No, you know what? F— June.
At least the fishing has been good.
Overall though, this month has been pretty crap-tastic. Maybe I’ll practice that “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” And I’ll just leave it at that instead of polluting your eyes and brain with my angry ramblings.
Just once though, I’d like something to go awesome this month. Ed McMahon, I’ll take that prize money now.
The only real holiday I enjoy is “Holiday” by Madonna. I suppose that’s not entirely true… but still. The surge of recent holidays in-game is both fun and frustrating at the same time. I’ll review them both quickly with my reasons why I do and do not like them.
Noblegarden
1) Pros – Minipets and no requirements for PvP or max level.
2) Cons – Limited egg spawning locations = high competition over just one week duration. Too much reliance on RNG–my paladin opened over 350 eggs and never got a rabbit foot, tuxedo pants, or elegant dress. I gave up on the holiday after foolishly spending hours collecting eggs.
Children’s Week
1) Pros – Lots of Minipets! Adorable bastard children everywhere! No RNG.
2) Cons – PvP and dungeon requirements for meta-achievement. If it were simply win or participate in the BGs I would be more satisfied, but because they are asking you to do very specific things that are sometimes easier for one class or one faction than the other(s) it is very annoying.
I’ll spend lots of time getting the mini-pets again this year for Children’s week. Elgar was the only one lucky enough to finish Noblegarden this year, my druid did it last year. And Elgar is the only one to have completed Children’s week as those PvP achievements basically made me want to cry so hard last year. Elgar to this day wears his Patron title because IMO, it was worse than getting Kingslayer.
Okay, this has nothing to do with WoW but everything to do with lunch. The cafeteria is serving TWO fish options today. There is by default a “healthy” fish option every day, then today the normal entrée, which is usually delicious is also fish. Boo.
Looks like it will be salad bar for me. I need meat!!
So I still really haven’t gotten into this expansion. I can’t pin-point why I’m not really enjoying myself, but I find myself more frequently logging in and then sitting there, staring at my character selection screen and thinking…
Elgar – did I do my transmute?
Schubert, Borka, Kalinnikov, Sibelius – do I feel like questing Vashir or Mt. Hyjal again?
Troutwort – is my Oracle egg hatched or is there GM stuff to do?
Rossini – dailies?
Haydn – is he rested yet?
Mouret – I really should wait to level with my friend…
And then I sit there, and go through the list again. And again…and then I think, I should go play that Orc, but then I think well I’m the GM so I should stay on my own server. So I pick someone in Stormwind, do a cooking daily and go from there.
I guess it’s not fair to say I’m not enjoying myself, because that’s not true. I do have fun playing, I just am not really all “Yay Cataclysm!” like I thought I would be. I have started to take a few guesses as to why:
1) Well we all know the healing thing from recent posts, so we’ll just skip that. 
1b) Getting around. Yes they added flying to the old world, which has been AWESOME for leveling archaeology. What is not awesome is that I constantly need to go back to Stormwind to get to a new Cataclysm zone. There’s no just get on your mount and fly to the next zone since they are all spread out. Yes, I know hearthstones are on 15 minute cooldowns, but still, this really seems more annoying than it should be. Outlands and Northrend kept all the zones together, this was nice, I thought. Though I’m sure people will beg to differ and they like their portals better.
1c) For the love of all things Elune, if you want to make me use these portals put them in more cities than just Stormwind. Seriously. I don’t like it that much.
2) Professions are…meh. I know people liked when they got rid of the specializations from BC to LK. I honestly miss them. There was actually a point to being a tailor back then. I would be much more into tailoring for example if there were some BoP. Remember when you could be a mooncloth tailor and basically get yourself a couple of epics right at 70? I miss that. Now all I can craft is not so useful PvP gear and those epics sure take a long time to make with an annoying cloth cooldown. I haven’t done ALL my professions yet, so maybe some will be a little more exciting or useful, but I guess I’m going to find similar things.
3) Quests are too linear? I know I’ve really only leveled two toons so far, so maybe you can skip quest hubs currently if you reach a high enough level or something, but I kinda liked hitting Borean Tundra and knowing that if I didn’t want to do DEHTA I didn’t have to, or I could skip Fizzcrank and just do Amber Ledge. There was a little more choice in which quests you could do because quest hubs in the zone kinda all became available about the same time. This linear model, while good for story telling, really doesn’t give me the option to skip quests that I don’t want to do. Too much phasing??
4) Leveling too fast. Okay, people are probably like “what?!” I know some people HATE leveling, they find it annoying they have to level up to get to the part of the game they enjoy and feel the game doesn’t really start until level 85. I like leveling. I like feeling accomplished when I hit max level, but just like Rossini, Schubert is currently leveling up via quests and he’s about halfway through Mt. Hyjal and he’s already level 82 having done 3 random dungeons in there. So I figure that I’ll probably be close to 83 if not done with 83 by the time I’m done in Hyjal and then head over to Deepholm and suddenly I’m close to or already 85 before I’ve completed 2 zones. It just seems too fast and like I’m missing out on so much or have to go back to do quests if I want to see them…or to stay on the most applicable zone, I leave zones incomplete.
5) Reputations. This one is the most annoying to me at the moment. Basically there is one place, one zone to get reputation with a faction. I’m not too thrilled on this again because just like the linearity of the quests, this doesn’t give me options. In LK you could get Valiance Expedition reputation in Borean AND Howling Fjord. Wyrmrest was in Borean AND Dragonblight. Argent Crusade was either Zul’Drak OR Icecrown. See my point? If I didn’t like one place I could go to the other and still get the reputation start I needed to get myself a tabard and some rewards. Even the Kalu’ak had questlines in both Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra. This one faction per zone really is…annoying.
Okay, I’ll stop now. Sorry, I’m just typing out thoughts as they come to me and really it’s helping me figure out why I seem not so eager to play lately. I think the one thing I really loved about WoW pre-Cata was that there were SO many options. Now I feel like that isn’t the case, my options are limited. For someone like me that plays solo 90% of his playtime, I feel the options to make the game what I wanted was what kept it so interesting. I never really had to do the same EXACT thing twice on my characters. Now to level up another toon it’s all the same…same thing I did yesterday or two weeks ago, or a month ago. The variation isn’t really there and I think that’s what is leaving me ‘unsatisfied’ at my character selection screen.
When I was an Resident Assistant at the dormitory of my college, I had one resident who was drunk and pretty obnoxious all the time. During this time, my other residents were also very unruly, drinking in the halls, being noisy past quiet hours, etc. The other RAs would constantly be giving my residents housing citations and warnings about their behavior and it was explained to them that this behavior could not continue or they would jeopardize their housing. This was a big enough threat for most, but the trouble resident continued anyways, and was put on probation. He was on his last strike when I caught him with a beer in the hallway. I had to issue a citation. And with that, he was removed from the housing system and a new resident brought in to fill his place. Almost immediately after his removal, the whole situation on the floor brightened. My residents were almost never issued citations anymore and general drinking and rowdiness was at a minimum. Funny how one bad apple really can spoil the batch.
Here’s hoping the same happens now that we’ve removed our bad apple.
Winterhoof is now a preferred server.
My thought? In a word: Boo.
Okay, so I love noobs as much as the next guy. I was one! I have no trouble with new players joining the game, it’s a fun one, and they should join! But what I do have a problem with is us being tagged as preferred and now instead of people randomly picking servers to join when they first start playing, they pick our server. Again no problem…mostly. I have ONE problem.
I now have a queue on my server. Yes. I transferred from a server with a queue back in February to Winterhoof. The population was really low, there was no lag in Dalaran, I didn’t have to fight people for quest mobs. It was great, there was no queue when I wanted to log in, I didn’t have anyone on my ignore list. The player base was mostly experienced people who also took the free transfer. Life was good, really good.
I’m a little peeved at Blizzard for marking us as preferred. We went from low population to max capacity in literally like 2 days. I know it’s just a little queue at the moment and hopefully some will quit, get annoyed with Furenchtoast and leave, or reroll on other servers, but man…if I have to start facing daily queues again, Blizz better up this servers capacity…or else.
Or else…I’ll…complain more? /cry
I liked Winterhoof the way it was.
So last night after returning from an awesome weekend I was met with not only the disappointment of having to wash all my stinky fishing clothes, but the disappointment that is lag in Dalaran. I have not yet had any trouble with lag in Dalaran since moving to my new server back in February. But after last weeks patch I can’t do anything. I start to run, and then eventually just reach a crawl before I lag out and the game freezes. Last night with the advice of some guildies, I tried the “log in and just wait” method. When I came back to the PC, I was disconnected from the server. I tried one more time this time making a run for the flight master. After about 5-10 minutes, I made it and he actually opened the flight map for me. Anything to get out of Dalaran. When I landed however, the situation was no better and I just said screw it and logged out for the night.
Some people advised not logging out in Dalaran, but of course that’s where I had always logged out. So when I looked at my character list…Elgar – Dalaran, Schubert - Dalaran, Troutwort – Dalaran, Borka – Dalaran. About the only one NOT in Dalaran was the bank toon, which I did log in on, did some AH crap, and just left. I’m hoping that some rolling restarts or some hot-fix on Tuesday will fix this trouble. I haven’t seen anything new on Patch 3.2 since both Tuesday and Wednesday last week were wasted and then I’ve been gone since then. I leave again this Saturday for a full week of vacation and hope that I’ll be able to get in some play time before then.
This lag is so frustrating in Dalaran at the moment though. Here’s hoping getting out of Dalaran fixed the problem for Elgar…he was the only one that made it out without crashing. Weekend fishing pictures later.
