Fun Times Doing Forgotten Content.

One of the biggest things my guild wants to accomplish is completing all of the old world content. Most of us have left behind high level characters, some with years of work put into them, to join up and play with other locals. Many of us never got a chance to finish the pre-BC content, but we've all agreed we want to. We aren't concerned with the loot that drops or even the new achievements, just that we want to taste every flavor of this game that has helped create virtual and real life friendships.

With myself and Rytes (my wife) hitting level 60 this weekend we wanted to start things off right. We headed into BRD and it took us several tried over the weekend to complete the instance. Last night would have been the end except that upon reaching The Lyceum and making it to the braziers Rytes and I noticed that our two guildies lost connection. They called our house a few minutes later to tell us their connection had died and Comcast reported there was an outage in their area and they were going to bed.

Tonight we picked it back up and dove back in. We had our strats down and nothing really posed a problem. It was pretty cool to see the entire instance and it really got us excited about getting through more of the forgotten content.

We even formed up a Zul'Gurub raid but only made it to Bloodlord Mandokir before our main tank had to go. Not bad considering that we only had two 70's, three 60's and the ten people in their mid-50's. I don't think any of the people in our guild had ever actually seen ZG before so it was awesome despite our many (yes many) wipes.

Other than that I've been hitting Outlands and enjoying the epic greens. It's crazy how much of a difference they are making when I do head back into Azeroth. I'm glad that Rytes is getting into the Outland content and we're actually reading the quest lines instead of hammering out way through to level. All in all it's been a fun couple of days in WoW.

WoW Is An Escape.

There is no doubt that in some form WoW is an escape mechanism. We use this game to get away from some part of our life that we don't like. That doesn't mean that we're running from relationships or real life responsibilities. It just means that WoW can be a way to step away from things like boredom or some things that are more serious. Last night WoW was a needed escape for me.

I received a call Thursday morning informing me that a good friend of mine had died in his sleep at age 38. He went out the night before, hung out with friends, came home and ate dinner. He told his fiance the food was good and that he was going to sleep on the couch. That morning she found him dead. I didn't know what to say.

He and I worked in the same bar and that means we know lots of people around town. Within an hour word had spread to everyone and there was a get together planned for 4pm that day. The bar he was working at would be closed for only those of us who were good friends of his. When I arrived there were easily 100 people inside. Half of us were in tears, the other half laughing as we thought about the good times... then we would switch roles.

After two hours I couldn't take it anymore. There was too much going on, too many memories that I couldn't sort out, too many regrets, too many questions. I started driving home and received a phone call informing me that my guild was about to run BRD and wanted to know if I could make it. I said I'd be there.

I walked in my house, sat down at the computer and spent the next few hours running through BRD with my guild. Every time the sadness crept back in my head there was something to be done, a mob to be taken down, some water to drink, a buff to re-apply. By the time we were finished I was tired and headed to bed.

Now it's a day later and the initial shock has passed, I can wrap my head around the situation. I can make plans with friends for a memorial service and so on without letting it hit me too hard. For a little bit of time during a tragedy I was able to take a breather, I was able to escape and gather myself. So people can say what they want about WoW removing you from reality, but sometimes people need it.

Stupid Achievements Distracting Me From Leveling.

The tenacious grip the achievement system has on myself and members of my guild is astounding. Normally during the prime-time we group together and try to bang out quests as fast as possible. It's all part of the rush to hit 70 before WotLK comes out and we have a lot of work to do seeing as most of us re-rolled on The Venture Co. to form this guild and we're starting from scratch.

Last night was different though. Instead of spending our valuable time earning experience and getting one step closer to end game we decided to turn back the clocks to a time when we were lower level... and a different faction. It was decided that we'd run the low level dungeons, but only the ones we hadn't yet, which meant Alliance territory dungeons, like Stockades in Stormwind.

While we stormed through Stockades and got our achievement in around four minutes it took us much longer to get there. Over an hour of running through the city, getting guard whacked, and corpse running was needed to pull it off. Now if you haven't done this let me tell you that the worst part is that the graveyard you're sent to as a Horde player is the Eastvale Logging Camp... which is practically on the border of Redridge. It's a long run... that we did about ten times.

After Stockades we did Deadmines, which was fun because I got to pull the entire ship. Then we did Gnomer which wasn't nearly as annoying as I remembered it, mainly because nothing aggro'd on us.

The plan today is for myself and Rytes to start chipping away at BG marks in preparation for our mounts at 60, which we are fast approaching. Sitting at level 56 for a day or two and letting guildies catch up goes against my usually "MORE MORE MORE!" philosophy, but it's for the best. Two levels from Outlands and our epic greens, four levels from 60 and the end of our recruit a friend triple experience bonus. Hopefully we can push through the final ten levels to 70 in the next two weeks.

It's Like Christmas For Dead People... Well Undead People Anyway.

Hallow's End is here and I've been pretty busy trying to get those achievements checked off the list. Sadly I won't be able to get the "Hallowed" title because the new characters my wife and I are playing are only level 52 at the moment. We can't exactly spend our days farming the Headless Horseman. That little disappointment aside I've been having a lot of fun.

The best part so far has been the candy buckets. Funeral and Rytes started off at level 48 and after getting all the buckets in The Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor we hit level 52. This recruit a friend bonus xp is awesome, giving us between 9300 and 10500xp for each one we did. We've been doing the dailies but haven't had a chance to check out the wickerman or do the rotten egg quest yet. We'll probably get to it tonight.

It's pretty cool running around all over the world and seeing the decorations and people populating areas that are usually ghost towns. It's a pretty massive celebration for what is essentially the Forsaken independence day, which makes me wonder why any race of Alliance would celebrate it. Heck, it doesn't even seem like the rest of the Horde would, but the Alliance? Yeah sure, I know it's your traditional "harvest festival" but let's be serious... jack-o-lanterns, ghosts, the trouble coming out of Scarlet Monastery... it's all about us Forsaken baby. Remember to thank us the next time you're gobbling up some treats.

"Greed is, for lack of a better word, good"

The latest patch has been a financial dream for me. A lot of people have been making hefty amounts of gold since the patch. Most of what I've seen are folks who realized in pre-release that inscription would be popular and would cause a staggering demand for herbs. They were smart and stockpiled the herbs and sold them. My guild mate made a 1500 gold profit in one day, that's pretty nuts, but it also took the effort of getting all the herbs. I wanted something easier.

The achievement system also provided for an increased demand in items, I'm mainly talking about vanity pets. Suddenly the non-combat pets in game are like Pokemon, everyone wants to get as many as they can. This is where I come in, as soon as I could log in I went to every horde city and bought the snakes, cockroaches, and whistles. After that I went to the neutral auction house and took a look at the market. A member of the Alliance had the same idea and was posting their pets for 15 to 20 gold. I did the same. Within an hour I had made 150 gold and by the end of the day I had made 587 gold... all from just re-selling pets.

I figured the profits would die out pretty quickly but they haven't. I'm re-stocking every few hours and selling out at 15 gold a pet. There wasn't a problem until another seller came along and undercut my prices. Now I'm all for competition, however there is a difference between competition and market sabotage. All the Alliance pets were 15-20g a piece, I was easily selling mine at the same price, then someone comes along and puts his up for 8 gold. This started a pricing war which lead to me dropping my prices to 2g for a couple of hours. I had the advantage due to being a mage and porting around to resupply. After a bit his sales stopped showing up.

Maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot by posting this, possibly inspiring other people to get in on my racket, but I like competition.

I Love The BlizzCon Polar Bear Mount.

I knew I wanted the mount from the time it was announced. The plan was to go to BlizzCon and get my hands on one, then that fell through. I still figured I'd have my shot by ordering the BlizzCon PPV on DirectTV though, but no, that too didn't pan out. Since BlizzCon I've been trying to convince myself that I didn't miss much and that listening to the audio of the panels is just as good... then I saw someone on the mount.

There I was heading to Wailing Caverns to work on fishing (damn those new achievements!) when the notice flew up that Crossroads was under attack. Nothing new there, but I figured if I joined in the fight I'd have a chance to /hug a corpse and mark off another achievement. I arrive and frostbolt a rogue, then I see this beautiful specimen go bounding past me. What distracted me more was that she was riding the BlizzCon mount. I mean how can you not love that? You've got a Murloc sitting there like a bobblehead on your dash.

As an avid pet/rarity collector in game things like this just make me think about all the items I'll never be able to get. Grrrr.

The Patch Broke My Firefly

Alright Blizzard, I can deal with the addons being screwed up. I can deal with having to respec and learn new talents. I can deal with the horrible lag and crashes on patch day. What I can not deal with is taking my favorite pet and deleting one of the coolest parts about it.

The Capture Firefly pet is my favorite. Not only am I fond of it because of the rarity and just the way it looks, but the fact that the tooltip used to say "Still flying..." a quote in reference to one of my favorite shows of all time. Now that is gone. You've removed some of the magic of this pet and it's really annoying me. Put it back, pretty please. It may seem petty or foolish, but it seriously was one of those things that made me smile every time I saw it.

Can't we just change this:

Back into this:

Not only that but it doesn't even fly anymore... just just hops along the ground on it's butt. It looks dumb now... this sucks.

Portland Guild Musings

The guild that I'm a member of consists primarily of local people (living in or around Portland Oregon). In most cases when a guild is full of people who live near one another it's a case where people who worked together or knew each other in some way decided to form a guild. Ours is different in that we didn't know each other in the real world until after joining the guild.

Since we've formed we have had a couple of meet ups and each one has been great. Last night we met at a bar and spent several hours having refreshing face to face conversations in game. We've exchanged invitations to parties, offered assistance with babysitters, and even made plans to get together for dinner. After having experienced how great it is to be a part of a guild like this I don't think I could go back to anything else. There are some unique challenges in this type of situation though, the biggest at the moment is recruitment.

Being that we are a Portland WoW guild our recruitment options are limited in many ways. For instance while other guilds can just spam the trade channel and grab whoever responds, we can't. Our success would depend on whatever small amount of people on The Venture Co. server who happen to live in Portland being online and in the Horde trade chat. Our best bet is recruiting outside of the game, which can be difficult for a few reasons.

One of those reasons is the breakdown of an online persona. Everyone takes part in creating and acting out a version of themselves online that may not reflect the real world reality. Some people are very secure in their online identity and keep close to it, the thought of then being involved with people who they will most likely encounter in the real world can cause a bit of anxiety. The people who are most comfortable with this separation of the physical and meta worlds will not be very likely to join regardless of how much fun our BBQ's are. This doesn't only apply to people who are insecure for some reason or another but to people who are just jerks. If you've spent the majority of your time in game being an abrasive jerk, insulting people, and generally being a pain in the butt you may think twice about having to face people you play with face to face.

The second tallest hurdle appears to be the discomfort of starting a new character. A lot of people don't feel like spending the money to transfer a character to our server, some have only played Alliance and couldn't transfer if they wanted. This leaves their only option being to leave behind the progress they have made on their character, the gold they've save, the rare items they've obtained and starting out as a lowbie killing animals for various parts. I myself was wary of starting all over, but once I met everyone and had a good time it's become more than worth my time. For others it may just be too much "work".

Hopefully we'll come up with some solutions for these issues or at least a way to better target people who would be willing to join our guild.

Now I'm off to read patch notes and try logging in once again.

What It Means To Be Forsaken And What Not To Do.

David Bowers over at WoW Insider posted a nifty introductory article on RPing an Undead. Reading it got me thinking about my history and current choices when it comes to roleplaying in WoW. It's safe to say that the only race which captures my interest beyond aesthetics in WoW is The Forsaken. It's a mixture of their (our?) painful history bringing about a powerful thirst for revenge as well as a desire for the destruction of all living things that really tugs at my heartstrings.

There are some that say Undead are the Horde version of Night Elves. What that implies is that people who take little interest in lore and just want a character that "looks cool" or fits into some typical fantasy archetype (although you'll encounter a lot less Undead erotic roleplaying than Night Elf). I won't sit here and deny that The Forsaken does draw in a certain type of person that tends to annoy the crap out of me. The people I'm talking about tend to be freshly out of puberty who select this race for a couple for either the hair, the fact that they are "lol zombies", and the "rocking out" dance.

First off this hair is out of control. The fact the spiked hair seems to be modeled after a member of a horrible band like Mudvayne makes it even worse. I mean come on, we're undead, soulless rotting shells of our former humanity (actually kind of like Mudvayne). I'm not sure if people realize it or not but haircuts like this and the mohawk take a lot of effort and upkeep to stay looking foolish. It's just not the kind of thing a member of The Forsaken should be concerned with. Every time I see an Undead with either one of these hairstyles I instantly dismiss them as being those kids that hang out at the mall being obnoxious and begging their parents for money to buy more stupid clothing from Hot Topic.

Then we have the "lol zombies" factor. In the past few years there has been a surge of zombie fandom. I recognize that there have been some great horror movies, of which I'm a fan, and the concept of becoming re-animated after death is pretty interesting. However having the detailed history of origins of The Forsaken reduced to someone walking around saying "braaaaaaains" gets on my nerves. I'm not the RP/lore police by any means. You can play however you wish, but that means I can also criticize you as I wish. Maybe it's that it was funny the first fifty times I saw someone doing it like four years ago and now it's more worn out that any Chuck Norris joke you can think of (are those even jokes?).

Finally I come to that horrible dance. I need to clarify that I'm speaking about the male Undead dance. The one where you hop around like an idiot throwing up the horns more often than Ronnie James Dio. The female dance is actually kind of pretty and seems to fit with the characters just fine. The male dance though is just out of place within the lore and setting. Overall it just adds to this general image that is available and annoying when creating an Undead character. I mean as Forsaken we've been recently freed from the grasp of the Lich King, we're bound to a curse which prevents us from enjoying the world as we did our entire lives, and our lands are corrupted and we've been forced to move into the sewers of our former city. Sounds like a perfect time to act like a spazz and hop around head banging... or not.

Although after looking at it... Dio does kind of look like an Undead Priest:

All I'm really saying is that The Forsaken (in my opinion) have one of the most interesting storylines in the WoW universe. We even have a leader that people take actual pride in (have you ever seen how tenaciously people from all Horde races will rush to defend The Dark Lady), and a wonderful opportunity to enjoy the game as a character who doesn't really fit with The Alliance or The Horde. Please take advantage of these things, for all of us, I don't want to see another mohawk.

WoTLK Bonus Footage From BlizzCon

The wonderful folks over at WoW Radio have uploaded some bonus footage from BlizzCon. I have tried to keep my head out of the spoiler/rumor mill when it comes to WoTLK for the most part, but considering how close we are to release and all the public announcements by Blizzard I figure I can start diving in. I don't want to ruin my experience, but there are a few spoilers that are just too good not to look at.

This video is getting me excited. I've recently upgraded my video card and I'm hoping that these new areas are actually going to take advantage of it beyond just increasing my FPS. That said, here is the video:

Live coverage of the BlizzCon panels starts in a few hours. I'm debating on if I'm going to actually stay awake and listen to them or just catch the archived audio later. No matter what I decide to do I should probably wear headphones because I think my wife is getting tired of hearing all the WoW talk.

BlizzKhaaan!

All week long I've been annoyed that I'm not attending BlizzCon. Earlier this year I had serious plans to, but life got in the way. It probably wouldn't be bugging me so much if I was still living in Chicago because I could convince myself that it's just too far to travel. Now that I'm sitting in Portland Oregon I'm teased by the fact that while BlizzCon is still far away, it's only a straight drive south.

Being the podcast addict that I am I spent part of yesterday listening to Gnomewise and Grail from WoW Radio's Casually Hardcore as they broadcast live from their car. That's right, I listened to two guys on a road trip. I don't know if that makes me a pathetic individual or not, but I don't care. I enjoyed it. Although I did keep having strange ideas about finding them on the road and yelling at them from a car with a megaphone.

Today I'm listening to the live stream of the panels at BlizzCon thanks, once again, to the folks over at WoW Radio. I haven't heard anything groundbreaking or stunning yet, but it's been solid entertainment and discussion. I must say that some of the Blizzard art design team really know how to work a crowd, a few of the comments made were hilarious. I think my favorite was when a little kid asked about different skins for Druids and one of them responded with a deep growling voice "NEEEEVEEER!".

The Diablo III Gameplay panel just started so I'm going listen to that and go check on the roast I have in the slow-cooker.