Decoding Dragons

Shared Topic: When the raid is cancelled I…

This is a Shared Topic post suggested by Deyndor and Light and Leafy.  You can find other posts with this Shared Topic here.

I glance at the nights sign ups, and my heart sinks as I realise we are short a crucial tank, and our melee have all gone on holiday at the same time. When this topic was first suggested I was a member of a raiding guild, and was struggling with a lack of enthusiasm and burn out. As I enter my fourth year of playing WoW, it is a familiar feeling during the spring time. The evenings are lighter, and I am less inclined to want to spend my evening on the computer after a whole day of spreadsheets and fractious emails.

Which made a cancelled raid something of a relief.

Now?

Now I am OFFICER and I must FIGHT THE CANCELLED LINE UP. A cancelled raid now represents a tiny personal failure.

It really shouldn’t be a tiny personal failure. This is an unpaid thing that we all volunteer to do because we like doing things for our friends and with our friends. At least that’s how it works in my guild.

Still, the guilt is there. I take things too personally.

So when a raid is cancelled, it is preceded by a lot of effort into getting it to not be cancelled. I will internally review our currently active raiders, and compare it to our current recruitment and recruitment prospects, trying to figure out if there is a slight change we can make. And I’m not even an actual raid officer, I just pseudo-worry while the Raid Leader and Healing lead do the actual work.

As the new officer in charge of the loot system (although never the designated master looter, thank heavens) I review our current rules and wonder if a tweak will encourage people to sign up more, and drop out less. Perhaps a KP bonus for being early? Tighter controls on the amount of KP given to those who roll up to the instance at start time instead of invite time? Double KP for Ulduar nights?

Time to spend my Neurotic and Emotional Spoons

If you know someone with a an illness or disability, you may have been directed to butyoudontlooksick.com, and a particular post on Spoon Theory. I have similar issues with emotional and physical energy that I’m not going to discuss here, but an especially neurotic (and highly driven, successful) friend of mine commented that he has neurotic ‘spoons’, and that they HAVE to be spent regularly, otherwise he ends up with a backpack full of the things.

As an officer who struggles with social anxiety and guilt issues, I HAVE to spend a certain amount of time and energy analysing my officery ‘views’ and decisions. A lot of second guessing takes place – am I making things too complicated? Am I making a rod for my own back? Am I just being an arse to my guildies by suggesting this? Am I taking into account that they’re all adult individuals and not children? Am I taking agency away? Am I giving people too much/too little credit?

Above all, am I being fair?

I’m very confident that I am not the only officer who looks at the slice of the pie they are responsible for, and feels that the pastry crust is wonky, thin, too brittle, or too fat and chewy.  When a raid is cancelled I cannot rest until I have spent some of my ‘worrying spoons’.

Hmm. Pie.

Time to catch up

Once I have done my ‘worrying’ and managed to discuss it with another officer or my real life partner, I suddenly have a large slice of time to spend. It could go on battleground, on farming, on spending some time at the auction house. If I do something solo I definitely feel as though I have lost time with my guildies, and ‘raid nights are group nights’ is somewhat ingrained in my head.

Indecisions indecisions. Run another bloody heroic again to help someone gear up their fifth alt, and build a little more of my own resto set, or spend the evening on the seesaw that is PvP. One minute I’m AWESOME AND KILLING LOADS and the next I’m the number one kill target and I die quick and it’s no fun.

More often than not

I log off and watch Glee, The Good Wife or Stargate Universe. Or Dr Who.

WEEPING ANGELS BRB HIDING BEHIND SOFA.

Shared Topic: When the raid is cancelled I… was published on April 28th, 2010, with the tags , , , , , , , , , , , , under the Meta-blog, Warcraft category. There are currently 3 comments on this article so far.

Starting Over: Gnome Anklets

The questions posted by Blog Azeroth’s shared question this week is what we would do if we started again from scratch with our characters. I find this a difficult question to answer because I’m kind of happy where I am, in game at least, and am not motivated or thinking of a character that might have been. The only situations that I could envisage having to start over completely would be some sort of utter humiliation or outrage with my current guild. I can see myself wishing to leave such a situation behind completely. Even down to mothballing my old character.

So, I would be extremely emotional. If I had to start out, from scratch, I would be switching from caster dps to a tanking character. My two favourite alts right at the moment are a little dwarf retribution paladin, and a gnomish arms warrior. I’ve tanked a couple of Scarlet Monestaries on my Paladin, but tanking in general is a completely new vista to me.

I have been a pvp-disc healer. I have been a pve-healer. I have been a hardcore shadow priest. I have levelled as an enhancement shaman. I have played Elemental both as pvp and pve (I do this without any pvp gear, so I get mixed results. It depends on whether the hordies realise I’m a glass cannon and start splatting me on sight. If they don’t I tend to come out with a lot of HKs and a lot of killing blows.) I’ve healed as a shaman also, in various settings.

I’ve spent a lot of time roleplaying.

But tanking? Well. Changes of scenery are always good for the soul. I can’t decide if it would be a paladin or a warrior, but it would be a dwarf female. I first started playing WoW when I was very low in self esteem. I picked humans first, and then switched to the Draenei when TBC came out. WoW was an escape, an illusion. An escape from my life and my body. I am not ashamed to admit that I am a fat female gamer, and I played Draenei because I didn’t want to be that person anymore.

And now? Now I am in a much better place. I like myself a lot more. And the dwarf woman is now an attractive avatar to me, because it is much more real to me, and in turn makes the game more immersive. Despite being 5’8″, I feel I could cosplay a female dwarf. Don’t ask why this is important to me, because it makes no sense (I’ve never cosplayed anything in my life, and I can’t afford to.)

A female, dwarf, tank. Armour plated femininity.

Huh.

Actually my first thought when I started writing this was that I would level my warrior gnome to be a tank, especially to piss of our much loved guild master. He hates gnome tanks as a raid leader because he can never see where they are. I get pictures of my little gnome gnawing on Deathwing’s ankles to keep his attention while the rest of the raid looks on in horror.

Starting Over: Gnome Anklets was published on March 29th, 2010, with the tags , , , , , , , , , , , under the Meta-blog, Warcraft category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.

Shared Topic: This is a Conversation

No comments = better bloggers?.This is the question posted by this week’s Blogazeroth shared topic, as proposed by Anea. I don’t normally do these as they tend to be a bit offtopic for my blog (which already runs the gamut from mental health issues to elemental shaman theorycrafting, and I find that a bit stretching at times.) However I think it is important to establish why one blogs.

Blogs, Journals, Diaries, Letters

Blogging is not entirely new and unique to the computer age, in my opinion. It follows in a long line of semi-public correspondence, memoirs, journalling, letters to the newspaper. Granted, the responses are much quicker and the readership more random and open. And anonymous. And unedited. I think you get the picture anyway, but the readership is open, and topics are subject to public response. On matters believed important enough, this happens via newspaper opinion columns, letters to the editor in more serious papers, and full on journal articles in the humanities and sciences.

I swear, during my post-graduate studies, half the journal articles I read were littered with passive aggressive personal attacks on ‘rivals’ in the field. Pettiness does not disappear in more academic circles, sadly.

In the days before the telephone and the more widespread newspaper, letters could be fairly public things. Many an intellectuals personal correspondence is published after they have passed on. The privacy of letters is something of a modern concept. Letters controlled the spread of ideas, and formed the basis of intellectual exchange between philosophers and scientists for hundreds of years, and were often written under the assumption that they would be read by more than the intended recipient.  As letter writing has declined, blogging increases. Even if the blogging is sometimes bite-sized. Twitter is many conversations, formed a line at a time, and displayed for public consumption.

Blog-o-sphere is not a forum or a guild

Now, there has been recent hubbub that I feel Tam has summarised neatly here, and one of the topics that came up there was ‘it is a public forum, prepare to be publicly answered.’ I think it is very easy to forget that our posts are accessible by everyone. You can of course make your blog accessible to only a few, and the privacy of what you post is then under your control. Post it in the sphere of ‘opinionators’ and it is subject to dissection, denouncement, praise, and so on – possibly from people you had no idea existed.

Now, where blogging does differ from the literary/academic/newspaper mediums is the immediacy of the community. However this community is not like other communities. The blogging community is not like a forum or a guild, because it is hundreds (thousands) of individual opinionators, opinionating in their own style and with no moderator or editor to slap their hand and tell them to write something else, or avoid certain topics. If a blogger wants to post paragraphs of nonsensical babble, there is no moderator to come along and delete the post as spam. If a blogger wants to post an article condemning raiders for being elitist no life bastards, there is no guild leader to /gkick them for disrespecting other members of the community.

There is a certain amount of leadership by popularity, but large blogs such as PPI and Tobold would never claim that he is in charge of anything, and I don’t think any little blogger would want that to pass.

So, Pewter, ‘conversation’? Remember the title of this post?

I blog when I feel I have something to say to the WoW Community at large. I comment on others because they say things which prompt things in me, and get me mulling over certain topics. I blog to share information, to improve my writing (slowly but surely, thank you for your patience.) I blog to hear points of view thrown back at me. To link in to the earlier analogy of letters, I write in my blog because I don’t write to my friends and certainly not on these topics. I don’t think turning comments off, or ignoring other blogs would make me a better blogger, because the dialogue would inevitably be one-sided.

Not that it isn’t already. A blog without comments is something like a soapbox or a pulpit. We would denounce, we would preach, but we wouldn’t connect, and connecting and the desire to connect is one of those fundamentals of being human.

Shared Topic: This is a Conversation was published on March 22nd, 2010, with the tags , , , , , , , under the Meta-blog category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.