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    • Archive for March, 2010

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    Whooosh


    2010 - 03.31

    Posted in Adventures in videogaming, People of WoW | No Comments »

    I’ve just discovered Klepsacovic has had some fun trolling the official forums. Looks like Nethaera got there pretty quickly and locked the thread before too many sense-of-humour-failures whooooshed under the (let’s face it) reasonably visible joke threshold and spewed rage everywhere. She did write him a poem, though. I like that.

    Whilst I’m not sure that the official forums need any more noise obscuring the signal, the post did make me grin. I guess, given my past form when it comes to “back in the good old days of WoW”, that’s not so surprising.

    Did I miss something?

    I’m always surprised by how many people *don’t* get jokes like these though. Looking at the timestamps, there were four responses in four minutes, and only two of them managed to spot the pun. I think some kind of alert (“warning: may contain jokes!”) should be part of the things that you’re taught when you first venture out onto the wild, wild internether. It’s twisty out there, after all [clique reference]. Perhaps we could also include:

    Chat rooms/guild chat/forums are like huge pubs. You’ll hear lots of very interesting stuff. Not all of it will be true and not everyone will be nice. Also, at some point a drunken doofus will probably stumble into your conversation and talk utter crap until you find a way of getting rid of them.

    Wikipedia/EJ/<community reference of your choice> is also like a pub, albeit a decent pub on quiz night where the cash prize is omg £250. There’s loads of smart people, loads of great information but you *still* can’t believe everything you hear. Even sophisticated smart people have a cognac too many every now and again. And that drunken bloke is probably still in here somewhere.

    Internet commenters are like drunks. They reply first, think later. And faced with confusion, they either hit you or burst into tears. Or both. Whichever it is, your drink will be flat/warm/cold/gone by the time you’ve sorted everything out.

    Ok, I think I’ve stretched that particular simile well past comfortable tolerances so I’ll stop there. Also, I need to stop drinking in Lewisham.

    Around and about


    2010 - 03.28

    Tags: , , , ,
    Posted in Adventures in videogaming, General purpose whinging, Raiding for fun (profit be damned) | 2 Comments »

    I’ve failed in my blogging this week. I had intended to do Jaedia’s explorer task and take a wander through the Caverns of Time, but other things kept distracting me — usually just after I’d made my way in. What I’ve seen so far is … interesting. I still haven’t worked out what might happen if I wander over to Gadgetzan — am I *really* in Tanaris, or in some odd CoT-instanced version? I don’t know yet (shh, don’t tell me) but I’ll find out.

    It’s been a slightly fractured week for me, on the WoW front. Earlier in the week, my guild were putting together a group for the weekly raid quest and, having waited for 45mins, directed a bunch of people to the relevant quest-giver* and chatted away in guildchat about the run, I was somewhat dismayed to find everyone had zoned into Naxx and I hadn’t been invited, despite having raised my hand a number of times.

    Actually, “somewhat dismayed” might be something of an understatement. I was pretty much furious. Coincidentally, and possibly fortuitously, I’d read the essay on raging at Righteous Orbs earlier that day. Whether that influenced my reaction I don’t know; but I simply asked if the group had already formed, and when I got an “OMG! I thought you were already here” response, managed an “Oh. Shame. Never mind.”

    Yeah, ok — a bit passive-aggressive I suppose. I was in the grip of a completely disproportional temper tantrum (“You play game with SOMEONE ELSE?! Anorak SMASH!”) and it was the best I could do. I guess I won’t be winning prizes for diplomacy or maturity.

    I bounced quickly to an alt but decided it would be entirely too annoying to watch the achievement spam from the newish 80s in guildchat, so I switched to Argent Dawn, my baby belf paladin and the comforting chatter of SAN for an hour or so, finally reaching level 20 and acquiring a rez for my healing arsenal. If you’re in the grip of guildrage I can definitely recommend spending an hour or two there — it’s very therapeutic.

    The following night (I think) I was again on Argent Dawn, this time running Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep with, if I remember correctly, included Llarisa’s tankcow, Thaliana and Conjaw — plus an amusing PuG’d rogue on the SFK run. As seems to be the pattern for SAN guildruns, we had a fabulous time (I certainly did). We also had some light entertainment from the rogue (whose name I forget) whose occasional faux pas were greatly amusing. Particularly fun was the group’s response to his posting recount to party chat — effectively “kiss me first”. All good fun.

    A return to normality at the end of the week meant rep running in ICC with the guild and getting the Ashen Band of Greater Might just before we broke up for the evening, and a couple of fun HCs.

    Time now to continue the weekend’s RL fun — having already gone speedboating on the Thames, it’s time for a dinner with friends. Have fun everyone!

    Did I just meet Snottydin?


    2010 - 03.20

    Tags: , , ,
    Posted in A funny thing happened on the way to the PuG, People of WoW | 1 Comment »

    Friday night found me rep farming trash in ICC again, and having a great time. We had a really friendly, chatty group — again a mix of guildies and others. And, when one of the randoms inevitably did start whinging about gearscore and DPS, and I (with the aid of a couple of whiskies inside me) leapt up in defense of the person targetted, there was a general outcry of “GS sucks, stop whining” type comments and I felt very much the paladin!

    Anyway. The run was also remarkable because we might have had Snottydin as our healer! Ok, she obviously wasn’t on top form and wasn’t flirting with anyone (that I noticed, anyway) but check this out:

    Snottydin: is that you?

    Snottydin: is that you?

    I rest my case.

    A QUICK EDIT: to be fair to the anonymous healer — she totally *could* solo heal ICC trash (lol).

    Armour design: did this happen? Does this happen?


    2010 - 03.17

    Tags: , ,
    Posted in The Question-asker | 2 Comments »

    When hunting for information yesterday, I came across this page on worldofwarcraft.com. It was linked from another page on the site as some of Blizzard’s original thoughts on raid design. So far, so interesting, but it was the armour design information that caught my eye. It’s a fair way down, so I’ll quote it here.

    Our raid loot will have a unique look too. When they see Onyxia loot, they’ll know that you killed the dragon. Obviously the loot has to scale with the difficulty of the encounter, so raid bosses that are lower-tiered will still give good loot, but not nearly as good as that from higher-tiered bosses. Despite this, even the lowest-tier raid bosses will give better loot than a typical dungeon boss, even a level 60 one.

    In particular, the first two sentences: “Our raid loot will have a unique look too. When they see Onyxia loot, they’ll know that you killed the dragon.”

    Did that happen? One of the complaints I’ve heard about endgame gear is that you don’t get much of a chance to make yourself distinctive with it: if you’re wearing tier 9, then you’ll look just like all of the other <insert your class here>s wearing tier 9, and so on.

    But if you could get the same stats with a different visual, depending on where you got it, then that could be a chance to be an individual. It might also give people who persist through tougher content a chance to show it. For example: my main, Theanorak, is currently wearing 4pc tier 9 thanks to the dungeon finder making it easy-peasy to collect Triumph badges. But what if I’d got my badges by raiding? What if I’d got my loot because it dropped at the end of an epic boss fight (that does happen, right?) and I won the roll? The only way you’d be able to tell is by looking at my achievements.

    Wouldn’t it be nice if you could see where/how I got my tier 9 gear just by looking at it? Of course, that would make TA’s gear a bit George-of-Asda (Wal-mart, for those of you outside the UK), but as long as the stats were the same it would make no difference. If Blizzard wanted to get *really* wild, they could actually theme items appropriately — so Onyxia’s loot would be dragonscale-y, and everything that dropped from Putricide would have scabrous bits falling off it. Hmm, well, you get the idea.

    Of course, it’s a ton of extra work for Blizzard’s modelers and designers, but the subject of identity is obviously one they’re considering at the moment, if the “vanity cape” idea is anything to go by. And I bet people other than me would like it.

    Oops, I broke it


    2010 - 03.17

    Tags:
    Posted in Dev test | No Comments »

    Waaaah!

    Did some theme editing last night, and everything’s peachy. No problems, no fuss. Added a sitemap plugin and fixed the permissions so it could work? Easy. I even fixed the stylesheet so you can actually see links in the text! Overconfidence is risky, though: I try to make one tiny change to the uploader and somehow manage to break everything. Go me.

    Fixed now (obviously) but… sheesh.

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