Stories of WoW

Binky says hi!

On April 26th, the last person signed the charter and <Soulbound> was officially born. We had two goals: kill the Lich King and get frost wyrms.

The Lich King died on May 19th. On September 2nd we got the wyrms.

I knew that we could do it, but it seemed hopeless at times. Small roster and people going on holiday, starting school, finishing school. Really bad nights when staying out of the fire seemed impossible. Wiping for hours on “easy” bosses. Saurfang heroic had our ranged for dinner repeatedly and P3 healing was a special kind of hell (not helped by the general lack of ranged in the guild). We went from constant 10% Putricide heroic attempts and a kill on the first night to wiping for 3 hours to killing him in 5 tries, from one week to another. Valithria heroic had everyone raging, and it felt like she’d never dielive. The next reset we were wondering why the hell we ever had a problem. Sindragosa heroic seemed to be the end of it; I’m still surprised we managed to kill her.

Last night we were 2 achievements away: All You Can Eat and Been Waiting a Long Time for This. We had been trying Sindragosa for a couple of nights. The normal strategy had failed in a bad way, we hadn’t even managed to get past the ice block. The zerg strategy kept getting us the 6th stack at 4-5%, even with my boyfriend brought in to help with his ICC25 heroic gear. Then tonight something clicked. After a couple of failed zerg attempts we gave the normal strategy a shot. And we got to 10% before people started fucking up the ice blocks. I was expecting a new horrible wipefest and… it wasn’t. Everyone was resetting their stacks in time. We fucked up the blocks (well, mostly I did) and people still killed the right one. I healed on auto-pilot and didn’t even see the health bars, only the stack counter. Then, 15 minutes before the raid end, achievement spam and yelling on Vent.

Only the Lich King stood between us and the wyrms. It was late, but it was also our last 10-man day for the reset, so we voted to give Mr Lich a try. Unfortunately we still had the Plague Wing up… but that was the fastest clear we’d ever done, they were all dead in 20 minutes. I was convinced we had no chance of getting the achievement: we’d wait for the 30 stacks, waste time and then wipe. One of the healers hadn’t even tried LK before so I kept imagining huge Defiles killing us.

First attempt, 30 stacks, dead people on phase 2. Release, run, rinse and repeat. I kept whispering strats to the new priest and watching the stacks of plague (tip: MyGhoul is a nice little addon that counts them for you). We got 30, we went to transition, the plague was still going strong at almost 40 stacks, we ran, we spread, we collapsed, I ran out of mana, I healed my roots out on Vile Spirits, I died, I was ressed, I went into Shadowmourne and I was so stressed I couldn’t find the guy at first, I couldn’t see the HP percentage… and then it was 10% and we died (yelling to the new guy to DO NOT RELEASE!!!). It was the longest RP we’d had. My hands were shaking and I kept thinking we fucked something up and we won’t get the achievement.

And then…

If you squint you can see our new priest getting Kingslayer

Vent was LOUD. My boyfriend got to show off his Jaina’s Locket and teleported us to Dalaran, where we, of course, promptly went to Krasus Landing for pictures, then we hovered above the “fly” spots for the next two hours. (One thing I discovered last night is that wyrms are an awesome means of recruitment. Spamming trade got us 2 or 3 unimpressive apps. Within 10 minutes of getting wyrms, we were getting whispers from 3-4 different people asking about recruitment. We’re not about to recruit and boost some random guys, but it’s nice to know.)

My new drake is called Binky – like the horse. Death’s Binky was specifically non-skeletal, and the wyrm is a girl, but I think the name fits her perfectly.

Getting the wyrms is a huge achievement for us. From three friends unhappy with their guild situation we became one of the best 10-man guilds on the realm, we raid with a great group of people and we have a blast. Glory of the Icecrown Raider is the end of the expansion for me. We’ll probably try heroic LK and heroic Halion, but I won’t be sad if we don’t get them. If Cataclysm dropped tomorrow, I’d be fully satisfied.

…and it’s getting worse.

Our raids start off as usual. Hi, how was your day, ok guys let’s buff up and go. Usually, 10 minutes in the raid, things start going downhill. Sometimes I swear half my guildies have a degree in “That’s what she said” and a detector for innuendos (inyourendos, ha ha ha). Sometimes they swear I should stop complaining because I’m worse. Somewhere along the way, we acquired a new raiding rule from our exasperated RL: everyone has to get laid before the raid. No one’s following it or it’s not working as intended, because Vent keeps getting filthier.

Then again, Blizzard aren’t helping things. As pointed out by Tam, some encounters make it impossible to keep a straight face. My personal one is Putricide (especially on heroic). “Two oozes, one room, so many delightful possibilities!” (Uh, you might not want to look for the source of that if you don’t know it already.) And don’t get me started on the plague. Our Vent usually sounds like some sort of deranged brothel where people are passing STDs left and right. “I’ve got it, who can take it next?” “Pass it to me!” “Ok, Jen got it!” I think I’ve snickered myself to death one time.

But, of course, we, the players behind the microphones, are the worst. I blame (British) English.
The priest is going down tomorrow. Going down to Cornwall to see her parents, but it was too late to take it back.
The tank wants to see how high he can get it. The debuff count for the Lich King achievement, of course, but that part was drowned out by the laughter.
Remarks about bosses being or getting big have been mostly phased out of our vocabulary, since they tend to result in at least three voices on Vent snickering in a meaningful way.

While the smut does get distracting at times, I love it. We’ve managed to kill 11/12 in 10 man heroic, we’re 2 achievements away from our frost wyrms, and I haven’t had this much fun raiding in… forever. Many people wouldn’t see it like this, but for me one of the best things about being in a small guild is the uncensored Vent, because we all know each other and we don’t have to hold back because of some new recruit or sensitive person.

(We might have scarred a few PuGs for life, though. But one of them came back for more!)

[Yeah, I'm not dead. I might post something more game-related at some point. Sometime.]

Someone at Blizzard was really drunk when they decided this. Starting with July 27th, there will be a new incarnation of the WoW forums, where you will only be able to post with your real name (i.e. RealID, the name on your battle.net account).

A lot of people are missing exactly what’s going on, so in short:
* Starting with July 27th, you have a choice: post with your RealID or not post at all.

* You can choose between displaying your RealID alone or your RealID and character. I imagine this means I will be either “Ioana [Surname]” or “Ioana [Surname] – Jen, level 80 druid, Alonsus”. This allows you a certain level of anonymity… unless you want to recruit for your guild. Or are someone well-known on the forums, like Lissanna. Or if you want to post with your lvl 80 to show you know what you’re talking about regarding a class. In that case, oops, you’re fucked.

* Blue posters will also have their real names revealed.

* The change won’t be retroactive – your existing forum posts won’t automagically have your name on them. This only applies to the new forums being rolled out at the end of July.

* Blizzard plans to integrate Battle.net with Facebook – see the press release from May.

The supposed reason? Less trolling. Yes, somehow making you use your real name is more effective than, say, making you choose an unique handle or a main character to always post with.

Many, many people have already voiced their concern (at the moment of writing this, 963 pages on the US thread, 172 pages on the EU thread, 55 pages on the Spanish thread, 59 pages on the French thread, 190 pages in the German thread and 27 pages in the Russian thread). I won’t pretend I read all the posts in all the languages, but by skimming the US, EU, FR and ES threads the overwhelming opinion is FUCK NO.

I will say upfront that this doesn’t affect me that much. I never was a frequent poster, my name is pretty damn common as far as Romania goes, and I never had trouble for being a girl in WoW. However, not everyone is in the same situation, so just a short list of potential problems:

* You have an uncommon name. Anyone who disagrees that DKs are overpowered can now look you up online and call you at 3.33 AM every day, if not worse. (Yes, there are a lot of fucked up people online, do you want to risk it?) This probably doesn’t work for all countries, but for the US and UK there’s people finding services that, judging by what people are posting, are very good at uncovering things about your real life. Like, say, what people found out about CM Bashiok after he disclosed his real name to the forum…

* You have a name that identifies you as female/Arabic/Mexican/etc, a dick decides that females/Arabs/Mexicans stole our jerbs and randomly decides to make life difficult for you. If you read the threads, there are a lot of women who were harassed in WoW by people who got crushes on them or for simply being in top guilds.

* Your battle.net is registered under someone else’s name. Minor children playing on parents’ accounts, couples using the same name on both accounts. Who will suffer the consequences when little Timmy decides to spew some rage, under his father’s name, at the Warlock who disagreed with him?

* You apply for a job at a company and the boss finds you posting on the WoW forums and decides they’d better go with the non-WoW-playing candidate. “I wouldn’t want to work in a company like that anyway!!” Yes, I’m sure, unless you just got fired, rent is due and you’re kinda out of money.

* You just don’t want your fucking name all over the internet. Even with my common name and while actively trying to not associate my real world person with the online Jen, a while ago by googling “Ioana [Surname]” you would land straight on my personal blog. Yes, if it’s a public blog then I should expect to be found, but I still made a conscious effort to make that difficult. While I don’t have a problem with Jen the druid being connected to Ioana the tech writer, I’m sure there’s many other people who might object. Some professions simply require maintaining a certain image; a weird name and a Google search could ruin your credibility. (Of course, there’s nothing wrong with playing WoW, we know that; employers might not.)

* From a personal point of view, I don’t like people on my realm knowing my nationality. With due apologies to the decent Romanians I know, most of the Romanians on General and Trade are dumb offensive trolls. The latest incident that comes to mind was during a World Cup game, when my intellectually challenged countrymen decided swearing on ICC’s General was the new fun thing… so 5 minutes of Romanian language involving sexual organs, families and football followed. I can only imagine the fun time I’d have posting in a recruitment thread about my guild and getting a bunch of these people… (Yes, for some reason I do find swearing in my native language more offensive than in English.) Not to mention that Romanians are already discriminated more than enough – we’re all Gypsies or thieves, of course, so I’ll be more than glad to hear this in game.

I don’t have anything to hide, but I’ve always felt more secure when people didn’t know information about myself without my permission. I’ve already had several incidents with idiots who thought that because they knew who my employer was, they knew my job responsibilities. They were wrong, but this made the whole situation even more infuriating – reading lies about myself made me livid.

I’ll stop here, since I am at work and so many people wrote about this already… I haven’t found a pro-change blog so far, but please point me at them if they exist, I’m always curious about different views.

I won’t quit WoW or burn my DVDs in the central square over this. I still enjoy the game a lot. But I don’t have any intention of posting on the official forums anymore; I’ll stick to recruiting in Trade and I’ll just hope I won’t have a problem that can’t be solved without posting in the Tech Support forums. I will also be following this very closely, since I’m very curious what Blizzard will do… I’ve never seen so much rage over an announcement.

(In the 15 minutes I’ve spent writing this, the page count for the threads became: US 975, EU 183, FR 68, ES 60, DE 200, RU 30. That’s a LOT of pissed off players…)

Edit: Pure win. Guy posts real name on the forum and dares posters to call him at work… and 20 minutes later, someone does.

I love failpug stories. I even love my own failpugs – raging is cathartic. Last night, when I zoned in Slave Pens and saw Weinodk the tank with Blood Presence, I groaned inwardly – and outwardly, to the guild. My first plea to please put Frost Presence was ignored as he ran ahead letting me remember (once again) that a shaman is not a druid, and even if it was, Rejuv at level 60 didn’t do squat.

Then he said this was the first “hard” dungeon he’d tanked. I told him about Frost Presence again, holding back the snark but fully expecting to be ignored and, lo and behold …“Oh, sorry, that must be why I’m losing aggro, I’ll put Frost”.

Yes, I managed to find the rare breed of new player who actually listens to advice.

The run continued in a just as amazing manner.
* The DK took care of my mana. More than me, to be honest.
* The other DK didn’t use D&D because he was higher level and didn’t want to grab aggro.
* The warlock always kept me soulstoned.
* The whole group was patient with the DK, gave advice, and didn’t utter a ‘wtf’ or a ‘noob’.
* The DK apologized when he ran too much ahead of me. He apologized even when I let him die because I was busy eating instead of healing.
* The DK tried to get us to queue for another dungeon (he wanted a harder one to practice his new found skills), but we declined politely and he understood. From his language, I’m pretty sure it was a kid, which makes this even more impressive. It wouldn’t have been the first time an over-eager 12-year old pissed me off.

In the end, we weren’t pr0, we got lost a bit on the way, we fucked up a few pulls and I did forget I have Earth Shield until halfway in… but it was one of the most pleasant runs I’ve had in a while outside the guild. I hope my DK doesn’t become one of those gogogogogo tanks in 20 levels…

Patch days are fun. They’re a time to bond with your guild and find new and creative ways to keep entertained.

Of course, after we got the patch later than the whole US (yes, even later than the whiners), the login servers were overloaded, and then my battlegroup’s instance server died a fiery death. In real life terms, that meant we found the chat feature of our guild site and used it. Someone remembered the scourge chat logs, so our new unofficial greeting is “spider pride!!! >8<".

The server was supposed to come back at 6 ST and we mananged to log in around 8... still hoping there might be a raid. With the instance server down, everyone spent their time flying around Wyrmrest temple. And I mean everybody. I’ve never seen so many flying mounts in the same spot. It was oddly fascinating, I watched it for an hour while playing with the new features.

(Click for big image)

(By the way, RealID is pretty cool, but I still haven’t added more than 10 people, 9 of which I know IRL.)

Yesterday the instance servers did work, and we kicked dragon ass.

(After wiping for almost 4 hours. Yeah, life without the ICC buff is hard.)

Also, kids, remember: jumping off Dalaran in a bike is fun and non-lethal if you pop in flight form before you hit the ground.

Jumping off Dalaran in a bike is lethal if you hit an unexpected ledge while taking screenshots.