Addon Highlights: A PSA

Now that 6.0.2 has been out for awhile, most addons will work properly and should continue to work properly after Warlords release. If you use addons, it's important to remember to update your addons correctly and to try not to go into Warlords using out of date ones, as addons can cause really weird things to happen to your game. Not just limited to LUA errors, addons can cause disconnects, inability to use skills on your hotbars, and I've recently had an error where my bags didn't update while I was filling them up.

dun dun dunnnn

The Homestretch

We're closing in on Warlords with only about three weeks left. While still awhile away, I forgot to keep count since back when we were in the ~40 day range, so it snuck up a bit on me. The pre-patch helped me find a stop to get off of the Hype Train for awhile, but a little more than a week of 6.0.2 and I'm back to the jitters when I think about how excited I am for November 13th.

The Possibility of Relaxing the Cross-Faction Restrictions

Before real ID and battle net, if you wanted to keep in contact with your friends, you had to add their characters' names to your friends list. Each time you made an alt, you whispered your friends to add you so you could talk, along with making sure to get a guild invite. It was unlikely that your friends were even on the other faction unless you met them in real life. It was difficult to make cross-faction friends through other mediums over the internet, especially since faction loyalty was much stronger during vanilla.

as demonstrated with cats

But real ID changed everything.

Should Your Guild Use "Personal Loot"?

With the overhaul to the raid difficulty system, we saw the added loot option of "personal loot". Personal loot is how loot is distributed in the LFR difficulty, and was the unchangeable loot distribution method of flex. Now that "flex" is no longer a difficulty but rather both normal and heroic modes are flexible, personal loot has become a choosable option, just like group loot or master loot.

First, a bit of explanation:

Loremaster

While I do have [The Loremaster], I'm not exactly an expert on the Warcraft universe. It surprises me, however, that there are so many people who have an express disinterest in the story behind the game. It seems unfathomable to me to be able to experience the game, in fact any game, with such a deep, detailed background without paying attention to lore. I never skipped cutscenes and I read all the dialogue in the old RPG console games I played - part of the entertainment factor was that the game was telling a story. Part of the appeal of video games as an activity is that it's a story where I am a direct participant.

The Bumpy Road of Blogging

After operating under the schedule and theme that I detailed several weeks ago, I've decided to make alterations once again. I enjoy writing advice posts, but my ability to give advice and write guides is artificially limited by what is already out there - when it comes to World of Warcraft, there are tens of thousands of other people constructing guides and sharing their knowledge with the playerbase. I feel like if I have something I'm interested in, I could make a post linking to a dozen other well written guides and call it a day.

or just link to wowhead and stop updating my blog, period

Caturday Abridged

Today's Caturday was a little hastily put together, but our star of the day is Toonaphish!

glorious sun shines upon him

On The Other Side

ugh these are all YOUR friends

I primarily play horde, but I've attempted to level alliance characters before. I never had one at max until Mists, which was encouraged by the [Double Agent] achievement.

Even though my brother and I started playing World of Warcraft at the same time, we started out playing opposite factions on different servers. I tried to level an alliance character on his server but only got to level 44 before completely losing interest.

"What's your played time?"

picture unrelated

Played time is a common comparison that World of Warcraft players often like to make. Some view it as a positive thing, a way to show how much time and dedication they've put into the game, while others seem to be embarrassed of their played time.

Threads pop up now and again, where invariably someone will say they are embarrassed of their 125 days and someone will respond to that person letting them know they have 300 days, someone nonchalantly says they've been playing for 800 days, so on and so forth. Some people seem to pretend to be embarrassed while others brag about played time that seems rather low.

Pet Battling: Getting Started

plus you can name all your pets after pokemon

While there is a little something for everyone in World of Warcraft, pet battling is something most people tend to either love or hate.

Maybe you dislike pet battling or actively avoid it, but would still like to collect pets and earn achievements - for example [Crazy for Cats] for "the Crazy Cat Lady/Man" title.

Maybe you're just at the end of your rope for things to do until Warlords of Draenor releases.

It's Not Saturday, it's Caturday!

Welcome back to your regularly scheduled Caturday! We have fluff and memes for you today plus a special feature of my favorite in-game cat pet!

as you can see, Toona is pumped for Caturday

"Experience"

I'm not here to say that I'm the best player around, I'm far from it - I'm pretty decent, but I make mistakes. I'd bet even raiders in cutting edge progression guilds do, too, just with much less frequency than your average player. I have a lot of practice raiding; I've been doing it for years. 

pictured: absolutely fantastic raiding skills

At the beginning of 5.2, the Throne of Thunder patch, I left my guild at the time because I was putting in far more effort than I was getting out of it. I'm not the best player in the world, but it felt like every night I was baby sitting. It felt more like I was carrying the raid rather than my guild members each exhibiting a relatively equal amount of skill and effort into our progression.

I had become so frustrated with my guild that I ended up taking a break altogether for a significant amount of months. When I came back, I knew I'd have trouble finding a new guild that was at my skill level and convincing them that I was worthwhile to bring when I hadn't done the raid on normal and was geared entirely from the previous tier.

Pascal: Origins

of course a master of the zergling rush

I've been playing video games since I was very young. I only played console games until my family got its first computer around when I was 11. The first notable games I played were Starcraft and Command and Conquer: Red Alert. I played other games, but RTS games were by far my favorite.

My brother owned Warcraft 3 but he insisted that I'd break it if I played it, so he never let me. I finally played it when I visited my family in Germany - my uncle specifically asked me if there were any games I'd like to play while I was visiting and I asked him for it. Once I got home, I secured myself a copy of it and played it for months.

When World of Warcraft first came out, I didn't even know it existed, but my brother got it a few months after its release. He no longer believed I would break his computer just by touching it and he more or less demanded that I come upstairs and play it.