World of Warcraft

0 words

87 entries. 71,566 words.

October, 2013

  • WoW, Relaxing Trinquility. 2013-10-23 7:00 PM.
    • MMORPG

    Perhaps as a result of a post on Inventory Full and a post on Herding Cats, I found myself playing WoW over the weekend. It was not one of my better weekends in terms of getting productive things done in my life, but I choose to think of that as the cause of playing WoW, rather than the effect. Anyway, I made a number of observations about WoW as compared to more modern MMOs. 657 words.
  • WoW Doesn't Take Itself Seriously. 2013-10-29 1:25 PM.
    • MMORPG

    Playing WoW again recently, it dawned on me why it’s been so popular. It’s a good game and all, and it’s more addictive than blue meth, but I think that one of the main things that pushes it over the top from niche game to mainstream hit is: It doesn’t take itself seriously. Most people would probably be embarassed to admit that they play a game involving elves and dwarves and knights and dragons. Society tells us that those things are for kids, or hardcore D&D nerds, and those guys are weird. (At least they were when I was growing up.) WoW said to the world, hey all that stuff is stupid, right? We’re going to make fun of that in our game. We’re going to put in quests with ridiculous characters who say silly things and make meta jokes about pop culture and anything we can think of to keep this from being a serious fantasy world. Our trolls are going to be Jamaican stoners. Our Undead are going to be necrophiliacs. Our dwarves are going to be Scottish highlanders. It’s all just going to be a big silly cartoon. So nobody will have to pretend that they’re really playing in a fantasy world, and it’ll be okay for normal people to enjoy it. (Normal as in not a D&D nerd.) 358 words.
  • Halloween in the MMO. 2013-10-31 3:00 PM.
    • MMORPG

    Autumn (aka. Halloween) celebrations are a staple of modern MMORPGs. Ye gods what is that? (I was going to put another picture captioned “It’s always Halloween in Kingsmouth!” but I couldn’t find my screenshot.) 34 words.

November, 2013

  • When WoW Tanks Go Rogue. 2013-11-05 8:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Tanking

    I had an odd, somewhat amusing experience in WoW recently. I’ve been playing a lot of dungeon instances lately, partly because I’ve never actually done any WoW dungeons before, and partly because I wanted to level a mage without going through the hassle of soloing. Almost every instance has been an enjoyable, workmanlike experience … until this tank decided to be an ass. So the random dungeon selector came up with the Scarlet Monastary. Or maybe it was the Scarlet Halls. I can’t remember. They all run together. It was the one that starts out with those piles of corpses and zombies which most people just run around, but the second we stepped into this instance we were beset by flaming zombies and fighting for our lives. That usually happens when somebody doesn’t circumvent that first area, so I figured somebody was trying to do a quest I didn’t know about, or somebody was panicking, or somebody just didn’t know what was going on. 667 words.
  • Is WoW Leveling Really That Fast?. 2013-11-06 8:00 PM.
    • MMORPG

    So my WoW mage has Enchanting as a profession, and he’d leveled way past the point where he could disenchant the magic items he picked up at the measely skill level of 15. I had a couple of other characters in the 25-30 range that I could have used to farm items from dungeons, but I didn’t think those items would be any better. So I got the brilliant idea that I would level another character to 15 and just keep doing dungeon instances and send all the excess low-level magic items that I picked up to my mage. 483 words.
  • Flying Mounts In WoW. 2013-11-13 8:00 PM.
    • MMORPG

    The Burning Crusade has been out since January 2007, which makes it nearly seven years old. Since that time, there has always been a contingient of people on every new MMO forum who scream, “Where are the flying mounts? I keep getting hit by mobs!” I, like most everyone else, always scoffed and thought, “Just run around the mobs. Jeez. We don’t need no stinkin’ flying mounts.” Flash forward to today, when my Hunter finally bought a flying mount on the Hellfire Penninsula. I’ve been slowly leveling him since I first started playing WoW, which was, coincidentally enough, somewhere around 2007. (Actually I think it was 2008.) Anyway, he’s 64 now and I still occasionally break him out and grind through some quests to inch slowly forward toward where I can enter the second oldest expansion area. One day I found myself standing in front of the flying mount vendor with 225 gold burning a hole in my pocket, so I bought a white griffin. 408 words.
  • WoW Dungeon Guides Are Terrible. 2013-11-14 8:00 PM.
    • MMORPG

    There is one area where WoW is woefully far behind other games like Rift and FFXIV. That is: Normal dungeon guides on YouTube. Good ones, I mean. They don’t exist for WoW. Or maybe they do exist, but they are so deeply buried within the noise that you can’t find them. I don’t want to see some guy rambling about nothing for twenty minutes of unedited game footage. I want a little intro telling me what the trash mobs are, then I want to see the first boss and his special mechanics, then the second boss, and so on. I don’t even need to see the whole boss fight. The whole video should be five minutes or less. And I don’t want to have the in-game dungeon guide read to me, either. I want to know in five words or less what I need to worry about. 167 words.
  • WoW Warlords of Draenor Impressions. 2013-11-18 8:00 PM.
    • MMORPG

    Here are some first impressions of the newly announced WoW expansion Warlords of Draenor. I’m not a hardcore WoW player but recently I’ve been playing more than I usually do, so I have more of an opinion than “meh, whatever.” New Character Models. It’s about time, I say. I can’t believe anyone would oppose this. I found it rather annoying that they made these nice, smooth panda models and animations for MoP but left everybody else with like fourty-seven triangles and six frames of movement. 508 words.
  • WoW Tanks Are Top DPS??. 2013-11-26 4:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Tanking

    I realize nobody wants to read about WoW, but historically I haven’t played it much, and about 90% of it is still new to me. Well “new” isn’t the right word exactly-it’s more that WoW’s implementation of familiar MMO tropes is new to me. For example, I’ve made a shocking observation in my low to mid-range dungeon runs: The tank almost always does the most damage in the group. Sometimes by a very large margin. 339 words.

December, 2013

  • WoW Progress Report. 2013-12-16 4:00 PM.
    • MMORPG

    I bought a 3-month subscription for WoW when I suddenly got interested in playing again. Now that I’m running out of interest, the subscription will be expiring in January. It’s obvious that game developers are not doing subscriptions anymore, but I have to say, it’s pretty awesome to play a game where you aren’t bothered with cash shops or gems or other alternate forms of cash-based currency. Anyway, my highest-level character in WoW is a 66 Night Elf Hunter. I rolled him back in Vanilla WoW when a Hunter was just about the only way to go around soloing without spending all of your time either dead or healing between encounters. He’s still the guy I do all my solo questing with, but now it’s trivial beyond belief. I just mow down all the mobs in the Outlands like cutting grass with a butter knife. Or cutting butter with a scythe. Or something. It’s actually not very fun. I typically log in with him, finish a handful of quests, and then log out. 493 words.

January, 2014

  • WoW Battle Pets FTW. 2014-01-09 4:00 PM.
    • MMORPG

    This is it. It’s all or nothing. My marmot is almost out of health. He won’t survive another round, and he’s the last one. I throw the box. I watch with breath caught in my throat as it teeters … totters … and falls down on the frog. I got it! I pump my fist and celebrate the capture of a new battle pet in WoW. My gnome jumps for joy on the screen, too. For this is not just any captured battle pet. This is a blue. A blue frog, to be specific. Not blue in skin color, mind you. Blue in rarity. That means it’s a special frog with lots of health and survivability. You don’t see blue battle pets out in the wild very often, so you try to grab them when you see them. 303 words.
  • WoW – Who to Boost. 2014-01-28 4:00 PM.
    • MMORPG

    I am blatantly stealing TAGN’s post subject here, which is the question of who to boost to 90 for Warlords of Draenor. My situation is a lot different than his though, because I only play WoW when I’m really bored with other games, and my highest-level character has only recently broken into the Wrath of the Lich King era of the game. Hunter? This was the second character I created when I started WoW in 2006, and my second-oldest surviving MMO character. (The first oldest is a warrior that I never play and should delete, but, well, he was my first WoW character.) He’s around level 72 now, having just left Outland for Northrend. It would be interesting to bump him up to 90, but then I would probably never experience any of that solo content between 72 and 90. I think I’ll pass on him. 508 words.

February, 2014

  • WoW – Outlands Completed, Or At Least Left. 2014-02-04 4:00 PM.
    • MMORPG

    Due to a heat pump failure, my normal schedule of writing scintillating posts (ha!) was totally borked. But lucky for you, I found some posts that I have previously rejected as being totally lame and irrelevant, pulled from the dregs of the barrel of mediocrity. My WoW Hunter has finally reached the level cap! Of Burning Crusade, that is. Which means he is now Level 70, a mere twenty levels and five years behind where everyone else is. I spent a weekend burning through quests (ha, get it?) in the Blade’s Edge Mountains and Netherstorm, and when I was nearing the end of level 69, I suddenly realized that it was pointless to finish the questing in the Outlands because the very first quests in Wrath of the Lich King would probably give me ridiculously awesome gear, higher experience, and more money. So I dropped everything and left. 447 words.
  • WoW – $60 Seems Reasonable. 2014-02-27 7:49 PM.
    • MMORPG

    I don’t have a problem with Blizzard’s $60 for a level 90 character. It’s within reach, but high enough to keep it from being an impulse buy (for me, at least). I think I would only pay to level a brand new character. It seems like a waste of money to take a mid-level or higher character up to 90. If you’re a person who can play all day and night, I could see where $60 seems high, because you can probably level a character to 90 within a month of subscription time, which is $15 I think. Even I could probably level a character to 90 in less than four months, which is $60 of subscription time. (Not counting 3-month discounts.) 312 words.

March, 2014

  • Landmark et al – Take My Money!. 2014-03-03 4:07 PM.
    • MMORPG

    Here’s my feedback to SOE regarding Landmark’s proposed monetization plans: Hey can I just pay you and not get spammed with advertising for potions and costumes? That would be super. Oh, and by the way I already paid you. Maybe factor that into your plans, too. Also, are you ever planning to increase the percentage of your game that is finished? It’s been at 60% now for a month. (Okay, that probably wasn’t fair. But I still think it’s ridiculous to claim that Landmark is anywhere near 60% finished.) 209 words.

June, 2014

  • Mid-June MMO Status Report. 2014-06-20 3:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Status

    Not much to talk about, so here’s a non-WildStar MMO status report! ArcheAge. I’ve only logged in to pay the taxes on my measely 8×8 farm, and occasionally grow aspen trees. I don’t expect to play this any more until after it launches. The Secret World. I have logged in every few days to grind through a mission or two in the City of the Sun God zone. I’m attempting to collect AP and SP so I can fill out my skills better, which will better prepare me to go back to the Besieged Farmlands and continue the main story quest, which will then eventually allow me to get to Tokyo perhaps sometime in 2018. 421 words.
  • WoW – Yeah, You Read That Right. 2014-06-23 3:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Status

    There’s WildStar to play, right? So of course I spent a big chunk of time over the weekend playing … wait for it … World of Warcraft. I have about ten days left on a subscription so I figured why not use it. I leveled my Hunter from level 72 to 75 with plain old PvE questing. It now seems quite plausible to level up to 90 before WoD comes out. Especially when it seems like everything you touch fills up 5% of your experience bar. In other words, leveling in the WotLK zones feels a lot faster than it was in the BC zones. (But then I’m making no attempt to finish all the quests I find now.) 346 words.

July, 2014

  • Ditching WildStar for WoW. 2014-07-02 3:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Status

    I cancelled my WildStar subscription*. It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s just that I don’t feel like playing it any more. My Esper has remained largely static between levels 20 and 30, with no noticeable improvements in abilities, so I fully anticipate it will just be a repetitive chore to get from 30 to 50, at which time I would enter the cesspool of toxic behavior that I keep hearing about. Don’t fret, though, I’m sure I’ll be back someday. 383 words.
  • WoW – 85 of 90 – Death March Continues. 2014-07-08 3:08 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Status

    Status of my WoW death march to 90: My Hunter is at level 85. I finished the Deepholm zone which was quite enjoyable; it was colorful and weird and gigantic (although strangely devoid of pets to tame). I had just started the Twilight Highlands, which the “Altoholic” addon told me was where I should go next, when I hit 85. It’s not as colorful but I love the way the dwarves go on those little raids to retake their little villages. Major props to Blizzard for improving the “look and feel” of their zones with every expansion. 514 words.
  • WoW – 86 of 90 – Jade Forest. 2014-07-11 3:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Status

    I’ve been experiencing a lot of drama at work lately, so vegging out with WoW has been pretty awesome. By the time I get home I’m not in any mood for challenging gameplay. I tried the Death Knight for the first time and couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to use all those weird rune resources or whatever. So on we go toward level 90 with the Hunter! I was going to spend a little more time in the Twilight Highlands to see what happened with the dwarves, but then I noticed that my experience bar barely moved after I turned in a few quests post-85. That was when I realized how many XP were required to get from 85 to 86 and I dropped everything to start the Mists of Pandaria quest line in Stormwind. 593 words.
  • WoW – 87 of 90 – Jade Forest Continued. 2014-07-17 3:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Status

    Since I’m now pretty sure I’m going to hit 90 well before Draenor comes out (I’m guessing it will be late Fall at the earliest, but I hear mutterings that it may not even make it out by December), I no longer feel the need to rush to maximize my leveling. So I’ve stuck around in the Jade Forest doing “low” level (85) quests so I can complete the whole zone, rather than rushing ahead to the higher level zones. Still, I hit level 87 before I completed the entire Jade Forest. Has anyone noticed that leveling is really fast in WoW? 422 words.

August, 2014

  • WoW – 88 of 90 – Valley of the Four Winds. 2014-08-06 3:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Status

    July was a rough month for me, professionally speaking. To make a long story short, I’m unemployed now. Consequently I’m forcing myself not to spend any money on games, so I cancelled my WoW subscription and I’m sticking to bought-but-unplayed Steam games. But before I did that, I made it to level 88. Ding! Valley of the Four Winds was kind of a weird place. Lots of giant mutant vegetables and Monty Python-esque cute, furry, dangerous creatures. 99 words.
  • Warlords of Draenor Launches Nov 13, 2014. 2014-08-14 10:56 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings

    I don’t really have anything to say about it, though. I just wanted my cleverly-crafted post title to draw you into my blog lair. Ha-ha! I social-engineered you! (I’ve been reading about copywriting and headlines today. Sorry.) I will say, though, that I’m a little surprised Warlords of Draenor is shipping so early. I figured it wouldn’t be out until December. I haven’t heard anything but “it’s not ready” from beta testers. 72 words.
  • WoW: 10 Years, 10 Questions, 10 Answers. 2014-08-19 3:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    • Responses

    Alternative Chat is asking everyone 10 questions about WoW for a documentary. Most answers that I’ve seen have been coming from semi-hardcore WoW players, but I thought it would be fun to give answers from a non-hardcore WoW player. Plus, it’s good material for a blog post! 1. Why did you start playing Warcraft? I started playing in 2006 after I saw the infamous Make Love, Not Warcraft episode of Southpark. I had had a WoW trial CD (yes, a CD!) sitting around for a long time prior to that from (I think) a video card purchase. I was scared to try it, though, because I had previously played Asheron’s Call way too much and I was a little worried I would get sucked into WoW in the same way. (Turns out I didn’t.) 1,006 words.
  • What’s The Best Subscription-Only MMO?. 2014-08-29 3:00 PM.
    • Advice
    • MMORPG
    • Opinion

    What’s the best subscription-only MMO out there right now? If you could only pick one to maintain, which one would it be? (By the way, the possible answers are: WoW, EVE, WildStar, ESO, or FFXIV.) This is pretty easy for me to answer, actually: Final Fantasy XIV. Hands down. No need to even talk about it. It’s beautiful, it’s fun, there’s a lot to do, it’s updated often, it does every MMO mechanic (that matters) exactly right, and it’s cheaper than the others at $12/month. The only down side is that replayability is low if you ever want to make a second character. (You don’t need to, though, since you can play any class.) 328 words.

October, 2014

  • Ping-Ponging My Way To Nightmare Tide. 2014-10-23 5:41 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Status

    I took a little break from ArcheAge and it turned into an unintentional gaming ping-ping-a-thon. Don't worry, I still log into ArcheAge to gather the fruit from my trees a couple times a day. Also, I finally destroyed my Scarecrow Garden to make a Farmer's Workbench. I hated to do it, though. I wish I could rotate my house to face a different direction. FFXIV First I dropped back into Final Fantasy XIV again because I had an active subscription. I didn't really have a goal but it turned out that there was a Halloween event going on so I went through that quest line. Seasonal events in FFXIV are very quick and easy, so it didn’t take more than an hour and I ended up with some neat-looking scary barding for my Chocobo. (I think it's the only barding I've gotten so far.) The rewards this year were far better than the silly ghost costume we got last year. 870 words.
  • WoW – Level Cap At Last!. 2014-10-24 3:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Status

    I haven’t mentioned Bragtoberfest yet because a) I haven’t really had anything to brag about and b) I’m not a very braggy sort of person to begin with. I’ve never been one of those people that parade around banks riding high-end mounts and wearing raid gear to make everyone jealous. I usually wear rag-tag outfits that don’t match. But this is undoubtedly the braggiest thing I will accomplish this month so: I dinged 90 in WoW! First time I’ve gotten to the level cap in WoW since I started in 2006! 385 words.

November, 2014

  • Rift Enthusiasm Waning, Bring on Draenor. 2014-11-29 4:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Status

    November is nearly over, which means NaNoWriMo is almost over for another year. As of this posting, I have some 1,500 words left to do before validating. (The story is nowhere near done, and I expect I will need to add another 40,000-50,000 words to actually finish the novel.) I’m growing a bit tired of Rift. I finished the main story and got my main Mage to 65, and my Rogue, Warrior, and Cleric are all sitting at 60. I still enjoy playing Rift and sending out Minions, but it’s prohibitively time-consuming to farm Void Stones from 61+ Zone Events to upgrade one’s gear, and I’m not really in the mood for dungeons right now. 370 words.

January, 2015

  • Arbitrary Mid-January Status Update. 2015-01-19 7:33 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Status

    I’m in a “bouncing around between games” mode at the moment, now that I’m done with Elite: Dangerous. I’ve been logging into two or three or four different MMOs a day, looking for one to capture my imagination. Level 100! WoW. My WoW subscription runs out on the 20th, and I won’t be renewing. WoW is a fun game, but I always tire of it pretty quickly. I did manage to reach level 100 with my Hunter and upgrade my Garrison, though. I have enjoyed my time in the game, but I simply can’t comprehend how people think the story in this expansion is the best ever. I guess I’ve never “gotten” the lore in WoW. (WoW might be the only game that I care less about the quest text than ArcheAge.) I thought there was supposed to be time travel in here somewhere but at no point do I remember anyone saying that I traveled back in time. (Except one quest to kill Banthar in Nagrand that sort-of referred to it, some five zones into the game.) There are Russian space goats and angry orcs everywhere, but then I was in a place with a bunch of bird people and giant crow gods or something. *shrug* I feel bad for people who will feel obligated to spend the next two years playing this expansion until the next one comes out. It’s okay to play other games, guys. You really don’t have to live in one game your whole life. :) 1,043 words.
  • Comparing Played Times. 2015-01-21 4:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings

    I found an old, old screenshot of my main Asheron’s Call character from near the end of my playing time: What MMORPGs looked like when they were more work than fun. There’s some interesting things to note there. First of all, my /played time was 17d 11h 26m 22s. I spent a ridiculous amount of time playing that game… it seemed like my entire life was spent in that game for about a year. (I was playing AC when everyone else was playing EverQuest.) Yet I only reached level 35. In AC, your character “level” wasn’t much except a measurement of how much you had played-your power level came from your skills. Level 35 seemed like an impossibly high number to me back then. I knew people in their 40s and I couldn’t imagine how anyone could get there without giving up sleep entirely. 402 words.

February, 2015

  • WoW – My Favorite Addons. 2015-02-20 4:00 PM.
    • Advice
    • MMORPG
    • Opinion

    I started this post in November 2014, and TAGN’s recent post on addons reminded me that it was still sitting in Drafts. So I thought I would finally post it. Addons are a fact of life when you play World of Warcraft. You can play without them (I’ve done it), and most of the gameplay basics are there, but Blizzard has consistently refused to put in any of the quality-of-life enhancements that we are all used to from every single other MMO released in the past ten years. (I’m thinking of Rift in particular here, which put in just about every quality-of-life improvement you could have ever wanted in an MMO UI.) Thus you’ll probably want some addons for WoW. Here are my favorites, not so much to recommend them but more as a handy index for later when I inevitably lose them all after a reformat. 909 words.

August, 2015

  • Reactions To WoW Legion. 2015-08-10 3:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings
    • Pre-Release

    World of Warcraft is so far off my radar right now that the announcement of the new Legion expansion* is about as interesting to me as a deer tick. Even that horrible analogy was more interesting to me. It’s not that I don’t like WoW when I play it. It just doesn’t hold my attention for very long. There are two things I just don’t understand about WoW fandom: The first is how people can look around at all of the MMORPGs out there and decide that WoW is the only one they want to play, and the second is how anyone can follow any of the lore that happens in WoW. 674 words.

August, 2016

  • Legion Pre-Expansion Invasions Are Fun. 2016-08-15 2:36 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Reviews
    • Status

    I had fun with the WoW Zone Events aka. Invasions over the weekend. But first, the biggest news from my weekend was that I finally moved all my furniture from the old rental house into my new house. I achieved my goal of picking the hottest day of the entire year to move. I believe it was upwards of 95 degrees Farenheit with a heat index of 105. (Google tells me that’s 35 and 40.5 Celsius, but that doesn’t sound nearly hot enough to me.) The temperature reading inside the old house was 92 by the time we left. Since I am not currently dead, I must have stayed sufficiently hydrated. 845 words.
  • Legion Ordered. 2016-08-17 8:12 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Status

    I went ahead and ordered Legion. Why not? I had fun with the last expansion. For a little while, at least. And a level 100 boost is worth a fair chunk of change to me, considering it normally takes me years to get to the level cap in WoW. (Although I confess I have yet to use the level 90 boost I got in the last expansion.) My second-highest level character in WoW is a Gnome Mage at, now, level 77, thanks to a handful of Invasions. This was also one of my original characters from back in 2006. I hear the experience gain from Invasions has gone down so I guess I won’t quite get the free ride to 100 that I’d hoped for. Still, I picked up four levels a lot faster than I would have through questing. And as it turns out, maybe fast leveling isn’t such a blessing for this character. 571 words.
  • WoW Invasion Level Tally. 2016-08-22 5:26 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Status

    WoW leveling tallies from the Invasion events so far: Mage from 73 to 87. Warlock from 50 to 60. Priest from 34 to 52. Druid from 23 to 32. My goal is to get the Priest and Druid to 60 before the end of the event. That will give me three choices from which to pick my two level boosts (one to 90 and one to 100). (My understanding is that if you boost from 60 it will also boost your professions too.) 636 words.
  • Melee Classes in WoW. 2016-08-26 6:14 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings

    While leveling my alts in WoW, it occurred to me that I don’t ever play any melee characters. I have a Warrior-two of them in fact-but I just don’t like Warriors in WoW. My very first character in 2006 was a Warrior, who I leveled to about 20-something and gave up on because I kept getting killed by those stupid Defias (or whatever they’re called) guys in Westfall. (Back in those days if you ever got jumped by 2 mobs you were basically dead-at least I was-hence my switch to a Hunter.) 807 words.
  • Early Legion Impressions. 2016-08-31 9:18 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Reviews

    So far Legion is … well, just like playing WoW. On your mark, get set, … I only played for about an hour and a half last night. I stopped right after I got my Mage Artifact staff Ebonchill. Obviously I haven’t seen all there is to see in Legion, but it starts out with … quests. Just like you’ve done in WoW for the last 50 bazillion years. 801 words.

September, 2016

  • Why I Can’t Follow WoW’s Story. 2016-09-02 3:30 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings

    I hadn’t had a chance to play much WoW since Tuesday, so I logged in Thursday night to continue my adventures with my Mage and his new Ebonchill gizmo. I hadn’t done much of anything since he obtained his Artifact. When I logged in, I had a quest to turn into the Great Alakazam, or whatever his name is. (I can’t quite make it out in the picture below.) I clicked him and turned in the quest, not really paying attention to what it was. I vaguely remembered this guy was supposed to find more mages to bring into “my” class hall. 1,012 words.
  • WoW Legion Status: Almost Done. 2016-09-08 9:14 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Status

    Since my last WoW post, I’ve finished the first four zones, and leveled my Mage to 106 and my Hunter to 110. Total WoW time played since August 30, according to ManicTime, has been 55 hours. (It was a holiday weekend.) So yes, basically I’ve been playing nothing but WoW. I intended to play my Mage all the way to the end, and started out going through Azsuna, then Stormheim, ending up at level 106. (By “finishing” zones, by the way, I mean I did all the quests I found and completed the final dungeon in the zone’s story which gives you the foozboozle piece you put in that Hall of the Guardian.) 892 words.
  • WoW Legion, Last Impressions. 2016-09-12 5:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Reviews
    • Status

    In this post I will share my thoughts on the new features found in Legion. This will probably be the last time I talk about WoW since, barring a last minute change of heart, I’m planning to let my subscription end today, the 12th. A brief character status update: In case you’re wondering, the brick wall hits in Suramar, the fifth zone. That’s where the grind begins and you’ll start wondering why you ever came back to WoW. This is the exact quest that did it for me: 2,200 words.

December, 2016

  • The Prestigious Endgame Viable Awards 2016. 2016-12-22 4:00 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Single-Player
    • Steam

    It occurred to me that the end of the year is approaching, and it’s time to do one of those year-end posts that bloggers love to do. Unfortunately I kind of hate doing them. It’s a lot of work. You have to actually look things up and think and count and multiply and divide and things like that. That goes against my normal principal of blogging by “just typing words into a text editor.” 690 words.

August, 2017

  • Comfort MMORPGs. 2017-08-25 2:30 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Responses

    Here’s another post based on a MassivelyOP’s Daily Grind: What’s Your Comfort MMO? I find this to be a somewhat odd question, because I generally like to have a constantly-changing game experience, as opposed to an experience that is always the same. I am the kind of person who likes to learn and try new things all the time (within the boundaries of crippling anxieties, of course). This is why I try out most new MMORPGs if I can. 513 words.

November, 2017

  • WoW – Battle For Azeroth. 2017-11-06 3:30 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Pre-Release

    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. 595 words.
  • WoW – What I Thought In 2006. 2017-11-22 3:30 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings

    In light of the announcement of World of Warcraft Classic, everybody’s abuzz with WoW nostalgia, so I thought it would be fun to re-post my very first thoughts about WoW Vanilla from 2006. From blizzard.com - I can’t find any screenshots prior to 2014. World of Warcraft October 10, 2006 Inspired by the recent episode of South Park, and being bored with FlatOut2, I finally installed my trial version of World of Warcraft yesterday, which I’d gotten with a video card about a year ago I think. I’ve been trying to stay away from MMORPGs because, as South Park indicated, you really can’t play them competitively unless you’re willing to join some kind of guild and give up your life, and really, what’s the point in playing a game if not to win? :) But I’ve heard repeatedly that WoW was particularly good for so-called “casual gamers” and people who liked solo adventuring, so I gave it a shot. 1,565 words.

February, 2018

  • MMO News Reactions 4. 2018-02-09 3:30 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Roundup

    _A series of short reactions to the week’s MMORPG stories, otherwise known as “just about giving up on blogging” because I can’t be bothered to write long posts lately. _ Nexon laid off some people. I don’t think I play any Nexon games. Forbes interview on WoW Classic. I don’t think I mentioned this at the time, but while Blizzcon made it sound like WoW Classic was right around the corner, I secretly thought it sounded like they hadn’t even started on it yet. This confirms that it sounds like they haven’t even gotten out of the “memos around the office” phase of this project yet. How many years away will this thing be? Will Star Citizen be out before WoW Classic? 165 words.
  • MMO News Reactions 5. 2018-02-16 3:30 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Roundup

    A series of short reactions to the week’s MMORPG stories, otherwise known as “just about giving up on blogging” because I can’t be bothered to write long posts lately. Sorry about last week’s post. I was scrolling through Twitter last Friday and much to my own surprise I found that I’d posted something to my blog without even looking at it or setting a header image or anything. This time I will refrain from scheduling this to post right after creating the draft!_ 318 words.

April, 2018

  • Weeklies – Haven Week. 2018-04-06 2:30 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Roundup

    New title! “Weeklies?” Get it? Like Dailies, but Weeklies! I was actually planning to stop doing these but then Bhagpuss had to go and say that he enjoyed them. :) I’ve been very distracted this week by re-watching the complete Haven series, because @MissByx reminded me that I had not yet seen past season 4, so I started it again from the beginning. I could write volumes about this show but I will try to refrain. The show has almost no connection to the novella it’s based on (which was a noir crime drama, not supernatural in any way), but it captures the spirit of Stephen King’s other supernatural works very well. It is also a textbook example of how building likable, relatable, grounded characters is the most important thing in genre fiction (for me, at least). The style and tone of the show changes quite a lot over the course of its six-but-they-call-it-five seasons, but it still resonated very strongly with me all the way to the end. (The video game tie-in is this: The show’s lead Emily Rose also voiced Elena Fisher in the Uncharted games, and fellow Uncharted actors Nolan North and Claudia Black also appeared in Haven.) 470 words.

July, 2018

  • Week End – WoW 8.0. 2018-07-21 2:30 PM.
    • MMORPG

    Weekly news and observations. In The News The biggest news this week is the World of Warcraft 8.0 pre-expansion patch dropping Tuesday. I don’t have a WoW subscription and have no plans to play this expansion (which doesn’t actually begin until next month), at least not right away. It’s tempting to jump in with all the excitement at launch time, but I haven’t played WoW since about two weeks after the last expansion, and I know I’ll only play this expansion for about two weeks before running into the “I’ve done all of this before” wall, so I’ll just save myself the $65 this time around. Not to mention I can’t play games right now anyway, see below. 455 words.
  • WoW – Questioning My Belonging In MMORPGs. 2018-07-24 2:30 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings

    MMORPG players are abuzz about World of Warcraft’s next expansion, Battle for Azeroth, which begins next month. (There are too many posts to link here; throw a dart at the blogosphere and you’ll find a post on Battle for Azeroth preparations.) The last character I played in unsubscribed WoW: A level 3 Goblin, c. 2017 Nothing makes me puzzle over my association with the MMORPG genre more than a World of Warcraft expansion. Nothing makes me feel so out of place-so much like an outsider, like I don’t fit in with the MMORPG player crowd. 1,192 words.
  • Week End – Thorny Battle. 2018-07-28 2:30 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Roundup

    In The News Nobody is talking about anything except World of Warcraft’s “War of Thorns” event. It’s either the greatest thing ever, or the worst thing ever, or some variation in between, depending on where you look. However, some people are talking about the newest update to No Man’s Sky. I’ve been tempted to get this game forever, but I’m really hesitant to get a game so dependent on procedurally-generated worlds, even at a discounted Steam price of $30. I didn’t care for Trove’s procedurally-generated worlds too much. 259 words.

August, 2018

  • Those WoW Cinematics – Blaugust 4. 2018-08-04 2:16 PM.
    • MMORPG

    From Legion, Helheim Normally each Saturday I post a summary of interesting gaming news and events from my week. But this week, I haven’t seen any gaming stories of interest, and I’ve already posted a number of things about myself for Blaugust. Instead, this morning I thought I would write about these wacky World of Warcraft cinematics all the kids are talking about. Specifically, Warbringer Jaina, Warbringer Sylvanas, and Old Soldier. 335 words.
  • Battle for Azeroth Impulse Buy – Blaugust 13. 2018-08-13 3:19 PM.
    • MMORPG

    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 Siege of Lordaeron – Blaugust 14. 2018-08-14 5:55 PM.
    • MMORPG

    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.
  • 2.5 Hrs Into Battle for Azeroth – Blaugust 15. 2018-08-15 1:40 PM.
    • MMORPG

    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.
  • Finding Teldrassil – Blaugust 16. 2018-08-16 2:48 PM.
    • MMORPG

    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.
  • Realm Pop – Blaugust 17. 2018-08-17 12:04 PM.
    • MMORPG

    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.
  • Sunday Browns and Disenchanted Disappointment – Blaugust 19. 2018-08-19 3:36 PM.
    • Media
    • MMORPG

    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. 581 words.
  • Drustvar Screenshots – Blaugust 20. 2018-08-20 6:07 PM.
    • MMORPG

    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. 108 words.
  • Drustvar Complete, Mastodon – Blaugust 21. 2018-08-21 1:24 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings

    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. 627 words.
  • Where Exactly Is This Battle? – Blaugust 24. 2018-08-24 6:26 PM.
    • MMORPG

    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. I knew this was going to happen, and I fell for the hype anyway. 657 words.
  • Stormsong Valley and On Accident – Blaugust 25. 2018-08-25 1:45 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Writing

    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. 494 words.
  • A Logical Dead End – Blaugust 26. 2018-08-26 3:19 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings

    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.
  • Side Quests and Spigots – Blaugust 27. 2018-08-27 1:51 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Musings

    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.
  • Battle for Azeroth 119 Update – Blaugust 30. 2018-08-30 1:45 PM.
    • MMORPG

    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. 1,008 words.

September, 2018

  • Games Played – August 2018. 2018-09-01 2:30 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Progression Report

    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. If you keep going, that’s fantastic, but if you need to take a break, that’s fine too. Every blogger has a different pace that their comfortable with. There’s no wrong way to do it. 387 words.
  • WoW – Finding Jaina’s Trail Again. 2018-09-03 2:30 PM.
    • MMORPG

    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. 601 words.
  • Week End – Carbine, CCP, Daybreak, Witcher. 2018-09-08 2:30 PM.
    • Blog

    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! I rather like the process of keeping a draft open throughout the week and just throwing sentences into it now and again as they occur to me. 1,275 words.

October, 2018

  • Games Played – September 2018. 2018-10-01 2:30 PM.
    • Consoles
    • Progression Report
    • Roundup
    • RPG

    Even with a week and a half of down time from cataract surgery, I still managed to play a few games this past month. The Witcher (Enhanced Edition), 39 hours. This is what I spent most of my gaming time doing after World of Warcraft and before surgery, and a little bit afterward to finish up the story. This is the first time I’ve finished the whole game. It got kind of weird at the end. Dragon Age: Inquisition, 5 hours. I restarted this a number of times with different classes, trying to find something to play after WoW. But it didn’t stick (again). World of Warcraft, 5 hours. The last bit before I lost interest. I don’t think I logged in for the last week of my subscription time. See you in two years for the next expansion, WoW! One problem with console gaming is that I don’t know where to find statistical data showing how much I played on the PS4. But I would guess I played 6 or 7 hours of The Last of Us (Remastered) this month. 296 words.
  • Battle for Azeroth Conclusions. 2018-10-03 4:06 PM.
    • MMORPG

    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. I don’t see that myself. I only see the people saying, “Gosh there’s a lot of people angry about this expansion.” I don’t know where people are looking to see all these angry people, or why people are even looking there. I’ve only seen people reporting what I consider to be legitimate criticisms in a fairly respectful way. 938 words.

December, 2018

  • Endgame Viable Awards 2018. 2018-12-31 3:30 PM.
    • MMORPG
    • Single-Player
    • Steam

    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. 1,055 words.

February, 2019

  • Cultural Perspective On The Activision/Blizzard News. 2019-02-14 3:30 PM.
    • Opinion

    I’ve been trying to think about how to approach this particular story, and whether I should address it at all. It doesn’t really affect me personally, and it’s dangerously close to Expressing A Political Opinion On The Internet. Which is basically an invitation for the world to come over here and yell angrily because there is only one correct opinion on everything and conformity must be enforced at all costs. Because yelling at people is historically proven to be the best way to change their views. And thus Reddit was born. Ahem. Anyway. 2,326 words.

August, 2019

  • WoW Classic Fever Heating Up. 2019-08-16 10:16 PM.
    • MMORPG

    Most of the blogging and Twittering MMO world is talking about World of Warcraft Classic, with all the recent hubbub about name reservations. My advanced Googling skills tell me that it launches on August 27th. Not WoW Classic, but probably a quest that will be in WoW Classic. I personally have never been interested in WoW Classic, have never yearned for the “good old days” of World of Warcraft, and have no idea why anyone would want such a thing. The Vanilla game engine was clearly inferior to the modern engine, which leaves nostalgia as the only reason to play. But I never played in a WoW guild, never did any raiding or dungeons, never formed any lifelong Internet friendships or married anyone in-game. WoW came along well *after* my “nostalgia days” of Internet gaming. I’ve been ignoring the whole thing. 979 words.
  • WoW Classic Obligatory Post. 2019-08-27 2:26 PM.
    • MMORPG

    Okay I’m going to try to be brief here because nobody likes a buzzkill. World of Warcraft Classic launched Monday night here in the U.S. It was extremely smooth and free of major technical issues, as far as I’m concerned, which is an amazing accomplishment. Blizzard has gotten really good at launches. The “narrative” will be that it was a catastrophe, because that’s the only narrative that can be spun to draw a crowd, but it wasn’t. Queues were inevitable. 693 words.

October, 2019

  • Four News Stories. 2019-10-09 10:28 PM.
    • MMORPG

    For SEO purposes, I should probably break these into separate posts, but I just don’t feel like it. But I’ve identified four big gaming news stories of late that I figured I should at least make a note of for posterity. Raph Koster’s New Company. Don’t really care. It’s vaporware until proven otherwise. Mainly it makes me wonder about the future of Crowfall. Perhaps he’s only left because Crowfall is fully set on its course and there’s no more creative work to do. Personally I’ve been wondering lately if Crowfall will be the first MMO to start its servers, run for a while with weekly press releases and publicity and patches, and then sunset, all without ever launching. 668 words.

October, 2020

  • Resident Evil 3 Demo. 2020-10-19 10:43 PM.
    • Blog
    • Consoles
    • Videos

    I tried out the Resident Evil 3 remake demo on the PS4 the other day. It looks nice, but the gameplay is brutal. It takes three headshots to kill a zombie, and about a dozen non-headshots if your aim is as bad as mine, so you run out of bullets in about 10 seconds flat, and then have to either run away or use the knife. The knife is not a very effective weapon. 530 words.

August, 2021

  • Best MMO Technology. 2021-08-25 8:40 AM.
    • Gaming

    Yesterday I mentioned how much I worried that Final Fantasy XIV was staggering into their new expansion on duct tape and bailing wire, so I thought today I’d mention the MMORPGs that appear to have a much more solid technology base that I don’t have to worry about. 417 words.

January, 2022

August, 2022

  • Those New MMOs. 2022-08-15 7:07 PM.
    • Gaming
    • MMORPG

    I heard talk about a couple of new MMOs, Tower of Fantasy, and one other one which disappeared so fast I can’t even remember the name of it. 255 words.

September, 2022

  • Wrath Classic Launch. 2022-09-27 8:41 AM.
    • Gaming
    • MMORPG

    There’s a bit (ha!) of buzz going around about World of Warcraft’s Wrath of the Lich King Classic launch today. 352 words.

December, 2022

November, 2023

  • Next.js - November 2023 Part 2. 2023-11-30 10:00 AM.
    • Blog

    World of Warcraft did a thing. New Next.js and AWS blog development. Dev vlogs. Lower Decks. Fairy Tale. Thanksgiving vacation. A work presentation. Jupyter. 2,536 words.

January, 2026

  • MMORPGs and a Polar Vortex - January 2026 Part 2. 2026-01-31 5:01 PM.
    • Blog

    The Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker trial The Dark Inside, World of Warcraft Catch-up Experience and Shadowlands, a new brain MRI, and a sudden burst of political commentary you surely won’t want to miss. 4,204 words.

February, 2026

March, 2026

May, 2026

  • The Recluse Report - April 2026 Part 2. 2026-05-01 11:22 AM.
    • Blog

    A long one about trying some tactical RPGs, Pathfinder: Kingmaker continued, NotebookLM for video transcripts, some shows, and other random news. 5,846 words.