Battle for Azeroth
18 entries. 13,046 words.
2017-11
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WoW – Battle For Azeroth.
2017-11-06.
From the media assets on the Battle for Azeroth web site. In general, I don’t think about WoW very much, but when Blizzcon comes around every year, Twitter explodes with chatter about this game. Even more than the moderate level of chatter that persists year-round. It continues to amaze me how many people seem to live completely inside a Blizzard bubble.
I guess there’s nothing wrong with focusing completely on WoW, but, to me, WoW is just one game out of a hundred, a game that remains dormant roughly 22 months out of every 24 months.
- MMORPG
- Pre-Release
2018-08
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Battle for Azeroth Impulse Buy – Blaugust 13.
2018-08-13.
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.
- MMORPG
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The Siege of Lordaeron – Blaugust 14.
2018-08-14.
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.
- MMORPG
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2.5 Hrs Into Battle for Azeroth – Blaugust 15.
2018-08-15.
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.
- MMORPG
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Finding Teldrassil – Blaugust 16.
2018-08-16.
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.
- MMORPG
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Sunday Browns and Disenchanted Disappointment – Blaugust 19.
2018-08-19.
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.
- Media
- MMORPG
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Drustvar Screenshots – Blaugust 20.
2018-08-20.
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.
- MMORPG
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Drustvar Complete, Mastodon – Blaugust 21.
2018-08-21.
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.
- MMORPG
- Musings
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Where Exactly Is This Battle? – Blaugust 24.
2018-08-24.
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.
- MMORPG
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Stormsong Valley and On Accident – Blaugust 25.
2018-08-25.
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.
- MMORPG
- Writing
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A Logical Dead End – Blaugust 26.
2018-08-26.
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.
- MMORPG
- Musings
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Side Quests and Spigots – Blaugust 27.
2018-08-27.
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.
- MMORPG
- Musings
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Battle for Azeroth 119 Update – Blaugust 30.
2018-08-30.
This will be my last “spontaneous” Blaugust post this year. I started tomorrow’s “performance review” post a week ago, and then there will be my “what I played this month” post after that, which I started yesterday. I started today’s post … well, today.
So since it’s my last one, I better make it good!
Um. Okay. Here we go. Any second now, something interesting will come to me.
- MMORPG
2018-09
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Games Played – August 2018.
2018-09-01.
The first story thing WoW gave me to do upon reaching level 120 was to go to this Zandalar desert to assassinate some Horde NPCs. I completely forgot to say this in my huge missive yesterday: Blaugust seemed like a great success, congratulations to everyone who participated! Huge thanks to Belghast and all the mentors for pulling all of that together. To all the new bloggers, great job! It doesn’t matter if you posted every day or not.
- MMORPG
- Progression Report
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WoW – Finding Jaina’s Trail Again.
2018-09-03.
I mentioned that I was close to giving up on World of Warcraft’s Battle for Azeroth expansion, because the game seemed to have given up on telling me Jaina’s story. Well I finally picked up her story again.
It turns out that you have to complete all three Kul Tiras zone story chapters (half of which don’t seem to have anything to do with anything) before a new quest unlocks which begins the followup to Jaina’s cut scenes from the very beginning of the expansion.
- MMORPG
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Week End – Carbine, CCP, Daybreak, Witcher.
2018-09-08.
I started to write three or four blog posts this week, didn’t finish them, and didn’t want to post them. Instead I decided to cram all of them together into one summary post for the week. This allows me to post, but without the bother of crafting long essays that have beginnings, middles, or ends, when everything I want to say can be summed up in a paragraph. No wonder listcicles are so popular!
- Blog
2018-10
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Battle for Azeroth Conclusions.
2018-10-03.
My World of Warcraft subscription ended weeks ago, and the last time I actually played was September 3rd, a month ago. I meant to go back and complete the Siege of Boralus but I got too involved playing The Witcher again. I rescued Jaina though, so that was a good-enough ending for me.
I figured I should finally post what I thought of the expansion.
I get the impression there’s a lot of people complaining about Battle for Azeroth.
- MMORPG
2018-12
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Endgame Viable Awards 2018.
2018-12-31.
It’s time once against for the prestigious Endgame Viable Awards for 2018.
2017 Awards 2016 Awards 2015 Awards I give out three awards for PC games only: Game of the Year, MMORPG of the Year, and MMORPG Expansion of the Year. In my warped worldview “Game of the Year” sort of implies Steam game of the year (because that’s the only place I buy PC games) and excludes traditional MMORPGs.
- MMORPG
- Single-Player
- Steam