A Short Addendum

I didn't get a chance to pull out any LOTRO screenshots because they're on the old PC, but I got on this afternoon and dicovered two things: the band on Gladden-US still plays at 5 PM EST on Fridays, and damn, I've missed them.

Nice!!

What I Did on my Fall Vacation

Once in a while I get the urge to post some pics that I screenshot here and there. Not because of any real reason, but just because.

And I do get around:

From isometric RPGs:

Tyranny from Obsidian Studios.
A bit of a cult classic.

To Old Time wargames:

A blast from the past: Medieval: Total War.

To other MMOs:

 

Ah, it's always a good day on Balmorra
when I pull the Old Man out of the garage.

 

Neverwinter. I swear, I login after a long
absence and I find myself surrounded by Dragonborn.

And under the heading of "WTF?"
There's this going on in Star Trek Online.

I can tell you that having seen people cosplaying as Next Gen Starfleet at a Star Trek convention (circa early-90s), those Starfleet outfits are very unforgiving in terms of fit. But if you've the fit and figure for it, the uniforms flatter your form to no end. 

***

Of course, the game of choice these days is WoW Classic, and that's where most of my screenshots lie....

A beautiful shot of the moon while
I was crossing The Barrens.

And just because the statue is of a Kaldorei
doesn't mean that Neve wasn't inspired by it.

And if you noticed, Neve finally got enough
gold to afford a mount. So, she paid a visit to
Eversong Forest to check out some striders.

Before that, this was Neve's life.

Well, when she wasn't playing messenger
for Sylvanas to Thrall.

And it's not like Brig has been suffering from a lack of use, as you can tell here:

Dancing bears providing our pre-Tidewalker
entertainment.

And she does have some snarky commentary:

Brig: "If you're a blacksmith, I am Mickey Mouse!!!"

And surprise surprise, Illidan's Kryptonite
is hidden away by Akama.

Another Thankless Task

I guess it was on the periphery of my vision, but Wilhelm jogged my memory that Blizz is creating a WoW Community Council to try to improve the game.

 

They're pretty serious putting this out,
but not so serious that they had Thrall or Jaina announce it.

 

Well, good luck with that. It would be nice to join the council, because I'm definitely not in the raider camp even though I raid, but I seriously don't have the time to do so.

But hey, I see they need transmog enthusiasts, so I would love to nominate Kamalia of Kamalia et Alia for that position!!

Sleeping With the Enemy*

It would be nice to have some stability from time to time.

Oh, I'm not talking about personal stability, as I'm pretty sure things are going okay for the moment in real life, but rather in MMO life.

While the scenery may only change for the lead dog in a dogsled team (like I referenced a few posts ago), it would be nice if the raid composition was stable for a couple of weeks.

Our progression raid is a once per week raid, and that's by design from the beginning. Not everybody can commit to a progression raid multiple days per week, and to be honest a lot of our raid team is perfectly happy committing to only one day per week. Still, that doesn't make it easy when we have multiple people on the raid team wanting us to switch to a multiple day progression raid. 

Oh, and one of the people who either want us to go to two days or just stay with SSC, farming it week in and week out? She's one of the raid leads for the OTHER progression team that does raid twice a week.

So yeah, there's some conflict there. 

***

I was originally going to post this mid week last week, but ironically enough some of the conflict worked out in the end, as a few people split for 2 day progression raids from other guilds while the rest remained with our raid team.*8 While that means we have to acquire a few more people for our raid team, at least those who decided we weren't doing things fast enough (or whatever) have moved on and are no longer a drag on the raid team. Sure, several of them were really good raiders, but at this point I'd rather have stability than precision. I personally am happy we only raid progression once per week, because that gives me the time and space to back off when need be. And I suspect we'd lose even more people than we did just now if we really DID go to two nights per week of progression raiding.

But such is progression raiding life.

***

Still, I was disappointed when our raid's lead team felt pressure from the other raid's leadership about expanding our raid nights. If there was any reason for us to believe that our raid is perceived as the "second string" or the "farm team", it was then. And you know what? I don't care what they think. They're not downing Kael'Thas or Vashj, so it's not like they've left us in the dust. And the people on our team that aren't very good raiders? They've gradually fallen by the wayside, so we don't have issues like that.

We're good at what we do and we're moving at our pace.

***

The Friday night Karazhan run? Well, when the raid lead got back from vacation, she pulled me aside and let me know that she didn't want to keep that raid going. (Burnout, you know.) She said that if I wanted to keep it going, she was happy giving me the reins. I was flattered by her trust in me, and I accepted managing that Friday raid.

It wasn't a big deal, I figured, since we had two other Kara raids: one on Wednesday and one that hits only a few bosses (for BiS gear) on Saturday.

Well..... It looks like we hit a wall on our Kara runs. 

The Wednesday run decided to bow out first, and then the Saturday run bailed as well.*** So mine is suddenly the only Kara run that's running consistently. 

(No pressure. None at all.)

However, the other progression raid's lead team decided to throw a Kara run for yesterday (Sunday), which more than one person raised their eyebrows over. "I don't get it," one person whispered me the other day. "There were already 3 Kara raids, why not fill up one of them?"

"No idea," I replied, but to be fair I have my suspicions. After all, I'm on the "other" raid lead team, and am arguably based on experience the least likely to actually lead a raid. I also am managing this Kara raid very informally: if you need gear and it drops, roll MS/OS. No biggie. The other progression raid, however, uses Loot Council to distribute loot, so my laissez faire attitude would run headfirst into a "who needs/deserves it more" mentality. Finally, there isn't a Kara raid specifically from the "other" raid lead team, so making their own fits the bill.

I'm not sure if this was just a one-off, but we'll see. I get where people are burned out, and I understand where Friday doesn't work for everyone, but I suspect that there's some rivalry mentality at play as well. Which annoys me to no end.

*Yes, the song from Roger Hodgson of Supertramp's first solo album. I loved his solo debut, In the Eye of the Storm (1984), but what also sealed the deal for me was that he played almost all the instruments in the album. I knew Prince had done it, but Roger? No, that was news to me.

**Yes, the other raid lead team members who are on our raid (playing alts) left for other progression raids. We weren't surprised.

***The Saturday run seems to have revived as one person needs a BiS weapon out of Kara, and she's singlehandedly keeping it going. Once she gets that weapon, however, she'll likely kill that raid off.

EtA: fixed the exact timing on when I reference the "lead dog" quip.

The Maelstrom is Churning

Well, that was fast.

Blizzard Delays Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2

Well, another reason why BlizzCon was cancelled, I suppose. There's nothing to announce. Oh, and more news on the Blizzard management front:

Jen Oneal is Stepping Down from Blizzard 

It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion. At this rate I could be a manager for Blizzard and have a longer shelf life.

This isn't a visualization of the state of
Blizzard. Honest.

Alas, BlizzCon...

Under the heading of "no surprise", Activision Blizzard announced the other day that there will be no BlizzCon in 2022.

The suits apparently need to spend time on how to reimagine BlizzCon and make it a more inclusive event, but aside from what the press release says I'd be mildly surprised if we ever see another BlizzCon again. Part of BlizzCon is a celebration of Blizzard's output, part of it is about Blizzard patting itself on the back, and part of it is for the fans of Blizzard's games. But when a massive misreading of the fanbase ("Do you not have phones?") or controversy (Google "Blitzchung and Hong Kong") are what is remembered from 2 of the last 3 BlizzCons, I find it hard to believe that Activision Blizzard is going to set themselves up for more (and well deserved) controversy with the ongoing lawsuits and corporate culture problems.

And to be fair, the company has a lot more problems than just "how do we make BlizzCon work?" If nothing else, the Activision side of things --or the corporate bean counters-- will likely try to kill off BlizzCon as "a waste of money". Because that's what they do.

Brig's Big Day*

People know the old joke about how in dog sledding the scenery only changes for the lead dog, right? The impression is that for the other dogs all they see is another dog's butt (plus tail), so only the lead dog sees where they're going.

And to be fair, that impression isn't a wrong one.

When you've got one job in a raid, it's easy to forget there's a lot of other work out there for people to handle. Likewise if you're just a cog in the raider machine, you can forget the "You had ONE job!" nature of being a "regular" raider.

But when the raid lead goes on vacation? Well, I suppose you can just stop the raid for a couple of weeks if it's not a progression raid, but a progression run doesn't simply go on hiatus for a couple of weeks. Or, if you're me, you simply don't stop running Kara for two weeks.

So I accepted the challenge of being raid lead and the sole leader for our Karazhan runs.

***

It has been.... interesting.

I mean, I know the fights**; we have 7-8 regulars on a week in and week out basis, and I still run my bookie routine for Opera. So the technicalities are down --with the exception of setting Master Looter, which for some reason I continue to screw up-- but it's the intangibles that I have issues with.

You know, making sure there's the right amount of chemistry in the raid, or me, Mister Nice Guy, having to be the bad guy and tell people they didn't make the raid because they signed up too late. Or they got bumped because we needed heals or a tank. 

My nervousness of being up front, leading, has evaporated. I know these people and they know me. They believe in me, and they actually freaking defer to me when a decision needs to be made. When the hell does THAT ever happen?

Anyhoo, it does happen, and I'm feeling better and better about this. I can be a raid leader. I can figure this out. I may not figure out everything about an individual raid, like BWL or Naxx, but I know enough that I can work my way through this. And given that nobody is going to ask me to run SSC anytime soon, I've got this.

***

Normally I'd be finished with this post, but I was on Neve the other day, having Hearthed back to Tarren Mill, and I was checking out gear when I got poked by my oldest about how Neve looked on screen. "You should screenshot this," she said. 

"Hmm?" I asked, closing my bags.

Then I noticed how the firelight caught in her staff and her clothing.

And those eyes. Light, the eyes.

It's like the Map Room in Uldaman:
the light has to be captured 'just so'....

Sometimes, the serendipity smacks you in the face with a clue by four.

 

 

*That was how the player who ran the raid logs called our first Kara run with me in charge.

**Except Netherspite, but I have plenty of regulars who know who to put in which beam, so I'm fine.