4.2 Ranty McRantrant ahead

I finally got the chance to get started on the new 4.2 questlines, and now I must rant.

Thrall
Former Leader of the Horde
Founder of the Modern Horde

I do not care how many times you tell me he's neutral and all about saving the world now, he's the FATHER OF THE FREAKING HORDE!

Let me give you an analogy. Picture George Washington, Father of the USA and first President. Man who led the rebellion against Britain and kicked their arses.
Now imagine that he's joined Greenpeace (or another organization attempting to save the world, feel free to fill in your favorite).
Now try to convince the British that he's neutral now. No, really, try. They're not going to buy it, and neither am I.

Yes, Thrall is most likely genuine. That doesn't mean my Alliance characters are buying what he's selling.

So, let's go through the beginning of this questline from my hunter's fiercely proud kaldorei (nelf) POV. This may not make much sense if you haven't seen the beginning of the questline, so go watch it or read about it or do it.

Okay, go fix the world. Good plan. Hey, it's the leader of the Horde. Okay, former leader.  Why's he helping?
Oh, cause the dragon aspects say so. Okay, I trust them.
Ooh, it's crazypants, the idiot grumpy founder of Darnassus, but now he's on fire. Not a bad look for him, actually.
Oh dear, he hurt orc guy. Do I care? Nope. Do I now want to fill what-her-face's head full of arrows for calling a member of my race a mongrel? Yup.
I don't care if he is CRAZYPANTS, Lover of RAGNAROS, he's one of the kaldorei! If he's a mongrel, so am I! WHY CAN'T I SHOOT HER!?

You're kidding me, right? So the founder of the Horde's gotten himself ripped apart or something, and now I have to go help his speciesist girlfriend put him back together? Dragon Aspects, I have no idea what you're smoking, but I want some. Also, I want to fill this Okra full of holes once we're done putting Thrall back together, but I bet you won't let me. Why didn't I retire to Zangermarsh like I wanted to? At least there, no one expects me to put the Father of the Horde back together. Sigh.

And in another, completely unrelated rant...
I can't queue for Cataclysm normals because my ilevel is too low. I can't queue for Lich King dungeons because I'm 81, I can't make myself caster mail because my leatherworking is too low, and I can't find any on the AH. I'm perfectly capable of running around the world and killing things, and completing quests, all in my lousy Wraith ilevel questing gear, but no dungeons for me. FSCK! FSCK!

Women in game: Source of drama or easy scapegoats?

I was wandering through the new Raid and Guild Leadership forums when I came across How to Deal with a Girl in my Guild. Obviously I started reading it, and thus started pondering where this idea of women as drama-makers comes from and is it Truth?

First off, no, I don't think it's Truth. I think some women, like some men, cause drama. There is a certain subset of the human population that causes and enjoys causing drama, and both men and women are part of this subset.  Most women I know, both in and out of game, do not like drama. I personally hate any conflict in groups I am a part of, and want everyone to get along and be happy. Obviously I cannot make the assumption that the majority of women in game are like me, BUT neither can I assume that I am abnormal in my desire for no drama. My best guesstimate is that I have some level of familiarity with about 100 players in game, of which a substantial minority are female. With 11 million players, 100 is nowhere near a decent sample size. In fact, I very much doubt that any player could manage to interact with enough people in game to form a decent sample, not to mention the fact that different servers have different norms and personalities (for lack of a better word).  So, please bear in mind that there is no Truth here, only individual truths. 

Now, where does this women cause drama idea come from? I'm not sure, but here's my guess...

In the early days of the Internet, it was male-dominated, and dominated by a particular type of male. We all know the stereotype. The geek/nerd who doesn't interact much with women, and whose higher brain functions tend to shut down in their presence. From what I have seen, these men tend to think of women as a weird and strange species and treat us differently.  Some women (and some men) took and still take advantage of this tendency. If you like drama, and you can use your sex to cause drama, well then you're probably going to do that. If you don't like drama, and don't like being treated differently because of your sex, then you're likely to just keep your mouth shut so no one finds out which sex you are. Can you see where this is going? Those most likely to be open about being female are also the most likely to use that fact to cause drama, thus creating the perception that all females cause drama.

Now, there is some female drama that the woman herself has nothing to do with. If player A finds out player B is female, and treats her differently from then on, then the fault lies with player A, not with player B. Any drama caused by this different (and likely preferential) treatment is player A's fault. But sadly, many will look at a scenario like this and say "See, girls in game cause drama!" and place blame on B instead of A. This is rather like introducing a minority person into a group and having drama because a member of the group reacted in a racially-insensitive fashion. Would you really blame the minority person? I doubt so.

If you look at the original post in the thread I linked, the scenario is not so cut and dried. You have a loot council member who is spending most of his time socializing with a female guildie, and his loot council decisions show favoritism towards this guildie. We have no way of knowing if the guildie has asked him to give her preference, or if she expects him to socialize almost exclusively with her. It is a fairly well-known phenomenon that people tend to want to spend time with the people they're dating, and many do take that to an extreme. Also, people tend to favor giving loot to people they like, a known problem with loot councils in general. So, if you remove the female guildie, would there still be drama? I'd say yes, sooner or later. The loot council member has shown that he has trouble removing his personal prejudices from his decisions. A woman may have brought that tendency to the forefront, but it's probably been there all along.

In closing, I would like to point something out that most of us forget in these kinds of discussions. When you generalize about women, or men, you are generalizing about 3 BILLION people. Even if you're saying something like "women get tetchy once a month", which may or may not be true for any woman who menstruates monthly. Assuming that statement is true for all women still means you're ignoring a substantial population of women who have passed menopause, are currently pregnant, or due to medical abnormalities do not menstruate or do not do so monthly.  It's a natural tendency of humans to generalize, it makes the world easier for us to deal with if we can put people in neat little boxes, but in real life, people don't always fit into those boxes and trying to force them to fit is harmful both to them and to you. Sometimes women cause drama, just like sometimes men cause drama. If you're not comfortable making the blanket statement "men cause drama", then why are you comfortable saying that women cause drama?

Don't mind me, I just need to rant

*cough*
Raid was frustrating for the second week in a row. I JUST WANT TO GO TO ULDUAR. Not TOC, not Onyxia, Ulduar. I still have a ton of upgrades I could get there, and I'd like to see all of it, and you know, we might not spend the entire evening wiping. I don't mind wiping, but after the 6th or 7th try, I'd kinda like to go hit something we can take down. Yes, we've taken down Ony, once, and the beasts once, but we've also wiped a lot on both of them, and I feel like I spend 3 hours of my life, and at least a hundred gold, with absolutely nothing to show for it. Why we can't wipe on one for a bit, then hit Ulduar and take down Flame Leviathan and XT and Razorscale, maybe make it all the way to Freya if we feel ambitious, and then hit TOC the next night is beyond me. (I do know why we went to TOC, but I don't agree with it, and I think we would have done far better to hit Ulduar and try TOC when we're fresh)

Plus, Freya's room makes me happy with the ridiculous amount of herbs. TOC, well, that is not a happy. That is a "frack, this again. I hate this," thing. It's a gear check/skill check and you know, I'd be much more successful if I got some gear from Ulduar first. (I have no idea where the rest of the raiders are gear-wise, so I can't speak for them. They may have geared completely past Ulduar by running heroics, but given the faceplanting, I'm not so sure) Now, Ony, Ony I don't mind. It's a short fight, and wiping isn't too painful. But the beasts, well, you wipe to the third one, you have to start all over again with the snobolds.

So what do I do while I'm frustrated and bored and waiting for everyone to come back from afks?

If you said redesign my ui, you'd be right. And I would have a screenshot, but for some reason WoW stopped registering me hitting print screen right after Lyllea helped win Eye of the Storm. No clue why, really, and I am far too tired and migrainy to figure it out.

And to any guildies reading this, please do not take it personally. I just need to rant, okay, and since it's my blog, I figure I can rant here. And while I'm ranting... Raids go on calendar at least 36 hours before raid, please? Generally I assume raids on Thursday, but the other one/two raiding days (if they happen at all) are always up in the air, and if you schedule something for Monday after Sat, I probably won't see it. Now I know, I'm just a dps and not essential, but I do show up every week (unless I say I won't be there ahead of time) and I'm flasked and I generally manage to not die in the fire and do what I'm told. Am I the best raider ever? Heck, no. And am I a good raid leader? No, cause I loathe telling people what to do. Seriously, seriously loathe it.

Another day, another patch...

Not much to note in the patch notes this time around. But I did come across something interesting in the Wow Forums...which I am going to rant about.
The developers believe hunter dps is too low, so today we are implementing a change to ranged weapon damage to improve dps across the board.

Bows, crossbows and guns of item level 226 or higher (which means weapons from Kel'Thuzad, Ulduar and the Furious Gladiator pieces) will do around 30 more dps. This should translate to a hunter damage increase of a few percent.

We don't think this will be quite sufficient in boosting hunter dps to where we think it needs to be and we have another buff that we plan to get in sometime over the next couple of weeks. We'll announce that change when it gets closer. (We have some plans for other classes as well, but we ask that you please keep this thread on the topic of hunters and the ranged weapon changes.)

As hunters may recall, we had an ambitious plan to change the way ammo worked for 3.1 that ended up being overly ambitious, causing us to scale back. However as part of that change, we stopped itemizing bullets and arrows. Since hunters could not upgrade from the ammo available at the launch of Lich King, their damage had started and would continue to fall behind as other classes upgraded their gear. This change basically incorporates the ammo damage into the weapons -- as you get better ranged weapons, it's as if you got better ammo to go along with them. This is likely to be a design we continue for the next few tiers of content until we have the opportunity to overhaul ammo completely.


Well, I am S.O.L.. I may have Accursed Bow of the Elite, but as a lvl 200 item, no damage boost for me. And I am unlikely to see 25 man Naxx or 10 man Uldaur any time soon. But what I really want to know is...
What percentage of hunters have these level weapons and thus will get a damage boost? I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority don't, and won't.
I am all for harder raids getting shinier things, and 25 man gear being better than 10 man is okay, and I understand and respect Blizzard's reasons for doing that. But Blizz, you shafted the dedicated 10 man raiders once already with the tokens in Ulduar (25 man Ulduar drops tokens equivalent to the gear that drops and 10 man drops tokens equivalent to Naxx 25 gear which is half a tier lower), so why are you attempting to raise the damage of an entire class by upping the damage on certain high-end gear (and not including any 10 man Naxx gear?)

And then there's the mind-bogglingness of trying to raise the damage of an entire class this way. To give an example, let's say I want to raise SAT scores in a high-school. Do I a) tutor only the kids in honor courses, or b) tutor everyone? Blizzard appears to have gone with a, and I have no idea what they were thinking. Increased dps across the board? WTF? Increased DPS for the dedicated raiders who have enough peeps to run 25 mans, and for the hardcore PVPers does not equal increased dps for all hunters.

I'm just going to be happy that they have realized that this probably (certainly) won't get hunters to where they need to be.

So now that I've ranted (and yes after rereading I did notice that this is meant to be a substitute for the ammo removal but I am still annoyed), I have other stuff to talk about.

I am now in a progression raiding guild (I didn't change guilds, my guild shifted a bit). Granted, we're a bit behind, but yay for progression. I saw Sarth for the first time last week (stupid firewalls) and will be seeing Maly (for the first time ever) and Sarth again this week, plus the normal 10 man Naxx. There's even talk of 25 man Naxx, since our RL doesn't think we can handle 10 man Ulduar in 10 man Naxx gear. I love seeing new content, and getting new shinies, so this is a yay. I just need to find a nice map of Sarth that shows the firewall safe spots (cause I cannot see them to save my life) and um, Sons of Hodir. I've been putting that off because I wanted to finish Dragonblight before I started a new zone, but I need to get the enchants. That's going to be tomorrow's job, I think, attempting to finish DB and hit Storm Peaks.