Mend Pet

In the aftermath of a giant drama explosion, my young guild (Razorblade Arcade) has been forced to reform (minus our now former guild leaders.)  It sucks, but that’s what it’s come to.  Which left us once again with the horrible task of picking a name.

We spent a good amount of time throwing around suggestions, both serious and not-so-serious ones.  And it seems that everyone has a different favoured style when it comes to names.  I’ve managed to narrow down a few types, and I’ve realized which are personally preferred for me.

1. Serious, meaningful names: These names are generally one or two words and say something about the members of the guild or how they came to be together.  Examples: <Unemployed>, <Kalimdors Legion>, <Avoiding Reality>.
2. Serious, meaningless names: These generally get picked for their dramatic effect, but don’t really have any importance to the players. Examples: <Evolve>, <Malice>, <Nothing Personal>, or often anything latin.
3. Funny, meaningful names: These occur when someone tries to fit an entire joke into 24 characters.  Usually a crude one, at that.  They’re also popular in Arena Team names.  Examples: <Sapped Girls Cant Say No>, <STDs are BoP>.
4. Funny, meaningless names: Usually of a silly nature, things that make you giggle or curious about the origin of the name. Examples: <Squid Squad>, <Razorblade Arcade>, <Seal Cub Clubbing Club>.

So it turns out I’m not a fan at all of categories 2 and 3.  The jokes are generally immature, and the drama names just don’t inspire any sort of interest in me.

We ended up going with <Evolve>.  I am so indifferent to that name that I already forgot what it was at least once.  To be honest, if I were searching for a guild to join, I would probably not even consider a guild with this name unless there was something really appealing about it (like the fact that all my friends are in it.)  While name doesn’t mean everything, it does present an image of who you are and what type of people are within the group.  Am I stereotyping?  Possibly.  But I am almost certain I would not want to be associated with anyone in <Sapped Girls Cant Say No>.

How does guild name effect you?  Would you join or avoid a guild based purely on the name, or does it not concern you at all as long as the guild is what you’re looking for?

I proposed the question on Twitter, and got quite an array of responses, including:

Rilgon: As long as it’s not anything that blatantly violates naming conventions, no consideration. (#)

Krizzlybear: Ideally, all things equal, I will join the guild with the most hilarious name. (#)

wowcynwise: It’s important that it be correctly spelled and either innocuous or authentically funny. There are a lot I look at and go “no.” (#)

I don’t know who her decorator is, but I love what they’ve done with the place!

It’s amazing how much beautiful scenery is missed by never looking up or down.  Make sure you take some time to get a good look at new places!

Wednesday night, Razorblade Arcade took advantage of the raid lockout extension feature to finally push through Singdragosa. With new Frost Resistance gear for our tanks and an improved block placement strategy, we were able to get her down on just the second attempt… and that left us with just the Lich King.

That’s when I realized – this is the last boss! We’re about to BEAT THE GAME. This is really significant to me, as I have a nasty habit of not finishing games of any type. Whether it’s because I don’t want it to end or because something new takes my inerest, I just never seem to reach the “final boss”.

World of Warcraft has been no different. In Vanilla, I was no where near the end of the game (mind you, not many were.) In Burning Crusade, I wasn’t even ready to set foot in the final raid dungeon. But Wrath has opened a lot of doors for a lot of people, and I am glad of that. There’s a feeling of conclusion to a story this time around, and I am a bit humbled by it.

I’m both excited to finally kill the last boss, and also scared to be finished. I know there will still be plenty of things for me to do, alts and hard modes waiting to be taken on, but this really is the end of the core story until the next expansion.

This demonstrates the strengths of this expansion. Yes, I’ve had issues with how raids have been released, and the 10 vs 25 setup has had it’s faults, but I think Blizzard has accomplished what they set out to do: All players, no matter how much or little they play the game, have the ability to follow a whole story through questing, dungeons and all the way to the final encounter.

I really hope they’re able to build a similar feeling with Cataclysm, even though they can’t have quite as interesting a villain to focus on as Arthas.

Last  night I raided from someone else’s computer.  His computer is way better than mine, and I think you could fit my monitor into his at least twice.  So visually, it was pretty sweet.

However, he’s got some issues with his sound card.  Everything has this annoying echo.  So while I tried to play normally for a bit, I eventually gave in and turned my game sounds off – I even turned vent down and could barely make out a word from it.

I am not used to playing without game sounds – and it really does change the game for me.  For example, I have become accustomed to hitting Feign Death whenever I hear Omen’s “WATCH YOUR THREAT!” sound.  Sure, I still had the flashing red on my screen, but it just wasn’t enough.

Even the sound of my arrows going off helps me know that things are going right.  If I don’t hear my arrows shooting, I know I need to pay more attention – am I web wrapped or stunned?  Am I facing the wrong way?

It’s amazing how I’ve adapted my play style to use my various senses.  I found myself getting a bit overwhelmed by how much I needed to watch the screen, when usually I leave some things to be taken care of by my ears.

Next challenge: Play with my monitor turned off and use only audio signals. 

When was the last time you queued for a battleground?  The other day I decided to try Isle of Conquest, and I hopped in the queue.  And that’s when I realized how spoiled the new Dungeon Finder has made us: it’s “Estimated wait times” are actually pretty accurate with that system.  But for BGs, the queue timer has been useless since the day it came out.

Here’s where I think it fails.

See that Last 10 players note?  What does that even mean? It’s a ambiguous.  For a BG like Isle of Conquest, which requires 40 people per side… how does the average over the last 10 players help me?  It doesn’t.  This number means nothing.  All it does it give people a false sense that they might get into the battleground in that time, while in truth only about the last five people to queue had wait times below that time.  The other 35 had to wait much longer.

They seem to have managed to get the estimation working for Dungeon Finder, why they haven’t just ported that system over to the BG queue is beyond my ken.  In fact, it might be simpler because there are no roles defined or needed, just numbers.

They should either improve this estimation or remove it entirely.