Guild Leadership Archives - Page 84 of 108

Bad Warlock

February 24, 2014 by Belghast

Vampire Wife

For awhile I have talked about my rockstar teacher of a wife and the forensics class she is pioneering with another teacher this year. Yesterday I got drafted into helping her make various kinds of fake blood. Essentially we needed to find a ready simulacrum for the real thing, that could be produced cheaply and efficiently. So for awhile yesterday I kitchen turned a little horror show. I was employed in the mixing part, since I could shake the bottles fast enough to get them to mix. This is my preferred way of mixing almost anything, including the constant flow of cherry pomegranate drink mix that I imbibe. Some of the mixtures were winners and some were very much not.

Of the various recipes available we tried three primarily. The first one I had experience with in the past, and I didn’t think it would be the kind of blood she was wanting. I used to work in a fundraiser haunted house and we mixed buckets of water, karo syrup and red food coloring to make gore to slop on everything. This of course is way thicker than human blood and as a result doesn’t perform in any way similar. Next we tried a mixture of sweet condensed milk, and red food coloring. This was a little better but still way too thick, but it was a big grizzly to watch my wife eat spoonfuls of the red ichor. Apparently she thought it tasted good.

The final winner was evaporated milk and red food coloring. Granted all of these produced pinkish blood but apparently adding a little bit of green will correct the color. She tested the products against a vial of simulated lab blood that she got from a forensics supply house and the evaporated milk performed similarly. Today over lunch I have an errand to go pick up a pint of fake blood from a local party store. We had tried this earlier but the only place that had it was in gallon size… and extremely expensive. We wanted to test it out before committing to buying it in bulk. My hope is that the premade stuff will be best so we don’t have to mix anymore at home. But at the very least it lead to an interesting evening.

Bad Warlock

Among other things, lately I have been poking my head onto my little Dwarven Warlock a bit. I am still phenomenally bad at playing casters, and the warlock is no exception. However having a Felguard makes up for a lot of my own mistakes. He just quietly kicks everything’s ass while I flail around trying to mash the correct buttons. Something I find interesting, is that in the past I have tried my best to skip outlands entirely… I am actually enjoying the content. Maybe it is the idea that I know I will be revisiting everything in Warlords, but the entire expansion somehow feels fresher. I have a feeling with this guy that it will be Wrath that becomes pure skull drudgery.

I am not really sure I landed on this character to level, after all I have both a Discipline Priest and a Hunter within striking distance of 90. Ultimately I would still like to get everything up to 90 before Warlords but my Mage. The mage is my intended boost target, because while I struggle playing a Warlock, I would be an absolute disaster playing a Mage. Characters that can be described as “glass cannons” have never appealed to me in the least. However I hear that frost provides a much sturdier alternative, given that they now have a permanent pet to watch after them. To say the least I have been enjoying being bad at warlocking.

Interesting Changes a Brewing

I am honestly not sure how much of this I can talk about, so I will have to get some clarification on the NDA I am presently under before delving into it too deeply. However I will say that there are some significant changes in the starter experience in the works that will hopefully make a lot of people happy. One of the big complaints from the various test weekends is that it feels too on rails for too long. While I said you can hop off the rails at any point you like and level away. I have done a fair bit of my leveling by just killing random mobs out in the world and mostly ignoring the quests, it still feels like you are lead down a slowly widening tunnel until finally at some point you get dumped into what is the “real” game for the rest of the 50 levels. One thing I have to say is that overall… the Zenimax folks have been extremely responsive to feedback.

That is one of the aspects of this testing process that most people just won’t understand. The game has changed a lot over the last year, and for the better. While there are features missing that I would have liked to see, almost all of those are User Interface based and have been successfully added back into the game with addons. The core game itself is extremely clean, and if you play the game on a server that is not screaming because they are purposefully stressing it to the maximum… the game performs admirably and combat feels great. The negative is a lot of the clunky combat comments that people have are during weekends where they are purposefully trying to break the systems, and combat fluidity decreases under extremely stressed situations.

I think a lot of people are going to be happy with the proposed changes. I however have been in the minority and felt that the starter island experience for each of the races was an extremely good experience. Each of the islands, and I use that term loosely since each faction starts slightly differently… is chock full of interesting things to find and quests that you would not receive if you did not go out and explore off the beaten path. I still cannot say with any certainty that I have ever gotten 100% of the content on any one of the islands, let alone all of them. But I can understand the complaint that it just doesn’t feel Elder Scrollsy to exit the prison sequence and be dumped into another controlled setting. Cold Harbor does a good job of teaching you the basics, and a prison intro is one of the key requirements of “being an Elder Scrolls Game”.

Belghast the Band Geek

The title pretty much says it all, I was a band geek. For those not familiar with the American education system, the term Middle School refers generally to grades six through eight, and is some what of a transition period to get students used to having specific classes with different teachers, rather than a single teacher doing everything. As part of this time period we were essentially funneled towards various electives. During that sixth grade year we had to take a number of elective classes including vocal and instrumental music. While I did manage to get a lead role in one of the musicals… which I did horribly at, I was far more comfortable behind an instrument in a much larger group.

I began my musical career, if you can call it that.. playing the trombone, because face it… trombones are cool. I did well enough to be second chair, and I was fine there… good enough to be recognized as being decent, without having to deal with the pressure of leading the section. This was fine and good until I had a major sinus surgery in seventh grade, and buzzing sound needed to play trombone was something the doctor said would be extremely painful for me for quite some time. As a result I ended up transitioning to the percussion section. To be honest… I had always wanted to be a drummer, but my mother played percussion in high school and told me that by far the short end of the stick as far as band goes. I should have listened, but of course I was smarter and knew better.

She was absolutely right… when you march a several mile parade route with a woodwind or a brass instrument you spend most of the time carrying it by your side. If you march as a drummer, you end up playing a cadence non-stop the entire route. Being a big guy, I somehow ended up being picked to play the cymbals during parades. Sure you are thinking… cymbals are a joke of an instrument… but imagine marching for miles while carrying a 20 pound cymbal in each hand… attached by a leather thong that makes it impossible to get a good grip on it. Then having to bang them together… all the while not dropping the beat of the cadence. It was absolute hell, and by the end of a parade route like that I literally could not feel my arms for hours.

Luckily however parade routes like that were few and far between, and namely during the Christmas season only. After coming back from Christmas break I finally got to have some fun. It began concert season and somehow I managed to get picked to play the Timpani drums. I loved the sound of them, and it felt so primal to bang on them with my tiny felt donut covered sticks. This was the part of band that I really enjoyed. I finally felt like I had a real purpose. I got good at tuning the Timpani drum, and as we did the various contests that came with concert season I became a critical part of the setup crew. Some kids are truly gifted in band, but I did just good enough to be respectable without ever really shining. I managed to make all district several times, but never really pushed hard enough to make all state. While I played drums for a few bands, I never really kept with it… apart from occasionally drumming on my steering wheel while driving.

My Adoration of QuikTrip

February 21, 2014 by Belghast

Rest In Peace

A few weeks back I had an idea for another regular column of sorts. The idea was that I would react to things I found on forums. I had enough fuel for one topic, but that’s where things went off the rails. It turns out that I really don’t read the various game forums as often as I thought I did, so Friday mornings became a mad dash for me to try and find something that inspired me in any way to write about it. After spending a few minutes this morning trying to do the same… much like I tried last week… I have reached the point where I am just filing this one away in the “bad idea” vault. Essentially the crux of this is in order to make it work I would have to devote more time than I currently have to trolling the forums.

I might make another stab at a feature, because Steampowered Sunday seems to work pretty well. Admitted it has been a few years since I have frequented the battle.net forums, and similarly with the rift forums as well. There seems to be a drought of substantive conversation out there, or maybe it really never was and I just applied substance in my head? I have heard for some time that forums are a dying thing, and by my attempts to find something worth writing about lately… it would almost seem to be the case. I am wondering if people have moved on to posting about things on the forums, and instead posting about them on social media or potentially sub reddits. I would be curious to find out you guys take on this. I know personally I tend to post things on my morning blogs rather than trying to find a home for them on a game forum.

Community Chest

Last night I had a fairly spastic night again, but towards the end of the evening I patched up Trove. Now I have not really followed the subreddit as closely as I once did, but they have been plugging away at this with high frequency. They seem like they have posted roughly a patch a week, and keep adding more features and polish. It had been roughly a month since I had last played it, and while Landmark has taken most of my “building game” focus, Trove is still very much an awesome game to play. I always sell the game as “minecraft with MMO loot” but as a whole the game is so much more than that. Right now I am loving the focus on the social community of a server, that really does seem like the ultimate win for trion is to make people care about the world.

One of the coolest additions that I saw last night was the community chest. For some time at the spawn point there has been a giant version of the in game chests, but inside of it now is a storage system. It allows players to donate items to noobies, and last night I was extremely thankful for this. I was able to pull a good weapon and a good shield out of the bin and jump straight into doing cool stuff. Another really cool thing is they added in /randomhead command, which you can see above I now have this really awesome engineer goggles appearance. This was the first thing to go into game to make abandoning the Fez and Moustache worth it!

The best quality of life change is the addition of a map. You can see above that each of the various biomes is now marked. I have not quite figured out what the red X icons are for, maybe dead bosses? Your home is marked with a little sign post to make it easier to find it. Of course this is still very alpha, and there are lots of bugs. Last night for example I killed six golden beetles… which are now super rare, and not a single one dropped the golden soul. Golden Souls are now needed to craft the gold torch, which in turn unlocks the ability to craft a robotic workbench opening up a whole new tier of crafting. That change went in some time ago, but crafting is now a tiered affair where crafting this thing unlocks the ability to purchase another thing.

I spent most of the night playing as Gunslinger because I had not really spent any time leveling that up. Right now I am level 12 Knight I believe, which gives me a good start each server reset, so I am hoping to bring Gunslinger in line to that same range. So far I am really enjoying the “rocket jump” ability where the Gunslinger fires at the ground and propels themselves high into the air. Really great for exploring areas. Another cool thing are the random quests while out in the world that provide fuel to the star meter shown on the right hand of the screen. This is something that the entire server works towards, so each boss you beat in the world helps leveling the world as a whole. Not really sure what happens when the world “dings” but the world I have been playing on has 46 stars.

Mostly my time spent playing last night has made me realize that I really need to devote more time to this game. While it is not as mind bending as Landmark, it has so much charm. Everything about the game, especially the user submitted weapons just drips “fun”. Especially as the game gets fleshed out, it has started to feel more and more cube world like, which is awesome. That game was a really great idea that was never really capitalized on. I might ping the Alliance of Awesome and see just how many of us are in Trove currently. Would be fun to have a night where we meet up on voice chat and wander about the world looking for mischief. Saying this is making me realize that I never actually mentioned the AoA before now… I should remedy that.

Alliance of Awesome

The blogosphere and the gaming groups they are associated with is a really twisted up community. Each of us have been the part of so many different groups that it became super evident with the launch of Landmark that we needed to come up with a way of standardizing some things. There was a period of time when several of us were joining upwards of seven different social channels, each of them with a different subset of players in them. I believe it was Scarybooster who first voiced the idea, but from there it spread quickly and the ever amazing Zelibeli became the ideas Champion. The idea was simple… to create a super alliance of all the different multi-gaming groups that our little community was associated with. After a few different tries we landed on using a subreddit as our “global forums” of sorts, and as a way for us to post about upcoming events in the various groups. Also it acts as a nice call to action to figure out what people are doing in the various games. Another big thing to come out of it is that we decided to start using “AoA” as our global social channel to span the various groups.

One of the challenges we have had in House Stalwart is trying to maintain guilds in each of the games we happen to be playing. When there is a rush of players it is an amazing thing and we have 50 or so active members. However after a few months this becomes a skeletal crew, and the question of whether or not it is actually worth keeping up arises. As it stands right now House Stalwart will focus on World of Warcraft Alliance side, Rift, and The Elder Scrolls. These will be the only “official” stalwart guilds, and for the rest of the games our members want to play we will be leaning on other AoA member groups to maintain them. This does two things…firstly it makes my life less spastic for trying to maintain a presense in so many games. Secondly it opens up so many more worlds to us. You can just take a look at the right hand side of the subreddit to see which guilds have active groups in which games. So when folks want to dabble in FFXIV or SWTOR or eventually Wildstar… they have a ready made home they can go to. While this arrangement is still very much in its infancy… it gives me a lot of hope for the future.

My Adoration of QuikTrip

I am in love with a gas station station… and have been since the first time I set foot in one. One of the things people not from this area find hard to understand, is the love that Tulsans have for the QuikTrip chain of stores. While I will use other Gas Stations, I will always go to a QuikTrip if one is available even if it is significantly out of the way. A little over a year ago, a friend of mine moved to town to accept a job at my workplace. She had heard me talk about QuikTrip but was skeptical, but within weeks of coming to town she was a devoted acolyte. Quite simply the chain is unlike any other gas station. Now I have had people sing the praises of Kumandgo, Casey’s, Flying J, PDQ… and many others that I have visited in my travels. None of them compare to the awesomeness of the QT.

Why do we love it? Well for starters even in the slummiest parts of town… QuikTrip is clean, well stocked, brightly lit and fully staffed 24/7. On top of this… they have actual food. Their breakfast offerings are especially awesome, but pretty much you can go into a QT any time of day and get fresh food that is not a “stomach bomb”. They have really great donuts and muffins… and if they ever have their limited time Red Velvet Muffins… you have to try them. They have a half dozen flavors of Taquito, Country Sausage, Jalepeno Sauage, Buffalo Chicken roller, cheese burger rollers… and fresh steamed buns. The newer stores have a place in store where they offer made to order food and coffee drinks as well. My friend Rae pretty much stops by every day to pick up a sandwich for lunch, because they have fresh made sandwiches and wraps.

Another really awesome thing about the chain is that they guarantee their gasoline… and were the first place I can remember doing this. It was their claim to fame back in the 80s, and has continued on to the current day. If you ever have a fuel related problem with your car, QuikTrip with pay to fix whatever it is… pending I am sure you can back up receipts of purchasing gas from there. Still however it is more than almost any other chain can say, and at the very least makes you feel better about purchasing your gas from them. Admittedly this is a huge chunk of why I always gas up before leaving town in the hopes that the tank of gas will last me until we reach another QuikTrip. Unfortunately their reach only extends so far, so once you leave the south central united states you have to rely on other chains.

The chain itself has really good cashiers, and the custom software they maintain is designed to be able to ring up I believe up to 16 customers at the same time. Once I finish writing this blog post, I will go to QuikTrip this morning and get a drink and a jalepeno sausage roll. I know that I can get in and out extremely quickly because there is a culture of efficiency that has sprung up around the store. Expected protocol is for there to be two lines at each and every cash register, one to the left and one to the right. As the QT employee finishes ringing up one, they immediately begin to ring up the next one on the other side, giving the first one time to walk away from the counter. When this works, it is a thing of beauty… but you can always tell neophytes when they try and form a single line.

I think in part QuikTrip is so successful because they have really good working conditions. They have managed to make the Fortune magazine top places to work list for 11 years in a row. In part this is due to their really odd practice of after 25 years with the company, you can take a year paid sabbatical, to do whatever the hell you want to do with it. This on top of paying significantly better than average wage allows them to keep good employees for the long haul. It is the type of place that folks either thrive in or they wash out really fast. As a customer and loyal devotee I really appreciate their attention to detail. I have long said that I could never live in a city that did not have QuikTrip… so pretty much that leaves me St. Louis Metro, Dallas Metro, and Kansas City Metro. Granted I am not sure if I would want to be without Taco Bueno, Arbys or Sonic Drive-In either… but the most important one is my beloved QuikTrip.

Corruption of My Youth

February 20, 2014 by Belghast

Confusing Dialog

For the last week or so I have been having an odd issue connecting to steam on my desktop. For random periods of time, steam cannot connect. However if I wait an hour or so… it connects in just fine. So far the online wisdom is that this has something to do with bad network drivers, but unfortunately nothing has changed on the system in the time it has occurred. So right now I am at a complete loss for this intermittent behavior. Would greatly appreciate any suggestions, especially if some of you have had this issue firing up the steam client… and better yet have found a solution. At this point my plan is to try and dig up the reference driver for my network card and install that, wondering if maybe a windows patch jacked something up.

The odd thing is, steam only hates me sometimes. Last night when I could connect I re-downloaded The Secret World and it was coming down at a peak of 10.5 megabytes per second. It seemed like the download was only being throttled by my disk I/O. Of note… I am really going to have to manually throttle steam because my system was really mostly unusable when it was downloading that fast. The hard drive was going through periods of being busied out by it. Games were completely unplayable during this time, so I am hoping that somewhere in steam there is a maximum speed setting I can ratchet down a bit. It was nice to download 18 gig in 30 minutes though.

Black Screen Blue Logo

Last night the wild goose chase in search of bottles continued, and on the way home I had to hit both Michaels and Hobby Lobby to finish getting the last few of them. So by the time I made it home I was just feeling out of it. I had a bit of trouble with my gaming desktop, and then a bout of the reoccurring steam issues, and by that time I was just mentally drained. I found out the hard way that Cyberpower PC, does the same bullshit that every manufacturer does. Namely tries to put a 350 watt power supply in a PC designed for gaming. I went to install a new video card, and noticed the size of the power supply, and didn’t even bother getting into the case. I did however at that point unhook everything.

After connecting everything back up again, I went to boot the machine and it hung indefinitely on the black screen with the blue windows logo. Thankfully I have a second machine beside this one, and I started furiously googling. Internet consensus is that something was up with the power supply. I had literally not doing anything other than unhook things… so after making sure the power cord was seated well a few times I got another idea. I unhooked absolutely everything from the machine again. This time only hooking up the monitor, mouse, keyboard, network cable and power cord. Sure enough it booted up happily… apparently in the processes I had hooked one too many things to a usb jack on the machine and it did not have enough power to boot.

So the power supply issue is not only critical to getting this newer video card installed, but seemingly for day to day usage as well. I realize it is a numbers game for companies, they try and put the smallest thing in a machine they can get away with. I just don’t understand however why anyone would put something smaller than a 500W supply in a new machine. Ultimately like it did me, it will bite the owner in the ass. Long story short, I have a new Corsair power supply on the way and it should be here on Friday. So I will be playing the swap power supplies game this weekend. Generally speaking I like to pull one power supply with all the wires connected, then disconnect the PSU one connector at a time, replacing it with a connecter from the new one. That way I am certain that nothing gets missed.

All Over the Map

By the time I finally got to where I could start playing games last night… I was like a toddler desperately in need of a nap. Nothing really seemed right, and in truth I should have just gone on to bed. I played a little bit of everything last night, but only a few minutes of each. I mined three or four resource nodes in Landmark, killed Onyxia and did Crown Chemicals in World of Warcraft, fired up Rift long enough to collect the weekly patron gift, played some of “that space game”, and finally spent the most amount of time playing some of “that elder game”. But like Goldilocks, everything was either too this or too that. I should have grabbed my 3DS and went to bed playing some Bravely Default.

The highlight of the evening was the fact that I picked up Chicken Tikka Masala on the way home from my errands from our favorite Indian place… Desi Wok. Even that just didn’t seem right, and I was only able to finish like half of mine. Nights like that suck, where you don’t like the world and you are pretty sure that it doesn’t like you either. Hopefully tonight I won’t have a bunch of running around to do before heading home. I think that combined with the power supply issues are what put me in that mood. What sucks is… I knew I was “in a mood” but I didn’t really know what I could do to snap myself back out of it. I have yet to find my personal slider that allows me to back off on the “pissy” setting.

Corruption of My Youth

I think I have told at least part of this tale, but I never had a chance to “not” be a geek. One of the cool things about being a teachers kid was that at the end of the school year, we got to rifle through the stuff left in kids lockers. The janitors would come through and dump everything out into the hall, and if it was not gone by that evening they would come through with a big dumpster and pitch it all. I felt this was a bit of a consolation prize for being stuck there as my mom cleaned her own room to get ready for summer. Over the years I found many prizes, but none of them were as life changing for me as stumbling across a Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook. Mind you this was when I was in first grade, and upon receiving that book I absolutely obsessed about it. While I didn’t fully understand much of it at the time, I started building games around the things that I found between its covers.

I wanted nothing more than to play a real D&D session… but I grew up deep in the bible belt and the popular consensus was that “D&D” would somehow make you into a mass murderer. So all through elementary school I collected everything I could get my hands on, but had never really played any of it. My parents obviously did not care, but the parents of my best friends at the time were absolute bible thumpers. It was mid way through elementary school that I found another option. Marvel Super Heroes by TSR was in reality a pretty damned crappy game system, but it was completely benign and with the little paper foldouts made it look like a board game and not something akin to D&D. I kept all of the dice and such at my house, and for the most part their parents never questioned what they were doing. I mean funny shaped dice would have been a dead give away… and something worthy of shunning.

As I moved into my High School years I found friends with whom we could pretty much play anything… and we did, so many different systems. While we didn’t really go back and play much D&D other than at conventions… we did play an absolutely silly amount of the Palladium system. The above image is a quick picture I snapped this morning of just a small sampling of the various palladium books I have accumulated. The thing about that system that drew me to it, was the fact that if I or my friends could dream it up… we could find rules to build it. The Rifts setting at the time completely blew me away, and I played it through most of high school. Even though I don’t really play much anymore, because I don’t have a local circle of people to play with… I still pick up the books anytime I find them out and about.

MMOs for the most part have become my new “D&D night”, and it just honestly fits my schedule better. Occasionally I join in games run by friends over one of the various Google hangout pen and paper mods, but that is about as close as I get to the old tabletop experience these days. So many of the things I have been into over the years, probably started with finding that first players handbook. It got me interested in what that was all about, and got me into Time Warp comics for the first time in search of “more”. It was through this connection that I go into Warhammer, Magic: The Gathering, and so many other geeky things. While the bible thumpers seemed to think it would steal my soul, more than anything it enflamed my curiosity and creativity. Pen and Paper games taught me it was completely okay to create my own reality. That seems like a skill we could use a lot more of.

I Lived Threes Company

February 19, 2014 by Belghast

The Illusive Bottle

Last night went absolutely nothing like I had expected. Well that is a bit of a misnomer in that I knew we would be running errands, but I did not realize it would take quite so long nor be so frantic. My wife is a rock star teacher, this much I have said before. However she is tag-team teaching a forensics science class this year and as a result they are pretty much pulling the curriculum out of their asses as they go. For what they are teaching there really are no textbooks, and as a result no approve lab equipment really either. Enter the empty eye drop bottle on the right. You would think something like this would be relatively easy to find. You would also be completely wrong

She needs these for a faux blood typing lab, since it is against safety regulations to use actual blood. Funny thing is I can remember doing blood typing in freshman biology… odd how things have changed in two decades. We went everywhere we could think that might have little bottles including craft stores, pharmacies, finally we found eight of these at a local medical equipment/compounding pharmacy. Problem is to be useful… she needs 30. We picked up what we could find and proceeded onwards in search of the illusive idea. Finally at Michaels we found some flip top bottles that should also work. The problem is this took the count up to 25… still 5 short of the finish line. Supposedly today that Michaels location is getting some more in a shipment, so that means we will need to make our way back out there tonight to pick some more up. The preference would be to find more of the actual eye drop bottles, so my wife plans on calling around to the various compounding pharmacies today. This is the unknown life of the husband of a rock star teacher… the constant trips out for random things for the classroom.

Clearance Lego Haul

Roughly every six months the various store chains jettison one batch of toys to receive new ones. This is my favorite time of the season… because it means I can pick up cheap Legos. I have always loved building with Legos and I likely always will. This desire to build things is exactly why games like Minecraft and Everquest Next Landmark are so sticky to me. They are the dream of every Lego kid, the ability to create things without restrictions of having to have the right pieces. The above image represents the haul of new sets for me to play with over the last several weeks. They have come from a mixture of Target and Wal-mart and for the most part everything was 25-50% off. There is a certain price range that I am willing to snatch things up, and while the Jabba’s Sail Barge that I saw yesterday would have been awesome… it was not $70 worth of awesome.

So instead I play a waiting game to see if it will make a second price cut and drop down into the range which I am willing to buy it for. Last night while we were running around in the mad search for the bottles I managed to pick up the two Galaxy Squad sets above. I might be because I grew up in the “funky space lego” era, but I love new space sets. What was extra cool about this find as a whole is that last year I managed to pick up the Lego Star Wars TIE Fighter really cheaply, so now having an X-Wing to go with it is pretty awesome. I realize I am a big damned kid… but I am okay with this. Getting older is require, growing up and losing the childish wonder at things… is completely optional… and not something I suggest at all.

Boosting for Fun and Profit

I feel like today’s post would be incomplete without mentioning the price leak yesterday for the boost to level 90. I realize ahead of time that my point of view on this is going to be controversial, but it is my point of view anyway. I personally think the boosting to 90 thing is generally going to be bad for the game community, in that dropping a new player into a fully leveled character is a bit of an overload. Honestly I went through this myself when I accepted a scroll of resurrection and decided to boost a character to 80 that I would never actually level otherwise. Dropping directly into a level 80 priest, when I had never actually played a priest past 10 before… was to say the least disorienting. This is coming from someone who has six 90s, and three others waiting in the wings to reach the cap as well. I “grok” warcraft on a pretty deep level and understand how the systems tend to work.

If I was completely at a loss for dropping in the pilot seat of a fully realized character… I can only imagine what it is going to be like for someone who has never played the game, or has not played the game in years. After all this is the reason why Blizzard says they are giving us a boost to 90, so that we can recruit new friends and catch back up old ones. It just seems like a fundamentally bad idea, but like I said I realize I am in the minority as people seem to want the ability to skip the majority of the game. That is honestly the other problem I have with this idea. Fundamentally Warcraft and the MMO genre in general… are about leveling and gaining constant incremental achievements and improvements. If you do not want to level… then maybe you are playing the wrong genre? MMOs are always going to be about leveling in one form or another… be it leveling in actual character level, or grinding away to get the gear to move to the next tier of LFR. There is always a leveling treadmill there, because at its core this is what the genre is all about.

So after all of this… now I feel like maybe you are prepared for my opinion on the price point. I honestly think $60 is rather fair for what you are asking. You are asking for the luxury of being able to skip the majority of the game and jump straight to being inches from the finish line. It is absolutely a luxury, so it should have a luxury price tag associated with it. Understand that this is for additional 90s… we are still getting one for free when we purchase Warlords of Draenor. So the ambiguous planned social benefit of catching people up to the latest content will still be firmly intact… as everyone is going to have to buy the expansion anyway. If you think of it in terms as paying for a Faction and Realm Transfer combo costs $55 right now… then it is not really out of order to expect that creating a brand new 90 character to cost $5 more.

Mentoring Is A Better Answer

I still feel like boosting was a bit of a copout answer to the problem at hand. A much better solution would have been to finally implement a good mentoring system like so many other MMOs have. Rift, EQ2, City of Heroes, and so many others have systems that allow you to drop your level to that of your friends. We we had the bulk of players actively playing Rift this year, we took advantage of this weekly. On Wednesday nights we would gather up and assess what levels we had, then everyone would mentor themselves to the lowest person and we would go do content together that was relevant for that level. It was pretty glorious and my only complaint is that hey really need to make “queue for random mentored dungeon” a thing, because it was always a pain in the butt to do a dungeon together with all the manual mentoring.

The ever awesome @Gypsy_Syl posed this statement when I opened up this line of dialog on twitter last night. While I agree with her that this likely was the intent with the boosts, the question is what exactly are players rushing towards then? Leveling is pretty much the solo game, and all that awaits you when you hit the cap is for the most part group content or leveling another character. Mentoring systems would help with what the stated intent was… to allow you to play with your friends. If that was not their intent, then quite honestly they should stop selling it that way. Mentoring systems go far further for helping you play with your friends, since you and your friends get to experience content the way it was designed to be experienced together.

At the end of the day I tend to align with @MatthewWRossi who put it so poignantly in the above tweet. If a character is a struggle to level, then it won’t be something I play often once I get it to the level cap. Prime example of this was my rogue that I just recently hit 90 on. It was absolute skull drudgery to get it to the level cap, but I forced myself to do it… because I have not had a rogue at cap since burning crusade. Problem is while leveling it and the eventual LFR grind… I came to realize just how much I do not like playing a rogue. I pushed him over this finish line for reasons other than wanting to play the character, namely I wanted a max level transmute specialization alchemist… but each time I log over to the rogue to do something like a holiday instance, it just feels wrong. If you don’t enjoy the process of leveling the character, then to me at least it is highly unlikely you will enjoy the end result either.

I Lived Threes Company

Today’s blog post is going super long, but I guess I had a lot bottled up in me to talk about… no callback to the eye droppers intended. As I have said a few times I started out at a junior college for the first two years of my college education. So when it came time to transfer up to a four year university to finish off, I opted to get an apartment with a high school friend who had been doing the same. For a few months everything was peachy, and we lived pretty blissfully. Then one morning I was woken up by a bunch of strange men moving my roommates stuff out of our apartment. Without warning he decided to move into the “band” frat house, leaving me pretty much high and dry without much explanation.

It turns out that the landlords were coming that afternoon to kick him out of our apartment. When we got the place we had opted to each pay our half of the rent separately. While I had been religiously bringing my envelope down to the landlord on time, it seems as though he had not for the last two months. They were not going to make me catch up his side of the rent, but I just didn’t feel right not doing so. As a result it pretty much burned through all of my available cash, and the burden of keeping a place that I got intending to have a second income to support. At this same time, my wife and her roommate were living in the slums essentially. The place they were renting had literal holes in the floor and a very curious maroon stain creeping through the paint on the ceiling. So we both needed to get out of our current situation.

As a result we did the pragmatic thing, since it was a rarity that my wife and I spent a night a part at that point. We found a place that was ideal for three people, and after spending a few months watching the really nice caretaker renovate the place… we moved in. It was in a quite little trailer park roughly ten miles from town, so it gave us the feeling of having a home… more than a rental. So at that point I was basically living Threes Company, with two female roommates. Essentially my wife and I had the master bedroom together, and our roommate had another large bedroom on the opposite end of the trailer. The computers and consoles were set up in a “vestigial” middle bedroom that while it had a bed, the bed got used more as a couch than anything else.

The funny thing is that my wife’s father refused to admit that we were “living together in sin”. Anytime he needed to talk to my wife, he would not call our phone line at our end of the trailer, but instead he would call the roommates phone at the opposite end. Remember these are the days of dial-up… and since all of us were IRC junkies to boot… we had to have separate phone lines. I have to say the situation was damned near idyllic, and over the time living together the room mate and I developed a loving brother/sister type relationship. She is one of the few people we still keep in contact with from our college days, and while we don’t see her often not a week goes by that we don’t think about her. Our bonding was special, since she has Cystic Fibrosis… and when she was having a bad night it was not unusual that I would get employed to pound on her back to help break up the gunk so she could breathe. After all us respiratory system rejects got to stick together.