May You Get a Chronic Case of Scabies

Unless you’re new around here, (and by “here” I mean online gaming), you probably know that Furor works for Blizzard as a quest dude. Let me state at the top that, for the most part, the quests in Warcraft are incredibly well done. Engaging stories, witty even, interesting to solve if you’d rather not thottbot, and best of all, they put out with worthwhile rewards — sometimes the uber.

Quests in Warcrack are as well done as the crafting system in Star Wars: Galaxies.

If you’re new, Furor was one of the few EQ player celebrities — by that I mean, he was vocal (as in shrill) and highly-opinionated (as in psychotic). The only other EQ celebrities I can think of now are Thott (even you noobs know him), Zato (the, or one of the, founders of The Safehouse) and maybe the guildleader of the uber guild on my EQ server, who was reknowned mostly because he was such a dick-sucking asshole.

Obviously, we had all heard about some of the other uber guilds, too, but weren’t really aware of who their leaders were, probably because they weren’t … (how to say?) … interesting specimens like Furor and Thott.

Thott, appearing to be the more even-tempered of the two (read: not a raving lunatic), wrote several very articulate and eloquent articles about various issues in EQ. In fact, one of my e-thug friends is convinced that one of Thott’s bard articles is solely responsible for the ass-reaming nerfs that EQ monks received late in the game and he will not, under any circumstances, use Thottbot in Warcrack. (issues!) But I digress.

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They Will Overcome

The warriors are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. Their chosen protest: a veritable sea of gnome warriors on the Argent Dawn server, Friday night, 7 pm pacific, a million gnome march to immediately follow.

You go, gnome!

OF COURSE, there’s some tattletales alerting our Blizzard overlords because, just in case they could play during primetime on Friday, (assuming the login servers behave and the typical weekend lag isn’t overly crushing), they’d really like to play without worrying about trampled gnome guts on the bottom of their boots.

Can’t you just hear the Thursday meetings over at Castle Blizzard now? (They’re going to do what? And why is that again? People actually do this? Is it too late to refund everyone’s money, I can’t take much more of this.)

I love a good protest: it’s the kind of roleplaying that almost anyone can pull off … angry. There’s also the very entertaining sideshow that a good protest leaves in its wake … the spin, the bannings, the spin on the bannings, the protest against the bannings, the spin on the protest against the bannings, ad infinitum.

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LFM 4 BRS

As I inch ever closer to level 60, one thing is clear: Warcraft is becoming more EQ-esque. That might not be, necessarily, a bad thing, but the happy happy joy joy game that Warcraft was from levels 1 through 50 is being replaced with a “you damn well better find some more people to do this instance because what you got here ain’t gonna cut it and why in the world did you bring a warlock along?” game.

Making do won’t do much longer.

The rest of my gang of e-thugs seems to realize this also. We’re currently shopping for other guilds and players worth a damn for the tougher encounters. In a game where a large portion of the population are fresh recruits to the wonderful world of gaming, this can be problematic.

Frankly, we’re willing to settle for a few players that won’t rob us blind and will sporadically pop a heal or apply some DPS. That they would also know how to arrive at the encounter safely, timely and PREPARED seems too much to hope for at this point.

We’ve considered creating an army of alts to pick up the slack, but who has the energy for that nowadays and that’s so three games ago.

The transition has been every so slight … gently nudging us away from solo and duo quests into requiring full, balanced groups to get the uber … one day, we’ll login and it’s back to 2002 with scheduled raids and not enough damn clerics to get the show on the road.

Eventually, all games arrive at a state of EQness.

All games I choose seem to anyways. Maybe, therein lies the problem.