Ding! Damn.

My warrior hit 80 this afternoon during a HoS run. Cool right? Well, now I don't know what to do. I'm bad with max level alts. He has nowhere to go except on the gear path. Yay? It's fun to get upgrades, but what's the point? I don't plan to make him my main. My guild doesn't need my warriors. I don't need another tank/DPS; I have a prot/ret paladin.

I suppose I can still max out his BS.

Maybe he can be my selfish generosity alt. What is selfish generosity? It's doing thing that seem nice, but only because you've figured out how to benefit from it. When people need a tank or DPS and I don't see any benefit to my paladin, I can go on my warrior.

Alts give the same problem as hybrids, but worse. The problem with hybrids is that they have multiple roles, but they need different gear for all of them. Inevitably the main spec is better off than the rest, unless the guild really likes giving you lots of gear. Alts are the same. When they get gear it means your main didn't get the gear. They tend to fall behind unless you're constantly running older content to keep them just barely with the curve. But I don't think I have the energy to keep my paladin doing Naxx 25 PUGs, guild Ulduar 25 runs, plus dailies and all the old world stuff I do, along with taking my warrior to heroics and Naxx 10.

Wouldn't it be cool if all gear was BoA? If I remember (I forgot last time I said this), I'll look at alternative loot systems more in the future.

End of Semster: Moving Out

The scene is me wandering to my parent's car which I borrowed, carrying my second to last load of stuff from my room. I hear a girl scream: "Kitten killer!" She has blue hair. She runs up and asks if I want a snowball. I ask why she has it and she responds that she's been saving it in her freezer since the winter. Her friend says it's too cold to make them in the winter. She hands it to me in a Ghirardelli chocolate bag and tells me to throw it at someone. Since my hands were full, she was not a convenient target.

I drop off my stuff in the car and head back towards the dorm. Along the way I see a friend of mine, one who might be understanding of a snowball in spring. I am tempted to throw it at her, but realize that it's about 50% solid ice, so I just toss it at her feet. After questioning its origins, we decide to play catch with it, along with a friend of hers. So there we are, playing catch with a ball of ice while parents and students are stumbling by with giant boxes and push carts.

I got home and my mom told me it was her birthday. This caught me by surprise because I don't remember things such as birthdays, or anything else. I made dinner, she seemed to like it. Apparently I know how to cook fluffy rice.

Why we have poop quests

They are to make something very clear to us: we are not heroes, we are adventurers. Yes we do cool and awesome stuff, but we are not Thrall or Jaina or Grom. We're maybe Garona. Our names aren't really known. Oh sure we get a letter of recommendation here and there, but in general, we're just anonymous people waiting to be hired just for something to do.

The only group that I've seen really notice us was the Scourge.

Proof that WG is a success

I planned to go to bed about an hour and a half ago. But they were yelling about needing reinforcements. So there I go. Horde were on defense and playing a bit less well than usual, but we managed to win. I got the tower daily done for my first time.

We cleaned up some stragglers afterward. Then I decided to go look for more. I saw a low level draenei paladin. Free honor! Or it was bait for a rogue. But hey, no problem, two melee, I'm prot! Then a DK showed up and it started getting ugly. I ended up burning lay on hands and my bubble but the DK and paladin were dead. I was one hit away from dying to the rogue when suddenly he goes flying away, death gripped by a Horde DK. And then cheapshotted by the DK's rogue friend. I thanked them and went looking for more fun.

Around the fire area I found more fun, including a mage who I of course killed, though not without having to look for him after he popped invis at around 25%. Then I ran into some hunters near the eastern Alliance graveyard. They were some trouble because they kept running back to the guards who would then MS me. A ret paladin showed up and helped, resulting in them dying a lot until the mage turned up again. After these there was a consistent theme: HoJ was always just barely too slow to interrupt polymorph. In other words, almost completely wasted.

Still, we managed to get in some kills before we got sick of them running to the guards. We went back to the fire area for some more killing, found the mage, killed him, killed the hunters, killed some elementals who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then the paladin had to go, so I was alone. At this point my luck went way down as I kept ending up facing the mage and a hunter or two at the same time, and HoJ was still late. After a couple hunter kills and a few deaths which I declared to be BS, I ran around for some ore before hearthing. The hunter liked spamming emotes, but unfortunately my attempt to report it was foiled by the long queue. Oh well. If I'm lucky he's a gold-buyer and he'll be banned for that. In fact, I think I'll just believe that and declare myself the victor on all fronts. Woo hoo!

This is a great thing. The rewards I got from the PvP were minimal for the time invested: a few gold from looting corpses and maybe a few hundred honor. There was little reward, except for the fun of it. I spent at least an hour hunting Alliance and no NPC told me to or offered epics. Admittedly I was in the zone because the battle gives a ton of honor in addition to shards and gold, but why stay? The farming is safer and faster elsewhere. I stayed because it was fun. That is the best measure of success.

Apparently WG is such a huge success that the devs want people to go there less. This almost seems like a pattern for Blizzard. When WoW first launched it ended up being way more popular than anticipated and there weren't enough server resources. World PvP became popular and then the problem became worse, so they put people in BGs. Now WG is too popular, so they want us back in BGs again. I'd not mind if there was a comparable BG, but sadly AV is a shell of its former self and I hate EotS.

In unrelated news, I joined a very good Naxx 25 PUG earlier in the day. We did a full clear, I won a piece of gear for each spec: holy chest, prot wrists, ret ring. Sadly I was outrolled on both weapons that dropped, including Betrayer of Humanity. I guess I'll be using my heroic axe for a while longer. And I tanked H UK just for the hell of it. It was the daily and after spending the day seeing trade and lfg filled with desperate calls for tanks, I figured I'd help out. The healer was new and the rogues liked to hug bombs, but we did alright.

In related news, I think Stabs was right. Playing less has caused me to have a lot more fun. Granted I pretty much played all day today, but in the week before I was playing a lot less than usual. I'll talk more about this later, I think it could be interesting.

I find useful information useless

And the reverse. My favorite blogs are the useless ones. I can't stand the ones filled with useful information.

Having recently completed a bit of a lit review about the limits of text, I suppose it would make sense to apply it. *Ahem* Sorry to ruin the usual flow of flowing, but I must inform the reader that the following is meant to be interpreted as an attempt at humor. You are free to decide that it is not funny, but acknowledge the attempt. This is not intended to be an attack on any bloggers or any content. Furthermore, why is this disclaimer/clarification the second longest paragraph?

Useful: Ferarro. She knows her stuff and explains things pretty well. I find it useless. What do I care which weapon is slightly better than the other? I'm not in a position to choose, instead I say "this is an upgrade" or "this is not an upgrade" or "this is an upgrade, but I just got a new weapon and look at what he's using over there."

Useless: Larisa. I can recall no time at which I gained any information from Larisa which would in any way improve my abilities in WoW. Utterly useless. It's great!

Mixed: Rohan. Sometimes a post has theorycraft and I say "oh that's nice." Sometimes a post is useless, discussions about guilds or tanking. Those are fun.

I imagine this is due to two things.
1) I am a noob.
2) Useful blogs are redundant. I can find useful information many other places. There are few places to find useless information.

For further, better reading, check out the comments here.

If arenas gave no gear, would people do them?

Yes and no, somewhere in between known as "a lot less."

In a way arenas did stop giving gear. More ratings meant that people couldn't lose their way to epics and as a result arena play went way down. Naxx gives better gear, faster.

People aren't doing arenas as much now that they don't give gear. This isn't really the fault of arenas.

I started a team today. We're not in much PvP gear, we've not done much PvP in a long time, neither of us have proper PvP specs. We got our asses handed to us a few times before the system realized we should be down in the noob section. We're at some sad low rating. But, weird thing is, it was fun. I'm actually looking forward to playing more games. We've only done 10, or maybe 11 so far, and then we did WG and BGs for some honor. I want to play more though.

Arenas might be horribly unbalanced. They might be gimmicky. They might be artificially restricted PvP in a small box. But they can be fun. The problem is that we've all learned to chase gear. What gives us the best gear in the least time? Go there! That's the thought process.

I think I figured out why I'm enjoying arenas again. They're offering something that I'm not getting from raiding: learning and advancement. As I get better, I actually see progress, I get somewhere. In raids, my individual ability is diluted by 25 people. If I screw up, so what? Odds are someone else would have as well. If I do great, someone else screwing up still ruins it.

Arenas are more conducive to learning. Early on when you're terrible, you lose a lot, but what do you actually lose? Rating? You can't go below zero and until you've won a bit, you don't seem to lose rating anyway. Repairs? Nope. Time? Instantly requeue and you're back in much faster than a corpse run. Arenas encourage learning with almost non-existent penalties in the learning stage. In contrast raids do all their punishing while you learn, then once you get it: easy street.

I've learned some useful bits. While it is tempting to stay close to my warrior partner while healing, don't do it with DKs around or it's just asking for pestilence. I've learned to love 20 second HoJ.

One of our wins was against a druid-DK team (that's where I learned to spread out) and I saw the druid wasn't topped off. He wanted some range to get MS off and heal up, so he started casting roots on my partner. HoJ locked out his nature tree, my partner charged in and started doing painful things. Just to be sure I threw up an arcane torrent when I thought the interrupt string was wearing off.

Another win was against a holy paladin-DK team. We were slowly losing, with me losing mana much faster. But then the DK dropped a bit more than he should have been allowed to. The paladin saw the problem and started up a holy light. Interrupt, DK died, paladin bubbled, noticed what happened, and left the match.

There aren't really moments like that in raids. Arenas are still stupid and terrible, but I think I might enjoy their stupid terribleness. :P

[edit] I forgot to add, read this post by Tobold.

The Politics of WoW

To set the stage, let's start with this: it's not just a game. It's entertainment for millions, for some a hobby, even a culture. To call it just a game is a terrible understatement.

There are somewhere around 11 million accounts or subscribers or something of that sort. An unfortunate effect of different billing methods and multi-boxing is that true population measures are impossible. Let's just go with 9 million, it's probably low, but close enough. Greece has around 11 million people. Consider that for a moment. WoW is country-sized. It is a convenient coincidence that the country I picked for population size also happens to have possibly the most important cultural and scientific history in the world. Greece changed the world. It gave us many scientific advances, logic and reason, and even an absolutely horrible form of democracy which inspired the systems we have today.

Is this the destiny of WoW? Eh. I have no doubt that WoW will be important culturally, but it's hardly going to be the next Greece. My initial thought was to call America the next Greece, but I suppose we're more the Rome to England being Greece. Who stole my point?

I propose that the developers are the politicians of WoW. Or an oligarchy, an unelected oligarchy, though not entirely immune to the influence of virtual pitchforks and rioting. They control how the world works. Their actions change the economy and how we play, virtually live (yes that was left ambiguous on purpose).

Apathy confuses me. Why would anyone ignore the political process? It shapes our nations and worlds, influences our lives in ways that we cannot always imagine. Should WoW be any different? To refuse to read patch notes is as terrible as ignoring the latest law to be passed. It's your world, know what's going on!

I am struck by a disturbing thought though: it is very likely that a higher percentage of players read patch notes than read the laws which are passed. Why? Obviously time is a factor: patch notes, even for a huge patch, are hardly comparable to the hundreds of pages in some packages of laws. Convenience as well: what else are you going to do while the patch is downloading? You can only pass so much time poking around your security settings trying to figure out if turning off your firewall actually removes the error message about being behind a firewall. Btw, I found no speed increase by turning it off, though I did get incredibly paranoid. The string of triggers on my anti-virus a few days later did not help.

Where was I? Oh yes, so politics and our worlds. How does real life compare to WoW in terms of the process to design it? Call me crazy, but I feel as if I may have some tiny little influence on the game design. In contrast, I don't feel the same influence in real life. This leads me to two questions.

First is the question: Why not? I think it's about communication and dilution. For WoW there are pretty obvious channels for yelling about stuff we don't like: official forums, official email, and of course moronic youtube comments on PvP videos. And these blag things. we even know that the devs sometimes read the forums and respond. Well, more than they used to. There's been some change and it makes me hopeful. Does that make Ghostcrwaler Obama?

Second: Are we going to change this? I believe that games can shape our perceptions. When you play and see the devs working on balance and aggressively improving the game, regardless of whatever terrible vision they had four years ago, that might have an influence on your expectations. Hey, if the leaders of a population the size of Greece can change their minds to improve the 'world', why can't leaders of real nations do the same?

I see so many ways this could turn out. An individualistic drive could be created, a self-motivated population which has not batted an eye at the prospect of wiping for months (hello, Razorgore, would you like to devour my guild this month?), might they say "Screw you economic downturn, I'm going to go get stuff done?" I don't know quite how this would work out, since real life doesn't exactly support farming by flying in circles or mass murder. Another possibility is players going "hey, my character has never starved to death, in fact he's never really had to worry about the basic necessities of life being missing."

I've recently been doing some research on Fox News for a class and noticed three things: they aren't good with games, they don't like socialism, and they love being able to create the impression of disaster on the horizon. I can see it now...

"This video game has been spreading a socialist message to millions, influencing adults and kids alike. It has global reach and the company producing it has revenues in the billions. These players are together living in this collective fantasy land in which they are taught that socialism works, that individuals don't need to work, they just survive no matter what they do. Here's the really chilling part: there is a war going on for the very survival of humanity and it is portrayed as completely optional."

[edit] I'm afraid when I wrote this originally I was far too tired to get my point across. The core ideas were that devs are like politicians, relating not reading patch notes or forums with political apathy, and how WoW might influence perceptions of real life. That last one is probably the weakest since it's really just the positive side of "VIDEO GAMES MAKE CHILDREN MURDER PUPPPIES! More at 10."

Towel Service

This afternoon while eating lunch I had a realization: there is an unfilled demand in the world. It came up in conversation that I did not know the exact location of my towel. As we all know, it is important to know where your towel is.

Technology would dictate an expensive and impractical solution, such as a GPS device embedded in the towel.

Behavior-oriented people would say to always leave your towel in the same place, such as a drying rack.

Ideally though, you wouldn't just think you know where it is, you would know where it is. How? You'd carry it with you! But how is that practical? Towels are bulky. That's when it struck me: make a towel into a bag.

Here's the service idea:
Mail in a towel and money. Or mail the towel and send money electronically. Maybe I could make a store in a major city as a centralized service location to save the mailing.
Also pick the style of bag. The cheapest is a simple fold over, stitch the sides, and cut out handles. Other styles would be significantly more expensive.

There you go, instant customer satisfaction and a major boost to their confidence. Who would dare mess with someone who is not only stylish, but also has their towel with them?