Tier pieces or just a candle – how much does it matter what the boss drops for our willingness to wipe on him?

Is it worth wiping on Al’Akir, considering that he only drops some randomly enchanted stuff and no tier pieces whatsoever?

How many wipes does it take before you say: “screw this, let’s go and grab some more epics from the bosses we already have on farm?”

Recent discussions in my guild showed that there are many different views on this. Some players argue that it’s a waste of time, while others (including me) think that the lack of interesting loot is highly irrelevant and that we’ve never shied away from any challenge previously, so why would we now?

So far I think it’s the loot-is-irrelevant side that is winning. Last Sunday we had a wipe night in good old fashioned style, 22 in a row, without ever making it into phase 3. In my world it’s just a starter. When we’re up above 100 wipes we could start talking, and maybe playing the Benny Hill signature on vent during the corpse runs. But until then? No reason to despair.

Gear cap at level 359?
It’s a funny thing though, how much we differ in the value we put to loot – how important it is to us as motivator. One of the commenters on Ghostcrawler’s post on raid difficulties questioned the idea of constant gear progression through the tiers. Stop handing out better and better epic loot, was his suggestion. Put a cap at item level 359 so the players don’t become more powerful. The point of raiding isn’t to get loot anyway; it’s the feeling of accomplishment, of downing the boss. According to him, they could award vanity items for fluff, fun and bragging. The gear levelling curve should be capped though.

As I read it I asked myself: how many raiders would keep raiding if there wasn’t any more gear to win, if your character didn’t get more powerful thanks to it. How many would be willing to wipe o Al’Akir if it only cost you time and consumables, with no reward apart from the entertainment during the raid? My answer is: probably very few. Just look at what happens to the final tier instances during the months before a new expansion is about to be launched.

I’m pretty certain that more players would have bothered about Ruby Sanctum if it, for instance, had awarded loot that you couldn’t equip right away, but would be useful later on at level 85. Like it or not, to most players – but mind you, not all – WoW is still very much all about improving your character from a gear point of view until you hit the ceiling and can’t realistically improve it anymore.

Raiding like dancing
But does it really have to be that way? Let’s make a parallel to my other current hobby, namely historical dances. Every second week I’m raiding with my dance guild. Well, we don’t call it a raid, but actually it feels pretty much like it, especially those nights when we get a new boss to conquer, a new dance to learn, upon the ones we already have on farm. Just like in any raid there are all those moves and actions that the group of 10-20 people have to learn to master. I

Initially we wipe a lot, since there’s always one or two who miss out something completely. And our learning curves differ a bit, so we have to wait for each other. But eventually, after many wipes, and many nights of training, it clicks and we nail the dance and afterwards we put our hands in the air and cheer of relief, happiness and pride of what we’ve accomplished. Do we get any loot? Not at all. Not as much as an achievement. All we get is the sense of having learned to master something, as a group. The joy of making it well, of beating the challenge. And that’s all we ask for.

To me raiding in WoW is pretty much the same thing as learning how to dance a pavane, a branle or a country dance, with the difference that the raid group is dominated by men rather than by women, that we're in physical and not just digital contact, and that there doesn’t come any fire balls from my hands (even though they DO get sweaty sometimes)

Different motivations
I feel a confession is incoming and I know my guild officers won’t be pleased to hear this. But to be honest: most of the time when I raid I have no idea of what loot will drop from a certain boss. I know I should; I know I’m expected to plan my gear in advance and keep close track on such things. But it’s so largely irrelevant for my motivation and generally it’s easy enough for me to see weather a drop is an upgrade or not. I’d rather spend time studying the dance moves than the loot lists, which just bore me out of my mind.

For me WoW isn’t about the loot, it never was. Al’Akir could drop candles for what I was concerned. I would still have a burning desire to keep wiping on him until we’ve learned the dance.

This said: I don’t look down on loot driven players. I just note the fact that we’re not triggered by the same things in the game. I enjoy dancing and reaching the top of the mountain, and the more suffering we’ve been through on the way, the happier I’ll be once I get there. Others get their kicks from a new piece of gear or from topping the damage chart. Different players have different motivations, and I guess that’s all fine, as long as we’re working towards the same goal and do it as a team.

Friday night
Enough talk about loot. Let’s get to the essentials: a drink and a fireplace is all I ask for right now. I have no worries to share, no tears to shred, no doom or gloom or sad tidings from the world. Actually I have one thing I’d like to mention. In case you haven’t already seen it, head over the The Daily Blink and see what buffs the mages will get in 4.1. At least it gave me a refreshing laugh. Now I remember why I chose to play a mage in the first place. Under the cover of cute pink pigtails, I’m made out of evil.

And with those words I’ll bring out the toast for the week. It goes to all guilds that are currently wiping on a boss. May your dancing be enjoyable and eventually successful! May the RNG force be with you in the loot bag!

Cheers!

The window that can bring your guild together

I think we can agree on that teamwork is one of the essentials in raiding.

You won’t kill a single boss if you have 10 or 25 individuals, each one running their own show without paying too much attention to what everyone else is doing. Optimal enchants and precious gems won’t help you if the group mind is lacking.

Yet I have the feeling that many raid teams spend way more time on memorizing every little detail in Tankspot videos or penetrating the latest spellrotation discussions at EJ than they spend time thinking about how they could develop their raiding team and bring it all together.

Why bother?
I’m not sure why this is. Perhaps the theories and suggestions about group development are just too vague and therefore more difficult to grasp than the solid number-crunching figures of strategies and spec optimization. After all, it’s not your guild happiness level that literally kills bosses. It’s raw damage, point by point. So why bother about psychology?

One reason why you should is that a stable raiding team which manages to hold together overtime, not getting dragged down by a huge turnover, probably will be more successful. in the long run Handling internal conflicts (a.k.a. Guild drama) leaks a ton of energy and effort that you could use way better elsewhere. If you want to minimize that kind of crap, I think you might want to look into this field.

Some guilds actually already do. For instance Paragon, the highest ranked guild in the world, cooperates with a researcher in group psychology. They use personality types as a tool when they’re recruiting and improving their raiding team.

But you don’t have to be a world class guild to benefit from this approach. Perhaps you’re not even raiding at all. You could still have a good reason to want to bring stability to your guild, making your members get a little closer to each other. After all, I think many of us (although not all) find it nicer to play with friends or colleagues than with NPC-resembling anonymous robots.

A Johari Window
One way to develop your team is to use a Johari Window. The new blogger Stubborn at Sheep The Diamond had a post where he suggested a way to adapt the model for a WoW setting.

Basically the Johari Window is a tool that you can use to help people to discuss how they see themselves and discover how others see them. As you get to know more about it, the window will open up, which from my experience will bring a solid ground for teambuilding as well as self development.

As an example Stubborn gives us a list with suggestion of adjectives to describe you as a player and he asks us to pick a few of them that we think fit to ourselves. The next step is to ask a guild mate to do the same thing and pick the adjectives that he or she thinks describe you best. And then you compare your resaults.

You might end up getting quite surprised, seeing that your ideas about yourself are entirely different to the impression you’ve made on your guildie. The differences you find can spark a discussion that can result in a deeper understanding and acceptance of each other’s personality. But it can also highlight behaviour and habits that you were completely oblivious of and that you might want to change.

I tried Stubborn’s list on myself and ended up with the following adjectives about me: doesn’t nerdrage, signs up for raids, stays until the end, reads WoW blogs, always ready on time, worries about causing wipes and doesn’t afk.

But is that how my guildies see me? Maybe, maybe not. And if I’d ask them about it, I might learn something from it. Our windows could widen a bit and bring us together, putting oil in the raiding machinery.

Check out Stubborn’s post and try it for yourself! Perhaps you’ll get some insights. And if you don’t – at least it can bring you some laughs.

A view from the bottom of the learning curve

Two weeks away from WoW was all it took for me to tumble down all the way down the learning curve back to the sewer level, where I started four years ago.

This was obvious as I logged in last weekend after my holiday absence.

I stared in disbelief at the screen, getting more and more nauseous as the camera nervously flipped up and down. You were supposed to control this thing with your mouse, weren’t you?
Was something broken or was this how it worked? How was I supposed to move my toon? Had I ever even played this game at all?

So this was my character, Larísa. A mage apparently. Level 85, it said, whatever that could mean.

Catching up
Slowly I recalled what this was about. Oh yes. There had been this expansion coming right before my holidays. In the middle of packing and other preparations I had managed to press her up to end game level, but not much more than that.

And now I was back and within 72 hours our first 25 man raid was scheduled, and I needed not only to remember how to play WoW, but also to make Larísa raid ready. It wasn’t anyone else who had required me to be prepared to go in such a short time, but I wanted to. This would be the first 25 man raid since June last year, and you all know what it’s like to get back to school after the summer vacation. There’s something special in the air in the first raid of the season. I just didn’t want to miss it.

But where to start, what to do? I was lost, so lost. And also increasingly ill, not just because of the view of the screen, but because all those germs we escaped in India seem to have been assembling in Sweden to have a sneaky assault on me as soon as I came home.

It was a challenging task, but somehow I did it. Don’t ask me how though, because those first few days are a bit hazy in my memory, an equal mix of chain running heroics and chain running to the bathroom.

Enough to say: when Adrenaline stood at the top of Bastion of Twilight Tuesday night, ready to enter for the first time, I was there.

I was dressed up in mostly heroic gear and even a couple of epics thanks to a very wealthy and equally generous guildie. I had the reputation enchants I needed and I had even managed to level first aid to max, which was a bit of a pain, especially since I levelled my tailoring profession at the same time. (A tip to anyone in the same predicament – if the cloth is dirty expensive at your server, take a treasure finding potion that gives you extra loot and find a spot for aoe-farming. Even with a price of 200 g a pot, it pays off and it saved my day.)

Climbing the learning curve
Gearing up is one thing though, learning how to play is something completely different. You can be as raid ready as you like gear wise, but this doesn’t help much if you’ve lost the feeling for how to play WoW.

This has made me think of learning curves. I’m admittedly not the quickest of climbers, and I tend to start out horribly low as we’re learning new encounters. Eventually I will always “get it”, but not quite as fast as the quickest learners in our guild.

But if I think about this first week back in WoW, I don’t feel as if I’m just at the bottom of a learning curve I need to climb. It’s more as if I’ve fallen down into a dark pit hole, losing skills I believed I already mastered.

When you think of learning how to ride a bicycle, it’s a one-time-only. Once you’ve learned how to do it, it’s there. You won’t forget how you do it, either you practice or not. You can mount a bicycle 10 years later and you’ll still not fall.

Playing WoW is different. Apparently you can de-climb the curve and de-learn things you knew, leaving you with no choice but to start over again.

A headless chicken
Partly I figure it’s the result of the class changes. Mages have gotten a couple of new spells that need to be squeezed, not only into my action bars, but also into my mindset, habits and muscle memory. It’s not done overnight.

Another reason for my struggles is probably that the difficulty level has stepped up considerably since Wrath. Some of the heroic bosses feel more like raid bosses than anything else. This is basically something I welcome; it means that also non-raiders can get access to interesting and challenging content. So it’s not as if I’m asking for nerfs, not at all.

But the fact remains, more than once have I felt like a headless chicken – in heroics as well as in raids - and I can’t help feeling a bit let down by myself.

Why I can’t pull my gameplay together and climb the learning curves as quick and easily as my fellow guildies? What am I doing here, still crawling around in the sewer?

However, this isn’t going to be a post that ends in misery, despair and self-bashing. I refuse to give up! I’ve climbed hills like this before and damned me if I won’t be able to climb it again!
As a reminder I’ve changed my title from Merrymaker to The Patient. Even if I geared up in two days I can’t expect myself to re-learn my class with all the changes there have been to it in the same amount of time. All I can do is to keep going, spend some times at the dummies, read up, ask fellow mages for advice and then and practice, practice, practice, Eventually I’ll get it.

The juggling experience
If I have any doubts about it, I’ll just think back at what I did in India. I spent most of my days lazily drifting in the ocean or reading novels on the beach. But I had brought one project with me: a set of juggling balls. I had decided to once for all learn how to juggle, which was quite ambitious for someone who lacks any sense for ball handling whatsoever.

The balls came with a leaflet, where you were told you could learn three-ball juggling in seven steps. “Anyone can learn this within one hour”, assured the writer. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. For me it took one and a half week of daily practice before I got it. But that’s not the point.

The point is that I didn’t give up. And I didn’t care about the quizzing glares I got from other beach visitors as I publicly displayed my shortcomings in tossing as little as one or two balls.

I just kept going. Not for long periods, just ten minutes per hour, day after day. Sometimes I fell back on the learning curve, starting to fail at step five, which I previously had mastered. In those moments I went back a few steps and practiced more until I had them working properly, before taking it back to where I was.

I didn’t bash on myself, I didn’t ask why it took me hours and hours of juggle training when the leaflet said it would take just 60 minutes. I just did it anyway, my way, enjoying the learning process as such, not attempting to take shortcuts as I climbed the curve in my own pace.

I left India with a moment forever burned into my memory: the feeling of successfully doing three-ball juggling as the sun dived into the ocean at the peaceful beach in Goa. Twenty times in a row I cast the balls without dropping them once. I don’t think anyone noticed. But I’ll never forget how I felt inside.

And whenever I’ll find the view in the sewers at the bottom of the learning curve just too depressing, whenever I’ll start doubting that I can be a true asset to our raid team rather than a burden, I will think about my juggling experience.

If I could learn how to juggle, I can learn how to do anything.

Even how to play my mage properly in Cataclysm.

Cheers!

How you can turn a terribad BG into a valuable leadership training ground

Gevlon is on strike.

Some bitter losses in WG crushed whatever remained of his fighting spirit, so from now on he refuses to leave another order to the entire raid group. He'll only act in small teams that are doing things on their own. And the objectives, to actually win the BG, will have to take a second place. No more leading of ungrateful M & S (his label for "morons and slackers" in case someone has missed it.)

This means that Gevlon takes the same path as the Superior People in Atlas Shrugged, if I remember it correctly. They went on strike, leaving the rest of the world citizens to handle whatever challenges that awaits them, without using the services of the elite anymore.

I'm not sure of Gevlon's motives for his decision not to lead. Maybe he's just very Randian in his view on life, following in her footsteps. Mostly it seems that he judges that the M&S are beyond the reach of any leadership, so there's no point in even trying. It's just not possible to direct them and help them to become useful. And it's also apparent that it's about his own enjoyment of the game. He has noticed that he simply doesn't like to lead other people. Fair enough.There's no reason to burn out yourself on a game activity that you don't enjoy. Better leave it to those who are natural leaders and can't stay away from it.

Missing the opportunity
However I think Gevlon is missing an opportunity here, namely to develop his ability in this area, which I'd argue is the most best and most useful longterm benefit you can get from spending a lot of time playing WoW.

While the usefulness of increased hand-eye coordination can be discussed, as well as the value and longevity of virtual friendships, the leadership training that players get as they run guilds and premades, is pretty solid.

I wouldn't recommend you to put it on your CV yet (maybe in a few years, when gaming has become more socially accepted). But if you're really interested in those perspectives, you can easily go from min-maxing your gear stats to min-maxing your management skills.

Azeroth is nothing but a huge sandbox, where you try out your own ideas of how to lead a group to a common goal. You can learn to become better at leading by trial and error in longlasting guilds or short-lasting BG:s. I'd dare say there's a lesson to learn in every situation. Even when you're starting from a bad position, having a sub-optimal group of "M&S"ers, you can learn from it.

Riding the M&S horse
If we go outside of WoW for a moment, the art of taking command in a BG or a pug reminds me a little bit of horse riding. If you're taking riding lessons, it's a normal thing to change horses every week. Inevitably there are horses in a stable that are considered "better" and "worse". Sometimes you'll get THAT horse, which is hard to get started and isn't easily motivated to jump or to gallop. It's a slacker who'd rather stay in the stable, munching on his oats. When this happens you know from the start that you'll have to work twice as hard as anyone else during that lesson.

But if you put in the effort, if you do it right, you will succeed, and what a triumph isn't that! The horse was never on autopilot; it was you who made it happen thanks to your leadership skills. You made the difference!

It's all a matter of perspective. Running a BG or a raid instance doesn't have to equal maximizing the amount of XP or honor points per hour. You could as well see it as a training ground for yourself to work on your confidence, to become better at giving orders, organizing other people, adjusting to the situation and motivating them to cooperate towards a common goal. And with those eyes, a crappy random group can be as good as a premade guild run.

It's the same thing in real life. Sometimes you are asked to do something with the odds to succeed against you. Sometimes you have to lead a group of average - or below average people - who you wouldn't have picked in the first place if you were given a choice. It' s a normal thing, really. Most grownups have to learn to cooperate with and lead suboptimal groups.

What is special in the case of random BG:s is that you have to be quick in everything. You haven't got more than a minute or two to establish yourself as a leader, to catch the attention and trust of the group, to figure out a strategy depending on the group composition and to assign players to different tasks. It resembles a bit of management in a real life crisis situation, where you also have to grasp the situation quickly, being clear and confident in everything you communicate.

An M&S leader
There are tons of management books, but in the end, a good leadership isn't just something you can study in theory. You learn it by doing, and I can't see why you shouldn't practice in WoW when the chances appear. By resigning from the leading role, Gevlon is missing out a chance to try out one of the most challenging, interesting and meaningful roles in WoW.

One of his commenters goes further, accusing Gevlon of being an M&S in his leadership.

"The best guild on your realm and the worst guild on your realm had access to the ***exact same people.*** Just because most of the people could be dramatically better, does not mean that leadership doesn't matter. A leader can't change human nature or gravity or the speed of light. But good leaders can accomplish more than bad leaders with the same people. It is not easy and it is not a science. But some people hire engineers and make an iPod; others make Zunes."

I liked this part, where the same Anonymous talks about what constitutes the optimal strategy for AV:

"I remember TBC AV and people were talking about the optimal strategy. The optimal strategy is what is the most that can be accomplished with the players in the BG. Not a guild premade; Not what some M&S leader wished they were, not what they could be or should be but what they are."

That's my philosophy too. A good leader has the ability to detect and the best use of the talents and abilities of a given group. They look for the gems.

Less random groups in the future
As you know, things are subject for changes right now. Come Cataclysm, there will be more incentives to run content within the frames of a guild - be it in raids, dungeons or rated battlegrounds. The content is also supposed to be much harder, which probably is a good reason to avoid pug groups as far as possible.

With this in mind, it's not a daring prophecy to say that we're likely to spend less time in randomly assembled groups in the future. So if you want a real challenge to see how far your talent for management might take you, you'd better do it now. See if you can bring that terribad battleground group to a win! See if you can make people listen to you!

If you succeed you'll be rewarded with a sweet sense of accomplishment, which is way better than any title or loot drop in my opinion.

Unless you prefer to be on strike of course and would rather lose a WG than to take command over it. The choice is yours.

Shadowmourne: a welfare legendary or a feat of strength?

It’s the twilight of Wrath, and many players are gone fishing or at least playing other games. But there are still a few stubborn players around who refuse to give up. They call themselves Adrenaline.

We haven’t been able to fill a 25 man raid for ages. But whenever we've managed to assemble a group of decent size - about 20 people - sometimes less, sometimes more, depending on how many out-of-guild-game friends we've persuaded to join us for the night - we've headed back for ICC 25 man. We had some unfinished business there.

The final grind

It wasn't about loot - most of the stuff that drops there these days is sharded anyway. It wasn't about doing achievements or hardmodes – with a few exceptions they're out of reach with a severely decimated group.

No, this was grind and nothing else. A collective one. For weeks we have been grinding the missing shards for our first - and most likely only – Shadowmourne. And finally, this very night, our grumpy ret paladin could complete the weapon of his dreams, an axe to match his temper perfectly. When he reached the end of the questline that takes you to the weapon, I think the guild was just as happy as he was.

Grinding can has a certain charm, as Tamarind described in a beautiful post a little while ago. But eventually it starts to get at you. As we watched the little scene before the weapon finally was handed over, we let out a sigh of relief. Done. At last. The weapon was ours as much as our paladin's. Theoretically he could of course leave the guild, taking it with him. But in reality - it just won't happen, with less than that Adrenaline will stop raiding. Which I don't think we will anytime soon. As long as Adrenaline is around there will be a Shadowmourne in it.

I tried to find some statistics on exactly how common itis, but I failed. However I stumbled upon some forum threads, and from those you sould see that some players think that this weapon isn’t quite as shiny as other legendaries.

“The most welfare legendary ever”, wrote someone, arguing that it only takes gold to get the 25 saronites you need as a starter, and that the hardest part is to convince your guild to give the shards to you.

Well, he may say so and I suppose it depends on from where you’re coming. If you’re in a huge guild with multiple raid groups, which never fails to clear ICC every week, it's probably rather trivial than challenging. And if you're a dedicated pugger maybe you can get it fairly easy these days too, especially with the ICC buff at 30 percent. But to complete it within a small guild such as ours - that's huge.

It symbolizes endurance and resilience, the ability to survive and continue, even in rough times. It symbolizes that we stick to promises and commitments. We are in this for the longterm.

A legendary achievement

I don’t know how much this weapon actually will be used before it will be replaced for something else in Cataclysm. And I don’t care, because that's not the point.

This is actually one of the very few moments when I could wish for a guild hall where we could hang up this axe as a trophy on display, once it has served out as a weapon. (No, this doesn’t mean that I’ve changed my mind about player and guild houses. I can see that some players wish for it but I don’t think it’s important enough for Blizzard to drop everything else they’re doing, putting all their resources into that. It’s just a temporary wish, OK?)

We don’t yet know exactly what the guild achievements will look like in Cataclysm. At Blizzcon last year they showed a few examples, of which one was “We are legendary”. But for that achievement you were supposed to create not just one legendary, but TEN.

Ugh. That sounds like a long term project, to say the least. I thought we were pretty outstanding, just finishing our second one (we did the Ulduar mace previously). But again: we’re all coming from different places, facing different challenges.

For some players Shadowmourne was a welfare legendary, too easily acquired to deserve the label. Maybe they're right in their universe. But honestly - I don't care.

Because for Adrenaline it was nothing less than a feat of strength.

Cheers for Eräjorma! And cheers for us!

Let´s foster a new generation of raiders

Anna at Too Many Annas had a great post the other day, where she discussed how we should approach the new raiders that will enter Azeroth for the first time with the arrival of Cataclysm. How will we work with them? Are we prepared to follow the DBAD-rule (Don’t Be a Dick)?

She gives examples from her own raiding career – negative as well as positive.

As a newbie hunter she was almost scared away from raiding for ever due to the utterly dickish behaviour from a fellow hunter – who wasn’t even an officer and had very little reason to criticize or bully her, which was what he actually was doing. His constant picking on her can hardly have resulted in any improvement in her performance whatsoever.

Later on when she did her less-than-successful debut as a resto shaman, her raid leader gave her honest and constructive feedback and quickly managed to put her on the right track. Within a week she was on par with any other healer in the raid.

Two different approaches. Two different results.

My personal WoW teachers
When I look back at my soon to be three years of raiding in WoW – from my first wipes on the trash before Attuman to killing LK 25, I can see that I’ve been lucky enough to see very few – if any at all of the dick types. On the other hand I’ve been blessed, running into some absolutely fantastic veteran players who gently and generously have given me guidance on how to improve my game play and understand what raiding is all about.

I remember for instance one guy who promptly took me to Dr Boom when I just had joined his guild. (Boom was the dummie like mob in Netherstorm we used before everyone became too lazy to ever take a step out of the major cities. In case anyone has forgotten). Within the course of 30 minutes he had revolutionized my rotations.

Or that raid leader who refused to let the warlocks summon me up when I had fell down into the waters of SSC through the noob trap (a glitch that everyone who’s been around for a while knows about and can avoid). I was completely lost down there, but he refused to let the warlocks summon me up. Instead he jumped down and showed me the way, knowing that I’d never ever again get allow myself to get lost down there. I returned the favour with a loving blog post.

And then there was this game friend of mine who was a mentor, a personal trainer for me for years, until he eventually got bored and left the game. He went through the weblogs with me and didn’t hesitate to call my attention to things that were bad. He helped me to grasp the BT tactics as we watched some videos together and he commented on them over vent.

Not to speak of my missed ex guild leader who built me a brand new UI after realizing how horribly clotted and dysfunctional my current one was and how hard it would be for me to figure out a better one on my own.

To all of you who took me under your wings: I can never ever pay you back, only give you my thanks, coming straight from my heart.

Becoming experienced
Coming from this, I’ve always thought that I would like to pay it forward, help out a clueless, newbie Larísa-type of player I may encounter in the future.

My biggest problem was that I didn’t really see what knowledge I had that was worth sharing. I pictured myself as something of an Eternal Noob, doomed to be a Tourist in Azeroth, unable to grow up and become a Real Raider.

But maybe I am one after all? In her post, Anna gives a few examples of the kind of knowledge and experience that you gather and incorporate with yourself as you raid, without taking much notice about it:

“There are skills you learn, certainly, and boss fights. But you also learn group coordination, what to expect when you show up for a raid, how things usually work, what it’s like to wipe on a new boss for hours or weeks. You learn how to read patch notes, look up strategies, and learn to be effective at your class. You pick up raiding jargon (like tank, crowd control, adds, line of sight, DKP) as well as picking up on little jokes that later become Raid Tropes to refer back to and laugh about. Some jokes become universal – The Safety Dance, Don’t stand in fire, Merely a setback, IN THE MOUNTAINS, 50 DKP Minus, Many Whelps Handle It, Leroy Jenkin. […] Every one of those little jokes, bits of jargon, raiding skills and coordination skills get filed away in your brain under “Raids”, and you become an experienced raider.”

All the stuff she talks about is so very familiar to me – everything except “In the mountains”, which doesn’t tell me anything. (Explain, anyone?)

Yeah. I suppose I’ve been around a while. According to the statistics in Armory, my main has entered 294 25-man raids and 118 10-mans. I’m not sure if this includes the raids we did before the statistics page was launched. Regardless of which – it adds up.

Anna says:

“Everyone who runs raids right now in Wrath will become an “old” player – we’ll be the voices of experience, even if we don’t feel qualified.”

OK, Anna. I hear you. As long as I've been playing WoW, I’ve been the newest kid on the block. I’ve rarely been in the position to guide anyone but myself: as far as I can recall it only happened once over all those years. But if I ever get the opportunity to be the teacher and the guide again, I promise I’ll grab it.

Reasons to bother
Why you may ask? Why should you bother? Why should you make the effort to share your experiences rather than being a dick? It might take your time and energy and effort after all.

Well for me it’s simple. You get a better feeling in your stomach. It feels better to be nice than to be a dick. There are few experiences that beat the one to see someone else grow, improve and succeed, as a result of your guidance. That goes for WoW as well as for real life. Proud mentor is proud. As simple as that.

Another reason is very egotistical: I want there to be good raiders around, people that I want to play with. Older players drop off eventually and if we want decent replacements we have to work for it. They don’t spawn ready-to-raid. They come as unwritten cards, and we have the opportunity to influence what kind of players they’ll become. We have every reason in the world to grab it.

It’s time to foster a new generation of raiders.

Does jumping straight into heroics at 80 make me a leech?

Do you always pull your own weight in a group? Does it make you cringe if you don’t? And how do you tell if a healer is carried in a five-man group? Can he or she basically be carried at all? And is it OK to jump straight into heroics as soon as you’ve dinged 80? This is the topic for today’s discussion at the Pink Pigtail Inn.

I’m in a confessional mood today, so let’s start it from there.

The shame of being carried
I can as well tell you right away: I haven’t always pulled my own weight in groups over the years I’ve been playing. There have been moments when my mage has been crawling in the sewer below the tank, barely beating the healer on the damage chart.

And the funny thing is that for a long while I had no idea that I actually was carried. I didn’t have any damage meter or even know that such things existed. I felt ashamed when it dawned upon me, Swedish as I am.

You see one of the most conspicuous national traits of our people is the obsession with the idea of being self sufficient. As a good Swede you’re not supposed to owe anyone else anything at any time. This shows in situations which probably would look pretty hilarious to an outsider.

In other countries – as I’ve been told – it’s considered normal, polite and expected that if you’re visiting a restaurant, someone will take the bill for the entire party. They know that next time someone else will pay and eventually it will even out. But so not in Sweden, oh no! In a Swedish restaurant, the bill will be split up. And sharing it evenly isn’t enough; every one will scrutinize the receipt, not hesitating to ask the serving staff for a calculator if necessary to make sure that no one by accident will pay a single cent more than they should. I’m not kidding. I’ve seen parties ending a lovely dinner spending 15-20 minutes or even more on the payment procedure.

Coming from this, you can imagine how I feel if I notice I’m falling behind in an instance party. It makes me cringe.

It happens – rarely - that I’m in the opposite situation, topping the damage chart in my PUG group thanks to superior gear. I don’t mind at all. I will carry my less fortunate fellow dps:ers and I’ll smile happily on the way! All I ask for is that they do their best, contributing with whatever they can. So what if it takes us a little bit longer to beat the content? Given the choice between being carried or carrying others as a dps:er, I’ll go for the last option, any day.

Struggling in normals
However: the last few days I’ve once again found myself in the role of a leech. At least I think I’ve been leeching, I’m not entirely sure. Judge for yourself.

The story is that I’ve finally gotten my third character to level 80 and like most players in this situation, I boldly ventured on my dungeon-grinding tour, hoping to gear up the druid, improve my healing skills and have some fun on the way.

To begin with I only signed up for the normal modes, even though the dungeon finder would admit me into several of the heroics. After all, I was dressed in blues. Shouldn’t I at least get myself some emblem gear and a few crafted purple pieces, maybe buying some BoE:s, before stepping up in difficulty level? As the “good girl” and Swede I am, I wanted to make sure that I did the “right thing”.

And maybe it was morally correct, but it certainly gave me a headache. Far from being easier than the heroics, those normal modes were rather a super-hard mode. Every single time I ended up as the only level 80 in a group where everyone else was level 78 or 79. The tanks were without exceptions death knights, and suddenly the name of the class got an entirely new meaning. Death was the word, and my heart sank whenever I saw their squishy little bodies go “splat”. I couldn’t help blaming myself (healer guilt, you know), and I wondered if I had been foolish to believe that I would have what it takes to become a reliable tree. I won’t lie to you; it was pretty depressing.

When I mentioned this to a guildie, he just laughed at my foolishness, saying that I was doing it wrong. Why didn’t I go for the heroics, like everyone else? People are so well geared these days, he said, that they don’t need that much of healing. I would be fine in there.

Reluctantly I gave it a try. It would offer me better loot and more badges, and after all – why should I distrust the gearscore that is built into the dungeon finder tool? If I wasn’t prepared to run a certain instance, I would be locked out from it.

Leeching in heroics
My legs trembled nervously as I entered my first heroic, which turned out to be Gundrak. I greeted the party, and couldn’t refrain from babbling insecurely, asking them to take it a bit careful since I was new to healing and badly geared. They just laughed it away: “No problem, we all have to start somewhere!” and with concern about me, they also made sure to take time to do the extra boss, so I could get a couple of more badges.

My friend had been totally right. The full epic geared warrior tank barely got a scratch, regardless of how big packs he pulled. I dutifully kept dotting people with HoTs, as a safety measure, giving me something to do. But it was barely needed. We reached the end quickly enough without a single death.

Was I carried through the instance? I suppose I was. I doubt the run would have been as smooth if everyone else in the party had been at my gear level. I was relying on them.

Did the group feel that I was a burden, dragging them down? Probably not. I don’t think a better geared healer would have made a huge difference to the run. They might have skipped the extra boss if I wasn’t there, but that’s all. As long as the party stays alive, can you really say that the healer has been carried?

Strengthened by this experience I checked the heroic box for the next instance. And then I did it again. And again. The results were similar: it worked just fine. I wouldn’t do this as a tank, and possibly not as a dps, but I tell you - as a healer, you’re way better off in a heroic instance than in normal.

Yet I can’t rid myself of the nagging suspicion that I was a leech after all. In the end, there were other players who took a bigger share of the bill. I heard this little voice telling me that I should call on the waitress, borrow a calculator, and settle my debts.

This doesn’t prevent me from keep signing up for heroics though. Why would I pick the normal one when all I get is a repair bill and severely bruised self confidence?

Carrying or being carried
A final thought on carrying and being carried. It’s easy to get blinded by the dazzling, seemingly scientific, unquestionable numbers on the damage chart, forgetting about everything else. But the truth is that the guys who are subscribing for the first place in your raid sometimes are carried by they ones who always dwell in the bottom. Only in another sense.

Who is the one who provides the spirit, the force and the giggles that keeps your guild going through times of hardships? What is he if not a carrier, and what is the constantly disgruntled, unsatisfied guy who never provides anything but negative energy, if not a leech?

There are many ways to carry. There are many ways to be carried. And maybe we should do as they do abroad: take turns in paying the bill and feel confident in doing so. It will all even out in the end.

Apropos of Heroes

Whatever happened to the heroes? No more heroes anymore, no more heroes anymore…

Sorry. I’m just singing to myself. The song from 1977 by The Stranglers started to play in my head this week and I can’t turn it off. Never heard of it? Jump over to YouTube and check it out!

OK, now when we all have some background music going, it’s time to welcome you to yet another episode of the Friday Night Talk Show at The Pink Pigtail Inn. Have a seat and a pint and let’s end the week with some relaxed ranting about what’s been up lately.

The lack of heroes
The topic for the discussions by the barside tonight is "Heroes", or rather the lack of them in WoW, something that was brought up first by Copra and then in a follow-up post by Tobold.

Among other things Copra pointed out that there aren't that many world famous WoW players around. For instance very few would know or care about who was the first one to kill LK.

And he's right of course. We who stalk WoW news sites and blogs may occasionally mention the guilds Ensida and Paragon and a minority of us can name one or two of their players. But the harsh truth is that their fame is limited, and I’m not talking about limited in the sense that non-WoW players never heard of them. They’re completely unknown to 99 percent of the WoW subscribers. Someone might recognize a guy called Jenkins, but that's about how many player celebrities as there are. I think we can agree on that the fame of a player rarely - if ever - will spread any further than to your own home server.

When you’re playing WoW it’s easy to find yourself as one in the crowd – a small and rather insignificant cog in a huge machine, and according to Copra this will give you a sense of hollowness. It's a game where everyone is greeted as a hero and yet no one really is one.

Tobold commented on it, agreeing in the case of the hollow feeling, but also saying that you can't really expect to reach hero status by playing a video game. If you want to become a hero you should rather join the fire brigade.

I think the discussion is slightly confusing since we haven’t really nailed down what we're actually talking about and how we define different words. Is this about heroes, heroism, e-fame or about the risk/reward system in the game? What constitutes a hero and what exactly is it that gives you a heroic experience? When does the sense of “heroism” kick in for a player? I’m afraid I can’t sort it all out myself either, but I’ll ponder a bit upon a few of those aspects.

The hidden heroes
As a starter I'll highlight the fact that being a hero is far from equivalent with being famous. There’s nothing heroic at all over the vast majority of people in the world that are considered "famous". They're in the position they are for many different reasons and quite often it involves a bit of luck. Equally there are also countless numbers of heroes who no one will ever notice or hear about.

Small and big deeds are done every day – in real life as in WoW. Dedicated leaders will make guilds that were on the verge of extinction rise and flourish again. Game friendships will evolve into something far beyond what you would have expected when someone is going through real life hardships as unemployment, divorces, illness or even death.

There are ever so many untold stories of heroism out there and I bet there even are heroes hiding in stealth here at this inn, too humble to even consider themselves heroes.

We’re living in a world where it in one way is much easier to get the word out about heroic deeds than it used to be. You don’t have to pass any gate keeper who has the power over the established, traditional media channels. Anyone can call for attention thanks to free tools such as Twitter, blogs, YouTube and Facebook.

On the other hand I’m not certain it’s easier to become a World Famous Hero than in the past. Everyone is so occupied shouting and exposing themselves that they haven’t got much time and space to listen to others. And even if they bothered they wouldn't hear much anyway due to all the noise.

No more heroes anymore. The lack of heroes n the WoW universe reflects the time we’re living in. Is it for good or for bad? Mostly for good I think. As good as heroes can be as inspiring examples I prefer a world where everyone has the potential to become a Hero in their own life, rather than watching and worshiping a few Chosen ones from the sideline.

A hero in the game
Let’s move along to the in-game perspective on heroism. Does the game manage to convince us that our characters are the heroes of Azeroth?

No doubt there’s at least an underlying intention that WoW should evoke heroic feelings within the player, just check how Blizzard describes it in the game introduction at their website:

“Players from across the globe can leave the real world behind and undertake grand quests and heroic exploits in a land of fantastic adventure.”

So, what do we say about this? How often do we sense that our quests are grand, our exploits heroic and our adventures fantastic?

Speaking for myself I felt like a hero this more ore less constantly as I first started to play WoW three years ago. I was a young, small but dedicated gnome mage, ready to explore and conquer the world. However the spell appears to have diminishing returns. Sure, I fly high, in moments of relief, joy, wonder and excitement once in a while, but I have the feeling that it takes more to get me there and that it lasts me slightly shorter. Which of course is a bit sad. I suppose that eventually when the moments just won’t appear at all, it’s time to move over and do something else.

What the NPCs tell us

If we have forgotten that we are heroes in the game, there are still quite a few NPCs around that are willing to remind us.

There was a time when I kind of believed the NPC when she told me I had made the world a huge service liberating it from ten frenzied pigs. Nowadays it takes quite a bit more to convince me. The NPCs may praise my name and call on me enthusiastically as I randomly pass them at Krasus Landing in Dalaran, but this doesn’t make my heart swell with heroic pride.

It reminds me a bit of the celebrations of Saint Lucy’s Day in Sweden, where well-meaning preschool teachers decide that “everyone who wants to” could be Saint Lucy, making you end up with 25 Saint Lucy’s in the procession and not a single accompanying maid. It takes away quite a bit of the enjoyment and beauty of the performance and I don’t know if even the kids are happier about it. When everyone is greeted as a hero no one really is, I would give Bullcopra right in this.

This said, there are also a few scripted events that are supposed to make you feel like a hero, which are if not heroic, at least enjoyable. The best one I’ve seen so far was definitely the scene that follows when you turn in the last part in the chain that opens up the Ogrila quests in Blades Edge, Into the Soulgrinder. I remember ogres all over the place, kneeling and dancing with joy, hailing me as their queen. Oh gosh, I wish I could redo that quest again just to see it happen!

The other day I passed by the ogre camp and even if it was scripted and something they’ll tell anyone with a decent reputation, I couldn’t help being a bit charmed by their call-outs:

“It's amazing how much you have helped us out. We'd dare say that if it weren't for you we'd already have been overrun by the demons or fried to a crisp by the Black Dragonflight!”

“We still stand here only because of Larísa's help.”

"It's Larísa, mighty mage and sister to ogres everywhere!"

Probably it helped a bit that I was the only player around; somehow it’s more convincing when you don’t see another 25 players at the same spot getting the same reception.

Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind if they expanded it a bit. Maybe they could let themselves be inspired by the wonderful Swedish commercial where you're picture is put into an heroic context? (The link goes to a version with Larísa included, sent to me in a comment after the LK kill, thanks for that!)

Moments of heroism
The heroism discussion has also branched out to include the issue of challenges and risk taking.

Copra complained that there isn’t really any risk involved in WoW as opposed to in EVE, which can be one reason for his lack of a heroic experience.

“In a game with instant resurrection and no fear of losing anything this feeling is watered down to a point that it causes no feelings at all.”, as he put it in a comment at Tobold's post.

This isn’t the first time someone brings this up. Some bloggers have suggested that WoW should have a more severe punishment for death, thus making the game more exciting. But I beg to differ on this.

The game provides all the tools you need as it is. You can very well make an encounter so hard that you will wipe unless every cast, every interrupt, every move and every CD is done with perfection. And once you succeed despite the odds against you, you’ll certainly feel the heroism flooding in your veins.

It’s easy to get there if you want to. Turn off the ICC buff, raid in blue gear instead of overgeared, make the achievements, run with a smaller group. It’s your choice. All it takes is self discipline and dedication. If you’ve been wiping for three nights straight, I can assure you that the death penalty with repair bills and endless times spent on corpse runs (or help me God listening to Arthas 1 min monologue) are harsh enough to motivate you not to want to wipe anymore.

I can’t help wondering if those who suffer from lack of heroism just are victims of the habit to follow the path of least resistance. Maybe you'd feel more heroic if you challenged yourself with something harder?

Final words
To summarize this monster post (I'm so sorry, but sometimes I just can't shut up once I've got started):

There may not be that many heroes around in the world or in WoW these days. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy moments of heroism – as the ogres are kneeling in front of you, as you’re giving a helping hand to someone in need or as you’re finally taking down that son-of-bitch-boss.

Now you’ve definitely heard enough of my voice for this week. So I'll turn up the volume again and lose myself in nostalgia, wondering whatever happened to the heroes of the 70s. But that's an entirely different story.

Cheers!

A Hardcore Guild in its True Sense

Yesterday was One of Those Nights. I think you know what I mean.

On nights like this you’ll have to make an emergency switch to another vent server, since the original won’t work as intended. Nights like this “something” seems to be going on with half of the raid - players turning up late, disconnecting, getting unexplainable lag spikes, being unlucky or just “out of shape”, unable to bring their A-game.

It all adds up and even if you try ever so hard to keep up the focus, you will see your raid session effectively chopped into mince meat because of all the interrupts. Time passes quickly, but the flow won’t appear, and you don’t seem to get anywhere apart from possibly going backwards compared to last raid.

Yeah, it was one of those nights.

Hope and disappointment
I wrote a while ago that we had wiped 38 times on LK. By now I’ve lost track on it, but I would easily estimate that it’s the double or even more, and it has gone from the “we’re still learning the encounter” stage over to something closer to “why haven’t we killed him yet?" rage. We should be done with this by now, or at least we should flawlessly enter the final phase on every single attempt. And yet we aren’t.

Last week the ICC buff went up to 15 percent and the difference was noticeable as we more or less steamrolled through the first 11 bosses Thursday night. And I believe this adds to the disappointment after the futile efforts to down him during the Sunday and Tuesday night. We know how to do this by now and we definitely should have the necessary dps for it. But for some reason we lack a bit in the execution, playing below what we have set as our standard.

Before the raid start yesterday we were pretty optimistic about the outcome. This was it. This would be our last week of (apart from LK) rather unchallenging normal modes in ICC. How we longed to finally start working our way through the herioic modes! It was just this mean guy stopping us from it, but not for any longer. We had made the final tweaks on our strategy for phase five on the forums and victory was within our grasp. Little did we realize that this would be One of Those Nights.

The higher you aim, the harder you fall.

Revealing the true nature
When you have nights as this, your guild can easily slip into a state of apathy, particularly with the end-of-expansion-blues currently spreading in the game.

It’s in those moments that your guild will reveal its true nature. How does it look beneath the surface – are you solid when you’re put at trial? Are you a hardcore guild in its true sense – meaning that you have a core that will endure and find ways to overcome the challenges? Or are there squishies among you, players who get cranky, bitter, blaming others, not taking responsibility or just hiding away from the problems when the success doesn’t come easily?

I have every reason in the world to believe that our core is solid. We’re looking over our performances once again, we're checking if there are smaller tweaks we can make to improve our strats and we’re extending our ID next week in order not to waste any more raiding time on farmed content – it isn’t gear that we’re lacking. We’re more determined than ever to move forward into the hardmodes.

This morning as I checked out our guild forums, I didn’t just find the first reflections about our night before. I also find this little video, posted under the headline “Are you prepared?”

It’s obviously a teaser for our upcoming two-year anniversary. The one we had last year was so well done that it even was highlighted at WoW.com, so the expectations on our officers are huge.

And the fact that they’re putting this up, right after One of Those Nights is a sign of high class.

We’re a hardcore guild, in its true sense.

And LK will die too, no doubt about that.

Time to Make Our Own Cataclysm

Cataclysm. The word on everybody’s lips these days.

Kyrilean longs desperately for it. Spinks predicts that it only will be able to hold the endgame player’s attention for a couple of months. An old game is an old game and we can’t take much more of the same.

More and more of the veteran players have called it a day since they’ve lost their edge and hunger for endgame. I’ve lost count on the “See you in Cataclysm!” farewells I’ve taken recently, to bloggers as well as to guildies.

Cataclysm. The one and only answer to all our wishes. Or fears– what if it doesn’t deliver?

However I’ve got some good news for you people! You don’t have to wait for Cataclysm to get your world turned upside down. There’s a Cataclysm available right in front of you.

You can get out of your comfort zone and make something different. Scary, I know! But it makes you good.

Ixobelle wrote one of the most inspiring posts I’ve seen in a long time about his ventures into PvPing. This is a completely new world to him, and initially he lost every single match, pretty clueless about what he was doing. But somehow he managed to disregard of the natural resistance we all have against doing new things, which require us to actually make an effort and learn something. And the reward wasn’t just that he eventually started to win a few games. The main reward was that he about got the spark back:

“We're embracing the fact that we have no idea what we're doing, and having fun learning this new system.”

My RP Cataclysm
Ixobelle found his Cataclysm in PvP. Tamarind found his switching to Alliance. I think I've found my Cataclysm in my recent RP adventures at Argent Dawn.

It’s new. It’s a learning process. And it’s scary as hell. Most of the time I’m more or less paralyzed by stage freight. Saying anything aloud in character gives me butterflies in my tummy. I guess it challenges the obsession I have with being good at whatever I do in real life as well as in WoW. Now I have to practice accepting that Larísa sometimes suck at things and that it isn’t such a big deal.

Take this little true story, which took place a late night this weekend. I was out questing in company with another tauren RP noob, when we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of some sort of event in a stronghold. We were facing an entire guild of high levelled players from the Alliance, who seemingly were patrolling the premises in set patterns. It would have been hard to tell them from NPCs, if it wasn’t for that they did “strange gestures” to us now and then.

We were puzzled and didn’t quite know what to do not to mess with their activities. Could we just keep killing the guards, pretending that we were alone on the spot? Would they think badly about us if we did? Maybe we should rather flag ourselves for PvP so they could finish us off? Suddenly the concept of PvP-RP made sense to me. Why would they just stand there, doing nothing, as we defeated the useless guards?

In the end we decided to complete our quest as quickly as possible, and then moved away, still confused, but at the same time excited. It’s a part of a game we’ve never seen before.

The Gnomish Rally
Another memorable recent event was the SAN Campaign for Gnomish Rights. Never ever had I imagined myself spending almost two hours on walking between the gnome starting area and Ironforge at half speed, enjoying every second of it.

Not once did I think about xp/hour, gold/hour or other stupid measures of efficency. The most threatening creature I killed that day was a yellow-flagged level 6 boar (we were hungry, so we no choice). I talked to the king, I had a swim in the public fountain, I got pretty drunk and I disregarded of most of the orders of our beloved captain Maximilian. I was absolutely immersed into it, since RP:ing can require just as much of your attention as any raid encounter.

In short: I had more fun and giggled more than I have done in a very, very long time. Because, as Ixobelle puts it, it's good to rock the boat. (For a more detailed recount, there’s an abundance of posts about this already, as you could expect from a guild of bloggers.)

Finding your Cataclysm
This post wouldn’t be complete without a message. I have a suggestion to all endgame players out there, all of you who are suffering from end-of-expansion apathy, all of you who have completed your full tier sets, never want to see another frost emblem, all of you who think you have seen and done it all.

Don’t waste your time doing the same things you’ve always done, or even worse, making circles in Dalaran!

Go out and make your own Cataclysm happen! You don’t have to wait for the expansion. It’s already available.

PS Regardless of my RP adventures, my main interest in WoW is still raiding and as you can see from this post, my guild Adrenaline has lost a few players recently. Because of this we have a few spots open. If you are an EU player who is enthusiastic about ICC raiding at a challenging level, we might be a good fit. Check it out.

A Lincoln Attitude To Raiding

It was a rather gloomy raid for being a first-time-visit to a new raid boss. Sindragosa landed and she was huge and three-phased and offered all sorts of tricks to keep us entertained and on our toes.

It should have been the most fun and exciting night we'd had for weeks. Finally some challenging, un-farmed content, forcing us to be on our toes, bringing out our very best game!

Yes, It should have been a party. The raid chat and the vent channel should have been sparkling with little bubbles of enthusiasm. But they weren't. They were as gloomy as if we'd been standing freezing in a rainy DWP.

The missing spark
Certainly we had our reasons not to be too happy. The lack of sign-ups lately was worrying, delaying our raid start and making our composition far from ideal. And the server lag seemed to be back, after staying away for a couple of weeks.

But we also missed something else: we missed the spark, we missed focused hunger for more and we missed a smile on our lips.

Normally I'm blessed with having a guild with quite a dedicated kick-ass attitude, which so far has helped us progress quite far despite our modest raid schedule with three nights a week. I hope - or rather I believe - that this night was just a temporary setback, and problems fixed, we'll be ready to go again, knocking down walls, taking the sky.

However, I can't rid myself of the thought that we're seeing some effects of the late-into-expansion apathy that started a little while ago and now rapidly is spreading through the community. It's in the blogs, it's in the podcasts, it's everywhere.

Fighting apathy
The question is: can you do something to fight it? Yes, you can.

If you're a really bad case of WoW apathy illness, you should of course take the consequences and stop raiding. No one is forcing you to be in a raid, you know. Just telling you. Rather than having players who hate what they're doing, I think any sensible guild would rather see that you left so they can recruit players who still have the spark.

One of our mages just did this. He's a long term member, a bit of a raid clown, and he'll be missed. But if you don't enjoy raiding anymore, it's the only decent thing you can do - for your own sake and for the guild's sake. Hopefully he'll be back for Cataclysm.

Now, suppose that you're not so unhappy that you want to stop raiding. Let's say that you're just a bit whiny, cranky, in a bad mood. Is there something you can do about it?

Yes, yes and yes! You can't change your fellow players. You can't change the server lag (the report button is just a placebo thing to keep us occupied.) But you can change your own attitude!

The Lincoln quote
The American president Abraham Lincoln obviously never played WoW, but I still think he has something relevant to say about it:

I have found that most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

I don't know if he ever said those words in reality - as always with those one-liners from supposedly wise guys, there's a distinct lack of sources and verification. Authors of "How-to-fix-your-life-and-become-successful-and-get-tons-of-friends-and-a-beautiful-wife-and become-rich-and-famous-and-get-laid-all-in-one-month" books don't care the slightest. Authentic or not, the quote fits perfectly into any handbook.

I like it, but just to some extent. I don't think you can apply it in any situation and I'll explain why. (Please forgive me for diving into stereotypes on the border to prejudices. )I believe my hesitation has to do with cultural differences.

On one side you find the Americans with their never-give-up-attitude that seems to be something they get with their mother's milk. It's like a natural life compass, encouraging them to always keep smiling, no matter what happens to them.

On the other side we have the Europeans, me included. We look suspiciously at all those constantly smiling people. It seems a bit artificial or even false. According to our view on life happiness isn't something you choose anymore than you choose what weather it will be today; it's rather the result of an equation- the effect of a certain combination of circumstances. There is something in the quote that shows a lack of compassion with other people, suffering from conditions such as depression, which isn't cured as easily as by just "pulling yourself together". And this bugs us.

Why Lincoln was right
However: when it comes to WoW I think Lincoln is quite right. If you want to be successful in raiding and happy with your time online, getting value for your subscription fees, you have to review your attitude and expectations. Things that you don't like may happen to you in game. You may lose that roll on a piece of gear, you may lose a battleground or wipe on a boss that you think should be a farm. But how you react to it is entirely your own choice.

With the mindset of the Lincoln quote, you'll notice: "Oh, the sign-ups weren't brilliant tonight and we've got a lag issue". But you won't let it drag you down and govern your state of mind.

Your next train of thought will be: "This means that I'll have to push my game skill even a little bit further than normal. We can SO do it. And we're going to have fun! Raiding is what I enjoy doing in my free time, and I like to hang around with those people. We're a fantastic team. Raiding makes me happy. Let's go and do this!"

I've used this technique myself in other situations, and it's amazing how it works. Try smiling (at least in your mind, even if your face doesn't show anything), and as by a miracle you'll find that the artificial smile will turn into a real one after a while. I don't know how many times I've pushed myself to go training, regardless of not feeling inclined to do it. I force myself to smile, pretending that I'm SO looking forward to do this. And half-way through the class, I always find myself completely energaized again, and I can't understand why I hesitated to go there in the first place.

I have found that most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

I'm going to be a happy raider in every raid I attend as long as I'm playing WoW. I'm going to sparkle. And if I don't sparkle I'm not going to be a raider anymore. Then it's time to move on and do something else. I have made up my mind. How about you?

Would you like to be Little Grey?

He’s been the topic on everyone’s lips the last week: the Taiwanese player rumoured to be called “Little Grey”, who has done all available achievements in WoW.

You could question if it’s even possible to “beat the game”, since there’s always something else to do – if nothing else you can level another class or experience it from the opposite faction’s point of view. Nevertheless I believe that most of the community will agree that Little Grey is the one who has been closest to play WoW to its end, even though this will change instantly with the next incoming patch.

What is so impressive about this is the diversity of his deeds. If you’re going to collect every single achievement in the game, you can’t just be focused on one aspect. You have to be a hybrid player in its modern sense, who can compete in any area with the specialists.

This guy is obviously a skilled and dedicated raider. No matter how big support you have from the guild, you need to be good in yourself to get the undying titles in for instance ToC25hc. He also has to be a good PvP:er, a pet collector, a faction grinder and a business at AH to be able to afford the most expensive vanity mounts.

Not envious
We’re scratching our heads, asking: how is it even possible? But we have no reason to doubt it. We can only say “well done” and “congrats”, hoping that someone like wow.com will be able to get in touch with him for an interview with some answers on our questions. How did he manage? Did he have fun? Where does he find his motivation and – above all – the time?

My question however is: are we envious of Little Grey?

I know I’m not. Not at all.

Sure, there are some raiding achievements I’d really like to do. Clearing ToCGC25. Killing Algalon. Getting one of the undying achievements. Things to strive for and be proud about. But I can also live happily with a lot of the gaps in my achievement record. I’m even glad they are there.

As long as I have achievements left to do, I know I’ll never run out of things to do in the game. Sure, we can always come up with our own challenges, soloing instances, levelling in new manners – naked, pacifistic, undying and such. Even if they’re not labelled as achievements. But sometimes we’re just void of creativity, and want the game to give us some suggestions about what to do next. And in those moments the achievements come in handy.

I haven’t earned my Chef hat yet, I’ve never declared war to the goblins in Booty Bay, and there are tons of creatures in need to be hugged – or killed. Despite of the Pilgrim event, I still haven’t done the turkey speedkill. I want to kill some rare spawns and read all those mystically appearing and disappearing books in Dalaran. I have yet to join a raid against the horde cities.

As a matter of fact I feel rich! I’m rich on potential game experiences. No matter how much I admire Little Grey, I’m equally thankful I’m not him. Reading about him I can't helping thinking about the title of a SF short story I read once upon a time: "After You’ve Stood on the Log at the Center of the Universe, What Is There Left to Do?"

Eleven hugs
And as if this wasn’t enough to keep me from getting envious, I only need to look at the statistics. Since they started to take records last year, this guy has killed 392 006 creatures, given out eleven hugs and waved ONCE.

I on my hand have killed 133 086 creatures, hugged 155 people and waved 207 times.

I need to work on improving my hugging.

Love what you do – do what you love

This post was inspired by the final angry rant from Angry Raid Leader, a blog where you over the years have been able to enjoy some charming, angry posts, written on a very irregular basis.

Now the former raid leader has left the blogging scene, but before doing so he decided to make a final fist punch. For once it wasn’t directed towards raiders who die in fire and do other stupid things just to annoy raid leaders. This time he was targeting his colleagues. I’ll quote you the juicy part:

I’m so damn sick of whiny ass raid leaders, that bitch about how hard their job is. It’s so stressful! I put in so much time! I don’t get anything back! No one listens to me! Boo fucking hoo! Man up, it’s a goddamn game. No one made you play it. Complaining about being a raid leader is like complaining about being too pretty. A bunch of people wanted to spend time with you, admired your skills, gave you first pick of loot, helped you pretty much every time you needed it, included you in every group, hung out and talked with you when your real life friends had given up on you ever coming out of your cave and hanging out with them. You had it made! You were in nerdvana! So stop yer bitchin, fuckin pansy!

Making a choice
It’s a damned good rant, don’t you think? Personally I’m not quite as disturbed as the author about raid leaders who let out some steam from time to time. I can understand that they need to do that, especially when they’re among colleagues. But there was one point that caught me especially: “You had it made”.

Exactly. No one has forced you to become or remain a raidleader. It’s your choice and you should take responsibility for it. Love it – or leave it.

And this leads us over to an important – and possibly disturbing – question I’d like to put:

Do you ever reflect over why you’re playing WoW?

Is it a habit? Addiction maybe? (Nooo, of course not :)) Or is it something that you actively choose over other available divertissements such as watching a movie, taking a walk in the park, making love with your second half or reading a book? In the best of worlds it’s the latter.

Ideally I think you should spend a few seconds before logging in, asking yourself if this is really is what you’d like to do in this very moment.

If the answer is “yes”, also reflect over exactly what in the game that makes you want to play it. And as your login screen is replaced by the view of the back of your toon – make sure to act accordingly.

If the answer is: “no”, you might still want to log in, since you have commitments to people that are waiting for you to come online, if you’ve for instance signed up for a raid. Do whatever you can to make the night pleasant even though you’d rather do something else. Putting up a smile can be a good start.

I can hear the objections coming already as I’m writing this. “Smile?” “Why so, I didn’t even want to play in the first place?”

Yeah. Smile. Just as in the song. Even fake smiles work pretty much as intended. They are contagious. Before you know it the smile that initially felt forced and artificial will have turned into an authentic one. It will help you and the people around you to get through the night.

But once you’re done with whatever your obligation in the game was, don’t forget take some time to reflect over your initial resistance to come online. What does it tell you? Maybe it’s time to reconsider your priorities – inside or outside the game.

The mustard factory
It’s time for a little bit of storytelling. Take a seat and make yourself comfortable in front of the fire!

Real life has taught me a few things over the years. One lesson that particularly has formed my way of thinking was my first encounter with a blue collar job. I was 19 years old and hired to join the extra seasonal crew at a mustard factory. The consumption of mustard always peaks at Christmas, so this factory brought in some extras to fill their barns. It was a traditional conveyer belt job, where I was doing the same movements over and over again, packing mustard and cleaning up the mess whenever a glass tin broke. The stench of mustard was impossible to describe. And it was a shock to this spoiled little middleclass girl never ever before had put her step in such an environment. I cried every morning before I went to work. And I cried every night as I went home. It only lasted a couple of months, but I couldn’t eat mustard for years.

But what I brought with me from that job wasn’t just the distaste for mustard. What stuck in my mind were the conversations I had with the small steady crew that worked at this plant all-year-long. It consisted of a bunch of ladies in their 60-s who all had worked there for 40 years or more. I just couldn’t understand it. How came that they kept working in this horrible environment with this tedious job, which gave them little money and aching bodies?

The answer I got was: “It just happened. Once upon a time I was young and I was just like you. I thought that this job would only be something temporary, that I would get a “real” and more interesting job later on. But the years passed and it just happened. I got left. It was nothing I had planned to do.”

This conversation filled me with terror and I decided at that moment to never let life “just happen” to me, to never give up my right and responsibility to take command of my own life.

That’s why I’ve done a few rather abrupt career changes and moves in my real life – as well as in Azeroth. Rather than whining and cursing my destiny I try to make something about it.

So returning to WoW, this is my conclusion:

Do what you love doing in WoW. Make those things happen. Love the things you do. Smile. And stop wearing yourself down with activities that you just don’t enjoy anymore.

As simple as that. And yet so difficult.

One of those epic moments - followed by another fail

A few hundred posts back, in June 2008, I made a list of my 10 top moments in WoW. I think it's still pretty much valid. During the time that has passed since I made that list, I've had a few more experiences that could deserve a spot on that 10-in top list.

One was when I was promoted from a trialist to a regular member of my guild last year. I still remember that first frightening jump into the comparatively serious raiding environment, where I suddenly found myself in Black Temple, trying to catch up with strategies, very unsecure and not quite sure if I really belonged there. But they decided I did . I was as proud as I was shocked.

Another moment was downing Archimonde the same autumn after hundreds of wipes. The pressure on each individual was huge, but I made it, I didn't wipe the raid and I was standing on my feet as he passed into the final, triumphant easymode at the last few percent.

Sarth+3d early this spring would definitely compete for a spot on the list. Now, as we're overgeared, we're heading there when we have some time over just to give more players a fancy mount. But when we did it the first time it was totally different. It was a sweet victory that came after a huge effort from everyone.

This weekend I had another one of those epic moments. And I bet nine out of ten of you who are reading this won't quite understand what was so epic about it. But if you've made the kind of journey through Azeroth as I have over the last years, you'll understand what I mean, so I'll share it with you.

It wasn't a moment of the kind that gives you achievement points. It isn't recorded anywhere at all, except for in my memory. No one noticed and no one but me will care. And still it was so shiny and purple that it gave me tears in my eyes and a huge smile on my face that wouldn't quite wear off for the whole evening.

The story of a pug
So what was it that had happened? As simple as that: I was asked if I wanted to join a heroic ToC 10 man handpicked pug.

The story begins earlier the same day, as I pugged the normal 10 man ToC. This turned out to be one of those good runs. We only had one wipe, when a couple of miserable players missclicked or something and managed to get smashed by Icehowl. A few annoyed comments followed, but then we shaped up and oneshotted everything properly after that, as smoothly as if it had been a guild run.

I wasn't one of the wipe causers. For once I managed to do everything right. I was quick on the snobolds, I mangaged the poison and fire debuffs correctly, I spellstole every single buff I could, I switched shields and targets exactly when I should and I moved around properly when chased by the giant bug, while happily taking out the adds. And I topped the dps as well as the damage list! I have no idea how this happened. Probably all the stars stood in the right constellation or some Azerothian godess had decided to give me her blessing for an afternoon. But it did happen, even if it probably was this one and only time.

And when I logged in again later the same evening, I got this whisper from one of the participants. He was putting together a team for the Grand Crusader 10 man the next day and since I had done so well in the normal version he wanted me to join.

Tears filled my eyes as I whispered him my "thank you".

It turned out that the run would be scheduled at a time that just didn't work with my real life obligations, so I had to turn him down. But that didn't matter much. Just to get the question - based on my performance in a pug - was definitely one of the my best moments in the game. Ever.

Never being asked
If you're a healer or tank you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. On the contrary. You're used to and a bit annoyed of being constantly approached by people who want you to come and heal or tank a certain instance for you.

If you're an veteran player with a huge in-game network, maybe even some real life friends playing and a solid reputation on your server, you're probably also used to get those whispers.

But I'm neither. I'm Larísa with endless learning curve, Larísa who always has to struggle a little bit longer than other players to master the gimmicks - moving out of fire, moving into beams, clicking a shield quickly or whatever it is. Larísa who has learned a stupid moving pattern with keybindings in the wrong places and now is fighting like mad to get it right. I'm Larísa who always was picked last at school during the athlete classes. I'm Larísa, the leftover, the reserve that you have to put up with when the best ones can't turn up. The one that is never asked.

And here I was, invited, not because I was in the LFG-channel and they had to take the chance on someone. I was invited personally because this group wanted ME to tag along. Can you imagine?

I cried. And I smiled. The disappointment that I had to turn him down didn't diminish my joy.

The next day I dinged exalted with the Wintersaber trainers and bought my beloved mount. It's just as shiny and beautiful as I had imagined and I'm glad I made the effort to get it. It was well worth every kill - and the process to get it was much more social and fun than I ever could have imagined.

But in epicness it can never compete with the moment when I was invited to the Grand Crusader 10 man raid because someone had thought that I did a good job.

Back to Earth

And so came Sunday night and our guild went to do Vezaxx on hardmode. I ate a ton of shadow crashes and to be honest: I sucked badly, so badly that I logged off in a low spirit, embarrassed, once again cursing myself because of my stupidity and incompetence.

I'm back to Earth again, facing the next steep climb on the learning curve. On the other hand - isn't that the very reason why we keep playing? WoW wouldn't be much fun if there wasn't another hill waiting behind the corner.

Hard mode excitement and an “I’m a noob moment”

This weekend we finally killed Hodir. Or rather: brought him back to his senses, if I’ve got the story right. To be fair, we’ve done it many times before, but this was the first time we did it in hard mode. And that’s quite a different thing.

Level of happiness
I know the player base is split in their views about the concept of hard modes. Some players couldn’t care less, thinking that Blizzard is cheating. They would rather have new encounters, harder bosses which put up proper resistance from the beginning. Doing the same thing over again with just a bit more of health, more damage taken or lesser time available doesn’t give enough variety to be pleased.

Personally I’m of the opposite view though. It’s a cleaver way to make sure that most players have a fair chance to have a ride at most of the attractions in the amusement park, while at the same time offering some real challenge for players who enjoy the process and efforts of progressive raiding. There’s no way that Blizzard can keep every single player happy about their decisions, since our wishes are so disparate. Hard mode is a compromise, and a pretty good one.

So, “killing” a boss we’ve killed before, but in a new way, how does it count on the scale of experienced raiding pleasure? Very high actually, much higher than I would have expected. There is a distinct correlation between how much effort an encounter requires and what level of happiness I reach when we succeed.

The new bosses in ToC may offer better loot, but they won’t offer the same “kill kick”, at least not in normal mode. When we downed them as they arrived, one new every week, it didn’t feel much like progress, more like “meh”, was that all there was to it? They lacked the genuine flavour of a first kill, a flavour that Hodir had, even though this was far from the first time we saw him go down.

Mental blockage
Of course the sweetness of this kill was increased by the fact that I’ve had (and still have to be honest) so much trouble with the execution of this encounter for my own part. Moving around while casting has never been my strong side. I’ve got some seriously bad habits and badly chosen key bindings, which will take a long time to change, if it’s even doable at all.

Hodir is the ultimate moving fight, and there have been nights when I’ve literally been crying after the raid, shreading real tears out of pure frustration over my own shortcomings. There’s no way you can escape the hard facts from the wws chart, mercilessly showing that you’re doing about half the damage you’re supposed to do as a mage, barely above the tanks. “Will Adrenaline EVER be able to do this boss as long as they’re dragging around Larísa in the raid” is a question I’ve asked myself more than once. And obviously the answer was: Yes. And at least for the kill attempt, it seemed as if did a fair amount of damage and wasn’t dragged at all, if the Recount report someone whispered to me was correct. This gives me hope. Maybe I can finally overcome my mental blockage about this guy and move ahead from now?

The raid moved ahead anyway. Hodir is behind us and our eyes are now fixed on our next hard mode targets: Thorim and Freya. (Steelbreaker and XT already done). Once again we’re on a countdown timer, since the news arrived last week about Icecrown incoming in a not too far distant future. Will we be able to see Algalon before it arrives and our focus inevitably will be drawn towards the new raid content?

Still high on the spirit from a good progression night I can’t say anything but: yes!

Anything is possible.

PS The night wasn’t all about success. I also contained one of those “I’m a noob moments”, so embarrassing that I have to share it with you to get it out of my system. It was at 19.59, one minute from our official raid start and we were all assembled, just about to buff up. I hurried to throw up a mage table before my fellow mage had got a chance to do the same. After all my biscuits taste better than his, right? It was just this thing that I didn’t make any mage table at all. I did a portal to Dalaran, which looks exactly the same. A second later, there was a “WTF”, and a couple of players were FAR out of range for any buffing whatsoever. And of course we didn’t have any warlock in the raid. You could almost think that it was an evil prank from me, but I’m afraid it wasn’t. Just a miss click. A very unfortunate one.

/blush

A homage to the Crusader Ixobelle

He doesn’t need to grind reputation with Bloodsail Buccaneers. He’s obviously a bit insane in the brain by birth. And that is exactly why I think he might succeed in his epic quest for the Holy Grail.

A couple of months ago Ixobelle left Japan with his mind set to one thing: to follow his heart and aim for a position in the game industry. Currently he’s storming the castle of Blizzard in Irvine, reporting about it on his blog.

Regardless of security guards, locked gates and other restrictions, Ixo has set his mind to get a foot inside. He has put up a sign across the street, trying to attract some attention from the employees. And he’s handing out a booklet containing the artwork and ideas for a dungeon that he’s created all on his own.

Employer POV
I’ve been on “the other side”, employing people, not in the game industry, but at a very popular NGO-alike organization, and I can imagine that it was a bit similar to the Blizzard case, even though the office was smaller.

To tell the truth we just hated “spontaneous applications” as the one from Ixobelle. If we wanted to hire people we did it in an organized manner, putting together an ad, letting the human resources people help us to do pick out the few plants among the abundance of weed.

People like Ixobelle, without a formal education and a background as a professional in the area we were looking for, wouldn’t stand a chance. If he just turned up at the office, we would politely tell him to sod off. And if he kept hanging around we’d call the police. I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizzard had the same approach. They want to be left alone. They don’t want to have their office stormed by hordes of fan boys who think they were born to become game designers.

However, Ixobelle isn’t just an ordinary fan boy. He hasn’t only got passion; he’s also got real artistic talent and a solid understanding of game construction. I’ve seen his portfolio booklet, since he was kind enough to send a pdf of it to me. And I tell you: he’s telling the truth. It’s bad ass looking. I can’t possibly see how anyone in his full senses could resist having a closer look at the creative mind behind it. The crucial point is to get it into the right hands, to make someone who has any kind of influence at least have a quick glance at it.

The American Dream
I’ve always had a week spot for the myth about the self made man. The US mantra: if you only try heard enough you can achieve anything. I agree about it. Sure there are exceptions, people who are born under extreme circumstances that their destiny is out of their hands, but most of us still have the freedom – and burden, since all this freedom actually can be a bit painful - to create our own destiny.

No matter if they’re clichés and lies – I can’t help loving those refrains from American TV series telling us that we can reach the stars. Does anyone remember Fame? “But fame costs. And right here is where you start paying. With sweat!” Or why not quote ST Enterprise:

I’m going where my heart will take me/I got faith to believe I can do anything/I got strength of the soul and no one’s gonna bend or break me/I can reach any star. I got faith. Faith of the heart.

As poetry regarded, it’s crap to tell the least, but I like the attitude. I really do.

Ixobelle. don’t know what’s most insane about this. His fearless attacks to the Blizzard headquarters or the fact that he’s publishing the full story at his blog. How brave isn’t that? I wouldn’t take the risk myself to be honest. I might go for the break-in mission, but I certainly wouldn’t tell anyone about it, in case I would fail. It would be too humiliating. I would rather go to my hamburger flipping job without having to sharing my disappointment with the world.

I’ll finish this post with a humble request:

Dear Blizzard employees, if anyone of you happens to read my blog (there might be one who does it, I actually do get regular hits from someone in Irvine. It could of course be just a coincidence, but you never know): PLEASE let Ixobelle in and have a look at his booklet. You won’t regret it.

Edit: Accordning to tha latest report, Ixo is facing some difficulties. But considering his energy and dedication I'm certain he'll be back to it soon.