When the pre-patch for Wrath Classic dropped, everybody in my BNet list --and I do mean everybody-- was in Wrath Classic.
This time, in Cataclysm Classic?
As of 9:30 PM EST, there are exactly four.
There's also two in Season of Discovery, and one in Classic Era.
Of a BNet list of 26 regular Classic players who were in Wrath Classic at pre-patch at this time of night back then, less than 20% is not a good look.
I was curious about people whom I'm not BNet friends with but have had direct messages via Discord, and unlike that first night, very very few people are on World of Warcraft right now. Especially those that I raided with in Vanilla and TBC Classic.
So, while there may be activity in Cataclysm Classic, among the people I played with in earlier instances of WoW Classic Cata does not have any draw whatsoever.
Yes, in Ohio it's that time of year: when you come out in the morning and your car is covered in pollen. If you wash your car, it'll be covered in pollen the next morning.
Oh yay.
In dubious honor of the flowers here going bananas, I figured I'd spend this Meme Monday on the bane of my existence, pollen.
And both blow things up, too. In the case of the former, my eyes and nose. From Memebase.
Yeah, I know. I get that. From Cheezburger.
Makes me wonder if that death mask found at Mycene merely had allergies. From Pinterest.
None of these items are enough for a post on their own, so I strung several that have been living rent free in my head into a single miscellaneous post.
***
In World of Warcraft, main raids typically have a gear set for each class known as a Tier set. In Vanilla WoW, there's even a pre-raid Tier set, known as T0, that you can accumulate via dungeons.* However, why is AQ40's Tier set considered T2.5 and not T3? It's not a set that came along later and was shoehorned in to give people a chance at better gear, like the T0.5 questlines, so why is it colloquially known as T2.5?
You'd think that going from Molten Core -> Onyxia/Blackwing Lair -> Temple of Ahn'Qiraj -> Naxxramas would be Tier 1 through Tier 4, but noooo....
***
Ex-Blizzard head honcho Mike Ybarra has this idea in his head to allow paying customers to tip game devs. Given that while he was in charge at Blizzard he had the ability to pay the development staff --all of them-- more money if he liked their work, why is he even suggesting this?
Apparently tip jar stickers are a thing that you can buy. From superostmk.live
Because he wants to turn game development into the equivalent of the wait staff at American restaurants, who survive on tips because of the low pay.
I mean, I get it if there's a tip jar out for free-to-play games, since that could make sense if you don't want to buy stuff from their cash shop (assuming there is one), but when a guy who was in charge of a game development studio makes these suggestions, it certainly seems less like he's trying to say "game devs deserve extra for a good game" and more like "I really want to find new ways to pay people less to increase my profit margins".
***
One thing that always puzzled me about the Plaguelands in WoW is how the land is so obviously diseased and plagued --both there and in the Ghostlands in southern Quel'Thalas-- but the NPCs and the players seem to be immune to the Plague itself. You see this in Northrend in Wrath of the Lich King as well, where in the Troll city of Zul'Drak has Plague Spreaders everywhere, but the Crusaders and the players are effectively immune to that. I would have thought that anything who stays long enough in Plague infested lands stands a very high chance of contracting the Plague themselves, but I guess plot armor is stronger than the Plague of Undeath.
Thought I'd go with a Ghostlands screenshot for a change. Even in broad daylight it looks like this.
***
I'm not the brightest bulb in the universe when someone tries to subtly tell me something.
For some reason I was thinking about the term Netflix and Chill, and it occurred to me just what other "come hither" signals in the past did I miss. I knew of "come up for a cup of coffee", but I personally never encountered that one, but beyond that outside of the stereotypical 'booty call' --calling someone up after midnight to ask them to come over to your place-- I don't know of any. And I certainly don't know of any references used by people playing various video, pencil/paper, and board games, for certain.
Still, maybe it's something to pursue for a while. Yes, I am such a dweeb. Or maybe I just want to look back on my past and smack my forehead and go "Oh CRAP! How did I miss that one??!!"
Sometimes being middle age is a bitch.
*Yes, I know that they're not all that good in terms of what your class is best at, Blizzard was still figuring this stuff out in Vanilla, you know, so it's not perfect. Still, the Rogue set and the Mage set do look nice from an aesthetics standpoint.
**There's a ton of them out there; I only linked one but if you want to read more, go ahead and search for "clueless guys reddit thread". Trust me, they'll pop out.
When I went away to college, I was a kid who listened to Rock and Metal, but also enjoyed Classical music. I had a thing for Canadian power rock trios, as my collection of Rush and Triumph cassettes proved, but I also would listen to the Classical LPs that my parents had in the basement*.
As far as I know, they're still down there. This pic is from Etsy, but this was the first album in the set.
I knew that Alternative --aka Modern Rock-- was out there, as was New Wave, but when I was in high school I wasn't really exposed to it at all. The legendary WOXY, 97.7 FM, was up in Oxford, Ohio, and while we could (barely) pick it up back home, it was more well known locally as the station used in the movie Rain Man.
The tagline was created for the movie, and
the station loved it so much they adopted it.
I knew of punk, and what I heard I liked, but it never got on the radio back home. Top 40 dominated the airwaves, and big corporate radio companies (Jaycor, a predecessor to IHeartRadio, began in the late 80s in Cincinnati) were just starting to make inroads on homogenizing what you could hear over the air, so I expected that going away to college would expose me to far more of what I liked than what I could hear locally.
But of all the things I expected to be exposed to, this certainly wasn't on the menu:
My new roommate was from Chicago, and I quickly learned a few things when we moved in together: we both shared a love of D&D and Doctor Who**, he certainly loved his Chicago Cubs and Chicago Bears, no city in the US was as good as Chicago, and that he was fine with putting up posters that would have given my parents a heart attack.
We both contributed to the decor in our dorm room. My posters were more along these lines:
Mine was a 5 foot version of this, which I still have stored away in the basement. (From Ebay.)
But these were more of my roommate's taste:
I had no idea who Samantha Fox was until he put this 5 foot tall poster up on the back of our door. This caused... drama... when my parents picked me up for Thanksgiving. (From Worthpoint.)
Oh, and he had eclectic taste in music.
He had an actual CD player --a portable model, and the first one I'd ever seen-- and about a dozen CDs. Sure, I'd seen a few CDs at stores, but compared to albums and cassettes there were very few of them. But I was surprised at what he had on his collection. Amy Grant? Stryper? He didn't seem like the sort for Christian music. He also had Genesis' Invisible Touch, a greatest hits compilation of The Young Rascals, and...
It might have been Fresh Aire III, but This was a better quality photo. From Discogs.
Fresh Aire? What the hell is this? And...
From Discogs.
"Windham Hill?" I asked.
"Yeah, it's pretty nice music. I'll put it on later."
Given his other geeky pastimes, I was willing to give it a try. And I surprised myself by actually liking both CDs, although I'll freely admit the sound quality of the CDs alone probably had an impact. By October, I'd heard enough to know two things: I actually liked this "New Age" type of music, and I wanted a CD player for Christmas. Given that I didn't have a receiver but I did have a boom box with AUX inputs, that's saying something.
***
Fast forward to today, and the past couple of months I've been spending time re-ripping my old CDs at a better bit rate than before***, so I've reacquainted myself with my old Windham Hill and Mannheim Steamroller CDs. I mean, I still play them from time to time, but one thing about re-ripping means I'm hearing everything again, listening critically, to make sure that the CD was ripped properly.****
Because of this exercise, I've been struck by how greatly my roommate from 37 years ago influenced my musical tastes of today.
And now, I've got online friends to thank for influencing my musical tastes again.
Found this at a bookstore. This one's for you, Bhagpuss.
*My dad did NOT listen to Classical music; my mom got the Funk and Wagnalls collection --one week at a time as they were released-- from our local discount store down the street.
**When he was moving his stuff into our dorm, I noticed this magazine on the top of one of his boxes:
Took me a while to find this out of the Parallel Context archive, but here it is.
I immediately recognized it as TSR's Dragon magazine, so I pretended I didn't see anything so as not to attract my parents' attention, but if I had any doubt that I had found another one of my people, this dispelled it. He also had a signed black and white photo of Tom "The Fourth Doctor" Baker on his desk, next to the prom photos with his (then) girlfriend. So yeah, a nerd through and through.
***Yes, it's still MP3s, because I don't have that much in terms of disk space for storage to handle FLAC. Besides, being in my mid-50s means that my ears aren't as good as they once were, but they're good enough to hear the difference in some pieces of music in a 192-bitrate versus a 320-bitrate MP3. You just have to know where to listen --and have the right sort of music-- to make it noticeable. Sure, FLAC or WAV files are better than MP3s, but MP3s are pretty universal, so I don't have to worry about not having a format that won't play (I'm looking at you, Samsung Music).
****Alas, after 35+ years, a handful of my CDs no longer play. It's not because they're scratched, but it looks like it's a failure of the metallic material comprising the CDs. Among those CDs were The Eagles' Hotel California, The Cult's Sonic Temple, a Greatest Hits compilation from Golden Earring, and Alice in Chains' Dirt.
YouTuber Vulgrin dropped a video the other day, titled "This Place is Why I Love Classic World of Warcraft", and three guesses as to which zone it is:
Despite my hardly ever playing Horde toons these days, and the highest level Tauren toon I've ever created I got to Level 7 back in late Wrath, I have to agree that Mulgore is my favorite Classic Era zone to just relax and enjoy.
I almost never go there because I'd rather not scare the lowbie Horde toons, but I typically will find an excuse to stop in when I'm passing nearby. And if Darkmoon Faire is there, that works for an excuse.
Another place I like to go just to enjoy the sea is the coastline in Desolace. It's always empty, and the farther south you roam the fewer naga actually come out on the shore to disturb the view.
If you include TBC Classic zones, I'd also have to throw in Eversong Forest, as the place is locked in perpetual Autumn. That it existed as it was long past Cataclysm's reworking of the Old World was a bit of a bonus.
The irony is that while I like those areas the most, that doesn't translate into what toons I play the most. After all, I mostly play Alliance toons these days, and outside of Neve in TBC/Wrath Classic I have hardly touched Horde toons at all. Still, I can't deny the simple beauty of Mulgore.
Although nobody is asking for my take on the Pandamonium limited event that Retail will be experiencing, I figured I'd drop in my two cents:
Pandamonium is a hedge by the WoW team.
It's not a shrubbery, it's a hedge! From getyarn.io, but really from Monty Python.
What do I mean by that?
Well, it's pretty simple. The WoW Classic team is all in on Cataclysm Classic, but if it flops badly, there likely won't be a Mists of Pandaria Classic.
Let's face it: Cataclysm Classic is as big of a risk as the original WoW Classic was in 2019. Blizzard wasn't entirely sure if people would show up to play an "official" Vanilla Classic server* back then, and by throwing out the "Original Trilogy" by moving all Wrath Classic servers to the now-current Azeroth (before phasing, I presume) there's no guarantee that enough players will show up and continue to play Cataclysm Classic to make a Mists Classic viable.
So, the easiest way to present the Mists expansion in a way that will guarantee people will go back and play the content is to create a limited time event with wildly accelerated leveling in Retail. Throw in a bunch of FOMO cosmetic items, and there you go.
There is a second reason for this Pandamonium event, and it is to drum up interest for a Mists Classic.** This is a taste of what Mists was like, since it is still set in the current Retail environment, so Blizzard is also hoping that Pandamonium will generate enough interest in Mists as an expansion to counter the pushback from the bean counters should Cata Classic flop.
And that's that. For those interested in the event, go have fun. Enjoy yourself, because that's why we play games, right?
*Hindsight is a real bitch here, because looking back it seemed obvious, but there was no guarantee that people who'd been playing on private servers would actually show up to play the "official" version, and there was also no guarantee that people like me would return just to play the pre-Cataclysm version of WoW. There's a very vocal part of the player base that looks down upon Classic and Classic players, and even those blowhards aside the fracturing of the player base was a big risk Blizzard took.
**I don't think I need to go over my own opinion of Mists, so I'll save that for another time.)
