Six signs that you haven't played this alt in a LONG time

1. Your action bars have some very distinctive holes in them.

I'm not talking about missing skills that you're used to having on your main, but about finding holes where you know you used to have abilities on this character. Blizzard rarely removes spells, but even when they rework one (which they do reasonably often) it often gets taken off your bars and you'll have to manually put it back. A holey action bar is usually a good indicator that the class has probably gone through not one, but several revamps since you last played it.

2. You're missing skills that you really should have.

For example you might take your level fifty-two warrior to the warrior trainer just in case and find that she offers you an ability that's trainable at level six these days. But you never had it. Awkward.

Even better is logging onto a character in her thirties and realising that you don't have the basic riding skill or a mount, because you haven't played her since level twenty mounts were introduced. Bonus points if you're on the other end of the world from your race's riding trainer and have a long walk ahead of you while people ten levels below you zoom past you on their spiffy mounts.

3. You have lots of glyph slots and they are all empty.

Meh, last time I played this character, glyphs didn't even exist! Depending on your class it can take you a long time to actually notice this one from my experience, unless you have a frequently used ability that gets changed noticeably by a glyph (like a resto druid who is suddenly surprised to see swiftmend actually consume a HoT again).

4. You have a completely inappropriate seasonal buff on you.

A guildie recently helped me out on one of his rogue alts... and he was a turkey, in late summer. Most of my own Alliance alts have had fire festival fortitude on them for years now.

5. You have quests in your quest log that don't even exist anymore.

Daily battleground quests, daily Northrend dungeon quests, you name it. One of my Alliance alts had one of the last steps of the old Onyxia attunement chain in her log for ages.

6. When you look at your achievement panel, it tells you that you did a lot of impossible stuff today.

So, you've only just logged on, but apparently you've also run Uldaman, acquired a coin of ancestry and opened a Winter Veil present. All in October. Yes, you haven't logged on in so long that the achievement system introduced in WOTLK is only now catching up with all the stuff that it knows you did before its introduction. Neat!

When was the last time you reactivated a character that had been abandoned for that long?

Ten months of dungeon finding in review

Today the dungeon finder has been out for ten months (in Europe). I looked back at my "first impressions" post about it the other day, and it's strangely funny to be faced with those initial thoughts again, because in many ways they are very different from the way I look at the whole thing now. For example I was highly worried about players from the other realms in my battlegroup not being as skilled, and then there was all the hoohah about people needing on frozen orbs... all yesterday's news. Many of the things that people consider downsides of the dungeon finder these days also became apparent very early on, but I think I wasn't the only one who simply didn't foresee just how bad things were going to get over the course of a few months.

But let's start with the good stuff: The one thing the dungeon finder has done brilliantly, and I don't think anybody can deny that, is revitalise five-man instances throughout the whole game. I'm not just talking about how convenient it is to find a heroic group these days, because while it requires considerably less effort than it used to in the past, it was still very much possible to get level eighty groups together before the introduction of the new LFG tool.

Levelling instances however have been the real beneficiaries of the change. I vaguely remember trying to put a Zul'Farrak group together way back in the day... and when I did a /who 40-50, I couldn't even find four other people in the right level range online, and that's without even getting started on the question whether they were even interested in running the instance or whether we had the right classes to fill all the necessary roles. These days I can hop on an alt of any level, queue for a random or specific instance, and even as dps I'll find myself in a group for Scarlet Monestary or whatever within only a few minutes. It's absolutely amazing. I don't have any numbers for this, but I reckon that most levelling instances see a lot more traffic now than they ever did before. And I think that's a good thing, because I consider them fun content and anything that helps people to experience that is good.

Unfortunately it hasn't all been rainbows and sunshine, and the dungeon finder quickly started to show some ugly sides too, for example a major loss of immersion. The developers made no effort whatsoever to disguise the new tool as anything than what it is: a UI feature. You press a button and you get to play, that's it. In hindsight I really find that kind of strange, because it's so easy to explain things in WoW away with the good old "a wizard did it" excuse without breaking immersion, but for some reason they didn't bother in this case. Imagine if instead of having a hearthstone, you just had a UI button to take you back to your home location, and instead of taking those portals in Dalaran, you'd just open a tab with a drop-down menu to take you to the city of your choice from anywhere. Wouldn't that be kind of strange?

I know that not everyone cares about immersion in the same way - I didn't actually care that much myself at the beginning, but my concern quickly grew as time went by. Back on that first day I was kind of surprised to just be able to teleport at will, but it didn't particularly bother me because I had run to all those instances a dozen times before and was just eager to get into the action. It wasn't until later, when I realised that I was hardly leaving Dalaran anymore, that I began to feel a little awkward about the whole thing, wondering whether it was really such a good idea. Running into pugs where people didn't even know where they were, as if they were the confused victims of some kind of magical teleportation accident, or groups where people couldn't find their way back into the instance after a wipe because they didn't even know where it was, only asserted those feelings.

In Cataclysm one will need to discover the instance entrance first before being able to queue for a dungeon - we'll see how much of a difference that will make and whether they'll dare to take any further steps afterwards.

However, the biggest issue with the dungeon finder hasn't been immersion, it has been how it's changed people's behaviour. Again, it's kind of funny to look back at my initial worries about getting grouped with bad players... because player skill is the one area where I haven't noticed a major difference in the average pug. Instead it's everything else.

People hardly talk anymore. And I'm not just referring to idle chit-chat here; I've been in many groups where people were just completely ignoring anything said in party chat, even if they were being asked direct questions. This was unthinkable pre-dungeon finder, because if you didn't talk, you didn't get a group.

People are more prone to ninja-ing and generally being inconsiderate of others, because there are little to no consequences for being bad and few rewards for good behaviour. Even if you pissed off your whole party, you won't get called out in trade chat for it because the people you offended were all on different servers anyway. Worst case you end up on someone's ignore list, but that only has so much room and what are a few ignores in a mass of thousands of players anyway? In the same vein kicking someone for even the most trivial of reasons often has no repercussions either, because the dungeon finder instantly gets you a replacement anyway.

On the other hand, if you pass on a piece of loot for the undergeared guy from a different server, you can't go on another run with him tomorrow where he'll help you get your piece. Even if you get along really well with someone from a different realm and just want to play with them again, you won't be able to once the group disbands, because you can't be cross-realm friends without Real ID.

I've seen people suggest to limit the dungeon finder to the server you're on, or at least give the option to build a group that way. I don't think this would work. Yes, I do think that people would tread much more carefully around players from their own realm regardless of everything else, but it would also completely negate one of the dungeon finder's main benefits, the revitalisation of low-level instances, because many servers simply would't have sufficient numbers in the right level range most of the time if they only had their own population to draw from.

Personally I would mainly focus on two things: making people care more about the instance itself and allowing more positive cross-server interaction.

As far as "caring about the instance" goes, I think that at least part of the bad attitude many players display is not just down to lack of social cohesion, but because they simply don't actually enjoy dungeon runs that much. It's only natural to be happy and friendly when you're doing something you enjoy, and more prone to crankiness when you feel forced into something you don't want to do. The thing is, Blizzard tried so hard to make the dungeon finder attractive to people to ensure that enough players would use it that I think they went kind of overboard with it. Press that button and be teleported to a place where you can gain two levels in twenty minutes - you'd never level that fast from questing or grinding. Press that button and you'll be rewarded with currency that allows you to buy some of the best gear in the game. People will do anything if you only dangle a sufficiently large carrot in front of their noses, but that doesn't make the experience in itself that much more enjoyable.

How often have you heard the argument that "we're all just doing it for the two frost emblems anyway" or something similar, especially when people try to justify skipping a large part of the instance? I think it says a lot that so many openly admit to not enjoying the content, doing it only for the rewards, and even assume that everyone else must feel the same! As someone who enjoyed running instances for their own sake almost from the moment I first set foot in one I find that incredibly sad and off-putting. It's not fun to play with people who don't actually enjoy your game and are only participating in it as a means to an end. Don't push them quite so hard, Blizzard. Enough people will still do five-mans if they take a little more work and aren't quite as rewarding - have a little faith in the quality of your content!

Positive cross-server interaction is an easy one. Allow people to not just ignore players from other realms that they dislike, but to also friend those they do like, without immediately requiring Real ID. It doesn't necessarily have to be unlimited cross-realm chat (though that would have something going for it too, I suppose), but even something as simple as being able to send instance invites to friends on another server would already help a lot - as long as you allow people to connect in a positive way instead of just promoting /ignore as a solution to everything.

Looking back at the dungeon finder's release with all the knowledge that I have about it now... I'd still want it to be introduced again, because I think the basic concepts of automating the group-finding process and enlarging the pool of available players are absolutely worth it. I just hope that the developers don't close their eyes to the problems that the tool still has and will continue to tweak and improve it. (And just fiddling with the vote-kick cooldown doesn't really count.)

Officer Blues

It's been nearly two months since I was made an officer in our heavily shrunken guild. Things are kind of quiet now, but at the current point in the game I think that's okay. We're still running raids, even if a lot of them end up being retro raids or alt runs instead of progression.

Still, I have to admit that the initial shine of the officer badge has worn off quite quickly.

Human Resources

I used to think of myself as a pretty friendly and sociable player, but the way you have to judge people by their function an an officer and raid leader really doesn't play well with that ideal. I hate treating people like tools... but if you need another healer, you need another healer, not just another friend or guildmate. I have to spend a lot more time talking to people that I don't like as much, simply because of the role they fulfill, and I can't show my affection for those I do like a lot quite as much, because from an officer-to-raider point of view I should treat everyone equally. Leadership is srs bsns.

And it cuts both ways as well. I'm not just one of the healers anymore, I'm much more defined by my role as officer. On one occasion I was assumed to take responsibility for something that another officer did long before I was even raised to that rank, because clearly all officers share knowledge and responsibility across space and time, right? And if I get cranky with someone it's not just me being cranky, it's an officer bearing down on a poor guild member. I can never separate rank and person anymore, which is awkward at times.

It's all my fault!

Responsibility is another thing that I find quite challenging to deal with right now, especially while leading raids. As someone who mostly plays healers, I'm used to the concept of being responsible for other people and actually get enjoyment out of it, but when you're leading a raid it's all hugely magnified, and I haven't quite hardened my skin enough yet to not feel a little overwhelmed by it.

I mean, when I'm healing I feel responsible for people, but at the same time I know that there are limits to how much I can do. If someone gets one-shot, it's no fault of mine. If someone gets two-shot - well, I suppose I could have theoretically landed a heal right in that half-second between the hits, but realistically? No. I think this is something that players new to healing often struggle with, being able to judge these things correctly and to differentiate between when they actually messed up and when it's really not their fault.

Raid-leading is similar, except that at the moment I seriously do feel responsible for absolutely everything. Even if someone dies to a completely avoidable mechanic, I just find myself questioning my own part in it. Did I not explain the mechanic well enough? Maybe I should have called out a warning? And so on, and so forth. This isn't helped by the fact that many fights in ICC are very healing-intensive and I often feel that I don't have the time to spare to press push-to-talk instead of spamming heals. Hopefully this is an area where I'll manage to find my balance in time.

I thought I told you...

And finally, communication. This is something for which I criticised our old officers quite frequently, or rather for what I felt was a lack of it. Nothing like having a new plan or rule dropped on your head out of nowhere.

Walking in their shoes however, I find it much easier to see where they were coming from. First you discuss your idea with the guild leader, then with some friends, then on the forums... it gets bloody redundant after a while, so you eventually start to skip some steps or simply forget. Which works alright for a while, until something goes wrong and someone says "Well, how was I supposed to know?" and you realise that this is indeed something that wasn't posted anywhere where that person could see it. It's pretty tiring.

I think I'll have to take it easy in the next couple of weeks. I knew that becoming an officer would be a burden to a certain extent, but I didn't expect to feel it quite so quickly. I'm still convinced that I'll be able to handle it in the long run, but I think I need to be careful not to let too many things bog me down too soon.

A trip to Mount Hyjal

No Cataclysm spoilers here, this is about the old Mount Hyjal, the instance. My guild didn't have enough people for a "proper" raid last night, so we gathered what we had and went for a trip down nostalgia lane by fighting the battle for Mount Hyjal once again.

I had a feeling that it would be a fun run when our mage discovered that there were Brewfest banners on the tower in the Alliance base.

Time travel and impending doom can't stop Brewfest!

It did indeed turn out to be a fun run; we revelled in nostalgia and so on and so forth - but it also made me think.

The feelings of nostalgia that I experienced in Black Temple not long ago for example were bittersweet. It was nice to see the bosses again, and kicking butt with ten more levels under our belts was fun in a "getting revenge for all the wipes back then" sort of way, but the realisation how much the game had changed and how a lot of mechanics had become completely obsolete was also accompanied by a certain sense of melancholy, knowing that we'd never get to experience the game that way again - because even if it had been hard and frustrating at times, it used to be fun too.

Mount Hyjal evoked almost nothing of the sort. Maybe it's the scenery, as I'm generally less prone to feeling down in a bright and sunny environment, but there was little that I felt we were missing out on, even as we were steamrolling the instance with seven people of a way higher level than intended.

Take the trash for example: Hyjal was always the home of AoE, the main difference being that this heavily favoured paladin tanks, warlocks and mages back in BC, seeing how they were the only classes with spammable AoE damage abilities. For everyone else it was just pretty dull, single-target stabbing or nuking a lot of relatively low-health mobs, while only a select few people in the raid got to bask in the glory of their unbeatable AoE dps. Going back there at level eighty, with everyone being able to make a contribution, actually felt nothing but right, and almost as if we were only now able to finally clear the content the way it was meant to be played.

Likewise all the bosses except Archimonde were always pretty much tank and spank with only one major gimmick and a couple of minor abilities - they kind of had to be that way back in the day, seeing how the trash made every single boss attempt take about half an hour, and if they had been much more difficult, nobody would've ever got very far without going insane. When coming back at level eighty this has the advantage that even though the fights are obviously still considerably easier, they don't feel completely different and trivialised (unlike several fights in Black Temple for example, which used to have lots of fiddly mechanics that can mostly be ignored these days).

The NPCs also got me thinking, as I watched them die pathetically during the trash waves because nobody really gave a damn about saving them.

Back in the day they were actually really well balanced when I think about it now, because they were genuinely valuable. We used to have people dedicated to kiting single mobs into the NPCs to get them to help out and tried to save them if they got aggro, because they really contributed - but at the same time they were nothing without the players. Jaina and Thrall were powerful, and again, strategies often included positioning that would help to get them engaged, but they still died quite quickly without the rest of the raid.

I do wish that this was something that Blizzard remembered, as I feel that they've thrown way too many NPCs at us during this expansion that were either totally useless in a fight (like the guys "helping" you to get to Valithria Dreamwalker) or so powerful that they could solo everything and made you feel redundant (the leaders in the Battle for Undercity, Tirion stealing the show on the Lich King). Friendly NPCs can be cool, but only if their power is balanced correctly against the player characters.

And then there was Archimonde, oh yeah. I know some of my fellow raiders hate him with a passion, but I still love the fight to this day, despite of the many weeks we spent wiping on him before we finally killed him. I just love fights that force you to think on your feet, where you start with a strategy but have to be able to make small adjustments on the fly depending on circumstances, while at the same time not descending into complete chaos. (Why hello there, Doomfire!)

I also felt a weird sense of pride, always timing my tears correctly so that I didn't even take the tiniest bit of falling damage. It's hardly a transferable skill, but maybe it's because of that that there is something deeply satisfying about still remembering how to do it. Shows just how much time I spent on that fight, when the right way to click is still ingrained in my muscle memory years later.

Attunements: sense and sensibility

I recently worked my way through the old Onyxia attunement quest chain for the Horde. If you've never done it yourself, this series of "interactive movies" by Wowcrendor gives a pretty good impression of how tedious and annoying it is, gameplay-wise. Though I really liked getting to dress up as a black dragontaur, something that is not shown in the movie. These things have a pretty ridiculous waddle.

Now, while I definitely wouldn't consider this chain a fun attunement as a whole, I have to admit that the idea behind it, that you need to acquire a magical item to access Onyxia's Lair, rang very true for me. She's a powerful black dragon, but she's not stupid. She wouldn't let just about anyone wander into her lair unchecked, would she?

This in turn made me think about WOTLK's raid instances, and how I really feel that they are missing something in terms of story by not having any kind of attunement. The only WOTLK raid that does have one is Malygos' Lair, which requires you to get a key from Sapphiron in Naxx. Sapphiron used to be a mighty blue dragon in life, so I guess it makes sense that he would have something that allows access to the leader of the blue dragonflight. That's fair enough. If we look at any of the other raids however... oh dear.

First we have Naxxramas. What, does the Scourge really have no magical wards or anything that prevent people from just wandering in? Even worse, there's nothing in the game that even encourages you to go raid the place. The Alliance NPCs in Wintergarde Keep are chatting about the floating citadel and its inhabitants for a bit, but there are no quests telling you to go there or anything. The Horde has it even worse, because they don't even acknowledge its existence. I think I once saw a line of quest text that said something about the Alliance being under siege from Naxx, but that this was something that didn't concern the Horde. Seriously, the only reason to go there was the meta-game knowledge about it being Wrath's introductory raid. Poor storytelling, that.

Sartharion is even worse, as there is absolutely no explanation for why he is even there or why we should kill him. I believe that I read somewhere that Blizzard did have plans to include a story for him but it was cut out due to time constraints.

Then we have Ulduar. This one gets a pass from me because even though they are not required for being allowed to enter the instance, there are quests in the Storm Peaks that serve as a sort of introduction to the place. There was also this video on the official website. And the fact that anyone can just go inside can be explained by the fact that Brann has already kicked down the door.

Trial of the Crusader not requiring any kind of attunement on the other hand was terrible in terms of in-game logic at least. The whole point of the Argent Tournament was to put together an elite team of fighters to face the Lich King. That's why you go from aspirant to champion to crusader, proving yourself over and over again along the way. Yet anyone can enter Trial of the Champion and Trial of the Crusader, even if they haven't proven their skills at the tournament in any way? No, just no.

This logical error then continues in Icecrown Citadel. Yes, the Ashen Verdict have kicked down the door and made the place accessible, but again, wasn't the whole point of the Argent Tournament to make sure that only the ones with the highest chances of survival would enter ICC? Yet once again, they take absolutely anyone. This is in direct contradiction of a whole patch worth of story. Bad Blizzard, bad!

That said, I think we can all agree that story and gameplay can easily come into conflict, and what's good for one can be detrimental to the other. For example, requiring people to actually have the Crusader title before they could enter Trial of the Crusader would have been the harshest attunement ever, seeing how the title takes almost a month to acquire even if you do all your daily quests every day. Still, I don't think that excuses Blizzard from making a nonsensical story just to facilitate easy gameplay. For example, they simply could have given the Argent Tournament instances names independent of the titles, such as "The Grand Coliseum" or whatever; that alone would have alleviated a lot of the concerns mentioned above.

Lately I realised however, that attunements are important for more than just story. People have derided them in the past as being nothing but artificial obstacles to keep content exclusive, but I think that this expansion has proven that hardly anyone really wants everything to be equally accessible to everyone anyway.

Why do you think Blizzard released TotC's bosses one at a time and delayed the opening of ICC's different wings? Because they didn't want everyone to complete all the new content right away. Why didn't they just keep attunements then? They serve a similar purpose and at least they leave the ball in the player's court and give them something to do: "Okay, you can't go in there - yet. But you can complete a couple of tasks which will then open the place up. Go work on them!" In contrast, the gating that we saw in this expansion gives people nothing to do but sit on their arses and wait, because they have no way of influencing their access to the raid. Dead boring if you ask me - I'd take a long attunement chain over that any day.

More importantly though, the players themselves also have an interest in keeping people out of content if they aren't ready to cope with it yet. That's why you see all these silly pugs that require achievement linking and GearScore numbers. After all, Blizzard themselves have drilled it into our heads that gear is the only thing that matters. WOTLK heroic dungeons require no attunement - the dungeon finder will only check your gear. And what was the argument for rewarding top-tier emblems from heroic dungeons again? To allow people to get the gear to raid ICC - the implication being that that's all they need, actual experience with raiding or other group content is completely optional.

Good attunements on the other hand can be so much more useful for judging a player's readiness for content. I always thought the heroic Magister's Terrace attunement was brilliant - all it requires is that you do a quest while completing the instance on normal mode. That way any person who joined your heroic group was guaranteed to at least have a clue about the instance.

The Karazhan attunement was pretty good as well in my opinion - a bit lengthy maybe, but it required you to take an interest in the instance and to tackle some reasonably challenging content with a group - if you couldn't make it through normal Black Morass for example, you really had no business being in Karazhan yet.

The way I see it, the main problems with attunements in BC were that some of them were way too convoluted, and that they were very alt-unfriendly. These issues would have been relatively simple to solve though by making keys account-wide (maybe leaving the quests as something optional for alts) and generally easing up on the complexity. Blizzard was making good progress on the latter towards the end of BC, but then they threw the baby out with the bathwater in WOTLK when they just got rid of attunements altogether (with the exception of Malygos).

Unfortunately I haven't heard anything good about Cataclysm in that regard either. From what little I've heard it sounds like instances and heroics will once again have nothing but annoying gear checks - I remember hearing a story of someone who had to go quest before an instance run just to get a new ring, which had worse itemisation but a higher ilevel, just so the game would allow him to enter an instance.

I don't mind having to work to get to see all the content, but it should happen in a way that makes sense story-wise. Doing nothing but grind gear to get to the next tier is boring and creates an environment where people are judged by nothing but the numbers on their epics.

More weekend pug adventures

I had a string of friendly pugs yesterday and today - though it's kind of sad that nice pugs have become something noteworthy to begin with.

First I healed a heroic Utgarde Pinnacle run where the tank suddenly said "brb" as we were getting ready for the second boss encounter. And nobody shouted "gogogo" or decided to start the event anyway! People just waited and chatted. The rogue apologised for his low dps, explaining that he had only just dinged that day. And he was doing nearly two thousand dps anyway, nothing to be ashamed of! When the tank came back he apologised too, explaining that he had had to get the doorbell.

On Skadi our hunter picked up all the harpoons without prompting and shot the boss down in one flyby. So nice, considering the amount of bickering I've had to observe in regards to that simple task over time.

Then, just as we were going down the stairs after the boss, the tank suddenly went afk again. The hunter pulled anyway and we wiped, but he said that it had been an accident and once again apologised profusely. Everyone ran back on their own (!), except for the tank, who was still afk. However, he didn't complain about his death either once he came back, just told us instead that he had been gone because he had to attend to the workers in his house that were there to fix a leak in the roof. I told him that that was definitely one of the better reasons to go afk and that it was all good. It was nice to see people act laid-back about things like brief interruptions and mistakes without immediately flying into some sort of nerd rage.

Today I was healing a heroic Halls of Stone run, where the tank asked us after the Brann event whether we'd be willing to do the Abuse the Ooze achievement, since that was the only thing he really wanted from this instance. "In that case... hell no! Just kidding," responded one of the dps, which made me smile. We discussed briefly how it worked and then completed it without any problems. It's amazing how much of a difference to the general tone and people's willingness to help it can make if someone just bothers to phrase their requests politely.

Ironically I was the one who broke the lucky streak - sort of, at least. When I queued up my mage for a random right after the run mentioned above, I got Halls of Stone again. After a few pulls I noticed that our dps paladin was putting out really good damage and went to inspect him because I wanted to see what kind of gear he had. Except... I accidentally clicked on "vote to kick", which is right above inspect on the drop-down menu. I immediately said in chat that it was a mistake and apologised... just to see the vote-kick go through two seconds later. What? WHAT?!

I was shocked and flabbergasted. Why did people approve of kicking someone who had done nothing wrong?! We got a replacement immediately and nobody commented on what had just happened in any way. I quietly completed the run but felt terribly guilty the entire time. So guilty in fact, that I went to create a level one alt on the kicked guy's server afterwards to apologise to him. He said that it was fine and that I shouldn't worry, which made me feel a lot better.

Still, the whole incident was stupid. I kind of want to say that Blizzard should implement some kind of confirmation screen for vote-kick initiation, but then the rest of the party is sort of supposed to work as a safety catch to prevent you from kicking people wrongfully anyway, isn't it? Too bad that this doesn't work if they just mindlessly click "yes" to whatever questions you put in front of them.

Trollfest 2010: total disappointment

So I was listening to the live stream of Blue Plz!, the WoW podcast by TotalBiscuit tonight. At some point he mentioned that he was organising an event called Trollfest on the Ahn'Qiraj server and invited people to come and join. There didn't seem to be much point to it other than to create a few minutes of video footage of lots of trolls dancing in Sen'jin for him, but I've heard a lot of good things about large events like that in the past and thought that it could be fun. So I decided to create a little troll hunter of my own on Ahn'Qiraj. The dedicated starting time was still over an hour away, but I figured that that would give me at least a bit of time to level, which is good fun after all (and would prevent the scorpids around Sen'jin from pwning me).

At first I was pleasantly surprised to actually see the troll starting zone be full of life for a change. I hadn't seen a starting zone this active since the start of BC. I actually had to work to hunt down those mottled boars because so many other people were trying to do the quests too!

Unfortunately that's already where the positive impressions ended. Despite of there being some questing activity, the majority of people didn't seem to have any interest in actually playing and set off for Sen'jin straight away. And the spam was crazy. I'm not just talking about general chat being very active (which it was), but pure, undiluted stupidity. People constantly seemed to be making macros to spam yet more pointless crap, whether it was "for the alliance" or "mosh mosh" - and all in caps of course. It was hard to keep up with all the spam reporting, so I eventually just gave up on trying to make any kind of sense of the chat window.

Also, from comments that TotalBiscuit made live on the show and the occasional coherent sentence in general, it quickly became apparent that there was trouble. People were complaining about constantly getting disconnected and claimed that the server was crashing - the latter definitely wasn't true during my time online at least, as I was happily questing away in the Valley of Trials without even the slighest lag.

There did seem to be problems in the immediate Sen'jin area however, and as it turned out at least one GM actually appeared and asked people to log off since their behaviour was "having a negative impact on the normal users of this realm". TB went along with this and said that the event was cancelled, while complaining about how weak Blizzard's servers were. Keep in mind that the Trollfest guild capped out at five hundred members and I reckon that there were at least another five hundred people around who wanted to join, and all these people were trying to get into Sen'jin! Considering that I reckon that each WoW server is only optimised to manage a few thousand players at a time, that was a considerable chunk right there.

Thus the event was cancelled before it had even begun. I made it over to Sen'jin a bit later, once I had hit level five, and there were still a fair number of people around, still dancing, still spamming, and becoming more embarrassing by the minute. A lot of people who had come to the event apparently didn't even listen to the radio show itself and had no clue that it had been cancelled, which quickly led to a war in chat as some people were claiming that TotalBiscuit would arrive soon or that he was just observing things anonymously, and that anyone who tried to relay the message that the event had been cancelled was just a dirty, dirty liar. Is this how new religions get started? I eventually logged off because the whole thing just became too awkward.

I suppose part of the problem was that the whole event had no point other than to have people standing around in Sen'jin and doing the /dance emote, which meant that the whole zone pretty much degenerated into nothing but a glorified chat room. I wonder if the GMs had felt the need to interfere in the same way if more people had actually played in some fashion, whether it was just doing quests, organising a communal run to Thunder Bluff or whatever. At least then the activity would have been spread out a little bit.

But yeah, I'm definitely going to stay away from any more "massive" events of that type in the future. Too many people with nothing to do in one spot just breeds dumb behaviour and no fun at all.