I’ve seen statistics about how many people are playing each class in Season of Discovery, but no one tracking what I’m really curious about: is this is largest percentage of characters with gray hair… ever? I’m seeing a lot of old humans in the Eastern Kingdoms. It’s a vibe that fits returning players, I guess.
We ran Deadmines on Monday night for the first time in many years. Compared to more recent instance groups it was a longer, slower, cinematic experience, the sort that cemented my love for this game and has been completely impossible during twelve years of having young children waking unpredictably. I’m cautiously celebrating a return of my ability to concentrate on something for a couple of hours. Maybe it’s safe to start writing and painting again.
I took the boat over the check out the world pvp event in Ashenvale. I enjoy open-world things because I can nose around and figure out the mechanics without taking a spot away from someone more qualified. On my first few trips out, I saw no horde players at all.
Eglantine the human priest is venturing into dangerous places to bury the dead. I won’t have as much time to play now that we are past the holidays, but I am looking forward to instances and battlegrounds.
I didn’t notice it as much when playing a gnome, but many objects in Azeroth are simply enormous in comparison to player avatars. The trees can be excused as an old growth fantasy forest, but scatter items like mugs are more baffling.
Trink
13
85 Engineering
76 Mining
61 Cooking
85 Fishing
2 First Aid
Eglantine
15
90 Skinning
63 Tailoring
96 Cooking
85 Fishing
I’m listening to the Murderbot audiobooks as I clean this week and the irony is not lost on me that I’m repeating a series that has self-comfort through repetitive media consumption as a major theme, and spending my other leisure time repeating 2005 in World of Warcraft. Murderbot is one of those fictional characters like Ignatius J. Reilly: you either see yourself, or you don’t understand the appeal. I read the series as ebooks the first time around and Kevin R. Free’s performance makes them more enjoyable because he gives subtle but distinct voices to the secondary characters, who don’t get much description in a novella’s space limitations.
We also reconnected with an old friend who we met on our original RPPvP server and lost track of after he left Facebook, so… reliving 2005 has some unambiguous positives!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I am going to resume my episode of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.
In 1937, a small boy on Matsungan Island saw a plane crash into the ocean. He told adults, but no one believed him.
In 1995, a diver found a wrecked plane… exactly where the boy said he’d seen one go down.
I heard this story listening to an interview with Bill Snavely, who believes that he’s found the final resting place of Amelia Earhart. (Image of Earhart’s Electra, above, from Wikipedia.) Whether this is her plane or a different aircraft, we can be certain that the little boy was right: he saw a plane spouting flame fall into the waves, an unmistakable sight. And no one believed him for almost sixty years.
How many victims does a pedophile traumatize before he is caught? On average, it’s 360-380 children. (Source.) He’s bold because he’s gotten away with it before. He’s bold because no one believes children when they describe a fiery plane crash, and he knows it.
Our Christmas Carol begins “Hardcore was dead, to begin with.”
Skull Rock was very quiet and I kept hearing chatter that all the players left for the Season of Discovery servers. And I missed battlegrounds. I recognize that concentrated PvP with permadeath would be inherently ridiculous but I’d do it. It would be fascinating to see how player behavior changed and how some of these maps would play with everyone acting very cautious.
I also missed roleplay ruleset servers. I was surprised to find no overlap with hardcore servers because the entire hardcore challenge is basically roleplaying; it’s trying to fill in the gaps left to your imagination with realistic motivations and consequences.
Padmina
20
150 Herbalism
140 Alchemy
150 Cooking
143 Fishing
77 First Aid
Evania
12
75 Herbalism
85 Tailoring
39 Cooking
57 Fishing
2 First Aid
Elnora
12
75 Herbalism
27 Enchanting
63 Cooking
88 Fishing
18 First Aid
Skull Rock
I made a gnome warlock and a human priest on Chaos Bolt (NA), an RPPvP server.
Trink
13
85 Engineering
76 Mining
61 Cooking
85 Fishing
2 First Aid
Eglantine
6
26 Cooking
44 Fishing
Chaos Bolt
I would probably be better off if I’d learned a language or something instead of memorizing Elwynn Forest, but those neurons are having fun firing again.
This server is bustling, and since Season of Discovery eventually ends, it meets my goal of wanting an experience that’s finite. Both discovering and using runes is fun. There are now so many variations that World of Warcraft is more of a game system than a game, and I wonder if we’ll ever see Blizzard completely embrace that and let players officially create custom experiences for one another the way they have with Overwatch.
We’ve been playing on the Hardcore Classic server Skull Rock for a bit over two weeks now.
Padmina
18
144 Herbalism
137 Alchemy
150 Cooking
138 Fishing
68 First Aid
Evania
12
75 Herbalism
85 Tailoring
39 Cooking
57 Fishing
2 First Aid
Elnora
12
75 Herbalism
27 Enchanting
63 Cooking
88 Fishing
18 First Aid
Current Progress.
I expected more death, so I made three mages and planned to level them evenly so that I could return to questing with My Paladin without having to detour and catch up. I forgot that My Paladin is really good at this and his favorite iterations of World of Warcraft have been the times when he could embrace the hybrid class and both protect and heal. So we’re the perfect team and one mage is pulling ahead of her sisters.
My closest call was with the Defias Pillagers when I was alone. I’d cleared the Gold Coast Quarry and was coming out carefully when I accepted a group invitation, and I learned the hard way that Hardcore servers have layering when I was pulled into a layer where the cave mouth was not clear and I was standing in the worst possible spot for it, pulling Defias from both sides and the one on patrol in the cave. I ran for it and (with the help of a swiftness potion) escaped with single digit health. I didn’t figure out what had happened until the next night when I logged out briefly to go afk… and logged back in still in party with My Paladin, but on a different layer. I’m not thrilled to find this mechanic on Classic servers. Its introduction made it more difficult to hold server events and locate friends who were online but not grouped with you.
Tales of Kids in Azeroth: some quiet questing is happening with the toddler between 4:30am and everyone else’s more normal wake-up times. From him I have learned that my mage is not conjuring water, but coffee. “Mama drink coffee.” It is in a giant pewter mug so that makes sense…
Computer games and the society around them have changed profoundly in the last twenty years. World of Warcraft was the first always-online game that I played and a personal landmark in slowly recognizing the dark consequences of the dawning always-online world. (It’s crazy to realize that children born after this game released are legal adults now; I hope they vote for faction leaders based on their ability to stand in the middle of the capital and fight raid groups, since that’s newly relevant to American politics.)
And at first, the positives of this massively-multiplayer world were enormous. I cannot overstate how exciting the social aspect was in the days before ubiquitous social media and unlimited texting. Real people are so interesting that it ruined single player games for me for a long time. And the game was basically a detailed tabletop roleplaying game system with a computer doing the bookkeeping, designed to encourage players to help one another. For example, many quest sequences return to the same area repeatedly for different targets. This is not designed to frustrate the solo player. It’s so you can find players to help you fight large groups even if they are on a different quest.
The beautiful design of the game started to erode almost immediately. Even before any game expansions, most of the player-crafted items and highly situational abilities… simply did not matter. Then the game design became manipulative, introducing mechanics like daily quests to create content that was endless but shallow. (I burned out at the Isle of Quel’Danas.) Datamining websites, YouTube, and Twitch made a lot of information available but changed the culture so that other players were less patient with exploration and trying to solve game mechanics by strategizing on the fly. Changes like layering and cross-server groups solved problems, but took away the greatest catalyst for community, a fixed set of people who repeatedly interacted with and needed one another.
The Classic ruleset removes years of changes, but it wasn’t enough to interest me on its own.
What makes this game one that I want to play again is permanent death.
Now it plays like the super-TTRPG it was meant to be. Every profession and every whimsical trick matters. I’m logging in to play the part of the game in front of me right now to the fullest. The fear of missing out on the current endgame and the endless greedy acquisition is removed because this character is going to die. Will it be deserved from hubris? Undeserved from an internet outage?
Part of the fun will be blogging about the journey.
Enchanted Horse 