Nostalgia and the Legacy of Blizzard North Keeps Blizzard Strong in the Q3 2021 Results

For Diablo, our plan to enter an era of unprecedented content scale for the franchise has experienced a strong start with the September release of Diablo II: Resurrected, the return of one of the most acclaimed titles in PC gaming history. First week sales of the title were the highest recorded for a remaster from the company.

-Activision-Blizzard Q3 2021 Presentation

As anticipated, yesterday saw the Activision-Blizzard Q3 2021 financials announced, which covers the period from July 1 through September 30 2021.

I put those dates in there just to be clear as to why I expected at least a little drama on the Blizzard front being that is the timeline when the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing hostile workplace lawsuit was headline news in the gaming community.

If players were really mad at Blizzard for being a horrible company, then it feels like there should have been some pain on their bottom line.  Instead, Blizzard posted its strongest quarter in 2021, bringing in $493 million, up $60 million from the $433 posted in Q2 and $10 million ahead of the $483 million posted in Q1.

Those were not “launch a new WoW expansion” numbers like Q4 2020, but they were still ahead of “its a pandemic and we’re all stuck at home playing video games” numbers.

Activision Blizzard Q3 2021 Financial Results Presentation – Slide 13

Margins were down a bit, 38% in Q3 compared to 43% in Q1, but still up when measured against Q2, when they dipped to 33%.

Overall, things were looking up for Blizzard in Q3, which might have been expected to have been the summer of their discontent.  What saved Blizzard’s bacon?

Apparently Diablo II Resurrected is a very popular title.  According to the earnings call it was a huge hit in South Korea, which might explain why I see Battle.net queues close to midnight Pacific time.  While people have been upset about BNet’s performance, it is apparently one of those problems related to being too successful.

That, however, was the extent of the good news at Blizzard as their achievements slide in the presentation deck shows.

Activision Blizzard Q3 2021 Financial Results Presentation – Slide 8

It opens with the quote I have at the top of the post, which honestly could have been taken as faint praise given how the Warcraft III remaster went.  Even the StarCraft remaster wasn’t a huge hair deal.  But Diablo II Resurrected, which launched on PC and consoles in September, was enough to carry the quarter, because the rest of that slide is excuses and qualified successes.

Diablo Immortal, which I keep reminding people had a playable demo at BlizzCon 2018, is now slated for some point in the first half of Q2 2022, while Diablo IV is nowhere in sight.  It seems unlikely for 2022.

The Overwatch 2 entry is likewise vague on when it might be a thing that can generate revenue.  2022 doesn’t seem to be the target anymore.

Hearthstone is hard to judge, so whatever “stable” means, that was what it was.  We’ll see if the new game mode warrants a big mention when they review Q4.

And World of Warcraft, which is running both retail and classic modes now, recorded the strongest engagement for a non-expansion year which, given the cliffs the subscriber base has been driven off of for some of those years, might not be as big of a brag as you might think, especially when they’re running Shadowlands and Burning Crusade Classic in parallel.  That the Monthly Active Users for Q3 2021 stayed stable at 26 million for Blizz while D2R was booming probably means WoW was down by quite a bit.

So I guess a qualified good quarter for the Blizzard side of the house, even if they are the third place studio, such that people are starting to refer to the company as “ABK,” for Activision Blizzard King.

It also seems that bad behavior didn’t harm them as much as it might have.  But gamers are not, as a larger group, an especially politically aware group I imagine.  I noted yesterday that Riot didn’t seem to suffer from bad behavior, with League of Legends remaining hugely popular even as headlines haunted them.  Maybe being a bad place to work doesn’t hurt your bottom line, which I am sure will make everybody toiling in the video games industry happy.

You can certainly argue that the lack of a strong plan for Shadowlands and having no other fresh titles on deck hurt them as much, if not more than, the investigation by the state of California did.

We will see have to see what Q4 looks like, with the new Hearthstone game mode, WoW Classic Season of Mastery, and the cat mount being the only big items visible.  I’m surprised the cat mount didn’t get a mention on the Blizzard slide.

But we won’t get the Q4 news until February, so we’ll see what happens then.

Related:

• Activision Blizzard Investor Relations Quarterly Results Page
• Massively OP coverage including notes on the investor call topics
• Ars Technica Coverage of the state of the company

A 64-bit EverQuest Client is Coming

Add this to the list of things I never would have imagined; Daybreak is talking about updating the EverQuest client and servers to 64-bit.

EverQuest in 1999

Back in 1999, when EverQuest launched, there were still a lot of 16-bit apps on Windows.  I am pretty sure InstallShield still had 16-bit libraries in its config when EverQuest shipped because I had to get a exception from Microsoft for a Win-logo certification because of them.  And it was a pain in the backside.

The EverQuest team put out a Producer’s Letter today which announced the 64-bit upgrade was coming, with a target of early 2022, after the Terror of Luclin expansion goes live and has settled in a bit.

There are some other items in the letter about events coming up, ExtraLife participation, and something about server merges.  But at its age, with all of the special servers it launches, doing an EverQuest server merge is just another part of the life of the game.

I am interested to see how the 64-bit conversion goes, whether or not it will improve performance, and if this might include an improved launcher.  Maybe this will put EverQuest on the 4Games platform, a move that EG7 said was in the works for all of their titles back in May.

Even if it doesn’t change much, having a 64-bit client is likely going to be a requirement to keep the game active in the future.  At some point Microsoft will stop supporting 32-bit apps on Windows.  I am not sure how I will play Civilization II when that happens though.  Maybe that will get a remaster by then.

Can Blizzard Do Anything That Doesn’t Look Bad Right Now?

Betteridge’s law of headlines suggests that the answer to this question must be “No,” unless we consider it an open ended question.  But the easy answer is “no,” and I’ll stake that against whatever Activision Blizzard announces in a few hours at their Q3 2021 investor’s call.

In advance of that however, we can look at the cat mount.  Did you know that you can buy a cat mount now, a flying cat mount no less, in World of Warcraft.  Well you can, and it is just $25 for the “Sunwarmed Feline,” described as the “fuzziest mount Azeroth has ever seen.”

It is admittedly very fuzzy

Now, even in the best of times, somebody would have been shouting “cash grab” or complaining about a subscription game padding their bankroll with cash shop purchases.

But that has died down somewhat, and you can usually predict the regulars who are going to show up with that complaint.  We’re kind of past the outrage era of the sparkle pony and the $10 horse I think.  Another mount in the cash shop is pretty much expected now and then.

Unless, of course, your studio is being investigated by the state for having been a hostile work place since forever ago and senior staff… who were already leaving rather regularly… begin getting the boot and even the CEO has to take a temporary cut.  Oh, and your studio is basically living off of nostalgia for games launched 15-20 years ago.

When that happens doing anything like adding a new mount to the online store is immediately greeted by rage.  How dare you continue to conduct business as normal!

I mean, look at this headline over at Massively OP:

Tell us how you really feel…

Not that I am holding up Massively OP as a beacon of temperate games journalism… I think one of the biggest arguments in favor of video games being art is the amount of ink spilled over opinions, and their site is driven by opinion as much as any… but a year ago that headline would have just been World of Warcraft releases a new cash shop mount and would have had maybe 20 comments split evenly between grumbles about corporate greed and joy about the cool new kitty.  Now the pitchforks and torches are out.

And that is pretty much the reaction to everything.  If they let somebody else go, change some NPCs name, cover up some cleavage, or remove a suggestive joke or emoji the crowd is angry because they aren’t doing enough, they are doing the wrong things, they should be focused on something else, or they are just doing some window dressing rather than fixing the main problem, take your pick.

And even things that might otherwise seem good get the veil of suspicion draped over them.  It is hard not to think that the whole WoW Classic Season of Mastery was a quick attempt to shore up Q4 2021 revenue and win some goodwill by feeding us some more nostalgia.

Even when the press release announced that Bobby Kotick had asked the board of directors to to cut his compensation, my gut reaction was to wonder aloud if they said yes.  Everything they say, everything they do, is under the microscope, so if the press release just says “asked” I want to know the response. I don’t want to hear that he asked, I want to hear that it was done.

This is what happens when people feel you have betrayed your trust, when you private reality turns out to be kind of shitty compared to your public persona, when you prove once again that corporations are not people so cannot be our friends, ever.  Our relationships with them are purely transactional and if we see them any other way we’re just kidding ourselves.

Of course, in the middle of all of this, are a lot of actual people who do the work that makes Blizzard go, most of whom probably just want to do their job in a safe environment where they can be themselves.  This has to be a miserable time for them.

But they have to move forward, the company has to move forward or a lot of people will lose their jobs, maybe jobs that they really love, jobs that they have worked many years to get to, and even if corporations done care about the individual, “Blizzard Lays Off Staff” would be another blow of a headline.

So I wonder what the other side of this looks like.  Ion Hazzikostas has an interview over at Venture Beat about trying to move forward.  Because they have to move forward, fixing things and shipping products, or they all go home.

And outrage has an expiration date, unless you keep feeding it, which has been one of the Blizzard problems; we keep getting new revelations.  The end doesn’t come until all the bad stuff comes out in the daylight.

There is a temptation to compare Blizzard to Riot, which went through its own series of damning revelations about being an incredibly hostile place to work if you weren’t a meat eating white hetro male.  The headlines for them dried up pretty fast after the initial revelations, though the state of California is still on them about working conditions.  The state will keep going until it stops getting complaints.

But Riot’s audience feels a little different than Blizzards.  Not that there isn’t toxicity in any large, popular online game, but League of Legends has a reputation in that regard above and beyond the likes of WoW.  And during the time when Riot was in the headlines they remained at the top of the monthly SuperData chart… I miss that bit of monthly insight… so the bottom line didn’t seem to be hard hit.

So I suppose we’ll see later today with the investor’s call how hard Blizzard is getting hit when it comes to the bottom line, though how much of that is outrage at the company and how much is the fact that Blizz just hasn’t been delivering much new in a while will still be up for debate.

The View From Delve as YC123 Draws Towards an End

YC123, the 123rd year since the Youli Conference, which marked the founding of CONCORD and the establishment of the current status quo of the empires of New Eden, opened with null sec space locked in a titanic war.  The second day of the year saw one of the biggest battles ever witnessed in the star cluster as the system of M2-XFE again became the place where many titans were destroyed.

That battle was at the end of a crescendo of spectacular, trillion ISK clashes in Delve that set world records.  October of YC122 saw thousands of ships destroyed and trillions of ISK vaporized in the vacuum of virtual space.

To put those ISK amounts into some context, using a scale I saw somebody using to make a very dumb political point, a million seconds ago was less than two weeks in the past, a billion seconds ago George H. W. Bush was still president of the United States, and a trillion seconds adds up to over 30K years, which would put us back in the late stone age when Fred Flintstone worked in a stone quarry and attended meetings of the Loyal Order of Water Buffalo.

So a trillion ISK is kind of a lot, and to commit that much ISK in assets across multiple battles takes some stamina.

The from late April of this year until the beginning of August, just three months back now, the Imperium holdings in Delve were just the O-EIMK constellation.

O-EIMK Constellation from late April forward

That was the great stalemate, where the might of the Imperium, focused in such a small area proved to be more than PAPI could manage.  There was a lot of talk about being contained and the threat of blockading the constellation by camping the NPC stations in Delve, but the will of PAPI as a coalition wasn’t up to the task.  Only Legacy Coalition had real skin in the game, having committed themselves to live in Imperium space.

On August 2nd, at the start of week 57 of the war, PAPI made one last attack on the Imperium stronghold, then started unanchoring structures even before the fighting was done.  By the end of week 57 of the war all of the ihubs in Delve were back in Imperium hands and the clean up of PAPI structures was well under way.

The war cost a lot in ISK, but there were other casualties.  The online user count suffered, especially towards the was entered its second summer.

Over the timeline of the war

While the PCU recovered as both sides reoriented themselves, it remains below where it was before the war started.  Some put blame on CCP and their economic starvation plan for that.  But a lot of us are also tired out after more than a year of war.

And now, in Delve, normalcy has returned.

The view from Delve

After many months of having content on our doorstep, of minor clashes happening multiple times daily just a gate or two away, it is kind of quiet.  People rat.  People mine.  Somebody in a Rorqual gets tackled about once a day and Delve 911 lights up.  The intel channels are active and some of the usual suspects from before the war appear now and then.

I went on an op last week, the first op I had been on in over a month, that was set to blow up a Fortizar in Cloud Ring.  As I got into fleet and the FC asked us to set our destination to J5A-IX I groaned a bit and the thought of that journey.  But once I adjusted my route settings to include friendly Ansiblexes, which is a hugely underrated feature in my opinion, it was just seven gates away.

A seriously excellent feature

The Eye of Terror Mk. IV was setup and in business, its Ansiblex highway ready to take me from Cloud Ring down to Period Basis or across Querious and into Catch, the last being a new outpost for the coalition since the war.

New Eden with Imperium space highlighted in red

It isn’t all peace and crabbing.  The combat pilots who still crave action are out with the various SIGs and squads making sure the rest of null sec, the bloc formerly known as PAPI, remembers that we’re still around and looking for revenge.  Meanwhile, our enemies have fragmented somewhat.  They have reset some of their blue standings and some of their own frictions are coming to the surface.

War will come again to null sec.  But for right now Delve is a pretty quiet place.

Also, as an aside, I made that “The View from 1DQ1-A” image with the intent of making a New Eden version of the famous (to those of us of the right age) cover from the New Yorker, View of the World from 9th Avenue.  However, my limited artistic skills haven’t gotten me very far.

The Group Pushes on to Duriel in Diablo II

Having made it through the narrow tubes of the Maggot Lair previously, the group formed back up to tackle the back half of Act II.  The last waypoint we had found was in the Far Oasis, so we went there to get started again.  We just had to collect some corpses for Kevin so he could raise his skeleton army to support us.  This left quite a loot pile in the middle of the desert.

Starting to see more runes drop

From there it was the usual search around the edge of the Far Oasis looking for the path to the next zone, the Lost City, with its waypoint and connection to our next quest objective.

As tends to happen, we found our way back into the Dry Hills zone before finishing our circuit and finally finding the path that led in the right direction.  Entering the Lost City zone saw the lights go out as a new quest was triggered.  Moving in the darkness in the new zone seemed to get us more spread out than usual and we managed to lose first Talon then Ulfar to the groups of mobs lurking in the dark.

Covering Ulfar’s corpse

Portals back to town helped reunite us, as well as getting the quest update about the darkness from Drognan in town once we found the waypoint, but we kept on the run around the edge of the zone until we found the pathway down to the Valley of the Snakes where the Claw Viper temple is located.

Now enter the Valley of the Snakes

The valley is quite small and the temple is in the center.  The temple is also built out like most of the underground areas of Act II, with plenty of room to maneuver save for the occasional doorway.

Getting down to the second level we found our way to the room of the Tainted Sun Altar.  Once the room was cleared, clicking on the altar yielded up the Amulet of the Viper, one for each of us, and updated the quest from Drognan as well, restoring light to the zones of Act II.

The amulet obtained

Back in town we took the Staff of Kings from the Maggot Lair and the newly obtained Amulet of the Viper and combined them in the Horadric Cube to create the Horadric Staff, which we would need later.  Until then that went back into our respective stashes as we headed next to the palace, where Jerhyn wanted us to do something about an infestation issue.

Now he deigns to let us visit

The palace is kind of a quick pass most of the time when I play.  It looks nice, but the levels are small and there are two ways down at each level, so it is often very easy to just bypass most of the mobs loitering around waiting to surprise you.

Some stairs down in the palace

We managed to grab the waypoint in the palace cellar, but it is one that I often don’t mind missing.  There isn’t much reason to revisit the palace that I know of and when you get down to the bottom level you’re going to leave via a portal anyway.

We found the portal at the bottom floor, but had once again managed to get spread out enough that it took a minute to get everybody back together.

All over the map looking for the portal

Through the portal lays the strangest part of Act II, and perhaps the strangest location in the whole game, the Arcane Sanctuary.

Fortunately there is a waypoint right where you enter it from the portal, which is part of why the palace waypoint generally isn’t missed.

The Arcane Sanctuary waypoint

We took a minute to go back to town and get ourselves prepared.  We were on a bit of a time limit that afternoon and I was expecting that we might only just finish up the Arcane Sanctuary before we had to stop, the zone being a bit of a slog at times.  The place is made up of narrow paths and single file stairs and little portals.  It is also sizable, being laid out like a four leaf clover.  The waypoint is at the center, with four stems leading out, each of which split after a way, leading you around in loops that form the leaves of the clover, coming back around to the stem when you complete them.

At the tip of three of the leaves is a platform with several chests.  At the tip of the fourth is the lair of The Summoner, the target for this part of the adventure.

Clearing out all the loops can be a long task, and I seem to always pick the wrong stem to start with and often end up having to work through at least two of them before I find the right one.

We, however, were in luck.  We picked the right path on the first try and actually seemed to get the easy way through that loop, landing us at The Summoner in almost no time, at least relative to my usual experience in that zone.  I don’t think I have ever gotten it right on the first try.

We stormed his platform and took him down, our main problem being that of getting as many of our minions to bear in order to speed the fight.  They were all over the place.

The Summoner down as our minions mill about

That brought us to the Canyon of the Magi, the waypoint before us.  We were now close enough to the end of the act that we were going to press on, head directly to the correct tomb, and wrap things up.

In the old days I would sit and farm all the false tombs in the Valley of the Kings, but with time pressure on us, we went to the right tomb, as indicated by the symbol in our quest logs.

The symbol we sought

Inside we set about looking for the chamber where we could use the Horadric Staff to unlock access to the final boss of Act II.  The tomb is rather full up with mobs, but as a group we were able to cut through them until we found the right room, placing the staff in the orifice (literally what it is called) to crack through the wall and open a passage.

The lightning is the key

Then it was time for a bit of preparation, making sure everybody had enough potions on hand.  I changed over to the paladin frost resist aura to give us a bit of help on that front, though in hindsight the might aura might have just let the skeletons slay the boss faster.  Once we were set, it was through the opening and in to face Duriel.

Everybody on Duriel… except the necro

The Duriel fight is the first tough boss fight in the game.  It is often the point where I use the one respec you get per play through to get serious about my build.  Duriel does a lot of damage and I always open up a town portal as soon as I enter his chamber.

Our army of minions managed to take him down, though Kevin lost about half of his skeletons and his golem along the way, while a mercenary or two bit the dust as well.

Duriel down for the count… the post-fight maggots are an odd touch

From there were ran to the back of the chamber to find Tyrael and hear his speech about the story so far.

Tyrael admonishes us for our tardiness

I actually made a video of his speech from the game about ten years back if you want the original sound and graphics.

After that it was back to town to say goodbye to everybody, then find Meshif to sail off to the next part of the story.

The boat is ready to set sail

And so we will pick up next time in Kurast and Act III.

WoW Classic Season of Mastery Goes Live on November 16th

Your chance to experience the rush and the crowds and queues, both in game and out, of a WoW Classic launch has returned

I bet they don’t line up this nicely in FFXIV

Blizzard has announced the launch date for their WoW Classic Season of Mastery servers.  Come November 16th 2021 in the US, or November 17th if you’re in Paris or beyond, you will be able to pile in to old Azeroth for another run through the game as it sorta was back in the day.  It will be a world-wide launch

The Season of Mastery Global Launch Times

If you’re jazzed to get back into semi-vanilla times again with your guild, you will probably want to get in there early and reserve a name for your main character.  You will be able to do so the evening of November 11th, at which time everybody with an active WoW subscription will be able to log in and reserve one name on one server.  Choose wisely and all of that.

There are some changes this time around when compared to the last run at a classic experience, which includes some pacing, difficulty, and quality of life changes I mentioned in a previous post.

While I am not exactly chomping at the bit for another run through a vanilla WoW experience… I think that might be more of a “once a decade” thing for me, I am sure there are plenty of people who missed it the first time around and raiding guilds who want to take another stab at the classic raids from the good old days.

Not mentioned so far that I have seen are the number of servers they plan to stand up.  We’ll probably get that soon as it will need to be decided on by the time they hit the name reservation day.  Of course, if things get swamped on the 11th then they might put more servers up before launch.

But if things are light… and given the mood about Blizzard right now that could be a possibility… well, I guess we’ll see.

But this completes the trifecta of nostalgia launches for 2021.  We got Burning Crusade Classic, Diablo II Resurrected, and now WoW Classic Season of Mastery.  I am happy with nostalgia trips, but it is tough to live on that alone.

The Crimson Harvest Returns to EVE Online

Halloween festivities have arrived in New Eden as CCP with the return of the Crimson Havest event.  Regarded by some as one of the better annual events, it is arriving a bit late this year, possibly due to the data center upgrades being performed by CCP earlier this week.

The Return of the Crimson Harvest

The Crimson Harvest comes along with other treats, all of which are included under the Halloween Horrors banner.

This year players will be able to choose which side of the event they wish to support.

EVE’s premiere Blood Raider seasonal event has begun once again, starting today and running until 9 November! This year, Capsuleers will be met in battle by the forces of the Order of St. Tetrimon, an Amarr religious order dedicated to the preservation of the scriptures of the faith. Join the Order in their campaign to drown this sanguine spectacle in laserfire, or for the first time ever take the side of the Blood Raiders, venerating the Harvest and painting New Eden in crimson!

Somebody will side with the Blood Raiders I am sure.  You get to pick which side in The Agency.

Sites for the event show up throughout New Eden, but some locations are better than others according to the patch notes.  Here are the details:

• Crimson Gauntlet and Tetrimon Base combat sites can be found in most areas of space. These sites should be approached with caution, and capsuleers are advised to fly a battlecruiser, battleship, heavy assault cruiser, or even more powerful vessels if they wish to investigate these locations. Rewards for looting the battleship NPCs found at the end of the sites include items that can be traded for isk, skins, boosters, clothing and more!
• Crimson Harvest Network Node and Tetrimon Network Node data sites are also appearing across New Eden. These hacking sites contain network node structures that can be accessed for more great rewards!
• Advanced versions of the combat and hacking sites can be found within the areas containing the most heated fighting between Blood Raider and Tetrimon forces: the Blood Raider controlled systems within the Delve region and the low security systems within the Derelik region. These advanced sites are rarer and more challenging than the standard versions of the sites but they provide much greater rewards. Bringing a friend or two helps reduce the risk immensely, but beware of other capsuleers who may be searching for the same loot!
• The most elusive and valuable strongholds of the Blood Raiders and Order of Tetrimon can only be found by obtaining a rare escalation from the advanced combat sites.

In addition there are the now traditional login rewards running during the event.

Crimson Harvest Rewards

The prizes include skill points, training accelerators, SKINs, and some fireworks.  As usual, Omega accounts get all the prizes, while Alpha accounts only get the top row.  Be sure to log in every day if you want to collect them all.

In addition, the popular Trick or Treat PvP flag has been set for the event, which boosts the drop rate for items for ships destroyed in PvP, with the dial being set to 90%.

More loot on the field

This will no doubt make some pilots quite happy.  Be extra careful flying your freighter through Uedama, the suicide gank capital of New Eden.

There are also various discounts on upgrading to Omega which include SKINs as well as some event theme SKINs returning to the in-game store.  There is also a a destroyer focused Proving Grounds event running that features boosts to Stasis Webifier range, Nosferatu and Energy Neutralizer strength, and Laser turret damage just to maintain the Blood Raider theme.

In addition to all of that, the patch notes also show that CCP is still adjusting the CRAB beacons introduced with last week’s update, with rewards and the requirements to build the beacons being changed up.

There was also an exploit notification posted about CRAB beacons.  Don’t get caught doing that trick now.  CCP is watching.  (Also, another reminder that players will find every flaw in CCP’s plans.)

Related:

• CCP – Halloween Horrors Announcement
• CCP – Patch Notes

Riding Out Panda Summer in Norrath

For whatever reason the announcement of the Visions of Vetrovia expansion for EverQuest II and the pre-expansion events got me stirred up and in the mood to go back to visit post-cataclysm Norrath.

I got in there and did the warm up quests, earned yet another currency for yet another vendor… I don’t think I have ever stopped to explore the number of currencies that game has accrued, but it is a substantial number… bought myself a jaunty pirate hat with a hope that it would make me look at least a bit like a pirate you’ve heard of… and then sort of ran out of steam.

All of which took me about two days, by which time I had pirate hats on five of my level cap characters.

All dressed up and no place to go really

Fortunately, there was still the annual Panda event to run, though I am beginning to suspect that the change over from “Days of Summer” name for the event might have been a bit last minute, given that the quest rewards still say the latter.

It must still be summer somewhere

The event isn’t exactly a huge effort.  It involves a weekly quest that sends you out to various location in Norrath in order to fetch a few things for Mei Lan.

In order to prolong the experience I decided to travel the old fashioned way… not that spires and bells transport system is all that slow, but it isn’t quite so direct as the map travel that subscribers get… and to make a serious effort not to look up any of the quests until I had least put in some serious effort into figuring them out on my own.

That mean a lot of flying about old zones, which is a bit like a walk down memory lane.

Swooping low in Butcherblock

As for the quests, well, I did okay.

Each week points to a specific zone and you have to go find three different things to complete the quest.  Most weeks I was able to get two pretty easily based on the quest details, but the third seemed to elude me.  A couple of times there was no real indication as to where that third item might be in the zone.  One time, in the Enchanted Lands, there was a clue in the name, but it was a name that corresponded to five locations, four of which I knew.  Failing with those I looked up the quest and found the fifth location… just a stone’s throw from the spires where I entered the zone.

Too many things named after Seamist around here

This week’s quest sent me off to Lavastorm, an original launch zone that was pretty fearsome back in the day, when the game was trying to make it clear that you shouldn’t be wandering out alone past level 20 or so.

The name is no lie, there is lava out there

But the quest clues for the zone were right on the money this time.  I was able to find them all without resorting to the web… which is probably a pretty low bar, but I’ll take what I can get.

These places are all on the map even

I collected all the items as well as picking up a few sparklies along the way, then headed back to the Sundered Frontier to turn in the quest to Mei Lan.  There we exchanged the usual end of quest banter that is almost, but not quite, humorous.

He is a bit of a literalist at times

That has a couple more weeks to play out, after which it will likely be time for the new expansion.  I am still thinking about jumping in to play it.  We’ll see how I feel when the date is closer.