I'm a 25-34 year old guy?

So make sure you are logged into your google account, then go to this link. It provides demographic information Google has inferred about you based on your web-surfing habits.

Let's take a look at mine:

So we have my comics, check.
Pandora, check.
All WoW related sites, check.
My blog stuffs, check.

I'm a bit confused by the finance and law/government categories. But see how at the bottom it says I am a 25-34 year old guy? I wonder exactly which category it was that put me over to the male side. I'm guessing the Gaming and I wonder when the "Games - Online Games - Massive Multiplayer" category won't be automatically tagged as male.

I find the 25-34 age bracket amusing as well because I wish I was still there! As of last year I am no longer in that age category. Also, I guess the Shopping category wasn't enough to tag me female? Does this take volume of surfing into account? Maybe I need to check out Pinterest more?

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PvP talk

So I was looking at my statcounter logs the other week and I kid you not, someone actually found this blog with this exact search: "I'm not bossy I just have better ideas". This is why statcounter rocks! Hmmm.... so I wonder if I should self reflect on this for a moment.

Ok, self reflection done. Speaking of being bossy and having better ideas let's talk about bgs for a bit, shall we? So I was in a Warsong Gulch over the weekend and there was a pretty undergeared hunter carrying the flag. He was getting targeted by a bunch of Horde who came after him and eventually he died. He then decided to question my healing of him. He said something to the effect of: "I'm getting targeted and all you do is cast the green aoe healing circle"?

To which I responded, "Hello, swiftmend"? So this huntard decides to criticize my healing when he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about? Let's just say I had some words with this guy. I probably should have taken screenshots but I was too hot to think straight.

Folks have asked me why or how I can pvp so much. And yes, I readily admit that it can be painful. PvP definitely has really high highs and really low lows. You have to remember those highs when you're in those lows. And likewise remember that you'll be back in those lows when you're in those highs. Despite our joking of alliance being bad at pvp, I do think that overall it balances out.

I think for myself I am addicted to the pvp rush. Whether its the rush of having a bunch of Horde trying taking you down, the rush of completely annihilating a team, or the rush of your blood boiling because of your own ridiculous team. In pve I may get frustrated, but I wouldn't say that I really get mad. But in pvp, its that rush of adrenaline whether from anger or exhilaration that has got me hooked.

Anyways, Sam, Violent, and I were doing some bgs together last night. Between all our pvp toons, the three of us probably have well over 200,000 honor kills. We were talking about what drives us crazy in different bgs. Here is my personal list.

How to drive K crazy in battlegrounds:

10. Twin Peaks or Warsong: A flag carrier that runs away from the healers when they are targeted, then proceeds to blame you for their death when you were being expertly cced.

9. Strand of the Ancients: Running instead of using the portals to quickly jump back to defend.

8. Arathi Basin: Teams that are overly defensive or overly offensive. Yay, lets have 7 people defending stables! (Though I think these 7 people would be related to #1 below). Or let's just constantly rush bases and have no one defend!

7. Strand of the Ancients: Folks who can't tell the difference between the green and blue gates.

6. Isle of Conquest: The fact that Alliance always takes Docks but can't defend the glaives worth shit.

5. Alterac Valley: Standing on noob hill instead of defending West and East Towers, allowing a rogue or druid to recap.

4. Battle of Gilneas: Teams that rush 8 folks to WW, see that no Horde are coming across, yet get all the way to WW, waste precious time there, then wonder why LH was lost. You can see them running across! If you see no red running across to WW, run back to LH or go to Mines. Quickly.

3. Strand of the Ancients: Taking the Southern graveyard when you're attacking.

2. Eye of the Storm: Having over half of your team go for the middle/flag instead of towers. Those who go for the middle when your team is down 3 towers to 1 deserve a special place in hell.

1. Any BG: Being afraid of dying. The penalty for dying is nothing in this game. Don't go do something stupid that won't help your team or will mean a certain death, but sometimes you have to take chances. So if you're afraid of dying, don't pvp.

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WoW on the brain

Last Saturday night I had the pleasure of being on the Twisted Nether podcast. It was a good time, though I'm not sure if I talked enough. While Sam texted me at the start of the interview to take it over like I do our raids, I'm actually quite shy in new situations. Many thanks to them for having me on. And I think with the guildies who were in the live chat, folks like Rades got a good sense of what our guild and our subsequent raids can be like. Crazy yet amusing.

Onto the title of this post. It's funny how once you start playing WoW it often shapes a lot of what you see or read or come across. For example, I saw this post the other day, a map released by NASA about where the trees are in the US, and what my mind saw was this:

Or how my mind interpreted a couple of Dilbert comics to apply to our guild and raids:

Clearly I have issues.

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Stuffs

1. I need a new game to play on my iphone. Anyone have any suggestions? I kind of got over Tiny Tower a while ago and have been looking for something new. Though perhaps what I need to be doing is chatting more with my Words with Friends opponents.

2. Jess created this for me on tagxedo, though I reminded him that I believe I posted something similar years ago. I seem to remember them being called Wordles or something like that? Though I do like the tree shape:

It's pretty amusing to look at the largest words, the words you use the most. The word "thing" amused me because just last week on our madness attempts, I really did say the following:

Wow that's really bad when that thing happens right after that thing!

3. I am going to be on the Twisted Nether blogcast this Saturday, January 14 at 8 pm PST. I believe you can go to the live broadcast on UStream during that time and participate in the live chatroom audience. Though part of me is a little leery about the questions any guildies may ask...

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Heart warming story

This story is heart warming.

A blogger and Gamestop employee Kristen Wolfe posted this on her Tumblr site:

You thought I didn’t really notice. But I did. I wanted to high-five you.

Yesterday I had a pair of brothers in my store. One was maybe between 15-17. He was a wrestler at the local high school. Kind of tall, stocky and handsome. He had a younger brother, who was maybe about 10-12 years old. The only way to describe him was scrawny, neat, and very clean for a boy his age. They were talking about finding a game for the younger one, and he was absolutely insisting it be one with a female character. I don’t know how many of y’all play games, but that isn’t exactly easy. Eventually, I helped the brothers pick a game called Mirror’s Edge. The youngest was pretty excited about the game, and then he specifically asked me.. “Do you have any girl color controllers?” I directed him to the only colored controllers we have which includes pink and purple ones. He grabbed the purple one, and informed me purple was his FAVORITE.

The boys had been taking awhile, so their father eventually comes in. He see’s the game, and the controller, and starts in on the youngest about how he needs to pick something different. Something more manly. Something with guns and fighting, and certainly not a purple controller. He tries to convince him to get the new Zombie game “Dead Island.” and the little boy just stands there repeating “Dad, this is what I want, ok?” Eventually it turns into a full blown argument complete with Dad threatening to whoop his son if he doesn’t choose different items.

That’s when big brother stepped in. He said to his Dad “It’s my money, it’s my gift to him, if it’s what he wants I’m getting it for him, and if your going to hit anyone for it, it’s going to be me.” Dad just gives his oldest son a strong stern stare down, and then leaves the store. Little brother is crying quietly, I walk over and ruffle his hair (yes this happened all in front of me.) I say “I’m a girl, and I like the color blue, and I like shooting games. There’s nothing wrong with what you like. Even if it’s different than what people think you should.” I smile, he smiles back (my heart melts!) Big brother then leans down, kisses little brother on the head, and says “Don’t worry dude.” They check out and leave, and all I can think is how awesome big brother is, how sweet little brother is, and how Dad ought to be ashamed for trying to make his son any other way.

I love that he wanted a game with a female character (he knows we're cooler and smarter!) and the big brother rocks. But this story also makes me want to kick this dad's ass.

I guess people have been questioning whether this story is real? So Kristen follows up here.

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Transmog not cooperating

Over the holidays I had a decent amount of time to play and was running some old dungeons for pets and drops. I thus started to pick up a lot of old gear, which was fun to try on. This got me to looking up gear on Atlasloot and thinking through possible transmog outfits. I've decided my first transmog priority is trying to grind out some BC dungeons for what I think is a really cool druidy transmog set, the replica Tier 1 set. See Angelya's incredible post on the druid tier sets.

My plan for this tier set was to match it up with a staff that has animated flowers and mushrooms growing on it.

Draenic Wildstaff drops from Crypts, but I was unsuccessful at getting it to drop. Though looking this staff up on Wowhead, it looks like it shares the same model as the quest rewards offered from this low level quest. Hooray! I know what I'm doing next time I'm online!

However it doesn't look like I have easy alternatives for the chest, helm, or shoulders, which I think are the key pieces to this outfit. I ran normal Bot 7 or 8 times over two days to try to get the shoulders. I also tried for the helm and the shoulders a couple times last week. Sigh. I guess I'll just have to offer up a prayer to the loot gods.

In other gear news, here is my latest pvp helm:

Look my eyes are covered and yet I can still tell the difference between the green and blue gates in Strand of the Ancients! (Yes, there is a painful bg backstory to this). Anyways, I wonder what Blizz's plan is with pvp gear and resilience. At some point they're going to have to reset some conversion element, don't you think? I mean look at where my resilience was last week:

I wonder if they're going to just let resilience scale with the higher level pvp gear we get. Are we going to see damage reduction of over 50%? Sure, I love that a single player cannot take me down (especially in tree form... rawr!) but damage reduction of +50%... doesn't that get a bit ridiculous? I would imagine such high damage reduction numbers would also make it very difficult (translation: many painful deaths and cursing at the screen) for anyone wanting to gear up a new toon with pvp gear.

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How are you different?

I recently saw the movie Catfish off my Netflix queue. I'll try not to completely give away the plot, but the movie asks the question of what is real on the internet. What is really real on Facebook profiles? We don't even have to go as far as saying what is real... but in a way doesn't everyone try to portray themselves in a certain light, a positive light on Facebook? How is the reality different from what you portray?

The movie made me think about how we come across in-game to our friends and guildies. I'm sure there are some folks who completely make up an alternate reality, though hopefully they are rare. But for the rest of us more normal folks... have you thought about how you portray yourself in game? Probably not even consciously? Maybe its not really different from how you really are, maybe there are just certain parts of yourself that you highlight or that come out more?

It's an interesting question for me to think about how current and past guildies come across in game because I've met a decent number of them at our past two clawcons. Hmmm lets see, specifically I've met 11 past and present guildies. I would say that for the most part, people are exactly as they are in game. Some people, scarily so. But for some folks I'd say that they are a bit more outgoing or outspoken in game than they are in real life.

If I think about myself, I would probably put myself in this category. Within the guild I have this reputation for being a bit bossy and pretty outspoken. While that side of me definitely comes from a real life bent, in real life I'm just not as in your face about it as I can be in game. In real life I tend to keep more opinions to myself:

If there ever was an opportunity for me to exercise my outspoken side, it'd be through pugs. Last week I did a couple of pugs on my lock with Jess' resto druid healer. Jess noted that he only seems to get in bad pugs with assholes when I go with him. I noted it's probably because the universe knows that I will not be able to keep my mouth shut and thus saves the really nice pugs for when he goes by himself.

We had one pug with an asshole tank who refused to run back after wipes and would pull before we could explain the fight to a dps who had never done it before. We were doing ZG, which we all know isn't a short instance. I started pushing back to the tank early on in the run, but then eventually kicked him right before the last boss. Mean, I know. But if you're an asshole, I find it hard to let it go.

Jess and I had another pug where we wiped on the first boss. The warrior dps proceeded to call us noobs. And did I let that go? Nope. I told him he was free to leave the group, that he wasn't being held hostage. After we ran back and got the first boss down, this warrior posted the dps meters, which had him on top. I then commented, "And you're leading the asshole meters as well, how's that going for you?" I proceeded to explain "Look, not everyone overgears these new heroics and sometimes people make mistakes. No need to call people noobs". And get this, the warrior laughed at my asshole comment then actually apologized!

Maybe this could be my new years resolution? To confront and turn the assholes in game, one asshole at a time? Nah... I'll pass on that. What am I, a saint? But in preparation for future assholes, I did end up resurrecting my old caring macro back from the TOC days. It's funny because I had to multiply the dps numbers by 10 to make it relevant. Funny how doing 2k was a big deal back then, huh?

Anyways, back to my original point. So yeah, while this is how my guildies often see me, I'm not as confrontational in real life. I think its because through the game you only see what that other person presents, and the only connection you have to what they present is what they say in chat or on vent. You don't see when they're not speaking or just listening, like you would in real life. And I think when someone chooses not to say something and just listen also is a part of someone's complete picture. Jess has noted that in real life I tend to often sit back and observe more and don't really talk unless I need to.

Perhaps being more outgoing or outspoken in game is a pretty common trait? Anyone different in game vs in real life in any other ways?

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