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!” But that sounds a lot like “Sky Is Blue Week” or “Water Is Wet Week” to me. Of course I appreciate the developers of the games I play. I wouldn’t be buying or writing about their games if I didn’t! Of course I don’t think developers should be getting death threats, because I’m a normal human being who understands cause and effect, and the consequences of my actions. (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. So it’s actually 232k people spread out over three different servers. (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. (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.) (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. We live in a time when even constructive criticism is interpreted as a personal affront to most fans. (It’s a bit like politics… you can either express hate for games, or express love for games, but anything in between is socially unacceptable now.) In reality it’s the same World of Warcraft with all of the same pros and cons as before, but I’ll just pretend I was starstruck the whole time. (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. PoE is a far better-looking game, but it also has more complex mechanics. It swung the pendulum a bit too far in the other direction. It’s actually hard to beat bosses. You have to watch your health bar and drink potions at the right time and dodge stuff and think about what you’re doing. :) (859 words.)

The quest for non-WASD games to play using only the right hand on the mouse inevitably leads to either strategy games or isometric action RPGs. I’ve been through a number of strategy games already and I just can’t get into them right now. In the past, I’ve turned to Path of Exile in this kind of situation (because it’s free), but this time I decided to try out the trial version of Diablo III for the very first time. (847 words.)

My dog likes to be involved with everything. They say everything’s been written before and there’s nothing new to write on a gaming blog. Well, okay, I say that, because I’m lazy and not very motivated. I keep looking at all the mountains of writing prompts floating around Blaugust, including the ones I wrote, and thinking, “Meh, I’m just not interested in writing about that today.” (880 words.)

You might have noticed I don’t post a lot about games here, and that’s mostly because I haven’t played much of anything in the last month. So the “here’s what I played last night” style of post is completely off the table for me so far in Blaugust. It makes it kind of hard to think of something to say. :) I could tell you what I watched last night, which was a Netflix documentary called Evil Genius: The True Story of America’s Most Diabolical Bank Heist. I had never heard of the so-called “pizza bomber” before, and the 4-part series fascinated me, in the same way that one is fascinated watching a train wreck. I don’t often watch documentaries about recent events (though I suppose one could argue that 2003 isn’t exactly “recent” anymore), and I was struck by how strange and unsettling it was to see a lot of HD footage. Documentary footage is supposed to be grainy restored film or old photographs moving around with Ken Burns’ panning and zooming effects. (550 words.)

 I just finished watching the American Crime Story: The People Versus O.J. Simpson series on Netflix. It’s pretty good. I’m not sure it deserved to win any Emmys, but I enjoyed it anyway, especially the second half of the series. I didn’t remember a lot of the twists and turns. I didn’t see much of anything about the whole OJ Trial when it happened. I remember the basic framework of it: The Bronco, the trial, the gloves, the acquittal. Oops, spoiler alert! Anyway I didn’t pay any attention to the details at the time. For example, I never knew that OJ’s friend is the same Kardashian that spawned all the Kardashians we know and love today. (297 words.)