Listen to the Rain

sashagee is off at an event tonight so I'm sitting at home. I just finished my exercise (70 minutes a day by the watch) and finished making a couple PRs for Cataclysm, so now I'm sitting down at my computer desk and playing Genshin Impact and watching some videos about the new WoW expansion that's coming out. Am I going to play it? Absolutely not. I'm out of WoW, and everything I've heard of Classic indicates that the way that people play is irrevocably changed and I would hate it if I went back. But the world is one of my favorite fictional worlds, so I still keep up with the story and the community around it no matter how bad things get (and they've gotten pretty dire at times).

On the other hand, I have been looking into buying Diablo II: Resurrected. I put thousands of hours into Diablo II over the years, from the summer of 2001 where uriany, sephimb, and I got together basically every single day after work and played Diablo II for hours right up until around 2017. While Blizzard botched Warcraft III Reforged to the level that it put me off continuing my journey through the Warcraft games (I reviewed Warcraft: Orcs and Humans back in 2017 and then just...never got around to any of the other games. Oops), I've heard that the Diablo II remaster was actually good, made by people who clearly care about Diablo without any of the nonsense from later Diablo games. Spell effects are way more impressive, the graphics are better, and you still have tons of runewords and synergies and so on you can make. Plus it has shapeshifting druids with nature magic, which is probably my favorite character type in any RPG. I'm going to wait for a sale, though--after thousands of hours there's no way I'm paying $40 for the same game again.

We had a Farmer's Market Dinner tonight but I sadly neglected to take a picture. It was (beef) BLTs, with beef bacon being the only non-farmer's market purchase. We used tomatoes from my parents' garden, lettuce and cucumber from Nichols' Family Farms, bread from Lost Larson, and blackberries from the farmer's market we went to last weekend out in the suburbs. Laila's plate had the most picturesque meal, all arranged together and given to her, and of course she smeared it all together within seconds of it being placed in front of her. She ate nearly everything, though.

We also ran into someone at the Farmer's Market yesterday who recognized me from Mishkan and asked if we were going to be at services tomorrow. They're outdoors, and last time Laila had a great time running around in the play area next to where people were seated, so I told her yes. We'll be there.

I haven't played World of Warcraft in over a decade but I still keep up with the storyline out of nostalgia and curiosity, but with everything that's happened since Legion it's getting harder and harder to care. Nowadays, it's that classic feeling of watching a trainwreck.

Here's the latest controversy:

Apparently during the Mal'Ganis and Kintessa fight in the Sepulcher, they reveal that they've been several dungeon and raid bosses spanning all the way back to Classic.

Let's... talk about this a lil' bit. pic.twitter.com/D3eGtCUX7u

— 🅱️en Grandblade 🌱💙💛 (@BenGrandblade) March 12, 2022

The Shadowlands expansion is very, let's say, controversial for introducing a new villain called the Jailer and, in order to build some kind of narrative weight behind him, implying that he was the secret mastermind behind essentially everything else that happened in the Warcraft universe despite his presence never being hinted at and not being required for any previous story development. After two years where he never once actually explained what his plan even was other than to "remake reality," he dies and claims that he was really trying to unite the cosmos because:

"You preserve that which is doomed. A cosmos divided will not survive what is to come."

Okay, whatever, I guess there's another universe that's going to invade the Warcraft universe or something.

Maybe the next expansion is the moment World of Warcraft finally becomes a JRPG and the players have to kill G-d.

Anyway, dreadlords. Throughout Warcraft's history, the demonic dreadlords are shown as consummate manipulators and schemers, and often disguise themselves as other people. This can be cool--I remember how neat it was doing Stratholme, fighting the over-zealous Scarlet Crusade, and having Grand Crusader Saidan Dathrohan transform into the dreadlord Balnazzar halfway through the fight. Gasp! The dreadlords had created the Scarlet Crusade, which was dedicated to fighting the undead Scourge, which the dreadlords had also created?? What were they planning??

The latest twist is that but in overdrive. Assuming that Mal'Ganis and Kin'tessa were indicating that they were impersonating all the people they transform into during the fight, they were manipulating, in order: The Twilight's Hammer, the Dark Iron Dwarves, the Arakkoa Outcasts, Kael'thas's blood elves, the Vrykul, the Blue Dragonflight, the Twilight's Hammer (again), the Twilight's Hammer (again again), the Order of the Cloud Serpent, the Mogu, the Burning Legion, the Nightborne, the Alliance (raid on Zuldazar), and Kul Tiras. "The Horde" is, of course, absent from this list.

This isn't all. There's a piece of loot called Alandien's Tortured Twinblades whose flavor text reads

"A trophy from Kin'tessa's favorite deception."

Alandien is the Demon Hunter trainer trainer in infiltration, which is fun and ironic except that Demon Hunters have an ability called Spectral Sight that lets them see demons in disguise, so it never would have worked. And I like how these demons were impersonating other demons, because even though the Burning Legion is literally an army with an actual command structure, sometimes you just have to do things yourself. Or manipulate other people into doing them instead of just ordering them to do it.

There's nothing wrong with revealing that a scheme or a villain was secretly part of a greater plot. Warcraft itself did this with the Burning Legion, revealing in Warcraft III that the Orcish Horde was actually a ploy by an army of demons to invade Azeroth, but there are some key differences: we already knew that demons existed and were tied to the orcs because in Warcraft: Orcs and Humans warlocks could summon them; it was revealed gradually over three games; and the revelations in Warcraft III specifically emphasized that the orcs took on demonic power of their own free will because they wanted to be better at genocide--they weren't manipulated into it, and thus retain agency. Shadowlands skips all that and tries to provide borrowed credibility to the Jailer and still doesn't manage to make him a compelling villain because even if he is a master manipulator the players never learn why he's manipulating people!

I might have my problems with the plot of Endwalker--which mostly come back to "it's the most cliche anime plot imaginable"--but at least we know why the villains did their villainous deeds.

I am very curious to see how much more train the WoW devs find to wreck.

▶️One, I got my first property tax bill, so now of course I have to become an anarchist. Who are these people to want all this money? ZOMG teh gubmint, etc, etc. It's actually less than I expected it to be so it's not a problem, but it still stings a bit to pay thousands of dollars after the already thousands of dollars I paid when I bought the place.

It helps me remember that mostly, the rich are evil due to environmental factors, not due to innate immorality.

▶️Two, Northern Ballad has shown up a couple times in my Listening To section, and I mixed in Sailing Icy Seas and Parting Icy Skies from the Wrath of the Lich King soundtrack, so I put out a call for similar music, and then thosesocks sent me the song that's currently in there. So I guess I'm on a hurdy-gurdy kick? "One by One" isn't anything like the other songs that's linked above--I can't imagine it playing over a shot of the protagonist coming back to the burned ruins of their childhood home, or a group of soldiers drinking together the night before a battle knowing most of them won't be back the next night--but it's good in its own right! I should look up more of her music.

Also, listening to "Sailing Icy Seas" is reminding me of Wrath of the Lich King, which was the most fun I ever had playing WoW. Partially because balance druids were finally good, but also because I finally got to see the part of WoW Lore I cared about through. One major reason I trailed off hard and then stopped playing in Cataclysm is that I didn't care about why I was doing anything. I played Warcraft III, and then I played WoW, and when I killed the Lich King in June of 2010, that was the last boss I cared about fighting. I stuck around through Firelands, but when I realized I was only logging on to raid and otherwise never playing, I figured my time was done, and nowadays I don't have time for an MMO.

But raiding Ulduar was up there with very-late-night drunk Karazhan raids with some of most fun I've ever had in a video game. I don't actually want to play WoW again, but I miss those experiences and the person I was then who had them.

Well, maybe if they had classic Burning Crusade or Wrath servers I'd dip back in...

▶️Three, I've been eating vegetarian meals for dinner every night this week, after I bought some ice cream on Sunday and then due to בשר בחלב basar bechalav decided to make egg curry instead of chicken curry so that I could have naan (made with butter) with it and it's been delicious. Tonight I'm having pita, vegetables, hummus, and feta cheese--I was going to have falafel, but the Middle Eastern Grocery store was out--and when I had it on Tuesday it was delicious. I mean, spicy hummus is amazing on anything, but I was surprised at how much I liked it.

Long meeting this morning and nothing tonight. Back to work.

I haven't played World of Warcraft in years, but I still occasionally keep tabs on the game because I spent so much of my life playing the game. I was recently watching Safe Haven, the latest cinematic where Varok Saurfang tracks down Thrall because it turns out that Sylvanas, the evil undead monster who has been a genocidal megalomaniac for her entire existence, is not a good choice to lead the Horde. It was extremely good, like Blizzard cinematics always are. Regardless of what you can say about their games, their cutscenes are top notch.

In the comments was a link to another series, though, someone using machinima to retell the plot of Warcraft III. And I watched it, and it's fantastic:

"WARCRAFT | Reign of Chaos - Season 1 (EN)" (Watch on YouTube)

It's all quotes from the game, so the voice acting is already all done, and though sometimes it sounds weird, at least it's a familiar weird. The music and models come from World of Warcraft. It means that sometimes the action is a little stiff and the battle scenes have a bunch of shakycam to hide the rigidity of the models, but it's amazing how much the creator did with the ingredients.

Also, I forgot that the human campaign started out against orcs, not against the Scourge, and that Thrall had to rescue Grom. I guess the last time I played it was over a decade ago.

Nostalgia means it's hard for me to say what someone who didn't play Warcraft, or video games at all, would think of it, but I love it. I can't wait to see where it goes from here.

I spent a while thinking about this at work yesterday, so I decided to write them all down. These are all the RPG games I currently want to run and have put some effort into planning. I have plenty of other "wouldn't it be fun to..." ideas, but if I haven't put any effort into it, I'll leave it out.

( A lifetime of game ideas )

When IT spends an hour fiddling with your computer to no avail and eventually has to export a copy of your registry to fiddle with on a test machine, you know things are going well!

Today was one of the health walks that the AMA wellness department puts on. Now that I'm switching over to schoolpsychnerd's insurance, finishing up the various program milestones to get the monetary credit on my insurance costs is pointless. But going on walks gets me out of the office, and the walk this time was to Christkindlmarket. How can I pass that up, even if it is -7°C out and Chicago windy? After a stop at the bank to withdraw money, I arrived...and the line for the cookies I was going to get was too long. And then the line for pretzels was too long. But there was one line that wasn't long at all and it led to food that was delicious:


We got them last year when we went and I wasn't going to turn down the opportunity to get one now. I'm I didn't get a cookie during my stair climbing earlier today. This was much better.

I also just bought a bunch of the old Warcraft TCG cards--two druid starter packs for about $10 each. I've started playing Hearthstone, and it's okay. I like how it takes advantage of the electronic format to create cards that would only work when a computer that can handle all the calculations, but it also leads to cards like Rod of Roasting. The physical card game is a ripoff of Magic the way most post-Magic TCGs are, schoolpsychnerd and I played a bit with the cards we got for free from my Burning Crusade CE and it was fun. Maybe she can build a warrior deck and we can play again!

Well.

Vanilla servers. Who would have thought.

Watch on YouTube

I would have loved this, once. A lot of my fondest memories of the game are from vanilla, though I preferred Burning Crusade. I stopped playing halfway through Cataclysm, and everything I've seen since then has convinced for me that it was the right choice. Druids have changed beyond recognition for me and I'm not at all interested in where they took the story.

But, I remember the lure of the world. I remember running down back roads looking for quests, and gathering a rag-tag band and delving into Scholomance and Stratholme. I remember stealthing into Upper Blackrock Spire, and using alchemy to fund my friends' and my mounts. I remember the run from Teldrassil to Ironforge to pick up all the flight points, and killing undead for Argent Dawn reputation. I remember delving into Zul'Gurub with a raid alliance and facing (and being murdered by) Hakkar the Soulflayer. I remember the druid quests for mounts, and spending time in out-of-the-way corners of the world, in Azshara and Un'Goro Crater. I remember winning the fishing contest on my birthday, the very first time I competed. I remember getting a frostsaber.

I also remember standing around for an hour trying to get a fifth party member for a dungeon. I remember being turned down for playing a balance druid, and spending hours killing random enemies to scrape up enough gold for an epic mount. I remember Molten Core requiring hours of painstaking grinding up of fire resist gear. I remember each class having maybe one viable spec (two for warriors), and any class that was able to heal having to heal. I remember hunters despawning their pets due to pathing problems and pet survivability. I remember having to pay money to swap between healing and DPS specs, and then again to swap back. I remember hitting 60 and, for large portions of time, having basically nothing I could do without getting another 19 or 39 other people to do it with me.

I don't think I'm going back. Maybe briefly, as a tourist.

There's no money in it, but what I really want is "World of Warcraft: Director's Cut," a version of vanilla WoW with all the content they were planning on including but had to cut for time. Finishing quests like The Missing Diplomat that just trail off, and zones like Silithus, Azshara, Dustwallow Marsh, and Arathi Highlands that got very little development. Put in Azshara Crater battleground. Make Karazhan the next raid after Naxxramas like it was meant to be. Atiesh, the legendary staff from Naxx, has the ability to teleport to Karazhan, and Karazhan itself is a perfect bridge between Naxxramas and Burning Crusade. At the bottom are undead and spooky ghosts, but as the raiders ascend the tower things get stranger and stranger until at the top they face the mastermind--Malchezzar, a prince of the Eredar. Mix all this in with some quality of life improvements that don't change the substance of the experience like dual specs and quests showing on the minimap, and I would be back in a flash.

They're not going to do that, though. I wish them luck with what they do. All the pirate servers show it's popular, but as the former player of a balance druid, I remember a lot of bad mixed in with the good. I played plenty of WoW, and while they can bring back the game, they can't bring back the person I was when I came to it, or the people I came to it with. It would not be the same.

I spent several hours today trying to get a multiplayer game of Warcraft III to work. There's a map called Sunken City that looks like a lot of fun that's designed for three players, so schoolpsychnerd and I roped in uriany to play with us, but we ad to jump through all kind of hoops. First they had to update their games to 1.28, which broke and required them to delete the game and completely reinstall. Then I had to set up port forwarding to allow uriany to successfully see and join the game. Then, when I figured out everything that was wrong and we had finally all joined and gotten the map started...uriany got dropped out of the game. Twice.

Remember when we had to put up with this every time we tried to play games online? At least I didn't have to set my IRQ.

On the other hand, we got to eat lunch with daveax! He's in town visiting family and had a lunch free today, so we met him downtown at Vermillion, a Latin/Indian fusion restaurant near where I work. That was lovely and I'm glad we did that first so I wasn't in a bad mood before we went to lunch.

Now, to cap off the day, we're watching Laser Time play through the first hour and half of Metroid: Other M (THE BABY THE BABY THE BABY THE BABY). Now that Metroid Prime 4 has been announced, it doesn't sting so badly.

I've been on edge almost all day, which doesn't make it easy to relax on a three-day weekend. I even went to get a manicure with schoolpsychnerd and while my nails are much more manageable--they were long enough that it was pretty annoying to type--all I could think of while I was there was how long it was taking. I didn't find it relaxing at all. And I meant to start playing ふしぎの木の実 (大地の章) (Oracle of Seasons) today and haven't even booted it up. Instead I finished reading Japan at War, which is admittedly an excellent book, and fiddled with music for hours.

I've been really nostalgic for Warcraft lately. Not World of Warcraft, necessarily. The time of my life when I played MMOs is over. But the Warcraft setting, around which there isn't any way to interact outside of WoW and Hearthstone now that Blizzard isn't putting out Warcraft RTSes. I downloaded and organized the entire Wrath of the Lich King soundtrack, all fourteen hours of it, and have original WoW and Burning Crusade waiting for me to sort through when I can find the time. I booted up Warcraft III and played for a while before I tore myself away. And I made that icon that's up there from one of the few screenshots of Algalon I could find that wasn't full of PC nameplates or raiders trying to murder him.

I originally thought of putting "The stars come to my aid" as the text, since I played a Balance Druid and wore the Starcaller title from the moment I got it until I stopped playing even as I accumulated titles like "The Insane" and "Battlemaster," but I thought the current version would be more broadly applicable.

I'm all fired up over trying to make my perfect version of a WoW tabletop RPG game based on Pathfinder and using the Spheres of Power sourcebook to build spell lists for each caster class and Path of War for the martial classes, because I think it would work incredibly well even if it would be a ton of work. It'd be less work than actually balancing WoW is, though! And I need a new project now that Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom is in tinkering mode and I have multiple other games prepped and ready for when I have more time.

Of course, that's what I need, right? More time.

(On the other hand, an old woman at the nail salon told me that I had interesting pants and the proprietor said she was jealous of my hair, so some good things happened today!)

Yesterday I was poking around Youtube looking at World of Warcraft shorts out of a sudden sense of nostalgia and I re-found this:

Watch on YouTube

This isn't my favorite WoW machinima I've ever seen--that honor goes to Ulduar: Defiance, to which I can attribute my love of trailer music like Two Steps from Hell or Epic Score--but it's definintely my second favorite, and I think a lot of that has to do with how I played World of Warcraft and why I ended up finally losing interest in the game after Cataclysm dropped.

One of the parts of World of Warcraft that I really loved when I first started playing was the sense of exploration. All the hard travel, the Menethil Harbor run, the Stranglethorn Vale run, traversing the length and breadth of the continents to get the flight points, all of that was great. As much as actually traveling on the flight points was a bit annoying--ten minutes to fly from Silithus to Darnassus--it gave a great sense of place in the world, and that's probably what I valued about the game most. Having played through Warcraft I, II, and III before I played World of Warcraft, so it was a chance to learn more about the setting that I already liked. I still have some of the screenshots I took of getting into bizarre places and exploring all the nooks and crannies that the designers didn't want you to go, like on top of the Ironforge gates, Mount Hyjal before it opened as a regular zone, or the edge of the world.

I mention this because I interpret the video as a conflict between people who want more DoTs and all the DPS (hence the title) against people who just want to explore the world. That's not actually a real conflict, since people who like raiding and downing bosses aren't diametrically opposed to people who like WoW as a setting or the feel of it as a world, but that kind of dichotomy was definitely drawn between them when I played.

Anyway, when Cataclysm remade the old world, it lost most of the spark for me. Most of the secret areas that I had spent so much time trying to get to were wiped away with the move to make the world suited for flying, the quest structure was revamped and, while it certainly improved the flow of the quests and the ease of getting into the game for new players, I found it pretty offputting when I went back and tried the quests out. There was none of that slow, plodding structure that I found really let me get into exploring the world. And with Arthas's death at the end of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, all the named characters I cared about had either mutated completely beyond recognition, if they were friendly; or already been killed, if they were enemies. Or gone insane and made us kill them, as the joke was.

I liked raiding and downing bosses, but not in isolation. Without context for them they were just so many numbers, and I stopped playing and have never really considered going back.

I played a lot of World of Warcraft. I think across all my characters, I had something like 500 days of play time, which is an insane amount even if a double-digit percentage of that was tabbed out doing other things while some kind of automatic process was running--camping for rare mobs, long-distance flying, crafting, etc. On the one hand, that's a lot of time spent on something ultimately ephemeral, but on the other hand, it is pretty hopeful from a certain perspective. When I think about how much effort I'd need to learn to program or to speak Japanese, I remember how much effort I put into system mastery for WoW. It reminds me of an article I read about how so many modern people complain that they have a hard time concentrating but are capable of spending hours at a time staring at a computer screen while moving only the mouse and their WASD hand.

Anyway! That's not what this entry is about.

As is my jumpy fashion, I've been giving some thought to using the World of Warcraft RPG to run a game. Well, kind of--I'll probably read it through and throw up a review on Goodreads later, but for the moment I'll say that it has a lot of oddities left over from its D&D heritage. It still has spells-per-day instead of a mana system, warriors and barbarians are separate classes despite the existence of fury warriors in WoW and the fact that stances would solve some of the problems with the 3.5 fighter (not all my any means, but some), most special abilities for martial classes are done through feats instead of class powers, enchanter is a class instead of a profession, paladins are much more warriory than castery...

Apparently Blizzard requested that this all be left the same in order to increase compatibility with D&D, but everything I've found suggested that it just made people think it was too watered down and not really worth buying. The authors released a free supplement (PDF warning) that fixes some of the problems, but not all of them, and by that time it was mostly too late. Several of the supplements, like Lands of Ruin about Outland, never came out, and the line was basically shut down.

Before that, though, there was a Warcraft RPG that came out before WoW did. The mechanical issues are even stronger, but I think the background works a lot better. As a illustration, here's the map from the book:



There's some interesting bits on there (Caverns of Time! Maraudon! No Teldrassil!), but the main thing is how empty it is. WoW had little outposts of civilization pretty much everywhere, but on the map there, there's Nighthaven and Ashenvale, which the text describes as mostly left wild and untamed, Durotar, Theramore, Ratchet, Bael Modan, Thunder Bluff, and...that's it, and that's in a crescent pattern across maybe a fourth of the continent. The vast majority of Kalimdor is an unknown, with a few pockets of civilization. Points of light, if you will.

The book also takes the tack that contact with the Eastern Kingdoms has been mostly cut off and no one really knows what's going on over there. When I first read the Warcraft RPG, I really liked that idea as a the setting for a game, and I was kind of disappointed that WoW made travel so easy and convenient. Even in the book, it was a bit out of place, since in The Frozen Throne we see that the Alliance still has a command structure in Lordaeron and people are able to travel back and forth from Northrend without much trouble. And that's fine in a high-level world-traveling game, but we all know that high-level 3.x is broken as hell anyway and that having people who can summon angels to fetch them tea delve into holes in the ground to haul out loot is ridiculous. But an E6 group out of Theramore, tasked to explore parts of Kalimdor to give the Alliance an advantage against the Horde? That sounds awesome.

I have too many game ideas and not enough time to run them all.

While Donald Rumsfeld crewing a ship that would possibly be in charge of a first contact situation is, in my opinion, pretty much asking for the beginning of a genocidal war, there's a reason I chose to include it as the title of my post. After a theoretical physics paper presented at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics annual conference won first place, the U.S. government has expressed interest at using the theories presented within to develop an honest-to-gods warp drive. Even the way it works is fantastic--generating a huge magnetic field to provide thrust, or, at high enough power levels, drop the spaceship into another dimension where the speed of light is faster. A literal hyperspace.

Of course, I'm leery about it actually working, and more worried about how much of an effect that strong of a magnetic field would have on the crew, not to mention shipboard equipment, but still. My government believes in this enough to fund research into hyperdrive. How awesome is that?

I've been reading Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead recently. I've always hated Ayn Rand's philosopher (as a sort of disclaimer), and this book hasn't changed my opinion. I think the main character is supposed to be likeable, since he's a shining paragon of self-sufficiency, but really, he's just a self-absorbed asshole. I put the book down after the rape scene where the woman, after Roark (the main character) leaves, goes to the bathroom to wash herself, but stops because that means she would remove his scent from her skin and she's obsessed with him...not cool.

schoolpsychnerd came to visit this weekend, and most of what we did...was play WoW. Well, okay. We did a bunch of other stuff (like watch Cowboy Bebop), but I got her hooked on WoW as well. According to kraada, I am now the moral equivalent of a crack dealer. Really, I'm not sure that's so wrong :-p