Twenty Things Foton Did on Holiday

Here’s the quick version of what I’ve been up to the past month, besides taking some time off to sharpen my axe:

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.

Zero Bonus Honor is Fun

This one was outrageous too:

Still Zero

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

Stormpike the Sieve

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.

22 thoughts on “Twenty Things Foton Did on Holiday

  1. I have no idea how you attract such awesome stories, but glad you do, and glad I’m on a different server. Keep ’em comming.

  2. Welcome Back. We, the no-so-many-as-we-were, are in fact still clicking your bookmark to check in now and again. =D

  3. Welcome back!

    I’ve been leveling a new alt on Mug’Thol and enjoying it. I usually hate PvP servers but this one is pretty good. Been running the battlegrounds all the way up from the 29 bracket to the 49 bracket which I’m in now and there’s been a lot of good games. Haven’t seen how AV plays out yet though.

  4. Age of Conan is where it’s at. I don’t have that much faith in Warhammer at this point, and plus Conan comes out in May :P. It’ll also have gore, decapitations, and boobs. Really, you can’t go wrong with that formula. Well, you could, but Conan will have l33t pretty graphics. ^^

  5. we took the entire month of december off. i think our last raid that month was dec 3rd and then we made the call: that’s it, no more trying to put one of these together until after the holidays. people spent time with their families, traveled, leveled up alts, etc.

    of COURSE we had the chicken littles running around screaming that the raid is falling! the raid is falling! we need to DO something! we need CHANGES!

    first week of january, we had fallen from something like #3 or 4 to maybe #5 or 7 on the server for pve progression. progression competition isn’t really what we (are supposed to) care about though, it’s just getting through new content that matters. that said, this past week we were sitting at #2.

    look for another raid slow-down in september when everyone panics about going back to school and vows to cut wow out of their lives. they’re generally back by the beginning of october.

    wow, all that took way longer to type than i thought it would.

    welcome back, foton. =)

  6. Welcome to the AV that the Horde have had to deal with since the cursed battleground was introduced 🙂

    It may be bad on your battlegroup now, but the numbers overall are showing a 50/50 split between the Horde and Alliance for AV since the reinforcement changes. Previously it was 80/20 in favor of the alliance. Interesting to see if the Alliance dominance returns with the 2.4 changes.

  7. It may be bad on your battlegroup now, but the numbers overall are showing a 50/50 split between the Horde and Alliance for AV since the reinforcement changes.

    True. And I’m all for 50/50, but zero bonus for the losers is bullshit, whether it’s Horde or Alliance losing. They fix that and everyone’s happy — happiER anyways. I’d still grumble about the map, the way I grumble about the AB map and how our bridge to blacksmith should be inched closer to our stables flag, but I’m not getting ZERO for a losing AB.

    And hey! there’s worse battlegroups than mine:

    Horde to Alliance Level-70 AV Win Ratio
    Bloodlust .655
    Cataclysm 3.700
    Cyclone .593
    Emberstorm 1.274
    Frenzy (insufficent data)
    Nightfall 1.171
    Rampage 1.624
    Reckoning .894
    Retaliation 3.047
    Ruin .749
    Shadowburn .833
    Stormstrike 1.776
    Vengeance 1.129
    Vindication .521 (omg, choke them at IBGY)
    Whirlwind 1.111
    Overall for US battlegroups .984

    (Based on data collected at WarcraftRealms.com by players using the census addon)

  8. This is interesting too. Also via WarcraftRealms.

    Horde to Alliance Win Ratio – All Level 70 Battlegrounds
    Alterac Valley .984
    Arathi Basin 1.484 (see what I mean about that blacksmith bridge??)
    Warsong Gulch 1.255
    Eye of the Storm 1.516

    Our paladins DO suck. I knew it all along.

  9. HAH! Validation! I KNEW it wasn’t just me! (This is a large part of why I rolled a Horde alt – it’s nice to win from time to time.)

  10. Huh. Reckoning isn’t as bad as I thought. Although we are pretty terrible. I refuse to enter a WSG that isn’t a premade anymore. (real premade to win – not that pansy let’s dance in the GY crap).

  11. Welcome back, Foton! I’m on Cyclone and that 0.593 ratio surprises me. I went 23 games as Horde in one day without winning one 🙁

  12. That Ruin ratio is actually a little higher than reality. I leveled up a BE lock solely to PVP with and since I got her to 70 my AV record is an abysmal 11-57. For the rest of the BGs, I’m at a combined 93-10 or so. For whatever reason, whenever I jump into an AV with the Horde on Ruin they all go retarded. I don’t get it. Maybe I just have that effect on people.

    And I transferred from a low/med pop server to a high pop server a few months ago and don’t regret it at all. Sure it’s harder to farm mobs/resources or do dailies – hello Netherwing mine – but there’s always something to do and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

  13. Well, it’s nice to know that my battlegroup (Vindication) really is the worst one out there 😛

    We have some success when people move with the zerg, but otherwise, gah.

    What really confuses me though is when I roll in with my S3/T6 enhance sham we get steamrolled. But, I queue up for kicks with my blue and green 70 warrior alt and we win instantly.

  14. If I had to guess why vindication has the best ratio for alliance winning Alterac Valley its probably because of Lightning’s Blade. For some reason that server seems filled with badass PvPers.

  15. Yay! The return of Foton! Thank god you’re back, the internet was getting a bit boring without you.

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