Rediscovering Season of Discovery

I wanted to take some more notes on my experience picking up Season of Discovery again:

One of the first things the game reminded of was that I made a whole bunch of alts in phase one that were all between level 10 and 20. Now, playing alts won't help with my goal of getting a single character to a high enough level to be able to do Demon Fall Canyon, but it's also fun and alleviates bag space issues (since I can just send all the cloth to my tailor and so on and so forth), so I spent some time burning through restedness on all of them anyway.

The world was busier than I expected - I'd figured that pretty much everyone but me would abandon everything they were doing on other classic realms to join the rush on the anniversary servers, but Wild Growth still seems plenty busy. Also, people were dropping Rend and dragon heads in Orgrimmar at seemingly all hours of the day, which kind of surprised me.

While going out to quest, I made the odd discovery that gathering nodes and chests were respawning at absolutely stupid rates for some reason. I first noticed it when I found a chest on my druid in Mulgore. I looted it, went to kill a nearby gnoll, turned around, and it was back! I looted it again, killed another gnoll, and the same thing happened again.

Later I was questing in the Barrens on my shaman, who is a miner, and I would almost get stuck in a loop running back and forth between the same couple of ore nodes that just kept coming back almost immediately after being mined out. As this was on the night of the anniversary server launch, I couldn't help but wonder whether some hyper-spawn setting intended for the launch day crowds was bleeding through to other servers.

The launch itself certainly had an impact as I got booted out of the game with the message "world server is down" (truly a classic) multiple times. At the time I had just killed Kreenig Snarlsnout, and coming back online in the middle of a fully respawned quillboar camp was not very fun. However, before I could properly fight my way out, I got disconnected again. This happened about five times in a row, until I decided to give up on fighting and just made a run for it. As it happened, this was also the time the server finally stayed up and I was able to make a close getaway.

My shaman also got an invite to heal Ragefire Chasm, which she accepted. I was told that the tank was new, and it was very noticeable as I did a lot of face-tanking while healing, but hey, people gotta learn somewhere. Plus it was only RFC and nobody died (I'm not counting the druid who somehow managed to fall into the lava on the way out). The group asked me afterwards whether they could add me to their friends list and I said sure, though I'm not sure how likely it is that we'll meet again with me playing my alts only in short bursts.

In terms of grouping, I noticed that there's now a manual group finder in Season of Discovery that's similar to the one we had in original Burning Crusade. I was always quite fond of that one, even if seemingly not a lot of people used it, but personally I always got good results with it. That said, I haven't really had a chance to put the SoD version to the test yet.

Another thing that happened was that I realised that with the lauch of the anniversary realms, Blizzard had also launched the AQ war effort in SoD. For a brief moment I got all starry-eyed, remembering the wonderful memories I made of the AQ gate opening event on Hydraxian Waterlords, and even wondered briefly whether I'd have enough time to level up high enough to witness the ringing of the gong on Wild Growth too. Sadly I quickly found out that the war effort in SoD is "fake" in the sense that your contributions don't matter and it just auto-completes after a week. While I can kind of get wanting to speed things up on a seasonal server, I still think that fully automating the process sucks, and I will of course not be able to see the event. Though to be fair, it's not why I came back anyway; it just would have been a nice bonus.

WoW Memories #8: November 13th, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Return to Season of Discovery

I haven't talked about Season of Discovery in about eight months. I had an absolute blast with its launch, but almost the moment phase two unlocked, my enjoyment pretty much fell of a cliff. I seemingly wasn't the only one who felt that way either (even if many likely had different reasons for their discontent), as the mode's population continued to decline. Last week's Warcraft Direct dedicated less than a minute to talking about Season of Discovery, and the 2025 road map for Classic just kind of fizzles out for SoD, with the last item being "new endgame content..." at the end of this winter. A blue post has since reassured players that SoD characters won't be deleted, and that they'll have more to share about the future of the mode "Soon™".

Still, at least in the short term things don't look good for SoD as it feels like the announcement of fresh vanilla servers has sucked all the air out of the room, and I expect the SoD servers to see an even sharper decline in activity from tonight onwards. So what's the best thing to do if you're a Classic hipster like me who doesn't care for fresh and doesn't want to be where everyone else is? Get back into SoD of course!

To be clear, I don't necessarily expect to be playing it a lot, but I've actually been thinking about at least temporarily getting back into it for a while. Why? To see the new dungeon! If you're asking "What new dungeon?" I can't blame you, because I myself wouldn't even have known about it if it hadn't been for a complete throwaway comment in a WillE video. If you ever needed any evidence for why "Classic Plus" would never work it's that Blizzard actually creating an entire new dungeon for SoD generated so little interest that it's something most people probably don't even know about.

For me, ever since I heard about it though, I've been thinking about returning to level my characters some more, if for no other reason than to check out this dungeon. I don't know whether it's any good, but I want to find out! Unfortunately "Demon Fall Canyon" apparently requires a character to be level 55+, and considering that I left my SoD toons in their twenties, I knew I would have some work to do, but you've got to start somewhere, right?

Just returning to the SoD tab in the Classic client, I was surprised to see the Lava Lash server still there, if marked as "locked". I would've expected Blizzard to close it down and fully merge it into Wild Growth by now. Wild Growth itself was marked as having "medium" population, but when I logged into my undead priest, Orgrimmar still seemed plenty busy. She was still wearing the red winter hat she acquired last Christmas too.

I logged out again and decided to check on my dwarf priest on Lava Lash, whom I'd actually got to 30 before quitting. A quick scan revealed an active population in the single digits, but I decided to do a bit of questing on my own anyway. At least I'd have no competition for mobs (something that had been a royal pain in the butt last time I played SoD) and I could always still take the free transfer later.

I've got to admit that gameplay-wise, it was fun to have my runes back. I'd forgotten how amusing and useful my little homunculi were, making solo questing as a priest a breeze compared to regular vanilla. The rune on my chest had been marked as "faded" though, which initially confused me, but it didn't take long to figure out that some runes had just been moved to different gear slots since I last played.

I was kind of stunned by how fast the XP was rolling in. Sure, I was rested, but even so - as it turns out, the XP boost I'd bemoaned at the start of phase two has been increased to 150% bonus XP since then, meaning that less than half a dozen quests in Duskwood were enough to net me two full levels.

I later returned to my undead priest to do some questing in Hillsbrad and had a similar experience there in terms of levelling speed. While pausing to cast my line into a fishing pool south of Tarren Mill, I spotted a night elf hunter interacting with a strange crate, which summoned an elite turtle that she ended up fighting. This reminded me that disregarding the way that both community and devs have been obsessing over raiding, seeing strange new things in the world that I knew weren't there in Vanilla was one of the things I really enjoyed about SoD. We'll see whether I'll get some more of that over the coming weeks, now that I no longer feel the need to keep up with anyone else and worry about raiding.

The Zones of The War Within

This is a post that I've kind of been meaning to write ever since the expansion launched, but I wanted to take all the quests into consideration as well, and it took the husband and me some time to actually get through all the side quests, one weekend play session at a time. Then other things came up that caused me to delay publishing this... but with the expansion's first new patch zone on the horizon, I figured it was way past time for me to actually get this out.

In Dragonflight, Blizzard decided to mix things up with their zone design compared to previous expansions, designing the environment and content with flight in mind from the beginning. This was something they had never done before, but in terms of the zones' general feel, they were relatively conservative. Personally, I kind of got the impression that they were trying to earn player goodwill by creating zones that were reminiscent of a "best of" of some of the most popular zones. The rolling green hills of the Ohn'aran Plains reminded me of Nagrand, and the Azure Span definitely had some Grizzly Hills vibes. The Waking Shores were somewhat unique in their particular combination of biomes I guess, but in general, I'd describe the overall vibe of the Dragon Isles as "Remember all the places in WoW you loved in the past? This is similar, just bigger."

In War Within with its underground theme, the zone designers had to be a bit more daring, and it shows.

Isle of Dorn

First off, am I the only one who keeps wanting to call this place "Khaz Algar"? I know that's the name of all the zones combined, but in my head I keep wanting to use that name and Isle of Dorn the other way round. Anyway...

This is probably the most conservative of TWW's four launch zones, as it's basically a bunch of green hills. I don't want to downplay the designers' efforts and how they tried to add distinction to different sub-zones (the forest with the giant elite bees is definitely one to remember and navigate carefully), but at its heart this zone recalls other dwarven settlements such as pre-Cataclysm Loch Modan and the non-destroyed parts of Twilight Highlands, just with more of a titanic twist in the architecture.

It also houses the expansion's main hub, the Earthen city of Dornogal, which is very open and inviting. (My only problem is that with all the buildings looking kind of blocky and similar, I often forget where I am when I log in and need to open the map to orientate myself.) I think this was an intentional choice as the other zones have us descending into increasingly uninviting territory underground, so there's always an aspect of "coming up for air" to returning to Dornogal.

Story-wise, the zone is all about the Earthen, which I thought were going to be very boring but actually turned out to be quite interesting in my opinion. They have this theme of being machine-like and mostly speak in kind of robotic voices, but the ones that have broken free of their programming/"directives" talk in a more animated way. Also, for being this robotic people strictly bound by ancient traditions, they also have a surprisingly... twee side. There's this village called Rumbleshire whose vibe somewhat reminded me of a hobbit town, what with being sent out to look for lost rock-sheep and the like.

The Ringing Deeps

The first zone you enter as you descend down the Coreway is the Ringing Deeps, and I think this is probably my least favourite zone so far. It's still solid, but I don't consider the scenery particularly pleasant and it doesn't really have a strong unique vibe either. Of all of the underground zones this one's probably the closest to feeling like "Zeralek Caverns 2.0", just with more browns and greens instead of blues.

The dominant theme of the zone is more Earthen, who are even more robotic than their cousins upstairs and look after the ancient titanic machinery, but at this point I was just kind of like... "okay, whatever". The devs did what they could with that theme but it just didn't grab me. All the areas are more mines or ruins, and tend to feature different types of annoying wildlife including "that one area with the elites where nobody goes unless the big world quest is up", which is another thing that feels very Zeralek 2.0.

Hallowfall

This is the zone that everybody's been talking about even since before launch and I can see why. Despite being underground, it kind of pretends to be an overground zone by having a sea shore and a fake "sun" in the sky in the form of the giant crystal Beledar, which alternates between glowing with friendly yellow light and taking on a voidy, dark purple hue. I've got to admit I initially didn't get what all the hype was about because I originally only witnessed this change during the storyline, so I genuinely thought it was just a one-time event for that... but no, once I spent more time in the zone, I realised it happens on the regular and it's always awe-inspiring to hear the bells ring and the music change as the sudden darkness descends - or the relief when Beledar lights up again. It's kind of funny actually because even in its "dark" state the zone doesn't really get that dark... but all the other environmental changes combined can really send a chill up your spine.

Aside from that, I think a lot of the zone's appeal comes from its resident faction, the Hallowfall Arathi. When I first heard about these guys being a long-lost expedition, I thought they were from the Arathi Highlands... but no, apparently they're from the Arathi Empire somewhere else on Azeroth where we haven't been. An interesting example of how the game can actually make up wild new lore after twenty years but people won't mind as long as it superficially looks and sounds like something they think they already know. I can recommend this Platinum WoW video on the subject if you want to learn more.

What makes the Arathi appealing (in my opinion) is that they subtly recall beloved parts of the original game. The theme of helping farmers on the frontiers reminded me of the original Westfall even if the context was quite different, and the fact that the Arathi are basically an army of paladins wielding the light and have constructed all these grandiose buildings kind of portrays them as what the Scarlet Crusade could've been if they hadn't gone evil. I get why people dig that!

I also do like this zone both for gathering purposes as well as its general look and feel, though I've got to say that for me it really suffers from its positioning, in the sense that it's the zone that's effectively the furthest away from the capital (while Azj-Kahet is another level down, you immediately get a direct portal to Dornogal when you arrive there in the story, making it much more convenient to travel to and from than Hallowfall).

Azj-Kahet

And yes, Azj-Kahet! The best way to describe this zone in my opinion is that this is the Azjol-Nerub zone that was cut from Wrath of the Lich King, fourteen years later at last. It's big and creepy and yet has surprised me by not feeling all that hostile for being the classic endgame zone occupied by the baddies. Mob density isn't that high in these new, bigger zones, at least when compared to classic endgame zones like the Plaguelands, Shadowmoon Valley or Icecrown (something I actually consider a positive) and the Nerubians are also characterised as not universally evil, but rather as suffering from leadership that has been corrupted by Xal'atath. You immediately make contact with a bunch of rebels that want to work with you to overthrow said leadership, so it's made clear that there is a lot of nuance going on with the different factions instead of all of them just being a race of baddies.

You even get to freely walk around their capital, the City of Threads... which I've seen some people compare unfavourably to Suramar, something I don't know how to rate as I didn't play during Legion and I assume that questing through Suramar in Chromie time doesn't have quite the same level of threat to it. The City of Threads isn't that bad to traverse, largely thanks to flight, but even if a disapproving guard does catch you and throws you out, it's mostly just kind of amusing. Personally I'm happy with that though - I appreciate that this endgame zone isn't overwhelmingly dark and hostile, but still a place where you can quest without feeling like you'll have to fight for your life at every given moment.

---

I'm not sure how I'd rank these four zones, other than that Ringing Deeps would be last. All the others each have their own unique appeal that I appreciate, despite not being a huge fan of the underground theme. In general, Blizz have tried hard to make things fit the themes of verticality and being underground as much as possible while at the same time really downplaying those very same features, if that makes sense. All three underground zones are huge and well-lit so never feel that oppressive, and there are "slipstreams" that easily allow your flying mount to ascend from a deeper zone to a higher-up one without having to worry about vigour. (Something I totally didn't manage to figure out by myself and hadn't even noticed until someone else told me.) It's an interesting design and just about works for me right now, though I do wonder how I'll feel about it after spending the next twelve months mostly underground...

Warcraft Direct: MoP Classic, Fresh Servers & Housing Confirmed

Last night we were treated to Blizzard's "Warcraft Direct" stream, which was generally seen as a sort-of replacement for BlizzCon this year. And they still know how to draw numbers - I was watching on Twitch (because I could earn some free mounts in the process) and the viewer count sat pretty steadily at around 170k concurrent... and that's without counting those who were watching through other channels, such as YouTube and TikTok.

I'll start off by pointing out the one thing that kept bugging me stylistically: whenever they kept changing the camera angle without changing the way the speaker was facing. That was just such a weird artistic choice and constantly distracted me. It's strange when someone talks to you on screen, seemingly addressing you but staring off to somewhere vaguely to the right! Stop doing that!

Anyway, with that out of the way, the announcements started with the more boring stuff first (no offense to anyone who was thrilled by more Hearthstone expansions) - I guess they knew that the vast majority of people were there for WoW and therefore saved that until the end. Early on we got a shout-out for The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (about which I still mean to write a separate post) and its associated charity drive, which I thought was sweet and in which Holly revealed that she personally met his parents.

In terms of actual game news, Mists of Pandaria Classic was confirmed for next year with its own launch trailer. I already mentioned a few weeks ago where I stand on this one.

However, there will also be "Classic Classic" launching in only a week! I guess the "fresh lovers" got their wish at last, though it's also been confirmed that these servers will be progressing into Burning Crusade, which may muddy the waters for some people? Because once again, where do those characters go after? Interestingly, a new hardcore server will be launching at the same time, and that progressing into BC would be something new for sure. Can't wait to see the clips of someone suffering permadeath at the feet of a fel reaver or something.

Again, as I said previously, this isn't really for me. I can't deal with the rushing, FOMO and mega-server environment any longer, but it'll be interesting to observe for sure.

On the retail front, it was confirmed that while we're still awaiting patch 11.0.7, 11.1 after that will take us to the underground goblin capital of Undermine, something that had already been speculated about for a while. I can't say that this sounds like the most appealing location to me, but we'll see.

What intrigued me about this one was that there was talk about us getting a special car ground mount which sounded like it will feature dynamic ground riding, which was another one of those things dataminers had found hints about some time ago. Curious how that will pan out.

At this point in the stream I was kind of like: okay, all of that sounds decent but I can't say I'm actively excited about any of it. Then Ian concluded his segment by saying that there was just one more thing they wanted to show us, and a little trailer began playing, showing a male human warrior in the new tier two armour entering a house. "Now what's this," I wondered, and it slowly dawned on me as the camera showed him walking past a bunch of decorations including an Ony head on the wall.

The trailer then shows him comfortably sitting down with a mug that says "home sweet home" and we get the tag line "your next adventure begins at home", followed by the logo for the next expansion (Midnight). I was keeping some notes already and just wrote down "HOUSING" in all caps. Good job, Blizzard, for saving the biggest hype feature until the end.

It's funny because I'm not even the biggest housing enthusiast myself, but it's just felt way overdue for the game at this point. Ian Hazzikostas actually commented in an interview a few years ago that they were finally looking into it, and I already half-expected a housing announcement at last year's BlizzCon; it just felt like it had to happen eventually, and here we are now.

WoW Memories #7: November 11th, 2006

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

The following was originally posted on October 11th, 2006 under the title "More WoW Talk":

After a week of frustrating uni work it was good to be able to just spend a whole day playing again. Mind, I still have work to do for next week, but just for this one day I got to enjoy pure bliss again.

As such I think it's time for some WoW observations again - randomly illustrated with pictures that have little to do with what I'm talking about, but I just like taking screenshots, and what's the point of taking them if nobody is ever going to see them?

First off, I think it's interesting to note that even though I've been playing for almost a month now, I've still made almost nothing but positive experiences with the game. Considering the kinds of stories I've heard from some people that's pretty damn impressive. I mean... yes, I have seen people pretend to engage in sexual acts.¹ I've also seen people beg, be careless, rude or generally unkind, but those are the exception rather than the rule. On the other hand I've teamed up with a lot of random strangers from all kinds of places - England, Poland, Italy, Romania, to name just a few - who were really nice, made me laugh and generally made my time worthwhile.

²

Getting used to all the game-specific lingo can be quite a challenge at times. Of course there's a fair deal you pick up automatically, other times you just ask nicely and people are more than willing to explain things to you, but there's just so damn much of everything... If I look at a random post in [a WoW forum community I had joined] you can bet that there'll still be a lot of comments including acronyms and other game-specific terms that mean absolutely nothing to me.

³

Also, while virtual realities like this allow for a lot of deception, allow you to be prettier and more talented than you'll ever be in real life, there are some personality traits that just show through no matter what. Case in point: my klutziness and dorkiness. I wish that some of the conversations I've had in game could have been saved to illustrate my point, but I'll just have to paraphrase:

Me: Where's the Howling Vale? I can't find it!
Friend: A little west of where you are right now.⁴
Me: *goes west, fights monsters* Does it actually say Howling Vale? Cause I see lots of monsters but it doesn't say...
Friend: Yes, it does.
Me: *runs in circles some more, killing some more monsters* I can't find iiit!
Friend: *comes over, points to the right of where I'm standing* Over there.
Me: ... oh.

I also have the most disconcerting habit of falling off things⁵, which manifested itself as early as Teldrassil (the starting area of the Night Elves), when I fell off the edge of the world a huge waterfall while trying to look over the edge. And died. Only yesterday I was going to take the ship from Booty Bay with Nemi and another guy, but somehow I managed to walk off it, and by the time I had climbed out of the water and came running back I could only yell "Nooo!" in a dramatic manner as the ship left without me. Not much later our party was leaving Ironforge, I ran ahead with an encouraging "I'm ready, let's go"... and promptly fell into one of the lava flows around the city. Fortunately it was covered by a net or something, so I didn't die, but it was still very embarrassing. Needless to say that Nemi was in stitches.

⁶

I also called the city of Auberdine "Aubergine" once. *shifty eyes*

On the whole I find the most fun part of the game so far to do challenging quests or instances together. It's fascinating what amounts of teamwork being stuck in a cave together can inspire (if you don't happen to stumble upon any of the aforementioned unkind exceptions). The only downside of the whole thing is that these things are often simply damn hard. I've tried to do Gnomeregan twice in the last couple of days and both times my group failed (meaning we died halfway through and then gave up because it had gotten late). Yet I still can't wait for the next time we get to try it. And then of course it's on to the next one! Am I a masochist or what?⁷

¹ I remember someone who was playing a male character asking me to do the /kneel emote (innocent ol' me complied of course), just to then stand right in front of me and do a /dance emote involving a lot of hip-thrusting... you get the idea. Obviously this stuck with me as rude, but on the whole I was significantly less bothered by this kind of thing back then than I would be now I think. I don't think it's uncommon to develop less tolerance for people giving you crap as you get older.

² I took that screenshot while our little group was auto-running from one end of Ashenvale to the other. This felt like it took up a lot of our time early in the game.

³ I remember in those early days I would often go into an inn and actually have my character lie down on a bed before logging out because it just seemed right. Definitely one of those aspects of innocence and immersion you can't go back to.

⁴ I find it interesting that I threw the names of friends around left and right without explaining to my readers who's who, but in this particular exchange I opted not to name the person and just put "friend". I wonder why. Also, I remember having this exact same problem with finding the Howling Vale while questing in Classic...

⁵ Now there's something that hasn't changed in almost twenty years!

⁶ This screenshot was taken inside the Stockades. I really wish I'd written down more about all those dungeons runs I did...

⁷ Okay, I guess this hasn't changed either.

The Big Birthday Bash

I held off a little on writing about WoW's 20th anniversary celebrations in retail because they were off to a bit of a rocky start but I had a feeling that things were going to get better. And they did!

Basically, the problem during the first week was simply that acquisition of the anniversary currency was throttled to an insane degree. I have no issue with devs preventing people from being able to grind out everything on day one, but that first week, even if you did every single activity that awarded bronze celebration tokens, you still couldn't earn enough of them to buy even a single one of the reimagined tier two sets that had been promoted as the main reward to earn during the event. So that sucked.

However, Blizzard saw the feedback and immediately course-corrected in week two, massively increasing token payouts from all sources and it's been fine since then. I've acquired most of the new sets already, but there are plenty more rewards to earn and I'm having fun.

The celebratory activities are very varied and I've been kind of surprised by how... self-directed some of them are. Sure, there are plenty of quests to be completed and achievements to be earned, but there are also a lot of things that don't seem to serve any particular purpose other than to have fun - something that's quite rare in modern WoW - such as rare clickables scattered around the area that temporarily grant you the appearance of popular NPCs and allow you to say some of their voice lines. I wouldn't even have known that these existed if it wasn't for Arlaeya Explores on Bluesky posting about all the different costumes she keeps finding. When I started to look around for myself, I managed to turn my hunter into Jaina.

Most of the time however, I've been busy taking part in the more "directed" activities. First off, there are three very open and casual events constantly rotating around the area: Storytime, Mount Mania and Fashion Frenzy.

Storytime is Lorewalker Cho telling you a story similar to what you got to witness after collecting all the lore scrolls in Pandaria, while you sit in the audience and cheer or boo as appropriate. I think these are nice, it's just a shame that there are only three different ones because that makes the event become repetitive quite quickly. Hearing C'thun get called a "giant creepy artichoke" made me laugh out loud though.

Mount Mania is basically an official version of the "mount-offs" that were popularised by streamers over the years and is easily the most popular of the three activities. To be honest, I can see why! Even though there are no prizes, it's just fun to join in and see how many of the mounts that get called out you've got yourself. It's also kind of humbling as a long-time player who might feel that you've got quite a few mounts to repeatedly be reminded of just how many you don't have.

Finally, there's Fashion Frenzy, which I believe is similar to the Trial of Style. People are invited to take a couple of minutes to create a transmog that goes with a certain theme, then everyone gets to cast votes, and winners are briefly announced on stage (though again, there are no prizes or anything). This doesn't seem that popular to me, I think mainly because of the time pressure. I like me a good transmog as much as anyone else, but I wouldn't be able to throw something together so quickly. Since voting is also something that gives credit towards a quest and achievement, people also tend to just show up and throw their ribbons at random people, regardless of whether they were even trying to take part and match the theme. My priest was once declared one of the winners just for standing nearby in her tier two outfit.

But really, all that's just the "background noise" to all the dedicated events you can take part in for rewards.

The BRD raid was a nice trip down memory lane, but I was a bit disappointed to find that you seemingly can't get all the related achievements done in LFR, or at least not without great difficulty. The final fight at the Imperial seat was interesting from a lore perspective as it makes sense that Moira nopes out of watching you kill her husband again, but the devs also gave him some voice lines that feel like they are trying to retroactively make him into a more sympathetic figure. Ragnaros also gets summoned in during the fight, because I guess you can't have any nostalgia-related activities in WoW without him.

Classic Timewalking was slightly disappointing to me in the sense that most of the dungeons featured in it are just the already neutered Cata versions (though I still found all the Strat runs I'd done in Classic to be beneficial in terms of knowing what the different trash mobs do for example). They did bring back the original Deadmines though, which I appreciated, even if you can't queue for it specifically and just have to cross your fingers that the randomiser will put you in there at some point.

The biggest disappointment to me personally though was the Chromie activity that had been promoted as being about "time tours of the opening of the Ahn'qiraj gate", as it doesn't really have much to do with that at all, other than being set in old-school Silithus. It's still a fun little scenario (I particularly enjoyed the activity where you have to find the NPC that matches your class - once I figured out what I was supposed to do that is); it's just not at all what I thought it was going to be.

The thing that surprisingly caused me to fall down a bit of a masochistic rabbit hole was Korrak's Revenge, the Alterac Valley mode with vanilla mechanics, including all the different quests and NPCs. AV has always been one of my favourite battlegrounds, and one I even enjoyed in Classic (even though I think PvP in Classic in general is pretty bad).

There is a weekly quest to earn 500 honour within that battleground, but once inside I also found that some of the quests within the valley itself, such as to capture a bunker or graveyard, also award bronze celebration tokens, plus there was a ram mount to be acquired for earning 200 timewarped badges from doing quests within the valley over a longer period of time, both of which encouraged me to keep queueing beyond the requirement for the main quest.

Interestingly, it was nothing like the quick rushes I'd experienced in Classic. Instead I lost every single match I joined, and many of them took over an hour (may have been longer, since a couple of times I also just deserted after a while - something I usually never do, but I honestly hadn't been prepared for how long these were going to last and needed to do something else). It was always the same scenario of an awkward stalemate at the Dun Baldar bridge, with the Alliance occasionally pushing forward as far as Icewing bunker but then quickly losing ground again.

That's pretty old-school and I guess I wouldn't have minded so much if I had the feeling that anyone at all actually understood what was going on or cared about winning the battleground, but I distinctly got the impression that the Alliance side at least was full of PvErs who just wanted to do the quests for rewards and had no clue what was even going on. This was most obvious at the start of a match when the majority of people rode southwards to Snowfall graveyard to cap that, but then just awkwardly stood there, not even trying to go any further. Once I saw a small group of about five players dare to venture a bit further south and ran along with them to provide encouragement and heals, just for them to decide to try to take on Galvangar with five people - I even tried to warn them in chat but they clearly had no idea what awaited them inside that building and it was just pointless carnage.

Where it gets really frustrating though is when you hit that stalemate at Dun Baldar because the thing to do when that happens is to get a small group of people past enemy lines and start capping things down south - you'll probably still lose, but at least you'll get some honour and break the stalemate. However, the NPCs in this version of AV hit so hard that you can't really take anything but a mine by yourself, and often times when I would try to sneak south, literally not even a single other person would want to come along, preferring to just get slaughtered over and over by the bridge. Or on the rare occasion when someone would come along, they would once again not really understand how hard the NPCs hit and charge head-first into a group of guards just to get insta-gibbed. It's just a kind of painful and bizarre parody of what PvP is supposed to be like. I wonder what the experience is like as Horde.

Finally, there's this thing called Secrets of Azeroth or Guest Relations, which is basically like a bunch of quests without quest markers that expect you to actually read the instructions and put some clues together by yourself. On paper, that sounds like something I should really like, but in practice my experience with it has been so-so. I managed to work my way through the introductory quest by myself, just using the in-game hint system once or twice, but eventually I hit a point where I just had no idea what was going on and had to look up help. The instructions are just too vague in some parts, and I simply don't have the patience for this kind of thing any longer, especially when so much of these quests seems to require you to run around on foot (Azeroth is big, y'all) and look for tiny things to click on on the ground. When I'm not even sure anymore whether I'm even remotely in the right area, I definitely just want to get on with it at some point.

Still, all in all I've been having fun with the varied activities. What's been your favourite thing to do so far?