I'm horrified by RealID becoming mandatory on the official forums, where people are often referred by support — in other words, if we encounter a bug or technical problems, we're required to link our real names to an MMO in a worldwide public forum to get help. It was bad enough that RealID didn't offer the ability to have an official, perhaps difficult-to-change pseudonym, but this is over-the-top. Privacy may be more and more an illusion these days, but that doesn't mean I need to pay money to give it up.

Believe it or not, I am actually less inclined to call and speak to a representative to make this happen — whenever I've had two accounts and needed to close one of them in the past (credit cards, etc.), the phone representatives have mucked it up. (I once had a support rep inadvertently close my main credit card while supposedly closing one I wasn't using. I gave them my credit card number, of course — the one I wanted closed, not the other one handled by that banking institution — but…)

(Incidentally, if anyone has suggestions for what to file this under, I'm all ears. I've been categorizing my complaint under [Support Issues] -> [Terms of Use/EULA disagreement], but is there a better place?)

ETA, from Twitter: What a surprise, the support line for cancelling your account is FULL and they tell me to post on the forums. So even if I called, they'd just… tell me to post on the forums. This is stunningly bad customer service, guys.

ETA 2: From a cached post on Google that has since been removed from the official forums (and why it was removed, I don't know), discovered that part of what breaks the "cancel subscription" page is going over the character limit in the comments box. My 514-character initial comment did not go through, but my 400-character comment did. My second account is now deactivated, and expires 7/29. My next billing date for my primary account is 7/26, by which time I'm really hoping they'll have some response to the public outcry.

Here's what I eventually sent (a shortened version of the above):

It was bad enough that RealID didn't offer the ability to have a pseudonym, but now that the official forums will require use of first and last name, we are required to link our real names to an MMO in a worldwide public forum in order to get tech support/report bugs. This is over-the-top. Privacy may be more and more an illusion these days, but that doesn't mean I need to pay money to give it up.

How often do you get impatient for something big to happen for your character? Whether it's a wedding, a breakup, a character revamp, or just having the opportunity to RP with a well-loved but rarely-seen character, there are often circumstances that prevent us from being able to snap our fingers and declare "boom! done!" about something.

When it's a matter of lining schedules up, that can be frustrating. When it's a matter of many plots weaving together properly, that can be challenging.

When you are waiting for Cataclysm to come out so you can race-change your most-logged-in character and have her take over the mantle of the character you still consider your main, it can drive you UP THE DAMN WALL.

In a way, I kind of wonder if the impatience I'm feeling toward getting to play Ovistine full-time again is rubbing off on poor Teuthida. Teuthida's major plotline, I felt, had a lot to do with Kael'Thas — she and Valyrie originally set off on the mission to retake Tempest Keep, ended up on the Exodar, and after many adventures, took the bastard down. Her real goal at this point has always been to help rebuild Shattrath City and try to help out at the orphanage. But off she trots into Naxxramas… Ulduar… Trial of the Crusader… Icecrown Citadel… not because she wants to, but because I love playing a shaman.

How's she doing now? Well, she's not really enjoying herself in ICC; she comes home smelling terrible, she's not entirely convinced Arthas can be beaten, and she simply doesn't have the same kind of background with the heroes of Azeroth that other people do. (She barely blinks an eyelash at Muradin Bronzebeard, and has yet to figure out why Muradin calling out "By me own beard!" makes several members of her adventuring party raise their boomsticks or steins in a loud /cheer.) Arthas, ultimately, worries her a lot, and she's not so sure her time is best-spent there in ICC, as opposed to being home with Valyrie or going back to Shattrath and trying to make sure a few orphaned Draenei have a really great next few years (even if the next few years are all that's left).

I, on the other hand, pretty much love ICC. The fights are challenging but not impossible, the plot is great, and I'm really excited to see how it all works out for us (PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD NO SPOILERS). I'm really having a good time there, and it's nice to know that there's still so much new content ahead of us.

Mind you, there's an RP reason for Ovistine not to be in Icecrown Citadel right now — with her memory and abilities as fractured as they are, she knows she can't be trusted to go into the front lines. She doesn't know when her healing abilities will be cut off again — it could happen at any moment. She doesn't know whether she'll always be able to harness chaos and walk in shadows, or if that's at some risk of going away with the light as well. ICC is really dangerous, and Ovistine's not about to put her friends at risk by asking them to bring along a priest who may or may not be reliable, albeit through no fault of her own.

There's still Ovi's memory to sort out before she can really tackle the other alternative, the one she hasn't even thought about yet — harnessing healing energies the way the Wildhammers do it. I have a character in play who's intended to be a possible pathway to that end, but I'm leaving my options open — I don't want to lock myself into one true storyline, since I think improvising Ovi's story has been an awful lot of fun over the past several months. But at some point, I should probably write up a quick bit on Varrim Featherstoneshire (Fanshaw), a former gryphon rider who took a very bad fall and is not even a little bit happy about being grounded for the foreseeable future.

I'd heard of WoW. I was familiar with the Warcraft franchise, having been with Valinar and one of our good friends at the midnight release of Warcraft III (I chose the orc cover but ultimately liked playing the undead best; I never had gotten around to Frozen Throne, though), and I'd never known Blizzard to make a bad game, but still… MMORPGs were not my thing. The only one I'd tried was Asheron's Call, and I simply wasn't sold on the idea of a game where you had to put in hours just to maintain your status, or build pots, or whatever.

So on the 25th, Val installed WoW, rolled up a paladin named Vaelen, and played for a few hours. I was distracted by the many books and DVDs I'd gotten, so I wasn't really watching, but he said it seemed like it had a lot of potential, and that I could roll up a character on his account if I wanted to try it out.

On the morning of the 26th, I was up an hour or two before Val, as usual (you'll note that I'm writing this post around 8:00AM, and Val is still quite asleep). I logged into his account and rolled, if memory serves, a dwarven hunter with blonde braids named Agnessa. I was trying to emulate my favorite Diablo II character — I'd played a bowazon with multi-shot for most of the time I'd spent playing the game, and thought a hunter was clearly the way to go.

I spent about fifteen minutes playing — with the naked vanilla interface and no pet — before I went back to the bedroom, woke Val up, and said "Okay, I think I love this. We have to get me my own copy."

The day after Christmas, 2004, was not exactly an easy time to find a copy of WoW. We called every software store in range of our house, including Target and Best Buy, and did not find a copy until we got to Renton — a 30-minute drive away — and their relatively-new Fry's. They said they had "tons" of copies, and we drove down, picked up my copy, and brought it home.

This time when I installed it, I decided I'd try out a priest. I rolled Agness v1.0, who was destined to be a shadow priest. It took me three months or so (I have a journal entry noting her creation on 3/18/05) to roll up Ovistine. By then I'd gotten interested enough in healing that I really wanted a priest to heal with, and dwarf priests were very much in demand, so I thought back to the whirling braids of my original hunter and rolled Ovistine Lighthammer, who set out on her first adventure with her mom's old mace, looking to fight evil. Or troggs. Whichever.

By October, I'd met some of the RPers I still know today. My guild leader actually sought Ovistine out after seeing her on the boards and discovering she was an female dwarf priest seeking dungeons and RP who was, somehow, not yet a member of The Boomstick Gang.

Things have changed here and there over the years. When Burning Crusade came out, I ended up with a shiny new main, thanks to the fact that I loved playing the shaman class. When Lich King came out, Val and I finally managed to be in the same raid at the same time for the first time, which was a vast, vast improvement from vanilla, when I raided Thursday and Friday with one group and he raided Friday and Saturday with a different group. And there'll be more changes in Cataclysm. I can't predict all of them, but I can say that in one form or another, Ovistine Lighthammer is gonna be getting the lion's share of my playtime. It's times like this I wish I'd registered twirlybraids.com instead of sandwichrations.com, but oh well. Dwarves gotta eat, too.

Happy Winter Veil to everyone; I know I'm going to be spending the day happily entrenched in my nostalgia. Maybe I'll go send Ovistine to Stratholme for old times' sake.

By the way, if you're on Twitter, and would like to contribute to a running list of "stupidest things you've heard someone in a LFG pug say," tag it with #pugbingo! Eventually, if I can find a list of 25 universal stupid-things-heard, I'll make a bingo card (or rather, will set something up to randomly generate a bingo card) and give prizes to people who manage to make a bingo. ^_^

I tried to click the "need" button. I tried again. I tried again, and nothing happened. I had to roll "greed", but of course others had rolled "disenchant". Sorry, Ovi — now that nice new trinket is a dream shard.

Uh, okay, I thought. I went on to Halls of Stone. This time we lost our healer midway through, and (cover your eyes, RP folks) I went disc in order to get us through the rest of the instance (it was not hard to find another DPS). Well, a Forge Ember dropped. Okay, not the most exciting healing trinket, but not not a healing trinket, right? Everyone else in the group was melee anyway.

I tried to click "need" again. Nothing. Another shard; another disappointed dwarf.

Valinar pointed out, today, this post:

The "need" option is only available for both armor and weapons that are designed for your class. Caster classes and hybrid caster classes can roll "need" on items with intellect and/or spell power while melee classes cannot. Melee classes and hybrid melee classes can roll "need" on the items without intellect and/or spell power.

What do you notice about Forge Ember and Pendulum of Telluric Currents? Forge Ember's base stat is crit. Pendulum's is haste.

Not Int. Not spellpower. Crit and haste.

Hot damn, guys, those are melee trinkets. Or at least the Need-Before-Greed system sure thinks they are.

Until this is fixed — and I hope it gets fixed soon; the GM ticket I submitted got a response that said "we know it's an issue and we're working on it" — please, for Muradin's beard's sake, pass on caster trinkets that don't have int or spellpower. You may get shafted once or twice on this; you may lose out rolling on a shard. Greediboi-NotYourServer the nelf rogue may walk away with a shard unopposed (except by the desperate druid rolling "greed" instead of "disenchant").

But right now, rolling greed on trinkets is the only thing those of us with shitty caster trinkets can do. And we're doing it. Give us a hand, if you can.

But the LFG tool actually got me pretty excited about this whole pugging idea. It's not just the title (although I think "Ovistine the Patient" and "Teuthida the Patient" will eventually be pretty rad), and it's certainly not the pet (I'm not overly fond of pugs), but the ability to get a group pretty much any time I want, for any character I want, run a quick heroic, and get scads of rewards? It's shiny.

So I have made great use of the LFG tool on Ovistine, and in three days I've upgraded her from the godawful Spaulders of the Runeseeker she started with (I took away her heirloom shoulders; other alts needed them more, and I'm too lazy to swap them to her every single time I wanted to play her) to a quest reward from the Nexus (Ovi hadn't stepped foot in the Nexus, ever, so she had four quests to do there) to, finally, her first piece of Lich King tier gear. My only regret is buying her the Sons of Hodir shoulder enchant for every one of those. But hey — I didn't know she was going to get her upgrade so fast!

My evaluation of the LFG tool: It's actually pretty decent. I have been extremely lucky so far; of the 30+ random people I've grouped with, 99% of them have been perfectly reasonable folks to group with. No better than a battleground, perhaps, but certainly no worse. There's been no blaming the healer or tank, and most of the groups substantially outgear the instances and are basically just there for badges — almost all loot gets disenchanted. (Although I am still cranky about the fact that there seems to be a bug at present that prevents hybrid casters from rolling need on caster trinkets. Maybe it's just priests. I dunno. I submitted a ticket, but you can bet they'll just tell me to disable all my addons.)

It is substantially faster to get a group if you're willing to heal. When Val and I queued up with Val willing to tank or DPS and Teu willing to heal or DPS, we got a group literally as soon as he clicked the "Join as Group" button — with him tanking and me healing, of course.

I'm always willing to heal with Teu, and probably will always end up doing so; I'd rather not heal with Ovi, since it's OOC and I'd like more practice at shadow, but in less-than-ideal situations, it's nice to have the other spec. (I did successfully heal a Heroic Halls of Stone run today. I thought I was crazy for trying it, since I haven't healed an instance with Ovi since, uh, Burning Crusade, but it turned out to be relatively easy on me. That said, it's a good thing there's a lot of overlap on shadow and healing gear, because oof. I may have a healing spec, but I don't have separate healing gear. Also, per my raid, Disc is bullshit — in the best possible way.)

I am really grateful, though, that I haven't had to stop instancing with my friends altogether! Yesterday we took a whirlwind trip through the new Icecrown instances, and it was an absolute blast. Heroic Halls of Reflection was a challenge, but a really fun one. And lo, there is a five-man that has a caster shield! Pit of Saron, normal. I have better — but Val's paladin sure doesn't.

Yesterday I was afraid that if I let myself, I'd just go to random heroics with Ovi nonstop until I forgot things like eating and sleeping. Today I've done only two on Ovi and one on Teu, so I think the shiny might give way to other stuff soon. Still, I like that the option's there. It'll be interesting to see how it works out in the long run. And… really, only five or so random heroics for another piece of non-crappy gear? I might be back online sooner than I think.

Dinging 80 comes with such a high price tag. 300g got dropped at the priest trainer! I'm also in the process of picking up materials for Jeeves and my Wormhole Generator. (Mining. So much mining. So very, very much mining.) And Ovi would love an epic gyrocopter of her very own. At least she already has dual-spec; Nancie's still waiting on that.

I think I'm going to bite the bullet and race-change Trisia (my previous mage, L63, herbalist/alchemist-in-training) to be the new Li'l Teu. Not only will I pick up five levels, I'll get free 150 riding (well, that used to be more meaningful than it is now…) and access to my hoard of caster heirlooms. At that point, it'll be time to say goodbye to the second account. I never actually upgraded that account to LK, either, so frankly, a race change is cheaper than doing that — at least at this point.

I have been secretly playing Ovi up the last few levels as, um, shadow. It turns out shadow is ridiculously fun; I won't mind having a shadow-oriented Ovistine around a bit in the upcoming months. In fact, it's kinda nice to have realized that, because it means instead of having a character that makes me think "but… I've got an endgame healer", instead I end up thinking, "Well, hey! A shadow priest! You don't see many of those around nowadays." Whether that'll end up being useful in the long run or not, I'm honestly not sure, but I'd love to get her some playtime soon. I find myself terribly tempted to try PvPing with her, too.

Hey, speaking of dwarf shamans! Were we speaking of dwarf shamans? Oh, who am I kidding; I'm always speaking of dwarf shamans these days. Did anyone else notice that the Earthen in Loken's Lackeys and The Earthen Oath are, kinda, dwarf shamans? Well, they're Earthen, but they have shaman-esque abilities: Lava Burst, Earth Shield, Earth Shock. Maybe another way of discovering a dwarf's innate shamanism has to do with exploring their ties to earth (the element, rather), and not just "well, Wildhammer dwarves are closer to nature, so it just makes sense". (Not that there's anything wrong with Wildhammer dwarves, mind you!)

Teuthida (L80, raiding main): 62 days, 20 at L80.
Ovistine (L75, RP main, main up until late in BC): 67 days
Nancie (L80, current favorite for soloing): 19 days, 1 day at L80.

(A small note: I was deeply relieved to see that Ovistine's /played still outnumbers Teu's. I can still hang onto the idea that Ovi is my main if her /played total is higher, right? Right?)

This doesn't take into account my original main, my other half-dozen alts, or any other characters I've played up to 20-ish and deleted. All told, that's more than 3552 hours, and a little under half a year spent doing nothing but playing World of Warcraft since December 26, 2004. And if anything, I'm more interested in playing than ever — lately I've been really interested in crafting, getting some of my alts up to 450 in their respective professions and mining a ton of Saronite for Valinar's blacksmith, Vaelen. I have also been doing some crazy things, mostly involving RP gear ("Today's project: soloing the Slave Pens for a drop off Quagmirran."). Nancie's treks into Scholo and Strat are over for now (exalted with the Dawn!), so it looks like I'm back to leveling and dailies.

Having something a little different to do can really energize me, and I think that's important to keeping the game fresh for me. I don't mind the bank space I'm using for Nancie's RP gear, or the time I spent in Scholo and Strat trying to grind rep (omgwow SO MUCH RUNECLOTH). I am not quite prepared to go hunting Alliance rep with her, but I know when I'm bored of leveling and dailies again, I have other goals. Ovistine needs to go tromping across the world so I can pick up her Explorer achievements. Nancie will probably want to pick up the rest of her Lightforge set and finish converting it into Soulforge. Someday Agness will finish leveling up her Inscription. Having become a heck of a lot more interested in the Scarlet Crusade and the Argent Dawn of late, I want to go replay those starting DK levels (and I have just the DK character in mind with which to do it).

I should really make a list.

Not so clear-cut these days! With new alts being rolled all the time, events that are brand-new to one character are things I did four or five years ago with one of mine. How do you deal with a character who's just found out that the Scarlet Crusade is being run by demons? "Oh, I've known that for years." "…*splutter* You could have told me before I went in there." Or is the news new to you again every time you hear it?

The more interesting question I'm thinking about right now is whether it's feasible to juggle a timeline somewhat — could a character of mine level up to 60, 70, even 80, without ever tackling some of the quests that should come up at 30, 40, 50? In RP/IC, could I get a character out to the Argent Tournament before she finishes the Wrathgate storyline?

Even WoW itself does some bending, folding, spindling, and mutilating to give people the opportunity to do the same quests without necessarily being at the same point in the story. Take Drakuru — if you've done his Grizzly Hills/Drak'Tharon Keep quests, you get one quest when you see him in Zul'Drak. If you haven't, you get a different one. Either way, though, you have the same goals, and people questing together can definitely work together on them.

As NaNo approaches and I hammer down some of the details in Nancie's life, I find myself pondering what order she might have taken things in. There are some quests she probably would have avoided at all costs when she was supposed to do them, but that would make perfect sense for her character now. But it's a pretty twisty timeline, the likes of which might get me a visit from the Office of Temporal Affairs, and I'm hesitant to go for it if it seems too jarring. The fact that my character could have skipped past things, that they'd make sense for her now in a way they wouldn't have then, doesn't necessarily mean it makes good game-and-RP sense to put the timeline in a weird and unexpected order.

Yesterday, though, I found something even more appalling.

Imagine you're a male dwarf with a particular beard graphic (short and tidy!), and then you get a Female Dwarf Mask.  You might try it on.

You might look like this:

Yes, folks, that's a female dwarven mask with a Fu Manchu mustache.  (I suppose it helps to have the same hair color, roughly, as the mask.)