Cruel Garrison

Time for a very quick update on what I've been up to in World of Warcraft. Dithering, mostly. My monthly subscription falls due in five days and I haven't yet decided whether to cancel. 

I re-subbed back in October with the intention of checking out the Shadowlands pre-patch, the level squish, Chromie Time and the new tutorial zone, Exile's Reach. I did all of those, wrote a bunch of posts about it and generally had a pretty good time. 

The plan had also been to open up access to the Vulpera allied race, make a fox and level that character to the cap but what with one thing and another I ended up levelling a goblin shaman first, all the way from character creation to the pre-Shadowlands level cap of fifty, something I definitely hadn't expected to find myself doing. After that I didn't quite have the determination to push the fox to fifty, mostly because the EverQuest II expansion arrived when she was about ten levels shy.

When Reign of Shadows appeared in early December I didn't stop playing WoW altogether but my hours dropped to a bare minimum. I was still logging in but almost entirely to keep my ricketty garrison working on hexweave bags. 

 

Even so, that took more time than I expected. I'd imagined it would be like EverQuest's Overseer, just a few clicks on the UI each day, but it seems Blizzard intended something a lot more hands-on. Making bags required me to keep my tailor supplied with sumptuous furs, while upgrading just the few buildings I needed to get the operation up and running cost gold I didn't have. 

I found myself out hunting wolves and cat-people for their fur for an hour or so almost every other day and making repeated forays into old raid instances to make money. For the last two months I've played WoW every day and while I've been there, that's all I've done. 

At first it was fun. Then it became a habit. Now it's starting to feel like a chore. I guess it's the WoD experience in microcosm. And I'm beginning to realize it's also all been a bit... pointless.

First I noticed that hexweave bags can reliably be bought for between 250g and 300g on my server. Using my garrison I can make a bag every other day or so for free but I can make enough gold to buy three or four bags in just the time it would take me to gather the fur. 

It's more satisfying to make them, in theory, but that satisfaction wears off after the first half-dozen or so. I'm at the point now where I feel I might as well just do a bunch of old raids once a week and buy my bags.

 

More significantly, I realized eventually that having an Alliance character with a garrison isn't going to help my Horde characters with their inventory issues. Blizzard take their faction split a lot more seriously than most other developers. Since one of the main reasons I was doing this in the first place was to put thirty slot bags on my Vulpera hunter I clearly didn't think it through.

Of course, I have Horde characters who could build garrisons of their own. And that sounded like a fairly attractive option until I realized something else. Garrisons are unique to the character that quests for them, not the account or even the faction on that account. 

Since my end-game here is to be capable of supplying big bags on demand to any new characters I make and play under the free-to-play rules after I cancel my subscription, what I should have done was send one Alliance and one Horde character, under level twenty, to start a garrison and then be very careful not to let them level too far to be able to keep using it. 

I'd already confirmed on my other free account that you don't need to subscribe to have a garrison and that under the new levelling rules you can get the quest at level ten. Today I spent half an hour getting my level fifteen druid from Stormwind to Shadowmoon Valley just to make absolutely sure she couldn't use the garrison I already had. I've found that no matter what online guides tell you about WoW you never really know for sure until you test it in game.

 

This time I could have saved myself the swim. She couldn't even see the damn thing. It exists in some other plane of reality, apparently. I spent the next half hour porting back to talk to Chromie then heading back to Shadowmoon to get the necessary quests.

That was just for proof of concept. I'd have to do the same again with a horde character and then I'd have to level up the garrisons and the necessary buildings and keep farming the furs and I'd have to fund all of that with characters in their teens. It makes absolutely no sense and I'm not going to do it.

A better plan might be to use the remaining five days of my sub to make enough gold with my Horde and Alliance level fifty characters to buy enough hexweave bags for everyone. That would be far, far easier and an ideal project for keeping my hands busy while I listen to the second England-Sri Lanka Test Match.

That's sorted then. Grind some gold, buy some bags, cancel the sub, go back to playing for free. Only...

I've been wondering whether I ought to buy Shadowlands. I've read a lot about it and it sounds pretty good for someone who enjoys levelling. I'd probably get a month or two's solid entertainment out of it and it's looking likely I'll be at home for about that long before I get the call to go back to work.

So, I'm dithering, as I said. Shadowlands is tempting but I haven't really finished with Reign of Shadows yet. It would make more sense to concentrate on finishing one expansion before I start on another. 

Or I could just let the sub roll on for another month and decide later. That's how they get you, isn't it? 

Well, it's how they get me, anyway.

Last Year's Model

I wasn't playing World of Warcraft when Warlords of Draenor was current content so I have no personal experience of what must surely go down in Azerothian history as the Garrison Era. I certainly read plenty about it at the time, though, from blow by blow accounts of construction to guides on how to make your fortune to complaints of burnout and ennui.  Judging by what I was reading, for a couple of years it seemed that piece of real estate all but defined gameplay for many.

Years later, as I pick through the confusing mess of outdated, confusing and just plain wrong garrison guides, I keep coming across apologies and  excuses for even suggesting anyone might still need to know about this embarrassing period in the game's life. I could have sworn I remembered a time when garrisons were almost popular. I guess the novelty wore off.

A year after the Overseer systems were introduced to EverQuest and EverQuest II I can't say I sense the same level of hostility. That's certainly not because players have come around to the mechanic over time. More that no-one really mentions it at all any more. 

If there was ever a moment when Overseer content was what you could genuinely call "popular" I think I missed it. Oh, wait, no, there was that one week right at the start when the EQ version was giving out rewards players thought were pretty good. People liked that, alright. Then there was a patch that toned things down, which set off a few days of uproar, and then everyone seemed to forget Overseer existed.

In EQII I don't recall the system getting even that brief flurry of controversy. There was that one time they changed the icons...

Both systems received some quite extensive tweaking and tuning through the year, entirely to the good. Compared with how they were at launch, both are slicker, sleeker and simpler to use. In EQII we got a series of fresh Overseer missions for most of the significant holidays and there was a "Season" update that doubled the levels and added a ton of new rewards. 

There was talk in podcasts and forum posts about the Overseer systems having been developed as a faster, less resource-intesive means of adding questlike content to both games. The developers seemed a lot more excited about that than the players, for reasons that are all too obvious but, like it or not, it seemed as though we'd all have to get used to seeing quests happen offstage.

My detailed knowledge of how WoW works could be handily etched onto the head of a brass thumb tack but I have an idea the only concept introduced to the game with garrisons that Blizzard saw fit to develop and evolve once WoD became old news was the "table" thing. It's an oddly tactile rendition of an application you'd normally expect to find embedded in the UI, if not in a separate mobile app, whereby you send agents on missions that play out with no further involvement on your part. It would actually fit better in EQII, where you can at least put your tables where you want them.

I was expecting something similar from Daybreak (as was). I thought there'd be some attempt to incorporate the Overseer feature into each of this year's expansions. I imagined the most likely way being by means of another "Season". So far we've only had the one. And come to think of it, that might only have been in EQII.

There was no mention of Overseer content in any of the promotional material for either of the expansions. I found that surprising but then the pre-launch information we were getting was barebones at best so I didn't read too much into it. There'd be something, I was sure.

 

There still might be something for EQII. Reign of Shadows doesn't drop until next week. But Claws of Veeshan is already up and running in EverQuest and if it incudes any new Overseer content, I can't see it. 

Of course, I don't own CoV. There's no level cap increase and all I do in EQ is level, so there's no point buying it for me. Overseer, though, is not tied to expansion ownership in EQ, nor even to membership. It's available to all accounts including F2P. In fact, as I've previously mentioned, for historical reasons I play EQ mostly on my unsubscribed account despite having another that I'm paying for. Most of my Overseer gameplay is outside of membership. If there was new content for Overseer I'd be seeing it. There's none.

I'd take a bet that the majority of players in both games would prefer it that way. Just as I'd guess most WoW players would rather forget they ever had a garrison. A lot of people disliked the basic premise, others the implementation and as for the rewards...

Ah, now we're getting to it. Here's the problem with dissociated game systems in mmorpgs. If the rewards are deemed to be insignificant, players ignore the system completely other than to complain about the resources being wasted on it. If the rewards are thought to be worth having, players feel they have no option but to use the system, even though they don't enjoy and maybe even disapprove of it. 

As I understand it, at WoD's peak a lot of WoW players felt they had no choice over whether or not they upgraded and used their garrison. The rewards were too good to miss. In Norrath, old and new, the pointer is nearer the other end of the scale. 

Which is strange, because for casual players the rewards are fantastic! I've been making out like a bandit with Overseer in both EverQuest games. I used Overseer in EQII to equip and upgrade most of the gear on six max level characters. I leveled up mounts and mercenaries with Overseer-sourced time-reducers. I filled my bank vaults with more rare tradeskill materials from Overseer missions than I've ever had, let alone in the opening stages of an expansion cycle. 

I needed those rares because Overseer also gave me all my important crafting recipes, which I used not only to give all my 120s expert quality abilities but also to make a relative fortune by making and selling spells, combat arts and augments to others who hadn't had the same rng luck or, more likely, who weren't taking Overseer as seriously as I was. By the summer I was both richer and better-equipped than I'd ever been and all  thanks to Overseer missions. 

I'm richer yet in EverQuest. For much of the year I concentrated on using Overseer to level up my magician. She went from 93 to 115 and although she did quite a lot of proper soloing, I'd estimate twenty of those twenty-two levels came exclusively from Overseer xp.

Once there was no more need for xp I swapped to making money. I've made almost three million platinum in a couple of months, more than I've made in the last fifteen years put together. I run craft and research missions every day then, a couple of times a week, I swap the crafting mats I get from doing them onto my Bazaar trader and collect what he's made so far. 

The strangest thing isn't how well and consistently the rewards I'm getting from Overseer sell to other players. It's that you can do these missions on a F2P account. I'm amazed people aren't setting up farms of dozens of free accounts and pumping this stuff into the tradeskill economy until it tanks. It's not as though I haven't thought of doing it myself, only I don't really have anything to spend the money on. All I do is stand in the Bazaar next to the bank setting these quests once or twice a day.

Over in WoW I've spent an inordinate amount of time this week trying to get my garrison ready to make thirty slot Hexweave bags. I'm not planning on selling them, although they go for 200g a pop on my server and I should be able to make them for well under a tenth of that. No, I just want to give them to all my characters.

The prep to get to the point where I can begin grinding them out is significant, although nothing I've had to do in game has come close to the sheer amount of research I've had to do online before I could work out how to do it. I think I've finally got it figured out. 

I have my garrison and my tailoring shop at tier two. The character who owns them has retrained as a tailor. He's bought and learned Draenor tailoring. I've done the quest to get the follower with the Tailoring trait and I've assigned him to the tailor shop. I've farmed a lot of sumptuous fur and stockpiled hexweave cloth. All I have to do now is the five time-gated missions to get the tokens to buy the Hexweave bag recipe and I'm in business. 

I hope. So far, every time I thought I'd done what what I needed to do I found I needed to do something else. I'll get there in the end but I can already see why people found garrisons... annoying. Nothing like spending half an hour soloing old raids to make gold to buy a training manual off the trainer in your garrison only to get the same damn book as a drop from a quest someone else in your garrison sends you on an hour later. You'd think they could at least talk to each other.

If DBG/EG7 let Overseer wither on the vine I'll be disappointed. I like it. Compared to the vastly more complex and detailed garrison feature both Overseer versions seem clean, simple and straightforward. Yes, there's a strong rng component in the EQII edition but my experience suggests that if you just keep at it you'll eventually get pretty much everything you could want or need. Okay, there is still that one augment recipe...

On the other hand, as a dedicated but casual solo player, it's not all that much of an exaggeration to say that in both games Overseer rewards have largely rendered going out and killing stuff unecessary. I've mostly been doing that because either I just felt like it or because there was new narrative and scenery to enjoy. 

Which is a very valid reason to do content - once or twice. That whole mechanic mmorpgs rely on, though? The running dungeons until your fingers bleed to get gear or grinding them until you hate yourself to level up? Yeah, Overseer has kind of replaced both of those treadmills with a daily routine that takes five or ten minutes.  And you can get rich while you're at it.

Gear and levels get periodic resets but the thing about money is it never goes out of style. If EQII's Overseer system doesn't get an update I'll probably drift out of the habit of using it. I'm already skipping days. In EQ, though, why would I stop the presses from printing out platinum? I might not need the money right now but it's not going to spoil and I might need it later.

As for my garrison, I imagine it has a future as a bag factory. At least until my sub lapses. I won't be able to use it after that. Oh, except, I can just make another, like this commenter on the still-inaccurate-even-after-being-updated-for-Shadowlands guide to what you can and can't do on a Starter account did.

I guess I'm going to be sending those agents and followers out on missions for a while to come. The developers' focus may have moved elsewhere but there's money and bags still to be made. And bags of money, come to that.

Fire On The Mountain

Everyone else is out there, venturing into the lands of the dead and here am I, plodding through pre-Shadowlands WoW. Not even the cool, new Chromie-time WoW, either. Just plain old no-one likes me I'm the worst expansion ever Cataclysm.

Only I do kind of like it. I finished the whole of the zone storyline in Eastern and Western Plaguelands and thought it was pretty good. That popped me over the limit for most of the expansion but there were a handful of zones that went another five levels so I picked one of those and on I went.

Which is how I ended up spending the last couple of days in Mount Hyjal. WoWHead calls it "the zone most players quest in when starting Cataclysm zones". Yeah, I wouldn't have used the word "zone" twice in one sentence there. Also, a little confused as to how they'd have started in Mt. Hyjal when Cataclysm was new. There was no level-scaling back then, right? Wouldn't it have been high-level? 

Who knows? Ancient history. Whatever. Add it to the pile of things I don't understand about how WoW works. It's a big pile.

I had vaguely heard of Mount Hyjal before but I had no idea where or what it was. I do now, having spent something like ten hours there, and I can't say it's anywhere I'm keen to see again, once I get the hell out. Half of it's on fire and the rest is so undifferentiated and bland you can only imagine being on fire would be an improvement.

The zone storyline is equally uninspired and derivative. It has none of the personality or, indeed, personalities that made the Plaguelands such a pleasure. It's all druids and nature and elemental forces and demons and blah blah blah. How many times are we going to do this dance? Seriously?

I'm tough but I'm fair.

 

That sounds like I hated it. I didn't. It's perfectly fine, in the usage I was decrying the other day. The narrative at least makes sense although the structure is a little unstable. As far as I can tell you can be at the end while still not having done all of the middle but I don't think it matters all that much. 

Also, could we get a moratorium on NPCs giving dire warnings about urgency when in practice you can take all the time you want and it's going to make no difference whatsoever. I mean, I really dislike quests and events with timers but if you say the clock's ticking and it's not it feels even worse.

And anyway, how bad can things be if we're taking time out to save bunnies? About the only memorable NPC in the whole timeline is the self-aware, passive-aggressive, emotionally manipulative, centaur, Mylune. She literally hugs bunnies and makes doe eyes at you if you don't want to join in.

She has a couple of quests, one of which involves catching hyperactive, terrified rabbits and squirrels in a box, the other rescuing injured baby deer. Someone was very clearly having altogether too much fun when they wrote Mylune's lines,a  few of which made me laugh out loud. Fun at whose expense, though? That's the question.

I don't want to question your priorities, but...

I'm guessing Mylune, whose first appearance this is, was a bit of a favorite at the time, either with players or developers, because I see she turns up again in every succeeding expansion. Maybe she's in Shadowlands, too, although I guess she'd have to be dead, which might not quite fit the mood.

Other than that, I couldn't tell you the name of another NPC, even though it's only been a day or two. There was an archdruid who got burned to a crisp. I remember him. He looked like a bear. Well, he looked like a charred black lump but that was after. And there was big turtle who talked in free verse. Other than that I'm blanking.

Oh, wait, there was that snarky guy on the hook! He was fun. They should have given him more screen-time. And the mortal-turned-demon who played us in the most predictable scam ever. He was... well, okay, he was straight from central casting but at least I can remember him. 

Tell me how you really feel, Kristoff.

If the plot wasn't up to much the mechanics did their best to make up for it. There was a fair bit of turning into things which, as has been discussed here before, is something I generally disapprove of but I have to say WoW probably does it better than most. If I'm going to have to turn into a giant owl and fly around blowing a whistle or climb up trees and throw bear cubs into a net I'd rather do it with one simple button to press and the UI doing all the heavy lifting.

I forget exactly what level my vulpera hunter was when she arrived in Mount Hyjal. Thirty-four? Thirty-five? With just one final part of the zone storyline left to complete she's now thirty-nine. I'm hoping to limp her on to forty before we leave but I'm not sure there's quite enough questing left in the tank. 

Still, it's pretty good going. The mobs stopped scaling at thirty five but I can't say I've noticed much of a difference. They don't seem to die any faster than they did a few levels ago. The quest rewards are still mostly upgrades although that's often because of the random roll mechanic. It seems to fire more often than you'd expect, bumping close to half of everything I get by a quality level. Sometimes two.

Wait, so you're saying all that stuff you got me to do that was supposed to help the cause was just to break your bonds and set you free? Wow! I never saw that coming...

 

Xp, though, that's very much beginning to fall behind. Even thought there are other 30-35 zones in Cataclysm, I won't be trying to stretch this experiment any further. I haven't decided yet whether to move to another expansion or go back and have Chromie re-fit the Cataclysmic world to my requirements. 

I'm tempted to move on, partly because I can see doing all of the Cataclysm zones on different characters, but also for the money. The biggest practical difference I've noticed between levelling in older expansions as opposed to newer ones is the amount of gold I make. 

By the time my shaman hit fifty she had around six thousand gold and that was after spending a couple of thousand along the way. She made pretty much all of it in Battle for Azeroth's Vol'Dun, which is, ironically, the vulpera's homeland. By contrast, as she nears forty, the vulpera hunter has barely a thousand gold to her name. I'm thinking maybe it's time for her to go visit the folks for a while or at least do some adventuring closer to home.

I'm feeling kinda woozy. Y'don't think it could be these flowerzzzz....

 

One thing's for sure: in WoW Retail this time around, I've rediscovered my love of levelling for it's own sake. I'm having a great time bringing these characters up through the ranks but I have no clue what to do with any of them when they hit fifty. They're pretty much going straight onto the bench to sit things out while the next up takes a turn. Which is exactly how I played mmorpgs for years.

The exception is the dwarf hunter. He has a garrison to run. He comes out once or twice a day to set missions and check everything's running smoothly. I can already see why this was a feature loved by some and hated by many (or was that the other way around?). Even in its eviscerated state it's demanding. When it was current content it must have bordered on the oppressive.

The main reason I'm sticlking with it is I hear you can make bags. It seems you need to be a tailor to do it. So far I've worked out how to farm the fur and make the cloth. That much I managed by trial and error but I suspect the next stage will require research. 

I'm off to do that now. Expect more redundant news on outdated content no-one cares about any more - as it happens!

More Of The Same

 

Time for a few bullet-point updates on how things are going in World of Warcraft Retail. Keeping it short because this kind of stuff tends to run away with me and sometimes even I roll my eyes when I read it back.

• Invulnerable Hunter Pet

Yeah, I don't have one any more. After I finished writing about it, I went back to hunt and quest in Northrend for a while, before moving on to the expansion Chromie expected me to be in, Warlords of Draenor. I wondered if that would set things back to normal but no, the cat remained all but indestructible as I plowed through nearly two full levels, logging out out just before I hit fifty. 

I only saw the pet take significant damage once. It was while I was on an escort quest alongside two other players, all of us doing our own thing. It was a farcical sight, three of us running along behind identical triplet NPCs, each of them getting ambushed by three sets of mobs. 

At one point there seemed to be a mechanic where mobs kept spawning and in a few seconds there were so many of them all you could see was a big, red blob where all the nameplates blurred together. I was tabbing through as many mobs as possible, setting the pet on all of them, and after a while his health did drop a few notches. 

When some of the mobs peeled off onto me I had to feign and I watched while the cat fought an army. Couldn't see him for the crowd. He went to maybe 80% health at one point. Mobs kept dying but more kept coming in and he clearly wasn't going to make much headway but nor was he in any danger of dying so I stood up, whereupon a bunch came at me and killed me. I may have shot some of them first.

 

Other than that, nothing could put a scratch on him. Didn't matter what expansion, zone, mob or difficulty level. I even logged right out of the game once to see if that would make a difference but nope. Just the same when I got back in. 

Then this morning I logged in, decided to go  to my Garrison and finish a few things, picked up a quest there to clear some racoons out of the herb garden, set the pet to gathering them up so I could multi-shot them and next thing I knew he was dead and I was feigned, trying to figure out what happened. Since then the pet's been completely back to normal, taking the damage you'd expect, needing to be healed all the time, losing aggro if I go too fast (did I mention the invulnerable pet also held aggro like superglue?).

No explanation for what started it or why it stopped. I hadn't changed anything I was aware of. I'm putting it down to a bug but who knows? All I can say is it was nice while it lasted and if someone wanted to make hunter pets work like that all the time I wouldn't be the one complaining.

• Garrisons

Since I've mentioned them...

I read a lot about WoW's garrison feature back when Warlords of Draenor was the new not-so-hotness. Opinions seemed to be mixed. Those who'd been hoping for something like a real housing option were disappointed while others, taking the system on its own merits, seemed a lot more impressed. Since I wasn't playing WoW at the time I didn't pay that much attention but I got the impression that it was kind of a fun mini-game and potentially very profitable. 

When the EverQuest games added the Overseer feature last year I saw a number of comments comparing it, unfavorably, to the mission system that comes with having a garrison. I really like both editions of Overseer, particularly the more filled-out EQ version, so I was expecting to enjoy my garrison when I finally got one. 

 

And I do. I can easily see how people got addicted to it when it was a live option. Even as a legacy relic it seems like it could be a lot of fun. As housing it reminds me very strongly of Guild Wars 2's Personal Instances: a bunch of buildings you can't do much to customize with a load of NPCs wandering around looking like extras inbetween takes.

It clearly beats GW2 in that you do at least get some choice in what buildings you see and where they're placed and the overall structure has a form of progression but compared to any game that has actual housing... well, this isn't that. On the other hand, it's better than nothing and it does feel somewhat like a place your character might want to hang out.

I can also very much see the attraction of having all my facilities somewhere I can teleport to from anywhere on a twenty-minute cooldown. I haven't had much of a chance to dig into the mission system yet, but it looks interesting. If it wasn't for the fact that everyone did all this to death several years ago, I could see a number of blog posts in it, too, but I'll do my best to restrain my enthusiasm for going into this outdated content no-one cares about any more in nit-picking, tooth-grinding detail.

 

• Ding! Level 50 Hunter

The last five levels seemed to go reasonably quickly. Or it did until I came to do the last five per cent this morning.

Is it just me or is it sadistic to have a death mechanic that gives you a ghost form and a map marker so you can return in complete safety to recover your corpse and then allows you to die somewhere that's not only impossible to reach but where even your ghost dies if you try. Your ghost ffs! How does a ghost die? And then you're back in the same graveyard, looking at the same map pin in the same damn place and if you go for it again the same damn thing happens!

It went like this: I lit up a quest marker and saw it was most of a zone away so I got on the griffin and hit autorun. Then I tabbed out to do something else. I tabbed back in and out a couple of times and I was still flying. Then I tabbed in one more time and I was dead. 

I'd died of exhaustion, apparently. I figured maybe I had the angle wrong and flew too high. That'll kill you in some games. But no, when I checked the map my gravestone was way out at the furthest edge, in the ocean. In the opposite direction from where I'd been heading. Somehow, maybe one time when I logged in and out, I'd managed to get turned around and flown off the edge of the map, or tried to, whereupon the game killed me.

 

Fair enough. My mistake, no doubt. I'll just run and get my corpse. Long run. Maybe I'll just tab out... and I'm dead again. I tabbed back in just as I was about to arrive at the marker but I didn't see the revive button pop. 

Second time around I paid more attention. Didn't tab out. Looked at the screen up the whole time. Watched the yards count down... 

About a couple of hundred yards out the exhaustion warning came on. The two timers raced to meet in the middle and the exhaustion timer won. I never got the option to resurrect although I was only about fifty yards away when my ghost, um, gave up the ghost. 

It appears my corpse was beyond the point the game would let me go, which I understand, only why even let me think I could get there? I took the durability hit and rezzed in the graveyard (and then nearly got killed by a passing bird but let's not mention that). When my rez sickness wore off I got back on the griffin, flew the right way for once, did my hand-in and dinged. There wasn't much time for a celebration before Chromie whisked me back to Stormwind. Which was handy because...

 

• Farming The Rares In Icecrown

Back in Stormwind I got the quest for the Shadowlands pre-event and its going pretty well, thanks for asking. I did a couple of rounds with the shaman last night and got another nice purple. Then today I took the hunter through the Alliance version of the questline before spending a couple of hours doing the dailies and hitting each rare as it popped.

Things have gotten much more organized. When I was first doing it a couple of days there seemed to be radio silence on the map. I never heard anyone speak. Today there's plenty of chatter and someone calls every rare, in advance, with a map pin linked in general. 

It makes a huge difference. The event suddenly feels communal and relaxed. There's plenty of time to get to where you need to be even with slow flying, just as well since I can't afford the 4,000 gold for the hunter's training yet.

The twenty minute fixed spawn (I was misinformed when I reported it as fifteen last time) is perfect for having the event on in the background while I'm writing a blog post. It reminds me enormously of last year's combined fifteenth anniversary and pre-expansion events in EverQuest II, when I spent several weeks killing dragons on a very similar schedule. That was a better event all round, not least because the dragons took longer than fifteen seconds to kill.

The drop rate is reasonable. I've had two purples on each character so far, plus a ludicrous number of Pitch Black Scourgestones. There's a daily for those but it only needs twenty-five. I've got almost a thousand already. I think you can turn them in for rep with the Argent Dawn somewhere. Yay! I guess. Not sure how long I'll keep it up but I do find these things quite moreish.

• Caravanserai

Perhaps the most surprising thing that happened last night was when I took a quest from some priest or other and he started telling me about a caravan "led by a woman that looked like a wolf". Hang on, that sounds familiar...

And so it should. It turned out to be none other than Fiona, my friend from the Plaguelands. Only of course she's not my hunter's friend at all. He's never met her before. She's a pal of the shaman's. There was nothing in the dialog to suggest otherwise but it made me wonder whether there would have been, had the shaman been doing it. I'm going to have to bring her to Draenor to find out.

It's a very nice piece of continuity, anyway. So far there haven't been any actual wagon rides but I live in hope. Fiona and her boys are solid characters. It's good to see them being used again in a later expansion. Did they make a cameo appearance in Mists of Pandaria, too?

I could look it up but why spoil the surprise?

And that's about it for now. Didn't really keep it all that short, did I?