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.

While they were doing that, I wanted to talk about the post-2.3 patch Alterac Valley. What a shithole that has become.

I’ve read some of the threads calling for boycotts and such of AV by the Alliance, here’s what I say: organized protests will not be necessary. Players will go where the honor is, and it ain’t in AV anymore.

I gave it a good try. I had an open mind. No one can doubt that Alterac Valley used to be my dirty lover. But, the one post-2.3 AV loss where I earned 20 bonus honor for my troubles versus the 600+ to the winning Horde was the last straw. F THAT.

And let’s be frank here (you can be susie), the AV honor system before the Great Nerf of 2007 was a little ridiculous. Tap a few things on the way to Drek, ka-ching, big honor! Even on non-AV holiday weekends, Alterac Valley was still king. Clearly, that needed tuning — I knew it, you knew it, they knew it.

So as I played through a couple weeks’ worth of post-2.3 AVs, I watched and studied the various stats of each round to figure out what in the hell was the problem with the Alliance.

Healing: no material difference between Horde and Alliance either in # of healers or in overall healing done. EXCEPT, paladins. Horde paladins are rocking the house and Alliance paladins, almost without exception, should delete their characters. Of course, in a smaller battleground (your Warsong Gulches, your Arathi Basins and Eye of the Storms) even a minor healing advantage can pull the win, but we’re discussing the 40-man AV here.

Killing the healers first: looked to be about even to me. I even benched my rogue and called up my priest for dozens of rounds so I could watch how regularly I was targeted first, and/or early, by Horde. Both sides equally sloppy with effective class targeting.

Fighting at capture points rather than pointless mini-battles in the middle of nowhere: Both sides guilty. And let me say, I LOVE when Horde does this. Some Alliance get angry when a group of Horde chase them to a corner of the map and gang … up … on him/her. Not me, I love it. That’s three or four or five less Horde messing with my flags and towers. Of course, if it’s five Horde on me at a crossroads, they won’t be distracted by my smoke and mirrors for very long, but still … it’s a distraction.

Organization and rapid deployment: My observation has been that Horde is clearly superior, however, in AV, if you’re pinned up at Stormpike, you’re pinned up at Stormpike and no amount of shouting about Frostwolf or the Relief Hut can help you mobilize … unless you can stealth, of course.

Gear and skeelz: Other than an obvious differential between PVP servers and PVE servers, both gear and skill are equivalent for a large sample of AV battlegrounds. (By the way, I prefer the term “PVP experience” to the myth of “PVP skill”, because c’mon, there really isn’t that much skill in PVP. We are just hitting buttons here, we’re not artists or licensed trades people. Some people pick up the nuisances of PVP faster than others, sure, but it’s still just buttons.)

Number of AFK players in AV: same.

Maturity level: another myth, it’s the same between factions.

Vann pull bullshit: gone.

Towers and defense of same: Each have their pros and cons. I prefer Alliance towers with the more spacious accommodations — when I’m stalking, I like to have some room. Others probably prefer the tighter quarters of the Horde towers — easier to flush out the stealthers lying in wait. Sounds like personal preference to me, rather than a clear advantage for one side or the other.

Which leaves us with the map. And I don’t know the answer of whether the map is a sizeable advantage for Horde (or Alliance). I know the Horde’s starting point is ahead of their base and Alliance is not. I know the Stormpike/Dun Baldur bridge is one helluva choke point and the ride into Frostwolf Keep … not so much. And probably dozens of other pro vs con comparisons we could discuss.

So here’s what I’d like to try: let’s swap bases each week. Sure, it’d be a pain to code, but it would settle the arguments and dispell the myths — from both sides. I’ll assault Dun Baldur with my merry band of crappy paladins, and you Horde can assault Frostwolf Keep with your stomping cows and after a few weeks, we can see who’s crying then … or still.

Mostly this would be to satisfy my own curiousity, because whether the map is or isn’t at fault in Alterac Valley, it will be the same result: players will not queue for a battleground that won’t put out. Losers need more for their time than, umm, ZERO, unless there’s absolutely no other alternate activity.

Fortunately, there is such an alternative. Salvation, thy name is Eye of the Storm.