Well, it’s been nearly a year and a half since I last posted here. <brushes dust off of things> Pardon the mess, and the length of my absence.
I stopped playing WoW for about a year. About the guild bank stuff.
My views on playing WoW…
And then, after enough time had passed, I realized that I had unconsciously made some major changes to my views on WoW. (And yes, these are just my views.)
First, subscribing to the World of Warcraft, if it gives me enjoyment, is fine. This is especially true if I don’t give them any of my own money. I liken it to how I deal with Netflix. For years and years, Netflix was the one subscription I never went without. And then, they started making decisions that I didn’t like. They started cancelling shows I loved. As a direct result of that, I can (and do) go months and months without being subscribed. Then I resub for a month, maybe two, then I unsub again. I can absolutely treat WoW like that. And I have. When my game time ran out in late 2024, I let it go. At the time, I was fairly certain I never wanted to play the game again. (Do not get me started about the data loss; I am still very angry about it.) However, I found myself drawn back to content about WoW, particularly the Goldbound series by Pathalerix on YouTube.
The sheer joy that Pathalerix seems to have for playing the game was, well, infectious. I’m still mad. I’m still not going to trust Blizzard worth a damn. Microsoft can eat shit. (Or is that Microslop? hahaha) But why deprive myself of something I want to do when I don’t have to directly give them money and I can sustain myself on gold? And if I don’t want to do it any longer, I don’t have to. The fact that I no longer run a guild, no longer raid, etc, means that a WoW sub is no longer vital to me. It hasn’t been for a very long time. And so, I resubbed. I even started my own “locked” challenge. (I have exactly one episode up and then I have hours and hours and hours of footage that I have to edit and I hate editing sooooooo… Anyway. I’m sure I’ll get back to it eventually.)
Since resubbing, I’ve let the subscription lapse already. 😂 I wasn’t playing actively, so I just let the sub go. And then I resubbed a week or maybe two ago. Again, using gold/WoW tokens.
Second, I will admit I changed my mind and bought the base version of Midnight — again, with gold. I’m actually planning to upgrade to the top version with gold at some point over the next couple of weeks. It comes with 3-day early access to Midnight and a month of gametime, so I’ll probably do that to try to make tons of gold at the start of the expansion. After all, the more gold I make, the more I can do with it. I need about three tokens to purchase the upgrade. I would only need two tokens, but there’s that pesky sales tax in Canada and Quebec, so I do actually need three. And tokens are about 300k gold at the moment, so we’re looking at about 900,000 gold. IÂ have that much, I just want to build up a bit more of a reserve before I blow that much cash.
Basically, as long as I can pay for things in gold, whatever. I will play if I want to. I will not play (and let my sub expire) if I don’t want to play or if I’m not having fun.
However, I will not trust these bastards. Nothing is forever. They clearly do not care about data integrity. So long as I accept that risk, so long as I understand that a failure can wipe out my whole account, so long as I don’t count on things remaning the same (in terms of my account and characters), I will enjoy what I do in the moment. Why? In part because I’m going to pay with gold. I won’t spend my own real money on this company. Or others in the Microsoft family. I don’t respect them, I don’t trust them, and they don’t respect me or the time and money I’ve given them over the years. So that’s it. It’s a transactional relationship we’ll have, with fake money (gold) paying the way for those transactions.
Speaking of Microsoft…
Oh, man, I am done with Microsoft products. Barring what I have to use for work 🤮 (and Minecraft, which I bought over a decade ago), I’m just SO done with that company’s products. And I stayed true to my word (no pun intended!) — last summer, I swapped over to Linux on my main desktop. (I have a MacBook laptop that’s mine and a work MacBook as well.) So to hell with Windows. I won’t ever own a Windows machine again. I’m enjoying Ubuntu (it’s actually Kubuntu, so Ubuntu with KDE) and I’m very comfortable with it as my main personal computer.
The only thing I miss about Windows is Adobe products. I love Photoshop. (I know, GIMP is available and an option.) And in order to actually edit things I need some kind of video editor like, you know Adobe Premiere. So editing is made more difficult by virtue of having to use my 4-year-old MacBook Pro to edit videos on my work setup versus doing it on my desktop. It doesn’t make it any easier to do a task I dislike in the first place.
Still, everything else is fine. Just about everything else I use works beautifully. Steam games run wonderfully. I truly can’t complain about switching to Linux. And it feels particularly good to have swapped away from Windows after decades (decades!) of being a Microsoft operating system user. I started out with like, DOS 5.0 in like 1990? 1991? I remember DOS 6.0 being a Big Deal. Here’s what my first PC looked like — 286, 1 meg of RAM, 40 meg hard drive. And a 2400 baud modem. 😂
So way to go, Microsoft. You drove away a user who had spent thirty-five years on your operating systems. Not just because of the Great Blizzard Bank Heist, but also because Windows 11 is a piece of AI slop, plus all the ads, plus the fact I can’t trust you, particularly after the Recall announcement.
So what now?
Well, I’m planning to play Midnight until I get bored. I was overly ambitious with The War Within when it came to professions. I did not do even 75% of what I had planned with my toons. So what I’m hoping to do.
Before the launch:
- Level a couple toons to 80 (Madrana is 80 by virtue of the character boost with the purchase of Midnight)
- Make another like 200k then buy 3 tokens for the upgrade
- Poke a bit at the beta, see if I can make any quick, fun-sized videos
After the launch:
- Bring toons to the new city (Silvermoon, IIRC?)
- Get Kurn out into the world and sell leather and various drops immediately (may just DE greens and sell the dust)
- Get my double-gatherer shaman out into the world and gather and sell stuff
- Focus on getting all kinds of profession equipment/accessories craftable so I can sell them (and make them for my own toons)
- Get Treatises discovered/learned for my scribe, although I may change my main scribe to be my druid rather than my evoker
So yeah, I think that’s what I’m aiming for. Oh, and like, juggling life and work and stuff too, of course. ;)
What about you? What are you up to?