The Tragic Ending

How ironic that not a few days after I post about the sad state of small raiding guilds due to Warlords' new raiding system, my guild finally kicks the bucket.

After putting up quite a fight, I'm honestly more surprised that we lasted as long as we did. The only reason I thought we could even pull through was due to our tenacity - but we took a huge hit as three of our best members, one an officer, split off.

Our GM had tried very hard to keep things together, but with this hit, he just gave up. I don't blame him. I was acting recruitment officer and I had been trying pretty hard to find people, but there was just no response. It seemed hopeless, but I figured as long as we had the people we had, we could eventually endure through it. That, of course, would have required keeping those people.

What Warlords Did to Guilds

8/10H thanks to random pugs and lots of perseverance

My guild has been through a lot since Warlords came out, but after finally being able to relax for a minute, I realized that it's not just my guild that's suffering - Warlords' new raid system set up has had a widespread, far reaching effect on the vast majority of guilds.

As we know, Warlords removed 10 and 25 mans as a thing and replaced all difficulties with flexible roster numbers, except for mythic, which is exclusively 20 - a number Blizzard probably looked at as a 'happy medium', and a solution to the 10 vs. 25 drama.

The problem now is that there's a large number of small guilds that need to recruit for 20 man rosters and not enough potential recruits to go around. Every 10 man guild from Mists is looking to bring on 10 or more new people just to reach mythic content, but there are nowhere near that many recruits looking to join new guilds. It's not like 25 man guilds had to shed any of their members - those extra five people simply had to compete for their spots and the losers likely stayed in their guilds to warm the benches. The result of the 20 man "happy medium" was that 10 man guilds were expected to scrounge for a minimum of 10 more people, while 25 man guilds had to do nothing.

written out it's something like this

"DPS Doesn't Matter"

The argument that, unless a fight is a DPS race, DPS doesn't matter is used very frequently in the general applications of this argument:

"I'd rather take someone who does less DPS, but takes less avoidable damage and doesn't die over someone who did more DPS, but kept dying."

Well, obviously, because the person who's dying is actually, in fact, not doing as much damage as the guy who did not die. Dying is the worst thing you can do to your DPS. If he's dying, he's actually not doing more damage, so you are, in fact, taking the person who is doing more damage.

Let's look at this argument from another angle - let's say, what if no one is dying? Who would you rather take:

1. Jim Bob who does 25,000 DPS, takes little avoidable damage, and doesn't die.
2. Bob Jim who does 33,000 DPS, takes little avoidable damage, and doesn't die.

Assuming we have no further information about these two people, that neither one of them brings a unique buff you need for your raid, and that you couldn't just take both, you would take the person doing 33,000 DPS.

What I'm getting at here is that DPS is, in fact, important - all the time.

shock and horror - disagreeing with a popular opinion

The Dark Times - a Guild Story

I figured there's no time like the present, and I've decided to regale you all with the tale of my third guild, that fabled year I spent with the worst guild I've ever been in. The first time I dedicated more than a sentence or two to it was the opening to my Experience post, but it was always a story for another day. I've waited long enough, so that day is today, or whichever day it happens to be when you read this.

Now, I mean no offense to anyone when I say this guild was 'the worst'. Mathematically, statistically, and operationally, it was undeniably less functional than any other guild I've been in. It's just fact. I had issues with only one member, and I put a lot of time, effort, and emotion into that guild.

Though the main catalyst that caused me to leave was directly related to a person within the guild, I imagine that after enough time, I still would have made the decision to part ways. It's doesn't feel good to accept putting my heart and soul into something while the people around me consistently fail without holding anyone accountable, without any signs of improvement. Even so, I was in the guild for an entire year - and it wasn't because they weren't always bad. Oh, they were always bad.

"Well, how did you even end up there if you think you're so great?" you ask me, accusingly. Yeah, I heard you - rude much. Well, what had happened was...

it was just a couple years ago...

Miscellaneous Caturday

It's my twentieth Caturday today!

this round of fancy feast is on me

...and I got nothing in terms of a theme. I started trying to think up something yesterday even, but I did not succeed.

must have been distracted by the birds outside

So, anyway, here's twenty cats.

Cell Phones and Gaming

I recently got a new smartphone. I asked for something decent that I could take good pictures with (I did not mention outright to the employee that it was to take pictures of my cats) and I took the first thing he showed me because it was free with a 100 dollar mail in rebate, was clearly leagues ahead of my old phone, and seemed fine from the 5 minutes I fiddled with it.

Turned out it was actually a pretty powerful phone with 2GB of ram. So, naturally, now that I had a powerful electronic device intended to be used to communicate with other people, I started looking for games to play on it to avoid communicating with people.

I've written before about idle games, and how I actually like them, and had previously been looking at some sort of dragon game that cookie clicker was advertising, but it was not available on the web.

obviously I want to play this

It was the first game I downloaded on my new phone. It follows the same general guidelines as cookie clicker - click/tap on the egg/gem for points, buy things that give you auto-points, so you can get points faster and buy better things that give you more points even faster so you can buy better things that give you more points... etc. The only thing is, because it was a cell phone game, it had an obligatory 'pay to win' item you can purchase with real money. Of course it did.

100th Post Celebration

So I've made it to 100 blog posts. Some of them may be garbage cop-outs or little updates, but it's sort of like having 600 days of played time even though at the very least 100 of them are afking in the auction house or alt-tabbing.

Misleadingly, my last post was my 100th post, not this one. Whoops - but, still, here I am. 100 posts about World of Warcraft, cats, D&D and various other video games.

your typical internet fare

I was aware my 100th post was coming up back around my 94th, but I sort of forgot about it when we found out Kirin might have cancer last week, so it snuck up on me. I didn't know what I was going to do for my 100th post then (which accidentally ended up being about my failed guild merger), and I still don't know what to write now. At first I thought maybe it could be a little bit about myself, maybe my gaming or Warcraft history, but then I thought, who the hell wants to read that?

that's who

Then I got sidetracked about other stuff and forgot to think of something.

With this in mind, I'm going to just write stuff because I can, and if you read it, you're the best, and if you like it, then I like you.

Why Our Merger Didn't Work

As I posted about previously, our guild attempted to merge with another guild awhile back which totally failed. It's been awhile since the implosion and I think I've realized why it didn't work out. If you missed it, I wrote about it three times - before it happened, after the initial merge, and the aftermath, including a follow-up of our guild's state after the calamity - or you can read my expositional summary below!

once upon a time...

Kirinday

I didn't post yesterday because on Wednesday I got a new phone and for a few days I forgot that the internet can also be accessed on a computer. I'll make it up to you with today's Caturday!

 

The WoW Token - The Cure?

We first heard about the WoW Token awhile back as a potential addition to the game. It was recently confirmed. In summary:

The tokens are purchased for actual money (The price isn't set yet, but it won't be less than the regular subscription price.) and are only able to be sold in a dedicated game time token section of the auction house.

They are set to an exact amount, determined by the game rather than the seller, and unable to be bid on, only bought out. Once purchased, the item becomes bound and can only be used to give yourself 30 days of game time. It does not expire nor can it be destroyed.

Basically, it's a way to buy game time with real money and sell it for gold, allowing players to "buy" gold from other players by selling them these tokens - hopefully cutting down on the gold selling problem in WoW.

Caution: Animal Crossing

I recently got back into Animal Crossing: New Leaf. It was sort of an accident. I've been playing MH4U, which is basically the opposite of AC, so I'm not sure what happened.

monster hunting

butterfly hunting

If you've never played Animal Crossing, the wiki page sums the game series up pretty well...

Animal Crossing is a community simulation video game series developed and published by Nintendo, in which the human player lives in a village inhabited by anthropomorphic animals, carrying out various activities.

Yeah... a real action packed game.

AC:NL was released in 2013, which is when I got it, and I was super happy with it, especially considering I actually kinda really disliked the AC that was released for the Wii. I hadn't played it since forever, so I was hesitant to even start up the game again considering your town decays while you don't play. However, when I started it up, my town was missing entirely. My save file was gone. Well, easy way out I suppose - so I started a new town.

Brave Caturday

My favorite cat picture this week:

everything about this is perfect, a caption cannot improve it

Following my trend of making themed Caturdays (since that seems a bit more organized than just posting pictures of cats willy nilly), today I have some of my favorite brave cats.

The Secrets of Backpedaling

If I could pick any hot topic to get people into a kerfuffle over, the debate about how to set up your keybindings may be my favorite.

Now, everyone has their opinion about this - you kind of have to. You can't really play WoW without being confronted at some point by the facts that 1. you can manually adjust your keybindings however you want and 2. someone will always vehemently disagree with you about how you've chosen to do so.

Whether you move with your mouse or keyboard, whether you click or use keybindings - regardless of your methods or results, someone out there will always decide that your opinions are questionable.

ft. - your opinions

You have two main extremes to this debate - the steadfast clicker who swears up and down that clicking on spells and abilities, even as a healer, is just as effective as using keybindings or mouseover macros - and the keybinding activist who unbinds their turn and backward keys on their keyboard and considers non-mouse-movers to be lesser beings.

Well, this post isn't about my opinion and how it's totally, definitely the correct opinion, but it's just here to shed a little light on a behavior that completely boggles me - completely unbinding your backward key.

Chess and Dungeons and Dragons

We finally finished our three session dungeon two weeks ago. I left off after we defeated a giant skeleton and opened a stairwell behind a spooky statue.

not exactly this

We entered a room with five circular discs in a pedestal and no exits. After we clarify that they are just blank discs, I decide to pick one up, and a picture of a castle materialized on it. I put it down and pick up another one, but nothing happens. Our ranger picks one up and a picture of a very royally dressed, fancy woman appeared. Our paladin picks up a different disc, and the DM says "a picture of a regal bishop- oops."

"Oh, duh."

When the Going Gets Tough, the Guild Gets Going

My guild has been through a lot in the past few months. It's easy to say that the people who are still there are some of the most loyal and determined people I've ever raided with. Some of them had been given offers to join better guilds, and a good chunk of them easily could have left to better guilds if they had wanted to - but they didn't.

Of the ones who left, I've heard here and there that a number of them have quit raiding or quit the game altogether, and the guild that formed from the departure of several long time members is currently lost in a trail of dust in progression.

I even recently found that a good chunk of the members in the guild from our failed merger stopped trying and chose to be absorbed by a much more progressed guild - something we've refused to do. All of this bedlam going on within and around us, and we're still here and raiding.