Sodd's Law - Another Blog that no-one will read!

Soon…

I can feel another post coming on soon. But it’s too late now… bed. But soon.

.: A note to the ladies who follow me

More of the WoW bashing.

So where was I?….O yeah. WoW bashing. 

This has been a long time coming primarily because I just don’t care enough to be bothered with it anymore. However I started it, so I will finish it. 

So after you’ve been playing WoW for a while and you hit the maximum level, your journey is over and you can relax, sit back, take in all that you’ve achieved and move onto other things. WRONG!!!!!! 

If you are a purely ‘casual’ player there are a few things you can do. Get your Profession skills to their maximum level. You can perform daily quests over and over again for weeks/months to earn extra gold and some rewards, like mounts or bits of equipment. Buy and sell on the auction house to earn more gold or just hang around in one of the capitol cities and shoot the breeze with random people. You could even create another character and start the whole thing over again. 

If you are still interested in playing and progressing your current character however you will want to get some better equipment. Getting that equipment itself is really the only thing left to progress on, and you get that equipment from raiding. 

During the process of leveling you may have done a few dungeons. Dungeons are areas where 5 characters get together and take on monsters and bad guys that a single person would otherwise not be able to do. The rewards for doing so are; seeing another part of the world and equipment better than is available elsewhere. These dungeon groups normally take the form of, 1 ‘Tank’ 1 ‘Healer’ and 3 ‘DPS’.

A Tank is a character who’s stats and equipment have all been pushed in the direction of taking and surviving incoming damage. They have a secondary role, but by no means less important, of also attracting and keeping the attention of the monsters in the dungeon, otherwise called ‘Threat’ or ‘Agro’. 

A Healer, as the name implies is a character who can heal the damage done to the other characters in the group. It is their role to keep everyone alive. 

The DPS (Damage per second) characters are there to dish out as much damage as they can. 

So typically a dungeon group works like this. Groups of monster in these dungeons are usually in little packs of 3-6. The Tank will run in using his abilities will hit/cause damage to all the mobs in a particular group creating “Aggro/Threat” on all of them. The Healer will use his healing abilities on the tank to keep the Tank alive while they do so. The DPS will start to kill those monsters. That’s the way it should work. 

Where it can go wrong however is as follows. If the Tanks misses hitting a particular mob on the way in it will run towards the healer, because healing causes a little threat on everything nearby, kill the healer, the tank will get no healing, the tank will die and then everyone else will die ‘wipe’, and everyone has to run back in and try again. 

If the Healer cannot heal people fast enough, people die, the group wipes, same result as above.

If the DPS don’t give the tank a chance to build enough ‘Threat’, then the monster runs at the DPS kills it, usually then heads at the healer and kills it, and then the group falls apart and again it’s a wipe.

As you can see it takes a group effort with co-ordination and teamwork to succeed. It also gets more complicated as you take on monsters with varying abilities and spells that require you to counter with different tactics. It’s all pretty easy as you go through the early dungeons that you encounter as you are going up the levels, but after you get the maximum level you are faced with dungeons with monsters in them that are tuned to be just at the limits of what you can be expected to deal with given the quality of your equipment. In those situations it takes the whole group to be performing at their best in order to be able to progress through the dungeons. Now if you are doing the dungeon with friends this can be a lot of fun. Plotting strategies while just basically chatting and cracking jokes. If you are in a randomly generated group of strangers who a bunch of egotistical fuckwits all trying to prove how they awesome they are it can be a nightmare of epic proportions. 

But whats this ‘Raiding’ thing? Well raiding is basically the same thing as doing a dungeon group, only it occurs in larger groups of 10 or 25 people. It even used to involve groups of 40 people when WoW was first released (before the Burning Crusade expansion). 

Now raiding with more people ups the ante quite a bit. It is a lot harder to organize a group of 10 people than 5, exponentially harder again in 25 and I thank god I never had to organize a 40 man. A 10 man group usually takes the form of 2 5 man groups, 2 tanks, 2 healers, 6 dps. A 25 man usually has 2-3 tanks, 5-7 healers and the rest DPS.

Now this ‘game’ just took on a whole different dimension. In order to proceed you need 10 or 25 people to be ready at the right time, but not just any 10-25 people. They have to be the right mix of the right roles, appropriately skilled and equipped to take on what is ahead of them. They all need to know what they are doing, what is going to be attempted on the night and any strategies that are required. This takes organisation, and quite a lot if it. In the game people organize themselves in teams or ‘Guilds’ that, at the upper end of the scale, will have websites and forums in order to facilitate the organisation needed to put theses groups together. Regularly entry into these guilds is done via an application process that very much mirrors that which you would expect in a job interview. Raiding will occur at a particular time several times a week, for several hours at a stint. My old guild used to raid Sunday, Monday, Wednesday with an optional Thursday from 8pm till midnight. Those times were not the worst either, other more accomplished guilds would raid more often. Attendance at the vast majority of these days is often mandatory in order to maintain your position in the guild. If you wanted to have a good shot a benefiting from the rewards of these raids you needed to be present close to 100% of the time. That’s a lot of hours spent playing a game. Slot that into your weekly schedule and tell me how you would fare. Not a lot of time for working out or socializing in that week. At least we had Fri/Sat off. I’m not even mentioning the time you need to spend in the game in preparation for these events. Obtaining potions, food, gold, special equipment and other items you need to keep going in the raid.

Now this raiding, as you can see, is looked on by people who get into the game as kind of a big deal. It takes a great deal of effort and coordination to succeed and when you do the feeling of accomplishment is relative to the amount of work you put in. It’s also quite fun when everything is working. It can also be very frustrating if you are hanging around doing nothing waiting for someone to be ready, or things aren’t going well because a few people didn’t come prepared or aren’t paying attention.

I’m running out of time now. I hope the above has given you an insight into WoW Raiding, why it takes so much time, why so many people enjoy it, take it as seriously as they do and why ultimately as much as I enjoyed it, I had to say no. It’s just too much time for me. 

Since stopping playing I’ve lost 12kilos, 12% body fat, gained some muscle and can look at myself in the mirror and not be disappointed. I’ve made real world friends. been camping and hiking and had a lot of fun. The right decision certainly. 

I am out of time, but there is one aspect yet that I think needs more elaboration and that is of the friends you make while playing the game. I’m sure some of you have seen or heard of the stories of people flying and driving hundreds if not thousands of kilometers to hook up with people they have met in the game and are curious how this happens so I think my next post will be about that.

Got to go, workout to be done. :D

Dearly Departed

A friend of a friend’s funeral is today. 

I only met the bloke once but he seemed like a nice chap. I was quite drunk at the time and the numerous Jack Daniels he bought me probably didn’t help much. I really didn’t learn that much about the fellow but he did seem quite similar to myself and someone who, given the right circumstance, I could have easily been friends with. 

All I know is that he was ‘having a bit of a hard time’ and he took his own life last week. Facebook as you might expect has been awash with people expressing their condolences and respects which makes me wonder how many of his friends knew of the difficulties he was having or how he was coping with them. Was he a troubled person by nature and things slowly built up over him? Or did something short and sharp happen that just led him to act rashly.

I cant help but think that If i wasn’t such a reclusive person and had offered him my phone number that night that I might have another friend and his closer mates would still have had theirs. I realize yes that that could easily be interpreted as a very vain statement on my part. What could I possibly have done? Would I have been the kind of person to be able to step in and offer myself in his time of need? I dont know the answer to the first question. But the answer to the second question is almost definitely a no. 

All of us with our busy lives to live, social ladders to climb and facades of imperviousness to maintain rarely have the time for others that we should. I know I am a chief offender and much to my own detriment. Perhaps this writing may be a stepping stone on turning that around. A little.

What this is not.

This is not a law blog. 

I am not a lawyer.

I am not a pessimist. 

I may however be a Sod.

At least that’s the name I’ve been known by for the last 3 years. Playing WoW (World of Warcraft). Now if there is indeed anyone who had read my first post and was intrigued enough to have read on I think I just lost them. So be it. I shall continue in the isolation that I had planned. 

For the 3 previous years up until a month ago this game has been my soul consuming passion. I would spend my days reading blogs, theorycrafting stats and otherwise passing time I should have spent working waiting for 5pm to tick over so I could race home through traffic and get on-line to play this game. 

Why? I guess would be the most asked question (if anyone was to ever read this, which they wont, will you!?). I had just left a relationship that I got into in the first place for the wrong reasons, moved back in with the parents and was basically just working. At the time I started I remember having more spare time than I knew what to do with. I remember thinking to myself “I need something to waste my time.” And waste my time it did, very effectively.

But let me clear up a few misconceptions that may have been gleamed from the previous text. WoW was by no means the first game that I have ever wasted time on. In fact much of the previous decade since my teens had been spent playing some game or other on the computer usually while stoned. WoW is not a bad game. In so much as game design is concerned. I would rate it as one of the best I have ever played. 

What is bad about it is the grind. The pointless repetition aimed at keeping people playing for far longer than they otherwise would. But I contradict myself a little here, because in a sense that is all the game is, grind.

I played my first character and raced up the levels addicted to that little ding noise as instinctively as any of Pavlov’s dogs ever would have been. In the back of mind always striving for that next level, that next spell, that next ability and allowing that search to cloud my mind of the glaring fact that the core mechanics of the game really aren’t that much fun. 

But perhaps I’m being a little too harsh. Perhaps that strive and quest is all that the game is. Entertainment needn’t be ‘fun’ all the time. The strive for goals and the reward, even if only personal satisfaction, is all that is required to justify many entirely un-fun activities. Even those that leave no discernible benefits, another major complaint that is often leveled against WoW.

But I digress. What is bad about it was the sheer amount of time that the game occupied from me in order to do this thing called “Raiding”. Which I will elaborate more on in a future post. As will I on how I came to abandon this both loved and despised past time.

My cat, who has been missing for four days just bounced through my window and I am in a good mood and my train of thought has been broken. I will return to this on another day.

Edit: Some spelling and grammar.

ZOMG a post!!!

I jokingly told a firend this weekend about this ‘the blog that no-one will read, and that I may not write’ and it provoked much laughter and amusement. He suggested I posted only every 6 months or so with veiled warnings and insults for those people foolish enough to come and read.

This all of course has ironically given me the motivation to actually start writing something and to carry through with the intention of what this blog was to be about. A ventilation for the numerous neurosis swirling my synapses that I am for some reason rarely able to burden my friends with.

I don’t expect anyone will ever read any of this and I think that’s the way I like it. Still I hope to gain some measure of catharsis from the writing. A chance to regurgitate my ill-conceived thoughts and opinions and regurgitate them on the carpet of global anonymity that only the internet with it’s several billion users can provide.