From World of Warcraft. I had a decent seat for the event.
Happy New Year 2020
Tag: WorldofWarcraft
World of Warcrack, as we deemed it before I starting playing it. That was a play on the name given to Everquest (Evercrack) because of the addictive nature of MMO style gameplay. World of Warcraft is addictive, but it is also life-changing for someone who has to be a shut-in most of the time.
Tis the Season
As I’m contemplating the impending holiday season, the final cutscene from the Battle For Azeroth ending raid springs to mind.
Why is that? Well, since the Old Gods are returning in the upcoming Shadowlands expansion for World of Warcraft, I’m thinking that maybe a Lovecraft Christmas is in order. Something like this tree from 2011 that made the rounds on Facebook in 2012.
We could even create a soundtrack for this season from the various songs inspired by Lovecraft’s fantasy writing that appear on various Blue Oyster Cult albums, some of these songs penned by fantasy and science fiction writer Michael Moorcock. Here’s one from a recent album with an appropriate name and theme.
Down But Not Out
I’m back! Did you miss me?
On Tuesday I started feeling the effects of an oncoming attack, but I was determined to raid with my group in World of Warcraft as scheduled. We managed to do our average best, although we didn’t clear the entire heroic level of Azshara’s palace the first night. On Wednesday I felt worse. The start of a two-day migraine set in, a knot of pain right in the center of my skull. I did manage to show up and raid again that day, but I wasn’t my best and it showed. Thursday the pain was so bad that I sat in the library with no lights on for the entire day, wishing the pain would go away. Even the monitor for the laptop set to the lowest light setting was bright enough to cause stabbing pain, so I just sat there listening to podcasts wishing I could do something else.
On Friday night the vertigo started. It was pretty mild, compared to vertigo attacks of the past. No projectile vomiting. No lying on the bathroom floor. The room would start spinning, and then I would re-orient myself by staring at a point on the wall for ten minutes or so. When I went to bed the vertigo was so bad and persistent that I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t focus on a point in the dark. So I took a valium and finally fell asleep. On Saturday the vertigo could not be dispelled any longer. No amount of re-orientation would make it stop, and I was beginning to get nauseous. Time for the Xanax, which I stayed on for the entire day and through most of Sunday morning.
I woke up about an hour ago. I feel dizzy now. Dizzy, not vertiginous. The lights are still too bright but they don’t hurt like they did Wednesday. I’ve got to go visit my ENT on Tuesday to get a refill on my Betahistine anyway, so at least I’ll have some symptomatic stuff to talk with her about while I’m there. I’m going to try the vestibular exercises that my physical therapist gave me as soon as I publish this. I tried them on Friday when the vertigo started and they just made things worse. Fingers crossed.
Happy Birthday World of Warcraft
Every year on the anniversary of the launch of World of Warcraft there are in-game perks for logging onto the game and playing the current game content. Pets and mounts and extra quests that test your knowledge of previous iterations of the game.
This year there are even more rewards than usual. Log on and pick up your breadcrumb quests, then head to the Caverns of Time and join in the amusement and general chaos that is a world event in World of Warcraft.
I got bonus loot while doing the Memories of Azeroth raid that is part of the celebration. A mount that I had been trying to get to drop off of Ragnaros for several years now in the Firelands raid was in the loot I got off of defeating Ragnaros in Memories of Azeroth. I can now cross the Pureblood Firehawk off of my want list, making Memories of Azeroth doubly worth my time. The only way the experience could have been better is if Invincible’s Reins had dropped off of the Icecrown instance. No one got that one in our group, making Arthas’s stallion still one of the rarest mounts in World of Warcraft.
Part of this event is looking back on these fights and feeling that nostalgia if you were there, or seeing the building blocks of WoW if you weren’t. It’s a chance for an old vet like me to pull up a chair on my porch, sit down next to a youngblood, and regale them with tales of honor and horror. “I remember when Lady Vashj’s Tainted Elemental phase wiped my entire raid over and over for hours. The flasks and food wasted are the stuff of legends.” Memories of Azeroth feels like it was targeted at me.
USGamer
Full Rotation Today. Azshara Declared Victory Over Me.
I haven’t been tracking my vertigo spells on the blog. I don’t know why. I think I didn’t want to make everyone reading this suffer through repetitive bouts of vertigo with me by my documenting the episodes on the blog directly, each time that I went through one.
I wasn’t really able to type or even make noises beyond gagging on vomit between requests for someone to kill me in the years of suffering that I endured before being prescribed Xanax and Promethazine, which work quite well to subdue the worst parts of rotational vertigo.
…and after the attacks were over, sometimes two days later, I would be unable to do much more than sit up in bed and eat soup for at least a day. So I would have had to remember to go document the event while still recovering from the trauma of the event. Anyone who has had an intense illness can testify just how much they don’t want to go back and revisit just how hellish the event was later. “…and then I blew chunks all over the bathroom floor. Luckily I didn’t fall back into it when I passed out.” All the pain of a drunken bender without the entertainment of being stupid drunk first. Leave it in the past.
Now that I have a medication regimen down, I just have to deal with the fuzzy-headedness the drugs inflict on me. I’m stuck for hours, essentially staring at a fixed point in space so as to anchor the eyes on something. Oops they’re drifting left again. Find the Catbus plushy. No more drift? Okay, back to writing. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. For as long as is necessary. For as long as it takes to get tired and fall asleep.
This year has been really bad. The worst since I stopped working and could eliminate stress by not having to perform on a set schedule every week. The increase in symptoms started February a year ago and has slowly gotten worse. I’m pretty sure it’s the second ear failing on me, having gone bilateral then. If that’s the true cause of my current suffering, then I should level back out after a few miserable years, and hit a different long-lasting trough of capabilities. I’ll just have to take stock again then, see what I can still do.
In the meantime I’m going to start trying to document each time I get full vertigo. Since I can do it while sitting here trying not to spin, access to the laptop being a qualifier, I’m going to do my best to write something while the vertigo is kicking my ass. I’m going to do this because this blog is for me as well as for you, dear reader. It might be handy to be able to go back and check how bad the bad really was.
This time the vertigo popped right in the middle of the heroic Azshara raid boss fight my current raiding group has been working on for the better part of two weeks. It looked like we might have a good chance of getting her down this week, but I kept getting dizzier and dizzier and missing prompts to go here and there as the mechanics of the fight require.
Just too much screen movement for a day that the eyes want to pretend that the world is spinning around my head. I had to bow out and leave them to their work. Hopefully they did better not burdened by my inability to deal with so much motion on the screen. It’s taken two hours to get the spinning down to the point where I can sit in my adjustable bed and type this simple entry up.
I don’t know how many actual spells I’ve had this year, which is why I’m going to start trying to do this each time I have one. I know it’s the first one in October because it’s still the first week of October, or was until yesterday. But I had at least two in September, ditto in August and it was even worse in July. June wasn’t too bad but that was when the light dizziness really seemed to kick in, May leading into June, and I can’t figure out what is causing this constant near-nausea inducing dislocation and disorientation on a daily basis. It is maddening.
I’m getting blood tests done for allergies this time, betahistine will interfere with the skin tests and I’m not willing to stay off it for a week. I’ve also started some training in vestibular therapy while I’m in physical therapy for lower back pain. I’ll write more on that subject when I know more about it. I just want the dizzy to GO AWAY. But it won’t. So I’ll medicate it away when I have to.
October 9th – Still recovering from the vertigo last night. I’m going to miss two raids this week. Can’t be helped. I’m almost in a vegetative state today.
Divorce
The inspiration for this post sprang out of the destruction of my World of Warcraft raiding guild a few days previously. A group of friends that I’ve spent six hours a week, minimum, talking to and working closely with to solve problems in a game that we jointly enjoy. A game we couldn’t enjoy if we didn’t have each other to rely on day-in and day-out. It took twenty people to raid successfully in World of Warcraft when I started playing the end-game content during Wrath of the Lich King. Working closely with twenty people to master the mechanics of a battle for weeks on end draws you closer than most casual friendships.
What happens when these groups of closely-knit battle-hardened companions suddenly decide that they can’t play with each other anymore? I don’t know what else to call that situation other than divorce. A bit extreme you say? It’s not that traumatic? Spend ten years reliably sitting down with the same twenty people and experiencing the adrenaline surge of beating a difficult boss fight through precise coordination, and then get back to me after you tell the other nineteen people to kiss your ass. Let me know how that goes.
Divorce. I’ve been to this dance quite a few times. I’ve never been an invited guest, always the chosen onlooker. When intimacies turn to hostilities, the invited guests always look to the involuntary participants to pick sides. As Bartleby said yesterday I prefer not to.
I’ve never been the invited guest to a divorce because that was one of the ground rules I set for myself a long time ago, when I witnessed the first divorce. The divorce of my adopted father and my biological mother. This was the first time I was encouraged to pick sides as an involuntary participant, just a child of fourteen. I had nowhere else to go, so was forced to witness the folly of adults that should have known better than to let things fall apart as far as they did.
It’s easy. No really, it is easy, not the easy thing that really is hard (any kind of group effort in an MMO) Talk to your intimate relations. Don’t keep secrets unless they are secrets the others have already told you they want kept. Don’t betray agreed-to standards of behavior without talking out the changes first. Don’t close off channels of discussion unless you are prepared to never speak to these people again except in the presence of a lawyer.
But it never fails. Someone thinks they can get by without communicating something. Then that something turns to a thing that can’t be spoken of. Turns into a barrier between two people. Turns into a weight around the neck of the relationship. Turns into a wall preventing communication. Then the secret is found out and the accusations of betrayal begin.
These are adults, but they sure don’t act like adults. Adults that understand even the uncomfortable subjects have to be discussed, and discussed endlessly. This is the nature of being humans, like it or not. Talk. Endless talk. Talk that makes you want to cut off your own tongue or gouge out your ears. If you stop talking, you will eventually cease to be intimate with the other in question. That is the point where they become other.
Other rather than same. The outgroup. The other.
But he…
But she…
But they…
Doesn’t matter. It wasn’t done against me, because I fucking talked it out first. I understand ownership and value and don’t take it for granted. I resent being asked to lend weight to one side or the other of a separation when I have no clear understanding of the fault that led to the separation. I will not willingly pick sides when both sides seem to be at fault and there is no clear reason for the separation in the first place aside from childish insistence on having your own way in a relationship.
But he…
But she…
But they…
The closest I have come to divorce is quitting a job, being fired from a job. There are employers that I can’t speak to again because of what transpired between myself and them. Always it was something kept from me that required that separation, not something I failed to tell them. I am what I present myself to be, take it or leave it, warts and all.
I remained Dad’s friend after the divorce despite his actions. Despite the facts of his behavior that I had to drag kicking and screaming out of the woman who expected me to follow her without reason. She was a little bit crazy like that, my mom. A conflict avoided was a win in her book. As if she could avoid the permanent void created in her children’s hearts by simply not talking about the cause of the divorce. It’s not that I had a choice in the matter, dad didn’t want us children, he just wanted things to remain the same in the daylight as they were in the dark. The philandering. The silence. I eventually forgave him, because, what else can you do with family? You will have to see them again. That is a given.
I won’t willingly speak with the employers that betrayed my trust. They earned my enmity by keeping essential facts from me. One day those betrayals may cost them dearly, if that day of judgement comes. Most of them are probably dead already, personally safe from further judgments against them. They are the lucky ones.
Lucky like the stepfather, the Polk in mom’s name, who publicly betrayed everything the word father means. Safe from judgment by being dead by some other hands than mine. Saving me the trouble of having his blood on my hands. I should have thanked him for that, but I never spoke to him after the betrayal of that day. The opportunity to strike or to speak never presented itself. Mercy, after a fashion. Probably a mercy crafted by mom’s hands. She never liked conflict, evaded it at every opportunity. Her unwillingness to engage probably being the the first miscommunication in a long series of misunderstandings. But she’s dead now too. Beyond the reach of judgement.
So here I am asked to take sides in another messy divorce. A smaller, less life-altering conflict than the ones I’ve been in before. If I never log on to World of Warcraft again, a game that for me is like softball or bowling was to my father, it is the social connection that keeps me active among my group of friends. If I never play the game again I won’t have to talk to any of the participants of this messy break-up again.
On the upside, unlike family, I’ll never have to look at any of them again or have to listen to any of their excuses for their inexcusable behavior. So not quite as demeaning as the dissolution of a marriage is to the children of that marriage. The children of our in-game collaboration are the characters that we’ve worked so hard to level, over and over again, just to have the most powerful characters we could construct to bring to the next battle. Those children you can delete and no one will accuse you of murder when you do.
It might be a form of self-mutilation, if self-mutilation can be performed mentally. Investing all that time only to discard it by typing six characters and hitting enter? It ranks up there with self-mutilation in my mind. But it isn’t illegal to delete that part of yourself. That piece of your history. If only all mistakes could be erased that easily.
If I quit playing World of Warcraft I’ll lose those friends. I’ll lose those parts of myself and the parts of themselves that I’ve grown to love as part of the game we play together. I’ll make new friends. I’ll find other games to play, other ways to connect to the outside world. The other games and other friends won’t have fifteen years of history for me to bank on. I’ll have to start over.
So I probably won’t quit World of Warcraft. I probably will log on and play the game. I like the game, even after all this time. Probably because of all this time, not because the game has been mindlessly enjoyable. It wasn’t and it isn’t. It presented challenges, but it offered social connections, connections that are simply not present in most other games. Social connection is why I am still playing the game, and now that very social connection threatens to destroy any remaining pleasure I find in it. I’m tempted to delete all my toons and start over fresh. A fresh start, like I’ve never played the game before. Maybe this week is the week to download and log on to World of Warcraft – Classic. Play a game that I’ve never played before, but sure does seem like what I’ve been playing for the last fifteen years.
At the very least, I will have to log onto the voice chat service and have those discussions that have to be had before either calling it quits or picking a side. I still would prefer not to, but the post-mortem must be performed if I am to have any closure for this latest divorce. I’m beginning to wonder if closure is overrated.
The family asked “why did you go there?” after I wrote this. My guildmates in a game I’ve played for almost as long as my children have been alive, 15 years now, wanted to know why I wouldn’t willingly just pick a side in the diaspora of the guild. This is the explanation for why I try not to pick sides. I’ve been used as a weapon before and I won’t willingly go there again. My insistence on knowing the gory details of a conflict has cost me dearly, many times. I’ll still ask those questions, every time. It is who I am. Take it or leave it. Warts and all.
It is worth noting that both the leader of my former guild as well as members of the diaspora tried to tell me just how wrong the other side was. The guildmaster made it his duty to try to keep me from joining the diaspora by telling me just how bad the people I love and cherish like family really are. It should come as no surprise to anyone that all my Alliance toons are now back in my own guild (Frosty Wyrm Riders) for the time being. I need a bit of a break after that orchestrated trauma to my psyche.
Uncomfortably Numb
I prefer not to.
Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville
On this week’s On the Media, how painful news might be making America numb. And, why sometimes it’s okay to tune out.
I prefer not to is the sum total of my inclinations for today. My Alliance raiding guild in World of Warcraft has broken up, and now I’m expected to choose sides in a fight I tried to convince people not to have in the first place. So now even my distractions are forcing decisions on me that I never wanted to make in the first place.
The Great Level Squish?
World of Warcraft studio Blizzard has apparently announced that WoW is going to reduce its level cap – a so-called ‘level squish’ – at some point in the future, and it has done so via a customer survey asking if you knew about that.
PC Games
Wow. An idea that I’ve been pushing for awhile now, and I didn’t even have to write them about doing it. I really don’t know why they ever increased character levels beyond 100 in the first place. It just doesn’t make any sense. I’m not even sure why leveling is still part of the game, at this point. It just serves as a gateway that players have to get through before being able to be free to do what they want in the game.
Blizzard has conducted a stat squish already. The player base got over that. They take away in-game flight routinely with every release of new content. The player base puts up with that. I can’t see why reducing levels to 100 (60) from the current 120 makes any difference at all, or should make a difference to anyone playing the game. Max level is max level, no matter what number is attached to it. You can’t get more max than max.
I’ve been of the opinion that levels should be reduced and capped for quite some time now. If Blizzard insists on leveling-gating new content, they should just reset the level of existing maxxed toons to 99 (59) and be done with it. As I outlined above, I don’t understand why this warrants a lot of wishy washy, hand wringing bullshit. Just do the thing and be done with it. The players will probably not even notice. I’m convinced they won’t notice much of anything unless you went back to making them walk everywhere in game. That suggestion seems to piss most players off the way I get pissed off about not being able to fly in game:
Postscript
I would have preferred that they made all heroic dungeons and raids equally available as endgame content, with bonuses available for doing the featured week’s timewalking events for older content. Offsetting the old content by ten levels is more than a bit lame in my opinion.
Random Dungeons?
I hate doing random dungeons. I don’t know where the dungeons fit into the lore or where they fit into the plot or narrative if I’m sent to them at random. Like this dungeon.
Long ago, when the land of Vol’dun was still a lush jungle, the Loa Sethraliss sacrificed herself to defeat Mythrax the Unraveler and seal him away beneath the earth. Her followers built a temple to house her body as they waited for Sethraliss to one day return. Years later, after the land of Vol’dun had turned to sand without Sethraliss’ power, one of her followers began working with a Zandalari troll and the Prophet Zul to revive Mythraxx. Sethraliss is needed once again, but she has not awakened. Both the Horde and Alliance are entering her temple to see what is preventing her homecoming.
peakofserenity.com
…Which I was sent to at random before I ever had the chance to be introduced to the Sethrak (not to be confused with Sithrak) or discover Vol’dun and its native inhabitants. The only reason I was doing random dungeons at all was because I needed to have gear to start raiding in a few days, and the world quest rewards are lower point gear than the gear required to get into the raids or the heroic dungeons.
It is completely pointless for world quests to award gear with a gear score that is less than 305 since heroic dungeons require as GS of 305. Players who do not know that the gear scales up as your gear score scales up will simply not do quests until they get gear higher than 300 and the WQ’s reflect that. Just make the baseline the same gear you need to get into the heroic dungeons and there will be less confusion involved in the player base.
Darkmoon Faire Has the Hind Teat
It is the first week of the month, time for Darkmoon Faire! One of the longest running world events in World of Warcraft, and now that it has been relocated to its own island and expanded to be the kind of event it always should have been, I really make a point to spend some time on the island each month. This is mostly for the reason that I can get five points for each in-game profession without having to make something with rare or impossible to find materials in-game. It is fun, and you get payback for spending time at the faire. Win-win.
Not in this expansion. I went into the Darkmoon Faire for the first time in Battle for Azeroth (BfA) and the profession quests don’t give 5 points anymore. Well, Archeology still gives 5 points, the rest of the professions do not. The fact that Archeology is the only profession that still shows a total points level (950) for the profession as a whole, when all the other professions show expansion points for each expansion of the game separately, is illustrative of the oversight that was part of skill-ups in BfA.
As is typical for Blizzard and World of Warcraft, professions end up working differently based on the different plans of the programmers for the different professions. It would be nice if the left hand told the right hand what it was doing, Blizzard. Can we get this fixed? Eventually?
Tab target seems to work for the first time ever, so I don’t want to divert y’alls attention from the important things, like making sure fight mechanics work properly. It would be nice though if professions felt like they were finished products.
Editor’s note. This glitch was fixed the next month, and tab target still worked after that patch. So, they appear to be fixing things and not breaking things at the same time. Fingers crossed that this trend continues.