The Site

I did my complaining about WordPress early this month, so I can move on to something more upbeat for this section.  I got at least a bit of recognition this month from CCP as they included the blog in the Community Beat post published on July 5th. (The title says “July 7” which just says to me an American wrote the title and screwed up the Euro date pattern.  Swift?  I blame all things on CCP Swift now.)

Woo hoo!  I guess I have to set aside my usual “CCP only cares about Twitch streamers and the rare site they let into the community program” gripe for a while.  I mean, it is still true, but I can’t gripe about it for a few weeks now.

Hey, they didn’t just link to this blog, they also took a moment to link out to my other blog, EVE Online Pictures.  So it was a twofer!  That site saw an immediate boost in view!

I mean, maybe that wasn’t a huge boost, but when the average is zero, anything is an improvement.  (It looked like one person showed up and used infinite scroll to look at pictures until they got bored and moved on.)

And what prompted them to notice my work?  Was it my ongoing writing about life in New Eden?  Was it my monthly look at destruction from the MER?  Was it my criticism of their economic policy and their plans for null sec?  Was it my years of CSM election coverage?  Was it my posts about the Alliance Tournament?  Was it all the historical posts about wars in null sec?  Was it because I was bitching again about the in-game map?

Nope!  It was due to me repeating the story Asher Elias told at the fireside a while back about Ser Fukalite’s ship spinning medal… a medal which I am pretty sure was handed out by the community team.

So the lesson here is clear enough that I can put it in meme form.

You can close the loop if you just write about what the people who write the community outreach post are up to.  Look for more of that for sure!

One Year Ago

We got the announcement that Blaugust would be returning for its 10th edition.  We had a decent list of signups in advance.

I did a run down of my gaming in the first six months of 2023.

EverQuest and EverQuest II got quiet summer producer’s letters.

Blizzard’s Q2 2023 financials were all about Diablo IV.

In Wrath Classic I was indulging in the Call of the Crusade update.  That is always good for faction rep… and for heirloom gear for alts to come to Northrend.

The group gave heroic Gundrak a try and we didn’t quite have it in us.  That got us doing Wintergrasp for welfare epics… when we were not having desync issues.

I thought about flying in Wrath of the Lich King, probably the last expansion where it wasn’t a controversy.

Blizz was warming up for WoW Classic Hardcore with the proposed rule set.

CCP announced that the EVE Online 20th Anniversary Edition box was ready to order… though the shipping was going to be so expensive they pledged to give is PLEX in compensation.  CCP also gave us the roadmap to the CSM18 election.  I went over the June 2023 destruction from the MER.

In New Eden the drama of the Tranquility Trading Consortium kept on going with Vily changing his mind and declaring it would carry on, just as a PanFam-only business.

Pandemic Horde lost their irreplaceable Pochven Fortizar in Skarkon.

And I reviewed The Fountain War a decade after its end.

The Metaverse was still trying to be a thing, but even after pouring billions into Facebook Horizon Worlds, Zuck’s metaverse vision still lacked legs, both literally and metaphorically.

Twitter, which was still Twitter, was trying to limit the posting rate of non-subscribers.  Many thought for sure that would kill Twitter, yet it lived.  Only Twitter could kill Twitter I opined, and it couldn’t even manage that right.  At that point I had spent a month with Twitter alternatives and Facebook launched Instagram Threads.  I tried to sum up the different pretenders and the communities they were fostering.

And then Elon announced his master plan, to change the name of Twitter to X.  Jesus wept he is so dumb.

I did a brief wrap up of the 2023 Steam Summer Sale.

I was looking at old books on my shelf wondering what to do with them… besides read them again.

And I started off on my Telephony Tales series of posts.  That started with my misspent youth and calling payphones at the mall and yelling past the Popcorn Lady.

Five Years Ago

There was a Steam Summer Sale to write about, with its odd contest.

Daybreak was fiddling around and registering studio names with the USPTO.

Pokemon Go hit its third birthday. StarCraft got cartooned.

And it looked like Blizz was going to give people a mount every six months so long as they subscribed to the six month renewal plan.

CCP, after saying they would change the 1 million skill point starter pack, just kept on selling it so long as there was sufficient demand.  But at least it was limited to one per account.

Out in null sec space, it was all about the Drifters as the month opened up.  They changed up a bit, but the war we had in progress was already ruined.  We tallied up the damage and headed home.  We had chased PanFam out of Tribute and Vale of the Silent.

But the Drifters were just the start of what would be dubbed the Chaos Era.  CCP announced that local would soon be blacked out in null sec.  We got warnings it was coming.  And then it hit and CCP said it would remain in place indefinitely. (Which some people took to mean permanently.)  The idea came from Hilmar, though many people were going on about null sec being risk averse.

The big VNI nerf hit in there as well.  And a tax increase!  Good thing devs don’t need to run for re-election.

Meanwhile, CCP was trying to keep people in the game during the blackout with skill point handouts.  So many skill points.  And they had to clarify what they meant even.  But the online player count suffered all the same.

And I was on CCP about maybe building their own killboard or at least making SKINs for all the things.

Still, I did get some play time in New Eden.  We did a Triglavian roam with DBRB.  I went on a blackout roam. I moved a dreadnought around to a new deployment on my own, then lost it.  It was a suicide dread.

I tried out DOTA Underlords.

I had been fiddling around with tracking my game play time for six months.

And, finally, we were getting ready for Blaugust once again.

Ten Years Ago

There was a site put up by eBay about game return on investment.  Unsurprisingly, it indicated that used games are a deal in that regard, so you should go buy some on eBay.

There was the passing of yet another Steam Summer Sale.

SOE forgot to pay their domain name registration.  Wasn’t that fun!  Meanwhile, Landmark was available for a deep discount after the Steam Summer Sale, leading to speculation about its future.

SuperData Research was listing out the Top Subscription MMOs while not defining what they really meant by the term.

Anarchy Online introduced a PLEX-like currency, GRACE.

The community manager for LOTRO was busy telling raiders and PvMP players that they weren’t getting any new content because they added up to less than 10% of the player population.

I finished up Pokemon Y on the 3DS.

In my attempt at the loremaster achievement in WoW I ran through Desolace, Feralas, and Thousand Needles one week, Felwood and Un’goro Crater the next.  Then it was Winterspring, Swamp of Sorrows, and the Blasted Lands, the Cape of Stranglethorn, and the final bit of the Eastern Kingdoms.  I was on a roll.

in EVE Online we were commuting to Delve, where maybe there was going to be a war, and chasing Brave Newbies around (then getting pipe bombed) when there wasn’t anything going on.  That was back when we owned Delve.  Fights went on sporadically for a while and many a Rupture was sacrificed simply try a fresh doctrine.  So many Ruptures.  Apocs did better.

Meanwhile the Crius expansion hit New Eden, making industry better… it did get better, right?

In EverQuest, on the Fippy Darkpaw Time Locked Progression server, the vote to unlock the Underfoot expansion failed, making it the second expansion ever to get voted down, the first being Gates of Discord nearly two years before.

With that I was wondering what other MMOs might go for the retro nostalgia server thing.  Not WoW, I was sure of that at the time.  Since then though…

I was also on about housing in MMOs, what has really worked for me and what has fallen flat and why.  This included some projection as to what garrisons might end up being in WoW.

Our epic game of Civilization V saw expansionism and direct conflict with the Aztec empire.

Fifteen Years Ago

I won a contest.  Granted, all I got was a T-shirt.  But that was probably more than you got.  And it was due to a video game.

Mythic announced a version of Warhammer Online for the Mac.  Not sure that helped anything at all.

I was, as usual, asking silly questions like why does Tetris gets faster.  Okay, it was an analogy, but it was still silly.

Oh, and then there was the horse.  Remember the $10 horse?  I did a poll about it and everything.  Boy, that seems like small potatoes these days.  I mean, that was a cash shop game selling a horse for $10.  Now WoW and EQ2 will sell you mounts that cost much more.

Gary Gannon announced that GAX Online was going to close in August, bringing to an end that experiment in gamer community building.

I asked what people considered cheating in an MMO.  It included another poll.  I was doing polls that July.

I did a parody of Tipa’s Daily Blog Roll feature.  That is some pretty rich stuff in hindsight.

In EVE Online I got another step closer to mining perfection.  I was also fiddling around with a fit for a Dominix.

In World of Warcraft the instance group hit Violet Hold and Gundrak, but couldn’t get the team together for Halls of Stone, so went back and did some Burning Crusade heroics just for kicks.

Then the instance group took a run at Onyxia.  The old school Onyxia.  She’s since been remade.

My daughter somehow got to Dalaran at level 16… without having the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

And even as we were doing all that, we were starting to mull over what we should do once we were level 80 with no new expansion in sight.  It only took us a year to try another game.  At about that time, my hunter alt hit level 80.

I also dredged up the old Alamo Teechs U 2 Play Druid post from the WoW forums.  Philosophical question:  Would Alamo have posted that if RealID had forced him to use his real name?

And, finally, my daughter was trying to get me to help her make WoW videos to post on YouTube.

Twenty-Five Years Ago

Billy Mitchell got the first perfect score in Pac-Man, though his record has since been expunged due to accusations about cheating.

Forty Five Years Ago

The Sony Walkman was introduced and portable music has not been the same since.  A pair of classmates of mine had a father went to Japan on business regularly and who brought them each one of the brand new devices back from one of his trips.  Those were the first two I ever saw.  Blue and gray cases and headphones with bright orange foam padding for the ears.

Most Viewed Posts in July

1. Blackrock Caverns for Four
2. Return from Pokemon Go Fest 2024
3. I Sold a SKIN on the Paragon Hub!
4. Level 45 at Last in Pokemon Go
5. Stars Reach Appears on Steam and all the Default Social Media Outlets
6. Timing those Lucky Eggs for Friendship Milestones in Pokemon Go
7. Starting No Man’s Sky – My Ship is on Fire and I am Being Irradiated
8. June 2024 in Review
9. In Which We Bowl Over Blackrock Caverns
10. Averting a Black Ops Disaster
11. Answering Gaming Questions with AI – Finding a Warm Ocean in Minecraft
12. Tarisland – I Hate it Already

Search Terms of the Month

starcraft cartooned carbot deviant art
[Why Deviant Art?]

ttc-collective-agreement-2020
[I have some posts about that!]

gamer blogs
[pretty sure I’ve had my card revoked]

neg vs enad
[gen vs dane?]

zmud on windows 11?
[Haven’t gone there yet… maybe?]

Game Time by ManicTime

On the one hand, I did play a few more titles than usual this past month.

• EVE Online – 48.14%
• No Man’s Sky – 24.11%
• WoW Classic – 14.81%
• Valheim – 6.04%
• EverQuest – 4.01%
• Unnamed Beta – 1.50%
• Once Human – 1.31%
• Palia – 0.04%
• World of Warcraft – 0.04%

On the other, nearly 75% of that time was the first two titles, though No Man’s Sky was a surprise dark horse candidate.  But I cover that below.  It could have been a Once Human month.  I played that for an evening… and then was distracted elsewhere.  Meanwhile, I think I logged into WoW and Palia to claim a gift or a Twitch drop or something.  It was quick.

EVE Online

New Eden was at the top of the chart this month, thanks to several factors.  First, there was a new group formed in the Imperium to go out and pick fights in the middle of PanFam space, so that got me undocked.  Then there was the Keepstar bout in Catch.  That might turn into something next month, but in July it was mostly move ops.  I was recorded on 16 different fleets according to the participation dashboard, but at least 6 of those were just getting in to move ships from point A to point B.

A lot of my time in game was probably attributable to me logging in and doing the AIR daily goals for 12 days across seven characters, 5 Omega and 2 Alpha, to test that out.  Well, if the goal was to get entice me to log in more, op success.

EverQuest

Really, I am still subscribed, but all I am doing in the Overseer thing every day… and I have almost gotten all the achievements for that.  So I might be done here sooner rather than later.  My 25th anniversary spirit is waining.

No Man’s Sky

Kind of a surprise entry this month… or any month.  It came out in 2016, I played it for a short bit in 2017, and then haven’t really thought about it much since then, save for noting updates coming out every so often.  Then there was all the Stars Reach talk this past month, with pillars and being on Steam, and I started thinking about procedurally generated exploratory space games… and hey, here we are!  More to come on this too.

Once Human

I came very close to making Once Human a thing, mostly because I had picked it in our Game Critic Fantasy League, so I had a vested interest, and because I left Twitch tuned into Mind1 and he went and played it so I ended up with some Twitch Drops for it.  So I tried it for a bit.  It has its own interesting flavor.  But then all the Stars Reach stuff made me think about No Man’s Sky and I went there instead.

Pokemon Go

• Level: 46 (+1, level, 10% of the way to 47, 0 of 4 tasks complete)
• Pokedex status: 838 (+8) caught, 847 (+7) seen
• Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 16 of 18
• Pokemon I want: Two specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm and Sun
• Current buddy: Annihilape

Valheim

I think I finally hit the wall here in the Ashlands.  But that is fine.  We got some good times out of this third run at the game.  It is my most played title on Steam.  I can feel good about moving on.

WoW Classic

I am feeling kind of the way I did with Burning Crusade Classic, that I have started to prove that my negative feelings for Cataclysm back in the day were not wholly unwarranted.  And we have six more months to go on this.  Our group still has a dungeons to run.  But logging in to level up alts and that sort of thing… not really feeling it for that.

Coming Up

Blaugust.  Next month is Blaugust so you can expect a Blaugust kick off post tomorrow to celebrate the first day of the event, with a run down of participants, probably with a bit of history and some reasons to join in.  Or maybe not.  I don’t know.

Then I have to figure out how to fill out the month… which is one of those things that is always daunting on the first day, and then when I get to the last day I realize I have a half a dozen more unfinished drafts in the drafts folder and didn’t even start on some things I felt I should have.

There might be a war of sorts in EVE Online.  We’ll see if the other side shows up I suppose.

Other than that, nothing is going on in August… wait, I am being told that there might actually be a release or two in August.

Yes, we’re getting the Janthir Wilds expansion for Guild Wars 2, which will bring with it player housing.  A very big deal there.

I think we’re getting a big update in EverQuest 2.

Oh, and Visionary Realms is said to be doing a pre-alpha beta test of Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen in anticipation of early access in December… I think I have that right.  But you won’t hear about it here as this event is has been reported to require that participants not share, communicate, or deliberately imply information about their pre-alpha experience or involvement.  Public information on their website, however, is fair game and we’ll get to the plan for early access, oh you can just bet.

And I suppose I would be remiss if I did not mention The War Within for WoW.  Big new expansion.  Kind of a thing here in the game’s 20th year.

The Site

WordPress.com acknowledged once again that I posted every day for a year straight, a reminder than quantity does not equal quality.

Also, it only says that because I changed the time zone setting for the blog from UTC to Pacific time which changed my streak when it recalculated it.  The count should be around 1,522, but I posted the occasional item for the next day before midnight Pacific time so the changing of the time setting changed what counted.  That’s the way it goes.

Also, the chaos that social media has become has taken a lot of the edge off of Dril these days.  But that is for another post I suppose.

Anyway, I am not mad because what is a posting streak anyway?  Plus, WP.com did something nice this month… they paid me.  Those ads some of you had to endure earlier in the year paid the hosting fee for the site for 2024.

Granted, they took their time about it.  But dollars are dollars… and they are in my PayPal account just in time for me to blow it all on the Steam Summer Sale in June, if I can wait that long.

Then there is my other site, EVE Online Pictures, which I have let slide this month.  Part of that is due to not playing much EVE Online, so not having any new screen shots… I am surprisingly picky about what I post there, though you might not believe that if you scroll through the place… has taken the edge off.  That and the fact that not posting has had pretty much zero impact on traffic… nobody visits when I post, so it is hard to go downhill from there… has made it easy to ignore.  I might go back to it with the new expansion… but after 16 years of being essentially unknown, it might also be time to let the experiment fade.

The question back in 2008 was whether or not an all pictures blog about EVE Online could achieve some level of popularity.  The answer, in this case, seems to be “no.”

One Year Ago

EVE Online turned 20 and the month long capsuleer day celebrations kicked off.  I did my own post reflecting on the two decades of the game.

CCP was also talking about the upcoming Viridian expansion, which included tech II capital ships.

I also did a bullet point post about the game that included the deadline to get on the monument, the minutes from the CSM17 summit, the delay of the CSM18 election, fireworks in Jita, the building of the first shipcaster, an ESS theft story, and the end of the BOSS alliance.  Then I did another one, again mentioning the monument, chat channel issues, the MER, player made billboards, a T-shirt design contest, and the Pearl Abyss financials.

I was considering average daily destruction as a metric for EVE Online and looked into the April 2023 destruction count.  I also wondered how many skill points were enough in New Eden.

Over at Enad Global 7, My Singing Monsters was still making the most money, but investment groups were demanding more money from the company, suggesting that the company explore being sold.  Good thing Embracer Group didn’t get hold of them.

In Wrath Classic I had accomplished some of my goals in Wintergrasp and the Argent Tournament, though I could not yet build Jeeves.  The group managed to get through The Oculus,

Blizzard said they were going to make a hardcore mode server for WoW Classic and they introduced WoW Tokens to Wrath Classic.

I started my lossless scaling experiment to see if that would make LOTRO more playable on my 34″ wide screen monitor.  It helped, but couldn’t overcome all of my large screen issues.  That was just in time for the 16th anniversary.  Meanwhile, Amazon said they were again interested in doing a Middle-earth game.

In the AI Question Time series I asked about a tank in EVE Online, sandbox MMO options, whether it could generate some ideas for an RPG campaign, including a royal family, and about Wilhelm Arcturus.

I was on about timing lucky eggs with friendship levels in Pokemon Go.  That is probably my most popular post from 2023.

I did a mail bag post after being inundated by media op offers.

I caught up with HBO becoming Max, Netflix ending its DVD services, and MTV just ending, along with some more binge watching.

I was checking out Twitter alternatives as Elon’s reign kept getting dumber and dumber.

Finally, it was Memorial Day once more.

Five Years Ago

Back in May of 2018 there was a rumor leak about Daybreak, so a year later I went back over them to see what came to pass.

Blizzard revenue margins dropped considerably.  As if to prove the point, WoW dropped off of SuperData’s digital revenue chart.

To hide that in the news cycle Blizzard gave us a date for WoW Classic. I wondered if the Cataclysm expansion was a necessary prerequisite for WoW Classic.  I also was speculating as to what would happen with WoW Classic as it aged.

The beta for WoW Classic had been up for a while, but they decided to do a stress test, so they let everybody in for a bit.  Of course I went!  And I did the following week as well.

In what we now call retail WoW I was off collecting the Children’s Week pets.

Blizzard also gave us a peek at their 15th Anniversary Collector’s Edition.

The Mittani uttered the words, “Gevlon was right” in a public forum.

EVE Online celebrated its sixteen year anniversary with a sixteen day login campaign.  The Invasion expansion was slated for the end of the month.  Its arrival brought more Triglavian fun to the game as well as the big revamp of The Agency interface and some war dec changes.

CCP Peligro Tweeted out a chart about who gets banned for botting in New Eden.  CCP had also been trying to nerf ratting and mining, so that was the focus of my MER review that month.

The CSM14 election was coming up and Jester did a Reddit AMA about his time on the CSM as his NDA had finally expired.  I also had a bullet points post about CSM14 candidates and rewards and a coming war and such.

Out in Delve I got to undock my dreadnought.

With Liberty Squad I went on ops to Amamake and into Etherium reach that resulted in explosions.  I also got to drop on some Rorquals with Black Ops.

But people were focused on the coming Imperium attack on the north and where it would land.  Even as we formed up and moved vast fleets to the north of null sec, our target was still speculation, though once we set up shop in the east of Pure Blind it looked like Tribute was the target.  There was a rush to see if we could kill the PanFam staging Keepstar, but when that failed we settled in to burn down the region.

In Minecraft I was growing bamboo and looking for the new village types that came in with the Village & Pillage update.  The I went looking for pillagers.

Connor at MMO Fallout announced that the site was winding down… and then he changed his mind.

And I watched the Catch-22 miniseries on Hulu.  I liked some of it, but there were issues for me.  There always are.

Ten Years Ago

EA killed off Mythic Entertainment.  They had already handed over Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot to Broadsword, so what was left in any case?

The news about post-Kickstarter Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen continued to be off-putting.

I got another seven day trial in Landmark.

The strategy group started in on our BIG map campaign in Civilization V.

Nintendo announced Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire were coming in November. They also closed down the WiFi game services for the Nintendo DS and Wii, which led EA to shut down the server support for 50 games a month later.  Most of them were DS and Wii related, but EA used the opportunity to kill off some PC game support as well.

Nintendo also launched Mario Kart 8, one of the few bright spots on the otherwise disappointing Wii U.  Soon the Luigi death stare was everywhere.

In EverQuest the Fippy Darkpaw progression server wrapped up the Seeds of Destruction expansion.

In EVE Online I was wondering about the prospects for a summer war.  Everybody just assumed that there would be one, though in null sec the various empires seemed to be settling in and consolidating.  Sure, there was the trap at Daras… another on the list of reasons we shy away from low sec… the run down to Placid for a kill, and that op down in Syndicate (my post on which stirred up some sour grapes about day one players) but otherwise things were quiet.  That left plenty of time to go find my name on the monument.

As EVE Online turned eleven I was wondering if the alleged ‘learning cliff’ was still the biggest issue facing EVE Online.

Meanwhile CCP announced they were getting off the twice a year, huge update release pattern in order to have releases… named releases for a while… every month.  This led into a post about the pacing of content delivery.

In World of Warcraft the Timeless Isle was still a thing.  The Warlords of Draenor expansion was still over the horizon and subscriptions were down to 7.6 million under the weight of wait.  That seemed like a big drop until Warlords of Draenor fell to 5 million two years later.   Meanwhile, our group was slowing down a bit even as we started in on dungeons in Pandaria.

In attempt to make plans for another summer hiatus, I gave Star Wars: The Old Republic a try, going through the Sith starting area.

And then there was the kick off of the 2014 Newbie Blogger Initiative.

Fifteen Years Ago

I was able to expose the true conspiracy behind the EuroGamer Darkfall review.  Powerful forces have been suppressing this story ever since.

EA lost a billion dollars.  This came after the CEO announced that recessions were good because they eliminate competitors.  They can also eliminate bad execs.

Meanwhile, EverQuest was celebrating its 10 year anniversary by putting up a new server.  Polled on what it should be, people chose the 51/50 rule set.  I’m sure that, somehow, that says something about MMOs and nostalgia.  I cannot recall how that server even played out at this point.

I went back and played some Blizzard classics, Diablo II and StarCraft, both of which received  patches that meant you no longer needed the CD to play.  This was prompted by Blizzard’s pushing people towards Battle.net and the announcement of the opt-in for the StarCraft II beta.  I opted in right away.  I hear that some people got in to the beta almost a year later. *cough*

In New Eden, it was new ship time, as I picked up both an Orca and a Buzzard.  I also managed to lose my Cerebus.   Oops.

And speaking of EVE Online, I announced my one year experiment, EVE Online Pictures.

CCP put a new boxed version of EVE Online on store shelves.  I bought a copy and made a fabulous new character.

In World of Warcraft the instance group was moving along slowly.  We did hit Azjol Nerub, but vacations and such kept us down to four people, so we spent a bit of time back in Burning Crusade doing heroics and generally messing around.  That included our run into Ogrimmar to do Ragefire Chasm.

I also messed around with the Noblegarden holiday.  I actually got all the achievements for that.  However, Children’s Week was another story.

Playboy’s “Massively Casual Online Game” Playboy Manager was announced.  The game was supposed to launch in the summer of 2009 according to the press release.  There was a whole story about what happened… but you’ll have to search up on it because it is too long to repeat here.

And then there was a little game called Minecraft that was first made available in early access back in May 2009.  Estimates put it as possibly the best selling game of all time.

Twenty Years Ago

Nintendo announces a new console code named Revolution to follow from the GameCube.  Revolution would latter be given the official name Wii.

Twenty-Five Years Ago

Nintendo started talking about Project Dolphin, the console to follow the Nintendo 64.  This would eventually become the GameCube.

The 4th Coming, an early MMORPG developed by the French Canadian firm Vircom Interactive, is officially launched.  The game is still running and being updated as of this writing by DialSoft, which took over the title in 2006.

Thirty Years Ago

Chaos Studios, once called Silicone & Synapse, having changed its name to Ogre Studios the month before due to a trademark claim by Chaos Technologies, changed its name one last time and became Blizzard Entertainment.

Most Viewed Posts in May

1. Are the Ashlands going to Kill Valheim?
2. The Ashlands Arrive in Valheim
3. Quote of the Day – Just Say No?
4. Timing those Lucky Eggs for Friendship Milestone…
5. Just a Sap in the Mistlands
6. The Special Business Unit
7. After Three Weeks of the Cataclysm Pre-Patch
8. Finding an Infested Mine in Valheim at Last!
9. Level 45 at Last in Pokemon Go
10. Warm Ups for Cataclysm Classic
11. EverQuest Starting Points – Butcherblock and Kaladim
12. EverQuest Starting Points – Ak’Anon and Whatever Happened to the Steamfont Mountains

Search Terms of the Month

can i still play the older versions of civilization?
[Have I got the post for you!]

pokemon go best friend lucky egg can i claim later
[I don’t think so]

gamer blogs
[I think I am on page 912 of that search on Google]

waerzor
[Neither than nor porn here]

Game Time from ManicTime

WoW Classic, with Cataclysm showing up, got the gang back together and into Azeroth.  Clearly I spent a lot of time there… and all the more so due to Valheim issues.  At the bottom end is Palia, which I tried briefly early in the month for somebody’s friend code bonus and… I don’t really remember much… and the retail WoW, where I logged in to collect something and to check an achievement.

• WoW Classic – 80.02%
• EVE Online – 6.68%
• EverQuest – 5.86%
• Valheim – 5.66%
• Palia – 1.72%
• World of Warcraft – 0.06%

EVE Online

I did managed to collect all 30 daily rewards for capsuleer day/month in celebration of the game’s 21st anniversary.  I even logged in and went on a couple of fleets, got on my requisite kill mail, updated my PI… and did nothing else.  I am kind of waiting around for the Equinox expansion to show up to see what that will mean.

EverQuest

I spent a bit of time running around old Norrath in search of starting points.  I think I have one more post in me on that front, if I can find some words.  But I think come June and the launch of the EverQuest II Origins Server that I might need to turn my eye towards post-cataclysm Norrath.

Pokemon Go

As noted earlier this month, my wife and I finally made it past the final task to get to level 45, which meant we were already halfway to 46 on the xp front.

• Level: 45 (+1, now 57% of the way to 46 in xp, 1 of 4 level tasks complete)
• Pokedex status: 825 (+4) caught, 839 (+5) seen
• Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 15 of 20
• Pokemon I want: Three specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm, Icy Snow, and Meadow
• Current buddy: Varoom… which is really a Pokemon, I swear

Valheim

The letdown of the Ashlands and Iron Gate going all in on “you must suffer to play our game!” along with the arrival of Cata Classic made for a pretty steep downturn in my play time here, which is saying something because so for in 2024 Valheim is my most played title by a fair margin.  I still want to try The Queen in the Mistlands, but that will probably be then end of things until somebody rolls up a “make the Ashlands available to casuals” mod like the mist removal mod for the Mistlands.

WoW Classic

Cataclysm Classic is now a thing.  It may not be a popular thing, but it does seem to be our thing.  For all the issues it has and my general angst about it as an expansion, I have spent more time playing it than anything else this month.  We’ll see how that carries on though…

Zwift

My last entry for Zwift.  As I noted earlier this month, they sent me a note saying that on my next billing cycle they would be raising the price to $20 a month.  That prompted me to cancel immediately.  I thought I had the rest of May to ride because the note said my next billing date was June 6… however, that was wrong and I found my account lapsed by mid-month.  So it goes.  These are my final numbers for Zwift.

• Level – 27
• Distanced cycled – 1,980.5 miles
• Time spent riding – 4d 8h 23m
• Elevation climbed – 72,375
• Calories burned – 58,617 (+1,323)

Going back to something I was doing previously, that distance would be about from my house to Davenport, Iowa.

Coming Up

On June 11th we’re going to get the Equinox expansion for EVE Online, so that will be a thing that I will be there to try out.

Over at Daybreak, the EverQuest II time locked expansion server Anashti Sul will go live, and I want to take a peek into that.

Traisland, the Tencent MMORPG that the gaming press cannot stop calling a WoW rip-off, is set to go live on June 21.  Given that it is following the free to play model, it is likely I will give it a try.

The first day of summer… the summer solstice is on Thursday, June 20th, should see the start of the Steam Summer Sale.  Like I need more titles in my back log.  Still, there it is.

And then there is Cataclysm Classic.  We’re invested for the moment and the first dungeon is waiting for us.

The Cataclysm arrived in its full form about a week ago and I swear to you that I have had to update the Questie addon twice a day, every day, since then.

Questie puts up an apologetic message on loading that says that the quest data for the addon has been built up via private servers and Cataclysm isn’t popular in that domain so the new quest data is a lot rougher than past outings.  Another argument for “classic” ending with Wrath I suppose.  But I give them props for the updates.

Otherwise things work… or at least are not egregiously broken.  At least not after a couple of updates.

Out in Vashj’ir there were few oddities with quests not running right on the first pass, the occasional quest window that wouldn’t go away when accepted, and one quest where the object given you wouldn’t perform its task.

That led to a point in under water where I was without a connecting quest in the chain to send me to the next location.  After some going back and forth I gave up and managed to pick up the quest chain… or at least a quest chain… further on down the zone, so could carry on.

This got fixed later and I was able to go back and pick up the missed quest, so my ability to get the achievement for doing the zone quests won’t be blocked… by that at least.

There are other, more general failings in this zone, but they are more by design than by failing to replicate a stable, playable version of the original.

I also learned, in playing the DK, that path of frost might not be the most useful ability in Vashj’ir.  I had it up when I hit the zone and, once in the capsized boat that is the first quest hub, found I needed to dismiss it to jump back in the water.  Go figure.

I did find it a bit amusing when my DK, the first of my characters to level up, was congratulated on hitting level 0.

I figured that was a minor oversight, something easy to fix.  But as the week went on and I hit 81 with three more characters, then 82 with a couple, I began to suspect that this might be a symptom of some more fundamental conflict with Cataclysm code running on the current retail framework.  For users it is cosmetic and doesn’t appear elsewhere, but it is one of those things that if I were the project manage, I would be asking the devs to explain what this really meant.

That said, and my tepid engagement with Cataclysm as a whole aside, I have been putting some effort to get into things.

Being only a 5 level expansion, people were hitting level cap on opening day.  The opening zones of Vashj’ir, while not empty… there is always that guy there to snipe that last mob you need it seems… was certainly over the first day rush very quickly.  Even the weekend failed to bring much of a surge to the game that I could detect.

Then again, we are on Bloodsail Buccaneers, the PVE-RP server, which according to Ironforge.pro, which uses data from Blizzard’s armory site to try and estimate populations, isn’t exactly a booming metropolis, reporting in about as about 1.4% of the population of the US Cataclysm servers.  If you want an active US server you need to land on Pagle for Alliance and Faerlina for Horde.

The numbers also show Cataclysm Classic being slightly more popular in the EU than the US… by very close to the ratio of the population difference between the two regions.  I find that both normal and odd at the same time.

According to the demographics, Cataclysm is also more than twice as popular than classic era vanilla but about half as popular as Season of Discovery.  And while I am skeptical that those numbers absolutely represent the player base, the ratios may be okay if they are generating all the numbers in the same way.  The usual “even data collected incorrectly can be useful in some ways if it is collected consistently” argument I make applies.

I have been sending characters up both the Vashj’ir and Hyjal paths for their first zone and the xp is such that it appears you need only do one or the other before moving on to Deepholm, so it is probably good that achievements are shared so I don’t have to do all the zones with one character.

So far most of the classes have been working out okay.  The protection paladin and blood deathknight have no problem tearing through overland leveling content.  Likewise, my hunter was just fine once I remembered to spend the pet talent points as well… though he wasn’t having any problems before I did that, it just made things go faster.

The feral druid is a little squishy… but always was I suppose.  They made an odd change to thorns, which is now a short buff with a cool down.  And I also got Chad the rogue out, though that is a play style I need to be in the right mindset to pull off.  After stomping through the brush with the pally and DK, being a little circumspect takes some effort.

Trade skills… are in progress.  It took me a bit to realize that, with the alts who only have gathering professions only, that they have the tracker on for both.  So I was out with Irondam, who has both mining and herbalism, thinking I was only tracking herbs and wondering why I kept finding mining nodes.

When it comes to cooking however, the cult of dailies has taken over and you are at the mercy of Robby Flay and the currency he offers, which are required to buy recipes.

This is offset a bit by Darkmoon Faire moving to its island instance, which means once a month you can go there and get a 5 point boost on your trade skills with a quick quest.  That doesn’t seem like much, but sometimes 5 points will be just enough to get you past a dead spot.

Overall, not a bad first week I suppose.  Popularity is obviously nowhere near where it was with the launch of WoW Classic nearly five years back, nor even the arrival of Wrath Classic 18 month ago, but it is trucking along.  This is similar to the player arc you might see with EverQuest retro servers, where the launch is always huge, but after a few expansion unlocks it tends to be down to those invested in reliving the raids or other aspects of the experience.

Even if it is just 50K players, they are all subscribed and, judging by what I have seen, a certain percentage even bought the special mount pack.  So probably well worth the time invested.  Not a gold mine anymore, but making money.

And, for all the complaints above, I have spent most of my gaming time playing it and rediscovering what the expansion brought.  Expect more opinions I suppose.

Rather by chance we all ended up online and in WoW Classic yesterday.  There was no plan.  We all hadn’t been online together for a few months at this point, probably not since we attempted Shadowfang Keep in Season of Discovery.  And it was a timely meeting as we were close to the eve of Cataclysm Classic.  It was time to start getting ready.

We spent a bit of time getting everybody together and making sure we all had flight unlocked in Azeroth proper.  There was some fumbling about to get characters together and working with their changed up specs.  Ula, a frost mage so far in WoW Classic, read that frost was dead in Cataclysm, so swapped out to be a fire mage.

There were other change ups.

Beanpole was done being a gnome warlock and paid for the race change, which includes a name change, so became Liftkit, a worgen warlock, largely on the strength of the built-in speed traits.

Then Potshot, who dual-boxed a pally healer and a hunter DPS through Wrath for us decided to swap out the hunter for a Deathknight.  He leveled his new DK up over the last few weeks and even did a bit of Wintergrasp with him to gear up a bit.

So our new lineup for Cataclysm is now

• Wilhelm – Protection Pally
• Fergorin – Holy Paladin
• Kharageenan – Blood Deathknight
• Ula – Fire Mage
• Liftkit – Demonology Warlock

Having gotten all that together in about an hour, and still having daylight to burn, Potshot suggested we ought to do a practice run.  So we started planning to go back to Northrend and travel to an instance, once we figured out which instance would be suitable… when somebody noted that we could just use the Dungeon Finder and teleport our collective asses into an instance.

The Dungeon Finder had limits on where we could go as level 80s, so we decided on heroic Utgarde Keep.  That is a pretty well known instance to us and we have a history there.  So it was off to Utgarde… pop, and we were in there.

Once in there was a bit more setup time to figure out what we had to do and what buffs still applied and all of that.  Small things changed.  Warlock health stones, for example, now heal a set percentage of your health rather than a specific number of hit points, no doubt a reaction to the hit point inflation that the Northrend gear stats brought about… and which the Cataclysm stats will no doubt inflate further.

Eventually we got ourselves set and faced the first mobs.

That went pretty well.  We were sloppy on the first pulls no doubt, but we were overpowered enough to account for that with trash mobs.

We made our way through the trash to the first boss, the legendary (to our guild at least) Prince Keleseth.  We knew how to fight him, it was just a matter of holding it together and doing the right thing… which basically means all standing on Keleseth so AOE will take care of any ice block issues.

As it turned out our group in Cata spec melted Keleseth so fast that ice block wasn’t an issue.  We even got the achievement for not breaking any of his ice blocks.

We rolled on from there pretty confident.

We managed to screw up the fight with Skarvald the Constructor and Dalronn the Controller, slaying Dalronn too quickly, leaving us fighting Skarvald at almost full health while Dalronn’s ghost beat on us.  But we powered through.

We drove on to Ingvar the Plunderer and, knowing the trick to that fight, also got him on the first try.  The only hitch was one fight where we picked up four trash mobs, only to have another three wander in on the side where I didn’t see them.  If I had been more aware I could have laid hands or used a healthstone.  And, even then, it wasn’t a wipe as Ula and Fergorin finished off the fight, then Fergorin ressed us.

So we got through our first instance with the new specs pretty well.  That also got us our first guild dungeon achievement, as guild achievements are a thing with Cata.

Having done that in a rather short time, we decided to do another, this time picking the heroic version of The Nexus, another dungeon well known to us.

Our main issue in The Nexus was simply forgetting all the mechanics of the first fight with the heroic only mini-boss, Commander Kolurg.  The whole thing where his group will fear you and you’ll go run into a bunch of other mobs, pulling them into the fight, which is a pretty sure fire way to get a wipe.

So we wiped.  But by that time we had remembered the warlock soul stone and had one up on Fergorin, who revived himself.  The trick was that I died way on the far side of Commander Kolurg, such that there was no way to get close enough to ress me without aggroing the boss again.

That was when the new pally spell, Absolution, came in handy.  That revives the whole group at once, bringing them to the pally, while having a much greater casting range (100 yards vs. 30 yards).  That was enough to pull us all in safely.

We went back and pulled Commander Kolurg around the corner, far from other mobs, and dealt with him there.  Then it was onward, clockwise around The Nexus, picking off all of the usual suspects.

We got all the way around to Keristrasza, where we managed to remember to jump frequently, bringing her down, finishing the instance and garnering our second guild dungeon achievement.

So we did pretty well with our warm up, and even got Kharageenan a few upgrades… not that they won’t be immediately replaced by superior green gear in the first zone in Cataclysm.  But it is always nice to get an upgrade.

We were also looking at the transmog system in Cata Classic, which as I think I mentioned, is actually the version in retail, which only sucks somewhat, and not the original version from Cata, which sucked a lot more.

As part of that some of us were interested in acquiring gear “looks” from stuff that dropped.  You might be able to see that I am wielding the Mace of Unrequited Love, a drop from that fight, because I wanted that in my transmog options.

I do like that they went with the more modern transmog mechanics… there is no reason to relive the original versions, that doesn’t help anybody… but I am a bit miffed, as always, that it totally ignored anything you had in the past.  That means we might be going back to some old instances to seek out some looks… or old raids.  We’re high enough level now that we could probably smash and grab raids through Outland at least.  We’ll see.

Anyway, we had our warm up.  Now to see if we are prepared.

On Monday at 3pm Pacific time the launch of Cataclysm Classic begins… and I am honestly not even sure where I need to be to best experience it.

I mean three years ago… was it really that long ago… with Burning Crusade Classic everybody went to the newly upgraded black gate and waited for our chance to rush through into Outland.  There was a crowd.

Then, with the Wrath Classic launch back in September 2022, we were all on the dock eager to get on the first boat to Northrend.

But with Cataclysm Classic we are getting into the post-Classic era in more ways than just, say, the before/after era of dungeon finder.  We’re now into the era of expansions I didn’t really play much when compared to Wrath.

My memories are pretty vague, but I know we went into Cata back in the day by re-rolling new characters with an eye to experiencing the new world of Azeroth only to find it had been dumbed down to the point of being quite dull compared to our original experiences.  We ended up leaving and didn’t come back until Mists of Pandaria was wrapping up and Warlords of Draenor was warming up.

So, as I said already, I am not even sure where everybody is going to be on Monday, and the three weeks of the pre-patch were not much help.

Though, part of me thinks the pre-patch started as an involuntary beta given how much was broken the day it launched.  I got in there and had to figure out how to spec and play my paladin on day one, only to come back later and find all of our talent points had been refunded because things still needed to be fixed.

And then we had three weeks to do… what?

Was there a Cataclysm launch event or quest chain that I missed?

I mean sure, if you wanted to roll up a goblin or worgen character, you had some runway to get that done.  And I guess there is the new archaeology trade skill to work on… though I always found archaeology dull and somewhat less rewarding than many of the already dull and unrewarding trade skills in the game.  I mean, I guess I could still catch up on that, but I would need to find the motivation.

On the trade front, I was pleased to see inscription and glyphs were actually expanded with Cata.  I totally forgot about that.

Then again, I know inscription will be nerfed into irrelevance eventually… doesn’t Warlords of Draenor pretty much kill all crafting… but for the moment it is pretty good.

I was also a bit pleased to see that we got transmog that was closer to current retail transmog than what we got back in the day.  I mean, I think transmog in retail is fraught and over complicated, but it suck at least 80% less than the original pass at it.

So, with three weeks to kill, the first thing I did, of course, was head to the flight master in Stormwind and spend the 200 gold to get flying in Azeroth.  Best gold spent ever.

Then I spent some time running the Children’s Week quests on multiple characters.  Might as well beef up my companion pet roster in advanced of pet battles in Pandaria… which should be released before the next Children’s Week rolls around.

That done I… poked around and tried to learn my classes a bit.

I am actually somewhat pleased with how the protection paladin plays now, at least solo.  I have no memories about specs after Wrath, mostly because Blizz just got in the habit of throwing everything in the air and shuffling specs after that.  But this time around it worked pretty well.  I am definitely more OP than I was with the Wrath spec.  I base this on the fact that I could never quite solo Chillmaw on that one Argent Tournament quest.  I came close, but could never quite swing it.  I always needed a bit more DPS.  And this kind of bothered me because I have distinct memories of soloing Chillmaw.

Well, after getting into the Cata spec, Chillmaw was soloable.

I guess those memories are more of early Cata than late Wrath.  Maybe?  Anyway, I could go earn 10 champions seals daily, which I am saving up to buy the tournament pets.  Again, gotta fill up that pest roster.

I did also run around and get the achievement for doing the quests in Icecrown.  I was only a few quests shy.

I now just need Storm Peaks and Zul’Drak.  Storm Peaks I am also close on, but Zul’Drak… le sigh.

I did strongly consider starting a new character just to experience some of updated Azeroth… to the point of rolling up a dwarf shaman and getting into the starter area… but then thought better of that.  I have done the whole loremaster of Kalmidor and the Eastern Kingdoms before.  I don’t need to do it again.  Plus I have six characters at level cap already.  Seven isn’t going to make me feel better.  Now I regret spending some champion’s seals on some heirloom gear for him.

I did get ahead of the game on one Cata ritual.  While running around during Children’s Week I got blasted by Deathwing and got the obligatory “stood in the fire” achievement for dying.

So that is out of the way.

Now we have a weekend left before the big unlock and I am not sure what I should do, if anything, to get ready for it.  I’ll probably run the Argent Tournament dailies… and maybe work on finishing up the Storm Peaks.

Wrath of the Lich King Classic is effectively over now.  The Cataclysm Classic pre-patch has been on the servers for two weeks, the initial chaos of that patch has been mostly resolved, and now I’m hanging out, doing a few clean up things in Northrend as I get to learn how the new specs… old specs… new old specs… work for a couple of classes.

Back before Wrath Classic hit, I had put a lot of weight on the idea that THIS was going to be the peak of the classic experience for me.  It wasn’t that we didn’t love vanilla WoW Classic, grindy though it could be, relatively speaking at least, it was just that Northrend lives larger in my memory than any of the expansion.  My head canon is that this is peak WoW for me.

So how did that play out?

On a gut level, I think it made the mark.  I am certainly less inclined to play when I am not engaged, but that was also the case with The Burning Crusade Classic, where we bailed as a group once we were not having fun, which was pretty quickly.  And, in Northrend, once our group had done what it came to do, we ran off and did something else.

The desire to grind out every last thing wasn’t as prevalent.

It may even be that Blizz let the expansion run a bit longer than it should have.  I was on the first boat to Borean Tundra more than 19 months ago.  The thing about the classic experience is that it is also supposed to be a more condensed experience.

Original Wrath ran for 754 days, which was a smidge over two years.

Wrath Classic will close out on May 20th having run for 601 days, which was probably a good 90 days too many for the experience.  Retro servers always run at nearly 2x speed, so running Wrath Classic at 1.25x speed meant people were done before Blizz was ready.

I know, Blizz has to balance a release schedule and doesn’t want one thing to interfere with another and also had its whole Season of Discovery shtick going and there was the possibility, given the way the pre-patch landed initially, that they simply were not ready to go to Cata Classic yet.  Lots of things go into the timing.

But, also, I haven’t played all that much since the new year.  Actually, if you go back, you will see we were playing Season of Discovery for a while even.  Now, we all stayed subscribed, so Blizz won the economic victory, but dead servers and people not playing your game is an issue on its own.

Anyway, we’re now at the end, our group is waking up back in Northrend, taking stock, and getting ready for Cataclysm.

Back to my subjective feelings about Wrath Classic, I think it was both more and less than I expected.

A lot of it is fun and interesting and all the classes I played felt useful and a bit over powered, which I don’t think is a bad thing.  Generally speaking, feeling a bit OP makes me play more aggressively, which means I am often more likely to get in over my head and end up with a fun fight than if I feel I am out of my depth and expect that if i get more than one mob on me that I need to flee.

The zones… I’ve probably done a few of them too many times for there to be more than the joy of competence, the feeling that I know where I am and where I need to go to accomplish my assigned task.  This is not nothing.  One of my favorite zones in LOTRO is the Lone Lands because, after all these years, I know it like the rangers do.  It is a place that makes me feel a part of the story and land I know it so well.

There is also this flat spot in leveling… something accentuated by the fact that when you roll into Borean Tundra at 68, the 68-70 ride is very fast… that makes things feel like they are dragging around 73-75.  Maybe I just don’t like those middle zones.  But once you hit Sholazar Basin things seems to start to pick up and the drive to 80 feels like it goes by more quickly than the previous few levels.

Looking at my achievements… which are now unified across characters since the pre-patch… the only zones I did not get the “did all the quests” update for were Zul’Drak and the Storm Peaks, and I am close on the Storm Peaks.  I might go finish that.  Zul’Drak though… how badly do I want that “Loremaster of Northrend” achievement?

The dungeons were good, and while we got into heroics with our group, none of them were complete push-overs on the first try.  We had to figure things out.  I was also happy enough to see Blizz pushing the envelope with extra hard modes for dungeons, so that there was a challenge for those sharper than us.

I also played a lot of Wintergrasp.  Again, my memories of it are probably a case of rose colored glasses.  I enjoyed it, but it also at times could feel like a solved problem on some rounds, where a core people could show up and drive victory.  But it was fun and chaotic at times and an absolute fountain of honor points.  Our guild message of the day is something like:

How much honor for a shameful defeat? Oh, wow, that’s a lot!

I am interested to be reminded how much Blizz reigned all of that in when it came to Cata.

So, subjectively, here at the far end of Wrath Classic, I am pretty happy with the experience.  There are, and always be, purists stomping their feet about this detail or that, but overall it lived up to my expectations… except for the draw distance thing.  That still irks me and I don’t know why it is such an issue, but it has been there since day one of WoW Classic, so that is hardly just a Wrath issue.

Flipping that around, I was digging for things that might objectively indicate I enjoyed Wrath Classic.  I expect the biggest sign is the fact that I got six characters up to level 80.

I will grant you that I took full advantage of the various points where Blizz turned on the Joyous Journeys xp boost, along with a bit of heirloom gear, and that at least three of those characters were around level 60 at the end of vanilla Classic.  But that is still a pretty good run for me, especially for the rogue, a class I often don’t like, and one that Blizz likes to alternately buff then mess up with spec changes, who was around level 40 when Wrath Classic hit.

There is also the factions in Northrend, at least the ones you encounter on the overland journey.  I did pretty well with them.

On my main, my paladin Wilhelm, I managed to get 10 out of 11 to exalted.

The Wyrmrest Accord… getting faction with them is right in the start of that flat spot for leveling, where I am always trying to get to the next zone, so I fear I do not hang around in Dragonblight very long.  You have to be there long enough to unlock the dailies to get them up to exalted, and I am never quite up to that. [Edit: I went back and got them to revered after writing this post.]

I also did enough of the Argent Tournament to get Wil exalted with all of the alliance home city factions and become the exalted champion of each.

Overall, I feel pretty good about Wrath Classic.  I enjoyed my time going back to Northrend as it was… or as it mostly was… and playing through it fresh with the correct specs and rewards.  My memories of it are not all just filtered through a heavy curtain of nostalgia.  It was some good stuff.

Did it run too long?  Probably.  But it also sounds like they won’t be making that same error with Cataclysm Classic.  So it is on to the new specs and the reborn old world.

Blizzard would like to keep the WoW Classic party… and revenue stream… going, lest that team appear next on Phil Spencer’s every increasing list of layoff targets, and they need some help.

Having split WoW Classic into four different flavors at this point and facing the peril of the main thread heading into what was once considered one of the worst WoW expansions… at least until Shadowlands came along… with the coming of Cataclysm Classic, they really need some more people playing… and paying.  So they are giving it away for free, at least for the weekend.

Or at least that is my take.  Your mileage may vary.  Either way, WoW Classic is free to play for the weekend… but only the Cataclysm Classic flavor according to the news piece.  So come enjoy the pre-patch!

The instructions are:

• Download the Battle.net® desktop app
• Launch the app and log in to your account.
  • Need to recover your account information?
• Within the app, click on the World of Warcraft tab, then either Install or Update.
  • Latest system requirements
• When the installation or update is complete, click Play.
• Play free through May 13, 2024, at 10:00 am PDT!

Also, Blizzard would very much like you to buy some things and they have a new WoW Classic focused shop as a vehicle for your virtual good needs… again, they want to stay off of Spencer’s list, because the word is that he is far from done on his cutting spree.  But I guess they won’t need developers once they develop an AI that can do more than parlor tricks.

Related:

• Blizzard – Join the Welcome Back Weekend May 9-13

Blizzard would like to keep the WoW Classic party… and revenue stream… going, lest that team appear next on Phil Spencer’s every increasing list of layoff targets, and they need some help.

Having split WoW Classic into four different flavors at this point and facing the peril of the main thread heading into what was once considered one of the worst WoW expansions… at least until Shadowlands came along… with the coming of Cataclysm Classic, they really need some more people playing… and paying.  So they are giving it away for free, at least for the weekend.

Or at least that is my take.  Your mileage may vary.  Either way, WoW Classic is free to play for the weekend… but only the Cataclysm Classic flavor according to the news piece.  So come enjoy the pre-patch!

The instructions are:

• Download the Battle.net® desktop app
• Launch the app and log in to your account.
  • Need to recover your account information?
• Within the app, click on the World of Warcraft tab, then either Install or Update.
  • Latest system requirements
• When the installation or update is complete, click Play.
• Play free through May 13, 2024, at 10:00 am PDT!

Also, Blizzard would very much like you to buy some things and they have a new WoW Classic focused shop as a vehicle for your virtual good needs… again, they want to stay off of Spencer’s list, because the word is that he is far from done on his cutting spree.  But I guess they won’t need developers once they develop an AI that can do more than parlor tricks.

Related:

• Blizzard – Join the Welcome Back Weekend May 9-13

Blizzard would like to keep the WoW Classic party… and revenue stream… going, lest that team appear next on Phil Spencer’s every increasing list of layoff targets, and they need some help.

Having split WoW Classic into four different flavors at this point and facing the peril of the main thread heading into what was once considered one of the worst WoW expansions… at least until Shadowlands came along… with the coming of Cataclysm Classic, they really need some more people playing… and paying.  So they are giving it away for free, at least for the weekend.

Or at least that is my take.  Your mileage may vary.  Either way, WoW Classic is free to play for the weekend… but only the Cataclysm Classic flavor according to the news piece.  So come enjoy the pre-patch!

The instructions are:

• Download the Battle.net® desktop app
• Launch the app and log in to your account.
  • Need to recover your account information?
• Within the app, click on the World of Warcraft tab, then either Install or Update.
  • Latest system requirements
• When the installation or update is complete, click Play.
• Play free through May 13, 2024, at 10:00 am PDT!

Also, Blizzard would very much like you to buy some things and they have a new WoW Classic focused shop as a vehicle for your virtual good needs… again, they want to stay off of Spencer’s list, because the word is that he is far from done on his cutting spree.  But I guess they won’t need developers once they develop an AI that can do more than parlor tricks.

Related:

• Blizzard – Join the Welcome Back Weekend May 9-13

My addons need to be updated and my joyous journeys xp buff is gone, the Dalaran portals are all gone save one, and I have to figure out how to spec into six character at or close to level cap. Wrath Classic is now waning, but at least we’re on the road to the next thing.

I can now fly around Stormwind and Ironforge… for just a couple hundred gold no less.  That is not nothing, even if the city is a shambles and the old world has been redone and every good old dungeon has been sliced up into easy to digest bits.  But I wasn’t going to go re-run those anyway, I am moving forward.

We have all sorts of things, from new races to guild perks to archeology, to reforging to transmog to account-wide achievements.

Some of them are a little odd… not like I remembered them or straight up different than they were back in the day and called out in the patch notes.

There have long been complaints about WoW Classic not being pure in one way or another, not being a true return to the old game.  Often that has been about details that only the diehards would likely notice, though there have been the occasional dumb call outs for things that never were.  Some days it boggles the mind.

But getting into Cataclysm Classic it feels like not only have we passed out of the true “classic” era, but even Blizz is now willing to make some changes from the strict retro path.  Probably for the better, and we are talking about Cataclysm, one of the most controversial expansions in the history of the game and not one that many people get choked up with nostalgia about.

I have one last character to get to level 80 before the whole thing goes live… though I have three weeks to get from mid-79 to 80, so I am not exactly stressed.  And I have five other characters at level cap, so I’m covered no matter what.

I’ll get around to summing up how Wrath Classic felt at some point soon.  But the change is upon us.  Time to move forward.

Addendum:  Also, a bunch of things seem broken or wrong.  I am told a bunch of issues from the beta that were reported were clearly not yet fixed.

For example, after my first visit to the ink vendor with my inscription character, the currency changed to the Cataclysm ink, which you cannot yet make, which means I have to go whip up inks for the updated glyphs the old fashioned way.

Also, didn’t Cataclysm have launch events back in the day?

Related:

• Blizzard – Cataclsym Classic pre-patch notes

The Site

A while back WP.com introduced Blaze, a paid ad program that allows you to promote your blog.  Back when it first showed up they gave me a $50 credit and I tried it… and it was not worth the cash.  65 clicks into my promoted post seemed like a joke for that much money.

Then they sent out surveys and talked about how they were making it better.  So when they gave me another $50 credit this month I decided to try it again.  This time I chose my post about Balatro, which I though was maybe a bit more mainstream for a video game ad.

And this time they are telling me the ad pulled in almost 500 clicks.  A serious improvement… if it is true.  The problem is that if I go into the WP.com stats and look at how many clicks that post received during the run of the ad, it is actually closer to 250.

Still an improvement… but the stats on my admin page show clicks from all sources, just not the ad, and while traffic often dies off after a day or two, it can still carry on for weeks in little drips and drabs.  So there is no saying that all of those 250 were from the ad.

In the end, even if it was a great improvement and added another 25 to 50 views a day over a ten day campaign, would you spend $50 of your own money for that result?  I wouldn’t.

Meanwhile, just because I need an excuse to put an image in here somewhere, the surges of direct traffic continue to pop up now and again.

However, these surges are a lot less regular than they were back in November and December.  Search engine traffic… which means Google 99% of the time, remain steady.

Also, WTF is going on with the Google Analytics site?  Have they just broken it on Firefox to be dicks?

Finally, the Flag Counter widget informs me that somebody from a new country visited the blog in April.  Welcome random person from Palau!  I hope you found something interesting!

Palau, a trust territory of the United States in the wake of the second world war, is an independent island nation, but has two ZIP codes assigned to it and is still served by the US Postal Service.

One Year Ago

I did what I believed to be my final post specifically covering April Fools at Blizzard, Blizz having gone pretty cool on the whole thing since around 2017. We’ll see if this pans out.

The Fellowship and Fire update came to New World, bringing with is seasons and season passes.

LOTRO offered a limited time level 140 boost, which was the cap at the time.  I bought one and went through the process of using it.

Niantic was going after remote raiding in Pokemon Go.

Honest Game Trailers took on the Civilization Series, which aligned nicely with my own brief retrospective on the games.  I did my own round up of the series, with some ranking.  All versions I looked at were playable in some form.  I even went and played Civilization VI.  I am still not a fan.

In Wrath Classic the group was culling Stratholme with Arthas.  I also had some minor gripes about Wrath Classic.  We also had the Activision Blizzard Q1 2023 financials.

I wrote about five EVE Online maps that were better than the two in-game maps the game offers.  Spoiler: fifth place was a multi-way tie, so it was way more than five.  Meanwhile, somebody did a video of the 2007 to 2022 null sec influence map… which was one of the maps on my list.

Meanwhile, as we drew closer to the EVE 20th anniversary, CCP was refurbing the EVE monument, which included the ability to get your character name on the plaques if you missed that at the ten year anniversary.  They also outlined the road to Alliance Tournament XIX.

I also did a Friday Bullet Points post about EVE Online that covered the new launcher beta, another in-game theft, a reminder about the monument thing, Fraternity Keepstars, and the MER.  Oh, and they also announced that EVE Anywhere was going away.  Cloud Computing was sooo 2016.

In the game, the Imperium and B2 coalitions managed to win the armor time against Fraternity’s Keepstar in X47L-Q, a battle than ran through down time, so we all got kicked and had to log back in again to resume the fight.  Having lost the armor timer, Fraternity and its allies did not contest the final timer and the Keepstar was destroyed.  The Imperium then dialed-back operations in Pure Blind.

I also looked into March 2023 destruction in the game.

Then there was the a16z Project Awakening that CCP was going on about.  I was not a fan.  Since Pearl Abyss was all in on this blockchain scam nonsense, I wondered who should have bought CCP back in 2018.

I was wondering what Atari… or the company that owned the Atari name… was actually in the business of doing.

I was also kind of wondering what the Metaverse Standards Forum was doing… another working group for a nonsense idea.

I did another Friday Bullet Points post, this time about the Worldle-verse, where Wordle itself hit puzzle 666, Spotify was shutting down Heardle, a DOS version of Wordle, a WoW focused version of Wordle, and Digits from the NYT which they have since shut down.

I was fiddling with AI bots, asking what the difference between an MMO and an MMORPG was, why there were so many fantasy MMORPS, and how to find a warm ocean in Minecraft.

And over on Twitter, which was still Twitter then, Elon’s threat to take away blue checkmarks for verified users and make them only available for sale failed to appear on the appointed day… except for the New York Times, which Elon felt was spreading the “woke mind virus” or some BS.  “Woke” quickly came to mean “something I don’t like” when used by Elon.  The unpaid for blue checks eventually were taken away in the back half of the month.  The blue check mark went from “this celeb or whoever is who they say they are” to “This bozo paid $8.”

Five Years Ago

April Fools, once a grand tradition at Blizzard, was pretty sparse.

Google Plus went away.

The Minecraft Village & Pillage update landed.

CCP loudly announced the removal and banning of CSM13 member Brisc Rubal.  And then in what I described as the “nightmare scenario,” CCP hedged, promising to investigate further.  And then they exonerated Brisc and restored him apologizing for all the trouble. A disastrous example of “measure once, cut twice” by CCP.  And Brisc didn’t get his reputation back.  I still see people who think he must have been guilty and somehow worked a deal or threatened to sue in order to get CCP to back down.

CCP also announced the CSM14 election timeline.  Brisc opted to stay away from that.  And the April update brought capital nerfs, especially for the Rorqual.  Hilmar was starting on something about player retention.  And CCP unveiled the Katia Sai monument in Saisio.

Actually out in space myself in EVE Online, I was flying with Liberty Squad as we visited The Spire for a fight over a Sotiyo as well as busting some other structures and setting some timers.  There was also an op from Delve to Lonetrek and another Reavers Race.

NantWorks handed H1Z1… or Z1 Battle Royale… back to Daybreak, having failed to make a go of the challenge of reviving the game.

I reviewed a bit of the coverage the EverQuest 20th anniversary got.  There was also some changes to the Selo progression server, which reflected on what players wanted versus what Daybreak was offering.

I was also playing World of Warcraft, binging on pet battles and catching some new pets.  We got some news about the approaching update, which would unlock flying in Battle for Azeroth.  That promoted me to get the first part of the pathfinder achievement done.  I also got my first alt to level 120, though he hadn’t even been to Zandalar or Kul’Tiras.  Pet battles will do ya.

And I came up with a guide to criticizing games you do not like.

Ten Years Ago

Spacewar! for the PDP-1 was up via emulation on the internet archive.

The Elder Scrolls Online launched, hitting its planned April 4th date.  I did not play.

I was diving in to Pokemon X & Y, having returned to Pokemon at last.

The strategy group played a game of Civilization V that ended with a win via nuclear terror.

The Kickstarter campaign for the book A History of the Great Empires of EVE Online kicked off.  We were also watching Pantheon: Rise of the Something was splutter along after failing its Kickstarter campaign.

In EVE Online proper there was Burn Jita 3, which seemed like less of a thing the third time out.  There was a video.  Then there was the CSM9 vote.  At least there were only 36 candidates on the ballot.

In null sec we were shooting Black Legion things, because that is what we did in the CFC.  I was just happy to be using lasers, those skills having been trained up amongst my 120 million skill points.  There were also some posts about being space famous and an attempt at in-game blackmail.

But on the broader CCP front, World of Darkness was officially cancelled.

On the iPad I was playing Hearthstone and QuizUp… for about a week.

Turbine announced that Beornings were coming to Lord of the Rings Online.

SOE gave me a key for seven days of Landmark, so I went and tried it out.  SOE also announced H1Z1 and began their love affair with Reddit and got their new All Access plan running.  While on the old school front, Dave Georgeson said SOE never plans to shut down EverQuest.

Warlords of Draenor was still a long ways away.  But Blizzard was doing well on other fronts.  The instance group finished up Zul’gurub.  And there was the usual April Fools stuff.

Over at GamesIndustry.biz they have a round up of what was going in April of 2014.

Fifteen Years Ago

Dave Arneson passed away.  He was, with Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, that so-influential gaming system that has shaped how we view fantasy swords and sorcery games for over 30 years now.  There would be no World of Warcraft as it is today without Dungeons & Dragons.

We also saw the launch of SOE’s Free Realms, which stuttered a bit on day one.  Soon though they had millions of people signed up for the game, but since it was free to play, not a common thing at the time, that was no indication of revenue.  My daughter tried to sign up four times, so that was at least four out of the millions.  SOE was advertising the game heavily on Cartoon Network.  But FR did not run on MacOS, and my daughter was running on an iMac at the time.  I knew she has signed up because her email used to get routed to me.

In EVE Online I was mulling over the Apocrypha expansion and configuring up a Cerebus to try out as a mission runner.  I was also doing invention to make tech II missiles, which meant data cores and research agents and such, and pondering the idea that maybe using your skills should increase your skill points or something.

As usual, there was much ado about World of Warcraft.

• PETA was planning some event in WoW.  I had trouble believing it wasn’t a joke.
• In a blinding flash of the obvious, Nielsen reported that a lot of guys play WoW.
• There was Noblegarden, or Blizzard Easter, and its egg collecting frenzy.
• There was my daughter and I trying to swim to Silvermoon to find a pet for her hunter.
• I couldn’t find a copy of The Burning Crusade at Fry’s.
• After hitting level 30 my daughter, my mom, and I were all riding around together on our night elf cat mounts.
• And the instance group, after a hiatus, got back together, did a warm up run in the Shadow Labyrinth, then went on to finally collect the head of Ingvar the Plunderer.  After that it was on to The Nexus.

I was sniggering like a pre-teen about Cornhole.  Also, there was something about Honest Scrap that was a meme, back when memes weren’t just pop culture references.

I was looking back on two years of the Wii and the games we played on it.

On the TV we were apparently watching Castle and Dollhouse.

And then there were new comers as we brought home two wee kittens.

Twenty Years Ago

City of Heroes launched in the US.  Closed down by NCsoft in 2012, the game lives on with a privately run server called City of Heroes Rebirth, built on the original code base.

Lineage II launched in North America.  This successor to the Lineage never reached the original’s popularity, but hung on to its own user base.

Thirty Five Years Ago

The Nintendo Game Boy launched in Japan.  Perhaps the definitive hand held console for a generation, it lasted from the Tetris era into the original Pokemon series of games.

Most Viewed Posts in April

1. Timing those Lucky Eggs for Friendship Milestones in Pokemon Go
2. WoW Classic Season of Discovery Phase 3 Kicks Off
3. Wake up sweetie, Cataclysm Classic is Almost Home…
4. Now Playing – Balatro
5. Web Banking, The Acquisition, and the Start of the Great Decline
6. Ahbazon Fight Sees 100+ Dreads Destroyed over Fortizar Hull Timer
7. The Contested Seat – Every Vote Counts
8. Pokemon Go Now Lets You Use a Lucky Egg at Friendship Milestones
9. The Altar of Zul and Jintha’alor
10. Answering Gaming Questions with AI – Finding a Warm Ocean in Minecraft
11. Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!
12. EverQuest Starting Points – West Karana Where the Scope of the World Begins

Search Terms of the Month

eve origin of the northern coalition
[Pretty sure it started in the north…]

zombie heat gay game
[Look man, just leave me out of this…]

“ttc-collective-agreement-2020”
[Widely criticized, now just a PanFam thing]

is jetpack replaced wordpress app
[Sort of…]

valheim how much iron do i need for the entire game
[All of it. Seriously, later biomes use it.]

how to get edencom lp
[Run Edencom missions?]

Game Time from ManicTime

In the end, April was pretty evenly divided.  I came in on Conan Exiles and out on Wrath Classic really.

• Conan Exiles – 29.56%
• WoW Classic – 23.75%
• Balatro – 21.81%
• Valheim – 13.00%
• EVE Online – 5.50%
• EverQuest – 6.39%

Balatro

A deck building rogue-like poker based card game.  That ate up some time.  I’ve kind of hit a wall on getting past 80K points in a single hand to be a boss blind.  The cards have failed me there a few times.

Conan Exiles

We were all-in on this at the start of the month.  Many hours were invested.  We explored, found horses, did our first dungeon… then it kind of faded.  It didn’t help that GPortal’s LA data center, where our server is hosted, was down for a full weekend this month.  That’ll break your stride.

EVE Online

I did undock and go on a couple of fleets this month.  I left my mark on zKillboard to at least provide proof of life.  But I haven’t been all that invested.  The interesting ops have been running in early EU time, which is the only time PanFam and Fraternity will show up.

EverQuest

I continue to explore some of the old places still there in Norrath, with erratic tales of the old days based on foggy memories and rose colored glasses.  Not done with this yet.

Pokemon Go

Just a few more Team Rocket leaders to go to unlock level 45 for my with and I.  At least we still earn xp as we try to knock down that one final objective, so we’ll be a few million points into that level once we finish the task.

• Level: 44 (138% of the way to 45 in xp, 3 of 4 level tasks complete)
• Pokedex status: 822 (+1) caught, 836 (+2) seen
• Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 15 of 20
• Pokemon I want: Three specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm, Icy Snow, and Meadow
• Current buddy: Zygarde

Valheim

We had a slow down in Valheim as Conan Exiles became a focus for several weeks.  Also, the Mistlands were a bit too oppressive.  Now that I have banished the mist… at least on my client… I am going to see if we can unlock some of the resources of the biome as the Ashlands loom.

WoW Classic

We started off the month having spent weeks away from the game.  But the coming of Cataclysm Classic awakened the desire to carry on… at least in Potshot and I.  I spent time working on one last alt who is already level 79 as I write this.  I will have some options going into a revamped Azeroth late in May.

Zwift

Zwift gave up on its bonus experience for weekly usage streaks, so my unearned advancement up the level path has slowed down.  Not that levels mean much, aside from cosmetic unlocks, and I am many levels from anything interesting.  But still I get on and ride.

• Level – 27 (+1)
• Distanced cycled – 1,973 miles (+35 miles)
• Elevation climbed – 72,198 (+1,457 feet)
  
• Calories burned – 59,692 (+1,075)

Coming Up

I wrote a post about a number of things coming up on the WoW front in May.  Probably the most on point is the coming of Cataclysm Classic.  The pre-patch lands today and the expansion on May 20th.  The will no doubt generate some sort of assessment of Wrath Classic and a bit of history about Cata.

It is also the Capsuleer Day celebration in EVE Online.  I’ll get to that, but it looks like that day, the game’s 21st anniversary this year, will be celebrated all month long.

I also strongly suspect that we’ll get the Ashlands update for Valheim in May.  They are close.

I have to travel quite a bit more than usual in May, so my posting streak is at risk of being broken… not that such a streak has any real meaning.  But it is a thing.

So we know Cataclysm Classic is on the way.  We have the timeline, with dates already pinned down for all the major milestones.  In a little over a week the pre-patch will arrive and it will be time to decide if we’re in on another WoW Classic adventure.

I find it a bit amusing that on social media Blizz has been pushing the idea that this will be a speedy experience… as opposed to the original which, in addition to pissing people off by destroying the vanilla world, felt like it languished too long for a five level expansion.

Granted, in the grand scheme of things the wait from the launch of Cataclysm to the launch of Mists of Pandaria was actually at the short end of the scale, even if it felt long.

• WoW Launch to The Burning Crusade – 784 days
• The Burning Crusade to Wrath of the Lich King – 667 days
• Wrath of the Lich King to Cataclysm – 754 days
• Cataclysm to Mists of Pandaria – 658 days
• Mists of Pandaria to Warlords of Draenor – 779 days
• Warlords of Draenor to Legion – 656 days
• Legion to Battle for Azeroth – 714 days
• Battle for Azeroth to Shadowlands – 832 days
• Shadowlands to Dragonflight – 734 days

But it was also the first time when WoW began dumping subscriptions dramatically mid-way through an expansion.  That seems normal now, the second half slump, and Blizz still hasn’t figured out how to abate it, but back then it was the first time the company had experienced the line going down rather than up.  Losing a couple million subscribers… more than four times the peak subscriber numbers of most of the breakthrough generation of MMORPGs that preceded WoW… was shocking.

In a panic they offered WoW players a free copy of Diablo III (once it launched, which is a whole different story) if they would just sign up for the annual pass, a one time full year subscription to WoW.  Very much worth it if you stuck around and played Cataclysm through its second half… but how many people did that?  I mean sure, more than played Shadowlands after even four months, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Our group ran up against a lack of interest in the expansion, though that was because we believed the hype… and I’ll have a whole hype retrospective post at some point, as it was in many ways the peak of my hype for WoW… and wanted to start fresh in the revamped new world… only to find it really not very much fun.  Overland solo zones were better, but as a group, the dungeon content had all been neutered, chopped up into little, digestible bits guaranteed to be runnable in 30 minutes or less with even the most half-assed grab back of dungeon finder despicables you could imagine.

Add in the dungeon finder and it became the “sit in town and queue for the next dungeon” game that made many question whether or not accessibility had gone too far.  This is why, when drawing the line between “classic” and “modern” WoW I usually point at the dungeon finder rather than Cataclysm.  Oh, and there was only five levels of content, the dungeons were not really all that memorable, and if it wasn’t for the heroic five person versions of the vanilla troll raids I might argue that this was a completely skippable expansion on the road trip through expansions that WoW Classic has inevitably becomes.

So there was very much a question in the air in our group as to whether or not we were going to bother or how much effort we were going to put into it.  We had fallen off the Wrath Classic train back in January and have been on vacation from Azeroth pretty much ever since, spending time looking for Valheim alternatives, then playing Valheim, and then spending some time in Conan Exiles.

Looking at ManicTime tracking, I spent almost not time in WoW Classic in February and March.

But now we have a date for the pre-patch and another for the expansion, so the time to decide is upon us… and we appear to be leaning towards playing.  We have had a nice vacation from Azeroth, but thoughts have begun to return there and, in doing so, seek a plan.

Specifically, Potshot started looking into what classes might best suit his dual-boxing play style as he continues to do the heavy lifting to get us to five people for dungeons.  He has the healers job, and had had a hunter as his secondary, auto-shoot and the occasional special attack at range being somewhat manageable.  But his research indicated that for Cata, a DK might be another option, so he has set about leveling one up.

Fortunately they start at level 55 and with Joyous Journeys still active you are apparently level 59 or so when you exit the tutorial.  So he is off to Outland and was heading into Nagrand last I checked.  All of which is preferable to giving Blizz $60 to $80 to get a level 80 character boost if you have the time.

Seeing him back, I started poking around with my rogue who I had run through Outland and into Northrend late last year with an eye towards getting one more level 80 ready for Cataclysm Classic.  I was always going to do the five levels of Cata, the question was the level of commitment.

So we’re waking up in Azeroth again, warming up some characters while we wait for the pre-patch to drop and screw up our build.  I forget which classes were most screwed over by the Cata respec, though I am tempted to say “all of them” because one of the great aspects of Wrath was that most classes were pretty OP.

Blizzard has a consistent through line of hating it when we all feel comfortable with our classes.  It is as though if the players feel good, they feel bad, something that carries on to this day… see the great Diablo IV nerfing.

It is a cold Friday in March, I turned a year older this week, and I am in a bit of a mood for no good reason besides being a cranky old guy.  So perhaps it is time for some bullet point bile, broken up into three categories.  Can you put each in its correct place?

• The New York Times to Impose Its New Wordle Order

The self-proclaimed “paper of record” took a bit of time from its nearly non-stop headlines about President Biden’s age to go after anybody who was out there peddling any games that seemed even Wordle adjacent.

The New York Times bought the game from its creator about two years back.  The game wasn’t original, the concept wasn’t original, and even the name had been used before.  But it became a hit during the pandemic and the Times wanted to expand its word games.  One does not live by the Sunday crossword alone I guess.

This week their lawyers began sending out copyright based take down notices to “hundreds” of Wordle-like titles.

This should have been no surprise.  The Times has a long history of sending its lawyers after any hint of what they consider infringement.  I remember back in the 80s when Infocom‘s company newsletter was called the New Zork Times.  They too received a cease and desist letter threatening legal action and had to change the name lest somebody mistake it for a product of the New York Times, which might cause confusion in the marketplace and tarnish the brand of the paper.

None of the regular sites I hit has gone down yet, but I will keep an eye out.

• Nintendo Shuts Down Yuzu

Elsewhere out on the legal front, Nintendo won its lawsuit against Switch emulator creator Yuzu, who acceded to the mounting pressure from the video game giant who had been framing Yuzu’s intent as being to circumvent DRM, which would put it in line for violating the DMCA.

In addition to ceasing all development and support of its emulator, Yuzu also had to agree to pay all of Nintendo’s costs, which totaled up to $2.4 million by their calculation.

Nintendo has long been as fierce as the New York Times in sending its lawyers after anybody using their intellectual property, including some innocuous fan projects, and vigorously stomping out anything that might cause one less hardware unit to sell.

Anyway, I am kind of sad I missed out on Yuzu because, for me at least, the worst thing about playing games on the Switch is actually being required to play them on the Switch.  I’d much prefer them on my PC.  Alas, no longer and option.

• Apple and Epic at it Again

Epic went spoiling for a fight with Apple and Google a few years back because… well, Tim Sweeney wants to be as rich as possible I guess.  As with his fight with Steam, he just wants to be the person collecting the tax and resents other who got there first.

The fight with Apple has gone back and forth since then and it had looked like things had settled down with Epic getting some of what it wanted, including the ability to have its own storefront.  And then Apple banned Epic’s developer account in the EU.

Sweeney was immediately out with histrionics, but Apple was also declaring that Epic was “verifiably untrustworthy” and would not live up to the developer agreement they had signed.  This will all draw the attention of EU regulators again, who will be wielding their Digital Markets Act, it “tax the US tech companies” regulations.

How do I feel about this?

It is hard to feel sad when rich people are fighting to be incrementally more rich.

A follow up about how Apple is embracing the drama and that the EU is its real foe in this battle.

• Elon Invents Blogging

Having chased away all serious, paying advertisers on the Twitter platform… we have Cheech & Chong, Crypto scams (still!), and nazi ads left, and I block all of them besides Cheech & Chong… Elon has been thrashing around trying to find SOMETHING that will make money for his $44 billion boondoggle.  And so they have announced Articles.

You can have BOLD, ITALIC, and STRIKETHROUGH text.  And images!

Freaking amazing, right?  RIGHT?!?

Oh yeah.  Who needs quote blocks or inline links, just give us money and we’ll let you do long form and give them a special icon and tab on your profile.  We totally won’t change our mind in three months and disappear the whole thing the next time Elon has a brain fart, we promise!

I am just waiting until he finally gets around to re-inventing Twitter… a version without him on it.

• EA Jumps on the AI Bandwagon

I mean, EA has a long tradition of being dumb, or at least not being able to read the room.  And they are ramping up to lay off 5% of their staff.  So they have to give the investors SOMETHING to be positive about, and AI is the magic wand currently.  Just say that and Wall Street will love you, right?  So how did EA CEO Andrew Wilson do on that?  Let’s go check over at PC Gamer… and… oh my!

I am not positive the bong hit was verified, but Andrew did ramble on about 3 billion people using EA tools to make games while he painted a picture of a future where EA simply didn’t have to pay any of those pesky creative or technical people who actually make literally everything they sell today.

There was some law of hiring I recall where bad managers only hire people dumber than they are, so when we’re at a point where the CEO of EA wants to fire everybody and I am starting to suspect that we are seeing this in action.  Dumb guy achieves life goal, promoted to CEO and fires everybody.

That is probably being too hard on him.  As we all know by this point, as a public company you must meet the infinite growth demands of Wall Street, and when you’ve got nothing you have to make shit up.  This is a classic “making shit up” performance.  He’ll probably get a huge bonus and lay off even more staff.

• Cataclysm Classic Closed Beta Begins

Finally, Blizzard announced that Cataclysm Classic, which will remake the WoW Classic progression servers now lingering in Wrath of the Lich King into a new world, has started its closed beta test.

I’ve actually been waiting for this to show up, having worn out on Wrath Classic after five characters.  However, closed beta doesn’t mean we’re close to actually getting it, and the roadmap that Blizzard put out at the beginning of the year made it seem like we would be into summer before the cataclysm hit.  Still, it is nice to see it is finally in motion.

And on that bit of upbeat news, it is off to get through the day and to the weekend.

It appears that based on the success of the first pass at WoW Classic, which was hugely successful to the point of probably saving the WoW team from more layoffs in a time when retail was just failing to hold people with Shadowlands, that the whole “special rules server” idea is here to stay.

I won’t call them “classic” servers because people get their panties in a bunch over classic when it isn’t exactly the version of classic they want.  That was always going to be an issue, I just didn’t think the winging would be so loud.  Also, “classic” limits the appeal to just nostalgia which both restricts us from some ideas and… well, let’s face it, the vanilla WoW card has been played.

The vanilla card worked once because there was huge, pent up nostalgia for the old game which was no longer available from Blizzard.  That nostalgia was never going to be satisfied by pirate/private servers, which were never going to cater beyond a small, self-selecting, technically adept group of indiviuals.  Any plan that starts with users needing to torrent a specific version of the client automatically excludes 98% of the WoW player base.

But now that the vanilla card has been played, that pent up demand is gone.  There are still vanilla servers available, but those who really wanted the experience got into it during the pandemic nearly four years ago.  Nostalgia requires some level of restriction on access, and I don’t think Blizz is going to go all Disney on us and put vanilla in the vault for seven years in the hope of driving another WoW Classic frenzy.

So that leaves special rules servers to keep the retail alternative revenue stream perculating.  The progression through the expansions will keep some people engaged, hardcore is having its moment still, and the Season of Discovery experiment was interesting for a bit, but they need a bit more to keep that flame alive.

And we’re not going to get new content.  Classic Plus is a pipe dream.  It will never happen.  New content is, and will always be, the realm of retail WoW, so the classic and classic era servers, as they are called, will need to live within the content we all know and… love, hate, or just remember.

What Blizzard CAN do within that limitation is tinker with the dials for xp, difficulty, gear, and even some of the skills given what we have seen in Season of Discovery, which rides on the classic era code base.

Given all of that, which I will sum up as “no new content” and “playing with the dials and switches” I thought about what they might get up to in the classic era line.

1 – All raids have a five person group option

What if, you know, the goal wasn’t to take five person dungeons away from players to turn them into raids?  I know the response in retail varies between “non-raiders should not be allowed to see raids unless they can bring 10-40 fully geared people with them” and “wait a couple of expansions and go solo some raids,” but seriously, there is some content that could be opened up to a wider audience.

This is one of those things where people who raid will say it isn’t that hard to raid without realizing the commitment it really forces on people, not to mention the cultural norms that raiders have adopted that drive people away.  Go watch Why it’s Rude to Suck at WoW for a fuller take on that.

Even getting past that, there are issues.  Raiding is not as hugely interesting in vanilla, where it is 59 levels away from where you start, as it is in some of the later expansions where a lot of thought went into making raids be a bit more interesting.  Five person raid options in Wrath interest me more than in vanilla, though maybe that is just me.

And there is precedent for this.  Blizz did go back and turn a couple of vanilla raids into five person heroic dungeons in Cataclysm, and they were really cool.

Pros: New perspective on some content

Cons: Annoys raiders and might not be a huge draw for non-raiders?

2 – All raids and dungeons have a solo option

I will call this the Tour de Azeroth option maybe, the sightseeing version of WoW Classic, where you can play through the game, seeing all the sights, without even the need for a group, much less a guild, to support you.  There is a demographic for this, I know it.

Again, the 59 levels of vanilla make this hard to jump start, but it agruably gets more interesting as expansions roll on.

There is of course a whole “how do I tune this to even work for all classes and specs?” aspect to this.  Maybe the whole follower dungeon idea from retail could be borrowed, so you declare your role and you get the other two roles filled in?

There are also some social dynamics to play with in this.  What if you turned it into silent WoW?  No chat, no emotes, no guilds, no groups, no auction house, just you and a bunch of others silently co-existing in a strange new Azeroth.

Or maybe not.  That might be too much, but there are things to play with in this idea.

Pros: Really the only way some people are ever going to see raid content.  Some possible interesting side paths.

Cons: You think tuning raids for groups will be bad?  Raiders now incandescent with rage.  Are we beyond the WoW audience with this?

3 – All content requires a group

And, having done the “make everything easier” route, let’s go the other way and make every mob outside to the initial tutorial elite.  This is a world where you can’t kill your ten rats without a tank, healer, and DPS around to support your effort.

Pros: You want people to group up, this will make people group up!

Cons: The appeal of WoW was being able to make some progress while your friends were not around, so what happens when that is gone?

4 – Cataclysm vanilla fresh start

What if we all started fresh in Cataclysm era WoW?

No, seriously, hear me out.

I know “we hates it” because it destroyed our childhood or whatever, but there is an argument to be made about the quality of the 1-60 zones in that era. This was supposed to be the re-do that would fix things and make them more focused, include stories, and simply be less chaotic and more playable.

Yes, there is the problem that a good portion of the story lines are predicated on something that happened in vanilla, and they would have to adjust the xp gain to make sure you were not out-leveling every zone before you hit the halfway point. But it could be something. I am not sure I would let it go beyond level 60… Outland and Northrend don’t change… but it might be interesting. Maybe?

And there are aspects that could be played with here, making it an achievements race or some of the other things that the Daybreak crew has done with EverQuest and EverQuest II special servers.

Pros: A never before seen new server starting point!

Cons: Does anybody care?  Is our resentment too strong to embrace this?

5 – Open world, full loot PvP option

I love this idea and I hate this idea.  And I only love it because I believe it would prove the point that nobody really wants this as an option.  So yeah, what if we had Darkfall rules in a WoW Classic context?

My prediction is that the whole thing would collapse within two weeks, but it would bring me joy when it does even if all the forum trolls who always demand this sort of garbage idea will 100% go “Well akshully..” and explain that it failed due to some irrelevent detail.

Pros: Might prove to some that this is almost always a bad idea

Cons: It won’t prove it to the people who need to hear it the most

Anyway, those are a few idea.  What else could they try?

I pretty much spent all of February ignoring WoW, Blizzard, or anything related.  The call of Valheim and the need for a break was strong I guess.  I suppose it is time to take a minute to catch up with a new month on hand.  And hey, it is Friday, so bullet points look like the path forward.

• Season of Discovery Season 2 and XP Boosts

WoW Classic: Season of Discovery hit phase 2 early in February, so that is hardly news I suppose, except to acknowlegde that it happened and that I haven’t logged in since before that occured.  I had done the WoW Classic zones already a few times, and for anybody who was neither raiding nor interested in PvP, Season of Discorvery doesn’t have much new to offer.  The idea of “Classic Plus” was always a fantasy.

Well, Blizz has apparently at least realized that making everybody grind through vanilla yet again… they’re on a mission to make us do this once a year I guess… so will be introducing the Discoverer’s Delight buff, which brings a 100% xp boost for level 1-39 characters.

They have also decided to cut the price of level 40 mounts in half and to increase the coin reward for all level 1-39 quests, because while penury was all fun and laughs back in 2004, asking us to scrimp and save to just buy our basic class skills yet again is turning into a non-starter for some.

That will all land next Tuesday next week, March 5th, which is also “Super Tuesday” (of “Stupid Tuesday” as it may turn out) here in the US.

The team did say they won’t change the price of epic mounts, but I am not convinced they will stick with that.  Grind for that fast mount just on a server that will go away soon enough?

Blizz is also going to adjust a bunch of raid related things, because raiders are always the main concern of the company.  There is also some discussion of level 60, end game, and what happens to these characters with all the special skills and runes when Blizz ends the season.  My bet is that they will managed to make people angry somehow when they shut down the Season of Discovery servers.

Read all about it here.

• Diablo IV on XBox PC Game Pass

Microsoft… and I should probably just stop using “Blizzard” or “Activision” now, it is all the Microsoft show, layoffs and all… has announced the first formerly Blizzard title to show up on the Microsoft XBox PC Game Pass:  Diablo IV.

Coming March 28th, you will be able to play Diablo IV by just subscribing to the XBox PC Game Pass, which last I checked was $10 a month, though rumor has it that price will be going up before the end of the year.

Announcement here.

• Prime Gaming WoW Tabard Give Away

Blizz has another WoW item available on Prime Gaming, the tabard of frost.

While a tabard is kind of small potatoes, it still looks better than what you can make with the guild tabard generator, a bit of the game still stuck in 2004.  Also, only available for retail WoW.

Find out how to claim the tabard of frost here.

• Harder WoW Classic Hardcore

Is WoW Classic Hardcore not challenging enough?  Want to prove you’re even tougher than the run of the mill no-lifers who made it to level 60?  WoW Classic Hardcore introduced “self found” mode so you can prove you’re a step above the average hardcore survivor.

Self found mode restricts your character from using the auction house, recieving in-game mail, or trading with other players so that you can prove the purity of your efforts.

If you decide you have made a horrible mistake in choosing that mode, you can turn it off.  But once turned off, it can never be restored.

Read all about it here.

• The War Within Hero Talents Preview

I feel like I should be interested in what Blizz has going on when it comes to the next retail expansion… though I also feel like I shouldn’t care since I haven’t played since early Shadowlands… so I did poke my nose into the early look at the hero talent trees for The War Within.  So, for example, Paladins will have hero talents that work between spec pairs it seems.

And, at some level, “hero talents” sounds pretty cool.

But then the history of the game starts to weigh on me.  Specs and talents get thrown in the air and redone with EVERY expansion.  Nothing ever builds on the past, everything is a complete rug pull, changing up what you’ve grown used to in order to try and be fresh and new.  Also, anything with “hero” in the name is doomed to be nerfed it is as all useful.  The history of the game demands it.

Still, they have something in play.

More on that available, including large and complicated charts, here.

• Hearthstone Anniversary Rewards for WoW

Remember when Hearthstone came out… oh… ten years ago!  Yeah, back then for launch to get WoW players to try it out, they gave away the Hearthsteed.  I will admit, that was enough to bribe me to try it out.

Well, now that Hearthstone is turning ten, they are doing it again, this time offering the Fiery Hearthsteed mount to WoW players who log in between March 11 and May 14 2024.

This reward, like the frost tabard above, is only available to be redeemed in retail WoW.  Classic players can suck it… which makes me wonder if I should bother.  Oh, who am I kidding, I do Twitch drops for games I’ll never play again, I can log into Hearthstone for this.

For all the detail about that and the Hearthstone anniversary click this link.

So it goes, here on the first day of March.  Spring is in the offing, at least here in the US, but so is Daylight Savings Time, so your mileage may vary.

The Site

WordPress.com always wants to make sure I have something to write about in this section every month.  This time around I am back on about email subscriptions.

Last month I was complaining that they were only getting delievered to my inbox every other day.  This month… that stopped completely.  No email delivered with my posts any day of the week.  This coincided with WP.com removing a bunch of the email section of the subscription UI they put in a while back that looked like they wanted to take on Substack.  They have clearly changed their mind or are covering up some failure.

Anyway, if you are still getting email updates from here, WP.com clearly thinks you are special.

Also mentioned last month was the RSS feed issue, where WP.com is updating the feed only every few days.  I see this from other sites that use WP as their host, like Game Developer.  I will see nothing in Feedly for three or four days from them, then suddenly there will be 35 posts.

If that sort of burst behavior doesn’t bother you, carry on.  If it does, you can use the Feedburner RSS feed, though recommending a Google solution to a problem feels like herasy these days.  How have they not shut down Feedburner yet?  It must drive ad revenue in some way.

WP.com has also gotten extremely finicky about being able to leave comments without having a WP.com account.  It seems that you either need to be completely logged in or be willing to leave a full anonymous comment, with no in between.  Thanks a lot WP.

Finally, the wierd direct source bursts of traffic continued this month, though it has grown more erratic and seems to be tapering off somewhat.

Basically, if it wasn’t there I would be getting about 500 page views a day, 300 of which would be from Google search.  But with that direct traffic the daily views run between 550 and 1,300.  That makes direct traffic the top source so far this year.

I don’t know what it means, but it does seem to be driving ad revenue.  Go money.

Also, I strongly recommend you use Ad Block when visiting here.  I want the bots to pay my hosting, not you.  I currently use uBlock Origin for my own ad blocking needs.

One Year Ago

We were in Vegas during the Pro Bowl, those that was pretty much on accident.  We didn’t go see it or anything.

Meta was trying to get a younger demographic into Horizon Worlds.  I was also still on Twitter, though the alternatives were ramping up.

At Enad Global 7, the Q4 2022 financials celebrated the start of the My Singing Monsters hype bubble.

I was going on about some of the barriers in the way of going back to play old MMORPGs.  I was also pondering what Twitch drops do for games.

Activision Blizzard Q4 2022 financials were out and, while Dragonflight did well, it clearly did not break any records.   They were also trying to drum up pre-sales for Diablo IV.  Would that mean that season 28 would be the last season for Diablo III?  Probably.  Meanwhile, Mike Ybarra was pleading poverty or some absolute BS.

I was already on about the whole Cataclysm Classic question.  It would not be announced until BlizzCon later in the year.  I was also wondering when the peak era for crafting was in WoW.

In Wrath Classic we were working on the Lunar Festival achievements, since those were now available.  We all achieved the title of The Elder.  I was also going pretty heavy on the Wrath Classic dailies.  We ran off and did Violet Hold and Gundrak.

CCP was finally putting their Microsoft Excel plugin in to beta testing.  There was also the January 2023 MER to go over and a PLEX for Good campaign for earthquake relief in Turkey which raised $26K.

I did a Friday Bullet Points post about EVE Online that covered the Photon UI, pink SKINs, Imperium War Bonds, and the company financials.  I also started looking at ship destruction in New Eden and I hit 260 million skill points on my main.

At the CSM17 winter summit there was a dubious proposal about improving PvE.

Actually in game, the collapse of the FI.RE coalition ended up with the South East Agreement in null sec.

I had something about the postcards in Pokemon Go.  What are they ever there for?

And WordPress.com changed out the WordPress app out for the JetPack app, though aside from a color change, I couldn’t tell you why.

Five Years Ago

Epic Games had announced their digital storefront the previous December (2019), but we were finally getting a deeper look at their strategy for taking on Steam.  One word: Exclusives.  (Some of which were already up for sale on Steam, then withdrawn, making as many people angry as happy.)

Over at Activision-Blizzard they announced record annual revenues for 2018, then laid off 8% of their staff.  I suppose, in hindsight, they predicted 2019 correctly, but laying people off while execs get bonuses is never a good look.

Daybreak gave us some details about their planned special rules EverQuest II PvP server.  On the same front, the plans for the EverQuest anniversary servers sounded a bit muddled.  They gave us a revised plan for all servers before the month was out.

Meanwhile, the PlanetSide Arena launch, pushed back to March, was pushed out again, this time until “summer,” with a planned simultaneous Playstation 4 launch given as a reason.

I also wondered what EverQuest III should even look like, were it a possibility.  I doubt that it is, but it is fun to speculate.

All of that aside, with the approach of the EverQuest 20th anniversary I started logging in to play a bit with a fresh character.  I started on Vox, a standard rules server, with an eye on the tutorial.  I ran through the revolt in Glooming Deep.

On the LOTRO Legendary server I was wrapping up in Eriador.  It was time to start considering Moria.

I was also rolling back into WoW and Battle for Azeroth for a bit.  It was a change up from LOTRO.

On the EVE Online front it was announced there would be no alliance tournament for 2019.  The February update brought us some fixes and the Guardians Gala event.  CCP was also talking about letting people buy skills straight from the character sheet.  There was also talk of a new launcher coming.

I wrote something about the time zones of New Eden, it being a world spanning, 24 hour game.

Burn Jita was back again, kicking off with explosions as usual.

I wrote a bit about the city of Waterdeep, the heart of TorilMUD.

Twitch offered me a free trial in Final Fantasy XIV, but I couldn’t get it to work.

I was on about there being no good expansions again.

And there was word of a smaller Switch, the end of the Wii Shop Channel, eports was stomping its feet and demanding to be taken seriously, and the Olympics rejecting esports all wrapped up in a Friday bullet points post.

Ten Years Ago

A lot of people got their panties in a twist about Steam tags.  It was the literal end of civilization as we knew it… for about 30 minutes.

EA handed over the running of Camelot Unchained and Ultima Online to Broadsword.

I spent some time with Warcraft III attempting to discover the pre-history of WoW.

There was Diablo III version 2.0, and the changes looked promising.

On the World of Warcraft front, we were still talking about Warlords of Draenor.  Pre-orders were announced an there was a rumor that the expansion would cost $60, which seemed a bit steep.  Also, insta-90s looked to be coming as a cash shop item.  Would all of that stem the tide on subscription decline?

Meanwhile, I finished the last of the LFR raids, witnessing the downfall of Garrosh Hellscream.  For all of the complaints about LFR, I enjoyed my raid tourism.  The instance group did Grim Batol, then made the jump to Pandaria before returning with slightly better equipment for Heroic Deadmines.

I was wondering why PvP seemed to be a requirement for all MMOs.

I got into The Edler Scrolls Online beta and declared it Skyrim-like enough for me, then never played it again.

Brad McQuaid’s Pantheon: Further Falling of the Fallen Kickstarter campaign was winding down, doomed to failure.  There was talk about what would happen next.  Plan B anybody?

I ran another EVE Online screen shot contest to give away some items from the Second Decade Collector’s Edition which I scored for free… after having bought it for myself.  And then there was the monument and drone assist and campaign medals and the repercussions of B-R5RB to talk about.

I wondered what was going to happen with people being given free reign in Landmark.

And, finally, it was the end for Flappy Bird.  I grabbed that from GameIndustry.biz and their look back to February 2014.

Fifteen Years Ago

My 8800GT video card died.  That was the second one to go.

I had been looking at my dis-used GAX Online account and wondered what gamer social networking needed to be viable.  Since then, GAX Online has shut down.

PLEX showed up in EVE Online fifteen years ago.  It doesn’t seem like it has been around for that long.  And then there was the whole Goonswarm disbandment of Band of Brothers, and act that effectively ended the Great War, and which made the BBC news.  This led to talk of how much control players should have over their destiny.

In game I got the mining foreman mindlink as a storyline mission drop, I upgraded to a Raven Navy Isssue, and finally bought the freighter for which I had been training, and got some ships blown up in the Worlds Collide mission… again. There was EVE Vegas, which was just a player run meet up at that point.

I was still active in Lord of the Rings Online, playing characters on the Nimrodel server.  Looking for a class on which to affix the Reynaldo Fabulous name, I put up a poll on the subject.  While Minstrel won the poll, Reynaldo ended up being a hunter with a fabulous hat.  And when I wasn’t fooling around with alts, I was leveling up my captain who made it all the way to Rivendell at one point.

While over in Azeroth, it was revealed that my mom plays WoW.  I wondered at how active Westfall seems to be most of the time.  But the answer to that seems to be the Deadmines, which I ran my mom and daughter through. (No dungeon finder back then!)  There was a little pet drama with my daughter who wanted a raptor.  I also managed my first exalted status with a faction in WoW, the Kalu’ak in Northrend.  I wanted that fishing pole.

On the Wii, we had Wii Music, which was crap, and LEGO Batman, which suffered a bit from being yet another variation in the successful LEGO video game franchise.

And then there was the usual blog war shenanigans as somebody was still looking to blame WoW and WoW players for Warhammer Online’s failure to meets its subscriber goals.  I think we’re all over that now, right?  Warhammer did what it did on its own faults and merits in a market that was well known before they shipped.

And Darkfall finally launched and began its short life as… whatever it was.  I didn’t play it.

Twenty Years Ago

The aptly named Gates of Discord expansion for EverQuest launched.  While Smed called its bug-ridden launch “SOE’s worst mistake in five years” it did see the game to its subscription peak of 550K and introduced instancing as the default dungeon mode, something WoW would make a genre default soon enough.

The creator of the original Castle Wolfenstein game from 1981, Silas Warner,  passed away at the age of 54.  I played that game a lot back on my Apple II.  Also, that seems young now.

Twenty-Five Years Ago

Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, arguably one of the best entries in the Civilization series, ships.  My only nit-pick is that it ran full screen at pre-set resolutions so, unlike its predecessor Civilization II, if you play it today it either has to be in a small window or distorted full screen on your likely much-bigger-than-1999 monitor.

Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance also launched, one of the better Star Wars titles.  But Star Wars was never plagued by bad titles the way Star Trek has been over the years

Most Viewed Posts in February

1. Just a Lockpicking Minute…
2. Twitter and the Unleashing of the Great Blue Hope
3. The New System Purge of Video Games
4. Timing those Lucky Eggs for Friendship Milestones in Pokemon Go
5. Bonemass and Mountain Fever in Valheim
6. Stock Options and the IPO
7. Moving in to a New Computer Once More
8. Sailing into a Lightly Modded Valheim
9. EverQuest Starting Points – What Can I Even Say About Qeynos?
10. Quote of the Day – The Fourth A stands for… what now?
11. Quote of the Day – But Think of the Shareholder Value!
12. A Look into January 2024 Destruction in EVE Online

Once again, the direct traffic surge favored recent posts, so there were only two carry overs from last month.  The Lucky Eggs post is a Google search favorite, which is what keeps it on the list.

Search Terms of the Month

“wagering-agreement-meaning-in-nepali”
[I guess I keep this going by posting it]

“aveo-enterprise-agreement”
[Oh now what is this?]

battle of m2-xfe titans lost by corporation
[How about by alliance? I can do by alliance]

poe daily game like wordle
[There are many…]

“civ5-research-agreement-worth-it”
[Still yes…]

gay game
[Not my bag, but don’t let me stop you…]

gay game pc
[Still not much help here]

game java sex gay
[Does being in Java change anything?]

геи игры
[Saying it in Russian doesn’t go anywhere either]

Game Time from ManicTime

The numbers this month pretty much confirm what I probably could have told you based on my gut; I spent a lot of time playing Valheim, to the exclusion of other titles.

• Valheim – 89.63%
• EVE Online – 5.08%
• EverQuest – 3.40%
• Forza Horizon 4 – 1.13%
• Wreckfest – 0.50%
• WoW Classic – 0.26%

The biggest change was WoW Classic, which had been topping the list for months.  I clearly took a month off from Azeroth.

EVE Online

I did get in and go on a few fleets this past month.  I did not spend a lot of time playing in New Eden, but I kept my PI farm going.  That is my sole source of revenue these days, though with the demand for mechanical parts, which among other things are required for fuel blocks, PI is worth about a billion ISK a month to me.  That and SRP is what keeps me solvent.

EverQuest

I am not so much playing EverQuest as touring.  I have been and out for my posting series for the 25th anniversary.  A nostalgia tour of my own.  The visuals stimulate memories which I then take and turn into rambling, semi-coherent posts.  The touring will continue until my writing style improves… or I get bored… or we get past the anniversaries.  The $1,500 Fippy Fest 2024 in-person ticket price certainly did not endear me to Darkpaw.

Pokemon Go

My wife and I are very close to hitting level 45… or we would be if we had finished up that last task.  You have to defeat 50 Team Rocket Go bosses to get to 45, and I stand at 25 defeated and my wife at 20.  We still have some remedial work to do on that front.  It could take a bit.  But at least we can still earn xp towards level 46 while we do it.

• Level: 44 (75% of the way to 45 in xp, 3 of 4 level tasks complete)
• Pokedex status: 818 (+3) caught, 832 (+3) seen
• Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 15 of 20
• Pokemon I want: Three specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm, Icy Snow, and Meadow
• Current buddy: Arctibax

Valheim

Whether or not Valheim was the right choice, it was the choice I jumped into in February.  I have pretty much taked a break from WoW all month to play Valheim, where there is always something to do.  We are currently in the mountains mining silver and search for the next boss.  I’ve geared up enough that I have ventured into the plains a few times and lived to tell the tale.  The mistlands await and maybe the Ashlands will be done before we burn out… so to speak.

WoW Classic

A very quiet month.  I did spend a little time in Wrath Classic working on my rogue, who is up to level 72 now.  Season of Discovery hasn’t held much interest for me since we got past Westfall.  That is kind part of the nostalgia barrier I guess.  Happy memories of Westfall and a bit after that.

Zwift

I managed to get on the bike every weekend this month.  Color that a win.  Meanwhile, the lower level curve meant I racked up three more undeserved levels.  Still no glowing neon tire sets available to me yet.

• Level – 21 (+2)
• Distanced cycled – 1,879 miles (+59 miles)
• Elevation climbed – 69,829 (+1,909 feet)
  
• Calories burned – 57,294 (+1,609)

Coming Up

Apparently one aspect of getting old is constantly asking things like “Is it March already? How did that happen?” aloud to your aging friends and family, who all declare their mystification as well.

So yeah, March.

That means that we will hit the EverQuest 25th anniversary on the 16th.  Expect a post.  Also, I will likely carry on with my own series of starting points posts.  A few more zones and then a couple about getting places.  I will have to run from Qeynos to Freeport.

You can expect some more Valheim I am sure.  Not done there yet.  At least not until we get to the mistlands… though reading up on that, things will get more complicated there.  Something about magic and a mana-like player resource.  We’ll see.  We still have the mountains to finish and the plains to conquor.

I will have to cast an eye towards WoW at some point.  Things are going on.  Cataclysm Classic looms.  Descisions will need to be made.

And then whatever news the wind might bring I suppose. I guess we already know that Microsoft is laying more people off in March.  We’ll have to see who else carries on with this trend.

I pretty much spent all of February ignoring WoW, Blizzard, or anything related.  The call of Valheim and the need for a break was strong I guess.  I suppose it is time to take a minute to catch up with a new month on hand.  And hey, it is Friday, so bullet points look like the path forward.

• Season of Discovery Season 2 and XP Boosts

WoW Classic: Season of Discovery hit phase 2 early in February, so that is hardly news I suppose, except to acknowlegde that it happened and that I haven’t logged in since before that occured.  I had done the WoW Classic zones already a few times, and for anybody who was neither raiding nor interested in PvP, Season of Discorvery doesn’t have much new to offer.  The idea of “Classic Plus” was always a fantasy.

Well, Blizz has apparently at least realized that making everybody grind through vanilla yet again… they’re on a mission to make us do this once a year I guess… so will be introducing the Discoverer’s Delight buff, which brings a 100% xp boost for level 1-39 characters.

They have also decided to cut the price of level 40 mounts in half and to increase the coin reward for all level 1-39 quests, because while penury was all fun and laughs back in 2004, asking us to scrimp and save to just buy our basic class skills yet again is turning into a non-starter for some.

That will all land next Tuesday next week, March 5th, which is also “Super Tuesday” (of “Stupid Tuesday” as it may turn out) here in the US.

The team did say they won’t change the price of epic mounts, but I am not convinced they will stick with that.  Grind for that fast mount just on a server that will go away soon enough?

Blizz is also going to adjust a bunch of raid related things, because raiders are always the main concern of the company.  There is also some discussion of level 60, end game, and what happens to these characters with all the special skills and runes when Blizz ends the season.  My bet is that they will managed to make people angry somehow when they shut down the Season of Discovery servers.

Read all about it here.

• Diablo IV on XBox PC Game Pass

Microsoft… and I should probably just stop using “Blizzard” or “Activision” now, it is all the Microsoft show, layoffs and all… has announced the first formerly Blizzard title to show up on the Microsoft XBox PC Game Pass:  Diablo IV.

Coming March 28th, you will be able to play Diablo IV by just subscribing to the XBox PC Game Pass, which last I checked was $10 a month, though rumor has it that price will be going up before the end of the year.

Announcement here.

• Prime Gaming WoW Tabard Give Away

Blizz has another WoW item available on Prime Gaming, the tabard of frost.

While a tabard is kind of small potatoes, it still looks better than what you can make with the guild tabard generator, a bit of the game still stuck in 2004.  Also, only available for retail WoW.

Find out how to claim the tabard of frost here.

• Harder WoW Classic Hardcore

Is WoW Classic Hardcore not challenging enough?  Want to prove you’re even tougher than the run of the mill no-lifers who made it to level 60?  WoW Classic Hardcore introduced “self found” mode so you can prove you’re a step above the average hardcore survivor.

Self found mode restricts your character from using the auction house, recieving in-game mail, or trading with other players so that you can prove the purity of your efforts.

If you decide you have made a horrible mistake in choosing that mode, you can turn it off.  But once turned off, it can never be restored.

Read all about it here.

• The War Within Hero Talents Preview

I feel like I should be interested in what Blizz has going on when it comes to the next retail expansion… though I also feel like I shouldn’t care since I haven’t played since early Shadowlands… so I did poke my nose into the early look at the hero talent trees for The War Within.  So, for example, Paladins will have hero talents that work between spec pairs it seems.

And, at some level, “hero talents” sounds pretty cool.

But then the history of the game starts to weigh on me.  Specs and talents get thrown in the air and redone with EVERY expansion.  Nothing ever builds on the past, everything is a complete rug pull, changing up what you’ve grown used to in order to try and be fresh and new.  Also, anything with “hero” in the name is doomed to be nerfed it is as all useful.  The history of the game demands it.

Still, they have something in play.

More on that available, including large and complicated charts, here.

• Hearthstone Anniversary Rewards for WoW

Remember when Hearthstone came out… oh… ten years ago!  Yeah, back then for launch to get WoW players to try it out, they gave away the Hearthsteed.  I will admit, that was enough to bribe me to try it out.

Well, now that Hearthstone is turning ten, they are doing it again, this time offering the Fiery Hearthsteed mount to WoW players who log in between March 11 and May 14 2024.

This reward, like the frost tabard above, is only available to be redeemed in retail WoW.  Classic players can suck it… which makes me wonder if I should bother.  Oh, who am I kidding, I do Twitch drops for games I’ll never play again, I can log into Hearthstone for this.

For all the detail about that and the Hearthstone anniversary click this link.

So it goes, here on the first day of March.  Spring is in the offing, at least here in the US, but so is Daylight Savings Time, so your mileage may vary.

The Site

WordPress.com always wants to make sure I have something to write about in this section every month.  This time around I am back on about email subscriptions.

Last month I was complaining that they were only getting delievered to my inbox every other day.  This month… that stopped completely.  No email delivered with my posts any day of the week.  This coincided with WP.com removing a bunch of the email section of the subscription UI they put in a while back that looked like they wanted to take on Substack.  They have clearly changed their mind or are covering up some failure.

Anyway, if you are still getting email updates from here, WP.com clearly thinks you are special.

Also mentioned last month was the RSS feed issue, where WP.com is updating the feed only every few days.  I see this from other sites that use WP as their host, like Game Developer.  I will see nothing in Feedly for three or four days from them, then suddenly there will be 35 posts.

If that sort of burst behavior doesn’t bother you, carry on.  If it does, you can use the Feedburner RSS feed, though recommending a Google solution to a problem feels like herasy these days.  How have they not shut down Feedburner yet?  It must drive ad revenue in some way.

WP.com has also gotten extremely finicky about being able to leave comments without having a WP.com account.  It seems that you either need to be completely logged in or be willing to leave a full anonymous comment, with no in between.  Thanks a lot WP.

Finally, the wierd direct source bursts of traffic continued this month, though it has grown more erratic and seems to be tapering off somewhat.

Basically, if it wasn’t there I would be getting about 500 page views a day, 300 of which would be from Google search.  But with that direct traffic the daily views run between 550 and 1,300.  That makes direct traffic the top source so far this year.

I don’t know what it means, but it does seem to be driving ad revenue.  Go money.

Also, I strongly recommend you use Ad Block when visiting here.  I want the bots to pay my hosting, not you.  I currently use uBlock Origin for my own ad blocking needs.

One Year Ago

We were in Vegas during the Pro Bowl, those that was pretty much on accident.  We didn’t go see it or anything.

Meta was trying to get a younger demographic into Horizon Worlds.  I was also still on Twitter, though the alternatives were ramping up.

At Enad Global 7, the Q4 2022 financials celebrated the start of the My Singing Monsters hype bubble.

I was going on about some of the barriers in the way of going back to play old MMORPGs.  I was also pondering what Twitch drops do for games.

Activision Blizzard Q4 2022 financials were out and, while Dragonflight did well, it clearly did not break any records.   They were also trying to drum up pre-sales for Diablo IV.  Would that mean that season 28 would be the last season for Diablo III?  Probably.  Meanwhile, Mike Ybarra was pleading poverty or some absolute BS.

I was already on about the whole Cataclysm Classic question.  It would not be announced until BlizzCon later in the year.  I was also wondering when the peak era for crafting was in WoW.

In Wrath Classic we were working on the Lunar Festival achievements, since those were now available.  We all achieved the title of The Elder.  I was also going pretty heavy on the Wrath Classic dailies.  We ran off and did Violet Hold and Gundrak.

CCP was finally putting their Microsoft Excel plugin in to beta testing.  There was also the January 2023 MER to go over and a PLEX for Good campaign for earthquake relief in Turkey which raised $26K.

I did a Friday Bullet Points post about EVE Online that covered the Photon UI, pink SKINs, Imperium War Bonds, and the company financials.  I also started looking at ship destruction in New Eden and I hit 260 million skill points on my main.

At the CSM17 winter summit there was a dubious proposal about improving PvE.

Actually in game, the collapse of the FI.RE coalition ended up with the South East Agreement in null sec.

I had something about the postcards in Pokemon Go.  What are they ever there for?

And WordPress.com changed out the WordPress app out for the JetPack app, though aside from a color change, I couldn’t tell you why.

Five Years Ago

Epic Games had announced their digital storefront the previous December (2019), but we were finally getting a deeper look at their strategy for taking on Steam.  One word: Exclusives.  (Some of which were already up for sale on Steam, then withdrawn, making as many people angry as happy.)

Over at Activision-Blizzard they announced record annual revenues for 2018, then laid off 8% of their staff.  I suppose, in hindsight, they predicted 2019 correctly, but laying people off while execs get bonuses is never a good look.

Daybreak gave us some details about their planned special rules EverQuest II PvP server.  On the same front, the plans for the EverQuest anniversary servers sounded a bit muddled.  They gave us a revised plan for all servers before the month was out.

Meanwhile, the PlanetSide Arena launch, pushed back to March, was pushed out again, this time until “summer,” with a planned simultaneous Playstation 4 launch given as a reason.

I also wondered what EverQuest III should even look like, were it a possibility.  I doubt that it is, but it is fun to speculate.

All of that aside, with the approach of the EverQuest 20th anniversary I started logging in to play a bit with a fresh character.  I started on Vox, a standard rules server, with an eye on the tutorial.  I ran through the revolt in Glooming Deep.

On the LOTRO Legendary server I was wrapping up in Eriador.  It was time to start considering Moria.

I was also rolling back into WoW and Battle for Azeroth for a bit.  It was a change up from LOTRO.

On the EVE Online front it was announced there would be no alliance tournament for 2019.  The February update brought us some fixes and the Guardians Gala event.  CCP was also talking about letting people buy skills straight from the character sheet.  There was also talk of a new launcher coming.

I wrote something about the time zones of New Eden, it being a world spanning, 24 hour game.

Burn Jita was back again, kicking off with explosions as usual.

I wrote a bit about the city of Waterdeep, the heart of TorilMUD.

Twitch offered me a free trial in Final Fantasy XIV, but I couldn’t get it to work.

I was on about there being no good expansions again.

And there was word of a smaller Switch, the end of the Wii Shop Channel, eports was stomping its feet and demanding to be taken seriously, and the Olympics rejecting esports all wrapped up in a Friday bullet points post.

Ten Years Ago

A lot of people got their panties in a twist about Steam tags.  It was the literal end of civilization as we knew it… for about 30 minutes.

EA handed over the running of Camelot Unchained and Ultima Online to Broadsword.

I spent some time with Warcraft III attempting to discover the pre-history of WoW.

There was Diablo III version 2.0, and the changes looked promising.

On the World of Warcraft front, we were still talking about Warlords of Draenor.  Pre-orders were announced an there was a rumor that the expansion would cost $60, which seemed a bit steep.  Also, insta-90s looked to be coming as a cash shop item.  Would all of that stem the tide on subscription decline?

Meanwhile, I finished the last of the LFR raids, witnessing the downfall of Garrosh Hellscream.  For all of the complaints about LFR, I enjoyed my raid tourism.  The instance group did Grim Batol, then made the jump to Pandaria before returning with slightly better equipment for Heroic Deadmines.

I was wondering why PvP seemed to be a requirement for all MMOs.

I got into The Edler Scrolls Online beta and declared it Skyrim-like enough for me, then never played it again.

Brad McQuaid’s Pantheon: Further Falling of the Fallen Kickstarter campaign was winding down, doomed to failure.  There was talk about what would happen next.  Plan B anybody?

I ran another EVE Online screen shot contest to give away some items from the Second Decade Collector’s Edition which I scored for free… after having bought it for myself.  And then there was the monument and drone assist and campaign medals and the repercussions of B-R5RB to talk about.

I wondered what was going to happen with people being given free reign in Landmark.

And, finally, it was the end for Flappy Bird.  I grabbed that from GameIndustry.biz and their look back to February 2014.

Fifteen Years Ago

My 8800GT video card died.  That was the second one to go.

I had been looking at my dis-used GAX Online account and wondered what gamer social networking needed to be viable.  Since then, GAX Online has shut down.

PLEX showed up in EVE Online fifteen years ago.  It doesn’t seem like it has been around for that long.  And then there was the whole Goonswarm disbandment of Band of Brothers, and act that effectively ended the Great War, and which made the BBC news.  This led to talk of how much control players should have over their destiny.

In game I got the mining foreman mindlink as a storyline mission drop, I upgraded to a Raven Navy Isssue, and finally bought the freighter for which I had been training, and got some ships blown up in the Worlds Collide mission… again. There was EVE Vegas, which was just a player run meet up at that point.

I was still active in Lord of the Rings Online, playing characters on the Nimrodel server.  Looking for a class on which to affix the Reynaldo Fabulous name, I put up a poll on the subject.  While Minstrel won the poll, Reynaldo ended up being a hunter with a fabulous hat.  And when I wasn’t fooling around with alts, I was leveling up my captain who made it all the way to Rivendell at one point.

While over in Azeroth, it was revealed that my mom plays WoW.  I wondered at how active Westfall seems to be most of the time.  But the answer to that seems to be the Deadmines, which I ran my mom and daughter through. (No dungeon finder back then!)  There was a little pet drama with my daughter who wanted a raptor.  I also managed my first exalted status with a faction in WoW, the Kalu’ak in Northrend.  I wanted that fishing pole.

On the Wii, we had Wii Music, which was crap, and LEGO Batman, which suffered a bit from being yet another variation in the successful LEGO video game franchise.

And then there was the usual blog war shenanigans as somebody was still looking to blame WoW and WoW players for Warhammer Online’s failure to meets its subscriber goals.  I think we’re all over that now, right?  Warhammer did what it did on its own faults and merits in a market that was well known before they shipped.

And Darkfall finally launched and began its short life as… whatever it was.  I didn’t play it.

Twenty Years Ago

The aptly named Gates of Discord expansion for EverQuest launched.  While Smed called its bug-ridden launch “SOE’s worst mistake in five years” it did see the game to its subscription peak of 550K and introduced instancing as the default dungeon mode, something WoW would make a genre default soon enough.

The creator of the original Castle Wolfenstein game from 1981, Silas Warner,  passed away at the age of 54.  I played that game a lot back on my Apple II.  Also, that seems young now.

Twenty-Five Years Ago

Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, arguably one of the best entries in the Civilization series, ships.  My only nit-pick is that it ran full screen at pre-set resolutions so, unlike its predecessor Civilization II, if you play it today it either has to be in a small window or distorted full screen on your likely much-bigger-than-1999 monitor.

Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance also launched, one of the better Star Wars titles.  But Star Wars was never plagued by bad titles the way Star Trek has been over the years

Most Viewed Posts in February

1. Just a Lockpicking Minute…
2. Twitter and the Unleashing of the Great Blue Hope
3. The New System Purge of Video Games
4. Timing those Lucky Eggs for Friendship Milestones in Pokemon Go
5. Bonemass and Mountain Fever in Valheim
6. Stock Options and the IPO
7. Moving in to a New Computer Once More
8. Sailing into a Lightly Modded Valheim
9. EverQuest Starting Points – What Can I Even Say About Qeynos?
10. Quote of the Day – The Fourth A stands for… what now?
11. Quote of the Day – But Think of the Shareholder Value!
12. A Look into January 2024 Destruction in EVE Online

Once again, the direct traffic surge favored recent posts, so there were only two carry overs from last month.  The Lucky Eggs post is a Google search favorite, which is what keeps it on the list.

Search Terms of the Month

“wagering-agreement-meaning-in-nepali”
[I guess I keep this going by posting it]

“aveo-enterprise-agreement”
[Oh now what is this?]

battle of m2-xfe titans lost by corporation
[How about by alliance? I can do by alliance]

poe daily game like wordle
[There are many…]

“civ5-research-agreement-worth-it”
[Still yes…]

gay game
[Not my bag, but don’t let me stop you…]

gay game pc
[Still not much help here]

game java sex gay
[Does being in Java change anything?]

геи игры
[Saying it in Russian doesn’t go anywhere either]

Game Time from ManicTime

The numbers this month pretty much confirm what I probably could have told you based on my gut; I spent a lot of time playing Valheim, to the exclusion of other titles.

• Valheim – 89.63%
• EVE Online – 5.08%
• EverQuest – 3.40%
• Forza Horizon 4 – 1.13%
• Wreckfest – 0.50%
• WoW Classic – 0.26%

The biggest change was WoW Classic, which had been topping the list for months.  I clearly took a month off from Azeroth.

EVE Online

I did get in and go on a few fleets this past month.  I did not spend a lot of time playing in New Eden, but I kept my PI farm going.  That is my sole source of revenue these days, though with the demand for mechanical parts, which among other things are required for fuel blocks, PI is worth about a billion ISK a month to me.  That and SRP is what keeps me solvent.

EverQuest

I am not so much playing EverQuest as touring.  I have been and out for my posting series for the 25th anniversary.  A nostalgia tour of my own.  The visuals stimulate memories which I then take and turn into rambling, semi-coherent posts.  The touring will continue until my writing style improves… or I get bored… or we get past the anniversaries.  The $1,500 Fippy Fest 2024 in-person ticket price certainly did not endear me to Darkpaw.

Pokemon Go

My wife and I are very close to hitting level 45… or we would be if we had finished up that last task.  You have to defeat 50 Team Rocket Go bosses to get to 45, and I stand at 25 defeated and my wife at 20.  We still have some remedial work to do on that front.  It could take a bit.  But at least we can still earn xp towards level 46 while we do it.

• Level: 44 (75% of the way to 45 in xp, 3 of 4 level tasks complete)
• Pokedex status: 818 (+3) caught, 832 (+3) seen
• Vivillon Evolutions obtained: 15 of 20
• Pokemon I want: Three specific Scatterbugs; Sandstorm, Icy Snow, and Meadow
• Current buddy: Arctibax

Valheim

Whether or not Valheim was the right choice, it was the choice I jumped into in February.  I have pretty much taked a break from WoW all month to play Valheim, where there is always something to do.  We are currently in the mountains mining silver and search for the next boss.  I’ve geared up enough that I have ventured into the plains a few times and lived to tell the tale.  The mistlands await and maybe the Ashlands will be done before we burn out… so to speak.

WoW Classic

A very quiet month.  I did spend a little time in Wrath Classic working on my rogue, who is up to level 72 now.  Season of Discovery hasn’t held much interest for me since we got past Westfall.  That is kind part of the nostalgia barrier I guess.  Happy memories of Westfall and a bit after that.

Zwift

I managed to get on the bike every weekend this month.  Color that a win.  Meanwhile, the lower level curve meant I racked up three more undeserved levels.  Still no glowing neon tire sets available to me yet.

• Level – 21 (+2)
• Distanced cycled – 1,879 miles (+59 miles)
• Elevation climbed – 69,829 (+1,909 feet)
  
• Calories burned – 57,294 (+1,609)

Coming Up

Apparently one aspect of getting old is constantly asking things like “Is it March already? How did that happen?” aloud to your aging friends and family, who all declare their mystification as well.

So yeah, March.

That means that we will hit the EverQuest 25th anniversary on the 16th.  Expect a post.  Also, I will likely carry on with my own series of starting points posts.  A few more zones and then a couple about getting places.  I will have to run from Qeynos to Freeport.

You can expect some more Valheim I am sure.  Not done there yet.  At least not until we get to the mistlands… though reading up on that, things will get more complicated there.  Something about magic and a mana-like player resource.  We’ll see.  We still have the mountains to finish and the plains to conquor.

I will have to cast an eye towards WoW at some point.  Things are going on.  Cataclysm Classic looms.  Descisions will need to be made.

And then whatever news the wind might bring I suppose. I guess we already know that Microsoft is laying more people off in March.  We’ll have to see who else carries on with this trend.

I had successfully made my way to Northrend with my rogue, now my sixth character to get into the content of Wrath Classic.  But I was a bit behind on a few of his skill, which meant returning to older content to catch up.

The first was mining.

One of the errors, in my view, of The Burning Crusade was the necessity to have harvesting skills up to 300 before you could use them in Outland… well, except herbalism.  Somehow they saw the light on herbalism, mostly by putting some vanilla era herbs out in Hellfire Peninsula.  But mining… forget about it.  You need 300 mining skill to get fel iron ore, and Chad was sitting at 245.  Not even close.

Fortunately I had done the thorium loop in Winterspring in the past so knew what to do.  I had to pass some rich deposits at first, but soon skilled up enough to get them.  A couple of sessions of that… one can only run in a circle mining for so long… and I had hit the magic number.

Then it was out to Hellfire Peninsula to mine fel iron until I hit 325, then to Zangarmarsh where Adamantite gets thrown into the mix.  I hit 350 quickly enough… my main problem was another person out there flying the same loop for the same reason… and I was on to Borean Tundra because the devs learned their lesson and made cobalt mining require just 350 skill level.

So, problem solved.  Also, Chad’s other harvesting skill was skinning, and that is almost always maxed out… especially after Nagrand and Hemet Nesingwary.

Which brought me to lockpicking.  Having only barely played a rogue in the early days… technically, my first character in the group was a rogue name Blintz, but he was replaced by my paladin when the group caught up to him in levels… lockpicking never really entered into it that much.  I remember doing some leveling up with a bunch of locked boxes that spawned out in Redridge, but I mostly just ignored the skill after that.

And then, at some point, the skill just went away and your lockpicking skill was a function of your level and nobody mentioned it ever again.

But not yet.  Not in Wrath Classic.  There I was still in the era of having to skill that up and I was… way behind in lockpicking.

That picture I took a bit into my efforts.  I was down at 135 when I started.

Where to even go to get that skill leveled up?  Fortunately, when it comes to WoW at least, there is always some site out there that has the answer.

First it was off to Ashenvale to the coast around Blackfathom Deeps where I ran around in a large loop by the naga and the wildlife looking for chests to get to 150.  Then it was off to Angor Fortress in the Badlands for the next segment of training.

I spent a good part of an afternoon there.  The lockboxes upstairs will get you to at least 175, and then you go downstairs and can get past 250.  That is still a lot of locks to pick in a place where I estimate no more than five are active at any moment and you can easily outrun the spawn rate.

I ran that until all the chests were green difficulty before moving on to Searing Gorge, where you have to go into the mines with the Dark Iron dwarves and find their chests to unlock.

That stage also took a while, because chests are scattered about and only a couple seem active at any given moment.  I pushed that until I wasn’t getting skillups because the next suggested location was Blackrock Depths.  So off I went again.

The guide says that there are four locks you can do at the start of the instance.  There are three doors that will give skill ups and then the shadowforge lock that is in one of the first crowded rooms where things can go wrong if you don’t manage your aggro radius.

I pushed Searing Gorge for all it was worth because, while it is easy enough to run in and pick these locks… I did it with no problems and got my skillups… you can only reset an instance 5 times in an hour, so I wanted to get to within 20 skill points of 300… once again, the barried for Outland lockpicking… so I could do it all in one go.

I succeeded in that.  From there it was off to Outland and Zangarmarsh, where there are a bunch of chests along the north of the western side of the swamp.

And then, once those went green in difficulty, it was off to Nagrand and one of the fortresses there that has boxes to pick scattered about.

That was actually where I had to do some work and be careful because, at level 70, I was still in the level range for the mobs around there and couldn’t just one-shot anything that looked at me cross-eyed.

With that I made it to 350.

I also stopped for a minute to slay a few Talbuk so I could get my cooking skill… at 349 in the first screen shot… over the 350 marker so I could start in on recipes in Northrend.

So Chad is all tuned up on lockpicking.  Now it is just the detail of getting him to level 80 at some point before Cataclysm Classic.

I had successfully made my way to Northrend with my rogue, now my sixth character to get into the content of Wrath Classic.  But I was a bit behind on a few of his skill, which meant returning to older content to catch up.

The first was mining.

One of the errors, in my view, of The Burning Crusade was the necessity to have harvesting skills up to 300 before you could use them in Outland… well, except herbalism.  Somehow they saw the light on herbalism, mostly by putting some vanilla era herbs out in Hellfire Peninsula.  But mining… forget about it.  You need 300 mining skill to get fel iron ore, and Chad was sitting at 245.  Not even close.

Fortunately I had done the thorium loop in Winterspring in the past so knew what to do.  I had to pass some rich deposits at first, but soon skilled up enough to get them.  A couple of sessions of that… one can only run in a circle mining for so long… and I had hit the magic number.

Then it was out to Hellfire Peninsula to mine fel iron until I hit 325, then to Zangarmarsh where Adamantite gets thrown into the mix.  I hit 350 quickly enough… my main problem was another person out there flying the same loop for the same reason… and I was on to Borean Tundra because the devs learned their lesson and made cobalt mining require just 350 skill level.

So, problem solved.  Also, Chad’s other harvesting skill was skinning, and that is almost always maxed out… especially after Nagrand and Hemet Nesingwary.

Which brought me to lockpicking.  Having only barely played a rogue in the early days… technically, my first character in the group was a rogue name Blintz, but he was replaced by my paladin when the group caught up to him in levels… lockpicking never really entered into it that much.  I remember doing some leveling up with a bunch of locked boxes that spawned out in Redridge, but I mostly just ignored the skill after that.

And then, at some point, the skill just went away and your lockpicking skill was a function of your level and nobody mentioned it ever again.

But not yet.  Not in Wrath Classic.  There I was still in the era of having to skill that up and I was… way behind in lockpicking.

That picture I took a bit into my efforts.  I was down at 135 when I started.

Where to even go to get that skill leveled up?  Fortunately, when it comes to WoW at least, there is always some site out there that has the answer.

First it was off to Ashenvale to the coast around Blackfathom Deeps where I ran around in a large loop by the naga and the wildlife looking for chests to get to 150.  Then it was off to Angor Fortress in the Badlands for the next segment of training.

I spent a good part of an afternoon there.  The lockboxes upstairs will get you to at least 175, and then you go downstairs and can get past 250.  That is still a lot of locks to pick in a place where I estimate no more than five are active at any moment and you can easily outrun the spawn rate.

I ran that until all the chests were green difficulty before moving on to Searing Gorge, where you have to go into the mines with the Dark Iron dwarves and find their chests to unlock.

That stage also took a while, because chests are scattered about and only a couple seem active at any given moment.  I pushed that until I wasn’t getting skillups because the next suggested location was Blackrock Depths.  So off I went again.

The guide says that there are four locks you can do at the start of the instance.  There are three doors that will give skill ups and then the shadowforge lock that is in one of the first crowded rooms where things can go wrong if you don’t manage your aggro radius.

I pushed Searing Gorge for all it was worth because, while it is easy enough to run in and pick these locks… I did it with no problems and got my skillups… you can only reset an instance 5 times in an hour, so I wanted to get to within 20 skill points of 300… once again, the barried for Outland lockpicking… so I could do it all in one go.

I succeeded in that.  From there it was off to Outland and Zangarmarsh, where there are a bunch of chests along the north of the western side of the swamp.

And then, once those went green in difficulty, it was off to Nagrand and one of the fortresses there that has boxes to pick scattered about.

That was actually where I had to do some work and be careful because, at level 70, I was still in the level range for the mobs around there and couldn’t just one-shot anything that looked at me cross-eyed.

With that I made it to 350.

I also stopped for a minute to slay a few Talbuk so I could get my cooking skill… at 349 in the first screen shot… over the 350 marker so I could start in on recipes in Northrend.

So Chad is all tuned up on lockpicking.  Now it is just the detail of getting him to level 80 at some point before Cataclysm Classic.