if you find yourself spending time with parsers or in discords filled with cretins you’d never associate with irl or online other than the fact you need/want a piece of gear or to clear some content is a sign you have gone too far and need to take a step back. taken far enough it always leads there. i wont go back
idk all I can say is the community is truly horrible and filled with legitimately severely ill people. like really dogshit. cops everywhere too, believe it or not. although I must say my experience is probably colored a lot by playing on horde tryhard megaservers.
In management interviews I like to point to my experience running 40 man pugs and organized raids as evidence I can manage fundamentally unmanageable and broken people
You dont really have to involve yourself in the community unless you are a raid enthusiast. They added group finder to vanilla so if you cap out at 5 mans you really don’t have to deal with anyone long term.
only the original wc3 mod but it’s a different kind of toxic. if i want to turn my chat off and play my game in a moba i can do so and probably have a fine gameplay experience.
in wow raid environment, especially classic, you are forced to join guilds and socialize with these people whether you want to or not, to get what you want.
per @WichitaDM’s point it is possible in wow to avoid raids, but, inevitably the stuff you can get from 5 man pugs pales in comparison to even the crappiest raid gear. I’m incapable of not going for stuff like that.
the best balance I found after my guild fell apart was to whore myself out and sell my services to raids as a mercenary (even though the only reason i could do that was because i had the gear from being in a raid guild). then my exposure to the cretins is limited to however long it takes to clear the raid. lots of times i didnt even need to join voice if i didnt want to. IMHO this is the best way to play wow, but it’s also very anti social, which to me kind of defeats the point of playing a mmo in the first place, so I do not. I honestly would treat it like a serious relapse if I ended up back in it, it was that bad for me
funny enough though wow is where i learned about racism as a lily white christian 14 year old. with this screen name, the amount of times people have hurled the n word at me i’d put in the tens of thousands
this screen name was originally used by a troll hunter, a black jamaican stereotype, but to me it was supposed to just mean “jmakin me crazy”
you get wild dm’s, and often. or, it’ll start off innocent by wow standards “are you black??” to which i finally by age 17 just started answering “ask your mom” and these mfin types go to that word very very quickly. you also learn that these platforms do not care at all
can’t believe i missed two weeks of WoW classic discussion. definitely my favorite video game of all time. i hit 2019 classic pretty hard, and the group i was with carried through most of tbc, wotlk, and then reformed for Season of Discovery but fell apart during that. on anniversary none of the people i played with previously decided to return so i mostly just leveled and pvp ranked by myself but didn’t ever join a guild..
i’d like to get back in it for TBC but the most fun parts for me are the initial launch phase and not having a core group of people for that is probably going to keep me away.
i will always come back for a “fresh” though. that first week feeling of a fresh launch is just to much dopamine to miss.
speaking of wow classic, i am a bit sad that we aren’t getting the Titan Reforged servers that they are doing in China. from what i’ve seen it’s been like a fresh server that is based on WOTLK but ALL the classic raids will be upscaled to 80 for 20 or 25 people(i think) and the itemization is all changed. so molten core will be for level 80 with different itemization all the way through ICC. although there is also probably a shit ton of micro transactions added because the Chinese market is cool with that.
but apparently that is Netease that is doing the work which is the company that operates blizzard stuff in china.
Wanted to play “Dispatch” based on the rec itt, unfortunately it’s not available on Mac so will have to wait.
On the other hand “Blue Prince” (roguelike puzzle game, also mentioned itt) was now available, so I spent a good portion of the last 2 weeks playing it…it really is the best game ever for the first 20 hours or so, when you’re unlocking/figuring out new stuff on every run…
the next 20 (the time it took me to get to Room 46) were a bit more tough. Was several times in a spot where I wanted a specific item and it took me several hours to get it, only then to realize that solving this particular puzzle didn’t really advance my progression. I definitely made some bad decisions (emptying aquarium before fountain, then chasing a bunch of red herrings probably cost me 10 hours lol).
On the other hand, I now have a bunch of clues (or at least, places where clues should be…) unlocked for the later game…
Life is calling now but I’ll def try to come back to it soon, it’s definitely a very rich game (maybe a little too much if you have an obsessive personality…)
I loved Blue Prince for the first 40 hours or so. After rolling credits though, some of the solutions to the problems became a bit obnoxious. I wonder how it would play if I went back to it now. I was taking Myst level notes when I played through the first time
Speaking of roguelikes and 40 hours playing, Hades 2 is still outstanding 50 hours in. Ive beaten both main bosses and gotten Nem to fall in love with me, plus I got Doom to take his shirt off (ooo la la) so Im making progress, but every run is so unique especially since Im trying to clear the fated list with each weapon so Im taking a bunch of upgrades I never would before.
Not sure if you mean you just wasted time or if you didn’t catch the full pump functionality but the switches go both ways. It shouldn’t be possible to make a mistake that can’t be reversed.
Also I’m not sure when I realized this and it’s a highly debated topic but the mechanism of forcing you away from what you’re trying to do into different paths is an important part of the game. That room 46 cut scene hits harder the more you’ve learned about the world and you’re not going to get that without being forced down unexpected paths. I’m sure there are people out there who found the path to room 46 in record time due to sheer luck and I feel so bad for them cause they got robbed. I think if you accept and embrace that part of the game you’ll have a much better experience.
