Devil May Soulcry

I was a bit freaked out to see this message. I wasn't sure if the person on the other side had a good or bad memory of me, maybe I had trash-talked them (unlikely, but maybe I was in a party with someone who did trash talk them and they associated it with me), maybe I had corpse camped them on one of my world-PvP romps with various people, I couldn't tell! So I tried to keep my reply pretty neutral.

I was doing a bunch of quests with cutscenes, and didn't see a reply for a while, until...

Now I was pretty freaked out. I still didn't know if it was a good or bad thing! But I figured the person was probably from One, as that was the most likely way they would know my first name but not already have me on steam / Facebook.

I nearly screamed with joy when I got this response. The only thing that stopped me was that I was completely stunned. IT'S HIM! It's been a while since I mentioned him, but Soulcry was a mage in One. He was an incredibly dedicated and talented player, but more importantly, he was one of the most nurturing players I've ever met. A few people in the guild would get together and play DotA (the Warcraft 3 version), and I'd often ask if I could join - sometimes they'd even ask me if I'd like to join! To say I was bad was an understatement. I didn't know any heroes and as I mentioned in that blog post, I'd often random and rely on Soulcry to tell me what to do. I bought Diffusal Blade on Anti-Mage, I would Omnislash when there were lots of creeps. I'd be off farming while my team was dying. I was the world's biggest anchor, and whether we won or lost was probably due to how much I fed.

I've come a long way since then, and the last time Soul and I played together was when we randomly bumped into each other on the Bored Aussie server. I pulled my weight in that game as Dazzle. I had his email address from the time that I tried to meet up with him when I was in his city briefly, and we were even both going to be at the airport at the same time, but unfortunately, he was arriving and I was departing, and we missed each other. I felt weird contacting him out of the blue after I stopped playing WoW, so I never did. But I still thought about him. A lot.

To bump into him in Final Fantasy XIV was an amazing stroke of luck. It turns out he was invited to join our guild, and he was guildless at the time, so he accepted.

Anyway, his statement hung in the air for a while, "dont know if you remember".

I wanted to say, "Of course I remember you! You are the most amazing gamer I've ever met. You always kept your cool, you're such a great coach, you're so good at everything you do. I wanted to be like you for so long. I still remember that time TheShadow (?) raged at Moo for buying Mechansm on every single hero, and he just snapped when Moo bought it on Alchemist. You were trying not to laugh, but you didn't quite mute your mic in time. Or maybe you hit your PTT button by accident. I'd recognise your laugh anywhere."

Too intense. Too creepy. Gotta try again.

Take 2: "Yeah, sure, you were a mage, right?"

Pfft. Complete lie. The fangirl in me could never say such a thing.

I felt so nervous. It felt like an eternity had passed and I still hadn't typed anything in response. Even though most of my time with him was through WoW, I mostly associate him with DotA. Whenever I play well, I imagine him being proud of me. Whenever someone picks Vengeful Spirit (one of his favourite heroes), it always makes me think of him (he played carry VS, as opposed to my support VS). He just had such an easy-going nature that it made me feel good to be around him. He never made me feel bad about feeding, and always had something helpful to say. Despite that, you could really feel how intense he was when he was completely focused on something and it felt like he was good at everything.

So this is what I ended up saying to him:

Cool as a cucumber.

Then redbeanpork said it was time to play Dota, so I said bye and logged out.

And then I started kicking myself. What was I doing?! Even though we were in the same guild, that was such a crappy response. After explaining to redbeanpork that I wanted to wait a bit before we queued, I logged back into the game (and was put in queue to get onto the server!!!!! T_T), and quickly messaged him asking if he still played Dota.

He responded that he stopped playing a couple of years ago, but he'd be up for playing again if people he knew were playing. I linked him my Steam profile and he added me to Steam.

HE ADDED ME TO STEAM!

I'm really trying to suppress my innate stalker urges right now. I've only looked through his library. And found an old WoW video that he uploaded (I didn't watch it).

I finally worked up the courage to ask him to join us for a game of Dota 2, but it wasn't meant to be. :'(

We chatted for a bit, but there was Dota to be played, so the conversation died off.

I still feel like I'm on cloud nine.

Dr. Rekisu or: How I Learned to Start Strafing and Walk with QWES

11:28 PM - Fodder: prayer of healing is bound to D T_T
11:29 PM - redbeanpork: how do you move without wasd?
11:29 PM - Fodder: i move with qwes
11:29 PM - redbeanpork: YOU'RE SO WEIRD
11:29 PM - Fodder: i only have left and right strafe
11:29 PM - Fodder: and forward and backward

The last time I played WoW (as in, the time before now), was during Mists of Pandaria, and the number of spells I had on my characters at that point was pretty ridiculous. I could probably have been a bit more efficient if I used a few of them more often, but I just really couldn't be bothered because I had run out of keybinds. MrMan5.5 and Olek both kept talking about how they rebound left and right turn, because they just needed strafe, and only dirty keyboard turners use the keyboard to turn (for the non-WoW players, keyboard turning is incredibly slow compared to mouse-turning). My argument was that sometimes I need to click on someone to heal, and I don't have time to turn with my mouse - so I had WASD for movement and turning, and Q and E for strafing. I think that was a fairly weak argument, so in the end, I caved and rebound my keys.

EXCEPT, I found out yesterday that I did it wrong. MrMan5.5 insists that what he said was that I should rebind A and D to left and right strafe, respectively, but what I heard was that I should rebind A and D to spells, giving myself an additional 4 keybinds (A, D shift+A, shift+D). So ever since then, I have been using QWES to move.

However, I've been thinking about it, and I feel justified in my accidental rebinding. See the evidence below (finally, a use for the customisable coloured lights on my keyboard):

This is my current keybind setup. 1234 are my most commonly used spells, with 5 being a somewhat common spell (it's a bit of a reach for me). QWES are for movement. A and D are for my next most commonly used spells. RTY are for my long cooldown spells. FG are for my rarely used, but will need to use quickly if I do need to use them spells (e.g. silence, leap of faith), ZXC are my mostly PvP long cooldown spells (WotF and trinket).

As you can see, this is where my hand would sit when using QWES for movement. I can comfortably move forward and strafe left and right, and my most commonly used keys (1234) are close, and my next most commonly pressed keys (AD) are also close.

However, when I have WASD, assuming A and D would now be Q and E, I am further away from my most commonly pressed keys (1234).

That, and the fact that playing DotA means I'm starting to get used to a resting position of QWER, so moving with QWES doesn't feel all that weird anymore. Plus - it took me weeks to get used to walking with QWES, and I only did it because Olek and MrMan5.5 kept saying it was what everyone did (or at least that's what I thought they said - but it seems that I may have misheard). I don't care how silly it looks, it's what I'm comfortable with now so I'm sticking with it!

Katarno, the Police Mage

Unrelated to today's topic, Yish linked this blog Blackboards in Porn (SFW) which I found pretty funny (but I found it a bit disturbing that two girls in those photos have the same skirt that Charmeleon suggested I buy. Is that red, plaid skirt the stock standard for porn schoolgirls?).

I was looking through screenshots for my photobook and came across the comic I drew for Katarno's police graduation ceremony (sorry for the quality, it was taken with my phone, and each panel was one photo as Kat would be viewing it on his iPhone. Also, all the jokes in the comic are WoW(WotLK) jokes).

I find it funny that bad guys in my comics always have eyepatches, because my lack of drawing skill makes that pretty much the only distinguishing characteristic in people (that and ponytails, which I usually reserve for when I draw myself). I also found it strange that in some of the pictures, Kat doesn't have a face, I don't really know the reason for that.

In the drawing for Kat creating the portal, that was my attempt to draw the undead male casting animation. Kat did it once during a Tuesday dinner, and he looked so ridiculous it stuck in my mind. I also know evocation doesn't create ammo (especially not ammo for others), but I figured that was the real-life equivalent of reloading. Before you argue that it should have been "Improved Counterspell", Kat is arcane, so it probably is. But even if it wasn't, I imagine his wife talking that much is a channeled spell called Mesmerize (somewhat similar to the succubus' Seduction), it has a 4 hour channel time, and no mana cost. If you are under the effect, and you break the channel, you die instantly (anyone else breaking it is OK, but she will immediately attempt to cast it on whoever tries to break it, unless she is crowd controlled).

The policeman that looks like he's getting ready to be anal raped is supposed to be someone crouching behind a box (seriously, are there stick figure drawing classes I can take?!). If you are wondering why Kat looks so happy even though he lost his puppy, it's because he's a really cheerful guy.

Whose Fault Is It Anyway?

It has been a question that comes up every single time I go back to playing WoW. When someone dies in a dungeon, whose fault is it? So in typically MMOs, you have the holy trinity of tank, healer and DPS (which stands for Damage Per Second, which somehow means a damage dealer, but I guess DD was taken for things like double damage).

The tank's job is to take the damage, usually this involves knowing fights in order to position bosses to reduce party damage. The healer's job is to keep everybody alive. This usually involves casting healing spells, or buffs to reduce damage - though priests get a skill at level 85 which pulls someone towards them, which can help save someone from being stomped on, or something like that (I haven't hit 85 yet, so I don't really know how well it fits into my current toolkit). DPS are required to do lots of damage, and occasionally they will have a skill that lets them disable a monster, which they might also need to use.

During the week or so after the release of Cataclysm, the general consensus was that things were much harder than Wrath of the Faceroll. Things like crowd control are actually important, at least in heroics, and everyone has to pull their weight or the group will probably wipe. I've found that healing is actually a challenge now, and there have been a few times where I've felt like I've done everything I can, and it's still not enough. I took a bit of a break for a while, in order to farm up better gear, and things seem not so dire at the moment (although there was a hotfix that buffed priests not too long ago - I'm not sure what it did, but healing seems much, much easier now. It was kinda crazy, there was a poll on MMO champion about which healers people preferred. At the time I checked, 82% of people preferred paladins, and I forget the distribution between druid and shaman, but only a measly 3% of people preferred priest).

Previously in WoW, when a group wiped, unless it was really obvious someone else had done something absurdly stupid, the blame typically went towards the healer. If you send a letter, and find out later that it never arrived, it makes sense to assume something is wrong with the postal system. It would never occur to you that perhaps you addressed it incorrectly, or you might have completely forgotten to mail it in the first place, as these are usually unlikely events, and who blames themselves anyway?

As I mentioned, one of the big changes in Cata is that it's not just the healer's responsibility to keep everyone alive. As Olek puts it, the most important thing to learn in this expansion is it "stay out of the hurty shit". If you don't move out of the lava, you will die. If you don't keep adds crowd controlled, and the healer can't keep up with the damage, you will die. If you don't move away from the falling rocks, you will die (*cough, cough*).

Not too long ago, I came across this situation in a dungeon.

(If you don't understand what's going on: the warrior (brown - Nag) is telling the druid (orange - Dat) to focus on the mob marked with skull. The druid is saying he did, but the warrior said he was using an area of effect skill which was causing the druid to gain threat on other targets, and so they'd go and beat on the druid and he'd die. The druid said that what he was doing was fine, and if the warrior was any good, he would be able to hold aggro even with hurricane.)

Add to this, later I get a message from the warrior:

Thinking back towards the roles I described earlier, is the tank at fault for not being able to hold aggro over the druid's pitiful hurricane damage (I don't actually know how much damage he was doing) so that the mobs would attack him instead of the rest of the party? He purposely assigned an attack target so that he could build up enough aggro on that target not to have to worry that it would change targets. Holding a lot of aggro on multiple targets at once can be difficult, because while you are trying to build aggro on another, the DPS classes are unleashing everything they have on the marked target, so unless your threat can keep up, someone is going to get their face smashed in. At the same time, the tank can't completely ignore the other targets, as healing causes aggro on all mobs, so if the tank doesn't get at least some aggro on the others, eventually they're going to decide to beat down on the healer.

Is the druid at fault for.... doing too much damage? So as a DPS class, his job is essentially to deal damage, and lots of it. Also, they should crowd control where possible to ease the stress on the healer (druid wasn't able to do anything that pull). If he doesn't do enough damage, eventually the healer will run out of mana (it happens now, it's so great!), the tank will run out of health, and you'll all die (unless you're pro like Rob).

Am I at fault for letting the druid live? That doesn't seem to make sense, as it's my job to keep people alive, so letting them die seems counter-intuitive. I had a discussion with Julian ages ago about how to spot a good healer. DPS have damage meters, but using healing meters to judge skill doesn't quite work. I can make my way to the top of the healing meters spamming heals on random people all fight, but if half the raid is dead at the end, does that make me a good healer?

Knowing your class well is something that makes someone a good player in general, and I have read a lot about priests in Cata, and one of the things that crops up the most is holy priests are the best (unlike the other healing classes, priests have two healing specialisations - discipline and holy). I am a huge disc supporter. Other than a brief period in WotLK when I had disc for PvP and holy for PvE, I have always been disc for PvE (I was 31/30/0 in TBC, and that meant I was "hybrid", but I count that as disc as I had one point more in disc than holy!) and although the reason behind that might not be the greatest, it's something I want to stick with. According to the number crunchers, this is the less-than-ideal path.

This makes me worry that I might not be carrying my weight. Maybe I'm just feeling this way because after wiping on a boss many, many times, they managed to kill him after I was kicked from the group. MrMan5.5 says that it wasn't my fault, but if you look at the common element in all the failures that wasn't present in the success, arrow points to me (and all the random players who left as they didn't have the patience to keep trying, but it seems like they were just replaced with more of the same people).

The other pandemic that is spreading is the trigger happy vote-kickers. It seems that rather than give someone a chance to learn, they'd rather kick them from the party and hope to get someone new who is good. I understand that it is a waste of time explaining to someone how something works and possibly dying because they're still learning the encounter, but everyone was in that boat not too long ago, and someone was kind enough to explain it to them, so why don't they do the same to others?

I've read some stories about people who have waited in queue for over 40 minutes, only to get kicked the moment they join without any explanation (which is another problem, when you kick someone, you are required to give a reason, yet the person who gets kicked never finds out the reason - although the reason can be "asdf" and they'll still get kicked if the vote is passed). That is why I'm really reluctant to kick someone, especially a DPS class who has another long wait ahead of them.

I'm not sure if I'm doing the right thing though. It's unfair to the rest of the party to die over and over just because I'm happy to be patient and teach someone new. As I said, I'd be happy to pay for people to repair their armour, but you can't trade gold across realms (I did offer to give the DK the loot I won so that he could sell it for gold, but he ignored me). But it's not just gold, it's also a waste of their time. That being said, the vote kick system would still allow the person to be kicked even if I voted no, assuming everyone else voted yes. It also punishes people for votekicking people too often, which is why the DK had to ask me to do it, as I'm guessing he has tried to kick too many people.


QUICK WoW DUNGEON QUEUE EXPLANATION
There are many different dungeons in WoW, and can be completed in parties of five people. Previously, you had to find the other party members yourself, but now you can just pick a dungeon (or a random) and tick the roles you can fulfill (tank/damage/healer) and wait in queue. The system matches people based on roles, puts you together in a party, and off you go! There is a shortage of tanks and healers compared to DPS, so they typically have short wait times, with the average DPS wait time sometimes getting to over an hour (compared to the instant - 1 min wait times for tanks and healers). =/

The good/bad thing about it is that it can match you with people from other servers, so you can be a complete asshole to everyone else and probably never see them again!

Beep, Beep

Big event happened in my life! I was driving Graham home, this woman was crossing the road really slowly. I was ages away from her when I first saw and by the time I reached her, she was only halfway across the road. Since there was plenty of time to stop, I stopped next to her, and she didn't even notice, just continued at her snail pace across the road. Graham said I should beep her, and I did! It was the first time I had ever beeped someone on purpose since I got my license.The only two other times I have beeped my horn was when I accidentally sat on the steering wheel while trying to reach something in the back.

I think it says something about my personality. When people swerve into my lane, or do stupid things on the road, I would much rather just get out of their way than honk my horn and potentially get into a fight with them. Anyway, MrMan5.5 was saying it wasn't something worth celebrating, but I think it is.

Also, to Peki, I am not into beastiality!

(while in Arathi)

(this is what it was about)

More Stats

Doing all of this in Excel makes me realise how much I miss SPSS. Thought about installing R, which I might end up doing next time I do stats related stuff and have the bandwidth.

WoW players and sexual activity

As many people have said, losing your virginity isn't the same as being sexually active. As Graham put it, you only have to lose it once to get kicked out of the V-Club, so as people get older, they are more and more likely to have lost it. If this were a longitudinal study, I would expect everyone to have lost it eventually. So with the same 38 people, here are the stats with sexual activity instead.

22 WoW players, 9 of which are currently sexually active.
16 non-WoW players, 6 of which are currently sexually active.

Chi-Squared test showed no significant difference (X^2 = 0.047, p > .05).

Hardcore vs single/multiplayer

Seeing as I didn't make that part of my survey compulsory, I did have one missing value, which I've decided to just delete. I've had a few comments about this question, the most prominent being that certain people prefer different types of games depending on the mood they are in. I'm not too sure how I would change that if I were to run the survey again, but keep that in mind when you read the results.

So we had 37 results.
24 defined themselves has hardcore gamers, 5 of which preferred single-player, and 19 of which preferred multi-player.
13 defined themselves as not hardcore gamers, 6 of which preferred single-player, and 7 of which preferred multi-player.

Chi-squared test showed no significant difference between the two (X^2=2.6, p > .05).

World of CasualCraft, the Follow-Up

I've closed the poll now, and have started calculating some results. I had a total of 38 people respond to my survey. I didn't take any demographic data, which I probably should have, but it is too late now.

Quick note about my survey. Yes, I was only looking at whether being a WoW player affects whether you are a virgin, but I also asked a few other questions because it felt weird to just outright ask whether someone is a virgin or not. I think I am going to try to look at what some of that other data says, but I just have to work out how I'm going to do that first!

So the first part, is there a relationship between WoW and virginity?

Number of WoW players (this includes ex-WoW players, as well as current): 22
WoW + Virgin: 10
% virgins: 45%

Number of non-WoW players: 16
Non-WoW + Virgin: 7
% virgins: 44%

I guess I wasn't all that good at guessing after all. =(

I ran a Chi-squared test and found that the results show there isn't a significant difference (X^2 = 0.14, p > .05) between WoW players and non-WoW players and virginity.

Interestingly, if you look within the WoW players, dividing between current and ex-WoW players, you get a different result.

Current WoW players: 7
# Virgins: 1
% virgins: 14%

Ex-WoW players: 15
# Virgins: 9
% virgins 60%

Chi-squared test shows that this is a significant difference (X^2 = 4.04, p < .05)! Does that mean that playing WoW and then stopping means you're less likely to lose your virginity? I did get data on whether players are currently sexually active, so that will come in a further post!

[EDIT] Eric points out that this more likely means that people who have lost their virginity are less likely to quit WoW, rather than what I said - which makes much more sense!

I guess the biggest problem is the whole time factor, that I didn't include in my survey - ie. whether it was lost before or after playing WoW. But it still goes with my personality theory, maybe people who are WoW-quitters (!) have a certain type of personality. If I was to continue with my World of CasualCraft assertion, vanilla WoW, and perhaps BC were far more hardcore than WotLK is, and so hardcore players would have quit long ago.

The other things I want to look at:

-whether hardcore players tend to prefer single-player or multi-player games
-whether hardcore players tend to prefer certain genres
-whether WoW playing and current sexual activity are related
-whether it's not just WoW, but MMOs in general

Gobble Gobble

There's an achievement in WoW during the Pilgrim's Bounty (Thanksgiving) holiday that involves killing 40 turkeys within 30s of each other. It can be frustrating to try when the area is populated by other people trying to do the same achievement. You can be so close to a string of 40 kills when someone ninjas a turkey and there are no other turkeys within attack distance from where you are, so you have to start over again.

I figured the best time to farm the achievement would be later in the week, as the eager beavers will have finished with it, and you'd get in just before the people who suddenly realised the holiday would be over soon and wanted to quickly farm it before it ended. Then Brookie got it and told me Tirisfal was empty, so I ported over and tried my luck. HE LIED. There were so many other people farming at the same time I got the chain up to the 20s a few times before losing my turkey and starting over.

While I was grinding turkeys, I was thinking about how if you have a short chain (1-20 kills), are you're better off letting someone else finish their chain, and losing yours? If you do, that's one less person who is going to compete with you for turkeys. I had this idea that if two people came across a turkey, they could both say how long their chain was, and the person with the longest chain could have the kill. Or they could both play rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock and the winner would kill.

Though I imagine if you went by the longest chain gets the kill method, it would be really hard to get a long chain in the first place, because if you have to keep starting over, you're likely to come across people with longer chains than you, forcing you to start over. There isn't even time for the other two methods, as precious seconds will tick away while you sort out who should get the kill.

I wonder if all the people who threatened to quit WoW over this achievement, and other similar ones, actually did quit, would they put a serious dent in Blizzard/Activision's pocket?

World of CasualCraft, Part 2

So it seems I wasn't entirely clear about what I was looking for in my last post. Although I wanted to answer chaoticgood's statement about my WoW friends being more sexually active than your typical nerd, I wanted to go about it in a different way. What I wanted to show was that the kind of person who would play WoW is possibly more likely to be the kind of person who enjoys being in a social setting, and meeting new people. I know that isn't true about everyone (I know someone who played WoW and suffers from social anxiety), but I think compared to games such as Counter-Strike or Starcraft, World of Warcraft is more likely to attract a more social-minded audience.

Again, I need to add more disclaimers, correlation is by no means causation (so going out and buying WoW isn't going to get you laid!), my sample is biased, I am only looking at whether someone has lost their virginity rather than whether they are currently sexually active (which does make a difference).

So for anyone that missed it, since it kinda got eaten when I tried to post it, my "results" were:

Total WoW-friends: 63
Total assumed to have had sex: 45
% of total: 71.4%

Total non-WoW-friends: 75
Total assumed to have had sex: 34
% of total: 45.3%

I would do t-tests and stuff, but I'm kinda lazy, you can see the difference is quite large. I'd also like to emphasize that the sample was of gamers, so this doesn't indicate that non-gamers are less likely to have had sex than WoW players (which everyone seems to assume is untrue, I wonder if anyone has done a study on that...)! So going with these results, what are some of the reasons that could explain this?

As chaoticgood mentioned in a comment, WoW tends to be more of a social game, and this may attract more social-minded players. So rather than a game that prompts a "LOL, n00b, I pwned you" attitude, WoW and other MMOs tend to be a game where you build up a character and join a community to accomplish goals. While it's not impossible, it is quite difficult (and for most of your journey it will be lonely) to do a lot of the things in the game without having other people.

I read somewhere that WoW has a higher female:male ratio than most games, so perhaps it has a higher pick-up potential. I think one of the factors that caused a bias is that WoW is one of the games you can bring your partner to. MrMan5.5 and I have tried playing a few games together, but WoW seems to be the best game that we can actually play together. When we try to play TF2 together, we usually get separated, or one of us gets auto-balanced to the other team. When we played DotA/HoN together, it seemed like we spent more time in different lanes because of our different playstyles.

The reason for the title of this post though, is that WoW seems to be a really casual game now. It took me hours of practice before I managed to even make it to gold rank in Starcraft 2, and probably years of practice before I was half-decent at DotA/HoN. It seems that WoW doesn't have that great a skill curve. Sure, if you want to be gladiator, you need to be incredibly skilled, but to do normal stuff, it doesn't seem that way anymore. In vanilla WoW, healing seemed so much harder, because mana management was actually an issue. Now I heal without even looking at my mana bar. I joined Chris and Brookiee's ICC group one night, and they had managed to get to Lich King, the last boss. The warlock in the group was a complete moron, and yet he managed to get to the last boss of what is currently the hardest instance in the game.

It seems that in a game like WoW, where you can be carried by gear, and gear drops from trees, it attracts more of a casual playerbase. So people who prefer doing things on weekends that don't involve sitting in front of the computer may prefer playing a game that you can play for a few hours a week. I know that it seems weird for an MMO to be a casual game, but at the moment, you can play a little and still do reasonably well. Gone are the days of having to farm a lot each day in order to keep up.

Thoughts? Suggestions for more research? I would like to do a study on gamers and sexual activity, but I don't think anyone would answer me, because it's a bit of a dodgy question!

World of CasualCraft

Also, on a more personal level, given your average friend is a computer nerd who has had rare, if any contact with anyone other than his left and right hands (this of course is a broad generalisation, and I don’t wish to offend (I put myself in this category). That said, it does seem that you have a number of sexually active WoW friends).
-chaoticgood, on my post Advice Anna

I was thinking, why does it seem like my WoW playing friends seem more sexually active than the rest of my gaming friends? Now that Facebook doesn't seem to have any of those friend wheel apps anymore, I can't make any pretty graphs, but just off the top of my head, I would say that a larger percentage of my WoW friends have been in a serious (and let's just assume that implies sexual) relationship than my friends who play games other than WoW. I would like to be able to do a survey on this, but I don't know how open people are going to be if I ask them if they're virgins or not. >_<

Actually, before I start this, maybe I'll see if I can make some graphs. Disclaimer first: this is a small sample size, and biased, as they are all my friends, which means they all might have some quality that makes them want to be friends with me or something, so keep that in mind! I hypothesize that a higher percentage of my WoW playing friends will have had sex than my non-WoW playing friends.

I'm going to go through my Facebook friends, and list all the people that I know play games and group them into WoW players (which is any WoW player, regardless if they play any other games, and regardless of whether they still play or not), and non-WoW players (possibly sub-grouping them into smaller categories if there are enough of them). Then I'm going to take a guess at whether they have had sex or not based on what I know of them. If I don't actually happen to know, then I'm just going to assume based on whether they have been in a relationship or not, and my general impression of them.

OK, I have to leave in a second, so no time to make graphs. Just a quick summary of the people on my list:

Total WoW-friends: 63
Total assumed to have had sex: 45
% of total: 71.4%

Total non-WoW-friends: 75
Total assumed to have had sex: 34
% of total: 45.3%

Have to leave now, don't really have time to write this out coherently in an argument, but this is the problem Mars found in my "study". Will discuss later!

Marstar says (4:41 PM):
so why do you want to survey who's not a virgin out of your WoW friends?
Fodder says (4:41 PM):
i just want to know
if my wow friends are more likely to not be virgins than my non wow friends
Marstar says (4:42 PM):
i think you'll find the numbers comparable
Fodder says (4:42 PM):
so you think playing wow doesn't make a difference?
Marstar says (4:42 PM):
shouldnt make any difference IMO
Fodder says (4:43 PM):
ah, i thought it would be less likely
but we'll see :)
Marstar says (4:44 PM):
there is no reason for it to be less likely ... losing your virginity is a once off event
and more than likely most of your friends (wow or not) would have lost it b4 they played wow
Fodder says (4:44 PM):
it's not about when they did
but more about the kind of person who would be drawn to that particular game
Marstar says (4:45 PM):
i.e. at the time they lost it ... WoW wasnt a factor
Fodder says (4:45 PM):
i think wow is somewhat of a less hardcore gamer game
than other games such as CS
so if you are a wow player
you are the kind of person who would play wow
it doesn't really matter when you started playing
the fact that you chose to play it defines the kind of person you are
to some degree
Marstar says (4:45 PM):
But you are seeing if WoW gamers are more or less virgins to non-wow gamers
Marstar says (4:47 PM):
youre survey won't show that though
Fodder says (4:47 PM):
why not?
Marstar says (4:47 PM):
cause most of the people who arnt virgins , but play WoW ... lost it b4 WoW
Marstar says (4:48 PM):
e.g. I lost mine a good 15 yrs ago
I then played wow
so who is to know ... if i would have remained a virgin if i played WoW b4 i lost it
Fodder says (4:49 PM):
well, there is the theory that someone's underlying personality will not change a great deal over the course of their life
Marstar says (4:49 PM):
what does personality have to do with Virginity? :P
sooner or later every1 loses it
Fodder says (4:49 PM):
a lot!
that is true
but with the exception of you :P
most of the people in my survey are my age
give or take a few years
Fodder says (4:50 PM):
actually, you're not the oldest
@_@
but either way
Marstar says (4:50 PM):
haha
Fodder says (4:50 PM):
to have lost it before getting married
requires a certain type of personality
and i think that playing wow might be an indicator of a certain type of personality
Marstar says (4:50 PM):
actually to keep it until marraige requires a certain personality these days :P
Fodder says (4:51 PM):
for instance, most CS players tend to have a different personality to most WoW players
it's just something i want to test :)
Marstar says (4:51 PM):
I don't see your survey as statistically significant though :P
Fodder says (4:51 PM):
of course it's not
hahaha
Fodder says (4:52 PM):
first of all, it is inherently biased
Marstar says (4:52 PM):
as in i dont see WoW and Virginity correlating at all
Marstar says (4:53 PM):
your survey ersult will just be : "i have more virgin friends who do./dont play WOW"
Marstar says (4:54 PM):
more than likely it'll be your personality that is being tested :P

My Life is Complete

Phew. I was nearly 1000 points behind him, but I finally caught up!

Guy In Real Life

I am told that the girlfriend of one of my ex-WoW-guildies (let's call him PW for now) wants to meet me. It was something completely out of the blue, PW and I have barely spoken since I quit. Not that I mind meeting new people, and it's always nice to meet the partners of my friends, but usually that happens as a consequence of something else, like when we get together as a group and they bring their partner along. Not something that's pre-arranged for the single purpose of introducing each other. Stranger yet, why would she want to meet me? We don't live near each other, and are extremely unlikely to bump into each other or hang out together - I don't even think we have anything in common.

Then I found out the reason. I had commented on one of PW's Facebook statuses, and she found out I was one of his female WoW friends, and all of a sudden she wanted to meet me. Well, to be fair, of all of PW's female WoW friends, I believe he has slept with probably half of them (or wanted to), so maybe she just wanted to check if I was a threat? She just wants to meet me to see if I look like my level 26 blood elf priest, that's OK, right?

Wait, what? That's not OK! First of all, my main is an undead priest (and I wear shoes - actually, I lie, my UD priest doesn't seem to wear shoes either)! Secondly, what did I even do? Why am I travelling to the other side of the city to ease someone else's insecurity? I'm half tempted to do a QC and "like" everything on his Facebook, as well as commenting with love hearts or something to everything that he says. But I'm too lazy.

I just know that if I meet up with her, I'm going to overanalyse everything I say and do and end up stressing myself out. T_T

Will the Real Anna Fodder Please Stand Up?

I was talking to MrMan5.5 not long ago about how I'm happy to write personal things here, but there are some details that I'll leave out - most notably, my full name. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest reason for me is that I don't want to chance meeting somebody who started reading my blog before they met me (I know it seems unlikely, but it has happened to someone I know, so it's not impossible - although she has more of an e-presence than I do). As does probably anyone who spends a large amount of time online, I feel like my online persona is different from my "real life" persona. Sure, I'm the same person in both cases, but there are things that I feel more comfortable talking about online than I do IRL, and vice versa, and so logically, a person's perception of me would differ depending on their main form of interaction with me.

When I found out Blizzard was going to link RealIDs (a Blizzard-wide user ID) with real first names and last names on Blizzard forums, I was suprised by their decision. They blame trolls for this decision, but I love how they add that it will "connect the Blizzard community in ways they haven’t been connected before" as though it's a positive thing. The only "connection" that I can see coming out of this is that it'll make it easier for guys to pick out which players are female in real life (yes, I naively signed up with my real name).

Another problem I can think of is that every time I meet someone new who I find out is a gamer, I will do an internal memory scan to see if I've played with that person before (I know it says forum link, but as someone pointed out in the comments, there are WoW addons that draw data from the armory, so I wouldn't be surprised if someone wrote one to scan the forum for real names. There are even tons of sites like WoW Census that store heaps of information about WoW characters, so it wouldn't be too hard to add real name to the list).

"Oh, are you that John Mitchell that has an 85 rogue on Barthilas?"
"Have we played together before?"
"Yeah.... you were asking my priest for water. I didn't even know rogues had mana."
"Er... umm. Hi."

I don't even see why you'd need to know someone's real name to "make a connection". I have lots of WoW friends who I still call by their WoW names. Partly because it's easier, as quite a few of them are named John, but also because it's easier for me to keep track of them in my head. I know so many David/Daves, but only one Korsair, Mlargle or Meshugganah. Although the only downside to this is when I have to introduce them to my non-WoW friends, I always struggle to remember their real names. I could introduce them by their WoW-names, but people always look so confused as though they misheard what I said. I guess that's a reasonable assumption, but I thought it was an Aussie thing to give nicknames to people like Jozza or Macca (hi, Beans!), so what's wrong with Empathogen or Eviscerator?

What I love the most is what someone quoted out of Blizzard's code of conduct:

Quoted from the Battle.net forum code of conduct
DISTRIBUTION OF REAL-LIFE PERSONAL INFORMATION
This category includes:
Releasing any real-life information about other players or Blizzard Entertainment employees
If a player is found to have participated in such actions, he/she will:
Be permanently banned from the Battle.net forums

GG.

Most of the comments point out that it's really only the people who aren't in it to troll that are going to be affected by this, as anyone who intends to troll will have made a fake name anyway. Sigh. Why is everyone trying to turn into Facebook? Google Buzz failed hard, IMO. I'd log into my email to find a new "Buzz" only to spend ages scrolling down to find someone wrote a smiley face in reply to someone's Buzz from three weeks ago which I didn't even read because I already read it in Google Reader. Thank you, Google, how would I have lived without seeing that?

IMHO, keep the main focus of games on gaming. Or do what Steam does and have an IM-type system. How is learning someone's real name going to encourage friendship - are people going to look up people's addresses and write them letters?

The part of the arguing is between those who want to protect their privacy because of the principle of it (or because you're probably safer that way), and those who think that those who want to protect their privacy must have something to hide. It seems to me to be like that whole if you oppose the Internet filter, you must approve of child pornography argument. Just because you don't want your information revealed to all doesn't mean you have some deep dark secret to hide. I don't walk around with my mobile number tattooed on my face because I don't want random people calling me for no reason. I'm not hiding it, as such, I would just like to be selective in who gets it.

Maybe I'm just too tired to think of any good points at the moment, but really, all I can think of the idea is that it's dumb, dumb, dumb.

[EDIT] Oh, wow. Just as I finished writing all of that, I read a link from Agents Simon saying they decided to scrap the whole real name thing. Zzzzz.

Here We Go Again

I guess I'm going to be the one who starts it off, but GP, Olek and I are doing a 1 for 1 (for 1) blog thing, where if one of us blogs, the other two must also blog (within 24 hours, I'm guessing?). I don't really know the reason behind it, but I guess it's reason enough to end the blog drought.

Since it has dominated most of my life for the past few months, I guess this blog is going to be a bit WoW related, but I think people who don't play can still comment. Just need to set the context though, so bear with me!

Some background first. With the most recent patch (3.3), Blizzard have introduced a new emblem, Frost Emblems, that you can get from doing random heroic dugeons and killing raid bosses from the newest raid Icecrown Citadel. Raids and heroics get 'locked', so that once you've done one, you can't do another until the locks reset. For heroics it's everyday at 3am, for raids it's every Tuesday (not sure what time, I should really find out). So you're limited in the number of Frost Emblems you can get each week due to the locks. In addition, you can do the weekly raid quest, which also awards Frost Emblems. Players can exchange emblems for items used for end-game crafting, recipes or new armour.

The structure of the locks is such that once you kill a boss in a raid (or heroic dungeon), you become locked into that particular instance, along with the other members of your raid. For instance, if I joined a raid and killed the first boss in Ulduar, and left the raid, if I went back into Ulduar that week, the first boss would be dead for me. However, if Olek, assuming he wasn't in the raid with me, went into Ulduar, he'd be in his own 'instance' of it, and the first boss would be alive for him. Although, there are two different raids, 10-man and 25-man raids. The instance is similar in both raids, but 25-man raids can be harder as the bosses do more damage (though you have more people to carry you if you suck). So if I did Ulduar10 and killed the first boss, and then joined an Ulduar25 raid, the first boss would still be alive as they're considered different instances.

So this week, the weekly raid quest was to kill the second boss in Ulduar. With all the new gear that people have access to from the new patch, players tend to be really overgeared for instances now, and so Olek and I joined an Ulduar25 raid for the weekly, which should have been a cakewalk. The second boss is really just a matter of not standing in the fire, and not standing next to guys who whirlwind, which was apparently too much for a majority of the raid, and so we wiped. So the raid made the corpse run back to the boss, and we prepared to start a second attempt when we realised someone was still dead. A few ressurection spells later (which he didn't accept), he got the AFK tag.

A few raid members were suggesting we kick him from the raid. So taking into account a few things, do you think it would be right to kick him?

1) Everyone was so overgeared, he was just a DPS paladin, it's not like he was playing a major role. We could have easily done it without him.

2) If we kicked him, and he was locked out of Ulduar10, then he'd miss the chance to do the weekly raid.

3) In the first attempt, he was the first to die from a whirlwind, even though it was mentioned repeatedly which adds were to be avoided by melee DPS (of which he was one) because of their whirlwind attack.

And in retrospect 4) On our second attempt, which was successful, he died from the whirldwind again not long into the fight.


One one hand, I think it would have been mean to kick him, for the first two reasons.

On the other hand, I believe that if you're going to join a raid, you should have an idea of what's going on. You have a responsibility to the other raid members to not do stupid things, and even if you don't know the fight, you should at least listen to what other people are telling you. By letting him get Frost Emblems, he would get access to higher level gear, and for some reason, gearscore (a number indicating the quality/rating of your gear) seems to be intertwined with skill level.

While the whole gearscore/skill level thing may have been valid previously, I don't think it's a useful indicator right now due to the flux of high level gear introduced by 3.3. Most people can get a gearscore of 4800 simply from farming random dungeons, and so the new cut-off gearscore for 'skilled' people seems to be 5200, which is really overkill for things like Ulduar considering people were doing it with less than 4800 gearscore before 3.3. I've been in parties with people who have 5600+ gearscore who have been complete morons and people with 4000 gearscore who have been amazing. The problem is, with people being so overgeared, other players can get carried and get 4800 gearscore not long after hitting level 80, without struggling through dungeons and raids and really getting to know how to play their character.

Which brings me to my next gripe. Players and HoN and PSR. PSR (pub skill rating) is a bit like chess ratings in that you gain and lose points when you win or lose, and how much you can gain or lose depends on the PSRs of the other players. Unlike DotA, HoN stores the number of your wins, losses, kills, deaths, assists, and various other stats which leads to stat retards who only care about their stats/PSR. So you get people who like to concede a game when they think their team can't win, and if their team disagrees, they'll sit at the fountain in base so that at least they won't add more deaths to their profile. You get people who refuse to initiate fights even though their hero is best suited for it, because they don't want to die. You get people who are so concerned about stealing kills that they're not really helping the team fight (like a scout does nothing but ult someone who is going to die anyway, and now we've lost the chance to slow someone else).

Weirdest of all I think are the people who don't want to remake games after someone on the other team has disconnected in the first few minutes because they want the "free PSR". I think that's so stupid because highest PSR just means you'll end up playing other players with high PSR, and if you really aren't skilled enough to get to that level on your own, you're just going to lose to those players and drop back down to a lower PSR. So I really see no point in PSR inflation, unless you like to take screenshots and brag about it.

What I do like about HoN is the no-leaver option. If you quit or disconnect from a game, it gets added to your profile, and since the game can't tell if you legitimately disconnected or your PP'd to avoid a loss, it counts them all as leaves, but gives you a leeway of being able to leave 9% of your games before you are flagged a leaver. If you become a leaver, you can't join games which have the no-leaver option. And that brings me to my last gripe of the night, people who ask their teammates to kick them from a losing game because they don't want to get a loss, but they don't want to be labelled a leaver. If you want to leave a game before it's over for that reason, you're a leaver. End of story. Go play with other people who like to do that and see how it feels to be left in a 3v5 game. Don't ask to be kicked so you won't marr your pristine profile, because it's a lie. Just because the Tempest doesn't know how to use his ult doesn't mean the game is over. Give him suggestions on items, explain his spells to him. I'm pretty sure nobody is born knowing how to play DotA/HoN so there are people who have had to do the same for you when you were a noob, so it's only fair that you do the same for others in return.

So QC, if all of my blog posts from now on are going to be gripes about games, do you really want me to post everyday? =P