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Episode 165: Bringing Balance to the Hobbies
350 Plays3 years ago
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome back to another episode of the Goblin Lore Podcast! Today Alex is solo and talking about a topic that's been on his mind recently, trying to find a balance in hobbies to help mitigate burnout. This topic is relevant to a lot of hobbies, including Magic, and Alex touches on that briefly, but does mostly talk about this topic in the context of returning to World of Warcraft: Classic recently. That game is the main focus of this episode, though Alex did try to keep it high level enough folks who don't play that game should be able to follow along
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As promised, we keep Mental Health Links available every episode. But For general Mental Health the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has great resources for people struggling with mental health concerns as well as their families. We also want to draw attention to this article on stigma from NAMI's site.
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Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art by Steven Raffael (@SteveRaffle)
Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast, and a part of their growing Vorthos content – as well as Magic content of all kinds. Check them out at hipstersofthecoast.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Updates
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome to another episode of the Goblin Lore podcast. So today, I say we. I'm already distracting myself. I say I'm doing something a little different. So you're just hearing one voice. Hobbs is not here tonight. He was feeling sick, and while we postpone the episode, he and I were going to delay together, or record together. Hopefully we'll get to that.
00:00:25
Speaker
in the next couple of days, decided I'm going to record something myself just to kind of help fill in the schedule. We've missed some episodes and we're also in the winter. We're starting to get toward November where suddenly there's a lot of holidays in the US and also it's cold and people tend to get sick. And so we're just going to record one myself here.
00:00:49
Speaker
And what I wanted to do, and I've done a handful of episodes on my own, and usually I plan out very specifically kind of what I want to talk about. Oh, maybe I should introduce myself.
Balancing Hobbies and Avoiding Burnout
00:00:58
Speaker
I'm Alex, found on Twitter, sometimes not often right now, at Mel underscore chronicler, and my pronouns are he, him.
00:01:07
Speaker
So as I was trying to say, normally I kind of plan out what I want to say because there's some very specific thing I want to talk about. And I kind of script it out a lot for myself because most episodes for me, I don't plan too much because there's a conversation. But when I'm sitting here by myself, there is no conversation. It's a monologue. It's just me docking. So I usually script that. But for today's episode, I kind of have a
00:01:32
Speaker
a rough topic in my head. And it's something I think could be a really interesting conversation. And rather than trying to script things out and do a scripted monologue, I might sort of try to work my way through this conversation myself. And hopefully it becomes, it's an interesting thing. And it's a topic that, you know, is relevant to some other people. So I want to talk about kind of hobbies
00:01:56
Speaker
and burning yourself out on them and sort of finding a balance in them. Because this is something I've been doing very recently with a hobby of mine, a game called World of Warcraft, specifically the classic re-release that's kind of been running alongside the main game for the last couple of years. But I think it also applies to other hobbies. I know magic for sure.
00:02:19
Speaker
is a place where folks will sometimes burn themselves out and leave the hobby and then come back years later. I myself have done that, taken breaks. And I know, you know, we talk about, well, there's a lot of topics in the magic sort of sphere of things. You talk about product overload, you talk about, you know, if you're going to lots of events or you're having maybe get, have some bad issues at some Friday night magic or something, your local game store has some issues. There's lots of reasons why you might burn out on magic, decide to take a break.
00:02:48
Speaker
and then come back later and try to find a better balance. And so that magic might come up. That's a thing I've been doing myself, but I will just preface this while we are a magic podcast. I will be mostly talking about my experiences with World of Warcraft
Community and Friendships in World of Warcraft
00:03:03
Speaker
tonight. Not so much the details of the game itself, but more just kind of talking about this topic of burning myself out and reasons why I quit playing.
00:03:16
Speaker
And then reasons why I find myself a little over a year back to the game and kind of some of my thoughts about some of my concerns and also some of my hopes and some of my, I guess, successes, some of the good things that I've had in the last couple of weeks that I'm feeling good about this. So before I get too deep into all of that, I'm going to, in the first five minutes, actually remember to shout out the Granny Coffee Company.
00:03:43
Speaker
Generally, I remember right at the end, well, I'm trying to wrap up, but so we wanna give them a shout out. There's Link in our show notes. They make some fantastic product. I myself don't drink coffee, but Hobbs loves them and I love to hear about all the things that he does and all the various flavors he gets.
00:04:01
Speaker
all the stuff he does with it making ice cream and various other coffee and non coffee things with this coffee but the granted coffee company is fantastic they are a minority owned lgbtq ran a copy company they like to support gamers they've been sponsoring us for a couple of years now we are very happy and
00:04:22
Speaker
They give us stuff for our charity events and they're always supportive of us. Like when we take breaks and we kind of talk about that, they're always there to support us and give us some assurance. And we really appreciate their support and we love what they're doing in the community. And if you are interested in coffee, please check them out.
00:04:45
Speaker
And then the Fireside Alliance is also, we're talking about community. It's a good time to give them a shout out. That's a community, a progressive community of progressive communities, a number of content creators, mostly podcasts. We're the only magic focused content creators, but a lot of other nerddom movies and comics and other sorts of things of that nature.
00:05:09
Speaker
are involved in the Fireside Alliance. We have a Discord server. It's basically a lot of content creators like ourselves who have our own little communities on the internet decided it would be nice to have a better, you know, a bigger shared space on the internet that is good for progressive folks to hang out and for people just in general to be able to spend time and not feel concerned about
00:05:36
Speaker
There's lots of nastiness on the internet and toxicity and we're trying to build a space that does not have that stuff. So if that is something you're interested in, please check out the Fireside Alliance. Links to that should also be in our show notes. So let me get back to my actual topic here. So like I said, I want to talk about
00:05:58
Speaker
sort of hobbies and getting burned out and balance, trying to find balance within them. So I'll talk a little bit about kind of my time with World of Warcraft Classic. So I've played WoW on and off since 2005, I believe. I think the game came out where I started playing a year into the original game, the original version of World of Warcraft.
00:06:24
Speaker
And I played that game for quite a while, a little over a decade on and off. If you played World of Warcraft, I stopped playing during Warlords of Draenor, which was the fifth expansion, I believe, maybe fourth expansion on top of the base game.
00:06:44
Speaker
And so I think it was fifth, regardless. I enjoyed the game a lot. I met a lot of friends through the game. I initially started playing the game with real life friends of mine, but then started to find more friends within the game and I built a community. I have a group of friends I go and
00:07:03
Speaker
um in the before you know before the pandemic times um would go out and visit them every year there's i mean i'd go to there's a anime convention in dc right now called otacon it used to be in baltimore i started i live in minnesota no reason to know about this con but i have a friend who lives in baltimore this friend i met through world of warcraft and other friends who live in that area so we would make five six seven of us would meet up at this convention every year because
00:07:30
Speaker
These are people who I spent years and years playing with and getting to know online. And this was a place that we found a nice neutral ground for us to meet up in real life and hang out. So this is a group of friends that I've known for years, played multiple other games with online.
00:07:50
Speaker
like, eventually started meeting up with multiple times in real life. In January of 2020, and some times would be good timing for us, we rented an Airbnb for a week and went and hung out and just played board games. Just spent a week living in a house together, this group of 10 people, most of whom were part of this World of Warcraft guild. Most of us met playing this game together. So,
00:08:17
Speaker
That game, I quit that 2015 was when I quit playing original World of Warcraft. I skipped several expansions. I played some of the content I'd come back and love a little bit and then leave for one or two of them, but I didn't play that again until
00:08:36
Speaker
2019 2020 last year I went back to retail for a little bit but before that World of Warcraft classic launched in unlike August or September of 2019 basically Blizzard decided to
00:08:52
Speaker
re-released the original version of the game. They found a way to run it. It's a thing people had been asking for for a long time, and community members were creating their own servers that were sort of illegal, or at least there's a whole gray area there, but they were getting shut down when Blizzard found them, and this is just the whole thing.
00:09:14
Speaker
Um, but in, in 20, I think it was 17 was when they announced that they were doing it. But basically around that time, Blizzard found a way to support the old software on new hardware. And they're like, okay, now that we can do this and it's not going to be really excessive, expensive for us to have to maintain lots of different hardware.
00:09:33
Speaker
we're gonna release this original version of the game. And so I went back and I played it a little bit in 2019 with some friends and that was fun. But then I quit pretty early, but during the pandemic.
00:09:44
Speaker
June, July or so of 2020, I was missing community that I normally would go to conventions. I have social anxiety. I talk about this on the cast a lot. I'm also pretty introverted in that I tend to spend time alone. That's how I get my energy, but I'm also very outgoing. I mean, that's why I do a podcast at this point. So I've been doing it for
00:10:08
Speaker
for four years. This is great for me to get to just hang out and chat with people and have the socialization in very high bursts, small windows of high socialization and then I'm done and I can go sit by myself for a few hours and do other things.
00:10:28
Speaker
So in 2020, we had just started the podcast. The podcast had been going at that point. We're about a
Impact of Pandemic on Social Life and Gaming
00:10:34
Speaker
year, year and a half into it. But I would go to conventions. That's a big part of how I socialized. That's a big part of how I did that thing four, five, six times a year. I'd go to a Magic Grand Prix or a Magic Fest or a
00:10:50
Speaker
convention of some kind. I mentioned Oticon earlier, there's some local ones that are a little smaller I'd go to as well. And that I would have like a weekend of intense socialization. And then I would usually take a day or two off after the weekend to recover before I went back to work. And then I'd go back to work. And like, and that was what I did for six or seven years. Like this was talk a little bit about this and some other episodes, but like conventions were a thing I've wanted to do my whole life. But with my social anxiety, I really
00:11:20
Speaker
Had a hard time getting to home. I just couldn't like in my head. I knew I couldn't do this thing and through the process of getting that diagnosed and working on it. I realized that this is something I can do. I can go to these events and see if this is a thing for me and I discovered it really is. I love I love those events.
00:11:40
Speaker
And so I was missing that, you know, we weren't even that deep into the pandemic at that point. I'd really only missed like one, but summer is like the high time for conventions. I will do June to August. There's two or three or four some years conventions that I'll go to in that stretch of time. And so.
00:11:59
Speaker
As I'm hitting end of July in 2020, I was really hurting. And at that point, I hadn't seen my friends in real life for months at that point. I had met up. I know a friend of mine who I actually live near now, and I go lift.
00:12:17
Speaker
with him every so often. He and I met up in like Minecraft a couple of times and did some like voice chat while we were playing Minecraft and found some other ways to try to keep in contact. But it was just, it's not the same. I mean, it's the thing I don't think I need to explain too much that that was just wasn't the same. And it didn't really fill that that need for socialization for me. So I went back to World of Warcraft Classic, I decided
00:12:43
Speaker
Blizzard, for whatever reason, maybe because the game is 20 years old at this point, still has forums. I know that's a thing that not a lot of modern internet stuff has done forums for a while, but they have forums for various topics within the game, including individual servers, so that these are just the people who you'll see when you log into your specific server that you made your character on. So I decided that...
00:13:10
Speaker
I was going to go to the server forum and see if I could find a guild that was recruiting that seemed like it'd be a good community-focused guild. And I found one that really, really fit for me. And I really liked kind of what they were talking about in their pitch. And they just sounded like a good home. And so I decided to try joining the guild. And it was a good home.
00:13:34
Speaker
I really, really liked spending time there, and it was a fairly big community relative to World of Warcraft guild, and especially in that time, the first version of the game, just because the way the content works usually had a little bit bigger, required a little bit bigger communities to do some of the early content.
00:13:54
Speaker
And so I really, that was a good place for me for a while. And there were some things we ended up, there was a schism and the whole thing is I don't need to get into all the guilt drama, but
00:14:10
Speaker
Even with that, we settled into a new guild with most of the same people from the first one and a really good, tight community of people who cared about each other and were willing to call out some things that needed to be called out if people were
00:14:26
Speaker
being a little toxic or even just saying things and not realizing like hey that's a little fatphobic or hey that's you know that's a slur you may not realize is this you know and things that were and then people who get called out were oh thanks for letting me know I and they were similar to our cast like if we run into those things and people correct us we want to be corrected on those we don't want to be perpetrate you know we don't want to be continuing to do those things and so it was the same thing this is a community that was really focused
00:14:55
Speaker
on having a good community and people were not only willing to kind of call some of this out but then to change and be happy to have been called out and happy to have been helped to work through that so just it was just a fantastic community and we
00:15:12
Speaker
push through to the end of the content and we didn't quite finish the highest end stuff but honestly in the original version of World of Warcraft is vanilla as it's sometimes called because every expansion is still called World of Warcraft but then adds a soba title but the first one doesn't have a soba title so the community is kind of had to come up with its own names for it.
00:15:33
Speaker
But so in that first one, you actually, to do the highest and biggest group content, you need 40 people together, all in the same spot to do the thing. That number goes down a lot as even the first expansion come out, and then every subsequent one, they fiddled with that formula for a number of expansions. But so starting with 40, and so we had a big crowd of people in there and doing that, and even at the end,
00:16:00
Speaker
you know, bringing in some people from other guilds or communities. We were one of the last really, really active guilds on our server, which kind of helped us out. We got to benefit a little from that, but that's
00:16:11
Speaker
Now they're here and they're there. But I pushed myself really hard in that. And I think that is part of what is going to lead me to kind of this conversation about burnout in the game. Because I was spending, well, we didn't actually spend, I think we had two raid nights a week and that went to three as we were trying to finish the content. But I think that actually slid back down to two.
00:16:35
Speaker
before we finished, before the vanilla finished running its course.
Time Management and Gaming Balance
00:16:41
Speaker
But even with that, I was spending extra nights doing other prep, doing other things, and even within those two nights, I took on a lot of responsibility for myself and did not delegate a lot. I was not a guild leader, but I was an officer, and I was kind of our heel lead.
00:17:00
Speaker
and the game has a few different roles, and so I was kind of the lead within that and I did not hand stuff off and delegate as much as I should. I did get some help, but I really didn't take a break because we were pushing toward the end of the content and we could see that the new, because they were going to re-release the first expansion as of recording this, they've actually re-released the second and that's kind of what brought me back.
00:17:24
Speaker
We knew that we were coming to the end of our timeline. And so I kept pushing myself harder and harder to try to get us there. And we didn't quite make it. And honestly, I took our last night of rating off because I knew I was burning myself out. And I'm really glad I did. And everyone was super supportive of me taking that time off. I just wish I had taken a little more. So that didn't help.
00:17:46
Speaker
But ultimately, I think that would have been okay. But as we pushed into the new expansion, all of a sudden, there's... I don't want to get too much into the details about World of Warcraft when I'm talking on a magic podcast, but there were a number of issues within the guild, and really one of the biggest ones that happened for us was...
00:18:07
Speaker
that suddenly, like I said, there are 40 people required for the content in the vanilla, but 25 is the highest in Burning Crusade, which is the first expansion. But to make it more complicated, the first thing is a 10 person
00:18:27
Speaker
dungeon raid, then you do the 25. And so there's this weird bottleneck where you have to kind of squeeze people through 10 person groups to gear them up to get them into the 25 person stuff, which then 25 runs for the rest of the expansion and you're fine there. But we had a hard transition from 40 to 10.
00:18:49
Speaker
in preparation for 25s because, well, a number of things. We lost people who didn't move over from vanilla. We brought some other people brought in. And also, there's a complication that always happens with expansions like this and something that didn't occur to me until it started happening.
00:19:08
Speaker
People level at different speeds. People have different amounts of time they put into the game. And when you are already at what they call the end game, you're already at level cap, you're already there. Lots of people are there that may have taken them six months, it might have taken them two weeks, it might have taken them a year to get to that point. But if you're all sitting there, you can do the content together.
00:19:29
Speaker
Now all of a sudden, new content comes out and people have to level again. Some people are going to do it in days, some people are going to do it in weeks, and some people are going to do it in months. And all of a sudden, you have this stratified situation and that didn't help. And then so there's lots of things. And so ultimately, from a social standpoint,
00:19:50
Speaker
guild's logistics standpoint and the fact that I put so much time into the game, and there was a few other things. I don't like how Blizzard handled the launch. They didn't give us very much time. Originally, they said it was going to be longer than normal. Pre-patch is basically when they put in all the new updates and the new game is basically ready, but you just can't go to the new places. You can't start leveling yet.
00:20:14
Speaker
They said it was going to be longer than normal and it was much shorter than normal, which meant that timelines were weird and there was a bunch of stuff that I wanted to get done despite putting tons of time into the game. I was still not sort of ready. I hadn't accomplished all the things I wanted to do. And so I ended up in a situation where even when I was playing the game, working toward
00:20:36
Speaker
you know, one of my goals, it felt like I was doing the wrong thing because it felt in my head like, well, I should be working toward this goal or working toward this goal or working toward that goal.
00:20:46
Speaker
And so ultimately I burned myself out and I quit playing. I told my other officers and guild mates that I was going to take a break for the month of July was my initial plan last year. And then within the first week, I realized all of a sudden I was sleeping better. I was feeling better. I wasn't depressed. Like I was going through, I realized
00:21:14
Speaker
For me, one of the big symptoms of depression is A, I don't sleep very well, which I've had other sleep issues since then. But at the time, I started sleeping better as soon as I was done. But also, I don't enjoy
00:21:27
Speaker
things that I should be enjoying or that I normally enjoy. We talked about this a while ago with Chase. They came on and we talked about corn and depression. And that was a thing that corn, you know, in the story, one of the lines talked about corn looking out in the cosmos and all he saw was the bad stuff. He didn't see any of the good things. He just saw the bad things. And it's like that's kind of one of the symptoms for me.
00:21:55
Speaker
that I first usually will first recognize when I'm starting to get into a place of depression and to into that into that place mentally because there were there was a few things I did break before I quit where it's like I should be having fun and I'm not and the only like all of the positive things that I know are happening aren't registering I'm not feeling it all I'm feeling are the negatives and so
00:22:20
Speaker
I took a break, and like I said, within the first week, immediately, I mean days, I just immediately felt better. I felt like all the stress from that was gone. And that's when I just said to them, like, I can't come back. I need to be done with this game right now. And so then I stepped away.
00:22:40
Speaker
And I was happy, frankly, to be doing other things. I love the content. I love the world. I love playing that game. It has fun stuff, but also because it's a massive multiplayer online game. It's an MMO.
00:22:58
Speaker
It's designed to be potentially the only thing you do. There is enough stuff that for people who want to get deep, it can be the only thing that you do. And there are people that are happy doing that, and that's wonderful. But I always have lots of things that I want to be doing with my time. And that was another thing that was kind of burning me out.
Gaming and Social Interactions During the Pandemic
00:23:24
Speaker
The Mass Effect Legendary Edition came out last year. Talked about that in our recent top 10 episode. Those are my favorite games of all time. And I wanted to play those games, but because I was spending so much time playing WoW, I was not really getting to those. I think they came up May last year and I didn't finish the third one until October or November because I just couldn't play them early because I was putting so much time into WoW.
00:23:49
Speaker
And there's just other stuff. And it was like, it felt so good to just decide I wanted to just sit and read a book today, or I'm going to just play games on this old system of mine, or I'm going to do this other thing or go, you know, hang out with friends and stuff is that was feeling more, more safe and available. And
00:24:09
Speaker
But then my dad has been playing. I got my dad into World of Warcraft. I got him into it years ago. I mean, I kind of feel that was revenge for him getting me into Dungeons and Dragons was the thing that I've spent.
00:24:24
Speaker
my life playing too. But so when I went back to classic in 2020, he came back to a couple months after me and started playing the classic game. And he really got into it because, frankly, he played back then, but he never really learned how to play if that makes sense. You can play the game and have a lot of fun just kind of doing your own thing, but there's also definitely
00:24:53
Speaker
ways to do the stuff better if you really want to get into it. And my dad really got into it. And he really enjoyed doing some of the high-end game stuff with us, which, by the way, was amazing. I love that my dad and I share a lot of hobbies and that I can really do this stuff with him sometimes. And so that was a lot of fun to play with him. And that was also one of the things when I left was like, well, I'm not going to be playing with dad again.
00:25:20
Speaker
I mean, he and I are in a D&D campaign right now. And so it's like, I still see him, I still do stuff. But that was a fun game to play. It was a fun thing to do with him. A fun activity just to do with my dad.
00:25:35
Speaker
But so, having stepped away from it, he kept me apprised of the situation and told me about, oh, this person's doing this or this thing's going on or there's some issues in the guild and people are leaving and some of just the happenings and stuff. So he kind of kept me in the loop a little bit.
00:25:53
Speaker
for the 14-ish months that I wasn't playing. And so it kept the game kind of in the back of my mind. And that kept going, well, there are definitely things that I miss and things I'd like to be doing. But at the same time, there's also reasons I stepped away and I'm glad to be doing other stuff.
00:26:10
Speaker
Um, but as I, this is the whole point of this entire story is that I'm back playing the game now and I'm really thinking about this sort of this idea of balance. I mean, I joke a little bit about calling it my wildlife balance. Cause in, you know, corporate world that I'm working, you talk about work-life balance a lot and to the point of cliche, though I'll say my, my work actually genuinely does.
00:26:36
Speaker
want to help employees, you know, not burnout and do stuff. That's a whole other conversation. But I'm really thinking about this topic of burnout and this topic of balance. Because like I said, it was really nice to step away from WoW and do other things with my time. Even just my free time playing video games, like play other games and have the freedom to pick up
00:27:01
Speaker
something from my old, you know, PlayStation 3, my, you know, 64. I've got a number of old game systems. And the last year, in particular, without playing WoW, I started to collect some older games and play some older games. And it's really fun to do that, to have the sort of, quote unquote, freedom to
00:27:20
Speaker
to be able to switch up and not have to feel responsible to do the tasks in WoW to keep my character up to date so that when I go run group content, I'm not holding the group back.
00:27:36
Speaker
At the same time, I was really missing that community. I realized when I left last summer, part of it was it felt like vaccines were going out and maybe we could start doing things again. And that's still in a not great place. We talked a little bit, Hobbs and I both sort of went to a big event this summer. I went to Fourth Street Fantasy and I talked to my friend Tim about it.
00:28:06
Speaker
he and I both went, and so we kind of talked about our experiences there, and Hobbs went to Command Fest, I believe, in a few weeks before that, so kind of in the June, made a June range for him as well, and he recorded a solo episode sort of talking about his decision process and assessing the risks and all of that, and that's a whole conversation, but it's not
00:28:30
Speaker
Regardless of all the things, we know that it isn't the same situation as it was three or four years ago where we could just go to these events and not worry about getting people sick and not worry about, you know, this disease that can cause lingering issues even if it isn't fatal. It is also fatal sometimes too. So like setting all of that aside, I was kind of feeling
00:28:57
Speaker
Like that was a thing that was going to start picking up and that, that hasn't. I went to the one convention this year and honestly, I don't really feel comfortable doing big things. And I don't know if I'll be doing big conventions next year either. I'm hopeful that fourth street will happen. It was, it was a small convention anyway. I think there's only about a hundred people, but they took a lot of really good precautions. I watched as all of the social medias and things that I could through that. And I don't think anyone got sick. I don't think there was any report of sickness from that. I think.
00:29:27
Speaker
The precautions that were taken at that event were all good ones, but unfortunately most events are much bigger and aren't going to do the things that 4th Street did and aren't going to really be able to do the things that 4th Street was able to kind of do. And so I don't know that I'll be getting back to 4, 5, 6 conventions a year anymore.
00:29:49
Speaker
It may be even ever. I mean, who knows what the future will hold at this point. Maybe I will get there, but ultimately, I may only be a couple. I mean, especially one of the things that's nice about 4th Street is that it's local, so I didn't have to fly. And that's a whole other thing. But anyway, set that aside. So that's part of why I was thinking about going back to World of Warcraft. But again, this whole burnout and balance thing has been
00:30:19
Speaker
weighing on me pretty heavily and I'll say I'm really happy I've gone back. I've met up with and had conversations with a lot of folks I used to run with well a year and a half ago that we were doing stuff with and it's been really nice and
00:30:34
Speaker
We've got a small group who are back, who are planning to start doing some 10-person stuff, smaller things, and a big part of that, honestly, having conversations with those people too, like a big part of why they're looking at only doing 10s and not doing 25, which is the bigger stuff in the Wrath of the Lich King, which is the expansion that just came out.
00:31:01
Speaker
25, like the best gear, the best stuff comes from the 25 person. There is 10%. It's the same content. It's the same bosses, but it has worse gear. And honestly, the mechanics are just a little different at 10 versus 25. But they've said, and I really agree with them too, that we just don't want to coordinate the large group and to have to manage that and the extra stress and the extra
00:31:28
Speaker
effort and the extra time. And so I'm really hopeful that that is a part, that that helps this balance. And I think that's why I'm feeling more balanced with this. I actually had some time off this week and I definitely put time into a while, but I also put time into other games. I was just playing something on my PlayStation VR today and having a lot of fun with that. So I'm feeling better about this balance. And I think, I don't know that I'm coming to a lesson or anything, but I'm finding a better place for me
00:31:58
Speaker
within this game, and I think targeting that smaller content is really helpful. Fortunately, it helps that this is part of what Blizzard was doing as they added new expansions. They understood that it takes a lot of people. I'll tell you, I really enjoy doing the 40-person raids. There is something epic about going into the heart of a volcano and finding these giants.
00:32:23
Speaker
10 times taller than your characters, and needing 40 people with you. I mean, you don't need 40 people for that if you know what I'm talking about as a WoW player. But like, to do that raid, you're bringing 40 people to go do this thing. And there's something epic about having 39 people around you to go take down this dragon, to go take down this rock monster, to go take down this giant fire elemental. Like, that feels cool. It's... but...
00:32:53
Speaker
my god is it so much to coordinate is it so hard and in in the classic i think it was a lot less than than back in the day because back in the day we were all terrible at the game and it took a lot longer and a lot more time
Challenges and Rewards of Coordinating WoW Raids
00:33:08
Speaker
remember I used to read one of original original vanilla we spent six nights a week doing what my classic guild would do in like an hour and a half and an hour and a half because we were slow compared to other people who would run it much faster but so
00:33:24
Speaker
But even then, it takes a lot of people to coordinate that because even especially with us, we never quite had all 40 people in our guild. So we would have 30 people in our guild and then we'd have to go coordinate, try to find 10 people from other guilds who we were working with at the time or as a term in the game pickup group.
00:33:45
Speaker
Um, got turned into pug and then pug rather than being referring to groups started to refer to individuals who are not part of the original group. So we'd have to go pug people and find people to fill in the, the, the rest of the roster. And then frankly, we would run some of this content we'd run with 38 people and it'd be fine, but.
00:34:04
Speaker
still we'd have to go find people which then took more time and then you've got to talk you know make sure a little bit of vetting you know to have to do necessarily lots but if there's a lot of people who want to come you need to figure out who's gonna become and if they these people have done the stuff or if they haven't and if they're set up to do the stuff and it's it's just the whole thing there's so much to do even like I said though it's less this these years but
00:34:31
Speaker
to doing it with just 10 people, doing this stuff in two expansions later with just 10 people.
00:34:38
Speaker
You don't have to really deal with any of that, because it's going to mostly be people who are around. And even if you have to fill in one person, filling in one random person is fine. You don't have to go through lots of effort to find this and that, and especially the way some of the, just the design worked in the early game too. Sometimes you just needed this specific class. You didn't have mages, you couldn't finish this fight, because mages have this specific ability that are required for this fight.
00:35:07
Speaker
There's a certain neat aspect to that where things feel more impactful, the world feels bigger. I'm kind of of two minds with it because I love the original World of Warcraft content and I love
00:35:23
Speaker
Honestly, I love how janky it is and how rough it is sometimes, but at the same time, that makes it harder to, that causes more burnout, that makes it more stressful, that makes it more difficult to do this stuff. And so I think, I'm hoping, I just, I've spent less than a month that I've been back. So I'm hoping I have a better balance.
00:35:45
Speaker
We will see. I hope that this was a much longer conversation with myself than I was expecting it to be. So I hope this was engaging for people. I hope this was valuable to kind of think about and examine this idea, this topic. I said, I don't really have answers. I'm working towards answers for myself. I think doing the smaller content, especially
00:36:09
Speaker
Aiming for this smaller thing, especially with a handful of people who, frankly, I missed dearly. Two of the people I'm running with right now, two of the people who are still in my guild right now. There's really the three of us, we're only three officers who are left from back in the day. All three of us basically skipped Burning Crusade, and that's part of why we're still in the guild, because the people who didn't left, because if they wanted to play our guild
00:36:34
Speaker
was not playing. Our guild wasn't running stuff, so they had to leave and join other guilds, which was fine, but I miss many of them. I've talked to many of them. I've played with many of them, and I'm happy to see them, but I'm also very happy to be back spending time and working with these couple of people, and just to have a small group. And honestly, this content's been good, too. I was just having a conversation with a friend of mine where this stuff right off the bat, it's a little bit easier than some of the others.
00:37:04
Speaker
not that molten core was all that hard but it just it feels less maybe this is more me than the actual content as i'm talking through this but i feel less obligation to just do all the things to be as good as i can right now because i know half of the stuff that i half of the gear that i could grind hours and hours and a few dozen hours to get
00:37:28
Speaker
I'm just going to replace it in the very first night, maybe even. And so I'm spending time. I'm definitely doing things. I'm definitely running dungeons and doing other stuff that is making my character more powerful for the run, literally, tomorrow night as I'm recording. We have our first scheduled raid.
00:37:49
Speaker
But I'm not sweating having to have everything in the best in slot, as they like to say. I'm not sweating having best in slot for everything. I'm getting good enough in a few places and just kind of running with what I have and others. And ultimately right now it's just about playing the game and having fun with the people and not playing the game when I'm feeling that and spending time. Like I said, today I spent some time doing something else. Yesterday I spent some time
00:38:15
Speaker
doing something else. There's a couple other games. Like this week, I finished up just a couple other games that weren't wow. I just took time, stepped away. And then today, actually, I spent a lot of time, which was great because just a couple of my friends were running dungeons. And so I just ran a bunch of dungeons with them, which was nice to get a little practice with my character, but just kind of doing what was fun. And so I'm hoping
00:38:37
Speaker
that this is a balance that I can kind of maintain and keep playing and having that fun, good community here, but also not feeling like the obligation to need to drive, to push things. And we'll see. Some of that that burned me out in the last expansion was definitely some of that obligation. And honestly, again, I don't want to get too into detail because it doesn't really matter for a magic community, but some of it was the company. Honestly, Blizzard still, I'm not super comfortable supporting
00:39:07
Speaker
There's some just dumb nasty things that were happening with employees and harassment and things. And that's not really going anywhere. Don't feel great about that.
00:39:20
Speaker
I don't know, some of the other stuff, there's some other things that they did just as a game developer where I just wasn't, I just didn't trust them. I really, really don't like how they launched Burning Crusade, but in the last year, they've turned that around a lot. They're much more open about what they're doing, much more open about their philosophy and what they're planning, much more open about where they're at and talking to the community and interacting with the community. I am actually,
00:39:49
Speaker
looking forward to what their plans are for this expansion as opposed to the last expansion where I was really concerned about sticking around and feeling like I was going to waste my time because it's like I don't trust that they're not going to, you know, do some poor timing thing or make some bad decisions that I think hurt the community and have sunk all this time into a game that I'm not having fun with down the line. I wasn't having fun with it at the time either for other things, but that's all turned around. So
00:40:18
Speaker
I
00:40:24
Speaker
interesting or engaging topic, please let me know. I tend to sit down and I think I'm going to record something short and then I get off on a meandering topic and I record something long. So I'm going to cut this off here.
Gratitude and Community Support
00:40:38
Speaker
Thank you everybody for spending time here. And I just want to say a quick, as I go on, I just want to thank our community and our listeners and everyone for being so supportive because I know
00:40:43
Speaker
don't know, I'm hoping this is a good balance and again.
00:40:48
Speaker
for for a while through the summer we were hitting pretty good consistency and now the last few weeks we've we've or the last month or so we've missed some we've missed some weeks and haven't posted some things and i know hob is going through some stuff and i haven't talked a little bit about some of the stuff i'm going through i have some other stuff too and
00:41:06
Speaker
Our community has just always been so supportive. Folks on our Discord, I always appreciate all of y'all and our community and listeners. I appreciate all the support everybody gives us. Thank you all very much and I guess have a good night.