Tag Archives: wowhardcore

Tuesday Maintenance Report

We’ve been playing on the Hardcore Classic server Skull Rock for a bit over two weeks now.

Padmina18144 Herbalism137 Alchemy150 Cooking138 Fishing68 First Aid
Evania1275 Herbalism85 Tailoring39 Cooking57 Fishing2 First Aid
Elnora1275 Herbalism27 Enchanting63 Cooking88 Fishing18 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…

This week’s relevant meme: “I made food! I’m magical!”

Memento Mori

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.