"Blizzard Judges Are High" - Jacob 11.11.07

My forum access was magically restored without warning recently. No mention of a suspension, no e-mail explaining the situation, just one day it's broken and the next day it's fixed. I'd like to think that Blizzard was shamed into doing the right thing, but it's more likely that one of their monkeys spilled coffee on a computer somewhere and nobody noticed for two months. Then one of their attempts to futz with the website and forums replaced a semicolon somewhere and fixed the bug.

So hopefully I'll be able to advertise again soon. Perhaps an influx of new readers will galvanize the artist into a flurry of updates. [Anya: Urk. School is in sudden-death overtime. I'll try, but don't count on it.]

As some readers are aware, we've been annual entrants into Blizzard's pumpkin carving contest. Anya does completely original artwork which I then carve into the pumpkin. Last year, we missed the deadline thanks to the ambiguous timestamp (if you go back and read the rules, you'll notice that this year features an 11:59 deadline, rather than saying "midnight" like last year). This year we made it in well before the deadline, then waited with baited breath to see the winners.

It's not so much that I mind not even making it to the honorable mentions page. What really burns me is what Blizzard thought was better than our entry. Their "four time contest winner" (viewable here) is just a pumpkin with the skin peeled off to form a pattern. Any real artist will tell you that one of the most difficult things to do is compose a piece given only three colors, which is how you create patterns for pumpkin carving so the carver knows how to vary the depth of the cuts. The natural tendency is for most objects to be in the mid-tones, but if you only have one color in that range your objects begin to overlap and become indistinct. The artist has to balance adjacent objects into different shades to maintain their shapes while placing them at the correct visual depth.

It's more challenging for the carver as well, especially when two objects that need to be carved at very different depths are close to each other. Pumpkin peeling is just tracing the design and peeling away the unwanted material on the surface. It's a cheap and easy way to make a design that has no depth or composition. To be fair, not all the pumpkins displayed are simply peeled. Some, like this image of a dwarf's face are actually sculpted works of art that leave even me impressed.

And as you may have noticed, I'm not easy to impress.

The artwork on the zealot is nothing special, but it's possibly an original work. Which is more than can be said for their "three time contest winners" here and here. Both are traced from someone else's art, one from the Burning Crusade box art and the other from the lame Warcraft South Park cartoon that spotlighted everything that's wrong with Blizzard and their products. I should have known that a South Park reference would take top prize. Watching a fat kid blow diarrhea all over his mother seems like exactly the sort of humor Blizzard would get off on after loading WoW with quests to dig through animal dung.

The worst part is this isn't the only contest Blizzard's running with judges who don't have any taste. Let's look at the most recent Comic Contest winner, found here. It's literally titled "Witty WoW Comic Title", the art looks like it was created in MS Paint by an autistic chimp, and it doesn't feature anything that remotely resembles a joke. Oh look, he's mining, he's still mining, he's still mining, it's taking him a long time, he's almost finished and -bam-, he gets interrupted.

He's mining, and he gets interrupted. This is not a joke, people. The only way this could possibly be funny is if the person reading it is stoned off their gourd. I'm imagining Blizzard employees giggling themselves into fits of hysteria in between cramming their faces full of hash brownies, high-fiving each other while screaming "He got interrupted! Totally pwned! Get it!? Do you get it!?"

The comic's one saving grace, the one thing that saves it from utter failure, is the fact that Blizzard chose to display a comic without gratuitous cleavage for once. I was beginning to wonder if the next comic winner would be an animated cartoon GIF of the Night Elf female in-game "bounce up and down to make my boobs jiggle" animation.

"The Stealth Ban" - Jacob 08.30.07

One of the biggest challenges for any webcomic is getting your name out there and making your comic visible to the public. It's one of those things that we, honestly, haven't spent a lot of time and energy on.

When we do spend time and energy on advertising, we've typically focused on a very specific audience. A good deal of the material on this site, most of the references, and nearly all of the jokes just aren't interesting to anyone who's not a WoW player. So, when we advertise, we try to advertise to WoW players. The obvious place to do that is the WoW Forums.

Well, that option got yanked away from me, and I still have no idea why.

For the past few months, every time I've tried to log into the WoW Forums, all I get is a "Login Error" message. Someone else, from the same machine, can log in to their account just fine. I've received no e-mails telling me of any penalties on the account, and I've been able to play the game just fine the whole time.

I've e-mailed literally every address listed on the WoW website and received ZERO response. Finally I re-emailed the billing department, asking them to check if my account had any penalties on it. This, miraculously, received a response within 24 hours. After confirming that there were no penalties on the account, I managed to back the rep into a corner asking about the forums. After the rep posted the same form letter (clear your browser's cache, change your account password, get a new computer, etc) THREE TIMES, she finally told me that "the forums were not a part of the website" so they "didn't offer any kind of support for the forums."

I spent days trying to figure out what was going on, even to the point of reading all of my recent posts (Character name: Ergiz. See for yourself if you're curious.) to see if I'd somehow committed one of those little faux pas that every other troll on the boards drops in carelessly but random people get banned for. Nothing, of course.

We (okay, I in particular) haven't been the sort of ravening fans that Blizzard is used to dealing with. In the comics and rants we've been more than a little critical and sometimes downright mean in pointing out Blizzard's shortcomings. Like any fan who feels betrayed by the authors of their favorite fiction world (for a great example of this, read the Amazon reviews for Robert Jordan's book Crossroads of Twilight on Amazon) we feel the need to share our opinions in the vain hope that someone who can do something about it will hear that the fans are displeased and do something about it.

I've had a sneaking suspicion that not only is Blizzard fully aware of what I've written, not only are they displeased with it, but now they're actively taking steps against this website. You know, if Blizzard wanted to respond, if they wanted to say "While we don't agree with the content on this website, we support our fans and are glad they feel so strongly about the game." that would have been just great. But this little "stealth ban" to keep us off the forums without so much as an e-mail is cheap, and it is petty, and it is amateurish for a company like Blizzard to be dealing with fans and customers in this manner.

The funny thing is, we're not the only one. Blizzard recently banned porn starlet Mia Rose's game account after someone else in the game mentioned her website in a public channel (story here).

I wonder if Blizzard is starting to buy into their own hype, if they suddenly think that "the most popular MMORPG on earth" can treat customers any way they wish solely for their amusement or out of sheer spite.

"WoW Radio" - Jacob 08.20.07

Thanks to an extreme fit of boredom, I decided to check out WoWRadio.

Big mistake.

WoWRadio is best described in the immortal words of Strong Bad commenting on college radio: "Dead air, uh, dead air."

The one section of most interest to me was The Lorekeepers. In a rare moment of naiveté, I figured it might just maybe cover topics concerning the lore of Warcraft. Instead, it seems to consist primarily of dead air and the female host sighing repeatedly. It's like softcore Ventrilo pornography. The running gags (including someone feigning a gnomish voice) are loud, unfunny, and annoying.

Now, I've got to go off on this tangent. People who know me know that Gnomes are my favorite race in Azeroth, despite being the whipping boy of Blizzard and the other stupid netkiddies who can't get beyond "elf pretty, orc bad". So I was particularly interested in their take on "Gnomish Lore". For anyone actually familiar with Gnomish Lore, the one thing you do know is there is not much of it at all thanks to Blizzard's short-sightedness. Nonetheless, they decided to try and do an hour show on this topic. Some basic arithmetic would have told them how well this was going to work. 20min of reading the newsposts on the WoW.com site plus 5min of reading the articles verbatim off of WoWWiki plus another 5min of the girl sighing. The rest? Dead air.

It probably wouldn't have been bad if they'd bothered to actually do some research before airing! That might have contributed to such novel ideas as an outline of the show for the hosts to use as a reference to minimize lines like "uh, what are we going to talk about next?" and "you talk about something now."

The inner Gnome in me spent the entire time I was listening to that episode wanting to strangle the gnome-voiced person and then use his limp corpse to beat the girl into submission for suggesting that the origin of the Gnomish race is linked to the goblins.

The whole thing made me miss my early days playing on Silver Hand server. Specifically in regards to two people: Zulgazarg "Old Zul" the loremaster, and Pakwa of Raven Dreams. Old Zul hosted (and may still host) Lorecraft chats wherein he would take questions and provide answers on lore questions, using his massive collection of Warcraft novels, RPG supplements, and game manuals. Pakwa and her guild would host Native American-themed Tauren holiday celebrations. I felt kind of lonely trying to do my magic discussions on the Alliance side; as previously discussed, most good roleplayers in the game tend to gravitate to the Horde faction.

If I could track the pair of them down, I know the three of us could do a fair sight better than the current staff. We'd be able to deliver actual information, broken down into chunks by similar topic, instead of just rambling on about whatever happened to come to mind.

We'd also get rid of the sound effects board with all its stupid toy noises. I realize that the attention span of the average WoW gamer may necessitate playing "toilet flush" or "spring boing" every thirty seconds to keep them interested, but people like that are rarely interested in the lore to begin with.

"GM Taunt" - Jacob 07.03.07

One of these days when I expand my programming skills beyond HTML and BASIC, I'm going to create an add-on for all the people like me who continue to try to do their part to keep World of Warcraft a nice place to play. People who find themselves constantly reporting botters, gold-selling spammers, and characters with stupid names would find this add-on especially useful.

I call it "GMTaunt". Its function is to handle GM aggro by taunting the GM off you so you can continue doing what you were doing. It will be a relatively simple program, simply monitoring your /whisper channels for any person who has <GM> in front of their name. Then it scans for specific key words and phrases, then responds with one random response taken from a list. If nothing matches, it just waits until they send the next form letter macro.

So it would work something like this (key phrases in bold):

*A flash of light or some other ostentatious bullshit happens because we either get off on being a GM or Blizzard is forcing us to give some semblance of being part of a fantasy environment.* Hello, I am GM Denserthanboulder. While I'm praying to God that you're AFK and therefore I won't have to deal with you, do you have a moment to discuss your unfounded bitching?

Responses: Sure. Of course. You betcha.

In an effort to keep you from leaving negative feedback about me and thus spoil my possibilities of a three hours coffee break, I'm going to ask as insincerely as possible: How are you today?

Responses: Fine, thank you. Doing alright. Walkin' and talkin'.

I see you are pissing and moaning about something I could care less about, but I get paid minimum wage to pretend like you're actually making a difference. Is this correct?

Responses: Correct. Yes. That's right.

God damn you, now I have to free up and wipe off my right hand so I can use my mouse to click the button that sends your petition either to my supervisor or the trash bin based on a random number generator. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Responses: Thank you. Thanks. 'Kay.

To make it seem like I really care when in reality I just want you to shut the hell up and leave me alone, I'll ask: is there anything else I can do for you today?

Responses: No. Nope. No, thank you. That's all, thank you.

At which point the GM will pop off two macros, one thanking you for being such a gullible fool as to believe that your wanting to not be harassed by idiots actually concerns Blizzard in the least, one giving you an e-mail address where Blizzard can continue to ignore your concerns about their retarded minimum-wagers. But since neither of these macros requires a response, GMTaunt has already done its job and can go back to sleep until the next form letter fills up your chat window.

"Twelve-Year-Olds With Glitter Glue" - Jacob 05.30.07

So the really stupid rumor I heard a few weeks back came true. Blizzard put Nether Rays into the game as new oobergoober flying mounts. Apparently being them a useless family of Hunter pets wasn't enough. You'd think this also meant mounts that people actually want like Hippogryphs, Bats, and Dragonhawks, right? I mean, those models are already in the game, rendered with multiple textures, and even have the flight animations set.

But no such luck. Unless you're one of the super-elite (read: losers) with enough time to grind for the nether rays or nether drakes (which look like the bastard children of the new Godzilla and a stunt kite) you're stuck with either a gryphon or a wyvern. At least the wyvern's wings fold correctly. The gryphon, when terrestrial, looks like something a mother parakeet would show to her children and say "This is what's going to happen to you if you keep flying in traffic!"

So all the WC3 ladies who had dreams of roleplaying an archer with their hippogryph mount once again get the finger in favor of the bored netkiddies. I wish I could say I was surprised.

Of course, that's not even the worst-smelling part of Blizzard's newest attempt at adding content. They also added an "ogre plane of enlightenment" which they decided to name "Ogri'la".

Wow. Just, wow. I bet it took the development team a whole month to come up with that winner. Are these people even trying anymore? Setting aside for the moment how idiotic the idea of enlightened ogres is, they couldn't even bother themselves to come up with a vaguely ogre-ish sounding name for it! They just decided to turn it into one more freakin' easter egg.

Outland is already full of stupid easter egg names. Innkeepers Oprah Windfury and Floyd Pinkus, anyone? There's even Haris Pilton and her stupid dog! If that wasn't bad enough, whichever designer's unhealthy He-man fetish led him to create the elite saber mounts' armor finally spilled over into putting Adam Eternium as an NPC! It's like playing a game designed by twelve-year-olds.

Not that anyone would need it at this point, but Blizzard has graciously served up even more proof that they should send their current designers back to gluing macaroni onto paper plates and hire some adults for a change. There are at least two quests in the game that involve digging through animal fecal matter to find something for the questgiver!

This game, supposedly rated T for Teen by the ESRB, has players clawing through actual shit for rewards.

The best part is how the one adult that manages the daycare that is Blizzard's development team immediately posted a rule banning any comic contest submissions making fun of Blizzard for allowing these quests in their game.

Last, but not least, please do not submit comics on the following topics: Any reference to or depiction of (in the vernacular) "poop," or variants thereof, including any quests that may feature it.

It would be understandable (but not excusable) if everyone who worked at Blizzard was simply an unimaginative ignorant child. This, however, clearly shows that some people involved in World of Warcraft can see themselves rocketing toward the fiery gates of Hell and are simply too cowardly to do anything about it.

"The Honeymoon is Over." - Jacob 03.21.07

Way back in January, with the release of the Burning Crusade expansion imminent, we had both decided to quit World of Warcraft. The game itself isn't very interesting. Idiot-proofed to the point of no learning curve, no content past level 30, no variation in the quest system, and most importantly, nothing to do in the game that can't be accomplished with a simple bot program. The game very much deserves the appellation "World of GrindCraft".

To top it off, playing on Silver Hand server was becoming an exercise in masochism. When we originally started playing, back at release, we figured that Blizzard set aside certain servers as Roleplaying servers because those servers would be free from the normal idiocy and harassment you find in other MMORPG's.

Boy, were we ever wrong.

Even now, Silver Hand has entire guilds of people dedicated to harassing roleplayers, not to mention the guilds of bondage freaks, yiffy dog people, lesbian night elf vampires, and the overwhelming abundance of emo kiddies. So people like us get shut out because Blizzard is too cheap to pay the extra dollar an hour to hire an actual GM who can get involved in the community instead of handing out form-letter replies in between their three-hour coffee breaks. Because that would involve, you know, actually caring. And caring takes away valuable time from coke and hookers.

So with Silver Hand a lost cause and Burning Crusade not offering anything but a lore-raping, we got all geared up to cancel our accounts and wash our hands of the whole deal. Then Blizzard decided to do something they'd never done before...

They offered transfers off an RP server.

Suddenly we found ourselves in a brand new world, away from all the crap and ready to start anew. And start anew we did, laying the foundation for a network of roleplaying guilds with actual standards to promote cross-guild roleplay and stave off an eventual decline into little cliques that make lunchtime in a high school cafeteria look like a giant group hug. There was open roleplay in the streets of Stormwind! People asking for help used actual words, complete with punctuation! Life was beautiful!

But, like all good things, the honeymoon came to an abrupt halt.

Being a low-population server, Sisters of Elune (our new home) got put on a "recommended" list. Suddenly, we were flooded with the worst the internet has to offer. Netkiddies of all stripes pouring into our nice, fresh world. It's been barely three months since the server went online, and already we have anti-RP guilds openly advertising in the game and on the forums. We have ERP guilds, ERP being short hand for "I'm too stupid and lazy to type out 'erotic roleplaying' or even 'hawt cyborz' so I'll just hit three keys and if you're very good I'll capitalize them all!" We have dozens of guilds created by people too stupid to spell simple words! Every time I see someone running around with a guild tag that says 'gaurds' 'harbringers' or 'courtisans' it makes me want to find their parents and smash their faces into a computer screen screaming "Look what you have spawned, you feckless, worthless piece of garbage! Look what you have inflicted upon the world!"

To top it all off, only a few dozen people on the new server have managed to live up to the insanely high standards we set for guild members (the ability to properly name a character, and being able to type better than a baboon smashing his face against a keyboard, both of which are near impossible to find in a WoW player). And of those, most end up leaving within a day or two because of the low guild population. Just like every other feature of WoW that requires group participation, nobody bothers to participate in anything while simultaneously complaining that nobody ever participates!

So my dream of sifting what diamonds I can out of the cesspool that is the server population (and to be fair, what few people we've found have been gems indeed) is slowly slipping through my fingers, every day bringing me that much closer to giving it up entirely.

"What's There to do in World of Warcraft Anymore?" - Jacob 12.31.06

I haven't had a group of any kind in three weeks.

Before the last patch, I used to run UBRS daily and sometimes tag along with people going elsewhere. Getting a group was easy. Just log on to the LookingForGroup channel, tell people where you're going or where you want to go, and you'd get about a dozen responses. Just wade through those responses and choose the people who sound the most intelligent (it's my experience that people who can type are less likely to be idiots), then group up and go. If someone has to leave, it's not a problem, you can just advertise that you need a replacement.

Now, if I want a group, I have to turn on the LFG tool and pick the top three dungeons I want to go to even though I'd want to go to 5 or more. I have to browse all the dungeons in the Looking for More tab and randomly whisper people who are usually a) already in a dungeon or b) not really interested in going. I then have to advertise in the player-made channels /lfg and /lookingforgroup (assuming some idiot hasn't become owner and muted everyone, which happens quite often) that nobody really uses anymore, certainly not in the numbers required to do any good. When that doesn't work, I have to advertise in the Trade channel, the /yell channel, then go to a different city and use the /yell channel there.

When none of that works, I get fed up and turn the game off to find something less frustrating to play. I haven't had a single group, not a single one, in three weeks. Pretty much all of my characters are level 60. So what's the point? What am I supposed to do now? I can't stomach the World of Grindcraft, so PvE is pretty much closed to me. Even if it's true that the upcoming expansion will have plenty of 5- and 10- man instances, what's the point if I can't find other people to go with?

I tried PvPing for a while. My tauren got a wolf mount, my mage got a frost tome, and my rogue got a dagger. Then they nerfed the honor gain. The ultimate idiocy; they put the new honor system in to give casual players the opportunity to gear up the same as the hardcore players, then they nerfed the honor system when the hardcore players started "progressing too fast". It boggles the mind that no one at Blizzard saw that coming. I imagine the following conversation taking place in a back room somewhere:

"I've got it! I know how to make it so the casual players don't realize how much we don't care about them! We'll change the honor system so that they can pick up rank 14 gear fairly quickly so they'll be on par with raiders. That'll give us a few weeks, a month tops, before they all start quitting."

"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard! What's to stop all the oobergoobers from taking advantage of the system and getting all of that in a day?"

"Well... nothing. But they'd never use it that way. Netkiddies are smart, kind, hardworking people with a strong sense of decency who take good sportsmanship as a religion!"

"Wha-!? What the heck are you talking about?"

"Dude, it's totally true! George Washington told me when he spoke to me through my Magic 8-Ball after I ate that sandwich I found in the very back of the break room fridge..."

So no PvE action, and no PvP either. And don't even get me started about the roleplaying. What a joke. Roleplaying is about more than "hawt cyborz" in Goldshire, but don't tell that to anyone on my server. They wouldn't understand. It's one of the drawbacks of playing on one of the oldest roleplaying servers, I suppose. Not only do you have to deal with everyone who thought "RP" meant "PvE Easymode" and the people who think harassing roleplayers is fun despite Blizzard's many unenforced policies. You also have to deal with all the folks who think any roleplaying is better than none at all and so put up with every catboy, vampire, and cyber-sexkitten rather than trying to educate them.

So no PvE, no PvP, and no roleplaying.

What's there to do in World of Warcraft anymore?