MMXI

So, it's been a while.

I did something I've never done before in WoW. I sent out Christmas and New Year greetings to people -- and because I was/am in something of a sentimental mood, they varied from including actual presents, to including joke-nostalgia presents, to just containing words of good-will for 2011. I'm now on Defias Brotherhood, where I don't know many people, so quite a few of these messages were on servers I once called home, to people I rarely talk to any more.

I should probably find time to update this again. It would do me good.

Happy New Year, everyone. Celebrate well.

Wowhead Priests

... have the best community in WoW. Evidence here. I love you guys.

Almost a pet class

So, there are some amusing changes currently on the Beta regarding Shadow Priests. The new PvP talent, Sin and Punishment, has been developed further with elements that PvE players will enjoy. And I really hope it stays the way it currently looks.

Obviously, all those pesky things like crit rating and haste rating will be harder to acquire in Cataclysm and will result, therefore, in us having less of them percentage-wise. But, still, what? 20 second reduction on Shadowfiend just from critting with Mind Flay? In 9-10 crits, assuming a 15% crit chance, you've reset the cooldown. That's ... We're going to be swimming in mana, and more than ever will we be using Shadowfiend for the damage it will deal rather than the mana it provides. Archangel will result in high uptime on a large mana restore...

But maybe I am thinking about this the wrong way. I have had the growing concern that Mind Spike is going to replace a great amount of Mind Flay's damage in Cataclysm. Expressing this as a "concern" is a slightly silly thing to do, of course. Think about it: Mind Blast will have a 6.5 second cooldown in Cataclysm. That means that, between each Mind Blast, you can fit two Mind Spikes and a Mind Flay, with a bit of dead space (0.5 seconds plus hasted excess).

At this stage of the beta, I posit that this will be the best way to DPS: The Mind Spikes will give the subsequent Mind Blast an extra 60% chance to crit on that target and cause it to be instant. The Mind Flay will refresh SW: P and keep Evangelism ticking over, ready to be consumed by Archangel when you're at five stacks. (Look at the disparity between Evangelism and Archangel, by the way. Archangel isn't a nuke button; it's a "Use whenever you get five stacks" button. 15% on all damage rather than 10% on periodical damage? No-brainer.) You then have a half-GCD's worth of dead space. You can fill that with a DoT refresh, another Mind Spike, or a Shadow Word: Death if that proves to be good with its relevant talent.

And if this is the correct way to go, we'll need all that extra mana. Mind Spike is almost twice as expensive as Mind Flay.

Looking forward to it, in either case.

And it's over

After much QQ,
Wowhead ends their beta trial
of polling systems.

Cataclysm

My internet is being retarded, so I'll keep this one short from my phone.

Cataclysm is a four-syllable word.

Haiku contest? Hells yes.

So, I'm going to Ireland shortly -- and I will need to do something on the plane. As if by magic, Wowhead announces a haiku competition.

They have no idea how hard I am going to spam them when I get back tomorrow.

Additionally, my luck has been utterly bloody ludicrous. I have a guaranteed job at the end of my six-month placement with my place of work (details to be discussed on Monday), and my Stormrage Death Knight hit level 80 last night... And look how geared he is. Yes, that is Needle-Encrusted Scorpion. Yes, I ran FoS specifically to get it before signing myself for the daily random. Yes, there was zero competition because both of the other DPS were casters and the tank didn't roll need. Yes, it was my very first heroic -- and I earned the "Dungeon and Raid Emblem" achievement from it when Bronjahm died.

I fucking love my life. See you tomorrow, bitches.

Americanisms, Part II

This isn't another rant. It's just an amusing coincidence. 10 days after I posted this, this appeared on YouTube.

Like I say, it is an amusing coincidence. I love David Mitchell, and I think he rants about the subject way better than I did. I like to think I successfully held the fort while he constructed a much better demonstration of why "I could care less" is idiotic.

RealID Addendum.

I do, however, feel that it is very wrong of Blizzard to push through Forum RealID if they have decided that Blizzard's own staff will not have their names displayed for "Security reasons".

I don't support hypocrisy in any form.

RealID.

This will be a big post. Like, really big. Because it's a big issue, and it's one that the privacy brigade -- the "Hockey moms" and the Daily Mail readers -- have all wrong. But, frankly, when do they stop to apply their walnut brains?

(If you're offended by the outset without even looking at the content I'm about to pour out, you have proven my first point. Congratulations for being a walking foil for my cynicism. It's all right. I won't force you to strain your least-exercised muscle. I do hope you feel small in the process of clicking the X in the corner, though.)

So, RealID: Blizzard's new pet that it is rolling out throughout the new Battle.net system. This post is going to be one huge counter-rant against all the people I mention in the first paragraph. To give it some structure, I will be working through this Wowhead blog post on the subject. I'll pick out the quotes that capture the essence of the arguments against this system, and will comprehensively destroy them in order of importance and distance from the central point (i.e., the points that cause me to go on tangents will be placed later on in the article).

But, first, if you genuinely don't already know what I'm on about, here's the essentials: Blizzard, having created a "RealID" friends list (which, it turns out, does not require you to know more than one friend's e-mail address, since you can then pull the other people off their friends-of-friends list -- so, well done, guys, your security is actually not at all affected there either), is changing the official forum structure. When the new Battle.net system is rolled out, alongside Starcraft II, all official forum posts will use RealID instead of character aliases for the cognomines (that's the correct plural of cognomen, by the way) of those who post there.

People who were up-in-arms about RealID friends lists are, of course, up-in-arms about this, waving around the same old, tired arguments. So, let me set the scene further by pointing out the benefit that no sane person can deny: Real accountability. No level 1 alts clogging up the system with purely retarded posts. Actual names with actual recognition will cause this to be a thing of the past. People will still post stupid shit, and people will still troll, but they will have to consider that it is their real name being displayed when they do it.
This works the other way, too: people who have written guides and who are very proud of their positive contributions to the official forums will now get proper recognition. I do not at all suggest that they're going to be winning Nobel Prizes for literature with their fanfics, or whatever, but, if they have any sense of self, they will enjoy seeing their name there. It helps one's ego, even just a fraction of a fraction, when one encounters someone else who recognises their alias -- so how about someone recognising their name?

This is summed up perfectly by this post by ceto:

I think this is bound to increase the quality of discussion on the forums. Posts actually mean something when you sign your name at the bottom. Likewise when you're replying to someone with a name. You might feel no qualms telling Omgbeefeater, Level 3 Tauren Druid, that he's full of fail and should kill himself. Now you're , telling the same thing to David Anderson. Maybe the conversation just got a little more civil. Or maybe you just stopped posting to the forums. Either way, quality won.

This is the best thing that could happen to the crowded, noisy World of Warcraft forums.

So, let's delve into the realms of pucks and racism.

Compromised Security

This is the main thrust of the nay-sayers' argument. They claim that, because information based on one's legal name is publicly available, they open themselves up to all kinds of attacks and fraud just by posting on the official forums. That, regardless of their post's content, they will be targeted.

Random targeting

That bit in italics will be my first counter-question: Why would someone target you when the only thing you did was post on the forums? Assuming the mark had nothing to do with the content you posted, it can only have been random. Newsflash: randomised targeting of people to exploit is not a new thing. It has been around for hundreds -- hell, fucking thousands -- of years. Since the dawn of time, one dishonest man has stolen from another whom he targeted semi-, if not completely, randomly. You can be targeted at any time by anyone. If you're seriously worried about this on the WoW forums, you must live in fear, surely? You must be aware of the dangers of, y'know, existing on this planet? How on Earth do you cope with crossing the road ten times a day?

I'll stop the silly rhetorical questions and ask the main one behind this point: How is it that you are going to be targeted, randomly, through the WoW forums, in a way that you could not be targeted by any other person in any other medium? Answer: you're not. Yes, I guess it must suck that, until now, the WoW forums had been a cocoon for you in which you felt that nothing could harm you. If you did feel that the WoW forums were safe before RealID then you are blind or stupid. Nowhere on the internet is safe -- it's the same level of danger as crossing the road (i.e., low-level), but not completely safe.

Malicious targeting

So, we can discredit randomised targeting as a valid reason for disliking RealID -- or, at least, a valid reason for disliking RealID more than, say, signing up for a mobile phone contract and ticking the "Do not share my information with third parties" box. We now turn to malicious targeting. In other words, targeting which has been caused by the direct or indirect result of the actual content that a user has posted.

So I'll get the short one out of the way: if you're posting stupid shit at the present time on the WoW Forums, I would recommend that you stop posting, since, yes, by some degree of logic people could maliciously target you for posting stupid shit. I will go on to explain how even the fear of that is unfounded (using a degree of logic much more advanced than the one mentioned in the previous sentence), but, if you want to play it safe, you can do us all a favour and take your ball home with you. As shown in the quote earlier, the prospective improvement of post quality in the WoW Forums, as a result of RealID, is a good thing.

Now, some slightly longer, more advanced arguments:

The likelihood of being targeted effectively is incredibly small.

I entered that Wowhead thread at this point.

Xaratherus: Give me your name and two hours. I'll give you a call.
Sinespe: Chris de Lacy. Go for it.

Over the course of the next two pages, Xaratherus showed me the following.
1) Three links (Gone Blogal, Twitter and Facebook) that I knew were in the public domain. Look -- I've even linked them here, too!
2) One link (192.com) which garnered no information that he could use. It wasn't even that 192.com did have the correct information and that it would yield it for a fee. The information it had was completely wrong, and the only places where it even came close to the mark was three years out of date.
3) That he is a retarded 11-year-old.

Xaratherus: If I had the desire, and financial resources, to dig a bit deeper, I could find more.
Sinespe: Except, you couldn't, because that second link sees only one Chris de Lacy in Exeter, and it has the age range completely wrong -- yet, my age, I'm pretty sure, is publicly accessible somewhere too. "I could if I wanted to" is not valid argument ... It's 11-year-old logic, at most. So, please, come back with something more substantial. I'm waiting for my phone-call.
[...]
Xaratherus: When exactly did I say that I would restrict my search to the public domain?
Sinespe: Quite a few times. Because you "don't have/want to use the resources to search deeper". You're just making wild assumptions now about whether I can or cannot be located. All you have done is claimed you can find me and then backed away from it, falling back on "Well, I could if I wanted to!". It invalidates your argument utterly. In short, I've called your bluff. So, please, stop talking. And, in future, maybe you'll learn not to make grandiose claims before checking whether you can actually live up to the bluff. It'll make you look less stupid. You do feel stupid, I hope? Doesn't matter if you're behind an alias -- anonymity doesn't protect you from that.

(I'm done, by the way. I've proven my point; you haven't proven yours, nor do you intend to.)

I will return to Xaratherus later, because he is an incredibly amusing hypocrite on another issue of security which is a mirror-image of this one. That is something of a tangent, though, so I will stick to my point here.

I cannot be located in any meaningful way using a Google search. I do not deny that, if someone had a lot of time and a lot of contacts, that person could find out whatever they liked about me ... But that returns to my random targeting point: That could happen at any point and for any/no reason. Why is RealID, specifically, going to be the catalyst that causes me to become the subject of fraud or stalking? Answer: It's not. The information I have made publicly available has been done so by my own hand, with my own knowledge. I have control over it. Oh, speaking of which:

Stalking

If someone knows where I live, they can stalk me. There you go: I said it. 1-0 to the Daily Mail? Not so fast! There are a number of reasons why I don't care; and, moreover, why no one is going to stalk me.

1) I can, and will, call the police. They can, and will, deal with it. Ironically, the reason why they are likely to deal with it is exactly because of Daily Mail scare stories. That is, I will admit, the advantage of the tabloid press: they do make people aware of the dangers of the modern world. The problem with the them is that they exaggerate everything. (In the Daily Mail's case, everything gives you cancer. No, seriously, I mean it.)

2) I am a nobody, frankly. And, further frankly, so are all of you; paranoia is one of the highest forms of arrogance. And, damn, am I ever arrogant. I do not run my own company, I have very little money to my name, I am not famous in any way. I'm reasonably good-looking, I'm informed, but someone is more likely to stalk me for that reason outside of WoW than as a consequence of posting on the WoW forums. Even if you are notorious in a WoW context, you aren't going to be stalked. So get over yourself.

But enough about me. What about other people's concerns that they will be stalked or e-stalked? Well, let's see the arguments:

1) Female gamers (such as myself) who do not wish to be "targeted", either in game or offline.

So, apparently there is a third potential target criterion: being female in a male-dominated environment (which WoW is: 84% of its population is male). Fair enough; you could be targeted just because you're female. But, again, I'd have to ask the question: who on earth is going to do that? It'd have to be a really dedicated kind of crazy to go to all the trouble of stalking someone from a WoW forum, when (and I'm almost sorry to be crude, but this is criminal logic) there are far more accessible, immediate targets in the real world. The "female gamer" angle can only be spun from a purely sexual perspective, so, by its very nature, it falls flat on its face.

2) I have already covered.

3) Users getting fired or disciplined at work for posting on Blizzard forums.
5) Exploitation of children who must now either post under their real name, or not be allowed to post at all.

Apparently it is Blizzard's fault that you're slacking off at work. Nice scapegoating tactic, there. You might as well also blame YouTube. Hell, why not go the whole hog and blame Google? WoW has been used as a scapegoat throughout that Wowhead thread for bad parenting and bad self-discipline. Sorry, but those arguments are incredibly old and incredibly tired. They have no weight behind them; they never did. Oh no, children are going to be forbidden from posting on the WoW forums. What a huge loss to the community. (I'll be coming onto community later, too.)

4) Users being discriminated against by potential employers, friends, romantic partners based on easily searched gaming habits.

a) Employers. Illegal. You can sue. Well, if you can prove that i) that was the reason you weren't chosen for the post, ii) that reason was not sufficient grounds for refusal, and iii) that you were otherwise the most qualified and capable person for the post. And, frankly, any employer who does that much of a background check on you before you even get hired is very likely to fire you six months down the line for whatever s/he can. Lack of trust does not make for good business arrangements in 90% of circumstances.

b) All of my friends know that I play WoW. Know why they're friends? Because they accept it as part of who I am. Get new friends, frankly. Don't bother with people who don't want to bother with you. This logic extends to c). I don't understand why you would want to be with someone who dislikes something that you do on a regular basis, if you personally like that regular thing and have no desire, now or in the future, to stop it. It is just going to cause more hassle than it could ever be worth. I can understand compromise, but that is not what is being implied in c). What is being implied in c) is someone who, upon hearing that you play WoW, either tries to make you stop altogether or just doesn't want to see you any more as a result. Again, why bother with someone like that who cannot accept you for who you are?

I think I've covered the main points of the whole "I'm going to get stalked/have my identity stolen" brigade now, so I will just finish with my Xaratherus-based tangent.

Authenticators

I could be wrong, but I'm fairly sure that Xaratherus has locked horns with me before. If it was not him, then I apologise, but I'm going to forge ahead anyway and claim it was him because I am 90% sure it was.

I am an authenticator-denier. By that, I mean I do not subscribe at all to the theory that, if you have an authenticator, you're not going to get hacked. We know that's not true, and I've had it demonstrated to me how it can be done. Yes, it is more elaborate than a simple keylogger, but it's enough to make you realise that you don't want to lax on security.

Xaratherus's argument is that Man in the Middle attacks are too elaborate to be considered a viable threat. Yet, this is the same Xaratherus who claims that just by giving him my name he can find out everything about me. Do you see the double-standard? It's pretty subtle, so I'll use an analogue.

Man in the Middle attacks : Deep Privacy Searches :: Keyloggers : Google searches.

See what I mean? The person who claims that an authenticator will provide nigh-on immunity from being attacked is the same person allowing himself to react in a knee-jerk fashion to the idea that people's real names can be googled. Just as Man in the Middle attacks require more set-up than a simple keylogger, so too do deep privacy searches than Googling. There are already so many other reasons why someone would want to perform an MitM attack (a deep privacy search): a WoW account (a real name on a WoW forum) is not going to be high up the list.

Business sense

People seem to think that this is a bad idea because it will lose Blizzard money due to its unpopularity. People also seem to think that this decision was made because the only thing that Blizzard cares about is money. Sorry, what? How does that work, exactly? Either it will gain them money or lose them money. You can't claim that it is unpopular but that it will make them money.

I can assure you all that Blizzard is going to profit off of this; or, if not profit, it is not going to lose money. Know why? Because Blizzard is a business, and it has been a business for over ten years. It knows about market research, and that you don't take any action without first carrying out market research. They are big boys now. They can look after themselves. Whatever changes you might perceive as being crackpot ideas have actually been considered from a business and practicality perspective. In short: Blizzard> You.

Community

This post sickened me.

Krypter: That's going to kill their forums quite a bit. People are going to be too scared to post things since the great thing about forum communities is the sense of anonymity. Now you have to worry about your idea or post being taken the wrong way, and someone finding you on Facebook and making your life miserable. No thanks.

"The great thing about forum communities is the sense of anonymity"? What? No... Sorry, I think you must have misspoke. You aren't anonymous in a forum community unless that forum "community" is /b/. Remind me: Why is that community "great", again? Do you really want to put forward /b/ as an argument in favour of anonymity?

No, what you meant to say was that forum communities give you an alias. You are still known by a name -- it's just not your real name. Your alias can still be brought into disrepute. Your alias will still carry with it the mark of whatever you choose to post. Your alias will be branded in people's minds as "Helpful" or "Unhelpful". If "Unhelpful", at some point, you're still going to have to leave that community owing to everyone eventually ignoring you, after your constant asstardery.

Opt-in & "The majority of people do not want this"

It just is an opt-in. The forums are not the game. I'm pretty sure that the majority of people do not even know that the forums exist, let alone post on them. At the end of the day, WoW is a game, and there are other avenues to give your feedback. Hell, you can post on the Wowhead forums to give your feedback: Blizzard does read those. Nothing has actually been lost in this respect, because your views will still get across if you publicise them in equally notable venues.

_________

And, with that, I think I'm done. There's a whole slew of other stuff about this issue that I think I wanted to say, but which I simply can't remember at the moment. Oh well. I think 3.3k words is long enough for one night.

Wall of Whispers.

All I am going to do here is link you to a tweet.

Dear America (and the World, by Extension),

Now, I don't follow football. Especially where the World Cup is concerned, I think it is a blight, especially for the English, who seem to like to take it as an opportunity to show the hosting nation just how full of pathetic hooligans England is.

However, it is in my best interests that England stay in for as long as possible, since it means that, whenever England are playing a match, I get to socialise with certain people and do certain things with an increased frequency -- plus, everywhere in town is nice and quiet because everyone is in pubs or at home watching the matches.

So if you guys could let us get to the semi-finals, at least, that would be nice. Go on. Do it for your old pal Sinespe. He likes getting tail.

The Huge, Throbbing Stick and the Tiny Carrot

No euphemisms here.

This is what happens when you are useful.

This is what happens when you are useless. (See over the page, too.)

Take your pick, ladies and gents.

Touched by a Troll on YouTube!

http://www.youtube.com/trolltouched

I'm not telling you which voice is mine.

Raid SHeroics

We tried Earth, Wind and Fire tonight.

Dear God it is hard.

We'll get it later in the week.

HTC Bastard.

DISCLAIMER: O2 are awesome people. I am retarded.

For six years, I have had the same phone: my trusty Nokia 7250i. Given that it is now more rusty than trusty, I figured it was time to get a new one.

So, I go to the o2 store. I happened to see the HTC Desire, which was described by one of my friends as, "Like an iPhone, but without the restrictions that come with an apple logo." I had a nice long talk with the trainee who had asked if I needed any help, and he gave me the outline of the pay monthly tariffs (I am currently, and always have been, Pay as You Go, but recently I have found that I am in need of talk-time, owing to being in contact with one of my long-lost school friends, rather than so many hundred free texts per month; calls to other networks being needlessly excessively expensive as they are, I figured I'd go Contract and get some free ones).

I, intelligently, I thought, said that I would go away and think about it for a while before deciding whether I wanted it. Because I really did want it, but I didn't want just to get it on impulse. So I went away, spoke with my mum, outlined what I intended to do (my sister is the complete opposite of this: whenever she gets a new phone or car, mum knows after the event. I figured I could do with a voice of reason, however), and asked her if she thought it was a good idea. She did, so I went back to the store and asked to get it. Here begins my long journey filled with trepidation on the road to entering the 21st century 10 years too late.

Problem 1: Saturday 22nd May: Phone not in stock. This is fine, it's perfectly common. The chap I spoke to was very nice and said that he would take my name and number, and would phone me when they knew that they were getting some more in. This was duly done on Wednesday, and the phonecall detailed that a new delivery of Desires would be in on Thursday and ready by 12 o'clock. Okay, I said, I'll come in after work.

Problem 2: Thursday 27th May, 2.30 p.m.: I don't have my account number to hand. That's fine, I thought, I'll go to my bank and get a statement with it printed on. I'll be back, I said, after a meeting that I had at three o'clock. So, I went to my bank. While I was getting my statement, the cashier asked me if my address was still correct. It had not been correct since I had started going to university, and I thought that now might be a good time to update it. So, I told her my new address, and the system was updated.

Problem 3: Thursday 27th May, 5.10 p.m.: Card declined in O2 store. Wrong address: Because of how banks work, it would take a while for my updated details to be completely fed through the system. As a result, my updated address, for the time-being, would not work for such things as setting up a Direct Debit for a phone contract. I was advised by Fred, the person who has the misfortune of dealing with such an idiot but who is very kind and polite about the whole thing and entirely sees my perspective. He advised that I come back tomorrow and try it again.

Problem 4: Friday 28th May: O2 Exeter's linked computer systems are down. My card is still declining on the non-linked, manual system. I am advised to come back tomorrow.

Someone doesn't want me to get my new phone. I am determined that tomorrow there will be no more hitches and that I will get the arsing thing.

UPDATE 29th May: Still nothing. Apparently it could be a credit issue, which is pretty retarded, so I now have to wait for someone to get back to me on that front.

Tier 10 trinkets

10-man: 1.
25-man: 3.

I hear 25-man raiders have three trinket slots.

Oh wait.

@Nymarie

Re this:

The cloaks aren't really that good for Shadow. Spirit/Crit is pretty suboptimal -- not quite as bad as the stat combination on that god-awful Tier 9 Spirit/Hit helm, but still not fantastic. I'd hold out for Lich Wrappings (Valithria-10). A stop-gap with +hit is Kurisu's Indecision (ToC5N). Where emblems are concerned, I instead recommend investing in 4T10 Shadow if you have not already. Whenever someone decides that they want to develop their shadow gear set, Tier 10 must be the first port of call. It is so powerful that it dwarfs all other Frost Emblems purchases

So, with regards to some gearing suggestions: Tier 10 Gloves, Helm, Shoulders and Chest (In that order) should be considered. Your Tier 10 Disc legs will be just fine until a SP/Crit/Haste alternative comes along. The Tier 10 Shadow legs have too much hit on them. Your Circle of Ossus will also do nicely in Shadow.

... Although, having said all that, hit rating on 25-man Icecrown gear seems to be focused in the neck, one ring (Valanar's. Don't get the Crit/Hit one unless it is a stop-gap for the Haste/hit) and ... that's pretty much it for optimal slots, annoyingly. You don't want the Chest, Gloves or Shoulders because they're all tier slots. That's incredibly short-sighted, I think.

But let's have a play, shall we? We've identified this, this, this and this. 194 Hit. 95 short. Let's get these. 31 to go. These. Done.

Alternative: Tier 10 Shadow legs instead of Tier 10 Shadow chest (+80) and a Rigid gem in the cloak (+24).

(I know that you have the +hit offhand, but you'll want to get rid of that as soon as you win Dying Light. Dying Light is wonderful for Shadow.)

Obviously these are all optimal selections rather than necessarily what you'll be able to get your hands on at first. I tend to do that.

And now I must go out, so I'll have to cut short my advice for the time-being.

Bad Priest #243

That's a random number, of course.

Sinespe versus Blendia.

Just look at those delicious Haste/Spirit gems socketed everywhere in that Priest's bloody gear. Funnily enough, despite his over-zealous hasty behaviour, he almost has less haste than I do.

But look at that spellpower. 3150 without Inner Fire. Not even my Draenei has that much. Full 251 and 264 epics. A challenge, surely, in spite of the terrible gemming choices.

The boss? Toravon the Ice Watcher.

The result? An obliteration.

5.8k? Seriously? Full bloody buffs, right down to an unholy death knight for the extra disease damage, and you pull 5.8k? You're about 3k below what you should be capable of doing with that gear. Full bloody Tier 10, and all.

Want to know the kicker? Tier 10 legs dropped. Now, I already have these, and I will only be using them for a very short period of time while I accumulate enough emblems to have four pieces of tier 10 without relying on something with a severe problem in the hit department.

This guy, on the other hand, already has four pieces of tier 10, and Leggings of Woven Death. That's pretty much Best in Slot without access to anything above ICC25-N content.

He rolled on the legs.

I died a little inside.

Why I love being British

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/7746090/Cream-teas-battle-rages-between-Devon-and-Cornwall.html

That is all.

Americanisms.

The ones that make no sense and which make me cringe whenever I read them.

Language is important. Thinking about language is even more important. If you use a word without knowing what it means, you have a high probability of being ousted for attempting to embellish the expanse of your vocabulary by the use of oddities of verbosity.

Text-speak, it has been claimed, uses an altogether different part of the brain from the one devoted to language and communication: it cuts out that part of our brain which is designed to think, carefully, about whether we are using words appropriately, aptly and correctly. Instead of thinking how to express an idea in 140 characters using full words and sentences, text-speak is a convenient circumnavigation past the necessity of considering and weighing up each word. The counter-argument is that considering and weighing each word could take longer than just writing in a sentence composed of half-words, and that text-speak is used for its expediency, which makes it appropriate to the medium of communication in which it is deployed -- text messages themselves designed to be a quick way of telling something to someone.

This argument falls apart, however, when one considers the simple adage, "Practice makes perfect." The same argument is applied to using text-speak on-line: it is claimed that the fractions of seconds saved by missing out characters can make all the difference on, to take a WoW example, a message typed in the middle of a boss-fight, where time is at a premium for communication owing to being completely disabled while typing. But consider this: what if one actually practises typing full words from the start? They'll type quicker as they learn the positions of the keys. Text-speak is a whole other language with its own alphabet -- pseudo-Oriental in its use of certain characters to represent whole words (compare Japanese or Chinese Kanji with "4" as a substitute for the combination of phonics producing the sound "for").
To become fluent in any language, you have to think in that language. That's what fluency means: you spend no time at all consciously thinking about what you want to say -- the words enter your speech centres directly from your subconscious and go straight out; and, conversely, words of others in the same language flow into your brain and are immediately understood. A scholar of Latin could stare at a complex sentence for many minutes to work out its full meaning; show it to a Roman and he'll react to it instantly.
Where typing is concerned, the same logic applies, but rather than your brain being the key motivator, it is a combination of your brain and muscles. Muscle memory is used to remember the position of the keys. Assuming one has one's hands anchored at the same location on the keyboard, one's muscles learn exactly how far to move in order to press down on a particular key. Combine that with fluency in the language, and you have the phenomenon touch-typing.
So, learning fluency in English, rather than in text-speak, means that the two are apples and oranges. Those who claim that the amount of time saved by cutting out characters make such a claim from the position of typing proper English really slowly. I would type text-speak as slowly as they would type English.

This is a large diversion from the point I want to make, which is the following: once you are fluent in a language, you can devote more time to analysing it instead of spending time making sure that what you are saying it grammatically accurate. You can analyse the differences in meaning between "drenched" and "damp"; both mean "wet" but have differing levels of wetness associated with them. This varying scale can be applied to other, more subtle examples: Greed vs. Gluttony, Tautology vs. Redundancy. By such analysis, one starts to use more precise language; one becomes more efficient, in a way that text-speak, by its very nature as an invention of convenience thought up in but a moment compared to the millennial evolution of English, cannot hope to achieve. In that previous sentence, I could have said "the evolution of English over thousands of years"; but "millennial" is more succint and conveys the exact same meaning.

So. Americanisms. Why am I annoyed at their use of language today? Well, it isn't the spelling, for once. At least, not really. Instead, my problem is that some of our English idioms have been corrupted by our Free cousins, in ways that do not make sense; ways that show, clearly, a disregard for actual thought: text-speak evolutions, done in haste, mistranslation or for convenience.

Some examples for you:

Correct idiom: "I couldn't care less." Meaning of idiom: "I don't care." Americanised idiom: "I could care less."
Why the Americanism is wrong: Just think about it for a moment. If you use a conditional sentence indicating that you could care less about something, you are saying that the current reality is that you do care to an extent -- that it would be possible for you in another circumstance to care to a lesser extent than you currently do. But the meaning is supposed to be "I do not care one little bit. It is impossible for my care level to be lower: My level of care is 0 on the scale from 0 to infinity. I could not care less."

Correct idiom "There is still a way to go." Meaning of idiom: "Progress is still to be made before we can consider this deed accomplished." Americanism: "There is still a ways to go."
Why the Americanism is wrong: a way. A: singular, impersonal pronoun. Singular. It is a singular, non-collective noun. Change it for any similar word: "We have been travelling on this path for a mile, but we are only half way along it. There is still a mile to go." Not "A miles", "a mile".

Now, by the sounds of things, I am late to the party on this one, because Webster has prepared a defence: it insists that idioms are not defined by their grammatical structure, and that, by their nature, require foundational knowledge of the culture in which they are used if they are to be understood. I do not consider this argument remotely adequate: There is no cultural difference between "A way to go" and "A ways to go". They convey the exact same thing. The only difference is that one of them is wrong. Furthermore, "I could/couldn't care less" is not the same as the difference between, for instance, "He kicked the bucket," in English and ,"He broke his pipe," in French -- in the latter idiomatic construct, and others of its kind, the thought being conveyed is completely based in imagery and metaphor. "I couldn't care less", however, is entirely linguistic. Calling these literal expressions "Idioms" is therefore something of a misnomer: They are commonly used expressions specific to a particular language, and they are expressed as self-contained units in the same way that individual words are, but their grammar should nevertheless be correct. There is no reason why someone from another culture should not be able to understand the meaning expressed by "I couldn't care less" simply by reading the sentence.

I will come up with more examples and lengthen this treatise, but I should really do the heroic daily and stuff.

SHeroics.

Meet the Fungineers:
Sinespe, Hand of A'dal: Undead Shadow Priest
Isolde the Patient: Undead Discipline Priest
Fermy of the Nightfall: Blood Elf Holy Paladin (And Kartok the Patient: Blood Elf Beast Mastery Hunter)
Twilight Vanquisher Zorzil: Troll Protection Warrior
Starcaller Drenera: Undead Arcane Mage (And Cherana: Blood Elf Protection Paladin)

Together, we are Touched by a Troll. We intend to be a 10-man raiding guild in Cataclysm. We are transferring to Stormrage, where there are actually good people. (Cyclone-EU is a fantastic battlegroup. Frenzy, on the other hand, has Magtheridon in it. Oh dear.)

To tide us over until Cataclysm actually gets launched, we intend to get a decent raiding base together and clear some ICC content. And, while we wait for that, to get us noticed, we are doing SHeroics.

"SHeroics" is a term we coined from calling what we were doing in Heroics "Shenanigans". "Heroic Shenanigans" became "SHeroics". SHeroics are Heroic Hard Modes. "But, Chris, 'Heroic' means 'Hard mode' already!" Well, yes, but have you seen Wrath 5-man Heroics? They're a joke. You can't really call them "Hard".

So, what are Heroic Hard Modes? Simple, really: engaging multiple bosses at the same time, and killing them one-by-one.

This post is a trial-run of the formula I will be using on our guild site, which will hopefully have a blogging section. There will be Youtube videos of the kills when my lovely companions have worked out how video editing works. We have already done one SHeroic -- Nexus -- and we have been experimenting with Utgarde Pinnacle. So, without further ado:

SHeroic Nexus
Bosses engaged: Ormorok --> Anomalous --> Telestra.
Kill order decided: Anomalous --> Telestra --> Ormorok
Toons used: Sinespe, Isolde, Cherana, Zorzil, Fermy.

After some experimentation, we found that the only way this was going to work was to clear all trash and pull backwards through the instance from Ormorok. We had accidentally killed the Alliance captain during trash clearing, so killing all four bosses will have to wait for another time.

So, we pulled Ormorok, then worked our way back through a sea of respawned mini-lashers (The Aura of Regeneration mobs) to get to Anomalous. Cherana and Fermy went with Ormorok towards Telestra. Zorzil, Issy and I ran up to Anomalous to pull him. While on the move towards Telestra, I was killing the Chaotic Rifts to limit the adds we had. Upon reaching Telestra, our priority was to kill Anomalous first, since the number of adds was ludicrous. The combination of Telestra's AoE "freeze" stuns and Ormorok's Crystal Spikes was brutal, as was all the damage from Chaotic Rifts, adds, and Telestra's Blizzards, fire bombs and Gravity Wells. I died at around 30% of Anomalous' health, but that was the majority of the challenge: identifying which of his Chaotic Rifts was generating his immunity shield. Once that was overcome, the rest was relatively straightforward.

Attempts required: 2. (1 wipe, 1 kill).
Achievement name: "There's Plenty of Them to Go Around. [10]" Sequential achievement. Next achievements in sequence: "There's Even More of Them to Go Around. [25]" (O->A->AC->T Kill A Kill T Kill AC Kill O); "Chaos: It's Not Just a Theory. [40]" (Overview: " Pull O Pull A Pull AC Pull T Kill A Kill T Kite to K Kill O Pull K Kill K Kill AC".)

The beauty of SHeroics is in inventing these achievements. You can come up with various ways to pull, deal with and kill bosses, and the combinations you come up with will have varying levels of difficulty.

So watch this space for more Heroic Shenanigans.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Link.

The first of the refinements being made is that we're combining all raid sizes and difficulties into a single lockout. Unlike today, 10- and 25-player modes of a single raid will share the same lockout.

SUCK IT. SUCK IT HARD.

About fucking time.

This is the appropriate form of greeting when someone takes an extra five minutes to log in, owing to the Cyclone battlegroup's login servers playing up,which they had been doing for days. Such was the level of playing-up of the login servers that it had been well documented on the official board for Cyclone over the past three days from when the problem started and, thus, should be at least partially expected and wholly sympathised with.

That is, of course, if you are more concerned about doing SRSBSNSS 5v5 than concerned about the actual "friends" (I use the term incredibly loosely, because I don't think it's appropriate at all -- it's more an aspiration) with whom you're doing said 5v5. Speaking of which, by the way, our 5s started out as just a way to get points and was never, and will never, be srsbsnss. 1950 does not make us awesome. Nor is it worth being so fucking acerbic, obsessed, and haranguing about.

It very quickly becomes suffocating to know that whenever I log into my toon I'm going to get people interrogating me on why I've not been online (Note, not "asking"; "interrogating". Asking is nice -- especially if it shows a regard for how I am. Interrogating doesn't care about how I am, it cares about the use of my toon for the sake of 5v5). I wonder what the chances are that that suffocation explains why, even when I do have free time lately, I'm more likely to log on to my Horde priest with other friends who don't have these scheduling expectations of me. Pretty high, I'd say.

My apologies to Elanie and Sane, who did nothing to piss me off and who, I hope, care more that I'm using my energy to immerse myself in the working world, and thus increase my employability, and that this is leaving me very tired at the end of the day, and in very little mood to deal with any other crap (that I already had done on Tuesday and had had quite enough of) such that I am in no mood to have sarcastic snipes thrown at me by the other two thanks to their complete selfishness and single-mindedness. "Just an excuse for taking so long".

Rad Nauseam

I have a job.

I start on Monday.

More 25-man exclusive crap

Grats Shadowmourners.

I will spare you all a 1.5k-word rant this time. You all know how much bullshit that is.

Tier 10 Healing.

Get it changed; and tell them to talk to us.

Because, right now, they're not discussing it with us at all.

Hell, if you're on the US forums, copy it over to them.

Want me in your guild?

Then don't advertise yourselves like this:

[14:25:04] [W From] [Bien]: Hey mate, you need a new guild ? :) we are a newly formed guild, gonna be a good raiding guild, and we would like to have you in :)
[14:25:09] [80:Bien]: Level 80 Human Paladin [Shadow Raiders] - The Forge of Souls

Because it translates as "You have awesome gear and I want you to carry people I already have in the guild who think they're a lot better than they are, and think that if they get four pieces of tier 10 like you they will, magically, know their class inside-out and pull the DPS you can."

______

Someone commented about me being in Inglourious Gankers. I am, as a pink pony-tailed gnome rogue. Levelling is very slow -- but I'll get my scalps in due course.

______

Account is due to expire in one month. Just before you start thinking I'm back. Oh, and I am deliberately being more of a jerk and caring less about being such. Retarded blog posts, which have their justification sounding very much like "Balance", are not softening my edges. "These people are clearly morons of the highest order [...] 'Everyone's opinion is equally valid', my arse!"

______

I am on Twitter now, for some reason.

______

"Lay" still takes a direct object.

Gambler's Fallacy

I have made it my business not to be kicked from any guild I join, nor have a guild application refused, nor be involved or be a party to pointless, destructive arguments through any medium. My luck on all fronts however has changed and it is time to assess where I stand.

Much like the gambler coin-tossing away his savings, I can rationalise that this is a downturn that will improve, or I can cut my losses and get out before I go insane. Having never been one to subscribe to fallacies against statistics, and being quite fond of what little sanity I have, guess which option I'm taking.

(Note: At this point I just start rambling, so the TL;DR is "To keep a long story short ... The End.")

WoW loses one shadow priest with an ego doing nothing but crowding up server space. One slightly louder voice in ~7 million. There was a post I was going to make at the turn of the decade pointing out that Anathema is nothing special, in response in part to someone on Wowhead's forums saying that they "couldn't do what I do": all I do is write into an easy-to-read form what is readily available for anyone to find out if they have a spare 20 minutes; and where my character is concerned all I do is press buttons in a certain way. As with quite a few of the unfinished posts in my Dashboard, I started to write it but then lost my flow and didn't return to it. I could say to myself that people will notice the void left by my departure, but that'd be a lie.

Funnily enough, I knew there was a reason why I wasn't interested in WoW when it first came out, despite having been quite fond of WCII and WCIII. I think I need to get back into that mentality which takes a while to react to anything, instead of jumping on anything new and exciting. There's probably quite a lot to be said for taking everything slowly. It's more biological -- I won't necessarily say "natural", because "nature" within humans isn't the same as with any other animal given our self-awareness -- it adds a layer.

You might've figured out by now that I'm just rambling and not really wanting to press "publish" on something quite so short. Rambling is something I'm rather good at. One of my favourite things to do in the company of someone else is just to wind through long, tangential discussions -- no central point, just jumping opportunistically from one subject to another. I don't do it enough with the people with whom I'd get the most out of it -- I'm too comfortable with my default position of silence. (I know, right? For someone who types such long stuff you'd probably expect me to talk a lot. Not so. I don't necessarily prefer silence; my brain just shuts off when it feels it isn't needed, expected or wanted.) On Thursday I move into a house whose occupants are 5 people I've never met -- hopefully at least one of them will encourage me to ramble speakily, and perhaps even to get back into coining odd words like "speakily". My imagination has been rather stunted over the past few years; it's not a good thing to lose so easily -- it's one of the things we should long to hold on to from our childhoods for as long as we can; not necessarily out of any sense of staving off the inevitable, but just because it's enjoyable to imagine.

So ... yeah. Sorry if this is sudden, or whatever. You can all go back now to your respective comings-from with whatever opinion you like of me, of shadow priests, of maths, of "being emo" as I believe kids like to call it these days, of anything. Hopefully I won't be around to hear it.

Hide Helm.

I have raided with Fancy Hat Club for 8 months. Over those months, I have found a home -- after almost three years of playing the game. A place in which I feel comfortable raiding, and don't feel the need to reach through my monitor and throttle the other 9-24 people with whom I'm wiping on bosses. The 6-hour-per-week structure was perfect for a 10-man guild: Not as many nights as would be needed for Icecrown Hard modes -- so, when they come around, raid extension lockouts will likely be needed so that time isn't spent clearing normal mode bosses first off -- but enough to clear each wing of Icecrown before the new one had been released, and more than sufficient competency to form a solid basis for defeating Arthas.

Apparently, though, I missed the point completely. Today I was kicked out, after assisting with killing Putricide and Lanathel (Shadow and Discipline, respectively, and damn hard roles they are to fill successfully) and assisting with the acquisition of Proto-Drakes and Tribute to Insanity. -- Apparently, even that sentence misses the point completely.

The reason why I've been rejected after an 8-month trial period (Because that's effectively what has happened: I've never been a member; just a very very long-standing, very valuable triallist who has now gotten on the members' nerves to the point where they would rather I leave) is something I'm still struggling actually to find, but I think the best summation of it is: "Some of the core of the guild decided on my behalf and without consulting me that I was not happy where I was, and mistook other 10-man raiding guilds on the same server or on other servers as more suited to my needs, and so have given me a push in that direction."

Yeah. I know. This is going to be a long one.

Firstly, let's look at the guild structure. Or, more to the point, let's look at the perception I had of the guild structure which apparently is not actually how things work at all. At the top of any guild, you have the GM -- in this case, Chayah. Below that, you have the officers. In this case, the officers were the two assistant Raid Leaders: Razzmatazz and Tinytran; with assistance from the Main Tanks -- Finaldo, Lucian, and occasionally Asmodeus (Matsumoto). Below that, you have the raiders.

That's it. That's how a guild works. The GM calls the shots with assistance from his officers. Specifically in this case, there were always two raid leaders in one raid for the purposes of debate and consultation in officer chat -- two out of the three (Chayah, Razzmatazz and Tinytran) were present at all times.

Now I'll explain about myself as a raider: I have a capacity for leadership. I am perceptive, intelligent, and extremely good with language and communication. I can see what goes wrong on a wipe, how to solve it, and how to tell other people how to solve it. That's what you see in a raid with me: I don't pay attention to membership, ranks, or anything like that. If I have something to say which will assist in killing the boss, I will say it in /ra and I will, perfectly justifiably, expect my opinion to be taken note of, because I know what I'm talking about and it will benefit you to listen to it. If you read those last few sentences and thought "What an arrogant jerk", you can click the red X now. No one will judge you. I'll call you an ignorant scrub for thinking that successful raids could operate without people giving their input, but apart from that no one will judge you.

Since I have a capacity for leadership, I understand the importance of a command structure. 10 people with opinions is great; but if no one speaks out to say, "Right, we will take THIS element of this strategy and THAT element from that strategy, because it is most likely to result in success" then a raid will be all theory and no action. Conversely, if everyone says in whispers or in some other chat channel with just a few of their friends what should be done, and doesn't communicate with the whole of the group, bedlam occurs.

FHC has no command structure. Outwardly, it appears that it does, and I truly challenge anyone to come to a different conclusion about the guild's structure when you see three different people rotating who wears the Slightly Darker Text hat, two of them always being present at one raid, and pointing out that "Stuff" is being "Discussed" -- with the rest of the raid listening to what they eventually conclude. I'll let Chayah explain what I mean by that:

You see, I think that your impression of what FHC is is still a bit skewiff. I didn't "found" it, I just "did the paperwork". It was founded by Matsumoto, Finaldo, Lucian, Tuonie, Tinytran, Sinthaya, Clavicus, Maudlin, Riel, Razzmatazz, and myself. I'm not being diplomatic - these are the people who got together, said "hey, we're fed up with 25s and with all the raid group baggage, what if we could do 10s together? as friends instead of as "members"? what would it be like?" I'm GM because they all trust me to manage the guild effectively - I was one of the leaders of the old raid groups that most of them were part of and have been friends with most of them for even longer than that. I'm GM because I'm something that everyone has in common. I'm a unifying factor to the sometimes disparate elements of the group. I'm everybody's friend. I've not got any greater authority or weight than any of the other founders except what they give me because of that friendship. (And I have to be very careful not to abuse that.)

So, underlying the seemingly straightforward nature of GM-->Officer-->Member, what we actually have is a group of friends. This is where problems start.

Count the names, if you would. You'll notice there are 11 people. That's enough for a 10-man guild as it is, and it's a structure that works more than successfully for CakeFM -- a very greatly progressed 10-man guild on the same server who have just that: 11 members, with one of them on near-permanent standby because all of them have 100% attendance to every raid.

The problem comes when not everyone can attend all the time. And this, presumably, is why FHC recruits other people: Not everyone is able to attend every raid, and there are so few raids per week that even dropping one raid reduces that week's productivity by 50%. All it takes is two drop-outs from that 11-man roster -- say, the girlfriend/boyfriend duo in that list of names -- and that's a raiding week gone. There's nothing wrong with that; but if it happens too often then one moves from being a stable raiding guild to a collection of people all of whom log on very occasionally and clear an instance: without the stability, no progression can occur -- and, while progression isn't a focal point of FHC's raiding goals, it factors in at least to the degree that they want to be raiding the current tier of content at any point of time.

So, you recruit extras to fill the gaps. But the extras don't necessarily fit. They might want something slightly different to what you want. In my case -- my "problem", as it were -- the clique (Since that's what it is) seemed to think that I am solely focussed on progression. I must clear hard modes. I must get my proto-drake. I must beat the game. At one point in time, maybe 18 months ago, that may indeed have been my goal: I did beat the game when Illidan was the final boss, and then I burnt out. What I am actually interested in is bringing out the potential of everyone else in the group. As soon as I started raiding Ulduar with FHC, I saw how much potential there was for greatness. Not "Greatness" in terms of a 10-man Strict ranking, or a "Beat everyone else to kill Arthas Heroic", but "greatness" in the sense of the guild fulfilling the latent potential it had in every single one of those incredibly competent 11 people.

My way of helping this potential to be filled was to contribute quite vastly to the discussions of tactics in /ra and on the forums, to make sure that I was always aware of what I had to do -- and to maintain two gear sets, two specs and five playstyles (I'm not even joking. There's more than one way to play Shadow and more than two ways to play Discipline) for those two specs so that I could contribute as much as I could to the success of the group. But, I'll refer to Chayah again:

People in FHC don't want to wipe, but they want to be allowed to show up to raids after a hard day at uni or the zoo or whatever and not necessarily know everything about every boss, or to be allowed to choose gear based on their own terms rather than on hours of theorycraft, and so on.

I've emboldened two things there, because this kind of hyperbole has always irritated me whenever I've seen it; two different and equally strong arguments can be made against it, which I will come on to after I've explained the context of this quote.

Rarely -- and I do mean rarely; I can count on one hand the times that I did this, and over 8 months that's a very small number of occurrences -- I have questioned people's gear choices or spec choices. Not criticised, not blamed: questioned. The times when I've done this have been when we've been chasing that elusive 1% on Anub'arak -- when I was looking for ways in which we could take him down; looking for ways to improve. (And, yes, before you suggest that I didn't look at myself, I did look at myself; hard.) So, fine, occasionally I have crossed the line with one foot, dipping my toes into unknown waters, and perhaps that generated a negative reaction. That is an excuse for an eight-month campaign not to accept me into the rank and file? Something tells me not. Oh, but, Sinespe, what about your arrogance in correcting people's grammar? Short answer: Again, single-hand counting on how many times this happened, and grow the hell up.

The two arguments against this lazy hyperbole are the following:
1) The reason why there are condensed, and very enjoyable to read, strategies on
the guild forums as opposed just to linking people to Tankspot is because it takes 5 minutes; 10 at most; to read a boss strategy. Combine that with the staggered nature of releases in Icecrown, and you're looking at 10-15 minutes per week of reading forum posts detailing strategies. You can do that while on a break at work, or checking e-mails, or while you eat your breakfast. Same with the theorycrafting: The good sections of Elitist Jerks (Off the top of my head and from experience at the ones I have used, Blood Simple springs to mind) tells you what you need to know in a concise and easy-to-read manner. This does not take hours. It takes the mathematicians and casual theorycrafters hours to come up with numbers and prose that you can devour in ten minutes.

2) Since when does everyone need to know "everything" about a boss strat? When did I even imply that? You couldn't do that in Vanilla WoW, and even in TBC the guilds I was in tended to have separate chat channels for Healing, DPS and Tank roles to be assigned. I like to know everything about a boss fight because I like to be able to analyse for improvement -- but on Blood Prince Council, for instance, I could get by knowing the key points: "DPS the one with the healthbar"; "Throw a SW: D on a Kinetic Bomb if you see it's getting low to the ground"; "Be prepared to run when Taldaram is Empowered"; "Stay away from vortices [not "vortexes", you asshats. I've been drilling that into people since TBC.]".

I have digressed slightly. Back to the guild structure, and recruitment from outside: Sometimes, people won't fit. So, what do you do? You'll find out they don't fit pretty quickly -- so, you could talk to them about it and try to see where they're coming from, or you could silently allow your irritation at them to get worse and worse over an 8-month period, recognising that they're incredibly strong players and very useful to your progression, until you get one of the people from the group who knows the Problem Player well -- the GM, of course, because he's the token Fall Guy (Sorry, C, I meant you're a "Friend to everyone" -- that's the term you used to describe it. I prefer "The mask behind which all the bitching can go on" myself. You say potayto, I say "Get stuffed with this cliquery". I mean ... Potahto.) -- to kick the person out and try to explain the unreasonable in reasonable terms.

The problem with the latter choice is that I've been left feeling like an object. An alien. I knew, when I joined, that I had caused a bit of friction. In the first month, this was, I thought, all smoothed over. Chayah was a constant source of sanity in the madness that appeared to be sheer insanity -- For instance someone reportedly got offended during one Ulduar raid when I said "Be careful of aggro in the first few seconds [on Auriaya's pull]." Really. Someone got offended at that purely neutral, sensible reminder. I persevered, because he reminded me that FHC was about accepting others for their faults. So I accepted others for their faults. Seven months later, the clique decided that they didn't want to accept me for mine. But it has been dressed up to me in a way that makes it seem like it's for my own good. Chayah, once more:

So we revisited all the stuff that we thought makes us us and how you could fit into that. The conclusion reached was that both FHC and you would still need to change significantly before we could be comfortable bedfellows. And - I know it sounds hard to believe when you've just been kicked out - but people were genuinely concerned as to how "fair" it was to you to "require" you to change so they didn't have to. They genuinely think that you'll be better off in another group. I think nobody except myself really realised how much you regarded FHC as your home, which I suppose isn't their fault.

And why did this happen? Complete lack of communication. Chayah has been my only point of contact -- ever -- for how I have behaved within the guild; and his disposition to be friendly and see everyone's point of view has resulted in my failure to see just how much people apparently hate me. I don't even know who those people are in the list of 11. I suspected that Maudlin might, but apparently he didn't until four or five months into my lack-of-tenure. Did Clavicus hate me? I spent whole evenings talking with him about everything and nothing. Tuonie, I know, did not -- and he reacted with surprise when he discovered that I was no longer in the guild, and the reasoning behind it; so is it the case that some members of that clique were not even present at the decision-making process where what would make me "better off" was decided without my own voice being heard? Same with Lucian: not so often did we speak, but we did speak, and I enjoyed his company immensely; was all that enjoyment one-sided?

It strikes me that I have not been treated as a human being in this. I have been treated as a problem that needs to be solved; a problem that wasn't solved because everyone was too lazy to practice what Chayah was preaching when he told me that everyone accepts everyone else in FHC in spite of their flaws -- if, indeed, this was the philosophy applicable to new members too. The very fact that I've been kicked out is proof that at not one moment did anyone, with the possible exception of those that I have mentioned, consider that I am currently sitting on a chair, looking at a computer screen, and typing on a keyboard: just like they are. I am feeling the pressure of the keys, my heart is pounding in my chest and blood is flowing around my blood vessels. There are people in this world -- outside of this online guise of Sinespe and those who know it -- whom I love: faithfully, passionately, filially, fraternally and sororially. There are passions I follow: my poetry, my archery, my (simple, by comparison) maths, my explorations of philosophy; that none of them know anything about. My fate within this guild has been decided by a group of people who do not know the first thing about me, because I was an outsider and they were determined to keep me that way.

But how could I say they were determined to keep me at arm's length? Simple, really: None of the people who are likely to have been instrumental in my removal from FHC have ever tried to talk to me. They've never tried to get to know me. They've never tried to reconcile what they perceive as differences with me. Throughout, they have not needed me, thus they have chosen to ignore the problem as best they could rather than tackle it. If all goes wrong? Well, doesn't matter, really, does it? They still have enough people to raid with.

And this is the problem with the guild's lack of structure: Letting no one new into the ranks will cause their ranks to stagnate, and eventually they will die off. What's Chayah's reaction to this?

As I said online, the end to an affair is not the end of its meaning: endings complete meaning. They're a necessary component of meaning. Some day, maybe very soon, FHC will end and we'll all move on to other stuff. When that happens I'll still have some very fond (as well as not so fond) memories of FHC and I'll still have things to be pleased about or angry about and to learn from.

Everything ends, therefore we'll just sit back and let it happen. I'll give you my direct response to that:

You may have accepted "One day it will die", but that's laziness, in my opinion. It's a casual, shameful excuse for not wanting to do anything about it. Yes, one day we'll all die. That's why we make an effort to last as long as we fucking can.

This whole situation has been about a lack of effort. Not in whether to approach me or not, but in the very essence of whether it was worth it to try to approach me. It must have been deemed quite early on -- perhaps even from the guild's creation -- that it was better just to keep themselves to themselves. Perhaps it would have been better for them to stick to that model completely, and recruit no-one, instead of selfishly stringing along very good, perfectly legitimate members only to ditch them at a moment's notice later on.

FHC very quickly became my home. The landlords, who are also the tenants, have decided that I'm "too good", under some ludicrous, hashed definition of the word, for FHC -- that I am unhappy where I am. They think I'd be better off in some flying-pink-unicorn guild where I can be myself. They seemed to think that their lack of desire to integrate me into their group was a two-way thing: That just as they didn't want me in, I didn't want to be in.

I did not go into FHC wanting to be myself; I wanted to be a Hatter. And I damn well did try, okay? To say that this is a two-way thing is ludicrous, Chayah. I have reached out to people; and I've been met by the cold silence of a group banding together and deciding that I'm not suitable for that empty chair on your raiding roster. It was a perfectly comfy chair. I don't want a super expensive and technologically advanced massage chair, thanks; I'll quite happily sit in the comfy, old, moth-eaten armchair into which one can sink and from which one never has to rise.

Sinespe will no longer show her helm, as proud of every single one of Blizzard's cloth helm artworks she may be.

(A side note: Coming in at 3,499 words in length, this is longer than any essay I wrote while I was at University.)
(Another, far more bitter side-note: The last person who suggested on my behalf that I was "unhappy" is still working in Tesco without any kind of analytical brain beyond the shallow. Completely unrelated; I just thought I'd throw something very venomous out there while I was in a "Looking at the people in my life who have sucked hard" mood.)

Just a taste ...

Here, have a terrible killshot.

What? Of course I was Shadow for it. Why would you think otherwise? It's right there in the killshot.

The combat log, you say?

... What combat log?

Invincible

This was going to be a short and relatively straightforward post about how stupid it is that Invincible is not available to 10-player raiders. It still is going to be that, but the thread in question has had its stupidity factor multiplied by several magnitudes.

But we'll start from the core:

If [Invincible] were available in the 10-person encounter as well, it may become too prolific and lose some of its initial unique qualities.

The way this reads, to me, is Crygil trying to protect 10-man raiders from themselves. "We could give you this, but you won't like it!" Oh, will we not? So, in order to save us from "devaluing" our own reward, your solution is just not to give us that reward at all? Gee, thanks. I feel so much better.

One of the flaws behind this issue is that Blizzard assumes we care whether 25-man raiders farm our stuff when what is at stake is a mount, and nothing else. Y'know what? If they have enough hours in the week to clear both 25-man and 10-man versions of ICC, which is a massive instance, and if they do the latter solely for the purpose of an extra mount, let them. They've earned it, frankly. The only thing that changes if you allow Invincible to drop 100% of the time from Arthas-10-H is that one or two 25-man guilds per server will get a full guild's worth of mounts in half the time. Once they've killed Arthas-25-H once, they're going to kill him 25 times anyway. All you do by allowing them to farm 10-man content is reduce the amount of time it takes for the inevitable to occur. And if they want the mount badly enough, but run out of time for everyone to get one before Cataclysm gets launched, they'll find a spare day to go back and farm it again when they're level 85. This isn't Al'ar we're talking about here: This thing has a 100% drop chance.

Besides which, how would this hypothetical situation -- 25-man raiders get the mount quicker than 10-man raiders -- be any different to the fact that they gear up faster than us? Bosses in 25-man drop more pieces of loot because Blizzard has to account for the fact that there are more people in a 25-man raid that need to gear up. It's balanced. So why is it not balanced in the case of a mount that only a small, finite number of 25-man raiders per server are going to have access to in the first place?

But let's look at it from the other side of the fence: What if 25-man hardcore raiders complain that "their" reward is getting handed to 10-man-H raiders? What if it is devalued from their side of the fence? Well ... it's not, frankly. Sorry. I know I bang on about this, and it's something I'll come onto again shortly, but there is no reason for 25-man raiders to get any additional benefit simply for having more people than 10-man raiders. The inflated item levels on their gear is enough -- and is reasonable, because it is a point of design and of concession (If they weren't more powerful, people would just raid 10s). But as I say, we'll come onto that in a little while.

But even if either of these things is a concern, there is a solution to appease both parties: Put Herald/Insanity conditions on the 10-Player Invincible. This solves Blizzard's irrational fear of servers being swamped by Invincibles, and ensures that only people who raid 25-H or 10-H can get the mount: 25-N wouldn't be able to, because the only 264 gear permitted would be 10-H gear -- 10-H raiders would have to work equally hard as 25-H raiders in order to qualify for the mount. The reward in both circumstances would be appropriate for the conditions under which it was sought. But it seems like Blizzard has forgotten all about those conditions since ToC: There's no such achievement in the ICC list.

That's the main issue. Now, we delve into the realm of "Looking at blue post comments and ripping them to shreds", since as I continued to scroll down that thread I found myself getting increasingly annoyed at what I read.

You would think, reading things like ...

The 10-person heroic raid dungeons are tuned in such a way that players do not need to rely on gear from the 25-person normal mode equivalents.

And

It's as simple as logistics. When in a 25-person instance, you are using 25 peoples time. This makes accumulating that number of players more difficult to achieve.

And

The more people you have, the more difficult (numerically) you can make the encounters.

Might make me tempted to say "I told you so" ... But, unfortunately, I can't say such a thing, because Blizzard is being irritatingly cryptic. One the one hand, they claim that 25-mans are scaled up just on the number of players and the numerical increase in damage, but on the other hand they say things like ...

We also scale the difficulty of the encounters up in the larger group of players. Thus, because of added difficulty, they achieve slightly better rewards.

And

We will continue watching upcoming content in the future to make certain that we are able to adjust these encounters and keep them aligned with our goals.

Does the first one mean they are scaled up purely because there are more people, or because the increase in people allows for better synergy? Is it "simple logistics" or not? What exactly are Blizzard's "Goals" related to the 10-/25-player dichotomy? None of this tells us anything -- it's all just vagueness that points in different directions.

You then get conflicting philosophies. In response to a request that 10- and 25-player versions of every raid be on a shared lockout (i.e., you're only able to participate in either the 10- or 25-player version of a raid each week), Crygil said this:

The matter is more complex than that. It's not a good thing to take away content from players, be it 10-person or 25-person.

Are we expected to buy that line, when the whole of the rest of the thread is about Blizzard's decision to take away a piece of content from 10-man raiders? How can we take that philosophy seriously when it runs in direct contravention to Blizzard's choice in this matter?

Then, there is our old favourite:

I've PuG'ed my way to Putricide in 25-person content.

And how many times in that PuG did you wipe, Crygil? Did you actually kill Putricide? "To", once more, is ambiguous. How out-of-touch are you that you suggest 10-player raiders want to be doing 25-man content? Yes, it is true that 10-manners do pug 25-man content. Does that mean they want to? Hell no. I sure as hell don't want to pug ICC25 -- the times that I do, I do so for the sake of gold (through a GDKP run), or Emblems (Only when I miss out on said Emblems in 10-player owing to missing a raid). I don't even want to pug ToC25 in order to get a respectable second trinket -- that's your fault, too, y'know: not giving 10-manners two well-itemised ones at endgame level.

On the aforementioned GDKP runs, I have the potential to get Dislodged Foreign Object -- I have enough (26k gold) to outbid any other competitor. Would I, though? Probably not. I'd bid up to 16k to jack up the price, but I wouldn't bid to win. I don't want to feel like I have to go into potentially disastrous PuGs just for the sake of not wearing a trinket which is three tiers of content below the content I'm supposed to be raiding. Pugging is not an acceptable alternative. Congratulations to you for being on a server capable of doing it, but absolutely nothing compares to the environment of an organised, guilded raid group -- and I don't want to do anything besides organised, guilded raid groups if I can at all help it.

Aside from the issue of the pugging environment, there is the time element to be considered. I'm (un)fortunate in that I have a lot of time on my hands at the moment with which I can potentially pug. What about the people in my raid group who can only set aside 1 hour a day for the random daily and a couple of daily quests/profession cooldowns, plus 3 extra hours on Mondays and Wednesdays in order to clear Icecrown? One of the benefits of 10-man raiding over 25-man is, once more, in the logistics: Fewer people to organise means less time spent waiting for everyone to come online, etc. etc. One player dying in 25-man raids might not be a lot, but 24 people waiting for player number 25 to come online so that they can start is one of the most irritating things imaginable.

Now, though, I've run out of steam. In short, Invincible is the 25-H equivalent of a Legendary: Available to a 25-man playerbase for no discernable reason. We can only hope that what we do get from Arthas-10-H is more of an incentive to kill him than that silly tentacle trinket for YS10+0.

Delicious mid-week breaks.

I was away in Exeter, in case anyone noticed my absence. I'm flattered that someone broke their two-year silence of the Wowhead forums just so they could misinterpret something that I said, take it out of context, then claim that I was wrong -- and all in vain, 'cause I wasn't around to respond to it. People are funny.

How to get a Battered Hilt.

Stop running Pit of Saron.

I'll explain: Blizzard messed around with the drop rate quite a bit, but settled on it. The blue post I would like to draw your attention to is this one:

The increase in drop rate is more significant than the removal of this item's chance to drop from Skeletal Slaves, particularly for those clearing all three wings as intended.

Now, I've emboldened that last bit, because I'm pretty sure people haven't quite grasped how the drop chance on Battered Hilt works.

Firstly, let's dispel a myth: The chance of a Battered Hilt dropping off one mob in a 5-man Icecrown instance is not 1%-2%. Oh, yes, the Armoury claims that it is 1%-2%, but do you want to know why that is? "Extremely low" is the lowest category they have. I'll show you another example to demonstrate this: The Tiny Emerald Whelpling drops from mobs at a rate of 0.2%, recorded by 190,000 trials using Wowhead's looter. What does the Armoury tell us about it? Extremely Low (1% - 2%).

So, why do I say "Don't do Pit of Saron"? Well, this is myth #2: The chance of a Battered Hilt dropping off a mob in Halls of Reflection is not the same as the chance of it dropping off a mob in Pit of Saron. For this, we need to look at the aforementioned blue post: He says that if you clear all three dungeons, you have an increased chance of getting a Hilt drop. In a way, what he is saying is true according to the myth: If you do Forge of Souls and Pit of Saron, you have more of a chance of getting a Battered Hilt than if you just do Forge of Souls. But if you click "Next blue post" on that link, you get this:

No, the drop rate is flat. You have a fixed chance of getting the item every time you run one of the dungeons. What we did in these recent fixes is substantially increase that chance and remove this item's ability to drop from the creatures most frequently and easily being farmed for it.

Read that extremely carefully: The chance for a Hilt to drop is equal for the dungeon; it is not equal for each cross-dungeon mob. I will explain this with statistics:

Let's say that you have a fair, six-sided die, and you're trying to roll a 6. Of course, your chance of success is 1/6. You also have something called the "Expected value", which is the number of trials that you expect, from looking at the probability, you will need to complete in order to get a success. Predictably, this is 1/(1/6) = 6. If you roll the die 3 times, you're going to have a 1-(0.85^3) ( = 38.6%) chance of rolling at least one 6. If you roll the die 6 times, a 1-(0.85^6) = 62.3% chance. And so on.

What do you do, though, if you want to make sure that you have an equal probability of rolling a 6 on two dice, but you're allowed to roll one more times than the other? Well, not too hard: You increase the number of faces on the die that gets rolled more often. That way, the probability of rolling a 6 on one individual roll will go down, which increases the expected value.

So, let's say you have a 6-sided die and a 10-sided die. You want to rig it such that you have the same chance of rolling a 6 on both. The default chances of success of this are 1/6 and 1/10. We'll say, for simplicity, that you want a 1/6 chance of rolling a 6 on the 10-sided die. This means that you only roll the 6-sided die once, but you roll the 10-sided die 1-(o.9^n)=1/6 times.

1 = 1/6 + (0.9^n)
5/6 = 0.9^n
ln(5/6) = nln(0.9)
ln(5/6)/ln(0.9) = n = 1.7304....

Obviously, we can't have 1.7 trials, but you see the point being made here: As with all algebra, changing the variables while keeping only one unknown allows us to rig systems for equal probability in unequal starting circumstances.

This brings us back to Blizzard's semi-cryptic message about the drop rate. This is why I started going on about dice: You have various different numbers of trials in each of the instances -- one mob kill is equal to one trial. So, this example differs because we know the maximum number of trials allowed per instance. We also know the probability we wish to achieve: We want to rig the drop chance of each instance mob so that the overall chance of a Hilt dropping in Halls of Reflection is the same as Forge of Souls and Pit of Saron. The unknown, then, is p: to what level is each mob in each instance rigged in order to produce an equal total chance?

Let's say that the overall total probability we're trying to achieve is 0.02 -- a 2% chance. That seems reasonable for an iLvl251 weapon: 50 trials is about two weeks of running through all three instances.
Forge of Souls has 39 lootable mobs including bosses. This means 1-(q^39)=0.02
0.98 = q^39
39√0.98 = q = 0.99948... p = (1-q) = 0.0005. So, you have a 0.05% chance off any individual mob in FoS to get a Battered Hilt, assuming a 2% total chance.
Pit of Saron has 62 lootable mobs including bosses. This means 1-(p^62)=0.02
62√0.98 = q = 0.99967... p = 0.0003. A 0.03% chance. Roughly 40% lower, per mob, than Forge of Souls.

This means that, to achieve the same drop chance from Pit of Saron as you do in Forge of Souls, you have to do 58% more clearing. If you ignore mobs, then you won't even get to 2%: Your chance will diminish. It'll be appallingly low if you're only clearing half the instance in order to get through it quickly.

There are 36 mobs/lootable objects in HoR, so your chance there is slightly higher than in FoS on a per-mob basis.

Because Pit takes up so much time to clear through, it's better for the sake of efficiency not to do it at all. Forge of Souls and Halls of Reflection are both worth doing: In Forge you have minimal effort to pick up the 6 mobs not directly on your path to the finish, and in Halls every trash pack is mandatory anyway.

So if you want to get a Battered Hilt, and don't want to spend an additional 5-10 minutes clearing insignificant trash in Pit of Saron for the sake of having the same drop chance as the other two instances, just don't go in there at all. It's not worth it in Pit of Saron to ignore half the trash, because you ruin your chances of getting one. That is not to say that if you just run HoR and FoS, you will have a greater chance of getting a hilt than running all three -- but the time:reward ratio will be lower by ignoring PoS.

And please don't join purely for trash only to leave before the first boss of any of these instances. That's just poor form. If you want to do that in a guild group, that's fine; don't subject LFDs to your selfishness.