Proudmoore Pride 6

World of Warcraft is a community-based game (this, I know, is a "duh" statement), and so a lot of its success has to do with the people that play it. For instance, I probably wouldn't play nearly as much if I didn't have the people I played with. It also mirrors our society and the things we find important, such as holidays like Winter Veil, Hallow's End, and that Love Fool one. Most of these things come from Blizzard to show that our characters have lives similar to our own, that even in a fantasy environment these things are still important to the life of the community and that, regardless of race or faction (and whatever differences we think we see), we still value the same ideals. World of Warcraft isn't as much a sandbox or as community-controlled as, say, Eve Online, but it does have its moments. For instance, June is Gay Pride Month, and what better way to celebrate it but to have a gay pride parade in World of Warcraft. This is a player-created holiday and the first time I'd ever heard of it.

It's called Proudmoore Pride, taking place on Proudmoore-US for both factions. When I read about it on wow.com I was floored. Although it is after the fact, here is the website if you care to take a look. It was for the entire player base on Proudmoore, hosted by Taint (Horde) and The Stonewall Family (Alliance). Horde characters met in Camp Turajo and Alliance in Theramore and they marched up to Crossroads to meet up, and then to Ratchet for the boat to Booty Bay for a night of dancing, flirting, and general merriment. Getting to the event was easy, with warlocks at each place summoning. Each guild had a sister guild for everyone coming with alts from other servers, which I joined on a tauren hunter I created for the event. She became a Tainter Tot.

The parade marched up to Crossroads, with a few different kinds of floats. There were guild that were represented in pink shirts and tabards, along with a bear mount float, a sparkle pony float, and a lumberjack float.

The Lumberjack one was funny, with tree druids and lots of plaid shirts. In Ratchet, it took a few boat rides to get everyone over to Booty Bay. I was there for one of the first ones, but waited behind to see more people. The Alliance were behind the Horde, and I was curious to see what they had. Truthfully, I wish I had stayed for more of the parade to see what floats the Alliance had, although I'm sure it'll be posted on the Pridemoore website soon enough.

All in all, the experience was amazing. The community was fantastic and it was very well planned, with a radio streaming dance music from the website and just this great collective of people celebrating the idea of just...loving who love and are proud of who they are. It's also a really impressive look at the World of Warcraft community as a whole and exactly what it means to the players. This is, regardless, a place where you can be exactly who you want to be, without limitations. There were no nay-sayers, just friendly players and a good time.

It makes me proud of be a WoW player. :D

The Return, along with a new UI

I've been around, doing mostly real life things, like finishing up school for the semester, doing seasonal work at Disney World, and starting my new internship at a ad agency. So, I went to log on today and discovered something really strange. My Blogger AND my Youtube accounts are both being moved over to associate with my Google account. So I had a helluva time getting back into this, so much so that I was contemplating just moving it and reposting everything somewhere else! Anyway, I'm here now.

Been working on Loremaster of Outland, did Zangarmarsh and Hellfire Peninsula yesterday. Working on Nagrand and something else today. Pretty standard stuff there.

A couple weeks ago I got fed up with my crazy old UI and started looking for something else. What encouraged me to do this was actually watching TankSpot's 10m Sindragosa strategy video with Mouse and he kept commenting how he really liked the girl's UI, which got me on the hunt to actually try to do it. With the help of Google, I actually found this addon pack at WoWInterface that contained everything you'd need to replicate Aliena's UI.

I spent about four hours just that night trying to make it look right, almost losing my WTF folder in the process. The next day weird shit wouldn't work. I couldn't get invited to groups, and my BGs wouldn't proc for me. I still can't Need/Greed/DE loot, which I just haven't had the energy to fix, although it looks great. There are a few things that need to be tidied up, like the Cooldowns v. DBM's warnings, all of which I will get to....eventually.

Why are images not working the way they did before? *sigh*

Loremaster

I've been quiet on the WoW front for the past couple weeks with all the final projects I'm working on for school. Not that I haven't, however, been playing WoW. In fact, I've been working on Loremaster of Eastern Kingdoms, crawling through the 700 quests. I'm currently sitting in the Grim Guzzler, waiting for my hearthstone to be up, with 675 quests down (not including those I have completed in my questlog). I got all the way to the door two rooms outside the end boss for BRD and realized I needed the key. I will be skipping the rest of these unless I absolutely have to. I have a few left for the Lower and Upper Spires, which will be for tomorrow. I hope to coerce Ith into helping me. He owes me.

I haven't been logging very much on this, although I've spent a lot of time in the Plaguelands, which is an area I really like for the story. Very dark and sad.

I'm not sure I can take anymore Blackrock Depths quests.

Random Screenshot: The First Day of Epic Gems

On another note, I think I broke my blog. I have the organization set up to have comments, tags, etc at the bottom, and no matter how hard I try or how many times I redo it, the blog won't change. Wtf.

Moral of this story: Don't fuck around with your blog's settings. You will break it.

Children's Week, Or Why You're Not Allowed to Adopt a Child of Your Own

I like the message behind World of Warcraft's Children's Week: show the orphans and refugees from war around Azeroth to inspire them and help them in their dreams to become great adventurers like you or their parents (who coincidentally died adventuring). So, you take your little orphan to all the things they want to see, a spooky lighthouse, the Dark Portal, Jaina Proudmoore..(What I truly think is precious is that when you get to your orphan's idol, they're usually too shy to ask for an autograph themselves. Really sweet.)

When I got little Dornaa in Shattrath, all I wanted was to keep her. She was so cute, she had sweet little curious things to say. Being a Draenei also made Mitter want to keep her all the more. She even began to question her life as an adventurer, and wonder if, perhaps, she too should settle down soon. But then, here is this little Draenei child, without a family. Rather than procreate, shouldn't Mitter adopt this little girl? And raise her to be a priest? Or a hunter? (Anything but a paladin, really.)

It turns out that as geared-out max-level characters, we're not equipped to handle the rigors of raising a child. Certain things, like eating a ton of sweet in front of them, is just poor manners, where as things like the Hard Knocks achievement, are downright dangerous and negligent. (Although, I happen to think that out of all the classes, a priest is probably the safest one to leave a child with, except for a shadow priest. That's just scary right there.) Were I one of the matrons, I wouldn't lend out one of my charges to a death knight, for instance. Sworn to the Alliance or not, you still worked for the Lich King for a time. You deal out plagues and diseases, not exactly the kind of environment I see fit for a child.

Overall, I think the achievements for this holiday are far easier than most, with the exception of School of Hard Knocks, the PVP one. It's also the one that questions Mitter's parental potential the most. In order to get School of Hard Knocks, you must:

1. Capture the flag in Eye of the Storm
2. Assault a flag in Arathi Basin
3. Assault a tower in Alterac Valley
4. Return fallen flag in Warsong Gulch.

I made the mistake of doing these on the first day. So, Eye of the Storm was by far the hardest. I always avoid assaulting/capturing in BGs, so I really don't know even where to turn most of this stuff in at. When EoS started, all of the Alliance booked it to the flag. One person would get it, and half of the Alliance team would loiter around the flag spawn until the Horde capped everything. I did this with Mouse and a couple other guildies. Mouse hates achievements, and he hated this one far more than the others. I actually can't believe I finally got it, during the third EoS.

Arathi was easy, just needed to be fast, which I am when doing these achievements, like my own personal Crusader Aura. I anticipated Warsong Gulch being hard, too, with half the team loitering around the Alliance flag spawn. A Horde rogue entered and NO ONE touched her. Kindly, she picked up and dropped the flag repeatedly. I hadn't even thought of it! So, I went over to Horde side, waved, and did the same. This is truly the funniest thing I've ever seen.

It took two tries in Alterac Valley, but I finally got it. :D

Saturday Raid

This is my little guild's raid group for ICC10. It's our only raid, once a week, so we have to really churn it out to get through bosses. Our group is made up of a lot of RL friends, although a couple we've met along the way. I'm so proud of how far this little guild has come. I don't ever want to raid with anyone else.

It raises the question about the difference between 25m and 10m raids. 10 mans always seem easier, more like an alt run, whereas 25 mans are where the "good" players are, the hardcore players, and the better loot. It might be considered by some to be ridiculous that I put up screenshots for a ten man group. I like ten mans more. Each person is 2-3x more important. I like the intimacy, particularly as a GM that likes to really know my guildmates and the people I raid with. (And I always feel like just a number in a 25man.) I don't lead raids, that's Mouse's job. Anything outside the raid is my responsibility, but when we zone in it's up to Mouse.

Recently, Blizzard posted this about Cataclysm's raiding change.

"The first of the refinements being made is that we're combining all raid sizes and difficulties into a single lockout. Unlike today, 10- and 25-player modes of a single raid will share the same lockout. You can defeat each raid boss once per week per character. In other words, if you wanted to do both a 10- and 25-person raid in a single week, you’d need to do so on two different characters. Normal versus Heroic mode will be chosen on a per-boss basis in Cataclysm raids, the same way it works in Icecrown Citadel. Obviously the raid lockout change doesn't apply in pure Icecrown terms though, as this change goes hand-in-hand with a few other changes to raid progression in Cataclysm.

We're designing and balancing raids so that the difficulty between 10- and 25-player versions of each difficulty will be as close as possible to each other as we can achieve. That closeness in difficulty also means that we'll have bosses dropping the same items in 10- and 25-player raids of each difficulty. They'll have the same name and same stats; they are in fact the exact same items. Choosing Heroic mode will drop a scaled-up version of those items. Our hope is that players will be able to associate bosses with their loot tables and even associate specific artwork with specific item names to a far greater extent than today."

 I...don't mind this. At all. In a way, I'm going to miss the option to do both raids each week. However, I want 10m groups to have access to the same gear. This will put better, more serious emphasis (I think and hope) on 10 mans.

I know a lot of people are a bit upset about this. What do you think?

Modern Marvels - Video Games: Behind the Fun

I found this documentary on Netflix a while back, but I never bothered to watch it until today. I guess I reached that level of boredom after finishing up Guarding Tess. Anyway, it was very long just, just a mere 50 minutes. It was like a very quick overview of the history of video games, nothing in depth. It only went up to 2000 so nothing was truly relevant. If it detailed how games are now, that would be a bit more interesting, particularly since games (and computers) have come so far.

I'd like to see, in an updated version, the show cover World of Warcraft and the Sims, at least. World of Warcraft is legendary in popularity. 

And the Sims I'd like to see just because the game engine is so cool. When I made Sims for my friends in the Sims 3, I tried to give them true to life personalities. So, when I put Mouse, Ith, and myself into a house and saw how they interacted, I was floored. The first thing Ith's Sim did was go and scare mine (he's like this in real life, taunting me the way a tank taunts a boss, etc.). When my Sim was bored, she paused and then thought, "I will go yell at Ith," and she did! It blew my mind.