Stories of WoW

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.

Continue reading Missed opportunities?

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.

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

There is one problem with my guild (aside from the “will we get 10 people tonight or not?”). The problem has caused me a lot of sleepless nights in the past week. We’re too bloody chatty.

Soulbound raids (in theory, at least) from 8 to 11 pm server time. I chose those times because 11 ST is midnight for me, which meant an hour earlier than my previous guild, which meant I could go to sleep earlier and not be a zombie at work.

Easier said than done. All my guildies are so nice that I end up spending 2 more hours on Vent after the raid. Or instead of the raid. Or before and after the raid. It gets worse when leveling alts. We’re RAFing and want to get to 60 before I leave on holiday tomorrow, so me and Valli have been spending every free moment on our alts, and on Vent of course. Apparently our bitching at PUGs is entertaining, because we keep getting company, sometimes Vent-only, sometimes for leveling/boosting. And it’s so goddamn fun that I can’t quit.

Two days ago, it was “boost your friends day”, so Valli’s boyfriend grabbed his mage and took us plus a guildie to a leisurely walk in Uldaman. The place is a shithole as usual, but being led like a pack of hyper sheep was much more fun than an actual PuG. (Fact: men really are better at directions.) After 2 hours of picking up quests, turning in quests, waiting for the dead dwarf to come back to life, I actually started to find “That’s what she said” jokes funny. Went to bed at 1.30, braaaainz at work.

Yesterday, it was “raid called early so let’s get to 50 day”. We helped a druid get her quests in ST done (I have such a soft spot for baby trees), which meant a long, LONG dungeon, with a bunch of uncooperative players who didn’t know what to do and didn’t know how to follow instructions. By the time we were done, I realized it was 2 am and us girls and our shammy had been chatting for 3 hours. Went to bed at 2.00, braaainz at work.

They’re mean, evil people and they’re making me lose sleep. But how can I resist it? We really are girls in WoW too, so we do squee over pretty dresses, grumpy boyfriend was laughing his ass off in the background, the crude jokes were flying, I was being bitched at regularly… a perfect day of WoW-life.

Tomorrow I’m leaving for Turkey, hopefully on a good note: we seem to have enough sign-ups, of the appropriate classes, for the raid tonight, so we’re going to try Deathwhisper and finish our Storming the Citadel heroic.

See you on the other side, with more tan!

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.