Happy Second Anniversary to The Illuminati!

Hello again everyone. Well it's that time of year again, when both my guilds celebrate their anniversaries with big events. The AIE crew did their Summer of Love week last week with tons of great events I may get into next time. On the Illuminati side, you may recall that I came up just short in the running for the officer position to run these events, but I threw in my thoughts and my hat with the wonderful person who did get the job, Soph. I could go into details about the planning, but needless to say Soph put a ton of work into her first event and our guild leader as well as two of us who volunteered to be commanders had many comments on her drafts and hopefully guided her correctly to improve the event.

Phase one of the event was a meeting in Shattrath where we sent pairs of two members off to a new server to level to 5, catch some fish or kill some creatures, and then turn in their gold winnings to Soph to buy a pet for her, when they could move on in teams of 4 back on our server to phase 2. Here's some kickoff pictures in Shatt.


Our unflappable leader and her commander, both in wedding dresses.


About half the group, maybe more of the 35 participants.

Phase 2 of the competition sent teams of 3-5 back and forth from commander to commander in various locations in Azeroth (Zangarmarsh, Elwynn Forest, and Ungoro Crater) with riddles to solve to go get items from low-level instance bosses in about 5 instances. Then the finish line was in Twilight Grove in Duskwood where our fearless leader had set herself up again. I drew the best location in Azeroth, the crystal cave in Ungoro...but probably the worst RP role for me, the war general commander. Get down maggot and give me 20! Anyway,...here's my view of most of the evening, and it is very pleasant.


Pretty colors...


And your friendly commander in the back.

So here are four of the riddles, see for yourself if you can figure them out! These are fantastic nuggets and all the credit goes to Soph on these, as the rest of us had nothing to do with them as far as I know. The idea was to gear up one of your toons for a big battle to come (level up, gear up, profit!)

QUEST 1
Flower Power:
A message from Soph:

I know this might come as a shock, but there is another with my name.
To her shop many do not flock in a land of the past near Festival Lane

Get your guildfrond a lily held-in-the-off-hand.
Similar to a Darkmoon bloom, but of a different brand.

Make sure not to let Arthas talk or back through the inn you will walk.
The instance you must not activate, do not hasten the plagued citizen's fates.
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QUEST 2
Neck Respect:

Provide yourself with an amulet that suites your mood
Are you lonely, compassionate, hungry, or is your scent just plain rude?

Find the troll that can help you with your Tikbalang and get any item that'll set you apart from the gang.
He claims his Amulets are "Amazing", but do pay attention to his phrasing.

Should you go to the upper city I will look upon you with pity.
------------------------------------------------------------------
QUEST 3
Robe Probe:

There is a Fanglord out there
With such beautiful blue hair.
His robes of deer hair
I wish he would share.

He dwells in a land near the shore
Of plants and water it is poor
go to the place where few have been
and get yourself some moccasin.

Find him where the caverns wail
take a wrong turn and you might fail.
---------------------------------------------------------
QUEST 4
Obscene Machine:

Though triathlons are all brawn I find physical activity to be quite a yawn.
Here is a mini-equation with just enough information.
Hope you aced all your courses, if not feel free to use outside sources!

A= the symbol for the 16th element of the periodic table
B= the opposite roll of greed
C= the 19th letter of the alphabet
D= Oruko Saki is his real name; Splinter's enemy

A=C

(A+B)'C + (D)=
Provide yourself with something Buzzworthy from him... it?

You'll discover this being where you'd find Van Cleef
Go get 'em and give 'em some grief.

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So then once a team found their way to Duskwood they had to locate Soph, who like I said was hanging out with the world dragon spawn point in Twilight Grove. Once everyone finished the quests we all gathered for a party and prizes. Thansk to all the generous donors of the guild once again for giving very valuable gifts for everyone to share!


It's like a hot tub time machine moonwell!


More hot tub fun while we waited for the grand finale.


Prizes and fireworks! What could be better?

Then once all the prizes were handed out for good costumes, good RP commanders (not me), good RP teams, and winning racers, it was time for our semiannual knighting ceremony. While the first two of these ceremonies took place in Feralas on the Twin Spires, we had a star-wars ending type setting with everyone lined up on opposite sides of the ramp up to the portal to the emerald dream. Then the officers stood up top amongst all the flares and called up our newest knights, also known as the grump club and the veteran members of the The Illuminati. Here are some pictures from some of the knighting ceremony, although the flares do make it hard to see a bit!











Congratulations to all our newest Knights. I did not vote on you guys, but I believe the decisions were all correct and warranted. And congratulations to Soph for having such a well-received first event. Now that the big hitter is done, Ekat has a little something up her sleeve pre-Cataclysm. More on that later, but needless to say, just because I'm not an officer doesn't mean it will stop me from running some fun stuff floating about in the old noggin. Stay tuned...

Or as a proper Illuminati "Trials of the Illuminated" participant would say in Ungoro Crater, /salute and HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!

Team Update July 2010

Well it has been some time since I did a team update, and I have managed a bit of playtime recently so some movement has occurred. The main Ekaterinae has one more weekly quest to go for her tier 10 shoulders, which will fully equip her in 251 and higher gear in every slot but wand. I actually missed the weekly this week so ahh well. Navarionae has continued gem cutting epics that Ariel transmutes and he has pushed the team over 20k gold. Although a big chunk of that is soon to be eaten because...

The Tree is in Northrend! Oh noes! I have healed probably 7 PUG Utgarde Keep thus far and I've seen everything from groups outright rude to healers to a Kingslayer tanking for a friend. I think I cast 4 heals that mattered the whole time. And by four I mean zero. Anyway, Ariel is grinding those instances and is mostly through 70 which means epic flight is coming soon and will perhaps cause some questing to be done too. However, I really like grinding one instance a day for xp.

Biancae has also been burning through rested time and has cleared most of STV out finally. She is working in Dustwallow for a bit longer although at level 43, she is really starting to think about Tanaris. So the horde main is moving on up and wow is retribution hard to die with. She's never out of mana to heal and she does a lot of damage. It's wonderful.

Clarissae is still parked in the late 20's. No movement there.

I also got to see Ruby Sanctum for 20 minutes last night. I thought the first mini boss was a nice challenge and I want to see the rest of it even though it seems the overall reaction is blah. That just might be the summertime, which is keeping me busy. Plus another business trip next week on top of Grand Prix Columbus (my one MTG tournament this year) and I won't be online much. However, check out my sports site (linked in the blogroll) for new college football articles starting up last week. Woot!

Do You Believe in Precognition?

Precognition (from the Latin præ-, “prior to,” + cognitio, “acquiring knowledge”), also called future sight,[1] refers to perception that involves the acquisition of future information that cannot be deduced from presently available and normally acquired sense-based information.

So a little non-wow entry today, although I will briefly report that Ariel has hit 69 and discovered what everyone probably goes through once. I had not discovered that when you dual spec at 40, your spells for the non-active spec DO NOT UPDATE when you train like normal. I had no clue but I always trained in Feral so instances seemed pretty hard but not out of the questions in TBC. Then my first forays into UK were failures and the second tank was nice enough to point out that my rejuv was not ticking for enough. So I check and sure enough, I'm 5 ranks behind schedule on Rejuvenation and even more/less ranks behind in every healing spell. This turned me from terrible into overpowered, so please note this when you dual spec early!

Now going back to the definition above, I'm a person who has beliefs and all but I've never really considered precognition seriously. But sometimes coincidence is so strong that you really have to wonder if sometimes you just get sent a message somehow. So last night I wake up in a cold sweat at 5 AM after a lengthy dream about losing my wallet and having my identity and my money stolen. I had trouble shaking it but I managed to get back to sleep. I even told my friends online about it this morning when I went into work.

I get a call from my wife later in the day that says her bank card was declined. This is terribly embarrassing, especially for people who have some money in the bank in savings like we do. So while we run at about $500-700 in the banking account at our low point each month, we never get so close to overdraft. But sure enough, I log onto online banking and we are overdrafted for like $250. I start to look at the transactions and starting last night around 1 AM in the morning, there were some suspicious transactions that happened with my wife's bank card. These escalated today when the account was overdrafted. So we obviously called the bank and she'll be getting a new card, I'll dispute the charges and the bank assures me we'll get the money back. However, as I find out this news I'm half-pissed and half-creeped-out because of my dream. Could that have somehow been precognition?

I indeed had absolutely no reasonable way to know the events that were happening to our bank account. Even had I logged onto online banking at that hour, I would have not realized the first transactions were bogus. I'm the kind of skeptic that would just chalk this up to random coincidence, but the dream was so strong. I have woken up in a sweat from a dream only about 4-5 times in the last decade. It's not pleasant. And it is unbelievably rare for me to remember a dream so vividly like I did this time, so perhaps there's just something in the brain synapses that makes connections and has some level of future sight. It certainly is creepy if that is true, I mean imagine the power of the human brain if we could harness that.

So while I may be in a bad mood about this banking trouble for the next few days, I will forget about this aspect of the incident far before I forget the strange coincidence that makes me wonder: Is Precognition Real?

The Good and the Bad

It seems like since the Blizzard HQ has lifted the veil on the Beta information in Cataclysm, all hell has broken loose like the stock market. Every other day there is good news and then every other day there's bad news. This week the good and bad has been notable, so I got drawn out for a midweek entry! We'll start with the bad news doc...

Blizzard decided that the next step in the Real ID revolution is to force all posters on the official forums to use their Real ID's and thus their real names! Now take a moment to think about all the forums that have been on the internet for two decades, and think about why people are so drawn to them. It's the anonymity within a community, and making a name for yourself outside your real identity. I'm sure there are some professional community forums with real name ID's, but the vast overwhelming majority is anonymous user names. And that's how it should be because discussing things on a hotbed like Blizzard official forums opens yourself up to stalkers and attackers and general douche-bags.

So it begs the question as Larisa so elonquently put it...did Blizzard forget to do a reality check before announcing this change? Despite one day of overwhelming negative reaction from the blogging community, they are still not backpedaling much in the blue posts today. And then, in the most ironic twist, Blizzard has tried to decide that the blue posters will not use their real names "because it will be detrimental to our employee's security." Oh really? Maybe you think it's not just the blue posters that have hate mail and psychos coming their way?

As Larisa and most others concluded, this is a terrible idea. When real identities are forced, the forums will slowly die if they are not truly dead already. One hopes that Blizzard's infatuation with Real ID does not taint them so much that they make moves that will definitely make people run away from the community. Although there will likely be more traffic and comments in blogs then, which is a good thing! Silver lining...

Time to turn to the good news. The talent system is being overhauled after Blizzard listened to alpha and beta players who let them know that the talent overhauls were not good enough. And truly, looking at the proposed changes, they were not. The problem was that no matter how much you try to do, with 51 point top line talents, the talent trees were unnecessarily bloated and always would be. So now the revamp has been announced. I'd link the blue post but it is way to long to quote here. The overview is that you will be locked into a talent tree at level 10 by your choice until you put 31 talent points into it, which will happen at level 70 because talents are coming every other level instead of every level. The mastery bonuses are coming in a little quicker including at level 10 since you are locked to what you want to specialize in. I agree with this change considering the new LFG system, and assuming you can still switch specs at level 40. All the crappy talents can finally go away and the system can be simplified to be much better and more streamlined.

With the overall additions over time to the game, sometimes you have to pare away to make it better. And this is a good choice here. It sounds like Mastery will be it's own separate stat on gear as well which converts to something useful to you once you have Mastery trained at level 78 or beyond. So while Blizzard has made one crazy decision, they have made one great decision. One would hope the way they listened to their customers in the talent tree paring will be the same way they eventually approach the Real ID forum issue. Making your customers safe and happy is the primary goal in any business, and that's where the focus at Blizzard needs to be right now.

PostNote - I was not selected for the officer position in my guild. While I was disappointed, I was apparently second place behind someone who is far more connected and social, and she is such a sweet person that I know the position will succeed. Additionally, the guild leader gave me full authority to join forces with her and help her make things great, so I've chosen to pitch in that way and I'll obviously report on our big fun events as they come along. The first one is August 15, but no details allowed! there might be guildies around you know.

Public Service Announcement - Real ID

So Real ID has been live for a couple of weeks now, and the controversy has hit a fever pitch in some areas while other people rejoice at lost connections coming back into touch. For me personally, I saw the system as a good opportunity to keep in touch with the real life friends I joined the game to keep in touch with. Nothing more, nothing less. So when one of my two close friends (who plays either on other servers/factions a lot or other Blizzard games) who the system would be best for me to use it with refused initially to use the system, I balked. Well needless to say that someone accepted a friend request this weekend and then while nobody else was online went through three hours of trying to use parental controls and such, freaking out over the features of Real ID.

The entire problem appears to be what is called "friends of friends." Basically if you've ever been on Facebook you will understand that you can set up your facebook profile to be shown only to friends or to friends of friends (default). Most people do not understand this default and so get freaked out when a boss or employer can look up your information despite not being friends with you. So the facebook controversy has spread through the web and while they fixed their system to allow more control, Blizzard still has this Real ID system in its infancy. Hence my buddy freaks out because his account and all his toons are exposed to "10 million people."

That's not how the system works. All you can see in the friends of friends list (and that's only if you click twice to get into that information for a particular player) is a list of real names in no particular order. No identifiers, no toon names, no email addresses, no nothing else. Just a list of names. Hence, if you have a friends list of maybe 5-10 people, they are all pretty anonymous. There's no real privacy risk here, unless you don't want your friends to bother you when you are on a toon that is your getaway from it all. But that being said, there's one simple rule I have to share with all of you using Real ID.

KEEP TRACK OF YOUR FRIENDS LIST AND MAKE SURE YOU HAVEN'T ADDED ANYONE STUPID!!!

In the example I just gave you, if you don't want to be bothered when on a getaway toon, do not give your Real ID to guild members or people you will likely be getting away from. If they are your true friends, you should be able to tell them that you are not wantign to chat or group at the moment and they would respect your wishes. Obviously if they do not respect those simple wishes, then they shouldn't be your Real ID friend. Arguably they shouldn't be your facebook friend either, but that's a whole different can of worms that I do not regulate well myself.

There's already one horror story out there for Real ID about stalking just 10 days after the system goes live. You can read it for yourself by Googling the Real ID stalker incident, but here's the short version. Girl adds boyfriend and a couple other people on her Real ID list. Her boyfriend is a moron who adds every guildie who will accept him even though he knows few of them in real life. One of such guildies is a little teenager who has been basically separated from grouping with the girlfriend because he's a harassing jerk. Teenager sees boyfriend's friends of friends list has only one female name on it, he googles this name, and calls the girlfriend at work. Oh the horror! What can we do to stop this crazy train?

OK snap out of it, chicken little. First off, the girlfriend should immediately drop the boyfriend from her Real ID friends list because he is not keeping a responsible friends list. You'll be able to tell by monitoring your friends' lists every once in a while, as if one balloons up dramatically you should drop them. Especially if there's some reason you can be identified in a plain old list of names and you have reason (like a guild stalker) to not be known, then be careful! Second off, if this story is true, and with 10 million people it probably is, the girl should call the cops on this dumbass. He wants to be a general stalking douchebag, let him learn a valuable life lesson about respecting authority and the rule of law. Don't go write a big internet story telling people Real ID is broken because you made bad decisions and then did not handle the consequences as effectively as you could have.

So to my readers who may want to add me as a Real ID friend, I say nay nay. It's nothing personal, but I keep my friends list to a select few real life friends. People who have reason to know my email address and people who will be responsible with their own friends list. If you wanted to look me up and you had my name, fair enough go ahead and call. But be prepared to face the consequences. And that's the end of the story.

So while I'm unhappy with a friend for buying into the internet freak out about the latest way Blizzard is invading our privacy and ruining the game, life moves on. Keep yourself safe out there, but realize everyone is not out to get you.

WOW is Dying?

My apologies for not hitting my usual one entry per weekend routine, but as I said last week Origins was going on and I got my game on for four days in real life. It was a fantastic break from work and well needed. I thought about writing an entry yesterday for the benefit of my server called "what to do with 24 hours of WoW downtime" but I figure if you need to be told to go outside, maybe you should stop playing the Wii.

Larisa brings up a good topic today: WoW is dying. To summarize:

"Is there any existing game that has received as many death sentences as WoW? I doubt it. WoW has been "dying" almost since it was launched, if you would listen to the community."

Unlike her conclusion that WoW is not dying, I actually think it is. Now this is not the doom and gloom that the posters on their way out with a ragequit on the forums allude to, but World of Warcraft is back on the decline. I suspect with Cataclysm that Activision-Blizzard will be able to get a slight bump in subscription numbers again for a while, but WoW 2.0 is basically a pretty rehash of a game many have been playing for 4-5 years at this point. While it is true that many players like me who came in late to the party will be sticking around for the foreseeable future, on the whole I almost guarantee blizzard will have trouble ever reaching their peak subscription numbers again.

Every two years this topic becomes in vogue because players run out of things to do and walk away because it is summertime at the end of an expansion. The sheer fact of the matter is many people will go away to Starcraft II and Diablo III, but Blizzard is keeping our community aspect of their games together by enacting Real ID chat across realms and games. That is the real reason most of us pay $15 a month: the community of friends. Last night I tried out Real ID chat while I was on a horde character speaking to an alliance character. This is a fantastic addition to the game and will bring together our group of four real life friends again. Plus if there's any more deep relationships I end up with on the horde side, I can talk to them while spending most of my time alliance side.

So Blizzard is essentially acknowledging that people are drifting away as they must after this long in a game. There's only so many hours you can do the same thing, even if you are doing different raid bosses or different battlegrounds. Console game developers would give their souls to hold a player's interest for one-tenth the amount of time the average wow players spends in Azeroth. The players will slowly move out of the game and the subscriber numbers will decline, but very slowly over the next 2-3 expansions of the game. Then I suspect the game will be replaced and support will disappear. But to Blizzard it will not matter as their profit machine will shift to the next MMO, and so will the playerbase (even if it is not to the legendary extent of World of Warcraft).

The real reason WoW will die is that Blizzard wants it to die. They may not want it to die anytime soon, but eventually they will want to support their new IP. If Blizzard maintained the same level of support and advertising for the game as they have now, the game would probably stabilize around 3-4 million subscribers just like Magic the Gathering stabilized in the CCG market by being consistently the best product out there. MTG does not have peak numbers, but they have a steady playerbase and that works for a game that does not need replaced with card sets moving in and out every few months. But while cards stay at the same level of coolness over 20 years, computer games age quickly and need to be wholesale replaced. Cataclysm is a stopgap, and WoW will die.

Nevertheless, that should not stop us from enjoying the game at its peak or near its peak. This is a beautiful game that will only get better in the coming year, and we are blessed to see Blizzard resetting the deck and not letting things go stagnant at this point. While Larisa is wrong, so are all the ragequitters on the forums that think everyone should follow them like little lambs. No sir. People come and go, but the community will stay as long as Blizzard wants them to. There may just be a few more barseats available at the Legerdemain Lounge next year, and anybody who lags in Dalaran can agree that's OK.

Sidenote - no word on the officer decision, but it sounds like a tough one. I suspect I'm out of the real running because of my real life obligations keeping me away from game some nights, but you never know. Stay tuned...

Happy Father's Day

Well I think I had one of the better father's days I will ever have today. It all started with waking up and sitting at the computer for a bit of WoW time. Now it was nothing special, just leveling my horde paladin in Stranglethorn Vale some more, but it's like my weekend coffee. So I'm already off to a good start when my daughter comes in wearing a shirt that says...

Big Sister

We only have one child, so this was our long awaited word that my wife is pregnant again. So I'll be a dad once again here in about 8 months. My daughter helps me bang on the keyboard in STV for a few minutes, just hanging with dad. Then we finally got out to King's Island with my in-laws and Kelley and my father in law head off to the waterpark with the little ones while my mother in law, brother in law, and his girlfriend all went on some rides for the morning. Now last summer I let myself get mighty down about not fitting on a couple of rides including the new Diamondback supercoaster (the walk of shame out of the coaster car is sad, for sure). But I have been working out since February and I know I'm seeing some minor results in the health department.

So we get to the first of the rides I could not fit on last year and while the thing has the most awkward seats you'll ever sit in, I had little issue. Then we grabbed lunch and spent some time in the waterpark, hanging out with my daughter in the wave pool. After that it was time for a couple kiddy rides and we capped the night with Diamondback. It's definitely a close fit as I cannot have anything in my pockets thanks to the contoured seats, but I can get on! And the supercoaster is definitely a good one even if it doesn't live up to the super-hype it gets. However, it is definitely one of the best rides in the park (I also tried another unique coaster where you hang belly down and face first like Superman). But all in all, as silly as it may seem, this is the first time I know I'm seeing results with the gym. Getting healthy means I can enjoy many more father's days.

So finding out we're having another baby, spending time with the daughter without giving a hoot about work for a day, and seeing some results on my health regime. What a great day. I hope all the fathers out there had just as prosperous of a father's day. Cheers!

By the way, don't know if I'll have much to say next week wow related as I am headed to Origins Game Fair again. This will be my 8th Origins in 9 years, missing one for my wedding. Looking forward to seeing my favorite kind of games and their latest developments. Also will be shaking down my Goblin Charbelcher deck in MTG Legacy in preparation for the Grand Prix pro-level tournament coming through Ohio next month. So lots of good times, even if they are not in Azeroth. I applied for a leadership position in my alliance guild, so perhaps I'll have good news in game regarding that next week (and even if not, I'm sure we'll find someone great to fill the officer opening).