OstensiblyWow

Status Report

2011-11-29T19:31:00.001Z

Hello reader! Long time no see, eh? Blame work for that – software development is rather draining, and when the clock hits 6 I don’t generally feel like doing anything creative.

I have, however, felt like playing WoW some, although even then only a couple of times a week, and even then, only with my girlfriend. We decided a while back to try levelling a pair of characters up again – we’d attempted this a few times before but never really got beyond level 20 or so – and since she was wanting a break from Heroic raiding we went to a quiet little server and created two goblins, Festoon (my protection warrior) and Ozmund (her destruction warlock) and have been having a mostly super time, barring the occasional fail PuG.

I levelled a prot warrior before Cataclysm hit, up to 77, but it was long enough ago that the changes in talents, abilities etc. didn’t really affect me. They’re just minor technical details, though; the overall feel of tanking remains as I remember it: fun! I quite enjoy having so many abilities and having to know which ones to use in what situations, although it’s sometimes tricky to organise logical keybindings for everything.

It’s been really nice levelling with Zoe, especially since we tried to stay as close as possible in experience/level the whole time, always doing quests together and only rarely going our own ways, usually just to collect ore (me) or farm mobs for cloth (her).

Intermission

I normally write these blog posts using my Soda webapp. This post is no different, except that I finally had both the motivation and the free time to fix some of the most annoying issues I had with it. I also added a new preview mode for those poor folk stuck using IE8 – it scales the width of the preview page only, rather than the entire thing. Works quite well on narrower screens since you can shrink it down and still have it remain readable. I removed the ‘paragraph marks’ option too, because it was kinda pointless and just made the CSS more awkward.

Act II

Having reached 85 together and got a bit of non-crap gear, Zoe and I are now venturing forth into Heroic dungeons! Thankfully we’ve been relatively fortunate with our random groups (there aren’t enough members of our guild for guild-only (or even guild-mostly) runs) so it’s been rather pleasant. Even when we have had the occasional fool, it’s not stressed me out much, as I’m fairly confident in my tanking abilities by now. It’ll be even better when we get a guildie healer.

Change of scene

WoW isn’t the only game I’ve been playing lately. First up there’s Trackmania 2, which is super fun, and in whose track editor I have spent probably 90% of my time with the game. I’ve only made four tracks (and only three of those are on MX as of writing), since it takes a long time to really hone one to perfection, but it’s been great fun.

The other game I’ve been playing is this thing called Skyrim. You might have heard of it. It’s lush, and big, and fun and I’ve been known to stay up til nearly 4am playing it, which I don’t recommend. I don’t really have much else to say about it yet, as despite my marathon sessions I’ve still barely gone anywhere in the world. There’s just so much to see.

Another blog of mine

2011-10-31T21:50:00.003Z

I got an iPhone recently, and the bests thing about it are the camera, and how quick and easy it is to share photos from it, in particular using Instagram. At the moment I’m rather taken by the Earlybird filter, as you’ll see on my… new blog!

Its sole purpse, at least for now, is as a place to post my ‘non-serious’ photos, i.e. ones I don’t think really fit with my Flickr stuff. I couldn’t at this point clarify the distinction much, as it’s a little hazy, but I think Flickr I will reserve for my more ‘serious’ stuff such as photoshoots, landscapes and documentary. We’ll see how it goes but for now my Tumblr output should be more frequent than the Flickr stuff.

The Guard Cat

2011-09-22T15:47:00.000+01:00

Watch in awe as our tabby cat valiantly defends the family home from intruders.

RangeBar addon?

2011-07-26T17:00:00.002+01:00

I had another idea for an addon: a simple ‘range-to-target’ bar:

Not sure about the exact ranges – I’d need to check the RangeDisplay addon for that – but I think a small graphical indicator like this might be more useful to some people than a text-based one.

Edit

I looked at the Lua code for RangeDisplay. Good grief, that's an astonishing amount of work necessary just to display a simple range indicator.

FailScore

2011-07-26T10:03:00.002+01:00

Yaggle’s comment in Gevlon’s recent post got me thinking about another addon I could make. Rather than something like GearScore, which gives you a larger arbitrary number the “better” your gear is, I propose an alternative: FailScore. This would start you at 0, then deduct points for things like wrong armour class (e.g. shaman wearing leather or cloth), wrong stats (e.g. hunter with intellect gear), missing/wrong enchants, glyphs and gems, and bad perhaps talents, although this last would have to be fairly specific in what it considers a fail (e.g. 41 points in one tree) as many non-optimal talents aren’t exactly bad, and often have a PVE utility function like being an interrupt.

The idea would be to have a FailScore as close to 0 as possible, and with more serious fails affecting the player’s score more than minor ones like a sub-optimal enchant. Different gear levels could also affect the score in different ways, too: unenchanted green-quality gear would be less of an issue than unenchanted epics, because it’s usually not worth enchanting gear that will be replaced so soon. Moreover, the cheaper enchants can sometimes be unavailable in the AH, or very overpriced.

Incidentally, I believe it should be a negative number simply to avoid any misunderstanding: if someone’s FailScore increased, they might (if they were a moron, which people with large FailScores probably are) mistake this to mean “higher = better”.

This would primarily be aimed at players below level 85, as obviously when levelling up it’s rarely worth enchanting or gemming quest gear, and even having the wrong armour class can be acceptable given the limited choices. However, some of the larger fails, e.g. wrong stats on armour, will still apply, possibly with some extra leniency in Outland due to the messed-up stat allocations (like strength and intellect on the same piece of gear); that said, hunters wearing cloth will still get large failscores.

One final thing I might include, although it may be a bad idea, is the ability to generate a FailScore Report, detailing the issues.

On and maybe I could make a Recount plugin, “DPS per FailScore”. Not sure what value that would provide, though.

Edit

I just thought of another idea: representing the fail as a percentage. For a given class/spec/gear setup/level, the maximum potential FailScore would be calculated, then the player’s actual score given as a percentage of it. This would in theory normalise all scores, as some classes probably have more potential for fail than others, and it also gets around the issue of lower-level players having lower scores but still being just as fail as an epic-geared 85.

Addon Reins

2011-07-25T12:51:00.005+01:00

Alas, some research on WoWWiki and the #wowuidev IRC channel has revealed that this point—

Clear differentiation between ‘historical’ nodes and ‘detected’ nodes.

—will be much harder to implement as I originally envisaged. For technical reasons, it’s not possible for an addon to get minimap tracking information, so I won’t be able to show current nodes without resorting to some SexyMap HudMap-style hackery.

That said, SexyMap HudMap-style hackery may not be such a bad thing. The issue in SexyMap is that when you enable the HudMap, the background of the map disappears, so you can’t see terrain features on it, which makes it difficult to assess where a node might be. To work around this, I still want to go with the ‘wireframe map’ idea, although obviously this requires a vast amount of work, to draw custom maps for every single zone.

Another downside to ‘faking’ it is that I have no control over the shape of the map; it’ll just be a circle, and it will have a fixed maximum range. This is in contrast to Gatherer’s HUD, for example, which allows it to show an angled ‘perspective’ view which can help when screen space is limited, and which some may find easier to read.

Another point—

Custom node icons, following the theme of the radar style – simplified wireframe shape (or just text), possibly coloured to match the associated herb.

—I want to expand upon. In any given zone there are a limited number of different node types, so rather than just use the herb’s icon as a map/radar marker, I think using custom node textures would work better as they can be both small yet easier to differentiate. The size is important: when you have a very extensive node map, it can get very crowded, so you could reduce the icon size, but then you have tiny 8-pixel blobs that are hard to tell apart.

As an example, in Storm Peaks, the only two herbs you’ll find are Lichbloom and Icethorn, both of which have blue/white icons. For that reason, I could for example use a ▲ for Icethorn and o for Lichbloom. In a zone like Sholazar Basin, where there is more variety of herbs, it could be something like ▲ for Adder’s Tongue, █ for Tiger Lily and o for Goldclover.

Another idea I had is based on the first picture in my first post on this matter:

You’ll notice that the ‘centre’ of the map is near the bottom, which might be another good idea for saving space yet still providing decent range. After all, I suspect people are more interested in nodes in front of them than behind.

Edit

Here's a mockup I made of what I imagine the radar thing to look like, obviously in this case without terrain features; I might do one later with those included later.

The small blue circle is the detection range, within which nodes should appear on the minimap assuming they're present. The vertical dotted line is current heading, and the small number pairs along it are distance and time.

It's far from perfect – there are too many dashed circles, for one thing, and it definitely needs some adjustable opacity; possibly it could lose the quite large border too.

I came back to build something

2011-07-21T18:31:00.001+01:00

I have renewed my subscription to WoW, and got myself some Cataclysm. This was quite unexpected, and although I’m pretty much done with raiding still, and even moreso with guild dramas, I had an Idea, and that Idea nagged at me until I gave in.

Watching my girlfriend farm herbs, it seemed to me there was a gap in the addon market for such activities. Gatherer is nice, but it’s kinda primitive in the way it represents nodes, even using the HUD: there’s no indication of how far you can ‘see’ herbs, the only way you can know a herb is nearby is by constantly looking to the minimap. The HUD is helpful, but limited, and awkward to set up.

So, being the programmery type I am, I’ve got it in my head to make something better. The plan is to create ‘radar-style’ HUD showing a basic wireframe terrain map, something like these:

Later on I’ll create a better mockup that better matches what I have in mind.

I want it to have the following features:

Node markers (obviously), with optional distance and time-to display.
Integration with Gatherer node data (very important).
Clear differentiation between ‘historical’ nodes and ‘detected’ nodes.
Coastlines/riverbanks, caves and possibly major terrain features like waterfalls or cliffs.
Optional display of enemy mobs and their aggro ranges.
A ‘detection range’ circle, ideally using the current lag figure to improve accuracy.
Custom node icons, following the theme of the radar style – simplified wireframe shape (or just text), possibly coloured to match the associated herb.
Various readouts such as player altitude, speed, radar display range, view direction,
Possibly a waypoints system.
Military HUD style ‘targetting’, i.e. overlaying a highlight box on nodes in the world (may be frowned upon by Blizzard).

I have no idea how feasible any of this is, and I know for sure that the actual wireframe terrain map is going to be either a lot of work, or just not possible, but I am eager to give it a go. I’ll be happy if I can even have the display without the terrain outlines.

Less WoT, moar WoW (and some L4D2)

2011-06-23T17:02:00.002+01:00

I spent ages grinding XP for a nice shiny new KV tank. It took the best part of a week, scooting around in my T-28 ~~boat~~ tank, until FINALLY I had both enough XP to research the KV, and enough credits to actually buy one. Hooray!

Then I started to play with it. Good grief it’s slow, taking about half an ice age to turn 180°, and getting overtaken by SPGs. Plus, since it’s the stock KV and is a Tier 5 Heavy tank, I often get matched up against Tier 8 and 9 tanks against which the best I can do is fire puny 75mm HE shells and hope I don’t attract any attention, which is unlikely because even if the enemy tanks don’t spot me, the artillery certainly do. I imagine them rubbing their hands with glee as their aiming reticules slowly gather around my turret.

Now the KV is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. It is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Henceforth I will meet equally well armed, and probably better armed tanks. It will be a long grind.

In the meantime, I also managed to get myself an A-20, which is like the opposite of a KV: it appears to have armour made of cardboard, and a gun that might as well not even be there. Despite these flaws, it does have one thing going for it: it’s really really fast. Like, 72 km/h fast. This is greatly entertaining, zooming about on the battlefield being eyes for the tanks and artillery that have guns that can do more than ping uselessly off the enemy. It’s fun enough that I decided to go for a second light tank, the Leopard (from the German tech tree). It’s slightly slower than the A-20, but it turns more like a Tron lightcycle. Excellent for confounding one’s foes.

And then… and then I stopped playing. I think the prospect of the gigantic grind required to make the KV competitive is putting me off.

Left for dead tank

Just as I was trying to come up with an alternative to shooting tanks, I get an invite to a game of Left 4 Dead 2. Golly gosh that game is exciting! I am distinctly average at it (actually more towards the ‘crap’ end of the scale), but it’s the kind of game you can still have fun in despite that. It’s also completely lacking in grind: you start, you get good weapons, and you shoot zombies. Lots and lots and lots of zombies (including one called a Tank!).

I discovered I rather like the auto shotgun, even though the combat shotgun is ostensibly better (it definitely has a better sound, and looks more badass). Swinging a fire axe about is also tremendously fun.

Mine!

Just as I am starting to enjoy L4D2, I’m also reading people discussing Minecraft, and now I want to play that again! Man, so many games. I played Minecraft a while back, when it was v1.3, but not since. Now I am feeling the urge to dig and build in 1m³ blocks.

Overall effect

AND! I bought Mass Effect, after reading a blog post on FemSheps and then remembering that the game sounded interesting. It was only £10 on Steam, too, which was nice. I haven’t actually played it yet, though, because by the time it had downloaded it was about 1 in the morning.

Wow, seriously

Yes, srsly, I am playing WoW a bit more now too, still on Zoe’s account. I daren’t install the game on my own PC. Still, what limited time I play, I’m back to shamaning it up. The shaman originally had an Elemental spec, and a Restoration offspec that neither of us ever used. Then I read an blog post by someone talking about Enhancement and wanted to try it out, so we dumped the Resto spec and changed it to Enh, and hoo, it’s fun! Fists of flame!

So anyway, I then wrote/adapted/ripped off a Resto Shaman Guide and since I’d done a fair bit of Restoring in WotLK, I got curious, and 57 gold later the shaman re-acquired a Resto spec to replace the Elemental. I’m such a goblin.

I’ve not tried it in actual real instances yet, as I did the spec and associated paraphernalia (glyphs, UI setup, gear) on my lunch break. I’m gonna dive in tonight though, and since the shaman just hit 80 I’ll be trying to fill green bars in Cataclysm instances, of which I have somewhat limited experience. Fun times ahead. Still, at least shaman healing is fairly unchanged from Lich King, so at least I won’t be totally clueless as when I tried to heal Zul’Aman on Zoe’s Discipline-spec priest. That wasn’t fun.

A Week of WoT

2011-06-13T15:59:00.002+01:00

I’ve been playing World of Tanks for a week now, more or less. It’s really good! It reminds me in some ways of the tank bits of Wargasm, only with a WW2 flavour rather than modern/sci-fi.

Not really knowing what I was doing, I went initially for a Soviet MS-1 tank, because, well, it was Russian. I then progressed on to the T-26, T-46 up to my current T-28, which is a stupid-looking tank. It looks like a cross between a boat and a tank, seriously. Also, I’m not sure what this monster is but it’s definitely not the same thing I’m talking about. It does look somewhat impractical.

Grind My Gears

Once I acquired my lovely T-28, I encountered the grind, whereupon progress through the tiers slows dramatically due to the much larger experience point requirements: going from Tier III to Tier IV means saving up around 3,500 XP; from Tier IV to Tier V it’s more like 13,000. Given that even if you do exceptionally well in a battle and have a premium account you can earn at best about 1,000 XP, and that more realistically you will lost around half your battles, thus earning something more in the region of 100 XP, you can see how long it can take to make that climb to the next tier. Even the radio in one of them costs 5,600 XP to research!

It was at this point that I discovered there is no penalty for leaving a battle once your tank has been destroyed. Thus enlightened, I strove to populate my garage with a variety of other vehicles to join the grind, resulting in an almost non-stop succession of tankshoots. Doing this in similar tanks would quite likely make the grind seem even more interminable than with just the one, akin to repeatedly being thrown into a meatgrinder, so to spice things up a little I have chosen a more diverse range:

SU-26 SPG (USSR): a lovely little artillery gun with an 360° rotating turret, making it easy to stay hidden. Apparently has 5 crew members, though I’m not sure where they’re all supposed to go.
Hetzer tank destroyer (German): possibly the most ~~ridiculous~~ distinctive-looking tank in the game. Godawful slow until you get the good engine for it.
M5 Stuart (USA): speedy little monster, although not terribly good on the acceleration front, and apparently not that good compared to the Soviet scout tanks like the A-20. Still, fun to drive. I fitted mine with the 75mm derp gun, to surprise and delight my foes.

Bar the M5, all of my tanks are interim until I can get enough XP to buy better ones. In the meantime, they all provide some fun battles, so while the grind is long, it is rarely dull.

The M5 is one I might actually consider replacing, thinking about it: sure it’s great zooming about at 56km/h but it takes so long to get there, and it’s hardly nimble. I look upon those little zippy German tanks (PzIII? Pz38NA? Some of the names for the German tanks are confusing to the outsider) and feel envy.

Say, that looks like…

2011-06-07T10:48:00.005+01:00

Blog redesign time again.

This one, unlike previous efforts, actually had some effort and thought put into it: it’s based on my Soda application, although with different fonts – Blogger has a nice built-in serif one, and I thought Gill Sans goes better with it than the Lucida Grande I use on Soda. I hope it looks nice on Windows :S

If you clicked that link to Soda earlier, you’ll notice it’s this post, only in Soda. One of the reasons I made the application was to enable easier (for me, at least) writing of blog posts, as I find with the plain HTML editor it’s a bit too hard to visualise the final result (and switching between Preview and back gets tiresome; moreover, the preview isn’t even that accurate). The WYSIWYG editor is fine for visualisation, but I just don’t like the way formatting etc. is applied – as I mentioned a while ago, I don’t like the character-centric approach. Using most web-based WYSIWYG editors can often feel like a struggle, too, especially when trying to modify links or images.

I’ve also added a popup image thing I made. Here is a test image:

(click it to enlarge)

Edit made after the one below: clearly this popup business won't work if you're reading this in a feed reader. It's really good on the site though! In case you were wondering.

Edit: that fake italic in the font provided by Blogger was annoying me, so I reverted to Palatino for the body text. And, since Gill Sans doesn't really go as well with that, I changed the headings to use Lucida Grande (or Lucida Sans Unicode) instead.

Tanks and the world

2011-06-05T13:10:00.001+01:00

I’ve been playing WoW quite a bit lately. A short time ago I got a DK to 85, and while he’s ostensibly main-spec tank, I haven’t actually tanked anything in a random in any of the Cataclysm dungeons. So, dual-wield Frost second spec it is.

I also levelled up a druid, in a cat-based Feral spec, which I’ve been enjoying quite a bit. The character was originally only supposed to be a bank character (hence the name ‘Morcasha’), but then Zoe and I wanted an enchanter, and so we needed to get Morcasha to a higher level. And I just kept going, because it was fun, and because I read a post on Gevlon’s blog about skinning crocolisks in Tol Barad or something for easy money.

Bear Necessity

As I was traipsing around Twilight Highlands in the last few bars of being level 84, helping out the dwarves with their wedding (best questline ever, btw, and also Keely Dunwald is kinda cute), I decided to see what it was like being a bear. This was not entirely out of the blue: I’d done a random a few days earlier wherein the tank abandoned us at the last boss, and one of the DPS asked me to tank. I was like “lol no” (paraphrasing here), because I had no idea what I was doing in bear form. So anyway, turns out it’s not really that hard! Certainly less buttons to push than cat form, although since my UI was set up specifically for cat, it didn’t work so well for bear.

So I bought dual spec and made the second spec pure bear. And lo! I am almost indestructible when taking on normal mobs! In cat form, when levelling, taking on more than 2 mobs at once is a risky thing, as you are rather squishy and your heals barely do anything (healing for ~4K out of 75K at level 84). In bear, though, with a proper bear spec: bring it on! Obviously it’s news to nobody that a tank-specced character can survive better, but it’s surprising just how much difference a few (really a few – maybe 5 or so) talent points in different places can make; going into bear form in a spec optimised for cat DPS doesn’t really help much: sure you can get aggro better, and are slightly tougher, but you’re missing the uncritability, damage-reduction and Pulverize talents that are pretty much the point of being a bear tank.

World of Tank

Now that I have this lovely bear spec, what could I do with it? I mean, it’s not like I tank much on my DK, despite being much more familiar with tanking that class because of my experience in Lich King. Then again, it might be precisely because of that familiarity that I’m reluctant to try it: I want to try new things. Bear tanking is something I’ve never done, and I’m curious to see how it plays.

Perhaps once I get more familiar with the Cataclysm instances I will try tanking them on my DK, too. He’s certainly better-geared than the druid, and like I said, I pretty much know how to play the class already (I even levelled him in tank spec). Honestly, though, I’m not sure. Before I stopped playing WoW last year, I had a warrior tank that I really enjoyed playing, much more thank a DK. I think it was something to do with the mobility, and the variety of abilities at my disposal, and from what I’ve read and in my limited time with the spec experienced, bear is quite similar.

Speaking of tanks…

If you’ve been reading Tobold’s blog lately, you’ll notice he’s been posting a lot about World Of Tanks, a free-to-play team-based tank warfare game. I don’t know much about it beyond what I’ve read on Tobold’s blog (and the occasional Rock, Paper, Shotgun article), but it does sound interesting. I imagine it as a sort of slower-paced Counter-Strike, although that may turn out to be laughably far from the truth. No matter, it’s definitely something I’m going to look into, perhaps to the extent that I forget about WoW for another four months. I shall report back here if/when I have anything interesting to say about the game.

Soda: a document editor

2011-05-25T22:34:00.001+01:00

Hello! I’ve been working on a thing! It’s called Soda, and it’s a document editor. It’s sort of like Google Docs, only a bit simpler and, well, different. The most important difference is the way you create documents: rather than do it visually, you write them in a sort of code.

Now I realise this doesn’t sound terribly brilliant, but there’s a reason for it. When you type stuff using a WYSIWYG editor, it’s often difficult to maintain consistent formatting across a complex document. The ideal way to do it is to use some sort of style system – Word 2007 has those nice big style buttons if you have enough screen space, while LibreOffice has a handy Styles pallete/list thing.

However, neither of them really encourage the user to make use of these facilities, which I think is a shame, albeit understandable from a historical perspective. The ‘apply formatting to a selection of characters’ style of editing was laid down in The Beginning, and it’s probably far too late to do anything about it now. Still, I made Soda anyway, because it’s something I want to use (I wrote this blog post with it).

Anyway, the idea is you use various ‘control characters’ to apply semantic styling to blocks of text. For example, rather than say “make this text bold, size 22 and centred”, you instead say “make this text a level 1 heading”. In other words, you apply meaning to sections of text, and then you can control how all text with that meaning appears throughout the document (well, you can’t control it yet, as I’ve not actually implemented a style editing interface, but there is going to be one).

Caveat Emptor

Soda is not finished. It probably never will be, completely – there’ll always be something to add or something to fix. In its current state it’s quite usable, and I’ve tried to make sure the main part of it, the editor, has no glaring bugs.

That said, there’s still plenty to do before I’d be comfortable with declaring it fit for general use. Here are some things I have in mind at the moment:

Making registration/sign-in easier. I’ve been experimenting with OAuth login and it’s really just a question of putting the code in place, after which you’ll be able to sign in using Facebook, Twitter etc.
Smooth off the rough edges. At the moment, when you leave the editor with unsaved changes, there’s no warning/confirmation. Likewise for deleting documents.
Editor and preview preferences are not saved.
Needs a Markdown formatting guide.

This isn’t a comprehensive list, obviously, but these are the priority things. Like I said, none of them are really show-stopping problems, but they’re definitely obstacles which shouldn’t be there.

So yeah, if you want to poke around with it, feel free. It’d be good to get some feedback, too, as it’s hard to know what kinds of issues users may encounter when approaching it fresh.

Oh yeah and I know it’s silly, and I really do keep meaning to do something about it, but after logging in you need to click the ‘Your saved documents’ link at the top to create a new document. Once I’ve put the OAuth stuff in place, you’ll be redirected to that page after signing in or registering.

http://soda.heroku.com/

Download Sizes: A Rant

2011-04-15T18:17:00.003+01:00

I'm on a rant roll this week. Today it's about download sizes, why the hell they're so big and WHAT IN THE NAME OF JOVE IS IN A DECOMPRESSION UTILITY TO MAKE IT 29MB?!

Twenty-nine megabytes! I'm talking about Stuffit Expander, a program designed solely to decompress and browse the contents of .SIT archives. That's all. That's what, 2MB of code at most? What's in the other 27MB? Wallpaper-sized bitmap images? Tutorial videos?

And don't get me started on the SELL! SELL! SELL! nature of the Stuffit web page. You have to jump through several hoops just to get the free version of the program (or to even know it exists). It's stupid. It even has a LOOK! FREE* UPGRADE TO PRO VERSION! .app in the downloaded archive. Makes me irate, it does.

Contrast this with FontExampler, which is why I am downloading Stuffit Expander in the first place, since apparently OS X no longer comes with it. FontExampler is a 78KB download. Kilobytes. It downloaded in seconds.

This sort of thing makes me want to learn Xcode just so I can try to at least glimpse an understanding of why. I suspect it's folly, though; I've seen far too much bad software around for years, and I'm no closer to understanding.

Word Processors: A Rant

2011-04-14T11:16:00.006+01:00

Note: this was originally going to include a rant about image editors and their general lack of support for adjustment layers, but it got a bit long so I've put that rant into its own post.

This is a semi-rant about word processors, and how so many of them persist in Doing It Wrong. This is going to be a long post…

Wrong?

"What's wrong with the way they work now?" The basic problem is that word processors are too focussed on character-level formatting. To make a block of text into something that looks like a heading, the common approach is to select the text, change its size using the Font Size drop-down on the toolbar, then maybe make it bold too, or use a different font family. If you want to change the look of a paragraph, you'd select it, then change its appearance using the usual controls.

This works for documents with one heading and where all the paragraphs have nothing else between them, but what about more complex text (like this one)? To continue the old way you'd have to go through the entire document changing each paragraph or heading individually; Microsoft Word even has a tool to make this process more efficient: the Format Painter. Here's what the MS Office help page has to say about it:

Say you've written a report in Word. You like the look, especially your headings, which are 14 pt. Bookman Old Style, centered, green, and bold, with a nice subtle shadow.

Fifteen minutes before you're supposed to present the report to the team, your manager asks you to add four new sections to the report. You spend thirteen minutes adding the information, and the next two wishing that you hadn't chosen such complicated formatting for your headings, since you now have to apply it to all the new ones.

Using Format Painter saves you that time and duplicated effort. Instead of having to manually apply the font, font effects, centered paragraph alignment, and other formatting to each new section heading, you can quickly copy all of the formatting attributes by using one toolbar button.

That's great and all, but it's a case of fixing the symptom, not the cause of the problem, which is that the application encourages users to format text the wrong way.

Ok then smartypants…

Any modern web designer knows that an HTML document should be styled with CSS. Gone are the days of <font> tags littering the page, and <body bgcolor=gray> and the like – these days we do it the right way by separating content/structure from presentation, with a (normally) external CSS file which contains rules on how document the document should look. This allows an entire site's presentation to be changed by editing a relatively small file dedicated to the purpose.

You can see where I'm going with this. I'm not suggesting word processors should use CSS, or that users should have to edit a separate file in order to format their documents. Rather, I just would like to see the applications make stylesheet-based editing the main way to do things. Not the only way, of course: like I said, for very simple documents it's easier to just apply the formatting you want to the text directly, instead of giving the text some structural meaning (heading, normal paragraph, block quote etc.) then editing the style rule for that.

Naturally, many people will reject this idea. It's not what they're used to, they like it how things are, etc. But, for anyone who needs to write a moderately complex document I believe it's by far the better way to work. It lets you concentrate on the content and structure of your document, rather than the superficial appearance. Yes, once you've written your document you could easily spend hours tweaking the style to perfection, but if sensible default styles are provided, or if it's easy to save new ones, this step will be a quick one. This was the thinking behind Soda, my (unfinished) attempt at writing a styles-based word processor: good default styles that let you write nice-looking documents in a structured, easy-to-change way.

With Soda, there is will be no font size or font family drop-down on the toolbar. Documents have a base font size (12pt by default), from which other sizes are derived – level 1 headings, for example, are 150% of the base size. Similarly, you can't change the font family of a block of text except by marking as having some particular meaning (such as emphasised or a citation), then modifying the rule for text with that meaning.

The idea is to enforce consistency and structure throughout the document: using the example above from the Office help page, if you were using a style-based editor the new headings would automatically match the existing ones. There would be no need to to copy styles, with the possibility of missing one, or applying it incorrectly. You just create a heading, and it looks like all the other headings.

To continue Microsoft's example, let's say you were asked at the last minute to make all the headings red instead of green. No problem using the Format Painter if you only have one or two headings, but what if this is a 20-page report with 45 or so headings? Changing one style rule is hugely more convenient than having to go through the entire document clicking each heading to change it to the new format.

But Word can already…

Yes, yes, I know. You can already use Word (and OpenOffice/LibreOffice, and presumably most other word processors) this way. The point is they don't make it as easy as it should be. Word even comes across to me like it's trying to get you to not use the Styles functionality, as if it'd prefer it if you did things the old-fashioned way. I understand why Microsoft do this – people have been using Word for years, and people generally don't like change (just look at how people reacted when MS Office introduced the 'ribbon' interface).

I'm also not naive enough to think that anything can reasonably replace Office in, well, offices. Microsoft and Office are deeply entrenched in the business world, and there's little anyone can do about it. So why bother ranting about it? Mostly just because it's been bothering me for a while, and writing is cathartic, and maybe there's a chance someone more influential than me will read it. A large part of the reason I started working on Soda was frustration with existing tools. I want to make it easy to create good-looking, easily-maintainable documents.

Totoro!

2011-04-09T15:03:00.003+01:00

Vim to HTML

2011-03-26T14:58:00.001Z

I just discovered a feature of Vim that I'm not entirely sure is useful, but it's certainly interesting:

:TOhtml

It outputs the current file as HTML, including syntax highlighting! To see what I mean, this is the output when run on the main JavaScript file for my piXY application. Set your browser's monospace font to Consolas and what you'll see is pretty much exactly what I see in MacVim (as seen in the screenshot in the previous post).

Big Code

2011-03-21T14:12:00.003Z

A big monitor can be a big productivity boost.

(click to embiggen, 647KB)

Also, Vim is so great. I've been using it for about 6 months and I'm still learning new things. Like, just the other day I found out you can do diB to delete in the current code block. My .vimrc is 129 lines long now!

Sproutlings

2011-03-19T13:06:00.003Z

Signs of life! After one week, some of our kohl rabi and radishes are sprouting:

And since it was such a nice day – the first warm day we've had this year, in fact – Tabbs decided to join us in the garden:

Green Thumbs

2011-03-12T15:51:00.003Z

A week ago, Zoe and I had an Amazing Idea: we would grow some vegetables! I'm not entirely sure how we came up with this plan, possibly it was me lamenting my ever-expanding belly, and a desire to eat more healthily. It's also the right time of year for such things, and so here we are today with our first set of seeds all planted and ready to go:

We have planted (from left to right):

Cucumber
Radish
Kohl rabi
Leek (seeds look like tiny chunks of coal!)
Orange-scented thyme
Old English thyme
Chilli
Radish

So, fingers crossed we haven't failed at growing things! In a few weeks we should see some signs of life, at which time more photos will be posted and progress written about.

Juggling!

2011-01-01T22:37:00.000Z

Today I started learning to juggle. This is not a new-year's resolution – my brother started a month or so ago and has been trying to get me to learn too, and today for lack of anything better to do, I tried it.

It turns out juggling is much easier than it looks! A handy tutorial video explains the basics of juggling with three balls in less than five minutes, and the concept is really very simple; the difficulty lies in the execution, specifically: being able to throw accurately so you don't have to reach awkwardly to catch the balls.

Considering I started at about 13:00 today, I've already managed to keep three balls going for six or so throws, which I never thought would be possible so soon. Obviously I still need lots of practice, but the best thing is, now that I know the basics it really is just practice – there's not really much more to it, and you get a very clear sense of progression, being able to keep the cascade (technical term) going longer and longer. Moreover, it's such a fun feeling being able to do it, and it also looks really impressive.

I definitely recommend watching the video and giving it a try – you'll honestly be surprised at how easy and fun it is!

Bytes To Bytes, Bits To Bits

2010-12-04T11:45:00.005Z

I haven't played World Of Warcraft since the end of August, and I'm not sure what I want to do with my account. It's paid up until the end of March 2011, so it's not like there's any urgency, but it's been on my mind somewhat lately. I've considered logging in to give away all the stuff I can, including the gold, and I've considered just cancelling the account without doing this. I've considered playing again, too, as I still read some WoW blogs and the talk of the Shattering is quite interesting. And yet, the longer I go having not played, the less find myself caring about the game; at the moment, the only things that interest me are seeing the new Azeroth from a levelling perspective, and continuing my Worldview series (oh how optimistic I was that I would cover any significant amount of the world before it got Shattered!). Honestly, the main thing preventing me making a decision on the matter is the thought of having to download the various patches released since I last played.

I have almost no interest in raiding, least of all in Icecrown Citadel. I don't care about loot – this close to Cataclysm it's all pointless anyway. The only slight interest I have is seeing how my level 80 characters (and my 77 warrior) perform with the new talent trees. I also wouldn't mind going to Ulduar again, not to defeat bosses, but to do a Worldview post (or series) there, as it really is a fantastic place.

In some respects one of the things I miss most about WoW is gone forever: the exploration and discovery. Sure, the world is changed, and sure, there are and will be new zones and dungeons to see, but the game is no longer really new and strange and exciting to me. It's like Morrowind in that respect, a game I spent countless hours playing just because it was so big and there was so much to see – misty, rain-soaked swamps, ash-blighted mountains, a strange giant mushroom town, ethereal and dangerous Daedric ruins, and best of all the creepy steampunk Dwarf ruins, with their mysterious rumbles and clangs. However, because I have experienced all of that, it is of course no longer new, so the adventure of playing though the game again is but a shadow of what it was; very little is new but what I have since forgotten, and the dated, awkward mechanics of the game-play become foremost in my attention, particularly in the long beginning when your character is weak and lacking in the array of skills you acquire by the end of the game – once you've become used to leaping over mountains and covering the length of Vvardenfell in less than a minute, going back to being weak, earth-bound and slow is quite demoralising.

In contrast to games like Morrowind, World Of Warcraft does an excellent job of making you feel at least somewhat powerful right from the start – at no point are you in danger of being killed by a lone mudcrab, and when you try to hit something, you mostly do actually hit it, rather than flail uselessly around it (assuming it's roughly your level or lower). Of course, the memories of past glories are there, and many level 80 characters have seen things a newbie wouldn't believe: setting ghouls on fire off the shoulders of dragons, watching Moonfire glittering in the dark near the Wrathgate, many of these moments preserved in time by the umbrella of Achievements. But World Of Warcraft does a much better job of drawing you in so you see past the limitations of the gameplay mechanics, and moreover, there is just more: more terrain to explore, more variety of things to kill, more weapons to wield, more people to talk to, whether real or NPC. There mere fact that it offers twelve different ways to start the game, depending on the race you choose, and ten different ways to play through the game, depending on the class you choose, is another way Blizzard improves upon the much more initially linear approach Morrowind et al take.

I feel I'm very much an Explorer type – I love seeing what's over the next hill or through the next door. Seeing new things is largely what keeps me interested in a game, and when I've seen all there is to be seen, I start to lose interest. To some extent, I'm reluctant to cancel my WoW account now, with Cataclysm so close, because there really will be, for a time, lots of new things to explore. On the other hand, there are many, many other games that can offer a more completely new experience – Dragon Age, Guild Wars 2 and LoTRO are just three that come to mind right away, and that's just in the (MMO)RPG genre.

Beyond games, there's also my programming: right now I'm still pretty much a noob in the world of web-based software development, and it's still new and exciting. More importantly, it's more directly useful to my life, as it's something I feel I could really build a career out of, as opposed to the mostly stuck-in-a-rut jobs I've had up til now. And the best part is, software development will always offer new things to discover and learn about; innovation is integral to the enterprise. Programming is important to me, and I don't want to let a 'mere game' get in the way of making something of my life.

Perhaps once I'm more settled in a software development career I'll come back to WoW, if it's even still around by then. Or, perhaps I'll ride the wave of the Next Big Thing in MMOs, exploring along with everyone else.

Forum Emoticons

2010-11-29T09:02:00.004Z

Any respectable forum needs emoticons, and FORJ shall be no different! I've based these on the 'Like' icon in Google Reader, because the style is a nice match with FORJ's default theme.

There's still a few more I need to do – 'angry' and 'rolls eyes', for example – but after that they're more or less done, until I think of some others I'm missing.

The forum also allows linking directly to posts, so here is the link to the emoticon forum post.

FORJing ahead

2010-11-16T09:25:00.003Z

The forum is coming along rather nicely now – I recently added the functionality to store each registered user's count of how many posts they've read in each thread, and soon I'll be able to implement thread list filtering based on this or other criteria (such as 'interest').

It's actually getting close to the point where I'd feel comfortable with saying the forum is ready for limited general use, so long as the users aren't expecting something as full-featured as vBulletin or Beehive. Still, the foundations are there, and the basic structure is more or less done, I just need to add furniture and stuff now. And maybe wallpaper.

Also, what it really needs more than anything is for a lot of people to test it out, poke it and see if it falls over. As much as I test it myself, there's bound to be some things I miss. If you sign up, you don't have to use a real (or even valid, I think) e-mail address – it's effectively just a username, and there's no mechanism in place to send anything to it. I'm not even sure yet how to do that if I wanted to.

Sidetrack

While the forum is taking up most of my coding time, I've also started working on another project, ostensibly for work but with the aim of making it generally available if it turns out to be useful beyond the circumstances in which it'll initially be used. In a nutshell, it's a non-realtime messaging application that's a sort of hybrid of e-mail and IM, for the purpose of basic information requests. The main selling point, and the reason you'd use it in preference to e-mail, is that it will make tracking and reporting on such requests much simpler, and easier to collaborate on.

So, not much to say about it yet, as I'm still working out the basics of how it's all going to work, and even what it's actually going to do, but once I have something worth showing, I'll talk about it here.

GitHub

If you're of a coding bent, these two projects are on my GitHub profile.

Ostensibly Here

2010-10-31T16:48:00.000Z

ALERT: this post is about programming and stuff, so if you're not interested, best skip it! That said, I'd love it if you had a look at the new forum I'm working on and had a play. If it breaks, please let me know :D

Hello!

Gosh it's been a while, hasn't it? There's a good reason for that, however, and it does sort of involve WoW. Or rather, it involves a distinct lack of WoW: I haven't played since I broke my Windows 7 install by messing up the installation process of Ubuntu, about two months ago (I told it to put the bootloader on my external drive. Don't ask). Anyway, in lieu of WoW-playing, I have been doing something to break out of the rut of career mediocrity I've been in for years: I have been learning how to make web-based programs. That is, how to write in Javascript, Python and Ruby, how to run servers, and all (well, some) about the stuff that holds it all together.

Said the client to the server

Javascript, as it happens, is a really nice language. Apparently it gets a lot of stick for being a toy, but I feel it's more like a surprisingly versatile yet lightweight tool. The best part is, pretty much every desktop and laptop computer comes with the tools necessary to begin with Javascript: a text editor and a web browser. Of course, the real power comes when you can communicate with and store data on a server, as then you can split an application into two parts: the server-side which does all the data-retrieval, and the client-side which does all the presentation and interaction.

A common framework for developing the server-side web applications is MVC – Model, View, Controller. This is all well and good for presenting mostly static pages that the user doesn't interact with much, but when you involve Javascript on the client side more than for a few nice effects, you can start offloading a lot more of the page rendering to the client. Rather than sending fully-formed HTML from the server, you can just send the relevant data (in JSON format, ideally) and have the client set up the HTML on the fly. Until fairly recently this wasn't a practical way to do things, as browser incompatibilities and slow Javascript performance meant the DOM manipulation required just wasn't practical. However, efforts by Google, Mozilla and Opera to vastly improve their Javascript engines, combined with the emergence of Javascript frameworks like jQuery and Prototype, has resulted in a new style of developing large, complex web applications.

Enter Andy, stage left

It was into this environment that I entered more or less in ignorance. Ten years ago I'd done some programming for a while in Delphi, writing some handy little utilities like a font browser (sadly no longer available since the host it was on closed down). However, writing Windows desktop software is really quite different to writing for the web. For one thing, the applications tend to be more monolithic and closed – all compiled up into one neat .exe file. Web apps on the other hand are invariably run directly from source code, albeit often minified, and can easily pull their various parts from different servers around the web; they feel looser and more open to write.

On Javascript

Speaking of 'loose and open', that's generally how I see Javascript. It's a very easygoing language, due in large part to its loose typing. It's that and the fact that functions are first-class object that really make Javascript so nice to use. You almost never have to declare the type of a variable, and a function definition (which itself can be a variable) has a list of parameters that doesn't specify their type:

var add = function(a, b) {
    return a + b;
}

The thing about that function is that its parameters don't even have to be numbers:

var foobar = add("foo", "bar"), // foobar = "foobar"
    forty_two = add(40, 2);     // forty_two = 42

Or how about:

var arbitrary = function(a, b, func) {
    a *= 2;
    b *= 1.5;
    return func(a, b);
};

var number1 = 64,
    number2 = 99,
    number3 = arbitrary(number1, number2, add);

alert(number3);

There's just so much I could write here, about objects, closures, AJAX, jQuery and so on, but it'd get kinda boring I reckon, so I'll move one.

The future's bright

But it's Ruby-coloured, at least for me. It took a lot of prompting and hinting and suggesting, but my brother finally persuaded me to dive into all this stuff, and after a nice chat with his boss I've begun to focus my attention on Rails, pretty much just because it apparently has better (i.e. more) job prospects than the language and framework I initially chose, Python and Pylons.

Job prospects is what I need, as I'm currently working fixing computers, which, while not boring, is hardly challenging. One of the things I love about programming is solving problems, and there is an endless supply of those. There's always something new to learn, to try and understand, and maybe even eventually to teach others about.

I feel with programming I can do something more directly useful to people than just being a cog in a black box machine that takes in broken computers and spits out working ones. That's a large part of the motivation for writing my forum – I want to do something that people will use and appreciate. The idea was born of dissatisfaction with the way most existing forum software works: too many page loads, cumbersome to navigate and slow to use. Another part of the motivation, of course, is so that I have something to show to prospective employers, as it's not like I have x years of commercial programming experience. From what I've heard and read, though, I stand a good chance of getting hired based on what I know and can do, rather than how long I've been doing it.

So, here's to hoping for an improvement in my general state of affairs! Who knows, maybe one day I'll even come back and have a pop at ol' Deathwing.

/usr/bin/python

2010-08-27T19:50:00.002+01:00

I tried, but doing Python/database/Apache things in Windows just isn't nice. All the guides for doing it are like afterthoughts to the Linux guides. Consequently, I am downloading Ubuntu. uTorrent says it'll be done in 6 minutes, but that's assuming the speed holds, which it hasn't for the previous 72.3%.

I have a Grand Scheme to make some simple blogging software as a way to learn Python, Pylons, SQL et al, possibly even moving this very blog to it. We shall see. In any event, it means I'll probably be playing WoW less as I'm lazy and rebooting back into Windows just to play will seem like an insurmountable obstacle. This is a good thing, honestly, as I need to aim higher than my current "career".

Anyway, must go, takeaway Chinese food should be ready for collection now!

Class Body

2010-08-25T13:10:00.011+01:00

Chas' recent post at Righteous Orbs got me thinking about a few things (unsurprisingly—it's a thought-provoking post). The thing I want to write about here is about body shapes in games, and how they relate to the character's role in the game. I'm going to use World of Warcraft for my examples in this post as it's the game I'm most faimilar with.

In most role-playing games, the character you play uses the same basic model regardless of what class it is, and as Chas noted, they're invariably well-build musclemen if male, or "sexy" if female. Naturally there are exceptions: I don't think female orcs, trolls or tauren (or even dorfs) in WoW are supposed to be "sexy", and apparently Blizzard's artists consulted real actual women when designing the Horde females. Imagine that! Maybe it explains why the Horde women are able to stand upright, rather than walking around dragging their fists on the floor.

To use a rather extreme example of body-to-role mismatch, let's look at the male draenei:

Clearly one is a HULK SMASH melee fighter and the other is a sissy robe-wearing flinger of girly magic.

My first character in WoW was a rogue. Rogues are supposed to be sneaky-stealthy types who stab people in the back and then vanish if things get too confrontational. They do not take hits to the face very well at all. And yet, because my rogue was male and human, he was build like Conan the Barbarian, which really grates rather.

My second character was a priest, and this time I made it female. It took a lot of fiddling to come up with one that didn't look like an empty-headed bimbo.

I fully intended her to be a shadow priest, hence the serious face. Alas, her voice doesn't match her appearance in the slightest: she sounds like a bimbo in the same way that my rogue sounds like an 80s action movie character.

Coming from the other end of the spectrum we have the female characters in melee fighter or tank roles. Female blood elves are notoriously thin, and even kitted out in plate armour they look frail, so much so that they looks out of place up front getting smacked in the face by a boss. It's rather silly to imagine them being able to hit as hard, and take hits as hard, as someone three times larger and heavier than they are.

His forearms are thicker than her waist.

Make It Fit

So what could be done about this? I think it's quite simple, at least conceptually: make it so your character's body shape reflects the role it performs. Tanks and plate-wearing melee fighters would be stocky and strong-looking, regardless of whether they were male or female. Rogues and hunters would be lithe and agile, relying on stealth, subtlety and accuracy of attacks rather than brute force. And finally, spellcasters would be thin and physically weak-looking, reflecting their inability to do any meaningful physical damage. Hybrid classes like shaman, druids and paladins could simply have their body shape determined by their primary talent tree (although this may introduce oddness should a player re-spec, unless the body shape adjusted over a few days or something).

I imagine this might annoy some players (anything will annoy someone), so it could easily be made an option - some people might not like the idea of a tough-looking female character, or a thin and weak-looking male. Still, it would be nice to have the option to control a character that actually looks like they would be performing their role.

update:

A reply to Chas' post brought up another point related to my post: animations. As things are now, if you make a priest melee something with a mace, they'll do it in exactly the same way as a warrior, paladin or shaman. The jumping animation, the running animation, it's the same across all the classes for a particular race/gender set.

This, however, is not something I can get too worked up about, as it starts to wander into development constraints territory. Animation is expensive and time-consuming, and creating a different animation for every class, race and sex combination could well be prohibitively so given the relatively minor difference it would make. That's not to say I think it's a bad idea; in fact I'd love Blizzard to do something like that—it's not like they're short of money—but I just don't feel they'd see it as worth the effort, which is a shame. It's small details like that which can really help immersion, even if they're not immediately obvious.

Post Is Late

2010-08-24T09:15:00.004+01:00

Good day! Well it is for me, as good as work days can be, which on balance is actually around average. 50% good. So, WoW then, eh? I've not stopped playing in the long time since my last post, but I've also not really had a lot I've felt like writing about. Drama happened with the guild (again), resulting in me pretty much losing interest in raiding altogether. I think I've been on one raid in the past 2 months, and that only because Zoe begged me to come and tank Patchwerk for the weekly. Tanking Patchwerk in a mostly 251-geared Blood-spec DK tank is kinda dull. Zoe did did 360 DPS on her Disc priest. I think she was the only healer, too.

And speaking of tanking! I might have mentioned in these hallow'd posts my orc warrior. He's called Sibher and he's a tank. He's also now level 77, and has been Prot spec from day one. Well, from level 10 at least, as much as a level 10 character can be said to have any spec at all with just one talent point. So warrior tanking. There's a lot more to it than DK tanking, that's for sure. Many more buttons to press, or at least that's how it feels. Definitely more dynamic, and zooming about like a bit spiky pinball of doom is great fun. I just seriously with you got Heroic Throw sooner, and not damn level 80.

I actually levelled all the way to 75 as Prot spec, and to be honest I think this is the best way to do it - you are really really hard to kill, and with DPS gear on you still do a pretty high amount of damage. Soloing elites of your own level or maybe 1 higher is often possible. Rounding up a bunch of 9 mobs and killing them all at once is routine stuff - they don't hit very hard individually, so while Shield Block is up you're more or less invincible. Unless there's more than one spellcaster in the mix, then you're stuffed. Hate spellcasters.

At level 75 I got him a Fury spec, then bought him another Bloodied Arcanite Reaper, and... well, did crap DPS to be honest. I don't really know what I'm doing wrong but other classes (hunters, warlocks and boomkins in particular) seem to do vastly more damage than me in dungeons. At 77 with full heirloom gear I can manage about 1300 DPS on a training dummy, but in instances it barely gets above 1000. I discovered that having enough Hit rating is essential, as not only do missed melee swings lower your DPS, they also generate no rage, with has an even bigger impact on your damage output.

And maybe I'm doing it wrong or something but Fury DPS is kinda... simplistic. All I seem to do is hit Whirlwind and Bloodthirst on cooldown, and Slam when it procs. Maybe Execute on a boss but they're usually dead by the time I notice their health is below 20%. Four buttons, then, none of which are spammable. I dunno, it just seems weird not to be constantly using GCDs for something. Maybe I should put Sunder Armor on my bars.

And Another Thing

I didn't play WoW at all last night. Instead, I worked on my new Project: learning how to program for the web. Specifically, Python. I didn't actually get much done, having managed to install Apache and Python, then Pylons, and I still need to get some kind of SQL going (Bob recommends PostgreSQL instead of MySQL so I'll give that a pop).

The purpose for all this is two-fold. Firstly, I need to wean myself off WoW. I am too easily tempted by distraction for it to be good for me, and I would be better off spending my time doing something with real-world benefits. Which leads into the second point: I want eventually to make this a career. I enjoy programming, having done a lot of Delphi, HTML, CSS, and lately at work some VBA (yuck), and I've dabbled a bit in Javascript. I believe web programming is going to be very important in the coming decades, so I want to make sure I'm prepared. Programming jobs are usually well-paid, so hopefully with Zoe becoming a teacher we'll have a comfortable life together :-)

Healers Are Overrated

2010-07-15T23:31:00.003+01:00

Recount from Keristraza in heroic Nexus:

The druid was actually a tree until we downed Anomalous. After that, he apparently decided he'd be more useful as DPS, and… well, nobody died, so I guess he was right.

It Biggles The Mind

2010-07-13T13:35:00.004+01:00

Whilst browsing MMO-Champion's Bluetracker RSS feed in Google Reader, I came across this excellent post. This is awesome! I have a bunch of critter bites on one of my characters, and now I can't wait for Noob'Rekhan (or any of the first-in-wing Naxx bosses) to be the weekly just so I can tame Mr. Bigglesworth :D

Wherein I answer questions

2010-06-29T11:22:00.004+01:00

As seen on Kiss My Alas, I hereby present answers to questions:

1. Raider, farmer, PvPer, or altoholic?
Mostly raider, with a bit of altoholic thrown in when I get the time, which alas is quite rare these days.

2. Favorite raid or dungeon?
For raid, definitely Ulduar. I just love the style, the architecture and the lore. For dungeon it's gotta be Dire Maul, it's beautiful (and ogres are cool). I still want to do a Worldview on Dire Maul

3. Number one choice for a new playable race?
Before the Cataclysm announcement I would have said goblin, but now, umm... ethereals are pretty cool? A vrykul would be quite fun maybe, although they're a little tall.

4. Class you suck at the most?
At the moment, rogue. My first ever character, I levelled him to 55 then abandoned him to make a priest. Then a shaman. Then a DK. I recently went back to the rogue, kitted him out in full heirlooms, and got him to 58 and Hellfire Peninsula. And now he gets killed by hellboars one level higher than him.

5. Original UI or modded UI?
Modded, totally. The default UI is painful to heal with, I feel like I'm blind. For tanking it's not as bad, although all my UI layouts have my character and its target's health bars in the middle just below my character. When they're up in the corner they're too far out of the way, especially on a large-ish (21") widescreen monitor. Plus the default DK rune display is crap - especially when tanking, you need to be looking near the middle of the screen, not at some tiny round icons way off in the corner.

6. Profession you’ve never levelled past 200?
Engineering for one. My level 22 paladin is an engineer but my god it takes so much bag space. Alchemy and blacksmithing are another two, and I think that's it. All the secondary professions I've levelled to max, on various characters.

7. Favourite flying mount?
I'm quite fond of the red drake you can get from the Wyrmrest quartermaster - it's the first epic mount I bought, and I got another one for my DK even though he has the bronze one from Culling of Stratholme. I would quite like an ironbound proto-drake, though I doubt I'm ever likely to get one.

8. Nozdormu — friend or foe, you figure?
He seems like an okay kinda chap.

9. Useless item you have in your bank that you’ll never get rid of?
Got a whole pile of Tier 7 gear in my priest's bank, along with a Super Simian Sphere that dropped in a Naxx25 run ages ago. My DK also has the huge sword that drops off Hakkar in Zul'Gurub. I'm also bad at getting rid of old quest items - my various banks have stuff

10. Most expensive thing you’ve ever bought?
Epic flying, sadly.

11. Favorite starting area?
Definitely Mulgore, it's lovely and I love the tauren lore. The DK starting zone is alo really well-done, too. I also get a bit nostalgic whenever I find myself in Elwynn Forest as that was my first experience with the game, sneaking about on my rogue being a total noob. I didn't even know what "DPS" meant until I got to level 40 or so.

12. Inane goal you worked hardest to achieve?
Probably The Explorer, just cos Caera The Explorer kinda rolls off the tongue (though she's usually Ambassador Caera these days).

13. Darion Mograine VS Tirion Fordring, gloves off — winner is?
Darion. Tirion hits like a girl.

14. Game music or your own playlist?
I usually have the music off completely, and the ambient sound turned up. Sometimes I'll put the music on if I'm in the right mood, but not very often.

15. Particular option or setting that you always toggle on a new alt/server?
I always have to arrange my UI it's inevitably not set up properly for a new character. Luckily I have a few standard Pitbull profiles I use for most things.

16. Highest amount of levels gained in one play session?
I really couldn't say, though it was possibly my orc warrior in heirloom gear, who I think I got to level 14 in one go.

17. Thing you’d most like to experience or see in-game?
Algalon! I reeeaalllly want the Starcaller title :D

18. Worst PuG moment?
Ohhh where to start. The one that stands out is when I was a relativlely new 80 DK tank, still not completely comfortable in the role despite having levelled in that role/spec. It was in Forge Of Souls and I was being quite cautious, marking targets etc., only to have them mostly ignored by the impatient DPS who kept pressuring me to hurry up, and often pulled "for" me. This is despite me being 2nd on total damage for the instance, and the rogue still wearing heirloom gear. In the end they pissed me off so much with their elitist wanker attitude I pulled the last boss and dropped group, leaving them to it.

19. Best dungeon/raid moment?
Either finally getting Sindragosa down, or likewise Putricide. I think the Putricide victory felt better partly because for the last 20 seconds of the Sindy fight I was stuck inside an ice tomb and couldn't see what was going on - all I could see was her health bar gradually approaching 0 and everyone on Vent getting excited :D

20. Worst quest ever that you totally hate doing?
There's a quest in Tanaris that has you collecting Roc feathers or something. You only need 3 but they have such a low drop rate, and there aren't that many Rocs around.

21. First thing you do when you hit 80?
Visit the class trainer, then buy some gear if I have enough emblems.

22. Character (of yours) you would RP as if you had to?
Possibly my orc warrior, or maybe my priest. My priest is burdened with an idiotic voice :(

23. Keyboard, mouse, or both for using abilities?
Keyboard for anything important, mouse for stuff like drinking Noggenfoggers.

24. Thottbot or WoWhead?
Whichever comes up first on Google.

25. Acronym you’ve seen in chat but don’t understand?
I kept forgetting what "idd" meant for a long time. It's finally stuck now, indeed.

26. Plot point you’d like to see resolved someday?
Pass. I'm not familiar enough with the lore to be able to answer this.

27. Biggest thing you’re looking forward to in Cataclysm?
The world events leading up to it, hunters not using mana any more (and having infinite ammo), elemental shamans getting a proper AoE, the new zones, new instances being a challenge rather than an AoE grindfest… loads of stuff. Also really looking forward to 10- and 25-player raids dropping the same loot.

28. Guild event you’d like to see?
Full and regular 25-man raids.

29. Level range you hate being in?
Most likely 10-20, because you don't get the quick levelling as in 1-10, and you have to run further afield on foot more, and, at least as a priest, you're woefully underpowered. As a hunter it's not so bad. The Outlands level range wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the overwhelming number of bad DKs you have to group with in randoms.

30. Favorite map to quest in?
Possibly Feralas, because it's so pretty, likewise for Grizzly Hills. I also like Searing Gorge for some reason - I think it's because it's quite atmospheric, and not too large.

There he goes again

2010-06-25T08:47:00.003+01:00

Yes I changed it again. Although the pretty mountain scene one was nice, it was a bit... heavy. I don't like web pages to be heavy. This design is much more lightweight (and kinder to slower computers like the one I have to use at work).

Heroic Difficulty

2010-06-21T11:10:00.006+01:00

It wasn't always like this. There was a time when heroics were actually hard. I'm not talking so much about how they got nerfed for speed reasons (gogogogo no time to sit around waiting for Ionar to disperse three times, we get the idea, once is enough), but rather about a time when did them in mostly blue gear (kinda like how Gevlon and co raid ICC now), when the ilevel 200 epic at the end was a highly priced bit of loot. One of our tanks ran Utgarde Pinnacle twenty-six times before the Red Sword of Courage finally dropped for him, and this was long before LFD meant tanks could get a group at the drop of a hat. Back then, that sword was the best pre-raid tanking sword in the game, and even the ones from Naxxramas weren't a huge improvement, at least in 10-player.

I sometimes read about how the design of the Northrend instances is conducive to them becoming an AoE grindfest, and to be honest I'm not really convinced. The harder heroics were not like that in the beginning; tanks simply could not survive the constant high level of damage from a pack of mobs while they were all burned down at once - they had to be taken out one by one in order to reduce the incoming damage to a manageable level, much like in Halls Of Reflection now. People might even have used crowd control(!) to help out. Imagine that!

No, the problem I think is gear level inflation. When the highest level of gear was 213, all was fine, and nobody really over-geared heroics unless they were part of a 25man raiding guild that had Naxx on farm. Then came Ulduar, where 10 reasonably motivated people could get together and kill bosses and get 219 level stuff, or even 226/232 if they fancied a real challenge. Then came Trial of The Crusader, upping the gear level to 232 for 10man (245 for 10man heroic), along with the 5-man Trial of The Champion instance which dropped 219 gear on heroic mode. Aaaand again when Icecrown Citadel was opened: higher item level (251/264) and new 5-man instances dropping loot of the same level as that of the previous raid tier. Add to that the availability of a full Tier 9 Set of 232 armour just from the emblems that drop from the bosses designed for 200 blues, and you can see where the problem is.

Blizzard have got themselves into a bit of a bind here, with their desire to make the latest tier of raiding accessible to everyone. That's all very well, a noble goal, but the side effect has been to make the previous tiers more or less obsolete. The only reason people raid Ulduar, Naxx or Obsidian Sanctum these days is for the achievements, and their associated titles and mounts (or, rarely, just because it's fun, but let's not get into such esoteric concepts here).

So, what's an MMO maker to do? Well, one solution would be to reduce the disparity between the first tier of raid gear and the projected last tier. It really shouldn't be possible in 4th tier gear to output over eight times the DPS you can in first tier. I think the merging of 10- and 25-man loot tables in Cataclysm will go some way towards this, as there no longer needs to be the leapfrog where 10-man gear needs to be better than the prievious tier's 25-man stuff. Reducing loot inflation may also mean fewer loot whores, who only raid for teh shinies. If the next tier's gear isn't vastly better than the current stuff, there'll be less incentive to raid just for loot's sake. Instead, people might raid for (shock horror) the fun and challenge of facing new content. Furthermore, there'll be less of a reason for Blizzard to introduce "wellfare gear" available from emblems: since the differences in gear level won't be so important, it won't be so necessary to have the latest and greatest just to stand a chance in the new raid (although as Gevlon's proved already, that isn't even the case now).

I have no experience with the transition between two expansions, so I'm unsure what to expect when Cataclysm hits.I remain hopeful, however, as despite the problems WoW has now, it's still a damn good fun game and if Blizzard can make it better, I'll be there, trying to bring Deathwing down with 9 or 24 other folks.

Uphill Both Ways, In The Snow

2010-06-16T13:24:00.005+01:00

A couple of recent posts (well, one is a link from a recent post), by Larísa and Klepsacovic, reminded me of a couple of times I've had similar experiences of having to fight carefully through an instance and actually use quite a bit of teamwork and communication in order to proceed. They've also got me thinking about another thing but I'll get to that later.

In both of their posts, Larísa and Klepsacovic talk about how they've suddenly been left in the middle of a low level instance missing one or two players, and how they carried on regardless, and most importantly, enjoyed it.

I Like It Hard

I arrived at Klep's lowbie instance post via another of his where he advocates reducing the number of people in a regular dungeon to four. It's an interesting idea, especially since in my experiences levelling my hunter, warrior and rogue the low level instances have mostly been facerolls assuming everyone in the party is at least somewhat competent. Throw in heirlooms and you end up with almost comically overpowered characters.

Take, for example, one of my own sub-five experiences. I'm levelling an orc prot warrior, and a short while back, level 28 or so, I put myself in the queue for a random instance and we get Razorfen Kraul. Almost immediately one of the DPS, a hunter, appears to disconnect. The healer, a shaman, seems to be a bit slow on the uptake too, so I pull a bit more carefully. After a while I notice he's not actually healing at all, because he's also disconnected. That leaves a rogue, a (presumably frost spec) mage, and me. Not sure about the rogue but I am almost fully heirloomed (missing the bow to go in my ranged slot).

We to see how far we can get until they come back, except five minutes later neither have returned. We then votekick them both and wait for replacements, and in the meantime continue further, because hey, it's actually not going so badly. And so we continue, for about half an hour, managing to kill (I think) two more bosses, with none of us dying. Sure, I had to stop quite a lot to bandage and eat, but with my heirloom gear and their DPS things were dying too fast to do any life-threatening damage. The rogue was sapping, the mage was sheeping, increasing the odds in our favour whenever possible. It was, as Klep and Larísa discovered, a lot of fun. For me, it's how five-man instances should be played: crowd control, careful pulls, and actually having to worry about wiping. It's fun, in my opinion, whereas the speed-pull AoE-everything method in today's five-mans (the ICC ones excluded) is really quite boring for most of the party (it's still an interesting challenge when I'm tanking).

The fun didn't last forever, or even until the end of the instance, for we did eventually get a replacement healer and DPS, and from there on things went downhill. The new DPS was a rogue, and since he was similarly heirloom'd up, apparently decided he was capable of tanking stuff, and rather than let me pull, did so "for" me. I considered asking him to maybe let the tank do the pulling, and thought about asking the healer to maybe not heal him, but in the end I decided to go with the flow and just pull quicker, not giving the rogue a chance to get aggro. This is not easy as a rage-starved level 28 prot warrior, incidentally. Luckily we were near the end so the gogogogo didn't last too long.

Back In My Day

I really don't want to come across here as a nostalgic know-it-all pining for the golden days of vanilla WoW and how it was all so much better back then. Hell, I only started playing a week before Lich King came out, so I don't even know what it was like back in the day. I have, however, experienced challenging five-man content: when Naxx and OS were the only level 80, places like Old Kingdown or Utgarde Pinnacle were a real challenge. Patchwerk was a tough boss, reqiuring a level of DPS that now seems like a joke (you needed six damage folks each doing a massive 1,500 DPS to beat his enrage timer). These days you can almost treat Naxx like a very big five-man, certain bosses notwithstanding (Four Horsemen, for instance, or Razuvious).

What can Blizzard do to avoid people facerolling level 85 content? They've already said they don't like the current round-em-up-and-AoE mentality, and plan to introduce more crowd control in Cataclysm. I really really hope this comes true. As Reversion said:

It might be a nightmare at first. Forcing people to use CC (as they have said will happen more) means fights are going to be harder and more complicated. Tanks will have to do more than just AOE spam. Also healers are going to have to get better at triage instead of just ‘topping people off’. All this means instances runs may well be a rude awakening for many. Personally I am hoping for it. I am hoping it will blow away the current level of stagnation in randoms and get people think more and do more. I only hope that overgeared morons will not be able to steamroll their way to 85. I want to see them slam hard into the wall and learn to play again.

The other problem I see is the degree of gear inflation present in Wrath Of The Lich King. As I said above, Patchwerk was considered a serious DPS check in the early days of the expansion, and yet you now have classes capable of almost ten times that level of damage output. Tanks in the Naxx days would be lucky to reach 30k health with raid buffs, yet now they prance around with 55k unbuffed. Moreover, avoidance has become so high that Blizzard had to reduce dodge by 20% across the board in Icecrown Citadel or face some serious balancing issues with boss damage.

So is the solution simply harder instances and smaller increments between gear/raid tiers? I doubt it's that simple, but I for one would like to see such things. I would like challenging content that isn't only based around raids (or PvP but that's a whole other ballgame). Perhaps too with the proposed changes to the emblem system, people won't just run heroic instances for the Cata equivalent of frost emblems, but instead do them because they're a fun challenge.

OMG IT LOOKS DIFFERENT

2010-06-15T20:00:00.009+01:00

Yeh so the green design was kinda dull, and Blogger seduced me with its fancy new template designer, and I saw the "picture window" design with the rain and thought "that kinda looks like Storm Peaks, vaguely".

BUT THAT'S NOT ALL

No indeed, for I along with fellow guildie Scootz have been experimenting with video, ostensibly for the recording of boss kills. Here is an example:

You may notice a distinct lack of sound in this video. I did upload it with Dry Kill Logic's Rot in the background, and had it timed wonderfully so that the song ends (suddenly, as it does) just as the boss dies. Alas, Warner Music Group being the bunch of 19th century copyright holdout fails they are, have decided that OMG THIEF YOU MUST PAY FOR USING OUR MUSIC FROM NINE YEARS AGO IN YOUR MINOR VIDEO THAT PROBABLY ONLY FIFTY PEOPLE WILL WATCH. Bet you that's what their automatic ban-machine was thinking. Maybe I should turn it black-and-white and add a jaunty piano soundtrack to go with the speeded-up visuals.

Also note that it's in glorious high definition. Well, sort of. I recorded it with WeGame, and WeGame's definition of HD is "640 pixels high", as opposed to the usual "720 pixels high". Still, it's better than 320 pixels high which just reduces on-screen text to meaningless dots.

This amused me

2010-06-02T15:08:00.001+01:00

I added a widget to my blog. It's under the heading This amused me, and is a small box of links to things that amused me when I saw them in Google Reader. Usually the links come from the various I Can Has Cheezburger-related sites.

Chain Pulling

2010-05-13T15:45:00.004+01:00

There's a post at Kill Ten Rats that mocks the somewhat absurd nature of pulling groups of enemies in an MMO. Basically, no matter how you pull, any other enemies outside a set distance, whether they be in the same room or not, will completely ignore you, even if you pull with a honking great big flashy exploding fireball of doom.

But one of the comments (the first one, by NBarnes) puts forth an interesting idea: what if, upon pulling the first group, the entire instance was alerted to your party's presence, and began to make its way toward you?

If done right, this could make an instance really exciting, as you'd be racing against the tide, desperately trying to reach an objective before becoming overwhelmed. If there were multiple paths through an instance, you could perhaps employ some tricks to divert enemies away from you, although you'd then have them racing to catch up behind you, adding to the pressure.

This sort of mechanic is already in the game to some degree in instances like Violet Hold, or the Thorim fight in Ulduar: waves of enemies come at you and you have to fend them off. The problem here is that the location is more or less static: you basically stand in the same room and take what's thrown at you. Culling Of Stratholme and Pit Of Saron, on the other hand, have a "gauntlet" section, where enemies keep on coming at you until you get all the way through it. It's still a relatively small area of the zone, but the important difference is you have to make your way from point A to point B whilst fighting off enemies (or in the PoS case, rounding them up then fighting them all at once).

Boss fights in such a place could differ from the norm in that you'd be quite pushed for time - perhaps the party would enter the boss's room and the doors would lock for a time, keeping the approaching enemies at bay. You'd then have a clearly defined (thus controllable, from an encounter mechanics point of view) area in which to do battle. Defeating the boss could then throw up some kind of permanent obstacle to the enemies, and you'd have to leave via a newly uncovered (and also enemy-free, for now) route.

As with the boss encounters, there could be sections where you're allowed a brief reprieve, restore mana, top people off, then away you go again, into the fray!

It's obviously impossible to say how well this kind of dungeon would work in practice, and how hard it would be to balance. I also think it should be reserved for the higher levels, since by then tanks would have more experience (barring those who levelled as DPS then respecced once they reached the level cap) and would be better able to cope with the constant pressure to move forward, better able to round up enemies whilst on the move.

Really, there are many possibilities for this kind of encounter, and whether it's fun or not really depends on how well it's balanced, or the timing of enemies. Perhaps they wouldn't come in "waves" as such, but instead more randomly, with different mixtures: at one point you might encounter a large, tough monster on its own, other times weaker but more numerous ones grouped together.

The element of randomness would, I think, add to the experience, as otherwise you'd get into a situation where people could simply learn the sequence and dance their way through it, eventually narrowing it down to one optimum path. I've read in various places that at least some people would prefer more dynamic encounters (unless they're PvP-like, where the rules are completely different), and I believe this sort of idea could work well and allevieate some of the grind if it offered enough variety.

Worldview: Felwood

2010-05-01T15:50:00.004+01:00

Felwood, the green unpleasant land bordering Darkshore, is a sickly, diseased place. The wildlife is rabid, with large gashes and weeping sores covering the bodies of the wolves and bears, and many of the trees have been altered to feature twisted "faces", complete with dripping green ooze for saliva. Even the elven lanterns that light the road are corrupt. For certain, questing in Felwood is an uncomfortable experience, with most of the objectives based on cleansing the demonic taint. It's no surprise that the questgivers here are members of the Cenarion Circle.

Unlike Feralas, the green of Felwood is far from lush – rather it is the green of poison and decay and worse. In spite of all this, however, there are a few plants still remaining free of the illness which has soaked into the land, and the owls of the region likewise seem untouched.

Approaching Felwood from Ashenvale in the south; the air is not so bad here.

Two furbolg clans in the area, the Deadwood and the Felpaw, have been corrupted and are hostile to players, and to the Timbermaw tribe in the north.

The thick forest canpopy rarely offers an unobstructed view of the sun, placing almost the entire region into a murky gloom.

Ancient elven ruins mark the entrance to the demonic enclave of Jaedenar in the west of Felwood, where the Shadow Council go about their business.

A large portion of Jaedenar is underground, accessible through this building.

A change from the rotten green outside, the demons' lair is a mixture of red and blue.

Warlocks of many races inhabit the caverns along with the demons.

The red tinge permeates the air surrounding demonic dwellings.

Dead and dead: elven ruins and rotting trees.

The lake in at the bottom of Bloodvenom Falls, which then flows into Bloodvenom River.

Bloodvenom River overflowing the cliffs that separate Felwood and Darkshore. From here the river flows down numerous waterfalls and eventually becomes Wildbend River.

Shatter Scar Vale. The burnt patches were caused by infernals and fire elementals landing here during the invasion of the Burning Legion

A diseased bear, its wounds seeping openly, heads towards the road in northern Felwood.

The northern parts of the zone aren't quite so heavily canopied, although the thick, tainted air still occludes much of the light.

Occasionally, though, the sun does manage to reach the forest floor, resulting in a few patches of light here and there.

In Irontree Woods, in the north of the zone, these three Ancients – Hastat, Stoma and Vartrus – have been permanently petrified.

Corrupt treants also wander Irontree Woods.

More open areas near Irontree Woods.

A furbolg of the Felpaw tribe stands watching his camp in northern Felwood.

Looking along the road heading south back into Felwood.

Along the eastern edge of Felwood, the massive cliffs of Mount Hyjal soar, protecting the World Tree Nordrassil.

As you can see, Felwood is by no means a pretty place, but nonetheless I feel is quite interesting, particularly in the effect is has on players questing there.

My Dongle-ong

2010-04-22T12:36:00.005+01:00

Dongle. It sounds rude. It even, if you squint and have a dirty mind, look rude. A bit. Or at least looks like it could have rude applications.

But anyway, dongles: the means by which one connects to the internet free of the shackles of landline oppression. And more importantly, in the case of my girlfriend and I, free of the £125 charge required of British Telecom to connect our flat's landline. Since we're only going to be living here for six months, we deemed it an extravagance in the face of no-strings-attached mobile broadband, although if it turns out that said net connection is not workable, we may give in and pay up. Still, a quick 10-man poke-Noth-with-sticks last night gave me hope that dongle-net will at least be workable: pings in the region of 300—500ms, but no lag spikes, no disconnects, no freezing. No Ventrilo either, since I didn't want to push my luck. Guild raiding without Vent is weird.

It seems we are quite fortunate in that we live in an area of strong 3G mojo – the Three "3Connect" program informs me my connection is 5-out-of-5-bars HSDPA, which I gather is the best available.

One of the downsides of dongling is although it's only £15 a month, there is a rather tight-fisted 5GB monthly data limit. I am informed by a guildie that WoW will account for 1.8 of those gigabytes, so that's a relief. The other downside is that the dongle only is only beholden to my computer. In order to get her ladyship's computer connected, either I'll have to perform some connection-sharing theurgy, or she'll have to get her own dongle, and pay her own £15 a month. To be honest, I doubt a single connection would be able to cope with the force of two data streams surging through it, so it's looking likely we'll be going with Plan B. On balance it still works out cheaper than getting the landline connected, even accounting for the lower monthly cost of such an earthbound link.

And hey, it's only ("only") six months. We'll be back on a real net connection just in time for Cataclysm.

Photography and Screenshots

2010-04-16T13:55:00.003+01:00

As I mentioned in my first Worldview post, one of my hobbies is photography. I've been doing it for around 8 years now (it seems weird saying that, as it doesn't feel anywhere near that long. Makes me feel old) and I've used assorted different types of camera from basic point-and-shoots with no manual controls, up to DSLR+lens combos that cost more than my car (which is to say, about £1100. I have an old car).

However, despite the differences in technique when using these various cameras, certain important things remain constant: you are looking out fully immersed in the environment, with all your senses in use, feeling the world around you. The process of capturing a two-dimensional image in such a situation generally involves looking at a small rectangle onto which is projected said image, then waiting for the right moment at which to trip the shutter, freezing and storing that small slice of time.

Photography also has some common physical constraints across the board, though they vary in extent depending on the camera and lens (and film) used. Contrast can be a problem, especially on sunny days or in dark rooms with few light sources. Low light levels generally mean slower shutter speeds, which can mean blur due to camera shake or subject movement.

One of the biggest constraints is also the one that for many people inspires the photography in the first place: you have to actually be there in the right place at the right time (and looking in the right direction). Depending on the person, photography falls somewhere on spectrum that ranges from "snapshot of where I was" to "work of art" (and a picture can be both at once, but let's not complicate matters). In other words, for many people the photography is secondary to the experience of going somewhere, a record to remind them of the time. For some, the photography is the whole point of going to a place; the journey there is a relatively minor thing. And, of course, there are all the shades in between.

The point is, to take a photo you have to go to a place, and once there you experience it with all your senses. Naturally, people emphasise various sensory aspects differently - my brother, for example, is more likely to remember the sounds of things than what they look like. He is also a far better musician than I'll ever be.

And so we come to Screenshots, and given the above, I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. Azeroth and Outland are virtual worlds (no, really), meaning the physical limitations of photography don't apply to them. In fact, to get the effects of long shutter speeds, contrast exceeding the limitations of the capture medium, or artefacts like film grain, these things have to be deliberately simulated. Limitations in camera focal length are arbitrarily fixed. Heck, even the mathematically perfect rectilinear projection used in pretty much every 3D game ever is a simulation of how things look in photographs.

Then of course, in WoW, you generally experience the world visually through a rectangle 17-24 inches diagonal, and aurally through either small desktop speakers, or through headphones. You cannot feel, smell or taste Azeroth. You are not there. Furthermore, the real world is really rather large, meaning long travel times, meaning time, effort and, often, money, is required to get around. As a result, you have a strong emotional investment in the place you are going to.

By contrast, Azeroth is tiny. Travel from one end of the world to the other takes half an hour at most, and is mostly a passive experience (sitting on a mythical flying creature while you go and make a cup of tea). When you do have to manually direct your avatar in the world, you don't get tired or out of breath, your legs and back and shoulders do not ache, and you can summon a mount out of thin air and move far faster than anyone on foot, or, if you're in Outland or Northrend, fly without the hassle and limitations of an aeroplane or other unwieldy real-life flying machine.

The upshot of this is much less emotional attachment to places in the game. You spent no effort to get there, so getting and being there means less. You don't feel the world anywhere near as fully, so it's less memorable. The latter point is compounded with the re-use of assets in the game, so once you've seen the caves in Elwynn Forest, you've more or less seen the caves in the rest of the Eastern Kingdoms, and they all kind of blur together into one meta-cave. Even within a zone, most of the landscape features will have few variations, so you end up seeing the same four trees everywhere you go in Azshara. The real world, on the other hand, is of course infintely variable – every place is totally different to every other place.

Lest I seem overly critical of the world Blizzard have created, I should make it clear that this weaker emotional attachment to places is can arguably be a positive thing for creating interesting screenshots. If you climbed Everest and took some pictures from the summit, those pictures would mean a lot to you regardless of whether they were "good" or not: you put an enormous amount of time and effort into getting there, and the simple act of standing on the summit of the world's highest mountain is quite achievement enough. In your euphoria and exhaustion your state of mind would be much less conducive to making good pictures, as you'd have so many other things to think about (even the simple act of breathing would require some concentration). As a result, you might well come home with what to anyone else look like rather generic pictures of some mountains. It's a common mistake of beginning photographers to assume that a picture that was hard to get, such as one taken from the summit of Everest, is one that people will want to see. On the whole, people don't care, and rightly so – all they can respond to is what's in front of them.

Since in WoW getting to places is so comparatively easy, you're much more free to concentrate on what things look like. Moreover, you are basically looking through a camera's-eye view of the world the entire time, so there's no disconnect between what you eyes see and what the virtual camera sees. There are far fewer distractions, too – although the world only fills a quite small portion of your overall field of view, everything outside the bounds of your monitor screen is fairly static, so your brain pretty much ignores it. With headphones on, music off and ambient sounds turned up, you can indeed become quite immersed in the world, just in a different way to how you are immersed in the real world. With the UI turned off ( [Alt] + [Z], if you didn't know), the world is almost pure visual stimulus, so your response to it is likewise going to be highly visual; you enter a peculiar state of mind where you are focussed near-exclusively on the appearance of that rectangle in front of you. So long as you are comfortable with movement and camera control in game, you barely need to think about such things, and it's only when the game forces you to concentrate on them, like when you get stuck on a low fence, that you ever think about them.

I don't know whether this state of mind comes as freely to others as it does to me. Perhaps my years of photography have trained me to enter it more easily. It's actually quite similar when I do street photography: senses other than sight are pushed to the back, and I see the world much more as shapes, compositions and contrasts. When I'm wandering around a zone in "screenshot mode", I try to dampen any thoughts about quests and lore and such, and instead just see.

When it comes to pruning, again, it is easier to separate the good images from the merely ok ones, as there aren't really any feelings attached to any of them regarding the effort involved to get them, since they were all easy to get (usually – there are exceptions, like if I was to do a Worldview on Ulduar or Icecrown Citadel or other high-level instance. I couldn't very well run about merrily taking snaps until the place was cleared first, which would of course require a lot of time and effort).

That's not to say it doesn't take a long time, incidentally – when you've spent two hours waltzing around Azshara pressing the screenshot key whenever you see something even a little interesting (occasionally multiple times with slightly different framing), you end up with 150 images to sort through and try to reduce down to 25 at most. Then they need to be arranged into as cohesive an order as possible so that they look more like a collection and less like a disjointed array of vaguely similar-looking pictures. Still, this point applies just the same to photography as it does to screenshots, particularly with photoshoots.

In the end, photography and making-screenshots-in-WoW (fairly rolls of the tongue, doesn't it?) are quite different activities. You still need the same sense of aesthetics for both, as for any visual medium, but the actual processes each have their own challenges and benefits.

Addon: NeedToKnow

2010-04-14T18:00:00.001+01:00

Need To Know is a nice small and uncomplicated addon that lets you have up to 4 groups of 5 bars wherever you want on screen, to show spell cooldowns, DoTs/HoTs, buffs/debuffs and totems.

My central UI setup for my DK in frost tank spec. Click to see a slightly larger version.

The bars NTK shows always appear in the same place when active, and disappear otherwise. Taking the above screenshot as an example, once Anti-Magic Shell comes off cooldown (thus causing the bar to disappear), the Unbreakable Armor and Icebound Fortitude bars would not move downwards to fill the empty space. This helps to maintain a consistent mental map of where things are.

Bars are coloured manually - the default is medium grey. Each bar can optionally show an icon for its related spell, buff etc.

The Frost Fever and Blood Plague bars are tracking their respective DoTs on my current target. When set to Buff or Debuff mode, the bars can be set to track either the player, your target, your pet, and so on.

Another handy feature that I only read about as I was writing this post is that you can set bars to track multiple buffs/debuffs: it shows the remaining time for the shortest, then when that expires moves to the next one. Another possible use for this, although I've not tried it, is loading a bar with all important vehicle abilities you're going to encounter, so for example in Oculus you can have a single bar for tracking Leeching Poison stacks (green drake), Shock Charge (amber drake) or Evasion Charge (red drake). You could even further load this bar with other stuff like pyrite stacks for the Flame Leviathan encounter in Ulduar.

That's more or less it really: it's a lightweight addon that does one particular thing, and does it well.

Here's a brief explanation of things in the screenshot that aren't related to NTK:

the health bars (and target buffs/debuff icons) are by Pitbull 3.0
the RS, GCD and Mind Freeze "indicators" are really just 3 buttons on a small Bartender4 bar that isn't clickable
- the "GCD indicator" is actually just a button for a stamina scroll
- I have Rune Strike macro'd to all my main attacks, so most of the time I don't need to manually activate it. However, if all runes are on cooldown and I only have 20 RP, the Rune Strike indicator lets me know when the ability is ready so I can use it manually
- the Mind Freeze indicator serves as both a range check, a cooldown monitor and an availability check, all in one handy icon
the runes display and runic power bar are by Magic Runes
the numbers in the top-right are MikScrollingBattleText. I should really make the crit display a bit smaller

Worldview: Feralas

2010-04-13T00:49:00.005+01:00

The lush green forest of Feralas lies in stark contrast to the adjacent dry, baking zone of Thousand Needles. It is a lush forest home to a wide variety of wildlife, including harpies, hippogryphs, gorillas and bears. It is also the location of Dire Maul, one of the great level 60 5-man instances.

The border between Feralas and Thousand Needles.

The characteristic tall rock spires that give Thousand Needles its name also continue some way into Feralas.

The small lake below the Tauren village of Camp Mojache.

The Lariss Pavillion, north-east of Camp Mojache.

In the distance, a village of the Grimtotem tribe of Taurens, who are not part of the Horde.

A waterfall cascading down the mountains that separate Feralas and the Tauren starting area of Mulgore.

The entrance to Dire Maul, guarded by ogres.

Looking west along the outer wall of Dire Maul.

Moving further west, we approach the cliffs overlooking the sea.

On the path leading to northern Feralas, a bridge over another waterfall.

There are more ruins in northern Feralas, many of them occupied by harpies. Northern Feralas is more open than the rest of the zone, and not so gloomy.

The blazing sun makes quite a difference compared to the darkness one emerges from when travelling north.

Ruins around Oneiros.

Some more ruins. There are many patrols of level 62 elite dragonkin in this area…

…and in the centre of Dream Bough sits (occasionally) Taerar, guarding one of the entrances to the Emerald Dream.

Looking north up the lake surrounding Dream Bough.

The Ruins of Ravenwind. These also are infested with harpies - their nests are the rough ball shapes hanging from trees and parts of the ruins.

Heading south again, looking down on the dock where one may catch the boat to Feathermoon Stronghold, a Night Elf town on Sardor Isle.

Looking back up at the cliffs from the coast.

Heading west towards the dock at Feathermoon Stronghold.

Looking south at Sardor Isle, with the Isle Of Dread in the background.

Looking north towards Sardor Isle from some ruins on the Isle Of Dread. These ruins are occupied by a tribe of Naga, whilst the central valley of the island is full of wandering level 60-62 elite chimaera.

The ruins on the south coast of Sardore Isle.

Heading back into southeastern Feralas.

The Ruins of Isildien in the High Wilderness area, populated by ogres.

And that's Feralas! As you can see, it's very green and lush (except for the southern part of Sardor Isle, which is more grey and sickly), and one of the first zones I discovered that really made me stop questing and just look at it. In fact, the zone has affected me so much the colour scheme of my blog is inspired by it (and the header image is a crop of the Lariss Pavillion image).

I briefly skirted around Dire Maul in this post, and I do plan to do a full session(?) on it soon – there really are a lot of interesting things to see in the instance!

Addon: Satrina Buff Frames

2010-04-10T22:49:00.004+01:00

A quick post to mention a handy little addon I found the other day: Satrina Buff Frames. In a nutshell, it lets you customise the layout, size and grouping of your buff/debuff display. Here's how I have mine set up:

Short buffs are ones lasting less than 3 minutes. I might change this at some point to "less than 1 minute". The different colouring on the debuff timers is to show their type (magic, disease, etc.). I've since changed it so the debuff name now appears above the icon, too.

Another handy thing about SBF is it can show you who's given you a particular buff (or debuff, but that's usually obvious) in the tooltip.

All in all a very useful addon!

Worldview: Azshara

2010-04-06T00:07:00.003+01:00

Azshara, a place so seldom travelled I had to look it up to make sure I'd spelt it correctly. It's really a shame there aren't more quests in this zone, as it's a very pretty and scenic place, especially in the evening. Mind you, even during the middle of the day it seems to be late afternoon in Azshara, with an almost perpetually setting sun, as if the zone is further north than it actually is.

The zone is populated with quite a variety of wildlife, including stags, hippogryphs, naga, murlocs and, in the southern region, many elite stone giants.

As usual, you can click the images to see a larger (960px wide) version.

The road entering Azshara from Ashenvale, from the west.

A path leading up to an Alliance base in the hills of south-west Azshara.

A strange rock formation atop a hill.

A stag wandering around on a hill.

A rocky outcrop at the top of a hill. There are lots of hills in Azshara.

Looking north towards the mountains that divide Azshara and Winterspring.

The gates at the Azshara side of Timbermaw Hold.

Ruined archway and a ghost at the border of Azshara and Ashenvale.

A waterfall cascading down from the mountains bordering Winterspring and Azshara.

Ruins along the coast, and some Naga buildings.

The ruins actually go quite far out to sea, and there are many giants wandering around below the surface.

The temple of Arkkoran, off the northern peninsula.

These rockpools are scattered all around the coast of the southern peninsula.

The beach at the far eastern tip of the north peninsula, leading up to higher ground.

Looking back down towards the above location.

The Temple of Zin-Malor, in the ruins of Eldarath, in central Azshara.

Naga occupying the the Temple of Zin-Malor. The temple has the same layout as the Temple of the Moon in Darnassus.

More of the ruins of Eldarath.

The entire zone of Azshara seems to be in a perpetual autumn.

A troll turned into stone by one of the giants. The giant to the left in this picture is Monnos the Elder.

Naga patrolling the dead land surrounding the Ravencrest Monument.

The legs, head and sword are all that remains of the Monument.

The view north along the coast from the Monument.

And that concludes this little view of Azshara! I haven't yet decided which zone to do next week – Feralas is certainly high on the list, as is Dire Maul.

Fiddle-de-ree

2010-03-31T15:22:00.005+01:00

The more observant amongst you may have noticed my blog looks a bit different now. As I write this, it's a pale blue-grey background, green headings, black text and blue links. This may change - an image behind the title would be nice, for instance.

The initial motivation for fiddling, incidentally, was to see if I could widen the main post column, so that I can post slightly larger screenshots; 400px wide is kinda small. Also, the darker background makes for easier viewing of screenshots (they get a little drowned in all that white).

Edit now I'm home using my colour-accurate monitor: OK so it wasn't actually pale blue at all, more like lilac.

Worldview: Azuremyst and Bloodmyst Isles

2010-03-30T20:27:00.007+01:00

This is the first post in what I plan to make into an on-going series exhibiting the zones and instances of World Of Warcraft. Outside of WoW, my main hobby is photography, and I've decided to try and apply my knowledge and skills in that field to screenshot-making in the game. There is so much to see in Azeroth and Outland, yet I suspect many veteran players don't really look at it with an aesthetic mindset - everything is mere function.

My purpose, then, is to show what the world is like when you spend the time to stop and just look at it, without issues of quests, travel, chores and so forth clouding your mind. A secondary goal is to make pictures that even non-players will find interesting, thus there will be few images documenting practical aspects of the world such as vendors, flight paths and so forth. In fact, this is not really a documentary project at all, more of a series of themed galleries.

This idea has been fermenting for quite a while – I think it was when I first saw Feralas that I began to see the game in a different light, and it was only when I read a post on HoTs & DoTs about Firefox Personas (themes), of all things, that I finally began to seriously consider doing something constructive.

So why the draenei starting areas first? Mostly because it's my nature to root for the underdog, and to be different. I have no proof but I get the feeling the Isles are one of the less-busy Alliance zones in the game; I suspect this is simply because draenei are not one of the standard fantasy races, so most people will start with the more familiar humans, dorfs and elves. A comparatively minor reason for starting in Exodar is because I am using my shaman to take the screenshots, as Far Sight allows me to see the world from normally inaccessible places.

So then, let us begin. You can click the images to see a larger (960px wide) version.

The Traders' Tier in the Exodar.

Workers clearing up a less well-travelled area of the Exodar.

Near the top of the ramp leading in and out of the Exodar.

The Exodar from the outside looking towards the front entrance.

The road leading north from Azure Watch, the draenei starting town.

A stag and some ruins on the hill overlooking Azure Watch.

Overlooking Ammen Vale, the draenei starting zone.

Looking north from Blood Watch on Bloodmyst Isle. Various pieces of the Exodar that broke off during the crash are scattered around Bloodmyst Isle, corrupting the area.

A view out across the sea to Wyrmscar Isle.

The ghost of Razormaw circling the sky above Wyrmscar Isle.

The Warp Piston, part of the Exodar which broke off during the crash.

An un-harnessed voidwalker wandering around near the Warp Piston.

The Vector Coil, another broken-off part of the Exodar. The Blood Elves in the area are using it to empower their leader Sironas.

Apathy has rained on me

2010-03-24T17:34:00.000Z

Lately, whether due to tiredness or Recent Events, I've felt somewhat less enthusiastic about raiding, preferring instead just to tootle about on my hunter, levelling up gradually and getting into Uldaman failpugs repeatedly. It's actually a combination of the above factors, probably, plus a feeling that despite pressure from some members to attempt it, we as a guild just aren't ready for ICC. Sure, we can down the first 3 (maybe 4) bosses, but then it gets hard, and I honestly don't think we're capable of tackling it yet. Rather than bash my head against a wall in ICC, I would much rather spend time in Ulduar and see it through to completion. In fact, I'm fairly sure there are people in the guild who haven't even seen all (or any) of Naxx.

The problem is, I'm often needed for raids. At the risk of blowing my own trumpet, I do good DPS, good healing and maybe even good tanking, though I've not tanked many raids. I feel like I'm needed, which puts pressure on me to log to my main characters for the benefit of the guild, at odds with what I want to do at the time. Mind you, despite my initial reluctance, I do actually end up enjoying myself if the raid goes well like it did in ToC10 the other day, and it's always a nice feeling being with people who are seeing something for the first time ("What's the Lich King doing here? And wh... aaaahhh wtf?!").

Perhaps I'm being selfish? Should I say "bollocks to the guild"? Put that way it does seem selfish, seeing as without them I wouldn't have much. I could maybe hook up with another guild, but I do like the people in New Dawn, and have known some of them for quite a while now. We're one of those indeterminate "social raiding" guilds, with frequent tension between the "progression" folks and the "let's just have fun together"s.

I do think that, like Tam, I put priority on "not putting up with shit" over "doing raiding". It's why I made my hunter (and my Horde rogue, who shall remain nameless) in the first place: to escape the shit-flinging and whining and drama. And yet, I made these characters on the same server as New Dawn, presumably because I believed subconsciously that things would blow over and I could then play them without feeling like I was hiding.

The social aspect of WoW is a large part of its appeal to me, and I have little interest in progression in the usual sense. I enjoy raiding when we have a good group and are making progress in something that at least a few people in the group haven't seen before. If I'm one of the ones experiencing The New, all the better. I really couldn't give a hoot that we're not up there getting server-firsts; Cataclysm is a long way off, so we have plenty of time to see all the raiding that WoW has to offer us until Deathwing goes and upheaves it all. Meanwhile, I just want to have fun.

In Other News

Beyond the shaman and DK (double respec will be needed for Gorain, o joy) changes in today's 3.3.3 patch, one other thing stood out to me:

Players can no longer roll Need on Frozen Orbs in dungeons under Need Before Greed loot rules. Pass and Greed options will still be available.

Excellent, no more orb ninjas! This change pretty much had to be made anyway, actually, what with Frozen Orbs being tradeable for things like Frost Lotus now. It'll have interesting implications for server economies, at any rate.

I'm also cautiously optimistic about the changes to the random dungeon system. Increasing the length of the deserter debuff (up from 15 minutes to 30) should hopefully encourage people to stay with the group they have, especially if they DPS, and removing the waiting period before being able to kick someone from the group should mean less time wasted with idiots. On the other hand, for tanks who don't over-gear Heroics by at least two full tiers, and have the audacity to show up with less than 27k health unbuffed, it could mean insta-kick, though at least the kick instigator having to provide a reason may deter this behaviour somewhat. Time will tell.

An HTML editor thing

2010-03-23T22:46:00.004Z

I've written two posts so far and already I don't like the Blogger editor. I like working directly in HTML, so I decided to make my own:

Real-Time HTML Editor

It's a bit basic for now, but I have Grand Plans for it, including the ability to link to a remote stylesheet, adjustable pane sizes, auto-saving, ~~and magic scrollbar position matching, although that last one might turn out to be rather hard. I shall need to research the matter.~~ (it was actually quite easy, even if I did use a non-W3C-standard property)

It works just as well off-line, although you'll need a copy of the jQuery script file too (see also the jQuery website if you're curious).

I rather suspect there'll be some kind of security issue with allowing anyone to insert whatever code they want on a page on my site, but for now I shall just trust to anonymity.

*crosses fingers*

Who?

2010-03-22T08:19:00.018Z

I am Andy, currently living in Liverpool, in England.

I play these characters:

Caera

My first level 80, although not my first ever character. I forget why I abandoned the rogue, but I think I just wanted to try playing as a healer, so naturally I levelled Caera as Shadow and pretty much stayed that way until dual-spec came about, whereupon I gave her a Holy spec and didn't like it at all. Not long after that I discovered Elitist Jerks and began to read up on Discipline healing, and for whatever reason found it a much better fit than Holy. Now my guild has 3 other Discipline priests so I've had to respec her back to Holy, and will probably have to abandon the Shadow spec for a Disc one (despite having just bought and gemmed the T9 Shadow chest. WTB moar emblems).

Around the time Trial Of The Crusader came out I decided we didn't have enough (any) shamans in the guild, and that this was not good enough. So, I left Caera gathering dust and began levelling…

Zobu

The one I'd consider my main, mostly because I've put the most effort into him. As such he's my best geared, sporting the lovely-looking Tier 10 shoulders (and legs but they're rather dull). I'm so glad the T10 shaman shoulders look cool, as opposed to the T9 ones which look like boats or bits of Japanese roof (and look the same as the hunter shoulders; great imagination there Blizzard). You may notice he also sports the Hammer Of Purified Flame as a result of a lucky Battered Hilt drop from Halls of Reflection not long after the ICC 5-mans were released. I've never seen it drop since, on any of my characters. T.G. Zobu's main spec is Elemental, but he also has 4-piece T9 Resto gear for his secondary spec (and shares most of the rest of the gear with Elemental).

A few months ago a combination of altitis and a lack of tanks caused me to start on…

Gorain

My dual-wielding frost-spec DK tank, who badly needs some new bracers. I chose a DK for my tank as I'd tried levelling a Draenei warrior tank (to the giddy heights of level 21) and found it terribly dull and slow; I've yet to give druids and paladins a serious go. Moreover, I wanted to try and redeem the image of lolknights in my own small way, spreading the word that yes, some DK tanks are actually not drooling idiots. I like to believe the pugs do a collective /facepalm when they see me as their tank, then by the end of the instance they've changed their minds and told all their guild friends about this awesome DK tank they had this one time, and his name shall become reknowned throughout the Glutsturm/Emberstorm battlegroups. I can see it now.

Anyway, levelled as a tank from day one, but it was only once I had a fair few heroics under my belt (and got my unbuffed health over 30k) that I really felt genuinely comfortable being up front getting hit in the face – up til then I was still very cautious and hesitant, which of course annoyed the "gogogogogogo" DPS no end. These days I take heroic Halls of Reflection in my stride (failpugs notwithstanding), and have even tanked the first couple of bosses in ICC (being MT in a raid is so exciting…).

Recently I got him a nice Unholy DPS spec and have been collecting the appropriate gear. Unholy DPS is quite fun, I've found, with much less of the waiting around for runes to come off cooldown that you get with Frost. And of course, having a perma-ghoul is funtabulous. I like to click him just to hear him go YEEAAAAGH.

Speaking of DPS, lately I've been levelling another character more or less in secret:

Raig

Yessir, a hunter! As with the DK, part of the reason for levelling this chap is to redeem the good name of hunters by showing that not all of us are morons who wear spellpower gear, gem for strength and/or don't know what Misdirection or Feign Death are (mind you, not giving us Misdirect until level SEVENTY FIVE doesn't exactly help encourage its use).

The more ~~astute~~ nosy amongst you may have noticed that wee Raig has no heirloom gear. That was deliberate: he is also an experiment in self-sufficiency, and quite a successful one at that, having 890 gold to his name when he dinged 40 last night (wahey, a ranged AoE spell AT PISSING LAST), just from mining, skinning and AH trading, with no help from rich relatives (a kindly mage portalling him to Dalaran doesn't count). Furthermore the lack of heirlooms ties in to the previous point, in that I believe it makes a stronger case for the existence of good hunters if people believe it's my only/first character. The reasoning on that one is a bit wooly, so don't question me about it.

I must also tell here the tale of Epic Journey I took Raig on to get him a tiger pet at level 10. I don't know if you're aware, but the only tigers at that level are quite far away from the dorf starting area. On the Echo Isles, in Durotar, to be precise. And so began the perilous trek, first up to Ironforge then along the tram and down through Elwynn Forest. No worries so far, it's all been fairly harmless. However, darkness lies yonder, across the river in Duskwood. Therein lie beasts of level ?? that can sniff out a lowly level 10 dorf from three miles away! I decided to play it (relatively) safe and follow the road leading to Darkshire, yet in spite of my precautions I managed to get myself eaten a couple of times. I think I may have sacrificed my temporary boar pet once or twice in an effort to escape. But indeed, in due course I made it all the way to Darkshire, and then on to the small outpost at the junction on the road leading to a yet more terrifying place: Stranglethorn Vale.

Yes, the wild, vicious jungle. There be tigers! And yet, not the tigers I want, as even the baby ones there could swallow me whole. Here now is actually the one concession I made to the self-sufficiency effort: I got a friendly level 80 warlock from the guild to escort me through the perilous jungles to Booty Bay, from whence I got on the boat to Ratchet. It turns out things might have gone quite disastrously wrong, as not long after setting foot upon the sandy shores of the Barrens, my warlock bodyguard disappeared into the æther of the net, leaving me to fend for myself in a hostile, dry and above all big place. On foot.

Despite this stroke of ill luck, I had few further hindrances and soon was in sight of Sen'jin Village, and the Echo Isles beyond. Giving the village a wide berth, for troll NPCs do not look kindly on lowbie dorfs, I ventured out across the water and finally claimed my prize: a wonderful orange-and-black-with-a-white-belly tiger, who I named Shillelagh. And yes, I well realise there are level-appropriate cats to tame in Dun Morogh, but damn it I want a proper tiger as a pet, not some wussy pussy snow leopard (and certainly not some mangy wolf). Tigers are awesome.

One of Shillelagh's brothers come to give us a "welcome back" hug.

There are others

But they're not worth mentioning until such a time as I point my mind at them again for longer than five seconds on the character select screen. The rogue I really should get up to speed - I've bought him a full set of heirloom gear, after all.

I done a blog!

2010-03-18T16:54:00.009Z

Yes indeed, an actual blog. Not that I actually have anything to write about at this moment, although something might come up as I waffle on (or it might not, so don't get your hopes up).

*racks brains*

Um.

Oh! Starcaller! Yes indeed, I have Grand Plans for my guildenfolk. It will be hard, and I fully expect people to moan that they didn't get picked for my elite raiding team but tough luck. We're going to do it 10-man (cos there's not a hope in hell we'll do it 25-man) and it's probably going to take a good few weeks. I want to keep the same people each week until we succeed, and then I can take more people.

Yes, I will pick my favourite people, which will seem unfair and blah blah blah. The reason they're my favourite people is because I believe they have what we will need to succeed: high and intelligent DPS, or excellent healing ability. Furthermore, I'll pick people based on whether they can actually be online consistently and the right time - I don't want to be starting the raid at 21:00 local.

Of course, that still means I'll have to leave capable people out, but that's the nature of 10-man raiding. If you play a class that we have a lot of, don't be surprised if you don't get to come. Hell, I recently respecced my priest to Holy because we've somehow ended up with 3 other raiding Disc priests.

(sidenote: we once did the weekly raid quest, which happened to be Marrowgar, with 4 priests (2 disc, 2 shadow), 3 DKs, 2 paladins (1 prot, 1 holy) and a shaman (elemental). Optimal group compositions ftw)

Where was I? Distracting sidenote was distracting.

Oh yes. So, Starcaller here we come. I would oh so like to do it on my DK tank but I suspect my shaman might be more valuable. The reason I want to do it on my DK is simple: respect. Having suffered the spirit-crushing shit flung at ~~inexperienced~~ ~~new~~ ~~blue-geared~~ ~~careful~~ ~~considerate~~ ~~chain-pulling~~ tanks in heroics, I would very much like to have 'Starcaller Gorain' floating above my character's head as proof that I do, in fact, know what I'm doing.

(seriously mister impatient reta(r)din, when you're below me on total damage in heroic Forge Of Souls, you absolutely do not get to bitch about the instance going too slow. Also, pulling one of those AoEing ghost things just before the last boss 'just to speed things up lol' does not help one bit when you end up dead because I'm standing there watching you fail at tanking it)

I should put those asides in after I've finished, they do rather derail my thought train. Although to be honest that should probably suffice for a first post.

Wait, I didn't even say 'hi!' or introduce myself or anything! That'll be the next post I suppose - I had to get some of this off my chest first.

FINALLY: my new favourite emoticon: QK

Can you tell what it is yet?

Here is a clue:

Ok, ramblesome post is done now. Seems I had something to write about after all.