I'm getting the WoW itch (and the blog itch) again. I haven't been playing all that much for the past month or so, in lieu of other game releases, real life business and the like. In fact, we just got around to finally running Zul'Aman tonight (one of my absolute favorite raid instances back in the day, glad it's back in the game).

Is it just me or does the 60 to 90 day mark seem to be the make or break point for most new MMORPGs? That span of time seems to be the period in which most of the converts either get bored of or burned out on the new game and start trickling back to old WoW habits. Though, if you truly do play that MMO consistently for about a month or so, that's actually not a bad value in terms of time:money. A month of solid play isn't bad for $60, considering how most games nowadays are at about 10 hours of gameplay if you are lucky, some significantly less (or more if you count multiplayer I guess).

The market is pretty saturated with fantasy MMOs to say the least. Do we really need more of them? I would absolutely love a good future themed game (with relatively fast paced action). Word is that Blizzard's next-gem MMO, "Titan" will be sci-fi themed. If there is a game that I will consider replacing my WoW habit with, it would probably be that. And honestly, Blizzard is probably the only company that's going to outdo Blizzard. That's my 2 coppers on other MMOs for the time being.

Also, on an unrelated WoW note: I am kind of a backseat tank ಠ_ಠ; Not in group of course because that's fucking rude. Most of my in-head and whisper conversations to certain people have been inane concerns about the current PuG tank, how they fail at threat generation, fail at marking, etc. Though in my defense, we really do have horrible luck with PuG tanks. Properly marking mobs and assigning targets is a lost art apparently. I should learn to tank again, it would make our queue times shorter.

I really like the shared topics concept over at Blog Azeroth. Interestingly enough, the last (and only) time I have posted one was a little over a year ago about WotLK release speculation. Anyway, I have actually been meaning to post about this one for some time. A while back, Penny Arcade posted this comic which sadly reminded me a little of my own uuuh situation. For context, here is a screenshot of my bank inventory:

It used to be worse and doesn't even include crafting materials and raid consumables, which I now keep on one of my banker mules in a slightly more organized state. I don't really even know what half of this stuff is anymore, though I have a strong inkling that most of it needs to be disenchanted or deleted. I tend to do that on an item by item basis as I run out of space. Oh, my ArkInventory rules got messed up. At some point they just need to be deleted and redone.

The guild bank (not pictured) is far worse. You see, it used to be fairly organized before a round of account hacking that went down a couple of months back. Someone with access got compromised and the bank was cleaned out. A week later, the same thing happened to a lesser extent. Thankfully everything was restored and returned, but they were all returned to my mailbox. I wasn't exactly a on the ball about keeping it organized in the first place. So that's karma I suppose.

Shared Topic Idea: Mementos - What mementos have you kept and why? This topic is asking: What items or mementos have you kept (in your toon's pack or bank) and why? Whether it be keepsakes, quest rewards, special items, random drops, whatever! - why did you decide to hang on to it? What's its significance to you?

[item]Skullflame Shield[/item]: This shield was my first epic piece of gear ever. I think. It was either this shield or the banana shoulders, I'm not sure anymore. It was a gift from a real life friend and still one of the coolest looking items in the game. The proc was decent back in the day iirc.

[item]Glimmering Mithril Insignia[/item]: This trinket was the reward for completing a fairly annoying series of blacksmithing quests. I think it required a total of about 200+ mithril bars to complete. Old world spawn rates coupled with constant node camping made this such a pain in the ass to obtain. It is a testament to time spent ore farming.

[item]Lawbringer Spaulders[/item]: I disenchanted my original banana shoulders at the beginning of the Burning Crusade in an attempt to free up bag space and regretted doing so. A couple of months back I went along on a Molten Core fun run and reacquired them. Alas, all is well in the world once more.

[item]Commendation of Kael'thas[/item]: I wanted this trinket so bad in the Burning Crusade and never received it. A while back a couple of guild members were on a mount farming bender and were running that 5-man quite frequently. It finally dropped.

[item]Jin'rohk, The Great Apocalypse[/item]: I leveled with this for much of WotLK. I will disenchant this word when an I get an even bigger and more awesome looking troll sword. I just, can't bring myself to dump it. Not just yet.

I have a handful of old school raid items that I am reluctant to throw out: The Onyxia attunement necklace, the Dire Maul fire resistance trinket, the Onyxia cloak, the Molten Core water and a couple of other things. A good portion of my bank though are just tabards, fun trinkets and funny hats. I mean, literally every single funny hat and funny trinket that I have ever come across during my 5+ year journey around Azeroth. I would just kill for a vanity head slot. I mean, I should be able to raid in a chef's hat without incurring the wrath of my fellow team mates.

Bonus: Here you all go, my inventory, which is somewhat messier than usual because it includes all of the stuff that I haven't DE'd yet from ICC as well as some loremaster crap. I found this post from two years back. ArkInventory makes it soo sooooo much easier to sort through junk. I keep receiving odd error messages from it though. I have a feeling that I either need to start from scratch and redo all of my rules or just look into another bag mod.

I seem to be low on potions and flasks

Now, I am not all that paranoid of a person, but the new Real ID Blizzard forum announcement just reinforces the fact that I have no plans on ever posting on the WoW forums ever again. All though I am not overly concerned about my real identity there are many WoW players who are and with good reason out of concern for their profession, their families or out of concern for internet stalking: Military personal, medical professionals, legal professionals, government workers.

First of all: I do like and have always liked the idea that all relevant characters on a single account should be visible on any forum post from that same account. Though there are a couple of good gems on the WoW forums most of that shit is either a level 1 trolling or a level 80 trolling about the level 1 not posting on their level 80. If you are that ashamed to post on your main just don't post it at all.

But that said, I definitely do not feel comfortable with having my real identity attached with my forum account. I have always made some sort of an effort to keep a division between my personal life, my professional life and my gaming life. I am already iffy on Real ID's in general but this change just steps way over the creepy line. It is unrealistic and I hope Blizzard realizes that sooner than later.

I would have very much preferred if the ID's were based off of a global avatar, linking your WoW alts and gaming accounts together while retaining anonymity in regards to your real identity. Since it is probably not all that feasible to have several million people picking unique avatars all at once with out uuuh some collusion occurring, what about binding your Real ID name to an existing gaming character? Like for example, Keiya <Proudmoore>. I wouldn't mind that being my ID across all Blizzard games. There needs to be some sort of middle ground to prevent trolling, something between what we have now and what is proposed.

Edit: Since posting this, Blizzard has responded to a couple of concerns. Article at WoW.com. Also, can we blame Facebook? I am sure that the extreme rise in Facebook usage is at least partially responsible for this decision be it direct or indirect.

Apologies to anyone whos comment was blocked or unpublished. A significant amount of comment spam was bypassing the CAPTCHA module so I swapped over to Mollom, an anti-spam service similar to Akismet. It works like a champ but unfortunately, it seems to be blocking a few legitimate comments as well. Which, kind of sucks because it is not as if a whole lot of people bother visiting or commenting on this site >_<.

Anyway, Real IDs: I was kind of hoping for something similar to Steam's community chat system. Or rather, I was kind of hoping for a chat system promoting a global Battle.net avatar linking social communities across games. For security reasons, I'm not comfortable with just doling out my battle.net login email, which is unfortunately needed in order to add Real ID friends. I don't like the fact that my real name is shown in game and on friends list, I don't like how people not on my friends list are able to view my name on friends lists and I really don't like how there is no way to control friends list visibility.

Being able to link your game identity with your real identity within the game isn't a very good idea. It's mildly creepy and breaks immersion. I know that it is not that big of a deal (hint: if you don't like it don't use it), but it makes me very reluctant to add anyone to my Real ID list who I am not directly associated with outside of the game. I assume that was Blizzard's original intention, but as mentioned above, I was really hoping for more of a community system.

But all of that aside, I have quite a few co-workers and real life friends scattered across servers. It's nice being able to contact them in game without having to roll a social alt on another server (talking out of my ass since I don't think I have ever RL whispered anyone off server yet :P). On the other hand, it is not that hard just to uuuh send someone a text message or IM outside of the game...

Oh, people who are purchasing the new iPhone upgrade: Make sure that you unbind your authenticator so that you don't get locked out of your account. The authenticator app is tied to the phone's serial number.

Regarding my posts on PuG raid leading: On second thought, disregard any of the strategy explaining advice and just tell people to heed Mortigan the Lock's rules on how to raid anything. WoW blog post of the week, I lol'd. But seriously, is it really that difficult for people to not stand in a fire?

I think I'll make more of an effort to blog regularly; Regularly being defined as once a week-ish. So without further adieu. rambling time! AKA non-cohesive bits typed past midnight. All of my daily computer and WoW playing is done in a dual screen setup. It's great for multitasking; I can raid and watch stupid YouTube videos at the same time! But lately my right monitor, which is a 4 or 5 year old 19" LCD, has been slowly taking longer and longer to warm-up. It took 5 minutes at the beginning of last week, which was annoying but tolerable because I could just go make a cup of coffee and read something in the mean time. 15 minutes was pushing it and 1 hour meant a trip to the nerd goody store.

So anyway, I replaced it with a 24". It's not really that much bigger, but I've noticed a reasonable increase in environmental visibility, which helps with the aforementioned task of avoiding circles of fire and keeping an eye on where everyone else is positioned duringcertain encounters. I remember raiding on a setup like this, viewing the game through a small box in the center of the screen. That's the cleaned up UI too, I ran with a few more items on my screen during our Molten Core phase.

Both monitors are in widescreen format, but for some reason the new monitor has a slightly different ratio. Just different enough to force me to reposition half of my user interface elements. I think it's about time to redo some of my UI anyway; Primarily upgrading to Pitbull4 and finding a replacement forFubar since the project went perma -dead (I think No Stock UI has an article on that). I guess I'll make another Keiya's UI post at some point. I'm pretty happy with my general layout though, so I doubt I will change much.