The announcements about World of Warcrafts upcoming Patch 4.3 keep rolling out, and once again I find myself putting what is said together and thinking, “who comes up with this stuff?”

You ever hear this old joke?

A manager is speaking to a gathering of employees. He tells them that because of the costs of restructuring, the downturn of the economy, and the need to stay competitive in the marketplace, there will be no raises or profit matching bonuses this year. Then he tells the employees that sales have continued to grow at record levels, making this the most profitable quarter in company history. Then he stops, looks over at his secretary, and says, “I told you to put the United Way employee donation drive announcement between those two.”

Sometimes, that’s the way it seems with Blizzard, isn’t it? All these announcements and press releases and interviews and revelations come out, and individually they all make perfect sense and are clearly meant to generate excitement and buzz, but when I put them together without the filler, the message gets kinda… mixed. Or misleading. Or, and I’ll be blunt, self-serving corporate bullshit.

Make no mistake. Content does not come out for the sake of content to please the player. Blizzard does not have a crew of men and women creating and changing code for World of Warcraft in the backroom or in their basement for fun, rogue coders ranging wild and free adding whatever they feel like at their own pace.

No. Everything that gets added or changed in game comes out after planning meetings, time to market discussions, and cost/benefit analysis is done.

If you see content announced, be it new raids, hot gear, rules changes or a new Legendary, you should know that there was a meeting or series of meetings behind it.

In those meetings, there were overall objectives to meet. ”What can we do to improve retention of existing customers? What can we do to attract new customers? What can we do to encourage existing customers to not drop payment for the few months before new content comes out? How do we get old, tired, bored customers to come back again? How do we handle the cynical and bitter?” 

I’m sure there are additional concerns in planning meetings, but you get the idea. Committing programmer and quality testing resources costs money, and before that money and time are committed, there will be an expected return on investment.

So, back to the mixed messages. The bullshit messages. The upswing of excitement tempered with the “but why can’t we do x?”

Or, to put it another way, Why So Serious?

Transmogrification, or ‘mogging’ as it’s now called, was announced to great excitement on my part. In almost all ways I’ve been delighted with the very idea. It has succeeded in one assumed goal; I am revitilized in playing World of Warcraft, because this has challenged my ‘collector’ instincts to go out there into old content and gather pieces of gear together for that ‘neato’ set. It’s also brought renewed attachment to my characters, fulfilling my desire to customise and personalize my avatar so that I’m not just Huntard #4590786. Sure, I’ll still be generic Big Brown Bear Butt #75876, but the non-shifty among us will finally get to look cool while we kill stuffs.

We’ll even get to dispense with clown suits in Outlands, and for once in our lives, if we don’t WANT bare belly buttons in our plate armor, we won’t have to put up with it.

Unless you’re into that kind of thing.

The mogging announcements and the questions that came out of the community (and the Blue responses) give us some food for thought. 

Let’s take a look at some of these discussions, shall we?

From this article;

We have an obligation to players and to our hard working artists to keep the game from looking too silly. I know looking ridiculous is fun for some players, but World of Warcraft was established with a design that the game overall kept its silliness in check. That’s one of the reasons we resisted adding a feature like Transmogrification for so long.

So weapons that look like fish, for example, probably won’t be available as source items for Transmogrification, even if one is technically a dagger and has stats. There are a handful other weapons with “silly” models (such as frying pans, brooms, etc.) that may or may not be allowed — it’s still under discussion.

From this article;

Fishing Poles cannot be transmogrified.
Fishing Poles cannot be used to transmogrify.
There may be individual items that are excluded from being transmogrified on the basis that they were originally added to the game as absurdities. (examples: a weapon that looks like a fish, or a chest piece that is invisible)

Going off of what has been said, mogging will allow players to wear armor and weapons that are effective in combat while at the same time present a player-chosen appearance.

But Blizzard is also saying that they do not want players to have total freedom in the choices available to them. Things that Blizzard deems ‘silly’ are not permitted. The reason, the sole reason, is out of a self-imposed obligation to the players and to the artists to keep the game from getting too silly.

Err. Wut?

We as players are being given the freedom to take the disparate ‘clown suit’ clashing appearance of items, items that are individually best in performance but look like shit visually when all mixed together, and pay gold to have them all look like matching or themed sets we choose.

Many players will certainly take advantage of this.

But we are NOT being given the chance to truly let our own attitudes or humor or sense of satire shine through. We do not have freedom of personal expression in how we do this, unless someone chooses to mog their gear to intentionally pick items that clash as horribly as possible, going for a circus clown look.

And the reason given is to keep things serious.  

Let’s put ourself in that hypothetical Blizzard meeting. The one where the suits are looking for the cost/profit analysis before giving the green light to coders to even begin implementing a new feature like mogging.

When mogging comes up, what does Blizzard get out of it? We can see the cost in coding time, and we can see the fun aspect as players, but where does Blizzard see a profit?

In terms of retention, perhaps a little. Mogging will provide an opportunity for customization, and the act of customizing will bring us to invest more of ourselves into our characters, leading at least some of us to feel a closer investment into WoW. 

But is that all?

What about attracting new players amidst all the competition out there in the MMO world, with all these shiny new games?

If you have not played an MMO before, and were comparing screenshots or looking at in-game videos on Youtube, wouldn’t Blizzard come out looking a little better if their characters wore more cohesive and attractive gear with amazing looking weapons?

Wouldn’t screenshots of boss kills look a bit better if everyone stood out more and looked… planned?

The impression that potential new customers would have is that you can look cool in WoW, something that mismatched armor appearances and clown suits worn for the stat benefits don’t provide.

As an aside, why don’t they currently provide them? Because whoever the design team is for gear sets, as talented as they are and as kick-ass as the work they’ve done over the years is, the people putting stats on those gear items have forced players to choose between style and substance instead of having both in one package. And talking about why that has been the way it has would make for another fun discussion.

Back on point, when you consider screenshots and the new player attraction point of view from a Public Relations / Sales (corporate suit with no sense of humor)perspective, the decision to ban silly looking items from mogging becomes self-explanatory.

I’m a blogger, so I’ll say it anyway; if Blizzard is trying to entice new customers with images of epic battles and high fantasy, competing against games with more cohesive high fantasy art styles (and more realistic looks with higher polygon counts) they don’t want to have videos floating around out there of top flight raid teams killing Ragnaros while wielding fishing poles, frying pans, baseball bats and pitchforks, with a main tank beating Rag with a fish.

It would happen. Why would it happen? Because we are, the most of us, gamers playing a game, and we gamers as a class have this annoying tendency to enjoy the silly, the absurb, the satirical and the loony. We often like Fawlty Towers, Red Dwarf, Monty Python, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and other things that poke fun at the too self-important or deadly serious.

We are Not So Serious. We ARE the people who think tanking Ragnaros and beating on him with a dead floppy fish would be hilarious. 

Blizzard knows this. And at least one aspect of policy makers has chosen to pre-emptively block it before it can become a problem.

Who in Blizzard would worry about this? After all, I know that part of what brought me into the game was the light-hearted nature of the art, the stylistic sense of the game, and yes, pop culture references and more tender moments.

In game non-combat pets are an example of the heart of the game that drew me in. Things that spoke to me of people making a game that loved what they did, and knew what fun was. People who knew how to have a good time. I felt I could trust people like that to continue to support a fun game to play.

Would tanking Ragnaros with a fish main hand hurt Blizzard? Would it detract from our enjoyment of the game? I submit to you the argument that if it would, it would do so to the same extent that the entire quest series in Westfall parodying Horatio from CSI: Miami does already.

I know there are some players that do not like having that type of pop culture involvement or sillyness in the game. But it’s in the game already. Clearly, there is a faction within Blizzard that DOES have a sense of humor, DOES know how to have fun, and also knows how not to take themselves too seriously. And who have tried to explore that sense of humor while staying within the boundaries of a very smart and intelligent world setting with amazingly rich lore.

This isn’t War and Peace, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, or On War.

This is a video game, and as such, we the players get in there and mess around.

Who plays World of Warcraft?

People who have so much fun that we take the serious aspects of the game like dying in the Ring of Fire and make Johnny Cash parody songs, or look at the insane farming requirements to open the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj and make parody videos of it, or just take the brilliance of Avenue Q and set one of their songs to a video about what those nice people in your guild are really like.

So someone put sillyness in the game, someone I would wager is a gamer at heart and knows how to have fun.

But here is a new feature, and we’re told that there is now an obligation to prevent sillyness. Apparently, we wouldn’t be showing the proper respect for the material and the artists hard work if we killed Ragnaros by beating him to death with floppy dead fishies. 

I call bullshit on that one. 

So why? Why risk a downside of player irritation at being restricted? There has to be some benefit that outweighs the negative.

Maybe someone can suggest another in the comments, but the only one I see is the possible PR benefit from having movies with Oh So Serious players beating raids and doing PvP in badass looking matching gear sets, sans fish. 

It’s an idea only a suit would have; to assume potential players of a fantasy game with Orcs and Elves (and Gnomes), seeing characters fighting with fish, would be TURNED OFF and walk away saying “Hell no, that shit is too damn silly for me. I’d prefer a nice game of SimAccountant”.

It is, to bring this back to my earlier corporate joke, the equivalent of a proposed picture of all the company employees for the company website or newsletter. Human Resources or Public Relations people come out to hand out t-shirts with the company logo on them for everyone to wear, arrange everyone so the ‘pretty’ office people and managers are standing prominently out in front or on the sides to kind of mute the grubbiness of the production staff, and generally manage the situation so the picture taken presents the image they want to show, and if it happens to resemble reality, well, that was an accident.

It’s one step up from doing what my last company did, and just hire professional models to portray the company employees on the company website, leading employees to ask each other, “Who the hell is that, and when did we hire them?”

Seriously Blizz, Why So Serious?

Time keeps on slippin’ into the future, my friends.

World of Warcraft is almost alive, isn’t it?

The older it gets, the more it changes and grows, just like us.

Tanking is going to change. Oh noes! Worgen are going to get horsies. Oh noes!

Is it the end of the World as we know it?

No, it’s just another sign that as time passes, things change.

Perspectives change. Attitudes change. New information is obtained that, when added to existing knowledge and acquired experience, causes us to re-evaluate our beliefs and modify our assumptions, then act accordingly.

Or, we just assume we know everything there is to know, assume we peaked in the eleventh grade, can’t improve on perfection, lock our minds rigidly into stagnation and judge everyone and everything around us based on our own limited worldview. 

Of course I don’t mean you. No, I’m talking about those other close-minded people, and aren’t they fun to look at.

World of Warcraft changes all the time. Sometimes we don’t like the changes, sometimes we do.

You can accept things and adapt, try to make the most of it, open your mind to the possibility that things might be okay after all, or you can get the hell out.

There really is no option three.

The one thing I’m not sure gets across to some people is that no matter how loudly you bitch, piss and moan, the changes Will. Not. Stop.

There is no special freeze-frame timestop mode just because you like things just the way they are.

Improvise, adapt and overcome, or GTFO.

One way or another, be advised, if your way of dealing with every change you don’t like is to bitch about it, complain about it, whine and piss and moan and harp on and on about how great it was in the good old days, how much better everything was, how bad everything now sucks, how much you hate everything they’ve done or will ever do unless they wipe the servers and re-install Vanilla….

Then screw you, I’m turning you off.

While the game changed, you stayed exactly the same. Locked into a single-minded worldview that was not open to the possibility of change or growth. You had one thing, you learned it, you liked it, and now you’re rushing out there into the surf, hands outstretched to stop the tide. Nooo! Noooo! No dissassemble Number Five!

Here comes the hurricane, and no, it’s not stopping for you. Number Five is being scrapped for parts, Steve Jobs made a phone that’s smarter. Them’s the breaks, kid. Liked the articulation on those eyebrows, though.

The wise people may not like the changes, but instead of barking like walruses they go on the official forums and post intelligent, coherent and mostly POLITE statements concerning the state of proposed changes and how they either don’t work as advertised, don’t address the stated problem, or could stand to be improved. These people perform analysis, make recommendations, and then when that wave comes rolling in, they’re out there holding their surfboards saying, “Bring it on, bitch. Let’s shoot the curl.”

I am sick and tired of hearing about how badly the game sucks now, how terrible it is, how broken, how corrupt, how venal or self-serving. How it totally lacks fun.

hmmm. That’s all news to me.

Here’s a clue for you.

I have never, in all the years I have played WoW, ever had more fun in the game than I am RIGHT NOW.

Broken? Broken my ass.

I am playing with great people, simply GREAT people. I am leveling alts in different areas and in different ways.

Are you not having fun? Well, that’s your experience, and that’s certainly valid. But what you people continuously seem to do is forget that YOUR experience is only true for YOU, and you do NOT speak for ME!

Why can you not get it through your heads? Just because YOU’RE not happy doesn’t mean EVERYONE ain’t happy, it just means the only person that is really real to you ain’t happy.

I’m having lots of fun, and not just on my mains, and not just because I raid every once in a while with great folks. I’m having TONS of fun with alts, too!

Wait, what? Why yes, didnt you know? Back in Vanilla WoW you had to quest to level.

That was it.

But now, why look! You can quest in a streamlined system that doesn’t have any dead level zones at all that force you to grind mobs to get through levels 48-54, OR you can PvP through the levels getting XP, OR you can LFG through the levels doing nothing but cooperative grouping meeting completely new people in dungeons and getting bags of loot, just wow!

Wait, what if I’ve got a max level character already and I’m not interested in questing for the third (or thirtieth) time, I just want to get to max level fast so I can tank for my friends? Why, look at this shit, we’ve got Heirlooms all UP in your grill you can get to speed up XP gains, plus we’ve got Guild Advancement that increases XP gains PLUS lets you buy even more Heirlooms to speed that shit up if you don’t have the time or Justice Points to get them, and you’re also too lazy to do the Argent Tournament dailies to earn tokens to buy them. Oh yeah, that;’s right, three different ways to get Heirlooms, not counting doing PvP and then converting Honor to JP to buy your Heirlooms, OR competing in the fishing tournament for the Pirate Ring.

But wait, what if you never played before at all, AND you don’t care about seeing any of that awesome questing, you want to blow off the storylines and completely ignore the lore, that stuff is for geeks and freaks (like me), all you want to do is leap right in and rush as fast as possible to max level so you can go play with your friends with these raids and stuff fo’shizzle? 

Well hell, we’ve even got Recruit a Friend to give you and your buddy that you’re going to be playing with some SERIOUS XP gains fast!

Err, you DO have a friend that will play with you and be part of your Recruit a Friend, righty-O? I mean, that’s your argument here, right?

Oh, they just want you to get yourself, all alone, to max level as fast as you can so you can join them?

Errr.

Cluebot: If they’re not willing to group with you and help you take advantage of Recruit a Friend to get you to max level so you can play with them… well, they’re not really a fgood riend, understand? They’re just people you know that said, “Hey, why not pick up the game and join us, it’ll be cool dude.” No, this is more about you wanting to get yourself to max level so you will be worthy of joining them in what they’re doing. Friends are usually at least a teensy bit interested in spending time with you, no matter the level, especially if it’ll help you get to play with them and their max level characters faster. 

The game changes, grows, adapts to the demands that we, the players, make. Marketing types sit around and try to come up with things to add or change that will entice new players, and delight old ones.

Transmogrification? I’ve actually seen people pissed that this will be added. “OMG, another gold sink” they say. “Why would I do that, what’s the point. Well, at least I can farm BoE items to sell to the idiots that want it.”

Spoken like a true “My character is just a bunch of numbers that I have no emotional attachment to whatsoever and I never came up with any kind of backstory at all for” player.

Oh, and a gold sink?

Yeah, like Reforging.

Oh, wait. Maybe they added other tools and content in game that made getting tons and tons of gold easy at max level, the only level in which you’d want to use Reforging in the first place. Or would be able to gather all those interesting old items to build a neat set.

Damnit, I don’t have time to Reforge anyway, I have to grind Hellfire rep so I can get the key to unlock Heroics in that zone. Oh wait, that was removed. Now I can just join a heroic, as soon as I find more in Trade chat to join my group, then fly out to the instance with enough to use the summoning stone.

Oh, wait.

But I can’t play tonight guys, I have to go farm all the mats for the Flasks that I’ll need for the raids, just like the other 24 members of the raid team, all grinding those mats all the time we’re in game that we’re not actually raiding…

Oh, wait. Cauldrons and Fish Feasts kinda cut way down on the farming needed, didn’t it? Just a few Flasks and stuff, and the whole raid is hooked up.

Huh. It’s almost as though the things that were massive time sinks that you simply HAD to do were streamlined or removed outright to allow you the freedom to leap right into the meat of PLAYING as fast and as much as possible…

And time sinks and daily quests were added that were fun, and helpful, but purely optional.

Choice. Freedom of, one each. Hmm, I like this concept. Please, give me more!

Would I like a lot more raids to do, tons more content, boss after zone after boss all waiting to be explored, five or six raids all waiting to be tamed, but each one having to be done before the next could be tried, like we had when Burning Crusade was released?

Well, sure. And more five person dungeons. More and more content. Absolutely. All the time. Keep it coming.

You see, with all of the barriers to getting stuck into the good stuff removed, all the attunements and gear grinds and rep grinds that weren’t helpful but were required all gone… the good stuff, the content, it just doesn’t last very long.

Boy, that sure is a problem. It really is. The easier you make it to get into raiding, the faster it gets eaten up.

Of course, they could always add a ton more attunements and rep grinds and such that have to be completed before you can unlock content. That’ll slow us back down.

Or maybe we can stick with what they’re doing instead, rolling out optional daily quest areas that will distract us temporarily while they work on the next content patch. Oh wait, that came with a new raid, didn’t it?

Huh. You don’t say.

Look, if you don’t like WoW, if all you can see are the things that have changed for what you consider to be the worst, if all you can remember of the old days were the things you thought were just great, if your rose colored glasses are just setting the past to glow all pretty and warm, if all you dwell on now are the things you cannot adapt to or that have ‘ruined’ the game for you…

Then stop playing. Leave. Put the damn game down, cancel your subscription, and go play Rift. Or pre-order SWTOR! Or try Guild Wars 2, or LOTRO, or Warhammer 40K, or World of Tanks, or any of seemingly hundreds of other options.

If WoW sucks that bad, then why in the name of Elune are you still playing it, and bitching about it endlessly?

I’m sick of hearing about it.

It’s not the game. It’s you. Grow up and look around you with fresh eyes, open your mind, no really open it this time, and maybe actually make an effort on YOUR part to find some friends and play with them.

Friends make a huge difference. Purging your head of the sick poison and bitterness you’ve got choking you will help, too.

Oh, it’ll help in seeing the game clearly for what it is, sure, but I was thinking more in terms of actually making friends.

I shall leave you with the inspiration for this post, and then I’m off to play WoW, and have a DAMN FINE TIME DOING IT.

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but its sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

I’m requesting an intervention.

The next time someone wants to write a story, do me a favor… don’t include zombies.

If you have the urge to type that “z” word, stop yourself. Think long and hard about what you’re about to do… and then don’t.

It’s been done. It’s been done to death, raised, killed again, and then had a dozen boring variations on the theme brought out to try and make it seem cute, much like these “done to death” cliché lines.

Now, I understand your fascination with zombies. You can do SO MUCH with your story, using zombies as a metaphor for something else.

Zombies are symbolic of the human condition, and very tempting to use to make your point.

If you want to talk about how a person can feel alone in a crowd, few things represent it quite so well as having that someone running around surrounded by mindless, unresponsive, hostile zombies that just don’t ‘get’ you, no matter how hard they try. A sea of faces, blank or hostile, that are all around you, but no matter how loudly you scream for help, you are still all alone in a cold, threatening world that sometimes seems to hate you.

But here’s the thing. It’s been done. It’s been done, the point has been made, it wasn’t even a point, it was a massive sledgehammer of brutal obviousness ramming the entire concept down your throat.

Zombies do NOT equal subtlety.

So why is it people will not leave zombies alone? Why do we keep getting zombie movies, books, comic books, video games all in seemingly endless derivations?

Does someone out there think that there is still some untapped reserve of zombie goodness, some secret well that, once found, will gush forth with a fresh perspective that adds something new?

Here’s a secret for you. Shhh. Don’t tell anyone.

IT’S BEEN DONE!

I don’t have to be more specific. Whatever the hell it was, if you were thinking about it plus zombies, it’s been done.

If your idea was, just pulling something out of my butt, literary fictional classics and zombies, I bet it’s been done somewhere.

I’m sure if you looked, and I’m not even going to bother, but I’ll bet you could find a version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and even Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, all done with added zombie.

Zombies in Space? Oh, please. There’s even been Jason Voorhees in space, for the love of memes!

Oh, are your zombies from a plague, the main characters are isolated and alone and fearing infection, and you’re making a witty statement by having the healthy be the minority, hurting and alone, and the sick be the uncaring, unfeeling masses? No, we missed that you inverted things to make your point. We are completely incapable of grasping your intended statement about aids or other communicable diseases, and how terrible the isolation feels, without the addition of zombies.

Oh yeah. You’re a freaking genius. Our silence stems from stunned admiration. Or a cowlike obliviousness. You pick. You will anyway.

Does your special zombie breed come from some alien cause, and part of the horror is being alone in a world that is not just hostile, but is unknown and unknowable, something you will never understand or be able to deal with, where all you can do is try and survive and keep ahold of your sanity, and find hope amongst the hopeless even when it seems there is no possible future to be found?

Well, just so long as it’s done with zombies.

Just, yes. We get it.

Funny zombies, scary zombies, adventure zombies, mercenary zombies going into war torn regions of the world to rescue political prisoners, a world of the living dead where humans are long gone and all that is left are zombies versus vampires, I DON’T CARE!

Just stop it.

Just… stop it.

We keep seeing the same cycles. New zombie story is very, very serious business. Next zombie story  is a variation on the theme, playing on some popular small bit the fans of the serious movie liked, like special forces vs zombies. Then the humorous take on zombies comes out, poking fun at the ‘serious zombie’ story. Then the self-conscious ironic take on the zombie story comes out, lampooning the whole thing, tongue sticking out of rotted cheek.

Then, a new serious zombie story comes out to remind people what a serious zombie story is, and is acclaimed as revolutionary, revitalizing the genre.

And it starts all over again!

Please.

Zombies.

Just say no.

If you still feel the urge, that primal drive to write or direct something that has zombies in it, if you feel that your message, whatever the hell it may be, can only be said through the use of the shambling undead, then prove it to yourself.

Take a moment of private time to contemplate Edward Hoppers’ painting, Nighthawks. Don’t think about it, don’t try to analyze it or break it down, just contemplate it. Let it seep in.

Now, while you’re contemplating Nighthawks, in the back of your mind, just let this thought seep into view…

Could I improve this by adding a zombie?

Think about it. Then go write a screenplay featuring cartoon characters from the ’80s in our modern world. You’ll display the same creative integrity, but aren’t they so cute.

If you’re a bitter nihilist, you’ll make the cartoon characters be zombies, just to spite us.

Zombie Smurf has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

At this point, straight up, I’d rather see just about any other damn thing than a new zombie story.

I won’t specifically name which zombie ‘thing’ was the inspiration for this post, I’ll leave it to your imagination to come up with the possible culprits. I’m sure you won’t be lacking possibilities. If someone somehow does guess right, I’ll say so, but I won’t confirm what type of media it was. Well, I’ll narrow it down for you. It was either a movie, book, comic book or video game.

Yeah, that narrowed it down. At least you won’t be wondering which music video set me off.

I will say, for the record, that it wasn’t “They Live“, only because, well, it was hilarious, I love Rowdy Roddy Piper, the alley brawl is legendary, and I feel like giving it a pass, even though you could use it as a freaking textbook case of what I’m talking about. 

Oh… and psych! If you made it this far, smile. I’ve been having some fun with you. What’s the point of doing Aprils Fools posts on Aprils Fools Day when everybody expects it?

You’ve been Bearwalled!

I guess a lot has been said recently about the whole Valor Point/Justice Point drop rate.

I won’t quote various sources, but there seems to be a bunch of folks that are pretty hot that normal raiding, BWD/BoT raiding, no longer yields Valor. Instead, it’s all about the Troll dungeons and the Firelands. Well, and Baradin Hold.

I’ve even heard that some folks are in guilds that require raiding members to ‘cap’ their weekly potential Valor points by running Troll dungeons, and other folks resent the heck out of feeling they have to run Trolls if they are going to stay competitive.

I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that World of Warcraft represents a wide open landscape for you to pursue your goals, and the freedom to make your own choices. Nobody is forcing you to do anything, including pay a monthly subscription.

Aside from the break between European and US/Oceana servers, WoW has no borders or passports. If you want to move to a different server, do it. There are no locks to bar your way. Nobody holds up a sign sayin,g “Must have 359+ gear level to ride this server.”

If you choose to raid at a pace that competes for first kills with other guilds, then that’s your choice. If the guild you choose to be in to meet that goal sets expectations for what you have to do, including meeting a weekly Valor Point cap, then again, your choice; stay or go.

I’m in a guild that has three raid teams. One of those teams is destroying Firelands and having a great time. Maybe one of the expectations among the members of that team is that they cap Valor Points each week. I wouldn’t know, nobody has said anything that I’ve heard, and it’s sure as hell not an expectation for the team I’m in. Because that’s not one of my goals, so I’m not even trying to be in that team, so I don’t have to meet that expectation.

If I wanted to be at that level of play? Then I’d expect to have to pay… with my time and energy and determination.

Is the raid team I’m a part of doing Firelands? Not yet. Cleared trash, sure, killed the new BH boss. Mostly, they’ve focused on clearing the last of the original raids and getting the Defender of a Shattered World closure first. 

Goal met. Bigbearbutt, Defender of a Shattered World says hello.  

Are they full up on hard modes? No, no they’re not.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? If they wanted to make the commitment in terms of time, if they wanted to set hard modes and race to server first kills as team goals… then the rules for the team would be different.

Look, it’s all about what you want to set as a goal for yourself, finding other like-minded people to play with to pursue that goal, and then doing what you feel is necessary and beyond to achieve success.

If you want to get all the Valor Points that you can in a given week, then you’ll use whatever method that you’re given. If you don’t, you won’t.

If your team feels that it is necessary to cap Valor Points each week, and you resent it, then your goals might match the rest of your raid team, but your level of personal commitment does not. Might be time to find a different raid team that has your same level of commitment, or lack thereof.

If you feel that the method Blizzard put in place isn’t fair, that’s your opinion and you’re welcome to it, but don’t expect me to share it. I clearly don’t have the same goals that you do.

From the outside, this is how the whole discussion sounds.

A player wants to raid, and be one of the first to see and do the new content. At the same time as the new content is released to challenge raid teams, wonderful, powerful new gear upgrades are made available through Valor Points.

These Valor Point gear upgrades would clearly make completing the existing content a little easier, but they’re not absolutely necessary to complete normal mode Firelands, as shown by other top notch raid teams that have already done it with existing gear from the old raiding Hard modes. The Valor Point gear makes it easier, but are not strictly required, and do not block progression.

With that being the case, Valor Point gear seems to occupy a place as an optional luxury to help raid teams that have not been doing Hard modes narrow the gap.

If the Valor Point gear is an optional luxury meant to help raid teams that have not been doing Hard modes get caught up, then yes, it would make sense to have Valor Points drop from old raids like BWD and BoT.

What Blizzard did makes sense to me, though, as it allows players to get those optional luxury points on their own time, outside of scheduled Firelands raids, without having to deal with a weekly lockout or by dividing their raid time between Firelands and BWD/BoT/Tot4W.

Their move also has one further benefit from Blizzards’ point of view; it encourages raid geared players to re-enter the LFD random mix in Troll dungeons, potentially shortening the queue times and increasing the possibility that at least one or two players in an LFD troll dungeon has been there before and is truly geared and capable of leading a team to victory.

So, what is the down side?

Well, I see a whole lot of QQing that people who aren’t raiding are able to get the Valor Point gear just as fast as raiders.

Err. Umm.

Yeah, not really feeling your pain, there.

If you don’t want to do Troll dungeons, don’t do them. If your guild is telling you that you have to, then guess what, sparky? You’ve got one of them whatchamacallems… dilemmas. Only you can decide if you want it bad enough. 

You know that determination and sacrifice and hard work you hear Michelle Kwan talk about? How she worked her ass off to do what she had to do to succeed and win, but she stayed the course and pushed herself, because she had a personal desire and drive to be the best, and she refused to give in or give up?

Yeah, about your desire for those server first kills and speed of progression? Turns out, you might have to work for it a little bit. I know that comes as somewhat of a surprise, but there you have it.

Anything worth having doesn’t come cheap. If you want it, earn it. If you don’t want it, then stop bitching about it, and do your normal raids and take your time. It’ll still be there a year from now, waiting for you.

Is it worth the price you’re expected to pay?

Your call.

I just know I’m tired of hearing about it.

It was announced over the weekend that Osama bin Laden is dead, killed by American special forces personnel in a carefully planned operation.

Reactions to the news have been interesting to watch.

The reactions of people shown in the media here in the USA were initially joyous, images of cheering crowds, delighted citizens of all ages in the papers and on TV.

As the week goes on, I’m seeing more people stand forward to respond not to the death of Osama itself, but instead to those joyous reactions. Responses from those sad to see anyone celebrating the death of anyone, no matter what they may have done. 

I’m going to raise the issue briefly, just to touch on some of these points.

I’d like to go directly at the heart of this concern; the celebration of the death of a human being.

It sounds like a very laudable thing, wonderfully sensitive and compassionate, to so love your fellow man that you are pained to see anyone celebrate death rather than life. To feel sadness that others would find joy in the misery or ending of another human life.

The death of Osama bin Laden can’t be broken down that easily, as the simple death of a man like any other.

This was more than that for many people. This was not just the death of a man, but of a symbol.

I’m going to make a comparison that I hope will show more clearly what I mean. Please bear with me for a moment.

In the movie The Wizard of Oz, when Glinda the Good Witch of the North tells Dorothy that her falling house has crushed and killed the Wicked Witch of the East, we have never been shown the wicked witch or heard of her deeds, so her death holds little meaning for us. 

Upon hearing this news, the Munchkins come out of hiding. They spontaneously burst into song, singing “Ding dong! The witch is dead” and dance in celebration.

Is this fiction? Of course it is. But it’s also a scene that I think many of us can understand when watching from the outside. The munchkins lived in fear under the shadow of the Wicked Witch of the East. They cowered in their homes, afraid of what evil she might do to them next. They feared standing out, for it might bring them to her notice, attract her attention to them.

When they knew that she was dead, their celebration spoke to me not of joy at the death of a person, but instead of a joyous reaction to the passing of fear, a fear they had lived under for a very long time, a fear they were powerless to do anything about.

The munchkins were not evil. They did not glory in the death of another human being, assuming the witches were human. But they had been afraid, and had been unable to strike back or even to defend themselves against the power of the Wicked Witch of the East. Once the Witch was dead, they looked around, and slowly came to the realization that they were free of that which they feared the most. Their hearts were gladdened and full of joy, so full they had to sing and dance to let it all out.

Analogies are always flawed things, but I see a lot of reasons for comparing the two situations.

From the moment the Twin Towers fell, America passed under the shadow of Osama bin Laden. For good or ill he was turned into a living symbol of terror. We lived our lives knowing that there was a man out there in the world bent on the death and destruction of American innocents, what the government calls non-combatants.

Here in America, we structured our lives around terror alerts and color codes and protective measures. In those first few months, we were told to seal our homes in pastic wrap, to watch our mail for anthrax dust, to watch our neighbors and the strangers on the street for anyone at any time could be seeking to kill us. We went to war to strike at the source, we took actions to hunt him down, we were told that at any moment the next attack may come.

We watched the media talk about how any large gathering, any event where Americans would gather together was now a potential target, a preferred target. The Super Bowl, the Democratic National Convention, a Barbara Streisand concert, all of these became ‘ideal targets for terrorism’.

We went about our lives anyway, because that’s who we are. We’re Americans, and while the normal stereotype of the American is of a loud, arrogant, violent cowboy, one thing is certainly true; we don’t cower in our holes or go into hiding. We take action. It may be the wrong action, but we do something, or we want to see that our government is doing something about it.

On September 11th 2001, a tension entered the lives of all Americans, whether we are willing to admit it or not. Osama bin Laden was turned into a symbol for terrorism, the face of those that want to kill our families, our children. The face of an enemy that did not want to face soldiers on the battlefield, but instead place bombs in schools and churches, to strike at the innocent and the defenseless.

For almost ten years, all Americans that choose to enlist in the armed forces know exactly who Osama bin Laden is, and what role he has had to play in our awareness of terrorism. 

The symbol of terrorism is dead, killed by an American warrior in an intentionally planned strike. That’s a very powerful symbol, too.

Do I think people cheering and celebrating are ghouls, delighting in the death of a human being? Do I feel sadness for them?

No. I think we are seeing people who are celebrating that the symbol of terror we have known for almost ten years is dead. The bogeyman is gone. The Wicked Witch of the East got a house dropped on her, and for the moment, we can dance in the streets and cheer Dorothy and pretend that all is well.

We know in our hearts that the Wicked Witch of the West is still out there intending to get us, and our little dog too. A symbol of terrorism is dead, but terrorism itself is not. We all know this, we’re not idiots.

This was a victory, and it is right and just to celebrate a victory, to acknowledge what we have suffered, to remember those that we loved that have been lost along the way, and to show our gratitude and appreciation to the warriors that volunteered to seek out the source of our fears and destroy them, and who remain pledged to destroy all others that would continue to serve him and his cause.

God bless all those who continue to fight on behalf of the American people, and who place themselves in harms way to protect the innocent. God bless you from the bottom of my heart.