Random Retail Ramblings

Last night I had a random idea for an alt in retail, so I started playing around with the character creator. A bit of fiddling was required until I found a suitable name that wasn't taken (the way WoW's character creator gives feedback on that while you're typing is very good by the way); then I hit finish... and was presented with the following error message:

You already have the maximum number of characters allowed on this account.

While I've been vaguley aware of this limit of fifty characters per account for a long time, I never expected to actually run up against it myself in a million years. My immediate reaction was to go back to the server selection screen and add up the numbers myself. Yes, I had ten characters on my old Horde server, ten characters on my old Alliance server, plus obviously a few characters on Azjol-Nerub, where I'm playing with my husband nowadays, but that's barely halfway there!

The numbers didn't lie though - apparently I'd amassed so many random low-levels across a number of different servers over the years (to say hi to friends there, take part in projects/events etc.) that I had indeed hit fifty. Interestingly, for all the interest in monetisation, additional character slots are not something Blizzard sells even to this day. Fortunately I had no particular qualms about deleting a random level three druid that I could barely even remember making to free up some space, so I could then go ahead and create the new worgen rogue I'd actually wanted to make.

This was my third time through the worgen starter zone, and it was shockingly lonely despite of cross-realm zones. This isn't some sort of "game is dead" dig - the worgen starter experience moves you around a lot and involves a lot of phasing, so this wasn't entirely unexpected, but still... I remember running into a total of three other players during the entire two play sessions I spent on this little adventure, and none of them stayed within my sights for long.

By the time I was finally ejected from Gilneas, I was level 17, which is about where you'd end up back in the day as well but which still feels mildly insane to me now that the level cap has been squished down to sixty. After a bit of musing about how much it must suck to roleplay a Gilnean in lore right now (you lose your home to the Forsaken, carve out a little niche among the night elves, and then their whole tree gets burned down by the Horde as well), I ran into my usual troubles figuring out how to travel cross-continent in retail.

It wasn't lost on me that it was quite ironic that my attempts to google advice on this mostly resulted in results for WoW Classic. I know my way around Classic, thanks; things make sense there! Say what you want about boats, there's a lot of logic in reaching a shoreline, seeing a port, and taking a boat from there to somewhere beyond the water. Portals may be convenient but they can be anywhere and lead to anywhere, so there's no natural rhyme or reason to where you can find a portal to go to any particular place in WoW (with the exception of the big portal room in the Stormwind mage tower). Fortunately I eventually found a portal to Stormwind regardless.

Every time I play an alt in retail it strikes me that there's still a lot of "world" in World of Warcraft but that the game just has zero interest in making you engage with it. The best way for things to make some semblance of sense for new players is to put them through a very curated experience that just ignores everything pre-BfA (which is what Blizzard has done with Shadowlands) and it just seems like such a shame when I suspect that it's precisely all this older stuff that keeps many people subscribed long term, even if that content doesn't reward relevant gear anymore. Or at least that's what I'm seeing with my husband, who spends hours going through old quests and grinding old reputations and achievements for completion's sake. And there are certainly only so many hours in the day that I want to spend exclusively on the newest expansion content myself.

What's the point of Classic now?

I'm still logging into Classic regularly, but it's mainly an exercise in going through the motions, such as to use my daily alchemy transmute. Even though the Sunwell patch dropped this week, I've had no desire to go to the Isle of Quel'Danas at this juncture.

I keep clinging to the notion that Blizzard could still change their minds about the continued existence of BC Classic servers, but having followed the relevant forum threads I'm not hopeful, and then I wonder why I even bother if all my characters are effectively going to be deleted in a few months.

I went back to some of my early posts about Classic and it struck me as almost tragic to see how much things have changed since then. My excitement for Classic was based on a simple premise: Blizzard letting us continue to play our favourite expansion forever. Sadly I couldn't find the link (if you know where to look, please share in the comments) but I distinctly remember an interview about Classic not long after its original announcement where someone from Blizzard (I think it was Ion but not 100% sure) said something along the lines of them realising that there was a huge passion for Classic and that they were going to honour that by recreating it and maintaining it effectively as a museum piece, even if only a small number of players were interested in playing it continuously.

Now, to be clear, I know they never claimed that they were going to do the same for later expansions, but I don't think I was unreasonable in taking it as a general expression of sentiment and to think that they were likely to approach classic versions of other expansions in a similar way. Their current attitude towards BC isn't just a slight deviation from what they said back then - going "well, we're not going to maintain it because we don't think enough people are willing to pay for it" is a complete 180 degree turn! They effectively built Burning Crusade Classic just to close it down again after less than two years.

And again, I'm not saying that progressing into Wrath of the Lich King is inherently wrong. I get that this is something that a lot of people want. It's just not what I wanted, and Blizzard certainly didn't make it clear that this was going to be forced on me when I opted to move my characters forward into Burning Crusade less than a year ago. For me, the promise of Classic was that it would allow us to go back and re-experience content and the world as it was, without having a deadline looming over our heads when it would all go away again. And no, of course a "stagnant" MMO like that wouldn't be as busy with people grinding frantically as a constantly evolving game, but that's kind of the point. Classic era is quiet, but it is being played by people who are enjoying themselves and re-running the old raids just for fun. All I wanted was the same opportunity for BC.

If Classic is just turning into a bunch of progression servers, that's - to me - worse than retail. One of the things that put me off back in Cataclysm was how blatant a treadmill the game had become and how fast it expected you to move, to the point that it would basically push you forward forcefully if it considered you too slow. New content was no longer an open invitation to do more, it became a mandate. The way the Classic team has been rushing to push out the last few Burning Crusade patches already replicates that feeling pretty perfectly.

Meanwhile, Shadowlands has had the slowest patch cadence ever, something that a lot of people have been complaining about, but which at the same time makes it extremely casual-friendly because you have loads of time to complete your goals. The irony of that is not lost on me.

Pandas of Draenor

Just as I was starting to wonder whether I still had enough of a reason to stay subscribed to WoW, my husband came in clutch for Blizzard by expressing a desire to pick up retail again, now that our new-expansion gearing frenzy in SWTOR was coming to an end for the time being. Much to my surprise, he wasn't that keen on going to Zereth Mortis yet, but wanted to roll up a new pair of characters, this time to level through Warlords of Draenor.

After a bit of discussion about what to go for, we ended up with a pair of pandaren, him a brewmaster monk, me a discipline priest. I've certainly come a long way from being notably underwhelmed by the Mists of Pandaria announcement, to finding the expansion itself kind of neat, to actually playing a pandaren myself!

I had never played through the pandaren starting experience before and found it enjoyable enough, though I did get a bit of a sense of déjà vu towards the end, which makes me think that I must have watched a playthrough of the zone on YouTube at some point many years ago.

And then we were off to Warlords of Draenor, the one remaining expansion from which I hadn't played any content before, though it does of course have a strong reputation. I remember when it was first announced I was actually kind of intrigued and considered checking it out, but that interest didn't last long. I also recall watching my husband play through the content on his own at the time and commenting how ridiculous it was that all the orc warlords appeared with their names floating next to them in giant letters - I guess Blizzard didn't think people would be able to tell them apart otherwise. My opinion on this was unchanged when we got to that part ourselves.

The introduction to Draenor in general is a fast-paced adventure that feels super odd to jump into story-wise with the new levelling system. A moment ago we were noobish pandas only just earning the right to leave the Wandering Isle for the first time, the next Khadgar greets us as famous champions who are Azeroth's only hope. I know that opting into Chromie Time includes implicit acceptance that the timeline won't really make sense, but this just seemed like a particularly extreme contrast. There also isn't any real context for why we suddenly have to go through the Dark Portal, it just feels very rushed and out of nowhere. Also, speaking of Khadgar: I thought he was kind of funny in Legion, but here the first impression he makes is actually one of being rather cold and uncaring... not a fan.

After the intro we were off to Shadowmoon Valley to start building our garrison, another feature that was reported on a lot back in the day. My husband seems to be very fond of it (he has several across his stable of characters) but he does love base-building games in general. I was a little overwhelmed at first to be honest, especially with him going on about all the things I "should" be doing to upgrade my garrison asap. The process looks like it must have been sped up a lot compared to back in the day, but it still costs resources - in fact it's ironic that the garrison had a reputation for being a massive gold generator when WoD was current but now seems to have been reduced to a gold sink instead - my husband confessed that he sent his new alt several tens of thousands of gold to be able to upgrade his buildings asap. As I've refused to do this so far, my own garrison is still extremely basic as my panda priest has only earned a few hundred gold throughout her questing so far.

At the time of me writing this, we've only done a few quests in Shadowmoon Valley plus one random dungeon and we're already level thirty, so I anticipate that just like with Legion, we'll hit fifty very quickly and will then continue running through the rest of the zones overlevelled, one-shotting everything for almost zero XP just to see the story.

While it's been fun to level with my husband again, I have to admit that the expansion content itself hasn't really grabbed me yet. The Alliance garrison being situated in a zone where it's basically always night is an emotional downer for me, and I struggle a bit to care about what we're doing. I think it's a mix between the whole alternate timeline thing and the story just not establishing very well what our motivations are. It was one thing to stop a sudden and barely explained invasion in the intro, but what exactly our beef with all the orcs is now that we're settling down on Draenor ourselves feels a lot more fuzzy. I was always told that the hate for WoD mainly came from the fact that it had little to no content added after launch but that the levelling experience was fine, but to be honest it doesn't really strike me as all that great so far either. We'll see whether that opinion changes as we explore further.

Oh, and as a fun little aside: I'd only been playing my new panda priest for a few hours when a friend whispered me on Battle.net:

Him: Did you really name a character Pishin? [Panda-Shin... get it?]
Me: Please don't tell me it means something bad!
Him: Oh no... OK, my lips are sealed.

At this point I put "Pishin" into Google of course... first result was a city/district in Pakistan, that didn't seem so bad? However, a bit further down the page I found "(Scots): urine, piss" - and of course the friend mentioned above is Scottish. Sigh!

Videos as Scrapbooking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No BC Classic Era Servers? Come on, Blizz.

Blizzard really has a way with their timing when it comes to delivering emotional gut punches to me in regards to Classic. When I worried about my RP server's continued viability back in November, they opened up free server transfers to dismantle it literally the next day. 

Two weeks ago I talked about how dejected I was feeling about my situation in BC Classic at the moment, but concluded that I also had some hope for maybe finding more of the sort of atmosphere I'd been looking for once most of the "current content crowd" had moved on to Classic Wrath and I could potentially hang out and be chill with more like-minded people on BC Classic era. This assumed that Blizzard was going to handle the transition from BC to WOTLK the same or at least in a very similar way to how they made the one from OG Classic to BC: by giving people a choice.

Of course, then I found out that this time around, Blizzard isn't planning to give people a choice, and that the plan is to simply forcefully progress everyone currently playing on BC servers to Wrath whether they want it or not. Here's the relevant quote from an IGN interview with lead developer Brian Birmingham and production director Patrick Dawson:

Another shift Classic players might want to take note of is how Blizzard is handling the transition from Burning Crusade to Lich King. When Burning Crusade was first announced, Blizzard allowed players to choose whether they wanted to stay in the original World of Warcraft Classic or move to Burning Crusade. While those who opted to stay in the original version can still remain there, this time there won't be an option to keep characters in The Burning Crusade expansion. Everyone who's already in Burning Crusade must move on to Wrath of the Lich King.

Fortunately, Dawson says that not many people currently in Burning Crusade want to stick around in that expansion anyway.

I just read that and was like: "What?!". Thanks for crushing my dreams yet again, Blizz. If my choices are going to be WOTLK Classic or bust, I'd rather stop playing Classic altogether, thanks.

This whole situation is just giving me flashbacks to my late Cata days when I was getting increasingly frustrated with Blizzard's constant pronouncements that nobody could possibly like the things I liked, so that it was only natural to nerf or remove them. I thought that they had turned a new leaf with Classic, acknowledging that hey, perhaps they'd used the argument that "nobody likes this anyway" to sand away features enjoyed by a relative minority of the player base one too many times over the years. And yet here we are once again, being told to run with the pack or GTFO.

I'm not giving up just yet because they've said that they are open to feedback in regards to all things Classic, and I'd invite you all to add your voice too if this as something you care about at all. Here's the thread on the US forums, here's the one on the EU forums, and here's a reddit thread on the subject. It's worth noting that this question might be relevant to you even if you personally want to move on to Wrath anyway, because Blizzard has already indicated that they are open to progressing to Cataclysm after Wrath, and would you want to be forcefully moved on then? Do think about the precedent that is being set with BC now.

I know that playing on BC era is something that is only going to be interesting to a minority, but we're not really asking for much here! They can merge servers down to one PvE and one PvP per region to simplify things and everything! However, entirely removing BC Classic once Wrath comes out just seems wrong to me, and goes entirely against the original mission statement of Classic being at least partially a preservation project. I'm not hopeful that the ones responsible at Blizzard will care enough at this point, but don't let it be said later that nobody spoke up about this.

Dragonflight Announcement

I got to watch the new expansion announcement stream live on Tuesday evening because it actually happened at a convenient time for me. Sadly, all the "live experience" added was a scrolling chat full of the WoW community's worst dregs being juvenile and bigoted every time there were female devs on screen, which was distracting and not in a good way. One star, cannot recommend.

The expansion cinematic was a bit of a weird one. It was of course beautifully rendered as always, and I liked how people got really invested in Stony Tony's fate (or however the golem dude ended up being called in your circles) and were instantly meme-ing about him ("already a better character than the Jailer" etc.), which was quite fun to see. As Rohan also observed yesterday, players who meme affectionately are happy players.

However in terms of content and hype, the trailer felt like a bit of a nothing sandwich to me. Looking back at previous expansion cinematics, they always tended to include at least one of three things:

• cool fight scenes
• depictions of one or more of the expansion's new features
• an iconic lore character

Dragonflight doesn't really deliver on any of those - we do see a bit of the Dragon Isles, but what we see is very barren and not really showing much other than the big beacon thing. And Alexstrasza is technically an important character in lore, but considering that we've been on a first-name basis with her since Wrath, never mind the commodification of dragons in WoW in general, just seeing her fly past and roar isn't really that awe-inspiring anymore, sorry.

The actual dev round-tables were interesting, though my first thought was simply: "God, does Ion look old and tired." The past few years clearly haven't been kind to him. The general presentation style was also somewhat stiff - not insincere, but like everything was heavily scripted, and even with that in mind the general vibe (as I perceived it anyway) was that of people who are a little timid and very aware that anything coming out the wrong way would lead to them being torn apart by the community later. I'm all too happy to acknowledge Blizzard's corporate failings, but it's also impossible for me to not feel compassion for the people who are still working there on the ground because they enjoy what they're doing and who've clearly been having a rough time.

Now for the actual expansion-related content reveals... like many, I was kind of surprised/impressed to see Ion actually admit that they'd heard the feedback about players being sick of all these temporary systems and that they want more long-lasting additions and improvements to the game. And to be fair, a lot of the feature bullet points seemed to indicate that Blizzard have listened!

First off, there's a new race and class, the "dracthyr evoker". This one was a big surprise to me because for all the speculation that had been going on about the dragon theme beforehand, the idea of playable dragons always seemed ludicrous to me. But no, Blizzard are actually doing it! Sorta.

Mechanically, everything about the new class sounds very sound and appealing. It's going to be another hero class with its own starting zone, and it will be a ranged dps/healer that wears mail, which seems like a sensible decision in terms of balance. (Did you know that until now, every single class that has been added to the game since launch has been melee?) The fact that the new race and class are a package deal, meaning that you can't have one without the other, is unusual by WoW standards but again, pretty reasonable under the circumstances and certainly not a novelty in the MMO space as a whole. (The most frequent parallel I've seen people draw here is to the Beorning in LOTRO.)

I have yet to see anyone comment that they really love the aesthetic of these new dragon people though. What's been shown of their animations reminded me of the Worgen (whose animations I used to loathe, though I got used to them over time) and overall the closest thing to these dracthyr that we've seen in WoW before is probably Maloriak, the raid boss from Cataclysm, who was created by Nefarian fusing the body of a young human with the corpse (!) of a dragonspawn. There's even a parallel in the origin story here as the dracthyr were apparently created by Neltharion wanting to combine the best humanoid and draconic traits. It's not a good look, is what I'm saying!

Then there is dragonriding, a new form of flying exclusive to the Dragon Isles, and the mechanics of which appear to be a wholesale copy and paste job from Guild Wars 2's Skyscale mount - honestly, I recognised that even as someone who's never played GW2. I see no shame in copying good features from other MMOs though - it's what WoW used to be good at, after all. I personally can't judge how fun this will be, but it does seem like a potentially neat idea and like it would offer a different kind of non-combat gameplay. The dragon mounts are also supposed to be super customisable. If this takes off (pun intended), we can only hope that it or something similar at least will also become an option for other mounts/in other expansions eventually.

There will be a long overdue revamp for professions, with crafting supposedly becoming more involved - I guess we'll see how that pans out in practice, because WoW's crafting has never been great even at the best of times, so I'm a bit sceptical of whether the team has the design chops to get this right... but I do appreciate them making the effort at least. There'll also be a new "work order" system where you can advertise that you want people to craft stuff for you, and they can even turn your soulbound materials into gear for you. This sounds great! Makes me wish we could have buy or sell orders for general goods as well though, instead of being stuck with an auction house where everything needs to be relisted every two days.

Talents are making a comeback! Now, having lived through times when Blizzard changed the way talents work every expansion, I can't fault people for being a bit wary of this, but the system introduced in MoP never grew on me, so personally I'm happy for them to revisit this. From my point of view almost anything they can do in that area can only be an improvement.

And finally, while I'm sure that a lot of addon lovers won't care about this, as someone who's been playing with the default UI for most of my time in WoW and who generally wants to avoid dealing with addons as much as possible, I was very pleased to hear that they're planning to upgrade the default UI. While they've made some tweaks to things like raid frames over the years, I've generally been quite astounded by how little they seemed to care about the UI, seemingly because they assumed that if you didn't like it, you could always download an addon. Which is an approach that's fine for some things in my opinion, but not so much for the basic window through which the player interacts with your game.

I've been trying to get an idea of how to characterise the community response to Dragonflight, and it's been somewhat difficult, because the reactions have honestly been all over the place, with most of the ones I've seen sitting somewhere in the middle. I guess in a way that's telling in itself, seeing how I used to joke that it was typical of the WoW player base in general to always be hyped for every expansion when it's announced and then hate it two weeks after launch. So things have definitely changed... then again, maybe that will give Dragonflight a chance to prove itself on its own merits instead of having to live up to made-up hype. I don't think it's a coincidence that Mists of Pandaria is now remembered so fondly by many while also having been the expansion that probably had the coolest reception at the start.

I'm also in a strange position myself since I have little interest in classic Wrath of the Lich King at this point (which was also confirmed during the announcement by the way), and it's the first time since Cataclysm that I'm actually an active (if casual) retail player at the time of an expansion announcement and could potentially see myself playing it when it comes out. From that point of view I've got to say that I like what I've seen, even if I'm not "hyped". Things like a new race/class, updating the UI, re-thinking talents and revamping professions are long-term investments in the game - and dragonriding could potentially be developed beyond this expansion (though I'll be honest and admit that I kind of doubt it will be), which to me is a better way of managing the game than the modus operandi of recent years where stuff gets added and then trashed again pretty much on a schedule.

World of Queuecraft (Sanctum LFR, Part 2)

Have you ever watched or read about a person playing a game that you're very familiar with and that you personally enjoy, and at first you're pleased by watching them be delighted by all the things you remember really loving about the game when you were new too? But then they get caught up in some random side activity that clearly frustrates them in some way, and you keep thinking: "Just let it go, man... I agree this isn't a great system/situation, but this isn't what the game is meant to be about! Just get back to the well-designed, fun stuff already!"

While trying to get into the last two remaining wings of Sanctum of Domination in LFR, I've been feeling like I must be the type of player who would cause that kind of consternation in random observers. All these things to do in WoW and I'm wasting my days screwing around with LFR for hours on end! What is wrong with me?

I just thought that I should be fine queueing for it on a Saturday afternoon on a long weekend, because I had a lot of time and lots of people should be playing, right? Even the less recent/relevant content? No? No.

When I started writing this post, I'd already been sat in the queue for the "Shackles of Fate" wing of LFR as both damage dealer and healer for nearly three hours. Since I got a bit tired of levelling cooking and fishing, I decided to pass some of that time doing archaeology this time around, but after about two hours I got somewhat bored of that too.

I also became oddly mesmerised by what the LFR UI kept showing me... at around the one-hour mark, I was quite close to getting a full group, then it went into the sort of pause mode while it assembles a group, and then most of the group was gone but I was still there in the queue. I can only guess that a partial group sucked a lot of potentials out of the pool or something, because I'm not sure how else I could have missed out on both a healer and dps spot when I'd already been queued up as both for so long. This pattern repeated a couple more times, with the UI proudly updating to say that the average queue time was "only" 45 minutes to an hour, all while my own wait had already been three times as long.

It was a funny situation in a way because while I was getting increasingly annoyed, I could tell that it was at least partially my own fault for wanting to play the game "wrong" by queueing for old raid finder wings that nobody cares about anymore, but at the same time I was thinking: Why are queues for content from the current expansion so empty? This doesn't seem right. However, I had set myself the goal to do this and I wasn't going to give up this close to the finish line. I will beat you, raid finder queue!

After five and a half hours, time I mostly spent doing things on my second monitor, the queue finally popped after I'd set myself a deadline of six hours - by that time it was well into the evening and I figured that if I still couldn't get a pop by then, there was no point in waiting for it to get even later.

We made our way to the first boss of the wing, Guardian of the First ones, where we just stood around for a while. Since some markers were being put down, I figured that maybe the tanks were discussing tactics in whispers or something. I didn't mind the additional wait, but what I did mind was all the players getting out their noisy toys - there was no Transmorpher Beacon this time, but the classic train set was present and some sort of jukebox that played a horribly out of tune NPC song. Someone complained that the train noises were so loud that they'd woken their sleeping child.

When we finally pulled the boss, we wiped. A rogue posted damage meters in chat that showed them on top and complained that the dps sucked. He also called us a bunch of clowns. I looked at my death message and it said that I was killed by an ability that wasn't on the boss's ability list in the adventure guide, so I googled it. What I found was that it was "the big hit that goes on the tank and anyone standing too close", which left me wondering whether I had messed up or whether it had been the tank, considering that a lot of others had fallen over at the same time as me.

While we were still trying to reassemble, the boss suddenly got pulled and we wiped again. For a couple of minutes a vicious blame game ensued, until it was agreed that the person pulling had been a replacement for a quitter who had simply been loaded into the instance at an unfortunate spot. The rogue from earlier and one of the tanks quit, and several people commented with something along the lines of "glad they're gone", which honestly surprised me, as I'm used to being in the minority in WoW when it comes to perceiving behaviour like that of the rogue as toxic.

After we'd got another set of replacements, we killed the boss just fine, and the consensus seemed to be that the tank who had left had been the problem on the first attempt since there was supposed to be a tank swap mechanic and they had never taunted.

I got a cloak from the first boss, which would turn out to be the only piece of gear I got from the entire run, and someone instantly whispered me to ask whether they could have it. That other person already had a much better cloak, but it wasn't an upgrade for me either so I assumed they wanted it for transmog and gave it to them, since I didn't really care.

On the way to the next boss, we pulled seemingly every trash mob under the sun, which led to some joking comments along the lines of: "You can't pull everything!" - "Hold my beer."

I was a little worried how Fatescribe, the second boss, was going to go, but this one was actually really easy, not to say boring. I even found myself looking at the clock and wondering why some sort of "you're the bomb" mechanic seems to be a requirement for every single raid boss nowadays.

Then we got to Kel'Thuzad, a fight that once again started with an opaque wait in front of the boss and people rupturing the group's ear drums with train sets. There was some talk about "melee going down" which I deduced was about the phylactery mechanic described in the adventure guide. When we finally pulled, we wiped when it came to that part because not enough people "went down" - including me, since I'd been expecting some kind of portal or other obvious visual... but instead you have to step into some menacing-looking swirly stuff on the floor to make a temporary ability button appear that will take you to the room with the phylactery.

After a kind druid had explained this in detail, we tried again... and this time it went much better, but we still lost a bunch of dps along the way so that the eventual result was another wipe. Fortunately the third try was the charm, though it was another close call. People were typing their encouragement into chat as the last (wo)men standing shaved off KT's last few percent of health, and then we were done. (And this time someone revived everyone at the end too.)

I looked at the clock and killing just those three bosses in LFR had taken almost one and a half hours. Add to that the five and a half hours of waiting time and you shouldn't be surprised that I had no desire to queue for Sylvanas that same evening.

I took a break from WoW for most of the next day and didn't try to queue again until Sunday evening, this time with more of a plan. I had a raid in SWTOR later, so I told myself that I'd queue for Sylvanas  about two hours before then, and if I didn't get a pop within half an hour before the start of my "proper" raid, I'd leave. The previous run had taken one and a half hours for three bosses, including a bunch of wipes, so allotting half an hour to a single boss didn't strike me as unreasonable.

And I did get that pop just in time! I gotta say, the Sylvanas fight is pretty cool in terms of setup, music and mechanics. Sadly I did not get it down that time though... we wiped twice due to failing to run fast enough to interrupt her one-shot mechanic in the second phase, and then I had to go.

The next evening I put myself in the queue again while doing a bit of housework, and was surprised when I came back after about fifteen minutes and had actually missed a pop. I signed up again and got a pop after only another ten minutes! It may well be that I got into the same group that had formed earlier though, as it was evident that there had already been at least one wipe from the way people were talking.

This time we made it to phase three on the first try for which I was present, but then we still wiped. I won't go into detail about every other wipe after that because I honestly don't remember them all... we had one wipe to the same lack of interrupt that had caused both of my wipes the night before, but aside from that, it was always due to things going south during the last phase. (There were also always at least a couple of people who fell through the holes in the bridges, but that just seemed to be par for the course.)

Bridge talk. Also, you can see someone emitting random boss yells due to that bloody toy again.

Fortunately there was a human hunter from Ravencrest called Corneiius who had the patience of a saint (and I whispered him to say as much at the end) who told people to calm down when tempers flared and was trying hard to get everyone to understand what they were supposed to do. The thing that kept catching us out was that during the last phase of the fight you need to move among a small number of platforms for two different mechanics: One is an arrow that does massive AoE damage around the person targeted, so that player is supposed to jump to another platform temporarily to "explode" there. The other mechanic was Sylvanas razing the platform we were currently standing on, so everyone had to "flee" to the next one down the line to stay alive. We mostly died to the first mechanic to be honest, as the affected people didn't seem to notice what was happening to them and would blow up most of the raid around them.

We eventually got her down with six stacks of the Determination buff, and with Corneiius spamming macros in raid warnings to call out the mechanics as they happened (interspersed with comments like "stop jumping randomly xD", as we were still pretty hopeless at telling what was happening). I was very relieved to be done, though I hadn't really minded the wiping all that much as I was still learning the mechanics myself.

And that finally concludes my LFR exploration for now! The current patch's raid hasn't fully unlocked in LFR yet, but more importantly I haven't even been to Zereth Mortis at all, so my gear is probably way below the raid's requirements and I'd have no context for what's happening in there. The husband and I have been too busy focusing on SWTOR recently to play retail WoW, but seeing how the next expansion (to be announced tomorrow!) is likely to still be many months away, we should have plenty of time to check out Shadowlands' last content patch before it becomes obsolete.