Ah, yes, it seems I need help finding you, Master Glowergold.

Perhaps I need new glasses?

Or are you in stealth?

Oh wait, there you are!

Getting my gnome warlock her pretty spotted apricot-coloured mechanostrider - 2 more Champion’s Seal and it is hers.

Levelling Engineering and Mining on my gnome warrior -- she exhausted Howling Fjord’s Cobalt mines and then ventured carefully into the Storm Peaks to mine Saronite to get her those last five elusive skillups needed to learn to smelt Titanium for her shiny new goggles. Just too bad her old ones look better.

And of course I’m levelling my darling rogue Tessye. She is currently level 74 and has been merrily ambling her way through Dragonblight.

I don’t have that much of a clue anymore on how to play a rogue very good, but somehow playing her feels a bit like slipping into a  comfy old shirt and sweatpants after a busy day at work. It feels a bit like coming home.

And because I still use my old skills and macros, it takes a pretty long time to kill mobs and I don’t want to bring her into any dungeons where her dps output will be questioned. I like questing around on my own, stealthing up and sneaking past mobs, sapping them, pickpocketing them, vanish into thin air after I’ve looted what I want.

Anyways, her questing had finally brought her to the Wrathgate and eventually to Undercity where she was to assist King Varian to bring Apothecary Putress to justice.

The king is standing outside the UC sewer exit and he stays there for five minutes after you have told him you are ready to go. So I stand around and wait for him to get moving, alt-tabbing out a lot to pass the time, before the party gets started and we move into the sewers, the king and his men killing Scourge and me mostly standing around.

A bit into the sewers I see there is this night elf hunter who have joined the party. The hunter participates in the fight, assisting the king. I don’t.

We move along, me still alt-tabbing out during the fights. I have been through this fight five times before, there is nothing I can do to affect the outcome of it.

In Putress’ hideout the hunter tells me “Don’t strain yourself”. I think I do kill one of the little slimes who have started to attack me, otherwise I watch the fight from atop a book case, and when the fight is over the hunter pats me a lot.

As the king run after Thrall I ask “Show’s over?” and he replies “Not thanks to you, but what would one expect from a former twink”.

Somehow, this struck me as hilarious. Me, a former twink? Why would anyone think my rogue is a former twink?

She is a rogue -- but not all rogues have been twinks.

She actually has an old pvp title on display, she is Sergeant Major Tessye. Sergeant Major was rank 5 out of 14 possible in the old pre-TBC pvp honor system.

That system was painful and you needed to play insanely much to get the higher ranks, and just as much to keep your title as the honor you had earned decayed away over time. BUT, just prior to the release of TBC the honor system was changed so that the honor did not decay away so you could get those higher ranks (and their associated rewards of course) rather quickly without spending all day and night in front of the computer. So, no, not all players with pvp titles are twinks.

She doesn’t even have any pvp gear equipped -- she has some Karazhan raid gear from the one time she was there at lvl 70 when a couple of lvl 8o friends wanted to grind rep, and she has the lvl 70 epic leatherworking set that she made herself.

But perhaps I am thinking too narrow? To me, a twink is strictly pvp oriented, but perhaps the concept has widened a bit and includes all sorts of toons that you dress up extensively and expensively?

She still doesn’t fit the bill, nothing she is wearing has been extensively expensive. Maybe I just don’t get it.

Anyways, as I asked the hunter “You think I used to be a twink?” he replied “I don’t really give a flying toss about what you are or what you were -- but Blizz should not give the achievement to people who just stand around with their thumb up their arse.”

I tell him “Interesting to hear your opinion on this”, to which he replies “I bet…” and as we finish the quest he emotes looking down upon me with pity and whispers “I hope you enjoyed the “show”".

Somehow the entire conversation left me feeling a bit sad and confused.

The hunter was obviously rather upset with me for not engaging in the fight, but he just jumped to conclusions about me and how I was playing my game and why.

My standing and watching did nothing to affect his game in a bad way. I didn’t steal his mobs, I did not slow his gameplay down, I did not hinder him getting the quest done.

Yet he felt it was ok to be rude and sarcastic to me and call me names, just because I did not play the game the way he did. Like he had the manual on How To Do It and I was Doin’ It Wrong.

I whispered back “I don’t understand what your problem is, I let you play your way without being rude to you.”

I got no reply, but then, I didn’t expect any.

It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad that so many people seem to always interpret things for the worst, how they jump to conclusions and have no patience and understanding whatsoever for things and people that are not themselves. I can only hope they will learn to take themselves less seriously and look at life from the bright side someday.

(On a side note, this makes me wonder if Cataclysm will run on it or if I will have to choose between upgrading to a new computer or quit the game.)

Locating my headset. Playing on a laptop means I ditch my headset wherever I used it last time, upstairs in the bedroom, in the kitchen, in the den, and then it gets tidied away into some closet or on top of some bookshelf.

Updating addons. Why do I have PallyPower on my shaman? Why are my macroed hotkeys not working properly?

Flying to Sholazar Basin buying yet another mysterious egg. Bags full of ageing yolk and no green proto-drake yet.

Rummaging in bags trying to find the frost wyrm flasks my Altoholic tells me are stashed in there somewhere. Ah, there they are! No, that was the Endless Mana Potion that has the same icon as the flasks.

More rummaging to see if there are enouch stacks of my usual variety of food – haste food, spell power food and mp5 food. There are.

Thinking to myself, don’t forget to put Earthliving up on my Trauma again! This prompts two things, me thinking of how much I love seeing that weapon proc and splash green numbers all over my screen – all over! – and of course me forgetting to put the damn weapon enchant up until we are a long way into the Icecream Citadel. I really should enable Cork or some other addon to remind me!

Running off getting me a shoe shine from the cobbler in Dalaran.

Making sure I have some sort of random silliness gear in my bags to play with my raid mates. Bunny wand, baby spices, zeppelin, piccolo. Wishing I could make an Gordok Ogre Suit on my shammy.

Flying off to ICC to Be Prepared And Wait Outside.

Let the fun begin!

Playing With Addons

A bit dated but still reflects how I view it rather accurately – although I wish I could express myselft with the force of Chas’s crystal cut logic!

I also think that Tam’s closing notes about the God-Author touches upon the root of what bothers me in these kinds of discussions, the fact that they are kind of lopsided because one side bases their arguments on faith and the other on logic.

One side homes in on how it is Supposed To Be – or rather, their version of how it is supposed to be and that version only – without anything to back it up except faith. No testing, no objective comparisons, no falsifiability, no willingness to concede that My Way is perhaps not your way because My Way is based in subjective faith and thus it must be True, and death to all infidels!

And the other side usually concedes there might perhaps be something to it, but without any logic deduction or some kind of general proof they are not willing to accept it. Especially as any logic deduction performed usually points in another direction entirely.

So my take on this is like my take on life itself, play it your way, end your swinging fists before they hit another persons nose, don’t shove your views down another persons throat and accept that you don’t know what is right for everyone.

So, I present to you, the Tessy function of Vent Time Spent Speaking:

Number of people in the raid or group

If I am in a group of two, like the times Jac and I spent trying to one-woman-one-man the world dragons or when we went around annihilating all the old world dungeons, there is generally a more or less constant dialogue between us. And a lot of laughs, which counts as speaking.

A party of five or a 10-man raid both fall into the same general category for me numberwise, and I think I generally do speak more than my share in these groupings.

25 people in a group though is too much to handle for me, I tend to hush up and only speak when I absolutely must, to ask a question for clarification or to shout out

I haven’t been to that many 40-man raids but at the few MC raids I did attend at the end of vanilla WoW I was always silent as a mouse and didn’t pipe up at all, only following orders and being totally awed by the flaming inferno beneath Blackrock Mountain. (I played a rogue back then, not a healer, in case you wondered how I could see anything at all.)

So, the relationship between how much I talk on Vent and the number of people in the group is not linear, but rather something like this:

As a side note writing this finally got me googling where that expression – vanilla WoW – came from and I found the following on Urban Dictionary:

It’s the original of something, like the original Ice Cream flavour. In computer games the original game is called classic or vanilla when the expansion comes out.

Makes sense, should have figured it out meself.

Familiarity with raid or group members

How well I know the other people in the group also affects how much I talk. If there are many of my friends around, I tend to be more relaxed and talk more, if I am in a group where most are strangers to me I am more quiet, especially if these strangers-to-me obviously not are strangers to each other.

I remember once my little warlock was in a Mount Hyjal raid at the end of TBC, run by a serious raid guild and I was invited by a friend in said guild. They chatted a lot, having fun in among all the raid leading instructions and the killing of things, but I just sat back and enjoyed their banter, not contributing myself.

Fluency in language and pronunciation

This is rather important part for me.

If it is an exclusively Swedish-speaking group I am much more relaxed and willing to speak than if I have to speak English.

I may write somewhat decent and intelligible English (hopefully) but when it comes to speaking it I tend to stutter and not find the words. Also I have problems pronouncing a few English words – can’t seem to wrap my tongue around some relatively simple words like ‘months’ (it’s the ‘ths’ part which kills me) or ‘runner’ (having a Swedish dialect which are pretty mean to ‘r’ sounds to start with), which makes me slightly reluctant to say them. Not that I off the top of my head can think of any raid-related situation where those words would come in handy, but still.

Both this and the factor above have the same distribution for me:

Difficulty of raid or whatever you are doing

Being a woman, it is assumed I can do many things at once. This is true.

Being a woman, it is also generally assumed I can run my mouth on auto-pilot, streaming words without any apparent thought behind them. This is to some extent true, but only when I also have my mind on auto-pilot and in those cases the “words” consist mostly of encouraging and non-committing sounds and does not really qualify as speaking.

Anyways, my multitasking ability is not always at the top notch and sometimes I rather prefer to not have to focus both on making sense and doing the right thing.

So, generally, the more things happening at the same time the quieter I turn.

Familiarity with raid mechanics

This is a bit of a joker, because at first glance I thought it was pretty much as the above, the more familiar with the raid mechanics you are the more brain capacity you can devote to talking.

But if I am really unfamiliar I am not quiet, I talk a lot, only it is not chit-chatting but in the form of questions and imperatives – Where is the portal? Tell me when to pop heroism! You are out of reach! I am out of reach! I am out of mana! Popping Mana Tide totem! I am dead! Want me to ankh? – all while figuratively (and sometimes literally) running around in circles trying to avoid Doing It Wrong.

Time of day/night

I don’t have a chattiness peak during the day but I definitely have a dip when the clock strikes midnight and my brain, conditioned after many years of getting up at six in the morning to shut down all non-essential functions at about this time, loses coherence and my words get that slight zzzz-quality.

I have on occasion been up playing WoW long into the small hours, but most of those times I have had some sort of chemical aids to help me stay awake – see the next factor – and the only time ever I can recall staying up til seven in the morning was in a Zul’Gurub pug back in those glorious vanilla days on my rogue where the raid turnover between bosses was about 25% so there was an awful lot of summoning and waiting for the new ones to show up involved.

Like I implied above, the time of day/night-factor often have a correlation with this next one:

Amount of wine and/or other alcoholic beverages consumed

I think this picture says all there is to say, actually:

The Equation

So, if we name the different factors thusly:

T = percentage of time spent actually speaking on Vent

and

n = number of people in group

m = familiarity with raid or group members

f = fluency in language and pronunciation

q = difficulty of raid

e = familiarity with raid mechanics

t = time of day/night

x = amount of alcohol consumed)

then I get the function

 T(Tessy) = T(n, m, f, q, e, t , x)

I will leave working out how all these factors factor together as an exercise for a rainy day :P

Note though that this personalized equation only attempts to describe the amount of my speaking, not the actual amount of useful information conveyed!

And in a flash I saw it before me – why not skip the idea of even micro-transactions and base it all on adverts instead?

I am a huge fan of Spotify, the on-line music service.  After I was introduced to that year before last my old cd’s are gathering dust and my dl’d music faced the same fate.

I already had a small kitchen laptop and completed it with the cutest pair of loudspeakers ever,

 a black set of the JBL Spyro and I was set.  Got myself an Android phone recently, also the cutest ever but with a ridiculously long name, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro, and the Spotify icon is parked on the front screen of it.

Anyway, Spotify comes in different flavors. When I started out, you could choose between Premium and Free. Free was free to subscribe to but you had ad banners all over the interface and the music was interrupted ever so often for more ads. Premium cost 10 about Euros a month.

Naturally, I chose Premium.

Nowadays there are some more varieties of Spotify and more features, but that total lack of ads is what keeps me subscribing to the Premium variety.

But what if WoW were re-made to be like Spotify?

You could either do it my way then, the allergic-to-ads-way and dish out that 10+ Euros a month to keep your screen free from flashing adverts and your game sounds and chats free from interrupts, or you could play the game for free, your dragon-slaying put on hold while you looked at some messages from the sponsors, the fighting to be resumed after the break.

Would make for some fun moments, don’t you think?

Like, say, the tank in your FoS pug being freebie, suddenly frozen while the rest of you struggled to keep up while he was watching some actor talk about the amazing qualities of some diaper brand or the exquisite flavors of some coffe or other.

Or your little alt levelling on that pvp server when you hear the characteristic swoosh sound of a someone going stealth behind you and then Bam! Not from a dagger in your neck but from the ad pop-up filling up your screen.

Or perhaps they’d settle for a side banner constantly blaring out things you need to buy to be happy, slim, fit, whatever.

Crazy idea, I know, and I laughed at it. But with the apparent emerging fondness for crazy ideas at Blizzard’s, maybe the laugh will turn out to be on me.

I have just a few points to add:

- Gnomes die all to easily!

- I suck horribly at pvp!

- Water breathing is a beautiful spell and should not be banned! Also, I had no idea how many crooks and nannies there are in the canals!

- Speaking Swedish with people you’ve only been speaking English to for many months suddenly reveals a lot about their origins when you hear their native dialects instead of slightly swedish-accented English.

- Gnomes die all to easily!

I have been in guilds previously where we have arranged fun events outside of raids, lots of events ranging from photo shoots to celebrations to pvp extravaganzas similar to the Turpster one (slightly down-scaled) to peace festivals and naked gnome races and other gnome marches. Actually, I still am in most of those guilds although I sadly I rarely have time to play those of my toons very much nowadays.

These events have all been fun and rewarding and most of the time the people participating were the usual suspects, you know those 5-10 people who turns up for anything and have a blast together.

Here almost the entire guild turned up and I think a part of the reason for us doing that was because this anniversary was set on a raid night, not on an off night. The anniversary and the celebrating of it was important enough for the guild to take a night off from progress raiding in ICC and spend some time together having fun in other ways.

I like that. Not only was it easier for me to be there since the raid nights are already negotiated as game nights, but it also showed that while the focus of the guild is raiding, the people in it is what is important – it gave me a feeling of being appreciated for who I am (me!) and not just for what I am (a slightly confused resto shammy chucking heals on everyone, an interchangeable cog in the raid machinery).

Already looking forward to the third one!

This buff started out at 5% and has been increased every 4 weeks in 5%-increments and is since Wednesday at 20%.

This buff has also been the object of many heated discussions and has some less than flattering names, like the pity buff or the l2play buff, like it is somehow demeaning or insulting to be offered some extra help – you can politely refuse the help and carry on without it if you so choose.

I’m not gonna delve into the pro’s and con’s of this buff anymore because Chas over at Righteous Orbs has already done so most splendidly and eloquently quite a long time ago and I can only say I agree with him completely.

(Incidentally, that pretty bear sitting in the screenshot in the first part of his post is me! Mah bear!)

I am just going to say that last night me and my guild went into ICC once again and made full use of the 20% increase from the buff.

Thanks to our sweetest Guild Master (sadly, soon to be ex Guild Master) we did Flu Shot Shortage especially for me! (probably because I keep pestering the RL’s about achievements) and it went like a charm. I am convinced we could have done it last week as well but never got around to ask for it then.

Then we went for Rotface heroic and in one of the messiest fights ever we got him down on the first try with just a few people still standing at the end, a bear tanking, a few dps’ers and me healing and popping off a Shock whenever I could to help bring him down those slow long last percent.

Could we have done it without the 20% buff? Not in this particular go but doubtless in another.

Was it easy? No, it was messy and frantic and hectic and hard, there were definitely no facerolling involved.

Was it fun? Hell yes, scrambling around to keep people alive and do some abysmal dps and stay alive myself with a pounding heart and sweaty fingers.

And then after having killed the Gooey Newsman (on normal, not pushing our luck) we proceeded onto the Princes and after a few messy tries the pale belf trio bit the dust as well.

Same here, not easy at all but so much fun. Not moving while trying to be in range of as many as possible for heals, shooting at kinetic bomb balloons, popping heals at whomever ran past, bracing for that fire ballon explosion, punding heart and sweaty fingers here too.

Doubtless we will be throwing ourselves at long wipe nights again when we face other heroic encounters, but it is fun to once in a while one-shot encounters, albeit very precariously hanging by the proverbial thread.

The Strength of Wrynn is like the lazy man’s version of running heroics for Emblem gear – I don’t have the time or inclination for excessive emblem farming to get me that 5% incremental increase in output so I freely admit I like the buff.

It gives me freedom to play the game at my leisure and do what I enjoy in Azeroth. And that’s my reason for playing.

This year, I have been a very good big girl.

I have not used cheats or exploits (well, not after they were banned at least), I have patiently endured the lag and server crashes inflicted upon me and I have sometimes helped my guildies doing the daily random dungeon or the odd group quests, even if it meant having to fly across an entire continent to do so.

And I always say thank you, which is really nice and thus I deserve lots of presents in Cataclysm this year!

So, for Cataclysm I want the following:

1. More damaging totems

The Magma and Searing totem are lovely and I use them whenever possible, but what about my other schools of magic?

I want a Snowball totem pelting the enemy with icy snowballs, I want a Rubble totem doing the same with rocks, I want a Water Hose totem drenching them and a Wind funnel blowing them away.

2. More abilities linked to totems

The Fire Nova is a wonderful ability and I would like to see more of that.

I want to be able to emit a Healing Stream Nova from any Water totem for those emergency heals and why not get rid of the Mana Tide totem for a Mana Tide to be used on any water totem, I want a Blizzard Nova causing a localized snow storm, I want an Avalanche crushing my enemies and burying them under a shitload of rubble, I want a Twister lifting those opposing me high up in the air in a whirlwind of air, I want a Flood Nova of biblical proportions washing the earth clean of any filthy scum that stands in my way.

3. Totem Grenades

While I absolutely love my cool space totems, my little helpers and guardians, and pop them whenever and wherever I can, I would also absolutely love to be able to throw them like a grenade and place them exactly where I want them.

Imagine a Fire totem lobbed right into the midst of the enemy with a Nova going off there, imagine a Healing Stream totem landing in the melee with a Heal Nova pulling them back from certain death, imagine that Avalanche blocking the enemies from escaping from or coming closer to me and my fellow adventurers.

4. More elementals

I love and cherish my Earth elemental and my Fire too, but it should not be any harder summoning a Water or an Air elemental, right? The water elemental could conjure up geysers and the air elemental could conjure up a lightning storm!

5. Ghost Wolf to be an instant cast and usable indoors

In my everyday life I am constantly communicating with the spirits, be I outdoors or indoors. Mere walls do not hinder me seeing into the world of the spirits and should thus not hinder me entering it.

Oh, and make it instant cast while you are at it, when I enter the spirit world I do in instantaneously, like stepping through a doorway. I do not need to knock on the door and ask permission to enter.

6. Ghost Eagle

I want to be able to fly!

My Ghost Wolf form is for travelling and only travelling and surely there are eagles in the spirit world too? I can totally see myself soaring over the world in the guise of a spirit eagle.

I know you have been busy and I know you have already started to gift-wrap the Cataclysm pressies, but I’d be really happy if you would consider this wish-list of mine.

Anyway, I hope you like the milk and cookies I left out for you.

Love,

Larúe

PS: Please say hi to Mrs Blizzard.

I was not there.

For what feels like weeks we have been struggling on that damned icy plateau of the Icecream Ciatdel, with that prince turned evil and his various minions.

We have had good raids, bad raids and all you can imagine in between. We have had screwups and lag and dc’s and just about everything going wrong but somehow we have been inching our way through the encounter, overcoming the setbacks and getting more and more practice and confidence in.

The raid ID’s been extended so we could focus on the Lich King only and not waste a raid night clearing away the rest of his cronies.

And yesterday you could feel it in the air, in the forum posts, in the in-game atmosphere. The LK was gonna die.

And he did.

And I was not there.

I was not not there because I was away having fun in RL, or even away doing important stuff in RL.

I was not not there because I was on reserve duty for the night.

No, I was not there because at the time the raid invites started, at about half an hour before the raid start, my laptop chose that very moment to go all Matrix on me – green pixels raining down all over the screen.

Several attempts at restarting the crappy piece of hardware yielded the same result – green pixel rain and then finally nothing but an all black screen.

Dead. Ceased to be. Gone to the happy hunting grounds. Ex-laptop.

Emergency reallocating computer assets at home (ie kicking my husband off his own old excentric computer and logging in there) did not help. The old excentric computer did not take kindly to having my needful addons installed and flatly refused to allow me to set them up – I managed to allocate Chain Heal to my left mouse key, not that it was very helpful though because the player frames refused to show up on my healbot anyway so I could not target anyone.

Fleetingly considering using the mod-less way of healing, with targetting every individual and clicking a key, I decided against it – I know I can’t heal very efficiently that way and I did not want to jeopardize this evening’s chance of a successful kill.

So I asked to be replaced.

I was in the raid, on-line in time, haven’t had a dc in ages, prepared and pepped and ready to go kick the LK’s butt – not some minor obstacle boss but the last biggest badass boss in this entire expansion, the one everything is revolving around.  I’ve been quitting all other WoW-playing to not strain my bad shoulder so I will be able to keep raiding with my guild and this is what I get for it?? My fucking crappy useless laptop decides to go bust on me??

The disappointment was so heavy I could choke on it.

I am really really happy for my guild, but really really sad for not being there with them on this first kill for this silly frustrating reason.

I know there will be more chances to see the Lich King dead, but like the sying goes, there’s no kill like the first kill.

I wish I’d been there.