Tag Archives: Bloodsail Buccaneers

Tough Times for Plague Zombies

3 Replies

My memories of the zombie plague event before the original Wrath of the Lich King launch back in 2008 are, admittedly, a bit foggy.  It has been almost fourteen years, so my recollections are a misty water colored memory of people being angry, a chaos of zombies throwing themselves at players in town, and new players being griefed relentlessly, causing me to pack up and stay out in the field for the duration of the event.

Players trying to go about their business were angry about how things were going and Blizzard was telling people to maybe, you know, just not log in during the run of the event if they were not having fun.

My writing style was a bit more crude and terse back then, but I did post about the whole thing.  But no screen shots and not much in the way of detail was included.  These days I have a dozen screen shots in a post about a minor UI change in a game.  My memories are more easily stimulated by visuals.

Anyway, with this bit of color in the back of my head, I suspected this week might be chaos and griefing once more and accepted that I likely wouldn’t be able to get anything done in town.  I was just going to stay away.

But then curiosity began to pick at my will.  Some part of me wanted to see how it was playing out.  So I logged in and went to Stormwind and stood around in the town square between the bank and the auction house, a locus of activity for any such event… and there was nothing.

I mean, sure, there were a few plagued cockroaches wandering around, but they were getting zapped by passers by about as fast as they popped up.

You’d get zapped even if you were not plagued

So I started looking around to see if maybe I could get this party started.  And, sure enough, I found some cases of plagued grain on one of the docks.

All that grain just sitting there… in boxes… which is how we store grain now I guess…

We know the grain is the source of the plague because even Arthas figured that out eventually back in Warcraft III.

Yes, dammit, it is the grain!

So I clicked on one of the plagued grain cases and, hey presto, had the zombie plague on me.

Here we go, on the train to zombie town

And then, suddenly, I was cured.  Did I heal myself?  Did I get some insufficiently bad grain?

So I clicked on a box again… got plagued… then was suddenly cured.

I had to look around for a bit before I spotted a priest sitting on the bridge nearby casting cure disease on anybody who touched the grain.

Will nobody rid me of this troublesome priest?

No fun to be had here.  I can’t get mad at them.  It is an RP server after all, and there they are diligently defending the town from the zombie plague.  So I went looking for trouble elsewhere.

To Ironfoge!

I took the tram over and went looking for plague grain there, finding some over in the military district.

More crates of grain

That was far enough away from the bank and auction house to be safe from prying eyes.  Still, I wasn’t going to take any chance this time.  I click on the grain, then ran around the corner and hid, waiting for the zombie timer to run down and transform me.

A zombie at last

Now I just had to run to the bank and cause some chaos.

However, the guards had other ideas.

The guards spot me

Zombies run slowly.  You get a little speed booster, but it is on a cool down and the guards will catch you if you’re not careful.  They caught me.

Well, back to the drawing board… or the plague crates as it were.

This time I decided I would contract the plague, then rush over to the bank and hide behind the counter until zombie time.  But as I rode over I passed by one of the Argent Healers and… well… he healed me.

Uh… thanks I guess…

Again, my memories of the original event are dim, but I thought you had to actually speak to them to get a heal back in the day.  Maybe?  I could be wrong.

So I went back to the grain again, got myself infected, then rode back, keeping well clear of the Argent Healers… which was a bit of a task because there is even one in the bank… and managed to slip through without being cured.  I hid in the vault and waited.

Waiting to be a vault zombie

The timer ran down and I was a zombie again.  Now I had to decide how to play this,

I decided to just walk up behind one of the bank NPCs behind the counter and use the explode skill, which hits everybody within a given range with the zombie plague, players and NPCs alike.

So I did it.

Dead zombie on the counter

But even as I watched, the Argent Healed cured everybody on his side of the bank and a priest showed p and cured everybody else.

Zombie chaos was just not going to happen.

Now, while I was in evening prime time, this was still on a week night on the Bloodsail Buccaneers server, which is not a high population “OMG it has a queue again” server, so my experiences might not be representative.  But it sure seemed like the whole zombie thing wasn’t going to have much of an impact without more effort than I was willing to put in.

And now the zombie plague event ended early as the scourge invasion has reportedly begun.

Probably for the best.

WoW Classic Running of the Gnomes Coming October 16th

The running of the gnomes is back for its second appearance in WoW Classic.  It is time to get out your pink haired gnome and make the run from Gnomeregan to Booty Bay.

Some gnomes around from last year

The event will take place this coming Saturday Friday, October 16th, at 4pm Pacific time, 7 pm Eastern time, or 23:00 UTC, depending on where you sync your clock.  The official notice is here:

Come run with the gnomes

We did the run last year and it was pretty fun.  I have a post about it and Ula did a video to commemorate the run.  We will be back again for the run again this year.

The run on WoW Classic is in addition to the run on retail WoW. (Which was this past weekend.  I have been a bit slow in posting about this, so much other stuff has been going on.)  Information about the run can be found at the official site for the event.

WoW Classic First Night Fun Complete with Queues

I will be the first to admit that my own WoW Classic first night experience may not be representative.  I know a bunch of people who saw this on their screens.

Taken from Asmogold’s stream at 9pm PDT last night

Blizzard even opened up more US realms, a couple of more EU realms, and even a new Oceanic realm. (And another)  We’re now around 50 WoW Classic realms.  Demand was high.  Time to update my realms list post.

But there were no queues for me.  Not right away.

I got home from work about 15 minutes before the servers were set to unlock.  I booted up my computer, switched into shorts (because it was 95 degrees out and we have no AC), and got myself logged in.  Skronk and Ula were already online and logged in and we got onto a voice channel in our Discord.  Our first choice, Bloodsail Buccaneers, still looked good.

US Server Choices

I made a character on Old Blanchy as a backup, but went back to BB and got on the character screen, where the “Enter World” button was still gray.

The promise was there…

Skronk and Ula were a dwarf and a gnome respectively, so I set aside Wilhelm the human pally for a bit and went with Tistann, my dwarf hunter, so we could all start off together.

And then the “Enter World” button went live right on time… give Blizz some credit there… and we all hit it. After a moment or two, we were dumped into a mass of dwarves and gnomes.  It was a sea of new characters.

Like a casting call for the Wizard of Oz

We quickly grouped up and were pulled together into the same layer.  We managed to find each other for our first group selfie of WoW Classic.

Arrival in Azeroth – Priest, Hunter, Mage

Then we got ourselves oriented, made the usual changes to the settings… must have fast quest text or die… and launched ourselves into the game.  And it was a crowded game, with everybody right there in the starter zone.

We’re all in this little valley

It was time to look for mobs.

Oh man, that is a lot of dead wolves

Wolves, the first of the stock bear/boar/wolf quest trifecta to hit us, were being slaughtered en masses and for a few minutes it was a tough call to tag one before somebody else grabbed it.  The slight delay as a hunter in getting a shot off felt very long.

But the edge of the wave of new players passed beyond the wolves pretty quickly.  Not that the wolves were not still being hunted like crazy, but after not too long it became fairly easy to pick off a wolf now and then to advance our quests.  During that we leveled for the first time, as a group, about 22 minutes after the server went live.

Leveling together

We turned in that quest and got sent to Anvilmar to meet our class trainers for the first time, to get our first new skill.  Mine was track beasts, which was not all that useful, but you take what you can get.

Then it was off into the zone again for some boars… naturally… and a delivery quest which led use from camp to camp.  While the dwarf/gnome starter zone was the one alliance area I had not done during the stress tests, all of this was still oddly familiar despite it having been years since I had been here.  As Skronk noted, our memories of a lot of this very old content was better than more recent expansions.

We were given a few more tasks, including picking up the lost belongings of Felix Whindlebolt.  In searching for those we ran into our first server queue… a queue in the game.

There is a line! Maybe they have toilet paper!

The gear Felix was missing were all items you had to click on the retrieve, after which they would disappear for a moment before appearing again.  Old WoW tech.  In order to facilitate everybody getting their quest item, people nicely queued up and waited their turn.  So we joined in.

Waiting in line in the snow

I don’t know if this was simply RP server behavior… lots of people in line had set themselves to walk rather than run, so we did so as well…or if this was a manifestation of what I have observed in other retro server experiences, where everybody is simply so happy to be there that they feel cooperative, but we were willing to go along with that.

Not so Poncho, whose legend began right there before our eyes.

Poncho cut the line.

And at that point people began booing Poncho, shouting shame at him, and generally haranguing him.  As soon as could be, Poncho because the byword for a bad player and for the rest of the evening Poncho would remain a topic of conversation in general chat.  There was even a guild formed with the name “No Ponchos” in response to his actions.

We carried on.  The first line was long, the second was shorter, and there was no line for the third item Felix was missing, so we returned that, hit level 4, and ended up heading back to Anvilmar again.  There we were treated to the an aspect of the classic WoW experience, not having enough coins to buy all your skills.  We all had two skills to buy, at a price of 1 silver each, but we didn’t have even five silver all combined.

27 copper short

Ah well, living the WoW Classic lifestyle.

Then it was time for our final queue.  The big quest in the zone is The Stolen Journal, where you have to go slay a named troll in the troll cave.  That meant another queue.  But this time people queued by groups, as one of the early innovations of WoW over EverQuest was making sure everybody in your group got the drop for certain quests.  If you had to bring back somebody’s head, then all five of you got a head from the kill.

So groups, standing abreast, lined up, one after another, to take their turn to slay Grik’nir the Cold in order to retrieve the journal.

Our group in the line of groups

A couple of times people looked like they were going to try to cut in line, but they were shouted at, advised not to be a Poncho.  We only had three in our group, so invited a couple of singles to join in.  It was like being at the ski lift on a busy weekend.

We got the journal and headed back out to Anvilmar.  The quest reward was enough to buy us all our missing skills.  The next steps sent us out of Coldridge Valley, through the trog cave… which seemed a lot shorter than I remembered it… and into Dun Morogh proper.

On the far side of the cave we saw Syp standing AFK, so we took a quick passing selfie with him and moved on.

Random picture time

Out in Dun Morogh things remained crowded, but never quite as crowded as it was in a few of those opening quests.  The queues seemed to act as a meter to dole people out into the world in little groups, spreading them out just enough that we ran into no more queues.  Or maybe Blizz added more layers.  I saw some people disappearing for a while.  Maybe they were grouping with people in other layers, or maybe Blizz was evening out the load.

We hit the old points out in Dun Morogh, remembering some quests in full, forgetting steps in other quests.  We ran all the way to Rumbleshot before we remembered we were supposed to pick up a box of stuff for him along the way.  And we spent some time in the Wendigo cave competing for mobs, though the spawns were plenty.

So many unskinned wendigos

We ended up at level 7 then took a bit of a break for dinner.  My wife had brought me something, so while Ula and Skronk idled I ran up to Ironforge and trained skinning and leatherworking, the went back to the wendigo cave and quickly got my skinning skill up past 50.

When they got back Bung and his son, who hadn’t even been born when WoW came out, got on Discord with us and said they were in the queue for the server.  It was a few thousand deep, but the estimate was only 20 minutes or so, though that did bounce around quite a bit, like they had hired the person who did the time estimate for Windows file copy to do the queue time estimate.

They got in, but rolled up humans, so were over around Northshire Abby.  We logged out our dwarves (and gnome) and grabbed humans as well to go hang out with them.

The human starter area was crowded of course, but as with Dun Morogh, it felt like the big wave had passed and we were in the midst of a those behind the wave.  There was competition for mobs, but not like the first ten minutes we were out there struggling to tag a wolf.  I even saw a familiar name.

Didn’t I see you in Norrath before?

We wandered about, grouping up to go take on the Defias in the first of the bandana collection quests.  I was on as a pally, and I did sorely miss the ranged ability of my hunter.  But we got through the Northshire Abby quests.  There was barely a line for Garrick Padfoot, the named Defias whose head we all needed.  There were two other groups hanging around him, so we waited our turn for his spawn, then went on our way.

The only problem of the evening occurred while we were out among the Defias.  Word was that Blizzard was having some problems with layers crashing now and then.  There had been reports of BB being down while we were on and happily questing away.  But then it came time for our layer to crash and we were kicked out.  But the queue was “only” about 3,500 deep for me, which only took a few minutes to work through until I was back on again.

I stuck it out until we got to Goldshire, then I decided to call it a night.  I had been on for more than five hours straight on a week night after a full day at work and with another looming in the morning and this blog post to finish up.

We still have a lot ahead of us.  We have to form a guild… because, of course we must… and we’re still working on a name.  We have to sort out our group a bit.  And we have a determination to go and do Ragefire Chasm at level, which means getting through Orgrimmar naked at around level 15 or so.  But there is plenty of time for that.  We had what I would have to consider a good first night, which hopefully portends more.

So did anybody get to level 60 yet?  I am going to have to score myself on my predictions.

Others writing about the first night: