News and Opinion

Here’s a few of my initial thoughts and impressions:

• Omen: I like the way it looks, but I can’t seem to get it to function for me. Maybe it’s because I’m a healer. But I don’t get any bars of any sort.
• WoWAce Updater makes my life easier for dealing with addons
• Sunwell Island is an absolute mess. It’s amazing that my server’s hit 50%. Wait, is that part timed or is it just the unlocking of the last 3 raid bosses?
• The quickest way to Mt Hyjal is to go to the World’s End Tavern in Lower City and talk to Zephyr who teleports you there directly. Although I do believe a certain amount of rep is required.
• The badge vendor is available during phase 3, from what I heard.
• Chat window appears to be buggy. No matter how many times I try, Guild Chat does not stay in one window. It appears in two. So does /say, /party and all the others. I tried disabling Prat but that seems to do nothing.
• Need help with the new daily quests? Look no further than Siha’s guides.
• Having an extra tier token drop is really nice.
• 10 gold per boss kill is nice.
• As are the 2 badges per boss. All of a sudden, getting 150 badges doesn’t seem so difficult anymore.
• Primal Nether is going at a rate between 60 – 90 gold and there are no vortexes on the auction house as of yet.
• There are always people who don’t read patch notes and resort to asking in trade, general, or guild chat incessantly about things that are blatantly stated in patch notes. I want to shoot these people.
• Magister’s Terrace appears to be the first anti-Paladin tank instance.
• My Ret Paladin got some decent upgrades without having to do anything.
• Going to set up a Pickup Group for Mag’s Lair on Saturday consisting of mostly Guildies and their alts. Hopefully we can one shot "Bagtheridon".
• Recount keeps asking me if I want to reset data every time I enter a new area.
• Came quite close to lashing out at a Guild mate. A friend said in Guild Chat that "raiding on patch days are a pain". Somehow, that earlier Guildie took it as a sign that there wasn’t going to be a raid today and decides to AFK AV. He comes back and is dismayed to find that there is a raid and no one told him about it and proceeds to lash out at said friend because he seems to think it was their fault. I never had respect for the guy in the first place. His rank is that of a Backup Raider, not a starter. So he has no right to complain even if he doesn’t get.
• I seem to have installed a new UI addon which has my name in yellow on the bottom left with yellow bars on a black background, and a black bar on the bottom right with an icon of a white sleepy alien-like thing. In the middle, I have another similarly striped black bar which has my name and functions as a targetting bracket. I don’t know what this addon is and it’s impeding my chat boxes. I can’t seem to right click or find the icon for it anywhere near the minimap and I have no idea what it’s called. Does anyone have an idea?

Matt’s note: Not WoW Related. Can mark as read.

I had just finished class and was on my way home. I’m waiting at one of the university bus loops and I see an ad taped to the glass pane on the bus shelter. I told a friend of mine to take a picture of it and send it to me later. You can’t say he hasn’t attracted interest though. It looks like he’s got at least 3 takers. I wonder if this method actually works.

It’s that time again! The Chamber of Guilds has undergone a recently management shuffle and this will be the inaugural meeting of a new moderator by the name of Gertrudis. Here’s a quick overview of one of their meetings that I have done in the past on cliques.
For those that might not be aware, the Chamber of Guilds is a gathering of some of the top minds in Guild leaders and officers exchanging ideas. This conference takes place both live on ventrilo and in game so that everyone has a chance to participate. Typically, these conferences last no more than 3 hours.

Roundtable is a cross-server, cross-faction guild that allows past, present, and future guild leaders/officers get together and discuss any issues that they may be experiencing and see how other guilds deal with it. Everything from guild involvement and events to instances and loot is discussed. This is more a “Chamber of Commerce” type situation where we exist to provide information and discussion. How you apply that to your guild, is completely up to you.

Date and time: March 29, 11 AM PST (1 PM CST, 2 PM EST)
Location: You’ll need to make an account there first, I believe. But it takes place on a WoW

There’s been several topics that have been posed for discussion for everyone involved.

• Sharing the load: Creating meaningful officer roles and delegating responsibility
• What makes a great guild website?
• Marketing your guild: How to attract the “right” recruits
• How do I get them to turn down the suck? Encouraging player improvement in the casual raiding guild

All of those are excellent topics and could serve as a future foundation for blog posts for me. I highly encourage you whether or not you are in a position of power to attend the Chamber of Guilds. Meet people and exchange ideas.

For those that might not be able to attend, I’ll be there liveblogging the entire event mostly taking down notes and thoughts from contributors.

EDIT: If you’re interested, you’ll want to look at this thread on their forums for information on how to join.

I got a laugh from reading a post coutesy of Kulrayk (or Aylii) about Ventrilo environments and how they might be different. Although she does post a great question that I should go out of my way to look up. I really have no idea what the average age of the Guild is. Kulrayk has been a guest on my Guilds vent at my request. I figured she might be interested in learning about how Carnage operates during raids, and here are some of her conclusions:

• Carnage had longer periods of rated X talk than my guild. This leads me to believe that the average age of members on carnage are lower than of those in Echoes.
• Accents. Most of my guildies are east coasters. carnage seems to have an abundance for west coasters, and surprisingly enough, many live here in Southern California!
• There is more talk of PvP-QQ on Carnage, which once again leads me to believe that the members are younger.

But I can say most of us (with the exception of Netherscrub ^^) are past high school. I love it. I can’t wait until she hits 70. She’d fit in well, I figure =).

Image courtesy of rrss
First, I have a story to share for the sake of context.

One Raid

The other day, I assembled a a Guild Zul’Aman run. The goal is to keep a consistent ZA group that would run once a week in the hopes of eventually gelling together and running ZA with relative ease on a raiding off night without the displeasure of having to pug ZA groups. As usual, the group was built around a Prot Paladin and a Druid as well as the other miscellaneous classes that would be needed.

One Player

A DPS player from my Guild was interested in coming. Let’s call him Bruce. The only boss he needed was Zul’Jin and he really wanted the kill so he could get his weapon. I never really had a high opinion of this player in the first place but I didn’t care all that much about it. I just wanted to get the job done. He wanted to know whether or not this run would be a full clear. I told him that I could not guarantee a full Zul’Jin run. While my team scoffed at the idea, I exercised caution as there was still a few players who were new to the instance. I myself was rusty in Zul’Aman. Sure enough, we ran into a few bumps along the way. We started at approximately 8 PM and brute forced our way to Zul’Jin at 11 PM. The instance was slated to reset in 8 hours so we would not have the benefit of an extra day to come back.

We took 3 or so shots on him and managed to blow by phase 3 with relative ease. Unfortunately, we couldn’t follow up on our momentum and finish him off. We had a few EST players and it was getting late for them. As a result, we killed the raid and disbanded the raid.

Bruce wanted another attempt otherwise all of the efforts up to this point would have been for naught.

One Remark

A week later, the same core of us decide to go back in again. In Guild chat, Bruce stated that he’d like to go again but felt that the previous attempt was a waste of his time and hoped to be able to kill Zul’Jin again.

And that really struck a chord with me.

After all, Bruce only wants a weapon off of Zul’Jin. And if our little motley crew can’t kill him consistently enough, then that little remark implies that he would only be wasting his time by running with us. That is absolutely fine with me. I don’t really care much for the guy. If our Guild was a hockey team, he’d be a 4th line player and would see 6 minutes of ice time in a 60 minute game. As a result, I’ve no intention of taking Bruce into any kind of runs I do ever again because I’m afraid that it would simply be a waste of his time.

And I don’t like to waste people’s time.