066: How Cartographer can get you a girlfriend

Shortly before I joined Kamuflasjefylla I went on a heroic run of SL with a bunch of them. At that time the only people I knew were Dave, Tammy and Chiwi, so I had no idea who anyone were. During the run, at one point, the Paladin healer pronounces my characters name wrong on vent and I yelled at him for it. A couple of days later, now a member of the guild, that same Paladin whispers me asking if I want to group up for the dailies. He says something about how since he's a healer it takes him 2 hours to kill a mob while I'm built to melt faces. He hadn't needed to present any reasons, I was brand new in the guild and wanted get to know everyone. The next day we team up for the dailies again.

That was December 2007. It's July 2008, now, and we're planning on moving in together soon.

It's funny how Warcraft brings people together - through partychat, guildchat and especially voice chat we get to know each other and form deep friendships. In my guild alone there's at least 5 couples, of which more than half met through the game.

Many months after that first heroic Shadowlabs, Tom/Emerald/Adagio the Pink Paladin revealed to me that it had been my yelling at him for not saying my chars name right that had piqued his interest in me. Or as he so eloquently put it: "...and I thougth, hey! She sounds hot!" (Meanwhile I was feeling bad that I'd shouted at one of the guilds officers and all. :P) When I joined the guild he used Cartographer to stalk me see where I was located, and upon finding me in Skettis that day he whispered asking for a dailies group. Who knew that this little map addon could get you a girlfriend/boyfriend? They ought to advertise this, in my opinion. I'm certain the amount of downloads would skyrocket.

So there you are, the main reason for my absence lately. I went to visit him in England for two weeks in early June, and in a couple weeks time we're going on a mini-holiday together to visit some friends in Ireland. The other reason is that my guild, Kamuflasjefylla, died and was reborn that same month. Our Prot Paladin transfered to play with a friend in a M'uru guild, and both our solid-attendance, awesome-gear Resto Shamans packed up and went with him. So did Dave, who was gearing up his mage (not banned as it was on a separate account) for Sunwell. In the wake after those four left, we lost a DPS Warrior to rerolling Horde and the breakdown of our raiding capability was a fact.

After a few days of considering our options and being politely declined after approaching our servers second best guild asking about a merge, we allied with a Sunwell guild on another server. They were in roughly the same situation as us and were persuaded to transfer over to Dentarg to join us. In the process we abandoned Kamuflasjefylla and adopted the name of the transfering guild: NES. Supposedly it stands for lots of things, like Never Ever Sleep and Never Ending Story, but it does not under any circumstances stand for Nintendo Entertainment System. I'll always miss the old name and the story behind it, but in the end the name you raid under doesn't really matter much. What does matter is that after some horrible weeks and over a month of not even being able to get proper BT/Hyjal raids up, we're back in Sunwell were we belong.

What does not break you makes you stronger, right?

065: Field Trip

We kept reassuring her that it was just ol' Sillydan and there was nothing to worry about. She didn't seem too convinced. Eventually, after some discreet bribery (strawberry ice cream and a candy bar), we were able to talk her into posing for this shot:





Where did you take your orphan?



Also, if you click to view the larger image, please take notice of that Rogue's name. First time he was with us for an Illidan fight was hilarious: "Alright Shadowdemon, he does this... shadow... demon thing.... you, uh, DPS the... shadow demons... Bwahahahahahaha." "Look, just comitt suicide in phase 4 and we should be okay!!" He was not impressed.

064: RIP Meepmeep

On May 20th, in the late evening (European time), Blizzard took the names and credit cards numbers that they had obtained and compared it to their database of accounts. The names and numbers were those of people who had purchased the well-known Warcraft bot Glider. They were all perma-banned.

We were in Sunwell, progressing on Brutallus. Since we got him down a few weeks back we haven't been able to repeat it. We lost a few of our strong DPSers to burnout and Age of Conan and exams, and while we've filled in the ranks again, they haven't had the gear to provide sufficient DPS until now. Our first attempt went really well, even without flasks we had enough raid DPS to bring him down.

"Did anyone else just get disconnected?", our raid leader says on vent. He was the only one. Then the disbelief when he tried to log back in. The cries of "You're kidding me, you've got to be kidding me." I was whispered shortly after by a friend asking if anyone in Kamuflasjefylla had just been suspended. Three characters in my friends guild had, only minutes before.

We speculated at first if there was something wrong, since none of them had gotten emails stating why. It became obvious soon enough when the forum threads began popping up.

I first met Dave back in my old guild, when Tieryn was around level fifty-something. He and I got dragged along on a fun-run of ZG and all I remember is that he played a Hunter then, and that he'd given his pet cat his own name. After that I'd bump into him from time to time - sometimes he'd merely be mentioned by my guildmates, other times he'd come with us on an instance run or a heroic run. I grew to like him, an alright fellow that laughed a lot and had so much more experience with BC raiding than us. At some point his Hunter was hacked and destroyed and he switched to playing a Priest. I looked up to him, as he was the only one I really knew who played hardcore and had raided all the instances I secretly dreamed of some day seeing myself. As time passed, he would be the one to invite me into Kamuflasjefylla and give me the chance to fulfill that dream.

He's a nice guy. He doesn't seek to hurt anyone and he isn't the kind of person that would break the law or deliberatly try to mess things up for others. He didn't use the bot to farm for gold, he merely wanted to skip the boring leveling on his new baby hunter, wanting it to get to 70 faster so that he could have his lost Locutus back. He'd talk about his plans to get a pet Scorpion called Bob again and go back onto the barricades, promoting the use of Scoprion pets in high-end raids. He didn't mean any harm. Few people who use bots do. He's a nice guy. Most people who use bots are.

I'm not saying what he did was okay or that his banning was unfair, because it isn't and it wasn't. I'm saying that the people who bot are people like you and me. It might not actually be you and me, but it might be your friend or your guildie. I'm saying that in an instant he was disconnected from the servers forever. His Shadow Priest with five or six pieces of tier 6, Skull of Gul'dan and the Spectral Tiger mount was gone. All because he wanted to speed up the boring leveling process a bit. Most people don't see that as a big deal. It is a big deal.

No matter your reason to use a bot, it is against the Terms of Service. It's not a big thing - it's not like stealing from a store or hurting another person - but it is against the rules you agreed to follow, and thus punishable as per the terms.

Realise what you're risking. Realise it can all be taken away from you in a heartbeat. Everything you've worked so hard for. If you're an end-game raider - realise what you're risking for not just yourself but your entire guild.




When he first logged on, after having namechanged from Cascada to Meepmeep.




The Shadow Council won't ever be the same :/




Goodbye Meepmeep, we had some great times ♥

063: QQ

For many months now, Tom and I have organised a Karathon every Friday. I do the signups, make sure we have enough tanks and healers and raid lead. He assists me and handles the occasional loot buyer + distributes voids at the end. At first it was all fun and it felt nice to raid lead Kara again like I used to do in my old guild. These days though, it feels like more hassle than it's worth. The below is the list of Rules I want to post in the next signup thread. I won't though, I think it's better to just take a break from running these things altogether.

#1: If you sign up and then get saved before Friday, have the courtesy to let us know. Preferably before we log on Thursday night and see your character is in Karazhan with some other group. Or if we don't happen to see you do this, let us know before we start sending out raid invites ten to seven on Friday evening.

#2: If you sign up as a tank, get saved with some other group and decide that this is okay cause you'll just come with your other character (who is not a tank), don't just whisper the severly undergeared feral druid that's coming to be geared up and tell her 'You'll be offtanking, I'll come on my lock instead'. Especially do not do this and not tell us anything about it. She's not strong enough to fill that role yet and we'll have to arrange something else. We'd like to know we need to do so before it's one hour until raid time.

#3: Don't sign if you're not going to show up. If you have an excuse that's fine, but 'I forgot' is not an excuse. Neither is 'It's just Kara, chill'.

#4: Do not show up drunk to the point where you keep dying and/or wipe us because you a) overaggro, b) pull extra packs of mobs, c) spend your time whispering your crush and not paying attention to what the group is doing, d) auto-run into packs we skipped, e) fall down and die, f) set off Flame Wreath on Aran, or any other ridiculously stupid thing. It's not cute. You're just pissing everybody off and wasting our time.

#5: You are not a special snowflake. You will be DPSing the flares on Curator and you will be DPSing the chains on Illhoof. You will also corpse run with everybody else when we wipe.

#6: If you're listed as a DPS and you're told to DPS, do not go into bear form and taunt things off the poor off-tank with lesser gear than you. Yes, you are the better tank, but he does buggerall damage with his prot spec and he doesn't have adequate DPS gear. You do. Next time, state that you'll only come if you can tank and we will work around it.

#7: No, that guy isn't in our guild. He is a good friend of mine that asked very nicely if he could come along for badges (and we needed a well-geared DPSer to carry your blue-and-green geared alt). He's 15, a sweetheart and about a million times more polite than you. Stop making fun of him and act your age. You make me ashamed to wear the same guildtag as you when you get all elitist like that. If only you worked as hard to be a nice person as you did on getting your t6!

#8: No, you can't just take that item. You'll pass on it like we always do, and then the interested people will /roll and we sort it out. This is how we've always done it and you've run Kara with us plenty of times before. There are others here too that wear cloth/leather/mail/plate/need healing gear/need tanking gear/can use that weapon (cross out as applicable). Stop being greedy!

Yeah, I need a vacation :/

062: Speedy!

I haven't seen any announcments anywhere, but apparantly it's Children's Week again. I ran into some Horde players yesterday with orphans in tow so I headed over to the Stormwind Orphanage this morning to pick up my own. Some 15 minutes later I had my very own Speedy the turtle, a pet I've wanted ever since I first started playing :D

Go grab one for yourself!

061: Life and times

Still no 4set. Like I mentioned 2 weeks ago, I sat out for 1 Illidan raid and of course 3x Conqueror tokens dropped. Then there was a change of tanks, or rather, the changing of a holy paladin to a tank, and last weeks only Conqueror token went to him on tank-prio. Now bosses are dropping Conqueror left and right (much to the amusement of our new straight-out-of-Karazhan imp-bish - more on that later) except for, of course, Illidan. The new rogues are happy, our new new Sherman is happy (we can't seem to hold on to enhancment Shamans & thus we are in a perpetual state of gearing a new one up) and all the offspec-hungry guildies are happy.

Me, not so much.

:(

It wouldn't have been so bad if Illidan hadn't sent Sathrovarr a memo, but he did and now that pesky demon isn't dropping Conqueror either. It feels like back when we were progress raiding Illy and no weapon would drop for me. I guess this means I'll get my 4set once Felmyst is down or something. Maybe the Twins.

Spreaking of - that damned dragon isn't down yet. We banged our heads against Brutallus again this weekend after a shoddy Kalecgos-kill, but he refused to play nice for us. It's a big shame cause as of today we're on a week and a half's raidbreak to try and cure a guild-wide burnout. Most of the core raiders don't need loot from BT/Hyjal anymore. Even though we've stopped going to Hyjal completely, farming BT every Wednesday and then progress-wiping the rest of the week in Sunwell is draining everyone. Some are dodging raids, some are whining and some show up, shut up and just want to get it overwith. It happens. It happened before I joined too, when Kamuf prog-raided TK. They took a break back then too and once it was over they nailed a boss they'd not been able to get down before. Here's to hoping it'll have the same effect this time!

(And maybe there'll be more frequent blog-posts now that I'm not doing much until May 7th.)

I mentioned some new recruits. Since Illy went on farm we've had the obligatory 1-3 people fall off, either to xfers or quitting the game entirely. I'm pretty sure the officers knew it'd happen, it seems like this happens with all guilds that down the "final" boss. At any rate, after some recruiting we've picked up a new afl Warlock, a new enh Sherman (#5 I believe, here's to hoping this one lasts!) and two new Rogues. Nothing terribly interesting if it wasn't for what I previously mentioned - the Warlock is straight out of Karazhan. (If you were reading my blog back in December you'll remember that so was I when I first joined. Hell, I hadn't even killed Netherspite and Nightbane.) As such, his gear was obviously not the greatest.

Let's face it though, a guild like Kamuf can take a player in blues and greens and epic them out in BT/Hyjal in a matter of weeks. Skill, attitude and loyalty are much more valuable assets than gear when it comes to applicants. This guy? He knew he didn't stand a chance but he was bored, it was late at night and he decided he'd give it a go anyway just for the hell of it. He posted a long, well-written application to our forums that was soaked through with personality. He was funny. He wanted to raid. He was taken in and put on trial the next day.

After pretty much half the guild had crawled all over him, inspecting his gear, his gems, his enchants, his rep and told him exactly how tough a job he had ahead of him, he was brought along for the last BT clear before the raidbreak. Being naturally friendly and helpful to newbies (I've worked as an admin on a large message board for 7 years) I'd taken it upon myself to whisper him the tactics from a DPS point of view for each boss so that he'd be somewhat prepared. I must say he did remarkably well for someone who'd never set foot in the place before!

Then Mother dropped multiple Conqueror tokens (of course) and only one of the core raiders rolled on it for mainspec. The new Warlock rolled too, for the hell of it, even though he barely had any DKP. (He is a 'for the hell of it' kind of guy.) His voice on ventrilo when the raid leader offhandedly told him to pick up one of the tokens was a real treat. The poor thing had not expected to end up with tier 6 shoulders on his very first raid into Black Temple and was quite awed and surprised. The next day when we came back for Council and Illidan, he got himself some tier6 pants as well. I don't think there was a happier guy in all of Azeroth and Outland that day. :)

060: I've drowned in the Funwell

So tired these days once raid ends, no real time and energy for blogging even though I have lots of things I'd like to write about. Kalecgos is on farm, Brutallus is finally down after some heartbreaking 2% and 1% wipes, and we're now progress raiding Felmyst 5 hours a day.

It occured to us only tonight that the reason Mass Dispell seems to resist abnormally often is that it's not a shadow based spell, and the priest +spell hit talent only counts for shadow spells. Bugger. Will have to look into that and maybe set up a +spell hit gear to get over-capped just for this fight. And farm more Primal Manas for Cauldrons of Arcane Protection. And mats for Destro pots. And for Pure Death flasks. And Mana pots. And... and....