The Blizzcon Experience

Blizzcon. A place for the WoW players to mingle and share their love of all things Blizzard. This year I was fortunate enough to be able to get tickets to the convention. I think that the only appropriate word that I can think of to describe it was: AWESOME! I had written a blog post about how I was worried that my introvertedness would make an appearance and punch me in the face. Thankfully that was not the case! So buckle up my faithful readers for beyond this point lies Blizzcon! (Also expect a lot of name dropping)

Blizzcon Plans

With Blizzcon rapidly approaching I figured it would probably be a good idea to write down what my plans are going to. I decided to make it a blog post because I figured maybe someone out there would want to hang out or meet up or just walk by and awkwardly wave at me. With so many people from twitter going to Blizzcon, I'm sure I'll meet at least one person. I honestly debated blogging about this because I thought to myself "What if no one wants to meet up? What if someone is going to stalk me while I'm there?! What if no one cares?!" I ultimately decided to say screw it, I'm going to post this because I'm not going to let my scumbag brain win! So here are my plans for Blizzcon and with any luck I can meet at least a handful of you fine folks!

Thursday:
I fly into sunny California Thursday afternoon and plan on picking up my badge from the convention center After that I'll probably grab a bite to eat nearby and then I'll be heading to the Wow Insider Party and hanging out there for a while. If you'd like to hang out I will probably be live tweeting the event as soon as I arrive so people can definitely tweet me to see where I'm currently at. The party is open to everyone so everyone can attend!  I'll probably hang out there for a while until I either 1) get bored or 2) find somewhere else to go hang out and drink. I'm sure there will be plenty of people hanging out at the lobby of most nearby hotels so that is always an option.

Friday
Friday morning I'll obviously be in line to get into convention center along with everyone else but if you are further ahead of me in line and wouldn't be opposed to letting me cut in front of you, I suppose I could be nice and hang out with you a bit. ;-P
The convention panel plan is currently to hit up all the WoW related panels first and see all the things! I probably won't decide what I'm going to do until I'm waiting in line to get into the convention center because that's just the kind of slacker that I am. Now Blizzcon itself will take most of the day but afterwards I plan on heading over to the Twisted Nether Blogcast party and hanging out/drinking with all the cool attendees. This party is also open to everyone whether you blog, read blogs, or are illiterate! I expect to see all of you lovely readers there!

Saturday
Obviously more Blizzcon WoW panels during the day but at night, well at night it's going to get awesome. Since they have not announced who the closing musical act will be and chances are I won't be interested anyway,  I'll be at Medieval Times Saturday night for their 8:15 show so that will definitely be awesome. Blizzcon attendees get a discount for Medieval Times so it's cheaper to go see a show now than any other time! They have dinner and a show for a cheap price, can you do any better? I didn't think so! After the show, I'll have to figure out what I'll be doing but chances are I'll be hanging out in the lobby of the Anaheim Hilton hanging out for a bit.

Sunday
Sunday is normally a day of rest but this time...it's time for BLIZZNEYCON! I'll be hitting up the Disneyland theme park for most of the day. I'll be getting the two park ticket thing so I'll be at one of the parks most of the day. Lots of walking, lots of park rides, and lots of silliness. Afterwards, depending on how tired I am, I could be talked into hanging out with people. I'll also be live tweeting so if you're wandering around the park and want to hang out you can probably tweet me and see where I'm at.

We fly home monday morning so I dont plan on hanging out unless you're at the airport or on my flight.

That's pretty much my Blizzcon plans and most of it will be affected by how tired I am feeling, how much I've had to drink, and how little I've had to drink. If you see me walking around and want to say hi, please feel free to! I only ask that you introduce yourself first so I'm not left playing the "Who the hell is this" game. If you want to buy me drinks at any of the parties, I will definitely NOT turn you down but I may walk with you to the drink vendor and get a fresh drink. Not that I don't trust you folks but I don't trust you folks. I'll tweet out what cool geek shirt I'll be wearing each day so you can identify me in a crowd.

ALSO IF YOU HAVE NOT SHOWERED RECENTLY OR ARE NOT WEARING DEODORANT AND SMELL A TAD RIPE I WILL NOT SHAKE YOUR HAND OR GIVE YOU A HUG!* Cleanliness is next to Godliness. Now if I smell a tad bit ripe, you will have to put up with it as I am an internet celebrity!(in my own head)

It's going to be a fun time and I m definitely looking forward to it. Hope to see some of you there!

*Tongue in cheek btw, while I would prefer nothing but nice smelling people around me, it's a con and things like that are out of my hands.*

Flexin' with Jed

With the introduction of Flexible Raids, current content will finally be cross realmable. What does this mean? It means that if a group of friends on different servers want to raid the newest raid, the Siege of Orgrimmar, they can do so at a Flexible raid difficulty. You will still need a minimum of 10 people for the raid but you can have anywhere between 11 and 25 people in the raid. The flex difficulty will allow the raid to adjust how many people are in the raid instance. If you have 15 people and 3 have to go for whatever reason, the raid will compensate for having 3 fewer people and adjust the raid difficulty. This means that unless it's a tank or healer that has to go, your raid will be able to continue clearing trash/bosses without missing a beat because the raid will adjust to however many people you have left in the raid.

Why am I going on about flex raiding once again when I wrote a huge blog post about it already? Well I bring it up because my guild, Avengers of Azeroth, is looking for more people to fill out our flex raid team! That's right you can raid current content along side your favorite slacker Mage! (ME!)

Keep on keeping on

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. I think this quote from Ferris Beuller's Day Off kind of sums up what I've been up to the last few weeks. The last time I blogged I wrote about Virtual Realms and Flex raiding and since then we have received more information about both. I am eagerly awaiting both and I wish I could speed up the patch so that it could be 5.4 already! When I started blogging I had so much free time that I could write a lot of posts in between classes but when I got a job I suddenly lost all that free time. Eventually I had the desire to blog but whenever I would sit down to write something I would get writers block. You (the few readers I still have) probably read the few words I write and think to yourselves "how the hell can it take such a long time to write such short, uninteresting, mindless drivel??" 

Well my response is..uhmm..yeah I got nothing. But since you do read my blog regularly, I can safely reason that you:
1) have bad taste since you read my ramblings
or 
2) enjoy punishing yourself by reading my blog 
or 
3)are either used long delays betwen my blog posts 
or 
4) have me on your feedreader by accident and are now wondering who the hell I am.

So like yeah!

I apologize for the above. I blame global warming or something.

Virtual Flexing

A little bit ago I wrote about my low population server and I listed out a few things that I felt that Blizzard could do to help out not just my server but all low pop servers. Included in that list were the suggestions to merge servers and to open the current tier for cross realm raidability. Two weeks ago Blizzard released not just one but TWO things that I feel will help out all low pop servers when they go live in the 5.4 patch. The two things: Virtual Realms and Flexible Raiding. Do Blizzard developers read my blog and think I have great ideas? Probably not but at the very least they are finally doing something to help low pop servers.

What's in a name?

I was reading something in the WoW subreddit(as I often do) and I ran across an interesting question: How do you come up with a name for your characters? This is such an interesting question because everyone has different reasons for why they use a certain name. Some choose names from other games, some just use the in game random name generator until they find a name they like, and some don't care about their character names and pick random things. Each person is different and while some names are completely unoriginal, they probably mean something to the person who rolled that character. As for me, I have a long and weird process I go through when I pick a name for characters.

I once made the joke that you can tell when in my life people met me by what they call me. If you call me by my real name we probably met in high school. If you know me as Jedi Optimus, we most likely met when I was in college and very active on several online message boards and I also played many online FPS games where that was the handle I used. Many a noob cursed that name in anger as I shot them ingame. If you know me as Jedem, we most likely met in 2005 when I first started playing WoW and I used that name for my very first character, a warrior. I eventually changed servers and classes but the first character I rolled on Ursin was a mage named Jedem. If you refer to me as Izak, you probably raided with me in BC when my pally sadly became my raiding main. Now Jed, well if that's what you know me as and you have never been in my guild, you probably met me in Wrath when I first started blogging. Of course if you have ever been in my guild regardless of when, you eventually know me as Jed.

Plight of the low pop server

I have been on my server since 2005 when it was first launched and in that time my server has gone from being a medium population server (ever so briefly) to being a low population server less than a year after going live. Since then, it has remained a low pop server. While at the time it wasn’t a big deal, the population on the server has steadily declined. During Vanilla, before paid transfers were implemented, most people rolled on a server and stayed on that server until they either stopped playing or found a reason to start over on a different realm. If you reached level 60 on a character, people tended to stay on that server because it was such a pain to re-level on a new server. Once paid transfers were introduced the barrier to leaving your server was removed. Players were free to transfer their characters to new servers to play with friends/coworkers/raiding guilds/etc.

Of course this didn’t affect the larger realms since the higher population numbers meant they could afford to lose some people to other servers without it affecting the overall population. Unlike larger servers, the smaller servers suffered because the realms couldn’t afford to lose so many people. As new people began playing WoW, most would pick the larger realms because the population made them more appealing than the low pop counterparts. Who wants to roll a new character on what appears to be an empty server when they can roll on a busy server that looks to be more fun? Not all transfers were off of low pop realms. Some people transferred to smaller servers to play with friends or because they grew tired of life on a larger server.The transfers in weren’t numerous enough to slow the tide of people leaving.

Blizzcon Feels

Blizzard has announced the dates for this year’s Blizzcon: November 8-9. What does this mean? It means that this year there will be a Blizzcon in Anaheim where hopefully we will get all sorts of new info about the next expansion for WoW/Starcraft/Diablo/Lost Vikings. I have always wanted to go to Blizzcon and see all the cool stuff in person but logistics have made it extremely difficult. However this year is different. I turn 30 this year(I know I’m a baby to some and old to others) and my lady love asked me what I wanted to do to celebrate and I told her I wanted to go to Blizzcon. She has agreed to make it happen for us so if we can get tickets we will be at Blizzcon in November!! We booked a room and once the tickets go on sale we will be camping out in the online queue to get tickets.

Of course immediately after reserving the hotel room I looked at twitter to see who was planning on going to Blizzcon. There were several people made the decision to go and there were some on the fence about whether they could go or not. Sadly there were a few people who either couldn’t make it or were choosing to not attempt to go. I was excited about the prospect of meeting some of the people who were going to try and go to Blizzcon when suddenly my brain decided to be a scumbag.

For those of you who are new around these parts, I have made mention before that I am an introvert (shocking I know) and while I tend to have a few extrovert tendencies I tend to have social anxiety hit me often. It’s why I have been on twitter for 2 years now and I barely have 5000 tweets compared to people who have been on for a quarter of that time and have triple the amount of tweets. I tend to spend most of my time watching the conversations going on between people and often I don’t see any place where I can join the conversation. Most times I see an opening I the conversation where I can join in, I stop and think about what I’m about to say and over think it. What if what I say isn’t relevant? What if they hate what I said? What if they just keep on talking and ignore what I said?

Well I started thinking about Blizzcon and possibly meeting some of the people I interact with on twitter and the social anxiety started kicking in.

It honestly reminded me of a scene from the movie “How the Grinch stole Christmas” when the Grinch is debating showing up to the Whoville Whobilation:

Grinch: (after standing grumpily with his arms crossed) All right. I'll swing by for a minute, allow them to envy me, grab a handful of popcorn shrimp and blow outta there. (heads for the door, then stops abruptly and returns nervously) But what if it's a cruel prank? What if it's a cash bar?! How dare they! (scowls, then calms down) All right, I'll go. But I shall be fashionably late. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes! (groans in frustration) Definitely not. (firmly, heading for the door with his hand behind his back) All right! I've made my decision. I'm going, And that's that! (shows his hand) Ah! Had my fingers crossed.

My brain started asking me similar questions. What if people don’t want to meet up? What if I meet them and they hate me? What if I make an ass of myself? What if I do or say something that causes a large number of people to unfollow me on twitter or stop reading my blog or listening to my podcast? Damn it brain why can’t you just let me be happy????? My brain had me thinking that maybe I might have made a huge mistake in wanting to go to Blizzcon.

Thankfully the awesomeness of actually being at Blizzcon outweighed all the things my brain thought up. I will be at Blizzcon and I will see all the cool panels in person and just maybe I might even participate in a lore question thing or a contest or something. I will be at Blizzcon! If any of my readers are going to be going as well and want to meet up and hang out at the bar, let me know! I plan on having a great time and if I can meet people that’ll be awesome but if I don’t, I’ll still have a great time.

Third times a charm

Apparently I am rather bad at remembering to check my calendar because my third blogaversary was on January 25^th and here I am almost a week later and just now getting around to writing a post for it. What can I say, I’m a horrible slacker and you should all stop reading whatever inane crap I write. Now for some reason, some of you are still reading this so I suppose I should continue this post. I have repeatedly mentioned that I started this blog because I had a lot of time in between courses so I decided to start blogging to keep me from being bored to tears. I have somehow managed to keep writing because it’s an outlet for my thoughts on WoW/leadership/finance/robots. I know my wife is happy that I write this blog because that way I don’t drive her crazy with all the stuff running through my head.

Well anyway, it’s been 3 years. I’ve had a lot of visitors come to my blog and some have even been nice enough to leave me comments. The past year has definitely been a busy one for me; I started a podcast, designed some cool shirts, wrote a short story involving my mage, wrote a class guidefor the best mage spec, and of course wrote blog posts that some of you read.

In game I’ve been working on gearing for raiding and leveling alts that also need gearing for raiding. Stupid vicious cycle of needing to do stuff to get gear so you can raid and get gear. I’ve been slacking and only have 6 level 90 characters. I know, I know, it’s shameful and I feel all of the shame. I’ve got a mage, pally, monk, rogue, death knight, and another mage. I’m currently working on leveling my gnome priest and horde dk so those two will be my next level capped characters. I am not going to lie, I think I might have a problem.

So the question ahead of me other than what alt I will level after the priest/dk is: what do I do to celebrate 3 years of blogging? I thought about my usual celebration event the gnomish death race but while we had a good turn out last time, I think I need something new and different.  So I thought to myself, why not do something pet battle related? I know I have been spending a lot of time leveling pets to 25 and battling pet tamers across the zones. Maybe some other people have also done the same and would like to do a tournament. So maybe in February I’ll post details about when/where the tournament will be held. The beauty of pet battles is that they are shared across all your characters so you can roll a level one on my server and participate or if you are alliance you can be battle tag friended/invited to my server for some battling! If anyone reading this is interested please let me know, I think if we can get a decent amount of people we can have a great time.

In parting, I leave you with a funny story that happened to me in the olden days of the Burning Crusade expansion. At the time if you were a tank you had to grind rep with the Keepers of Time for their helm enchant. This was a very annoying rep grind because there were only 2 instances that gave KoT rep: Old Hillsbrad and the Black Morass. Sadly each gave crap for rep and took forever to find a group for/do because you had to do a super annoying quest that involved walking around the caverns of time listening to some npc yammer on about the timeways and such. If you’ve ever done the Aldor/Scryer quest when you first enter Shattrath, it’s like that but worse because you are walking in such a large circle and you had no choice but to do it if you wanted to do Old Hillsbrad. More often than not you would get a group, everyone would make their way to the instance and someone would NOT be able to zone in because they had never done the stupid quest and couldn’t be bothered to do it then.

Anyway back to the story, a guildee was leveling his paladin and needed to grind rep with the KoT. He asked me if I had any alts around the level 66 range that I could take to the instance with him. Luckily for him I had a spriest that I was working on and had done the walk around attunement on. The two of us get in vent and we get a healer and dps who were also attuned and head to the instance. My guildee and I were the only ones who had done the instance before so we had to explain what to expect to the dps/healer. My guildee decided that since he needed rep he was going to find every single mob in the instance that gave rep and pull it. We cleared all the mobs in the first area including the mobs in the tower to the left of the main building where Thrall was. The poor pugged people must have been wondering why the instance had so much trash that needed to be cleared. We finish the instance and the dps/healer leave so my guildee pulls in another guildee who had a resto shaman and we clear it again with just the three of us. Since I was the only dps this took longer than a normal run and when we finished we reset the instance and went back in.

The three of us start clearing trash and mount up to run to the next part when suddenly the healer got a bad lag spike that caused him to run forward into several mobs and dc’d him. Of course all the mobs kill him and turn to us. Thankfully the two of us were still mounted and I’m not ashamed to say that we turned around and ran for the entrance. As we were running my guildee tells me in vent “Why are we running? We should just kill them!” I hesitate but he tells me that we can do it so I agree to give it a chance. He tells me “Heal me! We can take them!” as he dismounts and runs into the chasing mobs. I pop out of shadow and toss him a shield and a renew when suddenly he gets blinded and they all turn to me and do unspeakable things to me. As soon as I'm dead they proceed to kill my guildee. At this point I’m yelling at him in vent for getting us killed and all he can say is “I didn’t know they cc’ed! I didn't know they cc'ed!!!” I was laughing so hard at this point that I couldn’t seriously be mad at him but I have yet to let him live it down and this happened 5-6 years ago.

It’s become a running joke in my guild between the two of us to yell out “Heal me! We can take them!” whenever we’re in an instance or questing. So yeah, there’s a story about Jed that hopefully made you laugh a little at my death.

Thank you everyone who reads my blog, retweets my blog post tweets, leaves comments on my blog, and subscribes to my post feed. You are all awesome and I am thankful that you are all reading my blog, even if it is just to laugh at me. Here’s to another year of crazy blogging fun!

Have Jed, will travel

Well the last post I had written decided that when I sent it to myself it was NOT going to send and so I lost what I had written so far for this post. I think it is a sign that what I had written was crap and that I shouldn’t force anyone to read what I had written. Point made universe, point made.

Here is the basics of today’s post:

Who: Me, possibly you, maybe you, definitely you, oh and you.

What: I’m a bored 90. I like helping people. I’ve decided to offer my services to the WoW public! This means that if you are a lowbie trying to run instances, I can help you out. If you’re coming back to the game and want to know whats changed, I can help you. If you are a healer and want to run old raids but can’t solo them, I can help you. If you don’t know what to do at level cap, I can help you. In a group with friends and need a tank for something, I can help you. Can’t quite solo a difficult quest mob/rare, I can help you.

Where: Thanks to cross realm zones, it can be on my server or your server or that other server over there.

Why: I like helping people and along the way people have helped me with things so I have decided to pay it forward and help others. I get nothing out of doing this other than the satisfaction of knowing that I have helped someone. You aren’t obligated to help anyone else out along the way but if you did it’d be neat.

The details:

I decided to do this one day after spending a few fun hours in Ulduar with a cool Disco Priest and her husband. They had been trying to solo Ulduar for achievements and the mount but they needed a little boost. Having both the 10 and 25 man achievement mounts from Ulduar, I can say that I know my way around that place so I offered up my dk to help out and we managed to get many of the achievements that they needed. This got me thinking about how many people in game have the desire and drive to do things like old raids or rep grinds but have no knowledge about how to go about them.

My guild raids one night a week and the rest of the week I am usually putzing around on alts either leveling them or working on their professions. This causes me to have a lot of time in game where I am bored and looking for something fun to do. Most things are more fun with friends after all. I tend to run parts of the LFR on 3 different characters and always love having someone I know along with me to make it more interesting.

I have a few alts still at 85 that I wouldn't mind leveling through instances/questing with friends. Currently sitting at 85 I have an enh shaman, resto druid, ele/resto shaman, warlock, warrior, spriest, guardian druid, and windwalker monk. At 90 and looking for gear I have a frost mage, frost dk, brewmaster monk, combat rogue, and fire mage. These are all alliance BUT for my horde readers, I have an 86 frost dk that I'd be up for questing/instancing with along with several lowbies from level 20 to 70.

I know to some of my readers this may seem like an elaborate scheme to do something nefarious...but it isn't. I have amazing people in my guild who will gladly help me with stuff when I ask and I know some people out there don't have access to this level of support. I want to help people in the hopes of bringing balance to the force only without the dismemberment and large scale genocide.

In conclusion if you want some help with stuff in game, add me to your friends list: Jedem#1828 and let me know who you are so I can make a note next to your name. Then as long as I'm not in the middle of an instance or on limited time, I will be more than happy to help out. If you want to just chat about stuff in game, I am also down with that. If this is all for naught and no one friends me, well at least I will know that I have tried to do something good for the community and I guess that'll have to be enough for me.