…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.]

Holidays are fun and exhausting. Fun because we saw a lot of great places (and great beaches!), exhausting because after the first 3 days I fell dead asleep at 10 (and because a loud 3-year old – not mine – can be hell).

Beach. I has it.

However, I did have my laptop with me and I did manage to find a good wifi connection, so my latest project, no. 4 in my quest to get all healers to 80, Aushra the shaman almost hit 60 while I was in Turkey.

This means two things:
1. I’m having fun! I like shammy healing and I think she will be my new main alt when she gets to 80. Also, OMG RaF is the best thing EVER, totally worth buying a second account.

2. Since my priest on Defias is 66, I am basically doing Outland twice, at the same time. This is not fun. I hope Deathwing sits on Auchindoun because the place is a shithole filled with tanks who don’t understand that if I’m being mana drained I need more fucking breaks than usual (yes, even though 2 hours ago they ran with a priest who could heal blind and one handed and was always on 110% mana).

It also seems like I’m a lucky charm. [That, or actually having main spec healers helps.] The guild is struggling through summer holidays and class balance, so with one healer gone things get pretty tough. Raids weren’t very happy while I was gone, but everything seems to be back on track. Class balance is still not ideal and we’re using a lot of offspecs/alts on occasion, but we are 6/12 in ICC heroic and we also managed to do a bunch of frostwyrm achievements. I’m constantly impressed by how well we’re doing considering we almost never get 10 main spec, main char, 100% sure sign ups… last night we ran with 1 offspec healer, 1 alt tank, and 1 guy who can’t follow instructions or do basic things, and we still got 3 or 4 achievements (mostly 1 shots) and a heroic. We might really get those pretty skeletons after all…

Here’s another beach to end with. Yes, you should envy me because I had a great holiday :D

I’ve been away for a while. I got a life and – ironically – it was because of WoW. Two weeks ago I got my ass on a plane, then on a bus, and went to Ireland to play my cow.

Ok, that wasn’t exactly the plan.

Let’s say I went to Ireland to visit the real people behind the cows. We did end up playing WoW for quite a while. And Mario Kart on Wii. And got our asses kicked by a 4-year old.

Now that I’m back I can confirm that yes, people who are nice in WoW are also nice IRL and that The Game That Kills Social Lives doesn’t really – this is not my first WoW-related travel and it won’t be the last. We played, we walked around, we ate dead cow in various incarnations (does that make us cannibals?), and I decided that Ireland has very nice people and very bad weather.

A cow post will probably show up here in a couple of days, but for the moment my lunch breaks are quite busy (two new co-workers to train) and my evenings are spent playing (trying to get Khrista past the horrible 50s) and watching Lost. I don’t know when job no. 2 will hit again, so I try to make the most of the break.

P.S. Altitis is bad, mkay? I’m trying to raid, level Khrista (priest), level Avilion (SAN lock) and then a friend makes a hunter on Alonsus and I dust off my hunter and go massacring The Barrens. Oh yes, and when the new RAF mount is released I’m making a rogue. Then, if time allows us, another druid which I plan to X-realm to Defias.

Not that I have 2 more slots on Alonsus, that is. Gah.

I was going to write about something more serious – raids and healing and trust. But I won’t, because I’m distracted and excited about something else.

In case I haven’t mentioned before, I love languages. I know two of them very well (Romanian – duh – and English) and another two at a decent level (French and Spanish). I can understand most Romance languages, I’ve heard enough German to be able to at least distinguish where words begin and end, I learnt Cyrillic when I traveled to Ukraine… and I always love talking about vocabulary, grammar, syntax and style. I guess that makes me a special kind of geek? My jobs have been language-related since I finished university; most of them involved writing or editing people’s writing, and most have been very fun.

What does that have to do with WoW? Well, the obvious first: by playing WoW I make sure I’m always speaking/writing English. Guild chat and forums, raids, talking with guildies outside the game and even meeting them – all this happens in English. More, I got used to many different accents, which is proving very useful now, when I’m in a team consisting of an American, a Filipina, an Ukrainian and an Asian (not sure about the exact country). Trust me, conferences on sucky phones require very good accent-understanding skills.

So, while I get the usefulness of servers divided by language, I don’t like them. I wouldn’t be caught dead on a RO one – partly because 90% of the Romanians I met in game are idiots and partly because I find that very limiting. I like speaking English and meeting people from other cultures. I’d also like to practice the other languages I know, but see, both Spanish and French have their own servers. In my 3 years of WoW, I’ve met one girl from Spain who played on my EN server, and that’s it.

However, despite my dislike of the idea of language-divided servers, I giggle like a kid when I talk with someone with a client in another language or when I join/read about EN/FR/DE servers. A new guildie is from Germany, so I almost died once trying to read what his DBM was saying instead of “Malleable goo on me”… then he got his Roter Protodrache and it was even funnier. A friend used to play on a French realm, so I found out about the wonders of “boubou” (bouclier – shield) and “foufou” (furtif – rogue). I’m having a blast reading Protflashes’ World of Frenchcraft. My short stay on a Spanish server taught me I’m a “cura” (healer), that I will be a “pollo” at level 40 (chicken – I couldn’t for the life of me remember what moonkin translates to exactly) and that I can express my anger fairly well even in Spanish.

So after debating käsekrainers and reading about the Protflashes and Nefernet speaking/learning French, I had a brilliant idea: hey, let’s make a language channel! Two minutes later, I realized the odds of SAN having other language geeks were small, so I scrapped it. And today… squee, it looks like I’m not the only one interested in this, because Nefernet suggested we make language channels for SAN members! The bandwagon was jumped upon, and I can’t wait for tonight. So far there’s SANfr, SANsp, SANde and SANit.. but of course everyone’s free to make more.

You’ll find me in the Spanish and French ones, bugging people and not leveling my warlock.

This post has been in my head for over a year and was supposed to be called “Why I love my guild”. Everytime I decided to write it, some sort of drama would happen and make me not love my guild anymore. So it’s not going to be about a particular guild; I don’t get so attached anymore. Instead it will be about what I like most about WoW: the social aspect.

The background
Two or so years ago, my then-friend, current boyfriend gave me WoW Vanilla and told me to try it out. The sales pitch? “It’s like Yahoo Messenger with characters.” I gave in and installed it.

My first character

The first months sucked. I didn’t know anything, I was utterly lost and I hated the game. I was too scared to join a group, I only talked to the two people I knew in real life and who were helping me level, I was basically playing an RPG not an MMO. However, I slowly started to like it… and at level 47 I joined my boyfriend’s guild. I spent a month not saying one word in guild chat – they were raiders and I was a total noob; I’m ok with being dumb, but I don’t like strangers knowing it, so I kept to myself.

Level 70 hit, and after the high of getting my first max-level char I got to an all-time low: now what? I had only the vaguest idea about gear, no clue about enchants and gems, never thought of finding a blog for advice, and my DPS was horrible (not that I had Recount or anything). Then a kind soul stepped in, dragged me to Shattrath, hunted down enchanters and jewelcrafters and got me all set up. He was a tank and not known for being very friendly, but without him I’d have been absolutely dead. Despite being bad at a class that was already bad, my guild let me raid, boosted my ass in Kara, taught me what raiding was about – and I had a blast in the process.

Naked party before a SSC run

We raided T5 for a few good months… then drama ensued. I came home from vacation to half a guild gone and no chance of getting my Hand of Ad’al (I’m still bitter about that). After that split the guild wasn’t the same, but I stuck it out because most of the people were nice – some I could call friends. Slowly but surely, people started leaving; the management of the guild changed; I was an officer for a short time and I had the ugliest arguments in /o; it got to the point where I got angry even seeing certain people log in, so I left. A few social guilds later, I got back to raiding in the guild I’m in today… ironically (or fittingly?) created by a member of my first guild during one of the splits.

Despite all the drama, I never left the game and never considered a server change. It’s just pixels, but there’s real people behind those pixels, and too many of them are on my beloved Alonsus.

The now
One of the reasons I’ve always loved the internet was people. You can have good friends from your hometown and be perfectly happy, but I discovered that having friends with a different view on life is much more interesting. There’s the downside of not being able to go out with them every day… but I love being given reasons to travel.

So the best part of WoW, for me, is being part of an international guild (and server). I couldn’t imagine playing on a same-nationality server. My guildies and WoW friends come from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Switzerland, Spain, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, South Africa, Denmark, Russia, Belgium, Korea, Portugal, Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Germany, Ukraine – almost every country in Europe and some beyond.

I’m the tree on the right

For a lover of travel and different cultures this is a small paradise, especially when I can find someone who allows me to pick their brain about cultural difference and languages. I love my Vent with a dozen different accents, I love listening to the Scottish guy when he – rarely – speaks, I practice my British English and I can actually understand most of it now, I spoke Spanish with the rare Madrid girl who rolled on our server, I got used to hearing Romanian accents, I had raid leaders from at least 5 different countries. I learned 2 sentences in Welsh which I promptly forgot, I learned that “hello” in Lithuanian sounds very dirty in Romanian, I learned to swear in Finnish, I replaced my “fucking” with “bloody” (but I still hate “mate” or – ew – “m8″ with a passion), I learned where some countries were on the map.

And I met the people behind the screen – a day in London, running after the Eurostar on the way back, a week in the Netherlands and Belgium, a couple of hours in the mall down the street, and a long weekend in Ireland the coming April. Everyone was nice, everyone had social skills, I drank lots of international beer and had a blast.

My friends probably don’t want their faces all over the internet, so here’s me and a random kitty from Amsterdam

I lost touch with some people, I kept in touch with others. The friend in Netherlands calls me while getting drunk with one of our Russian ex-guildies; I call a friend to Ireland to tell her my net is down and I can’t raid, we rant online about games and boyfriends and clothes and jobs; the friend in Portugal spends 2 hours with me while I’m trying to fix my computer; I bitch at the Korean living in London about PuGs, guilds and real life. Sometimes I see my boyfriend in Dalaran more than in real life, because a log on screen takes 1 minute and getting to his place takes 45. We can make WoW jokes about real things and laugh our asses off – we raid the fridge or quest to the supermarket or learn new cooking recipes, he says the stupid “grats” joke to the microwave and I ignore it for the tenth time.

Boosting my boyfriend’s newly dinged shaman. Draenei power!

Even the bad is useful. I learned that adults can act like children, and that teens can be very mature. The biggest asses I met in-game was in their late 20s, some of the best raid leaders I had weren’t even 20 yet. I saw people quitting guilds over stupid reasons, arguments about purple pixels and people forgetting some might have real lives. Lessons in human nature, let’s call them. Pugging taught me patience, expecting the worst and enjoying pleasant surprises and fun with total strangers.

The future
It’s easy to say that World of Warcraft or the internet, in general, kills social interaction. Wrong. They only kill social interaction if you let them. I would argue that WoW is actually a great way of meeting new people. Why would it be any different than getting to know someone through your local knitting club or through a penpal network?

So thank you to all my WoW friends – for drunken nights on Vent, for first kills, for boosting my alts, for traveling, for showing and telling me about your countries, for stealthing in front when you know I’ll follow and ninja pull on my healer, for knowing that I lose focus and need to be smacked across the head, for helping me with professions, gear, specs, glyphs and weird achievements, for analyzing grammar and vocabulary in dozens of different languages, for supermarket mammoths, for endless summons when I get lost and for letting me bitch at the world. See you tonight in game.

I’m not running out of ideas, but this Blog Azeroth shared topic is a good opportunity to talk about something I like – me!

“What do you do when you can’t WoW?”

My old laptop. Stepping on it was a bad idea.

I’m lucky. I have a reliable internet connection, a backup, two WoW-capable computers and a boyfriend with all the above. None of my WoW absences have been caused by technological disasters (except for some ADSL deaths), but I do occassionally end up in places where WoW simply isn’t possible…

Sadly, I don’t have any simple solution for entertaining yourself while you can’t play. Very basic things work for me…
1. Reading. I love to read and, while I probably still do it more than the average person, I’m nowhere near my all-time highs. No computer/internet = a lot of catching up. I miss staying in bed all day because “OMG what happens next?!?”.

2. Writing comes with reading. I write book reviews on blog and I always want to rant or rave about how cool the last book was or how the writer sucks. I usually take advantage of WoW breaks to fiddle with the design too.

3. I used to watch a lot of TV series a couple of years ago, but my attention span has gotten smaller and smaller, so I haven’t done it in a while. That said, last year I took the laptop with me on holidays in places without internet and had a blast catching up on Lost and BSG. I still haven’t watched the last 2 episodes of BSG and that holiday was 10 months ago…

4. Although it’s not half as fun, cleaning is also on the list. I need a WoW break from time to time to move the mountains of discarded stuff from place to place… Sometimes I even cook! If I’m horribly bored, this can actually be entertaining – and audiobooks are perfect for when i’m mindlessly vacuuming.

5. But the best thing to do when you can’t WoW is… read about WoW. Whenever I’m bored at work I open WoW.com or click through blogs and get my game fix by proxy, then plan what I’ll do when I get home. I guess this won’t help anyone who’s away from WoW for a long time, but oh well, you can troll the forums or something, right?

6. Oh yeah, and sometimes I even go out. If it’s not too cold or too hot or too wet and I’m not too lazy. Yeah.

It never occured to me that healers are usually played by girls. I was DPS for 2+ years and most of the girls I knew back then also played DPS. I avoided healing, actually, it felt like way too much responsability for a noob like me. And then… in a moment of boredom I rolled a baby druid and discovered that healing is fun and rewarding, and that I actually like the responsability.

Since then, I’ve been paying more attention to articles about healing and a recurring theme keeps popping up: girls tend to roll healers because of their nurturing instincts. (And, to continue, males roll tanks because they like leading and “roar, me protect group”.) My first reaction would be to rant against traditional gender roles and all that, but… looks like in my case it’s more or less true. I like the way people depend on me. I like the way I can shield them from horrible death. I like that I’m the one in the back and not the leader. I like my falling leaves :P

A totally unscientific test on my guild reveals that the healing team has four girls, while there’s only one female tank and two DPS (both mages, incidentally, but one of them has a very good healer alt).

I can’t speak for everyone, but having tried all roles to an extent I have to say healing is by far my favorite. Although I’m sure people will disagree, I think the healer’s role is the most important – not because a group could exist without a tank or DPS, but because a healer has more means to save the group in an oh-shit situation. I’ve only recently started tanking seriously, but I feel a bit gimped on my pally: all I can do is keep the mobs on me (and maybe not even that, the taunts have a cooldown). Is a DPS standing in the fire? Am I getting hit too hard? Is there horrible AoE damage? All I can do is throw a Hand of Protection, shield myself and hope the healer knows what s/he’s doing. (And don’t even get me started on how much I miss the ability to innervate poor OOMs.)

The conclusion? There isn’t one, really. Although the idea that my instincts are guiding my play style ticked me off at start… who cares, after all? I like healing and that’s what’s important. And, thankfully, I also have alternatives: DPS for when I want to relax and watch big numbers on the screen or tank for when I’m feeling bossy and controlling. Yes, you can have your cake and eat it :)

I was reading WoW Insider one morning and ran into an interesting Breakfast Topic: Should the girlfriend play WoW?

295 comments later, it was clear people didn’t agree on one answer (of course). And that no one seemed to have the same experience as I did. Rather than adding comment 296 which no one would read, I figured I’d make a post out of it.

Why?

The opinions most prevalent through the comments were:
1. (Men) No, you’ll have to hold her hand and give her money all the time;
2. (Men) No, you need your own space;
3. (Women) Yes, I play and I give my boyfriend money;
4. (Men) Yes, she’ll understand you better, but have her create a char on another server;
5. (All) Yes, playing with your partner is fun!

I won’t rant and rave about the misconception that girl = won’t be able to play = a burden, because it seemed like the people who said this hadn’t actually tried to play with the girlfriend.

People I know

So far, all the girls I know who play with their boyfriends/husbands do perfectly well on their own. Ok, it might be because I’m in a raiding guild, so I only get to meet those girlfriends who have proved they can play, but they are girls and they do play with their partners, so they meet the definition. And they range from college students to mothers who go AFK during raids because the baby is crying to mothers who also have children in the guild, so it’s a pretty diverse group.

My story

I started playing because my boyfriend (then just friend) bought me the game and bugged me to install it. “It’s just like chatting on Yahoo Messenger, only with a character in front of you.” Seeing as I spend ages chatting online and love meeting new people, this was a good argument.

And yet I hated the game in the beginning. Too many buttons, too confusing, how should I know what I’m supposed to do etc. (I’m not much of a gamer, and my last RPG was Diablo 2.) So he made an alt and played with me until level 40 (with the occasional boost). I’m sure I was pretty annoying at start, because I’m impatient when learning something new, but aren’t all noobs?

The rest is history, as they say: followed him into a lovely guild at level 60, been there ever since, met a lot of helpful people and turned into a half-decent player at a point in time. Thanks to several guildies, not him, because his knowledge of warriors is about what mine is about moonkins, i.e. not much.

The money thing

I don’t recall ever asking for money, but I had 1500 g forced on me when I reached level 70 because “epic flying is so cool, get it NOW, don’t wait until you grind the rest of the money”. We argued, but he won, I took the money and flew away into the sunset.

As for the rest: I don’t need my hand held (except when I get lost in an instance, but I do that IRL too so it’s nothing new), I make my own money, I’m going to pay for my second epic mount as soon as my mage gets to 77, and I only take advantage of him when it comes to health pots. Hey, it’s not my fault that he’s an alchemist and my warrior is a squishy plate wearer who thinks she can tank and takes on more than she should… I usually pester him about boosts, but it almost never works… thank God for bored guildies.

Raiding

Another seldom-mentioned problem was raiding. One advice on Wow Insider was to make sure you didn’t share tier tokens. I had no idea what tokens were when I rolled my warrior, but I happily shared the token with my druid boyfriend and we never had a problem. If he has more DKP than me, he should get it, what does the relationship have to do with it?

As for favoritism… pfff. Right. People assume that because he’s the raid leader I get preferential treatment. Nothing could be more wrong: I get scolded during the raid with all the rest when we do something stupid, and I get extra bitching IRL too. My only priviledges are being able to choose when I raid without bothering to unsign off our raid planner and getting priority in case someone doesn’t show up… but seeing as I’m not that crazy about raiding every night, I don’t use those priviledges too often.

So?

The key point here: don’t generalize. Don’t expect people to change just because they’re in a game. A clingy person will be clingy IRL too, an independent person will want to keep being independent in-game. If she starts playing, of course she’ll be a noob – weren’t you? It’s the personality that will decide what happens next, not the sex.

Sunday morning. I’m happily doing SSO dailies. Boyfriend wakes up and logs in. “Good morning dear, how are you?” would be a normal thing to hear in this situation, right?

Wrong. What I get is a bit different: “You are in tonight’s raid, you MUST read about Rage Winterchill and Anetheron!”. Er, hi honey, ok.
(We did down him that night.)

A few days later, he’s coming over and his life won’t be complete if he doesn’t get cheese. I am less than excited to go out in the scary world, so I get an explanation of the way I should handle the situation:
“Go hunt for the cheese. Yes, outside. Your group goes to position ‘Market’ where it has to do a body pull on the mob ‘Feta’, then loot it, then bring it home.”
It worked, so I successfully looted it and it turned out to be very tasty.