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.

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.

So, the NDA was lifted. It’s time to rejoice. I’m just a bit… puzzled.

I was in the Alpha. I should have all this info stashed up to share with the world and bask in the pageviews. I should have tons of posts written about the changes. I don’t.

[Luckily for you, Lissanna was also in the Alpha and she's promised some yummy posts.]

I maybe played the Alpha for 10 hours in total, which were spent:
- leveling a worgen hunter to 11
- making a goblin mage, logging into her, looking around and logging out
- flying around on my druid in Elwynn forest to see the big hole in Stormwind
- doing one run of Blackrock whateveritscalled
- doing the first few quests of Vashj’ir.

So I don’t have anything much to say yet. I probably won’t spend much time now in the beta either, because, honestly, I have enough to do on live, and I don’t want to spoil my Cataclysm leveling. I’m curious about the changes, but I don’t want to get bored of the quests before the expansion even hits.

So, no major insights, just a few observations. Spoilers be here, so don’t carry on if you want to skip them.

Healing touch is (at least was, in a previous build) AMAZING. A much shorter cast time and a lot of healing. I really, really, really hope it stays like this. Judging by this page, it has the same base cast time as Nourish (3 seconds), so I doubt it’s going to stay the same, but with my haste it was a really big and fairly fast heal. You mean I could actually tank heal now without spamming Nourish like crazy and hoping s/he won’t get plastered?

Tree form on a cooldown is depressing. I know I said it’s not so bad, but healing without being a tree felt… wrong.

Blackrock whatever is just as ugly as the other Blackrock dungeons. I hate all that lava. I don’t know if it will remain the same difficulty in live, but it didn’t pose any problems to us (our gear was T10 but not BiS). The blue drops were better than what we were wearing. Yep, our epics will be replaced very very fast.

Vashj’ir is fun and leveling underwater rocks. The quests are also better than the usual ‘bring me 20 of these’.

The worgen starter zone is phased and it’s annoying. I was leveling with friends, but they started a bit after me so we couldn’t even see each other. On the bright side, they finally put a mailbox there – yay heirlooms without running half the map!

Flying in the old world ROCKS. I only explored a tiny bit (I wanted to see wtf the big hole in Stormwind was), but whooooosh birdie!

That’s it for now. I might make a separate post where people can ask questions, if anyone’s interested. I don’t know much (anything) about lore, I won’t do many quests, but if you want me to take a screenshot of this place or look for that NPC… no problem.

I’m having a lot of fun reading the QQ. This time around we got 66 pages of fun on this thread alone, and it’s doing wonders to get rid of office boredom.

What’s the problem, you say? Oh, life and death, of course. Blizzard delayed Ruby Sanctum with a week on the US realms, to make it coincide with the European release. And then, shock horror!!, they launched it in the middle of 24h maintenance on a bunch of servers. The rage, the foaming at the mouth, the victimizing, the forum sigs… It’s not fair, they promised we’d all get the raid at the same time!

Did anyone stop and think that Europe has Wednesday maintenance, which means even with the 24h maintenance, ALL the US realms still got to see RS before us?

No?

Ok, keep saying how this is the death of WoW and how everyone will quit the game now.

Roleplaying and me – not a love story
I don’t understand RP.

I can see RP as a form of creative writing; getting into a character’s head is probably very useful for authors and doing it with a “real” avatar might be easier. That being said, despite being a book lover, I find in-character blog posts utterly boring. I honestly tried to read a few and didn’t last past the first paragraph. Why would I want to know what your undead priest did yesterday? (Yes, I know it’s somewhat of a contradiction, given how I apparently do care what the real person behind the priest did in last week’s raid.) The only sort-of-RP stories I’ve enjoyed were Tam’s Gerald posts, but that’s only because he’s funny.

My priest on Defias Brotherhood RP-PvP

On the other hand, in-game RP is fascinating… from a voyeuristic point of view. I have characters on two RP servers and seeing RP is interesting, it’s experiencing a completely different side of WoW, even though that side isn’t for me. However, I found RPers quite unwelcoming, despite being told the opposite. I ended up on my first RP server because I had RL friends there, so I posted on the realm forums asking for a leveling guild that doesn’t require RP. Cue 20 posts telling me to gtfo back to my server and stop ruining their fun. Needless to say, I had an appropriate name, knew the rules and wasn’t in the least interested in griefing… but hey, better flame, then ask! Then came the Too Many Annas ‘incident’ and the throngs of RP ‘defenders’ coming down on one person who didn’t know better… yep, friendly folk.

In conclusion, so far RP servers seem just the same as normal servers: idiots and nice people alike. And the spelling? No, people on RP servers aren’t better at that, no matter how much I wish it were true.

As for RP itself, I have trouble understanding why someone would want to become someone else. I can find rational explanations, of course, from depression to a desire to explore one’s hidden sides, but I never had any sort of impulse to do that. It probably has a lot to do with my reasons for playing the game: it’s less about the lore and the fantasy setting and more about the social side. When I meet people, I want to meet Billy or Mary, not Ghortok the orc or Xxbelfgirlxx. How can a connection with a fictional character mean anything? If it’s just a different form of fiction, why wouldn’t I just read a book? The odds of finding a good writer are higher than finding a good RPer, and then I’d be able to lose myself in the story without having to interact with anyone. (Antisocial? Maybe.)

My green haired night elf
So we get to something I’ve thinking about for a long time: racial choices. My first character was a human and I tried to make her look as similar as possible to me (oh, the sad day I discovered I can’t have the proper ponytail). It took me a year to consider making something non-human; they all seemed so alien and not-me.

I don’t RP, but I still like pretty clothes.

Since then, my preferences have changed: human aside, I have two level 80 draenei, one night elf, and my following 80s will be a night elf and a draenei. On the Alliance side, I might level a gnome to 80 at some point (my rogue is cute as a button, but I just can’t make myself like that class), and if I ever went Horde I’d have a collection of blood elves and maybe a tauren and an undead. I refuse to play other races – I find dwarves ugly and/or boring, while trolls and orcs are just plain horrible (yes, even the ‘nice’ faces). I keep reading about people who love their ’sexy orcs’ and it boggles the mind: how can someone think that horrible green scowling Hulk can be pretty?! Sorry orc lovers.

But why?
Today, this post from Pilf got me thinking. Why do I play the classes I do? It got me thinking so much it got out of hand and I decided to make a post instead of a huge comment.

And I think the real explanation finally occured to me: I play those classes (and always female) because I find them visually appealing (sexy, pretty, nice, cute… etc) and that’s how I want the real me to be seen. I want to be a pretty girl in real life, so I want to project that in the game world too; I assume that people who play ‘ugly’ characters do it in a more RP-ish way (the characters have their own personality, so their appearance doesn’t reflect on the ‘owner’). I doubt my preference for pretty characters comes from some massive feeling of not being good enough: I’m a fairly standard European woman and I’m generally OK with my looks. Of course, I’d change things if I could (wouldn’t anyone?), but I don’t see anything majorly wrong with me.

Instead, I think WoW is a perfect playground for dress up and a distorted mirror to see a “virtual Jen” closer to the “real Jen” I’d like to be. I get to play hot girls and dress them up in pretty robes (the only thing I hate about heirlooms is the way my clothies never get to wear pretty things). I get to stare at my elf’s boobs in raids (they’re better than mine, but hey, I’m happy with virtual ones). I get to change her hair and tattoos once a week, even though I’ve had the same haircut for 10 years in real life and I generally can’t be arsed wearing make up. I get to talk about virtual fashion with friends I can’t see IRL.

Is there a conclusion to this? Probably not, but I’m interested in other opinions on the subject. Please keep in mind that, even though I’m personally not interested in RP or in-character blogs, that doesn’t mean they suck and need to disappear. No flames please, kthx.

Exactly a month ago, Windsoar had a blog anniversary. A little less than a month ago, I asked for a blogging topic in her muse thread and… I pretty much let it go, since I was busy/lazy. But it got me thinking and tonight something happened to remind me of it.

/cast Muse

You state you’d like a Healer, Tank and DPS fairly geared and ready for current content. How’s that going?

(That’s what I say in my about, by the way.)

That page was written when I started this blog – I was raiding on my druid, gearing my mage and leveling my paladin. In the meantime, things have changed.

My druid is still my main and her healing gear is pretty good. I have a +hit offhand which I can’t seem to get rid of, and I could use a new trinket, but all in all nothing to complain. Her moonkin gear is decent (if not fully enchanted and gemmed)… ignoring the fact that my moonkin could get nice wild growth bonuses since I use my resto tier gear. Since I’m only moonkin once in a blue moon, for 6 bosses, I haven’t bothered investing in moonkin tier yet (not that I had the Frosts to do it anyway).

My paladin is slowly but surely gathering a nice collection of pretties. Last week’s ICC alt run got me a new weapon and a belt to replace my sucky ilvl 219 one, plus a few healer items. The tank set is way ahead of the holy one, but I can now say I can safely heal at least the first 6-7 ICC bosses too. Problems still arise, of course, but they have more to do with my druid twitchiness than with gear. (I’m so used to bouncing around while throwing HoTs, a stationary paladin is a huge change.)

My mage… is pretty much abandoned now. At some point I’ll run 3 more heroics on her to get enough Frosts for a new Saronite, but that’s about it. I don’t really like the playstyle, so I can’t get interested enough to learn to play her properly.

My warrior is where things change. She’s been my mote farmer ever since I quit my guild back in Ulduar and I thought I was done with melee, but seeing our warriors kick ass in ICC made me want to play her again. Her gear is a bit on the depressing side (average item level 214 according to this site – useful, by the way, for those of us who are curious but don’t want to clutter their addon list with GearScore) and she can’t even go to HoR heroic, but I did a few randoms on her and my axes are still fun. My current goal is to get her two Bryntrolls – because I love matching weapons (used to have two Jawbones, now I have two – ugly – Edges of Ruin). I haven’t yet found a point to this gearing, since the odds of me raiding on her again are really slim, but hey, pretty weapons smashing the faces of mobs!

This brings us to the other topic of this post, the WTF moment. Last night I queued up for a random dungeon. First surprise, the whole group was from Alonsus. Rare, but nothing extraordinary. The tank is called Tzepes (as in Vlad, the Impaler), so I know he’s Romanian, but I don’t like broadcasting my nationality so I shut up and kill. 5 minutes into the instance, the healer drops group, and we get someone called Krina from another realm. The name sounds Romanian again, but what are the odds? Very high, it seems, as she asks the tank, in Romanian, to go slow. At that point, the other 2 DPS in the run pipe up and say they’re Romanian too.

And then the healer asks if I’m that Jen with the blog. At this point, I’m looking at the screen and going WTF. The odds of 5 people in the same random PuG coming from the same country were small… the odds of one of them actually knowing me were tiny. I’m not sure if I’m proud or just weirded out… but it’s a fun story to tell nevertheless. Let’s just say I’m famous. Hi Krina and everyone else on the Cruelty battlegroup I might end up playing with :)

[Regular posting might resume soon or not, depending on how work goes. I have a lot of single abstract gnome screenshots to post...]

Just this: I can’t just “roll a priest” if I “want to see my armor”. I do have a priest (and a paladin, and a shaman) and I like druids because of the healing style, NOT because they have tree form. If you’re playing a druid strictly for the form… are you serious?

I like my tree form (mostly because it’s unique and it makes it easier to position people in the raid – Run to the tree!), but I DO want to see my armor. I heal heroics in caster form because I want to see my armor and my pretty elf. I change my hair color/haircut every few weeks, I had a crush on the T9 chest + T8 helm, I LIKE seeing myself when I’m playing, not a big treant.

I do like my special form and I was hoping we’d get a redesign in Cataclysm (different colored leaves based on hair color?), but I can’t get angry about the cooldown-based tree form. My arguments right now are 50% pro and 50% con… but “if you want to see your armor, roll a priest” is NOT a valid one.

Hint: When it’s April 1st and a blogger says s/he is:
- quitting WoW
- deleting the blog
- changing the main s/he was known for, changing faction, changing race, changing spec in a drastic way
- changing the blog layout to something terribly silly

…it’s not for real.

This has been a public service announcement from grumpy Jen who doesn’t like April Fools so is always on the lookout for “jokes”.
(Hint #2: I find 99% of April Fools jokes very unfunny.)

Also, tomorrow I leave on a short holiday to visit two guildies (aka Truffles and Ballon in the cow stories), so unless we get very lucky tonight and we kill BQL and I feel like bragging… see you next week.

Oh, and the public transport strike we had this morning was NOT a joke, hence added grumpiness.

What noun, what recruiting, what bloggers? Well, Tam from Righteous Orbs had this idea: since we’re all WoW bloggers (or readers)… why don’t we actually play WoW together? Now we can, in <Single Abstract Noun>. Because of that small problem of oceans between continents and two different WoW clients, there’s actually two guilds: one on Argent Dawn-EU, made by Tam, and one on Argent Dawn-US, made by MissMedicina. The EU version already has a handful of players and it seems like they had fun last night. I could only pop by really really fast on a raid break, then I had to run just as fast when Vent started going “Jeeeen where are you?”.

My new baby is Avilion, a blood elf warlock who managed to hit level 2 (whoa) this morning before work. I wanted to roll a healer, but I’ve already have one of each class at various levels… and my other warlock was abandoned at 20, so I figured one more try can’t hurt.

I most likely won’t have time to play in the next few weeks (work crits me for 10k), but yay, sounds like fun. And I have the say the name is BRILLIANT. Especially considering my main’s guild name is also a single abstract noun… and so was my previous guild’s…

There’s a little trade troll inside of me.

Ok, I’ve admitted it. I love Trade, and raid General chat, and people spamming shit in Local Defense. I don’t know why; after all, most of the time it’s just mindless spam, QQ or calling other people noobs. And it gets worse: I like getting involved. You know the dude telling the other people to STFU and trying to be funny? Yes, that’s me.

In my defense, I also contribute useful info. I actually answer people’s questions with legitimate info. I report spammers, even though I doubt anything happens to them. I don’t go as far as joining the Anal or Dirge spam. Still…

I have to sit on my fingers not to join the raid General chat. Ok, so it’s no more than “Guild X sucks” or “Hai guild Y!”, but then I see names I know! Or I think of a really witty comeback! Then I have to remind myself that we’re mid-boss fight and I’m supposed to look at Grid and not the chat, dammit. (I got in trouble for that with raid leaders more than once.)

I’m sure there’s an explanation for this. Until I learn it, I’ll call it the need to socialize. And my superhero complex. The world needs me to set idiots straight! Really.