Someone just became an internet hero

One sentence from Boubouille said it all "Someone just became an internet hero".

You've probably heard the story already, but OK, in case you've been living under a rock I'll write it down here anyway, just because I too want to bring out a toast for our hero.

The Red Shirt Guy got his name as he spoke up in one of the panels at Blizzcon, asking Chris Metzen and Alex Afrasiabi why the NPC Falstad Wildhammer wasn't in the beta for Cataclysm, which he should have been, according to their own lore, as presented in novels and earlier game. Metzen obviously didn't have any good reply at this and promised to look into it.

It didn't take long before a video of the Red Shirt Guy had spread over Internet, with millions of views. Some players approved of his question, but many - too many - mocked his slightly slow, a little bit peculiar way of putting his question, and tossed out all the usual insults about how this guy was a loser who should crawl out of his basement and get a life.

So what did the Red Shirt Guy do? Did he let himself be discouraged? Did he let those morons get to him? No. He put up his own answer on YouTube, where tells the world about why he sounded a little strange - which had to do with a combination of being nervous (and who wouldn't be in that situation?) and a light version Asperger's syndrome. And knowing what an attention his person has gotten, he didn't miss the opportunity to make some PR for his guild.

It's obvious this guy has more guts than the haters ever could dream of and after seeing his video, it's easy to join his fanclub. Red Shirt Guy rocks!

And obviously this view is shared by the people at Blizzard, so much that they've even decided to make him into an NPC, "Wildhammer Fact checker". Dressed as he should be, of course: in a red shirt.

When the first picture of it came up, there were some voices raised that it might be a fake. But blue poster Valnot has put a stop to the debate with a simple statement: "It's real".

Sometimes we accuse Blizzard of being too goddamn slow about things. I do it too. They were slow with fixing the Halloween bugs, they were slow about informing about the change to the Insane title, well, there are many examples.

But then there are those moments when they suddenly show a fingertip sense of how to interact with the community, and they're on their toes, taking action. I have no idea of the standard procedures for naming NPCs. How many committees do you have to go through before a suggestion is approved? I could vividly imagine that the flowchart is a nightmare.

Not in this case though. They just DID it. And they did it the right way.

Red Shirt Guy, you just became immortal. Here's a toast for you!

Cheers!

In the Shade of Deathwing - about those things we normally try not to think about

We’ve reached the end of this post-Blizzcon week and I’ve noticed a couple of pieces of news that I could have reflected over together with our Friday night pint here at the inn.

The announced arrival of Deathwing, for instance. Lucky those who will get fried in his fire! One commenter at MMO-Champion figured out that the chances to be on the right spot in the right time could be as low as 2 percent. I hope he didn’t have a clue about what he was talking about.

But I’ll leave this and the other potential topics for now, because something else came up, namely a blog post by Aurdon. It brought tears into my eyes when I read it and I couldn't get it out of my head ever since. So I'll deal with it the way that bloggers do it: I write. It usually helps.

I'll tell you right from the start that this post will on the serious side, so if you have a problem with this kind of discussions and prefer your WoW blog experience to be lighthearted and merry, since you're here to escape the crap in your RL rather than talk about it, I suggest that you take your pint and move over to the other corner of the inn. Why don't you read an old post or visit my neighbour blogs? I can hear the happy banter and there's laughter and silliness in the air. It's totally OK to leave and I don't blame you if you don't want to go serious tonight.

For you who choose to stay though, I'm going to talk a bit about Aurdon's post even if it might bring up some sad or even painful emotions, thoughts and memories. Be warned. This will be a post about things that we normally try not to think about, and if we do it, we keep it to ourselves.

The death of a guild member
Aurdon tells the story about what recently happened to his guild, as they lost one of their long time guild members. When they logged on after the weekend, it turned out that he had died, all of a sudden.

It's quite rare that you hear about players dying, but it happens. Of course it does; with 12 million players over the world, it's to be expected, even if I suppose that the community is fairly young compared to the entire population. Sometimes the dead players get honoured with memorial posts in the official forums, or there will even be special arrangements on their home servers, like this memorial walk that Pike wrote about a couple of years ago.

Occasionally as I see those stories, a thought flies through my head: what if it was me that died? Or as I put the question in a blog post from 2008: If I die for real, will anyone notice?, where I wrote about the rift that goes between my life in Azeroth and my real life. No one but me knows my password to WoW, no one in my family knows how to get in touch with my guild, and if they did I doubt they'd care about it anyway, since "it's just a game". No one outside of the WoW/MMO community knows about this blog. Some game and blogger friends know my real name, but unless I died in such a very spectacular way that it would become news, I can't see how the people I see in WoW ever would learn about that I've died.

They would notice that I suddenly was gone, without giving any notice, and a few might be a bit concerned, knowing that it's very much unlike me. But would they be worried enough to actually take action and try to contact my family? Or would they be reluctant to break into my private sphere?

From a logical point of view I suppose it wouldn't matter to me either way, after all I'd be dead and wouldn't know. Still: somehow it bothers me a little to leave people hanging; it's as if someone had tore away the final pages of a novel. We want to know how it ended.

Not thinking about death
Aurdon's guild learned about what had happened, but I wonder if that is the normal case. Probably I'm not the only one to keep my lives apart. Could it be that players and bloggers who have vanished from my horizon without any apparent reason, actually have died?

We prefer to find up other explanations. We assume they've just quit playing WoW, maybe they've uninstalled the game and quit cold turkey style since that was the only way they could do it? Maybe they just wanted a fresh start, so the named changed and moved to another server? That's what we tell ourselves, since we don't like the idea that something bad could have happened. Because if our fellow players turn out to be mortal, it implies the same about us and that's something we'd rather not think about.

But in the end I think that avoidance and refusal to acknowledge the existence of death is a bad strategy. I come to think of a story about the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren. As she grew old, it's been told that she used to begin her telephone calls to her sister with the words: "The Death, The Death, The Death". And with that topic out of the way they were ready to talk about other things.

Call the ghosts by their names, look them right into their eyes, and they'll be less scary.

And that's why I find myself talking about death on a Friday night rather than about raids instances and class nerfs, and you'll have to excuse me if I'm rambling a bit. It's not an easy topic to write about and now comes the part when it gets even more difficult.

A guild in shock
I'll go back to where I started, with Aurdon. His guild member didn't die from an accident. He committed suicide, and in his post Aurdon describes how deeply this has affected him as well as the guild. None of them had seen it coming.

"He was just as active in the guild as I and he participated in our voice chat like anyone else. In fact he was on the day before with no signs that would suggest anything was wrong. It’s an odd feeling knowing that he’ll never log in again. None of us knew he was feeling this way."

I can imagine the shock, the loss, the disorientation, the confusion you can feel in such a situation. And maybe some guilt too, even if it's not justified at all. In this way it's probably not much different to lose a guild member this way than it is to lose a real life friend or colleague. All those questions, hanging in the air. Why didn't we see this coming? Why didn't he talk to us, confide himself? We would have been there for him. Could we have done something to prevent this?

What makes it a bit different to a guild than to a circle of real life friends is the distance barrier, the fact that most of us never meet in real life. When you need to hug someone, you'll will have to settle with an emote. And even if a virtual emote can carry a lot of meaning, it doesn't bring you the physical feeling of another warm body and you can't help someone else wipe their tears. At the most you'll hear them over vent. It's not an easy situation to deal with.

How to handle it
Sometimes Azeroth becomes a shelter or a bubble, a place where we can relax and regenerate or simply kill our pain for a while; it can help us to cope better with issues we have in real life. But when the bubble bursts and the pain is right where you are, in the middle of the game, where else can you go?

There are ever so many brilliant guides out there, covering almost any aspect of WoW you could think of. But I've never heard of any guide to what a guildmaster should do in this situation. I suppose there just isn't any "correct" way of doing this. It's one of those things you have to improvise, letting your gut feeling take the lead.

Aurdon's guild decided to honor his memory by restructuring the ranks. The player and his alt were set to the highest awarded rank of "Rest in peace".

Another thing they did was to not shy away from talking about what had happened. Aurdon was informed immediatley about it by his guild master, as soon as he logged on. And then he blogged about it, and even if it mostly was for his own sake, I'm sure it helps the entire guild in this situation. Not everyone is capable of putting their feelings into words. It can be a relief when someone else does it so you can recognize yourself and maybe get a release for your own tears.

Aurdon ends his post turning directly to his guildie:

“I don’t know if you felt you would be missed or not but you are. I didn’t know you as well as I could have and I’m sure you could say the same about me. I can’t help but imagine that you might have felt your action would not have impacted those that didn’t know you so well. If so you were wrong. I am saddened by your choice and wish I had the chance to know you better. My thoughts and prayers go out to all those you left behind. You are missed.”

Aurdon decided to disable comments on his post, since he felt that all had been said. So before I wrote this post, I contacted him and told him about my plans.

He wrote back to me:

"You have my full permission to send anyone who might benefit from my post on over. Part of the post was simply for me to get it off my chest what I would have said to him and the other part was to reach out to others who might be struggling with the same issues. I barely knew the guy beyond his avatar and voice on voice chat but his decision impacted me quite deeply. That's the message I want people to know. You may feel small, unloved, insignificant, etc but there is always people who care about you."

Not scared of the abyss
People decide to end their lives for various reasons. Sometimes they know very well that there are other people around who care about them deeply, people who would do anything in their power to help if they could, but they go through with their decision anyway. "All you need is love" is a wonderful line, but unfortunately it's not entirely true, not for everyone.

Knowing all this, I will still second Aurdon. If someone around me, in the game and the blogosphere, carries this kind of thoughts and feelings and wants to share it, this pink pigtailed gnome is old and strong enough to listen. I can't guarantee that I'll say something incredibly wise that will make you change your mind - probably I won't. I'm as lost at the question of life and universe and everything as everyone else. But at least, know this: I don't shy away from darkness. The abyss doesn't scare me. And that's why I'm writing this post in the first place.

It's close to midnight and it's been raining for so long that I've forgotten when it started. Was it today or the day before? And where did this post begin? Oh yes, Deathwing. I made a silly remark and thought I wouldn't talk about him, but thinking closer about it, haven't I been doing that all night, talking about Deathwing?

He's coming for us, sweeping in over our lands the minute we last expect it. We can live many years, never seeing him closer than as a shadow in the distance, and we tell ourselves it was just a bird, or he's in the next village, and who cares about those people? Not our problem. If we even mention him, we laugh him away. But he's lurking in the shadows and he won't disappear no matter how much we pretend and when he grabs our friends, our families, our guildies, they won't come running back from the graveyard like they do in the game, as if nothing had happened. Death is death is death.

Candles

I'm running out of words, at last. So I'll just move a bit closer to the fire and sit here for a while in the silence, alone and yet in company.

This is for all of you who have lost someone you cared about as he or she decided to put an end to life. For all the thoughts and words in this post, for all my effort, I don't think I ever fully can understand what you've gone through. But I'm trying to. I'm not afraid of the darkness. Not a bit.

I've got candles.

So my worgen will be a guy after all

My resto druid Arasil is probably going to get through a major surgery in Cataclysm. She has no idea about it now, but I bet it will be a bit of a shock to her as she wakes up from her digital coma once I've put the order to Blizzard.

She’ll go to bed as a pretty night elf woman, with bluish skin and bouncing breasts. And as she looks into the mirror, she’ll find that she hasn’t only switched race. She’ll be turned into a furry beast. A male worgen.

First time male
If I go through with my decision (I might actually bail out and stay night elf in the end), this will my debut. Believe it or not, but over my 3.5 years in WoW, I’ve never ever come around to play a male character.

I’m not sure what’s been holding me back, but somehow I reckon I’m putting a bit of myself into the toons I play. Maybe I’m just not enough of a roleplayer to break the boundaries. For whatever reason there is, I’ve always felt uncomfortable at the thought of rolling a guy with a neck that is thicker than his head.

It was the recent pictures of the female worgen dance that settled it to me. There just isn’t any way that I can make those moves go together with the image I have of what a worgen should be like. I’m not going to analyze why, or argue whether the dance is too much of a sex show or not. The point is that it doesn't click, because it looks like a senseless and unnatural thing for a worgen to do. Too artificial to fit.

No reason for dancing
“Big deal”, someone might say. “If you don’t like the dance, well, then, don’t dance! Dancing is a pointless activity for socials and it doesn’t affect your performance. As a matter of fact it’s more of a distraction than anything else, so there really isn’t any logical reason to ever do it!”

However I’m not a robot. It happens that I feel like dancing in the game, in the same way as I jump when there’s no reason to jump apart from getting a moral boost, or hug someone nearby that looks as if he needs one, or lit a camp fire because it’s cosy or put up a vanity pet because it amuses me. It’s not the main focus of my game play, but it adds a little something to it that I don’t want to be without.

I want to dance sometimes, but the female worgen dance doesn’t make it for me, so as it stands now, I can't see myself playing one. The male worgen dance isn’t splendid either, but at least it I don’t get embarrassed every time I see it.

The thought of playing a male character feels a bit weird, but hey, it might be an interesting experience. It’s really about time I try it.

By the way, did you notice that the female worgen dances in her bikini in the video from the beta, while the male worgen is fully dressed? You may wonder why.

Why removing the Insane title is OK but screwing up players isn’t

So it looks as if we can’t go insane in Cataclysm. Or at least we’ll have to find another way to show it to the world than by putting a title above our heads.

Blizzard representative Bashiok recently wrote the following:

“Insane in the Membrane is a feat of strength, not an achievement. Feats are things that you can't be guaranteed to complete, which is why they're feats and not achievements. Most of them are actually now impossible to complete, and this feat will join a long list of "you had to be there" moments in WoW time.

The feat isn't being removed of course, those who have it will retain it, however; some of the requirements are, so it will no longer be able to be completed by anyone who has not already done so.

It's possible that in some very specific situations where someone has completed the reputations which are being removed, but not others that will still be in the game, that it can still be completed. But it's something we're waiting for clarity on, and will
let you know as soon as we do.”

And this was confirmed in one of the panels at Blizzcon, where they explained why you won’t be able to get the title in Cataclysm:

”The biggest problem are the changes to the bloodsail buccaneers, that kinda put a bullet in that feat of strength for now. It's fun to do painful things in WoW. If there's a huge outcry for it we'll try to put something equally brute in the game.”

Feats of strength
If you ask me, I’m totally fine with them moving this feat out of my reach. There are already a lot of others that I’ll never be able to get and you know what: I can live with it. I don’t cry myself to sleep for not being a Scarab Lord either. Why would I?

The thing is: feats of strength aren’t that important. They don’t have any impact whatsoever on your character’s stats or abilities to perform. And the sad truth is that I think we’re heavily overestimating the e-peen impact it has. People don’t care that much about those things anymore. We’re all so preoccupied polishing our own achievements and epics that we don’t bother about what anyone else has.

If you’re a completionist at heart, the feats of strength might mean something, but for most of us it’s just a little bit of flavour added to your character. Nothing more.

I think it’s only natural – or actually even good – that they update the feats of strength every now and then, removing the possibility to get them, for instance when they have been trivialized due to a higher level cap. Sure, it sucked a little that I never got the bear mount in Zul Aman, but on the other hand, I’m glad for those who got it. It was absolutely the right thing to do to remove it from the game. Those who got it had to really perform to get it and they deserve to stand out and show off a bit. If I ran through this now, it would feel totally wrong if it gave me that mount.

The game moves on. Some mount drops are removed – but there will be new ones, I assure you. There will always be new feats of strength to strive for, new worthy goals to aim for. If you’re stupid enough to grind for the Insane in the membrane achievement, I’m positive you can keep grinding for something equally insane in Cataclysm. Have no fear.

How Blizzard screwed up
However. This isn’t all there is to this story, which was brought to me by Khaas at the blog Srsbusiness, who sent me an e-mail and asked for my take on this. There are other circumstances, which he talks about in his own blogpost, and here comes the part where I think Blizzard screwed up the players.

You see, it wasn’t until very recently that they said that this was going to happen to the Insane title. As a matter of fact, they’ve assured the players exactly the opposite! One year ago, blue poster Ancilorn wrote the following in the EU forums:

"Just for clarity, Insane in the Membrane will not be removed in Cataclysm. We can only confirm this one for you, but since it's undoubtedly one of the most brain-melting achievements, we thought it nice to let you know that you don't have to rush to have this done before the expansion. ;) "

Apparently they hadn’t thought this through properly when he came up with this "clarification", but the consequences are unfortunate. This title is special in the manner that it is the most extremely grindy achievement you could think of. There’s absolutely nothing that would stand a comparison to it.

If they would remove some other achievement with a month of notice, such as a meta-achievement mount from one of the raid instances, you could argue that it would give plenty of time to complete the achievements you were missing out.

For the Insane title however, a little more than a month is a fairly short time. If you want that title and you’ve only begun your grinding, you’ll be pretty busy the next few weeks to finish it in time. Players who have put their trust into Ancilorn's statement and planned accordingly have every right in the world to feel deceived.

Blizzard has screwed up on this one. They didn’t mean to, but it happened.

And I think this is a good example to explain why they normally are so annoyingly vague as they reply to player questions, why they don’t want to give exact answers about their plans and upcoming changes in the game. They don’t want to accidentally make promises that they later will have to break because things took another turn than they had anticipated.

Ancilorn slipped and now there will be qq.

And this is my third post this week. My slowing down is going badly. I blame Khaas.

An unfortunate meet-up with the pumpkin leechers

I have a confession to make. I'm a pumpkin leecher. This means that I refuse to click the pumpkin, no matter what.

While I don't go on date with the headless horseman on a daily basis, I've been there a couple of times to see if I would be lucky and grab his mount; the drop rate seems to have increased, judging from the happy reports from other bloggers who have looted it recently. But not once have I clicked the infamous cog wheel. Not me, Sir, oh noes! I know too well what fate awaits the daring clickers. You won't trick me into that!

Game freezes
As a matter of fact I was scared away from it the first night as the event started. I didn't have to even touch the pumpkin at that point. Just entering the instance was enough to freeze the game completely and I had to shut it down in the most brutal way. I did this three or four times before giving it up completely. I don't want to go through that again. Been there, done, that, OK?

It took me a couple of days before I was convinced that they had fixed the worst bug and I was safe to even set my foot in SM without expecting an instant DC. But I didn't want to push my luck. So I left the clicking to someone else. And this strategy worked perfectly well until the other night.

It began as all those seasonal boss PUGs do: with a silent buffing session. For some reason most parties bother enough to buff, but they won't say "hi", because it feels a little pointless for such a short meeting. Little did we know that this PUG would end up as a veritable time sink and that we'd get to know each other pretty well.

You see: after the buffing was done, nothing more happened. Everyone just stood there, waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Finally someone got impatient and spoke up, "hey, can someone start the event?", followed by a "gogogo!". This was followed by silence. No one moved as much as an inch and I wondered if they all had DC:d, like I did back in my first runs.

A chicken race
After a couple of minutes of awkward silence someone finally spoke up and said: "I can't start it, I'll just DC". And one by one we chimed in. It turned out that we all had survived in SM, using the same successful leeching "let someone else do it" strategy. Until now. Finally all the leechers had ended up in the same party, and here we were, stuck.

"This is apparently a chicken race", I said merrily. "We'll see who gives in first". And then I calmly lit a campfire and sat down by it, as to show them that if anyone was in a hurry, it certainly wasn't me. I could sit there all night if that was what it would take. This gnome may look cute, but she's tough inside and there was no way that I would click that pumpkin.

No one else moved. "Gogogo!" begged the impatient rogue.

"Well, you certainly don't want ME to click it, since I'm the tank. Just think of what will happen if I'll DC".

The healer tried the same trick, all in vain. You're kidding me? Who cares about tanks or healers when everyone's dressed up in T10 epics and the seasonal boss is a joke anyway?

The first one to give in was the gogo-rogue. He suddenly left the party and we queued for a new member

"Let's hope we'll get a clicker this time!"

But alas, we had yet another leecher to join our group and we were back where we were before: waiting.

The available solutions
Now this had been going on for a ridiculous long time and I was starting to get second thoughts about it. After all I was an enlightened, although a little bit lazy blogger. There was a solution available. All I needed to do was to tab out and copy that anti-cog-DC-macro that I've seen in a couple of places. I hadn't bothered so far, not just because I was slacking, but also because I thought it basically was Blizzard's business to fix this bug. We shouldn't have to make macros and install addons (I've heard there is one around) just to make the game work at a basic level.

I considered doing something about the situation, but at the same time, the chicken-race competition had grabbed my interest. I wanted to see who would give in first. As it turned out, it was a healer. He gave up a little sigh "OK - I'll do it" and then he approached the pumpkin. We waited. And waited. Nothing happened, nothing moved - especially not the healer. And in a minute we saw what we had already suspected. Yep. He had DC:d.

It was at this moment that I asked myself the question I should have asked from the beginning: is it really worth it? Is that mount important enough for me to risk to freeze up the entire game? Is it worth this waiting time, this hassle? And I realized that it wasn't. So I left the party.

It was at this point that I noticed that I didn't get any deserter debuff. I don't know if this was because seasonal events are excluded from this mechanism or if we had spent so much time running our leeching competition in there, that the time for the dungeon debuff had expired. But the fact remained: I could queue up for another group if I wanted to.

So I waited a minute, giving the leeching party the chance to grab two other players than me. Chances were that at least one of them wouldn't shy away from pumpkin clicking.

The end of the leeching
My next group was uneventful. We buffed. We didn't say a word. I held my breath as I waited for someone to click. Someone did. Larísa, The pumpkin leecher had gotten away with her trick once again!

At least the voluntary clicker didn't DC. Silently I hoped his unselfish sacrifice would pay off with a mount reward. I certainly didn't get one. It was just another pumpkin pet, the one I already had, and the vendors wouldn't offer me as much as a copper coin for it.

Thinking about it closer, I thought it served me right. For all the benefit you can get from it, leeching always leaves me with a somewhat bad taste in the mouth.

If I don't dare to share the risk of DC:ing, I don't deserve any award. Deep down I don't want to be a leecher. I'm not George in Seinfeld. Or at least that's what I'm telling myself.

From now on the headless horseman will go safe from me. There's always "next year" and hopefully they've solved the cogwheel issues by then.

Do female characters come from underwear catalogues? Musings over Blizzcon

I think we can agree on that there wasn't much at Blizzcon 2010 that stuck out. Here's my quick summary out of my memory:

• Arthas has been killed 489 000 times. Is the content accessible for everyone these days? I'd dare say so. And I'm not miffed. The fact that I see Kingslayer titles everywhere doesn't take away the fact that it was a fun fight and that I was insanely happy as we beat it the first time back in the spring.
• Cataclysm will be available for downloading on beforehand for those who buy the digital online version. Count me in! Sweden at midnight in the beginning of December is freaking cold.
• Chances are that I've gotten lost in Sunken Temple for the last time. They're not only finally offering maps for the old instances, but also rebuilding the ones who suck most badly. Yay!
• They're adding information about the abilities of the bosses to the maps, giving us less reasons to tab out and look at out-of-game resources for hints. I've got mixed feelings about this. A little voice inside me reminds me of how fun we had during our blind raids when we refrained from looking at the strategy videos in advance. Once again they're taking away a bit of the mystery and challenge in the game, assuming that players don't want to find out things for themselves. But then the more pragmatic part of me says: so what, don't lie to yourself - everyone checks out the resources anyway. Thy're just making us a good service as they integrate it into the game.
• The new login screen is pretty. Some players apparently don't like the sound of Deathwing, following the debate at MMO-Champion. I bother more about his underbite.
• Mike Morhaime isn't as charismatic as we'd like him to be.
• Another pet that looks like a miniature druid will be on sale soon. There's something compelling about having a miniture version of your own character. WTB mini gnome! With pink pigtails!
• Some poor guy managed to break his own leg as he was participating in the dance competition. That's what I'd call dedication! I hope he got a special prize.
• And talking about dances, they're still working on that dance studio. At least they claim they do. But no promises about when we'll see it. I don't think they'll make that mistake twice. I wonder though how outdated the dances will be once they're launched. They're often based on some popular music video. Will anyone remember the original?

Bringing in the trolls
I might come back those topics and a few other tidbits from Blizzcon in the following weeks, but the fact remains that the overall competition for our attention is underwhelming. This means that even the slightest slip of the tongue from someone could render a mentioning in a Blizzcon commentary blog post. There's so little else to talk about. Bare this in mind as I'm approaching the next part of this post of this post. I'm going to ponder a bit over a very small thing, and I know already as I'm writing this that it might annoy a couple of readers.

This is as good as to ask for trolls. Any post that touches the slightest on the gender topic will lure them out from their caves. Actually I could as well give the word to them right away, they'll speak up eventually anyway. I think I'll go for a lovely piece of work that turned up on another recent post:

"You rage because you don't like how pixels of a female model look in a computer game?? You're either intolerant/discriminatory or it's just subconscious envy, which is even worse. You make smart women, naturally born with big boobs, feel bad. Then, I guess you're one of those persons who wear tight turtle-necks in RL don't take this literally). May I suggest that you go outside, walk in the park or talk to real people more? Blogs written out of rage are always failures. Always."

It's good, isn't it? No, don't thank me. All credits to "Derrek" for this one!

Q&A
So now, that we've established that I've probably got a turtle neck and carry a subconscious envy of big breasted girls and need a walk, I'd like to talk about a statement from Blizzard that rubbed me a little the wrong way. I'm thinking about how they chose to answer one of the questions that came up in the open Q&A panel:

Question:
"I love what you guys have done with WoW, I love that there's a lot of strong female chars, though I wonder if we can have some that didnt look like they came out of a Victoria's Secrets catalogue? "

Answer:
"Which catalogue would you like them step out of then? We feel ya, we want to vary our female chars more in the future. So yeah we'll pick different catalogues. "

So. What kind of an answer is this? I'm not sure what they're trying to do here. I suppose it's intended to be somehow funny, but I don't think it is. Actually I don't think it would have been that hard to give a proper answer. There's no reason for Blizzard to fall flat on the floor, unconditionally apologizing for the stereotyped female bodies. Even if we bash them sometimes for their shortcomings in this area, they're actually far better in this aspect than many other games I've seen.

What they could have said
Rather than answering in a snotty, dismissing manner, they could have discussed the question properly. Let's say I would have been a Blizzard employee, sitting in that panel, how would I have replied?

I think I first would have talked enthusiastically about how important the strong presence of women is in the game, maybe mentioning that a large part of the player base is female, and what a great change this is to how it used to be back in time. I would have said something about how Blizzard takes those questions seriously and how they listen carefully to the input they get from players - women as well as men. Then I would probably have questioned the claim that all female characters look as if they came from an underwear catalogue. Some do it, no doubt, but far from all. I would have highlighted the huge variety there is, and said that there are many options that are pretty far from the traditional photo model.

You can make your female warrior into a mighty tauren, you can create a badass dwarf chick who looks like most women do, with broader hips than they have in any catalogue, or you can make an wrinkled gnome lady with a face that is grim rather than cute. Unfortunately very few players do. For some reason the "pretty" female models are way more popular. Regardless of this, I would have said, Blizzard will keep creating a variety of looks, keeping them available. But in the end it's up to the player to choose.

But they didn't say any of this. Instead they said that they'll add some more catalogues apart from Victoria's Secret. I don't think it was even remotely funny. It's possible that it was honest, but most of all it was lazy. I would have expected Blizzard employees to be a little bit more polished and PR minded. They're big business now, not a basement company and they should have the resources to get some proper training.

It's not as if I'm raging. I'm not overly upset and it's not the end of the world; it's just a minor detail that popped up in the Blizzcon flood of pseudo news. But after all those years in the spotlight, Blizzard should know how to answer a standard question such as this one in a proper manner.

My Friday Pint of Ponderings for all of you who stayed at home

It’s Friday night, but the inn is somewhat quiet, like the rest of the blogosphere, as Blizzcon 2010 is at full swing and that’s the bar where everyone’s gathering at the moment.

I’m still here though, and maybe there are a few more poor fellows, especially Europeans, who couldn’t find a good enough reason to toss up thousands of Euros just to attend a marketing event.

So if you’re still around, please come closer to the fire, slip into your favourite armchair end let us end this week as we always do – sipping a pint of ponderings over the state of the game, sharing what’s up in our gaming lives.

Ponderings over Blizzcon
To be honest I’m not that heartbroken by not attending Blizzcon. Sure, it would have been great to meet up with some of my fellow bloggers, to see the faces and hear the voices of those people who I somehow feel that I know personally after sharing thoughts with them for so long.

But as far as the official convention is concerned, it’s probably too commercial and big scale to suit me; after attending SF fan driven conventions, I’m used to something completely different to what Blizzcon can offer. Earlier this year I wrote a post about why I wished I could go to Blizzcon, but some of the comments made me change my mind.

Besides, if you’re mostly interested in the news that will be presented at Blizzcon, I honestly believe that you’re better off following them from your home. You don’t even have to buy the broadcast stream from the panels to get access to the content. The opening ceremony will be streamed for free(!). MMO-Champion will be live blogging, and considering how quick they normally are with news, I doubt they will fail us. Íf you want to see the happenings from different points of view, there are a bunch of other blogs and podcasts, such as Twisted Nether and Wowhead, who also will be posting and broadcasting live during the weekend.

Those media will not only give you an excellent overview, they will also add commentary to it, and you’re guaranteed not to find yourself stuck in a queue somewhere as they’re closing the doors to a panel you had planned to attend. Actually I think you'll be more informed in your armchair than most of the participants on spot.

So don’t be sad if you’re sitting at home right now, enjoying your pint with this pigtailed gnome as your only company. You should rather congratulate yourself to all the money and effort you’ve saved. Enjoy the free reports online – or do like me: ignore them and wait a few hours until someone has made a good summary for you.

I can guarantee you one thing: you won’t miss out ANY important piece of information just because you didn’t attend Blizzcon. Every inch of the premises, every second of the event will be covered.

A buggy week
Apart from Blizzcon, what’s up in the game? Well, I say like Syl: Bugs, bugs and more bugs. They clearly outnumber the ones who dwell outside Putricide's laboratory.

I suppose we could expect and should accept a few issues with such a huge patch as 4.01, but isn't this a little bit too much, especially since the amount of bugs rather seems to have been increasing than decreasing after the release? At least the EU realms have been plagued with dc:s, and flying from the graveyard in slowmotion after wipes became painful after a while.

As we've seen before in this kind of situations, Blizzard hasn't been too impressive in terms of communications. I've said it before and I say it again: it takes so little to keep the players in a better mood. A blue acknowledgement that they've noticed what's going on, that they're working on a solution and estimation about how long this might take. If it isn't possible to say when you can expect things to be fixed - well, you can at least give a time for when you will update the information.

It's all very basic, it doesn't cost much and they should totally be able to do this - if nothing else because it would save them some work, dealing with multiple posts from costumers who all put the same questions over and over again. I don't know what prevents them from doing this. Shall we blame the upcoming Blizzcon, pulling their attention elsewhere?

Relearning how to play
Despite the situation, I’ve tried to learn to play my characters again with mixed, or to be honest, pretty bad results.

First out was my mage, of course, and I'm afraid that the new version of the arcane spec was a disappointment. It wasn't fun or interesting or exciting at all, only difficult, confusing and frustrating. I just don’t get it. The mana juggling is counter intuitive; beyond my comprehension and not enjoyable at all. But who enjoys sucking?

Currently I'm trying out the fiery side instead. While it feels rather unfamiliar for one who has played arcane for ages, it's still got potential as "fun", and who can resist a free instant pyroblast? So I reckon I'll give this a chance and do it some more, before I'll consider sending my mage to retirement.

An overall issue, regardless of spec, is the new system, where any button you push will make you put that cast in a queue, from where there is no return, as far as I know of. The only way to maintain control is to break the habit of spam smashing buttons. You're not supposed to push anything until you're ready to cast.

This has turned out to be a way bigger issue to me than I imagined as I read about it. You don't mess around with your muscle memories that easily. It will take time to adapt. I'm glad we have the entire levelling in Cataclysm for practice. As we reach end game the next time, I should have learned the new manners.

Loving the green
Apart from struggling with my mage, I’ve also sneaked away into instances and battlegrounds with my resto druid, which has been a way more pleasant experience. The new "good green" goo effect is fun, even if certainly is a challenge for us to learn to love it, embrace it, stand in it and inhale it, rather than run away from it. Kae provided a guide, but I’m afraid that backbone reactions are strong, and it will take some time to change this pattern.

It will also take me a while to learn to remember to turn into a tree once in a while. Most of the time, I'm oblivious of the fact that I can do it, which is odd considering that I most of all wants to stay in tree form all the time. You would expect me to use the cd as soon as it was up. Once again it’s about learning new patterns and habits.

I try not to be too harsh with myself though. We have to give ourselves a bit of slack and have some patience with our own shortcomings as we slowly let the new stuff sink in.

A blind Kingslayer
I'll end this week with sharing a story about someone who really knows how to overcome difficulties. I stumbled upon this story about Hexu, an enhancement shaman at Dreanor, EU who recently earned his Kingslayer title. What makes him different to many other Kingslayers is the fact that his blind, after being injured as he served in the military. Here's a quote from the forum post, written by one of his guildies:

"Hexu tonight just killed the final Icecrown Citadel boss tonight with the aid of various mods, excellent Ventrilo comunication and the lovely function of Auto-Follow. He made it through all 3 phases without dying, even out lasting one of the tanks (/hate ardent defender not being passive).

So i would like to congratulate Hexu on a remarkable achievement which would seem so out of reach even for people with functional eyes! (no offence to people with
functional eyes!)

Kudos Hexu, he did awsome! and i really mean that, he wasn't carried nor boosted, he did all the hard work himself! (well and 9 others)"

Of course there's no way for me to verify the story, but it sounds credible enough, so I'll join the Polaris guild in their celebrations. It's an impressive achievement, not only by Hexu, but by the entire raid group. It's something to take inspiration from next time we're about to feel sorry for ourselves over something insignificant.

So big congratulations from The Pink Pigtail Inn! This toast is for you.

Cheers!

Now if you excuse me I'll retire to my seat by the fireplace, finishing my drink and waiting for the gossip from Blizzcon to eventually reach our little corner of the world. Hopefully we'll have something to talk about next week too. See you then!