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.

• The Beatles: Rock Band. I would like to say that I remained strong in the face of finding out that the XBox 360 has Gamer Achievements (my characters in WoW aren't achievement-happy, after all!), but that would be a bald-faced lie. I am currently working on "How Could I Dance With Another?" (100% on Expert Bass on "I Saw Her Standing There") and "That's It! You've Got It!" (350-note streak on bass on "Hey Bulldog", which I think will probably need to be done on Expert to even have 350 notes). Still, for having owned the game for less than a week, I think I'm learning pretty fast.
• Starcraft II Beta (only not). I… installed it. But I really play the Warcraft and Starcraft RTS games for the story, not the multiplayer "stomp people's faces in/get your face stomped in" experience — I pretty much did that to exhaustion in college — so having discovered that single player mode is not available in the beta, I'm not so sure I want to bother.
• Defense Grid. Defense Grid is made of win and awesome and more win and more awesome. It's a terrific tower defense game, and I'm having a lot of fun with it. Tower defense games are very me — I like defensive strategy games. (This may have something to do with why I like healer classes in WoW.)
• Portal. I recently played through Portal again. I found it just as much fun the second time through, only I was better at it this time around. That was a nice surprise! Normally I'm not so great at 3d-shooter style games.
• Cogs. I really need to reinstall this. (I recently lost my entire hard drive to a crash, so I'll have to start it over. Groan.) It's like a 3d version of Pipe Dream/The Very Clever Pipe Game, in which you move around sliding pieces of a given puzzle to get steam from one end of a pipe to another (or turn cogs which turn other cogs, or any number of other things). It has a really pretty steampunk theme, and as a bonus, you can get your menus and other information in English or LOLCat.
• The Sims: World Adventures. I can only play The Sims for so long before I feel like I've beaten the game, but the World Adventures expansion was tons of fun. I really enjoyed the puzzle-game-esque nature of the "adventures" you go on in China, France, and Egypt. I'm looking forward to the next expansion, which is coming out next month.

That's about it, I think. I'm still looking over XBox and Wii games to see if there's anything else I'm interested in playing — if you have puzzle game/strategy game/casual game recommendations for XBox and Wii, I'm all ears.

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.

When we started getting into instances, I was still basically glued to Valinar, and we seemed to know more people who wanted to stay Tanks than who wanted to offspec and play DPS. So Val continued to be the Furious Whirlwind of Night Elf Rage, Yet Politely. Synergy being what it was, and what with everyone we knew leveling up at the same time, we were frequently spoiled for choice on things. We often took along other melee folks (rogues, c'mon down! you're the next contestant on the heals are for you!).

Then when I started raiding, I pretty much didn't see any reason not to keep doing that. We had lovely paladin healers to handle the tanks, and priests who could cover the tanks as well as raid heal if they liked, and druids who could make the whole raid HoT, and then… there was me. I like to raid heal. I really, really, really like to raid heal. I like the fact that my abilities make me a natural fit for raid healing. I like saving group 2 from themselves, and being part of the reason warriors can stand in shit they really shouldn't ("but it's RAGE!"). Mostly I like the fact that my careful watching of a situation includes the knowledge that my addons can't really predict who's going to soak up the chain heal, so I have to know whether someone's out by his lonesome somewhere, or whether he's surrounded by people who also need a heal. Generally, when we all take damage at once, I slam heals on all the dudes packed up by the boss's feets — the tank and melee, not necessarily in that order.

So what I don't know is what other shamans were doing, because apparently that wasn't it. Now, I've been in raids before where for some reason the actual assignment someone gets is this big status thing — "I'm the MT healer! I'd like to thank my family, friends, and Bolvar Fordragon for his inpsiration", but I'm happy to say that TRI is not like that. We do try to give everyone jobs suited to them, but I don't think any of us perceive it as a status thing. And yeah, if I reglyph and respec a little, I can make a perfectly tolerable tank healer…

…and maybe that's what other shamans were doing. Why? I don't know. It's a more straightforward job, sure, but to me it seemed kinda boring (I have one… big… very slow… heal, and Earth Shield, which I have on the tank most of the time anyway. Sure, I could occasionally throw a Lesser Healing Wave or a Riptide, but mostly… it's that one… big… sloooooooow… heal.), and very heavy on mana. If I'm going to be covering a single tank, I really like that he's often in the midst of a bunch of people, who I can hit with incidental chain heals, or when he's fighting something that has a spell that needs interrupting, which I can do with a timely Wind Shock, thus decreasing my threat on that mob, anyway. (When you have no other aggro dump, you get grateful for the ones you have, even if you wear mail and carry a shield.)

At any rate, apparently enough of the other shamans were Doing It Wrong (at least according to Blizzard) that… Chain Heal got buffed through the roof. What's more, my mana regeneration via chain heal got buffed through the roof. Take a look at this:

That's an average night's chain heal and water shield output before and after the patch. Hitting more people and doing more healing and replenishing more mana = happy happy happy shammy!

As for the totem bar, I am… undecided. It's useful and nice, but it's not very useful in the heat of combat, except to drop sets you've already established. There are no options on it; you can't make it fly up with mouseover. If you want to drop a new totem out of the bar, you have to click a teeny tiny
button, then click a very small picture of the totem you want, then click the teeny tiny button again. If you click wrong, you end up with NO totem in the bar, or some godawful totem you really do not want (magma totem + cc'd mobs = NOOOOO).

It's great to be able to drop more than one totem at a time, I'll give them that. Repositioning fights where I used to lose four GCDs are much easier to handle; never was I so grateful for it as I was during the gauntlet half of Thorim. (Though the Auriaya repositinings were nice, too.) However, on those times when I just want one totem, it falls short. I don't always have 1700 mana to spend on the entire totem spread; sometimes I need to drop Mana Tide, for instance. Or maybe I'm down to my last few hundred mana, but if I don't drop a Tremor Totem, things are going to go badly.

This is where the mod I've been using forever, Totem Timers, has always shined through. I have it set up so my (non-Blizz) totem bar is in the center of my screen (more or less), and when I mouse over each column by element, the totem choices spring up. At that point, they're keybound to 1-6 (or however many totems are in that column), and you can reposition them so the numbers make sense for you (in my case, for water, say, 1 is Mana Spring, 2 is Healing Stream, 3 is Cleansing Totem and 4 is Mana Tide). All I have to do is hover and hit "4" if I'm desperate for mana. With the new system, I'd probably be better off moving Mana Tide to a whole new key binding.

Which is problematic. I'd need a new key binding for the three totem sets, and then a new key binding for every totem I might want to drop without dropping all the other totems. (Mana Tide, Cleansing, Tremor, Earthbind, Grounding, and Magma, just to name a few.)

So while I like the eventual results from the totem bar — I'm not complaining about being able to drop all four at once; there have been times when not losing four global cooldowns has been fantastic — I'm not really sure they know what they're doing with the concept yet. And I'm definitely not giving up TotemTimers anytime soon.

General
+ New quest log: IT'S ABOUT DAMN TIME.
+ Sell value: Ibid.
+ iLvl and info on the tooltip: Ibid ibid!
+ Class colors in /say, /channel, /etc.: Woohoo!
+ Heirloom chestpiece: Okay, so I didn't really want my druid to run around in Dreadmist, but for 10% bonus XP, she'll do it. (My other toons that still need a-levelin' are a priest, a warlock, and a mage.)

Teuthida
+ Totem bar sets are kind of nice…
- but they don't eliminate the need for a totem mod. I still need a visible timer for totems with a cooldown (mana tide, etc.), and sometimes I don't have the fifteen hundred mana it would take to switch to my set-with-tremor-totem, etc.
+ Fortunately, TotemTimers still works.
- Unfortunately, the totem bar isn't actually built into Bartender4 yet (I'm not sure I'm ready for an alpha version), so I have resorted to building a bar and putting it up between my character bar and my TotemTimers.

Ovinia
+ Epic riding for 45g!
+ Flight form for 3g60!
+ No, really, FLIGHT FORM AT L60 OMG OMG.

"L.O.S." = line of sight.  If you lose line of sight to a target, you can't cast a spell at it or otherwise affect it.

"S.O.S." = my favorite ABBA song.

"L.O.S.", a filk by Teuthida of Feathermoon

Where is that buffed-up tank?
He seems so hard to find
I tried to throw a heal,
but there is no sight line!
Why did he move from off his spot?
I cannot understand!
We had it set up nice,
so all our heals would land!

When we can't see ya, darlin', we can't heal ya!
L.O.S.!
The heals won't find ya if we have no sight lines!
L.O.S.!
When you're gone
Up those stairs
We all panic and run
When you're gone
We stab "heal"
Nothing lands and we're done!

You seem so far away
Though you are standing near
We heal so you might live,
But you will die, we fear!
We know you can't stand in the clouds,
Or flame waves or void zones,
But if we see you not,
O, Tank, you will be pwned!

When we can't see ya, darlin', we can't heal ya!
L.O.S.!
The heals won't find ya if we have no sight lines!
L.O.S.!
When you're gone
Round the corner
We panic and run
When you're gone
Though we try
We can't heal and we're done!
When you're gone
Up those stairs
We all panic and run
When you're gone
We stab "heal"
Nothing lands and we're done!
When you're gone
Round the corner
We panic and run
When you're gone
Though we try
We can't heal and we're done!

The Players

• Romney: The media center in our bedroom. Romney dual-boots into Romney-Vista and Romney-Linux.
• Shetland: The audio-recording computer in the craft room.
• Leicester: Val's WoW rig
• Dorset: My WoW rig, largely inherited from Val's castoffs, which also functions as the only computer in the house that will talk to the printer
• Perendale: My laptop

The Scene, Part 1
I walk into the bedroom and turn on Romney-Vista, hoping to watch a little Star Trek and knit on a blanket. Romney-Vista boots up without sound. Media Center won't start. AVRT.dll has failed entirely. Restoring the system to a two-days-earlier backup point does nothing, even though last night, this worked fine. Also, Windows Defender won't load and we've somehow lost SP1, which now refuses to install. CHKDISK fails. o_O

Romney-Linux has been having issues with DVD playback (known, fixable ones which Val will get to later that evening). I give up and read a book.

The Scene, Part 2

• 4pm: I boot up Dorset, print something, and set Dorset back to hibernating. There is no indication from Dorset that there are any problems.

The Scene, Part 3

• 5:45pm: I hit the "power" button to bring Dorset out of hibernate. Nothing happens.
• 5:46pm: I power Dorset down manually and try to restart it. Dorset tells me there's some kind of CMOS error and asks if I want to continue. I blink a few times and tell it "yes". Val loads up WoW on Leicester as usual.
• 5:47pm: Dorset fails to boot.
• 5:48pm: I power Dorset down manually and try to restart it. Dorset boots, but bluescreens as soon as I load it up.
• 5:49pm: I power Dorset down manually and try to restart it. At this point, I'm getting a little worried.
• 5:51pm: As a requirement for boot-up Dorset asks us to choose one of two options using the keyboard. The keyboard is USB, and the boot process has not loaded USB at this point. Val tracks down a PS/2 keyboard in the garage so we can try again.
• 5:53pm: Val starts working on Dorset after Dorset's third blue-screen. I use Leicester to whisper my raid leader that HOLYSHITWTFCOMPUTERERROR. Everyone shares a moment of "OSHIT".
• 5:57pm: It starts becoming clear to me that Dorset isn't going to be booting up tonight. I switch to Perendale, which, mercifully, has WoW and LK installed, but which doesn't have the latest patch. I patch it and panic about my addons, trying to figure out which ones are absolutely necessary to go to raid. I come up with TotemTimers, Grid, GridManaBars, PitBull, Omen, ORA2, Bartender4, and BigWigs. I pray this is sufficient. I start installing addons.
• 5:58pm: I steal the mouse and keyboard off of Shetland and plug them into Perendale. The mouse is three-button instead of five and the keyboard isn't ergonomic, but it's better than trying to play on the trackpad…
• 6:17pm: Val continues working on Dorset while our raid goes and takes down Flame Leviathan. Go TRI!
• 6:20pm: Patched, terrified, on a keyboard where I keep hitting "space" instead of "alt", and having to use "Y" for push-to-talk, staring at a 1280×960 screen (as opposed to my usual 1680×1050), I log into Vent and load up.
• 6:22pm: I land in Ulduar for those last few trash pulls before Deconstructor. I get 6fps. I panic some more and try to beat my UI into some semblance of shape. BigWigs and ORA2 frames are taking up the entire screen, I have no raidframes, and my performance is abysmal. I ask my raidleader if he can find someone to replace me. Turns out I'm the fourth person to have computer failure tonight, and the raid is looking dire.
• 6:26pm: I set every single setting to minimum (except anti-aliasing, without which I get seasick, and projected textures, without which I will die), turn off every addon I can possibly live without (this includes PitBull at this stage), and log back on. This brings me up to 15fps, sometimes as high as 30fps. This is playable. I go back to fussing with my UI.
• 6:34pm: The raid has been filled with bodies, and my UI is playable even if it terrifies me. I have Grid back. We go smash the crap out of Deconstructor.
• 6:42pm: Getting killed now makes me say "Oh, thank God, I can work on my raidframes." During the trash and setup for Kologarn, I successfully set up Grid and get my alert for Stone Grip working. We kick the crap out of Kologarn.
• 6:50pm: I have a UI again. In fact, I'm starting to kind of like the new UI. It involves TotemTimers, Grid, GridManaBars, Bartender4, BigWigs, and ORA2; I have decided that MT frames are actually kind of neat. My screen is still not at native res and therefore looks scary-bad, but things are working pretty well all things considered. I can play this way.

OH MY GOD. No, really. OH MY GOD. This is not something I really wanted to deal with last night. I'm hopeful that the issues with Dorset will be fixable, but I'm grateful to say that I can play like this tonight, at the very least. I'm really grateful that my laptop is powerful enough to run WoW. Today I got Quartz running on the laptop in hopes that it won't eat up too much memory and that it'll help me with some things, and I looked really carefully around at the Blizzard UI, trying to determine what I can actually make use of. I found an option to use a modifier to cast something on my focus target, which, OMG, wow, that sounds amazing — I mucked around with some keybindings to see if I can make use of that.

In the meantime, my raid is awesome for putting up with me last night, and I am glad I did not completely go "splat" when trying to heal. It was a rough night for everyone, but I felt like our camaraderie and morale was at a surprising high for all that. It was one of those nights that reminds me how much I love my raid and makes me glad to be there. *warm fuzzies* I was especially happy with the healing squad, who was down a player (I'd say "key player", but our heal squad is so tightly-interwoven that we're all key players, and we work amazingly well together), and had one of our beloved boomkin step in for us, shaking those branches with the best of 'em. (I was so distracted with the UI issues that it took me forever to notice her, but once I did, Teu squeaked and clung to her branches.)

Oh, and I did get some folks going in on the chicken-sacrifice plan with me, from the healer squad, after Razorscale once more refused to drop our healy hammer. I don't know about anybody else, but for me, I just want to see things DROP. If something drops even once, even if I don't get it, at least I feel like someone's getting some benefit out of it (and with my healy team, I never feel like an item is wasted so long as one of us gets it; I'm just as happy for everyone else as I am for me). If we never see it drop, that's when I get bitter. I'm seriously considering getting started on the sacrificial chickens tonight, but I'm kind of exhausted from wrestling with computers all last night, and I'm not sure I can handle doing a roast before raid. Next Thursday, though, it's going to happen.

while there is a game there, where you kill monsters and take their lunch money and gather eight [Bear Asses] and turn them in to gain the [Gigantic Hammer of E-Peenage]…there’s also a community there, of real people. Good people, bad people, shy people, loud people, young people, old people, in-between people. Never forget that.

And it’s the people that make WoW more than "just a game."

I'm not the most social squid around. I'm a super-super-super introvert, the kind of person who scores 100% I and 0% E on any of those MBTI quizzes. Even if somebody's a good friend, my best friend from high school or college, whatever, hanging out with them 24/7 will start making me antsy around day 3. The one exception is my favorite elf, who (after a decade of cohabitation) I'm pretty used to.

So when I started playing WoW, I wasn't really sure what to make of the social aspects. I avoided grouping with people I didn't know (okay, I still won't PuG), and I really wasn't quite sure how to meet people. How I ended up falling in with a group of hardcore RPers and having WoW make up a very large chunk of my social circle, both when I'm logged in and logged out, remains a bit of a mystery to me.

My friends are men and women — approximately equal amounts of each. (We know a shocking number of couples who play this game together, and oftentimes if one member of a couple quits, it's the guy. Wonder what people who think girls don't game make of that?) They're older than me and younger than me. Parents, childfree, married, single, gay, straight, bi, trans, cis, seriously, we're all over the map. We live in Seattle, Portland, Canada, California, Texas, New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, and lots of other places I'm not sure about.

Like any group of people who get together due to a single hobby, we have tons in common and tons that's not in common. Our get-togethers may have the conversation focused on our characters, and yeah, many of us will refer to each other by our in-game names (I will answer to Ovi in RL, and I'm starting to answer to Teu — HA HA! Perhaps this is a sign my former main still has a chance), but it does come down to the fact that it's a social circle I'm quite happy to be a part of, introvert or no.

I spend nine hours a week in a 25-person conference call, a situation I'd never have imagined myself in before I started playing WoW. (True story: I was called for jury duty a couple years back. The room I sat in while we waited to go in for selection contained exactly 40 people. I stared at it, kind of dumbfounded, and realized that that was a.) more people than there were at my wedding [38], and b.) it took that many people to run Molten Core. I felt a bit faint.) It's a heck of a group activity, and the fact that I don't see many of these people face-to-face doesn't mean that I don't feel like I know them. And, amusingly, they know me. (Last year's birthday wishes included virtual sheep and chocolate and yarn.)

In some of the other parts of my online life, there's been strife and frustration and grief and fighting, a lot of people behaving like total gits and a lot of people who are just trying to stay sane amidst the crapstorm. While it might be stretching matters to say we're all sane in the WoW group, it's going to be nice to be in a "room" full of people who know who our friends are and who our enemies are, which is to say:

Sarth+3, your days are numbered. Start counting down. Don't start high.

1. Can your character read and write?
   All my characters can definitely read and write, although of all my girls, Agness and Ovistine are the ones most likely to curl up with a book for fun. Those two are definitely into the "trashy" genre, by the way — if there's a "Dwarves of Our Lives" paperback series, Ovistine definitely collects it!
2. Is he/she good with numbers and business-like things?
   Agness and Trisia are for sure! Agness is better with theoretical numbers; Trisia is better with business numbers. But of my girls, Lyja is the star in this field. She's a businessgnome with an GMBA (Gnomish Masters of Business Administration). Not only is she great at doing things like taxes, she loves it! She'd have been an excellent accountant or banker-gnome, but she's thrilled to have a stake in her own business.
3. Does your character have a formal (schooled) education or an informal (apprenticed/learned by experience) education? Or both?
   Agness and Ovistine are both apprenticed (Agness to Nancie, Ovistine to Agness). Trisia has no education to speak of and no formal apprenticeships, either. Teu — hard to say; I'm not sure. She definitely seeks guidance from the elemental spirits, but I'd hardly call that an apprenticeship. Lyja, however, went to school, college, and grad school. As I mentioned earlier, she has a GMBA — and it's in finance.
4. Has he/she learned another language than the one they grew up speaking (in full or in part)?
   Agness would speak a rudimentary form of Dwarvish if she could. Obviously, Ovi and Nancie both speak Common as well as Dwarvish, although Dwarvish was the language spoken in their house when Ovi was growing up. Lyja speaks both Gnomish and Common, but considers Common her primary tongue. Teu only barely speaks Common, and would much, much rather speak Draenei if it weren't considered rude to do so in front of people who don't speak it!
5. What does your character’s handwriting look like?
   People who get mail from me in-game know that my girls tend to leave a note with their items. I think most of them have legible, "girly" handwriting, although Nancie tends to write in block capitals.
]]> http://sandwichrations.com/blog/2009/02/annas-friday-five-the-three-rs/feed/ 0 http://sandwichrations.com/blog/2009/02/mental-note-not-all-guys-are-sleazy/ http://sandwichrations.com/blog/2009/02/mental-note-not-all-guys-are-sleazy/#comments Mon, 16 Feb 2009 18:19:03 +0000 Ovistine http://wow.sheeponmystuff.com/?p=19 One day, many many many many moons ago, I'd told a friend of mine that I was on Feathermoon under the name of [MyNowDeletedToon], and to look me up if he rolled a character there.

A few days later:

RandomPerson: My, aren't you a fine-looking woman!
Me: /ignore RandomPerson
Friend: Oh, hey! RandomPerson is that friend of yours… he just sent me a tell saying you'd put him on /ignore.
Me: Oh, crap!

I will admit to this: my /ignore finger is very, very trigger-happy. I /ignore people for /yelling in cities (oh, if only I could /ignore Arcanist Braedin). I /ignore people for chattering OOC in the auction house. I /ignore people for using Trade for random babble. I have installed IgnoreMore, and I am not ashamed.

My first toon was a human female. I've also played nelf females, draenei females, dwarf females, and gnome females. I think the highest I've ever gotten a male toon is about 28… I'm just not very interested in male characters, for whatever reason.

And if you're playing a human or a nelf or a draenei, people will randomly whisper you with things like:

Sleaze1: hot ass

Sleaze2: mmmm wanna cyber

ICSleaze: Would you care to make ten gold for a few minutes' easy work?

…I admit, ICSleazes give me a moment or two of pause, because okay, sleaze, but in-character RPing sleaze! It's kind of awesome, in a "please be awesome somewhere else" sort of way.

But, as Anna points out, randomly hitting someone up for RP may be their very first attempt at doing it — and now I feel guilty for all the times I've cut somebody off at the knees and quickly punched the /ignore button.

The other day I was passing through Darkshire. As usual, I had ImmersionRP on. (Agness's current IRP description: "For some reason this warlock is trying to make her imp stand behind her and stay out of sight. It isn't working very well.") I got a tell:

RandomNightElf: You RP?
RandomNightElf: I'd be happy to RP with you in Darkshire.

My first thought: Oh ew! I'm so not going to cyber with him in the undead-infested land of Darkshire. How is that even an appropriate venue? Why isn't he looking for people in Goldshire or something?

Which should have been my first clue that maybe this guy wasn't looking for Deeprun Tram-style action.

I really wasn't up for random RP at the time; I was on my way elsewhere anyway. But I did whisper him to say, "um… when someone with an obvious female name gets a random tell asking for RP, she may be a bit suspicious."

Which is completely true — and completely unfair.

Exactly how are guys — or girls, for that matter — supposed to meet people if they can't whisper anybody in different zones? Is it really so bad to look up the people in /xtensiontooltip2 and ask if they're interested in spending some time RPing? Of course it's not. Not everyone hangs out in Stormwind, and at 11am server time, the server's pretty dead. If you're not into Goldshire-style RP, the crowds in Stormwind probably aren't your style, either. Dalaran might be way too taxing for your computer. Where else do you run into folks? That's what global channels are for; that's what RP mods are for.

So, RandomNightElf, I apologize (and if I could remember your name, I'd apologize in-game), and next time I'll give someone who does that the benefit of the doubt.

(Postscript: You may have noticed that I left out dwarf and gnome females on that list. Is it because no one's ever hit on my dwarf or gnome girls? Actually, no! It's just that they only do that in character, in person. And, amusingly enough, only the younger of my dwarf girls gets hit on — the older one was deliberately designed to look like someone's mom, which she is. It's not a hardship to hear someone telling my dwarf lass, "Ach, ye're one o' th' most bonnie lasses I've seen in ages — would ye take this bouquet frae me?" )

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