Pst me plz

| Friday, October 30, 2009






Breaking news on GNOME PALADINS

| Thursday, October 29, 2009
This is official and straight from the Blues.

First off, they're giving in:
"give you gnome paladins just to put a stop to your relentless requests for them."

However they are likely to follow a similar 'evil' path as the Blood Knights, at least initially, as indicated by these straightforward statements:
"Gnomes are evil."

"Cute does not equal good."

And in response to "They are creatures...of destruction" the response was a clear "Exactly."


Don't Panic.

| Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Just think of where you left your towel.

I'm going to be mass-editing posts to add/remove/change the tags since currently they are nearly useless. So if you suddenly cannot find the one post tagged "3.0" I'm sorry. Try "Wrath of the Lich King" instead. In the meantime, try to make due without what must have been a very important post.

Someday I hope to ave such useful tags that I can add one of those cloud widgets. Those look cool.

[edit] Oh, and you might see some really awful posts put up randomly here and there if for some reason you're digging through the archive. That's because I was trying to just work on published posts, but sometimes I'd hit drafts instead, so instead of the publish button applying changes, it instead posts the wrong thing. The result is something that I didn't see fit to post with a very old post date. I suppose the good news is that no one is likely to notice them so my reputation for flawless and inspiring writing will not be tarnished.

A Perfect World





“What are you suggesting?”
In response Fritz pulled out a globe.
“See here?”
“I’m not a neurosurgeon.”

“It won’t work.”

“Get that thing away from me!”



The Line

| Tuesday, October 27, 2009













The Insane

| Monday, October 26, 2009




Damn you, new template

| Saturday, October 24, 2009
It appears that when I switched to a new template, it wiped out the tracking code for Google Analytics. Oops. I finally thought to actually check for it after a few too many days of assuming that Google was having some sort of problems. I suppose the fact that my other blog had no problems at all should have been some tip-off. This might be premature, since I don't actually know yet if it's working. I'm going off my inability to find the code and the stunning coincidence that I stopped getting data the same day I switched templates.

Why am I still up? Damn you, Jabba and your weird food demands that make me fly all over the desert. On that note, I'll be writing a review of sorts of Star Wars Galaxies, with the disclaimer that I'm still only level 22 and I think it goes up to 90. When possible I'll try to focus on stuff that isn't directly related to the actual content (since we all know how much that can change just by hitting the cap).

Your biggest fail

| Friday, October 23, 2009
My my biggest fail is hard to pick, but I still remember a certain arena match. One person was low and I planned to BoP him to buy time. The other team also had someone low, within execute range. We were going to have a good shot at winning. Then I accidentally put BoP on the warrior, so he couldn't attack, which gave time for his target to get healed up. Meanwhile my other teammate died. One misclick lost the match.

What is your biggest fail?

Yesterday's Fail in Star Wars Galaxies

| Thursday, October 22, 2009













Failed Quests

| Wednesday, October 21, 2009
What happens when you fail a quest? You drop it and try again. Nothing lost. Maybe you died. Overall, no big deal.

It's boring. There's no impact. It's a slight inconvenience. Oh noes.

Permanent failure would 'fix' that. Fix being in quotes because it wouldn't be worth the loss of fun. Imagine the horrible mob grinding if you ran out of quests. No thanks.

What if failure meant something more than just failure? Failure could open up different quests. But again, this means restricted content and the potential for people failing just to see the quests.

How about fixing our mistakes instead? Failure might mean dying and then you must fix your mistakes in the spirit world. Lose here? Try again, over there.

Or maybe after a dozen failed and retaken quests, you're sent to cleanse your spirit. It is revealed that the failure did have a negative impact and you must correct that in yourself. You'd need to complete this quest to advance further, but it would give XP to compensate for the slowed leveling and so it feels less like a barrier and more like an opportunity.

Too often death and failure are entirely trivial. We can barely notice them sometimes. This isn't good for learning. Death and failure should matter and be noticed. But permanent failure and XP less/debt like in other games are not the solution. Those only encourage us to do the most trivial possible tasks in order to avoid losing.

Using the wrong mats

| Tuesday, October 20, 2009
The overall idea is to give the option to use higher or lower level mats for crafting than what are called for by the recipe. These would allow for greater variety in crafting but would come with the risk of failure during crafting.

I will use blacksmithing for examples since it fits best with the idea, but this could be applied to any profession.

Let's look at Shining Silver Breastplate. It has a very nice stat layout, great for plate DPS leveling. But alas, you're short on iron and you couldn't wear it yet anyway. What to do? Try using bronze to craft it. You'll end up with worse stats, and you might fail, but you'll get a product you can use. Or maybe you're a high crafter trying to get business from a lowbie.

We could work in the other direction too. Again, you see a low chest with good stat layout, but it's so low that it's not useful anymore. Try using higher mats such as mithril. It might fail, but if it works, you'll have a better chest than you might get from quests or instances. And, if it does work, you'll gain more skill than you would from crafting an item normally. This might mean orange chances for a green craft or two points for an orange craft.

Additional mats could also be mixed in to add some additional properties, though also at risk of failure and with some tradeoff of stats. Mix in air for greater agility at a loss of armor. Fire might add a reactive proc, which might hit you instead. Water would add mana and health regen, but the rusting would lower agility. Earth would add strength and armor at the cost of move speed. Shadow, oh who knows what horrible stuff it might do. Almost anything could be added to a craft to change the result, but admittedly the majority would have negative effects (don't add deeprock salt to your copper bars) with only a few percent of additives even giving a tradeoff of stats. Sometimes the tradeoffs would be situationally useful.

I want to see crafting while leveling. However failure would increase the chance of successful crafting, and the chance and size of skillup from the crafting. Failed armor pieces would range from having vastly inferior stats (white quality) to trash, but failed pieces could be deconstructed to recover mats. Resmelt metals, unstitch cloth and leather. The idea is to make crafting not flood the player with items which are mostly useless except for the vendor and so it feels less spammy. In practice you'll still be trying to make a dozen copper chests, but you won't be making a dozen; many will fail, as you'd expect when learning. The mat recovery and skill modifiers are so that failure is a learning method rather than just a waste of mats.

This idea of failure being another path of progression will come up in the quest post as well. I am surprised that WoW has managed to do so much to make failure less painful, but so rarely does it add any benefits. It wasn't until the tri-bug fight in AQ40 that "doing it wrong" had any significance besides death and even then, it was only with hardmodes in Ulduar that 'failure' became something significant: "Who talked to the defense projection!?"

Molten Core 2.0

| Monday, October 19, 2009
This will be the Week of Fail.











Water: This would go away.



Magmadar: No change now that tranq shot is baseline.

Gehennas: Less curse.


Baron Geddon: The burn would hit fewer people.


Sulfuron: Leave as is.

Golemagg: Leave as is.





None of you exist

| Saturday, October 17, 2009


From this can I reach only two possible conclusions.


I wonder what I'd do if I was a social

| Friday, October 16, 2009






I shall call it the Driven Draenei.


I bet other people don't have this problem

| Thursday, October 15, 2009



What to do...

Useful or ugly? Useful or ugly? Function or form?



Being Helpful

| Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Today I ran into a helpful person.











You just don't understand us!


Enchanting is a crafting profession.

This is not true.





Enchanters, stop making stupid comparisons.





But they're rolling on my stuff!




Thoughts on appearance

Give them to me.




Hybrid for a minute

| Monday, October 12, 2009









A stable server economy would be so boring.

When Rawr crushes your soul

| Sunday, October 11, 2009





People like this ruin WoW

| Saturday, October 10, 2009
Gabe (yellow shirt)

I know the comic is a bit old now, sorry about that, but the insight only came about two minutes ago.

Trivializing upgrades

| Friday, October 9, 2009
Remember when epics were epic?








The problem with disenchanting

| Thursday, October 8, 2009






The Two Goblins

| Wednesday, October 7, 2009








Undercutting and You.

| Tuesday, October 6, 2009

1) Undercutting way too damn much.




2) Undercutting when you don't need to.




Undercut smarter, make more gold.



History gets muddled

| Sunday, October 4, 2009
It's been a while since I first called for historians to begin writing the history of Azeroth. Since then I managed to only write the very beginning of my shaman's story. Sen'jin is somehow just not working. Perhaps I'm going about it the wrong way. I'm asking too much of my memory.

Let us instead go back to what I remember. I will try to catch the spirit of the time, what I felt. The history of Azeroth itself, I'm sure wowiki can handle.

Vanilla PvP

9 shamans ended up in the same Warsong Gulch in the 20s bracket. This was a point at which we had ghost wolf and druids did not yet have travel form, and no one had mounts at all until 40. We were fast and mobile. We absolutely dominated. This was a period when shamans were considered to be overpowered at 60 (the level cap). I didn't really think so (maybe a tiny bit, but let's face it, people weren't very good at PvP back then), but in this bracket, YES. We had windfury and frost shock and ghost wolf and we would destroy you. I used to love Warsong Gulch. I did it a ton while leveling. I even got a bit of rank. Lowbie PvP was more fun back then; there seemed to be no twinks.

BG rep was serious business. AV was the one we all farmed and farmed and farmed. A short battle ended in a day. Sometimes they only 'ended' because the server went down for maintenance. Notice I said server, not servers. Back then there were no cross-realm BGs. This made it great to be Horde, since being lower population meant pretty much instant queues and we were dominant in PvP back then. Why? Some say racials (Will of the Forsaken was AMAZING; broke most C and it even used to give a period of immunity), some say experience (since we could do twice as much PvP in the same amount of time), other say we just became accepted as the PvP faction so if you were serious, you went Horde. Who knows?

But back to rep: it used to be how we got gear. There was also honor gear with rank requirements but that was mostly reserved for people with no lives and/or shared accounts. Back then honor was almost like arena rating now; so it was all relative and to be at the top meant pretty much constant play, depending on the server. For the rest of us, we got our rank trinkets, maybe some bracers, and then it was rep. Some of the stuff was impressive. Near the end of Vanilla WSG had pants added which were amazing but I never got because by then I hated WSG (rep was very slow unless you were in a dominating pre-made). AB had nice stuff, such as boots with +15% to ghost wolf speed, meaning you could almost keep up with a normal mount. AV gave The Unstoppable Force. This was about as powerful as the first 2h weapons from raiding and had a stun proc on it. It was a pig's head on a stick, with darkness glowing around it.

There was also a mount from AV, which was maybe 100 or so gold cheaper than the normal racial mounts. I bought this one because back then the 1000g for a mount was a big deal (no dailies and max-level qiests didn't give gold instead of xp). Training was cheap (well, 100g was still a big deal) but mounts were expensive. At some point they switched them, which was a great idea, but still resulted in much QQ.

There weren't DRs back then, so CC was a huge deal. Especially fear. Back then it shared no DRs with anything and seemed to take forever to break. If you look back you might be able to find some old seduce-nuke videos. This was a warlock style of PvP which revolved around seducing a target and then putting a soulfire into its face. If they weren't dead, an immolate->conflagrate would probably do the trick. Meanwhile the other enemy was running in circles feared. Then you'd kill him. I know this well, because I'd done it a few times. Warlocks were pretty squishy back then with fear and stamina-stacking as our only real defenses, though we also had neat things like curse of exhaustion which was a curse with a snare on it; tremendously useful, especially since amplify curse would increase the effect of it or agony by a big amount, enough to make it a potent long-range snare. Good warlocks were to be feared, by that I mean you were meant to be afraid of them, because they'd destroy you.

There was no resilience. PvP gear was kinda crappy, especially for hybrids. Hybrid gear meant SP and strength on the same gear along with int and spirit. Good gear came from PvE. When T3 came out, the very few players who saw old Naxx were absolutely dominant. Before them, BWL and AQ gear did a good job of making PvP painful for non-raiders. And for hybrids, since back then we mostly had healing gear since that's what we did in raids, we cried a lot that DPS got gear that was good for all aspects of the game. Then we'd get told to heal some more. And then I'd stormstrike their faces off.

BG tokens weren't for buying stuff; they were for turning in for rep or honor or something like that. I don't remember. We also didn't spend honor. We spent gold instead, which was hard to get back then. Back to AV: it was a good way to increase city rep since enemies dropped body parts which could be turned in for rep with a corresponding city. I don't remember who took night elf heads, but that was an easy city to get exalted with.

Back then we would summon cavalry, gryphon riders, even an incredibly powerful elemental or tree, depending on faction. These required tons of turn-ins, which could take hours to get enough of, but it wasn't a problem since the BG took ten times that anyway. Imagine you're pushing back your enemy and suddenly there are wolf riders beating the crap out of you. And something keeps yelling "I drink in your suffering, mortal. Let your essence congeal with Lokholar!" Meanwhile there are gryphons and bat riders raining down destruction from the skies. Zergs didn't pass each other by. They couldn't. There were tons of NPCs who would kill you if you tried to just go straight through, especially with a little bit of player support. Ironically, these PvE elements forced us to PvP. And it made us creative, leading to all sorts of tactics like a warlock (me) sneaking past enemy lines and hiding in their mine. Then summoning half the Horde practically next to the enemy base. A few good rogues could also cause some serious trouble, destroying enemy towers, killing guards, and generally wrecking havoc. It was fucking awesome.

Sadly, there was a lot of complaining about AV. It was too long, too complex, too zergy. It required mass coordination and strategy rather than just the more individual tactics that we see in the smaller BGs and arenas. It was steadily nerfed, most noticeably with the removal of the swarms of NPCs. The owls that patrol used to drop feathers which were useful for crafting but are no longer needed. There used to be fishing parties, people just hanging around fishing (back then you could fish in there). People might farm stuff, skinning or cloth from the NPCs. There was a lot of non-combat stuff going on, people running all over. I liked it a lot, it added depth to imagine that this place was more than just a box for us to fight it, in was actually part of a world. I miss old AV.

If you really want to hear nostalgia, ask someone who has been around longer about Tarren Mill and Southshore.

Goblin ERP

| Saturday, October 3, 2009
Warning: Not safe for ascetics; contains lurid descriptions of wealth.

She was not a child, certainly of age, but still so young. It could be hard to guess her age, since she had so much and displayed it so prominently. The beautiful sight would make anyone interested, but especially a goblin, for she was the sort who would fill her brassiere with gold coins to fill it out. Even through thick clothes (which she never wore), the bounty was obvious.

And he was the lucky goblin.

He stood back a bit to watch, not wanting to get in her way. Slowly, she undid her shirt and pulled it off. He could see the slight bumps in her bra and he knew it would be good. She unclasped it and let it fall to the floor. It was followed down by much more. With his experienced eye he could tell everything from sight: the bounce and weight were just right. They were absolutely real and so much for so young.

His eyes fell to the nearly perfect mounds which seemed to radiate perfection. No longer could he resist. He buried his face in them, rubbing and touching and exalting in the purity of the feeling. Was this heaven? Almost certainly.

"Hey!" she yelled, "My eyes are up here."

Oh no.

He had misread her cues. But how? She had presented it so willingly. So openly. How could she have not expected this? He could not meet her eyes. What went wrong?

He ran from the room, whispering to himself: "That whore, that show-off, that... that sub-prime loan!" She heard the last one and began to scream.

As he got out of range of the noise his mind began to wander back, not to the confusion, but to the sensation. He had touched her gold. Piles of pure gold. She couldn't take that back no matter how much she yelled. How many other goblins could claim to have stolen more than a glance at such obscene personal wealth? And it was all his for a moment. A few more, for he'd palmed a few.

Time to head to the next bar and search for more easily profitable girls.

Abyssal Shatter: effects on JC/mining?

| Friday, October 2, 2009





Yay for aimless speculation.

Why I ask

| Thursday, October 1, 2009


I get a tell. Sweet!

[Tardala] i will buy
[Falna] how many do you need?
[Tardala] all


[Tardala] no


[Falna] that's what I am selling
[Tardala] ic lol
[Tardala] hi?
[Falna] Hello.
[Tardala] i said i want to buy

Did I just go back in time?

[Tardala] offer


[Tardala] each?
[Falna] yes
[Tardala] oh sry pass



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