autographedcat

In 1994, Blizzard Entertainment came out with a real-time strategy computer game called "Warcraft: Orcs & Humans". It was well received in the gaming community, but I paid it very little notice personally.

One year later, a sequel was released, coming out just as I entered a six month period of unemployment. I ended up spending a lot of time playing Warcraft II, which was an awesome game.

By the time World of Warcraft in 2005, an MMO based on the same world as the RTS game, I was already deeply engaged with a game called City of Heroes. Some of my friends left CoH to play WoW, but I was still having a great time where I was, so I didn't pay it much mind. In fact, I kinda resented it for stealing away my friends from the game I was playing. My dismissing it didn't seem to cause it any lasting harm, though, and it grew like gangbusters.

Around the time that the first expansion for World of Warcraft came out, I was growing bored with City of Heroes/Villains. You can only go beat up the same bad guys in the same warehouse so many times before it starts to acquire a sense of sameness. So I asked eloren what server she and her hubby were playing on, bought the trial CD, and rolled a character.

I had no idea that this would change my life.

I played the game mostly solo, sometimes asking eloren to help me with difficult things or quests that required groups. I didn't really know anyone who was playing; well, that's not strictly true - I knew lots of people who were playing, and not one of them played on the same server as me or each other. I joined Jon and Aileen's guild, and got to know a few of the people there vaguely, but I was mostly just enjoying the game as a solo player. Then drama happened, as it so often does in guilds, and they broke up. A small group of friends went looking for a new guild to join, and ended up with a group called The Grim Covenant. They seemed nice enough, and I was invited to join them as well, even though I was still far below max-level.

This was a transformation experience. As I reached level 70 (the cap at the time) and started participating in group activities, I starting getting to know people. I began to feel like I belonged in the group. I began to form real and solid friendships with people.

And then I fell in love with one of them.

It wasn't on purpose; I certainly wasn't looking for a new relationship. We had just gotten to talking, which led to more talking which led to exchanging emails...at some point she found out I was polyamorous, and started to ask me questions about it. As time went on, we were spending more and more time talking to each other, and it was obvious to me that there was something between us growing deeper.

Honestly, the details at this point are beside the point. We met in person when kitanzi and I went up to visit a group of guildies for a trip to King Richard's Fair, a trip that had been organised well in advance of these developments. During that trip, we began officially dating, although only the people who needed to know this were aware of it.

A couple of years go by. Following the failure of her marriage, she decided that, in the end, poly wasn't something she felt she could handle, and we broke up. This is probably the hardest breakup I've ever been through; neither of us really wanted to and we both still loved one another deeply, but she was in a place where she needed to figure out who she was and what she was doing with her life, and this just wasn't part of it. Her finding out that polyamory wasn't for her after all was certainly a risk I'd been aware of when I started the relationship.

(I wrote and removed a lot of detail in the last three paragraphs, deciding it was largely beside the point. If you want to know more about what this was all about, email me, and we can talk.)

That was nearly a year ago, just before Valentine's Day. I spent the next few months being pretty broken as a result, withdrawing from a lot of people in the process. Part of my withdrawing was to quietly withdraw from the WoW guild we were both part of. I was an officer and raid leader, but those were roles I'd been increasingly frustrated with, and this gave me the excuse and the permission to just let go of them. I went to another server, where I’d established a character and made some casual friends, and set back to playing the game semi-casually. Eventually, I joined up with a small group of friends to begin raiding again, though never as hardcore as before, and that's been my focus for the last 12 months.

Now there's a new expansion out, and as the new year begins I'm reflecting again on my life and how i spend my time. The truth is, I still enjoy the game quite a lot. The new expansion is full of really interesting new things to explore. catalana and I still play together every week or so, working our way now through our second pair of characters since we began to play every Friday a couple of years ago. And I still have many people that are dear to me in the game, both in my old guild and in my new one, and others besides. Azeroth has become a comforting place to wile away my time.

But the thing is....time is the one thing in my life I never have enough of. And there's a lot of things that I want to do that want to compete with that time. I want to spend more time writing, both creative writing and blogging. I want to spend more time working on my musical interests. I want to catch up on some of the TV/movie watching that's been piling up. I want to just sit and read. Sometimes, I want to just sit.

Given that I'm not currently able to give up either work or sleep, I have to make some decisions about how to spend my time, and the decision I'm making right now is to take a vacation from World of Warcraft. I'm not saying I won't play it at all; I'm not giving up my nights with Erica, and it is a good way to kill an hour when you're in the mood for it. But aside from that regular session and the odd jaunt here and there, I'm going to spend a few weeks in pursuit of other hobbies, until I figure out the best way to create a balance that lets me do everything as I'd like to.

It feels very strange to step away from something that's dominated my leisure time for over four years. But ultimately, I think that right now it's best for me.

Blizzard Entertainment, makers of World of Warcraft and other games, unveils controversial new forum policies

I'm a person who has long argued that there is no privacy on the Internet,there never was any privacy on the Internet, and that pretending otherwise is a comfortable delusion people craft for themselves in order to not freak out thinking about how much of their personal information is floating around in the ether.

Having said that...Blizzard is seriously out of bounds on this one. The concern isn't just the forums. If it was, we'd all just shrug and go on with our lives; I can't remember the last time I read the official forums, much less posted to them. And as you can see, I post to Usenet with my real name and e-mail address, and have done so for 20 years, so I'm not overly concerned with people finding me .

But then, I've never had a stalker. I've never been sexually assaulted. I've never been the victim of identity theft. I've never been harassed because I'm female, or gay, or transgendered. But I know people who fall into every single one of those categories, some of them very close to me. Their concerns about protecting their identity from random strangers are real, substantial, and very much valid.

Right now, it's just the forums, but what happens when they decide to reveal your real name to people using the Armoury? Or an in-game query against your character? As much as I generally regard slippery-slope arguments as a fallacy, it does seem very clear that Blizzard has a cavalier attitude towards its users' identities, and that is troubling.

It's one thing to soapbox about the illusion of privacy on the Internet, and another thing to simply blatantly ignore the importance of the illusion and flagrantly expose your users' information. There may be only the thinnest line between you and the world, but that thin line matters; it's part of the social contract that allows the Internet to function.

Bad move, Blizzard. Very, very bad move.

More reading on this that I liked:

• P.Z. Myers: The interesting experiment is already getting interesting
  
• Alisia @ Hellmode.com: Why Real ID is a Really Bad Idea

When writing about topical things, there is always a danger of your work being "overtaken by events", which is to say made obsolete by the world changing over the course of time. I wrote this months and months ago, when it was more topical than nostalgic.

But, as we take our first exploratory steps into Naxxramas, high above the snowy valleys of Northrend, let's remember those heady days when the place to be was Deadwind Pass.

( Nothing but ghosts, nothing that's real... )

I had a relatively relaxing weekend, which is good because that was just the sort of weekend I wanted.

Friday night, catalana and I met up for our usual night of WoW questing. We spent a good deal of time killing giants and water elementals in Feralas -- the giants were dutifully dropping stuff for us, and the water elementals not so much, so we dropped that quest and went to collect Yeti hides instead. On the way to the yeti cave, catalana spotted a sprite darter and said "Those are so pretty! I wish you could get a non-combat pet version of one of those!" I whispered one of my friends who is a rabid non-combat pet collector and asked if there was one. It turns out, there is! It just involves doing a very long quest chain that starts with an NPC hidden in a spot that one would be fairly unlikely to notice. We dropped our plans for mega XP and decided to chase this chain down instead. It mostly involved razing a village of Tauren and freeing a bunch of the little dragons, then flying all the way to Darnassus to turn in the quest, then flying all the way back to Feralas to pick up the second part of the chain, then down to Shimmering Flats, and then The Hinterlands. Those of you familiar with the geography of Azeroth will note that we earned our frequent flyer miles on this one! It was late when we finally wrapped up for the night, but we were both the proud new parents of tiny little faerie dragons!

I split most of Saturday between WoW and Warhammer Online. WH Online is a new MMO that just came out, and a large number of my guildies are playing it, so I figured I'd at least see what the fuss was about. I'm really horribly underwhelmed by it, unfortunately. I'll keep dabbling with it, but as soon as Wrath of the Lich King comes out, I expect it to start gathering dust. I'll go on more about my impressions of the game in another post.

Currently exciting in WoW land is Brewfest! World of Warcraft has a number of little holiday festival events through the year, and Brewfest is essentially the dwarven (and Orcish) Okotberfest. There's a fair, and kegs of beer, and ram races, and a cool boss mob to go and kill for shiny trinkets. We spent a good deal of time on Saturday and Sunday repeatedly running the special boss -- hes' not hard to kill, but you can only run the event once per person, so even swapping people in and out of the party, there's a limit to how many times a day you can get his loot. But it's fun to do stuff as a guild again.

Sunday night, my darling sweetmusic_27 and her old roommate Patty dropped in on their way down to Walt Disney World! This made me quite happy as I have not seen my darling Amy since January, and there was much cuddling to be had. We went out to Famous Dave's for a Giant Helping of Protein, then came home and watched a Jeff Dunham DVD. A good time having been had by all, we went to bed at a reasonable hour, as kitanzi and I had to be at work and Patty and Amy had a long drive to Orlando ahead of them. But it was fantastic to get to meet Patty, and of course I'm always happy to see Amy. (We'll get to see them both again in a week or so, when they're on their way back north. We made sure they'd have to stop...we loaned them graphic novels! *grin*)

Oddest response a girl has ever given me to an overture of affection, ever:

"Well, if you were more like a scorpid..."

ETA: Perhaps its just that kind of day. Someone I'm actually dating just said to me: "If I were an alien wasp, I would totally use your flesh to nurture my young." Which is really very sweet, when you think about it.

Weekend started out lousy, got better, then got much worse.

Friday night, WoW date with catalana was scuttled by Internet troubles. Spent some time with Comcast on the phone, then they were going to send out a technician on Sunday. Bah. Borrowed a cup of wireless from a neighbor, which was good enough to surf, but not to do anything that required long sustained connections like WoW or ssh.

Saturday, went to the library book sale, and scored a lot of fun books (including a 1974 "Encyclopedia of Love and Sex" that should be worth at least a few giggles) and an eclectic stack of CDs. From there, got a call from Comcast that they'd found and fixed the Internet problem (which was a neighborhood outage and not specific to my apartment. Went to a housewarming party a friend was having, where we gathered quite a few more books from a recent warehouse clearing.

During the party, got a call from a co-worker that we had a server down and she was going to investigate it. Called various up-line people to inform them, but figured she had it under control. She checked it at various times...but was working close with the vendor support staff to try and recover.

Came home and had my online date that had been canceled the previous night. Much fun had. Then...

Another call from co-worker. Things still going badly, needing me to come pick up for her, as she's been on this for over fourteen hours and is getting cross-eyed. I ended up working 32 of the next 48 hours.

So the bookends of the weekend weren't very good, but the middle was lovely.

Given that I want to post more often (just to be in the habit) and I spend a fair emount of my time these days playing World of Warcraft, I'm considering adding posts about things happening to and around me in-game to my blogging schedule. I'd never bothered before because I didn't think anyone would really care, but I have enough people on my friends list who play, now someone who plays, or just find things i write interesting that it might be worth doing. So, a poll:

[Poll #1176971]

Several months ago, I finally gave in to the lure of the worlds most popular online RPG and started playing World of Warcraft. (You can find me on The Venture Co server as Pryderi.) For months, I worked my way up to level 70, meeting lots of cool people along the way, and finally, about three weeks ago, I finally reached that exalted summit. One of the interesting things about WoW is that, unlike a lot of games where you hit the level cap and wonder "OK, now what?", there is a whole complex set of challenges designed especially for the top level characters. So rather than being the end of the journey, max level is a new beginning.

Of course, it's possible for people to get all the way to max level without ever really learning to play your character effectively, which becomes painfully obvious to the people you end up in groups with during endgame content. I try very hard not to be one of those players, but I got the idea to write a song about the types of players everyone dreads teaming up with. This may not make sense if you don't play the game, but hopefully the meta-joke at least works outside of context.

I apologize in advance for inflicting yet another parody of this tune on the world, but it fit too perfectly.

Max Level Newbie
by Rob Wynne
TTTO: "I Am The Very Model of A Modern Major General" by Gilbert and Sullivan

I am the very model of a Warcraft Newbie 70
I've never been on raids, but I insist that I would like to be
I know the kings of Azeroth, but what they drop's a mystery
From Netherstorm to Shadowmoon, no one has ever heard of me
I'm very uninformed about the way to play my character
And if your toon is female, I will prob'ly grin and hit on her
On every pull at the worst time, I will hit tab and free the sheep
And halfway through the boss fight, i'll be in a corner fast asleep

I AFK in battlegrounds, thats how I got my purple gear
The stats don't match my build, but I still like the way that I appear
In short, you see I have no clue and everyone I know agrees
I am the very model of a Warcraft Newbie 70

I've been to Ironforge, and yet I do not know the tram exists
I pester folks on general to take me out to Tanaris
Although I've never played your class, if we team up it won't be long
Before I tell you all the things I think that you are doing wrong
Invite me to your group and i'll insist that you should summon me
Then when you do I'll ask for food and other things that I might need
Before the pull has been discussed I rush right in to start the fray
But when the fight gets out of hand I am the first to run away

I ninja loot by rolling need on every drop that's green or blue
And if you haven't kicked me yet, I'll do it on the epics too
And so, you see why everyone in Shattrath City laughs at me
I am the very model of a Warcraft Newbie 70

My warriors try tanking with no shield and a two handed sword
My priests will heal you only right up to the point that they get bored
My rouges pickpocket every mob and cause the pull to go awry
My shamans never use their totems even when you ask them why
My warlocks never look to see what's nearby when they cast a fear
My druids always go to dungeons wearing the same set of gear
My paladins cast random seals and never bring a judgment down
My hunters pets chase random mobs and during fights just run around

I run from PVP but I will gank you when your back is turned
Although I post in forums, I don't read them so Ive never learned
That while I claim that I'm the greatest player you will ever see
I am the very model of a Warcraft Newbie 70