Those poor bastards.

 I’ve been playing online games ever since my cousin got me hooked on Quake. I vividly remember the very first time I interacted with another player in Quake, and no, it wasn’t at muzzle velocity.

My cousin Josh put me in a pickup CTF game with a few of his Clan members and some of their friends. Quake itself was still pretty young at that time, if memory serves, it was only out for about five months at that point., and full-on 3d graphics were really making themselves known upon the gamers of the time.

One thing that I’ll never forget was Josh telling me “Dude, you have to look at the flag” as he took over the keyboard and ran my character to see it. I have to say, it was impressive, the lighting effects, the ‘flow’ of it waving, ect. However, the truest sign of things to come happened at that exact moment. Not the flag, but the dude that was standing nearby, guarding the flag room.

“Who is that?” I had asked.

My cousin told me that it wasn’t a bot, it was a person. A -real- person. Right there, standing near the flag with a wicked looking rocket launcher. The thought hit me that at some other area of the country, someone had just watched me walk into the flag room, and was aware of my existence, without even being able to physically see me. So, at that point, instead of sallying forth to collect the enemy flag, or do a mid-field scrim, I sat in the flag room, and started chatting with the dude.

That moment really stuck with me, for all these years. I mean, sure, everyone had chat programs back then, ICQ, AIM, that Microsoft comic chat program, but this level of interaction with a netizen really struck me as rewarding, and I’m not sure why I felt that way, even now. In the years that followed, I made many friends online across many games, in many states and even other countries. In today’s era, that’s common-place. But in the days before those on the net booked-face or other such major social networks, it was uncommon.

Perhaps, given the whimsical nature of this memory, this is the reason I don’t understand the every-day abuse that those poor bastards we know as “CM’s” or “Blue posters” are subjected to. In my time and travels, I’ve met several of these people. Most of them have been very pleasant to converse with, and I dare-say that almost all of them had a soul. Even the online interaction I’ve had with  these representatives has been helpful, if not out-right professional.

Lately I’ve been following the development of Star Wars – The Old Republic, and in particular the tweets and posts of Steven Reid, alias Rockjaw, who is the Senior Community Manager for SW:TOR. One exchange really brought this subject to the forefront of my thoughts. One netizen stood out among the dross of several stupid or ignorant tweets, who goes by the name of “SoulstitchMMO.” After digging around through his posts, tweets, and blog, I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s a self-centered egomaniac and a all around cunt. The exchange was over several tweeted conversations, ultimately culminating in the statement from Soulstitch stating “..No surprise, it’s the same half assed work I have expected from your team.”

Now, being on the web as long as I have been, I’m used to seeing statements like this, but what made me smile and almost applaud was Steven Reid’s reply – “You have absolutely no idea of the work my team does on a daily basis.”

Delicious.

When did we start being such utter pricks to these people? The only thing I can come up with is that we feel that THEY are responsible for our woes, or that they could help you, but simply won’t.

Well, they are people, and people have limits. When those limits are reached, the results can be… well..

… enlightening.

 

Land of Confusion.

 These days, one can’t help but sit back and feel frustration towards the game that never ends: Washington, District of Columbia. Recent months have been (to me) reaching epic proportions of stupidity. And sure, I’m aware that I’m not involved in the process, I’m not in the cloakrooms of the Capital building, nor am I in any way on the inside of the Obama administration. However, I think we’ve really reached a point in our political lifetime where Americans on -both- sides of the aisle are fed up with the politics both parties are playing. Off the top of my head, the last time I can imagine such a time (although I could be wrong, as I wasn’t alive then) was during the hey-days of the ’60s with Vietnam.

Certainly has the same floral bouquet, doesn’t it?

Embroiled in unpopular wars, atrocities, no real idea of WHY we are in the situation in the first place, and soldiers coming home in body-bags. Now, I’m not trying to say that our modern day conflicts are the same as the horror of the Vietnam war, either in scope or in the human cost; merely that several general facts are true in both cases which I will list for sake of clarity.

• The origins of these conflicts are both cemented in rather shaky(understatement) ideological ground.
• We don’t have a clear imperative as far as a ‘win’ or a firm exit strategy.
•  These conflicts are almost universally unpopular, hugely expensive, and ultimately limited in terms of ‘gain.’

Now, as I stated earlier, Iraq and Afghanistan are thankfully not as viscous as Vietnam was. During Tet ’68, the deadliest week of the conflict, 543 American soldiers died, with 2547 wounded. So far as I’m aware, our most costly weeks in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost us between 40 and 60 lives.

And at the same time, political posturing hasn’t stopped since 9/11. The pretext for the Iraqi War is so flimsy that polls taken last year say that only 37 percent of Americans feel that the war was justified. Everyone now has heard the statements from the early days of the invasion of Iraq, culminating in the popular culture statement “Where are the WMD’s?” as well as the political fallout that brought down the Neo-conservative grip on American politics. Most talking heads will shy away from speaking about the causes of the war anymore, and instead hold the Bush Doctrine as the only motivation needed. Oh, and of course, freedom for the Iraqi people.

So, as a controversial man once said, “It’s a case of the chicken’s coming home to roost.” The idea that this what our course of action led us to, reaping the whirlwind.  That man was Malcolm X, and he was speaking about the recent assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

A disturbing thought, by the way, was pointed out to me recently by my fiancee. There are now soldiers operating in Iraq and Afghanistan right now, who were ten years old when the towers fell. To me, that’s a terrible milestone and one that I struggle with still today, when I think of the young children in my immediate and extended family in 2001.

So, while all this is going on in the Middle-East and Central Asia, our elected officials are engaging in another ideological war in regards to the Federal Budget. This war is frustrating, confusing, and frequently shows an apparent lack of common sense and perspective by both political parties, as well as an obvious lack of communication. This type of atmosphere is quickly becoming the prime export of America.

I know this post was a ramble, that we’ve gone all across the subjects of the day, but I feel it reflects my state of mind where this is all concerned, and I can’t help but think “That this is a Land of Confusion.”

Dillon, one of my dearest friends and a soldier in the United States Armed Forces recently returned home to the states from Afghanistan, alive and well. I love you brother, welcome home.

Guess who’s back….

… Back again. Charnal’s back, tell a friend.

It’s been -quite- awhile, and many things have happened in the time since my last post (obviously.) But what would a post be without spite and hatred towards the game that I’ve inexplicably given a stupid amount of money over the years? I mean, lets be honest, the subscription numbers of WoW have been falling over the past year like a shit from heaven. Rumors abound of a rather strange method that Blizzard uses to calculate their ‘current’ numbers, which allows them to maintain the illusion that all is business as usual.

Enter their latest opus, the Firelands. Now, let me put the cards on the table here – I haven’t raided there.

“But Charnal, you devilishly delightful dastardly duke of despair! How can you pass judgement upon a raid expansion that you refuse to play?”

Simple folks, from what I’ve seen of it due to watching my fiancee run the joint with our guild, I’ve come to one resounding thought which I’ll voice here.

BECAUSE IT’S AN UPDATED AND RESKINNED MOLTEN CORE, MINUS THE CAVE NETWORK.

Seriously, is this the best that Blizzard is willing to offer now? Reskins, restructuring of old instances? What’s next, AQ? Or as a friend of mine insists, “AQ under water.” I’m already betting that Blizzard is going to be putting the ‘Titan’ next-gen MMO up front at Blizzcon, with WoW being an afterthought. And with the way that they’ve been re-arranging their production team, it’s hardly surprising that WoW is in the state that it’s in.

With that in mind, as well as the not-so-recent cancellation of my battle.net account, I’m going to be moving on from WoW to another franchise in the coming months. More commentary will no doubt follow, as I have no doubt that I’ll be able to find the creme-de-la-creme of assbags and fratboy douchebag players who will manage to piss me off in ways that I can’t yet comprehend. So stay tuned!

What a long, strange instance it’s been..

I know at one point or another I was musing at the direction instances were taking in terms of ‘hard mode’ content and all the fun and joy that come with it. In the recent two month period (which my absence of writing nicely encapsulates) I’ve hurled my fleshy form at this instance with enough force to knock my digital eyes out from the impact. So, the time for first impressions is obviously passed given the length of time since the whole place came out, but now with 3.2 looming in the near future, Ulduar’s hey-day may be in the process of having it’s sunset.

One thing I think that must be discussed regarding this was the rapid-fire nerfing that befell this hell-hole. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s a very pretty instance with many new interesting and innovative bossfights that I enjoyed witnessing and murdering, but damn, man. I don’t even think the T5 instances got cornholed as bad as this place did on the nerf-o-matic.

First thing that comes to mind? Xt-002 trash. Hoooollllllyyyyy hell was that shit buggy. First, both trash packs were linked together. That what patched, but they were still as unforgiving as a concrete dildo attached to a jackhammer, necessitating at one point a return to one of the older and nobler antics in MMO canon, the zerg approach. But, that didn’t last more than a week, and now ? They’re glorified Naxx trash. Get in, get off, get out.

Iron Council didn’t evade the nerf-bat either – the rune of death used to be the thing of raid-healing nightmares. I was certain that the breaks before an IC attempt were given specifically for the raidhealers to go afk and mainline the black-tar heroin they needed to motivate interest (or apathy, maybe?) in this fight. Oh, and that one little guy with the lightning coming out of his ass was also nerfed, but who cares about him.

Crazy-cat lady and her little pussies? Meh. I don’t want to talk about her.

Thorim. Wow. I loved and hated that gauntlet. The almost absolute certainty of any melee venturing down there due to whirling trip + impale would usually harm the rogues, shaman, and warriors that would try going through there beyond the might of any soothing cream! I recall Serianna (on her rogue) from World of Snarkcraft volunteering to go with the gauntlet crew one time, and she died before she even knew what hit her. I giggled.

She loves me.

E HARTZ SERI.

Freya trash was the thing of nightmare. My friends Aionus, Emphatic and I were the first tanks to wander into -that- particular hellhole in our guild, and holy christ. Blizzard has revolutionized the industry by managing to make mob-trash take the form of pure joy. Only not really. The verdict? Lots of them removed from the instance entirely, hitpoint values dropped, abilities nerfed, you name it, they did it.

Mimiron the Mexican killer. That’s right, you heard me. I don’t recall who exactly coined that phrase (I’m pretty sure it was Aionus, or maybe Kerp), but Mimiron -hated- Emphatic, our resident beaner. So much so that his trash, which was rather insane at the time anyway, managed to kill Emphatic so badly it ‘sploded his computer and knocked him out of the game for a week.

Damn, man. Oh, and I’m being asked to also point out that the trash in this wing of Ulduar is also fond of hate-crimes and gaybashing, as it seems to kill Dornilust with gusto.

As for the mechanical man himself? Nerf after nerf after nerf. And don’t get me wrong, this is the one fight I wasn’t going to lose sleep over it being slapped around by the nerfbat. P4, with the thing being mobile while a laser barrage was going on? Ugh.

This leaves us with Yogg and General. Unfortunately for everyone, I haven’t snorted enough Ajax to want to put my mind through -those- fights at this early hour, so we’ll just leave it at that.

All in all? When Ulduar launched, it was a titan of bugs and difficulty, trash that would molest you in ways even I won’t put into words with the slightest provocation, bosses that crushed entire raids ‘neath their mighty tread, and many other ways that made you question why you hated yourself so much to put yourself through this hell.

Now? What once was strong and turgid is limp and floppy, and it’s beginning to leak a disgusting fluid that it’s too ashamed to ask the developers about.

Ulduar…

Hello, my loving readers.

Has our break been good for you? Have you gotten over whatever proverbial assraping that your class may or may not have gotten in 3.1? Have you nailed Ulduar so hard that your significant other thinks you’re having an affair?

Well, I hope that you have had fun in the last few weeks, regardless of your anal situation.

First off, let me get the painful part out of the way – I like Ulduar.

Mostly.

My guild took off into that place the very first night it was live, which incidentally was probably a terrible idea in hindsight, but after weeks of aoe clearing Naxx trash and farming Sartharion, we wanted to get our proverbial dicks wet. So, lets take it from the top, nay?

1. 1 – Flame Leviathan - Okay, this shit was fun as hell, and fuck anyone out there that says otherwise. Interesting way to start out a raid instance, and lots of confusion at first, but ultimately making for moments of hilarity, especially with people getting shot out of demolishers.  Dropped like a chump, coughed up his loot, and I thanked the Blizzard Gods for putting the “Lootreaver 3.0″ right at the beginning part of the instance.

• 2 – Ignis – Wow. Woooooow. Bugged to HELL and back. And what is with that crotchpot he’s got going on? But, before I can even talk about the horrid gangbanging he did to us that first night, we have to talk about the trash that you had to kill to get to him.

In reference to the trash in this zone, versus the ones from before? One phrase comes to mind in terms of dealing with it.

Now that we’ve established that fact, we can talk about the sodomy inflicted upon my raid and many, many others that night. Actually, I don’t want to. It’s too fresh in my mind.

• 3 – Razorscale – Well, this was fun. It was like trying to take Fort Knox with a fucking slingshot. Considering that the adds were spawning all over the motherfucking place that first night, and I was playing a broken frost-tanking spec, I may as well have invited them over to fuck my sister instead of trying to tank them. The fight still was interesting, but when I say that, I mean interesting in a “Oh, wow, so -that- is how fisting works” kind of interesting.

• 4 -  Xt-002 – Hah. HAHAHAHA. No. We made it to it’s trash, that was fucking LINKED, and got murdered. We did wave at him, though.

All in all though, once the first, you know, week of bug fixes and tweaks were out of the way, in addition to relearning my class from the ground up, I started to enjoy the joint. Not the four bosses mentioned above though, hell no. But once you get inside, the place is fun.

More to come on this subject soonish, I’m still trying to process all of the nerfs, bugs, and other clusterfucks into a proper blog entry.

Glory of the Phail?

One thing that I -loved- was when the blue’s announced that the Glory of the Raider and it’s heroic cousin were both going to have their mount rewards removed when 3.1 hit. Do I really give a shit about it? Hell no, I couldn’t care less, you know how I feel about achievements. Unfortunately, I do (slightly) care about my friends in guild, and for those OCD bastards like my guildmaster that have to get it completed, it also ment that I couldn’t just sideline my frost-tank ass and let the simians go nuts fist-fucking the instances to get all of the required feats of bullshit out of the way.

I know that I had commented on this before in a passing manner, but the fact remains that this is one of the most hated things that have come to pass from Blizzard as of late. We know my stance on RAE’s and whatnot, but the desperate drive that most have had as of late to get them finished before BigDaddyBlizzard comes and whisks all the black and plagued proto-drakes off to the magical land of Who-The-Hell-Cares as only made things a million times more … joyful.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I know that the ease of doing this would be much easier after the standard raiding guild is decked out in the full Ulduar loot. Hell, I bet when you’re doing 6-Man Maly after that point (for those of you sad, sad bastards that really want a mount that badly, lunatics.) that you can almost drop his draconic ass before he finishes his declaration between P1 and P2 about all the raiders’ sexual preference and parental heritage. Wouldn’t that just make you giggle a little? Seeing him floating around at 10% or so? Anyway, it would certainly curtail the difficulty of the meta.

How about the fact that they removed the “Immortal” clone out of the Ulduar meta-achievement? Boooy, thanks for that. Too bad Blizzard couldn’t have done that before with the current meta. Christ, my life would be so much calmer right now if we didn’t have to keep stressing over someone dying in a bossfight over a disconnect, or server-side lag, or whatever.

So for all of you out there who are about to, or have gotten your meta out of the way? Congratulations, I hope it somehow completes you in a way that copious amounts of drugs, pills, or sex never could. I hope that you wake up the day after with a new sense of purpose in your lives, and more importantly, I hope that you fly that goddamned mount from here to the next expansion, without getting pissy that you never got the next one out of Ulduar.

And the day that such a glorious moment comes to pass, I’ll stick my own dick in my ear.

Fuck these metas. Fuck them in the ass.

Oh, and speaking of fucking in the ass, I want you all to pay a visit to my good friend Dorn. No, not -that- kind of friend.

He wishes.

The trouble with titles.

So. I’m an old-school Mmo player – hailing back from the sun-drenched days of Everquest, when the very notion of reaching max level in a few weeks was the demented thoughts of a madman, and the idea of having mounts (nevermind ones that can fly) was hand in hand with waking up to a supermodel sharing your bed.

Among the things that I recalled from my days of Everquest was the awe of someone accomplishing something so groundbreaking, or so very noteworthy, that the GM’s would decend from their halls of ambrosia and bestow a special title onto the player in question as a tip of the hat to their success. One of the people (and really the only one I can recall) was back on my Tarew Marr server, a wood-elf ranger named Jykferith. Jyk went zone-to-zone, broadcasting in the general channels that he could craft the fabled Trueshot bow, and would gladly do so if you gathered the required materials for it, abeit with a charge, but welcome to capitalism.

Anyway. This person had put so much time and effort into his fletching skill, and was so far ahead of everyone else in that profession, that the GM’s gave him a title, “the Fletcher”. And this is within the first six months of the servers being up, so it was a very major deal. “Jykferith the Fletcher.”

So, that kind of awe for titles continued for me later in World of Warcraft. We all know that unless you were the first jackass to ring a gong (or within the hour of it being rung) in Silithus, you were pretty much stuck with the lukewarm pvp titles. Not that it was such a bad thing, some people took pride and joy in their High Warlord or whatever branding, which also become fodder for people shooting back and forth about the lack of skill the person in question had (afking through battlegrounds, and so on), and blah blah blah.

Burning Crusade saw the advent of the first titles that could be gained by everyone, not just one person in the elite guild of the top horde or alliance server, the Hand of A’dal and Champion of the Naaru titles. Then the Arena system was launched, and we had gladiators of various flavors. All in all though, these were not ‘easy’ to get, as in, not everyone got them by the end of the expansion.

So what the fuck happened.

Wrath came along, and Blizzard decided that we’re going to reward people with titles for….. EVERYTHING. Pvp, Pve, boss kills, holiday events, you name it, you could probably eventually get a title from it. I was looking at my alliance warrior the other night, and she had a single title from pvp. Getting on Charnal later, he had over a half dozen. What a huge leap we’ve had now with these, and the sad thing is that most of them aren’t even remotely impressive. Well, sure. I still use my ‘of the Shattered Sun’ with Charnal, just to prove what a baller I am, but beyond that? Jenkins? Really? We really need a title for Jenkins? Hasn’t that whole joke been fist-fucked into a chafed, dry nightmare at this point?

Apparently not.

A friend of mine was telling me of another mmo where the titles were more than badges of honor or proof that you have too much time or too much in game money on your hands, but where they gave bonuses to your stats (some plus, some minus), ultimately serving a purpose beyond stroking epeen.

Are you getting as tired of this onslaught of titles as I am?

Guest post – Kerp on PvP Woes.

With myself being a big PvPer, I always fanaticized of writing my own…I guess you would call it, a rant?  Yea…a rant.  When Charnal asked me if I wanted to do one, I had to take the opportunity to express my feelings towards this “thing” that caused me to be  a true life warrior.  People say I have a full rage bar at all times in real life.  All I have to say to that is, NO SHIT SHERLOCK!  From all the fucking Cyclones…. Cyclones…. Cyclones…and well… Cyclones, this game has truly pushed all of my buttons.  

It all started last summer (End of S3, going into S4), where I found myself bored with my mage.  I really never got into PvP with my mage.  All of the key bindings, macros, etc that I needed to push, turned me off completely.  It was just a total mess in my eyes.  So, I decided to make a warrior.  Not a lot of macros to make, was a straight up balls to the face experience that I kind of wanted to try.  I leveled and leveled, and finally got to 70 in about a month or so.  My partner was our warlock lead of our guild and he had a druid that he PvPed with from time to time.  So, we teamed up and made a 2’s team called “Man Candy”.  We started out decently well, got to 1600 in about an hour and a half, and wobbled there for a good two weeks or so.  Grinded out all of the gear we could get, and we hit 1700 in a matter of a week or so.  For some reason, I wasn’t expecting terribly long games, but man… was I wrong.  

With us hitting 1700 in the 2’s bracket, we always came across druid, rogue teams.  These games would last 5-45 minutes long, I wanted to jump out of my window for fuck sakes sometimes.   No matter how fucking hard I tried, I somehow couldn’t kill a rogue, or a druid.  Anyone know why… I couldn’t kill a fucking druid? (Yes I do suck, maybe that’s the reason, but…it really isn’t)  One seven letter word.  ONE FUCKING SEVEN LETTER WORD. 

Cyclone. 

The first time I ever got Cyclone I had my partner explain to me, what’s with this spell.  He told me it Tosses the enemy target into the air, preventing all action but making them invulnerable for up to 6 sec.  Only one target can be affected by your Cyclone at a time.  I told him that was a blatant lie. So, I looked it up on Wowhead.  It read this, “Cyclones Kerp into all FUCKING ETERNITY, THAT WAY HE CAN’T CHOP MY DICK OFF, AND THEN LATER THROW IT INTO A GOD DAMN LAKE!”   This spell has made me go off into a full blown yell, involving every single curse word known to man come out of my mouth in a matter of 10 seconds flat.  It wasn’t just “Cyclone” either.  You had to toss in two Entangling Roots as well, to avoid the “Diminishing Returns” of this god forsaken barrel of monkey shit spell.

You know what? Fuck druids.  Fuck each and every single one of you.  Fuck your mother, fuck your dog, and fuck your couch.  I hope each and every single one of you druids from S4, dies in a burning building.  Though, do you know what the saddest part of this rant is Ladies and Gentleman?  I now have a druid, and PvP with it.  That’s right, bitches!  I now can Cyclone every single cock licking warrior known to man!  What a wonderful feeling it is too.  Knowing, that a warrior is probably screaming and yelling at his monitor like I did in s4 about how he gotten Cyclone “FULL FUCKING DURATION”, makes me jizz in my pants.  

Enough talk about druids and why they suck major donkey dick, lets get down to what I think is the most important aspect of PvP, Keybinds, and moving your toon with either your mouse, or WSAD.  People, lets be realistic here, players who fucking click there GOD DAMN SPELLS, should be tarred and feathered at your local WalMart.  Why Walmart you ask?  So every blessed person that works there that has some type of handicap disability, might feel better about themselves.  Hell, everyone needs to feel some sort of comfort of how they look, talk, etc.  Especially the handicaps. 

God bless every single one of them.  You know what though?  Keyboard turners(People who use the up, right, left, down arrow keys to move there toons) have a purpose though, in the World of Warcraft.  Easy Honorable Kills.  You know that feeling, right?  You charge on your mount towards this under geared Moonkin.  You have to feel bad for him.  All innocent, probably only has 5k armor in caster form.  But man, what an easy kill it is to get.  All of a sudden, not only is it an easy HK, but he fucking Keyboard turns too!  Keyboard turns the other way, and oh look!  His back is now facing me for some nice burst damage.  Man oh man, how I love and hate fucking terrible players.

Ulduar!

Fuck yeah! Comin’ to save the motherfuckin’ raid now!

Ulduar! 

Fuck yeah! Hard mode is the only wayyyy now.

Alright, so maybe I got a bit carried away, and Ulduar doesn’t deserve it’s own theme-song, but it’s a sad state of affairs when yours truly is so eagerly anticipating something, that I decide to break into song. 

You, my loving readers, are oh so lucky to have just experienced that. But, moving on.

Ulduar is just around the proverbial corner, and think the only thing that’s keeping my guildleader from wetting himself in ecstasy over the prospect of a completely new instance to violate is more than likely the same as every other major raid/guildleader out there – You know that it’s going to be a fleeting experience, like rubbing one out in the bathroom at work. Yes, it may make you feel good for that moment, but once you leave, you’ll just feel dirty, mellow, and also have an uncontrollable desire to raid the nearest fridge. 

Get it? I talk about a RAID instance, and then make a comparison that makes you want to RAID a fridge? Yeah? Y’get it?

Oh shut up. 

But it is inevitable. We’re seeing two instances in one as we did before – a ten and a twenty-five man (or woman, sheesh) version with the same basic experience in each. And the major point that Blizzard has been shouting about almost non-stop for the last few weeks? The fact that it’s loaded – LOADED – with ‘Hard mode’ fights. I’m resisting the urge to bitch more about it, but moving on. But the basic question that I’ve heard asked a few times, and in a few back-alley forums on teh internetz is “How long is going to last?”

Now sure, you’ve got the ten-man guilds out there that are still working in raid-alliances or whatever to be able to field a 25 man run for Naxx still, so there are those people that aren’t going to be going there anytime soon. But what of the ‘core’ raiding element in the World of Warcraft community? 

And I’m not talking about those SK Gaming fucks that are treating it like a second job. People may think that’s cool, but I’m sure as hell not one of them. Doing this stuff because you enjoy it, or you enjoy the company of your fellows is one thing. Doing this kinda shit because someone is paying you to do it, to be first in the world, country, state, zipcode, whatever, just seems to be too much like masturbation without the payoff to me.

 Days? Weeks? A few months, at the most I’m sure, before the place is just as much on farm-mode as Sarth 3D and whatnot. Then we wait, in annoyed silence, for our next blast of joy in the form of another content patch. So, I guess that everyone should sit down, kick back, and drink down this new instance the moment it comes to them.

Me? I’m going to pass. Too much like drinking Drain-o. Sure, it’ll clean you out, but it’ll leave you hollow inside.

As a side-note, I’m currently dying of the plague IRL, so my entries will be slowed slightly. I was hoping to put up a guest-post by a pvp-nazi friend of mine, but he sent it to me in a text-file, and I wasn’t feeling that productive.

Looking at the trend.

So, I was sitting here earlier, pondering the various deep and earth-shattering things that a person of my impressive intelligence ponders (not a word out of you, Joveta), and suddenly the whole ‘trend’ that World of Warcraft has been taking as of late become all too clear for me. And you know what? Usually this would be a point where I would remind all of you with smug cynicism that I’ve predicted other happenings in the game and was correct, but honestly, I don’t feel that way on this one. And I blame Blizzard.

And you know what, Blizzard? I used to be on your side. When World of Warcraft was announced, I was still a hold-over from Everquest, fapping at the epic warrior swords that my WOOD ELF warrior had.

 

Lightsaber, motherfawkers.

 

That’s right. WOOD ELF. Fuck you, those of you that rolled your eyes.

 

 

Anyway ….. where was I? Oh yes, the fapping. The ability to fly from place to place, mounts, orcs, night elves and tauren, oh my! You go down the list of the original things that they had offered to the press in their first meaty press release, and I was sold. I mean, to be able to go to Stormwind, see Lorderon, and so forth. All of these places I knew because I was usually playing Warcraft 2 and 3 about six BILLION times a month, and the thought of interacting in them? Wow! 

Of course, that was before I knew that going to Stormwind ment you had to pass through Goldshire, which (on my server) is the online WoW equivalent of willingly going to Thailand with a bottle of Vaseline, cheap booze and even cheaper 12 year old boy prostitutes, but I digress.

But I was sold on all of it. The game came out, I started playing, seeking out the awe-inspiring places of Warcraft lore, killing everything there, taking their loot, it was like American foreign policy, only I had an exit strategy. Raid instances were challenging, epic loot was.. well, epic, compared to what you could get without raiding, and the first time you saw Ony take off into the motherfucking air, you had to have felt a little turned on.

>.>

<.<

Anyway.

Then comes TBC, which was fun. Flying mounts, ten more levels, -tons- of content and quests, along with heroic versions of instances that you could get special badges out of to turn in for loot off of a vendor. And hey! Tired of your tier items never dropping? No problem, bosses now had a very convenient  item that specific classes could turn in for specific tier pieces. Helps stop the bottleneck, keeps the economy going, and so forth! Fantastic, right?

In hindsight, I’m not so sure. Well, the tier tokens, yes, that was a good call. I spent way too much fucking time in MC to get my warrior her shit, and I have the mental scarring and sunny disposition to prove it. But the heroic badges, now.. I’m not sold on anymore. It was only the inevitable step that bosses in TBC started dropping them as well. Raid bosses, that is. And why not, you may say. Some of the better items for certain classes came off those badge vendors, so the more you can get, the better.

However, then came Wrath. And yes, for those of you keeping count, I’m skipping the SWP and it’s surrounding isle of fun. Why?

BECAUSE IT’S MY BLOG.

Anyway, Wrath. Now we see that we have heroic versions of the same instance, as well as having two new types of badges. Two new types of badges that can buy three separate pieces of tier armor. I was excited about this at first, but now, I think it was a very bad sign. I mean, I know -I- was bitter when I went through my first 10-man Naxx, got a few T7 items, and then walked out into Dalaran and saw some asshole that had never put one foot into a 10man, who had some of those items himself. Why does this make me bitter? 

Remember back in the day, when you saw someone with Tier 5 shit? They (mostly) looked BADASS. And you would sit there and be all “WHOA. That guy (or girl) must be good!” Christ, they’d have to be for someone to drag their ass along through SSC and TK. What I’m saying is that, barring a few exceptions, if you saw someone in mostly tier gear, they were usually decent players. I think most of us can agree to having taken part in a pug recently where some dicksmoke paladin named “Retlolol” or whatever, packing a few items of t7, facepulling and wiping everyone out, or doing other stupid shit. Why? Because this guy is so foul, so absolutely putrid, so irredeemably shitty that the Republicans wouldn’t even draft him for Iraq. So much for Tier armor being a sign of a good (or decent) player.

So I have to wonder, what’s going to come next? Are we going to be going into instances, raid and otherwise, where each place has it’s own vendor? The mobs don’t have loot tables, just little coins, or badges, or Hello Kitty bottlecaps, whatever, that you collect and turn in for an item from a vendor out in front of the joint? Given the way things are sliding, that would make sense, in a very cynical way. Why make the casuals spend more time in an instance than they have to? Lets make it easier!

After all, they are the core of the game, we’ve got to keep them playing. Twats.