Isn't anyone going to clean up this beach? Really bad for tourism. My Blaugust posts have definitely turned into a diary. Not normally what I like to write, but the posts must be posted. I’ve abandoned the concept of playing World of Warcraft by giving the game my full attention. I played for two more hours yesterday while watching Hulu, clicking through the quest text without reading it, blindly killing mobs and collecting drops until the objectives were done. (813 words.)

Island Expedition tutorial I just went ahead and cancelled my World of Warcraft subscription today. It was largely a formality. I can’t imagine a world (of Warcraft! Har!) where this expansion would have been so great that I’d have played for more than a month. Incidentally, no other MMO makes it so easy to cancel its subscription, I’ve noticed. You just click the “Cancel” link and that’s it. No questions, no guilt trips, no nothing. (834 words.)

Moonshade Highlands, I mean, Stormsong Valley The Azshara short was the weakest of the three Warbringer videos, as self-contained short films go. (Sylvanas being the strongest.) My reaction before watching it: Who is Azshara? And after watching it: Who is Azshara? As far as I could tell, it had no connection with the game of World of Warcraft that I’ve been playing the past week. As I’m going through Stormsong Valley, I can understand why people rush to endgame in WoW. (494 words.)

Stormsong Valley This is going to get me into trouble, but I’m already bored with Battle for Azeroth. I didn’t even play yesterday. It’s basically a continuation of Legion, and … well, I already played Legion. The story that got me interested in the first place is nowhere to be seen. There is no “battle for Azeroth” taking place in the Battle for Azeroth expansion, as far as I can tell, at least through level 115. (657 words.)

There were a few big news items in the gaming world that I failed to mention, largely because they didn’t mean that much to me, but if I smash them all together perhaps I can make a post out of them. From the Ashes of Creation press kit. Ashes of Creation and My.com The first is Ashes of Creation’s publishing deal with My.com. My understanding is this is a European deal so theoretically it doesn’t affect me anyway. (652 words.)

From the [new New World game site][1]. Cool for a game, but loads of historicity to pick apart there. :) We got our first “hands on” look at Amazon’s New World from Tech Advisor UK, and it doesn’t look pretty. (I mean, it looks pretty, sure, but I am referring to the gameplay.) Here’s what I’ve previously written about New World: Amazon’s New World Reveal Hopes and Predictions for New World Amazon’s New World, Part Two Week End - EQ Royale, New World I’ve had a rather cynical take, to put it mildly. (680 words.)

So we meet again, blank page. Stop yelling at me, now-a-total-of-150-draft-posts-I-can’t-use, you know what you did. Ever wonder why I embed the image in the post and also set it as the "featured image" in WordPress, so it shows up twice on the web site? For the RSS feed. I design my posts almost exclusively for RSS feed readers. World of Warcraft In Battle for Azeroth yesterday, I got to the end of the Drustvar zone, which actually isn’t the end because there are still some side quests and missing pieces for the zone completion achievement, but it’s the end of the main story for the zone, and of course I excitedly ran after the NPCs to go into the final dramatic confrontation to complete it … until I saw I was running into a Dungeon Portal. (627 words.)

Screenshots! Because it’s that kind of a day. A friendly, inviting architectural feature for the entrance to a building. Here we see the bow of a boat built in a house, and the incredibly rare Swift Stormsaber mount that I usually ride in WoW. This vaguely terrifying creature was called a "mountain doe." That doesn't look like any doe \*I've\* ever seen. Except maybe in my nightmares. Here we see the standard position of my Hunter's pet in most attempted screenshots. (108 words.)

Drustvar, the brown zone … for a few steps, until the lighting changes. Today is not just an “I can’t think of anything to write” day, it’s an “I actively don’t want to write because I hate the way I write” day. I was working on a post about comments last night but it’s not finished and I don’t want to post it until it is. It’s been, what, two days since I reported on Battle for Azeroth, so surely there must be a clamoring for news there. (581 words.)

The Blaugust theme of the week is Developer Appreciation, but I’ll be honest, I have no idea how to write on this topic. It’s one of those situations where I have to decide whether to write what I think everyone expects, or write what I actually think. I’m sure the intention here is to simply state, “I think games are great and I don’t think developers should get death threats on Twitter! (830 words.)

Thanks to a post from Leo’s Life, I learned about a web site called Realm Pop. It’s a very simple site that charts demographics information about all of the World of Warcraft servers. I’ve always suspected that I played World of Warcraft on a fairly low population server (Undermine), but now I can finally see it in black-and-white: 232,356 players. And that is including the populations of its two “connected” realms, Anvilmar and Xavius. (493 words.)

That's not Teldrassil, that's the new city in Kul Tiras, which I can confirm is, in fact, sprawling and confusing. I’m already tired of writing about Battle for Azeroth and I’ve played for less than 4 hours. It’s possible that you can infer something on how I feel about MMORPGs in general right now, but I’ll leave that to the reader’s imagination. Big news, though: I installed an addon! Bagnon, the one (of many) that merges all your different bags into one big bag. (699 words.)

Finding spoiler-free screenshots typically results in rather bland imagery for blog posts. The second problem with writing post after post about Battle for Azeroth, besides boring everyone to death, is that nobody is going to read them. Everyone is avoiding spoilers, so nobody is going to click on a post about the expansion two days in. (I wouldn’t, and I’m generally not reading WoW posts right now.) As of this writing, ManicTime says I’ve played the expansion for a total of 2. (745 words.)

I re-activated my World of Warcraft subscription this morning and played the new expansion for about 45 minutes. Hardcore! I had some hope that I might avoid spamming posts about Battle for Azeroth, but what else is there to talk about? I also made an appointment to take my dog and cat to the vet next week. Not exactly riveting stuff. I’m going to refrain from mentioning any of the negative observations I made and just focus on the good things. (770 words.)

It was probably inevitable. I went ahead and pre-ordered the World of Warcraft expansion Battle for Azeroth one day early. There’s a couple of reasons I caved. First, I was thinking about buying a new game anyway. Even though I said I wasn’t going to buy Diablo III, I started contemplating it. I did in fact load up Path of Exile Sunday night and play a little bit of my old characters (level 13 is my highest level guy there), and it wasn’t as fun as I expected. (859 words.)