World of Ennuicraft

Well that certainly didn't take long. A week into my World of Warcraft return and it already feels like a part time job.

Yesterday I had to spend several hours at the local DMV getting my driver's license and car registration transferred over to a new state. This involved not just a bunch of paperwork, but actually setting down and taking a standardized test (bubble sheet and grumpy middle aged proctor included!).

What makes the whole ordeal worse is that I put all this effort into something that I already had. I've driven for 15 years without so much as a speeding ticket but I still had to waste an afternoon proving to the state of Minnesota through a paper test what was already obvious.

World of Warcraft is giving me the exact same feeling when it comes to earning the ability to use my flying mounts in new content. World quests have become a drudgery that has me staring at that WOW desktop icon and looking to do anything else.

This week is a world quest bonus week, which should make getting these quests done an even bigger priority but I didn't even bother. Other options in the game haven't hooked their claws into me either:

• Dungeons and Raid Finder are the same "gogogogogo" as they've always been, a boring existence when you're a healer with nothing to heal.
• Crafting certainly seems more detailed than in the past, but as someone who likes to be a self-sufficient and earn these skill levels instead of throwing gold at them, leveling and collecting materials feels arduous when my competitors all have flying mounts.
• PVP is mostly fine. My Discipline Priest seemed able to stay alive long enough to actually have an impact in both Battlegrounds and Skirmishes. But with abilities pared back so much it feels like I'm playing a lower level character. I find myself missing Prayer of Mending, oddly enough, and I don't know why.

Since WOW Classic comes out in a month, I'll likely keep Azeroth on the back burner for a little bit. Which means that at least temporarily I'm in the market for a new MMO. Tomorrow is a weekend for me, and researching what the MMO industry has been working on for the past decade or so that I was out seems like a good project.

I did also want to mention some of the other projects I'm currently working on that might rear their head up on this blog in the near future:

• My original Xbox Component cables finally came in from eBay (smelling like an ash tray) and my sixth generation "classic" game room is nearly complete. The Xbox, PlayStation 2, and GameCube will be hooked up through a receiver while the oddball Dreamcast hooks up through a VGA connection. I'm still waiting on the receiver from Amazon, however, so the tedious task of switching five very snug connections behind a cramped TV are still my near future. I'd also like to track down a Game Boy Player addon for the GameCube, and have the handheld portion of the sixth generation covered as well.
• Getting the old Plex server back on its feet. Now that I have a more permanent residence, it makes sense to start thinking about using dedicated hardware for a server instead of simply using my desktop's poor beleaguered hard drives. I'm not sure how much horsepower I actually need to run Plex. I suspect not a ton since my connection and networking hardware are powerful enough to run my media natively, but I need to research into this more.
• And lastly, why Blogger seems perfectly fine as a Blogging platform, I did want to use this blog as an excuse to update my web development skills that stopped somewhere around HTML 3/4 and CSS 2. I'd also like to run my own server for this website, and I suspect the newly released Raspberry Pi 4 would make an excellent host.

So far this blog has been mostly a journal. Which I suppose is fine, but it really isn't what I want and I suspect its not the most fun thing in the world to read if your not my mother. My goal for week 2 of Blaugust is to focus more on the "feature" writing I've enjoyed so much from other blogs.