1. Holidays. Duh.
2. Traveling for the holidays.
3. Finished a major project at work. Ka-ching!
4. Traveling for work. Bleh.
5. Updated the blog software and ruined the site … on New Year’s Day while VERY hung over. That was fun.
6. Told 1/3 of our World of Warcraft guild membership to GTFO of our guild. We realized it was more efficient to have them type /gquit then go down the list and /gkick. Really saved a lot of time.
7. Explained on Vent that we really did mean it.
8. No. Seriously. GTFO.

Here’s the thing. Every goddamn year around Christmas time, raiding guilds go through this period where people are traveling or spending time with their families or both, cuz THAT’S WHAT NORMAL PEOPLE DO. So, of course, the raiding (read: the loot train) slows down or grinds to a halt, only to pick up again after the holidays have passed. And every goddamn year, there’s a group of players who begin to panic when the loot train isn’t chugging down the tracks. “Are we disbanding?” “Will we raid again?” “This guild is dead!!”

Fercrissakes, it’s two weeks out of the year and these losers can’t wait for people to get back to their computers.

So our officers told the losers not to panic, and, after the holidays, they’d see, everything would be back to normal.

Apparently, losers don’t have access to calendars, and in their world, the holidays are over December 26th. Therefore, they had been more than patient by waiting until January 1st to start issuing ultimatums like … replacing our long-serving officers and giving King Loser the guildleader rank. (Riiight.)

See #5 above. I was trying to put out a fire on Ye Olde Blog while alt-tabbed at the PVP lounge and those sonuvabitches are complaining because we’re not in Serpentshrine Cavern and goddammit, turn over that guildleader tag and give them admin rights to all the web resources and the Ventrilo server so they can get to it.

The officers said, “So go raid SSC, nothing stopping you.” And indeed, they were welcome to raid SSC, there was nothing stopping them.

Not good enough. They wanted the raid leader to stop playing his alt and lead the raid; they wanted me to stop screwing around at the PVP battlemasters and heal the raid on my priest alt; and pretty much everyone to stop what they’re doing for a good old-fashioned New Year’s Day raid in Serpentshrine Cavern.

It was one of those super-rare moments when everyone’s temper blows at once. In short, every single officer online issued a “GTFO” (or some variation thereof), and me, late to the party, added my GTFO on Ventrilo … y’know, for the illiterate in the audience.

Those that GTFO are now on their third post-Foton guild.

9. Remember that one chick in my guild who plays the same class as me, and, she and her imaginary guild boyfriend always hassled me — more accurately, passively aggressively hassled me — about rolling/bidding on any loot ever that she might want? They left. Server transferred to another server where her dude had a real life friend in a Black Temple guild. He’s the one guy in all of gaming who has a worse personality online than out in the world. We were all (secretly) glad to see them leave.

Guess that didn’t work out though because they’re unguilded now. BIG surprise.

10. I PVP’d ALOT. Mostly Eye of the Storm. As you might recall, Alterac Valley is dead on my battlegroup, but I tried AV out a few times to see if it was still dead. Take a look.

This one was outrageous too:

A screenshot demonstrating the sieve-like qualities of the Stormpike graveyard:

That was actually a fun Alterac Valley. No wait. It wasn’t. Made a good screenshot tho.

11. Leveled up a couple of alts, mostly for PVP fun, and took them to Alterac Valley to see if the other brackets are as stupid as the level 70 AV. Surprisingly, no. And I’ll say here, if your battlegroup’s Horde aren’t winning every single AV except late at night when they all fall asleep at the keyboard, your Horde aren’t doing it right.
12. Chuckled at the AV changes coming in Patch 2.4. Whatever. It’s much too late. Patch 2.3 was released 11/13/2007 so that’s 3 months (and counting) of Horde 3 medals plus 500-ish+ bonus honor per versus Alliance one medal + 0-ish bonus honor per. On my battlegroup at least … and almost all the others now. No way that gear gap will have a lasting effect. No way.
13. Shelved my level 70 priest alt, probably for good, but at least until Wrath of the Lich King’s gear reset. And I mean SHELVED. Emptied the mailbox, burned the transmute timers, shipped out the gold and primo mats to my rogue, and wrote a short retirement post for the guild boards. And I’ll tell you the reasons why.

As healers burnt out, we were relying more and more on my priest to pick up the healing slack, which was the purpose of my priest alt, yes, but I figure I’ve put in my time and we were never going to stop leaning on my priest until I called a halt to it. So I did.

But also, I confirmed in my own mind what I suspected when The Burning Crusade went live: priests are not the foundation on which to build a guild’s healing strategy anymore. I’ll go so far as to say that guilds should bring ONE priest on raids for the buffs, shadow-spec preferred, and round out the raid healing with paladins primarily + druids and shaman.

You might disagree, many in my guild do.

(And NO! I do NOT want Blizzard to nerf paladins … or druids or shaman. Toss the priests a bone and stop yammering about Lightwell, you twits.)

14. Attracted another anonymous game stalker who hates me and my guild and can’t stop posting about his hate on the official World of Warcraft boards from the safety of his level-nothing posting alt.

I promise you this: I am going to find out who that motherfucker is and then I’m going to call him on his bullshit.

Meanwhile, his drama posts are becoming ever more shrill since we (the royal guild we) all refuse to take his bait.

15. Did some thinking about server transferring. My realm is low/medium population, guild recruitment is a bitch lemmetellya, and as you know, my battlegroup is awful. It’s not just the AV thing, our Alliance has some truly terrible PVPers — disheartened PVPers, always-AFK PVPers, and stupid, very very stoopid PVPers, hunters who never trap, warlocks who never fear, paladins who think they have Hammers of Glory, rogues who can’t afford poisons, the list is endless. Sad.

On the other hand, it’s a great realm for leveling alts or farming mat(erial)s.

Still thinking on that, but if you have a realm recommendation, by all means, speak up.

16. STILL haven’t received a Warhammer Online beta invite. Those bastards.
17. Holy crap, that was a lot of spam email, phishing and keyloggers!
18. Realized that procrastinating blogly administrative chores for a month isn’t such a great idea. I mean, why can’t the internet tend to itself for a few weeks? I don’t know. It just won’t.
19. Our guild paladin man-whore MADE us guild invite his latest game love interest. She promptly dumped him and took up with another paladin in the guild. How long until this blows up in our face? (Y’know, more so than it already has.) I’m going to guess two weeks, tops.

So we all have THAT to look forward to.

and 20. I discovered a place on the public World of Warcraft forums where no man, woman or child should dare tread: the battlegroup forums.

If you’ve never been, it’s worse than you can imagine, and if you have been, it’s worse than you remember.

I’ve been trying to recover ever since my gruesome discovery. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Dear *Former Member*,

You’re a great player and any guild would be lucky to have you.

Unfortunately, there was a ruckus on the public realm forums (which you initiated?). Insult to injury, the ruckus was about your application to another guild. Something about they denied your application … and also your app was a complete surprise to us?

You see our point.

While we do appreciate functional alcoholism (and who among us hasn’t applied to a rival guild while drunk? — we all have!), we’d like to move on.

Best Wishes Always,

*Foton’s Guild*

Feel free to use this template for your own guild. You wouldn’t think you’d need this kind of administration for gaming guilds, but you really do.

Anyways. They may pump up the honor of the 2.3 AVs, but I’m getting while the getting’s good.

So. I spent a bajillion hours in AV this weekend, making friends … no, actually, I didn’t make any friends, but I did get some laughs and I made it to at least one new /ignore list (that’s confirmed, people), and, oh ya, I met a horde warlock I hope to never cross paths with again.

One of the first interesting interactions came from this druid on my server. He wasn’t in AV, but he sent me a tell asking if my guild was recruiting boomkins. (That’s moonkin druids, for you non-WoW people. They boom boom, mostly.) Said me, I’ll ask. His name sounded familiar, I remember /who’ing him a few weeks back because some guildmates were in an awful heroic instance with him. Asked me in /gu, Isn’t *LilBoomkin* the druid who was gawdawful in heroic few weeks back?

No one knew, but before I could respond to LilBoomkin, he sent a mistell to me “I asked the guild”, and then, not realizing his mistake, “When we go?”. I was momentarily flummoxed. I /replied, “mt?” (that’s gamer-speak for mistell). He replied, “Hi. Yes? Who are you?” I “umm”-ed. He asked, “what they say recruiting?”

“Sorry, we’re full up on crazy in this guild.”

…

Later, I was in this scrappy AV where each side is fighting tooth and nail over every tower and graveyard. I’m on duty at Tower Point when the Iceblood Graveyard people ask for assistance. You might not know, but IBGY (that’s gamer-speak for Iceblood Graveyard — you’re catching on!) is just down the road from Tower Point, so I told my tower partners that I was gonna head over there and help them out, WHICH MEANS: Stay here and watch this. If I hadn’t said anything, I could see where a person could be confused if anyone was going and those graveyards sure are important.

I mounted up to ride over to IBGY, with all the other tower defenders behind me (/sigh), and when we arrived, we saw that the two IBGY defenders were fighting the Wing Commander. This was their IBGY emergency, the will-not-aggro-you-unless-you’re-really-trying bitch-to-kill horde NPC Wing Commander.

And of course, as you probably guessed already, we lost Tower Point in the meantime. GOD I LOVE ALLIANCE!

Before I returned to Tower Point to recapture, I did explain to the IBGY defenders that the Wing Commander IS NOT AN EMERGENCY. Don’t you be calling Foton over there to help you kill an optional mob. Or that beast of a warlock. No thank you!

…

It was kind of funny about the time I met that warlock beast, who I will call Beastie. Shortly before, I had just finished another AV where this one Alliance dude asked in /bg chat for some help with a warlock out in the middle of nowhere. I had told him, /bg I’m sorry, we can’t spare 15 people right now to go kill a warlock. Yuk yuk, warlocks are so OP, which I didn’t use to believe very much as I only had troubles here and there with them. But brother, now I’m a believer.

Back to Beastie. He was ten feet tall if he was an inch, shoulders as broad as a horde tower, forearms like tree trunks, and his AE fear could reach from Dun Baldur to Frostwolf Keep. A drain lock (think: EQ necro) with about a billion hit points.

How I ran into this beast: I was cheerfully guarding Iceblood Tower ( … IBT) with a feral druid guildmate, hoping for some horde customers, when up wandered Beastie, and we were ready.

I’ll spare you the play by play. I’ll just say he made short work of my guildmate and was able to focus on our PVP dance, the warlock and rogue — me determined to stay toe-to-toe, him determined to stay out of range, although I have my doubts that he even NEEDS to be out of range to survive. For my part, I did solo him down to 20 percent health, which was a far sight better than I saw anyone else do, but nevertheless, a poor showing.

Ventrilo – Guildmate: What. Was. That?
Me: I dunno, that guy’s nasty.
Guildmate: To the armory!

On my way to have another go, while my guildmate was fawning over Beastie’s armory, I spotted Beastie out in the Field of Strife dealing with five Alliance players. Five on one, not very fair, eh? OH HOW WRONG YOU ARE. He never dropped below 80 percent health and quickly sent all five on their way … to the graveyard.

Before I could stealth over (you might call it slink, I call it STEALTHING), he met up with a blood elf paladin buddy and this is my true strength in PVP: I know when I’m licked. No thank you, the Field of Strife is yours, I’ll go watch this tower over here (WAY over here) and collect my honor.

I’ve checked for him in every battleground since then, and, fortunately for my sometimes-large PVP ego, I haven’t had the pleasure again.

…

Do some players think that battleground flags and/or capture points explode on contact? I’ve noticed this behavior for many, many months, where players will tap a flag for their side and then immediately run away. So quick is their retreat that I wonder.

A related observation: If no player or one player is guarding a capture point, no one else will guard the point. If two or more players are guarding, everyone else will gather around to guard also … almost as if they think refreshments will be served. I understand there is safety in numbers but five Alliance in a horde tower is too much. Besides the misuse of limited player resources, there’s no way we’ll get any action if the Horde see five of us packed into such a small area.

…

Very often I’ll be randomly assigned as the battleground raid leader. I’m not sure how the game assigns this position: I know it varies in different battlegrounds, it seems to be related to PVP rank or honor kill totals, I don’t know, but frequently I am raid leader. I do understand that in Warsong Gulch, Arathi or Eye of the Storm, guildmates and friends want to be grouped together and I accommodate those requests. However, in Alterac Valley, with 40 team members, and several people asking to be moved around or put with this healer or that shaman … I don’t have time for that.

Honestly, some players act like AV is a field trip and they want to sit next to their buddies on the bus. Has no one heard of raid frames? There’s even some rudimentary default ones built into the UI nowadays, they can drag their buddies’ names to the WoW desktop and fondle the health bars all they like — I won’t judge.

…

I was guarding the Iceblood Graveyard flag in stealth. There were a few minutes left to go before the GY flipped to Alliance. A horde warlock arrived and began the 10-second flag capture. I slunk over and sapped him. (Non-WoWs: sap is a 10-second rogue ability that freezes a target. His head rolls around and his body wobbles — it’s quite entertaining.) I slunk away. After he recovered control, he ran in concentric circles trying to flush me out with an AE. (Boy, I didn’t see that coming.) He tried a flag capture again. I slunk in, sapped, slunk away. He let out a heavy /sigh.

A horde mage arrived and began to flag capture. Horde warlock did a /say “throm”. Hmmm, thought me, I wonder if that means “rogue” in Horde-ish. The mage interrupted his capture and AE’d. No throms that he could see. He restarted his flag capture. Horde warlock repeated, this time with more urgency, “THROM”, but alas and alack, his pal was sapped and he took a cheap shot to the spine.

Next time, that mage really ought to listen to his buddy about the stealthed throm.

…

The afk-reporting in Alterac Valley has really gotten out of control. I like the system, it needs some work for sure, I enjoy abusing it as much as the next guy — I’ll report the people who call everyone “tard fags”, or the blaming dudes, or character names that irritate me cuz they’re so damn stupid, but it seems to me that SOME OF US are spending too much time worried about possible AFK people and not enough time worried about fast offense, or minimal defense.

To wit: I arrived late in this AV and was just about finished carefully picking my way past the horde zerg near Icewing Tower (I like to be on O, donchaknow), when one of the Alliance told me to take back Icewing as long as I was nearby. Ok, sure, should have thought of that myself. So I went inside the very spacious Alliance tower known as Icewing, found it empty (FOOLS!), and restored the tower to Alliance status. Stealth, drop down, watch.

In came a blood elf paladin. He retagged the flag to Horde and ran around spamming AEs trying to flush out any potential stealthers. I like to let the flag timer drain down a ways before recapturing — gives them hope.

He grew tired of spam AEs and wandered off. I stealthed back in, retook the tower, stealthed/dropped/watched. (Possibly he thought “fucking throms”, I wouldn’t know that, but I like to think he did. I would have been.) He returned, retook for his side and spammed AEs.

Just about then, when I had plenty of time to get back in there and retake for our side, some Alliance douchebag told the battleground to report me as AFK near the Icewing Tower. Y’know wtf. I let him have it in /bg chat, cuz I’ll just sit on my ass and watch the BELF paladin take our tower and I’ll laugh and laugh — much easier than playing cat and mouse with fancy pants here.

…

Speaking of the battleground-AFK fascists, I had been assigned to the same AV as one of their more fervent believers a few times before there was any … “incident”.

This guy had a macro he would use many times in each AV. Something like, “Report the cave AFKs so they don’t get any honor! Make them work for the honor!” The macro really didn’t bother me, I had more of a problem with his blaming everyone else for everything, but there’d be plenty of opportunities to mock him openly when some graveyards and towers were secured.

In the fortuitous AV, we were having a tough time doing just that. Possibly due to the “zero or one defenders means everyone else run away!” phenomenon I cited earlier, graveyards weren’t secured, no towers taken, and only a few of the ranked horde NPCs had been killed. Naturally, Mr. AFK-Macro blamed the rest of us entirely (Cuz his play is perfect. Always.), and then he added his AFK macro for good measure. Another teammate complained about the macro and told him to knock it off already.

He protested, and further, we were tard fags who were too noob to guard graveyards and towers. I know, yayaya, it’s all us.

So, I suggested he should macro THAT. And he could name it the “blame macro”. Would save him some time typing out the blame every AV.

And that’s when I got this:

Because as luck would have it, he’s on my server.

Now. You might think I would /ignore him in retaliation. Take that, Mr. Ignore with the AFK Macro! Oh no no no no. I’m much smarter than that. Now I get to have some REAL fun with him. Y’see, I can still hear/read him, but he can’t hear/read me.

Like in the AV a few battlegrounds after that, when I told /bg to report Kal***** as AFK hiding behind the Iceblood Tower. And they did.

Boy. Was he mad.

BONUS from the World of Warcraft forums: Another WoW poster who should self-edit his posts. Maybe. “Horde ALWAYS wins EVERY BJ!”

You’d think horde characters would be more popular if that were the case.

So I guess that didn’t work out (shocking), and our man-whore paladin moved on to other female gamers, eventually landing on (pun!) a female paladin in our guild.

Now, this gal was an interesting character. Friendly, outgoing, and a reasonably skilled player (that’s code for “kinda sucked, but not enough to get kicked”). After about a week of guild membership, she’s comfortable enough with us to reveal more of her personality, which is somewhat clever sexual innuendos and occasional bawdiness. Who doesn’t love bawdy? I love bawdy, I’ll bet you do too.

Un-for-tun-ate-ly, one of the consequences of a female gamer working bawdy humor is unwanted attention. I saw a few things in /guildchat that gave me pause, and I wondered if it bothered her, but she would carry on like there was no harm. Cool, because I hate policing the guild.

Then, late winter 2007, we had this huge guild meeting in Ventrilo. Planned agenda: the future, namely raiding, recruiting, downsizing (that was my agenda item because goddamn, we were just TOO BIG for a max 25-man raid scheme), and restructuring of guild leadership. Actual agenda: airing of grievances.

One of those grievances, which took up AN HOUR OF DISCUSSION TIME, was that bawdy paladin girl didn’t appreciate the similarly bawdy (my opinion) comments made in return. Summarized: she didn’t like the inappropriate comments made to her and the guild dudes often stepped over the (invisible) line when talking to her. And of course, the gentlemen officership expressed GREAT ALARM and rushed to comfort her while scolding the rest of us. Truly, most of us knew exactly who she was probably talking about — the suspects had tried to initiate outrageous conversations with other guild women in the past, however, when rebuffed, the suspects had ceased and never bothered those women again.

Isn’t that ok? It is in my opinion. Someone says something that someone else doesn’t want to talk about, the someone else says stop, and the offensive someone stops. Another crisis averted!

So, I asked her, who are we talking about, and did you ask them to stop? And, of course, as is the way of modern times, she doesn’t want to say who it is, and yes she did ask him/them to stop and he/they didn’t. Christ. I really hate that. Some dude(s) is sexually harassing her or borderline harassing and she won’t say who. How are we supposed to deal with that? Here’s how we did deal with that: Hey guys, don’t sexually harass anyone. Kthx!

Talk about an edict with no teeth. (I mean, duh?)

She seemed satisfied and the meeting crawled forward.

Few weeks after that, there’s this new level 65-ish druid in the guild and I asked the officers why in the hell were we recruiting new people when we’re already obese with members, and further, why in the hell were we inviting low levels?? Oh, that’s the bawdy paladin’s real life husband.

!!!

She really kept that a secret. Not that married people aren’t bawdy, but usually they mention their spouse at least ONCE.

Their game relationship was somewhat unusual, too — they never played together, hardly spoke to each other, and his presence didn’t curtail the bawdiness one bit. I appreciated that, because I love bawdy. I’ll bet you do too.

Another thing his presence didn’t curtail, her private Ventrilo sessions with whomever was her favored guildmember of the month. Interesting.

Fast forward a month, and she announced to the guild that she was getting a divorce. (I believe that was our 2nd or 3rd real life divorce.) Also interesting.

Shortly after her announcement, the mutineers and I jumped ship and started our own guild. We offered to take her aboard, but she’s one of those guild teases — ya I’ll join, I can’t join just yet, no I won’t join, ask me tomorrow, for sure I’ll join next week, seriously I’ll join tomorrow night after raids, etc. etc. until we just don’t give a shit anymore. Last I heard, she couldn’t join because her guild boyfriend (real life boyfriend now) hated us. Another interesting. That guy wasn’t even in our old guild two months ago! Girl moves fast.

Back to our man-whore paladin. He was done with HunterSister because she was crazy. She was different, I’d grant him that. A divorced woman in her mid-30s who digs horses, and fairies (the fantasy kind, not … well, you know.), and glitter, and sometimes her Myspace had tears raining down the page with motivational messages like “believe in your woman-ness” and “everywhere is LOVE, LOVE, LOOOOOOOOOOOVE!!!” or something, and she hearts puppies and kittens and babies and lip gloss too! You don’t find that every day … in someone over the age of 13.

Until she deleted her Myspace after ANOTHER bad breakup, it was a good source of regular entertainment. She had this predictable cycle where she’d be single and looking for the perfect man who she just knows is out there (her words) and she’d have a photo with some skin — not too much (as if), just some. Then, she’d be IN A RELATIONSHIP and the photo would go to less skin, like a turtleneck and jeans, and she’s so lucky to have this guy. Then oh noes, the tears would rain down her page and she’d post some blog about not trusting men because they’re all liars and the cycle would start all over again.

My theory, then and now, is that all these guys would get frightened away by the doll and model horse collections she must have all over her apartment. I walk into some house with dolls and model horses all over and I walk right back out. My line in the sand, no doll or model horse collections.

Anyways, our man-whore paladin ran away, probably trampling several other guys also fleeing.

Now I used to think our man-whore was a stable individual, but then he started doing this routine: he’d log on a few hours before raids, he’d run around doing daily quests or whatever, then he’d get in a snit over some offhand remark in /guildchat and log off — sometimes he’d be gone for days, sulking, I assumed. He’d come back (maybe after intense therapy or multiple listens to a My Chemical Romance CD, who knows), he’d raid normally and joke around, and then one day, back to snits and sulking offline. A grown man sulking, that can’t be attractive.

In between the sulking, he told one of the guildmates that he and bawdy paladin were boyfriend girlfriend or dating or really close (in real life, tyvm) and he might join her guild or she his guild (i.e. my guild — and suuuure she will) and ISN’T LIFE GRAND!!

How lucky was that guild going to be to have the two of them? DAMN lucky.

Sooo. You know how these things work out with the … undiagnosed. Not well. And soon after them being really close (and you know “really close” is just code for screwing but no time to add guassian blur to sappy photos), there was trouble in paradise and she went back to her prior game/real life boyfriend and he went back to his true loves, My Chemical Romance and sulking.

Now this is what we wonder: who exactly is the whack job in these scenarios? I’m not so sure anymore.

But here’s a scarier thought: maybe he’s the one with the doll and model horse collections. Think about it.

Remember that one dude who was guildleader of (yet another) guild that hates my guild and he claimed he got hacked and/or keylogged and, what a world! what a world!, their phat guildbank is gone and they might have to start whoring themselves for a living to survive in Le World of Warcraft? Well … whoring more, if that were at all possible. (Link if you need a refresher.)

So, he had tried for a few weeks to prop up his “I’ve been HACKED! and/or KEYLOGGED!” story for a week or two on my realm forums, and of course all of us were doing the “uh huh, sure”, and his guildmates were licking ass and telling us haters to stfu. And then, suddenly, he dropped off the face of the Earth.

A month went by without a word from him to his guildmates. We know this because we’d politely inquire of his guildmates and they said they hadn’t heard from him in weeks.

(That’s not suspicious at all. No way.)

And so, after weeks of no communication, his guildmates scattered to the winds and transferred to different servers or joined other raiding guilds, like mine, and that one dude became just a story we told our younger members who, often times, take every game character at face value.

Last week, some of our members got tells from “That One Dude” and he explained that he did get his account back from Blizzard after an EXHAUSTIVE investigation and he had server transferred and changed his character name. (As you do.) Despite several direct inquiries, he refused to disclose his new name or server … because “he didn’t want all that drama to follow him”, and he wished everyone well or something ridiculous like that.

Are these the actions of an innocent character? Several of his former guildmates think thought so.

So. Being the fucking guerilla master that I am, I resolve to get to the bottom of this cuz I’m tired of being labeled a hater cuz I won’t swallow bullshit.

Fortunately for me, some of his friends ratted out the thieving bastard and named the new server, and again fortunately for me, he’s as stupid as he is dishonest and he renamed his character similarly, although not quite searchable without more info, thereby saving me several hours (days) of fruitless hunting. Ba da bing, I have the server, I have the name, and now, thanks armory!, I have the guild.

And with the guild, which has forums, and a searchable member list with join dates, I now have the date he first expressed an interest in this other guild on a server far, far away from his own guild — a date one week prior to the day he claimed that he was HACKED! and/or KEYLOGGED! Why … it’s almost as if he planned the whole thing.

Ya’know, it’s almost not fair how smart I am compared to the average gamer. It’s like I’m that Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and I can frighten the superstitious populace with my superior knowledge of a solar eclipse. It’s magic, be afraid!

It’s interesting to me how otherwise (mostly) honest people assume a fake name in a game, and sometimes a fake personality, and their dishonest, thieving nature comes to light. It’s doubly interesting that there’s always apologists and hive minds to defend them. His original story didn’t even make sense and yet, there they were, buzzing around his level one posting alt calling the rest of us jealous haters.

The things some players will do, the things they will believe, all for loot — future loot, the hope of loot, the fond memory of past loot — that’s the magic.

Tomorrow: Meh, I ran out of time to tell you about the continuing woes of hunter sister and our man-whore paladin. I’ll save that one for tomorrow, plus … BabbleOn is back!! She’s still not speaking to us. Yet.

From an interview at the Leipzig Games Convention with WoWarcraft’s senior art director Sam Didier and lead designer Jeffrey Kaplan (Tigole) by ComputerandVideoGames.com’s Stuart Bishop — Tigole said:

The big lesson we learned from The Burning Crusade was that our ten-person instances are extremely popular. So for Wrath of the Lich King we wanted progression in the ten-person raid game for the players… who want to stick to that ten-person cap.

Well dammit boys, you learned the wrong lesson. You completely missed the most important lesson of The Burning Crusade, that is “The Karazhan Mistake”. And really, how could you miss it? I don’t know — I guess because you’re listening to the neo-uber guilds STILL, instead of the meat of the raiding bell curve.

Nevertheless. Since you all failed that portion of the final exam, let’s go over the material again (with some added explanations for the non-WoW people):

Karazhan is a 10-man instance with a reset timer of one week. It is firmly placed in the line of gear progression. Technically, you could skip Kara gear and step right into the first 25-man instances, I suppose, if you had a guild composed entirely of messiahs, prophets and gods. (Hint: none of us do.)

Therefore, since we all had to do Karazhan at some point, every guild either had to run multiple simultaneous weekly Karazhan raids with guildmembers tied to a single raid ID (no swapping of guildmates to the other guild Kara raids), OR, they ran a single Karazhan over and over and over and over many weeks to gear everyone up for the 25-man raids.

Was this fun? (Imagine I drew a huge question mark on the whiteboard at this point.) NO IT WAS NOT. I’ll pause while you take some notes. No pen or paper? Crimony. Never go into class or into the boss’s office without pens (plural) and paper. Write that down too.

We’re continuing. So here’s what happened with Karazhan. If the guild chose to run multiple simultaneous Karazhans, and if they required more than one night to clear Karazhan (typical), every once in a while some of the raiders had real life obligations and couldn’t show up that night and a replacement was needed. And so another guildmate was locked into a raid ID and was unavailable for the other Karazhans as replacements. Inevitably, one Karazhan raid would be the strongest and the others were weaker — either by way of gear or attendance or ability/knowledge of the zone.

While guilds would try to balance out the raids from week to week (to week to week to week), one set of guildmates were well prepared for the 25-mans and ready to go, and the others not so much. Mostly the geared/keyed guildmates would look for greener pastures and move on, or, maybe, wait around for what seemed like flippin-4-evah for the rest of the guild — either way, you’ve set up a pressure cooker for guild implosion.

This precarious period for guilds would last until they could step into the 25-mans (admittedly, that step was made much easier with the lifting of attunements), and continue until the guild could bid fucking adieu to the Kara trashfest.

Now write this part down: This was not lack of commitment or lack of ambition or lack of skeelz, this was poor game mechanics screwing over guilds. You can’t tell your players, ok have a raid force for 40-man gear farms, now slim down for 10-man gear farms, oops, now bulk up for 25-mans.

So here’s the deal. Either fix the fucking raid system for 10-man gear-required instances or stick to a 25-man progression model. Yes, we players love the ideal of 10-man instances, but not if we have to mess with guild numbers up, down, up again, now down … and finally back up again. (Imagine I drew alternating up and down arrows on the whiteboard.) Since, I dare say, you haven’t been active in guild recruitment and raid invites and /tells from the undergeared and the overgeared for quite some time, let me remind you, IT’S A ROYAL PAIN IN THE ASS.

Here’s an example: Poor guildmate has a hard time getting into guild raids for a while, we’re overstaffed with his class, he’s undergeared because he misses the 10-man clear, whatever. I /tell him sorry mate, maybe next run. For a few weeks I tell him this and he complains of course, I listen, but damn, I have a raid to attend. He’s fed up and moves on to another guild. I’m relieved, albeit temporarily because I can see the future. Now we’re firmly in the 25-mans FINALLY, and oops, we need more raiders.

I could ask former guildmates who moved on because they were slower than the rest of us in gearing up IF I liked being told to fuck off (which I don’t, btw), or I can look for a feeder guild, i.e. a guild behind mine in progression whose better geared people are looking for said greener pastures. And I can poach from guilds around the same progression as mine, which is poor form, I know, however, I’m already being told daily to “fuck off” by my former raiders, so being told to “fuck off” by other guild’s leaders isn’t that big of a deal.

Thank you, game mechanics.

Two ways I believe 10-man instances could still fit into a 25-man raid-gear progression model:

1. Raid IDs of 3 days for the 10-mans, similar to Zul’Grub. Dare I hope for 1-day raid IDs for 10-mans? No, I do not dare hope.
or 2. Guild-wide raid IDs. Probably the 3-day solution is much easier to implement.

(Imagine I wrote “Hope” on the whiteboard and drew a circle around it with a slash through it, cuz there’s a whole lot of shit I don’t dare hope.)

Be ignorant no more, consider yourself enlightened. Now go forth and develop.

Say for example you forgot where the Stormwind reagent vendor is and so you go to the inn and run upstairs looking for the elusive vendor, don’t go charging into the bedrooms without knocking first. Nightelf roleplaying is everywhere.

Since I’ve been occupied with fixing up my guild’s web presence — y’know, front page, forums, extra doodads — let’s talk about guild websites.

My opinion is that a guild’s website has two audiences: guildmembers and the gaming public which includes potential applicants, rival guilds and nosey outsiders. Remembering our audiences, here’s five considerations for your guild’s web presence:

1. Where. There are hosted guild resources available nowadays (read: mostly free) — GuildPortal, for example, and the newly funded GuildCafe (you’re welcome, Tweety), and some games offer guild resources for their players like Sony’s Station Players. Alternatively, your guild can buy its own domain name through a registrar and purchase private hosting.

There are pros and cons to hosted and private solutions beyond the costs, but remember that whoever has admin rights or is paying the bills owns your guild’s public persona. If he or she is a flake, they can nuke your site in a matter of minutes and your guild’s history, messages, DKP, screenshots are all gone. Don’t think that can’t happen, it does ALL THE TIME.

2. What. At a minimum, your guild will want a message board for persistent guild conversations. More elaborate guild sites also include a front page for news and announcements, DKP (kill points or attendance) software, a roster, a wiki, screenshot galleries, member pages, tradeskill details, a chat room, etc. etc. With a free hosting system, you’re limited to what is offered — with private hosting, you’re limited by what you’re willing to maintain. There is nothing sadder than a guild site that appears abandoned because it’s so poorly maintained.

Me, I like a guild site with a front page + forums. Much more than that and you’ll need a second person on website maintenance, and it’s hard enough to find even ONE guildmate willing to handle htmls, phps and ftps, much less two volunteers.

3. How. Again, free hosting you’re limited to the software they offer. Private hosting, open source is the way to go — free donchaknow. Examples for front page or content management services: WordPress, Drupal, Movable Type (open source as of June 2007). Message board/forum software examples: phpBB, Vanilla, bbPress.

Download, install, check for updates regularly.

4. Why. Remember I said that a guild website has two audiences, guildmates and the gaming public? Primarily, you’ll use your website to communicate with and motivate your guildmates. Y’know, like … we killed This last night and Soandso FINALLY got some gear.

Secondly, your sneaky, not-so-obvious agenda is to communicate with potential applicants to your guild. Even before they fill out an application, probably before they inquire of an officer, applicants check out your website. NEVER NEVER NEVER never never never use your public guild areas to discuss how much the guild is sucking lately. Save that shit for your myspace, or your super secret blog, or the private members-only areas of the website.

Ideally, your public areas will be updated regularly and will reflect the happy fun personality of your guild, however, not every guild has a happy fun person to do said updating. Minimally, your public area should be updated with the latest first kill or latest guild accomplishment or event. That might only be once a month. Any less than that and the website starts to look abandoned. No one wants to join (or belong to) an abandoned guild.

Lastly, your rivals will snoop around your website too and be mindful of that. Nowadays, with instances and private zones, allowing your rivals to see what you’re up to isn’t as critical as in the old days when we’d monitor other websites to check their targets for the night. However, using World of Warcraft as an example, as the competition for raiding level 70 characters gets tighter, your rivals will use your weaknesses against you. (read: poaching. For the gaming noobs, poaching is actively recruiting rival guildmembers.)

5. Why else. You’re going to keep your public areas classy — happy fun news and conversations for the gaming public and your members to see. Fun links! (Like AFKGamer? Of course you should!) Humorous video clips! Beautiful screenshots!

And then we have your private, members-only area. (I could have written “private area” there, but this ain’t no porn site.)

I’m a big believer in muzzling your guild. Do you see a lot of constructive, positive posting on your community gaming site? I don’t either. Your members may behave themselves most of the time on the community site, but the one time they’re drunk or angry or lose their temper, all those well behaved posts are forgotten and the trolls gather for an old fashioned forum beatdown because your guild name is now mud.

Even if your guild policy won’t be as strict as my guild’s, guildmates need a members-only area to discuss strats or real life falala. Lock that area up with registration and passwords, test it thoroughly and, for the love of gawd, monitor and update access as guildmates come and go. An ex-guildmate can wreak a lot of havoc with continuing members-only access.

Some other areas you’ll want to lock up behind registration and passwords of varying degrees: the Ventrilo/Team Speak server, the DKP/attendance area, officers-only forums, and maybe the applications area, too.

And I’ll close with a story, because I know some of you are thinking, “why would I lock up DKP/attendance? what do I care if someone sees our raids?”

I’ll tell you why. Because you might have someone like me on your server who knows to check out your attendance. And I do.

So when you announce to the server that you’ve downed Void Reaver, for example, I know that isn’t quite the whole story. I know you only had 6 or 7 of your people there, and you had StrongerGuild03 with you to down the Reaver. I don’t post this, of course, because I’m muzzled. But when I talk to your raiders and ask how things are going and they tell me “great! never been better!”, I know they’re fibbing. And as competition for level 70 raiders is getting pretty damn fierce, I use what I know to craft my cleverly disguised, oh-so-subtle recruiting pitch.

And the competition is only going to get fiercer.

Here’s just some of the possibilities:

The douchebag card line – congrats on avoiding a game ban, selling gold for $$$, making everyone’s /ignore list (except for the characters created in the last hour), pulling off a loot and scoot on UberGuild03. Plus, the classics: the loot ninja, the loot whore and turning cyber tricks for loot.

The whole imaginary love scene – congrats on imaginary girlfriend, imaginary fiance, imaginary wedding, the new cyber partner. Also, good luck on keeping it from the real wife (especially after she sees the greeting card in your email/guild boards.)

Just for your guildmates (or your rival guild’s members) – congrats on the promotion for no pay, repeated failing of a gear check (or intell check) mob, proving that human evolution is a myth, also, congrats on the /gkick, the guild hop, or guild poaching.

The key is authenticity. It’s not enough anymore to have a 1950s photo of a guy drinking a cup of shut the fuck up, the market needs authentic-looking flamebait with focused messages.

Even in my free time, I’m thinking of improved methods to best the internet other guy.

Ya. I love optimism like that because it means they’re about to get a lesson from the school of hard knocks.

Like this lesson. Remember several months ago I told you about the World of Warcraft rogue that stole the bank from the Unguildables guild? (Parts I and II) Briefly, this rogue kept applying to join our guild and we kept denying him, so he formed his own guild out of the server’s unguildable players — those prone to drama or ninja’ing — then he did a late-night server transfer with the guild bank and told the Unguildables he had cut a deal with my guild for all of the them to join all of us in happy raid land.

I may have also told you (maybe I didn’t though), he returned to our server on a level one noobie rogue WITH THE SAME NAME as his thief character and was chatting it up with the crowd in Ironforge.

This is how that night went down. A few of us are sitting around in Ironforge after the night’s 40-man raid, marveling that our guild can kill anything with some of the “talent” we have, and I see in /say his noobie rogue chatting with a couple of our guild (ALLEGEDLY) female players. Let’s say his rogue is named Beneful.

Me: /officer wtf. is that fucking beneful?
Officer channel: He transferred. Remember?? He stole that guild bank.
Me: /officer Well I’m looking right at him in Ironforge. Who the fuck else would name their character with that dumass name?
Officer channel: Wow. That’s ballsy.
Me: (to one of the females chatting with him) Is that fucking beneful?
Her: teehee ya. He made a level 1 to chat with people. He’s lonely on his new server.
Me thinks: Musta run out of money.

Ordinarily, in this situation I’d be on high alert to carefully scour any rogue applicant to keep his thieving ass out of the guild, but as we hadn’t tagged a new rogue since 2005, high alert seemed unwarranted.

Fast forward a few months and we’re several weeks into the Burning Crusade content. Remember, I got the tip that Dr. Cyber, one of our warlocks, had given his guild site login credentials to a former guildmate and I don’t know why — maybe he was sleeping with a married woman, maybe he wasn’t, maybe they were “just good friends” — but, I called Dr. C on it and he tried to deny, then I oh snapped him and everyone yelled at me for being mean and I was the bad guy for a few weeks there. (the Dr. C adventure)

Part of the information I received along with the tip about Dr. C was that Beneful (thieving rogue) had applied to, AND WAS ACCEPTED INTO, our guild as a level 70 warrior a few days earlier. I had passed on that info to the other guild officers while I was working on trapping Dr. C. Nothing was really done about Beneful’s warrior, but it all became a moot issue when Beneful-warrior left the guild along with Dr. C and joined one of the many Guilds That Hate Our Guild.

In a rare moment of altruism, I even warned the guildleader of the Guild That Hates Our Guild. His response: Ya, I know. He bought a warrior character off one of those auction sites, but he learned his lesson and is really quite a good raider and officer. (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

OFFICER??? They made him an OFFICER??? Ya, they made him an officer. Cue the School of Hard Knocks.

A few more weeks passed and the one night in World of Warcraft, Raster, fearless raid leader/occasional AFK blogger, got an angry tell from a former guildmate asking him wtf is his problem. Raster responded, the former guildie responded back, bla bla, Raster asked around and got some more wtf’s, bla bla, and here’s what was going on: the prior week, some asshat had made a level one mule named Rasterbank and was asking former guildmates for loans and current guildmates for material and gold donations. Not so coincidentally, the guildleader of the Guild That Hates Our Guild also was victim, via name-posing, of the same bank alt scam. Hmmm.

They both petitioned GMs, who responded and said an investigation would be launched! I don’t know whatever happened with that investigation but I know both Raster and the rival guildleader got ALOT of tells from angry players.

When the scam broke, immediately my guild suspected Beneful. A. He’s a thief. and B. He has a hardon for our guild.

Eventually the angry tells died down and game life returned to … something resembling normal.

Then, just last week, I found out that the School of Hard Knocks had been in session and there were some new graduates.

Beneful had spent a couple of weeks fattening his virtual bank account by begging for loans from guildmates and loans from server friends. He had improved his gear by spending all his DKP, and then some! Apparently, they fronted him a lot of tank gear because he was the main tank, plus he whined alot.

Then, when he had all he could eat (and carry), he posted on the Guild That Hates Our Guild’s boards that they were all idiots who couldn’t kill jack or shit and he was server transferring to get away from their noobete. Ouch.

And I shake my head sadly. Not because I feel sorry for the Guild That Hates My Guild — better they learn this lesson in a game rather than out in real life where we play for keeps.

No, I feel sorry for me, because now I have to scour every goddamn guild application for subtle personality clues that may, or may not, tip me off that he’s applying for the 12th time to my guild. He won’t come at me with a rogue. He knows we haven’t tagged a rogue in two years. He’s going to come at me with a druid or a warlock. Maybe a mage or a shaman, but druid is my best guess. Every app is a suspect, every player is a “person of interest”. Nobody is cleared until they pass my IP and Ventrilo check.

IT’S HIGH ALERT!! We’re on GUILD LOCK DOWN.

Really, I just wanted an alt with my porn name.

So ladies, if you’re looking for a hobbit who really knows how to party, you know who to /tell.

(Anyone else surprised that LOTRO hasn’t filtered S-E-X from naming? I was. FOOLS!)