Don't Nuke the Ant

There has always been a lot of controversy around the 'addictive nature' of computer games in general. The topic recently flared again in the country I live in and once again about half the population screams for more warning labels on games, clinics to treat the afflicted, extra warnings in games and more of the same.

Games are addictive. There is no question of that simply because the definition of addiction includes statements like 'The condition of being habitually or compulsively occupied with or or involved in something.'

So in that line I can honestly say I am addicted to games as others may be addicted to exercise, french quisine, writing in their diary, singing in the shower, playing an instrument...

Frankly I'd be quite happy to be a bit of a compulsive when it comes to exercise but alas. Still... all this just goes to show that it's not so much the 'addiction' itself that represents the problem but how it's affect your life and the lives of the people around you.

After all, just because you get a new game once in a while and then play it for as much as you can for a week or two or maybe even longer isn't representative of someone whose dangerously addicted and in need of treatment. It becomes a problem when this game takes over your life and your work/school performance starts to go down the drain and your loved ones only know you as that zombie that sits in front of the computer all day.
A recovery from that kind of situation is hard no matter the chosen addiction and definitely requires some serious kind of pro-active measure. But while everyone seems to be setting the stage every few years for a massive 'game addiction' intervention I sit here and wonder if we're not just trying to drop a nuke on an anthill.

I am sure there are those dangerously addicted to games, and they should receive adequate help but wouldn't it be simply enough to put the information out there? Burn a few million tax money on an add campain that runs for a little while that tells you the symptoms and a place to fix it and I think most people would get the gist. If not the overzealous gamers themselves then surely a friend or family member will be able to connect the add to the situation and make 'the call'.

On a side note: when your child has been playing the computer for so long you actually have to check if he/she's still sitting there it might be time to take the keyboard away for a few hours; There's no crime in that.

Instead we end up with rules and regulations that add nothing to the problem but making it cost money (regulations need to be enforced) and do very little.
Worse, If I start seeing games with warning labels that would represent glaring advertisement to me. The game is so good it has a warning sticker on it? Sweet...

But what really needs to be done? Do we not have to first determine the size of the actual problem? How many people are there really dangerously addicted to say: WoW?

You can't just see how long someone is on a day and then call it a problematic addiction after x hours simply because it doesn't take into account people that share accounts or just have a game binge and then stop playing alltogether.

In fact if you would've measured my average ultima online time for an average day about 5 or so years ago you would've come out with a staggering 18/hours a day for months due to various macro programs (*disclaimer: only did that on free servers).

The simple fact is the figures I've heard over the years from the dozens of studies don't match up even in the slightest and that's simply because there is no reliable way to measure those that are indeed dangerously addicted.

They don't turn themselves in, they're too busy playing a game and the rest of us either do not recognize the problem as a problem or wouldn't know what to do about it if we did.

So how about some decent information before we decide to nuke the ant. In fact, please don't nuke the ant at all because us ants aren't cockroaches.

Where is the love?

So there I was, happily chipping away at the various achievements for the lovely holiday of lovely hearts, lovely pink stuff and lovely tokens that buy lovely little trinkets.

And while I sat at my recently purchased lovely picnic basket somewhere in dalaran filching through the lovely achievements for this lovely holiday plotting my course through them to hopefully get the lovely title I paused for a moment.

All the achievements seemed very much doable. Time consuming maybe but very much doable within a day or two or more if you're on the lazy side and with that I thought, lovely while I quested away on my priest collecting lovely little charm bracelets and turning them into tokens.

I must've done this for about an hour or so making good progress xp wise and ending up about a half a level off of 73 before I went back into town to burn off some of the lovely tokens I had gathered on the lovely valentine's vendor.

I decided to pick up a couple of love fools to get the pity the fool achievement out of the way, hopped on my lovely mount flew out of dalaran towards lovely naxxramas and...

... then it hit me. There was no chance in hell I was going to march my level 72 priest into a naxx raid anytime soon due to the level 80 restriction.

My hopes for getting a nice title out of the whole endeavour lay shattered before me. I could either try and pick it up on a different (level 80) character or not but no matter how much time I was willing to invest in it or how much I was willing to do endless repetetive runs for it there was simply no chance in hell my priest was going to walk out of this event with a title.

Why this particular title is completely out of reach for a low *caugh* level is beyond me and to make things worse they could've swapped out one of the achievements that's not in the meta achievement for 'I pity the fool' and it would've been fine.

... lovely.

Dalaran Airtraffic Tax to come!

The already shaky political situation in the greater Dalaran area was rudely disturbed once more after recent reports that the local government is considering implementing a Dalaran Airport Tax (DAT) to push back the ever increasing amount of beasts being parked in the only fly zone in Dalaran.
A government spokesman for the Dalaran transportation authority stated in a recent press conference that The Flightmaster union has launched a complaint against the city of Dalaran for failing to police the quote 'ever increasing amount of foul smelling beasts clogging up the place and ~expletive deleted~expletive deleted~ all over the place' unquote.

The spokesman added that the ever increasing cost of cleaning on krasus' landing was tearing a hole in the city budget and the council would have no choice but to either limit airflight traffic to official flightmaster operated flights and 'smaller vehicles' or implement some kind of taxation to compensate for the unexpectedly high cleaning bills.

When asked about what this tax would entail the spokesman referred to a press conference that would be held on the topic next month or so. And while the governments holds it's tongue rumors of what is quickly becoming known as the 'dragon tax' are abounding.

The public opinion is clearly not in favor of the new dragon tax as the opinion on the street has quickly soured after the bill on lifting mailbox taxation was dismissed by the council in last week's referendum.

"The mailbox tax was supposed to be a temporary measure to fight inflation of our gold, now, instead of getting the taxation lifted they want to charge us more taxes?" said one of the adventurers before he lifted himself onto his dragon only to sit there and hover for the next hour.

With airtraffic tax to come, what will you do?

Mr T finally good for a laugh

For a brief moment I thought it was simply one of the corpsevertisement refreshing(gold seller ads made from corpses). Only this time, rather than falling on the floor and forming the letters to one goldseller site or the other the guys just stood there in the air. About 20 orcs forming up individual letters, holding position in mid air for a while and then running to form up the next letter, holding position etc etc.

Basically air writing with orcs.

Just in case by some miracle my server isn't actually the last to get any kind of innovation (we're still on [dirge]) have a gander at a lovely mid air O.



A few things crossed my mind as I watched the scene unfold:

You have to admire whomever thought of that particulat trick and wrote the code necessary to interact with the wow client in that fashion and it just goes to show how much money there really is to be had selling virtual goods in general.

That said I am sure the display will get annoying sooner or later. With orcs running on a transparant floor right above it'll become a pain in the arse to stand anywhere near the newfangly advertisement as they do a pretty good job blocking your view at times. For me that puts them right smack dab in the same group as people that use their mammoth to block mailboxes (a practice which I still don't quite understand).

I am not sure how long it'll take blizzard to deal with the new type of advertisement. Their reactions to gold seller ads have been somewhat sluggish but in this particular case I think blizzard will be a little faster?

Why do I think this? Well apparantly all the characters forming up the advertisement ran by Mr T on their way to their floating little slavepen as they all have had their faces turned into Mr T's horrible elven visage.

Any bets on how long that one will last?

Remarkable

I am finally done with desperately trying to sort out my heavily overflowing mailboxes and re-sorting most of the junk in my bags which I had left in a bit of a mess before I left on my holiday.

A mess, of course, I had to sort out eventually unless I wanted to see some of the stuff in there dissapear into the endless reaches of what must be a big magical whirlpool of stuff that is known as the WoW mailbox system.

And while you're sorting out mess you tend to come across stuff you haven't seen in a while... remarkable things like old pvp helmets that have wing animations or currency for something or the other you just can't remember what it is for like necrotic runes.

There's some remarkable stuff in there... but that's not really what this post is about.
It does however have something to do with stuff just sitting there being useless though. Namely Marks... more specifically isle of conquest and strand of the ancient marks of honor whose only purpose seems to be to annoy people doing inventory.

I always had thought they'd patch some silly little reward system in there at some point in some patch or the other, but here we are it being patch 3.3 and the only thing they still seem to be good for is turning them to honor via a quest.

Now don't get me wrong, I had never really taken a shine to SotA due to horde starting out in defense for so long the odds of actually winning were low without pre-mades. So it's not like I am swimming in sota marks and watching them waste away in my mailbox.

IoC on the other hand is something I rather enjoy. You can go different directions with it and there's enough fun things to do with catapults to keep me entertained for at least a few months.

And so while we're looking at another set of rather remarkable extensions to the game for instancing purposes slapping together a cheap nasty reward system with maybe a nifty mount for 100 marks was apparantly a little too much to ask.

At this point they should just make them tradeable for other marks 1:1 or even 2:1 because whatever they do with them eventually will have to take into account that there will be a lot of people with these marks around...

I am a bit saddened that these marks aren't getting a use, or at the very least didn't get a use of any kind sooner. I'm not that picky... I can settle for a few pets or some such but there has to be some hope for the abandoned currencies of the world?

Welcome to 2010

Welcome to 2010, I hope you had a pleasant holiday season and I'd like to welcome you back to what is undoubtedly going to be yet another exciting year of random oddball posts over here at noobding.

To start you off: A light snack before we dive into the usual wow banter...

I give you a wordle!


click to enlarge


Comprised of the word content from my blog; a feature provided by the wordle generator.

Haven't seen one yet? play around with it here: wordle

Have the forsaken been forsaken?

Patch notes always manage to annoy me. Of course they do, I am a warlock after all and even though I am now far more in tune with other character classes understanding their soft spots and where they could use some help seeing the stale and uncreative changes to the warlock class never put a huge smile on my face.

But this is not about warlocks... at least not specifically. I make it about warlocks because I happen to be a warlock of the undead variety. So chosen back in the day for the race defining ability 'will of the forsaken'.

Will of the forsaken is an absolute godsent for any warlock especially in the northrend PvP game. Together with the standard PVP trinket undead warlocks can break snares twice and happily port back to their circle of magical 'there will be a warlock here soon' glowiness (you know the little green circle things where rogues like to hang out).

But the PTR patch notes for 3.3 tell us a story of foreboding doom:

"Will of the Forsaken now shares a 45-second cooldown with similar effects, including the Medallion of the Horde, Titan-Forged runes, Insignia of the Horde, etc."

Which in essence means that your race defining ability now shares a cooldown with quite a few silly little pvp trinkets that are available to pretty much anyone with the gumption to cap a few towers in Hellfire peninsula or do any other moderated form of pvp.

So no matter what kind of undead you are, come 3.3. your PVP trinket will be useless. After all it's not like you can exchange racials nor do you get the option to change race after such a modification so the only real thing left to do is hunt for a new trinket.

Perhaps this is the great equalizer, a cheap little trick to snuff out the value of yet another racial to bring it in line with the collection of other marginally useful racials.

But to this here warlock, whom even with a spec that is literally built for survival it's a significant kick in his non-existing nuts (organic stuff does not stay attached post death).

I can stomach the fact that I have to go look for a different trinket, in a way it's a relief not to have to go for the pvp trinket anymore but losing yet another defensive cooldown is hard especially when you know you're reliant on it for your survival.

My warlocks future looks somewhat bleaker for it. Now rather than to trinket out of the rogue stun, port back to my circle and WotF out of the rogue stun from the rogue that's surely there I get to recapture those lovely moments all us warlocks know where we get bursted down from 100% to 0 in the duration of a single stun.

But hey, maybe we can hit the sacrifice button from our otherwise useless voidwalker before the second rogue gets to us. Or perhaps they got bored waiting on that big green glowing blotch on the floor for a warlock to appear. Or maybe we can get that 1000+ resilience we're going to need to just live through the initial stunlock burst sequence so we actually get to cast something. Or maybe I'll just stay in the tree I've been sitting in casting dots at the passing crowds.

On the bright side it may, in the long run, result in a few less undead in the world and we'd all be better of without so many of us trying to develop a new plague to turn us all into forsaken (in which case all of y'all will get our spiffy racial).

WotF much?