Guest Post: Musings of a Mod

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Matt’s Note: Today’s guest post comes from a friend and colleague of mine from Curse. Thanks to Indelible for his help! You may or may not find it… disturbing and/or depressing. I finished exam #2 yesterday. 2 down, 2 to go and it concludes Saturday afternoon. Then I’ll go back to my daily routine of a near post-a-day rate.

It’s Sunday. It’s 12.45. It’s that time of day when you’ve just got out of bed and the air around you feels fresh and exciting. It’s damn cold as well and I want to go back to sleep. I can’t however as I was asked by Matticus to provide him with a guest blog about something wholesome and interesting…

I have however, run in to one major problem…

What exactly is there left to talk about? We’ve had our token PvP and PvE blogs. We’ve got our class blogs and our spec blogs. We’ve even got our blogs about other blogs. The blogging world is just a sphere of repetativness. What one blogger covers one week, is another bloggers gold mine the next and we end up going round in these viscious circles that claim the lives of many a blogger.

I guess that is what I shall talk about then. To hell with TheoryCraft and, “How To…” guides. To hell with Top 5 lists and, “You should try…” blogs. I’m going to talk about… something.

I’ll think of something in a second…

What Now?

I’m not an expert. I don’t know who started the very first blog. I don’t know much about the political side of blogging. All I know is that blogs have gone from being an obscure entity deeply hidden in the depths of the Internet, much like forums and Paris Hilton, to one of the single largest outlets of moronic and arrogant point making. They are sometimes opinionated, sometimes interesting and fullfilling, mostly painfull and anger-inducing; probably one of the most testing media arms in the known World, closely followed by Sky News.

Sounds like the perfect place to succeed, right?

Wrong. Blogging has to be one of the single most time consuming and effort involved activities you could ever undertake as a passtime. On average, I spend about 1 to 2 hours a day on my varying blogging efforts, and that doesn’t include side projects I am exploring and moderation duties at Curse so blogging really does b(l)og me down…….

I’m sorry. I’m in one of those moods.

Now, this neatly leads on to why you are all here (because I’ve finally thought about something to talk about properly). Well, it does in my head. I don’t actually think any of the above has any relevance to what I am going to be discussing but I’ve had a long day (despite the fact that I only just woke up) and you’ll have to sift through the crap to find the good bits… like with meat and… stuff. You are all here to get your daily WoW fix. I know that I have started off poorly and it is getting worse. You are worried you will be seeing pink Tauren’ if I don’t hurry up with the WoW-speak, right? Well, you are in luck as that is about to start now as we compare…

I can only think of one thing in the world worst than reading a blog or worse than writing a blog when you have major writers block.

Blogging – ’tis an art form.

Grinding… oh the horror…

Grinding – ’tis horrid. I hate it. I hate you for putting up with it. I hate me for hating you for putting up with it as I put up with it and put up with you putting up with it. Meh.

Both blogging and grinding are evil. Pure unaltered evil. They are fonts of the most sinister and horrid evil you will ever come across. They make the Devil look like one of the Teletubbies. Stand Illidan next to the personification of blogging and Illidan will cry like a baby. The personification of grinding is a stereotype and we all know what stereotype that is (you can see the fat man from South Park too :o) so I feel no need to add wit to my point.

They are both evil. There is no doubt of that. My girlfriend thinks I’m sad for playing PC games all the time. She thinks I’m even more sad for writing about those PC games. Mostly, she takes pity upon me. Both blogging and grinding are the evils that destroy social lives around the world but which one is more evil?

Grinding.

An Example… sort of

Oh this is fun. I want this flask, right? I need 25 Glowing Bits of Leaf (?) and 600 Roots of Lesser Drop Chance. I need them by next Wednesday. You’d think that was a fairly respectable amount of time to have to get yours stuff together, right? Well, you’ve never played Lifeless Gaming Online have you? I can tell you that Roots of Lesser Drop Chance only drop off Mobs of Lesser Spawning and, as the name suggests, it takes hours to find the things… and we haven’t even started on the Glowing Bits of Leaf yet.

All in all, grinding sucks. I needed 200 stacks of Netherweave Cloth. That doesn’t sound like a lot when you think about how many mobs drop Netherweave but I’m one of these people who finds the act of grinding hard to swallow. Let me put it this way…

Day 1

I woke up this morning – ’twas a nice day. The sun was shining. The birds were chirping. Even the old woman out back waved to me as I stared like a lifeless, mindless automaton out of my bedroom window.

So I went downstairs, got a cup of Coffee, admired the back of my hand for a while and then…

Spent the next 7 hours of my life on Ventrillo, talking to the rest of my 5 man guild group. We’d arranged to go Netherweave farming in Netherstorm.

Good times.

Day 5

The sun wasn’t shining today. There were no birds.

I’ve installed sound proofing. The constant chirping was breaking my concentration. The black out curtains have limited the glare on my monitor. I was finding it hard to see the goddamn drops.

My girlfriend’s told me to get a job. I’ve looked around but no one wants to sponsor me to play WoW. She says that isn’t what she meant. I don’t know what she means.

Today is once again Netherweave day. We’ve all (25 man raid groups ftw) decided to go to Netherstorm again and make a day of it. Mark is taking his picnic set. Jack is bringing the fireworks. It should be fun, especially with the Leather Ball Sally crafted last night.

Good times.

Day 15

She left me. We were sitting in Orgrimmar chatting and she said she met a Nelf called MoreManly who had taken her heart away from me. I sobbed. She rofl’d.

She left me too. She said that a job wasn’t just going to walk through the door. I said that I was looking for sponsors but all the good ones had been taken. She said that that was the only reason she got with me. She took the kids.

We’re off to Shadowmoon to farm Primals. I have enough Netherweave for my Frozen Shadoweave Robe but Johnny needs my Shadowcloth for guild tailoring so I’m going to have to spend all of today farming Primals and Netherweave.

Good times.

And so on and so forth.

It is tragic; when your life is reduced to grinding. Your girlfriends leaves you and your kids disown you and yet the most immediate thing on your mind is Shadowmoon Valley.

The first part of this entry was really a look into my mind and the way I blog – chaotically with no clear purpose. The second part was almost entertaining and informative but was, mostly, High School humour.

I apologize.

It has been a long day but I would like to thank Matticus for allowing me to infest his blog with this poison. I’ve had fun.

YES! I beat WoW!

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I’m telling you right now, that nothing beats that thrilling feeling of winning that fishing contest. Not killing my first Horde. Not doing my first instance. Not killing Rag. Not my first epic flying mount. Not even killing Vashj.

Thanks Blori and Keruen! Without their ability to run interference and crowd control, I would not have been able to get it. I wanted it on my priest initially, but I figured my Shaman could withstand the pain better from Horde.

WoWosphere Weekend Warmup

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I’m retiring my 3 stars. There’s simply too much blogging material and not enough stars to hand out! Starting on Saturdays, I’m going to be summarize what’s been happening here with me, my blog, and my other fellow bloggers out there.

In Game

We’ve had a wall with raiding recently. Last Thursday, one of our MT’s had DSL issues, our Paladin’s hard drive crashed, another healer has retired, and we’re losing a rogue to the US Army. I knew the holiday season was tough, but holy moly. As far as I know, we’re going back in on Sunday.

I’ve acquired a whole level of respect for Paladin tanks. We set up an on-the-fly run with a friend of mine and he literally tanked the whole instance by himself. We brought in a DPS Warrior for off tanking duty because we didn’t expect him to tank as much anyway. 3 hour Karazhan runs are ridiculously awesome. We downed every boss with the exception of Netherspite (due to execution, in my opinion).

World of Matticus

  • 5 Gaming Lessons from Matticus: I got tagged the other day by GMW. The concept here is one blogger comes up with a list, then “tags” other bloggers to come up with their own unique lists. It doesn’t even have to be a list! They’re just tagged to “do” something. In this case, it was a list of lessons that I’ve learned from WoW or gaming.
  • WoW Bloggers <3 WordPress: This is just something I noted last night. A lot of bloggers are switching platforms from Blogger to WordPress.
  • Why Do You Play WoW?: This is a guest post from Leiandra. I didn’t want to leave my blog completely dry so I sent out a plea for guest bloggers to help me out. Thanks again for responding!

I’ve got a larged sized to do list which I can’t get started on just yet. 1 exam down, but I still have 3 more to go.

  • Complete blog design overhaul
  • Mag strat and overview
  • Tips for WoW Bloggers who just moved to WordPress
  • Getting my other blog underway

The WoWosphere at a Glance

  • Veteran Hunter blogger BigRedKitty has switched! Be sure to update your bookmarks and RSS feeds accordingly. He’s also opened up some new forums! Fellow blogger Pike is also considering the switch.

    Matt’s Reaction: I love the forums! I’m even debating opening one of my own soon. I also think Pike should switch =).

  • Fate has a great post up effectively summarizing what the trends seem to be in class issues. You’ll remember a few days ago Blizzard put the call out for feedback on what players felt to be the problems with their class. They even created threads on every class forum.

    Matt’s Reaction: One of the points Fate made was that each class seemed to be complaining that every other class was imbalanced and should be nerfed. If that’s the case, then Blizzard should sit back and do nothing because if every class complains that other classes are overpowered, would that not then imply that every class IS balanced?

  • There’s been some recent blog discussion on the gender of your characters on WoW. Nothing’s wrong with players playing a character of the opposite gender. Some play it to express themselves. Others play it to avoid being cliche’d. The rest do it for the ass (or so they claim).

    Matt’s Reaction: I chose a Dranei and Human females purely for performance reasons. I need as much possible real estate as I can get on my screen. I’m not the only one who feels that way.

  • GMW and her Guild discovered a neat way of adding colour to your Guild MoTD’s and Guild Notes!

    Matt’s Reaction: Instead of the usual green text, now you can color code your messages for importance. I haven’t quite discovered a practical use for it yet, but I’m not an officer and I don’t have the authority to alter my own Guild Note. But, I think by color coding Guild Notes, it would be easy to tell at a glance what kind of specs certain players are in the Guild without having to repeatedly ask them. For example, tanks could be blue, healers would be white, and DPS would be red. This way, there would be no confusion as to whether Paladins were prot or holy (or Priests shadow or Holy).

  • Nibuca at Mystic Chicanery created an excellent list of fun Pally tricks to try!

    Matt’s Reaction: I like tip 3.

Blog Spotlight

  • I’ve spent a lot of time reading Rohan’s Blessing of Kings. One of his recent posts addressed the topic of welfare epics (AKA PvP purples). There’s been some discussion about the skinning differences between PvP and PvE. Another point that was brought up is the seeming lack of progression that the PvE aspect has. The only thing stopping alts from going into Hyjal/BT is attunement. That is a barried that PvP doesn’t really have except for rating brackets (even then, at 3 AM you might find a 1500 team playing a 2300 team and by sheer luck/disconnects steal 40 points off of them) In PvE, it’s possible to directly skip over T4 and go straight for T5 (Remember the attunements were lifted).

    In fact, several months ago on my resto shaman, I raided with a group of friends into Karazhan while wearing a combination of greens and blues. In June, I sported +600 healing! That number is far below my minimum recommended stats. But my friends were extremely geared and my lack of healing didn’t really hinder progress. In one run, I replaced my greens with purples (T4 gloves, Curator shoulders, Chess Shield, Netherspite’s Chest, Attument’s bracers, Moroes’ Belt, Opera trinket).Should I have to go through that chain of progression again? I don’t think so.

    My Priest did most of the work learning the encounters and helping my friends get gear as well. I had a good support network in place and good contacts. I think this debate sounds akin to having a level 70 running you through Scarlet Monastary. Different application but same principle.So in PvP, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with characters in blues getting epics. They’re still putting in time and effort to get it. An S2 geared player will acquire S3 gear far faster then a blue’d character with little resilience.

    My Shaman took six months to get the entire S2 set. This is just the armor alone. I did not purchase the weapon, shield, or totem. That’s a long time just to get the armor. Don’t forget the fact that this was during the summer before the AV changes. I had lots of time which I piled into the AV queues earning 7000+ honor per day. Obviously with school, it is no longer possible. But winter break is nearly here, and I’ve already picked up the Vindicator Bracers…About the visualizations of the gear, I think they should be kept the same way. I know I’m definitely a minority in this for sure, but hear me out for a moment.

    Most of us don’t have the time to armory other players to determine what they’re wearing or what spec they’re playing (having a macbook by your side lets you do that). But information and intelligence is key to any kind of warfare! The more information you have, the better off you’ll be!

    One of Sun Tzu’s famous quotes:

    So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will fight without danger in battles.
    If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose.
    If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself

    A key piece of information is the level of gear that your opponents are wearing. One glance at a Priest with dark wings, and what does that tell you? He’s wearing S2 shoulders. Like it or not, we rely on visual cues to inform of us what’s going on around the world. If PvP and PvE gear models were drastically changed, that’s more information we have to know. Out in PvE land if the models were to change, a new player with absolutely no idea of what PvP models look like could check out a player and find out the hard way that this is NOT a player they want to pick a fight with.

    Lastly, to change the models and textures would require more work to do on the part of Blizzard. I’d much rather have them work on new raiding content then armor which I will replace anyway. I’m paying 15 bucks a month to solve hard encounters, not appear on an Ironforge’s Secret fashion show.

Again, I wanted to apologize to everyone for my reduced blogload this week. It’s crunch time for many students. I’ve got 3 more next week so expect similar activity. Wish me luck =(.

I started this piece at 9 AM. It is now 1 PM.

WordPress Slowly Becoming the WoW Blogging Platform of Choice

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Renowned WoW Blogger BigRedKitty has migrated from his home on Blogspot to his own domain. A quick examination of his footer reveals that he too has switched over to the WordPress platform.

Earlier in the week, Gwaendar (of Altitis) switched from Blogger to WordPress. Not far behind him Before that, Ess also moved to WordPress.

From the list of Blogs I follow on Google Reader:

Blogger

WordPress

Blogspot Bloggers: 15 14
Wordpress Bloggers: 15 16

Conclusion: Both platforms perform as intended, but we’ve seen evidence of people switching from Blogger to WordPress. I have yet to encounter a WoW Blogger switching from WordPress to Blogger. Of course, there must be countless of WoW Blogs that have escaped under my radar so those numbers up there could very well be skewed in either direction.

So to all of you young Blogglings out there, I suggest saving yourself a day’s worth of effort and just using WordPress initially instead of signing up for Blogger and then switching to WordPress =).

Guest Post: Why Do You Play WoW?

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Matticus’ Note: I posted a small, but brief plea yesterday for help with my blog. Leiandra has helped me answer my plea. My exams conclude on the 15th of December, therefore my personal posts will be drastically reduced while I’m busy raiding cramming for my finals. But I don’t want to leave my readers hanging. I’m looking for some guest posters to help me for the next week or so. If you have your own WoW blog, chances are I’ve read it or ran into it. This is a great opportunity for you to expand your viewership and receive exposure. Your posts (if I like them) will appear here and on Curse. Simply drop me an email (look right) and we can work something out. I spend 2 – 4 hours a day blogging and I cannot sustain that kind of effort for the time being. Anyways, here’s Leiandra!

With Matticus being busy with finals, I volunteered to help him out with a post or two so that he could hopefully pass his classes :). Just a few, quick comment about me for those that don’t read my blog: My mage’s name is Leiandra, and I am a Guild Master for a raiding guild on the Bronzebeard – US server. I’ve been in guild leadership since I first starting playing MMO’s (only with the release of EQ2), and have been playing Wow for about 2.5 years now. I’ve been the GM of Primogeniture for about 2 months now, but have been part of the final decision making process for much, much longer.

The latest inspiration for this post comes from a recent person that I have been recruiting. Most of the Bronzebeard raiding guilds tend to start around 5 or 6pm server time. Our raid times start at 8:30, so we get a lot of people that want to join because of work shifts or just general night owls (vampires as one of my Raid Leaders calls them). This recent recruit registered for an account on our forums, but never filled out an app. He then contacted me in game to find our more about our guild. His work schedule had changed and he wouldn’t be able to raid with his current guild, hence the conversation he had with me. He sounded like he was interested, but told me he had to think about it. A few days later, he told me that he just wasn’t being fair to us, because he would only raid with us until his work schedule changed. I thanked him for his honesty, and we put each other on our friends’ lists in case we ever needed anything.

A few nights back, I needed another member for a 5-man run. He was online, and I asked him if he wanted to come. After a fairly successful run in which he did a great job, I was curious if he still maintained his loyalty to his guild. He told me that it was really only one raid leader that he was still loyal to, and that person was actually okay with him leaving. He filled out an application on our forums, and then again, decided that he wanted to stay with his guild.

Some people might consider this frequent changing of one’s mind quite annoying, but I completely understood. Sometimes people move on from the game. Sometimes people change guilds. The only thing that’s constant is that each guild will change. I think the successful guilds generally roll with those punches, adapt, and move on. But when is it right for you, the individual player, to move on?

To answer that question, it takes some deep introspection on the part of each individual. Questions like “Why do I play WoW?” should be addressed. What is most important to you? Is it important to be with friends? Is progression your big thing? Are you just in a guild that nobody is online when you are? Sometimes there’s drama or fights… that can happen to. Do you just want to play solo for awhile? How much are you going to regret leaving your guild, if at all?

When I first starting playing Wow, I did so to play with my best friend and his brother. The three of us started a guild because we were tired of random guild invites. The guild grew as RL friends and relatives joined us or transferred servers. We were never huge, but at our height, right before the expansion, we were getting in to Zul’Gurub. A lot of us also PUG’ed and participated in other guild raids in almost all of the dungeons (I think Naxx was the only one not on our lists). With the expansion, and me being a night owl, a few of us decided that we’d break off into a more structured raiding guild and have more than just one guild run per week. It was a difficult decision to leave my guild of friends. I knew a few of them would come with me, and hoped others would follow. We had all been together for so long that I knew I’d still talk to them often, and hopefully group with them regularly as well. Well, the grouping thing hasn’t happened as much as I had originally planned, but I still talk to most of them nightly. My priorities, at the time of our new guild, were based around progression and seeing new content. I have a whole list of new, online friends, and I enjoy being in the guild I am.

My priorities are aligned with where my toons are and the guild they are in. Sure, there are ups and downs. It’s not like I always get my way, even as GM, but I’m happy where I’m at. Are you? Is it time to move on? Is there something better on the horizon, but maybe you’re just too scared to make the change? Or are you exactly where you want to be with the people you want to be there with? I hope most of you can answer “yes” to that last question. It’s just a game. Have fun. Be happy.

So did you like what you read? Then head on over to Leiandra’s blog. While you’re there, don’t forget to subscribe to Leiandra’s RSS.