World Of Warcraft

Last night I took a break from attempting to halt the Mongol invasion of Japan and returned to Azeroth. I have three characters horde side that are not 120. Weirdly they also represent most of my allied races characters aka my Maghar Shaman, Void Elf Priest and Vulpera Rogue. I made a massive push and leveled so many things to 120 in such a short period of time, that I am now sorta keeping these as a low key side project for when I need equally low key levels of activity. World of Warcraft is comfort gaming that I can more or less play in my sleep at this point, and sometimes you just need that in your life.

I am however getting somewhat tired of Borean Tundra. It is significantly more efficient than Howling Fjord but it also lags a bit and has a few quests that I absolutely cannot stand. I am standing where I am because I was lured over to complete a quest without reading what it was. I abandoned the quest where you load a mule up with wreckage and then try and get it back to base without losing anything. I just cannot be bothered by that nonsense and as a result I think I am probably going to be seeking out a command board to get the starter quest to go elsewhere in Northrend.

I am not a completionist at all and I will happily abandon quests left and right, especially when I am playing an alt. I’m 76 currently and I believe the elevator stops when I get to 80 and will ultimately transition over into I believe a choice of Pandaria or Cataclysm. As frustratingly gated as it is, I do enjoy the content in Pandaria significantly more as it has aged. In fact my overall opinion of that expansion has also increased significantly with age. Strangely Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King on the other hand are content blocks that I don’t look forward to in quite the way that I once did because the game has evolved since those days as has my attention span.

In my normal tradition of discovering things years too late… my wife and I have recently started a watch through of Schitt’s Creek. I had heard of the show but never got around to checking it out, and quite honestly I had no clue what the Pop Channel was. It turns out it is the channel formerly known as Prevue and later the TV Guide Channel… which is peak levels of irony since I used to work for the parent company during the early 2000s. I spent New Years of 2000 on the roof of the corporate headquarters since we had an all hands order as we prepared for all of the post apocalyptic things that were supposed to be happening.

It is a good show but I am not entirely certain if I can pinpoint WHY I find it so funny. I think on one hand it is that Schitt’s Creek is not dissimilar to the tiny towns that both my wife and I grew up in. I know the people that are represented on screen and serve as a foil to the Rose family. David and Stevie are without a doubt my favorite characters, but I do admit it was a little weird seeing Chris Elliot playing Roland without devolving to full Cabin Boy levels of nonsense. I think the series does a good job of creating humorous fish out of water situations without going all the way in painting the local folk as idiots. I ran like hell as soon as I could get out of my small town upbringing, and am still in many ways running from it… but that said I still have certain nostalgia for the cast of non-sequitur characters that small towns create.

As of last night we are about halfway through season three and I am hoping by the time we get there the sixth and final season will be available on netflix.

I spent the majority of this weekend in World of Warcraft Retail. I am not exactly sure what prompted this, but I needed something somewhat mindless and grindy. I’ve been in a bit of a weird mental state of late and I always find working away on characters in WoW to be relaxing. I can put something on YouTube or an Audiobook and level away happily, pushing my mind somewhere outside of myself for awhile. A few months back I had been on this kick of trying to level one of everything to 120 before the release of Shadowlands. The next in line was my Monk but I stalled out in the Cataclysm levels after having ground up something like seven characters to 120 in a row.

Yesterday afternoon I managed to push the monk across the line and ding 120. This was not the easiest of characters to level, because there were quite a few points where it seemed weaker than I would have expected the Windwalker to be. The biggest problem I encountered was that the healing of the spheres that you spawn randomly doesn’t seem to make up for the incoming damage. I contemplated swapping over to Brewmaster Monk but managed to stick things out but that last level was a pain in the butt. Really it just seemed like certain mob types dealt way more damage than I could keep up with.

Now I am going through the very familiar long grind, of cherry picking which daily quests reward item level upgrades all with the goal of getting up to somewhere in the vicinity of 430. At this point I managed to push up to the neighborhood of 358 so I am slowly making progress. What is ultimately the problem is the lack of ring, trinket and weapon slots. The first thing I did upon dinging 120 was to purchase a full set of benthic gear, which sorta begins the process and is a seed for getting the world quests up into reasonable levels. I’ve already replaced a number of pieces, which always feels a little bad but I know it is just part of the process.

I’ve already picked out the next character I intend to level, which is my Maghar Shaman. For now I have decided to go elemental, because this is not really something I have ever spent much time with in the past. I’ve spent lots of time leveling enhancement, and I figured it might be an enjoyable break. That leaves Rogue and Priest that are still low levels, but if I can somehow manage to push all of these up I will have a full stable of 120s going into Shadowlands. The next trick would be pushing up some of their tradeskills, though the segmentation mostly makes that useless.

Finally there was one other thing that I was not expecting that happened this weekend. I managed to get a slot in the Perky Pugs lead Friendship Dragon. I had more or less resigned myself that it was not a thing that was going to happen this time. However Saturday night shortly after we had wrapped up the podcast I got pinged to join what was one of the last few runs of the 12 hour N’zoth-a-thon in which the horde team managed to get 455 people their mounts. The really cool thing however is that they managed to raise $10,425 for RAINN at the time of posting this. Still super humbled and shook that I managed to get in and get a purple dargon.

I spent most of last night playing around on my Monk in World of Warcraft. I am still in a somewhat weird headspace and decided to hang out on the sofa and snuggle with the cats instead of doing anything more serious. One of the challenges of being a gamer like I am that hops around through a bunch of games is that you end up losing touch with a lot of friends along the way. Gamer friends right or wrong and largely bound together by the mutual love and adoration of a specific game. When you are not playing that game together, you often end up struggling to find things to relate to because that social lubricant in the form of the shared gaming interest is gone from the equation.

Sure you can build lasting friendships that are based on firmer stuff, but those take time and as someone who has formed guilds and raids for decades I have a truly ridiculous number of “surface friendships”. What I mean by that is that you are close within the context of a specific medium, sorta like the friends you might make at a workplace and then never see again once either of you have moved on from that environment. The thing is every so often something reminds you of one of those folks that were lost in the shuffle, and you start to get some pangs of regret that you couldn’t find a way for that friendship to stay evergreen.

At some point last night I was searching for something in gmail, and because I never seem to actually delete anything I stumbled across a conversation thread between me and one of these friends. There used to be a time when my means of contact with a whole slew of people was through trading long form emails. The entire thing was peppered with in jokes, because we had this running gag where we both claimed that they hated me… since they constantly avoided my recruitment pitch to join House Stalwart. This is someone that I raided in Vanilla with and then fairly frequently communicated off and on until I ultimately left the game in Cataclysm, and again pretty frequently when we were both playing SWTOR.

It is weird how ephemeral friendships can be at times. We were obviously close because reading back through this ancient gaming history there were all of the markers of a shared language. However its probably been a decade now since we were in regular contact. A lot of stuff happens in a decade, but as I sat there in World of Warcraft I decided to dust off my Battle.net friends list, something I almost NEVER pay any attention to these days and sure enough they happened to be also playing at the same time. The problem with getting out of contact with someone is that the longer it goes the harder it becomes to fire off that opening salvo of conversation. Not knowing what to say I just went with the sheepish “Heya :)”.

What followed was a solid hour and a half of catching up about this or that and while yeah a gulf of time had passed, it was still pretty easy to fall back into holding a conversation. I am exceptionally bad at staying in contact with people once whatever shared medium we had is gone. I need to reach out more and try and catch up with more of these people lost to the turning of the tides. The challenge however is that there is no going back really. I’m not the person I was when I was leading House Stalwart and actively recruiting for raids. Mentally I have to realize that this person in question is not the exactly skittish warlock that I knew from so long ago. Time passes and people change and some of those folks that you were once “drift compatible” with are probably not going to be.

The thing is, I need to learn to get over the fear of reaching out and finding out. I have this list of friends in Battle.net for a reason, I guess at some point I should start poking additional people on it to see how they are doing. Right now I find myself in the awkward position of being without a permanent game home, and I tend to flit around madly between a bunch of side projects in different games. It is super hard to build a stable support structure when you yourself cannot seem to commit to any specific medium. Facepull is a delightful home in World of Warcraft, and I adore them all given our long shared history. However there are a bunch of voices out there that I would love to hear from again if only to have a single day of catching up before fading into the mists once again.

The funny thing is… there are still a handful of friends that I communicate with mostly through email. Back during the days when everyone was using a single messaging platform, it was a bit easier. I could fire up Google Talk or AOL Instant Messenger and get immediate access to a whole list of people. I still have a fully populated friends list in Google Hangouts, but the only people I ever seem to talk to are Vernie and my Wife. AOL Instant Messenger was the platform I was way more prolific on… but it of course is lost to time. So as a result of all of this email just sorta became the easiest default middle ground. My friend Cylladora and I go through this pattern where completely from out of nowhere we will exchange an email and then go months again without communication.

Being an old gamer means you have a lot of old gamer friends out there somewhere. It would probably be good for my mental state to occasionally reach out to a lot of them and at least get into the pattern of talking once or twice a year.