WoW's Upcoming 20th Anniversary

This November, World of Warcraft turns twenty years old. There are MMOs that are even older than that, but in general, a game being live and continuing to be developed for such a long time is still a rare thing. I remember when I had just started playing WoW and was absolutely enthralled by it for the first few months, the thought occurred to me how I would feel if it was going to shut down, and I found the idea rather heart-wrenching at the time. Still, I don't think I would've expected to still be here playing and talking about it almost twenty years later. Funny how that goes.

There are always some celebratory activities going on each year, but they usually don't change from one year to the next. I think the first time I did them I was quite impressed and meant to write a post about hunting down the modern version of the green dragons, but I never actually ended up doing that. When I came back in subsequent years and found that it was just the exact same stuff again I became somewhat less impressed.

I remember there were some big nostalgic events going on during the tenth anniversary and that I was vaguely tempted to resub just to check out Molten Core in LFR, but that ultimately didn't end up happening either. During the fifteenth anniversary I was technically subscribed, but Classic had just launched and I had absolutely zero interest in retail at the time.

For this year's 20th anniversary, it looks like Blizzard is pulling out all the stops. They just released a video and accompanying article about everything that will be happening and it's a lot of stuff. Chromie will host an event to commemorate the opening of the AQ gates, there'll be a Blackrock Depths raid, classic dungeons will come back for Timetalking, and there'll be new high-res versions of the old tier two sets available, to name just a few of the items on the list. It sounds really cool and I look forward to checking it all out. Inject that nostalgia right into my veins, baby.

I'm thinking about doing something for the anniversary on this blog as well actually. I've really enjoyed what Wilhelm and Bhagpuss have been doing for Everquest's 25th anniversary this year for example, and I never even played that! Wilhelm wrote a series of posts about the game's many different starting/early zones and how he remembers them, and Bhagpuss is currently working his way through a series remembering all his EQ characters and their adventures in order of their original creation date. I couldn't do that for my WoW characters as WoW doesn't let players see their characters' creation dates, and I feel there's been more than enough talk about WoW's original starting zones already (really enjoyed this recent video by Jediwarlock about the human starting experience for example).

Some readers may remember however that I mentioned in the past that I used to maintain a personal blog for more than a decade. You wouldn't find it via Google because this was during a time when personal blogs like that were "noindex" by default. Imagine people writing with the express intent of not being found by search engines. Those were different times...

Anyway, I'm actually not that keen on looking back on that blog because even though I'm sure it contains some interesting tidbits about my past, on a more general level it mostly covers a period of my life that I don't look back on with too much fondness. However! It also contains some notes about my earliest experiences with World of Warcraft, and those I find quite interesting. I actually wish I'd written more about that so I'd have more written evidence of what I thought about things like new content when it actually came out. What I did write down reads quite strangely two decades later, as it harkens back to a time when I basically knew nothing about MMOs and therefore talked about my experiences in WoW in very different terms.

I think for the anniversary it could be fun to pull some of those old blog posts and reproduce them on here, maybe with some commentary. We'll see how that goes. Oh, and if you are interested in reading more personal ramblings, I did actually start a new personal blog last year that currently has zero readers because I didn't tell anyone about it, even though it's linked from my blogger profile. I only update it about once a month but if you ever were curious about what goes on in my life outside MMOs, feel free to take a peek.

Fifteen Years of WoW Blogging

I haven't been very good at keeping track of milestones on this blog. Partially I think this is due to the fact that I'd only been posting for a little over three years by the time that I originally decided to step away from WoW. After this the blog lay fallow for a while, even if it never went completely quiet (I'd still find excuses to occasionally comment on BlizzCon announcements and stuff like that), and it seemed odd to celebrate so-and-so many years of blogging when I hadn't really done all that much for a good chunk of those years.

This year I remembered to make a note in advance though... that today, the blog turns fifteen years old. What a crazy ride it's been. I thought it would be fun to look back on those years a bit.

When I started this blog in July 2009, I was 26 years old, working a part-time job in a bakery and still living in Austria with my mother, though I was saving up to relocate to the UK and move in with my then-boyfriend (whom I'd met in WoW, of course) at the end of the year. World of Warcraft was probably close to the peak of its popularity with its Wrath of the Lich King expansion. Blogging was quite popular as well, and blogging about WoW was a solid niche.

I'd been reading and leaving comments on other people's WoW blogs for a while (many of which have sadly been lost to time since then), and finally figured that it was time to set up my own space to share my thoughts about the game. My very first post was about heroic Oculus, which was certainly... a choice. In those early days I had a lot of free time and not much else going on in my life, so I posted 12-20 times a month, which seems slightly insane to me now, looking back at it as a 41-year-old with a full time job.

It's hard to summarise all those posts in a few sentences as I wrote about a lot of different subjects. I guess one thing I can say is that my posts were perhaps slightly shorter on average than they are nowadays, and I didn't seem to have as many reservations about just how much "meat" there needed to be to a topic to make it worth its own little post. I wrote about random game mechanics I liked and disliked, good pugs and bad pugs (I spent so much time pugging dungeons back then), raiding with my guild, commented on WoW-related news, and talked about pieces of gear I liked. I basically just really enjoyed the game and almost every aspect of it. I wrote about day one of the dungeon finder, which honestly feels like something of a historical document at this point. At the end of the year, I went through with my plan to move to the UK.

I spent most of 2010 unemployed, and therefore continued to have a lot of time to play and blog, maintaining my cadence of publishing a post pretty much every other day. I continued to write about the same kinds of things, though I think if you look closely, you can see a slow decline in the amount of joy I expressed. There were fewer happy stories, and more rants about inconsiderate pugs and changes I didn't like. Plus my guild wasn't doing so well either. Incidentally, WoW did help me get a job in November though - that post was also the first time I heard of reddit, as someone linked it there and I went to investigate the source of that sudden traffic spike.

At the end of the year, the Cataclysm came, and my boyfriend's physical copy of the expansion got lost in the mail. (If I remember correctly, Amazon refunded him but then the parcel randomly showed up in May the next year or something.) The new content gave me a lot to talk about, something that lasted into 2011.

However, somehow things weren't quite the same. I still posted quite a lot that year, but 12 posts a month went from being my lower limit to being my upper one, with the average being closer to 8. I posted about lacking lustre in February, and nostalgia and doubts in July. When Mists of Pandaria was announced, I was decidedly underwhelmed. I stepped down from raiding and focused on my rated battleground team instead, which brought with it a brief revival of the joy I used to feel when playing. But then Star Wars: The Old Republic came out, and my interest in WoW just petered out. I only made 6 posts in 2012, the last of which was me declaring that I was done with the game and retiring the blog. Funny how that worked out, isn't it?

I did indeed not post for more than one and a half years after that, but things changed in my real life during that time. I broke up with my boyfriend (insert some snarky comment about how he was my "WoW boyfriend" so naturally I had dump him when I stopped playing) and started a relationship with the guy who I'm now married to. This included moving house and being unemployed again, which was not so great. As my new love scrambled to find ways to keep me from being too depressed by the circumstances, we ended up realising that he'd also used to play WoW at one point, and we rolled up a new pair of alts at the end of 2013 to check out the changes since both of us had last played. This ended up keeping us busy a few months into 2014, but it wasn't long until we both lost interest in the game again, so I only got a little over a dozen posts out of the whole adventure. In real life, I also got a full time job a couple of months later.

The next revival of the blog came from an unexpected source in mid-2015, as Nostalrius took the private server scene by storm and really made the whole concept of going back to Vanilla go mainstream. I actually never played there myself, as I rolled up on its much smaller competitor Kronos instead. That was super exciting for about a month or ten posts, but then my interest flagged again... though not so much due to lack of appeal this time and more a general lack of time to engage with multiple MMOs at once. At the end of the year I posted about BlizzCon (and shared a video by some medium-sized YouTuber I'd found, called Asmongold) and felt an urge to get back into the saddle on Kronos. I continued to post about my private server adventures at a rate of a couple of posts per month throughout 2016.

By 2017 my enthusiasm for that was starting to dry up again though. I'd left Kronos the previous year since I couldn't stand life at max level on a PvP server, and there always seemed to be something wrong with every other server I tried, so I only made about half a dozen posts throughout most of the year. That November of course was when Blizzard officially announced Classic. I made a few posts related to that in a flurry of initial excitement, and then set in for a long wait until Classic's release, only checking in with the blog occasionally throughout 2018.

The release of Classic in August 2019 is when I feel the blog was revived "properly", as that's when I started posting several times a month again (even if I only made half a dozen posts or less, it was still more and more regular than I'd been for the last seven years before that). I was all in on playing Classic on Horde side for more than six months, followed by me levelling a night elf on an RP server by myself, but I did start to feel the doldrums a bit by spring of 2020 as I didn't have any real friends left to play with.

Through a series of fortunate events, I ended up joining a pug raid in August, and found myself recruited into a great guild shortly afterwards. I also ended up checking out retail again for the first time in more than six years. Hanging out and raiding with my Classic guild - plus an increase in working from home time due to the pandemic - carried me through most of 2021, though things started to go a bit pear-shaped during Classic Burning Crusade as the vibe of the guild changed and Blizzard decided to soft-close the server I was on by enabling free transfers.

I got a few more months of enjoyment out of that expansion in 2022, but my guild eventually folded and when it became clear that there would be no BC era servers, I felt I was done with Classic as it was. I decided to try my luck on Classic era instead and once again fell in with a great guild, though I also kept playing retail on the side and got excited for the Dragonflight expansion.

Throughout 2023, I continued to post about my adventures on Classic era, mixed with posts about retail, which started to gain more ground. Changes at my work meant that raiding with my era guild didn't really work anymore and I had to give up on that, which provided even more of an incentive to focus on retail with my husband and some friends instead. I also tried out Hardcore when it launched, and got excited about Season of Discovery in December.

Sadly, that excitement didn't carry over into 2024 for more than two months, so since then it's mostly been retail with the occasional dip into one of the Classic modes sprinkled in here and there. We'll see where things go from here, but it's certainly been one hell of a journey.

I'm a Priest Again!

A common piece of advice given to new bloggers is to not make the name and theme of their blog too specific, because interests change over time and you'll want to be able to seamlessly expand the focus of your writing as required, without having anything feel out of place. I've always discarded the part about not being too narrow with your theme, because I've been happy to just make new blogs with different themes anyway... but there's something to the name thing I suppose.

I've never exactly regretted naming this blog "Priest with a Cause", but even aside from Google's initial confusion about whether my writings had anything to do with clergymen, it's sometimes felt a bit awkward as time went on. Back when I started this blog, it seemed impossible to fathom that I'd ever want to main anything other than a priest - my mains on both sides of the faction divide had been priests for years, after all. However, after I first quit the game in Cataclysm, things got weird:

• When I came back for a few months to check out Mists of Pandaria, I levelled a druid.
• Most of my time on Classic private servers was spent on levelling a paladin.
• Most of my time on official Classic has been spent maining a hunter.
• And during my casual adventures in retail, I've mostly been either a monk or a demon hunter.

In other words, it's actually been a full decade since this blog really lived up to its name, and that has sometimes bothered me at least a little. I tried my hand at playing priest here and there during my private server years, and I did eventually make a dwarf priest in Classic too, but she never really got levelled very much or quickly.

Until recently, that is. As I said in my last post, with all my previous max-level characters at 70, it was time for a new alt to rise up from the ranks, and my most progressed was actually my priest, so I kept working on her here and there. Soon my levelling buddy expressed interest in having her team up with his warrior once she got high enough for Outland. Warrior/priest, the original OTP... who could say no to that?

Originally I thought she was going to be shadow spec, like I was for most of original Burning Crusade. Back in the day shadow priests were the new hotness and everyone wanted one or more in their raid. I remember I was pretty much recruited specifically to be part of one of my guild's Kara teams because they "needed" a shadow priest for crowd control and other utility. And in the 25-mans we ideally always wanted to run with three shadow priests, one for the two ranged dps groups and one for the healers. I remember that people absolutely loved shadow priests, and I loved being popular.

In Classic BC though... things feel very different. Shadow priests still have their role to play, and nobody dislikes them, but it's much, much more low key than it used to be. People hardly cared about CC in Karazhan even at the start of Classic, and in 25-mans you apparently want exactly one shadow priest to power your arcane mages and that's it. Nobody minds if you want to bring a shadow priest to a dungeon or Kara, but if you're in the process of building a group and thinking about what classes you'd like to bring, you're likely to think of almost every other ranged dps before a shadow priest. That's just how it is, and I'm not entirely sure why.

I guess Classic's increased min-max culture has brought it into starker relief that shadow priests do less damage per second than other classes (back in original BC, with so many of us being bad, the waters remained muddy about these things for much longer), plus average dps is so much higher, leading to fights being over much more quickly, so that "running out of mana" (the main thing a shadow priest in the group helps to prevent) just isn't as much of a concern as it used to be.

I still levelled my little dwarf as shadow of course, because anything else would have seemed masochistic. She spent most of her time questing on her own after all, and when I did get into a dungeon group on occasion I could still both dps or heal as shadow spec. But as I approached Outland, I got thoughtful. My levelling buddy was going to go for a hybrid spec to be able to both tank or dps in levelling dungeons, but healing as shadow was likely going to get rough after level 60 in a group of levellers with average gear.

So when the time eventually came to start adventuring in Hellfire Peninsula, and step into Ramparts in specific, I hearthed to Ironforge, respecced to holy, and then asked for a summon back. And I didn't really mind. My night elf priest back in the day did something very similar, respeccing from shadow to holy in early Outland to focus on being the group healer, and it was fine. And even my troll priest, who was shadow throughout most of BC, ended up going holy when we suffered a healer shortage towards the end of the expansion.

What surprised me though, was that it wasn't just fine: I absolutely loved it. I've enjoyed healing on my paladin, but she only has two healing spells: big heal and small heal, and while that comes with its own challenges, especially in AoE situations, it's not exactly very mentally stimulating to decide which of the two to press next in any given situation.

But even though it's been so many years now since I played a priest at anything but lowbie level, it somehow still felt like coming home. So many different heals to keybind, and oh the fun of deciding which one to choose moment to moment. My brain and fingers even seemed to long to return to keybinds from a decade ago that I couldn't possibly remember on a conscious level, but I could still sense my fingers twitching towards certain combinations if that makes sense. I also instantly found myself missing Prayer of Mending and Binding Heal, abilities I won't get until later down the line but which I kind of automatically wanted to slot into my rotation already. It was honestly kind of surreal how familiar and comfortable it felt.

We blasted from level 60 to 62 within two days by mostly running Ramparts and Blood Furnace, and it just made me so happy it's silly. I'm not saying anything about wanting to change mains or anything at this point, but boy, do I really want to play this character more.

Priest can be rough to play solo because while the class can be specced and equipped to play "okay" on its own, it will still always pale in comparison to the power of a dedicated dps class, and if you've ever had a taste of the latter, it will always feel like a downgrade. But a priest's power to keep a group of friends alive (and in interesting ways!) is perhaps unmatched... it's just that the only way to really enjoy this is to have multiple friends that are reliably playing with you, ideally both a tank and dps to actually kill stuff. I went for a long time without having this sort of group setup... but I'm thinking I might finally be back in a place that makes it worth it.

Remember Rades

Yesterday I found out via Twitter that Rades of the Orcish Army Knife blog passed away this weekend. 

Okay, I’ve received his brother’s blessing to share this with Twitter at large. With deepest regrets, I’m sorry to tell you that the inimitable @_Rades passed away suddenly this weekend. To know him was to love him. He was the most creative, hilarious and kind person.

— Stacey (@_vidyala) August 30, 2021

He's still there on my blog roll, even though he stopped being a regular WoW blogger quite a few years ago. He never really quit or anything, he just moved on to other endeavours, only using his blog to occasionally post Onion-style news articles about whatever was going on in Azeroth at the time.

I can't say that I knew him well, but I knew him in that way bloggers often know each other... where they sometimes read each other's posts and occasionally leave a comment. Even if the majority of our interactions happened more than a decade ago now, I still thought of him fondly. Back in 2010 I nominated him for "best writer" for the Pink Pigtail Inn list of the year. (I wonder whether that still means anything to anyone other than Redbeard.) It's not a lot, but it's not nothing either.

So hearing the news of his passing made me sad. Death is always a gloomy affair, but even more so when the person affected was still very young and full of life. The "suddenly" in Vid's announcement indicates that there hadn't been any ongoing illness previously.

In a way I find these sorts of news even more profound when the person was a blogger. I think it's because with the way we put small parts of ourselves onto the page day after day in a way that feels quite permanent, it feels like we as people should also be around forever... even beyond that youthful sense of immortality that most of us have at some point whenever we manage to spend enough time not having to think about death.

But then something like this happens and the updates just... stop. It seems strange that his post from March this year mocking the Horde's talent for picking terrible warchiefs (as well as Activision-Blizzard's hiring choices... topical!) will now be the last thing to ever appear on Rades' blog. He was more active on Twitter, where his last update will now forever be a quip about (what I think was) his D&D campaign from a little over a week ago.

I suppose one bright spot is that with so much of what he did written down somewhere on the internet, he's left everyone with lots of tangible memories to go back to and remember him by. I went back through some of his old blog posts and it was quite a trip down memory lane. Like how his paladin alt Fabulor turned into this whole comic personality - on some posts I even found comments from my past self expressing my amusement.

I also enjoyed people on Twitter sharing their own favourite memories of him, showing off some of his post-WoW endeavours - from Vid reposting strips of From Draenor With Love, the webcomic the two of them created together for several years, to Anne Stickney highlighting his creations in Animal Crossing (also inspired by Fabulor, clearly) to a race track entirely made of beer signs he built in Wildstar.

It's clear that he was an awesome person beyond WoW and blogging, and I can only express my deepest condolences for his friends and family, for whom this must be a horrible loss. All the rest of us can do now is remember.

10 Years of WoW Blogging

Nogamara from Battle Stance celebrated his blog's tenth birthday today. Go and congratulate him, because he's awesome!

Reading that post also gave me pause though. 2009 to 2019... wait, didn't I start blogging on here in 2009 as well? The answer is yes: in fact, technically this blog's anniversary was about three months ago, and I completely forgot about it. (I have no idea why Parallel Context's tenth anniversary the other day didn't trigger a similar line of thought in my mind by the way... brains are weird.)

I suppose I didn't really think of celebrating this blog's anniversary at least in part because I've been completely focused on my Star Wars: The Old Republic blog for the last eight years, and tended to think of this one as lying dormant. However, Nogamara even counted two whole years of his blog's lifetime during which he didn't make a single post at all - meanwhile I somehow ended up putting out at least half a dozen entries per year even during years when I thought of myself as totally not playing WoW, so... I guess that counts as active in some way?

My first ever post was made on the 12th of July 2009 and called Some thoughts on heroic Oculus. I have to admit that, on re-reading that post, I chuckled at myself referring to it as "the o-word". Yes, I know you're not supposed to laugh at your own jokes, but me from ten years ago might as well be a different person and I think she's kind of funny sometimes, OK?

It's kind of amazing to me now just how prolific I was during the first one and a half years of this blog: I posted pretty much every other day! I was going to say something like "I have no idea how I had the time to do that" but then I remembered that I was unemployed for at least half of that time, so that probably helped.

Incidentally, WoW also played a role in eventually ending my unemployment - and that post was my introduction to reddit, since someone linked it there and gave me a crazy traffic spike.

Anyway, I remain impressed by the sheer amount of things I actually had to say about the game in late Wrath in particular. I kind of wish I'd started this whole blogging lark much earlier; then I would now have a detailed record of everything I thought during Burning Crusade as well.

Going through the archives of those early years, you can see the very slow and gradual decrease in my enjoyment of WoW. My second post on the blog was called Four reasons why I like pugs, and especially in the early days there were still quite a number of happy posts about grouping experiences, but over time the percentage of things that annoyed and frustrated me clearly grew.

I quit in March 2012 and had no intentions of coming back, until my now-husband unexpectedly gifted me the Mists of Pandaria expansion and some game time at the end of 2013, which had us going through a little levelling adventure together, until we both hit max level and quickly got bored again.

In 2015 I discovered the world of private servers during a burst of nostalgia, so then I wrote about my experiences on those at intervals over the next couple of years. Conveniently Blizzard announced WoW Classic mere weeks after I'd got fed up with yet another piece of private server drama, and that eventually led me to where I am now, blogging about WoW Classic. It feels crazy to think that a whole decade has passed in that time, because it certainly hasn't felt that long to me.

I would say something like "to the next ten years", but the thought of one day being able to say that I've blogged about World of Warcraft for twenty years is kind of terrifying in its own right. We'll just see how it goes, alright? Thanks for being along for the ride.

Vanilla WoW on Hold

Just in case anyone has been wondering why I haven't posted an update on here in over a month, I wanted to give a brief explanation for that. Basically, I found that it's impossible for me to play three MMOs at the same time, at least while also maintaining a level of involvement that I'm comfortable with. (That is to say that I'm not someone who's happy to play any MMO for two hours a week.) So something had to give, and WoW was the natural choice since it was "only" a solo project. In both SWTOR and Neverwinter I have other people coaxing me to log in, so those games couldn't be dropped as easily. (Well, that and SWTOR has been my main game for three and a half years now... it was more of a case of WoW vs. Neverwinter really.)

That doesn't mean that I've lost interest in the project or have completely given up on it. Based on experience I would expect my pet tank's interest in Neverwinter to decrease again after the summer, at which point I might be able to give that game a break and get back on the road to Stranglethorn Vale instead.

You Knew This Was Coming...

You could probably already guess from my lack of posting here as of late, but I thought that I should make it official: my current WoW sub ran out at the end of March and it looks like my pre-WoD stint with the game has come to an end. I enjoyed my time in Pandaria and it was nice to see Blizzard go back to a slightly more "worldly" zone and quest design on that continent, with optional mini quest hubs similar to the ones in Northrend, and more "hidden" surprises out in the world that were worth discovering. (That time my pet tank unexpectedly fished up a Lurker-lookalike rare mob out of a giant fishing pool for example was awesome.)

I didn't exactly run out of things to do, as I still had a bunch of goals that I could have worked towards - but I just wasn't drawn in enough to prioritise WoW over other things. By the end I was only logging in to do a certain amount of "chores" every day and eventually I asked myself: why am I doing this when I'd rather be doing something else? To what end? And that was that.

One statement I often see when people go back to WoW after a period of absence is how it feels like going home, or how they think that WoW is still the best MMO out there. For me, this simply wasn't the case. For me, the experience has been more alike to meeting someone who used to be your best friend in childhood, but while you're happy to see them, you've developed into completely different directions in adulthood and it's pretty much impossible to have a non-awkward conversation about anything that isn't "the good old days". Really, that's me and WoW in a nutshell.

For example, WoW just feels too fast for me these days, in pretty much every respect. It's like the player base's unofficial motto is "wherever you are and whatever you're doing, you would rather be somewhere else already". I'm not expecting people to listen to every NPC conversation they've heard ten times before, but there are... gradients. There was this one time I decided on a lark to queue for a random dungeon on my lowbie ret paladin. I got into the last part of Maraudon with a tank/healer duo in full heirlooms that were clearly working together and were absolutely racing to the end, AoEing trash pulls on the go and skipping all the bosses but the last one. It seemed like every time I paused to loot something, they were already a mile ahead again, to the point that I spent most of the dungeon just jogging after the rest of the group and not actually hitting anything. I'm sure many people would have considered that a great run. Lots of XP for little effort! Me? I absolutely hated it. In fact, I was so disgusted that I didn't even want to touch my paladin for a couple of days afterwards, as if she had pug cooties or something. Every game has both its clueless players and its jerks, but if even getting into a pug with competent and not unfriendly people results in something that feels like a horrible experience to me, then I'm clearly playing the wrong game.

I also think that, in general, my standards of what I expect from an MMO have become higher. There have always been things about WoW that annoyed me, but I used to accept them simply because I didn't know anything else. Nowadays I know that WoW is not the gold standard for everything. Depending on what matters to you in an MMO, there absolutely are other games out there that do certain things better. For example I know now that playing a healer doesn't have to mean living on a constant rollercoaster of massive nerfs and buffs and play style revamps. I've also had friendly commenters chime in with genuinely well-intended advice such as "you just need to watch some videos / read this guide" or "you can download this addon" when I expressed annoyance about simple aspects of the game, and all I could think is: why should I have to do that when I can play other games without needing that amount of outside resources to "make" it fun? (For what it's worth, I was happily addon-less during the last four months.)

All these are things that matter to me and that seem to pretty firmly put me outside of WoW's target demographic these days. I still plan on checking out Warlords of Draenor eventually, if nothing else to have a look at this alternate Outland and to check out my old characters' new looks after Blizzard revamps the character models. I'm just not sure if I'll bother right at launch.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by to comment in the last couple of months, both old bloggers who still had this site on their blogroll and new readers that found me by clicking a random link somewhere. It's been nice to chat.

The End of an Era

Today my WoW subscription runs out and I won't renew it. For many people that wouldn't be a big deal, and I'm sure there are a fair number of players around for whom it's completely normal to let their subscription lapse repeatedly and then just renew it again whenever they feel like playing. Not for me though. I've been playing this game pretty much continually for five and a half years. I was devoted to it, and paid Blizzard hundreds of euros for the privilege of continuing to play, but now that I'm done I think I'm done for good. I'm not good at enjoying things in half measures.

To be honest, it had been a long time coming. Basically, I've only been logging on for the rated battlegrounds for months anyway, and ever since I started playing The Old Republic, I'd find myself stalling even then, thinking, "I like my rated battleground buddies, but I'd rather be playing Star Wars to be honest."

However, social ties are extremely powerful. Just because I didn't want to let the team down, just because I have only limited ways to talk to some of my WoW friends outside the game, Blizzard got another couple of months worth of sub money out of me. I really do think they've got their priorities all wrong by not caring more about the social aspect of the game.

Anyway, eventually it became too frustrating regardless, and I decided that I wasn't going to keep paying for what had basically become a fancy chat client for me at this point. I only have so much free time to spend on MMO playing, and I'd rather be spending it on a game where I actually have fun with the game itself too.

So I made a goodbye post on our guild forums, which I tried to keep light-hearted and positive, emphasising that I still wanted to stay in touch on a personal level if at all possible. Most of the people who replied seemed to take it well, but some also seemed to take it harder than I expected - in writing it can be a bit hard to tell sometimes whether someone is completely serious or adapting a slightly tongue-in-cheek tone.

Two days after I made that post, our rated battleground team leader also threw in the towel. I've been assured that it's not my fault, and I could definitely see signs of his growing frustration long before I made my announcement, but it still left me feeling extremely awkward, as if I had personally gone and ruined the game for a whole bunch of other people as well.

Logging in one more time on my last evening also felt very strange. There was nothing different about the game of course, but knowing and thinking about how it's the last time makes all the difference in a person's head. I felt waves of nostalgia wash over me as I looked at all my characters, and I may even have become a little teary-eyed, soppy fool that I am. However, it was telling that when a friend asked me whether there was anything I wanted to do on my last day, I couldn't think of anything. Everything that I really used to love about WoW is in the past now.

I put most of my gold into the guild bank because I didn't see a point in having it all just sit there when it could at least be funding guild repairs for a few weeks or something. I didn't delete any of my characters however. Never say never.

Since I couldn't think of anything else that I wanted to do, I just sat down on a rock in Nagrand and chatted a bit. As it was getting late and I found myself wondering what would be the best time to log out, a call went out in general chat from a little orc who was looking for help with the Ring of Blood. We grouped up and I healed him through it; he thanked me and continued on his merry little way. It felt like an appropriate point to stop, after having brightened a stranger's day a little bit.

Since I won't be playing anymore, I'll also be retiring this blog, though I'll still continue to read and comment on some WoW blogs at least for a while I guess. Thanks to everyone who took the time to read any of my posts and shared their thoughts on my writings over the years. I'll now be adventuring in a galaxy far, far away.

My nominations for the Piggie Awards 2011

Don't know what the Piggies are? Go read this. Only a few more days left to get nominations in too, so if you were planning to add yours and haven't done so yet, it's time to get cracking! In fact, I haven't seen any other nominations posts yet this year, but maybe people are just sending them in by e-mail (I hope).

The Melting Pot is trying to spice things up a bit this year by accepting nominations for all MMOs, not just WoW, which sounds like a sweet idea in theory, but I'm a bit concerned how well it will work out in practice - after all WoW is still by far the biggest game out there, so it's likely to have an edge simply due to the amount of players that are familiar with it. I'm not sure how much enthusiasm there will be for including other MMOs in nominations. Not to mention that I'm not sure all MMOs are equally comparable... but we'll see how it works out. Myself, I'll mostly stick to WoW since that's what I know, and maybe make the odd point about SWTOR here or there where it strikes me as relevant.

Best raid instance

This one is easy for me and my vote goes hands down to Blackwing Descent. It didn't really have anything to truly amaze like other great raid instances of the past, but it was definitely my favourite of Cataclysm's offerings. It recreated some of that old school Blackrock atmosphere, the difficulty was nicely tuned in my opinion and all the bosses were interesting in their own way.

Least successful raid instance

My first instinct is to say Firelands, simply because that seemed to be the raid where most people had something to complain about this year, whether it was the bosses being too dance-y, too hard, or too easy after the big nerf.

However, I've said in the past that the truly unsuccessful raids, in my opinion anyway, are not necessarily the ones that people complain about, but those that they don't even bother with. In that category I think the winner should be Throne of the Four Winds. It being an instance with only two bosses that felt kind of out of the way of everywhere, even with portals to Uldum available in the cities, and crappy loot with random stats, I got the impression that few people ever went there once they had killed Al'akir... or even if they never killed him, they simply might've forgotten about it completely. (I know our raid group always scheduled raids for either Blackwing Descent or Bastion of Twilight in tier eleven, Throne was a complete afterthought that only came up whenever someone whined about wanting to go because they had never even seen a Conclave kill.)

Best small-group instance

I think Cataclysm has had some pretty nice five-mans in general, but this is where I'd like to give a vote to SWTOR's The Esseles, which I've seen people compare to the original Deadmines elsewhere - and it certainly gave me that same epic feeling that I got from the old Defias hideout back in the day.

Least successful small-group instance

Like with the least successful raid, this kind of depends on your definition of success. The Zuls got everyone riled up with their repetitive valor grind, but Halls of Origination sticks in my mind as "that instance where most people don't even want to bother killing half the bosses". A shame too.

Most longed for instance

I think the Dragon Soul five-mans were the most longed-for, simply because people wanted to have an excuse to get out of the Zulroics.

Silliest gold sink

Larísa gave this award to the Sparkle Pony last year, and in line with that I would give it to the Winged Guardian this year. The whole craze about store pets and mounts reminds me a lot of fashion trends in real life, which are something that I don't care for either.

Biggest game addition / improvement

I think the single biggest addition to WoW this year has without a doubt been the raid finder. However, since I'm still not convinced that this will actually be an improvement to the game in the long run, I'd nominate transmogrification instead - something nice that finally allows people to give their characters some individuality again, and there really is no downside.

In a more general sense, I think that SWTOR's more interactive quests and group dialogues have really made a difference to how people will perceive questing in the future.

Best quest

I can't think of a single quest that stood out above all others, but Silverpine Forest as a whole has been rewritten in a very compelling and interesting way.

Ugliest new piece of outfit

Probably hunter tier 11. There is trying to be creative and then there's trying to pass off a murloc suit as epic armour. Priest tier 11 with its shoulder bird baths was pretty awful as well though, especially since up until then priest sets had never been truly ugly.

Favourite non combat pet

I loved Mr. Grubbs and his silly bouncing when I picked him up in the Plaguelands while levelling new alts! Though an honourable mention has to go to the Lil' XT that was gifted to me by a guildie and that finally provided me with an easy way of getting rid of annoying train sets.

Most charming games company employee

I listened to a long interview with one of the people behind SWTOR the other day, but unfortunately I lost the link to it so I'm not even entirely sure what the guy's name was. I do think it was Daniel Erickson, the lead writer, and he sounded like an utterly charming fellow.

Best podcast

The Instance continues to amuse and entertain me at a level that is unparalleled by any other podcasts I've tried. I don't always agree with everything they are saying, but it's refreshing how the hosts always remain both positive and professional.

Most memorable blog post

Are 400 Pull Kills Good Design? Are They Fun? by Beru.

Most noticed blogger breakthrough

Stubborn from Sheep the Diamond. He made his entrance sneakily by leaving thoughtful comments all over the place at first, and if you then clicked on his name you'd find an even more thoughtful blog, written in an interesting and unique style.

Most solid content provider

Nils from Nils' Blog. He just can't stop talking, but I'm very grateful for that because it gives me new things to read all the time!

Most hugged blogger

Probably the Gold Queen after that horrible ordeal she went through one and a half months ago.

Best writing

I would give this one to Stubborn as well, because he really has a way with prose. I don't think I've read a single post of his that didn't make me crack a smile at a pun or unusual turn of phrase. We need more teachers in the blogosphere...

Biggest controversy

I always suck at remembering these for some reason, though I always follow them with interest while they are current. Probably the Mists of Pandaria announcement.

Most appreciated announcement

That SWTOR wouldn't launch with a dungeon finder... *cough*

MMORPG Company of the Year

I want to say Bioware, because regardless of how SWTOR turns out in the long term, they've delivered a very smooth launch for a highly anticipated and so far very fun game.

Most “Er… what?” moment in MMOs this year

The announcement of Mists of Pandaria.

People’s Choice: Blog Post

Same as above.

People’s Choice: Games Company

Same as above.

Since some people asked for it...

Any further thoughts I have on SWTOR will now go here. Enjoy!

A Gnome's Life

Every now and then the WoW blogosphere is good for some in-game laughs. First there was Single Abstract Noun, the bloggers' guild (is that still going?), then there were the Real ID heroics (which I didn't write a separate post about, but I did participate), and now the latest craze are gnome clones, originally inspired by a nostalgic post by Alas.

Since I had yet to try out the new gnome starter area anyway, I decided to join in the fun as a gnome clone "impostor" (copying the look but rolling up a warrior, so I won't be able to be a fully armoured clone). While I've been playing a lot of alts this expansion, I mostly used already existing characters that had simply been sitting around at level twenty or so pre-Cataclysm; I haven't actually done a lot of levelling from one to ten. But holy crap, Nils wasn't kidding when he said that those first ten levels were hardcore!

I started off being confused by what was only the second or third quest in the gnome starter area. After I'd just made my way out of a gnome refugee camp, I was told to save some more survivors that couldn't make it on their own. "Okay, that makes sense!" I thought and went back to save all those injured gnomes that were lying on the floor. Nope, couldn't target them or they came up as "invalid target". Turns out that I was supposed to "save" some perfectly healthy and only slightly scared gnomes that were standing around outside. O-kay?

Not much later I was told to ask for a teleport to the surface. Why teleport when there's a perfectly serviceable elevator right next to me? Fortunately a vague memory reasserted itself to tell me that taking the lift would not be a good idea before I could do anything foolish.

At level three a warrior quest rewarded me with a Very Light Sabre. Yes, I know... cheap joke. But I really loved it!

In a cave full of troggs I had my first death as early as level... was it four or five? A rogue in full heirlooms had just mowed everything down in front of me, and then all the mobs respawned at once and I was buried under a pile of troggs. It's as if the game wanted to teach me early on that the presence of other players was only going to cause me headaches.

Getting Victory Rush at level five increased my survivability a lot, though I learned quickly that its use is limited when it comes to casters. Nothing like dying at the feet of the second Frostmane Seer that's attacking you a mere second before you manage to run over and hit it. That was death number two. On a side note, I'm impressed that the Frostmane trolls have survived as long as they have, considering that they appear to live on nothing but weed and fight by throwing snowballs at you.

Then there was the cave with the wendigos. I managed to overlook one of the quest NPCs near the entrance and (unnecessarily) went all the way to the back of the cave in search of him. However, I found something else there, a rare! Acutely aware of my vulnerability, I made sure to clear the mobs around him before attacking, but once I charged him I found to my dismay that he still had quite a lot of health relative to my puny damage output. So I died, again.

Since it had been quite a close affair, I immediately ran back in to try again, and this time managed to get him down with literally one hitpoint left on my own character. More exciting than any raid boss kill these days if you ask me!

I had one more death when I was asked to kill a yeti called Vagash. Non-elite, no adds... no biggie, right? Well, maybe if you have heirlooms, but as a warrior in whites he kicked my arse, and in a very thorough fashion. I went back to my trainer to pick up Thunder Clap, which I hadn't done yet, in hopes that this would help - though I'm not sure it would have, considering how I hadn't even come close to killing him before. Fortunately I was saved from any further embarrassment as I ran into a random gnome priest upon my return to the cave, who tentatively threw a heal on me and looked at me in what I interpreted as a hopeful manner. We grouped up and it was easy peasy. I couldn't help but wonder whether he hadn't got his arse kicked before as well.

Then I hit level ten, picked up prot spec, and the next cave I went into seemed to hold no threat to me at all. I also dinged eleven before I even knew it. I guess the really exciting levels are over. Still, I'm looking forward to seeing where the project as a whole goes.

On the whole, this starter zone was amazingly fun! The only thing that marred the experience ever so slightly for me was the how-to-use-the-flight-master quest line, which still told me that I couldn't fly anywhere where I hadn't been before (flat out not true anymore), and the quest text couldn't seem to decide on what exactly it was that I was transporting for the dwarves, as it alternated between cleavers and mining picks every other sentence. Okay, it's kind of fun to joke about dwarves cooking with mining picks, but really? That's one of those things that I would have expected them to have fixed nearly a year after release.

The voices around us

I was going to write a post about the joys of pugging today, but after a Zul'Gurub run on my hunter left me fuming due to an extremely patronising druid who was tanking in cloth, I felt that I wasn't exactly in the right mindset for the subject anymore.

I've finally managed to catch up with all the blog posts that people have made during my absence, and this post by Rohan was an interesting inspiration to me. In it he talks about how one's impression of the state of the blogosphere is affected by personal experience. If you read a lot of blogs that have shut down recently, you might be tempted to assume that this is what's happening to blogs everywhere. You might also conclude that WoW as a whole is dying. Now, Blizzard did report losing a fair chunk of subscribers lately, but by itself that's hardly a sign of the incoming WoW apocalypse just yet.

Nonetheless a lot of people seem to agree that Cataclysm has done more bad than good for the game. Wait, who are these "lot of people"? Looking at my blog roll, it has half a dozen blogs at the bottom that have stopped updating, and at least another half dozen that still update frequently but whose owners have stopped playing WoW and regard it with a critical eye these days. Nonetheless I still enjoy reading all of them, and often find myself nodding my head in agreement with whatever points they make. Yeah, the game has really gone downhill...

Except then something funny happened: I discovered The Instance. Okay, "discovered" is a bit of an exaggeration as I had been vaguely aware of its existence before, but now I actually started listening to it. And wow, what a different picture of WoW did I get from that. I guess it's easy to love something that doesn't cost you any money (the hosts seem to have been given a lot of free play time by Blizzard), but still, their enthusiasm sounds very genuine. It's not that they are never critical of anything the developers do, but on the whole they spend a lot more time being excited about the parts of the game that they love than focusing on what bothers them. And you know what? I agreed with them as well. WoW is great!

But wait, which is it? I can't agree with both of them, can I? It certainly made me think about where my own opinions come from. Obviously I'm not just blindly following whatever someone else says, but I am pretty empathic, so it's generally easy for me to identify with different points of view. And it made me wonder what kind of voices I'm listening to as of late. Am I really thinking that the game is less fun than it used to be or am I just automatically nodding along when others say so?

When I started reading WoW blogs, they were all pretty positive and fun. However, over time a lot of writers that I follow have become disillusioned with the game. I'm still reading them because I enjoy their writing style, but it does make me wonder whether I'm not sucking some of my own enjoyment out of the game by spending too much time reading about how much things suck in the eyes of certain bloggers. Wouldn't my experience be enhanced by reading blogs that remind me of the things that are fun?

I'll have to be on the lookout for some more enthusiastic blog writers and podcasters. I'd like to have some sort of balance on my blog roll, so that if I ever get truly bored of WoW, I want it to be because of my own feelings, and not because I let other people's negative opinions of the game affect me too much.

Revenge of the search terms

Been a while since I did one of these, and people have found their way to this blog with quite a few, erm, "interesting" search terms since then.

big tongues - I do hope that whoever came here for these was looking for articles about the Oracles in Sholazar Basin, and not... you know, other things.

can a priest be your friend - Of course! I'll be your friend!

cast into a pit of bees wow pug dungeon blog - I think you're looking for the Murloc Parliament. I wouldn't call them a "pug dungeon blog", but they certainly cast people into their bee pit if they piss them off.

days of thunder headlamp roleplayer us for master toast given here - ... Excuse me?

dead kings vs druids - My money would be on the druids simply for not being dead.

dragon age bad pug - A multiplayer mode for Dragon Age would certainly be interesting... or you could consider the entire adventuring party in it a bad pug I guess, considering how much they bitch at each other at times.

dungeon finder bang script - I got up to "bang" and then my brain shut down.

get gabbin or get going - Shut up! Nobody talks like that!

got loremaster now what - Now you can pat yourself on the back for a job well done and then focus on a different part of the game... or unsubscribe. I'm kind of surprised you have to ask...

heroic gnomer - Ack no, don't give them ideas!

how come silithus wasn't shattered - Have you ever been to the place? It's all sand and rocks, hard to make that look any worse.

how to stop ranting - Tell me if you find out!

is there any way for a holy priest to not be so squishy - Yes, it's called "rerolling paladin".

jaina and sylvanas slash - The sad thing is, I'm almost intrigued. I can hardly think of two women in the Warcraft universe who could possibly be any less friendly with each other.

monasteryporn - ... Of course I'm making it worse now by reposting this here.

my priest doesn't speak english - Neither does mine, but she's fluent in Troll and Orcish.

orgrimmar has changed and i have no idea where to go anymore - Aw, I know the feeling. Don't be disheartened; see it as an opportunity to explore the game as if you were a newbie again. Just ask the guards for information, or even general chat if you're desperate. You'll quickly find that many important facilities are actually more convenient to access than ever before.

proxy lama - Hm, that's one kind of llama I don't know. Will one of these do instead?

stop ranting - No!

taelan big butt - Hang on, are we talking about the same Taelan here? The son of Tirion Fordring that joined the Scarlet Crusade and died tragically after he finally turned his back on them? Why in the world are you concerning yourself with the size of his rear?

the lich king killed my computer - The bastard! With any luck he'll resurrect it as more powerful than before though.

varian and jaina get together spoilers - Won't someone think of the poor people looking at their Google Analytics? Maybe they don't want to be spoiled?

when are the most people online in my guild? - Do you really think Google will know the answer to that?

zul'farrak heroic - Now this I could get behind. Hmm, heroic pyramid event...

Fun with Google Analytics

This is going to be one of those boring posts about blogging itself, so if that's not your kind of thing, feel free to skip. (Also, apologies to anyone who might have seen this appear and then disappear again - I noticed a big factual error upon posting that made me unpublish again until I had straightened it out.)

I installed Google Analytics on this blog about a year ago, because I wanted to know just how many people were reading me and where they were coming from. This is the one feature I envy Wordpress users for: the fact that when someone links to them it gets displayed in a comment to the post in question, so everyone can see it right away and the link love can be shared. If you get a sudden influx of traffic as a Blogger user, you can only go "bwuh?"

Anyway, Google revealed that I got between fifty and a hundred hits per day for most of the year, going up very slightly right after I got linked in places but overall staying around that level. I'm quite happy with that, as I don't think I could deal with a larger audience to be honest. Even the few times when I got more than ten comments to some of my posts often made me feel awkward more than anything. Blogging may be a public endeavour but there is still a certain illusion that you're only talking to a limited audience and it's awkward when that gets broken. It's like performing in a small theatre and then finding out that there was a tv crew in the audience that broadcast the whole thing nationwide. Oops.

Or to use another example, it's like inviting some friends over for a fun evening, except that they then also ask some of their mates to come along, who then ask more of their own in turn - and you end up with a house full of people you don't even know, wondering what the hell just happened. If you're unlucky there might even be some unsavoury subjects in the crowd - though I've been really lucky in that regard, fortunately. Even though I allow anonymous commenting and don't even have Captcha-ing turned on I think I've had to delete less than ten comments during my entire blogging career.

Anyway, I did get a couple of traffic spikes from links and thought them somewhat amusing to be honest, mostly because the biggest spikes didn't necessarily come from the sites from which I'd expected it. Let's observe the following graph (click to embiggen):

Point A marks my first tiny traffic spike back in February (288 hits), when Alison Robert included a link to a post of mine about druid vs. paladin tanking in one of her Shifting Perspectives articles. While I got quite excited about this, I was also surprised that it wasn't worse, considering the comments I'd seen from other people who got linked on WoW Insider. Then again, the link was only part of a side note, as opposed to being featured in a major "look at this" way.

After that things were quiet for a long time, until Larísa linked to my post about saying goodbye to tree form (point B, 704 hits). WoW, the Pink Pigtail Inn sure has a lot of readers that are willing to click links!

Point C came completely out of the blue to me, as I hadn't noticed any links on any of the blogs I usually read, so where the hell did those 1,386 hits come from all of a sudden? This is where Google Analytics was really helpful, because it led me to a site called reddit (which I hadn't heard of before I have to admit) where a kind reader had shared a link to the post about my WoW-flavoured job interview.

Point D surprised me with a massive 2,500 hits after my first impressions of the Shattering were featured on WoW Insider's Daily Quest column. Ah, so that's what it's like to be "properly WoW Insidered"!

At that point I thought that it couldn't possibly get any crazier... until Point E (4,019 hits) was created three days ago after Tam linked me in one of his posts. Forget WoW Insider, clearly Righteous Orbs is where the publicity is at! Except that upon closer inspection I realised that I had actually been linked by WoW Insider again on the same day and only a couple of hits actually came via RO. I bet Tam must be relieved that he hasn't outgrown WoW Insider yet.

My picks for the Pink Pigtail Inn list of 2010

Larísa is once again looking for input for her annual roundup of what was good and interesting in WoW - if you haven't seen it yet, the post is here. I always love these; finally an awards "show" that I can care about!  

1. Best raid instance 

Unfortunately there isn't really much to choose from in this category, is there? We pretty much raided Icecrown Citadel all year round. It was good for a while, but it was annoying and tedious for even longer. 

2. Least successful raid instance 

Again, this one is pretty easy. Like I said last year when I nominated the Eye of Eternity, the least successful instances aren't actually those that people complain about, it's those that they don't even care to go into. There was only one such raid that fit that bill this year: the Ruby Sanctum. I think it's a bit of a shame actually because Halion wasn't a terrible boss. He just felt kind of out of place, both in terms of lore and in terms of difficulty. Then again, a small part of me is tempted to nominate Naxxramas. People raided Karazhan right until WOTLK came around, but who bothered to visit Kel'thuzad anymore this year? 

3. Most longed for instance 

I'm finding it hard to pick anything here because we spent all year longing for Cataclysm. I don't think anyone really longed for Ruby Sanctum to come out (and if they did, they were probably disappointed quite quickly). I suppose some of us were longing for the Ulduar days, but Ulduar already won this category last year. Personally I think I mostly longed for the Black Temple, remembering what it was like for raiding to truly hold my interest until the very end of an expansion.  

4. Silliest gold sink 

I already nominated them last year but since they didn't win I can do so again... Mechano-Hogs! Not only are they ludicrously expensive, their sound effects are annoying as hell. I can listen to cars driving outside my window all day, thanks, I don't need that to invade my fantasy world... Of course now it's even worse because with the introduction of goblins to the Horde, poor people can get access to noisy vehicles too. /sigh  

5. Biggest addition to the game  

I don't think the dungeon finder counts because it was already introduced last year and it just doesn't feel new to me anymore. So I would say the 4.0 revamp of all classes and their talent trees.  

6. Best quest 

Have there even been any new quests this year other than the breadcrumb quest for Ruby Sanctum? I think I'll have to abstain from that one because all I can think of right now are the shiny new Cataclysm quests.  

7. Ugliest tabard  

I'll probably have to agree with someone else's nomination of the Loremaster's Colors here. The idea with the exclamation mark was nice and all, but the end result just looks ugly. 

8. Favorite non combat pet 

On a side note, I was rather baffled when immediately upon release of the Shattering, half the blogs I read updated with nothing but squeeing about some new non-combat pets. O...kay? The whole world has changed and that's the thing everyone's most excited about? Am I the only female player who doesn't really care about them? I mean, they look kind of cute but I never even remember to keep any of them out anyway... My personal favourite this year would have to be a tie between the Netherwhelp and Lurky because a guildie gifted me a BC collector's code, which meant a lot to me. But since those two are not from one, but two expansions ago by now, I'll vote for the Curious Wolvar Pup instead. Nothing beats a pet with a story. I was rather disappointed that Blizzard never reset the Dalaran orphan quest this year so I couldn't get the Oracle Hatchling as well.  

9. Biggest community controversy 

You know, I couldn't actually think of something for this category right away, until I saw someone else bring up Real ID on the forums. Oh right, that thing where I was in the very small minority that wasn't terribly upset; that would explain why I forgot about it... definitely caused the biggest hubbub though. 

10. Most charming Blizzard employee 

I haven't really been keeping up with what the blues say and do, so I can't comment on this one.  

11. Best podcast 

Blue Plz! is the only one I listen to with any regularity, but the Obscurecast seems pretty nice as well.  

12. Biggest blog facelift 

Murloc Parliament, without a doubt! I'm not sure if everyone even remembers who she was before...  

13. Most memorable blog post 

I've read a lot of good posts this year but can't think of a single best one to pick.  

14. Most noticed blogger breakthrough 

Syl from Raging Monkeys. Yes, I know she's got co-bloggers... but it was mostly her that I noticed commenting on other people's blogs when they'd only just started up and I've seriously never seen a blog skyrocket in popularity so quickly. That's what I call successful networking!  

15. Most solid content provider 

I'd like to nominate Klepsacovic from Troll Racials are Overpowered for this one. Sometimes he strays into crazy rambling territory, but he does update more frequently and more reliably than anyone else I read. That's worth a lot, especially on a quiet Sunday afternoon.  

16. Most hugged blogger 

Again I take inspiration from another blogger and cast my vote with Pike from Aspect of the Hare. The outpouring of support when she brought up having financial problems recently was quite impressive. Though not as impressive as that in response to her favourite pet's model getting changed... Hunters. They like to stick together.  

17. Hottest blogosphere topic 

The whole feminism debate. There was some good and thought-provoking stuff in there, but it went on for so long and got so heated after a while that I just wanted it to go away eventually. "Frostheimgate" or whatever you want to call it would probably make a pretty decent runner-up though. And if bronze medals were to be given out as well, I'd give one to the whole "harrassing bad roleplayers" affair early in the year.  

18. Best writer 

Tamarind won last year... can I nominate his co-writer Chastity then? If not I'll go with Rades from Orcish Army Knife. I can't wait to see Larísa's own picks, she always has interesting thoughts on them as well.

Return of the search terms

More strange search terms that led people to this blog:

cap the amount of death knights allowed in one pvp match - You know, I could totally get on board with that, especially for the 50-59 bracket. I shudder to think back to my shaman's Warsong Gulch experiences in that level range...

celestial steed floppy legs - I believe the word that I used to describe the sparkle pony's legs was "spindly", but yeah, I agree that something about its legs looks off.

drakes oculus cannot dismount - Well, there is this button with a big red arrow on the right side of the vehicle interface; pressing that should dismount you. That said, I have heard of cases where it bugged out for people and pressing the button seemed to do nothing. Puggers that I ran with seemed to be able to solve this problem by either reloading their user interface (/console reloadui) or by relogging.

eu stormscale jerks - Now, now, no need to be so harsh. As my almost scientific observations of pug composition showed, Stormscalers simply like to pug a lot in general, which is why you seem to meet more rude players from that server - simply because there are a lot more of them around. Don't judge them too harshly.

humminghippies.com - I had to go and have a look at that website after spotting this search term, but it only has a front page that seems to have been under construction for several months and nothing else. Just going by the overall look of it, I'm guessing that it's probably meant to be about proper hippies though. I'm only a hippie in the eyes of certain rage-quitting tanks.

lalapala - Okay, I made fun of a guy with that name once, but am I missing something here? Is he someone famous? Or is this actually a proper word in a language I don't know? I'm not sure why people would be googling for this repeatedly...

lfg tfa/cit - Assuming this wasn't meant to go into general chat instead of Google, I'm guessing that people searching the internet for this are trying to find out what that acronym actually stands for. It means "looking for group for Threat From Above/Battle Before The Citadel" (though on my server they tend to shorten the latter to bbc instead). These are daily group quests in Icecrown that become available once you've become a champion of your home city at the Argent Tournament.

old guild feels betrayed - Yes, yes, we do. Especially if you've been raiding with us for a year or longer and then just leave without as much as a word of goodbye. Hmph.

pukaja sport day - Pukaja is the name of my tauren hunter, and upon reading these words I couldn't help picturing her in a tennis outfit - something that makes for a very bizarre mental image, let me tell you. My curiosity was piqued enough that I investigated a little further and from the looks of it pukaja is actually a word or a name in a language that I don't speak. Anyone happen to know anything more about that? I think it's kind of ironic, since her first incarnation was called Pünktchen (German for "little dot"), but when I mentioned this to a friend he told me that it was against the naming rules for roleplaying servers, so I deleted and re-created her with what I considered a completely random name instead. Seems there is no escaping those pesky real words.

running around zul drak and sometimes all objects disappear and and i only saw the main frame of the terain i hope this is only a 1 time error - Holy convoluted search term, Batman! I really don't know what else to say to that.

tail sticking out near the drakkari colossus / elemental room in gundrak - Well spotted, though it looks more like a giant snake to me. One of my friends pointed this out to me during one of our earliest Gundrak runs and we got all excited about what it might be, but there's nothing in the game that gives us any further information about it. I've only heard vague speculation about how it might have been part of a scrapped plot for Zul'Drak involving a raid instance, but nothing official.

what is the weekly raid quest this week - I really hope that this one was meant to go into general chat instead, because Google isn't going to tell you the answer to that one, buddy.

Belated blogday to me!

So, I realised the other day that I missed my blog's one year anniversary. This is sadly typical and perfectly in line with how I treat birthdays and anniversaries in real life as well: I notice them on the calendar or otherwise remember them about three weeks in advance, at which point I go "oh right, I need to do something about that", but about three days before the actual event it will suddenly escape my mind and I won't remember again until at least a week later, by which point it will be too late to say anything without feeling at least slightly embarrassed. "I swear, I didn't forget, I just... remembered at the wrong time!"

I thought about just letting it slide in this case, as I so often do, but then I figured: hey, this is my blog, why would I be embarrassed about being late to congratulate myself? So here we go. Happy blogday to me! And I'm only two weeks late.

It's been an interesting year for sure. You see, I've been keeping a personal blog for over six years now, but it's never served any other purpose than to record stuff that happened in my life so I would remember it later, and to give my friends a way to stay in touch. It doesn't have the aim to entertain, so my writing there is often trite and I don't care.

With this blog, the moment I poured my thoughts on heroic Oculus on the web page, I knew that I meant for other people, complete strangers, to read it, so I tried to make sure to have an actual subject and a proper structure for every article. And then, once a few people actually started commenting, that created new dynamics as I began to take their opinion into account for future articles. Not to imply that I write purely for my readers - it's still about getting particularly persistent thoughts out of my head more than anything else - but I can't imagine writing something for a public audience and not caring about their reactions at all. It's a wondrous little world, that of a writer.

According to Google Analytics I seem to have an average of about a hundred page views per day. I did get linked by WoW.com once, in this article by Allison Robert, but it was a class-specific link in a class-related article, mentioned as a side note in a whole sea of links, so it didn't result in any noticeable craziness other than a traffic spike on that day, and I'm glad. I look at the kind of stuff that larger blogs often have to deal with and I'm really rather grateful that I'm not attracting that kind of attention.

Still, I'm happy with the progress I've made, trying to write more coherently while also posting at least once every couple of days. I hope I'll be able to keep it up. And thanks to my readers for reading; it's nice to know that some people get enjoyment out of looking at the things I write.

One of those search term posts

A lot of bloggers I know occasionally post about funny search terms that brought visitors to their site, and I have to admit that even if they sometimes go slightly off-topic, I love those posts. Vidyala's interpretation of "you've got mail sfk" was an instant classic for example. So I went to Google Analytics and had a look at what brought people to my own blog. Unfortunately most of it was pretty boring in fact - who'd have thought that people would look for information about priests, healing and paladin tanking here? Crazy. There were a few search terms that I considered funny or interesting though, so without further ado:

arthas jokes - Why did Arthas cross the road? To cull the people on the other side of course. Sorry, I was never good at telling jokes. Let me know if you've got any good ones!

azshara how to get back up the cliffs - I guess that's a question that all of us have asked ourselves at one point or another. I don't know, maybe there are some secret paths somewhere, but if there are I never found them myself either. My personal recommendation is that if you fall off in the southern part of the zone, swim around to the Bay of Storms and get on the beach there. There are a couple of paths up through the naga-infested ruins. If you fall down somewhere up north, the slope at the eastern tip of that part of the landmass is quite gentle, so you can walk back up there, or you can swim into the bay as well.

azshara instances - Alas, there aren't any. Not as of now anyway, who knows what Cataclysm might bring. There are a couple of instance portals right now, but they don't work. The ones in the southern half of the zone were supposedly meant to lead to a battleground that never actually went live, and there's a mysterious portal to the Timbermaw Hold up north as well. When I was an ickle noob I was told that it would be a raid one day, but considering you become friendly with the furbolgs it could have been meant to become a city too I guess.

don't understand the ending of the arthas fight - If you've ever run Halls of Reflection and actually listened to the long intro with Jaina or Sylvanas, one of the things that Uther's ghost says is that there'll always have to be a Lich King. So that's why, uh... that stuff happens at the end of the fight. And that weird flamey dude? That's Bolvar Fordragon, who used to be an important Alliance NPC and then got poisoned and roasted at the Wrathgate (if you remember the video), though it seems he got better. If you actually know all this but still think that it makes no sense in context... let me just tell you that you're not alone.

i love the oculus - I don't really, but I don't mind it either these days, and I think a lot of people have softened up in their attitude towards the instance after it was nerfed so many times. Either way you're not alone, I even had a guildie or two who were in love with the instance from day one - though we all considered them weirdos at the time.

where will everyone afk in cataclysm - Good question. I don't know if they'll make a new Dalaran in the sense of a new city with lots of portals to everywhere. Generally I guess people will hang out in whichever major city ends up being closest to the new raids and dailies.

who killed the lich king - I did! So did a lot of other people though, and you can kill him too if you work hard enough. The Lich King is for everyone.

why did pally cross the road - To get to the Uther side? Nah, still suck at jokes.