Jed's Corner of WoW Shenanigans

Classical beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 22:28:00 +0000

*Opens rusted shut door with difficulty*

Hello folks, its me, your favorite mage Jed! Now I know that it's been a minute or two since I wrote a blog post but lately I've had that itch that only blogging can scratch. First off let me apologize for not having written anything since...2015?! Well crap that is a lifetime ago. Since then my adorable baby girl has grown into an adorable four year old who still demands a TON of my time. I've also been streaming a crap load more and have made it to twitch affiliate. I know that y'all are super impressed by the streamer part more than the baby part. Well anyway that's enough of me and my story, lets go on with the whole blogging thingy!

*Replaces burned out light bulbs and clears off cobwebs*

There's an old saying "everything old is new again" and as I get older, it does seem to be proving itself truer and truer every year. Blizzard announced at Blizzcon 2017 that they were going to be bringing us World of Warcraft Vanilla in the near future and I got to tell you that there was not a single person in that hall that wasn't cheering their mind out. Fast forward to today and we are counting down the global launch of Classic Warcraft. What is Classic Warcraft?

Well imagine a beloved old television show that you grew up watching and eventually you stopped watching it because you grew out of its demographic or because you just didn't have time for it. You spent a lot of time and energy invested in that show and made tons of friends through your love of it and you miss it dearly. Now imagine that the show continued on after you stopped watching it. Eventually you go back and try to watch the new version of the show but it is a pale imitation of the show you have in your heart. Now pretend that you find out that you can watch the show digitally and that you can now watch the show that you grew up watching. That's Classic Warcraft in a convoluted and super unclear nutshell.

Classic Warcraft is essentially Vanilla WoW. With its level 60 cap, talent trees, no flying, horrible questing paths, terrible attunement chains, and atrocious ingame models. If you have a current active WoW subscription, you can play on the Classic servers FOR FREE! WoW has been out for 15 years now and in that time millions of people have come and gone through our hallowed digital halls. One thing that has remained the same though is that all new players have heard stories from older players about what life in WoW was like back in the day. Whether that day was in Legion, WoD, MoP, Cata, Wrath, BC, or Vanilla, the stories are all the same. Shit was tough and new players have it so easy.

Well let me tell you that y'all are a bunch of babies who don't know tough! I played on the beta servers and spent ALL MY MONEY(a hard earned 10 silver) on a stable slot as a warrior because I thought it would get me a mount. There were no warnings informing me that I was an idiot. There were no confirmation windows popping up that said "hey don't do this buddy." The game just took my money and laughed at me. That was what beta was like. No one knew anything about anything and we LIKED IT!

But I feel like I may have steered away from my point which was that most new players grew up ingame listening to these stories about the great yesteryear and wishing that they too could have experienced all of those wonders. With Classic Warcraft, players can experience a little bit of that magic for themselves. Whether it will be something that every loves or something that most people will play for an hour and walk away from, only time will tell.

Since the announcement there have been several beta test phases and stress tests. I sadly did not get into any of the betas so I had to sate my thirst for the olden days during the stress tests. What was it like you may be wondering? Well it was like I was in college once again playing a brand new mage. The first stress test was hella rough though because mobs took FOREVER to respawn so questing was a serious headache. The last stress test was a lot better though. Mobs were spawning regularly and the only challenge was in tagging the mobs before someone else did. Many groups were created to quest together since it was easier to have 5 people tapping mobs and giving everyone credit for kills.

Once I got through the initial zone(after a few hours) I hit the second zone humans experience, Westfall. Boy let me tell you that it was in this zone that I spent most of my time dead or dying. You see, I had gotten used to being a super awesome level capped frost mage with a ton of abilities and cool downs. But in Classic, I was a level 10 mage with 3 damage abilities and not a whole lot else. It was definitely a reality check that I was going to have to pull very carefully and more importantly that running away was definitely a good option.

So yeah Classic Warcraft is a thing. It goes live on August 27th and I know TONS of us are going to be excited for it. I have reserved names on Pagle-EST PVE server and plan on creating my guild there on day one, servers permitting lol. If you're interested in checking it out and want to play Alliance, you are more than welcome to play with me in my guild! We have a discord server and will definitely have a tabard! I'll be more than glad to invite all the cool kids to my discord server so we can all geek out.

Well that's it for now. I will try to make this whole blogging thing happen on a regular basis but honestly everyone who knows me knows that I'll probably come up with a million excuses as to why I haven't blogged lately lol. Are y'all excited about Classic? Will you try it out or pretend it doesn't exist? Let me know in the comments!

A decade of shenanigans

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 14:48:00 +0000

*taps mic*

Hello...is this thing still on? Crap it is! Uhmm...hi everyone. I bet you're all wondering where in the hell I have been this whole time! I mean my last post was back in January and since then this place has been deader than a bbq at the Firelands. Well I HAD planned to blog about stuff since than and honestly I did have things I wanted to write about but I didn't because something came up. What came up that could have kept me away from my loving and adoring audience? Well if you've been following me on Twitter, and let's face it most of you have not, you know that in February my wife and I adopted a beautiful baby girl. If you aren't on Twitter and didn't know what was going on, well now you do! I'm not gonna post pictures here because they are all over twitter and you can go there and look at them if you so desire.

Since February the baby has taken up most of my free time and man are babies tiring as hell! As the stay at home parent, I barely get time to do much of anything during the day because I have to give the baby all the attention she wants or she'll grow up to be a horrible person or something. : / Thankfully my wife is awesome and tries to be home on days that I would normally raid and she takes the baby off my hands during that time. But other than that my WoW time is so random and sporadic that I only have seven level capped characters so far! I know what you're thinking and I agree how slow of me!

So if I'm so busy with real life and such why am I even bothering to write a post now? Well if the title of this post didn't give you a hint, I have officially been playing World of Warcraft 10 years of this May! According to the WoW account history thing I entered in a 10 day trial code on May 15, 2005 and 10 days later I got my free month from buying the game. I can't believe that I've been playing WoW for 10 years. Hell I can't believe that I've been doing ANYTHING for 10 years. Life is just so crazy. 10 years ago when I started playing I was a senior in college and living in Florida. Now I'm a stay at home dad living in Chicago and honestly my life is sooooo much better than it was 10 years ago.

This also means that my guild(Avengers of Azeroth) turns 10 next month! Holy crap something I created has been around this long!! I honestly figured that we would have faded away and died a long the way but NOPE! We are still chugging along having a good time and doing things in and out of game. I've met so many guildees in person and even met my wife through the guild. My best man has been one of my guild officers since forever and he has visited the wife and I several times even though we live no where near each other.

Speaking of meeting guildees, I will once again be going to Blizzcon this year where I will hang out with whoever wants to hang out and buy me drinks! Several of my guildees are going as well so it'll be a mini guild party! Huzzah! All of the booze! Blizzcon is such a great time for me because I can meet up with all the people that I talk with on twitter and other social media. Also there is like Blizzard news and such to see and hear.

So yeah that's what I've been up to and why I haven't been around to write all sorts of crappy things for no one to read. I'll try to sneak away while the baby is asleep and maybe write something here and there but I make no promises. I have a reputation as a slacker to uphold after all! So like join my guild and follow me on twitter/instagram/and twitch to keep up with what I'm doing. Or just wait for me to remember to write something here. =D

From the Mage's mouth

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 16:26:00 +0000

Hello adoring audience, your normal writer Jed has been sidelined for numerous reasons that he has assured me are not made up or pathetic. He asked me to cover for him I've chosen to pretend that he isn't a complete slacker and have taken pity on him. So you get to enjoy my amazing writing. Who am I? Why I'm the amazing, outstanding, and oh so awesome Archmage Jedem!

You may recognize me from the image in the banner of this blog. Sadly that photo is from years ago when I was younger and slightly less experienced but as often happens to people, I've come a long way since then. Why these days at my disposal I have several weapons of mass destruc.... uhm pretend you didn't hear that and if the mages guild asks you, you have never heard that term before. Let's just say that I am even more awesome than I used to be. Why am I here writing this blog post instead of off adventuring in the past Draenor or saving some damsels from distress or drinking many wonderous alcoholic beverages? Well like I said, Jed is a slacker. He asked me to regale you folks with stories of my amazing adventures. That bum knows how to appeal to my one weakness, talking about my awesomeness.

So where do we begin? How about the latest adventure I had and trust me its a good one. I went back in TIME to another PLANET to save the Draenei AND all of the current inhabitants of Azeroth from being destroyed in another war with the Orcish Horde. I'm of course not talking about the current multi-race Horde that we all know and hate. I'm talking about the current Orc's parents who were in the orginal Horde! Apparently after we defeated the crybaby with daddy issues, Garrosh, he somehow broke free at his trial and managed to go back in time to Draenor before it became the Outlands that we all know and dislike today. Because he did that the timeline of Draenor split into a new timeline where the Orc Horde became known as the Iron Horde and they apparently realized drinking demon blood was bad and have decided to attack the current Azeroth through time portals. Confusing as all get out right?

Suffice it to say that I've been neck deep in dead Orcs, Ogres, and everything else that tried to kill me on Draenor. Now I barely liked the Outland when I went the first time and had to fight off everything trying to kill me and now that I've seen what it used to be before it all went kaput, I like the place even less! No wonder the Orcs were super angry and wanted to come to our planet back in the day, if I lived on a planet where EVERYTHING IS TRYING TO KILL YOU I'd want to leave too. There have been some cool things on Draenor though, I've gotten to kill a bunch of Orcs. Who doesn't love slaughtering Orcs? I've also run into some Draenei and for the most part they've been pretty cool.

Out of all the Draenei I've met I gotta say that Yrel is definitely my new favorite. Clearly she has a thing for me because it seemed like everywhere I was on Draenor, she magically appeared to "lend a hand." As if I'd need a hand killing Orcs! It was such a weak attempt to cover up for the fact that like every woman I've met, she has fallen for me. It happens to me all the time. Aysa Cloudsinger, Jaina Proudmoore, Katrana Prestor, and Brigitte Abbendis are just a few of the many lovely ladies that I've had chase after me. Although now that I think of it, the last two on that list did try to kill me but I just assumed that when I spurned their advances, they were a tad bit angry with me. Such is the life of Jedem the amazing. I can't even step foot in Silvermoon without huge numbers of Blood Elves mobbing me.

Anyway back to my Draenor adventures, most recently a group of friends and I decided to venture into the Highmaul area and see about punching some Ogres in the face. That Kargath guy was not happy when I tried to high five him. You'd think he'd have a better sense of humor but I guess when you live in fear of slicing off a body part when you go to blow your nose, you tend to not enjoy life as much.That Butcher guy was also not a barrel of laughs and no matter what he offers you to eat...just don't eat it. Trust me on that. That Tectus thing was kind of weird and he farted out red clouds at us which was both rude and horrifying. Don't even get me started on the Twin Ogron because those two were obsessed with fire and charging around after people. I guess they must not have a lot of friends because they kept trying to kill us. Go figure.

Oh and before I forget I had to get a group together and kill Ragnaros AGAIN! I swear this is the third time I've had to fight that guy! First I fought him like 9 years ago in the Molten Core when some dumb Dark Iron Dwarves summoned him and then I had to go into the Firelands 4 years ago because of that Deathwing deciding to make buddies with Rag. Now I had to go BACK INTO MOLTEN CORE! For some reason he decided to come back to his old stomping grounds and cause trouble but thankfully I was able to put him back into his place. It was weird being back there and seeing all the same crap I saw so long ago. Hopefully this time he stays dead and gone but realistically someone one in the future will decide that the world needs some more fiery destruction and they'll manage to summon Ragnaros again. At least I'm experienced at killing him or banishing him or whatever it is that happens each time I kill him.

So that's what I've been up to so far. As you can see, unlike that slacker Jed I've been very busy so far. He has no excuse for not keeping up with this so called blog. Lazy bum. He just reminded me that he is doing something called "streaming" and that you should all go subscribe, whatever that means. I honestly don't know why anyone even reads this "blog" but I guess people must get very bored. Well it was nice talking about myself and my adventures but I have to go save the world again. Until the next time that bum Jed needs help, I'll be off adventuring. /wave

Blizzcon prep

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Mon, 03 Nov 2014 19:02:00 +0000

Last year I wrote a Blizzcon post with all sorts of details about what I was planning on doing. I wrote it because it was my first Blizzcon and I wanted to make sure I had my plan set out so I could make sure that I didn't miss out on anything. Now that I've got one con under my belt, I think I've gotten the hang of it. There are a lot of people out there who are going for the first time and so I figured I should help them out a little with a list of things to do before or at the convention to fully enjoy it all.

So without further ado, here is my small list of tips for Blizzcon goers:

1) Wear comfortable shoes

Most of the time at Blizzcon you will either be standing in line or walking to different panels. Comfortable shoes are a must! If you decide to get new shoes for the con, break them in BEFORE you wear them to the convention! Last thing you need is to find out that your brand new shoes cause you pain in your feet at the convention when you have no other alternative.

2) Bring a charger

If you have a smartphone, you will find yourself using it a lot in the convention center. Whether its to check twitter/facebook/etc. to see where people are meeting up or to check the Blizzcon app to see where the next panel is going to be. You will find yourself going through your battery life rather quickly. There are plenty of phone chargers out there and you can get some good ones for a good price. Most have a usb plug so you can plug in whatever you want to charge whether its a smartphone/tablet/camera. No reason to have your phone go dead midway through you live tweeting something awesome.

3) Decide what you want to do outside of the convention

There are a TON of external Blizzcon events happening in the convention center and you should take a look at whats going on and decide what you want to do. Realistically you wont be able to hit up every single party but at the very least you can pick which ones you really want to go to. Hestiah wrote up this cool post with info about parties that you should all read. Obviously the coolest party is the one that I am sponsoring: The Twisted Nether Party! Blizzcon parties are a good time and you will meet up with plenty of cool people at them. You don't have to have a written schedule for what you want to do but knowing what parties are available to you before hand can help you make sure that you don't miss out on something that you wanted to do.

4) Photograph everything

With all the cool stuff to see, why on earth would you not take plenty of pictures? There will be so much going on that if you forget to take pictures, you may forget things that you saw. Also there may be friends back home that are living vicariously through you and want to see all the pictures you take! If you see people cosplaying, ask them if its ok to take their picture before you do so. It's a respect thing and you should respect the people who are cosplaying. Just because they are cosplaying doesn't mean that they want you to run over to them and put your hands all up on them for a picture. Ask them if they mind before you do so. Also if you plan on posting pictures to twitter/facebook/flickr be sure to ask people if they mind if you do so with their picture. Some people are very wary of pictures of what they look like getting online so be sure to get permission before posting them.

5) Respect people's space

There are a lot of people at Blizzcon and some of them you may know and want to run up to and hug the everliving crap out of them. Resist this urge. Well resist it unless they have specifically told you that it is ok to hug them. Some people are not ok with random unexpected contact and the last thing you want to do is leave a bad impression with someone because you didn't respect their personal space. If you know people going and you want to hug them when you see them, ask them before hand if it's ok. If you are not ok with hugs and such, tell people before hand so they can respect your personal space!

6) Enjoy yourself

There is a lot to see and do but honestly the most important thing is to have a good time. You spent the time/money to go to Blizzcon and damn it, you should have fun. If you are with a group of people and they all want to see one panel while you want to see another, tell them you'll meet up with them after the panels and go see what YOU want to see. There is no reason why you shouldn't do what you want to do and see what you want to see. If the crowd at one party is too much for you, go elsewhere! There are plenty of alternatives that you can pick and choose from so there is no reason for you to be miserable or unhappy.

7) Take time for yourself

If you are like me, you tend to need some time alone away from crowds to recharge your personal battery so you can do more things. There is no shame in take a break from the crowds and finding a little quiet for yourself. If you don't take a little break, you may end up straining yourself and pushing yourself past your breaking point. This can lead to not enjoying the convention. Don't let that happen to you! I hit up the convention and before going out to dinner or a party I would take a little bit of time in my hotel room to unwind from all the crowds and noise. This allowed me to go to the parties/dinners/etc and not feel like all I wanted to do was get out of there and go back to my room.

8) Take advantage of the virtual pass

Last year they gave all Blizzcon attendees a free virtual pass and I believe its the same again this year. You don't have to feel like you HAVE to go to every panel because now you can go to a handful and then watch the rest through the virtual pass whenever you want! You'll have access to it for a month after the con I believe so you can watch every panel they have! Missed part of a panel because you had to go pee really badly? No big deal you can watch it later!

9) Eat and keep hydrated

With all the walking you'll be doing, it'd be silly to not recharge your body with food and drink! The convention center has plenty of food vendors inside with many different menu options so chances are that you'll find something you'll want to eat. If you are going to be going to the parties and drinking all the booze, make sure you drink plenty of water before bed and buy a water bottle for the next morning's panels. Nothing worse than not being able to pay attention to important game information during a Q&A panel because you're horribly hung over!

So that's my list of tips for first time Blizzcon goers! I hope y'all enjoyed it and if you're going to Blizzcon I hope to see you there. I will gladly accept hugs from people provided that they tell me who they are before they do so. Also if you're going I fully expect everyone to come hang out at the Twisted Nether Party, it really is a good time and they'll have a BAR! ALL THE BOOZE FOR THE BOOZE GOD!

Gotta heirloom'em all

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Sun, 26 Oct 2014 20:48:00 +0000

They should have renamed the 6.0 patch to the Heirloom Patch. I say this because since the patch went live I've done nothing but try and get heirlooms from Garrosh Kills on all my characters. Some I've gotten through groups I've put together and some through awesome people on twitter organizing groups. I've yet to get one through the new group finder because sadly most of my groups fall apart after one wipe or because people think they can overpower mechanics and as we all know...that rarely works. At least I can cry myself to sleep holding the heirlooms I have.

So a lot of heirlooms, a lot of changes to classes, and a Halloween holiday event. Blizzard has definitely provided us with a lot of content in game to keep us busy until the expansion release date which is almost upon us. Throw Blizzcon into the mix and suddenly October has been a very busy month for most of us! With all this activity it's been fun to see people who stopped playing WoW, finally log back on after a long time. They are usually confused at all the changes and are often asking questions in guild as to how to do stuff or what things are.

Of course now is the best time to start playing WoW if you stopped to take a break for whatever reason. With the stat squish and all the mechanics changes, we're all in the same boat when it comes to relearning how to play the game. Sadly some people have decided to ignore the fact that the game is different and try to play the game the same as they did pre-patch. Those people seem to make up most of the pug SoO and Ordos groups I get in. I keep queueing for pugs because I'm stubborn and damn it I want to believe that I can find a good group of decent people who can clear raids! Maybe one day.

Speaking of people coming back to the game, if anyone out there finds themselves coming back and not having a guild to call home, I highly recommend my awesome adult only social guild Avengers of Azeroth. We are located on the pvp server Ursin which has been connected to three other realms and is now a medium to high pop server depending on the time of day. While we are a social guild that focuses on having fun in the game, we also have a raid team that runs Wednesday 5-8 PST and Sunday 3-6 PST. We started out as a flex group and about two months ago we made the transition to a normal mode raid team. We finished the expansion at 13/14 and we had gotten Garrosh to the third phase but sadly we just couldn't get him before 6.0 dropped.

I know some people worry that they'll join a guild and it will disappear due to drama or transferring or things of that nature but the guild just turned 9 this year and we are the oldest active guild on our server and we have no plans to go anywhere. Because we are all over the age of 18 and then some we tend not to have much drama.(yay go us!) So yeah that's my standard my guild is super awesome and everyone should join it pitch. Because we are in fact super awesome and everyone should join us.

So yeah lot of stuff going on and honestly I am excited for the expansion! I've been in the beta for it for a while and I can't wait for launch. I mentioned in my last blog post that I will be attending Blizzcon and that I would once again be attending the Twisted Nether Party Friday night. What I didn't mention is that this year I will be one of the party sponsors! Very excited for that because I love the TNB crew and I'm glad I can help them keep the party going! I fully expect everyone who reads my blog to be in attendance at the TNB party!

So that's that. Lot of excitement and anticipation for the future. =D

Random Musings

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Mon, 22 Sep 2014 17:41:00 +0000

Sometimes I think I should post more but I can't figure out what I want to write about and then when I think about a topic I can't find the words to convey what I want to say. This is why my blog posts have been...lets just say few and far between. It sounds nicer than non existent. I am sadly having this problem with a lot of projects I have going on. I just can't find the words I want to use. It makes me the sads.

In an effort to force myself to write something I have decided to just post whatever random thoughts I have floating around in my head and see if I can make a blog post out of them. Bear with me, it may not be the most cohesive blog post I've ever written but hey no one reads my blog for a well written post anyway. So...uhm buyer beware or something.

Blizzcon
Blizzcon is nearing and I can't wait! I was lucky and was able to sweet talk my awesome and amazing wife into going to Blizzcon again. So once again this year I will be in Anaheim crowded into a large convention center with a bunch of nerds watching the Blizzard team shows all sorts of new shinies! Huzzah! If you're going to be at Blizzcon this year and want to hang out or get a drink let me know! I stupidly didn't take pictures last year until the last night so I will remedy that this year and take pictures with all the cool people I meet! Also if you're going to Blizzcon(or not) you should def buy one of my super sweet custom made light up jackets. Just saying, they look awesome and you'll get all sorts of attention when wearing one.

I will also once again be going to the Twisted Nether Blogcast party so if you can make it to that party you should! They are cool people and it was a great time last year. I'm sure this year will be just as awesome if not more so.

Raiding
Well raiding is going pretty awesomely for my raid team, we are 13/14 in 10 man Normal mode SoO. We are working our butts off trying to get Gary dead so people can get their mounts/achievements before 6.0 drops and takes both away. It's been a hard road to get to this point but I'm happy we are here and I know we will def get him down. My raid team started out as my flex mode team which was composed of a handful of my guildees and a handful of other people I met through twitter/ingame raid finder. Initially we had over 15 people and slowly we ended up dropping down to 10 people as people lost interest or just couldn't attend raids due to personal stuff. I made the decision to switch to normal mode at that point since it was made cross realmable and here we are almost done with the raid.

If you're alliance and looking for a casual adult raid group in the expansion, let me know! In the expansion normal and heroic modes will be flexible and cross realmable so we can fit a lot of people into the raid!

Guild
We turned 9 in July and I am honestly still amazed at the fact that something I created has stuck around for so long. My realm, Ursin, was connected to two realms earlier this year(Scilla and Andorhal) and that helped bring up the number of people running around the Shrine/Stormwind. We were connected to the realm Zuluhed not too long ago and that had a bigger impact than the other two realm connections. We now have a lively(sometimes too lively) trade chat, an active auction house, and more importantly there people are everywhere! It has helped the server feel less like a dead server and more like a living breathing one!

So if you're looking for a guild to join for the expansion, why not check out my super awesome 9 year old, adult, social guild with a raid team?

The Beta
I have been playing in the beta and honestly I can't wait for the expansion. Garrisons are pretty cool and the questing zones are really well done. I'm not happy about only having four leveling instances though. I am the type of person who alternates how I level characters. Maybe for one character I'll do nothing but quest and for another it'll be all instancing and yet on another pet battles. I don't like the fact that instances are being removed as a viable leveling mechanic. =(

But anyway, the zones are pretty and you can tell that the Blizz devs worked really hard on them. I can't wait for launch so I can get all the cool things done! =D

Youtube
I have started a Youtube channel where I will be posting videos of me playing all sorts of games like Heroes of the Storm and Diablo 3 and such. You should all head over and subscribe to my channel. It's for the fun times. =D

Well I think thats enough random rambling for now. Maybe in the next post I'll post something amazing and awe inspiring for you all. Probably not but hey I can dream can't I?

Long road

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Fri, 29 Aug 2014 16:08:00 +0000

In November World of Warcraft will be 10 years old. 10 years. Let me put that into perspective for you: 10 years ago the biggest grossing movie was Shrek 2 followed by Spiderman 2, the best selling video game was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the world was still reading the Da Vinci Code, the Harry Potter series was only on its third movie and half a year away from its sixth book. Now if all that didn't make you feel old already, Facebook was not even a year old, the Nintendo DS had just come out in North America, and more importantly there were NO Kardashians on the tv.

Why the trip down memory lane? Well because 10 years is a long time and to have spent 10 years playing the same video game is kind of amazing. Think back to 10 years ago and what you were doing at the time. I was a Junior in college in Florida when WoW came out. I remember the build up to the release of the game was insane. I followed the beta coverage at the time loosely since I wasn't really sure if I would play the game when it went live. I remember the feeling of amazement I felt when I watched the behind the scenes video of the creation of the cinematic. It was pretty amazing and I couldn't wait to see more!

I didn't play WoW at release though. I was able to get into the beta and played some and thought it was pretty neat but I wasn't quite sure that it was the game for me. It was definitely a cool game but I had just finished playing Star Wars Galaxies and I was trying out different games to find the perfect one for me. Having played in the beta, I wanted to see other MMOs before I committed to just one.

A few of my college buddies were playing Final Fantasy 11 and they wanted me to play with them so I said sure. I played it for a while and honestly if you've never played FF11, you have no clue what a horrible grind fest really is. You could solo until about level 12 and after that you were forced to find groups to grind mobs to level up. About every three to four levels you would have to move on to a new grind location because you'd outlevel the mobs you were grinding. You'd spend hours looking for a group depending on your class and if you were lucky enough to ding, you could lose all that hard work if you died. Did I mention that there was an xp penalty when you died? Well there was. If you died you lost xp. So really quickly I got tired of FF11 and took a break from MMOs for a bit.

Around May of 2005, some buddies at the college LAN party decided to try out WoW and I said why not? I subscribed and rolled a mage on Darkspear named Jedem. Eventually after two months I ended up rolling on a new server named Ursin with the LAN party guys. I made a mage named Jedem and the rest is as they say history. I got abandoned by the LAN party dudes when they went horde and I said the hell with them and made my guild on the alliance, played a crap ton of WoW and met some awesome people.

10 years of Warcraft is still mind blowing to me. I was talking to my wife about the game and what an impact it has had on my life. Had I not rolled on Ursin, I'd never have met all the amazing people I've met. I'd never have met my wife or my best man. I'd never have started blogging, podcasting, or even tweeting. Hell I'd never have visited Anaheim for Blizzcon!

10 years of WoW and 9 years of my guild. Oh come on now, like you actually expected me to not to pimp out my super awesome guild? Well if you did than you must be new here. Either way we're a social adult guild with 9 years of history, a fun is first attitude, our own guild car club, a facebook page, and even a raid team. We're located on the Ursin pvp server which, thanks to server connections, is now a medium to high population server! If you're looking for a home for the expansion or even just want someplace to log onto before the expansion, check us out!

It's been a long road for WoW to get to this point and I don't know about y'all but the last 10 years have been amazing and honestly I can't wait to see where WoW is going to be in another 10 years. So here's to another amazing 10 years! /cheers

10 for 10

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Mon, 18 Aug 2014 17:12:00 +0000

Been a while since my last blog post and while life has kept me busy there have been so many things I have wanted to write about! Things like how well my guild is doing, how my flex team went from raiding flex modes to raiding regular mods, how my achievement hunting has been going, how much I'm enjoying the Warlords of Draenor beta, and so on. I saw on the twitter verse that there was a blog initiative by @Alternativechat to get people to answer her 10 questions for a project she was working on for the 10th anniversary of WoW. I have decided to participate because damn it I miss blogging.

So here goes nothing:

1. Why did you start playing Warcraft?
2. What was the first ever character you rolled?
3. Which factors determined your faction choice in game?
4. What has been your most memorable moment in Warcraft and why?
5. What is your favourite aspect of the game and has this always been the case?
6. Do you have an area in game that you always return to?
7. How long have you /played and has that been continuous?
8. Admit it: do you read quest text or not?
9. Are there any regrets from your time in game?
10. What effect has Warcraft had on your life outside gaming? - See more at: http://www.alternative-blog.net/2014/08/10-years-10-questions-official-launch.html#sthash.Ucidw0fJ.dpuf

1. Why did you start playing Warcraft?
I first played WoW during the beta but for some reason I decided to take a pass when it went live. I played Final Fantasy 11 for a few months and in May of 2005 I decided to play WoW because a bunch of college buddies were playing it and honestly I was tired of the horrible grind fest that was FF11.

2. What was the first ever character you rolled?
Since I had just played FF11 and had been playing a Dark Knight, I decided to play something easy and decided to roll a warrior. Good old Jedem the human warrior on Darkspear. Because someone had a 60 on the server, a bunch of us decided to roll new characters on a new server so that we could all level together and no one would have an advantage. I decided to roll Jedem the mage and that has been my main since. I still play Jedem the warrior and have gotten him to 86 so far. My goal is to get him to cap before the expansion.

3. Which factors determined your faction choice in game?

Well when I started playing the game some of the people I was going to play with were alliance so I decided to play alliance with them. After a few hours they all decided to go horde when I was out grabbing lunch and when I came back I said "hell no I'm not switching just because you people all did without telling me!" And so I stayed alliance.

4. What has been your most memorable moment in Warcraft and why?
I don't know that I have just one memorable moment over all others. I remember the first time my guild had on over 10 people in vanilla and being super excited about that. I remember organizing an all warlock raid on Tarren Mill and getting close to 20 warlocks involved. I remember the first time I ever downed Ragnaros in MC and everyone looking through their combat logs to find out who got the killing blow and it was me! =D

5. What is your favourite aspect of the game and has this always been the case?

My favorite aspect of the game has always been socializing in my guild. I've met a lot of cool and interesting people in my time playing WoW. There is nothing I enjoy more than logging on and shooting the shit with guildees. Just yesterday a guildee who hadn't logged on in a long time logged on and leveled an alt. I remember when this guildee joined the guild back in BC and we teased her about barely being 18 and here she was playing the game again.

6. Do you have an area in game that you always return to?

Before Wrath I always logged out in Ironforge because it used to be the cool place to hang out in vanilla. During Wrath it was always in Dalaran and during Cata it was always Stormwind. This expansion has been a toss up between Stormwind and the Shrine. I tend not to log my characters out in the world unless I'm camping for something or I'm in a rush to exit the game. I don't really have any place in game where I visit for no reason.

7. How long have you /played and has that been continuous?

Ok just going off my main account my total /played time is: 821 days 0 hours 23 minutes and if I added in my second accounts /played I'd end up over 900 hours played. In real time I've been subscribed since May 2005 and have never taken a break.

8. Admit it: do you read quest text or not?
The first few times I leveled I definitely read through all the quest text because I had no clue what I was doing or where I had to go. I always read the quest text the first two or three times I level a character each expansion. After I get a good rhythm going I tend to not read the quests and just plow through zones leveling.

9. Are there any regrets from your time in game?

Regrets I've had a few. I think if you've played the game as long as I have, you'll definitely have a few regrets. I regret making someone an officer in vanilla just because they were online a lot. That decision cost me a lot of people leaving the guild because he was annoying and the worst possibly person I could have picked to be in charge. Drove away people by the dozens before he ended up leaving the guild himself and it took a long time to get the guild back to where it was before he was made an officer. I regret not being able to get a Lich King kill when it was current content because of an under performing healer who kept causing us to wipe on the fight. In fact I'm still a little bitter about that one. I regret a few more things but I think that's all I'll say for now. Maybe I'll write a blog post about it down the line.

10. What effect has Warcraft had on your life outside gaming?
Well it has had a HUGE effect on me in real life. I was depressed for a while and kind of shut everyone out of my life. WoW was one of the few ways I had to keep people around me during that time. When I couldn't face the world I would play WoW and talk to people in game and it made me feel like I wasn't alone and maybe just maybe I was worth something. I knew that I could log onto the game and forget all the horribleness I was feeling at least for a little while.

I also met a lot of people in game that I still talk to today. I met my wife while raiding MC and my best man and close friend has been an officer in my guild since vanilla. I've met up with several guildees in real life and it was a great time. I've also learned a lot from the game, especially from being a guild leader. I have been able to use my GM skills to manage people in RL at work. I started this blog because of the game and I podcasted for a while because of it as well.

So that concludes my 10 answers. I hope you all liked what I wrote and if you didn't...well too bad. If you are interested in participating you should definitely do so! Click here to read more about it.

Cross Realm Boosts

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 15:13:00 +0000

So uhm there is a perfectly good reason why my last post was almost two months ago and that reason is uhm...well.. ya see...HEY LOOK OVER THERE! /Cast Invisibility /Run Away

The real reason is that life in Zurich has kept me rather busy and sometimes I just don't have the time to blog about things and stuff in the World of Warcraft! I am still playing and still raiding in the SoO raid instance(at a really late local time) and over all I've been having a good time. Lot of stuff has happened since the last time I blogged and I figured I might as well make with the yakkity yak blog stuff.

First off is the recent announcement that Normal and Heroic Siege of Orgrimmar are now able to be done in 10 and 25 person raids with people across realms. That is correct, you can now raid Normal and Heroic SoO with friends on other servers! This is pretty sweet because if you're short a tank, dps, or healer on a raid night you can now invite btag buddies to cover those spots! Now you still need either 10 or 25 people to do normal and heroic raids so if you have more than 10 and less than 25 people, you can only do Flex raids.

Since I am currently Flex raiding and have between 10 and 25 people, I don't know that I'll step foot into a normal raid but hey if any of you awesome readers wants to invite my mage into your raid, I'll gladly come along and pew pew pew all the things! I tried using Open Raid to find a group the other day and people are seriously stupid. It was waves of people looking for people who were 570+ ilvl and knew all the fights. Now on my mage I'm sitting at almost 550 ilvl and I knew almost all the fights from Flex difficulty. The people starting the raids basically wanted people who had all the gear they could get from the normal mode raid. Why would you bother doing a raid that you didn't need gear from? Obviously you wouldn't and so it said to me that the people who were looking for such high ilvls were NOT at said ilvl and wanted a group that would carry them through the raid. Or they were looking for people who wouldn't compete with them for gear that dropped.

Either way this made finding a group difficult and I said to hell with that! Honestly this behavior has been going on since cross realm was first introduced. At the time it was "LFM Firelands 390+ ilvl!" which meant that you had to be wearing all Dragon Soul gear to come to a raid that dropped 378 gear. Kind of dumb if you ask me and sadly it makes it hard for someone who is trying to find a normal raid and is sporting flex in all available slots.

I might have a few opinions about this behavior. Just a few.

Anyway let's move on before I rage anymore more. So boosted characters! If you hadn't heard Blizzard announced that if bought the next expansion, Warlords of Draenor, you would get a free level 90 character. You get a one time boost to 90 that you'd use on an existing character or a new character and they would go from whatever level they are to 90!

In essence you're getting a current max level character that you can use to play with your friends at level cap. Raiding, Arenas, and BGs are now something you can do with friends who don't have a current max level character! Now obviously Blizzard saw how much people were looking forward to this and they decided to make this service available to everyone without pre-ordering WoD.

For the low, low cost of $60 you can boost a character to 90! No more of that whole leveling mess! Before if you wanted a friend to start playing WoW with you, you'd have to level an alt with them to keep them interested because honestly leveling alone your first time is no fun. Now you can just roll a level 1, pay the $60, and get a free max level character. That's a pretty handy tool for increasing your subscription numbers.

When it was announced that this service was coming there was a lot of outcry about it trivializing leveling and how Blizzard was selling out, etc. Blizzard released statements that said that they set the price at $60 so that people won't just use it on every single character they have and never level again. Leveling means something and so it's not a cheap shortcut. To everyone who is complaining about the service/price I just have this to say: "You're obviously NOT the intended target!"

If you can't justify spending the money on the boost then you shouldn't use it! It's not a mandatory thing! It's a completely optional service that was made available for people who do want to use it. Personally I won't be using it because 1) I enjoy leveling, 2) I'm at the cap of characters I can create for my main account, and 3) the idea of boosting doesn't appeal to me. I get a free boost when I get WoD that I'll have to spend some time deciding which non capped character I have will get the boost.

So that's my post! A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.

The new year

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Mon, 27 Jan 2014 10:47:00 +0000

It's been a bit since my last blog post and a lot has happened since that time, both in and out of game. The last time I blogged I talked about how Blizzcon was awesome and how I had a great time and met all sorts of cool people. Wow, I really am a slacker when it comes to writing blog posts. =(

But we all knew that well before now so too late to pretend otherwise. So whats been going on ingame for your dear old Jed? Well I've been flexing like crazy in Siege of Orgrimmar! I've met a bunch of new and cool people and wiped repeatedly with them on bosses/trash/random falling deaths. Some of the people are from twitter and some are from friends of friends who are from twitter. Hell some of my raid team, I can't even remember who is friends with who and how they got into the raid. I just know that they are now people on MY friends list that I send invites to.

Honestly Flex raiding is one of my favorite things to come out of the entire expansion. We always have room for a few more people as long as they are either a healer or a dps, our tanks are pretty set and we have back ups in place already. So if you're alliance and you'd like to flex it up with Jed, we flex Wednesdays 5-8 PST and Sundays 3-6 PST. Hit me up on twitter or leave a comment and we'll get it all worked out.

In other ingame news, Ursin was FINALLY CONNECTED! While this is not a server merge, its the next best thing! We were connected with Andorhal and Scilla and since the connection we've been listed as a medium population server the majority of time! So if you've ever wanted to alt it up with Jed and the whole low pop server situation scared you away, that's no longer an issue! I've been slowly working on getting my flex team to roll an alt on Ursin or to transfer an existing alt over. So far it's been working and we've gained a few new members. Always cool to see people online and doing stuff in guild. =D

Out of game theres been a lot going on. The biggest thing is that I am currently living in Zurich, Switzerland. Yes, you read that right. Switzerland, the land of chocolate, hidden bank accounts, and beautiful locations! I've been blogging about it over on a different blog so feel free to head on over and check it out. I've posted a few posts already with some very nice pictures so hopefully you'll all enjoy them.

Next up, I am now selling that cool light up jacket that I wore to Blizzcon over on Etsy. For the moment there is only a black color jacket available but it's available in several different sizes. If these manage to sell I'll possibly add different color options. But clearly you folks need to buy all the jackets that I have available now. The jackets are pretty neat and the light from them is pretty bright without being annoyingly bright. The light wire also does not generate any heat so you won't have to worry about overheating while wearing it. It's what all the cool kids are wearing.

I've also started a Tumblr page where I've posted pictures of my car, Switzerland, and other miscellaneous things. So if you are on Tumblr feel free to follow me.

So that's what has been keeping me from writing blog posts. It was a busy end of year and so far this year is looking to be just as busy but I'll do my best to post more often here. So keep on keeping on people!

The Blizzcon Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 18:26:00 +0000

Blizzcon. A place for the WoW players to mingle and share their love of all things Blizzard. This year I was fortunate enough to be able to get tickets to the convention. I think that the only appropriate word that I can think of to describe it was: AWESOME! I had written a blog post about how I was worried that my introvertedness would make an appearance and punch me in the face. Thankfully that was not the case! So buckle up my faithful readers for beyond this point lies Blizzcon! (Also expect a lot of name dropping)

Arrival

My wife and I flew out Thursday afternoon and when we got to the airport we discovered that our flight was delayed over an hour. Not a good start for our trip but we eventually made it to sunny Anaheim! Because of the delay we left the airport and ran right into horrible rush hour traffic. What should have taken 20 minutes took almost an hour.

Eventually we made it in to the hotel where we had a room rate issue but thanks to my smartphone I was able to find the confirmation email with the correct rate. We went up to our room and dropped off our stuff and my wife had to work a little bit while I found the email and sent it along to the hotel staff. We made our way down to the badge pick up line and thankfully when we got in line, it was moving pretty quickly. We waited under an hour and were able to finally make it to the front of the line in the convention center.

Badges in hand, the wife went back upstairs to work some more so she could enjoy the rest of the weekend work free. I decided to go wander around the Hilton lobby where I ran into Aero, Nyxy, Fontis, and Exlucis.

We chatted a little bit before I ran into Hestiah and talked with her a few minutes before heading upstairs to my room to grab my guildee who had just arrived at our room and was staying with us for the trip.

We descended into the Hilton lobby and managed to find HayFayFay who walked with us over to the Anabella for the WoW Insider/Wowhead party. Sadly the party had just shut down as we got there so we walked back to the Hilton lobby where we hung out and chatted up people. I met up with LorekeeperGlaci, Kelesti, Hestiah, Entropia, and Jasyla. It was pretty sweet to talk to everyone even if it was only for a few minutes. I decided to retire for the night and so ended the first night of my trip.

The First Day

Since I woke up at 7am due to the timezone difference between Illinois and California, I had plenty of time to figure out what I wanted to do that day. I of course got up and played Tiny Death Star for the iPad until people started waking up for Blizzcon! Clearly my wife, my guildee, and his girlfriend needed to get their priorities in order! We had room service and headed down to the convention a little after the doors opened so we managed to avoid the horrible line out front. (I had made a cool light up jacket that I decided to wear to the convention so if you see any pictures of me, I'll probably have it on and glowing!) Inside we walked around a bit to look at the vendor booths before walking into the massive main hall to see the opening ceremony.

The opening ceremony was pretty awesome and there were so many people packed into that hall that it took a little bit before we were able to find four seats together. We stayed in that hall for the next three panels which was pretty sweet. We were able to move up to sit a little closer to the stage so that was cool. A lot of awesome panels and we managed to meet up with our guildee again for the art panel down at the other end of the convention center. We saw a few panels and then went back to the main hall for the costume/talent contest. We accidently got into the line for people participating in the costume contest but were easily able to get out of line before we were ushered backstage. We saw a lot of super cool costumes and it was obvious who put the effort into making their costume. I also waved at @khuruuk who was sitting a few rows down from where I was at. We skipped out on the rest of the talent show because honestly we were interested and we had more important things to do: PARTY!

Friday night was the Twisted Nether party and there was no way that we were going to be missing it. Especially since Hydra pretty much threatened my life if I didn’t show up for the party. It was at the Bowlmor bowling alley a short walking distance away and so we journeyed over there. We got there and there was already a decent crowd there. One of my guild tanks ran over to us as soon as we arrived and in true guild sucking up fashion, he gave me a drink ticket so I could get some booze. Such a good boy that Rofer. I got a hug from Hydra and a handshake from Fimlys and Rilandune. After a few drinks I met @RogueDarren who was a guest on my podcast, which was cool. Rilandune was nice enough to introduce me to two nice people who were looking for a flex raid and we chatted a bit about raiding.

Twice was super nice enough to chase me down and buy me a drink at the bar like he had previously told me he would during one of our raids. Darren, Twice, Rofer, and I stood around talking raids for a bit before I realized that Vidyala was at the party. I went to get a refill at the bar and I talk to her for a bit before she introduced me to Vosskah, Kaleri, Rhidach, and Antigen. Their table was engaged in much tank talk so it was interesting to hear that. I also got Navispammed in real life by @Navimiedruid which was a surprise since she was the only person who had left a comment on my Blizzcon plans post.

My wife wandered over to the table at one point and informed me that it was time to leave since it was past midnight. Of course I agreed since I'd been drinking the whole time I'd gotten to the party three hours prior. I said my goodbyes to people and we went back to our hotel to end the night.

Day Two

The next day, none of us wanted to see the live raid so we all slept in a bit and my wife and I made our way down to the convention center first developer panel. Was amazing to see all the changes they have planned for the next expansion. I ran into @Aerix and met his fiancee which was pretty neat. I had @totmdispenzr chase me down and we chatted for a few minutes. He had tried finding me the day before but we apparently kept missing each other by minutes at each panel. Glaci came by to find my guildee and myself and we all sat together for the Q&A panel that came next.

At the start of Blizzcon my guildee told me that whenever he saw Corey Stockton/@Mumper he always pictured Dewey from Malcom in the Middle. During the panel my guildee decided to spend time making a picture of Dewey and Mumper next to each other. I of course laughed and had him email it to me. I tweeted it out and included Mumper in the tweet. Some people saw it, laughed, and most people forgot about it.

After the panel my guildee and I wandered around the convention and played the Warlords of Draenor beta which was cool. I picked a male gnome mage and my guildee rolled a gnome lock. We had no clue if we had to go back outside and get in line to run the instance so we just asked one of the people telling us how much time we had. He had no clue so he grabbed a Blizzard employee who said we had the item in our bags. Of course my guildee and I told him we wanted to run the instance. He laughed and asked if it was just going to be the two of us and when we told him that was all we needed, he told us to go for it. Now my guildee and I have been playing WoW together since vanilla and we both are good at our classes. We used the item to get ported to the instance entrance and ran in. We then proceeded to clear trash to the ring of mobs before we died and the volunteer dude said we were out of time. Had we had more time, we could have definitely gotten to a boss.

We wandered around a bit before heading back to the hotel to meet up with my wife and my guildee's girlfriend who had gone to a spa appointment. We had tickets to Medieval Times and let me tell you now, that place is fun sober but when you're drinking it is even MORE fun! There was jousting, cheering, horses, and swordplay! The best part was that during the drive to the Medievial Times location, I got an email notification letting me know someone retweeted my Dewey/Mumper picture. When I looked at who it was, it was none other than Mumper himself! For the rest of the night my phone blew up as people retweeted/favorited the tweet.

It was a good time and when we got back to the hotel we walked into a jam packed Hilton lobby. The wall of noise was deafening. We headed back to the hotel room where I tweeted @Elfindale to see where she was at and she told me that she was hanging with Vidyala in her room and that I should come by. My guildee and I headed over and we got to hang out with Vidyala, Vosskah, Elfindale, Rhidach, and Beartank. After a bit my guildee and I decided to venture downstairs where we met up with Fimlys and hung out. My guildee vanished and when I went to look for him I ran into Mumper! I took a picture with him and told him that he caused my phone to go crazy because of that retweet. He laughed and was a really good sport about it. As I was talking to him I got a text from my guildee who was across the lobby. The text? It was a picture of him and Mumper.

We wandered around the lobby and I was able to take pictures with @Rhowow, Matticus, Zarhym, Nethaera, Ion Hazzikostas, and Dave Kosak. My guildee and Fim of course tried to jump into the background of all the shots and photobomb them. The party in the lobby started dying down and so my guildee and I head back to our room to crash for the night. The silence in the elevator was so odd after the lobby and its craziness.

Dawn of the Third Day

The next day we all got up and headed to breakfast at IHOP where Glaci met up with us and we had some delicious breakfast. We went to Disney and spent most of the day walking around the park and waiting in said park lines. I ran into Vidyala and @Beruheals at the Star Wars ride shop which was neat. I also ran across Exlucis and his wife Fontis while we were in line for another ride. There was a lot of line waiting and very little meeting people at Disney but that's ok because we had a great time. Since my wife and I live in Illinois, we laughed at the heat lamps that were all over the restaurant we had dinner at. It was in the low 60s and everyone was complaining of the cold. Silly Californians.

We headed back to the hotel and since all of us were so tired from walking around the park, we all fell asleep quickly. It had been a good day.

The End?

The next day my wife and I packed all our stuff, fedexed whatever we couldn't fit into our luggage, and said good bye to my guildee and his girlfriend. We headed to the airport and I said my last goodbyes to Anaheim and Blizzcon. It was a great time and my wife and I are going to try to head back for the next one. I was able to meet up with several people and talk to people who I usually only tweet with. I probably would have met more people had I tweeted out what I looked like BEFORE the convention so if people saw me they'd hopefully recognize me. But this is all lessons learned for next time I suppose. There were some people who I saw and wanted to talk to but just couldn't so I still have some introvert issues to work on. I think maybe next year I will give out stickers or something to all the people I meet. It was a great time and if we met and I forgot to mention you in this post, please don't take it personally. I have a horrible memory and I tried as hard as I could to remember who I met.

Blizzcon Plans

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 17:56:00 +0000

With Blizzcon rapidly approaching I figured it would probably be a good idea to write down what my plans are going to. I decided to make it a blog post because I figured maybe someone out there would want to hang out or meet up or just walk by and awkwardly wave at me. With so many people from twitter going to Blizzcon, I'm sure I'll meet at least one person. I honestly debated blogging about this because I thought to myself "What if no one wants to meet up? What if someone is going to stalk me while I'm there?! What if no one cares?!" I ultimately decided to say screw it, I'm going to post this because I'm not going to let my scumbag brain win! So here are my plans for Blizzcon and with any luck I can meet at least a handful of you fine folks!

Thursday:
I fly into sunny California Thursday afternoon and plan on picking up my badge from the convention center After that I'll probably grab a bite to eat nearby and then I'll be heading to the Wow Insider Party and hanging out there for a while. If you'd like to hang out I will probably be live tweeting the event as soon as I arrive so people can definitely tweet me to see where I'm currently at. The party is open to everyone so everyone can attend! I'll probably hang out there for a while until I either 1) get bored or 2) find somewhere else to go hang out and drink. I'm sure there will be plenty of people hanging out at the lobby of most nearby hotels so that is always an option.

Friday
Friday morning I'll obviously be in line to get into convention center along with everyone else but if you are further ahead of me in line and wouldn't be opposed to letting me cut in front of you, I suppose I could be nice and hang out with you a bit. ;-P
The convention panel plan is currently to hit up all the WoW related panels first and see all the things! I probably won't decide what I'm going to do until I'm waiting in line to get into the convention center because that's just the kind of slacker that I am. Now Blizzcon itself will take most of the day but afterwards I plan on heading over to the Twisted Nether Blogcast party and hanging out/drinking with all the cool attendees. This party is also open to everyone whether you blog, read blogs, or are illiterate! I expect to see all of you lovely readers there!

Saturday
Obviously more Blizzcon WoW panels during the day but at night, well at night it's going to get awesome. Since they have not announced who the closing musical act will be and chances are I won't be interested anyway, I'll be at Medieval Times Saturday night for their 8:15 show so that will definitely be awesome. Blizzcon attendees get a discount for Medieval Times so it's cheaper to go see a show now than any other time! They have dinner and a show for a cheap price, can you do any better? I didn't think so! After the show, I'll have to figure out what I'll be doing but chances are I'll be hanging out in the lobby of the Anaheim Hilton hanging out for a bit.

Sunday
Sunday is normally a day of rest but this time...it's time for BLIZZNEYCON! I'll be hitting up the Disneyland theme park for most of the day. I'll be getting the two park ticket thing so I'll be at one of the parks most of the day. Lots of walking, lots of park rides, and lots of silliness. Afterwards, depending on how tired I am, I could be talked into hanging out with people. I'll also be live tweeting so if you're wandering around the park and want to hang out you can probably tweet me and see where I'm at.

We fly home monday morning so I dont plan on hanging out unless you're at the airport or on my flight.

That's pretty much my Blizzcon plans and most of it will be affected by how tired I am feeling, how much I've had to drink, and how little I've had to drink. If you see me walking around and want to say hi, please feel free to! I only ask that you introduce yourself first so I'm not left playing the "Who the hell is this" game. If you want to buy me drinks at any of the parties, I will definitely NOT turn you down but I may walk with you to the drink vendor and get a fresh drink. Not that I don't trust you folks but I don't trust you folks. I'll tweet out what cool geek shirt I'll be wearing each day so you can identify me in a crowd.

ALSO IF YOU HAVE NOT SHOWERED RECENTLY OR ARE NOT WEARING DEODORANT AND SMELL A TAD RIPE I WILL NOT SHAKE YOUR HAND OR GIVE YOU A HUG!* Cleanliness is next to Godliness. Now if I smell a tad bit ripe, you will have to put up with it as I am an internet celebrity!(in my own head)

It's going to be a fun time and I m definitely looking forward to it. Hope to see some of you there!

*Tongue in cheek btw, while I would prefer nothing but nice smelling people around me, it's a con and things like that are out of my hands.*

Flexin' with Jed

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 16:53:00 +0000

With the introduction of Flexible Raids, current content will finally be cross realmable. What does this mean? It means that if a group of friends on different servers want to raid the newest raid, the Siege of Orgrimmar, they can do so at a Flexible raid difficulty. You will still need a minimum of 10 people for the raid but you can have anywhere between 11 and 25 people in the raid. The flex difficulty will allow the raid to adjust how many people are in the raid instance. If you have 15 people and 3 have to go for whatever reason, the raid will compensate for having 3 fewer people and adjust the raid difficulty. This means that unless it's a tank or healer that has to go, your raid will be able to continue clearing trash/bosses without missing a beat because the raid will adjust to however many people you have left in the raid.

Why am I going on about flex raiding once again when I wrote a huge blog post about it already? Well I bring it up because my guild, Avengers of Azeroth, is looking for more people to fill out our flex raid team! That's right you can raid current content along side your favorite slacker Mage! (ME!)

Our info:
Faction: Alliance
When: Wednesdays/Sundays* 5-8 PST *Sunday date added because people are enjoying flex raiding!*
Classes needed: DPS, Healers, and possibly a Tank(we have two atm from my guild but I'd gladly switch to my mage and DPS!)
Other info:
You must have a 500 equipped ilvl for your relevant class/spec.
Ventrilo is also mandatory.(you don't need a working mic, you just need to be able to get in vent and hear instructions)
You must have a sense of humor!
You must be willing to wipe a few times without raging and dropping group! (It's a new raid and we will all be learning it as we go along so chances are some wipes will happen)
You must be able to take instructions and follow them.

While this raid difficulty is a more of a community activity and is slightly easier than normal raids, it is still a raid. The goal is to have fun and if possible to down bosses! Everyone will need to pull their own weight and hustle when needed. We will try and provide feasts but everyone is responsible for their own flasks, gems/enchants, and other consumable.

I know some of you out there are wary of raiding either due to bad experiences in the past or because you are afraid that you'll get yelled at and treated like crap in the raid. The way I raid lead is to NOT yell at people when things go wrong and I don't belittle my raid members. I don't believe that is an effective raid leadership method. If you show up to the raid you can expect to raid in a respectful environment with no hateful language. We are adults so some cursing may happen and some raunchy humor may occur. If you have any issues with anyone else in the raid because of something someone said or did, you can let me know and I will do what I can to handle the situation.

If you show up to the raid I expect you to be raid ready. That means that all your gear is gemmed/enchanted/reforged before the raid, all your gear is repaired, and it is all correct for your spec. With the 500 ilvl requirement everyone should be able to DPS, Tank, or Heal to the best of their gear/skill. If you are not able to keep up with the rest of the raid, we may make suggestions on how you can improve BUT it will be done in a respectful way. Constructive criticism is only good if it's done constructively. No one will be called out for sucking at healing/dpsing/or tanking like often happens in the LFR.

Transmogs will be judged and if they appear to look nicer than my own, you may be docked 50 DKP!

Loot will not be an cause of drama since the loot will be done like it is in raid finder, individual rolls for gear. This means that you can't get mad at someone because they keep winning all the loot that you wanted. Well you can get mad but it should be at Blizzard and not the individual person.

It's going to be a fun time and I hope to see many of you in my flex raid as we down bosses, get loot, and have a good time! If you want in please either comment here with your spec, armory link, and btag or you can tweet me it! @Jedsblog

Keep on keeping on

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 17:27:00 +0000

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. I think this quote from Ferris Beuller's Day Off kind of sums up what I've been up to the last few weeks. The last time I blogged I wrote about Virtual Realms and Flex raiding and since then we have received more information about both. I am eagerly awaiting both and I wish I could speed up the patch so that it could be 5.4 already! When I started blogging I had so much free time that I could write a lot of posts in between classes but when I got a job I suddenly lost all that free time. Eventually I had the desire to blog but whenever I would sit down to write something I would get writers block. You (the few readers I still have) probably read the few words I write and think to yourselves "how the hell can it take such a long time to write such short, uninteresting, mindless drivel??"

Well my response is..uhmm..yeah I got nothing. But since you do read my blog regularly, I can safely reason that you:
1) have bad taste since you read my ramblings
or
2) enjoy punishing yourself by reading my blog
or
3)are either used long delays betwen my blog posts
or
4) have me on your feedreader by accident and are now wondering who the hell I am.

So like yeah!

I apologize for the above. I blame global warming or something.

Anyway back to life in WoW!

I've been keeping busy in game by doing several things and sometimes all at the same time! I've been pet battling and have managed to get the different World Taming achievements. I am very ready for the pet battle stuff in the next patch with my uber leet team of over 30 level capped pets! I've also been running the ToT LFR with the wife every now and then. Clearly I have to get my alts ready to raid the Siege of Orgrimmar when it comes out!

Speaking of alts, I have been leveling several of those and I am now at about 12 level capped characters. Only two are mages and two are DKs(one horde). Of those 12 level 90 characters, 10 of them are able to run the MSV LFR, 7-8 can do HoF/ToES, and about 5-6 can do ToT. What can I say, I enjoy leveling alts and apparently gearing them. I might have a problem...only 50 character slots per account!

Moving on, my guild just hit our eight year anniversary in July! Huzzah for making it this long!! We are still going on and doing things but sadly the Throne of Thunder raid came at a bad time for us as we are being hit by the attendance boss. I expect that when 5.4 and the Siege of Orgrimmar raid comes along we'll probably flex raid the hell out of it until we can normal raid the hell out of it! If you are wanting to flex raid and are alliance side, let me know and we can work something out! Right now our scheduled Flex Raid time is going to be 5-8 PST on wednesday nights. We have 2 tanks at the moment but I'm sure we can accommodate another one(maybe I'll be able to dps on my mage instead of tanking!) if we get another one.

So yeah thats what I've been up to since the last time I blogged. 5.4 and Connected Realms(new name for Virtual Realms) are almost upon us and I am eagerly awaiting their arrival! Until next time here is a fun story of an instance run that I was involved in back in BC.

I was leveling my warlock and decided to run Sethekk Halls and put out the call in guild to see if anyone wanted to come with me. My wife(just a friend at the time) volunteered to come on her lock and a guildee came along on his shadow priest. Since this was BC there was no LFD tool to use so we had to find a tank and healer the old fashioned way: spamming in trade until we found them or gave up. We got lucky and were able to find a tank and healer after a short while and we all proceed to the instance and run inside. It became apparently really early on that the tank(a warrior) was not very good at tanking. He wasn't thunder clapping to get agro and he wasn't cleaving.

Now this was back in BC when tanks(especially warriors) had to fight to hold agro. After a few pulls where the dps was tanking mobs, I noticed that none of the mobs had a single application of sunder armor on them. As a tank at the time you would spam sunder armor as fast as you could on each mob so that you could have threat on each of them. When tanking multiple mobs you'd taunt one mob, sunder armor it, tab to the next mob sunder armor it, tab to the next sunder armor it, and thunderclap/cleave as much as you could. This was how you generated threat back in the day against multiple mobs. It SUCKED as a warrior but it was doable. Well we wiped in the first big room in the instance because one of us got MC'ed and feared the rest of the group into more mobs who agro'ed and proceeded to kill us.

Up to this point the warrior has not said anything in party chat since he whispered me that he could tank for us. He proceeds to tell us that we need to target adds and that we "need to lock it down." My guildee, my wife, and I were all on vent talking about the group and we all read that and were struck silent for a few seconds. We ask each other if anyone had any clue what he wanted us to do but eventually we realize that he wants us to shackle(which we had 1 of since we my guildee was a priest) the MC mob since it was undead. We tell him in party that we only have one shackle since we only have one priest in the group. I suppose this was not good enough for him because he says "Lock it down fukwitz!" At this point you can just hear the confusion the three of us in vent grow. We start asking each other if he just didn't understand that we weren't priests or if he didn't care and just wanted some sort of CC. Now at the time there were no glyphs for fear so if someone feared a mob, it would run around until the fear broke. This was obviously a bad thing because the mob would run around agro'ing every single mob pack it ran by. The only other CC locks had was the Succubus seduce but this was sadly unreliable as it was prone to breaking and the mob would make a beeline right to the warlock. Life as a warlock in BC was not for fun times, that's for sure.

So we try to explain that we don't have any other CCs available and to do what he can. This leads us to getting up to the first boss with a few deaths but nothing too major. We pull and he has trouble holding agro on the boss but thankfully we were able to down it. We tell him he needs to sunder more and that he needs to taunt adds off us. He then proceeds to tell us that his sunder has an eight second cool down so he cant spam it. Now at this point in BC I had raid tanked on my warrior and my spriest guildee had a warrior main. We both instantly call bullshit on him and tell him that no it only has a 1.5 global cool down. He starts ranting about how we are wrong and that he is tanking fine. We move along clearing mob packs and dps tanking things that the tank should have held agro on. The tank randomly yelling "lock it down fukwitz!" at us and we have a few group wipes.

We get to a point where the tank decides to rant at us about how he is not specced for tanking and "has no points in defensive". We of course figured that he was a bad tank and he confirmed it for us by telling us this. We tell him that he was a bad tank(which he honestly was) and he goes off on a HUGE tirade about how we were typical spoiled Americans and how everyone in the world hates us. So we decide that enough is enough and we boot the tank. Sadly the healer had had enough and dropped group. The three of us were sitting in the instance not that far from finishing the run and we decide that we can finish it without having to go back to Shattrath and spend who knows how long looking for a tank and healer. My spriest guildee puts on what little spirit gear he has and we pull in a level 70 hunter friend and summon him to the instance.

The hunter pulls out his turtle pet and misdirects to it and we proceed to not only clear all the trash leading up to the last boss but we also manage to down the boss. Afterwards we all laughed at how a hunter pet was able to hold agro better than that warrior. Since that run, we often joke about having points in defensive and when we need to CC something we'll tell someone to lock it down fukwitz! So that's a fun story for you all from the olden days of BC. Hope you all enjoyed it.

Virtual Flexing

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 17:21:00 +0000

A little bit ago I wrote about my low population server and I listed out a few things that I felt that Blizzard could do to help out not just my server but all low pop servers. Included in that list were the suggestions to merge servers and to open the current tier for cross realm raidability. Two weeks ago Blizzard released not just one but TWO things that I feel will help out all low pop servers when they go live in the 5.4 patch. The two things: Virtual Realms and Flexible Raiding. Do Blizzard developers read my blog and think I have great ideas? Probably not but at the very least they are finally doing something to help low pop servers.

For those of you who have no clue what I’m talking about when it comes to Virtual Realms and Flexible Raiding I’ll do my best to explain each. We’ll start with Flexible Raids. Right now if you are level capped and looking to raid you have 2 options: join a raiding guild and do 10/25 person raids or you can do the LFR which are 25 players only. If your guild doesn’t have enough people to run a 25 player raid or even 2 10 person raids, you will have people who are not able to raid with the guild raid team because you can only fit 10 people into a 10 person raid. With Flexible Raids, there will be a new level of raid difficult added. It will be LFR (25 person) > Flexible Raids (10-25 person) > Normal Mode Raids (10/25) > Heroic Raids (10/25). You did in fact read that right, Flex Raids can be raided by anywhere from 10 to 25 people. If you only have 20 people online, you can raid at the Flex Raid difficulty and the raid difficulty will adjust automatically based on the number of people present. This means that if you are in a 25 person flex raid and someone has to leave, the raid difficulty will ease up a little to compensate for having one less person in the raid.

Flex Raids don’t share a raid id with LFR or regular raids so if you wanted to you could do an LFR raid on Tuesday, a regular difficulty raid on Wednesday, and a Flex Raid on Thursday all on the same character each week. Unlike the LFR, Flex Raids will not have a minimum ilvl requirement and more importantly, it is cross realm raidable! This means that you can raid current raid content with guildees and real id friends without having to deal with the headache that is the LFR. The gear is better than what you’d get from the LFR but below regular raid mode gear and it will follow the LFR loot system with each person getting an individual loot roll for each boss killed. This new level of raiding means several things:

1) I can raid current content with friends and guildees.

2) I can avoid the weekly LFR headache if I choose to.

3) I can raid on my protadin as dps and let someone else tank while I set my loot role to tank so I can still get tank gear.

Right now my guild has been hit hard by the attendance bug and we have not been able to field a raid team and enter the Throne of Thunder. Since it is “current” content, we also can’t cross realm raid it. But when 5.4 launches even if my guild is still having a hard time getting a raid team going, I can pull people from my battle tag friend list into a raid and we can clear a current content raid that isn’t the LFR! This is huge for my guild and our raid team! Yes it isn’t a normal raid and the gear is a lower item level than what you’d get in a normal raid but honestly I don’t care. I get to raid with my guildees and btag friends and we get to see non-LFR boss fights! There are a lot of smaller guilds that this will help see the current raid instances. Guilds that otherwise wouldn’t see anything other than the LFR version of the fight, which is not the same.

The second thing that Blizzard is doing to help low pop servers is releasing Virtual Realms. Virtual Realms are what happens when you take several servers and expand Cross Realm Zones to include major cities, auction houses, arena teams, and more importantly guilds! Let’s say for example that you are on server A and it is a low pop server. Blizzard is taking server A and stretching CRZ on Server A to cover Server B and Server C, which are also low pop servers. So people on Server B can join a guild from Server A or Server C. People on Server C will be able to list stuff on the auction house and Server A/B people can buy said items. Currently all you can do with CRZ’ed people is group up to quest and to run old content. You can’t trade anything that isn’t conjured or isn’t an instance boss drop.

This new feature will do a couple of things:

1) Increase the number of people that appear on your “server.”

2) Help low pop server guilds recruit from within their server.

3) Increase auction house activity.

4) Make low pop servers no longer be looked down upon compared to a medium or high pop server.

By increasing the pool of people I can recruit from, I know I'll be able to get people to join my guild. Right now my server has a small handful of people who are looking for a guild to join or want to leave their current guild. Recruitment on server is difficult and recruiting people from other avenues such as forums or twitter is slow going and almost as difficult. I have had a little luck with twitter and a few people have joined as social members on alts which is great but I'd love to have people join my guild on their mains so that they can be on more or participate more in guild activities. *WE ARE ALWAYS LOOKING FOR MORE GOOD PEOPLE!* Whether you want to raid or just hang out and chat in guild chat while leveling/farming/questing/etc. I'd love to have you with us!

Now we don’t have a whole lot of information about this new feature compared to Flexible Raids but the fact that it has been announced is a step in the right direction. For years when asked about low pop servers Blizzard has responded with statements like “we’re looking into it and working on solutions” or “it’s something we are aware of.” This feature is proof that Blizzard is actually listening to our concerns. I am looking forward to hearing more about Virtual realms and how it can save my low pop server and more importantly, how it can help my guild continue to thrive.

The future looks bright for low pop servers.

What's in a name?

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 16:16:00 +0000

I was reading something in the WoW subreddit(as I often do) and I ran across an interesting question: How do you come up with a name for your characters? This is such an interesting question because everyone has different reasons for why they use a certain name. Some choose names from other games, some just use the in game random name generator until they find a name they like, and some don't care about their character names and pick random things. Each person is different and while some names are completely unoriginal, they probably mean something to the person who rolled that character. As for me, I have a long and weird process I go through when I pick a name for characters.

I once made the joke that you can tell when in my life people met me by what they call me. If you call me by my real name we probably met in high school. If you know me as Jedi Optimus, we most likely met when I was in college and very active on several online message boards and I also played many online FPS games where that was the handle I used. Many a noob cursed that name in anger as I shot them ingame. If you know me as Jedem, we most likely met in 2005 when I first started playing WoW and I used that name for my very first character, a warrior. I eventually changed servers and classes but the first character I rolled on Ursin was a mage named Jedem. If you refer to me as Izak, you probably raided with me in BC when my pally sadly became my raiding main. Now Jed, well if that's what you know me as and you have never been in my guild, you probably met me in Wrath when I first started blogging. Of course if you have ever been in my guild regardless of when, you eventually know me as Jed.

When it comes to my characters I tend to take some time when it comes to thinking up their names. Some take me weeks to figure out what I want to name them and some take me minutes. For my mage, Jedem, I had started using it when I played Final Fantasy 11. When I made the move to WoW I liked the name so I brought it with me and named my first character Jedem. Now that character was a warrior and not a mage because I wanted to try my hand at an easy class to play since I had come from FF11 where everything was super difficult to play. Eventually I rolled a mage and decided I liked it enough that when I moved to my current server(Ursin) I rolled my first character: a mage named Jedem. Eventually as more people joined my guild, Jedem was shortened to Jed by new players and I've been stuck with the name since.

Now obviously my mage will have a lot of history behind his name, being my main in my heart.(not always in raids) Some names don't have as much meaning behind them until I've played them a while and the character earns the name. Now some of my character names aren't as serious or have a history behind them. Some are meant to be silly and playful. When I first created an alt of a certain class I would try to give it a slightly serious name but when I created a new alt of the same class, that would go out the window. Sometimes silly names make an appearance. My latest alt is my new human warlock that I named CptSerious after the nickname of the captain of the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team. He is my second warlock alt and so there are no rules for his name. When I made my horde panda monk I had already leveled an alliance panda monk to 90 so the horde one was named something light. I chose to go with SteveJabbs because it was a funny name and seemed to fit.

Sometimes I get on a streak of names that are somewhat related to each other. I named several of my alts after famous generals. I have a Winfield, Rhommel, Bonapartte, Stonewall, Wellesley, Moltke, and Cauthonn. If you recognize all of those names you get a gold star! History nerds unite! I have never named an alt anything stupid like XxArthasxX or DKLAWLS or anything stupid like that. Here's hoping that I never do! So that is a little peak into my mind when it comes to character names. Some are serious, some are funny, and some are slightly silly. In the end they are all me.

Plight of the low pop server

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 02:45:00 +0000

I have been on my server since 2005 when it was first launched and in that time my server has gone from being a medium population server (ever so briefly) to being a low population server less than a year after going live. Since then, it has remained a low pop server. While at the time it wasn’t a big deal, the population on the server has steadily declined. During Vanilla, before paid transfers were implemented, most people rolled on a server and stayed on that server until they either stopped playing or found a reason to start over on a different realm. If you reached level 60 on a character, people tended to stay on that server because it was such a pain to re-level on a new server. Once paid transfers were introduced the barrier to leaving your server was removed. Players were free to transfer their characters to new servers to play with friends/coworkers/raiding guilds/etc.

Of course this didn’t affect the larger realms since the higher population numbers meant they could afford to lose some people to other servers without it affecting the overall population. Unlike larger servers, the smaller servers suffered because the realms couldn’t afford to lose so many people. As new people began playing WoW, most would pick the larger realms because the population made them more appealing than the low pop counterparts. Who wants to roll a new character on what appears to be an empty server when they can roll on a busy server that looks to be more fun? Not all transfers were off of low pop realms. Some people transferred to smaller servers to play with friends or because they grew tired of life on a larger server.The transfers in weren’t numerous enough to slow the tide of people leaving.

There are a few things that affect low pop realms that you might not think about on larger population servers:

· lack of materials on the auction house prohibiting you from leveling professions without farming materials

· difficulty finding people to quest/instance/raid with from the server

· difficulty starting a new guild or joining a new guild

· recruitment can feel like the most difficult thing ever

· frustration trying to meet new people.

The last two are the hardest to deal with as a guild leader. I often have to PuG people into raids when we don’t have enough guildees to fill a raid. I ask those in the raid if they have any people on their friend’s lists that would be interested in raiding. And when that doesn’t work I’ve been forced to go to trade chat. On my server, trade chat is usually a barren wasteland.

I don’t mean that the server is a post-apocalyptic land, filled with horrible things, but rather in that it feels like everyone is gone except for me. When I say something in trade, it stays in the chat window until it eventually disappears. People rarely talk in trade and sadly when they do it’s usually a few trolls who want to spam anal jokes or other equally dumb memes. If you are trying to sell anything in trade, you might be waiting for a long while before anyone responds. Like I said, this is just for my server but I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if other low pop servers experienced the same thing.

The auction house can often be hit or miss for items that are usually listed in large quantities on other servers. The number of people who are out in the world farming for mats is smaller so the items go quickly. Prices are, of course, skewed because people don’t want to pay outrageous amounts for items like can be expected on larger servers where there are more people with money to spend. Trying to sell anything through trade chat is difficult, if not impossible, so the AH is often the only place to sell stuff. As with most markets, there are items that consistently sell, but even high demand items can take a relisting or two before they sell because people aren’t online looking to buy all the time.

And recruitment?? Don’t even get me started on how hard it is to recruit competent people! We have an age and personality requirement for our guild. In order to join you have to be over 18 and be a decent person. We don’t force people to raid if they don’t want to, but if they want to raid, we help them get gear so that they can meet our raiding minimums. When we recruit we will advertise (not spam) in trade chat in a major city, use the in-game guild finder, advertise on twitter, and post on various forums. The people on our server (the few left) tend to already be guilded, not interested in our guild, or don’t meet our two requirements.

Trying to get people to transfer to the server to join our guild doesn’t happen because the server is low pop and people don’t want to spend the money to transfer. If people decide to roll a new character on the server, the server inevitably disappoints them and they leave. We have had a small number of people join the guild but obviously it was more luck that they found us than anything else.

By this point in the post you are probably wondering what the hell all this information about low pop servers has to do with anything. Well first off I’m on a low pop and this is what I have to do deal with every day I decide to play. Second, I am writing because Blizzard has yet to do anything about this situation and it has caused a lot of frustration. In order to get rid of some of this frustration, I am writing about it. So I’m bitching about the situation but do I have any real suggestions? As a matter of fact I have a few! While they may not be the best solutions, they are at least something positive that can be tried out:

· Merge the servers

· Open current tier for cross-realm raiding

· Enable free transfers for guilds TO low pop servers from more than just 2-3 high pop servers

Merge the servers

This is often the first thing most people demand of Blizzard when it comes to low pop servers. So I’ll talk about it first. Currently Blizzard has about 256 US/South American/Oceanic realms. Of those servers, 54 are marked as low pop. That means that just over 20% of servers are low pop. Blizzard doesn’t release exact population numbers for servers, so we don’t have an exact population numbers for what makes up a low, medium, or high population. We do have nifty websites like realmpop.com that gives an approximation based on armory trawling. Because this uses data from the armory, it includes alts and the unplayed characters that still show up on the armory. Obviously inflates the numbers that realmpop displays, but since that’s all we have it’s what I’ll use.

According to realmpop, the lowest population on a low pop server (Chromaggus-PVP-US) is about 18,600 and the highest (Destromath-PVP-US) is 58,000. Compare this to the lowest population on a high pop server (Dath’Remar-PVE-US) at 80,000 and the highest population (Tichondrius-PVP-US) at 205,500. The gap between the smallest and largest high pop servers is larger than the highest population on a low pop server.

So now that my math has made my head hurt, let’s talk about merging them servers! So if you have so many servers with such a low population, why not merge them into one medium or high population server? The Blizzard developers are constantly asked about this and questioned about why it hasn’t been done to correct the problem. Their responses are usually “we’re looking into it but it isn’t something we’re going to do right now.” The reasons they give are related to problems with character/guild names across the merged servers as well as the problem of forcing people to leave their server.

I get their concerns, I really do. I’d be more than a bit upset if my mage and guild of 8 years suddenly had to have its name changed. Is this an insurmountable obstacle for realm merging? No. Through cross-realm grouping we’ve already experienced running a group with people who have the same name but are on different servers. How does the game handle that? It added their realm name to their character name. So what you’ll see is Arthasdklol – Ursin and Arthasdklol – Illidan in the same raid without the game breaking. Why not merge the servers into a new server and add the previous server name to the characters with name clashes? If you have a character with a unique name then you don’t have to add the previous server but if you have a commonly used name, you add the – previous server name to the name. It allows people who’ve had their names to keep them.

This also works for guild names. There could be an Avengers of Azeroth – Ursin and an Avengers of Azeroth – Dalaran, for example. I think if they did this it would allow guilds to still keep their names as well as allowing each guild to represent where they came from. I’m sure that this would take some work to get sorted out but honestly a little hard work now means later on a lot more people are happy in game. Sure it might look a little weird at first but if it’ll give me a server with real people to play on, I’ll get used to it!

Open the current tier for cross realm raiding

Why are raiding guilds transferring off low pop servers and taking a large amount of people with them? Because they can’t recruit people for their raid teams and so they must look to greener pastures to maintain their way of life. In the last three weeks my server has lost about 5 raiding guilds because they couldn’t find new recruits. Two of those guilds were in the top four guilds on the server for progression and the other three were not far behind.

Each guild has given the same reason for leaving the server: finding new recruits that can raid at the level/time that the guild requires was next to impossible for them. So they all went to larger realms where they could recruit the people that they needed. I know that as a raid leader of a casual guild, I HATE having to cancel our raid because we don't have enough people to fill the raid. It’s super frustrating to spend an hour in trade trying to find one or two people, but have no luck. If I were in a progression raiding guild, and was the raid leader of a team that often cancelled raids because people weren’t available, I'd be looking to move somewhere I could find people who could raid.

Blizzard has given us the ability to run dungeons, heroics, scenarios. and raids together through the wonders of cross-realm grouping, but we can only raid the previous tier of content. This means that while the Throne of Thunder raid is the current raid tier, we can only raid MSV, HoF, and ToES since those are considered the previous tier. I've been in several successful cross realm raids with people from twitter. If I am running MSV or HoF with my guild and I find myself short a dps or two, I can hit up my friends list, openraid, the TLR forums, and even twitter to find someone to fill the raid. Cross-realm raiding has made it possible for people to be on different realms and still get a chance to raid. Your server can be a low pop pvp server and it won't matter because you can invite friends to fill your raid.

My suggestion is to allow us to cross realm the current tier of raids. If I don't have enough people to raid new raid instance, I can find people who want to run it. My guilds biggest draw is that we have a great time when we raid. It's a low stress raid and we often have moments when we can't stop laughing at something that happened in raid chat or vent. When we pug people into our raids, they tend to enjoy themselves and eventually we either get a new guildee or a person that we know is really good and is willing to pug for us when we need someone.

This raid culture has gotten more than a few people to either transfer to Ursin or to start a brand new alt on the server to play with us. If I could raid current content with cross realm people, it would

(1) allow us to actually raid when we are short people

(2) possibly get us a few new members, and

(3) let people who wouldn't other wise raid the current content, raid said content.

Blizzard says they don't know if they will allow this because they’re unsure what affect it'll have on guilds. I guess Blizz seems to think that guilds are only created to bring people together to raid. Maybe they've never heard of several small guilds coming together to raid together without merging. Or possibly they've never had alts that have raided with other guilds.

Whenever opening current content to cross realm raiding gets mentioned, there are a few vocal people who claim that it will ruin progression tracking. I guess they seem to think that if you can suddenly raid current content, a pug of cross realm raiders will manage to magically down everything and lay claim to all server firsts for each person. The chances of that happening are slim to none. Even fi it were a potential issue, Blizzard could make it so that realm first kills are like guild raid achievements; You need 80% of people from a realm for it to count as a realm first for that realm. For example, I am raiding Heroic Terrace of Endless Spring in 10 man mode and have eight guildees in the raid, I pug in two people from twitter and we manage to not only clear the raid but we also get a realm first for downing the Sha of Fear. The 80% of people on my server (my guildees) will get a realm first achievement while the two pugged people will not.

It’s a simple solution to a potential complaint. It wouldn't mess with progression tracking because it’s almost all members of my guild and the probability that we would have gotten that kill if we had two more guildees is pretty high. No one is going to magically jump up in the progression charts quicker than they would have moved by being able to pug in cross realm people. BUT people will be able to raid with their friends and progress and see the raid tiers before they are old content.

I would even go as far as to say that by allowing this, progression guilds could see a high influx of new members because they could run the current tier of raids with applicants and this would allow the guilds to know whether the applicant would be able to pull their weight in a progression raid without having to pay money to server or faction change. If someone wants to join a raiding guild, they have to apply to the guild, pay to transfer a character to the new realm, run a few trial raids with the guild, and find out if they’re a good fit. If they pass they get in and the money was well spent but if they don't get in, the applicant just wasted money and they are now stuck on that server until they find another guild elsewhere. If I was in the situation where I was looking for a raiding guild, I'd love the option of NOT having to shell out money to find a guild that works for me.

Enable free transfers for guilds TO low pop servers from more than just 2-3 high pop servers

When Blizzard does allow transfers from high pop to a low pop server it’s usually from one or two high pop servers to several low pop servers. This usually means that the high pop server will see a small handful of people actually leave it to go to the low pop servers. The high pop server doesn't see a decrease in population and the low pop populations continues to decline.

My suggestion is that they open realm transfers from the top 10 high pop servers to 3-4 low pop servers. Now this won't make more people leave each server than normal BUT with enough servers having the option to transfer off, the usual tiny trickle of people could turn into a slight stream of people heading to low pop servers. There are enough high pop servers that Blizz could easily do this enough times to get at least a few new people on most of the low pop servers. It's a stretch, but at this point anything is better than nothing.

So that's at least three things that Blizzard can do to help the low population situation. Will they do any of these things? No clue. Would I LOVE it if they did? Hell yes I would! Until then, I'll be on my server, doing my thing with my guild, and hoping that we can get a few more people to join our guild and/or server.

Come on Blizzard, don't make me cancel any more of my raids due to not having enough people!

Blizzcon Feels

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 18:24:00 +0000

Blizzard has announced the dates for this year’s Blizzcon: November 8-9. What does this mean? It means that this year there will be a Blizzcon in Anaheim where hopefully we will get all sorts of new info about the next expansion for WoW/Starcraft/Diablo/Lost Vikings. I have always wanted to go to Blizzcon and see all the cool stuff in person but logistics have made it extremely difficult. However this year is different. I turn 30 this year(I know I’m a baby to some and old to others) and my lady love asked me what I wanted to do to celebrate and I told her I wanted to go to Blizzcon. She has agreed to make it happen for us so if we can get tickets we will be at Blizzcon in November!! We booked a room and once the tickets go on sale we will be camping out in the online queue to get tickets.

Of course immediately after reserving the hotel room I looked at twitter to see who was planning on going to Blizzcon. There were several people made the decision to go and there were some on the fence about whether they could go or not. Sadly there were a few people who either couldn’t make it or were choosing to not attempt to go. I was excited about the prospect of meeting some of the people who were going to try and go to Blizzcon when suddenly my brain decided to be a scumbag.

For those of you who are new around these parts, I have made mention before that I am an introvert (shocking I know) and while I tend to have a few extrovert tendencies I tend to have social anxiety hit me often. It’s why I have been on twitter for 2 years now and I barely have 5000 tweets compared to people who have been on for a quarter of that time and have triple the amount of tweets. I tend to spend most of my time watching the conversations going on between people and often I don’t see any place where I can join the conversation. Most times I see an opening I the conversation where I can join in, I stop and think about what I’m about to say and over think it. What if what I say isn’t relevant? What if they hate what I said? What if they just keep on talking and ignore what I said?

Well I started thinking about Blizzcon and possibly meeting some of the people I interact with on twitter and the social anxiety started kicking in.

It honestly reminded me of a scene from the movie “How the Grinch stole Christmas” when the Grinch is debating showing up to the Whoville Whobilation:

Grinch: (after standing grumpily with his arms crossed) All right. I'll swing by for a minute, allow them to envy me, grab a handful of popcorn shrimp and blow outta there. (heads for the door, then stops abruptly and returns nervously) But what if it's a cruel prank? What if it's a cash bar?! How dare they! (scowls, then calms down) All right, I'll go. But I shall be fashionably late. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes! (groans in frustration) Definitely not. (firmly, heading for the door with his hand behind his back) All right! I've made my decision. I'm going, And that's that! (shows his hand) Ah! Had my fingers crossed.

My brain started asking me similar questions. What if people don’t want to meet up? What if I meet them and they hate me? What if I make an ass of myself? What if I do or say something that causes a large number of people to unfollow me on twitter or stop reading my blog or listening to my podcast? Damn it brain why can’t you just let me be happy????? My brain had me thinking that maybe I might have made a huge mistake in wanting to go to Blizzcon.

Thankfully the awesomeness of actually being at Blizzcon outweighed all the things my brain thought up. I will be at Blizzcon and I will see all the cool panels in person and just maybe I might even participate in a lore question thing or a contest or something. I will be at Blizzcon! If any of my readers are going to be going as well and want to meet up and hang out at the bar, let me know! I plan on having a great time and if I can meet people that’ll be awesome but if I don’t, I’ll still have a great time.

Third times a charm

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 22:44:00 +0000

Apparently I am rather bad at remembering to check my calendar because my third blogaversary was on January 25^th and here I am almost a week later and just now getting around to writing a post for it. What can I say, I’m a horrible slacker and you should all stop reading whatever inane crap I write. Now for some reason, some of you are still reading this so I suppose I should continue this post. I have repeatedly mentioned that I started this blog because I had a lot of time in between courses so I decided to start blogging to keep me from being bored to tears. I have somehow managed to keep writing because it’s an outlet for my thoughts on WoW/leadership/finance/robots. I know my wife is happy that I write this blog because that way I don’t drive her crazy with all the stuff running through my head.

Well anyway, it’s been 3 years. I’ve had a lot of visitors come to my blog and some have even been nice enough to leave me comments. The past year has definitely been a busy one for me; I started a podcast, designed some cool shirts, wrote a short story involving my mage, wrote a class guidefor the best mage spec, and of course wrote blog posts that some of you read.

In game I’ve been working on gearing for raiding and leveling alts that also need gearing for raiding. Stupid vicious cycle of needing to do stuff to get gear so you can raid and get gear. I’ve been slacking and only have 6 level 90 characters. I know, I know, it’s shameful and I feel all of the shame. I’ve got a mage, pally, monk, rogue, death knight, and another mage. I’m currently working on leveling my gnome priest and horde dk so those two will be my next level capped characters. I am not going to lie, I think I might have a problem.

So the question ahead of me other than what alt I will level after the priest/dk is: what do I do to celebrate 3 years of blogging? I thought about my usual celebration event the gnomish death race but while we had a good turn out last time, I think I need something new and different. So I thought to myself, why not do something pet battle related? I know I have been spending a lot of time leveling pets to 25 and battling pet tamers across the zones. Maybe some other people have also done the same and would like to do a tournament. So maybe in February I’ll post details about when/where the tournament will be held. The beauty of pet battles is that they are shared across all your characters so you can roll a level one on my server and participate or if you are alliance you can be battle tag friended/invited to my server for some battling! If anyone reading this is interested please let me know, I think if we can get a decent amount of people we can have a great time.

In parting, I leave you with a funny story that happened to me in the olden days of the Burning Crusade expansion. At the time if you were a tank you had to grind rep with the Keepers of Time for their helm enchant. This was a very annoying rep grind because there were only 2 instances that gave KoT rep: Old Hillsbrad and the Black Morass. Sadly each gave crap for rep and took forever to find a group for/do because you had to do a super annoying quest that involved walking around the caverns of time listening to some npc yammer on about the timeways and such. If you’ve ever done the Aldor/Scryer quest when you first enter Shattrath, it’s like that but worse because you are walking in such a large circle and you had no choice but to do it if you wanted to do Old Hillsbrad. More often than not you would get a group, everyone would make their way to the instance and someone would NOT be able to zone in because they had never done the stupid quest and couldn’t be bothered to do it then.

Anyway back to the story, a guildee was leveling his paladin and needed to grind rep with the KoT. He asked me if I had any alts around the level 66 range that I could take to the instance with him. Luckily for him I had a spriest that I was working on and had done the walk around attunement on. The two of us get in vent and we get a healer and dps who were also attuned and head to the instance. My guildee and I were the only ones who had done the instance before so we had to explain what to expect to the dps/healer. My guildee decided that since he needed rep he was going to find every single mob in the instance that gave rep and pull it. We cleared all the mobs in the first area including the mobs in the tower to the left of the main building where Thrall was. The poor pugged people must have been wondering why the instance had so much trash that needed to be cleared. We finish the instance and the dps/healer leave so my guildee pulls in another guildee who had a resto shaman and we clear it again with just the three of us. Since I was the only dps this took longer than a normal run and when we finished we reset the instance and went back in.

The three of us start clearing trash and mount up to run to the next part when suddenly the healer got a bad lag spike that caused him to run forward into several mobs and dc’d him. Of course all the mobs kill him and turn to us. Thankfully the two of us were still mounted and I’m not ashamed to say that we turned around and ran for the entrance. As we were running my guildee tells me in vent “Why are we running? We should just kill them!” I hesitate but he tells me that we can do it so I agree to give it a chance. He tells me “Heal me! We can take them!” as he dismounts and runs into the chasing mobs. I pop out of shadow and toss him a shield and a renew when suddenly he gets blinded and they all turn to me and do unspeakable things to me. As soon as I'm dead they proceed to kill my guildee. At this point I’m yelling at him in vent for getting us killed and all he can say is “I didn’t know they cc’ed! I didn't know they cc'ed!!!” I was laughing so hard at this point that I couldn’t seriously be mad at him but I have yet to let him live it down and this happened 5-6 years ago.

It’s become a running joke in my guild between the two of us to yell out “Heal me! We can take them!” whenever we’re in an instance or questing. So yeah, there’s a story about Jed that hopefully made you laugh a little at my death.

Thank you everyone who reads my blog, retweets my blog post tweets, leaves comments on my blog, and subscribes to my post feed. You are all awesome and I am thankful that you are all reading my blog, even if it is just to laugh at me. Here’s to another year of crazy blogging fun!

Have Jed, will travel

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 02:44:00 +0000

Well the last post I had written decided that when I sent it to myself it was NOT going to send and so I lost what I had written so far for this post. I think it is a sign that what I had written was crap and that I shouldn’t force anyone to read what I had written. Point made universe, point made.

Here is the basics of today’s post:

Who: Me, possibly you, maybe you, definitely you, oh and you.

What: I’m a bored 90. I like helping people. I’ve decided to offer my services to the WoW public! This means that if you are a lowbie trying to run instances, I can help you out. If you’re coming back to the game and want to know whats changed, I can help you. If you are a healer and want to run old raids but can’t solo them, I can help you. If you don’t know what to do at level cap, I can help you. In a group with friends and need a tank for something, I can help you. Can’t quite solo a difficult quest mob/rare, I can help you.

Where: Thanks to cross realm zones, it can be on my server or your server or that other server over there.

Why: I like helping people and along the way people have helped me with things so I have decided to pay it forward and help others. I get nothing out of doing this other than the satisfaction of knowing that I have helped someone. You aren’t obligated to help anyone else out along the way but if you did it’d be neat.

The details:

I decided to do this one day after spending a few fun hours in Ulduar with a cool Disco Priest and her husband. They had been trying to solo Ulduar for achievements and the mount but they needed a little boost. Having both the 10 and 25 man achievement mounts from Ulduar, I can say that I know my way around that place so I offered up my dk to help out and we managed to get many of the achievements that they needed. This got me thinking about how many people in game have the desire and drive to do things like old raids or rep grinds but have no knowledge about how to go about them.

My guild raids one night a week and the rest of the week I am usually putzing around on alts either leveling them or working on their professions. This causes me to have a lot of time in game where I am bored and looking for something fun to do. Most things are more fun with friends after all. I tend to run parts of the LFR on 3 different characters and always love having someone I know along with me to make it more interesting.

I have a few alts still at 85 that I wouldn't mind leveling through instances/questing with friends. Currently sitting at 85 I have an enh shaman, resto druid, ele/resto shaman, warlock, warrior, spriest, guardian druid, and windwalker monk. At 90 and looking for gear I have a frost mage, frost dk, brewmaster monk, combat rogue, and fire mage. These are all alliance BUT for my horde readers, I have an 86 frost dk that I'd be up for questing/instancing with along with several lowbies from level 20 to 70.

I know to some of my readers this may seem like an elaborate scheme to do something nefarious...but it isn't. I have amazing people in my guild who will gladly help me with stuff when I ask and I know some people out there don't have access to this level of support. I want to help people in the hopes of bringing balance to the force only without the dismemberment and large scale genocide.

In conclusion if you want some help with stuff in game, add me to your friends list: Jedem#1828 and let me know who you are so I can make a note next to your name. Then as long as I'm not in the middle of an instance or on limited time, I will be more than happy to help out. If you want to just chat about stuff in game, I am also down with that. If this is all for naught and no one friends me, well at least I will know that I have tried to do something good for the community and I guess that'll have to be enough for me.

Thunderous Fury

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:22:00 +0000

This is a post that I have wanted to write for two years; in fact it’s something that I’ve been working on for over 5 years. What the hell am I rambling about you may be asking yourselves. Well I’m talking about [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker]. The very same item that is often linked by trade chat trolls. Now I am not just linking it because I want to troll you all. I am talking about it because a week and a half ago this happened:

That’s right my DK got the second binding that he needed to complete the legendary and I finally got my very own Thunderfury. Big whoop, you might be saying to yourselves, it’s a useless item that you can’t even use nowadays. Well to those people I say…SHUT UP! I have wanted my own Thunderfury since I was raiding MC on my mage in vanilla. I decided to start farming for it in BC on my protadin because I wanted him to have it. I would go into MC and solo Garr and Baron Geddon which at the time was difficult to do unless you were block capped and sometimes it would take forever to kill the bosses. You can youtube videos of paladins prot solo’ing the two of them and trust me when I tell you that it is boring as hell. It was pretty much a lot of block damage from Blessing of Sanctuary/Retribution Aura as the boss would beat on you and you’d judge light to heal yourself some. Super boring and you had to bring an extra shield with you because the shield you had equipped had a tendency to break from all the damage being done to it.

In Wrath it got a little easier to solo since you were 80 and had higher stats than you did in BC. It still took a while but at least you could avoid some of the trash mobs. I sadly did not get a binding off either boss in Wrath on my paladin. =( When Cata came around it was even easier to farm the two bosses that drop the bindings and I was regularly farming MC on my pally, warrior, rogue, and dk. I finally experienced some success and got the first binding off Garr on my pally, rogue, and dk! Of course Geddon refused to drop his binding so I was only half way to a Thunderfury. I suppose something is better than nothing. To give you readers an idea of how long I’ve been farming for the bindings on my pally, every single mob in MC will give you rep with the Hydraxian Waterlords until Revered, at which point only bosses give rep and that’s only about 250 rep. I am 7.9k/21k revered with them on my pally. I mainly avoided trash and only focused on killed the two bosses I needed for the bindings. Most of the rep I’ve gotten is from killing the two bosses.

When MoP came around, I continued farming for the bindings and finally after years and years of farming, Geddon dropped the second binding…for my dk. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu! But at least one of my characters got the damn binding!

I had most of the quest stuff ready but I had to farm for a few things to transmute into things I needed for the quest.

Once I got that done I headed to Silithus, home of sand, sand bugs, and one very special NPC.

I gave him his items and he gave me an item to summon Prince Thunderaan.

Being 85 it was relatively easy to kill him but I can imagine how much fun that fight must have been at 60. You needed a raid to kill him and it really must have felt like an accomplishment to down him then.

I proceeded to own the Prince and I looted the item I needed off of him and gave it to the NPC.

He was nice enough to give me my legendary weapon.

It was finally mine after years and years of farming and hoping!

Now that I have one Thunderfury, I will still continue to farm for it on my pally because damn it I want one on my pally! I’ve spent this long farming for it, whats a few more years?

Days of Future Past

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:49:00 +0000

Today I am going to talk about several different things and hopefully it’ll seem like I have coherent thoughts when I write (I don’t) and it will all blend together to make a good post. (it won’t) So buckle your seat belts boys and girls and prepare for the trip of your life!*

*Trip of your life may not actually be the trip of your life. Mileage may vary. If this is the trip of your life…you may need to have more fun in your life!*

To celebrate WoW’s 8^th anniversary Blizzard released this video that mashed up a lot of the previous game cinematics and to me it is awesome! If you haven’t seen it yet you should open up another tab/window and watch it right now. Go ahead I’ll wait.

If you’ve been playing for several years I am sure that you are probably reminiscing about those times. Such good times were had. Not that I’m not having good times now mind you, it was just a different time and nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Anyway, that video is awesome and I can’t believe that WoW is 8 years old now. Kind of crazy but I still remember when they released this video showing how they made the original trailer. I was in a friends dorm room and he showed me the video and I was just stunned that something could look so amazing! Ahhh good times.

Honestly if 8 years ago you had told me that in a year I would start up a guild that would last 7+ years, I’d have told you that you were crazy! When WoW came out I believe I was playing Final Fantasy 11 and I had no interest in leaving it since so many of my friends at college were playing it. 7 years is a long time to be playing anything and I am glad that I still have reasons every day to log in and play the game. Not just the game itself but the friends that I've made in game. Those friendships in game have led to me getting married, have a best man that I met in game, and having a great time online with people I've never met face to fact but can make even something as tedious as rep grinding feel like a great time.

Well enough looking back! It’s time to move forward and look to the future! I have a lot of projects that I’m working on at the moment which have kept me busy and unable to really blog much. (likely story I know) I’m working on getting a second raid night OR a second raid group going on in guild and that of course requires people level alts/gear alts so that’s always a big time sink. Why can’t people be like me and level multiple alts to level cap quickly! Slackers, I tell ya.

I’m still podcasting the Follow the Leader Podcast with Orvillius, Nymphy, and Aero but it seems that getting a set time to record with those three is always a difficult assignment. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to the podcast, you totally should. It’s a podcast focused on guild leading, raid leading, and general leadership stuff. I’ve shared plenty of personal stories there about my leadership history so you should all tune in just for that alone! My stories are comedy plutonium!* But we do have good advice for people who are in the leadership role in game.

*Not really comedy plutonium. In fact it’s more like weapons grade balonium.*

Out of game, I have a few things that are keeping me busy. I am working on a few short stories that I plan on self-publishing online through Amazon once they are ready to go. I am afraid of mentioning what they are about in case anyone tries to steal my ideas or in reality if someone thinks the premise is dumb. Either way once I get ready to list them I’ll be sure to make a post about it or tweet it out in case anyone would like to read something I’ve written. Never done any serious writing like this other than the choose my adventure series of posts and I can say for sure that writing is not easy. Nothing like sitting down to write something and just staring at the computer trying to continue where I left off on the story. Damn you writers block for not kicking in until I actually have time to write!!!

Along with writing stuff, I just came into possession of a working arcade cabinet and it is pretty damn sweet. Right now it’s in working condition and everything but it is powered by a really old (Pentium 2) computer so I’m working on upgrading it piece by piece so that it can load up the arcade games faster than it does now. I may make a separate page with pictures of the current progress I’m making on the cabinet if anyone is interested. It should be for fun times. I will say this for the cabinet, playing Captain America and the Avengers AND Captain Commando at an arcade are among some of my precious memories of childhood and the fact that I can play them at home now on a cabinet I own is a dream come true! =D

So that’s the blog post, I hope whoever read it enjoyed it. Lot going on at the moment that I can’t write about yet but maybe someday soon I can. Until that day, I’ll just have to continue writing my horrible blog posts that really only three people will read.

Pandarian Things

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 18:18:00 +0000

It’s been a month and a half since the Mists of Pandaria launched and things have been a bit busy in my little corner of the internets. I’ve leveled 2 characters to 90, gotten another to 89, gotten a monk to 86, farmed a lot, and gotten my pally ready for raiding with the guild. Very busy 6 weeks. So what do I think about this expansion now that I’ve had time to spend a good amount of time playing it? I think that Blizzard has done a good job so far with most of the new stuff in Pandaria. I am having a good time playing and as usual I don’t see myself quitting any time soon. Lot of real life stuff going on so I haven’t been able to blog about what I’ve been up to in WoW.

The Good

I LOVE ~~lamp~~ pandas. They are seriously fun to play and just watching them run around is hilarious. Pandaria is a very beautiful place and flying around it and just watching the scenery is a fun time. The storylines in each zone are also pretty awesome and at times you can easily find yourself pulled into the storyline, cheering on the NPC’s or feeling sad when someone dies/succumbs to emotions.

I can’t forget to mention pet battles. Oh man pet battles are so much fun. Stupid awesome pets requiring you to battle to make them even more awesome. DAMN YOU PET BATTLES! DAMN YOU AND YOUR FUN! Must battle one more pet, just one more pet. One more…just one…must be the best, like no one ever was…

The Bad

SO MANY DAILIES! Once you hit 90 there are so many things that you can do that it can be slightly overwhelming. There are Tiller dailies, Anglers dailies, Golden Lotus dailies, Klaxxi dailies, cooking dailies, archeology dailies, Cloud Serpent dailies, AND you have dailies to get rep with individual people like Nat Pagle and the Black Prince. If you want to get VP you do dailies. If you want to get gear because the LFR/raid won’t drop pieces for you, you do dailies because you need to get revered with factions to buy VP gear. It’s a little weak but honestly you don’t NEED to be fully geared out in VP gear to do well in raids.

Pandas are awesome BUT since both factions can have them, you are technically neutral until you pick a faction around level 12 or so. This means that you have to go through the Panda starter zone with no guild chat, no direct whispers, and no mailbox. Kind of a pain but thankfully once you pick a faction and get out into the world you realize that you are a Panda and that you rock. Until that point though, you are isolated and worst of all…you have no bags except for the ones that you can get to drop! The horror of running around with 6 slot bags!!!

The Guild

My guild was able to work hard and pull together and snag the Realm First Working as a Better Team achievement which was really cool. I know that several of my guildees got a few realm first profession achievements which is great for them. We also started raiding and downed the first boss in the Mogushan Vaults, the Stone Guard, and we are making good progress with the second boss, Feng the something or other. Seriously that guy made me want to punch the computer when we wiped at 8%! So close!!!! But I know that we are awesome and we’ll down it the next time we raid.

Speaking of which, we are looking for more people to start a second raid group on Sundays! Tanks, heals, and dps are needed! It’d be Sundays 5-8 PST on Ursin-US-PVP. Oh and it’s for alliance only in case anyone was wondering. We’re a casual group that happens to raid and our raids are usually full of fun times so if you’re looking for a home check us out! Also if you're just looking for a guild where you can be social and not raid, we would totes love to have ya! =D

Overall I am having a good time. I love my little farm where I can grow veggies or motes of harmony and since I hit exalted with the tillers I finally got the 60 exalted factions achievement. I’ll probably slowly work on getting my mage exalted with the remaining factions that I need and see how far I am from 70 exalted factions and the Beloved title. I might have issues.

To all the lowbie groups

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 21:44:00 +0000

I am going to start this post by announcing that this is a rant. If you have no desire to read my angry rant, please feel free to browse through my other posts until you find something more to your liking. If you’re still with me, hold on to something because this is going to get angry and possibly violent. I’ve been leveling my panda and I LOVE it! They are a fun class to play regardless of spec and I highly recommend leveling one. Now because I am one of those weird people who like to play a class to level cap as the same spec that they are going to be at said level cap, I tend to level some characters as healers or tanks. For my panda I decided to level as a Brewmaster, which is the tank spec.

This means that I’ve run a lot of dungeons so far. I usually quest for a bit and then queue for a bit so that I don’t end up running the same dungeon a million times in a row. Nothing like running RFD 5 times in a row to make you want to stop playing for the night. Anyway, since I’ve been leveling I end up in a lot of groups with everyone but me wearing all heirlooms. Why don’t I have heirlooms you ask? Well because until this expansion each account could only have 10 character slots per server. I had one of each class at level cap. I had no need to buy heirlooms because I didn’t have a character that could benefit from them and I would rather spend the JP on other stuff like mounts or crafting mats or gnomish hookers. Had I been smart, I would have bought them with the extra JP I had before it got turned into gold in 5.0.4 or whatever patch it was. But since I’m dumb and didn’t remember to do that, I have no heirlooms.

Does this make leveling harder, having no heirlooms? No. Does it make leveling slower? No because I level pretty fast since I know where to go for each quest and I supplement my questing with herbing/mining for more free xp. Anyway, back to my rant. Whenever I zone into an instance the first thing I do is greet the group. Some groups respond and some are dead silent the entire time, it varies. After I greet everyone, I type the following message “Please don’t pull for me or ahead of me and we’ll have a great time.” Why do I do this? Well I do it because as a tank there is nothing more frustrating than tanking a group of mobs and seeing one of the dps go and grab more mobs that they then expect you to pick up. If you don’t and they die, you better be ready for them to accuse you of being a bad tank, the healer of being super bad, and the dps for not helping them out.

It is super frustrating because it happens so often in groups now that so many people have access to heirlooms. I often have to tell people that they aren’t the tank and that if they wanted to tank they should queue as a tank. As a tank I know what I can pull and survive, I know when my cooldowns are available, and I know when mob groups should be pulled back to not grab pats. When a DPS decides to grab more mobs I warn them once or twice to NOT do that. If they persist on pulling more mobs, I don’t taunt off them. I let them die. I got into a fight with a DPS who kept trying to defend a dumb DK that not only pulled for me, he death gripped mobs off me. The Dumb DPS argued that as long as stuff was dying and no one was in any real danger, what did it matter if people pulled for me?

At first I was shocked that someone would argue with me when I told the dk that if he pulled again, that he could tank whatever he pulled. I was nice and warned the dk several times before letting him deal with the mob packs that he pulled. The Dumb DPS thought I was in the wrong because I, the tank, wanted to be the only person TANKING! Honestly I don’t care if you have a million heirlooms and feel that you can solo things, if you queue as a dps, you are dps and NOT a tank. It’d be like me queuing as a healer and just deciding to dps or tank. You select what role you want to be in the instance. I choose to tank because I like tanking and I want to make sure that when I get to level cap I will know all there is to know about tanking. If you are a dps and feel that the tank could move faster, drop queue and requeue as a tank and see how you feel when people pull stuff for you, pull off of you, and blame you when they die to agro. Don’t pull if you’re not a tank.

Tanking in instances at times can be a thankless job and it gets worse when I run into dps who want to tank/pull for me. It can get seriously frustrating. I haven’t had any issues when I’m tanking on my pally in MoP regs/heroics so maybe it has to do with people not taking lowbie instances seriously. I know some people go “lawls lowbie instances who cares steamroll it all” but that can piss off your group mates and I KNOW it pisses off your tank. I’ve leveled through running lowbie instances on several healers and when I see it happening, I just don’t bother to heal the overeager dps. When they ask why they didn’t get heals, I explain that they are not the tank and should not pretend to be. Usually the tank will whisper me thanking me for either sticking up for them or to laugh at the dumb dps.

People wonder why there are so few tanks leveling, this is why. If you’re new to the game and want to try your hand at tanking and run into this kind of behavior, you are going to get discouraged really quickly. If you’re with a group of guildees and they don’t mind you pulling stuff for them, good for you, have at it! When you queue with a random group as a dps, remember that you are a dps. Now I am not saying that if a group of mobs gets pulled accidently to not grab one or two of them and hold them until the tank can grab them. If you want to speed the group along, do everyone a favor and don’t.

Well that’s my rant. Angry tank is angry! But Pandas are cool, Pandaria is cool, Battle pets are AWESOME, and my guild starts raiding next week hopefully. I would write about dailies and how raiders are forced to do them…except I haven’t really been doing dailies. I do some of my farming dailies on my mage and then switch over to either my pally for heroics or I switch to my monk for lowbie leveling action. I don’t let things like dailies stress me out, I play the game to enjoy myself and honestly I don’t even have enough points to buy anything worthwhile on my Pally even if I had the required rep. If we have a night of 1-2% wipes next week well I’ll be all over them dailies to get a little bit more edge so we can down stuff. Until then I’ll be here flying around on my He-man the Movie flying Disc. =D

Bad World PVP

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 15:42:00 +0000

Let me start this story by stating that the server that I play on is a pvp server. I’ve played on this server since it opened up in 2005 and as a result I’ve seen my fair share of world pvp. When I was a young mage questing in Redridge, it was a common occurrence to have high level horde raid the town and gank every poor lowbie alliance person they saw. On a pvp server you often get used to such douche baggery happening and when you are higher level and able to do something about it, most people often do. I can remember several pvp battles in Lakeshire, Menethil Harbor, and the ever famous Southshore. Sometimes the pvp fights were a nice distraction and sometimes they were a rather large annoyance but being on a pvp server, you knew what you could expect at any time. To me this made the game a little more deadly and exciting. Not everyone’s cup of tea I suppose.

Sadly as the years have gone by, my server population went from medium in vanilla to low in BC and has stayed there since. Every now and then it’ll pop up briefly to medium before sinking back into its usual low pop status. What does this mean? Well it means that while leveling a lowbie alt you’re more likely to see a group of mobs having a naked dance party than seeing a horde. In fact that’s one of the biggest selling points I tell people on twitter when I tell them to roll on my server to play with me! This is mostly true except for poor Megs who kept running into horde who managed to kill her often. Anyway, because our population is so low, world pvp doesn’t happen that often. This is great for leveling alts but bad for people who want to pvp.

Due to the low pop numbers, many people have played on the server but have no clue how to really do world pvp and when faced with it, fold like a house of cards. The other night I logged onto my mage, who was 87 at the time, in Halfhill and was mailing stuff to an alt. Suddenly, I found myself cheap shotted and unable to move. Obviously a rogue decided that he would gank a clothie and get some honor. I waited a few seconds for the guards to show up and kill him and to my surprise they didn’t. Well instead of sitting back and letting him get free honor from killing me, I decided to make him work for his honor. I tossed on ice barrier, frost nova’ed him, and proceeded to not only kill him, but to kill him so hard that he should have been seriously embarrassed. He was 87 as well and when I looked him up later on the armory, he had all MoP gear.

The guy had the advantage of surprise and gear and yet he failed. He popped all his cool downs and only managed to get me to 50% health. It was hilarious to watch. After he died I bandaged myself and went back to the mail box to continue my business. I figured that he wouldn’t try again since he never even got me close to dead. I might have underestimated him because not 30 seconds later I found myself cheap shotted again. I got him to 20% this time before a horde priest showed up and healed him to full. As I had no healer I decided to run into the guards so that they would agro onto him and kill him. Damn guards killed me BUT they also killed the rogue and chased down the priest and killed him. I figure that because of that it was worth dying to guards.

Well later when I was out questing with my guildee who was a prot warrior, the same damn rogue tries to gank me again! We both proceed to turn to him and stomp him into the ground. As I said before, I’ve done my fair share of pvp in WoW and in Vanilla I managed to get the Knight rank which required a lot of honor grinding. My guildee is all about the pvp and was a Knight-Lieutenant in vanilla. We both wear our pvp ranks as our titles. This silly rogue was so obsessed with killing me that tried to attack two seasoned pvp’ers. We killed him and in vent I tell him about my earlier adventures with the rogue. We both had a good laugh and went about our questing.

You’d think that this would be the end of the story right? Well you’d be wrong because not more than 20 minutes later the damn rogue tries to gank me again. My guildee was gathering a bunch of mobs and tanking them while I aoe’ed them down in melee range. The rogue tried to gank and before he could even do more than stun me, my guildee charged him and proceed to wail away on him. We stomp him into the ground again and loot the mobs we killed. 20 minutes later the rogue has had enough of trying to gank and has decided to just harass us by sapping one of us and distracting the other. He only did this for a few minutes and went away. We figured that he was trying to annoy us since he knew that he couldn’t take us on. We continued questing and another 20 minutes later…you guessed it, I was cheap shotted once again. At that point it was just sad that he kept trying to kill me but we still killed him.

I think that this was the final straw for him because the rogue left us alone for the rest of the night. Yesterday my guildee was running around farming up ore when he spots the rogue and decided to gank him! The rogue was so bad that he got ganked by a prot warrior who had mobs on him. He announced it in vent and we had a laugh. My wife was in vent with us and asked about it and after I told her about the bad rogue she laughed.

I think the moral of this story is: if you try and gank someone on a pvp server, don’t try and gank someone with a pvp title. If you do try and fail at ganking them, don’t keep trying to gank them repeatedly because they will keep killing you. I honestly think that this rogue figured I was an easy kill because he’s probably ganked many bad pvp’ers. You’d think he’d have learned his lesson after the second time I killed him. I still shake my head and giggle at how bad that guy was. World pvp, more like world free honor from bad rogues!