And Refugees has been born

So, for a while now I have been sort of stressing about guild and guild type stuff. First the break from SB for what I thought to be greener pastures at GIP. For a while that seemed to be going well, until drama that I didn't see coming. That caused a split, and I got to watch the guild essentially die around me. Now even the GL has decided to take a break. Couple with that a good friend joining the game on another server and I find it as time to move on for a bit.

All the time in the back of my mind I am seeing the failures of the guilds around me. I refuse to believe this is how guild must be. Elitest, stressful, angry, and unfair. I tried a guild to see what it was like on an RP server. Elitest, just in a different fashion. Instead of the classic “Your gear isn't cool enough. You can't play with us.” It was more of a quiet indifference. Not much more fun, and it equates to essentially the same thing in my mind.

On a lark, I tried a couple of other guilds on the server, and learned a few things about the seedier side of people's personalities and why some people should not be allowed to procreate. One was nothing more than the porn channel with worse writing and another was just a group of people who combined seemed to have a combined IQ smaller than my son's. Needless to say I didn't hang around either of these guilds for very long.

I ended up spending the 10 silver and buying a guild charter for myself. If what I have seen of guilds is what I have to compete with, I doubt seriously that I will have a hard time succeeding where others have failed. Considering I have no level 85 toons on this server, nor many friends on the server I think my first big hurdle will be getting people to join. We shall see.

My guild bears the moniker of “Refugees”. There are multiple meanings behind it. The most obvious can be attributed to being a refugee of the upheaval of Cataclysm. Less obvious, I am a refugee from another server, and the other founding member is a Refugee of another MMO.

20 days of WoW blogging Day 05

 This one has been hard for me to really decide upon. I have banged back and forth on it for a while, trying to decide whether I wanted to do something humorous, or to do something serious. Surprisingly, it was a hard for me to decide. I would like to think that I am funny, and some days I even am known to be funny, at least in my own mind.

In the end, I decided to be serious. The item I decided on is part of the reason I originally decided to try to begin to make gold consistently on my original server. I saw some guy riding around on this guy with a couple of his friends. I then later found out that he even had a couple of vendors on his back which was even cooler in my mind. Finally, finding out that he had a repair dude on his back made me giddy with glee. I might even have squee’d a little though don’t tell anyone.

Without further ado: Traveling Tundra Mammoth.

Edit: Thank you to the person who notified me that the picture was not working properly.

Gold Capped. I wish - Update

So, in my first post on Gold Capped, I had said I was going to do updates periodically to show where I stand. Here is my first in these updates.

So, It has not been very successful to start. My purple lotus didn't sell. I have re-listed it a couple times at lower prices keeping in mind how much it cost me so I can at least get my money back. I will be doing another check tonight, but I'm not really positive that I am going to see it sold.

I am actually going to infuse my "goldcapping" character with some money I've made on an alt. I have been pretty consistently using Auctioneer to build my database of what sells and for how much on the server, though of late I have been less than perfect of doing it twice a day as I had originally planned. I am going to take a shot at a few things that I have been watching and well let people know how it goes over the next week or so. maybe I will be able to show I have turned my 1g 1s into some actual gold.

20 days of WoW blogging Day 04

Day 04 – Your best WoW memory

I am not sure what my best WoW memory. I have had a lot of really good memories as I look back at my time here. I have had the opportunity to do a lot of cool things, met a lot of great people, and even learned a few things about myself. With all of these different things it is hard to come up with one particular thing that I would consider my best WoW memory.

I think I will talk about a memory I remind myself of when I get frustrated with different things in the game. I am not known to be the most outgoing person on the game. You won’t find me talking a lot on chat most days because I don’t go out looking to talk to people. Now this isn’t to say that I want to play a single player game. If someone talks to me I will talk back and from I’m told I can even be pretty interesting and insightful. I don’t know that I necessarily believe that, but hey it made me feel good.

Anyway, Best WoW memory. I am often annoyed by the fact that the guilds I have been in do not often do things together. If you are a special snowflake, you are allowed into runs, or small groups get together and do things consistently on their own. Because of my lack of outgoing nature, I have not really been a special snowflake, nor am I often part of one of the splinter groups.

I often am left to pug things like Baradin Hold (BH) or Vault of Archanon (VoA). Back before Wrath died I got frustrated after missing running VoA for several weeks in a row. I got it in my head that I was going to run a VoA raid all on my own. I’d done the fights enough to know what is needed and how to do it. It isn’t like the fight was hot and heavy, and only rarely did I ever see a wipe in it. So I began /2 calls for a VoA run. Surprisingly to me, I got a pretty good number of requests for invites right off the bat. I had my tanks and heals within the first few minutes, which was awesome because of how rare they could be. After filling the DPS with a couple ringer friends, we ran off to Wintergrasp to smack us some bosses (or at least one boss).

As we were getting gathered, I did have to ask some of my friends a couple of questions like how to set a lootmaster, do raid warnings, and the like. Feeling slightly foolish as I asked the questions, I quickly learned what needs to be done and got it all set up. Buffs were done, and off we went. After a mis-cue on the first trash mob that roams around right at the bottom of the stairs I was a getting really nervous. The bodies were rezed, or people ran back in and I waited for people to ragequit /leave party. None did, a few jokes were made and people continued forward. The group was able to get through the trash with no further problems, which bolstered my confidence a bit before we got to the boss that we were going after (it is a bit foggy to me now which it was, but I think it was the fire dude).

Feasts were dropped, buffs were applied, tanks co-ordinated on when the switches in taunts should happen, and off we went. By this point, my heart was pounding blood in my ears, and I could barely keep my calm as it began. Amazingly (to me at least), nothing bad happened. The dude was popped like the big loot piñata that he was, and the lootmaster tossed out the gear after rolls were made. I even ended up with a piece that I could have disenchanted.

I couldn’t believe it, nothing bad had happened. I had survived my first attempt at a raid run. Now I don’t have any illusions, I have no experience at raid calling, nor do I pretend to think that I am any good at that sort of thing. Having never done it and a bit of a lazy streak, I doubt I ever will, though on occasion after that I have been known to set up and run a VoA here and there. Now that Cata has dropped and been around a while, I will probably someday set up a BH run or two. Hopefully those runs will be added to my memory of the first VoA run I set up.

Gold Capped. I wish

The other night I was in a heroic with my friends Jinsao and Caralee. Cara and I were lamenting how poor we were. I think at the time I was sitting on about 7,000 gold while Cara was a bit below that. We both had gotten there through things that we had done Cara getting the Vial of Sands, and me in a failed attempt to make money at Leatherworking. Jin commented that he was also low, though he was significantly higher than Cara and I put together. He had been making gold selling the epic LW items that I had just gotten done blowing loads of gold trying to get to.

In general I have been frustrated with the small amount of gold that I typically am sitting on across my toons. In general at any given time I am somewhere in the 15,000 - 20,000 gold made through random quests, selling of junk to vendors and the like. I have always wanted to be one of those people who can say they are gold-capped. The problem being I have never really wanted to put the required effort to get there.

With my friend purchasing the game and becoming a full time member of the WoW community and finding a server to be home for us I have decided to put that effort into seeing if I can get myself to gold-capped. As such, I need something to keep me going on that track and not to peter out in boredom, or because it gets hard. I am going to report out my progress on occasion to remind myself that I am doing this and keep me moving forward.

To begin, I have begun using Auctioneer to scan the AH and begin to build a price data base on my new server. I will say it is a big server, and it seems to have a lot of movement on items. I will continue to scan for about a week before I begin trying to sell in earnest. In general I find that if I scan twice a day for about a week, I have enough data to use Auctioneer to begin flipping stuff that people are throwing up on the Auction House to get rid of, and turn it into profit on my own.

I did see what I consider to be my first purchase. I have noticed that herbs on the server seem to be pretty high priced in general compared to the server my old main was on. Noticing that trend I happened to look at one of my old standby’s to sell, Black Lotus. It happened that there was a couple of bits on the AH for 50g a stack, and then there was a single one selling for 54s. I also noticed a couple of bundles of just 2 for about 2-3 gold. On a lark I invested the 54s into buying the 1 piece to flip. Now understand 54 silver is more than half of all of the gold I have on that server right now. Prior to the purchase I had 1g 1s 1c. I have posted that 1 Black Lotus at 4g to see if it gets picked up by someone who needs an even five to mill for ink but doesn’t want to pay the 50g for a stack. When I get home I will check it and see if I have started my way to a flipping business, or do I still have more questing to do to make enough money to truly get into the business.

20 days of WoW blogging Day 03

 

20 days of wow blogging day 3 – First day in WoW

 

Ok, my first day in WoW was kind of a long time ago. Also, I have started and stopped a couple of times before I ever really hit my stride in WoW. I am pretty sure my first character ever was Skerril the Human Rogue. I remember thinking Holy Crap this is hard right at level 1. I was able to level my way out to about Westfall at level 12, before giving it up as a lost cause. I also know I tried a Warlock, and Paci my druid who persists to today.

Instead of trying to remember my first day in WoW, I am going to talk a little bit about early impressions of WoW from the standpoint of looking back and remembering what it was like. I cannot say that these memories are not warped by time, some may be completely inaccurate, but I leave it to you, dear reader to determine reality vs. fantasy.

Things I remember that actually almost kept me from ever really getting anywhere was WoW was how absolutely difficult it was to get started. Back in the early days of Wrath when I started, the beginning area still had mobs that aggroed you and would beat you to a pulp because they would gang up on you; man were there a lot of them too. I ended up learning some very hard lessons, like dying over and over is a part of the game, and I even used a technique that had me run as far into an area toward a quest goal as I could before I died, and then ran back and continued my run trying to get as far as I could before I was killed again by the hordes of troggs, defias thieves, or rat dudes that filled the area I was questing in.

I also remember thinking how the game was essentially solo content. Or at least to me it was. I knew a couple of people on the server, but they were already max level and were busy, so only popped by to see me for a few minutes, throw a buff my way, pat me on the head and send me on my way to certain death. One of these times I remember my friend running me through the stockades instance in Stormwind. As we ran through it, her destroying everything in sight and me staying behind just collecting all the stuff and meager xp all I could think was this could not be the way that Blizzard intended these instances to be. Why would the developers put so much work into creating these instances if you couldn’t run them when you were at the level where they were relevant? I knew that some people had friends that were of equal level and played together, but I didn’t see how two people could master one of these instances on their own, they were made for five people to run, not two or three.

Eventually I gave up on Alliance for a while and went over to the Horde side where I found my home for a while.Before making my way back to the Alliance.

If only everything could be so easily dispelled

I knew it. I just knew it. I was burnt out. I had been going through the motions for a while and not really enjoying anything that I was doing the way I used to when it came down to it. First it was the end of Wrath, and no one was really interested in doing anything. Then Cataclysm came out and I was rejuvenated for a bit, but the drama of the guild I had joined got in the way of any real enjoyment. I was left tired, frustrated, doing the things I had always done without any real enjoyment.

Log on, do the cooking/fishing daily; struggle through a dungeon or two. Talk to a couple of guild mates or a friend or two. I never really did anything new or different. Sure, once in a while I’d hop on one alt or another and bang through a level or two, but that really isn’t much fun when you are doing it by yourself. I can’t say it was work, since work is well….work.

Along comes a friend of mine and mentions that he might be interested in giving WoW another try. He’s played before at least once that I know of, but was turned off back before Blizzard did a lot of the updates to the leveling experience. I didn’t really think he was serious about it because I had pushed him a couple of times to load it up and play, but he never did for a number of reasons.

Out of the blue the other day I get an email from him saying “…do you have any advice for a WoW Noob?” DO I EVER! After going through the basics of what server are you on, what race/character did you create, I created one in the same starting area on the same server so we could bang around together. I was able to provide a few pointers to get started and then we just started to quest together. It was fun, lots of fun.

We started out as Dwarves, he a Hunter, and I started a Paladin since I had never really played one. It took a little bit to catch up to him as far as level goes in those early days it is extremely easy to catch up. And off we went, creating havoc for all of the troggs that normally live their quiet lives until some new WoW player destroys their lives and livelihood.

It didn’t take long to start enjoying WoW again, not only playing with my friend, but also on my old main characters. It is nice to see that WoW is still fresh enough for me that can dispel burn out with merely an occasional change of scenery.