Thunderous Fury

This is a post that I have wanted to write for two years; in fact it’s something that I’ve been working on for over 5 years. What the hell am I rambling about you may be asking yourselves. Well I’m talking about [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker]. The very same item that is often linked by trade chat trolls. Now I am not just linking it because I want to troll you all. I am talking about it because a week and a half ago this happened:

Days of Future Past

Today I am going to talk about several different things and hopefully it’ll seem like I have coherent thoughts when I write (I don’t) and it will all blend together to make a good post. (it won’t) So buckle your seat belts boys and girls and prepare for the trip of your life!*

*Trip of your life may not actually be the trip of your life. Mileage may vary. If this is the trip of your life…you may need to have more fun in your life!*

To celebrate WoW’s 8^th anniversary Blizzard released this video that mashed up a lot of the previous game cinematics and to me it is awesome! If you haven’t seen it yet you should open up another tab/window and watch it right now. Go ahead I’ll wait.

Pandarian Things

It’s been a month and a half since the Mists of Pandaria launched and things have been a bit busy in my little corner of the internets. I’ve leveled 2 characters to 90, gotten another to 89, gotten a monk to 86, farmed a lot, and gotten my pally ready for raiding with the guild. Very busy 6 weeks. So what do I think about this expansion now that I’ve had time to spend a good amount of time playing it? I think that Blizzard has done a good job so far with most of the new stuff in Pandaria. I am having a good time playing and as usual I don’t see myself quitting any time soon. Lot of real life stuff going on so I haven’t been able to blog about what I’ve been up to in WoW.

The Good

I LOVE lamp pandas. They are seriously fun to play and just watching them run around is hilarious. Pandaria is a very beautiful place and flying around it and just watching the scenery is a fun time. The storylines in each zone are also pretty awesome and at times you can easily find yourself pulled into the storyline, cheering on the NPC’s or feeling sad when someone dies/succumbs to emotions.

I can’t forget to mention pet battles. Oh man pet battles are so much fun. Stupid awesome pets requiring you to battle to make them even more awesome. DAMN YOU PET BATTLES! DAMN YOU AND YOUR FUN! Must battle one more pet, just one more pet. One more…just one…must be the best, like no one ever was…

The Bad

SO MANY DAILIES! Once you hit 90 there are so many things that you can do that it can be slightly overwhelming. There are Tiller dailies, Anglers dailies, Golden Lotus dailies, Klaxxi dailies, cooking dailies, archeology dailies, Cloud Serpent dailies, AND you have dailies to get rep with individual people like Nat Pagle and the Black Prince. If you want to get VP you do dailies. If you want to get gear because the LFR/raid won’t drop pieces for you, you do dailies because you need to get revered with factions to buy VP gear. It’s a little weak but honestly you don’t NEED to be fully geared out in VP gear to do well in raids.

Pandas are awesome BUT since both factions can have them, you are technically neutral until you pick a faction around level 12 or so. This means that you have to go through the Panda starter zone with no guild chat, no direct whispers, and no mailbox. Kind of a pain but thankfully once you pick a faction and get out into the world you realize that you are a Panda and that you rock. Until that point though, you are isolated and worst of all…you have no bags except for the ones that you can get to drop! The horror of running around with 6 slot bags!!!

The Guild

My guild was able to work hard and pull together and snag the Realm First Working as a Better Team achievement which was really cool. I know that several of my guildees got a few realm first profession achievements which is great for them. We also started raiding and downed the first boss in the Mogushan Vaults, the Stone Guard, and we are making good progress with the second boss, Feng the something or other. Seriously that guy made me want to punch the computer when we wiped at 8%! So close!!!! But I know that we are awesome and we’ll down it the next time we raid. 

Speaking of which, we are looking for more people to start a second raid group on Sundays! Tanks, heals, and dps are needed! It’d be Sundays 5-8 PST on Ursin-US-PVP. Oh and it’s for alliance only in case anyone was wondering. We’re a casual group that happens to raid and our raids are usually full of fun times so if you’re looking for a home check us out! Also if you're just looking for a guild where you can be social and not raid, we would totes love to have ya! =D

Overall I am having a good time. I love my little farm where I can grow veggies or motes of harmony and since I hit exalted with the tillers I finally got the 60 exalted factions achievement. I’ll probably slowly work on getting my mage exalted with the remaining factions that I need and see how far I am from 70 exalted factions and the Beloved title. I might have issues.

To all the lowbie groups

I am going to start this post by announcing that this is a rant. If you have no desire to read my angry rant, please feel free to browse through my other posts until you find something more to your liking. If you’re still with me, hold on to something because this is going to get angry and possibly violent. I’ve been leveling my panda and I LOVE it! They are a fun class to play regardless of spec and I highly recommend leveling one. Now because I am one of those weird people who like to play a class to level cap as the same spec that they are going to be at said level cap, I tend to level some characters as healers or tanks. For my panda I decided to level as a Brewmaster, which is the tank spec. 

This means that I’ve run a lot of dungeons so far. I usually quest for a bit and then queue for a bit so that I don’t end up running the same dungeon a million times in a row. Nothing like running RFD 5 times in a row to make you want to stop playing for the night. Anyway, since I’ve been leveling I end up in a lot of groups with everyone but me wearing all heirlooms. Why don’t I have heirlooms you ask? Well because until this expansion each account could only have 10 character slots per server. I had one of each class at level cap. I had no need to buy heirlooms because I didn’t have a character that could benefit from them and I would rather spend the JP on other stuff like mounts or crafting mats or gnomish hookers. Had I been smart, I would have bought them with the extra JP I had before it got turned into gold in 5.0.4 or whatever patch it was. But since I’m dumb and didn’t remember to do that, I have no heirlooms.

Bad World PVP

Let me start this story by stating that the server that I play on is a pvp server. I’ve played on this server since it opened up in 2005 and as a result I’ve seen my fair share of world pvp. When I was a young mage questing in Redridge, it was a common occurrence to have high level horde raid the town and gank every poor lowbie alliance person they saw. On a pvp server you often get used to such douche baggery happening and when you are higher level and able to do something about it, most people often do. I can remember several pvp battles in Lakeshire, Menethil Harbor, and the ever famous Southshore. Sometimes the pvp fights were a nice distraction and sometimes they were a rather large annoyance but being on a pvp server, you knew what you could expect at any time. To me this made the game a little more deadly and exciting. Not everyone’s cup of tea I suppose.

Sadly as the years have gone by, my server population went from medium in vanilla to low in BC and has stayed there since. Every now and then it’ll pop up briefly to medium before sinking back into its usual low pop status. What does this mean? Well it means that while leveling a lowbie alt you’re more likely to see a group of mobs having a naked dance party than seeing a horde. In fact that’s one of the biggest selling points I tell people on twitter when I tell them to roll on my server to play with me! This is mostly true except for poor Megs who kept running into horde who managed to kill her often.  Anyway, because our population is so low, world pvp doesn’t happen that often. This is great for leveling alts but bad for people who want to pvp.

Pandarian Shenanigans

The Mists of Pandaria expansion has been out about a week now and I’ve been very busy in game seeing what it has to offer. I think that after all I’ve seen so, I am loving this expansion. The first day I might have caught a 24 hour type of bug that forced me to stay home…and play a lot of WoW. Damn those strange and random illnesses! (/shifty eyes)The first day I said forget leveling I’m battling my pets and so I ran around leveling up a battle team. I have yet to name my battle team or even the pets in said team but they are around level 10/11. I have collected a lot of new pets and currently I am under 50 pets to the 250 unique pets achievement. Woots.  

After a while I decided to go quest for a bit in Pandaria and see what else the expansion included. I had quested in the Jade forest on the Beta back before they changed the whole zone. Because of this I had seen what the starter quest lines were like and I think that the new starter area is a ton better than the old area. In the old starter area you would find yourself in the Jade Forest under attack from Hozen and you would have to defend yourself. The new zone has you take the fight to the Horde and their base on the island. I much prefer the new quests as they definitely convey the “we are at war” concept that blizzard has been pushing on us for this expansion.

Guild Mentoring

It was announced recently which guilds were selected to participate in the WoW guild mentoring program. For those of you who have no clue what the guild mentoring program is, it’s a program that has guilds on select servers open their doors to whoever wants to join so that they can be shown how to play the game by people in the guilds.  Each guild will welcome new and old players(under 85) alike and I assume that blizzard is hoping that by doing this the number of people who stop playing the game because they have no clue what they are doing, will decrease. When I first heard about the program I thought it was a cool idea but after some thought I had mixed feelings about it.

On one hand it can be a great experience for people who are starting the game and don’t know anyone who is playing the game that can help them. We assume that with WoW’s subscription numbers being in the millions, everyone who wants to play the game is already playing it but of the 9 million subscribers only a quarter or so of that is from North American players. That means that there are plenty of people who are not playing WoW but see the commercials/game box and decide to give it a spin. These new people start out with nothing and have no clue what they are doing. Remember back to when you first started, how many of you had no friends/family that played the game? How many of you ran around exploring the world alone? How many of you resorted to asking in trade/general chat for answers to questions you had about the game?

Coolest Mage Spec: A guide to 5.0.4 Frost Mages

Oh Frost spec. You and I have done our dance for a long time now and we’ve seen many highs and many more lows throughout our WoW love affair. We have been mocked for choosing each other but those people never understood the power of Frost. They didn’t let us raid with them and it was ok, because you and I were better than them and we knew it. We were once the top dog in Vanilla but when BC came out, we were left behind by the other two specs. It was ok because we had our water elemental (Aquamus Prime)and we were still feared in pvp. In Wrath we were given more fight control talents but our dps was miles behind most other classes. Our new ability, deep freeze, only froze things in place for a few seconds and on mobs that were immune to it, it was wasted. Eventually it was made to do damage on immune mobs and seeing high crits on bosses was nice but we were still a rare sight in raids.

When leveling, many mages went frost because it made leveling a lot easier to have a damage shield and plenty of crowd controllability. As soon as most frost mages hit level cap, they’d usually pick a different spec. Why bother playing a class that you enjoy if it can’t bring the dps you need in raids? Because of the high number of leveling frost mages who didn’t understand the class or how to play it right, most people assumed that frost was a lost cause and that only baddies played frost at level cap.

Looking Back and Moving Forward

We have a week to go before the 5.0.4 patch drops and about a month before Mists of Pandaria is finally released. Between then and now we have to do two things: relearn how to play our characters with the new MoP talents and secondly, decide if the new game changes have made the game more or less fun. Hopefully most of you are in the more fun category but I know that for a few of you, the game has lost its grasp on your interest. Don't worry my dear readers, I have played the beta and am firmly in the still fun category. I look forward to seeing everything Pandaria has to offer and having a great time with my guild running new dungeons, raids, and scenarios.

With so many new and exciting features like pet battles and scenarios, I believe that there is enough to keep me interested and playing WoW until the next expansion. I know some people are looking forward to one feature above all others, the pet battles! For others they are looking forward to Pandas and monks. 


But as I said, for some the game has taken a turn that they don't like. For some of these people the game is not the same game they fell in love with. For some real life has intruded (as it does) and while they sadly would love to play the game, they are unable to do so because of real life. Perhaps some have found a different game that now holds the place in their heart that WoW once used to occupy. They have decided to jump ship and are not looking back.

Legendary Encounters

6 months of spending Saturday nights raiding, about 20 actual raids, countless wipes. In the end what did I get out of it? Well that’s easy to answer. I got to spend 20 nights have a great time with some really fun and awesome people. Oh and I also got a legendary staff that is full of awesomeness and win.

Why did it take 6 months to get a legendary for my mage? Well I went through the Twitterland Raiding community which is composed of people from twitter. We didn’t always have the same raid roster every night so we had to spend a lot of time explaining fights and figuring out why people were dying. Sometimes we didn’t even have enough people signed up so we had to spend time trying to pull people into the raid from twitter/real id friends lists and that ate into the raid time. Both of these reasons caused us to not always down every boss each raid night which led to not getting the maximum number of eternal embers/seething cinders/smouldering essences.

I decided to go through Twitter because one night in February(the 18th to be precise) someone else was running a Firelands run and I wanted to join it. Sadly I did not but while I was waiting to hear back I was in the Twitter Mumble server talking to Oestrus who decided that we should just organize our own group. This led to a lot of tweeting and real id friending and before I knew it, we had a Firelands raid. We had a great time and I met a lot of new and fun people who wanted to run Firelands with me whenever I ran it.

I wrote a post about running Firelands with Twitter people back in February and how much fun I had. Looking back at it now, I have had even more fun since then. Not long into the Firelands runs I decided to take a page from my vanilla playbook and spend the night drinking and killing fire bosses. Back in vanilla, I ran Molten Core with the guild on Saturday nights and several guildees and I would drink together and have a great time killing stuff. With Firelands feeling like Molten Core 2.0 I clearly needed to drink! This quickly spread amongst some of the raid members and became our Saturday night tradition. I would drink and some people would join me and we’d have a good time. If we didn’t down everything, well at least we had a damn good time.

I definitely could not have done this alone and so I get to the most important part of this post. This is the part where I thank everyone who showed up to the raid whether it was just once or whether they were there every single night. A big thank you to the following: Rowann, Oestrus, Poneria, Hestiah, Asherrylie, Hempia, Velidra, Rooster, Dee, Lemon, Sidecar, Rofer, Rilandune, Exlucis, Ekinara, Aero, Pix, Kia, Saz, Munificence, Thyro, Penguin, Stellery, Megs, Haitia, Askevi, Lurien, Matticus, Macaroni, Kitsuno, Sikaros, Finalflame, and everyone in my guild who tried to down rag for me. If I missed your name please let me know and I will gladly add you to the list!  

If anyone would like to watch the Livestream I did of the turning in ceremony you can click here.

Ursin Adventures

I had asked Exlucis to write a guest post for me and he did an awesome job at it. I meant to post this over the weekend when I originally got it but since I was at a Comic Convention, I didn't get the chance. So you get it today! I'll try to get out the next part of the story later this week.

When Jed asked me to do a guest post on his blog, I was honored.  Then I was hungry, so I made a sandwich.  After the sandwich I felt nervous; not because of the mayo or anything like that.  I wasn’t sure what I would write about.

It’s easy to write about myself and stuff about me, because I am familiar with myself and what I’m dealing with, and how all of that coincides with gaming.  What could I use from my knowledge that I could apply to Jed’s blog?  I considered spinning a yarn of my own, about Jedem and Oslis, adding to the tale.  I considered writing about the effect an enthralling story has in our interactions in Azeroth, both with the game and each other.  I considered writing a biopic about Jed himself.  I decided to write about the gnomish death race instead.  Or rather, where the race itself took place.

Adventure Times

I know this is late and I have no excuse other than the fact that I was suffering from a case of serious writers block. Thankfully I was able to overcome it and I figured out what I wanted to say for this part AND the next part! For now, enjoy! =D

“Fine! I suppose we can wait for you to get us in but you better make sure we don’t wait all day Elling,” Jedem said. “We’ll be at the Pig and Whistle Tavern. Come along Oslis; let’s give Elling some time to work his magic.”

“Ye had mae at tavern,” Oslis responded.

“Watch yourself in Old Town Jedem,” Elling warned. “By now word of your arrival in town has probably spread across Stormwind and you-know-who will want to have a word with you.”

Pandas and you

So with Mists of Pandaria having a release date of 9/25/12 we are now faced with the fun task of preparing for the expansion that will be here before we know it. What does this mean for you? Well now is a great time for someone to decide to switch who their main raiding character is going to be. This character wont be the character you'll be forced to play for the rest of the expansion, it'll just be the character that you are focused on leveling to 90 first. If you mainly played a healer this expansion and want to raid tank or just focus on dps, this expansion is the perfect excuse to make that switch.

For me I know that I'll be leveling my mage AND my pally at the same time but focusing on the mage since he is always my first max level capped alt. The pally will be my raid main so he will be who I raid progression stuff with, as usual. I know that I'll be make a panda monk on my main account and that I'll be race changing my mini-mage to a panda because panda mages, like fezzes and bow ties, are cool.

I also plan on running around pet battling the hell out of everyone on my main mage because he is my pet/mount collector and I wants me some more achievement points! I suppose I should make a bucket list now that I know I have a deadline for it so expect to see that post somewhere down the line.

What about the rest of you? Who will you all be leveling to 90 first? Is anyone going to be rolling a panda monk and power leveling that to 90?

The Seven Year Itch

Once upon a time in WoW, there was a stubborn guy who was abandoned by all his friends on a brand new server. Instead of despairing and following them, this super stubborn fella decided to create a guild and show all his supposed friends that they were wrong for leaving him behind. From this stubbornness something was created that has continued to thrive to this day: the Avengers of Azeroth guild. I’m sure that some of you read that last sentence and probably thought to yourselves “wait all this over some dumb video game guild?” To those people I respond with: YES NOW SHUT UP AND LET ME CONTINUE!

Why am I rambling about my guild yet again? Well because it's the bee's knees duh! Also because we have officially turned 7 years old today July 24th. Our server was opened on July 23, 2005 and my guild came into existence the next day. We would have started that first day but I wasn't able to get enough people to sign my charter until the next day. As it stands now, my guild is the oldest active guild on the server. There is only one older guild on the server but they are not really active and so my guild > theirs.

To celebrate we are going to be holding one of our super awesome traditional events: a Gnomish Death Race! This year its going to be an Outland style race, from Shattrath to Honor Hold. The race will start at 5pm Central Standard Time and will probably go for about an hour or so. We will provide a Ventrilo server for all the racers to join us before the race to facilitate invites and such.

Sounds amazingly awesome right? Want to attend the race? Well all you have to do is roll a level 1 gnome on the Ursin-PvP server and send a whisper to Jedem or anyone online in Avengers of Azeroth. The race is always a fun time and some people go all out with their racers by sending themselves vanity pets and fashionable white gear. No heirlooms are allowed in the race as they provide an unfair advantage since not everyone has easy access to them.

For anyone who can't make the race but would like to watch it, I will be streaming it live: http://www.livestream.com/jedsstream

Its a race...of DEATH! I hope to see you all at the race!

Continuing Adventures

Sorry for the delay, between the holiday and illness I've been a little occupied. Well enough of my excuses here is the next part! Enjoy!

The mage looked at the dwarf and realized that he would not be able to win this argument. He resigned himself to going along with the dwarf. “Fine. We’ll go to SI:7 first and after that’s over with, I’ll be going about my business,” the mage told the dwarf. “I’m sure that they are more experienced in matters involving finding assassins.”

“Aye, they should be,” Oslis responded.

Continuing Story Adventures

Jumping out the window was the winning choice last week. So here is the fun story you've been waiting for! As always please leave a comment with your choice for next week's adventure and thanks for reading!

The stranger gathered the few things he has brought in with him and walked to the door. He heard noises outside in the hallway which made him pause. “That doesn’t sound like people leaving the inn because of the fire,” he thought to himself. He heard footsteps coming down the hallway to his door and he took a step back and prepared himself. “Whoever it is, they aren’t getting me without a fight.”

Adventure Story Time

It seems that last weeks choose my adventure ended with a tie! Talk to the dwarf and eat dinner tied with 4 votes each so I decided to work both into the story. I think I'll leave the voting open up until Monday morning each week when I'll see which option wins and write the next part. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy this weeks story.

We join our story already in progress:

The stranger looked away before the gnome decided to approach him and try to talk. “Where is my blasted drink?” The stranger thought to himself. “All I want to do is have a drink and be left alone. If not for this blasted weather I would be in Stormwind by now.”

Choose My Adventure!

Ok so I have some free time (read: I am bored as hell at work and want to procrastinate) and I figured that I might as well do something creative since I haven’t done anything truly creative in years. I’ve decided to write a story based in Azeroth and starring the best mage out there: MY mage Jedem. The twist here is that I am going to try out a choose my adventure style for this story. I’ll write something out and at the end of each part, there will be 2-3 options. People can tweet or comment me what they think the choice should be and that’ll be what I write next. I figure this way I’ll get to flex my creative muscles and work with whatever is picked to make an interesting story.

Our story begins as most do: in the midst of a rain storm.

PUG Etiquette

As a smallish 10 man casual raiding guild, my guild tends to find itself having to pug a person or two for our raids when we don't have enough people sign up/show up for our raids. Now this doesn't mean that we are a horribad guild that couldn't down hogger or anything. It just means that recruitment has not brought in enough people who can show up to a raid. A normal raid night this expansion will often see us with eight or nine guildees online and ready to raid.

This situation leads us to pug a spot or two so that we can raid on raid nights. Sometimes I have a friend on my friends list that I can ask to come to the raid and when this happens, it's not really pugging as you are pulling in someone you know and not a complete stranger. But sadly there are times when our friends list fails us and we are stuck having to resort to asking for people in trade chat. This is not something that we enjoy doing but sometimes it's either pug or not raid.

For the Bloggers

Today I think I will talk about blogging. So if you only read my blog (and let’s face it...no one reads my blog) for only WoW stuff you may want to amuse yourself in other ways which I may or may not want to know about. Hmm dirty humor in the second sentence of a post...right on schedule. I think this will be the first in a series of helpful blogging tips so enjoy the first post and eventually I’ll get around to posting more.

So how do you rise to levels of blog fame where people flock to your blog posts in the thousands and hang on your every word? Well the first step is the easiest: start a blog! Once you have a blog you need to do three things: Find a subject to write about, write something, and get your name out there.

Projects and testing

Normally I try to push out at least two blog posts a month but this month has been a busy month for me. I've got a few projects that I've been working on and on Friday one of them together at last. What is this project you may be wondering to yourself. Well wonder no more for the curtain has been pulled away to reveal a brand new podcast! Aero, Orvillius, Nymphy, and I have decided to team up and do a podcast titled "Follow the Leader," which is focused on Guild Leadership, Raid leading, and other management issues in WoW and other games.

Our first episode went live on Friday and so far most people seem to like it. At least no one seems to hate it enough to tell us so, which I will gladly take as a sign that we are doing a decent job. Self delusion is a wonderful thing after all.

Another project that I am working on is the Mists of Pandaria Beta! I've copied my Mage over to the beta server and have been slowly working my way through the questing areas. So far Frost Mages seem more awesome than they are now. My only gripe so far is that Deep Freeze no longer does damage to mobs that are immune to it, which means its no longer a big damage dealer on bosses like it is now. =( I'll probably make a post with a ton of cool screenshots of the Panda Island because it is really pretty looking.

I've also been running Dragon Soul with the Guild and I am proud to say that we not only clear it in one night, we can clear it in an hour and a half! At least last week we did. I know we can def keep that up but I think we might be dipping our toe into a heroic mode or two this week. Hopefully it'll go just as well and if it does, I'll be sure to let you all know because I know you are all super interested.

Finally I've been helping many new guildees level up by running them through instances,  giving them crafting mats, and generally being a nice GM to them. We've had a nice influx of cool people join the guild from the twitterverse. If you are 18 years of age or older and are suffering from burnout due to end of expansion blues, are looking for a nice place to hang out, or are looking for a permanent home for the upcoming expansion, you should definitely check out my guild the Avengers of Azeroth. We're a nice group of adults who enjoy playing the game together and are always looking for more cool people to join us.

So that's what's been keeping me from posting more stuff...this time. I know I know, I'm full of excuses and Redbull. Clearly you nice readers will forgive me since you've stuck with me so far. <3 to you all.

Quality Control

Every day I log into my GM character and I go through a list of things before I start playing the game. First I check to see who is online so that when I say hello and I won’t wonder why I haven’t gotten a response back if it’s only me online. Next I check the guild info panel to see if anyone has joined the guild while I was offline or to make sure no one has mysteriously gquit in the middle of the night when no one was online. The last thing I do is check the Guild Finder to see if we have had any anyone try applying to the guild through it.

What is the Guild Finder you may be asking yourselves? Well Blizzard added in a Looking For Guild feature a few patches ago, that allowed guilds to list themselves as recruiting. If you are looking for a guild you’d type /gf, enter in your information in the screen that pops up, and you are presented with a list of guilds that are listed as recruiting. It shows you a guild’s level, achievement points, whether they are looking for in more people for PvE, RP, or PvP as well as a comment box with information about the guild.

To the winners

When I saw that my blog was going to hit the 2 year mark I thought that I should do something for my readers who have stuck around through so much of my random rambling and ranting. I figured that since you readers have stuck around with me this far I should do a giveaway as a way to show that I appreciate each and every one of you. I decided that instead of just giving one thing away I would do three so that more than one person could win. I enlisted the services of the amazing and awesome Liala to create a reward for whoever won the giveaway. I figured that her custom icons were so cool that they would be the perfect reward for whoever won.

When the contest closed I had 17 comment entries and of those 17, three were chosen to receive their very own icon. The winners were: Windsoar, Angelya, and Selly. I wish I could have given an icon to each person who entered the giveaway but sadly I could not. Also I think Liala would have killed me if I had tried commission her to create 17 icons. She does have a temper after all! (Please don't beat me anymore Liala, I'll be good I swear!)

Jedem: Through the years

The very nice and friendly Vidyala over at Manalicious wrote about a cool meme that involved posting a screenshot of your main from many levels ago along with a screenshot of it now to show how far you've come along. I meant to do this post the other day when Vid actually posted about it but of course doing things when they are relevant just isn't my style. So I dug through seven years worth of screenshots and eventually I found screenshots that made me both laugh and cry. Seven years of visual reminders of things that you've gone through tend to do that.

Anyway on with the show! I decided that I would tweak the premise of the meme and instead of posting a comparison of a character then and now, I am posting a visual timeline for my mage. Step back into the way back machine with me as we travel back to the year 2005. It was a good year: Facebook was still only for the cool kids in college, the White Sox won the World Series, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith was released, and a young man who would go on to be known world wide as Jed, began to play the World of Warcraft.

Community Fun

Back in July 2011 Blizzard announced that they were activating the much talked about Real ID grouping feature that would allow you to group with your Real ID friends for random instance fun. When I heard about this feature I instantly though "Sweet I can run randoms with twitter friends so they can see how awesome I really am and want to be my friends forever!" Blizzard then decided that they would make the Real ID system use your real name and verily the twitter community took up arms against this invasion of privacy. Some of my readers will remember that I posted about the Real ID feature when it was first announced, along with the huge controversy that came along with it. I honestly didn't have a problem with it but I also don't have a one of a kind super unique name like some people out there.

Well the Real ID announcement was pretty cool but you could only run random 5mans with Real ID friends, which was nice and all but the system was a little lacking. Yes you could get a full group of RID friends and not worry about having to pug in randoms but you couldn't run a raid with them or even run a battleground with them. As someone who grew up in one city in one state and then moved to a different city for college and finally moved out of that state, I tend to have a few friends that I am too far from seeing without much planning and travel. Real ID allowed me to be able to talk to my WoW playing friends regardless of the faction that they were playing. This alone was a pretty sweet feature.

You can keep your Flowers

In 2011 Blizzard auctioned off several old server blades on ebay for charity and in November the Ursin server blades were posted. Now being a day one Ursinite, I knew that I had to have one. Well I got lucky and was able to win one and when it arrived, it was glorious. Well my lovely lady was very happy with the purchase and she even offered to write something for me about the whole event and I took her up on the offer. She emailed me the following and now submitted for the approval of the midnight society I now present you, my lovely readers with this:

KEEP YOUR STUPID FLOWERS!!!

 

*Ring

Me: “Hello?”

Jed: “Hunny the Ursin server blades are for sale!”

That was the beginning.  Here we were just over a month into marriage and he wasn’t calling to hear my voice, he wasn’t calling because he missed me or because he thought he would check on my day.  He was calling to tell me a piece of hardware was on EBay.

Terrible Twos

I was reading a blog post the other day over at Looking For More and they mentioned that they had been super busy with real life home stuff but that they weren't done with blogging, especially since they had their two year blogaversary coming up. This got me thinking about my blogaversary and when it was and after doing some searching I found out when it was. For those of you keeping score at home, yes I did not remember my own blogaversary. (Hell I can't even remember how old I am most of the time) Anyway, I started blogging on January 25, 2010 and yet somehow I am still blogging! At a slightly slower pace than my first year of course but that's not the point. The point is that I'm still here and still whining and ranting about things no one else really cares about and you all are stuck with me for the foreseeable future!

Seriously, I am as shocked as you all are that (1) I am still writing this blog and (2) that you weird people are still reading my blog. I would have figured you'd have all abandoned my blog by now, what with my slow post schedule, lack of interesting posts, and horrible attempts at guild recruitment. I suppose some of you just enjoy torturing yourselves and use my blog as the tool to do so.

So after two years of blogging about random things, I have decided to do something fun for my readers. What do I have planned you may be asking yourselves. Is it a pony? Could it be bigger than a breadbox? Is it steel? Are there locks? Will it come in a box? Is it filled with a pox? Well since I'm a bastard, I will keep you all in suspense for a little bit longer. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Ok well that's enough of that. For my 2 year blogaversary I will be giving away not one, not two, but THREE custom icon images created by the awesome and very talented Liala. The icon can be of your WoW or SWTOR character. I don't know about you but I would totally enter this giveaway for one of those sexy icons. If you are not sure what the icons look like, check out Liala's Space Cadets website to see the ones she created for the Star Wars: The Old Republic companion NPCS. They are seriously cool.

So what do you have to do to enter this giveaway of mine? Will it be legal in all 50 States? Well it is very simple, all you have to do is just leave a comment with a link to the image of the character that you'd like an icon of. I will assign a number to each person as they comment and at the contest close I will randomly choose three numbers and those three people will get their very own icons!

The deadline to comment to enter the giveaway will be 11am central time on Friday February 3, 2012 and I will post the winners not long after that! Please only leave one comment entry and be sure to tell all your friends about this giveaway! And most important of all: Thanks for continuing to read my blog. <3

Here's to many more years of blogging about random shenanigans! /Cheers

How not to apply to a guild

With my Guild starting a Star Wars: The Old Republic branch, we have had some people apply to join the guild and for the most part the applications have been pretty standard and those people have all gotten into the guild. The other day we had one that was so outstanding that I just had to share it with everyone. When it came in, I had to read it several times to make sure I was reading it correctly. It represents everything that you should NOT do when applying to join a guild. It was so bad that my wife read the first few lines and instantly said Hell No to the app. I figure that I should rant about this guild a bit so if you have no interest in reading about an application to my guild, feel free to change the channel.

Now while I won't link the application here, I will be describing sections of it so you can understand how bad the app was. If you want to see the application you can head over to my guild site and find it for yourself. Here is a link to the blank application template, as you can see it has five sections but the info we ask is kind of important and we aren't expecting someone to write a paragraph for each question. Most people answer each question as best as they can and move on. The application shouldn't take long to fill out and most people fill it out rather quickly.

To all the GM's I've loved

I was talking to a fellow Guild Master about the nature of guilds and how they can wear you down and I was asked when the last time I was thanked for everything that I did or that I was appreciated? I had to stop and think about that and when I finally came up with an answer, I responded with "Not in a long while." This got me thinking: Why do I bother to be the GM of my guild if I can't even recall when the last time someone told me they appreciated anything I did?

That's a tough question to answer. Why does anyone do anything if they can expect to never be thanked or be made to feel appreciated. Well I know why I do it? I like to believe that I am a sane and rational person and I do it because I like providing a service to the people in the guild. Of course I also like to believe that one day Baron Geddon will drop the Left Bindings of the Windseeker for my pally. Clearly neither of these things are true. I lead because while I can be a follower, I prefer to do my own thing and the best way to do that for me was to start my own guild and along the way other people who enjoyed the way I ran things joined me on my quest to hang out and have a good time.

I had written those last two paragraphs about 3 weeks ago and had let them sit there while I figured out what else I wanted to say when I remembered something. One of my newer guildees had emailed me a guest post back in October for me to post while I was away getting married/on my honeymoon and I had forgotten to post it. I went back and read it and I remembered one the most rewarding things about being a guild master in WoW. Here is the post for you all to read and afterward I'll explain what that rewarding thing is(my edits will be in italic): 

A while back my awesome, cool, now MARRIED (congrats you two love birds) guildmaster posted a blog about why he continues to play WoW after 6 long years of badassery. So I figured hey, I should share why I love WoW after just a few months of playing…and against my better judgment I decided that I would let other people read something that I wrote.

               
Besides the amazing visualizations, the years and years of in depth actually INTERESTING storyline, the sheer volume of add ons, extras, perks, world events, mounts, achievements, professions, blah blah blah. Or besides the fact that Warcraft allows you to run around facing demons, monsters, rock giants, or my favorite murlocs as a night elf with a green Mohawk and a panther as a sidekick; the game is still at its core very much like many other games I have played before it.

So what brings me, the awesome JuJu(our guild nickname for him) into a game that allows you to see how much life you have spent into something (/played for all you naive folks)? Easy! It’s the friends you make. I have played Diablo, COD, Starcraft, Halo…I could go on forever… but you won’t find a better group of people to play with than in the AoA guild.

Consider this, macrame a connoisseur of google images, a motherly red head who will gladly trash talk everyone to shame on your behalf(my wife), a robot alien healer(a priest who's computer made her sound like a robot on vent), a druid whose nickname is based off of the best snack of all time(PBNJ), and a handful of other awesome guildies who answer all of your mind numbing questions without ridicule and you find yourself in the best four hours of gaming any fellow nerd can ever ask for. I honestly look forward to playing with such a great group of friends even when my day job is flying planes. So in short, you all make my day. I love you, and if you ever want a romantic plane ride over Florida or just a buddy to drink with and make fun of, I am your man. You make my life great and complete. So in short, it is the amazing people I play with that makes this game and not the game itself that makes me come back hour after hour…please continue to make the gaming world great all of you.

So while for me it is obvious why I play this game after already spent 14 days of my life on one character, I wanted to share it with everyone so they can realize that, holy shit we are playing with the nicest most interesting and awkwardly hilarious ragtag group of people you could ever find. It isn’t an amazing fantasy world where everyone is a hero, but rather a real life link to people who are truly amazing.

After reading that I realized that the most rewarding thing about being the guild master of my guild wasn't getting thanked by people for anything I did, it was that every now and than I got to participate in someones journey of WoW discovery. Hearing the pure joy that they experience when they run their first instance and down a boss or listening to them describe how the handled a quest by themselves. It's like watching your children grow up and experiencing the world. Sometimes you get a thank you out of it, sometimes you don't but it doesn't matter.

While my guildee above did thank me and my scatter brained self forgot about his post until recently, I would have posted this eventually because it illustrates that our guild is the type of place where people can have fun and enjoy themselves. That's all I wanted when I made the guild so long ago and I am glad that it is still true today. I will say this for everyone who is in a guild and not a guild leader, the next time they log on, you should tell them that you appreciate what they do. You can also tell them thank you. Or give them gifts...nice and shiny gifts like gold or mounts or pets! At the very least you can give them a nice hug.

Being a GM is very tiring work and sometimes even the best of us could use a nice compliment. Now that Operation Hug A GM has been initiated, I leave you all with this oh so funny classic WoW Machinima.

/Hug to all my fellow Guild Masters