More thoughts on classic raids

The basic draw of the old world stuff for me is, I think, the story behind everything. I'm one of those gamers that (on my first toon anyway) read every quest description, marveled at the zones and the lore, and read up on a great deal of stuff. This is why I'm now leveling a Horde character--to see what I missed story-wise. When I play other RPGs or shooters I really like to poke around and see what kind of interesting nuggets of backstory I can find here and there.

For example--Half-Life, where in the various games you can see the G-man (and a lot more) every once in a while if you explore a lot. (My favorite shooter series, by the way.)

The thing about WoW lore is that it's not that great--B+ level fantasy, I'd say. It's got some great sub-plots (Tiron Fordring and the Ashbringer) and some lousy ones (Varian Wrynn), but the ability to be there and watch it all happen is really cool--it makes what would be a mediocre book into a near-transcendent experience. The first time I saw Illidan was a feeling of overwhelming excitement.

Of course, that feeling is likely easily exhausted--but as gamers cycle through WoW and new raids keep coming out, there's going to be a expanding set of old raids with a growing population of gamers that haven't seen any of it. I think that if people like me and Klepsacovic
can make a hobby out of old raid exploring with basically no rewards except bling, there must be a viable sub-market out there.

Comments

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that

Internet Writing and the Content Vacuum

It's been a few times now I've had full weekday control of the Monthly 's headline blog, Political Animal, and I feel like I have a decent idea now what it's like being at the top level of blogging. (Not to say that I am at the top level, of course, just that I've walked in those shoes for a few days and gotten some blisters.) Anyway, the first thing I've noticed is that it is really, really hard to do well. I've had days before when I just didn't have anything to do and ended up at home writing 4-5 posts in one day on this site, but pro blogging is an entirely different beast. The expectation is that during the day you will write 10-12 posts. This includes an intro music video, a lunch links post, and evening links and/or video. So that means 7-9 short, punchy essays on something , with maybe 1-2 of those being longer and more worked out thoughts. This ferocious demand for content is both good and bad. The iron weight of responsibiliy—the knowledge

Ryan Cooper

Search This Blog