Attack of the Anti-Pugger

Like it or not, the main driver of play in World of Warcraft is group activity. Whether you raid, run 5-person instances, or PvP in various forms, WoW revolves around the "multiplayer" in the MMO acronym. Easing the access for multiplayer activity has been a driver of the more controversial changes to WoW over the years, from the automated group finder to LFR (LFD's raid level equivalent). 

Given that Blizzard has stoked the FOMO furnace over the years, it's no surprise that raid and dungeon teams have spent a lot of time trying to find the "right" player to help them clear content. We're not talking about friends and family raid teams who raid in a more social manner, but raiders who have aspirations of Heroic and maybe even Mythic clears of content.

Oh, and then there's puggers, who don't belong to a regular raid team for various reasons, yet still want to experience group content. It goes without saying that pugging is a bit of a hit-or-miss activity in MMOs in general without even taking into consideration any "requirements" placed on the prospective raid leads. 

The WoW community has responded to those needs --and the FOMO driver-- by creating addons and websites to "assist" people in finding the best players for their needs. To say that these have been controversial has been a bit of an understatement.

Anybody remember the initial release of GearScore back in Wrath?

There it is, in all its glory.
I had this from another post; I can't
remember which one now.

The GearScore addon caused a huge row in the WoW community by attempting to reduce a player's raid usefulness to a single number --the GearScore itself-- which led to entries such as this in Trade Chat:

"Need 2 DPS for ICC 25 GS 5000+ req"

The irony about gatekeepers using GearScore as a barrier to entry is that all it provided was a compilation of the iLevels of your gear, not whether you were any good in a raid. I mean, by the end of Wrath of the Lich King my Ret Paladin, Quintalan, had a GearScore of something like ~5200 and he never set a single foot in a raid instance. All that gear he got by grinding badges by running random Heroic Instances. 

Could I get into some of these raids with these GS requirements? Certainly. 

Did it mean I was a good raider? Certainly not.

***

Why dredge up GearScore again? Didn't we have a repeat of GS in Wrath Classic? Oh yes, Wrath Classic, where people swore right and left that they weren't going to use it... Until it came out and people used it like crazy once more. 

The thing is, GearScore is just one incremental step along the way to the current status of pugging in WoW. Parse Culture has always been around to an extent, but ever since GearScore and the rise of FOMO, Parse Culture has been pushing the envelope of what it means to be a "good player". Notice I didn't say good raider, but good player. If you raid or run instances and you pug, you have to deal with people who think all of your qualities as a WoW player can be reduced to a single number, a color, or a summary chart.

And now here comes Archon.

From the Archon website, as of April 7. 2025.

Archon is brought to you by the same team that created the Warcraftlogs app and website, and the TL;DR is that it takes all of the searching through Warcraftlogs and places it into a tooltip addon, so you can perform real time analysis of who to take as a pug in your raid. 

GearScore on steroids, basically.

***

This addon has been the subject of quite a bit of discussion on MMO Champion and has seen its share of YouTube videos:

Of course, Archon has been around in Early Access for months now, but a wider release apparently happened last week (ish). The current version everybody can use, but if you subscribe (as in pay real money) you can get more info than what the free users get.

It's not as if gatekeeping is new, but this is making gatekeeping easier than ever before.  Just rolling up and hovering over players allows you to see at a glance what it would have taken people a lot longer to review manually on Warcraftlogs.

Even then, it still doesn't tell you everything. Archon can't tell you if you do the mechanics right in a raid, and if you perform a critical job --which typically also means having a lower parse-- you're punished for it. Look at Vanilla Naxx as an example: I was on Wall Duty on Maexxna and would be tasked with calling out and freezing the scarabs on Anub'Rekhan, both of which are critical tasks for success on those bosses. Both of them also required me to be basically giving up on my parses for the good of the raid. With Archon, however, I'd be punished for such behavior, with a lesson to be learned is that I need to play less as a teammate and more of an asshole. And who wants to play with someone like that?

Needless to say, there have been some interesting takes on this...

From the comments from Bellular's video above.

From the MMO Champion thread linked to above.

I tried to avoid some of the more toxic responses in those threads, especially when you see people pooh-poohing the whole thing as "it's easy to to get XXX parses", basically trolling everybody. And it kind of spiraled out of control in spots from there.

Still, if the best advice to give people is "join a guild and raid with them", well, I have some experience there.

No, this was not me.
From the comments from Bellular's video above.

My own experience with guilds over the past 15+ years of playing MMOs hasn't been that inspiring. The guilds I've been in the longest over this time have been --by quite a wide margin-- the guild the kids and I have in LOTRO (Heroes of the Old Forest on the Gladden server) and Rades' old blogger guild Puggers Anonymous on Moonrunner-US.* The Retail guilds from back in the day either imploded with the the force of a thousand suns or faded away to nothing. The guilds I've been a part of in Classic WoW either faded away or swung heavily toward hardcore to the point where it was unbearable to remain. 

'We want to raid with friends', indeed.

After years of those shenanigans, I fail to see why I'd want to sign up for it all over again just to raid or run dungeons. And let's be honest for a minute: if my experience is pretty typical, I'd say that joining any guild will have issues because of the cliques that have developed over the time the guild has been around. Unless guild leadership makes an actual effort to include new people in group activities, any new guildie will find themselves it a double bind, where they can't get into guild runs and they can't get into pugs.

And really, if the solution is continuously guild hop until you find one that you like, at what point to you decide to go and do something else?

That aside, I think this is just more of the same as far as WoW goes. For the people who seek out drama, they'll find it in spades with this addon. For the people who are part of a guild of any real cohesion, then this is a non-issue for them. For people who stick to LFR and normal/heroic mode instances (and Delves), this won't affect them at all. It's only the people who want to try something different, to push themselves beyond the basics, that will find issues exacerbated by this addon. If Blizzard wants to turn the casual crowd into something more, then this addon --and the community culture-- will torpedo that. 

But maybe Blizzard doesn't want to bother trying any more, because that's not what they measure success at in Microsoft. There, it's all about whether you met your profit numbers, and if another mount or two in the cash shop will get them there, that's what we should expect.

*I had to go login to Retail to make sure I had the server right.

EtA: Corrected grammar and some wording.

Meme Monday:

After this past week, I was regretting having a Rainy Day Memes a couple of weeks ago. I'm actually quite surprised I haven't seen an ark float by yet, but there's more rain in the forecast, so you never know.

Hey, did you remember to add the dragons??!!
From imgflip.

Regardless, I'm going to provide some positivity for the Meme Monday this week.

I've been skiing a few times. Yeah, this fits.
From Tessera Guild.

Again, true. Also means you're alive
at the same time as Warsong Gulch, but diff'rent strokes.
From Pinterest.

Even if it's a pair of crappy gray quality ones,
they're SOMETHING. From Cheezburger.

I could go for a burger. Yeah...
From Instagram.

Oh, and I shot first. From Sayingimages.

That Time When Red Filled Out a Blizzard Survey

The other day I received a request via email to fill out a survey for Blizzard.

From the email I received.

I figured, sure, why not, so I logged into the survey website* and pulled up the survey to fill out.

The first question, about whether I played World of Warcraft, elicited a "does a duck like water?" response from me. I was in the process of clicking "yes" when the brief thought of "what if they meant Retail as opposed to Classic?" crossed my mind, but I ignored it and finished clicking. After all, I had actually logged into Retail on Tuesday or so to check out something from Neve**, so I could truthfully say that I had "played" Retail.

I should have listened to my inner voice, since the next question made it plain they were talking about Retail WoW: it was a query about what I thought of The War Within. (And going back later to take that screencap above confirmed that yes, it was about The War Within and I completely missed that.)

Well, I thought, I'd just select the "Does Not Apply" or "No Opinion", and...

There wasn't an option for either of those responses. Just a number scale.

I wasn't going to be one of those people who assign terrible responses just because I don't play the current expac, so I just selected the "Mediocre" responses and kept going.

More and more numerical rating questions came at me, all about aspects of The War Within. Although at one point the questions turned to the various types of activities I could participate with in-game and I truthfully answered "No" to all of them. Then, for some reason, the survey believed I was a PvP-er and gave me a bunch of those questions too. 

It wasn't until questions finally surfaced about the latest patch (Undermined) --and what patches The War Within I have played before-- did I finally have the option to select "Did Not Play" or an equivalent. 

Then I received an open ended question about repeat activities in Retail and what would encourage me to participate in those activities, and I finally got the chance to explain a few things. Yes, I wrote, I play WoW, but I'm primarily a WoW Classic player. If I play Retail, it's usually just to login and putz around a bit. I'm not interested in repeat activities because I hate it when a game becomes a job. I learned this in TBC Classic, when due to external pressure Dailies turned the game into job, and I play WoW to have fun, not because I don't have enough work in my life.

I also got an open ended question about what to change about the experience that could be improved, and I certainly had an answer to that one given that I did just run the gauntlet of crap you have to work though when you come back after being away for months (or years). I suggested a button you could click on the Warband login screen where you can prevent all of the login pop-ups from happening. If all you want to do is login and explore, having to get rid of "do this" and "do that" is annoying and makes me want to logout and do something else.

After submitting that last response, I got a "I'm sorry, it seems you're not the primary person for this survey."

"I could have told you that," I grumbled.

The survey then ended abruptly, and that was that.

***

If there's one thing that Blizzard seems to have trouble with, it's the concept that someone might play WoW but not the current Retail expansion. 

That was pretty obvious by the lack of options to simply respond with "Did Not Play" or "Not Applicable" or "No Opinion". You'd also have thought that the option of saying "Do you mean Classic or Retail WoW?" at the beginning would have provided a proper clarification to the survey, but they didn't. So either they were lazy or they didn't consider it to be a real option. I'd like to think it's the former, but it's most likely the latter. People who design surveys ought to be able to provide sufficient clarifying questions to weed out people earlier than at the end of the survey.

This leads into another another issue that the survey highlighted is that Blizz isn't sure what to do with people who play Retail WoW in a non-standard way. Sure, those people play Retail WoW and likely even own the current expansion, but they don't actually "play the game". When people say that, what they really mean is "play the game properly" or "play the game as-intended".*** Blizz can't seem to break out of that trap themselves, despite them harping on how important the world itself is to the game. From what I saw, the focus of the survey wasn't what worked and what didn't (despite the email), but "How do we get you to try all of the things? Is it you don't know where to go? Do you need reminders? Do we need to make it easier to get to the repeatable activities? Can we improve the UI so that it's easier to do all the things?"

The final issue I see Blizzard having trouble with is that they're stuck in Diablo-style tunnel vision: quickly get to the end, then do repeatable things. Whether you call them "repeatable activities" or "dailies" or "world quests" doesn't change the result: all Blizz seems to know what to do is to create things you do in WoW over and over and over. And Raids/Mythic+. That's partly a player driven issue, because the player base expects it. Hell, I look at the number of times my Questing Buddy or I have gone into instances, hoping for that elusive gear drop --over the course of a single day-- and I realize that we are part of the problem too. 

But could you imagine a World of Warcraft expac leveling experience that takes 100 hours to complete? Or more? I'm pretty sure the collective heads of the player base would explode, because as a whole they're not interested in a deep immersive experience, but different types of speed running to get to the various forms of endgame as quickly as possible.

Here's the thing: my first experience leveling in WoW took me well over 150 hours to go from L1 through L80 back in Wrath of the Lich King as (mostly) a Holy Paladin. And I loved it. That long journey shaped my opinions of MMOs, fair or not, and it impacts what I've done since. I've found I prefer the long game, with self-directed play exploring the nooks and crannies of the world, rather than playing optimally. It's kind of sad that even the development staff simply don't appreciate that aspect of their own game. 

*After having had friends recently get hacked and one of my own cards end up on a dark web site, I've decided to be more cautious about email than I usually am and skipped clicking on links like this. I've found that if companies want me to fill out info, I can go to their website independently and find it there.

**I can't remember what it was, honestly. It wasn't anything she had in her bank or gear, that's for certain, but it might have been something like what quests she still had in her Quest Log. Whatever it was, the results weren't interesting enough for me to follow up with a post on it. (Yet.)

***What I've found over the years is that the quickest way to get a person to show their biases in WoW is that when they ask what I do, I tell them "Not much; I just goof off for the most part. Don't raid, don't PvP, don't RP, don't bother with the quests or story." There are people who say "Hey, good for you! Have fun!" But then there are a subset of people who simply can't fathom that and try to get me to do different things. "Hey, let's go do this! Let's do that! You HAVE to try this other thing!" And I've seen more than my share of YouTubers talk up the vast number of things to do in WoW, but when the rubber hits the road they're all about the Endgame in it's various forms (I include alts as an Endgame activity). 

Meme Monday: Miscellaneous Memes for Spring

Okay, it's been a few months, so why not? My backlog pile won't go down without it...

I used to chuckle at this, remembering what
it was like when someone disconnected in an
instance run. Then I began playing hardcore mode,
and the terror began... From iFunny.co.

I agree, there's a lot of truth here.
From Mememonkey.

Speaking of truth...
From ifunny.co.

Okay, I laughed at this one. From The Oatmeal,
when he's not designing another Exploding Kittens game.

Back in my day, Paladins were Lawful Good,
and they were damn impossible to get the stats
for, too! From Memegenerator.

Permanence in a Fluid Environment

I occasionally go back through some of my old posts when one of them unexpectedly makes an appearance on my analytics, and inevitably those posts have some issues. Yes, I'm not very fond of my writing in old posts --if you ever have flashbacks to really stupid mistakes you did in the past, that's what it's like-- but for a change I'm not talking about that. 

It's this:

Apparently the Snipping tool that replaced the old
Snip and Sketch in Windows 11 kind of sucks.
From a PC post on January 17, 2016.

What you're not seeing is a graphic that I linked to rather than made a local copy and uploaded. 

I realize that the internet can be a fluid thing, and since storage space costs money, old graphics have a habit of getting deleted. Of course, that's only one issue with graphics or videos disappearing: there are people who die, people who try to hide past involvement, lawsuits, etc.

The point is that the internet is fluid, and you can't necessarily rely something to be there in the future.

That's why I began several years ago simply downloading graphics and then uploading them with a reference, rather that simply linking to them. It's kind of sad that I can't rely upon a link going forward and instead using low-key piracy for references, but when things are made to be temporary the concept of permanence is a foreign idea.

***

That does bring up the question as to what will happen to all of that digital data I've accumulated when I die. 

I'd like this blog to remain in place as a record. That's not strictly an egotistical thing, but rather as a reference to the era PC was created. Over the years I've seen blogs die and get removed, such as Righteous Orbs, and I'd hate for PC to join them.

At least The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation years ago has been pulling data from blogs such as this one into a central location for recordkeeping, but even then that's an inexact science. 

I discovered that they weren't getting any recent data out of PC because I'd moved us to HTTPS from HTTP, and it took a little bit of back and forth with the Web Collection Librarian for the Ivy Plus Confederation before the crawls began working once more.* It's nice to have an independent backup going on, but I'm always concerned that politics and whatnot will interfere with the storage of this data in the long term. I used to think we'd learned the lessons of the past regarding data storage, but apparently not.

I guess I ought to look into another solution going forward, one that won't vanish at the whim of someone I've never met.

*If your blog is listed in there --don't rely upon the blog name but instead search for a title-- you might want to see if the data is being accurately captured.

Putting Words to Passion

One of the nice things about going to a bookstore is that you might walk in on an event and be instantly enthralled.

That happened on Tuesday, as my wife went down to Louisville to visit with her aged parents* and to watch a concert our youngest played in. If I left after work I might have been able to make it if I didn't have traffic and I didn't get pulled over for speeding, but I figured I'd better not risk it.** Since my wife was spending the night down there I decided to visit the bookstore. 

The moment I walked through the doors I knew something was up; a huge crowd had assembled to my right with a speaker at the podium.

"What's going on?" I asked one of the booksellers.

"It's an author signing."

Then I noticed the big poster next to the author:

From Joseph-Beth's Facebook page (and Hanif Abdurraqib).

I'd heard about that book before, but I couldn't exactly remember where. "Oh!" I exclaimed. "The basketball guy."

"Yeah, the basketball guy," the bookseller confirmed. "Go over and listen!"

If on the surface the book was about basketball, considering it was broken into sections about pre-game, the various quarters, time outs, and whatnot, the book was not strictly about basketball itself. It was more a set of essays about life and family and friendship, mixed in with poetry.

But hearing Hanif speak, and listening to him read sections of the book... Holy crap, can that man write. 

It was an otherworldly experience when Hanif read, whether it was opining on when he thought Michael Jordan was at his coolest --the 1985 slam dunk contest-- or relating the story when a friend of his asked him to cut her hair off. However, what charmed me the most was when he was simply discussing things with the audience, about how the first line of this book came to him in a "Boogie Nights"-esque way, or how he'd read Lloyd Alexander's The Black Cauldron in his youth.

"Wow, he's amazing," I said to another bookseller, who was standing nearby, also listening.

"Yeah, he's good," he replied.

"Yeah, if I had only a quarter of his talent... Just, wow."

The bookseller told me they were really pleased with the turnout, and given that Hanif's book tour was only to a handful of locations --Ann Arbor, Michigan, was next-- I think that Hanif knew his audience. 

Hanif also had high praise for his editor, and he hammered home how vital he believed editors were to the creative process. I can't remember the last time I heard an author at a signing give so much praise to their editor in an unprompted manner, and it felt so refreshing for Hanif to give some love to that often overlooked person in publishing.

It was a ticketed event, so I'd have had to have bought a ticket --which included a copy of the book-- for him to sign, but that's fine. I can go back another time and grab a copy of the book. In the meantime, I picked up another one of his books, a collection of essays on music and pop culture, to tide me over.

***

Speaking of things to tide me over...

I asked my questing buddy, a voracious reader in her own right, what I ought to be looking out for. 

"'When the Moon Hatched,' by Sarah Parker," she replied. She'd apparently had her eye on it for quite a while.

Although part of the store was taken up by the event with Hanif, I managed to find it in the SF&F section.

There were quite a few copies there,
which is a pretty good sign.

"It's pretty thick," I told her later.

"How many pages is it?" she asked.

I thumbed through the book to the end. "690 pages."

"OOOO...."

*They're both in their 90s and are still kicking.

**I much prefer the weekend concerts, which I can make more easily. That being said, my time away from home the past couple of weeks kept me from taking the afternoon off to go on down as well. Even then, I would have had to come back that evening because my wife was intent on staying the night anyway. Luckily, my wife informed me that I'd already heard the music they played at a previous concert I attended.

Closing in on the Halfway Point

It's been 4 months since the WoW Classic Anniversary servers opened, and here's where Operation Spread the Love stands right now:

The toon levels as of March 25, 2025.
Shaluna was the name I assigned to my Druid on
Classic Era. (Oops.) She's also the first toon
to ever wear that Corsair's Overshirt (above)
that drops from Edwin Van Cleef in The Deadmines.

I'm probably a week away from having at least one toon at L30, and that depends upon getting a toon or two into Blackfathom Deeps. Both the Paladin and Warlock have class quests that involve a visit to Blackfathom Deeps, so they're likely to go. Other toons I don't intend to take into instances much due to the expectations that they'll be healing (Shaluna) or tanking (Taldanifal). I can handle pugging dungeons as DPS, but healing and tanking bring along extra expectations that I would rather not meet. 

As it is, I spend a lot of my time running back and forth between the Wetlands, Duskwood, and Ashenvale, with the occasional side trip to Stonetalon Mountains along the way. 

People who played Classic back in 2019 will tell you that Stonetalon Mountains is typically one of the emptiest zones in the Old World. It takes a bit of time to get there, and the Alliance flight point is stuck at the top of Stonetalon Peak itself, so it's far out of the way for any questing in the zone itself. That zone also has some of the first "go see people on the other side of the world" quests to perform, and consequently a lot of people simply skip it entirely. Cardwyn used to visit Stonetalon because it was so empty, so she could farm Light Feathers off of the harpies there without bothering anybody. 

Except the harpies.

Well, dip me in molasses, cover me in feathers, and call me a chicken, but on the Anniversary servers Stonetalon was incredibly busy every time I've set foot in the place. 

I've never had to fight for mobs there in the past, not even in 2019, so this is a new experience for me. Here we are, 4 months into the 20th Anniversary servers, and new toons are still out there, questing in Stonetalon. 

My questing buddy suggested they were part of the 4th or 5th wave of toons coming up, and she's likely not wrong. I put some of the toons I've encountered in Deadmines on my Friends List, and they're now at either max level or are in the L50s. So if those players go and make (another) alt, they'll likely lap me another time or two while I'm leveling.

***

I have begun going back to Classic Era a bit lately.

This past weekend was Alterac Valley weekend, and when the 20th Anniversary servers first opened you couldn't find a single AV battleground up and running on Classic Era, even on AV Weekend. This weekend I finally saw some good signs that players have returned, because about 3-4 AV battles were going the entire weekend. 

It felt weird to be back in a battleground after months of being away, but after a day or so I got out of my awkwardness and settled into the organized chaos that is a WoW battleground. I suspect that some players, having gotten to max level on the 20th Anniversary servers, are now raid logging over there and are coming back to Classic Era to play in the interim. I don't have any evidence of that, of course, but given that the Blackwing Lair raid just opened on the 20th Anniversary servers I suspect people are focusing on raids there and then returning to Era for everything else. 

I think I might stay on Classic Era more as my leveling slows down, because it provides me some variety over what I've got on the so-called Classic Fresh servers. I don't mean in terms of class breadth, because I've got 8 toons of various classes I'm leveling at once on those Anniversary servers, but in terms of being satisfied where I'm at. On Classic Era I have two max level Mages and one max level Rogue, and I just have no real desire to level another toon there. I've taken OG Cardwyn through Naxx and she has the full T3 set to prove it, so I don't really have any desire to go to a raid team and do regular raiding. I suppose if somebody offered me a shot at an Atiesh that'd be nice, but I have no desire to "jump the line" and bypass a bunch of people that have been raiding in an established raid team to get it. (Plus I think the staff looks ugly. Big turn-off, if you ask me.)

I still think it looks like a sulphur ball
attached to a stick. Gandalf's staff, this ain't.
From Wowhead.

***

As far as how other people are doing on the Classic Fresh/20th Anniversary servers, my questing buddy discovered AoE leveling in Zul'Farrak and got a second toon, a Mage, to max level last week. I knew she was going to get a second toon to max level, yet despite her insistence that she was not going to speed level a second toon after her experience with her Druid, she still did it anyway. She claims she's not going to do that again with a third toon, but stay tuned.

I told her I should start a betting pool on how quickly she levels a third toon.

Let's see...

One of our group stopped logging in, but that was to be expected as he got kicked from the guild he was in for being an asshat in chat even after he'd been warned. I should have had a betting pool going for that, because he was that sort of player who was guaranteed to get gkicked at some point. 

Someone who shall remain nameless once asked me how I stood for that player's behavior. 

"I don't," I replied shortly. "I don't encourage it and I don't defend him. Sometimes people need to feel the consequences of their actions."

Others in our group have made it to L60, and still others are far enough ahead of me that they'll get to max level soon.

***

With the roadmap for these Fresh servers having bumped the opening of the Dark Portal to early 2025, I've got even more time to get to max level than I thought. My suspicion is that a two month window for raiding Naxx is likely too short for most players --I know it would be for me-- so Blizz is likely extending that phase by a couple of months. 

I've been starting to think what I intend to do when TBC drops and the Dark Portal opens. 

While it'd be nice to actually experience the expansion without rushing through, as I'd originally intended, I'm not sure what everybody else is going to do. The optimal strategy for leveling in TBC Classic was to chain-run instances until you got to max level, then start questing, so it might be that the actual zones might not be crowded at all. If they are crowded, however, I could just default back to the Blood Elf toons I intend to create and roll with them for a while. And maybe a Draenei too.

That being said, do I want to raid? 

Maybe? I do want to see Kael'Thas die so I can have some closure from my time as a raid lead in 2021-2022, but my entire TBC experience has been as an Enhancement Shaman, so doing this as a Mage would be somewhat different. Most raid teams will only take 2-3 Mages at most because that's the optimal configuration, so I might once again be faced with the choice of either playing a Shaman in a raid or simply not raiding beyond the occasional Karazhan run. 

And I don't want to be part of a raid where I'm carried, either. I'd rather eat ground glass.

Yummy.
From Budget Glass Nanaimo.

*Used when casting Slow Fall. I've since been told that Priests use Light Feathers too for a spell --Water Walking or something like that-- but I never saw Priests over in Stonetalon. Only the occasional Mage.