The best loot

Recently when I was running LBRS for junkboxes. Less than 1000 to go! I have glyph of lockpick so I can quickly unlock all the boxes. Then I turn off auto-loot and spam click them to check for anything good. I was just trying to get some cheap poisons to kill the last boss.

Sometimes I find a potion or poisons and take out the coin. This time I found a lightsaber. Okay not actually a lightsaber. But the closest thing: Teebu's Blazing Longsword.

Wowhead won't even display anything but zero for two of the three mobs which have dropped it. The other mob, high drop rate, but that's during the AQ gates event which doesn't happen anymore. The other source is Heavy Junkbox, with again, zero: 6 out of 39445. I'm sure there are other sources, but wowhead tends to stop displaying a result if it's too low.

What I'm trying to get at is this is rare. More than rare. People server transfer to sell these things. This is not the sort of thing to expect.

The best drop was the Thunderfury binding off Garr. It was my paladin's first time in MC, doing a funrun with a few guildies. They told me to take it. To even see it is unexpected.

This past week I started running UBRS to see if I could get the sword off the last boss. Last night I started working on trimming off as much time as I could, skipping more mobs, fighting in better places, and really cut down the time per run. I started considering not looting Rend, but I figured, I might as well take the second to click Gyth since there's always the tiny chance of a carapace dropping, and then I can get a useless plate FR chest. What more could a paladin want? It dropped. I looted it, ran along my merry way, ran out, reset, ran again, killed him, and another dropped. That brings the total number I've seen in 5 years to: 3. It's a 4% drop and again, not something to expect. It dropping was a bonus. In contrast, I imagine I'll stop running UBRS once I get the sword

What made these so great? It's not the gold or status of them. It's mental: I didn't expect them or have any sense of entitlement.

That's the killer of fun: running for loot. If it doesn't drop, there's no fun. If it does drop and you don't get it, oh those bullshit rolls fucking bullshit what the fuck don't they fucking know I've been running this for two months straight!? And if you do get it, well why run the instance anymore?

I liked ToC. Then one day I checked wowhead for drops to see what I still wanted. Saw nothing. Stopped queueing.

I ran heroic PoS a few times a week to get some new tanking boots. At first I had fun. Then they didn't drop. And didn't drop. And it stopped being fun. I want my boots! Then I got them. Stopped queueing.

I'm still running LBRS. That's because I still have more boxes to get. But maybe there's still something to learn here: loot doesn't make or break when we don't expect it or feel we deserve it.

I'm not in MC anymore. I started grinding it for my other binding. My. Possessive you say? Oh yes. Yes. And it sucked out a lot of the fun. I kept running it after I got TF. Decided I wanted HoR. Got that. Stopped running.

The most fun loot is that which we don't expect. We aren't disappointed when it doesn't drop. We don't run just to get it.

So what?
If loot didn't motivate us, what would? Challenge? Kill the boss once and you're done. That's even faster than you'd get lucky with loot. Lore? Not enough people care, and stories run out even faster than challenge.

The most fun loot system might be to have it all world drops, with harder mobs having higher chances and higher loot. Never expect anything and it's all fun.

But this would be completely incompatible with a loot-based character development system. If we need loot, we have to be able to get it. Pure random would just be frustrating.

The drama would be terrible. Imagine forming raids to farm the highest raid, getting unwanted drop after unwanted drop until finally, something good drops, and half the raid jumps on it. One person gets it and the rest cannot even think "we'll kill it again next week." It would encourage mass grinding, endlessly, never enough, because maybe it's the next mob, the next mob, the next mob, and you never know which one is the right mob.

It could all be made BoE, so trading could help even out the RNG. There would be no 'bad' drops then, just an inconvenient ones. Except this would be a boon to botters and gold sellers.

Maybe there's nothing to be fixed or gained by changing loot systems.

Is it just our own faults?
The loot isn't the true problem. The true problem is our sense of entitlement. Our sense that we deserve this or that and it is an injustice if we don't get it. No loot system can fix this. Only we can.

Losers lose when loser activities aren't for losers

Imagine that you're socially inept and awkward around women. What's the ideal activity? No not that. Yes, gaming. You can do it either with or without other people at your own discretion and no one is in your personal space. There is distance.

Real life is pushed away and ignored. The well-dressed guy with money might be intimidating at a party, but in a raid he's just another person. The good-looking guy who knows how to talk without giggling and spilling Mountain Dew on himself isn't a problem anymore. All that matters is how well he plays. No friends, no job, no life? No problem!

It's a little haven for losers.

Then some person or some company goes and ruins that. Suddenly normal people start playing. And girls. And what's a loser to do? As much as they might wish girls played what they play, the unfortunate reality for them is that girls playing what they play just brings back home their social ineptitude and awkwardness. They want girls to play what they play, but what they really want is to play what girls play. They want to play barhopping and basketball and beach and being socially adept. But those aren't games that one can simply pick up and play, or even grind up. They can be overgeared, as can be seen by unfortunate numbers of rich and entirely worthless individuals*, but in general they are skill-based, and not everyone has those skills.

The losers lose.

* This isn't an attack on the wealthy, but on that douchebag who no one likes, but he has money, so he can buy drinks until people can't see what a douchebag he really is.

Nethaera is nice

She wrote me a poem.

*You came close
Close but no cigar
You didn't miss by far
You know you came this close- Nethaera

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=24038825826&sid=1

Leveling with no XP

Many of my addons aren't quite up to date. Some are configured oddly or have the wrong bits disabled. The result is that unless I go to the default UI, I have no XP bar.

My little paladin has no measure of how close or far he is from the next level. He has no measure of how much total experience is needed. Because of this, there is no reward from grinding. 50xp is the same as 1000xp in the sense that 20 times an unknown proportion is still unknown. Or the reverse. There is no xp/hour with no xp. Any rush is meaningless.

Have you ever seen 1% to level and done some mindless and boring grinding? My paladin has not. He is either 1% to level or 1% from having leveled. He is left with no choice but to do whatever he feels like, unaffected by any numbers telling him a better or worse way.

It's liberating.

Alexstrasza and her Scourge: Bolvar and Neltharion

Last year I predicted that, in fitting with the theme of the Aspects going crazy, Alexstrasza would create her own undead army as the only way to fight the Scourge.

What better way to protect life than to make it unending and persist even after death? She will see undeath as the solution and will create her own Scourge. Already it has been shown that the Red Dragonflight, having mastery over life, also has the same knowledge of death.

This seems to have come to pass, in a way. Bolvar was saved by the fires of the Red Dragonflight and persists as something which seems between life and undeath. She seemed to have a plan for him.

They must not discover the fate of the young paladin. Not yet.

With the defeat of Arthas, Bolvar takes up the crown to become the new Lich King. He controls it, or at least attempts to. Could the red flight control him in turn? He may be the path by which Alextrasza has her Scourge.

This may not be the end of the story of her and the undead. While Wrath of the Lich King is ending, we know what comes next: the reemergence of the aspect of the earth: Neltharion... Deathwing. I do not know what research he did into undeath, but Nefarian, the current (and thought dead) leader of the black flight had necromantic powers and was experimenting with different breeds of dragons. The crossover into a undead dragon breed is not unimaginable.

A plagued dragonflight seems possible. In Scholomance we saw the beginning: plagued whelps. I doubt Alextrazsa would have as much difficulty in transforming her flight to undeath. How long before we adventurers are sent to kill a new set of plagued whelps?

I was wrong predicting a red plagued flight, but I think we just might see a black plagued flight. Again the life vs. undeath battle will come, and Alexstrasza will have the Scourge at her command. What will she do with it?

On a related note, I will pretend I was brilliant for predicting we'd end up fighting the Titans. Or I would have been if we'd all wiped on Algalon.

The post where I laugh at people who try to predict world firsts

Who will get the world first Arthas HM?

Some obscure overrated guild, of course.

Hint: Paragon.

What happened on Whiny Post Day?

Suicidal Zebra suggested that I make a post of whiny posts. I liked the idea a lot. So I set out to find whiny posts and a few helpful people emailed me with links to their posts. Thank you, helpful people.

Here's what I found. These are in no particular order. I hope I've read them correctly. I've a bad habit of failing at reading.

Pink Pigtail Inn: Whiny Post Day: A post about loneliness
It was about loneliness and games.

Looking for More: Whiny Post Day
The approach of Cataclysm is killing WoW. Also he had to wear a flashlight.

The Noisy Rogue: Thank God for Whiny Post Day
Fine thread and blacksmithing and bloggers are supposed to know everything. The shame to not...

Dwarf Death knight or Dwism: Whiny post day: When you run out of fun
Idiots and death knights. When the wife breaks up with your characters, can you really play the same?

Revive and Rejuvinate: A Post of Whine and Two Qs
Sobriety on St. Patrick's Day is a sin. Stop gratzing me, that new gear just made me broke!

Light's Fury: The Day of the Whiny Post
When the casual goes hardcore, and regrets it.

The Mana Obscura: Care For Some Cheese With Your Whine?
Just another mage whining, probably didn't even need whiny post day to whine. I kid, I kid... maybe.

A High Latency Life: Whiny Post Day! – Mage QQ
Mages are billed as glass cannons, but aren't quite cannons, and talents aren't making that glass bullet-proof.

Tobold's MMORPG Blog: Whiny Post Day
People bitch about him writing anything non-robotic, despite him being a human and it being his blog. Then there was a fun little flame war with Syncaine in the comments.

Killing 'em Slowly: Whiny Post Day Shall Commence!
Buying a house sucks, rogues suck, tech support sucks, and that cat can poop rainbows on command.

The Barrens Chat: Whiny Post Day
PUGs lol Chores (daily badge grind) lol and lol as punctuation lol!
lol

The Lazy Sniper: You Guys Have A Whine Day?
People ruin the experience of leveling alts. Trade chat is full of crap, and get your goddamn mammoth off the mailbox.
"People who say “lol”, sorry it means to laugh, if you’re fucking laughing WE KNOW YOU’RE LOLING. I don’t eat a fucking sandwich and randomly go “Chew!” out loud do I?"
Also: gay.

Bubble Hearth: Whiny Post Day – Bears Have All The Fun
Title.

Barkskin: Whiny Post Day : The Prot Paladin Effect
Paladin rerollers are flooding the world with obnoxious noob tanks.

Stabbed Up: Whiny Post Day: Facebook, facebook everywhere
Facebook is killing games, will continue to kill games, and fun will drown in a sea of swindled facebook money.

Righteous Orbs: Klepsacovic Sanctioned Whining
Too good of a password, too convenient of an authenticator, and why is my date running away when I pull out my keys?

The 'mental Shaman: St Paddy’s….oh, Whiny Post Day.

RP communities are killing RP by being pretentious nitpicking pricks.

Shadow Outpost: Whiny Post Day – makes me laugh / rant / laugh
Gorillas, pricks, twats, and certain customers. God that sounded dirty.

I can do alts, me: Whiny post day...
Too cheerful to whine. What a shame. She did manage to complain about nerfing the cactus apple quest in the Valley of Trials.

Petaholics Anonymous: Whiny Post Day
"People who don’t play with mods and/or macros and are proud of it" are annoying!

We Fly Spitfires: Would You Like Some Cheese With Your Whine?
There's never enough time.

Spinksville: Whiny Post Day: What would you sacrifice at the altar of progression?
Why do people treat this game like work? And why do we give up so much for this work-game? It kills communities and friendships.

Escape Hatch: Whiny Post Day
He hates on the backseat raid leaders, causing great offense to those of us who play something lame like DPS and need to order others around to feel important.

Zarii and Me: Happy Whiny Post Day!
Too much fuck, swearing isn't stupid, and people of all sorts. It was legitimately whiny, but the title just ruined it for me. HAPPY!? No, ma'am. No.

Clearcasting: Not Quite Whiny
Beware the blogger, for she can show all the world your sexism.

Priest with a Cause: Whiny Post Day: The lull
Bored? You can't quit! Too many social obligations.

Aggro Management: /whine(y post day)
Hates on troll women, whines a lot about people and the various ways they make life worse.

Grandma's Gametime: Whiney Post Day
She needs more time. And her husband needs to stop talking during shows.

The Beast Within: Whiny Post Day
Rogues and warlocks are assholes and no one enjoys losing control of their character.

Kill that Cheerleader: Moan of the day! – Opinions
Give an opinion, don't sit on the fence, and what do people do? They attack you can say you're wrong.

Just One More Unlock: March 17th Whiny Post Day
Borderlands isn't loved enough.

Killed in a Smiling Accident: Thought for the Day
"Having a Whiny Post Day among bloggers is like having a Fly Aircraft In The Sky Day among airline pilots."

Tish Tosh Tesh: Why Whine?
Gramer whining, Farmville, and people who will and will not take our money.

Need More Rage: Whiny Post Day?
"Pffft. Yeah, bugger that. Got things ta hit with me axe, got exotic wimmens ta meet. Ain't got time fer whining."
At least he wrote something. You know who writes nothing? Hitler.

Thank you to everyone who wrote a whiny post. Sorry if I missed yours. I tried searching the back alleys of google and the blogosphere, but I kept running into those creepy sites that collect bits of posts and ruin any attempt to search by terms. Also certain people didn't write whiny posts but people in their blogrolls did, thereby triggering a lot of false results.

Are trolls just bad at telling jokes?

I have this whole post written up about wow.com and blog links and building up visitors. It's just about ready to go. Except for one slight problem: it's mostly intended as a joke, but instead it looks like a desperate plea for attention, randomly bashing Gnomeaggedon, wow.com, and Big Bear Butt guy. It looks like a gigantic troll.

How could I bash Gnomeaggedon? He's one of my top two gnomes! And Larisa. Third place is of course Millhouse Manastorm. But who would know this? It would be an inside joke told outside. Then there's wow.com. Why would I bash them? They've done nothing to hurt me or help me. But again, who would know? Rather than being intentional nonsense it would look like unintentional, and not so nice, nonsense. Finally druid guy, why would I attack him? I read his blog one day, looked nice, had a kitty drinking water. I can't remember why I didn't follow it. But who cares? I'm rambling...

Short version: post was supposed to be funny but wasn't because it would be hard to recognize that it wasn't just me being a total asshole.

As any DVD release will do, here is a special exclusive unseen deleted scene. Post. It's a bit old now, but it fits.

I got banned from the official forums again. Again.

I tried to make a joke, which in retrospect was a bit lame. I claimed that the Infinite Dragonflight in CoT: Stratholme was actually Ensidia trying a new Lich King exploit. Like I said, a bit lame, and a bit late.

From my perspective, it's a harmless stupid joke. I could see an argument for it being spam, but in that case, I'd just delete it. This being in the mythical universe where I'm a forum mod.

Trolling and spamming are listed together, so it's hard to tell exactly what the problem was. Iapetes suggested it was trolling. Made no sense at all. Until he pointed out that it would rile up the extremists on the pro and anti-Ensidia sides. That wasn't my intention, but it certainly makes sense as something to take action to prevent.

This leads me to a question: Are trolling and joking the same thing? I say no, but in the right context, they lead to the same result: flame wars and stupidity.

In my family we sometimes tell Obama jokes, about he's going to kill our grandma or he's a socialist or whatever. They're jokes and we take them as such. I suppose they're not actually about him but about people who talk about him. Whatever they are, they start and stop at joke. Imagine if we said this at a rally either for or against him. "Obama wants to kill my grandma!" Suddenly it's not ironic. It's either a call for more people to join in with senseless screaming, or for people to rabidly attack me.

Or let's take another pair of contexts. I walk up to an Obama rally and ask one of the people "so how's that hopey changey thing workin' out for ya?" I'd look like a total asshole, wouldn't I? On the other hand, if I said it as a tea party rally, I'd just fit in and seem ironic and observant.

That last paragraph is edited. I thought the last line might have not been as funny as I thought, so away it went.

Or are we just bad at seeing jokes? [insert scientific-sounding psychology research]; Bullies don't interpret actions normally. They interpret as hostile what are neutral or humorous gestures, and respond as one does to hostility: by beating up little kids on the playground. Or that's just me. And bullies.

Maybe we are bullies, seeing hostility where there is none. Then responding in turn, with real hostility. It doesn't help that text is ambiguous; you can put any face on the writer. Am I deep in thought? Smirking? Laughing? You don't know! Does that exclamation point mean I just shouted at you? If you can't see my face, you won't know exactly what I intended to say. Put the wrong face on me and the results could be disastrous, on a very very tiny scale.

People adapt to their environments. A mean place creates mean people. It isn't always permanent, but it happens. When we get used to everyone being a flame-baiting troll (or so we think), do we lose our ability to see the joke?

A joke is supposed to make us laugh. A troll is supposed to make us angry. A bad joke might make us angry.

No offense intended.

The post where I laugh at people who try to predict expansions

This dumbass thought WotLK was going to be the last expansion.

Coincidentally, just as we reach the end of history, we are also closing in on what will most likely be the last expansion.

Okay I lied, just one person.

Being yourself doesn't mean unique

People spend a lot of time pretending to express themselves or be themselves or something involving themselves and image projection. WoW is no exception. People do all manner of grinds to get titles and mounts and pets. They will never win.

They aren't actually trying to express themselves. They say they are, but in reality they are trying to appear unique. The snowflake myth has convinced people that to be themselves they must be radically different. Of course they're not. Any given person is going to be very similar to those around them. Maybe if we lived in small towns of 100 people we could be significantly different than those around us. But we don't.

This isn't very good for anyone. It wastes a lot of time and money for the people trying to express themselves. It makes a lot of failure. It skews the economy towards stupid shit that no person in their right mind would buy. But they're not in their right minds, they're in their "I must be different because that's who I am" minds.

What I'm trying to get at is, you can be yourself without being completely different from everyone else. A few times (okay more than a few times) in high school I would wear the same shirt as a friend of mine. Similar pants. We both had fairly short hair. How terrible! We were not expressing ourselves at all, right? We were. But since we weren't obsessed with self-expression and being snowflakes, we were able to accept that maybe we're not radically different people. Different, but not so much that it's worth taking extra time and money to emphasize it. It's not as if we wore the same shoes or looked the same.

In WoW terms, I seek self-expression. For a while this meant an obsession with the Scourge. Killing it to be exact. I mean killing it more so than it is. You know, like making it well-done instead of medium rare. So I ran around with an Argent Dawn title of some sort. But I like lore, so I was working towards Loremaster. Which I got. I alternated those as my mood suited until I received the Exalted. Now I run that almost exclusively. Back in late BC I ran with of the Shattered Sun for a while, to express my willingness and ability to waste gold on stupid crap.

These aren't unique. I've run into other loremasters (though not many), other people with Argent Dawn titles, a few of the Shattered Sun. As for gear, I've seen Hands of Rag and Thunderfuries and some tier sets. Those don't detract from me having them. Being less unique isn't a problem as long as they still express what I intend to express, which is my weird obsession with killing undead and knowing irrelevant details about old content.

While we're on the subject of irrelevant content, grinds, and titles; I've completed all but one of the needed reputations for Insane in the Membrane. All that is left are about 900 heavy junkboxes. I've already done about 500. These come from my rogue, who has for a couple months used a customized mutilate spec which emphasizes being a mutilate spec and having a high run speed. It gets both run speed boosts; 15% normal and 15% in stealth, giving a stealthed speed of almost normal speed. That's pretty important when I'm sneaking through all of LBRS in one go, picking along the way. She also uses glyph of pick pocket (really long range) and glyph of pick lock, which makes it instant and saves a huge amount of time when I'm checking a few dozen boxes at once. If not for that I'd probably not bother to check the boxes, and I'd have missed out on some of the surprises they can hold.

It's very difficult to be unique in WoW. With millions of people playing and a limited selection of titles, races, and classes, odds are someone is going to be like you. That's not bad.

Be yourself, and don't be afraid to see an identical snowflake.

But I leave the final word to The Onion.

Confession: I started blogging to meet women

Not really, but I did run into an interesting observation a week or two ago in SAN gchat: there are a lot of women in the guild. As I thought about the blogs I follow, I realized a lot of them are written by women. Are women more likely than men to be bloggers? I forgot about it for a while. Then Pugnacious Priest posted today about what effectively seemed to be a virtual escort service: pay for a girl to play with you. That seemed creepy. And almost entirely irrelevant to this post, except for having been about women, and acting as inspiration for my attempt at an ironically funny title.

I decided to get numbers. Total blogs followed: 31. Blogs that I'm 99% sure are male: 19. Blogs that I'm 99% sure are female: 11. And then a few that I'm not sure. Okay based on the numbers it looks that the "few I'm not sure" are actually just one. Maybe I put the unsures in with male.

A bit over 35% of the blogs I read are written by female bloggers. Numbers vary, but I'm pretty sure less than 35% of players are female.

Clearly women, more so than men, like to talk a lot.

While we're on the sterotyping train, one is a mage, one is a warlock, I have no clue, and the rest are healers; priests and druids. That last bit may be biased because paladin blogs appear to be universally boring. I suspect it's because we play a boring class. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong. On the boring blogs part, don't tell me how to play my class*.

Since I'm the one with the blank page, I'll just go ahead and make up useless theories which have little to no basis in reality.
- Social or biological pressure pushes women into the 'maternal' role of healing.
- The dominance of men in the medical field causes women to go for the one place a man won't tell them they can't heal.
- Men are too insecure to wear dresses and not hit things in the face, leaving women to fill the gap.
- Any attempt to talk on vent results in "omg a girl?", so a blog with the ability to delete jackasses is a better way to talk.
- Women are more social than men and therefore more likely to join SAN.
- Women write in a different manner (statistically speaking) than men and this happens to appeal to me, causing me to read their blogs more often than randomly sampling of the WoW blogosphere would predict, meaning that my observations are statistically not useful and therefore any conclusions I attempt to draw from them are best ignored.
That last one seemed pretty good, actually.

I also seem to have a lot of European blogs. Either they are a talkative sort, or I'm statistically invalid. Or my methodology sucks, since I did kinda sorta shove the Australians into the European category as a sort of "not North America" category. Sorry guys, but I'm legally required to add an "us vs. them" comment into every post; you just don't usually notice. I can't go into details, but let's just say I ordered french fries in 2005.

* Why the fuck do people say this? It's a bit of advice, an observation, a suggestion of room for improvement. So what if they're 'telling you how to play you class'? You're playing a like a fucking jackass! Stop using seal of wisdom as ret and exorcism while tanking! It's fucking stupid! Ahem. Sorry.

P.S. After I wrote this, I found another blog to add. So make that 12 female out of 22.

It's too easy to be wrong

The internet is giving rise to a whole new morality. Or lack of. I've noticed a pattern: things which nearly effortless are hard to see as wrong.

A few Sundays ago I wrote not so nicely about the orb speculators. Gevlon wrote a strange sort of rebuttal, boiling down to "The higher the price is, the more likely it will be used by someone worthwhile." That's actually less ridiculous than it sounds, I agree with the general concept. Others commented in my post, some quite offended by my suggestion that buying, holding, and reselling, which change absolutely nothing about the product, not making it into something more valuable, is unethical. Somehow the market has become the new morality for some people. If it's profitable it must be okay!

But that's not my point here. Instead I want to look at it from another angle: the way people could not even consider that there could be anything wrong. Why not? I believe it is because buying up 5-10g orbs is as simple as a few clicks and seems to have no effect on anyone or anything until you resell in a few weeks for massive profits. It looks like printing money but without even causing inflation.

It's easy and it benefits me, how could it be wrong?

I see a similar behavior in software and music piracy. I bet a dozen clicks and a bit of waiting could get you 95% of the music or software you'd ever want. If it was wrong, why would it be so easy? Bad things are hard, like stealing and murder and that sort of thing. Thieves have to break windows and stuff, not click a mouse a dozen times. It doesn't help that it's not theft the way we'd see it in the real world.

The internet, electronics in general, are a strange sort of world, and the words and rules of the 'real world' don't work quite right there. For another example, see Tobold try to figure out friends on Facebook. Friends that aren't friends but we call friends. Facebook friend sounds also insulting. But really anything less than friend sounds a bit mean, as if to say "Just so we're clear, we're not actually friends, so don't get any ideas." But on the easy note, think of how easy it is to friend someone. Trivial. While it's nor morally wrong, it is perhaps dishonest, but it's so easy, we don't really bother to consider: Is this person actually a friend? Actually in the past year or so I started ignoring friend requests for people I didn't see at least once a week. Then I just stopped checking Facebook at all. This process of doing nothing was assisted by my login/saved name eventually running out and it being 'too hard' (relative to benefit) to actually type in my name and password check it anymore.

I think of when Tobold experimented with anonymous, unmoderated comments, not even deleting anything. And told everyone first. Someone spammed NIGGER a few dozen times. He probably thought it was funny. And what's the harm? Just 6 letters and some copy-paste. Harmlessly easy. The trolls and spammers have it so easy. Imagine on the forums; quote, "wrong", post. Just like that you can annoy someone and potentially derail a thread. But it's so easy, why would anyone ever hold that against them?

The ninja in randoms, the person who gets the drop they want and bails, the partial guild runs that kick competition just before the boss: they're all so easy.

Click click click. It can't be wrong! It was so easy.

What it comes down to is failure to engage the mind. Trivially easy activities don't force us to take time or effort to consider them. We don't justify them because we don't have time. They are done and done.

Imagine if buying orbs required going to a buyer and explaining "Prices are going to go up, but this is a gamble, so I am willing to take on that risk to give you gold now. However keep in mind that if I am so sure of the risk to buy up not just your orbs, but those of many other people, it's probably a sure shot. Really you're an idiot to sell them to be at these prices" And you can't macro it into your trade macro, gotta say it per stack.

Or if music piracy required going all the way to the store, opening the CD, copying it to your laptop, and carefully rewrapping it.

Or if leaving an instance or kicking someone required taking the few seconds to give a reason.

Obviously these will reduce activity purely due to the added inconvenience. But I believe there will be a further effect as people think during it "What am I doing?"

The LFD RFD from pre-BC

Razorfen Downs was a terrible place back in the day. The run there was too long. The corpse run was too long. It was hard to keep aggro on all the little piggies.

It did have one really great feature: A sword which was awesome for, let's say a leveling rogue or fury warrior. Pair it with the quest for clearing all of SM and you're going to have a nicely-geared lowbie. It's too slow for tanking, but would still be an upgrade for my little paladin.

So I queue for a random, hoping for RFD. I get it.

As we approach the gong, two DPS leave. They said nothing and I didn't see anything obviously stupid going on in the group. We get a hunter and a rogue. Near the escort/second boss, the new rogue leaves. We carry on. Someone starts the escort early. The boss from the escort drops a mage-specific wand. Yes, a class-specific random drop from an escort event. I think all that could make that a worse way of distributing loot would be to make it BiS so mages must farm it endlessly.

I die when I pull the second boss. Turns out the healer is DCed. I run back, we kill him. As we work our way around the spire the healer is lagging, then DCing again. So we got old-school.

These days we just AoE everything down and the healer is a healer and the hunter is just some near-useless idiot who ninjas the drops at the end.

But back in my day...

The hunters were idiots.

Actually this one dropped freezing traps to reduce the damage I was taking. The elemental shaman was healing. And so we three-manned a few packs, fully expecting to do that until the end. Some groups would have quit. Some groups would have requeued. But this group just kept on fighting.

That felt strange. And good.

I won't lie and say it was hard. It wasn't. It was still pretty easy (for me, not sure how the shaman felt about it). But it was different. It was something other than the normal chain-pull face-roll oh-em-gee-r-we-done-yet of the usual randoms.

The random loot bag gave me plate tanking shoulders. I'm level 36 (37 after a gnome gave me a very expensive ring; expensive for me, damn scam artist).

The value of extra time in a heroic

Warning: obvious statement incoming.

Sometimes people are in too much of a rush and harm themselves as a result.

Chests
Ever seen someone leave before rolls could finish on a chest? I have. Too many times. Meaning ever. If they waited a few more seconds they'd have had a 20% chance at the 25-30g crystal, maybe a 5g shard or the 10-20g vendor price, and of course the orb which isn't vendor trash anymore. 10 seconds for an average of 5-10g seems worth it to me. Sometimes it's longer because someone leave before the chest even opens so we have to wait for the auto-pass. Why not just tab out to look at the porn you were anyway? I'm looking at you, 1k DPS guy.

Looting
Back when the timer on HCoS was tricky and we were getting the boss down with only seconds to spare, the moments of time to loot corpses weren't worth as much as a OMG EPIC DRAGON NEED NEED NEED. These days we have plenty of time. Most heroics don't have timers like that anyway. Taking two seconds to loot the 1g off a corpse, plus some trash or cloth is worth it now that it's not preventing us from getting a OMG EPIC DRAGON NEED NEED NEED. It's actually pretty neat; you click sparklies and get gold. I wish real life was like that.

Wrong bosses
Many of the heroics have optional bosses; you can skip them and still get your frost emblems. Some people skip them. Some people don't. And some people are idiots.

Imagine that you're in an instance and everyone else wants to skip the optional boss that you want. Would leaving group help? Not really. You'd have to start all over again. Might as well kill the last one or two bosses, get your trash and triumph, and requeue as you would anyway. You can avoid the debuff too. Hm, 10 minutes of bosses you'll kill anyway when you requeue or 15 minutes in Dalaran bored?

Or imagine that you want to skip an optional boss. Would leaving the group help? Probably not. Most optional bosses are 5-10 minute delays. The debuff, 15 minutes. Or 30 if you're in the future. Which you might be. Spooky. 5-10 minutes of the wastes of time or 15 minutes of Dalaran?

Then there is the added bonus of the DPS who do this. If you're just doing the one per day for frost, just stay in for 5-10 extra minutes and avoid a 15 minute debuff and 10 minute queue. Plus having to clear whatever you'd already done.

Culling of Stratholme is a special case. If you're going to be one of those jackasses who leaves, try first asking if they've talked to Arthas yet. The odds are that someone else has already left and while the group waited for a replacement, Arthas has been glad to see Uther.

Two seconds of reading while autorunning are worth 10g
I've said before to compare vendor and DE prices. Do it. Wait a second before picking DE to see what an item vendors for. Blue weapons are not worth DEing. BLue gear cloth usually is; blue plate and mail often aren't. I can get shards for 5g or less while weapons are 12-15g. Simply reading the vendor price is worth 10g to me. That's about as close as you can get to free gold.

Slow down, get rich faster.

Is Blizzard failing to teach new players about talents?

Thursday was druids' day. Congratulations druids, you had a day. On Tuesday I suggested that new players might benefit from cheap, low level dual spec. It was brought up that this adds a lot of complication. People get confused.

Really now? New players cannot handle the idea of "I can do this or I can do this"? Perhaps that's true. Actually I'm certain it is. In the previous post I told a bit of how mixed up I was with talents at first. I don't know when I really understood the concept of using talents to support the playstyle/role I wanted. Maybe it wasn't until I read the forums more.

That implies a failure on the part of Blizzard. Or I'm just really stupid. I'll go with blaming someone else. Why are new players left so much on their own, stumbling in the dark, and frequently clueless about talents?

Getting back to me being stupid, I must admit that I've had tutorials and tips off for years, so for all I know at level 10 players get a summary of the use of talents and respeccing. I doubt it though, since if they did, players could be expected to understand talents and handle their 'complexity' before level 40.

I'd love to see some sort of tutorial quest line to teach players about talents. The trainers could send them off to learn some lore, tell exaggerated stories about each spec, and most importantly, help them understand what talents are. For DPS they would mostly be RP of sorts, emphasizing the flavor of each spec while for hybrids the quests would explain the roles and how talents relate to them.

I don't expect deep insight. If a new prot paladin can't pick between divine strength and divinity, that's really not so bad. But they should have the idea that their job is to distract enemies from the rest of the group and minimize the damage they take. How exactly to do that can be something to learn on their own.

Rogue:
Assasination: "Once, a rogue made his own poisons and understood them as well as his own weapons. Those times are past, but the path of the assassin still teaches the full potential of poisons; their power to sap an enemy's health, to slow the minds of casters, to even calm the furious rage of an enemy who knows that death approaches."
Combat: "Let the others slink in shadows and dabble in poisons; we are the ones who understand that ultimately, it is direct violence which solves problems. But do not mistake us for the unsubtle warriors; we still know how to not be seen."
Subtlety: "The best place to hide a dagger is in an enemy's back. The best place to hide the hand that holds it is in the shadow of stealth; the stalker unseen."

These are just summaries of what a full quest or series of quests would give. Ideally they would put each class in a slightly different situation which emphasizes the playstyle. Assassination would face an enemy which takes increased nature damage; combat would face an enemy with a lot of health but low damage; subtlety would face an enemy with low health but high damage. Each would be most successful when emphasizing poisons, steady damage, and burst damage from stealth, respectively.

Obviously at level 10 these won't do much, since one talent point hardly differentiates a spec. By 30 they are a bit more clear and certainly by 40. At whichever level it is, the player would be given temporary talents fitting each role and given the opportunity to try each. Then they'd get a free respec at the end so they could pick whichever role they felt was most suitable. Or perhaps two if they can afford dual spec. But really, I just want an excuse to reset the talents of that poor troll shaman who meleed as elemental almost until 60 because he was afraid of the trainer offering to unlearn his skills.

P.S. Let pre-40 shamans queues as tanks. All shamans deserve the opportunity to tank Scarlet Monastery like I did.

No one wants to feel useless

If you don't want all the pointless context, you can skip the first few paragraphs. I know I would. Who wants to hear about lowbie randoms?

My little alt paladin is 35 now. That means he can queue for SM cath. But when mobs are 3-4 levels higher, pulling must be done carefully.

Let's backtrack a bit to level 33, or maybe 34. I'd queued for a random and gotten SM lib. The healer quickly proved herself to be capable when we started the first hallways and runner after runner meant that I was tanking 5-6 mobs at a time pretty much down the entire hall, as one group got low it would aggro the next, and so on. No time for rest. In contrast the warlock was absolutely terrible. I'm not sure if he actually casted anything and his blueberry was poorly controlled, constantly aggroing new groups even when there wasn't a runner. At the end the fury warrior rolled need on the caster dagger (against the good druid healer), refused to trade it until we explained why he didn't get a cache of random goods, and then left after saying "what dagger?" The druid had a rogue guildy with her.

We did another random, getting SM GY. This was when uselessness set in. Not for me, but for pretty much everyone else. At 35 the mobs are green and I can easily pull until dazed, drop consecrate, and do loads of damage. Meanwhile the rogue is stabbing one at a time, the warlock is already useless, and I forgot what else we had. That's a rather unfun situation, to be useless like that. I felt sorry for them but what was I to do? I spotted a rarespawn and the warlock got a hat. The druid saw the offhand drop for what was apparently her second time, we noted that it would have gone perfectly with the dagger she didn't have.

Onward to specifically queuing for SM armory. Trash trash trash trash. The healer said I was a good tank. I explained my tanking policy: The mobs may only hit me or DPS who I don't like. I enforce this rule very strictly. Then Herod gave me shoulders that I can't wear yet.

Then we went to RFD. We kicked the warlock after he continued to be silently useless (I hate it when people who don't respond at all in chat) and rolled need on some mail. A mage joined. I got a plate chest. Someone started the escort too soon and two people didn't get it, including the mage. He left. Someone joined. They left. Someone else left. I leveled up just in time to have enough mana to grab the last wave and boss. Then we carried on with no problems. The druid got gloves and the rogue got a dagger and shoulders.

Onward to SM cath. It went fairly smoothly until the third pull in the cathedral. Okay before that the shaman annoyed me by demanding that we pull the other side too, after I'd just pulled a mob from that side. I wasn't watching the pats carefully and got two wizards (they are so OP) and some melee mobs. I died. The group died. The mobs reset. We ran back and the level 40 warrior in all manner of heirlooms asked if she could tank instead.

I said that I had no DPS spec, so I'd just be uselessly leeching XP. The rogue supported me. We kept running to the cathedral while the warrior explained that she could take a lot more damage than me and hold aggro perfectly. Someone initiated a vote kick on her. I whispered the rogue "she's just trying to help". Which I thought she was and she had a point after all. The kick went through and the shaman didn't requeue us because it's more XP. That seemed dumb. We lost so much DPS that the XP gain was offset by slower kills.

I didn't want to feel useless, auto-attacking with a 2h with 10 second judgement, low crit, and no 2h talents. It's a terrible feeling. It's the feeling my priest has gotten in some very fast heroics where I barely get off a mindflay or dot and the mob is dead. It sounds weird to say "My DPS would be higher if yours was lower", but it's true.

There's some maximum possible DPS in a heroic. I don't mean from gear or skill, just that mobs only have so much health and are spread out. If a mob dies in five seconds and your spells are 2 second casts, you're getting off three attacks maximum. More likely you're a caster lagging behind slightly and you get two casts. Right there, a 33% reduction in DPS.

Some classes are better at trash that others. Paladins are great with seal of cleave, a lot of instant attacks, and an AoE attack as part of their normal rotation. Warriors work well too. Then there are the rogues who need to get behind the target to use their best openers and build combo points for the big attacks, but the mob might be dead already, so the points are wasted. I don't imagine kitties are in any better of a position. But those two have it easy compared to an affliction warlock. Poor dot spec. This is one benefit to destruction: nukes.

Trash meters are little more than an indicator of what class the person plays. Highest? Paladin. Lowest? Rogue or warlock. Only boss meters can demonstrate much about player skill. And yet how often are people kicked before the boss, or kicked due to overall DPS? It's ridiculous. When I've looked at my rogue, trash is pitiful, 1500 maybe, while bosses are minimum 2k, but more likely 2.5k. Not great, but surely above the threshold of terrible. If only trash lasted long enough to get a finisher off!

Next time you think you're carrying people in a heroic, consider that they might not be asking to be carried. They might be little kids walking a little slow, but at no point did they just sit on the ground or whine "up up up!" You just picked them up without asking and then complained about having to do it.

Drama is stupid

Conflicts happen. It's inevitable. People get into disagreements. They get rude. They get mean. Give it time and it goes away.

Fanning the flames doesn't help. Picking sides doesn't help. Not even if you're on the right side.

Drama is stupid. It can be funny, but it's still stupid.

To take it seriously only gives it legitimacy. To ignore it reveals it for what it is: an immature outburst.

You might have recently decided that I am a terrible jerk. You might be right. But recent evidence should considered from a new perspective: being fake. Not photoshopped or edited or even taken out of context. But fake. Staged.

At the risk of sounding insulting, I can't believe anyone took the feud between Miss Medicina and me seriously. My own first post was so ridiculous that I felt it was obvious. I went out of my way to make myself look bad. I went out of my way to make the accusations so absurd as to not make sense. For her part, Miss Medicina followed my lead with labels like "a fascist name" and "jerky mcjerkface".

I probably didn't fully take into account how existing drama makes people more sensitive to new drama and how drama spawns drama. Too bad for me I guess.

We weren't trying to troll. We were trying to stir up trouble. These are different! With all the stupid drama stuff going on, I thought it would be fun to point out the utter absurdity of drama. The waste of time it is. So I willingly stepped into the bad person role and started coordinating our behavior; which is the first line in the chat log you see. I included plenty of taunting of "I bet you're taking screenshots" sort of stuff, to make sure she had her material to work with.

Someone did blow our cover, but that's what super-delete is for. I normally reserve it for spam posts, but this was urgent! However I hate destruction of evidence, so I copied it first.

Anonymous said...

No sarcasm my behind. Miss Medicina and Klepsacovic masterminded this little episode of drama. I was there, watching. Tsk, shame on the two of you.

Incidentally, you were both great. Couldn't see myself ever be that good at RP (even if RP wasn't how you were thinking of it).

Now let see if this gets published or not, and *I* don't get gkicked. :D

Boris aka Frocke

March 19, 2010 1:13 PM

Jerk!

What I'm trying to get at are three points:
1) Please don't hate me.
2) Please don't encourage drama by hyping it up.
3) Go read Larisa's post on drama. Because she's awesome.

SAND

Maybe you've heard of Simple Abstract Noun. I have. I'm in it. Then briefly wasn't. Then was again.

In other words I got gkicked.

You're probably wondering how one manages to get gkicked from a social blog community guild. Oh it's simple: let's just say the person who made the American side of it is a power-tripping crazy.

I didn't bother to take any screenshots since I'm trusting her to get all drama-whore and post some. Also because unlike someone I like to leave stuff behind me and not go on and on about it.

It's ridiculous. I send some polite tells and gchat messages about how I should be GM and she's lazy and emotional and next thing I can't send any green text anymore. She called me sexist too. That's totally unfounded. I specifically avoided sex-specific terms like "bitch" and went with the neutral "fascist". But does she bother to notice that I'm being reasonable? Clearly no!

Oh yea then after I refuse the first invite because who would want to go back to that, she starts sending me these tells... Let's just say the only one I can repeat is "so you're playing hard to get?" Did I look like I was in Goldshire flagged for ... that?

I did rejoin, but it kinda ruins the fun knowing there's this person with a god complex hovering over me, just waiting to ruin it all. I thought of starting my own guild that wouldn't be ridiculous like that, but damn, is that what being a GM does to a person?

Yea, so there's your Simple Abstract Noun Drama.

Part Two: What Happened on Whiny Post Day?
In one of yesterday's posts, Suicidal Zebra suggested that I make a post of whiny posts. I like the idea a lot. But there's a slight problem: I don't know all the whiny posts. I did try to find them, and found a lot, but I'm sure I missed some.

So I submit this request, or two, to the blogosphereodomeocron:
If you wrote a whiny post, please send me a link. Replace the yahoo in my email with gmail to ensure I get it.
If you didn't write a whiny post, let me remind you that Gevlon and Hitler did not write whiny posts. Do you want to be like them?
Second request: I could probably most easily find this if I knew how to find any page which linked the whiny post day announcement. I don't know how to do that. Would anyone like to point me to a place describing how to do that? Or tell me what it would be called, because "how do I see what pages are linked to the one about whiny post day" returns let's see... Spinks, Larisa, wowblips whatever that is, "Angry for a Reason: 'Whiny' Feminists and comics", "Is Jim "***" Brady a whiny ass titty baby?" and so on.

On a related note, I gave brief thought to moving the day to the last day of March. But then I realized that I shouldn't mess with tradition.

Thank you to everyone who whined.

The turth comes out: I don't write every day

Despite being Whiny Post Day, some people took my I Hate Filler Posts post to mean I was unhappy. Apparently posting about posting is a sign of burnout, despite that actually being an extra post and clearly not a filler post, since I already had my real post for the day. And it was whiny as fitting with the day. I figured I'd clarify a bit. First off, I cannot get burned out, due to the way I write and schedule posts. If I don't want to write, I don't.

I don't actually write every day. Instead I have a general category system of posts which are urgent (see: dicks on the dancefloor), posts which are sort of time-relevant such as counter-posts (Tuesday's dual-spec post), and posts which are sort of vague "here's something I thought of sometime" posts (most of them).

I tend to write a bunch of the last category at once. At one point I had a dozen or so in a day. I then space them out rather than posting a dozen posts in a day and then nothing for a few days. These will get pushed back if the other sort of post comes up. For example, So Sick of Welfare Levels was written days before it went up. I have dozens and dozens of drafts of complete or mostly complete posts which I can call on if I don't feel like writing today, or tomorrow, or possibly for the next month. I won't get burned out because I almost never have to write. In the case of the filler post on Sunday, I was too tired to even glance at posts to pick one. That was a rare occurrence.

Many of the drafts are incomplete or I didn't post them yet because I didn't like how they turned out. But there are at least a week of posts which are ready to go, but got pushed back by more urgent matters such as arguing about talents, calling Gevlon an idiot, and other bloggers writing posts which I don't want to spam with comments as long as a full post.

Perhaps this is an artificial way of blogging. Perhaps I'm supposed to write and post the moment I have a thought, no sooner or later, and not draft them if they turn out poorly. It is a box of sorts, restricting how I post, based on how posts can get pushed back. But is that really so unusual? I'm sure we've all had a stream of ideas and doled them out one at a time rather than dumping twenty emails on our boss' desk or raising our hands with ten questions in a row. It's the polite thing to do. Who wants to read the blog equivalent of that one girl we all knew as teenagers who would go on and on and on in an endless stream of unrelated thoughts punctuated only by like and so and totally and you know?

On the other hand it is liberating in a way. If I have an idea I have at least a day to think about it, develop it, and turn it into something better than the semi-literate offensive rambling which is my normal thought process. I had a post that I made in that style which was started off as a question of economic morality in WoW and quickly veered into Protestant jokes and Hitler. Aw screw it, here you go. Have a blast.

I am going to make one change though. If I have a bit more emotional of a post, I will post it right then. Such as this one. I was a little bit annoyed at the "sky is falling" (blog is falling?) comments. Larisa seems to have this problem too; post the slightest negative thing and suddenly it's all over, quit now before it gets worse, run for cover.

I'm Catholic

Or perhaps more accurately, I was Catholic. Not anymore. I wasn't excommunicated or anything, but I haven't been to Mass in a while. But being Catholic isn't just about being bored out of your mind. After all, Protestants are perfectly capable of being bored.

It's also about feeling bad about everything you do, always knowing that sometime that day you probably committed a sin and the fact that you've forgotten what it was just makes it worse. In contrast Protestants feel no remorse or guilt. Sorry about the tangent, but while I'm making fun of Protestants, I have this brief snippet of gchat.

Kelpsacovic: We're not sexist
Guildy: No? Then why can't women be priests?
Kelpsacovic: It is scientific fact that women priests act in reverse, sending people to hell.
Kelpsacovic: We tested it.
Kelpsacovic: See: Protestantism.

But getting back from the Protestant jokes: As a Catholic I am plagued by the constant question: "Should I feel bad about this?" And so I am led to my dilemma.

I watch the AH for certain materials, such as infinite dust, certain shards, and epic DE results. I don't use an addon which specifically finds 'underpriced' items, but I instead of a set of saved searches: infinite dust, dream shard, large brilliant shard; those sort of things. I search and use those results to determine what is profitable to put on a scroll and sometimes what is so cheap that I buy it even if I don't need it an time soon. Sometimes I resell that stuff.

Should I feel bad about that?

If I was a Protestant I wouldn't. I'd pretend I did work and made money off it and therefore I'm righteous. Then I'd kick an Irish child into the mud and tell him to get back to work in the coal mines.

The issue isn't that I spent time. I certainly did. But who was the last significant person to measure everything purely by time spent? Marx, that's who. And look how that turned out: people misrepresented everything he said, started a revolution (or two) in the wrong places, and then other people declared it a failure. Meanwhile the capitalists sold some excellent summer homes in Siberia, from which one can see Sarah Palin's house. My point is, merely spending time does not mean the person should get anything in return. Is any value added, that's the true issue.

I suppose I could say yes. After all, if prices were only 1g then, demand was low, so I was merely helping suppliers to move unwanted inventory; while when prices are high I am helping to fulfill demand, helping keep crafters employed and people enchanted. I effectively turn an unwanted item into a wanted item. Or I just have a few spare mail slots and don't really do jack shit.

Or do I? If I was not doing this, who would? Why those awful speculators, flipping mats and screwing up markets. I've done a god-damn service by depriving them of some small amount of gold. I'm underpaid! Yes, my speculation is clearly a good thing, helping to drive away the speculators. Oh fuck, I became one. Forgive me, Father, for I have profited from the poor timing of others.

[edit] Abortion jokes aren't funny. I thought I'd removed that. Oops.

I suppose this post sounds a bit odd. Maybe. But this is actually typical of at least 10% of my posts. Minimum. I have a lot of drafts and deleted drafts. Actually I don't have the deleted drafts. Because I deleted them. Others I edit heavily to remove what would otherwise be half a post devoted to explaining why comparisons to Hitler are actually quite valid, the problem is that people too quickly get emotionally involved rather than maintaining the heartless distance which is necessary for such high-minded topics such as During the beer hall shouting matches, how frequently Hilter interjected with "Das sie spragt!" That's not Babelfish. That's my own terrible grammar.

No, I am not drunk. This is just how I think.

Are druids not for new players?

On Tuesday I suggested that dual spec be lowered in level and cost so that new players could pick it up. Somehow my incredible brilliance was not recognized by all. The opposition to dual specs seems to mostly consist of "It's too complex for new players." There are also the not-in-favor opinions such as "it's unnecessary", but that can be applied to 90% of 90% of anything. The complexity argument seems somewhat compelling. I mean, new players can get overwhelmed.

But then why are druids available to new players? I won't claim they're more complex in any given role (shut up kitties, this isn't about you) than any other class. But the class overall is complex. They have dual spec built right in. What? Shapeshifting!

When my lowbie ret wants to tank, he throws on a shield and turns on RF. No new spells or anything. Tanking is effectively the same as DPS. DKs are even simpler; switch to frost presence, no need for a shield even. Warriors have stances, but many abilities are shared across them and the general concept of "hit in face/back of the head and use rage" remains. Then there are druids.

Shift into bear form and suddenly you have entirely different abilities. These aren't the handful of stance-specific abilities of a warrior. Oh no, every single ability works in only that form. Okay, you can cast spells in caster/moonkin/tree, but kitty and bear are completely distinct. They even have their own version of faerie fire. Which doesn't even have the exact effect in bear form.

The resource systems aren't even the same. Kitty is energy, bear is rage, and other forms are mana. These regenerate in different ways and are spent in different ways. Only kitty has combo points.

Druids don't have dual spec or even tri-spec. They have tri-class. Should they even have talent points? Can you imagine the confusion of a new player trying to decide whether to spend points on that cool bear or the cow form or maybe they heard rumors of a kitty and oh my god what is this moonkin and tree of life thing?

It is clear that death knights and druids should be switched, with the complex druid class only being available to experienced players. Unlike DKs they won't start at level 55. It's bad enough getting 10 talent points every five minutes and a new ability every ten minutes; now do that for caster form and two shapeshifts. DKs will also start at level one, to more accurately reflect the fact that they are rerolls of bored hunters who think complex gameplay means sometimes maintaining a sting.

I hate filler posts

You get a bonus today, two posts. Both whiny.

And as an extra bonus I screwed up the date o this post, so it's late.

This past weekend was not conducive to writing about WoW. I played Civ 4 in my spare time and didn't have much of that. My drafts weren't quite what I wanted. I don't like to post them early and screw up an idea I liked; I'd feel too repetitive to return to an idea to take another crack at it just because I failed at writing the first time around. A different angle is fine, I do that a lot, but pure repetition feels wrong.

So I ended up with filler posts. Poker on Sunday and Whiny Post Day post on Monday. The second one wasn't totally terrible, since I had somehow mixed up my days and felt it needed some more thought. Or some other nights when I just sort of talk about the previous night's raid. I don't like those. They're just not what I do. That sounds rather stupid to say, but maybe you get what I mean. If someone analyzed my normal posts they could get some idea what I'm playing; since my topics are affected by my alt or raid at the time, but I feel too much like a diary blogger if I talk directly about recent experiences. Also who cares? Twitter is bad enough, but Twitter with a multi-hour delay pretending to be a real post? No thanks.

I guess I've put myself in a box. I post every day, so to not post feels like I'm breaking my own rules. Then there's Saturday. To be honest, I don't really know what the theme is meant to be. The first posts I wrote never actually got published. They were a sort of joke about people whose economic decisions had benefited me and which would indirectly teach something useful. The first was about bold bloodstones. Somehow since then it has turned into a general "talk about a person or type or person" post which isn't really distinct from what I'd post during the week. I have even less clue what Sunday is supposed to be. Or why I bother to post then. It's not a big blog-reading day for most people apparently.

Possibly worse than filler posts are having more than one in a day. It's overwhelming. Even worse is when there are two one day and none the next. Spread them out a bit. But maybe that's artificial.

Two filler posts this week and two in one day? I should lose my license. Which reminds me, that seems like the sort of thing they'd require in Australia: blog licenses. I used to think it was some big free place; rough and liberated by being populated by the offspring of prisoners and British rejects. Turns out they've got all sorts of government interference in their media. I didn't really realize they had a government. Not cool! I'd hear about this or that election, but it never seemed like it meant anything. Like they were an elected version of the British royalty: useless and unneeded for anything but ceremonial purposes. Please no one tell me the royalty have any power. I like them as a pointless drain on government resources used to prop up dying memories of empire and glory.

Whining

You'd think whining would be easy. I have all manner of complaints, annoyances, irritations, and hatreds stored up. But are they really whining? Somehow this is hard to write.

This is somewhat typical. I get a sort of neat idea, spread it a bit, and then fall on my end. So here I am wondering how to whine. I could not whine, but I started this whole "whine in solidarity" business, so I better fucking whine.

My guild uses DKP. This has some good aspects, and some bad ones. Bad ones like mail bracers drop which are a DPS upgrade for me and no one wants them. No shamans, no hunters; they're worth a shard to the guild. Unless of course I spend DKP to get them. Which I did since they were a significant upgrade, but it feels a bit odd to penalize someone for not making another shard.

I don't have much DKP anyway. So if we ever kill Putricide, I'm not getting a new trinket any time soon. And my T10 will stay T10. Mt loot situation in general is rather boring. Upgrades are either marginal or out of reach.

My computer is getting old. WoW is getting slightly better graphics each expansion and it seems like ever more spell effects. My framerates make raid fights a lot less fun. And hurt my DPS. I still do okay, but I feel bad about it, that I'm doing less than I could. But what can I do? I can't afford to buy a new computer just to raid a little bit better. I don't buy many games, so it's not as if it can be considered an investment in future fun. My mic doesn't work and I don't know why. But what do I need to say in vent anyway? I used to be a talker. Now I don't really care.

I screwed up a pickpocketing macro and destroyed about 40 boxes.

The last hour of raiding is the worst. That's when we're just wiping on progression fights. It doesn't feel like learning or progressing. Just dying. People are tired and nothing seems to get done. I don't remember hating wiping so much in MC. Are we all spoiled brats now who can't stand to not one-shot a boss?

Ever tried to talk about WoW with someone who doesn't play? It doesn't work. If you talked about a job or hobby or sport, anything other than gaming, people would at some level understand. They'd have some clue what you're talking about. Oh but simple ignorance would be preferable. I seem to run into a lot of people who put gaming on the same level as heroin addition, except at least that has the slight glamor of killing famous people. All we have are social rejects and the occasional 48 hour play death; which that sort of person would have found something else to die to.

It's a bit lonely to have no one to talk to. Well, a few friends, but I don't see them often and I feel like I'm supposed to talk about something more substantial. I've never mentioned my blog to my family. Even though I see it as semi-productive as a writing exercise, I imagine they'd be shocked that I talk so much about a game.

Sometimes I wonder why I blog. Is this nothing more than an outlet for my incessant desire to tell people what I think? I was one of those people who never stopped talking in school. It wasn't necessarily talking about something unrelated to what we were learning, but I would debate endlessly and ask questions as much as a little kid going through the "why?" phase. It sometimes seems rather pointless. What impact does it have? There's the vague "building a community" aspect, but what is that even? Sometimes a big blogger leaves and there is much lamentation and then it seems like we all move on. They're not indispensable or irreplaceable. I'm sure that applies even more to small blogs. I suppose I've had some small impact based on a few Whiny Post Day posts and Tobold's recent moderation experiment. But that seems a bit pitiful in context: I slightly altered the posting of people blogging about WoW. Worst of all is probably that I doubt anyone from Blizzard has read this blog, or cared. Maybe a forum mod checked the link to ensure my sig doesn't link to a porn blog, but that's about it.

Last week I got my passport. It was a smooth process of tpye directly into the PDF, print it out, sign some stuff, and good to go. For some reason they don't take credit cards. I wasn't quite sure how to write a check, since I haven't in about 5 years. The whining part is where it asks for employment. I don't have a career yet. I'm graduated, so not a student. So I'm... unemployed? That's a bit humiliating, and it's valid for 10 years.

I guess whining wasn't so hard after all. Why the hell are people so negative?

Happy St. Patrick's Day. My friends aren't accessible via public transit and we don't have money to waste on taxis, so no drunk hanging out for us. My only plan for the day is to dig up some sort of invasive tall grass near the fence in the garden.

Should players start with dual spec?

Green Armadillo has pointed out the strangeness of dual spec being so expensive, and fairly late in the leveling game. 1000g is a lot for a new player, so they're not likely to get it right away. Keep in mind this is new new players. I'm talking about the troll shaman who put his first points into improved healing wave, thought respec would make him lose all his abilities, and who never casted spells despite being elemental because he always ran out of mana. This isn't about alts, or even new server rerolls.

For those players, gold isn't even the real issue. The true problem is learning. Playing as the wrong spec for a role causes problems. Experienced players can tank as ret and heal as shadow (I have) or whatever other wrong combination you can imagine. We have a strong grasp of how healing, tanking, and DPS work and can adapt to a suboptimal spec. New players don't have that experience. They can learn of course; I did. But what are they learning? Playing a role with the wrong spec tends to teach bad habits.

My priest would start throwing mind blasts at low mobs hoping for the killing blow spirit regen and tended to use dispersion as a regen crutch. She had no concept of which healing spells to choose, since none are boosted at all by a shadow spec. Do I use flash heal? Greater heal? Maybe I use renew and player of healing? Talents act as guides: disc talents encourage the use of PW:S while holy talents encourage renew and flash heal. This won't guarantee perfect play, but it will give some concept of what is for what.

Until I went prot at 50, my warrior would tank instances in berserker stance throwing whirlwinds for aggro. Defensive stance and a shield? Not gonna work. Well maybe now; this was a few years ago after all. I was hell for my healers. But at least I topped the meters. That's what matters, right? It took a while to learn what to do in defensive stance, since I barely ever used it.

Dual specs might also help to teach the difference between solo and group play. The act of zoning in and switching specs reinforces that you're in a different role and environment. It's like changing clothes. It changes how people act. This probably won't help much with DPS, but for tanks and healers, while leveling it could help to teach them that they are part of a group. Or maybe it would help DPS. They'd run off and pull while healers are still drinking and don't yet have the regen to bail them out of their stupid. Dead DPS learn faster than bubbled DPS. But getting back to tanks; how often do you see tanks, or DPS, or healers, who seem to play as if they are still soloing, but their health sometimes goes back up? Switching specs would be a message: "You are not soloing anymore. Act different."

Blizzard has tried to make leveling easier with cheaper mounts at lower levels. But how much do mounts really change the game? If it's a short distance, not much difference. If it's a long difference, that's when you pull out a book to read along the way. They affect us while soloing. Dual spec, that affects us in groups. It might just be my bias, but isn't group play really the more important aspect of the game? That is where we affect others, for better and for worse; where we create a community (or not thanks to cross-server); where we learn our roles beyond "read quest helper, kill, repeat."

Before 30 the specs aren't significantly different; but after 30 they diverge much more, gaining their unique flavors and styles of play. By 40 they are clearly different. But what new player has 1000g at 30 or 40? I certainly didn't. While I am well aware that low level players can make tons of gold from gathering low level mats, that's not always apparent. I'd even argue that it's something they shouldn't know. Let them level their crappy crafting profession that they think goes with their otherwise profitable gathering profession. It helps the immersion. It gets them into the game. Don't tear them away from their ignorant bliss too soon. Leave the gold sinks to the 80s who should have by then learned the cold reality of the game.

Wouldn't it make more sense for the luxury of mounts to have a luxury cost, and give the necessity of dual-specs a cost in line with any other necessary training?

Clarifying Whiny Post Day

March 17th is Whiny Post Day.

Due to a scheduling mishap many years ago, that is also Saint Patrick's Day. At least in the good parts of the United States, that means wear green, get drunk, and eat what might be Irish food, but you're too drunk to know. It's a celebration.

By some strange cosmic flux radiation incident, everyone is temporarily Irish. It makes sense since in bad sci-fi, radiation glows green. Also the Hulk is clearly not angry, just very very drunk.

This wouldn't seem to be a good day for whining. It isn't! In fact it is a good day for not whining.

Which is why we have whiny blog posts.

Rather than getting drunk and airing all your greivances, and likely confusing people at the bar, "Let me tell you, itsh a crime how they let these casuals have my gear and they nerfed everything!" Instead you can get that all out of the way ahead of time. Write it the day before and schedule it. Or if you're just drunk at home and alone, then go ahead and whine all you want right then.

All things in moderation

You might have noticed that I tend to avoid the pointless RL posts with no point and too much redundancy. But I'm still drunk. That's what happens when you're skinny, don't drink much, and therefore have no tolerance.

At two drinks I was doing decently at poker (by my standards). $10 buy in and I was at $12 or more. In contrast my dad had run out, my brother had bought in again, and my other brother the same. Two friends were making out like bandits. Then I started on the third drink and my funds went almost straight down. The friends ended up splitting something like $60 between the two of them and both my brothers were bought in twice with one totally empty. I ended at $2.70, took $2.50 since there were quarters, and decided it had been a decent night.

I shouldn't have had the third. Or maybe it was the lack of lime. Corona really isn't that good, but the lime makes it better.

My day started with painting and smoke alarms going off next to my ear while I was installing them. My oldest brother yelled a lot. The other yelled a lot when he lost all his money. He doesn't seem to understand that poker is a mixture of luck and not choosing to lose your money.

Obama's socialist government is stealing an hour from us for 'conservation'. True story.

Saturday Superstar: People who are too busy being antisocial to think

I'll just skip to the fun parts.

Gevlon: Don't help dumb people because I have absolutely no evidence that they cannot be helped. (My interpretation)

Klepsacovic

For the most part, M&S are made, not born or chosen. Read up on child development and the role of proper nutrition and early education. A capable child may be born, but in an unstimulating environment, their mind won't develop; they will grow up stupid, by no or fault of their own, but only by the environment. If there was more support for poor children, they'd be less stupid. Your antisocial tendencies actually create more M&S rather than reducing them.

Gevlon

and how would you give more support to poor children? Children cannot trade. You can only give to their parents who will spend it on smoke and booze.

Is he really this stupid? Where the fuck does he even get the idea "children can't trade"? It's completely irrelevant. And the smokes and booze, seriously, that's... that's just the sort of retarded lazy stereotype that a moron would use.

Children do not need to 'trade' or own or be directly given any money. Instead there can be these things called 'schools' in which children are 'taught' and unless the parents somehow know how to extract knowledge from their brains and sell it for crack, the 'school' won't be used to buy the parents drugs. Furthermore, at these 'schools' the children can be given lunch and dinner, which will be digested while they are there, meaning that unless their parents steal their blood, the children are the only ones getting the food.

There are ways to help children without helping terrible parents. Unfortunately, some people are so busy hating the world that they lack the free mental resources to think of these. Like I said, free public education and free lunch and breakfast for sufficiently poor children. Or public libraries where children can go to learn as much as they want. These were really fucking obvious.

Of course no system or solution is perfect. There will be some kids for whom school is a waste. In an ideal world they would be sent somewhere else to kill each other and smoke crack as they wish. Unfortunately that's not legal. Schooling them will be a waste, but waste is inevitable in any system.

It is unjust to reject all children who lack the ability to pay for their own schooling (by that I mean, whose parents are too poor to pay for it) simply because a significant portion will be wasted. To use a minority of moronic children to justify the abandonment of the majority is little different than the indiscriminate killing of civilians practiced by terrorists. It is the bedrock of civilization to not punish the innocent for the crimes of the guilty.

Furthermore, it is harmful to have large uneducated populations. Without education, they are more prone to violence and social unrest. How so? School isn't just about geometry and history; it's also a place where people are taught to follow rules, to respect authority, to be civilized. It serves no one to have large populations with little hope of employment and no respect for rules (including rule of law). That is an easy recruitment center for enemies of civilization; criminals, foreign enemies, terrorists, whoever.

I'm not saying we need to be nice or the stupid people will attack us. If that was the case I'd just say to shoot them while we have the element of surprise.

What I am saying is that we should not reject the upcoming generations purely because their parents lacked the means to educate and develop them. To do so is actively encouraging the growth of a worthless, unruly population. No one benefits when the world turns into Brazil: massive ghettos of uneducated idiots surrounding tiny enclaves of the inherited rich. Of course we also should not be France, whose excessive government support has discouraged employment, which impairs the social integration of Muslim immigrants, fueling discontent. The middle is almost always better than the extremes.

Some days I think Gevlon is just selfish and lacks empathy. Other days he appears to be incapable of anything approaching rational thought or seeing the possibility that he is wrong.

His title should have given it away: "Challenge for social(ist)s"
He somehow has the ridiculous idea that social people; those who acre about their fellow human beings, are the slightest bit interchangeable with socialists. Obviously there would be some link between caring about other people and an economic system of government ownership for a collective good. But socials are far more likely to not work through government, but on their own. It's called charity. Socials don't demand that the government take over industry. They give money to charities and volunteer and take an active role.

As I think about this more, I can only conclude that Gevlon's grasp of English is so poor that he does not realize that social and socialist are not synonyms, and despite sharing a root (social), they do not share the entirety of their meaning. Or, he's only reaching logical conclusions given his initial assumption: Everyone else is so incredibly stupid, they can barely breath without government subsidies for air. When you start from that, it's not hard to see how he could reach all sorts of conclusions which would seem ridiculous if you started with more reasonable assumptions such as assuming that reality exists and is not merely an illusion created by aliens.

It's so easy to be angry and point out the flawed thinking of fools. I shouldn't be so lazy.

What's your blog's drinking game?

As Iapetes and I were joking around a bit about how I tend to go silent on IM when he tries any theorycraft, I thought of the worst drinking game ever: read my blog and take a shot ever time I do any theorycraft. We figured no one would even get buzzed. So instead we went with posts in which I complain about people I don't like. We determined that would kill you. Which made me laugh, since I try to be positive.

What's your blog's drinking game?

Who'd have noticed that they didn't suck?

I hopped on my warrior for some saronite farming; meaning one random heroic for the frost emblems. Queued as tank/DPS and got a ridiculously long two second wait to get into a DTK run.

The hunter kept pulling.

And the DK was well... a DK.

I get mad when DPS pull.

But can I get mad when misdirect is on me, after admitting that I was rusty (and therefore my aggro was shaky)? And when the healer has 90%+ mana? In a bad mood I'd have gotten mad at the hunter and called him a noob. Instead of recognizing that he was just speeding up the run without causing problems for the tank (misdirect) or the healer (plenty of mana and not too many mobs at once). Maybe I just ran into someone who plays a bit differently. Not badly, except by my arbitrary and rather restrictive standards. But who'd have noticed he was anything but an ADD-rushed noob DPS?

I hate the spider room on my warrior. They come out in ones and twos and are hard to pick up. I don't need to tank them since they barely hurt, but it's the principle of the matter. From somewhere (could it be the DK?) came chains of ice, slowing them and buying time for us to kill them before they got the swarms of spiders.

I don't know how they did on DPS. I don't really care.

Okay the priest was kinda low. Around 1.5k. Her gear appeared to be quest stuff and maybe a heroic blue here and there. And she was a priest in a group that burned down mobs in seconds. Kinda hard to get DoTs to tick for anything significant when the mob dies before then. Oh, check out Pugnacious Priest on this. She seemed new. I wish I'd been able to check out her spec and maybe even see what spells she was using, but tanking isn't as forgiving of inspecting and chatting. She got the gloves at the end and I thought of what the vendor price was compared to the thrill of those first few epics when they feel so special. I think that was worth my 20% share of less than 4g. As for the rest of the group, well screw them! I'm going to look out for myself, as any goblin would encourage. But my self-interest is rather social.

I'm so much better than you that you don't even count as a person

A couple Saturdays ago I explained how ninjas are actually idiots, causing harm to the community overall and therefore to themselves, eventually.

My favorite social made a more recent post about the same issue, but he had an entirely opposite take on it. He took into account something that I'd not considered: Everyone else is stupid and therefore I don't need to show them the slightest shred of decency or respect. How silly of me to forget this.

The world looks quite different if you start with the assumption that 95% of the world is stupid, lazy, and nearly incapable of even basic survival on their own. Almost any activity makes more sense after making this assumption. Steal? Go for it, they're probably not putting it to good use. Murder? Saves air for the smart people and we can take their stuff. Genocide? Well that's just murder with economies of scale. Starvation, disease, natural disaster? Same as before, probably just killing people not worth caring about, except they don't even require any work. It's like the real wold equivalent of a world drop during dailies.

We all complain about how everyone is stupid or lazy or corrupt or all manner of problems. We've all said how all politicians are crooks or all voters are idiots for voting for them. Maybe they are. People are likely less intelligent than they could be, if they cared enough to try. But we tend to say these as asides, little comments or complaints which don't mean much. A lengthy way of swearing, perhaps.

It is rather stupid to instead use this as the basis for viewing the world. To play spin the bottle, except instead to point at the target and say "moron." This cannot give any benefit beside an ego boost. It's rather non-objective to decide the fate of all other humans on a pessimistic hunch. Then again, he is a social after all.

I am reminded of Scott Adams (Dilbert guy) creation of the Induhvidual. Induhviduals are stupid people; expressed in this way so you can say it to their face: "You're quite an induhvidual!" without violence resulting. He later wrote of how we're all induhviduals at some time or another. At some points in our lives we are stupid. Everyone. So to attempt to use instances of induhividualism to label a population is to open yourself to extremes of conformation bias.

Consider that at this very moment you can find someone being stupid. Right as you read this, millions of people are doing something stupid. Hundreds of thousands are risking death for no good reason. And the 6 billion others are going about their lives doing nothing particularly smart or stupid, just being human. At worst we can call them unmotivated, but stupid is hardly accurate.

People don't walk around tallying the non-moronic actions people take. You'd run out of notebooks. Instead you notice the stupid stuff. It's simply more noticeable, since humans didn't evolve and survive by noticing the ordinary. The very fact that we notice stupid actions rather than smart ones indicates that stupid actions are the unusual ones. Smart actions are the ten thousand faceless commuters; stupid actions are the guy in a clown suit on the train.

It would be rather ironic to have a fit of induhvidualism while explaining that people as a whole are not crash-helmet stupid or perhaps worse, while claiming to be in the only worthwhile 5%.

Or a copy-paste of my comment on his blog, since it's probably buried under ten thousand people saying more or less "omg communist! Hiss hiss!"

You're basing this entire argument on the pretty risky assumption that 95% of players are useless and you're not.

Based on your blue raids, I won't argue if you are better than that 95%. But to assume that the 95% is worthless is rather stupid. That 95% might not be the greatest ever, but truly useless players, players who ideally would not even play, are rare.

What do you even base your claims on, random people in heroics? They're probably going in with the same greedy, self-serving attitude. A group full of assholes will tend to perform poorly. If instead they cared about the rest of the group, they'd try harder, and not ninja every drop out of spite.

When we all pretend we're superior, when we all dismiss the other 95% of the world, we end up as a whole lot of selfish people, wondering why the other people are such lazy dicks, and asking why we should care when that other person sucks so much. A world based on "fuck you" "well fuck you too!" is hardly going to be profitable for Blizzard. And then who would make more raids?

Unexpected nuance

Alternate title: Why is something so simple so complex?

Recently I was touching up the paint on a door. As I looked at the door I realized: painting doors is more complex than it would appear at first. At first glance you'd think to just put some paint on a brush, smear on door, repeat until door is the desired color.

The door appeared to have been done with this method. It looked like shit.

Instead, it is best to paint with a pattern. Do the inset portions first loading up a lot of paint and spreading it (this is faster than dabbing little bits at a time). Where it spills out of there, spread it out so it doesn't build up. Get drips and any pools in the corners and spread those. Then follow the direction of the wood. I tend to go horizontal first. That way the vertical sides can be used to redirect any overlap paint from the horizontal parts, in the correct direction.

This process is a bit slower, but it makes the paint much less chaotic in appearance and minimizes the effect of the hairs of the brush.

Who would think of this? I'd guess not many people. It's a fucking door, not a mentally engaging process. The people are not stupid, overall; though in this particular instance they might be. Instead they just don't imagine that a simple task might not be perfectly straightforward.

Could this happen in WoW as well? I suspect it does, and accounts for a lot of apparently stupid players. It's a game, how complex could it be? Once you know the steps, really not very. But who would bother to learn the steps? It's a door, it's a game; why do I need to paint in a direction or use a rotation of runes and abilities? "It's just a game!" they insist. And of course they're right.

Yet it remains that no matter their intellect or ability, their inability to imagine the improvement of mundane tasks is holding them back. And affecting others.

I care how my doors look. They're going to be in someone's house, seen every day, possibly not repainted for 1, 5, 10, 20 years. That door better look good, or I'm really fucking someone over. I get paid either way. But I feel better if I know I've done a good job and made a life ever so slightly better. Are raids all that different? It's another mundane task, a seemingly trivial one, which done poorly will negatively effect dozens of other people.

I'm not advocating min-maxing every detail of your character. Diminishing returns set in and it ceases to be worth the time spent. To return to the paint analogy, if it's a wall, there's no point at all in going right down to the cabinets. They won't be seen and the point of the paint is for appearance; unseen paint is wasted paint. Of course you can see it if you get on a ladder and look up there, but why are they looking up there? It's not worth the paint to appease the ladder people. Similarly, I'm not in favor of spending every last piece of gold on crafted gear for marginal upgrades. I did buy some expensive boots, but only because I was still in Ulduar leather boots and my DKP wasn't favorable to getting an upgrade any time soon.

Learn your paint rotation and your DPS rotation. It's worth seeing the overall effect afterward.

So sick of welfare levels

As if getting easy gear wasn't bad enough, Blizzard hands out level 80 to anyone who can grind a bunch of non-elites. They don't even have to solo them. These nubs could group up for what should be soloable mobs and still get xp. Seriously? Do we really need levels handed out like that? The other day I saw someone running around at level 80 like he was someone special, but I could tell he was a total noob.

What's next, some feature for noobs to invite other noobs and get free levels for it?

Or maybe, when they don't even play, they get 'virtual levels' which make them level faster. Yea, leveling up without even logging in.

It all started with the easy level 10 and went downhill from there. Level inflation got out of control and the noobs keep riding the wave. Easy 60, easy 70, easy 80 doesn't even surprise me anymore. I bet someday we're going to see noobs running around at level 85.

Yea, noobs at 85. Cataclysm is all set to ruin WoW.