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description=Originally a pair of views on gaming, it s now musings by Redbeard on video games (mainly MMOs), board games, RPGs, and other geeky hobbies.;

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ferent experiences and they do have a tight knit group of friends guildies that play at the same pace as them so many of the potential pitfalls with the seasonal format don t manifest with them and that s fine with me i m glad they re having fun but for me i dislike it when not everybody is having fun when people don t find the seasonal format to be an enriching experience it doesn t matter if it s in wow swtor eso or any of the other mmos out there i don t consider a marker of success to be whether merely enough people are having fun but whether those that aren t can find their place at the table as well maybe game companies can only do so much as the community s own behavior has its own part to play but game companies can create the conditions that a better in game community can arise or they too can focus on the short term and worry about the long term ramifications next season always next season or ham radios i guess it s a sign that this is everywhere and not just in gaming communities seriously do a short youtube search and it ll pop up and blood pressure it happens to me all the time this is my understanding as i ve never played retail since mists so it might have changed my watching the crowds at the major cities and goldshire don t count as playing imho except for the executives because of course that s the case it would also require me to engage more in the retail wow story and that is simply not happening posted by redbeard at 3 21 pm 2 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels elder scrolls online memes musings retail swtor wow wow classic wow classic anniversary wednesday september 10 2025 it s that midwestern mentality alas i did not win the 1 80 billion powerball jackpot last saturday of course there s the small matter of actually purchasing lottery tickets if you want to have a chance at winning i m very much in the if the winnings are high enough i ll buy a few tickets camp but that mentality also wars with a line an old friend from college used to say about lotteries lotteries are a tax for people who can t do math i m an irregular at best lottery player although i did buy a few tickets on saturday even if i had won you probably wouldn t have noticed any changes to the blog because i m not the sort of person who runs around showing off what riches they have and before you ask no i m not rich luckily for me i live in a state where the identity of major lottery winners can remain private so there s that at least i used to joke that the way you d find out if i won the lottery was not because i bought a new car or something like that but that i finally got some major repairs done to the house growing up and living in the midwest has given me a very specific set of values where the ostentatious display of wealth and or success is frowned upon obviously that midwestern mindset has declined a bit over the years as pop culture has penetrated even the most remote parts of the country but at the risk of sounding once again like an old man yelling get off my lawn tm i m a not a fan of the oh look at me sort of mentality sure dress the way you want i m fine with that hell i admire people with a fashion sense such as kamalia that i don t have if you want to see what you can do with fashion in an mmo such as wow go read her blog kamalia et alia because she is amazing at what she can pull off but if you go running around acting hey look at me i m more likely to grouse along the lines of quite a few old football coaches i d heard it said by paul brown by thinking to myself act like you ve been there before it needs to be said that i m not immune to that look at me mentality every time someone comments or whispers to me when i m on joanofdark about how much they love the name i get this small flush of pride then i frequently tell them that a friend came up with the name and i just ran with it okay i don t have to do that and i ve simply accepted the compliment as is a lot of times just like above but i do feel guilty otherwise a lot of multiplayer video games tend to utilize the peer pressure inherent in groups to sell things to their players okay this isn t exactly confined to video games since you see it everywhere even in what smartphone you use but since i play video games more often than i use my cell phone i see it there more often it s just like people showing off their mounts in mmos although i d hesitate in calling a giant floating cigar chomping face a mount and yes definitely a mount but i was never really a fan of their brethren back in wrath days all it takes is one mounted toon standing on top of a mailbox blocking your access for you to understand it s not merely a retail wow thing because i ve seen people showing off their gear and mounts in all sorts of other mmos where people congregate oh and there s plenty of mmo pundits out there who love to mention that a big motivation to getting gear is to show it off you know who you are youtube creators who never read this blog to me that s akin to going out on a date with your spouse or significant other primarily to show off how great a catch they were which says a lot more about you and your priorities than it does anything else in the end this is just me grumping a bit about priorities i can t make people change and really i shouldn t be able to anyway i guess it s an acknowledgement that i m going to do my own thing other people will do theirs and that ll be that that reminds me of an old joke i once heard that goes something like this version i got from the harvard website a deeply religious man whom i will call dave finds himself in dire financial trouble he prays earnestly to his god to help him out of his predicament god i m about to lose my car please help me let me win the lottery lottery night comes but sadly dave is not the winner things go from bad to worse without a car to get to work dave loses his job without a job his mortgage is foreclosed on and he loses his home without a home his wife leaves him taking the kids after each horrible step in the mounting crisis he pleads with god to let him win the lottery but he never does finally broke hungry living on the street he tries again god please my life is a wreck i have no car no home no family please let me win the lottery just this once so that i can turn my life around i beseech you suddenly a flash of light rends the sky and the voice of god echoes down from the heavens dave meet me halfway buy a ticket the late north carolina university head basketball coach dean smith built a culture that emphasized teamwork after one of his players would score that player would turn and point to his teammate who passed him the ball it was a visual acknowledgement that the basket was a team effort not simply an individual one no i don t play games on my phone to me my phone represents the 24x7 on call nature of my work and i try to use it as little as possible however my kids are far more used to utilizing their phones for keeping in contact than i am so i ve grown used to smartphones in my life more than i d like although i primarily use a smartphone to listen to music and or podcasts when i can t have access to my stereo or pc posted by redbeard at 4 26 pm 2 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels mmos musings wow tuesday july 15 2025 beware strange people bearing whispers i ve been on a bit of an exploration kick lately in retail where i just poke around areas looking for people while i m on my lowbie rogue this is all within reason of course since she s roughly l13 but i did poke my nose into northrend and all sorts of other areas on the old world needless to say it s all pretty empty eh i took the portal anyway i don t know where half of these portals go nowadays ever had the feeling that you re lost in your hometown retail is like that to someone who hasn t played since mists and even then mainly bgs oh i did recognize a few people around wait i thought cardwyn was your only apprentice when did all this happen and does card know about this and i couldn t go more than a few feet without it being suggested that i check out various things sigh but i found some honor hold personnel at the bottom of the mage tower and i saw they could port me to the dark portal aha i can go to outland that ll work whiskey tango foxtrot what the hell is going on you know what i think it s smarter to just go back to the old lion s pride inn and call it a day ahh much better still there was one thing on my mind after the roleplaying post from the other day i was reminded that the old moon guard us server was where most alliance rp took place and yes i m quite aware of goldshire and the lion s pride inn s reputation well the last time i visited goldshire on moon guard i wasn t that impressed this was back in 2013 or so and some of the worst offenders of erp back then had been purged from the server so it wasn t what i d call busy still i ve seen enough youtube videos that show an active rp scene so i got curious and made a toon on moon guard just to see what s going on sorry but she s not named cardwyn i did check to see if deathwyn was available but alas it was already taken it actually took me about 10 15 minutes of hunting for available names that i liked before i got to this one i wasn t planning on doing any rp myself i don t have any rp addons installed on retail and if anybody were to whisper me i d politely decline hey it s their world and it s the proper thing to do well at least this looks normal full disclosure i ran back last night to get this screencap because i forgot to take one on sunday i did find actual people questing in northshire abbey so that s an improvement over what livona experienced instead of doing those initial quests i figured it was safe to run straight to goldshire and see what i could find remember the proverb be careful what you wish for because you might get it yeah about that holy crap i got over to the inn saw that and immediately logged for the day that was a bit overwhelming the inside if the inn had to have the most people i ve seen in one place in retail since early cataclysm maybe it certainly wasn t in mists because ysera us was pretty empty even with the server merges on area 52 us a 10 1 horde server i think everybody was either raid logging or just hanging out in the horde pandaria hub but since i never leveled a horde toon to max level that expansion i never made it there so i decided it couldn t have been that bad and that i just happened to show up at a specific event or something so i checked goldshire and the inn again tonight do i really want to know what your rates are for a room sir and stepping outside there was this i ran back to northshire abbey because it was a lot quieter and it was there that i discovered two things the first is that it s now a default that if someone whispers you it s put in a separate tab and two well i m almost 100 certain that person wasn t talking about enterprise resource planning i didn t respond because at first i wasn t sure how long that whisper had been there it could have been about 10 minutes old for all i knew and i ll be honest in that i should have known that sort of whisper would happen but did you see the size of that crowd given the mob inside i figured it would have been hard to pick me out especially without me having installed any rp addons and only running out of the place but a female toon still managed it in the minute or so i actually spent in goldshire this kind of puts a lie to the concept of if there s a crowd nobody is paying attention to you if there s a way to make my anxiety spike while playing a video game that was it well i guess you could say i finally found where the people are in retail when they re not sitting around wherever the endgame area is they re in goldshire on an rp server you have to be paying attention if you do this in classic because the defias and hostile animals lurking near the road could kill you in retail it s not very likely eta added the comment on the last graphic because i can t not see the business version of erp when i see that acronym posted by redbeard at 6 00 am 5 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels retail role playing wow sunday july 13 2025 does romance give you the squick well it does for me oh not in real life irl i m a softie who enjoys romance not necessarily romance novels mind you but i meant the concept itself yes yes i know somebody alert my wife i also don t mind having romance in video games because for me that s a personal choice if you want to romance an npc go ahead if you don t you don t what i meant was romance in pencil and paper rpgs although to a lesser extent romance between two players in an mmo as well this was sparked by a video that popped up the other day concerning d d and romance yes i follow ginny di s youtube videos no i didn t get into her videos from critical role but rather i stumbled on her channel when she progressed to other rpg topics the algorithm looked at my viewing history and thought you know there s this woman who dyes her hair that you might find insightful and here i am she does have some great and insightful comments on a variety of rpg topics and between her pointy hat stephanie plays games kelsey dionne bob world builder and several other 20s and 30s content creators i feel that our ttrpg hobby is in good hands for the future i guess the reason why i watched ginny s video was due to my own experience with romance in a d d game if you ve been around this blog for a while you might recall i was part of a long running d d 3 0 campaign as in a 20 year old campaign when our dm got together with us to hash out what the campaign would be about there were a few ground rules we decided upon low to mid level magic use the greek and egyptian pantheons for the campaign and world building some roleplaying in character but not pure amateur thespian hour and absolutely no romance that last one was a hard no from us players as we were all dating and or married and we really just wanted to focus on a campaign with no romantic escapades involved we ve had romantic subplots in our campaign back in college and when it s involving people who are actually dating irl who then break up it gets really ugly really fast therefore just keeping things platonic would make it easier for everybody we players figured that with the ground rules set we were ready to play things worked out okay for a while and outside of us using im to play this was 2001 2 after all things seemed to progress decently well after a couple of years however our dm began trying to slip in romantic subplots and the occasional conan esque nudity into the game we all knew our dm who was a bit of a horndog back in college so we just figured it was him being him and we didn t take the rather obvious bait we kind of kept things at bay until a new player joined ...