Category WoW

So yesterday was the release of the latest expansion for World of Warcraft, the MMORPG that I have been playing since 2005, yes 2005.  I played a little bit in the morning before work to check out the new content and had a good time.  When I got settled in last night after work I tried to log in again to play some more.

I was greeted by a server full message, something I have not seen in WoW since the height of it’s popularity 6 or 7 years ago.  I was placed in the back of a 400 person line which took nearly 20 minutes to get to the front of, which was annoying enough.  However when my reward for that wait turned out to be a game loading screen that went nowhere my mild frustration got bumped up several notches.  I wound up closing the load screen and didn’t bother trying again as it would have meant being put back at the end of the line.

I read online that the problems were supposedly related to a DDOS attack on Blizzard’s servers however who knows if that’s true. DDOS is a great catch all excuse for server problems that could be actually tied into poor planning for the expansion launch.  I have no doubt Blizzard will fix the issue, they always do and in a perverse way I was happy to see that there was enough interest in the decade old game to cause such problems.

My mom used to always tell me she could care less when I wrote in my blog about WoW and gaming in general.  She said she would always skip past those parts as she had no interest in them.  I never quite understood her aversion to talking about the game and how it’s virtual reality tied into very real feelings, emotions and human nature.  I view gaming as my version of mom’s romance novels that she would read endlessly.  That was her escape, her way to release her mind from everyday stress and problems.  WoW and gaming in general has always been my way to accomplish the same thing.

Speaking of mom, this Sunday marks another of what will be many sad and awkward moments that will be forthcoming.  It would have been mom’s 67th birthday.  Yesterday marked 3 months since she passed away.  It’s been a very weird thing trying to figure out how I feel.  In some ways it feels like more time has passed but at the same time her last few days are imprinted in my mind like it just happened yesterday.  The bitterness, remorse, irony, sorrow, and reality of my mom’s passing has left a permanent cloud in my field of vision, even on the brightest and bluest Florida days.

Having her birthday come and go without seeing her face or hearing her voice will be another cup of cold water thrown in my direction.

Last night after work we had another running club related meeting, this time about our Thanksgiving race which may be the largest event of the year.  It feels like the planning for this years event has been slacking because last year, the first year of the event, we started early to mid-summer working on it.  As usual I emerged from the meeting with a list of to do’s.

Last night when I got home I again had an extended WoW session completing the second to last part of the end game raid, leaving only the final boss to go.  These encounters are total chaos, especially for me since I go into them with no prior knowledge of how the fights are supposed to go.  For the most part I just try to follow the lead of others, don’t stand in poop and  stay alive.  The boss fights can take a very long time,  the one last night was approaching 15 minutes.  The thing is if the group wipes (dies) before defeating the boss your reward is to go back and do it all over again from the beginning.  Two of the bosses were like that, taking two attempts to kill.

Having 25 players, especially 25 strangers trying to coordinate their efforts leads to conflict as you can imagine.  The more hardcore players that have already done these fights dozens of times have very little patience for those of us that have not.  When the group dies on a boss it instantly leads to waves of rage quitting, verbal chastising and other typical immature internet behavior.  However I am well versed in this behavior and for the most part ignore it unless it gets out of hand.

While I was waiting for the group to form to do the raid I was running around another area of the virtual world trying to work on some solo quests, minding my own business.  Unfortunately the area I was doing this in had a very large collection of opposing faction horde players.  On my server the horde to alliance faction ratio is terribly out of whack. There are many more of them than us so in most situations alliance characters such as myself are outnumbered.  On top of that, compared to serious players of the game, my character is a 98 pound weakling.

Well despite being no challenge for enemy horde players, they insisted on attacking and killing me literally dozens of time as I was trying to get stuff done.  Of course I tried to fight back best I could but having two or three well geared horde players on me at once meant I was dead in a matter of seconds.  Obviously this angers and frustrates me but I just rolled with it, trying to find more remote areas where I was not as easily spotted by these horde players that were so interested in unfair fights.  Even with those frustrations I am still enjoying traveling back into my virtual second home for awhile.  It’s a good disconnect from some of the stresses that roll up on me in my daily grind.

Speaking of grind, yesterday I had a huge serving of running club related things to attend to.  It looks like today I am going back for seconds, followed by our only mid-week, evening race of the year tomorrow.

So I finally got the paperwork for my mom’s estate through the courts last week.  I took the first step in liquidating her assets by executing a sell order on her Sherwin Williams stock that she acquired at her first post marriage job back in the 80’s.  Yesterday I went to a nearby Wells Fargo branch to see if I had everything I needed to gain control of her bank accounts.  Well I did and I didn’t.

The branch manager said I needed to establish a bank account for the estate along with a federal EIN number for the estate.  The funds could then be liquidated and moved into this estate account which I would have full control over.  According to the lawyer that handled the summary administration probate paperwork, this should not be necessary however in the big picture it may actually be better for me logistically.

If things went the way the lawyer said the bank would be cutting three equal checks to my brother, my sister and I which sounds ok until you figure in the accounting that needs to be done before things are really split.  Sorting out mom’s estate has involved me fronting a wad of cash and I also have to account for possible tax liabilities at the end of the year.  All that stuff needs to be accounted for before the split so having an estate account allows me to do it cleanly instead of checks going out only to have other checks written to come back to me.

Unfortunately all of this legwork has had to be done because mom never got around to putting my name on her bank accounts and giving me power of attorney, two things she talked about doing for years.  Navigating my way through the paperwork has been a learning process. I still have some more fog to get through before I am in the clear.

Although there have been many aspects of mom’s passing that invoke pain, tears, and sorrow, working on the estate financials has not been one of them.  This has been like a big tangled ball of string that I have been slowly untangling.  It becomes a tactical exercise, not an emotional one.  I feel obligated to get it handled as correctly, quickly and fairly for my siblings as possible.  Mom would want it no other way.

Last night when I got home I attended to the chickens.  Attending to the chickens means checking for eggs, scooping out any poop in their bedding and cleaning/refilling their food, water, and grit.  Last night I had a very close call.

When we first got the chickens they were very jumpy around us, if we got too close they would dash away.  Well those days are long gone.  We have firmly established in the chickens minds that we are their providers.  When I let them out of their coop they all mill about my feet expecting me to shower them with cracked corn goodness. It’s cute but it also can be dangerous.  The chickens will continue to place themselves under my feet even as I am walking.  You literally have to be looking down the entire time when they are nearby.  Both Cindy and I have had multiple episodes of almost stepping on them, they don’t move out of the way, even if your foot is on top of them.

Well last night I was carting the coop to a new location.  As I did I was trying to look around the end of it to find a good parking spot.  All of a sudden I again felt something under my foot just as I was ready to place it with my full weight on top.  I look down and see Wilma squatted down, mere milliseconds from me stepping on her.  Luckily I was able to stop and shoo her away.

Over the weekend we had another unintended close call. We had the chickens out roaming freely which means the dogs had to be indoors, contained.  Cindy came out of the patio door and Sadie shot out with her as she is accustomed to doing.  When I saw Sadie come out I freaked a bit and tried to move into position to intercept her if she headed for a chicken.  I was quite surprised she did nothing of the sort.  She just hung there and looked at them as I  directed her back inside.  I think Sadie actually realizes that the chickens are part of the inner circle as well and are “paws off”.

It would be great if we could allow the chickens the mingle with the dogs.  We actually already allow Nicki to  be loose with the hens roaming since she is not able to catch them anymore.  We would love to give Sadie the same leeway but if she did snap and harm a chicken we would never forgive ourselves.  That being said we might do more dog/chicken integration where Sadie is on her extended leash so we still have control while allowing them to interact more.

Last night I was playing some WoW, trying to get through the final boss raid of the current expansion.  It’s something most people have done months ago.  I figured I should at least do it with one of 10 characters since the new expansion is coming out in November. I felt bad as I was playing as Cindy was cleaning up and doing laundry. She insisted that I keep playing, she actually likes when I take the time to game and relax.  It’s amazing.

So yesterday I received an email from Network Solutions regarding renewing my duf.net domain name which has been in existence since 1997.  I clicked on the RENEW NOW link and was shocked at the dollar figure that flashed up on the screen, something like $185 to renew for 5 years.   When I broke it down was something ridiculous like $37 or $38 a year.

Now I knew that this is a common tactic of domain registrars, get you signed up with an attractive up front rate but then turn the screws on you when renewal time comes around, figuring many people will just pay the extra money instead of deal with the hassle of switching registrars.  Well I am not one of those people.  I picked up the phone and called their 800 number.  I told the woman on the phone that I just received my renewal bill and thought it was outrageously high, much higher than when I renewed 5 years ago.

Well that was all it took to get a nearly 50% discount, the woman said I could renew the domain at the same rate I paid in 2008, $99.  That was good enough for me although I could have still transferred to another registrar and saved even more money.  I was content to pay what I paid before and not have to go through moving the domain around.

This was just the latest of countless examples I have personally experienced where discounts and deals are there for the taking, all you have to do is ask for them.

Last night I sat down and watched the Homeland season premiere for the second night in a row.  When I watched it Monday night I was half passed out and missed huge chunks of it.  I am glad I took the time to watch it again, lots of fuzzy details became much more clear.

I had eaten my dinner while watching Homeland, finishing up with a Zone bar a little before 7.  I had planned for this to be the end of my eating for the night to assist in my goal of dropping a handful of pounds.  Well I pulled out my Blade MQX and did some flying/crashing, with an emphasis on crashing.  The copter was very difficult to control, more so than normal.  It did not want to hover in place, it would just keep drifting in various directions. It was frustrating me.

Well this frustration triggered a “must eat” reflex, I suddenly felt very hungry. Now I know this feeling was entirely caused by frustration and if I waited 5-10 minutes it would probably pass. I went ahead and poured myself a bowl of mini-wheats anyway and gobbled them down.  Doing so made me feel weak and disappointed in myself for not exercising more self discipline.

I messed around more with X-split and using it to capture and broadcast stuff on my computer.  Last night I used it to capture roughly a half hour of WoW play although I need to use larger video windows of both the game and my webcam feed.  You may find this interesting to watch or mind numbingly boring depending on your point of view on MMORPG’s.

Watch live video from greenmachine7691 on Justin.tv

When I got home last night I felt really blah.  I had no desire to do a home workout or anything resembling work for that matter.  I treated my poor mood with play.

I got all of the parts of my Blade MQX out and ready to fly.  I had thumbed through the manual during the day to loosely familiarize myself with the copter.   I expected it to be a different flying experience from what I was accustomed to with the RC planes I have flown.  I didn’t expect it to be significantly more difficult.  I was wrong.

On my initial attempts I was trying to keep the Blade very close to the ground, not getting it more than a foot off the ground at any time.  The copter seemed to be drifting more than I expected but I later attributed that to my very conservative lift offs which could drag the landing gear, tipping it one way or the other.

I found myself really having problems with disorientation with the 4 additional control directions I had to deal with.  With my RC planes like my Sky Scooter I am controlling throttle, tail elevator  for up/down angle and the ailerons on the wing that handle turning.  With the quadcopter I have throttle to control altitude up/down, right/left rotation, bank left, bank right, and forward/reverse which is controlled by dipping or raising the front end of the Blade.  I really had issues when the copter was coming towards me, I just don’t have the reflexes yet to be able to react accordingly.

I went through three battery charges of flights.  I was surprised how long the tiny lipo battery lasted, giving me a solid 10 minutes of fly time.  As expected the Blade had a LOT of crashes however none of them caused any significant damage.  Luckily despite my issues with overall control, I was pretty good at just killing the throttle whenever I saw an impact coming, saving the Blade from any high speed crashes. The funniest incident was when I had the copter up 5 or 6 feet in the air.  It drifted too close to one of the plants on top of the media cabinet and chopped a few leaves off, sending the Blade back down to the carpet.

As you can see in the video, I did have some pretty controlled hover time going on but I was really bad at doing any “steering”.  I moved the Blade around the room almost exclusively using the banking capability of the quadcopter.  If I tried to turn it I always had problems with it either gaining or losing altitude since left/right is on the same stick as the throttle. I also expect that flying outside with the Blade will be a much better experience.  The living room, despite it’s size, just had too many obstacles for a noob copter pilot.  The backyard offers much larger open spaces to allow for pilot error.

Tuki was not a fan of the helicopter.  As soon as I put it in the air he retreated back inside his cage.  Perhaps he didn’t trust my flying ability.  He is a pretty smart bird I guess.

In between the charging cycles of the copter battery I supplemented my night of play by getting on my warlock, named KeddieFruger, in WoW.  I have not played anything but my panda monk in WoW for the last 8 months.  I was pleasantly surprised with how much fun I had playing my warlock.  There have been a number of changes that make them much more powerful than they once were.

I did a couple 5 person instances.  Despite having gear that was not great via MOP standards and not knowing the instances or how to really play my warlock well anymore I still unleashed the most damage of anyone in the group.  It was cool.  It’s fun having 5 or 6 demons by your side unleashing all sorts of hell simultaneously on bad guys.

Tonight there will be no time for copter flying or WoW playing, I am hosting my fantasy football draft party.  I will be quite busy rearranging the furniture in the house, setting up food, drink, and getting all the tech up and running.  When I first started hosting this party a few years ago I provided a bunch of food that I had to bake/cook myself.

Since then I have streamlined things. I will only be baking some spanikopita and buying some pizzas.  The other team owners will be filling in the gaps.  I realized that although it is nice to provide a big, diverse menu for the party it was totally unnecessary.  This is a fantasy football party for cripes sake,  the core needs are pizza and beer, done.

This party also means another late night by the time I wind up cleaning up afterwards. Sure I could worry about cleaning up the place until the next day but I hate going to bed having the house in disarray.

To add to the formula I am picking up Lucky this afternoon for 4 days of dogsitting.  It will be interesting to see how Lucky does with a house full of fantasy football owners around.  It will be fun having Lucky around for a few days, he is so much fun and Uncle Shawn lets him get away with more than his dog dad does.  I am sure Sadie will be thrilled to see her good buddy this weekend.

So yesterday I finally got my first virtual WoW avatar to level 90, the maximum level in the latest expansion to the game, Mists of Panderia.  I actually leveled this character all the way from level 1-90 since he is a monk, a new class introduced with this version of the game.

When I compare this to my past WoW track record, taking 8 months to reach max level seems like pure fantasy, ridiculously slow.  There was a time I could reach max level in 2 weeks or less.

Of course this is simply a reflection of how little I play the game anymore.  In the past year I would have brief spurts where I was playing somewhat regularly but for the most part my account sits dormant most of the time.

This dramatic decrease in the time I spend scurrying about a virtual existence is a good thing in the big picture.  It means I am busy interacting with tangible items in my life instead of using the game to hide away from things I don’t want to deal with.

Still, there is a part of me that laments the lack of progress for my small army of virtual heroes.  I have 10 or 11 characters all sitting at the old level cap of 85 that have not seen the light of day in 2013. I imagine them all patiently waiting for me to take the time and effort to put them back at the pinnacle of in game seniority.  Unfortunately I think they may be waiting a long, long time.

When I was messing around with the AWESOME Craigslist search aggregator, searchtempest.com, a couple weeks ago I stumbled across a guy in Jacksonville that was selling a rear SSR factory chrome wheel for a SUPER cheap $75.  Although the guy was way too far away for me to go pick up the wheel and my being pretty sure it was sold anyway, I sent him an email expressing my interest.  I was surprised to hear it was still available.

Let me back up a sec.  My SSR, although incredibly awesome, has a few warts.  One of them are it’s wheels.  The prior owner evidently took a set of factory painted wheels and had them chromed.

Well either the chrome job was not good or this is just normal for 7 year old rechromed wheels, but the finish on the wheels has started to pit.  Some wheels are worse than others.  They are 15 footers, looking good from a distance but not so sharp as you get closer.

I saw some ridiculous prices for a set of new factory SSR chrome wheels, somewhere in the neighborhood of $2500, f that.  So anyway, you can understand why picking up a factory chrome wheel for $75 made my eyes light up.

Now normally with a Craigslist transaction, at least every one that I ever participated in, delivery of the item is handled in person as a local transaction. Obviously driving to Jacksonville and back for a $75 wheel would be rather silly, probably costing me upwards of $100 in gas and 10 hours of drive time.

I asked the seller if he would be open to my paying him with Paypal and him shipping the wheel to me.  Of course I would pay all shipping costs.  I was mildly surprised he said he would do it, cool!

The wheel arrived yesterday, packed with care.  Other than a small nick in it which I already knew about, it was in really good shape.

My plan is to swap this wheel with my driver side rear which has the worst pitting of the four.  Hopefully I can score similar deals to eventually get factory chrome on all 4 corners.

MMORPG alert, next few paragraphs are about WoW, something many of you will not care about or understand.

I have talked a few times on here about how surprised I was that once I became separated that my time gaming and specifically playing WoW fell off a cliff, the exact opposite of what I expected.  I figured a life where my only considerations were me, myself and I would include plenty of recreational time to do something like play WoW, my prime source of gaming enjoyment for over 7 years.

There was a long period of time where I was spending up to 30+ hours a week in the game, not that it was a good thing.  I just found it so engaging and enveloping, feeding into my need to always have something to do, even if those tasks are virtual. There were some nights where I didn’t crawl into bed at a ridiculous time early in the morning as I always had just one more goal to accomplish.

I found the game to be fascinating, not just because of the game but because of the dynamics of the millions of people playing it with you.  In many ways WoW felt like a real society upon itself, your interactions in game relied on many of the dynamics of human nature.  You ran into all types, the asshole, the bully, the coward, the whiner and even the occasional all around good guy.    I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think it was these interactions that made the game really interesting.  Fast forward to 2013.

Over the years the game developers have made a number of improvements to the game to make many functions in the game significantly quicker and easier.  For example, to do an instance (a challenge where 5 players work together to accomplish a goal) you used to have to do a lot of work.  You would announce in a town that you were looking to get a group together and then wait until you could find enough people to fill the various group roles.

Once you had that group together you literally had to travel to the area where this instance is located, in some situations this could have meant doing 10 minutes or more of virtual travel until you arrived at the location.  This situation was indeed laborious and time consuming.  But there is something else it did, it committed you to accomplishing the goal since there was a lot of work involved in both assembling the group and getting to the instance location.  Many times you would create in game friends during this process and going forward would often seek out these friends to do other instances since you knew them and they knew you.

One of the game improvements was making this process basically instant.  You no longer had to assemble a group, you simply joined a queue to do an instance and it would pair you up with a bunch of strangers.  In addition you no longer had to travel to these instances, it simply pulls you to the instance magically and pops you back to where you were after it is complete.  For sure, it made this sort of in game activity dramatically more convenient and less time consuming. There were many areas of the game where this type of streamlining was done, making tasks that took longer and required interaction with other players, into quick hitting items that required very little else of others.

So the end result of this tweaking has been a game that is much more convenient but much less engaging.  Many times you can do an instance without a single word being exchanged between the 5 players involved.  The player to player engagement in all areas of the game is dramatically less than it once was.

Once again, in a way, the game is reflecting real life where convenience is king. Fast food, 140 character thoughts, quick weight loss, instant credit and other sorts of instant gratification are what our basically lazy society demands.  Very few people take the time to think about what falls by the wayside in the process.

I am not sure how I got on this tangent as my main point was that I hardly play the game anymore. Perhaps this is just part of the reason why.  Although there has been an expansion out for 6 months I still have 10 virtual me’s that have not made one step towards progressing to the new level cap of 90.  At this point I’m not sure if it will ever happen as real life and lack of interest consistently gets in the way.

This weekend I have a Sunday race to time.  It is a warm up for two more busy upcoming weekends.  The followiing weekend I wil be heading to the east coast to hang with Randall and Tracy, attend a Marlins game and attend a SSR meet up.  Then the following weekend Troy comes down to spend a few days which will surely be a good time.

Yesterday Ali asked me if I could pick up the dogs from daycare since she was going to be tied up at work until later.  Luckily I didn’t have plans last night so I could do it.  This was the first time I set foot inside the place.  I told the girl at the front desk I was there to pick up Nicki and Sadie. She headed into the large area that holds most of the dogs.

As I looked around the place it seemed nice enough.  The only thing I didn’t like was what my ears were hearing.  The area where the girls were kept was very noisy with dogs barking non-stop.  I mentioned to Ali that the noise level reminded me of a kennel.  To be fair, employees were walking around in the room at the time which may have been prodding the dogs to bark more for attention.  But the idea that Nicki particularly (Sadie adapts to anything) could be exposed to that noise for long periods of the day did not give me the warm and fuzzies.

Ali said that the dogs are interacted with and in different areas of the place throughout the day.  When Nicki and Sadie were brought out they were excited of course and seemed fine, not overly stressed out.  I took them back to Ali’s place and walked them quickly before heading out.

Last night I made a continuous push up attempt and posted it on my new YouTube channel.  In related news I also created and posted my last video on my old, Google AdSense banned channel.  The video is intended to steer my nearly 200 subscribers to my new channel.  It seems to be working as I woke up this morning with over 25 notifications of people signing up for my new YouTube home.

I have been working diligently on moving and relabeling my video library over to the new channel.  I moved everything I had in one spot on my system over but that only totaled 230 videos, my old channel had 356.  I have some OLD stuff that I will either have to download from the old channel and re-upload or find it in whatever directory it is hidden in.  Much of it is old volleyball and RC hobby stuff that I cut my YouTube teeth on years and years ago. I also don’t have any of the epic animated Jmo’s World on the new channel.

Doing this migration has exposed some of the weird ways that YouTube tries to flag video content on the fly.  For instance, when I uploaded my Tough Mudder and latest head shaving video (both large view grabbers on my old channel), they were both flagged as “needing more information” in order to monetize them.  Normally everything I upload is enabled for monetization because I have it turned on as a default.

Well obvious things can flag a video as not being defaulted to making cash like having a music track in the video.  Hell they will flag a video even if there is faint music playing on a radio in the background.  Well evidently they also will flag a video simply based on keywords in the video title.   As I mentioned above, these two videos were not turned on for ads.

So I did an experiment.  I deleted both of these videos, renamed them to something generic and shipped them back up to YouTube.  Monetization for both of them worked just fine.  I then went in and changed the name, added descriptions and meta tags as I normally would and everything all was still well.  Hopefully it stays that way.  My new channel just crossed 1000 total views, now it’s only 324,000 behind my old home.

Today is the release of the new WoW expansion.  Long time blog readers may have noticed that I talk about WoW very infrequently anymore.  That is because I play it much less.  Hell I didn’t play it at all for between 4 and 5 months.  With the new expansion coming out I started to play a bit within the last 2 weeks, trying to get the last of my 10 characters up to max level of 85 before the hamster wheel is once again reset. (new cap is 90)

I haven’t even purchased the expansion yet, until I get my last virtual self to 85 I won’t bother.  Of course this expansion promises a multitude of improvements, changes and new content to explore, just like all of the previous expansions to the game have promised.

My excitement level for the “new” game is mild at best, just as my overall interest in video/computer games has consistently declined as I inch closer to half a century on the planet.  I just have a lot of other stuff to do, most of it much more productive than building up a virtual self to be the best he can be.  I have enough things to improve in my real existence as is.