WoW Forever: I Was There The First Time

At some point, keeping track of the different versions of World of Warcraft starts to feel like a game of its own. There is the current game, Classic, the various trips through old expansions and experiments with the original experience. Now there is WoW Forever.

I’m going to sit this one out.

For anyone else trying to keep the versions straight, Forever builds on the original WoW foundation with new content while retaining the older game’s design and pacing. It is another direction for that version of Azeroth to develop, alongside the current game and Classic. So there is more going on here than simply opening another set of servers and asking everyone to start over.

Even so, the appeal depends quite a bit on wanting to spend more time in that earlier version of WoW. I was there at the time, and I don’t feel much need to revisit twenty years ago.

That is really the deciding factor for me. I don’t have enough gaming time available to play everything that interests me now. Adding another version of WoW means taking time away from something else, and the prospect of returning to the original era does not make that a particularly difficult decision. There are current games and current stories I would rather spend that time on.

New content within the old framework may be exactly what some players want. I can understand the distinction between preserving the original game and giving it somewhere else to go. But understanding the appeal does not mean I feel it myself. I don’t need another opportunity to try to recapture my gaming youth.

There is also something a little confusing about following a franchise where going back to the beginning now comes with several different options. I’m sure the differences are clear enough if you are invested in those versions. From where I’m sitting, it is getting harder to explain which WoW someone is talking about without a follow-up question.

What I’m actually playing

Meanwhile, I’m continuing to play a little Aion 2 and getting caught up on the new content in Midnight. So WoW is still getting some of my time. It is just the current version that interests me.

FFXIV, on the other hand, has lost me again. I have officially unsubscribed.

The problems I discussed last week were enough to bring this latest return to an end. Waiting nearly an hour for a trial required to progress the main story felt like a colossal waste of the limited time I had available. That came on top of the feeling that much of the main story involved watching scenes and clicking through dialogue, with relatively little actual gameplay outside the dungeons and trials. Then, when I reached one of those, I had the wait to contend with.

I wanted to get caught up, but that combination was not working for me. There is only so much of a gaming session I want to spend waiting to play.

For now, a little Aion 2 and catching up in Midnight are enough. Forever can carry on without me. I already did my time in that version of Azeroth, and I have other things I want to play.

Cheers,

Joar

An Hour in Queue is Not Playing The Game

 

I've been making some progress catching up on the Final Fantasy XIV story since resubscribing a couple of weeks ago. I've now made it through the portion of the post-Dawntrail content that concludes with Calyx and his rather bizarre primal.

And in the process, I've been reminded of some of the reasons I stopped playing FFXIV in the first place.

The biggest issue came when I reached the trial that concludes that portion of the story. It's a required part of the MSQ, so there's no getting around it if you want to continue.

I spent almost an hour waiting in the queue.

An hour.

I realize that queues have always been a part of playing MMOs, particularly when you're catching up on older content. But with the relatively limited amount of time I spend gaming these days, sitting around waiting for a group to form feels like a colossal waste of time.

And it brought another frustration into focus.

Am I Playing a Game or Watching a Movie?

FFXIV has always been a story-heavy game. That's certainly nothing new, and the MSQ has always been central to the experience.

But as I've been catching up, I've been struck by how little actual gameplay seems to be involved in much of it.

There are long stretches where I'm essentially watching a movie, except that I have to keep clicking to advance each line of dialogue.

Then, eventually, I reach a dungeon or trial where there's some actual gameplay involved. Except now I may have to sit in a queue for a substantial amount of time before I can continue.

It's a strange combination.

I spend a lot of time advancing dialogue, and then when I finally get to the parts where I actually play the game, I may spend almost as much time waiting to do so.

I'm not suggesting that FFXIV should abandon its focus on storytelling. That's obviously an enormous part of its identity. But I do find myself wishing there were more opportunities to actually play my character as part of the MSQ, rather than moving from one conversation to the next.

It also helps explain why Dawntrail was the expansion that finally caused me to step away, even though I couldn't entirely put my finger on the reason at the time.

I haven't finished all the content I want to catch up on yet, so I'm not ready to make a final judgment. But the experience so far hasn't exactly convinced me that my earlier frustrations were misplaced.

Meanwhile, Aion 2

I also downloaded Aion 2 this week and have spent about two hours playing it.

That's obviously nowhere near enough time to form a serious opinion about a new MMO, but I've enjoyed what I've played so far and expect I'll spend more time with it.

It's an interesting contrast to returning to FFXIV.

With Aion 2, I'm starting something new and seeing whether it manages to hold my interest. With FFXIV, I'm returning to a game I know extremely well, trying to work through a backlog of content while rediscovering some of the things that made me leave.

I'll be curious to see where the two games end up.

I'd still like to finish getting caught up on FFXIV and give the post-Dawntrail content a fair assessment. But I'm increasingly aware that the amount of time a game asks me to spend doing things I don't particularly enjoy matters a lot more than it used to.

Especially when I could be spending that hour actually playing something else.

Cheers,

Joar

September Month In Review

Another month, another instance of me screwing up my TempusGameIt data.

The official total for September is 3 hours and 10 minutes, but that isn't quite right. When I reinstalled FFXIV, I forgot to run a new scan, so there's probably about an hour and 15 minutes of FFXIV play missing.

That puts the real total somewhere around 4 hours and 25 minutes.

Still not exactly a huge gaming month.

Guild Wars 2 accounted for about two hours of the recorded time, while World of Warcraft managed all of 29 minutes. FFXIV doesn't really show up at all because of my tracking mistake.

I already wrote about most of the reasons behind those numbers last week, so I won't go through all of that again. The short version is that my attempt to catch up in Guild Wars 2 came to a frustrating stop, WoW continues to give me very little reason to stick around once I log in, and I finally reinstalled FFXIV and started working through the story content I've missed.

So, despite what the tracker says, FFXIV is probably the most interesting part of September.

Looking Ahead to October

For now, that's where I expect most of my gaming time to go.

I'm going to keep working through the FFXIV content I've missed and see how far I can get. I'm enjoying being back so far, although I haven't played enough yet to know whether this return is really going to stick.

The potential obstacle is gear.

At some point I may hit a wall where I need better gear to keep moving forward. I'm not particularly interested in getting back into a regular raid cycle just to catch up, so if that happens I'll probably see how far I can get using tokens and other upgrade paths instead.

I'm mostly interested in seeing the story and getting myself current again.

Guild Wars 2 is still sitting there if I decide I want another shot at it. WoW obviously isn't going anywhere. But neither one is particularly high on my list for October right now.

Of course, given how my gaming plans have gone lately, check back in a month and see if I actually did any of that.

Cheers,

Joar

Reinstalled FFXIV, Still Logging Out of WoW

I reinstalled FFXIV and resubscribed last week. I’ve even played a little bit, which seems like a useful step beyond simply paying for it again.

Not much yet. Mostly I’ve started getting caught up on the story I missed while I was away. I’m still at the beginning of that process, so this isn’t going to be a detailed report on everything that’s happened since I last played.

The thing that finally pushed me to reinstall it was Guild Wars 2. Specifically, a jumping puzzle.

I had fully intended to get caught up on the current story there. Then I reached a part that required completing a jumping puzzle to continue. As far as I can remember, this is the first time they’ve gated part of the story behind one.

I’m terrible at jumping puzzles. Playing on a laptop may be part of the problem, but I can’t give the laptop all the credit. I’m generally just not very good at them.

This is the part of the story where I currently am

I tried it for a while. Eventually, my frustration with the jumping overcame my interest in finding out what happened next in the story. That’s where I left it.

I may go back and give it another try, but I may also be done with Guild Wars 2. I haven’t decided. What I do know is that getting stuck there, more than anything else, is what sent me back to FFXIV.

After writing recently about how hard I’d found it to get back into FFXIV, I figured actually reinstalling it deserved an update. Catching up had helped kill off at least one previous attempt to return. This time I’ve made a start. We’ll see how it goes.

World of Warcraft, meanwhile, continues to be a game I open and then close again.

There have been plenty of times lately when I’ve logged in, looked at my character, or looked at whichever alt I would normally be leveling next, and then logged right back out. Apparently choosing a character is about as far as I’m getting with the whole process right now.

I wish I could explain why. At this point, I’m not sure I can. I can describe what I’m doing a lot more easily than I can explain what’s behind it. There’s an obvious next character to play, but looking at that character isn’t making me want to play it.

I’m not saying I’ll never go back to WoW. I’m just not feeling it right now, and I don’t have a prediction for when that will change.

For the moment, I’m playing a little FFXIV and catching up on its story. Guild Wars 2 is waiting on my willingness to attempt that jumping puzzle again, and WoW is waiting on an interest in playing that I can’t seem to find right now. I hadn’t expected a jumping puzzle to be what got me to resubscribe to FFXIV, but here we are.

Cheers,
Joar

Catching Up in Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 has been getting most of my gaming time since last week’s post. There hasn’t been a huge amount of that, which isn’t particularly unusual these days, but it’s been good to spend some time getting caught up.

I’m a couple of major content patches behind, so there’s still plenty for me to work through. At least for now, I’m enjoying that more than doing the same old grind in WoW. Nothing especially dramatic to report on that front. Guild Wars 2 is just holding my interest a little better at the moment.

It feels like they’re moving toward some kind of wrap-up, although that’s more an impression than a prediction. I’ll see how that feels as I get further along. Being behind does mean I have some catching up to do before I start getting too confident about where things are going!

Meanwhile, I’m still thinking about resubbing to FFXIV to finish out the Dawntrail storyline before Evercold drops. As I mentioned last week, Dawntrail was the expansion that made me stop playing, and trying to catch up got in the way of my last attempt to return. So there’s a little history working against that idea.

Even so, I’m interested enough to be considering it again. Finishing the storyline is the thing I have in mind for now. I haven’t actually pulled the trigger on a subscription yet.

That leaves me with some Guild Wars 2 catch-up underway and a possible FFXIV return still at the thinking-about-it stage. We’ll see whether that second one turns into any actual playing.

Cheers,

Joar

Guild Wars 3, Evercold and Another Try

Guild Wars 3 and FFXIV's Evercold have both caught my interest. I've played both of their predecessors, although my relationship with FFXIV is a little more complicated at this point. Guild Wars 2 is still a game I enjoy hopping back into. FFXIV is one I've tried to return to without managing to make it stick.

Dawntrail was the expansion that made me stop playing, and I still can't entirely put my finger on why. I've tried to write about it before, but I haven't arrived at a particularly satisfying explanation. I can identify the expansion where I stopped. Explaining what changed for me has been harder.

I've tried coming back at least once since then. On the last attempt, the issues with catching up pretty much killed it. That makes Evercold a harder sell. A new expansion can get me interested in what's ahead, but there's still the question of getting from wherever I left off to the part I want to try.

I haven't followed everything being announced for Evercold, so I don't have a detailed opinion on its features yet. It's currently scheduled for January 2027, and I'll probably at least give it a try when it releases. Apparently, even having trouble explaining why I left doesn't prevent me from being curious about coming back.

There's also Beastmaster, the new limited job that arrived with patch 7.56. That has caught my eye too. I haven't tried it yet, but it's something I'd like to take a look at. Whether that turns into another serious attempt at returning to FFXIV is a separate question.

Guild Wars 3 has a more straightforward appeal for me. I've been playing Guild Wars 2 off and on for a few years now, and I still enjoy it when I go back. I'm not entirely caught up on the latest two content installments, but that hasn't stopped it being a game I want to return to.

My history with it wasn't quite that simple at the beginning. I played at launch, but it didn't stick then. I didn't really come back until much later, around Path of Fire, if I'm remembering correctly. Most of my time with Guild Wars 2 has therefore been with a game that had already had quite a while to grow.

The chance to start fresh with a new Guild Wars is attractive. I like the idea of giving the next one a try from the beginning, with the benefit of knowing that its predecessor eventually became something I enjoyed. Of course, I was there at the beginning of Guild Wars 2 as well, so launch attendance apparently isn't the whole answer.

There's still a wait ahead. ArenaNet's announcement points to a Guild Wars 3 beta in fall 2027. In the meantime, I still have Guild Wars 2 content to catch up on, and Beastmaster is already there if I decide to take another look at FFXIV.

For now, I'm interested in both. Evercold has some work to do to bring me back, while Guild Wars 3 offers a fresh start in a series I still enjoy. I'm curious to see where each of those goes.

Cheers,

Joar

Loremaster, Two Tier Pieces, and then Nothing

I finished Loremaster for Midnight, picked up my first two pieces of tier, and then stopped playing entirely. All inside about three weeks. Let me back up.

The patch dropped while we were in Vancouver for Jake's meet, which meant I was in a hotel room in another country with a laptop and a lot of downtime between sessions. Best possible timing. I played more that week than I had all summer sitting at home with nothing stopping me.

Loremaster got done while I was waiting on week two to unlock, and that one actually felt like something. I don't chase many achievements anymore, but Loremaster is the one I still go after every expansion, and knocking it out on Joar at eleven at night in a hotel room was a genuinely good couple of evenings.

On the patch itself. I liked the story for the most part. What I did not like is what a production it is to get out to the new zone. Every single time. There's no reason that should still be a chore.

The new Vaults area I'm just not a fan of. I did everything there the first two weeks, looked at what week three wanted from me, and decided I was done. It's another grind in a new hat. We have all played this one before.

The two new delves in the zone are good though! Really good. Delves are still the best thing they've added in years and these two hold up with the better ones.

And I've got two tier pieces now, which is a little ridiculous for a guy who has played roughly one week of this patch. Delves doing the heavy lifting again.

Mining and herbalism are fine. The switch works about how I hoped, gathering is low-commitment in a way modern crafting absolutely is not, and I can do it in ten minute chunks without planning my evening around it. I also still regret dropping the crafting a bit, and I don't think that regret is going anywhere. I'll live.

Now the part I didn't plan on writing when I sat down.

I have not logged in once since we got back from Vancouver.

It isn't a time problem. There have been plenty of open mornings and evenings. I've sat down at the computer with nothing scheduled and no reason in the world not to play, and I just wasn't interested. And it isn't only WoW. I haven't wanted to pick up anything at all. Not Guild Wars, not anything else sitting installed and waiting on me.

I don't know what that means yet. The obvious guess is that gaming filled a slot in my old life that my new one doesn't have. Which is backwards from what I expected, because I distinctly remember thinking retirement was going to mean more hours in Azeroth, not fewer. Apparently the hours were never the constraint.

I also noticed that, despite my efforts to post every day for 31 days and filling out the self-reporting form, I didn't get credit on the final Blaugust awards for my efforts.  I was upset at first, but then I realized that my blog name showing up on a list wasn't really why I was doing it anyway, so that quickly faded.  I know the folks that are running that now are busy and overwhelmed by the participation, but it was still a little disappointing.  Neither of my blogs got mentioned at all.

Anyway. Loremaster done, two pieces of tier, and a warlock standing in a capital city exactly where I left him three weeks ago.

Cheers,

Joar

August Month In Review

August came in at 2 hours and 24 minutes.

That number is wrong and I want to say so before anybody gets attached to it.

Here's what the tracker gave me. 1 hour in WoW. 56 minutes in Guild Wars 2. And then 28 minutes filed under something, somewhere, doing who knows what. I have no idea. It's a rounding error with a mystery attached.

The real number is more like 10 to 15 hours, and almost all of the missing time happened in Vancouver.

We went up for Junior Pan Pacs. Jake was traveling with Team USA, which means he was with his team and I was a guy in a hotel room in a foreign country with a laptop and a lot of downtime between sessions. So I played. More in that week than I'd played at home all summer, actually. And apparently almost none of it got recorded, because I forgot to update the app, and then the new patch also updated the game, and I don't think I ran a new scan.  Whether being outside the country made it worse, I honestly don't know. Seems like the kind of thing that could matter.

So there it is. A guy who spent an entire career on the quality of reported numbers, publishing a monthly figure he doesn't believe, in the same month he wrote thirty-one blog posts about the game he apparently only played for an hour. Beautiful.

Speaking of which. Blaugust. Thirty-one posts, thirty-one days, all of them up.

I have never finished Blaugust before. Not once, and not close. I've started it plenty of times and always trailed off somewhere in the second week when life got loud. This year I got all the way to the end, and doing it for Bel is the only reason I made it. I'm still a little surprised.

In terms of the play itself, I ran through all the new content and the new zone.  It's interesting, but I'm not sure I'll be doing a ton more of it.  Seems a bit grindy to me.  I also finished up Loremaster for Midnight on Joar, which is something I'm always proud of.  I like to see all the quests and side stories.  

The brief excursion into Guild Wars 2 is because I'm not fully current on the content there, so I did a little bit of that and unlocked some new areas and things.  It had been a while, so I'd forgotten a bit about where the story left us, but I'm getting back up to speed.

September should be a normal month, whatever that means anymore. Back to a weekly-ish posting schedule, back to the warlock, and back to a tracker that I will now be checking before I start playing rather than three weeks later while writing one of these.

Cheers,

Joar

Why I Still Log In After Everything That Has Changed

Day 31. I made it.

I want to sit with that for a second, because I've signed up for Blaugust before and I have never once finished it. Not close. I'd get eight or nine days in, life would do what life does, and the whole thing would quietly stop. Thirty-one straight days of posting has been on my list of things I'd get to eventually for years.

This was the year. And this was the year for one reason, which I said on Day 1 and will say again on the last day. Bel built this thing, Bel isn't here, and finishing it properly was the only tribute I actually had to offer.

So let's close it out with the question the whole month has been circling.

Everything about my situation has changed. Not gradually, either. In the last twelve months I've retired out of a thirty-five year career, sold the house we raised our kids in, watched the youngest leave for college, become a grandfather for the second time, and moved most of the way across the country into a string of short-term rentals with everything I own in a storage unit. My playtime went from 40 to 60 hours a month to 3 to 5. Every single structural reason I ever had for playing this game has been taken apart and put somewhere else.

And I still log in.

Not much. But I still do it, and I've spent this month trying to work out why, and also whether I want to continue.

It isn't the content. Let's be honest about that. I've written eleven expansion posts this month and there are maybe three I'd call great. The game has been up and down for nineteen years, and I've quit it once, for about a year, and I've been bored by it more times than that.

It isn't the achievement either. I finished Loremaster on Joar last week and it was satisfying for about an hour. I have 52 max-level characters and I could not tell you what most of them are for.

If it's anything, it's continuity.

That's the closest word I've got. Almost nothing else in my life has run unbroken for nineteen years. Jobs ended, houses sold, kids grew up and moved out, the whole architecture of who I was for three decades got dismantled in about eight months. And in the middle of all of it, there's a dead warlock in a hood who has been the same the entire time, standing in a game world I know better than the town I now live in. I can log in from an AirBnB in a state I've been in for a few months and be somewhere completely familiar in about ninety seconds.

I don't think I understood that was what I was buying. I started playing this game to stay connected to my oldest son. He was ten or eleven, living with my ex-wife 450 miles away, and an MMO was somewhere the two of us could actually be in the same place on a Tuesday night. That was the whole reason I made an account. For most of the years since, I'd have told you I kept playing because the game was fun, and it was.

But fun isn't what keeps something in your life for nineteen years. Fun runs out. And my son stopped playing a long, long time ago. What kept it was that it was always there, unchanged in the ways that mattered, while everything around it got rearranged.

That's not nostalgia, either. I'm not logging in to remember 2007. Joar's not a relic, he's just still going, and so am I, and that turns out to be the point.

There's a version of this where I'm the guy who couldn't put down a video game for nineteen years. Some days that's exactly what it is. And I don't know whether I'll still be logging in a year from now, in whatever this new stage turns into. But I've come to think that having one long unbroken thing in a life that changes this much is worth more than it looks like from the outside, and I've stopped needing to defend it. Everybody's got a thing. Mine has an auction house. 

So that's Blaugust 2026. Thirty-one posts, eleven expansions, six other MMOs, and a fair amount of stuff I've never actually written down before. Thanks for reading it, all of you who did, and thanks especially to the people who've been reading this blog since the very beginning.

Bel, this one was for you. I finally finished the thing.

Cheers,

Joar

Gaming As A Married Adult

This is the post I've rewritten the most times this month, and I still don't love it, which is usually a sign the subject is real.

Here's the situation, stated plainly. I've been married a long time. I have three kids, now 30, 21 and 18. I spent thirty-five years in a career that took a great deal of me. And through all of it I have played this game, most weeks, for nineteen years. Those facts have never sat comfortably next to each other.

The time is the easy part, and it's not actually easy. There is no such thing as free time when you have young kids and a job with a travel schedule. There's leftover time, and leftover time happens after everyone else is down. So for a solid decade my gaming happened between about ten at night and midnight, in a quiet house, with the volume low. That's not a complaint. That's just where the hours were. It also explains a lot about why I ended up an altoholic instead of a raider. You can level an alt in ninety minutes of leftover time. You cannot commit to a raid team.

The guilt is harder to talk about, and I think it's nearly universal among adults with a hobby that looks like nothing from the outside.

If I spend two hours on a Saturday reading a book, nobody in my house registers it. Two hours on a bike, that's admirable. Two hours in Azeroth and I catch myself preemptively justifying it before anyone has said a word. Same two hours. Same me. Completely different internal weather. And nobody put that there but me.

The disapproval is real too, and here's where I'll be careful, because it's not only my story to tell. My wife does not like this hobby. She never has. She doesn't play games, has no interest in them, and I don't think she has ever once looked at the screen and seen anything other than a grown man clicking on a dragon. That's a fair reading from where she's standing.

We've never had a war about it. Nobody has ever issued an ultimatum, and I want to be clear about that, because "gamer versus disapproving spouse" is a tired story and it isn't ours. What we have is quieter and more ordinary. A hobby I mostly don't bring up, and a mild ongoing sense that she'd rather I was doing something else, and both of us being adults about it for a couple of decades.

What I've worked out over nineteen years is that the disapproval was always about attention, and only incidentally about dragons. Any hobby that removes you from the room for two hours is going to register with the people left in the room, and games remove you more completely than most, because you can't half-do a dungeon while somebody talks to you about the calendar. Reading, you can look up. Gaming, you cannot look up, and the person talking to you knows it.

So the honest accommodations, arrived at slowly and never negotiated out loud. I play at the edges of the day. I don't schedule around it. I never once told my family I couldn't do something because of a raid, and I never will. If somebody needs me, the game gets abandoned mid-fight and it can go ahead and be annoyed about it.

Is that the right balance? I genuinely don't know. There's a version of this where I've been quietly apologizing for nineteen years about something that harms nobody, and there's a version where I've been mildly checked out at the edges of a lot of evenings and calling it fine. Both feel true depending on the day.

What I'm sure of is that the hobby has never cost me anything I actually cared about. Not a swim meet, not a graduation, not a conversation somebody needed to have. That's the line, and I've held it.

Everything else is just a man clicking on a dragon after everyone's gone to bed.

Cheers,

Joar

What The Blog Gave Me

Seventeen years is a long time to keep doing anything voluntarily. It's longer than I held all of my jobs. It's almost as long as my youngest kid has been alive. And if you'd asked me in 2008 why I was starting a WoW blog, I'd have given you an answer about wanting somewhere to put my thoughts on the game, which was true and which turned out to be about a tenth of what actually happened.

What I got was people.

That's the whole post, really, but let me do it properly, because it's the last week of Blaugust and this is the one I've been circling all month.

When I started, the WoW blogging scene was enormous. Dozens and dozens of us, all writing into the same small room, reading each other, linking each other, arguing in the comments about talent trees like it mattered. And it did matter, in the way that things matter when a group of people agree together that they do. You'd post something, and within a day somebody three time zones away would post a response, and by the weekend four other blogs had picked it up and taken it somewhere you hadn't thought of. That's a conversation. It just happened to be about a video game

The community outlasted the game topic, which is the part that still surprises me. The people I met through that blog are people I've now been in contact with for over a decade and a half, through expansions, through blog rebrands and hiatuses, through people getting married and having kids and changing careers and losing parents. I have watched entire adult lives unfold in the sidebar of a hobby website. I know things about these people that I don't know about neighbors I've lived next to for years.

And they know a version of me. Not the whole thing, and I've written this month about how that wall came down in pieces rather than all at once. But a real version. The guy who can't stop making alts and gets grumpy about faction war storylines and posts his hours every month. That's genuinely me. It's just me with a different name on it.

Bel is the obvious one to name here, because Blaugust was his, and because this entire month of posts exists for him. He built a thing whose whole purpose was to get people writing and keep them connected to each other, year after year, and he ran it with a generosity I don't think he ever fully clocked. That's what he gave the community. Not content. Infrastructure for a friendship network, disguised as a blogging challenge.

I've thought about that a lot this month, twenty-nine days into doing his event properly for the first time. The thing he understood is that the writing was mostly an excuse. The point was that a couple hundred people had a reason to show up in the same place every August and read each other.

There's a practical gift in here too, and I'd be dishonest to leave it out. Seventeen years of writing two or three hundred words at a time, week after week, will make you a better writer whether you intended it or not. Nobody edited me. Nobody paid me. I just did it, badly at first, for a very long time, and somewhere in there I stopped having to think about how a post is shaped. That skill has been worth more to me outside this hobby than I could have possibly predicted in 2008, and I'll leave it at that.

But the friends are the answer. If I quit WoW tomorrow, and one of these years I probably will, the blog is not the thing I'd lose. I'd lose the reason to keep showing up where those people are.

So I'll keep showing up.

Cheers,

Joar

Why I Started Tracking My Hours Every Month

Every month I post how many hours I played. Not roughly. Not "a fair bit." A number, down to the minutes. May came in at 7 hours and 30 minutes. June was 5 hours and 5 minutes.

I've only been doing this for about two and a half years, which surprises people who assume a guy who blogs his playtime has been at it since Wrath. I hadn't. I'd wanted to for ages and never had a decent way to do it.

What changed is that my friend Kevin Brill built an app called TempusGameIt, and the moment it existed the whole problem went away. That's the honest origin story. Not discipline, not some resolution I made. A friend made a good tool, I started using it, and about a month later I realized I finally had the thing I'd been vaguely wanting for a decade. It does exactly one job and does it well, which is my favorite kind of software.

People ask why I bother. The answer has three parts and only one of them is flattering.

The first part is that I'm an accountant. Thirty-five years of it. I have spent my entire adult life around people who say things like "we're spending a lot on that" and I have spent my entire adult life answering "how much, exactly?" That's not discipline so much as damage. If a thing can be counted, some part of my brain has already started counting it, and once counting it got easy I was never not going to.

The second part is that I did not want the number to be a secret from myself.

There's a specific lie available to anyone with a hobby and a family, and it goes like this. Oh, I barely play anymore. You say it out loud, everybody nods, and nobody checks. I noticed at some point that I didn't actually know whether it was true. I had a feeling about it, and a feeling is not a number.

I mostly wasn't lying, as it turns out. What I found instead was more interesting than a gotcha. My hours don't drift, they cliff. There's no gentle decline. There's forty or fifty hours in a good month and then something happens in real life and the number falls off a table.

Which brings me to the third part, and the one I didn't see coming. The hours aren't really about the game.

Look at this year. A normal month for me is somewhere in the 40 to 60 hour range. Then we put the house on the market and started moving across the country, and May was 7 and a half hours. June was 5. The last few months, in the thick of it, have been running 3 to 5 hours a month total. That's a life statistic wearing a gaming costume. You could hand somebody two years of my playtime log with no other context and they could point at the exact month my life came apart at the seams and got put back together in a different state.

That's what I actually got out of tracking, and it's why I kept going long after the original question was answered. The number measures how much room there was, far more than it measures the hobby.

There's a version of this habit that would be miserable, and I want to be clear I'm not doing that one. I'm not tracking hours to cut them down. No target, no budget, no monthly limit I'm holding myself to, and no guilt attached to a high number. When the number is 60 I don't feel bad about it. That's not what the ledger is for. I've spent enough of my career watching people weaponize a metric against the thing it was supposed to describe, and I'm not doing it to myself over a video game.

It also gave me a post format that writes itself. Here's the number, here's what it went into, here's what was going on in my life that month. Two years of those and I already find them stranger to reread than I expected, which makes me wish I'd had the tool ten years sooner. There's a whole stretch of expansions I have no numbers for at all, and I'd love to know what Legion actually cost me.

Number's low again this month. There's a reason, and it's a good one.

Cheers,

Joar

The Addons I Play With

This seems like an obligatory thing for someone who plays WoW frequently to write about, so I'm not going to fight the obligation.  The list is shorter than you'd think for a nineteen-year player, but it has been obviously impacted by the recent addon apocalypse.

Baganator. Bags. This is the one I'd fight over. When you have as many characters as I do, the bag addon stops being a convenience and becomes infrastructure. One search box, everything I own, across every character and every bank tab. Do I have that reagent somewhere? Which of the fifty-two is holding it? Baganator answers in half a second and saves me the twenty minutes of logging in and out that the answer used to cost. If you're an altoholic and you're still using the default bags, I don't know what to tell you. You're playing on hard mode for no reason.  This is also the newest one on the list.  I used to use AdiBags, but it got killed in the recent transition.

Auctionator. The auction house, made usable. I've said I'm not a gold tycoon and I mean it, but I still don't want to shop in a spreadsheet with no sorting. Auctionator turns posting my gathering hauls into about ninety seconds of work instead of a project.

Titan Panel. A bar at the top of the screen that quietly tells me things. Gold, mainly, and experience per hour when I'm leveling something. And I've come to believe the visible number is the whole point. Nobody tracks gold on purpose. You just put it on screen and after a month you notice you have opinions about the trend. Same reason I track my hours every month, which is tomorrow's post and not a coincidence.

Tidy Plates. Nameplates that tell me what I need at a glance. Who's on me, who's not, what's about to be a problem. It's such an old habit at this point that playing without it feels like driving with a dirty windshield. Everything's still there, technically, you just can't see it.

DBM. Deadly Boss Mods, and not for the reason people assume. I've written a whole post this month about why I'll never raid at the high end, so this isn't a guy optimizing a pull. I run it for delves, world bosses, and my occasional wander into LFR. The encounters I walk into cold, having read nothing, where a large calm voice telling me to move is the difference between finishing the thing and eating the floor.

Details! The damage meter. I know I just said I'm not optimizing anything, and I'm not, but I still want to know what happened. Not to rank myself against strangers. To answer the small questions that come up when you play a warlock badly for nineteen years. Is that new talent actually doing something? Did that trinket do anything at all? Details! answers it, I nod, I move on. It's curiosity, not competition, and I'd have a hard time playing without it now.  It's also the most recent in a long string of damage meters I've used over the years.

World Quest Tracker. Show's me a little bit more info about the currently live world quests and provide a nice little summary off to the side of what's available across all the zones today.  So if I'm looking to upgrade a particular piece of gear or searching for particular renown tokens, it's easy to find them at a glance.

Crap Away. Sells your junk automatically at the vendor. That's the whole thing. It's a tiny addon that does one boring job and it has probably saved me actual hours over the years, because otherwise I am the guy standing at the repair vendor dragging grey items one at a time like it's 2007.

Livestock. Random mount on a keybind. Purely aesthetic, zero function, absolutely staying. I've collected mounts for nineteen years mostly by accident and I'd rather not use the same one every time. One button, surprise horse. It's a small joy and small joys are the ones that survive.

What's not on the list is as telling as what is. No full UI replacement. I've tried ElvUI and the big all-in-one overhauls a few times over the years and they never stuck, because the setup becomes its own hobby and I'd rather spend that time playing. No WeakAuras, and I know exactly what I'm giving up there, and I've made my peace with it. My rotation is not the reason I log in.

Look at the list long enough and there's a pattern in it. Bags, gold, junk, mounts, nameplates, a voice yelling about the fire, and a meter I read out of curiosity after the fact. Almost all of it is inventory management and quality of life. What performance tooling I keep is there to tell me what already happened, not to coach me through what's about to.

That's a pretty honest picture of how I actually play, and I didn't design it. It just accumulated and adjusted, until it was clear what I'd keep and what I wouldn't.

Cheers,

Joar

SWTOR

Star Wars: The Old Republic launched in December 2011 with a promise that sounded, at the time, close to impossible. Eight class stories. Fully voiced. Every conversation, every quest handoff, every throwaway line from a random NPC on Nar Shaddaa. An MMO built like a BioWare single-player game and stretched across a whole galaxy.

I bought that promise immediately, and I want to be clear that it delivered on it.

Here's why it hit me so hard specifically. Eight class stories is altoholic catnip of the purest kind. You want to know how to get a man with a documented inability to main one character to buy your game? Tell him there are eight completely different narratives and he has to roll eight characters to see them. That isn't a game design, that's a personalized trap. I made a Sith Inquisitor. I made a Jedi Knight. I made a smuggler because the smuggler's dialogue was the funniest thing in the game and I have never once regretted that choice.

And the class stories were genuinely good. The Inquisitor arc, going from a slave in a collar to somebody the Dark Council has to take seriously, is a better power fantasy than most of what I've played anywhere. The agent story, which I got to later, is the one everybody talks up and they're right to. When SWTOR was doing the thing it was built to do, nothing else in the genre was close.

And that's not even getting to the part where you could choose between two Advanced Classes for each of those eight, with different play styles for each.

So where did it drift?

The first crack was the one every 2011-era MMO ran into. You can pour years into eight voiced stories, and players will finish them in weeks. Then they look around for what's next, and next is a much thinner thing than what came before it. The endgame didn't have the weight the leveling did. That's not a knock on the people who built it. It's the arithmetic of making content that can only be consumed once.

Then it went free to play in late 2012, and the model they chose was restrictive in a way I found genuinely tiring. Not the concept, I have no problem with free to play. The specifics. Bars on things that felt like they should be basic, unlock tokens for pieces of the game I already thought of as the game. It made every session feel like it had a turnstile in it somewhere.

But the real drift, for me, came later, when the story went from eight to one. The expansions moved to a single shared narrative with your character slotted into it, rather than eight parallel ones. And I understand the decision completely. Eight fully voiced storylines forever was never going to be affordable. It was the correct business call and it also removed the exact reason I was there. The thing that made me roll eight characters was that they were eight different games. Once they became one game with a costume change, I had no reason to be an altoholic in it anymore, and being an altoholic is most of what I do.

So I drifted too. Not with any drama. I didn't quit SWTOR, I just found myself logging in less, then rarely, then not, in that slow way an MMO leaves your rotation without ever announcing it.

It's still running, which is not nothing. Fourteen years is a long life for a game people were writing obituaries for by year three. And the class stories are still sitting there, still voiced, still good. If you've never played it and you like Star Wars even a little, go make an Inquisitor and just play the story and quit whenever you want. Nobody will stop you.

I think about it more than I expected to. It's the only MMO I've played where I can remember specific conversations, years later, the way you remember scenes from a movie. Whatever else drifted, that part stuck.

Cheers,

Joar

Gold, the Auction House, and the Games Within the Game

I have never been a gold tycoon. Let's get that out of the way right at the top, because there's a whole corner of this hobby full of people who treat the auction house like a second job and post spreadsheets about it, and I am not one of them. I'm an accountant by trade. You'd think I would be. I'm not.

What I am is a guy who has been playing this game for nineteen years and has slowly, accidentally, ended up playing a second game that runs alongside the first one. Not raiding. Not PvP. The market. And the reason it happened is the same reason everything happens to me in this game. Alts.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about being an altoholic. Fifty-two max-level characters at the end of the last expansion isn't just fifty-two characters. It's fifty-two sets of bags. Fifty-two mailboxes. Fifty-two little warehouses full of stuff somebody logged in and picked up at some point over the years and then forgot about entirely. I have opened a bank tab on a character I hadn't touched in two expansions and found things I genuinely did not know I owned. My alt army stopped being a roster years ago. What I actually own is a supply chain nobody's managing.

And when I switched professions on Joar, dropping tailoring and enchanting for mining and herbalism, that supply chain got a lot more interesting. Because now the flow goes one direction. I'm not consuming materials anymore. I'm producing them. Ore and herbs pile up while I'm doing something else entirely, and then they sit there looking at me until I do something about it.

So I do the lazy version of the market game, and I'm at peace with that. I run the gathering. I dump the results on the auction house at whatever the going rate is. I do not undercut by a copper in some five-hour war of attrition with a bot. I do not have a posting schedule. I post, I walk away, I come back later and there's mail. It is the least sophisticated participation in an economy that a CPA has ever managed and it works fine.

Auctionator does most of the actual thinking. Titan Panel sits up at the top of my screen telling me what my gold is doing, which is a small thing that turns out to matter, because a number you can see is a number you start paying attention to. I didn't set out to track my gold. Titan Panel just put it there and after a while I noticed I cared about the trend line. Sound familiar? It should. It's the same instinct that has me logging my playtime every month, which is a whole other post.

The part I actually enjoy has very little to do with the profit. The market is the only system in this game that other people are moving in real time. A raid boss does what it did last week. The auction house on a Tuesday night is a room full of strangers making decisions, and you can read it. Patch drops and suddenly a herb nobody wanted is worth six times what it was. Somebody dumps eight hundred of something and the floor falls out for two days. It's the closest WoW gets to weather.

And there are more of these little games than people give the game credit for. Collecting is one, though it's never grabbed me. Transmog is one, and I've said before it's not my thing. The pet and mount hunt is a whole parallel career for some people. Achievement hunting. Loremaster, which I actually did finish on Joar in Midnight, and which is absolutely a self-inflicted game inside the game.

The market is just the one that stuck to me, probably because it rewards exactly the thing I'm worst at avoiding. Having too many characters, in too many places, holding too much stuff.

Nineteen years of hoarding, finally monetized. Sort of. At my leisure. Badly.

Cheers,

Joar

WildStar

Every other MMO I've written about this month is still out there, running in some form, waiting for me to drift back if I ever want to. WildStar isn't. WildStar is gone, actually gone, servers dark, world deleted, the whole thing switched off in 2018 like a light in an empty room. That's why this is the one that actually hurt. You can leave a game. It's a different thing entirely when the game leaves you, and there's no reinstall that brings it back.

Let me tell you what it got gloriously right, because the tragedy needs the setup. WildStar came out in 2014 with more personality than any MMO I'd touched. Bright, stylized sci-fi, a planet called Nexus, a wisecracking attitude baked into everything from the tutorials to the marketing. It had swagger. And the housing, oh, the housing. WildStar's player housing was, flat out, the best I've ever seen in this genre. Floating sky plots you owned and shaped, decorated down to the smallest detail, and it wasn't a novelty tacked on the side, it was a real system with real depth. People built astonishing things up there.

I bring that up on purpose, because I just spent yesterday's post gushing about WoW finally adding player housing in 2026. WildStar had that in 2014, and did it better, and then died anyway. There's a lesson buried in there about how the best single feature in the world can't save a game if the rest of it fights you. And WildStar's rest of it fought you hard.

Here's where it went wrong, and I say this as someone who loved it. WildStar decided it was going to be the hardcore MMO. Old-school, punishing, proudly difficult, and it aimed its endgame straight at the most committed raiders it could find. Forty-man raids. Brutal attunement gates you had to grind through just to earn the right to walk in the door. It planted a flag that said this game is for the hardcore, and it meant it.

You've read enough of these posts to know exactly where that left me. I'm the guy who runs delves and LFR, who will never raid at the high end and stopped feeling bad about it. WildStar built a wall and put everything good behind it, and it was a wall I was never going to climb. I loved the world, loved my house, loved the personality of the thing, and I ran into a ceiling that told me in no uncertain terms that people like me weren't the point. So I drifted, the way I do. But I drifted out of WildStar with more regret than most, because so much of it was so right.

And it turned out I wasn't alone. The hardcore audience WildStar bet everything on wasn't big enough to hold it up, and the rest of us who loved the world got told there wasn't a place for us. It went free-to-play in 2015, the usual warning sign, and then in 2018 they shut it down for good. Not faded. Not limping along in maintenance mode like RIFT. Switched off. All those sky plots people built, all those hours of decorating, gone the day the servers went dark.

That's the part that still gets me. With every other game this month I can say I might go back someday. With WildStar there's no back to go to. The world I walked around in doesn't exist anymore, and the housing I'd point to as the best in the genre lives only in screenshots and memory now. You don't get to visit. It's the closest this hobby comes to a real goodbye.

WildStar is my cautionary tale and my genuine grief, both at once. A game with the best housing I've ever seen and the worst read on its own audience I've ever watched, and the second one killed the first. I loved it. It didn't love people like me back, and it paid for that. I still wish it were here.

Cheers,

Joar

Midnight

This is the expansion I'm standing in right now, and I have to be honest with you about it in a way that's a little uncomfortable. I've barely played it. Not because Midnight did anything wrong. Because life did. So consider this less a review and more a dispatch from a guy watching the current expansion through a keyhole, catching what he can in the minutes he's got.

Let me give you the number, because the number tells the whole story. My playtime is down to something like 3 to 5 hours a month right now. Not a typo. I used to put in 40 to 60 hours a month without thinking about it, and these days I'm lucky to scrape together an evening's worth across four weeks. The move ate my time whole. Between selling the house, living out of rentals, and everything else a cross-country relocation drags behind it, WoW has become the thing I do in the cracks, when there are cracks, which lately there mostly aren't.

Which brings me to the housing, and to the most honest thing in this post. I love it. Twenty years I waited for player housing in this game, and Midnight finally delivered it, and it's every bit as good as I hoped. I have a house. It's decorated. I got in there early and made it mine. And here's the gut-punch. It's not where my hours go. When you've got 3 to 5 hours a month, you do not spend them arranging furniture, no matter how much you love the room. I built the thing I'd been asking for since 2005 and now I mostly wave at it on my way to somewhere more urgent.

So where does the scarce time actually go? Staying somewhat current. That's the whole game plan right now, just not falling hopelessly behind in the base game. And the wins are small and I'll take them. I finished Midnight Loremaster on Joar yesterday, which means I've at least seen the story of Quel'Thalas, walked the blood elf homeland, done the questing that matters to me most. For a guy playing on fumes, getting Loremaster done felt like a real accomplishment, the kind of thing I'd have knocked out in a weekend once and now stretched across a month of stolen half-hours.

I'll admit what I skipped, too, because the skipping is part of the honest picture. I never really touched the Void Ritual Site stuff from the last patch. Just didn't have the hours for it, and it quietly passed me by. The new patch dropped this week, though, and I've managed the first week's worth of the new zone and the new vault feature they added, and both of those seem like genuine fun. Enough that I wish I had the time to actually sink into them.

And the altoholic in me is still twitching, even now, even at 3 to 5 hours a month. Joar's at max, obviously. My hunter's at max too. And I've started dragging a druid up the levels, sitting at 87 the last time I looked, because apparently no amount of time scarcity can fully cure me of the urge to have one more character in progress. The warlock plan holds most of the time. The druid is the 20% that never quite does.

So that's my Midnight, and it's a strange one to report. A house I love and never visit. A story I finished in stolen minutes. A new patch I've tasted just enough of to want more. I'm not going to hand you a verdict, partly because it's early and partly because I've barely been here. But what I've seen, in the cracks, I like. And the game will still be here when life loosens its grip, which it will, eventually.

For now, I log in when I can, do the one thing that matters that day, and log back out. It's the least I've ever played this game. It's also, somehow, still the one I come back to.

Cheers,

Joar

Blaugust Day 22: The Warlock Plan

Here's a sentence I never thought I'd write. For a while now I've been trying to main one character. Just the warlock. Park the alts, funnel everything into the one guy, actually finish something on a single toon instead of spreading myself across fifty-two of them. If you read the altoholic confession post earlier this month, you already know why that sentence is almost funny coming from me. I'm the guy who physically cannot leave the alts alone. I finished the last expansion with 52 max-level characters, and I mean that as a confession, not a brag. Fifty-two. And that's the guy who's now, nineteen years in, trying to run an experiment in monogamy.

The warlock is Joar. He's the undead one I've played since Burning Crusade, the character I sign every blog post with, and if I was ever going to pick one to go all-in on, it was always going to be him. Dark magic, a race that's already dead, the whole aesthetic fits me. So the plan was simple on paper. Make Joar the project. Gear him through Delves and renown, keep him current, and for once in my life have a single character that's actually done rather than nine that are all 80% there.

I even reshuffled the professions to do it. I wrote a whole post about that a while back. I dropped tailoring and enchanting and picked up mining and herbalism instead, which sounds backwards, ditching the crafting to go collect ore and flowers. But it's the right call for how I actually play now. Gathering you can do casually, in the gaps, while you're already out doing something else. Crafting the modern way is its own project, a grind that wants real attention I'd rather spend on the character himself. So I traded the professions that demand a session for the ones I can do half-asleep on a flying mount, and it felt weirdly freeing, like cleaning out a closet.

And the modern game actually supports this, which is the part that surprised me. Delves mean I can gear Joar up solo, on a weeknight, no raid schedule, no nineteen other people. Renown ticks up just by playing. Warbands, the account-wide stuff they added, means even the little I do earn elsewhere flows back to him. The game finally built the tools for a one-character life, right at the moment I decided to try living one. Good timing, for once.

Now here's the honest part, because these posts don't do clean victory laps. It's not working perfectly. I want to tell you I parked the alts and never looked back, that the reformed altoholic found peace with a single toon. Not quite. I still catch myself. A new patch drops and I feel the old itch to play something different, or I log in tired and end up puttering on an alt "just for a minute" and lose an evening to it. The plan is more of a strong lean than an iron rule. I'd say I'm maybe 80% loyal to Joar, which for me is a staggering number, and 20% still exactly the guy I've always been.

But the lean is real, and it's the most focused I've been on one character since maybe Wrath. When you stop spreading yourself thin, the one character you're pouring into actually gets somewhere. Joar is geared. Joar is current. Joar is, for the first time in a long time, a finished thought instead of one of fifty-two unfinished ones. And that feels good in a way the alt army never quite did, because the alt army was always about starting and this is about arriving.

Why now, this late? Same reason a lot of things are simplifying for me lately. I've got less patience for spreading myself thin, in the game and out of it. Doing one thing well is starting to beat doing fifty-two things halfway. The warlock plan is a small version of a bigger lesson I keep running into.

Will I stick to it? Probably 80% of the time. For an altoholic, that's basically a wedding vow.

Cheers,

Joar

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