The Cranky Old Gnome

Alright, so I’m not a computer programmer so I don’t know all the ins and outs of servers and instances and such.  What I do know is that when I log in on a Saturday night and can’t log in to any instance or raid I get rather upset.   I try not to rail on Blizzard specifically too much for issues.  Most of my daily gripes are player related.  First it was “additional instances cannot be launched.”  Now, it’s “transfer aborted: Instance not found.”

I don’t know what that means in computer speak.  What I do know is it’s obnoxious.  I’m not surprised that something like this happened.  WoW is a computer program.  Computer programs have bugs.  What’s actually bothering me is that there is no information about the problem.  Not even an acknowledgment.  By the time most people read this post, it’s likely that Blizzard will have given some info and the problem might even be fixed.  But for now, nothing.  Not a single blue post on the forums.

All I wish for is an acknowledgment of an issue.  A blue post that says, “hey here’s an issue.  This is why it’s happening (we think).  Here is what we are doing.”  I don’t even need an estimation of how long they think it will take.  I just want to know that Blizzard is doing SOMETHING.

Oh well.  It’s not really that big of a deal and it will be fixed soon.  It’s just annoying.

“[Insert clever sign off phrase here]”

~Fizz

So one of rumouncements (that’s rumor/announcements for those of you playing along at home) posted on WoW.com today was about the retaking of Gnomeregan.  Seeing as how this issue is near and dear to my heart I was super excited to see a semi-official source saying that we will be retaking Gnomerergan.  I looked at the image in the article and read the text in it, “For Gnomeregan! After five years of players purging Gnomeregan of its irradiated inhabitants, Gnomes may finally be able to reclaim their home as a new capital city for the Alliance…”

Seriously. Awesome.

However my joy was short lived.  First I had to bring myself back down to reality and remember that this was all hearsay and speculation anyway.  The second thing that I realized was I had missed the last part of the text in the quote on the image. “…until they mess it up again.”

Ok look.  I love gnomish engineering in all its quirks.  Sometimes the failures are more fun and exciting than the actual intent of the device (catastrophic poultryizer failure anyone?), and it’s these little quirks that make playing Gnomes fun.  We’re eccentric, clever, ingenious, and loyal.  We are not however, children, footballs, fools, or failures.

What I’m getting at I suppose is I am bothered by the continual lack of respect for gnomes, and to a somewhat lesser extent, the players who play them.  I’m not railing against the taunts and cries of the Horde.  They are the opposing side.  They are supposed to hate us.  I’m bothered by those who would call us allies.  Goodhearted teasing isn’t the problem.  I tease my friend who plays a Night Elf about being a dang dirty lazy hippie.  So when a few jokes about my stature or the reach of my arm comes my way, it doesn’t phase me.  It’s when people step in with the attitude (and sometimes the phrase), “Step aside shorty, let the real heroes take care of this.”  It shows a fundamental lack of faith and trust.  So when I read that we might get to retake Gnomeregan “until [we] mess it up again” I can’t help but feel the heavily implied (intended or not) disrespect.

Don’t write us off.

You may regret it.

“[Insert clever sign off phrase here]”

~Fizz

PS: Anyone who doesn’t think that the gnomes are heavily denigrated, just go read the comments in that post I mentioned.  Yes, many of the comments are cheers of huzzah, and there are an equal amount of people crying “If you give the Gnomes back their home, the Trolls should get theirs too.”  But if you really read the comments, you will pick up on an immense amount of flippant disregard for the Gnomes.

PPS: Just as a side note, for anyone wondering, yes I support the Trolls getting their own city (whether it be the Echo Isles or not).

My brother and I used to play a game as kids (that I would imagine lots of you reading played too) called the floor is lava.  The basic premise is fairly simple.  The floor is lava, and if you touch it you die.  That meant if you wanted to cross a room you would have to stay on the furniture or get real creative with couch cushions.  If you wanted to go down a hallway you could use the laundry basket ferry boat, which required a toll, or you could try and spider walk down the hall.  For those of you who don’t know what that means–you stretch out your arms and legs until either your legs are on one wall and your arms on the other or your right arm/leg are on one wall and your left arm/leg is on the other.  Then you ‘walk’ your way down the hall, only touching the walls.

This lead to hours of fun, fights, and arguing over whether someone really touched the floor and if they really are dead or not. “You touched the floor!”  “Nuh-uh!”  “Yes-huh! I saw you, your toe touched.” “No it didn’t you big fat doody head.”  “You’re a doody head!”  “Fart sniffer!” “Lint licker!” “Buttmunch!”  “Sissy!”  The insults would continue until either one person gave in, or somebody threw the first punch.  Ah.  Good times.

Anyway, it has become readily apparent to me that my childhood game prepared me quite well for their instances and raids.  The floor is lava. Or poison. Or ice.  Or something else very bad.  The floor is death.

Say that again, with me this time.

The Floor is Death.

If you are fighting along and suddenly the floor changes in any way, be it a thick black cloud, a change in color, a rune type thing, or…well, lava, then it’s time to move.  I cannot stress this enough.  Get. Out. Of. The. Floor. Death. Seriously.

It’s a lot harder for me to keep track of it when I’m tanking, because most of the time all I see is the bosses kneecaps or bootstraps, but as a healer I’m in the back and I can see what’s going on, and it’s ridiculous how many people will stay in the same place when the floor changes.  I really don’t know how they have never picked up on the floor is where death comes from.

Maybe it’s the fact that on very rare occasions (Hodir comes to mind) there are spots on the floor that when they change, that’s the only safe place to be.  And maybe the first raid they ever went on and the first boss fight they ever fought was one of those bosses where the changing floor wasn’t death.

But that seems very unlikely.

Just remember boys and girls, all you would be raiders and heroic runners:

The floor is lava.

“[Insert clever sign off phrase here]”

~Fizz

So last Saturday night I was having a real off-night.  First off I was late to the weekly raid of my shaman’s guild because I thought it was Sunday (the raid, I mean–for some reason I thought it was on Sunday).  I had been distracted all day because I had been helping my girlfriend take care of her recently spayed rabbits.  Poor little things were having a hard time because they wanted to lay down on the wood floor, but it was too cold for their shaved bellies.

Anyway, I was late to the raid.  I felt bad because right now that guild is progressing through Ulduar and we are working on Hodir.  I don’t claim to be more valuable than anyone else, but because I have been there during our learning phase, my role as a resto shaman is kinda key to downing Hodir. But it’s no more key than our druid tank or our mage dps, etc etc.  The point is, because I was late I figured they wouldn’t be able to run Ulduar.  Well it turns out there weren’t enough sign ups anyway, and they had decided to run Naxx to gear up some alts.

Well they summoned me in and I got all ready to heal.  We were working in the Construct Quarter, and they had already taken down Patchwerk.  For some reason, we were all having serious issues with frogger.  I died twice in a row.  Then we got to um…that boss right after that whose name escapes me at the moment.  Grobbulus, that’s it.  We wiped hard on him.  People were having a hard time staying out of the poison and the tanks couldn’t seem to pick up the slimes.

We all ended up at the graveyard and started to fly back.  I got halfway there and somehow dismounted myself.  I plummeted to earth, slammed into the side of the mountain, bounced off, fell a few more feet…and died.  I finally got myself back to Naxx, got to frogger…and died.  I had died so many times in a row, I had a 2 minute timer before I could be resurrected.  I got back to Naxx, got through frogger, and we took down Grobbulus.  We headed up to the pipe/tunnel right before Gluth.

I bet the astute reader will guess what happened next.  I fell off the pipe.  And then I died to frogger.

*face/palm*

On Monday night I was working on leveling my tauren druid.

(Just a quick little back story on him: when I first created my troll shaman, I needed a bank alt, much like I had on the Alliance side.  I had tried a night elf druid, but just couldn’t get past the fact that I hate night elves so much.  But my hatred of Night Elves is best left for another post.  Anyway–I needed a bank alt, and my roommate convinced me that I should try a druid; he suggested that the reason I never got my old one past level 10 and why I eventually deleted him was not because of the class but the elves.  So I created him, and he stayed low level for a long long time.  But once I got my shaman to 80 and started healing I discovered I really enjoy being a healer.  And I also really enjoy being a tank.  So the possibility of playing a class capable of playing both really intrigues me.  So I’m now trying to level him to 80.  And for those wondering, yes, I also have a paladin I’m working on.)

Anyway, I was working on a quest in Desolace which required me to go to the north-east corner and kill a bunch of Hatefury Satyrs.  One quest simply required me to kill a certain number of various types of the Hatefuries.  But one of them required me to get a scalp from a Shadowstalker.  First I had a hard time finding Shadowstalkers.  Then the ones I did find just wouldn’t drop the scalp.  It was getting rather frustrating.  But then I had an epiphany.

Thistlefizz to the rescue!

I switched to my little warrior and made my way to Desolace.  As I recall I took my Ultrasafe Transporter: Gadgetzan, and was turned into a kobol, and then a trogg.  So much for ultrasafe.  Then I flew up to Nijel’s Point, and headed over to the Hatefury area.  My plan was to kill every Hatefury that wasn’t a Shadowstalker (so the rogues, betrayers, tricksters, etc).  I killed satyr after satyr.  At first I was just going to kill enough to get 20 or so Shadowstalkers to leave for my druid.  But after a while it sort of became an obsession.  I wanted to get every mob in the area to turn into a Shadowstalker.  I thought I was getting close until I discovered a secondary area with more Satyrs.  *sigh*  Ok, well, it shouldn’t take too much longer…after all I was only…two hours in.  It became a pattern.  Mount up, ride to a non-Shadowstalker, charge then shield slam, revenge, shockwave, or thunderclap.  Then mount up and do it again.

It was sort of hypnotic.  And  I was lucky in that no-one else wanted to have anything to do with the area so I didn’t have to worry about the Shadowstalkers I was spawning getting killed.  Everything was going great.  I had finally converted some of the most stubborn ones in the area.  There only remained 10 or so (out of 50-ish?), and I was ready to kill them good.  But then this message flashed in my chat box.

Server restart in [15:00].

I…but…you just…they can’t….*urk*

I immediately switched over to my druid, which of course due to lag too me 12 minutes.  Ok maybe that’s an exaggeration, but not much.  I started killing shadowstalkers left and right with the clock running down.  But no scalp.   I was starting to panic.  [10:00] Keep going! [5:00]  It’ll drop off the next one! [1:00] Crap I need mana! [:45]  Now I need energy! [:30] Ok I can get this [:15] last mob!  Hey! There it is! Let me just click on the…[You Have Been Disconnected From the Server]

Dammit.

“[Insert clever sign off phrase here]”

~Fizz