I love it. :)

Seriously, a few hours worth of work, and we’re at level 30. We barely start quests before they go green. It’s amazing.

Aside from that, I did some well-fought Wintergrasps over the weekend, and did a lot of relaxing. We watched some TV in order to justify having just ordered Sky. We watched one episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter, which may have been the most cringeworthy thing I have ever watched in my life.

All in all, a good weekend. And I like my little shammy. The rocket is pretty cool, too. :)

And I just had to include a Dog the Bounty Hunter clip, just so you could see how awful/funny it is.  :D

Most of my upgrades, unless I start raiding, are here, more’s the pity. Hmmph…must have a think.

If only I’d realised how much growing up and becoming a responsible adult would suck, I don’t think I would have bothered. :/

I have been doing a bit of healing on my still-woefully-undergeared pally. I enjoy it a lot, although I think I would get very flustered if trying to raid heal. Better gear, with more intellect, would help a lot. Speed runs are tough, if there are people who need a lot of healing.

I know that healing has been described as whack-a-mole, and it’s true…there is an element of that. You stare at Grid while trying to keep half an eye out for shadow circles or fire or whatever on the floor. God knows what the instances actually look like. And yet, it’s fun. I’ve played ranged dps for so long that healing is a challenge, and everything feels new again.

The new pally changes are interesting – I love the idea of being a melee healer, a type of battle monk. I’ve loved classes in other games that combine healing with dps, and this would be a huge step in that direction. The only thing that I really don’t like is the combo-point-type mechanic. That is part of the reason why I’ve never been able to actually level a druid or rogue past 30…the combo point/finishing move mechanic just feels too artificial and stilted. But we will see. Despite my being a total tard at playing melee dps characters, I think it will be a good change.

Well, back to work. This was a stolen moment from my workday, taken to make up for having worked through lunch. I know, I know…emo  much?

“His obligation is to his shareholders,” Schafer tells Eurogamer. “Well, he doesn’t have to be as much of a dick about it, does he? I think there is a way he can do it without being a total prick. It seems like it would be possible. It’s not something he’s interested in.

He [Kotick] makes a big deal about not liking games, and I just don’t think that attitude is good for games in general. I just don’t think we’re an industry of widgets…We can approach it like we approach bars of soap, where you’re just trying to make the cheapest bar of soap. He definitely has that that kind of widget-maker attitude. I don’t think he’s great for the industry, overall. You can’t just latch onto something when it’s popular and then squeeze the life out of it and then move on to the next one. You have to at some point create something, build something.

Hopefully he’ll go back to another industry scene. He could go to an industry that makes more money. Ball bearings… something that suits his passions more. Weapons manufacturing?”

Activision then responded by stating “Bobby has always been passionate about games, and loves the video game industry. But as CEO of a company that makes games enjoyed by millions of people worldwide, the demands on his time now make it difficult to play games as often as he’d like to or as much as he once did.”

*snort*

And then it becomes priceless. “That was an accident,” Schafer told website Eurogamer. “I was going to change the title of my talk to ‘how to give interviews and remember to check the microphone is off.’”

I can’t tell you how much this interchange has cheered me up. I think I want to have Schafer’s babies or something.

And in case you forgot the quote that Bobby Kotick is most famous for, it is this:

Speaking at the Deutsche Bank Securities Technology Conference in San Francisco, Kotick said “The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games.”

Sounds an awful lot like a prick to me, actually.

I so very much am looking forward to this. Guild Wars was always lovely, even for it’s age…and this is simply gorgeous.

A warrior with 135k plus health.

It was absurd. We were actually worried that we would lose. As one Alliance player put it, “It will be so fail to lose 12 to 1!” But he was unstoppable.

Alliance was defending, and we’d managed to get a couple of siege vehicles up to the fort. And there he was, whirlwinding through the group, one-shotting players before I could get a heal off. It was ridiculous.

We won, eventually…but it was a very close thing. And he must have had a blast. :)

You see, I was going to get the Moms involved. Every womens and parenting site out there was going to hear about the plan to put their children’s real names on Teh Internets. Just sit back and imagine the beauty of it, imagine the full hue and cry. (To be honest, as a parent myself, I was horrified by the possibilities. That’s the first thing you teach children about online safety: “Never give anyone your real name, your address, the name of your school…”) And day-um, they went and backed down before I could get started.

Ixobelle’s post Don’t Applaud Rapists for “Not Raping Last Wednesday” pretty sums sums up my feelings to the community’s reaction. The players have been pissing me off…there are a bunch of kiss asses out there. Blizzard/Activision doesn’t love you, the players…they love your skinny little wallets, they are still planning (I guarantee you) to implement nefarious plans to sell your identities, if not your very souls. It will just be a bit sneakier. Love the game – god knows I do. But don’t be thankful and grateful now that Blizzard has stopped kicking you for the moment. Don’t wag your tails and lick their hand.

I quote from the above post:

“We shouldn’t cheer and carry them around on our shoulders for not fucking us. We should nod once, and stay vigilant… backing slowly towards the exit while keeping wary eyes on Bobby Kotick, and our IDs safely in our wallets.”

Amen!

On a more positive note, I placed my order for the Final Fantasy XIV collectors edition. Roll on September!

This is a bad thing for a game company, in my opinion. If you totally don’t understand the culture, how can you make the right decisions for your player base? If you don’t play games yourself, if you don’t understand the love of gaming itself, you think of games as units to be shipped, as though they could easily be cars or rolls of toilet paper instead of games. They don’t understand that you can’t lump Farmville and Warcraft together in the same category – they are very much not the same thing.

You don’t live in Farmville. Quite a few people, however, do to an extent “live” in games like Warcraft. I’m not talking about saddoes who have no life outside their mother’s basement, I’m talking about people who have real relationships and friendships within a virtual environment. I’m talking about people like me who have felt joy in their heart when watching a virtual dawn seeping like gold across the Barrens.

Virtual worlds have always fascinated me in part because they allow you to be who you are inside, without being judged for your economic circumstances or for whatever random roll of the chromosomes went into making up your physical face and body. Every waking moment we are pigeonholed and judged for what we look like, for our sex, for the clothing that we can afford. What a relief, what magic to be liked or disliked for our intelligence, our sense of humour, for what we contribute to others.

I wasn’t shortchanged by Fate…I come from a pretty family, and I’ve enjoyed the perks in life that being attractive gets you. I’m a professional in a technical/creative field, and I make a decent wage. Even so, I love being able to step out of my life and into another persona. When I am Kitsune, my hunter, I literally think like a different person, and I love it, I absolutely love leaving the suit behind and being my hunter. I don’t want to be my real self in game, that is totally NOT why I love to play.

Neither do I want to hide behind a handle on forums because I enjoy being a forum troll. I don’t post often, but when I do my responses are literate and well-thought-out. I might write something quite lacerating if I’m excited enough about what I’m writing, but I’ll do it in a logical, sensible fashion. I don’t troll. But I want to make those posts as my nickname, which is unisex…not as my real name. I don’t need fourteen-year-old boys sneering at my opinions because I’m a woman, and because I’m as old as their moms.

I’ve also been quite open about past relationships to people who know me in game, and they know that some of those relationships have been with women. (Although I don’t really have a sexual orientation, I’ve discovered that I do have a cultural orientation, and I don’t think that one should sleep with people who they wouldn’t bring home to meet the family…so those relationships have been rare, but they exist.) Some guildies, predictably, think this is just the sexiest damn thing that they have ever heard, and they think if I’ve done it with X, I probably want to do it with their girlfriend as well. Wrong. This attention has at times gotten to the point where I’ve stopped playing mains, hiding on alts if Testosterone Boy was online. I haven’t ever felt in danger, as in this case he seemed a nice enough guy…but I would have been very concerned if I knew that at any time he could look up my address and show up on my doorstep.

I want to be safe. I want the right to play as I wish, as whomever I wish. I want to be able to escape into a character and be me for awhile. And a non-gamer will never, ever understand that.