Self-righteous Sunday: go go go

| Sunday, January 31, 2010





Maybe it's just a power trip.


This isn't restricted to WoW.






Or let's make it better.



Fight where the tank says




Saturday Superstar: Goblin Goes Galt

| Saturday, January 30, 2010
I'm not an artist, just a concerned citizen like you.

Disclaimer: This pencil drawing has been edited using the open-source and free software known as GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). Due to lighting and an old camera, the words were completely illegible. They were not originally green, just plain mechanical pencil lead. In other words: in before "this looks photoshopped". It's not!

Know your customer

| Friday, January 29, 2010
Think about who is going to buy what you are selling. This will help with pricing.

Are you selling gear that someone would actually wear? How good is it?

If it's at the upper end of a level, look it up on wowhead and see if it's a twink item. If so, take the buyout listed there and add a larger percentage and ratchet it down gradually. Twink items will go for far more than comparable, but slightly inferior items. Welcome to a fundemental truth of WoW economics: min-maxers and their gold are easily separated.

If it's just decent gear; maybe "of the tiger" leather or "of the soldier" mail, then try a few times vendor price. You'll get some sales from people leveling alts who are trying to fill non-heirloom slots or who can't spare the badges. Maybe new players as well; until they learn the joys of instant loot, and then back again as they learn that the RNG hates each and every one of us, personally.

If it has terrible stats, then you're not likely to get anyone who wants to wear it. Spirit combined with physical damage stats: agi or str, is very unpopular. Those classes don't benefit much at all from spirit. With the exception of troll shamans who regenerate massive hp and no one cans top them. This sort of gear is best sold to enchanters. If you want their attention, you need to make the buyout significantly cheaper than the average DE value. Also be nice and make the bid and buyout the same. This allows instant buying without needing to confirm every item. Saves us enchanters a lot of time.

With all of these, be aware of the vendor price and the AH deposit and cut. The cut is 5%; so if vendor/.95 isn't higher than the AH price, you're losing gold; not even including the time spent and risk of the deposit. I often see people posting at prices that are so close to vendor that they lose gold by using the AH. Sometimes they even post below vendor price. Keep an eye out for those auctions!

Shattered Glaives

| Thursday, January 28, 2010









Now you have the legendary warglaives.






Would you join a female-only guild?

| Wednesday, January 27, 2010




"Can you handle the thought of breasts?"
"Of course."
"You're tabbed out watching porn, aren't you?"




But I don't have a newsletter!

| Tuesday, January 26, 2010



Trial of the Terrible Death Knight

| Monday, January 25, 2010

I was the DK.




Responses were mixed.




I needed to work on my glyphs.

But why a DK?





| Sunday, January 24, 2010
Trial of the GhostCrawler

This is the most challenging raid yet. It is a single, PvP-style fight and requires one of every class. It only has a 10-man version because the 25-man version won't be available for another 15 expansions, not including Cataclysm.

The rewards are unmatched: A full 290 level set of gear. But no trinkets. You'll have to keep running the same places over and over for months, until finally you cave in and buy a crappier badge version, only to have it drop the next day after your refund timer has run out.

When the raid starts, every player in the raid is separated. They then must fight their way through wave after wave of elitists in order to get to the center where they meet up. In the center there is a chest filed with tokens for the mentioned gear, along with no trinkets. The tokens are all white-quality, so similar to the secret bank vault in Blackrock Depths, the loot goes to whoever opens it first with auto-loot on. However there is a twist: the person to get it first will not always be the melee hunter.

Upon opening the box, the player will receive the previously mentioned Tokens of the Awesome Set. And no trinkets. After looting, their class will then be nerfed into the ground, requiring other classes to use summons, portals, deathgrip, and knockkback effects to even move around the world.

If the player complete the fight within ten minutes of starting it, they also receive a ring with attack power and expertise.

Auto-DE was a buff to my enchanter

There are three enchanting activities: auction house work, tip work, and DEing in instances. The second group had really no changes at all. People bring mats and give them a pittance of gold, just as usual. The third group lost control of their profession and their pseudo-farming had been wrecked by the crashed mat prices. The first group is me.

My profession remains safely in my complete control. I don't sell WotLK mats. I buy them. So I benefit from cheap mats. I can create scrolls with less investment risk and prices didn't go down too much. Basically I gained profits at the cost of other enchanters.

Some have tried to claim that this is a spreading of the wealth. Bullshit. Did non-enchanters gain? Probably. But how much really? Before they got the vendor price of 4-8g for blues and 10-15g for purples (this is armor, not weapons). Now they get shards worth 6-8g and abyssals worth 25g. On weapons they're actually losing gold if they hit DE, but they're so convinced that shards are great and wonderful that they pick it anyway. On armor the gain is marginal. Only on armor DE do they gain much; about 15g per instance (not counting ToC and ICC), averaged among four people, and wow, that's pretty trivial. 3g average; less than is lost by the people who 'speed run' when they really mean 'don't loot corpses and lose a dozen gold in coin and vendor trash per instance'. In other words, the spreading out of mats didn't do much.

The lower mat cost has a greater effect, especially for those who would buy mats and tip enchanters. These people they gained quite a bit actually. They still give trivial tips and now they pay even less for mats. What a great change, it has enriched the jackasses who tip 5g for blade ward.

The 'gatherer' enchanters who go out and run instances and get their profession stolen, the ones who make the enchanting market possible, they lose. My most convenient source of mats is by playing my non-enchanting alts in instances and getting cheap mats by hijacking my fellow enchanters. My cheapest source is the AH where enchanters and non-enchanters furiously scramble to sell the flood of mats, undercutting each other to the point that dust is 1/4 what it used to be, with other mats having less dramatic, but still significant price drops.

The biggest gain was for the 'crafter' enchanters. But my enchanter who sits in the AH all day and makes scrolls at a 25-100% markup, he's doing just fine. I'm not going to spew that crap about "lol it's just clicking a button" because that's stupid and ignores the cost of leveling and other stuffs. But with cheap mats and no deposit, it's a nearly riskless activity. My JC goes through 1.5g deposits constantly; losing some, getting some back. My enchanter never loses a deposit because scrolls have none. He can just keep posting over and over and lose nothing but a few seconds. The lack of a deposit also keeps up prices.

Clearly my enchanter provides a valuable service. But so do the 'gatherer' enchanters and they get absolutely nothing. They get as many mats as before, but with much lower sell prices. They're losing an incentive to run instances.

I predict two competing forces that could affect my enchanter's profits. Fewer enchanters running mean prices go up along with my risk, and away go my profits. However fewer enchanters could also mean the characters going idle or switching professions, which means less competition in the scroll market.

The net effect of the DE change was to spread some gold away from enchanting as a profession, but within the profession there is a dramatic reversal, an extreme concentration of the wealth.

Saturday Superstar: Free Shards

| Saturday, January 23, 2010
TL;DR: Don't pick DE if the item vendors for more than the shard.

[Just moving my response to Stabs into the main post]
The greed/DE selection is done before any rolls. They have the same weight. So I pick greed and you pick DE; if I win I get the item and if you win you get a shard. Everyone makes their own choice on what they want to do with the item and they are unaffected by the choices of others.

After running a lot of heroics I've come across a stupid pattern: people hit DE on everything. Last night I tried to point out that hitting DE on a 15g weapon to get a 8g shard is a bad idea. They said they liked the free shards and didn't seem to understand the concept of "vendor the weapon and you can buy two shards." In their pursuit of a 'free shard' they were actually denying themselves a shard!

So I did what anyone else would do: laughed to myself and moved on.

I lied. I made a forum thread instead.

Wait! Before you select disenchant...

Check the vendor price relative to shard prices. I'm pretty sure all epics are worth more as shards (assuming they're not upgrades). But blues are often worth less.

Weapons are the best example: they sell for 15g or more, but on my server dream shards are only 7-8g. I can't imagine any server being so much higher that they'd beat the vendor price.

Don't fall for the trap of "but it's a free shard." Sell the weapon for 15g and buy two shards off the AH.

It's only a few gold, but if you're running a lot of heroics over and over, that's going to add up. Free gold, just for reading vendor prices!

The first response was lazy in the opposite direction: greeding everything and potentially losing shard value rather than vendor value.
The second person claimed rational self-interest: needing on everything.

And then it went downhill. More downhill than Lazy and Ninja.
Not all of us are selling the shards. I'm building up a base so I can get enchants when I get really good gear.

That person got trolled. Then they swore at the troll.

I like keeping a stockpile of enchanting mats.

Means I don't have to sift through pages of 1 infinite dust.

This is entirely irrelevant considering blues don't DE into dust.

Then it's time for a round of Poor Accounting
I don't need shards to sell, I need them for enchants so I don't need to buy them.

step 1: collect materials
step 2: buy a vellum
step 3: enchant it with a wanted enchant
step 4: sell for profit.

The markup can be substantially higher than the vendor difference ^_^

The second person is the best example: he fails to recognize that the scroll profit was there regardless of the 'free shard'. He could have bought them off the AH and enchanted for profit. But instead by failing to break down where the profit is actually coming from, he's harming the economy; first by destroying the 15g (without getting 15g in value) and then by reducing his role in the economy. It's the equivalent of growing tomatoes in dirt mixed with shredded 50's just so you don't have to go to the store.

Finally near the end of the thread two people seemed to get it.
I've seen an epic BoE drop before in a 5 man. 3 out of the 5 people in the group quickly clicked "Disenchant", not even looking at what the item was. Luckily my guild (who was running chain heroics with me) won the role, and made himself a nice 1k later that night. A lot more money than the 30g Abyss Crystal one of the other PUGs would have got.

Check what you're Disenchanting before clicking the button, you might be losing out...

if you vendor the thing for 15g and then buy 2 shards for 8g, you CAN MAKE TWICE AS MUCH VELLUMS TO SELL FOR A PROFIT.

that is the whole point of this thread.

gawd, you just made my headache even worse.

Only one person had what could be viewed as a counter-argument.
It's still like 15g for a shard and 30g for a crystal on my realm. At least the last time i checked.

If shards are actually that expensive, then it would make sense to DE out of habit. But more likely the price went down and they didn't notice. I know shards dropped in price since abyssal shatter came out and even more since random heroics and auto-DE; since both inflated the supply by a lot.

To put this in terms of the enchanter with his brilliant vellum scheme.
1) Get shard
2) Make profit from enchanting
Those are the important points. Now imagine that step one was instead a choice between two options:
1a) Get shard
1b) Get 15g
And imagine that if you pick b there's another step you can take:
2a) Buy a shard for 8g and pocket the extra 7g as pure profit.

Normally I would try to create a sort of pseudo-rational argument for these people. I'd explain how they have a different perspective or value, but I can't seem to find that. It's just people not thinking and as a result harming themselves economically. This is worse than the 'farming it for free' mentality because they're not accepting an arbitrary lower gold per hour, they're actively destroying their potential gold. Do you want 15g or do you want something worth 8g? That's the question, and people are too busy thinking about how the 8g shard is free that they miss out on the 15g free gold!

Maybe accessibility isn't all good

| Friday, January 22, 2010
Last week I said I'd have lore for every class-race combination. Well then Larisa ruined that by her guild getting a legendary so then I had to go on a tangent for the entire week. She just ruins everything, doesn't she? The lore will be up next week. Or someone else will ruin it.

Vanilla had some problems, such as the "end-game" and all its numerous rewards being cut off from the vast majority of players. BC helped with this a little bit. Or at least I thought so. Then again, I live in a bubble. WotLK definitely changed this, to the point that we now have PUGs of the latest 10-man the day it comes out and people are even making PUG hardmodes. There are gear checks and achievement linking and all that, but are these really so outrageous? We used to have gear checks and guild checks and just plain questions of who are you? Back then a name meant more. Well, some did. Mine didn't; most didn't. And most people didn't raid. But that's not my point.

Content is more accessible and as all things go, we tend to value less that which we can get and conversely, that which we lack must be amazing. The sweetest fruit is always out of reach. This isn't bad, but it has a terrible side-effect: the progressive trivialization of gear.

This is not about "when epics were epic". Instead it is about the cost players put on gear and negative behavior. I remember when ninjaing in MC was a big deal. Past that; well I didn't hear about much since by then people were in with friends, or at least knew what it would do to their names. People ninjaed still, but less so, and I believe a lot of that was ignorance: the old huntar waepon syndrome.

Undoubtedly the weakening of community has some effect. But I propose that a bigger effect may be the perception that any given item is trivial to enough people that ninjaing it causes little negative attention. Or in other words: "lol [instance loot] is srs bns". As loot becomes more accessible, it become less valuable. This doesn't always weaken the hurt it causes to the victim, but the aggressor is often let off the hook because whatever they took is regarded as trivial.

Under the old system a given ninja incident had a much worse effect on the victim, but the ninja was even worse off. Now there's pretty much nothing lost for the ninja while the victim is still out a little bit of hope and gear.

P.S. Actually I lied, this post was already written and planned for this week. But all the guild and legendary talk pushed it back several days.

Bind on Guild Recipes

| Thursday, January 21, 2010
In yesterday's thread comments the idea came up of patterns being bound to guilds rather than players. This has all sorts of implications.

Drop rate
Would it go up or down? I have no clue! It probably comes down to the intended level of accessibility and how Blizzard expects BoG recipes to change it. I imagine the drop rate would be lower since the schematic is effectively unlimited, being able to enable many crafters per guild. It might get dropped even further if Blizzard found that all guilds were commonly getting all schematics.

Who can get the crafted goods?
It isn't unlikely that guild schematics would only make BoG items. It would be similar to profession-specific BoPs: they're a bonus intended to be only for those which are in the profession/guild.

If the creations were BoE, then guilds might attempt to control their production in order to maximize profits or to reduce the gear available to competing guilds.

Guild control of crafting
Would this cause crafted goods to be more or less accessible? It could be that this causes a single drop to enable dozens of crafters. That would cause prices to drop as they compete. Or it could be that where before a crafter owned his schematics and could use them however he wished, that power would be gone. Guild control could have all sorts of effects depending on how the mechanic of guild crafting works.

The schematic could be learned by the guild, meaning that any person in the guild with the profession skill can make it. This gives the guild no control of crafting except to remove those who they don't want to craft anymore. That's not a very good level of control. Even worse, for the guild, is that it could be nearly impossible to spot offenses, to spot people breaking any rules the guild tries to make for crafting.

Alternatively the crafting could taught through a non-consumed BoG recipe. This allows the guild to control who learns it but nothing past that.

The item could not teach the craft, but instead only grant the ability. That would allow the guild to control the location of the item and therefore who can craft and when. Guilds might just stick them in the bank and let them be traded and and moved in and out as people want to craft. More restrictive guilds might have one person control access to the item, trading it only for individual crafts approved by the guild. This would be pretty overbearing and most likely any guild that tried this would collapse. With a possible exception of guilds created purely for crafting.

Crafting guilds
If crafting is done with the non-consumable, guild-bound item which grants crafting, then guilds could potentially form entirely for crafting. Players would pay to get into the guild; perhaps a monthly amount to stay in or they might only rent the BoG crafting. These fees might be used to pay for raid runs to farm the schematics within.

Depending on the rarity of the drops, we might see the rise of cartels as players use guilds to monitor and control the crafting of others. Crafting alts will not be in the main's guild for familiarity but instead in the crafting guild for profit.

Are BoG recipes a step backward?
Dungeon finder helps to separate the guild from small group PvE. It makes it so guilds are not required for readily available heroics. This means guilds can exist more out of social connection, rather than the necessities of game mechanics. Presumably this would mean tighter-knit guilds. BoG recipes might reverse this. The low drop rate and guild necessity would tie people to guilds again, this time for crafting.

Would Bind on Guild change our concept of ownership?

| Wednesday, January 20, 2010


WoW has almost 100% private property. Individual property.






Poll about Scarlet Monastery

| Tuesday, January 19, 2010
I'm trying to decipher Scarlet Monastery, so I wrote a post about it. Then I realized that I was lacking actual evidence for my assertions. So the post has been put on hold and instead there's a poll in the upper-right. I realize that like-dislike is too extreme, but I don't know how to ask two questions at the same time and have the results linked without just combining the polls. It would have been better to have a scale of one to five or something else with more options, but every option goes in three times and then the poll has 15 questions and it starts to get ridiculous.

Please vote. Please don't overthink your vote, I'm just looking for first reactions. Also please don't vote after having run SM 50 times to get a rare spawn to drop a chest for your twink, because that's going to bias the results a bit.

Maybe if I glue a feather there and add a marble and...

What? Oh sorry, I'm trying to make an Atiesh.

My favorite gnome was taunted by the presence of a legendary and I thought I'd try to help. Alas, there don't seem to be any more splinters dropping, so I'm forced to improvise. Oh sure, she said she's happy to see her guild get a pretty hammer, but we all know there's a loot whore in all of us.

Hold this would you?

Legendaries are strange things, aren't they? They take a guild to make. At least if you make them when they're supposed to be made and not four years late like someone who shall remain unnamed. So a guild makes it and then a person gets it. That's quite a bit to put on one person.

It's not just a reward. It's also a burden. Such a big investment by the guild carries some obligations. Some would disagree, but those people are sociopaths, so fuck their opinions. The player owes something to the guild. But what?

Certainly they shouldn't quit the next day or switch guilds or that sort of thing. And they should remain active and help out. But are they a slave to the guild, shackled to it forever? That's unreasonable.

And what about their role? Sure, the mage gets Atiesh and will use it for a long time and the rogue gets warglaives and stays swords. But what about the healing priest with a hammer who wants to melt faces? Or the paladin with a shadowmourne who really wants to get hit in the face repeatedly for hours on end. Does the legendary tie their spec too, and for how long? Perhaps until it is no longer the greatest thing imaginable. But that could be a very long time; they are legendaries after all.

Don't even think about switching mains...

Perhaps legendaries are an ideal candidate for being guild-bound. But for the person who is given main use of the weapon, it still ties them. Leave the guild and the weapon is out of reach. While the guild played a role, I doubt the individual player just sat around waiting for the guild bank to dole out expensive mats. They invested in it as well, but they don't own any of the weapon.

Divorce is messy, isn't it?

Can I borrow a hand here? Yep, hold that. Okay now I can twist that around there and loop and tighten that and


So um, how about a legendary wand and held in offhand?

The Dishwasher didn't give women any more free time

| Monday, January 18, 2010
Le's go back a few years. A few more. Let us go back to the time of home appliances. These were the greatest idea ever.
Step one: Create labor and time-saving devices and use a post-war civilian industry boom to put them in half the houses (I made up that percentage).
Step two: Don't worry about women's rights, they wil come naturally thanks to step three.
Step three: Now women have spare time for things other than washing, washing, cooking, washing, raising kids, and washing.
Step four: With this free time women can do things like "be liberated", whatever that means.
If things don't work quite right, make a huge chemicals industry devoted to making cleaning easier and faster.

There you go, technology has freed women from the shackles of maintaining a home and no one even had to sit through boring lectures about how housewives were being mentally destroyed by the incredible tedium. Yep, technology totally fixed society with no work at all.

You might have noticed that this didn't actually happen. Remember that chemical industry? They didn't save any time, they just raised expectations. Mopping the floor with water, maybe some soap and scrubbing if there would be guests, wasn't enough anymore. Buy this and that and mix that and spray this and scent this and next thing they spent twice as long. Sure the floor looked nicer, but then the wife got cancer from the chemicals and died and was never any more free.

I'm making it sound worse than it was for dramatic effect. But the fact remains that labor-saving devices didn't save women much labor, or anyone else. Remember the paperless office? Then we discovered that computers are really great at putting stuff on paper and Brazil chopped down half the Amazon in a week.

WoW isn't all that different. Okay, orders of magnitude different in terms of human oppression, and beside belfs I can't think of who are the women, but that's not the point. As things get easier, we just do more of the, raise our expectations, and ask for even more. It's a different sort of hamster wheel, all of us utterly convinced that this next nerf, this next easy loot, this next set of dailies will fix our problems.

Blizzard created 10-mans as an alternative to the sometimes unwieldy 25-mans, to give smaller guilds a shot. And they did. But then we ended up with twice as many tiers of loot and those tiers had to be clearly different. So we had even more stat inflation. And we said "but if we can just get X type of badges and gear up, we'll be able to make the GearScore for the next raid". And so it was, and so the inflation went on, and so we scrubbed the floors and hoped to not get kicked for ruining the party.

Self-Righteous Sunday: "It's just heroic"

| Sunday, January 17, 2010


Apparently he's going fury.




Saturday Superstar: Understanding

| Saturday, January 16, 2010
This will be in the context of noobs.








Even more Blood Knights

| Friday, January 15, 2010




Similarly, it appears that Night Elf mages are returning Highborn.


I can play WoW in my sleep

| Thursday, January 14, 2010
And that's not a good thing. Yet another lesson on why it's bad to play before bed.


WTF stop! You don't need to tank, you're asleep.
No you're not losing aggro. You're not even logged in. The computer is even off.


Get up, look around, take note of reality. You know, that place where you are not a blood elf paladin. At least not a female one (I have way better hair than the males). And not a paladin!

Oh shit shit shit where are those mobs coming from? Dammit, I just cannot hold aggro. I can't even see what's attacking them. How am I supposed to get aggro on mobs that I can't see?
You're not in a group. Remember, computer is off.
But they're getting their asses kicked! The mobs keep spawning way behind the healer and I can't see very well with all the commotion.
There's no commotion! Go to sleep!
Go to sleep.



At least I stopped PvPing before bed. Dreaming of getting stunlocked is even less fun.

But speaking of 6-9, I sometimes throw myself off if I consciously press my consecrate key, because that's a '9' second cooldown (8, but with a delay) but it's actually the 6 key. I should get around to making a pair of castsequence macros for that.

Gnome Hunters

| Wednesday, January 13, 2010





Frozen Orb: Need or Greed?

| Tuesday, January 12, 2010


Things seem to have settled down and people are all needing.







What to put in Cheerscore?

| Monday, January 11, 2010
Shamelessly stolen from Larisa: What's Your Cheerscore?

How do you want to run this instance?
Rank by order of importance:
Kill everything
Learning the pulls
Learning the bosses



What would you add? And what's your score?

4Kill everything
6Learning the pulls
5Learning the bosses


Clarifying terrible writing

| Sunday, January 10, 2010

So I'll take a second shot at this.

Crafting Arrogance



Hunter Tanks


Nostalgia Day

If you're in Mass, reading this on your iPhone, nice phone. You might happen to hear the preacher talk of Biblical times with some sort of whistful nostalgia. Or his childhood. $10 he'll mention values at least once and how they've declined. Double or nothing on family.

Personally I prefer a Lord with whom I can directly interact. Specifically one I can kill and maybe take stuff from. He talks to me and other people can hear it. It's nice. His name is Ragnaros.

You probably have figured out that I am a bit of a nostalgia nut. I liked vanilla and I still do. That's why I'm in MC while you're all sitting in DPS queues trying to get frost emblems. We called them badges in my day. Actually, in my day we called the scarabs and we had too many, always of the wrong kind. Have I mentioned that I don't sit in DPS queues because I'm a tank? I wonder who would win, my tank alter-ego or Ragnaros. Considering my ego can solo some level 80 heroic pulls, I'm betting on that. Moving on.

I've decided to add some balance. You see, I believe in simpler times (the irony better not be wasted), back when we had regulations on media that forced some amount of balance in the media. Now all we have is Fox News and not nearly enough people watch it or listen to their many fine people in other media such as radio, podcasts, and the hysterical guys (and if you love etymology you'll like that one too) screaming on the street corner.

So, time for some balance; I will present two sides on the nostalgia issue:

Things were better back then, because we were poor.

They were all f-cking children!

Molten Core and why Vanilla players seem better
I recently ran into a few BC babies, meaning players who started after Burning Crusade came out. They are often entirely inexperienced in any high level content in Vanilla, often not doing any instances past level 55 or so. Maybe they wipe in BRD once, but they don't clear it, and the later instances are certainly unknown to them. Let's not even imagine raids.

So when I form an old world raid, they tend to get confused. They send me their gearscores and in one case, speculate that we won't be able to finish because our tank has only 22k health, which was a fury warrior; the tank was me with righteous fury on and marginally more health. This last group I ran into weren't attuned, got lost in BRD, and couldn't seem to understand basic directions.

The rogue did slightly impress me though. I don't think he'd ever heard of attunement and I'd not expected people to not be attuned. But he saw us all run over to an elf and vanish. rather than going "wtf where r u?" he instead talked to the elf and got a quest sending him into BRD. Then he got lost and almost died.

For someone who started in vanilla and knows the place, it seems stupid that someone can get lost in there. I mean come on, how can you not know the exact perfect route to take to get to any given location, with or without the key? Didn't you read the manual? What's next, a rogue without the lockpicking skill for a door 25 levels below him? Oh, we had that.

MC went fairly well aside from some loot complains. Such as the DK who claimed to be nine and furiously shaking because he was only standing up for himself; after I kicked him for being actively hostile and whiny the whole run. Also he got annoyed when I got the schematic for force reactive disk instead of him. He didn't seem to understand that the highest roll wins when there are four engineers rolling. The guildy got annoyed when the other enchanter outrolled him and frantically tried to buy it. Again, he didn't seem to understand that I meant it when I said it was an open roll, or at the start when I said they could make deals about the formulas if they wanted, as long as I was told before.

And then people forgot to get their cores, even though I told them to wait before leaving. So I ended up with almost all the cores and an ingot. At least I managed to hand out most of the BoEs before they scurried away. Yea, only most. This is pretty standard. People see the achievement pop up and *poof*. These were serious business back in the day. What may now seem like barely more than DE fodder (if not for nexus crystals being nearly worthless) was once worth a ton of gold; and the cores... well those are still worth a decent bit of change. So to a vanilla player, to just skip up on these when the raid leader is trying to hand them out, doesn't make much sense.

Okay TL;DR: Vanilla players have a certain set of knowledge and expectations which are unlikely to exist in newer players. This makes them appear stupid. It's worth noting that almost none of this knowledge has any practical use; unless you're the sort of person who prefers weird markets like mid-50s BoEs, mass runecloth, and turning nexus crystals into small prismatic shards and then into large prismatic shards which I presume are used by someone, since they give me gold for them.

Saturday Superstar: Pie

| Saturday, January 9, 2010
"I have my piece of the pie"




Fucking assholes taking away pie. What's next, no cake?






P.P.S. I lied: pie.

Oculus: Is this random?

| Friday, January 8, 2010





I hope I get Oculus some more.



New hunter pet taunt and tanking shortage

| Thursday, January 7, 2010






I like my bubbles

| Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Double, double pull and trouble;
Fire burn, and paladin bubble

Of course I like my immunity bubble.

I also like my 50% less damage bubble.





It's all in how you say it

| Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Did you know that in Outland there are animate herbs, hostile creatures which wander around and have to be killed before you can gather them? Even the trees are not chopped down, but hunted. They are immune to nature magic, and so resist the attempts to druids to pacify them. Even shamans must resort the mage-like calls of fire and frost to damage them.

Sounds so much more impressive than: In BC herbalists can pick crap off some mobs.

I know this is about three year old content, but I only thought of it a few months ago when I was talking to a new player. I guess that's still old.

When do we learn that gear is for certain roles?

| Monday, January 4, 2010





Now accepting submissions for you to write my posts for me

| Sunday, January 3, 2010
My favorite social is at it again. Oh yes, the Greedy Goblin has figured out a new scheme: convince people think he has a great new post format by making them do all the work. I have to hand it to him, this actually isn't an incredibly stupid idea.

Step one: Write the introduction post
Step two: Do nothing. This is the best step of all for a lazy social who expects others to do his work for him.
Step three: Copy-paste screenshots
Step four: Add stupid commentary, or maybe just copy-paste the submission email text.
Step five: See your viewers go up as people rush to see if their particular screenshot was stolen. Er, honored.

Oh he has a great scheme going. Tell people who are too stupid and lazy to understand others that they are in fact brilliant and hardworking and that the others are the stupid and lazy ones, and then get a whole army of stupid and lazy people eager to say how much they agree with your brilliance. Oh he's such a little Ayn Rand. Someday I also hope to be a terrible writer who is famous for making sociopaths feel better about themselves.

P.S. I am not actually accepting submissions for you to write my posts for me. Even if I put your name as the writer, who gets the traffic and attention? Not you! Maybe a little bit. But let's face it, being able to put "written by Larisa or Tamarind" in a title would benefit me a lot more than it would them. If you really do want to send me free posts so I can publish them and people can get confused and think I suddenly got way better at writing, go right ahead, but don't blame me. Blame Syrana. Except do it a month ago.

P.P.S. I was going to stop posting on Sundays.

It's a girl

| Saturday, January 2, 2010
I have a niece.

Apparently she's the first girl in thr family in 52 years. I hope I can give her my legos once she's old enough to not eat them.

Saturday Superstar: Person who found me in Orgrimmar







Player-made Heirlooms

| Friday, January 1, 2010

So how about making them heirlooms, scaling up until 60?

Twisting Nether: Same thing, it self-scales.



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