A Day on Silver Hand

I went to log into Thaurissan yesterday morning, but there was a problem of some kind preventing me from doing so.

Although I originally intended for it to only be for a few minutes, I then went and opened my Alliance character on Pike's server. Pike was there, but we only spoke very briefly, as she was in Karazhan and I didn't want to disturb her.

I ended up doing several runs within the Deadmines, which, although from the perspective of the groups, were fairly disastrous, the positive aspect was that I ended up getting probably two levels in the space of two hours; something which I wasn't able to go close to matching with a subsequent two hours of questing.

I've long suspected that instancing is the only real way to go when truly fast levelling is what I'm after; there are mobs in front of me constantly once I get inside, and I don't have to do a lot of walking around to find a specific mob type. There are also several instance based quests available for pretty much any instance, so I can couple fast grinding with quest experience as well.

I want to get to the point where I can possibly run the odd Heroic with Pike occasionally perhaps, if she is interested, and so on the few days I'm able to focus on the Silver Hand alt, I'm trying to level it as quickly as possible. At the rate Pike seems to be going, though, she's probably going to have hit the Black Temple before I get to 70 with that toon myself. ;-)

However, to Efri I also say, don't worry. I'm definitely still focused on my main on Thaurissan, and I realise I do need to narrow my focus more if I ever really want to get anywhere in this game. I was speaking to Zalmi on the forum the other day, and so I started levelling an alt to maybe play with him a bit, but I ended up deleting it. It takes so long, and if I want to finally get to some meaningful progression with my main, I need to focus on it primarily. It's just hard though because there are so many people I find myself wanting to spend time with on diff servers.

An apology to someone

I've done something I'm not terribly proud of, which might make my last post sound like hypocrisy, although that is not the intention.

I put my MSN messenger contact address in the forum in order for Rilgon and Alumatine to be able to contact me, the other day.

However, I also was contacted by someone else; a person who identified themselves simply as Jho. We talked for a little while, but I will confess that I started to become somewhat scared, as he/she seemed intent on discovering as much personal information about me as possible, and also gave what I interpreted as a few other signs of being severely (possibly dangerously) mentally ill.

I didn't swear at this person or otherwise engage in any negativity whatsoever, but at one point in the conversation I simply, wordlessly blocked and deleted the contact from my MSN client.

This situation presented (and still presents) a problem for me. I find myself wanting to be as accepting of others as I would want them to be of me, especially given what I wrote in the last post about acceptance, and yet at the same time I also feel a strong need to protect myself from potentially problematic influences.

Jho, if you're reading this, I do apologise for deleting your contact in such an abrupt manner, but some of what was said did alarm me. I was unsure how to explicitly handle the situation without offending you.

In response to Trackhoof

Trackhoof wrote to me earlier and said that, as a recent blog post of his suggests, he is contemplating returning to WoW.

I will confess that even when he left, part of me was hoping that this might still happen. Track, I think you still have a lot left that you can potentially contribute. Your own blog was great, as was your response to Rilgon on his a few hours ago.

Here's the thing. I don't believe World of Warcraft is going to last much longer. I give it a year after the release of WoTLK at the very most.

However, there is still a reason to play this game. Track, as you yourself said to Rilgon, people who make less conventional choices, and who do so for reasons of staying true to themselves, still at times need people around them.

There are going to be other games after WoW, (the most immediate perhaps being Warhammer) and in those games, there are still going to be offspecs. Melee Hunters with Engineering, DPS Priests and Paladins, hybrids of myriad different weird and wonderful kinds.

The common element among all of them would be unpredictability, and in many people's minds, unacceptability. They'd be character or class types that theorycrafting and empirical mathematics supposedly didn't have room for, but that the people using them had somehow been able to make work.

In a game, the straight edge, the predictable, the controllable; you need all of those things to make it work, and everyone knows that. However, just as crucially, you also need chaos, and less rigidly defined character types for those situations that are not anticipated, and cannot be conventionally quantified. Those are times when offspecs can be that missing 5% that provides success where otherwise there would be failure. Sun Tzu spoke of Ch'i and Cheng troops; the conventional and the unconventional.

These people are going to need others willing to support them. They're still going to need some degree of guidance, and more than anything else, they will need the knowledge that they are not alone. That others like them exist, and that said others understand them and the situations that, as an offspec, they find themselves in. They will also need assurance that, as Rakan actually says in the forum, although the more conventional class types do not or will not see it, the offspecs at times genuinely are what can allow the more conventional types to succeed.

Track, as a Survival Hunter yourself, you're one of the people who can be part of that mutual support group, if you choose to be. In WoW, for as long as this game continues to exist, and later, in Warhammer or whichever other game comes after, if you choose to continue to stay with it.

We need people to serve in a wide variety of roles, here. We need people like Alumatine who are able to work out what little hard scientific basis there is for various offspec types. We need people like Bandet who, with his videos, provide hard evidence of what Survival is capable of. We need people like Rakan to be the proverbial voice in the wilderness, and also to occasionally slap the opposition upside the head when they continue to bombard us with their usual prejudice.

And, Track, we need people like you...who are willing to talk to those of us who at times will inevitably waver, due to the incessant call of the mainstream, even when they know that mainstream existence just isn't what they're meant for.

At times we're all going to need some assurance that as painful as being different at times can be, we do it because not following our hearts, not following our conscience...not following what God whispers to us to be...is far worse, to the point of being unthinkable.

Rilgon's Inner Conflict

I wrote in my last post about how Rilgon was going to respec from Marksmanship to Beast Mastery. He and I had an MSN conversation about it, and as he relates in a post on his own blog, he eventually decided not to do it.

The post is here, and I would ask everyone who usually reads me to go and read that also, and to lend him your support.

Keeping Silent

Yurch mentioned earlier in a forum thread I started that a "real Survivalist," (meaning real-life, presumably) wouldn't make as much noise as Bandet and I have been lately.

For a certain period of time I thought he was possibly right, and decided to shut up; but then I found myself disagreeing with it.

I'm not going to claim to know nearly enough about Survivalism as a real-life ideology outside WoW to be able to argue with Yurch, if he is indeed one himself. I will very simply say this.

I don't see much point in a person keeping themselves biologically alive, if the way they do that is by keeping totally silent; never making noise, and never doing anything due to fear of the consequences. Truthfully, I spend far too much time offline living like that; I have for most of my life. It's cowardice, and I want to stop being a coward, gradually at least.

I'm starting to think that a life that isn't used trying to have some sort of consequence is a wasted existence; whether that is online or off, and to that end, I actually am going to keep fighting the BM zombies in the forum. That isn't directed towards everyone who specs Beast Mastery, but I realise that there are a group within the forum who are not going to rest until every single person who plays a Hunter in this game uses 41/20/0; us all being entirely uniform clones of each other is what they want.

Rilgon has already grown tired of the pressure, derison, and guild application rejection to the point where he has caved, and respecced.

I am not going to.

Linguistic integrity

I want to write about why I seemed to care so much about the filter Blizzard put on the forum, to the point where I got banned for it.

I don't point these things out because my intent is to be negative or hateful. In all honesty and seriousness, my intent is exactly the opposite. Sometimes however what I talk about can appear dark on the outside, when the intent is light internally; the Kali element again. ;-)

Some of you reading this (a few, at least) might have read a book by a man called George Orwell. The book was called 1984. He wrote it during the mid 1940s, and it was set in a hypothetical future, in the year 1984, where the planet was ruled by only around three or four different totalitarian governments.

At one point, the book details that one of the key ways in which the local totalitarian government maintained power was by the gradual erradication of language. The vocabulary was shrunk down to such an extent that certain concepts (such as freedom, for example) could not be spoken about at all, literally because there were no words with which to describe or express them.

Blizzard's filter, whether they were intending it to or not, actually made a very powerful point. Namely, that over use of acronyms (and especially, the corruption even of said acronyms to produce terms like lawl) can end up causing written language to become almost entirely unreadable.

I'm not trying to say that I never use acronyms or corrupted terms myself; when you're typing, the temptation to do so can be very difficult to resist, especially if you need to get something written quickly. However, the over use of such terms as LOL at times does genuinely bother me.

If you try reading some of the lines in either the Looking For Group or Trade channels within World of Warcraft, next time you do so, ask yourself how likely it is that you would be able to understand the strings of acronyms you see there, if you had never seen them before. Also stop and think; when you were new to the game yourself, were you able to understand intuitively what these acronyms meant, or did you need someone else to deliberately explain them to you?

Acronyms in that sense are very much like profanity. When used in moderation and in context, they're fine. However, there is a tendency with both of them, for them to be excessively relied on by people whose personal vocabularies are that small that they may not know how to express themselves in any other way.

I'm not one of the people who believes that computer games necessarily lead to real-world physical violence. However, one problem caused by computer games (that I feel legitimately does exist) is the gradual errosion and corruption of language that is engaged in, and apparently even encouraged, by the subcultures associated with said games.

Excessive use of LOL and other acronyms is never engaged in with any kind of introspection or analysis. It's all a big joke, something to be laughed at in itself. Anyone who does look at it seriously in any way receives the type of reception that I got; first reproach and claims that I "don't have a life," and then silencing.

I encourage anyone here who hasn't read it, to read 1984, and to especially look at the parts of the book describing the language Newspeak, and how it is used in the novel. The book is in the public domain, so you can read it here.

When you have read it, think about what it says regarding the subjects of language and memory. Then possibly think about the use of compacted language within games and other places, and lastly possibly about the current political situation within America in particular.

See what you come up with.

I've been temp banned

I'm off the forum until tomorrow. Apparently I was complaining too much about the April Fool's Day script Blizzard put on the forum. Someone decided to report me for hate speech; which I hadn't made that I was aware of.

Yeah, maybe I am too serious and need to lighten up, but I think it's one of the dumbest things Blizzard have ever done. Sue me.

Anywayz...just wanted to let Rilgon know, primarily. :)