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Look Upon My Gear, Ye Mighty, And Repair

Look Upon My Gear, Ye Mighty, And Repair
by Rob Wynne
TTTO: “Dust In The Wind” by Kansas

My warlock casts
Conjure up a demon from the fiery depths
The spell falls flat
My spec is gone, and everything I learned is wrong
Bits in the code
All we are is bits in the code

Once we strode
Like giants through the endgame, doing mighty deeds
But glory fades
Your grand achievements now just curiosities
Bits in the code
All we are is bits in the code

Game moves on
Level cap increases, once again we grind
New quests call
And all your epics won’t another level buy
Bits in the code
All we are is bits in the code

This morning (28 December 2012) in the Tadpool, discussing the current WoW expansion and whether it was worth coming back to, Cory Latham made a comment about having too much time invested in his characters to roll new ones, and Christopher Dunn quipped that all that was meaningless, only the current expansion matters. And that got my filker brain working and this came out.

There have been two more World of Warcraft expansions that have come out since I wrote this, and it’s still true, which hasn’t always been true of my WoW filks šŸ™‚

The Ones Who Walk Away From Azeroth

In 1994, Blizzard Entertainment came out with a real-time strategy computer game called “Warcraft: Orcs & Humans”. It was well received in the gaming community, but I paid it very little notice personally.

One year later, a sequel was released, coming out just as I entered a six month period of unemployment. I ended up spending a lot of time playing Warcraft II, which was an awesome game.

By the time World of Warcraft in 2005, an MMO based on the same world as the RTS game, I was already deeply engaged with a game called City of Heroes. Some of my friends left CoH to play WoW, but I was still having a great time where I was, so I didn’t pay it much mind. In fact, I kinda resented it for stealing away my friends from the game I was playing. My dismissing it didn’t seem to cause it any lasting harm, though, and it grew like gangbusters.

Around the time that the first expansion for World of Warcraft came out, I was growing bored with City of Heroes/Villains. You can only go beat up the same bad guys in the same warehouse so many times before it starts to acquire a sense of sameness. So I asked eloren what server she and her hubby were playing on, bought the trial CD, and rolled a character.

I had no idea that this would change my life.

I played the game mostly solo, sometimes asking eloren to help me with difficult things or quests that required groups. I didn’t really know anyone who was playing; well, that’s not strictly true – I knew lots of people who were playing, and not one of them played on the same server as me or each other. I joined Jon and Aileen’s guild, and got to know a few of the people there vaguely, but I was mostly just enjoying the game as a solo player. Then drama happened, as it so often does in guilds, and they broke up. A small group of friends went looking for a new guild to join, and ended up with a group called The Grim Covenant. They seemed nice enough, and I was invited to join them as well, even though I was still far below max-level.

This was a transformative experience. As I reached level 70 (the cap at the time) and started participating in group activities, I starting getting to know people. I began to feel like I belonged in the group. I began to form real and solid friendships with people.

And then I fell in love with one of them.

It wasn’t on purpose; I certainly wasn’t looking for a new relationship. We had just gotten to talking, which led to more talking which led to exchanging emails…at some point she found out I was polyamorous, and started to ask me questions about it. As time went on, we were spending more and more time talking to each other, and it was obvious to me that there was something between us growing deeper.

Honestly, the details at this point are irrelevant. We met in person when kitanzi and I went up to visit a group of guildies for a trip to King Richard’s Fair, a trip that had been organised well in advance of these developments. During that trip, we began officially dating, although only the people who needed to know this were aware of it.

A couple of years go by. Following the failure of her marriage, she decided that, in the end, poly wasn’t something she felt she could handle, and we broke up. This is probably the hardest breakup I’ve ever been through; neither of us really wanted to and we both still loved one another deeply, but she was in a place where she needed to figure out who she was and what she was doing with her life, and this just wasn’t part of it. Her finding out that polyamory wasn’t for her after all was certainly a risk I’d been aware of when I started the relationship.

(I wrote and removed a lot of detail in the last three paragraphs, deciding it was largely beside the point. If you want to know more about what this was all about, email me, and we can talk.)

That was nearly a year ago, just before Valentine’s Day. I spent the next few months being pretty broken as a result, withdrawing from a lot of people in the process. Part of my withdrawing was to quietly withdraw from the WoW guild we were both part of. I was an officer and raid leader, but those were roles I’d been increasingly frustrated with, and this gave me the excuse and the permission to just let go of them. I went to another server, where Iā€™d established a character and made some casual friends, and set back to playing the game semi-casually. Eventually, I joined up with a small group of friends to begin raiding again, though never as hardcore as before, and that’s been my focus for the last 12 months.

Now there’s a new expansion out, and as the new year begins I’m reflecting again on my life and how i spend my time. The truth is, I still enjoy the game quite a lot. The new expansion is full of really interesting new things to explore. catalana and I still play together every week or so, working our way now through our second pair of characters since we began to play every Friday a couple of years ago. And I still have many people that are dear to me in the game, both in my old guild and in my new one, and others besides. Azeroth has become a comforting place to wile away my time.

But the thing is….time is the one thing in my life I never have enough of. And there’s a lot of things that I want to do that want to compete with that time. I want to spend more time writing, both creative writing and blogging. I want to spend more time working on my musical interests. I want to catch up on some of the TV/movie watching that’s been piling up. I want to just sit and read. Sometimes, I want to just sit.

Given that I’m not currently able to give up either work or sleep, I have to make some decisions about how to spend my time, and the decision I’m making right now is to take a vacation from World of Warcraft. I’m not saying I won’t play it at all; I’m not giving up my nights with Erica, and it is a good way to kill an hour when you’re in the mood for it. But aside from that regular session and the odd jaunt here and there, I’m going to spend a few weeks in pursuit of other hobbies, until I figure out the best way to create a balance that lets me do everything as I’d like to.

It feels very strange to step away from something that’s dominated my leisure time for over four years. But ultimately, I think that right now it’s best for me.

Blizzard sensibly backs away from new forum policy

Since I got a fair bit of response to yesterday’s comments on Blizzard Entertainment’s proposed forum policies and the privacy implications of them, I wanted to make sure and take the time to note that they are responding to their customers in a postive manner. Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime made this post today on the game’s forums:

Hello everyone,

I’d like to take some time to speak with all of you regarding our desire to make the Blizzard forums a better place for players to discuss our games. We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.

It’s important to note that we still remain committed to improving our forums. Our efforts are driven 100% by the desire to find ways to make our community areas more welcoming for players and encourage more constructive conversations about our games. We will still move forward with new forum features such as the ability to rate posts up or down, post highlighting based on rating, improved search functionality, and more. However, when we launch the new StarCraft II forums that include these new features, you will be posting by your StarCraft II Battle.net character name + character code, not your real name. The upgraded World of Warcraft forums with these new features will launch close to the release of Cataclysm, and also will not require your real name.

I want to make sure it’s clear that our plans for the forums are completely separate from our plans for the optional in-game Real ID system now live with World of Warcraft and launching soon with StarCraft II. We believe that the powerful communications functionality enabled by Real ID, such as cross-game and cross-realm chat, make Battle.net a great place for players to stay connected to real-life friends and family while playing Blizzard games. And of course, you’ll still be able to keep your relationships at the anonymous, character level if you so choose when you communicate with other players in game. Over time, we will continue to evolve Real ID on Battle.net to add new and exciting functionality within our games for players who decide to use the feature.

In closing, I want to point out that our connection with our community has always been and will always be extremely important to us. We strongly believe that Every Voice Matters, ( http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/mission.html ) and we feel fortunate to have a community that cares so passionately about our games. We will always appreciate the feedback and support of our players, which has been a key to Blizzard’s success from the beginning.

Mike Morhaime
CEO & Cofounder
Blizzard Entertainment

Just as they deserved the brickbat when they were proposing to do something stupid, they deserve praise for recognizing they’d mis-stepped (and in a rare move for most companies, recognizing it before they actually implemented it.

Good job, Blizzard. Very good job.

Blizzard “Real ID” system sparks controversy

Blizzard Entertainment, makers of World of Warcraft and other games, unveils controversial new forum policies

I’m a person who has long argued that there is no privacy on the Internet,there never was any privacy on the Internet, and that pretending otherwise is a comfortable delusion people craft for themselves in order to not freak out thinking about how much of their personal information is floating around in the ether.

Having said that…Blizzard is seriously out of bounds on this one. The concern isn’t just the forums. If it was, we’d all just shrug and go on with our lives; I can’t remember the last time I read the official forums, much less posted to them. And as you can see, I post to Usenet with my real name and e-mail address, and have done so for 20 years, so I’m not overly concerned with people finding me .

But then, I’ve never had a stalker. I’ve never been sexually assaulted. I’ve never been the victim of identity theft. I’ve never been harassed because I’m female, or gay, or transgendered. But I know people who fall into every single one of those categories, some of them very close to me. Their concerns about protecting their identity from random strangers are real, substantial, and very much valid.

Right now, it’s just the forums, but what happens when they decide to reveal your real name to people using the Armoury? Or an in-game query against your character? As much as I generally regard slippery-slope arguments as a fallacy, it does seem very clear that Blizzard has a cavalier attitude towards its users’ identities, and that is troubling.

It’s one thing to soapbox about the illusion of privacy on the Internet, and another thing to simply blatantly ignore the importance of the illusion and flagrantly expose your users’ information. There may be only the thinnest line between you and the world, but that thin line matters; it’s part of the social contract that allows the Internet to function.

Bad move, Blizzard. Very, very bad move.

More reading on this that I liked:

World of Warcraft: It was a very very good night.

This is really just a random squee post. I had such a good night last night and I wanted to share.

First up was our Tuesday night raid, on which I am the Raid Leader. We got our group together neatly by first pull time, with only a couple of people to cut. (Tuesday is usually the hardest night to form, because we’ll get 32-35 people showing up. On Thursday and Sunday, when we’re wiping on stuff, suddenly people don’t turn out. Funny that. I keep lists.) We took a while to get started because we had to sort out some folks for a new strategy we were trying on Flame Leviathan, but once we got rolling it was easy city. We downed FL+2 in one with only a couple of deaths, so it was a marked improvement over the previous week. We then proceeded to knock off XT-002, which finally dropped Twisted Visage for our guild leader, Kologarn and Iron Council, each of which dropped wishlist items for folks….including me! I got the Iron-bound Mantle to replace my last piece of T7.5, and next week I’ll have the badges to get the helm and complete my 4pc bonus on T8.5.

As we were heading into IC, we got the news that the Alliance had managed to capture Lake Wintergrasp, so we downed the big trio and proceeded portal out to Dalaran to get our weekly guild clear of VoA done. The other hunter in the raid grabbed his T8.5 gloves as a result.

Though it was only 11:30, there really wasn’t time to do anything else, so we called it there. I went and got my new shoulders properly enchanted by the Son of Hodir, and checked to see what my guildies were up to. Seeing several folks in Slave Pens, I volunteered my daily Ahune summon to anyone who wanted it, and ended up duoing it with our chief ret paladin for just my one attempt (He’d just wrapped up about 4-5 attempts with someone else, who was going to bed.) We knocked him down easily and….the pet dropped, I won the roll, and I now has a Scorchling! *happy dance*

I’ve promised the pally I’ll keep going back with him in the hopes it will drop for him too. But what a great night of WoW!

Karazhan Tonight

Karazhan Tonight
by Rob Wynne
TTTO: “Comedy Tonight” by Stephen Sondheim

Epics drop for us
Badges of Justice
Something for everyone
in Karazhan tonight!

Attuman’s crossbow
Malchezaar’s longbow
Something for everyone
in Karazhan tonight!

Nothing but ghosts, nothing that’s real
Clear out Morose then sit for a meal

Dance with the undead
Tier 4 for your head
Ten bosses for the raid to fight!
Serpentshrine tomorrow
Karazhan tonight!

Two tanks, three healers
Five damage dealers
Something for everyone
in Karazhan tonight

Uni-mind Headdress
Quick break to play chess
Something for everyone
in Karazhan tonight

Shade of Aran’s the Master’s sire
Only this one time: stand in the fire

Maiden’s been cleaned up
Opera is next up
Hope it isn’t Romulo tonight!
Bring up the curtain
Karazhan tonight!

Boots of Fortelling
Bands of Indwelling
Something for everyone
in Karazhan tonignt!

Illhoof has gold chains
Charred earth from Nightbane
Something for everyone
in Karazhan tonight!

[Entire raid]
Epics drop for us
Badges of Justice
Something for everyone
in Karazhan tonight!

Each drops an upgrade
Repair bill prepaid

[Raid leader]
Something for everyone!

[Entire raid]
Karazhan tonight!

[Healer]
Nothing too hard

[Tank]
Grinding reprieve

[Raid leader]
Go get your key from Master Medivh

[Women]
Four hours clears it

[Men]
And it appears it’s

[All]
Full of purple loot that’s out of sight!

[Priest]
Pantaloons and Pendants!

[Shaman]
Drape of the Mysticant!

[Warrior]
The King’s Defender!

[Druid]
Mitts of Treemender!

[Rogue]
Malchazeen!

[Hunter]
Garona’s Ring!

[Warrior]
Decapitator!

[Mage]
Capacitor!

[Druid]
Forest Lord!

[Warlock]
Waist cord!

[Mage]
Rings!

[Shaman]
Kings!

[Raid leader]
Gauntlets!
Leggings!
Badges!
Tokens!

[Entire Raid]
All of this gear is somewhat antique
And we’ll be back Tuesday next week!

It’s old and dusty
Some of it’s rusty
But the treasure’s certain to delight!
Tempest Keep tomorrow
Karazhan tonight!

When writing about topical things, there is always a danger of your work being “overtaken by events”, which is to say made obsolete by the world changing over the course of time. I wrote this months and months ago, when it was more topical than nostalgic.

But, as we take our first exploratory steps into Naxxramas, high above the snowy valleys of Northrend, let’s remember those heady days when the place to be was Deadwind Pass.

WoW: Old Fashioned Instances

Among the many things that really sucked about bedlamhouse moving to Indiana was no longer being able to game with him every week. The D&D campaign soldiered on without him, but I really missed his presence at the table. I’m pretty sure he missed us too, because when the D&D group decided to shift from weekly to irregular status, he suggested that perhaps we could set up an MMO night so he could get in on some gaming fun.

Weekend Update: Video games and Drive through Sweeties!

I had a relatively relaxing weekend, which is good because that was just the sort of weekend I wanted.

Friday night, catalana and I met up for our usual night of WoW questing. We spent a good deal of time killing giants and water elementals in Feralas — the giants were dutifully dropping stuff for us, and the water elementals not so much, so we dropped that quest and went to collect Yeti hides instead. On the way to the yeti cave, catalana spotted a sprite darter and said “Those are so pretty! I wish you could get a non-combat pet version of one of those!” I whispered one of my friends who is a rabid non-combat pet collector and asked if there was one. It turns out, there is! It just involves doing a very long quest chain that starts with an NPC hidden in a spot that one would be fairly unlikely to notice. We dropped our plans for mega XP and decided to chase this chain down instead. It mostly involved razing a village of Tauren and freeing a bunch of the little dragons, then flying all the way to Darnassus to turn in the quest, then flying all the way back to Feralas to pick up the second part of the chain, then down to Shimmering Flats, and then The Hinterlands. Those of you familiar with the geography of Azeroth will note that we earned our frequent flyer miles on this one! It was late when we finally wrapped up for the night, but we were both the proud new parents of tiny little faerie dragons!

I split most of Saturday between WoW and Warhammer Online. WH Online is a new MMO that just came out, and a large number of my guildies are playing it, so I figured I’d at least see what the fuss was about. I’m really horribly underwhelmed by it, unfortunately. I’ll keep dabbling with it, but as soon as Wrath of the Lich King comes out, I expect it to start gathering dust. I’ll go on more about my impressions of the game in another post.

Currently exciting in WoW land is Brewfest! World of Warcraft has a number of little holiday festival events through the year, and Brewfest is essentially the dwarven (and Orcish) Okotberfest. There’s a fair, and kegs of beer, and ram races, and a cool boss mob to go and kill for shiny trinkets. We spent a good deal of time on Saturday and Sunday repeatedly running the special boss — hes’ not hard to kill, but you can only run the event once per person, so even swapping people in and out of the party, there’s a limit to how many times a day you can get his loot. But it’s fun to do stuff as a guild again.

Sunday night, my darling sweetmusic_27 and her old roommate Patty dropped in on their way down to Walt Disney World! This made me quite happy as I have not seen my darling Amy since January, and there was much cuddling to be had. We went out to Famous Dave's for a Giant Helping of Protein, then came home and watched a Jeff Dunham DVD. A good time having been had by all, we went to bed at a reasonable hour, as kitanzi and I had to be at work and Patty and Amy had a long drive to Orlando ahead of them. But it was fantastic to get to meet Patty, and of course I’m always happy to see Amy. (We’ll get to see them both again in a week or so, when they’re on their way back north. We made sure they’d have to stop…we loaned them graphic novels! *grin*)

This whole week can stop anytime.

Overall, the weekend was pretty relaxing. Didn’t do much to speak of, honestly. Friday night was my weekly WoW date with catalana. We’re slowly creeping our way up…level 46 now, and aside from instances, which we’ve been getting regularly run through by 70 friends, we’ve run into almost nothing we could not handle together. I seriously doubt we’ll hit 70 by the time the expansion comes out in 2 months, but that’s ok. We’re not really in a hurry.

Sunday was a bit of a down day, emotionally. It started out well — we went to the pool at the gym for a while, soaked in the hot tub, and came home for a nice brunch. It’s been a while since the last time we were at the gym, so I was pleased to discover that I’d lost 15 pounds since the last time I weighed in. I’d suspected this was the case, as my pants size has shrunk, but it was nice to see the scale reflect that as well.

The afternoon came with a case of the blahs. There were a variety of reasons for this, some of which I had a finger on, and some of which I didn’t. Of the things I had a finger on, at least one was completely irrational and the other was something I had no real ability to do anything about, so I was fairly unhappy about the state of my head. This wasn’t improved when I got a call from my mother around 6:30pm, to tell me that my Aunt Barbara (her oldest sister) had passed away suddenly that morning of a heart attack. She was 65, the same age as my grandmother was when she passed away under very similar circumstances. Mom pointed out that our family doesn’t tend to go for the long lingering illnesses, preferring to stay healthy to the end and going suddenly, and I’m sure that on the whole, I’d prefer that myself, but its certainly a shock to those left behind. This whole week has been filled with news of people close to me dealing with unexpected death, and I really wish the universe would just cut it out.

I made tacos for dinner and we watched the first episode of Alton Brown’s new show Feasting On Waves, which was much fun. I then logged into WoW for a while, and ended up pulling a guildmate and 2 other 50ish characters through about half of Blackrock Depths. This made for a nice distraction, and I have to admit it was fun to listen to the lowbie hunter ooh and ah as I dispatched the Dark Iron Dwarves and their minions. My guildmate has run me through more instances than I can count, so I was glad to return the favour to her.

Around midnight, I decided it was getting late, but took some time to give sweetmusic_27 a call. By the time we were done talking, it was late, but I was in a better frame of mind. But I’d really like another Sunday to replace this one…I think it was defective.

QotD

Oddest response a girl has ever given me to an overture of affection, ever:

“Well, if you were more like a scorpid…”

ETA: Perhaps its just that kind of day. Someone I’m actually dating just said to me: “If I were an alien wasp, I would totally use your flesh to nurture my young.” Which is really very sweet, when you think about it.

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