The soul of a guild

“You cannot create a functioning raiding guild”.

This statement comes from Gevlon at Greedy Goblin. In this post he explains the futility of trying to create a new raiding guild and why it’s wiser to join an existing one.

If I understand Gevlon right, the only reason to stay in a raiding guild is to progress in raids. But people will not carry exactly the same weight in raids and because of this the most skilled members are likely to leave the guild sooner or later to join a guild that’s doing better progress, according to him.

He also refuses to talk about the guild as an organism in its own. “Since it is not a body, it cannot act. You cannot touch or hit or talk to a guild”.

1+1=3
I guess it won’t come as a surprise to the regular PPI readers that I disagree about this. I seriously think that guilds will develop life of their own. At least the good ones will - the guilds which will last in the long run. Actually I think the existence of a guild soul is one of the great benefits, one of the reasons why we form guilds and don’t just pug out all the instances. There’s a saying that 1+1 isn’t necessarily always 2, sometimes it makes 3. And that’s what a guild is about.

A good guild will develop a culture of its own, a special atmosphere, which you can’t clearly credit to any specific person. It’s all over the place. It’s in the forums, it’s in the guild chat, it’s in the raid. The guild soul carries the heritage from earlier members, but also the visions for the future by the ones who’re in it now.

Describing this soul isn’t easy. You feel it, but how can you put words into it? Bre at Gun Lowing Dwarf Chick once suggested that you should picture your guild as a landscape. Is it dramatic with high rocks to climb, pretty harsh? Or is it a green bright meadow, full of colour?

Guilds with and without souls
Do ALL guilds have souls? Not necessarily. If the guild is just a platform for members to gear up – an agreement where you’re more or less a freelancing soldier, doing your job and getting your part of the share, but without connecting to the other members in anyway whatsoever, looking at them more or less as NPCs – well then it obviously hasn’t got any soul. Can a guild like that work? Yes, I guess it can. But I wouldn’t like to be a part of it.

The soul of my guild Adrenaline is invisible, but it does exist. It’s cold as ice and red as blood at the same time. And it’s got dramatic peaks as well as some nice grassy areas where you can rest and just enjoy watching the clouds and watching some really silly creatures playing around having fun. I wish you could feel it to. You just have to believe me when I tell you it’s beautiful.

Finally I’d like to go back to the initial statement, that you can’t create a functioning raiding guild. Maybe Gevlon's right about it in one way? You can create a guild, but to make it work in the long run the guild will need a soul. And that can’t be created artificially; you can’t force it to be born. It’s something that will just happen to you, and you can’t put your finger on when it happened or who made it. But one day it’s there, and you will see it – the soul of your guild.

The humiliation of a noob jumper

I was never any star when we had athletics at school. On the contrary. Whenever the teacher announced that we were going to the sport stadium to run, jump or throw things, I shrank. I knew that meant that I’d spend hours being humiliated. Getting hurt by the high jump bar falling down at the lowest of heights, to the amusement of others. Reaching the goal on the running track in twice the amount of time as anyone else. Throwing the ball such a short distance that it wasn’t worth taking measures. Not to speak of long jump, which in my case rather should be called short jump.

I came to think about this when I was humiliated again, doing my first Naxxramas 10 man raid last week. Our guild had already cleared two wings earlier during the week and now it was time for the Construct Quarter. It turned out that there were a couple of greenish floods which you had to cross, preferably jumping, since they hurt a lot. One of them was doable, even for me. Not the first time, but since we had a couple of wipes on Grobbulus and Gluth, I got the opportunity to practice. The second flow though, was a mystery to me. Not one single time did I get over without being drained on mana as well as health. Is it doable to jump it without touching the water? I don’t know. Not to me as it seems.

Jumping platforms
But this wasn’t the Big Humiliation during this evening; the flood was only the appetizer. The horror which made me think about athletics at school was the last boss of the wing, Thaddius. Entering the second phase in the fight, you’re supposed to make a huge jump from one platform to another. Everyone else succeeded but me. And as if that wasn’t enough – I failed three times more. Everytime I jumped and fell into the water I had to make a quite long run to get to the jumpspot again. When the raid finally wiped on this first try on him, I still haven’t reached it! I felt absolutely useless.

Admitting this to a friend in the group he asked: “have you tried slow fall?” And that made me feel even sillier. Of course I should have thought about it myself. When it was time to make the huge jump I slowfalled my way over without any problem whatsoever. Sometimes it’s great to be a mage!

Still the whole incidence stayed in my mind, disturbing me. This wasn’t the first time I had been into trouble while jumping and I definitely want to improve my performance. There is no reason why I should be as bad at jumping in game as I am in real life. In real life I can blame my physical weaknesses, being pretty short by nature. In game I’m even shorter, but as far as I can tell a gnome should be able to jump as far as a long legged nightelf.

Training arena
So now I’m scratching my head, wondering what to do. I’d like to see a training ground in the game. The introduction of the dummies in IF, where you can try spellrotations and such, was brilliant. I want more though. What I’d like to see is a whole arena where I could practice for instance precision jumping without the risk to take damage and get high repair bills.

Of course it’s possible that would attract some spectators, eager for blood, willing to mock and belittle anyone who’s a bit different. But so what? Being a grown up I can deal with the fact that we all have different sorts of talents. I may not be a gifted long jumper, but that shouldn’t deter me from jumping at all. On the contrary I should jump more in order to improve. The only thing I ask for is to be spared the humiliation of practicing jumping in the raid. When going to raid I want to be on top, trained and prepared for heroic deeds, including jumping, if that’s what it takes.

Now I don’t seriously believe Blizzard will create a special arena for practicing different sorts of moves, just because Larísa is asking for it. Probably there are good places for this already, all over the game. Rivers which could be jumped over, cliffs you could jump between, what do I know. If you come to think of any place like this, please let me know!

I’d really like to keep my feet dry next time we’re doing Naxx.

My geeky WoW code

Do you want to know my WoW history? Do you want to know what I’ve achieved in the game and which aspects of it I like most? Would you like to hear about my gaming habits, what I think about other classes and which position I have in my guild?

That could be quite a lengthy post. But Typhoondrew has showed us how it could be done in a truly geeky and very efficient way. It can all be abbreviated into a few lines of letters, all meaning something.

So this is the WoW code of Larísa:

M: Ma80, Mb:0/53/18, Mr: Gn, Alt: Ro70, S: Stormrage-EU-Pve, G:Adrenaline R, Pvp-, Pve+, Y2007.2. DHC, TBC-BT, L, C:++Ma, R:Gn++, -Hu!, RP-, :-D, V0.1

Do you get it? If not, I’m not going to give you the code key here. Instead I recommend you to go and check the original post, where you get it all explained.

Thank you Typhoonandrew for sharing this! I’m the kind of person who likes crosswords and such, so I found some geeky pleasure in doing this, don't ask me why.

It remains to see if the code will be established into the WoW fan community. Who knows? At least I was amused enough to do it myself and spread the word to a few more.

Time to dig for new jewels of WoW blogging

The activity on many WoW blogs recently has decreased, as Typhoonandrew noticed in a grumpy post the other day. Without scientific proof – I don’t keep records, I don’t even read the blogs through feeds, so there’s no counting there – I must agree. I always get a lot of inspiration and input to my own blogging from reading other blogs, but lately I’ve had the feeling that I haven’t been fed with tons of ideas the way I’m used to.

Prefer playing
There are several explanations for this. One, obviously, is that the expansion is too good. We all have a limited amount of time to spend on the game. Questing and killing in Azeroth is just a small part of it – we probably spend about as much time planning our playing on guild forums, following discussions about theorycrafting on other forums, looking up strategies for dungeons and raid instances, reading blogs and listening to podcasts. It’s no wonder it’s hard to get time to write our own stuff.

Another explanation is the time of the year, which is very busy for many people. Projects are supposed to be completed before New Year, exams are upcoming and there’s a bunch of holidays, which not only will demand our mental and physical presence with our families, but also take some planning and preparation.

All in all I think it isn’t a too wild guess that whatever time we’ll be able to spend on WoW, we rather use for actually playing the game, levelling and gearing our toons, than blogging about it.

The Blogosphere
Still all hope isn’t lost for the addicted WoW blog reader. The Blogosphere contains a lot more awesome blogs than you have a clue about. Let’s be honest – isn’t it easy to become a bit lazy when it comes to blog reading? We establish habits where we check out the “established blogs” and the blogs which happened to be around when we started blogging or blog reading a year ago. We read the blogs that EVERYONE else will read and link to.

Do we really give the new bloggers the chance they deserve? Almost every day a new blogger is introduced at the Blog Azeroth forums. Do you check them out? And if you do so, do you give them a second review when they’ve been around for a month, to see if they have developed their blog a bit further? Hands up, who hasn’t been there, writing their first confused “I don’t know why I blog but I’ll try it out” post? It will take any blogger a few weeks to see what shape their blog will take. Don’t judge the newbies too quickly!

And if Blog Azeroth doesn’t give you enough of new food for thought you could brows through the blog list at Twisted Nether Wiki. That’s SOME list, isn’t it?

To get established
I think it’s a bit sad to see how hard it seems to a new blogger to get established. There’s something in the media logic that leads us wrong. Really, the blogs with the highest number of readers aren’t necessarily the ones that are most read worthy. And yet they keep attracting new readers, thanks to their size. There’s something magnetic in it. People seem to think that “so many readers can’t be wrong”. They can.

If you look at my blogroll I follow a mix of blogs. Some are well established – but there are also a number of not-quite-as-often-mentioned-ones. I could go on and give a little rant about every single one, but I’ll just give you a few examples of blogs which I enjoy and that aren’t mentioned and linked to quite as often as they deserve:

Groups of Words. This blog contains… a lot of words. Interesting, well written posts about a range of topics. You will never find a “look at this silly screenshot” post here. It isn’t updated quite as often as I’d wish as a starving reader. But when he writes, he does it well. Don’t be scared off by the layout, which appears a bit broken in my reader (IE). Content is king in my world, and this blog has content.

Altoholic's Are us. Altoholicmom writes personal posts, written from the perspective of a player who's been around for a very long time and knows the game by heart. But she also provides very useful posts, such as the Wrathgate guide the other day or the Northrend Daily Quest. The name is a bit decieving. This blog is NOT about how fun it is to create 9 alts on 10 different servers and level them to 20. You don't have to be a fan of alts to be a fan of Altoholicmom. Tis is a general WoW blog, and a very good one. She's obviously got 4 (four) readers. That's ridiculous. They should be 400. At least.

Artisan Level. It’s a mystery to me why I’m about the only blog I’ve seen linking to her. This blog is awesome. For some reason it makes me think of Chick GM (the wonderful blogger who’s been silent now for a couple of months, maybe because of health reasons, I hope you’re OK if you’re reading this). Oriniwen is a guild leader and shares her experiences, her victories and defeats, her worries and ideas, with all of us. Obviously she hasn’t got quite the same authority as Chick GM and her guild isn’t a cutting-edge raiding guild (what I understand). But she writes about guild life from the leader aspect in an honest, personal manner and I guarantee she’ll give you food for thought.

Greedy Goblin. If you follow his blog you’ll never get out of reading. He posts every single day, sometimes even twice and I can’t understand how he managed to keep it up. What makes this blog so fun is that it mixes good hands-on-advice about how to make gold in WoW efficiently with philosophical rants about economical laws in the game as well as in real life. I don’t always agree with Gevlon. He’s pretty provocative in his goblin views (just look at the comment he made on this blog yesterday… oh dear!) He loves to call people “stupid”, something Larísa wouldn’t dream of doing. And that’s why it’s so good. I want to be annoyed and provoked from time to time, I want to get stuff to think, even if I’ll turn up in a completely different position.

This was just four examples of jewels to be found. There are plenty more out there. Don’t complain about the lack of posting from the established blogs. Go out and have a look I’m sure you’ll find a lot of new nodes on the blog map, which you’ve overlooked until now, following your ordinary reading pattern. It’s time to make new discoveries.

Farewell to privacy

First of all: I appreciate the social aspect of WoW as much as anyone else. I love to team up with and interact with other people and if I never did that I’d probably not play the game at all.

Now, this said, I also like WoW because you in spite of the socializing still can stay very anonymous. You’re not judged by other people by your looks, age or social status. If you want to stay private and keep some information to yourself you can do so. You share as much as you want to share and nothing more.

Armory changes
This is how it has been at least, until now. The recent “improvement” of the Armory feature has changed it. Not in the aspect that they’ll leave out information about your real life – that’s still a secret. But they’ve changed so that you’re character is open for inspection by anyone in the world.

I’m not only talking about your gear and talent spec. Those things have been available for others to see for a long time, and I think that makes sense. They provide information which is pretty necessary, for instance if you’re about to put together a team for some purpose, weather it’s an instance or Arena. You need to find people with the right combination of specs and gear.

No, the New Armory is something completely different. It will show the world everything available in your achievement window – not only achievements but also all kinds of statistics. Everything you’ve done in the game is available for judging and commenting – thing’s that you’re proud of as well as things that you’d rather forget.

How many times have you screwed up and died from falling damage? The Armory will tell. How much gold was the most you ever had? No secret anymore.

They don’t yet show what you have stored in your bank or carry in your bags and they haven’t yet displayed your friends list or ignore list. But thinking about how far it has gone already I wouldn’t be too surprised if that would appear too one day.

Benefits
I can see benefits of the change. It’s a part of the achievement system, which many players appreciate. You can’t deny that the measuring of yourself against other players, the e-peen factor of the game, is something that many players enjoy. It’s fun to show off, to be able to manifest that you have done something that not everyone else has done.

People want to know more about other people. They’re curious. There is a reason why newspapers at least where I live love to publish lists over who’s got the highest incomes, the most exclusive houses or did best on the national tests for access to university studies.

It may also be beneficial for guild recruiting – with the achievements available it will be harder for anyone to lie about what previous experiences they have in the game.

Bullying and hacking
But this said, I must still say that I’m not entirely happy about the new thing. And it’s got to do with the less pleasant sides of socializing in the game. I don’t think I’ll suffer much from it myself, being old enough to laugh about my own crappiness. But I can vividly imagine that younger players will be able to find ways not only to gloat and show their e-peens, but to actually bully each other. I’m also afraid that the display of the financial status can give useful information and inspiration to hackers.

And I can’t help feeling that I’ve lost some of my privacy in the game. They’ve taken it pretty far already – is this where it will stop? Mind you, I’m not a very secret person – I’ve got a blog where I’m telling the world about my life in the game. But it’s always voluntary. I share because I want to share, not because someone forces it upon me.

A solution?
So with the pros and cons of displaying achievements – is there any solution to meet the demands of those who want to show them as well as those who want to keep their achievements to themselves?

Well, I don’t know if it’s technically doable, but in the best of worlds I think players should be able to decide for themselves to show it or hide it in Armory. Give the achievement nerds the tools they need to compete with each other. And give players who wish to work towards their own goals silently the possibility to stay in the shadows, private and unseen.

Setting a course at 80

Some players make a huge effort in order to make the circumstances of their level cap dinging match the importance of the event. Their preferences vary – some want to ding mid-air, discovering a new zone – others want to turn in a certain quest or see to that they’re in an instance, surrounded by friends who can give praise and applauses. And of course those players make sure to capture the happening in a beautiful screenshot.

I’m not one of those players. When I dinged 80 the other night it was in the most unglamorous manner you could think of, killing an earth elemental in Storm Peaks. It dropped… whatever. It was as random as it could be. The reason was that I had been questing in this zone for a while. When I approached 80, all of my current quests seemed complicated. You know the kind of quests where you’re supposed to find npc:s hiding god knows where, use technical devices, clicking stuff or riding stuff but not killing stuff. That’s fun but not when you’re eager to ding. I wanted raw and simple xp like the one you get in Sholazar Basin. But I didn’t want to spend time switching zones just to find a kill-12-boar-quest in disguise. Instead I headed to the giants who give out daily quests to see if they had anything suitable for me. They did.

Crossroads

Immediately after dinging I went to grab my new spells. And then I activated my last inscription spot and put my last talent point before forgetting about it. But what should I do next?

Starting endgame at 80 is quite different to me to how it was to enter endgame at 70. At that point I had a very vague idea about what would await me beyond the cap. I had heard about Karazhan though, so I started the attunement chain since it seemed as a nice project. But I wasn’t in any hurry at all and my goals were still unclear.

Now I’ve got a deadline: right after Christmas we’ll start our 25 man raiding in Naxx. And by then I should be prepared – with better gear than my current (I’ve hardly had any upgrades at all in the expansion so far) – and with consumables and gold for repair available. The question is what road to pick to get there. I was standing in the middle of a crossroad, with a huge to-do-list.

• I need reputation with a number of factions in order to buy upgrades.
• I need to level my professions to support me with gear, elixirs and food.
• I need gold, which I could get at a decent speed if I kept questing – I still haven’t touched Grizzly Hills, Zul’Drak, Crystalsong or Icecrown.
• I need tons of Emblems of Heroism for badge gear.
• I may need to PvP – at least it used to be a (not altogether accepted) way to gear up to a decent level quickly.
• I even need to level my alt Arisal, since she’s the one who’s supposed to provide herbs to Larísas alchemy business.

I felt like Alice in Wonderland, looking at all those signs pointing in every direction, everyone claiming to be the way to go. Then I realized that maybe the choice wasn’t that crucial after all. Actually any of the available paths will lead to the destination – to become raid ready. It’s more about how to make the journey enjoyable – what aspect of the game do I like most? Any road goes. The only thing that doesn’t work well is getting paralyzed or randomly jumping between all of the roads, spreading out my efforts so much that I don’t progress on any of them.

The road of the heroics
As I was standing in the streets of Dalaran, still scratching my head, I noticed a new blue exclamation mark on the map. It led to the daily heroic dungeon quest. And then I knew I had set my course. I joined the LFG channel and a few minutes later I entered my first heroic instance in WotLK, ready to get the first emblem of many in my greedy little hands.

Doing as many heroics as possible will be my main occupation in the game from now on. If I’m lucky I’ll get drops – and I’ll always get badges and loads of frostweave cloth for gear and reputation with the faction of my choice.

Above all: I’ll be able to play in group, which is what I like to do, practicing my new spell rotations, experimenting on how to make the best use of novelties as Hot streak, Living bomb and Mirror image (which have made the life of a mage more fun, but also a lot more complicated).

I have set a course and I’ve got a huge smile on my face. It’s a new beginning.

The beauty of a spell

Does it really matter how a spell looks when you cast it? As long as it hurts a lot, couldn’t it have any kind of colour and shape? That would make sense. But I’ve got a confession to make: sometimes I’m not sensible at all. Sometimes I want to look cool and feel like the über-powered super mage I was meant to be, even if it’s just an illusion.

Learning frostfire
As a mage you have a few spells to choose between, but until now neither of them has met my expectations when it comes to looks. I guess I’ve seen too many fireballs and arcane blasts take off in my days to really notice them anymore.

I haven’t thrown quite that many frostbolts, but they seem a bit… plain. Arcane missiles are more spectacular, but a little too tiny, reminding of harmless fireworks handled by children.

But now my prayers have been heard! Dinging 75 last week I trained the new glorious frostfirebolt spell that the whole mage community has been talking about lately.

There was no doubt about the fact that this was an interesting spell damagewise. I won’t go on about that, it’s been covered in other blogs – check out Frost is the new black, Critical QQ and Player versus developer for some further theorycrafting and inspiration. What I appreciated most though was the graphics. Finally we’ve been given a spell that won’t pass unnoticed!

From slush to comet
To be honest I had been a bit sceptic towards the whole concept of frostfire. If you think about it, fire+ice should end up as some sort of harmless, melting, soft slush. Cold, wet and annoying, but not very hard hitting. But I was dead wrong. I had forgotten about the comets travelling all across the universe, cold ice blocks which turns into burning deadly projectiles when they hit the atmosphere. That’s where Blizzard has got their inspiration. Fire and ice – yes it makes sense in this version. They’ve also given it a sort of glimmering, metallic finish, which makes it look even better.

What does frustrate me a bit is the speed of it – the waiting time for it to go off makes me feel as if I had been hit by some slowing frost spell. On the other hand I’ve got hot streak and frostbite nowadays, giving me instant pyros and freezing the mobs to ice every now and than. That makes up for it. No more boring fireball spamming!

Time for a change
How many fireballs have left the little paws of Larísa during the years? I have no idea. Thousands? Millions? It was definitely about time she had a change. Even though it’s just the colour of the ball hurling through the air, the feeling of it is totally different.

Where will I stand in six months from now? Will I still be enthusiastic or will the sensation of a novelty have wear off by then? It remains to see. But for now I’m all in for it!

It remains to see where I’ll stand in six months from now. Will I still be enthusiastic or have I seen it too many times by then to notice anymore? It remains to see. But currently I enjoy every single beautiful comet spell that takes off.