Compared to Tirisfal Glades which was teeming with Undead, the Red Cloud Mesa in Mulgore was a relaxed and mellow gathering of Tauren, as befits their nature. It may also have to do with being on a PVE server instead of PVP… but I like the other theory better.

The two zones are quite different to begin with. Tirisfal funnels players down a road and hems you in quite tight, where Mulgore is wide open spaces with freedom to roam. It’s more clever design from Blizzard, establishing the dispositions of the races through the environment in which they’re introduced.

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The sound design of each zone also reflects the personality of their occupants. The Tauren are greeted with wonderful birdlife, the crackling of warming bonfires, and the creak of windmills providing sustenance to the villages. The Undead on the other hard are haunted by swirling wind and distant cries, and the incessant heartbeat of a life they can never live. I’ve really noticed the sound in Classic, with music down and ambience all the way up it’s spectacularly good. I wonder if in Live I’m too busy doing jobs - and too efficient at doing them - to just stop and listen.

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I also thing it’s vastly better how it doesn’t take long for Classic to introduce mobs that will agro. The starter zones on Live are all sanctuaries of passive mobs, and I think it’s an improvement to have a bit of danger even while you’re learning the ropes - it adds excitement and risk to the experience. Levelling a Warrior is pretty simple stuff, with only a few abilities. I made sure to get to level four so I could train Charge, which establishes the core Warrior characteristic early on - furiously running into battle and not stopping until either you or the enemy has fallen.

In Classic even a Warrior has to be a little cautious though - chain killing cougars was enough to get my health whittled down to the point where I had to pause and recover.

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I was amused to see a fellow Warrior charging toward a Plainstalker without a weapon equipped and punching it until it dropped. That reminded me that there is an Unarmed skill in Classic, so I took my weapon off too and ran around punching things. Very silly but very entertaining too.

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Classic continues to enchant, I really love the feeling of starting from nothing, not being able to lean on alts and cash reserves and banks full of help. Over the years I’ve sometimes decided I’ll start a whole new stable of characters on a fresh server, but it’s never had quite the same feel - I think because I’ve always been able to switch back to my established roster of equipped and enriched regulars. On Classic that’s not possible, and planning out a set of characters to support and compliment each other with professions and experience is a fun project in itself.

A next step is looking around for a guild. I wish there were more Australian bloggers around so there could be a guild with a strong community of people who also write about their experience - something like Belghast’s terrific House Kraken.

Once I’m through the level 10 specialisation choice (and once I’ve chosen which character to concentrate on first) I’ll start testing the waters of some of the broadcast guild invites. Another approach might be to run some Dungeons and observe which guilds seem to have good attitudes - and a good name! - and trial a few that way.

#Blaugust30

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My FFXIV subscription ran out yesterday, so the initial part of the project - spending Blaugust investigating the game - has come to an end.

Having played for a month, I don’t think I will stump up for a further subscription. That’s not because the game doesn’t warrant payment, but more because I felt like it was a game that should be played with others. Not surprising given it’s an MMO, but a little surprising given the reputation it has a strong story based game.

As I’ve covered, the story has failed to grab me in the first ~15 levels I’ve played on two separate characters. Which sounds like it’s a common experience when people discuss the original MSQ. The enthusiasm seems to come with the expansion packs, with Shadowbringers in particular getting very positive reviews, but I’m not ready to commit to pushing through the lower levels to reach the expansions and their stronger story modes.

I had thought that the end of the sub meant the end of playing, but thanks to Bhagpuss’s coverage I’ve realised there’s an endless free trial mode. Knowing how the game works now, it’s a very generous trial, much more so that Warcraft’s which ends at level 20. The trial allows you to have up to 8 characters (though really you only need one), and caps you at level 35. Given you can have all the classes/jobs - 10 combat and 11 crafting - on a single character, that adds up to about a billion levels and many many hours of trial play.

So I’m sure I’ll be back once the Classic fervour wears down, ignoring the story but enjoying the world.

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It’s certainly a beautiful game, with graphical detail that matches or surpasses many single player games. I still love the Warcraft aesthetic, and I’m even finding the Classic engine is capable of producing striking environments, but FFXIV is quite stunning. That’s mainly evidenced in the staggering wardrobe choices that are available to players, ranging from neatly simple to incredibly complex, and serious fantasy to ridiculous humour.

I found myself constantly stopping everything to take copious screenshots as a player wandered past in a brilliant outfit. And the main gathering area in Limsa Lominsa is a people watching paradise. In celebration of the players who must spend much time and in-game money creating the displays for us to enjoy, and to sign off on my FFXIV adventures (for now), here’s a selection of the best outfits I captured.

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#Blaugust29

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As the Classic fever was building, I enjoyed reading Belghast’s excellent post on communication and admiring the great screenshots from his early Warcraft days.

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It made me want to dig out my old screenshots from Burning Crusade, but unfortunately they were locked away in Picasa somewhere. I had assumed that they were lost forever due to Google sunsetting Picasa some time ago, but a small amount of research revealed that you could still get them if you could logon to the Google account associated with your Picasa account. Luckily enough I still had that logon and before long I had recovered all the pictures.

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Now that I had the images, it seemed like a good time to reconstruct the old guild blog, which was a two year history of my first Warcraft guild and our adventures in Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, and, in particular, Karazhan. The blog was also on a Google property - Blogspot. But the broken images made it no longer useful, plus Google’s propensity to shut services down meant it could disappear at any time. It was the same account as Picasa, so I could easily logon and download the post history as an XML file.

I decided the best plan would be to try and migrate the blog to a static Hugo blog and host it on a Galumphing subdomain, which would mean merging the Blogspot text with the Picasa images.

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Thanks to the internet magic of 2019, there are plenty of tools for doing the Blogspot to Hugo migration. The most promising looked to be this Blogger to Markdown tool written by palaniraja on Github. I installed it on a Mac and it worked flawlessly, miraculously producing a directory full of Hugo formatted markdown files. It even had a very nice feature that merged the blog comments into the single markdown post file, making it much easier to publish as a static archive of the original blog (comments being the bugbear of static site generators).

Next I followed the very simple Hugo Quick Start steps, and was very surprised to find it worked first time. I chose a theme - Solar - that was similar to the original blog, and before long had the site up and running locally and started configuring it in real-time with the Hugo server.

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I did a pass of comment formatting (some of the dates were a bit mangled), and tweaked some of the settings - publishing the full test of each post instead of a summary, and putting it in chronological order so you could read it from start to finish (which is the reverse of a standard blog setup). I also added Wowhead tooltips for good measure, which slows things down marginally on load but with a static site it seems a fair trade-off. Otherwise I left it as it was.

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The final step was merging the local images back into the blog. That was unfortunately a more manual process, as I had to remove a lot of Picasa HTML cruft, but it didn’t take too long with some judicious Notepad++ mass replacements. I published the site again, and there it was: Midnights Children, in all it’s non-apostrophed glory.

Just seeing it again hit me with a huge nostalgia wave, and reading the posts complete with images of glory and despair was even better. There’s probably only 5 people who are still interested, but for them it’s a reminder of a special time and a special friend.

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Epilogue

Coincidentally after doing all this, I read that UltrViolet at Endgame Viable was embarking on a very similar project, albeit more about consolidating multiple online identities and blogs.

I totally agree about the Wordpress dilemma - it’s a great platform in a lot of ways, but it’s very slow and kind of stodgy, especially when compared to static sites. It is however very easy to setup, has a strong support ecosystem, and importantly has integrated comments and associated spam protection (assuming you want comments, that is). I was tempted to move this blog to something simpler, but stumbled trying to find something that elegantly incorporated comments. Disqus seems to be the most common choice, but it seems to have pretty major privacy problems, and all the open source commenting engines seem pretty flakey and hard to configure and maintain.

Like UltrViolet, I’ve stuck with Wordpress, self hosting and using Markdown for writing the posts (so it can easily be migrated if need be), and disabling the frustrating new block editor. I even did a test migration of this blog to Hugo using the same tool as above and it worked just as well. Which gives me confidence that I’m not super locked-in should a nice simple option present itself.

I wish Endgame Viable well! It was certainly worth the time for me, though this was more an archival project than a living blog.

#Blaugust28

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It’s as good as I hoped - and may even be better.

The Oceanic servers filled up pretty quick, or at least the PVP ones did. By the time I was home from work the main server (Arugal) was full with a 10,000 person queue and 260 minute wait. Blizzard had opened up a second PVP server called Yojamba (which sounds more like a FFXIV server than WoW, but apparently it’s an abandoned Troll isle in Northern Stranglethorn) in the middle of the day, but that too was full and queued.

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As I pondered taking it easy on the medium-busy PVE server Remulos, another new PVP server appeared, and with an awesome name too: Felstriker. That’s a much better PVP name. So I hopped on, recreated Stroeb the Undead Rogue, and logged into a world of wonder.

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During the voice over intro there were streams of Undead emerging from the starting crypt, most with single-barrel names (thanks to the server only just popping), and all moving with purpose toward the first quest hub.

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The intro movie is very different to the current one, much more sinister and full of forboding, telling us that the Undead don’t give a damn about “the primitive races of the Horde” (let alone the Alliance), and will slaughter those that would hunt them as monsters:

They will go to any lengths to ensure their dark plans come to fruition. As one of the Forsaken, you must massacre any who pose a threat to the new order: Human, Undead, or otherwise…

One thing I noticed far more was the sound design. Along with the fantastically spooky music and muffled screams of the the intro, the entire zone pulses with a super low heartbeat which you don’t notice until you stop and listen for a few moments. The subtle tension that adds is terrific.

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Instead of taking the first quest, I just wandered through the starter area, poking around the edges of the map and seeing what was out there. I soon found Caretaker Caice, who wandered about restlessly with a lantern in front of a crypt, occasionally philosophising about the Undead state. Purely flavour, and purely great.

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I started attacking the many Duskbats that roam the zone, and was quickly equipped with top quality Grey gear - I even got Grey upgrades to my existing Grey gear. And, somewhat amazingly, a 6 slot Small Brown Pouch. Who said bag space would be a problem?!

The bat hunting was so fun I ended up levelling all the way to 3 without moving beyond the graveyards and surrounding hills. During this I was entertained by all manner of memory jolts, from weapon and defence skill upgrades to the beginnings of the skill tree adventure.

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Before logging off I tried one of the rites of passage of Vanilla by successfully kiting a Dusk Bat down into the spawning crypt.

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It all sounds so simple, but there’s something undefinably magic about it. I’m sure a lot of words will be written trying to capture exactly what that is, but for now I’m just thrilled we’re playing.

#Blaugust27

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It’s almost time. I tried to do some dailies in Nazjatar today but my heart wasn’t in it - Classic is too close.

I’m still unsure of which character to try first. As with many other bloggers, one inclination is to go with the first character I played - my Undead Rogue namesake. She was with me all the way through Kara, only eventually swapping out so I could level a tank for WotLK. Rogues are both easy and hard. For levelling, stealth allows Rogues to make their way to bosses and quest objectives without having to bother with the trash gauntlets, which is a major time saver. But in dungeons - and raids! - they are super squishy. I remember dying a lot, too much, and as the saying goes you can’t do any DPS when you’re dead.

Another option is a Hunter - echoing my current main, and also an early character of mine. Hunters too are an easy levelling class (once you get to level 10 and can tame a pet) and a it’s always fun to have a companion as you roam around. I clearly remember taking a Hunter into some BC dungeons and running out of ammo mid run, much to my horror, but on the whole they survive dungeons a lot better than Rogues, and bring good utility with their traps and snares. It’s was funny to read that Hunter’s were hands down the hardest class to recreate in Classic - pet management and ammo being the unique features I’m guessing.

My other main interest would be a Warrior. A Tauren Protection Warrior was my main throughout WotLK, and I loved the playstyle whether levelling or grouping. Charge is one of the all-time great abilities, and having plate on obviously great for staying alive. They do suffer a bit from not having any self heals though. And I do wonder if I’m up for tanking with strangers - the tankxiety is real.

In the end I think I’ll rotate around and see what feels best - unlike Method I’m not after a world first in a week. But I would like to find a guild and potentially join in with the raiding crowd so levelling can’t be too slow. Thinking about that possibility also means not tanking as I won’t have the time to dedicate to the gearing that raid tanking requires.

Plenty to ponder, and not much time to do it!

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Another thing to decide is how much UI to replace with add-ons. There are plenty of opinions on this, ranging from complete replacement to just the modifying the essentials to not touching anything:

something about the spirit of WoW Classic, a sort of back to nature, seeing the game in a raw or primitive form, makes me feel like Addons might be a bit of a betrayal, a cheat, an option that would deprive myself of the full experience.

BlizzardWatch have been tracking a list their best add-ons, and Curse have hundreds ready to go. If you did want to go with a whole hog, ‘Live’ game favourite ElvUI has been recreated for Classic too.

During BC and WotLK I used to build my own UI from scratch, grabbing bits and pieces from all over the place. I remember using TomTom, threat and damage meters, bags, and floating combat text - though why the latter became so popular is beyond me. My UI back then was a predictable messy nightmare, but I loved it - and loved constantly tinkering with it.

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Then I stumbled on the concept of total UI replacement packages put together by players. My favourite for a long time was the very minimalist but very functional GarUI from Garwulf, who still blogs very occasionally but no longer maintains his UI. It was a beautiful UI, fading into nothingness when you weren’t active so you could appreciate the world around you.

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More recently I’ve taken it easy and just plonked ElvUI into place, my bag manager of choice, and a few other utilities. Building your own is fun but maintaining it through patches and incompatibilities less so - ElvUI is a happy medium, if sometimes a bit over engineered.

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For Classic I think I’ll fall somewhere in the middle, replacing bags and toolbars, maybe nameplates (useful for Threat management on a tank), and some vendor helpers - I noticed during the stress test that the vendor price for items isn’t shown by default, something that’s super helpful when managing bag-rage during the early days when bag space is at a premium. But I’ll try to keep it simple and lightweight - unless the default UI cruft starts to become annoying.

I wish Blizzard had allowed us to logon in the past week or so, even if it was limited to the starter zones, just so we could configure our UIs before launch. There’s no rush of course, but it would have been a fun thing to do while waiting. Not long now!

#Blaugust26

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