Girls will be boys

I'm going to let you all in on a dirty secret.  Things are not as they seem in the World of Warcraft. That hunky male tauren whose biceps you've been sneakily admiring isn't a man in real life - it's a woman!

The signs are there for anyone to see. Who else would be playing a game whose main feature is the wide range of chat options and that rewards completion of the most difficult tasks with a pretty new outfit? A game where you can get your hair cut ten times a day if you want, with no frizzy ends from that change of colour!

No man would waste their time playing such a game when they could be out wrestling a bear, watching football, drinking beer or pausing Under Siege when it gets to the bit with the boobies.

How Blizzard supports roleplayers

One of the great joys of playing on an RP server is the wide range of player-organised events, such as the superb Strongest of the Horde tournament on Argent Dawn (EU). It's hard to describe how huge and well-organised this event is, but there were hundreds of spectators from both Horde & Alliance (viewing distance limits mean that the picture above doesn't do it justice) and there were player performers, gladiators and drink vendors. The spectacle went on for hours and left some my fellow SANers who weren't from RP realms stunned.

The problem is, that at any event like this, some people see it as an opportunity for attention seeking. In this case, our "hero" was a human paladin who tried to interfere with the duels by running into the arena and deliberately attacking one of the contestants. The organisers had tried to anticipate this by posting guards around the arena, but there's a limit to what you can do when the person involved doesn't care about dying in the process - they can live long enough to significantly interfere with the event.

Who says mages can't dual wield?

I haz staff  + fishing rod. Fear my fiery wrath!

Vigilante logic

Sitting on the train this morning en-route to a meeting, I overheard the following snippet of conversation from a couple of lads in the seat opposite:

"It says 'ere that they're spending a million quid protecting some paedo!"

"Dunno why they're bothering with that. I'd slit his throat for nothing."

Now what I wanted to say was "Surely, the reason why we're having to spend this much money is because people like you want to murder him", but somehow I don't think they were in the mood for fine debate.

We see similar things in WOW quite frequently. Someone decides that something is immoral (whether that be ganking, high prices on the AH or mucky talk in Goldshire) and decides that they are the man  to deal with it, as the lilly-livered Blizzard admins aren't up to the task. So they embark on their campaign of vengeance, seemingly unaware that they are more Paedogeddon than Dirty Harry.

My secret vice

I have a confession to make.

Although I certainly wouldn't describe my DK or paladin as my main characters, I have done a fair bit of tanking with each. It drives me crazy when I see the modern trend in WOW of rounding all the mobs up and AOEing them down. Not because it's inefficient in the hands of a good group, but because it can go horribly wrong in a bad one. It's led to a bunch of players who have forgotten there is an alternative: focus fire on the most troublesome mob in a pack to bring it down first & crowd control where needed. It had got so bad that when once I suggested marking mobs, I got met with a cry of "LOL! Marking is for n00bs".

When HOR first came out, I'd say 90% of wipes were caused by trying to AOE all the trash mobs down without having the tools to do so. This led to persistent cries of "it's too difficult" and people dropping group the second they got in there. So I started doing something sneaky. The so-called tanks were't marking anything, but I still have the keys bound from when I do tank, so I did it instead. Silently a skull would appear over the first mob to take down and a moon over the one to be CC'd. As if by magic, these previously incompetent random PUGs would start succeeding.

"Great tanking!"

"Great healing!"

"I think they must have nerfed it!" (they hadn't at the time)

Me? I just kept my mouth shut. But it got me wondering. How many other people are doing things quietly in the background to ensure that random PUGs succeed?

Introduction to roleplaying: part 5 - the art of darkness

This is the final part of a series of posts designed to introduce fellow MMO players to roleplaying. Part 1 covered the basics of what roleplaying is, part 2 described how you can decide what your character is like as a person, part 3 discussed how you can portray that to others and part 4 explained how you can get involved. This last post deals with some of the problems you may encounter and makes some suggestions about how you can deal with them.

Whiney post day

Klepsacovic has decreed this whiney post day, but unfortunately I haven't got much to whine about. I even joined a PUG that completed RFC successfully (rarer than you might think) - there was crowd control and everything! Even better, the re-taking of Echo Isles has started to go official. Dat be good news fa all us Darkspear.


I suppose I'd better make more of an effort. How about this?

Water! Blizzard, will you please at least go to the trouble to make mage water as good as the shop-bought stuff for levels x5-x9? It's only useful for half the levels you go through. If you're going to make us vending machines, at least expand our stock beyond a 3 year old flat bottle of IrnBru. What do you think I am, some kind of warlock?

Oh, and combine it with the food, like you do at higher levels. Pretty please? How about whaaaaaa?

FailPUG - turning water into whine since 2010!