Moving On...

Following some helpful advice in the comments to my last post, this morning I took advantage of the dying hours of World of Warcraft Classic's free weekend to move all my characters off their current server, Hydraxian Waterlords. 

Not that I wanted to move them anywhere. I would have been perfectly content to leave them where they were. Hydraxian Waterlords has been a very pleasant place to play. It makes little difference to me whether it's busy or quiet. I mostly play WoW as if it was a single-player game anyway.

But it wasn't my choice. Hydraxian Waterlords is scheduled to close when Cataclysm arrives. Not that I'd have known if it hadn't been for Pallais and Shintar explaining the situation. 

In fact, I still can't nail down an official confirmation from Blizzard. There are some very recent forum threads asking Blizzard not to close it and trying to rally support to keep it as the only EU-RP server but although everyone acts as if it's a done deal, no-one bothers to link to an official closure announcement.

Working on the dubious assumption that it's better to jump than be pushed, I made the decision to take my characters' fate into my own hands and move them anyway. Maybe they could just have sat tight and nothing would have happened but who knows?

The Free Transfer process is both simple and confusing. For a start, you have to somehow magically know about it already to access it. If the server really is about to close and free transfers have been offered, I would have expected either an in-game notification or an email to my account address. Then again, I have a suspicion free transfers off Hydraxian Waterlords may have been open continuously for a couple of years now, since the last time Blizzard threatened to close the server, so maybe they sent out notices then.

Once you know the option exists, you have to go through the cash shop to take advantage of it. That's how it's worked in most MMORPGs where I've done something similar in the past, although there have been cases where I was sent a token in the mail, which seems like a more elegant way of doing it. 

Blizzard gets points for not asking for banks to be cleared or guild permissions reset or auction house listings to be removed or any of the myriad other fussy housekeeping tasks I've had to fiddle about with in other games. It's a straightforward change of address with no complicated paperwork.

Unfortunately, they lose points for the all-round kludginess of the whole thing. I moved seven characters to two different servers and at no point was I ever entirely sure if the transfers had gone through correctly. The feedback from button-presses is all but non-existent. 

My confidence in the process wasn't improved when the first transfer I tried crashed fairly spectacularly, spitting out a chunk of incomprehensible code. Along with the error message there was a button to Reload UI. I pressed it and it dumped me back to character select, where the character I'd been trying to move had vanished altogether.

It was only a level 10 priest I will almost certainly never play again so I wasn't all that bothered but it made me apprehensive about moving the others. In the end, they did all transfer successfully, with no further crashes, although there was an unnerving moment when I went to log into the new server, only to find I had no characters there at all.

If in doubt, relog. I started over and there they all were, so that was fine. More worrying was the string of gibberish attached to the end of one of my characters' names.

It hadn't occured to me that someone on the destination server might have prior right to a name I was using. I rarely have much trouble with that sort of thing. I tend to pick names no-one else would be likley to think of so I'm generally safe. 

And that was how it worked out for six out of seven of them this time. The exception, naturally, was my highest level character. It bloody would be.

I renamed him and with that I was done. I now have four characters on Pyrewood Village and three on Mirage Raceway.  Those were the only available options under the free transfer system, which made me think I'd been wasting my time. 

They're both PvE servers, or "Normal" as Blizzard calls them, both with similar-size populations and similar faction balances. I can't see it makes any difference which of the two becomes my new home. I might just as well have done nothing and let the automatic relocation shunt me on to whichever it felt like, if and when Hydraxian Waterlords does finally close.

It's done now, anyway. In the not entirely likely event that I resubscribe for Cataclysm Classic, at least I know where I'll be.

Cataclysm? What Cataclysm?

Since Blizzard was desperate kind enough to offer me a free weekend in World of Warcraft Classic, it seemed rude to refuse. Even if I couldn't see any real point to it. 

I can totally see what Blizzard stands to get out of it. More players for Cataclysm Classic, of course. And what do players mean? Money! From a player's perspective, though, what could four days in the dying embers of Wrath of the Lich King Classic under the Cataclysm pre-patch offer? 

Don't look at me. I haven't been following this thing. I have a vague idea there are some tweaks from the original Cataclysm in the pre-patch but that might just be me getting it mixed up with something else. There are too many of these retro servers to keep up with nowadays.

I'm not even sure what version of "Classic" I have access to for the next couple of days although character select clearly indicates Cataclysm is already with us. Last time I played Classic was several years ago, just before the boycott. Back then, there was only one Classic. Now there are loads of them. I may not have been playing but I've been reading and I remember reading about Seasonal servers, Hardcore servers, Classic-Classic servers, Burning Crusade Servers and WotLK servers.

I remember there were deadlines when you had to do something or not do something to avoid or initiate server moves but I wasn't subscribing so I missed all of those. I remember Shintar explaining what would happen to my characters if I did absolutely nothing but I don't remember what she said it was. 

I am still on the EU/RP server Hydraxian Waterlords, I'm pleased to say. I thought I might have been relocated. I know, since I last played there, the server has at various times been everything from a ghost town to bursting at the seams. In the hour I was there this morning, I saw not one other player but it's hardly a representative sample. Still, you might expect to see someone in Ironforge on a Saturday morning.

As I said in a comment on Wilhelm's post on the free weekend offer, I didn't get anything from Blizzard to let me know in advance it was happening. The email inviting me finally turned up this morning, about a day and a half after the doors opened. It doesn't give you much confidence in the marketing department, does it?

Getting my Classic characters up and running again was both very simple and unnecesarily complicated. I opened Battlenet and the launcher immediately offered me an update, which I took. Unfortunately it had nothing to do with Classic. It was a 13GB download for Retail.

I worked out how to swap over to Classic, technically very straightforward to do while at the same time being very obscure. That, naturally, needed another download, although a much smaller one, thankfully.

One thing Blizzard does do better than almost anyone else is get you in and playing once you've worked out what version you want. The Play button lit up green in a matter of seconds even though the download had only just started.

I logged in to character select, where I found my Classic characters, tapping their toes and twiddling their thumbs, still waiting for me - all seven of them. I'd completely forgotten I had so many. 

I picked my highest, the Level 52 Dwarf Hunter and woke him up. He was down by the water's edge in Feralas. God knows why. Several notices popped up telling me various things including the surprising news that talking to other players is now an opt-in preference. Chat is disabled by default. I think we can all draw our own conclusions there.

A lot had changed, including all my Talents, which had been reset. I also had no combat abilities on my hot bars for some reason. There was no doing anything until I got that lot sorted.

It took about fifteen minutes. It's the kind of admin I don't particularly mind but it's surely not the best way to welcome back the prodigal. If nothing else, it did give me a moment to think about what I might want to do with my gifted time. Unfortunately, even after a quarter of an hour pondering on it, I still had no idea.

While I was re-assigning Talents and replacing hot keys, I did notice I was now entitled to a whole load of new abilities, some of which I was probably too mean to pay for last time and others that have no doubt been added to the game since I left. In the absence of anything better to do I ported back to Ironforge and made my way to the Hunter trainer, where I bought everything I was offered.

After that I headed out into Dun Morogh in search of the ranch where they train you to ride and sell you something to ride on. I was quite pleased with myself that I remembered where it was, although I did go to the Gnome riding school first. I'd also forgotten that Dwarves gad about on rams, which was quite a pleasant surprise.

I had 84 gold on me, which was more than enough to buy everything including a fast White ram. I even had some change left at the end. Whether I have more in the bank I have no idea because after taking a few screenshots I logged out. I just couldn't think of anything else worth doing.

I suppose, if I was serious about coming back for Cataclysm, I could carry on levelling up but I'm not even sure if I'm on a server that's going to be updated. The icon the launcher plonked on my desktop when it started patching is named "Burning Crusade Classic". 

I thought I remembered reading there weren't going to be any permanent BC servers but I was hardly paying full attention. Anyway, I thought that if you did nothing to stop it, you automatically carried on along the progression rails to whatever expansion station came next. Maybe I got shunted into a siding.

I'm thinking, though, that the whole point of Cataclysm was the remaking of the Old World. Wouldn't you want to start a new character to play through that anyway? I'm pretty sure that's what I'd do. If so, it makes it even harder to work out what this free weekend is supposed to do for me.

The danger with please-come-back offers like this is that if you don't actually come back, they can be a waste of a perfectly good weekend. In this instance, it was good to check in with my old Classic characters again, see they were still where I left them, wherever that was, but I don't think I'll be doing much more before the gates clang shut again on Monday.

Unless, that is, anyone has any ideas. Is there anything useful I could do now that would help, should I decide to try Cataclysm Classic in a couple of weeks? Answers in a comment, please...

You Wait All Year For An Expansion And Then Three Come Along At Once

Now that the dust has settled on Blizzcon '23, I thought I might have a bit of a potter through the various headline announcements. I did kind of pre-empt myself with my post on Tarisland but since that was written before the actual event I think a revisit is justified.

Of course, when I say "headline announcements" I really mean what they said about World of Warcraft. I have never played any other Blizzard games and I don't even know much about them other than what I've read on various blogs over the years. The thing about Blizzard, though, unlike other major players in the online multiplayer gamespace such as NCSoft or Tencent, is that it's very hard to avoid knowing about their games even if you're not particularly interested in them. I can give a precis of the Diablo franchise or Overwatch or Hearthstone even though I've never played any of them. 

Don't ask me about Heroes of the Storm, though. What even is that?

Blizzard, unlike other developers, penetrates the cultural consciousness to an extent not often enjoyed by gaming companies. It's become evident over the past couple of years, as the Blizzard name has become a byword for deceit and depravity, that a large number of people had far more invested in the reputation of the company than would seem rational or predictable to anyone outside the bubble. For many, it seems, Blizzard wasn't just a company that had made some very successful video games; it was some kind of role-model or exemplar.

I'm not sure I was even aware a lot of people felt that way until the roof began falling in. I knew the games were popular because I kept reading people talking about them but people talk about playing things like The Sims and Civilization all the time, too. There's a fairly small set of games that crop up over and over again, in the same way certain TV shows or movies are reference points for everyone of a certain age. You don't have to have watched them to know something about them. I didn't have to have played Diablo to know what it was but I didn't realize it represented the end product of a myth-making process that extended far past the game itself.

It was only when the seemingly endless stream of dire revelations began to spew out of Blizzard like a pyroclastic flow of disgrace and disappointment that I began to appreciate the deep, emotional connection the company maintained with with many of its customers. It did seem a little unsettling, even to someone with an arguably unhealthy tendency towards brand loyalty like myself.

As the pile-up of distressing revelations continued, I learned a few things, some of the more interesting of which were the explanations people gave for their deep connection with the company. As is common in other forms of popular media, growing up with certain activities and entertainments forms an associative bond. The things that surround you as you go through formative life experiences for the first time become inextricably linked with the intense feelings created by those experiences.

I'd like to say that being in my twenties when I first started playing video games inoculated me against anything like that but I was forty when I started playing EverQuest and look how that went. What I definitely would say is that at no time did I ever translate my affection - let's not say obsession - with the game into an idolization of the company that produced it. I mean, I knew SoE was my favorite MMORPG developer for a while but I never thought it went any further than their design choices matching my gameplay preferences. It was a marriage of convenience not a love match.

Back in the 2000s, I remember reading with something approaching incredulity the reports of conventions and fan events dedicated to specific games or publishers, SOE's Fan Faire included. For some reason, even though by then I'd spent the better part of two decades going to comics conventions, where I'd sit in a side room or an auditorium listening to writers, artists and editors repeating well-worn anecdotes from glory years spanning the nineteen-forties to the nineteen-seventies, it seemed bizarre to imagine anyone might want to do the same with video games. 

After all, the people who made those were just technicians and administrators, weren't they? It'd be like going to a convention to meet the people who'd designed and built your refrigerator. (Even as I type, it occurs to me there are probably people who do exactly that...)

Eventually I either came to a more nuanced understanding of the factors involved or became assimilated into the gamer hive-mind. Still not sure which. The concept of video game expos and cons and fan gatherings shifted from "weird and a bit scary, if I'm honest" to "no stranger than traction engine meets or renaissance fairs". Which, I admit, is still weird and a bit scary but in a much more ordinary way.

I still wouldn't want to go to one and I don't even want to sit at home and watch a livestream but I do find myself being drawn towards the comfortable thrill of mild anticipation arising from the possibility of hints of things to come. Which is really about as solid as most of this stuff ever gets, making this year's Blizzcon somewhat unusual in that respect.

We didn't just get to learn the name of the next WoW expansion. We got to hear the names of the next three! It's a brave move that I imagine has more to do with setting a marker than with any fundamental change of practice or principle. 

Given the last couple of years, it looks as though the plan is to establish the new Microsoft-owned company as a solid, dependable and even predictable supplier of quality product, to be delivered in a timely and reliable manner. Announcing a trilogy of themed expansions with an explicit but finite narrative arc makes a clear statement of commitment to the game and its players. 

It says we're going to be here for the foreseeable future so you can feel safe to start making your plans with WoW again. We've got you covered for MMORPG entertainment for the next five years, minimum. No need to start looking around. 

The same sentiment is contained in the commitment to only adding mechanics that will hold value over more than a single expansion cycle and the increase in systems that benefit the whole account rather than a single character. These are moves designed to foster a self-sustaining ecosystem, where players feel too comfortable, committed and embedded to find it easy to pick up and move elsewhere. 

The only thing that's hard to understand about such a change of emphasis is how the hell it took them this long to come up with it. Every other MMORPG developer figured out years ago that you need to get players so enmeshed it's harder to leave than it is to stay. Meanwhile, Blizzard has been fostering a culture around expansions that, coupled with one of the slowest development cycles in the genre, actively mitigates against the kind of loyalty and retention they used to be famous for. 

Everyone knows you can just skip the content droughts or even the bad expansions and come back later. Or not come back at all. It's not like you'll miss anything that matters. Every new expansion is a full reset.

The three expansions themselves sound interesting enough, as far as the information available goes. They revolve around known areas of the existing world, not excursions into unknown realms, which is a solid play towards the installed base and that great mass of lapsed players, many of whom, on reading a news item somewhere, will think to themselves "Oh, I remember having some good times there!" and think about maybe coming back to see what's going on.

None of that is going to work on me because I don't have the necessary nostalgia for such an announcement to trigger in the first place. I like WoW but I don't feel closely connected to it. With the Microsoft buyout in place, however, I have given myself permission to revisit Azeroth, and I would certainly not rule out trying one or more of these expansions at some point. Of course, I'd have to re-install the game first...

The widely-expected confirmation of Cataclysm Classic interests me more. As I've said on several occasions, I know just enough about the areas that were disrupted by the original Cataclysm expansion to be curious to see how they've changed, without the significant emotional attachment to the originals that would make me feel disturbed or angry when I find out what's been done to them. And since I mostly never bothered to investigate any of the post-Cataclysm zones when I had the chance, it would all largely be new content for me.

It's always nice to jump into these things along with everyone else, so there's a not-insignificant chance I might resubscribe for a month or two when CataClassic arrives, presumably sometime next spring. I'm fairly curious about the new "Season of Discovery" that's coming to regular Classic much sooner as well, although I'm not sure the timing works for me to join in right away. 

As I commented on Shintar's WoW blog "Priest Without A Cause", this really does seem like Holly Longdale making her influence known. Sony Online Entertainment began the idea of the rolling nostalgia circus as far back as 2008 but it was under Holly at Daybreak that the operation really took off. 

For years now, it's been the practice at EverQuest and latterly at EQII to fire up new nostalgia servers at least once a year, almost always with slightly different rulesets. Go back far enough and it was generally assumed these servers would stay up, if not permanently, then at least until there weren't enough players left on them to justify their continued existence. In more recent times, there's been a much clearer expectation and understanding that they'll only run for a couple of years or so before being merged into a more recent or a more stable server.

Much of that predates now-familiar online gaming concept of "Seasons", a more elegant solution to the concept of shaking things up to keep people interested than booting up whole new servers every five minutes. The Blizzard way of doing things is marrying up nicely with the Daybreak experience, potentially creating a more flexible model for endless experimentation within a fairly fixed framework. It's presumably just what they wanted when they made Holly an offer she couldn't and didn't refuse.

It is ironic that, in both games, the supposedly most traditional part of the game, the nostalgia-driven servers where time, if it doesn't exactly stand still, certainly travels in a closed loop, is also the place where the companies feel most free to experiment. If you tried these kinds of shenanigans on Live or Retail there'd be uproar. It makes me wonder sometimes who the true traditionalists really are.

All in all, I'd say things are looking good for the immediate future of WoW. Certainly a lot better than it seemed they might a year or two back. The last expansion, Dragonflight, while reportedly no resounding success, was certainly no disaster, either. People seemed generally affable towards it and largely still do which, under the circumstances, has to be considered a win for Blizzard. 

Responses to the announcements at Blizzcon '23 also seem generally favorable. No-one's jumping up and down, waving a flag or claiming the glory days are back, or at least not that I've seen, but the tone of the reporting has largely been optimistic and positive, if occasionally grudgingly so. 

Equally, I don't think many are claiming the myriad problems of the past have all miraculously gone away but there's only so long most people can retain a sense of outrage and frankly there are a lot more serious things to be outraged about right now than what happened at a video company a few years ago. The company changing hands may well not fix all or even most of the underlying problems but at least, until and unless evidence of new or ongoing malpractice surfaces, it'll be convenient for many of us to act as though it has.

Finally, there was one announcement at Blizzcon this year that took my fancy. Warcraft Rumble, the new, free-to-play mobile title, is already up and running. I think I might go take a look. After all, it's not every day Blizzard gives us something for nothing. Well, not anything we might actually want, anyway.

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A note on AI images used in this post.

The header is by DreamShaper XL alpha2  with Prompt and Refiner Weights both at 50. The prompt used was "Firiona Vie from EverQuest as a character in World of Warcraft". I used Uncrop to reformat the image to fit the space and it mostly added some foliage. Firiona has dyed her hair for some reason and seems to have grown a second belly-button somehow but otherwise it kind of works.

The second image uses the same source and settings. The prompt was "a pyroclastic flow of disgrace and disappointment World of Warcraft". I tried it without the WoW suffix but either way it just gives a volcano. I was kind of hoping for some personifcations of abstract ideas but no such luck.

Dragons! Why Did It Have To Be Dragons?

It's more than a little unfortunate for ArenaNet that another mmo gaming company chose to release a cinematic on the same day they chose to plug the first episode of the revamped, replayable Living World Season One. Especially when you consider that gaming company happens to be Blizzard and the cinematic in question is the official announcement of the details of the next World of Warcraft expansion.

I mean, come on! Even I was watching the Blizzard stream, which started very conveniently for me at five in the evening, and I don't even play the blasted game.

The question is, having watched it, would I want to start? For the moment, let's just focus on the content of the expansion itself, putting all the other baggage to one side. No moral choices here, just aesthetic and entertainment ones.

On first impressions, based on what I saw and heard in the Livestream and read in the press release and media coverage afterwards, yes I probably would. I'm not saying I'd make a long-term home in WoW just off the back of what I just watched but I can easily see me buying the expansion and playing for a month or two.

It has a couple of things that appeal to me: a new race/class and a new starting area. The race itself isn't all that exciting. It's yet another dragon/human hybrid. I'm sure that's not the official description but a Drakkin by any other name is just as clichéd. At least it looks halfway decent. I never liked the look of the Drakkin and EverQuest II's Aerykin aren't much better.

Granted, it's a "Hero Class" so it starts at Level 58, but that's still better than going straight into the new at-cap content. With the new cap moving to 70, that's a dozen levels of new content if you roll a new Dracthyr character rather than just ten, although what that means, given the level squish that preceded the last expansion, is a lot harder to say. 

It seems unlikely there'd be a whole starter zone for a mere two levels but what do levels even mean in WoW now anyway? Maybe that's how it was for Death Knights back in Wrath. I played one but I can't remember. 

I could remind myself soon enough if I wanted to find out, though. Wrath of the Lich King Classic is coming. Not quite sure when but it's definitely on the way.. 

That doesn't even qualify as news, more like confirmation and I wouldn't begin to suggest any connection with the Norrathian drogon kin, even if  Holly Longdale is working for WoW these days but it felt very strange to see her fronting such a big announcement in her capacity as Lead Producer for the retro Classic faction.

What was even odder was the way her reminiscences about WoW sounded more heartfelt and convincing than anything the two WoW lifers sitting next to her could contribute. She has the ardency of a convert.

More of a surprise were her comments on the absence of the Group Finder from the servers at launch (Assuming I heard that right. It seemed a little muddled.). Of course, it wasn't added until late WotLK, so I'm guessing it will turn up eventually. Or maybe, if Wrath Classic really does signal the end of the line for the WoW Classic Experience, it won't.

Going back to the expansion, which I haven't mentioned is called Dragonflight, I was amused to see what looked suspiciously like both the Guild Wars 2 UI and GW2's Griffon mount make appearances as exciting new innovations. It wouldn't be WoW if it didn't add features other games perfected years ago. I'm pretty sure I've seen the crafting commission system in at least three mmorpgs I've played before, too.

The cinematic was quite nice. A little subdued, I thought. Almost thoughtful. As for the discussion that followed, it was a litany of saying the right things but with some surprisingly convincing self-deprecatory banter between the principals. 

And it's certainly better to have figureheads spouting things we want to hear than the opposite, even if they do sometimes seem to be doing it through gritted teeth. I'm not sure Kaylriene will have heard everything he was hoping for (I'm sure he'll let us know.) but at least it's a gesture in that direction.

The new zones look very pretty. More importantly, they don't look weird or spacey or unearthly or doomy or other-dimensiony or any of the other things I'm sure most WoW players have had about enough of by now. A return to Azeroth and landscapes that look suitably fantasy-real has to be a relief for everyone, not least the artists.

The last big ticket item in the expansion pack I won't comment on, other than to say I have no opinions on Talent trees in WoW and precious few thoughts on them in any game. A necessary inconvenience is about as emotional as I ever get about the mechanic. I'm sure it'll be a big deal to someone, just not to me.

I'll also pass on any comments on the lore or the story. None of it meant anything to me at all. I barely recognized any of the names. It's not as if I haven't played the game, either. I probably have a few thousand hours in WoW. That stuff just washes over me.

What was conspicuously missing from both the livestream and the press release was any detailed timescale. I think we did get a definite nod to "this year" but that was about all. We shouldn't have to wait too long to find out whether Dragonflight is going to be enough to rekindle the light in the eyes of the faithful. 

I suspect, at best, it'll be a holding excercise. WoW's glory days are most likely behind it now. It would be kind of appropriate if an expansion based around dragons turned out to be the beginning of a long tail for the game.

Your Cover's Blown

I have a super-busy weekend from Friday through Monday for one reason or another but I didn't want to let four days go by without posting at all. My go-to for quick posts these days is music but I already did one of those on Thursday. I absolutely could do another but I have a ton of music stuff planned for Blaugust (Oh, yes! Be afraid!) so let's see if I can think of anything else to write about...

Hmm. How about this? 

There's already been some great personal testimony and commentary on the topic of the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing vs Activision-Blizzard from the likes of Belghast, Stargrace , Hannah, Nathan, Syp, Gnomecore, Wilhelm, Ace Asunder and no doubt more that I've forgotten. It would be tempting to describe the whole thing as Blitzchung 2.0 but really the only similarities are that it involves Blizzard once again doing something that makes a lot of people feel disgusted, outraged, let down or betrayed. They do seem to be making a habit of it.

The differences are vast. Blitzchung was (arguably) a heat of the moment decision with uncomfortable political and ethical ramifications. It involved three people (Blitzchung and the two streamers) and pointed up anomalies between the company's stated position on certain issues and how they acted.

A lot of people found Blizzard's response either unfair or inconsistent, while others saw it as part of an ongoing, existential battle. Positions were taken, subscriptions were cancelled. Bloggers I followed struggled with loyalty to their characters and the games in which they'd invested so much time versus their need to make a point and send Blizzard a message.

A lot of people did cancel. Some stopped playing immediately, some carried on until their subs ran out. 

Unusually, I was subbed to World of Warcraft at the time. I was playing Classic. I didn't make any grand gestures. I understood and respected the arguments of those who did but the whole thing felt a little dry to me. Distant, even.

The whole farago did take the wind out of my sails as far as Classic was concerned, though. I'd been posting about it non-stop and playing every day but suddenly doing either just felt uncomfortable. I played less, then not at at all. I didn't write about the game any more and when my monthly sub expired I didn't renew. 

All the pictures in this post are from games that look like WoW.

 

This feels different. This is different. This isn't someone making one dumb choice and then someone else trying to spin it as not what it was. This isn't a plain and obvious clash between corporate greed and doing the right thing. 

This is lifting a rock and watching stuff crawl out. Stuff that's been there a long time. Stuff that lives there, feels comfortable there, feels safe there. Stuff that really would like it if you put the rock back, please, so everything can carry on just like before. This is a company not just shrugging off accusations but turning on their accusers and calling them out as though they were the ones at fault.

I have no personal experience of life inside a major video game company. Anything I say about it is based entirely on what I may have seen and read as a player over the last forty years. From that perspective, the basic facts of gender discrimination and a "boys club" attitude at Activision-Blizzard don't surprise me in the least. A lot of companies, in and out of the video game industry, have a hell of a lot of work to do on both those fronts, that's for sure.

What does take me aback about the detail, repulsive and gross as it is, is the sheer scale of it. It seems to have been not just endemic but almost universal. 

Then there's the frankly puerile nature of some of the abuse. We don't really have "frat houses" where I come from but this sounds more like the behavior you'd expect from unsupervised schoolboys rather than someone taking a university degree. It makes me wonder how anything worthwhile ever got into the games at all, if this was the sort of thing the people working on it felt was a good way to spend the day.

Nathan asks "What will it take?" as he ponders whether to cancel his subsciption. I could ask myself the same question. The Blitzchung affair wasn't enough to make me cancel, just not to renew. This lawsuit and the revelations therein would be... if I had anything to cancel.

Or play like WoW.

 

I don't, though. I have no subscriptions to anything Activision-Blizzard offer at present and no plans to buy anything they're proposing to offer in the future. I was briefly subbed to WoW while I was writing about the level squish, Exiles' Reach and Chromie Time but I'm not now.  I didn't buy Shadowlands and I never planned to. I've never played any other Blizzard game than WoW and chances are I never will.

I do, however, have characters in WoW that I have affection for. And I can still play some of them if I want to, without subscribing. 

WoW has a half-assed Free-to-Play offer that's really a glorified free trial but it pretty much gives me everything I want from the game. I can log in any time and run my characters around or make new ones and so long as I don't level up too far I'm golden.

In doing so I don't give Act-Blizz a cent. All I do is use some of their server bandwidth. And since I only solo, never talk to anyone, mostly never even see anyone, I'm not even doing that thing we sometimes talk about - being the content for other people.

If I do this, am I tacitly supporting Blizzard? Does the very act of logging in mean I'm condoning the appalling behavior of the people who made the game I'm playing? Or am I really committing an act of social disobedience? Taking for free the very thing they rely on me to pay for to keep the whole shebang rolling?

I don't know. It seems to me that to stop playing a game for which you don't pay and which no-one else knows you are playing is a bit of a weak statement but I suppose it's stronger than just carrying on as if none of it has anything to do with you at all. 

As a blogger who has, quite often, written about playing WoW for free, usually quite positively, how would it be if I carried on playing but stopped writing about it? Would that be striking more of a blow than just not playing it at all?

And I didn't even mention FFXIV.

 

It's a moot point, anyway, because I'm not playing WoW right now. But I was thinking about playing again and if I had it would have been the free version. Well, I'm not going to do that any more. Suck on that, Blizz!

I guess that does answer my own question to myself, though. Regardless of how pointless it might be to declare you're no longer going to play a game you weren't playing anyway, far less paying for, that, apparently, is what I'm going to do. And even if I change my mind and play you won't be reading about it here. Not that I'm going to change my mind. But if I did, you wouldn't know. Just sayin'.

Unless, I guess, something changes in Blizzard's favor. Hard to see what that would be. I suppose they could win the lawsuit in a convincing fashion that exonerates everyone concerned. That could happen. Or they could clean house so thoroughly and convincingly that we'd all believe they'd changed for good. That could happen.

Or, I guess, as happened with Blitzchung, we could all gradually forget about it, or forget about how angry we were about it, and drift back. Almost everyone (not everyone) I can think of did. Except this time there's going to be that lawsuit and a trial and a constant, daily reminder of what this is all about. So it's going to be a lot harder to just give Blizz a slap with a few months cancelled subs then climb back on the sparkle pony again.

Oh, it's easy for me, though, isn't it? WoW doesn't have the meaning in my life other mmorpgs do. I wouldn't be so sanguine if this was Daybreak (or EG7, I guess I should say) or ArenaNet we were talking about. But then, both of those (and SOE before Daybreak) have had their share of terrible news stories and awful behavior. But nothing like this.

So I guess either they're doing a better job than Blizzard of holding that rock down or the appalling behavior we're reading about really isn't par for the course in video game companies after all. 

I bloody well hope not, anyway. If it is, we'd all better find another hobby.

Unrealistic Expectations

I've seen an awful lot of discontented posts about Blizzard and World of Warcraft lately. It's hard to avoid them. Even though I'm not currently playing WoW it remains, as it has been for the best part of a decade and a half, the big story in the genre just about all the time.

These days, of course, there isn't just the one World of Warcraft. Blizzard may never have produced a sequel but, perhaps without intending to, they've somehow managed to make it seem as though they have. As with Norrath and a growing number of imaginary worlds, there are multiple versions of Azeroth available now. 

With three distinct and different versions available it's quite possible, likely even, that some are doing better than others. Not everyone is going to be unhappy all the time. Even so, there seems to be a general sense of malaise around the franchise as a whole.

For much of this year it was Retail in the firing line. There seemed to be no end to the complaints and discussions over everything that was wrong with Shadowlands. I kept hearing how most of the mechanics and systems introduced by the expansion were flawed or Not Fun. Either Blizzard wasn't doing much of anything about it or whatever it was doing didn't seem to be working.

As Classic wound down and the countdown to Burning Crusade ramped up, there was a fair amount of excitement but also some apprehension. Choices needed to be made and not everyone seemed comfortable about them. In the event the launch did arrive with the anticipated rush of exhillaration, and yet in a matter of days I found myself reading more tales of woe. 

Players leveling Shamans felt ignored and neglected, left in the old world dust to fend for themselves as the leveling bubble rose through Outlands towards the cap. Then there was the inevitable guild drama over reduced raid sizes, benching and the usual internecine maneuverings guilds tend to foster.

With the advent of the latest patch (9.1 I think it is) there's been a tinge of optimism over in Retail. I've seen commentary suggesting notice has finally been taken of the general levels of disatisfaction. Attempts are being made to turn the ship. Even then, there's a sense that it might be too little or too late or both.

The release of the recent Carbot Animations video "This is World of Warcraft" seems to have ratchetted the anxious tension around the games up another notch. Wilhelm has an excellent post on that, as does Gnomecore. Their positions overlap in a number of interesting way, especially given the extreme difference of their in-game interests and experiences. Both seem to agree the problems, whatever they are, lie as much with players and their expectations as with developers and their intent.

Both the posts also generated some lengthy and thoughtful comments. I get the impression the current state of all flavors of World of Warcraft and of the company behind them is giving a lot of players pause for thought.

It is, of course, not just about the games. It's only a couple of years since decisions taken over what could or couldn't be said in a livestream gave Blizzard unwelcome prominence on non-gaming newsfeeds all over the world. That controversy, bright though it blazed, doesn't appear to have smoldered as long as some expected or maybe hoped. In the end it seems it's the gameplay that matters most; the gameplay and the friendships it sustains.

Or doesn't. And that seems to be the problem. One of the problems, anyway.

In a comment on Wilhelm's post, Shintar linked another WoW video. 

 

I watched it but, like the Carbot video, it didn't really connect with me on the kind of visceral level it seems to have reached almost all of the two thousand or so YouTube viewers who left anguished comments on the thread. It's not that I don't recognize the experiences, albeit from games other than WoW; it's more that I don't look back on those same experiences with the anything close to the kind of emotion I'm reading about.

Perhaps the main difference between the two videos is where the center of gravity sits. The Carbot appears to drill down into what Blizzard, as both creator and curator, first got right and then got so badly wrong. The Pint video, conversely, appears to place a question mark over the validity of the experience itself, leaving the viewer uncertain where the blame, if blame there's to be, might lie.

All of this dovetails neatly into a sequence of posts Wilhelm has been running concerning the unwillingness of mmoprg players, en masse, to accept or even recognize the practicalities of keeping these games alive. Put shortly, it takes money and players don't want to pay.

There's another, closely-related theme playing out elsewhere. It concerns the attitude of players to games developers in general. Kaylriene has an excellent post up about that. He takes a very reasoned and reasonable approach, assuming goodwill on the developers' side, but it's worth reading the very well-argued counterpoint by Jackie in the comment thread, which includes this telling assessment:

"I don’t believe the developers want to engage with the playerbase. They’re not interested in criticism even from the people who can articulate it. If they wanted to communicate they would. My perception is that it’s an inward looking culture rather than outward looking."

It jibes nicely with something I said in my own comment on the thread there, where I asked why it might be, if we accept the premise that games developers do care quite deeply about the quality of their work and its fitness for purpose, that "so many changes in so many games appear to work so badly for so many players".

It's a worrisome question, isn't it? Personally, I've always been skeptical about player involvement in games development. I don't necessarily accept that individual players know what they want and I certainly don't see much in the way of collective agreement. 

Even if players did know what they wanted and could band together to express their wishes coherently, though, wouldn't it feel even worse to know the developers were listening and did care, but were fundementally incapable of doing anything very effective about it? 

Devs aren't gods, after all. Not even gaming gods. On the same day I read Jackie's comment I read this heartfelt statement by a developer for whom I have a lot of time, CharlieX of SmokymonkeyS, creators of the wondeful (now, sadly, mothballed) Ninelives. Despite the idiosyncratic English the emotion comes through perfectly: 

"Sometimes a player tells me, you design your game to more difficult and annoying to prevent the player to get the achieve. Well, this is a wrong idea overall. Sadly, this mean the developer's intend is not going well, and it happens always. Sometimes I go to watch my game player's video and get sick every time I saw the player stuck, get lost, or failed caused by my design."

Just because you know what you want to do doesn't always mean you're able to do it.

So much for the developers' side of the table. Returning to the comments in the threads following both the YouTube videos I mentioned, the recurring, indeed overwhelming theme coming from the players seems to be one of heroically unrealistic expectations. 

Playing World of Warcraft has very definitely been a seminal experience for many. Almost a rite of passage. From comment after comment I get the sense that playing WoW marked a transition from solipsistic isolation to social engagement, at least for some. Some feel betrayed that Blizzard somehow took this away from them. Others seem bereft, almost guilty. They lost the way all on their own.

The Pint video is fascinating in the way it depicts a player who, after playing and then leaving the game, has clearly been able to ground themselves in a committed relationship and, by implication, in the web of adult responsibilities required to support their newfound social status. Even with that support structure firmly in place, however, it just takes a nudge of commercially-driven nostalgia to tip them back into longing for a fondly-remembered past.

Wilhelm has another great post up about what prerequisites an mmorpg developer might need to have in place before choosing to enter the nostalgia market. For most games I think the factors he lists would be sufficient. For World of Warcraft, though, I suspect there needed to be more to make it work.

WoW wasn't just a video game. It was a global phenomenon. Its players weren't necessarily like other mmorpg players, either then or now. A lot of people ended up playing WoW who hadn't played other, similar games before. The things they did there were different to other things they'd done, not just in degree but in essence. 

I'd be willing to bet that some of the people posting elegaic, emotional comments on the threads following these deeply nostalgic videos found social engagement and acceptance in Azeroth for perhaps the first time. In their memory the experience isn't just one of many, another social setting where friendships were forged then forgotten. It was an intense experience that changed them and for that they value it highly.

It's a theme not in any way unique to WoW or indeed to mmorpgs or even video games. I see it repeated over and over in comment threads that draw on any widely-shared experience, from childhood itself through musical trends to a college education to sports... Any moment in a life when everything just seems to fall into place. When people around you understand. When you find your tribe. When you belong.

It always fades. School breaks up. You graduate college. The bands you followed split up or find new directions that don't sound good any more. You don't get picked for the team because you can't run so fast or jump so high and anyway practice is on a weekend and there are things you need to do, more important things. Your guildmates stop logging in, even on raid nights. Life moves on, everything changes, nothing stays the same.

 

If you're hoping that long-lasting mmorpg you used to love is going to buck that trend and stay the same forever, you're in line for a disappointment. It's going to change along with everything else or else it's not going to be there or if it is then no-one will be playing any more. 

And if you believe a Classic server is a time machine to take you and your friends back ten years to when you were younger and freer and life was better, well, you might, if you're lucky, get to take a nice vacation in a well-managed resort version of a specific snapshot of that past. And then time will catch up with you once again and you'll be back where you started, only with more disappointment than you had before because one more fantasy turned out to be just that and nothing more.

Listening to the various voices, the ones that seem most sanguine, most satisfied, are those that recognize a game is after all a game. Not "just" a game. More than that. But not so much more it can stop time and bring back lost youth. The people still having fun in World of Warcraft, both Retail and Classic/TBC, seem to me to be those who aren't expecting it to change their lives, just entertain them for a while.

I suspect that, if developers concentrated a little harder on entertaining people and worried a little less on keeping them locked into a revenue cycle, both sides might stand a better chance of getting what it is they really want. The games might hold onto the interest of more people for longer if players felt more accepted and more at home.

It's a pipe dream, I know, but its one that quite a few people seem to share. A few years back the buzzwords around the genre seemed to be Classic and Retro and Social. Now, the mission statements of many of the plethora of new studios spinning up from splintering mmorpg majors all seem to echo the call for a more emotionally intelligent approach to making mmorpgs. It's not so much a case of turning back time as it is learning from the past.

Whether any of them will be able to turn good intentions into good games remains to be seen but I think we should probably give them the benefit of the doubt, for now at least. If they can pull it off they'll only be giving us what we say we want, after all. 

Whether we'll want it when we get it, though, that's a whole different question.

Twenty The Hard Way

I spent what felt like most of today taking my goblin shaman in World of Warcraft from fifteen to twenty. First I waved the trolls of Zuldezar goodbye, hoping never to see their monumental ziggurat-city again. It's an impressive feat of engineering, sure, but a nightmare to navigate.

Back in Orgrimmar, itself no favorite of mine, I went to see Chromie, looking as out-of-place as you'd imagine a gnome among orcs might. After a quick look at the options I plumped for Cataclysm. I've always wanted to take a tour of the old world to see what changes nature wrought.

Chromie sent me to go read some Warolord's board or other. When I found it, there she was, sitting on her hourglass. Unlike her Stormwind version, who, in my limited experience at least, stands in one place and looks respectable, Orgrimmar-Chromie seems mischievious. She vanished and re-appeared twice in the short time I was with her. She even made a joke about it.

The options on the board she made me read were disappointing. Two zones I don't like (Searing Gorge and another volcanic/desert zone I forget) and one I'd never heard of. That one was at least a forest so I picked it and spoke to Chromie again.

She told me to go to the Pathfinder's Den, which obviously I had never heard of, and take the portal to Shattrath, which sounded vaguely familiar although I couldn't place it. I went to the spot marked on the map and spent five minutes checking all the portals I could find. None of them went to Shattrath.

I picked one that went somewhere else I'd never heard of, Silvermoon City, on the grounds that it also began with an "S".  It seemed to be full of elves. I wandered around for a few minutes before deciding it couldn't be the place. 

Looking it up online I discovered it was the starting city of the Blood Elves, as I'm sure every single person reading this already knows. Being almost as allergic to elves, particularly the Azerothian kind, as Syp, I have never played a Blood Elf, nor visited their city. It's better than the Night Elves' shack, which I know all too well, I'll say that for it but not much more.

 

If you meant the secret portal room you should have said so!

Back in the portal room again I tried to google my way to Shattrath. It turned out to be somewhere in Outland, part of the Burning Crusade expansion. How this makes it part of Cataclysm beats me but by that stage I wasn't interested in starting over. I'd wasted enough time.

I was set to waste a little more, since nothing I read online explained how to find the portal I needed. In the end I had to watch a YouTube video, although sadly not this one, which does actually show you where you need to go. The one I watched showed you where you used to have to go before they changed it in the pre-patch.

In the end I stumbled upon a comment on a thread on the forums that mentioned you have to go downstairs to find the portal I needed. That possibility had already occured to me and I had already looked for a way down but I hadn't been able to find one. 

With the information that the entrance to the cellar was off the opening corridor I eventually managed to find it. It doesn't help that if you stand at the top and look straight ahead all you see is a wall. Only as you get to what appears to be a dead end does it become apparent that there's a ramp going down.

By this point I was already wondering to myself just what exactly it is that Blizzard think they're doing with their game. This time last year we were all talking a lot about how Classic doesn't hold your hand and expects you to work things out for yourself, while at the same time making the point that, by the standards of 2004, it was actually doing the exact opposite.

Having spent most of this last week playing it (or trying to), I have to say that a lot less has changed in the last fifteen years than I thought. Compared to almost any other MMORPG I've played in years, Retail WoW is still fabulously confusing and astoundingly user-unfriendly. If its reputation as a casual-friendly MMO was ever deserved it can only have been because all the others were so impossibly unwelcoming. Now the shoe is on the other foot.

Damn you, quest tracker!

 

The sheer volume of pre-existing knowledge expected of a new or returning player, not just systems and mechanics but the basics of knowing the hell where you are, is overwhelming. I've been trying not to look too much up out of game but frankly, if I hadn't I'd still be wandering around Stormwind trying to find Chromie.

In the end I made it to Shattrath, whereupon I immediately got hopelessly lost. Before I could orient myself I'd somehow acquired yet another "take a tour of our fine city" quest. I had the quest tracker up and unbeknownst to me it had already defaulted to the tour, while I had it in my head, from the original instructions back in Orgrimmar, that I needed to head out into the woods.

Consequently I spent the next ten minutes running a full circle around the outside of Shattrath before I realised the yellow dot on my map was in the middle of the city. Finally I got it sorted out, found the NPC I was looking for just along the main road out of town and settled down to what seemed to be a never-ending sequence of kill quests.

The irony wasn't lost on me. I've been sniping at new Blizzard's propensity for gimmicky quests that have you riding animals, piloting aircraft or morphing into monsters. I really shouldn't be complaining that what I ended up doing this time felt so... old school. There's a happy medium, surely?

Only a hundred and ninety-nine more like him and that's the level!

Maybe if the kill quotas had been the regular ten at a time it wouldn't have been so bad but these were fourteen, twenty, twenty-five. And there were dozens of them, or it felt like it. I killed wolves for their skins (Bad drop rate. Turned a kill twelve into more than double that.), trees for their termites (Better. Kill a tree, out pop five termites), moths for their... I don't remember what the moths dropped. Mostly I just killed things so I could go back and tell someone they were dead. 

For a long while it was utterly routine. I can't say I fnd the shaman an exciting class to play. It's far behind hunter or warlock or mage for thrills. It certainly is steady, though, and robust. Very hard to kill. 

Best drop of the day!

Most fights seemed to take about twice as long as they would for either a hunter or a druid at the same level, although that has to be perception rather than reality. When the shaman dinged twenty I checked her played time against what it had taken the hunter and the shaman took exactly an hour longer, half of which is accounted for by the problems I recounted earier.

So it's not much slower but boy does it feel it. I wish I'd picked a Warlock for my Horde character now. I'm not relishing another fifteen levels of this just to get to the point where I can get going on my Vulpera quests.

The best part by far was when I ended up in a series of underground ruins packed with mobs. At times I had three or four of them on me at once and often I got adds on top of that. I had to heal myself a lot and at one point I ran out of mana! Really happened!

That part went faster than any of the rest. There was even an escort quest down there, which I failed on first attempt, when the extremely traditional rescuee, who would not move faster than a slow walk but had to attack every mob he saw, managed to get us about six mobs at once and got himself killed. 

And best quest reward.

I was going to leave him down there after that but it turned out I had to go back and pick up some stuff I'd missed. I gave him another chance only this time I made sure to pull things before he could spot them and that way we made it back to his camp alive.

Altogether it wasn't a bad afternoon's entertainment. It wasn't great, though. At times I did find myself musing over whether you can buy xp boosts in the store in WoW. I can see now why the double xp event Blizzard ran for a few months was so well-recieved. There's fast levelling and there's fast-feeling levelling. I know which this is.

That said, I wonder how much it has to do with the content itself? The five levels I did in Tirargarde Sound positively zipped by and I don't think that was just because I was playing a class I enjoy more. I think I might take the shaman back to talk to Chromie and try one of the other expansions for the next stage. Pandaria, perhaps.

Or maybe I should just learn to love the trolls and go back to Zandalar. I do get the sense that if what you're really after is the swiftest trip up the levels it's probably best to do what Blizzard want you to do and stick to the most recent content. Otherwise, I imagine, they're probably thinking you might as well go play Classic.

Geez! And just imagine doing the stuff I did today with Classic's xp rates... I think I'll probably give Burning Crusade Classic a miss.

Just Relax

Syp and Belghast both posted today on the relaxing nature of leveling. I should need no reminding of that. Syp even talks about how the whole process can be made even more stress-free by avoiding quests in favor of killing mobs and farming crafting materials, something I was doing an awful lot of this time last year.

Ah, last year, eh? Remember that? When the biggest thing we had to worry about was whether to cancel our subscriptions to World of Warcraft to teach Blizzard a lesson? Happy days...

I was doing a lot of leveling back than. Two months, at least thirty hours a week, taking a Hunter into the fifties and a couple more into the twenties. When that all fell apart there was the EverQuest II expansion with another ten levels to do. Wouldn't have taken very long with the new accelerated xp but I had a lot of characters so I managed to make it last well into the New Year.

This year it's mostly been good old EverQuest picking up the slack. My highest character was level 93 back in the spring. Now she's 113, just two dings from cap. For much of the summer I was taking her out almost daily to hunt in all kinds of new zones and do all kinds of new content (new to me, obviously, not to anyone who's actually been playing since about 2013).

I kind of fell off that wagon when the recent double xp ended. I'm back to just logging in to set and collect the Overseer dailies. Since those give orders of magnitude more xp than I'm likely to get by going out and soloing there's not a huge amount of incentive to do anything more effortful.

It's very nice to get levels for doing nothing but I'm starting to get twitchy. I love leveling. Like Bel and Syp I find it relaxing but I also find it involving and interesting, too. I'm generally at my most  engaged with an MMORPG when I'm actively leveling a character.

I've been thinking about what I could do about it for a while. I have a Fury in the nineties in EQII I could dust off  but the nineties can be a real struggle in that game. It's why I stopped there in the first place. 

It's also so close to a hundred it feels crazy to slog through seven or eight tedious levels when I'm sitting on several boosts I haven't used. I could skip to 100 or even straight to 120. Which would defeat the object, so there she sits, dithering.

In Guild Wars 2 I considered converting some of my extensive gold reserves to gems to buy a new character slot. Leveling in GW2 can be a lot of fun and although I have all the classes, most of them twice at least, there are plenty of race/class combos I haven't tried yet, not to mention weapons.

And then I remember how my bank vaults groan with every kind of leveling boost. Last time I counted I had enough consumables to jump thirty or so characters from zero to eighty. I know I don't have to use them but just knowing I could is undermining. Plus, they're taking up space!

There are other options. I was enjoying leveling my Final Fantasy XIV character under the endless free trial  back when that only went to thirty-five. She's level thirty-three if I remember correctly. Now she can go all the way to sixty. I could do some more with her.

Then there's that new Microsoft game, Elder Scrolls Online. I was enjoying that one for a bit. And Blade and Soul, didn't I go back there for a heartbeat not a month or so ago? And I took the option to have all those Lord of the Rings quests for nothing back when they were giving them away. I could level up the normal way there instead of grinding mobs and pretending it's a prettier EverQuest.

Oh yeah, and Star Wars: the Old Republic too. Let's not forget that one. All games where I'd like to level up some characters - in theory. I just can't seem to commit to doing any of it in practice. 

And y'know what I blame? The weather, that's what.

Doesn't proper get-stuck-in, do the hours leveling feel like something you do when it's cold or wet or dark outside? Doesn't it feel a bit weird to be grinding away on mobs when the sun's shining through the open window and the birds are singing away?

In fact, back in the summer, when I was leveling away in EQ, it was mostly wet and not that warm. I remember doing a whole bunch of adventures with Test Match Special on in the background as the team desperately tried to fill an entire week of airtime with random conversation as a whole five-day test match was rained off. And they were playing not that far away from me, so we had much the same weather.

September has been glorious. I've spent most of my time either out enjoying the late summer sunshine or using the dry, warm weather to do a whole load of stuff around the house. What with that and going back to work, albeit only two days a week, I haven't felt much like sitting down at the computer for anything much, neither blogging nor gaming.

I'm coming to the end of the home improvement projects I wanted to get done this year, though, and today the weather broke. Tomorrow it's going to feel much more like autumn and that ought to do it.

The timing looks good. Blizzard are still being coy about the precise date of the Shadowlands pre-patch but everyone seems to think it's imminent. When that drops I've decided I'll definitely re-sub for a month. I'm hoping that the squish and the new leveling mechanics will give me as much to chew on as the launch of Classic last year.

Back then, the blog posts all but wrote themselves. Here's hoping history repeats.

Whether the pre-expansion experience translates into a desire to try Shadowlands itself will be interesting to find out. If I had to bet, I'd bet against it. In the end I never did play through any of that Legion expansion I was given. But who knows? Maybe I'll get the WoW bug and use the squish to explore all the supposedly good leveling content from Pandaria, Legion, Battle for Azeroth (people did say the zones were nice...) and Shadowlands itself.

That ought to keep me going until the next EQII expansion comes out. Which, now I think of it, won't have any new levels, anyway.