At Least I'm not a Marxist

This post was first written in my first few days back. It was not particularly positive, including this predictable, and wrong, opening line: "My WoW time has run out and I don't plan to renew it. I had some bits of fun here and there, but it's not the game it was and even the parts that still were are being changed even further."

Actually I stand by that, half of it. "I had some bits of fun here and there, but it's not the game it was and even the parts that still were are being changed even further." WoW has a lower ratio of fun parts (for me) than it used to. But 50% of 100 is 100% of 50. At this point, WoW has Cataclysm Azeroth, with Outland and Northrend layered on top, with varying levels of playability at various ranges, from the 70 heroics to the low level twink brackets to the many tiers of play at level 85. It's a bit of a spaghetti on the wall approach, but when they've thrown a few pots, you're bound to find a plateful.

Cataclysm remade Azeroth. But even Outland has been changed, with instances reworked slightly to remove any keys as well as changing the quests, usually to make them picked up inside rather than outside, a sad recognition of that fact that players don't play out in the world anymore. It was a small thing, but I found that Flesh Beast's Metal Greaves, once a much-desired item for prot paladins, being about the best tanking boots we could get until Karazhan, are no longer available. The quest for them is gone, a victim of the changes to instances, asking too much of players by requiring them to... bear with me on this one... go in the other direction.

You might be wondering what the title is. Maybe some strange tangential oddity about socialists? Well yes, in fact. Well, a communist. Karl Marx himself. I read some more about him recently and learned more of why his history never happened (even if some signs point in that direction again). One major problem was that he had some really nifty ideas and analysis, but he wasn't out actually looking at the world, so he didn't see that a middle class was forming and that social mobility, while low, was increasing, thanks to industrialization and capitalism. His analysis may have been correct, but he wasn't using new data. Regardless of the quality of calculation, garbage data will produce garbage results. By hopping back into WoW and looking around a bit, perhaps not getting deep into all the nuances, but seeing some of what is going on, actually experiencing it for myself, maybe I can avoid his mistake.

For example, I am not predicting a revolution of the proletariat in WoW. Or did it already happen? Analogies between gaming and reality are tricky. Maybe LFD is the revolution? Or is it just empty consumerism? Are dailies the transition from the starving farming peasants to the factory worker? But dailies just give gold which is of limited use if we consider NPC->player, player->NPC interaction, though it is a useful player->player currency, Ron Paul would not approve of our inflation rate. Maybe dailies are the oversized world of finance.

Well anyway, I got another time card. With my paladin sorta raid-ready, I might try to get into real raiding and see how that turns out. Failing that, my other paladin is having fun in the BC heroics. I'm still curious about why players over level 70 are in there so often. It's not even uncommon, it's common, possibly even majority. I think I've had one heroic run without a player over level 70 and most runs have at least two, often three or four. This means that my paladin gets very few justice points. Predictably, I will have complaints and suggestions about this.

So contrary to at least one prediction, I have not been conducting an elaborate song and dance routine to lead into a dramatic rage quit. Or am I?

Dun dun dun.

Yea, I definitely bought one, and now two, time cards just so I could rage about how WoW is the worst game ever and how everything has been ruined. I could do that anyway! If I was that big of an asshole I could just lie! I won't pretend to be a person of strong moral values and integrity, though I sometimes try, to pretend. But I am incredibly cheap and nothing will ever change that. So there.

Given that I have a month and no definite plans on what to do with it beyond "do stuff", does anyone have any suggestions or ideas they'd like me to try? Just no PvP. I've given up on that. It was better back when it was "raid or die" because beside a very few raiders who steamrolled everyone else, everyone had crap gear, so the barriers to entry were very low.