Taking One’s Time, and Taking One’s Lumps

What a concept!

We had an interesting discussion in guild chat last night. Caraway, our GM, is a pally tank, and was raging about pugs wanting to rush through the content, and wanting the tank to know every fight going in. One of the other members chimed in, and noted that this is pretty much how WoW is played. Before you tackle content, you read up on it, make sure you’re geared, gemmed, enchanted appropriately, etc.

Caraway made a couple very good points last night. One sounded very familiar. Blizzard worked on Cataclysm for over two years. Why does everyone try to finish it as fast as possible? Hmmm…. I’m fairly certain I heard similar rumblings from a mage that shall remain nameless, during Wrath.

The other, and more telling, point Caraway made, was that somewhere, sometime, someone went through this content without the benefit of guides, advice, perfectly tuned gear and specs, etc. Does that somehow mean that they’re better, smarter, or more capable than we? I really doubt most of us would say “well, yeah! They’re WoW gods!” The fact of the matter is, they were lucky enough to get into beta, and have a crack at it. Or, on the Live realms, chances are their guild had a commitment to be the first, and they tackled it blind.

One of our other members chimed in with some valid points. It’s very hard to find people who are willing to tackle content that way. Most people are caught up in the “NEED MOAR GEER!” mindset. And further, they look upon anyone who doesn’t know the fights as a noob.

Um, no. All it means is they don’t know the fight. They may know how to play their class perfectly well. Which Caraway proved in a pug last night by turning off chat bubbles, switching to the combat log, and tanking Blackrock Caverns, successfully, without any prior prep.

Caraway and I work together, and we started talking about last night’s chat, and he came up with an idea that I quickly band-wagoned on. Moonlight Requiem is the most casual of guilds. Basically, you have people to talk to on guild-chat, and we try help each other as we can, but no one really makes a point of helping someone level, or whatever. When one of our members was getting ganked in Hyjal, I dropped what I was doing and went to help. those of us that know each other outside the game will run together somewhat. Things are pretty loose, though. Which, given my own distaste for pugs, has been a bit of a drag.

However, that may be about to change. Caraway announced to me this morning that we’re forming our own Explorer’s League, within the guild. He’s completely committed to people doing their own thing, and keeping things casual, but last night reinforced the problem with the prevailing view in WoW, and this is how we hope to resolve it in our little corner of Azeroth.

The Explorer’s League is going to be for those players who don’t want to rush through content as fast as possible, as painlessly as possible. We’re not excluding anyone; they’re welcome to run with us. Just don’t tell us how to play. Our devil’s advocate made a good point last night: “So, what if I know the fight? What, am I supposed to pretend I don’t?” Nope. Play your toon. Just don’t spoil it for the rest of us.

See, what get’s lost in the heat of discussion is a simple fact of human evolution. If someone constantly solves your problems for you, you never learn to solve problems yourself. As a parent, I’ve spent my last fifteen-plus years letting my kids go through unpleasant experiences that I might have spared them. It’s hard, especially as a parent. But that’s the only way they really learn. You can tell someone not to stand in the fire. But until they stand in it for themselves, and die, sometimes it just doesn’t sink in.

It’s an experiment. I’m optimistic that it will be a productive one.

Adventures in Healing

So, from midweek, on through the weekend, I was fighting off the latest crud going around. In my case, it manifested mostly with wracking cough that by Thursday had my diaphragm in perpetual cramp, but I got the stuffy head, etc. Luckily, this was a quiet weekend. I spent most of the weekend playing WoW, which was a nice change.

I work on the principle of total immersion, so I’ve pretty much ignored most of my other characters, and concentrated on my dwarf priest, Coosh. Just to recap, I got him to Kharanos, did a bit in Loch Modan, and then headed to Elwynn, more to see how the quests looked than anything else. From there, I went out to Westfall, and got thoroughly hooked on the questline, which ultimately sent me off to Redridge, where, among other things, I got to do the new Bravo Company questline, which is a tongue-in-cheek Rambo parody, and an absolute blast. Cataclysm continues the BC and Wrath pattern of achievements for completing a certain number of quests in an area. I got the one for Redridge, which then sent me along to Duskwood, where I knocked out the quests for the achievement, and then happily headed for the new Northern Strangelthorn area, where again, I got the achievement.

A quick word on the new quests: so far, an enthusiastic Two-Thumbs Up. Gone are the “slay things endlessly waiting for certain items to drop” quests. Most amusing, to me, was the fact that the one quest where I had a low drop rate on a needed item was killing Murlocks, which are supposed to be irritating, so I view that as game-flavor. Along the way were some downright engaging quests, some reworks of old classics, and some very creative new ones.

Spirestone is a PvP server, so ganking comes as no surprise.  I’ve been pretty fortunate so far, only one real ass-hat encountered. My first brush with “the enemy” was out in Redridge, where I’d gotten myself in over my head with a pack of gnolls. Suddenly, I see the pillar flash and crash sound of moonfire, and a gnoll evaporates. I was in “keep alive” mode at that point, and another moonfire came crashing down a cooldown later, and I turned to see a Tauren Druid tapping away at a mining node. I bowed, and saluted, and sent off a /thanks, and was on my way. Example 1: Classy Player, can obviously squish me like a bug, but helps out the lowbie. In my opinion, the way it should be.

Yesterday, however, I was in Northern Stranglethorn, and I saw a rogue vanish. “Here it comes” I thought, and prepared to take my medicine. Sure enough, one shotted. The rogue did an apology emote, so I figured he was gonna leave it at that. I ran back from the spirit healer, and resurrected. Bam, one shotted again.Rinse, lather, repeat, a couple times.

Here we have Example 2: The No-Class Cork-Soaker. I truly have problems understanding this mentality. Ok, so a level 80 squashes a level 30. That’s not something to feel proud of, it’s just a fact of game mechanics. Once is someone feeling bored. Not a problem. But to repeatedly grief someone… that screams to me of a truly pathetic personality. We all play the game for rewards, whether it be satisfaction, challenge, whatever. What kind of person is rewarded by making someone else miserable? Or in this case, thinking they were making me miserable? I pretty much just rolled my eyes, then after the fourth or fifth time, went and got more NyQuil, sampled some of the wife and daughter’s baked goods, then returned. By this time, he’d gotten bored and left. No doubt an e-peen that tiny can only take so much self-stroking before they have to go take a nap.

Later, my guild leader (and co-worker) Caraway invited me to heal his group in an already in-process Maraudon. I was still a bit low for the instance, but he was pretty comfortable tanking, so no problem. After all, how could I resist a trip to see the hottest babe in WoW, Princess Theradas? I’d just gotten a point into Atonement, so I was anxious to see how effective using Smite to heal actually was.

By itself, not terribly effective, especially with melee DPS in the party. All too often, I watched the healing go to the rogue, not the tank. For the most part, I felt I did okay. Could have used more mana, and since I hadn’t been planning on running an instance, I didn’t have much to drink with me, but all in all, it went well.

Nick, in his usual fashion, is dithering around with 3 or 4 characters, but he’s out of school, so he should be able to get his pally up to near my level, so we can start chain running instances. Either that, or I’ll have to ground him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moar PeeVeePee

So yeah, I’m a bit obsessive. I’ve tried leveling my lock a few times over the last week, but it dulled real fast. Right now, I’m immersed in mage PvP mode, and I keep feeling the compulsion to hit the “H” key and queue up for a random BG.  Why fight it?

With this weeks arena matches in the books, this weekend was a running mixture of heroics, an Ulduar 25 and 10 for the weekly, and lots of bgs. As RG mentioned, Saturday afternoon Fiaked, Hartbane, Kalyon and I teamed up on a string of random bgs, and while I wouldn’t put it in the “pwned” category, it is true that we won pretty much every BG we went into.

So, a couple notes on the incessant whining on Winterhoof that “Alliance sucks in Wintergrasp”, and on the Whirlwind battlegroup in general that “Horde dominate bgs”.  None of these is particularly new or earthshaking, but I’ll repeat them here anyway, if for nothing else than to display the fact that I get it.

1. Battlegrounds in General – Know the objectives. If you don’t know, ask. If you’re too timid to ask, shut up, listen, and stick with the crowd. Even if they’re “not doing it right”, battlegrounds are about coordinated effort, and while you learn, you’re much better sticking with a group. Curb your heroic tendencies, you’ll live longer.
2. Bases are King – Particularly in Eye and Arathi, but the theory applies in some form to pretty much all battlegrounds. In those two in particular, if you consistently control 3 bases, you will win. The flag in Eye is only of use when you can only hold 2 bases, and need an edge, or when you hold 3 bases, and want to speed up the victory. If you’re going for the flag with less than 2 bases, you’re doing it wrong.
3. Think Logically – If you have 3 bases in Arathi or Eye, and half a dozen Horde show up to attack one, that means one of theirs is going to be lightly defended.
4. Don’t Road Fight – This is a reflex that’s really hard to overcome, but it must be overcome, nonetheless. The only time you want to road fight is when you have a numerical base advantage, and you can tie up a significant number of the enemy on the road, so they can’t attack your bases. Guess what? This is what the enemy has been doing to you in all those BGs you lost!
5. In Wintergrasp – If you keep throwing your forces at a single point, the enemy will mass there, and unless you outnumber them drastically, you will be stopped. If you ignore your towers, they will be destroyed, and you will run out of time.
6. Moar Healerz – To all those healie types who come to bgs and heal me… I love you, no shit, let me buy you a beer. That’s why paladins, druids, and priests can be such terrors in battlegrounds… they bring their own healer.
7. Communication and coordination – a group of 4 or 5 people who are on the same page can dominate a battleground.

Case in point… on Saturday, in Warsong Gulch. While Kalyon and Hartbane were back on defense, Fiaked and I went on the offensive. We ran into 3 Horde outside the upper tunnel, 2 of them mages, and took them out, then got some cooldowns, and rushed the flagroom. Five enemies in there, with TWO resto druids. Neither was well geared, and it showed. We burned both of them, and held out long enough for a few other teammates to show up, and a flag cap soon followed. None of it was particularly due to MY skill. I played my class, we communicated on Vent, I got heals, and good things happened.

Like the arena, being on Vent is huge in actual fights. But I did a lot of battlegrounds solo over the weekend, and invariably, when people played as a team, and paid attention to the objectives instead of just “see Horde -attack Horde”, we did well.

Wintergrasp is tough for Alliance on Winterhoof, because yes, we’re generally hugely outnumbered. That’s only going to change if we encourage more people to come out. It’s still possible to win, though, even when outnumbered, if people play smart, and coordinate. Even outnumbered, you have to spread out to attack from Broken Temple, and Sunken Ring simultaneously, and to defend the towers. When you get right down to it, it’s the “Bases are King” principle. If you control all the bases, the enemy has to dispatch forces to take them back, and to do it effectively, they have to send a larger force. So, effectively, 2 people on a base can keep double, triple, or quadruple that number tied up. That’s X number of fortress defenders that aren’t up stopping siege vehicles. That’s the numbers game that allows a smaller force to win on attack.

Defense is another matter altogether. Realize, from the start, that Blizzard didn’t design Wintergrasp to be defended effectively. They WANT it to change hands. The best bet there is to build catapults to go out and kill siege vehicles as fast as possible, and to send out squads to kill towers. Only after towers are down should defenders try to cap Sunken Ring and Broken Temple.

Anyway… a good tally this weekend. I was able to upgrade a ring, so I’ve got Relentless and Wrathful rings on, and I’m only a few WG marks short of being able to swap my PvE Bloodmage shoulders for the Titan-Forged Shoulderpads of Salvation. When my arena points come up for this last week, I should be able to swap my Hood of Fiery Aftermath for the Relentless Gladiator’s Silk Cowl. I might even manage another upgrade as well.

Azeroth’s Axis Just Tilted a Tiny Bit

Last night, the unthinkable happened… an event that will have wide-ranging repercussions that will and resound through the very fabric of Azeroth, with echos in far off Outland. Compared to this, Cataclysm will be but a faint whisper of an aftershock. Dragon’s stopped in their tracks, and raised their heads, testing the swirls and eddies of magic that permeate the fabric of Azeroth. Garrosh Hellscream woke in a cold sweat, the vestiges of an un-recallable nightmare fading into the gloom. The Lich King in the middle of his speech to Svala Sorrowgrave, suddenly began sounding like Alvin the Chipmunk. Hogger suddenly went “Hrrrmmmmuh?” and fell dead after being hit with a staff by a level 6 mage.

Okay, it’s wasn’t that big a deal. But it was something that I really did not expect to happen. Nick and I joined Crits and Giggles.

As the post activity on my blog shows, I’ve been busy. Softball season ties up my Saturdays, but when all-stars rolled around, and my daughter made it, that went from “Saturdays” to “weekends”. I’ve bemoaned at length the normal challenges our guild faced, having such a small core membership, and apparently, the inevitable finally caught up with us. I wish everyone the best, have fun. That’s what it’s all about.

Meh, high-road be damned. It’s my blog, and as best I could tell, none of my ex-guildies ever read it anyway. I’m feeling something that’s a cross between hurt, bitterness, and just  plain sadness. Nick and I have could have been in Crits or Apathy months ago, and been raiding our little hearts out, but we stuck with our friends. I’ve sat around Dalaran for hours, turning down raid invites, because I wanted to stay freed up in case my guildies showed up and we could put together a heroic. I cheered my ass off when our group cleared their first heroic. While my guildies were working the auction house, and buying gear because they were too shy to run heroics, I was spending my money on guild tabs, a tundra-mammoth so I could run lowbies to flight points, repair bots, etcetera.

And then I stopped being on every night of the week, and my weekends were taken up by my daughter’s tournaments, and I logged on to find our core group gone, without a word. When I asked, I was told “they had no one to play with”. Ah well. I hope you find people to play with, and I hope they can keep you amused. I do wish you the best.

And a friend of twenty-five years who never mentioned a word of any problems in the guild to me, who in fact had been telling me over the past few months how well I handled the role of “cat herder”, lectured me on my lack of leaderships skills and “selfishness” - when she could finally be bothered to even return an email. Yah, sweety, I hear ya. Thanks for “smoothing things over” with everyone, while keeping me in the dark. Hope you enjoy those glacial bags that I bought for you because you were bitching at me about people filling up the guild tab that you paid for.

::Deep Breath:: Ok, got that off my chest. Cathartic. And yes, I know that all that is MY perception, and they may see things entirely differently. It’s over, it’s done, move on.

And to return to our regularly schedule programming, move on we did. I managed to get the guild bank someone straightened out, and promoted Zachiel, my utility toon to GM, and then told RG she could pull the trigger. And it was done. And it was good.

After a chorus of welcomes from the Crits crowd, and getting Nick in, we did a random, then went for Magister’s Terrace, first normal, then normal again, because Sol and Nick didn’t realize they needed to complete the quest to get into the heroic, and then heroic. It was a learning experience. For example, I learned that despite the tank running around and chain-aggroing everything in site, there was in fact method to the madness, and that did not in fact mean that I should start long-range pulling mobs standing off to the side. Go figure. My bad.

And as RG mentioned in her post today, the Phoenix Hatchling dropped twice in a row, and she didn’t get it. Nick and I will have to start scheduling play-dates for our new pets.

After that, RG was off to help Hartbane, and I responded to a call from a guildie in WG, only to undergo multiple ass-handings. I see I’m going to have to rebuild my PvP set, and get back in the swing of things. That, and get my ‘lock leveled. I still enjoy the mage, but there’s no doubt who my eventual main will be.

Holy shit. It just hit me. I have a guild full of people. Lots and lots of people. There’s bound to be some toons around my lock’s level to play with. Don’t get me wrong. One thing I could always count on from my ex-guildies was help, if they were on. (Despite my self-indulgent rant above, don’t think for a moment that these are “bad people”. It was just a bad situation that was poorly handled all around. ) But I don’t always WANT to have an 80 running me through instances or quests. I *like* challenge, and learning to play my toon. Simple math says I’m going to see more of that.

Most cliche’s have at least some truth behind them, and my own life experience has taught me that when something happens that seems earth-shaking, and terrible, it’s likely just The Power’s That Be forcing you into the change that you already knew, in the back of your mind, that you needed to make. One door closes, another opens.

To all my new guildies… it’s good to be home!

My Butt Is Numb

Ah, Sunday night. Relaxing at the computer, winding down before falling into bed to get some shuteye before the workweek starts… well, at least, I’m at the computer. In this case, I’m trying to wind down, take the edge off, and let the remnants of repeated adrenalin rushes fade out. It were A Good Day.

Start at the beginning… with Saturday. I got to sleep in. For me, that means getting up after 7AM. After 30-odd years of getting up between 3:30 and 6:30 AM, it’s rare that I get past 6:30. Got up, logged on – and got hit with a splitting allergy headache. Screw earthquakes and falling into the ocean… this weekend, the SoCal winds decided to try and blow things into the ocean. Better yet, my daughter’s softball team had a doubleheader. Oh, joy of joys. Don’t get me wrong, I love watching her play. But…. it’s Rec ball. That means cliques, stacked teams, a season that starts in February with maybe three practices as a team,  and players that don’t want to be there but are because Mom and Dad think that they should be.  Or what’s worse, Mom and Dad  decide that soccer, homework, and who knows what else aren’t enough to keep their child occupied. At least one girl plays two other sports. She’s a good little player, but she gets beat up playing soccer, beat up playing softball, and then beats herself up when she doesn’t make the play. Sad, sad.

Screenshot Grabbag

Not too much new and exciting, and I’ve been remiss on the screenshots lately, so I figured I’d go through and recap.

Last night, from Crits Classic Raid Night, the League perched atop Nefarian’s throne in Blackwing Lair, with Louweaze from Crit’s nestled in there amongst us.

Of special note, look what’s strapped across Nick’s back:

That’s Ashkandi, Greatsword of the Brotherhood, sword of Anduin Lothar. Kudo’s to Hartbane, who suggested that it be rolled on, so whoever got it could have the fun of running around Ironforge with it. Nick won it with a roll of 100, then promptly stripped down to nothing but the sword, and ran around IF.  Nick is a huge lore buff, and he was tickled beyond end.

Here’s the final from the Naxx run the other day:

And ToC25 from last week:

Unfortunately, I don’t have access to screenshots from other peoples computers. I need to set my guildies up with an achievement screenshot addon, and get them added to my Dropbox so they can upload them easily.

After BWL last night, Edelestar, Tiamarie, Lightblazer, Bootters and myself queued up for a random heroic, and got Gundrak. Of the group, only Ed and I had been through on Heroic, so it was new territory. We were still feeling a bit giddy after BWL, so we didn’t exactly go in serious and at the top of our game. Our wipes were pretty much “doh!”s (like yours truly grabbing aggro), but other than that, we went through pretty easy. All in all, a good night.

Monday, Monday

Ok, so yeah, it’s another Monday, we’re a guy short, we’ve got fifteen in the call queue, and I’m still fixing customer problems from last week. See, my job started as simple “Product Support Specialist”, but it sort of evolved. Anyone who has worked for a software developer will tell you that there’s usually something of a disconnect between front line tech and developer. Developers just never seem to quite feel the same urgency the people who are dealing with the customer have.  In our case, it’s not the norm… our devs are extremely responsive. I’ve escalated a customer issue to the devs, and had them spend several hours jumping through hoops to get the issue resolved. That’s NOT the norm in the software business. As far as that goes, I can’t speak highly enough about our developers.

Where the disconnect comes, in our case, is when we find a problem that’s machine specific. The dev, on his machine, can’t reproduce the problem. And in the dev mindset, that means that the problem is on the customer machine, and therefore, not his problem. That, of course, ignores the fact that, bottom line, things aren’t working correctly. It’s one thing if I can point to a specific problem on the customer machine, and say “you need to have this fixed”. But if the cause is unknown, as far as the customer is concerned, we’re just trying to weasel out of fixing the problem, and furthermore, they are broke. “Can’t reproduce”, in this case, is of absolutely no use to me.

As far as the techs here go, I have it better than most, because I speak Developer, and I’ve done enough development, I know how to look for things that most of the other techs don’t. Further, over the first few months I was here, through a series of coincidences, I got dragged into the area of custom reporting and exporting. When the Prez/CEO found out I had installed Microsof’ts free Express version of Visual Studio on my workstation, he very sternly told me to remove it – and replace it with the Pro version that our company developers use. Little did I know that Tony is one of those guys who believes in matching talent with task, and before I knew it, I was being through custom exporter projects, and then custom reports. Over time, things have further evolved so that most database corruption issues come to me before being escalated to the devs.  One of the things that I wistfully hope to get accomplished Some Day is to do some utility programs for the other guys to run to help in diagnosing database issues.

This weekend went well. Friday, I decided that if I’m going to direct raids with my guild, I need to learn all the jobs, so I started working my DK up as a tank. Did a quest in Hellfire to get a trinket, at RG‘s suggestion, then tanked Sethekk Halls for her priest, and Elgar’s pally. It seem to go well. No one died. lol. I’ve got a long way to go, tho’. I have a bad habit in melee of right clicking my mouse for auto-attack, and of course, that makes me jump targets.

Saturday, we got the gang together, and ran H-HoL, taking down Loken after one wipe. More progress. Sunday, Edelestar, and myself got with Innarra, who has done some questing with some of us, and she graciously agreed to tank a random heroic. We got AN, and had little problem until the final boss, where we wiped. She’s never tanked it on heroic, and one of the DPSers started quizzing her about whether she was capped. She’d had some gear upgrades, and no, she hadn’t gotten her enchants on, so no, she wasn’t. He came off with a “no wonder”. Edelestar and I promptly invited him to tank if he’d like, and he said “if he had a toon that could, he would”. He then made some remarks about leaving if we wanted him to, and we corrected him on that: We didn’t ask him to leave, but if he was going to play “whine about the tank” games, we’d happily wave goodbye. He remarked about “how do you expect her to hold aggro?” and I very pointedly said “by the DPS watching their own aggro, and throttling as necessary.” Let me point out, she hadn’t lost aggro to me, and I’m constantly struggling with threat management, so she couldn’t be doing too bad.

I finished up by observing that DPS are a dime a dozen, at which point, he shut up, and I pointed out to Innarra that the trick was to get the Anub turned around, so he couldn’t pound us, and then when he submerged, run for the gate to pick up the adds. She’d missed that the first time, having issues with her camera, but second time around, she snagged them flawlessly, and we had no real problem downing Anub.

After that, we grabbed Booters, and Mysticdemon, and ran a normal, getting Old Kingdoms. It went well. A few deaths here and there, but we made it through fairly easily. After that, we decided to take them down to Upper Blackrock Spire and get the Jenkins title for those who didn’t have it. That turned into a clear of UBRS, and LBRS. Then we took a break, hoping to get on later and do something, but it was not to be… real life finally caught up. Still, it was a good day, and I’m looking forward to getting more of the guildies into the fun.

Another Monday Morning

So,  Love is In The Air ended, the Lunar Festival continued. WoW-wise, it wasn’t precisely an exciting weekend, but it had it’s moments. Outside of WoW, it was one of those daddy weekends. My daughter started her softball season. She went ten-for-ten in the league hit-a-thon, raising $200, to take second overall. The girl who took first place was the daughter of one of the coaches, who got his checkbook out of the glovebox of his Hummer, and wrote a $400 dollar check. The “daddy moment” came when a bunch of the girls were booing the winner because of this, and my daughter told them to lay off, it wasn’t the girl who wrote the check, then trotted out and high-fived the winner.

Meanwhile, back on WoW, I got my Elder title,  with Kalyon‘s and  Zarchius‘ help on the Omen fight, as well as a couple of the dungeon elders. Probably the most exciting thing, however, was Saturday night. I’ve talked about our guild before. We’re about as casual as they come, and we’ve been smacked with pug-crap a few times, leaving us very shy about pugging, and unfortunately, until recently, we were short a tank. Our pally tanked with his DK over on Thunderlord for a long time, on a laptop that was giving him a consistent framerate down around 3. Any wonder he burned out on tanking? Eventually, my son got his DK up, and started tanking for us, but he isn’t on as much as we’d like. With 3.3 coming out, Nick led the way into pug-a-geddon, and I timidly followed. The other members have been slowly following. Now that my gear is up to a level that I pretty much feel like I’m not going to embarrass myself in most content, I’ve been going back, and trying to organize something to get the others back in the swing of things, and convince our pally to try tanking. With some rotation advice from Hartbane over in Apathy, he’s been coming along nicely. It’s been awhile since we’ve done instances on a regular basis, so everyone was a bit rusty in their roles. This weekend, another guildie brought her high-70′s mage, Bootters, over from Thunderlord, and she joined us in Hall’s of Lightning, which she’s never finished before.

On Guilds, Human Beings, and Drama

Note: Just to put this in context, I am NOT a raider. I go on raids, do the best DPS I can at the target the raid leader indicates, or failing that, what my fellow mages are shooting at. I try to get out of the fire as fast as I can. That’s about the extent of it.

That said, I spent 6 years as a non-com in the military, and a good portion of the 13 years since dealing with and managing people. I’ve been to schools on leadership, management, project management, and have an avid interest in history. As any true historian will tell you, history is really nothing more than studying human nature, and patterns of humanity. I spent years living in close confines with other people for months at a time, and I came out of it without any lasting physical damage. Yes, I tease, I play, I bullshit, but in this, I am absolutely serious. When it comes to dealing with groups of people, I know just a bit what I’m talking about.

I don’t think anyone in any MMO, can hear the word “Guild”, and not have the word “drama” flash through their head. It’s the nature of the beast. In dealing with a guild, you are dealing with a collective of human beings, of varying intelligence, patience, generosity, etc. etc. etc. Insert trait here. Believe it or not, it all matters, because the variance in different traits creates differences. Like two pieces of metal that are supposed to mesh smoothly, differences create friction.

Understand, you cannot have a guild without drama. It involves human beings, and human beings thrive on a certain amount of drama. Some like to observe it, some like to be in the middle of it. The trick is to catch the drama early, or failing that, have mechanisms in place that prevent you from personally having to make decisions in crisis. Ideally, a GM should not have to “make a tough decision.” The rules of the guild should already be clear, and in place, and the proper response already outlined. Don’t make the mistake of thinking your dealing with adults. You are dealing with human beings, and they react to the same thing in many different ways, some of which will seem absolutely childish to you or I. The average WoW player will tell you “I pay my WoW bill, I’ll play how I like!” That’s fine. Just do it within the rules of the guild.

A Bright Spot

Every since 3.3 went live, the blogsphere has been rampant with posts talking about the various problems with random heroics. One of the problems that we talk about is simply a new spin on an old theme – that phenomenon known as the Swollen Headed Assclown. We’ve all seen it: The arrogant cock monkey that thinks since his guild carried his ass through high level content, and got his sorry incompetent ass geared that he is something 733t.  You can recognize this pseudo-sentient waste of precious natural resources like air, water, and bandwidth by their familiar cry of “what’s your gear score?”.

However, what you don’t often hear about – and should more! – is the opposite extreme: the patient, encouraging, nay nurturing sort of player that besides obviously remembering where they came from, is just a genuinely good human being, and team member. I’ve made it clear here that I will call out the asshats, but I’ve sworn to to use my powers for good, and that includes recognizing  the good with the bad.

I mentioned in my last two posts a healer that impressed me by their attitude, not just their skill. She deserves a post to herself. We were playing around Friday night, my son Nick tanking, Karius and Lore from Apathy, and myself, DPSing. We popped a random, and found ourselves in Pit of Saron. The healer that we picked up bore the memorable moniker of Gracemoose.

Edit: Note that I’ve since confirmed that the player is male. The character was female, that’s why I wrote “she”. Doesn’t matter. Still pure awesome.

As we got to the first uphill, Grace remarked “I’ve never tanked this before, it should be interesting.” I thought at the time, she just mispoke, but I soon realized she recognized the problems Nick was going to have. Face it, three ICC-10+ geared Arcane mages, we were putting out pretty serious DPS. After the first wipe on the hill, she said “Hey, DPS… give Nick a few seconds to lock down aggro, ‘k”? I immediately whispered, thanking her, and mentioned that Nick was my boy. She just smiled and said “Cool!”.

Nick had a bit of trouble getting the hang of drag-tanking at the Gauntlet, as he’d never tanked that section before. She explained it to him – even as we were getting ready to – and once again, I just shook my head. She wasn’t giving orders, or lecturing… just doing her best to help a still-learning player get better. No finger-pointing, no accusations. I was chuckling to myself, because she sounded almost motherly. I was enjoying the instance, and enjoying seeing my son learn, but most of all, I was enjoying having an obviously experienced player, who knew none of us from Adam, just being so damned nice!

Her healing was great. The times we wiped, no healer was going to heal us through. But no level of competent healing would have outshone her attitude. I’ve mentioned it before, and I’ll say it again: I will pay for her server transfer to Winterhoof! That’s the type of player that I want to play with again!