing too crazy, but with enough of a twist to arouse curiosity from the masses. Just three months ago I wasn't sure whether Season of Mastery could be considered a success, but I think that having some sort of seasonal server running at all times will probably be in Blizzard's interest; they'll just have to make it more interesting than SoM was.

Finally, someone always brings up "Classic+" or continued development in the Classic world in the form of an alternate timeline or something. I already said back in 2019 that I considered this unlikely due to the risk and cost involved, but honestly, I've only come to view this idea less and less favourably over time. I've learned that Old School Runescape is a much more sandboxy game than WoW, so that it doesn't actually work that well as a model to emulate, and cramming more dungeons and raids into old Azeroth just seems like it would create problems left and right. People who continuously push for this honestly just give me the vibe of wanting to eat their cake and still have it too - as in, they want Vanilla Classic to simultaneously stay the exact same but somehow also have new content every couple of months just for the sake of having new content, without any real vision for how to actually square that circle.

I think in practice Classic will continue to be about rehashing old content with only minor changes, and that is fine - that's what we all signed up for after all. However, I think it will increasingly become a challenge for Blizzard to maintain all these different versions of the same MMO (something I seem to remember them saying at some point they really didn't want to do... yet here we are with three different game clients already), while the community will become more and more spread out and pulled in different directions.

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:

Vault of the Incarnates LFR

In Shadowlands I did two of the expansion's three raids through the raid finder. I was planning to do the last one as well before Dragonflight came out, but in the end I just couldn't deal with the prospect of hour-long queue times for each wing yet again.

In Dragonflight, I decided to give the whole thing another go, mostly because I'm spending so much time flying around the Dragon Isles doing chill world content anyway, I figured spending that time in the queue wouldn't feel like such a big deal. And it wasn't - though as it turns out, getting into LFR at the very start of the expansion helps a lot too, as I didn't actually have to wait for a pop for more than a few minutes at any point.

I didn't keep a detailed log of the experience this time. I was surprised to find that the introduction to the raid features version 2.0 of the Grim Batol dragon ride (just not a throwback I expected at all), and the spider boss was seriously creepy. Other than that, the bosses were... okay, but didn't strike me as particularly remarkable. The overarching Primalist theme is strong and the designers didn't deviate from it a lot throughout the raid.

I didn't watch any guides beforehand, which got me all philosophical about how unforgiving some mechanics are even in LFR if you're unprepared. There are a few things that are pretty self-explanatory, like not standing in circles that pop up on the ground, and moving away from other people if a circle appears around you. Except - then you'll suddenly get a mechanic where a circle around you means the opposite, that you need to stack up, and there's no obvious indicator to show the difference. So people get those circles for the first time, run away because that's what they're used to, and then they die. It got me the first time, and I saw it get others as well.

I do look at the in-game adventure guide sometimes, because I remember when that feature was added in Cataclysm to provide a sort of alternative to having to refer to out-of-game guides, but it really doesn't work. The thing is, the adventure guide will tell you something like this:

Raszageth and her Primalist forces seek to shatter the prisons that hold her siblings. As the battle begins, Raszageth uses Hurricane Wing to sweep her assailants from the central platform. [...] Static Field reduces movement speed and forced movement effects on players standing in the area.

I already cheated a bit there because I put two mechanics together that relate to each other, though in the guide they are just lost in a sea of text. But even so, can you deduce from this what you're meant to do? For comparison, let me tell you what the actual instructions about this mechanic are, as given to people inside LFR by other players:

When you get the big circle on you, drop it at the edge of the platform. When she does Hurricane, everyone stand in front of the circle to not get thrown off.

Quite different and much easier to understand, wouldn't you say?

Fortunately I've found people in LFR to be surprisingly decent overall. I think I've said this before, but retail WoW pugs have such a reputation for toxicity, I continue to be positively surprised by my interactions with random strangers there. Sure, there always seems to be "that one guy" who complains that the damage is too low, how this fight should be face-roll and we all suck blah blah blah, but these types don't tend to hang around anyway. Most people will just sigh at that person, move on, and do their best to work together.

I was actually kind of surprised when I queued for the last wing for the first time and was thrown into a run in progress that was already standing in front of Raszageth, and someone actually stopped and said: "Hey, we got newcomers. Does anyone need an explanation?" I'm a little ashamed to admit that I hesitated to speak up, despite knowing full well that it was the right thing to do! But I did speak up after a moment, mostly because I remembered the embarrassment I'd felt on that earlier boss when I'd died from the circle that I was meant to stack up for instead of running away. And so me and at least one other person got a friendly explanation of what to do and didn't mess up completely on the first try as a result.

I was still dead by the time the boss died though.

Either way, I'm actually kind of pleased with myself for completing the current raid in LFR, something that hasn't happened since LFR's introduction with the Dragon Soul raid back in Cataclysm. I wasn't too impressed back then, mostly because I couldn't get over how uninspired the whole thing felt compared to a "proper" raid, but more than a decade later, I know that LFR has to be approached with a different attitude and I've been pretty content with the results.

I was surprised to find that I even earned some loot from the Great Vault for the first time - I'd just assumed that LFR wouldn't count towards it, seeing how easy mode queued content doesn't count toward's the Vault's dungeon or PvP reward tracks either, but I'm not going to complain about some free bonus loot.

We'll see whether I'll bother to go back. Like I said, it wasn't an unpleasant experience, but the time investment required still feels like a bit of a drag for what you get out of it in my opinion.