The Argent Tournament was interesting. My priest’s dual spec was fun. Playing alongside my wife was fun.

I actually blocked out some time last night to take an offer up from a friend regarding running the Tournament of Champions. I was looking forward to it.

Of course, it ended up being patch day, and the servers were shot, yielding an infinite response after every time I tried to log in:

Waited a half hour, tried again, then another half hour, then another. Gave up.

What really struck me about this was that there was no official note from Blizzard about why it happened. No window on the login screen acknowledging the problem, no details on what the problem was or the progress on it. Nothing on the official website, either. I found an article on WoW Insider with details.

What a weird way to learn about the status of a game where you pay for every minute of service. Five years in and a patch still wholly kills their servers for a day.

Evidently it got fixed after I went to bed for the evening. When I tried to log on this morning, my free week was over. The error message after your time is up helpfully reminds you to go purchase more time to play. Time, like yesterday?

Same issues. WoW is a great feast, with tons of leftovers. It’s just a poor snack.

My wife and I will probably check out Cataclysm. Given this handy reminder of uptime and login problems, we’ll pass on the launch celebration, though.

Back to Hibernation is from Groups of Words.

• If, If, Wait, Wait
• The Offseason
• Rebirth
• “No, it’s totally healthy.”
• When to post?

1. miss me
2. would like me to come back to participate in WoW’s five year anniversary

They did this by offering a 7-day free revisiting period so that I could see all the new fun they’ve added. Something about Onyxia being dual spec or something?

My wife and I often talk about returning to WoW. Our second daughter is beyond the six-month mark, and we almost somewhat have some time at night.

Returning sounds awfully tempting, but we decided that it was probably not the best idea. Still so much to do apart from WoW: parenting, career, other hobbies, friends, exercise, other family stuff.

But then she walked by when I had the email open.

“Is that an Onyxia whelpling minipet?”

“Yeah.”

“Ohhhh, well it’s a good thing that I didn’t get an email, too.” Then she laughed nervously.

Right, I mean lucky for us that they didn’t extend the free week to her as well. We wouldn’t play apart, so if they had offered… oh wait, there’s her email too.

Well.

I mean, free minipet, right?

It’s only one week, right?

Rebirth is from Groups of Words.

• Commenting is now wide open
• Raiding vs Parenting
• Minipets are joy
• When to post?
• Feedburner is live

We originally got into WoW because I had two computers (I’m a PC tinkerer), and we didn’t have a lot of money. World of Warcraft, if you play it a decent amount and already have the computers, is a cost-effective hobby. $300/year for two people is great when you’re playing almost every day.

But what happens when the parameters of your life change? How about logging on once a week? No raiding, instancing, or remaining competitive at pvp. We couldn’t put the time together to finish a seasonal event before it ended. In such cases, the cost/value ratio comes out differently, and in our case, unfavorably.

We still love WoW. In fact, if we hadn’t decided to become parents, we’d be playing tonight. My wife got teary-eyed during our conversation on whether to cancel or not. We’ve spent a lot of time playing this game together, had a lot of fun, and made real friends. I’ve learned so much about leadership from this game that I can’t even begin to describe it. Participating in this experience has changed us, and we’re going to miss it.

However, times change. I feel like part of the struggle of being a healthy person is letting go of what has passed and putting your attention into what is happening now. Right now, my wife is in her last trimester, and we have a little firecracker running around our apartment. For us, it’s just not the right time for a hobby like WoW.

So, our WoW chapter has come to an end.

(…for now. Blizzard doesn’t delete characters, after all.)

Times Change is from Groups of Words.

• Child’s Play can make you awesome
• Rebirth
• Happy New Year and a New Design
• WoW and me
• When to post?

it won’t be quite as easy to get deadly items via emblems of conquest as hateful items currently are via emblems of valor

Well, that’s interesting. So what have we learned?

First, unlike some well-meaning folk have recently advised, don’t horde your tokens. Hey, I guessed wrong. It happens.

Emblems are intended for that level of content, and there likely won’t be new rewards trickling down. I actually like this system better; raiding Naxx every week won’t be “mandatory” the way that raiding Kara was.

So, from this one sentence, we can derive that there will be an Emblem for each tier of content:

• Heroic/Naxx10 : Emblem of Heroism
• Naxx25/Ulduar10 : Emblem of Valor
• Ulduar25/ThirdWrathRaid10 : Emblem of Conquest
• ThirdWrathRaid25/FourthWrathRaid10: Emblem of Zomgepics
• and so on

Thus maintaining the steady progression of both 10 and 25-man raiding, and also sticking with their stated design objective that managing twenty-five players in a raid should yield higher rewards than managing ten.

This also eliminates any save/spend strategy regarding emblems, which is probably for the best anyway. If you see something you like at that tier, grab it.

Wrath Emblem Design Revealed is from Groups of Words.

• Emblem Strategy for the Super-Casual
• There are Many Ways to Win
• The Downside of Endgame Guilds
• Historicity and WoW
• Raid Sizes and Design Inertia

However, it kills me to delete text, so I’ll leave it here anyway. Also as a reminder to myself that design is opaque.

Only raid or instance once a week? Wondering what to do with those 25 or 30 emblems you’ve finally accumulated? Like real-life money, don’t let those shiny tokens burn a hole in your pocket.

“But, but, but how can I wait? Zomgepics!”

I know, I know. The siren call of zomgepics beckon us all.

The emblem gear will (in all likelihood) be refreshed when a higher tier of content comes out, just like the Badge of Justice system did in the Burning Crusade. This means that your Emblems will (in all likelihood) appreciate in value.

The item level (or ilevel) is the budget of goodies that roughly determines the strength of an item. In general, you’re going to be better at what you want to do if you have an item with a higher item level.

Right now (Feb 2009), the ilevel of the items you can buy with Emblems of Heroism are the same ilevel as those obtained from the final boss of a heroic instance or a Naxx10 raid, which is likely where you got the token in the first place. Basically, you’re buying entry-level raid gear that can be gotten through the diligent running of heroics and entry-level raids. Good deal.

So why wait?

Well, I’m assuming two things:

1. You’re in late-Wrath quest gear and heroic instance blues, with perhaps a couple of pvp and raid/heroic/crafted epics mixed in.
2. You aren’t gaining Emblems at a massive rate.

For the most part, the difference between your current blues and those introductory epics is not game changing… not with just one item. Upgrading all of them? Sure, that’s a big difference. But you’re not playing frequently enough to upgrade all of them. You’re looking for the one item that you’re spending your hard-saved tokens on to give you a notable change.

When the next level of content arrives, there will be new items for sale at the Emblem vendor. Those items will be the same ilevel as the new raid content. And guess what? Your Emblems, the ones you’re saving right now, will still be accepted there.

So why not wait until that day? Sure, it means passing on current Emblem gear. But if you can wait until then, you’ll have gone from a blue item to a zomgepic Ulduar-level item with the same currency you have now. That’s a notable change.

So when I look at my (humble) collection of Emblems, I don’t see one Naxx10 piece of gear right now, I see an as-yet-unreleased Ulduar-level item in the future.

(Of course, all of this is predicated on the Emblem vendors getting stock of better items, which is how it worked in TBC. I’ve read nothing to suggest that it won’t work this way in Wrath, as well.)

Emblem Strategy for the Super-Casual is from Groups of Words.

• Wrath Emblem Design Revealed
• Historicity and WoW
• Where PvP Gear Often Helps
• There are Many Ways to Win
• Geeky Game Design and Automated Character Audits

Parent freedom time! However, said parents are absolutely exhausted. Need to do something before sleep, though. We’re not parent-bots.

“Hey, you know what would be great?”

“No, what’s that?”

“Want to do some dailies? Just to relax for a few minutes. Get you closer to that rep sword.”

“That sounds good!”

Ok then! Let’s log on for fifteen minutes or so and do some dailies.

Position in queue: 429
Estimated time: Calculating...

The calculated time ended up being twenty-four minutes.

Back in the days when we were sitting down for a three or four hour block, a twenty-four-minute delay was just a minor irritation. But now, we’re (trying to) log on for a half-hour or even ten-minute session. A twenty-four minute wait? It’s the whole thing.

This got me thinking.

Don’t get me wrong–I appreciate Blizzard reaching out to us casuals with dailies, shorter instances, and easier raids. The system mechanics and content are the best version of WoW yet. All great fun, and I wish I had more time to play and enjoy this version of WoW.

I was just dropped from my server this morning (3:30am server time), and couldn’t log back on. I was fishing in Stormwind. The server was as empty it gets. No notice of server restarts or anything like it, just boot then hang at login screen. (Other WoW game servers were up.) Oh, they’ll probably have it worked out in what, fifteen minutes? An hour? I’ll be commuting to work by then. For me, it’s the same as being offline all day.

Raid instances are just performing poorly overall. A two-second lag when I try to heal someone? I just don’t have that time for this kind of experience anymore–I don’t have time to block out an evening and then have it be wasted for basic mechanical reasons. For all that people are arguing about class rebalances and whatnot, every spell I try to cast in a raid takes two seconds before it begins. (Imagine if they put that in the tooltip? “Time before cast begins: 2 seconds”)

I had time recently to go through a heroic that was new to my guild. The opportunity to learn new content with my friends, woohoo! But then an unannounced, three-hour server maintenance downtime in the middle of the instance. In the middle of Saturday afternoon.

The ability to log in and play a normal session at any time is more important than everything else put together.

I’m shocked as to what the day-to-day reality of playing WoW has become: rolling restarts, patches that break more than they fix, game-effecting lag, server crashes, a frequent event that kills game performance, and so on. It’s like we’re all playing a mythic version of WoW, hoping that things will get better.

My wife and I are hoping that they’ll get it all worked out; that the basic gameplay and performance will soon be more like it was before Wrath came out. But it’s been months now. The crush of the holidays is over, and yet basic game performance isn’t any better.

WoW has become the high-maintenance boyfriend or girlfriend. Yes, you can get enjoyment out of the relationship, but it takes so much more effort, time, and patience than it should. I can have fun if I can successfully log on. If the server stays up for the time that I play. Just wait for Wintergrasp to finish. Wait for Blizzard to fix raid performance and basic gameplay response time.

If, if. Wait, wait.

In fact, if I were going to describe the game experience to someone who was curious about WoW, I wouldn’t recommend it. I would say to hold off and see. I would say it currently sucks and that they’re trying to fix it.

And once I realize that the word sucks could be used to describe the game that we’re paying how much each month?

Well, there’s only one rational piece of advice for someone who is on the wrong side of a high-maintenance relationship, and my wife and I are thinking about it.

If, If, Wait, Wait is from Groups of Words.

• Secret Design of WoW PvE: Solo Difficulty vs Group Difficulty
• Secret Design of WoW PvE: Introduction, and a call for comments
• Maximum Performance Isn’t Always Maximum Fun
• Raiding vs Parenting
• One week with patch 2.4

1. Is the GE (Ghostcrawler era) of WoW better than the BGE?
2. Does Ghostcrawler do a good job?

I just wanted to post something quick in response. I’ve written about Ghostcrawler before, although I perhaps wasn’t as blunt as I could have been. So, I will speak more plainly now: Yes, and I can’t believe that we’re even talking about this.

Upsides of Ghostcrawler:

• The game itself is better since he joined. There are fewer broken talent trees. I don’t remember exactly when he came on, but are there any broken builds left? I mean, for the most part you can find a good build for your chosen tree, learn how to play it, and not completely suck, right? Is this all his doing? No. Is he the lead of systems design and are those basic systems are better? Yes.
• He communicates with a noticeable lack of bullshit. When people point out that some part of the game seems out of balance, the answer is anything from “Yes, we’re hotfixing that” to “Sorry, working as intended” to “I’ll go check that out”, with everything in between.
  Point me at another game company whose lead designer posts such open and thoughtful discussion about the goal of its game design, including frank admissions of shortcomings and parts that need improvement! I’ve never seen it. He’s not spending his limited time for customer communication bragging about his top-tier arena team. Does anyone really look back on those days with misted eyes?
• He’s putting on a game design clinic. The subject of my previous post regarding him. To review, here’s a recent example from today’s mmo-champion blue tracker, responding to a question about how talents and spells are designed (source):
  

  We have budgets for the power of individual spells and talents. We do not budget based on the total number of abilities available — some classes just have more than others.

  I would also call the budgets a guideline. You have to know when to change the numbers on something even if the budget suggests that will be overpowered or underpowered.

  To be metaphysical for a minute, you can’t define the universe with one gigantic equation. There are just too many variables. You can use simpler equations to attempt to describe small parts of things as long as you understand their limitations. A great deal of your success in WoW, perhaps even more in PvP than PvE, is your skill in using your abilities and that is a hard thing to model.

  By reading what he writes, you better understand not just WoW, but all large games. Is this groundbreaking, revelatory stuff? No. But it’s honest, and if you’re trying to figure out how this one piece fits into the system, then he has taken the time to explain it.

• He obviously cares deeply about the systemic improvement of the game system of WoW, the entire game, whether it’s leveling or questing or instancing or raiding or arena or battlegrounds. He posts a lot on every subject. He is in the details.
• He weathers a continuous torrent of unbelievable whining, and continues to do his job with good humor. I cannot emphasize this enough. The whiners of WoW are numerous and prolific. Some of my favorite bloggers and players are chronic whiners regarding their class. We all, I suspect, tune such noise out while looking for the useful signal, but it’s his job to actually sift through all that noise, every class, everywhere. And for the most part, he succeeds. I have no idea how he manages to do that without going the road of the other hands-on community managers who have been worn down in the past.
• I know this is a personal thing, but: he writes well.

Downsides to Ghostcrawler:

• None.
• Pardon me, there is this: Because he posts open game design, including admitting errors when they arise, the whiners now have more fodder with which to ply their trade. “Blizzard hates my favorite class!” Even this is useful, because I read that as “I don’t understand or don’t care about game design! I only care about my character!” and put that person into my skim-or-skip queue.

I’ll close with a rant.

When someone admits imperfection, a certain type of person will feebly scream with the goal of getting people behind their plight–via personal attacks, exaggerated despair, and so on–all of which is summed up in these gaming circles as QQ. The natural response to QQ is to be less forthcoming, and fill that space where honest talk used to be with something else. Because fighting through the QQ is not worth the effort, most of the time.

This tendency, when expanded beyond this little circle of game design, ultimately leads to the current and persistent sea of unbelievable bullshit that we wade through in all walks of life: media, politics, business, careers, and yes, even game design. If you enjoy consuming bullshit, continue with the QQ! However, if you do not, stop whining! Someone who speaks honestly isn’t a bad thing. Someone who speaks truth about the flaws in his work, and has the ability to solve the problem, and actually works to do so?

That person is awesome. In WoW, that person is Ghostcrawler. Haters, please stop whining.

Ghostcrawler is Awesome is from Groups of Words.

• Ghostcrawler is WoW Game Design Porn
• The Most Successful Loot Systems
• Secret Design of WoW PvE: Introduction, and a call for comments
• When to post?
• Happy Mother’s Day

Any system that involves large teams and limited loot (for example, PvE raiding in World of Warcraft) requires a system to sort that loot out. If your 25-person group takes down a raid boss, and that boss drops 4 items, how do you determine who gets those items? It takes time and effort to raid, and someone has to get gear before someone else.

There are many, many kinds of loot systems. However, all of the ones I’m aware of fall into three broad categories: earn and spend, higher authority, and random.

Earn/Spend

You earn something outside of the game through participation, which I’ll call guild juice. You spend your guild juice competitively on gear that drops in those raids, while your fellow raiders are doing their guild juice in the same way.

There are many, many kinds of Earn and Spend systems. You might have heard of DKP, which people commonly call points, and has dozens of implementations.

Pros:

• Good feeling of user control.
  You earn guild juice by participating in raids. Save and spend your juice as you like, according to your guild’s rules. If you decide that you want a piece of loot more than anyone else, then spend more juice than everyone else when you see it. If you don’t have enough juice, then earn more juice.
• Defined, public rule system.
  Conflicts can (theoretically) be resolved by pointing at your guild’s posted policy: “Listen, I’m sorry that you want to spend your juice on your alt, but we’ve got a rule for that right here.”
• Quick.
  Item is up, whisper me your juice bid. Done.

Cons:

• Can be a nightmare to administer. Addons usually come into play at some point, and these addons are typically perfect for the author but not for you.
• Selfish people will game the system.
  A firsthand example: When I became raid leader, I inherited a DKP point system. Members would not show up for raids on time, knowing that there was 20+ minutes of trash to clear before the first boss. I convinced the officers to put a small bonus for being at the instance 5 min early. Members then showed up 5 min early, yay! Then they went afk, boo. I know that this says a lot about the people I was raiding with, but my point is that there is no point system that cannot be gamed.
  Every time you reward behavior you want to see, someone will actually put effort into finding the point of least effort and disrupt your happy and healthy raid environment. Once this happens, it becomes harder to correct the behavior, because they can point at your guild’s posted policy, too. Which leads to fixing that particular weakness with a new rule. Which leads to new flaws that are exposed and abused. Which leads to another new rule, until you get a loot system that is twenty-odd pages long with people quoting “article 4, section b, paragraphs 3 and 5″ in their arguments and your healthy raid enviroment being gamed just as effectively. (Not that I’ve ever been down that road)
• These systems can be complicated.
  Earn/spend can feel simple but actually be the opposite. Some point systems end up only accurately described with macroeconomic terms. This means that you can have problems where the person doesn’t even understand what they’re doing is wrong.
  A firsthand example: I had to try to a group of well-meaning players why collusion in a points system is bad. I failed, as I couldn’t find a simple way to explain collusion. And all they wanted to do was pass loot to each other.

My favorite earn/spend system is Suicide Kings (otherwise known as spend-all DKP). Nice participant control, easy to administer, very little gaming possible.

Higher Authority

This is also known as Loot Council. The Higher Authority (HA) is one or more people who keep score in their head, and assign loot to members of the raid as it drops. The raid trusts that the HA gets the assignments correct.

Pros:

• When the Higher Authority gets it right, everything is right.
  A smart and attentive person knows better than any arbitrary set of rules what each person does to help a guild’s progress. As one GM told me, all that rules in an earn/spend system try to describe is what everyone already knows anyway, so why not dispense with the artificial rules and just go by judgement?
  The HA knows what the members are looking for, knows which egos need to be stroked and which ones are more selfless, know how to maintain the juggling act of rewards-versus-effort going indefinitely. When done well, everyone trusts that the HA will get the loot to the most deserving people, and be fair about it, and keep everyone motivated and on the right track. It’s perfect when it’s working well.
• Can Be Fastest.
  HA sees item, HA assigns item. No administration or bookkeeping. This is the most common case.

Cons:

• When the Higher Authority is wrong, it’s so wrong.
  Take everything I listed above, and then picture HA only getting it right 70% of the time, or blatantly favoring one group of people (officers, relatives, spouses) over everyone else. This is usually easy to see, and these raids/guilds fail quickly.
  More commonly, though, imagine that the HA gets everything 97% correct, but with one or two people consistently wrong, whether due to:
  • personal bias (“lol hunters”)
  • personality conflicts (“this person is so damn annoying”)
  • lack of understanding (“this person has the least overhealing, they are doing best”)

  In my experience, when a person feels that they’re on the outside of a HA’s wrong decision, there is nothing more aggravating and drama-inducing. Because the system is the HA, a problem with the system is a direct conflict with the HA. Hence, the higher drama multiplier.

• People can game the Higher Authority.
  How do you game a person? Social hacking. A certain kind of person (read: Guild Cancer) will shamelessly buddy up to the HA and try to ingratiate themselves just for this reason.
  A firsthand (offtopic but related) example: In my guild we have a rotating GM role. We have a guy who shamelessly buddied up to every GM for two years, through six GMs, wanting to be an officer. The seventh guild GM, he finally found a person who his shtick worked on, and voila he’s an officer. Hacked!
  The same kind of crap can happen to the HA:

  Guild Cancer says, “Hey HA, you want some help running an alt through an instance?“
  HA thinks, “Wow, I never knew that this person was so interested in helping others.”

  (For the record, despite calling such a person Guild Cancer, I try to be dispassionate about these kinds of things. In my opinion, being aware of such trends in people is part of being a leader.)

• Can Be Slowest.
  If the HA is a group of people, and those people disagree on where a piece of loot should go, the raid comes to a halt while the HA hashes it out. And as any raid leader will tell you, idle time kills raids.

So, how do you know if you have the right people running it? How does the HA know if they’re doing it right, with the correct balance of objective and correct? How does the HA maintain the trust necessary to keep this system going?

Again, that’s why guild leadership gets the big bucks.

Random

This is also known as Need/Greed. A piece of loot drops, everyone who’s interested in it executes some kind of random die roll, and the winner gets the loot. This is often the “default” loot system because it’s implemented with in-game tools. Virtually every pickup group uses Random.

Pros:

• Quick and easy.
  “X dropped. Roll.” Over and done.
• Absolutely no favoritism.
  Unless you are friends with probability, like I am. I’m kidding.

Cons:

• People don’t understand probability.
  Otherwise known as: “I lost again?!” I know that this is a broad and crass generalization, but some people are just ill-informed when it comes to luck, chance, fate, probability, whatever you want to call it. People don’t like what they don’t understand. Some percentage of people are just going to flip out when random means random. They won’t understand that it’s perfectly fair when someone wins twice, four times, six times in a row.
• Fair isn’t always the goal.
  When a person never sees their zomgepic drop, and then when it finally does, fails to win it. You can put on a seminar with the subject Probability Works and Why It’s Fair, but the answer you’re likely to get is “Whatever, I haven’t gotten loot in 30 raids, so I’m leaving this guild for that one, which doesn’t roll for loot. /gquit“
  People expect their contributions to add up, they expect some kind of score to be kept… whether they’re aware of it or not. This is why most guilds with a persistent raiding effort don’t use Random on the parts they consider to be important.
• Has a pickup feel to it, even within a guild run.
  In my experience, people treat Random loot with less consideration for fellow guildmates.
  A firsthand example: My guild finally did take down the PvE boss from PvP Wintergrasp. An item dropped that is a nice upgrade for someone who PvPs. A good friend of mine, who is usually generous to the point of being loot-averse, rolled on and won the item despite having a loathing for PvP. Meanwhile, there were several PvP enthusiasts for whom the item was a greatly desired upgrade. I asked him why he rolled, and he said, “It was a free roll.“
  When you offer something up for a free roll where people have to opt out, you’re going to see weird (undesired) behavior.

Final Thoughts

There are many combinations of the above three systems. Limiting who can roll is a mix of HA/Random. Spending accumulated points to influence a random die roll is EarnSpend/Random.

If you look at the pros/cons for each major component, they’re mirror images. Every upside has a corresponding downside. Rules and points means the (likely) possibility of people who manipulate rules. Trust in HA means the possibility of the HA letting someone down. Random is fair, but fair once isn’t fair always.

That’s why I said that there is no correct loot system. There is only correct enough for your guild, and the answer to that is determined by the leadership of your guild’s officers, the particular hills and valleys you’ve all encountered.

Overview of Loot Systems is from Groups of Words.

• The Most Successful Loot Systems
• Emblem Strategy for the Super-Casual
• There are Many Ways to Win
• The Downside of Endgame Guilds
• Officers should all have Tanks and Healers

Some stuff got moved around, but let me know if anything seems out of place.

Also, a new year is as good an excuse as any to offer gratitude, so:

Thanks very much to all the readers and fellow bloggers for following and commenting on my eclectic thoughts.

Each of you have a dynamic and attractive energy about you, don’t think that I didn’t notice.

(Not that I would stop writing if I had no readers, but I already get enough of that action with my fiction. *rimshot*)

Also: Happy New Year!

Happy New Year and a New Design is from Groups of Words.

• The Declarative Voice and Blogging
• When to post?
• Wrath of the L
• Wrath Quickies
• This Blog is Powered By…

If you’re not aware, it’s a series of machinima on warcraftmovies by Stoker. He has thirty films, and it’s the same format every time:

1. screenshots of hating-on-Stoker forums mixed with a starwarsy scroll of poorly spelled, self-mocking intro text
2. four to six minutes of absolute inanity that is so incredible that your brain hurts at the end
   

What is absolute inanity? Trying to describe How to Paladin is like trying to describe love or the color blue or a car crash, and so is doomed to fail. I can describe the components, though:

• video played back at double or maybe triple speed
• music sped up accordingly, the same two or three songs on a loop
• A male blood elf paladin running
• aoe’ing everything down when possible, preferably passively
• jumping like it’s the only way to move
• jumping repeatedly upon his fallen enemies
• spinning–whether it’s his character or a flying mount or something else, he just loves spinning and flying loops
• arenas/battlegrounds/raids/instances/boss fights/dailies… whatever the most recent content is
• dancing, oh the dancing
• bubblehearthing elevated to an artform
  

If you’re going to try him out (for example, episode XXIX), please don’t give in after the first minute. Something in your brain breaks at around three or four minutes, and the secrets of the universe are laid bare. Or maybe you just go a little insane. Either way works.

How to Paladin might not be for you. I mean, I enjoyed Skeletor and Gang, too, and as far as I know, I’m the only one. (SAG10 and 12 for the win)

He stopped updating after Sunwell, I was hoping he’d pick back up after Wrath dropped, but he’s still gone. I miss him. In the meantime, I jump on my fallen enemies relentlessly.

Is there a possible substitute for How to Paladin? I’m asking, even though I strongly suspect that the answer is no. I know that with inlaws visiting for the holiday, I need amusement, the more insane and harmless the better.

I Jump On My Fallen Enemies is from Groups of Words.

• If, If, Wait, Wait
• WQ: Alliance Skinning Tip
• Texan Sayings
• Times Change
• This Blog is Powered By…