RIFT

RIFT is the one that showed up in 2011 looking like it might actually do it, actually be the game that gave WoW a real run, and then slowly, quietly, didn't. It's the saddest kind of MMO story to me. Not the ones that launch broken and deserve to fade. The ones that launch genuinely good, make you believe for a while, and run out of road anyway.

Let me tell you how good the launch actually was, because people forget. RIFT came out polished. Not "polished for a small studio," just polished. It ran well, it looked sharp, Telara held together, and it did the thing almost no WoW competitor managed, which is that it felt finished on day one instead of like an early-access apology. The line going around back then was that RIFT was a better WoW than WoW in a few specific ways, and for a few months that wasn't even a stretch.

The rifts themselves were the hook, and they were a genuinely fresh idea. Tears would open up across a zone, invaders would come pouring out, and everyone in the area would drop what they were doing and pile in to push them back. Dynamic, unscripted, happening whether you planned for it or not. You'd be running a quest and suddenly the sky cracks open and half the zone is fighting for the town. It made the world feel alive and reactive in a way that questing-then-dungeon-then-raid never did. For a while it was the most exciting thing in the genre.

Here's the part I find genuinely interesting, looking back. That rift mechanic is a very close cousin of the dynamic events that Guild Wars 2 built its whole world around, and I wrote about GW2 already this month. Same core idea. Stuff happens in the world on its own, players show up and deal with it, the zone reacts. Two games, roughly the same era, both leaning on the same fresh idea as their signature. And GW2 is still going strong all these years later while RIFT faded out. Same defining feature, wildly different fates. A decent reminder that the idea is rarely what kills or saves a game. It was great in both. Everything around it decided which one lasted.

And then there was the soul system, built for a guy exactly like me. Every class had a big pile of "souls," sub-specs you could mix and match into your own build, three at a time, swapped around however you liked. If you know me at all from these posts, you know that's catnip. I'm the altoholic who tinkers with talent trees on a quiet night. RIFT handed me more knobs to turn than almost anything I'd played, and I spent happy hours building weird hybrid nonsense just to see what worked. That flexibility was the thing I loved most and still miss.

So why did it fade? Not one dramatic reason, which is the frustrating part. It just couldn't hold the momentum. WoW was still the gravity well, and RIFT had all my characters and none of my history. I'd built up over there without ever quite building roots. The content came, people cleared it, and the population thinned the way MMO populations do when a game is fine but not essential. It went free-to-play in 2013, usually the tell, and after that it drifted into the long slow twilight these games do, still running, sort of, but clearly past its moment.

Here's the honest part. I drifted too. I played RIFT hard for a stretch, loved the souls, chased the rifts, and then one day I noticed I'd gone back to WoW and just never came back over. No rage-quit, no wall. I let the gravity take me home, the way I do with almost every MMO that isn't the one I've given nineteen years. RIFT deserved better than that. It was good enough to keep. I just wasn't capable of keeping two.

That's the tragedy of the promising ones. They don't need to be bad to fade. They just need to be second, and second in this genre is a very hard place to survive. RIFT had the bad luck to be great in a world that already had a favorite. I still think about those souls, though. Nobody's built a system quite like it since.

Cheers,

Joar

The War Within

We're about two thirds of the way through Blaugust, so I'm feeling pretty good at this point about my plan for the month.  Today, I'm going to continue the theme of discussing World of Warcraft expansions.

The War Within is the one I just finished, the expansion that carried me right up to the doorstep of where I am now. Writing about it feels strange, because it's not history yet. Midnight is the live game as I type this, so the War Within is the stretch I was playing until about five minutes ago, and looking back on it is less nostalgia and more checking the rearview mirror. Still, it earned its own post, because it quietly became my favorite way to play the game in years.

The setup was that we finally went underground. After Dragonflight brought me back, the War Within opened up Khaz Algar and sent us down into it, a whole continent of caverns and buried civilizations. Isle of Dorn up top, the Ringing Deeps with the machine-speakers, Azj-Kahet where the nerubians live, and Hallowfall with that enormous crystal standing in for a sun. I'm a sucker for a good underground zone, and Hallowfall in particular got me. A pocket of light in the deep dark, a whole people organized around keeping the crystal lit. That's the kind of setting that sticks with me.

But the real story of the War Within, for a player like me, wasn't the zones. It was two changes that felt like the game had finally been built with me in mind.

The first is Warbands. They made your progress account-wide in ways that actually matter, so all the stuff I earn spreads across my characters instead of dying on whichever one happened to be logged in. For a confirmed altoholic, this was close to a religious experience. I've spent nineteen years grinding the same things over and over on alt after alt, and the War Within finally said, you know what, you earned that once, keep it. It doesn't sound romantic. It changed how I play more than any dungeon ever did.

And I want to be honest about what that permission did to me, because it got a little unhinged. I finished the War Within with 52 max-level alts. Fifty-two. Sit with that number, because I have, and I'm still not sure whether it's an achievement or a cry for help. Warbands removed the one thing standing between me and total altoholic collapse, the pain of re-grinding everything per character, so I did what I always do with the brakes off. Fifty-two characters at the cap. That's not a roster. That's a small guild that happens to be one guy.

The second is Delves, and I've already given those their own post, so I'll keep it short. Delves gave me a real path to good gear that runs through zero other people and zero raid nights. Just me, Brann tagging along, a bite-sized dungeon I can knock out on a weeknight. The War Within is where that clicked into being the core of how I play. Solo, semi-committed, geared enough to keep up, on my own clock. I've wanted that from WoW for twenty years and this is the expansion that finally handed it over.

I'll caveat the raid side the way I always do, because I don't live there. There's a big Worldsoul Saga going on, Xal'atath pulling strings, bigger threats pointed at down the road, and Nerub-ar Palace was the raid everyone was clearing. I got the story version and the LFR version and I was happy with that. The high-end folks got their fights, I got mine, and for once the game gave me a gearing lane that didn't run through a room I'd decided not to enter. No complaints from the cheap seats.

Looking back now that I'm standing in Midnight, the War Within reads as exactly what its name half-promised. The last stretch of a certain era, the setup expansion that laid the track for everything the Worldsoul Saga is now cashing in. It wasn't trying to be the grand finale. It was the deep breath before it, and it happened to be the most comfortable I've been in the game since Wrath.

That's a strange thing to say about an expansion that's barely cold, but it's the honest read. The War Within didn't blow the doors off. It quietly became the version of WoW that fits my life best, then handed me off to Midnight without a fumble. Good handoffs are underrated. This was a good one.

Cheers,

Joar

Writing as Joar

I've written under this name for seventeen years, and people still ask me now and then why I don't just put my real name on it. The easy answer is that Joar is a pen name and the whole point of a pen name is privacy. The honest answer is more complicated than that, because if I'm being straight with you, the wall I supposedly built around this thing has more holes in it than I'd like to admit, and most of them I punched myself.

Start with where the name comes from, since that part's simple. Joar is a character. He's my undead warlock, the guy I've been playing since Burning Crusade, and when I started the blog seventeen years ago it never occurred to me to sign it anything else. You write about WoW, you write as your WoW self. It stuck, and by the time I'd have thought twice about it there were already a couple hundred posts under it. The name grew roots.

The idea, at least in my head, was that Joar would stay sealed off from the rest of my life. A hobby identity, walled away from the buttoned-up professional world where "I run a World of Warcraft blog" would have landed like a confession. That was the theory. In practice, I blew the first hole in that wall myself, early, and on purpose.

Some of my most popular posts in the early years were breakdowns of Blizzard's earnings calls and quarterly financials. I could not help myself. Here was a company I loved, publishing exactly the kind of numbers I stare at for a living, and I was going to read those filings whether I wrote about them or not. So I wrote about them. And anybody paying attention learned pretty quickly that the guy behind Joar does something with financial statements for a living, because you don't casually dissect a 10-Q for fun unless that's your world. The professional wall came down almost immediately, and I knocked it over myself because the material was too good to leave alone.

The personal stuff crept in slower, and mostly as I got closer to retirement. Somewhere in the last several years the separation just started mattering less to me. I've written about my son's swimming, the meets, the way that took over our calendar. I've written about becoming a grandfather. Bits of real life that a stricter, younger Joar would have kept firmly on the other side of the wall. If you really wanted to sit down and assemble it, I suspect you could sketch a decent picture of who I actually am from what's already sitting on this blog. I've left more fingerprints than the pen name implies.

So why keep the name at all, if the secrecy's this leaky? Honestly, because it stopped being about secrecy a while ago and became about identity. Joar isn't a disguise anymore. He's a mode. He's who I am when I'm writing about this specific hobby, seventeen years deep, and the name carries all of that history with it. Retiring it now would feel like renaming an old friend. The wall came down in pieces, but the name stayed, because the name was never really the wall. It was just mine.

There's still a little separation left, and I'll keep that little bit. This is the corner of my writing life that's purely for love, no professional angle, no personal-brand strategy, and the name helps me remember that when I sit down here I'm not performing for anyone. But it's a low fence now, not a fortress, and I've made my peace with that. Seventeen years in, the honest version is that I let people in gradually, one earnings-call post and one swim meet at a time, and the world didn't end.

Still Joar. Just a more transparent one than I set out to be.

Dragonflight

Dragonflight is the expansion that got me back, and I don't say that about many of them. I ended the Shadowlands post walking away, gone for the better part of a year, telling myself I might not come back at all. Dragonflight is the thing that reached across that gap and pulled me home. Not with a grand story or a shocking villain. It won me back by being fun to log into again, which after Shadowlands felt like a small miracle.

Here's the thing that mattered most, and it sounds almost too simple. They stopped burying the game under systems. Shadowlands had covenants and anima and Torghast and a checklist that grew every week, and Dragonflight walked in, cleared the table, and said, "what if you just played?" No borrowed power you'd lose next patch. No agonizing over a choice that came with a math penalty. They even brought back the actual talent trees, the ones you could sit and tinker with, and for a guy who likes to fiddle with a build on a quiet night, that alone was worth the price of admission.

Then there's dragonriding, which I did not expect to care about and ended up loving. Flying in WoW had been the same hover-and-autopilot for years. Dragonriding made it a thing you actually do, with momentum and speed and a little skill to it, diving to build up steam and pulling up to gain height. The first time I really got the rhythm of it, swooping across the Dragon Isles with the ground blurring underneath me, I caught myself grinning like it was 2007 again. That doesn't happen much this far in.

The Dragon Isles themselves were the right kind of setting after a gray prison realm. Green, open, full of dragons and the Dracthyr and old titan machinery, a world that felt like it wanted you to explore it rather than survive it. The Evoker showed up as the new class, the dragon-people who breathe magic, and while I stayed loyal to my undead warlock, I absolutely rolled one to poke at, because I am who I am and a new class is a new toy.

The story was lower stakes on purpose, and that turned out to be exactly what I needed. No universe-ending threat, no cosmic force retconning everything I cared about. Just the dragons coming home to the Isles, sorting out old business, a more grounded story about legacy and stewardship. After Sylvanas and "it was all part of the plan," a smaller, more honest story felt like the game apologizing without saying the words.

I'll be straight about the part that didn't grab me, because these posts aren't ads. Dragonflight was so focused on being pleasant and frictionless that some of it slid off me without leaving much of a mark. I couldn't tell you the villain's name without checking. A few of the middle patches came and went and I logged in less. That's the tradeoff when you build an expansion around not annoying anyone. It also doesn't produce many moments that grab you by the collar. I'll take it. Boring-good beats frustrating-bad every single time, and I'd just spent a year learning that lesson the hard way.

What Dragonflight really did was remind me why I gave this game nineteen years. It took the resentment I'd built up in Shadowlands and quietly dissolved it, one fun evening at a time, until one day I realized I wasn't logging in out of habit or obligation. I was logging in because I wanted to. I'd forgotten that was even possible.

So that's the comeback. Not a bang, an exhale. The expansion that didn't try to blow my mind, just tried to give me my hobby back. It worked, and everything I've played since, I've played because of it.

Cheers,

Joar

Elder Scrolls Online

Elder Scrolls Online is the MMO I keep going back to, which is not the same thing as an MMO I stayed with. I've drifted into ESO more times than I can count, played it hard for a few weeks, drifted back out, and then found myself reinstalling it a year later when the itch returned. Nothing else has that pull-and-release pattern on me. So this is the honest accounting of what keeps dragging me back and what keeps letting me go.

I have no memory of taking this screenshot, but it seems cool.

Start with what kept me. It's Tamriel. I played the single-player Elder Scrolls games, I've got real affection for that world, and ESO lets me walk around inside it with other people wandering by. Morrowind as a living zone, Summerset, Elsweyr with the actual Khajiit at home, the whole map slowly filling in over the years. The questing is genuinely good, fully voiced, more written care per quest than a lot of MMOs bother with. You can stumble into a side story in some no-name town that's better told than the main plot of games I've paid more attention to.

The other thing that kept me is the shape of it. Buy the box, and the subscription is optional. That's huge for a guy like me. ESO doesn't punish you for leaving. I can vanish for eight months, come back, and pick up more or less where I left off without a wall of catch-up, because the whole world scales to you. Go anywhere, any order, any time. For someone who plays in bursts around real life, that freedom is exactly right. It's a game built to be left and returned to, and I've tested that promise thoroughly.

And here's the tell that I've tested it deeper than "drops in now and then" makes it sound. I'm an altoholic to the core, in every game I touch, and ESO got the same treatment. Across all those on-again stretches I've built up a max-level character of every class in the thing. That's not a tourist's résumé. The drifting is real, but so are the hours, because when I drop back in I don't roll one character and wander around. I roll all of them, because at this point I don't seem to be capable of doing it any other way.

Now what didn't keep me, and it mostly comes down to one thing. The combat never felt right in my hands. After seventeen years of WoW, ESO's fighting feels floaty to me, a little weightless, like my hits aren't quite landing on anything solid. I know the high-end players have a whole intricate rhythm to it, animation timing and weaving that turns it into something skillful. I could never make myself care enough to learn it. Every time I got to the point where the combat should have hooked me, it instead reminded me it wasn't the combat my hands already knew.

The other thing is just the size of it. ESO is enormous, and it presents that enormity as a giant menu on day one. Chapters, DLCs, zones, systems, all shouting at once. WoW at least walks you down a path. ESO drops you into a buffet and wishes you luck, and for a certain kind of player that's paradise, but for me it sometimes tips into paralysis. Too many doors, and I end up standing in the hallway.

So that's the pattern. Tamriel pulls me in, the questing and the freedom keep me happy for a while, and then the combat feel and the WoW gravity quietly pull me back home. It's the healthiest relationship I have with any game outside WoW, precisely because ESO never demanded I commit. It lets me treat it like a place I visit rather than a place I live, and honestly, that suits both of us.

I'll be back in Tamriel again. I always am. I just won't be moving in, and ESO, to its credit, has never once asked me to.

Cheers! 

Joar 

Shadowlands

Shadowlands is the one that actually got me to quit, and after nineteen years of playing, that's not a sentence I write lightly. Warlords nearly lost me to boredom, a year of sitting in a garrison with nothing to do, but I white-knuckled through it and stayed subscribed. Shadowlands I didn't. Shadowlands frustrated me so thoroughly that I unsubscribed, walked away, and stayed gone for about a year. Boredom just means the game left. Frustration means the game is right there, asking for your time every single day and making you resent it, until one day you stop giving it.

The setup had me. The afterlife, the realms of Death, an undead warlock finally getting to see where all of this actually goes. I'm the guy who plays a class built around dark magic and a race that's already dead, so an expansion about the machinery of the beyond should have been catnip. And the zones delivered. Bastion, Maldraxxus, Ardenweald, Revendreth, each a distinct take on death, all of them gorgeous. Maldraxxus especially, the undead-army realm, felt built for exactly my kind of character.

Then the systems closed in. Shadowlands is where Blizzard's love affair with borrowed power hit its absolute peak, and it buried a genuinely interesting expansion under a pile of grind. You picked a covenant, and it came with an ability so tied to your performance that picking wrong could hobble your character, and switching was painful enough that people agonized over it like a mortgage. The thing that should have been a fun roleplay choice, which faction of the afterlife do I want to run with, got turned into a math problem with a penalty for guessing wrong.

Then there was the Maw, and Torghast, and anima. The Maw was designed to be unpleasant and it succeeded a little too well. Torghast started as a genuinely cool idea, a tower you climb with weird temporary powers, and then they wrapped requirements around it until it became one more weekly chore with a timer. Anima was the grind under the grind, the currency you fed into everything, and there was never enough of it and always another thing that wanted it. The whole expansion had this feeling of a checklist that got longer every time you cleared it.

And the story, the thing I'd actually shown up for, fell apart at the end. Years of buildup around Sylvanas and the villain behind the curtain, and the payoff was essentially "it was all part of the plan," which retroactively made a lot of things I cared about feel cheap. When the lore is the reason you play your character and it lets you down that hard, it takes something out of you.

It didn't help that this all landed in 2020, when the game was one of the few social things a lot of us had left, and it asked us to spend that time on chores in a gray prison realm. I logged in out of obligation, did my anima laps, and felt the thing I never want to feel about this hobby. That it had become work I wasn't getting paid for.

So I stopped. I leveled maybe two alts into the expansion, sat with how little I actually wanted to log in, and decided I hated it and canceled the sub. I left. For real, for the better part of a year, and I spent most of that stretch playing Final Fantasy XIV instead. WoW carried on without me and I didn't miss it, and that scared me a little, because I'd never once been able to say that before.

I came back near the tail end of Shadowlands and caught up on what I'd skipped. Dragonflight was on the horizon by then, ready to remind me why I'd given this game so many years, and that's a story for another day soon. But Shadowlands is the one that broke the streak. Not the expansion that gave me nothing. The one that gave me too much of the wrong thing, and for the first time made walking away feel like the healthy call.

And the pause had taken its toll.  Instead of 43 max level alts at the end of the expansion, I went into Dragonflight with only 8.

Joar

Why I'll Never Raid At The High End

I don't have enough predictable time slots.  Thanks!  Hope you enjoyed today's blog post.

In all seriousness, if you've read any of these expansion posts, you've seen the same line show up over and over. Leveled at my own pace, ran heroics and LFR, did world quests or dailies, but never went anywhere near the cutting edge. It's practically a refrain at this point. So today's the confession post where I actually explain it, because "I don't raid at the high end" isn't the interesting part. The interesting part is that I used to feel bad about it, and somewhere along the way I completely stopped.

Let me be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not knocking the people who do it. High-end raiding is genuinely hard, it takes real skill and real coordination, and the guilds who clear mythic content the week it drops have earned every bit of the flex. I respect it the way I respect marathon runners. From a chair. With a snack.

Because that's the thing nobody tells you until you're in it. High-end raiding is a second job. Fixed schedule, three-plus nights a week, invite times you're expected to hit whether or not real life had other plans. Showing up isn't enough, you're expected to show up prepared, which means the pre-work of farming consumables and studying fights and keeping your gear optimized between raids. Miss too many nights and you lose your spot, because the roster is a machine and the machine needs bodies in seats. I did the corporate version of that for 35 years. I am not signing up for the volunteer version at 56.

And the temperament isn't in me either. The high end runs on performance meters, on knowing exactly where you rank, on someone being able to pull up a log after a wipe and point at the reason. Some people thrive on that pressure. I spent a career being measured on a spreadsheet, and the last thing I want out of the thing I do to relax is another spreadsheet with my name on it and a number next to it that somebody's about to question.

So for years I did the thing where I told myself I was missing out. The game didn't help. For most of WoW's history, if you weren't raiding at the top, the message was that the good gear, the real accomplishments, the stuff that "counted," all lived in a room I'd decided not to walk into. I ran my LFR and carried around this low-grade sense that I was doing it wrong. Playing the game in the discount lane.

Then, honestly, I just aged out of caring. Somewhere in the last few years it clicked that I was having a genuinely good time doing exactly what I do. Leveling slowly. Seeing the story. Running the accessible content on my own clock. And the thing I'd been calling "missing out" was actually just a different game, one that fit my life instead of fighting it. The gear I wasn't getting wasn't making anyone happier than I was. It was just making them tired on a schedule.

The game finally caught up to that, too. Delves gave the solo, semi-committed player a real path to gear that doesn't run through 19 other people and three raid nights. I don't need the mythic room anymore, and here's the part that took me twenty years to reach. I don't want it. That's not settling. That's knowing what the hobby is for.

I'll never raid at the high end. I used to say that like an apology. Now I just say it.

Cheers! 

Joar

Battle for Azeroth

Battle for Azeroth wore me out, and it did it with the one thing WoW is supposedly built on. Faction war. Alliance versus Horde, the oldest fight in the game, cranked up to be the entire point of an expansion. And instead of feeling like the payoff to two decades of buildup, it mostly made me tired. I main an undead warlock. I've been Horde since Burning Crusade. And BfA is the expansion that made me realize I didn't actually want to fight this war anymore.

It's also the expansion where my altoholism got the most out of control, at least until recently.

It opened on a gut punch. Sylvanas burns Teldrassil, the whole night elf world tree, right there in the intro cinematic, and the message was clear. This is going to be ugly and you're going to have a side in it. I'll give them this, it was a bold swing. The trouble is what came after never earned that opening. The war campaign turned into a slog of back-and-forth where nobody could win because the story wasn't allowed to let anybody win, and Sylvanas's whole arc got muddier and muddier until by the end I genuinely could not tell you what she wanted or why I was following her into any of it.

Then there was Azerite. The Heart of Azeroth, this necklace you leveled up, feeding it to unlock traits on your armor. On paper, more progression. In practice it was the borrowed-power grind at its most joyless. You'd get a new piece of gear and it would be sidegrade-locked behind a system you had to grind out again, and the whole thing had this treadmill-on-a-treadmill feel that soured a lot of the expansion for me. I'm a guy who likes the loop, I said so yesterday, but even I have a limit, and Azerite armor found it.

The zones themselves were actually good, which is the frustrating part. Zandalar and Kul Tiras were gorgeous and full of character, the troll city stuff and the vaguely-nautical Drustvar witch questing were some of the best-built leveling content in the game. Mechagon was a fun little side world. Island expeditions were a decent idea that never quite came together, and warfronts were an okay idea that came together even less. There was a good expansion buried in BfA. It just kept getting in its own way.

But the thing that actually got me was the fatigue. Twenty years of "for the Horde" and "for the Alliance," and BfA leaned on that harder than any expansion before it, and instead of firing me up it just made me notice how little I cared about the war anymore. I don't want to burn down the other faction. I've got friends who play Alliance. I had more than a dozen max level Alliance characters myself at that time.  The whole premise felt like it was written for a version of me that stopped existing around Wrath. When your big emotional hook is a grudge I no longer hold, the whole thing rings a little hollow.

The old god payoff at the end, Ny'alotha and N'Zoth, was fine. Serviceable. But by then I was mostly running on momentum, doing my heroics and my LFR, leveling alts and waiting to see what came next, hoping the next one would be about something other than a war I was done with.

And my altoholism completely lost control by the end of it, as I finished with 43 max level characters.  Basically one of each class across three servers and a decent start on a fourth.

BfA isn't the worst expansion. But it's the one that quietly retired the faction conflict for me. After that, "for the Horde" stopped being a rallying cry and started being a thing my character says out of habit. Kind of like logging in, some nights.

Cheers! 

Joar

Guild Wars 2

Today we're going to divert yet again from the regular discussion of World of Warcraft, just like I have over the years with this blog.  

Guild Wars 2 is the MMO I respect more than almost any other, and the one I keep at arm's length even though I've quietly poured a serious number of hours into it. That's the contradiction I want to be honest about. "Keep at arms length" makes it sound like I've barely touched the thing. I haven't. I've got a max-level character of every class in that game, because the altoholic in me doesn't switch off just because I've wandered out of Azeroth. The distance was never about playtime. It's about where home is.

Start with why I respect it, because that part is easy. GW2 took a hard look at everything that grinds you down in a traditional MMO and designed those things out. No subscription, you buy the box and you're in, play a session a year if you want and nobody's charging you for the privilege. No gear treadmill, once you hit max stats they mostly stay there, so a friend who quit for two years can come back and not be three tiers of armor behind you. The quest hubs with the yellow exclamation points are gone, replaced with dynamic events that just happen in the world whether you're there or not. Even the holy trinity got tossed. Everybody brings some support, everybody brings some damage, and the "we can't run tonight, we don't have a healer" problem largely evaporates.

And here's the part that undercuts my own statement about being someone who only admires GW2 from afar. I've actually done the content. My main is completely caught up on the story, all the way through the expansions, the whole through-line. One of my alts is nearly there too. Add in a max-level character of every class and you are not describing a tourist. You're describing someone who has put real, sustained time into a game he keeps claiming he only respects from the sidelines. So let me drop the pretense. I like GW2. I play GW2. I've finished things in GW2 that most people never get to.

So why the distance, then, if I'm clearly in there swinging?

Because it never became home, and after seventeen years I've learned that home is a real thing in this hobby, not just a figure of speech. WoW is where the muscle memory lives, where the friends are, where the version of me that's been logging in since Burning Crusade actually resides. GW2 is the extraordinary place I keep a second residence and genuinely enjoy, but I've never moved in. When I've got one MMO night in a week, it goes to Azeroth almost every time. Not because GW2 is the lesser game, but because the pull of the place you've lived for nineteen years is not a rational thing.

There's a smaller piece to it, and it's the treadmill. GW2 gently removes the carrot on the stick, and it turns out my lizard brain misses the carrot. I like logging in and knowing there's a number a little higher than yesterday, a piece of gear I'm chasing, a reason the session counted. GW2 hands you freedom instead, and freedom is a harder thing to build a nightly habit around than a grind is. I completed the content because finishing things is what I do. But the loop that pulls me back night after night is a WoW-shaped loop, and GW2 was built, on purpose, without one.

So I respect it from a distance, and I mean respect, not the backhanded version. GW2 is what happens when a studio has the nerve to question the parts of the genre everyone else treats as load-bearing. I've spent enough hours in it to say that from experience rather than from the sidelines. It's just never going to be home, because I already have one of those, and nineteen years in, it isn't going anywhere.

Try it. It might be the game you didn't know you wanted. It turned out to be more of one for me than I usually let on.

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar

Legion

I'm not quite halfway there, but I'm feeling pretty good about having posted every day so far.  Continuing the theme of discussing the various expansions, today's topic is Legion.

Legion is the expansion that saved WoW for me, and I don't think that's an exaggeration. I came out of the Warlords drought about as close to done as I've ever been, logging in out of habit more than want, watching a garrison table like a guy checking a mailbox he knows is empty. Then Legion dropped, and within a week I remembered why I'd given this game something like nine years at that point. It was WoW at full strength, firing on every cylinder at once, and it showed up right when I needed it to.

The Broken Isles were the best set of leveling zones they'd built in years. Every zone told its own story and told it well, Val'sharah and Highmountain and Stormheim all pulling their weight, and then Suramar sitting on top of the whole thing as this slow-burn masterpiece that they kept feeding you across patch after patch. The Burning Legion invasion actually felt like an invasion. High stakes, real losses, a world that felt like it was genuinely under threat instead of just waiting for the next patch cycle.

But the thing everyone remembers is the artifact weapons, and they earned it. For the first time your weapon wasn't a slot you upgraded and forgot. It was your class fantasy made physical, a named legendary you carried the whole expansion and poured your progress into. On the warlock that meant carrying around a weapon with actual history and lore stapled to it, leveling it, unlocking its traits, tricking it out with relics. It made a character feel like a character instead of a rack you hung gear on. I got attached to the thing, and I say that fully aware of how ridiculous it sounds to be attached to a pretend scythe.

The artifact weapon had a natural home, too, and that was the Class Order Hall. Legion made you the leader of your entire class, all of you, every warlock in the game running the same fantasy of commanding the Council of the Black Harvest out of a hidden pocket dimension. You recruited champions, sent them out on missions, ran a class-specific campaign that actually respected the lore of what a warlock is supposed to be. It's the most seen my class has ever felt. For one expansion I wasn't just a guy playing a warlock, I was the warlock the other warlocks answered to, and that kind of class identity is exactly the thing WoW usually sands off in the name of everybody being interchangeable.

I was never sure that all the attention from other warlocks was really deserved given I had just spent the past two years sitting around my garrison like some netherworld hermit, but I got over it.

Legion is also where Mythic+ arrived and quietly changed the game forever. Now, I've never been the guy pushing high keys, that's not my lane and never has been. But even from the outside I could see it was the missing piece. Suddenly there was a whole progression ladder for five-person groups that didn't require raiding, endlessly repeatable, always another rung to climb. Half the modern game's endgame grew out of that seed. They planted it in Legion.

What made it all land, though, wasn't any single system. It was that they came back. After Warlords taught me that Blizzard could take my favorite game and just leave it in a ditch for a year, Legion was the patch cadence never letting up. New content kept landing, the story kept moving, Suramar kept unfolding, and then Argus at the end to close the whole thing out. They went from the longest drought in the game's history to the steadiest run of updates I could remember, back to back, and the whiplash of that is a big part of why Legion sits so high for me.

I did what I always do. Leveled at my own pace, ran normals and LFR, poked at the world quests way longer than was strictly reasonable, never went near the cutting edge. And I had a better time doing it than I'd had in years, because the game around me was finally worth showing up for again.

The altoholism also got a little more out of control during Legion for me.  I finished the character of each class of each faction plan, and then started on a second set of Horde alts, so that by the time Legion was finished, I had 33 max level alts

If you bounced off WoW during the Warlords drought and never came back, Legion is the one you missed. It's the comeback the game needed and, honestly, the one I needed too.

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar

Delves

Delves are the best thing Blizzard has added to WoW in years, and I say that as someone who has been around long enough to be suspicious of every new system they roll out. Usually the new shiny thing is a grind wearing a costume. This one isn't. Delves are the first piece of endgame in a long time that was built for the exact player I actually am, and I didn't realize how much I'd been waiting for it until it showed up.

Here's the pitch. Small, self-contained dungeon-shaped chunks you can run solo or with a couple of friends. They scale, so a tier 1 is a walk and a tier 11 will absolutely end you if you get sloppy. You bring a companion along who levels up over the season and fights at your side. It started with Brann Bronzebeard back in War Within, who you could spec to either patch you up, tank or add damage. These days, in Midnight, it's Valeera Sanguinar riding shotgun instead. Either way the point is the same, a partner who makes solo not feel quite so solo. That's it. No group finder anxiety, no linking your score to a stranger who's going to leave after one bad pull, no signing up for a schedule. You log in, you run a delve, you get something for it.

And the something actually matters. That's the part that still surprises me. For most of WoW's history, if you weren't raiding or pushing high Mythic+ keys, the game quietly told you the good gear wasn't for you. You could do LFR and the occasional normal and cap out somewhere respectable but distinctly second-tier. Delves broke that. The coffer keys, the Great Vault slot, the gilded stuff at the higher tiers, it's real gear at a real item level, and I earned every piece of it by myself on my own clock. A solo player finally has a lane to competitive gear that doesn't run through 19 other people.

For the warlock plan this is the whole ballgame. I've parked the alts, I'm going all-in on one character for once in my life, and delves are how that character stays geared without me having to become a raider at 56. Renown, a steady delve habit, the vault every week, and the blues slowly get replaced with things I'm not embarrassed to be wearing. Except for pants.  Pants never drop for me.  From anything.  

It's a progression path that fits the amount of time I actually have, which is not a sentence I've been able to write about WoW's endgame in about a decade.

They're not flawless. The companion AI does things that make me want to reach through the screen and smack it upside the head. The difficulty spikes between tiers can be rude if you're undergeared and stubborn, which I always am. And there's an end boss at the very top that rotates with the seasons. Zekvir was the first, back in War Within, the one who taught everybody that "solo content" doesn't mean "easy content." Nullaeus closed out the just-finished first season of Midnight and carried on the fine tradition of separating me from my repair money. Whoever's sitting up there, the lesson lands the same way.

But none of that touches the core of it. Delves respect my time and they respect the fact that I mostly play alone these days. They gave the solo, semi-committed, one-character-at-a-time player a real seat at the table instead of a folding chair by the door. Nineteen years in to this game for me, that's not a small thing. That's Blizzard finally building something for the guy who's still logging in on a Tuesday night with 45 minutes and no group.

More of this, please. Fewer costumes on grinds.

That's it for now! 

Cheers!

Joar

Warlords of Draenor

Warlords of Draenor is the expansion I think about when someone tells me WoW can't disappoint me anymore. It started as strong as any expansion ever has, and then it just stopped, and the way it stopped taught me something about what I actually want out of this game.

The opening was genuinely great. The intro on the Tanaan Peninsula, blowing through the Dark Portal in reverse, the leveling zones through Draenor, all of it hit. The old orc warlords were a fun hook, the questing was tight, and for a few weeks it felt like Blizzard had a real one on their hands.

Then there was the garrison. Your own base, your own little plot of Draenor, and on paper it sounded fantastic. In practice it quietly ate the game. Everything you needed came to your garrison. Materials, missions, followers doing the work for you while you watched a table. Why fly out to a zone when the zone comes to your doorstep? Why stand around in a city when your garrison has everything? I logged in, made my rounds like I was checking on a farm, made a ton of gold, and logged out having barely seen another player. The most social game I own turned me into a hermit, and it did it on purpose.

And then came the drought. Content dried up, the patches stopped landing, and we sat in that garrison for well over a year with nothing new before Legion finally showed up to bail everyone out. It was the longest stretch of nothing WoW had ever put me through. Some people feel the same way about Siege of Orgrimmar, but this one felt worse for me.  We've already talked about the insanity that I was trying during that particular long piece of content. 

A lot of people quit in that gap. I didn't fully quit, but I got as close as I've ever come, and I played a lot of other games.

My altoholism also made great strides during Warlords, and I was up to 20 different max-level alts by the end, and was very close to the goal of having a different character of each class AND each faction by the end.  I think it was just an alliance monk and an alliance warriro that I didn't finish.  But imagine having a garrison on all of those alts and doing all the various garrison chores on all of them every single day.  

Draenor is the cautionary tale. Great bones, a killer opening, and a flagship feature that isolated everybody and then left them there. I learned that I don't just want things to do in this game. I want reasons to bump into other people while I do them. Warlords is what it looks like when you take that away.

That's it for now!

Cheers!

Joar 

Where My Ideas Actually Come From

People assume there's a system. That after seventeen years of posting there must be a notebook, a list, some process where I sit down and brainstorm topics like a real content operation. There isn't. Except for this month for Blaugust.  This month, there definitely is.  In general, there really isn't.  The honest answer to where the ideas come from is messier and a lot less impressive.

Not even sure what this is

Most of them show up while I'm playing. Not while I'm thinking about writing. While I'm halfway through a delve, or standing at the mailbox sorting bags, and some small thing snags. A mechanic that annoys me. A feature I love that nobody talks about. A memory of an old zone that Cataclysm paved over. The idea isn't the post. The idea is just the snag, the little burr that won't come off, and if it's still bugging me an hour later, there's probably eight hundred words in it.

Frustration is the most reliable source, honestly. Some of my best posts started as me being irritated about something and needing to work out on the page whether I was right to be. Enthusiasm works too, but it's rarer, and it's harder to write well without tipping into gushing. Annoyance has edges. Edges are easier to write around.

The other big source is a screenshot. I take way more than I use. Every so often I'll be scrolling back through them, and one will remind me of exactly how I felt in that moment, and that feeling is usually the actual subject, with the game as the excuse to talk about it.

But most of the time I just talk about what I've been playing, what characters I've been leveling and how, and what I think about it.  A vast majority of my 640+ posts don't have any fantastic theme or subject.  It's just me talking about what I've been doing in video games.

What I don't do is force it. I said a few days ago that the fastest way to kill a blog is to turn it into a calendar you owe somebody, and this is the flip side of that. If nothing's snagging, or I haven't been doing much, I don't post. The ideas come when they come. My only real job is to notice them when they do, and to not talk myself out of the ones that seem too small. The small ones are usually the good ones.

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar

Mists of Pandaria

Mists of Pandaria got laughed at before anyone had played a minute of it. Kung fu pandas. A whole expansion about kung fu pandas, plus a pet-battle system a lot of people immediately wrote off as WoW doing Pokémon. I remember the reaction to the announcement, and it was not kind. It also turned out to be one of my favorite expansions in the whole run, and I've never really backed off that.

The joke fell apart the second you actually got to Pandaria. The place was gorgeous. The Jade Forest, the Valley of the Four Winds, the Vale, all of it hand-built with a care that the goofy marketing completely undersold. And the pandaren weren't a punchline once you spent time with them. There was a melancholy running under the whole continent, this sense that fear and doubt were literal monsters here, that stuck with me more than most WoW stories do.

Even the pet battles I'd rolled my eyes at hooked me for a while, and I'm not proud of the hours I spent chasing rare critters around zones I'd already cleared. That's the MoP magic in miniature. The stuff that sounded dumb on paper was quietly some of the best-designed content they'd shipped.

I did what I always do. Leveled at my own pace, leveled a new panda alt, ran heroics and LFR, poked at scenarios, never went anywhere near the cutting-edge raiding. And I had a better time doing it than in expansions with far better reputations.

I also finally hit the goal of having a character at max level from every class during this expansion.  And then quickly moved on to starting on the same thing on the alliance side.  

Oh, and I did the rep grinds.  That was probably the least great part.  And I killed a lot of rares, which was another great addition to this expansion.

Mists is also where I pulled off the single most absurd thing I've ever done in this game, and I mean that as a compliment to myself. The expansion ended with the Siege of Orgrimmar, and Garrosh Hellscream waiting at the bottom of it. I killed him on a character of every single class. All of them. If the altoholism ever needed a monument, that's it, one dead warchief for every class in the game, most of it through the Raid Finder, one run at a time, over and over until I'd taken him down from every angle WoW would let me. Nobody asked me to do that. Nobody should. I did it anyway, and I'd do it again.  

It was also an expansion where I found myself getting oddly attached to and protective of Anduin Wrynn, which is kind of weird for a Horde guy, but he brought me some hope and stood up for what was right, and I got a little emotional about it.  Still have a soft spot for him, and he's been through some shit now.

Draenor was right around the corner and it would remind me how badly this can go. Mists was the opposite of that. It was WoW being confident and a little weird and completely committed to the bit.

If you skipped Pandaria because the trailer made you groan, you missed one of the good ones. I'll die on that hill, panda and all.

That's it for now! Cheers! Joar

Why I've Stopped Playing FFXIV

After a pretty solid week of World of Warcraft discussions, I thought I'd take today to being to toss in some discussions on other games.

I gave Final Fantasy XIV a real shot. Not a weekend, not a free trial I abandoned in the starting city. A couple of years, an actual subscription, a character and jobs I put genuine hours into. And I still stopped. This is my attempt to be honest about why, without doing the tribal thing where you have to trash one game to justify playing another.

And of course I did the altoholic thing, FFXIV style.  By the end of Endwalker, I had every job at max level on my character.

Because here's the thing. FFXIV is good. It's clearly, obviously good, and the people who love it aren't wrong. The story people rave about really is that well told. The community is about as friendly as any I've dropped into. The presentation, the music, the sheer care in it, all of that is real and I'm not going to sit here and pretend otherwise.

And I embraced it for a long time and thought I'd found a new home after WoW disappointed me with Shadowlands.  But at the end, it just wasn't for me, and I think it comes down to two things. The first is the story itself, which is the game's biggest strength and, for me, its biggest wall. FFXIV asks you to sit through an enormous amount of narrative to get to the parts everyone talks about. I respect people who did it. I found myself skipping cutscenes I'd promised myself I'd watch, and once you're skipping the thing the game is built around, you have to ask what you're actually there for.  But at some point it just felt like I was moving my character from cut scene to cut scene instead of actually playing.

A second reason is that, in order to level alt jobs in FFXIV, you can't just go back to the beginning and start questing again.  Really the only way to do it is to do group content, and that just didn't fit as well with my play style.

The last is simpler and a little embarrassing. It wasn't WoW. Seventeen years of muscle memory means I sit down in another MMO and half my brain is comparing the map, the bags, the way abilities feel, to a game I already know in my bones. That's not FFXIV's fault. That's mine. But it's real, and it's why almost nothing else has ever fully stuck.

So I let the sub lapse, no drama, no burned bridge. I'd tell anyone on the fence to try it, honestly. It might grab you the way it grabs its people. It just turned out that it wasn't the replacement for WoW for me.

But when the next expansion drops, don't be surprised if you see me jump back in to try out the new stuff.  

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar 

Cataclysm

Cataclysm is the expansion that took the world I'd spent a few years in and rearranged the furniture while I was out of the room. Deathwing came up through the middle of Azeroth and broke it, and Blizzard used that as the excuse to rebuild the entire old world. Every low-level zone I'd leveled through a dozen times was suddenly different. That was the whole pitch, and it landed as a strange mix of exciting and unsettling.

I have complicated feelings about it, and I think most people who were around then do too. On one hand, the revamp was genuinely impressive. Zones that had been dull, disconnected quest-strings for years finally told a story, flowed properly, made sense. And they finally let you fly in the old world, which is the kind of thing that sounds small until you've spent hundreds of hours running around Azeroth on the ground. Two new races, Worgen and Goblin, and I rolled both just to see the starting zone, because of course I did.

On the other hand, there was a loss in it I didn't fully clock at the time. The old world I'd learned WoW in was gone. Not updated. Gone. The rough, sprawling, slightly broken 2004 version that pulled a lot of us in got paved over, and you can't go back and visit. Classic servers eventually gave people that, years later, and the fact that they were so popular tells you I wasn't the only one who missed it.

Cataclysm was also the expansion during which I joined the guild that I'm still in today, at least with my main Horde characters.  That alone has provided quite a bit of stability for me in the times since then.

It was also the expansion during which I started to get more deliberate about my alt leveling process.  I have tracking data from Cataclysm on my leveling times to max.  The average was around 24.7 hours.  I still didn't have a character of each class at max level, but I was only missing one or two by the end of the expansion.

The endgame gets a mixed reputation and I won't pretend I loved all of it. The heroics at launch were brutal, on purpose, and plenty of people bounced. But Cataclysm handed me something that mattered more to me than any raid tier list, and it's the reason I'll always have a soft spot for it. This is the expansion where they added the Raid Finder, LFR, first bolted onto the Dragon Soul raid near the end. For a guy who was never going to schedule his life around a raid roster, that was the door finally opening. I could walk into current raid content, see the fights everybody was talking about, and put Deathwing down myself. And because I'm the way I am, I didn't see it once and move on. I ran it across a whole stack of characters, watching the same raid unfold from behind a warlock, then a paladin, then whatever else I had parked at the cap. LFR is the thing that let me actually experience this game's raids, and it started here.

Cataclysm was ambitious in a way WoW rarely is. It also spent its ambition redecorating the past instead of building the future. I respect it more than I enjoyed it.

That's it for now! 

Cheers!

Joar

The Altoholic Confession

I have a main. An undead warlock that I've been playing for over 19 years, and never seriously wavered. And I still can't stop rolling alts. Both of those things are true, and if that sounds like a contradiction, welcome to my armory page.

The 52 characters that I leveled to max in War Within

Here's how it goes. I'll be perfectly happy on the warlock, chipping away at whatever the current thing is, and then I'll see a class and race combo that I don't have, or a class gets reworked, or Blizzard releases a new class or a new allied race or something. Next thing I know I've got yet another character plugging along towards max level. I've leveled the same early zones so many times I could quest them with the monitor off.  And that eventually ends up being true for the leveling process for each expansion.

And it has gotten completely insane.  Going into midnight I had 52 different max level characters.  I hadn't been anywhere close to that since Battle for Azeroth, where I think I finished with 43.  And it's spread across everything.  The most of a particular class that I have is warlock at 7 and hunter at 6, druid at 5 and then every other class is either 3 or 4.  Evoker only has 2 at max level, but I had started a third and was working on it when midnight dropped.  So 53 alts in total.

The honest reason isn't that I want to master every class. I'm not chasing anything. It's that a fresh character is a fresh start with no baggage. No half-finished reputations, no bags full of stuff I'm afraid to vendor, no sense that I'm behind. Level one is clean. Level one is possible. There's something genuinely relaxing about being bad at the game again on purpose.

It's also just that I honestly enjoy the leveling process and it fits in well with my schedule and my play time these days.

The catch is that spreading yourself across dozens of characters means none of them are ever quite where they should be. I've felt behind on my own main because I was off playing pretend on a rogue I wasn't even enjoying that much. That's the altoholic tax, and I've paid it for years.

Which is exactly why the current plan is warlock-only. Renown, delves, events, world bosses, all of it on the one character, alts parked. It's the most disciplined I've been about this game in a decade, and I give it maybe even odds of surviving the next class patch. The itch doesn't really go away. You just negotiate with it.

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar

Wrath of the Lich King

 Ask a hundred WoW players which expansion was the best and a good chunk of them, without hesitating, will say Wrath. I'm one of them. I've played every expansion since, and none of them ever quite got back to what Northrend felt like in 2009.

Part of it was the setup. TBC pulled me in, but Wrath was the first expansion I got to walk into on day one, already max level, already ready, no old-world slog standing between me and the new stuff. You picked a boat to Howling Fjord or a zeppelin to Borean Tundra, and either way you dropped into a continent that actually felt like a place. Snow, longships, vrykul, a mystery hanging over the whole thing. And behind all of it, the one villain the game had been building toward since before I ever logged in. Arthas. The Lich King on his throne, waiting the entire expansion.

Wrath is also where the wheels came off, in the best way. I'd been a one-character guy through TBC, faithful to the undead warlock. Then Wrath added the Death Knight, the first hero class, starting at level 55 with that fantastic intro questline, and I had to try it. Then dual specs showed up and suddenly respeccing wasn't a tax. I'd already toyed with an alliance hunter a little bit.  Then I rolled a Blood Elf paladin just to see, and that was it. A druid and shaman were not far behind. The altoholism I'll confess to later this month started right here. I blame Northrend entirely.

I wasn't in there clearing Icecrown the week it dropped. But Wrath is where the Dungeon Finder landed, in patch 3.3, and that quietly changed the game for a player like me. Suddenly you could queue up, get dropped into a random heroic with four strangers, and actually grind out the gear to be ready for a raid without having to build your whole evening around organizing one. I ran a lot of those five-mans. I geared up more reliably than I ever had, and I saw the Lich King go down eventually, well after the people who are good at this game had moved on. Didn't matter. Getting there at my own pace, on my own characters, was the whole point.

I also should mention that I never had a consistent guild up through Wrath.  That didn't gel for me until Cataclysm.  So I was always bouncing around trying new guilds.  Sometimes seeing if a more serious raiding guild would fit, or trying something casual, or signing up with whatever random person messaged me while I was out leveling.

I also have to give Wintergrasp its due. I'm not generally much of a PvP guy, although I have had my moments where I've done quite a bit.   The itch hits me occasionally, and that big battle out in the Northrend snow was the most fun I've ever had with the PvP side of WoW. Whole raids of players fighting over a keep, siege vehicles rolling in, the whole zone flipping back and forth. When it was about to pop I'd drop whatever I was doing and go. That kind of thing almost never grabs me. That one did.

People argue Wrath was the peak and it's been downhill since. I don't fully buy that. But I understand exactly why they say it.

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar

Seventeen Years of Blogging

Seventeen years. Somewhere between twenty-one and seventy-seven posts a year, depending on how much life was in the way. It works out to more than six hundred posts about a video game and the guy playing it, written under a name that isn't mine, for an audience some years I could count on two hands.

When people find out, they ask why anyone keeps a blog going that long with numbers like that. Fair question. Here's the honest answer.

I kept going because I never made it a job. The second a blog turns into a content calendar you owe somebody, it dies. Mine has gone dark for months at a stretch. Whole expansions where I barely posted. Then something clicks, I get the itch, and I'm back once or twice a week like I never left. I stopped feeling guilty about that a long time ago. The blog is a place I go when I have something to say, not a machine I have to feed.

The other reason is the people. Not a big crowd, but a real one. The same handful of names in the comments, year after year. Other bloggers I've never met in person and would still call friends. That's a hard thing to explain to somebody who doesn't do this, but if you do it, you get it right away.

And I'll admit the pen name helps. Joar isn't quite me. He's the part of me that plays too much WoW and doesn't have to answer to anybody about it. Writing as him is easier than writing as myself, for reasons I'll get into later this month.

Seventeen years is a long time to keep doing anything for no particular reason. But that's sort of the reason. Nobody's paying me, nobody's making me, and I'm still here.

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar

The Burning Crusade

I didn't start with Vanilla. I know that's practically heresy in some circles, but it's the truth. The expansion that actually pulled me into World of Warcraft and never let go was The Burning Crusade.

Picture where I was. Everybody I knew was already max level, already geared, already talking about a game I'd never touched. So I rolled a character and started the long grind to 60, through the same Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor zones that hadn't really been touched in a while by everyone else. That part wasn't glamorous. It was a slog, and plenty of people bounced off the old world before they ever saw the new stuff. But then you hit 60, stepped through the Dark Portal, and dropped into Outland. Hellfire Peninsula is not most people's idea of beautiful. Red dirt, broken rock, a sky the color of a bruise. I loved it. After all those hours in the old world, it felt like somewhere new, and new was exactly what I wanted.

Then came the thing TBC is remembered for most, at least for me. Flying mounts at 70. The first time you lift off in Netherstorm and realize you can just go anywhere, the whole game cracks open. Of course, you needed a ton of gold to buy it then, so that piece took a while too.  There were also the two new races too, Blood Elves and Draenei, and half the server rolled one. I didn't. I stuck with my undead warlock, the character I'd started on and have mained ever since. The Blood Elf paladin didn't show up until Wrath, once the altoholism really got going.

I wasn't raiding Black Temple or anything close to it. I did a little Karazhan, mostly with a guild that had more patience than I deserved, and I'll get into why the high-end stuff was never for me another day this month. But TBC is where I learned the loop that's kept me here for seventeen years. Log in, chip away at something, fly somewhere new, log out a little more attached than when I started.

People argue endlessly about which expansion was the best. I won't pretend TBC was flawless or would even make my top three. The attunement grinds were brutal and I bounced off a couple of them completely. But it's the one that turned me into a WoW player instead of a guy who happened to own WoW, and you only get one of those.

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar

Blaugust 2026

Good morning, Friends. Belghast opened that way, most mornings, for as long as I can remember. Felt like the right thing to borrow for day one.

Thirty-one posts in thirty-one days. That's the plan, and I'm starting today.

If you've spent any time in the gaming blogosphere, you already know Blaugust. Every August, the people who write about games try to post every single day for a month. I've never come anywhere close. Some years I manage a decent run and then fall off, some years I barely show up. Posting all thirty-one days would be a huge stretch for me. This year I'm going to try anyway, and I want to be clear up front about why.

Blaugust was Bel's. He took a small annual blogging challenge and grew it into a real community event, dozens of people posting all month, cheering each other on, dragging the quiet blogs back to life for a few weeks. He died in July, in the middle of another round of chemo. I wrote about that already and I'm not going to do it again here. What I'll say is this. The best way I know to honor a guy who wrote nearly every day of his life is to sit down and write.

So that's what August is. Thirty-one days, one post a day.

I've got a rough map. Eleven posts on WoW expansions, one for almost every one we've had, from Burning Crusade all the way up to Midnight. A handful on writing and the blog itself. Six on the other MMOs that grabbed me over the years and then let go. And nine on the habits and confessions of being an altoholic who's been at this game for way too long.

Really?  We're doing this?

Some of these posts will be good. Some will be four hundred words I bang out at eleven at night because I refuse to break the streak. That's the deal you sign with Blaugust, and honestly that's the point. Show up, say the thing, hit publish, do it again tomorrow.

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar