Welcome to the Places of My Mind

I went over to a friend's place today to watch the Blizzcon Virtual Ticket and one of the announcements was the new expansion for World of Warcraft. The new expansion is: Battle for Azeroth. I'm not totally sold on the idea of Horde versus Alliance as an expansion theme, though. Pandaria taught us that war is not the answer, yet it seems the developers didn't really learn from that experience. But, the scenery of the new zones does have me interested in exploring them. I'm hoping that flight will be enabled in a similar manner to how it has been done for Legion content.

Flight in World of Warcraft
Flight in WoW has gone through changes with the last two expansions. In the past, you got flight for each of your characters by scraping together enough gold to afford the flight training and the flying mounts for each character. Starting with Warlords of Draenor (WoD), flight has become an unlock system via achievements. Each zone has an achievement for the storyline quests in it. Completing these quests completes the achievement and unlocks one of the steps for the meta achievement (Think of logic gates where all the inputs must be true to trigger the output). Once all of the achievements are completed, then the meta achievement is also triggered. Flight in WoD worked in two steps, one meta achievement granted you increased mount speed in the specific content area. The second step required you to have completed the first meta achievement and a few other achievements along the way. This second one grants flight to the entire BattleNet account. Legion used the same system of unlocking flight, but the content was designed around it instead of having the flight unlock shoe-horned in late in the expansion like it was in WoD. In Legion, flight is unlocked more naturally as you progressed through quests.

Upcoming Changes to the Leveling Experience
Starting with Patch 7.3.5, Blizzard is working on fixing the leveling experience for the older content. Instead of having different level ranges of creatures scattered across a zone, the creatures will scale with you to a certain maximum level cap. Some zones will have a range of 10-60, others may be 40-60. This will make the creatures more relevant as you gain levels while questing across a zone. You'll still be able to come back at higher levels and one-shot creatures, but there will be less issues of creatures not giving experience points (XP) while questing.

Another change is how the previous expansions will be handled. Right now, the questing experience going through the expansions looks like this: Eastern Kingdoms/Kalimdor -> Outland (BC) -> Northrend (WotLK) -> Cataclysm -> Pandaria -> Warlords of Draenor (WoD) -> Legion. With Patch 7.3.5, the questing through expansions will be less linear. BC and WotLK content will both be changed to be for the level 60-80 range. Cataclysm and Pandaria will both be for the level 80-90 range. These changes will make questing more of a player's choice than being forced to do certain content because of level restrictions. The dungeons and quest gear for these expansions will also be adjusted to match the new level ranges.

I'm looking forward to these changes as it will refresh the leveling experience a bit for me in the future. As the questing stands right now, there is a lot of weird back and forth through time as you go through the expansions. Cataclysm changed the world of Azeroth and refreshed the quests to be more current for Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor. Then, you go back in time a long ways when doing quests in Outland. Things get brought closer to the present in Northrend and back even closer to the present in the five Cataclysm zones. With the ability to pick and choose how I progress through expansions, I might skip Outland in the future while questing and go back later for Loremaster reasons.

PvP Changes:
While there wasn't a set milestone for when the new PvP changes will be rolled out, I still want to post a highlight on them. The biggest change is that there won't be a difference between PvE and PvP servers after the new changes roll out. One of the options available by right-clicking on your character's portrait is to disable PvP and it will available to all characters regardless of realm. The only differences between realms will be between normal and role-playing realms at that point. This will be a big change for those that currently have characters on a PvP realm and not wanting to play while on those realms. The realm type won't matter anymore for them. I suspect these PvP changes will go out either with Patch 7.3.5 or when the Battle for Azeroth expansion launches.

Tonight, I ran my first session of the ProMods 2.16 mod on Euro Truck Simulator 2 (ETS2). I was holding off on updating my game from version 1.26 to 1.27 because my favorite map mod hadn't been updated yet. The reason for the delay of ProMods getting updated? The game's model format got changed, so the ProMods team had to convert all of their models to match the new format. They also had to add new police vehicles for the 19 countries that they added to the base game's map.

First Delivery Run in PM 2.16
I pruned a few mods that were outdated from my mod list and activated the new versions of existing ones in the game's Mod Manager for my current profile. Then I went to load my last save, at which point the game complained that it couldn't find the old mods that the save file had last used. I told it to continue loading the save despite the changes in the mod load-out. Due to the changes from the game itself and the mods I am using, the game relocated me back to my home garage in Köln, Germany.

First delivery I took was from Köln, Germany to Metz, France. (The cargo types aren't important, so I'm not going to list them here.) From Metz, I headed down to Livorno, Italy. I got to see the new highway segments that ProMods added to the map which link Genova and Livorno to each other and to France. Traveling along the coast of Italy and France will be so much easier now! I used to have to head north from Genova or Livorno to get to a different east/west highway to travel between them. Now, I can stay near the coast on the E80 highway between them.

Police Roam the Roads
Regarding the addition of police cars to ETS2, I have no problem with them being present in the game. I saw a few as I was traveling the highways, but I wasn't speeding or breaking other laws, so they didn't pay me any mind. I feel they add another layer of immersion to the game. The SCS Software forums have a few threads of complaints about the police being present, but the messages posted reveal that the complaining posters are generally speeding at more than 5 kph over the speed limits. (If you're going to speed, you don't get to complain about receiving speeding tickets for doing so.) The only thing that changes for me with having the police present is that I'm going to be a lot more careful about speeding, particularly on exit ramps which usually have a lowered speed limit due to the curvature of the ramps.

Poland
I haven't been over to Poland yet with the new version of the map, but I will try to make a few runs over there to see some of the updates that ProMods has been doing over that way. The Poland Rebuilding team pulled out of ProMods for various reasons and ProMods is going through that section of the map to bring up to ProMods' standards. Screenshots in the ProMods forums (Link) show a vast improvement over the original work. Poland Rebuilding's crew did a decent job, but there were issues with how they did things and I always thought things could be better. Looks like things will be over the next few months/years as the ProMods crew cleans up that section of the map.

Overall, I think I will be continuing to play ETS2 and enjoying the new features brought by both SCS Software (the game publisher) and ProMods together. Is it painful to wait for updates of beloved mods? Sure, but they do eventually get released. Fortunately, I can roll back to a previous version of the game thanks to Steam while I wait for these updates so I can keep playing. My (currently) 1276 hours of time logged on the game shows that I'll keep trucking across Europe for the time being.