To make it clear: all the voices on this blog live in the same head. The blog subtitle should give it away, but in case that wasn’t clear…

Still, we try to make it flow as if there were a team of distinct individuals living and blogging here. It’s a little game, of sorts, that may or may not have some intrinsic value, at least to me.

The one thing that kills this suspension of disbelief – for me, anyway – is posting an entry as, say, Flora, getting comments, and then seeing my mustachioed countenance looking back from her comment box. Well, that’s my gravatar, what am I to do?

Gravatars are cool, but they’re tied to email addresses, and I’m not that thrilled by obtaining and maintaining twelve (at current count) email addresses.

GMail, however, for whatever reason, has an answer.

If you look at the most recent post, you’ll notice that Jasra’s responded to one comment, and she has her own gravatar. If you had admin access, like I do, you’d see that she has an unusual email address: grimmtooth+jasra at gmail. This is my email – grimmtooth at gmail – with her name added with a plus sign.

Turns out you can do that with any name, and most email-keyed services do indeed see these different email addresses as unique to each other. Thus, Flora and Jas both currently have gravatars, and more will be added as needed. They could even have their own Facebook pages and Twitter accounts if I really wanted to get silly.

There are other benefits, too. For example, I can filter emails to my toons based on the t0-address, and then sort them accordingly.

Naturally, this assumes you use gmail. If not, you’re on your own.

I hope this proves useful to some of the other bloggish-rp-ish beings out there. Happy blogging!

Grimm noticed this first, but it’s hit me, too.  The Apothecary bosses are just horrible on pets. Grimm at least has a HoT heal for his (that also cleanses). Phil the Phelguard doesn’t have a chance. I was able to recover slightly by bringing out Iggy the Imp and, as long as he followed me, keep him alive.

What this fight does is highlight what someone else was saying elsewhere; Blizz is making it hard on our pets, and for those of us for which pets are significant (hello, BM Hunters and Demon Warlocks!), this causes a major drop in our usefulness to the team.

So much for “Avoidance is the answer”.

Moving on.

I’d like to introduce you to Squicky, isn’t he the cutest lil thing? His hobbies include eating rats, moles, mice, small cats, and beagles when he’s really hungry (and really big).  I like hanging out in the tram station with him just to watch him chase the rats.

Over the past 48 or so hours, there has been much trash-talking about the Ensidia world-first kill of Arthas (and subsequent fallout).  People are weighing in on both sides.

One prevailing viewpoint of the pro-Ensidia crowd is that Blizzard failed to test the software “properly” and thus, somehow and ergo, Ensidia is blameless in this situation.

What utter, profound crap.

Let me essplain.  No – it is too much. Let me summarize.

There is a rule of thumb in the software testing world, which boils down to this:  “to attack the software properly, you have to think like a criminal” – such as , for example, when dealing with things like credit card processing – the storage of account numbers and so forth, especially. The designer will tell you how it’s supposed to work under normal conditions. You get to figure out what he didn’t think of, the cracks in the shell that you can exploit.

So; this rule of thumb helps one find good testers, but it begs the question as to how to “catch a thief”! Until you’ve sat in the seat of an interviewer, you really don’t know how difficult it is to find a mediocre tester, much less a world-class game buster.  To “catch a thief” to work on your team, you kinda have to think like one, too.

So that’s one issue.

Another issue is what I like to summarize as “the view is really good from the cheap seats”. Really, until you’ve actually been put in the place of finding bugs as your bread and butter, you really have no idea what you’re talking about when you criticize the work done by the testers in this situation. You really, really, don’t. You have no idea what kind of guidelines they were given. You have no idea what level of knowledge they were given about how the encounter was supposed to progress, nor how complete the testing environment was. You have no idea, at all, how this was tested, or even if it was testable.

So sure, go ahead and talk trash all you want, but those of us that work in the industry know exactly how hollow and foolish your critiques are.

Walk a mile in my shoes, and we have common ground to talk.  You can make real critiques at that point, not a bunch of generalities that mean absolutely nothing.

-=-=-=-=-=-

Regarding Ensidia; Grimm said this elsewhere, but I will reiterate now.  You don’t play this game for five years, earn a seat in one of the premier raiding guilds in the world, and somehow not know that this was an exploit. Saronite bombs are to be thrown at the enemy, not collapsed portions of a platform, and the enemy was not standing on collapsed parts of the platform. No, this was deliberate. And anyone that’s been playing that long would know it.

To whine that they’re victims of faulty QA is disingenuous at best. That QA team didn’t make them toss bombs off where they would (theoretically) do no good.  That QA team didn’t force them to take the achievement. That QA team didn’t keep them from reporting the issue.The QA team didn’t make them crow at their achievement.

-=-=-=-=-=-

An analogy, and then I will shut up on this topic.

You are walking through a mall. Ahead of you, a woman’s purse has a broken strap, and the wallet has fallen out. When it hits the ground, a bunch of $50 bills spill out on the ground. She continues on, unaware of the incident.

If you take the money and toss her wallet, who’s in the wrong?  Sure, she should have fixed the purse, secured the wallet. But does that in any way excuse theft? I don’t think so.

-=-=-=-=-=-

Ensidia, I’m sorry that you didn’t get a nice set of steak knives, but maybe next time you will use your heads and not risk your reputation on something so obvious. Or if you do (and I suspect you will), I hope you can at least own up to your stupidity next time.

Oh, and gratz to Paragon, that did it without exploits.

Can you feel it? It is calling in the air.

I’m not naming names. I’m not even promising to be true to the gender involved. I’m not trying to start a fight. I am making an observation. Kapitch?

What happened to me this morning is that I was reading what is considered by all to be a well-informed, rounded blog specific to one specific class.  I have been reading that blog for some time. But, today, for whatever reason, I while I was reading it, I realized, of a sudden, that I had no idea – none at all – if the author was actually enjoying the activities described therein, or if it was just another notch, just another boss, just another data point.

And that got me thinking.

What’s your first-best love?

Do you play the class you love the most, or do you play a class or spec that is needed, for whatever reason, more than your favorite?

If you blog about this silly game, do you blog about what you do, or what you want to do?

I’m reminded of the blogger that most influenced me at first, the guy that taught me that it was good to be enthusiastic and happy and, well, maybe even gush a little about how much fun he was happening.  BRK may be gone, but he is not forgotten, and the post that most reminds me of the outright fun he brought to the game would be the time he had Hobbes tanking the adds in the Moroes encounter.

He was analytical. He was helpful. But, most of all, he was having a hella good time.

He not only helped me enjoy the game … he got me to start playing the game again. I had quit. Deleted all my toons. I was just reading because WoW was, still, interesting in some way¹.  But this guy’s enthusiasm and joy in what he was doing drove home an important lesson to me – It’s a game! Have some fun, FFS!

When I tanked one of the Four Horsemen in Naxx, I had that in mind. This is how we huntard, babee! Bringing you Pewpew and RAWR in one handsome package! If I had Megan’s soul², I’d even do a song about it! Alas, the best you get from me is fish puns, and links to people with actual talent.

Contemplate, for a moment, this post’s titular question.

Frustration and sadness arise when you are kept from what you love. You may have a sense of duty, or loyalty, or something else, that drives you to do that which you do not enjoy as much.  Sometimes, we all have to be “grownups” and do what needs to be done, indeed! But if you don’t recognize that which makes you tick, and embrace it, and nurture it … what kind of experience do you believe you will get from this game?

I firmly believe that if you aren’t having fun, it’s not a game. It’s a job, and probably one with no pay.

Now that this love has overcome me …
Now that this fire is burning bright …
All of these words seem just beyond my reasoning.
Be still my soul …

1. I actually found him via wow.com, so let it never be said that they don’t have their moments. [↩]
2. No, not the ones in her shard bag! [↩]

Say what you want about The Guild, but at least the humor is topical.

Credits

• Ratshag, Vyprania, Kinnavieve – story inspiration, possibly the kitten
• Hannelore – story within the story – disc priest story elements – pennance hurts
• Looking for Group – when Demons go wrong
• Atkins Switcher – “I have minions, I know things.”

I don’t often step out of character, but to finish off the Faiella arc, I feel I need to essplain mahself a little more. So read on if at all interested.

Read the rest of this entry »

First of all, a quick /salute to Hydra at Almost Evil, who has been and will continue to be (fortunately) one of my personal a-listers in the blogosphere. Creator of the EVIL CHECK(tm), she’s a joy to read.  Happy second anniversary, Hydra!

On other fronts, there was a recent Hunter Q&A¹ posted at Blizzard’s website that is an interesting read. I have thoughts. I am no BRK, and will never make such claims. These are my private views and nobody else’s. You have to remember that I’m still pure BM despite empirical evidence that Survival is the Sleek New Hawtness. Unsolicited these opinions are, and likely unwanted.

They are also inevitable.

• Ammunition – The idea of removing ammo as a consumable was a good idea. We are already there with throwing weapons. They certainly have a map showing one model to follow. But they failed to follow through due to fears of blowing up the database (talk about touchy-feely development),  so what we got was all bonuses removed from quivers and ammo pouches, and x1000 stacks of ammo. It would be nice to get that bonus back, to be honest, as I don’t see where it went. But I doubt we’re going to see anything further on this because of the database fears. I also predict that there will be no changes on warlock bags for the same reasons. Though they might surprise me. The hunter changes require movement of data structures. Changes to warlocks might cause it to just ignore a certain structure. But I have strong doubts in that direction. I also suspect that means that X3 is closer than anyone imagines – otherwise they’d not want to wait another 12-18 months to solve this little issue.
• Auto-shoot while running – I can’t believe they actually talked about this, it’s just silly. There are very few things that anyone can do while running, and none automatic that I am aware of. Moving stops auto attacks of all kinds. That’s a core mechanic. There are exceptions but they are just that. Move on.
• Mana vs something else – GC pretty much punted and said this would be a blizzcon topic, which immediately implies that something else actually is being contemplated. TL;DR: I agree. More below.
• Stings == Curses – I would buy that for a dollar. My greatest fear is that there will be more of a one to one mapping between the two as we go forward – “Bring the player, not the class”² which makes the game less attractive overall³.
• “Beast Mastery falls behind Marksmanship and Survival in regards to DPS, especially when the pet dies, due to how much damage comes from the pet when specialized in the Beast Mastery talent tree.” – Duh. Hello, “Beast mastery“? That’s what we do. Make it so our DPS doesn’t suffer when our pet dies, and it’s what, again? That’s a huge chunk of what this spec’s about. There are two ways to help here: (1) Hunters keep the pet alive, and (2) raid healers heal raid pets. #2 is my favored because it acknowledges what a BM hunter brings to the raid, such as buffs and so forth. Damage is damage, people.
• Regarding GC’s response to that question: “Getting the pet out of trouble” isn’t going t resolve anything. Whether the pet is running back to me, or dead, it still isn’t doing any damage. The only net difference is my DPS loss when I am rezzing my pet if it dies. Really, if buffing Arcane Shot⁴ deep in the tree is the only answer, then carry on.
• Pet Survivability – to the point of the above two, pet survivability does not resolve the actual current issue, which is that BM hunters are the DPS Tail-end Charlies of the hunter world these days. Survivability only addresses the status quo, and the status is not “quo”, as it were.
• Pet Action Bars – More? Groovy!
• Number of Pet Slots – I am content with five + one slots, and GC claims that this is a good number that forces a choice. Allow me to be pessimistic. If the crybabies are loud enough (and when are they not?), we will see that expanded.

More on Mana

The Mana topic is an interesting one. I personally don’t feel that it is at all an appropriate resource for Hunters, so I am completely behind changing all that. It would be such a fundamental change that it would have to be an Expansion that brought it.

If not Mana, then what? Energy? Rage? Something else?

I personally lean towards Energy, the same as Rogues use. Hunters do physical damage rather than magical, which is why I find Mana ill-advised for us. However, for me it is more a matter of aesthetics than anything else theory-craftish. There is no compelling reason to shift from mana to anything else. Mana is a deeper pool that recharges more slowly. Energy, a shallow pool that refills quickly. Depending on how you tweak abilities, the two come out pretty much on an even footing. It’s just a matter of scale. So, in this regard, it’s really immaterial except in one respect.

Down time. When playing a rogue, you see quickly that other than for bandaging and buff food, you have no real down time. You’re back to 100% pretty much by the  time you’re done looting. Mana based classes occasionally have to stop and drink. This to me does not fit the Hunter lifestyle.

Consistency. Pets use an energy-ish resource system. In fact, I imagine it was a big fat headache to bolt the pet system to a mana-using class. Hunters using energy, however, would allow for more direct linkage between the two resource systems.

Bonus – Why stop at resource type? Rogues also have “combo points”. Want to make the class more interesting? Maybe you can make combo-linked skills and talents. Maybe that’s the answer to the BM issue.

Finally; there are a lot of people that look at Hunters as if they’re more or less heavy-armored Rogues with combat pets. Some, like Gweryc, take it to the extreme and make it work. There are very good reasons behind the natural assumptions some people make, as well as the very real results that some post⁵. And yet, few people would make the argument that Hunters are more like Shaman with guns and pets, much less tougher versions of Warlocks.  What I’m saying is that the similarities between Hunters and non-mana classes are greater than those between Hunters and other mana classes.

A mana-using class that does primarily physical damage is a very, very odd thing.

Not that that has ever been a detriment to us.

1. Which really isn’t as … spontaneous … as one might suppose from the title. [↩]
2. To which I reply: nuts. [↩]
3. Though it will help on keymapping between me and Flora. [↩]
4. Of course, if they drop Mana as our “resource” then Arcane Shot makes little sense since it is no longer rooted on a mana-based class. Arcane, Mana, dig? [↩]
5. Of course, Gweryc also makes a good argument for Hunter / Warrior mechanics crossover. [↩]

It’s happening everywhere. One blog after another is dropping off the face of the planet. In many cases, the people are still in the game, but they’ve lost interest in blogging about it. In other cases, they’re dropping out of the game, and why blog about something that you don’t do any more?

I’m starting to feel like I land somewhere in between “done with blogging” and “done with the game”.

Looking back, even when our guild was being torn apart by drama and we were failing one attempt after another on Maiden, it was fun and interesting. Now, when similar things happen, I can’t even bring myself to blog about it. Our guild did go through another upheaval, and we’ve been bashing against our first Naxx bosses, and I haven’t said word one about it. In fact, we downed our first two Naxx bosses two nights ago, as a guild, and I haven’t said squat. Jasra got a belt and everything.

I started to blog about the big bruhaha around Curse and WoWI’s blocking of WoWMatrix (and also WUU, by the way). It’s still in draft form. I realized that no matter which side you fall on, that’s the side you’re on and you won’t see reason either way. They’re either evil or they’re justified¹.

I have a mostly complete How to Huntard entry on Pets. It’s still in draft form, for at least a month. Even then, though, there was a voice in the back of my head. Why bother? Nobody will care about something that isn’t a cookie-cutter recipe they can follow.

So many topics, so many aborted posts.

And then there’s Noble Garden.

I started to blog about that, too. About how Blizzard has taken something that was fun, and used it to give satisfaction and justification to people who have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement.² The other day, I went to one of the lowbie towns just to watch. You should, too. Watch your fellow players. Just watch. I’ve seen behavior like that before, but it wasn’t from a group that would flatter the people that I was watching, I can assure you. Selfish, grabby, rude … adjectives fail me. Adverbs too. I’ve rarely been so ashamed to be with a group of people as I was just being logged on in that place at that time.

Within our own guild, I see the same thing. One player the other night refused to come to the instance with the rest of us, but instead insisted that we summon him when we were all there. Wasn’t my run, so I didn’t kick him, but in retrospect I wish I had walked out of that run right here. I was part of the problem, that night, but I failed to live up to my own standards just to avoid more “drama”.

A feeling has been building, permeating my gaming experience since the release of the expansion. Blizzard has gone to what seems to be extraordinary lengths to make the game less interesting and less satisfying to those that like to work for their accomplishments. They have implemented a lot of great stuff, such as phasing, and yet time and time again they have opened the game to griefers and slackers, making any accomplishment you might achieve meaningless, except in how much asshattery you might be willing to tolerate (hello, SoH dailies!).

Finished Naxx? Did that in a PuG. In one night? That too. Ulduar? Give it time. Didn’t get the drops you wanted? Go buy them. It’s all about the benjamins, baby. People don’t matter. Loyalty doesn’t matter. Effort is overrated. All you have to do is click faster than the other guy.

Even the armor is homegenized. I can’t believe that I actally miss the clown suit days of BC, but I do. There is nothing in the armor I wear that is any different than any number of epic drops from any number of bosses. It all looks alike. How can you be proud of what you’ve done when there is no visible indication at all of it? Unless they /inspect you they have no idea if what you’re wearing is PvP gear, Naxx gear, crafted, quest item, or welfare.

Little by little, the fun is being sucked out of the old game.

It hasn’t reached the point where I’m dropping out of blogging or the game just yet. But the day may be closer than ever before. Maybe you feel the same way; know that you are not alone and that it’s OK to be pissed off about it. Your perceptions aren’t skewed – it really is that bad. Too many people have said as much. Too many people have given up on this game. More people every day are looking at the  login screen and saying “Meh. I think I’ll go play Civ 4 today, that sounds like more fun.”

There is nothing I can do to stem the tide. Blizzard only understands the bottom line, and me leaving won’t be noticed if another million people start playing between now and then. As a group, yes, we could make a dent, but it’s obvious to me that most people in the game now are the kind that do not care, as long as they get that title and that drake and whatever else that the game owes them. Chances are, people like us are already leaving and nobody can notice. We are insubstantial to the bottom line viewpoint.

Thus, leaving the game is less a form of protest than it is a funeral service. It has a sense of finality to it. If that analogy holds, then perhaps I’m starting the mourning process. Maybe this is the time between when the corpse is on the slab, and in the grave.

The good news is that there should be a wake between those two points. I hope it’s a good one.

On the other hand, once I get this out of my system, perhaps I’ll be ready to go on, delusional or not.

WTB fun.

Nota bene: comments are disabled. I’m not looking for sympathy or justification, nor am I interested in a debate.

1. I would also add: bad programmers, but that’s just how I roll. [↩]
2. That big purple drake? Meaningless. It’s a welfare epic as far as I’m concerned. [↩]

The WoWHead Blog¹ links to an interview with Connie Mableson, a lawyer whose bona fides includes representing MDY against Blizzard in the Glider case recently. She has interesting views on the subject, and concludes that Blizzard is going to try to monetize addons somehow.

I disagree with Connie’s reasoning. Her suspicions seem to be flawed by her basic lack of understanding of the actual technical aspects of creating addons. Here are some points to consider.²

• Addons are written in a computer language called LUA. LUA is an interpreted language. The programs are simple text files that are fed to an interpreter.
• Addons as distributed, therefore, are plain text files that anyone can review, unless you are very tricksey like those Carbonite people, who manage to obscure code so that you can’t tamper with it.³
• WoW internals are written in a compiled language.  Compiled languages deliver executables that can be run directly without any extra interpreter steps. A popular language of choice for this is C or its more modern cohort C++.⁴
• The WoW executable has a LUA interpreter built in to it. This interpreter is gimped – it does not have full access to the full LUA language standard command set, for example, nor does it have access to the network or to WoW internal data structures. This is done for security, and is a good thing.
• Therefore, if Blizzard wanted to shut down addon developers, they could just disable the interpreter. No need for draconian revisions to policy or anything else of the sort.
• LUA programs (addons) have access to in-game data through a very narrowly defined interface. Want to find out the time? You can’t just look at the clock. You have to ask WoW to do it for you, and return the value.
• The WoW executable has access to data structures that are far richer than the data available to LUA programs. Potentially, the WoW client could find out the time by looking directly at the clock, no matter where that data lived.
• Therefore, attempting to take over the LUA addon marketplace would be one of the more rediculous things they could do, gimping themselves by disallowing the very data they owned. That would be very stupid.
• Interpreted languages like LUA run slower than thier compiled language counterparts. Why on earth would they go that route when it would gimp the performance of the addon? Again, that would be blazingly stupid.
• Addons are required to “persist” data (save it) through a narrowly defined, inefficient database engine. You can likely experience the inefficiency directly, or see the difference directly, is more accurate. Go in and nuke your Auctioneer database, and see how fast your next load is. I bet you gain five to ten seconds minimum. And that’s one program.
• The WoW client can access disk files directly, which is potentially near-instantaneous access to information. The WoW client’s LUA interpreter cannot. Not allowed. No disk access, no network access.
• Therefore, Blizzard would be foolish yet again to go this route, by frustrating the user, increasing load times, and degrading performance overall. More stupid!

So, besides the obvious technical flaws in Connie’s argument, everything else she says in this regard is guesswork – and based on flawed assumptions, at that.

She might still be very right. Blizz has pulled some classic blunders in the past, and this would fall right into that sort of bucket.

But I very much doubt it.

I have a possible alternate scenario, involving something like an Apple App Store on the Blizzard web site, requiring all addons to filter through that⁵ and cutting Blizz a piece of the pie of any revenues taken in by addon developers.

This would be great, except one thing. This is Blizzard. They can’t maintain a searchable forum, the main website goes kaput under the slightest traffic spike, huge chunks of webspace go south for no reason, etc. In short, they suck at internet other than how it directly pertains to the games they distribute – and that’s because the two are maintained by completely different groups. But point is, the odds of getting the ‘good’ geeks on this are probably less than even.

So: do not want.

1. Is there nothing they can’t do? [↩]
2. Full disclosure: This is an expanded version of the reply I left over on the WoWHead blog. [↩]
3. As of the recent update of the addon policies by Blizzard, obscuring the code in this manner is no longer allowed. [↩]
4. If you don’t program in C, you won’t “get” why there are two plusses. I will only say that it is not an Orwell reference. [↩]
5. And won’t Curse et al be thrilled at that! [↩]

The Paladin of Paladins, He Who Dances In Knightly Armor, the master of the spin, jump, and bounce, is back!

I can never get enough of Shepiwot. Mostly because he annoys the dickens out of Flora.

Now he adds vehicular brainslaughter and spinning parachutes to his resume. Well played, sir. Well played.

HOW TO PALADIN XXXI

Our guild’s former raid leader had a do-all macro set up for his hunter alt¹, and bound it to his scroll wheel, so that all he had to do to keep things going was to twiddle the scroll wheel. His hunter alt, mind you, got better DPS than I did when I was in the role of the team’s Main, and that was with moderately inferior equipment.

Not that I’m bitter².

OK, I can accept being fairly beaten by a more skilled player. I will learn from him or her, and the raid will benefit from having that person within its ranks. But binding a macro to a button takes no skill.

This should not bother me, but it does. It offends my “sensibilities”, tweaks my gamer ethic on the nose. There is a line between brute force efficiency and skill that is all too easy to cross in this game. Skill gives way to gimmicks. I like to admire a fine player practicing his or her craft. I like the bon vivante of a friendly competition between the DPSers of a group. It keeps us sharp. But the exercise is meaningless when we are competing against a gimmick.

The game would be nigh unplayable without macros. And not all macros are, technically speaking, gimmicks in the sense I’m using the word here. I can’t even, in good conscience, argue in favor of removing that which makes “gimmicking” possible, because at the end of the day, any raid leader will want as much DPS as he or she can get. Same for heals – you can gimmick that too. All other things being equal, though, the toon with the best numbers is the one you want, as a raid leader. Numbers are harsh little devils.

It just makes me a little sad that the game has taken this turn. That anything and every thing in this game can, apparently, be griefed so that you can either eliminate it (hello, Flora Fan Club!) or just muddle along and pretend it doesn’t exist.

Epilogue: The other night we went into Heroic Nexus with a pugged Hunter that had a face roller macro set up like that. He blew me away on the meters. Oh, he was wearing Tier gear and some Naxx drops (at least one that I recognized), and he was Survival build, the new belle of the ball. But again with the macro. I can’t really tell how valid the comparison between BM and SV would be under the circumstances, all other things being equal.

Still, he was a good Hunter, which merits pointing out, because quite often this sort of thing is seen from e-Bayers.  In fact, I picked up a couple of good things from him.

Pity about the macro, ’sall I’m saying.

1. the famous BRK macro with non-BRK-endorsed frills. [↩]
2. No, I didn’t lose a spot to him. I was on the main team with his Main (Tank). [↩]

Big Bear Butt Blogger has a problem. He was using Feedburner through a widget of some sort to feed his, uh, feeds, and now it doesn’t work so he’s had to republish his RSS feed – but it comes down a different URL now.

So if you read BBBB via a feed reader, please go back and re-subscribe. The intertubes will thank you.

“Raiding guild”.

What constitutes a raiding guild? Does it welcome new players and help them come up to the level that they can raid? Or does it exclude all but those that are a certain level, and a certain spec, and have certain equipment already?

Over the past year I’ve seen our guild torn asunder by an alleged “raiding guild” and it’s starting to come home how much these people are … parasites … on the rest of the server.

Here’s an example.

Summertime, we had a new feral bear druid join the guild. He was sub-70 at the time. He quested with us, we helped him get his epic flight form, and when he made 70 we helped key him, and then put up with his inability to reliably tank anything in Karazhan because his gear was sub-par. We hung in there with him, and he grew into a major tanking terror. He asked if his wife could join the guild, and we started to gear her up.

Shortly after WotLK came out, when he saw that the mains in the guild were not playing night and day to get to 80 as fast as him, he went off and joined “a raiding guild”, and took his wife with him.

This scenario has played over and over again.  And it’s finally dawned on me that these people contribute nothing to the overall experience. They use other guilds as incubators from which they pull the most talented without any recompense or even thanks to the hapless rubes that just gave them their newest Arcane mage or what have you.

They are parasites.

They could not survive without us. And they leech our health away, every day they exist.

I’m sure there are exceptions. But I think this is the general rule.

So now you know. When you hear that extra contempt in my voice when I say “raiding guild”, know where that contempt comes from.

I think we need to find some way for “raiding guilds” to contribute back to the ecosystem that they are exploiting.  This is not a WoW issue, though it is raised in bold relief in WoW because of the number of players, number of raiding guilds, and the amount of endgame material there is to exploit. What’s really needed is some form of embedding of toons into the social groups they become part of that would apply real consequences for what, in the real world, would be a major upheaval if you did it yourself.

Right now, though, loyalty is not rewarded nearly as well as sheer disloyalty and underhandedness. If you play it right, you can get leveled up in no time, and then make a break to join one of your server’s “premier” guilds that care not a whit for loyalty or honesty, but merely that you show up at the appointed time with what you said you were bringing, and follow the instructions given to you without fail. That’s it.

Call that a “gaming experience” if you want. I call it “a second job.” Sorry, got one, and I play WoW partly to relax after all that. You want two jobs? You should get a second one that makes money.

No wonder our GM shows all the signs of burning out. She’s had to put up with this crap for four years. I’d eat my own soul under those circumstances.

If we get back into raiding, I’m gonna suggest that all raiders be required to put up a 500 gold “security deposit”, nonrefundable.  If we’re doomed to gear up raiding guilds, at least we can get repair costs out of it.

Think she’ll go for it?

The other night I was asked to come along for OK. I really shouldn’t have. For all intents and purposes, we 4 1/2-manned that instance because of my level and  hit rating.

The report was clear: I missed a lot. Even the tank topped me in terms of DPS.

This is no surprise, really. I’ve been on the back burner for the most part. My gear is not the greatest. A lot of greens, no DS3 pieces, very few epics, not much from Kara (not many Kara runs). Going in, I’m undergeared.

The other reason? Well, even A-N is greyed out for me. I’m below level there.

Still, it outlines the complete and utter importance of HIT for DPS classes. No Pew Pew without HIT. Load up on RAP or Spell Power all you want, but they are useless if you don’t actually connect.

Well, it was fun doing something other than picking flowers for a change. It’s really strange … having to worry about dying and stuff.

I did manage to top the meters later on with three DKs and a priest in Ramparts. Sweet, sweet, e-peen.

Fashion related note: I really hate the idea of getting rid of these goggles. But the day will come. That’s it. No point. Just grumbling over my absynthe.

Sometimes I’m too dense to notice that things are happening around me that are happening around me. Such is the case with this post. There was a bit more interest in this post than I have seen in the past, but didn’t think much of it until I looked at the trackback logs and saw that Mr. Bartle had linked to it as an example of one of the few voices of agreement (it’s the final bullet point) in his post¹ .

There are a couple of reactions here.

First of course is a mild Dwarfish squee sound (kinda like I imagine was uttered by Saruman the first time Sauron said howdy). I keep forgetting these trackback thingys help one note quickly who’s saying what about one’s own posts. Well, you can never have too much Dwarfish Squee ^(tm), can you?

Second, the amount of bile and vitriol hurled at the man is astounding. Gabe is right. As usual. It makes me sad.

Housekeeping

As Shalkis and others pointed out, this quest does not block you from getting to the Nexus. You can always ask Big Red for a ride and you’ll get it. So I was in error on that detail. I don’t think it makes a big difference in the central premise here, but it does at least remove the potential resentment at blocking off a whole quest hub, although the resentment at blocking off the end of a major questline remains.

Conclusion, still

I remain unconvinced.

At issue – always – has been the fact that you are being asked to do immoral things to advance the story line. Turning a blind eye to it is, quite simply, the mortar that holds together the bricks of the road to Hell. You can make any argument to justify it that you want, but I don’t buy it for a second. Saying that you can sidestep the issue and make it somebody else’s problem does not remove that there is this elephant sitting in your living room.

As I said, replace “torture” with “rape” and see how many people jump to defend it. Other than Warlocks, everyone else in the game seems to identify themselves as the Good Guys. The Good Guys don’t do that kind of crap, nor do they tolerate it in their allies.

Not without consequences.

As with the Scourge Invasion event, there is a subset of our population that revels in this sort of thing, and does so because they know they won’t suffer any real consequence.

Blizz could have helped out by making it impact faction in both cases. For the invasion, you lose faction with all Alliance when you are “scourged”. Sure, it will happen, but you would work real hard to avoid it, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t go try to get infected just for jollies.

With the torture (and the killing mommie and kidnapping babies, etc.) quest, maybe have it impact Argent Dawn faction or something. Just make it have consequences.

As I said before, I’d never tolerate players in my AD&D campaigns getting away with that sort of crap. They’d pay for it.

All I’m asking for … is justice² .

1. I am treading a fine line here, on the one side is petty self-congratulation, and on the other is citation. I am shooting for the latter. [↩]
2. … and yes, true Justice would have far harsher and widespread consequences than just these two small bits. But I think that it would make the game far more interesting in the long run. [↩]