🎮 Warcraft Classic
Life has been pretty shit lately. I have some time off due to the holidays but also for some tremendous shit that happened in my life, that I won't go into here. But I'm in a lot of pain right now, physical and mental, and trying to keep my mind off of things.
So to distract myself, we've been playing a bit of World of Wacraft (vanilla/Classic.) They're prepping to re-release Burning Crusade early next year so we (me, my husband Dane, my brother, and a couple other friends) are leveling some characters beforehand. Currently sitting at level 41 on a night elf priest. I had a NE priest in the original vanilla so I just recreated her. I remember the first time around, I disliked priests so much that I basically had a friend level me through double experience and dungeon run-throughs. So her played time was really low, though it still took a year or more to get her to 60 (and then 70, where I properly leveled through quests and actual group runs.) It was BC that got me to like priests and to understand the nuances between the different healing classes.
We've been three-manning dungeons and questing to level, since we aren't always all on at the same time. Though since we came back, we've noticed that finding chests out in the field is garbage. Apparently Blizzard nerfed them because bots were just farming them for their greens, so they took the greens out. 🙄 Dane LOVES chests and we often go out of our way for them, so it's been a huge bummer. It really seems like Blizzard has no idea what they're doing or how to solve problems anymore.
Also, it seems like layering is ass. It's so bizaare that countless MMOs have figured out channels and when WoW finally adds them, it just sucks. Other MMOs allow you to choose what channel you're on, so you can choose to go elsewhere if one is too populated to get anything done. Not only does WoW not allow a manual choice - it doesn't even tell you what channel (or layer, as it calls them) you're on. Players circumvent this by using mods to expose your layer's name, and can jump layers by joining the group of someone on a different one.
So... players can get around it, but it's annoying to do so, and the game will also just randomly decide you should go to another layer if it wants you to. My brother complained that as he was finishing an escort quest in Desolace, he was phased into a different layer, which forced him to fail the quest and he had to start it over. A needless issue that just wouldn't exist if WoW didn't insist on re-inventing the wheel. My guess is Blizzard is afraid of things becoming over-farmed if people can just swap layers, but is that actually a problem? Things are over-farmed anyway. The game is so over-saturated with people who know exactly how everything works now, what does it actually hurt to let people choose their layer? It's far more painful to spend unnecessary hours on a quest because you aren't able to tag the mobs you want, because you're forced onto a grossly overcrowded layer, and for some reason the system won't let you choose a different one.
Anyway, we're having fun at the moment, but it's just jarring how out of touch Blizzard continues to be - and how much worse they seem to get as each year passes. The open disdain the company seems to have for players was evident to me when Diablo IV launched, and it does not seem to be getting better. But as a longtime fan of Warcraft, we find that we're eventually called back to play by the dark recesses of our brains. We've been talking to so many people who had the same call recently, who we haven't spoken to in a while (in some cases, years.) It's addictive for sure, but it's long been at the point where it's not appreciated.
Though for the moment, it's a good distraction from the real world and helping to cope with bad things.