The Geek that Would Be a Prince

I promise you that we'll get off of WoW and talk about something else some time soon, but as WoW is the number 1 MMO in the world and my primary game of choice right now, there's a lot to say about it. Today however, I want to jack out of the game and take a look at the giant pulling the strings of the puppet...Blizzard.

I have been playing WoW off and on for the past 5 years and I can tell you that for the majority of my time playing the game, I have had a very distinct hate for Blizzard Entertainment. I've quit the game out of sheer principle more times than I can remember, vowing to never come back; always at some point, finding myself fitting my Night Elf feet back into my boots. What Blizzard has created is more addictive than Coke when they were putting cocaine in it. These days however, I've made my peace with Blizz. Patch 3.3.0 did it for me. The Random Dungeon Finder...wow, this was an awesome and much needed addition to the game and a huge first step to making changes to the game that actually mattered to the players. Now whether you are one of those hardcore players that feel like this and other changes put the game too far into "Easy Mode", or a happy happy hippo like me, you use and love the RDF.

Good job Blizz, but what's next? Well, they answered with the next big update, 3.3.5. A new raid AND most importantly an absolutely overhauled chat system with finally, CROSS-SERVER chat! How many times have you met an awesome person (especially with the RDF) and was elated to find out that they play WoW just like you, but then totally let down when you found out they played on a different server...if you were using the RDF when you found them then you guys can just queue up for another instance, but eventually, you'll have to let them go. So sad; but soon, with RealID, the new chat system powered by Battle.net, you'll be able to add friends and talk to them cross-server, cross faction, and even across game platforms (WoW to Starcaft for example). Blizzard is on a roll and I'm loving them. I don't know if someone got fired and someone else got hired, or if the execs just decided to remove the wool from their heads but some good things are being done these days.

But then...

I was reading my July/August edition of Massive Online Gamer. If you are looking for a magazine that does more than just mention a couple of MMOs then goes right back to what really matters, console games, and haven't found one then I highly suggest you check out MOG. It's a magazine devoted to online games and gamers. It has it's flaws, mostly having to do with focusing on the same select few games each month, but if you play one of the main 5 P2P games, I'm sure that the magazine covers yours. Okay, back to the point; I was reading my MOG, this edition featuring a spread on the upcoming expansion, Cataclysm, and I almost slapped myself in the face.

I have come to the realization that Blizzard has a very difficult time figuring out what is worth charging 12 million people $39.99 + tax and what should be put into an update. Looking at the cycle created by the past two expansions, you could figure out that this is a "new race" turn and I don't even have a problem with the races that are being offered. I actually think they are kinda cool. Mainly because of the worgen. Being Team Jacob, this is my chance to be a werewolf too! But the implementation is not right. First of all, if you take a look at the goblin racials vs the worgen's it will make you say, "Really?" As a matter of fact, let's take a look at them now.

• Rocket Belt- Allows the player to activate one of two rocket abilities every 2 minutes.

1. Jump up to 20 yards
2. Shoot rockets at an enemy within 30 yards

• Hobgoblin- Summon a pack hobgoblin once every 30 minutes, which will act as a personal servant and grant bank access.
• Bonus to Alchemy skill and should the player decide to become an alchemist, there will be an increased benefit from drinking health and mana potions
• Haste- Permanent 1% increase to attack and casting speed
• Diplomacy- Because of their knack for mercantile affairs, goblins will always receive the best possible gold discount, regardless of reputation

Now just counting the bullet-points, one race has a clear advantage, 4 vs 6, but when you actually read what the talents are, there is no comparison. Based on racials alone, I want to be a goblin, hands down. I'll take not having to use my hearth and then waste 10 minutes flying back to where I was, every thirty minutes over not having to buy a 39 copper skinning knife (IF I'm a skinner) any day. I'll take a 40 or more gold discount on all items over a reduced duration of diseases and curses. And I'll take a championship belt that can either blast my opponent in the face or give me a leap and bound of escape every two minutes over simply running faster for a few seconds every three.

The racial mounts:

Worgen:




Goblin:




Now I know those images may be a little hard to make out, but this is what it comes down to. Goblin, roadster (and we're not even going to discuss the possible submarine the goblins may be getting); worgen, boar...Really? A wolf riding on a pig? Marissa Monera, writer of the article covering the expansion in MOG, excused Blizzard for this huge deficit by saying, "Hey, they have to provide some incentive for players to create what could be the most annoying characters in the game." However, I beg to differ. Players have been asking for a playable goblin race for years, and that's besides the fact that many Horde players consider themselves too "mature" to play a pretty character. Why else would people be willing to play trolls? All that besides, I personally think the goblins look pretty cool and am probably going to roll one at some point.

But given this excuse, if the worgen is supposed to be the race with the cool factor, which I can't say that it isn't...make it cool Blizz. The talent Flayer; this could be a decent talent if you made it worth our while. The idea is right, werewolves should be able to skin without a skinning knife and fast, but don't leave it there, making our gain an one time saving of 39 c. Why shouldn't ALL worgen, regardless of profession, be able to skin? Now that's cool. Whoever heard of a werewolf needing to ride any mount? Let them train to get on all fours at level 20, 40, and 60, and run like the wind! Now THAT'S cool. Which brings up another point. If you've seen the videos, currently the worgen talent, Darkflight, looks the same as a rogue activating Sprint. That's not cool, werewolves are not supposed to be humans dressed up for Halloween. They are supposed to be humans transformed, eating all the people at the Halloween party. If I'm a werewolf and I'm going to dash, it needs to be on all fours.

MOG goes on in the article to list the Race/Class Combination changes as such:

• Blood Elf- Warrior
• Dwarf- Shaman, Mage
• Gnome- Priest
• Human- Hunter
• Night Elf- Mage
• Orc- Mage
• Tauren Paladin, Priest
• Troll- Druid
• Undead- Hunter
• Goblin- Everything but Paladin and Druid
• Worgen- Everything but Shaman and Paladin

Now those combinations don't look too bad, some of the new combos are ones I've heard asked for in my five years of playing the game. However, someone tell me how it makes sense that a werewolf can be a Druid and transform into a cat, bear, bird, and moonchicken thing (sounds more like a vampire), but CAN NOT be a Shaman, who transforms into a wolf and (depending on the spec) can summon lupine companions.

The reason these imbalances bother me so much is because of the seemingly omnipresent imbalance between the factions, Horde and Alliance. Since I've been playing WoW, the Horde have always been the hardcore raiders, getting through content and stomping face in PvP...basically the adults that play the game, and the Alliance has always consisted of those who played the game to socialize and look at themselves, thinking of how pretty they are...the "children" of the game. Now this is a stereotype, I know, but as with all, there is certainly some truth to that claim. I remember when Burning Crusade was coming out, I, as an Alliance player was elated, because I was thinking that the whole lot of immature players were going to head on over to the Horde to make Blood Elves and then maybe we could actually start to win some in PvP. I remember that obviously the Horde feared this as well as there were a lot of guilds that banned Blood Elves from joining their ranks.

Unfortunately the shift never panned out. The kids found out that Draenei women were pretty too and the Horde numbers only solidified, holding on to any of their members that would have eventually left due to the lack of attractive Horde toons. Wrath of the Lich King brought no prospects of shift in the scales of power due to Death Knights being available to both factions. And today, on most servers, I'd say it is difficult being an Alliance raider/PvPer. On my server, there are very few good raiding guilds, those having limited or no slots available for new recruits, and absolutely no PvP ones. I wanted to try to get some honor while I was leveling my shaman and consistently ran into, Alliance 5 players to Horde 10 players, situations. I just gave up. Alliance players wanting to do Wintergrasp have it only a little better, being guaranteed one win (because players show up) at 7:00 PM on Tuesday evening.

The faction truly needs a boost, and I was hoping/thinking being awarded the worgen race would be it. But given the vast advantage to goblins in racial talents, I fear that I'll be singing the same sad song for the Alliance.

Cataclysm is also going to introduce (surprisingly) a new profession, Archaeology, which I currently do not really get the gist of how it works. An overhaul to the talent tree system is on the way, a new way to grind after grinding to max level, Path of the Titans, and a dumbing down of the item stat system, with some major changes to how a couple of classes work. The new level cap will be 85...Really? Five levels? Either those levels are going to fly by, or they are going to be far too tedious and long to obtain.

Two exciting things that Cataclysm are bringing are going to be the ability to fly anywhere in Azeroth and a resurfacing of much of the Old World. I am interested to see how far they will go to make the "cataclysm" a real change to Azeroth.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that these updates to the game are not good ones or even in some cases, needed ones. What I am saying is that the majority of the changes could be implemented in a patch or a major update. To me, RealID, coming out in Patch 3.3.5 revolutionizes the game much more than adding two more races to it. Cross-server chat is expansion content, talent tree changes is patch/update content.

My problem with Blizzard is that they are acquiesced with mediocrity. The World of Warcraft has the the talent behind it, fan base, and resources to be truly the greatest MMO ever created. But Blizzard is fine with half-stepping. They go just far enough to make sure their subscribers are going to buy what they ship out, but never work hard enough to be really great. Why do we players have to wait two years for an expansion to come out and get either two new races that change nothing about the game, or one new class, that gives you no options on what new you want to try? Even two new races and two new classes in an expansion would be a big enough update to satisfy me. Why is it that even WoW F2P (free to play) lookalike, Runes of Magic, has player housing yet we don't and it's not being offered in an expansion? Why is it that other major games (Lord of the Rings Online, City of Heroes/Villians, EvE Online), some having, I daresay, far less resources than WoW does, can release huge updates that change the face of the game for free, yet we are expected to pay $40 for cosmetic changes? Blizzard announced that Cataclysm would be WoW's last "expansion", this was their time/opportunity to do something really phenomenal.

WoW is a great game, one that changed the face of online gaming forever; and as a consumer, I don't mind paying for the work that is put in to keep the game running. Compared to other hobbies' start-up and maintenance costs, gaming is dirt cheap. However, if a company expects me to pay almost the same amount as I paid for the game in the first place, in the way of an expansion, I expect a product in return that truly expands the game.

Hey everyone! So I was thinking to myself, "Man, I haven't been writing lately," and then I thought, "Meh...only 3 people are actually looking at my blog," but then I realized that it doesn't matter if it's 3 people or 1000! There's someone out there who actually wants to know what's going on in this head of mine! Therefore, it's my responsibility to keep on keeping on and I will! See, something you must understand about me is that I'm a quitter. I don't mean to be, I really don't, but it's my nature. I have these wonderful ideas that get me excited and I jump to go do them, (like starting a blog) but then the excitement wears off, as in all things, it does, and I usually lack the fortitude within myself to keep going. So you will be my accountability. The little faces at the bottom of my screen representing people out there listening will be my gas to keep the car driving and we'll see how far we go.

With all that being said, Guilds...WoW guilds. Last week, I was leveling my shaman, Etherael, and was looking for a nice, comfortable guild with people who would be fun to hang out with, yet skilled and disciplined enough to raid effectively. Trade chat was buzzing with the usual fast food garbage sprinkled with a dash of guild recruitment spam...yum right? While questing I was keeping my eye out for the random chance of a interesting recruitment post coming through; and it came. A guild named Treewardens was recruiting. A guild that advertised itself to be enriched with kind, mature, and helpful adults; people that loved lore, and even some light RP. They were recruiting for their Icecrown Citadel team. Hmm, not too bad, being a player who's favorite classes in games are the druid/shaman archetypes, the name was alluring, sounded like the kind of people I wanted, and I had always wanted to do some role-playing.

So I messaged the recruiter, a player by the name of Rainulf, and told him that I would be interested in joining the Wardens and he told me the Wardens would be interested in having me, so I joined. Now, we talked briefly about first impressions a few days ago, they are important. And my first impression of any guild I join is always generated first, by the welcome that I receive. This one was so so; a couple of people paused a moment while grinding long enough to say hello or welcome. At one time, that would have been an absolute turn-off for me, but after having been in guilds where no one even stops the conversation that they are having in guild chat to welcome you, a couple of people saying hi is pretty decent.

Now let me back up and give you some history so you can see where this is going and why. Rewinding 3 months back, I was an active raider in the number 9 or 10 (at that time) Alliance guild on this server called RoA Nightmare Co. We were progressing quite decently in ICC, and I was getting my death knight geared up, but I didn't feel too connected to any of the people in the guild, save my wife. That's a problem for me. See, gaming is more than just a hobby that takes up 97% of my free time. Gaming is my primary social outlet, so playing with people that I don't care about or even like, is not acceptable for me. It absolutely defeats the purpose of playing an MMORPG as a matter of fact.

Considering all of this, I may a bold decision. I had always wanted a shaman but never really sat down and made one because the first 15 levels at least (I had gotten that far quite a few times) are boring beyond belief. In addition to that, having played this game for 5 years, I am no longer a fan of questing. That day though, something in me said, "Quit wishing to have a shaman, go make one," and I listened. Now initially, this was supposed to be a project in my spare time, while I wasn't raiding, but the very next raid night, I told my wife I didn't really feel like going and she didn't either, so we skipped it and I kept on leveling Etherael. Then the next night got skipped and the next. Before I knew it, I realized that I cared much more about getting my shaman to 80 and finding a guild that really fit me than raiding and getting gear.

Okay, back to the Treewardens. During my stay as a gamer, I have been in some casual guilds; and one thing they all seem to have in common is very nice people. People who are cheerful and helpful and just make you feel like you have a second home with them. Another thing they have in common is very unskilled players...usually the two sets are in actuality, one in the same. After time though, you come to know and expect for this to be the case. You join a casual guild guild for the community, not the skill. However, I am bullheaded enough to believe that somewhere out there, there is a casual raiding guild that truly is filled with kind, helpful, skilled, reliable, players.

To my utter surprise, Treewardens was not this fabled guild. Each day for the approximate 4 days I was in the guild, I would say hello to the guild when I logged on and more often than not, no one spoke at all. If anyone spoke, it was my recruiter. So kindness...uncheck. No one even addressed each other by their full character name, let alone, "My lord/lady" or any other role-playish title. RP...uncheck. The day before my fated departure from the Wardens, Rainulf invited me to come farm an instance that his girlfriend wanted gear out of, Trial of the Champion. I was close to 80 and in past experiences, enjoyed the instance, so I agreed to go. As soon as we got to there, someone disconnected and seeing that 2 of the would be 5 players were under 80, it would have made sense for us to wait on the other player to reconnect, but Rainulf insisted that we would be fine by ourselves.

Everything that could possibly go wrong in this instance, happened that evening. The tank (Rainulf) could not hold aggro, the healer (his girlfriend) could not keep the other players grabbing aggro alive, the muscle (the level 80 shaman) was doing less DPS than the low-level DPS (myself). We wiped...and wiped, and wiped, and wiped again. Somewhere in the middle of these failed attempts, I suggested we try to get another player but Rainulf was convinced that he just needed to bring his stronger tanking character to turn this whole thing around. Two of those wipes were after he switched. The level 80 shaman was geared wrong for his spec and repeatedly stated that maybe he should go get some other character he actually knew how to play, yet never changed characters.

Eventually, Rainulf did recruit in guild chat and we got a level 80 hunter with us from the guild who did fairly decent DPS, but died within the first few seconds of engaging the boss. Yet somehow, after around 7 wipes, we pulled through. The loot was sweet for me, my first epic, a chestpiece...but the level 80 enhancement shaman rolled on my elemental chestpiece against me and (typical) won. Now to the credit of the shaman, after I asked him why he rolled on the piece, he ended up giving it to me, but seeing that he rolled on it in the first place, explained to me why he was doing less DPS than me. He didn't know his class. Skill...uncheck.

I gave it some thought, but basically, I had joined a guild that was nothing like what they advertised themselves to be. It was inevitable for me to leave. I waited until the next day when there were not many people online, I'm not one for causing drama in a guild, messaged my recruiter, Rainulf, and simply told him that the guild was not what I was looking for, but I thanked him for the invitation and wished them good luck. After I left the guild, he messaged me and asked me what I was looking for. Now, having been in relationships where I broke up with the other person, I should have known to not even respond; this was a plea to get me back and I knew I was done. Yet I (dumbly) replied back that I initially thought I wanted a casual guild because I was tired of raiding with people I didn't really know or like, but in actuality, at my core, I'm a raider. This response was my try at diplomacy, keeping away from telling him that his guild was a fraud because it wasn't all that kind and welcoming of a guild and his players were unskilled louts. The message I got back was from a place of personal injury caused by any person leaving his guild. It intoned that I was a selfish person that wanted a guild to carry him through raids to get "welfare purples" and I belonged in a raiding guild with that attitude instead his...good riddance. That's what I get for saying that his guild wasn't what I was looking for? Mature adults...uncheck.

Wow...guilds.

They say that a first impression is a lasting one. I wonder what kind of impression I've made on you. I've been talking to you but haven't even told you my name. Well to be fair to myself, I did say that introductions would come later, but I wonder if even saying that was bad form...I'm rambling; if you were absolutely turned away then you won't be reading this and therefore it won't matter, ha.

With no further ado, my name is Antoine Jay Anderson. Now I spent quite a bit of time thinking about how much of myself I wanted to reveal to you. Funny enough, what name to give was about 90% of that process. I don't like my name. Antoine just doesn't sound right to me, and Jay is about one of the most boring names I've ever seen. Throughout my lifetime, I have tried different methods to make my name more interesting. I have switched back and forth between Antoine and Jay; I have pronounced Antoine differently to make it sound more like a name I don't mind, An - tō - nee. And the most recent attempt, about 7 years ago, was to show homage to Japanese culture (which I love!) and change the spelling of the name I now go by, Jay, to be phonetically correct in Japanese, Jei.

I was actually satisfied with my name for the first time in my life. It was an interesting spin on the name that my mother had given me and everyone that I've met in the past 7 years has thought that I have a cool name, one that they've never seen before. All was well until my family starting joining Facebook. Some of them, my mother being the first, started addressing me as Jay and that brought inquiries from friends, but what really affected me was the ones that addressed me as Jei... It suddenly occurred to me that Jei, as much as I loved it, was a moniker, a pen name, and it hurt my heart to see these people, the most important people in my life, who had been spelling my name as Jay since I was born, change just to suit me. So now, after 29 years of trying to be different, I settle back on the name and spelling that my mom decided on on June 10, 1981; Jay.

That being said, a lot of friends still spell my name Jei and I still love that spelling, so it's perfectly fine to and that's where the aforementioned internal struggle came from. So being a man of compromise, I decided it would be best to tell you my whole name and if you look at my signature line, you'll see that the spelling I chose is simply, J.

Wow...what's in a name right? So if you do the math, you'll see that I am on the last fringes of my 28th year on this earth. I'm a husband and a father. And my favorite thing to do is play massively multi-player online games.

In 2003, I was reading my favorite magazine, Newtype America (R.I.P.), one day and I came across this ad that was a free trial for a game where the characters in it looked like anime characters called Ragnarok Online. I read the description and saw that it was an RPG, which was by far my favorite genre of video game. It also said that you could play with thousands of people at one time and that part, I was confused about because the most people I'd even talked to at this time was probably about 50 in an AIM chatroom. But whatever, getting a chance to be an anime character, I was in.

So I installed the game, made my first character, Animeus, and walked into a world that was fated to be my home away from home for the very first time. Going through the tutorial was easy enough and at the end of it, there was short personality test to tell you what class would probably be best for you. Ragnarok chose swordsman for me however being the non-conformist that I am =), I chose mage (which I ended up hating). Once graduating from the tutorial, I got sent to the main city, Prontera, and was instantly overwhelmed. I was surrounded by a ton of people, all going about their business and absolutely ignoring me, I didn't know where to go or what to do. Somehow, I found my way out of the busy city square, and decided to try out my brand new skills and kill something. I saw some people fighting these butterfly looking things so I decided to too. I swung at it, it dodged, and then it killed me. I'm persistent (and prideful) so I got back up, determined to end that butterfly and it spanked me like a child a second time. This went on for about 5 rounds before I was ready to exit out of the game and uninstall, when a beautiful dancer walked up...no, she really was a dancer. It's a class in the game, look it up. A beautiful dancer walked up beside me, whip in hand, and *crack, crack, CRACK* the butterfly from hell was on the ground. Victory! Even though it wasn't necessarily mine, it still was; kinda. So anyhow she laughed at me and told me that at level 4 I was supposed to be over -----> killing those, not these until I was around 10. Oh. Well why didn't any of the other people standing around watching me get my ass handed to me say anything? She offered to "tank" for me for a while so that I could level up faster, which consisted of her smacking a butterfly one time with her whip and then letting it attempt to hit her, while her hips swaying, dodged the lashes. Meanwhile, I was supposed to make my feeble, furious, assault on the butterfly safe from harm. Two hours later and I was hooked...on a dancer, and a genre. The dancer and I aren't kicking it anymore but 8 years later, the genre and I, we're still going strong.

Ragnarok was my first, but since then I have traveled the lands of almost every major (pay to play) MMO out there. Everything from World of Warcraft to EvE and Champions Online, if it came out in the past decade, I've probably at least played the 14 day free trial.

Now I'm not your stereotypical gamer (I've heard). I'm what you would call an anomaly, a wolf in sheep's clothing, a cool guy playing at geek. That's what they say; but honestly, I'm just Steve Urkel without the suspenders. Oh! Or the high water pants. Now granted, that was then. I remember when I first started getting onto gamer forums and talking on vent back in Vanilla WoW and people were seeing my pictures saying, "That's not really you, come on!" then hearing my voice and retracting saying, "Oh damn...well maybe it is." But that was because at the time, online gaming was almost taboo. It was limited to the rejects who could not function in a proper social environment...the hottest night club in town. The overweight, the math nerd, the stay at home mom with nothing to do...not a guy that worked out and sounded like Barry White. So although I wasn't truly an anomaly even then, I can understand why some may have thought that. Nowadays however, WoW may as well be Match.com with all the hot guys and girls it has to offer. Gaming, I believe single-handedly because of the World of Warcraft, is damn near the cool thing to do. If you don't believe me, check out GorgeousGamers.com.

The world of MMOs has changed much around me since that first day in Prontera, and not all of the changes have been for the better. But the core still remains, a place where people who may not ever have met if left to the physical world, are able to meet, form and nurture relationships, and have fun killing wolves, boars, dragons, and some times even a rock out in space or two, all at the same time for $15/mo. What could be better? I'm a gamer, geeky and proud.

Play Me!

I am DEAD tired. I mean, seriously, my eyes are itching. Ok, that has much more to do with my allergies than the fact that I am sleepy, but as I write this, my eyes are periodically closing as well. I was considering skipping any communication tonight, but I wanted to "say" something...anything to you so badly that I decided to stay online just long enough to tell you that.

With that being said, I am going to bed; good night.

So I'm thinking that I should probably start this relationship out with an introduction. Maybe also an explanation about the title of this fledgling online journal. However, I think that will have to wait, as I'm at work and need to actually go do some. But I can tell you this...I feel better already. I remember when I was in Middle School, my English teacher (sorry I don't remember your name =( ) forced us to write every day in a journal/diary. She said that writing down whatever was on your mind at the time, no matter what it was... Ok, I actually don't remember what she said, but I DO remember that she said it was a good thing to do. I also remember that I didn't agree with her then, and haven't really since, but at this moment, I do.

So thank you for letting me unload on you for this first 5 mins. Now I am going to go back to work. Introductions will come later.