Now I'm really mad!

How dare they!

I checked my email this morning to find that I had two new comments on my site. I always like comments, everyone blogger does. It validates what we do, even if the comments are "You are so wrong..." its nice to be able to continue the discussion.

So I was excited, a new person was commenting on my two most recent posts. I opened the email to see what was written.

It was a gold seller spamming my site. Well the first thing I did was delete the posts, but it makes me mad and makes me regret that I keep this site PG-13 because there are some choice words I would like to use right now.

If your account has been hacked, like mine was once, gold sellers are about as evil as it gets. Sure there are many who pay meager wages to people to play the games and farm gold for them, but there are also the ones that hack accounts and steal your gold and sell all your stuff and.... grrrr this just put me in a really bad mood.

Of course, they are wasting their time here as all my wonderful readers would never consider buying gold. Whats the point? It cheapens the gaming experience and causes server-wide inflation to all of us. But I would think that people who spend some time reading WoW blogs and trying to learn a little bit more about game play are not likely to go cheating.

On the plus side, I crafted Boots of the Crimson Hawk.. not a huge upgrade, but any plus to crit is going to help me.

Being a n00b is better than being a jerk!

So our Kara team is taking a little break -- we were going to take two weeks off, but it looks like it will be only a week as we will start up Zul'Aman when 2.3 drops on Tuesday.

In the meantime, four of us decided we would spend Tuesday running heroics. That left one spot for pugging and since we had two hunters, a priest, and a feral druid, we really needed a mage. We picked Slave Pens and started looking for a fifth. We found one and summoned him using the summoning stone did a /inspect and see that he was wear all blues and greens. We agreed that he was not quite ready for heroics and asked him to leave. He understood, we apologized, he opened a portal and off he went -- no hurt feelings -- at least not too badly. I'm sorry to say I don't remember his name, because he was cool about it.

I do however remember the name of the mage we picked to replace him and if you're on Hyjal and send me a tell I'll spill the name so you know not to group with this person.

This fire mage shows up and certainly doesn't bring the DPS like I do, on par with our MM hunter though and the sheep are nice. The first sign of trouble comes when our Priest fears a sporebat into another group.

Look, the pet was on the bat, but intimidation was on CD and I couldn't get the pet off of the squishy who was about to die so he cast fear. It's a shame that it happened we tried to stay up, but we wiped. It happens. This mage types, "That was really bad, guys."

Without further incident we got to Mennu the Betrayer and got him down with no significant problems. Our mage's typed response, "That took too long".

About 5 minutes later I pulled aggro on a pat because I backed up a little too much. We wiped again. On our way back to the instance, I noticed our mage disconnected. She never came back.

She just decided she didn't want to be a part of our group anymore and instead of saying to us, "Guys, I don't like the wiping, I'm leaving." She pulled this passive aggressive BS on us and we wound up waiting for 10 minutes to see if she would reconnect and then another 10 while we found a replacement (another Feral Druid, who off-tanked what the mage would have sheeped).

And of course, we rocked the instance and got through it without another wipe.

I just got really irate at this person and their jerky attitude. I would much rather people say about me, "He's a n00b, he backs up into pats (but he does bring the DPS)." Then saying, "He's a jerk, he says disparaging things to his party mates and drops out of instances without comment."

Blogs are weird

Take a look at the top of this page. Go Ahead, I'll wait.................................. ....................... ........................ ................................ ..................................... ...................... did you see the "Search Blog | Flag Blog | Next Blog»" Thingy?

Go ahead and hit "Next Blog" a few times and see what you get. I'll still be here when you get back. [WARNING: Some sites may not be safe for work.]
Did you see them? There are Thousands and thousands more just like them, blogs discussing people passions, lives, banalities and irregularities.

Outside of WoW there are a few blogs I go to on a regular basis, a few more on an irregular basis but the huge pile of dross that seems to clog just the arteries of blogger.com is astounding!

I can understand if you want to create a blog to put up pictures of your baby/children so that family and friends can keep tabs on whats going on, but when you start trying to get your baby blog listed on Technorati so complete strangers can watch your children grow up... well thats just wrong on many levels.

Then there are the obsessed fan sites.. people who just post hundreds of images/videos of their object of desire -- I'm not sure whether they want the world to know how great their subject is or they want their subject to notice that they have a stalker?

There are also some neat finds, but usually they are within their own community. I found a site for a Batik Artists who talked about her work and technique and linked to other artists. I've also found television writers, who talk about their work. The first real blog I found, many years ago, was Wil Wheaton's, you know Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation, I don't read it anymore but when I was reading it, I found it quite entertaining.

It's just that if I I hit the "Next Blog" link 50 times, I will get 15 blogs not in English, 7 blogs trying to sell me something (or with lots of links to p0rn), 10 that are total gibberish, 15 that neither me or anyone I know would find interesting, 2 strange conglomerations of videos and 1 that I will take a minute or two to look at and never bother to look at again. In all the times the I have hit this "next blog" button above, (Which I do when I'm bored or in a particularly masochistic mood) I have never, ever found one that I have ever wanted to go back to.

So... what is my point? What is my point? I don't know I guess I see these other blogs and I think that exactly "What is their point?" and I guess I feel lucky that I am part of a larger on-line community that appreciates that I have something to contribute to our passion.

We few, we happy few, we band of WoW players, we have a community, a community that uses the same medium as our blogs (our computers, our connection to the internet), so it is tangential for us to use blogs as a means to divulge information or share tips and tricks. And therefore I happen to think that my blog, my readers, my community is different from the cacophony of voices in the blogsophere. [Edit: Would you believe when I wrote that above paragraph I had no idea that today was St. Crispin's Day?]

So I guess my point is, I appreciate being able to write and I am glad that there are people who appreciate me.

Oh, and hey on Tuesday in Kara the [Worgen Claw Necklace] dropped for me. A huge upgrade! And I think that was the last thing any of use needed from Attunmen, so I think we will be skipping him from now on.

You don't have to be the best, but you do have to be good

Here is the worst secret ever kept: I am not the best hunter in the world. I am not the best hunter on my server, I'm not even the best hunter in my guild. But I read, I study, I have learned my class and now I am a damn good hunter, I've even been called uber by one deranged person.

In World of Warcraft, being the best is not needed. Doing your best is. Take the time to learn to play your main and any high level alts you have. Research strategies and put some time and effort into it and you may be rewarded with people who want to and enjoy playing with you.

If you have tried all those things and people still don't want to group with you, if you just don't have an innate talent for the class you're playing it may be time to re-roll -- test the waters and see if there is another class more to your liking. If you have rolled every class and you still suck, hey switch to Age of Conan, at least you may get laid!

I figure I'm kinda preaching to the choir here, because if you are here, chances are you found me from some better fount of information than my short blog has to offer. But I give most of my post as much effort as I possibly can and I hope that they are helpful to all of us who feel a little left out.

So whatever you choose to do, work hard, put in some effort and try to do good. It will be appreciated.