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.