Draenor! HoOOooo!

It's Orctacular!

The sites and colors of Draenor

You know what I like best about the new expansion so far? ALL THE DRAENEI!! I feel like my favorite race has sat around like a bunch of outcasts for six years now and suddenly we're everywhere! I mean, we are on the planet they named after themselves and all. But hanging with Maraad, and that posse of Drae refugees that keeps growing and growing as we maneuver to destroy the Dark Portal! My Blue Brethren not beaten down and mostly destroyed by filthy Orcses! Yeah! This is my kind of expansion.

And then there's all the Orcs. One thing I kinda noticed is that all these clans have parallels to Azerothean races. The Shattered Hand clan puts on body paint and runs around with their shirts off. Just like trolls. The Blackrock clan spends all their time at the forges. Just like dwarves. In one part, I'm a little disappointed that I see such parallels. On the other, I like that these clans kinda sorta have their own flavor, which will go a lot further towards my enjoyment of killing them all.

My biggest raised eyebrow right now goes to Ner'zhul who seems like a raving thug each time I've laid eyes on him so far. In this parallel universe, it seems like the Burning Legion skipped him altogether and made their pacts directly with Gul'dan, so Ner'zhul ought to be a shaman of sorts, but all I've seen him do is yell uncontrollably and snatch a girl. I expect there to be more, but I'm like, "Sheesh! This was the cloth they cut the original Lich King from?" It actually brings LK down a peg in my mind.

I've been writing (and rewriting and rewriting, hence it's not posted) a summary of thoughts about Pandaria. And seeing Draenor has reinforced one thing that disappointed me about MoP: The land is so much more beautiful in Draenor. Pandaria felt like an Asian wonderland, but with each zone very ascribable to certain Asian contexts or locations. Draenor is where they've thrown off that restriction again. I can see techniques they've learned to do since Outlands was created, and they put those to unfettered use in a landscape that ever so barely hearkens back to Outlands and yet feels very new and very vibrant. My only concern might be that the terrain is very rugged and with no flying in this world even announced at present, I'm gonna get might tired of trying to farm stuff while navigating the cliffs and ravines of this place.

Well. In truth, I've not even seen half of Shadowmoon Valley yet, there is so much left to do (and the servers are doing their normal new x-pac strain and shut down for maintennance) so I'll write more impressions later. But here's a few first stray thoughts:

• Thrall is slave's name. No more shall Thrall be known by a slave's name. From now on, Thrall shall be known as Baldy. Seriously, what happened to his hair? Did we all just let 15 years slip by or something? That can't be a valid style choice!  That said, I kinda did enjoy actually running along and casting lightning with Baldy. He and I have talked on a number of occasions but this is the first time we've ever really "teamed up."

• Garrison. Hmm. I dunno. Do you get the sense that garrisons feel like a well-packaged Facebook game? Showing up at City Hall, telling this follower to go do that quest and that I should come back to check on it again in an hour, or how ever long, reeks of Farmville, or The Simpsons: Tapped Out. Keeping an open mind, but really... It has not made the best first impression. Keeping an open mind... keeping and open mind...

Servers Move That Way, I Move This Way

They confirmed it long before I ever heard a rumor.

This feels more like a maintenance post than anything else, but it would feel loathe to not talk about this straight up.

I think it's been mentioned somewhere in the archives here that I started my Warcraft Career in Asia. I actually had friends there who played and they talked me into it. Needless to say, I was hooked.

That first fateful day, when I had no characters on any server, the server recommended to me was that Oceanic server Nagrand.  That is where I went. It was (is still) full of Australians and New Zealanders who enjoy warcraft. I could also report a significant number of Singapore players and guilds. This connection worked fine for me with a minimum of latency and I've made gobs of Australian, New Zealander and Singapore friends. Some of them have moved onto places like South Africa, Malaysia and a bevvy of European countries. Warcraft has been a fantastic international experience in that regard.

These Oceanic servers, however were located near Los Angeles, in the United States. While, for some reason, I was getting barely any latency rates, I never knew that my Aussie friends routinely played with 200-300ms latency rates. There were days when it was worse, but hardly any days when it was better.  When I moved back to the United States almost four years ago, I kept playing on Oceanic Nagrand with almost no change in my performance rates.

And then, last month, Blizzard announced they were moving their oceanic server farms actually to Australia and a week later it was done. They started offering free transfers for Aussies looking to come to home servers and all were happy!

That Chest and Batgirl

Babs Tarr's new Batgirl costume design includes this key note

Earlier on, while I was going through the new character changes in game, I got stuck considering changes to Merinna's character model that I just hadn't expected. Particularly, the size and shape of her bust.

I went to some of the forums, both the WoW forums and places like WoW Insider and found a few others struggling to put into words, politely, what they felt about what they saw and whether it was something to like, or not.

Finally, I went back in game and using the magical "use new models" switch, I took pictures of the old model and new model Merinna so this can be described better.

Merinna's breasts are flat-out bigger than they were before-- and draenei never lacked for size there in the first place.  They have a big more of a sag and are slightly allowed to splay. I think it is arguable that they are more "natural seeming" like this but I stand by an earlier statement I made on a forum somewhere. It looks like somebody's taken her bra away.

Live Blog: Patch Day 6.0.2

Merinna 6.0

I've never done this before, but here's the blow-by-blow account of my first time seeing all these changes hitting at once. I've been in beta the past several expansions and always had these things sort of filter through more slowly. Today, it's just an onrush of impressions. I will add to this as time goes on.

• We start the day off with Merinna. Mer is my main. She'll always be my main. She gets first attention no matter what. 
• Great God! It looks like she has a huge overbite now. Her hair looks a bit like she was standing out in the rain.
• Log out and update some add ons. Very few have updates ready to go. Very unschway. 
• And back. Poking around the UI. Not having bags open in Bagnon (no update there) is tough. It's taken me a while to find the glorified new Toy Box, but yup. There it is. And it's recorded all the archaeology toys I had built and thrown away because there was no room in my inventory. That is very nice. When I heard about Toy Box, I thought it was at least an expansion too late (and it may still be) because I'd had to purge my bank to make room for... anything.  Several of my key binds have been lost, but Bartender is functioning and keeping track as I reset some of those. Guppet, the add on I use to get something to ride on is hopelessly messed up.
• HOLY COW! DRAENEI FEMALES MAKE THE MOST AWFUL FACES WHEN YOU /DANCE. Ugh. I'm never doing that again. 
• Well, the overbite thing looks much less so out in the light. That's a relief. I'm spending a lot of time thinking about this new character model. But truth is, I expect to turn it off before I do anything for real. It seems highly unlikely that my 8 year old iMac is going to be able to handle all these additional polygons. That said, it's doing alright so far. And this is with new patch lagginess and insanity happening everywhere. We shall see.
• Swooped in and killed a rarespawn in the Vale of the Eternal Blossoms. I still got it, but man is it the crap that I'm no longer allowed to cast lightning while on the move. I hate hate hate that change and knew it was going to hurt. 
• Just realized my weapon imbues are gone. I think that's something they just baked into the specc build now. Elemental shamans were always supposed to use flame imbue and now that damage is just in the build. 
• Aaaaand, there's the first DC.

Warcraft and Racism

Is this a problem?

Long-time readers of Be Healed! would rightly guess that I am an Alliance patriot. I mean that in the best sense of the word "patriot." I make no bones about it: the Horde is the instigators of most horrors brought on Azeroth. Yah yah, the ultimate evil of the Burning Legion played a hand in that, but the orcs made their own choices and need to reap their own consequences. And anybody who wants to stand next to them can get what's coming too. The basic orc point of view-- that they should be able to take whatever they need to survive because they have the strength to do so-- is no different from how a bully justifies his actions. And I won't stand for it.

Anyway, That's not really what I wanted to talk about today.

What I really want to talk about is, "Am I being racist when I slam on the orcs or Blood Elves?" I am always struck by a lot of people using a morally flexible point of view to justify actions or plot twists in Warcraft: WoW presents a "morally complex" story with many shades of grey and no absolute rights or wrongs. Or is it really a lot simpler than that?

And, yes, Warcraft is a game and that's a good thing. But playing games gives us chances to make bad choices and to explore morally gray areas in a context where the consequences aren't as dire as they are in real life. In order to get this benefit, though, we do have to examine the quandry.

Battlepet Blitz!

I think the bandicoon has got this one.

It's about two years since Pet Battles came along. How are they doing on the eve of Warlords of Draenor?

I'm pretty sure if you go back into my archives at this site, you'd find that I was a skeptic of this pet battles. Pokewow, I'm sure I called it, and didn't see a lot of value in co-opting a Nintendo game into WoW in the first place. 

Well, I stand corrected on that. It was good, mostly-mindless fun for those long waits between raids or whatever other downtime you're experiencing. I think I've enjoyed pet collecting more than pet battling, per se, but the whole thing was more entertaining than I ever expected. God help you if you're OCD though.

The Warlords of Draenor battle pets model has no significant changes to the system. There's a bevy of new pets, some things to do in your garrison and the new black market auction house will have rare pets that you might not have found in Pandaria. But the basic model of getting your pets to level 25 and then going out to beat up some trainers continues with no respite. Right now, there's no sign of a new Celestial Tournament, but you've got to believe that it will be a feature of patch 6.X announced at some point in the future.

As far as I'm concerned, this is just fine. I do wish they'd consider some refinements however:

Blizzard Got It Wrong: It's not a "Timeline"

What kind of portal is it?

Well. It's been two years since I posted. What can I say? It's been a rough two years, personally. Too much Real World business to do, diminishing returns on fun in game. I took a break from Azeroth and buckled down to mastering my universe.

But all things come in some variety of cycles and time has opened up somewhat and I'm back, at least for now.

It is the eve of the Warlords of Draenor. It's about three months out. The beta is allegedly going swimmingly. Garrisons are being considered, half my favorite abilities are being culled in The Great Ability Culling of 2014, and those are topics for another time.

Even when I wasn't playing, I was reading the blogs and caught all the Warlords reveal at the last Blizzcon and I've experienced the befuddlement of the greater WoW community in trying to figure out exactly what is going on with the premise of this expansion. At best, it seems very timey-wimey (if I may borrow an expression from The Doctor). At other points, it makes no sense whatsoever.

The big problem here is that this time travel business is the farthest edge of science fiction fantasy. There are some who have invested some serious thought into the business of this thing, but the facts are that we really don't even have a real-world working hypothesis for how time travel should play itself out, much less a theory or ... god help us... some laws of nature on the issue.  The point is that each universe pretty well makes things up as they go along. But, I'd argue, that some sort of crowdsourced understanding of temporal mechanics has risen to the top of the public conscious and should be observed.

The point is: Azeroth is not dealing with an alternate timeline in Warlords of Draenor. Azeroth is being invaded by a parallel universe.