I did sweet fuck all this week in WoW.
And I didn’t really miss it.
I had a short work week, spent time with loved ones, friends, family, read a book and a half in the last week, watched four hockey games and that meant no real time for video games.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I don’t have thoughts on things. :)
Topic 1: The WoW Store
There’s a sale being advertised in the Blizzard launcher, for many (all?) of the Blizzard games. When you click on World of Warcraft, they are encouraging you to buy Midnight, but also a housing thing. “Cozy Treehouse Retreat Bundle”, which has some druid or panda themed housing stuff, including the externals. Only 7500 Hearthsteel!!! WHAT A DEAL, PEOPLE!!!! ahahaha. That is $92.50 CAD, and that’s before tax. That is more expensive than all but the epic version of the Midnight expansion.
But wait, there’s more! You can get a “Blooming Arboon” mount, either “Blossomback” or “Amberback” for $32 CAD apiece. (I’m guessing that’s about $25 USD.)
And if that’s not enough, they’re bribing you to buy a 6-month subscription ($97.99 CAD, pre-tax) in exchange for a flying mount in Retail and a pet in Classic. And if you buy a 12-month subscription ($195.98 CAD, pre-tax), you get an additional flying mount and ground mount in Retail and a flying mount in classic. Or some nonsense like that. You can read more about the offer here.
Why at least a six-month subscription? Because that’s like $100 (CAD, maybe 70-75 USD) in their pockets immediately. It’s a very nice revenue bump. And why does that matter? It matters because the Microsoft fiscal year ends at the end of June. So the revenue bump helps the bottom line now, right before the end of the fiscal year, and then since it’s for 6 months, any money from those WoW subscribers between now and November is sort of like the icing on the cake. So if they buy Hearthsteel, or if they buy a mount, or a pet, or a character boost, or whatever. It’s above and beyond what they anticipated from you just having an ongoing subscription.
Honestly, looking at the finance page at Yahoo about Microsoft makes me feel vaguely ill. Everything is basically in billions. The market value of Microsoft is approximately 4.1 trillion dollars.
And they couldn’t be bothered to fix the guild bank issues.
Or make sure a patch launches without game-breaking bugs.
Or ensure that textures persist in housing.
But they can take the time to come up with new art assets and sell them or bribe people into getting them, as long as they make a quick buck!
It’s pretty gross.
Topic 2: If I were rich…
If I were very, very independently wealthy, there are several things I’d want to do right off the bat, most of which is caring for my family and friends. You know, pay off my brother and sister-in-law’s mortgage. Pay for private school for their kids. That sort of thing.
But assuming I’d have a good chunk left over, I think I’d want to try to put together a small game dev company. Nothing huge, but a nice place to work, where everyone gets benefits, mostly flexible hours, work remotely, all that good stuff. I have a lot of ideas rattling around in my head and I am not talented enough to code everything, nor do I have the time to code everything. Because it would be a lot.
And just looking at the Microsoft financials (even more info here), and knowing that they’re doing voluntary layoffs makes me feel even more ill. All of this means that they hope their numbers will go up.
We are in late-stage capitalism and the numbers cannot always go up.
I am tired of living in such a rabidly capitalist society, and I don’t even live in the USA (although anything they do affects us significantly). But in order to, you know, have a place to live, one needs to at least try to play the capitalism-numbers-go-up game. So if I could run a small game dev company, hire carefully, pay very well, and then get some kind of return because the games are good, then that would be awesome.
Alas, I fear I will never be independently wealthy to the point of doing so. But it’s nice to dream about.
Topic 3: Classic Dungeons
I think Strat UD is my favourite of the Classic dungeons, but BRD is a close second, followed by LBRS as a close third. Strat is my favourite because of my multiple failed (and some successful!) 45-minute Baron runs. I just know it so well and have so many great memories of being in there.
BRD might be closer to Stockholm Syndrome, given the number of times I’ve run Jailbreak or attuned someone to the core. But again, the memories made there are priceless to me.
LBRS is a freaking labyrinth until it clicks. And once it clicks, you’ll never get lost again. Or, at least I never did. It was one of my first runs with my guild at the time and I was level 52 (? Maybe 53?) and I was level-pulling everything around us. Whoopsiedoodle. :D But I always enjoyed it. There was a ton to explore, lots of rare drops, lots of bosses, lots of tier 0 pieces to be had.
What about you? What are your favourite Classic/Vanilla dungeons?
I’m still waiting for Blizz to fix the “o” button “Contacts” listing. The only listings that actually seem to work properly are the BNet entries; if you create a non-BNet friend in your F-List, You’ll frequently get an “Unknown” listing as to their location. This happens on both Retail and Classic, even on Classic Anniversary, which has absolutely no cross-realms at all.
When they do that will I start believing that they’ll be working on fixing all the other “small stuff”.
Hmm… My favorite Classic instance…
I could make an argument for a full clear of the entirety of BRD or Strat, which is an entire evening’s worth of activity, and might even require a trip outside to sell stuff from your bags to continue. I could also argue a full clear of LBRS and UBRS, which I and a few acquaintances did in late Wrath for the hell of it. None of us had done UBRS or LBRS in its heyday because we all started playing WoW in either TBC or Wrath, so it was all new to us.
However, I think I’m going to go waaay back in the Classic instance lists and pick Deadmines.
I never ran Deadmines when I first played WoW, because I played Horde. So it wasn’t until the run up to Cataclysm when I created an Alliance toon (a Draenei Pally) and was first introduced to Deadmines. My first group run, I must have been the only person in the group who didn’t know about DM, because I sure was lost, but even though I still struggled to keep up (and running as a Holy Pally in DM for the first time was an abject lesson in “watch your back”.) Sure, it’s a single path all the way through the instance, and sure, if you have 5 people who know what they’re doing they can blast through it while underpowered in Vanilla Classic, but it was an epic end to an epic quest chain and it took you deep into the bowels of the mines before you found out what the Defias had really been up to.
When I introduced my oldest to actually playing WoW (she’d been playing LOTRO and SWTOR for years) I pulled a group together and we went in and she couldn’t stop raving afterward about how cool it was. And while she’s my kid, she was an adult at the time. She was just completely floored by the epic scope of something that was on the face of it a pretty straightforward dungeon run. So, my vote is for DM because it is the gateway drug to playing WoW: once you run it in Classic, you’re hooked.
I think all software companies (and I include games in that) are always way too focused on the new shiny things. That’s what will draw in more people, after all. It’s always some half-baked “feature” that they put all their focus and energy on. It’s never the bugs that are super annoying. I’ve worked the last 12 years at various software companies and have had a really good view of it. I even ended up coding two separate fixes to two bugs at one of my jobs, and coding wasn’t even part of the job! But the devs? They were never going to get to it. Even if they wanted to.
Mmmmmm, full-clear BRD in the old days. SO much love for that instance. I rarely did a full Strat clear, probably just two or three times, but damn, those ambushes in Strat Live always sucked!
Interesting choice with Deadmines! I did it at some point for the first time on like a third or fourth alt, I think. And then I definitely livestreamed a HEROIC run of it at 85 with Majik and a few guildies at the time (sadly the livestream no longer exists):
https://kurn.info/blog/welcome-to-the-deadmines-the-stonecore/
Having done the entire quest chain a couple times, I can definitely see how epic the chain was and how epic it must have been to see in context. I definitely did not do that before I ran DM for the very first time, having levelled up primarily in Kalimdor (Teldrassil, Darkshore, Ashenvale). That’s fantastic that you were able to play with your daughter and introduce her to what is absolutely an epic dungeon. I had a similar reaction to questing in Elwynn with my brother and his eldest. My nephew was a rogue and I was on a mage and I was stealing aggro on all the mobs and he would cry out on Disc “AUNTIE (my real name)!!! STOP STEALING THEM FROM ME!!!” :D
Love hearing stories like this, Redbeard. Thank you for sharing!
KURN! This is Aaza! (Vanilla Apotheosis) I’ve been meaning to write and ask you if you have a location for the video of our Illidan fight. I love it and miss it and everyone. Would love to see it again. I hope you are well. I’m on an anniversary…
Aaza! So great to hear from you. :)
I think this should be the proper link to our kill:
https://youtu.be/J439wbuy2I4