Posts Tagged ‘Altitis’

Phoenix Reborn?

It most definitely was a Blizzardish soon, but there we go. A new post after a semester-long hiatus.

So, what happened to Altitis?

Real life, that’s what happened. While I don’t want to dwell on things too much (or turn this into a “fishing for sympathy” post), I went through a situation not unlike what Big Red Kitty went through. Oh, the circumstances were different, and WoW was a mere symptom of what had gone wrong in my life, but the background is similar.

Except in my case, I went a bridge too far, and almost failed to mend and amend what I once thought would be lasting for the rest of my life. My family was on the brink of dissolution, and I moved out for about six months, convinced it was the end. And while I used to qualify blogging as cathartic, I never found the strength to blog about that at all. That explains the long hiatus.

In the middle of it, I thought I would be able to resume blogging, but for some reason, I never managed to do so since that cryptic one-worder a few months back.

Against my pessimistic outlook six months ago, though, events took a turn for the better, and we finally worked things out.

This isn’t however a sob-story serving as the testimonial on how MMORPGs have ruined (or almost ruined) the life of yet another family. As I said, it was a mere symptom of things gone wrong – spending too long in the game, investing too much into the completely wrong thing. And it wasn’t just gaming either, my job had taken an overblown importance too. What happened is probably just one in a million similar stories, where the people change, the context changes, and the symptoms change, but to keep this short, where we went wrong was that my significant other and myself started to take each other for granted and stopped communicating on tiny issues at first, and then on bigger and bigger issues, and this almost brought our couple down.

So the only advice I can give to any gamer out there, in particular if you’re in a stable, long term relationship, and more so if you have kids: you may want, periodically, to examine your gaming habits and ask yourself if they are an innocuous hobby or have become escapism for you. If it’s the latter, it may be worth taking a honest look at your life,  figure out what you’re fleeing, and address the issue, because trust me, leaving your home while your 4-year old daughter starts asking “why is daddy taking his pillow with him?” is not an experience you will enjoy.

But that’s enough background already. This was then, and as I said, we finally worked it out a couple of weeks ago.

What is going to happen to Altitis?

Frankly, I don’t know really. When crap hit the fan, I jokingly remarked to my friend Adventsparky that at least I’d be able to play during raiding peak times. In reality, that never happened.

I continued playing WoW pretty casually for a while, first on my mage, and then I picked up my shammie and eventually reached level 80 with her.

At the same time, for the first time since joining in May 2005, I actually let my subscription run out, and didn’t notice for several weeks. And it happened a second time more recently – a few weeks ago, before moving back, I wanted to check out something in the game and found, again, that I could no longer do so.

I haven’t resubscribed since.

Interestingly enough, Adventsparky once asked me whether I was still playing the game, explaining that some evening this Spring he just logged out after a raid, and never logged back in. The heart isn’t in it anymore.

Oh, I read the cataclysm announcements, but they failed to raise any kind of enthusiasm. I think the only thought that entertained me was when reading about the split of the Barrens zone, I started wondering whether this would be the end of the Mankirk’s Wife jokes.

In reality, like many other commentators on the blogosphere, I now find myself playing various different games extremely casually, either purely single-player games, or trying out one of the several viable Free2Play MMOs out there: From Wizard101 to FreeRealms, over Jade Dynasty, World of Kung Fu and Runes of Magic. I’m currently exploring Dungeons and Dragons Online (which recently went Free2Play) a bit, when I have time. I’m not really far in the game.

World of Warcraft? A while ago, I pondered resubbing for the anniversary pet and the headless horseman event. I probably won’t do that any more. In reality, the Free2Play games out there, and their microtransaction schemes allowing you to buy and consume content at your leisure, represent simply much more entertainment value for my money than shelling out 15€ / month for WoW when I might play it for little more than a couple of hours at best, if at all.

And while I could definitely afford it, I also find that the subscription fee actually participates in generating a compulsion to play in me, at the exclusion of other games, becoming enough a narrow focus that it might again draw me in and provoke another spiral that may, next time around, no longer come with a happy ending.

So the future of Altitis is similar to what a few other former WoW bloggers have done – altitis no longer confined to one game, but offering, perhaps, comments, reviews but also broader thoughts on several games.

Or maybe not. Time will tell.

In the meantime, the tagline of the blog has changed (I actually changed it when I posted the “Soon” message already), it has now become “Seeking Better Worlds”.

It is a combination of Dr. Richard Bartle‘s continuous action to try and push developers and players alike to create and demand better, richer virtual worlds. At the same time, it is also a play on the fictional Weyland-Yutani (of the Alien movie series) corporate slogan, “Building better worlds”, as a reminder that the quest for better virtual worlds in itself may very well become perverted if it turns, again, into a threat to my real life.

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Soon…

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Altitis Goes on Indefinite Blogging Hiatus

Just a quick note to my readers, due to real life circumstances I am currently (as has become obvious in the last month) not in the required mindset to keep on blogging. I can also not predict how long this state of affairs may continue, or whether I’ll ever resume writing.

I will therefore thank all my readers, commenters, respondents, and the fellow bloggers in the WoW gaming community for your participation, interaction and readership over the roughly 18 months during which Altitis has remained active.

Of course, since an inactive blog doesn’t actually take too much space in your feed readers, you can always keep it in in case I get back to blogging about WoW in the future. If not, thank you for the shared journey, and the best to all of you.

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Odds and Ends before Christmas

In no particular order, and on Steptoe’s request:

Of the joys of being a two-man guild (instead of a one-man show)

Some people have a specific sense of what being back means

Some people have a peculiar sense of what being back means

A new DK needs professions!

Chain mail needs to be knitted

Chain mail needs to be knitted

Acronyms are HARD

The Unholy Death Knight rotation explained to Steptoe

The Unholy Death Knight rotation explained to Steptoe

Dragonback flying
I know it’s not my private mount but it looks great nonetheless:

Makes me more likely to grind Rep for the red proto dragon mount

Makes me more likely to grind Rep for the red proto dragon mount

The Kirin Tor Tortue quest

Much virtual ink has been spilled by many on this topic already, first by Rohan, and then a bit later by none less than Dr. Richard Bartle. Being a slow leveler, not on as often as everyone else and having taken my DK to 70 before resuming leveling on the paladin, I only did this two nights ago.

As a player, and to stay in line with being a Bartle apologist, I experienced the same sense of disturbance as everyone else who hasn’t just shrugged it off. I do also feel it breaks away in a poorly done manner from the tone WoW has presented to us, and as others I feel this is one prime example where having quests which allow you to actually make moral choices rather than being just a straightforward storyline with player actions between the reading would have been not just great, but actually important for the game.

As a character, and yes, despite NOT playing on an RP server (I know many people believe I’m actually on one, am not, never have been), I sometimes try to put stuff into a roleplaying perspective, things looked different. The toon seeing this quest is a blood elf blood knight (sounds a bit redundant, no?). And while I imagine the character would definitely have scoffed at the hypocrisy of the Kirin Tor (“Our code forbids us to torture but you can do it for us” – interesting political statement for the matter, and this one is too out of place in WoW, as Scott Jennings has pointed out), it’s a lot less shocking for this character than it would have been for an alliance paladin, in particular a Draenei (or so I imagine).

See, the toon is one of the few (OK, given how many blood elves the game throws at you in Outlands, actually not that few) survivors of a race deeply addicted to magic. After facing near extinction at the hands of the Scourge, their Blood Knights derived their powers by leeching it off a Naaru in order to become the protectors of their people. And while the events leading to the Shattered Sun Offensive have redeemed the class in the sense that they were now granted free access to the holy energy powering their spells, their magic addiction has not been cured.

The storyline which involves the infamous quest revolves about the fight between a power who seeks to bar access to arcane magic to all mortals, and mortals who try to preserve that access. From the perspective of a defender of an entire race addicted to arcane magic, who has been using and abusing all means available for the greater goal of preserving his people for a long time, this isn’t out of character at all. I’ve long seen Blood Elves and the Forsaken as pragmatists who will use whatever it takes to achieve their objectives. For the Death Knight it won’t be much different, if you have played the final act of the starter quest at all. They believe themselves beyond redemption anyway, and while they wouldn’t perhaps derive any pleasure from doing this now, they certainly aren’t in a position to play the holier-than-thou crusader about zapping prisoners for information.

So here I am, the player uneasy about the quest, the characters not having an issue with it. Paradoxal? Definitely. Here’s hoping that similar elements will be used and introduced better in the future.

Last but not least

The paladin is level 74, about half-way to 75. I went to Dalaran, got two cooking dailies done so far, still 40 quests left in Borean Tundra, trolled some Winter’s Veil achievements. That’s the pre-break update.

Merry Christmas to all readers, and best wishes to you and yours.

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Leveling a Second Paladin? Hell No

I might have mentioned I’m currently focusing my attention on a PvP realm, that’s where my pals are playing. The side-effect though is that my level 70 pallie lost all focus, due to sitting on a PvE realm.

My mage is level 60 and I thought, before doing the whole Outlands stretch, I’d see about raising 1-2 other toons, and started a new paladin.

“Heck, I did it once, I can do it again, right?”

Well no. I can’t. After the mage, after all the other toons I’ve played and leveled to a certain point, going from level 1 to 4 with just autoattack (hey, you can seal every 30 seconds too! woo!) waiting for stuff to die in about 12-15 seconds while a mage takes 5 seconds for the same thing did it for me. No way, not again, not before patch 3.0.2 changes things (assuming that it does actually change things at low levels, and I’m not holding my breath) and speeds the whole thing up.

What the motivation I had right after TBC, combined with discovering the new belf starting zones, was obscuring back then but is now just plainly obvious: the paladin currently totally sucks as a soloing and leveling class, from level 1 to level 70. No matter how you do it, even prot-grinding multiple mobs at a time without downtime, it just takes forever. I absolutely love the versatility of the class as a healer and a tank, but no other class makes the lack of soloability of tanks and healers in WoW 1 and 2 as painfully apparent as the paladin does. And this time around, Eversong Woods and Ghostlands aren’t new, in fact I could do it blindly.

And extremely slowly. Not.

That’s why the opening of PvE to PvP transfers, as reported by BBB, comes in extremely handy to me. A chance to take a toon I love at level 70 to the realm which currently has my attention. All other considerations are pretty moot, and the argument about going through 69 levels of gankage to “earn” the right is a bit silly nowadays, considering I had less than 10 world PvP encounters in 60 levels on my mage. Only since hitting Outlands do I actually see 1-2 alliance toons in the vicinity, and we tend to avoid each other. Azeroth was an empty world.

And there’s little ganking going on in empty worlds. So little “earning” opportunities.

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I’m Alive, Damnit!

Matticus writes about dead WoW Blogs. I’m not dead. I was on vacation, remember?

And since Steptoe actually suddenly reappeared, I’m also back in the game and made level 54 (first level in a month or so) on my mage. Funny thing, by the way. One month without playing and you need to relearn all of the controls. I had a similar feeling a bit before going on vacation while playing a couple of AVs on my paladin trying to get the Olympics pet (and failing because horde actually lost all 4 games I was in, go figure).

Mentioning Steptoe… You remember Steptoe the Warlock, right? He wasn’t just my 2007 arena buddy, he was also my willing accomplice throughout the first TBC year, my lieutenant who tried to keep me from failing to run a guild and then bolted off Ghostlands (EU) to other places where the grass wasn’t greener but the BG queues only took half a second.

Back in January, we were getting our arses handed to us in Season 3, and after a particularly embarrassing hilarious match during which we played so badly that a team of nekkid arena dancers could have beaten us, Steptoe cut short on our cheering and told me “BRB, going for a smoke” (yes, as a warlock he has some very filthy habits. Consorting with demons and tabagism are only the tip of the iceberg, believe me). And that was the last time I heard from him until he suddenly reappeared in the comments section here.

And on Dragonmaw EU, too. Only he apparently has seen the light or something, because Steptoe the Warlock has morphed into Steptoe the Priest.

I know what you’re thinking. From warlock to shadow priest, the only filthy habit being shed is the demon consorting because they sure do a lot of dabbling in the dark arts. And that would be a perfectly reasonable thought, since everyone + dog levels priest as a tenbraic disciple of unholiness.

Like me, you’d be perfectly wrong. My bloody contrarian buddy is levelling as…

…holy.

I kid you not. He has embraced the Light as tightly as he was hugging the shadows before, and I suspect the only reason which prevented him from becoming a zealous paladin instead of a squishy robe-wearer was one year of playing together with the most rotten paladin role model you could have. Me. Oh, and the fact that he noticed I took about 4 times as long to kill anything at 70 than his warlock, but I digress.

Will there be an improbable but equally hilarious priest / mage 2v2 duo making a fool of itself to be formed at level 70? I doubt it, chances are that Wrath will be out before I make it to 70 on that mage. As a matter of fact, if the new and improved Wrath Paladin becomes easier to level that his Burning Predecessor, I’ll throw my previous prejudices in the wind and roll another one.

So if you’re suddenly looking forward to more tales of arena bungling on Altitis because Steptoe has finally finished his cigarette, you’ll be disappointed. Nonetheless, welcome back, buddy.

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Right Now: Altitis Tops on Google for Altitis

This is actually the first time this has happened in over a year of existence: Altitis is currently google’s top search result for… altitis.

SERP for Altitis

Yes, it’s a silly self-congratulatory post. I’m still proud :)

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Yes, it’s That Time Again. Theme Change Time.

So the Summer theme will have been quite short-lived, but I actually recently realized it was completely and horribly borked in IE7. And I started growing pretty tired of the header with horde and alliance logos around.

Which means that rather than trying to tweak stuff around to make it fit for IE7 consumption, I just started over with something a bit different.

Oh, of course, it’s not exactly a departure from my usual spartan theme design (read: I still couldn’t do decent graphic stuff to save my life), but here you go. New theme. Shazam or something.

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State of Altitis, July 2008 Edition

I’m currently training & travelling quite a bit, which seriously hampers my playtime (and explains my utter lack of relevant posts lately).

My mage is therefore pretty much stuck at level 53, waiting for a Plaguelands push all the way to Outlands when I have some spare time. On the other hand, at least she builds some rest XP to speed the whole thing up.

But as usual when I lose the opportunity to focus on one toon, alts happen. Sometimes it is out of necessity. The guild my mage is a member of had a month of massive member bleed, with most players having a high-end toon listening to the siren calls of Kara raiding and moving to some 250+ strong guild to visit the Big Gray Guildbreaker.

Which pretty much left me with two other not-so-casuals occupying guild chat.

And no rogue to unlock my chests. During summer slump.

Sometimes, alts happen out of necessity. I rolled my 5th rogue. She’s alive dead & kicking, and as you will have guessed, came to a semblance of life for the second time in her history in Deathknell.

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Master Blogging and Altitis Birthsday

So after a significant slowdown to my posting activities, this is my 300th post on Altitis. Incidentally, the blog is also 1 year (and 10 days) old now.

Before moving on towards 400, let’s take the opportunity to review some facts both interesting and trivial about this place:

  • Collectively, my Damage Meter benchmarking series are what interested most readers, attracting slightly over 10’000 pageviews over time. While I can’t make any promises, I intend to get back to these “soon” to check where we stand now that the landscape has stabilized and the new combat log feature is almost ironed out.
  • My Parrot review remains the most popular post not part of a series, followed quite closely by my CowTip review.

Interestingly enough, as the wow blogosphere always makes a point of mentioning this kind of things, none of the above have ever been mentioned by wowinsider, and for that matter, haven’t been linked to from other blogs. The readers all come in through search engines, 98% from Google.

A quick review of phpbb3 combined with a mention of wowdb comes next in popularity, although I suspect most visitors to that page leave disappointed. From the search terms used, visitors were mainly interested in phpbb3 wow themes, not my short review & ramblings. Well, for wow-themed phpbb3 styles, here’s a short list:

There’s likely to be more out there if you want to google around but the above sampling should give you a good starting point.

My two most popular rants are tied to the Ghostwolf nerf, and I have mainly Mania to thank for that, as most viewers to these pages come from her blog.

One of my oldest theory posts still attracts a decent amount of viewers every day, the second one in the Defense Theory series which explains how PvE defense works, in particular for tanks.

Now for some other interesting or odd stats:

  • Last week, Altitis ranked second in Google for clicked queries on wrath talent trees (in fact I’m still second as I write this). There’s definitely a hunger for information on the matter out there. Unfortunately for visitors looking for this kind of information, what they get here is my post on how I believe it is too early to engage in in-depth discussions about wrath talents.
  • Some people are apparently still interested in my clumsy attempts to write my own armory crawler in php.
  • To the three people looking for Stop the Warrior: although we both are frequently commenting on each other’s posts and sometimes shouting out (or at) each other, his blog is over there. And while we’re at it, his GM, who holds a (probably deserved) bad opinion of me, has her own blog as well, and if you’re interested in insights into how guild management works in a serious raiding environment, you should have her on your blogroll. No excuses, go subscribe now.
  • What gives honor in AV? Killing other people of course, but also burning towers, holding onto towers until the end of the match, killing the opposing Captain (that’s either Galvander or Balinda depending on your faction), protecting your own captain until the end of the game, killing the enemy general.
  • Armchair from treehugger: dunno what you were looking for, but it sounds hurtful.
  • Casserole FFXI: sounds tasty
  • Cheese Conspiracy Theory: Yes, the good old mystery about the Darnassian Bleu still hasn’t been solved.

While there’s a lot of additional sassy keywords in here, this is probably enough of self-congratulation for a single post. As always, allow me to thank everyone of you for reading and commenting on Altitis, it’s your silent or outspoken presence which gives this blog a reason to be.

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