Rant
Naming violations in WoW
Earlier this week, a poster on WoW_Ladies made a comment about how she often reports names in violation of the naming policies using the in-game ticket feature. While it takes a few days for her to get an automated GM response, she would go back to the toons’ armory pages to see that nothing had changed. I’m sure most of us have found a toon’s name that was completely out of line; some of us ignored it and kept playing, some of us, like that LJ poster, spoke up and tried to change it.
The naming policies of WoW are multi-tiered. “Highly inappropriate” encompasses racial, ethnic, or national slurs; mentions of extreme sexuality or violence; references to sexual orientation (note: Blizzard prohibits names which “refer to any aspect of sexual orientation pertaining to themselves or other players” — meaning that even gay-positive names are in violation); or any name containing obscene or vulgar language. Interestingly, names which are designed to harass another user or a Blizzard employee fall in the middle tier of infractions: it’s apparently worse to name your toon “Sapphiclover” than it is to name it “Metaneiraisfat”. (Don’t register that name; it’s probably too many characters.) The other rules are largely ignored by the gaming population: no trademarked words, no references to famous people alive or dead, no phrases (e.g., “Iamacow”), no real world titles (so “Sirmixalot” violates two of those rules). Players are also encouraged to create names that fit within the gaming universe: naming your blood elf hunter “Legolas” doesn’t work in the world of Azeroth. But, again, people are pretty lenient about these: I think it’s safe to say that most quality players ignore anyone with a name like that as being subpar.
But let’s go back to the top tier of offenses — “Highly Inappropriate”. (Trigger warning: sexual, homophobic and racial slurs are used, as well as terms referencing sexual assault.) › Continue reading
What’s in a main?
I started playing WoW in January of 2008, following a pretty intense break-up. (Because the best cure for a broken heart is a socially crippling hobby, amirite?) Meta was the first character I rolled, the first character I got to 70 on, and the first character I raided with. I lucked out in that a guild on my server actually needed a mage in T6/SWP content: I was in the process of leveling up a resto shaman so I could be more appealing to recruiting guilds, but a guild actually took me to Black Temple instead of just summoning me to ZA to drop a table and then booting me from the raid. I worked hard to make sure I’d be a good raider: read pages upon pages of theorycrafting, redid my professions over and over (including leveling tailoring to max twice), picked up badge gear, and happily respecced to provide whatever buff my raid needed. Most people I knew in my raiding guild had a few alts, but very few of them at max level, and even fewer had toons that could manage anything besides half a Kara run. Having an alt who could do T5/T6 content was virtually unheard of on my server, apart from the top guild who’d take their own alts in on farm content.
After a few months on the raiding scene, I finally got my priest up to 70, but by then the 3.0 nerf was in place and I could take her COH-spamming butt into Kara and Mag’s with no problems at all. When Wrath hit, I leveled up my mage, got plenty of heirloom pieces, and managed to get my warrior to 80 before Ulduar hit. I started tanking Naxx 10 and 25 on my off-nights, and gearing her up past the first hurdle of getting def-capped for raids was no problem at all. Badge gear was even easier to get than at the end of BC.
Now we’re near the end of the expansion: Cata looms on the horizon. › Continue reading
I’m still just Metaneira.
Real names on forums will not be going live.
I can’t express how grateful I am to hear this. Both Aislinana and I canceled our accounts yesterday in protest over the decision to link real names to our accounts when posting on the forums. Many, many bloggers, forum denizens, and even non-WoW players spoke out against the decision, and I’m glad that we were heard. (You know something’s big when your friends or relatives who only dimly know you play this game forward you links about the controversy.)
Ais and I are in voice chat right now, almost giddy. Yes, there are still major problems with RealID: there are still exploitable security holes, the friend-of-a-friend “feature” still causes concern, and while it works cross-games, cross-servers, cross-factions, it is not cross-regional (a shame since I have a couple of good WoW friends across the pond with whom I would trust my RealID info). But … yesterday we were mourning a game we loved because the security risk was too high a price to pay for our own enjoyment. So many of our friends and guildmates canceled their accounts within the past few days, people we had planned on playing with into Cataclysm. Now we feel we can do that again. Our guild will still be alive (and as Northrend Commonwealth, not Tatooine Commonwealth), we’ll still have internet dragons to slay. There are still issues with the system, and I’m still not comfortable with the whole “you got your Facebook in my video game” ethos they’re moving towards, but at least today I feel like Metaneira can go back home.
Ais will be streaming some beta stuff today, I believe (she stopped when I called her to cheer about the change), and I’ll likely be joining her soon. But right now we’re just figuring out how to re-up our accounts:
Ais: How do you un-unsubscribe?
Meta: I don’t know, I’ve never done it!
See you in Azeroth, mages and friends. Welcome home.
RealID and Forums: Your Name, Please
Blizzard, I’m so beyond disappointed in you right that it physically hurts.
Today Blizzard announced that in the near future, with the release of Starcraft II and Cataclysm, no doubt, that RealID will be implemented on the forums to further display your real life name next to all of your posts. This has already created an outcry louder and stronger than any other in the Blizzard community in the past and revealed a hotbed of further cynicism and aggression towards RealID.
I had my misgivings about even the implementation of the RealID “friends list” feature because it seemingly had glaring security and personal privacy issues. I have even tried it out for the purposes of seeing how bad the system was and reporting it back to you, but this unfortunately came up before I could even address it. Blizzard purported not even a couple weeks ago that RealID was to be used for “real life friends” and people you could “trust with sensitive real life information.” So how does this fit into that scheme? It doesn’t, and it seems like this has all been calculated and figured out long before this went public. I’ve had some fun using the RealID system on my friends list, even with my concerns, even with people who aren’t my real life friends. While it felt a little weird exposing my real life name to some people that I had known only in-game, these were all people I had a vested personal interest in over a long period of time – cross-server buddies I knew from Elitist Jerks, guildmates who often played alts, and friends I knew strongly in other guilds via Wow Ladies. There were already some issues I didn’t like – the friends of friends feature being the biggest. I did have random people add me from X’s friends list and therefore thought I was a guildmate with X on another server. The conversations with a RealID and a third person I didn’t know exposed my real name to them. These were all minor, however, and at this time I’ve had no substantial problems with the service.
This however, is another kettle of fish.
I’m appalled at the idea that this is resulting from a systemic problem with flaming and trolls and that using personal accountability with real life names will somehow reform this. On the long, slippery curve to online transparency, a lot of people will have their liberties and privacy crushed, and many more people will be hurt than will be harmed before everything is said and done. While it is nice to think that the utopian online society has everyone being responsible because of their real names being used as tentative collateral in the social contract, it ultimately fails because of people with privilege. Privilege to disregard or not understand that there are still very few consequences for the aggressor and quite a lot of consequences for the aggressed. Anonymity is not only a glamor that one uses to express themselves on Internet, or a cloak by which to hide behind, but a form of security that some people quite desperately need for both their sanity and their personal safety. As we’ve seen in the past couple of years, the incidence of personal information being abused has gone up and there’s still very little protections for people who are caught up in this mess, despite the complete shift of the social media from anonymous to real life identification.
It makes me sad that Blizzard is participating in this with RealID. It speaks unquestionably of a privilege that Blizzard as a company has to not understand its players wants and needs, nor its support staff. For everyone on the general forums crowing about having a non-unique name, there’s quite a few who do. There’s quite a few people who’ve been the targets of Internet harassment and stalking (myself included), quite a few people who would have liked to use the service but now cannot. There’s also quite a few people who wish to use an Internet handle due to the fact that their legal name is no longer an option or appropriate to their identity. There’s quite a few people who are not legally allowed to have their name displayed on the Internet.
What happens to all of these people? Why were these people not considered? I can’t say that this is a vocal minority anymore, Blizzard. And it saddens me that you’ve gone so far now and done so little for the people who’ve gotten you there. By creating this use of the service, not only have they silenced the trolls, but they’ve also effectively silenced everyone else who cares enough about their identity and safety (and jobs! who knew!) to keep their real name safe. In their rush to be the next Facebook (despite being a stupid gaming company), they’ve made an incredibly stupid move. Whether or not I continue to support Blizzard, the company who’s been helping me through my own harassment, remains to be seen. This is an incredibly hurtful blow to their user base.
Sunwell’d Again – Heroic Lich King World First
So the game so far is officially “beaten” by Paragon (Lightning’s Blade-EU) until Ruby Sanctum comes out. They took down Heroic Lich King 25M last week and the whole Warcraft world exhaled again. As the dust settled, the logs were reviewed and scoured, forum posts were made and people noted that there were entirely no mages on their kill. (Same goes for DPS shaman as well, but this is a mage blog, so that’s what I took notice of.)
Kyth over at Strat-Fu made this insightful post about the composition and their choices, and while I agree with her dissemination, I do not necessarily draw the same conclusions. I can’t say I have the same insight as a mage who has raided in the top 20 of raiding for the past couple of years. There’s a different standard for composition when you are gunning for rated kills, and expectations that far exceed what I’ve ever encountered or produced in raiding. So take my words with some casual salt, I might advise. But I feel raiding guilds leaving out entire classes from top kills is a failure of the system. Competitive raiding requires that someone gets the kill first and the edge that gets them there can’t be begrudged, perhaps. However, I feel that you can blame Blizzard for some of this. “Bring the player, not the class” has an odd and ironic sting to it right about now.
Zarhym considers ICC some of their most interesting and challenging content to date and I’ve heard that Heroic Lich King is on par, if not harder than old chestnuts of the past like Mu’ru and Yogg-0 Light in terms of pure ball-busting terror. So why do I feel that this assessment is inaccurate in terms of success? It is another case where Blizzard makes fights that specifically plays to a certain mechanic or set of mechanics from classes but leaves other classes in the dust in terms of competing. Thankfully, unlike Sunwell, mages are at least coming neck and neck with rogues and warlocks in DPS, but we still fall very short on high single-target DPS that doesn’t sacrifice multiple-target AOE (and vice-versa). This is the key to why Heroic Lich King firsts are not for us. Even our single target DPS up until now relied very heavily on Incanter’s Absorption if you wanted to remain competitive, which required taking additional damage and being effectively babysat by disc priests and paladins. I guess I just don’t agree with Zarhym’s crowing from a magely perspective. ICC has been a big fat lot of annoying nonsense as a mage. Sure, the fights provide a lot more interesting challenges, but I can’t help but feel that as a ranged DPSer, and mostly as a mage, that we were not the audience being catered to in this content.
I don’t want to sound incredibly unhappy, because I’m not. I’m sure some of this ICC rankling comes from the fact that our raid is incredibly melee-oriented. We have all the caster buffs we could want, for sure, but our strategies and perspectives tip heavily towards our melee. The fact that a lot of fights from their outset rely on ranged and casters to essentially hop-skip-jump around while melee are gleefully single-targetting the bosses makes me feel that this is not just isolated to my particular raid group. The Citadel has felt like one long list of half-fixes and short-sticks when it comes to mage DPS, mage strategies and most importantly, mage fun. We’re not being replaced by six shaman and 5 warlocks like Sunwell, but I feel we’ve gotten the rub in this patch.
So congratulations to Paragon on their kill. I’m pretty sure their mages aren’t crying about being left out because if you enjoy being in a guild like that, your raid comes before your individual participation. But I feel for the rest of us who probably would feel left out of their raid’s crowning victory over some of the hardest content in the game. And for no reason other than being a day late and a dollar short on cutting-edge DPS mechanics for fights in Icecrown. I feel it is antithetical to Blizzard’s motto to have fight mechanics that completely obliterate the need to bring a certain pure DPS class in order to edge out other guilds to a first kill. Is that competitive raiding trying to beat Blizzard at its own game or is that entirely Blizzard’s fault? That I do not know. I just hope raiding guilds don’t catch onto Staff of Conjuring, or we will all be out of jobs.
On tanking, mages, and why rogues should die in fires
I know Ais has already apologized for the lack of updates, but I’m going to throw in another apology from myself. The past few months have been fairly hectic in that “real life” thing I occasionally indulge in: interviewing for new jobs, having a relationship end (and on the day before Valentine’s Day, too, which is good because I hadn’t met my dramatic irony quota that month), and generally trying to get more organized and focused. I’m doing pretty well now, though, and can invest more energy in projects like this site.
In game, I’ve been spending a lot more time on my tanks: my 80 prot warrior and my 80 prot paladin. Maybe it’s just making up for years of being squishy, but I love standing in front of bosses and protecting my raid. There’s still a lot of pressure in tanking: blowing your cooldowns at the right moment, making sure you’re positioning the mobs in the best possible way (I like to face them towards Ais’s boyfriend so he gets cleaved), and pushing buttons frantically to stay on top of the DPS who are just dying to rip aggro off of you. (Okay, the paladin tanking isn’t so much frenzied button pushing as lazily hitting them in order. I love my pally but warrior tanking is much more interesting and dynamic.) And yet, I don’t feel as stressed while tanking: no one’s going to spam Recount after a battle and point out how I did compared to everyone else. I can focus on being a member of a team, and working with everyone to achieve a certain goal. It’s a nice change of pace from DPSing on my mage, where I’m almost secretly hoping a rogue stands in fire and dies so I’ll beat him on the charts. I’m more than happy to give up ten-man raiding on my mage in favor of doing it on one of my shield-wearing girls.
But I do love my mage, and ICC has gotten better for Ais and me lately. I think the ranged DPS in our raid have really started working together to point out how we can make the fights a bit easier on us, and we’re beginning to function as a team. Tensions were high for a while, but I think our melee have finally realized that it’s not that half our raid is bad, it’s that the fights and our strategies for them were vastly favoring their playstyle. We’ve adapted some strategies, aired our frustrations, and I think we’re back to being a fairly laidback, happy group. (Until I watch someone keyboard turning to run out of Sindragosa’s death-grip, that is. RAGE.)
Enough about what I’ve been up to. Here’s a few of my thoughts about mage raiding in ICC:
1) Incanter’s Absorption is still worth it if you can get shielded reliably. In my raid, we’ve done crazy things where I’ll get fed shields on Rotface while I’m standing in the slime to DPS. The numbers I put out are nuts, but it just seems so gimmicky and stupid. I am actually looking forward to the nerf: too many mage mechanics are already dependent on very particular and often dumb things (Torment the Weak, I’m looking at you), and IA has always felt cheap to me. Is it fun to get shielded and watch your spellpower shoot up? Sure. But I don’t like sucking up to a disc priest and then standing in fire just to do more damage. (Note: this is no longer relevant after 3.3.3: IA is not nearly as valuable as it was since it only procs off of your own frost/fire ward and mana shield.)
2) Once you get two piece mage T10, your rotation may change slightly. The top DPS rotation still is stacking Arcane Blast to four and then using Arcane Missiles when Missile Barrage procs. However, the haste boost from consuming MBAM means that your less mana-intensive rotations aren’t that far off from the highest DPS rotation. If mana is a problem for you, don’t feel bad about using MBAM when it procs after the second, third, or fourth AB.
3) Four piece mage T10 is the most ridiculously awesome set bonus in the world. Other set bonuses look at mage T10 and weep, for they will never be so amazing. It’s especially fun when we do our weekly raid quests in Naxx and have a fight that lasts only 45 seconds—you just can’t touch a mage who blows Quad Core, Arcane Power, Icy Veins, and trinket(s), and who doesn’t have to worry about mana. I am actually really surprised it hasn’t been nerfed yet.
3) Yes, we’ve heard about proposed fire changes. I think that with the IA nerf, the combustion change (down to two minutes from three, thank goodness), pyroblast now benefitting from TtW, and the Glyph of Fireball change (instead of 5% crit, the cast time on fireball is reduced by .15 seconds), fire might be more in-line with arcane mages. Maybe. Arcane gives you controlled burst and amazing single-target DPS, which are both crucial in ICC encounters. Fire does well with multiple targets, but so far that’s only Gunship. (Dreamwalker has lots of adds, but they need to be burst down quickly and a lot of them won’t be up long enough for living bomb to explode.) But we’ll see: I know Ais is itching to get back to blowing stuff up with fireballs.
4) I hate trinkets so much. So very much. I lucked out and got a Muradin’s on my first ICC 10 run, but my guild has seen exactly one Reign drop in our TOC runs. Another one dropped on a pug Ais and I were in, and it went to a warlock in our guild—who then picked up the first (and only) DFO we’ve seen. I was trying to move away from the years-long feud between mages and warlocks and instead unite ourselves against rogues and DKs, but, man. *shakes fist at our warlock guildmate* I just know I’m going to be using Talisman of Resurgence until Cataclysm. (Of course, that’s not the worst of it: if I want to go back to fire for a boss fight, Rawr tells me I should use Dying Curse. *twitch* I’ll stay arcane, thanks.) Trinkets can suck my non-existent junk.
But, all in all, WoW has been treating me well lately. I love that Ais and I got Starcaller on our alts (especially since, uh, I might have been drunk at the time); I managed to get a Blood Queen’s Crimson Choker in my Sack of Frosty Treasures, which netted me quite a nice chunk of change; and we’re working on getting another mage friend of ours a Tiny Voodoo Mask trinket so we can do a voodoo gnome parade with -wait for it- 24 voodoo gnomes. (We’ll be glyphing for mirror image, of course.) Ais and I have done it with just the two of us and I will say that 14 pygmy gnomes RP walking through Dalaran will turn heads. I highly recommend it. I’m meeting new people, having fun goofing off on alts, and raiding doesn’t feel quite so tedious lately.
I hope our mage readers are faring well! How is Icecrown treating you?
Stop the Frost Resist Insanity!
Even though I have many alts and things I could be doing, I often stand around Dalaran on my 80s, like ya do. One of my favorite things is to look for people wearing really stupid gear. You know, hunters in spellpower leather…hunters in defense gear…okay so hunters are really dumb sometimes. Anyways, one of the most glaringly obvious offenses, the one that really drives me nuts – mages in frost resist epics.
At first, back when Wrath started, you could have pawned it off that you just got fresh off a Sapphiron kill (Despite the fact that you didn’t really need it.) But time and time again, long past its scant usefulness, I see mages running around in the trademark azure blue of fail. Why do people do this? Even as far back as Burning Crusade, I used to see mages and warlocks in the epic arcane resist gear too. Is it the draw of the stamina? I’ve seen people trying to pass it off as PVP gear, but with no trinkets in sight. And every time I inspect them, there’s terrible gems of all colours, rarity and cuts. Epics do not necessarily mean better, people. I know none of you wonderful readers are in this category, being smart and logical people.
But really? Really? There’s nothing you could gem for, even with epic gems, that would really beat out solid blues over the epic frost resist pieces. Why would you sink the mats and money into something like this? Go make something else for your tailoring skill-ups! Stop thinking this is a good idea! Step away from the tailoring window, kiddo, and come with us.
Here’s a screenshot of an anonymous offender:
Well let’s see here. Epic gem with two green-rarity cuts. Mana per 5 enchant. Pure intellect cut. This is a hot mess, you know?
I feel bad that there are thought processes in players that lead them to believe that any and all epics must be good. It’s the same process that leads people to not understand what stats mages need! This is why I started this blog, but this is just beyond my understanding. These things take so much resources to create and they are so useless. If you want easy PVP epics, run heroics for badges and buy appropriate gear or go be a squishy arcane mage in Wintergrasp for a while. Save your time and gold for buying craftables from Ulduar or TOC, or just…you know, stop spending money and spend more time reading about mages first and plowing through dungeons and quests for gear. Because stuff like this makes you look like a moron.
If you see anyone like this, take their hand gently and link them this entry.
DPS Depression, an Exploratory Rant
Enjoy Empowered Fire’s very first guest post! Daeena’s own blog can be found at wowfailure.wordpress.com.
A couple of weeks ago I fell into what I’d like to call a “DPS Depression.” People are so quick to insult DPSers or write them off as replaceable or unnecessary and after a while it becomes incredibly frustrating to both hear and deal with. It doesn’t take much to be a DPSer, but it takes a lot to be a GOOD DPSer. There’s a key difference between the two and anyone who figures out what that is gets a gold star. However, there’s more things behind my depression than just that.
Before dropping a couple thousand hours on my mage, I used to be one of the proud heal-flinging folks. I clung to my chain heal button as if it were my only salvation. For context, I’ve played a healer in pretty much every multi-player game since…well…ever. (If a healing class was available.) This priestly-inclination had gone back as far as the archaic MuD days where I would sit and use my “c tel DT” macro over and over in fights. I was, if I may toot my own horn, a pretty damned good healer. This extended well into my WoW career. It wasn’t until sometime around BT in the Burning Crusade that I switched to a mage.
I realize the whole DPS/healing/tanking thing is a “grass is greener” scenario. But to me, healing was ridiculously easy. It always has been. Be proactive, hit heal buttons, collect loot, you’re done. I switched to my mage because I wanted to step out of my box and challenge myself. I had no idea just how challenging it would turn out to be. When I went into my latest DPS depression, I debated leveling up one of my healers so I could hide behind the familiar shield of healing once again. The only thing that kept me from doing that was…well actually there are a lot of reasons that I’ll get into here in a minute.
› Continue reading
Harassment in Warcraft
As some of you may know, Ais and I met through a community of women who play World of Warcraft. With over 7500 members, ranging from completely casual to the hardest of hardcore raiders, a lot of topics crop up repeatedly. Unfortunately, one of the issues Ais and I see all too often is about in-game harassment. Week after week, there will be a post from a woman discussing someone who is making her gaming experience miserable.
The saddest thing of all, however, is the fact that the woman very seldom identifies it as harassment or talks about how Blizzard would respond to it. She’ll say that the harasser will call her a slut in the trade channel, or whisper her from level one alts about how she deserves to be raped, or that he’ll stand in Dalaran /yelling that she’s not a real woman and a horrible bitch. The poster will talk about how she doesn’t feel comfortable signing in or that she’s worried other people will think less of her, but she doesn’t ask what to do about it. The attitude inherent in these posts is that she put the person on ignore (and any alts he happens to roll), but what else can she do? Most of the time the posts are filled with caveats: he called me a whore in Trade, but it’s not like he’s threatening me; he told my old guild that I was a bitch and no one should group with me, but I did just leave them for a raiding guild; he rolled alts to call me names, but I can’t be sure it was him. So much is done to minimize the extent of what he’s done, and there’s usually a lot of apologizing for even bringing it up as it’s “probably not a big deal”.
It is a big deal. › Continue reading
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