Banal and self-serving? Yes, you bet!

“Pink Pigtail Inn needs to think up some better topics. […]. I am hoping WI can find better posts to link to in the future that aren't as banal and self-serving”

Those sweet lines dropped in a comment at WoW Insider this weekend. Lately they have shown the blogosphere more “love” than usual, speeding up the frequency of their Daily Quest column where they feature links to posts they’ve found interesting for whatever reason.

This time they decided to mention my post about how annoying the single-listing practice is from the point of view from a customer. I guess I would have been better off if they hadn’t.

Getting link love from WoW Insider is a double-edged sword. Many new bloggers crave for it; they think it would be the best thing ever to happen to their blog, to finally get the chance to reach a bigger audience. (Unfortunately the bump in the visitor statistics will be just a bump. It’s not the ICC buff we’re talking about here, rather a short burst of heroism/bloodlust).

But even as a veteran I can’t deny that I too secretly get a little bit flattered by the attention. I suspect that bloggers are a bit like actors – happy and terrified in equal proportions as we’re taking our place in the spotlight – left out, vulnerable, fragile and yet thrilled, empowered and confident.

The negatives about WI linkage is that you’re exposed to the views of a lot of people who never have read your blog before, who don’t know you and who are every so quickly to judge you and point fingers. Expect rotten tomatoes come flying in your direction. You’re dealing with a mob.

Shielding yourself
Wise bloggers know how to shield themselves from this. If they even take notice of the trolls, they give the trolls the laugh they deserve. And that’s the advice I’ve given too, over and over again over the years to fresh bloggers. If you get hurt, it’s only because you let them hurt you. There’s no need to! You can choose your own reactions.

But for all my gnomish wisdom and insights about how I SHOULD react, the comment above still slipped through my defence system. For a moment I lost my balance. And as I did so, stumbling on the stage, wondering where to put my feet, I looked at myself and wondered what this was all about. Why did I care?

And I found that this particular troll had managed to pick up and echo doubts my own doubts, doubts that I think most writers struggle with at some point. It happens that we ask those questions: “What’s the point in my blogging in the first place? What am I doing, standing on this soapbox, sharing my banal thoughts with the world, as if they were worth listening to? Who do I think I am?”

Long-time readers of PPI know that I normally try to remain positive, no matter what. However it happens that I occasionally slip and fall into more self-destructive patterns. And that’s why this post could break through my shield and get to me. It matched thoughts that I already carried myself.

Banal and proud
However, the slip was temporarily and I definitely won’t let this troll leave the inn with the last word. Because after a short moment of self-pity and soaking in my own butt hurt feelings, I popped heroism and manned up, growing to the double size if not more, ready for a fight.

So this guy thinks that PPI is banal and self-serving? Good for him. He's right. PPI probably is quite banal. And you know what? I’m not even ashamed of it! Why would I be?

Banalities are fine. People have made entire comedy shows going on for years about “nothing” and they were excellent. There are so many pretentious works of art in the world that crave desperately for a little bit of banality, which would make them matter and not just remain unreachable thought constructions. Gief more banality!

This week I’ll be celebrating three years as a blogger. During this time I’ve given my thoughts, experiences and views on WoW in over 600 posts. They’re probably not the kind of deep or world-changing posts that the commenter is looking for. But so what? I never claimed anything else; I’ve never reported in as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. I’m just an average – or sometimes even mediocre if I’m absolutely honest - player who runs an average blog where I ramble about my very ordinary life in Azeroth.

The guests that frequent PPI are accordingly kindly asked to leave their e-peens as well as steel toe shoes in the hallway. You see, I think that there are others like me in the community, players who long for a safe spot, somewhere where banality and mediocrity is not only accepted, but even embraced.

I want PPI to be a place in my mind where walk barefoot, where I don’t need to pretend that I’m any better or smarter than I really am. Where I’m just me. And if the WI readers don’t approve of their choice for linkage, it’s their problem, not mine.

As long as PPI remains open, it will always be a home for banalities. I promise.

When the ballet boss turned into a punch-bag

Magmaw was nerfed last night. Before someone will enrage, I might add that it wasn’t Blizzard who did a hotfix in order to please entitled casuals or anything like that. We did it ourselves as we changed strategy.

No more anxious watching over the cooldown for pillar of flame, no more worries about stray parasites pestering the ranged group, spawning more of them. No more dancing, at least not for me. Our DK did it for all of us, beautifully keeping the little buggers occupied (with the help of some hunter traps) while everyone else stood in melee range, focusing on the boss and nothing else. The melee people had previously claimed that Magmaw was about as exciting as Patchwerk, and now the ranged couldn’t but agree.

From ballet to boxing
So we got our kill without a single death and we were even rewarded with an unexpected achievement for it since the pesky parasites didn’t even touch us. Needless to say this will most likely be how we fight Magmaw from now on, unless Blizzard decides that it’s not what they intended and fix it.

It’s the natural law of raiding, isn’t it? We will always find the quickest way down, like a creek of melt water will use every shortcut it can find as it flows down the mountainside. Why complicate it if you don’t have to?

And yet I couldn’t help feeling a little bit cheated on my raid experience. Just a tiny little, but still. My dance class suddenly turned into a session at the boxing club. All I was supposed to do was to stand there on the same spot and punch that bag the hardest I could, over and over again. It was like facing one of the training dummies in IF, with the difference that this one carried epic loot.

Admittedly, sometimes a tank’n’spank fight can be exactly what you need. I remember nights of slow progression, when we’ve been wiping for hours on some complicated ballet-style boss. Finishing such a raid beating up one of the dummy bosses in VoA can be a bit of a relief. Punching a boss really hard and you might get back to your senses.

I don’t say that tank’n’spank is The Evil and should be exterminated from the game. But given the choice between the two extremes, I’d vote for ballet bosses any day.

For me raiding is more about learning the dance than hitting a punch-bag.

Overcomplicated fights?
Some players think differently about this though. Keen over at Keen and Graev’s Gaming Blog for instance had a wipe night in Bastion of Twilight, facing the three random dragons with intricate combinations of buffs and debuffs. Keen calls it “overcomplicated” and doesn’t hesitate on calling out Blizzard:

“When the whole raid has to orchestrate a ballet in order to not wipe in 10 seconds it crosses the line”.

According to Keen, more complex doesn’t mean more fun and he asks Blizzard to stop what he calls “the insanity”. He doesn’t make unreasonable claims, suggesting that bosses should be designed like Patchwerk. But he definitely wants them to be simpler than most encounters I’ve seen so far in Cataclysm. According to Keen, Gunship and Saurfang in ICC were examples of good fights, where there’s enough going on to make them interesting, while they’re still simple enough for you to be able to “just enjoy the content”.

I must say that I disagree with this praise, especially when it comes to Gunship. Sure, I bet Blizzard had the very best intentions as they designed that fight: they wanted to create something new and refreshing, something different from the old fire spitting dragon concept. And of course I loved the rocket jumping, is there anyone who didn’t? I hope they’ll bring them back into game and reuse it at some point, if nothing else in a quest or a five-man dungeon. Jumping makes me giddy.

But aside from that, Gunship was more than anything else annoyingly slow, something you did just to get your “free loot of the week”. The lack of challenge always left me with a hollow feeling and a bad taste in the mouth. Did I really deserve those epics? Maybe I did, but not as a reward for making an effort, but rather as a compensation for the horrendous lag we had to endure doing it. A bad night the fight could easily stretch out to 15 frustrated and painful minutes – or even more.

What about the other example, Saurfang? Well, he wasn’t bad. The mechanics were straight forward enough, but still quite challenging initially and required good execution. However, since it was very much gear depending, it became rather trivial as we geared up and the ICC buff decreased.

I wouldn’t say that Saurfang was what I consider a perfect boss fight. I want bosses to be a little more complicated than that, more steps to learn and if possible several phases. Think Yogg-Saron. Think Lich King. Were they complicated? Absolutely! It took me ages to learn them. But they were good ballets.

A nightmare dancer
This doesn't mean that I'm a perticularly good dancer myself. I won’t lie to you; if you met me in WoW you’d probably consider me a bit of a nightmare partner at first. I would step on your toes; I would mix up left and right and would bump into other couples, making you and everyone else embarrassed.

However, if you wouldn’t run away from me yelling, you’d see that I would improve over time. Eventually I would see the pattern, sense the rhythm and hear the music. My feet would move by themselves, without me having to yell commands at them “left foot, move one step forward – press button – engage”. And to me, the magic of raiding comes in those moments, when everything suddenly clicks. Ballet bosses have it. Punch-bag bosses don’t.

Magmaw turned from a ballet partner into a punch-box yesterday. But there are still many other bosses in Cataclysm who require me to learn how to dance, so I don’t think I have anything to worry about.

Enough of rambling - I think it’s about time that I wrap up this post. It’s Friday night at the inn, the dance floor will open soon and we serve some pretty good punch in the bar. There’s something for everyone, just like in the game. So go ahead and enjoy!

Cheers!

25 man raiding – how long can we defy the law of gravity?

Back in April I asked if anyone will bother to do run 25 man raids in Cataclysm, considering the announced changes with shared lockouts and loot in 10 mans becoming the same as the 25 man loot.

As someone who loves 25 man raiding, I was concerned, even though I also could understand why the 10 man raiding guilds welcomed the changes and thought it was about time. The gain of someone is the loss of someone else.

Here we are now, one month - soon to be two, into Cataclysm. How did it go? Has the world changed or were my worries unfounded? Is it business as usual?

Hitting hard
Well, I suppose that it’s still a little bit too early in Cataclysm to make the definite call. People have only been at max level for a month. Players who aren’t on the bleeding edge, but still plan to raid in Cataclysm, are still in the process of gearing up in heroics. And the post-Cataclysmic guild landscape on each server isn’t set in stone yet; it’s a process in progress. We’re only seeing the first tier of several and each one might have an impact on the social structure and how people choose to raid.

So there are a lot of reservations and maybes in this post, in the usual Larísa manner.

However, if I’m putting up my finger in the air to feel where the wind is going, I would say that Cataclysm has hit the 25 man raiding pretty hard.

I can only speak about what I see on my server, but where there used to be at least 15-20 guilds on the alliance side that did 25 man raids back in the days, there are just a handful who do them in Cataclysm, so far.

If you look at the recruitment ads on the forums, there are plenty of guilds who claim that they’ve got plans on 25 man raids. However, when you look a little closer at their raid progression, it turns out that most of their kills, if not all, are from 10 man raids.

Not everyone will agree with me. I read a post by Gavendo at Rapid Fire, who argued that the hardcore guilds such as Paragon still are rocking it in the 25 mans. He also talks about why 10 mans are harder than 25 mans, since there among other things is less room for individual mistakes. So according to Gav we were wrong to worry about the future of 25 man raiding.

And sure, I’m certain that the top class guilds of the world are doing just fine. But the world I live in is different. What we currently experience is a distinct lack of people who want to do 25 man raiding. Recruiting is harder than ever been before. For all the efforts we’ve made, we don’t get many applications, and I find it hard to believe that it would be because it’s not as if we’re not an attractive guild. We’re one of the oldest, most reliable and well organized guilds on the server if I’d dare say so, with an infrastructure that works and a solid record of progression in the past. If we can’t recruit, it’s not just because we’re not good enough. It’s something else going on.

Was it only about the loot?
Last spring we had quite an intense debate going on in the blogosphere about 10 vs 25 man raiding. There was a lot of talk about the loot aspect, where 25 mans always had been at advantage and things now would be more or less equal (although with a little more points awarded to 25 man raids.) Many argued that if loot was all that kept people doing 25 mans and that players really didn’t enjoy it for its own sake, then it was just as good if it disappeared.

And I’m sad to say it, but it seems as if this is what we see happening now. With the promise of better loot to show off in the cities gone, the gravitation towards smaller, easier-to-handle, more tightly knit raiding formats is turning out to be strong, maybe too strong.

Our guild is still determined to defy this gravitation. Loot or not, we think that 25 man raiding has a certain “something” that 10 man raiding lacks. Not that there’s anything bad about 10 man raiding. I enjoy the smaller format immensely too, with the intimacy and cosiness that a tighter team brings. However, it’s a different creature and it can’t really replace the experience of having a 25 man team climb a learning curve, click and pull it together.

But unfortunately, people like me seem to be a dying breed and the question is for how long we can keep doing this. And how much worries and stress can our officers put up with before it’s wearing them down?

History repeating itself?
The other night our officers set a date. If we can’t fill our vacancies before March 1, so we’re sure that we can pull off every raid and progress as planned, we will no more be a 25 man guild, but a 10 man guild spotting only one team, and the roster will be cut down accordingly.

No one wants it to happen and everyone’s prepared to do whatever they can to help out recruiting. Hopefully Adrenaline won’t become one of the victims of the 25 man raiding death of Cataclysm. But there’s no guarantee we’ll succeed.

If you forget about Paragon and their buddies, I think it’s a tough time for many 25 man guilds in Cataclysm. I was never around for the 40 man raiding in vanilla, but I’ve understood that the transformation for TBC, when they were removed from the game, was painful to say the least. While we still have 25 man raids in the game, I can’t help wondering if what we see now is the beginning of a repetition of the past.

And the next question that comes to mind is of course: how could Blizzard possibly motivate keeping making content for 25 man raids in the next expansion, if it’s just a small minority of the players who bother to do it? It sure carries a symbolic value, but it also pulls development resources, and the question is how much they can allow it to cost.

Again: it probably is too early to judge out the 25 mans completely. This is not my “The End is Near” post. Not quite yet.

But the situation is indeed worrying for all of us who love to raid in 25 mans, but wouldn’t qualify to do it in Paragon.

The Single Pack Disease at AH

I shop my groceries in a supermarket once a week. It's the quickest and cheapest way to get the stuff you need for a family of four. The carrier is always filled to the brim, so heavy that I just barely can handle it and stop it from running straight into the back of adjacent cars in the parking area. I guess I'm like any ordinary middle aged mum in my neighborhood, apart from that I normally listen one or another of my favorite WoW podcasts as I'm doing it. This makes the task far less tedious.

But let's move along to the point. As I do my shopping I tend to buy the items in big packs. Living in a fairly small house I haven't got storage space enough to go for the Very Biggest, Supergigantic and therefore also cheapest versions. But I go for the middle priced. Take toilet tissue. I wouldn't dream of buying that in singles. It would be quite inconvenient for one thing, but it would also be far more expensive. So normally I stick to the 8 or 12 packs, even though I know that the ideal would be to buy 64 at a time, if I only had somewhere to put it.

The more of them you buy, the better price you'll get. That's the norm in real life shopping. Buy three books and you'll get a fourth for free. Buy ten at the price of nine. You know the drill.

The Cataclysm change
It used to be that way in Azeroth too. Stacks of items were always cheaper per item than buying them one by one. Pre-Cataclysm you could always make a little money at AH this way. You bought one elemental fire and cut it into ten crystallized fire pieces, selling each one at the double price of what they had cost you to begin with. The people who only wanted to buy that single crystallized fire they needed for their crafting were happy, the seller was happy, everyone was happy.

Enter Cataclysm and something happened.

The "Multi packs always give you a discount rule" is broken. Nowadays the rule seems to be exactly the opposite, at least at my server. And it drives me nuts.

My main is a tailor, but I don't have any miner or herbalist at max level. This means that I need to buy elementals to do my weekly special cool down cloths. And I buy loads of them. Each cloth type takes 30 elementals and I can make five of those cloths a week. This means 150 freaking volatiles of different flavours!

All this would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that the rule has changed. The elementals even stack better these days, so theoretically I could buy 30-packs. Click, click, click, loot mail box, DONE.

But alas - no. I can't speak for other servers of course, but on my server, Stormrage EU, you have to pay extra nowadays if you want a proper stack. The single packs are always cheaper per item, and I mean a LOT cheaper.

For every single item I need this means that I have to click at least three times in AH. One time to mark the item, one time to mark that I want to buy it out immediately and a third time to accept it and get it done. Looting it from the mail box fortunately only takes me one click, provided that I remember to use shift and right click. But never the less, all in all, it's four clicks for each one of the 150 elementals every week, which if I count it right will result in 600 clicks. And that, my friends leads to a LOT of clicking.

One day this is going to give me some problems with my arm, no kidding. The repetitive clicking, over and over again isn't just boring and annoying, it even hurts, physically.

I suppose there is a solution out there if you use the proper addons. There surely must be some addon that enables you to bid on a multitude of single posted items without having to mark and click on each one of them.

But should I really have to go through that hassle to find that addon, to install it, to configure it, to keep it updated and make sure it doesn't drag down my system?

I don't even WANT an auction addon in the first place! I'm not interested in gold making and I spend as little time as possible messing around with business related activities. I'm in the game to kill dragons, explore worlds and hang around with people I like.

Possible solutions
I guess there are two solutions to this. One is that Blizzard could change the game default UI in some manner so you don't need to do all that clicking if you want to buy 30 volatiles and end up buying them in singles because people refuse to post stacks of them.

Another solution of course is that we somehow get back to the standard that the more you buy, the less you pay. But I suppose that won't happen.

The goblins get better paid for big stacks, which require them less work to post. And I must admit that I'm sometimes even prepared to pay them for it, even if I grumble as I do it. It happens that I just can't face another click-my-way-through-thirty-singles session and buy out the pricey stacks just to save me some time. So why would they refrain from the possibility to do such good business?

The question is what a grumpy gnome is to do when she's out to do her weekly stack up shopping for her crafting?

Well, I put on a podcast and try to think of something else as I click my way through page after page at AH. Just as I do when I go for my weekly shopping at the supermarket.

But I can't help thinking myself back to better times, when the market in Azeroth behaved like other markets and one elemental was cheaper than ten crystals.

The honeymoon is over for the bitter veterans

I probably shouldn’t write about this post since doing it puts me in a slightly bad mood. However, there are some thoughts and views that have been swirling aruond in my backhead for a few days now, following a debate in the blogosphere. And I can't help myself; I need to let out this steam so I can enter the weekend with peace in my mind.

The firestarter is no one but Wolfshead, who is done with his month of evaluating Cataclysm and now has come to the conclusion that it’s the worst expansion in the entire MMO history.

The blogger who more than anyone else (possibly with exception for Syncaine) loves to hate WoW, the guy who has appointed Blizzard the Evil Destroyer of the MMO concept, has once again played WoW for a few days – how many hours is unclear – and come to the conclusion that it still sucks. I would have been way more surprised if he had changed his mind.

“WoW is dying” over again.
As long as I’ve been playing, since 2007, there have been people whining on the forums about how “WoW is dying”, how the game has been ruined by equally bad and evil developers, spiced up with some well chosen general insults to the entire community, meaning: all other players except for me are idiots.

We saw those ex-players return for Cataclysm and for a month they’ve been occupied playing the game. Now the honeymoon is over and this week a wave of negative posts popped up in the blogosphere, Wolfshead the most extreme example. Apparently those who basically don’t like WoW because they’re burned out or just haven't come over EQ are done with their thing and about to leave us.

And to be truthful: the quicker they go, the better it is. I’ve had enough of their presence. Their constant flow of bitter and poisonous throw-ups in blogs and forum posts is sickening and doesn’t’ give me any insight or knowledge whatsoever. All it gives is an annoying debuff on my mood.

It’s hard to take doom and gloom prophecies seriously. Is Cataclysm doing well or not? I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see what the annual reports for Blizzard Activision say. But one think is clear: I don’t think that Wolfshead’s conclusions or a bunch of whiny forum posts can be hold as evidence that Cataclysm is a bad expansion, that it’s badly received, that Blizzard has failed and that players now are leaving for greener pastures.

We’ve seen exactly this happening in every expansion of WoW. Players fled after Vanilla, after TBC, after Wrath and now after Cataclysm. Just like in any other hobby activity, people come and go for various reasons.

But when it comes to WoW it’s a little bit different. For some reason, those who are unhappy can’t just cancel their subscription and play another game that suites them better, which seems to be the logical thing to do. Oh no, they have to make a hell of a noise as they’re leaving, slamming the door to make sure we’re really noticing their departure, yelling in red: “We’re all doomed, WoW is dying!”

A kick from bashing WoW
Isn’t this behavior a little bit odd, thinking about it?

I mean, it isn’t as if WoW was the only game on the market, just as little as there is only one sort of food available in the store. I for instance don’t like the taste of egg. As a matter of fact I hate it in its pure form, such as a boiled egg or an omelet. Does this mean that I’m at war with people who like egg, who make those dishes and eat them with pleasure? Do I call them tasteless, childish and lacking any kind of thinking ability because their taste is different to mine? Do I think that egg-producers are doing the wrong thing, destroying the market for good and tasty food? Nope. The thought is rather absurd.

However, some ex-players feed on and get a kick out of bashing WoW. I’m not sure why. Could it possibly be that it’s a case of an unhappy divorce, an unfinished relationship? WoW is their ex lover and they’ve parted from it on the paper but not in their heart and mind and now they’re trying to convince themselves to let go of it. When they demonize it, it’s their last, desperate effort to try to get away from it.

Lack of nuances
I guess Wolfshead wanted to provoke a discussion, but how do you argue with someone who so completely lacks nuances and perspective, claiming that “It’s almost as if someone has kidnapped the game designers at Irvine and replaced them with childcare workers.”?

How do you talk to someone who sweepingly says: “Like some deranged madman bent on suicide, Blizzard has destroyed everything that was good and noble about MMOs and seemingly wants to take the entire genre with it into existential oblivion”? Can you take this seriously?

Wolfshead claims that Blizzard has created “the worst community in MMO history”.

On what grounds does he say so? I’m a part of the community. So is my guild. So are the bloggers I read and love. Are we all just childish, entitled scum in the world of Wolfshead?

And he goes on:

“You’d almost think that Blizzard feels that socialization and camaraderie are liabilities that should be removed from MMOs altogether.”

I suppose Wolfshead hasn’t noticed the new guild leveling and guild perk system or the changes to raiding that means a huge buff to small, tightly knit 10 man raiding guilds? Likewise he doesn’t see how beautiful Azeroth has become. Has he ever set his foot in Vashj’ir?

All he does is raging about how thee world has been ruined: “Familiar and sentimental zones like Loch Modan, have been destroyed and replaced with desolate ugliness.” Would he prefer if Azeroth had frozen and looked exactly as it did in vanilla? A museum rather than a living, breathing and always changing world.

I could go on and on about Wolfshead’s post, but I think I’ve ranted enough. I just can’t help thinking that it’s a little sad that the guy doesn’t use his writing skill, influence in the community and knowledge about MMOs to make something more interesting. He could have initiated a good discussion; instead he comes out like a reckless forum troll, just repeating it self. Such a waste of talent.

The Cataclysm disease
Wolfshead isn’t the only blogger who has been writing rather negative posts about Cataclysm this week. There have been quite a few others. On that stood out as better an more interesting than many others was the one by Lonomonkey, who tried to put his finger on what he calls “The Cataclysm Disease.”

As opposed to Wolfshead, Lonomonkey doesn’t fall into the pit hole of troll rhetoric. He’s reasonable and I think he’s on to something when he talks about the backside of the streamlined player experience – a lack of free choice and control. I’ve noticed it myself, especially as I was leveling in Uldum and felt as if I was on a moving walkway, unable to decide for myself.

For my own part I haven’t seen enough of the game to make a verdict on how Cataclysm panned out at this stage. I’ve leveled a character to max level, I’ve seen most of the five man dungeons and I’ve started out raiding, but I haven’t quested through the revamped zones with an alt. I have yet to try out PvPing, I have yet to pay the worgen and goblin areas, I have yet to see the new Azeroth from a RP perspective. And above all – I haven’t seen what impact the changes to the game have had on the community from a long term perspective. It’s way too early to make the call. You can’t base such a judgment solely on what people post on the forums.

The good and the bad
If you push me for an answer, asking for my gut feeling, I’m a little bit worried about the lack of player choice, just like Lonomonkey, and I also have the feeling that 25 man raiding has taken quite a hit, judging from what I see on our own server. I miss the group quests while leveling, thinking it was a good preparation for five-mans and a way to get to know other people on the server. Overall I think that leveling is too much of a pure solo experience, considering it’s supposed to be an MMO.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of stuff that probably makes Cataclysm the best WoW expansion ever. The quests are more fun and varied, many zones are incredibly beautiful and imaginative, they’ve made the five man dungeons interesting and challenging again and they’ve given players more incentives to join guilds and play with friends, at least on end-game level. Epics feel like epics again, a reward for effort and overcoming of challenge. There’s a lot to be happy about.

However as I said: my picture is incomplete. We have all time in the world to discuss this. This expansion has only begun and if I’m allowed to speculate I doubt we’ll see the next one until the end of 2012.

I’m looking forward to have some serious and balanced debates about what lessons we can learn from Cataclysm and what future we see for WoW as well as the next generation of MMOs. But let the WoW haters leave the scene first. Then we start talking.

And now I think we all need something to raise our spirits after the hit they took by the post-honeymoon backlash. It’s time for the weekly toast. I hope you’ll get an enjoyable weekend! Oh, and let’s make next week into a happier one, shall we? I for one am still having a blast exploring Cataclysm.

Cheers!

Gnomebliteration for Daily!

I’m normally not a huge fan of daily quests. I make a few of them, but more often than not it’s out of duty and a fixed idea that I “have to” make the best out of my character than anything else. Not doing them would feel like slacking. Yeah, I’m probably a bit silly, but that’s me.

I still have painful memories of being captured in slavery for the Sons of Hodir, polishing their not-to-be-mentioned thingies and whatnot. Pure humiliation, I tell you.

The very moment when I dinged exalted with Therazane, I told them some truths about what I really thought about them and made it perfectly clear that I was out of that pit for good. If they wanted shiny rocks from labyrinths they would have to grab them themselves. I was done.

Tol Barad
I’m still on the fence about the Tor Barad dailies. Admittedly those guys have some quite shiny trinkets in their store and a close to irresistible non combat pet. However most of the quests are underwhelming, to say the least.

We thought that Blizzard hade moved on from the “kill-ten-rats” quest era and that quests were supposed to be fun and interesting these days. The truth is: they haven’t. Not entirely. They just gathered them all up in this zone. Gather body parts from crocs, kill tons of spiders, kill X amount of mobs in the Y village. Zzzzzz.

I still do the Tol Barad quests occasionally, sort of half hearted. But not all of them and not every day; that would be more than I could stomach.

When you think about it closer, isn’t it rather insane to even consider doing the same simple, un-fun quest over and over again? Especially so since I still haven’t cherished all content there in for instance Vashj’ir and Twilight Highlands. But the min-maxing madness is hard to resist once it gets hold of you. I reckon that’s why I haven’t given up on them altogether.

There are exceptions of course. Pygmy slaughtering, say no more! You can never get enough of that, can you?

Quests I can do again
As I shared my enthusiasm for that daily quest the other day, I started to think about other quests I like in Cataclysm. Was there any other quest that I hadn’t had enough of doing it once? Was there a quest that I could imagine to do over and over again, even once I’ve reached exalted, just because of the entertainment value?

There was. There was one quest that came out as top-on mind, one quest that kept me giggling all the way as I did it. One quest that tendered to my need for big numbers and merciless slaughter of small creatures.

Yep. I’m talking about Gnomebliteration, the quest in Uldum where you handle a gigantic fireball, rolling down the hill on the hunt for 1 000 (!) crazed gnomes.

If I’d known better as I did it, I would never have turned it in. Then I could have done it over and over again as much as I wanted to. According to the comments at Wowhead, you can proceed in Uldum without completing this quest. But I didn’t know, so now it’s out of my reach unless I level an alt.

My hope now is that Blizzard will hear the cries from the masses. Judging from pleading threads in the forums and from several of the comments to my pygmy quest post, I’m not the only one who loves to crush gnomes with a giant ball of fire.

Make Gnomebliteration into a daily!

The Unfiltered Joy of Smashing Thieving Little Pluckers

Let me reveal a secret. Those pink pigtails - the doll-like cute little face if mine – is just a disguise. In reality I’m a full-fledged slaughter machine, always craving for blood.

The more they bleed and scream, the wider is the smile on my face. It feels good to be evil!

Pygmy cravings
My true nature was revealed to me the first time I did the quest Thieving Little Pluckers in Uldum.

As I raised the Tehtret Dynasty Mallet, which is about the size of Larisa and smashed it into the living pillar of equally annoying and cute sand pygmies, and as I saw how they fell in all directions, blood flowing and yellow numbers filling my screen, I knew that I was lost.

I had to do this again! Please, please let me! I would do anything in my power – even level an alt if that was what was needed– to get the chance to just one more time pwn those little creatures and tear them into pieces.

Fortunately enough it turned out that someone at Blizzard knew about those darkest corners of the pink pigtailed mind. Of all quests in Uldum, they had picked this one for making a daily, in an effort to meet the needs of us addicts. And I pulled a sigh of relief. I could do this quest, over and over again, as many times as I liked. The flow of blood from smashed pygmies would never get dry.

And this was how it all began back in December. Many pygmies have died for my mallet since then and Ramkahen now are so pleased with my services as a smasher that they’ve given me a camel mount and released me from my duties. If I insist on keeping smashing pygmies, they let me of course, but the salary is set at a modest 7 g 85 silver, which I probably could earn quicker if I just gave AH 30 seconds of my attention.

From a strict goblin perspective, there’s no reason why I should do this daily again, ever.

But I do. Because I’m just like Raz the Crazed in Blackrock Caverns. I like to smash!

The joy of destruction
I frankly don’t know what it is about it that makes it so satisfying. There isn’t any challenge, no e-peen to wave and certainly no tasty quest reward awaiting.

And yet I love it, the same way as I enjoy stomping on the thin ice covering a ground pool an early winter morning, seeing the ice shatter into pieces as you pray silently that this pool was empty and not filled with dirty water. I think it’s something about the sound and the very sensation of breaking things. It’s the joy of pure, unfiltered destruction.

Bam, bam, splash! You’re so dead!

Blizzard may break their backs to provide us with all sorts of sophisticated quests with phasing, invisible vehicles, mystical mists à la Emerald Dram or crazy action filled cut scenes in the company of Harrison Ford. But we players are strange, ungrateful creatures. Sometimes we don’t want sophistication. Sometimes we just want to smash things and listen to the sound of screaming victims and flowing blood.

Thieving Little Pluckers. I think I already have a good candidate for when it’s time to nominate the best quest of 2011.

To all fellow smashers
My Friday night toast goes to all my fellow pygmy smashers out there. Maybe you find reasons to hide your addiction, putting up a façade that you prefer quests to be challenging and intriguing. But even so, don’t feel ashamed for your secret cravings.

You’re not alone!

Cheers!