Please, Let Me Say "Cheese"!

I've never been the kind of player who cares a lot about her looks. Most of my online time utility is all what matters, and when I'm raiding I'm so focused on the encounter that my own char could as well have the shape of a blue cube - I wouldn't notice.

The exception is of course the pink pigtails, the sources of my spirit, stamina and power. I wouldn't even let Larísa get close to the in-game hairdresser. Who knows, she might become victim of an outburst of accidental scissor activity

As a matter of fact - apart from the hair - I never knew quite how my character looked. Or to be more correct: I know her back very well, but not her face. Normally I only flip the camera for certain encounters such as XT, to keep an eye on the adds from behind. And then I've been to occupied doing this to pay any attention to my appearance.

For those reasons it was a bit of a shock for me to check out the new Armory feature where you can decide what your toon should look like. The basic idle pose was familiar, since I meet it on the logon screen. But the rest of it not very much.

Take the pose "yes" for instance. Or "no". How often do you make that in game? I didn't even know those emotes existed! And what bothers me is that they are far from flattering, especially the yes-saying one. It's something with the eyes that bothers me. They are crazy, not to say outspoken evil. I just don't recognize the cute little doll I always thought I was playing. And the same goes with the laughter. This is a huge crying-out-loud laugh, not at all resembling to the cute little gnome giggle I'm used to hear.

Actually I had to look quite closely before I could find a pose that I thought carried some sort of resemblance to the picture of Larísa I have in my head. After some playing around I finally settled for the "flex" pose in a close-up version. The twisting body makes her somehow come alive compared to the default portrait.

I must admit though that there are some poses I miss in Armory. For instance, where is the one for "shy" or "flirt"? I've always loved it - I always want to hug whoever makes it - even the boldest warrior. I would definitely rather be able to expose a shy Larísa than the current versions of "chicken" or "train", which are plain ugly and annoying.

However there's one emote that I'd like to see more than anything else. It's an emote which currently doesn't even exist in game - don't ask me why. Can it really be that complicated to program it? Are there too many muscles involved?

All I want to see is a simple "smile". Larísa smiles quite a lot in the game but it never shows anywhere but in the chat window and my imagination.

Now that Armory looks like a photo album, I don't think it's to ask too much that our characters should be able to say: "Cheese"!

What actually happens during maintenance?

A thread at the official EU forums caught my attention. It started with a straightforward question from a player about what actually happens when the servers are shut down for maintenance, apart from applying patches.

In the replies there are a few efforts to give a serious answer to the question. There are suggestions that the Blizzard people do things such as restarting the servers, checking their performance using diagnostic tools, defragmenting etc. And I guess that’s the pretty close to the truth.

However, what makes this discussion entertaining is that most of the ideas are much more imaginative than truthful. I’ll quote some of them for you:

"I believe that Blizzard send a fleet of mechano hogs throughout World of Warcraft paying each mob and critter their weekly wages."

"They take turns to log into my account and farm battered hilt only to delete it afterwards. They do this to make battered hilt feel animosity towards me and never show up when it's me playing."

"It's so the blizzard employees can raid lag free."

"…And they keep trying to take back Gnomeregan but they run out of time cause servers got to go back up and they got lost because there is no map for the old dungeons."

"Maintenance days are the only time the hamster that power the servers gets time off. You wouldn’t take that away from him would you WOULD YOU!?"

A lot players want to believe that this is the weekly rest for the Blizzard staff:

"That one single poor GM ingame needs a break once in a while".

Quite a few imagine them shutting down the servers, going to a pub. Or maybe it’s just the opposite:

"*sigh* silly people.. nah the one and only true explanation is this:

All your suggestions about GM's and service team going out to the pub gettin drunk each wednesday are so wrong... thats the time they do things, theyre at the bar drinkin for the rest of the week, thats why most of the help requests you make at 20 are replied at 3-4AM - cuz thats when they manage to crawl back ;)"

And I couldn’t help loving the idea that they are sending out a squad of GMs of different classes all over Azeroth to put things right again and make them ready for another week:

• "Priest and Paladin GMs travel all over WoW universe, resurrecting bosses, using memory wipes on them so that they forget which players have killed them before so they don't know the tactics those players will use on them next time.
• Any engineer GMs go and repair the keep in Wintergrasp, as it takes a LOT of damage during the rest of the week.
• Druid GMs go round the world planting more herbs for herbalism.
• Shaman GMs go round the world manipulating the molten layer under the land's crust and bringing new metals and gems to the surface in the form of mining nodes.
• Mage GMs go around with the Priests and Paladins, summoning their water elementals to wash all the blood splatters off the walls and floors of the dungeons.
• Hunter GMs summon their special sheepdog pets and go and round up all the animals that have run off scared from all the rampaging adventurers running through their homes.
• Rogue GMs sneak round all player accounts stealing tiny amounts like a few copper coins, dust, potions and gems from those that will notice the loss the least and distribute them amongst various loot boxes and chests around the world.
• Warlock and Warrior GMs also travel with the other GMs that go round the dungeons, teaching the bosses how to be evil again and how to fight following the memory wipes.
• Death Knight GMs with blacksmithing again join the dungeon crew, so that they re-forge weapons and inscribe all the cool-looking runes on them"

Go and enjoy the thread! Add your own suggestions! What do you think actually happens during maintenance?

The Joy of Making Legendaries

This weekend I finished my first legendary weapon – Val’anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings. Playing a mage I couldn’t equip it of course – and even less use it. Strictly speaking it wasn’t even my property, but that didn’t make any difference. I was just as happy about this weapon as our priest Ostaker, who actually held it in his hands.

A long term project
Adrenaline has been working on this mace since Ulduar came during the spring 2009. Lately our Ulduar runs have been few and far between, and before that we we used to extend our saved instances in order to work on hard modes, rather than farming the place for fragments. That’s why it took us so long to get the 30th fragment and finally forge it together in the gap of Yogg-Saron.

Nevertheless it was clear from the beginning that this project would go on until the mace was complete. More than once has our guild leader reassured the chosen mace owner that he would get his Precious eventually. Leaving it unfinished was out of the question – even though more than one in the guild felt that we were over and done with Ulduar – especially with the arrival of ICC.

This Sunday time had come to make the final push to put it all together. We had a saved clearance up to general Vezax, and killing him was a quickie, even though I must admit that I ate far more shadow crashes than I should have. I suppose I can blame my lack of recent practice on that encounter, which is even more true about the following Yogg-Saron encounter.

I wasn’t alone in being ring rusty, I dare say. And the thing about this fight is that it’s so very much about control, precision and technique, and so little about gear. Even though we’re currently raiding two tiers above the encounter and have an average gearscore number far beyond what’s requested in Ulduar, it doesn’t help much if you accidently spawn adds in phase 1 or if you fail to keep track on your sanity in phase 2. Turning down the help from one of the watchers (Hodir I believe we picked), which is required for the making of the mace, definitely didn’t make it any easier.

We had to re-conquer this fight once again, getting reminded of all the things to keep in mind (and they are quite a few) until we finally got the hang of it, two hours into the raid.

Farewell to Ulduar
Words can’t describe the relief we felt as we saw Yogg go down. Ulduar had been awesome in every way – and for a good reason picked as the best raid instance in the PPI list of 2009. But now we were done and over with it, and you could hardly think of any more worthy end of it.

It was in this very moment that Ostaker started to say on vent that he couldn’t see any item on the corpse. During the fight he assured us that he had thrown the thing into the mouth of Yogg, not only once but several times to make sure it worked. But had it been enough? What if he didn’t complete the quest after all? It would have been the most epic fail you could think of. I started to make feverish calculations on the chances we had to convince a GM that our priest was entitled to get the quest done.

We all held our breath for a few nervous seconds. But finally, when all other items were removed from the corpse for disenchanting, he could loot it (and receive a well deserved temporary demotion from raider to “muppet”). However this wasn’t quite the end of it. It turned out that we had to go and make one finally Iron council kill to get it all done, and so we did, and Adrenaline had acquired our first legendary item.

I don’t care if there already might be better healing weapons available in ICC. I don’t care if killing Yogg+3 isn’t the most impressive of achievements these days. Because the true feat of strength in this is not the kill in itself, but that we have kept the guild together for such a long time, through progress and through difficulties, never giving up, never forgetting about our promise.

Shadowmourne next
Someone nominated Val’Anyr for the title “guild drama of the year”, and it’s possible that it’s been the case in some other guilds, but definitely not in ours. It has never been a source of envy and split – rather it’s the opposite. It’s something that unites us and glues us together – the very symbol of our common efforts.

Now the mace is done and we’re rapidly progressing on our next legendary weapon – Shadowmourne. A few days ago our chosen axe wearer (picked through normal dkp bidding, in case anyone’s wondering) had come to the step where he needed 25 primordial saronites to complete the quest and move forward.

If we just would have waited for them to drop in ICC, this would indeed have been a painfully slow long term project. But lo and behold, what happened? People in the guild started to donate saronites to speed up the process. And the willingness to donate was so big that you actually had to be very quick if you wanted to have a part in that weapon.

Legendaries in Cataclysm
One legendary weapon done and the next one on its way. It won’t be completed tomorrow, but it will one day. I know it and everyone in my guild knows it.

And it gives me such a fuzzy feeling in my stomach.

I hope they’ll create another legendary in Cataclysm. If it would be something a mage could find useful – the better. And if not – I can live with it.

The greatness in legendary weapons doesn’t lie in the stats or the ownership. No, it’s all about the process of making it. A lot of blood, sweat and tears will be shed over this axe. This is what forges a guild together, this is what distinguishes Adrenaline from pugs and "want-to-raid-one-day" guilds.

With Shadowmourne in our hands we will be stronger than ever.

The activity feed in Armory should be optional

13 hours and 28 minutes ago Larísa killed Eregos, the end boss in Oculus. It was the 23th time I did it in her lifetime. Saturday she had another go with Loken. Friday night was more intense with six boss kills in ICC, of which two first kills. This run provided her with two upgrades - a trinket and a pair of trousers (or to be more precise, a kilt), of which she equipped both. She ended up doing the weekly raiding quest in Naxx and ran the dungeon daily as well, which turned out to be Drak'Tharon Keep. This was by the way the only 5-man Larísa did this day.

It's all there in the new Armory activity feed for anyone to read. To be honest I don't think many will. Who cares about how Larísa spends her time online? Not many. I't's not as if I'm Kungen. (He on the other hand can expect some stalkers.) But still. There's something in this new armory feature that bugs me. I feel naked. I used to slip into Azeroth to have time for myself, seen and known by no one. Now I feel as if someone is watching over me, every step I take.

Personal integrity
Probably I'm just a bit old fashioned, not belonging to the twittering, facebooking and bigbrothering generation, who is used to expose everything in their life including webcams all the way into the bathroom and bedroom. Probably I'm just not keeping up with the modern way of living. But I fail to see how complete transparency in every action I take in game will make anyone more happy or entertained.

I never understood the point of the profile tracker that WoW.com introduced last spring. And honestly I don't think many other players did either - you haven't heard much about it lately, so I reckon it didn't become any big success However what was good about this feature is that it was absolutely optional. Displaying your activities at Wow Armory isn't. And that bugs me.

Oh well. Admittedly I'm a grumpy old gnome. The personal integrity topic isn't exactly new at the PPI. Over a year ago, when they started to show achievements in armory, I protested against it, and they didn't bother at that point, so why would they now?

However I think this change is worse, taking it one step further. I'm just waiting for them to link together your different characters, displaying the recent account activities. They've already crossed every border you can think of, so why stop now?

Make it optional
And yet a solution would be so very simple. All it takes is a tiny little check box. I can choose whether to display my cloak and helm or not. Give me the same opportunity for the activity feed and I promise I'll stop bitching about it. OK?

Tickled Pink: Music from the Hearts of Warcraft

This is the final Tickled Pink post. Under this label the staff at the PPI used to give different perspectives on a topic that had tickled our minds. Since Elnia has quit there won't be anymore posts in this series. However, before leaving, Elnia sent me a last idea for a Tickled post. He never finished his part, but since I’ve done mine I could as well publish it. So here we go, tickled one last time!

Tickled Pink
The music is an integral part of Warcraft. From the choral chants of “Lamb of God” while in ghost form, to the swelling chords of Stormwind City, to the soulful punk of the new Icecrown Citadel music transforms the playing experience. In fact, the Blizzard developers have stated that half the size of recent patches is taken up by sound files alone. So what music leaves you Tickled Pink?

Larísa: To be honest I’ve missed out a lot of the music in WoW, if not most of it. There are several reasons for this. One is my former wreck of a computer, with its horrendous lagging. I had to take every possible measure to decrease the strain on the system as I was playing WoW. Apart from putting the graphic settings on a minimum, minimum, this also meant that I had to turn off the music or even the entire game sound, at least as long as I was raiding. It didn’t help much, but it helped a little and every counted.

This problem is gone, and nowadays I can turn on the music as much as I want. But I still miss a lot of it.

Partly I blame my non WoW-playing family members for this. One of the things that annoy them most is when I’m playing with my headset on, since it shields me from taking part in any conversation or noticing when they’re calling on me. When I’m raiding I have to use them, and they accept it since it’s something we’ve agreed on. But at any other time, I try not to use my headset as long as there are people around me. Since the computer is situated in the living room, this is often the case. The more discrete I can be in my playing, the better. So letting the sound come out of the loudspeaker is of definitely out of the question.

But what about the raids then? I surely could listen to the music then, since I have my headset on? Well, I could. But on those occasions I have so many other things to listen to – the instructions and discussions in the vent channel, but also alert sounds coming from a bunch of addons. Even if I do keep the music turned on nowadays, I tend to have it on a very low volume, not to distract me from more important sounds. This means that I don’t notice the music all that much, which probably is a shame.

However, if I was to choose the one piece of music from the game that meant most to me, it wouldn’t be the majestic music from a raid instance. No, it would be the most basic, childish, simple one you could think of: the default music in Elwynn Forest. To me this represents the heart of WoW. It reminds me of my first, innocent, struggling steps in WoW three years ago and it makes me feel cheerful, happy and positive for some reason.

No matter if you’ve had one of those nights when nothing worked the way that you hoped for and you just feel worn out, empty and disappointed. Enter Elwynn Forest, hug a cow, smell a flower, say hello to one of the guards, grab a beer at the inn, listen to the music and remember once again that Azeroth is a wonderful magic fantasy world where anything can happens.

This little melody speaks to me, telling me that there may be heroic deeds to be performed in far distance countries, but in the end every adventurer wants to return one day to the merry, sunny pastures we call “home”.

Here I am – alone again

So, here I am – back to where I was when I began this blogging adventure almost two years ago. A pigtailed innkeeper, managing her own little corner of the WoW blogosphere. Alone.

I woke up one morning to find that Elnia, our highly appreciated bartender, has decided to quit blogging. To be honest it didn’t come as a complete surprise; it was evident that the game had lost its magic to him and he was planning to take an extended break from it. However I hadn’t expected it to happen so soon. He didn’t even write a farewell note to inform our guests. So that’s what I’m doing in this post.

The work of the bartender
Elnia started to write for the PPI in May last year. He was actually one of the regular readers, who one day approached me, offering me some posts. And so he was hired.

Even if I didn’t always agree on Elnia’s views (we had very different interests in the game, me a dedicated raider, he a much more casual player), I liked his creative style, energy and ideas.

I think I can say that I’m not the only one who will miss Elnia. During his stay here he wrote 36 posts on his own and contributed to a bunch of Tickled Pink Posts that we made in cooperation.

More than once has the bartender's posts stirred up some controversy in the blogosphere or made its way into wow.com. He has even managed to get readers to rage-quit, unsubscribing, as a reaction to his sometimes rather adult language and approach. However the post that will stay longest in my memory isn’t one of the controversial ones, but Landscapes of Heart, one of the most beautiful and poetic posts about WoW I’ve ever read.

The future
So what will happen now? Not very much. There’s one voice less to listen to here at the inn, but apart from that it’s business as usual.

Will there be any new bartender? Well I'm not going to advertise, but who knows - maybe one day someone will walk in through the door starting to hand out pints to the guests as if that was what he always had been doing. And if this won't happen - no big deal. In the end, running a blog is a lonely business for most of us, with a few exceptions.

The frequency in posting will probably decrease slightly from now on, partly as a result of the decreased staff, partly because my own lack of time. I don’t expect to post more than maybe two or three times a week on average. And if this will mean fewer visitors – so be it. It was never about the numbers anyway. Blogging is my guilty pleasure, something I’m doing for enjoyment and as a let-out for some of the thoughts and emotions that are swirling in my mind. Not for money. Not performing a duty. Just having fun.

So here’s a final toast for Elnia. Even though he’s absent now – I don’t know if he’s even reading this – I just wanted to express my gratitude for all you did for the inn.

Good luck on whatever will be your next creative project.

Cheers from your former landlady!

Love rather than loot will turn me into a healer

There’s a discussion going on in the blogosphere about if you should hand out some extra rewards to tanks and healers. It sparked from a guest post at World of Matticus by Gordon from We Fly Spitfire. Blessing of Kings, Big Bear Butt , Spinksville and Forbearance among others have commented on it.

A lot has been said about how much or how little the dpsers are contributing to the success of the group. Some argue that we’re quite disposable, more or less dead meat nowadays (as opposed to when there at least was a need for good, reliable cc), while others point out that enrage timers are hard to beat without sufficient dps and that GOOD dpsers are just as rare as good tanks and healers.

The enjoyable stress
Gordon talks a lot about the stress and pressure that comes with the tanking and healer roles. He seems to regard this task as a burden. The poor tanks and healers have to work harder than anyone else in the group and this justifies an extra reward.

Frankly I just can’t see it that way. When did running an instance become a burden or a job? I thought we did this for relaxation and entertainment (with possible exception for a few gold farmers, if there still are any around these days).

Admittedly my experiences as a tank or a healer are restricted to my druid alt who is currently lvl 73, so I don’t claim to be any expert. But as far as I’m concerned, the pressure put on me as a healer is a reward in itself. It’s the very reason for me to want to turn into a tree!

I enjoy the feeling that I’m really making a difference. An instance can be four-manned or three-manned, but only as long as there’s a healer and a tank in the group. As a healer I’m running the show as a team with the tank. I enjoy the adrenaline rushes, not only during the bosses, but during almost every single pack. I enjoy sweating and swearing and responding to the challenge! I enjoy not being able to follow the guild chat since’ I’m totally focused on what I’m doing.

There isn’t such a thing as a facerolling easy instance as long as I’m on my little druid. The stress kick I get from a normal five-man instance would require a major new boss fight if I was on my mage. I find it highly enjoyable and it definitely isn’t something I expect extra rewards for doing.

Encouraging healing and tanking
Still – I admit there is an issue concerning the incentives for choosing a role as a tank or healer. Apparently something is keeping people away from it - otherwise we wouldn’t face the unbalances in the Dungeonfinder system, where a healer or tank will get a group within a second, while a dps can expect to queue for at least 10 minutes, if not more.

The question is: can we get more willing tankers or healers simply bribing them with extra emblems, gold or even special drops, only-for-them? I sincerely doubt it.

The best thing that Blizzard possibly could to do encourage players to try out a healing or tanking role is already done. It was when they introduced the dual spec, so that all players always could have an easily available dps spec to bring out for questing – either for levelling purposes or for knocking off dailies. Gone are the days when healers had to either waste tons of gold on respeccing or put up with painfully slow killing as they were questing.

However it’s evident that the removal of this obstacle wasn’t enough. There still aren’t enough people who are willing to bring up as many new tanks and healers as we need to make balanced groups to beat the content.

The lack of patience
I think the major problem is player attitude – how we treat our healers and tanks. There is absolutely no forbearance, no patience, no understanding for the fact that everyone is new at some point and has to start somewhere – gearing up and learning to play their class in this specific roll.

Although you can gear up a bit outside of instances, it’s rather hard not to say impossible to learn how to heal a party by questing. You have to make your errors and climb the learning curve in a real instance environment. Even players who realize this need seem to think: “fine, you need to learn, but please don’t do it in my party. I don’t have time for this.”

Calli at Pew Pew Lazers put it well in a recent rant, which has epic proportions but is well worth reading.

He points out the rather ridiculous expectations players of today have on the time and easiness of an instance run and the gear level of the tanks. Some players even prefer a deserter debuff and making the queue once again to giving a tank with less than 4 pieces of T9 a shot.

I can’t but agree. It’s absolutely astonishing how spoiled players are, how we expect literally every encounter in the game to be on farm mode from the very beginning and any instance to be cleared without any causalities within 20 minutes.

If a new tank takes his time to actually mark things and ponder a bit upon on how to make a pull or wait for the healer to gain mana, you can bet that someone will yell: “Gogogo”, followed by a “Gtg soon, hurry!”

And I honestly don’t think ANY kind of extra loot can be enough to compensate for some of the douchebaggery fresh tanks had healers have to put up with.

What I want as a healer
My druid has recently taken her first stumbling steps waving her branches in the Northrend instances. What will it take to make her continue to offer her healing services through the Dungeon finder system, rather than questing, hiding in the shadows as a kitty or just giving up the whole project, sticking to one of my dps characters?

Well, it takes two things. The first, and definitely the most crucial one, is cooperative tanks. Tanks who don’t dismiss me when I admit that I’m new to healing, but rather adjust their pace and the size of packs they’re pulling to what I’m capable of healing through. Tanks who give me time, if not to loot and skin (oh what a mistake to pick skinning as a profession for a healer!), at least enough for me to have a drink every now and then.

The second thing it takes is a little bit of encouragement from the fellow players in the party. You can’t overestimate how much the feedback you get from your first healing or tanking experiences ever in the game mean - how it can inspire you to pick a challenging, stressful path– or how it can scare you away from ever trying such a thing again.

A few days ago I ran my first Nexus and UK in a random group consisting of only players at the right level. And I was lucky enough to get one of those insightful and patient tanks. Of course I overhealed a lot, nervously staring at the health bars, resulting in rather long drinking pauses when the party had to wait patiently for me. Of course I got tunnel vision, resulting in rather stupid standing-in-fire actions from my side. But somehow we managed to make our way through it and the party was up for another instance with me as a healer. Words can’t describe what a boost this was to my self confidence!

As we separated after UK, as I had to leave for real life stuff, the leader said: “I’m sure you’ll make a fine healer at lvl 80”. It may not sound as anything special, but I tell you, for the terrified newbie healer, it meant more than any drop Gordon could have brought me. I was exhausted from the tension and strain, but my healing heart was glowing with pride.

My simple conclusion is: All you need is love.

Give me a cheer and a hug and I’ll heal my arse off for you in any instance you like. Regardless of what awards it offers.