Duct Tape and a Prayer

“Don’t take it so seriously. It’s just a game.”

Then it expands.

“It’s just a TPS report. I shouldn’t put so much thought into it.”

“It’s just a temporary job. I don’t need to give it that much effort.”

“It’s just my day job. I don’t need to stress out so much about it.”

“It’s just my career.”

“It’s just my family.”

Of course I’m exaggerating. But little things like to spread. Why not start at the bottom with “Instead of doing what I need to do to get by, I’m going to do what it takes to accomplish something I’m proud of?”

Once you apply that in-game, it’s hard to not apply it to the rest of your life. After all, you can do it in WOW, and that’s just a game.

I’m thinking of doing a photo-travelogue of Old Azeroth, before Cataclysm sets in. Any opinions on where I should start, and what direction to travel?

A quick update on this:

• I’m planning on starting as a level-1 alt and traveling the world. (Yes, I am going to spend a lot of time as a ghost.)
  • I may level this alt to 10 before I set out proper.
• This isn’t going to be “a memoir of leveling”; it’s a deliberate, Pausanias (or Bill Bryson, as you prefer) -style travel journal, going to different interesting places and recording them for posterity.
• This is going to be on a new server, one I haven’t played on before, to avoid the temptation to supply this character with gold and gear.
• I welcome guest stars, but I won’t be taking on permanent traveling companions.

I’ve stopped raiding.

Don’t get me wrong – I love raiding, and I really like the group I’ve been raiding with. But right now, my son just came back from his summer in California and has started school (he’s in 5th grade this year – I can barely believe it), my wife is going back to being a full-time student (to finish an English/Business degree), and I’m working 50 to 60 hours a week (and that doesn’t include the time I’m spending training up on work-related skills). Plus, we have a new dog who needs to go out regularly. All of that comes together to put me in a situation in life where I really can’t put together three or four uninterrupted hours at the times when my guild raids.

Because I feel guilty about not raiding, I’ve been avoiding playing my priest – I think I’ve been in the new 5-man all of three times (not for lack of trying – someone else always gets to the healing spots first), and of the new raid I only ever saw Northrend Beasts. I’m kind of tired of dailies, and I don’t do heroics (for a lot of reasons – one being that as a healer, I’m the one who’s going to take the blame, deserved or not, if the group fails). Instead, I’ve put a lot of time into my rogue alt (she’s level 44 now – I’m averaging about a level a day for the last two weeks), since I can play her in little bits. (Heirloom shoulders, chest, and dagger mean she’s doing just over 100 DPS and getting 120% XP from killing and quests, so I’m cruising right along. I’ve been out of rested XP since level 27…)

I try to log on to Theande and Sisuphe once a day to transmute and do the Jewelcrafting daily, respectively, but I don’t always remember, and I’m running out of green Northrend gems to feed the daily – and I really don’t want to have to fly around Storm Peaks two dozen times gathering ore again. (I know, I bought Sisuphe’s epic flyer so she could do exactly that, but I do my best farming when I can play uninterrupted and, as above, I don’t really get uninterrupted time these days. That’s one of the reasons I love my rogue – if I have to step away, I can just stealth in a corner until I get back.)

I am happy about most of the changes in 3.2 (the Penance cooldown was a nerf, and honestly we should have taken the +5% crit they offered us in exchange in 3.1), and I’m really looking forward to the reworked Onyxia in 3.3 and to Cataclysm. But otherwise – well, I don’t really have very much to say about WOW right now, I think.*

All of which is to say that I’m sorry posts have been thin on the ground here lately, and I don’t know when I’m coming back.

* Yes, I’m consciously invoking this in order to kick-start my creative brain. Don’t tell it that, though, or it won’t work.

Quasi of <Exturo> says:

Now:
Mount training 510g
Mount: 85g

The day after SOON:
Mount training: 50g
Mount: 10g

Being backstabbed by Blizzard: Priceless

But the question remains (even knowing that 600g is not a whole alot) shouldn’t I get a refund for this?

No.

If you buy mount training now – as I did last night on my Death Knight* – you are paying for the privilege of not having to wait. Having the mount in 2-3 weeks (whenever 3.2 comes out) is not equivalent to having it now. By buying it early, you have an advantage over people who are waiting until the price drops. Their patience is rewarded with a lower price. Your paying the higher price is rewarded by having the extra speed for weeks or months longer than others.

There is one concession I would make to this argument: not everybody who plays the game interacts with the WOW community outside the game. There are some players who genuinely don’t know that the mount training prices are dropping. The proper solution for this problem, in my mind, is to add gossip options to the riding trainers, saying “Hey, I’m dropping my prices in a few weeks – I don’t know exactly when yet, but if you’re interested in saving money you might want to hold off for a while.” (That also has the added benefit of letting Blizzard tell the whiners “you had to click past the message telling you the price was dropping. You have no excuse.”)

* Then, in a moment of standard braindeadness, I realized that I needed 200g more for the actual epic flying mount.

You may be aware that for the last couple weeks, I’ve been fighting a script-injection infection on etherjammer.com. Last weekend was the third in a row that I’d been infected, and I finally got annoyed enough to nuke the site to the ground. Nothing left except directories. I even destroyed the hidden files.

Today I’m finally bringing things back online.

You may notice some quirks as the blog reasserts itself. Things may not be as you remember them – I kept the posts and comments but couldn’t save the blog settings, so I’m reworking it from memory, and from changed tastes. I’ll be back in posting trim here soon enough. For now, I’m happy enough that I’m back at all.

From the official forums:

Let’s not everybody get too excited here. Yes, they’re planning on letting us switch factions. No, we have no damn idea how it’s going to work. Maybe we’ll be able to pay a one-time fee and redesign our characters from the ground up, only on the other side. Maybe we’ll have to get sponsorship from someone on the other side, guild-charter style. Maybe it’ll be race roulette (thanks to Anea), where you can switch factions but everything is randomized. We don’t know.

I’m aware that fandom rule #1 is “If a situation is ever unclear, assume whatever it would take to drive you into a blind rage.” Please resist that urge. This probably won’t be out until WOW 4.0 at the earliest, so be patient and rational, and withhold judgment until you actually know what’s going on. Okay?

I’ve shuffled some things around on the server, and hopefully now the old etherjammer.com/wowblog/* links will redirect to ducttape.etherjammer.com/* . Specifically, this should mean that RSS readers using www.etherjammer.com/wowblog/feed should start updating again! If you’re still having trouble, please let me know below.

I’ve been packing my wife up for a vacation today and seeing her off to the airport, so I haven’t really had a lot of time to put together a post. The 3/31 Linksation will be put off until 4/1 (and no, it’s not a joke), and I’ll have some more comments on Discipline, haste, crit, and gear later in the week.

In the meantime, enjoy the Plague of Hakkar decimating Ironforge (way back before Naxx 40!).

Is it, perhaps, silly to have a “World of Warcraft” tag on a World of Warcraft blog?