Miscellaneous Thoughts on the New Year

One thing I dislike about getting back to work after a vacation is that the sheer volume of work awaiting you can be overwhelming.  And, like the polar vortex that brought Canadian weather to the Midwest*, my workload blew me over for several days.

I did, however, get a little bit of gaming in that didn't involve losing at Mario Kart or bricking 3-point shots in Wii Sports Resort.**

I spent one evening as Azshandra, loitering around Hellfire Peninsula to keep the Horde gankers away from the L60 toons.  I'd finished a game of Eye of the Storm and gotten up to get something to drink, and came back to find a Hunter assaulting Honor Hold.  A DK was keeping the Hunter busy, but the Hunter was skilled enough to keep the DK at arm's length.  I jumped into the fray, forcing the Hunter to retreat by air. Meanwhile, a Lock was bothering people at the Stadium, so a Worgen Hunter and I went over there and dealt with that threat.

"The guy isn't very skilled at PvP," I said in Gen Chat after we dispatched him.  "I've seen a single Demo Lock hold off 3-4 people in BGs."

"Yeah," the Worgen replied. "I don't think he feared us once."

"Well, maybe this will attract that Troll Hunter.  I want another crack at him."

"Pains me to say it," the DK added, "but I couldn't DPS him down."

I scouted around, including a foray into Thrallmar, but that Troll Hunter never came back.  (Good riddance.)

But still, I never used to have to worry about this sort of thing very much in a PvE game.  Occasionally there would be some asshat who would slice through a town and kill all the NPCs, but when the auto-leveling of guards to L90 was put in place in the Old World, that sort of thing disappeared.***  I guess it's migrated to Outland, where the lure of ganking new DKs is a powerful attraction.

***

In non-WoW news, I finally finished Makeb, just about catching me up to the current story.  Ironically enough, my Sith Sorcerer is the toon who made it to L55 (and the end of Makeb) first.  In some respects, the Sorcerer (with Lightning Spec) reminds me of my Rogue.  Oh, not with stealth, I'd have had to spec myself differently for that, but with the issues of constantly finding myself undergeared for fights toward the end of a questline.

When I had issues with the elites in the final questline for Makeb, I had to abandon the quest for a while and go run some flashpoints to gear myself up properly.  Then I was able to make some inroads on that last quest, until I met the final boss.

I suspect that a Sorcerer with the right companion would be able to solo the Hutt Boss, but I had Andronikos with me.  I didn't want to waste time gearing up a separate companion for this boss, so I ended up teaming up with a Sith Assassin and working through the boss that way.  Even though I'm specced Lightning (read:  glass cannon), I ended up spending a lot of my time during the fight healing.  The assassin dropped about 2/3 of the way through the fight, but I was able to battle rez him and heal him back up before we wiped.

That last boss fight on Makeb saw me do more healing than I've done in a long while.  I think I have to go back to some of the early instances that I ran with Tomakan as a Holy Spec Pally to match the amount of healing that I did.  Of course, that wasn't a good situation to be in given that I was specced DPS, so I guess you'd have to go back to Wrath-era WoW when I was still playing Quintalan (Ret Spec) to something that was an equivalent.

Still, courtesy of gear repair and a bit of luck, I survived another day.

Oh, and apparently my Sorcerer is married to Andronikos now.  Not sure what the other members of the Dark Council will say about that, but for now they're not saying much of anything.

***

I watched my oldest play LOTRO for a bit the other day and I got the urge to login to my old L16 toon there.  The only thing that's keeping me from doing it is the LOTRO interface.  I have issues reading the interface --and the map in particular-- and I don't want to end up with a headache over something pretty basic.

This is the one place where WoW and SWTOR have an advantage over LOTRO:  the ability to tweak the interface in a meaningful fashion and improve legibility.  WoW allows add-ons which completely revamp the entire interface, and SWTOR's interface adjustments do exactly what I want to improve legibility without sacrificing screen space.  Oh, and the coloring in WoW and SWTOR are much easier on my mumblety-mumble aged eyes.  I may not have color blindness, but I can only imagine the UI coloring in LOTRO playing hell with people who do.

Still, the LOTRO UI interface is better than that in Age of Conan, which often leaves me frustrated when I try to tweak it.

EtA:  Before anyone asks, I know that you can mod the UI in LOTRO.  However, the mods I've found a) keep the same text font, which still isn't the easiest thing for me to read, and b) the map mods don't really replace the current map with quest info into something I can more easily read.




*I've got a new respect for my Canadian friends who deal with -10F/23C temperatures on a regular basis.  Of course, having a home that's insulated for that weather helps too, which the homes in the Ohio Valley sadly aren't. I wonder if Mike Holmes does housecalls.

**If there's one thing that Wii Sports Resort has right with their simulation, it's that I can't shoot worth a damn in basketball, whether it be real life or in the game.

***I once sat, stealthed, on the entrance to Nijel's Point in Desolace and watched an L50 Troll Hunter slowly work their way up the path.  (See a pattern here?)  Once they got close enough, the guards aggroed to L90 and carved him up like he was a rib roast.  I'll confess I did the "/point  /laugh" at him.

What a way to start the new year

I wasn't planning on making this my first post of the year, but I see being an ass in video gamer space is reaching the level of interfering with emergency calls:

Hackers Harass League of Legends Livestreamer with DDOS Attacks

Calling 911 on somebody?  Really?  Just how old are these people, 10?

Alterac Valley: The Spirit of Christmas, Scrooge Style

The Lock was not pleased.  "No, dammit, that's the old strat," he snapped.  "The new strat is to rush everyone to Drek, cap the two towers nearby, and then kill Drek."

"Somebody had told the Horde, then, because they're ahead of us in getting our first two towers down," I quipped.  "If we want to win, we have to take them back."

"Didn't you hear me?"  The Lock demanded as we finished recapping Stonehearth and Icewing Bunkers.  "Everybody get down to Drek now!"

"F--- him," a Druid in the backcap team said aloud.  "We've got to get DB North and South back."

We recapped the two Dun Baldur bunkers --as well as the Aid Station-- and then everybody began the trek south.  Meanwhile, the 25+ people surrounding Drek began their attack, but kept wiping.

"What gives?" someone asked in BG chat.  "You have 8 healers there."

"We ALSO have 7 Horde in the base, asshole," the Lock replied.  "We need EVERYONE down here!"

Another half dozen or so of people abandoned their watch on Stonehearth and Icewing and ran south, just in time for the Horde to begin to cap those two bunkers.

I watched from my position at DB North as a dozen Horde pushed their way up north and began crossing the bridge.  There were only a few of us left to counter them, and not enough time to get to Stonehearth or Icewing before they were captured, ending the game on attrition.

The Lock kept up a running diatribe on how badly we sucked, and if we'd have just done what he wanted we'd have won anyway.  Regardless of whether he was right or not, changing the strategy by abandoning our position in the southern two bunkers meant that we absolutely HAD to burn down Drek within a few minutes or lose.

And given the title of this warm and fuzzy piece, you can probably guess the outcome.


EtA:  Somehow the first sentence got chopped off.

Courtesy of Cheezeburger

Okay, I laughed.  And yes, it does have MMO content.

An NSA/WoW Top Ten List

Apologies to David Letterman, but this is what you get when you have too much coffee too early in the morning.


Top Ten things people said when they heard the the NSA was spying on them in WoW:

10)  Well, that explains why the Alliance never has healers in a battleground.
9) I bet they were just checking out Goldshire for terrorists.
8) That explains the "Terrorist Hunter" guild name.
7) Can you transmog your gear into a "spy" outfit?
6) I bet they were planning on infiltrating SI:7 too.
5) Did they team up with Pat Robertson to investigate Warlocks for witchcraft?
4) They thought Tauren were a sleeper cell of the terrorist group Al-'Cow'da.
3) All those taxpayer dollars, and the U.S. still can't field a top raiding guild.
2) Ghostcrawler leaves and the NSA report is leaked.  Coincidence?

And the Number One thing people said when they heard the NSA was spying on them in WoW:

1) Were these the people behind all the crap in LFR after all?

For what its worth, Jon Stewart's The Daily Show has their own take on what they call NSA's World of Watchcraft:

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook

Because, you know, we gamers are hotbeds of subversive activity....

A new report from Gizmodo points out that NSA had infiltrated WoW (among other MMOs) back in 2008.

And you thought the worst thing about MMOs was the proliferation of bots and asshats.

Speaking of which, does that mean that the NSA is controlling the bots?  It would explain a lot, you know...