A Tale of WoW

This past weekend, I had a rather bizarre experience that could only occur in an MMORPG, where your character’s name identifies you more uniquely than your real name.

Once or twice a week, I play a level 65 Tauren Hunter that I am slowly taking to 80.  The other day, as I was working on the Nesingwary quests in Nagrand, I get this whisper out of the blue from a player we’ll call Drakuru: “Matt, is that you?”

Surprisingly, I wasn’t too shocked by this.  Our guild leader sometimes calls me by my real name.  I didn’t recognize the character name, and the player wasn’t in our guild…but we all have unguilded alts.  Maybe this is one of her secret alts, I thought.

“Yeah, it’s me,” I said.

“I thought so.  Leveling your hunter, eh?”

“Yep,” I said.  “I think he has a better shot at reaching 80 than any of my other Horde characters.”

“What level’s your DK?”  Drakuru asked.

“Level 62 Orc DK,” I said, “but I decided I don’t like playing a DK.  I don’t want to tank.”

“I thought you had a Blood Elf DK?”

“No, I don’t have any Blood Elf alts at all,” I said.

“You sure?”  Drakuru insisted.

“Yeah, no BE’s here.”

“I coulda swore you ran me through SFK on a BE DK,” Drakuru added.

“When was that?” I asked, “I don’t remember.”

At this point, I was really confused.  It occurred to me that maybe the person I was talking to wasn’t the person I thought.

When Drakuru didn’t answer my question, I said, “Is this <insert guild leader’s name>?”

“Who?”  Drakuru responded.

I repeated the name.

“Oh no, this is Marty from work.  This is Matt I’m talking to, right?”

“My name is Matt, but I’m not sure I’m the Matt you think I am.”

“Are you sure?” Drakuru asked.  “You sure talk like him.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.  I imagined myself saying, in my best Alec Guiness voice, “I am not the Matt you’re looking for.”

Instead, I said, “No, I think you’ve got the wrong person.”

Silence for a long while.  I imagined him trying to work out what was going on.  Was I really “his” Matt, and was I fooling him, or giving him the brush off because I didn’t want to bothered?

Finally, he said, “Well do you know the name of Matt’s DK?  He’s in your guild.”

“No,” I said, “I have no idea.  What’s his main’s name and I’ll keep my eye open for him?”

Drakuru told me the name, and I agreed to send him a note if I found out the name of Matt’s DK.

It was really quite the bizarre little mixup.  As I said, the ironic thing is that in this situation, my real name meant less than a character’s name.  In real life, multiple people can and do have the same names.  In an MMORPG, no one can have the same name; we are all truly uniquely named, though our characters themselves are little better than templates.

What are the chances, though, that I would have the same real first name as the person this random player is looking for?  If he had said, “Chris, is that you?”, the story would be totally different.   As uncomfortable as we felt once we realized the mistake, it’s become one of those odd incidents in the game that will remain with me long after I stop playing.

The patch that failed

So Patch 3.0.8 has been a monumental disaster for Blizzard, as far as game patches go. This is the first time I can remember a major part of the game–in this case Wintergrasp–being removed indefinitely because it brings the whole game crashing down.

Since I logged on last night, after Wintergrasp was disabled, I didn’t experience the server crashes. However, the lag was abysmal, and supposedly that, too, has been the consequence of the patch.

For me, the lag is always horrendous in Dalaran. I actively avoid the place at peak hours. So I didn’t notice the lag all that much until I tried to do the Thrusting Hodir’s Spear daily for the Sons of Hodir. It’s a frustrating quest anyway, but trying to do it with lag is impossible.

The key to killing the dragon before it kills you or drops you (same difference) is that you have to hit a “Dodge” button at the precise moment you see the warning that the Dragon is tightening its grip. If your dodges are delayed due to lag, you will die.

So I died. Twice. Then I decided to give up and do the other daily quests. Then I remembered that one good thing about this patch is that I can now turn in all those Relics of Ulduar to the Sons for rep.  I am about a quarter of the way from Revered…and thus  a quarter of the way from getting my Reins of the Ice Mammoth.

Back on the issue of the huge Wintergrasp bug, at first I felt like it doesn’t affect me too much.  I don’t PvP much.  My first venture into Wintergrasp the other day was frustrating to say the least.  I had no idea what I was doing.  The Daily Quest to kill 20 Horde seemed bugged (I made it to First Lieutenant rank, which requires killing at least five players I think, but I only received credit for two kills the whole forty minutes).

However, the more I’ve thought about it, I’ve grown concerned for a couple reasons.  First, I don’t recall Bliz ever screwing the pooch this badly before, although there was the issue of that dreadful patch just prior to Wrath.  Is Blizzard getting sloppy?

Second, there are quite a few people for whom PvP is just about the whole game.  Removing Wintergrasp, with no ETA on when it will return, is the PvP equivalent of taking down Naxx for an unknown length of time because it’s crashing the servers.  You can bet there would be some rather intense dissatisfaction over that, and right now, I can imagine there are certain forums full of vituperation aimed at Bliz over this Wintergrasp situation.  Will they lose subscribers?  Will it matter if they do?  Who knows.

Anyway, PvP-ers aren’t the only ones affected by removing Wintergrasp.  Without the buff, raiders won’t get Stone Keeper’s Shards from Heroics.  Additionally, raiders  won’t be able to enter the Vault of Archavon, as long as Wintergrasp is down.  And that means me, if the problem isn’t fixed by Saturday.

And so it begins

I signed up for my first raid this weekend, a combination Vault and Obsidian Sanctum raid, preceded by some guild PvP in Wintergrasp if we need to take control of it for the raid to proceed.

Next week, I signed up for Naxx on Weds. and Fri.

I have mixed feelings.  On the one hand, it was inevitable that this day would come.  Raiding is one of the things I enjoy the most about the game.  But there are also stressors that come with raiding.

For me, the biggest one is the time factor.  In order to raid on a weekend evening, I have to make sure it’s OK with my wife.  Even with her permission, I still feel guilty because of the time raiding takes away from her and my son.  And sometimes, even when she’s said it’s OK, I can sense her resentment from the other room—maybe our son is especially demanding that evening, or the cat pukes up a hairball on the bed (my wife will freak over that!).  In those cases, playing WoW seems like not just a luxury, but an actual avoidance of family responsibilities.

But I can’t just get up in the middle of a boss fight to go yell at my kid, or clean up a hairball mess (it’s always during a fight, never during a down time, when these things happen).  So I deal with guilt.

My wife and I have minimal time together during the week, some of which I also spend playing WoW.  The mature part of my brain, which certainly does not rule the rest of that organ (or any other organ for that matter), tells me that it’s wrong to allow a video game to consume four to five hours of prime family time on a Friday or Saturday night.

Another part of my brain says, “Yeah, but every person has their hobbies.  your hobby is not different than golf, except that you play golf late at night on a weekend.”

And yet, I have also enjoyed not raiding over the past couple months.  I can log on whenever I want, do whatever I want.  I’m on no one’s schedule but my own.  If I want to quit in the middle of something and go do something else, I can darn well do it.  I like the freedom of not raiding.

Another stressor is personal.  Am I willing to put myself out there and have my performance judged by others who are depending on me?  Raiding is the closest thing most of us will experience to a real military battle.  Just as in a platoon, every person is integral to the whole.  Am I willing to have my DPS analyzed?  The logs of my performance pored over by a raid leader, my missteps scrutinized and called to my attention?

Not that those kinds of things happen all that often in a casual, friendly guild…but the possibility is there.  After my second or third time in Kara, the raid leader messaged me in private to talk about my sub-par DPS performance.  He was kind in his criticism, but it still stings.

But you know what, next raid I didn’t use Drain Life anymore, instead casting Shadowbolt whenever I did not need to refresh a DoT, as the raid leader recommended.

Another factor in my mixed feelings: personal game goals.  My playtime is limited.  Would it be better spent looking for Everfrost shards to turn in for Sons of Hodir rep?  What about the Achievements I want for myself?  There are any number of things I could be doing on a Friday night, rather than raiding Naxx.

But I know that despite these doubts, there is really nothing else I could be doing on a Friday night.  This is the reason I play the game: to get together with friendly people on a weekend evening and kill some tough monsters for a chance at some nice gear. What more is there to the game than that?

ArkInventory

Although I’ve had ArkInventory in my Addon directory for months, it was only last night that I actually spent some time configuring it to suit myself. For the most part, I’ve just been using it as a One Bag kind of mod, assembling all my bags into one pane but leaving the items in the bag as unorganized as ever.

I wasn’t using the addon to its full advantage. The last straw for me was during a Gundrak Heroic when I went to my bags to disenchant a BoP drop so that my group could roll on it. I couldn’t find the item. My group had to wait while I, like an idiot, went through my bags item by item until I found the piece of armor to disenchant.

So I decided I had to get organized. But one thing that has always stopped me before was I didn’t know how to configure ArkInventory. Nor are there any good guides to it on the Internet. There is a Google wiki with some information and sample Rules, but no simple, step-by-step guide for configuring it.

I’m going to try to describe some basic ways to configure ArkInventory, and I may add some screenshots at a later date.

The mistake I made was believing that I actually needed to create Rules in order to organize my bags. In fact for most purposes, you don’t need to create Rules at all. When you download the mod, items in the game are assigned a category such as “Consumable > Elixir” or “Class > Rogue,” and organizing your bags is simply a matter of assigning a bar in your inventory to a category or categories.

The first thing you have to do is go to the series of tiny icons in the upper right corner of your bag and click “Edit Mode.” This throws your bags into a mode that allows you to assign your categories.

Your bags essentially become one bag, but a bag made up of any number of bars that expand or contract as items are added or taken away. The number of bars is limited only by your screen real estate and they are numbered sequentially with no size restrictions on the number of items they can hold (as long as you don’t exceed your bag space of course).

To assign a category to a bar in Edit Mode, left-click the number of the bar you want to organize. A menu list will drop down and allow you to choose from several categories, for example “Consumables > Drink,” which will then place all items in your bag that fit that category into that bar.

Items that remain unorganized/uncategorized are put into the bar labeled 1 by default, so it’s useful to mouseover any items remaining in 1 to see what category ArkInventory assigns to it. Something like a Rogue’s Poisons, for example, are categorized as “Class > Rogue” rather than consumable, so you might want to assign all Rogue-type items such as Thieves tools and poisons to a “Class” bar.

If an item does not seem to fit a category–special Holiday items are a case in point–you can create a custom category. Again, click the item itself in Edit Mode and a menu list will drop down. Go down to “Custom” and “Create a Custome Category.” Type in the name of what you want to call it–”Holiday” for example–and it will automatically be added to the Custom list and you can assign the item to that category. Then left-click an empty bar and assign to it any items in the Custom Category “Holiday.”

Before you create a Custom category, though, make sure the item really doesn’t have a category already in the system. No need to reinvent the wheel.

Couple points: there are more configuration options via the in-game Options menu (accessible via the little computer icon you click when you want to exit the game). Click “Interface” and then click the Add-Ons panel. There should be options for ArkInventory there. I accessed this panel for two reasons. There is an important toggle under the “Sorting” options. I made sorting instant so that my bags constantly update as I add things.

One other thing accessible via these options is “Profiles.” To save yourself some time, the profile for the first character whose bags you modify can be copied to other characters and then modified based on those individual character needs.

The first character whose bags I organized became the Default profile and then I copied it to other characters and modified as needed.

Last night, I spent probably two hours organizing my bags rather than playing, but it was well worth it. Overnight, ArkInventory has become an indispensable AddOn, maybe moreso than even Auctioneer.

Achievements: Holy or Shadow?

In a recent post on our guild forums, a friend good-naturedly called out several of our guildmates for being ahead of him in Achievement points.  This led to some bragging and some trash-talking, all of it in fun, but of course as always with gamers there is a very real underlying spirit of competition to the whole conversation about Achievements.

Blizzard wouldn’t give us Achievement points if they didn’t want people to brag about their score.  Heck, even by calling these feats “Achievements” Blizzard is asking us to measure ourselves against each other–and the double entendre in the word “measuring” is fully intended.

My question is, do we really need more competition in this game?  I love Achievements, personally.  It gives me something fairly innocuous to do when I don’t feel much like doing anything else.

“Oh, I can bake a chocolate cake for an Achievement; let me do that and then just log off.”

You get Achievments just for fully exploring an area.  You get an Achievement for catching 25 fish.

But as I was reading the forum post at my guild, I found myself thinking with a sigh, “Ah great, yet another standard I won’t measure up to.”  I’m currently 36th in our guild in terms of Achievement points.

Yes, I know I have a problem.  I’m competitive, but I can’t really compete.  That’s not really the point, though.  I think the tendency to view the game as a middle school-ish cock measuring contest–a tendency I admit I am guilty of as well–is pretty insidious and in some ways can sap a lot of the fun out of the game.  The best example is the most common: getting to 80 (and reaching level 80 is an Achievement).

There was a blue post at the WoW forums awhile back by Ghostcrawler, who said that anyone who had reached level 80 by that point (early December) was a hardcore player.  He also said that the majority of players hadn’t reached 80 by that point.

A lot of people took issue with being considered hardcore, and I found that interesting.  Starman on the World of Warcast podcast took issue with being called hardcore because he dinged eighty about three weeks after installing Wrath.  Others, I think, didn’t want to feel like just because they were eighty so quickly, that they have no life; but secretly, inside, they were probably proud that they turned eighty under the deadline set by Ghostcrawler and thus were part of the elite.

First of all, it’s interesting how achieving something has value for some people relative to their own position in the hierarchy of achievements.  Starman doesn’t think he’s hardcore, because he knows people who were 80 within a week of installing Wrath.  I don’t think I’m hardcore, because I’m still not 80 yet.  However, a friend of mine, who only played for about two months during which time he only reached level 20, might think I’m really hardcore because, compared to him, I’m a super-fast leveler.

Anyway, because there is always someone who is going to be ahead of you in Achievements and in achievements can lead to a feeling that one has somehow “failed” at the game.  I think it’s difficult for many of us to simply enjoy a game for it’s own sake.  After all, it’s a game, and by definition a game is a competition between people.

I’m not arguing against the Achievement system here, but simply wishing I could play the game like a friend of mine, who isn’t in a guild, doesn’t raid or do instances, only groups with me, and doesn’t care a fig for Achievements.  There’s a self-confidence in him that I wish I had, and it does seem to allow him to enjoy the game in a simple way uncorrupted by competitiveness.

Ah geez, but there I go again…measuring myself against someone else.  It’s truly an illness.