WOW

AggroChat #108 – Because Morality

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Ashgar, Belghast,  Kodra, Tam and a super rambly show filled with lots of topics

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This week we are down to a much smaller core for the AggroChat podcast with Thalen off exploring Japan and making us all jealous, and Grace needing to deal with some family stuff.  The irony is there was a time when three members of the podcast was the norm but it is funny how much smaller the group feels when we are down a few now.  For years I wondered if we would ever get used to recording with as big of a group as we often do… and I guess the answer to that is a resounding yes.  As far as the show… this is yet another one of those “do we have anything to talk about?” episodes that ends up developing a life of its own.

Topics Discussed

  • Tanking in WoW and FFXIV
  • Mark of the Ninja
  • Ronin
  • Tenchu
  • Ninja Gaiden
  • Nintendo Articles of Incorporation
  • Rom Hacks
  • Overwatch
  • Fan Fiction
  • Harry Potter
  • Idol Master Xenoglossia
  • BabyMetal
  • LadyBaby
  • Cleveland
  • Infinity Showdown
  • Uncharted
  • Goldeneye

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Accepting Help

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Last week was quite the rollercoaster around here, with a few very excessive ups and downs. The downs are personal so I’m not going to get into details, but they had me sad and anxious and stressed for a lot of the week. The ups were 100% due to the awesomeness of my friends in ways I cannot completely explain on this humble blog.

I had a long discussion with my spouse at one point during the week about giving and accepting gifts. We have so many cultural hang ups about accepting gifts in part because there are so many situations where “gifts” come with an expectation of some sort of reciprocity. It can be disarming to receive a gift, freely given just to make you happy or to help out when you needed it. This weekend I was getting carried a bit in D3, and I can sort of justify accepting that help because I know that once I get my character built up I’ll turn around and carry other friends later on. But in the middle of the silliness of being dragged through TX rifts I got a whisper from another friend inviting me to a WoW friendship moose run. In that case there’s no way I could repay that kindness. I’ve stopped raiding in WoW, all my characters are barely in Tanaan gear. I actually had to spend a WoW token to join the moose party because I had been distracted enough that my subscription had lapsed. I took my completely undergeared kitty druid into that raid and I ate the floor like a champion and walked away with a moose and it was amazing. There’s no way for me to repay the folks that made that possible other than to thank them profusely, and maybe try to pay it forward in some way when I am able.

Here’s the thing: happiness isn’t a zero sum game. Gifts don’t have to be transactional. Doing silly things for your friends can feel pretty great, so being on the receiving end of help shouldn’t feel weird. Life can be pretty crappy sometimes, so embrace happiness when it is offered and do your best to spread it around when you can. And to all the friends who made my week better last week, thank you.


Accepting Help

Company and Misery (and also Fun!)

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I’ve been playing WildStar and WoW mostly solo the past few weeks, and have recently resolved to at least make an effort to be more social again. So when I saw my buddy Lonomonkey (sorry for revealing your WoW shame, friend!) had logged into WoW for the first time in a year or so I grabbed him for some legacy raid silliness. Not only was I being social for a change, but it also kept both of us from just sitting around in our garrisons being bored and boring. I had been meaning to try soloing Elegon for the fancy celestial cloud serpent mount, so I dragged him along to pandaland to try it together. There were a few missteps due to him being out of practice and me playing a mage I hadn’t taken out of the garrison in a few months but we eventually killed Elegon and unsurprisingly there was no mount.

This is the moment where the afternoon started going off the rails. We decided to keep going to kill the last boss because neither of us was sure we had ever finished the place outside of LFR. Unfortunately between our lack of gear and our rustiness with our characters we just couldn’t get it down. Having resolved to be more social, I decided to reach out to Belghast to see if he could come help finish this fight with us. The three of us were more than a match for it, and killed it easily on the first try. Delirious from our victory, we decided to move on to Dragon Soul, which Lono had never completed on any difficulty. Since that raid was 2 expansions ago you’d think it would be a piece of cake, and it was…except for Spine of Deathwing. That fight has way too many needlessly fiddly moving parts, and is one of those sad circumstances where soloing it is easier than doing it with a couple friends because of the way the mechanics work. We died an awful lot, and there were a few way too close attempts where the last person standing got rolled off before they could finish the encounter. At this point I’m regretting my social attempts because after this everyone is about to murder each other. We did eventually win, no thanks to my squishy mage who ended up dying almost every attempt. Killing the final boss in that place always feels so anticlimactic after the stress of Spine.

Now in a flash of utter stupidity I decided that the best thing to follow that up with is a quick jaunt to ICC to get my blood infusion, a part of the legendary quest line from the Wrath of the Lich King expansion that my paladin has been sitting stuck on for forever. It required a lot of silly antics with mechanics again, and poor Lono had to keep dying multiple times each attempt on his warlock. It took fewer attempts than Spine of Deathwing, but felt even worse since this time my friends were dying for a silly quest for me. I’m so grateful that they both stuck around until we succeeded. After we won everyone seemed to disappear very quickly, I think we were all really eager for a break after so much frustration.

I still think that my social attempt was a success though. It is funny how even doing something kinda awful with friends was more fun than soloing dailies in WildStar or rotating through a dozen garrisons all day in WoW. I certainly wouldn’t want to make a habit of this exact choice of activities or we all might not remain friends for very long I think.

P.S. Speaking of social, don’t forget that the Diablo 3 season 6 is about to start this Friday evening! Leveling is way faster and more fun with friends, and I’ll be rolling around in a ball of murder with various folks all night until I get to 70. Are you excited about Season 6 too?


Company and Misery (and also Fun!)

Past and Future of World of Warcraft

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There’s been a bit of fuss recently with the closure of a “vanilla” WoW server, and it has me thinking about the pull between nostalgia and progress. Now, for the record, I believe that Blizzard is 100% within their rights to force the closure of any 3rd party WoW server of any flavor. It is their IP, it is their game, they’re right to protect it. However, I’m also in the camp that would absolutely love to see them launch a legacy server or three. Full disclosure: I’ve played briefly on a vanilla server a few years back, during WoW’s Cataclysm expansion. I had never even played WoW during vanilla, I didn’t get sucked in until the first expansion, The Burning Crusade. The vanilla server still called to me because I wanted to see for myself what things were like back then, and because it conveniently erased all of the changes that were making me outright hate the game in its current state. It was a very different game at a very different pace, and I could have happily kept playing it indefinitely if the nagging understanding that I was walking in a moral gray area at best hadn’t driven me back to the straight and narrow. The fact that my chosen vanilla server has long since been closed down tells me I did the right thing by stopping.

I hold out hope that Blizzard might one day launch legacy servers the same way I still hold out hope that they’ll institute an invisible mode for battle.net. They obviously think both those things are not in their best interests or they’d have implemented them by now, but a girl can dream. Ironically, I think that having legacy servers might actually let people enjoy the current offerings more. There have been almost too many quality of life changes to the game to count, and running around questing on foot until level 40 with no heirlooms or dungeon finder might put some things in perspective. I also think that during the flatly awful lulls in content it would be nice to be able to travel back to a simpler time and be a tourist still in WoW, still giving Blizzard money but experiencing something a little different for a few months instead of quitting the game completely.

Looking forward towards Legion I don’t see a lot to excite me, and I do see a few things that turn me off. I feel like I am drifting farther away from WoW’s target demographic, and maybe that’s ok but it still makes me feel a little sad. I also look at the game itself and it is showing its age more and more. The older zones look pretty awful and that’s fine on a nostalgia server but a harder sell for an actively updating game. Each expansion works a little magic and brings a partial facelift but even the newest zones don’t hold a candle to the graphics of more modern MMOs in my opinion. After all this contemplation I find myself strangely yearning for the change that relegates all of WoW to “legacy” status, a fresh clean 2.0 with modern sensibilities and graphics. Maybe if that happens Blizz will finally open a vanilla WoW server.


Past and Future of World of Warcraft