Playing Catch-Up

Since I was so uncomplimentary about the scenery at the start of Dragonflight last time, I thought it only fair I give some praise where it's due. Yesterday I finally got back to playing again (So much for the Winds of Mysterious Fortune - I really dropped the ball on that one...) and after I'd cleared up a couple more quests, the breadcrumb trail took me over the hill and out of the grey-red-black hellscape into a beautiful, lush valley.

Why they wouldn't start with somewhere this lovely I have no idea. Or, wait, yes I do. Someone at Blizzard either has an emotional age of about twelve or thirteen or believes most WoW players do. That'll be it. Also I bet they all listen to some stripe of metal. In the office, likely as not. They all think red and black is cool. 

Okay, red and black is cool. But only in clothes, not in landscapes. Glad we got that cleared up, at least. 

In contrast to what happened the first time I arrived in the Dragon Isles, when I took no screenshots at all, this time I took...  hang on, wait a moment while I count them... eighteen. Could have been a lot more, too.

That was this morning but I got to the new area last night, so why the wait? Ah, well that makes a very nice example of why veterans and developers don't always remember what things are like for a new player. Or a returning player. Or someone who just plain doesn't know what they're doing. You can guess where I fit in.

Here's what happened. I got the quest from the over-enthusiastic but inexperienced dragon cadet outside the Embassy (Nice bit of characterization there.). She'd been deputed by the Majordomo to take me to the camp where there'd been some trouble with some ancestral enemy of the dragons. They'd (Conveniently or inconveniently, depending which way you look at it.) just woken up from... I don't know, hibernation? Stasis? Deep meditation? They hadn't been seen for a long time, anyway, but now they were back.

Before I get to the next part, I have to ask. Why? I mean, why a Majordomo? It's an obscure choice of rank, isn't it? There's an option to have him explain what it means , which I already knew, which was why I wanted to ask him. My not-that-extensive experience of majordomos (Majordomi?)suggest it would be kinda weird to see one commanding an army in the field. More likely to find them organizing the help for a big party in the palace, I'd have thought.

His explanation didn't hold much water but maybe it's different for dragons. Whatever, he was there and he was giving... not so much orders as rather avuncular suggestions it felt like it would be unwise to ignore. So off I went with the cadet, who set off at a jog-trot towards a gap in the hills I hadn't even noticed.

And that was where the problem arose. I was on foot because I generally only mount up in games if I'm planning on going some distance, not if I'm walking (Or running, because it's always running in games, isn't it?) around town. I jogged along behind but the dragon was a lot taller than my vulpera (Isn't everyone? Okay, not gnomes.) and I fell further and further behind.

Waaaiiit! I only have little legs!

The cadet was yammering away to herself the whole way. She never stops monologuing. I was trying to read her speech bubbles although I think she was voice-acted as well. I thought about mounting up but I decided by the time I worked out how to do it she'd be completely out of sight.

Luckily she stopped at the brow of the hill to wax lyrical about something or other and I was able to catch her up. Then, just as I was about to follow her, she shot off and before I could get started she disappeared. I carried on down to the camp but no-one there would talk to me. The quest tracker still told me I needed to be following the cadet to the camp, even though I was already in it and she was nowhere to be seen.

I spent about five minutes looking all around for her. No luck. I figured I was either going to have to drop the quest and start again, if you can do that in WoW, or else go all the way back to the Embassy to see if she'd reset. It was getting late, though, so I decided to leave it til the morning and logged out.

That was last night. This morning I logged back in, hoping maybe the quest would have sorted itself out while I was asleep but it hadn't. I was obviously going to have to go back to where I started but before I did that I thought I'd better mount up so the whole thing didn't just happen all over again. 

And I could not remember how to do it. I must have summoned a mount in WOW scores of times. Hundreds, probably. I was convinced I'd always done it by clicking an icon on a hot bar. And I'm sure that's just what I have done in the past. Only before you can click an icon on a hot bar it has to be on one and as I mentioned last time, all my hot bars were cleansed while I was away.

Now, in retrospect I'm willing to concede that the permanent services hot bar that comes as part of the default UI does include a pretty obvious horseshoe, which should have been a clue. In my defense, it's really small and if you mouse over it it doesn't say anything about a mount. It says something about Collections.

So sue me but I don't think of my mounts first and foremost as something to be collected. I think of them as something to ride. I concede that collecting mounts in WoW is a thing. I've read enough blog posts where people talk about their collection of mounts. It's not, however, one of my things so I didn't make the connection.

What I did do was go through all the keybinds looking for one to summon a ride. There isn't one. Or if there is, it's not included in the in-game information. I also looked through my bags in case there was something in there I was supposed to click but that's not how it works in Azeroth. (How it does work, as in where all those mounts hang out when you're not using them, probably best not to think about.)

In the end I had to google it.  And that's why MMORPGs are so confusing and frustrating for people who aren't intimately familiar with them. Nothing is ever as simple and straightforward as the people who play every day and the people who design the content imagine.

Once I'd found my "Collection" of mounts and pulled one of the icons onto a hot bar, I was ready to carry on. I rode back to the last place I'd seen the cadet (She has a name. I just don't remember what it is. I think it was something like Sarsaparilla.) and there she was. I spoke to her and the whole thing started up again, except this time I was on my Felsteed (Which it occurs to me suddenly I shouldn't have at Level 13, should I?) so instead of struggling to keep up with her, I had to keep stopping so the cadet could catch up to me.

All of which I found quite entertaining and even more so when I finally got to the camp and picked up my next set of quests. I did a couple and then just went exploring. I took all those screenshots with no interruptions because the whole area seems to be remarkably quiet, not to say idyllic.

There's an abundance of curious and interesting wildlife but almost none of it is aggressive. Whole valleys seem to be entirely devoid of threat or danger of any kind. It looks like it would be an excellent place to build a spa hotel. Or to take a party of Playable Worlds devs so they could get an idea of what makes for a fun environment.

After about twenty minutes, I ended up on the coast. I could see the Horde zeppelin service pulling away in the distance so I trotted down the beach in that general direction and in no time ended up back where I'd started. I have made this observation before but it bears repeating: a lot of MMORPGs, WoW being no exception, are more fun when you stop acting like everybody's gofer and just wander off and do your own thing.

I do find it surprising that, in the midst of my current lack of enthusiasm for games in general, it's WoW I most feel drawn to but that's how it is. I was quite looking forward to playing today and I'm quite looking forward to playing some more. I think the very pointlessness of it all is part of the charm.

Lastly, I just wanted to thank Shintar, who left a comment on the previous post with a link to a reddit thread explaining how to free up some of the hard disk space the WoW patcher leaves stuffed with unnecessary clutter. I'm very bad at checking older posts for late comments so I only saw it today, when I opened that one to get the link.

At first, I thought the tip wasn't going to be of any help. I checked the relevant location as advised but the folders in question were measurable in mere megabytes. I was about to forget it, when I noticed there was a folder called "World of Warcraft" inside my "World of Warcraft" folder. 

That seemed weird so I had a good look at both of them and guess what? It was the whole dam' lot again. I had the entire installation, twice, on the same drive. I mean, I knew in the past I'd had multiple installations on different drives but this was a whole new way to waste space.

I deleted everything from the spare installation except the screenshots and that freed up almost 100GB. Then I logged back into WoW in case it might need to replace a few files but it worked perfectly. How that bonus client got there I have no idea but I'm happy to have the space back.

I'll just have to remember to keep an eye on things to make sure it doesn't come back. I certainly don't trust Blizzard to do its own housekeeping.