Precious and Soft

Games Bears Play - Torchlight 2

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 01:06:27 -0600

I couldn’t decide whether to write about Dungeons of Dredmor or Torchlight 2 (I’ve been loving both games in different ways), so I asked Twitter. Twitter wants Torchlight 2 first!

There are plenty of reviews of Torchlight 2 on the Internet already, but the point of Games Bears Play isn’t necessarily to review brand spankin’ new games. It’s about the point of view. So! Let’s get on with it…

BEARS PLAY TORCHLIGHT 2!

I really enjoyed Torchlight, so it was pretty likely I was going to enjoy Torchlight 2. The truth is, I haven’t made it all the way through the second act yet and I just love it! It’s not heavy on story, though it does have more than Torchlight did. Story is usually a huge thing for me, but I’m okay with the light story. It’s like listening to someone give you a brief run-down of things, as opposed to listening to someone try to tell you a story they’ve forgotten half the details of. The light story feels like it’s light by design… enough to make you feel like there’s a reason you’re doing this, but then it gets out of the way and lets you do your thing.

There are side quests. I haven’t felt like they do anything to flesh out the main story, but they do flesh out the world. I’ve helped a pirate’s ghost get revenge on his old shipmates, started picking up pieces for some kind of robot, recharged a crystal with magic energy… None of these things got me any closer to my goal as far as the story is concerned, but I picked up extra experience and loot and got to do something other than simply chase after the bad guy.

The side quests are optional. In fact, some of them require that you do something to make the quest giver show up before you can even decide whether to take the quest or not. That’s one of the ways the game rewards exploration. You really are welcome to go from one objective to the next in the main story, though, or just stop doing side quests if you get tired of them.

If you played the first Torchlight, it can be a little surprising at first not to find all the vendors in the first city when you get there. The vendor who destroys gems, as well as the one who destroys gear and saves the gems, will show up with time! So will a transmuter. A loading screen tooltip will tell you the art of combining ember (gems) to make higher quality ember has been lost, and so you should just go ahead and use it when you get it. That’s… not entirely true.

The old system was kind of a pain. It took four Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Dull Ember to make one Teeny Weeny Dull Ember. Four Teeny Weeny Dull Ember to make one Dull Ember. Four Dull… well, you either get the point or you’ve actually done it. The transmuter now will take any three socketable items and give you back one socketable item of higher quality. And instead of randomly plugging items in to find out what works, he has “recipes”. It’ll tell you to put in three health potions, or three mana potions, or four unique items. There may very well be a method to the madness of exactly what you put in and exactly what you get back out. I haven’t played with it enough to know. The overall transmuting system is much more user-friendly, though!

I don’t know why the transmuter and enchanter are little bipedal raccoons with goggle and clothes, but they are ADORABLE! <3

There is an NPC in the city who will allow you to unlearn skills in order to get the talent points back. You can only unlearn from the last three points you’ve spent, though, and it will cost gold. I haven’t really had any gold problems with all the loot I sell. Or, all the loot I send my pet to sell.

Yes, pets are still in the game! No, they aren’t quite the same as before!

If you haven’t played Torchlight, there were two pets you could choose from when starting a character - cat (housecat) or dog (sort of like a husky). A ferret with goggles was added later for the box game, and a mod made the ferret an option for everyone else, as well. The pet could learn a couple of spells (I taught mine to heal, and to summon zombies. It pretty much cast the spells every chance it could.) It had gear slots for a necklace and two rings, and backpack space so you could send it back to town to sell things for you instead of leaving the dungeon yourself. Feeding it different fish would transform it temporarily into spiders, elementals… all kinds of things that could be helpful in combat. Certain fish would transform the pet permanently (or until a different “permanent” fish was used).

Torchlight 2 has the dog, cat, and ferret again… as well as an owl, eagle, papillion (the breed of dog, not a French butterfly), bulldog, panther, and some kind of strange upright lizard I’m pretty sure is only native to the world where Torchlight exists. Some of the pets have different color options. Osita, my berseker, has a purple panther named Morada. My engineer, Fizzy, has a ferret named Rocket. My Outlander travels with one of the lizards… Merry and Pippin. And my embermage, Fire, is always with her beloved papillion Smoke. (Because where there’s Smoke there’s Fire… um… I’ll go sit in my corner.)

Pets are no longer a place to keep an extra necklace and pair of rings that you might want to swap out with your own at some point. Pets now have collars and tags that they wear. This is pretty cool, since the collars and tags are designed to actually be pet gear. They can put things like “steals health for master” on them. Pets can now be set for aggressive, defensive, and passive stances. (I could be wrong, but I don’t think that was possible in the first game.) And not only can you still send them to town to sell stuff, but you can also have them buy stuff for you! There’s a little “shopping list” where you can select items and quantities from the things that are always for sale. Health and mana potions, portal and identify scrolls, etc.

I mentioned the classes - berserker, engineer, Outlander, and embermage. All classes have male and female options without the use of a mod now.

Most gear is not restricted to a specific class, and one of the changes in Torchlight 2 is that you can equip gear if you meet the level requirement OR if you meet a stat requirement. For example, you may pick up a piece of gear that can’t be equipped until level 27, but let’s say the alternative requirement on it is a certain number of points in Strength and you’re playing an engineer who meets the Strength requirement at level 16. In that case, your engineer can equip it at level 16.

How each class plays really depends on what you’re putting points into, and skills unlock so that you can put points into them at certain levels, rather than once a required number of points have been put into previously unlocked skills. You get one skill point per level to put into an active or passive skill, as well as one skill point when your fame goes up to a new rank. You get five stat points per level to spend on your stats (strength, dexterity, focus, and vitality). You know how it’s easy to level up in combat and forget to spend your points? Yeah… I know exacty how easy that is. The loading screen will let you know if you’re wandering around with any unspent points.

Each stat has a little box when you hover over it that shows you what this stat is contributing to. This was really helpful when I didn’t see that putting only a single point into dexterity would actually be enough to increase my crit chance. I almost skipped putting the point in that time, except I was able to see that it would affect my dodge chance and fumble recovery. For people who enjoy going over numbers, there’s also an “Arcane Statistics” tab that goes into a lot more detail about damage, crit, defenses, etc. I can easily get overloaded by too much information in one place, so this really works for me. The numbers on the tab where I spend my points give me enough information that I feel I can confidently allocate points, but the nitty-gritty details are on another tab where I can look at them while standing somewhere safe… like the city. Both tabs are easily accessible. I don’t feel like I have to go hunt down the information.

Each class has a charge bar. This bar fills up in combat and gives certain bonuses to each class. It also works a little different for each class. My berserker’s bar fills up as she fights and, when it hits full, she goes into a frenzy that gives her passive buffs. When the frenzy ends, her chanrge bar empties and must be refilled. My engineer’s charges are used automatically to enhance certain abilities when she uses those abilities. Her fire hammer attack uses one charge (if available) to do more damage. The Outlander’s charge bar grants passive bonuses based on how full the bar is at any given time. My poor embermage has not yet hit a full charge bar. The charges do decay while out of combat, and she’s the one I move most carefully with right now.

My husband started with an engineer, while I started with a berserker (not a surprise at all to some of you, I know), so I asked him what kind of class the engineer is before I started one. He told me it’s basically a warrior. When my best friend played with us, he said it was a little surprising to him to see how my husband’s engineer was different from his own. Husband’s engineer has a bubble shield and a healbot who follows him around sending out pulses of health and mana replenishment, while my best friend described his engineer as “fire and smash”. My own engineer has spent quite a bit of time doing ranged damage. After all, the passive ability that gives bonuses to greatswords and greathammers also gives bonuses to cannons, and I did get a very nice cannon that steals health for me.

See, I’m reluctant to say, “This is what X class is like,” because I don’t know how you’ll build your character. My berserker is kind of a feral, shapeshifting monk right now. She was very much a warrior ten levels ago. My husband said he saw a berserker build for dual wielding wands, and I definitely see how that would work with points pumped into the focus stat.

Embermages are spellcasters. Outlanders has a lot of skills available that require a ranged weapon (though I can see going with a build that doesn’t rely on those skills). Engineers are… well, not spellcasters. And they have skills that make use of robots. You could think of them as the steampunk class, I suppose.

The berserker is what I’ve spent the most time playing. The three skill trees for a berserker are Hunter, which is melee fighting, Tundra, which is frost and lightning skills, and Shadow, which is the tree that gives shadow wolf abilities.

Here’s what I’ve done with my berserker so far:

I’ve put some points into all three of the Hunter passives. Blood Hunger gives me some healing when I get a critical strike with a melee weapon. Executioner works when I’m dual weilding two of the same type of weapon. It lets me do more damage while dual weilding, and gives me an increased chance to “execute”, which is striking with both weapons at once instead of one after the other. When I “execute”, I gain charge more quickly for a while. Rampage gives me a chance to go into a rampage - attack and move faster - for a little while after I kill an enemy with a melee attack.

I’ve got nothing from the Tundra tree.

I have points in all three passives from Shadow, as well as three active abilities. The passives first! Frenzy Mastery makes my frenzy from the charge bar filling up last longer. Shred Armor decreases my opponents armor a bit and increases mine a bit each time I hit them. Red Wolf makes up to two nearby enemies take damage when I get a critical strike on an enemy.

The active abilties I’ve put points into are : Shadow Burst, which makes me shift into a shadow wolf form and charge through enemies in front of me. It does damage to them and heals me. Wolf Shade allows me to summon a shadow wolf once per minute (with the number of points I have in the skill, mine will stay for 30 seconds) which will steal health from enemies for me. Savage Rush looks a lot like Shadow Burst, except I have to hold the key it’s assigned to down and it drains mana per second to work. My berserker shifts into a shadow wolf and runs back and forth attacking enemies in the area and putting a bleed effect on them.

Since I have Executioner, I want to be using two of the same type of weapon. I use claw weapons. They are fast, and they ignore half of the enemy’s armor. They don’t do splash damage, but my Red Wolf passive kind of fills in for that when I get a critical strike. In addition to the claw weapons ignoring half the enemy armor, Shred Armor tears away at it each time I hit the enemy… which I do quickly because of my fast claw weapons. And my self-healing abilities do damage to the enemy in order to heal me.

THAT IS HOW YOU RAWRSMASH!

Now… keep in mind I’m only playing on Casual difficulty. Many of you reading already know my problem. Health issues have really compromised my ability to perform in many games. If not for that, I’m confident I’d do fine on Normal and would be willing to try Veteran. (The difficulties are Casual, Normal, Veteran, and Elite. There is also the option for Hardcore, which is perma death mode and separate from the difficulty setting.) I liked this about the first Torchlight, and I like it about Torchlight 2… I can play on Casual, and my husband can play on a setting he’s comfortable with. Instead of being forced to start on the easiest setting and work up, he just jumped right in on Veteran.

Torchlight 2 goes a step further with flexibility in difficulty settings, though. Each time you start or load a character, you choose if you want to play single player, Internet, on LAN. When I hosted the game for my best friend to play with us, I had to choose a difficulty for that. My husband’s character he’d been playing on Veteran was able to come play on Casual with us for a while. When he hosts a game for me to join, he can choose the setting that creates a comfortable environment for me, then play at his own comfort level when I leave.

You do have to create a Runic account for online play, but I was able to have it import my friends from Steam. When you host a multiplayer game over the Internet, you can choose to make it available to friends only or leave it open.

I’m really happy that this game has a setting that is low-stress and low-challenge enough for my health issues, as well as having higher difficulties for my husband and for me if I find myself doing well enough that I can handle that level of play again. I’m also very happy with the flexibility in how you can build a character. I thought the only thing I would have wanted as an improvement over Torchlight was the option to connect with others to play, but I’m happy to see they’ve improved on an already great game in quite a few ways. Part of me still wants a more in-depth story, but I don’t feel like I’m not getting something I was promised, so that’s not really a mark against it for me.

Five out of five bears!

(“”\ ( -.- ) /”“) (“”\ ( -.- ) /”“) (“”\ ( -.- ) /”“) (“”\ ( -.- ) /”“) (“”\ ( -.- ) /”“)

What kinds of games do bears play?

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 17:43:00 -0600

Let’s talk about what’s going on here at Precious and Soft. Or, more importantly, what’s NOT going on. I’m not talking about games anymore. Why? Well… that goes back to why I started this in the first place.

I got tired of starting a new game blog every time I felt like the identity of my old game blog wasn’t fitting anymore. It made perfect sense to switch from an in-character roleplay blog to an out-of-character newbie healer blog. But healing didn’t work out so well for me over time. (Of course not! I preferred direct heals and never got the hang of HoTs. *ahem* Sorry.) Pushing myself through group content was getting harder and harder for me. That was a real problem if I was supposed to be a healer. I was making more and more posts that were about other aspects as of the game. It didn’t feel like a healing blog anymore. I was going to try healing in battlegrounds as a resto druid, but it turned out I wasn’t comfortable with any healing other than holy paladin. I kept leveling the druid anyway, but went feral.

Finding my love of being a bear was going to fix everything for the blog! I would change one more time and make it a BEAR BLOG! As long as I loved bear tanking, I’d blog about that. If I went back to being a hunter one day I already knew I enjoyed pet tanking with a bear, so that would fit on a bear blog. Any Pandaren character would fit on a bear blog. Bears were the answer!

And then that whole thing with me not playing WoW anymore happened. But it was OKAY! I was going to get Guild Wars 2, and there was no doubt I would play a Norn.

I sense a theme here. A big, hairy theme that goes “RAWR!”

Sadly, there’s a downside to being one half of a gaming couple that tends to enjoy the same games. We enjoy different aspects, but MMOs and even single player RPGs tend to offer enough that we will both enjoy a game. It means we rarely are okay with just buying one copy. Guild Wars 2 would be a great value in the long-run, I have no doubt. Shelling out $120.00 for a game right now just isn’t an option.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t been playing games, though. Granted, I’ve been spending a lot less time on games than I was before. One of the joys of being self-employed is making your own flexible schedule. That also means when my health has taken time away from my work, I have to be able to catch up. I don’t always get to say, “It’s 5:00 pm! Quittin’ time!” I’m still spending time playing games on most weekends, however, and I’ve tried some games I would have passed by before because they are things I can play when my arthritis gets in the way of other games or work.

So here’s what I’m considering doing: I can tell you what I am playing, why I’m playing it, and what I think of it. Yes, I’m saying I could write reviews of games. That’s not exactly the exciting part unless you just get REALLY excited every time you see an opinion about a game. In which case, I’d assume the Internet is a constant source of joy for you.

If you’re sitting there saying to yourself, “But that’s not the clever bit,” and muttering about conical bathtubs, HUSH!

Ever read one of my tanking guides? That’s pretty much the kind of writing you can expect from me if I write reviews of games. Game reviews for bears. With a rating system that goes from one bear -

(“”\ ( -.- ) /”“)

to five bears -

(“”\ ( -.- ) /”“) (“”\ ( -.- ) /”“) (“”\ ( -.- ) /”“) (“”\ ( -.- ) /”“) (“”\ ( -.- ) /”“)

I’m thinking it over. It’s something I want to do. I’ve never really been too concerned with how many people are or aren’t reading what I say about a game, anyway. I’ve had setbacks with keeping up with my non-game blog this year, but that’s something I think spending a little more time writing something I’m not really concerned about readership for can help with.

I don’t think the bear blog’s dead. It’s just been hibernating.

And then I just couldn't bleed off enough rage...

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 20:36:33 -0500

I never got around to explaining my reasons for quitting WoW as completely as I would have liked. Never really explained them as well as I would have liked, either. I think I may have left a lot of people with the impression that it was all, or even mostly, about social interactions. I’m a big bear (okay, no… I’m on the smallish side for an adult bear, but stay with me here). I can choose my social circles and surround myself with people who are not raging asshats. This was not THE problem.

I think the social aspect of things was both a symptom and a by-product of “the real problem”.

I’ve tried to explain my anxiety. It’s difficult. My anxiety pops up most often in social situations. It LOOKS like I’ve simply developed social anxiety somehow. That’s not really it, though. The real problem is how my medical condition has eroded by ability to process and react to the same amount of stimuli in the same amount of time that the average person can. It has also complicated my ability to take my thoughts and ideas, turn them into words, and communicate them to other people.

Basically, I am an extrovert who must live as an introvert. I have many of the same needs as introverts, and I now keep ending up being categorized as an introvert. I have not actually lost my extrovert desires or viewpoints, though.

This affects every aspect of my life, including gaming. Unless you’ve actually been through it, I doubt you can really imagine how hard it is to watch yourself steadily get worse at doing something you love. To watch your ability go DOWN with more time and effort, rather than UP. To be told, “You’ll get the hang of it, just keep practicing,” but to see yourself either lose what little ability you had or fight like mad just to hold onto what you’ve got.

In addition to the neurological illness, I have arthritis. I’ve had it for several years but didn’t have a diagnosis until this year. It turns out THAT is why I couldn’t consistently push buttons or click abilities (sometimes I had to do one, sometimes the other). THAT, in addition to the mental processing issue, is why I had so much trouble moving in the middle of fights at times, and especially why it got physically more difficult for me to do as a night went on.

I also have a mild hearing problem. I’m not deaf. Doctors tend to mention a hearing aid once, but then treat it as something to be addressed “in the future” and never mention it again. It’s just enough of a problem that I cannot talk on the phone while doing something else. If I cann’t see the face of the person I’m talking to, I have to put all my focus on listening to what they’re saying. This is enough of a hearing problem to make things like Mumble or Vent useless for me. I used Vent the night I did the Malygos raid at the end of Wrath. It made things more difficult, and I’m glad my husband was in the raid and could repeat things to me.

I sometimes bring up the pain of seeing people say things about players who can’t mastery a certain basic level of play. It often gets taken as me talking about raging asshats. So here’s the funny part… some of THE SAME PEOPLE I’m talking about when I point out how shitty it is to treat someone like they’re stupid for not being good at a video game will tweet in reply to AGREE and tell me how they just hate people who treat others like that!

Stop and take that in for a second. I’m not talking about raging asshats who seem to only find pleasure in tearing others down. I’m talking about generally kind and fair people who just don’t understand that what is “basic” and “easy” for them very well may not be for everyone.

There’s a decent chance that I’m talking about YOU.

The people didn’t drive me away, though. What drove me away was the fact that I was putting HEAVY effort into the game. I researched my class. I didn’t always know what the best gear was for me or where it dropped, but I understood the mechanics of my class well enough to know why I wanted more of one stat, less of another, why Mr. Robot wasn’t ALWAYS correct for me, and could recognize a good piece of gear when I did see it. I knew what I should be doing in a group, and I knew how to do it. I could talk you through the steps of what to do, how to do it, and how to handle it if something went wrong in the middle.

I just couldn’t handle the actual doing it. My brain froze when it was all coming at me at once. My hands gave out and fingers would NOT go where I told them to when I told them to for the whole dungeon. I couldn’t get the space I needed to just BREATHE for a second, and so it would all fall apart.

The people didn’t chase me away, but it didn’t help to keep hearing that I was a “casual” player, or that people who found five mans to be difficult were stupid, or any number of other bullshit things people say when they act like their experience is everyone’s experience.

I couldn’t push myself through the game anymore because the reward was not worth the effort. I was working just as hard as many raiders do, but not even able to do five mans unless I could outgear and outlevel them or find four people I really felt comfortable with and trusted to go with me. I don’t actually care about doing dungeons. I care about the story. I like collecting pets. I’m a completionist when it comes to profession recipes. I like to get achievements as a little sign that says, “I was there. I did this thing.”

I’d say “I like to see the content”, but I think that phrase means different things to different people. I think a lot of people tend to think of “the content” as whatever it is they are focused on doing in the game.

Some people may tell you “the content” is everything there is to do except dailies and PvP. Some people may tell you it includes dailies and PvP. Some people may tell you it’s the story. Some people may tell you it’s the raids. Some people may tell you it’s heroic raiding.

I never got to kill Deathwing. Hell… I never got to kill Arthas. I barely managed to get my baby dinosaur back, and I never actual finished a Trollroic. I never got to do Heroic Shadowfang Keep or Heroic Deadmines. I didn’t even get to run the normal versions of Cataclysm five mans until it was almost time for the Dragon Soul raid to come out.

I couldn’t keep working so hard to achieve so little. I felt like Blizzard was moving more and more of the content I do want (story, pets, etc) into places I’m less and less able to go (heroic dungeons, raids, etc). Even LFR is too much for me.

I am not stupid. I am not simply not paying attention. I am not a “casual” who didn’t want to put the effort into learning. I’m just not as quick as a lot of other people. And in case you haven’t noticed, Blizzard equates speed with challenge. Move faster, do damage faster, get geared up faster.

Honestly, I’m not convinced that someone’s ability to raid shows that they ARE smart. For all I know, they just have really good reflexes and not enough imagination to think for themself, so they follow directions REALLY WELL.

See, it’s pretty ridiculous to judge someone as a person based on their performance in a game.

BUT HERE’S WHY I’M BITCHING ABOUT THIS!

LFR. There was Twitter drama about LFR. Again. In general, I think people who have long-term agitations and resentments about things in WoW that aren’t likely to change (and assuming this is causing a massive case of “not fun” for the person) should just unsubscribe. It’s a game. It’s your fun time. If you’re not having fun, you shouldn’t have to just live with it.

I also recognize that a certain amount of criticism is healthy. Not everything will please everyone all the time, and player feedback should matter when it’s logical feedback. There are questions that sometimes have to be asked in order to form opinions that qualify as worthy feedback. Discussions that must be had.

I don’t think criticism of LFR should be taken as criticism of those who use LFR. If someone is looking at LFR as an introduction to regular raiding, and saying it fails as such, then it’s totally valid to point out that LFR isn’t actually intended to be an introduction to regular raiding. It is totally valid to point out that raiding is not everyone’s goal for end game, and that Blizzard has described LFR as being for people who are not raiding to see the content. I don’t think it’s valid to take “LFR is fail” and interpret it as “people who do LFR are fail”.

There’s that phrase again… “see the content”. I’m thinking Blizzard considers everything in the game to be “content”. Blizzard has described putting in dailies very few people want to do more than twice as “adding content” before.

Personally, I don’t think people who see content through LFR because they are not raiding otherwise are “raiders”. There are certain things that make it “raiding” in my mind that just aren’t present in LFR, just as I don’t call a group of five or six kids having fun tossing and hitting a baseball “baseball players”. I also don’t think that matters. I don’t think everyone has to be a raider to have a worthy opinion about the game.

I am no more amused by people jumping all over someone’s wording and ignoring their message (or worse, dismissing what they tell you and re-interpreteing their message for them) than I am by people judging someone’s worth by their preferred type of content and level of skill in a game. It hurts. It makes me angry. It prompts me to write long-ass posts AGAIN about topics I swear I’ve already said everything I have to say about!

If you get more satisfaction out of pointing to others and shaming them for being “wrong” than from making an effort to find some common ground where you can build a place where people have enough room to be different kinds of “right”, you make me just an anxious and unhappy as people who treated me like my game experience was less valid than theirs. Worse, really, because I can’t stop you by just changing the subject to something else.

And, yes, the point could be made that creating a space for everyone’s way to be “right” is what Blizzard says they’re doing, but look how it affects this, that, blah, blah, blah… Blizzard is shoving everybody into one room and letting feral druids shit on the carpet. Boundaries are healthy. My opinion Blizzard doesn’t care about would be to stop trying to funnel everyone down a single path in the game. Spread things out, some, and really support different styles of play. Build a nice yard with a little wooded area and let the bears poop back there.

From "Many Winters: Prose and Poetry of the Pueblos"

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 22:13:22 -0500

“In the distance of my years I cover myself with time
Like a blanket which enfolds me with the layers of my life.
What can I tell you except that I have gone
nowhere and everywhere?
What can I tell you except that I have not begun
my journey now that it is through?
All that I ever was and am yet to be
lies within me now this way.

There is the Young Boy in me traveling east
With the Eagle which taught me to see far and wide.
The Eagle took his distance and said,
There is a Time for Rising Above
So that you do not think
Your small world too important.
There is a time for turning your vision toward the sky.

There is the Young Girl in me traveling west
With the Bear which taught me to look inside.
The Bear stood by himself and said,
There is a Time for Being Alone
So that you do not take on
The appearance of your friends.
There is a time for being at home with yourself.

There is the Old Man in me traveling north
With the Buffalo which taught me wisdom.
The Buffalo disappeared and said,
There is a Time for Believing Nothing
So that you do not speak
What you have already heard.
There is a Time for Keeping Quiet.

There is the Old Woman in me traveling south
With the Mouse which taught me my limitations.
The Mouse lay close to the ground and said,
There is a Time for Taking Comfort in Small Things
So that you do not feel
Forgotten in the night.
There is a Time for enjoying the Worm.

That is the way it was.
That is the way it shall continue
With the Eagle and the Bear
With the Buffalo and the Mouse
In all directions joined with me
To form the circle of my life.

I am an Eagle.
The small world laughs at my deeds.
But the great sky keeps to itself
My thoughts of immortality.

I am a Bear.
In my solitude I resemble the wind.
I blow the clouds together
So they form images of my friends.

I am a Buffalo.
My voice echoes inside my mouth.
All that I have learned in life
I share with the smoke of my fire.

I am a Mouse.
My life is beneath my nose.
Each time that I journey toward the horizon
I find a hole instead.”

Relevant to where I am in life right now in many ways. But especially the parts about Bear. Imagine that.

loosewiring: Just a quick note that I am accepting commissions...

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 01:47:49 -0500

loosewiring:

Just a quick note that I am accepting commissions now. Full-color, digital pieces like the one above are generally $50. Smaller sketch commissions (like the drawings I posted earlier) are $10 each. I can do pretty much everything in-between, too. Drop me an ask or a DM on Twitter if you’re interested!

I am so very honored to have been gifted with a drawing of my bear, and an actual shadow person painting on a small canvas, both done by Dee. I love to see the work she posts on Twitter, and she has been a real inspiration to me. I know there are quite a few folks out there who like to commission character portraits from time to time. Your money would be well spent with her.

I don’t know what’s better - that he answered my...

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 22:13:08 -0500

I don’t know what’s better - that he answered my question, or that I got Chris Metzen to tweet “bootypantsbear”!

I'm the Best Bear. I don't need to be the Biggest Bear.

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 16:58:32 -0500

Following the success of getting Ulduar done, I thought maybe we could get me the Kiril polearm, after all. This stupid weapon and I do not have a happy history with each other.

First of all, it’s a polearm. Not a staff. A POLEARM. I understand there are many people who are able to enjoy mogging for what it is, and maybe if I didn’t fret over each gold I could have learned to, as well. But it’s definitely not what I expected it to be, and I think even a lot of the hardcore moggers would agree there are things about it that just make you ask, “But… WHY???” And since I wouldn’t be able to mog Kiril to look like the Ursol’s Claw staff, I really have my doubts on how this is the best weapon for me as a bear.

Then there’s the problem with where it comes from. The people I can work with for a raid are spread across several severs, so LFR is my only hope. However, LFR is only 25 man. I’ve been through ups and dows of believing I can do this and believing it’s never going to happen. For quite a while now, I’ve believed the biggest thing standing in my way has been not being able to get the gear to get my ilevel up enough for LFR. Now that I know from Ulduar that I do have people on other servers I’m okay for grouping with, that doesn’t seem so impossible. It’s not that there’s no one on my home server… just that there’s frequently not enough for a whole group. That’s not really an obstacle, after all. We could do the dungeons and get me the gear.

But we don’t have 25 people I think I can work with. And here’s the part I really need folks to understand… just because I can’t work with you doesn’t mean I don’t like you, and just because I like you doesn’t mean I can work with you.

That’s a huge part of my problem in WoW right there. That’s why “group with friends” is not a simple solution to my problems in the game.

My anxiety in social situation isn’t true “social anxiety”. It’s anxiety that comes from too much going on at one time. Too many people present. Too much moving around. Too many things to consider. Too many voices speaking. Too much, too many, too often. The larger the group gets, the more I need to be able to control everything that’s happening. And then I get upset because I do NOT want that kind of responsibility and/or authority! If I had to assign an alignment to my meatspace self, I’m chaotic good. Now think about that… to handle all the stimuli, I need to be able to control all of it. But a lot of the stimuli is people. So, someone who is chaotic good having to have full control over a bunch of people… you see how this becomes a big ball of anxiety ripping through my guts and bursting out of my chest?

I do appreciate every offer of help I get from each and every person. I just can’t always take you up on it. And I certainly can’t anyone up on an offer that boils down to “just stay in the back and we’ll take care of it”. I will not be carried. More importantly, I will not be robbed of my chance to tank. I truly enjoy tanking and find peace in doing it. Getting a piece of gear I really, really want is a momento that goes in the bank when it’s replaced with an upgrade. I don’t want that to be replaced with “I just stood there while everybody else got it for me”.

I think Ulduar really was my last thing to do. That’s very fitting. I came full circle. Kiril isn’t that important. Bigger isn’t always better.

Monday Minipost: A very special Algalon kill

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 01:09:38 -0500

Monday Minipost: A very special Algalon kill :

blamerades:

Last Thursday, I got called in to help finish up the last few bosses in Ulduar. Not a big deal…one of the great perks of Real ID and cross-realm raiding is being able to help out your friends. So I hopped on my Alliance hunter and headed in.

However, I should point out that this was a very remarkable, noteworthy occasion. The person I was helping was my good friend Rosaa (of Heavy Wool Bandage, and @rosaamarilla on Twitter). She’d always wanted to finish Ulduar, but had never been able to, due to some really paralyzing social anxiety issues (I don’t say that lightly). Running group content has always been a struggle for her, and raiding, of course, was even more intimidating. She’s written about this in more detail in this post.

(Click here to read the rest of this post)

I’ve read Rades’s telling of the tale four or five times now, and I get teary every time. My main was a hunter, as was his, when I first started following him on Twitter, and I was full of fangirl awe. “OMG! The guy who writes Orcish Army Knife is on Twitter!” Knowing that we’ve come from me being too scared to tweet to him all the way to him writing a post about helping with this, calling me his friend, and saying he’s proud of me… I have no words for that. <3

vidyala: I decided recently that I wanted to start sketching...

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 01:00:50 -0500

vidyala:

I decided recently that I wanted to start sketching more (especially useful as a “warm-up” to start the day). This is the first day I am doing it and as I looked around the office for something to draw, my eyes fell on this guy.

When V’s dad was first diagnosed with cancer, I had the idea that we should go to Build-A-Bear and make him a bear. He and his wife had been talking about their lady bear and they obviously got a kick out of her. They enthusiastically told us about her likes and dislikes, and how she traveled with them to Switzerland.

At Build-A-Bear we carefully picked out this fellow’s components - a hypo-allergenic fur, and of course, a Jedi outfit. We had him stuffed after I started his heart in a procedure I never expected to perform for a stuffed animal. Instructed to fill out his birth certificate, I panicked. What would we name him? I decided on Maurice, in honour of Maurice “The Rocket” Richard. Plus, it seemed he needed a French name.

As we’d hoped, my father-in-law and his wife were thrilled with Maurice. They took photos of him with their other bear, told us how he was doing (apparently Almagel, his companion bear, was teaching him French). Even when he was in the hospital, his wife would play the sound of the bear through the phone for him every night.

After my father-in-law died, his wife thought that Maurice would be better off returning home to us. We received the box with him inside along with a surprise: the stethoscope that had served V’s father for his entire career. Not expecting this addition, the sight of it hit us like a physical pain. It was so much his.

Now, Maurice occupies a place of honour on our shelf. It’s still hard for me to look at him because in a way he has come to personify my father-in-law himself. He sits a quiet vigil next to a photo of the actual man, reminding me every day that you don’t have to win every battle to be a big damn hero.

Three Years, Nine Players, One Happy Bear

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 03:28:43 -0500

How many times have I told the Ulduar story now? I talked a bit here about why it mattered so much to me. I included some pictures from failed two-man attemtps here. Short re-cap: I started WoW the day Ulduar came out. I wanted to go! Time passed, and it became clear that some of my health issues would keep me from being able to full participate in game content, as well as some social anxiety issues that stem from those health issues. But I also wanted to Ulduar more than ever as I became more familiar with the lore. My one big regret about leaving WoW this year was going to be never getting to turn in the reply code.

I finally accepted that I could at least finally see the place, even if I didn’t get to turn in the code (though that’s what I wanted more than anything!) if I’d ask a friend to help. I would get my friend Takk, who is one of my best dudes, to go through with my husband (my bestest dude) and me. He agreed, and we were off to Ulduar!

Mat (often known as Apple, sometimes known as Mapple) was on when we all got ready to go in, and as he is the third of my best dudes, I got him in on it! Me and my three best dudes… off to Ulduar! This would be great! Not perfect. No reply code. But I was going to finally see it! “It” meaning “something past Flame Leviathan”. I think Takk had seen this before because I’m pretty sure he’s seen everything, but this was mostly a new adventure.

Okay, Mat had possibly seen it before, too. Or maybe he just picked that Starcaller title up from the Auction House. You never know.

I wish I had screenshots of all three nights and everyone who came along, but keep in mind we thought we were just going to run through this in a night or two. My husband and I are very experienced in two-manning raid content once we outlevel and outgear it, and that’s usually doable in five or six hours. No, we hadn’t managed Ulduar, but now we had a healer and great dps along!

Clearly, we were drawing strength from our rainbows.

We made it through Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, Ignis, XT-002, Kologarn, the Crazy Cat Lady, Thorim, and Hodir that first night. Thorim and Hodir were done by just two druids and our pally healer.

The next night, I knew this was the only other night Takk could join us this week. I was determined to get the rest of it done! We took down Freya after wandering into her asscheeks (though we never found her chest) and the Assembly of Iron. Then we went for Mimiron.

Okay, you know the button that says DO NOT PUSH THE BUTTON? We knew exactly what would happen if you did push it. We agreed that you can’t just not push it when you bring people who possibly could really die from trying to resist, and so we told Takk to go ahead and PUSH THE BUTTON! We will wipe and just do it again!

Takk’s Internet died. DO NOT PUSH THAT DAMNED BUTTON!

So we pushed on without him. The three of us got to the last phase of Mimiron (without hardmode) and discovered we needed ranged dps for his head.

This is where our final Rainbow Bear came in! (Yes, it’s a very limited membership guild. Bears need lots of space.) Asherrylie wasn’t on her Rainbow Bears character, but she is a member, so we were an all Rainbow Bear group for a while. When we put out a call for help on Twitter, she was the first to answer.

Mimiron went down FAST! General Vezax wasn’t too much of a problem. We had to break for a while before Yogg, though, and Asherrylie wasn’t able to go back with us.

Hello, Hestiah! Hestiah is, by the way, pretty freakin’ awesome. I love her to bits, and I was glad my husband (or “hooband”, in some Darnassian dialects) was able to sort of meet her through her joining us for this. He’s certainly heard me talk about her a lot from Twitter and Ravelry.

Yogg’s “Sara” phase wasn’t a big deal. Yogg’s “Let me grab you with my tentacles” phase was a much bigger deal, and I hear the “MAH INSANE BRAIN… LET ME SHOW U IT” part that goes with it was an absolutely massive deal. This was going to require a little more help. I understood this as soon as Hestiah said she was getting “Rooster”.

I almost freaked out. I did get a little scared. Meeting new people is often difficult for me, and I really need to be able to personally trust someone before I’m okay to work with them on something like this. I have slow processing and reaction times. I’m sometimes very silly just to keep my own stress level down. (I chewed out a Kirin Tor battle mage NPC in chat for asking “Any luck?” when we went back in once.) I may have a panic attack in the middle of things. I’m not very socially appropriate because I think there are many things we do more harm than good by staying so hung up about them that we practically deify them through our reverance born of fear, and my health is just not in a place where I can afford to put myself through that.

Here’s the good thing about being able to trust people, though - I trust Hestiah, so I was able to trust this would be okay. I knew she wouldn’t purposely put me in a bad situation, and if it did turn out to be a bad situation I trusted her to take responsibility for it. It turned out Rooster was pretty cool. :)

Yogg? Oh, no… we still didn’t get him down.

And that brings us to the last night.

There were folks on Twitter volunteering, and I do appreciate the offers for help. I was really going to take some of you up on it, and we tried to grab a few trusted others, but I know this was kind of a surprise and do not blame anyone who couldn’t make it. The fact that you are people I felt I could reach out to, or who had specifically offered for this, matters so much more than I can possibly tell you.

Talk of whether or not we could go back and start again to do hardmodes to get me that reply code started up. It was looking like that would require more people, and even with people I’m okay working with it doesn’t mean I can work with a large number of folks at one time. I started getting kind of nervous about it all and grabbed Mat to go with me to a place where we could talk it out without all the other voices and figure out what to do.

We talked about a lot of things. My fears. Why this mattered so much to me, and how much it meant that we’d made it this far. Daily life stuff. Social life stuff. How much of myself my osteoarthritis is costing me. We walked from gate into Ulduar down to the Observation Ring - the slow, RP walk speed - and then sat there a while. And we just talked. As it always happens when we “just talk”, everything seemed to sort itself out and we had a plan. Finish it the way we were doing it now, just in case I couldn’t push myself into coming back, but plan on coming back later with more friends for hardmodes. GET THAT REPLY CODE!

There was no way we’d get past Yogg without one dps more than just my husband’s dogcat, though, and quite a few folks were busy. Rades was able to answer the call for help, though! Even though we didn’t discuss lore while we were there, it was great to be in a place so rich in lore with a fellow lorenerd.

It’s possible just having him there turned my mind more toward lore. I hadn’t thought about Yogg’s broken chains until Rades was there. I’d always imagined they’d be like the chains forged by Hephaestus to bind Prometheus. When I saw that they had that sort of spectral/celestial look, I thought of Gleipnir, which would be more fitting with the Norse theme of the Storm Peaks. The chain forged by the dwarves to hold Loki’s monstrous offspring, Fenrir. Unbreakable because it was forged of impossible things… the sound of a cat’s footfalls, the beard of a woman, the sinews of a bear (I lack the proper cultural context for why this one was considered “impossible”), the breath of a fish, the roots of a mountain, and the spit of bird. And yet, even that chain will break one day… at Ragnarök.

Yogg-Saron’s broken chains might be more interesting than I’d previously considered.

I decided before we went in that I knew what our problem was with this fight. My strategy as a bear is always “BITE IT IN THE BALLS!” Bite dragon balls, Ignis’s balls… whatever. If a bear is biting you in a very, um… “personal region”… you’re less likely to pay attention to the elf throwing darts at you or the gnome climbing up your back and hammering you on the head.

Yogg-Saron has no balls. This is why I kept getting picked up by tentacles, and why my friends had to kill me to stop me from killing them. He shall forever be known as Yogg “No Balls” McOldgod.

We had extra help this time, though! I was introduced to POWERSAURUS, and to SNACKS the spider. (SPIDER PRIDE!!! >8<) But the best friend Rades brought along?

Bootypants! <3 I would join the Bootypants Fan Club in a heartbeat.

We got through Yogg, saw the Captain Planet door open, and found Brann Bronzebeard himself on the other side! And then Algalon killed us.

But we went back with a new plan! And Algalon killed us again.

That’s our whole group right there. Platypus the dogcat, my precious and soft ass, Mat’s faith in the Light, Rades, and Bootypants. I had a Dun Morogh cub helping me tank, and Platypus (my husband, in case you hadn’t caught onto that yet) pulled out a prairie dog for extra dps.

Mat: I’ll get my balloon for healz! (This is because I joked about ballons being for healing, not dps, the night before.)

Me: Balloons are just full of hot air.

Mat: I’m a paladin.

Me: I see your point.

The thing is, this was some pretty difficult healing for him to handle. We had bears going through a big bang, folks jumping into black holes, stars coming to Algalon’s aid, and folks witnessing THE FURY OF THE COSMOS!

And did I mention Mat was at work? I didn’t?! That’s how badly HE wanted to see me get to do this! He was sometimes having to stop and go tend to a customer when one came in, but yeah. And he was healing this ALONE!

And then I saw Big Bear Butt log in.

There’s something I haven’t made a big deal about because I didn’t want to embarrass anybear, but this is a really emotional post that’s all about making a big deal about those who have helped me. Big Bear Butt reached out to me when I was having trouble with groups and heroics. He whispered me very politely one night, told me he’d read my post, and offered to run things with me if I ever wanted it. He made it very clear he wasn’t trying to push me… just whenever I was ready, and if I ever wanted to… and that he wasn’t some creepy stalker or something. I was reading Twitter the next day and saw that the day before, he’d gotten some sad news. On a night that he had every right in the world to just shut down and be alone with his sadness, he had reached out to me and offered help to someone he didn’t know.

That’s what tells you what kind of person someone is. Not their gear score. Not their dps ranking. Not how many achievements they have or when and under what conditions they got them.

I trust Big Bear Butt enough to ask him if he could bring his priest and help Mat with the healing.

This was only the second time in all of this that we’d had five people. Never more than five, and sometimes as few as three. Plans had gone out the windown, nothing had gone the way we expected, and there had been a steady rotation of people in and out of the group. But here we were! Algalon the Observer! I had seen Ulduar!

With BBB healing, we got Algalon down with no problem! He and Brann had their little talk, in which Algalon the Observer learns a little something about the “observer effect” and starts thinking maybe we aren’t a lost cause just because we’re a bunch of failures.

“Perhaps it is your imperfection, that which grants you free will, that allows you to persevere against cosmically calculated odds.”

The chest opened, the loot came out and… THE REPLY CODE! It was there! We’d known you didn’t have to do the hardmodes to unlock Algalon anymore, but there was some confusion over how the reply code worked and a bunch of us thought you didn’t get that unless you did the hardmodes. We were wrong! There it was! The thing I waited three years for! I jumped out of windows to chase Rhonin and Brann down the street when other people turned this in! IT WAS IN THE CHEST!

So I asked if it was okay for me to need on it.

I know, I know! That’s just really drilled into me, and even though my husband said, “I don’t think anybody’s going to tell you not to take it,” I still asked first.

I GOT THE REPLY CODE!

(Floor decorations courtesy of BBB’s preist’s ability to poop pretty patterns.)

I took Brann’s ring as my reward. I kind of feel sorry for the NPCs there. “Leader”, “Archmage”, and “Ranger General” just don’t sound nearly as impressive as “Starcaller”, “Guardian of Cenarius”, “Flamebreaker”, and “Destroyer’s End”.

We’re missing someone, of course. Bootypants couldn’t go back to Dalaran with us. Neither could Rades. I was sad about this until I realized Rades was still with us in chat.

Friends don’t let friends RP walk alone.

Then, Rhonin gave the speech. The one I wanted so badly to hear again, and the reason I had wanted to do this.

“Citiziens of Dalaran, raise your eyes to the skies and observe. Today our world’s destruction has been averted in defiance of our very makers. Algalon the Observer has been defeated by our brave comrades in the depths of the titans city of Ulduar. Algalon was sent here to judge the fate of our world. He found a planet whose races had deviated from the titans’ blueprints. A planet where not everything had gone according to plan. Cold logic deemed our world not worth saving. Cold logic however does not account for the power of free will! It’s up to each of us to prove this is a world worth saving! That our lives… our lives are worth living! “

There’s a lot of talk about “cold logic” in WoW. Theorycrafting, Recount numbers, item levels on gear, this, that, and what-the-hell-ever other thing.

Cold logic doesn’t make you reach out to someone you only “know” from their blog posts. Cold logic doesn’t allow you to base a friendship on Spider Porn…um, PRIDE! >8< Cold logic doesn’t make you care so much that someone else achieve those things they want that you cry with them when it finally happens. Cold logic isn’t why someone answers a call for help on Twitter when they aren’t getting anything out of it except the joy of helping. Cold logic isn’t why we have friends, anyway.

Each and every person who went in to help me matters. I wish there had been a way to get all of you to Dalaran. Even if you were only there for one fight, you made this happen. And those of you who weren’t there but were willing to be helped me believe I could do this.

Three years. Nine players over the course of three nights. Several more cheering us on through Twitter. Bootypants the bear. And I finally got to do it! I finally turned in the reply code!

See, it’s not just about what happens in Azeroth. Here on Earth, not “working according to plan” doesn’t have to mean you’re useless and broken. It means you’re not what others expect. Who the fuck are they to tell you what you should be? Take care of your business, let others take care of their. Those you care about are “your business”, so look after them when doing so doesn’t conflict with looking after yourself or respecting their right to look after themself. How you do this, or what you do other than this, is YOUR life.

Sometimes a flaw is just a strength waiting for the right opportunity.

Bears, bears, bears, bears, bears!

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 20:50:00 -0500

I implied in my previous post that continuing to read it would reward you with bear pics. Somehow, by the time I reached the end, I’d forgotten to do anything about that. I was looking through screenshots today, though, and figured I ought to post part of my collection.

BEWARE! BEYOND THIS POINT, THERE BE BEARS! (“”\ ( -.- ) /”“)

I’m the gnome with the Dun Morogh cub. I have no idea who the druid and hunter were. They were just sitting there when I arrived.

This is from our “Go see Azeroth one last time before it changes!” tour the night before Cataclysm. We went to find Mankrik’s wife one last time. My hunter’s bear was always a camera hog.

I need RFC for an achievement. I was level 80, it was the end of Wrath, and it took a level 80 paladin and an ICC geared warrior to get me in there. Either that, or this is from the time we escorted Anachronos to Orgrimmar so he could use the auction house. I don’t remember which.

I was trying to get some really good shots of Aurius before Cataclsym, but the bear was yelling at me to hurry up!

The gates of Grim Batol. I loved going to hang out up there. If I had someone along with me, we took the motorcycle so I could “drive”. I knew exactly where every dragonkin would be and could easily weave in and out of them. The truth is, though, even with a motorcycle I often used one of my bear mounts when I was out on my own.

This is the last time I saw King Magni not in his Earthsiege Diamond form.

When everyone else forgot we were supposed to go to Ulduar for my birthday, my husband took me anyway. Note the hunter (me) is the female dwarf. That bear really liked husband’s paladin.

I feel like we’ve been here before…

I’m pretty sure the Deed to Uldum is one of those I picked up in Scholomance. Right?

@windandstardust and @ZealotPenguin got me a new Dun Morogh bear, since my others were attached to characters on a different server. This bear went everywhere with me! The first thing I did when I zoned in somewhere and he didn’t automatically show up was summon him. Even once I got the Hyjal bear cub, it was my Dun Morogh cub who stayed by my side.

Speaking of Hyjal bears… I don’t know if you know this, but baby bears are precious and soft! <3 This is from a post I wrote on Heavy Wool Bandage. It’s simple, but one of the most emotional posts I’ve ever written if you could have seen me working on it, and still one of my favorites. I’m glad I wrote it.

I posted this one before when I told the tale of how @Asherrylie and some other awesome folks helped me get my baby raptor back. Even though we never finished that dungeon, that night meant a lot to me and I still kind of (happily) tear up over it.

I think I’m running out of good bear pics here. I’ve got some beautiful art others have done for me, but that’s it for screenshots. Unless you want bear butts, and I think Big Bear Butt already has the market cornered there.

Why I'm Leaving Azeroth

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 23:26:20 -0500

Those of you who follow me on Twitter (or who have read other blogs I’ve written) have probably already heard this story in bits and pieces. You may not have realized it, though, because I’ve held off on just sitting down and really flat-out saying… well, exactly what the title says… why I’m leaving. I made it known a few months back that I will not be renewing my subscription once the year pass agreement is up. I started saying goodbye to characters. I just haven’t talked much about how I made the decision to leave, or what pushed me to that point. Between the number of “Cataclysm in Review” posts I’ve seen lately and the fact that I got a new diagnosis from my doctor today, I think I’m ready to talk about why I’m leaving Azeroth.

Let’s start with my thoughts on Cataclysm…

I’m a very story-oriented player. I will do damned near anything I can to see the story, but there are a lot of things I wouldn’t do without compelling story driving it. I guess that’s part of why I can’t maintain an interest in PvP, no matter how much I enjoyed it when I got an itch to do battlegrounds or the one season I was part of an arena team. Yes, there’s story context for why a battleground exists. It just seems like that story never goes anywhere.

I expected more from Cataclysm when it came to the story. It was wonderfully done in some places, and not just areas that had been radically changed geographically. Pre-Cata, I absoluted hated Duskwood! I think it’s now one of the best examples of updating story without changing too much. It’s mostly the same old quests, but some of them are done in a different context now and others have an actual reason that you have to do this again. It’s acknowledged that this has been done before. (Usually by “some adventurers a few years ago”.) My only complaint about the zone was that worgen aren’t sent there. Assuming you just follow the trail of quests, worgen are in Kalimdor doing Night Elf quests when humans are sent to Duskwood. I really feel like worgen should have been sent there to get some more of the background on the curse (I’m thinking about players who had never seen those quests before), as well as finding out what became of some of their fellow Gilneans. I often heard people say you don’t see worgen again until you get to the Plaguelands or the end of Felwood. There are worgen in Duskwood! Not only do you find out what some of them have been doing since leaving Gilneas, but Tobias Mistmantle says something about choosing to keep his human appearance while he’s in town because seeing worgen really sets the citizens of Duskwood on edge. That’s some relavant information about how people might respond to seeing a worgen, and how worgen might choose to handle the situation. Good for context for anyone, and especially useful for roleplayers.

I wish they had pulled the story out longer in some places and just not made it necessary to go through Outland and Northrend at all. I know they’ve said they had more story than levels, so they just didn’t update some zones because they couldn’t squeeze it all end. Yes, you could have, Blizzard folks. Rearrange the levels a bit, fill out Old World Azeroth with all that story, let people completely skip Outdatedlands and Notnewsanymorerend.

I really expected more about the dwarves. About King Magni, about Moira and the Dark Irons… about that one Dark Iron we just KNOW was lying and taking the blame for something he wasn’t guilty of! (Honestly, if that’s NOT how that turns out, I’ll be even more disappointed because it means the writing was just plain crappy there.) I didn’t necessarily expect that everything would play out and then be resolved for the dwarves before Cataclysm ended, but I expected to see more than just what happens before you get sent on to Loch Modan.

I expected to find out what happened to Koltira. Horde characters actually see Sylvanas drag him off, and Thassarian either knows what happened or it just didn’t take him much guessing to figure it out. He tells Alliance players he’s going to go find out what she did with Koltira. I can give Blizzard a break on not updating the story for Death Knights in general. I’d like to see that, but I do believe them when they talk about this having been such a massive change to the game that they just couldn’t update everything. But this chapter in the tale of Thassarian and Koltira is a new one, and I would have liked to see how it played out.

I think Blizzard has pacing problems with their story. See, I don’t think it’s just a case of adventurers have been gone, always moving on to the next thing, so it doesn’t make sense to suddenly send you BACK to follow up on things. While I do understand Azeroth is bigger than it seems (the book “The Last Guardian” talks about Medivh and Kadgar flying THROUGH THE NIGHT - Kadgar even falling asleep on the back of the gryphon - to get from Karazhan to Stormwind) we’ve been sent back and forth before. Mages have portals. Engineers have wormholes. Hearthstones. Warlock summons. Arcane-powered thingamabobs. Jaina just up and popped us right into Grommash Hold once. Hell… it probably took months for adventurers to travel by ship to get to Northrend, but not so long to travel back to Stormwind or Orgrimmar after the Wrathgate, over the the Undercity, and back to Northrend.

Or maybe it did. That could explain why everything sat at the end of Wrath for so long. Time had to catch up.

Blizzard doesn’t have a problem with asking us to suspend our disbelief and accept that we can easily travel back and forth across Azeroth when it’s about driving the bigger story forward. See, that’s the difference. The battle for the Undercity needed to happen in Wrath. It couldn’t be something you just got around to later. I didn’t see Burning Crusade when it was current content, so I don’t know if there was an explanation or not for how you were going from what was left of Draenor back to Azeroth, and then making the return trip, to visit the Caverns of Time so easily. Since there was a portal to the Caverns of Time in Dalaran, we can write easy access to Culling of Stratholme in Wrath off as “a wizard did it”.

But what happens when a storyline doesn’t NEED to be tied up now? It sits and does nothing. Or, okay, I’ll allow that it could be part of a bigger plan. It’s not that it’s on the back burner because it’s not necessary right now… maybe it’s really and truly not supposed to be tied up until later. But in that case, I feel like we see a lot of bad handling of those storylines. It often feels like they just drop off unfinished. I understand some events in MoP are a result of what’s going on in the Southern Barrens in Cataclysm. I played through there as both Alliance and Horde. On both sides, it doesn’t feel like this is “the end”… that it’s all resolved, no more problems… but it did feel “wrapped up for now”. It didn’t feel like it was just dropped suddenly simply because it wasn’t over. I wish more storylines that can’t be finished right now could be handled as well as that.

Okay, okay… no more chattering about the importance of STORY. But I think how we moved through that story had an effect on overall satisfaction.

Plenty has been said about the very linear way questing was done, both by players and Blizzard, and I’m on the side of “didn’t care for it”. I could live with it, though. It certainly didn’t stop me from playing through things again. I just made sure I got into whichever path I wanted to be on wherever I knew there was an opening in the quests to do so. And that’s all I have to say about that.

But what about the impact these epic storylines may have had on overall satisfaction with Deathwing being dead? I’ve seen a lot of people talk about just not feeling much of a sense of satisfaction there, and not just from a raiding perspective but also from a being part of the story perspective. I am horribly unqualified to talk about raiding, so again it’s the story I have thoughts on. I’ve said before, and had people agree with me, that I cared a lot more about those characters and their stories along the way, and less about Deathwing. I think there’s a problem there. Deathwing is a character that matters for me, for reasons best left to a different post, and I had to ask myself how I could possible not really care about how the story ended for him.

I didn’t get to kill Arthas, but I really wanted him dead! I wanted him dead because of all the times I couldn’t set things right. I wanted Arthas dead because of Sylvanas. Because of blood elves. Because of Sindragosa. Because of Invincible. Because of his father. Because of Pamela Redpath. Because of, whether he really had a better choice or not, Stratholme. Because Forsaken Death Knights are one of the most tragic things ever. Because of the years Muradin Bronzebeard didn’t know who he was, and Brann and Magni thought their brother was dead. Because, really… with the way Blizzard does things, what ARE the chances that David Trias and Elling Trias aren’t related? Because it was just Arthas in there, and I had a bone or two to pick with the rest of the Lich King, as well.

Time and time again, I couldn’t really set things right. So much story from Old World Azeroth through Northrend drove it home for me over and over that heroes are sometimes as helpless and useless as everybody else. What good was being a hero when you couldn’t do anything to set it all right? I wanted to be able to take that out on Arthas.

I just didn’t feel that about Deathwing. I didn’t feel a personal sense of betrayal. He flew over a fried me a few more times than he really needed to, but that was more a sense of annoyance at the RNG. Had I been more invested in draenei or some flavor of elf, I can see Burning Crusade content having that emotional tug I felt with Wrath. Deathwing? Not for me.

I was rewarded in such a big way over and over and over as I played through those epic storylines, I think it robbed me of that sense of, “This dude needs to finally go down!” I didn’t feel like a worn-down hero who had had enough of being the good guy on the losing side. I felt like I was a pretty big badass, even if I was walking away from a village that had burned to the ground. I think the epic stories with big endings and a fancy blue spoiled me.

Still with me? You must be really interested in where this all went wrong for me! Or you’re hoping for bear pictures. Keep reading.

That’s all just me pointing out what I think could have been done better. If those things were my only problem, I’d live with it. I’d probably still write a few posts complaining about it and offering suggestions, but I’d stay.

My biggest problems - the things pushing me out of Azeroth - are the focus on end game, and my inability to easily handle group content.

I’ve endured attitudes. I’ve spoken up over and over about how something being easy for some people does not mean everyone it’s not easy for is stupid. I’ve talked about problems with looking at changes as “casuals ruining the game”. I’ve also held my tongue in many cases. Sometimes because the argument wouldn’t be worth it, and sometimes because I just felt too battered and broken to be able to speak up again.

Many of you reading this probably know about my social anxiety. I didn’t always have it. I am not, by nature, a shy person. Several years ago, I was diagnosed with a rare neurological condition that mimics the effects of a brain tumor. This has seriously slowed my ability to process and respond to things, and it has made turning the thoughts in my head into words for others a task I sometimes just can’t handle. I also have a mild hearing problem. Using something like Vent just isn’t doable for me with this combination of things. This also has led to me becoming so panicked sometimes when trying to communicate with other people that I’ll just freeze up and run away.

I’ve also been fighting chronic pain and fatigue for three years. I’ve been shuffled back and forth by doctors. One thought CFS and fibromyalgia were the same thing, that I had that, and that my neurologist would be the one to treat it. The neurologist had to send me to someone else, and the whole issue of CFS and fibro NOT being the same thing was cleared up, but… well, this is a long boring story that finally ends up with me getting a diagnosis today. For three years, I have been living with untreated osteoarthritis. And that explains why it’s been getting worse. Osteoarthritis is a degenerative condition.

That’s why I couldn’t raid. That’s why running five mans with strangers hasn’t been something I could handle. Not because I’m stupid. Not because I’m a “casual”. Because I have a neurlogical disease that mimics a brain tumor, and I’ve been living with untreated osteoarthritis.

I’m going to say what I’ve wanted to say since before Wrath ended. I’m only going to say it once, but I’m not going to apologize for it.

If you’ve ever complained about the effect people who just don’t play as well as you have on the game… not dps who pulls for the tank, or people who really just STAND in the fire, but people who don’t move immediately or aren’t completely familiar with a new dungeon a month after it comes out… you’re a fucking asshole, and you made the game very unpleasant for me at times.

If anyone’s still reading this, there are things Blizzard has done that haven’t made this any easier for me.

I wanted to get Kiril so badly so I could be an ENORMOUS bear, but I needed better gear even to do LFR. I was in a guild, and my guildies would go with me for dungeons when they could, but there were plenty of times no one could or just not a full group could. But I couldn’t choose which dungeons to queue for and still get points. It was trying to run dungeons I wasn’t really ready for yet that gave me such a horrific panic attack I wasn’t able to tank again. My brain locked up because I was overwhelmed by everything going on and didn’t feel like I was in a safe social environment to let us wipe and be honest about what happened. I had one trusted friend with me, but the rest of the group was random people.

That could have been avoided if I could have been selective about only getting into dungeons I already felt okay with when I would be getting into a random group and still getting points for it.

The leveling process was SO streamlined in Cata that I had nothing but endless grinding or leveling alts (to get them up to the endless grinding point) to do at end game. I know that’s good for someone who wants to get to the raiding, but it was bad for me.

I made my decision when the previews of MoP started coming out and I saw that one zone starts with a dungeon. I wasn’t even ready to start doing the Cata dungeons that came out of the box until after Zul’Gurub came back. It took me the whole expansion to make peace with the fact that I just wasn’t adjusting to the hunter changes and find which class I could get comfortable with playing. I have no reason to believe that wouldn’t happen again in MoP, and I don’t want to be missing a chunk of story from the beginning of a zone because I’m not okay with doing the dungeons yet.

That made me look at the rest of it. How I was putting so much more effort into the game than I was getting out of it. How I was working just as hard at night in my “play time” as I did to manage regular life during the day, and how I was just coming up with longer and longer lists of realities I had to accept about my limitations in the game. I’ve been working way too hard to have such a long list of “I want to, but it’s not an option” or “I want to, but I’ll have to wait until they nerf it and I outgear it”.

I’m glad there are people who are still enjoying the game, and I’m not judging any of you for that. Playing WoW is often compared to relationships, and I think that’s probably because we really do put a lot of ourselves into it… especially the social aspects of it. So I think a lot of people leave WoW and need to feel like it wasn’t them, it was WoW, and that they know their “mutual friends” will still like them because they’ll be leaving WoW, too. When my ex-husband and I divorced, I told people we weren’t going to play the blame game. It wasn’t that he was a Bad Guy. It was that he and I had failed ourselves and each other because we were moving in directions in life that we could not travel those roads together, nor was it fair for either of us to abandon our road for the other. The divorce was about giving us both the chance to thrive indepently of each other, rather than continue to choke the life from each other. That’s how I’m leaving WoW, too. The things that are a problem for me may not be a problem for the game as a whole. They do, however, mean that I shouldn’t be playing this game. When the effort put in so greatly exceeds reward, and especially when the fruits of my “play time” effort are a lot of pain and disappointment, then it’s just not a good game FOR ME.

If you like WoW, I want you and WoW to be friends. Just don’t forget your favorite precious and soft bear. I’m looking at Guild Wars 2. They have Norn! (“”\ ( -.- ) /”“)

THE SMART KIDS aren't the only smart kids.

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 17:43:15 -0500

Near as I can tell, some folks are getting their knickers in a twist over this post on WoWInsider because of it being framed in a “Smart Kids” metaphor. I think these people are missing the point. Further, I see this as being symptomatic of the messed up way society views intelligence.

I’m not walking away from this with the feeling that Anne Stickney is talking about “the only smart and worthy kids” vs “a bunch of morons we’re better off without”. And, on Twitter, she has denied that this is hardcore elitist stuff. I’m going to accept her word on that. I’ve played on one of the same servers as her before, and I think that server would have been a waste of her time if she was a hardcore elitist. (Which is different than a hardcore player. Not all hardcores are elitists, and some elitists are all attitude that couldn’t hold their own with a group of dedicated hardcore PvPers/raiders/whichever thing we’re being “hardcore” about at the time.)

I think people are probably upset about the phrase “smart kids”. Personally, I think this is something society could do without. We’ve got this either/or approach to things that does more harm than good. Either you’re smart or you’re dumb. Either you’re talented or you can’t do X thing. I see people brag about their IQ or put someone else down for their IQ and think to myself, “You can’t be too brilliant, or you’d understand why that number doesn’t mean as much as you seem to think it does.” There are all kinds of assumptions that a person has mastery of this, this, and that subject if they are in a certain intelligence bracket. These things are misconceptions, and the personal histories of some of our greatest scientists and inventors reveal that, yet we hold onto them. They provide a crutch for us when we don’t put forth enough effort. Never put the time and effort into learning to paint portraits? “Oh, I’m not talented with drawing and painting. I’d make a mess all over the place!” But I don’t know anybody who is really okay with being seen as “not smart”, so that’s one folks tend to get upset about.

Here’s the kicker… to a large degree, intelligence is just another talent.

Some people naturally have a knack for drawing, playing piano, sports, etc. They still have to practice and improve, though, or people who do NOT have a natural knack for it can put in enough hard work to pass them up. Being “talented” just gives you a starting bonus. It may mean you stay way ahead of some people, no matter how hard they work, but there will be others who do not have that “talent” who will catch up to you, and even some who will end up teaching you a thing or two. Talent is not the magic ingredient in life. It’s just a starting bonus.

Some people get a starting bonus in “smart”. And, as Anne Stickney’s article points out, public schools are not designed for those kids. Your team only moves as fast as the slowest dog can pull. That doesn’t mean the slowest dog is weak or doesn’t deserve to be on the team… it just means he doesn’t pull quite as fast as the other dogs. He must be on the team for a reason. He’s not a bad dog. He’s just not the fastest dog.

In the context of the article, I’m reading “smart kids” as the ones who got that starting bonus and are bored because they got the basics and moved on already. I was one of those kids in several subjects, but especially reading. My reading and comprehension was on the college level before I made it out of the third grade. That didn’t make me better than other kids as a person, and there were other things other kids performed better in that I did. But it did mean the school library did not have even one book that was not way the hell below my reading level. That doesn’t mean all the other kids were a problem, or that they needed to GTFO my school library. I’m not being elitist about this. Other kids could find books on and above their reading levels in our school library. I could not find even one book that looked like it might approach the surrounding neighborhood of “my reading level” anytime within the forseeable future.

I think that’s more where Anne Stickney was headed with her article. That’s the message I’m getting, anyway. That there are players who are way above what WoW is giving them in skill level, and many of them are bored because of this.

I’ve touched on this before when I talk about tying shoelaces. I think a lot of people will not find what they want because they are just so good at games at this point. That they’ve been tying their shoes just fine for so long they forget how difficult it can be for a lot of small children who have just been told for the first time, “Now you hold the one loop and then you make the other side into a loop, keep them seperated but bring them together, over, under, around down, stand on your head, rub your tummy, wait until the moon turns purple, pull it tight and there you go! Easy, huh? :D”

The kid having trouble learning to tie their shoes isn’t dumb. One day, they will probably be someone who doesn’t give it a second thought… just ties the shoes… and may not remember that it was ever difficult for them, or understand how it could have ever been so. But today? Yeah… tying shoes is HARD today! The fact that it’s easy for a lot of people doesn’t invalidate how hard it can be for the beginner.

So I don’t think Anne Stickney is being elitist or trying to put anyone down for not being one of “THE SMART KIDS”. I think she was using a metaphor that some people reacted badly to because of their own insecurities.

Yes, if you’re upset over this and think she’s being elitist, I think it’s a sign of personal insecurity. Because why else would you get so damn worked up over someone on the Internet’s opinion, or your perception of their opinion? And I’m not above that myself. It’s not an issue for me in this case, but the Great Bear Spirit knows it has been about plenty of other things. And I have to stop myself and ask, “Why am I so upset? BECAUSE THEY THINK I’M STUPID! Why do I care what they think? Because sometimes I think I’m stupid, too, and that scares me.” AKA… upset because of my own insecurities.

I would like to offer an opposing view to the idea that it’s the folks on the lower end of the skill ladder Blizzard is designing for, though.

There’s a lot of complaining about “Blizz nerfing it for the casuals”, but I’m not sure they are. What if they’re streamlining it for the hardcores? (Yes, yes, I’m playing Devil’s Advocate here… but it’s still an idea worth tossing around. I think so, anyway, but I’m obviously biased.) I’ll admit this is based on my own reactions to the game, and I am aware not everyone has the same game priorites. But game priorites are another thing that isn’t either/or. I was once chastised for talking about raiders as if they don’t care about the story, but it was really that I was talking about a sub-set of raiders who only care about raiding and seem to see the rest of the game as a necessary evil to slog through. That’s not all raiders. Some people like one aspect of the game, same people like five. Not all of the people who like five necessarily like the same five aspects of the game. I’m speaking from my point of view… primarily story-oriented with a love of exploration and discovery.

As a new player, I wanted to take in EVERYTHING! Every quest was new, and there was a lot to learn by doing it all! I loved keys because their were a souvenier that said, “I went there. I did that thing. I succeeded and GOT MY KEY!” I didn’t see Karazhan until the game was at the end of the next expansion, but doing the quests to get the key was an awesome experience for me! I got a lot of story out of it, saw the dungeons and got gear from them, and had a key to prove it!

My first druid drowned a couple of times doing her swim form quest because, hey… swim form quest is hard when you don’t have swim form yet! But I learned how to push my limits underwater and still make it back alive, eventually. That was something I needed to learn because having my very first character be a Forsaken warlock had kind of spoiled me on the underwater thing.

New experiences taught me new things. Prepared me for what was up ahead. The dwarf starting experience pre-Cata… whew! When stuff was still hostile, that mug had a timer on it and the quickest route was right through troggs… DID YOU SEE THE TROGGS IN COLDRIDGE PASS?!?! Making it out of Coldridge Valley and running up the road to the distillery (which is the inn in Kharanos), you knew when you saw the distillery in the distance that you were going to be okay. If you made it to that far, you could make it through anything else Azeroth threw at you!

But it’s not so much fun the fifth or sixth time. It’s really not. The shine wears off. The lessons have been learned. Even if I’m playing a class I’ve never played before, a lot of things carry over. I was a better warlock after having played a hunter for a year, for example. Playing a hunter taught me a lot about controlling my pet that also works for controlling a demon.

Attunement chains got you geared up and exposed you to mechanics to prepare you for raid content, but c’mon… Blizzard isn’t pulling many new rabbits out of their hats. I’m guessing most raiders have seen these mechanics before in most cases and already know what to do. They already know what to do. And experienced raiders understand gear and how to get it.

Messages on the screen telling people what they died from and how to avoid it in the future? LFD and LFR may have improved getting into groups in a lot of ways, but I think this is the price for it. And I don’t think it’s because random groups get bad players who don’t know how to not suck/not die. I think it’s because random groups get random players who expect everyone to have run this content over and over and learned everything from it already, and have zero patience when mistakes are made. I’ve been in groups with them! Tanks, healers, dps… oh gawd, the dps! And the funny thing is, even though they’re complaining that it’s always somebody else who is “fail”… the healer who can’t heal, the tank who can’t keep aggro, whatever… as soon as they leave or get kicked and someone comes in to replace them, amazingly the group doesn’t have problems anymore. The healer is fine. The tank is awesome. The other dps can kill things within a reasonable amount of time. It’s almost as if the impaitent “Y U SUCK SO HARD” asshat is the one actually making the group suck.

There are tools for kicking, dropping group, ignoring people, etc. But in the end, Blizzard can’t make people play nice. They can’t make them slow down a bit, communicate with each other, and function as a team. So what can they do? Hand you the answer when you need it if your group isn’t going to help you find it.

Let’s go back to the shoelaces. Take a small child, just learning to tie their shoes, and give them slip on shoes or shoes with Velcro instead. Who does this improve the quality of life for? It’s not really the small child. They aren’t learning to tie their shoes now because you took away the ones with laces. It sure does make things easier on whoever is responsible for getting them dressed, though. Much easier to tell a kid to slip their shoes on, or show them how Velcro works and let them have at it, than to teach them how to tie the laces. It’s made things easier on the person who has already mastered shoe tying.

Maybe they aren’t really catering to the casuals, after all.

I think there are a lot of places Blizzard can improve. I think they’ve confused “challenge” with “test of your reflexes”. I’ve been looking at some other games lately and started to realize just how far behind Blizzard’s design approach really is. I see a lot of options they have available for truly making the game more accessible to a variety of players, but instead they opt for a design approach that makes encounters so easy they become hard again. (I can’t say how that works in raids, but in dungeons I see a case of things getting to the level of “too many cooks”. Try a dungeon at the level with just two or three people honestly working together, rather than five people half-heartedly smashing through it.) I’m not happy with feeling pushed into group content just to keep moving through the game, and I’m not happy with them choosing to take things like class mount quests and druid form quests out rather than redesign them. The paladin mount quests were ridiculously expensive, and I guess that made sense when it was something to do at end game. Now, they could have changed the quests and preserved all that beautiful lore that comes from doing them, but instead they just removed them. I’m so glad I got to at least see the Alliance side before it was gone. And the warlock demon and mount quests made it pretty clear exactly what kind of person a warlock is. None of this, “They aren’t really any different than mages, they just use a different energy source,” crap.

I don’t feel insulted by what Anne Stickney said. She hasn’t hurt my feelings at all, even though I’m not one of “the smart kids” in Azeroth. I think she raised points about game design and keeping your audience happy that really do need to be discussed when you aren’t looking at a niche naudience. (WoW has too many players of too many different types to be a niche thing anymore.) There are people perfectly happy with the game still. There are people who aren’t, though, and looking at why can be a step toward giving the kind of feedback that gets desired change from Blizzard, or toward make a decision about whether to stay or leave. Getting hung up on the phrase “smart kids” just gets in the way of giving the real issues the attention they deserve.

My Thoughts on the Ji Firepaw ReWrite

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 20:14:17 -0500

I’m not going to argue that Ji Firepaw’s quest text greeting wasn’t sexist or misogynistic. I’m not in the beta, so I haven’t seen it in its proper context. My husband is in the beta, and he tells me Ji seems to be quite taken with another character and so maybe his greetings were reflecting things that are on his mind. That still isn’t me seeing it first-hand, so I don’t “know” this character and can’t say if I’d see him as an overall creep, or if I’d see it as kind of cute in a “he’s so in love he thinks about her beauty all the time” way. I DON’T KNOW, SO I’M NOT ADDRESSING THAT.

Two things I do want to address - assuming your (in the sense of the general “you”) view is the only right view and treating others who think differently like crap, and why I don’t need fictional people to always behave the way I wish real world people would behave.

You have every right to disagree with someone. You have every right to have a civilized discussion and debate the context and impact of what the character said. You have every right to say where you’re coming from that makes you see it the way you do.

You also have a right to call someone who disagrees with you ugly names. You have a right to shame them for what they think. You have a right to toss aside their view and refuse to consider its merits. You have a right to verbally attack them based on their interpretation of things for as long as they continue to voluntarily engage in the conversation with you. Hell… you have a right to state your opinion and then immediately state that anyone who disagrees is wrong, thereby skipping all those other things you have a right to do.

Doing the first set of things will earn you my respect, even if I disagree with you.

Doing the second set of things will make me not want to be associated with you, even if we interpreted things the same way.

I have a right to associate with people who treat others with respect and stay away from those who do not.

As for the things fictional people say and do… maybe Ji Firepaw really is a sexist creep. Maybe everyone who has argued that there’s nothing wrong with what he says is wrong. Maybe there is EVERYTHING wrong with what he was saying!

Personally, I’m not much for shutting real people up. I’d rather walk away and tell others why that person lost my respect and what I think of their behavior and actions. I don’t condone bad behavior, but I’d rather have them put it on display than hide it. To some degree, I believe it’s the people who have harmful opinions that they will take to the extent of harmful actions BUT DON’T SAY ANYTHING THAT TIPS YOU OFF that are scarier than some asshat I can clearly see I should steer clear of.

I’m even less in favor of shutting up fictional people. Part of good storytelling is that everything drives the story, whether the audience is aware of it or not. Don’t introduce something that doesn’t matter. Until the writer proves to me that it’s not the case, I give them the benefit of the doubt and trust that there is a purpose for things. That even seemingly unimportant dialogue is giving me a feel for the fictional people I’m interacting with.

I don’t necessarily believe a character with some creepy views is reflective of Blizzard having creepy views. And yes, I know there’s a history there. I know about the Corpsegrinder BS, among other things, but I don’t want to see things reach a point where the audience allows no story to be told other than one that has been sanitized to reflect the way we want reality to work.

Maybe Ji Firepaw is a sexist, and maybe that’s not actually a problem. Not because it’s okay to be sexist, but maybe because it’s giving people a glimpse of something you need to know down the road.

I don’t condone slavery and mind control, either. But I wouldn’t want the human mind slave taken out of the Undercity. She helps paint a picture of what the Forsaken are really like. And I don’t take it as Blizzard condoning such things, either.

Varian Wrynn’s racism has just gotten ridiculous in how it’s been handled, but I don’t see many people comment on the racism of the dwarves. They are STILL holding it against the orcs that the Horde tried to attack Ironforge years ago! They’re holding it against orcs who weren’t even there!

Is it right? No. Should they learn to get past it? Hypothetically, yes… in the sense that it would be the best thing for a real world. But for a fictional world, maybe the racism is still serving a purpose.

Not everything bad that happens in a story makes it a bad story. Or makes the storytellers bad people.

I don’t think believing that makes me a bad person. You may not agree with me, and that’s fine. I may even be wrong about any of that applying to this specific situation. But does it make me a bad person to believe not all characters in a fictional world need to clearly and simply be either paragons of virtue of the worst of sinners? Does it make me a bad person to believe some complexity that makes me stop and think “Am I okay with people like this?” enriches a story?

I don’t think so. So you won’t convince me that being okay with what the old quest text said makes me a bad person. It may just make me a person who interpreted it differently than you did. That’s okay. I don’t think you’re a bad person if you disagree. I think the problem is when we decide some viewpoints are invalid before even trying to understand them. I’ve seen it said more than once today, very generally, that anyone who disagrees with the change is (insert hateful thing of choice here). I don’t appreciate that. I can’t say I actively disagree with the change, but I don’t really think it was necessary. So people who said that came a little closer than I’m okay with to calling ME hateful things by just randomly waving their hate around at whoever it hits. That’s not okay.

"The WoW community" is a myth

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:03:47 -0500

I haven’t made it a secret that I’m leaving WoW when my subscription is up. I’ve been working on saying my goodbyes. It hasn’t seemed like there’s any good reason to criticise this or that aspect of the game or players since my reasons for leaving are very personal and not something that can be “fixed” that way. But this post isn’t so much about criticism as it’s about how the things we say often conflict with the reality of the situation, and how we can sometimes make things easier on ourselves by changing the way we think about the situation. I’m not going on a rant about how “communities are supposed to do this and that, and the playerbase doesn’t act that way so THIS ISN’T REALLY A COMMUNITY! RAWR!” That’s not at all my point.

Traditionally, the word “community” doesn’t just refer to people with a common interest, but also with common backgrounds and living in relatively close physical proximity to each other. That’s not so true on the Internet. Or it is, depending on how you look at it… in cyberspace, we all live right next door to each other. It’s still usually true, though, that a community has a governing set of rules and social cohesion. They may not be formal rules. They can be “rules” that are just understood to exist because the members of the community are like-minded about how things should be done.

We often speak of “the WoW community”, and maybe it did exist at one time, but I don’t believe it exists now. I think it got bigger and more varied until it became “the WoW populace”. However, you can find communities within it.

That leads to speaking of things like “the WoW blogging community” or “the WoW Twitter community”. Or “the WoWInsider community”. I’d say that last one is a community. I’d say people who regularly read and post on the official forums comprise something of a “WoW forum community”. I’m not too sure about blogs, though, and even less sure about Twitter.

In many ways, I see blogs as being an extension of whatever other community within WoW the bloggers are part of. Maybe that’s wildly innacurate and just based on how I read blogs. I tend to read the ones that relate to my interests in the game. In the cases where I do read blogs written by, say, a dedicated raider, I tend to skip posts that seem to be solely applicable to raiding. In some cases that means I only skip a post now and then. In other cases, it means I only check in on that blog every now and again. My husband suggested I read Cynwise’s Battlefield Manual when I needed help in PvP, but I used it more as a reference than really keeping up with posts. On the other hand, I have enjoyed keeping up with a lot of his writing about other aspects of the game.

Twitter… Twitter is a strange beast. I got to thinking about how Twitter works (from a social perspective, not technical) while watching RuPaul’s Drag Race this week. If you haven’t watched this week’s episode yet and intend to, skip over this next paragraph. I don’t think I’m being too spoilery, but just in case… y’know?

I honestly believe Mike was kidding when it looked like he and Chad were about to get into a fight. Especially based on the things Mike said when the drag queens weren’t in the room during Untucked. It just wasn’t recieved the way he intended it, and I don’t think that’s something to blame anyone for. Mike and Chad aren’t part of the same community. They come from very different backgrounds and have very different experiences, and Mike isn’t part of the drag community.

Two people with different personalities and common backgrounds may find it easier to recognize each other’s motivations, even if they don’t agree with each other. That also often works for two people with similar personalities and different backgrounds. It can be a lot more difficult for two people with very different personalities and very different backgrounds, though, and can become a volatile situation if even one of them isn’t conciously aware of that.

I think a lot of that happens on Twitter.

Add to that what happens when not everyone is following all the same people. At least with a blog everyone who is commenting on a post has read the same post. (Or should have. It’s ridiculous to comment based on something someone told you about it, but without actually reading it.) The conversation on Twitter isn’t always so easily laid out in front of everyone.

Let’s say Bob follow Sally, Jim, and Steve. He does not follow Sarah, Chris, or Max. Jim follows Bob, Sally, Max, and Sarah. Steve follows Bob, Sally, Jim, Sarah, Chris, and Max. (Everyone except himself.)

Steve retweets something Sarah said. Bob will see that because he follows Steve. Jim asks Sarah for clarification on what she said, and she @ replies him to explain. Steve will see this because he follows both of them, but Bob will not because he follows Jim but not Sarah. And if Bob retweets what Steve retweeted and adds his own commentary, and Sally only follows him, Sally is getting a really skewed view of things.

That’s not a community. Not in my opinion. There’s too much of a breakdown in the cohesion of the group.

Now, I’m not saying it’s “too much breakdown” in the sense of “someone should fix this”. I’m saying I think it’s important to recognize that communities do exist, but not everyone who can freely take part in what a community is doing is actually a member of the community. And that it can often be nearly impossible to see where the community lines are drawn, so it’s not as simple as saying, “Be careful of your interactions with community members if you’re a visitor”.

Maybe what we need are new terms. The Internet has social networks that are very open and fluid now. I think that’s a great thing! I love Twitter. I have gotten to meet some wonderful people there, found a lot of inspiration and support when it comes to my art, been retweeted by Neil Gaiman, and had conversations about quantum physics with a physicist who lives on the other side of the world from me. Oh, yes, I DO love Twitter!

But Twitter is a lot like using the dungeon finder. I may be queueing up with some friends I’m comfortable with, but I never know who else will end up in the group. We might even get somebody I’ve ended up in a group with before, but they’re still someone outside of my inner circle.

It takes more than a common interest and being in the same place at the same time to build a community.

I’ve been alternating between “too busy to be on...

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 18:18:00 -0600

I’ve been alternating between “too busy to be on Twitter” and “in too much pain to do anything” lately, but I try to check in a few times a day. There’s been a lot of unhappiness lately (winter, politics, and whatever BS thing is happening in a person’s life can wear someone down) and I don’t mind using my few minutes to tell someone how loved they are. It’s a worthy use of my time. But then I am gone again… busy bear is oso busy. (That’s going to be a lot funnier if you know “oso” is “bear” in Spanish. Okay, maybe it just means I can make a bad pun in two languages at the same time.)

It made me smile when @Technophobia said this is the mental image he gets.

viewparadise:

Thank you, bear.

The Best Bear is, at best, mediocre.

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 18:36:15 -0600

I took to Twitter a little while ago with a calm rant about LFR. I’d just read this post about Jesse’s good LFR experience, and was smiling at things like, “It’s not that it was easy; you couldn’t quite power through certain mechanics like you could in Wrath. No, it just was less hectic.” and, “I downed an end game boss. It doesn’t matter if it was LFR. I still did it. It felt great.”

I’ve talked before about who the game is challenging for by comparing it to learning to tie your shoelaces. If you have no physical or mental impairments when it comes to doing so, and you’ve been tying them for years, it’s not going to be a problem for you. The design of shoes and shoelaces doesn’t change in radical enough ways that you have to learn it all over again. You get better and better, and then you just sort of do it automatically. Actually taking the time to think about each little step can then make it frustrating. It’s just… LOOK! It’s just SHOELACES! IT’S NOT THAT HARD, OKAY?!

But try telling that to a small child learning to tie them for the first time. Or someone who has suffered a serious injury that has cost them a hand, or made it more difficult to process a series of actions like that. Are they stupid because tying their shoes is hard? Are they just not trying? Of course not. And, quite frankly, you’re an asshole if you tell them they are.

There’s nothing wrong with expecting someone to put some honest effort into learning to tie those shoelaces. There is nothing wrong with finding it unacceptable for a child to look at the shoes and decide that you should tie them because it’s hard for them. There is nothing wrong with expecting someone to learn.

I’m not upset with people who get into a group with someone who does something they really have no business doing (pulling for the tank, healing their dps boy/girlfriend and letting the tank die, etc), let’s them know in a reasonable way that this is not how it’s done, and then gets pissed when they get a response of, “lol whatever. like u know everything. imma heal my frend”.

What I don’t approve of is all the rage and hate over experienced raiders going into LFR and expecting it to work like a group of experienced raiders. I see people agonizing over how their group could possibly be wiping on X phase of the fight. Over how tanks could not know when to swap. Over why someone’s dps can be so low, especially when they aren’t just sitting there and doing nothing.

Over how someone could possibly be having trouble tying their shoes.

I have a friend who went through LFR as a tank and made videos of the fights for me so he could explain things the way I need them explained. (Yes, I have awesome friends. I am thankful for them every day.) Here’s that I saw…

THERE IS CRAP EVERYWHERE! There is SO much STUFF going on! WHY ARE THERE SO MANY DRAGONS??? How the hell are you supposed to attack something from that platform? How are ranged dps doing anything if everybody stacks up like that? WTF? Why does the phase change??? WHERE IS THE BUTTON TO CHANGE IT BACK??? WHERE DID EVERYBODY GO??? Why does it happen so fast, and how does anybody keep up? WHY THE HELL DID THE GIVE YOU A DRAGON THE TANK CAN’T TURN??? EVERYBODY IS IN FRONT OF IT! YOU’LL ALL DIE!!!!

And no, my evaluation didn’t get any better with repeated viewings. Oddly, this doesn’t sound anything like what I’ve seen experienced raiders say about LFR. It almost like our different experiences in the game have given us completely different standards of what is and is not difficult. But that would be crazy talk, right?

After my tweets, my husband and I were talking about tank swapping. He has actual raiding experience, so he knows how things work in a raid. He was sure that I’m not one of those people who doesn’t know how tank swapping works. It was something we covered when I started learning to tank. So if I know HOW to do it, that means I’d also know WHEN to do it… right?

Actually, I didn’t. I told him under which circumstances I think it’s done, and he corrected me. I had listed three different situations, and only one of them was correct. How did I get something like that wrong? My lack of experience. Or, to be more precise, my lack of experience with doing things as part of a regular raid group.

Raid instances I have completed - Molten Core, Zul’Gurub (pre-Cata), Karazhan, 10 man AQ (when it was 20 man pre-Cata and the 10 man version), Mount Hyjal in CoT, Blackwing Lair, Obsidian Sanctum, Malygos

Raid instances I completed in a raid group - Mount Hyjal in CoT, Obsidian Sanctum, Malygos

Well, now. That sort of explains a few things about why I don’t know how raiding works.

Mount Hyjal doesn’t even count in my mind as experiencing a raid group. That many people at level 80… I don’t think any of us were really paying attention. We were there and stuff died. By the time we did Obsidian Sanctum, everyone else had done it plenty of times and there was no way for me to avoid just being carried. I was racing to keep up, but they couldn’t even notice if I was trying or not. I had no effect on the outcome of the raid. Malygos is my only real raiding experience, and the third phase left me shaking, crying, and just wanting it all to end. We were actually doing quite well, from what I was told. I hear I did my part just fine. I was told I could join them again anytime I wanted. I WANTED OUT OF THERE!

The other raids? Two-manned them with my husband before Cataclysm. We didn’t know what would disappear and what wouldn’t, so we wanted to see things just in case. (Correction - Blackwing Lair was done at 85. There were three of us, and one of us was a rogue with the first stage of the legendary daggers complete. Everything I’m about to say about how challenging old content can be does not apply to this.)

I can two-man almost any dungeon in the game at the level for it with another person. With a demonolgy warlock, I managed to pet tank low level Deadmines for us once. We didn’t do the old raids at the level, but they were still a challenge. I pet tanked Ragnaros for us in MC with my hunter’s bear. It had a higher chance of success than letting my husband’s ret pally get thrown around with me not being able to heal him. We even did the optional bosses in Kara. The mechanics of fights designed for large groups of people remain a challenge for two people at level 80.

I’ve learned to do things I will probably never be expected to do in a regular group, whether that’s for dungeons or raids. I did save a lot of groups during Wrath, both while leveling and at 80, by putting Growl on and taking over with my pet if a tanked died. But I’ve never needed to fill multiple roles simultaneously in a full group. I’ve never needed, as dps in a dungeon group, to share the healing responsibilites with the tank. I’ve never needed to cover, on my own, something that was designed for ten people to cover. (The level difference brings it down to being more like covering something designed for three people, but that’s still a bit for one person to juggle.)

It’s not that I don’t know how to play. It’s that I don’t know how to play in a regular group. Repeatedly being told that everyone should know how to do this stuff already doesn’t teach me anything other than “I can’t do this content until I can do it alone, or at least with just two people”.

I’ve made a huge effort in Cataclysm to overcome my social anxiety enough to see content while it’s at least not yet “last expansion’s content”, even if it’s no longer exactly “current”. I hit a wall in Well of Eternity. It was something no one could have seen coming, and no one could have prevented it.

I get asked about this, and I give a very brief summary of what happened that never really seems to get across to anyone why this has become a wall for me. I don’t mind talking about it. However, if you have severe anxiety and it can be triggered by having another person’s panic attack described, skip this. Scroll down until you seen the ASCII bear again. (“”\ ( -.- ) /”“)

I wasn’t sure if I was really ready to handle Well of Eternity yet. End Time had been difficult, but I’d gotten through it once I had a full group of people who knew about my anxiety, as well as the issues with processing things that I’ve had since being diagnosed with pseudotumor cerebri. (Short version of that - Cerebrospinal fluid is not absorbed fast enough and affects my brain as if I have a brain tumor, but there’s not actually a tumor present.) They went as slow as I needed to in order to learn it. It’s that first time that’s so difficult… when I’ve never experienced something before. I learn by experiencing. We spent three minutes just describing to me what the Ice Blades on the Jaina fight would look like because I’d never seen them before. But if that was difficult, could I really do the next dungeon?

A friend and I looked through the information, and he described each fight to me. Not just what happens, but what needs to be done, what potential problems there are for groups… everything. And we decided together that I would try it. He went with me as continued communicating with me in whispers as things were happening.

It was going fine. Apparently, I pretty much tanked Peroth’arn with no healer. They stood in the wrong place and died almost as soon as it started. But the rest of the fight was fine, and we moved on.

I hestitated on the Azshara fight. It was a terminology problem. I knew this was an add fight, but my friend had said one of the guys would move forward and DBM started warning me that “adds will spawn”. Since I hadn’t seen it before, I thought this meant both would happen. I suddenly wasn’t sure how to handle it when all that happened was a single guy moving forward. We handled the fight, though.

I was a little confused by things, but I wasn’t panicked. I was, after all, seeing this for the first time. One of the dps asked if I wanted him to tank the last fight, and my friend spoke up and said he was teaching me to tank, and that it’s a little hard to do unless I’m actually tanking. The dps agreed with that, and we went on. I was a bit miffed about missing what was being said in the little scene because of this conversation, but no big deal.

My friend reminded me of what we had covered about how the last part works. Tank Vero’then until demons mess with Tyrande, tank demons, finish Ver’othen, mostly tank demons while the dps finishes of Mannoroth.

I knew what to do. I was ready. I… HAD NO CLUE WHERE VERO’THEN WAS!

Where the HELL was he? Everything is a demon of some sort! Is the one I’m attacking? Okay, I’ve got him. But what about the other demons? Where do they come from? Where is Tyrande? Why is everything look like a bad acid trip? Why can’t I tell the ground from the mobs? Where is Tyrande? Where do the demons come from? Where are the dps? Where is the healer? What if the healer is getting attacked? What am I doing? Why don’t I know where anybody is? IS THERE ACTUALLY ANY FUCKING GROUND HERE????

I felt like I couldn’t breathe, but I must have been breathing because I was screaming. I know I kept screaming a few short phrases, but mostly I just screamed. Just pure, terrified sound. All the scary things on the screen melted together because my eyes were full of tears, and my husband came and sat next to me. I wouldn’t hand the laptop to him because I NEEDED TO KEEP TANKING, but I didn’t know what was happening and didn’t even care… I JUST WANTED OUT!

I kept moving. I kept doing my bear thing. I was told, later, that the group probably couldn’t tell that I was doing things at random. I was obviously a little slow, but it looked like I was tanking things and we all survived. I didn’t even know when it was over. I didn’t know why NPCs were talking, or who they were (Yeah… I couldn’t recognize Illidan at that point), and the fact that I couldn’t just hand my quest in and get out of there was REALLY freaking me out! I kept saying, “I just want to turn it in! I just want to turn it in!” and trying to click on people I couldn’t actually click on.

I had to walk away from the computer. My husband had to let my friend know what had happened, since he was a little concerned because I wasn’t answering his whispers. I couldn’t. I could barely string words together.

(“”\ ( -.- ) /”“) ASCII bear says it’s safe to come back now!

I haven’t finished a heroic since then. I’ve tried, but I end up leaving. I have stuck with some of the worst groups. I was dps in Wrath. Dropping groups because I didn’t like the dungeon or sumd00d was an ass just wasn’t worth waiting in the queue again. I’m not a group dropper. After Well of Eternity, though, I started dropping at the first sign of me being confused about a fight. Or which direction to go. Or what spec the dps was. Or much of anything.

It’s a bit like someone getting in a car wreck and then being afraid to ride in a car for a while. Simply going back into a dungeon is horrifying for me right now. I know I have to get over that. I want to. I’m scared.

It may not be hard for you. That doesn’t mean it just, universally, “isn’t hard”.

I’m not stupid. I don’t have a bad attitude about doing my part, pulling my weight. I hate asking people for help, even when it’s someone I’m generally comfortable with, because I can’t the thought of being carried through something.

LFR is made for people like me. Raiding is a part of the game for me, but it’s not THE game. Even if I were better at this, I wouldn’t want to be a hardcore raider. There are alts to level, story to see, favorite questlines to play through again, pets to collect… I love doing those things. Hate leveling professions. Swear to Khaz’goroth, I HATE leveling professions! But, for me, raids are something I’d have to do to see all of the story while it’s still current. Something to be suffered through to get what I want. My priorities are different from those of someone who raids for the love of challenging encounters and teamwork. But as long as I am in a group, that group is going to get my very best!

If only I weren’t so afraid of being told I have no business putting on shoes because I don’t already know how to tie them.

Storytelling, Flavor Lore, and The Worgen Story

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 19:29:55 -0600

I’ve been told Blizzard finally laid to rest the question of whether or not Night Elves evolved from trolls. I haven’t really looked into what they said, and that’s odd for me. I love lore, have argued in the past that it was a plausible idea, and have roleplayed a character who believed with all her heart that it was true because she found a book once that said so. The truth is, I don’t want to see the comments I’m afraid exist.

There are times I feel like Blizzard has really screwed up, or at least dropped the ball, on delivering the story. There are other times I feel like a vocal (whether or not it’s “large” is harder to judge) segment of the playerbase doesn’t understand how the story is being told. I wonder how much of that is Blizzard dropping the ball and how much of it is the expectations we’ve been given from previous experience with games, books, and movies. Then I wonder if Blizzard should change their storytelling methods to match expectations because if the audience isn’t getting the story, how much good is it doing you to keep telling it?

I never do come up with an answer I’m comfortable with for that. Here’s how the storytelling looks to me…

In most games I’ve played, you only really get to experience the story from one point of view. Even changing the character you play will still give you the same overall point of view, though some details may change. (Note that’s “most games I’ve played”, not “most games that exist”. I can’t speak about the ones I haven’t played.) Even if I do get to see a story from different sides, there’s usually a clear line between “the good guy side” and “the bad guy side”, and it’s the good guys and bad guys who are opposing each other. Really morally simple.

Books and movies often deliver a story from a limited point of view, and there’s often glimpses of other points of view besides that of the main character. I haven’t seen a lot of books and movies that tell the entire story, start to finish, from three or four characters’ unique perspectives, though.

I think we’re trained to expect that the story will be delivered to us, in its entirety, from whichever angle we are looking at it. That the whole point is to make sure you, the reader/viewer/player, get The Story.

In WoW, it seems to me the point is to make sure you, the player, get The Story As Understood By This Character You Are Playing Right Now. Your character is not merely a vehicle to move through the story with, but also a person who lives on Azeroth and has their own personal experiences. Much like people in the real world, they don’t experience everything, don’t always completely understand what they have experienced, and aren’t always aware of not having all the information.

I’m kind of afraid of seeing responses to the Night Elves and trolls thing because I remember seeing some angry responses to the answer about who the first druids were. There were people who felt Blizzard had lied to players who play Tauren druids because, from the point of view they experienced the story from, they’d been told Tauren were the first druids. Similarly, Night Elves haven’t been sitting around all this time saying, “You know, we just don’t know. Maybe it was trolls, maybe it wasn’t… We’ve got nothing solid to go on.” They’ve had a story about their origin all this time. They believe ~~after Pangu died, the goddess~~ That’s not it. ~~Spider Woman led them~~ That’s not the right one, either. ~~God took one of Adam’s ribs and~~ Elune made them.

Can you honestly tell me you’ve never heard of a culture making up an origin story for themselves?

I usually describe flavor lore as being something that, while it may or may not be canon that this is what happened, it’s often canon that this is what someone believes. Were the Tauren the first druids? Apparently not. But do the Tauren believe that? Yes! So why would they tell their own people something else? The story you’re getting there isn’t “what happened”, it’s “what these people believe”.

For a long time, the story about Night Elves evolving from trolls has been nothing more than flavor lore. Again, I hear Blizzard has confirmed it. That doesn’t change the fact that all we really knew before was that trolls had a story that taught that idea. Even if Blizzard had said, “No. Seriously? C’mon, guys… Elune made them!”, the fact that there were trolls who believed otherwise would not have changed. Even if trolls found out Elune made the Night Elves and it had nothing to do with them, it would not have changed the fact that there had been trolls who had died believing the troll legend.

We, in the real world, often make some kind of discovery and think it’s the final answer to a question. We now know How This Thing Works, or What Really Happened. Someday, more evidence is discovered, and sometimes it means people have to say, “Y’know, funny thing… That story we’ve believed all this time about What Really Happened? Turns out it’s only partially true. Some of that did happen, but not for the reasons we thought, and there’s this other stuff we didn’t know before.” That’s not history being retconned. That’s The Story Unfolding.

Blizzard didn’t lie about Tauren druids, and they didn’t lie about Night Elves. And it’s not a retcon.

There’s also the issue of how the story in Gilneas is told. I’ve seen many people lament having to roll a Horde character to see “the rest of the story”. It was even mentioned in a WoW Insider article today. I think this comes down to whether you’re looking at it as a player who wants to see all of the story, or looking at it from the point of view of a worgen. Again, I don’t think Blizzard is trying to tell you the whole story. They’re trying to tell you what the worgen experienced.

Having played through that content from both sides several times now, I’d say there’s a fair amount of it that is overlapping. It’s hard to say just how long our worgen were running wild in the woods before being caught and rehabilitated, but I’m going to guess the Forsaken story starts while a freshly rolled worgen is still pretty out of it and being kept in the stocks for everyone’s safety. Possibly even while they were still running around in the woods. (I know, I know… the last thing you remember is the windows shattering in Light’s Dawn Cathedral. It’s okay. Drink this potion.) It’s shortly after the freshly rolled worgen regains their senses there that HOLY CRAPNOODLES! THE FORSAKEN ARE ATTACKING! It took the Forsaken a while to get there, but I’m not convinced a freshly rolled Forsaken was working on that back when evacuating people from the feral worgen attacks in Gilneas was starting. I figure Godfrey can’t have been dead for too long (not weeks, or anything) when a new Forsaken assists in collecting his body because A.) THE ARE WORGEN CHASING YOU! and B.) the tide hasn’t washed his body out to sea.

One side is the worgen story. The other side is the Forsaken story. They largely happen at the same time, but from very different point of view. Of course you’d have to play a Forsaken to see what happsn to Godfrey! As a worgen, Genn Greymane told you to get on a horse and you went down to free people from slavery in the mine right after Godfrey jumped.

Could Blizzard have handled explaining to the Alliance why Godfrey is in Shadowfang Keep better? Yes. Hell… they could have done something to handle that AT ALL! There’s a breadcrumb quest that informs you Varian Wrynn has decided Godfrey has to be punished for what he did to the Alliances newest buddies, or you pick up your level 20 weapon quest and just get told you’re collecting the materials. You get to SFK and Ivar Bloodfang’s not really volunteering anything other than the fact that he can smell Godfrey.

So, yes, I’ll agree Blizzard dropped the ball on giving the Alliance an explanation. But I don’t agree that the Forsaken story is “the rest of the worgen story”. It’s the Forsaken story. It makes perfect sense that a worgen doesn’t know what’s happening in places they’ve already left. Just like it makes sense that Forsaken players don’t get to see what’s going on at the tree in the Blackwald or have the origin of worgen druids explained to them.

The Horde, in the context of the story, has every right to feel like “The Butcher of Taurajo” deserved that name. Alliance player characters know something the Horde doesn’t, and that not even all of the Alliance knows. And I’d say Alliance characters, within the context of the story, have every right to be outraged by what “the Horde” did to the druid students in Stonetalon Mountains. Because they don’t know what the Horde character goes through there.

You can roll a character of the other faction and play that content. YOU can know both sides of the story. But your character still won’t know. All they can know is what they experienced, and you couldn’t take the character with you when, as a player, you decided to see the whole story.

I’m just not ready to call this way of storytelling a failure on Blizzard’s part. I admit this is about my personal preferences, and I don’t claim that everyone should recognize it as “a superior storytelling method”, but I like it this way. It gives me a reason to play both sides. Sometimes it even gives me a reason to play multiple races within a faction, instead of just once through as Alliance, once through as Horde. I’m story-oriented, so that’s where the replayability is for me.

I’d like more bear lore, though. Everybody is so excited about bringing the Ancients back! No. We brought some of them back. There’s at least a pig and two bears missing.

Lore Post - What if the Northgate Rebellion Isn't Really Over?

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 21:10:00 -0600

I debated with myself over where to put this post. I’ve been keeping things all bear all the time over here. My last few lore posts have been on Heavy Wool Bandage because… well, c’mon! When was the last time I healed something? (I threw a heal on myself last night, actually.) This is a topic that’s been turning over in my head for months, but I just kept looking at it as a Gilnean issue. That doesn’t exclude it from being ~~inconspicuous~~ bear business, though. If anything, if the story played out like this, bears could be a big part of it! In the first Northgate Rebellion, neither side had BEARS! And if you think bears can’t turn the tide in battle, you should probably just leave right now. Go read about Fabulor.

No, I don’t have screenshots for this post. A lot of what I might want screenshots for happens in Silverpine Forest. I don’t want to go roll another Forsaken and do the quests again just to get screenshots for a post Blizzard will probably get around to disproving someday. If you’re looking for pretty pictures, go read about Fabulor.

Quick history lesson - Genn Greymane wasn’t impressed with how Arthas’s daddy was handling things. Instead of marching through Captial City and stabbing him in the guts like SOME PEOPLE, he took all his marbles and went home to build a wall. The wall not only kept his marbles in Gilneas, but also kept all his people in.

It was a big wall.

Not all the people of Gilneas were happy about this. Even if some of them knew keeping your marbles at home was best, they still liked knowing they COULD go roll their marbles around somewhere else. And some people were just like, “Screw you! My marbles! I roll ‘em wherever I want to!”

Darius Crowley had a nice chunk of playground to roll his marbles around on, and wasn’t pleased at all about having Genn’s Big Wall running right through it. This may have something to do with how Crowley ended up leading the Northgate Rebellion and getting locked up in prison.

So, no big deal… right? I mean, Genn and Darry used to be BFFs. Genn actually kind of understood why a man might be upset about not being able to roll his marbles around all over his own land whenever he so chooses. Really, if it hadn’t been for the setting fires and looting, he might not have locked his buddy up in prison at all! (One could argue there would have been no fires and looting if the people of Gilneas had enjoyed uninterrupted Freedom of Marble Rolling, but it’s a little late for that.) King Oblivious Greymane was a bit surprised to find out the REBELS who had resorted to CIVIL WAR had been STOCKPILING WEAPONS, but only Lord Godfrey seemed personally wounded over Darry being let out of prison once the worgen overran the city.

Let’s face it… Godfrey was an asshat. His top hat was probably covered with light leather skinned from the ass of a worgen so that it, too, was an asshat.

Sure, there’s that tense moment when Godfrey shows up to tell Crowley and all the other half-feral dogpeople with sharp teeth and claws (plus the elven visitors) that they must, BY LAW, get up there and start fighting the good fight for Gilneas! But Genn reassures Crowley that he is not at all there to hand out orders as the king who took away everybody’s marble-rolling fun, but to ask as a friend and fellow dogperson if we could all form a pack and sniff butts… and maybe fight the good fight for Gilneas while we’re at it.

Godfrey flips his lid (again). Dogpeople are friends (maybe). Everyone wins. (Except Prince Liam, the Greymane family in general, and all the Gilnean citzens.)

This is old news, yes? KING Genn Greymane is the leader of the Gilnean people. Crowley’s less rebel, more ambassador. And in spite of the trolls and gnomes (mostly) going home, people are still hosting homeless allies in their cities.

Wait… trolls got the Echo Isles. Gnomes got to move back to what was previously their front porch, but not take back their city. Goblins can’t really go back to their island, but they did get all of Azshara. Gilneans get to camp on the side of the road or live in a tree within a tree on Nelfdrassil.

I didn’t say “Horde bias”. You did NOT hear me say that!

I’m kidding. Have you seen Varian Wrynn’s hair? Even Blood Elves don’t have hair that pretty! Obviously, Blizzard favors Alliance.

But what if the Northgate Rebellion hasn’t REALLY ended? Everybody’s been kind of busy. Gilneans have split into a bunch of different directions. Some of them are in Duskwood. Some are really busy doin’ what druids do. What happens if we let things settle down so they get some time to think about Gilneas?

The Gilneans were winning the fight for Gilneas when Liam jumped in front of Sylvanas’s arrow. Could they have kept winning? I’m not sure. Having played the story from both sides, each side had a few tricks up their sleeve the other side didn’t know about. But the Gilnean people didn’t even get to decide if they wanted to stay and fight or not. Genn decided not to risk any more lives after his son died and made the decision to pull everyone out.

Was it his decision to make? Yes! He’s the KING! It was his decision to make when Genn’s Big Wall went up, and it was his decision to make when everybody was told to hop on the next boat to Nelfville. But that doesn’t mean people are always okay with the decisions kings make. Our own world’s history would be very different if every time a king decided something people just said, “Hey… it’s his call. Sucks, but we gotta take it.”

Some people who weren’t happy about the wall might not be happy about having to retreat, either. Some people who were fine with the wall might not be happy about the retreat. And some people could still get ticked off if Ol’ King Genn doesn’t say, “Let’s head home now,” as soon as they think he should.

But who would lead another rebellion? Things are just fine between Genn and Crowley these days. In fact, while Genn does his king thing in the city, Crowley’s off acting as his representative and meeting with the Bloodfang worgen. And one does not simply walk into Silverpine and…

Hold on!

Really? CROWLEY is the one who met with them? Met with Ivar Bloodfang and convinced him to agree to an alliance between his pack and the Gilnean worgen? Does anyone see anything wrong with this picture?

While the Bloodfang worgen may have been Gilneans at one time, they don’t seem to care about that at all anymore. They care about their pack, and they do what their leader says. Crowley had no hope of getting any of the Bloodfang to help unless he could get Ivar to agree to it. It was an “all or nothing” deal. The Bloodfang may not be completely feral, but they’re closer to it than the Gilneans. They function much more like an actual pack. And Ivar had no love for Crowley, Greymane, or Gilneas when he agreed that an alliance might be necessary for his pack’s survival.

Ivar Bloodfang does not strike me as someone who would be at all impressed by meeting with a “representative” sent by someone’s leader. He seems much more like the kind of guy to send the representative back with just enough of his flesh hanging on to be able to deliver the message, “He said to meet him yourself next time,” before dropping dead.

Genn Greymane stands around in the city looking clean, respectable, and human. (Perhaps to avoid upsetting others. Tobias Mistmantle says in Duskwood that he’s stayed in his human form because the worgen form is very upsetting to the people of Darkshire, but down at Raven Hill the worgen are… worgen.) Crowley is running around in the woods, half beast, getting blood under his claws, and making deals with other worgen that may have at least slowed Sylvanas down.

I guess if you’re the kind of Gilnean who wants to assimilate into “Alliance culture” as easily as possible and trust that your leaders will know what’s best, you might be inclined to stand by Genn. If you’re itching for a chance to grab life by the marbles and create your own destiny, you might side with Crowley.

I wonder who Ivar Bloodfang would tell you the leader of the Gilnean worgen is.

Gilneas is a beautiful area. It would be a shame if all that work was put into it just for one side’s starting experience and a low level (but awesome!) quest chain for the other side. It seems like it would be difficult to address sending the Gilnean people home without taking on Sylvanas, though.

Maybe it doesn’t have to be about Sylvanas just yet. We might have to get through a second Gilnean civil war first.

Instead of getting any serious work done in the later part of...

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:08:10 -0600

Instead of getting any serious work done in the later part of this afternoon, I scribbled spirals. It’s a surprisingly relaxing thing to do. OBEY THE HYPNO BEAR PAW! (“”\ (@.@) /”“)